Should We Burn Hegel?
Here I would like to recycle a question raised regarding Hegel by the Italian feminist Carla Lonzi (1931-1982), whose radical thought was brought into general intellectual circulation by her influence on Elena Ferrante’s multi-volume, My Brilliant Friend. The question is, undoubtedly, provocative, and only in a very restricted sense original. Her question is self-consciously a repetition of Simone de Beauvoir’s question regarding the Marquis de Sade. Her question was “Should we burn de Sade?” Shockingly, simultaneously attracted and repelled by de Sade’s monstrous encyclopedia of violation, frozen in indecision between the nightmare of everything being permitted and the liberating effect of a transgressive discourse, de Beauvoir fails to answer her own question.
With Hegel’s texts as the subject of the potential bonfire, things are not quite so literal or extreme. Though Hegel may be an encyclopedist like Sade, he is surely a very different one, one who does have an ethics and who displays what appears to be a friendly posture towards Christianity. The Italian feminist is much more interested in the first of the two issues, that is, whether Hegel outlines or fails to outline a sufficiently egalitarian ethics that takes account of differences and particularly takes account of women. Unlike de Beauvoir, she does not equivocate: given her feminist agenda, we should burn Hegel or at least spit on him (spitiamo su Hegel).
Our concern is with the other side of Hegel’s possible removal from our collective memory, that is, our nagging worry as to whether Hegel’s apparent hospitality to Christianity masks a systemic hostility. Following Lonzi, but from an entirely different angle, our task is to be appropriately decisive if the evidence mounts that at bedrock Hegelian speculation is hostile to Christianity, not by ignoring it, but by reproducing it in a carnival mirror that distorts it. Of course, to burn Hegel is not simply to remove his pages from our sight, but to remove their seeing from constituting a possible element of our seeing. Perhaps burning in this instance bears an analogy to the scandal referred to in Matthew 5:20-30 that if the eye offends, it needs to be plucked out. To burn Hegel is to refuse him a place in our Christian memory; it is to forget him in order to be able to go about our theological business of catching glimpses of God in world, history, in the Church, in the Christian tradition of doctrines, practices of worship, and lives of Christian discipleship.
Hegel can neither be read lightly, nor taken lightly. To read Hegel lightly is not to read him at all. If the incentive to read Hegel is that, on the one hand, he properly diagnoses the crisis of modernity that is both discursive (loss of belief) and real (lack of community) and, on the other, constructs a discourse that can take us beyond the crisis, the systemic worry has been that submitting oneself to the exhilarating rigors of Hegel’s speculative thinking, which involves nothing less than the alternation of the grammar of Western thought—including denial of the validity of the law of non-contradiction—plunges us deeper into the crisis and deprives us of a way out.
The suspicion, despite the manifest attraction of Hegel’s philosophy and the promise it suggests for redeeming Christianity by presenting it in a new discursive mode, that all may not be well is marked the very beginning of Hegel-reception in Christian circles. Even as copious gratitude is expressed to Hegel for giving Christianity up-scale lodgings in the well-appointed concept, we can see the dawning recognition that significant sacrifices of Christian substance are called for. The unremembered Karl Friedrich Göschel (1784-1862) has specific concerns about the immanentizaton of the divine; the unmemorable Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1796-1879), son of his controversial father, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who launches German Idealism, complains about the sacrifice of the notion of personal immortality required by Hegelian thought; and in the case of two major Catholic thinkers, after a period of bewitchment, it gradually dawned upon the Franz von Baader (1765-1841) that Hegel’s philosophy could not support a Christian doctrine of creation and perhaps more punctually in the case of theologian Franz Anton Staudenmaier (1800-1856) that Hegel may not simply be a solvent for an overly dogmatic and overly institutionalized Christianity, but rather present a post-Christian alternative to it.
With Kierkegaard, however, the recognition that Hegel is guilty of serious tampering with Christianity is both immediate and pungent: he thinks that in Hegel’s presentation of Christianity he has seen Christianity’s other, a conceptual miming and mincing of Christianity that betrays it to the core. He does not attempt to provide the kind of substantive refutation that we find in Staudenmaier who speaks ponderously but effectively to the alteration of doctrines of the Trinity, Christ, pneumatology, Church, and Trinity as they are wrung through the machinery of Hegel’s dialectic. Rather, through irony, satire, and hyperbole Kierkegaard repeatedly attacks the weak points of Hegel’s system in the attempt to damage its prestige, but also to illuminate that it has effectively erased specifically Christian notions of creatureliness, sin, and guilt, and effectively sidelined the biblical text that, for Hegel, was nothing more than a “wax nose” capable of any impression or interpretation. Twentieth-century criticism of Hegel’s fundamental distorting of Christianity can be found in the Russian Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), in the Catholic philosopher Gaston Fessard (1887-1978), and in the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1904-1986), whom, I have shown elsewhere, is as extensive in his refutation as Staudenmaier was in the nineteenth century.
Of course (though, arguably, the lazy option), it is possible to take Hegel at his word that he has preserved Christianity. After all, what really is the point of being skeptical when Hegel claims that he is a Lutheran and his wife insists on it, when he marks the Reformation as the decisive event in history that inaugurates modernity, when his discourse repeats Lutheran polemics against both Catholic worldliness and unworldliness, and when we find that he not only echoes but justifies Luther’s “Living God” and the cross against the horrors of the Catholic tradition committed to the metaphysical horrors of divine aseity, immutability, impassibility, and eternity? As for manifest differences between Hegel’s presentation or representation of Christianity and that of traditional Christianity and especially Catholic Christianity that he abjures, perhaps there is no particular reason to be upset that some dogmatic staples, incomprehensible practices, and stultifying forms of life are consigned to the dustbin of history, and equally no need for mourning when we notice that while traditional Christian symbols continue in play, their meaning is radically altered. Things have turned out for the best. Behaviorally, Christianity becomes contemporary with its century and brought up to intellectual code. Or put in the teleological terms that Hegel regularly deploys with respect to all subject matters, in its conceptual mansion Christian actuality finally corresponds to its potentiality. Even Catholics should be grateful for this new state of affairs in which they have a choice of continuing to be anachronistic or entering the promised land of comprehension in which their Catholic self-hatred is merely voluntary.
From the earliest Berne (1793-1796) and Frankfurt (1797-1800) writing on religion as potential cure for the experience of uncertainty and alienation that mark the modern age, to the writings of Berlin (1818-1831) and especially the Encyclopedia and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, through the Jena writings (1801-1807), and especially the Phenomenology (1807), philosophy and Christianity are familiars, indeed members of a special “absolute” family that in principle has no need for hierarchy. Yet it does seem that in this “all are equal” provision, we get the Orwellian hint that “some are more equal than others.” Certainly, as Hegel attempts to think through the relationship in his Jena period from the point of view of discursive adequacy, philosophy seems to be the pinnacle; it can account of art and religion and everything else, not excluding its own genesis and nature. No other discourse has this power; all suppose something given.
Both art and religion presuppose a reality that is not constituted by human subjectivity. In Christianity, what is presupposed is God; what is given is the revelation of God, the definitive giving and given being the incarnation. Moreover, the practice of philosophy seems purified of alien elements in a way that religious practices are not. Its practice too is a form of worship, but no longer of an alien other, but rather of itself. It is precisely as such that it is superior to the liturgy in the order of knowing that connects us with the divine and in the transformation of self and community that gets effected. Philosophy sublates (aufheben) Christianity, that is, preserves and surpasses it. While the claim of philosophy surpassing Christianity may be obnoxious, the claim of preservation may be both more noxious and more crucial. It is also impossible to damp down the questions: In what manner is Christianity supposed to be preserved? Preserved as itself or preserved as a shadow of itself, for its sign value rather than what it signifies?
Most often, the arguments for and against Hegel are made on the basis of what happens when Christian representation is sublated by Hegelian concept. In a sense, this is to be expected, since at the moment of transition everything Christian can be lost. Yet, the question is often begged as to what figuration of Christianity has been supplied by Hegel, as if the figuration of Christianity is a matter of indifference. One would like to ask impertinently, indifferent to whom? To a theist? To a confessional believer of whatever stripe with determinate beliefs and practices, and particular ways of reading and justifying the reading of scripture? Confessional theologians are not likely to be comforted when they find Hegel in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion dismissing scripture, nor enthused when Hegel in the above text, as well as in the Phenomenology, argues that the believing community rather than Christ provides the fundamental point of view of Christianity; nor feel sanguine about how the Christian narrative from the immanent Trinitarian divine to the economic activities in creation to eschaton fares when, despite invoking the name of Luther, there is little that is substantively Lutheran in terms of theology, just as there is no deployment of, or even reference to, Aquinas or Augustine, no Cappadocians when it comes to Hegel’s Trinitarian articulation.
Why We Might Burn Hegel: Hegel’s Derangement of Christianity
For a Christian thinker, and especially a Catholic thinker, to face up to Hegel’s articulation of the Christian narrative, to attend to the narrative company he keeps and his ancestors when it comes to the Trinity will likely move us from being amazed to being appalled. There are five “derangements” of Christian understanding that cumulatively might fund the response of permanently banishing Hegel from our communal memory. As a clarification, the term “derangement” here is not functioning in the clinical and pathological sense. Hegel is not being accused of being “crazy” or “insane.” Sidelined also is Eric Voegelin’s surrogate of “pneumapathology” or the deformation of the human that is indexed with a lack of acceptance of finitude. Rather, “derangement” has the sense of torsion applied to what appeared to be settled relations in mainline Christianity between faith and reason, revelation and philosophy, and distortions that are hidden in plain sight when we look at how Hegel handles the various episodes of the Christian narrative and the narrative as a whole, as well as the relation between the Trinity in se and what has come to be called the “economic Trinity.” If I begin and end with the distortions of relations between reason and revelation and reason and faith, at the center are the distortions that Hegel wrings on the Christian narrative and its general conspectus of the triune God.
Derangement 1: Revelation Accepted and Overcome
Against various strands of the Enlightenment’s reinterpretation of Christianity Hegel is adamant that Christianity is defined by revelation (Offenbarung). While this, in a sense, means that revelation is an event, crucially for Hegel what is given is in fundamental respects intelligible and knowable. In this respect, the event is husk, intelligibility the kernel. Thus, Hegel’s hostility to the post-Kantian trajectory in theology and philosophy that emphasizes God’s unknowability, which he takes to indicate God’s incommensurability with respect to the orders of nature and human beings. Hegel disputes both propositions: divine disclosure means that God is given to thought; and since God is thought, then God is genuinely reflected in Christian discourse, though only fully self-reflective in philosophy, which removes God’s fetishization as an object.
Hegel’s enlisting of Paul’s subversion of the “Unknown God” notwithstanding, Hegel not only takes his leave of Kant, but of the entire Christian tradition. In its most formal expression, the Christian tradition is riveted by epistemological and ontological suppositions that function as regulative for its own self-understanding. In the epistemological register, there are two fundamental components, first, that (a) finite mind is inadequate for an infinite object, and second, (b) whatever its intrinsic capacity, in the fallen human condition, reason no longer operates at its maximum level. The ontological supposition is that there is an ontological gap between the finite and the infinite that cannot be bridged. Hegel fundamentally takes issue with both of these suppositions and, after the manner of Spinoza, makes it his philosophical task to refute them.
Derangement 2: Rewriting the Christian Narrative
The single most stunning example of Hegel’s deviation from mainline Christianity (especially Catholic Christianity) is his alteration of the Christian narrative that he takes to define the limits of historical Christian self-reflection. This narrative posits an internally differentiated Trinitarian divine, but has at front and center the so-called the economic operations of the divine in creation, fall, incarnation, passion, and death of Christ, the formation of the Christian community, and its momentum towards the eschaton. It is truly remarkable that we see Hegel revise standard Christian proposals with regard to all of these narrative episodes.
A. Creation: Hegel not only rightly criticizes voluntarist views of creation that emphasize God’s display of his omnipotent will in bringing about the physical-temporal world, but also rationalist views that consider creation under the auspices of efficient causality (whether modern or medieval). In this respect, he reminds us of Spinoza, though, to be fair, his view sometimes looks as much like Neoplatonism as Spinoza in that the emphasis on logical necessity is supported by a vision of the generosity and expressivity of the divine which, however, is anxious to keep intact any genuine form of divine transcendence over creation as its expression.
B. Fall: Sin: In texts such as the Phenomenology and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel embraces the narrative distinction between creation and fall of human being only to subvert it. Substantively, creation is fall; the only formal difference being that creation provides a guarantee that fall is a “happy fault” (felix culpa), since its overcoming is built into it. Hegel here is not only at odds with the biblical view of creation, but also the entire subsequent tradition of interpretation. He is at odds with Irenaeus, who thinks that the identification of creation and fall is central to Gnosticism, with Augustine, who thinks the identification of creation and fall is typical of Manichaeism, and with Luther who thinks that the identification of creation and fall is the height of lunacy. Moreover, Hegel justifies the fall and upholds Adam’s ambitions to know the depths of reality that are being thwarted by the biblical God. In the Encyclopedia, as well as in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, the God of Christian faith, who funds theological interpretation, is envious. This unflattering figuration finds a precedent in Gnosticism making a hero of the serpent and a horizon in the Romantic Prometheus that came into fashion in Germany through Goethe’s famous poetic depiction of Prometheus’s rejection of the tyrant Zeus (read: biblical God).
In his reading of Adam’s fall, Hegel wipes out from it any sense of disobedience and consequent alienation. Whatever relation human beings should have with God, it should be characterized by a measure of equality and knowing. When he takes leave of the garden of Eden, Adam is taking leave of ignorance rather than innocence. Furthermore, to the extent to which Adam functions as exemplar—and this is for Hegel his entire role—sin is no longer an operative category. Thus, Kierkegaard’s outrage, his tracking of our pride and despair, and his hyperboles of fear and trembling before a God to whom a grave injustice has been done.
C. Incarnation: Passion: Death of Christ: In his major works, though at first sight Hegel appears to give an apparent endorsement of the uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth, as a matter of fact he does everything in his power to obviate uniqueness by making it a function of Christ as symbol. Ultimately, it is the meaning of Jesus that is important rather than his person. It is incumbent on the Christian as well as the philosopher to extract the meaning of the incarnation as the general belonging together of the divine and the human, and leave behind Christ’s particularity, contingency, and historicity. Furthermore, as the Phenomenology in particular makes clear, the passion and death of Christ is both a confirmation of the fragility of finitude and its implied overcoming; death is also the death of death. The pretext here is the Gospel of John, the antecedent of Luther. The glory of the cross is paradox. Yet Hegel manages—if not manicures—the paradox; it is a dialectical rule that all phenomena mutate into their opposite. Curiously, however, in this case the opposite of Christ’s death is not identified with the resurrection, but with the believing community (spiritual community) that takes upon itself the task of appropriating the meaning of Christ as capax infiniti.
D. Spiritual Community: What Hegel calls the “spiritual community” (Gemeinde) approximates to, but cannot be totally identified with the Church considered as an institutional and historical reality. If throughout history the Church is defined as the approximate site for the meaning of Christ, in modernity its exclusive prerogatives end, as appropriation of the meaning of Christ is also understood to involve transforming the entire social world. In his construct of spiritual community Hegel confounds the distinction between Church and world that was a hallmark of Luther, while extending Kant’s speculations of an “invisible Church” that would be identified by ethics rather the particular beliefs or Church membership. Hegel conveniently shifts the emphasis from Christ to the Holy Spirt, thereby associating him with the pneumatic wing of Christian thought that in modern religious thought evoked the Calabrian abbot, Joachim de Fiore. What separates Hegel from Joachim is that he does not conceive the community to be inspired by anything like a personal agent. In a sense, the spiritual community is the Holy Spirit.
E. Eschaton: The spiritual community is what throughout history the Church in its reality and practices have intended rather than realized. The pneumatic realization, for Hegel, is the full realization of freedom and knowledge, though the register of this freedom and knowledge—with the exception of the prerogatives of the philosopher who rises to the divine point of view—is communal rather than individual. Now, while Hegel does not say anything as silly as time stops, he does say that in and through its consummation of all religious groping and its own development throughout history and exclamation point in Protestantism, Christianity has come into possession of the meaning and truth of reality.
Noticeably ruled out, however, is the credibility of postmortem existence. Hegel finds such a notion primitive, indeed, essentially mythological: nothing more nor less than a conceptual confusion of eternity proper (which transcends time) with everylastingness (which interprets eternity after the model of time being interminable). His precedents (also warrants) for this view are twofold: within the Christian tradition, Meister Eckhart, in the philosophical tradition, Spinoza, more specifically Spinoza’s reflection on the intellectual love of God (amor intellectualis dei) in the crowning Book 5 of the Ethics that played an oversized role in German Romanticism and Idealism. Especially interesting from the perspective of how Hegel interprets the Christian tradition is that he reads the famous controversial passage in Meister Eckhart, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees himself,” as giving him leverage against the Christian tradition as a whole, even the mystical tradition as a whole, which insisted that whatever the level of insight into God and however deep the unity in relationship, in the postmortem situation, human knowing would be vastly deeper, since we would now see God “face to face,” and the level of unity unimaginably greater.
Derangement 3: Manhandling the Eucharist
When Hegel comes to reflect on the spiritual community, he does not entirely sideline the historical Church and its cultic practices. Routinely, for example, in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, he foregrounds the Eucharist, indeed, even gets into the theological weeds in comparing and contrasting the sacramental theologies of Catholicism, the Reform tradition, and Lutheranism. Though he finds the Reform view inadequate insofar as the Eucharist is reduced to a memorial of the past that has no transformative effect on the present, he reserves his scorn for the Catholic view of transubstantiation.
Though the scorn is in part licensed by Protestant polemics against the Catholic view, Hegel adds his own objections. Indeed, he has to add his own objections, since unlike Lutheranism as a whole, his objection against the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist cannot be against the use of philosophy as such. What is wrong with the Catholic view of transubstantiation is that it neither understands symbol nor transformation. A symbol gathers together meaning and truth that requires the exercise of intellect to unpack: there is not simply an epistemic gap between symbol and its comprehension, but also a temporal gap. Time is needed for the appropriation of its meaning. Relatedly, transformation does not concern the host itself, but the community in which and for which the Eucharist plays a role. It is Lutheranism that grasps most adequately that the Eucharist is the presence of Christ in the community and how in the appropriation of its meaning and truth the community is not only transformed, but also comes to understand itself.
Hegel is not a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century sacramental theologian. Rather, he is a modern religious thinker sifting through what he believes to be living and dead in the Christian tradition with a view to guaranteeing not only its survival in the modern age, but its continuing relevance. On his account, it can only continue to be relevant to the degree to which it is accepted that the institutional Church is not the only site for the experience of divine presence, indeed, not even the privileged site. The privileged site is now the secular as such, in order family life, the life of civil society, and ultimately the life of the State wherein especially the presence of the divine resides. Just how privileged is the secular manifestation of Spirit? At the very least, the secular is far more important than the Church as cultic site. Moreover, there is good reason to believe that Hegel considers that the raison d’être for the preservation of the Church is not for its own sake or its contribution to community self-understanding, but rather for it playing a pedagogic role in and through which communities in their secular state can read themselves as sites of the divine and of fundamental social transformation. Here Hegel seems to be exploiting the side of Luther that emphasized the collapsing of the distinction between the sacred and everyday life and developing it in such a way that it is in everyday life that the divine is most manifest and fully expressed. This proposal has proved enormously influential in modern religiously minded thinkers, even those who identify with Catholicism such as Charles Taylor.
Derangement 4: Deconstructing Classical Trinitarian Thought
Historians of modern Christian thought have rightly attributed to Hegel the rediscovery of the doctrine of the Trinity and the discovery of its importance for Protestant thought. However, we judge the reserve in Luther when it comes to the Trinity, in the Enlightenment period this doctrine turned out to be an easy target as an example of epistemic overreach. This marginalization was exacerbated as Protestantism sought to go back to its experiential roots in the eighteenth century, and appeared to be sealed when Kant bracketed it in his attempt to save what was left of Christian faith (Schleiermacher followed suit).
Yet, waxing eloquent on Hegel’s recovery of the doctrine cannot substitute for precise understanding of his articulation and how it relates to standard accounts of the immanent and economic Trinity. Putting Hegel into conversation with Nicaea or the treatment of magisterial theologians of either the Orthodox or Catholic tradition demonstrates just how anomalous his Trinitarianism is. Now, as we have seen, for Hegel, the main narrative line of Christian faith, as well as its Trinitarian prologue (and possibly epilogue) can be given a Trinitarian form. In a sense, Hegel’s project of reclaiming a doctrinal form of Christianity fitted for the modern age seems to recall Augustine’s De Trinitate with the immanent Trinity providing a frame for the Trinitarian economy in both its social-historical and individual modalities. Examination of this relation is worthwhile, even as we note that Augustine is mentioned only twice in Hegel’s work, and De Trinitate, not once. The lover of Augustine should not take umbrage. Augustine is in good company. When Hegel speaks to the Trinity, the Cappadocians are not mentioned, nor is Aquinas or Bonaventure. Philo is mentioned; Proclus is mentioned; and even most peculiarly, Valentinus. I have explored Hegel’s option for the heterodox elsewhere, so there is no need to get into this tangled matter here, since rhetorically it would proceed on the line of guilt by association. What is far more useful and illuminating is to compare this Trinitarian elaboration with that of an influential classical Trinitarian theologian. Augustine serves my purposes well here.
Two considerations can serve as a setup for the third and crucial point. First, Augustine insists that the doctrine of the Trinity is possible only as an exegesis of scripture and the witness of the Church. Philosophy comes on the scene belatedly; it can comment and elaborate, and draw out implications. It can never make scripture redundant. Hegel thinks otherwise; scripture is made redundant. Second, in De Trinitate Augustine speaks of the Trinity in se (immanent Trinity) as constituted by one essence and three “substances” (we are justified in thinking of “persons” and “substances” as interchangeable). In contrast, in the Phenomenology and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel rules against the language of persons. The language of persons is expressive of the reifying tendency of language and issues, in Hegel’s jaundiced view, in a self-destructive Tritheism. Instead, Hegel speaks of a process at the level of the immanent Trinity from “Father” to “Spirit” through “Son” in which a single divine person and self-consciousness is outlined, though even here not fully realized. Thus, at the level of the immanent Trinity Hegel’s articulation resembles that of ancient Sabellianism in which Trinitarian persons are a function of a divine essence. Unlike classical Sabellianism, however, where the divine essence is static, here the essence is in dynamic becoming, with the consequence that the Trinitarian ground is given as result rather than origin.
Third, and crucially, Hegel’s thinking dissolves the distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity set out in De Trinitate and rigorously observed throughout the entire Catholic theological tradition. In Augustine’s case this takes the form of a distinction between the intra-divine processions of the triune God and God’s mission to and for the world. For Augustine, and those Trinitarian theologians in his wake, the missions are expressions of who the Triune God is. Since this God is superabundant reality and love, it would make no sense to say that the missions or economy are constitutive of the identity of the triune divine. This, however, is precisely their role in Hegel’s construction of the Trinity. It is only in and through the divine’s operation in creation, incarnation, and transformation of the social world in history that there is an actualization of a divine personality. This personality was only provided a sketch at the level of the immanent Trinity and is fulfilled in and through meeting the challenges presented in the orders of nature and history. The Trinitarian divine is not perfect as origin but only as result. This means that instead of the pair immanent-economy Trinity, Hegel posits one Trinity inclusive of the disappearing moments of Father, Son, and Spirit at the level of the intra-Trinitarian divine but also of the divine economy in the land of unlikeness in and through which the ontological lack suffered at the level of the intra-Trinitarian divine is overcome. Ontological lack (correlatively epistemic lack) is the motor for the production of a reality other than the formal reality of the intra-divine Trinity. Hegel thereby deconstructs Augustine’s classic articulation of the Trinity, and in doing so articulates a form of Trinitarianism in which the divine effectively becomes a parasite none-greater-than-which-can-be-thought.
Derangement 5: The Proper Relation between Faith and Reason
It amuses when Hegel smooths out Luther’s opposing of faith and reason; it encourages when he disposes as shallow the Enlightenment critique of faith as craven superstition; it commands respect when Hegel refuses Kant’s translation of the Christian narrative of creation, fall, redemption, sanctification, and eschaton into ethical terms; and it delights when Hegel sees more than a shadow of truth in traditional proofs of God’s existence and especially Anselm’s form of the ontological proof. Yet for all that, speculative reason never gives up its massive prerogatives vis-à-vis faith, particularly its prerogatives to say the last word both regarding the Christian narrative and the inclusive Trinity that is its synopsis of its entire span across its many episodes, all of which, as we have noted, Hegel distorts.
Hegel’s account of his reworking of both is riddled with complicated logical and metaphysical details that cannot be reproduced here. Fortunately, however, the main points are easily stated. Notice in the case of the Christian narrative that the apparently discrete narrative episodes of creation, fall, incarnation, etc. are regulated by the narrative “and” that has a temporal implication. The temporal dimension has to be ruled out. When that happens, all the episodes from creation to eschaton cease to be part of a story and become functional parts of a giant syllogism encapsulating all reality. For related reasons, the same is true of the relation between what might be called a Trinitarian sketch and the Trinitarian economy. Thus, the magnificence of Hegel’s trespass against Christian faith: if few modern philosophers have granted Christian faith the kind of scope Hegel does, none quite so outrageously takes everything back: the Christian narrative in general and its particular episodes serve mere presupposition and subtext for the interpretive work of philosophy. Presuppositions are valuable only to the extent that they make possible comprehensive explanation; classical Trinitarian subtext is valuable only to the extent it yields to a Trinitarian view that dispenses with scripture and tradition and admits of being rewritten in a developmental and logical code.
At first blush, Hegel seems to be the kind of philosophical thinker who most appreciates the difficulty of the Christian believer, caught as she is between the demands of faith and reason, and faith and culture. He offers to mediate the tensions by working over the cognitive elements of faith. When he produces his version, Christian faith has become unrecognizable. In addition, though it is presupposition, it is not really a gift, since in Hegel’s thought presuppositions are indexed to results. What the believer and her tradition supplies is merely the occasion for a mode of thought that exceeds it. Thought moves in a world of clarity, depth, and comprehensiveness. As it works or reworks what is given, it reverses its status as recipient, and in doing so washes out all traces of gratitude. Indeed, the movement towards crossing out reception and substituting activity, and moving from operational gratitude to ingratitude, is the formal definition of Hegelianism.
Through the Looking Glass: The Distorting Mirror in Which Christianity Can See Itself
I have only listed the most obvious derangements. I could add more. This should steel religious believers against squeamishness. If we are not prepared to “burn Hegel” after this, then when? Of course, to speak in this way is to traffic in hyperbole. Still, as we downshift, it does seem as if the last religious philosopher with which Christian or especially Catholic thinkers should deal is the Hegel who takes up our deepest communal expressions, first defiguring and refiguring them, and then translating them into a conceptual idiom that is properly the idiom of the divine itself. If Enlightenment reason challenges Christian belief and its practices, Hegel transgresses them, because he takes them up and makes them say something quite other than they intend to express. Hegel’s duplicity is not nefarious, it happens before our eyes, making it fairly easy to say that we are done with his slippery and sometimes sibylline cogitation. Yet, there may be some reason other than cowardice and the underground pull of Hegel’s intellectual prestige, and let’s be honest his difficulty is one that makes mountain climbers of those who dare to ascent into the rarest of intellectual atmospheres, as to why Christians and Catholics might dally with him with open eyes and lowered expectations. It is to these reasons that I turn.
These reasons are clustered around the central metaphor of Hegel’s thought, that is, “speculation.” “Speculation” recalls the Latin speculum (mirror) or the verbal form speculare with the intention not so much of upholding the difference between what is mirrored and the mirroring, but the identity of seeing and being seen. From the point of view of the Christian believer, this seeing and being seen belongs only to God. Our seeing is otherwise, seeing finitely—however comprehensively—through a glass darkly. As articulated throughout his baffling and exhilarating foundational texts Hegel essentially constructs a distorting mirror in which Christianity becomes unrecognizable.
At the same time, it is through this distorting mirror that Hegel essentially preserves Christianity’s anatomic relations that in times of confusion as to Christian identity we no longer recognize. Even in its distorting form, mirroring is other than Enlightenment leaking and leaching of Christian substance by the accommodation to modern reason and its rational and procedural protocols. Hegel gives us a vision, provides us with a narrative determinate and full, which we can come to contest if we can figure out how the mirror distorts and come to measure the angle of its distortion. Similarly, however distorted the presentation, Hegel supplies us with a view of the Trinity and its relation to Christian narrative that is exceptional in its rigor and its persuasive power. What is required of us, again, is correcting for the lens. Yes, but why should we? We are tired, holding on by our fingertips to a tradition of thought with respect to which we lack confidence and struggle to recall. We are drifting; feeling no match for the Enlightenment reason that Hegel has so forcefully taught us has leached into our speech and our thinking. Hegel shows no such weakness. He believes that he has mounted a successful critique of Enlightenment reason. He is confident that he has demonstrated that Christian doctrine and especially the doctrine of the Trinity provides an answer to the Enlightenment. We can borrow his confidence regarding the critique of the Enlightenment and build on it. We can reimagine and recharge our doctrines and correct for Hegel’s willful and troubling distortions.
As we do so, we can and will find opportunities to think through the implications of our doctrines, excavate what has been unthought, and expose and dispatch our conceptual idolatries. Given Catholic commitments to doctrines as the lens in and through which they see God, the world, and human beings, Hegel’s critique of the salto mortale of faith is salutary, as is his critique of any and all modes of experiential expressiveness. Hegel is instructive, but merciless when it comes to the former, almost comic when it comes to the latter.
In terms of what has been left unthought, perhaps despite himself, Hegel reminds us that it is a Catholic imperative to think more holistically of the Eucharist, specifically, to understand the community context of its reception, its ethical implications, as well as eschatological horizon. In terms of conceptual idolatry, a very unmindful Hegel reminds us to be mindful as to whether efficient causality can function as the explanatory hinge for explaining the God-world relation that involves gratuity, divine expressiveness, and unimaginable divine expansiveness. Catholicism can neither baptize nor confirm Hegel. Nor can it afford to burn him.
He is a distorting mirror, yet a mirror, in a modern world in which Christian belief is attenuated, faith hobbled, cultic practices evacuated of meaning, and much of our theological apparatus running on automatic. He is no friend to Christianity and especially to Catholicism, which he routinely lambasts. Yet, in the kind of world we live in, we cannot afford to ignore our intellectual enemies if they instruct us and remind of who we were and could be. Unlike the apostles of the Enlightenment who dismiss with a sneer, Hegel pays us the compliment of perversely conjugating our faith. What we need to need to do is reverse engineer, and in doing so understand for the umpteenth and first time why we made the choices we did over the past two millennia.
