Until 15th July read Christopher B. Barnett’s full article “The “Lonely Game”: Baseball, Kierkegaard, and the Spiritual Life” from Horizons, Volume 47, Issue 1

In August 2010, David Bentley Hart published a short essay entitled “The Perfect Game: The Metaphysical Meaning of Baseball.”[1] Known for weighty tomes such as The Beauty of the Infinite (2003) and Atheist Delusions (2010), Hart seemed an unlikely candidate to analyze a sport often referred to as a “pastime.” What is most memorable about the essay is Hart’s claim that baseball is “the very Platonic ideal of organized sport,” indeed, that it is “‘the moving image of eternity’ in athleticis.” Hart claimed that baseball would one day be remembered as America’s greatest contribution to human civilization—an “invention” and, indeed, a “discovery” of the “traces of eternity’s radiance in fugitive splendors” on Earth.

Hart argues that, insofar as sports such as American football and soccer feature “limited and martial tactics” to conquer territory, they “appeal more to the beast within us than to the angel.” In contrast, baseball unites possibility with necessity in surprising ways, taking a meticulously conceived field of grass plus a collection of physical and mental aptitudes and subjecting them to countless probabilities. The upshot is gut-wrenching theater: baseball is not war but “Attic tragedy.” Because the game is divided into innings rather than discrete units of time, it unfolds as a metaphor of the human condition. Thrown into a world of ceaseless flux (Hart cites the Latin proverb omnia mutantur et nos mutamur in illis), human beings nevertheless strive in and before the eternal.

This essay would like to take Hart’s reflections on baseball a step further. It aims to expand upon his analysis, showing that baseball’s time-honored emphases on physical and spiritual discipline follow from its metaphysical imaginary. Moreover, it will show that, in both cases, Christian life and thought are capable of illuminating baseball—and vice versa.

The argument will proceed as follows: First, both Christianity and baseball frame their worlds in terms of emanation (exitus) and return (reditus): “players” leave home and aim to return home;[2] second, though players belong to a team (ecclesia), the task of returning home is ultimately a solitary one; it has to be done by the individual player, even if the team, too, benefits from the individual’s undertaking; and third, the spiritual or attitudinal development of the individual is thus crucial: players have to attend to how they approach the game, particularly in terms of their internal comportment. This last point will receive special attention: it will be reasoned that Søren Kierkegaard’s spiritual writings, tendered for the existential “upbuilding” (Opbyggelse) of “the single individual” (den Enkelte), might likewise offer upbuilding insights for the individuals who play baseball—a sport that John Updike once called “an essentially lonely game.”[3]

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[1] This piece was later included in a collection of Hart’s occasional writings: David Bentley Hart, A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 44–51. It is worth adding that “The Perfect Game” is not Hart’s only foray into baseball writing; also see his recent satirical editorial: “The New Yankees Are a Moral Abomination,” New York Times, July 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/14/opinion/new-york-yankees-evil.html.

[2] Here it is worth noting that this essay will focus almost exclusively on hitting, rather than on other facets of the game (e.g., pitching, fielding, baserunning, etc.). Perhaps this choice betrays an affinity for the modern version of the game, which, since the time of Babe Ruth, has tended to favor offense and, indeed, home runs. Nevertheless, the primary reason for concentrating on hitting is pragmatic: it would take a much longer work to explore how each aspect of baseball might be understood in theological terms. Secondarily, and as will be seen, it also happens that the role of the hitter best corresponds to the exitus-reditus framework explored in this piece, though pitchers, too, might benefit from Kierkegaard’s spiritual insights. After all, pitching requires what H. A. Dorfman calls “gathering,” the process by which one takes “charge of oneself and one’s circumstance” (H. A. Dorfman, The Mental ABC’s of Pitching: A Handbook for Performance Enhancement [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016], 119).
John Updike, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (New York: The Library of America, 2010), 14.