Systematised Logic from Aristotle to Aquinas, Hegel and Beyond [1 ed.] 1527550923, 9781527550926

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Systematised Logic from Aristotle to Aquinas, Hegel and Beyond

Systematised Logic from Aristotle to Aquinas, Hegel and Beyond: Body, Language, Mind By

Stephen Theron

Systematised Logic from Aristotle to Aquinas, Hegel and Beyond: Body, Language, Mind By Stephen Theron This book first published 2023 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2023 by Stephen Theron All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-5092-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-5092-6

CONTENTS

Chapter One ................................................................................................ 1 Knowledge of Linguistic Finitude as itself its Transcendence Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 31 What are the Roots that Clutch? Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 43 All or Nothing? Or All and Nothing? Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 51 Absolute Idealism as the True Realism Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 66 Political Theology in Hegel? Gadamer, MacIntyre Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 106 Grace Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 111 No Doctrine of Grace in Hegel? Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 126 Tenderness towards the Empirical? Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 139 A Developmental Spiral of Theological Understanding? Envoi....................................................................................................... 146 Bibliography ........................................................................................... 164 Index of Persons ..................................................................................... 167

CHAPTER ONE KNOWLEDGE OF LINGUISTIC FINITUDE AS ITSELF ITS TRANSCENDENCE

The body – as analogous substance; the soul - as existing “in the thought of itself” beyond death; two different orders of being, God’s and creation’s whereby creation is “as nothing”, is not the true being which is rather the Absolute Idea or thought thinking only, i.e. wholly, itself: - here are three aspects of this mystery of finitude, of “this passing show” (W.V.O. Quine), of the contradictions into which, seemingly, all representations of it (and language cannot cease to be representation, against which the Idea must in our hands ceaselessly battle), in advanced science as in thoughtless chatter, are inevitably led. Or, why is there anything at all and not just nothing? Simply because, Hegel and others might answer, “just nothing” cannot be! That is, being is finally necessary, in thought as in “reality”, itself none other than “the world of being” as just one of these two apparent conjuncts, being and nothing. “Reality”, that is, is otherwise nothing. Nothing, however, is non-reality. Reality then, rather, is thought but thought as, it turns out, being. This is the direct opposite of some oriental conceptions, is an affirmation of spirit, Geist. Here we are using language, quite legitimately, to represent what cannot be said, refusing silence, since this becomes merely craven or lazy in those who have thought, have been able to think, so far, knowing as they do that they thus think. Thus Cajetan (1469-1534)1, philosopher and theologian, came to doubt the immortality (or at least the proof thereof) of the “separated” soul but not that of the self, as active thought, for whom, for which, body, abstractly (“separated”) considered, has to be misperception only. Such talk of two orders principally means, rather, or should mean, that we are in God, viz. “in the spirit”, or we are nothing, as follows from the simple truth that no

1

For my view, interpretation, of Cajetan cf. the entry “Cajetan” in Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, ed. Hans Burkhardt and Barry Smith, Philosophia Verlag, Munich, Philadelphia & Vienna, 1991, pp. 109-111.

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creation can add anything to the being, real or supposed, that we call God2. It is, that is, in a sense nothing, if considered on its own. Thus if we should say that there are two not merely distinct but separate orders of being then the one must in some sense annihilate the other so long as we affirm equally that true being, true esse, is the Absolute Idea. In this sense creation is nothing, dust and ashes, as is perpetually affirmed in Scripture, in the sayings and writings of saints or, explicitly, at papal coronations. It is, then, an order of or in nothingness, the order of sin, indeed, when taken apart from divine grace specifically3. One of these supposed two orders is only an analogy of the other, is, moreover, necessarily that, viz, analogy4, as of “proper proportionality” (Cajetan). Only hence, in converse, must our 2

Hence it is that Aquinas concludes that God can have no real relation to any of his creatures but a relation “of reason only”, i.e. of our reason in the first instance. We can have no notion of a divine psychology, since just this conviction would have to be its first premise! Equally, “In God we live and move and have our being”, the two apostolic missionaries declare, actually citing a Greek poet, in the Acts of the Apostles”, the preposition “in” functioning so often as an identity, enhancing while annihilating the imagined created being, imagined only in the sense that “creation” is itself an analogous term, standing, Christianity reveals, for an identity, as of vine and branches, say, or for the condition, denoted by and in linguistic self-destruction, of being “members one of another”. Cf, Aquinas saying, claiming, that without analogy all things would be one (as in a sense, therefore, he thinks that they are, as expressed in the sacrament or in his hymn lauding it, where we sing sumit unus sumunt mille (where one receives a thousand receive) transcending all mathematics, something that will feature prominently in Hegel’s angelology (in The Phenomenology of Mind, VIIc, as also in “The Doctrine of Being” as found in his lesser Science of Logic), 3 Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theol, Ia-IIae, “Treatise on Grace”. Thus, in this treatise, the idea of a pure nature, unspoiled, whether in man or otherwise, appears effectively as a mirage, man inevitably tending, rather, to sin or existential failure unless divinely, that is deliberately or by “grace”, upheld. “What can fail at some time does” (Aquinas). Put differently, there is no unqualified apartness from God, his interfering kindness, so to say, being necessarily at work also or even in an or, it is implied, any endless Hell, real or imaginary, Aquinas reasons (Summa theol. Ia 21, 4), with amazing calm, one might think. Hence faith and hope are necessary as virtues specifically to be aspired after. This means that theology, explicit or disguised, is necessary: “and this we call God” is how Aquinas expresses this. But thus far, if there we, or he, stopped might be just a matter of “calling”, of choosing to continue within that debate. “I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the ungodly” (Psalm 84) might be the final word. 4 At the same time, however, we must add that it is only analogously analogous (yet can we not say that every analogy is analogous to all other analogies only?), inasmuch as, in its tending to error, finitude is the complete opposite of the infinite, i.e. what is normally taken as the note, i.e. opposition, of what is not analogous.

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speech, for example only, be analogous. Without analogy, claimed Aquinas, all things would be one, in what would be total abstraction. This of course shows that analogy for him was not purely and simply, i.e. abstractly, an affair of language or logic5 only. Yet they, things, are one anyway, this being the Hegelian unity in difference (concrete, not abstract unity), the contradiction, namely, that results in our having to contradict ourselves, on the face of it, but only on the face (i.e. the contradiction is not “vicious”: only the language committing it needing to be tidied up or expanded, possibly infinitely all the same, as Hegel for one in effect claims, so to say disarmingly!), in a corresponding logical contradiction. This necessity shows the incompetence of language as such, an infantile inheritance against which intelligence must after all battle (Wittgenstein), as it does not battle if it declares, with Wittgenstein, that it must here, faced with that of which it cannot speak, keep silence. We may indeed keep silence before “the mystical”, and nobly so. But someone, the high nobility of our nature necessitates, some, has or have to look into this, if only, first, to clarify the or, as it must inevitably be, our situation. Wittgenstein here “gave up too soon” (sic Herbert McCabe OP), maybe too readily even. Thus the “things themselves”, as in the Husserlian notion as espoused, say, by Joseph Seifert, are in reality not things at all, are collectively the nothing opposing itself to Being, to the Absolute Idea. Being that is, is necessarily idea, i.e. idea in the sense of thought, not as being merely ideal but rather as the converse of that. Being’s name, that is, is finally and properly, I AM, i.e. solely, which, surely, could be equally expressed by saying that it, just this name, is beyond or “above all names” (stress added). This, again, is not pantheism but its absolute converse and negation. It is the total domination of thought, of consciousness, that we call being, or love, or blessedness or, finally on Hegel’s analysis, as taken straightforwardly I would want to claim, the exclusive I AM, again, of Scripture (Cf. Enc. 159). These identifications occur immediately before or as leading immediately into the third and final section of Hegel’s later Science of Logic, viz. the Doctrine of the Concept6. This means that each

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Language or logic? This, Hegel will show, is a totally illegitimate duo. Logic, rather, is finally absolute and Idea, das wahre Seiendes and this precisely as system, but as self-vanishing system in the Absolute Idea in which all else is at once fulfilled and “cancelled”. 6 This is indeed a scientific treatise par excellence, i.e. the term “science” is not idle. The attempt by Fr. Daniel P. Jamros SJ to discredit this prominence of identifications, such as we have highlighted above, probably due to irritation with its currency among some youthful enthusiasts, seems to me, in the long run at least

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and any person, in ideating the world, through a mutual indwelling in and with Christ or God made man, is the world or Church. Thus the Pauline image of this as the body and its limbs has its limits, saved by his emphasis on each limb only living as in and one with the whole and hence not restrictedly itself. “I live and yet not I”. This is the true “consummation devoutly to be wished”, not least because it is true simply, love working in us to that end. Prayer, we are told, is an affair of love rather than of thinking. Yet the notion and love, in freedom, are one in such “blessedness”; this is acknowledged by Hegel (cf. again Enc. 159, end, leading immediately into his “Third Sub-Division of Logic”). Man here stands on the top rung of a ladder of ascent. He, as one in and with the Absolute Idea, will not be cast down. This Idea appears as Christ in and as religion, sic Hegel, yet why in or as religion exclusively, if the divine becoming man stands for itself or as such, but note the term “appears” here, signifying that man as such, as follows specifically from this logic (or why not just say “logically”?), is phenomenal, as Teilhard de Chardin’s title later recalled, whatever Teilhard meant or did not mean to suggest by his titular term. Thus man, the phenomenon, specifically has his being not in himself but “in God”, again, as does, however, all not divine and/or infinite in itself. Only this, in fact, is why he or any other empirical thing, excepting the “true vine”, Christ, in Christian belief, is not in himself divine, however may be miraculously endowed. Here, anyhow, we adhere to the Aristotelian view, as far as it goes at least, that philosophy naturally terminates in theology, theologia. There is no equivocation here, especially if we understand the Hegelian dictum that God is revelation. This view is also the key to the earlier Platonic veneration for the then current myths. But when that which is perfect is come then we speak specifically of that as the unveiled (revelata) ever looked for. This understanding, I believe, was reached already in medieval times, when philosophers pure and simple had come to be seen as a defunct class of the past, upon whose works the theologians showed themselves capable of commenting with accurate insight7. Thus it is as a theologian, one may well claim, that Hegel comments upon Kant, the “critical” philosopher, devastatingly. All of which immediately affects our view of analogy. Thus the analogy of the world and God is not analogy as one thing in the world, e.g. an ape, and hoping I err not, theologically ill-judged. The same identification, anyhow, is found repeatedly in Catherine of Siena’s dialogue, “A Treatise of Discretion”. 7 See, for example, the late Eugene Gendlin’s LINE BY LINE COMMENTARY ON ARISTOTLE’S DE ANIMA II & III for ample demonstration, in retailing Aquinas particularly and in explicit contrast with fashionable modern commentators, of this claim.

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might be an analogy of another in the world, e.g. a man nor even, more radically, according to a now fashionable interpretation, is it the analogy whereby what I say, as specifically and solely one expression, might be, often is indeed, an analogy of another simultaneously supposed expression still, or of what I don’t say, i.e. it will be in close relation to metaphor and simile, which are mere figures (analogies) of speech only, without being reducible, the doctrine’s followers claim, to these. In that case, however, one can see that what I say, this expression, is not to be understood as the words I utter or write, these being only able to be analogous or relatedly similar in shape or sound to what I say by their use. It is thus not empty to say, or write, that “The cat is on the mat” says that the cat or, better, some cat is on the mat. If one took for example “Stephen is on the mat” the relation, the difference, between word and what it signifies might itself be somewhat different, due to the proper naming quality of proper nouns or names such as “Stephen”. What one sees here is that it is impossible to separate analogy from the conceptual, from ideas, a position, however, not at all set to exclude analogies from “things” or, still less, excluding an analogy “of being” itself as final fundament. This continues to hold even should we want to say, with bishop Butler, to the apparent befuddlement, in our view, of G.E. Moore, that “each thing is itself and not another thing”. Rather, here, as applied to concepts, analogy is more fundamentally asserted than ever, since what are declared fundamentally different severally are united under one word or, rather, concept, that of thing.8 By absolute idealism as in Hegel, but not only he, all analogy is conceptual because things themselves are such, i.e. in the divine mind, itself no different from God himself as the Absolute Idea9 knowing and/or loving only self (and all else only “in” that, just as all is being, esse, negating all the potentiality that is essence by actualising it: this is the final sense of actus purus, i.e. this is not abstracted from acts in general but absolutely concrete, rather). By this Hegel logically concludes his Logic by asserting that it, or thought, is das wahre Seiendes. Whether intentionally or not he is there in full accord with the evangelical Johannine prologue, “In the beginning was the Word … and the Word was with God and the Word was God … full of grace and truth” (Gospel of John 1, i-xiv). Either way he intends the position to be and to be seen, because shown (by the whole exposition of this “science of logic”), as arrived at independently, as a noble and in the inclusive sense philosophical aim of which mockery is no refutation. 8

Cf. Hegel, Enc. 125 with Zus. This is itself only analogously an idea, God being the final reality or, indeed, being itself, which is not an idea or anything other than itself.

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Thus this account of analogy reducing it in great part to the conceptual as such is in the end not reductive enough. Regarding the final pair, God and the world, the latter, or nature even, is simply not God and is hence, by our premises so far, nothing, not even an analogy except in some again analogous sense! It is an analogy of those analogical relations between particulars found within the nothingness, i.e., nothing just in and by “the analogy of being” itself, a mere quasi-veil (this term is also used analogously here, note), namely, as “nothing and less than nothing” (Isaiah, on “the nations” before God, having already reduced things in general to residual wet drops on the sides of an emptied, by the constitutive divine thought itself, bucket), with which, again, Aquinas demonstrates, God, as the Idea (Hegel) or true being (Aquinas), has and can have no real relation, loving only himself rather here too without interruption, taking up the isles “as fine dust”, say the ancient prophets of Israel. Or, it is as His image simply that God bears this great love for man of which Scotus spoke, entailing the eventual incarnate union even without or independently of man’s sinful or fallen situation10. Thus it is that Hegel’s philosophy, the most intensively analogous of all perhaps, rigorously avoids the name “analogy” in the sense of making any positive use of it. He rather inclines, as far as this may be possible or just but no more, to an equation by assumptive absorption of nothing into being, of nature into God or Spirit11, or more generally of predicate into subject, matter into form, body into soul, part into whole (analogy of opposites: cf. note 9), the reverse of pantheism as we noted. It 10 This position does not contradict the Augustinian felix culpa, which is a deliberate paradox merely, naturally evoked by the Gospel. Divine, i.e. absolute love cannot be caused or magnified or lessened by anything other than itself (but nor by itself either). Here it refers to that divine likeness in rational man as such: “let us make man in our image and likeness”. That is what God loves, himself, as always. Here one may scent a link between medieval and more modern views as supplied by this Scotist intermediary position. “Abide in me” has been, as counsel, the so to say divine prayer of God to man (also “deliberate paradox” as evoking that ubiquitous analogy of opposites we are arguing for here) always and under whatever dispensation, conditions, etc. 11 This, in fact, is why he rejects the current “romantic” conception of nature as a work of spirit as the highest divine art or similar. The three forms of spirit are human art (work specifically of the human spirit), religion (as response of the human spirit to the divine) or, finally and supremely, philosophy (as the human thinking aspiration toward the divine Idea). Man and art, therefore, stand above or transcend mere nature, which is rather for man as its highest embodiment in and as its transcendence, rather. Compare the poet Francis Thompson’s reference, in the midst of the “Romantic” period, in his poem “The Hound of Heaven”, to “nature poor stepdame” and how nothing of hers “could slake me of my drought”.

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is thus a grave error to interpret his texts as a meditation on language alone or on mere logical paradoxes. His “logic”, in scorning such paradox, rather seeks to transcend text-book logic, to self-transcend, namely, or to think the Idea which is, over again, thought thinking itself eternally and immutably as having absolute confidence in itself, as he puts it, this being why, inter alia, it cannot be thought of as itself waiting upon time or change12. Inasmuch as idealism is a finite posture absolute idealism, therefore, is the reverse of ordinary or finite, ultimately incoherent idealism, besides being in name yet one more and that the purest illustration of the point we are labouring to put across (one might call it absolute realism, in aspiration at least). I end this first chapter with three considerations relating to the metaphysics of this “Aristotle of our times”13, not necessarily theological as the third one shows. I. Incarnation: the very Idea: Consider further St. Augustine’s O felix culpa, and the insertion of this phrase at the most solemnly joyous moment of the Church’s liturgy (Easter Vigil). How, again, can a fault, i.e. a sin, be happy? The people interpret the phrase, most immediately at least, as initiating a mere hyperbolic transfer, in speech only, of the happiness they, the worshippers, there and then may be feeling to the previous misery itself (culpa), inasmuch as they are now redeemed therefrom. The superlative quality of their joy spreads backwards over their first parents’ and their progeny’s fall. But would that really, in final analysis, be suitable for 12 Hence, if it introduces any change, any just then, it does so in an eternal intention the necessity of which rests squarely, because fairly, upon absolute because divine freedom which is itself divinity, immutably (and hence immutable divinely). 13 Hegel’s stature here seems to have been totally missed by one of our time’s foremost Christian apologists, C.S. Lewis, who saw him rather as a degenerate and over-prolix Berkeley (Surprised by Joy, 1955, Collins Fount Paperbacks 1977, p. 178), ignoring Hegel’s own criticism of the latter, e.g. at Phenomenology of Mind, Harper, Torchbook edn. 1966, pp. 278-280, where Berkeley’s self-contradiction is linked to Fichte’s (and also Kant’s) in their failure to give up “the thing” or, expressly in Fichte, “alien impact”. The Berkeleyan ideas in God’s mind remain real in their conceptual apartness from him, in whom (but not with the “in” of identity precisely, of the “I live yet not I”, of course applied by St. Paul to the graced union with Christ specifically but applicable generally as universally perfective) we “live and move etc.” Berkeley, that is, would have, if possible, to be read in a Hegelian way. Otherwise he seems simply to import the religious “picture” of the heavenly court (God and his ideas) into philosophy unspiritualised, which is also less than theological. What is an idea? This question remains thus far unanswered, whereas reason, nous, “all the while is intended to be all reality” (Hegel, op. cit. p.280: “But actual concrete reason is not so inconsequent as this …”).

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inclusion at the paschal liturgy’s highest point, if indeed at all, namely as being an evil means justified by the final end? For as the arch-human sin causing all else it, the felix culpa, is in a quite different category from that, say, of God himself acting to drown the Pharaonic horde or, say, to punish indifferently either wanton or accidental touching of the ark of glory, to keep to what is “in the Book” or Bible. Rather, this category, of the happy fault, is not mere so to say wilful paradox, “if we would but consider”14. Thus St. Augustine wrote here as philosopher and/or serious theologian and Patristic commentator. In what way then, again, can a culpa be felix for such? Only, one has to answer, inasmuch as it, just like anything else, is known and hence simultaneously willed by God, each, the knowing and the willing, entailing the other just in their final or essential identity, backed away from in the “religious” talk of God’s permissive will. There can be no such antecedent or secondary act there, whether or not it be true that we, finite and temporal, cannot but divide up sin and its repentance, nothing else showing, phenomenally, that it is “ever” repented. A certain primacy remains in the willing, nonetheless, as our finitude reflects, in nous as practical or, so to say, dynamic, as is acknowledged by Hegel. It is idiom as what we “have to say” if we would want to say anything specific (specification as of appearances, Latin species15). Hence in his system will and hence love follow upon Cognition Proper, i.e. in further ascent to the Idea, as naming the category specifically constituting “the truth of the Good” (I add the stress), as it must, since this truth is itself the unity of the theoretical and practical idea in the doctrine that the Good is radically and really achieved, that the objective world is in itself and for itself the Idea, just as it at the same time eternally lays itself down as End, and by action brings about its actuality. This … is the Speculative or Absolute Idea. (Enc. 235)

Since the ambiguities here are clearly deliberate I will not here attempt to improve upon or further order them but only add that here Augustine’s own distinction between God’s active and merely permissive will is of no use at all but rather the reverse. Thus it is only valid, again, when one has one’s eye, so to say, toward the creaturely and finite way of perceiving, where what God has permitted is ipso facto his will, since he is omnipotent, but his will in modified and limited manner. No doubt the preacher or teacher 14 A plea, mournful in a way, often used by St. Thomas Aquinas when replying to “objectors”. 15 We may thus note an ambiguity, whether more or less dormant, in the scholar Darwin’s famous title.

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has often, even more often than not, to advert to this our human manner of perception, as indeed religious discourse most typically does, e.g. as in “Our father who art in heaven”, as taught by the Lord himself, as if, but in idiom only, heaven were an entity greater than God himself. Hence the religious education of children consists largely in progressively making just this clear. This conclusion, “that the Good is radically and really achieved”, seemingly in perfect harmony with classical and hence Pauline-Augustinian theology in its greatest representatives, corresponds to Aquinas’s argument that the divine or absolute knowledge has to be itself causative (thus we use a finite term over again, however). In other words it is primal here conceptually that the divine ways are justified not merely to man, who often misses just this, but in themselves simply as being divine.16 This teaching is all of a piece with Aquinas’s declaration that God has no knowledge of us as being in ourselves but “only” as we are in His idea of us, understanding by this that we are not “in” ourselves but “live and move and have our being” in God, the “only”, like the “in” here in fact, having no function matching these terms’ literal sense, these themselves only serving rather to prompt us to find some other or others if any such might possibly be discoverable, here at the limit of finite language, given that we draw back from naming the identity to which thought presses us as here, where what Aquinas and the Scripture imply is that we simply are not in ourselves but do live and move in God as, indeed, in our “neighbour”. Sumit unus sumunt mille, “I am the vine and you are the branches”, “what you do to another you do to me”, “love your neighbour as yourself” as “like unto” loving God. That alone, that we “are not” independently (and so must fear being “cut off”), is why God has no knowledge of such assumed independence of being, a truth that no talk of two orders (of being) can finally obscure. An

16 Here one can see the shallowness of the intellectual culture within which the notion of a “naturalistic fallacy” was born. It had no worthy concept of God in thus positing independent evaluation to judge evaluation’s source and this at the summit of our metaphysical theory. Thus the fashionable adulation of mathematics, as knowing only abstract necessity exclusively (and hence unable to say without help what if anything it “knows”) among recent logical theorists is not divorcible from a wish to dethrone either God or metaphysics or both together. So while indeed one can talk of a good or bad argument as at least on occasion corresponding to the valid/invalid distinction yet one cannot or certainly does not properly speak of a good theorem, even if it be one that indeed “holds good” semper et ubique, as one can and did speak, Peter Geach once pointed out to me, of the bona consequentia.

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annihilative identity overthrows this finite duality (of both speech and being) as deepest explanation for why God “has spoken only one word”17. … alia autem a se videt non in ipsis, sed in se ipso, in quantum essentia sua continent similitudinem aliorum ab ipso (He, viz. God, sees things other than himself not in themselves, but in himself, in as much as his own essence contains the likeness of things other than himself).18

We may incline to contrast with this Hegel’s treatment of what is known as the Fall of Man. If it were really a fall, he comments, then God would not be God, an opinion apparently in conflict with the faith of the Church, or, it is the same, in conflict with the truth of reason that nothing is impossible with God or that we “fall but to rise” (i.e. such is anyhow the “real” fall), with an obvious bonus attendant upon the rising, in great (the greatest) matters as in small. But I am not having here to defend some unbroken consistency of Hegel’s thought, belief or actions or even whether any finite human being, be he or she Catholic or Protestant or “something else”, could ever have, under temporal conditions, absolute consistency. In fact we claim here that Hegel’s interpretation (of “the fall”) is more seriously faulted by neglect of explicit discussion of man’s creation in statu gratiae, in a state of (divine) grace, as we develop this aspect further here, that being what was lost. No doubt the fall of the evil angels is in a different category, that, indeed, of an absolute contradiction. They do not repent, do not wish for anything else, indeed know that they depend absolutely upon what God allows them. They are thus contradictions as such, beings in non-being finally. It is precisely the inverse of this, then, that shows the goodness of logic, shows, in fact, that Hegel was not reducing the Christian faith to logic but elevating logic toward the Absolute Idea which is simultaneously indeed the Absolute simply more than it is idea, known by faith as the holy Trinity of mutual personal relations and itself the inclusive acme of all logic or thought, of all that is spirit and, as we say in unconscious analogy, life19. Love itself is the 17

John of the Cross, praising, even enjoining silence, in, with or at least like Hegel, thought as showing the latter’s true ground, viz. sublime self-contradiction. There is in fact a distinctly odd reference to “Spanish poetry” in Hegel’s writings. 18 Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia, 14, 3 (“On God’s Knowledge”): “other than”, but then even opposite to (himself) as they all, like evil in this, anyhow are. Here is the root to Hegel’s reflections upon evil so often (thoughtlessly?) held against him. 19 What we are developing here, in the wake of Hegel, so to say, rather than merely following him, is an ontology in denial of ontology inasmuch as the latter, or being itself rather, has been customarily distinguished against thought. An example of this,

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final or abiding face of knowledge. So a final choice between the two as seems envisaged by McTaggart is thus an at least in some ways misleading presentation of this final Aufhebung as we find it in Hegel20. Or, “The knowledge that I have now is imperfect; but then I shall know fully as I am known” (I Cor. 13), i.e. as or in the way that I am loved. This is the “liberation” that “thinking means”, where “in the other one meets with one’s self” (the principle of Trinitarianism). This liberation is actually “called I”. Such is the coincidence of necessity and freedom as the Idea (Enc. 159). “Since being has shown that it is an element in the notion, the latter has thus exhibited itself as the truth of being”.21 It follows anyhow that God willed Adam to fall as he hardened Pharaoh’s heart at the Israelite Exodus and this not as releasing Adam or Pharaoh from their guilt. I am aware of course that this corresponds to the Dominican position as held against the Jesuit one during the papal consultation of 1607 or so where the Pope presiding refused to make a decision between them, the dispute just lingering on to this day also in orthodox theological circles with what good or bad effects one hesitates to determine, as not being within the terms of our controversy here. Thus even with the Pope, also an identifiable finite instance whatever one’s beliefs, the same questions arise after his decisions as do so after his non-decisions, themselves also decisions as is plain from Hegelian logic most particularly perhaps. So what light, again, might this throw upon Augustine’s exclamation? It shows, I answer, that infinite goodness is equal to whatever actually happens in the world. One can struggle, if one will, to construct a counterexample to this thesis but by virtue of the infinity one could always refuse it, not least because of the finitude of the terms used in human argument, and that of linguistic terms specifically, as touched on earlier here. Here one can follow Hegel’s line of thought again, for example in The the contrary, is or might be the hypothesis, which I neither defend nor reject just now (once mentioned by Peter Geach in a letter to me), that the postulated “separated” soul can or could be thought of as “existing” intermediately in the thought of itself. Thus, staying with this, thinking cannot be an attribute of an otherwise existing God. He has to be his thought, his thought he, as he has to be personality absolutely, Hegel’s “absolute person”, the absoluteness sufficing to keep the apparent clash with Trinitarianism of such speech as indeed no more than appearance, as applies also to Aquinas’s questions and articles on the Trinity in the main Summa. 20 Enc. 235. 21 I append here an alternative translation put to us students by Joseph Kockelmans in 1967: “Since nature has shown that it is an element in the concept, the latter has thus exhibited itself as the truth of nature”. This, however, would seem to reduce Hegel’s affirmation of his absolute idealism here to a merely partial statement of it in regard to nature specifically.

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Phenomenology of Mind where he discusses good and evil with respect to their final reality or otherwise. Relevant is his declared conclusion in the Encyclopaedia Logic or a Zusatz thereto that evil as such is essentially “a sham-being”, i.e. nothing, i.e. it finally is not, a decidedly Thomist conclusion though not perhaps thus decided by Hegel, his unconsciousness, to a degree at least, of the coincidence rather adding, in such case, to its substantial force. To understand that we are not making a distinction without a difference here, as concerning the felix culpa, we should look again at the expression we used above, “evil means”. A means as means, if it is a means, is good. Thus it is not an evil in God that his creatures are or become evil. In final analysis all and anything finite, taken on its own or in abstracto, is in itself evil as not being God or where, if ever, not “in” God, just as, or because, it is otherwise found “concretely” to be nothing except as living, moving and/or having its being in God, whatever we are finally to make of that crucial or, again, even evil preposition! For nothing can be in God except as one with God and hence more than “in”, although remaining, as finite, infinitely less than God. A point is here reached, rather, from the other direction, so to say, where “evil is just not evil” (Hegel), the point where Hegel urges us consciously to think contraries as far as possible in or as thinking one and the same thought, the impossibility, it may be, of this thus becoming the or a mark of created intellect’s finitude. This indeed is precisely why the sole means of that union with God, the infinite and absolute, that we naturally22 seek as rational, is faith and nothing but faith, of and for which providential grounds have accordingly been supplied by Absolute Goodness. This is the key posit and conclusion of the ascetic or mystical theology of St. John of the Cross, where faith as sole means of union is explicitly singled out and, in some sense, proved23. “The just shall live by faith”, wrote St. Paul, as definite doctrine and no mere platitude. If anything it is astounding, rather. You will get nowhere, “die in your sins” is 22

Well is it natural, or is it so above even angelic nature that having once heard of it and believed we cannot other than desire and hope for this extreme of love? The situation of the angels, pure spirits, good or bad, might seem to be different, inasmuch as we can know anything about them at all. Yet they, or some, those guarding children, “behold the face of my Father”, Christ shall have taught, i.e. enjoy the visio beatifica. Such considerations are the staple of Aquinas’s angelology (Summa theol. Ia). 23 This thesis, concerning the unique role of faith for union with the infinite, with God, is defended in a study of John of the Cross’s teaching by the Polish philosopher Karol Wojtyla (later Pope) when a student at the Dominican University (Angelicum) in Rome.

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the phrase used, except you believe in me, the Christ declared, for “I am the bread of life”, adding that “no one comes to the Father except through me”. I am led to add these confirmations from religion through the distinction made at the beginning of the previous paragraph here, though it is indeed faith and its intelligence that most typically open up that distinction. The circle is thus benign. In some sense of course this is true also of worldliness, where people close their dreary message by exclaiming “It just is like that” or similar. So they need not, as they nonetheless must, find fault with our contrary option here. “Only believe: believe in me”. “As existing in an individual form, this liberation is called I … free Spirit … Love … Blessedness. … but the notion itself realises for its own both the power of necessity and actual freedom” (Enc. 159). It is in fact “the Absolute Idea”, from the roots of which in demonstrating its necessity Hegel does not shy away, ever.24 As regards interpreting Augustine’s phrase it may still seem to some that I am making or trying to make a distinction without a difference, as if it were not the whole task of philosophy to eliminate paradox. Rather than that, in fact, one should prefer to stay in unresolved contradiction, as in some way Hegel counsels at the place we have been looking at, while Aquinas too in his main Summa, rather than have truck with paradox, declares that we know most about God when we know that we know nothing. This is literally meant insofar as it is a comment upon the quality of whatever that same Summa gives us to understand or know about God. “This is eternal life, to know God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent”. Meanwhile it is a question rather of the latter’s knowing us (so that he will never say “I never knew you”). Meanwhile, also, we think we understand the epistle II Peter’s “with God a thousand years is as a day” (“there is no difference”, it even adds, in one approved translation at least) as if it meant that God “thinks in centuries” (here millennia), as is derisively said of supposed naïve believers, when really it must mean that God, who is his thought, which is hence one, the Idea, is not in time at all, nor time in Him. This, in turn, means that time is nothing to be “in”, the position of McTaggart. What Augustine has to be saying, then, as at least not absent from his exclamation, is that all that is actual is God’s will, as further development of thought will confirm and in this case has confirmed, inasmuch as “his love for our fathers is fulfilled” (Simeon, cf. Gospel of Luke 2) with Christ’s birth and presentation in the Temple. Meanwhile faith is demanded for the life lived by “the just”, in aspiration at least, as also for understanding this thesis, that God wills, as eternally knowing it, also what is contrary to his 24

Cf. the closing pages of Hegel’s original or “greater” Science of Logic.

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will, since, for one thing, knowledge, itself causative, and will are necessarily one in God. Hence in religion, in the Gospel, to those he rejects, whether finally instantiated or not (that is not the point here: though one might want to argue just from this text that they are not, if God never knew them, or want even to ask “Are we?”), he says “I never knew you”, clearly something to put in our pipes and smoke, as the saying is. In a similar way it has been said that Christ’s appearance on earth only to be crucified is the demonstration of the world’s sinfulness to itself by itself, at the same time as it, this sin, becomes, what it therefore always was and which Jewish or “Old Testament” prophecy ever if mysteriously proclaimed, “happy fault”, as the faith of Augustine simply if exultantly records this, though one, whether fault or faith, lying deep indeed. The demonstration, moreover, is as happy as the cut is deep, this being the burden of the well-known hymnal poem, “When I survey the wondrous Cross”: Then am I dead to all the world And all the world is dead to me.

The choice, anyhow is not between individual person and/or abstract universality. Personality absorbs individuality, as of a “material” body of some kind, totally. This is seen again and again, that “I am you”25. Scripture regularly uses “in”, again, as metaphor for this identity of all with all, or of highest with lowest, or however we shall put it. “I in them and they in me”. In this way the situation of the God-man, of the incarnate Word, as therefore including our own total reality, the alternative being nothing or selfperdition, is put necessarily as the ideal, the concrete vocation rather as what we must “put on”, for us all. “I … will draw all men unto me” (stress added), by and in his own corporeal and individual death however, “if I be lifted up”. This is the devoutly wished consummation of faith, transcending quite its attribution to mere dreamless death in Hamlet. The end to heartache, that is, is transcended by an end to all, yet more thoroughly, in its converse or in joy, not reachable however by mere suicide. With Christ I hang upon the Cross, and yet I am alive; or rather, not I; it is Christ that lives in me. True, I am living here and now this mortal life; but my real life is the faith I have in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.26

25 26

Cf. D. Kolak, I am You, Springer, New York 2002. St. Paul the Apostle (Epistle to the Galatians 2: 19b-20).

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The reason for this latter restriction of definition is not, all the same, so simple to grasp. For it is just because this present life, or life itself, is not the real being as found in the finality of the end-state, ever abiding as controlling and just as such “realised end” (Hegel), that it is not to be forcibly, in fullness of will, put by, as if, that is, it were really there. To use such force upon life, to murder, self or other, is to give it more reality than is its due. It must, rather, fade from our maturing (self-)consciousness, this process being what we call prayer. “Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird”, indeed, but because qua immortal your being, in nightingale-like privilege, if allowed to develop, issues in a songful trampling of death no less than in a necessity of thought, in essence itself “liberation”, one with I, the I that I am, free Spirit, Love and Blessedness (Hegel, Enc. 159). Hence Hegel speaks of life as “only the Idea immediate”27, adding that “everything immediate is false”. And yet it is, it too or simultaneously, Idea and thus in itself logical. That is the originality here. The immediacy does not invalidate the use of “life” to denote the Absolute, precisely within the Logic, just as Hegel uses “idea” (also a finite term thus necessarily analogised). “I am the way, the truth and the life.” All reads, therefore, as if it is Christ’s hanging, fixed to the end, in death’s pain and humiliation, upon death’s instrument, seemingly so particular were it not that He is the Christ, in whom as individualised person all particularity is equalled to the whole, not, that is, to the abstractly universal but to the concretely universal, just to take up Hegel’s phrase for the moment. This indeed unlocks or, rather, constitutes the truth that the system of logic in itself is indeed “the true being”, as Hegel declares, at once Absolute Idea and “body” or organised whole and it alone, the Absolute Idea, where all parts are one with the whole and so de-part-ed, so to say. This is what Hegel in fact states on the closing two or three pages of his earlier or first Science of Logic (called “greater”). Hegel’s is thus a further revelation of logic to itself, while the One is demonstrated, were that needed, to be transcendental predicate28 along with the Being, the True, the Beautiful. In contemplating “the foolishness of God”, as delivered to him within his tradition, Hegel indeed became wise. As regards theology most immediately the parallel with Newman in the next generation or two is not hard to unearth, not least because Newman does not appear to have read much Hegel, just as, we noted, not much trace of any text of Aquinas appears in the latter’s leavings, recall Aquinas though they may. All the same regrettably, therefore, many scholars visibly “on the make” or otherwise negatively motivated have 27 28

This is why, as entitling this, it gets into Hegel’s treatise on logic specifically. Cf. Aquinas, QD de potentia VII.

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failed to remark or further take up these parallels, disclosing further organic structure within or absorbed by thought’s own final absolute simplicity. Still we may feel bound to add, here too, “This also is thou; neither is this thou”, just as we noted above that if the Absolute Idea is God then it is no longer in the finite category otherwise named “idea”. This is strictly parallel, as moment, to the declaration that Christ has been given the “name that is above all names” (stress added), i.e. even above the name here specified. So it is not a name at all in “our” sense, having rather the form of a riddle: “when is a name not a name?”. That is what it is to be “Lord”, dominus. II. Theotokos: Regarding the being of Christ, worshipped by the Christians, be they philosophers or not, one is not able, purely rationally I mean, to abstract from consideration of the mother of the man who is God, Mary, thus truly, i.e. if Christ is worshipped, “mother of God”, theotokos, literally God-bearer, as defined at the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus (431 AD) against the Nestorians. That is to say, the actual and hence proper term as defined is not “mother” but theotokos or, again, God-bearer, in the sense of child-bearer and so not mother merely. Motherhood is rather taken up, aufgehoben again, into something more or simply absolute, which motherhood thus or thence becomes in annihilative fulfilment, as is indeed the quality of truly maternal love. The relation to the child, however, to its being born qua child or “offspring”, is yet more immediate. Mary bore and brought forth this uniquely divine child, God’s divine word, one with himself in the sense in which “God has spoken only one word” (John of the Cross), or better say “speaks” (himself). This relation is in no way shared, for example, with the one called a “grandmother” (as if a species of mother). There is thus no call for supposed reductiones ad absurdum speaking, for example, of a grandmother of God and so on, whether or not we irreverently imagine St. Anne actually saying, as she might of course have done, to Mary: “Well if you’re God’s mother then I’m his grandmother”, as if claiming a share in some represented genus. This would, that is, have been at best a moment of jocular irreverence, no more. Otherwise one ignores the negative aspect of analogy. The privilege, the choice, was and is unique to the chosen one, Mary, herself therefore immaculately conceived by St. Anne during otherwise normal impregnation by St. Joachim, therefore not unprivileged in or by this essentially unobservable but not unintelligible mystery of Mary’s participation from the first moment of her existence in what is called mysterium fidei, a phrase specifically referred to the equally unobservable eucharistic change (of the “elements”, bread and wine), although the mystery of faith is just thereby one of several mysteries, as being itself “of faith”, like, say, any of the articles mentioned in the official

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creeds of the Church. By this or similar reasonings theologians, some of them, teach that in principle no one could have observed the resurrection as occurring, i.e. even though some, as chosen witnesses, observed the risen Christ himself. In any case the eucharistic transformation, utterly unobservable, remains the mystery of faith specifically. Thus it would be wrong or at least insensitive to call this essentially unobservable change of situation and/or status “miraculous”29 precisely, although it is certainly above or beyond nature. The miraculous, that is to say, tends to be limited to phenomena, while here we deal with noumena or what things really are. A saint turning some meat into fish because it is Friday is an absurd instance, thus, of the miraculous, while at the other end of the scale we have the healing miracles performed by Christ and the saints. There are, that is no unobserved miracles, as a mystery of faith is essentially unobserved, leading us just therefore to exclaim digitus Dei est hic. It is not, that is, phenomenal but yet actual and/or real, hence for us in our own present phenomenal state a mystery of faith, mysterium fidei, said again, supremely, of the eucharist. Miracles, being observable, do not require faith for their apprehension, except in the privileged person working them. That is their point. One might wonder if one might apply this quality of mystery to just everything noumenal or trans-phenomenal, or whether anything other than these divine mysteries is indeed “noumenal”, recalling Hegel’s critique of Kant here30. “I am God; there is none other”. That after all is what is effectively said in and by the claim to be the way, the truth and the life. Thus mystery of faith, as only seeming less than specific, can mean mystery of what faith, the faith, our faith (the Church) even, is. This, Mary’s specific God-bearing, is further brought out, in the Church’s proclamation, as alone mediating these realities, whereby, as against the heresy of Jovinian in or around the fourth century, Mary shall have born Jesus without pain or injury or modification of also her bodily virginity. In the words of the decree, repeated in the most recent Roman catechism31, Mary is virgin before, after and during the birth of Jesus. The hymen is not ruptured. For those who believe that Christ’s body after death passed, as resurrected, through locked doors to meet his faithful worshippers this is more than consistent, exhibiting a mystically aesthetic correspondence between initiation and final perfection of divine incarnation, in either case 29

This point is especially argued for in Abbot Ansgar Vonier’s essay on the eucharist (Vonier OSB, A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist, Wipf and Stock, Eugene, Or., 2002 (it dates originally from the 1920s). 30 Cf. Enc. 44. 31 Catechism of the Catholic Church, Rome 1994.

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an empowerment of the divine corporeality, already when first assumed32, in excess of our natural limitations. It, the unbroken virginity, also both corresponds to and enhances the dignity and ever unspoiled beauty of Mary theotokos. The sword would pierce her heart too, and that equally, Simeon’s prophecy, “a sword shall pierce thine own heart33 also”, seems to imply. It would do so at the Cross, not in this initial moment of joy for the world, as Hegel, to recall our project here34, lyrically describes the revelation of glory to the shepherds in the first book of his system, The Phenomenology of Mind, in or around 1800. It is thus, in celebrating Mary’s perpetual virginity, a cause of some sorrow to me that I at least once, in previous books in this series, as I recall, may be found suggesting that the fourth century condemnation of “Jovinianism” might implicitly be regarded as now withdrawn. I had wanted to enlist Hans Küng in my support35, particularly in view of his own timely defence of Hegel’s contribution to theology, more or less my own project for the moment, i.e. for these last twelve years, although not so as to throw out, with Küng, the baby, literally, with the bath-water if I recall correctly his saying, for example, that the faithful should not be obliged to believe in the virgin-birth of Christ at all. They just do believe and by that are 32 This is of course also indicated in what is called “the transfiguration” of Christ, one, indeed, from a lower to what is still a higher figure, of shining garments and so on, not as such corresponding to the eternal state, which is rather knowledge and Idea, as prayer on earth, or just thinking, foreshadows. Even if, for Aristotle, senseimages must accompany our thinking in our earthly state, yet they form no part of it (cf. Gendlin, op. cit.). This is important also in connection with our project, or at least working hypothesis, of absolute idealism, as showing how the divine infinity, as Absolute Idea, can unite itself, and must be able to do so, with the negative or “show”, can eat and drink in a word, and thus, by unshakeable intention at least, ever be one with that, with the show, as being itself entails its opposite. Thus Christ’s meat, the whole of it, remained his doing the will of Him who sent him, he says, and not corruptible food and drink at all, which, all the same, he assumes to himself in the sacrament. It is thus noteworthy that St. Teresa of Avila (but not only she) insists, in her commentary on “the Lord’s prayer” (Way of Perfection), that the petition for daily bread is principally, i.e. it has to be, a petition for sacramental, i.e. eucharistic, grace, from, in and with Him who is “the bread of life”. 33 The use of the word “heart” is significant if we relate it to later devotion to the “immaculate heart” of Mary theotokos following on that to the “sacred heart” of the incarnate and risen Son. 34 This book being thus my twelfth in a Hegel series (as distinct from a “Hegelian” series inasmuch as it has set out, so to say, to absorb Hegel into something less personally specific). 35 In particular his Menschwerdung Gottes, Freiburg 1970.

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“faithful”, as I was not in taking the “modernist” line mentioned. Such attitudes are not “development of Christian doctrine” as this phrase was intended by St. John Henry Newman, guiding spirit of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1964) according to Pope Paul VI, its eventual promoter and president. Küng here, we might say, is “out on a limb” (despite much incidentally valuable work), while in philosophy as in theology we have to know who is who as much as we do what’s what, not, indeed as respecting finite persons (in whatever sense they are that) but here as respecting personality in infinite form, the principle object of faith, itself venerable as the sole means of divine union36 as it is, we are told, of the moving of mere mountains. Meanwhile, as infinite, “God is the absolute person”, Hegel states, undaunted by the seeming clash between that statement and the truth of divine tri-personality as known and, for all one can judge (should one?), believed by him as well37. III. Language, a phenomenon: A further antinomy, the final or even quoad nos absolute antinomy, as we might collectively call these enigmas (though that, viz. enigma, darkness, is also a “calling”, a mere figure in origin, namely, for the puzzling), is of course that of language itself. This, its enigmatic quality specifically, has led to a gradually growing confusion of the philosophy of language now with philosophy itself, making of this indeed the final sophia or sapientia, as turning wine back into water, a truly insipid exercise, whether we date it from Wittgenstein, Russell, Frege or Kant or even, possibly, Descartes or, why not, further back into scholastic nominalism. None of the ventures, of these adventurers indeed, despite frequent promotion from powerful sources of material influence, have succeeded or can succeed in blowing out the flame of sapientia, final instance of the four intellectual virtues. But nor do I assert that that was their intention. Their achievements, as not negligible, must form part of sophia now and henceforth. The foremost examples of this principle, of linguistic self-reflection, successfully carried out, however, in our later times at least, or those coinciding with the Christian dispensation, can be found, among philosophers, in, as my preferred examples, works left by Thomas Aquinas or by Georg Hegel. As regards language then, “God has spoken only one word” (John of the Cross), “and that is His Son”, thus called because the “speaker”, God, is one 36 This thesis is philosophically worked out by St. John of the Cross OCD (cf. K. Wojtyla, Doctrina de fide apud S. Joannem a Cruce, 1958-59, first published by the University of St. Thomas, i.e. the Dominican Angelicum, Rome 1959). 37 Cf. our Thomas Aquinas and Georg Hegel on the Trinity, CSP, Newcastle-onTyne, 2020.

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and Father of all. He is called God’s Word, further, inasmuch as “I and my father are one”, said this Son on earth, the Christ for Christian belief. “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1, i). Together Father and Son breathe forth the spirit, Geist, thought, love, blessedness, the I of I AM.38 As regards, in this context, the essential plurality implicit in the idea of language, the final description is “I in them and they in me”, “all one body we”, just here and now “marching as to war”, however, and none more so than those ever wrapped in perfect contemplation as one with the one body, whose prayers, be they on earth or in heaven, we therefore seek. That body then, corpus Christi, it follows, is one with the community or unity in common, which is church, community, qahal, summoned or called up in each and every member. In this way, it can be seen, being an existing or actual individual is already a privilege vocation or calling, out of nothingness however and whether or not it be destined, in eternal perspective (i.e. not predestined strictly speaking) to come to fruition. Thus language indeed merits that high place accorded to it in recent philosophy, but only in order to be totally and finally cast down. Thus philosophy, Wittgenstein clearly saw, is the fight against “bewitchment of our intelligence”, and hence of intelligence itself, “by language”. This, with art and religion, is its spirituality, as Hegel makes explicit in his “Philosophy of Spirit” (Encyclopaedia III). This must be so, given the origin of every person’s language in babyhood, something with which thought has nothing to do. Thought, finally, thinks itself through all eternity, is, rather, that eternity necessarily, “and this we call God”. Thought cannot depend upon some milieu exterior to it. “In the beginning was the Word … and the Word was God” (identity as final state of being with). Any “bit” of language, by contrast, takes time to utter, while being finitely extended in time or space as sound, writing requiring “reading”, etc. Thus, further, the invention of writing was the conversion, in this instance, of time to space or extension proper, so to say, as is not the case with thought as such. It follows that thought is unutterable. Any utterance (Fr. outre) is phenomenal, apparent only, hence the Dominical saying “The letter kills”, as does this very expression therefore, if applied literally to all outrance or procession outwards or, therefore, to sacramentality as such. All nature is a sacrament, declares Aquinas, i.e. although or even when not covenanted, as are the seven. The reason for thought’s transcendence here is that it, thought, can only be, in final analysis, of itself, the Absolute Idea therefore, so called unless or until a better phrase may be found. Thus, even though nous has “set in 38

Cp. Hegel, Enc. 159, climaxing “The Doctrine of Essence”.

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order all things” (Anaxagoras) that is not what thought essentially is. It has nothing to do with “things” but thinks “only” itself as containing and hence simultaneously destroying all that might have been thought “else”, as we, for instance, if in Christo, in verbo, actually and/or potentially, are not “in ourselves”, each or collectively indifferently, in isolation or abstractedly. You are all “members one of another”; sumit unus sumunt mille, i.e. more tightly conjoined than the members of any mere “class”. “Love” seems to be the nearest term we have for this. I would recall once again here a remarkable feature of classical Greek, of its grammar in fact, namely that a neuter plural subject, such as “things”, properly “took” the singular of the verb. There is no intra-linguistic explanation for this. It is thus immediately referable as comparable to that other ancient legacy, again, of Him who spoke of “I in them and they in me”, or of his interpreter who said “You are all one person in Jesus Christ”, in Him who again said “I am the vine, you are the branches”, not, however, in final opposition but rather such that “together with me you form one vine”, the dead branches of which “my father cuts away”. For there is, it seems, no heaven without a hell. If heaven is here where Juliet lives then hell is there where she is not and there must be such a place, i.e. if she lives anywhere, lives at all, has her own “place” as God, transcending place, does not, heaven being in and with him rather than the reverse, as a state of being, then, as one must then postulate a “hell” too, apart from who or what may be in it or not39. By Hegelian logic40 the part anyhow, whether personal or material merely, i.e. just conceptually, is the whole, is thus absorbed or, qua part, “cancelled”. But they are parts, only when they are identified (!) by being related to one another; or in so far as they make up the whole, when taken together. But this ‘Together’ is the counterpart and negation of the part.41

The Zusatz further clarifies: Essential correlation is the specific and completely universal phrase in which things appear. Everything that exists stands in correlation, and this correlation 39

The idea of a “state” is compatible with being something personal, supremely the divinity, an or the evil angel, or something less than personal, more conceptual, e.g. the status perfectionis as applied to the religious or monastic life (cp. Aquinas on status perfectionis, or the life of the vows of religion, Summa theol. IIa-IIae, final section). 40 Enc. 136, also 135 Zus. distinguishing bodily organs from mere parts, of which “together” is “the counterpart”! 41 Enc. 135, parenthesis added.

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is the veritable nature of every existence. The existent thing in this way has no being of its own, but only in something else: in this other however it is selfrelation; and correlation is the unity of the self-relation and relation to others.

Sumit unus sumunt mille, great minds plainly thinking alike here. It will be clear that the point is to contrast existences with the absolute being of God. The word existence, Hegel claims, of itself suggests derivation from or dependence upon something else. The relation of the whole and the parts is untrue to this extent, that the notion and the reality of the relation are not in harmony. The notion of the whole is to contain parts: but if the whole is taken and made what its notion implies, i.e. if it is divided, it at once ceases to be a whole. Things there are, no doubt, which correspond to this relation: but for that very reason they are low and untrue existences. We must remember, however, what ‘untrue’ signifies. When it occurs in a philosophical discussion, the term ‘untrue’ does not signify that the thing to which it is applied is non-existent. A bad state or a sickly body may exist all the same; but these things are untrue, because their notion and their reality are out of harmony. … The relation of whole and parts, being the immediate relation, comes easy to reflective understanding; and for that reason it often satisfies when the question really turns on profounder ties. The limbs and organs, for instance, of an organic body are not merely parts of it: it is only in their unity that they are what they are, and they are unquestionably affected by that unity, as they also in turn affect it. These limbs and organs become mere parts only when they pass under the hands of the anatomist, whose occupation, be it remembered, is not with the living body but with the corpse. Not that such analysis is illegitimate; we only mean that the external and mechanical relation of whole and parts is not sufficient for us, if we want to study organic life in its truth. And if this be so in organic life, it is the case to a much greater extent when we apply this relation to the mind and the formations of the spiritual world. Psychologists may not expressly speak of parts of the soul or mind, but the mode in which this subject is treated by the analytic understanding is largely founded on the analogy of this finite relation. At least this is so, when the different forms of mental activity are enumerated and described merely in their isolation one after another, as so-called special powers and faculties.42

Here, all the same we can remind ourselves that life, which it comes so naturally to us to invoke, as indeed it did to humanity’s supreme representative, is not the final category, or idea, which it would then rather be. Yet we have “I am the way, the truth and the life”, as it were equally (one might compare Hegel’s identifications at Enc.159). “I am come that they may have life”. 42

Enc. 135, Zus., both stresses added.

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This, though, is the natural or immediate speech of religion or indeed prophecy. In philosophy, rather, life is characterised, identified indeed, as “only the idea immediate”, Hegel here adding that “everything immediate is false”, i.e. in that “last analysis” in which philosophy consists and according to which Hegel in sober fact makes of life a logical category. Thus we may recall the saying, addressed to God, “thy love is better than life”, believe it or not (as we say). Life is at least as “religious” as any other such category, yet none the less true for that, provided its proper idiom be understood as different from but related, as a form of spirit, to both philosophy and art, these themselves, with religion, constituting the three forms of spirit or Geist on Hegel’s analysis. This last observation can well be seen as underpinning the failure of all attempts to submit thought to language. “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein). Maybe so, but what have we to do, as thinking beings, with a limited world? Is that not what we must renounce, get away from, if thought is to succeed, to be? Even the universe of space cannot be thought of as having a limit, though the medium as such, space as extension, is certainly limited just in being extended, and this even though (or because, rather) it cannot, either, be thought of as not being extended. The same applies, finally, to time, as simply extension itself as found in processional consciousness. Thus each of these is a form of the other, unless one be given priority (which one?). Clear awareness of this underlies Kant’s categorisation of space and time, thus become space-time, as a priori limitations upon what then or just therefore gets confirmed as subjective thought or, just for that reason, for Hegel, a matter of representations only, Vorstellungen. True he speaks of them also as “reality” but that is for him, finally at least, a negative term (cf. Enc. 91 with Zusatz) for just what turns out to be the most unreal. Determinate being, or quality, the category, just is what is opposed to Thought, the Idea, which, Hegel’s “Greater Logic” ends by affirming, is the (only) true being, das wahre Seiendes (besides being the whole essence of logic), which, as Absolute Idea, is the antithesis of the merely ideal, as he speaks of “the ideality of the finite”. He does so inasmuch as it is “in God” and that solely that we “live and move and have our being” (words of a Greek poet taken over by Christianity’s first apostles in The Acts of the Apostles). So here quality, determinate being, is just cancelled inasmuch as further elevated. Here we find Hegel, consciously or not, reproducing the doctrine of being of Thomas Aquinas, while it is precisely from that coincidence, of neither’s denying the common root in Exodus, where God gives, as the name Moses had demanded to know, the

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non-name I AM (this is the visionary experience of Moses43), that Hegel derives the Absolute Idea, viz. thought thinking only itself. It will be seen that I equate this Hegelian development with Aquinas’s stress upon esse as a different order of reality from all essence(s). Hegel explains this difference as the Absolute Idea’s absorbing and hence “cancelling” all ideas, yet again, except itself. This can be seen as the direct idealist opposite of the Thomistic so to say existential realism, unless we realise that it is precisely idealism, e.g. as in Berkeley or Fichte, mutatis mutandis, that is here cancelled and/or transcended utterly. God, after all, has no body and loses nothing thereby. Hegel follows this as the “absolute” realism of monotheistic religion generally. Quantity, meanwhile, getting with this category yet further away from the Idea of Determinate Being specifically, is thus equally a step beyond quality and towards the Idea, only negatively however. It is “a passing over into determinateness as suppressed, i.e. into Being as Quantity”44 where, indeed, it, Quality is aufgehoben. Thus we read further, at this place in the arrangement of Hegel’s text(s) as handed down, that The philosophy of the Atomists is the doctrine in which the Absolute is formulated as Being-for-self, as One and many ones. And it is the repulsion, which shows itself in the notion of the One, which is assumed as the fundamental force in these atoms. But instead of attraction, it is Accident, that is, mere unintelligence, which is expected to bring them together. So long as the One is fixed as one, it is certainly impossible to regard its congression with others as anything but external and mechanical. The Void, which is assumed

43

Cf. the essay on Moses by Rudolph Steiner, who directly connects this “vision” with the “modern”, i.e. post-Pharaonic, sense of self. It is also Steiner who posits as necessary a pre-linguistic existence of thought as just “the reasonable, and everything reasonable”, at its most powerful or at least immediate instance as clairvoyance in human beings. Thus, we might note, God as Father comes to seem prior, not as in time merely (or at all) but metaphysically or even logically, given a premise that every word has a speaker, to God as Word. There God speaks only himself, as is true, however, in a sense, of all speakers. It does, though, seem a presumption on Steiner’s part to have made this “pre-” (as in “pre-linguistic”) a temporal prefix, if indeed he did. For might we not as consistently argue for such “clairvoyance” in animals, of today as of yesterday, or indeed, if at a stretch, in blocks of stone, roughly or smoothly hewn or in their natural state even and does this not lead us straight back to the Hegelian or in some respects at least Pauline view of Nature as finally, it too, in some sense one (just as one system) with God’s Word even in its difference, viz. in a self-alienated state, “groaning and travailing”? 44 Enc. 98, stress added.

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as the complementary principle to the atoms, is repulsion and nothing else, presented under the image of the nothing existing between the atoms.45

Hegel adds his regret here that Modern atomism – and physics is still in principle atomistic – has surrendered the atoms so far as to pin its faith on molecules or particles. In so doing science has come closer to sensuous conception, at the cost of losing the precision of thought.

These comments, incidentally enabling restoration of awareness of the undeniable historic link of empirical physics with “precise” philosophical speculation, are certainly relevant to evaluations of today’s expensive would- be atom-smashing machines, in search of an ultimate “particle” which yet itself would have to be, in the language of classical philosophy, an intellectual composition of form and matter, even it too, and hence not the ultimate “thing” or, maybe, anything at all. Meanwhile, it is plain, this summarial assessment of Hegel’s is put, is conceived rather, as a clear opposite just in its similarity to the Johannine discourses of Christ upon the final union in diversity of spirits, pure attraction, however, replacing pure repulsion as an attraction of otherness itself, of what is nothing, into the plenitude of infinity. Thus it is that “the Atomic philosophy forms a vital stage in the historical evolution of the Idea”, the stage of “Being-for-self in the shape of the many”.46 Thus Hegel finds place for this development precisely in his Logic. Quantity is indeed a logical notion, i.e. primarily or in its first instance in the general scheme, of “things” as we say, correctly enough on these principles, where the system itself of logic is effectively the true being, das wahre Seiendes, as he states elsewhere. It is as part of this conception that we should see his view of the syllogism as “the reasonable and everything reasonable” (Enc. 181), a view Peter Geach once put to me in a letter as being “too stupid to waste time discussing”. So we never discussed it. We do have here, however, an alternative to the more quantity-based development (sic) of logic in what is fondly called “our” time. Thus for Hegel “pure space, time, &c. may be taken as examples of Quantity, if we allow ourselves to regard the real as whatever fills up space and time, it matters not what” (Enc. 99). In general Hegel dismisses “this mere mathematical view” as “no other than the principle of Materialism” while “Matter, in the abstract, is just what, though of course there is form in it, has that form only as an 45 46

Hegel, Enc. 98. Hegel, Enc. 98 (1).

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indifferent and external attribute”. He nonetheless upholds that “Quantity, of course, is a stage of the Idea”, something, namely, to be got over, as is the case with all the other finite categories. In general, the qualitative is not explanatorially reducible to quantitative considerations, this being “one of the most hurtful prejudices” (Enc. 99, Zus.) and, he says again, the principle of materialism. Or, by contrast, starting from the phenomenon of living things in particular, rather, one might, working downwards, discern a unitary wisdom in precisely this essential link of the highest with the lowest and, hence, conversely, well instanced in David Attenborough’s presentation of “life on earth”. There, though, the difficulty comes up precisely with what one desperately strives to regard as within the scheme, namely, “the phenomenon of man”. Man, we might want to urge, is not a phenomenon47, is as noumenal 47

But should we thus want? Specifically, cannot God’s being made man, et homo factus est, be seen, perhaps even necessarily, as the assumption by Being of just nonbeing, of precisely the phenomenal in its highest reach of imagery or eikon (this would accord with Hegel’s logic, for good or ill)? This would then be the “true image”, such that what in language must appear, again, as self-contradiction, would, in the true or divine “scheme of things”, as we, again, say (and cannot other), be actually, in actu, the final consistency. Here too what is impossible for us, the camel passing through the eye of a needle, is possible for God or absolutely, as are “all things” (even, it seems to follow, those things which are no things). In Scripture this, or something similar, is put as the “still small voice” heard only by a privileged being, Elijah; heard, it is almost indicated, in not being heard, the principle of faith put by ascetic theology (John of the Cross) as the means, solely, for the longed-for “union with God” or indeed Aufhebung of it, viz. of faith, finally, in unified love and “sight”. Yet man, for his part, names the beasts, which at least seems(!) a cut above the phenomenal as thus characterised. Thus Duns Scotus affirmed that God would have become man, assumed human nature, whether or not man had sinned, due to his “great love” for man. One doesn’t love a mere phenomenon thus. “What is man? What is God?” (K. Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II). This should be taken in harmony with our comments above on the Augustinian felix culpa, a culpa as necessary in the divine mind, just therefore, as is also the incarnation in actuality consequent upon it. For, finally, every idea is itself identical (“concretely” or in difference) with the one absolute Idea, rather as, Hegel will outline in his final lectures, the contingent is as necessary in the world of necessary being and blessedness as the necessary itself; or as hell, whether or not in infinite restriction, is as necessary to thought, we noted, as the heaven cancelling it, or as the sham offsets and/or highlights the real or true. Non moriar sed vivam or, finally, as said of the believer, though he be dead yet shall he live or, as was said of the assuredly dead maiden, as men speak, or so the Gospel account plainly intends, we noted above. Yet a higher one qualifies, saying “She is not dead but sleepeth”, or as later, “plainly”, of Lazarus, that he “is dead, but I go to wake him”. Finally, mors, ero mors tua, though that “in a wondrous conflict” (Easter

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as we can get, while from man’s perspective the whole of nature can come to seem miasmal indeed, unless it be taken precisely as just that, viz. a whole, though then, as can seem apparent at times in Hegel, we encounter difficulty in keeping separate the divine Word and the “all things” made thereby, without whom indeed nothing is made. Yet nature groans and travails, reduced, except in the medium of art, to one thing at a time, no longer sym-phonic. Thus language, words in multiplicity, must fail us, use them though we must, even to say just this, if only before an eventual renunciation of them, ideally operating simultaneously, however. Hence one finds the impulse to communicate where possible in figures48, to represent merely a too horrific Preface). For the poet death was sleep’s sister: in final reality, i.e. that of the Idea Absolute, she is rather her identical twin, identical in that in each of these there is or can be, in absolute ideology so to say, an Aufhebung (“She is not dead but sleepeth”) of the one by the other, a situation best exemplified by Hegel in his words on the incarnation as at Phenomenology of Mind, VII C, viz.: “It is only these two propositions that make the whole complete … Since both are equally right they are both equally wrong … their truth is just their movement … Precisely this is what we have in sameness of the Divine being and Nature in general and human nature in particular: … But it is in Spirit that we find both abstract aspects affirmed as they truly are, viz. as cancelled and preserved at once:” This text, however, can only be fairly considered in its entirety, q.v. (Cf. Baillie translation, 2nd edn., Leeds University 1931; Torchbook edn., London, New York, 1966, p. 777). 48 One might well ponder the application of “figure” not only to speech but to our representation of pure quantities. “Quantity, of course, is a stage of the Idea” (Enc. 99, Zus.). Besides proper “figures” of speech any speech, we have been finding, is itself figure. Yet “figure” itself becomes the term for the representation of numbers, though we might well wonder whether it is, would have been or ever was properly applicable to the Roman numerals, these being first of all made up of representative alphabetical letters, apparently without ostensible (as opposed to some historical derivation) systematicity. One explains (does one?) the C (centum) and M (mille) or D (dimidium) as initials of the word for the quantity in question (the I for the unit might stand perhaps for indivisibile? I plead ignorance). In general “figure” might seem to admit of a potentially infinite gradation, whether relatively sliding, as it may seem in arithmetic, or in steps, as it may seem in geometry. In thought it seems, again, that we can’t or scarcely can separate one numeral from all the others, except we figure it and them (but just in the sense that they themselves are figures, of speech or sight, as is not the case with our “first degree” abstractions, e.g. on the Boethian scheme), precisely Hegel’s point about quantity as “pure being”, in a sense at first (but at last?) opposite to that of Aquinas’s ens qua ens, decoded as esse, namely, as itself actus and that, again, essendi or “of esse” (now more exactly essendum), this again being the explanation or identification of actus purus, a parallel, again mutual, in the active sense of (thus far, but how far?) parallelling.

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or blissful actuality. To speak plainly can require effort, the effort of science in particular or as, not always with success, in legal contexts. Hence also the Biblical “You have said it”, also found in less reputable contexts, evading a plea, typically a question (“Art thou a king then?”) or plea, again, to “tell plainly” (“Art thou he that should come?”), which, if thus responded to, can be met, or not, with a grateful “Now you are talking. Now we know etc.” That quality and quantity tend to merge, for example in evolutionary hypothesising, is not in contradiction with Hegel, since his quality and quantity are strictly logical categories, not individual objects. Thus to give more money is to give more generously, whereas on the other hand a late repentance, e.g. of the prodigal, is reckoned equal in degree, a species of quantity, to a quantitatively earlier instance of that quality. Every man is rewarded with a penny, as figure for perfect beatitude. * A recent review of one of my Hegel books by the Hegel scholar, Robert M. Wallace, while sympathetic and hence agreeable to me in the main, ends with a statement of my position which I can only regard as either unconscious misrepresentation or misapprehension of what I am about. After describing me as arguing for a need nowadays to state the Christian Gospel in philosophical terms, envisaging this as becoming the actual Christian preaching, kerygma, Wallace then states in effect, as would fit quite naturally into such a programme, that I present the Christian religion as free of confusion with any finite historical moment of time or place. I do not recognise myself here. I am in no way tempted to do such a thing against plain Christian and Catholic orthodoxy. It is, however, easy to see how some might misunderstand me thus. For one thing, they might view what I am actually saying as unsayable, selfcontradictory and so on. It may be so, yet I am still not saying this other thing, quite inconsistent, for example, with mention of Pontius Pilate, the historical Roman governor condemning the self-proclaimed Son of God to death by crucifixion, in the first or Apostles’ Creed. What I have been pointing to, rather, is a general fault in our human perception and discourse upon any and all finite realities as such, consisting in our just supposing such finite elements to be realities period, whether or not created or brought about by and in infinity, in God, conceived of as necessarily pure act, in Aristotelian language. Once we allow, as we cannot forbid, such a position to be stated in language, itself, as verbal plurality, necessarily finite, we will find it clashing with everything else but especially with itself. We can only “try to mean” (Herbert McCabe) what we want to

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say here as what we truly think. Such thinking is the direct opposite, the counter-example rather, of the Wittgensteinian conception, if it was that, of the limits of my language being the limits of my world, despite his saying in the same text, without qualification, that philosophy is “the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by language”, one with faith, the proper and only approach of the finite to the infinite, in this. Thus the liturgy speaks of Christ coming “down from the heaven he never left”, which speaks for the solidity of heaven while relativising, so to say, the “down”, enough to discourage complacency in regard to our understanding the saying that “the first shall be last, the last first”, say. The last become first inasmuch as they have nothing, rather than just very little (exactly as Marx posited of the proletariat, whether or not he was factually correct: the thought, the dialectic, is infectious). So the Christian truths, presented as if God were but chief of a plurality of actors on the same logical level, or as if each thing “is itself and not another thing”, or as if God enjoyed a (temporal?) period of being “before time began” or, as regards the creation, that both time and space have limited duration and/or extension, as if what is on a further side (spatially? temporally?) of this extension has neither time nor space, in which case they cannot explain either how God should have created endless time and endless space, as it were enclosing not infinity but an infinite number specifically of temporal or spatial “units”, are made to seem as if against all reason. They are made utterly false unless it be understood that the ordinary language in which believer or non-believer alike express such truths is sheer finite idiom for what is inexpressible otherwise, more and not less so in mathematical formulae. For us such truths, rather, are mysteries of faith. It perhaps never occurred to Hume, say, that faith is defensible as the reasonable attitude should such mysteries, mysteria, distinguishable from mere mystery, conclude our or his reflections, hence becoming a sound basis for thought, the true being for Hegel, notwithstanding that viventibus esse est vivere. For us who live, we say, because the next step should be, will be, the displacement of ourselves from the centre, which is what prayer specifically attempts, in order for the absolute, the idea, being, the all, by faith (in what is neither perceived nor perceptible, but nonetheless credible), to take over at that centre. This is called renouncing the world, flesh and devil as condition for Christian initiation, and it is believed to be not plain contradiction only but wonderful mystery, like the two natures, human and divine, as united in the person of Christ, who, liturgy confirms, “came down from the heaven he never left”, just as “with God a day is as a thousand years” and contrariwise, not however as if time merely passes very quickly (or slowly?) for God. Faith, one may here begin to see, opens uniquely a

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way into true and sufficient philosophy, as, however, become now pure sophia, Hegel’s stated goal as it happens. So here is a philosophy of faith but not a replacement of faith by philosophy. It is rather, again, sophia, as prime intellectual virtue (after first art and then religion as initial forms of “absolute spirit” for Hegel), as well expounded by Thomas Aquinas, which perfects, for Hegel too, as the perfect form of absolute spirit, for God as for man thus summoned to this, the love for this which is philo-sophia therefore. Yet wisdom, philosophy’s goal, comes naturally “from above”, not from below, i.e. it comes via total abnegation of finitude before infinity or, in Kantian terms, via noumenal neutralisation of all that is phenomenal, whatever our or Kant’s (sic Hegel) human “tenderness” for the latter. This too is to “build upon a rock”. So: Today a wonderful mystery is announced: something new has taken place; God has become man; he remained what he was and has become that which he was not; and though the two natures remain distinct, he is one.49

49

Antiphon from “1 January, Octave Day of Christmas”, Morning and Evening Prayer from The Divine Office, Collins, London & Glasgow, 1976, p. 76.

CHAPTER TWO WHAT ARE THE ROOTS THAT CLUTCH?

If language bewitches is it likely to be language, words or word, that redeems therefrom? Why so? Likely or not, if we suppose irremediability, as many appear to do, then man “may be compared to the beasts that perish”, his intellectual pretensions notwithstanding. Or could language redeem itself or us from itself? Hegel, in the wake of Kant, would show this as characterising the whole progress of the logic, of logic itself, as he claims50. It is possible, indeed necessary, to consider this progress as in no way a progress of logic away from itself, since logic is itself the progress and not just some “accidental”, that is to say temporal, process (whatever we might say or not say of the birth and life of G.W.F. Hegel or Aristotle). Logic, rather, is the anatomy of the Absolute Idea, which is eternal, swallowing up, furthermore, all of logic into itself due, all the same, to the truth progressively revealing itself in logic’s self-unfolding. All the same too, to turn from the Idea to logical process is to turn from life to anatomy, here also.51 This is the sense of the Idea as logic’s heart or fulfilment, eternal contemplation of and as self of all selves, namely. In a different if analogous sense, indeed, received theology speaks of “processions”, 50

It seems misrepresentation, by Geach and others, when Hegel is dismissed as inventing a new logic in some sense more far-reaching, while yet, in another sense, less so than, say, at a later date, gets applied to Frege and the “mathematical” school of logic in the opposite of a dismissive sense, while ignoring Hegel wholesale. 51 Hegel’s idea, I submit, is rather that one reads through The Science of Logic as an essay, turning the final page, and hence closing the book, with the internal affirmation “Now I know”, rather as Edith Stein turned down the back cover and put down her book, St. Teresa’s Life, exclaiming simultaneously: “This is the truth”. Something like this is what Hegel is requiring of us, vainly or not. This is, I would suggest, rather the sense of “essay”, which if correct somewhat miscredits a habit, in North American academia here and there, or at least the USA, of dismissing such a quality as “essayistic”. The habit might rather suggest cultural or spiritual deficiency, as in, for example, bright graduate students growling, as they approach the blackboard, “Now let’s get this into symbols”, as if words were not prime among these.

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processiones, permanently, i.e. unchangingly, non-progressively, not so much within as constituting the godhead (though the word intra be used here). There are thus, it is claimed, relations constituting the godhead, of begetting and being begotten, of breathing forth self as other, of “proceeding from”, relations which are themselves persons, the persons, in what are recognisably love-relations. Thus God is love, it is further said. McTaggart, not himself confessionally Christian, criticised Hegel for not seeing or bringing out this primacy of love (at the end of the Logic), as he himself would do, but Hegel’s mind seems clear to view, McTaggart seemingly mistaken in this. Hegel writes with reserve but his mind seems clear. In the hierarchy of blessings, as they might be called, whereby Hegel characterises thinking (McTaggart, however, claims there can be no thought in heaven, in striking contradiction or disregard of Aristotle), viz. the meeting in the other with one’s self, thinking comes first. What else is the Absolute Idea? This is its meaning, so to say progressively, though he characterises it first of all as “liberation”, thus proceeding upwards, as “I” first of all, next as free Spirit, then Love (it is love as “feeling”, Empfindung, a perhaps surprising concession) precisely as eliciting finally Blessedness or enjoyment, here again at one with McTaggart. Yet it is thinking that is the enjoyment and is finally love, in Hegel’s thought, so close to that of Aquinas (and Aristotle) here, as here represented (i.e. as at Enc. 159), as coincidence of self and other, eternally perfected in the Trinitarian relations52. Thus Hegel concludes his “doctrine of essence” in the Encyclopaedia (159). 52

Cf. the work being done at Cambridge by the group working (at time of writing), originally with John Milbank’s leadership, on the historically and/or conceptually philosophical backdrop to the development of Church dogmas, coinciding in this, in great measure, with Hegel’s philosophy of history, as well as with his account of Trinitarianism, philosophical while without hurt to the Trinity’s transcendence as mystery (so a philosophy just of mystery is entailed, one that might show, for example, how what must remain mystery for us can yet without contradiction be rationally confessed as true). When Hegel speaks here of distinction but “distinction in the way of distinction only” he has in mind that inescapable imperfection he has noted in the finitude of all and any language as such. Here again the properly dualist model of nature and the supra-natural gives way to that final assertion of dualism which is its denial, the dualism of being and nothing namely, in a principled confounding of language by language. We may compare this with Hegel’s treatment of good and evil plus, behind that again, though differently in a way perhaps not noticed or known by Hegel, with the thought of Aquinas or associated thinkers on the privatio boni. Similarly the dualism of being and essence is or can be shown to be ultimately the same as that of being and nothing. a total transcendence by the I AM with which the metaphysics, the thought, of Aquinas, e.g. as expounded by Cajetan, again, in particular coincides. Cajetan, following Thomas (e.g. In I Sent.

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He speaks of just these characteristics, seeming contradictions as they at first present themselves, as belonging precisely to necessity itself, as itself the ultimate freedom, he claims to show. He means them, that is, as the precise antitheses of “figurate conceptions” or those thrown up by language in its first immediacy and hence falsity. The notion, the concept, for Hegel, is hence itself das wahre Seiendes, i.e. nothing else is. The coincidence with Aquinas should strike anyone well versed in Thomistic metaphysics, especially at the point where these diverge from Aristotle’s: In this text (Aquinas, Summa contra gentes II, 54) we see clearly the great contribution the metaphysics of Thomas has made to the metaphysics of Aristotle. For Aristotle only form is act. Form by giving a being its substantial perfection makes it be. Aristotle never appeared to consider esse as the act of form. In fact, he never seemed to consider existence much at all. Certainly to speak of an act of form would make no sense to him. For Aristotle form does what esse does for Saint Thomas. Aristotle would have to maintain that an act of form would be an act of an act. To actualise form, therefore, is unnecessary because form is already act, is being. … To Thomas, who posited subsisting existence [being] as his very first principle, things appeared altogether different. The form of a creature by itself is not actual being at all. It is act in the order of essence only because it has received actuation from esse. If it really actuated a being, there would be no such thing as an essence without existence, that is, a purely possible essence. Thus in the order of existence form is pure potency. This is its whole intelligibility, capacity for existing. As existing its entire actuality comes from esse. Of itself, therefore, it does not add anything to esse because nothing can be added to existence (i.e. to esse).53

That all is necessarily because eternally fulfilled in God is itself a necessary truth, which Peter Geach, wishing to safeguard Christian freedom, tried hard to qualify by speaking of the divine intentions as being necessarily fulfilled in what was, he might seem to have been saying, all the same a context of or analogous to before and after. But can such a context co-exist with the divine will, as if God too were in it, in this sequence? Again, “With God a day is as a thousand years. There is no difference” (II Peter, stress added). This, as supposedly supra-natural, gets opposed to the so to say absolutely natural, although this latter is a mere conceptual posit, all the more so as finally self-contradictory (what is absolute is just what is supra-natural), as is that notion of creation which gets mistaken as its sensus strictus, that of 19, 5, 2 ad 1), appeals to an “analogy of proper proportionality” as found in reality itself. 53 Reilly, op. cit., p.25.

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the finite itself as it were marking, nonsensically, the limit of the infinite. But “in God we move and live and have our being” (stress added). If a day might as well be a thousand years or conversely then God is, as his infinity anyhow requires, wholly outside time and this should rule our attitude to the latter. Thus it is, again, that the liturgy speaks of Jesus descending “from the heaven he never left”. Thus we need to recognise that “reality” in Hegel’s discourse is often intended as naming a negative reality, i.e. a non-reality. Death is thus the entry into truth, the true alternative reality supplanting or totally absorbing the false or sham reality of this world that is at enmity with God as in general, it is implied, with true philosophy, always shunned by one’s more “worldly” colleagues, therefore. One’s own life has this negative quality, is thus “only the idea immediate” while “whatever is immediate is false”. It is accordingly, therefore, that one is enjoined to hate it as condition for discipleship. There is no call at all to brush this off as Semitic exaggeration or what not. Yet Hegel endeavours, simultaneously with reaffirming these traditional, even “Patristic” watchwords, to scorn and rebuke “otherworldliness” in no uncertain terms. It is in this present world, however, which in its immediacy at least he does discountenance, that language is at home, developed in time just like those neolithic spoons of bone recently discovered and interpreted as enabling babies to be earlier weaned, thus enabling more childbirth and human population increase. Today we have electronic mail and the Internet as analogous temporal enablers. We may say then that Hegel’s philosophy of mind, of Geist, offers a kind of reconciliation (or synthesis) of the otherworldliness of logic, of pure thought, with a full-blooded philosophy of nature, a schema which, if it is a correct representation, thinkers such as McTaggart or Gentile, in rejecting the latter, failed to grasp in its full intent. We may anyhow conclude, then, that Hegel regards, regarded, all that can indeed be seen, or the immediate in general, as just thereby false, given spiritual enlightenment, artistic, religious and/or philosophical, rather in the sense that “the fool sees not the same tree as the wise man sees”, understanding this (such is the claim) so as to include a final enlightenment in which trees as such are, as Hegel might and in effect does say, cancelled, along with their fruit which we eat and our bodies which these nourish. To thus deny the reality of the flesh, as “profiting nothing”, in no way endangers its role as a means to among other things its final salvation or release from vanity, to which St. Paul sees nature as a whole subjected. God assumed flesh, which is the same as to say, in earlier Christian idiom, that He was “found in fashion as a man”. He was thus crucified and rose to the heavens, whence, in consequence, the Spirit was poured out upon all flesh

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as inspiring minds and hearts above all. This is not, that is to say, Manichaeism. In fact it is more totally spiritual. The flesh is not evil. It is, rather, nothing, like those mountains which enough faith can cast into the sea. Can this be believed? It can, as indeed its necessity can be demonstrated. I will not further rehearse the arguments just here, but just pause a little to consider, via some well-known hymnic poetry, the message and power of “the Cross”, hailed over centuries as spes unica, “our one reliance”: His dying crimson like a robe Spreads o’er his body on the tree. Then am I dead to all the world And all the world is dead to me.

Hegel’s project is one of combining this, without modification, with simultaneously a seemingly exaggerated respect for the Prussian state of his time and place, a truly dialectical project which Alasdair MacIntyre for one unhesitatingly points out as bound to fail, whether because of or in spite of its specifically dialectical character (as presented here by MacIntyre) he does not say or overmuch go into, however54. Meanwhile Church authorities these days are emphasising that the divine being. and the being(s) of nature, of creation, are out of all proportion to one another and that is all that I am saying here. This lack of all proportion is the equivalent of that total dependence of the one upon the other which in turn amounts to a total absorption in annihilation, annihilation, however, of what was never anything other than annihilated, just in being created. Hence the unfolding divine love down the ages, as we see things, is indeed a taking to itself of all that it is not. This is, in effect, the same as such love’s knowledge of the creature, which thus, in refusing such love, remains alone and unknown. “Without me you can do nothing”. *

In considering the general resurrection Thomas Aquinas argues, as we have noted, that there is no resurrection of animals and plants, i.e. of “nature”, either individually or as regards any whole genus thereof (found in Hegel to be illusory or at least, like the meat that perishes, not to be “laboured for” in hope of resurrection: the praxis, here as always, derives from the theoria55). 54

A. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame Press 1988, p. 11. This is the great truth which the “naturalist fallacy”, invented by G.E. Moore, denied, thus befuddling the Grisez-Finnis account of “natural law” as if this could be blind to the natural goods dictating it. Cf. our Morals as Founded on Natural Law, Peter Lang, Frankfurt-am-Main 1987; Natural Law Reconsidered, Frankfurt

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While giving his reasons for this Aquinas adds, in reply to an objection, that “the beauty of the bodies of the redeemed” will exceed, and that by inclusion (Hegel has the same notion, i.e. it is his or the notion, all-inclusive as allcancelling, according to him), all that may have been found admirable in physical or “material” nature, taking the term “material” now in its sense of opposition to “spiritual” or ideal, viz. “formal”, as we might say. For Thomas this is simply consistent, given that God anyhow knows all things “only” in His idea, not merely of them but in that Idea which is himself. Since Thomas also teaches unwaveringly that anima mea non est ego we may conclude, or possibly infer at least, that in this text he envisages an absorption equivalent to Hegelian Aufhebung of the lower into the higher, the temporal into the eternal and so on, an absorption, that is, that fulfils and “cancels” (Hegel) in one. The risen body that can pass through locked doors, or be found “in heaven” or, for that matter, the infant body that according to faith passed through without rupturing the perpetual virginity (of his mother)56 is thus more rather than less “solid” than its corruptible prototype.57 Our reluctance to think this is incompatible with any view of God as “the All”. The situation is similar to, is ultimately the same as, that of the relation of part to whole in either direction, here however as respecting the totality of things as immune to dissection, hence transcending part and whole as 2002; also our New Hegelian Essays, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastleon-Tyne 2012 or Absolute Idealism as a Necessary Condition for Sacramental or Other Theology, Newcastle 2021, along with other titles in the series. 56 Denial of this, again, constituted the heresy of Jovinian. 57 This might seem to apply also to the transfigured though pre-resurrection Christ, hence occurring in time, shown to three disciples on Mount Tabor. It was thus still figure, though figure transcending everyday figure. As a mystery of faith, then, we are led on to ask whether Christ’s resurrection, “on the third day”, can ever, by contrast, be rightly or merely considered as an event like any other, even though miraculous? Does not “miracle” itself belong, by this, rather, we ask again, to the temporal view of things? Thus the transubstantiated bread at the Mass is spoken of, by the priest then and there consecrating, as mysterium fidei, i.e. not “miracle” only but mysterium of faith, whether or not we also include it under the miraculous as being more than so. It is a matter of believing that something appearing is in truth something other than it appears to be, somehow transcending miracle as specifically transcending the appearance only of continued sameness. Thus creatures enchanted into other creatures in appearance see themselves sadly fated, unlike those experiencing deeper changes, as spiritual, under the same appearance. Mutatis mutandis one might say the same of some other mysteries of faith, such as the Immaculate Conception of Mary (where is any visible “miracle” there?), as we have noted earlier on above or say it of sacraments generally, where the purely significative transforms thereby what is signified.

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such. This conceptual move in Hegel’s logic mirrors what is here envisaged for natural entities, as we might say, now as then. The implication is none other than when it is said, in the Acts of the Apostles, in approving citation of a Greek poet, that “in God we live and move and have our being”, i.e. we don’t have it in any other way (such that we might ourselves be “gods”). In that case, we might ask why we too, with our risen bodies, are not absorbed in God. The simple answer is that we are, this being the fulfilment of our original consciousness, which is to say our being. “I live yet not I”, exclaims St. Paul, yet adding “but Christ lives in me”. We perhaps don’t notice the literal contradiction, that the “I”, though here become “me”, survives its demise as, it is implied, stronger than ever. Or as it is elsewhere said, in effect, that in Christ I, or anyone, can do all things. The “in” here, traditional as it is, carries all the weight of a concrete one-way identification. “He who eats me shall live because of me” and, in further clarification, again, “Without me you can do nothing”. It is clear that this is divine speech in intention, whether this is believed or treated as usurpation. “No man has spoken like this man”. It is thus exquisitely, this speech, self-contradictory, unless or until it be realised that “the words which I speak to you are spirit and life”, i.e. not really mere words at all, as coming from one who “has spoken only one word”58, that word, namely, which is he. Here the words are cancelled, as he would seem to be if we were to write, rather, “which he is”, given that it is the predicate-term which gives the form to the “material” and first named subject, or which is the F of x. But then, if this might be self-contradictory, how can the claim find place in philosophical thought? What is needed here, this implies, is a philosophy of faith, which, orthodoxy claims, is the sole means, the only conceivable means, John of the Cross will emphasise, to the union of human consciousness, mind and soul, with God. I am more certain of God, Newman declared, than that I have hands and feet. No doubt I do have them, as he did, in that order of things, of ideas, to which hands and feet belong, all the same. It is that order, of essences namely (cf. Reilly, op. cit.) which is eternally fulfilled in cancellation, though no doubt it is men and women and not simply their “souls” that shall “shine like stars for all eternity”. Or, after all, their souls may turn out rather to include and to have included, even in present earthly life, their bodies, which are “seen” and “temporal”. Here one might just mention the controversy as to whether women and men have specifically different souls from one another, as was denied by Augustine, a denial hence upheld in his tradition, and yet affirmed by, again, Edith Stein OCD (murdered at Auschwitz), a modern canonised saint and a doctor, if not of 58

Cf. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, a deeply Thomistic work.

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the Church (but perhaps she is or will be declared that too?) then, in her lifetime, of academic philosophy. The discussion suffers from routine confusion of soul (really no more than a biological term and itself characterised therefore by St. Thomas as an “incomplete substance”, whatever that might be) with spirit. For Hegel it, the soul, is indeed conceptually incomplete and hence confused, despite his veneration for Aristotle, his own unique predecessor apart, that is, from those coincidences we are finding with the specifically Thomist positing of two orders, viz. of essence and esse, i.e. existence or, better, being (esse, to which, in the order of being, essence, we have noted, is pure potency). The Christian creed, in fact, makes no mention of souls, though freely proclaiming “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”. It is clear, though, from the term “everlasting” for one thing, that this religious proclamation, to everyone, namely, makes no claim to step beyond the naïve realism natural to the human mind. That step is for philosophy-theology. Hegel will claim that theology, at least, must have its “pictures”, though we are rather claiming here that the whole skein of language in any possible garb begins and ever hence rests upon picture. This, Hegel in fact claims, is the glory of the incarnation, viz. that the highest is fulfilled precisely in its union with the lowest, ultimately, it is in general implied, of being with nonbeing, of good with evil, but, emphatically, in and by a swallowing-up, symbolised by the saying, otherwise unintelligible, that Christ was “made sin” for us, is the “curse” that hangs upon a tree. Evil may be swallowed up as sham being, yet the devils are real enough if they are at all. Here we need to recall, as noted above, that Hegel finally denominates this that we call reality, this appeal to the “everyday”, as untrue, ultimately false, offering as examples of such “untruth” empirical statements such as “I slept well last night”, “The streets are wet (because it has rained)” or even “This rose is red”. We can relate this, perhaps, to Christ’s “I have meat to eat that ye know not of”, definitely implying in general that that is the true meat, as He himself is way, truth and life, exclusively. There is strong argument here for Christian faith’s implying, entailing even, absolute idealism as final position. “Moderate realism” might then be seen as a first or earlier stab at this, or as much as the authorities might then have permitted, the whole development being seen as one of doctrine (as this principle, of development, was taught, proposed, by Newman). By which I have no intention of asserting, in the “superior” sense of “reality”, the unreality of devils. They may well be really real, the “Prince of this world” (Christ’s term) being chief of them, as seems indeed to be the belief of the Church, as of the four evangelists. At the same time it may well

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be that all our distinctions dissolve or fade away in that final or absolute realm, being such still as we “shall no sooner know than enjoy” (Hobbes). “Oh well, in that case”, some will now say. But should they? Joy, especially if supra-conceptual (and yet a conceptual necessity) should not be thus lightly dismissed, as if we could exist without the hope, or even maybe the remembrance, of it. “Happy those early days … before I taught my soul to fancy aught but a wild celestial thought”. What thought was that? Not, for sure, that the cat is on the mat, or the streets wet. Nor need such poetry imply glorification of mere infancy although, it is declared (but why?) that the last shall be first, while, after all, the final concept of Being, which as the Absolute Idea is in fact itself Being in Hegel’s logic (the “greater version” particularly, final pages) as in Thomas Aquinas’s conception of esse, swallowing up, in thought, all the others, all essences, as act is “more perfect” than potentiality as “related to everything that is as its act”59, “the very act of form”. Yet what is this mind, mens, into which being, the concept (of being? Aristotle, for one, does not distinguish), as first of all concepts and hence, as all-inclusive60, infinitely so, falls (cadit)? What unless being over again, ens realissimum omnium entium? So, for Hegel, being, and a fortiori mind, is ultimately the absolute idea itself, as the true being, das wahre Seiendes, or, in effect, the science of, as selfscience, logic.61 * It is a matter of the Word’s becoming flesh, inasmuch as it is in the flesh, our own or the sensible world’s, that we encounter it. By the Word one understands thought, i.e. it is inter alia not just one individual, in the sense of individualised, word, just as it is not abstractly general, or “universalised”. It is, rather, final, and hence initial(!), exemplar. From it, that is to say, the actualisation of man, as rational, ultimately verbal, animal, follows. This, in fact, is to affirm the incarnation as a necessity, as one may interpret Duns Scotus, because, he says, of “God’s great love for man”, so to say specifically. This is necessity in the perhaps weaker sense of what is bound to be, rather than a necessity directly of divine being, though one can only add that these two senses, in the way of finite sense or meaning, must 59

Aquinas, Summa Theol. I, 4, 1 ad 3. Thus one can even ask, in all logic, as to the being of non-being or nothing, a question not touched on by Heidegger only. Or we can say, there is the negative in God, but precisely as the negative (Cf. G: van Riet, “The Problem of God in Hegel”, parts II and III, Philosophy Today, Summer 1967, Vol. XI, 2/4, pp. 75-106). 61 Cf., again, the closing paragraphs of the greater Science of Logic. 60

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ultimately be the same62. As to this, it is not merely that it appears as a switch backward, so to say, to theological idiom as against the philosophical. It is rather that, if taken literally, it appears to institute, or to fall back upon, mental division, here between thought as such, mind, the Idea, and what becomes called love, corresponding to the Hegelian category of Will, which is, however, penultimate to, on the threshold merely, of the Absolute Idea. This makes of it too, viz. God’s “great love for man”, a theological picture such as, Hegel claims, theology needs to have. As such we may theologically accept it while understanding it, nonetheless, as itself a disclosure of the inward richness of the Idea itself where it nestles without division or “parts outside parts”. Besides which there is nothing or very little to prevent the whole scheme of Hegel’s logic, as finally swallowed up in the Absolute Idea as the “true being” in which its appearance “noumenally” issues, being viewed as still picture and hence passing moment, like the lives of those thinking it, of the Absolute Idea, no longer fugitive but rather fugal as such, as, though not literally but “pictured” yet again, in the musical sense, staying the same in or as returning upon self the more it changes. For in fact this scheme, of the logic, is finally just as such swallowed up in the philosophy of spirit (Enc. III). This picture is obviously referable to the identity of all being(s) with the Idea itself. Sumit unus sumunt mille (where one receives a thousand receive) or “I in you and you in me”, a divine word which can yet be viewed as the ideal for all (of us), the basic injunction rather to love the neighbour as self. This, all this, is just why it is an error to view this injunction as purely moralistic inasmuch as practical in form. By it the neighbour is self, just as he or she is assumed by the divine or absolute human being to himself, to his own being that we “persecute” in all our unkindnesses. It is in accordance with this that the phrase “Son of Man”, as used by Jesus, is to be understood, I venture to submit to those appointed to judge our understandings in the first place. I further submit that this in no way obscures the function of this phrase “Son of Man” as a proper name. Inasmuch as there is a mutual indwelling between this Word, Christ, and his followers this relation itself is his unique creation as upholding it. Nonetheless I would claim that the philosophical situation disclosed by these theological concepts is anterior to the latter whether or not only reachable thereby. There is no contradiction in this position. By faith alone 62 This consideration is related to and not divorcible from what Hegel develops as the necessity of, precisely, the contingent in his last lectures (on proofs of God). Necessity in fact swallows all as itself the height of (divine) freedom, as summed up in the truth that, as we say, God necessarily exists. Thus he never “found himself” in being, as we do, however we develop the corresponding positive.

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can we be joined, in mind or body (however these two be related), to Infinity, to God, to the Absolute Idea, just as it is only thereby that we can first apprehend God as Trinity as this is revealed and, in a measure, viz. the linguistic, “defined”. The Word is the Absolute Idea. It is that which becomes flesh, in word as in body. It is in union with that, with Him, that “all flesh” may see God or be taken up, as it is said of the believer that “though he be dead, yet shall he live”, not merely in some projected purely temporal future but as eternity “de-realises” time. As Hegel, surely jokingly, or half so, rather, once declared, time is “only real for as long as spirit needs it”. There is only an “as long as” as long as time’s reality is already assumed! Hegel, indeed, declares incarnation to be the highest fulfilment, the defining self-revelation rather, of the godhead. One can, it may now seem, only understand this general term “incarnation”, however, as the taking flesh as man or as “the rational creature”, who, the latter, thus becomes a distinct oddity if or when viewed apart from this thereby defining destiny (of incarnation) of such a creature. This Scotistic stress, then, can be adapted without prejudice to Aquinas’s earlier insistence that the incarnation immediately viewed was a response to man’s sin specifically, to the “happy fault” in Augustine’s phrase, again. In an analogous or related way we find Hegel making of evil a necessary or in that sense logical part or moment of the final divine scheme of things, such that inasmuch as we assert an ultimate identity or sameness of good and evil (for the reasons he gives) we must equally or at the same time, in the same breath as he seems to imply, assert their absolute difference. This is not a mere warning to keep on the right side of inquisitors but rather a further step in the disclosing of spirit’s nature than that conventionally taken. Its closest analogue seems to be the Pauline affirmation that Christ was “made sin for us”, again, as with Hegel or Augustine, made with a complete seriousness innocent of paradox. Chesterton, therefore, can seem to have erred inasmuch as he glorified paradox as embraced by the believer’s mind. Rather, it is those without belief who see nothing but paradox there and are thus themselves shown to be irrational or biased in their reading. Nonetheless, it is a salvific nobility of mind to be able to believe without being able to understand, salvific, I mean, when and where dependent upon grace, as certain nonsensical beliefs are not. The same grace, however, at least points towards the superior sense of what one has yet to understand, urging and bestowing, namely, love for it. It is after all the case for all of us that credo ut intelligam. Faith opens the

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way to sound philosophy63, though as entering itself first through this door. “I am wiser than the aged, because I keep thy law” (Psalm 118/119). This, then, is the supreme affirmation of language, to negate itself by means of itself, whether by a treatise, shorter or longer, or in a phrase, it may also be from the Psalms of David, e.g. “Be still and know that I am God”.

63 Peter Geach’s having found intellectually distasteful the preferential inclination of believers to learn from thinkers themselves believers, as against his own inclination to Fregean or Quinean (cp. Anscombe’s rejection of the classical category of ens rationis) thinkers, might yet prove sound, given certain provisos, might itself be a felix culpa, so to say! I mean that all that we say against it here nonetheless in at least one of its unique respects opens the way or could do so at least to a further “turn of the screw”.

CHAPTER THREE ALL OR NOTHING? OR ALL AND NOTHING?

These disjointed perceptions find serious systematisation in Hegel’s thought and its expression, which thus represents a development, a developing, of Thomistic and Aristotelian philosophy, whether or not burdened with faults peculiar to Hegel or due to his situation in time and place or, consequently, his religious or other peculiarities of culture, as of course is equally true even of such standard-setters themselves, whatever our allegiances. Nor have I hidden my own here. The mediation, anyhow, towards his own system of thought, is attributed by Hegel to Kant, at the same time as he finds great fault64 with this thinker. * This development just turns more nearly upon the relation between finite and infinite. Hegel writes that the infinite

64 The most concentrated and yet detailed statement of his view of Kant is to be found in the section from the Encyclopaedia near the beginning, i.e. after the “General Introduction” (Einleitung) to the whole Encyclopaedia and the chapter “Preliminary Notion of Logic” (Vorbegriff), §§19-83. He thus concludes this extraordinary document, essential for a just appreciation of Hegel, with a long discussion (he calls it, with perhaps misleading modesty, a survey, Betrachtung) of “attitudes of thought to objectivity”. Despite his belittling this as “being only historical and inferential in its method”, this survey, originally dating from Hegel’s school-mastering days, of more or less the whole history of philosophy prior to himself, can well be claimed to include just about the most exhaustive refutation of Kant ever penned. Thus the second part of this second “attitude” (the first part of which is headed “Empiricism”) deals with die Kritische Philosophie, by which is meant simply Kant and his followers. The treatment is as systematic, despite the disclaimer just mentioned, as it is totally negative or, in a word, damning!

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Chapter Three is only as a going beyond (Hinausgehen über) the finite. … The finite is not sublated by the infinite as by a power existing outside it; on the contrary, its infinity consists in sublating its own self.65

It is the infinity of the finite to transcend, absorb or cancel itself, Hegel seems to say here. So he asserts the infinity of the finite, but as “sublating its own self”.

This is what is meant and/or implied by saying that the finite is ideal only. This is a variant upon “In God we live and move and have our being” (as cited in Acts of the Apostles from a Greek poet), i.e. “we” as meaning all that is finite (if it lives and moves at all, at least). It is the independence of the finite, while as it were awaiting sublation, that he is concerned to deny. Thus what he says here is that it is never outside of God at all. This is what leads him to the more problematic statement, until we have digested his commentary upon it, that “there is evil in God”. So to say that nothing is outside of God is not to assert pantheism, viz. that God is all things (merely), but rather the nothingness of those things, just on account of God’s truth. Thus Hegel goes on to say that then “evil is just not evil”, a variant, if not a restatement, of the Thomistic view of evil as privatio (boni), an absence; hence, in Hegel’s phrase, “a sham-existence”. In this sense morally evil acts specifically are in the same class as abstractly finite entities generally (i.e. non-actual as lacking esse), though no doubt, again, as a particular species of it: The case is similar with the contrast of Good and Evil, - the favourite contrast of the introspective modern world. If we regard evil as possessing a fixity of its own, apart and distinct from Good, we are to a certain extent right: there is an opposition between them: nor do those who maintain the apparent and relative character of the opposition mean that Evil and Good in the Absolute are one, or, in accordance with the modern phrase, that a thing first becomes evil from our way of looking at it. The error arises when we take Evil as a permanent positive, instead of – what it really is – a negative which, though it

65

“Eben so ist die Unendlichkeit nur als Hinausgehen über das Endliche; sie enthält aber wesentlich ihr Andres, und ist somit an ihr das Andre Ihrer selbst. Das Endliche wird nicht vom Unendlichen ab einer ausser ihm vorhandenen Macht aufgehoben, sondern es ist seine Unendlichkeit, sich selbst aufzuheben.” This is from The Science of Logic (GL), Wissenschaft der Logik, Suhrkamp edn., Werke in Zwanzig Bänden, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1969, Band 5, p. 160 (emphasis, on “is” added in the English translation of the main text above). The development in question here might well, precisely as cited, be viewed as the philosophical redemption of the popular and prayerful paradox: “This also is thou, neither is this thou”. The correspondences are exact.

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would fain assert itself, has no real persistence, and is, in fact, only the absolute sham-existence of negativity in itself.66

Much turns upon the sense of “similar” here, whether or not or how far its sense is one with “identical”. The creation is not evil, as it would be if taken to be apart from God or not “in” God, to use the most customary metaphor, prepositional figure rather, for what has finally to be identity, at least “in difference”, again, since God is not some kind of all-containing box merely, but rather, as Aquinas step by step expounds, absolutely simple (simplex) simply in this necessary identity with all the “things” that truly are (identity in the sense that they are all and each nothing apart from God, who is esse). This is, need I repeat, the polar opposite of pantheism, besides being what we find in Hegel specifically. One might add, going beyond the particular case, in a sense, of good and evil, that the view so to say de-temporalises the incarnation, though only in so far as it denies time’s reality generally, like the Petrine epistle (“With the Lord a day is as a thousand years”: this states the nothingness, at the absolute or “metaphysical” level, of time). This, after all, is how theologians regard Christ’s resurrection, as, namely, more or other than a mere miracle: mysterium fidei is the phrase used of the transubstantiated elements in the “canon” of the Mass and it applies well here too, to Christ’s resurrection. Miracles deal in appearances, as do their objects, such as health and sickness or, in some final sense, life and death. “Death is the entry into spirit”, declares Hegel, while making of life, and hence of its opposite, a finite category logically viewed, as against the Idea Absolute, “having” which would all the same, as men or prophets speak, be life indeed, while what we customarily speak of as life is, from the absolute viewpoint, or truly, “life that is no life at all” (St. Teresa of Avila), so that we find Christ himself, albeit from within that deep peace and relaxation so evident in the Gospels, expressing longing to be rid of it, though claiming that “I am come that they may have life”. Yet it is only for the mortally living that life appears most immediately as one with esse itself. So, the theologians say, or some of them do, that no one could observe or have observed the resurrection in actu, simply because they knew and believed in it, rather, as a mysterium fidei, i.e. precisely what is in principle unobservable, while this is equally the case with whatever was observed by the Apostles under what came to be called “the ascension” or by the dying St. Stephen when he saw Christ seated “at

66 Hegel, Enc. 35, Zus. “Apparent” here clearly means only apparent. Some editions omit this second paragraph of this Zusatz. Either way it speaks for itself.

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God’s right hand” and “the heavens opened”.67 They observed a figure of the real mysterium68. The unbelieving guards there, encountering the disturbances, had no idea what was really going on. This is the point of Duns Scotus’s emphasis on the unconditional necessity of the divine incarnation, as man in particular, bringing home what merely seems “far off”. It only seems so, further, because of our misplaced confidence in the reality of what is rather the final unreality of time, spatial distance and all that we call finite, though without meaning by that that it is simply a figment of our finite thought over again. We are concerned with the unreality of this as such, rather. Finite thought, that is, without esse or on its own is itself a figment, which alone can explain why or how God cannot or does not know us as we are in ourselves as opposed to as we are in His idea of us, as St. Thomas, again, soberly and flatly, argues and affirms. Thus we must say that God sees himself in himself, because he sees himself through his essence. Things other than himself he sees not in themselves but in himself, because his essence contains the likeness of things other than himself.69

He might just as well have said, therefore, that we are not in ourselves, as indeed follows from what he does say, this an sich (in itself) being proper to the Absolute Idea alone, contrary, it at least seems, to Kant’s view, for which Hegel takes him to task. This unique transcendence was claimed, if obliquely (e.g. “My thoughts are not your thoughts”), by religious or Mosaic tradition all along. Unawareness or ignoral of it underlies the emptiness of Berkeleyan and associate idealism, Hegel finds. What is at stake here is true, or the truth of, infinity or, say rather, of the divine absoluteness, this being what such infinity, once conceived, works out as and which is equated by Hegel indeed with an Idea, but an Idea such that it cannot be thought or conceived truly by any agent, hence any idea, other than itself, while indeed, and by the same premises, all that it knows is only (i.e. wholly, there being nothing else) itself, in whatever respect to whatever creature. Of course this embraces the mystery of the “I”, as we, each one of us, says, willy nilly, 67

Cf. The Cloud of Unknowing, East Anglia (14th century, anon.): “So take care not to interpret physically what is intended spiritually, even though material expressions are used, like ‘up, down, in, out, behind, before, this side, that side’. The most spiritual thing imaginable, if we are to speak of it at all – and speech is a physical action of the tongue, which is part of our body – must always be spoken of in physical words. But what of it? Are we therefore to understand it physically? Indeed not, but spiritually.” The Cloud of Unknowing, 61. 68 This point is firmly asserted in the spiritual classic just noted (note 59). 69 Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia, 14, 5.

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whenever he speaks, Hegel claims.70 Sumit unus sumunt mille: “… ipsum esse … is related to everything that is as its act.”71 * Consider, now, the sexual difference as an essential element in the story of “the Fall” which we have begun to consider here. This difference, or differentiation, is clearly connected with its not being the case that there is, or is to be, just one animal. This negativity, and it is that, extends right through the ladder of species or indeed of the Concept’s first differentiation here, in the Biblical account. Surely a divine guarantor of the account could differentiate itself in no other way than by means of the elements of the story itself. So there is no one perfect individuality corresponding to the concept’s fusing with itself. Still less then can there be a perfect pair fulfilling this role, but rather fissure upon fissure, ad infinitum in what Hegel would call “the bad infinite” of, inter alia, quantity. The good infinite must, again, be wholly, but of course not abstractly (the false reading of “clarity and distinctness”), simplex, having nothing else, therefore, in proportion with it. This situation calls for, evokes or elicits a reconciliation on the other side of or beyond animality and this is reason, referred to here as Adam’s naming of the beasts. It is in fact (nothing else would serve) the very Concept itself, the Hegelian Absolute Idea (of itself alone, necessarily, again). Here it is not abstract but, so to say, incarnate in a myriad individuals which are yet one and the same each, while yet not being so, and who may reproduce or not as they see or feel fit, transcending, upwards or downwards indifferently, this highest point of animal vitality in being what they are not and not being what they are. The name, or another name, for this or for any “situation”, is Time. If time is illusory, not finally being or absolute, not the Idea, then so is this, so is “nature”. It is this denial of the creation’s independent or, again, abstractly other being which preserves its goodness or saves it from being evil or a mere pretence, as some have read Hegel’s “philosophy of nature” as forced to represent things, just therefore condemning it as inconsistent with his system. Gentile, but also McTaggart (“What rot it is!”), seem of this mind. But what is dependent being? Hegel’s whole philosophy depends upon the answer given to this question. Still, from the absolute standpoint we have been elaborating, pure nature is, would be, pure essence as, it is to 70 Cf. our “Other Problems about the Self”, Sophia 24 (Australia), 1985, pp. 11-21, also our “Self and World”, New Blackfriars, Vol. 87, No. 1012, November 2006, pp. 547-560. 71 Reilly, op. cit., p. 17.

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say the same, wholly lacking esse or God’s creating hand and/or mind, pure potentiality in other words. In general, as against empiricism as a final negative metaphysic, he states the following: And yet it is not altogether wrong … to call the categories of themselves empty, if it be meant that they and the logical Idea, of which they are the members, do not constitute the whole of philosophy, but necessarily lead onwards in due progress to the real departments of Nature and Mind. Only let the progress not be misunderstood. The logical Idea does not thereby come into possession of a content originally foreign to it: but by its own native action is specialised and developed to Nature and Mind.72

* If we look at Hegel’s later lectures, whether on the Trinity or on God’s existence, we find him saying, in general, that the distinctions drawn, such as that between the necessary and contingent, are “merely imaginary”, not, however, because everything is contingent, a popular so to say “scientistic” view, but because everything, including the properly contingent in its very contingency, is necessary! Apart from this the independence, so to say isolated, of the necessary, would make its existence or non-existence a matter of indifference; yet it is “based upon” and involves or is “contained in a complete relation to everything else whereby it is surrounded and by the connection involved in which it is kept in existence”.73 Whatever Hegel means exactly here this cannot be a real relation to something outside of God, we have found Aquinas stressing, demonstrating even. What are we to think, we might want to ask at this point? Aquinas puts this situation thus: God has “no relation to his creatures who are, yet, necessarily related to him in identity (as nothing apart from him)”. This is also the identity of Being and Nothing found in Hegel’s Logic. Hence we must both renounce and love the world, or say rather our brothers and sisters, in one act, the only true or hate-free detachment. God, anyhow, cannot be “contained” or limited by exclusion and Hegel claims here that “the necessary, as posited by another, is dependent” on “the nature of these (imaginary) thoughts”, of ours, namely. We must rather look for “the mediation of an Other within itself” (91) such that it, the Other, is equally “with self”. Hence “mediation with an Other abolishes itself” (love?). Hence this “unity with self” is “not an abstract identity” but rather “the true unity”, 72 73

Hegel, Enc. 43, Zus. Cf. Hegel, LPEG.

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“the speculative or philosophical unity”, while necessity is “something more than a simple idea” or than “a simple determinateness” more still. We have here, in general, “the disappearance of the opposite characteristics in something higher”. This is “not merely our act”. They, the two in one, “are indeed united in one characteristic act of elevation … from the contingency of the world to an absolutely necessary Essence belonging to it”.74 Upon this is built his “Idea of Nature”, “poor stepdame” (Francis Thompson as cited above) though she may at present appear to be and as Hegel more than sufficiently confirms. So contingents “are in a real sense, but their reality has the value of something which is merely a possibility” (stress added) … “not, though, merely conditioned but law-governed”. The cause-effect relation implies necessity in the otherwise contingent “antitheses in nature”. But since laws are abstract such necessity is itself conditioned or limited as a category. Spirit, however, “reaches a necessity in end-for-itself”, while all other determinations are posited by it, e.g. human ideas as moments merely of man’s “inner life”. Hegel connects these reflections with the “quality of time” and “concludes” his Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God (LPEG, nonetheless incomplete at his death, at least as regards revision) thus: An investigation of the proofs of the existence of God cannot be undertaken independently at all if it is required to have philosophical and scientific completeness (p.89). … Limits must be set … as is the case in other instances of scientific enquiry, even though the unexplained may be “in harmony with consciousness”.

Here he excepts, from such limits, “speculative philosophical conceptions”. Implied seems to be that also the term “God” is necessarily infected with those inherent limitations of language we have been considering here. It is not yet, that is to say, the “name which is above all names” and in virtue of which God is called by the devout “Lord”, kyrios. * Basic to this whole set of thoughts on Hegel’s part is the reiterated conviction that every predicate, or predication as such, is an identity, whether I say C is C or C is T, say, indifferently (in this he is at one with

74

Ibid. XI, p. 86.

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Aquinas75) or, further, that P is the capital city of F. Thus C is C is the extreme case of what is still, as always, an identity in difference (hence absolute identity cannot be propositionally stated, though it can of course be affirmed in a proposition), corresponding to that between form (predicate) and matter (subject). Note the “every”, above. This is implied, one might say, in “The last shall be first” as the extreme case, a union of opposites implying, like any such union (unity rather), all the intermediate cases. The basic text here might well be that for which Hegel showed his satisfaction by transposing it in its entirety into his Encyclopaedia I, viz. “The Science of Logic”, without change, namely his “Three attitudes to Objectivity”, dating, we noted above, from his school-mastering days76.

75 Cf. our “Subject and Predicate Logic”, The Modern Schoolman LXVI, January 1989, pp. 129-139 (especially the final section); also “The Supposition of the Predicate”, Ibid. LXXVII, November 1999, pp. 73-77. 76 Hegel, Enc. 26–70.

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In my Phenomenology of the Spirit, which on that account was at its publication described as the first part of the system of Philosophy, the method adopted was to begin with the first and simplest phase of mind, immediate consciousness, and to show how that stage gradually of necessity worked onward to the philosophical point of view, the necessity of that view being proved by the process. But in these circumstances it was impossible to restrict the quest to the mere form of consciousness. For the stage of philosophical knowledge is the richest in material and organization, and therefore, as it came before us in the shape of a result, it pre-supposed the existence of the concrete formations of consciousness, such as individual and social morality, art and religion.77

Philosophy, that is, is a seamless development out of natural human consciousness, this potentiality thus distinguishing the latter, even in immediate self-consciousness, from what we might call animal consciousness. Or, we might say, it is natural for humanity, in fullest bloom at least, to leave its natural self behind, thus incidentally exposing an ambiguity in our immediate intentions in speaking of nature. Philosophy, or indeed thinking, is naturally resultant upon human nature, not, therefore, as a mere difference of form. Consciousness itself includes this difference in its awareness of its own potential development, actualised more or less as and when other factors, external or “internal”, permit. Consciousness, we might say, develops thus behind itself, since it is itself thinking and not consciousness! Here Hegel shows himself in accord with Aristotelian scholasticism, for which, in P.T. Geach’s words, “there is no empirical nature of the thought process”, as there certainly is (for this is what it means) of consciousness. The pack of cards may be on the table, but while these words must succeed one another temporally the thought that this is so takes no time at all, 77 Enc. 25, concluding the first chapter of “The Science of Logic”. I use this form (i.e. quotation marks rather than italics) to distinguish this treatise, as constituting the first of the three parts of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, from the earlier self-standing work, The Science of Logic (1812, 1816).

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William James once pointed out, nor does it occupy space at all. In this it is just like, to express it propositionally, twice two is four (or five) or God exists (or does not). In addition, the thought of a representation, we see, is as much a thought as is thought of such a thought and so on ad infinitum. This finite thought, furthermore, as and not merely about an infinite regress, and not only the thought of the regress itself, must in a sense clearly exist (i.e. we can think it without, impossibly noting, even in a mathematical formula, its individual moments, just as we think dogs or cats after all), as an infinite thought concerning some particular finitude like this does not, could not. This is the same objection as that against a specifically mathematical (or specific in any way) infinity. Infinity is absolute as being its own concept. So we can have our finite thoughts about infinity but we know most about it, as about God, “when we know that we know nothing” (Aquinas). Thus, anyhow, referring to “concrete forms of consciousness”, does Hegel introduce his “survey” (it is much more than that), “Three Attitudes of Thought to Objectivity”, mentioned also at the end of our previous chapter above. It is important to note that they are attitudes of thought specifically, the survey in fact being an historical if “inferential” history of previous philosophy, in which, we may note, Kant’s work is given a special place, positively as to such philosophy’s development while by and large negatively as to its truth, inasmuch as just his “personal” philosophy is included in it, almost as cornerstone in fact. Hence, again, the special, ferociously critical section devoted by Hegel to “The Critical Philosophy”78. We should note, though, that this is placed at the end of the “Second Attitude” as terminating it prior to the final “Third Attitude”, where Hegel engages primarily with Jacobi’s philosophical theology, so to call it, but only so as to dismiss it out of hand as, however fashionable, a regress. We might call this a study of how consciousness becomes of itself thought as its, consciousness’s, own self-transcendence, mirroring, one might wish to say, the human transcendence of animal body, upon which it nonetheless totally depends (whether constitutionally, as with the Aristotelian phantasmata, or merely historically in any life as lived), by and in spiritual mind. I will begin, anyhow, in view of the aim of this study, at its end or at Hegel’s third treatment, that of the third attitude to objectivity as represented by his near contemporary, Jacobi. The reason for this choice is that Jacobi sought to reduce Christian faith and religion themselves to an attitude without doctrinal or dogmatic belief, doing this in the name of philosophy, his own particularly. The point of significance is also, or more, rather, that 78

Ibid. 40–60.

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it is due to this that Hegel treats the thought of Jacobi as if it were a genre commensurate with ancient and medieval philosophy, firstly, as a whole and, secondly, with Kant, as indeed claiming to show their conclusion in a complete “demythologization” of Christian thought, practice and teaching. The point, again, is that this claim is the cause and rationale of Hegel’s unrelieved condemnation of this third attitude to objectivity, upon a consideration, namely, of just this point with respect to its falsity as an attitude. The significance of this, for us at least, is the plain implication that this is not and cannot be Hegel’s own attitude, otherwise he would not be found criticising it and that not merely upon this or that point but in toto and not without zeal. This, I would affirm, is in principle sufficient to silence and confound those concluding that this Jacobist approach was precisely Hegel’s. The closest parallel here that I can think of is that of those who wished to categorise Cardinal John Henry Newman’s theological thought, when it first came out (e.g. the Essay on Development, the Grammar of Assent and so on), as a species of what came to be condemned, in the Catholic Church, under the heading of “modernism”, while Newman went on to be more and more exonerated from this charge by the papacy and the theological body as a whole, being made first a cardinal and later, after a hundred years or so, canonised as a saint. Of course Hegel’s case is different as regards these particulars, but the analogy stands, as does the proof given of the difference of his own “modernist”, i.e. modernising proposal, if it ever might be at all that, from that of Jacobi, whom he so takes to task. He is or was, after all, no mere practical politician, any more than was Newman, but rather a defender “of the faith” according to his lights, by intention at least and insofar as a definite Lutheran commitment might admit this, as is surely implied by later Church documents, such as the Decree on Ecumenism of the Second Vatican Council (1962-4). The total inability or refusal, rather, of Marx or Engels, not to speak of Lenin, only a theoretician at all by comparison with his immediate “political” successor, Stalin (who shared with Hitler this limitation to an immediate identification with pure praxis, unmixed, despite all the rhetoric, with any spiritual or moral considerations), to appreciate or even countenance Hegel’s own deeply personal standpoint, their claiming him merely as an opener of the way for their own programme with its initial prejudice against religion, has greatly held back understanding of him. Such prejudice seems to come into its own precisely as and when it is recognised negatively as prejudice (something of which the prejudiced are as such not capable), confirmed in this degradation, as if thereby upgraded, as a merely practical hostility, a willed presupposition. That is, in self-recognition it is

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upgraded as intended science rather than renounced. If it is my prejudice then there must be, I must have, reason for it, such is the thought. So I incline to think something similar as regards Hitler and the Jews. His initial prejudice was first recognised by himself and then converted into a murderous persecution, now citing in justification the principles of the original prejudice as truth and hence motive. His real motive, however, whether initially or gradually revealing itself to him, was, in part at the very least, the obtaining of money not his, in sufficient quantity for the successful prosecution of war so as to establish a race of superior beings in control of the world, German, Aryan or whomever, hindered, if they would have but the luck to succeed, by nothing superior to themselves. But of course this money could not be got if the victims of the robbery were to remain alive after its seizure. Hence the mass-murder of those who were now presented as vermin simply, as a means chiefly to confiscation of their goods. In proof of this one may note the care with which servants of this national and socialist party gathered together the wealth of the dispossessed, with an almost ridiculous if macabre precision, gold teeth, old shoes etc., but also landed property and businesses above all. But I would wish here, as a common thread, to stress the dialectic of unthinking prejudice, its destiny of conversion into “prejudicial” thought for some finitely practical purpose. * One can note a similar process, of course far less objectionable or horrible, in Hannah Arendt’s remarkable and thorough study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, completed during the first post-war years, though what I have to say here may appear at first as largely conjectural. The clue is her extraordinary ignoring of the real genesis of the imperial motive, which she posits as initiator of the whole sorry tripartite process (imperialism, antisemitism, totalitarianism) in her terms, from within the Christian missionary motive, consequent upon the command of the risen Christ to “go and teach all nations”, i.e. without exception. She does indeed recognise a difference, from the other imperialists, in the latterday French motivation, which she relates to the old Roman model (without a word as to the Christian difference) when discussing the loss to them of Algeria, which had been taken as made part of the French commonwealth or of France itself even. She is equally silent about the Iberian conquests intended in just the same “missionary” way as being its inspiration, whatever allowance is made for other or more purely human motivations, nor is there any kind of glance at the roots of this difference from the later mercantile motivation. The Portuguese, being asked on landing in India what they sought, replied

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“Christians”, in clear difference from the later Captain Cook, our first travel agent rather. Thus Pope Alexander VI, in 1498, acted with both logic and foresight when he divided the newly discovered world in two for the sake of Spanish and Portuguese penetration and, for sure, evangelisation of these new races or peoples from the viewpoint of God’s chosen, viz. the Christian people specifically, who happened at that period (the legacy is still with us, however, since it mirrors a reality, after all, viz. that certain nations are as such founded upon reception of the Christian “good news”, others not) to be in great part identified with certain finite political formations or states, it being thus the duty of Christian kings too to support such enterprises. This pattern of viewing things was soon to be badly shaken by breakaways within the European Christian community, which reckoned itself as Catholic, i.e. universal or according to the whole (kata holon). Thus it was these faithful Iberians who gave us all one world first, just every voyage returning upon itself as, all the same, our astronauts still hope always to do, though some may dream of setting up faraway stock exchanges rather as too many, in those earlier days, embraced opportunities for enslaving and worse of people judged of inferior race and possibly not human in the same sense as “ourselves” in Europe, a quasi-criminal error apologists such as Las Casas sought, under the headline of justice, to erase with slow success only. Against such phenomena we find Hegel arguing from the absence of slavery in Europe specifically, or so he believed, for the unique claims regarding human dignity of Christianity. The Protestant powers scarcely shared this initial motivation, for whatever reason, more immediately identifying the project of exploration with enrichment of their own countries or communities, an attitude Arendt claims to see as maturing into “totalitarianism”, as before too the vision had been guided by an absolute, but a different one, viz. worship of the absolutely good God in and as his own redemptive Word, namely, this being taken as the revealed essence of Spirit. Is there a specifically Jewish blind spot here, such as Arendt gave signs of shaking off, as wishing at least to indicate this, on encountering Pope John XXIII some years later? Or how are we to interpret her making the first third of her explanation of totalitarianism, thus in some sense its basis, to consist in the mere particular, her title here in fact, she calls “Anti-Semitism” (or is this perhaps a codeword for Christian faith and polity?). To complete the criticism of Arendt’s nonetheless excellent and rewarding study of The Origins of Totalitarianism I cannot omit rejection of her claim that in the systems fathered by Hitler or Stalin one witnesses “an absolute evil” which qua absolute overturns or renders hopeless all

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previous attempts to include evil within a systematic outlook upon political or more general reality. This is just metaphysical, or rather anti-metaphysical, nonsense. One cannot put the point less strongly. Of whatever a Hitler or a Stalin did one can reasonably say “There but for the grace of God go I”, while none of these three agents (if we include “I”) is less finitely limited than the others or than anyone else. Evil, as the negative, can never have more than a finite reach since, again, it is “a sham-being” (Hegel), a privation of and upon the good (Aquinas), which, just therefore it can never finally overturn. If Hitler’s evil had not been finite we could never have overcome it (have we, though?) and, famously, the same is true of our later adversary, Stalin, i.e. it has to be, antecedent to our particular beliefs here. In this sense there is no absolute evil; the Manichees were and are wrong. All the same we have to confess an infinite quality in evil inasmuch as it becomes sin, against the infinite goodness which is God, namely, although this is hidden from those not confessing God. Hence they do not know what to make of this “bad infinite” indeed which they sense and hence employ their interpretive skills, as does Arendt, to produce wrong answers to this perplexity. Thus Arendt’s absolute evil stand alone and irredeemably out of place in her humanist outlook. In view of her personal association with Heidegger this aspect of things, I rather suspect, demands more consequent integration and/or conflict with just Heideggerian thought. What I want to emphasise here, however, with Hitler as example merely, is the observable tendency, as here I have suggested plays a role in Arendt’s in the main admirable compositions, to convert originally mere instinctual prejudice into some well or badly reasoned outlook79. This corresponds to that more general transformation of mere consciousness into mind which I am claiming to find systematically expounded in Hegel. Implied is that some forms of consciousness are more in accord, also beforehand, with reason than are some other forms of it. The continuity might best be charted by study of the maturing mind, e.g. in adolescence, whether from an educational or purely theoretical viewpoint. 79 This of course is precisely what confirmed secularists charge the theologically minded with doing. The end result, among liberals, has been suspicion of all system, thus indeed throwing out the baby with the bathwater. On a personal note, it was this aspect which the young Alasdair MacIntyre presented to us first-year students, in 1957, as the main conclusion to be drawn from the book set as subject of his lectures introducing us to philosophy, A.J. Ayer’s The Problem of Knowledge. If I had not forced myself to study that to me at that time dreary book as a deliberate Advent penance, though helped by the lectures, I would probably never have got much further philosophically. Honi soit qui mal y pense!

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I add that to understand our discussion here it is essential not to forget the Aristotelian point, as in particular it was and is understood within Scholastic thought, that there is, to cite Geach again, “no empirical nature of the thought process”. * We may return now to Hegel on “attitudes to objectivity” and what he has to say of possible relevance to our project here in his criticism of Jacobi’s approach, all with a view to gleaning from his treatment, his own diagnoses of these three attitudes taken together, what his own final view on the question (of “objectivity”) might be or if he has such a view at all, in particular one that should preface and dominate his whole revised account of “the science of logic” or, indeed, bring out the undoubted depth of this account’s implication for, as he would say, thought. I cite first Hegel’s own summary view of Jacobi’s “attitude” (use of this word here is itself significant of Hegel’s dismissive view of these mere attitudes, as he thus invites us to see them) to “objectivity”: From a formal point of view, there is a peculiar interest in the maxim that the being of God is immediately and inseparably bound up with the thought of God, that objectivity is bound up with the subjectivity which the thought originally presents. Not content with that, the philosophy of immediate knowledge goes so far in its one-sided view, as to affirm that the attribute of existence, even in perception, is quite as inseparably connected with the conception we have of our own bodies and of external things, as it is with the thought of God. Now it is the endeavour of philosophy to prove such a unity, to show that it lies in the very nature of thought and subjectivity, to be inseparable from being and objectivity.80

The key word here, in Hegel’s text, is “immediate”. Everything immediate is false, he says elsewhere. We might compare St. Paul’s contrast of the “things which are seen” with those that are “not seen”, which are, he says, alone eternal. It is indeed the same point, even if the Apostle softens “false” into “passing away”, and thus Hegel sees and means it. Thus he says that philosophy would have to prove the unity Jacobi asserts to be merely immediate while the latter understands this, as Hegel does not, as in some sense superior to mediated proof. Further, Hegel in fact holds the view that each and every one of God’s works is necessary, even attributing this quality to contingency itself, i.e. even or especially as such! The sense is that the 80

Hegel, Enc. 64.

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mind rises to God, to necessity itself, in the true thought of anything whatever as itself nothing. Yet it is senseless to begin with this view, as does Jacobi. That, anyhow, is the difference, making his philosophy a mere variant upon the facile idealism of such as Berkeley or even Kant, which Hegel is at pains to criticise, as we have already seen or tried to show here. For Hegel the claim of the all-sufficiency of immediate knowledge is thus a mere contradiction in terms, or like kicking a stone to refute Berkeley, who after all sees the attacking foot as no less ideal than the stone or the very kick itself, this in fact being in the end Hegel’s criticism of him, that everything is thus left as before, just substituting one immediacy for another, as if this quality were not the same in whatever instance of it. God and creation, anyhow, are falsely pictured, merely, as two entities of the same kind. Then, that is, one is no longer speaking of God, though maybe (mis)using the term. Hegel, we see, is respectful, which is to say accurate. Philosophy indeed proves, he says, that God and his creation are very much together, in the sense that the latter only has its being and life “in” God. Hegel’s view is thus close to Newman’s, that there were only two beings in the universe, “myself and God”, as is born out by the rest of his philosophy of the self, again misrepresented recently as equating everyone with Christ. Of course the last-named himself did the same(!), saying, in effect at least, that “what you did to your neighbour you did to me”. Hegel, anyhow, sums up his own view of such immediate knowledge as he perceives that Jacobi assumes here: Its distinctive doctrine is that immediate knowledge alone, to the total exclusion of mediation, can possess a content which is true. This exclusiveness is enough to show that the theory is a relapse into the metaphysical understanding (Verstand) with its passwords “Either -or”. And thus it is really a relapse into the habit of external mediation, the gist of which consists in clinging to those narrow and one-sided categories of the finite, which it falsely imagined itself to have left for ever behind.81

“The first of these attitudes of thought is seen in the method which has no doubts and no sense of the contradiction in thought, or of the hostility of thought against itself”.82 Such is the immediacy he mentions. Let us begin, anyhow, by exploring the wideness of reach of the critique of immediacy, by no means exclusively Hegelian, as if it had not already long previously been declared, and not at all as restricted to canonical Scripture only, that “the letter kills”, i.e. always and everywhere or as such. 81 82

Hegel, Ibid. 65. Ibid. 26.

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To get things right here we would need to plunge first into Hegel’s philosophy of nature (as set forth in the central section of the Encyclopaedia83). Gentile, McTaggart and like-minded commentators, we have noted, tended to dismiss Hegel’s offering of a philosophy of nature as inconsistent with his ground-axiom of the absorption, amounting even to cancellation, of everything finite into and by the Idea Absolute. This after all was the thesis whereby Aquinas declared that God had no knowledge of us as we are in ourselves, but only as being ideas in the divine mind of this knower, whether as to origin or to development. This did not at all stop him, however, from writing most exhaustively, succinctly and yet at length, i.e. always and everywhere as being in fact his method, on matters human as they appear to us, i.e. in the human way, at least when writing as theologian and indeed teacher rather than as philosopher pure and simple. For it is after all a condescension, a concession even, for thought to mix with language at all, which is why in Aristotle’s De interpretatione the concept posits itself before, logically before, the proposition, where, consequently, on Hegel’s view, the concept falls away from itself into what is nature or temporality, partes extra partes. Nor, in turn, however, does this stop Aquinas from declaring how things finally are, namely that it is in God alone that we “live and move and have our being”, such living and moving remaining all the same as what may be properly styled appearance only, the apparently rectilinear being in truth circular without exception, circular movement being unending (infinite in length) or, hence, not really movement at all, since the latter is a finite quality, not equatable with the restlessness, i.e. the lack of rest or pause (as if within some larger movement), of spirit proper. In this way Hegel too writes of nature, as the apostle writes of the “things which are seen”, dismissing them as “temporal”, i.e. nugatory of the eternal. Even, therefore, or especially rather, must the Cross be thus interpreted, as the denial of finite will namely, in and for those moved by the spirit and thus taught to “hate their lives in this world”, prime condition for Christian discipleship, Christ states. To see such a view, that of absolute idealism, as denial of the reality of the incarnation, say, is a confusion of thought. God, the Word, assumes here precisely that which is not or which is vanity, that flesh which “profiteth nothing” and yet is destined in him to be spiritualised. There are many ways of speaking of this. Compare the prophecy, “I will take away your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh”, using precisely human language and categories to rise above these, the natural, while flesh itself stands here for 83 Cf. also here our Thought and Incarnation in Hegel, CSP, Newcastle-on-Tyne, 2020, Chapter Two, “Trinity, Good and Evil”, pp. 104-190.

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the spiritual and final truth or, we might say, for flesh’s opposite. “The letter kills”. This going up a step, in seeming self-contradiction or paradox, is a regular moment for those who struggle against “the bewitchment of our thought by language”, i.e. ourselves as philosophers, as Wittgenstein, just for one, expresses it. * The situation just outlined is often best expressed by use of parable or story, is indeed the special province, project or problem for art, especially art as within spirituality. One proceeds, therefore, by way of contrast, typically going the length of seeming contradiction, seeming, however, only from this “artistic” viewpoint as enabling us to overturn a given concept’s name while retaining the concept, for which, we thus discover, we have no name nor could we ever have one. Hence Christ in his truth is spoken of as having received the name, again, which, yet, is “above all names”, even his own, it seems implied. So, anyhow, I will attempt such a representation here, the implication being that we simply fail to see that what we take “at the letter”, e.g. what we can see and touch as we tendentiously say, is not at all bound to be as it appears but can, rather, remain unknown84. Dialectic may be seen as victory over linguistic bewitchment by subversion of language, just as, we may here fancy, the Arctic waste regions of earth may be seen as subverting or giving the lie to regions where life appears to flourish, i.e. where the appearance of life, along with those more hospitable regions themselves, flourishes. Here let snow in its perpetuity stand for the constancy, the eternity rather, of spirit, “where mere life never comes” since death (sic Hegel) is the entry into it. Just to write of this, however, is to be seen as confounding just what one would present, because introducing it by representation. Nor, however, despite Wittgenstein (I do not, i.e. not just here, say pace him), may one keep silence about this of which one can indeed speak, dialectically in a word. By this picture the lifeless region of snow is put as the only “real” region, those of life belonging to representation only. That they form one globe corresponds, at the level of representation merely, of parable, to the mind, of man, however, rather than in itself or of God. Mind is the promised land toward which we strive, the temple where we would rather be a mere doorkeeper than “dwell among the tents of the ungodly”. This is the attitude 84 Cf. Eleonore Stump, “Aquinas on the Foundations of Knowledge”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 17, 1991, also in (or as) Aristotle and His Medieval Interpreters, ed. R. Bosley and M. Tweedale, University of Calgary Press, 1991.

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of spirit, of philosophy as of theology or prayer, confirmed equally by poetic intuition. Thus Life like a many-splendoured dome Stains the white radiance of eternity,

Shelley’s emphasis remaining with the negative “stains”, as if, despite himself maybe, his intuition, inspiration equally, felt that this was right. The magus Zoroaster Met his own image Walking in the garden.

The recall of Eden here, by this declared atheist, is not to be missed. So which was which, the image being “his own”, or whose was the garden? The image, after all, had met and been created by the “magus” before. So how does the magus merely “meet” his image, as if by surprise? Surely by an untoward act of the latter, thus become independent just in its identity with “the magus”, in whom alone it “lives and moves and has its being”, which is why, as Aquinas had emphasised, God has no knowledge of his creature man as “in himself” but only as in his, God’s, idea of him, of man. This “only” then only seems a limitation, in context intending rather the sense of “absolutely”; “only” is said only as answering the question whether God has knowledge of his creatures as (abstractly) other than himself or as parts outside of the whole, to approach the matter from the opposite end. Thus even what must be said to be outside God, as Peter is not Christ, say, is yet inside him, the outside indeed being the inside, as is declared in Hegel’s “science of logic”. Then indeed, as Hegel affirms, there has to be evil “in” God, meaning by “evil”, all the same, as in the best Thomist tradition, the negative, the nothing, “sham-being” (Hegel), which therefore does not “stain” the supra-white holiness of Absolute Spirit, of God. For this reason one has to reject Hannah Arendt’s apparent identification of a supposedly modern totalitarianism, seen as a novum, as an “absolute evil”, or at least affirm that if there could be such a thing it would be ipso facto nothing and not, nonsensically I fear, an absolute evil. It is or was rather a “moment”, like any other. Supremely the killing of Christ shows the world its own evil and even there the Infinite One suffering it invoked forgiveness “for they know not what they do”, even as He told the judge so shamefully condemning him that another than he had “the greater sin”, while not absolutising even that as conceivably “greatest” of evils. That would be Satan himself, although not even he, however, an angel namely, is to be absolutised, as in Manicheanism, is rather, merely, the “Prince of this World”

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(evangelical title), world that lies in his hand anyhow, totalitarianism or not. The Gospels and other canonical apostolic writings, even they, are as categorical upon this point as they are upon anything else, although nothing brings it more to the fore than, again, the actual torture and crucifixion, juridical instruments both, of the divine and so longed for Christ, revealer also of the divinity as a Trinity of personal relations. This is a or the mystery of faith which, however, reason can show is the only thinkable means85 of any merging in spirit of finite and infinite, such as philosophy itself demands and has ever sought, with angustia86. All this leaves “the world” as pure Vorstellung, representation, from which we men and women, in our self-consciousness of spirit, are and ever were destined to be lifted, should we wish, into the polar light of what is “better than life” or, alternatively, the true life and indeed “way” to itself. Or, as St. Teresa said, again, of its wounded simulacrum here below, “O life that is no life at all”, perhaps a better way of finally disqualifying the language of “parts outside parts” than we have attempted here in this our dialectic. * So we return to the schoolmaster Hegel, as he then was, and his attempt to bring out, under the mantle of “dialectic”, the latent, which he will make patent, “hostility of thought against itself” which is the very theme of dialectic and without which thought sticks out like a sore thumb or more from the wounded body of our treasured post-Hegelian evolutionary paradigm, as it cannot for philosophy surely. Such dialectic is rather part and parcel of “the natural attitude” that non-critical reason starts out from, as was equally recognised in the days of Plato and Aristotle, where, accordingly, a moment is recorded when the philosophers, teachers and their pupils, feared that their deliberations, precisely in their dialectical character, might destroy for ever the possibility of ordered speech just by acknowledgement of this its dialectical character. 85 Cf., again, the study by Karol Wojtyla, then a student at the Angelicum college, Rome, of the specifically necessary role of faith as regards any divine or absolute communication in the thought of St. John of the Cross (Doctrina de fide apud S. Joannem a Cruce, Thesis (Pontifical University of St. Thomas), Herder, Rome 1979. This quality, of faith, can only and must positively remain, with however much probability and good report either natural philosophy or the witness even of “miracles” can shed upon it. 86 Cf. our “The Resistance of Thomism to Analytical and Other Patronage”, The Monist, October 1997 Vol. 80, No. 4, pp. 611-618.

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It should be obvious that in none of this am I impugning the belief that in becoming incarnate God shared a life in nature under the same conditions as all human beings or rational creatures, as Kant both more and yet less precisely called them, his phrase being applicable to eventual non-human rational creatures. It is just in this its reduction, on Hegel’s analysis, to appearance merely that nature, as consisting, apparently again, of “parts outside parts”, subject to death, decay and general change, can nonetheless as well support assumption (of itself) by the divine being, by a divine person, even to the point of his becoming, it might be, as if a curse for us, i.e. in our place, as could any other finite entity or scheme.87 Thus the death that Christ shared with us is as real as and yet otherwise than any death of ours. Our death is anyhow real just in its awful negativity. What is real, anyhow, in our estimation, can be precisely what is unreal at the final count. These are the premises, or conclusions, behind the assertion that “faith can move mountains”, perhaps by grasping the unreality of these, as a synonym for “extension” in general, in the first place. For only such faith measures up to the Aristotelian principle that thought thinks only itself, ultimately. Thus, indeed, “the fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees”. So what is a tree, if not a function of such wisdom or foolishness, unless we posit the wise man as empirical realist, the fool as subjective idealist? We could do that of course, but the whole history of art, art’s mere existence as form of absolute spirit, amounts to this view’s denial.

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In a recent review of one of my Hegel books Robert M. Wallace seems to obscure this point I have been making concerning the nothingness of “nature” and/or creation unless as taken “in” God, ending his review by saying that I seek to present a view of Christianity, of Christian faith, not tied to any mere time or place. It is of course tied to the Galilee and Judaea of two millennia ago. My critique is rather of time and place (space) as such, as, ultimately, the non-being with which being unites itself, necessarily thus therefore appearing at some particular time and place where death had reigned, due to the spiritual separation of mankind from God. Cp. the liturgical reference to his coming down “from the heaven he never left” or to a “marvellous conflict” of death and life. The battle was fought on the true field of nothingness, the true field of falsity even. Such dialectic is Hegel’s chosen arena of thought. It is discernible, if more discreetly, in Aquinas also, as when he says, to repeat it, that God has and can have no “real” relation with his creatures, even with human beings. The difference, from Wallace, may seem fine; it is crucial all the same for the distinction of Christian faith from, say, Buddhism and similar purely human systems. In assuming our fallen or degraded nature Christ restored and elevated it, in the first place within the culture and history of a concretely “chosen” people, himself becoming wholly the restored or redeemed Israel, henceforth one with “the body of Christ”.

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So Christ himself said, or is put by the “inspired” evangelist as having said, “Before Abraham was, I am”. This, for anyone who would say it, if implying exclusivity, implies comparative unreality in the surrounding natural milieu. So what of the wood of the Cross? It is not part of the final reality that is spirit, as is the spirit of the man hanging upon it (indeed he is it whole), who exhorts us, somewhat fearsomely as it can indeed seem, not to fear what can kill the body without the power to harm our spirit (i.e. not just the “soul” in the biological sense). Properly understood this is so far from not being a dualism as it is pure monism, of being as against nothing, i.e. as not against anything but its own denial88. Obviously, distinctions in the godhead cannot finally be univocal, “in the way of distinction”, with distinctions between or among the mutual otherness of all finite things and/or notions. They are thus in that way (of distinction) analogously if at all. Recall Aquinas, sumit unus sumunt mille or the divine, but also Deuteronomic, command to love the neighbour as self. This is what Hegel strove, in his “Science of Logic” or “Philosophy of Spirit” particularly, to make his own or, rather, to give serious account of. Consider, then, the distinction of Father from Word or Spirit, God, whom Hegel calls “the absolute person”, but who yet, if he is called Father, as habitually by Christ (the Word), can equally be called Word as in truth his own Word, understanding this as one with a constitutive opposition of what is yet an entirely internal relation between persons, personae, who are finally found, each severally, in Augustinian thought particularly as “canonised” by the apostolic and “Catholic” body. To be one or other of these relations, scrupulously enumerated in Aquinas’s Trinitarian and other analyses, for example.89 Thus in Hegel’s not dissenting view, I would maintain, these relations, of which philosophy could never have had more than an inkling, since they are, again, entirely “internal”, nonetheless once proposed speak for themselves and thus as spoken he defends them without, on his own view, surrendering his due independence as philosopher. This aspect comes out particularly in his treatment of Jacobi. Let this suffice, for here and now as we say, though thus turning to straw the whole business of writing or indeed speaking (against which “bewitchment” we found Wittgenstein saying philosophy is itself the name of the battle) as use of more than one Word, that Word which, at its highest 88 Cf., or cp., the comment (by C.S. Lewis) upon the phrase of prayer “O God without

whom nothing is strong”, viz. “and nothing is very strong”. Here Lewis was wideawake, if dialectically humorous. Even if he “never got it together” (Peter Geach’s disparaging comment to me) he surely held together or prised many things very well apart! 89 Cf. our Thomas Aquinas and Georg Hegel on the Trinity, CSP Newcastle, 2020.

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and hence alone all-inclusive reach, became flesh so that flesh, sc. man, might become God (cf. the corresponding prayer from the eucharistic offertory of the Roman rite). God, Hegel does not scruple to say, again, is “the absolute person”, which is no more than what is implied by our most spontaneous prayers (e.g. “God help me”) or a majority of liturgical prayers, the “collects” particularly. So we address God personally both as trinity and as unity, without denying with, say, Sabellius the real distinction of the persons, “in the way of distinction” certainly, a phrase capable of inclusion of or identity with all the distinctions made or denied in the orthodox tractates, such as the Augustinian-Thomist ones, on the Trinity. Meanwhile, I point out that this intended demonstration of Hegelian orthodoxy, at least in the main, in no way dogmatically refuses possibilities of his unorthodoxy here and there in his written or spoken words when he was alive, any more than it does for anyone else, e.g. even a Pope as private person when not speaking ex cathedra, equally for a believer, whether he says “pass the salt” or mentions some theological subject, at table or otherwise.

CHAPTER FIVE POLITICAL THEOLOGY IN HEGEL? GADAMER, MACINTYRE

Political Theology in Hegel? Gadamer, MacIntyre Political theology? Can there be such a thing? No, and here’s why, in what follows. But why raise this question just here? Or at all, in this study of language vis à vis thought? One reason depends upon our titular phrase, whether explicit or left implicit, viz. “in Hegel”. Yet this explanation would be better expressed as the thesis that the question of a political theology arises precisely for those thinkers who may have lost their grasp on the essential unity of the Church, unity being the first of the four credal marks, i.e. as concerning the Church as an object of belief, viz. unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity, unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam (Nicene Creed). Note that nothing is here said as to visibility, but, note again, neither as to invisibility, although it is inasmuch as things, while truly such, are “not seen” that they are eternal. Similarly, or just so, are we told “Fear not those that can the body kill but have no power to hurt the soul”, concerning which I have argued above that this word of Christ transcends any mere dualism, this being the upshot of the continual apostolic and Dominical insistence that the flesh “profits nothing” since being and nothing do not form a duo. They would rather form and/or denote an identity, rising above “the soulless word ‘is’” (Hegel), which, I claim, is the same as saying that God alone is, is esse, which is its own act or actus purus. We here, note, are the latest, that is, rather than the first, to tread this ground. It is in this sense that the Church is ever one, while the second mark of the Church is holiness. Holiness is of God or, by extension, as being from God, like Satan originally, for example, God’s self-ruined creature ad maximum, who, however, said the Christ, “has nothing in me”. This is, of course, dialectical, as such, though, going no further than to say that the unholiness of Satan is his ruined holiness as God’s creature. This, now, as such, as dialectical, is firstly an idea, to which attribution of concrete existence is clearly additional or at least a separate issue, as we say, as,

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again, esse is separate, of a different order, from essence, though not entirely, since existence itself gets inevitably drawn into, cannot stand outside, this inherent self-contradiction of created, extensional speech. We speak of something “existing in thought” (How does an ens rationis differ from essence?). This has simply to be born in mind, philosophically, when, as Aristotle emphasised, we strive to govern our speech by the principle of non-contradiction, justifiably fearing that without that we would be condemned to silence. Politics, anyhow, is just the place, or places, of and for the kingdoms “of this world”, where holiness has no place. “Little children, love not the world”, exhorts the beloved apostle, adding, again, that “the whole world lies in the hand of the evil one”. Only with this background is the theology of the Cross, rather, understandable as, so to say, “functional”, as precisely, “the foolishness of God”. The Church anyhow will stick to her heaven-sent doctrines, so there will be regular martyrdoms in the future as in the past. Yet where will these come from if not from the rulers of the state, which for its part will most typically insist on the need for unity of whatever nation it represents? Thus a typical case of compromise that arises seems to be where the Church insists on the right to life of the unborn child while the state, inclusive of believing politicians, refuses to “criminalise” those acting against this right and this becomes accepted as in many cases the lesser evil, a situation concerning which I make no judgment here. So there will be mostly trouble, but this chiefly for the Church as granting citizenship somewhere else90, viz. in heaven. The whole force of Augustine’s massive classic, City of God, incidentally, rests upon refusal to regard these two senses, the earthly and the heavenly civitas, as genuinely analogous (in either direction: yet he clearly means the genuine city is the heavenly, whatever the politics of earthly language) merely. But what has revealed the wickedness of the world to all who care to consider is above all the Cross of Christ, the spotless (sacrificial) “lamb of God”. The very much increased and increasing mobility of individuals world-wide demands that the unity of political entities, which as necessary for them or their rulers is also a right of sorts, the same right in fact in virtue of which a tighter unity was previously enforced, or is still enforced in many Islamic countries, for 90 Cf. A.P. d’Entrèves, The Notion of the State, OUP 1967, esp. II 9, “Church and State”, for a vivid representation of the genesis of conflict between “Church and State”, both before and after the break-up of the “medieval” consensus, beginning after all with the ancient Roman state (of empire). The original conflict, however, of the Christian movement was, in the person of its Head, with the Judaean people “chosen of God”, as the Church unhesitatingly recognized, and with their leaders particularly.

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example, be more widely conceived and implemented. This consideration was in fact the typical driving force of political theory in the early modern period when considering, for example, in historically Christian countries particularly, just Church and State, while this is what we find still reflected in Hegel’s political philosophy.91 * Given that each person is in a sense in loco Dei, as Scripture makes multifariously plain, it follows that they are not numerable as parts of a whole, still less as separate universes, but as each imaging and thus in the place of (in loco) the one true God rather. This is the revealed Christian teaching, that while loving your neighbour as yourself you yet do to the teacher speaking, Christ, what you do to the least of these neighbours (rather than “others”) from which it follows that they are all properly one in him, given the invitation to be freed by renunciation from their separated state, viz. enslavement to world, flesh and Devil. Now of course politics could and should admit this but it regularly does not, or admits it only to fall away from it, apart at least from the mitigating factor of ignorance, of the human world’s essential evil namely, which the Cross of Christ is intended efficaciously to remove inasmuch as it has done so, i.e. it removes it as having done so as once it was removing it, as about to do so “prophetically” (time as a dialectical mode of being or as “merely ideal”, as in Hegel’s realism of the Absolute Idea). Hegel’s remark upon Rousseau’s general will is pertinent here92, not least as critique of our faith in democratically reckoned majorities, our willingness to give them power, whatever they propose doing. But this mystery of the strictly innumerable multitude in, therefore, its unity is more than matched by that of the “Why me?” that each, i.e. every one, must ask himself or herself. This “why me?”, however, is really only addressable to the notion itself and that by itself, while the “me” is itself the answer in terms of that necessity which it itself is, precisely as source of all freedom. “As existing in an individual form, this liberation is called I …”93 “Why am I?” thus contains its answer, viz. election, choice, the same in principle as was first that of Adam, i.e. the first Adam, the man who was

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Cp. d’Entrèves, op. cit., the final Part Three, “Authority”, in particular. Cf. Hegel, Enc. 163, Zus. “The universal will (volonté générale) … need not on that account be the will of all (volonté de tous). … The general will is the notion of the will …” 93 Hegel, Enc. 159. 92

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man and in (hence, ultimately, as) whom all “fell”94, just as all rose in and even as (in a sense to be carefully worked out or defined) the “second Adam” or “the son of man”, as He called himself without explanation. It cannot, in the divine counsels and just therefore, be otherwise, though Hegel emphasises its not becoming clear “till the days of Christianity”. It seems to me that Hans-Georg Gadamer’s horror of what he calls “dogmatism” leads him subtly to misrepresent and thus cloud over for others the pure and direct Christianity of Hegel’s writings, in the tradition of the Fathers and their successors, some of these successors indeed remaining outside of full communion with the Church of those baptised into the redemptively transformative death of Christ, as did Hegel himself, up to the time of death at least, itself sudden in his case. The tendency, Gadamer’s, is near-universal in academic and/or salaried writers today, a kind of unconscious snobbery or similar of which the first academicians were and/or would have been quite innocent, just as their example shows up the objective chasm between “academic” (originally a spiritual quality) and “salaried”, which fails to signify or to obtain in proportion as one becomes spiritual, as Hegel’s writings make clear. They are addressed to everyone’s geistlich, as well say intellectual, faculty. hence to all persons in their various “states of (phenomenal) life”. I cite Gadamer, as rather missing this (my own comments are italicised): For the concept of spirit which Hegel appropriated from the Christian spiritualistic tradition (this seems to me impure, indirect and evasive: Hegel is in this tradition) and raised to new life (i.e. he appropriated the life intrinsic to it, it was just his anyhow, just as when he was a Protestant seminarian), is still the basis … This concept of spirit (fearing perhaps that he has gone too far in this “enlightened” direction Gadamer now adds) that transcends the subjectivity of the ego (this is slightly misleading unless perhaps “ego” be qualified by “individual”: thus Hegel’s stress is to say that spirit is the true and final ego or I with which each is finally identified: “for I shall be in you”; 94 I follow the Biblical representation while interpreting it, and hence “the fall of man”, in its own terms, i.e. as accepting it. Whether Hegel objects so to say fundamentally or simply as stressing its unsuitability for any final or philosophical account is not clear to me. Should one expect such an account, of what was essentially a fall from, a loss of, grace? I rather think that philosophy itself can demonstrate that one should not (Cf. Joseph Pieper, Über die platonischen Mythen, Munich 1965). or that one will find oneself substituting a quite different account, in terms merely of finite and infinite for example, as we find Hegel himself doing (see below). In general, God cannot be subject to human understanding unless by his own good pleasure, as indeed infinite and, as we consequently see, divine. My impression is that Hegel assents to this in principle.

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Chapter Five compare the sumit unus sumunt mille of Aquinas on sacramental communion) has its true counterpart in the phenomenon of language (“counterpart” is a very bad word here for any relation of noumenal spirit to the phenomenal: hence John of the Cross’s “God has spoken only one Word and that is His Son”) … The reason is that, in contrast to the concept of spirit that Hegel drew from the Christian tradition (no: he possessed it as within this tradition himself, it must be insisted), the phenomenon of language has the merit of being appropriate to our finitude (actually for Hegel a demerit as being just what he strove to overcome, quite in line with the Christ-offer of salvation or eternal life, itself rich all the same in sacramental helps to our finitude). It is infinite (this is simply false of language), as is spirit, and yet finite, as is every event.95

For understanding this spirit and for whether or not it corresponds with the teaching of Christianity the locus is the first three paragraphs or so of Subdivision Three of the Encyclopaedia’s “Science of Logic”, viz. “The Doctrine of the Notion”, der Begriff, called by Hegel “the principle of freedom, the power of substance self-realised” (Enc. 160, emphasis added). Such self-realisation, the naming of it, cancels our finitude straight off. The intention is thus quite the reverse of patronising “our finitude” (Gadamer), something utterly inappropriate to fearless or, ultimately, honest thought. Why does Gadamer want to be finite so much, bending the infinity of truth and its necessity to that aspiration? Of course any academic position one holds is a matter of finitude and just therefore should find no place in our thought. This, I have argued elsewhere96, causes a certain tension where philosophy has become (o tempora …, not to speak of mores) used to naming just one academic “department” among many. Now this, I maintain, should be the real controversy about just Hegel and not merely whether he, as MacIntyre puts it, failed, with Fichte and Kant, to justify the Prussian state ideal “in which public law and Lutheran theology were blended”.97 This, in terms of “which rationality”, puts Hegel in quite a different class from Fichte and Kant, whom he designated as more “a phenomenologist than a philosopher”98, while Fichte he paired with Berkeley 95

Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer: "The Philosophical Foundations of the Twentieth Century” (1962), in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. David E. Linge, University of California Press, 1977, pp. 107-129, the above citation from page 128, italicised parentheses added. 96 Cf. our “The Position of Philosophy in a University Curriculum”, The South African Journal of Philosophy, 1991, no. 10, pp. 111-114. 97 Cf. A. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? UND Press 1988, p.11. 98 Cf. Enc. 49-60, “The Critical Philosophy”, for perhaps the most withering critique of Kant ever penned!

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as purveyors of “abstract, empty idealism”99. That MacIntyre only mentions him in his book when referring to this supposed Prussian ideal of “blending … public law and Lutheran theology” seems regrettable. If we are speaking of theology in its deep and true sense then in Hegel blending100, as between being and nothing, is the last thing to look for if we take his systematic Encyclopaedia texts as our rule, having The Phenomenology of Mind as prologue to the system. There is a Gadamerish whiff to MacIntyre’s remark here, in short. Both want to avoid treating Hegel’s text as confessional in the Patristic or indeed, mutatis mutandis, ancient Greek tradition of what philosophy and/or the academy is or is open to being. Must we view Hegel thus, as if this particular blending is at the centre of his in that case nonvision? Or, in the words of a recent internet article by two young thinkers at Boston College, “Must Catholics Hate Hegel?”101 Look again at the text from Aristotle with which, in the original Greek, Hegel chose to terminate, most fittingly, his Encyclopaedia. Hegel’s roots, running deep, are there and not in the iconoclastic Enlightenment or even in Luther, Lutheran though he of course was, as Cardinal Newman, a generation or more later, was for a long time an Anglican and so might well have died one, humanly speaking as we say. Hegel’s political ideas, like his ideas on Christian sacramentality generally, though not particularly on the “sacrament of sacraments”, viz. Jesus Christ, remain unsatisfactory, inconsistent indeed with the best and deepest in him. This latter is his aim of presenting a full-blooded, but deeply penetrating Christian philosophy, as the remarks, right or wrong, on the disappearance of slavery from Christian Europe indicate well enough. So we should not, with Gadamer, strive to cut off all who bear the mantle of philosophy from genuine, i.e. specific Christian development of doctrine, nor, with MacIntyre, resist acknowledging, as a possibility at least, the presence in modern times, also among those that are “far off” comparatively, of that spirit he came to recognise in Aquinas particularly. He acknowledges a “massive debt” to Newman. I suggest here we all have much to borrow from Hegel too, so misrepresented by those unable to credit the profound religious commitment of this near deepest of thinkers, encouraged perhaps in this inability by a certain aristocratic reserve toward or a distaste for “enthusiasm” on his own part. 99 Torchbook edn. (of The Phenomenology of Mind: tr. Baillie), New York 1966, p. 279. 100 This term itself blends quite a lot together which might well be considered separately. Is it not rather that the law itself is desired to become a blending, a ghostly invisible church in place of the real one facilitating this overbearing absorption? 101 Jordan Daniel Wood & Justin Shaun Coyle, “Must Catholics Hate Hegel?” Church Life Journal, Blog Posts, June 8, 2018.

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What we do find in Hegel, rather, and it seems to be precisely what is being misinterpreted here, is the suggestion that we should turn the weapons of those who, he thinks, have destroyed genuine orthodox theology back against themselves, as a kind of backlash or victory in defeat (this is in fact the quintessential Christian idea!) arising out of this seeming destruction, which thus gets revealed as no destruction at all in any but an accidental or partial sense, such as is compatible with the later guiding idea (e.g. in Newman) of development. * To fill out or make clear the drift here we cannot do better than continue our reading of “The Doctrine of the Notion”, of “the principle of freedom, the power of substance self-realised”, far from any thought of “public law” though illustrating and supporting, implicitly at least, Hegel’s frequent critiques of legal language as such. The Notion is a systematic whole, in which each of its constituent functions is the very total which the notion is, and is put as indissolubly one with it. Thus in its selfidentity it has original and complete determinateness,

we read at Enc. 160, as introducing the whole third “sub-division of logic” while simultaneously, or we should rather say identically, declaring what is, and it cannot be otherwise, the whole, God, spirit, thought, as he will not fail to bear out in what follows. Deus meus et omnia. We are close to the world, the universality, of Aquinas, as those reading both thinkers with openness of mind can scarcely fail to see, but not because Hegel had read Aquinas (it seems he hardly did) as, say, Aquinas read and commented exhaustively upon Aristotle. This omission gives all the greater force to his testimony as incidentally coinciding, not only as regards Aristotle but also and to a profound degree or at a deep level (where few philosophical submarines penetrate) Aquinas. * God, or “substance” as Descartes and the occasionalists had stressed but insufficiently, dualistically, is determinate freedom, fully realised, is realisation as such, the real simply, self-determined or, better, eternally self-determining so as to become self-determination as such, as principle as we say, here naming the most concrete and substantial by analogy with our abstract notions. Hegel will show how this substance has to be thought as thinking, as entire self-awareness and only that. Thus, as we found Aquinas saying (It

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can’t be cited too often), God has no real relation, in thought or anywhere else, to us but “only” to his idea of us. This, in my opinion, points to a limitation in Aquinas’s theological method, which his philosophy does much to properly relativise. That is, what he calls real is what he means to dismiss as unreal. In loving his creatures God loves himself, and finds only himself, in them. Thus God has spoken only one word and that is his Son, writes John of the Cross, opening up to the Trinity and not merely to a “Trinitarian perspective”. This Idea, which Hegel identifies as God or contrariwise, is “the principle of freedom”, i.e. solely, as being what it is, since it is wholly “self-realised”, i.e. it is freedom as such, never having first found itself just lying around, so to say. In the beginning, from the first, eternally, it acts, as act itself, Aristotle would say, “pure act” for the Scholastics, our notion of time being the first casualty, virtually, of this our mental opening up. Our thought itself will not be far behind, as casualty, though this too is something with which philosophy can deal, thus showing its kinship with the eternal sophia in question, the leap here being precisely that which Hegel had wished to make, we may recall. Each part is the total, in some sense is it “virtually”, as we feel bound to add, but more for the sake of listening neophytes than as qualifying our own message, on the right track as we believe we have shown and/or found it to be. Sumit unus sumunt mille, wrote Aquinas of sacramental communion with or in Christ. Where one receives a thousand receive, each in all and all in each. This is precisely Hegel’s principle of the notion, not merely borrowed or appropriated from Christianity but discerned just therein and just there, in Christianity, inspiring himself or St. Thomas Aquinas to expound the same consequences in their different ways and that to a remarkable degree. Hegel calls this “absolute idealism”. This means, in context, that such idealism is the metaphysico-religious or philosophical posture, or mind-set in freedom rather. It is the polar opposite of any merely finite idealism, which Hegel diagnoses as just some sort of semi-conscious pretence when criticising Berkeley or Fichte. Thus absolute idealism in no way denies the creation of the world while yet insisting on God alone as the Absolute Idea alone and solely thinking and thus knowing only self (Himself, Herself, Itself indifferently or, better, all together) but rather it brings out the difference between creation and our usual idea of mere making and this is the primal analogy of being, between the divine being and created being such as our own namely. In creation there is only analogously a passage, viz. from potency to act. Or, rather, our immediate notion we call “creation” is not a work of God distinguishable from God himself. This is the sense

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that Augustine, for example, teases out of the first words of Scripture, of Genesis, “In the beginning God created …” The “strict sense” of creation is not at all our first primitive, materialistically imagined first notion of it. Hence the saying, “I have loved thee with an everlasting love”. Hence, ethically, lies the importance of personality. God himself, Hegel does not scruple to say, Trinitarian though he be, “is the absolute person”, while each constituent or function “is the very total which the notion is and is put as indissolubly one with it”. The “is put” carries a lot of weight here. Hegel inclines, it is plain, to universalism, as he inclines to minimise the Fall of Man in Adam to a mere representation of growing up out of a somehow, it seems to him, unworthy innocence. His analysis of the Fall story is nonetheless profoundly compelling until one sets it against much else, in life or in doctrine, incompatible with it. The spirit of the early Genesis chapters is different, making them much more of a sort of “apologetic”, divine if we accept Scriptural inspiration in principle, for the terrible world we live in, where death rules, and which we are adjured by Christ not to love but even to “hate” our life in it, in imitation of or by incorporation into, rather, himself. “O death I will be thy death”, death and life fighting in a literally wonderfull conflict (duello mirando102). Yet Hegel gives the full credit of a believer, on my reading, to Christianity, in “the days” of which the significance of man himself first became clear. There is a touch of Scotism here, of the sense that God’s love for man is unconditional and eternal, unaffected by “the Fall”, upon which in consequence incarnation does not depend, as Aquinas seems to suggest, following Augustine’s o felix culpa. We forget, though, and whatever Augustine himself thought, that the fault’s being happy has no intrinsic connection with some absolute contingency (surely a contradiction in terms) seen as befalling us. His exclamation can also be read as the opposite of this, that man’s fault, the fault of the finite itself, was written into things from the start, however we understand the theology of grace and all the rest of it. Thus Aquinas reasons that grace is necessary for the so to say perpetual avoidance of sin; nonetheless the sin of our first parents was anyhow, it is taught, against such grace already given. The point here, anyhow, is that of accepting how things are as ultimately coming from God, such that the sinner must offer to God his sins, accept and acknowledge them. In fact, whatever the dramatic moments in the Genesis account, we need to keep in mind that there can in reality be no drama in which God in his eternity merely participates. The story has to be a representation, Vorstellung, of 102

From the liturgical Easter “sequence”, Victimae paschali laudes.

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something divinely absolute. What is called “the redemption” is nonetheless in no sense a mere “fall back” plan on the part of God, so to say. It is in essentials the only conceivable revelation of the depth, the meaning, of the intra-Trinitarian divine love. As at least an analogy of this we cite the purely Roman and heathen invention of the hideous cross of crucifixion pre-dating or pre-determining simply (always on God’s part, i.e. necessarily elected in divine freedom) the role in our redemption, again, of the “tree of beauty, tree of light”, so that of course, again, it is only a pre-determination in our essentially successive thought. “Before Abraham was I am.” On all this Hegel’s later writings on necessity and contingency, at least attempting to take the matter further, need to be recalled.103 The union, further (or it is the same), in God of absolute self-determination with absolute freedom need no longer surprise or perplex, it being rather our finite notions which receive here a divine critique, something Hegel remains very much alive to, particularly in his critique of language and predication. It is clear here too, for example, that self-determination itself only applies or can be applied to God as still containing a pictorial element. God does not and cannot be thought to determine himself at all, being absolutely simple, not, that is, unless we posit that the act whereby he is simple being and the act of self-determination are understood to be necessarily one and the same act. Hegel’s position, anyhow, on this is that these degrees of picturing, never entirely eliminated, belong to language as such. Nor does this make them finally normative, as seems to be claimed in some quarters. What is normative for Hegel, he himself says, is “the factual”, such as sound philosophy may disclose it. We have to hold, rather, that is to say (i.e. this is the sound philosophy), to our belief in God as incomprehensible, i.e. belief that He is such (except to himself, hence the Word which is himself). Thus Hegel shares, in great measure at least, the negative mystical theology of pseudo-Dionysus, which had been fully taken over by Aquinas. This position, in contrast to Wittgenstein’s, holds that there is nothing of which one can speak without fault of contradiction, though this, rather or just therefore, as dialectic pure and simple, gets absolved of such fault if not of finitude. A certain praise of silence is implied104, while also Aquinas exclaimed at the end of his life that all that he had written seemed to him “but straw”. What does this tell us concerning life, life in time, this present moment of writing? That it is no more than what we have to do for now, if that? “Work out your salvation in fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you” as knowing all things, as the Idea itself. It is around this 103

Cf. our Thought and Incarnation in Hegel, CSP 2020, esp. Chapter Four, p. 286f. Cp. John of the Cross: God has spoken only one word (he might as well have said “speaks” merely) and that is his Son.

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sticking-point that Hegel’s later writings on contingency, as mentioned above, cover original ground, though their matter follows quite smoothly from his text here at Enc. 160 and following: The position taken up by the notion is that of absolute idealism. Philosophy is a knowledge through notions because it sees that what on other grades of consciousness is taken to have Being and to be naturally or immediately independent, is but a constituent stage in the Idea. In the logic of understanding, the Notion is generally reckoned a mere form of thought, and treated as a general conception. It is in this inferior view of the notion that the assertion refers, so often urged on behalf of the heart and sentiment, that notions as such are something dead, empty, and abstract. The case is really quite the reverse. The notion is, on the contrary, the principle of all life, and thus possesses at the same time a character of thorough concreteness. That it is so follows from the whole logical movement up to this point, and need not be here proved. The contrast between form and content, which is thus used to criticise the notion when it is alleged to be merely formal, has, like all the other contrasts upheld by reflection, been already left behind and overcome dialectically or through itself. The notion, in short, is what contains all the earlier categories of thought merged in it. It certainly is a form, but an infinite and creative form, which includes, but at the same time releases from itself, the fulness of all content. And so too the notion may, if it be wished, be styled abstract, if the name concrete is restricted to the concrete facts of sense or of immediate perception. For the notion is not palpable to the touch, and when we are engaged with it hearing and seeing must quite fail us. And yet, as it was before remarked, the notion is a true concrete; for the reason that it involves Being and Essence, and the total wealth of these two spheres with them, merged in the unity of thought. (Enc. 160, Zus., stress added)

I would also want to claim, however, that the passage just quoted, which of course may not be Hegel’s exact original wording at all points though it has his approval, ties in quite smoothly with the doctrine of Aquinas, on the divine ideas particularly (Cf. Summa theol. Ia 15) but not only on them. Thus Aquinas states that God has no real relation with us, or with nature generally, but only with his idea of this and finally, therefore, with the notion which God is. The obvious conclusion from this (unless one be caught in the toils of “moderate realism”, as if anything can be merely moderate here) astonishing statement is that “we” are not real in the final sense. Aquinas contents himself elsewhere with saying that the idea exists differently in the mind (ours? God’s?) to how it is found in reality, which is no more than is obviously “seen” to be the case, i.e. immediately. It corresponds to Hegel’s saying that the Idea’s first or immediate shape or form is Being. As first this is in a sense or finally false. Being will show itself, according to Hegel at least, to be ultimately one with the System of

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Logic itself. Consult, here, the greater Science of Logic, 1816, final page(s). It is thus in a sense the reverse of Aquinas’s conception, where Being, esse, pure and intense, is all that God, the Idea, is. Yet it is not difficult to show that the two “ideas”, viz. being and the Idea, are the same, and even that both are just as much non-being, the me on that is not ouk on, transcending all that we immediately apprehend as being and call “the world”, creation or nature and so on, anything that can be called anything simply in contrast to Him, to that, who and/or which has “the name which is above all names”, the I AM of Moses, the esse of Aquinas, to which all essence is potential. Thus as Aquinas develops his conception we see that esse, actus purus, is such that there is nothing that it does not include and that, too, not as “parts outside parts” merely, but as each in all and all in each, something especially mirrored in Aquinas’s eucharistic thought, where, again, sumit unus sumit mille, or where each counts for all and none for less than all, as Christ said “you in me and I in you”, the converse here, which in import is the same, being sufficiently indicated in the simple command to love one another. Thus this being, esse, is not false at all or, in Hegelian terms, it is the stopping there that would be false, stopping, that is, at this first moment of a developing conception of precisely being, of “what it is”. It opens “a series of definitions of the Absolute”, yet in such a way, as the final page or two of the Greater Logic demonstrates, as to remain identical with what is finally reached, what Hegel calls “the Absolute Idea”. It is not, for example, percipi, as Berkeley had once wanted to express this mystery of philosophy itself, so to say. Thus we find also in Hegel the teaching that thought is a matter of the same idea, the one and absolute, successively embodying itself in more and more suitable fashion in the light of all that we know about what is finally, as absolute, the divine being. By this “the different stages of the logical idea are to be treated as a series of definitions of the Absolute” while if this is so then “the definition which now results for us is that the Absolute is the Notion” or Absolute Idea, is Mind, concerning which Aquinas had said that “the first thing that falls (cadit) into it” is being, thus implying that mind is, finally, greater than being (since this “falls into it”, cadit in mentem). Thus Mind and the Absolute Idea are one, and this is the significance, after all, of Aquinas’s clear definition of God, the Absolute, as itself Being, esse. It, in turn, is thus the divine mind, das wahre Seiendes as Hegel effectively brings out at the end, again, of the greater Science of Logic, although not scrupling there to identify it, all the same, with the method of logic itself, clearly conscious here, though, of the etymology of “method”, meta hodon in Greek, or “according to the way”. The way of logic, where true, is the divine mind ever unfolding, which yet cancels, consumes, fulfils and absorbs it utterly, this “it” in fact necessarily consuming

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the rational creature(s) in particular, inasmuch, that is, as there be such or, to express the same differently, as whatever form, shape or relation to one another we possess eternally, a way, anyhow, that Hegel or Aquinas seem keen to distance from all quantified number, following the lead of “You are all members one of another”, which the Gospels suggest can only have been passed on to St. Paul from Christ’s own discourse and action, viz. the eucharistic. * In Aquinas, of course, the stress is on the otherness, the holiness as this becomes in religion, of the divine or final being, in which, however, for Aquinas as for Hegel, all is contained as just thereby reduced to its, such being’s, opposite, viz. nothing. And of course the believer must grant that logic itself or especially must conclude to this, since, it is the same, there can be nothing in logic opposing it, so that even if we appear to be reduced to uttering contradictions in the dialectic of our thinking then this contradiction, effectively overcoming speech as Aristotle had noted, must be that in which thought must rest. Deus meus et omnia: so what about the “my” in the usual mistranslation to “My God and my All”? For much more is said in the original than in this mistranslation. The original says, in effect, “My God and all things”, or everything, i.e. objectively, as we say, and without self-congratulation. At the same time the first person referred to just once, not twice, is assured of everything, if God truly is his or her God. It is not so in any subjective sense, or, we say here, subject and object merge, ultimately in the addressee, God. Furthermore it coincides more exactly with the Pauline “All things are yours and you are God’s”, i.e. if you are faithful. He does not specifically say “God is yours” (as with “my all”), whether or not he might have done. There is thus nothing specifically Lutheran in Hegel’s procedure here, as many Catholic apologists, such as lately MacIntyre (see above) or Cyril O’Regan or William Desmond (apparently teaming up with the very Lutheran Anders Nygren in the process)105, have been concerned to suggest, however much remains to be said about this. At any rate it seems we would require something more in between these two alternatives, of grace and nature, so to say. An awful lot seems to hang on this. Thus, if we are right in our analysis here then there is no chance of Hegel’s being seen as an in the main orthodox 105

I recommend again the review by Amos Yong of William Desmond’s Hegel’s God: a Counterfeit Double? Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington, 2003, at “Wesleyan Philosophical Society”.

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interpreter or, in Newman’s sense, developer of doctrine. What can be salvaged? One first approach might be to try to discredit grace as a concept, possibly Hegel’s way. I offered a beginning of this above, asking what is specific, what is identifiable even, in or as divine grace, as gift. Is not everything grace (Karl Rahner’s assertion)? Is grace not therefore a specifically “religious” picture of something discoverable purely philosophically, such as the truth of God himself as giver of all graces? What does this add to “giver of all”, simply? Hegel certainly affirms this latter. His “absolute idea” is (necessarily) perfectly in actu. “Actuality and thought (or Idea) are often absurdly opposed. … The Idea is rather the absolutely active as well as actual.”106 The notion of a picture, to begin with this, is many-layered. Some Sadducees, who denied resurrection, are on record as presenting Jesus with the puzzle-picture of a woman who before dying had seven husbands, one after another, according to the Mosaic law of having to raise up seed or offspring to a dead brother. Jesus shows it is a picture and therefore inappropriate inasmuch as in the resurrection no one marries or is married, all being as the angels. Here the negative belief (denial of resurrection) vanishes with the picture expressing it. Jesus does this quite often, at other times less drastically, as a “developer of doctrine”. Is grace, then, such a hence discardable picture? Some contemporary theologians think to overcome this pictorial, “unsystematic” element, so to say, by declaring, I noted, that “Everything is grace”, which can seem, however, a plain equivocation on the term. For example, if my creation was a grace then upon whom was it bestowed? Yet we can say, do say, that Adam was created in grace, i.e. this is the Church’s teaching, applied equally to Eve. Now I am not expert in how far the apostolic office or papacy or whatever ecclesial offices might be involved permit or can accept fresh renderings of Christian belief here. What I am asking is whether any notion of grace such as is here involved, e.g. sacramental grace, finds or can or could find place in Hegel’s account of these things specifically. Consider the grace of baptism, for example, and how seriously Augustine and others stressed the necessity of this, at the same time developing wider, one might say more “spiritual” interpretations of the necessity, proposing a baptism of desire, or especially one of blood. These were scrupulously defined; thus Augustine felt, concluded, that they could not be applied to those unbaptised dying in infancy, at birth or before, i.e. before the age of reason and or choice, often reckoned to commence at around seven years of age. It was suggested, accordingly, that such infants must be “perishing everlastingly”, as would 106

Cf. Enc. 142 Zus.

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our race as a whole without the redemption. St. Thomas, confronted with this, took up the myth of “limbo” as a sort of “fringe” area where such unbaptised infants, plus maybe the retarded or incapacitated (for making decisions) enjoyed a perfect age (as at thirty-three was the usual estimate), calm and at peace, well pictured by St. Thomas, while all tried to keep from them knowledge of what they so to say might have had. Lately, however, the Church (under Pope Paul VI particularly), has told us to forget about such a limbo (not really a proper name or noun), there having been no need ever to believe or have believed in it107. Yet if, anyhow, one is in grace then just about any sin of moment will, we tend to think, break just this bond. That is, its function can seem to be preponderantly negative, which, as St. Thomas would say, seems inconveniens. The grace of baptism is necessary, anyhow, because the fall of man, which Hegel declares incompatible with God (his goodness? His power?), was a fall from grace specifically, i.e. not just a piece of bad behaviour only to be expected now and then from finite beings, even if rational. Hence the terrible consequences of this fall, up to, including and after the Flood, say, climaxing in the Son of God’s crucifixion as including in itself all the seemingly greater sins after it without exception or end, as equally those before it, right up to this Cross of Christ and beyond, the world being increasingly thus shown to itself. Here one needs to keep in mind, to respect, the force of the “in” in the routinely repeated but yet deeply mysterious phrase, “in Adam”, overthrowing our usual opposition of the personal and the universal or, even, merely collective, while yet the mere counterpart of what is said in the same sources (the Biblical and “traditional”) of love as 107

Strictly speaking it seems (to me) there can be no instances of the Church “commanding a belief” at some time and its opposite or contrary at another time, whatever the differences of praxis, such as belief is not, that can arise. Talk of refusing belief, even asking or begging people to believe, is actually therefore rather a begging of this gift for one’s listener from God, a position I propose as compatible with the ever-present awareness of this topos evinced by Christ in the Gospels. The belief is then revealed, either from God or from “flesh and blood” (cf. Christ’s words in Matthew’s Gospel upon St. Peter’s first profession of faith in him). We thus distinguish the gift of faith, of belief, from belief or faith, nonetheless spoken of as “infused”, as a virtue or habit. As such it is, like grace (of which it is an instance), not in our power. It is only such belief that the Church is properly concerned with. So those who believed in limbo mistook the object of their faith if they had it, a frailty, such mistaking namely, the reverse of uncommon. Nor, to my knowledge, does St. Thomas’s treatment of the matter amount to any expression of faith. Faith, anyhow, is spoken of as the only appropriate response to the reality of the infinite God, or of anything infinite, St. John of the Cross, we note again, in particular teaches.

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finally divine and/or absolute. It is even, and/or rather, the face of the absolute, is the exultant and/or worshipful claim. “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive”. One might rather say, however, that particularly on Hegel’s account all sin is just this fall from grace, is in itself a fall from the concept, not in the sense of becoming theoretically unclean because practically dirty so much as rather a fall in itself involving both theoria and praxis (and hence dissolving their mutual opposition and themselves with it, therefore) directly, something put by Aquinas and the tradition more as a consequence of the fall, as the “wounds of original sin”, a conception (as distinct from “concept”), however, to which Hegel comes closer than many, stressing nothing more than he stresses the vanity of the natural attitude. Only at death can one escape this altogether: death is “the entry into spirit”, i.e. the entry. Thus it is Hegel who warns that in the present climate, i.e. of his time, any thinker who busies himself with trying to understand God and his “ways” if any will find himself cold-shouldered and/or ignored by colleagues and the world generally. That is not the language of a “counterfeiter”, to cite Desmond on Hegel, here really taking sides with this cold-shouldering, himself wishing to be left alone with a Catholicism apparently closed to ecumenical contact or to any doctrinal development, such as the now sainted Newman had traced as its very essence, never more so than at its beginning, as we might even want to say, when God incarnate was offered to the “chosen people”, as they then were (and surely remain so today), of old. There are, then, many ways to kill a cat, the cat in this case being Georg Hegel. On this Catholic side Etienne Gilson had identified the modern development, which he disliked, as in large part a fruit or outcome of the thought and tendency of Duns Scotus in his differences, particularly, from Thomas Aquinas.108 Scotus turned out to have been right, from the eventually canonised (1854) Catholic viewpoint, on the Immaculate Conception of Mary, whereby she, “mystery of sinless life in our fallen race”, never for one moment even lay under divine condemnation. So for her even as first conceived, by St. Anne, say, limbo would never, in any possible world, have been in prospect, a point which St. Thomas in some sense had denied, while Scotus a generation later taught that what he identified as God’s great love for man, perhaps as it shines out from the Davidic Psalter these thinkers all recited regularly, would have issued in divine incarnation, the assumption of human nature, whether or not man had sinned or really “fallen” (pace Hegel), i.e. from grace. It is because this is 108

Cf. Gilson’s On Being and Some Philosophers, PIMS, Toronto, 1951.

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so that the culpa can be reckoned felix, as eliciting more of this antecedent love, viz. incarnation with, in addition, the laying down of the life assumed, on the Cross. Thus within this modern post-Scotist development, intra- or extraecclesial, space was created for further consideration of this most astounding of mysteries, the “phenomenon of man” (Teilhard de Chardin), this “further” being plain to see in the so to say blinded affirmation of Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II, “What is God? What is man?”, in the implication namely, that the two queries belong together. It is within this relatively, at least, new situation that space is created, demanded, for friendly dialogue, without hate, from whatever side, with the genius of Hegel, while calling him counterfeit comes across merely as a relic, in our century now, of twentieth century Irish Jansenism109 (intensified by American transplantation?), whether from Desmond or his openly mocking, malicious even, colleague, he of the Polish stained- glass spider, Cyril O’Regan, in an odour of unfreedom one learns to nose from afar. Hegel certainly did his best to identify with Lutheranism though not without seeking to reform this reform, and it is that attitude which, seemingly unwittingly, draws him in a measure back into the Thomistic Augustinian fold, from which he speaks with contempt of those who would rather have it that there is no God than that there is no world. The command, “Love not the world”, is thus far well fulfilled in his absolute idealism, identified by him as the religious attitude. To have found this “counterfeit” … One is best reminded of the blind hatred for Jews rampant in Eastern European “folk Catholicism”, as John XXIII, Pope, may well have discovered in his pre-papal diplomatic assignments there, resulting in his deletion early on in his papacy of the adjective “perfidious” attached to the Jews in the old Good Friday liturgy: “Let us pray for the perfidious Jews”. Nor do I deny that they were perfidious. Who has never been that? It is not the issue here. But is this part of what Hegel means to warn against regarding the “soulless word is”, in favour rather of the Platonic awareness, of course in a different context, of things which “both are and are not”? * So, anyhow, I would like now to refer back to Amos Yong’s critique of William Desmond’s dismissal of Hegel as just noted. While I am in sympathy with the project I am puzzled, but also intrigued, by some of 109

As once paired, by the late Fr. Herbert McCabe OP, in a talk given at the Leeds University Catholic chaplaincy, with the original nineteenth century French Jansenism.

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Yong’s interpretations, more of Hegel than of Desmond. His first paragraph sets the scene, broadly indeed: Already by the middle of the eighteenth century, the quest for a via media or third way between Calvinism and Arminianism, between deism and pietism, between rationalism and empiricism, etc., was well under way. This was the context in which Wesley attempted to develop an Arminianism that was but a hair’s breadth from Calvinism, and a pietist spirituality which did not ignore the demands of rational religion. By the end of the eighteenth century, Wesley’s third way was gaining momentum among the young churches called “Methodism”. Yet on the philosophical front, things had complexified with the legacies bequeathed by Hume’s scepticism and Kant’s agnosticism. It was in this context that Hegel attempted to develop a third way between reason and revelation, between intellect and feeling, between Enlightenment and Romanticism, between necessity and freedom, between nature and history; and between the state and the individual. And, since then, philosophers and theologians have been forced to reckon with Hegel’s legacy, either retrieving and reappropriating his contributions on the one hand or exorcising his ghost from their projects on the other.

This is a masterly paragraph indeed. One recognises Hegel in his situation with an exactitude almost becoming a seeing of him for the first time. But well, what else is recognition dialectically than this ever-diminishing “almost”? Yong, anyhow, is in a position to draw this illuminating parallel with Wesley, quite unexpectedly for most of us. My own focus for comparison with Hegel would be Aquinas, while the more usual reference tends to be to “the Aristotle of our time” rather. Yet here too we find the coincidence of opposites implied by Amos Yong’s talk of a “third way”. Aquinas was not the Aristotle of his or any time, nor, for that matter, was Aristotle the Aquinas of his. Here we touch on time itself, with which, all the same, we severally, insofar as absolute subject in every instance, can otherwise have nothing to do. Time is the principle of individual separation, of “parts outside parts”, necessary to spirit only for so long as spirit needs it, as Hegel “jokingly”, which is or can be the same in its difference from instantiating it at least “dialectically”, remarks. Thus “where we are at” is just therefore no place in particular, if thought absolutely, not ever at some time I mean, is rather the absolute centre expressed by the word “at”, into which we are one and all absorbed. This is “the Idea” or, indeed, God, Hegel’s main point being, as ever, that we cannot say anything absolutely110. 110

This is of course a “contradiction in performance”, awareness of which, i.e. of the necessity for it, leads to his apologia for dialectical contradiction specifically. Among other things this point is really the eventual refutation, as it seems to me at

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The synthesis drawn in the individual moment (of time particularly) by each thinker is the window from which just he shall look out. We could call it, and it is often done, his style merely. It is the point at which thought, in thus communicating itself, becomes, without loss, “animated by a pneumatological imagination” (title of Yong’s review). Thus each of us understands the Irish farmer’s reply to the young hiking couple, stuck in a bog perhaps, asking for the way to Tipperary, viz. “Well, I wouldn’t start from here”. The point is, they had to, he didn’t. This must be at least part of the answer to Hegel’s question, “With what must science begin?” In short, I find the attitude, and it is firstly that, of our two Irish stalwarts, unlike that of their imaginary compatriot above, enjoying the support of a U.S. Catholic university, somehow mean-spirited or less than fully catholic (without an initial capital) in either case111. I was interested to read that Desmond had been producing his case against Hegel at Louvain, just where Georges Van Riet had produced his tripartite “The Problem of God in Hegel”, i.e. the original French version, though I gather there was a previous presentation of this work in Latin at a Thomistic Congress, probably held in Rome, quite some years before, i.e. very close to or within the 1950s. Perhaps Desmond discusses this carefully argued yet revolutionary work, produced in the very heart of European Catholicism. Regrettably I have been able to find very little discussion of it indeed!112 What grieves one is the way our two Irish professors seem simply unable to enter sympathetically into the Hegelian largeness of mind, which has in reality nothing to do with duplicity, being “counterfeit” and so on, his integrity rather rubbing off on us, if we would let it, at every line. I suppose they cannot forgive his being anti-Catholic in some measure. But that is so superficial (of them). If one is in the know, as I suppose they are more so than I am, then Hegel’s integrity and sheer and simple “niceness” should indeed have been rubbing off on them at every line. There may perhaps be something purely American here, an uneasiness in presence of the European any rate, of Elizabeth Anscombe’s influential criticism of C.S. Lewis’s argument against “naturalism”, namely that, without this further reference to thought, as found finally absolute (as distinct from her pseudo-absolutising of a purely formalist logic: even Aristotle in his life-time did not finally stop at that), no metaphysical truth, inasmuch as found dependent upon truth in our mental processes, can be derived. 111 Cf. my The Orthodox Hegel (a reply in essence to O’Regan’s The Heterodox Hegel), Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle-on-Tyne, 2014. 112 I would mention that it was just Amos Yong here who supplied me, at my request, in the 1990s, with the English text of Part I of Van Riet’s work. I remain most grateful indeed for that. I had come across English versions of II and III in two cast out and trampled copies of Philosophy Today from the late 1960s, while in Lesotho, Africa, and was in a fidget to get hold of Part One.

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or more typically British ethos that can pop up regularly where we might least have expected it. How much we all lost, for example, through the inability of their main generals in 1944 and after to tolerate Montgomery’s obvious psychological blockheadedness, despite the much needed cooperation. The generosity was just not there. Not even the Anglophobe De Gaulle sank to such childishness, really something of an unacknowledged “inferiority complex”, in his handling of Churchill’s perhaps comparable and, it may have seemed, ruthless assumption of superiority. So here we have the Churchill of philosophy and he wasn’t even a Catholic, as nor was Newman later, until he became one, thus changing many such attitudes if not overnight, so to say. Had Hegel been so then all would have been forgiven, given a generation or two, from the Irish side at least. One only needs to start to read O’Regan’s piece on the spider and ninety-five theses (sic), if one can stomach it, to be convinced of this. Of course Hegel’s prejudices blinded him at clearly identifiable points, those where he just didn’t see the Catholic point, again, of which the rest of his writings show him to have been perfectly capable of seeing. He maybe would have needed another twenty years or so. They were not granted him, or us. In short, I incline to think that the gift of The Science of Logic, in its two versions, to the Church of today is at least in some respects comparable to Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (c.1845) as offered to the Ecumenical Council of 1962 to 1964, comparable I mean under some aspects, without meaning equal in worth, inasmuch as Hegel more simply recalls one merely to the classical metaphysical position, unless indeed mere re-naming can amount to a development, as is indeed the case. For here moderate or immoderate realism is renamed as absolute idealism, indicating identification with the divine “viewpoint” which, of course, contains and transcends all points of viewing in just one absolute view, itself not at all separable from what is viewed. Hegel holds out for this truth of ascetic theology, exploration of which Newman for the most part humbly eschewed. Hegel’s predecessors here would rather be the authors of such texts as The Cloud of Unknowing (fourteenth century English: anonymous), Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence (eighteenth Century French: De Caussade SJ) or, very much so, with Newman here at least, the Bible, of which Newman uttered the judgment that “orthodoxy stands or falls” with recognition of what is called Scripture’s “mystical sense”. Otherwise Hegel’s predecessors, although in philosophy Plato (not so well known to St. Thomas) and Aristotle, Leibniz and of course, willy nilly, Hume and Kant, are Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, John of the Cross, known or relatively unknown to him. Yet one may find his curious mention of

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Spanish poetry a nod, in default of anything else, to the last-named. For it is the spirit of these, all the more powerful in its sober renunciation, akin to the inner style of St. Thomas, of all untoward enthusiasm or “hot air”, that those who know them, and not just to the letter, might and often do recognise here. Who can have missed, for example, or failed to note, the sincere disdain (rather than mere contempt) Hegel evinces for those who would sooner believe there is no God than that there is no world, while, if one goes so far, how shall one miss the suggestion, implication even, that there is in truth no world, i.e. in the same sense as God is and alone is as being God, this in turn, however, revealing or first disclosing the sense, in its absoluteness, of esse?113 True, this is not the sense of it as belonging to language (one need not say “our”) as “the soulless word ‘is’” (no need to take him as referring just to the copula, omitted in Russian and some other languages: simply because, we just noted, he is not discussing language). One can find this set out in detail in the introductory chapters of the Encyclopaedia Logic (including the Introduction to the whole work) immediately preceding the chapters on “attitudes to objectivity”, these, as I noted above, containing perhaps the severest and/or profoundest critique of “the critical philosophy”, viz. Kant personally and solely, penned to that date or maybe since. Here also is where he warns that anyone thinking of discussing the question of God with the seriousness it deserves will in this his day, as so often in ours too, find himself misunderstood and shunned. The note of personal experience is plain to note, the adulation of his students coming later. Meanwhile we may take note of the following: There is something in its object concealed from consciousness if the object is for consciousness an “other”, or something alien, and if consciousness does not know the object as its self. This concealment, this secrecy, ceases when the Absolute Being qua spirit is object of consciousness. For here in its 113 With regard to this, if we return again to St. Francis’s Deus meus et omnia, note that while, as we have noted, the usual translation in English as “My God and my all” unwarrantedly subjectivises the whole exclamation which the original meus applied solely to God as identifying Him, even while (or even, on the developed view, just because) wholly mine, with all things, omnia or, it follows, all being, esse, Hegel’s Absolute Idea, the Thomist actus actuum. This insight has precisely the opposite effect which functions, nonetheless, as correction of the irrepressible subjective factor but in qualitative elevation to a more profound level, as a truly rational consciousness, indeed like faith itself, transcending individual immediacy while simultaneously making, or mediating, in and as acknowledgement, God’s limitlessness, the force of identification with omnia, one’s very own, as God in the first place to the one adoring or praying.

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relation to consciousness the object is in the form of self; i.e. consciousness immediately knows itself there, or is manifest, revealed, to itself in the object. Itself is manifest to itself only in its own certainty of self; the object it has is the self; self, however, is nothing alien and extraneous, but inseparable unity with itself, the immediately universal. It is the pure notion, pure thought, or self-existence (being-for-self), which is immediately being, and, therewith, being-for-another, and qua this being-for-another, is immediately turned back into itself and is at home with itself (bei sich). It is thus the truly and solely revealed. The Good, the Righteous, the Holy, Creator of Heaven and Earth, etc. – all these are predicates of a subject, universal moments, which have their support on this central point, and only are when consciousness goes back into thought.114

Yet “when consciousness goes back into thought” refers, in itself, however tight or otherwise Hegel’s own hold upon things here may have been (he has rubbed the magic lamp either way - the genie has appeared), to an event defined in the belief-system as in itself a grace, i.e. given by God and not captured or achieved, in the nature of things, by man. Here, then, Hegel’s text coincides with or mirrors the role of faith without his needing to say so directly. This does not make it “counterfeit” (Desmond). Consciousness, by making use of thought, has aroused a sleeping giant, “meant”, as St. John of the Cross will express it, “to cease all thinking”, because, simply, thought itself has roused the spirit pictured merely as sleeping while, rather, transcending all thought, one might say because it is thought itself, as, say, faith knows. Now faith proper is a progressive journey from the immediacy of subjective feeling to what is better called, if still representationally, a “dark knowledge”, which has perhaps to get ever darker: “when you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He”. There is something of a compelling unity between this and the oracular word to Socrates, “Know yourself”, an “only” being implied, although as the opposite of a limit, as in St. Thomas’s, reply on being asked by God what he wanted: “only Thyself”. For it is this “only” which is everything, i.e. it means that as the world immediately and hence falsely, Hegel does not scruple to say, presents itself to be, so that alone, the divine “thyself”, stands, as everything indeed. For, he says, everything immediate is false, making this indeed into a logical theorem, i.e. not quasi-logical merely, it is important to see. His logic, then, as thus intended, is the logic of the divine logos and as such the Absolute Idea, each further step of it absorbing and/or “cancelling” all previous, in Aufhebung.

114

Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), Torchbook edn., London 1966, p. 759.

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Next upon the above, therefore, Hegel makes a distinction of vital importance between these notions and the Notion, the Concept, viz. thought as such or the “Absolute Idea”, knowing only itself, such that we shall “no sooner know it than enjoy it” (Thomas Hobbes), where or in which all is indeed, to repeat, aufgehoben or “cancelled” in being taken up or absorbed: As long as it is they that are known, their ground and essential being, the Subject itself, is not yet revealed; and in the same way the specific determinations of the universal are not this universal itself. The Subject itself, and consequently this pure universal too, is, however, revealed as self; for this self is just this inner being reflected into itself, the inner being which is immediately given and is the proper certainty of that self, for which it is given. To be in its notion that which reveals and is revealed – this is, then, the true shape of spirit; and moreover, this shape, its notion, is alone its very essence and its substance. Spirit is known as self-consciousness, and to this selfconsciousness it is directly revealed, for it is this self-consciousness itself. The divine nature is the same as the human, and it is this unity which is intuitively apprehended (angeschaut).115

The deep kinship between this style and choice of matter of writing with that of St. Thomas Aquinas, and found nowhere else116 except perhaps in Aristotle (or Ayn Rand, I once heard it suggested!) cannot but startle and should do no less, however we judge the last sentence as, at least on the face of it, making an affirmation all the same startlingly contrary to what we might find in Aquinas. “The divine nature is the same as the human …” Does Hegel simply want to show independence of the careful Chalcedonian distinction between duality of natures in one person? More probably he prefers to ignore it as Luther ignored, more or less, what did not commend itself to his judgment, from the Epistle of St. James, say, on to indulgences, transubstantiation (as distinct, at least, from his chosen term, though even so not without loss of divine “substance”) and a well-known and wide assortment of customs and beliefs proper to the Catholic body. The last example, rejection of transubstantiation117, instances a constant Lutheran tendency to de-supernaturalisation of certain matters within the world, especially in sacramental theory or theology. Hegel surely inherited this in a measure, along, of course, with certain other contemporary postures, foe 115

Ibid., p.759 (cont.). I.e. in style, though also in conceptual apparatus. Otherwise the kinship with Eckhart, one of Hegel’s main sources, is, again, plain. 117 Of course not “defined” or thus proclaimed until the later Council of Trent, however. These historical matters have a clear bearing upon Hegel’s mind-set and manner of writing so it is mere folly to ignore them, embarrassments notwithstanding. 116

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of the Enlightenment, so-called, as, certainly in theological (and hence philosophical) matters he undoubtedly was. In him, however, the tendency is made also to serve to accentuate the mystical, i.e. the total majesty of God as sharing nothing in regard to existence with “the world”, thus returning him to a Catholic view, whereby the world is dust and ashes or, literally, nothing and, as sinful, “less than nothing”, again, in the Scriptural phrase, evil and not to be loved, not, that is, as being a “positive evil” (there is no such thing) but as plain negativity, evil against good or evil as absence of good and hence of being118, as is clear in Aquinas’s metaphysics particularly, they, negativity and contrariety, coinciding or, more strictly, the absence causing the contrariety and/or conversely. So we have not a dualism here, if dualism’s error is to make evil out to be some contrary substance. It is, in Hegel’s words, mere “sham-being”. He is, if anything, more forthright even than Aquinas on this point! This and not dualism, anyhow, is the sense, again, the intent, of the command just mentioned: “Fear not them that can the body kill but have no power to hurt the soul”. “Body” there stands for world in its nothingness, precisely, even just as such giving rise to a certain fearsomeness, we noted, in this divine counsel, if we try to take it seriously, as we say, though it is surely offered as encouragement all the same. Life itself, where life stands for being, cannot be killed, as can living “things”. This, the nothingness of creation on its own or, as is then the case, abstractly taken, is the true creation sensu stricto, as Hegel over and over affirms, at the same time as he speaks of the Idea “freely” going forth “as nature”. Hence we have his philosophy of nature, the necessary intermediate section of his tripartite system wherein the first two parts are totally absorbed and cancelled together (aufgehoben) in the final Philosophy of Spirit, somewhat misleadingly, or should one say uncompromisingly, translated in English often as “philosophy of mind”. For Hegel rather sets out to show Geist as “blowing where it will” (Gospel of John, 3), perhaps with just this Gospel passage in mind. Confirmatory of this is his closing the Encyclopaedia’s “Science of Logic” with Spirit’s “going forth freely as nature”. Of course that can and does apply to mind, as here to the mind of, or which is, God. Then, on the other hand, one arouses choruses denouncing the pantheism of equating God with nature, while “spirit” leaves better the opening precisely against the divinisation of nature, which Spirit merely “goes forth as” (like at a fancy-dress party perhaps: compare Francis Thompson’s reference to “nature, poor stepdame”, who “could not slake me of my drouth”), rather than for the naturalisation of God. What is either way overcome is the false confusion 118

Cf. Aquinas, QD de potentia VII.

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of finite and infinite of which Hegel regularly complains. He speaks, indeed, of “the inherent contradiction which originally attaches to determinate being, and which forces it out of its own bounds”119: this, in fact, he will in his final incomplete set of lectures (LPEG) affirm, is what we truly mean when speaking of “proofs of the existence of God”. Meanwhile the above cited text continues as follows: Here, then, we find as a fact consciousness, or the general form in which Being is aware of Being – the shape which Being adopts – to be identical with its self-consciousness. This shape is itself a self-consciousness; it is thus at the same time an existent object; and this existence possesses equally directly the significance of pure thought, of Absolute Being. The Absolute Being existing as a concrete actual self-consciousness, seems to have descended from its eternal pure simplicity; but in fact it has, in so doing, attained for the first time its highest nature, its supreme reach of being. For only when the notion of Being has reached its simple purity of nature, is it both the absolute abstraction, which is pure thought and hence the pure singleness of self, and immediacy or objective being, on account of its simplicity.120

This seems to me to be Hegel’s commentary on the text “and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (Gospel of John, 1). Scripture and/or the liturgy, again, speak of the Word incarnate as “coming down from the heaven he never left”. Hegel’s words fit well with this, are thus not “counterfeit”. It is important to note the “seems” in the above text. Hegel has no thought of a change in God, absolutely not. So the “for the first time” refers to our apprehension of “the Absolute Being”. Here it is “pure thought” which is itself “objective being”, das wahre Seiendes, in case we had forgotten this. Without making this identification we cannot come to any kind of grasp of that absolute simplicity which Aquinas had already found, and demonstrated, that the infinite and triune God must be, just as it must “be” what it “has”. * Returning to the topic of original sin, or how did I deserve to be born of a wicked race and so on, it really does seem that Hegel has meditated concentratedly on the Scriptural phrasings. Take again, for example, the Pauline “As in Adam all die”. In Adam: this means, just on the face of it, that we really all are that first exemplary man. Thus Hegel cuts out the 119 120

Enc. 92, Zus. Hegel, Ibid. p. 760, cited previously here.

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abstract individual, just as, we might hazard, for him we really each and all are an individual vagum. The viewpoint makes more intelligible the classical acceptance, upon, firstly, its being posited at all, of the exclusion from supernatural beatitude, to return to this, of unbaptised infants. They cannot, or could not, be accorded the “baptism of desire”, or so, one supposes reluctantly, claimed Augustine (but where is the “all shall be well” in that, or even, again, in the later most melancholy, as it seems, limbo121). They are not treated, namely, as separable individuals, they “fell” in Adam as Adam “rises” in Christ. The roots of Hegel’s logic, of the Absolute Idea, seem to lie deep in the Scriptural texts, for good or ill. Meanwhile the traditional philosophical categories are quite overcome or put out of use here. This, namely, is what I firstly am. This is whom I read about in the Genesis account. We cannot simply say, therefore, that it, Adam, is the “exemplar” merely and not the individual, as one of just two possibilities. In the later Scriptural version, rather, “You are all one person in Jesus Christ”, the second Adam, that is, yet not entirely second, or, yet more radically, perhaps at first sight nonsensically, you are “members of one another” (St. Paul) or all members one of another as discerned prelinguistically, not so much non-literally merely as non-litterally or, rather, in the spirit (and not merely in spirit).122 The fourth Gospel takes these words, this new awareness, back to the prolonged last discourse there of Christ himself: “I in them and they in me”. And so, to repeat, in the Corpus Christi liturgy, composed by Thomas Aquinas for the then new liturgical feast, we have the words sumit unus sumunt mille, where one receives (the sacramental corpus) a thousand receive, i.e. as indeed members one of another. Meanwhile the text cited above further continues123: What is called sense-consciousness is just this pure abstraction; it is this kind of thought for which being is the immediate. The lowest is thus at the same time the highest; the revealed which has come forth entirely to the surface is just therein the deepest reality. That the Supreme Being is seen, heard, etc., as an existent self-consciousness, - this is, in very truth, the culmination and 121 Now explicitly dropped from the Church’s

proclamation, as we noted earlier here, which, in turn, can only mean that it was never more than a speculation. We must leave those infants, and not only them, to God in faith and confidence without all this fuss, morbidity even! “All shall be well and all manner of thing” (Julian of Norwich). 122 Wittgenstein wanted us to keep silent concerning that of which we cannot speak. The presence of a certain accent of fear there, however, is hard not to miss. Or did he just “not try hard enough” (Herbert McCabe’s suggestion). 123 Ibid. p.760.

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We seem to have here Hegel’s statement of Christian faith, fused with a doctrine of being that, as I incline to judge, squares completely, whether or not this was known to Hegel, with that of Thomas Aquinas. Both, anyhow, got a lot of it from Aristotle, mutatis mutandis.124 The lowest is equally the highest because being is immediate there, he seems to say. But is not the immediacy for us only? Answer: this “only” does not find place in Hegel, where I am (or is) “the universal of universals”. “The proper study of mankind is man”, wrote the contemporary poet. Meanwhile we have today a more thorough account of such anthropocentrism, as necessary indeed, as itself the latest form of geocentrism, one might well say, thus properly relativising the Copernican revolution in its finitude. It, in the above citation, become necessarily I (or conversely!), is “the universal of universals”, such that we obscure the issue if we insist on replacing “I” with “the I” in our speech or writing. Or, anthropocentrism only makes sense because each of us, of us, note, is I, irreplaceably, and hence something more even than answering to a haecceitas. So much for “the linguistic idiom of our time” (Peter Geach, as more than usually deferential to this idiom, however). So, a further variant, ‘the “I”’, as quasi-lexicological merely, is just not relevant here, in thought, since thought knows nothing of it to the purpose. This anyhow, beyond mere astronomy, is Hegel’s Absolute Idea, his philosophical denomination of the “living God” of religion, i.e. of religion as demanding worship and total self-sacrifice, inasmuch as He is, necessarily, self as such, in whom all “live and move and have our being”, apostle and Greek poet concur in citing or saying. “What is called sense-consciousness” is thus neither lowest nor highest, or, rather, it is the highest, as “entirely to the surface” (of the pond, say). God is here seen and heard “as an existent self-consciousness”. By whom? Well, those who hear him automatically become “highest” among conscious beings (angels are not brought in here, for better or worse). This seeing and hearing (Hegel adds an et cetera) is anyhow “the culmination and consummation” of any notion of a Supreme Being. Implicit, perhaps, is that the category of Being belongs to us human beings, universalised by Kant, all the same, to “rational creatures” or the rational creature. It is through this consummation, Hegel startlingly adds, that the Divine Being “is given and exists immediately in its character as Divine Being”. Had we forgotten that our language, of beings etc., is but a finite creation? Maybe 124 Cf. Aristotle’s Metaphysics, XII, 7, a half-page citation from which, in the original Greek, concluded Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences.

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so, but then, Hegel seems to mean to say, our finite humanity becomes standard and yardstick. This might be seen as rationale for the devotion to the “holy face” of Christ the man and Son of Man, an odd honorary title otherwise. God became himself man because of his “great love for man” (Scotus). What is the meaning of such love unless something put into man by God to make him thus uniquely assumable to himself? * Note the “what is called” (sense-consciousness) in the citation above. Hegel attempts always to surmount such idioms, thus exemplifying Wittgenstein’s dictum that philosophy just is “the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by language”, i.e. principally or uniquely, simply because language is of animal or biologic origin, with a temporal beginning in the first mouthings of the infant “rational creature”. This term, in view of the final absoluteness of the Idea, is actually self-contradictory. It is perhaps just the contradiction to which Hegelian dialectic bears prime witness but which also evokes that special virtue we call religio as a subordinate part of general justice namely. Here125 it signals rather the first vestige or initiating echo of that “joyful mystery” recognised as incarnation or, as Hegel goes on to develop this, of the “hopes and expectations of preceding ages … solely directed towards this revelation, the vision of what Absolute Being is, and the discovery of themselves therein”126. The contradiction in terms, again, is dialectical, however, i.e. cancelled in the higher truth rather than self-cancelling, or it is of the moment, reflecting what is rather called in Scripture, in what is again a contradiction in terms, “the foolishness of God”. Hence a philosophy which would ignore this development, hidden within the heart of rationality from the beginning, would indeed be in contradiction and doubly so. It would, that is to say, contradict that contradiction which is, Hegel, for one, claims, the warp and woof of reality, such as dialectic merely or faithfully reflects. By it Hegel too must in time find himself contradicted, as he acknowledged. What is the good of it, then? It entails finding one’s writings “mere straw”, as Aquinas acknowledged at the end of his life, saying he could “write no more”, at the same time(!) as one has to “go through the motions” of that immediacy (“only the Idea immediate”) which Hegel identifies as Life, declaring that death, its opposite and/or negation “is the entry into spirit”. Hence it is that in the Christian liturgy for Easter they sing127, as I mentioned above, of the 125

At Hegel, op. cit., p. 760f. Hegel, ibid. page following, emphasis added. 127 Victimae paschali laudes 126

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clashing of life and death “in a wonderful conflict”, identified as the selfwilled crucifixion of God’s eternal Word in and by the human world, “fallen” indeed (figurative though that term may be), such as the actuality of this dread act, thus willed, finally brings home to it. This apparent coincidence of victory and defeat is rather the actuality of each in the other, its opposite, with both at full strength. It is even so, Hegel’s own later writings (or the surviving lecture notes) in particular bring out, up to the point, he concedes, or the parallel, in subsequent history, of the apparent ruin of the Church or of the body of the faithful herself. Against this, nonetheless, as he cites it, “the gates of hell shall not prevail” because, as he does not cite, this Church, this organic assembly, is built upon a certain Rock (petra). He might also have named resurrection as crowning every Christian death, beginning with baptism and the rising from the waters. We may take his words as a judgment upon Protestant “enlightened” theology in the first place, while what he knew of the contemporary Catholic variety seems to have merited no more, in his eyes, than the diatribe on it near the end of the Encyclopaedia. As regards gates, however, “of hell”, indeed, it is surely those which the Church breaks down, not that mere gates attack and break into the Church, as this Scriptural verse is often read (why?). * Hegel also calls it, “this kind of thought”, sense-consciousness. He thus signals reference to something other than the senses’ own view of themselves as a heterogeneous group of finite capacities. This, the empirical (implicitly found self-contradictory here), is itself, then, illusory unless it is, so to say, transcended in its own exercise, as accompanied by reason, namely. Absolute idealism, that is to say, is not merely the alternative to an immediately realist account, such we find idealism pictured, he claims, by Berkeley or Fichte, without their demonstrating anything. It is, rather, the exit from the Platonic cave, finally seeing “life” or the old ways as they are, viz. that they “both are and are not” (Plato). By this absolute idealism, then, the so-called sense-consciousness itself is actually being in its immediacy. That is, far from being a mere contingency of a natural development, this itself that we call nature must take on, for thought, a necessity also, of a type to include what we, ensconced in nature and the natural way of thinking, call the contingent. This, as an approach, helps towards an understanding of the intrinsic nobility of, say, the human face, again, and even of the form of the body, of Immolant Christiani …

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bodies generally, too, thus reaching back into the first principles of what we see, or mis-perceive (McTaggart’s term), rather, as a temporal and hence, in the mistakenly absolute sense, contingent development, itself then just “for the moment” mainly, as it is supposed. If this be avoided the lowest is thus indeed seen as “at the same time the highest”. This reflects the position of Being itself in Hegel’s scientific logic. It is both the first adversion to what becomes, through “the doctrine of essence”, the Notion or Absolute Idea, but is itself now more specifically not merely the “highest being” but being (esse) uniquely in its perfect or natural state, with God, yet, or just therefore, including, or, rather, amounting to. being as such, das wahre Seiendes, not in a pantheism, therefore, but by absorbing and “cancelling” (Hegel’s choice of this term is intended always, in this connection, as a further exactitude) all finitude, simply as, Hegel brings out, finitude is its own self-denial in its absolute necessity. The parallel with esse as developed by Aquinas128, and the consequent difference from Aristotle (after all), is remarkable indeed. Being, further, and/or consequently, is itself personal and, it will emerge, Trinitarian even, though Hegel does not allude to or depend upon ecclesial definitions here while Aquinas denies initial accessibility of “natural reason” to the Trinitarian scheme, since the relations constituting the persons are all purely internal to the divine being. The further move is implicit, however; viz., God is necessarily a Trinity or not that at all129. Hence once revealed it cannot but shed further rational light upon the divine or absolute idea. * So what is at the surface, which is our surface, is just therein the deepest and/or highest reality, Hegel would affirm here. One can connect this with the Scotist insight, or emphasis, to repeat an important point, that God’s love for man is such that he would have “assumed human nature” whether or not sin and man’s fall into it had intervened. What does this say of God and man 128

Cf. our “Esse”, The New Scholasticism, Spring 1979 (reproduced as a chapter in our Philosophy or Dialectic?, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1994, pp. 165-177). Cf. also the work by J.P. Reilly on esse in Aquinas. 129 This recovered or for the first time correctly interpreted position is at the heart of the recent philosophical school originating at Cambridge, England, led by John Milbank and colleagues. Among its tendencies is an uncovering of Trinitarian indications (e.g. in work done there by Ryan Haecker) in pre-Christian Greek thought. Similarly, for Hegel, the Absolute Idea is a matter of or within the Science of Logic as itself culminating in it as precisely das wahre Seiendes.

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in conjoined consideration?130 Or how is incarnation, its occurrence in this world of nature, if not God’s consummation yet the consummation of His idea? Or, since these two are one, as Hegel and others, e.g. Thomas Aquinas, despite his critique of Anselm, have found, how does this, the Idea, necessarily conclude in not merely incarnation or some incarnation as such but in specifically human “incarnation”. This term, though hallowed, can mislead, as if suggesting that no human soul in particular, as in the received anthropology, was assumed. On this point, what is required is deeper apprehension of the old psychology concerned, whereby, without the soul’s being the man, the body is yet found to be strictly nothing, materia as potentia pura, without the or its soul. It is then a mere likeness, Leiche, gleich, vergleich, Swedish lik, liksom. Without this soul, or “in itself”, the body does not, as pure potentiality, strictly have anything, is not strictly anything. Hence it is the man, rather, that “has” this soul. Hegel, perhaps, wisely, prefers to speak exclusively of spirit throughout, here and elsewhere in his writings. It can seem that religion, in the sense of Christian belief, is committed to the picture or representation of a separable soul as really that. What emerges here, however, from Hegel’s texts in particular, is that presupposed to this picture as, so to say, a theological necessity is the theorem, and not a picture, of the nothingness of nature apart from God, i.e. that it is “in God” that we, nature and all finite things have their being or that God is thus the all. Compare St. John of the Cross: “In order to have the all you must deny yourself in all”. This is not just a psychological posit but is, rather, argued for at length as a truth of being, just as we find it in Thomas Aquinas, cf. his treatise “on God”, De Deo Uno (Summa theol. Ia). In Newman this becomes “myself and God” as the only two real beings, while we find here Hegel showing that the two are in a sense one, that the self becomes one with God in discovering its own nothingness apart from this allness, which is the same thing as having an intellectual nature, without which there is anyhow no self at all, whatever our fondness for cockroaches etc. It is in these terms that Hegel characterises finitude itself. One who takes communion, did we but realise it in full degree, is thus lost in the all, cancelled and fulfilled just in this cancellation, the first symbol of which in Christianity is the old and hideous Roman Cross, sanctified by divine bloodstains. What, again, is 130 Cf., once more, Pope John Paul’s (the philosopher K. Wojtyla) exclamation, “What is God? What is man?” What, even, might this say, or not say, of ChristianMarxist or similar relations? The further development of Hegel studies after Hegel’s death is a pointer here, lamentable though much of it may in origin have been. In saying this I am not urging revision of the Christian condemnation of “the world” in any respect. “Love not the world”.

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man? The transformation anyway, the putting on of the divine nature, is achieved solely by faith, inclusive of faith in the grace given131, faith as the opposite of sight, since the divine light and/or truth is out of all proportion to anything our finite nature might grasp by its own natural means. It can, that is, only be seen by a not-seeing, known by a not-knowing (also the emphatic teaching of John of the Cross, declared Doctor of the Church132). Hence, “through this consummation the Divine Being is given and exists immediately in its character as Divine Being”. Thus Hegel concludes this startling paragraph (stress added), but only before, in continuation and without break, turning the screw tighter still (up to the end of this chapter on “Revealed Religion”) or, equivalently, startling us still further: This immediate existence is at the same time not solely and simply immediate consciousness; it is religious consciousness. This immediacy means not only an existent self-consciousness, but also the purely thought-constituted or Absolute Being; and these meanings are inseparable. What we [the philosophers] are conscious of in our conception, - that objective being is ultimate essence, - is the same as what the religious consciousness is aware of. This unity of being and essence, of thought which is immediately existence, is immediate knowledge on the part of this religious consciousness just as it is the inner thought or the mediated reflective knowledge of this consciousness. For this unity of being and thought is self-consciousness and actually exists; in other words, the thought-constituted unity has at the same time this concrete shape and form of what it is. God, then, is here revealed, as He is; He actually exists as He is in Himself; He is real as Spirit. God is attainable in pure speculative knowledge alone, and only is in that knowledge and is merely that knowledge itself, for He is spirit; and this speculative knowledge is the knowledge furnished by revealed religion. That knowledge knows God to be thought, or pure Essence; and knows this thought as actual being and as a real existence, and existence as the negativity of itself, hence as Self, an individual “this” and a universal self. It is just this that revealed religion knows.133

131

Grace, that is to say, remains distinct, from the faith in its, grace’s, being or having been given. 132 Cf., again, K. Wojtyla’s study of John of the Cross written while a student at the Angelicum, Rome. The study brings out the rational necessity solely of faith, emphasised by this Carmelite theologian, in any possible approach of the finite creature, even or especially as rational, to the infinite. Intrinsic to its notion is that it is a gift from that side which, once given, can yet be lost. Hence the apostles begged Christ: “Lord, increase our faith”. This is the background, the rationale, to the talk of moving mountains. 133 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, pp. 760-761.

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By the incarnation, however, “the Divine Being is given and exists immediately in its character as Divine Being” (stress added). Otherwise this divine being is that of which all other beings are merely analogies. The incarnation then, we might want to say, reveals the divine character of thought, even our thought. Or, actually, since it has this character, our thought in fact belongs to no one and this is the mystery, the ground, of any possible truth. It is thus truth itself which appears with the birth of Christ, appears because of the finitude of nature. Thus the Word, Christ, “came down from the heaven he never left” (from the Roman liturgy). Behind this, as what it expresses, is a kind of marriage of the finite with the infinite, equivalent, however, to the former’s being absorbed or, again, “cancelled” in this transfiguration. For in figuring what transcends it the finite is indeed absorbed, cancelled, translated or transferred even. It is in this sense that the wedding Psalm, with the injunction to the bride to “forget also thy father’s house” (“so shall the king desire thy beauty”) has always been understood, while Christ’s habitual words reach right up to this. “Except a man hate his life in this world he cannot be my disciple”. Sufficiat! Here we begin to introduce the nuptial theology of the Trinity and of the course of salvation which has come so much to the fore lately, especially in the work of the previous two Popes, Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II) and Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), although the theme seems originally to have been reintroduced into Trinitarian thought by Karl Barth, writing on the image: of God in man134 around a half century previously. The divine being thus exists immediately as existing “for us”, so that, namely, we can live “in” Him, by an identification clearly, that, namely, of faith, no other approach to the infinite by the finite being possible or conceivable. “The just shall live by faith”. Faith, Christ teaches, and only faith, can move mountains, or make to walk on water. “Be not faithless but believing”. This is the true, the effective rationality. “This immediate existence is at the same time not solely and simply immediate consciousness”. Yet, says Hegel, “it is religious consciousness”, by recall of the previous finding that this immediacy, as assumed by God in his union with man, is thus made itself to be, to “mean”, what might at first seem to us its opposite, namely “the purely thought-constituted or Absolute Being” in one and the same act (of being), in a fusion from which even the meanings, or just therefore the meanings, are inseparable. The lowest is the highest, again, in this unity of being and essence such that I am what or who I am and nothing else, i.e. the unity transcends abstract existence in this its 134

Cf. Barth, K., Church Dogmatics III/2: §44; pointed out by Fergus Kerr OP, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, subtitled “From Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism”, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford 2007.

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pure or sheer being. This might seem the opposite of the Thomistic evaluation of esse as act above essentia as potentiality, yet in reality it is the same. For as spoken by or as the Absolute Idea, as intending just this, “I” is resolved into this, being into essence (mediating being and the notion in Hegel’s system), and is nothing other, while this identity can equally be reversed, my essence as rather my being (not Dasein but Sein). That I am means that I am not just a concept in the finite sense, not just essence as potential to esse, but as having my being in that esse proper to God alone. Only as such am I known or knowable absolutely, i.e. to Him, to God as the All. “In God we live and move and have our being”, as the Greek poet shall have said, declare the two apostles in Acts of the Apostles. The order of thought, human thought, anyhow, is not the order of being, which is pure act whereas thoughts are also of pure possibles. This, all of it, recalls Thomas Aquinas as much or more than anything else outside of Scripture itself, recalls “the name which is above all names”, including its own. Thus here is where the or our self-standing I is cancelled, as with the “I in them and they in me” spoken by Christ and taken as a definition of love at its maximum, where life is laid down, perpetually, for the friend. This love is the chief “existential” demand upon us, that is what is revealed here. It is even the “I”, as finite and particular, crossed out (in being raised to the universal). Hence we have Hegel’s talk of “religious” consciousness, something anyhow in reality quite transcending the apparent immediacy of this (i.e. as it first appears to “the religious consciousness” as only thus able to initiate the process, the life of faith as what alone could enable the approach leading to eventual union of finite with infinite). It “brings to nought the things which are”. Such thought, that is, such revelation, desolidifies, by which is meant not merely a dissolving, the most hallowed metaphysical conceptions. They are rather raised up into a previously unguessed unity, identity even or especially, rather. “What we [the philosophers] are conscious of in our conception, that objective being is ultimate essence, - is the same as what the religious consciousness is aware of.” This is worth repeating. The unity of being and essence set forth here is the same unity as that of thought and immediate existence which is just what, he has said above, the divine incarnation achieves and reveals in and as one. It remains the case that if final esse is the fully actual or “ultimate essence” then essence, the order of essence, is effectively annihilated. Esse and essence in fact make up two quite distinct orders, roughly correspondent with uncreated and created. What Hegel insists upon is that, distinct (the Thomist “moment”, so to say) or not, they belong together, but that as one indeed, while if we ask which one the answer has to be the uncreated. To this corresponds the Scriptural picture of

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each one (of the ones) loving his neighbour as himself, where, if all do that, then “there am I in the midst of them”. So the command to love the neighbour as self, implies his or her being self, while what I do to him, well or badly, inasmuch as to him, I do to Christ, says the latter (q.v.). This series of identities, however, does not stand alone but only as participating all, the Absolute Idea. It is here that idealism and realism merge, i.e. absolutely or conceptually. It depends, again, upon esse being the act to which essence is potential. You bear this fruit in me or not at all, says Christ again. By this we can see that Hegel has not fallen back to Aristotle from Aquinas (cf. our earlier remarks on Aristotle and essence, citing J.P. Reilly). “God then is here revealed as He is”, Hegel declares meanwhile of the human and incarnate Christ as, indeed, “the Word”, one with God, “made flesh” although God transcends all change. In Scripture this is spoken of as a “treasure in earthen vessels”. Yet earth, dust, is itself the conventional symbol for nothing, i.e. it is this, so that the phrase “creation out of dust”, of Adam particularly, is metaphor for creation as such or not “out of” anything, the same applying anteriorly to the earth, i.e. the material or “natural” universe, as we say. We have, the Church has, faith in “the resurrection of the body”, meaning that of the whole man, only “rising” from what is pictured as a material grave or sepulchre. Rather, such graves, containing often just dust and ashes if that, are themselves such “pictures” (recall Hegel’s critique of Kant’s “tenderness” towards “the empirical”) by our reasoning here. The wider “picture”, meanwhile, includes that of an addition to “separated” souls already otherwise enwrapped in the perfect blessedness of visio beatifica135. It founds, typically, “religious consciousness” as Hegel uses the phrase. But if time too is pictured, does merely picture eternity, as its “moving image”, then entering heaven on departing this life or being “reunited” with our bodies is finally just picture in so far as belief in these mysteries is confused with the postulation of temporal events. They are rather very truth and hence they are not events merely. That is to say, the validity of the final mysteries of faith is necessarily beyond their guaranteed representation in orthodox religious language, that of the believing community, which follows the same rule of discourse and/or communication as did Christ on earth in saying, for example, “this is my body” (sometimes mocked as an invitation to cannibalism) or “I go to wake” Lazarus (i.e. before “saying plainly” that he is dead). The same applies to contradictory talk of an end, or a beginning, to time, these two terms themselves presuming time. As, in religion, St. Paul 135

This point was hotly disputed at a point in late medieval times, a situation exacerbated by the private remarks, in correspondence, of one of the Popes.

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says “with Christ I hang upon the Cross” or, sacramentally, we speak of being “risen with Christ in baptism”, so do we, if elect, “sit with Christ in the heavenly places”, not as if “the resurrection has already occurred”, a view, again, that St. Paul condemns as false, but inasmuch as it is that blessedness which is one with eternity, as neither a when nor a where136, an already or a not yet. That is, we must recognise, if we talk at all, that we are using pictures and that, in Hegel’s words, theology will always need its pictures, as surely philosophy too, from Plato’s cave onwards. Nor does the mathematised language of the dominant contemporary school of logic escape this. The debate here must move around asking what we mean when we say “three”, say. Or, to put it differently, does the Aristotelian phantasm merely “accompany” our thought? Can that be the sole meaning of its inevitability? It has been the effort of these pages to show that Hegel does not think so, that thought itself, rather, is enmeshed in the error, as he sees it (by comparison with the Absolute Idea knowing “only” itself), of finitude. So, Hegel concludes here: “God is attainable in pure speculative knowledge alone”. This indeed seems contrary to orthodoxy, contrary indeed to faith as such and the virtue of faith. But note that Hegel says this in consequence of what he adds here and adds, I would maintain, as supporting his first statement, namely that “God only is in that knowledge, and is merely that knowledge, for He is spirit”, while adding further that “this speculative knowledge is the knowledge furnished by revealed religion”. Knowledge and being are not distinct in God (Aquinas says the same), i.e. are not really distinct but only, Hegel says elsewhere, “distinct in the way of distinction”, which is that, the way, of human composite and finite speech, with its “parts outside parts”, such as we find in all nature and in the finite as such. Philosophy, as Plato found, is bound to attempt to say the unsayable, thus transcending inter alia the bounds of all possible university or other curricula, just by the way137, which is not at all to say that it should not be studied and, in some sense as yet to be specified, practiced in universities. Geach has suggested that the separated soul, after death and before the general resurrection hoped for in faith, might be thought of as “existing in the thought of itself”. This speculation has the undoubted merit of bridging, 136

This is substantially the account of “heaven” which Peter Geach retailed and defended, principally in an address given to sixth-formers near the end of his life, as McTaggart’s account of it, praising it as more approximate to orthodox faith (such as McTaggart claimed not to possess) than what is suggested by a majority of today’s leading theologians. 137 Cf. our “The Place of Philosophy in a University Curriculum”, The South African Journal of Philosophy, November 1991, pp. 111-115.

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or attempting to bridge, the dilemma of realism versus idealism (just as we have been finding in Hegel). Existing in the thought of itself, namely, its conceptual merit, is that it is an exquisitely Hegelian notion, however Geach came upon it. Actually ideas and private property do not fit together conceptually. So Geach does not mention it as anything other, e.g. a citation, than his own thought. It would, anyhow, resolve our dilemma in trying to specify Hegel’s “thought” along, doubtless, with such thought as such and as alighted upon by many, as transcending the realist/idealist divide. Thus Timothy Sprigge refers to his own “recent” stance as “akin to the views of … Whitehead who aimed to synthesise realism and idealism”. Of Hegel he says he was “not undeniably committed to any of the theses here taken as definitive of idealism” but not, that is, of “absolute idealism”, which could as well be named “absolute realism”, corresponding to the doctrine of esse as, in Thomas Aquinas, in reality God alone or, rather, God together with all created spirit(s) alive in God as, says Christ, “with me one vine”. Sprigge adds, concerning Hegel: The physical world is certainly for him in some sense an appearance of spirit to itself by means of which it develops in human life to a stage of full selfconsciousness, but ‘appearance’ here may mean rather emanation than something which only exists for a subject.138

The idea of a divine development, as if God were himself “in” time seems to me quite inapplicable, however, and certainly not at all “certainly” in Hegel, who writes, surely at least half in jest, that time is “real for spirit only so long as spirit needs it”, i.e. in the musings of our finite spirits. “Emanation” certainly can overcome the finitely idealist suggestion, however. In general, where realism takes the form of absolute idealism the absoluteness of the Thomistic and/or Biblical chasm between God (esse) and the creation as realm of finite essence(s) can be thought of as beginning to be understood better by us, i.e. understood as being something totally unknowable to us. Again, “We know most about God when we know that we know nothing”, declared Aquinas, adding that God in fact has no direct relation with us but, rather, in identity, with his own idea of us, each one of us. Yet from this it would seem to follow that that idea, and not something loosely or in imperfection corresponding to it, is in every case the reality. Otherwise, like the nations, we are “nothing and less than nothing”, prior to or apart from the divine love and, so to say, attention, in Christian belief 138

Timothy Sprigge, “Idealism/Realism”, in Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, ed. Hans Burkhardt & Barry Smith, Philosophia Verlag, Munich, Philadelphia, Vienna, 1991, 2 vols., pp. 377-379.

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taking the form, necessarily it seems to be meant, of unimaginable selfabnegation. * The knowledge furnished by revealed religion “knows God to be thought”, i.e. no reduction is intended. It is rather thought that finds here its proper elevation to “pure Essence”. By thought, namely, we know essences, i.e. truly so, because thought is itself “pure essence” or essence as such, ultimately the Absolute Idea which is All in the All’s full consciousness, viz. absolutely self-consciousness, most nearly approached by our finite thought in the Science of Logic, which thus does not destroy the faith which it elucidates, ultimately in theologia just in, as starting-point, its complete and utter deference to it. We are speaking now of thought as such, what it is. That is, as follows from the Hegelian dialectical logic itself, thought must be liable to complete cancellation cum absorption in esse, i.e. in the divine or absolute being (esse), to which thought, inasmuch as it is essence, especially “pure” essence (sic), is completely in potentia. I do not find in Hegel here anything entailing denial of this consideration, even if it is not there occupying the foreground precisely. Or are we missing this? Dialectical thought, after all, specialises in simultaneous affirmation and denial or so it can, again dialectically, seem while, self-evidently, it offers no means for refuting the position since this would either repeat itself at level after level or close down, as some of Plato’s companions feared. Hence Hegel will eventually seek to show, or at least make a beginning of this, that thought’s office is not, self-contradictorily, to “prove God”. He thus in a way undercuts, inasmuch as he might be successful, Aquinas’s apparent critique of St. Anselm. The thought which God is, the Absolute Idea, is itself actual being. That the converse is equally true is here implied, that God is ultimate reality, to use a once popular phrase, and hence “a real existence” even, to use the favoured finite category, actually, adds Hegel, “the negativity of itself” since, he affirms elsewhere, that is just what the finite is. It is due to this, surely, that Aquinas does not phrase the question utrum Deus existat but utrum Deus sit (of which esse is the verb, as act: actus purus and so, necessarily, infinitus, transcending all “objecthood”, as we might call it). It is thus too that God is, as seen by us, “Self, an individual ‘this’ and a universal self”, therefore. “It is this that revealed religion knows” (Hegel). The hopes and expectations of preceding ages pressed forward to, and were solely directed towards this revelation, the vision of what Absolute Being is, and the discovery of themselves therein. This joy, the joy of seeing itself in Absolute Being, becomes realized in self-consciousness, and seizes the whole

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Chapter Five world. For the Absolute is Spirit, it is the simple movement of those pure abstract moments, which expresses just this – that Ultimate Reality is then, and not till then, known as Spirit when it is seen and beheld as immediate selfconsciousness.

Here Hegel shows, again, awareness of divine grace, which as a topic or thematic element finds otherwise not much specific mention in his writings, conspicuously in his seemingly naturalistic interpretation of the account of the “fall of man” in Adam as indeed nothing but the loss of innocence, a loss necessary for adult moral maturity. Thus awareness, of this his awareness (of grace) might prompt us to look more closely at that apparent reduction, though without guarantee of reversing our impression, also that of MacIntyre when he speaks, as cited already above, of the whole Prussian tradition in which public law and Lutheran theology were blended, a tradition which Kant, Fichte and Hegel tried but failed to universalize.139

This refers principally, though not without corresponding implication, in MacIntyre, of the neglect of the factor of grace just mentioned, to Hegel’s problems with the relations of Church and state, his rejection of what he took to be the Catholic position here. This remains, as most forcefully expressed by the murdered Pope Boniface VIII (c. 1300), in the document Unam sanctam, that it is “necessary for salvation” for all, i.e. as a saving truth, though “invincible ignorance” or simple prejudice may possibly hide it from us through life without our personal fault, that we, from kings to serfs, be “subject to the Roman pontiff”, as to Christ’s “vicar” as it would later on occasion be put. Just this moment of Christian belief and that as a constant factor of it, of belief, namely, in “the Petrine office”140, both engendered the Constantinian thousand year or more settlement and, due to its “unworldliness” in the political sphere, nonetheless ensured, it may seem, its eventual unfashionableness in this wicked world (which is not to deny that it was in Newman’s sense a necessary development of orthodox doctrine), as was in a way prefigured prophetically by Constantine’s own removal of himself away from papal proximity in order to found that city once bearing his name. For here at Rome, as principal see of Peter and his successors, apostolic authority, built upon a rock-like (petra) witness, takes away from the world’s kings all inward or unconditional subjection of spirit 139

MacIntyre, op. cit., p. 11. Hans Küng’s chosen phrase for an office he describes and critically examines very much upon his own terms.

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to them by those believing the message preached by that indeed apostolic body to the “world” and its representatives. This world “lies in the hand of the evil one”, rather, it is taught. Hence it is not to be loved. Monarchs, above all others, must show themselves, therefore, as being and remaining “in grace”, ordained by God as “the powers that be” or not. So much, i.e. everything, for “Roman Catholicism”! Inevitably, rejection of this affects the way all the Christian doctrines are taken by the one rejecting. Yet Hegel, while not, so to say unspiritually, acknowledging a direct legality here (Aquinas’s lex divina), attempts consistently to theologically underpin the main Christian dogmas as indeed, according to his lights as we say, acknowledging them, e.g. in his critique of Jacobi’s procedure as being a more extreme form of “spiritualisation” than that proclaimed by the Church or constant Christian tradition (or “the Bible”). Here, however, we find Aquinas affirming that lex est aliqualis ratio iuris., i.e. generally or as such and nothing more, not the ius as such, while his final account of lex divina as lex nova squares entirely with this. It is written on the heart, i.e. it is not written at all.

CHAPTER SIX GRACE

Man is created, then, not merely in a state of innocence, which Hegel regards as in some fundamental way inferior to that of “knowing good and evil” (here, though, he adverts to the distinction, thus far rightly, between knowing evil and committing it). Man (Adam) is, i.e. he was, just as man, created in a state of grace, according, that is, to mainstream Christian belief, explicitly taught in tradition as in scripture. What, though, is this state of grace? Can it be considered philosophically at all? Must it not be thus considered, rather, if one is not to misrepresent man’s beginnings along with his present state, misrepresent, further, the Cross of Christ and the Christian religion? In St. Thomas’s main but unfinished (1274) Summa of theology we find a treatise (tractatus) specifically “on grace” following directly upon a “treatise on law” and its four kinds, viz. eternal, natural, human and divine. Grace, in fact, is a transcendence of natural law and or/of a hence purely hypothetical state of pure nature, in transcending which grace fulfils as perfecting it. So the fall of man, a notion Hegel explicitly reprobates, saying in effect that if man is fallen then God is not God, is specifically a fall from grace, understood as the divine love and friendship. Man simply couldn’t “fall” from just nature, after all, without ceasing to be man! Note, though, that Hegel’s objection can be argued to be against the appropriateness only of the term “fall” for what shall have occurred and not against the presupposed occurrence as such, which he interprets or re-interprets, rather, not without brilliance. Such an objection, however, would be found, all the same, to be rooted in Hegel’s ignorance of or ignoring, within the dynamics of the Genesis account as understood theologically, the fact that the fall was a fall from grace, not some kind of absolute or unspecified fall. To explicate this grace further, and the fall from it, I turn first not to Aquinas directly but to a modern theological document of some authority, viz. Katholischer Erwachsenen-Katechismus, das Glaubensbekenntnis der Kirche, given out by the German Bishops’ Conference and published, by apparently seven different publishers in concert, from Bonn in 1985.

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Mentioned there is that theology, building upon Scripture, distinguishes between “the createdly natural character and the graced or freely given and supra-natural divine image of man” (p. 125, my translation). This comes in section 3.5, specifically treating of “the graced vocation of man to fellowship (Gemeinschaft) with God”, following upon 3.4, Wesen des Menschen or what man essentially is, and 3.3, “The Divine Image in Man” (i.e. the grace treated of is not just this latter, which remains constant, but something yet more specific, viz. the graced vocation141). Meanwhile 3.2 posits as fundamental that man is God’s creature. Here the bishops, and/or canonical theology, distinguish between man’s natural or created likeness to God as indeed image of the same and the graced or freely given, and only or supremely this, divine image in man. Hence Aquinas points out that grace is something within the graced one whereas God in himself is, in the here relevant sense, without or outside, even granted that any creature has as such its being “in” God. So God is not his grace, even granted, again, that we must guard against treating grace as some kind of means of eventual sanctification merely. The bishops, then, distinguish grace from the transcendent divinity. It, grace, is rather the latter’s indwelling specifically. The Reformation (Protestant) doctrine on the other hand, they claim here, applies the concept of the image of God exclusively to the mentioned graced community with God and not to the still divinely created if presently “fallen” man. They, the bishops, mildly add that this difference can be overcome through attention to the stress made by Jesus Christ upon this natural divine image, along indeed with graced participation in His reality. The supra-natural “state of grace” of our first parents, according to theology one of holiness (the personal contact with God) and hence sinlessness, brought with it the so-called praeter-natural gifts, four of them, as enumerated early on by, for example, St. Bede of Northumbria (source cited by Aquinas). By these there was originally no conflict of body and soul, no “concupiscence” in general, but a wholly harmonious person who, secondly, suffered no mental confusion while, thirdly, he was free from pain

141

This is the aspect later stressed by Duns Scotus and others of God’s “great love for man”, whereby he would have joined Himself to him (the incarnation), whether or not man had sinned or, hence, fallen from such grace. Aquinas, in only apparent contrast, points out that the immediate cause or motivation, so to say, of the divine incarnation in Jesus Christ was man’s fallen or sinful state, making of Christ precisely saviour and “redeemer”, perhaps his main titles. The Scotist emphasis, anyhow, is what is dominant, if differently described, in Hegel’s account of the closeness of relation between God and man, for him too “the rational creature”.

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and suffering, sweat and toil. Fourthly and especially, however, he was free from death. All of which is to say that God, according to the same source, created man not only good, very good, but as participating in God’s own divine life, by grace. He created him in grace. Natural man, that is, is a mental construct. He is either graced or “fallen” simply (according to the Biblical account man and woman fell together or as one, whatever lesser differences one may or may not wish to draw from the text). According to John Duns Scotus, again, God would have assumed human nature whether man “fell” or not, because of his “great love for man”, the rational creature as Kant has it. This is so even though, as Aquinas stressed, man’s sin, his fall from grace, was the immediate cause of or motive for divine incarnation. This, as I noted above, is highly significant. Without this standpoint Hegel’s philosophy could hardly have come about, as regards especially the place he gives to thought as leading to his derivation of the Absolute Idea. Yet one might feel prompted next to ask whether the Lutheran system we have reprobated above, and which MacIntyre attributes to Hegel, could have come about, whether rightly or wrongly indifferently, without this previous Scotist moment. If so then this is highly significant for ecumenical relations, given that Scotus has recently been raised to the Catholic altars, i.e. either beatified or now further “canonised”, besides, more significantly, being declared doctor ecclesiae. As with Newman, it all took some time. On the question whether grace can be considered philosophically at all I find that the right approach to this is the one exemplified and/or defended by John Milbank and colleagues, as mentioned above here, viz. that the attempt to treat philosophy in abstraction from theology, as both have developed, is an abstraction indeed, with which, however, theologians too have at times cooperated in perpetrating. Like grace and nature, however, the two thus abstracted from one another by the finitude of human language are concomitant, rather, in reality and not two stages or levels whence one ascends or descends from the one to the other. In this sense indeed “everything is grace” (Rahner, somewhat double-edgedly) and God is “naturally” at work everywhere and in everything, as First Mover indeed, i.e. continually and constitutively. Of course the saying “everything is grace” is not to be taken so as to rule out differences across the board such as that of being “in” grace or out of it, graced or graceless and so on. For then grace is made nothing at all. Here, however, one cannot help but recall Hegel’s apparent animus earlier on in his Phenomenology against what he seemed to see as a perpetual and hence in some sense vain “giving of thanks” (gratias). Part of his meaning undoubtedly is that this is “bound” to be insincere. The question though, if

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any, would concern why, according to him anyhow, it is, so to say, bound to be thus bound. The text of St. Thomas is free from these oddities, while what Hegel writes about and concentrates on is thought. God is thought, as the Absolute Idea, prior to all or any “predication” and multiplicity, in all and “containing” (likewise “cancelling”) all. It is with this in mind that one can best read his following, so to say ecstatic (and truly so) two paragraphs (the first of which is also cited on its own above): The hopes and expectations of preceding ages pressed forward to, and were solely directed towards this revelation, the vision of what Absolute Being is, and the discovery of themselves therein. This joy, of seeing itself in Absolute Being, becomes realised in self-consciousness, and seizes the whole world. For the Absolute is Spirit, it is the simple movement of those pure abstract moments, which expresses just this – that ultimate reality is then, and not till then, known as Spirit when it is seen and beheld as immediate selfconsciousness. This conception of Spirit knowing itself to be Spirit, is still the immediate notion: it is not yet developed. The ultimate Being is spirit; in other words, it has appeared, it is revealed. This first revelation is itself immediate, but the immediacy is likewise thought, or pure mediation, and must therefore exhibit and set forth this moment in the sphere of immediacy as such.

It looks as if, with his account of self-consciousness, as “Spirit knowing itself to be Spirit”, Hegel is meaning to give a philosophical (yet why not say theological?) account of the virtue of faith in action, as act. What distinguishes and indeed elevates it is that it shows itself, as we read on, to be simultaneously an account, of course highly speculative as we say, of Christ-consciousness in and as its development from a consciousness tied to human individuality. This idea, or this account at least, is distinct from the orthodox version given in terms of a duality (of natures). It need not be heretical for that, though it might be.142 Thus It is a one, an excluding unit, which appears to that consciousness, for which it exists, in the as yet impervious form of a sensuous other, an unresolved entity in the sphere of sense … the shape it assumes has not as yet the form of the notion, i.e. of the universal self, of the self which … is thought, universality, without losing its reality in this universality. 142

I cite again, while translating, from the Catechism given out by the German Bishops’ Conference, 1985, the following: ‘The relation between nature and grace is therefore not, so to say, best thought of as like that between two levels set one upon the other or two “orders” having nothing to do with each other. For in both it is a matter of realising the one salvation-plan in Jesus Christ’ (op. cit. p. 125).

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One might equally, in support of this, compare the contrasts between Christ’s mortal body and his resurrection-body as it appeared to his disciples; one could insert one’s hand whole into praeternaturally gaping wounds on this body which, furthermore, could pass through locked doors, make itself personally unrecognizable and so on. In all this we have the regular notion of the relation between nature and grace, of which the miraculous is a mere sub-species, though sufficient to make grace vulnerable to both ignoring and ignorance by self-styled philosophers or their hangers-on. This is thus a variant upon the general populism that goes with universal literacy, for the time being at least. My general point, however, is that the factor of grace is mentioned in and cannot be omitted from an objective interpretation of the Eden account of a “fall of man”. Nor can it be omitted, therefore, from an account of man in his relation to God, where God is conceded to be the ultimate reality of thought or the absolute Idea.

CHAPTER SEVEN NO DOCTRINE OF GRACE IN HEGEL?

Hegel recommends not using the term “God” in scientific (wissenschaftlich) writing, a rule or principle he himself frequently ignores. It could anyhow hardly apply to theology, while Hegel’s tendency, following Aristotle, is not to distinguish theology from philosophy, although of course he recognises that a distinction, of which, say, in the second Christian century, Justin Martyr was innocent, whatever we say of Augustine two centuries later, has been in place. Thus he must have recognised the separation of the two in the universities where he himself held positions, as the principle itself illustrates. Today, anyhow, that distinction along with, ultimately, its institutional consequences if any, is being challenged by various practitioners of the one or the other discipline, most remarkably perhaps, as mentioned here above, by that group originally led or, so to say, chaired by John Milbank, from the side, in his own case at least, of theology. In the case of Hegel it was rather philosophy which refused to stand back from limitations the theologians or even the Church generally had wanted to impose upon it. We ourselves are arguing here that the dichotomy is to a great extent illusory. This is the position that Peter Geach’s writings were approaching towards more and more up to the time of his death. Thus one of his last works143, originally an address given to sixth-formers, identifies the relevant work and thought of the declared atheist McTaggart as a better account of the beatific vision, no less, than that found, it seemed to Geach, in the work of a majority of those today, institutionally or ecclesiastically, styled theologians (as of course was once Aristotle as author of the Metaphysics, as including, terminating in, theologia, as Hegel terminates his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences by citing the self-same Aristotelian statement of this, and in the original Greek too). 144 No name here, that is, for God, should be “proper”. Proper names, besides being of towns etc., are proper to persons. Yet Hegel himself declares that “God is the absolute person”, and thus he is named, or so to say de-named, 143 144

Peter Geach, Truth and Hope, University of Notre Dame Press, USA, 2001. On this cf., or cp., Rudolf Steiner’s essay “Moses” (1911).

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in Scripture. “I am He and there is no other.” Here indeed personality finds its fulfilment, as it must, in the conceptual, i.e. dialectical requirements of infinity. By this we may speak with some on occasion of a “beyond personality”, although this hardly squares on the face of it with Trinitarianism. There we have three persons who, however, are each identified with the respective Trinitarian personal relation, a clear case of dialectical contradiction just as meaning to deliver the reality. These relations are not or cannot be predicable of that person who is the relation, we want to say. Yet that is just what is the case. Ipsae relationes (between the persons) sunt personae. Filius, for example, is filiation. Father, the father, is fatherhood and it is just from this relation and person that “all fatherhood in heaven or earth is named”, the Apostle tells us. Does this mean that the persons are identified with the relations between them? Between whom, then? Ipsae relationes sunt personae and conversely. This is the doctrine of Augustine and Aquinas, again shown to be breaking finite linguistic rules. But consider “I and my father are one”. What else does that do? This is the final background to Hegel’s affirmation that contradiction, of or in language, is the “stuff”, the warp and woof, of reality. There is of course no contradiction in “the things”, or in reality, should there be only one “thing”, as in a sense there is and so it has to be. This is just what our language strives to get at, without ever succeeding. We cannot, for example, abandon the subjectpredicate structure, of saying something of something else or, most characteristically, saying it of itself but in a different way (this is the hylomorphic analogy of the subject-predicate structure), by which, incidentally, there can be no “simple” atoms or particles. This is the route by which Hegel concludes that the one is many, the many one. Thus behind Plato’s statement that the same things both are and are not is that statement itself, that thought itself, which alone IS. The absolute idea is the absolute as the Word is son, person. “In the beginning was the Word”, parallelling the original “In the beginning God” of Genesis, hence continuing “and the Word was with God and the Word was God”, i.e. wholly. This is Hegel’s principle, itself dialectical but no less true for that, of the essential restlessness, in total calmness, of Spirit or mind. “He was in the world and the world was made by him and the world knew him not.” As Hegel will emphasise, He, the Word, was “made flesh”. Essence here disappears inasmuch as all potentiality is fulfilled and hence as potentiality, as essence, “cancelled”, simply as having its being solely “in God” as that absolute being (which Hegel claims to be the Absolute Idea), viz. esse. “Die Methode

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ist der reine Begriff, der sich nur zu sich selbst verhält; sie ist daher die einfache Beziehung auf sich, welche Sein ist.”145 For Hegel, the classical Greek scholar, Methode here will have preserved the literal etymological sense, “according to the way”, meta hodon. Thus the identification of theoria, the pure idea, with final praxis, or the converse rather, is explicit, could not be clearer as we say. * Much of Hegel’s doctrine of God, his meditation on God as we might also say, has been retailed in our preceding chapter here. We have noted that it scarcely differs from that of Aquinas or, I would add, of Augustine or St. Paul (all of them, furthermore, soaked in the Psalms of King David, the Biblical “Psalter”, for which this attribution to David is traditional), whatever claim, if any, his doctrine may otherwise be making. But really it is more a matter of his, Hegel’s, not making explicit claim, in regard, namely, to divine grace, such as we have been discussing.146 The pages of Aquinas on grace, the tractate on grace, following upon the treatise on law in his main Summa, Ia-IIae, are among the subtlest, and exquisitely so, in the whole Summa147. Our difficulty, our holding back from retailing any of the traditional roles necessarily played by grace alone, as theology appears to teach, comes, I suspect, from our tendency to assimilate the theological concept to that on grace in aesthetics, where it does seem more an immediate intensification of existing qualities of the art-work than it might be any specific quality in itself. So we might begin here by showing 145

Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II, Werke 6, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt-amMain 1969, p. 570. This whole final section of the Greater Logic is relevant. Otherwise perhaps especially p. 552, “Die Methode ist dies Wissen selbst” and following could be read up to the conclusion as cited above here. 146 The German word for grace, Gnade, does of course occur in Hegel’s pages, in the Phenomenology of Mind, for example, at pages 623 and 625 (Baillie translation, 1966), the first occurrence being within scare-quotes (absent in the original), thus emphasising the point we are making, that these are not properly theological usages of his theological term. 147 Law and grace are, for St. Thomas, the two external principles whereby God, himself “external” in this context, moves or inclines us, rather, to good (as the Devil to evil!). Cf. Summa theol. Ia-IIae QQ 90-108 for law, QQ 109-114 for grace. For St. Thomas it is a case of the external become internal, whereas many later Scholastics as, a fortiori, more “modern” theologians, tend to see grace as naming God himself in specific action rather than grace itself as a distinct and infused quality acting within man. Thomas rather insists on this latter, even (cp. Ibid. Q110: he says there that grace is not a quality of the soul but a certain movement thereof: art. 2).

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how Aquinas teaches that divine grace is specifically different from any grace in the human world of art or manners merely, as a preliminary to showing its “necessity for salvation”, the stock phrase for something very precise and of very great moment. He does this at the same time as he shows full awareness of how we, along with some of the dissident theological teachers of modern times, can easily allow the substance of this notion to elude us. We have already noted the claim that the first human pair were created “in grace”. We will now look more closely than we have so far done, even though we have mentioned some of the manifestations indicating a “state of grace”, at what this might mean, not only, though, as concerns our first parents but, following Aquinas, firstly as concerns grace in general, what, how and why it is, whether, firstly, its notion posits something “in the soul” (aliquid in anima) and not merely “in God” as external principle, i.e. external, again, although allowing that “in God we live and move and have our being”. That is, although we are and have to be in God, given the “nothing and less than nothing” that are “the nations”, yet what of the divine might be in us, in this sense of especial favour, is and has to be not simply God over again but other, whether as a special mode of His presence or as some conceptually distinct quality. St. Thomas here insists on this with all the delicacy and subtlety at his command, at the same time as he surely does not forget those hallowed words, “I in them and they in me” or the apostolic “Now you are the body of Christ” or, again, “I and my father are one” (i.e. in and throughout all our difference, e.g. that he is invisibly in heaven while I am here on earth talking to you: grace too is a difference in general sameness, so to say). Note first, again, that St. Thomas titles the first quaestio (this term literally means “seeking”) of this treatise, “Of the exterior principle of human acts, namely of grace”. That is, “grace” stands here for the exterior (to us) specifically. Thomas speaks expressly of “the” exterior principle. The term actus here, translated “acts”, is more specific than would be “human actions”. God has given us whatever power of acting we have, namely, however we may go on, e.g. with Hegel later, to explain our evil acts, if any, or in what sense or measure they are or may be, although in some sense good, finally evil. Malum est semper in subjecto (bono). So grace is the first, the exterior or leading principle of all our graced acting (see below), at the same time as it, this power, is clearly distinct from God himself as first mover. That is, there is a “power” to be divinely moved not merely “logically” prior to being thus moved. Of course this makes of grace something like a more or less permanent potentiality. No matter! That is the prime setting of this treatise, even though we are needing to study it rather for clearer understanding of the canonical account of man’s “fall”

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specifically, i.e. from grace, and of how this account plays in some so to say technical sense an “apologetic” role as explanatory of the evil in our human world and so is thus not a simple relation of our maturing out of innocence, as Hegel rather seems to suggest. So, specifies St. Thomas, we will consider three topics: (a.) the necessity of grace, (b.) grace itself as regards its essence, (c.) its specific kinds (de ejus divisione). (a.) Concerning the necessity of grace, St. Thomas discusses ten pairs of alternatives (Q 109, in ten articles). I list his findings: First, again, man needs divine help (note this broad sense of “grace”) as moving his mind to its proper act. This requirement really falls completely under the general Aristotelian principle of a single First Mover, of and in all movement. Second, in a general state of integral nature man still needs a gratuitous superadded virtue, viz. grace, in order to produce or will any good surpassing his natural grasp. Third, man cannot naturally love God above all things, as naturally he should, without grace moving him to this, while in our own nature’s corrupted state healing grace is needed beyond our nature so as just to begin this. Fourth, while man in a state of integral nature could fulfil all the law’s commands yet now that our nature is corrupted he cannot fulfil them without healing grace. Fifth, without grace man cannot merit eternal life, he simply can’t. Sixth, man cannot prepare himself for reception of grace without God’s gratuitous help, i.e. grace, already moving him interiorly toward such preparation. Seventh, man needs the help of grace to rise again after falling into sin. Eighth, without grace man is not able not to sin, as he could in the state of integral or unfallen nature. Ninth, although when existing in grace man does not habitually need further grace to remain in grace, he still needs grace in a way other than the habitual, such as direct movement by God, first mover of all motions after all. Tenth, even when constituted in grace habitually man needs a special extra grace, not habitual, to persevere to the end, i.e. to maintain the habits of the virtues (the grace of perseverance).

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This list may appear to some as more than once attempting distinctions without difference. Its main result, however, is that it puts any idea of a necessity placed above God out of court. The divine necessity is precisely God’s freedom in all things, as is shown in both Aquinas and Hegel, for whom it is the very absoluteness of the Absolute Idea itself as truly and simply all, as even this prefixing of the “the” (as in “the all”) tends to obscure, as, to borrow Hegel’s phrase, only “distinction in the way of distinction”. The all, namely, cannot but tend to liken it to as thus suggesting some largest individual of a group. God, rather, is simply all. Even if St. Francis puts this in the plural, Deus meus et omnia, yet we may recall the uncertainty, if even that, as to one or many, of classical Greek grammar concerning the neuter plural generally. It takes the singular of the ensuing verb, something the schoolboy can only find totally puzzling if he thinks about it at all, as later in life he may begin at least to do! “All” as a word or term is of course indifferent to this (as is “everything” when one word only). We say “all men” as we say “all water” or “all my strength”. As excluding all else, anyhow, it expresses the polar opposite of pantheism, which would falsely divinise all else. “You are of more value than many sparrows.” (b.) We next (qu. CX), following Aquinas, consider this necessity we call grace as to its essence (quantum ad eius essentiam). First, it is necessary conceptually that the divine has or preserves freedom in its notion (grace, therefore, as what is freely given essentially). It must be supremely free inasmuch as freedom (from constraint or limit) is constitutive conceptually of the infinity proper solely to divinity in its essence or as what it is and what it isn’t, as the negation of all negation(s), Hegel will emphasise, preferring this more general term here to the more specific “limitation” and similar. To negate negations is a more total mental operation than to limit limitations. The motivation is thus more metaphysical than formally logical merely. Some, indeed, seem never to have formed this notion of infinity, or indeed that of Absolute Spirit, the matter of art as of religion nevertheless as, in perfect self-reflection, of philosophy. Philosophy thus belongs to, has or is, as to its necessary aspiration, sophia, the final intellectual virtue. It thus has as its business or object, sic Hegel, “religion and nothing but religion” as seeking the absolute or truth. On this, viz. grace as essentially free gift, Aquinas has, articulates, just four articles (articuli), i.e. divisions or moments of thought as to:

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First, whether grace posits something in the soul. Aquinas answers that a person’s being said to have God’s grace signifies something supernatural in the man or the woman as coming from God over and above the way of nature. Second, whether grace is a quality of the soul. Aquinas answers that man receives gratuitous help (grace) from God in two ways: first, inasmuch as he or she is moved by God to knowing, willing or doing something. Here the gratuitous effect (ipse gratuitus effectus) is not a quality, e.g. as “infused”, but a certain particular motion (by God) of the soul. By a second way of such help, such motion, however, man specifically, i.e. the rational creature, is also helped by the again gratuitous will of God as indeed infusing some habitual gift into the soul, which will thus be a habitual motion, as the habit of some virtue in the way of nature is not. As one reason for this Aquinas says it would not be fitting if God should provide less to those whom he loves, through the whole extent of that supernatural good which they should inherit as rational beings, than he provides to those less than rational beings, such as animals or plants, that he loves only to the point of their natural fulfilment, e.g. those we still tend today to call God’s creatures especially, such as the animals. To these he effectively gives everything they have and are inclined to, i.e. connaturally and easily (et disponit omnia suaviter, he cites from Wisdom 8, 1). Rather by much more, then, does he help those he calls and moves by a variety of special graces (i.e. these themselves are help and more than help) towards obtaining supernatural and eternal good, infusing forms or supernatural qualities by which they are moved, sweetly and promptly (suaviter et prompte) as ultimately by himself, to the attaining of the eternal good. In this second way the gift of grace becomes indeed or after all a certain quality, but by, specifically, a “habitual motion” but in a self-conscious liberty non-rational creatures lack. There is nothing “quaint” about this consideration of Aquinas’s here. It rather underlines simply how the creation as such is assimilated more and more to its creator the higher it rises above the original nothingness, while this whole trajectory in just any of its moments up or down is merely analogous to that original divine Word in which alone the Father speaks or utters Himself wholly. In fact the whole creation is but an analogy of God, which is why Aquinas reasons that God has no real relation to his creatures but only a “relation of reason”. They are not in the same way as He IS. Nonetheless or just therefore, Duns Scotus reasoned, God’s love for the rational creature man is so great that, as we have noted Scotus as saying, he would have assumed man’s nature, taken flesh, whether or not man had

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sinned. We have seen how this is echoed, consciously or not, in Hegel’s logic, while anyhow Scotism had become the leading philosophical strand in the Catholic “schools” too, particularly at that time, the Thomist revival lying still in the future. Grace, that is, marks a stage in the assimilation of man to divine life, “I in them and they in me”, while such grace comes to final expression in the domination of the Cross in Christian sanctity, this being the mark of grace’s divinity or, hence, all-sufficiency. Thus in Hegel too the Absolute Idea stands alone just because it absorbs in identity every one of its offshoots, of each of which it may thus be said “This also is thou: neither is this thou”, just what Hegelianism never tires of emphasising. In this way the world is no sooner created than it is “cancelled”, to repeat, taken back. Without the cancelling there would not be the creating. Cancelling is thus the more radical notion, expressive also of the Trinity of or in God, whereby any divine person is his/her relation to the and/or any other divine person and the same applying from that other too. These are God’s real relations, exclusively internal or otherwise a relation of reason only (cf. Summa theol. Ia 13, 7). Yet it is a mistake to think this means that these Trinitarian relations must be forever opaque to us, simply because of themselves undiscoverable (as is taught). They have only to be proposed, or the revelation has only to be considered, for its total reasonableness to shine forth and possess the mind, most notably still perhaps in Augustine’s great work or above all in the indications of Scripture he expounds, the clue perhaps being that if God is a Trinity then it is necessary that he be necessarily so. This, incidentally, points to the grounding of the legitimacy of Hegel’s finding this metaphysical necessity in the necessities of logic, such as we have cited him on this above. Third, whether grace is the same as virtue. As these articles progress there is a sense of Aquinas as coming nearer and nearer to his own conclusion, or to knowing how to express it rather, since for sure it is a view that he has held all along, implicitly at least, in virtue of the system of belief in general. In some sense everyone does this, knowing in advance what would or would not be in harmony with their inward convictions, sometimes called disparagingly mind-set, as opposite of an “open mind”. In truth the openings are only here and there in mind, as you cannot have doors without a fixed wall. The unity of grace and virtue, in truth as we say (“full of grace and truth”), their identity, is a strong prejudice. St. Thomas shows full appreciation of this, while pointing out that grace cannot be one of the three theological virtues, as one would expect, not even charity. He cites Augustine, gratia praevenit charitatem; the prevenience here is clearly conceptual rather than,

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irrelevantly, temporal merely if at all. Next he notes that some, including the highly respected “Master of the Sentences”, claim that the distinction between grace and virtue is one of reason alone. But this cannot be true, he claims, hoc stare non potest. His argument is complex. Virtue is a certain disposition of the perfect as disposed according to nature, i.e. perfectly, he cites from Aristotle’s Physics. From this it follows that the virtue of anything is predicated of some pre-existing nature it has as being congruent with it. Clearly, however, such virtues, acquired by human actions, conveniently dispose man to accord with that nature whereby he is man and no more than that. But the infused virtues, by contrast, dispose man in a higher way as towards a higher (altiorem) end, namely participation in the divine nature (i.e. and not just the human). It is just this which is called “the light of grace”. And according to the acceptation of just this nature we are said to be regenerated “into” sons of God: Just as, therefore, the natural light of reason is something beyond the acquired virtues, since they are posited as in order to that same natural light, so also the light itself of grace, which is a participation in the divine nature, is something beyond (even) the infused virtues, which (indeed) are derived from that light and are ordered towards that light. (Ia-IIae CX, 3).

So, just as the acquired virtues perfect man’s congruence with the light of natural reason (without being identical with that), so the infused virtues (faith, hope, love) perfect his congruence with the light of grace indwelling (without being identical with it). Fourthly Aquinas asks whether grace is in the soul’s essence as subject or in some one of its powers. He concludes to the former option. Grace is principally, per prius, in (and hence of?) the essence of the soul.148 It is important to see what is at stake here, what is meant. It seems to me to be something that puts St. Thomas on the side of the philosophers, of Hegel in particular, as against even Scotus and a majority of later theologians, up at least to the nineteenth century Thomist revival. Thus Scotus too, along with those maintaining that grace must be the same as virtue (in 2 Sent., dist. 26), the distinction between them being only one “of reason”, seems to maintain that grace possesses or subjects the will specifically, and so does not lie 148

It may or might be noted here that much of this discussion on grace bears upon our earlier discussions (e.g. in previous writings on Hegel) of the objections posed by Fr. Daniel Jamros SJ to vindications of Hegel, whether wholly or in part indifferently, by writers typified by him as “young”.

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immediately in the essence of the soul. This clearly tends to a more purely moralistic rendering of grace, rather than the more “mystical” (metaphysical) or realist perspective of St. Thomas which finds, indeed, a certain confirmation in Hegel’s account of thought or mind as absolute. Thus the essence of the soul, for Hegel, using to some degree a different set of categories (the ones, namely, that he systematically goes on to cancel or, rather, finds, by his reasoned investigation, systematically cancelled), is mind or thought as, finally, the Absolute Idea which is identical with, or which thus absorbs, all other ideas, meaning ourselves in the first place. Or, which is the same, it is, as absolute, nothing on a par with any finite notion of an idea. Yet Hegel has otherwise no clear account of grace, we are finding. Thus it is, again (i.e. it is the same absoluteness), that St. Thomas reasons that God has no “real relation” with his rational creatures (or anything else than himself), but only a relation “of reason”. All or any of his real relations would be internal, hence unknowable to us except by God’s gracious selfrevelation, though we can know in advance of this that there can be no composition in God. Hence the Augustinian solution, concerning the Trinity, frankly dependent on the Scriptural declarations (of Christ mainly as recorded), finds that ipsae relationes sunt personae, these persons, furthermore, coinciding (each having what the others have, namely the whole integral divine nature: “I and my father are one: he that has seen me has seen the Father”) in their distinctness, in that way preserving or indeed enabling the divine simplicity.149 This, too, is what Hegel understands by the Idea Absolute (as needing nothing, necessarily, it has a “life”, an act or activity of its own), compared or contrasted, rather, with Life, which is “only the idea immediate”. It is thus natural for us to say, on occasion, it is life, i.e. our life, which is “no life at all” (Teresa of Avila). It is not the Idea. We might recall the injunction to “hate” our life in this world as condition, again maybe a “fearsome” one as immediately viewed150, for discipleship. As the Word was and is God, so, in Hegel, is the Idea God, at the same time as it and/or He is “the system of logic”. “For thinking means that in the other one meets with oneself”. This parallelism of word and idea is instructive. Hegel agrees with Wittgenstein that language obfuscates thought. This, in 149

It is against this orthodox Christian background that Hegel can speak, as if by contrast namely, of what are “distinctions only in the way of distinction” or, equally, his phrase may be taken as applying to precisely the Trinitarian distinctions without in any way his lapsing into Sabellianism, i.e. into denying the relational differences as a (revealed) reality. Thus Christ can say “I and my father are one” but as adding that “I do everything that pleases Him”. 150 Recall, though, Hegel’s dictum that “everything immediate is false”.

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fact is why such slogans as “The meaning of a word is how it is used”, even when culled from Wittgenstein himself, are deeply confusing, especially for young undergraduates, for many of whom such would-be smart slogans are their first introduction to what philosophy might be or be about. For St. Thomas, rather, to return to our theme, grace is an entitative participation in the divine nature and could not be anything else, as if, for example, confined to the moral plane only151. It was in this sense, if one considers, that the Saint of Lisieux declared that she had no virtues, the implication being that she didn’t want them, did not want to step down from being immediately moved by God, by grace, in the essence of her soul. The notion of inspiration, readily lending itself to considerations about art, for example, is congenial here, though all the more so spirit itself. Art is for Hegel the first and most immediate form of Absolute Spirit, leading into religion and, ultimately, philosophy as absorbing and destroying both. Recall here De Lubac: Christianity, or Catholicism, “is not a religion, it is religion itself”. Now Hegel says this, in effect, of philosophy, that it is the highest fruit or form, as act, of Geist, the wisdom of God himself, which can appear to us, sunk in finite religion or religion’s denial, as foolishness. Geist all the same, he rather urges, is born of art in the sense of a self-revelation to or expansion of the senses. This, in fact, seems to be meant absolutely rather than as a comment on our particular human situation, particular at least as thus seen. It is thus, anyhow, that he speaks of the incarnation, as highest because lowest, on this absolute scale, so to say. Participation in the divine nature, then, sanctifying grace, as it is properly called, is participation in the divine nature, as it is said, breath-takingly, that Adam “walked with God”. Only because of this does it come to function subsidiarily as some kind, the best kind, of moral medicine, promoting final emergence of the truly “beautiful soul” or saint: By grace we are regenerated as sons of God. But generation terminates in the essence rather than in the powers only of what is generated. Thus grace essentially realises itself (per prius terminatur) in the essence rather than in just the powers of the soul.152

151

Nonetheless Hegel does say somewhere that genuine religion, or religiousness might be the better term, originates exclusively on the moral plane, or words to this effect, whether in deference to Kant or not. Yet he plainly elevates morality itself, as a branch of the more primal dialectic of good and evil, to almost the or an angelic sphere, like St. Thomas in this. 152 Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia-IIae CXI 4, sed contra.

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That is maybe why philosophers have found grace difficult to deal with153. If not in Kant then in Hegel there may be a sense in which the turn away from virtue in at least his moral philosophy (if such an animal can be found) may be yet more religious, more mystical, than the traditional tabling of the virtues, in a truly Eckhartian sense: “If God were not, I would not be, but then if I were not, God would not be. By God, this is true!” I here recall, from memory only, Eckhart’s miscalled “Neoplatonic ravings” (Peter Geach). Yet the I, Hegel affirmed, raved, is “the universal of universals”. One may connect this problematic with Hegel’s discussions, original indeed, in his very latest lectures, On the Proofs of the Existence of God in particular, on the necessity of, precisely, the contingent. What God wills, even as contingent, is just thereby more necessary than any other kind of necessity in our human milieu, since God has willed it, this being just the factor, namely, that we habitually abstract from. This necessity, of course, is not a necessity for God. His freedom engenders a necessity in us “here below” which we cannot but call in that respect contingent, rather, i.e. “absolutely speaking”. Yet also this phrase is another contradiction in performance, by our reasoning here, while that, I suggest, or awareness of it, caused Eckhart’s raving on this one occasion at least. Grace, then, says St. Thomas, in this final or fourth article of this quaestio, is in the essence of the soul as in a or its subject and not in some one or other of the soul’s powers. Hence it is precisely by grace that a person is said to “become a new creature”. Residing thus in the soul “as subjecting it prior to the soul’s specific powers” means that grace is in the soul’s essence. As a state of being it is prior to acts of virtue, cause them though it may. Thus just as man through the intellective power participates in divine cognition through the virtue of faith, while according to the power of the will he participates in divine love through the virtue of charity, so also through the nature of the soul he participates according to a certain likeness in the divine nature through a certain re-generation or re-creation. … Just as from the essence of the soul flow its powers as principles of the soul’s acts, so also it is from grace itself that the virtues through which the powers are moved to action flow into these powers of the soul. And according to this grace is

153

As is acknowledged to be the case, at least or particularly in studying the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, by Eleonore Stump in the course of her painstakingly enlightening study, as cited above here. She accordingly says not much about it, sc. grace in St. Thomas. So the pain here at least is entirely mine (see below, a few pages on).

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compared to the will as moving to moved, like rider to horse but not as accident to subject.154

Grace, that is, is far superior, as a new creature, to the virtues it activates. And so, as I recall the headmaster’s prayer at my “prep” school on Sunday nights, perhaps after a visit home: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit (or was it “Ghost”?) be with you all for ever and ever. Amen” (emphasis added). Grace, anyhow, is “like rider to horse but not as accident to subject”. In other words, the difference between Aquinas’s and these other accounts, at least if they be taken literally, is all the difference in the world. Philosophers commenting on theology need to be alive to this. Then they will feel enabled to write on grace, its notion, as, once this notion is to be found “riding” there, they should. (c.) This brings us to St. Thomas’s third topic here, that concerning the specific, or at least155 specified, kinds of grace, viz. De divisione gratiae (Summa theol. Ia-IIae, question CXI, in five articles). But within the limits of our purpose here, of situating Hegel’s treatment of “the fall of man” specifically, it does not seem germane to investigate these further details, of great interest nonetheless as, in particular, offering further clarification of many points mentioned here. Meanwhile I would emphasise that my introduction of the theme of grace here and my treating of it at such length and relative thoroughness is to be understood as support for my claim that there is no valid philosophical account of the infinite God that ignores, by implication denying, the rational consequence of there being an actualised divine grace, towards man in particular, as what is only explicable, under just this name, grace, as an 154

Ibid., ad 1. This qualification of “specific” by “specified” touches on the relation of language to thought since by it I refer to language as itself a referring or specifying activity, as investigated especially, or more systematically than in Wittgenstein, by Hegel. One might be tempted to say he investigates nothing else, at least inasmuch as it is precisely the investigation of language that there, as his counter-example, sets in relief or merely serves to confirm the absoluteness or non-relatedness of thought to language or to anything other than itself, “no matter what I say”. “Now language is the work of thought; … But language expresses nothing but universality; and so I cannot say what I merely mean” (Enc. 20), i.e. even or especially when I would say “I mean so and so”; i.e. just that, as to my meaning it, is what I say here and even here, in saying “I mean”, I do not “say what I merely mean” (to say). 155

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actual forgivingness, unless the previous sin, wrong-doing, evil etc. be denied too, which would raise a yet bigger problem for dismissers, or so at least one would think. Do, after all, materialist socialists really blame those they find unjust? They rather seem to dismiss them as “vermin” or as otherwise unserviceable, like the Polish martyred officers at Katyn, exactly, so far, as Hitler or his Nazis claimed to view the Jews, who, consequently (they further claimed), by this cruel and/or mad consistency, had no rights. The finding some to be unjust, therefore, is simply surface rhetoric on their part. Justice belongs, rather, to the world-view being rejected, though this is not to be trumpeted out to every Tom, Dick and Harry, just those, namely, that they, the controllers, need in order to get through with their hideous project(s), one either self-contradictory or, one must conclude, at the least fundamentally nihilistic. This, of course, is just what a prescient Dostoyevsky set out to emphasise in his main novels, while in Orwell’s sustained brilliance we see repeatedly (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-four), amusement soothing despair, that the chief or most immediate annihilation perpetrated by this type of socialism, typically national, is that done to language. “All men are equal but some men are more equal than others”. Why, though, are or were the controllers so idealistic, in this inverted sense, unless it is or was all a hypocritical cover for their subjection to those basic or baser desires so well known, again, to Tom, Dick and Harry? The true hypocrite, it is often noted, does not know he is one, does not literally blow a trumpet when giving alms. He is one, rather, who lacks in some measure the feeling for reality, “knows not what he does”. So the worst tyrants might seem to be the most pitiable of all, pity itself the phenomenal issue of our disgust and frank horror, eventually shared not infrequently by those even who participated! But who has not, whether before or after 1789? We only escape this net we (or some) call the world one by one and with difficulty. “Unless a man hate his life in this world he cannot be my disciple.” This aristocratic message remains addressed democratically to all without distinction. It might seem then the most extreme socialism of all, whether actual only or conceivable, “cancelling” particular notions at least as ruthlessly as we have found such cancellation recurring in Hegel’s “system of logic”. Surely this suggests a very close relation of these two proclamations, the evangelical and Hegel’s, be they otherwise different in type. Or which of them is harder to understand, for “the natural man”? Or is grace, after all, in some sense offered everywhere and to all, to partake of what we can and not what we can’t? But why the apparently logical need, in an account of God, for grace towards “man in particular”, the linguistic animal? We have touched here and there upon this point, in relation to divine incarnation, as man, namely,

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but not as horse or eagle, say, in particular, and then as just one man, in whom, however, all shall find place, if they wish156. Interpretation, along with affirmation, of man as being “in the divine image” seems important here, also as underpinning the Scotist stress upon God’s “great love for man”, such that he would have (is this a genuine or more than grammatical mode, though?) become incarnate, as man, whether or not man had sinned or “fallen”, even if sin, in actual reality, as St. Thomas had stressed, is what necessitates, as the moving occasion thereof, so to say, Christ’s coming as saviour. The Augustinian felix culpa, we might in consequence surmise, and to repeat, requires broader interpretation than is usually given it, one more closely related to Hegel’s profound claim, as based upon a deep “natural theology” of God as First Mover indeed, that “the factual is normative”. Here too one may well recall Hegel’s collapsing of the contingent into the necessary, and the necessary into the divinely free, in his later or final lectures and preparatory notes, on religion chiefly, a philosophy finally concerned, then, “with religion and nothing but religion” (Hegel). We return to further consideration of Hegel’s extensive critique of Kant as of empiricism in general, at the other extreme, so to say, of Jacobi’s reactionary celebration of immediacy, as Hegel analyses his philosophy as instantiating. These are seen as two wrong solutions to the initial problem posed by thought’s first “attitude to objectivity” which, he judges, lacked all “sense of the contradiction in thought, or of the hostility of thought against itself”.157

156

Aquinas devotes several articles, quasi-comically in some ways, to this nest of questions (Summa theol. III). 157 Enc. 26.

CHAPTER EIGHT TENDERNESS TOWARDS THE EMPIRICAL?

The titular approach questioned here is attributed by Hegel, critically, to Kant. Although seeming to name just a contrary approach to his own, however, it rather signals a near-total reversal of Kant’s thought, as is best charted in the section “The Critical Philosophy” of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia I, “The Science of Logic”, 40-60. This treatise is in fact lifted bodily from a much earlier work of Hegel’s, viz. his “Three Attitudes of Thought to Objectivity” (it is the second attitude), written during his school-mastering days but which he clearly saw no reason substantially to alter158. This long section on Kant is paired with, or prefaced by, so as to make up the second “attitude to objectivity”, his account, precisely, of “Empiricism”. Hegel will have none of it. To situate this, note that the first attitude is characterised as “the attitude which has no doubts and no sense of the contradiction in thought, or of the hostility of thought against itself”159, while the third attitude160 is entirely taken up with Jacobi’s endorsement of “immediate knowledge”, as against Hegel’s totally contrary position, viz. that “everything immediate is false”, though perhaps just therefore the two, empiricism and immediacy, are easily confused on a superficial reading, of some passages at least. They are indeed not entirely separable in reality. There is a peculiar “apologetic” intensity about this tripartite work, here deliberately resurrected in toto as a kind of alternative in method to The Phenomenology of Mind as prefacing the system. Hegel intends, in fact, with his “science of logic”, to offer and defend what is most accurately regarded as the true sense of solipsism, truer, in some sense, than the later “religious” version of it offered by Newman, viz. that there were just two “real” beings in the universe, myself (himself?) and God, though Newman was, clearly, perfectly aware of the shortcomings of his formulation. Yet he nowhere, to my knowledge, says it was false. He 158 Cf. G.W.F. Hegel. “Stellungen der Gedanken zur Objektivität”, in Hegel Studien Ausgabe, Band III, Fischer Bucherei, 1968. 159 Enc. 26, emphasis added. 160 Ibid. 61–78.

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merely thought it proper for the human creature to stick to the finitude of the gift to it of language, eschewing dialectic, an attitude which we find preserved throughout in the procedure of Thomas Aquinas, well aware of the paradoxes it necessarily generates, such as that of saying that God has no real relation to his creatures (or, alternatively, that is just where he overcomes the paradox, e.g. of theological or other language generally). God is at one, ones himself, with each and any of his creatures, in that identity which is a relation of reason alone. Yet, or thus, it is a one-sided identity, Hegel makes clear, in which the finite member is absorbed and annihilated in that infinite, in the Idea that we call God, meaning thereby the supremely real, however. “This also is thou; neither is this thou.” Thus the ideal, the knowledge, is more fundamental or “concrete” than anything else it is supposed to bear upon, unbearable almost as we, as other than Spirit, than God, are almost bound to find this. We cannot, it would seem anyhow, “count all things dung” (St. Paul). The obverse of the paradox is that language, first imbibed ever so finitely in children and never breaking free entirely from that humble beginning, necessarily distorts thought. In line with this Hegel finds the linguistic operation of predication totally at fault. The procedure of a Hegel or an Eckhart, a Dominican as was Aquinas, was different, partly because less burdened than was St. Thomas with the task of instruction. Yet for St. Thomas, as for Hegel, there is just one essential being, “in whom we live and move and have our being”161, as itself absorbing and/or consuming all else, this being just what is posited as “one essential being”, necessarily; i.e. it is a or the thesis, for Hegel anyhow, of what is called logic. True, Aquinas says that logicus non considerat existentiam rei, but it will be part of our claim here that the meaning of that is precisely, or in the last analysis, that thought, the Idea, transcends existence as a category, just as it finally annihilates just this system of categories in itself that in our thought leads up to it. Existence, Hegel remarks, implies or seems to imply (and not only etymologically?) dependence. There is no place here for empiricism as anything more than a finite and hence finally false procedure merely. Hegel holds this at the same time as he sees assumption of our human nature as the final index and expression of the divine reality, in the way we have seen above. This corresponds in Scotus, to repeat it, to God’s “great love for man”, whether fallen or not indifferently, as purposing incarnation. In Kant, in some measure at least, this is applied (reduced?) to man as “the rational creature”, while in Hegel incarnation is finalised as “the taking of the manhood into God” (in the 161

From a Greek poet but as cited with apostolic approval and conformation in Acts of the Apostles.

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words of the “Athanasian Creed”162), by means, however, of death in close union with or simply in “resurrection”, understood as a spiritual transcendence which all along was “the inward and spiritual meaning” of nature and all that we call natural as consisting, to our apprehensions at least, of partes extra partes, the prime instances of these being, as Kant had perceived, space and time. That, or these, namely, are just what logic destroys. In saying these things there seems no intention, on Hegel’s part, of denying created “reality” (rather useless though this term may become under dialectical treatment) but rather of delimiting it stricto sensu, though still not approaching the strictness of Scripture itself on this question. “He takes up the isles as fine dust”, “For him the nations are nothing and less than nothing” (stress added: the “less than” was traditionally taken as an allusion to man’s sinfulness). There is, we may conclude by saying, no proportion between divine and created being. Nor could there be. * It is worth our noting that this preliminary distancing from Kant (§40) we have noted, chiefly on account of his blameworthy “tenderness”, follows closely upon a first evaluation, in this “little” Logic, of the Genesis account of the “fall” of man (only in the latter part, however, of the long Zusatz to §24). The deficiencies of Hegel’s treatment, from the viewpoint of orthodox belief, we have already noted. This is mainly due to the close connection, as of contrasted opposites, posited by Hegel between what he sees as the immediacy of innocence and the all-encompassing determinativeness of knowledge, which thus becomes, if thought through, a name for God here, though here too it is a knowledge in the service of evil as passed on to man. Hence later, in Hegel’s system, the Absolute Idea, which is the divine knowledge, consumes (as by fire) all in the system that led up to it as in itself fulfilling the system. The mediating medium, the separating the two just in holding them together, innocence and knowledge, Creation and God, is truth. So what about being? Being retains the primacy, as in Aquinas, while what Hegel emphasises, again in substantial agreement with Aquinas and/or Aristotle, is that the true being, das wahre Seiendes, simply is the system of logic, as we have already noted here, a system. nonetheless, that rolls (or burns) up into one as the Absolute Idea, knowing only itself simply because there is nothing else to know, all that lives and moves or anything else 162

This document, currently dated from around the ninth century, it is thought, is or has been accepted or “used” by the Christian body as faithful to St. Athanasius, not as itself necessarily written by him.

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having its being “in” God as otherwise being “nothing and less than nothing”, i.e. for the divine thought, other than which again there is nothing. Being, that is, is the Idea. It is not any kind of “stuff”. Thought, likewise, is what it (thought) thinks, a doctrine clearly parallelling that of the divine Word of the Fourth Gospel but without any suggestion of dependence (but not of independence either: Hegel is neither ignorant nor dismissive of history and where he stands in it). Hegel’s term for what is at once all being as such and hence one, incomposite, and yet just as such self-thought, is “the Idea”. The final I of all conscious I’s, spirits (cf. love your neighbour as yourself), annihilates all or any “others”. It is thus that they become God and not, in flat contradiction, as godless man. But what we reason to here we shall “no sooner know than enjoy” (Hobbes) or, to cite Aquinas, we know most about God when we know that we know nothing. The third century martyr, Lucy, declared at the end that having given everything to God and so having nothing left to give she gives herself. “Our God is a consuming fire”. This, and nothing else, is the doctrine of creation stricto sensu163, and it is entirely, we see, within the reach of philosophy. We might see a certain analogy, resting like all analogies upon deeply trenched (i.e. not entrenched by us) identities. This is but a first approach on our or Hegel’s part to the final absolute identity between divine Trinity and absolute simplicity as what has to be so. In the nature of the case, however, that of the approach of the finite to the infinite, this has to be securely achievable by faith alone164, as the sole or principal means of the union of the soul, of human mind, with God, at once being, i.e. being as such (he does not “partake” of being) and, just thereby, truth. Driven by faith, explicit or implicit, some individuals, such as those we call philosophers (some of them again), attain individually to this truth or some portion of it, glimpsed further, but also antecedently, in artistic perfection. But this means that faith must have and here begins to have a philosophy, as do hope and love, all keyed, in theological terms, towards beatific (i.e. making blessed) vision. Faith, declares John of the Cross again, is the sole means of union of the finite 163

Cf., again, our “Creation stricto sensu”, New Blackfriars 89, March 2008, pp. 194-214. 164 Needless to say, the Humean equation of faith with unreasonableness is just dogmatic misrepresentation. Cf. again K. Wojtyla’s study of the thesis of John of the Cross, written as a student at the Dominican Angelicum in Rome, that by faith alone can the finite approach the infinite, i.e. that is the only reasonable approach or, one might also say, option. The status of option vis à vis reason (and/or will) belongs with the dialectic of freedom and necessity, prominent in Hegel’s thought in particular.

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with the infinite. This faith though, according to the teaching Church, is, and for the same reason (the infinitude), a gift. It does not follow that it should be or even can be excluded from philosophy, whatever the difficulties. It is possible, namely, that philosophy just cannot “go secular”. Wittgenstein clearly knew this, whether or not he gave up on showing it too easily, as the late Herbert McCabe OP once suggested. Faith, that is, like hope and love, is profoundly rational. The making of it a gift does not alter this. Are not all out skills and habits gifts? This, necessity, then, of faith, is one of the divine counsels, like everything else necessary, like poverty then, the first “counsel of perfection”, that to prize, have or value nothing else together with God. So faith works in “the night of the spirit”, which can make even kings or presidents “poor in spirit”, down to the evangelical sparrow, which does not reduce us to equality of value with sparrows. Christ is explicit here (“You are of more value than many sparrows”), even though, like the thousand years and the day cited above, the two in their contrast might be thought to be the same for God: surely not though! Rather, just here God differentiates, between spirits made in his image, “of more value than many sparrows”, and nature as holding the latter captive. See how language and imagery are inseparable! Nature “holding captive”? When or why then should we struggle to separate them, writing philosophy, for example? Because confusion otherwise arises. All the same, as concerns God, “God has spoken only one word, and that is his Son” (John of the Cross). So language retains to the end its origin in babyhood. It is finite through and through. This raises a question for logic, vis à vis the “the linguistic arts”:165 For once logic is forced to assume both the role of providing a universal linguistic theory, and that of providing the rules for correct reasoning, sharp distinctions between these two spheres of investigation are no longer so easily made. And this, it would appear, accounts in large measure for the disparities between the Arabic and Latin philosophers’ understanding of the linguistic content of the Perihermeneias. The consequences, moreover, are paradoxical, for it is the Arabic philosophers, for whom grammar is an inferior, nonphilosophical science, who are forced by their position to make the logician directly dependent upon the grammarian for the basic linguistic underpinnings of his discipline.166 165 Cf. Deborah L. Black, “Aristotle’s Peri hermeneias in medieval Latin and Arabic philosophy: Logic and the Linguistic Arts”, in Aristotle And His Medieval Interpreters, ed. Bosley and Tweedale, 1991, University of Calgary Press, Canada, 1991, pp. 25-83. 166 Black, op. cit., p. 80.

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According to our argument here Hegel solves this problem, as required for what he wants to say, by adverting to a total opposition between thought and language, visible above all in the language-constituting subjectpredicate relation of identity in difference constituted by language without its noting the difference, Hegel seems to mean, though the identity too is often missed. How far this must apply to all possible languages he does not seem here at least much to consider, though surely the project of logic, whether in his or other hands, aims at overcoming such opposition. Yet the project of a wholly logical language is no more and no less “artificial” than language as such, developed as it is within language. The same applies to arithmetic and algebra, whatever we say of geometry or our measuring of the earth specifically. We can distinguish its “diagrams” from what we say about them, the latter alone being the actual science, the drawings a mere convenience. Even the theorem of Pythagoras could be rewritten, and so surely re-thought, without them, in principle, difficult though this would surely be “for us”. Regarding language, “God has spoken only one word”. He would agree with this saying by the Carmelite ascetic theologian and “doctor”, John of the Cross. It instantiates the “total absorption” (Hegel) of the finite by and in the infinite. “In God we live and move and have our being”. Hence St. Thomas says, again, that God has no real relation with us but only (this makes it technically a “relation of reason” only: the real divine relations are the Trinitarian ones) with his idea of us, i.e. it, as a relation of reason, is included in the Absolute Idea which God is, as far, again, as language might ever express it. As such it is one-way and, this one, all-consuming. God, in fact, is thought’s final infinity, mis-called “disembodied”, as the Christian experience revealed. We speak of God’s taking flesh, yet we confess that God is immutable. The risen Christ can pass through locked doors, apparently at will, has holes in his side able to enclose someone’s hand, can accompany his closest associates on the road without their recognizing him (but rather in the breaking of the bread afterwards) and so on. In sacramental form he is received simultaneously in the mouths of believers all around the world, while to all of these instances of the actual we add what was the actual “transfiguration”, and no more than that (i.e. it was the transfiguration as being only into another if superior “figure”), as beheld or, rather, experienced on Mount Tabor, where it further figured, simply as being visible, what is to come as indeed eternally present or, again, actual. Yet it is all of faith. “You believe because you have seen”. Seeing belongs to life immediate, not to eternity. We shall believe in the resurrection of the body while remembering that “resurrection” is a pictured association (of the idea

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involved) taken from burials merely of, rather, rising from death or from all “the dead”. “… though he be dead, yet shall he live”. What is meant is the whole person in his or her eternal reality. He descended into Hell, states the Creed, yet, as the empirical body lay there in the burial cave simultaneously, we (too?) easily assume it is just His soul that is at issue, just as we think of “separated” souls in purgatory or enjoying beatific vision while awaiting resurrection. The emphasised terms, perhaps, we might now say, including “soul”, all refer to some temporal determinant. Yet we know, again, that time is not thinkable as some theatre for the divine, that time “is real for Spirit only for as long as Spirit needs it” (Hegel, in humorous mood or mode?). Again, that a thousand years and a day are no different for God means that God transcends time conceptually, not that he simply found time there so as to transcend it (as if a rival to himself) but that it was not there to be found, is a negative factor in our consciousness. So it is clear that Hegel’s philosophy of nature will be largely set as negative. Nonetheless, and just as such, it is a philosophy of nature and it is silly to say he shouldn’t have one. Mathematics is in modern logic largely taken to fill the gap left by nature’s exclusion, as if mathematics were not just the locus where each thing is itself and not another thing. Language is in no way transcended here, a bit of it being taken rather as sufficient, subjecting logic to a specialised cutting down rather than to transformation. Infinity is thoughtlessly taken as a name for a number, a quantity. In fact infinity will only be reached if it reaches down to us, since whatever lies passive before mental constructions is thereby finite. Quantity or more of the same gets no bite here. Infinity has to be simple, not composite at all. It has to be act, actual, in act. Cantor knew this. To speak of the infinity of space or of time, or of any number, is not to speak of infinity itself, seat of all perfections, such as that of or which is personality. Infinity, in a word, is “the absolute idea”, thought’s thought of itself. Inasmuch as it is, thus, thought’s terminus all other or, that is to say, finite thoughts are consumed in it, cancelled and fulfilled in one. This applies especially to the whole body of finite beings, who thus form one Idea in their union (communion) with one another, called, not only “in” religion, the Church or the Body of Christ. Religion is rather the virtue, a part of justice, of being the veneration due to these things. This coincides with Hegel’s saying of the angels that it is useless to count them, one or many being the same. In eternity thought, consciousness, is not meted out in bits, there is no history there. Thus it is that Christ says of the blessed that they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels, all and/or each being one with all over again. McTaggart thus seems to have erred in

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supposing that we would have special friends and so, by implication, those not so special167. Heaven is rather friendship itself, without limit, such that the first are last, the last first. Thus we, or rather the blessed among whom we may, or must, rather, hope to be included, are indeed “as the angels”. It is this to which St. Peter, as recorded in the Gospel, has been given the keys, but not as if he is himself outside of it. Spirit, mind, consciousness, will behold him and any “nameless” beggar (that was) in one and the same act or idea. In Newman’s image, the very staircases of heaven are full of life, i.e. would have to be if we supposed the image of such furnishings to be realised but not transcended “there”. This is perfectly represented in the common sacrificial meal of and with Him, viz. the Christ “redeemer”, offering himself for all, such that here “where one receives a thousand receive”168, one in all and all in one. Thus viewed it, heaven as end-state, appears to us as if a mere moment, eternally frozen, or at white heat perhaps. The transcendence of time is thus paramount, as “one day in thy courts is better than a thousand elsewhere”. And how! Or, as we say, “How could it be otherwise?” These considerations can help us see the seriousness, indeed truth, in locutions such as “in Adam all die”. When writing my doctoral thesis, Morals as Founded on Natural Law169, I disturbed my supervisor Peter Geach by including in the final chapter an unresolved query, “How did I deserve to be born of a sinful race?” I now see, rather, the truth of propositions such as “in Adam all die” (St. Paul), in parallel with “In Christ shall all be made alive”; i.e. we genuinely all are or were in Adam and his loss of grace. This preposition “in”, after all, plays a major part in Christ’s discourses, right back to Trinitarian considerations: “Do you not know (or believe) that I am in my father as my father is in me: he that has seen me has seen the father, Philip, so how can you ask me to show you the father?” It stands, routinely, for a real relation of identity in difference, as distinct from the merely abstract relation of reason (although even this latter, if ever 167

Nonetheless Peter Geach, remarkably, considered McTaggart’s formally atheist account of heaven and the “beatific vision” particularly to be nearer the mark than that supplied by many of today’s theologians. Cf. again Geach’s Truth and Hope, Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 2001, reviewed by Fergus Kerr OP when editing New Blackfriars, Oxford. There is a clear lessening here of the distance Geach took from McTaggart in his earlier account of him, Truth, Love and Immortality (1979, but based upon research carried out forty years earlier). 168 Sumit unus sumunt mille, from a liturgical poem composed by Thomas Aquinas for the then new feast of Corpus Christi. 169 Leeds 1979: later published unchanged as a book of that title, Frankfurt, 1987 & 1988 (Peter Lang, GmbH).

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expressed propositionally, implies distinction, Aquinas teaches, when put in subject-predicate form170). Thus it is, too, that in the tradition marriage should be seen as in all its actuality a figure of the union of Christ with us as a body, not merely “assembled” but fused together in one as the bride. In Hegel’s logic the other becomes, is found to be (in the Absolute Idea or thought itself finally) the same171. It is thus, too, that the Absolute Being is itself the Absolute Idea and conversely, is even the final outcome of the system of logic qua system, of which all mathematical systems are but faint images. There is then but one marriage eternally, that of Christ with redeemed humanity, of which each member is in perfect union with each and all of the other members and they all with its head, Christ divine, through the mediation of Mary, his and hence our mother as theotokos. As with grace, so here, difficulties of measure must not lead to relegation outside the pale of reasoned consideration. That is, philosophy, to be itself, must not keep clear of theology but rather accept absorption into it (and/or conversely), the present claim, if I have understood aright, of John Milbank and associates. This is actually no more than the Aristotelian relation of his metaphysics to the concluding theologia and/or conversely. Hence the importance of our saying that there has to be a philosophy of faith or of sacraments or, indeed, of “mystery” (just what is denied by or in Sartre’s writings). Philosophy was thus always theologia, as the Pre-Socratics witness, or as does Hume in discussing “natural religion”. One has then to concede that words such as mine here, they too, any words (save the one Word), are mere representations of this reality. But by this, inevitably, we must allow degrees of representation, such that, it follows, there is no mere simple opposition between image and reality. Consider the evangelical words, “The letter kills, only the spirit gives life”. The reference is to “the letter” as such. It will, namely, always contain a measure of violence against the truth, just because it is the letter172. Awareness of this, as applying also of course in a measure to what I am writing now specifically about it, should make generally for more open discussion. Hegel showed himself very aware of this and hence of the falsity 170

Cf. again our “Subject and Predicate Logic”, The Modern Schoolman, January 1989, pp. 129-139 (my own title, before it was editorially changed, was “SubjectPredicate Logic”). 171 It seems futile to condemn this as a logicisation of the Christian mysteries. It is, rather, one may at least suggest, sound theology, very much in the style of thinking of Thomas Aquinas, differences notwithstanding. The mysteries are not illogical, be they either known or simply believed (or both? Cf. Augustine: Credo ut intelligam). 172 This is the basic premise, though hardly touched upon, of the argument presented by Sartre against the possibility of sincerity.

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of finite language as a whole in presence of the Absolute Idea, a consuming fire indeed. His Logic represents, and/or is, a consistent attempt to ensure that this linguistic falsity be linguistically, that is logically, recognised. He is thus in line specifically with the Latin logicians, rather than the Arabic, as characterised in Deborah Black’s article cited above. The case of Aristotle himself is of interest here. How far did he see eye to eye with this later more medieval development? Eugene Gendlin in his splendid “line by line commentary” on the De anima (cited above) sometimes seems to suggest an Aristotelian commitment to the finite language at his disposal in what could be mistaken for an instance of the Arabic position mentioned above, to which such a commitment would at least be analogous173. This, however, can hardly be said of Plato, and it is Hegel who singles out for us the Platonic passages to the contrary, just as it is Hegel who stresses Aristotle’s Platonism: Although actuality certainly is the principle of the Aristotelian philosophy, it is not the vulgar actuality of what is immediately at hand, but the idea as actuality. Where then lies the controversy of Aristotle against Plato? It lies in this. Aristotle calls the Platonic idea a mere dynamis, and establishes in opposition to Plato that the idea, which both equally recognise to be the only truth, is essentially to be viewed as an energeia, in other words, as the inward which is quite to the fore, or as the unity of inner and outer, or as actuality, in the emphatic sense here given to the word.174

On the more general point, on mind’s freedom from linguistic determination according to Plato, Hegel (if we can rely on the Zusatz I cite here) gives us the following: Plato says: God made the world out of the nature of the ‘one’ and the ‘other’ (tou heterou): having brought these together, he formed from them a third, which is of the nature of the ‘one’ and the ‘other’. In these words we have in general terms a statement of the nature of the finite, which, as something, does not meet the nature of the other as if it had no affinity to it, but, being implicitly the other of itself, thus undergoes alteration. Alteration thus exhibits the inherent contradiction which originally attaches to determinate being, and which forces it out of its own bounds. To materialised conception existence stands in the character of something solely positive, and quietly abiding within its own limits: though we also know, it is true, that everything finite (such as existence) is subject to change. Such changeableness in existence is to the superficial eye a mere possibility, the realisation of which is not a consequence 173

Eugene Gendlin, Line by Line Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘De anima’ (2 vols.), The Focusing Institute, Spring Valley, New York State, 2012. 174 Hegel, Enc. 142, Zus.

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of its own nature. But the fact is, mutability lies in the notion of existence, and change is only the manifestation of what it implicitly is. The living die, simply because as living they bear in themselves the germ of death. (Enc. 94, Zus.)

Existence, in other words, is not what being finally is. We speak of the existence of God when we should rather speak of God’s being, as Idea namely, as it turns out in Hegel. For him, as for Plato, the idea(s) is or are the reality, the truth, rather. They are hence the true being of which our first notion of being, in “the doctrine of being” (as in Hegel’s Science of Logic, either version, specifically), is like a first sword-thrust only. The difference from Aquinas here will be found, may well be found, to be little more than verbal.175 Thus it is that the question Aquinas asks, in his main work, is not utrum Deus existat but De Deo, an Deus sit176. Of course this is in no way intended to deny the existence of God. It is rather to say that his existence is analogous to ours (in reality, as regards the analogy of things, or, more correctly, “of proportions of each thing to its own act of being”177, as distinct from that “of names”178, ours, our existence is analogous to His) because it is, rather, final being or, better, being finally. Here we have the supreme instance of what we have stressed throughout this work, namely, again, that “philosophy is the battle of our intelligence against its bewitchment by language” (Wittgenstein). Existence is finite, being is infinite. It is thus that 175

Such a difference (verbal), is of course real enough. Thus, while Hegel is led at times, in conformity with the above passage, to speak with Plato of things which both are and are not, Aquinas says quite firmly (at least in his discussion of transubstantiation), but only again as to “how we ought to speak”, that in nullo praedictorum trium extrema sunt simul (Summa theol. IIIa, 75, 8). But cp. Gendlin, op. cit., the commentary on 408a34 to 408b29 (of Aristotle’s De anima), illustrating while clarifying the difference between dianoia and nous, while at many other loci in Aristotle’s De anima Gendlin points out that “no English word fits nous” or, we may note, that with which Hegel is concerned throughout in his Science of Logic and which he calls “thought” (das Denken), stressing precisely that it is not a word or words. “Das Denken als Subject vorgestellt ist Denkendes, und die einfache Ausdruck des existirenden Subjects als Denkenden ist Ich” (Enc. 20). 176 Aquinas, Summa theologica, Pars prima, title of Quaestio 2. 177 This seems to be what is denied by the late Ralph McInerny (and swallowed whole by too many “scholastic” philosophers, I would, regrettably, make bold to claim) in his recent study of analogy. 178 Cf. Cajetan’s De analogia nominum (“On the Analogy of Names”). See also J.P. Reilly, “Cajetan: Essentialist or Existentialist?”, in The New Scholasticism, Vol. 41, pp. 191-222; also Fr. Reilly’s book on this theme (regrettably my photocopy lacks the title), published by Mouton & Co, The Hague, 1971. Cf. also our own article, “Cajetan”, in Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, ed. B. Smith & H. Burkhardt, Philosophia Verlag, Munich 1991, pp. 109-111.

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being, esse, is actus purus. The claim here has been that Hegel shows himself very much alive to this distinction, stressing the finitude of existence as a notion, the at least etymological implication of the ex, as if the subject of existence arises or arose out of something else. The Aristotelian notion of actus purus, taken over without reserve by St. Thomas, surmounts this objection and the same applies to the Hegelian absolute idea. If we object that this reduces God to being only an idea then we are simply claiming that an idea as such cannot be absolute. The overcoming of this prejudice is, one might claim, the main aim of Hegel’s science of logic. I defend this thesis subject to correction or modification by some higher instance, in my case the universal Christian ecclesia as or where or however legitimately in exercise, ultimately identifying this as I do with “the Petrine office” as, like Hegel’s absolute idea in this at least, ultimate instance. The seeing or drawing of this analogy, identification rather, cannot invalidate Hegel’s insight, to which it adds additional or wider interest, rather. Everyone in or out of academia claims the right to set forth their “own” philosophy and so, by this, I too claim the right to set forth as my own, as regards any claim to recognise some authority, finite or more and other than so, precisely and only (that’s the freedom) what is not my own, this being precisely, again, the dialectic of authority, though this remains, in St. Thomas’s words, the weakest form of argument. The only question that remains is whether Hegel does indeed overcome or expose as prejudice this denigration of the Platonic or still more, as active, Aristotelian idea or whether, that is, I have succeeded in answering this question in the affirmative here. Doubtless there is and must always be (a point Hegel himself stresses) indeed more to be said and/or investigated, new times raising new queries. Meanwhile: For Cajetan (1469-1534) the only metaphysical and perhaps proper type of analogy is that “according to both being and intention” (Aquinas, In I sent. 19, 5, 2 ad 1), the example given being precisely being (esse, act of being) itself. “Despite the fact that their quiddities (i.e. of substance, quality, quantity etc.) are not only diverse but even primarily diverse, they do retain a similitude in this that each of them has a ‘to be’ proportioned to itself.” This is called by Cajetan the analogy of proper proportionality (not to be confused with the improper or ‘extrinsic’ analogy of attribution or proportion). Whereas proportion here means any relation of one thing to another, proportionality (the name) “is given to a similitude of two proportions”, i.e. not to an equality (as in arithmetic, from which the idea is taken). Hence this analogy is not reducible to univocity but is found in reality itself. For in the metaphysical or real order (as opposed to the order of essences) there is no likeness of things to one another but only of proportions (of each thing to its own act of being). Hence the likeness in question is itself analogical, not univocal, and being is

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irreducibly an analogical concept, not able to be perfectly abstracted from what has it. This is why the basis of all “proper” analogy (as distinct, say, from analogous analogy!) is the analogy of the act of being, unique to each individual thing and because of which that thing is itself and not another. So this identity in nature of two acts of being is itself proportional, and Cajetan takes pains to show that proportional identity is a real species of identity and the only possible one through which one can argue in metaphysics in such a way as to avoid the fallacy of four terms. In support he cites Aristotle … (Post. An. 99a 16). Hence he can speak of scientific knowledge “of the analogous” as possible “if due attention is given to proportionality”.179

Regrettably, recent controversy on the topic of analogy has given very little consideration or indeed understanding to the profound and profoundly argued theses of Cajetan on this, a topic of central importance for the relation of language to thought as discussed in the present work.

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From our article “Cajetan” in the Handbook partially cited in the previous note, pp. 109-111.

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The Hegelian distinction between empirical and absolute knowledge does indeed appear to correspond, in large measure at least, to Aristotle’s between dianoia and nous. One thing the two pairs have in common is a discountenancing of the idea that mathematical knowledge is somehow normative as the highest or most exact representation of the or its object indifferently. What, after all, is that object? In Aristotelian terms it is neither substance nor “megethos”: When Aristotle speaks of “megethos” he means a three-dimensional thing. … “It is generally agreed that nothing has a separated existence except magnitudes” (De anima II-8, 432a3). He means sizable things, not mathematical objects. So there is no doubt that a megethos means a sizable thing, not a mathematical thing. To exist on its own it has to have three dimensions, in which case it is a body: “A body is the only complete magnitude since it is the only one that is delimited in three directions” (De caelo I-1, 268a7). However, being a body is more than being of a megethos. A body is not just the dimensions. The dimensions are merely its limits. It has limits only because it holds itself together and moves in one piece. Aristotle doesn’t define a body by its limits or its elements, rather by its kinds of motion. Places in what we call “space” are determined where bodies touch without merging, i.e. keep their limits. Megethe do exist but only because megethe are bodies, although merely considered just in terms of their limits. There is a further reason why existing as a body is prior to existing as a megethos: “If what is last in the order of generation is prior in the order of substance the body (to soma) will be prior to the plane and the line180 … more complete and whole because it can become animate. On the other hand, how could a line or a plane become animate? (Meta XIII, 1077a26). A three-dimensional 180 I.e. as the plane is already prior to the line (the line needs a plane in order to be a line).

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thing can be alive. … A megethos might be a stone, a clod of dried mud, a horse, an eye or a nose, but we are considering it only as a megethos. All the contexts show that by “megethos” (magnitude, also translated “size”) Aristotle refers to a sensible sizable thing, not a mathematical object.181

“Megethos”, then, is a more general term than “body” or “substance”, referable rather to anything three-dimensional indifferently, i.e. referable to any thing, thus to a nose, say (Gendlin’s example), unlike “substance”. As with substance, however, mathematical posits are excluded, whether or not as straight non-entities. The reason for this is that actual magnitudes require a sizable or three-dimensional body. Only such things have “a separated existence”, in some sense that would appear intended to exclude mathematical objects and, it may seem, supposedly “separated” souls or minds, as not having the separated existence, again, of magnitudes specifically, at least according to Aristotle182. In general the field for any sort of megethos ends where abstraction begins. So how might one explain Aristotle’s interest here in this concept of megethos and how does it relate to the difference between dianoia and nous? Dianoia, as an empirical knowing, thus actually falling short of knowing, is of quantities, of “parts outside parts”. For nous part and whole are indistinguishable, as Hegel will emphasise, thus coinciding in some measure

181

Gendlin, op. cit., Book III, Endnote 102, On Megathos. Commenting on this Peter Geach once suggested, as a conceptual possibility at least, that a “separated” soul might exist “in the thought of itself”. But. come to that, how does God exist? Surely, we seem to find, at least in Hegel’s text, precisely “in the thought of himself”, i.e. as absolute “idea”, where, however, as absolute, “idea” has lost the negative connotation with respect to some other reality. “The soul” in this case would then be more like God rather than less “real” than other finite realities. Or, say, when God gave me or gave my soul existence, being, what was it that was added to my ideal substantiality anyhow as one, necessarily, with the eternal and immutable Absolute Idea? “So you shall be one with me and we shall be one vine” (oblique citation). Here we might ask how exactly how we are to take the fearsome Dominical statement as recorded that it had been better for “that man” Judas, as betrayer, “if he had not been born”. How many such unborn are there? Is there a first pointer here to the outlook of the greatest minds, of Aquinas in his sumit unus sumunt mille, or of Hegel in his angelology: “It is useless to count”? What else, indeed, is implied in the simple “Love thy neighbour as thyself”, reduced by a recent analyst to “I am you” (D. Kolak, I am You, Pomona, New York 2002). Regarding the relation of “absolute idealism” to “realism”, as explored by Bernard Lonergan in particular, cf. (or cp.) Ulf Jonsson, Foundations for Knowing God, subtitled “Bernard Lonergan’s Foundations for Knowledge of God and the Challenge from Anti-foundationalism”, published by Peter Lang GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 1999.

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with Aquinas’s sumit unus sumunt mille183, as with the Scriptural or indeed evangelical “so you shall (all) be with me one vine”. Anything else, as dianoia namely, falls short of the truly knowable, as Hegel says of (his examples) “I slept well last night” or, yet more radically, as found thus short of the knowable(!), “This rose is red”. But we must say, rather, that dianoia falls short of the nous which it is! “Most nous activity is dianoia” (Gendlin, Endnote 8). “The word ‘dianoia’ could be interpreted as ‘through nous’ or ‘open to nous’”. Hegel can seem rather to stress an absolute difference here, however, while the attitude, as we may call it, of Aquinas, somewhat clumsily called his “moderate realism” (of “universals”), is more that dianoia is the specifically human norm, from which we may rise in voto to the nous of sophia. “With dianoia we can be mistaken because it combines” (Gendlin)184, as nous does not: … for falsity and truth are not in things … but in thought (dianoia) whereas with regard to the simple concepts and “what it is” truth and falsity do not exist even in thought (dianoia) … the combination and the separation are in thought (dianoia) and not in the things (Aristotle, Met. VI, 4, 1027b 25-31, also XI, 8, 1065a 24).

Hence, Aquinas will write repeatedly, veritas est in mente. Ultimately, as is at least equally clear in Hegel, “in God”, i.e. solely and uniquely, “we live and move and have our being”, as the apostolic missionaries in the Acts of 183

This refers, again, to the reception of communion (communicating) at Mass, as to the participants having become “members one of another”, in the pregnant Pauline phrase. That the “science of logic”, or logical science, leads on to or harmonises with this, the mysticism of the “mystical body” of Christ, is significant of the character of Hegelian thought, in deep sympathy, of itself, with Aquinas’s vision of things, even if he himself misses this connection (at the end of the Encyclopaedia particularly, marred by his ineptly prejudiced comments on the Catholic system). This, in turn, is enormously arousing (from anti-dogmatic slumbers!). It is penetration to the soul of logic as, in Lukasiewicz’s words, disclosing the divine mind, thus not at all meaning to replace some science already in place, as Geach and others may have perhaps carelessly or worse suggested. Yet what is it, in “this naughty world”, for a science (e.g. geocentrism) to be in place? 184 Cf. here some of our own previous work on subject-predicate logic, as I myself called it, e.g. “Subject and Predicate Logic” and “The Supposition of the Predicate” in The Modern Schoolman, 1989 and 1999 respectively. See also “The Interdependence of Semantics, Logic and Metaphysics as Exemplified in the Aristotelian Tradition” in International Philosophical Quarterly, 42, No. 1, March 2002, pp. 63-91. Cf. also our Hegel’s System of Logic, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2019, passim.

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the Apostles (St. Luke) cited approvingly from a Greek poet. Since God is Idea this means that we are not more or, in fact, other than that. Being itself is thus idea. Thus this final opposition too is consumed in the divine fire, so to say. Aristotle’s negative remarks on matter reflect this truth. If God is without matter then matter is nothing to be lacked, as of course is implicit in the traditional angelology and indeed in that of Hegel.185 Every saying says something of something … and is true or false. But not all nous as such. Nous that makes no assertions is never false since it “does not say something of something” (De anima III-6, 430b26-29).

Hence this “grasp of single essences, unities, understandables is beyond truth or falsehood”186. Further, nous is eternal whereas dianoeisthai belongs to soul and body (Hence Hegel’s negative view of “This rose is red” as candidate for nous). “For nous is concerned with the ultimates in both directions. For both the first terms and the last are objects of nous and not [objects of] reasoning” (EN 1143a 36-b1). One thus finds the same downgrading of plurality in Hegel as in Aristotle, while it clearly lies behind not merely the sumit unus sumunt mille just cited from Aquinas but underlies the whole theology of the corpus mysticum (as equally sacramentale). Hence Hegel will imply that Quantity is not really a category, this being the very opposite of a mathematical philosophy, which is rather shown up here as issuing out of what we call “materialism” and matter’s (Aristotle’s hyle) dialectic. Or we may say that quantity is only a finite category and is hence self-contradictory, without, as with the other categories, leading up to the Absolute Idea as an identity in which all plurality, all “ands” are absorbed as themselves identities. The internal relations of the Trinity, which are the persons, are free of this defect as themselves “only distinctions in the way of distinction” (Hegel). Hence “I and my father are one”, “He that has seen me has seen the Father”. It is thus in his assumed human nature only that the Son suffers extremely, the Father remaining perfect joy. We can see, in theology, that this must be so. 185

Cf. The Phenomenology of Mind, VIIc. Here too, we have noted, one and a thousand are found, in logic, to be the same, just as with the Lord a day is as a thousand years and conversely (Cf. 2 Peter, NT Epistle, citing Psalm 90), which means, can only mean, that this is really the case. McTaggart, as claiming to refute time, joins the chorus here. “I in them and they in me”, but also, or as in one thought (sumit unus sumunt mille), the “they” are “members one of another”, identity here taking the place of mere membership in fact. L’église, c’est moi applies to all of these, so that in appropriating this quality, whatever his intention, Pius IX rather illustrated the yet more radical thesis of his Lord, viz. last first and first last. 186 Gendlin, op. cit., Book I, Endnote 8.

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Nothing other than this contradiction inherent in quantity underlies the precept to love the neighbour as self. Reasoning, ratio, as distinct from intellectus, is thus inherently finite and hence incapable of declaring the divine secrets. The subject-predicate relation is thus essentially vitiated. To say “a is a” is thus malformation. Rather, “a” is what it is, as “I am who I am”, the name proper only to God all the same187. This is why, again, we should come to see only God in our neighbour, or in ourselves. “If God were not, I would not be” (Eckhart), hence God is I, hence I am God: hence he continues, “and if I were not God would not be”, adding “By God, this is true”. Being born, again, is thus clear vocation, entailing a need to which only baptism as voluntary self-dying (in and with Christ), as renouncing world, flesh and devil, can properly cater, Christians believe, as indeed being “born again”. This is the background to Hegel’s unusual account of Spirit as absolute restlessness, fitting in well with the place he gives to the labour which is art, first degree of absolute spirit, thinking perhaps of the dance. There just cannot be a motionless dance, the pauses signalled in a Bruckner’s symphonic movements notwithstanding. Thus far quantity! If music be the food of love, or revelation itself indeed, then play on, let it be like the air, needed indeed for every breath without exception, just like love of the neighbour, of the other that is we, ultimately I. That’s the peace of God passing understanding but not, not at all, passing rational assent. I cite Aristotle again: For nous is concerned with the ultimate in both directions. For both the first terms and the last are objects of nous and not [objects of] reasoning (EN 1143a-35b1).

So nous alone is eternal, dianoia belongs to soul-and-body. Given that the latter is guided by the sense-mean then imagery is needed. Implied, perhaps oddly, is a linkage of making assertions with this imagery-factor. Of course where everything is simply seen, or known rather, no one need assert. That might indeed be heaven. The thinking would be neither this, the imagery, nor assertive. The fourteenth century treatise, The Cloud of Unknowing, is particularly clear on this point, that there can be no images of the things of the spirit, however God might lead some disciples to see Christ ascending 187 We should perhaps rather say, i.e. write, “a is a”, recalling Aquinas saying that in subject position the materiality is (analogously or quasi) signified, in the predicate the corresponding quasi-form. Henry Veatch considered the failure to note that only an analogy is to be drawn here, so that “just anything and everything” can function as either subject or predicate indifferently, to be the chief fault of the Fregean analysis of predication.

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or “the heavens opened” or Christ “at God’s right hand”. Yet we cannot imagine an alternative. Here one might reflect upon numerals. There may be images of “two” or of “three” but not, it would seem, of five hundred and seventy-eight, say. Could those numerals of which we have images be different, as Aristotle might seem to require? It does not seem that it is only the numeral notation we have that is irrelevant to childhood attempts to “count” to infinity. A Roman child could have done as well, or as badly. So there is no contrast here like or corresponding to that between Latin and Arabic logical theory of the type noted above from Deborah Black’s essay. Aristotle thus concludes, as is clearly necessary, to the identity of “a thing” with its cause. We find the same move in Hegel while it is the clear sense of the “in” in “In God we live and move and have our being”, signifying, we noted, an identity in one-way “cancellation”. “This also is thou; neither is this thou”, even though we live in God. One may conclude either to our being God or to our being nothing. In either case we would not be ourselves as we had hitherto been abstractly imagining. How wide then is this gulf between self and God? It is either infinite or null or both indifferently. Christ’s “I in them and they in me”, however, goes a step further, like St. Paul’s “I live yet not I”. Transeamus! “Inasmuch as you did it unto one of the least of these you did it unto me”, Christ is reported as saying. “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” To which Saul, Paul, naturally replies, “Who are you?” “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.” The contrast, anyhow, between dianoia and nous is that between a combination of terms for two different “things” (dianoia) or else for one as saying “what it is” (nous). Note that the making or positing of identities, indeed of identity absolutely, is a or rather the salient feature of Hegel’s presentation of logic, logic in itself and the same logic as is the birthright of all and of everyone. He has not invented or substituted “a new logic”, as Geach charged, but rather taken us further into what it, logic, as absolute mind and as such to be worshipped, is, as coinciding with absolute selfconsciousness as “the way and the life”. “This is eternal life, to know God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent”. This is the conclusion of Hegel as of Thomas Aquinas, both drawing it from an original grounding in the Aristotelian system of logic as finally metaphysics and as such in no sense instrumental merely but “for itself”. Logic, it is implied, transcends language just inasmuch as it relates it to thought as judge188, thought which, Hegel finds, cannot but find language ultimately wanting. What is this wanting but Wittgenstein’s “bewitchment” of our intelligence by language? This is so and as conclusion may thus be arrived at without either injury to 188

Logica docens as contrasted with logica utens.

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or presumption of a personal faith, as the same would apply, after all, to a rational account of faith itself, such, indeed, as we have sought to offer here, pointing out that no other approach to the infinite is or could be offered to that which is finite. This, though, is not to say that it cannot in principle come down to faith in mind itself. We have shown, after all, or at least indicated, a fusion in identity in every case of the finite mind with absolute mind as what absorbs it, that which, we found, is called and is grace in or hence by religion and/or theology. This can be so even where the philosopher concerned elects not to treat of it, grace, or indeed remains simply unaware of it, just as we remain ignorant as to the origin of our intellectual faculty which we nonetheless are unable to deny without selfcontradiction, i.e. we are unable to deny it at all, a truth, inclusive of this truth itself (not therefore at second level in infinite regress, as Hegel especially points out, but all on one level), about that truth, especially emphasised first by St. Augustine. Truth, that is, is in the mind and is found in the mind, in logic, as, it follows, are both nature and spirit. In that sense indeed not only does the fool not see the same tree as the wise man sees but only the latter sees a or the tree or anything else at all. The supremacy of faith is acknowledged by Aquinas, and that philosophically, when he says that we know most about God when we know that we know nothing. Faith, therefore, is something infused, a gift, while faith, the necessity of faith, is itself a truth of faith (i.e. whether or not it is a truth of philosophy, of sophia, a truth standing or falling with the truth of God, veritas prima). This might seem a truth at once Thomistic and Humean, a dialectical twist in clear accord with the Hegelian theses in particular, one might wish to stress. Here too the last may be first and conversely. The parable, otherwise impenetrable, of the unjust steward comes to mind. Judge not! Judging, recall, belongs to dianoia, not to nous. Yet those believing, it is said or written, know in whom it is that they have believed.

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The object (or subject) of this book, since 2012 the thirteenth of mine to be thus concerned principally with Hegel, is theology, also the final and allembracing concern of Aristotle’s metaphysics, witness his Metaphysics XIV, the end-paragraph of which Hegel places at the end of his Encyclopaedia as crowning its third and final section, “The Philosophy of Mind”. It is put there precisely so as to show this agreement and put, accordingly, in the Greek original. Yet this unprecedented measure on Hegel’s part is, sadly, often omitted or concealed by those wishing to bend his thought in another, more congenial direction than his own, thus not merely taking distance but really distorting his own programme189. We claim that he unites himself equally closely with the intervening sacred texts and beliefs of Christianity. Hence his witheringly critical analyses of both Kant’s190 and Jacobi’s basic dismissals of these, such as we have elsewhere expounded concerning these critiques, the former particularly. Thus we further claim that “the absolute idea” (Hegel) is what “we call God” (Aquinas), that God is the idea absolute of himself (inasmuch as He is himself: i.e. his being consists in or of this absolute idea (which is thus the highest being, let us make no mistake, even while acknowledging Hegel’s “doctrine of being” as fulfilled , essence intervening, in that of “the notion”, Begriff), while all other existences, all other being in short, is and/or are analogous to this, which just therefore is in some theologies called non189

The version stemming from the University of Idaho, for instance, this being first to be found on the Internet (among English versions of Hegel’s text), is guilty of this, for whatever reason or cause. The meanness would be of a similar class, if less grave, to an issuing of John’s Gospel which omitted the first fourteen verses, just those long recited at the end of every celebration of Mass, along with genuflection at the words “and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth”. The motive or pretext for this barbarity of omission would be in both cases similar, viz. the presence of a distinguishing visible act, be it genuflection or the use of Greek, these tempting some to conceal just what these authors wanted to promote to the fore, doubtless too closely for comfort. 190 Cf. our Hegel’s Theology or Revelation Thematised, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2018, Chapter Four, “Hegel and Kant’s Third Critique”, pp. 21-28.

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being, to equal effect in such case as it may well seem, they claiming also and in consequence that “the Word was God”. This appears to posit identity as the closest form of “being with” (“the Word was with God and the Word was God”), the final love therefore inasmuch as the Absolute must inclusively, if at all, be absolute self-love. This is in fact the insight proper to “absolute idealism”, as systematised in Hegel. Thus, in The Phenomenology of Spirit (Geist), he rejects Berkeleyan idealism just as not being absolute. What is absolute, however, viz. infinity, differs in every case toto caeli from finite echoes or would-be approximations thereto merely, inclusive of the purely mathematical. Thus the Idea as absolute can have none of the deficiencies attributable to “idea” generally in our finite and baby-born language or “tongue” (lingua). God is his own idea of himself alone and hence of all else as wholly “in” him. No one and nothing else can “have” this idea with the requisite identification. Hence Aquinas too claims, deduces, that God can have no real relation with anything other than himself, but only a “relation of reason”. Thus any specific idea of it, of Him, will be mistaken and the same must therefore hold a fortiori of any proposed attributes. Nor is it self-contradictory to talk about such a proposed indiscutible. Thus God lacks nothing in not having a body and this assertion therefore, positive about the negative, would typically express a substantial notion, just as much as does the saying that all things are nothing (figurative variant, “like fine dust”). Hegel might seem to reject this in what he says about the incarnation, the taking of a body or coming down to our level, so to say, as if God there first really becomes real in some way, while the liturgy says he “came down from the heaven he never left”. So one should rather see this, quite simply, as God being seen here first as most truly revealed, just inasmuch as the incarnation was or is eternally purposed and hence represents for God, which is to say really and in final truth, no change, as nor does anything else attributed to him. So if we would choose to say “God rose from the dead”, “died for us” etc., perhaps not adding “in Christ” or similar, the onus would be on the non-scornful hearer to work out what we might mean. It does not, that is, merely (or at all) mean, that for God a thousand years seem as but a day. It is in this sense that it is said (in I Peter) that “with the Lord a thousand years are as a day” and conversely, one might add. Eternity cancels time absolutely, rather, and is its true measure eternally (“always has been” is thus a mere temporal picture of it). Upon this the divine necessity is founded and/or conversely. Clearly this is decisive in our estimate of the importance of man or of “the rational creature”. Upon this rests the correctness of Scotus’s insight, or view, that the incarnation is independent of man’s having sinned or not, a thesis which,

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anyhow, it is not clear at all that St. Thomas or even Augustine, with his felix culpa, denied. As Hegel put it, “The factual is normative”. In other words, the divine or absolute necessity just in its absoluteness controls all things and nothing more than our human freedom. Regarding the love we mentioned as holding between two members or more of a concrete identity in Hegel’s sense (one quite distinguished from abstract identity), we have there the link between absolute necessity and perfect freedom. God is never, therefore, taken by surprise as having to fall back upon an alternative “plan” or as having any plan at all. In God everything is realised, in “pure act” free of potentiality. This is the final immediate. It is just this which faith bears upon. As if in confirmation of this I mentioned above here my having once written as if objecting to being born, so to say innocently, as a member of a wicked and firstly condemned race. In fact I would firmly argue, rather, for the truth of the Scriptural “in Adam all die”. We really are all active in that aboriginal transgression, as the Scripture says if we look carefully. It is basic to the later expression, achievement, of our being “members one of another”. But nor is it divorcible from the idea of one’s individual creation as “vocation”. In Adam it is or was really all who die, as it is written. The roles of Satan or Judas, or of the Pharaoh whose heart was by God “hardened”, are crucial here for our meditation and there is no call ever for accusing God of injustice. “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with my own?” Indeed, but nor is there call to assume that one has fully understood this doing191. So “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” The Idea, it will emerge, is the identity of all with all, for this is absolute identity as the Idea is absolute and that within itself. Plurality is phenomenal, not notional. “In God we live and move and have our being”, but not like a crowd of creatures in a box. The whole or all can thus be regarded as an identity, as identity simply or of, in particular, being and nothing, inasmuch as, as Idea Absolute, it consumes eternally all else, all the “sweet nothings”, as we say, for indeed “our God is a consuming fire” as being pure act, no less, every potentiality realised, including firstly that of eternal actuality. This is precisely the esse of Thomas Aquinas, transcending all essence or indeed cancelling essence itself in conception as corresponding to potential esse merely. Potentiality, however, and hence essence, has no role in God, is not found there (is his existence or esse, rather, as St. Thomas has it) but only in finite creatures (i.e. finite because created, unlike those other in fact constitutive divine processions) as, precisely, essence. God then is pure being, esse, which is found to be act or an or the act. This move further back, 191

For starters one might recall St. Catherine of Siena’s sober or by no means “visionary” assertion (Dialogues) that the greatest sin of Judas was not his betrayal of Christ but his final despair of forgiveness, this being what hurt Christ the more.

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to essence as the domain of potentiality, seems to have been unknown to Aristotle, notes Reilly (op. cit.). So if being and nothing are not a duo, then neither are act and potentiality, since the second is, of course, only potential. To be actual as nothing or as potency is precisely not to be actual. Heidegger’s Das Nichts nichtet means simply (in so far as it can or could mean anything prior to stipulation) that it, nothing, doesn’t act, lacks all actuality, the general permissiveness of mere grammar notwithstanding. So theology maybe needs its pictures but precisely as implying the need to overcome them, as mere variants conceptually upon the letter that kills after all, namely as killing, obscuring, by, precisely, pictures, these letters being themselves a subclass of the latter, pictures, as themselves also standing for what falls short of the accuracy which is spirit, the spiritual, viz. thought, itself therefore not to be confused with the word “thought”, while even this only letters, the letter, can express, by saying specifically, namely. Yet this too only letters can “say”! Finally, that is (to say!), saying obscures thought or spirit. Hence, again, “God has spoken only one word”. For the rest, they serve as a façade to be looked behind, as an initial help as merely prompting to thought where not yet obscuring it (e.g. in the immature) or as innocent and indeed healthy diversion or relaxation, marked by verbalisation’s close cousin, in our human case, laughter. Note again, however, as noted by William James, that the thought that the pack of cards is on the table postulates temporal sequence or “now”, while thought as such stands for ever or, as a false thought, never gets off the ground, e.g. with minor differences, such thoughts even as that it is Monday or four o’clock, “it is now” becoming, with time(!), “it was then”. We can indeed not say “what time it is on the sun” (Anthony Kenny’s objection), simply because time isn’t, in the same way as nothing, of which it is a variant or “sub-class”, isn’t, is “sham-being” (Hegel on evil). We are truly fighting against linguistic bewitchment, such as Wittgenstein in particular, as launching this idea, has no right to forbid. It is thus as being that which is not that time requires to be studied, thought about, as the latest turns in astronomy seem to be provoking. This distinction, anyhow, between contemplating and doing a given thing, or (type of) action, fulfils a central role, just accordingly, in Hegel’s various treatments of action, of guilt vis à vis innocence, or of the knowing of good and evil, as distinct from doing it, etc., while verbal play, like play in general, is a major characteristic of the first form of spirit, viz. art, inclusive of the theme of playfulness as such, but it is so only in its own playful way of course. That is art’s limitation, as it is at once its essential spiritual tie to

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our human and hence finite form (the first of three such, Hegel192 affirms) of spirit: As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. Oh how I wish he’d go away.

Being and nothing, then, are not a duo.193 Rather, since being is everything or all, nothing is indeed nothing. Theology needing its pictures in fact implies the need, the responsibility, for trying to overcome them. It is no more or other than the remark that Christ made to those closest to Him, intended to show how things really are, as far as this might be possible, while he speaks to the multitude in “parables” only. It is the same with the interpretation of Scripture as containing essentially a “mystical” sense, with which, Newman quite consistently declared, orthodoxy “stands or falls”. Nothing less in fact underlies the position of the school of thought lately centred around John Milbank, Slavoj Zizek and others. According to this position philosophy, to be any sophia at all, has to become or be led by theology, a theology which will in consequence not tolerate any “pictures” at all avoidable, precisely Hegel’s position as it was 192

The three are art, religion, philosophy, with the latter as highest. So high is the latter that it, philo-sophia, should aim, or so Hegel aims it, at becoming sophia simply and/or absolutely. Its final constitutive form is the Idea itself, one with God or with the final being as itself none other than the system of logic! This system of systems, however, itself reduces to or is the Idea simply, is the absolutely simple which alone is God or which God alone is. It is, that is, the apotheosis of God as God is and has to be the apotheosis of himself or one with his idea. This can also be expressed by saying that the absolute idea is the absolute, the only difference there being that in this so to say secular alternative the personal element is not given its express due. Hence Hegel corrects it when he speaks, rather, of God as “the absolute person”, which it would be only mischievous, in view of Hegel’s express declarations (cf. our Thomas Aquinas and Georg Hegel on the Trinity, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2020), to set against the Trinitarian unity of persons. 193 Here, again, one might note St. Thomas’s treatment of the expression of identities in subject-predicate form (in his commentary on Aristotle’s Peri hermeneias). Absolute identity cannot be thus expressed since what is in subject-place is quasimaterial, what is predicated is quasi-formal. The “as if” element here seems not to be acknowledged in Frege’s account of this relation. We may meanwhile wonder how it affects poetic inversion, e.g. in English. For Aquinas’s distinction to go through one has to be able to keep, it might seem, to a sentential scheme of placing, or at least note and/or justify explicitly departures therefrom.

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that of Aristotle in dedicating the two final books of his post-pictorial and systematic treatise, The Metaphysics, to “theologia”. It is this of which, we noted, Hegel cites the final paragraph in Aristotle’s original Greek as itself climax (final paragraph) to his own magnum opus, thus concluding his Encyclopaedia. In this way the factor of what we call revelation is placed within a larger but still specific frame. There is a touch of the “ecumenical” here, but joined to the greatest emphasis possible upon the final Idea as being the divine esse in which nothing else has part specifically, having only hope, rather, of possible union with and in the divine and absolute simplicity (such that the eternally uttered Word is necessarily absolutely one with its utterer), as Adam “walked with God”.194 It is thus told of one of the saints that on his protesting once to God in his prayer that he had given Him everything God replied that he hadn’t. The saint asked what he had held back and received as reply the divine injunction “Give me your sins”. Thus it is said, indeed mysteriously, that Christ, having been born without such “original” sin, on the Cross was “made sin for us”. This I suppose is what finally resists objectification, remaining a mystery requiring faith to bear it. Regarding Adam we have that “in Adam all die”. This again overcomes finite collectivism. For as really having been “in Adam” there is no injustice in my, or anyone’s, burden of “original sin” as defining his humanity. I, you, ate of the fruit, just as now we are or may be “in Christ”. Such is the perspective, which one may or may not share of course, while being in it (or not being in it) all the same. That is, I am in it or I am not in it and I believe or disbelieve the affirmative proposition, proclamation rather. These are two distinct pairs of alternatives, generating together four further pairs. What is bound to happen, incidentally, is not just therefore unfree, as we see above all in the concept of divinity itself, that which can only be necessary and free supremely, hence in one. This is part of the general undertaking by and in philosophy of a correction of language, of lingual activity as developing in finite temporality out of, near enough, mammalian babyhood. “A sinner was I conceived …” Doubtless this is most clearly revealed in crucifixion of the One assuming this burden, this guilt, a term naming firstly, i.e. originally, this that we found taxing to understand as guilt. “In Adam all die”. What could it mean otherwise? Here too the Idea cancels plurality but in going beyond it, Hegel supplying the deep-level conceptuality involved, though it was to be found in the Church Fathers and their commentators, in Augustine, in Aquinas, above all in the Biblical Scriptures, also Hegel’s prime source, seminarian as he had been, while this 194 Cf. our Hegel’s Theology or Revelation Thematised, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne 2018.

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led further to an expansion and correction of the concept of logic itself, to its including, in a series, the concept of Life for example. Thus life too, by force of this series only, becomes due to be swallowed up in the Idea, as part, as the ultimate explanation, of our dying because we live, such dialectical opposition being the back side of any finite concept, as Hegel puts it. What is distinctive here, however, is that such opposition, its dialectic, governs every relation or substance taken as finite, as the Absolute, the Idea, finally consumes in fulfilling logic. The opposite movement, from the other direction, is the creation, in which logic itself as we know it, along with “nature”, unfurls or “evolves” as temporal process, all to be seen as a breakdown into parts actually outside parts or quantity. “Our God is a consuming fire”, has to be, if indeed God. Thus nothing is indeed nothing other than being, whether or not it is itself being also, of some sort. Yet being has no sorts. Still, the creation adds nothing to God, is in that sense nothing, it too. This the apostolic missionaries proclaimed from their earliest journey (Acts of the Apostles), citing a Greek poet, that it is solely “in” God that we (or, it is implied, anything) “live and move and have our being”. This is “creation stricto sensu”195. Thus Christianity, baptism, introduces the new-born babe of Christian parents, though not only him or her, to life and death at once, the one via the other in both directions. Hence hatred of our “life in this world” is put by Christ as prime condition for discipleship. Meanwhile, “the children of this world” are “wiser in their own generation than the children of light” and don’t we, and they, know it? So the night of faith, which night is faith, is the only means whereby the finite might approach the infinite. We had not known that these can or could be divine attributes but rather only or abstractly that infinity can stop at nothing. Hence infinity (“except you believe you cannot …”) and the Johannine “dark night of the soul” are one and the same196. The latter does not describe a more esoteric or “mystical” way (than the life of faith as such), the necessity for prayer being the same for all197. It is in general 195

Cf. our “Creation stricto sensu”, New Blackfriars, Vol. 89, No. 1020, March 2008, pp. 194-214. 196 Cf. Dom David Knowles OSB: What is Mysticism? Sheed & Ward, London 1967, 1971. 197 We approach here the positive sense of “faith” as a virtue (cp. Christ’s plea, “Believe me for the very works’ sake”), something quite missed and/or ignored in, say, Hume’s treatment of it. It can be thought of, for example, as a hanging on, under stress, duress, etc., to past enlightenments(!), something as clearly virtuous as it is distinct from obstinate refusal to abandon the plainly discredited, most starkly so

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difficult, anyhow, to judge between genuine prayer as approach to God and mere self-deception, even or especially in one’s own case. Judge not, just “keep on”, “endure to the end”. Or, it is the same, “In nothing be anxious”. “Take no thought for the morrow”. All seems to hang together, that is the enlightenment that faith brings, along with the ability to show this to whomever might want to listen. “Learn of me for I am meek and lowly of heart”. We had not known that these could be divine attributes but, rather, only, abstractly, that infinity can stop at nothing that is anything. Hence the importance of the Thomistic finding that evil is mere absence, of a good that is due, physically or “morally”. Add to this that the infinite or absolute good is absolutely due, it too, and Hegel’s notions concerning evil begin to become a little clearer, or may do so, perhaps. This “dueness” of the infinite, of course, is not to be thought of sa something in any way added to the infinite (even the mathematically infinite number is not increased by addition). Dueness, anyhow, is rather cancelled or swallowed up in the infinite. This is what the Kantian moral theory, of the absolute “ought” has obscured, is what Hegel would make clear in affirming that “the factual”, as well or rather say ‘actual’ (though this might then appear as a mere definition of the actual, as prominent in some previous philosophical theory), “is normative”. Under “absolutely due”, anyhow, we would raise the notion, the necessity rather, of, indeed, necessity, as being the face, the interpretation, of that absolute freedom which is God’s alone, which is God or itself the Absolute, without qualification, rather. This “alone” only goes through, again, because we refer by “God” to the All (Deus meus et omnia). Therefore, in being of the All freedom is whose ever might dwell “within” God as, the only possible relation as indeed being no real relation merely, “one with” God, in what Hegel calls concrete identity. This refers to an absolute albeit an eternally conferred identity with God (“You shall be with me one vine”), whose being, the being which he is, permits no other or prepositional relation with what he is not since this would leave the non-being in place. We touch again on the necessity for an absolute idealism but as the only true realism. These presentations of what is to be believed coincide, in our intention at the least, with the most ideal reach of sophia and my intention, where it is a matter of faith in a person, thus escaping the especial pain of Othello’s tragedy or similar, of “refusing belief”, something plainly attributed, here at least (refusal), to ill will. This is the incredulity of the self-styled “plain man”. For instance, refusal to believe that men have been on the moon seems plainly related to the stupidity all propagandists seek to exploit, whatever we are to make of spontaneous denial that the moon and its light, or the Lisbon earthquake, are put there or occur as intended for man.

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my wish, is to make no other assertion, whether as philosopher or as one of the faithful, so help me! In general, freedom, when absolute and infinite or unbounded, as one with its own inventiveness in actu, is the mother of or absolute basis for all necessity (which is thus a name for God and nothing abstract or “mathematical” at all). Necessity is rather itself determined by freedom’s absolute inventiveness. Thus it is only that necessity, this so to say second or “reverse” face of infinite freedom, which might and indeed does mother “invention”, though not indeed as mere discovery in the passive sense. In the first place it invented me and you, and this is the truth behind the Scotist necessity (of God’s love for man, as much individual as generic, the force of “in Adam”). This is the anatomy, in and by discursive thinking’s finitude, of infinite and hence pure act, actus actuum, this being the true sense of Aristotle’s first mover, i.e. mover of every motion as being motion itself. This and similar is totally missed in, say, Hume’s negative speculation. Yet the metaphysical necessities for conceiving infinite being are quite straightforward. One such primary necessity is the sublation of any possible difference between and hence diversity of (an) infinite being and infinity itself, of which, therefore, or indeed antecedently, there cannot be a plurality, since many infinities would just be the same one. Mathematical notions of infinity, then, such as Cantor strove after, yet in full knowledge of this Scholastic heritage, cannot remain exclusively, or at all, mathematical. An infinite number, just like infinity itself, could not remain just a number. It must, for one thing, be fully and/or ever, that is to say necessarily, in accordance, we noted above, with absolute freedom, “in act”, as indeed act itself and just as such one with its own act. Infinity is absolutely or necessarily one, as the perfection of freedom demands. All these attributions, however, derive from the clear view of infinity as maximally personal if it is anything, from the infinite person as Hegel surefootedly expresses it, as not wishing at all thereby to oppose a or indeed the Trinity of persons, corresponding to, identical, rather, with the constitutive relations of whom Hegel says that they are distinct “only in the way of distinction”, this phrase to be understood here, context shows, as itself truly distinct in meaning, i.e. not merely in the way of distinction, from the crude Sabellian heresy. The “way of distinction” (Hegel), that is, is what applies to finite discourse concerning finite supposita or at times the infinite itself (as finitely discoursed upon). Hence the Trinitarianism of selectively endorsed “idioms”, as corresponding to Church teaching, is a matter of knowing what statements are purely negatively not disallowed, in accordance with the statement of Aquinas that we know most about God when we know that we know nothing, meaning by this, again, that such

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negative but still finite statements offend divine truth, i.e. offend infinity, finitude’s non-negative but all- consuming opposite, less than any others intended as a possible basis for a speculative negative theology. Prayer and the confirmed truths of faith are the proportionate ways for us to reach or approach God. Without exception, these negations urge, “the letter kills”. This is the truth which underlies John of the Cross’s emphasising that God “has spoken only one word”, which Word, he clarifies, is Himself as Son, i.e. not a word at all except by condescension to the inspired Johannine text (another John) of the “fourth Gospel”. Yet the Gospel itself or as such is no text at all, is Spirit (Geist). Hence the response of the author of The Cloud of Unknowing: “I would leave all that I can think and take for my love that which I cannot think.” He nonetheless wrote a book about it, as we do here. Yet here the metaphysics diverge from or go higher than those of Aristotle (upon which they nonetheless build). The resolution of this seeming contradiction lies in a recall of the nothingness of creation in its finitude and quantitative anatomy except, unless or until viewed as having what being, life or movement (though this is already breaking up the reality) it has in God, in saying which all the weight of our understanding is laid upon this minuscule preposition “in”. This “in” is open to endless analogy, as we have noted it to be, for identity specifically, with or without difference as the particular case may be, while even here a continuous line of concrete identities is to be preferred to any positing of “degrees” of identity of creation’s act, on the model of “I in you and you in me”. This, therefore, ultimately identifies being and nothing, as specified, however, by the evangelical “Without me you can do nothing”, “I will be in you”, etc., sayings which are themselves varied amplifications of creation’s original nothingness stricto sensu or as against an infinite creator as posited. Hegel’s text is particularly rich in variations upon this theme. One may stress either the unity of theme or the diversity of variation but preferably both, as each depends upon the other for its own seemingly opposed meaning. Being itself is compared to the form itself as its act. Only so, in composites of matter and form, is form said to be a principle of being since it completes any substance, the act of which, however, is esse (being) … So in composites of matter and form neither the matter nor the form can be called that which is, nor can even the act of existing be so termed. Form, however, can be called that-by-which a thing is, inasmuch as it is a principle of existing; the complete substance, however, is that which exists, and the act of existing is that by which the substance is denominated a being.198 198

Aquinas, Summa contra gentes 2, 54 (free translation).

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J.P. Reilly comments: For Aristotle only form is act. Form by giving a being its substantial perfection makes it to be. Aristotle never appeared to consider esse as the act of form. In fact, he never seemed to consider existence much at all. Certainly to speak of an act of form would make no sense to him. For Aristotle form does what esse does for St. Thomas. Aristotle would have to maintain that an act of form would be an act of act. To actualise form, therefore, is unnecessary because form is already act, is being. To Thomas, who posited subsisting existence as his very first principle, things appeared altogether different. The form of a creature by itself alone is no actual being at all. It is act in the order of essence only because it has received actuation from esse. If it really actuated a being, there would be no such thing as an essence without existence, that is, a purely possible essence. Thus in the order of existence form is pure potency. This is its whole intelligibility: capacity for existing. As existing its entire actuality comes from esse. Of itself, therefore, it does not add anything to esse because nothing can be added to existence. Yet esse, because it makes real a definite essence, becomes a definite existence. Thus esse actualizes essence and in this same sense exerts some type of causality on form.199

* I end with some considerations upon what is called “The Lord’s Prayer”, insofar as they may relate to this study so far, as taught to his followers by Christ as their “Lord”, believed Lord not just of the universe but Lord absolutely. The prayer starts off “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name”, i.e. not on earth exclusively, as is more closely specified in the petition immediately following that earth not differ from heaven in this allimportant regard: “May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. I note all the same that the relation between God and his heaven much resembles that pictured in Shakespeare’s Romeo’s line, “Heaven is here where Juliet lives”, while earth too should be where God lives and hence heaven, as in pre-lapsarian Eden. Christ, further, enjoins use of the address “our Father”, quite clearly stated therefore as one with His Father, of whom He shall have said “I and my Father are one”. A whole Gospel is already packed into that implicit brotherhood of all with the Son. Note, though, that he is speaking to or teaching His believers firstly, although the consensus is that His work and words are offered to all for eventual acceptance in faith. So in this prayer, a declared veneration of the divine name, inclusive of petition for ever wider exercise of this veneration, i.e. for the coming of 199

J.P. Reilly (title mislaid, regrettably), Mouton & co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague 1971. Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 71-85900, pp. 24-25.

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God’s kingdom, understood as a future or ever-coming state of things anywhere and everywhere, so to say, as God’s will, immediately therefore entreated to “be done, on earth as it is in heaven”. We might point out that the implication is that this is done, or will be done, “on earth as it is (i.e. just as, sicut) in heaven”. … if you examine, you will see that man has become God, and God has become man, through the union of the divine with the human nature. (Catherine of Siena, Dialogues).

So in a sense, we might call it McTaggartian, though only up to a (McTaggartian) point. Heaven is by this prayer full-bloodedly assigned equally to earth. God’s will is done, always down all the ages, this being the Hegelian emphasis, that “the factual is normative”, which has often perplexed his readers, the same point as often inclines readers of Thomas Aquinas (or the Bible) to hesitate. What, then, is wished for the future particularly is the “as”. Let your will be done as it is, i.e. just as, in heaven. Really, this means, there is no such distinct or other “place” as earth, or ultimately no “place”, beyond the (to us) immediate phenomenon, at all. This is the sense of absolute idealism, so-called. Hence this term is not much more than a misleading shorthand for the cult, as it must necessarily become, of the Absolute Idea. Hence in Hegel Idea and ideal are much more opposed than joined. What he calls ideal is primarily the finite as such or with all its manifestations. There is no such place as earth inasmuch as time and place are what constitute earth, much more than do, say, time and space, “space-time”, which has, now as or “in” the universal singular, a more universal while yet more supposedly empirical application200, as the or an object of physics namely. “Space” specifies an empirically actual universal (in the nonuniversal, logically, but rather physical sense) individual, while “place” signifies only the idea of somewhere, among all places, as yet unspecified. It logically a universal. Time and place, anyhow then, form the first or immediate division (hence itself immediately ideal) of finite particulars, which are what is and/or are consumed by and in the Absolute, which, as supreme reality, is rather “idea” or, ultimately, thought as such. We routinely think of God, in fact, as without a body, while we routinely think of body as naming something so to say 200

Cp. M.P. Sacchi, “Does a Void Exist? The Thomistic Reduction”, in Indubitanter ad veritatem, “Studies Offered to Leo J. Elders SVD”, ed. J. Vijgen, DAMON, Budel, Holland, 2003, pp. 281-301; also Sacchi, “El espacio enigmatico”, in Basileia, Buenos Aires 1998.

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transcendentally solid or “real”, not noticing even the seeming contradiction. The body is real as we are real, no more but also no less, our stake in the phenomenal, as one might say, at the same time as it lifts or, rather, reveals the phenomenal, the lowest, to and/or in its role as just thereby the highest pledge of authenticity. In populist TV educational programmes young astronomers get shown as lost in wonder at the marvel of insignificant man, as they see or measure him, being able ever more to comprehend the, as they see it, infinitely extended material universe (we might ask: what else could any eye, any material organ, could ever be able just to see, in that sense, or given that the eye is that of a rational being?). They fail to place man at the centre (the anthropic principle). Thus the wonder is rather their not drawing the plain conclusion, each concerning himself or herself, from this drearily and colourlessly quantitative spectacle, concerning their own human selves as spectators thereof, along with the whole question of “the object” (as treated of, just for example at the very least, in Hegel’s “science of logic” by means of his logical science or faculty as one might rather say). The observer, after all, cannot as such be other than at the centre of the observation as of what is “found out”. It can be seen after all as an instance of “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath”. This is what Berkeley groped after but Hegel saw, Kant remaining in the wilderness, with the caput mortuum (sic Hegel) of the thing-in-itself. Add to this that there is logical contradiction in the idea of infinity of a purely quantified particular, such as Kant indeed saw, making rather of time and space an a priori necessity, in his truncated sense of the a priori, as essentially indifferent to truth or falsity. Yet if God’s will be done here as in heaven then they are, i.e. they “become”, earth and heaven, one and the same. Yet his will is, just so, done (surely it is) in hell, or the infernal regions, as faith teaches, but not, so to say by definition, as in heaven, which is, rather, His will and not “merely” the fulfilling of it. Thus earth, like hell in that, is not the final reality or, hence, any reality at all, by the above reasoning. “He takes up the isles as fine dust.” Hegel’s view of this seems to be that nature, say, is to be viewed as one and the same throughout (the “world in a grain of sand”), though not finally a case of “parts outside parts” merely, just as he applies this principle, firstly, to the human body but also, as the all that is “above all”, to being generally or as such, become now the Absolute Idea or the System of Logic indifferently, as a living unity which any anatomising destroys in even pace with its investigative activity201. This view, whether it be exclusively Hegelian or common tradition, rather, concerning “nature”, of earth or extended 201

Cf. Enc. 135 and 136 with Zusatz.

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universe or finitude generally, or of language as we might equally well say, is well reflected in the legends of St. Francis, as speaking to “my sister death” or as preaching to the fishes or in his “canticle” or, we have noted, in his affirmative “mind-blowing” prayer, Deus meus et omnia. But by this earth and heaven, the world and God, are strictly incommensurate, no quality, not even existence, able to be applied to God and the world or us univocally or without analogy. All things can only be mine if I am, or am become there with such a prayer myself omnia (everything rather than all things, despite the plural), esse in Aquinas. So we must pray for a state “on earth as it is in heaven”. Thus we start to bring this about. The point here is that of the non-being of a distinct or separated earth, or of an abstract “nature” as essential to the doctrine of creation stricto sensu, to the contrary, that is, if, as I hope, I err not, of what some have imagined orthodox belief required. That is, the creation “lives and moves and has its being” in God alone, this being ultimately why, to cite an earlier Scripture, “In God alone is my soul at rest” (if not as in a box then, it can only be, by some sort of identity). Nature, after all, is the original denial of Eden, of the “garden” inside the excluding fence. This of course is a picturing of a state of alienated finitude, which is alone what we, as finite humans, “can think”. Eden, by contrast, was God’s taking or “conceiving” finitude precisely as His created otherness, to Himself, other, that is to say, but not alien. This, in turn, is and was true being’s eternal refusal to be bounded by non-being, trickling down to us, conceptually again, as the very essence of infinity, of the infinite which is in no sense a mere quality or, still less, quantity. Confronted by this we are indeed “meant to cease all thinking” as meaning “to take for our love that which we cannot think”, the role of faith precisely and wholly at thought’s highest reach, that of self-exceeding. “For thinking means that in the other one meets with one’s self.”202 This, as thus characterising selfawareness, can be the first step (or is it the last?) of the state where, only apparently conversely, in one’s self one meets with the other or, inclusively, all others, the state of love, surely, as having its object ready to hand and hence cancelling it or them as object, “I in them and they in me” as Christians’ proffered exemplar, the Word, apparently soaked in the Deuteronomic texts in particular (when or where did He read them?), did not scruple to express it. Either way, sumit unus sumunt mille (Aquinas on sacramental communion). In itself, however, this meeting, with one’s self (in the Garden203), is itself in its deepest essence to be seen as nothing short 202 203

Hegel, Enc. 159, q.v., stress added. “The magus Zoroaster met his own image Walking in the garden” (P.B. Shelley).

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of being with, being one with, the or that Other. Here it is absolute idealism that opens the way exclusively to statement of this as itself nothing short of that realism Hegel calls “the Absolute Idea”, as earlier and indeed afterwards it was and is called “the Word”. Its being “made flesh” gives no deeper reality, nor could it, than it, the Word, already has. Rather, it was made flesh to “dwell amongst us” so that we might behold the Word’s glory “as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth”. Or one can say that in becoming flesh it became what it always was or, as the liturgy puts it, it came down from the heaven it never left. Here we have the perfect counterpart to the theme of ascension in caelis, reading rather of angels chiding the apostles for gazing up into the sky just because “this same Jesus shall come again as you have seen him go”204, in effect, or is “with you until the end of the world” though of course maximally thereafter or, rather, eternally. St. Luke here is no more nor less naïve than we moderns, even with a couple of angels or “men in white” thrown in (Acts of the Apostles, 1), robed in white, apparently especially for the occasion that it certainly is and, in some maximal sense, was - maximal inasmuch as, in my view at least, we need always to keep in mind that absolute truth, as affecting, at least, “the way” and “the life”, transcends change and thus, Hegel reasons, destroys and/or elevates it, in a “putting away” indeed of “childish things” as St. Paul speaks of his own “becoming a man”. The view of time picked up by McTaggart was already at work here.205 Concerning grace, however, of which we are clearly speaking and which is perhaps the main object and or inspiration of faith, there is much more to be said than the few and tentative indications given above here206. What we have chosen nonetheless to emphasise is the necessity of this free gift qua free. Precisely as gift it is a necessity on the part of infinite being. Note here that talk of an infinite being, as if one amongst several, is strictly nonsensical or, at least, as a material and/or quantified picturing, out of place here, although legitimate nonetheless in religio-devotional or poetic representation and, more comprehensively because just in that way more specifically, legitimate in, indeed essential to, proclamation of the fundamental truth to 204

It is possibly significant that St. Luke did not write “as He has gone” simply. McTaggart erred, however, in finding Hegel inconsistent in not ending his Logic with Love rather than Knowledge or Thought as category. Hegel writes concerning “the passage from necessity to freedom” that “this liberation … is called Love”, as it is also “called” I. But what it is, whatever it is called, is the Idea as eternally thinking itself, something to which McTaggart seems to forget to do justice here. Cf. Enc. 159, final paragraph introducing “The Doctrine of the Notion”. 206 Cf. Our references earlier to K. Wojtyla’s doctoral study of the doctrine of faith in St. John of the Cross’s works. 205

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all people at whatever stage of their specific human and temporal culture. Here the one proclaiming must be free to alternate between talk of (God as) “the” supreme being (impossible in some languages, e.g. Latin) and talk of, let us say, Spirit or mind. This is of course why Aquinas says we know most about God when we know that we know nothing. since we have no other language as such nor could we have. Language, that is, is on the wrong side of our discrimination here, a constant bewitcher of intelligence as Wittgenstein virtually (almost) implies. Within philosophy, therefore, the risk from this aboriginal linguistic tendency, never relaxes its pressure. The alternative is silence, signalling divine peace keeping hearts and minds in adoring knowledge as true terminus of intellect. Hence “God has spoken only one word” and that is nothing other than himself, who alone draws others to this kind of life, viz. the divine. It is our words that are lingual or of the tongue and associated organs merely. Babies learn them first as mere sounds. * We tend to separate the creation as resulting, caused. It must, that is, come from the First Mover. This is to forget that it has its being, inclusive of its otherness, in God, even, or just as, coming from Him. Nor is it impossible to set bounds or limits to this “in”. Far from inviting to some container or “box” theory of God’s relation to creation we are pushed time and again towards some sort of identification, though always in difference. “This also is thou, neither is this thou”. That such knowledge, such understanding, is a grace, if it is, is a clear philosophical conception, whether it be true or false and whether or not we can or could exclaim, on receiving the grace, “Why didn’t I think of that before?” Thus also the very term “theology” is the name of a concept (conceptus), like all and any of our verbalised conceptions (conceptiones), each calling equally for the requisite conceptual clarification, as do also any and all verbal phenomena including those not as such names of concepts, e.g. “and”, “Mark Twain”, etc. That the creation is nothing or less than nothing in comparison with God, i.e. there is no comparison, is affirmed time and again in Scripture. Elizabeth Anscombe at some stage in her career shall have found it impossible to conceive any entity(!) or category under the term ens rationis. Yet by our way here it is rather the case that everything is an ens rationis, ens itself included, i.e. it, as they, is a rationate207 conception, whether or 207

For this term “rationate” I am indebted to R.W. Schmidt’s use of it in his in many respects at that time ground-breaking (and/or ground-reclaiming) study The Domain of Logic according to St. Thomas Aquinas, Nijhoff, the Hague, 1966. Such

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not “rational”. Thus ens itself, as so named, is a or rather the concept, in, for example, Hegel’s thought as he expounds it. It is that, however, absolutely or “for God”, is indeed finally He, though the as esse as perfect act. That alone is our claim upon reality, that in being such an ens rationis we are really and truly ens. But is this not to render the category useless after all, as Anscombe found it to be? By no means. Everything turns upon the difference between divine thought as absolute and finite human conception. Yet just as given this difference human thinking, where properly philosophical or self-critical, aims to close the gap in which, nonetheless, it finds itself and is indeed found. “You would not seek me if you had not already found me”. What God alone has, indeed is, is esse, actus purus in Aristotle, “the absolute idea” in Hegel. This perfect act, as it was earlier on called, is that to which all and any essence, essentia, is “in potency”. If, as common ground, God is indeed esse and just thereby actus purus, then all and any other being is, as other, ens rationis or, in the first place, something other than God which God thinks. As such it remains in God and as such, this “separate” and/or finite thing, is in no way separate from him and so in that way is ens rationis. Similarly, so runs the thought, there are beings of our finite thought alone that we call entia rationis and this really does seem a form of being even if it is not “real” being, i.e. really is not! It is this act, actus, of real thought or reasoning or indeed of imagination at least tends to posit an object which qua object (of thought) is a being. Yet there is no essential link with consciousness here, as Hegel’s phraseology can tend to suggest although his discourse as a whole in “the logic” gives the lie to this. Furthermore, any thought whatever, just as such and as being any instance of being whatever (as is also any moment of or that is consciousness), is called upon or must tend, as indeed tending, to be absorbed by the Idea and in that one-way sense annihilated. This is the verdict equally of Hegel and of Aquinas upon finitude. Finitude is the realm of essence, that is to say, again, of potentiality208, while being, act, is infinite. This, it can be shown, was not realised by Aristotle in his doctrine of form, that the finite form is itself merely potential to being, to esse. Aquinas and Hegel both realised this although in the former it can seem, more discreetly perhaps, muted or needing to be teased out. The reason is at once theological, pastoral and, all the same, truly philosophical, it too. For Aquinas the foremost truths, to be abided by and promoted, are such as the divine Trinity of persons in one being and/or that He, that being, as second reclamation need by no means instantiate being “unreconstructed” simply, as the late and much missed Peter Geach wanted to insist to me in later conversation. Cf. our Philosophy or Dialectic?, Verlag Peter Lang, Frankfurt-am-Rhein, 1994. 208 Cf. Reilly, op. cit.

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person or Word, “came down from heaven”, by which is to be understood that, in the words of the liturgy, He came down from the heaven that He never left, whether we speak with Maritain of “the heaven of His soul” or however we wish further to qualify the seeming or so to say dialectical paradox. Hegel, on the other hand, rather begins from this “dialectical” end. It seems essential to see this in order to that more perfect fulfilling of evangelical proclamation which is demanded of us today and always has been. This yet more perfect fulfilment than hitherto, that is to say, ever has been demanded, under what Cardinal St. John Henry Newman specifically outlined as “the development of Christian doctrine”. He outlined it, however, as itself doctrine; hence this too, the thesis, the principle of doctrinal development, must itself ever be developed under the requisite spiritual guidance. To this end, however, a further development of philosophy too is ever required which, one must understand and concede, is qua philosophy nonetheless essentially innocent of any foregone conclusion. One can only say of it, as to all enquirers, in the pacific phrase of St. Thomas, “if one would but consider”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balthasar, Hans Urs von: The Theology of Karl Barth (transl. John Drury), Anchor Books, New York 1972. Black, Deborah L.: “Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias in Medieval Latin and Arabic Philosophy: Logic and the Linguistic Arts”, in Aristotle and his Medieval Interpreters, ed. Bosley & Tweedale, 1991, University of Calgary Press, Canada 1991, pp. 25-83. D’Entrèves, A.P.: The Notion of the State, Oxford 1967. Gadamer, H.-G.: “The Philosophical Foundations of the Twentieth Century” (1962), in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. David E. Linge, University of California Press, 1977, pp. 107-129. Geach, P.T.: Truth and Hope, UND Press, Notre Dame, USA, 2001. —. Truth, Love and Immortality: an Introduction to McTaggart’s Philosophy, Hutchinson, London 1979. Gendlin, Eugene T.: Line by Line Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima II & III, 2 vols., University of Chicago, published by The Focusing Institute, Spring Valley, New York., 2012. Gilson, E.: On Being and Some Philosophers, Toronto 1951. Hegel, G.W.F.: Stellungen der Gedanken zur Objektivität”, in Hegel Studien, Band III. Fischer Bucherei 1968. Jonsson, U.: Foundations for Knowing God: Bernard Lonergan’s Foundations for Knowledge of God and the Challenge from Antifoundationalism, Verlag Peter Lang, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1999. Kerr, Fergus, O.P.: Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK, 2007. Knowles OSB, Dom David: What is Mysticism? Sheed & Ward, London 1967, 1971. Kolak, D.: I Am You, Springer, New York 2002. Küng, H.: Menschwerdung Gottes, eine Einführung in Hegels theologisches Denken als Prolegomena zu einer künftige Christologie, Freiburg 1970. MacIntyre, A.C.: Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame Press, 1988. Reilly, J.P.: “Cajetan, Essentialist or Existentialist?” in The New Scholasticism, No. 41, pp. 191-222. Sprigge, T.; “Idealism/Realism”, in Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology (cited above).

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Steiner, R.: “Moses”, in Geschichtserkenntniss (ed. C. Lindenberg), Verlag Freies Geistesleben, 1982. Aristotle and his Medieval Interpreters, ed. Bosley & Tweedale, University of California Press 1991. Stump, E.: “Aquinas on the Foundations of Knowledge”, in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, supp. Vol. 17, 1991 (also in Aristotle and his Medieval Interpreters, ed. Bosley & Tweedale, University of Calgary Press, 1991). Theron, S: Absolute Idealism a Necessary Condition for Sacramental or Other Theology, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle-uponTyne, 2021. —. “Cajetan”, in Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, ed. Hans Burkhardt & Barry Smith, 2 vols., Philosophia Verlag: Munich, Philadelphia & Vienna, 1991, pp.109-111 —. “Creation stricto sensu”, New Blackfriars 1989, March 2008, pp. 194214. —. “ESSE”, The New Scholasticism, Spring 1979; later a chapter in our Philosophy or Dialectic, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 1994. —. Hegel’s System of Logic, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastleupon-Tyne 2019. —. Hegel’s Theology or Revelation Thematised, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 1019, Newcastle-upon-Tyne 2018. —. Morals as Founded on Natural Law, Verlag Peter Lang, Frankfurt-amMain, 1987. —. New Hegelian Essays, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastleupon-Tyne, 2012. —. “Other Problems about the Self”, Sophia 24 (Australia) 1985, pp. 11-21. —. “Self and World”, New, Blackfriars, Vol. 87, No. 1012, November 2006, pp. 547-560 —. The Orthodox Hegel, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle-uponTyne 2014. —. “Subject and Predicate Logic”, The Modern Schoolman LXVII, November 1989, pp. 73-77. —. “The Interdependence of Semantics, Logic and Metaphysics as Exemplified in the Aristotelian Tradition”, International Philosophical Quarterly 42, No. 1, March 2002, pp. 68-91. —. “The Position of Philosophy in a University Curriculum”, The South African Journal of Philosophy, 1991, no. 10, pp. 111-114. —. “The Supposition of the Predicate”, The Modern Schoolman LXXVII, November 1999, pp. 73-78.

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—. Thomas Aquinas and Georg Hegel on the Trinity, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle-on-Tyne, 2020. —. Thought and Incarnation in Hegel, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2020. Van Riet, G.: “The Problem of God in Hegel”, tripartite essay in Philosophy Today, 1966-7. Vol. XI, 2-4, pp. 75-106. Wojtyla, K.: Doctrina de fide apud S. Joannem a Cruce, 1958-59, first published by University of St. Thomas (the Dominican “Angelicum”), Rome 1959. Yong, A.: Review of W. Desmond’s Hegel’s God a Counterfeit Double, Ashgate 2003, at Wesleyan “Philosophical Society” (cf. Internet).

INDEX OF PERSONS Abraham: 64, 75 Anaxagoras: 21 Anne, St.: 16, 81 Anscombe, G.E.M.: 42, 161, 162 Anselm, St.: 96, 103 Aquinas, St. Thomas: 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 15, 23, 24, 27, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 43, 45, 46, 48, 50, 60, 61, 64, 72-78, 80, 81, 83, 85-89, 91, 95, 96, 97, 99-109, 113-117, 119-123, 125, 127129, 131, 132, 134, 136, 137, 140, 141, 143-145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153, 155, 161, 162 Arendt, H.: 54, 55, 61 Aristotle: 4, 7, 18, 28, 31, 33, 39, 43, 51, 52, 57, 62, 67, 72, 78, 83, 85, 88, 91, 92, 95, 100, 101, 115, 119, 130, 134-137, 139, 140, 142-144, 149-151, 162 Athanasius, St.: 128 Augustine, St.: 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 41, 64, 67, 74, 79, 85, 91, 111, 113, 118, 120, 134, 145, 146, 151, 152, 159 Barth, K.: 98 Berkeley, Bishop G.: 46, 161, 170, 189 Black, Deborah L.: 130, 135, 144Boniface VIII, Pope: 142, 172, 263 Bruckner, A.: 142 Burkhardt, H.: 205, 290 Cajetan: 132, 133, 136, 164, 166, 322 Catherine of Siena OP, St.: 4, 148, 157 Caussade SJ, J.-P. de: 87 Coyle, J.S.: 71 Darwin, C.: 8

David, King: 113 De Gaulle, C.: 85 D’Entrèves, A.P.: 67, 68 Descartes, R.: 19, 72 Desmond, W.: 78, 81-83, 87 Dionysios (pseudo-): 75 Eckhart OP, Meister: 88, 122, 127, 143 Elders SVD, L.: 157 Francis of Assissi, St.: 86, 159 Frege, G.: 85, 94, 150 Geach, P.T.: 11, 25, 31, 33, 42, 51, 57, 64, 99, 101, 102, 111, 122, 132, 140 Gendlin, E.: 4, 18, 135, 136, 140142, Gentile, G.: 34, 47, 59 Gilson, E.: 81 Haecker, R.: 95 Hegel, G.W.F.: 2-6, 8, 10-12, 15, 19-23, 25, 27, 28, 30-32, 34-38, 40, 41, 44, 46-50, 52, 53, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61-64, 66, 68, 69, 71-79, 81-86,88-97, 99-103, 106, 108, 111-114, 116, 118, 120, 125127, 129, 131, 132, 135-137, 139-142, 144, 146-148, 150,152, 158, 162 Heidegger, M.: 39, 56, 149 Hitler, A.: 53-56, 124 Hobbes, T.: 39, 88, 129 Hume, D.: 29, 85, 129, 134, 145, 152, 153 Jacobi, F.: 52, 53, 57, 58, 64, 125, 126 James, W.: 149 Jamros SJ, D.: 3, 119 Jansenius, C.: 82 Joachim, St.: 16

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John of the Cross O.C.D., St.: 10, 12, 19, 26, 37,62, 70, 75, 80, 85, 87, 96, 97, 129, 130, 131, 155, 160 John XXIII, Pope, St.: 55, 62 Jonsson S.J., U.: 140 Julian of Norwich: 91 Kant, I.: 4, 7. 19, 30, 43, 46, 52, 53, 58, 63, 70, 83, 85, 86, 100, 104, 122, 125-128, 158 Kenny, A.: 149 Kerr O.P., F.: 98, 132 Knowles O.S.B., Dom D.: 152 Kockelmans, J.: 11 Kolak, D.: 14, 140 Küng, H.: 18, 19, 104 Las Casas O.P., B.: 55 Leibniz, G. von: 85 Lenin, V.: 53 Lewis, C.S.: 7, 64 Linge, D.E.: 70 Lonergan S.J., B.: 140 Lukasiewicz, J.: 141 Luke, St.: 142 Luther, M.: 53, 71, 78, 82, 88, 108 Maritain, J.: 162 Marx, K.: 18, 148, 249, 274, 296 Mary theotokos: 16-18, 36, 81, 134 Marx, K.: 29, 53 Matthew, St.: 80 McCabe OP, H.: 3, 28, 82, 91, 130 McInerny, R.: 136 McTaggart, J.M.E.: 11, 12, 32, 34, 47, 59, 95, 101, 111, 132, 142, 157, 160 Meynell, H.: 280 Milbank, J.: 32, 95, 108, 134, 150 Moore, G.E.: 5, 35 Moses: 24, 46, 77, 79 Newman, St. John H.: 19, 37, 53, 58, 71, 79, 85, 96, 104, 108, 126, 150, 162 O’Regan, C.: 78, 82, 84, 85 Orwell, G.: 124 Paul the Apostle, St.: 4, 7, 9, 14, 24, 34, 37, 41, 57, 78, 90, 91, 101, 113, 132, 141, 144

Paul VI (Montini), Pope: 19, 80 Peter, St.: 45, 61, 80, 104 Pilate, Pontius: 28 Pius IX, Pope: 142 Plato: 62, 85, 94, 101, 103, 135-137 Pythagoras; 131 Quine, W.V.O.: 1, 42 Rahner S.J., K.: 79, 108 Ratzinger, J. (Pope Benedict XVI): 98 Reilly, J.P.: 33, 37, 47, 95, 100, 136, 149, 156, 162 Rousseau, J.-J.: 68 Sabellius: 65 Sacchi, M.E.: 157 Sartre, J.-P.: 134 Schmidt, R.W.: 161 Scotus O.F.M., Bd. John Duns: 26, 46, 74, 81, 85, 107, 108, 118, 125 Shakespeare, W.: 156 Shelley, P.B.: 61, 159 Smith, B.: 102 Sprigge, T.: 102 Stalin, J.: 55, 56 Stein O.C.D., St. Edith: 31, 37 Steiner, R.: 24, 111 Stephen, St.: 45 Stump, E.: 60, 122 Teilhard de Chardin S.J.: 4, 82 Teresa of Avila O.C.D., St.: 18, 31, 45, 62, 120 Thérèse Martin O.C.D., St.: 121 Thompson, F.: 6, 49, 89 Van Riet, G.: 39, 84 Veatch, H.B.: 143 Vonier O.S.B., Abbot A.: 17 Wallace, Robert M.: 27, 63 Whitehead, A.: 102 Wittgenstein, L.: 3, 19, 20, 23, 29, 60, 64, 75, 91, 93, 121, 123, 130, 136, 144, 149 Wood, J.: 71 Yong, A.: 78, 82-84 Zizek, S.: 150