hegel's atheism

HEGEL’S ATHEISM PAUL F. LAKELAND

Vanderbilt University

In this article I propose to consider the two points upon which the force of the charge of atheism rests, namely, Hegel’s understanding of the relation of finite and infinite, and the respective positions of religion and philosophy in the Hegelian system. Obviously, these two ‘points’ encompass the entire dialectic; finite is a moment in the infinite dialectical whole, philosophy is the Aufhebung of religion. Then I shall briefly consider the charges of Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach, and turn back to Hegel and examine how he can best be defended, concerning myself in particular with the preface and introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit’ and the closing sections of the Encyclopaedia.2 A final sharpening of the issues will be attempted through a consideration of one modern exchange of views.3 In the second part of the paper I will broaden out the discussion, using a reading of Tillich‘s essay ‘On the Two Types of Philosophy of Religi~n’.~ With this as a background, I will attempt to make a case for Hegel, drawing out some of the implications of his general approach for modem systematic theology.

1

In a paper of this length, assumptions have to be made. One of my major presuppositions is that of the essential unity of the Hegelian corpus, in particular that it is a mistake to attempt to drive a wedge between the Phenomenology and the system as a wh01e.~ There is more than enough evidence for a basic homogeneity of vision. The second assumption is more problematic, but it will be tested in the course of the paper. It is Warren McWilliams’s claim that the Hegelian problem is to r i d a model for divine

1 Translated, with an introduction and notes by J.B. BaillieiNew York, 1967). 2 Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, being part three of the Encyclopaedia of the philo-

sophical Sciences (1830), translated by William Wallace, together with the Zusri’rze in Boumann’s text (1845), translated by A.V. Miller, with a foreword by J.N. Findlay (Oxford, 1971).

3 ‘Hegel on the Identity of Content in Religion and Philosophy’, by Quentin Lauer, in Hegel and the Philosophy of Religion, the Wofford Symposium, edited by Dane1 E. Christensen (The Hague, 1070), pp.261-78.

4 In Z%eologv of Culture (Oxford and New York, 1975). pp.10-29. 5 One of Emil Fackenheim’s driving convictions in m e Religious Dimension of

Hegel’s Thoughf (Bloomington, Indiana, 1967).

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246 PAUL F. LAKELAND

transcendence wluch does not imply total otherness.6 Whether and to what extent Hegel succeeds in this search could be seen as the central question of this paper.

The narrator of the Hegelian story is a speculative philosopher looking back both over the logically developed structure of the dialectic, and its actual working-out in history. From this privileged point of view, surveying the dynamics of Spirit, finite and infinite are closely and totally inter-related. Finite spirit is the alienation or objectification of Spirit, one move in the dialectic by which Absolute Spirit is actualized. ‘Gott ohne Welt ist nicht Gott’ - to quote the inevitable. Which means simply that the abstract Spirit remains only abstract if it is not actualized and its actualization is accomplished in its self-diremption (in the positing of itself as other than itself) and return to self. Hegel circumvents a lot of possible questions about the ground of the godhead’s relation to the world, about change implying lack of perfection, and so on, by pinning his abstract idea to its representation in the absolute religion, Christianity (as, of course, he must if he is to declare Christianity the perfection of representation of the Absolute). In any case, the internal movement w i t h the Godhead is what allows it to be the ground of the dialectical process within the world. Or, to express it representationally, the immanerlt Trinity is the ground of the economic.

One consequence of this is clearly that a relation of considerable closeness is established between God and finite spirit. For one thing, if the truth of God is knowledge, which Hegel claims, then human knowing is the divine self-knowing. The Absolute knows itself as fur sich in finite knowing. So it is not too much to say that from the standpoint of the infinite, the finite is a necessary pole or stage or ‘moment’ in its self-actualization. Ths is one of the crucial issues in Hegel interpretation; representationally, does this make the divine dependent for its perfection upon contingent creation? Further, if we look at things now from the point of view of finite spirit, its recognition of its finitude is the negation of its finitude, and thus its association with the infinite. The finite cannot know itself as finite without stepping beyond the limit of the finite in some way. To conceive a limit is to transcend it. So, we have grounds in these considerations for the claim which Hegel makes, the claim of the implicit unity of finite and infinite.

As Stephen Crites s t r e s s e ~ , ~ this implicit unity has immediately to be qualified. The implicit unity is seen from the point of view of the philosopher who stands at the culmination of the system and can survey the whole. That the unity is implicit indicates that we are dealing at t h s stage with an

6 cf. Hegel and nanscendence: The Riddle of the Phenomenology, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (Vanderbilt University, 1974).

7 me Problem of the ‘Positivity’ of the Gospel in the Hegelian Dialectic of Alienation and Reconciliation, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (Yale, 1961). p.108.

HEGEL’S ATHEISM 247

abstract notion, not with its actualization. The notion of Absolute Spirit is included, so to speak, in the logical Idea, the first point in the dialectic. This notion involves Spirit in a movement of self-diremption and return to self through which it comes to know itself as it is in and for itself (an und fur sich). The notion is not an actuality, and has therefore to be actualized to achieve the Absolute. From the standpoint of finite spirit, the same notion is also only implicit (now implicit in the world rather than in the divine Idea) and needs to be actualized. Another way to put this is to say that we are dealing with the theory of the dialectic, with the dynamics of the concept of Geist. To become real it has to move from abstract concept to concrete reality. But for the concrete reality to occur, when the reality is the instantiation of the divine Idea, the Idea must be of the same structure as its instantiation. Speaking representationally for the moment, the immanent Trinity is the ground of the economic, but posited only through knowledge of the economic, and posited in its own order as identical with the economic. The trinitarian relations are known and understood only in and through the processions. Essentially, of course, they are one and the same reality.8

In this brief summary of the relation of finite and infinite in Hegel, the outlines of the problem are already beginning to emerge. Is the infinite dependent on the finite for its completion of its self-consciousness? Does the implicit unity of finite and infinite mean that human and divine are the same thing? If so, is there a difference between deifying humanity and secularizing God? Must such a schema, in other words, be classified as atheistic? The problem will become clearer when we turn to the second of our concerns, the question of the relation of philosophy and religion in the unfolding of the dialectic.

It is well known that for Hegel the true relation of finite and infinite achieves its most perfect representation in Christianity. The entirety of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Rerigion (LF’R) make exactly this point. At the same time, this full actualization is taken up or aufgehoben into philosophy. Looked at crudely, then, it is easy to see how the assumption is made that religion is an inferior expression of reality, destined to be lost before the final truth of philosophy. Of course, when somethingisaufgehoben in Hegel’s system, it is not strictly lost, but preserved in its essence in a new form. However, it is not so much religion that is preserved in philosophy, as the truth of religion. It is the content that remains the same. As Crites expresses it, ‘What “Philosophy” brings to -6‘Religion” is not a new content but simply the environment of a total, necessary System, in which the

8 This isomorphism between the logical idea and the total dialectical structure of reality is the ground for positing that there must be a positive aspect to alienation. The moment of alienation 4s existentid evil cannot in itself correspond to something in the Absolute.


moments of Religion can be grasped in their necessity’.g Nevertheless, the question does now arise of the true nature of the

Absolute, whether it is the transcendent divine Spirit which can be identified with the God of Christian theism, or is some abstract philosophical principle apprehended as at work in nature.1° To anticipate slightly, the way to distinguish religion and philosophy here is by considering their strengths; that of philosophy is its necessity and formality, and this means its abstract- ness. That of religion is its positivity and actuality, its concreteness and therefore its contingency. Without religion in the Hegelian sense as representation of the divine Idea, philosophy is empty theorizing. Without philosophy in the Hegelian sense (science, speculative thought), religion must be a totally unreflective activity. In other words, to be a religious person is to be in the truth, but not to know quite what that truth is, in conceptual terms. Crites argues that religion needs attestation in philosophy precisely because of its positivity, which is the same point: ‘The truth’, he says, ‘cannot finally be historical’.” Reason is the common basis of all forms of reality, including religious reality.

I have selected two of Hegd’s early critics, to show how their positions constitute attitudes to the matter we have discussed briefly above. There is little doubt that at one time Bruno Bauer could be counted as Hegel’s most polemical adversary:

N o occasion is sufficiently distant for him, no opportunity so remote, that he will not express his hatred and contempt for the world of the sacred and its writings. He is profound, but with the profundity of hell (which not unreasonably has been called simply ‘the abyss’), his energy is that of Satan. He is ‘the great dragon’.12

Bauer offers more rational criticism in a slightly earlier work, in which he isolates Hegel’s pantheism as the major weakness of his system.13 The individual is dissolved into the Absolute Spirit, and this Spirit is finally revealed as self-consciousness. So what is happening, says Bauer, is that

9 Crites (n.7 above), p.229. 10 Bernard Reardon has argued forcibly that this is the main distinguishing point

between left and right-wing Hegelianism. See his Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion (London, 1977). especially the extensive note, pp.135-8.

1t Crites (n.7 above), p.236. 12 My franslation from Hegels Lehre von der Religion und Kunsr, von dem Standpunkt

des G h b e n s aus beurteilt (Leipzig, 1842, new impression, 1967);pp.90-1. Almost any of the 227 pages would furnish a similar example.

13 Die Posaune des jungsten Gerichts uber Hegel den Atheisten und Antichristus (1841). This anonymous publication was in fact jointly written by Bauer and Marx, although most of the work was done by Bauer, since M a m was taken ill shortly after the project was begun. I have been unable to obtain access to this work, and my references and quotations are taken from the quite lengthy treatment given it in Cod in Exile, by Cornelio Fabro (New York, 1964), pp.63342.


self-consciousness is positing itself as the infinite universality of substance. Human self-consciousness is the only real power. Thus, in terms of our discussion above, Bauer is accusing Hegel of dissolving the infinite which stands over against the finite into an abstract extension of finite consciousness. When he comes to consider the relation of religion to philosophy, his complaint is that religion is restricted to the imagination, and so is out- classed by the Idea as ruling principle: ‘This philosophy wants no God, no gods even, like the heathen; it wants only men, only self-consciousness and everything in it is sheer ostentatious self-consciousness’. l4

Bauer was still a theist when he made the above critical remarks. But Ludwig Feuerbach makes essentially the same points from quite a different starting-point. For Feuerbach, confessedly atheistic,I5 the weakness of Hegel is not that his principles led to atheism, but that he personally was not atheistic enough. He was not a philosopher but ‘a theologian in disguise’ and in his system ‘the human is the same thing the divine is’. We can clearly see in Bauer’s comments on Hegel, Feuerbach’s contention that fundamentally religion worships human nature, and that the divine-human equation is in reality only that of human nature/human individual. Religion for Feuerbach is the consciousness human beings have of their own infinite nature. Divinity resides not in the God of whom we predicate various attributes, but in the attributes beyond which we illegitimately posit a subject other than human being. For Feuerbach and for Bauer in their different ways, what is problematic is the subjectivity of the Absolute Idea - the reappearance in another form of the nature of the infinite, of Geist. This is a question we shall see Hegel at some pains to address.

In one sense, the entire Hegelian corpus is an anticipation of such criticisms, but there are a few places where he seems directly to address his critics, and we shall concentrate on two of them, the preface and the introduction to the Phenomenology, and the concluding sections of the Encyclopaedia. With one or two exceptions, I have chosen here to avoid the Lectures on rhe Philosophy of Religion, since the objection might be made that I was presenting Hegel’s defence from just those writings in which he was seeking to cover his atheistical tracks. Bauer, for example, said that Hegel’s respectful attitude to religion in LPR was simply a stratagem (List) which right-wing Hegelians had fallen for.16

In a famous passage, Hegel distinguishes his view from that of Schelling: To consider any specific fact as it is in the Absolute, consists here

14 Die Posaune, p.157, quoted in Fabro, op.cit., p.635. 1s Barth’s defence of Feuerbach’s faith seems to me pure sophistry. See Feuerbach,

The Essence ofChristiunify, in the Harper Torchbook edition (New York, 1957), pp.xiv- xv.

16 Fabro, op.cit., p.641.


in nothing else than saying about it that, while it is now doubtless spoken of as something specific, yet in the Absolute, in the abstract identity A=A, there is no such thing at all, for everything is there all one. To pit this single assertion, that ‘in the Absolute all is one’, against the organized whole of determinate and complete knowledge, or of knowledge which a t least aims at and demands complete development - to give out its Absolute as the night in which, as we say, all cows are black - that is the very naivetk of emptiness of knowledge.”

This leads Hegel immediately into enunciating the principle which, if defensible, is his single best argument against afl the criticisms we have so far considered, namely, that ‘everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not only as Substance but as Subject as well’ (ibid., p.80). The Absolute Idea has to be distinguished from the one substance of Spinoza, and equally from the abstract universality of a Kant or a Fichte, and for the same reason. Both positions fall back into an undifferentiated substantiality. Reality and actuality, consequently knowledge, come only from the dialectical process. We can of course speak of the divine ‘essence’ as self-identity, but its actuality, its real nature which lies in the form beyond the mere essence, ‘consists in its being objective to itself, conscious of itself on its own account uiir sich zu sein); and where consequently we neglect altogether the self- movement which is the formal character of its activity’ (ibid., p.81). ‘The truth is the whole,’ and the whole includes the form as part of the essence, and the form is ‘the entire wealth of the developed form’ (ibid.). So, it would seem, the actuality and so reality of the Absolute Idea liesin the fullunfolding of the form.

For this to be true, indeed for any statement ahout the non-finite to be either true or false, there can be no total disjunction between the finite and infinite. If I may be allowed one quotation from LPR: ‘What is true is the unity of the infinite, in which the finite is contained . . . We must get rid of this bugbear of the opposition of finite and infinite’.18 This same idea is represented in slightly different form in the Phenomenology; there, discussing the fear of error which grows from a theory of knowledge as a medium, he argues that it presupposes a distinction of ourselves from this knowledge:

More especially, it takes for granted that the Absolute stands on one side, and that knowledge on the other side, by itself and cut off from the Absolute, is still something real; in other words, that knowledge,

17 Phenornenologv (n.1 above), p.79. 18 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, translated by E.B. Speirs and J . Burdon

Sanderson, edited by E.B. Speirs (London, 1895), in three volumes, I , p.200. The third part of the lectures, corresponding in the Speirs and Sanderson editon to 11, p.327 - 111, p.15 1 , has now appeared in a modern, critical English edition, based on the Lasson edition: 7 h e Chrisfhn R e l i g h , edited and translated by Peter C. Hodgson (American Academy of Religion Texts and Translations Series 2, Missoula, 1979). This invaluable edition includes an introduction and a commentary on the text.

HEGEL’S ATHEISM 25 1

which, by being outside the Absolute, is certainly also outside truth, is nevertheless true - a position which, while calling itself fear of error, makes itself known rather as fear of the truth (Phenomenology, p. 133).

Hegel believes that this line of thinking is false at the roots, since it uses terms, in this case Absolute, knowledge, as if all hearers were acquainted with their notion. The same thing also happens with words like subjectivity, objectivity, and so on. But the point of philosophy is precisely to get the notion, the concept. So Hegel’s positive attack on those who accuse him of pantheism takes the form of his system as a whole, that of analysing the content of the notion of Geist.

In the concluding sections of the Encyclopaedia Hegel returns to the subject. Religion and philosophy are declared to be identical in content, though different in form. Religion is the truth for all human beings, but in the form of representation. Philosophy, for those few who can attain it, is the recognition of the necessity of the content of religion. The charge to which Hegel now feels he must respond is that of pantheism, the claim that there is too much religion in philosophy, a charge he believes has displaced that of atheism, or of too little religion in philosophy. (The charges may be essentially similar in so far as they depend on the objection that philosophy has in some way been given hegemony over religion, either by its outright rejection or incorporation into some philosophical system.) The crude charge of pantheism amounts to the claim that in the Hegelian system ‘God is everything and everything is God’. This is another way of making the identification of Hegel’s thinking with that of Schelling - that in the Absolute all is one. Hegel’s defence is also similar; the true pantheism of Hinduism is so thorough- going that the individual entities do not retain sufficient independence to be named ‘God’. There is a sense in which this pantheism can be called mono- theistic, although he prefers the word ‘acosmic’. ihey are ‘systems which apprehend the Absolute only as substance’.

So we are back with the subjectivity of substance. Philosophy does not have to do with mere abstract unity, but with the concrete unity of the notion. Geist is consciousness, knowledge, even in a sense ‘love’. His critics, he says, stick fast at the abstract indeterminacy of the unity of Geist, and do not take the trouble to follow through the process by which Geist appro- priates its own notion. This unity has phases or moments, and these moments are necessary to the unity, because they are moments in the full actualization and hence reality of Geist. Hegel concludes the Encyclopediz by repeating a form of the triple syllogism. This is his way of warning against criticisms which come from an ‘undialectical reduction’ of his system. Truth is expressed in the Hegelian system by holding together the three viewpoints, the three mediations of the syllogisms.


A final clarification of the issues involved here can be found in a recent discussion by Quentin Lauer, at the Wofford symposium, and by the respondents to his paper there.I9 Lauer stands among the benign interpre- ters of Hegel, arguing for the identity of content of religion and philosophy in the Hegelian schema. He believes, in fact, that Hegel’s insistence on the identity of content is motivated by ‘his desire to rescue philosophy, which would be less than universal science if the object of religion were out of its domain’ (Lauer, p.265). The difference, as we said earlier, is one of form; religion achleves in two steps what philosophy accomplishes in one, because in religion that form is different from content, whereas philosophy deals in thought, and so content, thought, and form, thinking, are one. Lauer argues that the entire development of the Phenomenology demonstrates that for Hegel although reason is not to be separated from human reason, ‘there is no question . . . of universalizing human reason; rather . . . one of indi- vidualizing universal reason’ (p.269). The Logic picks up the infinite activity of thinking with which the Phenomenology ends. But infinite activity is the activity of an infinite subject. This is the progression of the Logic, and this is why for Lauer it can be seen as the detailed explication of the ontological argument. To think truly in reason as a finte subject is to discover infinite thought, and to discover infinite thought is to discover Cod thinking. And, in the quotation Lauer offers from the Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God:

That man knows God is in accord with the essential community (of God and man) as community of knowing, that is, man knows God only in so far as God knows Himself in man. This knowledge is God’s consciousness of self, but a t the same time it is God’s knowledge of man; and this knowledge of man by God is man’s knowledge of God.Zo

When we turn to the implications of Tillich’s essay on the two types of philosophy of religion, this interpretation of the ontological argument in terms of knowing is going to become quite significant. For the moment, Lauer’s conclusion is that with the LPR the view of philosophy as the perfection of religion is philosophy as ‘the thought of God’ (Lauer, p.274). This is a high calling for philosophy, and we can easily imagine the scorn that such a conclusion would have extracted from Feuerbach. It could of course still leave us wondering if it is only the thought of God because religious truth has been reduced to philosophical. Hegel would have answered that there is only one lund of truth. Philosophy, as the highest viewpoint, is not so because its content is any more exalted than that of religion, but

19 ‘Hegel on the Identity of Content . . .’ (n.3 above). 20 From Hegel’s LecZures on rhe Proofs of the Existence of God, in Lauer’s own

translation from Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Religion, edited by Ceorg Lasson, two volumes (Hamburg, 1925-30),11,496. See also LPR 111, 303.


precisely because it and it alone knows that the truth of religion is what it is. Philosophy alone is reflective. All the same, it is easy to understand Charles Barrett’s query of Lauer: ‘Is he saying only that, for Hegel, religion is the meat on which philosophy feeds?’ (Lauer, p.284).

Barrett’s question will lead us nicely, in fact, into the second half of our discussion. He refers to Barth’s view that Hegel stood potentially in something of the same position in Protestantism as Aquinas in fact held (and to some extent still does) in Catholicism. Barrett goes on:

As Professor Lauer suggests by his allusion to Hegel’s championing of the ontological argument, Hegel becomes an exponent, on Protestant ground, of the analogy of being. His view of the analogia entis differs from the Thomist view chiefly in that he sees the relation between Being and beings as less discontinuous, more dialectical, than did St Thomas (Lauer, p.287).

It seems to be misleading to make reference to the analogy of being, particu- larly when it is immediately qualified out of court. The doctrine of analogy is precisely a creation of natural theology intended to help bridge the gap between finite and infinite which, in Hegel’s terms, simply cannot exist. It is in fact not needed by proponents of the ontological argument or school of thought. More of that in a moment. Barrett suggests that Hegel, who argues for an ‘identify of inclusion’ (rather than of equation) between finite and infinite, is less Protestant than Aquinas, who ‘builds a kind of protestant principle into his very doctrine of analogy, holding that, while the finite may be like the infmite in certain respects, it can in no sense be identified with it’ (Lauer, ibid.). But this is no surprise; this is exactly what a doctrine of analogy is. Professor Barrett would have done well to distinguish between supporters of the ontological argument, and proponents of analogy. But he is exactly right about the distinction between Aquinas and Hegel, and right to query Hegel’s tricky project of positing identity of inclusion while skirting around identity of equation. However, the Protestant/Catholic language here is fundamentally misleading, unless perhaps Barrett wants to make the unusual case that Aquinas was proleptically a reformer. Paul Tillich shows the way to a better understanding.

2

Tillich‘s project in ‘The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion’2’ is to distinguish clearly the ontological and cosmological types as he sees them,, and to show how the cosmological, unless it depends and builds on the ontological, necessarily drives a wedge between finite and infinite. The

21 Originally published in Union Seminary Quarterly Review, I,4 (May, 1946).


usefulness of this essay for us is that Tillich suggests a more mature understanding of the essential religious impulse than it seems to me is at work in most criticisms of Hegel as ‘atheistic’.

The atheistic terminology of mysticism is striking. I t leads beyond God to the unconditioned, transcending any fixation of the divine as an object. But we have the same feeling of the inadequacy of all limiting names for God in non-mystical religion. Genuine religion without an element of atheism cannot be imagined. It is not by chance that not only Socrates, but also the Jews and the early Christians were persecuted as atheists. For those who adhered to the powers, they were atheists.22

What, then, are these ‘powers’? They are those ‘half religious-half magical, half divine-half demonic, half superhuman-half subhuman, half abstract- half concrete beings who are the genuine material of the mythos’ (ibid., p.11). The conquering of the powers came about in two ways, in philosophy through their subjection to a universal principle, being, and in religion by their dominance by the God of the prophets of Israel. This, of course, leaves the question of the relation between the absolute God and the universal philosophical principle. Surely Deus and esse cannot be unconnected? The two types of philosophy of religion, even the two basic religious attitudes, grow from the answer to this. On the one hand, the equation can be made between Deus and esse; thus, Augustine proposed that the two coincide in the nature of truth. This insight is at the root of transcendental thinking, such that, as Tillich puts it, ‘God is the presupposition of the question of God’ (ibid, p.13). The opposite approach, from the world to God, so to speak, opposed to the ontological argument and so making use of the doctrine of analogy, in some way driving an ultimately unbridgeable gap between humanity and God, starts in Tillich‘s opinion with Aquinas, and amounts to asserting that the structure of reality or reality itself as we perceive it is not esse, but the constitution of the human mind. Tillich’s most graphic way of expressing the contrast shows clearly why Hegel must stand on the former side:

One can distinguish two ways of approaching God: the way of overcoming estrangement and the way of meeting a stranger. In the first way man discovers himself when he discovers God, he discovers something that is identical with himself although it transcends him infinitely, something from which he is estranged, but from which he never has been and never can be separated. In the second way, man meets a stranger when he meets God. The meeting is accidental. Essentially they do not belong to one another. They may become friends on a tentative basis. But there is no certainty about the stranger man has met. He may disappear, and only probable statements can be made about his nature (ibid., p.10).

22 Theology of Cklture (n.4 above), p.25.


There can really be no argument about where to place Hegel. His view of the finite-infinite relationship is so close to that expressed here, namely, that the finite is infinitely transcended by an infinite with which at the same time it is in implicit union. Tillich rightly includes the idealists among those in the ontoloj$cal camp, but his brief dismissal of their contribution seems directed more at pantheists like Schelling than at Hegel:

Obviously, German idealism belongs to the ontological type of philosophy of religion. It was not wrong in re-establishing the prius of subject and object, but it was wrong to derive from the Absolute the whole of contingent contents, an attempt from which the Franciscans were protected by their religious positivism. This overstepping of the limits of the ontological approach has discredited it in Protestantism, while the same mistake of the neo-Scholastic ontologists has discredited it in Catholicism (ibid., p.2 1).

Quentin Lauer has suggested that Hegel should be included among the transcendentalists (Lauer, p.275). Tillich would, I think, be in substantial agreement with this. The dialectical ‘is’ and ‘is not’ of the mystics is close to Hegel’s own view:

In terms of our ideas of stranger and estrangement, Meister Eckhart says: ‘There is between God and the soul neither strangeness nor remoteness, therefore the soul is not only equal with God but it is . . . the same that he is’. This is, of course, a paradoxical statement, as Eckhart and all mystics knew; for in order to state the identity an element of non-identity must be presupposed. This proved to be the dynamic and critical point in the ontological approach (Theology of Culture, p. 14).

In Hegel, we could say that what is represented in religious experience as identity or unity is the experience of the moment of unity in the dialectic. In any case, Tillich claims this as the ‘dynamic and critical point’ for the basis of the ontological argument of the existence of God. The ontological argument is ‘the rational description of the relation of our mind to Being as such’. It is, in other words, the positing of the transcendentals of human knowing as the Absolute ‘in which the difference between knowing and known is not actual’ (ibid., p.15). Now this sounds not unlike the version of the triple syllogism in which finite spirit mediates. Of course, what happens in this mediation is that the logical idea comes to be recognized as logically and ontologically prior to finite spirit. Putting this differently, the knowledge of the possibility of the Absolute Idea as the self-consciousness of Reason lies in the rational appropriation of the logic of the divine Idea. The knowledge of its actualization comes to us in Christianity. The knowledge that it is actualized occurs fully only in the standpoint of speculative thought. Thus, in Tillich’s vision, the move from fmite spirit to God by a process of deduction (cosmological and teleological arguments) is dependent on the form and act


of God as logically prior (ontological argument). No deductive argument works without making use of processes of deduction and reasoning which, in their very use, presuppose a grounding in an unconditioned reason or Absolute. You cannot use your mind without implying a form of the ontological argument. ‘&us esr esse, and the certainty of God is identical with the certainty of Being itself: God is the presupposition of the question of God’ (ibid., pp.15-16).

What, then, of all these charges of atheism? Obviously, they come from thinkers who do not recognize the Christian God in the unconditioned of transcendental philosophy, or from those who, making the association, wish to eliminate thereby the transcendent deity in favour of secular salvation. We have said enough of the latter in our remarks on Bauer and Feuerbach. The former group cannot envisage God as anything other than the ‘wholly other’. Creation is a creation of something dependent as effect on cause; there is no reciprocity, God does not need the world. Its creation is a work of supererogation. This group’s objection to Hegel is a form of the argument that accuses of pantheism what can rightly only be charged with panentheism. Hegelian panentheism makes the finite out to be a necessary moment of the infmte, and so in a sense does posit a dependence of infinite on finite. But only the dependence that any whole has on one of its parts - that without this part it could not be whole. The infinite is not identical with but is the ground of the finite, and the ground could not know itself as what it is (the ground) unelss there was something of which it was the ground.

What positive doctrine of God lies behind this objection to Hegel? Without the ontological argument, there yawns the great divide. On the other side is God - perhaps. At least, on the other side, they reason, is the ultimate cause of everything on this side, though what it is like, or how it achieves what it achieves is something they cannot show without, as I have tried to demonstrate, the implicit use of the position they oppose. The idea of the Absolute on which they settle is divorced in its essence from human knowing, and divorced from philosophy, which is now not the science of Being but the science of the human mind. With the rejection of the ontological argument, we are left with a God who is posited as one form of existence (the unique case of essence = existence), and creation, which has another form of existence. In this second existence, through philosophy we can seek to establish that God is, and prove it after a manner. Tillich quotes Gilson:

It is indeed contestable that in God essence and existence are identical. But this is true of the existence in which God subsists eternally in Himself; not of the existence to which our finite mind can rise when, by demonstration, it establishes that God is (ibid., p. 18).

As Tdlich rightly points out, on this second level of existence we are talking


of God’s essence at the level of that of ‘a stone or a star,’ and this is at the root of atheism.

So, over against the accusations of atheism directed at Hegel, there may be counter-accusations to be made. The atheism of Hegel, if we grant his argument that his system is not pantheistic, comes down to his positing a relation of partial dependence between infinite and finite, and the claim for ‘implicit unity’. The atheism of his opponents grows from inevitably anthropomorphizing God in talking on a human level about that of which, in essence, nothing at all can be said. Much earlier, I threw in the question whether it is the same thing to divinize human being, and to secularize God, and I left it unanswered. It seems to me that the implications of Hegel’s system lie with the former, whereas the end of anthropomorphism is the secularization of God. Hegel’s master-stroke in this conflict is his appeal to the positivity of the Christian religion. We could equally well say that the weakness of the opposing view is demonstrated in the way in which undialectical theology drifts into ~ecular i sm.~~

If this is the case, then we ought to be able to demonstrate it by appealing to any standard Christian doctrine. Let us take the doctrine of the Incarnation, since that is the pivot of the Hegelian dialectic. How religiously, existentially and theologically satisfactory is the interpretation of the doctrine of the Incarnation in terms of Hegelian alienation and reconciliation? And how do alternatives stand up against it? In this brief discussion of Hegel on incarnation I owe a great deal to the work of Stephen C r i t e ~ . ~ ~

For Hegel, faith and reason cannot stand alongside one another if their contents are antagonistic. Finite spirit ‘is not so divided in its innermost nature that it can contain two kinds of things which are coritradict~ry’.~~ Finite spirit, indeed, exists to know divine Spirit, but since reason itself cannot generate the knowledge, Spirit can be known only because it has appeared in history. And this is essentially what the positivity of the Gospel means. Alienation and reconciliation seem to be necessarily dialectical within consciousness. So how is it possible to affirm the positive and historical event of the messiahship of Jesus of Nazareth? On the model of the above, precisely because truth becomes real for Hegel only when it becomes actual. The alienation-reconciliation dialectic is necessary, but it is only actual in historical fulfilment. Jesus of Nazareth thus become ‘the Truth in the form of Certainty’.

The divine reconciler is the one who makes the implicit unity of divine and human explicit. This principle is explicated by Hegel in a thoroughly orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation. Christian theology states that Christ’s

23 See P.F. Lakeland, ‘Accommodation to Secularity’, The Month (May, 1978). 24 Especially ch.5, pp.196-245. 2 5 Crites, p.199, quoting VPR I , 54-5, LPR I, 49.


death is the overcoming of death, and that with his passage to the Father, his presence remains in the community of believers animated by the Spirit. Hegel expresses this in terms of his system without serious distortion. By his death, Christ manifests that his finitude is only transitional; it is the ultimate moment of negation, and simultaneously the beginning of the return in reconciliation. In the resurrection, negation itself is negated and the recon- ciliatory move is completed. Christ’s truth is shown to be universality, his unity with Spirit in general. Resurrection is the death of death. And, at this point, the actual union of God and humanity, which was realized in the life, death and resurrection of Christ, passes over into the reconciled congregation.

Alternatives which reject the implicit unity of divine and human are left with the classic christological dilemma. How can Jesus Christ be both God and man? What is the ground of the unity? How can a unity be conceptualized which yet leaves room for the soteriological efficacy of the human will of Jesus? This set of problems simply does not exist for Hegel. The ground of the actual unity of finite and infinite in Jesus Christ is the implicit unity in humanity as a whole. And, of course, the receptivity for the actuality in Jesus Christ is the same receptivity in any human being. In one case the receptivity was the ground of actualization: in all other cases it is the ground of the possibility of recognition of the God-man, and hence of faith and member- ship of the community in which that actualization is both transformed and perpetuated. In classical terms, the christology is based on an anthropology which implies both a theology of revelation and an ecclesiology. A theology of grace cannot be far behind.

A brief response to accusations of atheism must take some such form as the following: like any good hypothesis, Hegel’s seems to fit the facts. It is both flexible and creative of further insights. Indeed, a fair representation of Hegel is extraordinarily fruitful for the theological task as a whole. His opponents leave one only with irrational, magical or fideistic options to escape the classic dilemma. Hegel’s view, then, seems to be no mare nor less atheistic than Christianity as a whole, and, as Tillich pointed out, the early Christians were often accused of atheism. But as a final word, the Christianity with which we are concerned to associate Hegel exists on a wider stage than many Christian sects might recognise. Walter Kasper has expressed Hegel’s place in this picture:

For Hegel, the dichotomy between faith and life is only a form of the alienation characteristic of the whole modern era. The emancipation in modern times of the (human) subject reduced the external world increasingly to the status of mere object . , . It is here that Christology wins a relevance beyond the narrower theological context. The doctrine of the Incarnation has to do with the reconciliation of God and the world. Since the oneness of God and man, as it occurred in Jesus Christ,


cancels neither the distinction between them nor the autonomy of man, but realizes that oneness and that distinction, reconciliation occurs in Jesus as liberation, and liberation as reconciliation - at one and the same time.26

26 Walter Kasper, Jesus the Christ (New York, 1977). p.16.

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