We sat down for an interview with Kevin Hart, the newly appointed Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor at Duke Divinity School, who also has a secondary appointment in the Department of English. We asked him about the layers of his scholarly work, his involvement with Catholic initiatives at secular universities, and the themes from his latest book.

Your work bridges theology, literature, and philosophy and appeals to a wide range of readers. For somebody just getting to know you, how would you describe yourself? Would you call yourself a theologian, a poet, or something else?

I started writing poems at the age of 13, and at the same time I started to think theologically: I read some Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich, Rudloph Bultmann and even, I think, a few pages by Karl Barth. I’ve never stopped with either activity, although both have expanded both in scope and have been informed by my study of philosophy. I suppose that I have a dual calling: theologian and poet. It’s probably not a good idea to be a connoisseur of one’s own consciousness, but I suspect that poetry, theology, and philosophy cross-fertilize each other. 

There are deeper reasons why poetry and theology have commerce with one another. No one can read Scripture well unless one is also a good reader of poetry: the Psalms, the Canticle, Job, Lamentations, and Ecclesiastes are poetry, and Jesus’s parables are short narratives that are often abundantly charged with metaphor. I suspect that no one can read anything well unless one reads slowly, aware of the roles of tropes and figures, as well as the powers of persuasion. The trivium consisted of the study of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and we read best when we have mastered all three, doubtless in ways other than those favored in the Carolingian Renaissance and thereafter. We need to know all three, and how they interact, regardless of whether we’re reading poetry, Scripture, or something else. 

You’ve long been involved with Catholic centers of learning at secular universities—the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago and the St. Anselm Institute at the University of Virginia. How do you see these centers as contributing to the life of the modern university?

Lumen Christi and the St. Anselm Institute open up whole new dimensions at the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia. They make available spaces where Catholic faculty and students can meet one another and learn informally about the faith. It’s wonderful to go to a lecture and sit beside a professor of physics, say, or a professor of medicine. Often, you hear questions raised or answers given that simply are never voiced within a Divinity School or a Department of Religious Studies! An organization like Fons Vitae [at Duke Divinity School] can facilitate new relationships, even friendships, across departments and faculties, which can deepen the faith of those who join the gatherings. Catholicism is irreducibly social in character. As an ecclesial group, we know very well that we grow in conversation with each other, often over drinks or a meal. 

Upon joining Duke, you were appointed the Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor in the Divinity School, marking the first university chair in Duke Divinity’s history. Were you surprised by this and what do you think this reveals about Duke?

Actually, I had been living in Durham for a couple of months before I realized that I was the first university professor to teach in the Divinity School. So it was a surprise! It’s a tremendous honor to be awarded the chair, and I am thankful to the provost for appointing me to it and to the dean and vice-dean of Divinity for their unwavering support. I think the appointment indicates how very highly the Divinity School is regarded by the university administration at Duke. The intellectual caliber, the human warmth, and the ecumenical spirit of the Divinity School are extraordinary. I cannot think of another place like it in the world.

You have had a storied career, holding appointments in Australia, Europe, and the U.S., most recently at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Virginia. What most excites you about coming to Duke Divinity?

Duke Divinity School lives and breathes Christianity in all its variety and in all its richnesses. I’m writing a systematic theology these days, which means that I’m always thinking about links between different parts of theology; and the breadth and depth of the Divinity School means that I can be part of very rich conversations about theology. I’m a church-based theologian, a lay preacher and someone heavily involved in adult ecclesial education, so it’s a delight and a privilege to be teaching so many students who are or will be pastors. The Department of English has been very kind to me and has given me a secondary appointment with them. Since one of my fields is “Poetry and Theology,” I look forward to contributing what I can to the Department of English. Right now, I’m writing Poetry as Spiritual Experience while making notes for another book, Poverty’s Speech: On Wallace Stevens. It’s always important to me to be involved in reading and writing about poetry as well as writing theology.

In your first publication as a Duke professor, Contemplation: The Movements of the Soul, you explore the movements of the soul in contemplation and defend contemplation against its detractors. There, you claim that modern nihilism is transfixed by “a culture of fascination”—with screens, personalities, and even ourselves. How does contemplation differ from this culture of fascination, and why do you believe it is essential—or even a lost treasure—for human flourishing?

In my Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness, I spent some time distinguishing contemplation from fascination, on the one hand, and consideration, on the other. Consideratio has somewhat fallen out of view in the theology of prayer, but it is very important. It is the search for the certitude around which contemplation turns. It can also be directed to oneself, so that one considers who one is, what one can do, what one is responsible for, and so on. I am in favor of recovering the lost arts of consideratio. (In Lands of Likeness I try to show that there is an unacknowledged poetry of consideration.) 

If there is one word that diagnoses the state of our culture today it may well be “fascination.” In Lands of Likeness, I trace this notion back to the ancient Romans, and then explore the poetry of fascination, which certainly has a great value. I spend some time reading Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” as different examples of the poetry of fascination. In our day, we are fascinated, often rendered passive, by technology of all sorts, including AI, and perhaps most especially computer and TV screens. We are also fascinated by violence and death, by Hollywood “lifestyles” and political or media “personalities.” Social media is a cult of fascination. When fascinated, we find it hard to detach ourselves from the object of fascination; and eventually we feel diminished, even stultified, by the experience. Not so with contemplation, which is always delightful, offering us an insight into freedom. But we cannot simply oppose the two, for we can slip from contemplation to fascination (or vice versa) in a moment. 

Anyone can learn the first steps of contemplation—and history shows us that it has not always been leagued with revealed religion. Aristotle thought that the highest reward for the philosopher was contemplating the structures of reality. More generally, the ancient Greeks and Romans practiced “spiritual exercises.” Modern German philosophers—Kant and Schopenhauer, Husserl and Wittgenstein—have all prized contemplation. For Kant and Schopenhauer, nature invites contemplation. For the latter, especially, it allows one to escape causal chains and the confines of strict morality. Husserl thought that doing philosophy is finally a mode of contemplation, rather than analysis or argument. Heidegger disagreed with him at first, preferring to talk of moods, rather than tranquility, as revealing being; but in his later years he adopted the view that being gives itself in and through contemplation. Between the Greeks and Romans and the Germans, though, there is the whole complex of Christian thought about contemplation, and this is something that should be of interest to Catholics. 

The central act of the Catholic faith is prayer, liturgical or private, and both have contemplative dimensions: e.g., adoration, for the one, and lectio divina, for the other. Since Vatican II, we haven’t heard very much from the pulpit or the bishops about prayer, let alone contemplative prayer, and this has given the Church a lop-sided theology. We’re told to pray but not taught how to pray. The practice of contemplation—in reading, in spiritual exercises, even in writing—can center the self in the imago dei and still the hive of the mind. But it’s not wholly restricted to individual acts, withdrawals from the world about one; it also has an ecclesial aspect: there are moments in the Mass that call to be beheld by everyone. We most resemble the Kingdom during the adoration of the consecrated elements. 

In modern times, we look to arguments to establish the certainty of something. The higher the degree of clarity and rigor of an argument, we believe, the more likely it is that we’ll find certain truth. The philosophy of religion has blossomed over the last few decades; it’s easy to find sophisticated proofs for the existence of God (and also sophisticated refutations of those proofs). If we go back a few centuries, though, we will find another situation. It was the practice of contemplative prayer that brought confidence to people in their awareness of God. Not that it’s easy. In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas points out that a whole life devoted to contemplation might result in one flash of simple intuition of the deity, and he says that this fully justifies the contemplative life. Of course, one must prepare for that one flash by love of God and neighbor, by study, by recourse to the sacraments, and practice in contemplation. 

The book you mention, Contemplation: The Movements of the Soul, can be read by anyone at all. Undergraduate students can read it with profit, and so can people involved in book groups in churches and in “small groups.” I hope it gets into the hands of people who have long commutes by bus or train; it might show them some horizons that will beckon them and help to nourish them.