The World as Analogy of Absolute Mind: An Hegelian, Thomist and Aristotelico-Platonist Account [1 ed.] 1527585506, 9781527585508

Table of contents :
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Bibliography

Citation preview

The World as Analogy of Absolute Mind

The World as Analogy of Absolute Mind: An Hegelian, Thomist and Aristotelico-Platonist Account By

Stephen Theron

The World as Analogy of Absolute Mind: An Hegelian, Thomist and Aristotelico-Platonist Account By Stephen Theron This book first published 2022 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 © 2022 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): 1-5275-8550-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-8550-8

“I am alive or rather, not I” (The Apostle Paul, Galatians 2: 19b-20). “The first form of the idea is Life: that is, the idea in the form of immediacy” (Hegel, Enc. 215, Zus.). “If there were no analogy of being then all beings would be one” (St. Thomas Aquinas).

CONTENTS

Chapter One ................................................................................................ 1 Grey Matter Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 43 Mythic Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 59 World and Nature Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 73 Spirit: What is It? Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 85 Time Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 123 Certitude Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 147 Necessity Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 172 Will, World, Analogy Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 186 Hegel, Aquinas, Aristotle Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 196 Note on “Misperception” Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 212 Technique, Environmentalism, World? Bibliography ........................................................................................... 242

CHAPTER ONE GREY MATTER

Why are we told, in the Gospel, to hate our lives in this world, as a condition for being Christ’s true disciple or, in other words, for living rightly, as judged by the highest standard at least? For a clear distinction is made, by Christ, between those to whom it is given to know the secrets on “the kingdom of heaven” and those others, so to say outside or at some distance, who are instructed exclusively in “parables” and, indeed, signs, such as miraculous healings or restoration of this life on earth or, again, in this world. One answer may seem to be that it is because of the separate finitude of each thing, thus set at loggerheads with God, unless, namely, it is grasped as within God or as absorbed conceptually, i.e. not spatially etc., “within” God. What is thus put as within is spirit, spiritual vision, annulling precisely what is visible to the eye, audible or otherwise sensible or, indeed, “felt”. One is reminded, has to recall, that God has no eyes, ears, hands and so on, doesn’t need them, is himself knowledge, thought, spirit, as condition for knowing and constituting everything supremely, transcendentally as we say. Hence the hatred of this “life that is no life at all” (Teresa of Avila) is enjoined, upon those seeking God and thus coming to Christ. So it is due to this infinite difference, however in place. That is, it is because of this, whether or not the situation results uniquely or in some respects from some supposed aboriginal fault or, in that case, such a fault results in turn from a deliberately, as it were perversely abused freedom, or whether the repulsion is a natural consequence of finitude inasmuch as, to cite Aquinas, what can err will, at or after some time, short or long indifferently, thus err and can no other, whether or not, again, this is to be explained as a forfeiture of divine grace. These all seem in fact no explanations, especially the latter, since the erring that St. Thomas speaks of is already a rejection of or a failure to correspond with such grace rather than a sheer perversity of nature as issuing from God’s hand.1 1

Note, however, that St. Thomas Aquinas, in first introducing the treatise on grace in his main Summa, speaks of it as necessary for Man’s attainment of his, in some

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We would have next to ask, or we might well ask, whether time itself, as immediately known, is either cause or consequence of the error, or neither of these, the error in the latter case not occurring at some time precisely, as St. Thomas had expressed it, but as part, again, of “the whole idea”, of the Idea or Concept, to speak with Hegel. It is certain, after all, as a matter of logic, that the creation itself did not occur at some particular time in the life of God, as we would then be imagining. Life, Hegel declares, is “only the Idea immediate”, i.e. as first represented (viventibus esse est vivere). We might rather have thought it does not belong to the Idea at all. Yet Life too as a category is expressly part of Hegel’s system of logic2. These considerations go some way towards suggesting that man, Adam, was bound from the start to fail at some point, just as being “the old man”, as he has become, by contrast with the new man in Christ, God’s eternal Word. Here the way can seem to prepare itself for Hegel’s view of the Eden myth as the ascent from innocence to self-consciousness, itself viewable as an assertion just of self which has to be made before we set about overcoming the “selfishness” involved. This, of course, will be overcome only by a more fully magnanimous “selfishness”, here taking the term more literally. Thus good men exclaim: “Who suffers and I do not suffer?” * Thus in having no body, since absolute being annuls this abstraction in the Concept which God is, God lacks nothing. The Hegelian Concept is not the being which it is or anything else, is rather spirit or mind, Geist, as annulling all things in thinking only itself. That is, he lacks nothing specifically just in that negation of body. So or by the same token the body is nothing, not a metaphysical notion at all, says Aquinas, adding, perhaps oddly, that body, its notion, is as such only of use or interest for logicians.3 This view is less sense at least as he surely means, natural end (Summa theol. Ia-IIae, Q109, art. 1). If this is so then Hegel’s analysis of man’s “fall” as, it can seem, a mere figure for growing up out of innocence (since otherwise man’s creator, God, “would not be God”) must be deeply faulted as ignoring or implicitly denying the presence of such grace, gratia, as being proper to God’s providence, also a God reached in and by philosophical reasoning, whether only or in part. Grace, that is, as a transcendence of nature, can be “naturally”, i.e. philosophically, considered, hence proposed, rejected, etc. Thus man’s “fall”, inasmuch as we admit the term, just means a fall from or forfeiture of (divine) grace specifically. This is thus a theological concept and thus it might at least seem that it is only within theology that it is immune to Hegel’s critique of it. Hegel could, however, have acknowledged this at least. 2 Enc. 216f. 3 Cf. his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

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a pure instance of apophatic mysticism than it is a transcendence by Hegel and/or Aquinas of this dilemma (between the apophatic and the cataphatic)4. True, the Creeds speak of the resurrection of the body, of the flesh even, as nature as a whole, herself material, groans and travails, awaiting her redemption, in St. Paul’s words. Intended there, however, is the glorious destiny of the whole person in which our everyday dualism of flesh and spirit is transcended. It is for this reason, it is plain, that St. Thomas affirms, if not without that “picture language” which Hegel affirms that theology needs specifically for communicating its truth, that “the beauty of the bodies of the redeemed” will more than compensate for the absence, in eternity, in “the resurrection”, of separate animals or plants. Further he could not go while retaining theology’s literal picture, or that of traditional apocalyptic rather, of a general return of a more super-abundant life than what time had sickled away. Indeed, for the eternal to be understood by us the everyday must first be mentioned, mere picture again, even though (or just because) belief in and worship of infinite actuality as personal and/or supra-personal must require this picture, the everyday “parable”, to be set (this is creation stricto sensu), rather, toward its own implied “cancellation” (one of Hegel’s several senses for this general Aufhebung in favour of the Idea) in fulfilment. For the same reason however, ourselves being part of this picture precisely, such an understanding beyond the picture by us is impossible. It is only faith that in principle can “overcome the world”. “I would leave all that I can think and take for my love that which I cannot think”, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing accordingly declares. Reason indeed, our spiritual nature, can take no other path, the diabolical non serviam of Joyce’s hero leading nowhere, affirmations of “life” notwithstanding. Thus the Scholastic viventibus vivere esse must be open to being both taken negatively and otherwise surmounted. The philosopher must practise and thus overcome death rather, befriending immortality in his athanatizein, as Aristotle had taught (De partibus animalium). Thus “life is only the idea immediate” (Hegel), again, and as such it, Life, again, actually features within Hegel’s logic, as a category namely, to the scandal of some5. Yet this already indicates that there is here no intent of reducing the Christian mysteries to logic, as is sometimes charged. Logic rather attains its true height, not so much as merely having an ontology as being it, even as, Hegel finds, it is the fabric, as is not immediately seen by us, of the world. Hence when St. Thérèse says on her deathbed, in the year 1897, that death is “only” the separation of the soul from the body (“It is not death but God who comes for me”, she crucially adds) she is not to be convicted of dualism 4 5

Cf. N. Berdyaev’s Spirit and Reality for extended discussion of this duo. Cf. note 2, above.

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but of a higher monism rather, where the body is just nothing. The flesh, again, profits nothing, as we hear or read again and again in the sacred and/or canonical texts6. She there, at least, transcends without discounting the more representational language of the creeds and religious devotion generally. Theology needs its pictures, Hegel had remarked, though in his system it follows further that all language whatever, as of the tongue after all, is reductively pictorial or, the more general term, representational. We must thus renounce or “escape from”7 language, nor, again, is there contradiction in an extensive use of language to achieve this, what we call philosophy in a word. Philosophy, Hegel understood, has thus to become sophia. Wittgenstein equated this with literal silence, apparently at least not prepared to countenance that intellect when brought to language can and must overturn while retaining it, not by resting content with mere paradox but by a dialectical discourse, not retaining passively merely “the soulless word ‘is’” (Hegel) but rather recalling the “fluid” ever self-transcendent and hence “restless” nature of spirit, of nous.8 So we may say that the true corpus is itself spirit (and not merely spiritual), thus remaining most truly itself. This equation of matter and form is a definite step in Hegel’s self-developing logic9. The Christian Gospels represent this situation, this reality, in presenting the risen Christ as able most perfectly to consume food while able all the same, or just in that selfassuredness, to pass through locked doors, or to bear, as it were for ever, open wounds beyond what we might endure for but a moment even, e.g. an opening in his side large enough to enclose a man’s hand. He, therefore, is master still or all the more of normal bodily language, saying “Doubt no longer but believe: touch me and see for yourselves, a ghost has no flesh and bones as you see that I have”. This flesh and bone, however, is absorbed into what transcends it, what passes through locked doors, again, or, in a figure, “ascends” into eternal “heaven” and “sits at God’s right hand”, whence the Spirit in its plenitude shortly and consequently, it seems implied, “comes down”. Implied equally is that flesh and the visible is and 6

In being canonical they are recognised by the appropriate body as sacred, just as saints or recognised holy persons are confirmed as such, some of them, in “canonisation”. 7 Herbert McCabe’s phrase. 8 He “did not try hard enough”, McCabe comments (in his Law, Love and Language, London 1968), perhaps hastily, however. Wittgenstein’s “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” could, can, be read as an invitation to “go up higher”, to the one divine Word (something like the “still small voice” Elijah heard or knew as beyond hearing). 9 Enc. 128, 129.

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was all along an analogous reality merely, as St. Paul regularly acknowledges in the above citation (“I live, yet not I”), language itself thus belonging to this analogy10. Just this, in fact, is the creation stricto sensu, again, in which we believe11, one namely that can add nothing to God, to infinity, being rather contained or “swallowed up” therein. This is the reverse of pantheism. Inasmuch, too, as time is itself analogy (of what if not of eternity, its “moving image”?) there is no “before the world was” which does not more truly, but as exceeding the presumed limit of comprehension of those first hearers, signify a possession of the glory mentioned (the Johannine Christ saying he had it with the Father “before the world was”) as outside of all time, this itself only analogous being. “With the Lord a thousand years is as a day.” As stated in the liturgy, Christ, the Son, “came down from heaven” without ever leaving it “in the heaven of his soul”, interprets Maritain12. Here the dualist anthropology employed seems to place more than a limit upon the heavenly man, however, unless understood in the Thérèsian way mentioned above, where “body” signifies nothing. Hence the Dominical image: “Fear not them that can the body kill but have no power to hurt the soul; fear rather him who can cast both body and soul into hell”. We may be guided here throughout by the Gospel account of what is more than aptly called Christ’s transfiguration, before three of his foremost disciples, an event, as it is believed to have been, of which the Church has made a special and major feast in her liturgical calendar, with reason. The reason, I suggest, tentatively at least, may lie close to or even within the line of thought developed here. For first of all, Christ is shown there to be “in glory” whether before or after his suffering life on earth generally. As a hymn from the Latin liturgy has it, And now, to heaven ascended, He sits upon a throne, Whence he had ne’er departed, His Father’s and his own.

10

Cf. John of the Cross, “God has spoken only one Word”. Cf. our “Creation stricto sensu”, in New Blackfriars, March 2008, pp. 194-213, replying in part to Richard Gildas’s Internet article “Examen critique du jugement de Hegel sur la notion de création ex nihilo”, but also as Chapter Five of our From Narrative to Necessity: Meaning and the Christian Movement according to Hegel, CSP Newcastle 2012, pp. 96-119. 12 Maritain, J., On the Grace and Humanity of Jesus, Burns & Oates, London 1969 (French original 1967). 11

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He did not depart from heaven, that is, even while hanging on the Cross, his assumed human nature, crying out his sense of forsakenness, a moment ever given special and honoured place by the Church, e.g. in the Good Friday liturgy. A question here would be whether his assumed human nature also sits, or has sat, ever “enthroned”, is included in that “he”. The answer is “of course”, i.e. this has to be, given this relation of time and eternity. God, the true yardstick, is immutable, not “in time”, as he was not in Elijah’s earthquake. Such things are nothings, representations, to use the Kantian term (Vorstellungen) that Hegel develops in all its implications. Theology had come, though, explicitly nearer to this implication in claiming to show (e.g. in Duns Scotus) that God’s love for man his “rational creature” (the phrase is not exclusively Kantian), identification with him even, is such that he would have become incarnate as man, as rational creature, sin or no sin. Only thus, one could argue, is the felix culpa truly felix and not in mere paradox. One may trace the kinship of much later thought with this, e.g. the statement of Alexander Pope, himself a believing Catholic by all accounts, that “The proper study of mankind is man”. I mean, on the Scotist account we have a sound theological reason why this is “proper”. It is proper, ultimately, because one man at least was and is, by antecedent divine intention, himself divine, as are others with respect to the union with himself offered by that divine man as in the true or full sense exemplar. This is anticipated, if obscurely, by selected spokesmen at least, in Israel, Greece or further east, also within post-apostolic otherwise dissident groups, as in Islam by Al Hallaj, whom they killed for it. Yet anima mea non est ego, wrote Thomas, for his part, in a Scriptural commentary, elsewhere affirming that “It is evident that it is this man who thinks”, i.e. an individual or “individuated” man (opusc. “Against a Common Intellect”). What is evident, however, can also be “off the cuff”, as in Thomas’s related principle, that of preferring the “literal” sense of Scripture wherever possible, though not blindly or “against the spirit”. Rather, in Thomas’s deeper thought, as in St. Paul’s, we are eternally “members one of another” (cp. “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up”, said of “his body”, the evangelist tells us). We are not, then, abstractly or unconditionally “this man” (who thinks). Thought thinks itself rather, Hegel will later affirm. “Who suffers and I do not suffer?” seems a corollary. The flesh, matter, is then, in Hegel’s account, at once nothing and/or one with the form while the form, ultimately, is one with the Idea, for the reason that matter individuates, abstractly again. It is, that is to say, literally the separating principle of alienation (absolutised to a further degree by G.E. Moore and followers). This opposite view, though, faith in the total allness of God, Deus meus et omnia (i.e. not merely “my” all),

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pantheism’s converse, is the victory overcoming, as annihilating, this world which, nonetheless, as flesh, is first or immediate reality and hence, according also to Hegel again, false. Truth is as such mediated13, as the Word (or any word) mediates, always and everywhere, the final mediator being thus eternal and Trinitarian, so not abstract but omni-comprehensive. This is reflected in Hegel’s principle, though itself a conclusion (of logic), that truth can only be as result, from what if not from the false, which is accordingly in itself nothing, first image of the true, rather. Incarnation is thus pictured in Scripture as divine self-humiliation, concerning which qua picture Hegel accordingly expresses reservation. The highest, rather, includes the lowest, cannot stand without it as one of its constitutive moments, Elijah’s “still small voice”, to hear which we must not “harden our hearts”, i.e. minds. Hence babyhood is a true and full part of divine incarnation, as signifying the whole incarnation itself of which it is otherwise part merely. The part, again, is the whole, both categories losing both themselves and their opposition in the Idea. In general, then, religious language, including its theological mode, speaks in inverted analogy when it attributes to God, and not to us, analogous being and, if it is not extremely careful, analogous reality. Viventibus esse est vivere. Precisely! That is why those living, in their spiritual contemplation or philosophy, must practice a certain death or lifedenial (Aristotle, in De partibus animalium, who adds there that “a little of this is worth more than all the rest”, i.e. than life). Thus in itself such prayer (implied is that this is what it amounts to as elevation of mind) is deathlessness, i.e. a praxis thereof (athanatizein). Here arises a certain conflict between knowledge and blind love, it may seem (“I will take for my love all that which I cannot think”, writes the fourteenth century man of prayer14, and none of that which I can think, he effectively adds), of which, while McTaggart made much, Hegel makes short work, as we see at Encyclopaedia 159, where he lists as internally related all the things that thinking “means”, viz. the other’s meeting with one’s self (effectively the Biblical definition of love), a liberation as that of having its own being “in the other actuality with which it is bound up”, just thereby or necessarily. Thinking, this liberation, is even, or further, what is “called I” or, finally, “free Spirit”. Of this he says, explicitly, that “as feeling, it is Love” while 13 Cf. Enc. 70, where Hegel also says, however, in the course of examining the mutual relation of being and the Idea, or “subjectivity” and “objectivity”, that “the quality of mediation is involved in the very immediacy of intuition” 14 I.e. the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, English, probably East Anglian, as was his contemporary anchorite, Julian of Norwich (Revelations of Divine Love).

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“as enjoyment, it is blessedness”. It is apparently just as thinking that free spirit so modulates, without losing its original being, into what these other terms name. A truly symphonic principle seems at work here, if it is not rather the spirit of music itself that is further revealed or disclosed, brought to expression at least. It might well be the unspoken premise to Beethoven’s conclusion, his thesis, that “Music is a greater revelation than the whole of religion and philosophy”15, whether or not we incline to think it is his own music to which he, Beethoven, primarily referred. Hegel, anyhow, sees as his theme here “liberation from finite exclusiveness and egoism”, his vision of the concept transcending even Spinoza’s vision of substance, which “is only a potential liberation”. That is to say that we need, the Concept needs, existence “in an individual form” such that here too “flesh” comes into its own. By the same token, however, it, incarnation, as in the view of Duns Scotus already sketched above, belongs to the Concept or is, theologically speaking, a divine or absolute necessity as belonging to what God or spirit is. He is, namely, love, however, the same theology, as Biblically based, insists. Hence it is just this, for Scotus, God’s love for his “rational creature”, i.e. man, that entails his union with man in incarnation, sin or no sin, to repeat. For why else would he love him rather than a horse, say, but that he has, the Scripture says, “put my spirit within him”, whereby alone Adam it is who names the beasts, and not contrariwise, as if they should name us? The authenticity and truth of this taking of an individual human form is not invalidated by our concluding here towards temporal life as misperception (McTaggart), as, again, Christ’s transfiguration, witnessed by the foremost apostles, bears out. That is the real or eternal reality of the man Christ, into which we are destined, such is the hope, to be incorporated as in fact we are already by the sacrament of the eucharist.16 Yet in a certain sense he was transfigured there only yet again into another, so to say more condign figure, i.e. for the eye, the “glistering” robes and so on, not yet the spirit transcending all figure, as in our saying above that the flesh is nothing. Nonetheless Christ says that my flesh (i.e. his) is meat indeed, my blood drink indeed. That is the sacramental principle, that “He that eats me shall live because of me”. The sacramental sign is a sign of itself, as the Word of God is that God of which, of whom, it is the Word, as the separation into 15 Compare the theological idea that the creation itself is a first revelation, of God. “Die Schöpfung ist die erste der Offenbarungstaten Gottes” (Katholischer Erwachsenen Katechismus, Bonn 1985, p.95). 16 Cf. M. Levering, “Metaphysics and Contemporary Sacramental Theology: Retrieving Anscar Vonier”, in Indubitanter ad veritatem, ed. Jörgen Vijgen, Damon Publishers, Kerkrade, Netherlands, 2003; also Abbot Vonier OSB, A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist, in his Collected Works, 1925.

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bread and wine signify effectively, i.e. in true sacramental mode (i.e. a new form of being, cf. Vonier cited above (note 16), the sacrifice of outpouring. The question that inevitably arises here, however, is how to avoid, or whether one should avoid, saying that the same necessity attaches to the creation, of man as finite rational spirit in particular, which we have noted above is God’s first revelation. If it does so attach, then how do we distinguish this from the divine incarnation in or as one unique individual? This is what, as for a Christian thinker, necessitates Hegel’s acknowledgement of and serious work with, a principle of identity in difference, in what one might call an exquisite representation of the import of a mass of key New Testament texts, whether evangelical or from the thought of Paul or John. One of the old breviary hymns, in fact, speaks of Adam as having the face of Christ, though I have no desire to provoke in citing this.17 This, all of it, in fact follows from the affirmed principle of St. Thomas that “we know most about God when we know that we know nothing about him”, affirmed without apology as the finally valid contradiction. This is mind not “at the end of its tether” (H.G. Wells) but at the beginning of its truth in untethered freedom. The condition for this, for such dialectic, is that we acknowledge the analogous character of our own reality, in faith, as indeed it has to be, no suppression of intellect but rather the reverse being here implied. “This is the victory that overcomes the world; even your faith”, though Christ adds here, as regards his own case (to which we are to 17

C.S. Lewis, for his part, speaks, writes, of conversing with a Swiss pastor who had met Hitler and who, upon Lewis’s asking him how Hitler looked, replied that he looked “like Christ”. What was Lewis’s or the pastor’s point here? One recalls anyhow Hegel’s affirmation that good and evil “are the same”, in which case “evil is just not evil” (well, it isn’t, being a privatio purely), Hegel adding, perhaps nervously, that we must strenuously continue to assert their difference. He will later qualify evil as “sham-being”, as privatio boni pretending to be something. This is perhaps the key, if we grant the identity of ens and bonum as defended by “the great metaphysicians of the past” (cf. Aquinas on the “transcendental predicates”, QD de potentia VII). This idea, of anti-Christ as the Christ, hovers also in Nietzsche’s thought, in terms of the union of opposites. St. Thomas had already affirmed that ratio est ad opposita, while natura est ad unum. But the Cross of Christ remains the most extreme instance, or that between Adam and Christ as “second Adam”, of fall and resurrection, or that “the last shall be first”. Yet none of these instances assert that “good and evil are the same” simply. Understanding Hegel rightly here requires some care. Did the Devil have a point, as Hegel seems to suggest in his angelology, maybe having read his Milton? Or, did Blake fully understand his own verdict on Milton as “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”? Putting the Devil “behind” us does not mean he has no role to play, that is, as had Gollum in Tolkien’s on-going saga.

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be more and more assimilated), that he has “overcome the world”. We might call this the world’s, or perhaps even the Church’s, “best kept secret”18. Is it for philosophy to re-open it to view? Hegel late in life implied, had to admit, that all seemed as if the “gates of hell had prevailed” (he referred to the Enlightenment in its impact on Protestant theology in the first instance), though he added at once that this was impossible, referring rather, if obliquely, to the invisibility of “the true church”, charged with reversing this very prevalence in its concept. One need not take exception to this, it seems to me, conceding rather that Hegel here would pass beyond the bounds of our own analogous reality, concerning which he might say, with St. Paul and hence safely, “I live and yet not I”, at some point perhaps reaching the situation of St. Thomas as one who “can write no more”, seeing indeed his own admirable texts as “but straw”, flesh, in a word. Implied, however, would have to be the positive notion of invisibility implied by Hegel’s own idealist philosophy in absolute form (where it becomes the final realism), the principle, rather, it is the same, that “no man has seen God at any time”, a principle to be held along with the Messianic declaration that “He that has seen me has seen the Father” (in response to St. Peter’s “Lord show us the Father”). This might be further source for Hegel’s principle that all truth is mediated. It would not be the populist Protestant notion, namely, of an invisible “church” yet existing side by side, merely, with our visible reality, in no way “overcome” intellectually thereby, as “science” too, for example, fights ever to overcome mere immediacy with no less immediate moon-landings or nuclear weapons. No doubt the unity in credibility of science, seen or seeing itself as the converse of “religion”, is here upheld in a measure. Yet the construction of huge (and hugely expensive) quasi-fairground structures to capture some minute ultimate particle representing matter as such (as if it would not itself have hylomorphic form and materia over again ad infinitum) certainly stretches belief in the credibility of that Naturwissenschaft Hegel would certainly have upheld and with all reason. But it begins essentially where practical experiment leaves off as being the latter’s true result in and as interpretation. * Yet, as philosophy, perhaps especially that of “the modern Aristotle” Hegel, demonstrates, the body, flesh, nature, “our sweating selves”, and all we can say of these, is mere analogy, as is, therefore, language (though the “therefore” holds equally in reverse of these), the labour of the fleshly 18

Herbert McCabe OP, op. cit.

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tongue, in itself. It is lingual analogy, while the same line of thought should be applied to our notion of “grey matter”, without which Anthony Kenny once declared that thought was inconceivable. He did not perceive, or wish to develop, the contradiction. So our very notion of being is, to a degree, analogous, is analogy for “the Concept” thinking only itself in “pure act”, i.e. this, the concept, is not itself analogous. Nor then, finally, is being, however be the case with our use and indeed exemplification of it. Hence, though it be the case that there is no class “of the things that are” yet there remains Being itself, uniquely, solely. This, Hegel himself affirms, with Thomas Aquinas after all, “is the true being”, seen as what must underly all as true substance and/or substrate or as, just therefore, the unique transcendental (cf. the final pages of Hegel’s greater Science of Logic) or the Idea, thinking “only” itself as and/or in “pure act”, in which all thinking finds its being as participating, as actively participated or, rather, absorbed, aufgehoben (by just the Idea). Thus it can even be equated with the very “method” of logic, “according to the way”, meta hodon, even as it is, understood as thought itself, thinking. This is the ceaseless activity of the divine “act” which God is, formal entelechy as such. Even, then, the “transfiguration” vouchsafed to the three apostles remains, again, within the representational ambit of religion, since visible light is not yet the light of what we call, still using a figure, spiritual enlightenment. Even the word “spirit” derives from breath or wind, after all. Ultimately, then, this was a passing from one figure to another still, though one more directly representing the spiritual, as will be all our philosophy too if we write it down, with negation itself as the last figure of all (for absolute positivity, namely)! That is, a transfiguration, even where “supernatural”, may remain a figuration, the final state being rather transcendence of all objectivity in water flowing from one’s own belly, as another figure, the evangelical, had it.19 Light, in itself our most positive figure, remains outside of logic or metaphysics, even if Life does not (according to Hegel, though for him it is still “only the Idea immediate”, i.e. a finite, absorbable category). Thus it was the proper means for the incarnate one, as part, summit even, of specifically religious revelation, to reveal himself as “glistering” white light, again, while as regards revelation itself, Hegel, for one, affirms, God is his revelation, or revelation simply, inasmuch also as he is love or being and “the like” but not any mathematical entity; such are second only of the three traditional or Boethian “degrees of abstraction” from matter. Hence Hegel is keen to distance Trinitarianism from any mathematical connotations. 19

Cf. Gospel of John 4, vareerse 14.

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This is also the meaning, if one would consider, of that other saying, “No man can see God and live” (i.e. have or be life merely, as outside “the Concept”). Venite adoremus, remembering also, however, that adoration is the same as the abhorring of oneself in dust and ashes, as the saying goes, if it is not the forgetting or loss of self altogether in an identification with its object; – not the way for angels perhaps, but then we are not, one supposes, angels right now, whatever we are or shall become, i.e. when, on the premises defended here, the illusion of time is stripped away, which, of course, is not a “when” at all. We reach a point whence one might be able to understand St. Paul’s self-confessed determination (which he posits as self-determination, though he will also deny that: “I live yet not I”) “to know nothing but Christ and him crucified”. No doubt if he had been a professional philosopher as we have them today that would not have stopped such forceful self-denial, forceful, yet not aggressive, more like the “still small voice”, rather, which only those hear who already belong to it, we seem to be told. “Marvel not that the world hates you”. A question here would be, then: on which side does philosophy stand, with the world or against it in Aristotelian (perhaps even more Platonic) athanatizein20? Undoubtedly Paul’s stand consists in a bringing to the fore of thought, of knowledge as he says, of sophia therefore, both an individual (though he calls him “anointed”) and the physical phenomenon, attributed to this individual, of crucifixion. That is, it is a species of thought’s self-denial indeed and that might well be the final so to say apotheosis of philosophy, such as might seem called for finally in its claim towards, its love for, wisdom, “a little of which is worth more than all the rest”21, and which thus must die inasmuch as declared lifeless in its former state. This would be The Science of the Cross22. * We have then “The Analogy of God and the World”. This was the title of the doctoral thesis submitted by Professor Hampus Lyttkens to the University of Uppsala during the 1950s.23 The title is accurate in its 20

Cf. Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, 6; also Metaphysics Z, ch. 3 or 1028b 3-4. Aristotle, Ibid. 22 Title of a study by Edith Stein. 23 A copy of it was lent me by Peter Geach when supervising my own doctoral studies at Leeds University in the 1970s. In the main this is a study in depth of St. Thomas’s doctrine of analogy in its theological application particularly. Cf. our Thought and Incarnation in Hegel (CSP Newcastle-on-Tyne, 2020), p. 306, with the citations from Hegel there and on the immediately previous pages. 21

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specification of our and his topic, leaving open as it does which of these supposed entities is analogous with which rather than proposing some twoway analogy in which, preposterously perhaps, nothing would be real and hence nothing analogous either. Wittgenstein, early or late, does not seem free from this ultimate or intimate self-contradiction. It is inasmuch as the reality of this analogy is not evident to everyone that a principle that “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” could have been proposed, on one understanding of it. But the principle is two-faced, inviting with equal immediacy a critique of language as such, of which indeed languageusers, as intellectual, geistig, are capable and that principally. Thus this so to say oracular utterance can be found to make the world itself analogous, without having to say of what. Nothing, after all, limits itself, since it would exceed itself in so doing. Clearly “God” would name whatever is not analogous here, supposing, as we surely must, the world to be in fact limited. Even if space were infinite in extent, which we might suppose is a nonsensical proposition, that there should be just one infinite attribute, viz. extension, of an otherwise very finite entity, even then we are left with a finite being, not as such causing itself, and nothing else, left with as it were essential absurdity, itself conceptually absurd if no further explanation be forthcoming. Many scholars or publicists have lately appeared to think24 that mathematics somehow demonstrates the contrary, as if mathematics were not itself finite. Nor does mathematics even conceive infinity in proposing merely an infinite number, about which one may anyhow wonder, if one discard in physics infinite extension of place or time. Number, quantity, Hegel and Aquinas before him make plain, does not, again, belong to “the Concept”. This, in fact, is precisely the negative explanation of why it seems one could go on counting for ever. This is not conceived. Hence its puzzling fascination, for immature children typically. Hence, or equivalently, numeri non ponuntur in divinis (Aquinas) and hence, again, “It is useless to count” (Hegel). Hegel makes this statement in considering, in The Phenomenology of Mind, ch. VII, section c, how many good or bad angels there might be said to be, leaving open questions of distinction, insofar at least as numerical, between God and his messengers (good) or spiritual opponents (bad) indifferently. God, as it were, remains himself in opposing himself, as being infinity in actu or, as infinite being, the concept. Evil, in other words, has no independent being and is thus(!) even the same as good and so is “just not evil”. This is best interpretable, I would claim, as a consistent rejection of Manicheism, as contrastable with a “logical Manicheism” (Peter 24

E.g. M. Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe.

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Geach) of the true and the false in Frege’s philosophy of logic, Hegel being here in fact heir to Aquinas, for whom evil is privation of good and nothing else, so that malum est semper in subjecto (bono understood). No doubt the religious language in which humanity is to stand united in prayer, of young and old, simple and subtle, wise and foolish even, must keep to our immediate notions. Thus it prays for deliverance for us from evil, though not from knowing evil, finally unknowable as nothing, as indeed it is on these premises. Yet it is the gods who know evil, together with good, says the serpent to Eve. So that, as put forward in the temptation at least, was a misrepresentation or lie, as one would expect from that quarter. Evil is sham-being, Hegel states, privatio boni says Aquinas25. Yes, but well, to have nothing is to be, positively, very poor, to have positively nothing as we can also say. Hegel, anyhow, enjoins us to continue energetically discriminating good from evil, whatever he has said here, but as if avoiding a conclusion or confusion into which neither he himself nor Aquinas have fallen. Is there perhaps a remnant of layman’s humility, true or fake (or can it never be less, or more, than both of these together?), here, something like a loss of nerve? Augustine was bolder, with his felix culpa, not after all merely that chancy paradox we easily imagine but something “inbuilt” rather. Even previous to Hegel the metaphysical view of evil, in particular that most associated with Aquinas, known as the Angelic Doctor, removes it somewhat from that clinging sphere of mere approval or disapproval, positive and negative, to the opposition between being and that absolutisation of disapproval which is nothing, removes in fact the dualism, since being and nothing are not two beings. At this level, furthermore, we do not engage in distinctions without final difference between moral evil and evil generally, transcending here the Kantian moralism, merely posing as or believing itself to be the more sensitive. Thus evil not merely ought not to be but is not. Its proponents ipso facto enter an unreal world, evoking the response, more absolute than condemnation, “I never knew you”. Hegel calls it, therefore, again, sham-being, while this is the reason for Aquinas’s view that evil is always, i.e. is necessarily, “in a subject” which is itself good, just as a hole must be in something. By this the speculations of Hannah Arendt, in her Origins of Totalitarianism, as to the absoluteness of evil, unleashed by contemplation of the Auschwitz and associated phenomena, are totally baseless and worse than baseless, herself being the subject of this latter evil (baselessness), noble soul though she may 25

Hegel treats this dialectically. “The gods” know evil in knowing its privative nothingness as itself less than nothing, as the prophet will characterise “the nations”. They know it in not being it. Cf. Genesis 3, vv. 5 and 22.

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otherwise have been. It is here that an analysis of “ought” becomes called for, the claim now being that “the factual is normative” (Hegel). Implied by this, in fact, is that whenever we say of something that it ought not to be we are referring to a special class, at a further remove, of the things that are and hence ought to be, even those things that in some respect or other ought not to be, for example, with respect to man’s moral nature, he who does those things which he ought not to have done, as an old prayer has it. The good needs the bad, as being needs nothing and this latter can be taken either way without distinction26. It is told of a certain saint (or two) that when he or she complained to God that he had given him everything he received the reply that he had not so done. On his demanding the meaning of this God replied, very shortly: “Give me your sins”. Accept them, that is, as part of the picture. “Only sin can this destroy”, runs one hymn praising the redemption, while we yet know that without sin in the first place there would be no such scheme or story at all, at least as we have it. “Though your sins be scarlet they shall be white as snow!” This saying of the prophet asks to be set against what we have been saying of time. For we have always to try to take the eternal or God’s eye view, in prayer, in philosophy, in meditation. The things that we tend to say “shall be” are often the things which, just therefore, most truly are, the future otherwise, like dreams, being an ens rationis only, as St. Thomas puts it. Thus it is also said, “Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”, not replaced by but turned into joy, of which, it is suggested, a mother might most nearly get an inkling, not merely forgetting the loved child’s entrance (itself an exit) as originating in birth pangs but accepting them as part of her joy, into which they are “turned”. Like all analogies this limps a bit, as does everything that this dialectic touches except the dialectic itself, which is to say all speech, in its constitutive if doomed attempt, since grounded in representation, to fully capture thought or spirit, these or this blowing only where they will and that in freedom exclusively. It is only our or finite thought which appears to derive from words as naming abstracted “things”, states etc. * We should rather speak, then, of the analogous being of the world (this is our titular point) as thus seeming to be set apart from God, who is thus, in Hegel’s word, the concept, i.e. not an item to be first discovered before or 26 On this cf. Enc. 91 and 92 with Zusätze. From Plato (Timaeus, 35) he derives “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”, from which alone, we might want to add, time derives.

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as run-up to conception. We rather discover ourselves and our thought first in Him, as we say, this “in” being all the same heavy with misleading spatial, hence material implications. In spiritual matters “in” stands rather for identity, best expressed, attemptedly at least, in a mutual reversibility, as in “I in them and they in me”, perhaps recalling Lyttkens’ title mentioned earlier, the analogy “of God and the world”. This suggestion of mutuality is a kind of first attempt of language, whether or not of Lyttkens, to capture the reality of concrete identity or identity “in” (again!) difference. This most fundamental of analogies is the analogy of human language as such27, in contrast to which “God has spoken only one Word”, from which, nonetheless, comes our analogous plural usage, “words”. In these matters, it might well seem, for once like Francis Thompson’s “nature, poor stepdame”, that we best “speak by silences”, Wittgenstein’s recommendation. But just as an otherwise contrasted “one Word” can seem more than close to this silence that the poet sets against it, so, if in reverse, Lyttkens’ title, just in contrasting God and the world, does not escape the suggestion of an amalgamation, possibly reductive. This is precisely the history of the later “modern” philosophy, still writhing about today however in the many who “linger shivering on the brink” of launching away, though this is but the old “Lord I believe: help thou mine unbelief”, after all, distinguishable from the case of those who “will not believe”, even after seeing, it is implied. This is a matter of love and its energy, then, concerning which no one can judge. Or, “as a man is, so does the end seem to him” (Aristotle). So everyone and hence everything must go on as it is, i.e. must “grow together until harvest”, in Christ’s words. He also shall have said, asked, as if hardly expecting it: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” So what kind of a victory overcoming the world is that? Surely a very special kind, an analogy yet again, in fact, as if of victory in defeat, as if the Cross were itself the resurrection, as in a manner it is, or as the immortals are those who have died. Has God died? Did He? “O death, I will be thy death”, how else, though, but by dying, otherwise “abiding by self alone”? “Thou knowest that all that lives must die.” “Ay, madam, ’tis common” (Hamlet). So life itself, it would seem ultimately to follow from the above, is not more than analogy for spirit, Geist, mind, while death, Hegel flatly declares, is itself “entry into spirit”, precisely St. Thérèse’s viewpoint as we cited it, spirit here not by any means serving as mere counter-part to matter, this latter rather dropping away as illusory while spirit, mind, is thus no part at all, knowing only itself rather. But what about the fresh air, or nature, in a 27

Cf. our Hegel’s System of Logic, subtitled “The Absolute Idea as Form of Forms”, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2019, especially the Preface (pp. ix-xxxii).

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word? As spirit’s externalisation, even in self-alienation, each person “counting for one” and no more, natural manifestations must be fresher than fresh when aufgehoben, taken up, by spirit alone, into spirit, as if we, the living, were to say, or would be able to say, that life is or would be “cancelled”28 in resurrection. There is, strictly speaking, no “pale cast of thought”, that idea after all being itself a thought. Ave crux spes unica, anyhow, or “accordingly” as one might rather say, was for long among the most sign-posted destinations in Western Europe, at crossroads and so on, it may be worthwhile recalling, even if the sentiment may now be too deep in our consciousness for sign-posting or, perhaps, for any evaluation, having come, so to say, too near for sight and thus “out of sight”. “As a man is, so does the end seem to him” (Aristotle) meanwhile, though it may exceed his powers of representation. The identity though, as we see, is one-way. God’s being in us (relation of reason alone) is utterly dependent upon our being in Him (real relation) to start with, as effect upon cause. Aquinas might describe this development as from an ontic dependency (one-way) to one of (mutual) love. Yet causality, this relation too, Hegel would show in his logic (he will have read Hume), is reversible, identity mediating. So our discourse, our speech, is left free, more free even after we have made these remarkable discoveries of what must be so, this, necessity, being the action, the act, of the concept, as Hegel emphasises, rather than some swollen-headed decision of ours. It is his discovery of “the Concept” and its powers and function that urges the avoidance of the name “God” in final philosophy. Thus, it would seem, God is not named in heaven, as he is not named in the atheist McTaggart’s thought, insisting as it does that we are ever in heaven to the annihilation of all place or, indeed, all otherness. Thus one can note a certain disgust in Scripture for the facile “Lord, Lord” and one may recall Meister Eckhart’s prayer to be delivered from speaking too much of God. Hegel even calls such piety “sickening” or worse, perhaps because it seems not to notice the difficulties requiring ever further and more concentrated speech, thought or writing, since, he is quite sure, it is not that “of which one cannot speak” (Wittgenstein), nor is nor can there be such an object. * So in speaking his Word, thus imaging himself, infinitely as it must be, God equally speaks, creates, an infinity of images (“it is useless to count”) of that image, such that, just therefore, “there can never be enough” (Mother now 28 This meaning, to cancel, is also a facet of the sense of aufheben according to Hegel.

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Saint Teresa of Calcutta’s words, surrounded by starving children), quite independently of questions of sin and so on, though the adversary, the nothing, the absence (this is the true malevolence), is ever there. Quantity as such, in other words, lies outside the Concept29. Not only, then, would God have proceeded thus whatever man did (or might have been bound to do) but His, God’s, assumption of a human nature fashioned so as to be perfectly susceptible of this (whatever we say of a supposed angelic nature), is so to say decreed as belonging to His being, necessarily, which is not to say unfreely but quite the contrary. The inescapable conclusion here is that this relation, put by history, we may as well say, as event rather, this closer than close relation between God and man, is a conceptual necessity30, derivable, if from nothing else, from the divine infinity, i.e. from the concept itself, from which a purely historical approach tends to fall away, indeed “putting by” in its “putting” or positing. “I have said you are gods; but you shall die like cattle”, as the pre-Christian Psalmist saw things. Thus the divine person assuming, Son or Word “of God”, assumes also the title “Son of man”. The theological categories lie to hand, as lies also, we can begin to see, their systematic conceptuality. Not that God is first objectified as man’s self-alienation, from which he, man, must return to himself, but that this return in self-discovery is inconceivable apart from progressive unveiling of the hidden God himself, called also revelation. This, which is truly called “mystery of faith”, primarily but not exclusively in a eucharistic context, is precisely that. “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” asks the Psalmist again, as he also asks, in his less than final perplexity, “Wherefore hast thou made all men for nought?” By this, anyhow, one can see how the nineteenth century movement of atheism would be a movement in a Christian context, erroneously dubbed post-Christian specifically, however. What is misjudged as atheism, by those professing it or by onlookers indifferently, is or can be one expression of the truth of faith that we “know nothing of God”, apart from what God himself, by his nature indeed, necessarily reveals or shows, to which our faith is the so to say demanded counterpart. Except you believe in me you can have no life in you, the historic Christ shall have declared, if we trust those reporting and/or proclaiming when they are guaranteed further to us by the contemporarily active Christian community or Church. Such faith, though theological, has to be a truly intellectual virtue, without which, in consequence, intellect is 29 Cf. Enc. 99 along with the important precisions to this statement added in the long Zusatz. 30 Conceptual as the first identifying of it by faith in this particular event, in this man, is not conceptual. Yet the identification, once made, absorbs event into concept or, more nearly, into liturgy.

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not perfected. Yet only the believer can see this. This is the “cornerstone laid in Zion”. This is what Hegel draws attention to when he remarks, without enthusiasm perhaps, on the difference of our situation from that of the ancient Greeks in the beginnings, as is supposed, of philosophy. It is something against which his faith tells him that the gates of hell cannot prevail, i.e. hell, its gates, must remain ever broken open, the conquerors pouring through those gates. So Hegel goes on to propose the new strategy demanded by the then, at his time and place, present situation. One has, so to say, to steal the enemy’s fire, in his eyes demanding first of all a rigorous critique of Kant, while acknowledging whatever credit remains due to Kant (“more of a phenomenologist than a philosopher”, comments Hegel), such as is supplied in the unsurpassed section of the Encyclopaedia entitled “The Critical Philosophy” (paragraphs 40 to 60 inclusive31). Without this divine-human link, then, it might at least seem, God would not be God, conceptually again. It is not, therefore, something added on. Its genuine gratuitousness, like our creation itself, is rather the essence and being of all that one might worship. This is the import of flesh and of nature too, of the whole universe we would so impatiently explore. The felix culpa is thus even more felix than perhaps Augustine imagined. It is felix, namely, in its necessity, as the true must result from the false or, as it develops, less than (entirely) true, or so Hegel reasons, God remaining the great exception to this, except insofar as he so to say eternally results. Would this then be of the essence of actus purus, as it certainly is of the dialectic that pictures it? Yes and no, most probably, given that a maximum affirmation, as even affirming the negative, is the constitutive matrix of the (Hegelian) dialectic. Hence it is these loci of thought that Hegel takes as definitive, that the same things, situations etc. both are and are not, in discounting which our word “is” becomes, he says, “soulless”. On the face of it this seems the complete reversal of Aquinas’s thought. Yet the face indeed, what one sees, is the place for just seeming, the veil that must hence itself be veiled. St. Paul’s thought began with a vision. Does any philosophy begin, could it, with anything else? “With what must science begin?” Hegel accordingly asks and answers just this question.32 31

This is actually, together with the survey of Empiricism, the second part of “Three Attitudes of Thought to Objectivity”, inserted here (Enc. 26-60) bodily as what he calls a survey, “only historical and inferential in its method” (Enc. 25), from Hegel’s school-teaching days. See otherwise the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion for what is said here. Cf. also our Thought and Incarnation in Hegel, CSP Newcastle 2020, Chapter Five, “Thought’s Present Situation”, pp.328-340, in particular 32 Hegel’s introductory question to Book One of Wissenschaft der Logik (ed. Suhrkamp 5, Frankfurt 1969, pp. 65-79, i.e. after the general introduction). For

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* Etienne Gilson, in The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy33 and other works, insists on the permanent validity of the Scholastic realism or “moderate realism”, against which he sets Kantianism as the typical Lutheran counterproduct. Our claim throughout here, however, as in our previous studies, is and has been that Hegel continues and indeed further transforms without destroying these earlier versions of “Christian” philosophy by, among other things, taking full account of his immediate predecessor’s work and of the baleful effect it has had upon the children of the Aufklärung generally. This has been persistently overlooked by the so-called left Hegelians, whether blindly or deliberately, which really is just another case of those who “got it wrong” stealing this world’s limelight for a season, as was once the case with the medieval Averroists or, today and yesterday, the varieties of a persistently defended academic empiricism more proper to a physics untouched by the wand, so to say (this image is more usually given a negatively sarcastic function, e.g. by Findlay), of genuinely metaphysical and hence dialectical thought, making indeed of Hegel “the Aristotle of our times”, concerning whom suspicious chatter about Lutheranism or bold imaginativeness or about “waving the dialectical wand”34 is simply out of place, not leaving philosophy its serene liberty to continue upon its transformative way. Thus it is in spite of his merely inherited Lutheranism that Hegel achieves his great reconciliation, the mystical element in it being as much in accord with medieval and earlier spirituality as it may recall the mystical side of early Lutheranism in particular, if such is to be found, concerning which, as a historical question, it is not my brief to make any judgment here. To read Hegel’s account of “the critical philosophy”, i.e. Kant, in the first section of his Encyclopaedia is to find a more damning and dismissive judgment upon certain features of Kant’s oeuvre, though still more upon its admirers, while

analysis and commentary upon his answer see our Hegel’s Theology or Revelation Thematised, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2018, pp. 4177. 33 Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York 1940. See also his studies of Scotus or Bonaventura plus his more general historical studies and/or reference works on “Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages”. 34 Cp. J.N. Findlay, The Philosophy of Hegel, Macmillan, New York 1958 (Collier Books 1962), still one of the best introductions to Hegel’s thought.

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all the same giving credit where credit is indeed due35, than can be found anywhere else stemming from that time and place. With Hegel, in fact, there no longer exists that dilemma that Gilson takes as given, between “idealism” and “realism”, as we have done enough in this and our earlier writings on Hegel to show. His thought most nearly resembles in aim and stature that of Aquinas’s developmental corrective to Augustine’s account of God-given knowledge or power of knowing, his illuminism, effectively, in its interpretation or reliance upon a text from the Psalter, viz. “In thy light shall we see light”, removing, or so it often seemed, intellectual cognition from the realm of purely natural powers. What Hegel does is to situate “cognition proper”, along with volition as also a species, indeed the fulfilment, transitional to the Idea, of cognition, in its, cognition’s, relation to a fully thought through account of infinity as coterminous with as proper to divinity, as “first” wisdom indeed, that is to say quite simply or finally “the All”, as this understanding is found ecstatically in Francis of Assissi or systematically in John of the Cross or, inasmuch as mediated to Hegel, Eckhart. * In reply to Gilson’s claim that without a realist acceptance or interpretation of creation, this dogma, plus everything thought might wish to say (i.e. think) about anything falls to the ground we may, therefore, advance not only the witness of those Christian writers somewhat misleadingly called mystics, a class inclusive of Augustine, Aquinas or (why not?) Hegel. For these surely include something to be found in all of us, in every Martha even. This must be part of any defence of our claim36 that it is just here that we reach an account of creation stricto sensu. That strictness, indeed, lies in 35

This certainly cannot be said of Alma von Stockhausen’s challengingly negative “Catholic” account, almost sectarian rather, of Hegel’s achievement, one which we have been finding here and elsewhere inherits much of Thomist Aristotelianism, even though her rejection of her colleague G. Siewerth’s attempted reconciliation, if rather with Heidegger in the main, is sympathetic. Cf. “Das Sein as Gleichnis Gottes”, in Indubitanter ad veritatem (Studies offered to Leo J. Elders SVD, ed. J. Vijgen, Damon, Holland, 2013, pp. 423-445). 36 This claim is more fully and systematically set out in our study From Narrative to Necessity, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle-on-Tyne, 2012, 325 pp., especially chapters Four to Ten, pp. 79-220. Cf. also our articles in New Blackfriars from this century’s first decade. We have noted that the world, rather than so to say duplicating or guaranteeing an intra-mundane “realism”, is better viewed, according to a well-argued modern catechetical and theological account (cf. footnote 11 above), as the first or foundational stage of divine self-revelation.

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recognition of the nothingness of creation before or apart from God, “in whom we live and move and have our being”, as this nothingness is set forth again and again in Scripture or, still more, as how it is just what presents itself to the contemplative soul, issuing in the sight, the thought, of God as “all things”, the All, and not simply “my all” as it, Francis’s prayer, Deus meus et omnia, is regularly mistranslated. No doubt we have to acknowledge, though we desire nothing other than to do this, the moment when, at the furthest reach of our knowledge this same knowledge is left behind by what is thenceforth better called love, or “knowing as I am known” by St. Paul. This is precisely the penultimate move of Hegel’s dialectic, where precisely volition, the will as love, succeeds upon “cognition proper” as last step before the Absolute Idea. What we love is precisely the Good for us, in a sense “the reverse of the idea of truth” (Enc. 232, Zus.) as directed to the world’s “purposed End” – “that the world may believe”, says Christ; but also “I pray not for the world but for those thou hast given me”.37 * As such this is indeed something of “the Will”. Hegel, that is, steers clear of that rationalism often disfiguring ethical theory, wherein the gerundive or thought of what is “to be done” is almost unknowingly substituted for the actual practical syllogism38, of which, as Aristotle had stipulated, the conclusion is itself an action of some kind and not a mere proposition as to what ought to be but is not. Thus Hegel’s concluding union here of theoria and act or praxis as itself contemplated, in what, namely theoria, is “the highest praxis” (Aristotle again), is precisely logic become metaphysics or conversely. Love for the good is precisely Volition, and that as such, such that even Milton’s Satan, or especially he, had to say “Evil, be thou my good”. Thus, it would seem, the “mortal sin” of the theologians cannot be seen or defined as the willing of evil known as such, since here, at most, it must be that evil itself has become known as, or mistaken for, good. This is the background to Hegel’s refusal to keep them dualistically apart in his Phenomenology of Mind. Evil, rather, is “sham-being”, leaving only a monism of the latter, of 37

The world stands condemned by its crucifixion of its maker, which is nonetheless the instrument of its salvation, whether en masse, as it can at least appear, or “one by one and silently”. 38 E.g. by G. Grisez, in his otherwise excellent and in its time (and place) beneficial “The First Principle of Practical Reason”, available in Aquinas, ed. A. Kenny, London 1969.

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being. Thus to choose evil is to opt out, resisting spirit as such. Das Nichts, then, does nothing, it doesn’t even nichten*, pace Heidegger, strictly speaking, since doing nothing is not even a doing except when it is a strategy deliberately pursued. Yet in wrestling with this seeming paradox Hegel himself is led, without contradiction, to his affirmation of contradiction in actu as a necessity and even the necessity of our ultimate metaphysics or theology, in what is only interpretable as the absolute converse of “dualism”. We have to look in the Christian and/or Jewish Scripture for support for and probable chief source of this position, such as the darkly intelligible prophecy, “O death I will be your death”, become the conflictum mirandum of the liturgy (Easter Sequence: Victimae paschali laudes immolant Christiani): Mors et vita duello conflixére mirando: Dux vitae mortuus regnat vivus.

Only with this presupposed, it might seem at least, could Christ’s utterance concerning those knocking nails into his sacred flesh, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”, be a genuine judicial response, an utterance concerning which we cannot prohibit or deny extension, in the divine mind, even to those whose acts “have the greater evil”, to those of Judas or the Jewish authorities there and then. Hence we have the implicit promise of his word to them that you shall not see me again until you say “Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord”. Even of Judas, of “that man” concerning whom “it would have been better for him not to have been born”, one might wish to infer there also an implicit hope implied in the distinction between “that man” and his having been born. Thus to have been born, as affecting the subject, does seem, quite independently, to imply, attribute even, and not merely “linguistically”, as it is the fashion to say, a prior being (as distinct from “previous existence”), for whom or which things might be better, to that subject, in its being known eternally to the divine mind, as one of those ideas ultimately one with it, as St. Thomas can seem to imply.39 “No birth no death” say some of the Buddhists, and it is consistent with our whole text here. Yet if none of this speculation is so, if “the place appointed for him” (or others) is more like its traditional representation within our “belief system”, then so it is and nonetheless “all shall be well and all manner of thing”.40 Yet we are not forbidden to pray 39

Cf. Summa theol., Q15. In saying, in speculation, all this I have no wish to “twist” what come to us as words of truth incarnate, would rather indeed withdraw it. 40 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, q.v. Cp. Chesterton’s citation of his grandfather’s words: “I believe I would thank God for my creation even if I knew

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for even Judas, as St. Thomas speaks of God’s mercy extending even to the eternally lost41, in relief of their pains, or as St, Thérèse prayed desperately for a convicted murderer’s repentance in his last moment, as then happened.42 * In considering Hegel’s alternative to Gilson’s head-on confrontation of realism and idealism we might first note that the section begins (I follow the later more concise treatment in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia) by introducing what Hegel calls Life as the pivotal category of the system here. Many have expressed opposition to the introduction of such a “material” or biological category into what purports to be or is presented as a or the most pure and profound system of logic. Hegel presents such Life as “the immediate idea” (216), however. Note, as the point here, that it is identified as the immediate idea and not merely as an immediate idea, even if, like food, drink, sleep, enjoyment, last night’s rain or any other such phenomenon it clearly is immediate. Rather, its, life’s, specifically formal role in the logic lies in its being the idea, hence the Idea Absolute, there being just the one, just in so far as this is or might be immediate. I say “might be” inasmuch as no explicitly empirical foreknowledge is here supposed. It is an idea, exemplified or not. As such it can be shown to contain or absorb all those other ideas that that may occur to us in attempting ordinarily to characterise our experienced life insofar as this is immediate, encapsulating all those other ideas. It is that in virtue of which they would be “immediately” instanced in all possible worlds (whatever we say about the idea of “world”) which remain worlds, is what in fact Hegel eventually identifies as nature. I were a damned soul”. These words too can seem to mean precisely the opposite of what they say in the saying of it. That, really, is the soul of the whole Hegelian dialectic. Is sophia, then, an invitation to abandon philosophia? But would one not then be loving the latter all the more in abandoning it, as the Christians love the Jewish law (“Old Testament”) perhaps? These are pertinent queries and not jokes. 41 E.g. at Summa theol. I, 21, 4, ad 1. 42 He, Pranzini, kissed the crucifix held out to him just prior to his execution. No such object existed in Judas’s time but it is difficult not to imagine the Apostles amid their Pentecostal joy not recalling his failure with some sorrow and tenderness, somehow not absent from Christ’s own response to his treacherous embrace as recorded. But we know very little both of him and of this, or of what he expected or hoped to bring about. The outcome certainly destroyed his love of money, we read. Just so may we ask and wonder who prays for certain notorious tyrants of our recent past, or for those then, it is and/or was thought, justly hanged (hence we add in our piety: “There but for the grace of God go I”), if not “drawn and quartered”.

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Thus it is the Idea as “the idea of life” that “goes forth freely as nature” (244, stress added). This is clearly a version, an interpretation, of the teaching that God creates all things by or through his “Word” (verbum, logos). Life is thus also the idea of nature, essential to Hegel’s tripartite system of philosophical science. Nature is what the Idea, here the Absolute Idea, of which the immediate idea is a moment, goes forth as. This too, however, as considered within the system, is still idea, just as the logical system or “method” is finally declared, at the end of the Greater Logic particularly, to be “the true being”. No “field work” is required here. Hegel pairs life with soul, to which he finds that “body” or “the” body adds nothing. We may recall Aquinas saying that “body” is a term for logicians but not for metaphysicians, in one of his philosophical commentaries, though it occurs regularly in religious language or in that of St. Thomas’s own theology as essentially commenting on Scriptural representations. These representations, I would just remark here, in general tend to be automatically translated by believers into whatever degree of scientific theology objectifies their faith, as this may differ from age to age or from place to place within their respective communities. Some such representations are to be found also in regularly repeated credal formulas, such as “he ascended into heaven”, as theologians or spiritual writers through all the Christian ages, but also right back in the “old” Testament, themselves point out, often indeed in order to correct, as in the Psalmist’s identification, viz. “the sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit”. Often we hardly notice them, their defect, or the obliqueness of the use of the preposition “in” for various posits of identity, rather, in the Gospel (of John particularly), though often their normal force is overcome by the style used, e.g. “I in them and they in me”. Talk about “dead metaphor” here does not reach the philosophical level. On soul and body Hegel is not so very clear. He states, however, that the soul “is the Individuality of the body as infinite negativity”. I take this to mean, recalling also other texts (e.g. in The Phenomenology of Mind), that the soul is the body, which is thus nothing else, neither the body, therefore, nor the soul being solely “itself and not another thing”. In the world of thought, moreover, individuality counts for nothing, is not a viable notion. All is relation, this final characteristic descending down from the top and infinite level of the Trinitarian persons. These relations, however, are “of reason” but with this difference, from Scholastic representation, that just these are finally the real relations. This inversion, within religious thought, did not wait for Hegel to arrive, however. It is thus a commonplace of Aristotelian thought that the reality, i.e. substance, is invisible. The poet, in saying “We are such stuff as dreams are made of”, approaches this mediated

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reversal of our immediate attitude but only, it seems, gets halfway. Unlike dreams, this new way of seeing things is more true and real, not less. Or, if faith indeed can move mountains, then mountains, “rocks and stones and trees”, are not up to much, in comparison with faith and its virtue, with final wisdom, or, in general, with “that within which passeth seeming”. Dreams, for Aquinas, like the future too, are mere entia rationis. In Hegel, however, it is, if not such entia, rather reason itself (Vernünft) that is real, as is thought as the res. Of course he often continues to use “real” for what can be sensed, etc. Similarly Aquinas writes of law, lex, as mere aliqualis ratio (in Hegel Verstand) of the right (thing), i.e. of ius here, compared to the just or right thing itself, which is ius43 and not lex, Hegel’s das Recht. “In this way”, Hegel sums up, “Life is essentially something alive”, “this individual living thing”, which just as such thus finds its way into logical analysis, like haecceitas before it in many ways. The truth of this is the basis for nature as we know it or, more especially, for it itself forming, in similar fashion, the middle section of Hegel’s system of reality, his philosophy. It is, he says, the immediacy of the idea that causes separability of body and soul, i.e. in our minds as he must mean, this being for him anyhow the real place of forms. There is a similar refusal to distinguish two “places” here, mind and world (for forms), in Aristotle. The consequent finitude, i.e. immediacy under another name, all the same causes this self-contradiction in the idea. It has not, i.e. not as idea but only as absolute, the unique absoluteness of truth, which is the infinite and absolute. The Idea is the notion of the Idea, just as, in reverse, Hegel asserts, “The Absolute Idea is the Absolute” Hegel’s final conclusion concerning this immediacy of life, even or particularly as in its idea, is that “it comes to itself, to its truth”, i.e. this idea does, by or through death, i.e. in and by its own cancellation (like all of the finite ideas) in death as itself “the ‘procession’ of spirit” (222). The Trinitarian and indeed Pentecostal echoes are no doubt deliberate. There is even an echo of baptismal theology, discreet enough to be missed, in this Christian philosopher, though not in general a very forthcoming one as regards sacraments, surrounded as he was by the slaves of the Enlightenment that he so despised on the one hand and by nominalistic Lutherans on the other, for both of whom Plato and Aristotle, Hegel’s philosophical life-blood, were just “old hat”. 43 John Finnis can seem to have been at fault in ignoring or even belittling this clear distinction by St. Thomas, between ius and lex. While not much in evidence in the treatise on Law as such (De lege) in Summa theol. Ia-IIae, yet the distinction is clearly vital for him: cf. IIa-IIae, 57, 1 ad 2um: lex non est ipsum ius, proprie loquendo, sed aliqualis ratio iuris.

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* Here, to bring out further a difference from Gilson’s perspective, we might consider the passage in the Gospels where Christ warns against abusing children, whose “angels behold the face of my father in heaven”. If children have angels it is quite clear that everyone must have them as having had them. Hence the remark is aimed at proclaiming the equal dignity of children, as persons, with adults. It also, however, proclaims angels, clearly in some sense “ideal”. Nor can these angels, in whom belief is proclaimed by those having charge of Catholic belief and teaching, be conceived as holding such office for a time only. Furthermore, but also therefore, they cannot be conceived of as wholly separate from the child himself or herself. My good angel, as we say, while not being me precisely is not wholly other than I am. Here we have already a certain confirmation of the Hegelian system, where the same, he says, is (ultimately the same as) the different, in so far as we deal with concrete identities and differences and not abstract ones. As regarding angels, however, one cannot so easily be clear as to how far they are or are not to be regarded as acting in both God’s name and person, as finds frequent support in Scripture. There is, again obviously, some connection with the (divine) ideas, now the idea, now the angel, just as, in Hegel (and in Scripture, we have been finding), there is interchange between individual and his idea. The idea, even, and still more the Absolute Idea, is “the ruin of the individual” (Hegel), seen as “itself and not another thing” only in our first immediate and hence false perspective out of which truth arises. This is quite different from Gilson’s perspective. He takes it as selfevident that truth comes from truth as already enshrined, therefore, in the first truth. Thus, since children mature into adults with insensible speed, we find implied in Christ’s words a general dominance of spirit (angels) over our immediate picture of ourselves as “a society of animals”. It is the same with Hegel’s Trinitarian thought, where he deprecates thinking of the numerical side of Trinitarianism as having any special significance. This leads him to a perhaps unwise play with ideas of quaternities and “quinities”, in his attempt to get his undoubtedly valid point, concerning quantity, as we have just seen above, across. In his support, however, I cite Aquinas: numeri non ponuntur in divinis. One can cite any number of Johannine or, still more, Pauline texts against the sacred separateness of absolute individuals. Why, then, is Hegel, say, not allowed to write in the same way, most probably inspired in his thinking by just these texts? Are we to think, for example, that these children’s, or anyone’s, angels all get together from time to time to compare notes about

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their individual charges? One may surely doubt whether that great theologian and saint thus intended things in composing his poem “The Dream of Gerontius”, while, coming back to Gilson, one may recall that in all probability it is the text of the same Newman’s study, in the book entitled Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, which most led the Pope of the day to denominate the Second Vatican Council (1962-1964) “Newman’s Council”, while, this being my point here, that book was written and thought out when Newman was still an Anglican Protestant, whatever was going on inside him. Now who is to deny that similar or, rather, analogous thoughts, in respect of a movement towards Roman orthodoxy, were not maybe germinating in Hegel’s mind, at an earlier time than that confronting Newman and in a possibly less intellectually liberal place? We even have evidence of a sort as to this in a letter he wrote to his wife while on a visit to Louvain, mentioning how impressed he was by the behaviour and attitudes of the local Catholic clergy, even saying to her that he could imagine easier cooperation with them than with the parsons in Berlin, or something similar. The evidence is, anyhow, that Newman’s subsequent canonisation as saint was largely decided by this originally Anglican work. “Newman’s Council?” Might we one day see “Hegel’s Council”? Well of course the case is different, Hegel being an academic philosopher, Newman an ordained clergyman or man of religion, as of theology in a supposedly “pure” state. But still … * Life, meanwhile, is the Idea immediate, the first presentation of the Idea to or for us, which comes to its truth, we noted Hegel saying above, in its cancellation, of which our physical death is the representation. Life is even the Idea as immediate, he further says (this surely is its entitlement as, in Hegel’s system, a logical category). Here lies the truth of that saying, “dying we live”, which Christians confess to have been born out, as its true and not merely truest exemplar, in the life in death of Christ, who may be regarded as nailed to the Cross from the first moment of his ex-istence, outside of himself, so to say (as we all are, mutatis mutandis, it then begins to become plain), upon earth, so to say again. No, language, to which philosophy as expressed is chained, is not philosophy’s friend. That is the sense, point and issue of dialectic as nothing else is. Life is “the initial particularisation” (216), this being the condition for the Idea’s “going forth as nature”, as we noted above, whereas in truth the part is the whole and conversely. I myself, apart from this, am nothing. With it, I am “universal of universals”. The whole “mystic way” is thus set forth: “I

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would leave all that I can think, and take for my love that which I cannot think”44. This is the direct import of philosophy set to become sophia, from Plato and earlier, through Aristotle and successors to Hegel and beyond, up indeed to the one writing now, here, there or anywhere. Meanwhile I cite Beethoven: “Music is a greater revelation than the whole of religion and philosophy” – the greatest artists do not lie. With music, that which is of the muses, as anciently with the working of miracles, language is renounced or, as St. Paul puts it, one hears words which it is not lawful to utter. There too, for those concerned, life is struck dead while they live, if one is but “faithful to the heavenly vision”, as we may believe some are and indeed trust in their help. The greatest musicians, nevertheless, like God in heaven, on occasion descend, have recourse, to words, Beethoven making this recourse itself, i.e. the statement of it, as it were dialectically, an event within hitherto wordless music. That is the difference between his Ninth Symphony and the immediately earlier Missa Solemnis. Yet how can one be “as it were” dialectical, which is the same as to ask, sceptically, how else one might be it? Spirit both is and is not (yet this is the fullness of being!), in this like those in paradise forever (or it is they), i.e. immutably but as dancing or in motion on one spot. Hence, to cite Beethoven again, from his Notebooks, “nothing must bind me to life”. Amen. It is in art, then, Hegel says, that Spirit first manifests itself. Is this to fall back to Gilson’s empirical realism? Yes and no. It is here that the Wittgensteinian image of throwing away the ladder of ascent comes in. This image, however, applies only in the realm of Vorstellung, being itself one such. The last, rather, literally becomes the first as one “puts away childish things” without which one could not have grown up, or so we think. Yet given or once established the unreality of time (while if this “once” is not temporal then it is given, absolutely, and not awaiting our establishing it) then it is of no moment that we begin, as we say, as babies. “No birth, no death”. This Buddhist saying may well seem or be the summit of purely human wisdom. That, its limitation as human, is why the death on the Cross is truly a death and yet the “death of death”, as noted earlier, cancelling it just in its supreme affirmation or “showing”. Hence, again, dialectic, hence, and not merely as exemplifying it, this death. Or, we may say, in clear figure still all the same, that Christ’s crucifixion is a transference to the “wild weather” of His outer provinces of what He, God, ever does at home (indirect recall of a sermon or similar by George MacDonald, d. 1905), though the outer just thereby becomes central, as the lowest highest, the last first. Analogy, we noted earlier, is itself analogical (and not merely, 44 From the anonymous fourteenth century East Anglian The Cloud of Unknowing (ed. Clifton Wolters).

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therefore, an analogical concept, as a would-be scientific characterisation might have it). Here, rather, the apophatic becomes itself the truly cataphatic, as we take for our object of thought “that which we cannot think”. This is justifiable, indeed mandatory, after first, necessarily, grasping that all else is error and confusion, the life that spirit cancels in death being itself a dying to itself as life mediated. With Hegel, following hints from Aristotle to Eckhart but perhaps from Plato most profoundly45, philosophy turns its screw one round tighter upon this. Marxism’s taking its rise from such dialectic, where not merely exploiting it, is its greatest claim to fame and infamy in one. In this way life is essentially something alive, and in point of its immediacy this individual living thing. It is characteristic of finitude in this sphere that, by reason of the immediacy of the idea, body and soul are separable. This constitutes the mortality of the living being. It is only, however, when the living being is dead, that these two sides of the idea are different ingredients.46

Hegel follows through with this identity of life with the Idea Immediate right up to “the Affinity of the Sexes” and beyond, as I have treated of in some detail elsewhere47. The living individual, at first taken as immediate, is yet mediated and generated or is thus seen within Life and “the process of Kind”. It therefore dies as never truly having been, i.e. as a contradiction walking, so to say. Death, therefore, it equally follows, is not really death or is the death of what is dead. This is not the logicisation “of the Christian mysteries” but rather what logic itself shows them to be. The “idea of Life” itself, in fact, here “throws off … this first immediacy as a whole”, thus coming to itself, to its truth. It is, so to say, “Kind” as individuality realised. 45 See, for example, the reference to Plato’s Timaeus on “the nature of the finite” at Enc. 91, Zus. 46 Enc. 216. What is said here governs the whole of Hegel’s philosophy of nature, that it, nature, is what the Idea goes forth freely as, such that nature is hence nothing in itself, is Vorstellung where not transfigured even beyond the Word’s episodic “transfiguration” as evangelically recorded, the “glistering” white garments and so on. This is not “docetism”, given that we, with Christ in this, are “all in the same boat”, this being precisely what He himself took on. It is not merely, either, that his “glory” there is actual but merely concealed in his earthly life while ours is rather potential only but, this being the meaning of faith as transcending mere predestination, that we “know not what we are”, a truth finally side-lining the distinction between actuality and potentiality itself (cf. Hegel at Enc. 143f. on Possibility), this being, again, what faith confesses is sacramentally shown forth (a claim not reducible to “representation”) at every eucharistic celebration. 47 See for example the chapters on Mechanism and especially Chemism in our Hegel’s System of Logic, Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2019.

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“The death of merely immediate and individual vitality is the ‘procession’ of spirit”, is finally and truly thought, we might also say, thought here being a consciousness transcending finally individual self-consciousness of any kind. This is the same as saying that there is no empirical thought-process, it has no nature in that sense. Mind, as Hegel puts it, is ever or intrinsically sure of itself. This is his answer to the Kantian notion of a critique of reason itself. After this the whole of paragraph 233 should be carefully read and assimilated, with its conclusion that “the idea realises in one both itself and its other” (234). In the words of Van Riet, “there is otherness in God” as infinite. Hence it is “in” God that we humans “live and move and have our being”. “The idea as a process runs through three stages” (215, Zus.). Is it then a process? Yes, but not a process of change specifically. It is more akin to that creed (Hegel’s example) which remains the same for the child, youth and mature man whose understanding of it, but not itself, develops. Immediately it is Life. As first mediated and/or differentiated it is Knowledge, of both the theoretical and practical ideas, interwoven as they are. Finally unity “enriched by (this) difference”48 is restored to it as the Absolute Idea, with which every idea is identified in its difference as yet having “a being due to itself alone”. What this means, entails, is that the conceptions of our variously finite ideas are ultimately, in McTaggart’s uncompromising language, “misperception” and remain that until they are seen exclusively in the one and absolute Idea. So the partial knowledge, which, Gilson argues, has to come first as condition for final knowledge, is not knowledge but error, like all that is immediate. This is not just use of a different vocabulary. These first perceptions, unless received with the simplicity or docility of a child, but, note, an ideal child49, are erroneous. They are to be “put away”, as St. Paul says. Truth, then, results from error, as having to be a result. Here too Hegel boldly transcends the opposition. In this way we must then say that God himself is result, not just floating there like some great bomb. Yet he is not of course result as subsequent. Eternity itself as last moment, rather, makes itself eternally first movement or what the whole thing was ever about. The music, the symphony, must be heard all at once, this being the essence distinguishing the art-work as it distinguishes religion and also philosophy itself as thus bending back upon religion and art as indeed itself höchste Gottesdienst. As Hegel puts it, “The single members of the body are what they are only by and in relation to their unity”. Thus the soul “is the notion of life”. “The 48

Parenthesis added. Note Hegel’s remark that the injunction to become as or like children in the relevant respect does not mean we should put ourselves on a par with actual children. 49

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process of life” is the power of emerging from the immediacy that at first, as itself constituting life, besets it. This process “results in the idea under the form of judgment, i.e. the idea as Cognition” (216, Zus.). Cognition especially results out of error retreating. We have discussed this, together with Cognition’s advance into Volition while remaining itself. Implied, though, if one read closely, is that life is set towards death as fulfilling it, as “the entry into Spirit”. Thus the truth of the Good is laid down as the unity of the theoretical 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 life which has returned to itself from the bias and finitude of cognition, and which by the activity of the notion has become identical with it, is the Speculative or Absolute Idea.50

“The Idea, as unity of the Subjective and Objective Idea, is the notion of the Idea.” This notion’s object is “the Idea as such”. This Object “embraces all characteristics in its unity”. That is, it is the Idea of God, or is God as Idea, indifferently. Hence we maybe know as little about it as we know about God, only that it must be so, must be simply, yet as transcending all other being(s) or of which all being(s) is or are analogies or, collectively, as world, are an analogy. This unity of all in one “is consequently the absolute and all truth, the idea which thinks itself”. Hegel comments that we have here “at least” “a thinking or logical Idea”, logos in that case. Insofar as now the idea “comes to be its own object”, he declares, “we have the noesis noeseos which Aristotle long ago termed the supreme form of the idea”.51 *

Lukasiewicz remarks that discovery of a new logical truth had always seemed to him as best compared with, as indeed illustrating, something more of the divine nature52. Hegel’s finding that much of divine revelation is precisely logical and/or necessary truth is, if anything, major confirmation of this, against which the cries of perversion (in Hegel) are impotent. So, again, “What is man? What is God?” This question was posed in just this form by Pope St. John Paul II, known to philosophers, whether previous to 50

Enc. 235. Enc. 236, Zus. 52 Cf. P.T. Geach’s citation from Lukasiewicz in Coope, Geach, Potts, White: A Wittgenstein Workbook, from the Department of Philosophy of the University of Leeds; Blackwells, Oxford 1970. 51

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or after his election in 1978, as Karol Wojtyla, without however his supplying an answer. Which, we might ask, was and/or is the self-styled “son of man”, a title proposed, it is difficult to deny, with clear reference to the heavenly man “like to a son of man” as set forth in the Book of Daniel? It is an extraordinary title, as used by one self-declared and shown to be actually and uniquely divine (but with whom alone, therefore or just thereby, according to Christian belief, we are to be identified inasmuch as being divinely indwelt), an invitation in itself to man, as to men, to acknowledge their dignity, as St. Augustine, in a passage cited in the paschal liturgy itself, exhorts Christians to do. Agnosce o Christiane dignitatem tuam, accordingly sings the priest at the nocturnal blessing of the outsize “paschal candle” at the Saturday night Easter Vigil. But Christ here acknowledges it, the dignity, before either his sacrificial death or consequent resurrection, namely that he is the son of man. Are we not a bit into angelology here too? “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God”, while as for the Word’s being “made flesh” Christians nonetheless know as well as anyone that no change in God, whether Father, Son or Spirit, can be conceptually countenanced.53 This “made”, therefore, 53

For a detailed yet concise treatment of this question cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia, Question 9, in two articles, viz. “Is God altogether unchangeable?” and “Is only God unchangeable?” The latter, longer article includes in a reply to an objection the statement that even angels, though “endowed by God’s power with unchangeable choice” and having “unchangeable being belonging to them by nature” yet “can still change as regards place”. This reply is plainly no more than recapitulation of Scriptural presentation. Just so, however, does it preserve close identification of message-bearer and message, or of message-bearer and sender, such as Scripture tends towards as leading quite naturally, whether or not without aberration, to Hegel’s angelology in The Phenomenology of Mind VII. For the most striking aspect of this is perhaps, especially in relation to the Trinity (he considers “quaternity” and “quinity” as, in what is not entirely reductio ad absurdum, at least thinkable alternatives), the deliberate questioning, without denial, of the traditional hard and fast distinction between creator and creature. This is done, however, in a way also mirrored in Scripture by the progressive identification of message-bearer and message just mentioned. This, indeed, has a relation, for thought, to the intraTrinitarian processiones, always distinguished from “missions” nonetheless. Yet in Aquinas a quaestio (q.43) on the sending (missio) of divine persons (in eight articles) forms the conclusion, as carefully distinguishing mission from processio, to the treatise on the Trinity itself (qq. 27-43). This can thus can seem not entirely separate from the next treatise, viz. on creation (q. 44 et seq.), also called processio, but now external as mirroring, if by contrast, the internal Trinitarian processions. Aquinas, that is, also seeks a unity between eternity and its representation or “emanation” in creation as bearing upon just time and change as potential, i.e. as other than the eternal and hence divine processiones. Yet for Hegel finally the other is the same in

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must relate to things as seen by men, or in man’s illusory world of “dust and ashes” specifically, as do the frequent mentions of God’s being or of how he was “before creation”. This is a view much inclined to by Duns Scotus, though he still uses the vocabulary of “what would have happened”, e.g. if man had not sinned, i.e. nothing else at all as regards God’s incarnation, the fact thereof, as due principally to his “great love for man” antecedent to any event and unable to be provoked alone by man’s sin alone, therefore. Nor does this contradict the view of Aquinas, though he prefers to stress the incarnation as a remedy for sin, as indeed it surely was, as more immediately Scriptural. In the end, as is especially clear from Hegel’s thought, everything that has happened, as we say, sin, incarnation, Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon, the so-called holocaust of a large-scale murder, my own falls from grace, all this is eternally known and hence determined by God, by thought, by the Idea absorbing one and all including our whole human and creaturely freedom, never more freedom than when, as saints, we may become directly moved by God with our full knowledge and consent. Add to this, as Hegel brings out in his last lectures (LPEG), that the creation as such of necessarily finite beings, apart from some very special gifts, entails a world inclusive of chance and error, these too, therefore, remaining within an absolute conspectus, like the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart or someone’s loss of innocence. It includes, that is, contingency as, it too, a divine creation. Our liberty too, then, is not a “liberty of indifference”, as it might at first or immediately appear. * Much of what we are urging here, from Hegel principally, is corroborated by sayings and attitudes of “the good guys” in Shakespeare’s dramas, principally Hamlet, as this main character is first introduced to us entering to face his mother and her new husband, his uncle and plain “villain of the the latter’s being or becoming the former, the Inward the Outward and, again, conversely. It is thus, indeed, that McTaggart propounds the fulfilment of reason in love, of “cognition proper” in will or Volition, virtually identified by Hegel with the Good, End and “purposed End” being the same, while this purpose (volition) is not distinguishable from Will itself as infinite (no “endless progress” or mere “ought”). It is a matter of the essential finitude of reason in abstractness, as contrasted with the Idea, reached indeed by reason and not by abandonment of it, i.e. not until “afterwards”, so to say, if we are considering what McTaggart, as formally atheist, calls “heaven”. By this transcending of finite reason a distinction between angels and God based upon place would fall away as provisional, as, Hegel assumes (with McTaggart!), will be all our reasoning as against the Idea itself.

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piece”. The royal couple urge him to moderate his prolonged grief for his dead, indeed murdered father, as Hamlet’s “prophetic soul” already suspects, his mother the queen particularly here arousing his disapproval, contempt even, held back in gentleness, as she, newly re-wed, urges him to “… cast thy nighted colour off … Do not for ever with thy vailéd lids Seek thy father in the dust. Thou know’st ‘tis common – all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity.”

Drily Hamlet agrees: “Ay, madam, it is common”. But she, doubtless blinded, Shakespeare would be intending us to think, in her “frailty”, by her new pleasures, misses the scorn: If it be so, Why seems it so particular with thee?

Hamlet’s scorn passes insensibly, seamlessly rather, to this gentleness we noted: Seems, madam!54 Nay, it is; I know not ‘seems’.

Here he despairs of his “good mother”, of her ability to understand him further. Outward shows of grief, he says … indeed, seem, For they are actions that a man might play. But I have that within which passeth seeming55; These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

There is maybe a touch of the rising anti-liturgical Protestantism here already, as there may be also a touch of criticism of it in the “What ceremony else, thou churlish priest?” of the later Act of this drama at Ophelia’s burial, though there from the conservative side rather, it may be, churlishness characterising rather the self-styled reformers. Hamlet, 54

This might be “What the hell are you talking about?” in today’s harsher if more democratic idiom. 55 “… that passeth seeming” I seem to recall as a more point-hammering-home variant of the text, seeming being the essence of “show”, although I am having to use the “New Swan Shakespeare” of 1968 just now. It seems new indeed!

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anyhow, assures his confused mother, of whom he later comments, “Frailty, thy name is woman!”, that “I shall in all my best obey you, madam”, this being “a loving and a fair reply”, as the King notes. All of which, however, is but a prelude to Hamlet’s first long soliloquy: “O. that this too too solid flesh would melt away”. expressing a longing for “self-slaughter” as he recalls his father, “so loving to my mother”, of whom he now says “a beast would have mourned longer”. “But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue”. What had the poet experienced, to write so? We can only guess, though as seeing analogies everywhere (and what else was the method of Freud?) we may find a hint of allegoric representation, if not entirely unconscious, of the precisely then recent history of England. * So, anyhow, “where one dies all die” (St. Paul on solidarity, if only, to begin with, in original sin), as it will be later, or was earlier, expressed. Against the utilitarian or socialist “Each to count for one and none for more than one” we affirm that each is to count for all and none for less than all! In other words we affirm Hegel’s “it is useless to count”. This is the consideration that many would set against the uniqueness of Christ, which, though, it rather affirms or confirms, in contemplation indeed of the selfmultiplying fruit of that uniqueness. “Where I am, there shall my servant be” and conversely, we may surely add. Christ, indeed, as one in nature with the Spirit, is present in all of us, though as containing rather than contained. That is to say, the commonness of death makes of it not something abstractly universal but, like the “I” itself, concretely universal in the deaths of each one, whose worlds die with them. This is both evangelical and more general New Testament doctrine, as at the hands of the apostles Paul or John. Yet lately some theologians have seen fit to call in question these identifications as brought more to the fore by Hegel’s thought and writings though ever present to supposedly more traditional thinkers, themselves writers, young or old. We, by the same texts, are equally present to it, to death, in (“members of”) one another, as part of the same saving mystery of faith, which must be included here as meaning trust in and acceptance of the word of one or more who know, for one or more acceptable reason. It is on this ground that faiths compete, must ever at least claim to be rational. Hence it is employed, this sense, in the claim that truth, or reality rather, is “what science says it is”, a clearly ambiguous predicate however, apart from its not being literal. For science says nothing, not even as to who or what (though I would claim that this “what” must be personal over again) possesses it. Either way, though,

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philosophy must also or even supremely be theology, negatively or positively, as theology is itself science, never therefore employing “pictures” without acknowledging their pictorial character. This returns us ultimately to the undoubted truth that language itself is picture, as thought is not. Thus I know what I say when I say “The cat is on the mat” but I do not and never could say it, i.e. what I know. It is first of all a picture, what I say, in sounds or tones, i.e. “picture” itself is a picture (and hence a “picture”!) for something more general, such as representation. But the regress can only be infinite here too (I don’t after all there ever purely “present” anything, and so on, since whatever is present but presents itself). It is futile to dismiss this as mysticism, even granted that its tendency is to conclude to what is being called by some “acosmism”, again a picture, or figure of speech of some sort. It really means that the cosmos, only analogous at most to what there is, yet differs in some radical way from what has been immediately assumed, as we find in absolute (or other) idealism for instance. “No birth no death”, say a large portion of the Buddhist thinkers, in full accord, though independently, with the Franciscan or in general Christian orthodox Deus meus et omnia. Thus St. Thérèse denies death just on her deathbed: “It is not death that is coming for me but God”, for the same acosmic reason, viz. acknowledgement of the absolute dominion of the Idea or, in so far as we think, Concept. The God of religion may tend to lose what we may have thought was a name among names through this process, but precisely because God’s “name” is “the name that is above all names”, i.e. not merely above, say, every other name (as we have to say), this being here exposed as a presumptuous expression. Here again Scripture leads the way in Spirit’s active decomposition, deconstruction, of language. This Aquinas acknowledges in defending dependence on the literal sense “wherever possible”, i.e. it may not always be so. “Literal” meanwhile means “letter”, that which “kills”, the letter itself says. This suggests a final viewpoint where a “literal” sense is just not possible because not conceivable and not therefore defensible. Or, what we must take literally, e.g. “this is my body”, may not itself be as object anything “literal” in its reference (it is, for example, in some sense one with those receiving it, as they are all in some sense members “one of another). What things are, that is, as substances, is in principle invisible (Aristotle), as is ultimate substance itself. It is precisely the accidents which can happen (accidere) to be visible, as, we might say, “that which appears beside”, paremphainomena, precisely as symbebekoi. These would be the “grey matter” of our title here. Thus if matter is nothing other than the form, or simply nothing, then so is “the brain”. Matter turns out to be an analogy of spirit, of the Idea, as accidental as, for faith, are the post-consecration eucharistic appearances,

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though in the symbolism, nonetheless, active and effective (they become “signs of themselves”). In the sacrifice they are now flesh and blood rather, yet these are also, just in their concept (for idealist philosophy at least), material phenomena (appearances). The whole celebration of Mass, that is to say, takes place in the phenomenal world “of sense” (while being simultaneously enacted “in heaven”, as indeed, in the divine or absolute thought), this “world of sense” to which infinite being, of necessity in the freedom of love, extends itself. O sacrum convivium, in quo Christus sumitur, recolitur memoria sacrificium eius, mens impletur gratia et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur. This is the difference between religion and philosophy or, rather, philosophy, finally theology, theologia, is, in part, the interpretation or theory of religious praxis. Yet what would “appear beside” is, for Aristotle, precisely the effect of, as just therefore impossible, a material organ of thought, i.e. what would happen if the impossible, viz. an organ of thought, were actual, whereas accidents are “real”. But are they real, even for Aristotle, if substance is precisely the real in its entirety? Are they not, then, side-appearances consequent upon the senses, upon a perception starting off as material, from which mathematics is right to move away, in regard to explaining phenomena, towards number and measure, though the inability to discard weight suggests this is still a midway house, satisfying to nobody therefore? Thus Hegel identifies the mathematical spirit with materialism. Here the way lies open to regarding all material perception, of what appears, or would appear, “beside” as misperception (McTaggart), disposing, as mere picture, of traditional presentations of soul as a thing that is not a thing, “informing” “the body” and surviving it. This belongs in a philosophy of nature as itself the realm of unlikeness, infinitely divisible, in contrast to the efforts of art to redeem it, from gardening to painting and music. We forget that the absolute being of God is realised without admixture of any such thing or form. God just is form, absolutely. Just so is our spirit, inasmuch as knowing and if we should know at all, one with such spirit, “in the end” absolute. It is useless to count only because there is nothing to count. The spirits in eternity form a perfect unity and not a mere union only. I am you, in loving the neighbour as self. He is then self, myself. Thus it is the life of the vine that courses through the branches, divine life. “Without me you can do nothing”. This is what we must change over to, having now realised that the soul does not depart from the body as from an old friend. The flesh profits nothing, is merely our kind of cipher or language for approaching to a grasp of spirit. In this way language is indeed a way of living, of being alive. It is waste of time, however, to ask now where we go when we are asleep, since it is part of this design that time is itself illusory.

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In this way sleep and death approximate to one another, as the language of Scripture plainly suggests, as being a version of periodic transfiguration such as was seen of Christ (by Peter, James and John) or, later, in the risen body, as we say. Yet by this, all this, physical seeing is in a basic way the very opposite of knowing. Can we not then know a visible thing? Yes, but we truly know it as no thing or nothing, an appearance merely. We glibly say that compared to God creatures are nothing, yet it is this nothingness that is their truth. So the truth is that our being and person are included in immortality just in the latter’s being what it is, each of us in the others and they in us, the unique and hence salvific mediation of Christ remaining. My soul then is not mine only. We all meet there, that “where I am, there shall my servant be”, as spoken in and by the final self-consciousness toward which we are each and all set, “I in them and they in me”. God would have become man even if Adam had not sinned, since He willed that in Christ humanity and the world should be united with Himself by the closest possible bond.

In citing this from Bd. John Duns Scotus my intention is in no way to confute the Augustinian felix culpa confirmed in St. Thomas and cited at the high point of the Easter night Exultet sung by the celebrant. In fact it is this Scotist thought, nonetheless rooted in Patristic tradition and thus not directly denied at all by St. Thomas’s contrary emphasis, that saves the exclamation from being one of paradox, as if a sin could ever be “happy”. Rather, in the very felicity of it lies the truth that the finite creature must inevitably err at some point in an unfolding temporal sequence as is proper to finitude, whether or not buoyed up by some special “graces” freely bestowed (and yet, Rahner reminds, everything is and must be grace), as the event has proved. That is man’s happy fault as himself destined to be retrieved, picked up and carried, this in itself as blessed revelation to his consciousness, at whatever cost to infinite being as Idea Absolute in its own self-Idea as incapable of surpassing itself, the unsurpassable namely. In this sense God himself does not “humble himself”, as he did, we believe, in his assumed human nature. * I as “universal of universals” – have we plumbed the depths or risen to the height of this intuition, not merely or solely to be encountered in Hegel, which would be self-defeating? “I do all things that please him”, hence “I and my father are one”, or just therefore: words of Christ. The claim, further, is that this relation is extendable to all his followers, such that they indeed

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become his body, i.e. one body, “members one of another”, i.e. not members exclusively in the anatomical or social sense, these being states of alienation, rather, to be overcome. Sumit unus sumunt mille; where one receives a thousand receive56. Still, he is the head, we are the body, while in this image he is not seen as, so to say, the top part of the body (rather all of it, in such case) but rather the Spirit, Mind, filling all. “Without me you can do nothing”. This kind of confidence can only be proper to such a one, i.e. to just that one, author and subject of the “I in them and they in me” relation. Thus St. Paul: “For me to live is Christ, to die is gain”. Gilson would insist that it is not possible to make a philosophy out of this. But why not really? Is not that very attitude part of that same realism we have been decrying as finally irreligious, compartmentalised. Hegel gets over it through his account of the Idea, whereby it is precisely the Idea which is concrete and not ideal, as are finite “realities”. The infinite is more personal than we, all of whom are to be absorbed in him, or what else shall “in” mean here? “There is one closer to me than I am to myself”, one, note, again. This one knows or “sees” nothing but himself, since all else is “in” him as one with him and not as in a collection of parts. Hence not merely the notion of “parts” but partition or participation themselves are analogous versions, offspring, of that first unity. Hence each is to count for all and none for less than all (no apologies to Bentham) while what you do to the least of these, to him or her especially, you do to me. This was never less than the sheerest metaphysics, though it may well be more. In view of the above the possibility, probability rather, cannot but impress itself that Scripture, that is to say the Christian preaching. is the first source of Hegel’s thought or inspiration, as we say, as is typical of an exseminarian, increasingly as youth passes. I offer this as a philosophical insight, fuelled by pure thought’s constant discovery of analogy upon analogy as its very method. “Only connect” (E.M. Forster). Only tear apart, cry rather the freshly minted logicians, eager to show that they have surmounted confusion. But they usually come around in the end, to the scandal of the next fresh brood. Hegel himself makes the same comment, when insisting, he too, that “the world is in order as it is”. Thus his whole philosophy, his account of logic, may best be seen as supplying the scaffolding for thinking the “concrete universal”. That is his answer to Gilson’s unmediated certainty that the most personal of histories, or of religious systems, cannot be put as the highest philosophy. First of all, it is sophia, rather, that Hegel has made his aim, as he tells us, and not the mere love of it, that sophia which, Aquinas and the long Aristotelian 56 From a hymn or poem composed by Thomas Aquinas for the then new liturgical feast of Corpus Christi.

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tradition tell us, is the highest or supreme “intellectual virtue”, a category not finding much respect, if any, among Hegel’s immediate predecessors, though nor were they Aristotelians such as he plainly presents himself as being. So Hegel would direct our gaze the whole time to the transforming of the earthly Christ into what he in truth is all the time. Thus it is, as noted here, more a transfiguration than a wholesale transformation (as the Gospel confirms he is ever the same), figured finally as the heavenly man, “son of man” in his own phrase, as is shown forth at and after the resurrection or, to the eyes of inspired faith likewise, also while hanging upon the Cross in deepest dereliction and sheer pain surely. “Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my father”. Who can understand those words? And what was or is the ascension spoken of anyway? Did he go up and not down or sideways or inside out, rather? Speaking to men, here it was to a woman, he uses the language of men or, some exegetes may want to insist, the inspired evangelist does so. This is no more a barrier, or should not be, for anyone than there may be in the whole notion of a divine man. It is the same difficulty, of which, anyhow, “ten thousand … do not make a doubt”57. All dedicated readers of Wittgenstein, or those dedicated to philosophy generally, have corroborated this sentiment, though they are of course not unprepared for finding error nonetheless. Nor was Newman. Hegel surely possessed this notion (of the heavenly man), as indeed did Duns Scotus as a predecessor, of the infinite being’s (God’s) necessary incarnation as man. Necessity, in fact, becomes in Hegel the mark of the divine freedom. Yet he is by no means its first discoverer. For that we would need to look in the Jewish scriptures from the first verse, “in the beginning”. People often speak and write as if this “in the beginning” is necessarily a relative statement, as to something God set about doing after a period of solitude or similar. But there is no trace of this in the text, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth”, as Hegel shows himself consistently aware. People imagine, since they cannot it seems imagine otherwise, that he is reducing God to a part of a more general system of thought, a truly miserable undertaking, ignoring that he denies this as forcefully and consistently as anyone could. Necessity, for him, is quite plainly a name for God, who thus knows no necessity other than his own self in its therefore absolute freedom, without trace or shadow of turning, who thus says to the individual soul, condescending to this human language, “I have loved thee since before the foundation of the world”. That is our key to our being, to the question, that can occur to us while still small children, “Why do I exist?” or even “What 57

Words of J.H. (later cardinal and later still canonised saint) Newman.

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have I done to deserve this?” The “this”, existence, can be as often seen as negative rather than positive, to start with (or to finish with). In his treatise on the incarnation, a term which he had perhaps no thought of enclosing in quotation marks or of adding to it “as it is called” (or not here in his theological Summa), St. Thomas, for his part, connects the incarnation essentially with human rationality although his emphasis is rather upon it as the greatest of “graces”, evoked by man’s wretchedness, say either finite wretchedness or wretched finitude, when without it. Gilson’s own verdict is that Scotus does not present a basically different account of it, despite his affirmation that it, incarnation as a divine intention, so to say, could not depend upon man’s sin, the so-called felix culpa? The culpa remains felix anyhow as finitude in God’s world, where the rational creature as knowing the truth of God, since he is rational, can be sure of a divine healing of all his ills and wants, though maybe in some or other respects the healing be conditional upon his response, may be even a paideia of millennia unimaginable in advance. The story of Jonah suggests that these ills and wants, whatever form they take, do not finally impede God much or at all, however. Thus, St. Thomas can seem also to imply that man, or the finite rational creature, was bound to fall into sin, whatever graces he might receive. “What can fail at some time does so”, he accordingly says. The key there would seem to be existence conceived and experienced as in time, as something not shared by the angels (should we wonder how they keep faithful, those who do or did), though for the main scholastics they, angels, are not eternal either. They make use here of an intermediate concept of the or an aevum or age58. The question of the final identity or non-identity but in great closeness of human children with their angels is mentioned, this closeness, as an undoubted truth by Christ himself, as base of the little ones’ so to say untouchable dignity, on a par at least with ours. Nor can one so easily conceive of a sounder base for human dignity.

58 Religion teaches that “Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life” (St. Basil), though Christ seems to speak of any child having such an angel as his own, leaving open how much this closeness amounts to identity in spirit, intellectual nature being necessarily personal, it seems also implied.

CHAPTER TWO MYTHIC

So far I have not much more than suggested what I might have meant or even been going on to mean by “the real analogy” or, indeed, by the borrowed titular phrase (from Lyttkens59) “of God and the world”60. We appear to have analogies of analogies or analogies within analogies, for instance.61 The body seems to analogise the soul or spirit, substituting the 59

Cf. Note 6 above and the main text referred to there. “The Real Analogy of God and the World” was my first thought for a title to this work. I am happy to recall it here as supplementing my final choice. 61 Cf. our Hegel’s System of Logic (CSP, Newcastle-on-Tyne,2011), pp. ix to xxxii, i.e. the Preface to just that book’s topic, viz. “The Absolute Idea as Form of Forms” (subtitle). This is already a consideration of analogy as manifested in the forms considered in logic in their relation to one another. Analogy is just like or analogous to the subject-predicate relation, in which “A is B” simply exemplifies “A is A” (since if A is B then B is A), once given the identity relation, “two-name” indeed but not exclusively Ockhamist. This position is the entire contrary of the abstract “Each thing is itself and not another thing” (G.E. Moore). Thus, I cite from p. xxxi in our above-named text a conclusion from this Preface as actually giving my conclusion: “Each thing is precisely every other thing if it is anything. So it is not in alienation from self a member of a class since it is its own class, as is said firstly and routinely of God, that he is his deity. Hegelian thought, for instance, shows the analogous reflection of this universally. In the process, however, analogy is made to a species of identity, analogy itself thus ceasing to be, as it was classically explained, a species of equivocation. Here too, then, analogy is analogous to itself … is only a restriction upon identity inasmuch as the latter (in ‘A is A’) conceptually exemplifies analogy” (Ibid. p. xxxi, emphases now added). Cf, our “Subject-Predicate Logic” (my title as first submitted to this journal) in The Modern Schoolman LXVI, January 1989, pp. 130-139, especially section IV. But, again, discerning the analogy is prior to specifying which limb is analogans, which analogandum. “Both terms are thereby ‘sublated’, aufgehoben, in and by the Idea, as absolute” (Hegel’s System …, p. xxxi). They are thus, e.g. “God” and “world” both, independently of whatever be each term’s reference to sense or lack of it, being 60

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latter for the more suspect as thing-like soul or “life principle”. That is, there is a certain cutting out of “life” from the discussion, as “only the idea immediate”, in favour of thought, a move often dismissed by the more poetic of our Christian metaphysicians as replacing colour with a drab grey although, ironically, it is precisely against “grey matter” that idealism, whether absolute or on the way to that, characterises itself. Or shall they, or we, call God grey? Here comes in the philosophy of light, asking whether colour is a species of darkness, of light’s absence, hence loved by ourselves as children of that darkness. Here is suggested the vanity of art abstractly considered, when not there for the sake of going, or pointing, or carrying, beyond itself, such that, for example, music is not just music nor, presumably, colour just colour, nor, indeed, poetry just “the music of words” (J.-P. Sartre’s dismissal, from a Marxist viewpoint, in What is Literature?62). The world, art’s theatre, must indeed be the analogy of God, concerning whom we must therefore use the world’s language only analogously, though it, the world, loses thereby all its pretended independence or “reality”. So there is a double analogy here. Language, part and parcel of God’s analogy, is used, so to say improperly, of God himself analogously over again. This, in the first place, tells us something about analogy conceptually, that from within it there is no coming to an end of it. It is this fact, this situation, that underlies Hegel’s somewhat ambiguous account, as regards the letter, of just reality. This, “reality”, is sometimes identified with spirit itself (his true meaning), though, when predicated of alienated nature it is identified with just what opposes spirit. It also underlies the calm complacency with which believers and indeed their foremost theologians treat the highly analogous (or figurative) language most typical of Scripture.63 For soul, in fact, Hegel substitutes, as spirit’s form, idea, just as God is the Absolute Idea. He is, that is, what is not, what transcends being. Yet this, as a “what”, is being too, or par excellence even. God, St. Thomas, reasons, has no relation with us in our “reality”, but only the intra-mental one with his idea of us, severally or as a social whole, the Church ultimately. This “phenomenal” only inasmuch as they name firstly immediate (ideas). One may recall Aquinas’s objection to Anselm that not all understand by “God” that than which a greater cannot be conceived. Thus it is that Hegel says that “God”, the name, belongs to religion rather than to philosophy, which may well take it over with stipulations, as Hegel (but also Aristotle) frequently does himself. 62 French original, 1949. 63 St. Thomas Aquinas gives reason for seeing this as the most rational approach to divine things, circumventing the danger of taking literally what we are saying. “The letter kills, the spirit gives life”.

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“only”, as applied to the infinite, ipso facto downgrades that “reality”, viz. ours, so long as belief in God is maintained (this much the nineteenth century “left” Hegelians perceived). Of others meanwhile, i.e. those unbelievers if any abstracted from this ecclesial whole (though this quality is not finally determinable by us, the word is “I never knew you”, the implication being that “you” are then nothing, outcast from spiritual, i.e. final reality. The idea that we are or, significantly, “have” souls, thing-like even in our anti-bodiness, is a constructed picture, egged on by talk of “faculties”. What we actually refer to with this word “soul”, if we are alert, is a kind of moment. It does not stand firm or “under”, does not support “accidents” and so on (i.e. is not “substance”, as St. Thomas half corroborates, but hence can seem to obscure, in offering the phrase or notion “incomplete substance”).64 The accidents correspond merely to perceptual or other forms of sense-experience which it is ultimately misleading to call observation. Accidents, symbebekoi, are not the “reality” at all. That, this, is the invisible or insensible “what something is”. Hence, logically, a thing can change utterly into something else while appearing exactly the same, as is claimed for the eucharistic species of the Mass65. It is not, that is, quite what we usually mean by “miracle”, being rather mysterium fidei. It is said to change from substance as signified by the remaining accidents, the look, smell, taste etc. of just precisely bread and wine, into a substance truly not of this world or explicable in the familiar categories. The only analogy to it

64 The case is different, in the tradition, with angels. As pure forms they just are, one by one so to say, substances. It is not so clear, however, that the other possibilities, which Hegel seems to countenance (cf. Phen. Sp. VIIc), were ever much considered in the tradition, viz. that quantity might not so to say neatly apply always to the angelic orders. Yet the tradition simultaneously considers the oneness, never merely a “moral” oneness, of believers in Christ, in the Church, in the bread where all the grains are baked together into one (a traditional image indeed). 65 This is not unusual as regards the dogmas of faith. Consider, for example, that of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Though itself full of substance the dogma does not refer to anything observable at all, while even where something is observable it need not be that which the dogma bears upon. Thus as regards the “assumption” of Mary, body and soul as is specified, the only perceptible corresponding element one can think of might be the negative one (but, given multiplicity of interpretation do we even know that? Probably we do: I only mean that the question could be meaningfully raised) that no one has found or will find upon earth a corporeal relic of Mary. Nor is this just a Marian peculiarity, however. The resurrection of Christ, precisely as a mystery of faith, must be seen as in principle imperceptible. He was only “caused to appear” to the chosen witnesses. Nor is the essential Pentecostal Spirit matter of a “mighty wind”, or the prefatory Ascension an ascending.

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is that of living things becoming dead while “looking the same”66, though in this case it is, to the contrary, lifeless things (yet they are chosen as being the means of life), viz. bread and wine, becoming (through the action of the sacramentally empowered celebrant, as ordained thereto, i.e. one in “holy orders”) more than immediately living, viz. becoming Christ in glory, yet precisely not as in glory but sacramentally as a third type of his being67. Simultaneously, in his death out of love for us, these elements become that in and through the signification of two separate consecrations in separation, viz. of bread and of wine, in the rite, as body and blood separated, even though each crumb or drop indifferently just is (the whole) Christ, faith affirms. This separateness, then, signifies the sacrifice here remembered in participation in it, while each element signifies equally in its separation what it becomes, viz. the whole Christ as a being quite transcending the mundaneness of flesh and blood. This is not some magic but a divine gift enabling full presence to and participation in the divine Christ’s selfoffering, a recognizably divine gift to the community of believers, this itself the mysterium fidei. They pray: O sacrum convivium, in quo Christus sumitur, recolitur memoria passionis eius, mens impletur gratia et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur.68 Thus the bread and wine, like food and drink generally, form one commodity, viz. food as nourishment. It is sacrificial death which suggests the fatal division, as the double consecration in the rite recalls the sacrifice. The “plot” of The Merchant of Venice plays precisely upon this and can thus seem rather absurd unless we recall this Christian or eucharistic background. The audiences of those early seventeenth century days would have been fully alive to this, as today in Europe we do not seem to be. The suggestion here anyhow, developed by Levering, is that the sacramental elements, bread and wine, somehow become in consecration “signs of themselves”, of what they themselves have then become in constituting Christ’s “sacramental” body. Implied is a third type of being after both the natural and the mystical or trans-terrestrial, where Christ “sits at God’s right hand”, as traditional iconology represents only the divine so to say individual humanity. * 66 For Aristotle the hand of a corpse is not the hand of a man, something that McTaggart, for his part, was prepared to challenge, however. 67 Cf. Matthew Levering, op. cit. 68 “O sacred banquet, in which Christ is consumed, the memory of his passion relived, the mind filled with grace and a pledge of coming glory given.” This prayer is recited before and to the sacrament on the altar when the community is assembled there for prayer in the Dominican and similar communities and “orders”.

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Implied again, quite clearly, in the whole notion of a need for “redemption”, is a certain disorder in nature, inclusive or indeed stemming from the disorder in our own “nature”, the effect, the “wounds” (St. Bede of Northumbria), of “original sin”. This is clearly given a cosmic dimension in Scripture and this is reflected in the imagined cosmology of J.R.R. Tolkien, which is a kind of rehearsal of the same catastrophe, one of “fallen angels”, in a quite differently imagined picture. Yet it is the common view that the original or Biblical presentation of this “fall”, as it is called, is also indeed storied or pictured. Let us look at this. Perhaps oddly, Hegel claims that if there was a real or genuine “fall” on the part of man then God is not God. This seems to stem from a felt need at that time to view the Eden myth, a mythic recounting of the inner truth of some event or, possibly, process transcending any historical representation, on a secular model. The fall (of man) in this way might represent an everpresent falling, or failing, on the part of the finite. Thus God knew this would occur, even determines (with God nothing is past, nor indeed present in our sense but eternal rather) it thus eternally. Finite man falls and falls in one long fall, God ever raising him up, this moment of pardon being thus ever-generative. Pardon would be simply the name for infinity’s dealings with the finite or, Hegel would seem to imply, for any life in the spirit, whether ours or God’s being not in question. Not so, however, or not entirely. The Fall is for faith a definite reality, only not an event in an ontology where events as such are denied. Rather, there was a mirror, so to say magical, which broke into innumerable separate pieces (Newman) or a fall, a sin, inflicting “wounds” on human nature and destiny (Bede). Thus the voyage of Tolkien’s Earandil, called “the mariner”, although it is the sky, the empyrean, now that is his ocean, through the heavens, in his star-ship, corresponds to the contact of Christ with earth from outside space and time. The two, anyhow, having started from opposite directions, both either return or come for the first time to blessedness, the blessed land. The extension of the mariner’s art is caused by the absolute separation of the land of the Valar, Tolkien’s quasi-angelic beings, from earth and the terrestrial, brought about by fault or sin (as in Genesis), that of a king on Middle Earth not accepting confinement against what is “out of bounds” (the Valars’ land). Yet the two domains are not really on the same map (our main point here), as it is put at first or mythically. The ancient cartography, of Middle Earth at least, must thus represent the forbidden domain only, i.e. at one or more removes from what maps do anyway. Similarly eating fruit from trees and such trees being “of life” or “of knowledge”, these two images are only first conceivably together when conceived “spiritually”, as it might be in poetry and as indeed we, as spiritual beings, unconsciously or

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naturally do so conceive, though unable to tell wherefrom or how, maybe. The coming and going between earth and heaven is thus prepared, healing the old separation. Actual jewels are transported69 in Tolkien’s storied account or transparent disguise of the original account in Genesis (i.e. not merely inspired by it). This parallels, more or less remotely, our earthly and real case, where the elements at Mass are in due course consecrated in heavenly manner, viz. transubstantiated into what is now, i.e. in this actual case and not in story merely, no mere magical but holy stuff of eternity, rather. This is the mysterium fidei, ever rejected by magicians, although the “simple faithful” ever tend to speak of mere miracle rather than mysterium, as they do also in the case of other spiritual mysteries of faith such as, say, Mary’s being immaculately conceived. For this, namely, means that Mary was ever free from any “stain” (macula) of inherited original sin. By decree or what? We don’t know or, more importantly, cannot say, but there is no mere “miracle”. Thus she was conceived in the natural way in the womb of her mother St. Anne, being fathered quite naturally, there being no need to suppose otherwise, by St. Joachim. Mary’s virginal conception of Christ then appears as a kind of borderline case, since a straight miracle is clearly implied in that if one knew all the facts one would see that this was a conception without male seed, as one never would in the case of her own “immaculate conception”, the absent macula of sin not being other than a spiritual reality in the first place. One concludes from these teachings of faith that “miracle” is a more general or less precise term than “mystery of faith”, used of the eucharistic consecration as making it more, not less, than miraculous. Hence, however, it seems a miracle can be also such a mystery or conversely might constitute an at least marginal defect in Fr. Levering’s thesis, following Abbot Vonier. Would it, namely, be entirely wrong or “against faith” to speak popularly of the eucharistic consecration as miraculous, since we are, in Mary’s conception of Christ, a clear “mystery of faith”, committed already to an unobservable miracle? Similarly, with respect to Tolkien’s roots in Genesis, the whereabouts of Eden are impenetrably concealed, guarding rather than “guardian” angels (with fiery swords) seeing to that. A fierce sword is set up to ward off “pilgrims”, much as Valinor, in The Silmarillion, was first forbidden to Ar Pharazon (the king mentioned above), great trouble following from his disobedience, consequent upon which the contact with Valinor from the finite or (middle-)earthly side was made literally impossible. This impatient king is thus the or an Adam of faerie. Middle Earth, through him, as is already hinted at in Tolkien’s story, gets transformed into a kind of spherical 69

Compare the magic dust in C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew.

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prison, the exitus of the moon-landing in our day, in reality rather, recalling Earandil’s mythical feat or, mutatis mutandis, even the supernatural history of Christ (ascent into heaven) as proclaimed, thus taking on the hue, people at least begin to feel, of a salvation history that is not history but eternal decree, viz. that of man’s realising himself, the Lord being his helper (as the Americans more or less acknowledged), since otherwise all would be as vain, as it may well anyhow be, as was the Tower of Babel. Yet more probably we seem rather to lose the indeed magical moon we once had, its “kindly” silvery light guiding us through the immediate darkness. Thus this, perhaps, is its real function and significance, lost sight of rather than coming closer in or through those well-intentioned clumsy footprints upon an unspeakably barren airless surface of dust and stones. Like all anatomy, it rather kills what it touches, our present perceptions being in essence separations. But well, in a similar way we lost the notion of a crock of gold at the end of the world, there being now no end where it might lie. Here too one can only “make” something by breaking something else.70 Through this journey, though, and its possible sequels if any, many may escape the roundness of the world itself, put in Tolkien’s tale as part of sin’s punishment or, indifferently, its “natural” consequence, imprisoning man in an eternal return, so to say, a mythical view compatible because so different in purpose and quality from present phenomenal astral and/or planetary experience, disregarding as it does all astronomy and cosmic history, as much as does the cosmology, as he calls it, of McTaggart71, whereby all phenomena short of thought are misperception simply as founded on error. We are on a different, more inward plane here, but plane indeed all the same. Hence analogies, again, must abound! This is not put in the original or canonical (“inspired”) account of man’s “fall” in Adam but nor could it be, since there was no general awareness then of the world’s roundness, its rounding on itself, anyhow at that time as proposed72. Thus Tolkien is able, enabled, to posit, to imagine, a world actually not having been originally 70

Cp. here our Africa, Philosophy and the Western Tradition, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 1995, final chapter, “Causality and Analogy”, pp. 123-149. 71 Cf. his Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology (a provocative title) of 1901. 72 One may note that the theological “as in Adam all die so in Christ all shall be made alive” depends as to its form, that of our being “in” Adam exclusively, not in Eve, upon an antique view of human reproduction at least as to its form again, viz. the parallel between being “in” Adam exclusively and the Christian’s new life “in” Christ, certainly exclusively since that is its point. Here too, it is being increasingly recognised on either side, the apparent clash of religious (and/or theological) with “natural” views is no more than that. The story simply works with then current notions as regards nature.

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round, this coming later through a “fall” which, however, is contained within, as part of the design, the literally creative and eternal vision (of or by God), eternity itself depending on this vision’s quality! Within it, in accordance with Hegel’s account too, truth emerges out of its contrary, out of error. The error, of whatever kind, is cancelled in its own built-in destiny of Aufhebung. So Hegel’s remark about the “fall of man” as incompatible with God’s being God just does not hold. It would only have been incompatible if God had no answer to it. God was indeed not in the least surprised by it, as being first mover in all things. These conclusions are perhaps softened if we accept Aquinas’s view (and others’, including Hegel’s, who classes evil as “sham-being”) of evil itself as an absence, of good. But God knows, even as first-causing them, absences too, as he hardens Pharaoh’s heart, who may or may not have deserved this, against which not even all species of “grace” as ordinarily conceived are fool-proof. Thus theology has to show us how to conceive such grace as differing from ordinary good will, if it is conceptually thus intended. The account, anyhow, must be seen as part of a corrective that Aquinas, say, intended as applicable within an acceptance of, at the time of his writing, an insistence on the viewing, even, of the Eden story as historical rather than mythical (or more probably they did not always thus distinguish), whereas we ourselves are today understanding “myth” itself as a kind of history beyond history but in oblique signification, or, anyhow, we noted, it is necessary for theology to have or use “pictures”, such as, Hegel’s example, the positing of a literal “son” in God. Must it be “literal” though and not rather, as with the correlative “father”, that from which “all fatherhood in heaven and earth is named” or, here, all sonship? This is no picture merely. Is “word” (as in Word of God) not equally a picture, we might want to ask here? All words are taken from our finite daily experience ultimately and none more so than the prepositional word “in”, to take a prominent example. This word is so to say destroyed or cancelled by the phrase “I in them and they in me”, simply because this cannot be pictured. We immediately pass over from picturing, therefore, to inward linguistic transformation, the theology of “idioms”, as from allegory to symbol. In general what betray the presence of picture-language are the insuperable contradictions it gives rise to, e.g. when we speak of time’s beginning or of the brain coming within evolution to know the truth of its deliverances, or coming to deliver truth simply (it, the material organ, could in such case only be “that which appears beside”, the paremphainomenon, as diagnosed by Aristotle). By this, indeed, the theory of evolution itself is shown up as picture-language. This and similar considerations constitute Hegel’s or

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McTaggart’s arguments for absolute idealism.73 These contradictions, like “the bad infinite”, disqualify such representations, when not understood as symbols, at the bar of reason, unlike those “contradictions” the having of which Hegel identifies as thought’s determinative characteristic. They amount rather to reason’s own impetus to explore further, as itself conscious of being so to say “up against” the infinite which it can never finally know unless as itself transformed into that infinite which alone thinks only itself. This would be eternal life, namely “to know God …”, which is impossible without the mediator, the mediator Dei who said “No man comes to the Father except through me”. Such, anyhow, is the faith of Christians, whose community claims to be “the home of reason”. What can have got into them if not the genuine article, one might wonder. Saying anyhow, then, that the literal sense is to be preferred where possible (Aquinas) is to say very little, or else too much. Origen took literally what many think he shouldn’t have done, St. Peter’s producing two swords as a literal response to Christ’s warning of coming conflicts were received with weary forbearance. Understanding spiritual things spiritually (St. Paul) seems a principle carrying greater authority. We can apply this to the Fall narrative. Is this what Hegel does? Aroused suspicion, after all, and even resentment, is always a possible reaction where spirit is urging some deep change in the sense of development of view. What else is the drama of the Gospels themselves? But we must be careful, must always discriminate. Above all we must not break the bond we have with those among us who hang back when the going gets rough, as St. Paul did not break finally with St. Peter, whom indeed he calls a “pillar”, over a situation of this kind, though he offered challenging criticism. In none of this now do I attempt to replace the faith-principle with superior knowledge but rather to bring reason to bear, the same reason that argues for faith’s necessity, upon faith’s mysteries, upon the reasonableness of believing them and/or believing “in” them, where the “in” appears to have the force, to ascribe to faith the force, of leading ever further into the mystery under consideration then and there, as we speak of belief “in” God, whereas believing in ghosts or extra planets is simply shorthand for believing some proposition or other. Thus where infinity is concerned the only knowledge of “it”, “them”, “him”, “her”, viz. of infinity, could or would be and, given an initiative from infinity’s side, may indeed be “knowing as I am known” (St. Paul). In religion this is put as simply future knowledge but we are meant ultimately to understand something transcending this since God’s knowledge of us is eternal. Therefore, if this 73

Persuasively repeated in some papers by the late Axel Randrup, a Danish anthropologist, on the Internet.

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saying of St. Paul’s, the “as” in particular, is literally to be believed, and for that too there are arguments, metaphysical ones, then our knowledge of God would have to be as eternal as his of us, a requirement which has the force of dissolving entirely all anatomically separated individuals in a divine or absolute fire, as we represent it, and as language will for sure never achieve other than in representation. So by crude acknowledgement or even unreflective acceptance of this one best avoids misunderstanding maybe. This, to repeat, is St. Thomas’s argument for the poetico-narrational language of Scripture as our ultimate text of reference. * For nature’s wilderness (erroneously posited as mere wildness, of the “romantic” variety, in some of C.S. Lewis’s writings) to be dependent upon, to arise or have arisen from, Man’s own self-estrangement, for this, I say, the frame of absolute idealism is clearly required as the explanation in sublation (or cancellation, as Scripture is cancelled in the letter, every letter as such, cancelled: “the letter kills”, without exception it seems, “the spirit gives life”), i.e. in Aufhebung, of the mythical. It, this, is and ever was man’s world or the world of spirit, man whose natural destiny is to “worship in spirit and in truth” or “neither on this mountain nor on that one”, i.e. not anywhere or anyhow particularly, religion surpassing itself toward its own fulfilment in love, philo-sophia, love to which faith and hope are initiating virtues. No privileged symbols remain. The impulse toward evolutionary development must thus be seen as conscious, as finally self-consciousness itself, at the same time as it is the impulse towards an evolutionary explanation, note, which is also an evolution of explanations and conversely. This situation can as well be marked out by the reflection that whereas other living creatures, the various species, all have a world which is proper to them yet man’s province or natural object is the world, i.e. everything, and cannot consistently be posited as anything less. This was the thesis advanced by Joseph Pieper in his study, The Philosophical Act. 74 In other words, as with angelology vis à vis God, but particularly as this is developed in Hegel, factors of singularity vis à vis plurality tend to lose their footing, analogously to what happens in Trinitarian theology itself. “I and my father are one.” This too, though, this self-consciousness itself, is fulfilled in its own progressive dropping of subjectivity toward pure science or knowledge which, as spiritual, retains no trace of that conscious subjectivity, as against all else that is then seen as object, with which we 74 Part Two of the English language publication, Leisure the Basis of Culture, Omega, New York 1952. Originally Was heisst Philosophieren?

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begin by associating self-consciousness. Zum erstaunen bin ich da! Indeed, and it is by this too, this union with all otherness just because it is other and as such calling out to me, whether in generous love or in pleading, that the “I”, or I myself, am thus universal of universals. “If God were not, I would be, but if I were not, God would not be.” On insighting this Eckhart exclaimed, throwing down his contemplative cigarette as it were: “By God, this is true!” In God, namely, nothing is accidental, every divine idea being identical with the Absolute Idea or divine substance.75 This is what men are to realise over the course of millennia, as our time-bound perception (not the same as our consciousness, note), which is total misperception by McTaggart’s reasoning, pictures this, as Christ himself grew from babyhood to manhood, grew even to death on a Cross. So what do we say about this mythic view that is Eden, with no conceivable historical counterpart? To answer, we must begin with a sacral picture, with the divine and, secular as it may sound to some, infinite. Yet an infinity without the sacred is finite, rather. There are few points that Hegel does not bring home to us more frequently, in the Phenomenology as in the Logic, than this, that contradiction is the warp and woof of spirit, of Spirit (the German convention concerning substantival capitals makes it scarcely possible to express this distinction; perhaps, then, it is no distinction at all, or is a distinction of what must finally show itself to be the same), since spirit is ipso facto ever itself on the move or breathing and blowing. Just as such it must transcend history, which is only one thing after another, whether in itself or in historical statement, never the two together, while it, history, is still less “the all”76. Not, then, that we can say nothing but that whatever we say lies open to ceaseless improvement, modification, correction. In or at the end, of course, we do indeed make no judgments (McTaggart), in this like God, who “has spoken only one Word”. Hegel connects this, it is implicit at least, with the injunction “Judge not!” Or the sacral element, mind’s counterpart, can derive simply from the nature of this mind, as in McTaggart’s formally atheist thought, as much 75

Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia, Q15. Hans Küng’s suggestion, in his courageous and in general heartening book on Hegel’s Christology, that the historical, or some word for it, should be treated as one of the transcendental predicates, along with “one”, “true”, “good”, in some lists “beautiful” and so on, seems to me, or seemed at least when I first read it, as deplorable as it is incomprehensible. It is just the historical that is here transfigured. But perhaps that is what he meant? Thus the creation, when seen as first “moment” (not a temporal moment) of divine self-revelation, is one with all of that, in our perspective, succeeding upon it as revealed. Germane here might be the sense of time as being “the moving image of eternity”.

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absorbing mind into the sacral or, for McTaggart, into love, as it might appear to be the converse. Mind too is then, or thus, found infinite. A pointer is the unresolvable contradiction natural science or cosmology finds itself in as regards a beginning, a question we noted better tackled in the relevant section of Hegel’s Science of Logic, facing up to the difficulty as to how anything, or things, can begin absolutely77. They can’t and don’t. Time, as McTaggart argues just therefrom, is illusory, impossible to conceive in fact. So much for the age of the universe as a concept! Things can only have an age in the universe. The “in the beginning” in which God created is not temporal, whether or not we can say what else it is. One might substitute something like “to start with”, replacing, in further refinement, “created” with “has created”. I say this as subject to what the possible meanings of the or an original text here, if we have one, might be. For the rest it is, as always, one’s own spirit that must strive, not without help however, to read aright.78 So, whether sacred (theology) or secular (McTaggart) the universalist picture of empirical science must at a certain depth be left hanging, yet without any hook to hang upon. It is important to see that there is no place for any particular picture as fundamental, rather than to go looking for a master proposition. To speak of “cultural posits” (Quine) here is less than half the battle won, as Quine must have realised. We must, anyhow, stop speculating as to where in the Middle East, say, the Garden of Eden was most probably placed, when we don’t even know if even in the sacred writer’s own mind it was placed anywhere (and if we did it would make no difference), just as we must drop, for scientific purposes, Milton’s crazy picture of Satan the angel hacking his way through superlative undergrowth (in the Middle East?) on his way thereto. This is just that, crazy, something fine poetry can happily admit, however. Angels, rather, bad or good, existent or non-existent, can be just anywhere with ease. “Turn but a stone and you touch a wing”. The mythic view, that is, can be the true view without having to make any concession to empirical science, confined to phenomena or to the 77

G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I, ”Womit muss der Anfang der Wissenschaft gemacht werden?”, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 1969, Werke 5, pp. 65–79. For a detailed presentation with commentary on this text cf. our Hegel’s Theology or Revelation Thematised, CSP, Newcastle 2018, Chapter Six (pp. 41-75). 78 On McTaggart cf. Peter Geach, Truth and Hope, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, U.S.A., 2001, critically and yet appreciatively reviewed by Fergus Kerr O.P. in New Blackfriars, Oxford, as “a splendid distillation of the thought of a fine philosopher”, referring here, however, to just six of the seven chapters, originally a series of six lectures delivered at the International Academy for Philosophy, Liechtenstein.

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mathematical view (of “our” universe) as this is. Recall Hegel’s judgment on Kant the empiricist as being a phenomenologist rather than a philosopher. Empiricism is thus confined as itself not considering observation as such, even when, with quantum physics, it appears to initiate meta-observations. Final immediacy, such as its practitioners, but not itself, seek, escapes it, not being willing or able to include necessary mediation within its concept of immediacy. This is a way of saying, with Hegel, that absolute idealism is the only finally viable scientific approach, as the prominence of evolutionary theory at all levels from biology to logic (as what, to be consistent or to avoid contradiction, we “have to say”) most glaringly shows, viz. that this science requires absolute idealism, since mind itself does not and cannot evolve (in time) to its having a right to rely upon its own deliverances at one time more validly than at another, while if it is only what we have to say then we do not have to say it or anything else. Rather, we have to “come off it”. So much for “grey matter”! Hegel here can appear to owe more to David Hume than he does to Kant, while yet owing much more again to Aristotle than Hume ever did. * Are we all then ideas simply? I omit a second adverb, viz. “just”, with emphasis, as negative, whereas “simply” can be, as here, positive in intention. Hegel says the same of God, viz. “the Absolute Idea”. Further, crucially further, “the Idea is the notion of the Idea” (Enc. 236). God, that is, is the thought of himself, something no creature, not even an angel, could be. An angel has to be precisely not that, something other than a thought, if he is to be at all. That is, he is not absolutely an “idea”, simply again. The Absolute Idea’s “object embraces all characteristics in its unity”, uniquely. So “This unity is consequently the absolute and all truth, the Idea which thinks itself”. That is, it is an agent insofar, at least, as thinking, such thinking, is act (agency). It is, simply and fully. It generates the Word, to the point that it is this generation, exemplar of all of its kind. The absolute idea is in general exemplary, is the exemplar, and so not abstract at all, as simply assumed by Marx or Feuerbach. Equally it is an or even the “logical” Idea precisely. Logical method, Hegel accordingly indicates, is the true Being. This, of course, is another way of saying that logic is much more than logic, or than we always had thought it was, its forms heavy with “ontological status”. When we think, then, we try, haltingly, to become that which we are not. This was the ground-conception of the ancient Greek epistemology, its basic

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philosophy of mind. Anima est omnia.79 We never complete such thinking. God, however, is thought as what thought is, just as he is thus his otherness, as spiritual being, as spirit, mind, without limit. That is what abides for ever, since realisation itself is its own necessity, from which all else comes in that necessity which is absolute freedom, diffusivum sui, “world without end”. This is the English rendering of et in saecula saeculorum as what gives back “glory” to God. The world, then, is the divine other, the other of the divine specifically, as being outside of God as what is not God but which is yet as such necessarily within him as what he has “gone forth” to be outside of himself, entirely nonetheless, as nature, while not ceasing to be within himself entirely80. Note that to say God is all things, Deus meus et omnia, is not the same as to say, pantheistically, that all things are God. Or, at the very least it is not the same pantheism. The one is rather the polar opposite or mirror image of the other, as, in and by Hegel’s logic, is the case expressly with being and nothing, with “are” and “are not”. First, however, he (she?), God, Spirit (der Geist), goes forth outside of himself as he goes forth within himself as spirit. This, that we call man, in some kind of internal relation to angels, God’s” messengers” as guardians sunk in worship, is first again, namely, as creation’s “crown”. Hence one might as well say he is last, as he is also the crown of nature, which he so to say brings with him, alpha and omega coinciding. Music is our best analogy in representation of these things, or a painting, or Scriptural and other poetry, so why not just say art as Word? But, note, art, as analogous to nature (and/or contrariwise), is not nature as still less, Hegel makes clear, is nature art. This is the real, the essential creation, and the view which today’s anthropocentrism inherits, as Adam shall “name” the beasts but not, note, name himself. So it is as God’s otherness that I am self, myself, as all others are my otherness again and I theirs. Otherness is thus here cancelled, together with sameness, each, otherness and sameness, being within its other. What, after all, is a shepherd without a flock? “There shall be one flock, one shepherd”. Compare, “l’église, c’est moi”. The modern Pope saying this (Pius IX), even the Gospel, appear as quite Hegelian, thus underlining, centring, the reverse resemblance.

79 Heidegger significantly omits the qualifying quodammodo when, in an early essay, he cites this phrase, from Aquinas most immediately. 80 Cf. Enc. 138: “But Inward and Outward are identified: and their identity is their identity brought to fulness in the content, that unity of reflection-into-self and reflection-into-other which was forced to appear in the movement of force. Both are the same one totality, and this unity makes them the content.”

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With self, then, the circle is completed, each counting for all and none for less than all. That is the universality, the intellectual or spiritual quality of the particular as completing or crowning, again, universality, as Hegel says of the incarnation in Jesus Christ as “that individual” one and only. In this way faith and faith in Him become necessary to philosophical system, never absorbed in it because, rather, absorbing it as, in its history and development, such system, fruit of just faith absorbing and, in a sense (i.e. Hegel’s sense), cancelling it, the system, as being the love of it, in and through such searching thus passing into the silence of a graced sophia. That at least is and must be, in the nature of things, or of thought itself, the hope, while the sins against hope are equally, the catechism teaches, despair and presumption. For no one knows if he has for sure even this hope itself, as being a “theological” virtue mediating between the two others, viz. faith and love (caritas). These virtues are put in religion as being the higher, ultimate and necessary iustitia, of which, as we noted, lex, law, as St. Thomas declares, is no more than aliqualis ratio or some kind of formalisation, of ius namely (Recht rather than Gesetz), while law itself, in its fourth and final form on Aquinas’s scheme as lex divina81, is, in its own final fulfilment in or as Christian or lex nova, divine law as succeeding upon the other three, viz. upon eternal, natural and human law. That is, it is nothing written or prescribed at all but, in this final or Christian form, nonetheless foreshadowed throughout the earlier written “Testament”, supra-natural love, caritas, poured, infusa, into our “hearts”.82 We need only add that no one knows if he has faith or charity either. We hope we have them without knowing if our hope is a true one, is truly virtuous. Hypocrisy, that is to say, is seldom deliberately assumed as an attitude (that would be too sincere!) inasmuch as it corresponds, after all, to spiritual blindness concerning oneself principally. It needs, famously, a preacher to point it out. Here it is in denying certitude, i.e. in just this area of praxis, that we see more truly83. This plain orthodox teaching marks those 81

Cf. the “treatise (tractatus) on law” in Summa theol. Ia-IIae. Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia-IIae, the treatise on law. For the distinction between ius and lex cf. ibid. IIa-IIae 57, 1 ad 2um: lex non est ipsum jus, proprie loquendo, sed aliqualis ratio juris. The work of the Grisez and Finnis group on “natural law” a generation ago was marred by a discountenancing of this insight, apparently deliberate. The point can be crucial when we come to a study of Hegel’s treatise, itself not on law (Gesetz) specifically but, in intention at least, on the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Cf., meanwhile, our earlier Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2002. 83 Yet praxis, we have noted, is present in theoria too as the latter is the highest embodiment of praxis. So what becomes of the theoretical certitude of faith? We might here recall the evangelical “Lord I believe. Help thou mine unbelief!” If the 82

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groups whose challenge to all and sundry is the question “Are you saved?” as plainly heretical, i.e. they do not hand down the doctrine of the apostles. St. Paul speaks in one place of “those that are being saved”; meanwhile he buffets his body, he says, “lest I become a castaway”. We hope we shall be saved and anything more is presumption, with despair making up equally the two sins against hope, we noted. In this department or field appeal to authority, generally the weakest argument-form (thus St. Thomas rates it), becomes the strongest ground, due to this very ignorance of ours. It differs therefore toto caeli from that assurance of an erstwhile self-styled analytical philosophy that the final yardstick for truth in nature and the world is “what science says it (this truth) is”. It is certainly not typical of “scientists” themselves to say this.

certitude here claimed, for faith, is reckoned the highest (e.g. by Newman), then the fault, if any, must lie with this concept itself, than which we have no better. They are all, beside the Absolute Idea, self-cancelling beyond a certain point, while the Idea either is only Concept by analogy or, the truer view, concepts are all but analogies of the Idea.

CHAPTER THREE WORLD AND NATURE

So if the world, i.e. the universe, and nature are God’s analogy then, besides being trans-analogically the same they form one entity. The universe is literally, “analytically” even, everything, yet in an analogy, i.e. it is really or literally nothing, and not merely not everything, in view of its having made this stupendous claim (to be God’s analogy), for such is the nature of analogy. If I am analogously fiery (we speak often of metaphor) then I am not smelling of charcoal. In this way the world differs from the Trinitarian divine Word with which Hegel, for one, so closely associates it. The Word, Christ, is not a mere analogy of the Father. “He that has seen me has seen the Father”. It is in “that” way that “I and my father are one”. Theologically, however, the universe is God’s first or initial and initiatory self-revelation.84 This oneness, of the universe as of the deity, is testified to in C.S. Lewis’s writing when he ends his Narnia series with the children, who yet are kings and queens in Narnia, see their parents waving to them in Narnia from a window in England (or would it be Northern Ireland?), i.e. in “the world”. Two superficially opposed reflections here suggest themselves. Nature, properly appreciated, the air we breathe there, the rustling trees, the heights and depths, “Titanic” horror and romping squirrels, along with ourselves in all our human diversity, does not seem to be the whole of the universe. So how is it one with the Word? It seems not. Outside of “our” world we find, or nature seems, just barrenness and waste. Where is the analogy in that? On the other hand it can well be argued, as is done anthropocentrically, that Earth and its nature would be impossible without precisely all the rest of our immediately “known” universe, perceived or inferred. Thus, again, the moon is really a “great light” for us and not some alien airless lump of dust upon which an astronaut has set his boot, yet hardly his foot. He missed it just by going “there”. This is not to say one should not “go there” but rather that such “going” is nothing at all. There are no events. Nor, then, is my saying that an event. The whole linguistic field of operation is but thought’s

84

Cf. the adult catechism cited above, first section.

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representation85, except that any representation, Vorstellung, represents firstly only itself, is, precisely in its immediacy, not a true picture, just because it is a picture, of the thought, of thought itself in that its “moment”, which is anything but a moment of or in time. Note that in assimilating Narnia and planet Earth (England) together via the equality of children (in one “world”) and parents (in another world) Lewis goes a step further, analogate meeting analogans or, equally, the two changing places, Narnia becoming another world truly and no longer an “other” world in full magic analogy as available only to children (or wicked uncles) or indeed as a book or narrative. Thus insofar as Lewis merely pretends this true alterity he would deceive also himself. His art would fail, or, some would say, fall back from symbolism to mere conscious allegory. Prayer or similar, e.g. thought, on the part of parents or other interested parties might be necessary86. There is no such analogy, after all, and never has been, between England and France, say, though there are plenty of other analogies. Thus they do not play cricket in France but they play analogous games or, if games ever be eschewed there, do game-like things instead87. That you cannot have analogy without having analogies of analogies88 ad 85

Whether this be representation by the individual of the moment of his thought or by thought of itself as such is not germane here. 86 Thus Lewis and his associates, Tolkien or Williams, considered that artistic or literary creation, like or such as poetry, was literally a godlike activity, as did Beethoven too, noting that “Music is a greater revelation than the whole of religion and philosophy”. This would tie up with some of Hegel’s remarks, in temporal picture, as to God’s “becoming” most perfectly himself, getting a face, just in the sensual immediacy of embodiment. We might recall the Biblical opening, “In the beginning God created…” I.e. there was/is no “before” that. This, though, says the same as that the creation, or creation simply, is eternal. This is what the stillness of painting best expresses, whatever the subject chosen. 87 Cf. Enc. 117, 118 et f. 88 There are good and bad analogies as well as, we note here, Hegel points out in reference to the moon particularly (if one were to argue for its being inhabited from our habitation on earth, simply) but more generally at Enc. 190 where it is discussed, employed rather, in discrediting empiricism along with Induction (which, to be valid, would require, impossibly, due to the “disparity” between universality and such immediacy, “the complete list of individuals as such” as inductive argumentation’s only valid “mean”), precisely as the logical category which Analogy is. That is, we identify rabbithood just by seeing a second rabbit from which we draw an analogy with the first one, sometimes getting it right, sometimes wrong, while it is generally the poorer resemblances (that is what it is a matter of) that are reduced in our thought-estimation to analogy, of the gorilla, say, precisely as a very poor likeness, with the rabbit. This point is already powerfully canvassed by Lewis’s picture, itself analogous like all pictures, of a “wood between the

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infinitum there seems no call to deny, good and bad ones as well as Hegel points out, in reference to the moon particularly89, only coming to the Absolute Idea through actual assimilation to it in consequent selfAufhebung, by hook or by crook so to say. This is the doctrine of grace and the beatific vision as assimilation, in such vision, such seeing, to the infinite’s or to God’s own lumen gloriae, God being thereby “heavenly father” (as generating) and lumen gloriae in one. It belongs, that is, to glory as ultimate good to be diffusivum sui without restriction, as Plato already worlds”, a wood of pools amid trees made as characterless as possible without loss of beauty. The implication, there from the first, is that one just as well might arrive in or at our world, as what would no longer be “the” world, as at any other, i.e. that our world too is other, just what the Darwinian hypothesis strives in vain to suppress. This specifically Darwinian hypothesis, by Hegel’s system, as he explains, does not “belong to the concept”. For this see Hegel, Enc. 161 plus the Zusatz, as also the entire note appended to W. Wallace’s translation of 1873, OUP 1965, pp. 424-425: “According to it”, i.e. the original pre-Darwinian Leibnizian theory of evolution, “development is no real generation of new parts, but only an augmentation into bulk and visibility of parts already outlined”. Cf. emboîtement or what Hegel calls the “box within box” theory. This is the indeed Aristotelian point (the paremphainomenon or that which would “appear beside”) made repeatedly by the late Danish anthropologist Axel Randrup in a handful of papers on the Internet, viz. that self-reliant mind, as advancing this or any theory, cannot be “only an augmentation” of previous and finite natural parts. Darwin’s stress upon “fieldwork” does not appear to essentially remove this objection (but rather the contrary), which as regards man is essentially set aside by the Aristotelian and indeed Platonic doctrine of the spiritual “soul”, anima, psyche, of mind, which latter, we have noted, Darwinism is quite simply unable to account for without exquisite selfcontradiction. Mind cannot be thus intrinsically finite. Hence Hegel’s doctrine of “the ruin of the individual” or the Christian doctrine of salvation (of individuals) by becoming “members of one another” (or having, giving way to, “the mind of Christ”), further interpretable as “becoming what we are” or what one is. These aspirations are addressed only phenomenally to “this individual” as himself not yet thus become that (viz. what we are). This is so even if we grant, with Kierkegaard, that Christian “proclamation” as such, phenomenally viewed at least, is first addressed to him or her. For this is in order that they, or each such a separated “one”, be baptized, i.e. be buried and die into supra-natural beatitude, where one is as a thousand and conversely. Otherwise we have again the ideally absolutised utilitarian or socialist principle, viz. “each to count for one and none for more than one”, incompatible with true philosophy as thus made into murderous populist ideology, debatable no doubt for ever and ever, in place of true human dignity as rather a matter of “each to count for all and none for less than all”, such that “what you do to one of the least of these you do to me”. 89 E.g. if (Hegel’s example) one argues from its likeness to earth that the moon is inhabited. Cf. Enc. 190.

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saw in his way, to be absolute generosity or virtue, ultimately that of “possessing” (in identity) all things, destroying all possibility of envy. * Seeing (vision) or knowing? It matters less than some seem to think, if both are pictures. Also knowledge, that is, is predicated of God analogically, but only because it is done in our language. By just the same token, however (since language is a matter of tokens), what we predicate analogically has itself only in this case some chance of being or becoming the real analogandum. This is surely the premise behind Hobbes’s remark concerning eternal glory in heaven, that we “shall no sooner know than enjoy it”, i.e. that enjoying, that “seeing”, will swallow up what we understand by knowing, this being precisely McTaggart’s view, viz. that we make no judgments “in heaven”, i.e. where we are now according to him, did we but realise it. He shared with Wittgenstein a sense of the ultimate vanity of philosophy as compared with that final sophia that Hegel too places above it. This much is already indicated by the Hegelian categorial system whereby Will, Volition (of the Good), as itself still a superior form of “cognition”, which, however, succeeds, to note it again, upon Cognition “proper” (or, just therefore, “in general”90) as a step closer (the penultimate one) to the Speculative or Absolute Idea. Back at Enc. 159 this liberation is called Love of which “I” as individualised just falls short in favour, “as developed to its totality”, of “free Spirit”, all of which is seen, as improving upon Spinoza’s “great vision”, as actual qua final “liberation from finite exclusiveness and egoism”. He might better have omitted these last two words, all the same, as tending to push us back into the dull negativity of “unselfishness”, thus falling short of his own great vision. The love of God, for or from God, is a cut above this, a catching or being caught by the divine fire rather. The movement of the notion is as it were to be looked upon merely as play: the other which it sets up is in reality not an other. Or, as it is expressed in the teaching of Christianity: not merely has God created a world which confronts him as an other; he has from all eternity begotten a Son in whom He, a Spirit, is at home with Himself.91 90

I am following W. Wallace’s translation here. Enc. 161, Zus. Note here also Hegel’s saying that Plato’s theory of learning as “reminiscence” (and that “merely”) derives from “this nature of the notion” as “development of its own self”. One may also claim that Development, the category named or translated here in §161 above as Development, might better have been 91

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This is what we pointed out above, that the merely analogous is the other as distinct from what is in either sense self-begotten. It is the other which is yet the same. “I and my father are one” says nothing else or other than Hegel says here but is merely the so to say Christian alternative still in sameness with the required philosophical conclusion. Nothing less is required by his doctrine of philosophy and religion as two forms of Absolute Spirit, with art as the third, all three, it follows, being necessary as also the contingent is necessary to the absolute92. Thought’s process, even in its absoluteness, begins in art and ends in religion’s supersession. Christianity is thus not a religion, even if maybe “religion itself” (Cardinal Henri de Lubac). It was originally and more simply called “the way”, analogously to Hegel’s understanding of the “method” (of logic, of thought: it actually means, it too, “according to the way”, Gk. meta hodon), if it be not rather the analogandum. But still less is it a philosophy. It is (sancta) sophia, where “neither on this mountain nor on that” (nor even at Constantinople, therefore) is God to be uniquely worshipped, but wholly “in spirit and in truth”, “and” here having something of the force of identity rather than literal addition. * So the notion absorbs all otherness into itself as thus never having been truly other. But in doing so it “cancels” this other, i.e. it “absorbs” it without itself being changed, as does not happen in pantheism. One solution, one answer, we have already intimated, might be a reflection such that the true moon, say, to return to this phenomenon, is not in any unique sense that more than frozen “place” or ground upon which the astronaut, as pictured in our consciousness, planted his space-suited shoe but, rather, the great and beautiful light we see in the night sky, beneficently relieving the nocturnal darkness. The moon, that is, is by this essentially, it too, a representation for

named “Self-Development” (suggested in a graduate course on Hegel by Joseph Kockelmans at the University of Pittsburgh, autumn 1967), as indeed mirroring that active character of form, entelechy, “the idea as actuality”, which, viz. idea as act, for Hegel is what distinguishes the account of Aristotle (and a fortiori his own), rather than does any “vulgar actuality of what is at hand”, inaccurately taken as making him “the founder of empiricism”, from that of Plato (Enc. 142, Zus.). 92 This latter point is brought out and explained in the incomplete (posthumous) Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God, a text largely unknown to nineteenth century Hegelians.

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us, a picture93, except when viewed in its creator, in whom “we live and move and have our being”, this being the opposite (God is everything) of pantheism (everything is God), again, as being is opposed to nothing. As such, as picture, there is no sense in seeking its true essence. Perhaps, then, more probably, the moon will eventually be reborn in our minds as a place, though this by our philosophy here is yet another picture, as is indeed the whole temporal spatial universe, postulated as infinite in extension yet at the same time, like any finite substance pictured, again, as generated out of some enormous explosion merely. All pictures, like all fictions, as philosophers are in general agreed, lead eventually to contradiction. One should rather climb out of the cave, to use Plato’s apt metaphor, whence this picture is engendered. So again, then, more probably, the moon, like America, will come to take its place, precisely as a place, for us researchers in (or immigrants from) the “Old World”, in our picture of “the known world”, thus indeed and/or nonetheless a picture still. There is thus, again, a kind of hierarchy of “pictures”, in our proper picture of such pictures at least! There are good and bad ones as well as Hegel points out in reference to the moon particularly (if, for example, one were to argue for its being inhabited merely from its analogy with earth: logic too, we see here, good or bad, in its inherited forms at least, has its pictures) but more generally at Enc. 190 where, we saw, this is discussed, employed rather, in discrediting empiricism along with Induction (which, to be valid, would require, impossibly, due to the “disparity” between universality and such immediacy, “the complete list of individuals as such” as inductive argumentation’s only valid “mean”), precisely as the logical category which Analogy is, the first analogy being simply that of all individuals with one another interchangeably. “Without analogy all beings would be one” (Aquinas94).95 This point is already powerfully canvassed, we noted, by 93

For this view cf. our Africa, Philosophy and the Western Tradition, Peter Lang, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1994, final chapter, “Causality and Analogy”, pp. 123-149. But perhaps more probably the moon will eventually be reborn in our minds as a place, though this by our philosophy here is yet another picture, as is indeed the whole temporal spatial universe, postulated as infinite in extension yet at the same time, like any finite substance, pictured, again, as generated out of some enormous explosion merely. All pictures, like all fictions, as philosophers are in general agreed, lead eventually to contradiction. 94 This remark refutes the view that Aquinas taught only a “logical” or languageorientated theory of analogy. 95 We may note in general that empiricism as a principle is but the endorsement of immediacy as ultimate yardstick, precisely that which Hegel dismisses as “always false”, reproaching Kant for “tenderness” towards it.

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Lewis’s picture that we mentioned, itself, like all pictures, analogous, of a “wood between the worlds”, a wood of pools amid trees made, again, as characterless as possible without loss of beauty. The implication, there from the first, is that one might just as well arrive in or at our or what would no longer be “the” world as our world too is other (than other ones), just what the Darwinian hypothesis strives in vain to suppress. For Darwinism this world or even, in its further reach, this “universe”, is normative, single, and not one of a multitude of representations such as absolute idealism might or must spawn and in line with which, we might think, Christ had “other sheep not of this fold”. For this would mean, one might thus suppose, not merely or only “sheep” from other parts of this world, only thus yielding an initial positively Christian ecumenism, otherwise a “naturally” rational duty to which Christianity might commend itself as finally or ever in principle conforming. But neither, to shift a little, would there be no difference between those worlds and Lewis’s properly fictional world(s). A “fictional” world means an inconsistent picture (like time, we are claiming), glaringly (e.g. where they all talk English) or covertly. Thus far the “realistic novel” is a fantasy-picture. Thus the specifically Darwinian hypothesis, by Hegel’s system, as he explains, does not “belong to the concept”, simply because, and just for example, it is assumed to have “begun in time”, which itself is not of the Concept, as being what can neither itself begin nor be infinite. For this see again Hegel, Enc. 161 plus the Zusatz (as also the note appended to W. Wallace’s translation of 1873, OUP 1965, pp. 424-425). This, we noted in a footnote above, is the point made repeatedly by the late Danish anthropologist Axel Randrup in a handful of papers on the Internet, that Darwinism has to exemplify absolute idealism or else flounder in selfcontradiction, that, namely, of mind as evolving, unknowingly, to knowledge of its own evolvement or evolution. How could it ever know it had evolved thus infinitely far, given its finitude?96 This is precisely why Darwinian evolution lies outside of the Concept. It is dependent upon as being an account of what happens in time and place, themselves pictures deriving from a false consciousness, however, so that whatever evolution itself finally delivers up, such as ourselves, must itself be finally no more than a picture. Mind plays no part in it except in “grey matter” or other non-mental accounts of mind, whereas of mind, philosophy specifically has long recognised, there can be no empirical account. The question of truth can find no footing here. Any true account of evolution, to repeat, would require its being situated upon absolute idealism as a 96

Randrup, as anthropologist rather than philosopher, tended to defend idealism, e.g. of Berkeley, when he should be appealing to absolute idealism. He was thus, as he told me himself, not well versed in Hegel’s thought.

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foundation. Once we realise this we can see or suspect a certain deliberate ambiguity in Hegel’s assertion that the fossils being then dug up around him represented nothing real or “notional”, i.e. were precisely representations, as, by his account, neither does anyhow the whole of nature represent anything real or notional. That is, they were no more real than the nearest oak-tree. This connects up with the Pauline idea of the captivity and selfalienation of nature as such, its being “subjected to vanity”. Evolution is of a piece there with all our perceptions as thus “subjected”. Nonetheless it functions as true also at the notional level precisely under the category of self-development, which Hegel likens, but only likens, to the process of a plant’s growth as being directed entirely from the inside97, i.e. like ideas at least in that. So Hegel’s views on evolution are no more and no less of a disaster than might be his philosophy of nature in its entirety. Charles Taylor creates confusion, therefore, in suggesting otherwise98. It is worth noting here that McTaggart’s “studies” in Hegelian Dialectic (1886) and Cosmology (1901) may be viewed as further systematisation of what Hegel does not always more than indicate here. As a reliable guide his deprecatory “off the cuff” remark(s) on Hegel’s philosophy of nature (“What rot it is!”), noted without comment by Peter Geach, is in no way of a piece with Gentile’s systematic dismissal of this whole threefold project (logic, nature, spirit) as, Gentile claims, out of logical line with the Hegelian project as a whole. One might rather view it, Hegel’s philosophy of nature, as its lynchpin, confirming the sober this-worldness of the whole project, the negativity of nature, our natural milieu, being positively, or thoroughly rather, outlined. This is by no means the same as crassly leaving it out. Thus in Hegel’s system a plausible theology of divine incarnation remains germane as would seem doubtful on Gentile’s premises. In conclusion here it is worth recalling St. Augustine’s long-held doubt as to whether the true man should be taken to be the composite of soul and body or just the soul. As we know, this was resoundingly settled by Thomas Aquinas and the medieval Aristotelians in favour of the first option, this being also truer, it seemed to them, to the “revealed” Christian anthropology, or to the very idea of the or a divine incarnation. Anima mea non est ego, St. Thomas forcefully declares in one of his Scriptural commentaries.

97 Cf., again, the papers by the late Axel Randrup of Copenhagen on this topic (on the Internet), to which I have also referred in previous work discussing Hegel’s thought. 98 Cf. Charles Taylor, Hegel, CUP 1975, discussing Hegel on evolution. For our criticism of Taylor cf., for example, our Hegel’s System of Logic, CSP Newcastle 2019, pp. 395-397 especially.

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According to absolute idealism, however, and, perhaps strange to say, it is also the mind of St. Thomas, spirit is the only final reality, presumed after all to any creation or to finitude as such, wherein “matter” makes its appearance or appears, to put it shortly. Thus, to recall, when the saint of Lisieux on her deathbed in 1897 speaks of death as no more and no less than God, and not a somehow personalised “death”, as “coming for her”, adding that death is “nothing but” the separation of the soul from the body, the implicit presupposition is clearly not of a unity that will be shattered but rather that of the nothingness of “the body”, as in St. Paul’s alternative expression, “It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body”. The notion of spirit is what is paramount. So she adds (of death as the separation of soul from the body) the words “and that is all it is”, i.e. not much or nothing. “Death, where is thy sting?” This is the background, fully Scriptural, to St. Augustine’s hesitation. Nor does it contradict the application of this question as to sting especially to a Christ-engendered situation. This engendering is also at the same time revelation. That is, Christ himself shows that death is no nightmarish defeat for the spiritual persons such as St. Thérèse, his unique facing up to it both efficient source and revealed content of our potential against it. “Fear not them that can the body kill but have no power to hurt the soul”, he accordingly teaches. * In summary we might say that the paradigm of evolution is entirely Hegelian in spirit, which can increase wonder at his so completely rejecting it. By evolution, namely, nature or, in the minds of its chief propagators, the whole of reality, appears more than ever as one concept, very much as Hegel develops his doctrine of the Absolute Idea. Yet he resists it, along with any idea of the merging of species, over time as it must be and that is the clue. For within logic and the Idea there is no time. Whatever be the case with empirical investigations of nature as understood by Hegel, the ideas of the various species, like all ideas, can in fact none other than merge with and/or be cancelled or subsumed, aufgehoben, in the Idea, this being none other than the divine nous transcending every shadow of finitude or, which is the same, every shadow of “parts outside parts” (the very phrase for nature, negatively viewed, among the Scholastics). This is why he says that the notion of evolution or, rather, the representation called evolution, lies outside the concept, just therefore giving rise to the glaring contradiction we and others have noted as to the possibility of any creature thus evolved cognizing the whole process as if “objectively”. At some point this, like any representation, comes up against a contradiction,

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this being the whole point of McTaggart’s, and Hegel’s before him, “refutation” of time. If someone claims self-refutation here inasmuch as we, who argue thus, are within time then the reply is quite simply that we are not.99 That we are in time is a “misperception” and has to be. At the same time we may, indeed must, cheerfully grant that this speaks also against (why does it not simply refute?) our acts of speech or writing. This is just why we may never equate such activities with thinking itself. A proposition is one thought which it takes no time (or space) to think as it does to speak or write “it” down, as noted later by William James. Since evolution cannot be viably proposed Hegel retains the finite notions of separable species, as not having blurred edges, so to say. Any real potentiality to change to something else would also have to be the work of a moment, magical in effect. In all this Hegel can be regarded as simply faithful to the Aristotelian doctrine of substance, whereby substance itself is never open to cognition by the senses, as are only the accidents. So the error of the evolutionists is that of not realising that they are no longer speaking of real substances. How far this entails an eventual resolution of the substance-concept into one necessary substance, as in Spinoza, is a question lying close to our present investigation here. This Aristotelian approach of Hegel’s is also operative in his treatment of the world, as where he says it is regrettable that men are more ready to declare that there is no God than that there is no “world”. He is quite obviously suggesting the latter alternative here. Again one is reminded of Sartre’s “Either God exists or man does”, an alternative resolved in Christendom by the deliberate union of the two, thus excluding the dilemma, but by an absorption, Hegel insists, as he insists also that it is only one-way. He objects to the finite’s being left in its place (like the world before thought goes to work), when “it is not expressly stated to be absorbed”, citing Plato’s Philebus.100 The rise of thought beyond the world of sense, its passage from the finite to the infinite, the leap into the super-sensible which it takes when it snaps

99

No birth no death, say the Buddhists (some). “O death, where is thy sting?” exclaims the Christian apostle, St. Paul, identifying it with “sin”, which becomes in McTaggart “misperception” merely, without explanation, and something is surely lost there. Yet it is with these misperceptions that human life, childhood, naturally begins indeed, the ladder ungrateful spirit must eventually (do not say “in time”: it is just this that we climb out of) cast away. Cf. E. Stein, “Endliches und Ewiges Sein … zum Sinn des Seins” in Werke, Vol.2 (Gelber & Leuven, Freiburg 1986), Vol. 2, 461: “Es liegt im Wesen des Menschen …”. 100 Cf. Enc. 95.

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asunder the chain of sense, all this transition is thought and nothing but thought.101

So, again, it is because the merging of species is proposed as occurring “over time” or in time that Hegel rejects the doctrine, the paradigm rather. In time we have “parts outside parts” and this, he seems to think, must remain so, if only in order to show up the contrast (of the finite with or against the infinite). Thus the logical assimilation of the finite to the infinite, of nature even in its distressed state to God, cannot be confounded, or, it seems, even have the appearance of being thus confounded, with any “natural” appearance. Evolution, if seriously meant, would have to take the view that all of nature must eventually be perceived (for that is what it would have to be a case of) as thus assimilable and in fact assimilated, perceptions to the contrary having been in error all along, i.e. “misperceptions” (McTaggart), as subject to the illusion of time. What is not “logical” we see here, but natural merely is finally non-being or the negative, while true being is rather, finally, logical system or method, as the first Greater Logic had concluded. This was Hegel’s “ontology of logical forms”, to cite Henry Veatch’s defining phrase for his own Thomist system of logic, suggesting, again, more interrelation of the two approaches, Thomist and Hegelian, than is generally conceded. Of course this would refer equally to the life (only the idea immediate) and activity of those expounding and researching the process and generally supposed to have a real being as it does to ourselves writing this. “God has spoken only one word” (John of the Cross) and Hegel concludes that “ungrateful spirit” is set to cast away this ladder, of speech and writing, whereby we ascend. This is just what is described, more or less, in the Christian vision of things where it is “this life” that is cast away, already at or in baptism. For this has to occur, it is a spiritual requirement, by man’s own free but slow learning as to how matters stand and must stand, if God is to impart himself at all. That God has no real relation to us (St. Thomas) is, then, because we are not real for God other than as his own idea of us as in himself. We have to reach a point where turning inward becomes as such our turning to God102. Otherwise we get nowhere. Meanwhile, there is more, much more, to be said and set forth in this regard, or as regards natural science in general. Is that not also absorbed and did not Aristotle already show this in his Metaphysics, building critically upon Plato? The allegory of the cave, in The 101

Enc. 50. The whole of this long section demands careful reading. Again an insight, or an idea, of Edith Stein’s. Cf. op. cit. 420: Die Hingabe an Gott ist zugleich Hingabe an das eigen gottgeliebte Selbst und die ganze Schöpfung, namentlich an alle gottgeeinten Geistwesen.

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Republic, is almost exact illustration of what I am saying here. That it was written beforehand is irrelevant. It is just, most typically, when we think the same thoughts that we first come upon the ancient manuscripts as speaking for us. Such is man! The case is similar with the logical analysis of matter, as pure potentiality, with which natural science can have or will have nothing to do. Matter “isn’t actually anything”. Peter Geach used this phrase mockingly; it can be shown, however, that he read Aquinas very selectively on this issue: the same can be said of his championing of the mathematical postures of Frege against the metaphysical backing of logic down the ages regarding which, by contrast, Hegel brings out the intrinsic vitality of the initial conceptions at least, as laid down in Aristotle’s De interpretatione in particular. Geach appears, from what he tells us, to have been over-influenced by his father, G.H. Geach, here, who set him to read mainly some early twentieth century Oxbridge logicians. I will only add that Geach nonetheless perceived clearly and unerringly the grosser errors of many fashionable Fregeans. Mathematics, however, is not our proper ally here. Thomas Aquinas has great difficulty accounting for the life of the “separated soul” between death and general resurrection, as if forgetting that God has to manage in this way! For God lacks nothing. Therefore, our dependence upon bodily organs is not something particularly positive, as St. Augustine was more aware. Thus matter becomes in Hegel a case of finding a positive place for the negative in the system, for which the incarnation (of God, even demanded by infinity, he, like Scotus, rather suggests) is clear prototype. Aquinas’s problem disappears if we take more seriously the phrase for death (e.g. in Sweden) that, namely, the person “goes”, or went, “out of time”. It is a small step from there for McTaggart to say we are never in time. “Forget also thy father’s house”. Here one cannot but recall the teaching about a particular and then a general judgment. I think most theologians today would class that as a representation only, as the fourth evangelist does of the judgment, as a forensic exercise, in general (e.g. “and this is the judgment, that men loved darkness rather than light” etc.). Nor, of course, does this invalidate St. Matthew’s clear and vivid picture of that final “day of wrath”. One could claim, in further support of Hegel, that in fact evolution as such is not discovered. What is discovered are lines of related fossils moving up, or sideways perhaps, to some presently existing creature, thus bearing out Hegel’s freedom to insist on the permanent separateness of species in time (and place). There are, one might insist, never really any links found that were at first missing, just new specific examples mediating (i.e.

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scientifically and thus somehow “logically”) between two already known species. Nobody really wants to be seen as a “missing link” merely! Everything that is not seen “in” God, is seen apart from God, is thus “put in brackets”, so to say, and this by thought (or why not, then, by God?). It is the insight that it adds nothing, ultimately to thought itself, that is to say. Is thought then God? Well, the Concept is, as Hegel makes explicit. Only thus does thought “think only itself”, the point being not that it is some highly specialised act but that there is nothing else. Nor is this a denial of creation. Creation, all the same, can imply no change in God. Hence, again, the Scripture says he created “in the beginning”. He is creator, ever or eternally. if he is anything. Yet it is clear that human development begins within the perspective of time, from “our” side, whether individually or as regards the totality, although, given God, there can be no sides, not even just two, just as we said of body vis à vis soul. This means inevitably that to write, or discourse, speak, is to leave the realm of thought unless these things are done as a conscious incarnational act, to use the only analogy available, a uniting of being with that which is not. This is why there is demand at all for spiritual understanding, i.e. interpretation, of the letter(s). From age to age the boundary between spirit and letter can shift, in accordance with doctrinal development, for instance, and much of the argument in consequence is one of asking “in what sense”. If we apply this to evolution we can see that Hegel’s position is part and parcel of his denial of the reality of time. Time is “real for spirit for as long as spirit needs it”: we can see humour here although, as so often, this means it is deadly serious. Hegel knows, it has become clear, that he cannot write a book, or anything else, without self-contradiction. Thus we speak of “when time began”, or even of a time “before” time, as we speak of God “before creation”. Against this we have, from the fourth Gospel: “Before Abraham was, I am”. But note that Christ does not expressly forbid any of us to say, to echo, the same as applied to ourselves, mutatis mutandis, thus thereby emphasising its uniqueness, that of self-consciousness as such, in its full development divine, self of myself, intimior me mihi. By the same move I myself and all selves not in Christo are denied, as obverse of the “I never knew you”. For to be known by me you yourself must become just I. I, or “I”, after all, Hegel claims, is “the universal of universals”. You “know not what you are”. Yet “I am the vine, you are the branches” is, of course, also true. Yet Christ speaks of a branch, any branch, bearing fruit, or not, “in me”. For Hegel, anyhow, the individual is finally “ruined”. Selfconsciousness transcends that, “I in them and they in me”, i.e. for everyone who finds the way thereto. This can hold all the way down to the lowly metaphor of washing one another’s feet, or even of our eating Christ, which

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turned out not to be metaphor at all, but rather the truest or exemplary instance of such assimilation. The whole body is sign of spirit, just as, for St. Paul, all fatherhood is named from God and not contrariwise.

CHAPTER FOUR SPIRIT: WHAT IS IT?

But what is it, this Spirit, Geist? What is the attraction of this Absolute Idea103? One can only answer “Everything”, or else “To Hell with it”, in Flannery O’Connor’s immortal words, speaking of what faith meets on the altars of the Church at Mass, i.e. should this not in truth be so. We have here illustration of an analogy between this Idea, namely, and faith as instancing, swallowing or absorbing philosophic wisdom or contrariwise, each becoming the other. Thus Thomas Aquinas offers a philosophy of faith, i.e. of theology, specifically. Both, that is, instance absolute spirit, in pain or joy, while even these two, faith and philosophic wisdom, swallow or absorb one another, sorrow being “turned into” joy, the latter remaining nonetheless paramount, as does good over evil, to cite another instance, yet more affronting to our immediate intuitions, of Hegel’s real union of initially, i.e. immediately, apparent opposites, where appearance too just is immediacy as the sign of falsity. Thus for Hegel as theologian Jesus’s appearing as man, i.e. as not-God, just is his divinity, is Spirit, as the miranda of his healings or of his teaching demonstrate104. For just this is Hegel’s account of the Absolute Idea, that it absorbs and, in a manner, “cancels” all other ideas or, still more, “things”, as possibly reasonable 103

By “Absolute Idea” is just meant the self-supersession of all finite characterisations, of “Thought, as Understanding” (Enc. 80, marked as “alpha”), while “For anything to be finite is just to suppress itself and put itself aside”, as revealed by dialectical reason, namely (Enc. 81, marked as “beta”), which is the very reverse, incidentally, of what Graham Priest, in an apparent total failure to understand Hegel, calls or called the “dialetheic” (G. Priest, “The Limits of Thought and Beyond”, Mind, Vol. C, Number 1, July 1991, pp. 361-370: cf. our Absolute Idealism as a Necessary Condition for Sacramental and Other Theology, CSP Newcastle, 2021, Chapter 11, pp. 288-302). The appearance of two truths is just that, as a stage on the road to deeper truth. So there is no dialetheia. 104 This is not a case of docetism, however, since man as such just is appearance, as is nature as a whole, is just what “ungrateful spirit” will and must go on to deny, as “putting away childish things” (St. Paul).

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competitors, transubstantiates them as an Aristotelian might well say, while St. Thomas teaches that each and every divine idea, of you or me for example, is one with the divine essence105. We might recall the saying, concerning just anything as it might stand at the core of the Hegelian dialectic, of his “true reason-world”, that “This also is thou, neither is this thou”. Thus, “Unless a man hate his life in this (non-absolute) world he cannot be my disciple”. In this world, namely, in nature, “each thing is itself and not another thing”106. “Or else we have Aristotle’s hesitant and yet in a sense still more sweeping verdict, viz. “a little of this (i.e. philosophy, studium, contemplation) is worth more than all the rest”107, bearing in mind that he says nothing there for or against identification, fusion rather, of the “this” with the Absolute Idea as being the prerogative of those the world singles out as philosophers, i.e. unless we take his “worth more than all the rest” as identifying, if obliquely, precisely “this”, as we well might, under just that description. Thus Hegel seems ready to grant a union with the Idea also or even to children108, as the Church has occasionally bestowed the title of “Doctor of the Church” also upon illiterate or less than learned women in particular.109 Hegel’s affirmation thus takes its place beside the Scriptural “In Christ there is neither male nor female”, while the little ones’ “angels behold the face of my father in heaven”, surely eternally110, a saying that might well be taken up if there will ever be a future angelology subsequent 105

Cf. Summa theol. Ia 15. Cp. the eighteenth century’s Bishop Butler’s The Analogy of Religion. 107 Studium can also mean, or even originally meant, zeal. Thus we get Kierkegaard’s “Purity of heart is to will one thing”, open to question in that form as it may be. 108 Cf. Enc. 82, Zus.: “If we consider only what it contains, and not how it contains it, the true reason-world, so far from being the exclusive property of philosophy, is the right of every human being on whatever grade of culture or mental growth he may stand; which would justify man’s ancient title of rational being. … The general mode by which experience first makes us aware of the reasonable order of things is by accepted and unreasoned belief; and the character of the rational, as already noted (§45), is to be unconditioned, and thus to be self-contained, self-determining. In this sense man becomes aware of the reasonable order, when he knows of God, and knows Him to be the completely self-determined. … And … the knowledge and will of the child is rational, when he knows his parents’ will, and wills it” (stress added). 109 Ss. Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Avila come to mind. As concerns men then surely all the New Testament writers, none of them academicians, are our doctors. 110 Cf. the saying, “I have loved you from before the foundation of the world”. One may, however, further consult the distinction, e.g. as Thomistic, between eternity, as proper to God alone, and aevum. Does it depend upon an immediate acceptance of time (cp. Newton’s “absolute” time) such as we have been questioning here? Or upon the divine freedom simply, not properly or merely a freedom between alternatives, however, as we have noted? 106

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upon that given systematically in the Summa theologica or that sketched by Hegel. The above might well suggest that Hegel means by Spirit something more like what is found in us as the perfection of the virtue of faith, able to be suited to the circumstances or degree of development of the individual subject, rather than philosophy as already exclusively participant in an eventual sophia. Thus sophia is listed by Thomas as the supreme intellectual virtue, fulfilling the promise of the other three of these (contrasted with the cardinal moral virtues, alone required for everyone) in the traditional Aristotelico-Thomist system111. It is the state in which understanding and science, plus, on the side of intellect as practical specifically, prudence (which is also a cardinal “moral” virtue) and art, plus, in some lists, synderesis, become wholly natural to the subject, becoming thus “at home” with these “intellectual virtues” as habits. So faith, the first theological virtue as it is called, is just what is fulfilled in and by the coming of the Spirit as in the Biblical history (Luke’s Acts of the Apostles) of the Church’s beginnings. But can Hegel really pass this off as the perfection of philosophy? Near enough, I would answer. Yet at the same time he makes a point of complaining about untrained people thinking they can just pass philosophical judgments as if with every entitlement, as free as children from its requirements! Nor is this mere propriety, a requiring that the job of identification, of spirit and truth, be left not merely to philosophy but to designated philosophers rather than to the untrained rabble, as he seems to see them, making up the pietist movements of his time and place? Thus he refers to the faith of the elderly man being the same faith he held as a child and in childhood’s terms at that. He compares it to the plant, any plant, which develops entirely from its first seed, adding nothing from outside, since whatever it takes from there is turned into its original self (the original “evolution”: cf. the discussion above112). In that way each plant remains 111

Cf. our Thomas Aquinas on Virtue and Human Flourishing, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2018, ch. 13, “The Intellectual Virtues”, pp. 5153. 112 If the thesis were generalised, from Hegel’s example of vegetable development, evolution might become justifiable but at the price or on the condition of divinising or “spiritualising” the world. In a sense this thesis is implicit in Hegel’s system, but implicit at the price of judging the world “in esse and posse null” (Enc. 50), rather. Or, it is God’s world as made by and through God’s Word (Cf. Gospel of John, Prologue), which or who, it might be just therefore (as affirmed by Scotus in particular), dwelt and/or dwells among us, as about to become or as having been or as being, in supreme freedom of absolute or divine will, man. “What, then, is man? What is God?” (Pope John Paul II Wojtyla’s unanswered, by him there and then, question). The self-chosen title “son of man” might well help us here. What is it that

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itself, even if it should assimilate and take to itself the whole world, which as external to it would thus be “cancelled”, again. The similarities with Newman (“myself and God”) in the next generation are remarkable. At any rate we seem to find that our “latter day” ideal of universal education as corresponding to a “right” seems here as it were transcendentally affirmed (but at the same time as any absolute need for it is cancelled!), if under the paradoxical sign of faith, dialectical as able to embrace childlike obedience and final wisdom in one.113 So, again, spirit, what is it? What is God? What is man? Since this is the question as to truth itself it cannot be specific to our enquiry here. Or philosophy, like eventual sophia in this at least, cannot itself be specific, is not properly or exclusively an or one academic subject.114 That, then, is the essence of spirit. You can’t place it in some higher or more general scheme, which it would automatically transcend. Hegel identifies it, astonishingly perhaps, as the method of dialectical (by no means “dialetheic”115) logic, requiring us however to understand by method, meta hodon, that which is “according to the way”, the way to go, namely. All roads of the mind lead there as initially participant therein. The way is the destination. “You would not seek me if you had not already found me” is the popular or pious version of this, implying in its paradox an inchoate transcendence of time for thought, such as the Absolute Idea, as infinity itself, requires. * As for philosophy’s not being properly an academic subject, as distinct from not being merely a proper academic subject, the cause of this must be sought in the reflection, whether in Aristotle or in Hegel, that quantity, though a category of the Logic, does not belong to the Concept as intended by Hegel at least. Inasmuch as the academia was devoted to wisdom, of which philosophy is the love, the latter cannot properly be but one of its subjects, among which the new students must choose their limited portion. This same it is concealing as unique to the speaker, since we are in fact, with the exception of Adam (were he anything other than just man simply, as the Hebrew etymology might suggest), all such sons? 113 Cp. J.H. Newman’s The Idea of a University. 114 Cp. our “The Position of Philosophy in a University Curriculum”, South African Journal of Philosophy, 1991, 10(4), pp. 111-114. 115 Cf. G. Priest, “The Limits of Thought and Beyond”, Mind, Vol. C, Number 1, July 1991, pp. 361-370 and the critique of Priest’s Hegel-interpretation in our Absolute Idealism as a Necessary Condition for Sacramental or Other Theology, Cambridge Scholars Publishers, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2021, ch. XI, pp. 288-303.

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sophia now, this wisdom, is represented very anciently, in the Jewish “wisdom” literature, as playing before the throne of God. Hegel echoes this, saying that the notion, the concept, “is pure play”.116 Strikingly, one would not hear any fashionable physicist, biologist or cosmologist speaking thus of his inevitably sectional subject. What they feel obliged to emphasise is their seriousness, something reaching its downward apogee, one might well suspect, in the controlling idea of the material evolution of the mind as shown in this same mind’s conception of material evolution. The contradiction here is apparently too flagrant for the so-called popular mind to become conscious of it. Thus we get offered for our informed enjoyment television programmes which, in the course of establishing remarkable natural historical connections between elephants and whales, for example, apply a time-scale in which the human contribution to this story is reduced to a very small fraction, one of much less, very much so, than, say, one per cent of life on earth’s temporal existence. Totally ignored here is the fact that explicitly quantified time and temporal reckoning as applied is itself an exclusively human factor, along with the language in which it is expressed. Neither it nor rational conceptual language, i.e. language proper, is found among animals. They are other than the rationality they merely objectively exemplify. These premises are the surest ground for establishing the truth of absolute idealism, something, unlike Berkeleyan or indeed Fichtean idealism, having nothing to do with abstract subjectivity but rather with the concrete human or, ultimately, divine subject, in the embrace of which and by which all finite objects must take whatever “place” they can hope to find. Human or divine? This is the emphatic pairing associated most with Scotus first, but at which Hegel seems to arrive independently, thus strengthening the bond’s credibility. No doubt it was given to man to “name” the animals, as Genesis has it as a first but ground-laying step in biology, one man, according to Christian belief, finally being given “the name which is above all names”, named nonetheless as kyrios, Lord. In that hence divine man, once recognised, men and women together are called to live and move and have their being as “members one of another”, since each is to live as one with, as inhabited by, that one man, there being in “the Notion”, Hegel might add, neither one nor many, just as in Christ, just mentioned, “there is neither male nor female”. That is, all finite categories are here sublated, aufgehoben, in truth and reality, just as they are, with some at least apparent difference, in McTaggart’s thought. 116

This consideration can be harnessed to refuting those who simply assume that the playful speculations, which are certainly not only playful, of the Argentinian J.-L. Borges simply cannot be treated as “serious” philosophy, analogies with Wittgenstein notwithstanding. Cf. note 154 below.

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It is impossible to take the first steps outlining this without going on to give the complete picture. Such is the dignity of “pure play”. “If music be the food of love play on!” So yes, philosophy cannot be or remain limitedly an academic subject. That would have to be a meta-philosophy in the sense of a first approach to wisdom’s habitation. The title adopted in North America of “cathedral of learning” for one or other of the campuses there is thus somewhat jarring. Learning too must be finally sublated, carried further namely, in our ultimate worship. * The enthroning of play above seriousness may evoke a dismissive raising of eyebrows. It was, however, seriously (!) advanced by Sartre (Saint Genet) and De Beauvoir (The Ethic of Ambiguity) and not only they not long ago while indeed it deserves serious consideration! One might first note that play is the first epithet bestowed upon wisdom, sophia, in the Jewish scriptures, widely taken as sacred. She, and wisdom here is clearly a she, as for one thing espoused to the divinity117, plays before God’s throne, as 117

Here one can see the deep, indeed deliberate alienation from all that makes us inheritors of any wisdom whatever by those advancing claims either for “homosexual marriages”, just what specifically marriage can never be, or, as once realising this, for a dreary promotion of “registered partnerships” or similar as if able to take the place of that marriage they plainly, whether themselves homosexual or not being irrelevant, wish to annihilate. It is quite clear, furthermore, that this impulse, this drive, is not separable from all that is intended by that collection of post-Revolutionary movements (the “French” revolution was itself the first one in the sense of the one establishing this possibility as an actuality of our collective political life, before which monarchy became and becomes the first apparently permanent casualty), whether Nazi (NSDAP), Stalinist (“socialism in one country”) or the hybrid “social democracy”, eating its way ever further into our inherited and precious fabric by means of this bland pleonastic lie. Here I might seem to differ sharply from Fr. Herbert McCabe OP, who invokes third world bishops as a group in support of “socialism”, whom I otherwise have been positively citing in recent writings. By this linguistic sleight of hand he, and perhaps they, surely consciously seeks to make us forget the classic papal social teaching of Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII) and Quadragesimo anno (Pius XI). My position is perhaps closer to that of Maritain, among the UN promoters of “human rights”, when he speaks of a “confusion of the orders”, as if, for example St. Paul’s “in Christ there is neither male nor female” cancelled but without Aufhebung the Dominical elevation of the last to the first place, or as if the children so honoured in Christ’s preaching thereby ceased to be children and should therefore “have the vote”, say. McCabe is nonetheless correct, of course, in identifying the Gospel as, one might well say, “the mother of all revolutions” everywhere and anywhere in its destruction and discrediting

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maybe the mere “priestly” knowledge of ritual correctness does not, sacred though this may also be. One has to go the whole hog here, it being a matter of “letting our minds be remade”, actually what any keen, i.e. “serious”, freshman hopes for when he or she “comes up” to university, for a short while at least. Thus it is the case that among the priests serving this particular altar, academia, prophetically playful figures have oft appeared, as much now as previously. This might seem more true of Europe and those milieus in long association with her (Latin America? Israel? “Commonwealth” countries?) than of, say, North America where, until recently, a definitely stern Scholastic spirit, at least on the “Puritan” side of both cultures (medieval, American) seems to have held things together, an analogy of medieval and American scholasticism, drawn by Joseph Pieper in his fine study, Scholasticism118, whatever we may take, as concerning Europe rather, for the final message of Amis’s classic and deeply comical first novel, Lucky Jim. On American campuses, or in lecture-rooms, you do not so easily find English Literature lecturers declaiming their own poetry or those of others with joyful abandon, sitting loose to formalities and so on119. The atmosphere in philosophy seminars is or was (in the eyes of at least one observer) also decidedly different from those held in the Old World, was as boring, often, as these had been stimulating. But such generalisations are perilous and America can change faster than most places, not least due to the Atlantic’s shrinking under the many-league boots of distinguished exiles, relaxations at home on either shore and so on. To sum up, anyhow, one may point out, or at least suggest, that the only situation in which one of this world’s deceitful appearance of stability. The requirement, however, to distinguish dogmatically materialist, at times murderous, socialism from a developing socialisation (cf. Pope St. John XXIII Roncalli’s encyclical letter, c.1960, Mater et magistra). still holds. 118 Josef Pieper, Scholastik, Kösel Verlag, Munich, 1960 (McGraw Hill Paperback, 1964). 119 Charles Williams lecturing at Oxford (d. 1945) was perhaps the wartime prototype of this, as against the rigid, originally US enforcement of a Ph.D. requirement for lecturers of “standing”, these working within or illustrating the opposed conventionalism or restoring it as once found, it is imagined, in the medieval scholastic set-up, where however a form-bestowing, universally shared Christian piety worked to imprint a human image nonetheless. Another example scarcely to be found in an American environment was Profess Wilson Knight, ecstatically declaiming any and every English poet at Leeds in his lectures during the 1950s. Nor, I think, did he have a Ph.D. One could hardly imagine him submitting to the discipline, tough on creativity, of going in for such an honour, though he might certainly be awarded it for any of his main published books, posthumously, though, so as to prevent a possible refusal of it.

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can enjoy the relaxation (there we have the key!) of having become completely serious is that of playing a game, i.e. just where by definition one is not serious. There alone are the rules sacrosanct. Yet in life one has to be the message one brings, if any. Thus my remarks here, in moderation of their outrageousness, must be taken as applying exclusively to the humanities, i.e. to life and not, for example, to mathematics, considered by Hegel, if taken as the norm for thought, to be the natural soil of “materialism”. * So, to come nearer to the point, or a point, that of the development of evolution, or the evolving of development, as increasingly uncovered, when one watches such films as I mentioned above, concerning the amazing transformations of animal species when meeting various pressures, whales evolving from small dog-like creatures, after having been palaeo-elephants in the interim, and so on, one may well be struck by the similarities with the Hegelian science of logic, of the stages of which I postpone enumeration. In this science, of logic, there is no time, no enduring opposition or pairs of opposites but rather not merely the absolute idea but in the end every idea, followed through, as embracing all else, all the other ideas. Hence ultimately the one remaining true or, hence, absolute idea cannot be thought by us at all, although every idea that is thus thought by us is one with it! St. Thomas teaches, argues for, exactly the same truth as concerns “the divine ideas”, each being one with the divine mind as such. Here we may note, maybe for the first time, how this exactly mirrors the eucharistic teaching concerning the “elements” at the Mass. The substances that were bread and wine become Christ’s divine substance, whether or not one believe this, since it is indeed taught there that faith, belief, is the proper and sole means of knowing it. Inasmuch, that is, as substance as such is inapprehensible to sense, in contrast to the “accidents” (the Aristotelian teaching, the import of which is not always truly fathomed), then the divine or sole true substance, as in Spinoza thus far, is anyhow merely veiled, i.e. this is so both naturally and sacramentally and not only in the latter case. Hence Aquinas confirms that nature as a whole is a sacrament, though it is certainly not one of the seven covenanted ones in or on the path to salvation. As immediate messenger of divine presence it cannot mediate the ultimate supra-natural truth of that presence. All immediacy is false, according to Hegel’s reasoning. One may therefore claim that the evolutionary studies, within the realm of natural and temporal space, may be found pushing those who consider and study them towards an absolute idealism in their outlook. Time falls

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away while space must more and more give way to definite place, seen then, however, as essential representation, Vorstellung. What are contemplated, what are presented, are ideas of creatures and this after all is just what a creature is, even a human one, according to that Greek poet, for a start, cited in the Acts of the Apostles: “In God we live and move and have our being”; i.e. and nowhere else. Of course then the same must apply to the stones and rocks, the air and seas. They are all one idea, that Idea indeed which “goes forth freely as nature”. By the same token, it, nature, is nothing, nothing other, even in its otherness, than the Idea containing it. There is, has to be, otherness in God and this is its reconciliation, is why we say, ever repeat, that God is, must be, a God of peace. The whole evolutionary scheme, to repeat, again, along with its content, is one idea. As well say it is revelation, in accordance with Hegel’s dictum that revelation, as divine, cannot be of this or that, cannot be of anything, is essentially self-revelation of self and by self, self here being what is called Spirit, Geist, Mind even.120 This could be so, however, only if it were (as it is not as Darwinists present it) one idea, with its end in its beginning, first logically, then, in consequence, temporally. What remains is only to ask what necessity underlies the contingency we call flesh, or grass, say. If we now come back to man, how does he stand in regard to all this? First of all he is called, impelled, to more and more direct “interiorisation”. The Outside is Inside121. As thinking he does not himself walk upon this millennia-scarred surface or any other, nor does his thinking take any time at all. Thought is real, while, to the contrary, what is seen or otherwise sensed is “what appears beside”, symbebekoi. This is in fact, again, precise Aristotelianism. Substance, as real, is invisible, non-sensible. The accidents of immediate perception are ipso facto unreal, clues though they may be to the real. Deny these things and you find yourself enravelled in paradoxes belonging rather to religion than to science. Thus that first paradox, barefaced contradiction rather, of evolved mind deciphering evolution, must give way, as we are here finding, along, it seems, with the field-workers themselves, to a picture, as presented in the phenomena of living experience, of mind’s progressive self-apprehension in interiorisation, here interiorising precisely that exteriorisation as a whole which we call nature, a nature, according to Christianity, precisely finding thus its own fulfilment, its liberation from its groaning and travailing, in a resurrection in which, nonetheless, it is no longer itself but rather at once absorbed and cancelled in “the beauty of the bodies of the redeemed” (Thomas Aquinas, offering a 120

Thus Scripture teaches that the creation of the world is God’s initial act of selfrevelation. Cf. the catechism referred to in the notes above. 121 Cf. The Science of Logic, either of Hegel’s versions of this.

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picture we are not bound to share in detail, no doubt, though by Aristotelian teaching we will be bound to carry along with our thought some picture or other, the prime one being language, that work of the spirit-manipulated tongue). That one finds Hegel denying precisely this interplay, interchange rather, of what appear at first but remain, he asserts, as separate species should not surprise and is no objection to the deeper strain of his thought identified here. For what he denies is precisely the truth of that appearance, that Vorstellung of mutual otherness constituting nature as a whole. This latter is just what his logic and metaphysics aim at overcoming, McTaggart being his most faithful and/or insightful disciple here. Thus for Hegel the natural as known to us is evil and certainly, therefore, not to be placed above works of art as first and even in a sense generative form of absolute spirit, the very antithesis of nature, i.e. that is what it, art, is defined as. Nature, meaning not only “birds, trees and flowers”, groans and travails (St. Paul), waiting for its redemption in resurrection however conceived, waiting, St. Thomas might appear to interpret, for bestowal upon it of a human face. Hegel, that is, is a firm adherent, knowingly or not, of the thesis of The Imitation of Christ concerning “the contrary workings of nature and grace”, one with Kant here, to a certain extent at least, in this if in nothing else. The various species, this is what it comes down to, are not finally real, are “outside the concept” or the truly real as absolute contrary, always, of what is immediate. Or, going deeper, there is no sense in loosening the conceptual bonds of species as such when species is already Vorstellung. Hegel denies evolution because he is already committed to it as belonging with the restless nature of the Concept, not seen, it should be clear, as some natural mechanism really and truly holding sway upon this phantom earth, not least because we ourselves (though what, again, are we exactly? Am I not you, for example?), the thinkers, are necessarily outside of this hence objectified picture So he denies that nature has some other appearance than that of a perceived kingdom of fixed species, thus far denies our notion of a “natural history”. At the same time, in his account of concepts, of thought, he champions the dialectical conversions and absorptions outlined in his Science(s) of Logic, in his account of logic, specifically. What the Darwinists, as they became, are trying to say, to postulate, he seems to mean, is no matter of observable quantities (as non-conceptual base for qualities) but the unconsciously material reflection only of the dialectical character of thought. It follows from this, however, that to the same extent as this picture, of mutual transformation of species into one another, almost as “members one of another”, in the Pauline phrase normally applied in another sphere, is held to, then to that extent we are picturing an ascent into

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philosophy or theology and away from observational science, itself anyhow undercut by the denial of final reality to the universal Vorstellung, a priori for Kant, of space-time. Once deny that and the various lines of specimens suggesting temporality, as do their material remains themselves, signify nothing, being themselves contained in this prime spatio-temporal illusion, any more than do our journeys by rocket or space-ship, these themselves being representations a fortiori. Perception, in Hegel, is itself a passing category of thought, even granted that we cannot avoid, nor can he, speaking in terms of it most of the time. We cannot, any more than could Wittgenstein, keep silence, even after realising that what we are surrounded by or enveloped in, say, is that of which we cannot speak (cf. Tractatus 7) except in what appear to be riddles to those not initiated into philosophy, into true sophia. So what Hegel was saying merely, in affirming fixity of species, and we can agree, is that “for all practical purposes” or by what St. Thomas calls the natural application of our reason, viz. to finite objects, elephants are elephants, without our bothering to add “for the time being”. Against this conceptual background precise details as to how he in his time reacted to or against excavations of extinct life-forms are of little weight, for the simple reason that excavation itself, along with all the associated phenomena of whatever is observable (as distinct from the true substance, ultimately one), is just that phenomenon, as are whatever is excavated, whether or not proclaiming crime and evil as in detective fiction or in what we call reality, in which indeed real sins may be committed, real virtuous behaviour be found. That, or this precisely, is the difference between Hegel’s or associated vision and the misapprehensions of genuine dualism or indeed monist materialism. So if he was a bit behind the times (times?) with his fixity of species, in his wish to maintain the alienatedness of nature, which he could anyhow have maintained, this rather belongs to the academic profession, as thinking academics now so often find in the demand made for attention, essentially for them a distracting attention, to all the new digital and related so-called tools being thrust upon them, one hopes to their eventual benefit, by those gifted groups and individuals having nothing better to do. Such is the way of the world, as Hegel himself knew at least as well as anybody. For here too, as the late Jacques Derrida122 has lately 122

Of course, and by this, he too, along with the present writer, is not or was not indifferently, and the same applies to what is here or anywhere written and to the finite in general. “In God we live and move and have our being.” That is the constant thrust of this work, though one act against it in order to prove it. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” is the obverse of that. The message, of scripture, of philosophy, of art even, is constant and unwavering because absolute and of the spirit, the spirit man

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insisted for us, pairs at first opposed can (they must not) eventually show themselves as in a one-way order of inclusion, rather, as instanced by our little meditation here ordering an otherwise disordered misapprehension toward the true state of the case.

has called and calls God as knowing only himself and thereby all, with a knowledge that transcends what we normally understand by the term, namely as bringing about that which it knows, what for us is cognition proper being thereby cancelled cognitively in “will and idea”, to borrow a phrase from Hegel’s fiercest critic contemporary with him.

CHAPTER FIVE TIME

When people refer to God as being in an eternal present they so to say fall completely out of God conceived as the true and absolute infinite, of whom our best knowledge is that we know and can know nothing. For, by this, God cannot be in the present merely, as we might think of ourselves as in the present, or “in” anything else. More truly, the famous “sacrament of the present moment” is precisely that, a sacrament, though not, as we have been finding in the eucharist here and there in this text, as a sign of itself, i.e. of what qua substance it is (it or they, some moment or moments, are of course not “substantial” at all), under whatever forms we receive it, simply. It is not simple at all. God is and has to be neither present, past nor future, equally. He is eternal in the sense of his being that eternity, the only and whole eternity, itself therefore personal. Thus, to enter into the presence of God we must step out of, withdraw from, in “recollection”, the present. This seems to be precisely what we do when we think, though as applied here to what, as object or anything else, unless as a term in our linguistic paraphernalia, we cannot think, viz. to God as all, first cause, saviour etc. Therefore the sense in which we are eternally known to God and in him is not precisely a sense of presence contradicting our everyday presence here between our birth and our death only. It is a state of truth cancelling, rather, this everyday being as reducing it to its true nothingness, that of “no birth, no death”, as some Buddhists, thus far truly, perceive and teach123. 123

Hegel applies the same term, aufheben, to denote what we might call now “cancelling”, now “absorbing”. The infinite absorbs the finite in a one-way act going further than “a rigid opposition between finite and infinite” (Enc. 94, Zus.). Similarly “the living die, simply because as living they bear within themselves the germ of death” (Ibid. 92, Zus.). If this truth is applied to the Garden of Eden account, however, then, to preserve consistency, we have to regard “sin” as a feature of finitude as such, according to the dictum of Aquinas that “what can fail at some time does fail”. Besides the assumption of time, however, this judgment, in the light of St. Thomas’s theological commitment, is to be taken as made with a necessary if implicit qualification, viz. “apart from (divine) grace”, this being what our first parents, and in them we ourselves, shall have lost. If we go on to ask why just man

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shall have been created “in grace” (not defining this theological term for the moment) it is helpful as a first moment of such an enquiry to note that the mix, the union, of rationality, of spirit, with a temporal mutability itself directed otherwise to eventual total deciduousness, is in itself or apart from such grace otherwise thoroughly improbable and, indeed, frail and awkward. Here comes in the Scotist affirmation that God purposed, must have purposed, from eternity to join himself with man or, more theologically, to assume human nature and that concretely or as individual, yet as yeast destined to “leaven the whole lump” (of bread) in view of the nature of matter if nothing else. It has of course to be added that the presence of this “grace”, a supernaturally divine quality of some sort, is what elevates what might seem to some a mere “natural” peccadillo to the upside-down dignity of “sin”, i.e. within the story itself, where grace is not, to begin with, mentioned by name. The teaching of faith, that is to say, is that man, i.e. Adam solely, though with Eve as implicitly included (the rib), was created in grace, this being what lay behind both Augustinian worries about the eternal fate of unbaptised infants, sinful in origin as “fallen” from such grace, and the beautiful pages on a consequent “limbo” supplied by St. Thomas Aquinas, a problematic that the Church has come in time to exhort us to disregard, whatever our curiosity, i.e. to forget about this limbo for beings naturally perfect with no touch of the supernatural, of grace, that is to say, at least as not our business, based as this speculation was upon the assumption, even given the love of God who “hates nothing that he has made”, that such infants, since not having attained the age of rational choice, could not be in heaven. They must remain, it was speculated, in a state of perfect and yet abstract age (thirty is suggested) and nature, not seeing God for whom they cannot but long, hopelessly. As if we know or can judge that or can’t imagine some other relation of them to God or what we might suppose as their own individuality! As unbaptized they are anyhow not named, in the Christian notion of human as distinct, say, from canine naming. Some people, indeed, worry about the eternal destinies of loved dogs, concerning which or whom, and heaven, I heard a priest say “he’ll be there if you want him”. With this seemingly fantastic problematic belongs implicitly the practice of some sects of “baptizing for the dead”, with a quantitative zeal outclassing even the efforts of St. Francis Xavier, moved by the same surely loving anxiety, to baptise as much of the Indian population as he came across. Great use is now rightly made of the conception of a “baptism of desire”, evolving naturally out of the initial “baptism of fire” as applied to martyred catechumens but implicit anyhow in the idea of imprisoned faithful souls, Israelites in the first place, awaiting in the centuries since their deaths the coming of the Saviour. All such pictures derive from initial inability to transcend the notions of time, still more of place and/or space (and ultimately the notion of number), rather, such that even the divinity was held subject to these finite imaginings. The opposite ability, however, requires, there seems much reason to think, absolute idealism as first cousin or a yet closer relative to the mystical notions of spirit, in themselves not at all objectively mystifying, as the first Marxists were too quick to judge or maintain at least, notions, though, which form the daily bread of Western religion in particular.

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Because we are known to God eternally, rather, “this life that I now lead” (St. Paul) is not my true life at all, even if everything seems and is even taught to hang upon it. It hangs upon it precisely in this call to renunciation of world, flesh and devil, which I either obey or refuse, explicitly or implicitly, as indeed is the case with every or any rational being. Thus ethics and virtue too are wiped out at the final count. I have no virtues, exclaimed the modern saint of Lisieux more than once, other, I suppose she meant, than faith, hope and love (the so-called theological virtues). Vanity of vanities, then; rather, all is vanity. We didn’t need even the Christian preaching to get hold of that one! Simply, “with the Lord a day is as a thousand years”, a saying the substance of which we most often throw out precisely in our thinking that we have understood it. It is not that every incident and “day” is present eternally to absolute knowing in total distortion of these finite phenomena (this word means appearances), as in God’s seeing the whole page upon which time’s line is, has been or will be drawn. Rather, all such finite “realities” or entities, regarded independently of their basis “in” the Idea, in God as religion has it, are finally cancelled by thought, in the sense of known as never having been, never being nor about to be. This is precisely the sense in which we, we have been seeing, know nature as cancelled, as the negative in the full being of its negativity, the Regarding grace, meanwhile, cf. the treatise of St. Thomas Aquinas on grace, De gratia, to which he first refers as an “exterior principle of human acts” (Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia-IIae QQ109-114). This is immediately preceded by a comparable treatise on law, lex. We have noted that lex was for Aquinas some kind of reification, so to say, of an indwelling ius or right. Might there be something more inward corresponding to grace as essentially ab extra? Or can we not simply give Hegel the right in claiming that the outside is the inside and conversely, i.e. that these are hidden or “dead” spatial metaphors? That “grace perfects nature”, after all, is a basic Thomistic principle. Hegel, anyhow, either chose to overlook or did not take note of the genuine function of grace in this topic of the Fall of Man. We might ask: how is grace different from the natural at all if one can as well sin against it too? Yet this topic was thoroughly gone into before Hegel’s time (cf. the Jansenist controversy in France, while theologians distinguish, conceptually at least, between resistible and irresistible grace). The question here, though, is whether Hegel’s ignoring such questions invalidates his treatment of the Fall. It is important to realise that they, the questions, are not “historical” merely while possibly, i.e. conceivably, even, not viable at all, however much that complicates our efforts to understand how, say, “all die in Adam”, such that we can only show we don’t deserve it by renouncing such a condition (of complicity with “the world, the flesh and the Devil”), for which also, however, faith teaches, grace is required! To close this, I simpler recall Karl Rahner’s saying that “Everything is grace”. This should be pondered, it would seem to merit, in concert with a meditative reading of St. Thomas’s not too long treatise cited above.

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nought between one and what is less than nothing. So let us “bow and bend low” and cast off our stupid slickness. Talk of an eternal present is but analogy for eternity itself. We are there already or might just as well be, “this present world” and we too being revealed in or understood as its own nothingness. We, inasmuch as believers anyhow, deny ourselves and follow Him, that one than whom there is no other, literally for once, this logic “ruining” the individual as indeed life itself as “only the Idea immediate”. “I am come that they may have life” i.e. this speaker is going to mediate it. There is no immediate life. “O life that is no life at all” rather124, while the Scholastic vivere viventibus esse shows up as a purely linguistic observation (though it might be or enshrine a call to renounce such “life”, such living) of no help or relevance to us here, except it be employed as evidence for Thomas’s statement that we know most about God when we know that we know and can know nothing about him, nothing essential about the divine esse. This, in fact, or just therefore rather, is precisely why the divine esse and essentia cannot be two distinct intellectual or other realities, the converse of this holding equally. The two affirmations, that is, are the same as applied, at least, to our knowledge, in which God’s own self-knowledge, put as expressed to Moses, would appear to concur. To have the name I AM is not to have a name, is, rather, the “name above all names”. One might wish to regard this as the kernel of truth in at least some forms of what we call atheism. It thus follows, for example, that McTaggart was right, as a continuator of Hegel, inasmuch as further commenting, unknowingly or not, upon the identity of the divine esse and essentia (with which we have continually been representing Hegel’s thought as consistent) in Thomas Aquinas or Scripture, or even as commenting implicitly upon the ancient Oracle and its most distinguished Athenian visitor when he, McTaggart, discounted present appearances. This oracular “Know thyself” meant that there was or is nothing else to know. Hence it was no restriction. Here, then, I cite again a description of the late Peter Geach’s final assessment and acceptance of McTaggart’s thought, an assessment, however, as expressed by Geach at least, not realising or unwilling to admit the degree to which this is bound to fundamental Hegelian premises. Here125 Geach “finally accepts”, writes

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St. Teresa of Avila. From the book of her Life, of which the philosopher Gertrude Stein exclaimed, on finishing her reading of it: “This is the truth”. 125 In Truth and Hope, UND Press 2001, Geach finally accepts what he was noncommittal about in McTaggart’s thought as set out in his earlier study of him, Truth, Love and Immortality of 1979, although the relevant section as referred to here in 2001 dates back, sic Geach, to 1939.

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his reviewer, “what is correct in McTaggart’s philosophy”, though still without much mention of Hegel. In these lectures of 2001, then, Geach wants to bring out what is correct in McTaggart’s philosophy. There are two matters about which McTaggart is absolutely right. First of all, Geach explains the “general ontology” in McTaggart’s magnum opus The Nature of Existence (1927), because ‘a thorough knowledge of it saved me from many endemic errors of English philosophy’. Roughly speaking, McTaggart saved Geach from logical atomism: ‘McTaggart utterly dismissed the idea of a “bare particular” which the mind can discern under the characteristics it wears, as a lady is naked under her clothes; taught by him, I have always rejected various allied notions, like that of the “pure ego” which has no mental states in its constitution because it is their “owner”!’ This provides an interesting sketch of the historical origins of Geach’s distinctive philosophical position. He goes on to list McTaggart’s main errors: ‘he disbelieved in God, in the reality of time, in the freedom of the will, and in the reality of matter’. But the second debt Geach owes to McTaggart is the belief that it could be shown philosophically to be a rational object of hope that ‘we shall obtain an eternal life of love, which he even often called Heaven’. McTaggart’s atheism, in other words, did not get in the way of his developing his view that all actual existence is timeless: ‘what seems to us to be successive experiences are, in his language, fragmentary perceptions, which do not really succeed one another but coexist with a total experience that subsumes and transcends them’. His conception of timeless experience, Geach contends, ‘the sort of Boethian eternity that McTaggart ascribed to all persons’, is effectively, ‘in a way that we cannot now begin to understand’, ‘the beatific vision’. Unsurprisingly, McTaggart was greatly impressed by the first Epistle of St. John and the emphasis therein of an eternal life of love. Geach develops a remarkable account of the traditional Catholic doctrine of the beatific vision of the Blessed Trinity which, he maintains, is a verification of McTaggart’s description of heaven: ‘we shall know nothing but our beloved, and those they love, and ourselves as loving them, and only in this shall we seek and find satisfaction’ (McTaggart’s words). McTaggart had mystical experiences, Geach reminds us, which ‘came to him unsought and quite unpredictably’: ‘these made him see the whole universe as a world of love’. He saw his vocation as a philosopher as seeking to validate by metaphysical arguments the truth he had grasped intuitively …’ Geach plainly believes that McTaggart came close to the ‘heart’ of orthodox Christianity. The ‘Victorian rationalist background’, the ‘muscular Christianity’ and so on, which was his only experience of actual Christian practice, prevented him from discovering how his metaphysical intuitions of eternity were anticipated in traditional Christian belief in the beatific vision. In short, what Geach is saying in this chapter is that the work of the atheist philosopher McTaggart offers a much sounder introduction to central

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There is not, then, a heavenly time perfecting earthly time. Rather, in Hegel’s deliberately self-contradictory phrasing, “Time is real for spirit only for as long as spirit needs it”127. Here the ideal character of divine knowledge and hence being as understood in and by “absolute idealism” is clearly affirmed. It is affirmed, however, as finally one with reality itself, as the only reality, as that in which all apparent “else”, such as are we, “live and move and have our being”.128 To this reality neither time nor space belong, but this without any cancellation of “the body” but rather the reverse, necessarily indeed but also in the faith of the Church. Thus St. Thomas posits the glorification of the resurrection bodies of the redeemed precisely in their beauty as more than compensating for, in his view, a necessary absence of animals and plants, these being merely Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course With rocks and stones and trees,

viewed here as part, no doubt, of Wordsworth’s general contempt for the prison of the everyday which G.K. Chesterton129 hastily, violently indeed, reprimanded as no less than “blasphemous”. One might indeed get a whiff of a scented heavenly character of the human erotic in St. Thomas’s sparse allusions here, thus presaging a kind of “downward” supervenience (infravenience?) as characterising nature, the “idea immediate” as Hegel indeed calls it but which many have misread as a thorough-going naturalist interpretation of the Christian event or actus rather. This whiff, anyhow, could well season a certain otherwise aseptic character in McTaggart’s descriptions of his ideal hope. The truth, then, of absolute idealism, as we find it at the surface in Hegel but there to be teased out, I suggest, in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, is not akin to affirmation of a “pale Galilean” but rather relatable to the vision, vouched one day to three of the future apostles, of the “transfiguration” of indeed the figure of the earthly Christ as of the “concrete universal”. 126

Fergus Kerr OP, reviewing Peter Geach’s Truth and Hope (UND Press, 2001) in New Blackfriars. 127 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, final chapter, “Absolute Knowledge”. 128 From a Greek poet thus quoted with consent by the apostles concerned (Paul and Barnabas) in the Lucan and Biblical Acts of the Apostles. 129 Cf. G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, The Bodley Head, London 1905, p. 162, in the chapter discussing, denouncing rather, the views of G. Lowes Dickinson, author of the later J. McT. E. McTaggart, CUP 1931.

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Absolute idealism, one might say, celebrates and confirms the superior ontological quality attributed so insistently in his day to what he called “the logical forms” by Henry B. Veatch in a sadly neglected bulk of publications.130 It is they that condition and hold together the world and all else, the logical idea being finally the Absolute Idea inseparable from logic’s “method”. We have to get rid of the idea that there is something lacking to the ideal or bodiless, as if spirit were itself something airy merely, or as if God himself suffered a lack in being bodiless. “Body”, St. Thomas affirmed, has no place in metaphysics but is of interest, as, we have noted, he somewhat oddly added, only to logicians. The universal meanwhile, as Plato affirmed, is “neither one nor many”, which is as much as to say, with Hegel, that quantity lies outside the Concept. In general, rather, as regards “finite being” (is there, finally, such a thing?), “we see it involves a contradiction in itself” (cf. Enc. 92, Zus.). Christ is reported as saying, again, that the angels of children regard the face of God in heaven. The point of this may be, whether also or exclusively, that such angels are in fact the children or as close to this as one can get while retaining otherness. One may be sure that a creation of an angel corresponding to the creation of a child is envisaged, rather than that they are, say, selected out from an otherwise unemployed throng, and this sureness may at some point require reconciliation with what we have to say here concerning time in general. The descent, ascent rather, from picturelanguage is necessarily gradual in the literal sense of proceeding, ascending, by stages: hence one can be pretty sure, in general, that our notions also today, even or especially our theological ones, have still an infinite length of staircase before them while, to the simultaneous contrary, infinity itself posits the cancellation of staircases along with all picturing whatever, as we can acknowledge even or especially in the act of employing the latter. That is the dialectical alternative to the Wittgensteinian silence. Angels, anyhow, are not temporal products, even granted that the divine eternity is unique to God, to Spirit as such. I point this out without wishing, again, to delve into the mysteries of the aevum as advanced by St. Thomas and others in an attempt to capture the notion of an eternal creature. Angels, in some sense at least, have no beginning inasmuch as that would imply a previous “aloneness” on God’s part, even granted that it is He who “alone is”. Nor, surely then, do the rational “souls” of children or others begin “in time”. I say this with all proper deference to the linguistic methods of orthodox theology, which I take as true. Divine creation is not, cannot itself be “in time”, while eternity reaches backwards and forwards indifferently, 130

Cp. our “Argument Forms and Argument from Analogy”, Acta Philosophica, Rome 1997, pp. 303-310.

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as is clear not only in McTaggart. Nor do representations of an “infusion” of human souls at some point in earthly or “animal” conception and birth carry with them a requirement to add to this account. One can just as well say that the latter, our “conception” as it is, as regards this context, revealingly thus named, reaches out to the intellectual soul or form, whether or not moulded mediately in some way by it. The taking possession and the being taken in possession would be, as is dialectically proper, the same. “I have loved thee from before the creation of the world”, i.e. eternally (“thee”, note, singular), with no provision there as to your appearing at “time t´” or at any time. That has simply just nothing to do with the case. If we exist, in our consciousness, then we are, in this derived sense, necessary beings. Thus St. Thomas lists human souls as necessary beings together with God, angels or prime matter, apparently indifferently, up to some given conceptual point at least!131 The “infusion” of the human soul into the temporal body, zygote or what you will is thus a back to front representation of the meaning of human conception in the contingently phenomenal order. With the Lord, that is to say really, a day is as a thousand years and conversely, again, or, as the liturgy expresses the same thought, “all times are His”. But thus is time cancelled indeed. So it is not the case that the procreative act of any two human beings living this “life that is no life at all” occasions or summons down a temporally simultaneous creation and “infusion” (an obvious picture) of a soul. Souls, or more especially spirits (more especially in the sense of more truly), are not “created in time”, since they are eternally known with neither change nor “shadow of turning” and that is their dignity. Rather, “no birth no death”, again. Hence there can be no generation or evocation of spirits from our human side in this “land of unlikeness”. The birth of this or that spirit, i.e. its temporal and hence “embodied” appearance, is eternally known without change, either by Spirit itself or by that indeed created spirit as eternally oned with it. I cannot see that this statement of the case clashes with any of the formulations of the Church, let me say to avoid misunderstanding, while if there is any error (there is maybe sure to be some, which I would therefore renounce prior to its discovery by me or others) it will be from the side of my writing here, so that I hope indeed that it will find correction. Father Abraham rejoiced to see Christ’s day, the latter assures us, the implication being that all times or days are known to Absolute Spirit, in whom all “live and move and have their being” and nowhere else.

131

Cf. the essay by Patterson Brown on Aquinas’s understanding of necessary being in the collection Aquinas, as selected and edited by Anthony Kenny, Macmillan Paperbacks, London 1970.

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* So if McTaggart’s account is to be equated with an account of the beatific vision (Geach as reported by Kerr above) and if Christianity is true then the account must require, to avoid lop-sidedness, mediation from this appearance (time) to that reality and even, i.e. especially, in that capacity, “our only mediator”, the crucified God, “made sin for us”. The world, that is, human society, of which time is the figure, is alien to and even hostile to God and hence to be hated, a stated condition of discipleship. Baptism, accepted death to world, flesh and devil, remains the sacramental means of sharing in this divine death (as in God’s own human nature of which we speak in temporal terms as “assumed”, though it embodies eternal love, itself necessary to God, we believe) as the eucharist is our sharing in the same, the bread of the life which baptism confers, sacramentally132 in either case. For this reason “those we love”, in McTaggart’s account, have to be seen in and with, in identity, the mediator, that “Christ may be all in all”, as St. Paul says. Or rather, this must eventually reveal itself as the further layer of meaning of what is otherwise, as far as it goes, a true account, as Geach claims, of the visio beatifica, those we thus love, after all, being indeed united to the point of identity with Christ as universal mediator, again, such that, we noted,, there is no number of separable individuals to be counted in heaven. The one hundred and forty-four thousand of Scripture was a way of expressing just this and not some infinitely higher number. Or, is infinity truly or possibly a number? It must be more, indeed other than such, simply because it can be, must be therefore, so conceived. We are all there then, to repeat, on this interpretation at least, and if we are, then we are one there with our own self-ideas, so to say, as the truth of ourselves, itself more real than we ourselves are or have thought that we are. Thus viewed, it is a matter of throwing in our lot, or not, with our ideal and yet, or thus, more real prototype than we ourselves immediately are, our exemplars as one might say. The oppressed but “angelic” beggar-child in the ashes discovers she is a king’s daughter, i.e. she really is. “You know not of what spirit you are”, said Christ on one occasion to two of his disciples. Compare further, once more, his remark as to the angels of children in heaven beholding the Father’s, his Father’s, face, as the children do not seem to know, though Newman records himself as a child coming close to it. Such, if anything, is our life “in God”, “in” obviously standing here for a form of identity, while God, St. Thomas teaches, as we noted, has 132 We have attempted an initial outlining of the sense of this term in our immediately

previous book to this, viz. Absolute Idealism as a Necessary Condition for Sacramental or Other Theology, CSP, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2021.

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no “real” relation to anything else describable as us but has this only and exclusively, which here means all-inclusively, to his own idea of each of us. What else could the “in” stand for, while thus it is regularly deconstructed in the New Testament writings, in ways not without precedent and inspiration in and from the “Old”, which as read spiritually remains ever fresh and new, it too? So much for time, while anything else we may “become”, as we say, is indeed nothing, another way of saying that God does not know it. “I never knew you”, he says to “the wicked”. “In God we live and move and have our being.” We do not have, in the same way, our non-being, our sin, there133. Yet we must offer to God our sins as part, and what a part, of our truth, as nature, the negative, is a positive or true constituent of Hegel’s system of reality, holding apart, by its keeping together, logic and spirit. * So much for time, then! But what about space in that case? Indeed, the concept of space, as developed lately in Einsteinian physics, for example, has its critics in so far as it pretends to any kind of absoluteness. In the light of such criticism it is reducible to the concept of place, which is something no less phenomenal, in the sense of unreal, than is time itself134 (Yet is not the phenomenal really phenomenal, i.e. not merely phenomenally phenomenal?). Size, or extent, given this perspective, no longer refers, as quantity lies outside of the Concept, in Hegel’s words, or in his reasoned judgment rather. So not only “no birth no death” but no world either. How, then, did the world require to be overcome? Or why? Or why, rather, did God make a world or need to do so? This was the question, in regard to the assertion of such a divine deed and/or need by the Christian Church, to which the Zen Buddhist D. Suzuki could find no answer. He tells us, indeed, that this is the 133

Thus even C.S. Lewis, a relatively enthusiastic apologist for Hell, brings his thus far damned “ghosts” on a daytrip to the lawns of heaven, they being as near ontically to nothing as possible while remaining objects of such divine rejection. Cf. his The Great Divorce, from the 1940s. The divorce is “great” as being as far as may be between being and nothing. The theme of “the wicked” being blown away like chaff is common in Scripture, from all which as “from all evils” “good Lord deliver us”, prays a well-known litany. 134 Cf., for example, work on this topic, this question, by the Argentinian Mario E. Sacchi, e.g. “Does a Void Exist?” (in Indubitanter ad veritatem, cf. bibliography there). Sacchi is editor of Sapientia (Buenos Aires) and author of several books related to our topic here.

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reason, or was so, why he could not become a Christian, as he must have felt pressure to do at some stage. So, to take up his challenge, as his words work out as being, did God make a world? God said “Let there be light” and so on “and there was light”. This Scripture reads well, therefore, as affirming the needlessness of any kind of making, for God, even if it (in what is reckoned, however, as having been originally a second or distinct account from this first) goes on to say that God “rested” from his labours and so on, a clear anthropomorphism without deceit. Suzuki would have surely understood this so far, that God did not labour as if against some counter- force, there being none. So the question that needed to be asked was: what kind of acts are there such as to be motivated without descent to self-need? Acts of love, we have learned to say, even if the lover as such can be ruled, i.e. rules himself, by those needs of just love which are thus the very opposite or converse of need, this being why they are needed! God creates out of love for himself, this being a need only in the sense that those who have legs need to walk, i.e. it is their nature as condition, therefore, for their being themselves. It is not some extra qualifying and even contradictory weakness added on as precisely a subtraction. Rather, bonum est diffusivum sui, precisely because the good is the loving or, as we say, “God is love”, an identification interpretable, e.g. by McTaggart, as we have seen above, as in some or many senses atheism. If God is wholly love then he is wholly not God, runs the claim. Yet it is “the gods of the heathen” that are nought, not this one. Where is thy God, they cried out all the day long, eliciting the swift Israelite reply, “As for our God, he is in heaven”, precisely McTaggart’s answer though for him it was the reason why we are there too, not, however, as well as God but instead of Him, i.e. if we are anywhere. One may raise this possible counter to McTaggart, that the “we” on his account comes down to God as the absolute first and only, over again. But then, anyhow, “there” will be here and conversely, while the world as we know it, i.e. phenomenally, as third, a surd, is ever then “passing away” as in its very being a non-being or “overcome”. This is more or less, if not exactly, what Christians too believe. Here lies the root of all analogy in our speech specifically (i.e. the McInernyan analogy as that of language only). It is the aim of this essay to show, as our title proclaims, that the analogy is on “our” side or the side of nature along with but not limited to the whole of language itself but not on the side of God or what we find to say about him even. Thus language itself, e.g. theology, is the prime analogans rather, God the analogatum and/or

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analogandum, but only in our language135, as concerning Him, namely. The real analogies, of God, as distinct from language itself merely, are ourselves, “made” in his image and likeness. “I am He who is; you are she who is not”, says God to the thus privileged soul. It is obvious really, too but too obvious, like the “too solid flesh” that is but vanity. Hence there is no need for it to melt away, as Hamlet wished, it being already more, i.e. absolutely less, than merely molten, along with all “number, weight and measure” as lying “outside the concept”. * We grapple here with time, recall. Comparison with Thomas Aquinas’s opusculum “On the Eternity of the World against the Grumblers”, the thesis there having been no less warmly defended by Augustine, might seem germane. Thus Thomas shows here strong affection almost for this thesis, for the truth, namely, that God can, could or has been able to create something, or things, angels above all perhaps, that do not “have a beginning in time”. One might want to ask: where else should they or anything have a beginning if not in time? But then did not time itself begin? Is it too not a divine creation, which yet cannot, without seemingly vicious regress, have a beginning in time? This might seem ultimate confirmation of Augustine’s view, that creation’s act, as entailing no change in God, is not temporal. Bonum just is diffusivum sui, while in consequence, partly, of the paradox just signalled we will come to view time not as a creation of some objective realm or mansion of the Father’s house but as the creation of a type of finite consciousness, this too however being finally revealed as an entity as subjective, objectively speaking still however, as time itself, the two being best viewed as distinct instances of the one or absolute reality, like being and time in Heidegger. Compare the “popular” rendition of time as “the moving image of eternity”. It is, as Hegel, but not only he136, has shown, in this total immanence that infinite transcendence is best preserved. There is, obviously, something wrong, then, with the expression “a beginning in time”, whether or not this is to be laid at St. Thomas’s door. It is at least pleonastic. For how else do things begin? In other words the whole notion of a beginning implies time, whether or not there can be creation of non-temporal objects, or as God is spoken of in Aristotelian tradition as 135

Note that I do not stress “our”, as if there were other languages. They are all “tongued” and that is what is meant, that a tongue cannot reach the truth, even where it “speaks” correctly. 136 Cp. Thomas Aquinas, ST Ia 15, saying that God, as absolute in simplicity, is identical with every or any one of his ideas.

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being simply act, pure act such as nothing else is, just as, therefore, conversely, pure act is what God is, something most like an event while transcending event in its very notion, as implying in the end that there are no events, that they too are picture-like constructs of the finite mind. “No birth no death”. I cannot be born, as if having been there before I was there, i.e. there can be no such “before”. Parents, mothers particularly perhaps, thus err in some sense, or do wrong even, when they dismiss the child’s questioning by saying “That was before you were even thought of” or similar, though no doubt this is how it seems to them. The act of creation, after all, like causality in general, as has long been understood, is not itself in time and in its fullness does not “take” time (compare this table’s causing my computer to be a couple of metres above the floor, or the footprint being caused by the boot above it137, not in either case in an instant or even in less than an instant, but in no time at all, instantaneously as we nonetheless say, i.e. represent it. “I have loved thee from before the foundation of the world”, shall God have “said”, something admittedly the human parent cannot easily say, not as parent at least. Hence it, creation, is spoken of, pinpointed, by St. Thomas and others, as the or a processio ad extra in or from God, as contrasted with the specifically Trinitarian processiones ad intra, contrasted, that is, as being very close in type, the type of a processio, to these and conversely. For what is extra God, unless nothingness? But nothingness is nothing, or…? So, then, it is in God that also we outsiders, or those two apostles, “live and move and have our being”. Thus, negatively, neither processio is mere process; both are proceedings, whether within or outwards. Yet note that we said “ad extra in or from God”, i.e. indifferently since what is from God is also within him as infinite, as Christ is spoken of in the liturgy as coming down “from the heaven he never left”. No doubt this is representation, as put in self-destroyed speech. But such speech is the very sign of spiritual truth, of which the beatitudes (of the “Sermon on the Mount”) are prime exemplar, though this is hidden in a measure by use of a future tense. Yet the comfort lies in the mourning, the resurrection in the Cross, not exclusively but more inclusively as of a necessary condition, as childbirth can scarcely be thought without the pain, the supposed exception, of the virginal birth, supplying the rule rather. This might seem on the face of it a rather rigid scheme. One might want to ask whether God’s repenting of himself having made man, of himself later almost destroying him, in the Sin-Flood (as it is still called in some languages), is not, as represented, as vorgestellt, also an internal procession (to start off with), remembering also that nothing in God, as being absolutely 137

Augustine cites this example from “the Platonists” in The City of God X: 31.

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simple, can be “accidental” or compositional toward a larger or more comprehensive whole, except conceptually. So such appearances, of complexity, have to be just a question about some linguistic terms, as real processions, do not, or as divine love is not: and yet they are complex, even these, at least as linguistically manifested, along with theology as a whole. For this is the difference, in identity again, of subject and predicate, or of matter and form (as disclosed in Hegelian logic). God is no other than his love, nor other even than such processions, i.e. they are not even really “his” merely. As pure act God is this act, as he is the Trinitarian unity, or as his unity is trinity, and so it is too with the Hegelian concept or Notion according to its doctrine: The Notion is the principle of freedom, the power of substance self-realised. It 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. (Enc. 160)

Similarly, as making up, we too, a three-dimensional world, we can never see in unity all the facets of anything, e.g. of a diamond. By contrast the completeness of the Notion generates freedom as such. So its systematic character is to say the least unique, as, in truth, is also its being “a” whole, as if taking some kind of part in some larger conglomeration. Such are the deceits of even the most careful language as in its very self Vorstellung. The example, all the same, i.e. also this representation, just like the “classical” ones mentioned, raises the possibility, urges as the truth, never conceptually denied in Aquinas or Augustine, of a basic sense in which all events, or, hence, processiones, are “in” God, the sense of this preposition having to be ultimately taken as that of an identity just in and because of difference, i.e. God, if he is anything, cannot and may not be this or anything abstractly, not even an identity, but is what he does as Act at its most concrete. It is about this alone that we ask whether it exists, about that, namely, which is that which is, so to say anyhow, this being the Anselmian thought which Aquinas correctly judged was not an argument at all, i.e. not concluding from previous premises of yet greater certainty, an ideal which Hegel too was to judge inapplicable to this truth of truths. In general there is no need to restrict divine creation to the temporal. The whole of traditional angelology assumes this denial, although recourse to the notion of an or the aevum gets substituted for it. Again, the main point of that is not to reintroduce time by the backdoor after expelling it from the front but rather that eternity is proper to God, to the Absolute Idea, alone. The phrase “Absolute Idea” is Hegel’s, who specifies that “the Absolute is

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the Absolute Idea”138, as it would then have to be, and full marks to him for seeing that. Whatever is absolutely is as Idea, while as absolute it knows only itself, i.e. absolutely and/or instantly without succession or repetition, ever new as we would have to say. Aquinas is quite clear that God only or exclusively knows his own ideas, each of which is one with himself and is thus known in the Idea which God is, without needing there to be even aufgehoben. “Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these you did it unto me”, says God incarnate in full consistency, while helping to explain further, this identity, that whatever is other is, as known to God, the same (as himself). We are bound to ask, in further development, in what sense, i.e. what degree of sameness is retained, when speaking of any conscient being, other than God or finite as different. God, anyhow, Aquinas concludes (and it is more than implicit in Hegel), has and can have no real relation with us individual human beings, as without mediation we, or whatever we are, first take ourselves severally to be. His relation, in infinite love, is in each and every case to that idea, or with that idea indifferently, i.e. His idea, of each or any of us, which, along with all the divine ideas, Thomas teaches, is one with himself in each and any case139. The divine simplicity itself requires no less. Thus as ever on this “holy ground” we have to put away shoes or representational crutches for ever, “pray without ceasing” in other, apostolical words, even “to cease all thinking” since thought here is thinking itself as its own object, whether it be ours or God’s. Philosophy cannot and must not hold back from this, thus reducing itself to finitude and its falsity. For it is, at least, in this, as its consummation in sophia, greatest of the specifically intellectual virtues, “devoutly to be wished” that the logic of it, of thinking in particular (i.e. it is emphatically not just a matter of “consciousness” but of unfelt or unrepresented logic), shows. So devotion too, the philia, as a partial variety of conscious attitude, must either cease or find an identity with just consciousness itself, transforming it as much as being transformed by it. The concept of faith, as a virtue, is itself a step in this direction, whether of the esse or of just the bene esse of it. Yet here too the latter option will lead back to the first as more fundamental. Thus that nous has set all in order (Anaxagoras) can be claimed as definitional, as concept and birth, of philosophy rather than as merely a variety of it. Time, then, does appear to be Vorstellung, an a priori form, along with space (whatever we say of the moment or the place), of human cognition in consciousness, as Kant had had it. Thus to identify the a priori is already to be finding one’s way out of it, as Kant, in Hegel’s view, himself failed or 138 139

Cf. Enc. 213. Cf. Summa theol. Ia 15, all articles.

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even refused to see. For it cannot be merely a priori that we thus identify the a priori. Yet Thomas and Augustine, as holding close to the thoughtworld of the first Biblical writers, or as we find retained even in the apocalyptic notions employed from time to time by St. Paul, often write as if God himself were subject to time. We may agree that the literal sense (of canonical Scripture) is to be preferred where possible while not holding these instances to be possible, any more, one inclines to judge, than it was “morally” possible (but can we judge that?) for Origen to take literally (as recommendation of such an act: but was this literally the sense? Literally it is only said that “there be” such heaven-seeking self-made eunuchs!) the Dominical word about self-made eunuchs. It is like nothing so much as St. Peter’s “Lord here are two swords”. He had taken Christ literally, or to the letter which, it was said (surely not literally!), kills. St. Thomas shows awareness of the problem when he thus states, for example again, that God can have no real relation to his creature man, but only a relation of reason as it is called. We as empirical individuals just are nothing for the Idea, for or to God. He relates solely to his idea of us, an idea which, St. Thomas claims, as he does for all the ideas, is one with God himself and so is why and how he loves us in Christ, his Word. This in itself implies absolute idealism, given that one cannot claim that there is some or any actual object to which God does not relate, namely our empirical selves in St. Thomas’s text, which rather “cancels” the empirical, as Hegel might put it. Similarly there cannot be a gap in God between will and effect, the one preceding the other, as if after deliberation. “Heaven forbid that we should attribute such deliberation to God”, St. Thomas exclaims140. Hence, as the absolute idea is the absolute, so is the idea (e.g. of me) the thing or true res. Otherwise why should “I” conform to it? The moral consciousness, in other words, is inseparable, to be true and consistent, from awareness that I who live am not I, realisation of which lies behind most revolts against the same in favour of, we have seen, a falsely conceived “self-assertion”, taking, paradoxically, the form of an identification with the state, this being just another other and indeed a finite other. It is, that is, as St. Thomas affirms, merely natural for man to belong to a state, which is not to say that this is immediately realised. Thus unqualifiedly tribal societies fall short of it. Here too it can be the case that I who live am not I, as, above rather than below this natural posit we have the Pauline “I live yet not I but Christ lives in me”, life as immediate being finally subsumed, under the agency of Spirit, into what is truly the Absolute Idea or, rather, what the latter finally is, in a sophia fully resolving the philia of it, that philia, however, of which Hegel 140

In “On the Eternity of the World”, opusc.

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says that it is already the highest Gottesdienst. “You would not seek me if you had not already found me”, despite those agonies, the angustia St. Thomas so movingly describes as himself divining them concerning those earlier searchers to whom the fuller truth had not been unveiled.141 * Thus God’s is an annihilating love, the divine correlate to the “faith which overcomes the world”. That is, philosophy itself already shows, the love and the faith in it would have to be just this, if, again, it is anything, as philosophy, all the same again, shows that it is, nowhere more so than in these remarkable Hegelian pages. It is in this sense, as Hegel saw, that what is called the ideal is in truth the real. Yet this is simple Aristotelianism, for Aristotle too refused to distinguish between thought and its object. All that is perceived immediately is accidental being, as it is called, the substance of which, as of anything, and whether one or many, is as and in essence invisible, not thus perceived but thought, as mediating it, in and by Spirit, finite or divine, such that this applies as much to bread and wine in their own substantiality as to the body and blood of Christ as divine substance though in an especial sacramental form or way of being, two substances which are really as offered one broken substance but no longer, in either case, bread and wine, according to the faith, that is, of those thus sacrificing. In mediating substance, always and everywhere, thought casts off the immediate (the “accidents”) as as such false. Thus the music I hear, if I hear it aright, is not its substance. Only thus could Beethoven, himself not hearing it, declare music to be “great”, a greater, if not the greatest, “revelation”, This is why the one can become the other, at the altar, as a mystery of faith and of its knowledge alone, without any miraculous change of, precisely, the accidents. It is why or how such a thing can be said and believed. Thus, theologians claim (some of them), no one could have seen Christ rising from the dead, as we believe he did, while if the “ascension” of Christ was seen then this is but figure and sign of Christ’s return into spirit as never having left it. “I came out from my father; I go to my father.” Both are the same. Nor did nor could anyone see the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, but only the wind, flames etc. if that. Conversely these, like all Christ’s miracles, or miracles per se, were and are strictly unnecessary, for faith as such particularly, though for some enabling its birth. “Because you have seen me you believe; blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe”. Thus, like any and every of faith’s dogmas the resurrection 141

Cf. our “The resistance of Thomism to Analytical and Other Patronage”, The Monist, October 1997 (issue on “Analytical Thomism”), pp. 611-617.

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remains a mystery, the “empty tomb” notwithstanding142, something in principle never perceived but leaving the perceptible “in order as it is” (Wittgenstein)143. Perceived miracles are but signs of these mysteries. Change of substance, substantial change, is thus not strictly miraculous, a term normally referred to something we immediately perceive144. Application of this term rather tends to reduce the mysterium fidei, even as does the Protestant retreat into subjectivity historically reacting (as, regrettably, does Hegel145) to this populist misrepresentation (i.e. representation) of faith’s supreme mystery. This mystery attaches to the opus operatum alone of the one, anyone, ordained to its operation (priests, bishops), the one sacrament thus depending upon another, as such ordination too depends upon the celebrant’s baptism and confirmation but not upon whether he himself is in a “state of grace” via personal and/or sacramental penance, or whether he is married or not. Thus by this sacrament faith itself becomes a matter of “belonging to the Church”, “all one body we”, Marching as to war, With the Cross of Jesus Going on before. 142

Tombs and their condition, like the bodies of paralytics before as after their cure, or the mountain Christ declared faith could uproot, are, as regards what of them we see etc., phenomenal only, Vorstellungen. As such they do not “belong to the Concept”. In this sense physical “beauty is vain”, is not the divine beauty as an extra “transcendental predicate” nor even that found in or through art (though perceived in and through the physical and sensibly mutable). 143 The same applies quite clearly, we have noted, to the Immaculate Conception of Mary, but also, it would seem at least, to the mystery of Christ’s birth of an immaculate virgin, before, after and even in partu, compared historically to the risen Christ’s passing through locked doors and as defined against the contrary heresy as condemned of Jovinian. This would not, perhaps could not is the truer picture, have been perceived. What about the transfiguration of Christ, or is that not rather a miracle than a mystery of faith? It does not seem strictly to be a functional part of our belief, of the “one lord, one faith”, is more like the feeding of the five thousand or the healing of the high priest servant’s ear in Gethsemane, which were surely perceived as they are remembered. Yet it was a manifestation to chosen witnesses, who also alone saw Christ after his having thus risen. 144 One might say the same, it is worth noting, of the mystery of faith known as the immaculate conception of Mary, destined after the interval of a few years to become theotokos (as defined in 431 at Ephesus), God-bearer and/or “mother of God”. That is, as strictly unobservable it is something more or other than a miracle, mysterium fidei rather. This phrase has prime usage, however, immediately after, or perhaps one should say “at”, the consecration at the Mass. 145 Enc. 552.

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We are not divided, All one body we ...146

It, faith, is something thought, thought as thus held, here in the past participle sense of “thinked”, an act ever present, at once tranquil and ecstatic, God knowing only his own thoughts, absolutely within himself, which are thus not so much an “only” as an everything, the external being the internal, it too, as Hegel will claim. As Jean-Paul Sartre once in a sense correctly expressed it, thereby evidencing insight, either God exists or man does, though we might also say either both or neither (exist). Thus the Son of God is “the son of man”, a phrase Christ used, though, in referring exclusively to himself. Now these thoughts, any thoughts, have nothing to do with time, leaving aside McTaggartian speculations about his B-series for the moment. God, in and as his thought, is far removed from time. Thus St. Thomas, like Augustine before him, to repeat, emphasises that the causal relation has nothing temporal about it at all, the cause in no essential way being temporally prior to its effect. The boot making the footprint and the footprint itself, again, are simultaneous. Thus where a temporal interval intervenes St. Thomas does not scruple to say the causality is not complete, adding that it is through hastiness merely (Hume?) that this conceptual timelessness is often overlooked. So we find him saying that God could or can quite easily cause something simultaneous with his own being while adding that in being thus caused the effect cannot share in God’s eternity, which is as such uncaused necessarily. Also, just incidentally, it makes no sense to assert that God’s causal activity can have begun after a break or previous period, within the divine trajectory as infinite, where no causality was operating or operates or could operate. We are with the aevum again. Yet neither is God’s action, his manner of being, reducible to a present like the human. This is what gets often misrepresented as “abstract”, as if God were but an “idea” in that sense. He, the living spirit, is rather the soul and substance of thought, something we grope after with our term “consciousness”, even though or just because there is no conscious nature of the (human) 146

From a Salvation Army hymn. Cf. St. Paul’s “Now you are the body of Christ” as the ultimate mysterium fidei again, this itself though in the first instance the “consecrated host”, no pun intended. Cp. Aquinas, in his superb poem for the new feast of corpus Christi: “sumit unus sumunt mille”, where one receives a thousand receive, i.e. in the same reception as “members one of another”. “Now you are the body of Christ.” Spirit is needed for these words to “get a grip” but not only in this supreme instance. It applies to all texts. For the true person of prayer his thoughts fly up, his words remain below, contrary to what happens to the wicked uncle Claudius in Hamlet, lament it though he may. All, then, must pray for grace, even here at the very beginning of what is called “conversion”, of self or its aims.

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thought-process, nor could there be. It would get in the way as much as any other “material” phenomenon. This is why thinking and stopping thinking are the same. So, did the world begin one day? Not, surely, if just that itself constitutes the or a first day. The same must apply to a “last day”. The dies irae, then, is ever with us or, hence, never, as originally posited, painted etc. Religiously believing people for the most part know this so clearly that they prefer to stay with representational language rather than struggle to put the true object (of faith) in more refined language as if claiming to objectify it thus as it is, which no objectification could do, i.e. all language, including the mathematical, is as such representational, even the algebraic “x” representing just, let us say (as, for example, in the “for all x” of a current logical system), some element or other qua element, with “y” and “z” then, as current examples, as second and third ones, while a numerical symbol, say “3” or “iii”, to take just two such, represents, names, that number which, as an idea, an ideal object, as Wittgenstein appears to have claimed, is thus not itself that idea’s representation, linguistic or otherwise, even if Vorstellung clings to any number just as a finite notion. Hence Hegel’s wish to downplay any specifically numerical significance in Trinitarian belief. Hence John of the Cross’s (in praise of silence) “God has spoken only one Word”, himself namely, speaks it, that is in constituting a relation which is itself the second Trinitarian person, from both of whom proceeds, in perfect yet distinct relation, Spirit as distinct or third person of this Absolute Idea which is the Absolute, Hegel affirms, as did Augustine and Thomas, principally, before him, interpreting Scripture and associated Church tradition. So, absolutely speaking (as distinct from career-wise or needing the money, or just enjoying it), one might just as well write in sand, unless one believes one is being of some help somewhere.147 One might add that although, as internal to God, this mystery could only be revealed to us by God himself, yet once revealed it stands before all as a hypothesis open to abundant confirmation, e.g. of the traces of it, once recognised as such148, in preceding yet as also indeed later philosophy or art or religion (as forms of Spirit). 147

It seems, then, at least at first, to be a curious fact that our Arabic numerals lie open to many arithmetical operations a majority of which would have been quite impossible to represent in writing, if not to think, for those limited to the old Roman system. Also, given the Arabic system, we have been able to devise ever more advanced new operations, such as logarithmic calculation. 148 This recognition appears to be proceeding apace, e.g. in work done at the University of Cambridge, England (e.g. by Milbank, Pickstock, Haecker et al.) as, doubtless, now elsewhere.

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* We have talked quite a lot now about grace, as found in Thomas Aquinas’s theological writings particularly. The similarities with Hegel’s account as lying beneath the differences are quite striking, despite my criticism of Hegel for ignoring grace even though it needs to be understood for its role in what the Genesis account of man’s “fall” in Adam (or why not in Eve?) hands down to us. To read St. Thomas on grace149 is to discover a deep family-resemblance, differences apart, between these two accounts, his own and Hegel’s. Grace, for example, is first (although it is more usually distinguished against the intellectual life “natural” to man, as one speaks of grace and/or nature150) what precedes, logically or metaphysically, every action of man, in virtue of God’s being “the first mover” of all that is moved, though it is only grace since or because, in man it moves, is what moves, a free mind or consciousness specifically. Man is never without God as the hypothesised state of “pure nature” can appear to imagine, in deep reification of an abstraction. This is what Scotus meant as being God’s deep because thus so intimate love for man, i.e. his grace. Such grace is certainly not absent from Hegel’s characterisation of man as, indeed, of the intellectual world as a whole. For this first motion of St. Thomas or indeed Aristotle, as nous, is nothing other than the Concept, assuming, identifying with and thus “cancelling” all else as all else exists only, finally, within or, hence, by it. “In God we live and move and have our being”, the Apostle in Luke’s Acts declared (i.e. unreservedly cited from a Greek poet) when the people would have declared them, Paul and Barnabas, gods. That is, there is no motion without this first motion, as if “free” of it. Rather, it is only free in it. For to be free of it would be not to move at all, not to be anything. Yet for Hegel too infinity can do no less, also the exterior procession of creation being within God as being nothing either beside or besides, though differently thus within from God’s Word as “begotten not made” or of Spirit proceeding from both. The division, however, of procession into interior and exterior is but a picture as literally contradicting theological truth, whereby not merely is there nothing outside of God but God has no outside or larger milieu in which He is situated. This, it will be found, is the background to Hegel’s declaring “The Inside is the Outside”151.

149

Summa theol. Ia-IIae, QQ 109-114. Recall K. Rahner S.J.: “Everything is grace”. 151 Cf. Enc. 138. “But Inward and Outward are identified: …” He also there identifies Existence (cf. 122) with the Outward categorially. 150

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For the knowing of anything true whatever (and not only things exceeding the natural cognitive power) man needs divine help for the intellect to be moved by God to its own act.152

This, that in the animals and plants, as we anyhow tend to assume, simply points to their createdness, in man indicates a potentially intimate or personal relation, included by St. Thomas under grace as a gift of unmerited participation, given gratis as we say. This is what Scotus meant as God’s especial and deep love for man, coming to fullest expression in the Christian self-sacrifice for man’s salvation and more. But this, after all, at least seems very close to what is implicit in Hegel, though there it finds expression in a denial that God would let man literally “fall”, i.e. from all grace. Could they both be right, given that Hegel underlines, he too, the need for an “external” mediator, for God made man?153 Perhaps they could, but what remains is that on the grace-view of St. Thomas and orthodox faith the need for such supernatural grace, as a personal or supra-personal gift, is more to the fore. In Hegel it shows up less, this being rather more in line with Hegel’s perceptible animosity, as it can seem, or impatience at least, in The Phenomenology of Mind, against such regular giving of thanks as, for example, grace freely given cannot but elicit. This may be partly because under Lutheranism there is not much liturgical opening, such as the thanksgiving would require, for such an offering as is virtually embodied in the Catholic Mass (eu-charist) as a whole, in the doing of something in grateful “remembrance” or making present again (anamnesis) the true Being, as it is for Hegel also as the Idea Absolute. Thus the Ambrosian (fourth century) Gloria, has, in just the kind of excess of gratitude that a sense of perpetual support by supra-natural grace would, again, elicit, “We give thee thanks for thy great glory”, i.e. that God is what he is, or, hence, is at all. Grace here, then, in its conceptual foundation so to say, for St. Thomas, appears as the constant support of life, of spiritual life. This is very close to Hegel’s account of the Concept as enfolding all, of absorbing the finite to the point of nothingness, just as, for St. Thomas and received theology as a whole, God enfolds, God as the true Being, the first Mover indeed, without whom there could be no movement at all, in the sense moreover of 152

Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia-IIae, 109, 1, emphasis added. The Hegelian writings, lectures, where this is made clear were for the most part not known or available to the nineteenth century secularist Hegelian ideologues and others, though what there was of this kind available was quite often facilely or downright discreditingly explained away. Their mind-set could indeed not credit Hegel’s religious depth. Thus the notion of ideology was evoked so as to be invoked.

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remaining First Mover of every subsequent and/or consequent human action too. That it is called grace stresses the religious note precisely of thankfulness, such as Hegel might feel he should soberly bypass, especially in view of the pietistic movements of his time and place, which he found “sickening”. We must therefore in a measure at least modify or remove our strictures above where we said that he tended to present the Eden story as an account just of man’s growing up, from innocence to true virtue, rather than as a betrayal of divine confidence and “sharing”. Much of this difference turns out to be one of mood and style only. On either account divine, i.e. absolute necessity, is involved, as that by which the call to devotion is evoked, devotion’s own depth, transcending mere emotion, being in direct proportion to the sense, intellectual as we may well call it, of this necessity. “I am wiser than the aged, because I keep thy law” (Psalm 118). Differences there are, however, as we here indicated in connection with the eucharist, Hegel seeming to prefer its Lutheran remains as improvements upon the “old religion”.154 Thus in the second article of St. Thomas, in the treatise on grace, Summa theol. Ia-IIae, question 109, he asks whether man can wish to or can do good at all without grace given, in a state whether of nature whole and hale or, the real situation of man, of corrupt or “fallen” nature indifferently. He replies in the negative as concerning man’s real situation before or after “the fall”, given, that is, or as follows from this, that man was never in a state of “pure nature”: in utroque statu indiget homo auxilio divino, ut ab ipso moveatur ad bene agendum. Both accounts, that is, imply a proportional non-realisation of anything other than or, rather, outside of the Absolute Idea, “in whom we … have our being”. Our deeds are not fundamentally our own at the final count, from which it does not at all follow that we are not to be held responsible for them, though the opening for forgiveness may lie just here. “He remembers that we are but dust”. At this point one might want to point to a difference of approach more fundamental as unaffected by our reducing the weight of these smaller differences. St. Thomas, namely, as a theologian, just here treats of “moral theology”, as it is called, in some way. Thus this short treatise on grace follows immediately upon a seminal treatise on law, eternal, natural, “human” and divine. The virtues and vices, however, which are at the centre of Thomas’s ethical thinking (“moral” is hardly the word) are not treated until the next volume, viz. IIa-IIae, which concludes with an examination of the vows of religion. 154

Cf. Enc. 552.

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In the Hegelian corpus, on the other hand, there is no treatment of morals or ethics until one comes to his final major work, The Philosophy of Right. The Absolute Idea seems, therefore, to transcend this ethical sphere more thoroughly than does the notion of grace. Seems so, that is, until one discovers that this Idea itself is as much practical as theoretical, just in its absoluteness. Will in fact, volition or the (Idea of the) Good itself, inseparable from Trieb or love, is its final manifestation, the last category, before this Idea itself. So, also in Hegel, it is, pace McTaggart, precisely by love155 that the Idea, just as much as grace, is immediately introduced. The unity of Hegel’s thought here, as an Aristotelian, is preserved if we recall the Aristotelian dictum that theoria is itself the highest praxis, though one might well go on to investigate whether it is not rather stressed here that praxis is the highest theoria, in the sense this has for religion, however, and not at all its perversion into elevating praxis above a then despised or simply unknown theoria, perversion into “ideology”, namely. * So, as we said above, grace for St. Thomas is that without which, as an external principle crucially, man cannot do or wish anything good at all, and that not only in his fallen state. It is simply that no good at all occurs without God’s impetus and enfolding as ever first. Viewing it thus we see that Descartes reduced the scope of the divine pre-motion, as of prime causality, as between two virtually univocal agents, on account of his quantitative thinking, thus introducing a dualism foreign to both Thomas and Hegel. This second article (of Ia-IIae, q.109), the question it asks (whether man can will or do good without grace) and the negative answer, underlines the coincidence of an explicitly Christian view in Thomist form and that of Hegel, in many more respects at least than generally supposed156, as we thus continue to affirm here. God’s is the credit for everything that happens, just as of everything that is. Hegel will stress that there is even evil in God, without of course that God is evil. Divine or absolute goodness contains its opposite in absorption, which, nonetheless, Hegel on occasion calls its cancelling. Compare St. Paul’s assertion that God’s Son and, indeed, Word “was made sin for us”, without, it is plainly to be understood, himself sinning.

155

Cp. Enc. 159. There is less stress in Hegel upon grace “building upon” nature, more upon their “contrary workings” (as in the fourteenth century devotional classic, The Imitation of Christ, from which I take this phrase).

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The first mover, that is, is in a sense the only mover, is movement itself (Hegel’s characterisation of spirit) or, to say the same thing differently, the “unmoved mover”. It follows that all other movement, in the whole of creation, is only analogously so as compared to this exemplar. That is this our book’s titular theme, that we only use analogous language of God because we and our language are themselves analogies only of his Word, absorbing them all as Hegel would say. Thus too, the Idea is grace-God, grace-God is the Idea, certainly if one follows Aquinas (and Hegel), or inasmuch as the good and the true coincide transcendentally or in God. This is the perfection that the system of logic, necessarily dialectical, arrives at or ends with after starting from the simplest of notions, most explicitly in the Greater Logic. It arrives at it as the Absolute Idea which is in fact the necessary or true Being (itself ultimately one with the system itself which is logic, promoting the latter rather than demoting the former: “the Absolute Idea is the Absolute”), with a first notion of which we necessarily began (to think). Thus Hegel, who may accordingly be seen as one of those amplifying and further clarifying the Anselmian, Augustinian and yet Biblical Idea. It is only this that might give food to the idea that the so-called Hegelianism of the Left also has something of substance to offer mankind, such as the idea of Marx that the proletariat alone has the truth as something to offer to mankind precisely because it has nothing of its own. A more natural response to this realisation, on the part of an actual individual, would seem to be to struggle to get out of the proletariat as fast as possible, a positive impulse that Marxist collectivism and its attendant tyranny tends to severely put down, as if in becoming a ballet dancer, say, one no longer champions or identifies with the poor. The Christian idea is rather that all can and should identify with everyone. Compare Christ’s “I do nothing of my own, do all things that please Him, my Father”. This everwilling other-identification, however, is something the princess-murdering et al. proletariat (of the year 1917, as ordered “from the top”) can hardly be thought to concur in or approve. Or is this the “evil in God” of which Hegel speaks, no different in that case from the tower in Christ’s time and place that fell on a group of people he expressly declares no more wicked than anyone else? Yet no one gives credit, still less encouragement and even less the reverse, to a tower. * The third article of this first question on grace in St. Thomas, with which we have so far found Hegel’s logic in harmony, asks whether man could love God above all natural things, as, so to say, in the system he is

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commanded to do, without grace. That he could not seems to follow already from what has been said. Inasmuch as the whole world is an analogy of God, our thesis here, God, the true God, establishes and holds in being all that comprises it and it itself in all and above all. So what really might seem to remain to be explained is how an idea, such as we severally are, even though, as topping this, we are members of the one eternal Word, can be graced, i.e. not just due to grace but itself graced. Here we might recall that, theologically at least, i.e. within its definitions, it is the souls of men and women that are graced rather than these persons themselves. We may agree with Rahner that everything is grace while yet remaining aware that “everything” simply means grace itself and that is why it is graced, grace upon grace as we say. Similarly with the Idea. It thinks only itself says Aristotle, as containing in itself this cancellation in and by elevation, says Hegel. Christ lives in you, says St. Paul, clearly not like a beetle in a box but in identity. Christ, God, the Idea, is everything and everywhere. Implicit is this cancellation of things, or the pure potentiality of pure matter. This is what we found lying behind St. Thérèse’s conclusion that death is the separation of the soul from the body “and that is all it is”, in complete harmony with Hegel’s unqualified assertion that “death is the entry into spirit”. When we read St. Thomas saying anima mea non est ego we easily misread it against the background of the traditional talk about “separated” souls. That there is nothing for a soul to be separated from is rather what is or should be implied157, while the ego we refer to within this life is just what we are called upon to get rid of. “I live yet not I”. “I in you and you in me!” Hence Hegel tends to dismiss talk of souls as a kind of thing-ing of spirit, reducing it to a life-principle. I, by contrast, is “the universal of universals”, he says, referring neither to a linguistic usage directly nor to any object at all. “I” refers rather to the miracle of miracles, that the subject’s consciousness cannot explain to itself how it comes to be at all except as by some incomprehensible election, whether of an eternal possibility or of a freshly minted invention of the divine mind.158 What, then, is the soul? In Hegel it seems clear that it is the idea put forward as a thing, just what a form is not. So when forms are spoken of as existing without matter, in separation or as angelic, or as God himself, it is ideas or the Idea that are or is under discussion. God truly thinks himself and 157 Conversely, the corpus of the feast named corpus Christi is in no sense some separated flesh, is Christ simply in sacramental form and that is what we worship. The separation of bread and wine is representation merely of a life laid down in sacrifice, the whole Christ, it is taught, being identical with each separated element. Hence the possibility of full communion “in one kind”. 158 Cf. our “Other Problems about the Self”, Sophia (Australia), 1984.

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this, i.e. logic, is “the true being” And so it is with the grace that moves us. It is the Idea, the Idea Absolute, First Mover of all that is moved. As rational beings most evidently we have that close upon close union with the Idea, the divine mind in its grace, in our going out and our coming in, first or last. So closely does God love or care for or about “the rational creature” and must, as God, do so, however much or little he may care for other beings. By this it might seem that it is, after all, only in a state of “corrupted” nature that man needs grace to love God as he should above all things. In itself he does not need grace for this supremely natural love in any state at all, be it corrupt or incorrupt indifferently, although, adds St. Thomas, he does need even for this the help of grace as healing nature. The situation is rather complex as depicted, indeed dialectical. We need help for that which needs no help, this being the misery of corruption. As much as anything we are reminded of Hegel’s criminal seeking healing for his crime by committing it, just as much or inasmuch as seeking punishment etc. afterwards as “fitting” it, crime being nonetheless its own punishment just inasmuch, again, as by the crime itself its punishment is sought. Significant is that the dialectical element thus enters into Aquinas’s thought but not as “thematised” as such, as it is in Hegel’s logic specifically. Nonetheless the finding here is that the Idea Absolute is the same terminus for spirit as is grace for St. Thomas. Hence, again, we have the Rahnerian “Everything is grace”, as the Idea in Hegel is the infinite, i.e. everything as all, to which nothing can be added since nothing, the other, except as absorbed and hence the same in its otherness, is inconceivable. Hegel thus repeats Aquinas without, we may have some reason to believe, knowing it. But whom they both knowingly follow is Aristotle. Thomas’s commentaries upon Aristotle continue to receive high praise, e.g. by the late Eugene Gendlin in his own commentary upon the De anima.159 * After having asked whether man could be in a state of loving God above all things and answered this with a perhaps qualified affirmative (qualified in so far as this pure state of nature is itself a state of corrupted nature: for he does not directly ask whether a state of pure uncorrupted nature, as with the souls he had hypothesised as in limbo, is possible – thus he says elsewhere, 159

Eugene T. Gendlin, Line by Line Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima II & III (2 vols.), The Focusing Institute, Spring Valley, New York State, 2012. See also F. Inciarte, Substance and Action, George Ohms Ltd., Hildesheim 2002, especially the chapter translating Inciarte’s original article “Die Einheit der aristotelischen Metaphysik” (in Philosophisches Jahrbuch 1994, 1e Halbband, pp. 1-22).

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again, that what can fail at some time does fail) Aquinas asks, at Article Four, whether man without grace could naturally keep the precepts of the law, as distinct from thus loving God wholly. St. Thomas is able to ask this question because of what, in reference to Kant, Hegel called “tenderness towards the empirical” and which he regards as an actual drawing back from philosophy proper. The precepts of the law, namely, can in a Hegelian perspective belong only to the domain of representation (Vorstellung), referring often, as they do, to empirical entities rather than to universal concepts (as distinct from concepts of such entities). It is possible that Christians as such, represented by this Christian and sainted doctor here, do do this, do “draw back from philosophy proper”. Thus philosophy has been traditionally spoken of as “the serving-maid (ancilla) of divine science or theology”. In St. Thomas’s own day, for example, philosophy as such had virtually disappeared, until the Latin Averroist movement, which St. Thomas fought tooth and nail so to say, got going. Hegel, on the other hand, in one act both affirms Christian faith and states that philosophy is the highest worship (höchste Gottesdienst). I hold that these states of affairs are reconcilable with one another, as I have argued, to the best of my ability, in many published instances. It is only after the time of St. Thomas that philosophy became accepted again on the academic scene as something other than ancillary, in its own right, that is to say, as in fact, as its name suggests, fulfilled only in contemplation, viz. sophia, highest intellectual virtue. This hinders mutual understanding or indeed any contact at all. Add to this that Hegel explicitly aimed at a complete rapprochement between Christianity and philosophy, as höchste Gottesdienst in a so to say thematised “revelation”, such as a Christian and Catholic thinker such as the late Joseph Pieper set his faces against, stressing as humility the insufficiency which might seem implied by the prefix philo-. This is one way of reacting to St. Paul’s distinction between the wisdom of the world and the “foolishness” of God, by which he in fact means the highest wisdom, as final gift of the Holy Spirit, already therefore sounding quite Hegelian, I cannot forbear to add. Yet, or just therefore, there is no suggestion in Hegel that this final wisdom could be expressed in or by a tongue, lingua, language. He remarks rather that this medium, and such it is, is forever marked by finitude, due to its essential origins in immaturity and/or babyhood and to its hence inescapable reflection or portrayal, in its structures, of nature as the other of God. Thus, as regards God as our aim, the only mediator, and Hegel argues forcefully that mediation is necessary since anything immediate would be false, is not language, but neither is it silence, the negative as such, virtue though this may be. Rather it has to be God himself, the End, proposing

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himself as means, in His own incarnation as man in Jesus Christ. This internal duality, however, is so essential in God as to be his constitutive selfdiffusion. It is his Word, the Word so perfect as to be not distinguishable from the perfect or rather infinite utterer. Thus Trinitarianism, in the spirit, in the sense of internal personal relations, is found to be, if distinguishable, yet not separable ontologically, so to say, from the divine project of love for man. This, however, is precisely what is found in Thomas Aquinas, e.g. in his question on the divine missions (sendings) with which he ends his treatise on the Trinity, whatever we may think of the somewhat diffuse or en passant character of Hegel’s Trinitarian speculations in The Phenomenology of Mind particularly.160 So Hegel draws no bounds for philosophy here, as neither does St. Thomas for the highest “intellectual virtue” which is, in fact, wisdom, sophia, sapientia, where in fact, again, true knowledge is tasted, is a tasting (sapor), a being touched, as if of the senses in their immediacy. This is sufficient, I would judge, to show that there is no essential conflict between the approach of Hegel in his day and of St. Thomas in his. Hegel himself stresses that this factor of “the day” cannot be transcended by our explicit thought. The saying of this, however, already outlines that there are also truths that escape this limit, the first of which is God himself who, however, has spoken and ever speaks “only one word” (St. John of the Cross, praising silence as an ascetic virtue or in respect of prayer). * What St. Thomas and Hegel have in common here is further brought out by the final three or four articles of this quaestio, this “seeking”, literally, upon grace as an “exterior principle”, whereby it assimilates all the more closely to the Absolute Idea as traced by Hegel. Just as Hegel stresses the absorption of all things, all realities, in the Absolute Idea, in the Encyclopaedia from paragraph 159 right through to the end of the third section on “The Notion” (or concept) which this paragraph introduces, so St. Thomas brings out with especial emphasis that “everything is grace” indeed, is thus initially and throughout moved primarily and solely by God and only analogously after the fashion of creatures in their own naïvely mistaken estimation. He further adds to this certain special extra reasons for the necessity of so thinking, not so spelled out in Hegel but less needed since he has stressed the first aspect 160

This is supplemented by Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. III, and, obliquely at least, by his unfinished Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God. Cf. our Thomas Aquinas and Georg Hegel on the Trinity, CSP, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2020.

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so much, of the primacy of the Notion, whereof every part is identical with the whole and so on, the finite being truly absorbed in what is the polar opposite of pantheism. I list the titles with summaries of contents of St. Thomas’s closing three “seekings” (i.e. three quaestiones):161 1: “Whether man without grace is able not to sin?” Yes, in this state of integral nature he was thus able but in our actual corrupt nature man needs habitual, i.e. constant grace to avoid sin of any and every kind (omnino), even if for limited periods he can abstain from sin. 2: “Whether having obtained grace man can of himself live well and avoid sin without further help of or from grace?” He cannot, even granted that he does not need the same habitual help over again in infinite regress. He needs rather the help of grace in another way, that of being moved by God directly, or without let-up so to say, to act rightly. As St. Thomas points out, this is a general point about created things, but with special application to fallen human or rational nature, which although healed as regards mind retains corrupt infection in the flesh (quantum ad carnem: this need not be translated dualistically; one can speak with St. Paul of the old man and the new man, etc.). 3: “Whether man once graced needs still help from grace to persevere?” Well, although he states that perseverance is precisely what is infused by grace at its first reception, just as is continence and the other virtues, yet he adds a fine distinction. Namely, since perseverance just is the continuation in grace, viz. the good life, to life’s end yet man, thus constituted in grace, although not needing some other habitual grace over again, still ever needs divine help directing him and protecting him against the impulses of temptation, and this is the special gift of perseverance as somehow going beyond the mere quality, the being not led into temptation but delivered from evil of the Lord’s Prayer as Thomas touchingly reminds here. He adds, not without a certain touch of circularity perhaps, that much grace is given to those who do not persevere. For what else then, as it seems proposed, was the first perseverance mentioned? It might help us here to recall a later spiritual writer, Fr. De Caussade SJ (Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence). He states at one point that there is a time when God dwells in the soul and a time when the soul lives in God. It is admittedly a bit difficult to decide which of these is meant as the more advanced state but one can see the difference between two states ultimately the same (as one finds so often in Hegel, of set purpose on his part). In the one state one bears one’s

161

Summa theol. Ia-IIae, Q109, articles 8-10.

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grace as a treasure, in the other the grace of God carries one along willy nilly. The closeness of this, of these three articles, to Realised End and other doctrines of Hegel can hardly be missed, as nor can an element of predestination, I venture to suggest, the “pre-” being of course a temporal figure for what is eternal, rocklike and sure. “I shall not die but live”, runs the Davidic psalm 117 (118), originally a warrior-song of sorts. The closeness between the two authors is their grasp of the idea of God as God, this idea which is God, than which a greater cannot be thought (Anselm). * The doctrines of grace or of the Idea bring the subject and God extraordinarily close together, recalling perhaps the “I am that” of the Indians, or the ecstatic identification with God of Al Hallaj (it cost him too, under God, his life). The so-called “anthropic principle” can well be viewed as a cosmic variant upon this, except that in saying all is for man or from the point of view of man one has not yet said that man is God. This is also the missing piece of McTaggart’s jigsaw, lost in his case in the name of freedom. A god could just decide to destroy man, he thought, rightly or wrongly, and then man would not be free as logic if nothing else (but not only logic) shows that he must be. By this principle, not necessarily idealist, the enormous cosmic distances are claimed to be in essential relation to man, his thinking and his needs. This may or may not be taken as relativising whatever was otherwise thought absolute in man’s thinking (as it would have to be absolute to devise the theory of evolution as true, even though this evolution should include that of this mind itself). This is Hegel’s position, for whom in any case number and material distance lie “outside the concept”, as does quantity generally, though reckoned as a concept (!), as nature is reckoned too as the concept of which it is yet denial in its particularisation and consequent selfalienation. It has to be asked how far the concept of man himself is affected by this. In so far as we become identified with thought, or souls in some systems, are we still man? Should we want to be? These were “hot” questions for Augustine. To be open to this view is not against the incarnation, of which St. Paul says that God chose what is not in order to confound what is. “The last man became a living spirit”. Is it always, though, man who thinks, in order thus to cancel or fulfil himself indifferently? Or is that the first step towards thought, or the thought of thought(!), as “thought thinking itself”?

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Must it not be this? In cancellation of mere opinion? We are born, that is, as having to develop through time, perfecting what is else mere potential. This, is matched by truth’s, for Hegel, having to be a result, in virtue of which it is truth, he seems to indicate, as thus overcoming what initially presented itself as pure opposition in or as imperfection, immaturity, or by its having to find out within time’s illusion that we were not born at all and shall not die, since we do not live, since life, in Hegel’s perception, is “only the idea immediate” (its title, however, for its being a category of mind or logic at all). In time, that is, we find out time’s nothingness. This is the true meaning of a thousand years being with the Lord the same as a day, not merely that God can vary his miles per hour indifferently. In any case, “Whatever is immediate is false”, this being also, in Hegel but not only there, the problem of the starting-point. “With what must (or can) science begin?”162 * So we find that the seemingly infinite quantities of space and time in our universe, used to strengthen intuitions of man’s insignificance, really work the other way. Only by thus exceeding our grasp do we have an environment that leaves us free and which, as those supporting the so-called “anthropic principle” are finding, is astonishingly tuned to our needs, without which we could not survive. They would have to be thought, that is, as being in the way that they are. This theory, however, remains within the finitely realist paradigm of traditional theology and Biblical literalism, as against the realisation generation by generation that it is the spiritual sense of Scripture that has to be grasped more and more. One should, according to St. Thomas, we have noted, prefer the literal sense where possible, but this is a diminishing possibility, besides being an ambiguous concept. It is always possible to castrate oneself, like Origen, but was this more spiritual just by being more literal?163 The case is rather the opposite. “Will he give us his flesh to eat?” asked Christ’s hearers at one point, and give it he did, but under the sacramental form of being or as spiritual. Only when faced with incomprehension did Christ tell his friends plainly, “Lazarus is dead”, having preferred otherwise to say that he sleeps and “I go to wake him”. We 162

Title, effectively, with parenthesis added, of the first section of Hegel’s The Science of Logic (GL, 1812), First Book. Cf. our Hegel’s Theology or Revelation Thematised for a line by line commentary on just this section: CSP Newcastle, 2018, pp. 41-75 (Chapter Six). 163 As a question this makes or passes no judgment upon Origen (c.185-253), perhaps the greatest mind among the early Church fathers.

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may recall his words on entering the house of the deceased child, or so it was taken that she was: “She is not dead but sleepeth”. It seems here as if he really wanted to deny the reality of death as mankind has usually taken it, as he did of his own in actu. Yet, we must confess, he really did die. What, though, is the force of this “really”? “No birth no death”, say, again, some Buddhists. Death belongs with representation and that is why, deeply, God did not make it, though he says, to our first parents, “You shall surely die” if you eat the forbidden fruit. Thus death, says Hegel, from the idealist standpoint, “is the entry into spirit”. This standpoint, however, is purely that of Christ: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”, that which the evangelist says he “gave up”. So, “Death, where is thy sting? Where grave thy victory?” There seems a sense in which the Gospel has revealed this, even as confirming an intuition maybe, in which we should trust. “I shall not die but live”, cried the warrior king and poet, again, and we repeat this in church. Nonetheless, “Der Tod ist schlimm” (words, as I have mentioned elsewhere, of the then recently widowed Joseph Pieper to the author when out walking during my stay in Münster. They hit home!). Indeed, it can seem that the music of believers in resurrection strikes deeper into this agony than any other, Bruckner’s seventh and ninth symphonies, the adagios, for instance, with which compare, contrast rather, his setting of the final Psalm, number one hundred and fifty. My point, I suppose, is that there is no literal sense of death or of anything else. The letter (littera) kills indeed, kills even our sense of death. Yet “the spirit gives life”. * We said that the anthropic principle idea did not go far enough in making out that the universe must be meant for man, to support man. Man is the universe, which, the true one, is not a matter of dust, winds, empty spaces or even plants, animals and/or viruses in a separated and external nature. The “beauty of the bodies of the redeemed”164, in the resurrection, more than compensates for the absent separateness of these, Aquinas would or does affirm, which are thus mere traces of what we just thoughtlessly put in a temporal or natural future, as if the flesh just named will not be as transfigured, will appear eternally so and thus in the divine Idea is so as I write, if it is to be at all, as was Christ’s once on earth, though only shown on one occasion of literal transfiguration. Meanwhile,

164

Thomas Aquinas, in the section of the Supplement (consisting mainly of texts taken from his earlier Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard) to the unfinished Summa theologica dealing with the general resurrection.

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“He’ll be there if you want him” said a priest once to me of a much loved recently dead dog. Not, surely though, by a mere taking up of an old pastime, there where all that is loved in dogs lives differently, since each part there is identical with the whole166, though how else do we perceive things “here” in our best moments (they being as best equally “there”, McTaggart would claim167)? This, in turn, however, teaches us how to view and value earth’s good things here and now, where each is bearer of all, a grain of sand, a lily or, supremely (as, in voto at least, transcending earth), a person. Indeed these things must all become personal, infinitely, or, it is the same, be “cancelled” (aufgehoben). “This also is thou …”, all of us knowing, of course, that “neither is this thou”. These supreme intuitions are what justifies Hegel’s logic, growing out of it as the latter grows out of them. * So from our or Hegel’s point of view the anthropic principle is on the right lines at least. “The proper study of mankind is man”, wrote Alexander Pope in the eighteenth century, precisely what seems abstained from in the texts of, say, Carl Sagan as representative as among the theorists of evolution. They do not stop to consider that it is man himself who is evolving these thoughts upon his own evolution, the evolution, one cannot avoid interpreting, of his very thinking power itself, which yet by these premises 165

From Francis Thompson’s poem, “The Hound of Heaven”. Compare Christ’s “Unless a man hate his life in this world he cannot be my disciple”, often misunderstood as mere Semitic (sic) exaggeration. This package must be taken whole or not at all. “No man can serve two masters”. Its difficult doctrine, however, is thus ipso facto the easiest of all (a seeming paradox accounted for in some measure at least by Hegel’s system of logic) as “yoke”, a “light burden”, it is added. So, “learn of me”. This position, in fact, finds support, before Christian times, in Aristotle, when he affirms that the philosopher or man as thinker does best by a kind of practice of death (as itself immortalising: athanatizein), death, namely, to all else (what else is death?) since “a little of this”, sc. thought, knowledge, understanding, “is worth more than all of the rest” (On the Parts of Animals VI). 166 Cf. Hegel, Enc. 159-160, i.e. the transition of his doctrine from Essence to the Concept as, the latter, “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” (160). 167 Note how the beatitudes in future tense of Matthew 5 are framed, first and last, by two expressed as present.

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could be no guarantor of truth at all168. Truth, indeed, is what was classically defined, by Augustine in particular, as undeniable, since this denial, to carry weight, would be either true or false, in either case indifferently a straight contradiction, i.e. it does not merely “lead” to this. Above all it is important to grasp that the anthropic principle is not a philosophical principle at all. For that one has to progress towards a comprehensive, that is to say absolute form of idealism, such as we have been considering here. By this it is not at all sure that the proper study of mankind is man and is not rather, say, thought as such. Kant moved halfheartedly towards this when instead of man he spoke of the rational creature. By absolute idealism, however, man becomes rather a mystery to himself, a conundrum, such as one is forced to ask: am I, or in what sense am I, I? Hegel’s answer, that I, or should one write “I”, am (or is? this is not at all certain) “the universal of universals”. Decline, declination, to the third person (hence oblique like those “cases” of nouns) is already compromise, in view of the fact, or of Hegel’s express statement, that the Idea is the individual, in whom all is absorbed or, again, cancelled indifferently. The anthropic principle, namely, envisages a spatio-temporal world, universe, arranged for or by (it is the same) man. It does not itself go so far as to say that man is the universe, as I suggested above. Man is placed in a theatre, easily seen temporally as pre-existent, though in accordance with the one divine design. This, by Hegel’s reckoning, would remain a phenomenology rather than a philosophy, as he suggests that Kant was more of a phenomenologist than a philosopher, just in virtue of his “tenderness toward the empirical”. But for absolute idealism everything lives and moves and has its being in God, and this “in” is clearly not a spatial “in” but rather an indirect evocation of identity, albeit a rather special one-way identity, that of absorption again, although the drive of spirit, even of finite spirit, if one may ever suitably call finite what is essentially capax Dei (here we see the potential fusion of 168

For trenchant statements of this objection from the viewpoint of natural science itself see, again, some articles by the anthropologist Axel Randrup of Copenhagen which may be found on the Internet (International Center for Interdisciplinary Psychiatric Research, CIRIP). Cf. Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, ed. H. Burkhardt and B. Smith, Philosophia Verlag GmbH, Munich 1991: “Cosmology I: Metaphysics” (George Gale), final paragraph especially citing John Wheeler: “when coupled to the quantum principle ‘only the observed is real’ the existence of human observers in some sense generates the real universe” (pp. 184-5); also “Worlds, Possible Worlds” (Steven J. Dick): “the last few decades have seen a conjoining of the two traditions of real and possible worlds in the form of the cosmological anthropic principle” (pp. 949-950).

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Scholastic Aristotelianism with absolute idealism as its further development rather than as a challenger), is towards just this absorption whether as absorbing or as being absorbed indifferently. Again: “There is a time when the soul lives in God and a time when God lives in the soul”. The mystical writers, even those of mystical theology (as distinct from spiritual counselling), strive to attain the philosophic mode, but it is not their main preoccupation, as I have noted that religious persons too are not much bothered as to whether they use more or less figurative expressions, happy, for example, to recite daily a Psalter in which everything spiritual is couched in terms of battles and daily human concerns generally. And so, what is the Cross? It is I, the I, crossed out, say some English-speakers immediately. Yet it is just not that but a piece of wood fashioned for torture and death of others. Clearly this linguistic oddity, or necessity, doesn’t matter much, or even has much to commend it. Spirit needs the letter to bring out what it is or is not equally. Man, then, in the necessary mediator, in the Christ anointed as “the last man” become “a living spirit”, has to become himself a living spirit, to which the risen body is no hindrance, being rather nothing apart from that spirit. We have to remember that the original conception of matter was that of pure potency. It is, simply, the underlying passive principle of a changing and hence spatio-temporal world. It is thus not in itself anything. The fantasy taken on by the empirical scientists (just what they are not in this) has not much to do with this classical conception of matter while Hegel notes with regret the adoption in physics at some point in the late medieval scene of the a priori empiricism (!) involved. The Scriptures speak of flesh as grass, either of which they dismiss as nothing, “which today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven”. They do not speak of it as matter. The search, therefore, for the final particle, if it were successful, would be the end of matter, since this particle would itself have some form or would be it rather if matter is not to be reconceived as again lying behind the particle, thus no longer ultimate after all. Thus Hegel concludes that matter and form are the same. Note here, as I mentioned, that the anthropic principle doctrine is more of a phenomenology than it is in itself a philosophy. Thus its subject is the material universe of immediate representation, routinely miscalled perception. For Hegel, as McTaggart correctly interprets, the Absolute Idea contains, upholds and cancels all lesser ideas which are thus merely ideal, or merely “thought” or imagined by us: they exist in our consciousness but are not true being. Hence Existence itself is a finite category of the Logic,

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destined for cancellation in Aufhebung.169 It leads thought into the Thing and eventually Matter, a trio concerning which Hegel says in critique that it, they, are “no better than a whim of the Understanding”. This moment of the Logic thus can be seen also as part of his trenchant rebuttal of “the critical philosophy”, of Kant namely.170 This confusion of philosophy with the phenomenology of much of even the most recent “science” (the reduction of this name from its classical meaning of knowledge or even knowing as such is here significant, as leading to the error as already even linguistically established) or cosmology should not be missed as awareness of it is crucial for a right understanding of creation, the tying of which to a realist metaphysics (hardly just epistemology) is not at all the badge of “creation stricto sensu” but rather the reverse, a kind of lapse, again, into Biblical literalism. For, again, “in God we live and move and have our being”. Thus D. Wilkinson171, in criticism of Stephen Hawking’s theory, speaks of “the anthropic fruitfulness of the universe”, in that “its structure seems to be sensitively tuned to the existence of life”. Here too, however, what we see, timebound as we are, as the emergence of life should rather be seen as a refining correction of knowledge, still our knowledge and as such becoming self-consciousness, which takes up and, again, “cancels” the previous “realist” position. Thus in the Genesis account, certainly not uninspired after all, Adam names the beasts and, therefore, everything else. He, the last, comes first, just as, in Christian belief as theologically accounted for, creation adds nothing to God, in whom it, we and all things have their being. As such it does not “develop with time”, mainly because God himself is not “in time” as is so often thoughtlessly put, an attitude seemingly carried over to the “big bang” theory, a representation if ever there was one, however much decorated mathematically. When it is said that God is not “in time” this is equivalent to saying that there is no time. Otherwise God is being excluded. So when it is said that with God a day is as a thousand years, again, this is a critique of days, years and thousands, not of God. It is under the influence of Christian learning or of philosophy or theology (first philosophy) itself that we have come to an “absolute idealism” discernible already, nonetheless, in Plato, Aristotle and much ancient Greek philosophy, reached eventually in Scripture too if not indeed implicit from the beginning but not able to be taken up into the conscious belief system of worshippers lacking the necessary sophistication, 169

Cf. Enc. 123-124 Ibid. 40-60. 171 D.A. Wilkinson, “Cosmology”, in New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics, Inter-Varsity Press, Leicester and Illinois, 2006, pp. 182-185. 170

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a state regrettably at times abetted by some lesser clergy or those not engaged in scholarship, either in a sharing of the naivete or from some kind of cynical calculation (or this as well meant: the two properties are not after all mutually exclusive, as Hegel’s logic would be able to show), it is to be feared.172

172

Cf. our “Creation stricto sensu”, New Blackfriars, Vol. 89, No. 1020, March 2008, replying to Richard Gildas, “Examen critique du jugement de Hegel sur la notion de creation ex nihilo”, http://philo.pourtous.free.fr/Articles/Gildas.

CHAPTER SIX CERTITUDE

In Cardinal Saint John Henry Newman’s173 study of 1870, A Grammar of Assent, we can read the following: I will take an example. Let us suppose we are told on an unimpeachable authority, that a man whom we saw die is now alive again and at his work, as it was his wont to be; let us suppose we actually see him and converse with him; what will become of our certitude of his death? I do not think we should give it up; how could we, when we actually saw him die? At first, indeed, we should be thrown into an astonishment and confusion so great, that the world would seem to reel round us, and we should be ready to give up the use of our senses and of our memory, of our reflective powers, and of our reason, and even to deny our power of thinking, and our existence itself. Such confidence have we in the doctrine that when life goes it never returns. Nor would our bewilderment be less, when the first blow was over; but our reason would rally, and with our reason our certitude would come back to us. Whatever came of it, we should never cease to know and to confess to ourselves both of the contrary facts, that we saw him die, and that after dying we saw him alive again. The overpowering strangeness of our experience would have no power to shake our certitude in the facts which created it. Again, let us suppose, for argument’s sake, that ethnologists, philologists, anatomists, and antiquarians agreed together in separate demonstrations that there were half a dozen races of men, and that they were all descended from gorillas, or chimpanzees, or ourang-outangs, or baboons; moreover, that Adam was an historical personage, with a well-ascertained dwelling-place, surroundings and date, in a comparatively modern world. On the other hand, let me believe that the Word of God himself distinctly declares that there were no men before Adam, that he was immediately made out of the slime of the earth, and that he is the first father of all men that are or ever have been. Here is a contradiction of statements more distinct than in the former instance; the two cannot stand together; one or other of them is untrue. But whatever means I might be led to take, for making, if possible, the antagonism tolerable, I conceive I should never give up my certitude in that truth which on sufficient 173

Born in 1801, Newman is of the generation immediately succeeding upon Hegel’s.

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grounds I determined to come from heaven. If I so believed, I should not pretend to argue, or to defend myself to others; I should be patient; I should look for better days; but I should still believe. If, indeed, I had hitherto only half believed, if I believed with an assent short of certitude or with an acquiescence short of assent, or hastily or on light grounds, then the case would be altered; but if, after full consideration, and availing myself of my best lights, I did think that beyond all question God spoke as I thought he did, philosophers and experimentalists might take their course for me, - I should consider that they and I thought or reasoned in different mediums, and that my certitude was in as little collision with them or damaged by them, as if they attempted to counteract in some great matter chemical action by the force of gravity, or to weigh magnetic influence against capillary attraction. Of course, I am putting an impossible case for philosophical discoveries cannot really contradict divine revelation. So much on the indefectibility of certitude; as to the question whether any other assent is indefectible beside it, I think prejudice may be such; but it cannot be confused with certitude, for the one is an assent previous to rational grounds, and the other an assent given expressly after careful examination. It seems then that on the whole there are three conditions of certitude; that it follows on investigation and proof, that it is accompanied by a specific sense of intellectual satisfaction and repose, and that it is irreversible. If the assent is made without rational grounds, it is a rash judgment, a fancy, or a prejudice; if without the sense of finality, it is scarcely more than an inference, if without permanence, it is a mere conviction.174

The approach of faith, as we may for the moment call it, exemplified here is clearly of a character analogous, and possibly more than so, to that which we have been calling here and in other publications absolute idealism. This is in itself remarkable, yet hardly refutable. The explanation is best found in systems such as Hegel’s which treat of both religion and philosophy as forms not merely of spirit, i.e. mind (Geist in Hegel), but of absolute mind, along with the work and works of art but not including that of the finite sciences or, indeed, of specifically moral theory or, as this is called in some places or institutes, “practical philosophy”. What is meant, rather, by “philosophy”, in Hegel particularly here, is metaphysics or “first philosophy”, so much first, indeed, that it looks towards or aims at sophia or wisdom itself and is not merely a comparatively hopeless love for or towards it. Whether or not, that is to say, the means towards such wisdom be divine grace or some purely natural approach may thus be left as a separate question. This would be, after all, a dilemma between two sources, between 174

J.H. Newman, A Grammar of Assent, 1870, New Edition, edited with a Preface and introduction by Charles Frederick Harrold, 1947, Longmans, Green and Co., New York, London, Toronto, pp. 194-196.

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which, if indeed they are two and we don’t even know that, simply speaking, various different relations might be held to obtain, such as one-way absorption, merging or some other systematic ordering. Thus we don’t clearly know how, as we may glibly declare, how grace, say, by its own nature, “builds upon” the first nature or just where along the line the join, should this be the right image, is to be found. The topic, the item of faith, subsuming these varying explanations, is of course that of “original sin”. We are, then, just therefore scarcely equipped to delimit any supposed differences. Grace is thus also a mysterium fidei in the sense outlined and discussed above. Only faith can prevent us mistaking it for our own natural capacity while, as Rahner has it, “Everything is grace”, which is almost the most plain lesson of Hegel’s philosophy, that everything comes from the Idea, itself. This is therefore not a passive principle to be discovered merely (the error of Plato in contrast to Aristotle, Hegel avers). This must be true, even if it brings with it a temptation to deny grace altogether, as being then unfalsifiable, as creation is itself the first grace, granted by definition to the created exclusively. Temptation, though, it certainly is, as was yesterday’s “logical positivism” with its “verification principle” as or when absolutised. This acceptance by faith, so to say, or Newman’s certitude itself, his “assent”, could be called the yes/no certitude, though for Newman that, with its dialectical ring, might seem for sure to acquiesce too much in, while yet meaning to cancel, the difficulty. One should rather “be patient … look for better days”, he says, i.e. not trifle one iota with one’s certitude (like St. Thomas meeting his objectors, even explaining them to themselves at times). There is indeed a theory, explored also in certain novels, that, say, what are called Neanderthalers became extinct through competition with consciousnesses better fitted to survive but, this theory runs, less intelligent or rational than the race thus extinguished all the same. Our struggle since then would thus be seen as one to get back what we had ruthlessly destroyed in our brother, as in the Cain and Abel interpretation or story. By this, though, the Darwinian premium on mere survival is already abandoned. Religion, or veneration for the good or the beautiful, worked against it from the start. This apart, there seems glaring contradiction in supposing ourselves capable of engendering or finding evidence for a true story of an infallible reason (it has to be that, as the presumption behind investigation itself) developing from a mere interest in survival. Survival is not self-evidently the summum bonum, far from it. If one should follow this line of reasoning one might well find oneself reacting not very differently from Hegel to much that is put about concerning various prehistoric animal and other relics. Nothing, he stresses, is more sure of itself than rational consciousness;

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it cannot be a chance-development, upon these or any other lines. The chance development, that is, cannot take the place of an absolute guarantee of reason’s credentials. For this, by Hegel’s reasoning in particular, is not able to be less than intrinsic, surely by divine gift alone, though this may be expressed as reason’s self-guarantee175. Yet it is only when this be granted that we come to see that it is indeed God’s “gift” or, indeed, absolute spirit within us, whether by nature or by grace or both intertwined. This, however, makes of man a very fragile creature inasmuch as one placed in the “natural” world, there being no proportion there between such “gifts” and the subhuman environment. * “I should assume that they and I thought in different mediums … and wait for better days”. This, from 1870, from Newman, is or seems different, and yet not entirely different, from the Christian believer’s approach today. We have seen how Darwinism has meshed together with the increasingly united empiricist coverage of the necessary objects of empiricism, viz. phenomena. Mythical accounts, not at all identifiable with false accounts (this was by and large Mircea Eliade’s main thesis, i.e. that myths are not false), meanwhile, remain indeed “thought in a different medium”. But to some extent Newman’s “better days” have arrived, though this may not be so clear to a majority of empiricist scientists. That is, the medium, his medium, is not merely different, but “absolutely” right as contrasted with what is essentially a web of misperception, in accordance with the philosophies of Hegel or McTaggart among others, inclusive of Aristotle, as Hegel himself demonstrates, as chief. This is quite simply demonstrated by the immense contradiction we have pointed out as found in the evolutionary hypothesis, whereby rational man descends by a variety of chances from the non-human non-rational. A better evolutionary hypothesis is not excluded by this consideration, while in general my point here would be that, as Newman already seemed to divine, natural science and theology operate in such disparate sets of circumstances that opposition between them cannot be more than occasioned, cannot be one of principle, as was long too easily assumed, surviving as easy fodder for today’s populist ideologies, however. 175

Cp. Cicero, De legibus, II, 4, 10: reason is divine and therefore law: “This reason began to be law, not when it was written down, but when it originated (cp. here Aquinas’s distinction, in ST IIa-IIae, between lex, as aliqualis ratio iuris, and ius) simultaneously with the divine mind. Hence the true and supreme law having to do with commanding and forbidding is the right reason of Jupiter the highest” (parenthesis added).

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Newman may or may not have succeeded in seeing this, beyond what he tells us in the passage cited. Yet such was his certitude in faith that he did indeed wait for the better days now come, his faith not failing. Waiting was his posture. One is reminded of how St. Thomas’s principle that the literal interpretation of Scripture is ever preferable where possible holds equally today while clearly differing as to when and where this possibility is fulfilled, as can be seen from his sharing the pre-Copernican geocentric hypothesis, which, as it certainly seems, one can now but reject, with, by and large, the sacred writers of Scripture. This situation, however, is simply misrepresented if seen as a case of exemplifying God’s domain (as if that were finitely sharable) with an ever diminishing assemblage of “gaps”176. God’s domain always transcends and includes any other. One reads, anyhow, quite often, professional “philosophers”, ensconced within the empiricist dogma (the fault which evoked Hegel’s judgment that Kant was not in truth a philosopher), who question whether the idealist hypothesis, in its absolute form even, can ever be taken seriously in our time. What is missing here, or just one of such faults, is perhaps a more critical view, once again, of the notion of seriousness. Wisdom, put in feminine guise, was anciently said to “play” before the throne of God and there is quite a lot of that in Plato. The devotees of “scientific method”, somewhat like maiden aunts of the less wise variety, profess to find this shocking, as it was not for Jorge Luis Borges, for instance. Thus he is accused, or credited, with “playing” with philosophy, with ideas, of lacking seriousness in fact177. 176

This is the error remarked by Bishop J.A.T. Robinson in his best-selling Honest to God a half century or more ago. His remedy for overcoming the error was in fact less revolutionary than he imagined. Or we may take his little book as an invitation to us all to become more philosophical, i.e., in the Pauline phrase, to strive more and more to “understand spiritual things spiritually”. But I hold no special brief for this Anglican theologian’s particular conclusions, inasmuch as I recall them. Austin Farrar’s Finite and Infinite had and has much more to offer. By this view, however, I do not at all wish to endorse Peter Geach’s analogy of an “ordainer of the lottery”. See his Providence and Evil, CUP, 1977, p. 120, in a passage substantially carried over from God and the Soul, RKP London 1969, p. 97. Here God is apparently made, impossibly, to share our decisions. The classic view (of Augustine, Aquinas and surely St. Paul) is that He makes our actions free and that we are never more free than when he does so. Hence it is due to a superior grade of freedom that the good angels are unable to sin. But it is true that we are never more free than when “obeying” God and this may be what Geach meant by sharing or similar, viz. that God is first mover of all our actions, they too. 177 This is the theme of this interesting essay by Fabio Moreno, “La intertextualidad fantástica en Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius de Borges” presented to the Humanist Faculty, Institutionen för Språkstudier, at the University of Umeå, Sweden, in the

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One would need to ask oneself if the situations Borges imagines on the planet Tlon (are his protagonists actually on it? Are they not unable to believe that?). The point is that with absolute idealism none of these semicomical thought-conflicts bred by “abstract empty idealism” (Berkeley) arise. Rather, in God (reason as home) “we live and move and have our being” and are never more immediately moved by God than when we act with creaturely freedom. It is thus the simple religious or mystical attitude preached, for example, by Christ, producing none of these contradictory effects at all and yet entirely “overcoming the world”. You might say it is the foundation presupposed to faith, or perhaps even to art (or indeed philosophy, which it itself is, we are arguing here). The coincidence of an Absolute Idealism, mutatis mutandis, with the view(s) endorsed by Saints Thomas or Augustine and those taught by them, or their instructors in turn, viz. the founding Biblical writers, may well feature as a discovery of our immediate future, not least on the grounds offered in this our book. The popular apologist, as he made himself, C.S. Lewis, sound as he generally spring of 2021, though his negative conclusion seems in some ways positively nuanced. Thus I am not sure if, in this essay at least, he comes clearly down on one side or the other on the question I am raising, viz. as to whether play is a wisdom superior to seriousness (which science only takes on when its devotees fancy themselves as arbiters between life and death: yet “he who loves his life will lose it”), i.e. play is that about which we should be really serious (as in a game perhaps), as being, for example, an essential part of authentic response to the emphatic recommendation of at least one wise man: “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice”. Thus everyone knows that rejoicing is serious as well as being immediately generative of play. Absolute idealism is likewise serious, the religious attitude as I have been arguing here. As I recall, however, the subject, or object rather, of Borges’s clear mockery (or not?) here is more the non-absolute or Berkeleyan idealism for which Hegel had no time at all (Cf. Phenomenology of Mind, New York 1966, tr. Baillie, pp. 276-277). “Reason”; Hegel says, “is the certainty of being all reality” (stress added). If so then “ego is the Category bare and simple” (stress original) or “existence and self-consciousness are the same” (the Kantian background is clear, yet in the same moment redeemed, so to say, or no longer in opposition to traditional ascetic theology, for example). We have or there is “a reality that thinks”. That’s absolute idealism, which at its most stern even, or especially, breeds a light and hence potentially at least playful approach to all human efforts. One might think, for example, of St. Francis in great grief at the same time as he playfully or at least whimsically (or was it desperately?) made for himself out of snow, in which he lay for penitential purposes, images of the wife and children whose possibility he had renounced. A true player!? But well, as we say, grim and playful at once; there are many ways to kill a cat. Sartre and De Beauvoir were thus on the right track here, at least: cf. the latter’s The Ethics of Ambiguity or Sartre’s study, Saint Genet. Cp. our note 107 above.

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was, failed to see this, largely, it seems, because the idealists he encountered mostly chose to look down on a religion offering itself to all. We have offered cause here for abandoning this rigidly esoteric posture, not found in Aquinas, for example, or McTaggart, who wished to share the view with those in grief during World War I.178 It is ignored, I say, that in the field of ethics Sartre and De Beauvoir, among others, such as the novelist Albert Camus, in his The Outsider or The Stranger for example179, had quite seriously found this “serious” approach to life and its problems wanting. Wanting in what? Only in the spirit of play? Or is this spirit the more truly spirit, an excess of positivity rather than something negative, such as might be due, just for example, to effective realisation that human concepts, whether generally or particular, are not comparable to the Concept or to the Absolute Idea as discerned not merely by Hegel. In a word, “reality is friendly” (Leo Elders, SVD) or, therefore, in the thought of this French group, at least, could or can be so found. It remains true, however, or so it appears, that Newman’s certitude remained with his vision of the divine origin of human reason as itself participating in this divinity at some level, spirit being unable to be taken as unrelated to the Holy Spirit (of God, who is Spirit). It did not lie with the powers for improvement of the orang outang and associated (significantly, we do not say associates!). For Newman, as for Hegel, reason is from the first assured of itself to the extent that it literally makes no sense to set about questioning it. This is the whole of Hegel’s objection to the Kantian exercise of a Kritik of it, and that, what’s more, in its “pure” state, as less than philosophical and indeed, again, self-contradictory.180 * So what is the analogy of our title. It is indeed “the analogy of God and the world” (Hampus Lyttkens’ own arresting title). As final analogy, however, it is required to be self-destructive. For it is, in fundament, the analogy of the infinite, which is Infinity, and the finite or finitude in whatever shape, i.e. it is the analogy of being and nothing, one more radical than that between left and right, for example, or black and white, right and wrong or divine 178

Cf. his Human Immortality and Pre-Existence, London: E. Arnold, 1916, consisting largely of two chapters from his Some Dogmas of Religion of 1906. 179 The original title, L-Étranger, might also be translated as “the foreigner”. Yet at stake here, paradoxically, is precisely our common or, better, individual humanity. 180 Any inclination to question this understanding of Hegel’s assessment of Kant can hardly survive a reading of the section “The Critical Philosophy” in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia (§§40-60).

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and human, etc. Finitude, that is, can only be swallowed up into the former, into the infinite, except where this itself somehow deigns to adopt the finite, in habit or otherwise taking it to itself. We have indeed to say that it must do this, on pain of contradicting its own infinitude. This is the paradox of grace, the paradox, as it seems to us, of necessary gratuitousness, since without it infinity is only finitely conceived. It extends rather of itself down or into creation itself as such. Thus figured (as, we have seen, all our speech is figure) it also figures the destined development, precisely as of necessity, of Judaism into Christianity as instanced in St. Paul’s theology particularly, nothing else being able to explain the daily and central use of the Davidic Psalter in its entirety in orthodox Christian worship East and West. That is one answer to Suzuki, whose objection we cited above, and it is an ancient one, viz.: bonum est diffusivum sui, which, again, this diffusion anyhow, must again bear the character of a grace, at least in respect of its gratuitousness as of its including the concept of a gift to someone, even if someone or something not “yet” existing, the gift itself bestowing this and thus entailing creation, itself mirroring, in proportion as it is optimal (as Leibniz claimed it must be), what thus comes to be revealed as Word. That is, necessity in final form is sheer gratuitousness, this (to us) paradox enshrining rather final critique of finite or multi-verbal language. The only reason for disagreeing with Leibniz on this point depends upon confusing the necessity of coercion with the necessity of, say, infinite love. What is thus given, anyhow, is given to one or many (i.e. however many are determined to be) or both of these, the latter taken as one again, the “body” and not merely “as it were”. That is to say, grace as prime attribute of infinity, i.e. what must necessarily be attributed, itself is prime agent of the destruction of all possibility of any conceivable independent finitude. This, the metaphysic of freedom, is not open to opposition by or from the latter. God himself, the infinite, that is, must be freedom itself, as Hegel, in perfect harmony with Aquinas here, prioritises this even over the divine necessity, the latter being precisely of the former, as the necessity of virtue is prior to that of precept, though this aspect, due possibly to a lingering influence from Kant, is not so immediately discernible everywhere in Hegel. All these notions, however, have necessarily to be taken up into infinity in its absolute and yet concrete or by no means abstract simplicity (abstracted from what?) as lacking the finitude of parts, into God “in whom is no division nor shadow of turning”. I will sketch the result. Meanwhile we may say that what finally breaks the mind is just what, as contemplated from afar, holds mind together, destined as it is, also by and in Hegel’s logic, to be swallowed up in will or, more precisely, love as the perfecting of “cognition in general” at the very threshold of the Absolute Idea, in what,

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taken as a whole, is “the doctrine of the Concept”. It is, then, this which, as necessary moment of such freedom, “goes forth freely as Nature”, nature which we in our day have come to see, if only by analogy with the human, as having a history. What we have thus come to see, however, viz. natural history, found early expression in the first page and chapter of Genesis, where creation itself is set forth in or as a succession of “days”. Here too salvation and much else is put as “of the Jews”, to whom the divine Word made flesh on Earth declared himself to be “first sent”, his first chosen “apostles”, in the precise theological sense of this term, being taken from that people or nation, at the same time as this new development, fulfilment rather, of “the people of God”, placed the gentile St. Luke among the four or first scriptorial “evangelists”. “So his love for our fathers is fulfilled …”181 This love is the same as the Idea’s constitutive willing of itself as its own absolute Object, just as even finite men are adjured to love the other as self. By this love, however, one with the very constitution of being as such, the End is as such realised. Nothing else can be “the unity of the theoretical and practical idea”. Its content, Hegel tells us, “is the system of Logic”. So “the whole evolution is what constitutes the content and the interest” (237, Zus.). The notion is the realised notion as “closing with itself”. The method “is the soul and notion of the content”. The End, the finis ultimus as such, is realised and was never anything else. In this too lies the unreality of time. * So as Hegel outlines Spirit as a threefold reality, that of art, religion and philosophy, in what yet forms a definite, despite his partial disclaimer, oneway numerical series, i.e. progressive number is about the best analogy of it, three absorbing one and two as containing in their destruction (should one be counting) both, so this threefold series expresses, in imitation of time itself, the eternity it images. It is in this sense that “the whole is the true” or conversely. No finite word or set of words, however, in the nature of the case as expounded, can comprehend this whole as such, however well it may apprehend it, this alone belonging to wisdom as greatest or itself comprehensive, again, as final and fourth intellectual virtue, surpassing the understanding, science or indeed prudence along with synderesis and all or any art or practical religion in the fullness of Spirit as fullness of the worship

181

Luke 1, 72.

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that is not practised or lived out upon this or that mountain but, again, “in spirit and in truth”.182 This whole, however, as the absolute idea, as infinite, as God, thus has no parts, is simple. So all these parts have fused, or, rather, this unity in simplicity is the “first” truth, inclusive of all divine or absolute “thoughts” that we, interrupting our contemplation, later separate out from it. These “thoughts”, we have no better term, are one and all actuality, even if they are of “possibles”, wherever they are a knowledge, say, of what would follow if … There is no dilemma, trilemma etc. of actual or possible. Possibility can only be admitted, if at all, as itself an actuality. Thus Hegel denies that it is a Kantian-type modality183. Hence, as St. Thomas clearly expounds (ST Ia q.15), each and every divine idea is one with the divine essence. In this sense, as the Indians, some, say (whether or not with good understanding), “I am that”. Consciousness, it follows, is all. Following up this is what will give us creation stricto sensu, how to conceive it, that is, as will not the blind adoption of the metaphor of a divine “artificer”. Plato may also be consulted here, as may he and colleagues also in connection with Trinitarian philosophy or its theology itself.184 So everything leads back to the infinite, in philosophy as in theology. Sometimes one gets the impression that some people considering philosophical issues, still more some mathematicians, have begun these labours without ever yet attaining to the idea of the infinite as such. Yet it ought to be clear that to posit the infinity of any one attribute or quality or notion, such as extension or duration, as infinity namely in or of just some finite element such as these, or number, is self-contradictory, as is in general identifying infinity with a supposed number that is infinite. This is a major problem in and indeed for Einsteinian physics.185 For such infinitude does not make it an infinite number, since this is a total impossibility, while if it 182

Cf. Gospel of John 4. This sublime doctrine is put there as first declared to a kind of ancient predecessor of Chaucer’s “wife of Bath”, yet even further distinguished, however, as being a member of a despised heretical sect, the Samaritan (i.e. of Samaria), once again. It is thus a type of the later Pauline indiscriminate proclamation. 183 Cf. Enc. 143. 184 This is something being progressively uncovered by a group of theologians at the University of Cambridge, England, in particular. Cf. especially work done and being done by Ryan Haecker, perhaps the youngest member of the group there. 185 Cf. M.P. Sacchi: “El espacio enigmatico”, in Basileia, Buenos Aires 1998; “Does a Void Exist? The Thomistic Reduction of its Presence in the Natural World” in Indubitanter ad veritatem, ed. Vijgen, Damon, Budel 2003, Netherlands, pp. 376387.

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is not a number it cannot terminate any numerical series. Infinity is simply infinity and nothing else, or, Hegel might add, it is exactly not that, as necessarily absorbing everything. We do indeed know most of God, then, when we know that we know and can know nothing of him, a feature his self-revelation would only amplify. We may know that God is love, yet not so as to deny that God alone knows his love, i.e. what or how it is. What we know, rather, is that God must be love. The same dialectic applies to whatever qualities we feel we can assert of God, such as justice or faithfulness or beauty or knowledge or omniscience and the rest. Can we know then that God is supremely important and must be written and thought about? Yes and no. St. Thomas saw in the end all his writings, though God shall have said to him “You have written well of me”, as straw (sic). God, as infinite, is in all things anyhow. Ours but to do or die, then, the right hand not knowing what the left one is doing. Or, what you do to me you do to God and conversely. Each is confronted by all. Sumit unus sumunt mille. Take and eat, whoever you are, for you are that, as you are infinity’s necessary fodder, whether he spew you out of his mouth (as regards the quite distinct matter as to who are God’s friends specifically), in the Scriptural figure, or not. You cannot step out of God’s presence, who has known you “from all eternity” and hence eternally knows you. For these and associated reasons the spiritual masters, if there be or ever were or could be such a group, tend to account intellect as useless beyond a certain point, as being entirely taken over by will or love. This in fact is precisely the penultimate move of Hegel’s dialectic186, while he appears to take seriously the question, or even not to question it, as to whether knowledge, as finite anyhow, is not insuperably connected with some general evil187. But here of course it is not, essentially at least, a “move”, such as a person contemplating has to make, renouncing his actively analytical attempts to reach or “see” God but is itself, the move, a so to say hard analysis on Hegel’s part, whether or not based upon “experience”. It 186

Compare also Enc. 159, final paragraph of “The Doctrine of Essence” as leading into that of “the Concept”. 187 Cf., for example, the Introduction to The Phenomenology of Mind. The knowledge in question is knowledge as distinguished from “objectless selfconsciousness” or “knowledge of pure knowledge”. Yet pure knowledge “is the diremption of negativity which constitutes the notion” but which yet can be evil, he says, and “the principle” thereof, indeed, inasmuch as it is or may be “the principle of becoming self-centred” (Ibid., Baillie, 1966, p. 796). Yet “self-centred” here in Hegel is not a term free of ambiguity, since the ultimate self is also the “principle of objectivity” precisely as self of selves. Renounce and you shall find, our interim analysis here seems to conclude.

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would certainly be “based” upon someone’s experience: for what would not, in our human and finite world? For he is analysing just the cause of or reason for such a move, i.e. its corresponding reality in the Idea itself, which eternally (or as in this or the system of logic!), as most near to the Idea’s eternal act or repose indifferently. That is, it passes through, as ever having known it, this move, this step, to a more true form of cognition, as might not be entirely clear at paragraph 159 (of the Encyclopaedia), where Hegel still employs the notion translated as “feeling”, one which, unlike “love”, is not applied to both occasions. Feeling, surely, is in itself an imprecise notion. For does not thought, as in the classical descriptions of contemplation, enjoy a peace which is beyond all “feeling”, “passes understanding” even as in the well-known vesperal prayer, referring there, indeed, to “the peace of God”? Yet the question has, again, to arise here concerning the supposed dependence of thought upon language as that which invalidates or finitises it from the beginning, its thus beginning. But is even this true? Are we not already “thinking” in our first groping apprehension of language? This, the Casper Hauser question so to say, is easily confused with speculation about states of consciousness, as if there were an or some “empirical nature of the thought process”, such as metaphysicians and logicians concur in rejecting, this being precisely the cause of the mistaken search for logic’s cognitive base in mathematics, i.e. in at least something material outside itself. The italicised word reflects Hegel’s judgment upon mathematics in regard to its having some or, here, no relation to “the Concept”, a judgment that without further thought is easily dismissed, by those enslaved to mathematics, as “naïve”, as compared to themselves of course, besides which, we may note, there are worse offences against truth than naivete, unless one suppose it was naïvete in the Devil that led him, as it leads so many others, to imagine he could oppose God and that with conceptual weapons. Such serpentine wisdom is not true wisdom, Genesis illustrates, as it certainly has its limits. It is hard on the then crawling belly in particular! We have to say, rather, that it is proper to thinking to exceed itself188, to lead ever further. What it leads to can still be reckoned thinking, as by Hegel, or regarded as a development of spirit transcending thinking. To go beyond is to fulfil oneself or be fulfilled, if indeed “it is God who works within you”. Yet if this self-transcendence is natural to what is anyhow supernatural then this difference seems nominal. Hence Augustine speaks, we noted, of “one closer than self to self”, intimior me mihi. So the difference we marked out above as between ecstatic discourse and critical analysis of the same appears itself nominal. So we must either require 188

Cf. our “Beyond Thinking”, The Downside Review, October 2007, pp. 281-305.

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accuracy of ecstasy or approach the former too with love, which, however, we can only do if we have already apprehended this equation. “You would not seek me if you had not already found me” seems instanced here. People have to stop defining themselves by exclusion, i.e. they have to stop defining themselves period. The Absolute Idea or final category (these are already mutually inclusive, i.e. are not categories but hard-won transcendence thereof) “thinks only itself”. Notice Hegel does not say “knows”, not because it does not know but because thinking becomes here a yet wider category than that. As well say, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Davidic psalm). One begins to see the awkwardness of making of philosophy a sectional academic pursuit, if one would consider the nature or quality of some contemporary institutes claiming this ancient title “academy”.189 We approach in fact to the ancient title of mind as the self-knowing, there being nothing else to know or, it is finally seen, there is nothing else. “In God we live and move and have our being”. The nations are as “a drop of water on the side of the bucket” (Isaiah), that bucket perhaps which itself we, and hence mind within us more truly, must eventually kick! “You are buried with Christ in baptism” in what is only called a “second” birth in a preliminary approach to it. It is actually the meaning of birth itself, this being “born again”, one in which we play our part, as it were dying to one another, and it is ultimately the work of spirit, of mind, of and/or by whom we are thus born. Being thus born, further, means that we were never otherwise, are eternally known with, as it is said, “an everlasting love”, such as can be seen cannot be otherwise, i.e. no contrary truth can be justifiably stated, difficulties notwithstanding, though if this is self-evident it has to be shown to be so, to finite minds, while, faith, of course, has to be in some way or other the seeing of this, a seeing, all the same, in which the will must play the primary part, that of virtue, as indeed is the case with all acquisition of knowledge, if not with all knowing precisely. Sometimes we don’t want to know what we know or even to know that we know. We approach, if in circular fashion, that absolute centre which is selfconsciousness, i.e. a consciousness inclusive of all otherness in this self. It is not abstract such as in its commencement (first degree precisely of abstraction) is finite knowing, ever marked by this its origin190. It includes 189

Cf. our “The Position of Philosophy in a University Curriculum”, South African Journal of Philosophy, 1991, 10(4), pp. 111-114. 190 “Es liegt im Wesen des Menschen dass jeder einzelne und das ganze Geschlecht das, wozu es seiner Natur nach bestimmt ist, erst in einer zeitlichen Entfaltung werden muss und dass diese Entfaltung an das freie Mitwirken jedes einzelnen und das Zusammenwirken aller gebunden ist.” Edith Stein, Endliches und Ewiges Sein. Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins: from Edith Stein’s Werke, Vol. II, ed.

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rather all virtue, memory and will, with neither beginning nor end nor, hence, duration. It is that absolute perfection we are bound to think, of which the “big bang” is manifestly but an image, though not one of the best. What is a bang without an ear? What is an ear without …? What limits the finite unless the infinite as that which is bound “logically” totally to consume it and yet thus, since it is infinite in this its act, to preserve it? Impossible, once muttered Sartre, though so have we all done or thought who ever reached maturity. Ask, rather, impossible by what authority? We see that nothing is “just there” except or unless that something has to be there, in a selfauthenticating way moreover, since this is precisely the difference (from Sartre’s onetime blind reaction). Only infinity is thus self-authenticated, by definition not bounded namely. And what are the “bounds” of reason, not to mention “reason alone”, thinking of Kant’s title? Reason, Geist, is, rather, itself the unbounded, as Hegel, like Ss. Thomas and Augustine, or Anaxagoras, saw so clearly. We turn perhaps the last corner, seeing only a straight road ahead. You wish! Well, of course I do. In philosophy everyone wishes to be where he eventually gets to, as there is no denying. It is quite natural and not invalidative. Reluctance, if clung to, is but pretence. So before being falls into the mind (primum quod cadit in mentem, wrote the young Thomas Aquinas191), we must concede, mind falls into itself. Cogito ergo sum. Being is thus the first or most general other of selfL. Gelber & R. Leuven, Freiburg, Basel, Vienna (reprinted in In der Kraft des Kreuzes, ed. W. Herbstrith, Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1987, cf. p. 42). That is, we have to “put away childish things”, “forget the father’s house”. “So shall the King desire thy beauty”. This is less of a mere maturing than it is an ungrateful casting away of the ladder, typical of “ungrateful spirit”, Hegel notes, an entry into an unchanging room or space literally cancelling the past. Man in Christ is “a new creature”, while of children it is required that we see their angels. Otherwise they too and our lives would be but phenomena. “I live now yet not I.” By this life itself is transcended to what it had otherwise in its immediacy merely promised or suggested, as indeed children typically feel. “Happy those early days…”, a sense of the value of which Newman in particular never lost. Thus Christ gives their angels as the reason for respectful care of children, as if they might not be anything proportionate to that without them. Now an angel is very much like an idea, especially when the latter is viewed as act, as by Aristotle. Insofar as we all have such angels, if any do, then we, without reverting to childishness, are on a par with the children as viewed from heaven. Thus St. Thomas ascribed to souls of unbaptised infants in “limbo” the same bodies as they would later have had but in perfecta aetate, without batting an eyelid (though one is free to suspect that the whole exercise was little more than hypothetical: i.e. its interest lies in its implications, or perhaps its presuppositions, rather). 191 In his opusculum entitled De ente et essentia.

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consciousness, through which, i.e. posterior to which, indeed, selfconsciousness knows itself as prior to it. These comparatives are logical, not temporal. But, or indeed thus, the mutual implication that thought seems to begin with is actually an identity. The parallel with the first Trinitarian relation, Father and Word, is obvious. If there is identity then Word too is personal, justly named “Son” as proceeding. On this point Hegel seems unnecessarily strict. “Son”, namely, its use, need not be seen as a concession to religion viewed as transcendently preserved only in philosophy. Thus this move away simply returns to make philosophy itself die höchste Gottesdienst, i.e. religion as giving in intention and fact true worship. By this, though, the poetic art too is immediately invoked. The three (Hegelian) forms of Absolute Spirit, of Spirit, viz. art, religion and philosophy, thus form, they too, a kind of Trinitarian analogue, with the first last or last first as art, the music (of the Muse) that is the final demand of the final Davidic Psalm (Psalms, 150), that clashes forth as itself final outcome of contemplative worship (the other one hundred and forty-nine psalms), i.e. of thought: O praise him with sound of trumpet … Praise him with the clashing of cymbals, Let everything that lives and breathes Give praise to the Lord.

What seems somehow to bedevil us here is that we repeatedly find ourselves as if compelled to speak of God as initially lacking all contact with or thought of matter, until he so to say thought it up out of nothing. There is thus an opposition misread somehow by such as C.S. Lewis in apologetic mode or mood, sounding almost facetious when he advises us not to be at enmity with matter in our aspirations because God himself thought it up out of nothing and so “likes it”. But that “out of nothing” is precisely it. Matter comes from nothing as being nothing, or as pure potentiality as in the Aristotelian philosophy. There is no duality between act and potency or pure possibility since all being is on the side of act. Potency, so to say, is impotent; this is the underlying idea behind St. Thomas’s sharpening ens or, in Greek, to on towards esse as suggestive of, mirroring, that infinite act which we worship, thought as ever thinking itself, as Hegel has it: The notion … is the realised notion … It is the idea which, as absolutely first (in the method), regards this terminus as merely the disappearance of the show or semblance, which made the beginning appear immediate, and made itself seem a result.192 192

Enc. 242.

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Hegel, as the modern Aristotle, here states by implication, as distinct from merely implying, that the system of logic as set out as a piece of print or writing is itself a mere representation (Vorstellung); of what if not of thought in unified simplicity thinking only itself and thereby all things? Hence Hegel’s derisive reference to “possibility and lots of possibilities”. Thus matter is not something that God has to “manage without”. It is rather the nothing which he is not and which is the basis of all separation, of partes extra partes. Hence the Idea, precisely by contrast, is “the ruin of the individual” since the principle of individuation is precisely matter. So we might, if we wish, say that this is the dualism that ends all dualisms, offering thus precise characterisation of monism, such as spirit claims for itself and which materialism apes. Or we might, must, also say that the “obediential potency” to the infinite which defines human reason in fact already divinises it in act, its being all set for possession, as the baby, whether or not yet “viable” outside the mother (what in all reason does such independence make for difference, as if the child is not to be protected just when or because, even, it needs it most?), possesses all the dignity of the actualisation it is set towards. This is the force of Christ’s word, again, concerning the “angels” of children, as of ourselves though, we may then assume. Individuality is thus a stage upon the way, merely, of being “members one of another”, i.e. we are that all the time (hence I avoid “becoming”) without let-up if we are such at all. We, so to say, die into one another, at baptism sacramentally: If we are to join the human race it is not enough to be born into it, it is also necessary to die into it and this is what baptism proclaims. It is a symbolic death, a creative sign of our dying the revolutionary death of Christ, out of which comes the new community.193

This sacrament is “membership of the Church” and not merely the sacrament of that over again. One is made a member of the body of Christ, of the “vine” as we are “the branches”. This vine is the Mediator between God and man that Hegel argues essential to the creation of rational man in the first place or as that which alone can explain it, as the echoes of it among the various non-rational primates, or whales and so on, cannot. They have their respective environments, while man has the world in its entirety as his “field”. This rationality that we find in nature is of the divine mind, against which our rationality is distinguished. Yet only we “have” a world

193

Herbert McCabe OP, Law Love and Language (USA: What is Ethics All About?), London 1968, p. 147.

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transcending mere environment, have a field of relations and the world together.194 Yet in fact, for the true worshipper of God, as well say the true philosopher, as just Hegel stresses, the world falls away, is “overcome” in what Aristotle had already, I note again, called a practice of death, athanatizein, i.e. not a mere practicing for death, as might appear. The difference is the element of the “all”, so strongly hinted at already by Aristotle when he says that only “a little of this” is “worth more than all the rest”.195 This then is what makes of the analogy of God and the world, analogy of the world with God, the exemplary analogy or, as “exemplary” can well mean, analogy of analogies. This is the theme, the certitude, of this our chapter here. McTaggart was certain of it while simultaneously denying God, or at least the only God he knew of, viz. that worshipped at his English “public school”, worshipped, he perhaps thought, in an ignorance too deep to make any clarification of this so to say final object thus conceived worthwhile. It is thus, I find, of some significance when we find Peter Geach finally declaring, as touched on above, that McTaggart’s “Boethian” conception of eternity, in which “all persons” are to be found, of course eternally, amounts, “in a way that we cannot now begin to understand”, to “the beatific vision”196. One might think that Geach himself must surely have begun to understand this if he can affirm it, and as he indeed gives his reasons for doing so. Such a conviction was not stated, was in fact expressly avoided, in his earlier study of McTaggart’s thought dating from 1939 but published in final form in 1979, by Hutchinson of London, as Truth, Love and Immortality. Implicit here, it seems to me, is the view that our conceptions, our mental life, thought, are not themselves “in time”. William James had noted that the thought that the pack of cards is on the table, say, cannot be supposed to have a duration in time such as might correspond, for example, to the inevitable length of time taken to utter or, equally, to imagine, this sentence qua sentence. Not our lives but our consciousnesses, as spiritual, i.e. our thoughts, would thus be being taken as corresponding to a timeless reality 194

Josef Pieper, The Philosophical Act (printed in English together with Pieper’s Leisure the Basis of Culture, 1952), ch. 2; German original, Was heisst Philosophieren? Kösel Verlag, 1947. Cf. Chapter Two (Was heisst Philosophieren?) in Werke in acht Bänden, vol. 3, ed. Berthold Wald, Felix Meiner, Hamburg, 1995. For a further summary of Pieper’s argument here see our Morals as Founded on Natural Law, Peter Lang, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1987, 1988 (doctoral thesis of 1979, philosophy, U. of Leeds), pp. 121-124. 195 Cf. his On the Parts of Animals, VI. 196 P.T. Geach, Truth and Hope, UND Press 2001, Chapter One.

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thereby so to say annihilating “life” as a spatio-temporal phenomenon, like space and time themselves. The question of McTaggart’s atheism, from Geach’s viewpoint at least, would have to be treated as purely phenomenal, concerning which there is no especial difficulty. One’s true thought, as is most clear with belief perhaps, is not always what one recites over to oneself, in sentences, as being it. This is the problem with legal judgments (or any judgments made exteriorly, in words) and their validity. On this basis, we have noted, Thomas Aquinas distinguishes ius, e.g. ius naturale, from lex or the formulation of right as law, which he says is only aliqualis ratio juris. This seems to mean something like our “rationalisation”, that law “rationalises” the right, often unduly, it seems implied. There is an opening here, from a theological standpoint, therefore, for a more nuanced view of what is often called “modern” atheism, of its relation, for example, to the atheism attributed to the Israelites in ancient times by the surrounding idolaters. This would not be unrelated to what we have written earlier in this chapter and book here; it is not as such a denial of the requirement that “He who approaches God in worship must believe that he is”. Yet we may also relate it to the saying, as it were deliberately preserved in the Gospel: “Lord I believe, help thou mine unbelief”, set against, for example, the declaration of the parents of the man born blind: “This we know, that before he was blind, but now he sees”, or the affirmation by those having seen and touched and spoken, in joy, with one risen from the dead and not “a ghost”. In general, we need to keep alive the difference between “is” and “ex-ists”, which, as Hegel points out, seems to bear the taint of alien derivation, of “standing out” from some other, while even if God necessarily creates he both does it as his other and yet does not essentially stand out from it, what or whom he creates, as it does from him. As Hegel puts it, and as we have seen in Aquinas, the finite and the infinite are not (it is their definition) reciprocally related as are these terms (we explain God as the actual which is not the finite). In short, what Geach is saying in this chapter is that the work of the atheist philosopher McTaggart offers a much sounder introduction to central Christian hopes about love, eternity, and beatific vision, than (by implication) much modern Christian apologetics.197 *

197 From the review of Geach’s Truth and Hope by Fergus Kerr OP in New Blackfriars.

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The difficulty, however, with Geach’s account derives from his fear of explaining God so as to exclude human freedom. He speaks elsewhere, accordingly, of the divine intentions which, however, are infallibly fulfilled whatever we do, unlike our human intentions and even though this is, for us, effectively what distinguishes an intention from an action. This account (unless indeed intention and act be equated here) clashes unmistakeably with the thesis, sustained by Geach as by the whole theistic tradition, that God is immutable. Hence he cannot, logically cannot, pass from intention to deed and hence all that is said in this vein, e.g. in the Bible or other religious writings, is representation only. As such it is precisely what distinguishes prophecy from philosophy. Nor is it to be supposed that the prophets themselves, or theologians when writing within this convention, are not in the main capable of themselves seeing, do see in fact, the representational character of their discourse. Indeed when a prophet declares a future event it is because he sees that event in some region of his consciousness that is free of time. God thus forgives us our trespasses before we commit them, insofar as he sees also, indeed initiates, sustains and so to say embodies, our future repentance. Thus even we, when we get to know a musical composition, hear each phrase in it as within the embrace of the whole. Geach suggests God is like a chess master who can decide to mate us on a given square whatever we ourselves, or the opponent, does. The analogy limps badly. Why must God stick to his square if we do not stick to ours, having plans B, C, and D ad inf. at his disposal? In one instance in fact the Scripture seems to put God as changing his plan, i.e. mating us on a different square, in consequence of “the fall”, of man’s original (in the sense of originating) sin. Hegel responds to this by saying that if it be taken literally then God is not God, i.e. the spiritual man should know that it is but a picture. Theology, he also says, however, has to make use of pictures, simply (this is the sense) because or inasmuch as it, most immediately anyhow, is a matter just of language. The true state of the case, rather, is that human freedom is a divinely infinite creation of the finite like any other. We are not free against God, but ever the more free, rather, the more we are united to him, in imitation of the Word Himself, who said “I do always what pleases him”. And so the fact is that St. Thomas, and the tradition, see the divine knowledge as itself causative, as not divorcible or somehow neutral with regard to the divine will. As in Hegel’s logic knowledge passes into will or love198, until, as in St. Paul (I Cor. xiii), only love remains, end realised as such. This is the 198

This is yet further stressed, in so far as this is possible, by McTaggart.

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implication, as itself implying, that in the divine nature there can be no suffering. Thus God in Christ, in Christian theology and proclamation, suffered “once and for all” in his assumed human nature. So one may quite well say that “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart”. Our own freedom then, in general, is equally susceptible, precisely as freedom, to an eventual possession by the divine peace within which we always know what to do, such that it is not we who do it but “God who works in you” (St. Paul). There is no loss of freedom here but the converse of that, and we can see the truth of this long before we come to feel it. God is not to be spoken of as if on the same level as his creatures, or as if he were but the best of them. He is all and nothing less serves to designate the divine. As Augustine once put it and as is simply echoed in Aquinas, freedom not to sin, e.g. the angelic, without mentioning God himself (for whatever He did would thereby not be sin), is a greater freedom than our freedom to sin. It follows, of course, that man, as contrasted with angels, can never have had this first freedom. Otherwise he would not have sinned. His original graces, whatever they were, must then, or so it seems to me, have been resistible. Yet the angelic or divine freedom remains the greater. St. Thomas teaches, then, that grace would always have been needed to avoid sin, though it cannot prevent sin against grace itself, necessarily more heinous. This is simply the supreme pain, to speak humanly, of loving the unworthy. It is, though, the kind of love, reflexion shows, which alone, but yet supremely, the divine love for the less than divine or for the creaturely, outside of its own divine life, can instance, as, faith teaches, it most wonderfully did. “Love divine, all love’s excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down”, as a hymn has it, going on to beg God to “fix in us thy humble dwelling” and thus “all thy faithful mercies crown”. It is “all of a piece”, so to say, and I would want to claim that it is not evident that Hegel, in attempting to make this intelligible, rejected it, free as he may have wanted to keep himself from merely canonised phrasing, this being the best way to be found shedding further light on such articles of common faith. Nothing, then, might seem to forbid reading or attempting the impossibility of reading the Genesis story not as a “fall” but as an inspired parable in representational mode of the human passage from innocence to maturity, knowing both good and evil in their difference and thus becoming like God or, in a word, rational. Yet it is, rather, formally speaking or whatever its matter, a theological apologia for the sinful state of the world. Nor, however, does one deny what one might want for a time to avoid confessing. Either way man is here seen as that creature born to transcend himself, daily even, being as it were the incarnation of time. Thus if I ever or always transcend myself then I am never myself, a “useless passion” as

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it once seemed to Sartre. In saying this, then, we do not intend to deny, whatever was Hegel’s intention, that there might still lie behind or within the account, and hence how we are to receive it, affirmation of some “original” boundless tragedy or at least one having “cosmic” repercussions of some kind. One might want to ask, for example, whether Hegel’s understanding of the Genesis account is compatible with the teaching whereby one member of the human race, apart from Christ, is preserved from guilt or “mark” (macula) of original sin, the death in Adam, from her first conception in her mother’s womb, this being, certainly since Hegel’s time (1854), a dogma of the teaching and worshipping (Catholic) Church, and if not compatible, why or how not. Or, it is the same, how does Hegel interpret the text: “As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive”? Or does he, can he, then interpret it in the undiminished way it can seem clear that he wants to do? There can seem a note of resignation in his claim not only to be a Lutheran but to be likely to remain one “until the day I die”, a hint even of those sufferings, that angustia, St. Thomas attributes to the great pagan spirits of Augustine or Plato and others, pre- and post-Christian, as we, somewhat unecumenically perhaps, say. Hence the uncharacteristic, unworthy even, savagery of his attacks upon Catholicism as he knew it (Enc. 552). The late (d. 1962) Fr. Gerald Vann OP’s attacks upon “modern Catholicism” (as against the medieval), however, were equally savage. What either of them would have made of Vatican II, poised between Archbishop Lefèvre and Teilhard de Chardin SJ, and its sequels is another question again. Such a tragedy as is the Fall of Man, as believed, anyhow, takes its place as a moment within eternal mind as itself, such mind, being none other than “realised end”, of a sort, necessarily, to include all possible or, that is to say (it is the same here) conceivable freedom. Either way, mere innocence is at a pole opposite to the angelic freedom not to sin. It requires, so to say, or so Hegel argues, to be lost. This loss, however, of innocence, if this were indeed so, would not need to be due, need not have been due, as it was, to sin, resulting in the breaking of a perfect mirror into innumerable separate pieces (an image of Newman’s), this being the source of all human failure, error and misery. One might speculate that Adam and Eve could have been led beyond mere innocence into grace-filled wisdom by the gently harmonious hand of God. But then it would not have been a loss at all but a development, the details, possible or actual, of which neither we nor Hegel have any means whatever of knowing or experiencing. The question arising here is this: does Hegel aim to justify sin as essential, i.e. as essential as its possibility, to divine creation? Aquinas, claims that grace would have been always necessary to avoid eventual sin in a finitely intelligent creature, in

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one way or other, i.e. not in every way199. In short, he claims that man as such, as finite, always needs the grace of the “first mover”. Hegel’s target is certainly the dogma of “original sin” in particular, though this alone makes of his thought here, brilliant as so much of it is, a species of Pelagianism or even a kind of super-Pelagianism, at least if one is not very careful indeed. He might and that probably, given his example and professed convictions, after all, be rather claiming to elicit the doctrine’s true meaning, certainly, unlike transubstantiation, inseparable from Lutheranism. In Scripture, anyhow, the most immediate result of the true Fall is the first of our ever-recurring fratricidal murders. Nonetheless, as against Hegel’s main argument, nothing forbids this, and its eventual overcoming (the felix culpa), all lying within the divine designs, against which our human freedom is not to be conceived as setting any possible limits. * We read in the Epistle to the Ephesians, long attributed to St. Paul and clearly Pauline in substance, that God chose his elect from before the foundation of the world. Of course we might equally say he chose to found the world before he founded it, so there might seem not much mileage to hand here. Or, it even supports Geach’s idea, mentioned above, of a divine intention, as at one with St. Paul here. But St. Paul does not write as a philosopher, as does Geach. Nonetheless this idea, or irrevocability, quite overthrows our normal meaning of “intention” or “purpose”, but it does so, one might now wish to say, rather from the side of the object intended than of the subject intending. What has such guarantee, namely, is no longer really separable from just that guarantor. Time itself is overthrown inasmuch as I am there before I am there, as St. Paul told his hearers they “sit with Christ in the heavenly places” at the same time as he condemned those saying the resurrection had already occurred. This is the sense in which God is not separable from his creation, in a genuine “before”, but is rather at one with his self-projected otherness, the other in turn being “in” him merely and yet, it too, equally the same, as Hegel expressly states in The Phenomenology of Mind, if we have not yet taken it seriously in the Logic200. Does this mean that anything goes? No, rather that nothing goes but this. As St. Paul put it, again, God exalts the things that are not in order 199

Cf. Summa theol. Ia-IIae, Q 109, for a nuanced if, it may seem, pedestrian discussion of such eventual eventualities, so to say. 200 But cf. Enc. 116 with Zusatz and Hegel’s further development of this. Or compare such sayings, Dominical, as “what you do to the least of these you do to me”.

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to bring to nought the things which are. By which is meant that really or truly they, the latter, are not and never were. They only are analogously, to revert to our titular theme here. The finite world, where “each thing is itself and not another thing”, is false, is after all misperception, jagged pieces of the broken mirror needing to be pieced together, just what McTaggart brings so sharply into focus. It is this which gets caught up into St. John of the Cross’s “Counsels for Beginners” in the spiritual life or in that of prayer, namely, in his The Ascent of Mount Carmel, albeit in frankly practical vein201, or indeed what a later finally murdered Carmelite, St. Teresa Benedicta OCD, formerly Edmund Husserl’s pupil Edith Stein (cited above), came to call “The Science of the Cross” (stress added)202. Could such a science have at least its modern roots in Hegel? Or could these two approaches (of the mystical philosopher and of the philosophical mystic: but which would be which?) rather not have drunk thus far from a common source? The calling this source a “science” derives, I surmise, from the authoress’s sense of the unjustified exclusion of this mystery from previous epistemology or ethics or, finally, metaphysics, even where these are taught in humane institutes (the “humanities”) also amid those cultures and countries where the Gospel of the Cross, along with its perpetuation in sacramental life, had and has long been officially received. The trouble arose, one might guess, from an earlier stage of admitting philosophy to the curriculum after a previously deliberate break with it, objectified by the closing of the Greek Academy several centuries before (by Justinian), but then admitting it as “the servant (ancilla) of theology”. This ancillary state, to repeat it, seems after all the most unimaginable possible for the science of being qua being, itself as much a theology as anything could be. Behind this, again, lie certain representations of what is or could be meant, and more particularly perhaps what could not be meant, by divine revelation. In my Hegel’s Theology or Revelation Thematised, CSP, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2018, I have at least attempted (cf. especially pp. 78-143), not without some diffidence, a fresh opening, no more, or I hope not more, of this question for us today. It is closely related to our discussion, above, of the Genesis 201

E.g.: “In order to have pleasure in all things strive to have pleasure in none” or, nonetheless getting closer to the Hegelian trajectory of thought: “In order to come to what you are not you must go through what you are not”, as with acquiring a taste, we might almost say. The thought fits high and low. 202 Kreuzenswissenschaft. Studie über Joannes a Cruce, Edith Stein, Werke, vol. 1, published by L. Gelber & R. Leuven, Louvain & Freiburg, 1985. Cf. also the Swedish-language book by the saint’s fellow-Carmelite, Cardinal Anders Arborelius OCD, now (2022) bishop of Stockholm, Edith Stein, Biografi – texter, TågarpGlumslöv, Sweden 1982.

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account both of the creation and of the “fall” of man, the former being God’s first, whether or not primary, self-revelation, that revelation which, as Hegel says, He is. Bonum est diffusivum sui.

CHAPTER SEVEN NECESSITY

In Thomism, as in Anselm’s thought, but not only there, necessity is generally seen as divinity’s or the Absolute’s most necessary attribute. Nor is the oddness here, the duplication, incidental. It means that necessity is not an attribute at all, is not other than the divinity itself, which yet is seen to be, necessarily (which does not mean that it is necessarily so seen), and, just therefore, absolute freedom, bound by nothing outside of itself, a self which itself does not bind either, though God may well be represented here and there as saying “I swear by my own self” while he is “put” as revealing himself – well, we may say he does reveal himself, as faithfulness itself. As Hegel puts it, the notion of necessity is very difficult “because it is the notion itself”203, adding also that God, in his notion, “is revelation”, i.e. not merely, as if exclusively, “his” revelation. Necessity is what God himself is, is what people who do not believe in Him still confess, e.g. as logic, while not recognising that He is equally and wholly love, strength and absolute reality or being, i.e. that “reality is friendly”. So when we speak of natural necessity, for, say, a sparrow to fall to the ground, or to fly, inasmuch as sparrow, we refer to the divine under this Idea of nature or of “birds, trees and flowers” along with all animals and finally men, especially as “male and female”, man and woman. Therefore it has to be the second sex which most immediately can evoke God as under the figure of (his) wisdom, as being the sex which just as existing the more immediately evokes this duality which it as female, not the male or man as such, enables, just in her being there, as an extra “rib”, so to say, but what a rib indeed! This duality, God and his wisdom, remains in the word “woman” or wife-man, in English for example, and she cannot get away from it. There is just a profound truth in that Polish comedy where the leader of a “monstrous regiment of women” that had taken over was finally exposed as a transvestite and bewigged man. I am referring here to the analogy, even web of analogies, to be found in contemplation between Trinitarian thought or belief and “nuptiality” in 203

Enc. 147.

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general, “the epithalamic tradition”, deeply entrenched in Scripture as in Patristic and other theological writings, which thus open up an in some sense ever new field for specifically philosophic speculation, as anciently, it is now being made more clear by researchers, the then contemporary or received philosophy enabled and pointed towards the development of theological Trinitarianism.204 So much for natural necessity, of itself pluralised. The twinning of nature with God’s creative Word, thus imparting a certain divinity, is very tight, therefore, particularly in Hegel, for whom it is the Idea itself which, as he concludes his “shorter logic”, “resolves to let the ‘moment’ of its ‘particularity’, or of the first characterisation and other-being, the immediate idea, as its (viz. the Idea’s) reflected image, go forth freely as Nature.”205 Indeed, in the arrangement we have of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, Part I, the shorter Science of Logic, there is added to this concluding affirmative identification, from elsewhere among Hegel’s recorded expositions, that “this Idea which has Being is Nature”206. Being, the doctrine thereof, was that wherewith “we began”, abstract Being as he now says, whereas we now have “the Idea as Being”, I stress. It seems to me otiose or perhaps worse than otiose to add in a note, as does our translator W. Wallace, that this “percipient idea”, “both object and subject of intuition”, “opposed to the Idea in the element of Thought”, yet “still as idea”, is thus not Kant’s natura materialiter spectata. Instead of “still as Idea”, above, “still an Idea” would have been more in line with Hegel’s thought, claiming as it does to reject Kant’s “tenderness toward the empirical”. Materialiter spectata can thus be nothing more than a gratuitous allusion on Kant’s part to how nature appears to the senses, while nature, rather, for Hegel, is appearance. It is the negative moment which his philosophical system requires to be affirmed but precisely as negative. It thus resembles “privation” in Aristotle’s account of change (in his Physics), is analogous to it, rather, or contrariwise, 204

For more detailed presentation of this theme I would for now simply refer the reader to its treatment in the study by Fergus Kerr OP, Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford 2007, sub-titled “From Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism”. On the philosophical soil within which Trinitarianism developed itself see, again, especially work done at Cambridge University by John Milbank and colleagues, e.g. Ryan Haecker’s “Traces of the Trinity in Plato’s Parmenides; Alan Badiou, Theological Mathematics, Trinitarian Ontology”, Cambridge 2020 (in-house paper). See also Milbank, “The Return of Mediation”, in Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology, ed. John Milbank, Slavoj Zizek, Creston Davis and Catherine Pickstock: Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI (USA), 2010. 205 Enc. 244, stress added, parenthesis added. 206 Ibid., Zusatz.

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while, in Hegel namely, it is the negation, is evil even207, or “sham-being”, which requires, as does contingency itself, to be affirmed but as such, as negative, in Hegel’s final, meta-physical account. This is totally misrepresented as a step back towards “thought” in the abstract, as it were. We may then indeed compare what Hegel has to say about the necessity of the contingent in his posthumous Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God, not well known until late in the twentieth century. No one understood this point better than had already McTaggart, however, in his two first Studies, of the Hegelian dialectic (1896) and of the Hegelian “cosmology” (1901). We might say that for Hegel we do not “spectate” anything materially, to recall Kant’s Latin phrase, it being precisely out of the seeming immediacy of this, false precisely because immediate, that we ascend to thought, a condition which Hegel nonetheless claims to have been shared, within the similar or associated falsity of temporality, by the Absolute Idea itself in its incarnation, which, therefore, only for us took place, so to say, “in time”, since the “assumption” of human nature by the divinity cannot be viewed as contradicting divinity’s immutability. “I have loved thee from before the foundation of the world”. It would be absurd to ask how much before is that. “Before” is rather cancelled, as in “Before Abraham was, I am”, a profoundly Yahwist statement and no mere Greek “intrusion” into this Gospel, the fourth. Equally, Christ, in the liturgy, is spoken of as “coming down from the heaven he never left”. * So, what is necessity, given that it is surely not something to which God himself can be subject? One sees at once that it is absolute freedom, loosed, namely, from all contingency and its shadows, so not a freedom to choose merely but a freedom constitutive of choice, unlike our own finite freedom. Do we need it? Can we, can thought, be without it? It is easy to see that without it the whole world of physics as explained from within an evolutionary straitjacket is wholly contingent, - contingent, that is, not as bound up with something else, the true etymology of the term, but as it were absolutely, i.e. absurdly, arbitrarily, like big bangs where there could be nothing to have banged. Thus it, necessity, might, must, if anything is, even be love, since there is no place for love amid absolute absurdity, since love does not waver or annul itself. Only here is there place too, therefore, for the genuinely contingent, as just indicated, in a “friendly” or so to say 207

This thought is traditional merely. Compare the chapter-heading in the devotional classic, The Imitation of Christ, “On the Contrary Workings of Nature and Grace”.

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human or super-human, as the merely “physical” or “natural” is not, reality. Only after this realisation can we pretend to consider the consequent difficulties, concerning a “friendly” reality.208 Necessity, that is, has to be a name for God. It cannot be something else, binding him, if only because God is and has to be freedom. Hence the equivalence. Hence, if this is, as it looks, a case of “If if a then b and if b then c then if a then c”, C&CabCbcCac, then necessity and freedom are mutually implicative when absolutely considered. In fact we arrive very quickly at the conclusion that all absolutes are one and even that absolute being, as Idea, devours or cancels all the others. It is not a case, again, of the being of the Idea but of the Idea as, necessarily, being. The Absolute Idea, says Hegel, is the Absolute. The Idea, that is, is the reverse of the ideal. It is the finally concrete, as matter, say, is not. Implicit is a return to the Aristotelian notion of matter as pure potentiality, i.e. nothing. It is this Idea and nothing else, perceiving itself and nothing else, which is Nature. It is identical with God, with the Absolute Idea, in the same way as Aquinas says that any one of the myriad divine ideas is identical with him, with the divine. Such is thought and it is why being has no parts. It is not, that is, an abstract identity, as in pantheism, thus reduced to absurdity, but always identity in difference. The situation is rather caught, again, by the old saying, of anything: “This also is thou; neither is this thou”. Thus, concerning this general reach and/or application of analogy St. Thomas comments that if there were no such analogy then all things would be one, indistinguishably, as, in the first half of the above saying, “this also is thou”, they indeed are. Similarly, “He that has seen me has seen the Father”, “I and my Father are one”, yet we are two: I go to Him and He receives me and will indeed raise me, but not Himself, from the dead, since He dies not, as does man. Hence I, as mediator, am both man and God in one person (cf. the “Tome of Leo”, sent, 451 AD, to Chalcedon). * By “nature” I take to be meant the whole extension, but also intension, of the true universe. This, in fact, is the true consequence of the destruction of quantity and extension and number brought about in the science of logic (cf. Hegel’s Science of Logic), the seeing of “the world in a grain of sand” or, by further extension, as in Thompson’s poem, of Christ on the waters “not of Geneserath but Thames”, should we be at the latter place (thus place is “cancelled”), that, equally, of loving the neighbour as self (Geneserath as 208

Cf. Leo Elders SVD: “Reality is friendly”, i.e. it has to be.

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Thames and, hence, conversely) and, thus, or and yet truly, seeing Christ in him or her as one must therefore see him pre-eminently in self, his total opposite. Thus we come also to I, or the I, as we are forced awkwardly to say, as “universal of universals” in the finally true self-consciousness which is absolute knowledge, such that the Oracle’s advice to Socrates, “know thyself”, was in no way a restriction upon wisdom’s reach. Selfconsciousness is thus cancelled inasmuch as everything else is cancelled in and by it. Thus, as is axiomatic in the Scholastic tradition and/or ambience, the thought-process has no empirical nature awaiting discovery. It is, rather, logic as of the logos, is thus archetypal method, “according to the way”, Greek meta hodon, of One who shall have said “I am the way”. It cannot, then, however we approach it, be less than “personal” (if we judge the latter quality correctly), is equally “the truth and the life”. Supremely, then, it is self-consciousness, our own depth-experience, as finally and hence properly self-annihilating or (self-)transcendent, not some necessarily finite object as set at a distance. This is the heart of Hegel’s philosophy and would be so whether he himself realised it or not. In McTaggart’s words, he was indeed more of a mystical philosopher than he himself seemed to realise. A certain self-protection may have been at work here. So at the same time as Nature appears to be everything it is yet nothing apart from the Idea, with which it, it too, is one, as Jesus wholly denied his own will as anything apart, i.e. he willed it in actu not to be that. Thus every effort of the artist representing nature is to present (Vorstellen) it as one and as, in that “moment”, the Idea; Mozart heard his symphonies all at once, he said. This is the aim, in fact, in every effort, linguistic or otherwise, to represent a thought or, ultimately, thought qua thought in its unicity. Nothing else is the moving energy of the sentence, any sentence, as predication of a subject. Nature itself resists this, Hegel points out, is not at first, i.e. as abstractly in itself, what thought makes it to be, or not in itself what thought knows it to be (i.e. this is not a becoming, at least in any temporal sense) and this is its inferiority, he claims, by comparison with art. This is, for Kant, the seeing of nature materialiter. He should rather have said, again, quasi materialiter, as recognising that it cannot be thus seen, since materia is nothing, not even some crude base from which one starts off but which yet would remain as if basis of the whole. Thus my leaving, starting from, London is not essential, as basis, to my coming to Edinburgh. It, matter, is rather the ladder one kicks away (on arrival, as Wittgenstein said, and truly so), like the earthly life of Christ according to Hegel. Thus my casting off of old shoes is merely the occasion of my buying new ones. In this sense history is indeed “bunk”, as the man said (thus the present is history transfigured, history and the present both being not otherwise

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intelligible). The kick to the ladder, on the other hand, is more than a kick, always, is rather the waving of a wand, dialectical (sic Findlay) or not. * Hegel’s treatment of necessity209 seems to break new ground for thought, breaking rather its own distinctions, which “take the form of independent realities”, into the Idea with such force of necessity’s own necessity that, as with Anselm’s argument, God is seen to need no further proof than his own Idea taken in fact as the Idea. It thus takes the form, again, of asserting the necessity of necessity, “God” in fact naming this necessity and conversely. So it is not, again, a reduction of the Christian mysteries to logic but rather a disclosure of the mystery of just logic, the logos which was in his beginning. Is this not precisely what the inspired fourth evangelist, in that Prologue (1, i-xiv), until recently proclaimed at the close of every celebration of the Roman Mass, for example, discerned: “In the beginning was the word”, logos, with “word” seen, and eventually put, as “Word”, i.e. capitalised? Not merely, then, do I think and therefore I am but such thinking is what I am (hence the failure of attempts to reduce, rather than amplify, the cogito to the syllogism having as main premise “Whatever thinks is”) as making me to be (act). It, thinking, is actus essendi in fullest extent, whether or not the mere idea immediate, as such for Hegel false, or “no life (in transferred sense) at all”, freezes to death in Sweden, say (vivere viventibus esse, i.e. that is life’s illusion as “no life at all”). I, my consciousness of myself, am spirit or Geist, personality, in fact, as Substance210. Hegel takes occasion to mark his difference from Spinoza here. In fact, all the same, necessity itself has the form of a denial of independent being to anything other than itself, denial of just what otherwise presents itself as most immediate. Necessity must reign absolutely to be itself, that self which it absolutely is. Yet it is equally a transcending of all restraint, is freedom and has, necessarily, to be freedom, which is, in St. Thomas, the “necessity of the end” as determining what shall be done, viz. those things, actions or abstentions without which the end cannot be attained or, ultimately, stand (for thought), ever. This necessity, nonetheless, transcends, is prior to, the so-called necessity of precept, as St. Thomas, just for example, clearly teaches211. This latter finitude in its immediacy, eliciting in good time “a new commandment”, is itself rather mediated, therefore, and through necessity as “the absolute form”. That is, what is 209

Enc. 147–149. Ibid. 150, Zus. 211 E.g. Summa theol. IIa-IIae 58, 3 ad 2. 210

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elicited here, or, rather, authoritatively declared as the basis of the whole “narrative”, is the transcendence of “command” as such in the context of a final God-based community. “The son goes free”. Precisely as the necessity of the end, need one add, it can never over-ride any of those goods known to participate in just this End. The end itself, rather, blots out application of any of the precepts to actions or omissions frustrating it, any lex appealed to here being no longer ius. Epieicheia, the virtue, is the formal expression of this, in terms of which, for example, St. Thomas argues, as an example only, for the theoretical necessity, thus properly moral, of capital punishment on occasion, i.e. it is otherwise wrong thus to kill, as much for the state as for any rational agent. There might seem a certain tension here between this and his apparent stress upon avoiding intentional killing even in war, and one can argue about that, under the rubric of “double effect”, until the cows come home, like saying one does not kill cockroaches but only keeps one’s house free of vermin. * God stands clear here as the thought of thought. There is thus no reduction of the Idea (of God) but rather a cancelling of all else posited independently (of God). “My God and all things”, exclaims not merely Francis of Assissi, Deus (meus) thus eclipsing omnia in this identification which is simultaneously intuition of God. I venture here to suggest that this is not unrelated to the regular taking of a singular verb-form in classical Greek (surely as spoken before written) when predicated of objects, i.e. grammatical subjects, in the neuter plural. Otherwise, or viewed just grammatically, this is a mere oddity to be learned as such or “by heart” as we say. If God is necessity then necessity is to be venerated as freedom in its perfection precisely. The “iron laws” of materialism, on the contrary, are pure fantasy (or lack of it). So if one takes a close look at what Hegel writes about necessity one sees that it is virtually the very same doctrine as one finds in St. Thomas Aquinas, in St. Augustine or, I make bold to say, in a host of Scriptural variants, from St. Paul to Exodus and back but above all in the various pronouncements to be found in the four Gospels. Similarly, both Hegel and all these authorities leave the resulting paradoxes largely unresolved: The theory however which regards the world as determined through necessity and the belief in a divine providence are by no means mutually excluding points of view. The intellectual principle underlying the idea of divine providence will hereafter be shown to be the notion. But the notion is the truth

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of necessity, which it contains in suspension in itself; just as, conversely, necessity is the notion implicit. Necessity is blind only so long as it is not understood.212

More unusually, Hegel explicitly applies, in his philosophy of history, to secular or mundane events in toto exactly the same principles as theologians apply to what they yet acknowledge as a uniquely and/or divinely inspired Scripture, made up of a selection, by the believing community, from the writings enacted (or, it may be, perpetrated) within this same Israelite “old” and ultimately “new” faith-community. Hegel thus immediately continues: There is nothing therefore more mistaken than the charge of blind fatalism made against the Philosophy of History, when it takes for its problem to understand the necessity of every event. The philosophy of history rightly understood takes the rank of a Théódicée; and those, who fancy they honour divine Providence by excluding necessity from it, are really degrading it by this exclusiveness to a blind and irrational caprice. In the simple language of the religious mind which speaks of God’s eternal and immutable decrees, there is implied an express recognition that necessity forms part of the essence of God. … But God knows what He wills, is determined in His eternal will neither by accident from within nor from without, and what He wills He also accomplishes, irresistibly.213

It is regrettable that many of the most far-seeing of the Thomists, if we are to call them such, in their zeal to vindicate Thomism, often mention Hegel without giving him a chance, as if he only existed in order to be refuted. They thus spring gleefully to accuse him of substituting logical for metaphysical necessity, or for a necessity depending more theologically upon divine decree, which of course could have been otherwise, they think, wishing to defend divine freedom, but without stopping to ask what sense if any such a being otherwise might possess. That is, they apply the yardstick of necessity as if it of course stood above God, binding him to choose one or the other course, just like the rational creature specifically, or as if he were to be duplicating the contingent world all over again in advance at His higher level, the height, however, being what is thereby destroyed. With God, however, there is not even the shadow of a turning, just as he has loved us all from before the foundation of the world, this “from before”, however, being no more than a picture of that concerning which we know most when we understand that we know nothing, in St. Thomas’s words, not even that it is in any usual sense. It is, rather, what swallows up this usual “is” and 212 213

Enc. 147, Zus. Ibid.

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can be nothing less, given that it is at all, as reason makes clear to us that it must be. Of necessity, rather, we have to say, with the ecstatic appreciation of the old song, referring to human love, however, which is a mere shadow of it, “It had to be you … You always did, and always will”. The case, rather, is that Hegel brings out what Henry Veatch, in his day as much a Thomist as anyone, called “the ontology of logical forms”, and which Veatch found as squarely in the Aristotelico-Thomist tradition as we are finding them in Hegel. “Everything”, says Hegel, “is a syllogism”. In this sense logic is truly divine, exceeding itself without losing itself in what we call metaphysics, rather as the advanced mystic need feel no pressure to give up traditional vocal prayer. Hegel’s science of logic is thus the science of science, but not less of an art for that, ars artium, become perfect form, as indeed philosophy, of Absolute Spirit, though it is not only for this reason that the necessities of logic do not constrain divine necessity (but rather the converse), one with divine freedom itself. There are few points that Hegel stresses more repeatedly in his exposition of this science, not a new or upstart logic as Peter Geach often wanted to make out, praising McTaggart for, according to him, later on abandoning it. What logic witnesses to is that thought thinks itself and only itself since thought, verbum, is the fullness of being or truly “what there is”. So much is this so that being, as a yet more general predicate, is itself overthrown, as predication itself establishes the rule of contradiction, or that A has to be B or non-A in order to remain A! Thus for St. Thomas the subject is named quasi materialiter while the predicate signifies differently, quasi formaliter, even when the name is the same, as in literal identity or “A is A” predications (which only thus have content and not through a specifically different meaning of “is”), signifies quasi formaliter.214 Such is the method or way of logic, the logical way, what is meta hodon, according to the way. This way, or the procedure according to it, is thus revealed, at the end of Hegel’s “greater logic” especially, as “the true being”. This, then, is the being, the true, the beautiful and the good, the one, as it existed “before” colour or weight or measure were created, as abiding for ever in the “peace that passes understanding” and none grasp this better than Hegel in intellectual format, whatever artists and saints derive from it. For this is the Divine Word if it is anything, I AM, unnameable else, since possessed of “the name that is above all names”, which we may on different 214

Apparent neglect of this point, this quasi, by Frege seems almost to form the basis, as starting-point at least, for Veatch’s extensive criticism of Fregean logical theory as if it identified predicates with actual forms (as it were materially!), subjects with actual material individuals (as if one could not say and mean, say, “Happiness is a bowl of cherries”).

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occasions call logic, Lord or laetitia. The wise have always seen this, that it is Mind that has “set all in order” (Anaxagoras), such that, in later amplification of the truth, it was asserted that inasmuch as we hear it we eat it (and hence conversely, if we but could eat it we would hear it: “he that eats me will live because of me”) and are thus turned into it, in transcendence of all sectionalist anatomies, language cancelling itself. This is the divine or “concrete” simplicity. What is most often forgotten here is that God, the all, in his own nature, has no body. But what God does not have just is not. This means, and St. Thomas confirms, that “body” is not a metaphysical term, is of interest “only for logicians” as he puts it. Or, rather, it is a sacramental notion (in the general acceptation of this term), the nothing that God made himself to be in order to “bring to nought the things which are” (St. Paul) but which otherwise than by Him are not or would not have been, joining himself to their nothingness and thus, so to say, absorbing and simultaneously cancelling them. This is the final secret of divinity, namely, in St. Augustine’s phrase, that it is closer, and that to us, than we are to ourselves, intimior me mihi in the inimitable conciseness of the Latin original, hot from the sainted seer’s pen and spirit. Just therefore it is the most universal of truths or even, as we say, an “open secret”. That is the divinity of language, offspring of the Word, the “only one”, as such enjoining silence in final sophia, nonrelational as itself a or the relation, last or hence first virtue of intellect wherever found. In becoming truly self-conscious, in the original sense of knowing ourselves, we unite truly with God as uncovering, discovering, the original or primal unity, that which un-makes, dismantles at least, what time represents to us, ourselves representing time, as our original assumptions. This union, with the Absolute Idea, is nothing other than the literal selfdenial demanded of us, the denial of our fancied selves in what becomes, as ever having been but now revealed, by us or to us as by another closer than close, again, this ultimate self-consciousness cancelling all that we generally mean by consciousness, viz. something felt by the individual especially. In the love of neighbour as self such a self is already eradicated, just as music as such or in itself, its self, never stops. There is and can be no stationary music. Just therefore is it “the food of love”, like spirit itself in its restlessness. So final appeal to it, here as in the Psalter’s final psalm, may be the most fitting closure. Cf. Psalm 150, the words of which all in fact refer to music, to which it was best set, so to say over again, by the Bruckner motet of 1892, already mentioned above, one of eight and a half minutes. All of nature, declares Thomas Aquinas meanwhile, is a sacrament. Hence, and really only hence, all things and hence nature being made by this Word, we have the seven sacraments of religion. In mundo erat, et

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mundus per ipsum factus est215, i.e. whether, thus far, it knew him or not. How many people, for that matter, knew (or know) the worth of Plato? Yet philosophy demands a right to be recognised and recognised with even worldly honours. The same, then, can be claimed for religion, as historically incarnated here bei uns in what is still called, here and there, “the Holy Land” especially, as can be done also for art, in accordance, just as it happens, with Hegel’s analysis of Absolute Spirit in its three primal forms. It is what contradicts this that is rather “upstart”, to resituate Geach’s term, and not Hegel’s own development of logic, rather as fascism and socialism216, national or otherwise, that murderous pair, are upstart. Conversely, there is nothing more creatively revolutionary than a living conservatism, though one has no wish to be reduced to or kept away from ideas by this finite set of categories. It is indeed language that sets limits. But just therefore one must fight it, whether by silence or otherwise. * What we have just touched on above, the final secret almost, as it might seem, means that man cannot be an optional extra for God, a kind of sideissue, any more than can the Cross itself of the incarnate Christ. This is more rather than less evident in earlier Christendom, witness Anglo-Saxon (“The Dream of the Rood”) or medieval English poetry (Quia amore langueo) of divine love, love between God and man, while in a sense it is even more prominent in the Old Testament as working out the idea of a, indeed the, “chosen people”. For that choice remains inasmuch as the whole of Christian theology is built upon it. If we have once grasped the flame of divine love, love for the eternal and infinite, burning from birth in our own heart and intellect, then we cannot but grant the converse, understanding this as a clear call of divine desire, since God qua God does nothing in vain, while, further, in God, desire cannot be less than the divine life itself, i.e. this too, just as End, is as such realised or fulfilled, not, then, so that God no longer desires but that desire itself here loses its negative quality of lack, becomes as such, and not as quenching anything, enjoyment. We must “wave the dialectical wand” (sic Findlay) here indeed217. The whole tragic 215

Gospel of John 1, 10. As dogmatically self-distinguished from an increasing need for socialisation as the responsibility of all and hence also, or in the first (i.e. last) place, of governments. 217 Thus we should not grant with Geach (Three Philosophers, p. 124), at least as citing Aquinas, that “God’s eternity is compresent with every part of time” as if this were the only alternative to equating his eternity or immutability with “the timelessness of mathematics”. Rather, again, one inclines to suggest at least (or, if 216

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vision of human history is thus set for incorporation into blessedness, set, however, not in some divine or absolute future, for there is no such thing. It is an ens rationis, in St. Thomas’s terms. In one good word, again, “reality is friendly”, while people claiming that some one particular manifestation of evil, more than all the others, overturns this good word simply do not know what they are talking about. Such things just as well demonstrate it, as of themselves calling up a search for an absolute response, itself demanded by a divine or absolute dialectic. It can’t go on, as we say of such things, and why, unless because, again, “reality is friendly”. So the dialectic is not, finally, between good and evil, since these, no more than necessity (and freedom), form no actual pair, do not subsist in their contrast as apart from the Idea, the divine Being, as neither do being and nothing. The Idea itself is rather precisely this dialectic, this way to go (method), this dynamically realised truth, this life which is, in one word, Spirit, or that which has ever resulted or, more truly, ever results. It is this dynamism, of man as made in the image of God, which underlies the phenomenon of atheism within Christian culture and consciousness, as the Jews themselves were seen as atheists more often than not by their heathen neighbours. “Why do I go mourning all the day long while the heathen say unto me ‘Where is thy God?’ As for our God, He is in heaven …” Blessed be that people who alone kept alive this true and only reasonable idea of God, man’s personal lover and source of his dignity! Whence, then, did they learn it? Whence did Moses or Abraham learn it? We do not know, any more than Rudolph Steiner218, great thinker though he may have been, knew, unless we confess an approach by this God himself. But, again, how separate is such an approach, in its very conception, from just phenomena themselves, the whole system? Or, it is or may be the same, do they not as such either herald or recall this approach, as Newman appears to have thought? What is revelation? Was heisst Gott spricht? (Joseph Pieper’s question). For Hegel it is clear, he makes it clear, God is revelation, so that, conversely, revelation is not of anything other than the divine being itself. Here Hegel held the key to the sacramental mysteries themselves, but without knowing or finding the door. Revelation is and has to be God’s gift of himself to us and nothing less, of his own life replacing our own, such not, to leave the puzzle standing), time itself, like space, like “the body” in its mathematically anatomical abstraction, is to be progressively known as Vorstellung. Timelessness is not only, still less firstly, “of mathematics”, dialectical notion though it be, even if it be true generally that “Aquinas does not try” to resolve this puzzle. Time, said Hegel, both jokingly and dialectically, “is real only so long as spirit needs it”. 218 Cf. his essay “Moses” (1911).

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that “I live yet not I, but Christ lives in me”. So much is this so that Christ, God’s Son and Word, gives us to participate actively in his own sacrifice for our sakes: “Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you.” “As many who eat me, the same shall live because of me.” We minister there to ourselves, but as having been given, at last, something worth thus offering, namely the divine self-offering as specified by the separation of bread and wine as separated body and (shed) blood, though each of these two here separated in sacrifice elements is yet “Christ entire”. Here too, then, the whole of nature, of the world and all its courses, is cancelled because aufgehoben, taken up, into the Idea, into God, the absolute, thus thereby loosed in thought from anything else which thereby becomes, for thought, dust and ashes or, without such a figure, nothing. “Turn but a stone and you touch a wing” and no longer stone. The poet might have written “touch” in place of his first “turn”. Or nothing is rather but itself, naturally as we say, is rather itself indeed nothing as being totally absorbed by thought, i.e. really, into the absolutely other which as infinite is itself, rather, identical with each and all but not they with it. “This also is thou, neither is this thou”. Hegel explicitly denies convertibility here, of finite and infinite, is thus the total reverse of pantheist.219 * Concerning necessity, then, St. Thomas distinguishes the necessity of precept from the necessity of end, the end as he means in the first place (since “only one thing is necessary”, even though the Gospel refers to it in the same breath as “the better part”, which not all choose), although not exclusively, having demonstrated that man’s end is unitary, that here especially no man serves two masters, i.e. he literally cannot. This is perhaps the main difficulty with the usual doctrinal exposition of “mortal sin”, that if man’s goal or happiness is unitary it is sought here too. So one cannot in that case have turned away from the end as such, the end, that is, as idea. Thus just here, where alone idea and reality coincide, i.e. that is the ultimate reality, is shown their final and ultimate difference in a one-way absorption or cancellation. God is, must be, “a hedonist at heart” (C.S. Lewis, who puts this, however, in the mouth of a devil220). This raises also the question about perversion, however. What is it? There must be some attraction in it where it is embraced or where, finally, evil becomes or evil would that itself become “my good”. Milton seems to see no paradox even in this final instance and perhaps there is none, although in that case, to borrow Hegel’s 219 220

Cp. Enc. 92 with Zusatz. Cf. C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 1942.

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words, “evil is just not evil”! The counsels for beginners in spirituality given by St. John of the Cross would seem equally freed from mere paradox by a kind of transient contradiction in the terms or situations themselves envisaged. Thus his “In order to have pleasure in everything seek to have pleasure in nothing”221. The seeking or similar attached to these counsels witnesses to this element of self-contradiction in actu of the finite notions themselves: i.e. just this is their finitude. The Gospels particularly are full of this type of speech, the very opposite of the Moorean fixation, “Each thing is itself and not another thing”, wherever he got it from. To have blethered on so about the grandly misnamed “naturalistic fallacy” after all Hegel had so recently expounded about just good and evil and even to have got whole succeeding generations in one or another country to carry it forward, well, it should help our liberation from fashion generally. Moore, it seems, to shift the ground slightly, just could not conceive that his having gone to the pictures on the previous night might be, after all said and done, illusion. Yet for some the previous can as well seem future: There was a young lady named Bright Who travelled much faster than light. She departed one day In a relative way And arrived on the previous night.

Some things only need saying. What chance, anyhow, had McTaggart in such a milieu? That the world cannot be as it immediately appears to us, that is the insight of wisdom, though even, we see here, of natural science. This is the beginning, leading to search for proof of the same, of escape from misperceived Moorean monstrosity as set forth in those counsels or similar of the Carmelite saint. The Psalmist says the same thing with great sobriety: “I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the ungodly”. Perverse? Meanwhile: Alia autem est necessitas ex obligatione praecepti, sive ex necessitate finis, quando scilicet aliquis non potest consequi finem virtutis nisi hoc faciat.222 Or what did Beethoven 221

“Counsels for beginners” at the beginning of his The Ascent of Mount Carmel. Aquinas, Summa theol. IIa-IIae 58, 3 ad 2. Note that he specifies the end in question as the end of virtue specifically, while yet firmly excluding any independent realm of value or of the sittlich. This recalls Hegel’s fulminations against the Kantian “ought”, though he seems to backtrack in some important ways, rather, for example, appearing to identify religion itself with the finally sittlich. For St. Thomas too, in fact, religion (religio) is a virtue as, namely, a subordinated part of cardinal justice. Also, we must remember that the term “virtue” transcends the sittlich or moral as 222

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mean by his talk of taking fate by the throat, what else could he have meant, unless an intention to turn the sorrow itself into joy? This Johannine vision spurs on his (fifth) symphony to the end, the third movement repeating the rhythm of the first but as transformed, as explosively transforming itself. Fate’s blows, the first movement, return transformed into a forward moving march of acceptance of the same material (third movement) leading straight into, and the leading is properly mysterious, joy, this process being once repeated, in reversal or interruption, as it must ever be while life here lasts or “here below” as we say. “Your sorrow will be turned into joy and your joy no man can take from you” (stress added), while in the next symphony, the “storm”, Beethoven first begins to show us how, backwardly, the new joy itself can be heart-breaking. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall be comforted”. Here, in this otherwise crazily matter of fact statement, is stated, again, the paradox that we have been urging is time itself, against which Christ sets “hatred of life in this world”, thus overcoming it completely in martyr after martyr. “A little while and you shall not see me; again a little while and you shall see me, and your joy no man can take from you.” Or, “he that shall endure to the end, the same shall be saved.” Why is it like this? We don’t know, apart from those hints from Eden we have been considering. My point here, though, is that its, immediate reality’s, essence is time. There is “a time to live and a time to die”, i.e. neither holds firm. Here in our text, anyhow, obligation is introduced to show that the necessity of justice is not a necessity of compulsion, and hence that it can be meritorious and thus a virtue despite such necessity. So it is yet another example of necessity not excluding freedom, indeed not. Behind it all lies awareness of the superiority of the vita contemplativa over the vita activa precisely as more immediately focussed upon the end (of man, of human life). Significantly, Aquinas writes here of “the end of virtue” and does not explicitly say “God”, with which he identifies this end as firmly as it is identified with beatitudo. For here, in Aquinas as in Hegel, we have the clearest instance of that one-way absorption or, equally cancellation so central in Hegel (and yet more explicit in Aquinas). What is cancelled in absorption is any kind of idea of value or moral goodness held to in priggish abstraction from its real participation and/or swallowing up in our final blessedness, final, namely, as our end (finis) now. “Hence St. Thomas not merely extending to but in some respects more centrally or “nobly” including the “intellectual” virtues, even though these are reckoned as not necessary for salvation “here below” as one says, unlike the moral virtues simply, lack of which requires forgiveness. These distinctions, and other ones too, are less “clear cut” in Hegel.

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explains moral evil not primarily as disobedience (one species of it) but as unsuitability of action to end”223or as missing the target, hamartia, as sin or wrong-doing had earlier been explained. * The point revolved around here is that you cannot have logical necessity or moral necessity without their being absorbed in, which is to say explained by, necessity itself. The question, to which the reply is anything and everything, as contained in identity within the all-encompassing simple because absolute Idea, then becomes: what is necessity and how does it relate, if at all, to freedom? For even the contingent, in so far as it is an actual factor, is necessary. Recall that Actuality was Hegel’s previous category under which, as by “the method” throughout, everything was to be sought so as to be thought. Why then just necessity, freedom’s immediate opposite after all? Because only necessity can enable immediacy. Or because a chance, i.e. non-necessary, coming to be of anything as something from nothing is simply absurd. Such a nothing would, in such case, not even be nothing. So logic goes on immediately from actuality to necessity or as, in fact, to God, as we call God necessity (as necessitating and not necessitated). Hence the truth of necessity is Freedom (Enc. 157), “the character of all thought” in its “absolute inwardness”. Is freedom then actually a category? If it is not then this seems to be because Hegel identifies it with necessity more closely than the categories in general or as a class, so to say, are all identified with one another in their difference. The difference between necessity and freedom, on the other hand, would not be “logical”, would be a transitory illusion, transiting rather. Is this at all tenable, that thought itself is a matter of transforming things into what we call their opposites, that ratio is ad opposita224 even in that sense, i.e. that this is precisely the sense of this phrase?

223

Cited from our Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2002, p.192. Cp. Martin Grabmann SJ, Thomas von Aquin, Munich 1959, p. 159, on transcendental beatitude as höchste Entfaltung der Sittlichkeit. Cf. also Aquinas, Comm. in Sent. IV, 33, 1, 1. 224 Thus ratio, mind, reasoning, is regularly opposed in Scholastic thought, e.g. Thomas Aquinas, to natura as being ad unum, precisely in and as itself ad opposita, hence finding, in nature, its own opposite to which (i.e. to nature) it is equally opposed, as its oppositum, therefore. Every affirmation of reason is simultaneously negation of negation while every negation is itself a species of affirmation.

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We say that a cause is a cause, only when it has an effect, and vice versa. Both cause and effect are thus one and the same content: and the distinction between them is primarily only that the one lays down, and the other is laid down. … The finitude of things consists accordingly in this. While cause and effect are in their notion identical, the two forms present themselves severed so that, though the cause is also an effect, and the effect also a cause, the cause is not an effect in the same connexion as it is a cause, nor the effect a cause in the same connexion as it is an effect. This again gives the infinite progress, in the shape of an endless series of causes, which shows itself at the same time as an endless series of effects.225

Causality, in fact, “passes into the relation of Action and Reaction, or Reciprocity”. The reciprocity is real, the apparently rectilinear movement “is bent round and back into itself, and thus the progress ad infinitum of causes and effects is, as a progress, really and truly suspended.” Hume here finds, would have found, his philosophy’s vindication. Here, though, it will itself be found to serve perennial metaphysics rather than to make an end of them. The bend “transforms the infinite progression into a self-contained relationship” and this is the necessity, even of what is contingent, it will be shown. Freedom, correspondingly, will be found in the inwardness and stability of reason itself and not in “possibilities and lots of possibilities”. This relation develops as reciprocity, mutuality, what Hegel will call, has called, in another context, pardon, the last as first and conversely. The centre is everywhere; “turn but a stone and you touch a wing”. Ultimately, “I am you”226; the centre, again, is everywhere. Hegel refers to the “inwardness” of reason here: Reciprocal action just means that each characteristic we impose is also to be suspended and inverted into its opposite, and that in this way the essential nullity of the ‘moments’ is explicitly stated.227

This reciprocity he has uncovered, Hegel says, “stands on the threshold of the notion”. Just therefore we have to go further, to proceed in fact from causality to identity, identity in the very difference, thus relativising, at least, difference itself. Cause and effect, action and reaction, must be recognised as factors of “the notion and nothing else”. By this “circulation of substance” it is disclosed that mere “self-subsistence is the infinite negative self-relation”. In this relation, of how we see things or even how they are, any “act of distinguishing and intermediating becomes a primariness 225

Hegel, Enc. 153, Zus. Cf. D. Kolak, I am You, Pomona, New York, 2002. 227 Enc. 156. 226

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of actual things independent one against the other”. In reality “their independence only lies in their identity” and not in their not being another thing. Thus, again, such “self-subsistence is the infinite negative selfrelation” which is thus, inasmuch as outside of the Idea, nothing, “dust and ashes” being the usual picture of this. As for true being, it is “in God” that such things, or we, “live and move and have their being”, i.e. “in the notion” as Hegel puts it here. Here, by contrast, we have freedom, that is to say, Hegel says, “an independence which, though self-repulsive into distinct independent elements, yet in that repulsion is self-identical, and in the movement of reciprocity still at home and conversant only with itself”. The most remarkable term here is surely “only”.228 “This truth of necessity, therefore,” Hegel concludes, “is Freedom: and the truth of substance is the Notion”. * This Notion, or concept, the terminus of Hegel’s logic, is thus out and out Necessity, which is thus in turn infinite, as is shown first by its oneness with freedom, primary attribute of what is absolute. How, though, is necessity one with freedom? This is like asking how does the eternal God act, or become incarnate, for example? How does being become, as something proper to being and not a falling off from it? How can God have a son, or even speak any “word” other than himself? The absorption in Aufhebung here, I answer, is a matter of our thought only as it rises in stages to grasp the infinite. The exception to this is the Trinity. Aquinas insists that this Trinity is opaque to our unaided thought, although he goes on to show how once it is revealed to us we then can come to see it as not merely the most but the uniquely reasonable account of infinity as of divinity, to see, though, not merely with the help of revealed premises but as truly seeing, casting aside those premises in our argumentation whilst and because beholding their subject, as those at that time and place beheld Jesus Christ and heard him say, certainly not impossibly, “I and my father are one”, adding that what we do to one of the least for whom he cares we do to him. There is no specifically “moral” identification employed here, as if in contrast with the real thing.229 *

228 229

Ibid. 158. Cf. our note 109 above.

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Here then we have the prime example of that necessity also of the historical, as of the contingent in general230, of which Hegel speaks, seeming to extend a principle of Biblical interpretation to all reality. There too, then, we would be learning it first from a sacred or privileged source, faith generating understanding. And this has indeed been the course of history itself over again, it might well be argued. What else led the Popes to drain the marshes threatening Rome, for example, or St. Boniface to chop down bothersome trees deemed sacred? Christianity, we may say, set in motion, or speeded up, the reasonable exploitation of, yet inclusive of care for, nature, opening up to man his birth-right. Of course the new freedom itself would also be exploited also in the bad or negative sense, here and there or even everywhere, no one being fully able to live up to heaven-sent freedoms, then or now. Or what gave thrust to that movement of education we call scholasticism, or to the piece by piece abandonment of slavery in Christian territories, in Europe, as Hegel chooses to put it? The resurgence of outright slavery in America and the reaction to it is the exception proving the rule. Note that “slavery” is not a term reducible to use for emotively helping the condemnation of forms of exploitation nonetheless falling short of a claim to outright ownership of one by another, whether in marital or in labour relations, and hence not in truth, i.e. not literally, slavery. South African apartheid comes to mind, while even “education for servitude”231 there would not be outright slavery. Real slavery is and was far worse. With the conversion of slave or master, or of both, slavery set about abolishing itself, as described in St. Paul’s letters. This attention of ours to underlying principles is not to be confused, wilfully or unconsciously, with “special pleading”. * Thus the Notion (Concept) is the truth of Being (Nature) and Essence (Idea), inasmuch as the seeming of self-reflection is itself at the same time independent immediacy, and this being of a different actuality is immediately only a seeming in (into) itself (i.e. it is Vorstellung). The Notion (Concept) has exhibited itself as the truth of Being (Nature) and Essence (Idea), as the ground to which the regress of both leads. Conversely it has been developed out of being (nature) as its ground. The former aspect of the advance may be regarded as a concentration of being (nature) into its depth, thereby disclosing its inner nature: the latter aspect as an issuing of the more perfect from the less perfect. When such development is viewed on the 230

This is emphasised in his posthumous Lectures the Proofs of the Existence of God (LPEG). 231 A chapter-heading in Trevor Huddleston’s Nought for your Comfort of 1956.

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latter side only, it does prejudice to the method of philosophy. The special meaning which these superficial thoughts of more imperfect and more perfect have in this place is to indicate the distinction of being, as an immediate unity with itself, from the notion, as free mediation with itself. Since being (nature) has shown that it is an element in the notion (concept), the latter has thus exhibited itself as the truth of being (nature). As this its reflection in itself and as an absorption of the mediation, the notion (concept) is the pre-supposition of the immediate – a pre-supposition which is identical with the return to self; and in this identity lie freedom and the notion (concept). If the partial element therefore be called the imperfect, then the notion (concept), or the perfect, is certainly a development from the imperfect; since its very nature is thus to suspend its pre-supposition. At the same time it is the notion (concept) alone which, in the act of supposing itself, makes its pre-supposition; as has been made apparent in causality in general and especially in reciprocal action.232

All, that is to say, is uplifted to, or is never removed from, the divine necessity as a freedom able to include also our creaturely free acts, as freedom itself is distinguished toto caeli from whatever else is free, indeed cancelling or neutralising or absorbing it, even action as something separate, leaving only that act which it necessarily is, viz. necessity, already as such in actu. This is what explains, causes and/or undergirds the coincidences of things with the opposites they pass into as precisely their act. We are never more free, therefore, than when we surrender ourselves to sovereign necessity, equivalent after all, we surmised, with “taking it (viz. fate) by the throat”, while if our fate seems to lead us into temptation then it does so, does this, both daily and differently, not at all. Per ardua ad astra indeed, yet the temptation (it only means being tried, proved or tested) arises from our weakness as needing for our own good to be overcome, grown out of. We are not led into it by deceit or ill will. This, I venture to suggest, is the 232

Enc. 159. With one exception (my comment at the third line) the bracketed additions reflect alternative translations dictated (or suggested?) to his class of graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh in the autumn of 1967 by Joseph Kockelmans. They do seem to me to shed light upon what is at stake or going on here and indeed in Hegel’s system as such. Yet when are Being and Essence convertible with Nature and the Idea and when not, as the Notion is the Concept but the Idea not always the Absolute Idea? Meanwhile it does seem to me that the English translator (W. Wallace) causes confusion, perplexity even, by translating scheinen with “shining or show” (rather than “seeming”, say) and that twice here. Scheinen can mean something like our shine in, say, die Sonne scheint, but not in the more usual es scheint mir, meaning simply “it seems to me”, as in a thousand or more such related uses. This is so even if one can perceive an awareness in Hegel of a significant relation, possibly more close in German, not usually noted between the two senses.

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sense of the Lord’s prayer here. Yet, we acknowledge, precisely the Spirit drove Christ into the desert in order to be tempted, as we have to be. “Nothing must bind me to life” (Beethoven again), yet, or he would not so have vowed, the bonds tempted or tested him. “Give me the strength to conquer myself”, he first says there (in the Notebooks), this, the italicised, being the point, the will as love and conversely. God gives the strength to those whom He sees will overcome. His having ordained this, however, is necessarily the same as his seeing it, truly and literally and necessarily. Much further we don’t get; yet, again, this ignorance gives no call to suppose malevolent ordinations on God’s part, i.e. there is no necessity for this and much to say against it, the supposition itself, rather, tending towards the malevolent. Necessity, as reality, is ever friendly, as Hegel’s texts confirm.233 * Everything is necessary, but above all myself, I being “the universal of universals”. The omission of scare-quotes from this pronoun “I” here intends volumes. “As existing in an individual form this liberation is called I” (Enc. 159). Note that it is this liberation and nothing else that is said to exist here. To say that liberation exists in an individual form, namely, is not to say that an individual correspondingly exists, at least not precisely, which is all that is needed for transcendence of “our” individuality which is thus, it may be, not ours. It is how this liberation “appears”, again, to us. Here we may note Hegel’s qualifications upon the notion of ex-istence, suggesting derivation as he says. In this sense if God is then he does not ex-ist (he rather “sists”, some, e.g. a “sistologist”, might want to say). The “this” (in “this liberation”) refers back, in the text, to “thinking”, i.e. the act, and nothing else. The term “means a liberation” (stress added). Hegel could as well have omitted the indefinite article, unless this should mark the distinction from willing. Liberation anyhow, i.e. as such, at first “called I” (later “free Spirit” and “Love”234), “consists in that which is actual having itself not as something else, but as its own being and creation, in the

233

E.g. Enc. 159, final paragraph. McTaggart’s charge that Hegel downplays Love can thus seem exaggerated, even unfounded. Love, rather, gets an explanation, indeed pride of penultimate place at the end of the Logic (Enc. 233-235), as “the Idea of the Good” in WL, “the unity of the theoretical and practical idea” (Enc. 235), recalling Aristotle saying “contemplation is the highest praxis”.

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other actuality with which it is bound up by the force of necessity”235. This, it is clear, can refer equally either to knowledge or to love and it is pure traditional Greek philosophy, Aristotelianism especially. Hegel calls it identity in difference, thereby signalling his own discovery of the contradiction at the heart of all compounded speech and understanding and hence eventually at the heart of finitude as such. “Wherefore hast thou made all men for nought?” Such a question, from Psalmist or Preacher, is thus most pertinent and pressing. We need to find out and understand why the addressee has done this. The question is plainly if unconsciously echoed by the poet: Wherefore should any set thee love apart, Since none but I make much of nought?236

It is nonetheless questioned by Hegel, as is any suggestion of an antecedent nothing. It is with the End that things not merely begin but in which they are forever known and hence derivatively necessary. The first view, that is, is a representation (Vorstellung). Scripture, for those who look, finally sides with Hegel here, as might the poet(s) if pressed. “I have loved thee from before the foundation of the world”, i.e. necessarily, if infinite sovereignty, i.e. God, the Absolute Idea, is to be maintained. This is the dignity St. Augustine urges the Christian to acknowledge and in acknowledging which a man or woman is already upon the true way “and the life”, her worth selfacknowledged indeed. “Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost”. Not for nothing, we are free to surmise, did the evangelist phrase things so. To be free, then, we must, as actual, have ourselves not as something else merely, i.e. the identity in difference. Rather, the self “as actual” shall have itself “not as something else, but as its own being and creation, in the other actuality with which it is bound up by the force of necessity”. This, that is, is still identity in difference but with a difference (over again). The something else which is not “else” is “its own being and creation” and the self which is not self, but rather self of selves perhaps, is “bound up” with it “by the force of necessity”. This necessity, however, seems to be God himself over again, since it is, as object of all thinking, this self, that very necessity, as it were taking over when we think but as having been our true self “all the time”. Cogito ergo sum but precisely as (res) cogitans. The res seems a concession to common speech and its representations merely. In

235

Cp. Edith Stein: “Endliches und Ewiges Sein. Versuch einen Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins”, Werke, vol. V, 410f., Louvain-Freiburg 1959. 236 Francis Thompson, d. 1907, “The Hound of Heaven”.

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more philosophical language act precedes substance, or is it. Sufficient faith itself moves mountains. The liberation, anyhow, “exists in an individual form” (Enc. 159), whence it develops to “free Spirit” as, indeed, “Love” and, as enjoyment, “blessedness”, freed from all “finite exclusiveness”, where we all “wash one another’s feet”, something Christ connects most closely to his doing this for each of us. * “Necessity is the mother of invention”. Like many popular proverbs, this one has a hidden meaning, hidden as substance is from its appearances. The proverb, in fact, may be treated as a first step towards deeper penetration inasmuch as its use of “mother” may be seen not so much as replacing as it is answering a more original thought, expressed by simple removal of the letter “m” in the English sentence. This leads to the apparent platitude, “Necessity is the other of invention”. What we have to do we don’t invent. And yet, of course, we do, just there where we need something, thus cancelling the otherness. So, one may add, if for reflection only, “the mother is the other of the child”, “God is the other of creation” and so on, “mother” being just one species of “other”, like all finite notions, precisely the initial truth of “Each thing is itself and not another thing”, uncritical use of which we criticised above. Thus we have seen that it is necessity that brings forth the contingent, that the contingent is itself necessary, therefore, and is included in the Absolute Idea, in inventiveness without limit. Necessity is the foreknowledge and creation of all free acts, inasmuch as they have substance. Necessity is the good beyond evil, that it sweeps away like a breath, since it is equally the Absolute Idea. It is thus being, esse, or perfect act precisely in its infinity, which is perfection in thought without limit and not perfection as mere absence of limit, in a self-cancellation. That would not be das wahre Seiendes, still less die Methode., besides which as identifying the perfection named as something else, e.g. absence of limit, it makes it to be finite and/or comprehensible. Thus we distinguish what is perefect from the perfect of its kind, a metaphysical contradiction. The perfection, rather, is in and of thought, specifically, simply as being the Idea which knows only itself and that exclusively, which does not prevent its self-diffusion but rather, in view of the Idea’s infinity, the contrary as what we call good (bonum) in transcendental perfection to the nth degree. For thought in itself is the perfect act, uniquely including love and all others. Thought has thought all things, just in that thinking (of) itself

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which is inseparable from its notion. But to remain infinite, in our conception of it, as Hegel well shows, duplicating Aquinas in a later key, or without limit, it cannot be other than freedom, freedom itself. In this act we are eternally known, therefore, while in each such an act of knowing anything the Idea is wholly present, this being the original intentional identity in every case. Thus when we say, again, more or less piously, “This also is thou, neither is this thou”, we are affirming this identity which, as of being with nothing, is the essence of what is wholly otherness. “We know most about God when we know that we know nothing about him” (Aquinas). To know this of God, however, is already to know something of him! For this, it, is the arch-call to worship, of the one who, without wishing to be unnecessarily mysterious, declares himself as I AM. One could, however, prolong this to “I am myself” which, we understand, has to approximate to a claim to be simply self, hence self of selves. This has to yield a sense, though requiring specification, in which each and any self may declare “I am you”, again, meaning first, if reverently, this divine “you” and with that, which is perhaps not so immediately clear, all other you-s. “What you do to another you do to me”: this yields also, if followed through, that what you do to another you do also to the other(s) of that other, without limit, so that, as the apostle says, “You are all members one of another”. This, though, he takes as derived from the mystery of Christ, which we have not mentioned in our derivation. But that is precisely how it has to be, that Christ, in his life, words and actions, “declares” God or how things ever are, tears aside the veil. This is why the heathen cry all the day long to God’s faithful, “Where is thy God?” The Davidic answer ran “As for our God, he is in heaven”. Now if it is “like heaven to be near you” (popular song of the early1950s) then it is heaven to be with, which would mean one with, God. God, then, is with himself wholly, hence unattainable by those others until he should, if he would, give himself to them, as the prophets believed he would. Now that is philosophy, as it can be traced also among the Greeks and others. * Time is clearly specific to finite creation, while necessity is divine. This is the basic meaning of Mother Julian’s “All shall be well and all manner of thing”, as the second conjunct so to say hammers home. It shall be because it is, and only so. The free decisions of God spoken of in religion are precisely this necessity and there is no other. It is self just as diffusive, as befits infinity in all logic, though we have needed revelation and will maybe

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will always do so to see it. It is after all itself necessarily revelation and that even beyond our dreams, as we say. The only true future is thus present and so in the sacraments, to the eye of faith, not future at all. This insight is the essence of eucharistic piety, could we but keep to it. Necessity is divine. Saying this means that necessity is freedom, that freedom at its most absolute is necessity, not of compulsion or precept but of the end as ever or per se realised. In this Hegel and St. Thomas concur. This has to be so simply because there can be no necessity above God and God is freedom. Is God then free not to exist? Pretty much. But then, this is the logical condition, he would just therein most fully show forth his godhead, his absoluteness in divinity. He did in fact make himself nothing in Jesus Christ, Christians believe, choosing the things that are not in order to bring to nought the things which are, in St. Paul’s words. Really, however, God, as pure act, does not himself act as ot this or that, unless insofar as such is itself included from the first. The Apostle speaks in a measure figuratively, as speech after all just is a figure (but not merely “of speech”). The negative is thus itself positive, it is shown, and thus can be negated again (and again). This is the dialectic of what Hegel refers to as “the soulless word ‘is’”. It is what leads him to assert that the true being is logical method, the logical forms therefore the most ontologically weighty elements not just “in the universe” (they are too weighty for that) but absolutely. As St. Thomas would say, even, implicitly at least, does say, “And this we call God”.

CHAPTER EIGHT WILL, WORLD, ANALOGY

The necessity which finite cognition produces in the Demonstration, is, in the first place, an external necessity, intended for the subjective intelligence alone. But in necessity as such, cognition itself has left behind its presupposition and starting-point, which consisted in accepting its content as given or found.

Hegel has just concluded his discussion of this, viz. of “Cognition Proper” (Enc. 226-232). He continues: Necessity qua necessity is implicitly the self-relating notion. The subjective idea has thus implicitly reached an original and objective determinateness, - a something not given, and for that reason immanent in the subject. It has passed over into the Idea of Will.237

Note that it is not the Idea itself in any sense that has passed over into this but we ourselves inasmuch as our own thinking or thought, i.e. “the subjective idea”, which, in the process here performed and described, insofar as Hegel has written a book, in itself a different because particular instance of willing, just as we ourselves are reading a book238, comes to this pass, i.e. of itself. But what, if anything in distinction, is this subjective idea? Hegel writes: “The Idea may be described in many ways. It may be called reason (and this is the proper philosophical signification of reason); subject-object; the unity of the ideal and the real …” Subject-object? So doesn’t he know either? Or have we ourselves made a distinction here without difference? Either way the universal “must be apprehended as subjectivity, as a notion self-moving, active, and form-imposing”. 237

Enc. 232. We could still, however, still say that we ourselves, i.e. ourselves and he, are actually simply thinking, that our combined thought is just thought simply, while the reading, along with all the distractions, stops, starts and irrelevancies there involved, is merely phenomenal or not to the purpose here. The main distinction is one of which Wittgenstein almost systematically fails to take note (as in his account of “reading” in Philosophical Investigations), for good or ill.

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By this we are forced to recall that such things as writing or reading a book, just mentioned, are Vorstellung, for us, unmediated we too, immediate perception which is hence misperception, like the colour of the rose or the wetness of the streets after last night’s rain, suggests Hegel, as being in fact like all before and after. In necessity as such “cognition has left behind its presupposition and starting-point”. But who are “we”, again? It is actually, rather, the I that is identical with subjectivity itself. There is no “inter-subjectivity” involved here: it is already “cancelled”, aufgehoben in every Hegelian sense. Such is thinking, legislating for the universe but because, simply, it is the universe. “It is evident that it is this man who thinks” (Aquinas) but this man is thus every man (and we should, it follows, not qualify here as when thinking239), while man himself specifically is but an animal, while the rational is spirit. Aristotle has “rational” qualifying “animal”, which makes of man the place where idea (spirit) and representation meet. The suggestion can become that of two “incomplete substances” (Aquinas), and here it is difficult to suppress the feeling that something is wrong, at least if we suppose rather that idea and representation approximate to being and nothing, as we have suggested. Aquinas himself says that “body” as a term has no place in metaphysics, as it does in physics or philosophy of nature or, he himself says, logic. This must be so if it is indeed the case that “In God we live and move and have our being” (apostolically cited with approval from a Greek poet in Acts of the Apostles). Thus in the Scriptural “Fear not them that can the body kill but have no power to hurt the soul” we have not to do, context shows (as does Who is speaking), with mere dualism of two types of being in “ontological discontinuity”240, whatever that might be, but with being and nothing, the body being ultimately a purely sacramental reality and as such sign of the spirit or of itself as absorbed in the Idea. As regards the actual body of Christ in heaven, by contrast, this is neither seated nor standing, neither at God’s right hand or any hand, while anything that we or St. Stephen sees is just ipso facto not seen, is misperceived. That was the meaning of the transfiguration, that Christ’s chosen were not perceiving him truly at all the other times, even though of course the same could be said of what they now saw instead, the glistering whiteness and so on. The final transfiguration would be rather a defiguration, a laying aside of all figure or, if preferable, a final perception in God of the truth in untruth of all figure, the image of 239

Cp. Descartes, (cogito ergo) sum res cogitans. This phrase is (was) Papal but is roughly speaking Hegelian inasmuch as Hegel can downplay the term “real”, and hence implicitly a term like “ontic”, should he have chosen to use it, to what he ultimately dubs unreal, viz. “this passing show” (Quine) of, for him, the finite generally.

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man giving way to that of the Word, of Christ, of “the Holy Face” indeed but what a face! A face, namely, no longer “on the face of it” merely. Spirit is spirit, and they that worship God “shall worship him in spirit and in truth”, sophia. Shortly, since God has no body but is yet the infinite the body, it follows, adds and hence is nothing. Yet, by infinity’s further reach, God assumed this nothing to himself (as, analogously, he creates nature), in the incarnation whereby according to Hegel infinity is perfected. That is, not merely, as for Scotus, does the incarnation in itself transcend any particular sin-situation, as dependent upon God’s great love for man, but further, and yet it is the same, this great love itself belongs to infinity, the embrace of nothing by being, and so must instance, with being, “the Absolute Idea” which is being itself, infinity (“the true being”, says Hegel), doubtless in whatever way infinity itself best knows. Thus it does not “perfect” infinity as coming to what it finds otherwise imperfect but is rather within infinity eternally, while talk of this being revealed necessarily implies “to us” or, still more, is real for us but not for God, exactly like any relation, we have seen, that we may have to God. It cannot be reciprocal, as logicians use this term. Of God again, therefore, we know most when we know that we know nothing, declares Aquinas, if anything more uncompromising even here than Hegel, who certainly tends to see incarnation as a real becoming in God or at least tends thus to express it within his supposedly philosophical discourse. Yet, all the same and apart from that, what this formula “the Absolute Idea” instances inclusively, in Hegel’s logical system, is indeed love, will, the good, as further (Enc. 233) integrating with the fullness of “cognition proper” in or which is indeed the Absolute Idea. Philosophy here, while, inasmuch as “of the tongue”, only representing eternal sophia (as all the same does theology, pre-eminently or “first”, in a sense both transcending and completing metaphysics as, of course, “religion”, the virtue, does not), goes a further step still in de-picturing, as being itself absolutely the Idea: The subjective Idea as original and objective determinateness, and as a simple uniform content, is the Good. Its impulse towards self-realisation is in its behaviour the reverse of the idea of truth, and rather directed towards moulding the world it finds before it into a shape conformable to its purposed End. – This Volition has, on the one hand, the certitude of the nothingness of the pre-supposed object; but, on the other, as finite, it at the same time presupposes the purposed End of the Good to be a mere subjective idea, and the object to be independent.241

241

Enc. 233.

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This volition “is finite” (cf. paragraph 234), decidedly, and is hence false, to itself above all. In Fichte and others it is made deliberately unfulfillable, an ideal in the sense of what is ineffective, represented therefore as a continuous striving toward what is known to be unattainable. Hegel’s view is the very opposite of this. Action, as due at every moment, is therefore shown to be for itself alone. It “supersedes the subjectivity of the purpose”, but also objectivity, “with the contrast which makes both finite”. Subjectivity as a whole falls away, there is an “identity of the two sides”, in “the content” rather. The objective world is seen to be mind’s own truth and substantiality, just as, at one remove up, it is “in God that we live and move and have our being”. The striving after the good is not to be seen, moralistically, as if in a sphere separate from the nonetheless confirmed or affirmed empirical “reality” viewed as, so to say, morally neutral. This is the inbuilt hypocrisy of morality, better called moralism. In Hegel’s theological outlook, meanwhile, this insight is inseparable from acknowledgement of the validity of Christ’s replacing the original commandments, forming a preceptive universe in themselves, with the unitive imperative of creative love.242 The world, that is, is “in order as it is”, good and bad growing together “until harvest”. All shall be well because all is well, or “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof”, tomorrow never coming. This is “the peace of God that passes understanding” as it does not pass reason, that which is ad opposita. Or again, if “this cup cannot pass away except I drink it” then let me drink it. Easier said than done, all the same. It might be called the death of death. Evil is thus revealed as, sentenced as and supremely revealed as “sham-being” for Hegel, privatio boni for Aquinas, who yet does not see bonum ever as other than eternally triumphant. In neither thinker, all the same, can this be dubbed “triumphalism” as something prematurely leaped forward to but quite the reverse as founding and refounding the philosophia perennis or, in religious idiom, “faith of our fathers”, either way a “thinking with assent”243. The fear is that “If the world then were as it ought to be, the action of Will would be at an end” (Enc. 234, Zus.), as if delectatio were not the most vivid act of will of all, eliciting the pouring out of alleluias, ordinary daily worship indeed. Such is Hegel’s view, a thoroughly orthodox one. Yet for Kant or Fichte “The Will itself therefore requires that its End should not be realised”. Of course prayer in this life is like this, that we never “see” God in the sense of comprehending him, and yet must “keep on”. But, simply, that too is right, is how it should be, though not that we should be 242

Cf. Enc. 159. Cf. our “Faith as Thinking with Assent”, New Blackfriars 86, Oxford, January 2005, pp. 101-113.

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disobedient to the heavenly vision on the day that it comes, in, as or before death. Strictly there is no “after” death for the one dying, given eternity, for the one “ascending to my father and your father”. We touch Christ by his gift, but sacramentally only. Thus the “touch me not” was not so much a command as a statement of impossibility (though Thomas might put a hand into his side, feel the marks of the nails, to help belief). Mary of Magdala would have to live out her traditional years of solitude in the desert before a full reunion absorbing meritorious faith with her beloved, even though it, or He, is yet eternally there. We are as unable to know eternity as we are to know God.244

244

For a theological analysis of the Fourth Gospel’s account of the constitutive links, the unity, of resurrection both with the death on the Cross and with the outpouring of Spirit on the community thus founded, cf. E. Schillebeeckx OP, Christ, SCM Press, translated from the original Dutch (1977), London 1980, 1990 pp. 415-427. Despite ten references to Kant in the Index of this book, however, or as many to Leibniz, there is but one reference to Hegel, who is there treated more or less as the mystical curtain-raiser to the more thoroughly treated Marx: in one remark Schillebeeckx seems at least to sympathise with Popper’s assertion that idealism (and hence Buddhism?) is an insult to “people in poverty”, though why or how neither of them says. Cp. “Must Catholics Hate Hegel?”, Wood & Coyle, Church Life Journal, June 2018, Blog Posts. Perhaps a defensive reply to this latter sensitive little article (“blog”), was Cyril O’Regan’s mud-slinging “97 Theses on Hegel and his Catholic Readers” in the same journal, August 2020. The question remains a live one nonetheless. A more dignified predecessor from this U.S. Hibernian constituency is that part, indeed extensive, of William Desmond’s oeuvre constituting, he tells us, a “farewell to Hegel”. This farewell receives a fairly comprehensive, even profound critique in work by Giacomo Rinaldi, such as his essay “Dialectical and Metaxological Thought in the Philosophy of William Desmond” in Rinaldi’s Hegeliana (Peter Lang, Frankfurt-am-Main, 2012, pp. 205227), dignity being preserved there on both sides as the subject, the question (“Must Catholics” etc.), deserves. One rather gets the impression from the citations that Desmond’s desire to distance himself from Hegel impels him towards the embrace of that other Lutheran, Anders Nygren, as expressed in his gloomy anti-mystical and hence anti-Augustinian book Eros and Agape. A lot of fine babies, to cite proverbially an immediate impression, seem to have been found needing to be thrown out with this supposedly Hegelian bath-water, as if one were obediently plucking out the offending eye to avoid having two to be cast into Hell, in words of the Gospel, where, however, one finds said both “He that is not with me is against me” and “He that is not against me is with me”. These are indeed logically compatible, just as we might wish to say as in one affirmation that he that is not with Hegel (implicitly at least) is against God while he that is not against God is with Hegel, perhaps adding “more than not” in both cases! There should be a name for this particular relation?

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Kant and Fichte stop at the finite will, its plain contradictoriness, Hegel claims. Will itself, then, must abolish finitude by uniting the theoretical and the practical idea, ethical life becoming a form of unbroken contemplation. Intelligence, meanwhile, “apprehends the world as the notion actual” in the unity of the theoretical and practical idea. “The world is itself the idea”, Speculative and Absolute, but as itself wrapped in its own figure, for us, the transfiguration being not so much a change as a revealing, a change in our vision rather. * All unsatisfied endeavour ceases, when we recognise that the final purpose of the world is accomplished no less than ever accomplishing itself. … The religious mind … views the world as ruled by Divine Providence, and therefore correspondent with what it ought to be. But this harmony between the “is” and the “ought to be” is not torpid and rigidly stationary. Good, the final end of the world, has being, only while it constantly produces itself. And the world of spirit and the world of nature continue to have this distinction, that the latter moves only in a recurring cycle, while the former certainly also makes progress.245

Hegel here acknowledges the ought-to-be but with an essential characterisation. The precise point is in fact that this is not a qualification but captures the essence of the Good in its dynamism. Nor is this to be confused with some linguistic essence of “good”. Much more is at stake. The Good’s being what it ought to be depends upon this absolute dynamism, as of something ever new. The Good is and has Being and hence Being is it in and by this constant self-production – of the Idea. A thought not thinking itself is thus not a thought. “Our God is a consuming fire.” Since Good itself is such we ourselves who would wait upon it must have, will be seen to have, the same ever-welcoming mien. Here the Idea Absolute, “unity of the theoretical and practical idea”, “comes to be its own object”. The will of act, as the act of will, the act constituting will, is ever “in act”. This vision, Hegel rejoining the classical or medieval tradition, is fundamentally contemplative. “Whatever you do in word or deed”, do all in the name of contemplation, sc. “of the Lord Jesus”. We might compare 245

Enc. 234, Zus. Hegel seems here, at least on the face of it, to concede the reality of time he otherwise denies. The meaning of it, however, is that spirit is actual or real as nature, if left similarly self-standing (i.e., not contained within spirit), is not. Hence Gentile’s rejection of Hegel’s philosophy of nature, which stands rather as giving the negative or finite its indeed logical due within the system, even granted that “the flesh profiteth nothing” (or just therefore) was short-sighted.

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George Herbert’s “He who sweeps a room as for thy laws”, i.e. one so acting, does not depart from his spiritual service, as nor did Jesus when going to the Cross. I take the obvious example precisely to bring out the obviousness of the claim. So it is most natural for Hegel to equate will, thus explained, with Love (at Enc. 159). Love, after all, though raised to the level of the supreme virtue, is first known as a passion purely, i.e. not a virtue at all and, furthermore, as something suffered (passio). As a passion it is paired with hate, as joy with sorrow, while here we might recall Christ’s saying that the sorrow of those who lost him in seeing him suffer so will precisely, i.e. just this sorrow will, be turned into joy, as some people’s actual love can itself turn, i.e. modulate, into hate and, there seems no reason why not (we have the example of St. Paul, of hate into love in his case, not to mention the stock Shakespearian situations, sometimes invoking magic), so can hate into love. I distinguish “turning into” from “turning to”. Love as a virtue, anyhow, was already lauded above the others in the two great commandments of Deuteronomy, love of God and neighbour (sc. nearest one), cited in the Gospel as source for true insight. The point, anyhow, is the link between virtue and passion. Hegel follows Kant in not having much time for the virtue-concept as such. All the same he abandons the abstractly moral stance of the latter in favour, principally, of “pardon”, forgiveness, as able to play a more central and transformative role in actual human living, a point taken up positively also by Nietzsche as his “rainbow after long storms”. Together with this, however, no one can be stricter than Hegel in stressing the contradiction between such behaviour and our natural inclinations, our nature, which is, he says, just what we have to get away from as, inter alia, so commanded by the inherited religion, teaching that what we have is a “corrupt” nature (a term regularly recurring also in Aquinas’s treatment of these themes). There seems some conflict here with Hegel’s denial of a genuine “fall” of man, since otherwise God is not God he says, perhaps rather strangely as we noted. For why, in particular according to Hegel’s own dialectical system, should there not be such a fall which is also willed by God, inasmuch as nothing, in so far as it is something at least, escapes this, not even Pharaoh’s “hardened heart” (cf. Exodus)? Thus, according to Thomistic teaching, and more strongly if anything in Hegel, it is God as “first mover” who, just therefore, moves and that above all the free choice of any will whatever. The Aristotelian term, that is, means first mover of every movement or chain of movements, something Cartesianism and its extensions at least tends to obscure. So the contrast between Hegel and Aquinas here is, I tend to think, marginal or superficial. Aquinas explains natural law, upon which the law

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of grace builds as perfecting it, as based upon natural inclination. Obligation can in fact have no other root. So, to sum up, he explains the opposition between this so to say original nature, with its knowledge, and our present evil inclinations as due to the supposed “wounds” (citing St. Bede of Northumbria) to our nature caused by “original sin” (originating, Lat. originale). Hegel, however, as it seems by contrast, rejects or reinterprets the Fall doctrine away from an actual “fall” (and it is surely a metaphor, dead or alive, and thus a representation in “picturing”) from what ought to be the case to what is rather simply a growing up out of innocence. But in fact it rather was the case and that case was destroyed. So runs the narrative. Maturity as such is not equivalent to loss of innocence and saints, some of them, are praised as never having lost it. The most immediate or material reference is sexual but this does not mean, especially by Hegel’s premises, that that is the situation’s truest essence, whatever preferential use the myth as related may seem, quite naturally indeed, to accord to it. For this natural passage away from innocence to knowledge of good and evil, Hegel claims, must for the finite creature as such imply inclination to evil, with the corollary that it cannot be a “fall from God” (yes and no), cannot create enmity between man and God. Well why not, if in theological terms (but why not philosophical?) it be a rejection of divine “grace”, as needed by any rational creature, Aquinas will reason? Hegel’s claim seems to obliterate the background to the whole Gospel as Good News, as when we read in the apostolic letter to the Ephesians (Eph. 2, 3f.) that “By nature we were as much under God’s anger as the rest of the world”. Rather, he claims that this state is spiritually if not “morally” superior to that of innocence and this might all the same, have some independent validity. Yet this claim seems of only apparent substance, perhaps helped on by the societal echoes attached to the German term sittlich but absent from lex as used in moral theology or in the more profound applications of the English “moral”, despite etymological roots in Latin mos, moralia, meaning custom merely. Thus Hegel seems to think one has to lose one’s innocence as a moment in moral advance, simply, though it be the moment of moral failure in fact, while indeed St. Thomas too claims that what can fail at some moment does fail. This might usefully be paired with the statement that “all have sinned”. But also a Lutheran must be aware that there are untold numbers of saints, celebrated or not, in whom this is, in a measure at least, falsified. To avoid misunderstanding, note that they may be married or unmarried. This, though, has the unfortunate or more grave consequence of making God’s anger towards his till then graced creature “natural”, although, again, this might be a way of showing up this concept, viz. divine

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anger, as figurative246. Hegel, as it were accordingly, tends to equate our sinfulness with our free spontaneity simply. Otherwise, he says, and it is perhaps surprising, God is not God, i.e. if man can literally fall away from him. We have already answered that objection here. Aquinas, however, distinguishes here between a state of friendship with God and one of alienation from Him, while in either case he is or may be “physically” (ontically) nearer to us than we are to ourselves. So we have to decide whether Hegel’s view develops that of Aquinas, freeing it from representative picture, or simply changes the account of our relation to God or of man’s general status. According to Scripture death entered the world through sin. Could this really mean simply that we grew up? We had to leave Eden at a certain age as the children in the Narnia series of C.S. Lewis had one by one to bid farewell to Narnia, some, or one, even denying that she had ever been there. Or what, again, does “being there” mean here? Is there not more to the myth than this, shown by the simple fact that Adam and Eve are not represented as having ever been children at all? But again, sinning was just about the first thing the latter did, the one killing the other. And where did the serpent come from? Evil, if it was this, was already part of things and this, particularly, is what Hegel’s account takes up, what leads him to state that “There is evil in God”, balancing this by his other remark that in certain conditions (like that one?) “evil is just not evil”. All such statements, on his analysis, are only momentary, are moments of thought, something he further brings out in his analyses of the arguments for God’s existence. Otherwise, for example, we move from stating that everything has a cause to denying that God has this. What this shows, rather, is the cancellation of everything in the Idea, except the Idea itself (cf. “Which of 246 This would be in line with The Phenomenology of Mind where Hegel finds the idea of God’s anger particularly perplexing as regards its intelligibility. Still, what else could explain the parlous state of our human world? Finitude simply? We might recall Christ’s word to one whom he had healed: “Go and sin no more, lest a worse fate befall you” (stress added), although without forgetting that other denial, to the pharisees’ question, that neither this man nor his parents had sinned for him to be born blind, but that “God’s glory might be revealed”, though we do not know how far we can generalise here, given the miracle. Innocent suffering, of course, is virtually the main Christian dogma, though there, as redemptive, it is the reverse of anger (despite some rather backward-looking theories of “the atonement”, surely “pictures”). Even the good human mother, anyhow, assures her child: “Be a good boy and I won’t be angry with you any more”. Not good enough perhaps? Or such anger might be defined as the consequence of a scorned love, an anger properly transmutable, dialectically again, into an innocent suffering sought and offered up, whether or not this provoke hate in the one made, so to say angelically, all the more guilty and not merely feeling such, need it be added?

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you, by taking thought, can add one cubit to his stature?”), dealt with by Aquinas as analogy, finally of being, by no means a purely logical doctrine or, if we would have it so, then we must give an ontological account of the logical forms themselves, as does Hegel or, following rather Aristotle and Aquinas, Henry Veatch247. Here, though, one can see how “liberalism” grows, and grew, out of Hegelian thought, that liberalism of which a Pope complained, in 1831, that it “overthrows the nature of an opinion”, though this after all might not be such a bad thing. Philosophy, anyhow, does not properly deal in opinions, as Plato made clear, firmly and trenchantly, quite early on. Or it deals in opinions either to refute them or confirm them as henceforth something more. One would thus have to say that St. Thomas did not have a wrong opinion about the Immaculate Conception of Mary but was simply wrong or in error, unless his words can be interpreted as consonant with this eventual dogma of faith, or that his objections, possibly valid in one context, were not valid in the final context of the dogma as defined, etc. etc. By this, incidentally, it would be rather the Pope of that time who showed tolerance, in the Encyclical letter Mirari vos of 1831, critical of “liberalism”, towards opinion, of the sort that Plato refused, in his, the Pope’s, wanting to preserve its nature from overthrow. The “liberalism” of Hegel rather shows how all conceptions have their hour and hence in a manner their point, though that must be teased out of them, this being the nature of the thought-process. Opinions would simply lie outside this, would be uncalled for stoppage (of thought), rather, more than halfway to ideology. It is the failure to see this which lies behind people’s frequent astonishment when one fails to express or denies that one has an opinion about anything and everything. Thus we do reproach people for being, quite simply, “opinionated” while it is more often than not a pleasure to reply to enquiries as to one’s views concerning some burning issue of the day that one has no opinion on that. Why should one have? And so Hegel never expresses an opinion finally, rather wishing to let thought itself, which (or whom) he venerates, unfold itself, even insisting that this unfolding will do only for the moment (of his life perhaps). A further puzzle is this. The Fall doctrine is bound up, we have now seen, with doctrines (when not dogmas) concerning grace, the “state of grace” and so on. But grace, the account itself shows, is not irresistible, so what role does it play, in this drama of “the fall”? Does it play a role? More fundamentally, is there a twofold give and take between God’s “help” and 247

Cf. Henry Veatch, “Concerning the Ontological Status of Logical Forms”, Review of Metaphysics, December 1948, but also Veatch’s other logical works.

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man’s efforts? Is that not decidedly a picture, as of a strong and a weak man, constant though it may seem to be in Aquinas’s texts, this all-determining concept of nature and grace as two distinctly opposite and yet inter-related principles? Rather, man proposes (if he does), God disposes. People think that “Christian freedom” has to be protected by and not merely from such defective pictures or representations, as indeed objects of all-conquering faith, but that is surely wrong, as Hegel shows in his account of freedom if he shows anything. As Augustine affirmed long ago, not to be able to sin is a greater degree of freedom (shared by God and his angels) than the possession of such a negative ability as is sinning itself. One may recall Newman saying that atheism would “break” his mind, which is another way of claiming that he, his mind, was too strong for it, though here again the question of grace comes in. Rahner’s “Everything is grace” might seem the only respectable starting-point here, though it may lead us straight into the Hegelian problematic concerning evil we have alluded to, as anyhow we have no excuse for avoiding, though I will leave it for the moment here248. God does not, cannot, share the field of decision-making with man. Hence, however, analogy has to be involved. We, taking our language as our natural norm, place whatever is applied to the divine nature as analogically applied as far as the human language employed is there concerned. The real analogy, however, is of ourselves with God, from whom not only “all fatherhood in heaven and earth is named” (St. Paul) but anything whatever, beginning with being, while we “are such stuff as dreams are made of”. That is, we are analogously; hence we have to die into our true being, as the sacrament of baptism, of rebirth, signifies for Christians. Baptism “brings out what it actually means to be born” and is not merely analogous to that, to our “real” birth. Baptism, as membership of Christ’s body now, the Church, is “the sacrament of membership of mankind”. Baptism is not a second birth that we have instead of the first; we are not discarding the first; still less are we adding something on top of it – a layer of grace-life on top of the natural life we received at birth. In this second birth we are discovering the implications of our first birth. Birth to be true to itself 248

But cf. above our earlier detailed representation and analysis of Aquinas’s specific treatise on grace in the Summa theologica (Ia-IIae 109-114). It emerges that it is needed for everything, that man alone is never first mover for good, while he is it for evil simply as refusing this divine or absolute motion, i.e. even in the structure of his proper nature as finite. What then moves his refusal? We mentioned Pharaoh’s heart. Aquinas and later tradition, however, speak simply of an (inexplicable?) absence of due good, as even of grace, again, needed in the only case we know since the first or Adamic instance, while Hegel can seem to credit Satan with being the first creature to show initiative, thus, apparently, getting everything started!

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has to be rebirth … it is to be born for the final revolution of death. If we are to join the human race it is not enough to be born into it, it is also necessary to die into it and this is what baptism proclaims. It is a symbolic death, a creative sign of our dying the revolutionary death of Christ, out of which comes the new community:249

Or, we might say, birth has to be consciously re-enacted to disclose its meaning. “The unexamined life is not worth living”. All, nature, is otherwise nothing. One cannot explain life, one’s own, otherwise. Why or how can just I be one of “this passing show”.250 Can I even be satisfied by being told I am “this individual” or similar. Maybe I don’t want to be individual, just for a start. Is it not rather that I, my very own being, itself points to “the universal of universals” with which I must and desire to progressively identify, if exclusively by my being identified in actively passive process? Then, to recall the text cited above from Edith Stein’s collected works, wird das göttliche Leben sein inneres Leben: er findet Gott in sich, wenn er bei sich einkehrt. The apparent coincidence with Hegel’s thought here251, if in a different idiom, is striking. A slogan in one of the Buddhist schools is “No birth, no death”. This cannot be far off the mark, if at all, especially if, as in Christianity, the meaning of our birth is itself a death, our death, it is to be hoped, a passage to life. “’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.” Meanwhile, again, “We are such stuff as dreams are made of”. * A mutual analogy, such as all these are, does not destroy simplicity but, on the contrary, concretises it as one indissoluble act common to what might otherwise have been its parts. These, as it is, are, at least as regards linguistic representation, only appearances generated by our recourse to representative language and not extending, explicitly not, i.e. this denial is itself linguistically expressed (e.g. “and yet they are not three gods but one God”252) to what it designates. The one entity is variously reflected in that 249

Cf. Herbert McCabe OP, Law, Love and Language, Sheed & Ward Ltd., London 1968, pp. 146-147. 250 Cf. our “Other Problems about the Self”, Sophia 24, 1, Geelong, Australia, pp. 11-20. 251 If anything it reads even more categorically in the direction of simultaneous human divinisation and annihilation in fulfilment, such being the force of “in”. I hope my reading of her has the approval of this now Catholic saint, murdered at Auschwitz, and one-time pupil and colleague of Edmund Husserl. 252 From the “Athanasian Creed”, q.v.

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system of mirrors which is the human mind, not as in Sabellianism merely but within a closed network of relations of which the human nuptial situation is perhaps the closest analogy253 This is quite different from presenting a specifically human reality already self-standing but “helped” by divine grace or by God simply, as we tend to find pictured in many of St. Thomas’s texts “taken literally”. But what else can one finally do with “letters”, i.e. when writing? Writing must differ from the more scientific method, so to say (as Hegel does), which is thinking, eventually contemplation254. This, in turn, implies the historic stress upon what one “must say”, of itself perilously close to ideology. That was St. Thomas’s point, that any scripture would fall short in this same way, so that to use more simple representations best avoids outright scientific error, such as the more specialised have to risk. So there seem, to a perhaps infinite degree, to be degrees of difference in likeness here. This, after all, is the method of Scripture as praised by St. Thomas, while what is written as conscious scientific study in one age can seem, again, misleadingly pictured or representational in another. Scripture itself anyhow, is bound as venerated and to the same degree to become an ancient text. Hence we naturally couple “ancient” and “venerable”, for good or ill. If, returning to analogy, there were no analogy in things, wrote the same St. Thomas, then all things would be one, as, he would imply, they manifestly are not. Yet in a sense this, their being one, is what Hegel’s thought, or even thought, sophia, itself, is moving towards, also in St. Thomas, towards the Absolute Idea, namely, as itself the absolute, “and this we call God”, to cite Aquinas’s phrase concluding each of his five “ways”, pilloried and yet upheld by Hegel, to knowing the truth of God. Hegel’s criticisms in fact serve to bring out the unique validity, its form however seeming ever to require further perfection, of the Anselmian “ontological” argument255 identified by Gilson as specifically Christian, not as limitation but, Gilson’s closely argued view,

253

On this cf. Fergus Kerr O.P., op. cit., passim. Hence, just hence, I suggest, St. Thomas, our most voluminous writer more or less, reached (at forty-nine only!) a stage at which he said “I can write no more”. The recorded blow to his head (when passing under a tree on a donkey) does not of itself destroy the significance of our “hence” here. He approaches here yet more nearly his master who wrote only, and even only once(?), in sand (but who yet said: “My words”, unlike “heaven and earth”, “shall not pass away”. A or the word, that is, though as logic would here show there can be only one word in final reality, are in essence neither written nor spoken, as are its various and myriad analogies). 255 Versions of it are found in early Christian writers such as Justin, Lactantius or Augustine. 254

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as arguing that which only the Christians would become capable of discovering and/or vindicating.256

256

Cf. E. Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy (translated A.H.C. Downes), Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York 1940 (esp. pp.33-36). This seems to be effectively Hegel’s view also. For Aquinas Anselm’s elucidation of God’s essence is not an argument for his existence. For that to be so being itself must be “ideal”, as it is for Hegel, the only Absolute Idea, namely, just as is the being, also, of the logical system itself, which swallows up not only Life as the Idea Immediate but any conceivable existence, the latter being a mere transient logical category (Cf. Enc. 122-124).

CHAPTER NINE HEGEL, AQUINAS, ARISTOTLE

At Question Twenty-Seven, article two, of the first part of his Summa theologica Thomas Aquinas questions “whether some procession in divine things could be called generation”. A first article asks “Whether there is procession in divine things”, i.e. at all. It is important to note that “procession” here does not mean “process” but rather what we might call a proceeding, as of a substance perpetually moving but without so to say linear change, unlike our more abstract scientific term “process”, inevitably connected with some form of permanent or one-directional alteration or change. In these two articles one may note a close similarity with Hegel’s account of these same divine things (just as we have found in Edith Stein’s account of self and God). Thus both accounts, Aquinas’s and Hegel’s, plainly derive from the passage from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, close on fifteen lines, which Hegel cites in the original Greek, thus stressing further the self-abnegation involved on his part, as conclusion to his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences.257 Aquinas, for his part (in this), brings the absorptive method of positive theology to his own systematic treatise on God258, paralleling in this Hegel’s absorptive presentation, which for him, Hegel, is that method which is logic, of the Absolute idea.259

257

We too, therefore, cite this text, but in the vernacular, as closing this chapter and, indeed, our book. 258 The whole Part One, namely, of the Summa theologica, viz. that named De Deo. 259 The parallel holds even though limited by “in this” (above). It holds even if we accept the contention of Georges Van Riet that “there are two systems in Saint Thomas, for there are two first principles, of which neither judges the other”, viz. faith and reason, as he makes clear in his extended study. Cf. Part II of that tripartite study, “The Problem of God in Hegel”, a translation from the French original, in Philosophy Today, Spring (I) and Summer (II&III) 1967, in particular see p. 77 of III in the summer issue. Van Riet adds that by contrast Hegel “rejects all dualism”, such as that between theology and philosophy or, ultimately, it seems, faith and reason (faith as, so to say, our initial share, in this world, in absolute reason or, better,

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Hegel, in fact, attains to his insights by the way of a developed Absolute Idealism itself resulting from them and which he finds, quite clearly, to be implicit in Aristotle. Thus he proffers it as “the dogma of philosophy” while reproaching Kant for not holding sufficiently or at all to it.260 This “dogma” is in fact offered as the super-dogma. Subsequent opinion remains at present still divided as to whether this can be taken as a vision of the rationality of faith that is not mere rationalisation or not. My own view is that the first alternative follows from a more complete apprehension of Hegel’s texts as now available. It is in fact the “normal” view, given that the Christian Church itself emphasises nothing more emphatically than it does the reasonableness of belief, for lack of which Christ most condemned his hearers of the then “religious” party. Reasonableness then, the practice of rationality, would be the supreme “spiritual” duty, against which one shall not “blaspheme”. * The specific process of Trinitarian generation anyhow, or nonetheless, is supplied to Aquinas by a specific theological dogma already in credal place. The coincidence with Hegel’s account is all the more striking.261 We have a continuous doctrine from pre-Christian Greek thought through Scholastic Latin to modern Germano-European philosophy. To this picture we would need to add an assessment of the Hebraic contribution, itself inclusive of a specifically Greco-Judaic element, to be found principally in the Scriptures through which both Aquinas’s and Hegel’s thinking was pedagogically formed. If faith is needed for our eventual understanding yet this same, as absolute knowledge, “ungratefully” dismisses it as love too will fulfil in abolishing an immediately needful hope. The key proposition when looking for continuity of any kind between Aquinas (and hence Aristotle) and Hegel is the statement in the Summa mind: cf., again, our “Faith as Thinking with Assent”, New Blackfriars, January 2005, pp. 101-113, plus our sustained later development of this theme. 260 See the section “The Critical Philosophy” in the Shorter (EL) Science of Logic, 40-60, at least at that time arguably the most thoroughly conclusive refutation of Kantian “critical idealism” yet penned, while being taken verbatim from a discourse first offered to a class of schoolboys many years before, “a schoolmaster who has to teach philosophy” (sic Hegel). It is significant, impressive even, that Hegel saw, again, no reason to change anything from the earlier “Three Attitudes of Thought to Objectivity”, Kantianism being the second. 261 Cf. our Hegel’s Theology or Revelation Thematised (CSP, Newcastle-on-Tyne, 2018), along with Thomas Aquinas and Georg Hegel on the Trinity (CSP 2020).

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theologica that in God knowing and being are the same: ex necessitate sequitur quod ipsum eius intelligere sit eius essentia et eius esse.262 Without commitment to this thesis Hegel could never have laid it down that God is the Idea, that this is God’s proper or philosophically analytic name. Not only so but it is clear, furthermore, that both Aquinas and Hegel find this thesis confirmed in Aristotle, above all in that text with the citing of which in the original Greek Hegel concludes the statement of his whole system as given in his Encyclopaedia, also a kind of summa, a summation: Now thinking in itself is concerned with that which is in itself best, and thinking in the highest sense with that which is in the highest sense best.263 And thought thinks itself through participation in the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought by the act of apprehension and thinking, so that thought and the object of thought are the same, because that which is receptive of the object of thought, i.e. essence, is thought.264 And it actually functions

262

Summa theol. Ia, 14, 4. Aristotle has already identified thinking with “the prime mover” because thinking is “that which is most pleasant”, along with general consciousness or “waking” and sensation but, further, it is that which is “in the highest sense best” and hence most pleasurable or, we might say, joyful (Cf. Eth. Nic. X, 4). Multiple confirmation, along with nuanced development, of these positions can be found throughout both Aquinas and Hegel. 264 On this as much as anything else is based Hegel’s view of Aristotle, and hence of philosophy, as in essence Absolute Idealism. This is not brought out, is in some degree resisted, in the late Eugene Gendlin’s excellent “line by line commentary” on Aristotle’s De anima in particular. Another of today’s (yesterday’s) foremost Aristotelian commentators, Fernando Inciarte, also holds back or at least does not bring to the central prominence needed this main feature in his many and varied Aristotelian studies, e.g. his posthumous Substance and Action, a summation in English translation (George Ohms, Hildesheim, 2002), as it mainly is, of his main German-language writings on this topic. Regarding Aquinas, the phrase added in the above citation, et eius esse, is often taken to exclude any form of idealism from Aquinas’s thought or from, shortly, Catholic thought in general. However this is by no means self-evident since, after all, Existence itself names (or is?) a logicometaphysical category of mind, for Hegel within the mediating doctrine (between that of Being and the Idea) of Essence (Enc. 122). Hence Aquinas himself speaks of it, of esse, as the first idea or notion that “falls into the mind”, which, mind, is thus given a kind of priority at least. As against this one can stress the quality of the divine I AM as itself naming, in dialectically valid contradiction, “the name which is above all names”, i.e. which is not itself a mere name. “Existence” itself, however, the term, Hegel notes, implies or suggests derivation (as esse, as found in Aquinas, does not). We may add that Anselm’s “proof” (Aquinas denies it is a proof for just this reason), central for Hegel as for Descartes, but discounted by Kant, is frankly “idealist” and 263

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when it possesses this object. Hence it is actuality rather than potentiality that is held to be the divine possession of rational thought, and its active contemplation is that which is most pleasant and best. If, then, the happiness which God always enjoys is as great as that which we enjoy sometimes, it is marvellous; and if it is greater, this is still more marvellous. Nevertheless it is so. Moreover, life belongs to God. For the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and the essential actuality of God is life both good and eternal. We hold, then, that God is a living being, eternal, most good; and therefore life and a continuous eternal existence belong to God: for that is what God is.265

It is through study and meditation upon this text and its endorsement, enthronement rather, by Hegel that one can see that it is the reverse of preposterous (except perhaps in the literal sense that it is precisely what stands first which is noted and understood last) to suggest that Aristotle, Aquinas and Hegel are the three great absolute idealists from the three constituencies of paganism, Catholicism and Protestantism. Hegel even calls God (being) the Idea (knowing), which amounts to saying that the Idea, or Logic, is “the true being”, as he in fact concludes the Greater Logic by affirming. Hence for Aquinas, following Aristotle, the soul, as what knows, is simply “all things” (omnia). Heidegger rightly drops the quodammodo as an unnecessary qualification here. There is no special or “intentional” way for being everything and this we find in Aristotle too, that he refuses the distinction: “thought and the object of thought are the same”. Just so is the omnia in St. Francis’s prayer all things simply and not merely “my all”. If God is everything then the creation, considered “on its own” or apart from God, is nothing, it follows, not even the burnt-out dust and ashes figuring, i.e. intending, this nothing when thrown before a newly elected Pope. Such is the tradition, a fortiori, of orthodox “mysticism”, identified in Hegel, and at times in St. Thomas, though he does not forget his teaching mission (thus from time to time confining himself therefore to our usual representations, as do the Scriptures), with philosophic truth. Hegel in effect corrects the Cartesian cogito, as applied to this supreme instance, to “I think and that is what I am”, i.e. that is what being is. The that too of the absolute kind which, we have been claiming, is entailed by acknowledgement of God. 265 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1072b, 18-32, cited by Hegel in the original Greek. Note that the term “existence” is not a literal translation of anything in Aristotle’s text. He speaks rather of an aeon suneches kai aidios. The Thomistic esse becomes in Hegel the Being which is ultimately the system and method (meta hodon, way to go) of thought itself, that highest and best which, for Aristotle, God is, again, and for all three the final actus (this is what, for Hegel, distinguishes Aristotle from Plato).

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whole of nature is thought as so to say laid out. It does not and could not, therefore, itself possess some kind as or which is thought. Meanwhile the end, all end, is as such realised.266 Hence there are no actions but solely eternal act itself, thought thinking only or wholly itself. We think we have to strive to do this, not realising that we never do anything else, that the passing show is indeed show only, to which sin, under one aspect at least, is the clinging. We have to “go to the Father”, in that act which is the renunciation of actions or, in a word, prayer, which we are enjoined to do “without ceasing”. That, therefore, is realised philosophy, sophia, Wittgenstein’s keeping silence, which has, however, as truth, to be a result, Hegel insists. * Thus we come, so to say backwards, to Hegel’s own summing up of things, of philosophy rather, just anterior to the final identification with the mature Aristotle. I begin where I left off, citing the Greater Logic’s penultimate page, where his grand conclusion, so to say, seems, with the so, to begin: So ist denn auch die Logik in der absoluten Idee zu dieser einfachen Einheit zurückgegangen, welche ihr Anfang ist; die reine Unmittelbarkeit des Seins, in dem zuerst alle Bestimmung als ausgelöscht oder durch die Abstraktion weggelassen erscheint, ist die durch die Vermittlung, nämlich die Aufhebung der Vermittlung zu ihrer entsprechenden Gleichheit mit sich gekommene Idee. Die Methode ist der reine Begriff, der sich nur zu sich selbst verhält; sie ist daher die einfache Beziehung auf sich, welche Sein ist. Aber es ist nun auch erfülltes Sein, der sich begreifende Begriff, das Sein als die konkrete, ebenso schlechthin intensive Totalität.267

The intensive totality which is Being, then, is not the five hundred or so pages making up one or all the copies of Hegel’s book, but it is what that book talks about and finally indicates to view as “the true being”, the Idea thinking itself, namely, intensively, i.e. in such a way that “each of its constituent functions is the very total which the notion is, and is put as indissolubly one with it” (Enc. 160). It is not, that is to say, itself a “speech act”, but rather the true “state of affairs”, Sachverhalte (A. Reinach)268. It is precisely thus that it is “a systematic whole”. Sumit unus sumunt mille, one 266

Enc. 204–212. Wissenschaft der Logik II, Suhrkamp 6, p. 572. 268 This term thus has an immediate pre-history, among the Göttingen phenomenologists chiefly, to its use in the Tractatus, not always taken up in Wittgenstein studies. 267

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can hardly help but recall in this context, one, namely, where one or a thousand (individuals) are the same. Numeri non ponuntur in divinis or, (Hegel) “it is useless to count”, the exemplar being “neither one nor many”, to recall Plato. What is important is not whether or not Hegel knew these texts but that he would have been bound to recognise the parallels with his own thought, also proceeding after all in some sense from the same initial source of inspiration. It remains only to mention before concluding, writes Hegel here, that it is from this, viz. from the Absolute Idea, that logical science has first grasped its own concept. With Being as the beginning of its content, i.e. the “first idea that falls into the mind” (Aquinas), logic’s notion (Begriff) appears as an external knowledge grasped by subjective reflection. In the idea of absolute knowing, however, it becomes its own content, since its knowing anything else would be less than absolute. The subject is its own object, precisely what religion, as Christian belief finally, proclaims concerning God and his Word (as in John 1, i-xiv) or, finally, the Trinity269. The notion (of Logic) makes itself the whole of its reality as itself running through the totality of its determinations (see again Enc. 160). This discourse concludes by cancelling or “sublating” (aufzuheben) its whole status as content or object of the science, of science. Just by this does it recognise and/or acknowledge science, i.e. scientia, knowing as such, just as we have seen in Aristotle270. Just by this, in Hegel’s system, does the Idea remain logical as enclosed in pure thought, as science of “the divine concept” only. Thus the systematic setting out of this view is itself a realisation of it as truth. Knowledge just of itself, its pure idea, also when enclosed in subjectivity, is set precisely to break out and destroy this boundary, as itself (and as knowledge of itself) final or pure truth, knowing itself now as Will (reckoned as ultimate cognition in Hegel’s text here), whether as coming to 269

But cf. note 109 above. This is something that the excellent commentator in detail of Aristotle’s De anima, viz. the late Eugene Gendlin, again, can appear to have missed or never taken seriously, not seeing the wood for the trees as we say. What Aristotle says of the role of the senses, it can be argued, is not of the essence of his view, any more than it was of Plato’s, being more the ungratefully cast aside ladder thereto. It is not for nothing that Aristotle does not include physics or ethics, if considered as composite wholes, under “first philosophy”. Gendlin in fact sets out to stress the very physicalist feel of Aristotle’s typical first notions, just as does Hegel, however. Truth results from these but is not “about” these. Just so the metaphysical conclusions have little or nothing to do with the notions of formal logic found in Aristotle’s earlier logical treatises, which they often rather contradict. 270

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know or as holding the known. By this its ultimate result is equally the beginning of another sphere, another science even: Indem die Idee sich nämlich als absolute Einheit des reinen Begriffs und seiner Realität setzt, somit in die Unmittelbarkeit des Seins zusammennimmt, so ist sie als die Totalität in dieser Form – Natur. (Ibid. p. 573, cf. note 267 above)

One hopes here to find further clarification in Hegel’s later but briefer statement of this transition in the Encyclopaedia (244). One notes first that what is put later as the Idea’s “going forth freely”, which is of course true like all and every act of God, himself pure act and hence freedom exemplarily, is here put and stressed as the unity, which, we have just noted, the later text assumes, “of the pure concept and of its reality”. This unity in this form, which cannot be less than one of Hegel’s “one-way” identities, is nature. Regarding what I am calling one- way identities the great ancestor, I venture to suggest, is St. Thomas’s saying (although he too simply builds upon, or takes over simply, but as completely his own, the tradition, Biblical, Augustinian, Aristotelian) that our real relation to God is not reciprocated by God’s having a real relation to us, for the simple reason that we ourselves in our individuality or simply, indeed, as outside of or other than God, are not univocally real. I add that in my view, or as my strong suspicion at least, this makes of St. Thomas an absolute idealist. This, I have little doubt, must relate to there being, as noted by Georges Van Riet and as mentioned above, two systems in St. Thomas, that of pure reason and that of received faith, never fully integrated, as is attempted in Hegel. The main reason for this, in the religious tradition, is that the teaching Church does not, up to today, find reason to impose upon the body of believers, most of them not initiated (or initiatable?) into perennial philosophical questions, a world-view overturning the accepted one of immediate “common sense”. Thus we, according to Catholic teaching at any rate, are obliged to believe that reason can prove God’s existence, as declared at the First Vatican Council of 1870, but not obliged to be able to prove it ourselves or even to ourselves, salutary achievement though this may be. Hence we find St. Thomas’s idealism for the most part, if anywhere, in his philosophical writings, theologically speculative they too, however, rather than in essentially pedagogical summae, though there too it must from time to time “slip out”. One notes, secondly, that Nature is put as “the totality”, although not itself the concept or God. This, Hegel stresses, is not something that it becomes. Clearly not, since it is essential here that time is found, together with space, to be representation or, as Hegel mischievously puts it, “real for spirit for as

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long as spirit needs it” (I cite from The Phenomenology of Mind, an earlier text still), i.e. only. End as such, it has been established, is realised. So the substance which Nature truly is has to be unseen, known only and purely, i.e. this its idea, as the idea of that which is not the idea. The pure Idea meanwhile, knowing only itself and thus in absolute contrast within the identity, is where the definiteness (and yet it is surely infinite, and hence absolutely bestimmt, rather than literally definite) or reality of the concept itself is indeed itself raised to just this concept. Nor is it fixed or posited, he says. Nature thus supplants itself, is fulfilled and cancelled in one, in what is an absolute liberation (from the dilemma between idea and reality), while it is only from a certain point of view what was called exemplary. In its freedom it, the idea, is not “of” anything (else). Simple being, in which the Idea terminates, is fully and simply known there (durchsichtig), the concept remaining purely with itself, as thought, which is thus not of thought. Rather than as a transition one can best think it, see it, thus: namely, that the Idea “freely lets itself go”, absolutely sure of itself and at rest. As evenso free the form of the Idea’s self-determination is simply free, i.e. such selfdetermination is not determination at all, but spirit. It is the absolute as for itself being without subjectivity the externality of space and time. This, that is, obtains by a kind of free decision, foreshadowing incarnation, as necessarily pre-determined in the sense only of self-determined, as one might say, and therefore itself, viz. nature, equally subject, though meanwhile “groaning and travailing”, to a series of transfigurations analogous, at least, to what we envisaged above of the incarnate divine one when “transfigured”. The highest, to remain so, must condescend to the lowest. This seems to be the thought here, oft repeated in Hegel. This, therefore, has the form of evolutionary speculation just in being a complete reversal of it. As the highest cannot stand without the lowest, so, more fundamentally, the lowest cannot stand without the highest. Mind cannot emerge, still less, therefore, judge itself as emerging, from nature. When Hegel goes on to say, then, that the externality of space and time is free (self-)determination of the Idea in a free going out of itself (by this, then, creation is not a mere “making”, that figure of Scripture we take so literally, as if creation happened itself in time, so as not to notice, as Plato noticed, that it is a figure, viz. that of the Artificer), he refers to this as an insofern. This picture of space and time as the base of objectivity holds only “according to the abstract immediacy of being” for us all and yet, as Hegel argues elsewhere and everywhere, it is false precisely as or since immediate. Or we may say that here it is objectivity itself that is rejected, quite consistently with Hegel’s logic. It is blosse Objektivität und ausserliches Leben, as life itself is “only the Idea immediate”.

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Yet in der Idee this Äusserlichkeit remains “the totality of the Concept”, science, i.e. knowledge, but knowledge “in the relation to Nature of divine, viz. absolute, (re)cognition (Erkennens)”. The Idea here is the idea of what is not the idea, again, taken as a necessary pole, for just thought, taken here, in what necessarily must become, but without invalidation since entirely consistent, an at least linguistic wobble, but as superior to mere “reality”. Compare the Heideggerian das Nichts nichtet. This wobble is but the philosopher’s tribute to the general principle that faith and not knowledge is our necessary approach to the infinite, taken when we in effect say, with the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, “I would leave all that I can think and take for my love that which I cannot think”, a step which, he abundantly, even caustically, shows up as being the acme of rationality. It certainly explains our and Hegel’s difficulties here. Nor is it excluded from Aristotle’s directive to philosophers to practice death, since “a little of this is worth more than all the rest”. That can surely be brought under the theological concept of fides implicita, as distinct from “refusal of belief”, however difficult the latter may be to identify. Indeed, any such final judgment upon others, or even perhaps as to quite how unsuitably I digress here, is rather to be discouraged. But nor, to continue, is it unthinkable for just a philosopher to leave all that he can think, as, at a lower level, a supreme musician climaxed his symphonic work with a nicht diese Töne, itself intoned all the same. Hegel, anyhow, abjures the Wittgensteinian silence, equated by Herbert McCabe too as “not trying hard enough”. The last longish sentence (eight lines) of his Science of Logic (GL), seems to draw a clear parallel between what he is driving at here and that better known free decision of “the pure Idea”, a freedom enclosing its own necessity (sic Scotus, sic Hegel), to become incarnate as an object of sense, this latter being the very nature, in regard to intelligence, of the spoken word, of which, says John of the Cross, recommending silence as a general policy, God “has spoken only one”. In fact it seems as here written, and Hegel’s general discreetness does not obscure it, rather more closely related than just as a parallel to the “earlier”271 or divine “decision” to “go forth freely as Nature”. This is thus 271

In fact neither of these “decisions” can be “in time”, the former indeed (to “go forth as Nature”) being rather the creation of the temporal phenomenon itself, intelligible, like anything else, only “in God”. Here as elsewhere the a priori, in severing this bond of intelligibility, is either merely unintelligent or sheerly impious, depending upon the viewpoint, as Hegel shows in perhaps the most brilliant critique of The Critical Philosophy penned to date (Enc. 40-60 plus all Zusätze: this is actually lifted in entirety from an earlier work of Hegel’s, as is the whole section of which it forms the second part).

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analogous to (or the same in difference as?) that to become incarnate, itself generating or shepherding it into being in accordance with this unity in convertibility, as in difference, of cause and effect that Hegel’s Science of Logic develops. At the same time these final ten lines or so of the earlier or “greater” Logic (244) not entirely obscurely herald, with their reference to the philosophy of mind (Wissenschaft des Geistes), the conceptually tripartite structure of the future Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences.

CHAPTER TEN NOTE ON “MISPERCEPTION”

McTaggart has created unnecessary difficulty for the reception of his and Hegel’s thought by suggesting complete reliance upon this highly paradoxical term “misperception”272. There should rather have been more analysis of perception itself, as indeed occurred later in philosophy’s historical development. The question became “Do we perceive” anything directly, e.g. matter, or spirits? Or is perception as such a matter of perception as, a dilemma finely heralded in Lewis Carroll’s comic poem concerning thinking one sees, looking again and finding something else before one? Of course that too must remain a “seeing as”, i.e. a third look, given time, is not excluded. Thus, all the same. the hippo remains “hypothetical”. He thought he saw a bank clerk descending from a bus. He looked again and found it was a hippopotamus. “If this should come to dine”, he said, “There won’t be much for us”.

Hypothetical, however, is still not the right term inasmuch as it continues to imply a better or more absolute state beyond, yet one which remains perception. For Hegel, however, knowledge is final, not perception, a knowledge, in fact, which can be nothing other than self-knowledge, 272

On this see again the review of Peter Geach’s Truth and Hope (Notre Dame, Indiana: UND Press 2001) by Fergus Kerr OP in New Blackfriars, Blackwell, Oxford. This book (originally a collection of addresses to sixth-formers) shows a marked contrast to Geach’s earlier theological reservations concerning McTaggart. Fr. Kerr comments: “Geach plainly believes that McTaggart came close to the ‘heart’ of orthodox Christianity. The ‘Victorian rationalist background’, the ‘muscular Christianity’, and so on, which was his only experience of actual Christian practice, prevented him from discovering how his metaphysical intuitions of eternity were anticipated in traditional Christian belief in the beatific vision. In short, what Geach is saying in this chapter (viz. 4) is that the work of the atheist philosopher McTaggart offers a much sounder introduction to central Christian hopes about love, eternity, and beatific vision, than (by implication) much modern Christian apologetics.”

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exclusively so (i.e. knowledge by or in or as the self of selves, the “I” as absolute universal or Idea, called in “the absolute religion”, and some others, God), in which the true perceptibilia, as they had been thought to be, are resolved, but not dissolved, quite the opposite, into a state excluding quantity, a state of one in all and all in one, figured unimaginably, yet intelligibly, by St. Paul as that of being “all members one of another”, the original phrase here being “I in them and they in me”, put as spoken by the Christ alone however273. Or we must say “imagined unimaginably”, thus indicating the plasticity of these terms, the sliding scale of all ideas except of the one as absolute, though even here one cannot exclude an element of plasticity, of analogy in flexibility from what is still a human term though used, in default of a better, to denominate, to evoke and only thus refer to the infinite, which has no true name in finite language since named as “above all names”. For what this means is that language in fact never refers; rather, it “stands for” (supponit pro) or in, again, more literal translation, is put in place of as standing instead of since, as Aristotle rather crudely put it274, the things themselves will not go into our heads (as will words). This older notion, as compared to referring, is more unwieldy, less “handy”, because more subtle and, ultimately, more true. Philosophers of language cannot abdicate their task as if they were mere practitioners of language over again, any more than Fregean logicians can be free to ignore the obvious element of analogy in the original hylomorphic account of the subjectpredicate relation in difference, whereby the subject-term stands for (supponit pro) what it denotes in “material” supposition, i.e. quasi materialiter (hence just anything or everything can stand as nominal subject), while the predicate-term does so in “formal” supposition, i.e. quasi-formaliter.275 For the philosophical equivalent (to comic poetry or to

273

This is the point that Fr. D. Jamros SJ has wished to stress (“Hegel on the Incarnation: Unique or Universal”, in Theologie und Philosophie 56, 1995) in what he seems to believe is opposition to recent theological writings on Hegel by a new generation of Catholic Hegelian thinkers. 274 Aristotle, De soph. el., 1, 165a 7-16. 275 See Henry B. Veatch, “St, Thomas’s Doctrine of Subject and Predicate” in St. Thomas Aquinas (1274-1974); Commemorative Studies, Vol. II, Toronto 1974. Cf. also our “Subject and Predicate Logic”, The Modern Schoolman LXVI, January 1989, pp. 73-79; also our “The Interdependence of Semantics, Logic, and Metaphysics as Exemplified in the Aristotelian Tradition”, International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1, issue 165; March, 2002, pp. 63-91; also “The Supposition of the Predicate”, The Modern Schoolman LXXVII, November 1999, pp. 73-79; also our “Argument Forms and Argument from Analogy”, Acta Philosophica (Rome), fasc. II, vol. 6, 1997, pp. 303, 310; also our “Metaphysical Analogy” in Proceedings of

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Plato’s own “allegory of the cave”) one may consult Plato’s Philebus, as Hegel recommends, or the Timaeus.276 The question comes down here to whether all seeing is seeing as or whether, in contrast, there is a seeing prior to interpretation, always and essentially. If the first view is the more correct, as seems to be the case, then there should after all be no especial problem with McTaggart’s account of the natural immediacy of our perceptions as a general “misperception”. This is simply, after all, the state within which the human animal by nature begins, before critical reflection sets in (cf. the passage from Edith Stein’s writings cited above), also according to the view of Hegel, as when he says “all immediacy is false”. We all know that we start off by misperceiving the moon as around the size of a common football, just as a dog might imagine (or whatever dogs do) that the telephone receiver beside him is speaking to him. It is or was the same with geocentrism. This last example highlights the difficulty of, as we say, “where to draw the line”, e.g. between a literal reading and “spiritual” (geistig) interpretation, given that this can vary from age to age. How one solves this difficulty remains also a main dividing line between religion and philosophy, with which in Hegel’s system it is thus identified, so that he thereby denominates philosophy, as against religion, as “the highest divine service”, a position as much in relegation as in further exaltation of philosophy as compared, after all, to religion in the triad art, religion, philosophy, the three forms of Absolute Spirit in which philosophy is otherwise put as the more perfect, religion being treated intermediately between the other two, a good example of dialectical mediation, not, except for its endlessness, to be confused with the notion of endless qualification. This latter is rather its perfect opposite, hence in a manner the same but viewed “materially” rather than “formally” or with “understanding” rather than reason. In the end everything is spiritual interpretation, as McTaggart stressed, and that is a problem sometimes for the guardians of orthodoxy, viz. that what can seem at first a “modernist” de-immediatising of a text can later become the norm, attempts to cover this over notwithstanding. “Will the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics, Fordham University, New York, Vol. 2, 2002, pp. 26-33. 276 Cp. Figueiredo, C.S.: “The Logic of Incarnation: Hegel’s Use of Plato’s Philebus in the Shorter Logic and in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion”, in Philosophy Study (Brazil), October 2016, Vol. 6, No. 10, pp. 569-577; also, again, Haecker, R.: “Traces of the Trinity in Plato’s Parmenides; Alan Badiou, Theological Mathematics, Trinitarian Ontology”, Cambridge University UK, 2020 (in-house paper). Also, again, Milbank, J., “The return of Mediation”, in Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology, ed. J. Milbank, S. Zizek, C. Davis and C. Pickstock; Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI (USA), 2010.

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he give us his flesh to eat?” asked Christ’s hearers, mocking (or not?) his deeply spiritual declaration. He also declared without qualification that “the letter kills”, as being the direct opposite of worship or speech that is “in spirit and in truth”, i.e. that, the letter, would, qua speech therefore, always be by analogy and hence, yet only in that sense, qualifiable. Or, contrariwise, in another place, the evangelist explains that Christ spoke not of the actual Temple (destroy it and “in three days I will raise it up”) but “of the temple which is his body”.277 * In Hegel’s system truth, to be truth, must “result”, must be mediated from an initial immediacy, on the analogy of childhood, which as such, as immediate, is false or, rather, the false, that which is false and/or that which falsity is. Ratio, Aquinas had stressed, est ad opposita. Nature, natura, on the other hand, i.e. not merely by contrast but as one of these two necessarily bound up together as each evoking logically the other, est ad unum. This is the final issue of “the ontology of logical forms”278, an ontology finally annihilating any other. Ipso facto it is, in its fullest comprehension, one with the love of God. I employ, in accordance with what I sketched above, a perhaps rather breath-taking enthymeme, intelligible, however, in the context of this whole essay, understanding “essay” as being a piece of writing not shackled to some method alien to it and hence, possibly, as the 277

On this question cf. E. Schillebeeckx OP, Christ, SCM Press 1990 (1980: Dutch original, Gerechtigheid en liefde: Genade en befrejding, 1977), pp. 925, pp. 49-54: “Revelation an interpretative element? Seeing as … or interpreting as …?” It is actually the question of this our whole book. It means that how McTaggart came to see the world is no more esoteric or exoteric than how he or any other child may first have seen it when reasoning, we may assume, for the most part enthymematically. We, that is, or the child, the adult, reason, i.e. think, with the aid of a hidden premise, that things are substantially as they appear to be to “the senses”, a syllogistic judgment (enthymeme) he or she will be constantly updating through life in proportion, for example, to his growing acquaintance with scientific research, philosophy generally or some other religious or cultural outlook. It, such empiricism, is the claim of immediacy which, Hegel counter-claims, giving his reasons however, is always false. Nor, therefore, is there reason to suppose one cannot adjudicate between these various “seeings as”, as Schillebeeckx almost suggests, reasoning here from or with the aid of R.M. Hare’s notion of a blik. For an extensive critique of the latter’s ethico-linguistic system, see our Morals as Founded on Natural Law, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 1987, 1988, Chapter One, “Evaluating”. 278 Cf. Henry B. Veatch: “Concerning the Ontological Status of Logical Forms”, in The Review of Metaphysics, December 1948.

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pieces thus shackled would not be, philosophical. It is the Absolute Idea itself with which alone philosophers are concerned, even if they should happen to be writers as well, and which is the method, Hegel teaches and affirms, at the same time as he de-mystifies, making sound use of etymology, “method” itself as regards its forgotten root-meaning of what is “according to the way”, meta hodon, that way which is congruent with life and, ultimately, truth. I recall the claim of Erasmus as to there being a “philosophy of Christ”, which he, Erasmus, would present. That, again, has been in some way the point of this whole book, that this is indeed the point with regard to which the attempted dissection of wisdom into theology with philosophy as its handmaid (ancilla), reflected in medieval universities and their successors, is not absolute, or, put differently, that faith itself is a rational virtue279 as being the only conceivable approach of mind or spirit from our side specifically towards the infinite280. In fact philosophy is absorbed and nullified in or into theology, theologia, precisely the position of Aristotle, which this “philosophy of Christ” confirms while in the same way absorbing (or nullifying) Aristotle. It includes within it, as perhaps its leading principle, a philosophy of faith, which is precisely why it is not a “fideism”, this being an ultimately less than honest discountenancing of mind or spirit. At the same time it sets a defining limit upon, at the same time as it promotes, the ecumenical principle. This principle is misunderstood, indeed perverted, if it be taken as meaning dissolution or relativisation of religious faith. It is rather, and this is the proposal of the Catholic Church and ever has been, recognition of this principle as itself ever having been ensconced within Catholic faith itself as pertaining to its essence. First in our time, however, or a generation or two ago, rather, was this explicitly or formally confessed, in close association with the principle of The Development of Christian Doctrine, as formally outlined by St. John Henry later Cardinal Newman (the book dates from 1845, the year of Newman’s reception into the Catholic Church), at the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (1962-1964), to which I here refer and which the Pope then presiding, Paul 279

Cf. inter alia our “Faith as Thinking with Assent”, New Blackfriars, Vol. 86, No. 1001, January 2005, pp. 101-113. 280 Only, that is, as first. For the thesis implies, once granted, equal rationality for hope and love and even, by Platonic premises concerning the Good, implying a certain further pre-eminence still in this regard (of rationality) for love, just as we find in Hegel’s science of logic (title of two of his treatises), where Love or Will succeeds upon “Cognition Proper” as final category before the Absolute Idea in and with which logic terminates (in a manner thus cancelling it in absorption as is the express categorial way in Hegel’s system).

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VI, dubbed “Newman’s Council”. This was itself only one of over twenty ecumenical councils held over an equal number of centuries. Only at the Council of Trent was a similar honour paid to an individual thinker when the Summa theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas was placed upon the altar where the fathers debated at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, unless one goes back to 451 at Chalcedon when, after the reading of the “Tome” Pope St. Leo I, “the Great”, the Council fathers cried out, or so it is related, “Peter has spoken through Leo”. The ecumenical principle means, then, that the Church claims all truth for its own and not some cancelling opposite of this. The presence of the Hegelian dialectical principle, as of St. Thomas’s ratio est ad opposita, may be noted here. Something similar, since it is ultimately the same, applies to the deconstruction of time already more than hinted at here. “Time”, Hegel had said, in The Phenomenology of Mind, is necessary to Spirit for as long as spirit needs it or “so long as it (sc. spirit) does not annul time”, “so long as it does not grasp its pure notion”. One may suspect humour, mischief indeed as I noted earlier, as underlying this apparent indifference to active selfcontradiction. Yet the translator (Baillie, p.800) is more or less faithful: Als der Geist, der weiss, was er ist, existiert er früher nicht, … “In the grasp of spirit’s pure notion time is eliminated”.281 Concerning this grasp, secured or securable in philosophy, religion, in its formulations at least, tends to vacillate, as is only to be expected and, even more, encouraged in a doctrinal proclamation offered not merely to humanity as a whole, lettered, unlettered, bright, dim, etc. but also offered and to be offered through succeeding ages, precisely as in these formulations, typically derived, each and all, from the call of expediency at various differing historical times(!). It is in accordance with these considerations that I find myself prepared to defend the view that in the light of his affirmations we can see that Thomas Aquinas, perhaps like any truly religious person in the Christian tradition at least, was in philosophical terms 281

In a letter to me of March 14, 2002, the late and much missed Peter Geach wrote to me, as exemplifying the “very low … level of philosophy” in the works of C.S. Lewis (d. 1964), that “He just did not get things together: he asserted free will, as an integral part of his theodicy, but also, the merely apparent nature of time. If there is no time, clearly there is no alternative future course of action to choose between!” From what I have been arguing here, however, this rather shows, in accordance with Hegelian logic, that created or finite freedom is finally absorbed and in this absolute (or relative?) respect “cancelled” in that infinite freedom which is God himself, absorbed, that is, while remaining itself in the way that created things alone, the creation alone, i.e. in an analogous way, does not so much participate as mirror (in opposition, as all photographs turn left to right and so on) what we “attribute” firstly to the divine. We are free in the same sense as our language is language.

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an absolute idealist. Only an absolute idealist can claim, for example, that God, ultimately the Idea Absolute, has no real relation to us such as we have to him, her, it or (why not, if these are only pro-nouns?) them, explanatory images of left, right or pillar notwithstanding. For God clearly has real relations, is them in fact, but to himself and to any others, e.g. rational creatures, only in Him282, with the inevitable consequence that their ideas, of each severally, in the divine mind are more real than they themselves are. Only hence can God be truthfully represented as saying “I never knew you”. What were they then, such beings, if they are or ever were anything at all? Nothing, clearly, “in themselves” purely but assuredly something “in God”, i.e. as divinely thought or, better, known. Those he “never knew” never were, unless or until (though there is no “until” from God’s side or “absolutely”) forgiveness and/or repentance can find place. The wicked, it is implied, “have no power to hurt the soul” and hence ought not to be feared, fear them though we may well do. This something which is nothing or conversely, as exemplified in Scriptural utterances concerning “the wicked”, is a constant feature of metaphysics, or certainly of “the philosophy of Christ” mooted by Erasmus. The whole creation, say the prophets, is as nothing and less than nothing (this extra minus, presumably, insofar as it becomes wicked, “the nations”) “in God’s sight”, i.e. really and truly. “I went by and lo, he was gone”. So it is sometimes applied just to neutral nature and sometimes to nature, or its “inhabitants”, as wicked, somehow indifferently. Thus Hegel, or The Imitation of Christ, portray nature often as a or even the principle of evil. This is not Manichaean unless one persist in according substance to it as well or equally. Here a careful survey of what we might call Hegel’s angelology, chiefly perhaps in The Phenomenology of Mind, is called for, in particular before one would go on to examine his statement that there is 282

That is, in God these real relations are precisely relations of reason but without any “only”, since outside of him anything other is nothing, not even properly other. In other words this Scholastic distinction breaks down here, not surprisingly since here just these relations are themselves divine persons, according to the received theology if this identification (Augustine, taken up in its entirety by Thomas Aquinas) is not indeed, like the Trinity itself, an actual article of faith as the only way that the Trinity can be thought. Even or especially a mystery of faith must as such be essentially or in itself intelligible, just as the believer must at least understand the meaning of the verbal formulae he professes or some minimum thereof. In the Idea, as itself the one ultimate reality, the reasonable is the actual and conversely. In general, all the same, God’s real relation with any creature has to be with himself, e.g. as life-principle (as in Christianity) within, i.e. identified with, that creature, i.e. “I in them and they in me”, impossible unless the “in” indeed stands for an identity or, one-way only (“I live yet not I”), replacement (of old with new).

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and must be “evil in God”, though he adds elsewhere that “then”, i.e. after the apparently right attitude to it in his eyes is taken, “evil is just not evil”, while urging us to continue acting and indeed speaking as if it is indeed real and the enemy. Yet for him, after all, evil is “only a sham-being”. We may well question whether for Thomas Aquinas too this privatio boni, in claiming to be anything else, was ever anything but sham or a lie. This is the solution too to what is often felt as a problem in reference to the doctrine of “mortal sin”, viz. the fact that in any action some good or other, and hence the good itself, is ultimately sought, right up to the Satanic “Evil, be thou my good!”. The Psalmist frequently characterises the evil-doer as one who knows not his guilt, in whom “all wisdom is gone”. But this is always only half the story, however mysterious the other half can seem. Rather like Milton, meanwhile, Hegel does seem to give the figure of Satan quite a lot more credit than the other obedient angels, in certain respects at least. But for him, anyhow, as I think is quite clear, the number and individuality of any such spirits, or even of ourselves in this regard, “lies outside the concept”. We who sing, with devotion maybe, St. Thomas’s sumit unus sumunt mille283 need not take much offence at this, I would want to argue meanwhile. In general it would be better if, instead of speaking of “after death” (a locution that revolted Nietzsche, and it is worthwhile to try to understand why), we spoke of “beyond death” as, it is implied, beyond time. Thus St. Paul (or a successor to him) says at one point to his addressees: “You sit with Christ in the heavenly places”, which may or may not be accompanied by the phrase “by faith”. This phrase, again, is not a disclamatory phrase, as if equivalent to “in a manner of speaking”, since faith is precisely the means, the only means, naturally maturing into hope and love, of either communicating with and understanding, in some sense at least, the infinite, or of causing mountains to be moved into the sea without help from the latest or any technology. Yet if it is faith that we would have to argue about then it is equally true that there are other ways of seeing how time is as such immediate representation (Vorstellung) and hence, it should be argued, ultimately false. Otherwise why is God not in time? Or how could he create something, viz. time, that cannot be thought of as having beginning or end and yet is finite? What price then the resurrection of the body? Rather, what he creates (in this connection) must rather be beings such as ourselves who have a temporal form of perception (rather, “temporal” means just this) and indeed 283

“Where one receives a thousand receive”, from a hymn Thomas composed, along with the whole liturgy for the then new feast of corpus Christi. Cp. the Pauline “You are all members one of another”.

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of living and hence a corresponding language, or just language, as means of holding to and communicating whatever and however they perceive or “misperceive” (McTaggart’s term). Or, rather, or further, organic life as such is conditioned by time as controlling representation so as to be itself representation twice over. “For the Lord a day is as a thousand years”, reads the apostolic Scripture. That is, it means, they are the same in themselves (for him, as we almost incurably add), representations in their pseudosubstance as much as in their temporal connotation within such pseudosubstance. Thus we speak of Christ’s sitting, or why not standing, at a supposed divine right hand, confident for the most part, though more or less differently in different degrees of culture maybe, again, that our hearers will not take us too “materially” (perhaps a better term than “literally” here). Here we touch on sacramentality and indeed, if we grant that Christ has, i.e. creates for himself, a specifically sacramental body on our altars (this is not so much “miraculous” as, rather, a mystery of faith, again284), does not this already tend to reduce the literalness of his supposed risen but “natural” body285, as it were two metres tall, though it is more difficult to dispense 284

By contrast “miraculous” refers to something, an object, a cure, as perceptible. Thus theologians distinguish resurrection appearances from the thing itself, which, they claim, some of them at least, no one could perceive: thus “the empty tomb” is not in itself a miracle. Nothing forbids that a mystery of faith, for example, be also a miracle, for example Christ’s virginal conception, whereas the immaculate conception of Mary does not appear, in this sense, to be a miracle. Hence miracles are always spoken of as “signs”, the chief virtue of which would be their evincing precisely faith. 285 It is “natural”, though, only in some rather wide sense, even before glorification, insofar as one might be invited to thrust one’s hand into his open and to normal ideas horribly wounded side at the same time as he could eat normally, indeed joyfully, or as he, his body, might pass through locked doors or be more than disguised as some stranger or indeed “appear” now here, Jerusalem, now there, Galilee, say. So why should it, this body, not have a sacramental form as well? That is, it would not really be two bodies or two kinds of body. He had already said, when living, of some thus far bread, “This is my body”. St. Thomas deals with this as a complication, since Christ is there neither dead nor glorified, but it may rather serve to further relate our speculations here to the whole insubstantiality of created things when not seen as “in” God, with whom therefore they cannot in substance be compared. What by our language can only be spoken of analogously is in truth the analogandum, all else being analogans, as every “I” is but an incipient or potential approach to the one and only “I” in whom all have their being. Thus he is said to be closer to us than we are to ourselves, a formulation, still more a thought, by no means peculiar to Augustine alone. Here, anyhow, it is essential to keep in mind the original significance of matter, as worked out eventually by Aristotle upon a term meaning originally simply wood as opposed to, say, “formed” furniture. In its “prime” instance it signifies pure

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with the idea of a or the “holy face”, something like that on the shroud of Turin perhaps but surely and infinitely exceeding that? God and hence Christ does not have a face since he is All and hence is everything that the face is, this being, by the way, the essential sense of the Absolute Idea in Hegel’s logic, upon which, however, its truth does not depend but rather conversely, that logic’s truth depends, as truth, upon this. Truth there, accordingly, in the logic, the method, would be, as Hegel appears to say, equally “the true being”, way (hodos) and life. Nor should we force ourselves, but only remain open to new, if entirely congruent, perspectives. The “not one jot or one tittle” principle remains in force, however easy it can seem to find exceptions, such as Christ himself saying that Moses gave permission for divorce (actually the putting away of wives exclusively: one may recognise the temporality of the jots and tittles without intending to disregard or invalidate them as such) because of the hardness of his hearers’ potentiality, i.e. nothing actual, and it can be clearly seen from some of his opuscula in particular that Aquinas shared this understanding, despite Peter Geach’s bid at one point at least to deny it, regrettably, to see matter as “stuff” (unless he is rather elevating the latter term to mean a pure potentiality!). God, however, is pure act or “form”. So matter is simply the denial or de-actualising of this, the polar opposite of thought, of spirit. In sanctioning and pursuing an empirical attempt to analyse something they still call matter the physicists are occupying themselves with something actually else, Hegel regretfully notes. If we apply this to “body” we find that apart from the action of the form the body is nothing, as a dead hand is not a hand. This is Aristotle’s judgment, questioned by McTaggart, probably only because for him a hand as such is already unreal misperception on our part while he assumes, we have argued probably wrongly, that the opposite was the case with Aristotle. We have pointed out that for Aristotle too substance, any substance, is in principle or as such non-sensible. This means indeed that the world is not perceptible, whatever we may perceive and/or infer from our perceptions, our journeyings, etc. Here, though, we need to ask: is a perception perceived? By these premises the question should be parsed as having the same form as asking whether nothing, das Nichts, is substantial. We can ask this just as, or rather as, we can ask if what we tend to regard as particular substances (just assuming that there are some such) are truly such indeed, or if, rather, substance is essentially one and indeed absolute, as tends to be the “modern” position from Descartes to Hegel but which, again, could be made out to be the doctrine, the view, of Aquinas and of the theists generally, a view, anyhow, certainly considered, to say the least, by Aristotle. “But it is clear that although in one sense knowledge is universal, in another it is not.” (Met. XII, 9, 1087 a, 24-25). In the original Greek the first sense, however, is that which we find more stressed in the passage Hegel quotes at the close of his Encyclopaedia cited above. Cf. F. Inciarte, “Die Einheit der aristotelischen Metaphysik”, Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 1994, 1 Halbband, pp. 1-22; also in English translation as a chapter in Inciarte’s Substance and Action, Georg Ohms Ltd., Hildesheim 2002.

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hearts though it was not so in the beginning. Yet in fact this is not an exception. Far more probable or reasonable is it to say that such details of immediate perception just do not enter into the modes of eternal blessedness and that nothing is thereby lost by their denial but rather the opposite. Thus even Christ was more than once not recognised by his intimates in the days after his resurrection. Interchange, becoming another, is the rule of spirit, “I in you and you in me”, “members one of another”. All this, in conclusion, has no other meaning than that God, as infinite, has no body and loses nothing thereby. The incarnation, therefore, is the redemption of non-being, otherwise posing as sham-being, by being. Nor is this a particular event but a necessary truth, picturing itself as an event in what is finitely misperceived as “historical time”. That is, this is the meaning, and not the denial, of the “coming down from heaven”. he came down from the heaven he never left, one finds in the Roman liturgy at one point. “I have other meat that ye know not of”. My thoughts are not your thoughts, saith the Lord. Philosophy, therefore, or, finally, sophia, must think divinely or rather, again, be so, “I in them and they in me”. Transeamus. Let us go then to Bethlehem and see this accomplished word which the Lord has shown us. Quickly doing this, they, viz. the shepherds, found Mary, Joseph and the infant laid in a manger. Paradox? Or what? Or is paradox itself the key, the way out of the linguistic prison which began (and shall end) with an impelling to music, i.e. art as first form of absolute spirit (Hegel) or to wisdom generally, upon which, even, the rest rests. In this sense indeed music is or can be said to be “a greater revelation than the whole of religion and philosophy”, as even once a deaf man perceived. That is, it, music is incomparably the Word which “as in the beginning”, it is said, was with God and was God. Otherwise it couldn’t be “with” Him in any substantive sense, given that the infinite can have no parts, this being the basis of all community in its transcending of it. Thus “even my body shall rest in hope”, i.e. because it is mine, me even, I, again, who, inasmuch as I, am, equally (identically, finally), the universal of universals. This is the dignity of “the rational creature”, tailor-made for grace without limit or as “ab-undant”, while “it is useless to count” (Hegel). Numeri non ponuntur in divinis (Aquinas). Now thinking in itself is concerned with that which is in itself best, and thinking in the highest sense with that which is in the highest sense best. And thought thinks itself through participation in the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought by the act of apprehension and thinking, so that thought and the object of thought are the same, because that which is receptive of the object of thought, i.e. essence, is thought. And it actually functions when it possesses this object. Hence it is actuality rather than potentiality that

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is held to be the divine possession of rational thought and its active contemplation is that which is most pleasant and best. If, then, the happiness which God always enjoys is as great as that which we enjoy sometimes, it is marvellous; and if it is greater, this is still more marvellous. Nevertheless it is so. Moreover, life belongs to God. For the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and the essential actuality of God is life most good and eternal. We hold, then, that God is a living being, eternal, most good; and therefore life and a continuous eternal existence belong to God; for that is what God is.286

With the citation of this passage in the original Greek Hegel terminates his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. * D.T. Suzuki of Japan wrote that he could not in youth, or it seems ever, become a Christian because he could not understand why God needed to create the world, one supposes he means this world as it is (or clearly “fallen”?). So have we just removed the riddle, of time and eternity, say, to another place? Or is not the answer, given by Plato, oft cited by Aquinas, bonum est diffusivum sui. The sufferings involved in this creation are closely bound up with the limitlessness of this will to give, to share, to diffuse. They are as nothing “compared to the glory that shall be revealed in us”, it is apostolically affirmed and hence presented to faith seeking understanding. We do not even need precisely to say that God is “indifferent” to animal suffering, though if he willed those of himself as Son or Word-made-flesh, as both other and same in divine nature or “godhead”, then it is love that appears paramount, as in the figure of the “lamb slain before the foundation of the world”. The bodily sufferings of Christ are scarcely imaginable in a world without animal pain, which Christ tells us not to fear, a tall order of course unless in transcendent context. “Pain is evil”287, no doubt, but so is “bad” weather, not to mention earthquakes, tsunamis and so on – or why not just say finitude, evil and painful especially for an intellectual nature such as ours? The phrase just cited from the final Biblical Apocalypse (or “Book of Revelations”) highlights our denial of change or temporality in God, from which Christ’s incarnation and sacrificial death, and even just that on a 286

Aristotle, Met. XII, 7, 1072 b, 19-31. As a one-time Scandinavian professor’s (Harald Ofstad) watchword this might not be the best translation of his natively conceived thought, “evil” being typically referred, in English, to a rational agency somewhere active, unless as a joke, like the old-fashioned “villainous” as applied to unswept interiors, say.

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Roman cross, follows with a necessity explicable as the divine freedom in its necessary infinity. God transcends the making of choices as expressive of a limited freedom288. His choices, elections, as in no way caused, are as necessary as necessary being itself, which is, has to be, freedom in fullest extension. We need not here develop the thought further, but only recommend it as the best way to understand creation, resolving Suzuki’s incomprehension of this divine love’s ransoming its opposite’s inanity. Thus creation by itself, we have noted already, does not resolve or remove creaturely nothingness, sc. finitude. The processio which is creation is radically other than God, than absolute being (within which, just as absolute, however, also creation, precisely as processio externa, is absorbed), as the necessary processions within the godhead are not necessary as unfree, neither happening to nor merely chosen by God but as love, of God for himself, of love for love, realised, of will just as will fulfilled, “realised end” being the Hegelian word here. Here too, though, we may recall Hegel’s saying that “the inside is the outside” and conversely. So why do the people “imagine a vain thing”? Search me! * A further all but impenetrable mystery at this summit of philosophical wisdom, as we find it in Aristotle or Hegel, is the following. Given that the self is absorbed in God along the lines described, how is it that just I am part of it all289, one such a self. And yet I am not. “I live yet not I”, exclaim the saints, while it is precisely this self-consciousness that Hegel exalts, at the same time as he contemplates the essential “ruin of the individual”. Selfconsciousness, then, it might almost seem, is its own warrant. Yet one can feel that one is no good, not fit to live, as others may indeed judge too. That is actually the main issue of loneliness, what it sometimes means. One has to get a grip on this recalcitrant puzzle. Numeri non ponuntur in divinis. That applies here too. Could we then be up against something divine? Or is it just the animal yelp? “If one died all died”, just as one later, both living and innocent, shall have died for all. We die in Christ, baptism declares and effects, while “in” stands clearly for some kind of identity, if in difference. It follows that we cannot contemplate God without abstraction while ignoring this or other problems about the self and about myself, whoever I am who seeks to do this. There is no “mathematical” way, just as, in Hegel’s 288

Cf. note 264 above. Cf., just for example, our “Other Problems about the Self”, Sophia, Australia, April 1985, pp. 11-20; also “Self and World”, New Blackfriars, Vol. 87, No. 1012, November 2006, pp. 547-560.

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logic, there is no concrete cognition without will or love, this succeeding upon the first abstract or “proper” notion of cognition. Or, it is the same, in so contemplating I am “taken out of” myself, the object of the exercise so to say taking possession.290 In this way the academic may contemplate, also academically, the supra-academic. The academy, indeed, requires this, the mind of its first founder. In this “just I” there is an element, a sense, of election, but why? Why just me? Imagine a pair of “identical” twins. One is chosen for some unique, highly significant mission, the other not. Just chosen, with no reasons given, that is. Now suppose there are several billion such twins, born of a most imposing giantess, but supposed only, as (the) possibilities. Yet only one, or a few million, are actualised. This is actually a wrong scenario, Hegel would suggest, I think rightly. A possibility is nothing. Only imagination leads us to think otherwise. What God thinks is just thereby actual, as he will truly say to some, according to Christ’s word, “I never knew you”. For it, God’s thinking, is actuality’s meaning. What is actual is what God thinks. Many scholastics, taking the immediately temporal for reality, went astray here, I rather think. Thus, Leibniz’s world is the best of all possible worlds simply in that it is actual291, while the sum of actual worlds would form one actual world over again. In fact that would be actuality itself and would hence include God, which is to say it would be included in God, which is to say that there is no world outside of that inclusion, that divine moment. Just similarly there is nothing outside of me if I were to know my true extension, which means that God is in me and I am in God, if I be “in grace”. Yet nothing seems to forbid it being a natural state also, though not without difference, e.g. if that special state of personal friendship (grace, as St. Thomas explains it) be lacking still in some way or other. That’s is, as I have defended here, “my true extension” must in God’s sight transcend time, which I have been arguing, against Peter Geach above, does not contradict creaturely freedom. This, anyhow, is in part why Hegel claimed there is evil in God, evil thereby transmuted, however. He speaks of the difficulty of thinking God’s wrath. We are back with “sham-being”, the Nichts that nichtet, but only to or as confirming its everlasting destruction in formation, in structure indeed. For it is the frontal denial that das Nichts ist, to coin a phrase. 290

Cf. the relevant citation from Edith Stein above. In this way, as it seems, one can either rise a little above philosophy, but that with all discipline, or sink a little below it (in enthusiasm). The idea of “drawing lines”, however, between these three is effectively a mere dismissal of this “state of affairs”. 291 This indeed is the limitation upon what may happen, granted that it may turn out to be less (or more) of a limit than we had supposed.

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So, neither I nor anyone is or ever was a mere (or sheer) possibility. We have, therefore, once posited, a form of necessary being, we too, such as the heroes of fiction lack. Hence they cannot but fall into inconsistency. So we are like gods in this, though we shall “die like cattle”. Therefore, Christ teaches, we should hate our lives, if we want to be his disciple. Hate them as found “in this world” he adds. Life anyhow, says Hegel, is “but the idea immediate”, unless indeed we shall have it more abundantly, through something like philosophical travail, i.e. through “watching” and praying, the Gospel teaches, starting with the “Our Father”. That needs faith, though it brings it too, people find. Jesus, anyhow, spent whole nights in prayer, as we read, without apparent harm to what he had of, say, affability. “He that eats me shall live because of me”. There is close identification, a kind of give and take in which the first I tends to disappear. So there is no question of robbing the Lord of his primacy. Prayer itself, however, is too personal, as we say, to translate into philosophy and that was the point of this section, explaining the “why just me”. Oh who am I, That for my sake My Lord should take frail flesh And die.292

* But in fact, and as we have more or less already indicated, this peculiarity of the “I”, the self, any self, stands quite independently of theological considerations, if anything preparing the way for them rather. This is its kinship with Anselmian thought. Thus I can as well ask, why should just I have been born of my parents? Even if they had a child, by some necessity of nature being just like me from the beginning in genetic or other make-up, yet why should it be me, I? What have or had I to do with it? So detached is it, am I, is this “I”, as to mean either no world or, quite impossibly but often in desperation assumed, no self. Yet both seem not to be possible except in an all-pervading two-way union. That is, I am just myself or I, the same, am everything. That, theologically, is the only way of being “in” Christ unless as minute and dispensable member, as if a beetle in a box, or ant in a nest, certainly not “I” as “members one of another”, each ready to die for each one, wholly, though eternally or finally in a wholly spiritual existence, this being the real, to which all that is finite, such as time, or “matter”, is 292

From the hymn by Samuel Crossman, “My Song is Love Unknown”, in Songs of Praise.

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analogous, but above all our thought, our thinking, such as it is. “It is sown a natural (psychikon) body, it is raised a spiritual (pneumatikon) body”293, perhaps something like a body “full of eyes” but more so. The idea, as a true explanation, of the animal organ or body-part we call brain coming to discern in toto its own evolution towards just this capacity (of discernment) through just its own capacity for “evolving” or being evolved (toward something it not yet is nor was) seems, by contrast, not to get off the ground much. It has no logic behind or within it, even as a probability. Rather, the growing human being must always begin merely with immediate perception, as with “psychic” or finite language and its analogies, traces of such animalitas remaining up till death or in its “tongued” speech as such. Thought, however, by contrast again, wings away from this from the first. That is the link between philosophy, begun in and with art (thus mathematicians and others speak of the beauty of their theories), and religion.

293

Cf. I Cor. 15.

CHAPTER ELEVEN TECHNIQUE, ENVIRONMENTALISM, WORLD?

Regarding our approach to the world today, that is to say, in Hegelian terms, to “nature”, whether our nature or nature, again, not merely out there but nature both or equally without and within, we seem to have an absolute division between two camps, viz. the ecological and the technical. True, they highjack one another in practice, ecologists calling upon ever more refined techniques for improving “the environment” (at times they are indeed rather denominated “environmentalists”) and even the climate, the technicians, in the face of those feeling ever more “disenvironed”, striving to overcome their “bad boy” image, in the face, again, of a by now ecologically somewhat “brainwashed” public. What unites the two is precisely their focussing upon “the world”, sometimes referred to as “this world”, sometimes not. Sometimes it is rather pathetically added that it is “the only world we have”, as if they would have wanted more given the chance, that chance these proponents typically feel they have not been given. What is clear, anyhow, is that each of the two parties claims to speak for, or in the name of, all. This ideological vice betrays their origin in the latterday ferment called socialism, whether “national” or “in one country”, or else, a little later, admitting the antecedent inhumanity, they speak of socialism “with a human face”, more or less contemporary as that pathetic inner protest (emanating from Prague) was with murderous socialist crime in China, Cambodia and other impressionable places. As if the murderously sadistic German National Socialism (I see no call or need to put this originally party-name in scare-quotes) had not tried to pass itself off as “true humanism”, wiping out, with no authority whatever, the unfit, i.e. those deemed by this movement, not fit to live, whether by reason of race or ill health indifferently. Add to this the older insight that “the revolution devours its own children”, instanced again and again, France, the Stalinist “purges”, the “night of the long knives”, oriental “purges” of “intellectuals” and so on. Nothing seems to stop people, not

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even the late finely tuned theologian Fr. Herbert McCabe OP294, from singing doctrinal, i.e. ideological socialism’s praises, hopelessly (in every sense of this term) confusing it with the self-evident need for greater or better socialisation in contemporary societies, deemed “modern”. I recall here the Encyclical letter “Mater et magistra” of Pope John XXIII Roncalli from around 1960, building upon two documents on social questions by previous latterday Popes. Not much attention or value has been accorded to this one-time plea of John XXIII, making this distinction (between socialism and socialisation), that we distinguish, namely, a necessary development of such socialisation in modern societies from the ideologically materialist socialism, with its cynically purpose-built “ideology”, perversion of our highest faculty, roundly condemned, again, by two of his modern predecessors295 as inhuman just because materialist. Thus by ideology one understands an enslavement of free intellect or one understands nothing at all. “Oh daughter of Babylon wasted with misery, blessed shall he be that taketh thy children and dasheth them against the stones”. “Do I not hate them that hate thee? Yea, Lord, I hate them with a perfect hatred” (two outbursts from the Psalms of David often quietly omitted or erased from editions of them for liturgical use296, though they clearly bear a positive “spiritual”, as distinct from the literal, sense). Here too, one may well be tempted to fear, of those for the moment calling the shots, that “they know not what they do”, or not quite and for whatever reason. * Before publishing his best-seller, on evolution roughly, Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ had published in the 1920s a book on “the spiritual life”, inasmuch as rethinking its object, entitled Le milieu divin, or The Divine Milieu in English translation. The pan-religious thought recommended there is largely traditional. What sticks out as new, however, is the insistence, the 294

McCabe’s strategy, however, later and different from Roncalli’s, was rather to use the term “socialism” itself for the necessary socialisation pleaded for by many bishops on “third world” countries in particular (perhaps because they themselves often do this), simply ignoring the ideological meaning it had for Nazism or Bolshevism. While this commended him to immature student youth to a great extent one fears it caused much honest bewilderment elsewhere. 295 Leo XIII (Rerum novarum, c. 1891), Pius XI (Quadragesimo anno, c. 1931). 296 This is a pity in a way, as being a “lesser evil”, as we say, given the traditional mystical application, comparable with that given to similar language used, i.e. recorded, in the Gospels themselves, of these heartfelt cries, whether we think of the call to hate our lives in this world, of the parable of the commended unjust steward or of many similar appeals to wide-awake intelligence.

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assertion, that Christians in the future are going to have to pay more attention to “the world”, where so much is happening, so many wonders, Teilhard seems to feel, are revealed, all of which he claims to see, quite properly so far, as summed up in a heightened awareness of the cosmic Christ, pantocrator. It is true that God is omnipresent, as we have been urging throughout this book. But, and by the same token, the world is nowhere, is absorbed “in” God, the Absolute Idea, as it is the great merit of Hegelian logic to have brought out in all its necessity. The world, inasmuch as it insists on taking itself on its own, so to say, is a deceit, the apostles in effect tell us. This was an insight the so-called (by us) Old Testament reveals, one which the Jewish people, ancient Israel, as having struggled painfully towards it, as is recorded in Isaiah, the Psalter and other books, later confirmed in a certain harmony with some findings of Greek philosophy but well able to stand firm without it or these. Thus in baptism Christians, “spiritual Semites”297 indeed, renounce “the world, the flesh and the devil”, while from the beginning the apostles enjoined that there shall be no preaching in the future of a doctrine different from what they preach, even though, as Newman, to repeat it, emphasised in later times, the form of statement and indeed understanding of these same doctrines is bound to “develop” and rightly so, i.e. within the wider Church. No doubt Fr. Teilhard’s emphasis can be harmonised with that. Unfortunately people go on to claim that a new situation has arisen through man’s discovery of a power to destroy the world, by which they mean, in a paradoxical reversion to medievalism, this globe only. This, though, is but one of a number of technical achievements or scientific discoveries, the standard one being that of the falsity, under some aspects at least, of geocentrism, a discovery used to argue for the above claim of a new, “postChristian” situation. Implied is a side-lining of Jesus Christ himself, possibly the secret wish behind this whole vast movement. “Love not your lives in this world”, commanded Christ, however, or you are not worthy to be my disciples. The seed sown remains, however, with the urge and frantic zeal to crush this its constant companion, the scandal of the Cross which yet is one with the resurrection, ascension and coming of the Spirit. * Another sign, it is felt, of an approaching end is the phenomenal rise in human population and, latterly, in human longevity, due mainly to our 297

Pope Paul VI, combatting “anti-Semitism”, in fact said “Spiritually we are all Semites”.

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scientific advances, one may fairly claim. What stands out, however, is that neither of the two parties, technologist or ecological, can offer any credible prospect of halting the felt slide to catastrophe. This prospect, all the same, has been a constant in humanity’s history, encouraged by plague, warfare and its politics or by occasional comets. Here I simply add that this may be true, we may be approaching catastrophe of some kind. Still, “Let not your hearts be troubled”, for to this, all the same, were added the words “The end is not yet”, this added in sympathetic consolation to all that multitude of “men’s hearts” foreseen as “failing them for fear”. The Christian position, after all, has always been to look forward to the end, dies irae notwithstanding. St. Augustine even recommended people not to marry and have children so as to bring it closer, though in some ways there was nothing new also in this “development” from Gospel and earlier sources in general! Such is the power, anyhow, of apocalyptic as a mode of interpretation imposed by our immediate “realist” premises. It was bound to be eventually replaced by absolute idealism as the religious form of perceptive thought. The beginnings of this can be seen in Augustine or Anselm but in general the intellectual world was not yet able to grasp it systematically while holding firm to theological and/or Church doctrine. One continued to speak of “God before creation”. Even Hegel does it though one sees that he understands he is using a representation (Vorstellung), this being his whole critique of language, as against the Absolute Idea, after all. In this way the limitations of (my) language are not the limitations of my world, which Hegel presents as knowable only when and as we free ourselves, by understanding them, from the false structure of subject and predicate, in which case we can’t say anything anymore, just as he himself uses that same form in condemning it. Similarly it is only in speech that we can praise or recommend silence. We are urged to search for a certain narrow and hidden path that leads to life eternal, always one by one or at least with just a chosen few in view. The broad way of fashion and ease does not lead there, but to destruction simply, and many walk upon it, whether or not to the or to their end we do not know, only able to hope that they, or those we most love, or we ourselves, are either no longer on it or are destined to leave it. Since all is in God’s hands, source of all goodness or virtue, joy or hope, as indeed of justice made perfect in boundless love, this being what we call God, if anything is, there is nothing here to get all het up about. “God will provide” is the faith of Abraham, father of all who believe. Meanwhile, “the eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me”, exclaimed Eckhart, adding immediately: “By God, this is true!”

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Incredibly as it may at first seem, this doctrine, this principle, of “opting out” one by one, was and is proclaimed from the first precisely to the generality of listeners (the Sermon on the Mount) or, later, readers, though one may well recall the Church’s much misunderstood hesitation about putting “the Bible” into the hands of all, even when its teaching had been recorded and proclaimed far and wide. Yet “strait is the gate” (English sixteenth century version in nonsensical mistranslation of the French citation for this novel’s title: “strait” means narrow, “gate”, in the original Norse gata, means street or path, here as the way leading to salvation), as Gide rather ironically entitled his gloomy novel of that name, in which in fact the narrow street leads nowhere or worse. This, anyhow, was the paradox of the medieval civilisation entrusted to the care of the Popes, that of a whole society, as broad as long and not narrow at all, asking, originally through their kings, rather than one by one, to be put on this narrow way. That the first missionaries regularly approached rulers of whole peoples first is proof, nevertheless, of their grasp of the importance of their mission. In the tradition of the Magi they had “seen the star”, “in the East” as the new sun rising. So such a possibility, of the conversion of whole peoples, was not in principle excluded beforehand but, rather, joyfully reckoned with. It is, meanwhile, nonsense or at least hyperbolic to claim that Luther and his “reformation” destroyed this the Christian “movement”, “shattered” it as Fr. McCabe suggests in one place. The shock of it might equally well be claimed to have been a main stimulus to the flourishing of Catholic missionary activity from that time, supervening upon the age of the Crusades, the Christian “wars of religion” notwithstanding. The world is best served, in other words, by those renouncing it. Only then, under the Popes, were the unhealthy Pontine Marshes drained, only then was slavery, slowly and not without relapses, replaced by feudalism and its successors298. Thus the missionary movement itself is the original motor producing the world-system of states we have today, of which the finally Christianised Roman Empire remains forever the type. For it is the type in a rather unique sense, which is just the sense of being the type, i.e. not accidentally, inasmuch as St. Peter, i.e. the rock (petra), was conformed 298

This historical point, of the initial transformation of the omnipresent ancient slavery by Christian feudalism, is totally missed or ignored by Richard Winfield in his Modernity, Religion and the War on Terror, Ashgate, Aldershot 2007, nor is it brought to light by his commentator G. Rinaldi in the section “Systematische Voraussetzungen von Winfields Religionsphilosophie” of his bilingual Absolute Idealism and Contemporary Philosophy (Hegeliana 22), Peter Lang GmbH, Frankfurt 2012, pp. 229-239.

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to this designation by Christ himself, whose divine identity, as is recorded, he had first discerned, precisely by and in his becoming the first bishop, i.e. apostolic leader, of, again, just Rome. So he too is the type indeed of all and each of his successors, whether in his or their failures or in the strength of their, i.e. his, faith. Since this is itself an article of faith, however, and of the Roman or Catholic faith in particular, it cannot be dependent upon the survival of some earthly city. Thus its bishop is also and thereby “Pope” and will remain thus even when or as resident in Avignon or the Antarctic or on Mars or similar, in ways we maybe cannot now imagine. The world, then, like Judas or Satan, has its part to play in the unfolding drama we call the “scheme of things”, whereby the infinite God manifests that he is light and that in him, as the author only of darkness (thus light creates the dark), or of night, there is no darkness at all, nor as the author of time and change is there any such in him either. Nature, we are told, awaits its redemption meanwhile. Again, this is misconceived, when not consciously thus pictured only or represented, as succeeding temporally upon time. We must see through time and nature to what it really is, as faith sees through the historically apparent Christ or through this life as a whole, thus already internally moving all mountains. Death, said Hegel, is the entry into spirit, “the undiscovered land from whose bourn no traveller returns”, for certainly Christ’s resurrection and ascension into “glory” is no mere return, just as his ascension is no mere going up, or sideways, something as clearly pointed out in the fourteenth century The Cloud of Unknowing as in any later verdict on this subject, as really in Scripture itself properly read. * The philosopher McTaggart, taking his cue from Hegel, certainly loved not the world299, for him misperception simply, lodged well into Plato’s cave. The tradition is constant, pointing rather to tradition’s transcendence by intellect as such. The orientals, Hindus or Buddhists, may be credited with having seen the half of this at least, but not particularly with having found a way out of it, if reincarnation be rejected, although actually, if I could reincarnate in time, then why not in space too, i.e. during any one temporal period (like Shelley’s magus Zoroaster perhaps, who “met his own image, walking in the garden”)? By this the Christian vision would be more closely approached, of our being members of one another or, ultimately, “all one

299

Cf. Geach, Faith and Hope, as cited above.

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person in Jesus Christ” (St. Paul300), our “exemplar”, as “communion” proclaims: sumit unus sumunt mille. The idea is, and in Hegel this is a thesis of logic, that “thought thinks only itself”, meaning that thought knows only itself. For thinking here has no empirical nature, as it did not at the heart of medieval realism, realism that is of sense and the immediate. “Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?” None, but what thought can do is downgrade the idea of stature altogether, can do and must do. God has no body. Nor did he take flesh as if supplementing a lack; quite the reverse, we have been suggesting here. Yet Hegel can be thought to contradict, when he says: That Absolute Spirit has taken on the shape of self-consciousness inherently, and therefore also consciously to itself - this appears now as the belief of the world, the belief that spirit exists in fact as a definite self-consciousness, i.e. an actual human being; that spirit is an object for immediate experience; that the believing mind sees, feels, and hears this divinity. Taken thus it is not imagination, not a fancy; it is actual in the believer. Consciousness in that case does not set out from its own inner life, does not start from thought, and in itself combine the thought of God with existence; rather it sets out from immediate present existence, and recognizes God in it.301

There can seem here to be a critique of Anselm, or at least a reminder that his philosophical position is transcended by or is other than the final stance of faith, in Anselm or any other believer. It seems a typically Lutheran point, consciously or not. Note, though, that here at least Hegel’s stress is upon taking on “the shape (Gestalt) of self-consciousness” rather than upon an unanalysed notion of flesh, as in the “classical” term incarnatus. The passage cannot be properly read, however, without awareness of the four or so earlier pages of this chapter VIIc of the Phenomenology of Mind. The religion of art was already a passing from “simple trust” to a “selfconsciousness” from the first identified with “incarnation in human form of the Divine Being” which “begins with the statue”. This is not to say, however, that “this incarnation” is being identified with the incarnation of faith, as if “demythologising” the latter, provocative though the text may seem. Rather, it is all in the service of a deeper theological penetration of a mystery of faith, in accordance with Newman’s thesis of “development of Christian doctrine”, as can certainly at least be argued. There is an idea of 300

A text of which Fr. Daniel Jamros SJ seems to have taken little note at the time of writing his article “Hegel on the incarnation: Unique or Universal”, Theologie und Philosophie 56, 1995. 301 Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, Baillie transl. 1966, pp. 757-758. “Recognizes” deserves emphasis here.

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incarnation and there is a supposed fact of incarnation. Nor are these two the same in idea themselves, though they might be posited (if absolute idealism be taken as true, or as a fact as we say) as the same in fact, obviously reducing the otherness of fact from idea in that case rather than the other way round, although in another sense it is then the idea than becomes fact, as, Hegel can be said to claim, the Absolute Idea is not merely the greatest fact of all but fact absolutely. We have been so to say hammering here in our book, our essay, at nothing else. Is Hegel then contradicting himself, or at least contradicting the position we have previously been outlining as his? Not if we accept the reasoning of our previous paragraph. The Word was both “incarnate”, enfleshed, and more specifically made man, et homo factus est. If time is not real, is misperceived, then this reality expresses an or the eternal relation between God and man, something that Hegel seems to emphasise or, we may say, that immediately becomes apparent, central even, if the truth of absolute idealism be granted. On the principles of interpretation generally accepted as to the “spiritual” sense of Scripture, such as that while the “literal” sense requires always to be respected, i.e. it is to be preferred as far as is possible302, one cannot forbid this, then indeed one cannot forbid it, this eternal relation between God and man, namely. The spiritual sense has anyhow ever been the most honoured, as is witnessed by the Church ’s centring its public prayer, the divine office, around the Davidic Psalter from the beginning, though it is also witnessed to, and that typically indeed, by many of the words of Christ. There is no God literally or temporally before creation or, equally, before man or, equally, before whoever we are and whatever we are now experiencing. To say “at this moment” is, it follows generally here, to devalue what we mean by “now”. So if “now” is “the moment of consciousness” it is the latter that must give way, admit to being a “false” consciousness, a judgment commonly made in other areas. The wicked man foolishly thought that God was another such as himself. Others thought he wanted the blood of bulls and sheep. Others picture God as feebly struggling against demonic evil in the world, and so on. “What then is man? What is God?” asked Karol Wojtyla, as Pope John Paul II, in some kind of wonderment almost, it seemed, rather than being about to give an answer. As St. Thomas had said, we know most about God when we know that we know nothing about Him. The point is that Wojtyla put man and God together, so that it can be true that “the proper study of mankind is man” without any limit or reduction being implied. Rather, it is 302

This principle, that of St. Thomas Aquinas, is not absolute or, hence, unquestionable, even on his own principles. “The letter kills, the spirit gives life”.

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there that we will reach the infinite, this being Hegel’s point about the incarnation, as he goes on to make clear. In this knowing nothing, however, we know everything, and that about God, Hegel seems to want to say, if only he could, here. Instead he says: “In this form of religion the Divine Being is, on that account, revealed. Its being revealed obviously consists in this, that what it is, is known. It is, however, known just in its being known as spirit, as a Being which is essentially selfconsciousness”. Note that he says “self-consciousness”, not merely “selfconscious”. For him, all the same, “being known as spirit” means precisely a not being known, in the sense of anything that could be pinned down in a formula or definition, such as is indeed the mark of the finite. So although God “became” man he did not become finite, whatever be the case with us, in our states of “nature” or of grace. “You are the Christ, the son of the living God”. Only as such was he “transfigured”, i.e. as actually having no figure, not even “glistering” robes etc. It is into this spiritual reality that the resurrection body is absorbed, Christ kindly leaving to us his “sacramental” body (and blood, offered separately in representative memory of his sacrifice) whereby we may participate in this final moment of his presence among us precisely as participating in his sacrifice.303 That is, again, what Hegel assumed is only real in God’s sight as an otherness. His otherness from himself in identity with himself, as Hegel insists in his Logic, is what infinity conceptually, i.e. really, requires. But in itself any otherness to God is a nothing, as Isaiah said that the nations are in God’s eyes nothing and, this being the meaning of sin, “less than nothing”. Just so, then, is it said that Christ, the Word, “was made sin for us”. This, in very truth, is the identity in difference which undercuts, indeed destroys, all dualism. Yet Hegel says “Consciousness sets out from immediate present existence, and recognizes God in it”. Hegel’s whole philosophy of spirit is involved here, also, then, that of mind, “also” because he thinks too, manifestly, of Scriptural passages such as that in Gospel of John, 3, where it is said that the spirit blows where it will and you cannot tell whence or where. We are dealing with mysteries of faith, where philosophy too stumbles. So “the divine Being” is “known just in its being known as spirit, as”, he now adds, “a Being which is essentially self-conscious”, as, in fact, are we. Thus that is the only way we too are known, to one another, as something, you might say, that you have to “get the feel of” rather than to define. This is the intuitive, the “tasting” quality of wisdom, sapientia (root 303 On this cf. M. Levering, “Metaphysics and Contemporary Sacramental Theology:

Retrieving Anscar Vonier”, in Indubitanter ad veritatem, ed. J. Vijgen, Damon Publishers, Kerkrade, Holland, 2003, pp. 281-300.

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sapor), which is one above “science”, scientia, better translated as knowledge simply maybe, as the final rung on the Aristotelian ladder of intellectual virtues taken over by Aquinas. It is only with wisdom that one begins to “taste”, therefore, or immediately perceive, the truth first reasoned towards by science (scientia) or understanding. Here is where Hegel analyses self-consciousness. The heart of this is indeed still, I would argue from the text, that “the Self is Absolute Being”, thus, for him, not really “light-hearted” or “folly” at all. Is he looking at a possible censor? Does he feel less free than the fourteenth century Dominican Eckhart declaring that “The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me” and not merely the converse of that, adding immediately, in what has come down to us: “By God, this is true!” Hegel himself got to know this text in conversation with Franz von Baader, if not before.304 We may add to this, all this, the affirmation of Duns Scotus that God in his great love for man would have united himself with man’s nature whether or not man had sinned. From our premises, meanwhile, this assertion can only mean that God has as such, or in just the same or equally (at the least) “central” way in which he is creator of all that is other than He, an intrinsic affinity with man just in His being divinity. Hence Christ calls himself, his own person, the “son of man”. Duns Scotus is now, i.e. since quite recently, “raised to the altars” as it is said. It was also he who turned out to be right, in the Church’s eyes, concerning the Immaculate Conception of Christ’s mother, Mary. So what now are those eyes seeing? “What is man?” i.e. in relation to God. We say God is man; the Marxists or similar say man is God. Is there after all no difference? Was Fr. Jamros right to object to “the young Hegelians”? I do not mean that they identified these two propositions, as he rather suggests. The Creed says God “was made man”, but this is from within man’s temporal blik (R.M. Hare) or “misperception”, let’s just say finitude. God cannot be spoken of as having mere intentions ever, except from within this our finite immediacy. In final reality “the end”, end as such, that means, “is realised”305. “Before Abraham was, I am”: these are words of the man Jesus, according to John’s Gospel as we have it, which thus on any account intend to teach this. What Hegel rather suggests is that this has to be something anyone might say and that truly, as we have noted above. Al Hallaj, for example, said it and was killed for it. Yet Jesus is definitely making a unique claim just for himself, as his whole proclamation underlines, even though always with the aim of incorporating us into himself, though here too by 304

Cf. Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel, New York 1994; also our The Orthodox Hegel, CSP, Newcastle-on-Tyne, 2014. 305 Enc. 212, Zus.

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“first” coming into them: “I in them and they in me”, precisely so that we too may claim it, “in Him” though, as it must then be. Or, conversely, anyone truly intuiting this could only be “in Him”, knowingly or unknowingly, perhaps like those “other sheep” the Good Shepherd claimed to have that were “not of this fold”. Jesus, we should remember, prayed without ceasing, lifting up his eyes to heaven, as it is written; so we can hardly do better than imitate that. There is no “death of God” here, no divine desire that we should live as if he did not exist, as the noble and murdered Bonhoeffer for one suggested. Rather, “pray without ceasing”, though, again, this gets equated by some with denial of any need to pray at all, life and prayer becoming one. Certainly we need not always be conscious that we are praying, witness to its presence being rather a peace, not to be commanded as if in our power, “which passes understanding”, like the Spirit whose movements elude us. On the question of Hegel’s final mind, however, the most probable stance to take up is to leave undecided whether he ever had a final mind, letting rather his whole corpus speak for itself, careful over every word though he indeed was, one rather feels, except when expressing his anti-Catholic prejudices perhaps. There, after all, it was safer in his situation to really let fly, though no doubt his indignation, following upon misinterpretation306, at Encyclopaedia 552, was genuine enough. * We conclude here by following Hegel’s thought as succeeding upon our last citation. He says, concerning this “recognition of God in immediate existence” (by the apostles? by us? By spirit itself? By all three?): The self of the existent spirit (passing from “unhappy” to happy consciousness) has in that way (incarnation) the form of complete immediacy. It is neither set up as something thought, or imaginatively represented, nor as something produced, as … in natural religion, or in religion as art. Rather, this concrete God is beheld sensuously and immediately as a self, as a real individual human being; only so is it a self-consciousness.307

His next statement is crucial:

306

Cf. note 245, above. Phenomenology of Mind, p. 758. Hegel might have noted how the Wisdom literature continually reached out after this, even uniquely so as if (at least) eliciting it.

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This incarnation of the Divine Being, its having essentially and directly the shape of self-consciousness, is the simple content of Absolute Religion. Here the Divine Being is known as Spirit; this religion is the Divine Being’s consciousness concerning itself that it is Spirit.

Sometimes Baillie translates Geist retaining the initial capital (which is not, however, in German a capitalisation), sometimes not, an indication not possible in Hegel’s original text. Is this a choice of spirit over the letter or simple unfaithfulness? I note that both here and in the Encyclopaedia Hegel speaks of “absolute religion”, in seeming contradiction of his scheme whereby it is philosophy that is absolute spirit or the absolute. This is only avoided if we take him as equating Christian religion with (the highest) philosophy or, as it would then be, sophia, just what he proclaims himself as aiming at rather than at a mere love (philia) of it. The sophia would then be sancta sophia, so “no harm done”, I find. Sophia is indeed spirit’s highest or absolute form.308 For spirit is knowledge of self in a state of alienation of self: spirit is the Being which is the process of retaining identity with itself in its otherness. This, however, is Substance, so far as in its accidents substance at the same time is turned back into itself; and is so, not as being indifferent towards something unessential and, consequently, as finding itself in some alien element, but as being there within itself, i.e. so far as it is subject or self.

Spirit is explained here in terms of self-denying or other-affirming love, with a clear Trinitarian overtone (“retaining identity with itself in its otherness”). Substance and accidence are posited almost as analogical with world and creation, as was typical of the preceding modern thought, Descartes in particular. Nor are these reflections, of one idea upon another, invalid. Thus Spirit becomes substance, the one assimilated to the other, but in a way affecting the doctrine of accidence. Substance is known indeed in and through its accidence, if at all. This is pure Aristotelianism. “Turned back into itself” seems to refer to the process of knowing as reversing an “actual” causal development, of accidents from the substance. Hence accidents are not unessential or alien to substance, as they might seem in the case of transubstantiation, Hegel’s unspoken thought, I would be prepared to bet. But really Christ does not find himself “in some alien element” on 308

Thus I can see no decisive objection to dedicating a Catholic Church, say, to Holy Wisdom once again, even if at least the English way of naming would be modified. “St. Sophia” would mean something else. Debate would rather centre round whether the divine wisdom thus remains personalised in itself, as in Scripture indeed she does.

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the altar. Transubstantiation, that is, is not a miracle, though popular belief might see it so, but rather mysterium fidei, a or the mystery of faith. This is the pure doctrine of Aquinas, as of the Church and of the liturgy itself, rediscovered, reaffirmed rather, by Abbot Vonier in the 1920s. So here Hegel’s identification of God with the world is a little too close to the absolutely abstract, in the very moment of his moving away from that, but abstractly, so to say. For it, substance, God, is there, in the accidents, in the world, “within itself”, and it is only “on this account”, he says, that “the Divine Being is … revealed”. “Its being revealed obviously consists in this, that what it is, is known”. Here, though, the “obviously” conceals that what is actually said is that it never needed to be revealed. “This also is thou; neither is this thou.” This incarnation, as he describes this doctrine, is indeed a “simple content”, of a religion become absolute toward the point of nothingness, or so it might be taken by those so wishing. It is in fact consciousness setting out “from its own inner life”, just what he wanted, surely genuinely, to put as superseded by consciousness recognizing God in immediate present existence, something, anyhow, to which one by no means would wish to be hostile. “Turn but a stone and you touch a wing”, or just listen to some Beethoven. The difficulty, then, is with the account of revelation.309 The latter appears here as a permanent fixture in the relation of God and man, not as an event coming to overturn accepted ways. “Its being revealed obviously consists in this, that what it is, is known”. “It is, however” (Hegel adds), “known just in its being known as spirit, as a Being which is essentially selfconsciousness”. The original subject here grammatically, however, is “the Divine Being”, “known as spirit, which is essentially self-consciousness”. Known as mind, this might equally well be translated. That mind is selfconsciousness would be quite a foreign idea to the main medieval thinkers as also to Aristotle, for whom any such thing would get in the way (paremphainomenon) of a pure consciousness becoming something other, i.e. what it knows, i.e. in knowing anything at all. Knowledge would be impossible, unless, and this is Hegel’s vantage point, such selfconsciousness, consciencia, was in itself all knowledge, all scientia and so not con- at all, as, the former, is the case with any possible God. In that case all knowledge is indeed exclusively a self-knowledge, on the part of the “I am”. There follows a paragraph of central importance here: 309 This is something I feel I may rather have missed in my earlier study, Hegel’s Theology or Revelation Thematised, CSP, Newcastle-upon-Tyne 2018.

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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 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 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 just 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.310

This, and the perspectives it is opening up, is entirely in accord with the passage cited earlier above from Edith Stein (known in religion as Sr. Teresa Benedicta OCD). It is only that she more stresses that this union with “the Good, the Righteous”, occurs first in the will, rather, also and perhaps more surely than intellect the faculty-equivalent of spirit (rather, it is intellect in its fullness, as rightly or wrongly directed), although of course intellect and will in their unity form one, precisely spirit, namely, which “blows where it will”. Thus Hegel willed to write what he wrote here. Edith Stein, as raised to the Church’s altars now, may thus be seen as the third Teresa in the gallery of Carmelite mystics, of which St. John of the Cross, in his mystical writings, is the systematiser, poet and ascetic theologian in one. What Hegel writes can be seen to be otherwise in complete accord with their doctrine, e.g. when Edith Stein writes, to cite it again: Denn indem er mit innerste Hingabe tut, was Gott von ihm verlangt, wird das göttliche Leben sein inneres Leben: er findet Gott in sich, wenn er bei sich einkehrt (from Endliches und Ewiges Sein, Werke, vol. 2, Freiburg 1986, 410f.). He finds God in himself as, says Hegel, “the truly and solely revealed”, though “solely” can seem a bit gratuitous; why not, rather, “most intimately” or similar, or even “most properly” revealed, like the vision of St. Paul, say, or, as Hegel for his part makes clear, like the immediate experience of Christ’s first disciples. What one notes also, in this paragraph, is the beginning of a tie-up, in anticipation, with the doctrines of the later Science of Logic of 1816, the closing pages on “the pure notion” as the true (or Absolute) Being, indeed 310

Hegel, op. cit., p. 759.

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an ontology of logical forms, of “the method” or way (Gk. meta hodon). Just how this progression of forms as set out can be a method (for thought) becomes clearer the more one re-reads it: it is, or can so seem, truly way, truth and recollected life. Logical forms, that is, in their systematic entirety, just are the personal logos, as “I am” itself cannot be said unless as taken from this whole system of thought, which it nonetheless totally transcends as being its ultimate sole support. The unity and cohesion of Hegel’s thought, indeed a system as he claimed, with this Phenomenology as first part (and not some youthful preliminary), is thus as striking as such thought is in Thomas Aquinas and, despite shifts of stress, Aristotle. But, Hegel claims, we have not yet reached rock-bottom. This is reached when we see that “The divine nature is the same as the human”! Now I would claim that this assertion turns out to mean that the human becomes itself as and when divinised in all its particulars, as naturally receptive of grace, to speak theologically. It does not mean an elimination of the divine, in an abstract identity without difference, as if, for example, in saying “I and my father are one” Christ had to be taken as saying “I am my father”, with no real relation obtaining in this identity. 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 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.311

Not then that God did not know himself until he became incarnate; that would be sheer atheism, it seems to me. But that incarnation, in the sense of becoming man, is essential to God, the essence, that is, of divine, i.e. absolute, freedom, we might say. For nothing is essential to God in the sense of a necessary addition to his simple being but, necessarily, as to his infinity (which is infinity itself), one with it and not an addition at all. “What is God? What is man?” God becomes there, at his human birth from or conception in Mary what he always was, is eternity manifested historically to us at the chosen place and moment. So we are, properly understood, God’s own manifestation, of himself and our self, to ourselves. This is to “know of what spirit we are”. In itself, however, this too, as it were in reverse, is thus eternally manifest. It is against this background that Hegel can refer to “the 311

Ibid. p. 761.

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soulless word ‘is’”. All beside Absolute Being both is and is not, namely. Thus when Hegel says there must be evil in God he is referring to something that is no longer evil as we know it in abstract separation from good, to whatever, rather, corresponds to that in the divine nature as, as we rather thoughtlessly say, “permitting” it; or, even more directly, to what is termed the “wrath” of God. Good and Evil were the specific distinctions of thought which we found. Since their opposition is not yet broken down, and they are represented as essential realities of thought, each of them independent by itself, man is the self with no essential reality of his own and the mere ground which couples them together, and on which they exist and war with one another. But these universal powers of good and evil belong all the same to the self, or the self is their actuality. … it thus comes about that, as evil is nothing else than the self-concentration of the natural existence of spirit, conversely, good enters into actual reality and appears as (objectively) existing self-consciousness (i.e. such objectivity is itself an appearance, as indeed is what we term in this analogical sense, that of immediacy, “actual reality”). That which, when Spirit is interpreted in terms of pure thought, is in general merely hinted at as the Divine Being’s transition into otherness, here, for figurative thinking, comes nearer its realization … taken to consist in the Divine Being humbling Itself … The other aspect, that of evil, is taken by imagination as an event extraneous and alien to the Divine Being: to grasp evil in the Divine Being itself as the wrath of God – that is the supreme effort, the severest strain, of which figurative thought, wrestling with its own limitations, is capable, an effort which, since it is devoid of the notion, remains a fruitless struggle.312

Hence, in view of this essential yet supremely free divine incarnation, it is with reference to the human body that all the animals and plants are what they are (this is not then an invoking of some “subjectivity of knowledge”). That body, in its proportions, is the index of nature. This view is often 312

Ibid. p. 773. In citing this passage here I intend to show continuity, if not identity, of Hegel’s thought with the “Dominican” position set forth at the attempted papal reconciliation, De auxiliis (1607), of Dominican (God as first mover of also all free acts even of rational creatures, as defended by Ss. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, following St. Paul) and Jesuit theologians (defending a divine scientia media of man’s freedom, this being seen as a pure indifference rather than a quality of rationality). The attempt failed, largely through practical ecclesiastical considerations (they were forbidden to call one another heretics) from which Hegel was free, though the subsequent movement of European atheism, which reaffirmation of the traditional doctrine might have checked, was in full swing. The divine knowledge has to be seen as in a manner causative (though actually all effects are contained within it, thus, by Hegel’s logic, “cancelling” this category as anything more than a “moment”, otherwise Pure Act is not actual).

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reflected in the liturgy, saying, for example, that “he came down from the heaven he never left”, or simply, taken from the Apocalypse, that he, Christ, is alpha and omega, that “all times are his”. Most of these sayings refer, again, as do Hegel’s remarks upon evil here, to the relation of time to eternity and very much urge the necessity in religion eventually, or in philosophy, for absolute idealism, which so many say they cannot see the point of. The discovery of ourselves in Absolute Being, meanwhile, is precisely the realisation that God loves us, eternally. It is in itself the key to the great mystery of our being. Why me? As long as we ask that question, as if of any other contingency, we have not understood the “me”. To understand it is immediately to be filled with repentance, which is no guarantee against falling and recovering again and again, “until seventy times seven”. The “me” in question, namely, transcends the merely abstract singling out of one from many, naming rather subjectivity in itself, never known by us, i.e. by the person, as other than his or her own. The “in” here, meanwhile (in “in Absolute Being” supra), can as much refer to a total absorption to the point of vanishing (“I live yet not I”) as it can refer to an identification with what absorbs, having become “a new creature”. It remains to be added that this “discovery of ourselves” in God is not brought to its own proper fulfilment except by way of a praxis. Yet the highest praxis is indeed contemplation, i.e. contemplation in proper form is already a praxis: the true philosopher marvels, worships. Consider Hegel’s identification of philosophy with the most perfect religion, which, as a virtue, is certainly a praxis and thus a subordinate part of justice, as being what we owe to God or the divine generally, as Aquinas explains it, whom I simply retail here in order to show how and where the tradition was continued into modernity. What MacIntyre has criticised in this latter, that is to say, is only its negative facet. Spirit continues to inspire the development, even while we may repeat the seemingly pessimistic question, “When the Son of Man comes will He find faith upon the earth?” From the same source, however, we may also read: “Greater things than I have done shall you do”. There seems little call to restrict the reference of this to its immediate hearers two millennia ago, this text in any case immediately continuing with “for I shall be in you”. * So neither technology nor ecology, virtuous though both may truly be, are what we should look to for the salvation which as rational creatures we naturally and desperately long for, even when hope is gone and we try to

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kill the pain by immersion in these movements or allied policies. They have a more modest, if good role to play, at least in comparison with philosophy, the “highest worship” (Hegel, höchste Gottesdienst). As we say, “They also serve who only stand and wait”. Yet the traditional view is rather that just they, as only standing and waiting, namely, serve especially, i.e. just this posture is the philosophical. Yet a certain active “embodiment”, representing as effect a universal concern, as outwardisation of the inwardly true attitude (we have seen, in Hegel’s logic, that this is indeed representation), is called for. The nexus demonstrating this apparent taking of distance from the affairs of the world is of course the role of art, as the more immediate elevation of consciousness to what is absolute. Now art is in good measure most preserved, for the so-called ordinary man, as estranged maybe from or too poor materially to appropriate leisure and understanding as art requires, within the practice of religion, as being indifferent to social standing, material capacity or similar. Yet art’s major analogy, thus falling short of it actually, Hegel maintains, is nature, a fitting object for free contemplation, whether within or without religion, whatever nature’s paradoxes. To deprive the so-called, miscalled rather, “masses” of art does them, therefore, the greatest wrong. Nor will they finally accept such a relegation in patronisation put upon them mainly by middle-class “do-gooders”, as one may call them, themselves typically estranged from art, whatever flattering unctions these would-be “idealists” themselves lay to their souls. What used to be a flourishing folk-art, meanwhile, gets reborn in also the darkest of industrial milieus, slums as one used to call them in horrified rejection. One example of this might be sport, football, athletics, tennis or “the Olympics”, followed by all (almost) on television everywhere. Good football, or tennis for the less proletarian classes, is clearly and/or analogously an art313. So, art for art’s sake is art for man’s sake, born historically out of religion, though at times at unnatural enmity with its parent. They become partners, after such an adolescent interlude, in a sophia which is truly sancta, marked by the divine play. So why did Constantinople, with its cathedral dedicated to sancta sophia, “get the works”? The question is everyone’s business and not just that of “the Turks”, as the text of a silly or thoughtless “hit”-song of the early 1950s had wanted to insist. The song still assumes, but as wanting to be rid of it as “nobody’s business but the Turks”, a rudimentary grasp, i.e. willy nilly, of history by the generality. For otherwise the song’s whole text, as “popular”, is pointless. One sees, however, that this consensus in received knowledge 313

Concerning cricket I will stay silent. Rugby, meanwhile, receives its due, or fails to do so, in one of Clint Eastwood’s more comical films.

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and understanding, seventy years later, can no longer be relied upon, as this dismissive humour against it still required314. As Hegel sees it, anyhow, Spirit as spirit transcends fixed definition, is activity. So, history will get its turn again. Meanwhile close this book and go forth or, it is the same in its oppositional difference, enter into yourself! There are, as we also say, rather grimly, “many ways to kill a cat”, be the beast bad and hateful or good and loveable. Here too the “why so” is everybody’s business. * We found Hegel perhaps at his most brilliant in his analysis of the account of the Fall of Man in the first chapters of Genesis. Unfortunately, however, the plain sense of the narrative, as received by orthodox Christians, not merely goes missing but is quite overturned by his interpretation of the text as being an account of man’s “growing up”, in an emergence from an unmeritorious innocence into something he reckons better. This is perhaps a variant upon Pelagianism, giving the clue to much else in Hegel, from his dismissal of the vows of religion to his endorsement of a contrary worldliness in active virtue as he sees it. This is all in pronounced conflict with his adjacent message of absolute idealism. Or rather, perhaps, it is the latter that would redeem it. We have claimed that this idealism is here vindicated as the unique principle of system at once rational and religious, just as, Catholics at least like to say, the Church is the home of reason. There is in fact more than a tension here in Hegel between these attitudes and his Christian theology such as we have been outlining it above. God brings it about that there is change without himself changing. This was at one time P. T. Geach’s apparent position at least. What it seemed to fail to take into account is that this distinction entirely changes the kind of possibility that change itself might be or, better, represent. However, the example, analogy rather, that Geach offered has still to receive more careful analysis. He 314

At a University where I taught in the early 1980s I encountered a Greek colleague who shaved his head every year in ritual mourning for the defeat, the loss, apparently permanent as men speak (unlike the Latin crusaders’ occupation of this city in 1204), of Constantinople, now Istanbul, in 1453 to the non-Christian Turks. But also that gesture of my colleague would lack much of its meaning today (may he forgive me for saying so if he is still living), not only because shaved heads have become the fashion but due to a general astonishment, condescending amusement rather, that anyone should or could feel such empathy in regard to historical events, i.e. events which by definition (whose, unless that of those who have nurtured wholesale denial of fellow-feeling for those engulfed by time’s eternal tsunami), are past and gone. Thus there is a time, then and now, for everything, “says the preacher”.

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spoke of God as or compared God to a chess-player able to checkmate anyone infallibly on the square he, God, has chosen, whatever the opponent may do. It was not noticed that this quite overthrows our notion of a game between two players. Thus there is no such “game” between finite man as seeming to change, and God, or who is conceived (by man) under the phenomenon (itself man’s) of a reconciliation between two disparate, equally independent as being “free”, agents, viz. man and God, who alone, however, is infinite and hence eternal, necessarily (until and unless man, “the manhood”, is “taken into God”: this has been our thesis almost here). The analogy thus limps badly but means in itself to do so, as Geach would have been the first to see. Hegel, on the other hand, would justify this his anthropology by the claim that a real “fall” of man, whether from grace or from whatever he was first “meant” to be is a denial of the truth of God. Having tried to accommodate this to traditional Christian belief, inclusive of original sin (“As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive”, as St. Paul had it: it is indeed central to the Gospel he preached), I remain dissatisfied and must confess to an impression of an attempted justification of the ways of man to God here which itself can only fall under this real “fall”. It does not seem to square, however, with much of the brilliant pages of theology from The Phenomenology of Mind we have just been analysing, though that too, and we have noted it, is surely not infallible. The answer to his objection, which I consider he had within his grasp, by virtue of his own logic, to overcome, is quite simple, as our account above begins to show. The Fall of Man, namely, is not to be seen as some kind of surprise to God, the true First Mover315. Thus here again Hegel tries to 315

Just this necessary truth prompts me to insist that what I report here concerning Hegel’s views on God and evil, still more what I say about the representational character (Vorstellung) of many if not all of the basic concepts our tongued speech requires, is not, in my understanding, a presentation of these views as finally incompatible with normal faith in the Christian mysteries, ever yielding greater depths in the believer, as these are so well expressed, for example, in the volume Katholischer erwachsenene Katechismus (published by the Conference of the German Bishops, Bonn 1985). I quote: Gesagt werden soll: Gott hat die Welt gut geschaffen. Das Üble und das Böse in der Welt gehen nicht auf Gott zurück, sie sind erst in der Geschichte entstanden. Sie sind nicht Gottes, sondern der Menschen Schuld. So geht es in der Paradiesgeschichte um eine grossangelegte Rechtfertigung Gottes (Theodizee) angesichts des Konkreten Zustands der Welt (p.129). The relation, namely, ultimately not real but of reason only, freedom being one and indivisible, between divine and human freedom (which, therefore, can never “surprise” God, as being contained, swallowed up even, in all its particulars within the Divine or Absolute Idea) and hence responsibility, as explored by Hegel or

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overcome his own objection by the questionable posit, which we have also tried to take in a “positive” way, in the light of other of his premises, re the nature of evil, which we found recalling those of Aquinas. That posit is his claim that there must be “evil in God”. Thus on Thomistic principles God is more surely the author, first mover, of man’s free acts, all of them, but more still of his virtuous free acts, than of any other created moments. Infinity can, indeed must, take in this frontal “otherness” in its wholeness (i.e. inclusive of the negativity called “sin”) as much as any other (otherness). Here Hegel would instance the “wrath of God” as a specifically divine evil (yet as posited by religion “devoid of the notion”), but it, the embraced opposition, can as well be applied to creation itself as a whole, time, space and so on, all of which more or less contradict eternity, infinity and other divine attributes, as mercy, in the opposite direction, “contradicts” justice, thus becoming, however, the highest justice (iustitia). The sinfulness of the world, in other words, is quite in order, i.e. disaster is quite in order, in the sense that God can and will deal with it, as we say, since it is absorbed in and even comes from him, just as his opposite, in the first place. In a related way nothing comes from being in being indeed nothing! So is the world as a whole, like the wrath of God, “devoid of the notion”? I would answer yes, in the same sense as the prophet Isaiah declared that the nations “are as nothing and less than nothing before Him”, less than nothing perhaps inasmuch as they are not merely finite but sinful. Given a concept of grace we do not need to equate sin and finitude simply. Prelapsarian Adam and Eve were not sinful, whether or not lacking all knowledge of good and evil, i.e. of an opposition there (though the prohibition and threatened sanction concerning such knowledge, such eating of the tree, cannot but suggest they had this knowledge in some form already: in our language it is maybe impossible to assert anything else). We are thus inclined to wish to rephrase the story as saying that they simply Aquinas or Augustine or St. Paul, is an entirely separate issue. The relation is exactly like, or is rather the same as, that between being and nothing, again not a real relation but ultimately an identity, i.e. nothing is indeed nothing! Schuld, however, or just therefore, cannot be a quality standing above God as potentially apportionable also to Him, guilt being anyhow guilt before God who, once conceived, e.g. as “absolute”, cannot be less than law (lex) and/or virtue (jus, justice, the right) itself. Hence, the point the bishops stress as of faith is, to look further, in itself necessary, just as, say, God, if he is Trinity, must be necessarily such. This is a philosophical point. Meanwhile, the greatest freedom lies in total subjection to God as to freedom itself, hence free even to permit man’s guilt as leading to greater good, reality remaining ever “friendly”, as, even, hence especially (“greater love has no man”), at the darkest moment on the Cross. The negative mystery of time, of separateness, is involved here.

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found out this sad fact (the culpa later to be seen as felix) in one and the same moment as that of the eating itself. This, however, would more than tend to make it impossible to see guilt here except in and as sheer disobedience, of the highest, truest etc. From there one must go on to recall that also guilt is more representation than “notion” absolute, being taken, or first constructed linguistically, from legal contexts. The “guilt” here is such as to produce very quickly the murder of one son of theirs by the other, a loss of tranquil understanding in mere babble (Babel) a few generations on, and eventually the attempted destruction of God himself on the Cross. This of course raises again the question as to the role of analogy in Hegel’s logic, namely that all the finite ideas which the “method” runs through, inasmuch as they must be absorbed one-way into the absolute idea, are thus in a manner cancelled as notions, i.e. are not notions because engulfed in the notion, of which they are one and all analogies. This is precisely the position of man himself in relation to God. Hence no chessgame! To sup eventually with God, having first thus supped with the Devil, more than a long spoon was needed in what would ever be the last supper of all. These considerations alone, or similar, explain why or how St. Thomas affirms that although man, insofar as he is anything more than such a walking analogy or is real, is really related to God as, precisely, his God, yet God, in contrast for just that reason, has no real relation to man! It is in the light of that metaphysical position that “the incarnation” should be explained and understood and there is indeed, we have tried to show, no insuperable difficulty in this but rather the contrary. By this contrast alone, or as surrounded by whatever other premises, I would, subject to correction, want to assert, does God remain God when he “is made man” (Nicene credo). As he shall have asserted to a sainted Dominican mystic, Catherine of Siena, “I am He who is; you are she who is not”.316 So there is no need to doubt that Man’s Fall was in the highest or ultimate sense God’s will, as included without distinction in what we obstinately would call his fore-knowledge (actually his knowledge must be eternal in its fullness, pardon and redemption thus being included from the first, although at first this is hidden from us), not some initiative on Man’s part 316

The divine play here upon the sexual difference, taken intelligently, need not distract. This difference, contemporary theology is more and more emphasising, finds deep resonance (intentional analogy) in the mysteries both of Trinitarian belief, the Word as the Father’s utterance that is one with himself, and of ecclesiology, the Church as Christ’s body and bride. What they are calling a “nuptial” relation is here put at the centre of revelation. Cf., again, Fergus Kerr OP, Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians: from Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford 2007.

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initiating a divine rethink! Nor does it seem that Augustine’s distinction between God’s will and God’s permission has much to recommend it metaphysically here. God simply willed that the man whom Jesus cured be born blind as part of his willing his own manifestation in Jesus. The whole divine history, the account, up to and beyond Christ’s ascension into heaven, is to be seen as redounding to the divine glory as, indeed, the principal motive, or just what is expressed, in all divine action, this being rather the act which God is, as such. It is difficult, therefore, not to suspect that Hegel had yet other motives for opposing this article of faith, viz. of a Fall of Man. All the more, however, may one suspect that Hegel, in his position in Lutheran society, had more than a small share of that angustia that St. Thomas attributed to the great philosophers of pre-Christian antiquity, while angustia, all the same, can also be reckoned as one of the trials of precisely faith, true or in some measure false, under stress. Newman, a generation or two later, compared our fallen world to a broken mirror, reflecting something of God’s glory but distortedly, so that the reflection can take on demonic characteristics instilling anguish and misery rather than hope and trust. Thus both religion and human culture remain deeply ambivalent. “All have sinned”, but “whom you worship in ignorance, Him declare I unto you”317, i.e. all have sinned but, or just therefore, here is salvation for all – “As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive” or similar. Such is the thought. Yet Hegel can seem to take this universality of opposed extremes, rather, as signifying simply that this is how it has to be. It is simple finitude, in one word, our sin, as indeed, grace once forfeited, is the case. But this is no motive for acceptance, for approval rather, of this situation, scorning the unconditional religious and Christian values of poverty, chastity and obedience in their expression of “hatred” (Christ’s word as signifying perfect discipleship) of life in this world, those who are thus able having taken up the Cross, as, in intention at least, all the baptised profess to do, renouncing “the world, the flesh and the Devil”. Rather, one has to look for a renewing and forgiving grace and indeed, more than that: And that a higher gift than grace Should flesh and blood refine, God’s presence and his very self And essence all divine,318

317 318

St. Paul (Acts of the Apostles, 17, 23). From Newman’s hymnal poem, “Praise to the Holiest in the Height”.

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faith in which, indeed, Hegel professed. Hence he declared, but again somewhat ambiguously, as if no personal conversion were required, that “death is the entry into spirit”, rather than eliciting “death to self” explicitly, though possibly that was what he had in mind, refusing evaluations of particular cases. Hence McTaggart, on atheist premises, interpreted or developed, rather, his philosophy as entailing that we all are in heaven already without perceiving it, misperceiving this world that is no world rather. Yet, as we have argued earlier here319, there is truth in this as can be seen if we consider the relation of eternity to time, even if “already” remains a representation only of what, ultimately, the tongue or, still less, written representation of this first representation, is not capable of saying, there being “only one Word” of God specifically320, such that concerning eternity we “shall no sooner know it than enjoy it” (Thomas Hobbes). Meanwhile we have the saying, “You would not seek me if you had not already found me” and similar. * So now, in concluding reflection, we have noted that Hegel is at one with Aquinas in refusing the latter-day separation, under cover of making a distinction, of the so-called “is” of predication from the equally miscalled “is” of identity. “Is”, namely, is “is”, simply, so far as formalities may be concerned. Thus the latter “is” (that “of identity”) is just one (material) form of predication321. But Aquinas, for his part, states this by means of showing that a judgment of identity is never absolute identity, “even in statements in which ‘the same thing’ is predicated of itself”322. There is difference there just inasmuch as even the otherwise same thing as the subject is predicated formally of just this quasi-material subject (of the sentence), as giving its form specifically, quasi-formally as Aquinas qualifies. The quasi is 319

Cf. our references above here to P.T. Geach’s Faith and Hope. St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, recommending silence via written words all the same. Hence the saying, “Let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing”, an approach recommended in detail, I would mention again, in the fourteenth century classic, The Cloud of Unknowing. 321 Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. 85, 5 ad 3. 322 Cf., again, our “Subject and Predicate Logic”, The Modern Schoolman LXVI, January 1989, pp. 129-139; “The Supposition of the Predicate”, Ibid LXXVII, November 1999, 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. 63-91. See also our “Argument Forms and Argument from Analogy” Acta Philosophica, Rome, vol. 6, fasc. II, 1997, pp. 303-310. 320

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essential as guaranteeing that anything and everything can stand on occasion as either subject or predicate of some sentence, with differing effect however. This quasi appears to have no counter-part in the Fregean account, thus permitting predicates to be conceived of as incomplete bits of language specifically but referred to the complete language of a name, the subject, of which the predicate is a “function”. Some think this deficiency can be overcome while retaining the general Fregean scheme, to what end would be a further question. The formality of identity, where expressed by language, in a sentence namely, may thus be said to be itself expressed materially, to use these always analogical hylomorphic terms, in predication by one thing of another which is thus not another. This linguistic formality is instanced even if or where this other is the same (and/or believed the same or not indifferently) as the subject or predicate which is itself the same as the other, i.e. always, this taken either way. It holds, even though no subject-term as such is a or the predicate-term and conversely. This is for Hegel the ground for the final supersession of judgment (Urteil) as such, seen now as not belonging to the concept, or as representation namely. Only thus can McTaggart claim that we make no judgments “in heaven” or where, according to him, we really are. “Our citizenship is in heaven” (St. Paul). The individual is the universal, though this is here unmasked, like all judgments linguistically expressed, as representation or as not of the concept. Thought battles against language, always. Yet the individual is, as we say, the universal. Language is thus called upon to transcend itself , as we find it trying to do ever with the help of art (poetry), religion and wisdom generally, as, for example, thus: “I in them and they in me … that they all (i.e. each and all) may be one in us” and, it is implied, with us, i.e. with my Father and myself, in the Spirit. This is a development (and more) of the aboriginal Parmenidean insight that being has no parts. Judgment, via syllogism (triple identity), leads into and back to the Notion, the absolute identity of all with all (cp. Leibniz). That is, there is no judgment prior to syllogism. Elsewhere I expressed this by suggesting we view rational discourse as made up of a succession or chain of enthymemes. Just therefore, however, a judgment should not be viewed as exclusively an insight descending from, say, the Ontological Argument, taken as an example of a would-be syllogism, or from the concept of the Absolute reached at its end (by this it would be made up of two enthymemes). It, or the syllogism or, ultimately the term or subject, ultimately I thinking, is rather the initial or constitutive insight of Logic which, Hegel says, is “nothing but” creation, as, rather, creation is nothing

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but logic and this a syllogism, hence the “syllogism of allness”. Thus we see that Aristotle did not invent or devise the syllogism. He simply found it to hand as general principle of any acquisition of new knowledge or understanding, of logic and hence logos as such, that is to say, a view Peter Geach once described to me as too stupid to controvert. We are arguing that claiming syllogistic to be a small or insignificant part of formal logic (Quine) partakes more surely of the negative quality mentioned. Only thus, anyhow, can the Mosaic author affirm that in the beginning God created heaven and earth (Genesis 1, i), as this is also his own first thought, i.e. it will be if the affirmation is to be the ground of all validity one-way only. But, as Hegel also claims to establish and that logically, cause and effect are as such convertible, this being their self-cancellation. By this also we are returned to the I or absolute subject, “universal of universals” (Hegel). If, as I hardly imagine, Hegel were ignorant of Aquinas’s theses cited here, this would surely strengthen his testimony as independent confluence with the latter, within which confluence Aristotle, representing Greek philosophy or mind (nous) as a whole, then forms a third element. Mind, says Anaxagoras, sets in order the things which are, have been or are to be, as it were indifferently, touching here, he too, upon the factor of time, in order, as it can well seem, already to dismiss it. For again, a beginning of time is a contradiction. Thus Aquinas, in saying that creation’s having a (temporal) beginning is a truth of faith, might well be interpreted in the light of the later Hume’s transparently deferring merely, though of course mockingly, to ecclesiastical authority, since that is what faith in this sense, is.323 Aquinas, however, could not then so easily as we look forward to an eventual reformulation of the dogma, also doctrine, which would remove the apparent contradiction. In fact a great deal had already been done in that direction by St. Augustine in his commentary on the first verse of Genesis, asking what could be meant by this “in the beginning”, with which Aquinas was conversant. In any case by our reasoning so far the notion of a temporal beginning is not only self-contradictory but also ambiguous in regard to whether it is referred to God or to us. For God, everything is always new, never ages or “endures” merely. “Behold I make all things new”, i.e. at every moment, thus cancelling temporal “moments”, not in some transient “now” over again but eternally. Heaven, itself not greater in intent or extent than God, never requires polishing up, since no dust can gather in that state as defined. This is the Concept, Anselmian if, with Hegel, though not necessarily without correctives, one so wish. 323

Cf. David Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion.

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In any case Aquinas himself teaches that the act of creation does not occur in time, not, though, that it occurs outside of it, time being rather nothing or “misperception” (McTaggart). It occurs eternally, rather, without prejudice, that is, to the divine immutability within which, again, we ourselves “live and move and have our being” as, of course, does our time. To be thus within thought, however, human or divine, is for Hegel representation (Vorstellung), as contrasted with the unitary reality which is thought itself, the Absolute Idea, nous, in just that sense “setting all in order” (including, even especially, ourselves), a better expression than “having set” unless the latter can be seen as fusing present and perfect, so to say perfectly. Time, it follows, anyhow, is merely ideal, as are we just in our temporality, while as divinely thought we are, we too it must follow but as no longer simply ourselves, eternally real. That is one of the prime things we acknowledge in or by our baptism or second birth in or as death, dying into one another inasmuch as made there “members of Christ”. Only hence can Hegel say, could he say, “death is the entry into spirit”, since life, and hence time, are “only the idea immediate” while “everything immediate is false”. These conclusions, as consensus of mysticism and historical philosophy indifferently, find attempted controversion by those illegitimately wedded to the letter of earlier orthodox proclamation, in saying which we have no wish to deny that not one jot or tittle of “the law” shall be abandoned (evangelical words of Christ, themselves too, however, calling for spiritual interpretation!). Only the Spirit, that is, can discern what is of the letter only, i.e. why or when it is not itself spiritual but the letter proper that “kills” (also Christ’s word). One such attempt, one may at least suggest, might be the proposal of the aevum or “age” for the or a time of the angels, whereby one could speak of an angelic permanence which yet fell short, as it must, it was and is thought, of eternity as proper to God alone. Yet God is not separable from his actions, nor, therefore, from the beginning which is creation, also of angels, where this shows up more clearly. This reflects itself in Hegel’s own angelology, in The Phenomenology of Mind, to some extent. As he puts it, speaking of any number of angels indifferently, “It is useless to count”, unconsciously maybe echoing Aquinas’s numeri non ponuntur in divinis. Thus also every divine idea is identical with the divine essence324. This angelology need not be taken as a playing down of the specifically angelic realm, but rather, or at least just as well, the opposite. God’s indwelling in an angel would of course be more to the fore, so to say, than is the case with us, the message they bear fusing insensibly down the ages with the coming of God himself 324

Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 15.

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propria persona. Christ referred the dignity of children precisely to their guardian angels who “behold the face of my father in heaven” the whole time, so to say, i.e. whether you thrash them or kiss them. Lately an “ontological discontinuity” has been proposed between God and creation. This can appear as a retreat from the Scriptural “In God we live and move and have our being” though surely it need not. The discontinuity can only in the end mean that we are “but dust”, taken in ourselves, which taking, however, is but abstraction as follows on our premises here, contrary to our immediate presumptions very often. We are not and never are just in ourselves, the contrary, this denial, of hell itself. By this reasoning here formal logic is found, quite simply, not to belong to the concept, being rather just one of the stages leading up to it. It is not difficult to argue for something like this from Aristotle himself, whose formal logical treatises thus play no role to speak of in his later metaphysical discourse, as here they do, of course, in Hegel’s treatise but precisely as leading up to the concept and so of course not belonging to it but yet joined to it by necessity, as what has to be gone through, the method. Here too, “in order to come to that which you are not you must go through that which you are not” (John of the Cross). * Not only logic formally considered, as instanced and treated of in these paragraphs of The Science of Logic, as in Part One of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, belongs to Spirit or falls under the Absolute Idea. Also Nature, as instanced in the category of the Logic called there Life, thus belongs. “Formal” Logic and Life or Nature are equally both parts or rather moments of the Absolute Idea itself, of God for religion as indeed of the Beautiful and True Unity, of the Good. As such they, Life and Nature, are both treated of and within the Science of Logic, whether of 1816 or within the Encyclopaedia, as parts or rather moments of this science. Thus they might both be called “only the Idea immediate”, as indeed Hegel says of Life and might thus equally have said of Nature in its entirety. Thus must God have created life and/or nature, with the lifeless “rocks and stones”, air, space and time, all as immediate sign of himself, hence otherwise falsity in just its immediacy. Thus too the accepted forms of logic, argument-forms in particular, are valid or invalid in just the same sense as all those arguments exemplifying them, as any attempt to prioritise them inductively particularly shows. Their truth is seen, that is, in more concrete or, as it is supposed, particularised thoughtmaterial, so to say, as well as in what is less so. This is the “allness” (“syllogism of allness”). Thus or similarly, the truth and/or validity of any

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argument is seen in the truth of syllogism as such, though this is but one moment of the concept. Hence “everything is a syllogism”, finding its own prolongation in any two identities coupled by a common term, this being the whole of logic and reason itself rather than a small (very small) part of it as some of our thought-technicians would make out. This is reason’s selfassurance and even its awareness of having made our world or of making it again at every moment, as “I” or “universal of universals”. This I, of course, is the I who is, or mind itself, in which, however, we can all and each mutually participate, while even from the beginning our angels, the angels of each, “behold the face of my (Christ’s) father”, as we are told. Yet how could it be otherwise? How can anyone else explain his or her being even a part of “this passing show”, especially that, let alone the whole of it? Well, solipsism might seem slightly less difficult even. Our individual presence, anyhow, would be, in fact is, qua just “this” individual, “out of all proportion”.325 By this, clearly, Aristotle’s “discovery” of the syllogism, single-handed, was a discovery indeed, one still awaiting discovery by many of our late or contemporary logicians. Nor does Hegel deny it to him. Looked at closely it can be seen not to be exclusively a logic of language (if there can even be such a thing?), as the Stoic or other logics even of antiquity could possibly be shown to be, but closely connected with the rest of his philosophy, his metaphysics, despite the discrepancies noted above as at least partly explicable by the different times in his life when he wrote or sketched the logical treatises and later the Metaphysics, with which Hegel closely identifies his own logical system, and other of the more substantial works. Hegel writes, as immediately prefacing, his “Doctrine of the Notion”: The passage from necessity to freedom, or from actuality into the notion, is the very hardest. … For thinking means that, in the other, one meets with one’s self. – It means a liberation, … As existing in an individual form, this liberation is called I; as developed to its totality, it is free Spirit; as feeling, it is Love …326

The English term “feeling” can seem inadequate or worse here. Thus one might more easily assume the original had Gefühl than Empfindung (more often translated as “sensation”, which wouldn’t fit well here either).327 The 325

Cf. our “Other Problems about the Self”, Sophia, Australia, 1984. Enc. 159. 327 The relations between Gefühl and Empfindung in German and Romantic idealism, inclusive of the approach to this topic by Gentile, are exhaustively gone into and hence clarified by G. Rinaldi in his The Philosophy of Art (Vol. 1), Oxford 2020, esp. pp. 269-314. 326

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more modern term “empathy” seems to fit better, keeping in mind that it is here meant as a species of “this liberation”. The fact remains that just in Hegel’s logic volition, i.e. love, the Good, the Practical, comes as a superior form of precisely cognition, following on after “cognition proper”, the Theoretical. Thus it, the practical or good, is the ultimate category prior to the Speculative or Absolute Idea itself. This seems closer to McTaggart’s claim that in heaven, where we really are now (sic), we make no judgments, than he himself realised when he criticised Hegel on this point. It is also in perfect harmony with Aristotle’s dictum that “contemplation is the highest praxis”, i.e. it is as praxis that contemplation or study is praised. The former, contemplation, studium, also translates as “zeal” (cf. studiositas), which illustrates the practical participation in the end as distinguishing it from vana curiositas. Note that as thus participating it is far removed from that perversion of mind called “ideology” as bent upon some other, inevitably finite end, as even a religious end becomes when pursued in this alienated way, i.e. as if an ideology merely.

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