Book Description

The essays here in fact form one essay, a connected whole demonstrating Hegel’s overcoming of the traditional religious dualisms, thus enabling Christian doctrine to be inserted, by a leap in interpretation, into the metaphysical tradition. This is chiefly effected via the various internal contradictions, laid bare in Hegel’s dialectical logic, in such pairs as natural and revealed, inside and outside, nature and grace, individual and universal. An overview of this is offered in the Preface. The first essay shows how religious apologetic cannot simply hold back from this deep penetration of religion’s mysteries in philosophical form. The next one sets forth Hegel’s account of revelation. We then pause for general consideration of Hegel’s absolute idealism as the philosophical form. This leads to a comparison with Aristotelian-Thomistic epistemology. After that we change direction somewhat to investigate the driving desire behind such investigations; a little biographical colouring is called into play. Quite naturally a treatment follows of happiness in relation to rationality, continuous with the author’s earlier treatments of the theme of happiness. This has now set the stage for a general comparison of theology and philosophy. Which of these is being exercised here? Grace in relation to nature follows naturally as the next subject. After this there follows a kind of commentary upon Hegel’s choice of Being and his justification for taking Being as starting-point for his Science of Logic. We then pass to consider logical relations generally and in particular Identity, which leads naturally into rational treatment of Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity and, after that, Incarnation, “Signs and Sacraments” and some of the at first sight odder manifestations of piety, viewed now philosophically. This is followed by consideration of Religion in relation to both Philosophy and Freedom. To illuminate the vision yet more we end with commentaries upon Hegel’s text, first that on “The Subjective Notion as Notion” and why it is called that, second upon his Introduction to the third part of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, namely, “The Philosophy of Spirit”. Porphyry called the ancient Jews “a nation of philosophers”. He saw them as something more than a religious sect. The claim here – Hegel’s claim – is that Christians are called to the perfection of both religion and philosophy in a “wisdom that comes from above” as perfecting the habit of faith. Religion, Hegel said, is for all men and women, and hence children; as it might seem, philosophy is not. Yet we have in most religions a tradition of “mysticism”, viewed either as an addition or, it is widely held, as the full accomplishment of the life of grace. Now there is more than an analogy between Hegel’s speculative philosophy and speculative mysticism, just as one might say of Augustine, Anselm, Eckhart and a host of others. In harmony with this, Hegel claims that speculative reason corresponds with our most ordinary thought processes. Thus, there is no technical philosophical language. To read Hegel, therefore, he says himself, is to participate in a philosophical Gottesdienst or divine “service”; one which as wholly spiritual bypasses the apparatus, it might seem, of Church and sacraments, whether or not these be deemed necessary. To this participation the text here presented invites, as sober presentation and not merely interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy.