I have just finished reading the children’s story The Mystery of Castle MacGorilla by David Bentley Hart. “What?” you ask. “The metaphysician, controversialist, and grandmaster of archaic vocabulary has written a children’s story? Surely you jest?” No, I do not jest. David has given us a delightful and whimsical tale, peopled with talking stuffed animals and sentient canines—a tale of high drama, Musaceaen cuisine, theft, chicanery, deception, a wild chase in a garden maze, and serious detective work. In other words, a mystery in the tradition of Agatha Christie.
Our detective is Theodore Bear, who goes by the name of Teddy. Think of him as the American version of Hercule Poirot, only much smaller, no moustache, and less persnickety. He is accompanied by his schoolmate Porculina (pronounced “por-su-lina”), a stuffed pig who is the creator and part-owner of the world’s largest manufacturer of cosmetics for soft toys. They have been invited by their mutual friend Gorilla to join him at his castle in Scotland for the grand celebration of his elevation to the title of Laird. It is a grand affair which quickly turns into a whodonnit mystery when the MacGorilla treasures are stolen in the midst of a blizzard. The treasure room is locked from the inside and there are no footprints in the snow outside the windows. Everyone’s a suspect. But thankfully, Detective Teddy is there to solve the conundrum and put the toy world to rights.
I don’t want to spoil the tale for you, but I’ll give you this hint: “Justice must be tampered with by Murphy!”
I am eager to read the book to my grandson Ahlrich. I just have to figure out how old he needs to be to enjoy it. At six-years old I’m sure he is still too young. Maybe when he’s ten or twelve or twenty-five. But I am sure that you, my adult readers, will enjoy The Mystery of Castle MacGorilla!
Eclectic Orthodoxy 
Does the bad guy to hell, temporal or otherwise?
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That would be telling! 🙂
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This sounds lovely. Curious about who DBH and Patrick Hart’s influences were in writing this story. Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows spring to mind based on the synopsis (which is an easy way to take my money)
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I read this to my wife and 15-year-old daughter. We all enjoyed it. My favorite characters were Woof (whose Scottish accent was effortless for me after reading about a dozen of George MacDonald’s Scottish novels–though I had to “translate” a bit for my wife’s and daughter’s understanding) and Cuttles.
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Reading “stolen in the midst of a blizzard” and “there are no footprints in the snow outside the windows”, I think of Charles Williams’s The Greater Trumps… but (C.W. spoiler alert) I don’t suppose Elementals as suspects would be playing fair, Christie style…
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Al,
Very grateful for the good notice. It is, of course, my maximum opus, even if it was a collaboration. It’s certainly one of the only two books I’ve published so far that I take complete pleasure in. And, needless to say, it’s my profoundest work. Though much of that is attributable Patrick, who was 11 when we wrote it, and so the wiser of us.
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Oh, and I should point out that the illustrations by Jerome Atherholt are things of considerable beauty. He’s a brilliant artist and one of my eldest brother’s oldest friends. Thank God he didn’t ask for the remuneration he rightly could have.
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When can we expect a new adventure of Detective Teddy?!
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Well, Patrick and I were planning one when I fell ill back in 2014. We are now returning to it. It takes place in the Loire Valley at the Chateau de Petit-Ours. Of course, now that he’s 20, he may have to think his way back into a purer and more spontaneous sense of the absurd.
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Excellent! I really enjoyed Castle MacGorilla. It is a delightful, well-crafted story. Well done, Sir.
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Is the second work you take complete pleasure in ‘The Devil and Pierre Gernet’?
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Yes.
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While I enjoyed that one, the one I’ve read more often is “Voices from the Emerald World.” I have to hold back tears every time. MacGorilla is on my list.
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I meant the book as a whole. But thanks.
By the way, “The House of Apollo” gets the most votes in that volume.
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By the way, Al, the more common form is “musaceous,” though “musacean” is of course a correct “implicate form.”
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Haha! I had no idea what word to invent to name “banana cuisine.” I just went with what looked good to me. 😎
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Another question DBH: Do you take issue with the popular theory of evolution insofar as it builds death and the will-to-power into it as a crucial component? The theory of evolution as I was taught in school seems to be the ultimate expression of the Nihilistic/Nietzchean Will to Power, Survival of the fittest. Reality is fundamentally violent and if a species doesn’t embrace that, it perishes.
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Is there a way to redeem the modern account of the origin of species from this captivity to death and the priority of selfishness? Will there be a second law of Thermodynamics in the eschaton?
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Awesome story, I wonder what the process was David, did Patrick and you write a scene then Jerome would interpret it via drawing or another process?
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The book was written in 2010. Jerome illustrated it in 2019. We gave him pictures of the stuffed toys that had inspired the characters.
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DBH, just wanna say that you’re probably my #1 role model these days. 1. You understand every important language. 2. You have read everything worth reading. 3. You intimately understand every important religion and philosophy. 4. You communicate with wit, eloquence, precision. Your command of English and your vocabulary are enviable. 5. You have managed to achieve financial stability in a cutthroat, risky field (Academia), even to such a degree that you are able to comfortably support a wife and kids! 6. You clearly have somehow synergistically merited the experience of an ascent into a direct intellectual/academic theoria and tasted of the beatific vision to an amazing degree. When you descend back into Samsara to tell the rest of us about what God has revealed to you, it is something of a eschatological division, as your words seem to liberate some of us with hope and joy, while damning others to retreat deeper into the darkness of blind dogmatism and tribalism. (cf. the polarised responses to TASBS)
I want whatever you’re smoking. Coming after “Fugi ab Samsaro in Eschatonum” while “bringing everyone who I love along for the jailbreak” and “Striving to love everyone”, my more immediate goal is to be like you. I’m currently studying a Masters of Theology at UNDA Sydney, and my dream is to know what you know, write like you write, and see what you’ve seen. While originally I was planning to stay single, God has a sense of humour and brought a partner into my life, which forces me to think more materialistically than I would otherwise (with a wife and kids you need a career). Hence, you fascinate me and I want to study how you got to where you are. Some questions:
1. At what point did you start seriously studying Dharmic Religions? Before you wrote BOTI?
2. What’s your stance on the spiritual value of psychedelics? Did you yourself ever go through a “60s” phase?
3. At any stage of your life, did you worry about the near, mid, or long-term future in a financial “how to put food on the table and support my family” sense? Or have you always just trusted God to provide a la Matt 5-7?
4. Have you ever experienced Infernalism from the inside? ie. Was there ever a time when you didn’t believe in Universalism and the Gospel of a guaranteed happy ending?
If you’re inclined to respond but would rather respond privately, my email is “tikajr ATT pm DOTT me”. Sorry for hammering you with questions on this blog, but I’m dying to talk with you and in the absence of a public email address Fr Kimel’s commboxes are all I’ve got!
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Oh also, I have a theory I’d like to run by you: I suspect that so much apologetics for Infernalism in Christian circles boils down to one fundamental error: The theologians producing this “theology” are focusing all of their attention on sin and evil (which are Maya; illusory; non-existent; nonbeing), rather than directing their intellects towards God, Beauty, Truth, Being, Goodness. Hence why I put “theology” in scarequotes: what these thinkers are doing is actually nihilology: They are spending all of their energy and efforts talking about, thinking about, and writing about absolutely nothing.
But surely, Goodness, Truth, and Beauty are the place the place these people should be devoting their attention: Here is where there is infinitely-attractive simplicity, consistency and coherence which once stated, is clearly soaked in clarity and obviousness, peacefully commanding assent and understanding. Whereas meditating obsessively over evil, nothingness, sin, suffering and Hell surely only leads to confusion, paradox, overcomplication beyond comprehension, equivocity, and a proliferation of further unresolved perplexities.
Surely the proper way to do theology is to focus on God. Constantly churning your mind on the “reasons” and “causes” and “explanations” and “justifications” and “reality” of evil is a hopeless, pointless, meaningless waste of human potential, which will only draw one deeper into the darkness. Evil has no reason. Suffering has no cause. Hell has no explanation. Damnation has no justification. Pain has no reality. Nihil ab Nihilo: If all you ever do is meditate on evil, evil is all you’re ever going to find.
It seems to me that you nail this aesthetic approach. In BOTI you don’t really talk about sin much at all. You just talk on and on about beauty, and recapitulate the entire history of western thought into the theme of beauty. The best theology is about God; not about sin, evil, suffering and Hell. And such talk peacefully and, dare I say it, irresistibly invites assent. Whereas the nihilology that infects our culture and religion today only attracts those who are already deep in the darkness, and draws them deeper into it’s depths. I can see the Gospel in this too, for how far can someone really sink before it becomes unbearable, and the true theology of beauty, exemplified in your writings penetrates to their heart and lifts them back towards the light?
Pondering this makes me appreciate how much of a slog it must have been to write TASBS. Rather than focusing on beauty as you usually do, I’m guessing you became an intellectual bodhisattva and descended into the chaos of paradox, half-baked apologetics for Hell, tribalism and dogmatism, in order to take it on and attempt to rescue some of the poor souls caught in it’s clutches. I suspect it’s ultimately a sisyphean task unfortunately. There seem to be an infinitude of ways to argue for the absurd. I bet you would have prefered to just keep meditating on the beautiful. Thanks for taking the time to momentarily avert your intellect from God and confront the ugly instead. I know it helped me, and i’m sure it’s helping others too.
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That’s something I encounter quite often. Many Christian theologians try to talk out of both sides of their mouth, as it were. On the one hand they will acknowledge evil as privatio boni, completely unreal and having no part in God, then they will waffle and say that somehow it still has a real substance to it that we can’t ignore or downplay. It’s either real or unreal, has substance or not, the middle is excluded here. God will utterly destroy all evil, of that we can be sure, I say.
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question 5: how many hours do you spend crafting single sentences in your books? Reading BOTI is itself an experience of beauty and delight even when I only wrestle with a single paragraph in a sitting. Every word has been placed on the page as a renaissance artist places precision strokes on a canvas. I know you have tapped into grace more than most of us, but even so, I struggle to imagine you composing these sentences in a single pass. Every one of them is perfect. How in the heavens do you pull it off, how easily does it come to you, and how long does it take to craft these miniature verbal artworks? Do you keep your spellcheck turned on?
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Forgive me, TIK, but your praise is more than I can quite process. Any response would look either insufferably arrogant or insufferably disingenuous. But thanks for the kind words.
I am aware, however, of many sentences I’ve written in the past that I would rewrite now. Reading oneself is never as satisfying as reading someone else whose work you like.
I’m afraid I’m not able to answer so many questions here, though. I’ll just say that the writing comes easily once I begin, but that the will to begin is hard to summon unless I’m writing fiction. Everything else is a boring task to be discharged.
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I will, however, answer your four questions here.
1. My study of Asian religions antedates–by many years–any specific interest in technical Christian theology. I found my way, reluctantly, into the latter by way of comparative mysticism and comparative metaphysics, and I had the classical languages, so patristic authors were a natural draw. But my chief academic interests are, to my mind, religious studies, philosophy, and world literature, not theology.
2. I am in my fifties, and grew up in a place and time when the culture of the 60’s and 70’s was still a very live option. But the past is another country. They do things differently there. (35 points for anyone who recognizes those lines.)
3. Many times, especially when catastrophic illness destroyed our savings.
4. I have never believed in an eternal hell. To me that would be like believing in the existence of such things as married bachelors or square circles or the conservative intellectual tradition.
Take care.
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Addendum to answer 2: Every few years, I re-read Huxley’s Doors of Perception. It’s a book I love. But, as an Indian teacher of Ram Das once remarked, the idiot who uses psychedelics is still an idiot when the drugs wear off. They might give one a glimpse of what lies outside the filter of normal intentional experience, but they do not offer an avenue of union. That requires spiritual discipline.
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Thanks so much for responding. It’s already made my day ❤
I'm currently tackling BOTI. It's the second time I've attempted it and this time I'm finally getting it. I last attempted to read it in early 2018 and at that stage, I had only one semester of pragmatically-taught (ie, "enough to understand most of John's gospel") koine greek under my belt. But come August 2020, I have studied classical latin and attic greek for 3 semesters, and classical (not vedic) sanskrit, biblical hebrew, mandarin and levantine arabic for 1, so whenever you use an obscure english word which I don't know, I'm generally able to etymologically deconstruct it on the fly and see how you use it in context to work out roughly what you mean by it.
My exposure to various currents of christian theology/philosophy has expanded enough that I can fairly well follow your analysis in the first part of the book this time around, despite being unacquainted with the writings of all the post-christian thinkers you confront. It's profound how you more or less affirm the various ontologies of violence their essential coherence and consistency, and then point out that such coherence and consistency is ultimately worthless if it is not also aesthetic. It's almost as if these modern and postmodern thinkers have bequeathed to us "the philosophical foundations of Hell", with Nietzsche's works being the supreme expression of this philosophy's rhetorical akerygma, and his followers fleshing out the logical details (and the 'akklesia' of the Third Reich – among others – giving it a concrete implementation).
I'm currently on page 177. You just blew my mind again with a succinct analysis of Augustine's account of the Trinity as Lover, Loved, and Love. This has always resonated with me, but as you mentioned tends to happen, I have always struggled with how the "verb" here (ie, the spirit) can also be a person, and in my own theologising i've always tended to try and resolve this by appeals to "husband, wife, child" thinking. But you suddenly got me thinking the Subject-Verb-Object trinity in terms of divine simplicity: If the Subject and Object are nouns (Lover, Loved), then simplicity demands that they be verbal nouns. And if the Verb is a verb, simplicity demands that it be a noun too. So I used to express this idea of the Trinity as "The Lover Loving the Loved", but what would you think if I rephrased that as "Loving as-such, Loving itself, in the Loving other“? This formulation seems to secure all terms as simultaneously nounal (personal) and verbal (relational).
While I’m writing, just thought I’d share a linguistic trinitarian analogy with you which I cooked up. The logos is an onomatopoeiac word: It’s “sound” (or manifestion, or representation, or expression) is exactly the same as it’s “meaning” (or essence). Furthermore, the content of that sound/meaning is it’s own etymology. So in the simplicity of the logos, representation, meaning, and etymology are all identical. The etymology of the logos, just as with any word, is a story/history of how the meaning of that word came to be expressed in its representation. However, because it is both onomatopoeiac and self-referential, both the meaning and the representation of the divine word just are that divine word’s own etymology. The father is the meaning, the son is the representation, and the spirit is the etymology, and all of these are united in an onomatopoeiac and self-referential divine simplicity. In human language, representation (eg Chinese logographs, devenagari script, the chiremes of signing, the phonemes of speaking) is distinct from meaning/definition, and both representation and meaning evolve in history as etymology. But in the divine word, these three things coinhere.
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or to put it another way: The Logos – and therefore the Divine Love that is God – just is it’s own etymology: it does not need to reference anything outside of itself in order to be complete in itself and as itself. This is an attempt to take your essential argument in TBOTI and transpose it into a linguistic key.
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It also just occurred to me that this divine etymology of the logos that i’m talking about is simply “I am who I am” (in original Hebrew of course, which also encompasses “I will be what I will be”).
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oh btw. It just occurred to me that in light of your deep understanding of divine love and your infinite command of language, your letters to your wife must be positively salvific (another skill which I aspire to)
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Wow that is impressive. Any resources for learning these ancient scriptural tongues for a layman with a full time job who can spare a few hours a week TIK? And I agree that it is very gratifying that DBH answers his readers’ questions as often as he does, truly commendable.
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TJF, basing off my own experience, I had to do a formal course before I was equipped to self-learn. With language learning, a foundation has to be laid before the snowball gets rolling, but once it’s rolling, you can drop the training wheels and learn independently. I recall attempting to teach myself latin and greek many times prior to formally studying it, but i was basically just burning rubber. But, thanks be to God, I now know enough that further learning is somewhat automatic: It’s at a point where I pick up on etymologies in everything and am slowly but steadily putting together pieces of the linguistic puzzle even while I’m not actively trying to learn the languages. It’s kinda like setting up a website which can generate a passive income: first you have to invest time in getting the website established, but once it’s going it can generate money for you automatically without you lifting a finger.
With that in mind, my tip would be to look for a MOOC in the language you want to learn. Pick a course with a timelimit if you want to really commit to it, or pick one that has no expiry date if you want to keep it as a “spare time, when I’m feeling up to it” thing. I know that ANU has great sanskrit offerings, and I’ve only heard good things about Macquarie Uni’s language programs (they have a massive focus on languages relevant to the christian traditions)
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The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley. Points for me!
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Your certificate is in the mail. Unfortunately, because of the current administration’s intrigues for stealing the election, that means it won’t reach you for seven months.
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oh also DBH, a recommendation. Have you read “Vanity Karma”? It’s a commentary on ekklesiasticus by a deeply intelligent Jewish Hare-Krishna convert. Very interesting! He goes through the book chapter-by-chapter, section by section and delivers his testimony fused with an exegesis. He comments from the perspective of an Atheist Jew who sought for God in cannabis, music and psychedelics but ultimately discovered him in the Mahamantra. He proposes a AC Bhaktivedanta/Gaudiya Vaishnava Soteriology as a satisfying solution to the Hebraic vision that Qoholeth relates, of a seemingly inescapable and interminably “Heveled” Samsara. Actually on that note, I would be very curious to see what you would do with ecclesiastes considering your intimate acquaintence with the thought of the modernists and post-modernists. Qoheleth essentially seems to espouse a biblical nihilism. I’d love to see you compare and contrast Qoheleth with Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hegel, and etc. Perhaps if i keep reading BOTI I will discover that at some point you do just that! (currently at page 189)
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see https://vanitykarma.com/ if you are curious
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What I’d most like to see from DBH is the essay ‘A Holiday Reading List’ expanded into a book, like the recent one by James Mustich called 1000 Books to Read Before You Die. At the end of that essay you wrote, “I had better stop here”, after a list of 30. That suggests you wanted to go on. So why don’t you? At book length?
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In fact, that is the plan.
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This is fantastic news! That essay and your book reviews have immensely influenced me. I cannot express what a joy it is hear this plan, and I will be impatiently anticipating the book from this moment till it arrives at my doorstep.
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If you can suffer another question, any plans to do commentaries on the scriptures now that you have translated the NT?
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Great news indeed!
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DBH you are truthfully my intro to philosophy, theological nuances and so on.
I think it is safe to say that for me and others in my generation (20’s) – you are like the experience of C.S. Lewis that many such as the blog’s author had.
I had discovered you few months after an epiphany had converted my heart to Christ, a moment out of time after which my life started to be marked by coincidences and blessings.
It is very hard for me to let go of you, I have watched every single interview, every single podcast, read most of your articles and have started to simultaneously read most of your books… it’s like you formulate clearly ideas by which at times I have been pulled towards or glimpsed their shadow, intuitions I had in my contemplative moments but then you add so much more to them. Including politics.
I do read everything critically, but I can’t stop learning more and more, especially because I find in your text confirmations of other sources I have read and such an unparalleled depth of many disciplines all of this adds more weight to your person, I experience shifts in world view with new articles read sometimes…
I thank you so much and hope you are all well!
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First off DBH, thanks for all your work. The Experience of God brought me out of a year long agnostic atheism, and exposed me to the broader stream of Christian intellectual tradition than the Evangelical tradition with which I was familiar at the time. I know that you prefer fiction to philosophy (as, admittedly, I have come to do as well), but I’m sure you’re aware of the positive spiritual influence that your writings (including the fiction) have had on me and others.
If I could get one question in: you mention in one of your essays that the Dhammapada and the Bodhicaryavatara are high on your list of favourite spiritual readings, and I was wondering what some of your favourite Christian spiritual readings were. Thanks, and hope everyone on this blog is taking care.
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DBH, BOTI, to me, comes across as the final word on the entire western tradition. I’m up to page 379 and already you have touched on the full range of modernist and postmodernist thought, as well as the theory of western music and how it relates to theological aesthetics. You’re currently talking about the history of drama (attic tragedy in particular). You’ve covered all the biggest names in christian theology. The conclusion is that only Cappadocian Trinitarianism and Chalcedonean Christology (and all the thought of the fathers who contributed to it), can provide a peaceful and beautiful ontology. I love how you oppose “restrictive totality” to “overflowing and creative Infinity”.
Your Erudition is staggering to behold. and what’s even more staggering is the thought that BOTI doesn’t even touch the surface of texts and traditions you are familiar with. You haven’t just studied the classics of the western tradition, you’ve also studied the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Indian thought, the entire Islamic tradition, etc. Which makes me wonder how you coordinate everything you say in BOTI with what you’ve learned from these other traditions? How does the peaceful ontology of BOTI collide with the dependant origination of Buddhism? How does Jesus reshape how you read the Ramayana? Have you been able to discover any links in the Islamic tradition with the peaceful ontology you identify and describe in BOTI? (I recall you mentioning Ibn Arabi in youtube interviews, as a potential start).
In my own interfaith adventures, I’ve mainly spoken to Ash’ari muslims. Their rejection of the Mutazileh divine simplicity is absolute and runs deep in their veins. Was Ibn Arabi able to simultaneously affirm the real distinction between the divine essence and attributes, but also incorporate the Mutazileh divine simplicity? Is the way he did it similar to the Trinitarian ontology described in BOTI?
Bottom line: I wanna see you write BOTI all over again, but from within another tradition. What are the implications of this ontology for Dharmic samsara? is samsara just another totalising narrative? What are the pros and cons of Advaita Vedanta when put next to the Trinitarian ontology of BOTI?
(I ask a lot of questions here, but please treat them all as entirely rhetorical prompts)
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