This book collects scholarly essays published by David Hart over the past two decades, and adds three previously unpublished pieces. This brilliant book can be read in a number of ways, with rich insights to be gained in a number of intellectual domains. It should primarily be read as an introduction to Christian philosophy.

The heart of the book is Hart's contention that Nicaea's affirmation of the consubstantial divinity of the Son produced a revolution in metaphysics. Prior to Nicaea, even Christian thinkers tended to think in terms of a transcendent One whose power and presence are mediated to us by semidivine intermediaries, with the result that intermediaries such as the Neoplatonic “nous” (or the Son) were imagined to get us closer to God and to make it possible for God to have contact with creatures. After Nicaea, however, it becomes clear that God is infinite triune plenitude, the source and cause of all finite being and the ground of all distinction. God's radical transcendence allows him to be intimately present to creatures.

A proper understanding of the transcendence of God enables us to appreciate the analogy of being. Far from constituting a pathway to God that makes Christ redundant, the analogy of being insists upon the transcendence of God and upon our dependence on God for finite existence at every instant. The analogy of being insists that God's “being” is not in any way like ours. But because God is our Creator and we exist through him, our existence is not utterly equivocal to God's: even if we cannot comprehend what God's “existence” means, we can know that God is, in an unimaginable infinite mode, every perfection of being. Employing Gregory of Nyssa (and Augustine as well), Hart describes the image of God in us as a mirror, so that human nature is perfected when we contemplate and imitate the wisdom, love, and beauty of the triune God.

Conceiving of the world as God's text (and suggesting that modern philosophy suffers from the attempt to read the world as revelatory of a self unnarrated by God), Hart argues that modern philosophy arises from the effort to find “a self beyond subjectivity,” or, put otherwise, “the desire to see and know ourselves pellucidly” (71) without seeing or hearing God, and thus within an immanent eschatological frame. Hart shows the failure of this interpretive project, which begins with the self alone and ends with no self at all. He moves at high speed, but with precision, through Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Deleuze, Levinas, Nancy, and Derrida. Lastly, he offers an alternative rooted in the Christian “belief that only God tells and has told the tale correctly, and by the hope that the self narrated in ‘me’ by God's creative Word is a story to which ‘my’ telling can conform itself in love” (80).

If modern philosophy displays the idolatry of the self, ancient philosophy also denies God, according to Hart. It does so by positing an immanentized infinite or by making the infinite a purely negative concept, an unintelligible formlessness. Hart connects the immanentizing of God with a zero-sum universe that makes blood sacrifice (as expressive of, and submissive, to the reign of the cosmic cycle of birth and death) necessary—a view of sacrifice overcome by Christ's Cross. Hart marches us through the thought of Anaximander, Empedocles, the Pythagoreans, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Plotinus stands as the great exponent of the transcendent One, who is knowable and active only in semidivine intermediaries, and who brings us back to the Nicene revolution.

In the background of much of Hart's work is Heidegger, whose effort to overthrow “metaphysics” is emblematic of the modern forgetting of the Nicene revolution. But Hart's book is not all philosophy: indeed, perhaps its most important essay is “The Myth of Schism,” which charts an intriguing path for East-West ecumenism. I note also his argument that Christian freedom is inevitably in some sense “anarchic,” because of its law of love.

Suffice it to say that this book merits the widest possible readership.