Abstract
Sketching the current division within receptions of Hegel, this article argues for Hegel as a philosophical theologian in a way that is not covered by the recent investigations into Hegel's theological project. Examining in particular the early work on Jesus Christ, the article analyses the changes in this work and how these changes in his understanding of Christology enabled Hegel to appreciate the logic of the Logos. This logic of the Logos is the basis for all his subsequent philosophy. It is a logic that is made possible in his philosophical theology of mediation, incarnation, and reconciliation.
In the Foreword to Stanley Cavell’s well-known book, Must We Mean What We Say?, he makes an observation on two types of claim. The first is “I teach philosophy” and the second is “I am a philosopher.” A series of questions follow: “And that is the problem. Does one teach philosophy? And when one is gripped by that question, one is really asking: Can philosophy be taught? Who is in a position to speak for philosophy?” (Cavell, 1976: xxiii–iv). Two further questions, I submit, must follow from the spatializing that occurs when we talk about the “position” from which someone speaks. Doing philosophy in the sense of being a philosopher is not just a question about “who” is in a position without also being about what that position is. Hence my two further questions: from where does the philosopher speak and what is it that opens up that space (Cavell’s “position”) enabling him or her to speak. 1 Philosophically, these questions are epistemological, insofar as they concern standpoint, 2 but the questions also might generate ontological enquiry into “what is a philosopher?” and “who or what grants the right whereby someone can be a philosopher?” These questions, I believe, were similar to the ones that preoccupied Hegel as increasingly he became aware that he could not be a professional theologian—because there were no theologians who were not also ministers within the church and a paid employee of the state. 3 Georg Lukács observes that prior to Hegel’s move to Frankfurt in 1797, Hegel “showed a remarkable lack of interest in philosophical problems, especially those of epistemology and logic” (Lukács, 1975: 97). 4 At the same time, Hegel bade his adieu to the profession of theologian in early unpublished essays—“The Life of Jesus” (finished 24 July 1795), his extended essay “The Positivity of the Christian Religion” (1796) and “The Spirit of Christianity” (1799)—that increasingly castigated ecclesial practices requiring passive obedience. However, although he bade farewell to being part of the ecclesial institution, what remains fundamentally being worked out intellectually, and being explored in all three essays, is the nature and impact of Jesus who is called the Christ. In other words, how does Hegel’s work on Christology relate to opening that space from within which he can be a philosopher?
Now I am going to make a large and highly controversial claim among those who either call for an atheistic and anti-theological Hegel or those who demand a non-metaphysical and/or neo-pragmatic Hegel who will embrace the subjective construction of all culturally conditioned knowledge. Then I will spend the rest of this article validating that claim: Hegel could only become a professional philosopher when he had found the place from which he could speak philosophically, and that place has much to do with developing a philosophical theology on the basis of a Logos Christology. This needs to be clarified somewhat, because Hegel does not develop a detailed Christology, even in these early essays. He is not, for example, particularly interested in Jesus Christ as an historical figure. He is interested in Jesus Christ as an historical event in which the divine is made human. He is interested in the theo-logic that such an event manifests and inaugurates—the logic of incarnation whereby God and human beings both share a nature and yet remain fundamentally distinct. His concern then is with the logic of Jesus Christ as the Logos, rather than, say, ontology. 5 It is a concern that is more philosophical in its orientation than dogmatic. Recently, Martin Wendt has explored some of these issues with respect to what he calls the “Chalcedonian” formula (Wendte, 2007: 2–9). 6 In terms of a dogmatic Christology, the sketches Hegel makes are not orthodox if measured by the teachings of the Ecumenical Councils of the Church, but the logic of the incarnation, divine mediation, and reconciliation remain central for Hegel. Also, there remains a wide space between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, for the teachings of the ecumenical councils have continued to be mulled over and interpreted; we cannot reify an orthodoxy which is in fact faith’s continual reaching out to understand. Christ as the incarnation of the Godhead’s Logos remains the key for all Hegel was attempting to do philosophically: that is, a mediating logic relating Naturphilosophie to a Geistesphilosophie, the empirical to the spiritual, which would provide a foundation for a system of the “whole”. There could in fact be no system if the whole could not be presupposed. Only once he had found the theological basis for this presupposition could Hegel embark upon what he termed his “voyage of discovery”—in the Phenomenology of Spirit, “a comprehensive philosophical conception that was to stay with him for the rest of his life” (Pinkard, 2000: 203). The basis for such attention to mediation was an understanding of the Incarnation of the Logos itself as the model for the logic of all mediation. 7 As such, for Hegel, the philosophical project of modernity, the advance of human reasoning, was only possible if the sacred—if Jesus as the revealed Logos of God—established the position from which to speak philosophically. It is the Logos that grounds Hegel’s standpoint—a Logos that integrates the ontological concerns of a theological enquiry with the logical concerns of a philosophical enquiry.
Before I continue validating this claim, allow me to sketch why this approach to interpreting Hegel’s oeuvre is so different from more dominant and accepted approaches. One prevalent approach, seen in the work of Alexander Kojève and Jean Hyppolite, is to locate a position for reading Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1806)—all his other published writings are subsequently viewed in terms of this seminal text (Kojève, 1969). I could go into the consequences of such a reading in more detail, but the upshot is a Nietzschean death of God scenario avant la letter. That is, the transcendent is collapsed into the immanent movement of history such that “to realize Freedom and to live in the World as a human being, autonomous and free—all this is only possible on the condition that one accept the idea of death and, consequently, atheism. And the whole evolution of the Christian World is nothing but a progress toward the atheistic awareness of the essential finiteness of human existence” (Kojève, 1969: 57). 8 This reading governed the Christian atheism of those self-dubbed “Death of God” theologians and more recently both the championing of those theologians by Slavoj Žižek and the castigation of those theologians because of their “correct” reading of Hegel by John Milbank (Žižek and Milbank, 2009). A second prevalent approach, seen more recently in the writings of Kenneth R Westphal, Robert B Pippin and Terry Pinkard, emphasizes that knowledge of reality, for Hegel (still carrying out the Kantian project) is socially and historically conditioned and subjectively constructed (see Pinkard, 1994; Pippin, 1989; Westphal, 1989). 9 These too often take the Phenomenology as their sounding board, whereas the critics who respond to this neo-pragmatism (frequently German scholars who wish to reinforce the metaphysical and idealist nature of Hegel’s project) will counter with reference to the Science of Logic (1812–16) and the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (1817) as the texts governing the interpretation of Hegel. Certainly, the non-metaphysical and neo-pragmatic approaches, despite some of them pointing to an epistemological holism in Hegel’s thought, do not look favorably on the theological aspects of Hegel’s work, and the metaphysical or more traditional countering interpretations of Hegel—to wit scholars like Rolf-Peter Horstmann (2006a, 2006b) and F C Beiser (2005)—consider Hegel some sort of monist, disregarding the Trinitarian principle governing Hegel’s logic of mediation, whilst recognizing that “‘Infinity’ is a fundamental concept for the philosophy of Hegel because it supposedly provides the structural resources necessary for… his project of describing reality as a self-realizing rational process” (Horstmann, 2006a: 83).
Of course, this division between which is the key text for interpreting Hegel is an old one. It divided the French Hegelians of the 1930s and 1940s—with the more existentialist and Marxist Hegelians viewing the Phenomenology as key. The division is often seen in the Phenomenology providing ground for an Hegelian anthropology (and epistemology), whereas the Logic and Encyclopaedia provide ground for an ontology. A third approach is as old as Hegel himself and developed the more right wing interpretations—that is, Hegel as theologian or at least religionist, and for some even a defender of Lutheranism. In the twentieth century this trend too emerged in France under the likes of Jean Wahl and the Jesuit interest in Hegel—particularly those working with Emmanuel Mounier and Esprit. It culminated in Albert Chapelle’s three volume work Hegel et la religion, published between 1964 and1971. I am continuing a third approach, in a sense, but what I am suggesting is that we take neither the Phenomenology nor the Logic and Encyclopaedia as the defining texts for the Hegelian oeuvre, but consider rather the Christological struggles in the unpublished early theological essays of Hegel, and the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (worked on over the ten years between 1821 and the day he died). 10 He did not publish these texts, but it seems to me that in them he is endeavoring to define that position from which to speak philosophically. 11 The last book he was preparing for publication before he died was on the ontological proofs for the existence of God. It is not that the philosophical project is framed by a theological issue (Christology), but rather that any approach to theology can only proceed via a recognition of the logic that governs theology itself. 12 The Christological and the philosophical are one in Jesus Christ, who Hegel describes in his (again unpublished) Lectures of the Philosophy of History as the “axis on which the History of the World turns” (Hegel, 1956: 319) and that “Christ has appeared—a Man who is God—God who is Man” (Hegel, 1956: 324).
The kind of questions Cavell sets up (and to which I have added) are para-philosophical questions. Cavell views them as “meta-philosophical” because they concern the philosophical possibilities of doing philosophy: that is, when we do philosophy we already assume we have answers to these questions. However, when we inquire into “who is in a position to speak for philosophy” and “what are the conditions for the position itself”, we are both reflecting upon the nature of the philosophical project itself and doing philosophy—certainly in Hegel’s case. One set of questions is not “above” or even “prior” to the philosophical investigation itself; the one inquiry stands “beside”, “near” or “in the presence of” [para] the other: we cannot venture into exploring the possibilities for doing philosophy without in fact doing philosophy. This is especially so in Hegel’s case because of the participation of human reasoning within divine reasoning—the operation of human Geist within divine Geist. We do not leap to another meta level; the phenomenal is not divorced from the noumenal (as in Kant). There is no great divide between the ontological from the epistemological, the finite and the infinite, human knowing and Supreme Being. In Hegel, the ontological weight of the phenomenal is only known as such through the operation of noumenal reason. This is one of the ways Hegel distinguishes himself from Kant.
Beyond Kant’s rational religion
Now, we turn to those early texts and Hegel’s Christological negotiations. In his “Life of Jesus” and the first two parts of the “The Positivity of the Christian Religion”, Hegel seems to espouse an uncritical Kantian framework by working within the limits of human reason alone, and by sketching a history in which Jesus was a teacher of a purely moral religion, and there are grounds for such an interpretation. In his “Life of Jesus”, like Kant, what is emphasized is Jesus as a moral educator; and Hegel comes close to paraphrasing the Kantian principle of morality when he has Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount to his disciples, say: “[A]ct only on principles that you can will to become universal laws, laws no less binding on you than them” (Hegel, 1984a: 115 [1907: 87]). Hegel goes into much more detail than Kant about Jesus’s teaching, as if systematically reading the gospels in the light of Kant’s ethical philosophy and religion within the limits of reason. He follows through the same “demythologizing” process as Kant, whereby miracles and demonic interruptions are either not mentioned or given a naturalistic interpretation; there is no emphasis upon salvation through Jesus’s death and resurrection; Jesus as the Jewish Messiah is described, by Jesus himself, as a “chimerical [chimärische] hope” (Hegel, 1984a: 150 [1907: 121]); and the temple and priests are viewed as unnecessary obstacles to the morality that is written upon the human heart and in need of no external authority to believe. In fact, throughout, Jesus repeatedly understands his mission as teaching the universal moral law and exhorting his followers to do their duty. The Holy Spirit is “the holy spirit of virtue” (Hegel, 1984a: 134 [1907: 105]). All this does a better job of Kantian ethics than Kant did—whose book Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone was censured by the Prussian government.
However, the “Life of Jesus” is not simply a Kantian exposition of the New Testament, and the scholars are slow to recognize this. A rather different anthropology informs the whole text, because, for Kant, human beings have knowledge only of the phenomenal world—they are cut off from the noumenal world—and so “God” can only be a regulative idea, not a constitutive one, even when it comes to proving His existence in Kant’s argument on the basis of practical reasoning. In fact, perhaps a different understanding of reasoning itself is evident in Hegel’s text. Take, for example, the very opening of that essay: Pure reason, transcending all limits, is divinity itself – whereby and in accordance with which the very plan of the world is ordered [überhaupt geordnet] (John 1). Through reason man learns of his destiny [Bestimmung], the unconditional purpose of his life … the cultivation [Ausbildung] of the spark of divinity allotted to them [zu teil geworden ist] – their proof of descendance, in a higher sense, from the Godhead itself. [der ihnen das Zeugnis gibt, dass sie in einem erhabnern Sinne von der Gottheit selbst abstammen]. (Hegel, 1984a: 104 [1907: 75])
13
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Kant could never have made this series of claims that read like Hegel’s free translation of the opening of John’s Gospel concerning the Logos: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him and without Him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:1–3). There is something more Christian about Reason here than in Kant; something even neo-Platonic, for the “spark of reason” in human beings relates to the neo-Platonic notion of logos spermatikos. Not only does this mean there is a direct association between God and humanity, but that the world has an order created in and through the operation of God’s Logos that makes knowledge of this direct association possible. Reason for Kant, though, can only be a human faculty; and it cannot become the basis of a “natural law” because, for him, human beings cannot know nature as such because they have no immediate access to things in themselves.
If Hegel does not continue to develop his thoughts here about the Logos of God, nevertheless more surfaces in his text about this form of reasoning. He speaks about it having “unusual powers” (Hegel, 1984a: 105 [1907: 76]); being the “divine power within” (Hegel, 1984a: 108 [1907: 79]) human beings; it has association with “the spirit of the rational world [Geiste der vernünftigen Welt], the spirit of divinity” (Hegel, 1984a: 109 [1907: 80]); 14 and constitutes a “sacred law” (Hegel, 1984a: 148 [1907: 119]). At one point Jesus answers the Pharisees and Sadducees who question him: “how could you allow reason to count [gelten] as the highest criterion [Massstab] of knowledge and belief, since you have never heard the divine voice, have never heeded the resonance of this voice in your hearts [da ihr Stimme Gottheit nie vernahmt, auf den Nachhall diese Stimme in eurem Herzen nie hörtet]” (Hegel, 1984a: 118 [1907: 89]). 15 Jesus declares he has come to reveal “the spirit whose source [Ursprung] is your infinity” (Hegel, 1984a: 156 [1907: 127]), so that, despite the denials of his Messianic vocation, Jesus is still crucified because of the blasphemy of his being “the son of God” (Hegel, 1984a: 160 [1907: 131]) and, rather awkwardly, twice Hegel refers to him as the Christ (Hegel, 1984a: 119 [1907: 90]). Already there appears in Hegel’s writing that God has to be understood for us (what God is in Godself no one has access to) in terms of Reason, Logos or Sophia (Wisdom)—and this is significant, as will we see much later. Then, in the last part of that second essay, “The Positivity of the Christian Religion,” 16 Hegel also wishes to claim that this teaching offered by Jesus was not simply “his own heart’s living sense of right and duty”, but in fact based on “the revealed will of God as it was transmitted to him by Jewish traditions” (Hegel, 1971a: 175 [1907: 146]). Whatever the disciples and the church did subsequently, nevertheless, in Jesus (whom Hegel does not take in this essay to be the revelation of God Himself), revelation and reason were not antithetical. There is a revelation of right reasoning, if you will. The authorship of Jesus’s teaching is made possible by a position outside and transcending that “who”—the position whence the teaching issues in the revelation of divine logic. Once more this is not a position Kant could have adopted.
In a re-write of the opening section (which is sub-titled Part III of “The Positivity of the Christian Religion” in the English translation) completed two years later, Hegel develops his ideas further: “the relation between man and the Christian religion cannot in itself exactly be called positive; it rests on the surely beautiful presupposition that everything high, noble, and good in man is divine, that it comes from God and is his spirit, issuing from himself” (Hegel, 1971a: 176 [1907: 146]). 17 If “presupposition” is understood as “postulate” of human reasoning, this would be Kantian, but prefaced by “beautiful”—a word for Hegel that was distinctly Hellenic in provenance 18 —the idea is closer to St Paul’s reference to the Greek poet Lucan when speaking to the Athenians of the God “in [whom] we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Hegel continues: “But this view becomes glaringly positive if human nature is absolutely severed from the divine, if no mediation between the two is conceded except in one isolated individual [ausser nur in Einem Individuum], if all man’s consciousness of the good and the divine is degraded to the dull [Dumpfheit] and killing [Vernichtung] belief in a Superior Being altogether alien [ein durchaus Fremdes und Übermächtiges] to man” (Hegel, 1971a: 176 [1907: 146]). So it is “mediation” that prevents Christianity from being “glaringly positive,” and although we have some way to go before Hegel will flesh this out more thoroughly in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (first undertaken in Berlin in 1821), we can observe that “mediation” in the elision that occurs following “from God” in the phrase “and is his spirit, issuing from himself”—where the subject of the possessive pronoun “his” and the reflexive pronoun “himself” could be either man or God. The elision is rhetorical but it performs (I shall be addressing this word much further below) the logic of the mediation between divine Geist and human.
Two points must be emphasized here. First, Lukács is wrong to say that in Hegel’s early work of the Berne period “there is absolutely no sign of the important dialectical categories of his later method: immediacy and mediation, the dialectical interaction of the particular and the general” (Lukács, 1975: 84). This is because Hegel’s Christological investigations are investigations into that which makes dialectic possible at all: the logic of mediation through and in Christ of God’s immediacy to humankind; the isolated singularity of Jesus of Nazareth and the universal embrace of the divine. The later dialectic is a working out of a Christological and philosophical principle. 19
Secondly, before jumping, as many others have jumped, to the conclusion that a univocity of Being is implied in this relation between the divine and the human—that the human and the divine share the same ontological status (though the divine being is proportionally much greater than the human being), let me refer to a statement made in an essay written perhaps two years later where Hegel makes quite evident that God (or what the terms here “the infinite Object”) makes human beings into something, “i.e., makes them not something which is, but something made [etwas macht, ein Gemachtes, kein Seiendes] which on its own account has no life, no rights, no love” (Hegel, 1971a: 191 [1907: 250]). Later, in the Lectures of the Philosophy of Religion, he will term this form of derivative existence “merely natural being” (Hegel, 1984b: 324) or “borrowed being” (Hegel, 1984b: 369). However, in an untranslated fragment, “Glauben und Sein”, found in Nohl’s collection of Hegel’s early thinking, we find this ontological distinction between the divine and the human made even more plain in terms of defining the “stumbling-block” of the “absoluteness of being” (bearing in mind that “stumbling-block” is a Christological description in the Gospels): “it must truly exist, but its mere existence does not mean that it exists for us [es soll wohl sein, aber dadurch dass es ist, sei es beswegen nicht für uns]. Thus this independence of being [die Unanhängigkeit des Seins] remains as it is, whether for us or not; being can only be quintessentially [schlechthin] separate [Getrenntes sein] from us, in which it is not necessarily implied [liege] that we come into a relationship with it” (Hegel, 1984a [1907: 383]). 20 It is this ontological distinction that is the condition for the possibility of what is, technically, an analogical relation between human reasoning and God’s reasoning; it guarantees a profound sharing and an equally profound difference between them. 21 It is this “independence” which makes possible the task both Schelling and Hegel viewed as necessary to go beyond Kant: define the grounds for objective idealism.
Christology is again the central theme of “The Spirit of Christianity” (1799), but it is developed in a way which deepens the difference between Hegel and Kant, although somewhat confusingly. On the one hand, we have the declarations (based again in an exegesis of relationship between God and Jesus found in the first chapter of John’s Gospel) that Jesus is the Logos and therefore the life of God incarnate: “In verse 14 the Logos appears modified as an individual [Modifikation als Individuum], in a form [Gestalt] also he has revealed himself [gezeigt] to us” (Hegel, 1971a: 259 [1907: 307]). Here, Jesus is God: “Father and Son are not simply modifications of the same life, not opposite essences, not a plurality of absolute substantialities. Thus the son of God is the same essence [daselbe Wesen] as the Father… He and the Father are one” (Hegel, 1971a: 260–261 [1907: 308]). 22 In a slightly later writing (around 1800), “Fragment of a System”, Hegel insists that the character of religion is to transcend the finite and “carries in itself the possibility of raising itself to infinite life” (Hegel, 1971a: 313 [1907: 348]). In Jesus the “infinite being, filling the immeasurability of space, exists at the same time in a definite [bestimmten] space” (Hegel, 1971a: 315 [1907: 349]). Only as such can Jesus mediate the finite and the infinite, overcoming the alienation (Entfremdung) and bringing about the reconciliation (Versöhnung or atonement). Only as such can Hegel speak of a participation in him and in the life, love, spirit he manifests—even when the manifestation brings about a recognition that the life, love, spirit is in them also.
One the other hand, in the very same essay, Jesus as the son of God is inferior to God as Father: “the man [Jesus] can appeal only to his origin [Ursprung], to the source [Quelle] from which every shape of restricted life flows to him; he can appeal to the whole, which he now is, as to an absolute. He must call on something higher, on the Father who lives immutable in all mutability” (Hegel, 1971a: 255 [1907: 303]). The Father “is greater than he” (Hegel, 1971a: 276 [1907: 320]). There is even a suggestion of adoptionism. For, in an exegesis of Jesus’s baptism in Mark’s Gospel, Hegel writes that it is: “In coming out of the water [that] he is filled with highest inspiration [Begeisterung]” (Hegel, 1971a: 276 [1907: 320]), and in this way, Jesus becomes “a divinely inspired man [eines gottbegeisterten Mannes]” (Hegel, 1971a: 281 [1907: 325]). Furthermore, the revelation of the divine in Jesus demonstrates the divinity in all human beings—that same divinity is what they recognize in Jesus and this recognition draws them towards faith in Him. On this basis, all can enter the same relationship he has with the Father; Jesus can then “train” human beings, “to develop in them the good spirit which he believed was in them” (Hegel, 1971a: 285 [1907: 328]). The emphasis upon “training” and “developing” through relations is not exactly Jesus as Kant’s moral teacher would have it. There is a level of participation in a practical reasoning that works “in” us, the work of the Logos that nurtures an ethics of love; but, nevertheless, what is confusing here is the extent to which Jesus is uniquely different from other human beings, because he is the incarnation of God. It is because of this that the observation in the text that human beings become identified with Jesus is ambivalent—“the divine in you has recognized [erkannt] my divinity” (Hegel, 1971a: 267 [1907: 313]). 23 This statement, undoubtedly indebted to Eckhart, could easily support an orthodox understanding of theosis as well as a more vague panentheism, what has been called Hegel’s “life-mysticism” (Crites, 1998: 122) or even a theosophy. 24 The operation of “raising up” or “elevation” correlates with Christian neo-Platonic notions of anagogy central to the orthodox teaching on theosis or deification. However, it is worth noting that elsewhere, in a “Fragment” written around the same time, Hegel quite explicitly does accept a notion of theosis rooted in the human beings made in the image of God. He speaks of a union of synthesis and antithesis in a reflection that “has a character of its own, namely, that of being a reality beyond reflection” such that “[f]inite life raises itself. It is only because the finite is itself life that it carries in itself the possibility of raising itself to eternal life… in rising toward the living being and intimately uniting himself with him, then he worships God” (Hegel, 1971a: 312–313 [1907: 347–348]). 25 It is this human capacity that establishes an immediate link with the universal, and constitutes (from the side of finitude) the ground for Hegel’s objective idealism; the other ground is God himself. 26 Lukács observes here how the “task of philosophy… is its own self-annulment in favor of religion” (Lukács, 1975: 214), but he fails to understand how Christianity itself must also experience a certain self-annulment for the logic of the incarnation to manifest itself as the ground upon which theology as a discourse is possible.
This second, seemingly more anthropological, understanding of Jesus culminates in Hegel’s analysis of him as a “beautiful soul”. This is an important motif that he develops in the Phenomenology, as we will see. As a beautiful soul, Hegel’s Christology is still affected by the Kantian emphasis upon human potential rather than what Küng has aptly described as “the Christ-event in its theanthropic structure” (Küng, 1970 [1999: 86]), and it is the “structure” that constitutes the very logic of Logos. As such, Jesus, the beautiful soul, suffers a tragic fate: he faces the choice of either withdrawing from the world entirely (in which case the truth he embodies cannot transform the world he came to save) or he must sully his own holiness by engaging with the world at least in part on its own terms. Jesus chooses the former course, and it is Hegel’s indictment against the Christian church that for the most part it imitated him in this. “The fate of Jesus was that he had to suffer from the fate of his people [Nation]; either he had to make that fate his own, to bear its necessity and share its joy, to unite his spirit with his people’s but sacrifice his own beauty, his connection [Zusammenhang] with the divine, or else he had to repel his nation’s [Volkes] fate from himself, but submit to a life undeveloped and without pleasure in itself. In neither event would his nature be fulfilled… Jesus chose the latter fate” (Hegel, 1971a: 285–286 [1907: 328–329]). The individual and particular could not then become the universal. Thus the “Kingdom of God”, which plays such an important role in Hegel’s thinking, cannot be of this world, for “Jesus could only carry the Kingdom of God in his heart” (Hegel, 1971a: 285 [1907: 328]). At this point, as in the earlier essays, Jesus’s religion is a private one, corrupted by a church (and later the state) that wished to develop a legalistic, public institution.
Yet, running contrary to this exposition and Jesus’s “connection” (Zusammenhang is a technical and procedural term rather than relational terms like either Beziehung or Verhältnis) to the divine, is Hegel’s rhapsodic appreciation of the divinity that Jesus incarnated: the manifestations of love and eternal life that he performed. 27 “Is there,” he asks, “an idea more beautiful than that of a nation related to one another by love?” (Hegel, 1971a: 276 [1907: 320]). Only in this love and in this understanding of true life is there “the freest possibility” (Hegel, 1971a: 276 [1907: 320]). The whole notion of Sittlichkeit that Hegel goes on to develop—first in an unpublished treatise the System of Ethical Life in 1802–03, and later in the Phenomenology, Encyclopaedia and the Philosophy of Right—issues on the basis of the inauguration of this ethics and sociality at the Last Supper (Hegel, 1971a: 248–253 [1907: 297–301]). Furthermore, this inauguration is not just a practical demonstration of moral reasoning; it is a genuine participation in the divine. The account of the Last Supper and its interpretation runs through a narrow pass between a Roman Catholic understanding of transubstantiation and a Lutheran understanding of consubstantiation: “because they eat the bread and drink the wine, because his body and blood pass over into them [in sie übergeht], Jesus is in them all, and his essence, as love, had divinely permeated them [sein Wesen hat sie göttlich, als Liebe durchdrungen]. Hence the bread and the wine are not just an object, something for the intellect [Verstand]… The spirit of Jesus, in which his disciples are one [Eins sind], has become a present object, a reality, for external feeling” (Hegel, 1971a: 250–251 [1907: 299]). 28 We can observe the theological distance Hegel has travelled by comparing this account of the Last Supper with the account in his “Life of Jesus”, and how the language of memorial is transposed into the language of incorporation (Hegel, 1984a: 155 [1907: 126]). In a moment that clearly foreshadows one of the most celebrated expositions of sociality in the Phenomenology, Hegel writes that Jesus opposed the alienation of the Jewish Lord and His servants, an alienation only reiterated in Kantian morality, fostering “virtues without lordship and submission, i.e., virtues as modifications of love” (Hegel, 1971a: 244 [1907: 293]).
The tensions evident in the Christology are clearly related to an underdevelopment of Trinitarian thinking—though the Trinitarian operations of the divine are startlingly evident throughout this essay (as is a new attention to miracles and the resurrection). Hegel does not sufficiently develop his thinking on the doctrine of the Trinity (as distinct from the Trinitarian logic made manifest in incarnation, mediation and reconciliation itself) until the lectures on the philosophy of religion in 1821. 29 Nevertheless, one aspect of this essay remains crucial for the interpretation of Hegelian development I am examining here, and that aspect is related to his concept of the Trinity. Why does Hegel return again to rethink the life and teaching of Jesus and explicitly take up once more the Greek Prologue to John’s Gospel? The answer, I would argue, is that Enlightenment reasoning—that foundation stone for modernity—culminates in dualism (Kant and Fichte) or nihilism (Jacobi). As both Hölderlin and Schelling realized, reasoning, and therefore ethics, remained far too subjective, ego-centred, and open to the charges of psychologism. In being subjective, any concept of unity or wholeness was compromised by its dualistic opposition to the object. Any starting point for a new philosophy would have to begin by locating a new form of reasoning—a new logic that sublated endemic dualism. Hegel continually returns to the life and teaching of Jesus because of his association with the Logos. The rewriting of reason is the key thread throughout Hegel’s “The Spirit of Christianity”. 30
Towards a new mythology of reason
To appreciate what Hegel is doing here we first must take a step back and then a step forward. The step back takes the form of a couple of pages of text, in Hegel’s writing, but now thought to be a transcription of a longer essay by Hölderlin, known as “The Oldest [or Earliest] Programme for a System of German Idealism”, written either in 1796 or early 1797. 31 In it Hölderlin speaks of the inter-relationship between morality and aesthetics—chastising Kant for not going far enough and the state for being too mechanical. In a move that is both Platonic and Christian neo-Platonic, Hölderlin views the highest act of reason as inseparable from the good and the beautiful. On this basis he makes two calls: first “we must have a new mythology… a mythology of reason.” This mythology must be the basis for a new Volksreligion. Secondly, a “higher Spirit sent from heaven must found this new religion among us, it will be the greatest work of humanity” (Hoffmeister, 1936: 219–221 [I have followed Crites’ translation (Crites, 1998: 47)]). For the Enlightenment, the very notion of a mythology of reason is an oxymoron, because their concept of reason was exactly pitted against notions of the mythological, allied as it was viewed, with obfuscating mysteries that nurtured febrile superstitions and irrationalism. Hölderlin’s call, then, is not just for something new; it is also for a recognition that Enlightenment reasoning, with its appeal to the “pure” and the isolated, de-socialized monadic subject, was itself a myth—a way of imagining and narrating a certain human facility.
Now let us take a step forward to 1802, when Hegel had moved to Jena and published his essay “Faith and Knowledge”. There is little in this essay about faith as such, and we will return to that; the emphasis is upon a castigation of Enlightenment reasoning (exemplified in Kant, Fichte and Jacobi) and the old dualisms that it has re-established between faith and reason, the finite and the infinite, reality and ideality, the sensuous and the suprasensuous, Dieseits und Jenseits. His argument is that these dualisms establish themselves because such reasoning concerns itself not with the universal but with the finitude of the particular. “[W]hat is here called Reason consists solely in counting the worth of each and every thing with respect to the singularity, and in placing every Idea under finitude” (Hegel, 1986a: 294, my translation). This does not mean that these figures are unable to speak of the Absolute, but such an absolute (like “God” for Kant) can only remain outside. Not only, then, is there no knowledge of God, but faith becomes an activity that is viewed as nonrational, or only rational (again as with Kant’s regulative ideals) “because the Reason that is reduced [eingeschränkte Vernunft] to its absolute opposite recognizes one [ein] higher above itself from which it is self-excluded” (Hegel, 1986a: 295). Faith is a negative response to the world. Thus, reason so tied to the immanent teleologies of consciousness and therefore secular humanism “renounces intuition and cognition of the eternal” (Hegel, 1986a: 297). What is therefore absent from such reasoning is exactly a logic of mediation, participation, and reconciliation. Having examined the work of these three thinkers in some detail, Hegel then concludes with his own movements towards a “new mythology of Reason”. 32 This is “God’s reason” and this divine logic is associated directly with divine wisdom as God’s “eternal incarnation [ewigen Menschwerdung]”. If there is no mention of Christ in this essay, when the term is used by Hegel in his earlier (1801) treatise, Differenz des Fichte’schen und Schelling’schen Systems der Philosophie, it is with respect to the Johannine Prologue (again!). Here, having pointed out the dualisms in the thought of both Kant and Fichte, and the division between intellect and nature that issue from these dualisms, Hegel offers his own understanding of an original identity of both intellect and nature. It is an original identity that “must unite them in the intuition of God’s eternal human incarnation, the witness of the Word from the beginning.” 33 Hegel’s new mythology of reason is God’s wisdom as the logic of the Logos. The exposition and examination of this new “logic” is philosophy’s new task as a theological project: of incarnation, mediation and reconciliation. This insight then leads to Hegel’s infamous conclusion of “Faith and Knowledge”: that what must be “re-established for philosophy [is] the Idea of absolute freedom and along with it the absolute Passion or the speculative Good Friday that was otherwise than the historical [der sonst historische] Good Friday. Good Friday must be speculatively re-established in the whole truth and harshness of its God-forsakenness. Because the happier [Heitere], superficial [Ungründlichere], and more individual style of the dogmatic philosophies as well as the natural religions must vanish, the highest totality can and must achieve its resurrection, encompassing everything, and ascend in all its earnestness and out of its deepest ground to the happiest freedom of its form [die höchste Totalität in ihrem ganzen Ernst und aus ihrem tiefsten Grunde, zugleich allumfassend und in die heiterste Freiheit ihrer Gestalt auferstenhen kann und muss]” (Hegel, 1986a: 432–433). 34
Now this is a complex and much quoted passage, which, rather akin to the ending of the Phenomenology of Spirit, announces philosophy’s new role in and through the use of Scriptural and theological particularities. What I suggest it is saying is that the crucifixion, Passion and God-forsakenness here relate to allowing the dogmatic philosophies and natural religions to “vanish” [the German word is much more active and negating: “made to disappear”]. There is a reason these must vanish—because the philosophical dualisms not only foster skepticism with respect to the existence of God, they also lead to “God-forsakenness”—that is, to atheism. Reducing knowledge to that only available to the subject, and rejecting that anything can be known of God, renders the existence of God an irrelevance (except for private consolation). A rampant skepticism lies in the wings: for in such an account of the broken relation between the self and the objectivity of what lies outside it, what guarantees that our knowledge of the objective is at all true? If the foundations for such knowledge are unstable (because they lie in the subjectivity of an ego, for example with Descartes and Kant), then such knowledge can be deemed arbitrary, delusional, constructed—a projection of subjective desires. Hence the philosophical “Good Friday”, although seemingly vouchsafing secular knowledge, opens up a nihilistic abyss. 35 In their own distinct ways Hamann and Jacobi had both pointed to this with respect to Kant. Fichte and the younger Schelling had tried to find new foundations, but their philosophies of identity, based in the Absolute ego, were open to the challenges of psychologism or what Feuerbach would later understand as subjective projection. It is these dogmatic and natural philosophies that must be negated—overcome. They must be crucified with Christ in order for there to be a transformation—a restoration—a resurrection of the Idea of absolute freedom. This Good Friday death will be philosophically therapeutic. It has to come about through working through and beyond the Kantian and Fichtean limitations of consciousness to the ego. What is most significant is the modelling of this new reasoning around the death and resurrection of Jesus (no longer his teachings). This is not simply metaphorical play; for the Idea achieving its form can be understood after “The Spirit of Christianity” as the generation of the Logos (and Jesus as the incarnate Logos). The new mythology of reason will develop out of and as a Logos Christology. It will not be a Logos Christology such as those offered by the Alexandrine Fathers. They were accounts concerned with theological doctrine and the ontology of Christ with respect to his generation in the Father and his becoming human. Hegel’s Logos Christology is more philosophical rather theological. At the heart of a new mythology of reason, it is an account of incarnational reasoning—divine logic—itself, the consequences of which are that theology and philosophy are treating the same object, and this he will later state in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Hegel has re-established modernity, not on the principle of secularism and secular reasoning—for he has viewed such reasoning as superficial, ungrounded, incoherent, and too governed by atomistic individualism; he has re-established modernity on the divine operations of the Logos. We saw earlier that Hegel had alluded to the Logos of the Johannine Prologue at the start of his “Life of Jesus”. However, he developed it there in a different way—as part, following Kant, of a vernunftreligione interpretation of the Gospels—although at times the timbre of that piece is at odds with Kant. 36 The nature of the Logos examined in “The Spirit of Christianity”, though, follows Hegel’s distancing of himself from Kant, and reservation of Vernuft for that which is primarily a divine operation that human beings have been given a share in because of the image of God that stirs within them.
Of course, critics would reply that I have read this important passage at the end of “Faith and Knowledge” too literally—that Hegel is only speaking metaphorically about the crucifixion and the resurrection and that is the reason for the adjective “speculative”. Certainly, in that early manuscript that we now know as the “Life of Jesus”, the systematic Kantian rationalist hermeneutic governing Hegel’s reading of the Gospels does “demythologize” the Scriptures and avoid talk about miracles. Although, mysteriously in that text, Hegel says nothing about the resurrection of the Jesus, this has not stopped a rightly acclaimed intellectual biographer of Hegel, writing: “Thus ‘raising the dead’ is a metaphor for ‘forgiving sins’, which is in turn a metaphor for awakening in someone the faith in his own power as a rational being to begin again” (Harris, 1972: 202). Harris honestly acknowledges that this is not explicit in the text, though, and that Hegel is struggling throughout this period with the historicity of Jesus—who is not just “a model case of the virtuous man” (as in Kant); “his is virtue itself personified”—and that the conception of Jesus as the incarnation of God “Hegel retained and deepened as the years went on” (Harris, 1972: 181).
I would answer those who believe this passage from “Faith and Knowledge” is intended to be understood metaphorically with three lines of argument that follow on from Harris. First, they are not acknowledging the radical shift Hegel makes away from Kant’s Vernuftreligion. Although in the “Life of Jesus” there is no sense that this historical human being is also “the second person of a mystic trinity” (Harris, 1972: 182), this understanding of Jesus as the Christ is not the same when we reach “The Spirit of Christianity”. Secondly, what is both retained and deepened throughout this period is Hegel’s commitment to both history and the concept of the mediation of the Spirit of reason. Even in the “Life of Jesus”, the historicity of Jesus and his crucifixion is never in doubt, and in all later accounts of this history both the resurrection and ascension are referred to. In other words, Hegel resolves the struggle he had with Kant’s dualism—“Hegel has by no means given up his Greek ideal of reconciling and harmonizing all natural impulses” (Harris, 1972: 206)—through exactly developing his understanding of the incarnation of the Logos and our potential participation in its operation. 37 Finally, “speculative”, for Hegel, does not indicate a shift from the literal to the metaphorical; it points to a higher level of reflection that both preserves the historical or actual and transcends it by pursuing its more essential form.
In “The Spirit of Christianity”, having drawn attention to the open lines of John’s Gospel and emphasized that in the Logos was life (his emphasis), Hegel continues: God and the Logos become distinct [unterschieden] because Being must be taken from a double point of view [in zweierlei Rücksicht] … God and the Logos are only different [verschieden] in that God is matter in the form of Logos [als jener der Stoff in der Form des Logos ist]
38
: the Logos itself is with God; both are one … by [durch] the Logos all things were made; the world is not an emanation of the Deity, or otherwise the real world [Wirkliche] would be through and through divine. Yet, as real, it is an emanation, a part of the infinite partitioning, though in part (en autō is better taken with the immediately preceding oude en o gegonen), or in the one who partitions ad infinitum (if en autō is taken as referring to the logos) … In verse 14 the Logos appears modified as an individual, in which form he has revealed [gezeigt] himself to us. (Hegel, 1971a: 257−259 [1907: 306−307])
There are several comments to make here that decisively break with other commentators—like Magee, who believes this is through and through Hermeticism à la Jakob Böhme. First, this is terse and undeveloped. Hence “double point of view” could refer to that which is actual in itself (the individual Logos) and that which is in relation to the Father as the eternal generator of the Logos. Whatever the ambiguity of the language, Hegel makes plain that there is a difference in the Godhead between the source, the Father, and the Son, the Logos. 39 In the Christian neo-Platonic tradition the analogy most used to depict this difference is between God’s thought and God’s utterance. As both those in this tradition and Hegel understand, in dealing with the Trinity we become dependent upon creaturely analogies—picturing thinking is as necessary as it is only partial. That does not mean there is no knowledge. Again, both the tradition and Hegel do not wish to entirely distinguish faith from knowledge as in the Humean, Wolffian and Kantian tradition, but the analogy has always to admit what remains of a transcendent mystery, and eschatological remainder. Secondly, the difference between God and the Logos is “that God is matter in the form of Logos [als jener der Stoff in der Form des Logos ist]”. This is awkward from an orthodox perspective and seems to suggest, as a number of theological critics have claimed (Cyril O’Regan, 1994 40 and William Desmond, 2003, 41 most recently) that, for Hegel, creation and the Logos are the same. However, such an interpretation of this phrase sits oddly with what immediately follows: “by the Logos all things were made; the world is not an emanation of the Deity.” I think the translation is misleading here. Creation is not self-creating. The Apostle’s Creed distinguishes between the Word/Son that is begotten and things that are made, and earlier in the text, as I have pointed out, Hegel observes that God “makes them [the Jewish nation, the world and the rest of the human race] not something which is, but something made which on its own account has no life” (Hegel, 1971a: 191 [1907: 250]). This would suggest—but again it is developed much later in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion—that creation is sustained in life in God; its being is subsistent, or what Hegel later calls “borrowed”. If then there remains a difference between the Logos and creation and that the Logos is one with God and is life itself, then there is a distinction, which admittedly at this stage Hegel is all too vague about, between the immanent generation of the Logos in Godself, and the externalization of the Logos, first in creation and subsequently in Jesus. The difference is that the first distinction between the Father and the Son is logical and the second distinction between the Son and creation is temporal. Hegel blurs the distinction time and again, and this has a bearing upon the doctrines of the Trinity, Christology and creation. However, in Hegel’s pursuit of the philosophical task that the new mythology of reason announces (not the doctrinal and theological task), the theo-logic of intra-Trinitarian relations can only be inferred from the operation of that same theo-logic in the materiality of the world created in and through that theo-logic—a theo-logic operative in and through temporality. Some critics have seen in this that Christ is conflated with the created world, but that need not be the case. Hegel’s new mythology insists on both a relation with and also a difference between Christ and creation which has continually to be discerned—thought through on the basis of the mediating logic of the incarnate Logos. So in his 1803 “The Divine Triangle”, Hegel can speak of the Son as the self-cognizance of God the Father (Rosenkranz, 1844: 163), whereas in his later work on the philosophy of nature he can refer to the Earth as “the self-consciousness of God” (Hegel, 1970: 206). Christian neo-Platonism saw the distinction between the Father and the Son as the difference between thought and utterance, and Rosenkranz, who preserved the fragment known as “The Divine Triangle”, observed that “Hegel still loved… in his first exposition of metaphysics, to present the creation of the universe as the utterance of the absolute Word, and the return of the universe into itself as the understanding of the Word, so that nature and history become the medium between the uttering and the understanding of the Word” (Rosenkranz, 1963: 193). 42 Hegel, it seems, at least at this stage in his development, is more concerned about the relationship between the utterance of creation and it destiny (the understanding of that unique utterance). The attention to Jesus as the Logos fixes Hegel’s attention on the material and the historical. What is significant is not whether Hegel’s philosophical theology is orthodox. Orthodoxy is not a closed system or some repository of abstract truth claims. There may be a theological grammar, but if our God-talk is not simply to lapse into inauthentic formulations—then theo-logic has to be rethought, authentically, in every generation as the operations of God unfold in new understandings of the world and what it is to be human. Orthodoxy is an unfinished project and an ongoing praxis of faith seeking understanding that has to take materiality and history seriously. Hegel understood that.
Conclusion
It is only because of what Derrida would call the logocentric understanding of God and the world that, for Hegel, we can have knowledge of God and the world. However, such a logocentrism, for Derrida, announced a univocity of being, whereas Hegel announces a qualitative difference (and still a continuity) between Enlightenment understanding and the reasoning of the Logos. Faith, as such, is not what he called in “The Positivity of the Christian Religion” “positive faith”—faith that sacrifices its own ability to reason and passively submits to the dogmas of ecclesial authorities—faith opposed to knowledge. Faith is now a participation in the reasoning of the Logos itself; a participation also in the two other characteristics of the Logos: life and love. 43 Here in the Logos Hegel finds his mythology of reason that trumps the reason of thinkers like Kant and Fichte—that can only lead to the dichotomy of faith and knowledge and hence to skepticism. The “concentration on Jesus” has yielded an Archimedean point from which a philosophy having the same object as theology, namely Absolute knowledge, becomes possible. In 1795 Schelling had written to Hegel summing up where modern philosophy had reached with the Kantian revolution, but “[p]hilosophy is not at an end,” he wrote. “Kant gave the results, but the premises are still lacking. And who can understand the results without the premises?” (Kaufmann, 1965: 300). Hegel found his foundational premise in a logos Christology, and having found that premise there are no further critical meditations on Jesus as the incarnation of the divine Logos, the second person of the Trinity, until 1821 with the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and 1822 when he began lecturing in Berlin on the Philosophy of World History. Now a new knowledge could be embarked upon that could never be either atheistic or secular, for it was founded upon the mediating and reconciling operations in the world of divine reason. As Stephen Crites writes (and this returns us to where I began with the questions raised by Cavell), following the geographical move Hegel made from Frankfurt to Jena, and the intellectual move from Christology to the early workings of his System, at the centre of which is Sittlichkeit: “From this time on, indeed, we find Hegel claiming to speak for ‘philosophy’ itself, and when he does so he does not refer simply to his own system but to the perennial vision he shares with all true philosophers, of reason participating in the very truth which it expresses, as against all merely subjective opinions” (Crites, 1998: 145).
To sum up, then, with respect to the questions raised by Stanley Cavell about being a philosopher as distinct from teaching philosophy: for Hegel, Christ as in the incarnation of the divine Logos enables him to grasp total reality (that which was created in and through the Logos) as a rational unity. To establish a philosophy of the whole and therefore have knowledge as truth—knowledge not founded on the contingent epistemic apparatus of cognitive subjects—the Logos as both the context for the philosopher’s standpoint and the content for the authorization to speak from that standpoint guarantees the very constitution of reality itself. As such, philosophically, epistemology cannot be divorced from ontology, or thought from being, and neither can be separated from metaphysics. What is the upshot of this study? The genealogy of the kind offered here needs, evidently, to press on into the major works of Hegel, and space does not allow for that in a single article. What this genealogy offers the basis for are a series of Christological readings of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences and the Science of Logic. Because Hegel returns to questions concerning Trinity, Christological reasoning and creation in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, what I am not arguing for is a radical rejection of this neo-Platonic Christology when he establishes himself as a philosopher with the Phenomenology. There are elaborations of his position and ambiguities, but he is continually working at a Christian metaphysics. He is not an atheist, a nihilist, Spinozist, or a secularist, and, in fact, he has still much to say to those concerned with the relationship between the Trinity, community and Sittlichkeit. In fact, that is where he begins the first sketch for his Phenomenology—with his 1803/4 System der Sittlichkeit.