OF COURSE I'm still reading The Beauty of the Infinite

I haven't posted anything from David Bentley Hart in a while, have I? I'm chugging along as best I can, nearing the halfway point. Here's something he wrote about Kant, which will relate to one of tomorrow's posts.

“In a sense, Kant's ‘Copernican revolution’ might better be called ‘Ptolemaic’: if Copernicus overthrew the commonsense geocentrism of ancient cosmology by advancing the heliocentric thesis, displacing the center from ‘here’ to ‘there,’ Kant (as an inheritor of the epistemological caesura such a revolution seems to introduce, more forcibly than Platonism, between sensibility and verifiable truth) enacted at the transcendental level an entirely contrary motion, reestablishing the order of knowledge by moving the axis of truth from the ‘sun of the good’ to the solid, imperturbable fundamentum inconcussum of the subjectum (substrate, substance, ground) transcendentale. Now the phenomena would revolve around the unyielding earth of apperception; again we would stand at the center. . . . And what was lost when the soul was forsaken for the self (however one interprets the move) is the world that the soul could at once dwell in and reflect within itself: the immediate impress of beauty, splendor, otherness both familiar and inviolably other, the desire this provokes, the overwhelming and strangely articulate address of its radiance, its inviting transcendence.”

-David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans) 2003. 137-8

If Hart is correct, then the Kantian revolution thrust us back into Plato's cave, back into our chains, where we contemplate what we can of our predicament. One of the arguments that underlies the whole first section of The Beauty of the Infinite is that Kant's system of thought very nearly discards beauty, and certainly considers the experience of the sublime to be much more important. Hart (apparently following Hans Urs von Balthasar) wants theologians to reverse this ordering, move us back to a contemplation of a good outside ourselves, and to take beauty rightly understood as our guide.

Now, I haven't yet read Kant, but I want to get to it someday. Frankly, I am intimidated by the German philosophers, but I know that I'll have to engage them before I can evaluate with any certainty what Hart says about them. But there's just so much to read...