“The Way That Abides Forever”: David Bentley Hart’s New Translation of the Tao Te Ching

In his 2024 book All Things Are Full of Gods, the renowned philosopher of religion David Bentley Hart wrote a Socratic dialogue unlike any other. The premise? The ancient Greek gods gather together in a beautiful garden to discuss the nature of being in a conversation largely driven and moderated by Psyche, the wife of Cupid. In their 500-page dialogue, they telescope into a whole world of ideas spanning from Greco-Roman antiquity to the Eastern mystics to, eventually, modern philosophers too, all with the aim of proving Hart’s key argument: the things seen are not all that there is. Scientific materialism is a flawed and unnecessarily limited perspective. The things unseen are, in fact, much more real than what we can touch, feel, taste.

Hart’s reflections in that book were the fruit of a lifetime of reading, thinking, and writing much more widely than most philosophers and scholars of religion tend to do. Typically, scholars of Christianity, in particular—of whom Hart is one—are well read in the Western tradition. But Hart, unlike most, has also been attracted to the ideas of Eastern mysticism, seamlessly incorporating them into his writing and, it seems, personal beliefs.

Perhaps, given his own conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy as a young man, this is not surprising. The Orthodox Church, since its inception, has generally dwelt with one foot in the East and the other in the West. Besides, as scholars from Michael Horton to Hart himself have noted, the ancient world makes more sense if we consider global antiquity in the Axial Age (roughly 800–200 BC) as a much more coherent whole. Historical evidence increasingly supports frequent interactions between civilizations as reflected by common themes in literature and beliefs. Ideas, like people, are prone to travel.

One of the texts that Hart has found his attention returning to, time and again, is the Tao Te Ching , or The Book of the Way , a classical Chinese philosophical poem attributed to one Laozi (a title rather than a real name), who lived and wrote in the sixth century BC. The author is semi-mythical, may have known Confucius, and may have lived to the age of 160—but again, perhaps did not. What matters is the intriguing text he has left. Building on his own forty years of reading and re-reading this text, Hart has now produced his own new translation of it with an introductory essay that is already worth the price of the book.

The Tao Te Ching is notoriously difficult to classify, Hart admits. Its writing style is puzzling, a nearly even-split combination of prose and poetry (Hart settles in his translation for poetic stanzas, some of them more free-verse in their approach than others). But its contents and genre are trickier yet. It is a work of philosophy, but it is also undeniably mystical, a work of religion at its heart:

“One might say that this is a work of metaphysical and spiritual monism, or at least of a philosophical and religious vision of the One and the many that assumes the real participation of all things in their divine or celestial source. It is also a picture of cosmic nature pervaded by living spiritual agencies, divine and mortal. It is a book intended not merely to chart a safe path through the contending forces and perils of worldly life, but much more to transfigure the soul, until even the most spontaneous promptings of its will have only the shape of the Way, because the soul has been perfectly united to its own eternal source and end.”

The focus of the book is the mysterious Way, which refers to dwelling rightly and justly in harmony with the divine and human beings of the universe. Reading repeated reflections on the Way should remind us of one parallel to Christian thought: as early as the days of Saul (later the Apostle Paul), Christians described their belief system as “the Way,” or “ hodos ” in Greek. In Acts 9:2 this term is used to describe the ones whom Saul is persecuting before his own miraculous encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus.

Laozi’s Way is more poetic and elusive, though, as the first line of the text suggests: “That Way that abides forever is not a way that can be trodden…” The book keeps returning to the idea of the Way as “that wondrous mystery,” something that is just as important as it is difficult to comprehend. Language of ordinary and recognizable activities and imagery turns these very familiar ideas on their head, as in this reflection:

“A skilled traveler leaves neither wheel-ruts nor footprints;

A skilled speaker commits no errors inviting reproach;

A skilled tallier does not resort to bamboo tallies;

The most adept at sealing a door needs neither bolts nor bars,

Requires no key, and yet none can open it;

The most adept at tying a knot needs neither cord nor string,

And yet none can unfasten it.”

And so, the segment continues, one who is wise will not abandon people but will always care for them. Similarly, the one who is wise and honorable will teach the “debased” (a harsh term here!), attempting to elevate them by his wisdom.

Wisdom, ultimately, is the key, the Tao Te Ching insists. The wise will also be good, honorable, and just. A society of wise people will be a good society, one in which every person can flourish. And because Laozi assumes that those who are not wise can be elevated by those who are, all citizens have a duty to improve themselves and each other.

This is a beautiful vision for civic education in this age of moral failures and degradation that we can see all around. Indeed, the Tao Te Ching is just the exhortation to moral growth needed for the moment, as vices once broadly recognized as inimical to a well functioning society proliferate, serving only to alienate us further from one another. If vice festers in and contributes to isolation and loneliness, the key to good citizenship and growth in the virtues is the community of other citizens, those who are wiser and more virtuous. We can certainly benefit from thinking more about the need to grow, not only for our own sake but for that of our country. Indeed, part of the wisdom that the Way insistently teaches is that we do not belong to ourselves alone.

And yet, as genuinely constructive as the Tao Te Ching is for thinking earnestly about the difficult questions of our own day, its message falls short of the Gospel. Its spirituality, for all its references to “Heaven,” is obviously not informed by Christ. And so, while Christians will benefit from reading this text and being reminded of the universality of its message, we must remember that to follow Christ is not equivalent to merely growing in wisdom. Indeed, sometimes to follow Christ looks like foolishness to the rest of the world (1 Cor. 1:18). But then, to be good and virtuous citizens in an age of vice is still good testimony for the cause of Christ.