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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Theological attitudes to Hegel have undergone considerable fluctuation in the 150 years that have elapsed since his death. If they were traced on a graph, the line would show a sequence of highs and lows. Hegel has been pronounced dead several times in these years, but he has shown a remarkable capacity for revival. And the occurrence of a revival near the 150th anniversary of his death may furnish an appropriate occasion for an examination of the ups and downs of Hegel in the theological stock-market.
page 339 note 1 Cited in Küng, Hans, Menschwerdung Gottes, Herder, 1970, p. 500Google Scholar, from Rosenkrantz, K., Kritische Erläuterungen des Hegelschen Systems, Königsberg, 1840Google Scholar, reprinted Hildesheim, 1963 (page reference not given).
page 340 note 2 System der christlichen Glaubenslehre, 1879. The point is lost in the title of the English translation, System of Christian Doctrine, 4 vols., Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1885ff.Google Scholar
page 340 note 3 The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, Glasgow, Maclehose, 1899.Google Scholar
page 341 note 4 New York, The Humanities Press, 1950.
page 341 note 5 Cambridge University Press, 1961.
page 341 note 6 Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, Valley Forge, Judson Press, 1973, P. 391.Google Scholar
page 342 note 7 Barth was anticipated on this point by Caird, John, who wrote that ‘the divine nature cannot be understood without ascribing to it a human element’. The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, Glasgow, Maclehose, 1899, Vol. I, pp. 156f.Google Scholar
page 342 note 8 One writer of this school refers to Hegel as ‘an enormously muddled but brilliant German professor of the nineteenth century’ (White, Morton, The Age of Analysis, Mentor Books, 1955, p. 13).Google Scholar
page 342 note 9 Hegel: a Re-examination, Macmillan, 1958.Google Scholar
page 342 note 10 He is, however, insensitive to the place of religion in Hegel's thought and tends to treat it as secondary and uncontributive to his main interest.
page 342 note 11 Hegel, Doubleday, 1965.
page 343 note 12 op. cit., p. 291.
page 343 note 13 Beacon Press, 1967.
page 343 note 14 Menschwerdung Gottes: eine Einführung in Hegels theologisches Denken als Prologomena zu einer künftigen Christologie (God's Incarnation: an Introduction to Hegel's theological thought as prolegomena to a future Christology), Herder, 1970.
page 343 note 15 op. cit., p. 510.
page 343 note 16 The writings of Erik Schmidt (Hegels Lehre von Gott, Gütersloh, Bertelsmann, 1952Google Scholar, and Hegels System der Theologie, Berlin, de Gruyter, 1974Google Scholar) go further than any in setting the seal of orthodoxy (and almost of sainthood) on Hegel.
page 344 note 17 It is under the title of ‘Revealed Religion’ that he introduces the discussion of Christianity in The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), p. 750.
page 345 note 18 This term calls to mind the words of Pope John XXIII in his opening speech to the second Vatican Council, in which he called upon the members to seek ‘new forms’ in which to express ‘the sacred patrimony of truth received from the Fathers’: — ‘The substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another.’ (Documents of Vatican II, ed. Abbott, Walter M., S. J., , New York, America Press, 1966, p. 715Google Scholar) Events in the Roman Catholic Church since Vatican II have shown that the line between transformation and transubstantiation is not so easily drawn.
page 345 note 19 Phenomenology of Mind, (tr. Baillie), p. 105.
page 345 note 20 There is a striking contrast to Hegel's figure in F. H. Bradley's famous protest against a philosophical tendency to dissolve reality into ‘an unearthly ballet of bloodless categories’ (The Principles of Logic, London, 1883, p. 533).Google Scholar
page 346 note 21 XXII, 318f., quoted in Küng, op. cit., p. 495. Hegel was not always so ‘gentle’. When he went to live at Bamberg, a predominantly Catholic town, in which a Protestant church had just been established, he was asked to teach in the Sunday School. He refused indignantly, and in a letter he said it was like asking him to tea chimney-sweep and a white-washer at the same time: ‘I, who dwelt for years on free crags with the eagles and was used to breathing the pure mountain air, should now learn to feed on the corpses of deceased or modern still-born thoughts in the leaden atmosphere of empty twaddle. To develop my theology at a university would be a different matter, and I would have come around to do it in my lectures anyway. But to be at the beck and call of the Protestant church here! The mere thought of this contact has given me a shock throughout my nervous system…’ Br. I, p. 196, cited in Mueller, Gustav E., Hegel, the Man, his Vision and Work, New York, Pageant Press, 1968, p. 217fGoogle Scholar. Mueller notes how Hegel's language about dwelling with eagles and breathing pure mountain air was echoed by Nietzsche.
page 346 note 22 Perhaps the question could be phrased: Could the philosophy of Hegel make anyone a better preacher? Certainly not, if the preacher merely introduced unprocessed chunks of Hegel into the sermon. On the other hand, John Caird, who was mentioned above, and who was regarded as one of the greatest preachers of his time, is said by his brother to have shown in his preaching a tendency to resist fragmentation and to bring the different aspects of life together in a unity within a larger unity — and though this is ascribed primarily to the influence of Spinoza, it was presumably reinforced by his study of Hegel (op. cit., p. cxxiv).
page 347 note 23 Küng expresses the view that ‘in the final analysis he [Hegel] philosophized from faith more than from speculative knowledge; indeed, he was able to proclaim his speculative knowledge so boldly only because it was in fact quite deep in his own existence… firmly sublated (aufgehoben) in a faith. He would not be the first who believes more than he knows.’ (op. cit., p. 302) Küng quotes Heidegger as saying of the current Hegel renaissance that it is in danger of missing Hegel's fundamental position, if it concentrates on his dialectic and neglects his ‘Christian-theological metaphysics; for in it alone has Hegel's dialectic its element and its support’(op. cit., p. 510). Heidegger is quoted from Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 21st September 1969.
page 348 note 24 Encyclopaedia, Part III, The Philosophy of Mind, § 573.
page 348 note 25 cf. TeSelle, Eugene, Christ in Context, Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1975, p. 48.Google Scholar
page 348 note 26 op. cit., p. 296.
page 349 note 27 Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Harper Torchbooks, 1960, pp. 133–138. Kant, however, did glance at the analogy of love in a manner which anticipates Hegel (p. 136).
page 350 note 28 Philosophy of Religion I, p. 200.
page 350 note 29 op. cit., p. 353.
page 350 note 30 Timaeus, 29E.
page 351 note 31 Philosophy of Religion, III, p. 35. Cf. the Preface to the Phenomenology where he says of this play of love with itself that ‘it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience and the labour of the negative’ (tr. Baillie) p. 81.
page 352 note 32 op. cit., p. 38f.
page 352 note 33 Life of Jesus, Vol. II, p. 895; cf. Pringle-Pattison, A. S., The Idea of God, Oxford University Press. 1920, p. 409.Google Scholar
page 353 note * ‘Sublation’ is a term that was coined from Latin by J. Hutchison Stirling, one of the earliest interpreters of Hegel in English, to represent the German word Aufhebung, for which there is no precise equivalent in English. Aufhebung has two opposite meanings, suppression and elevation, and it played a cardinal role in Hegel's system, in which the process of thought, which corresponds to the process of reality, is dialectical, i.e., it advances by the resolution of contradictions: a position (thesis) is posited, it is opposed by a counter-position (anti-thesis), then the opposition is resolved and the original position is taken up in a higher synthesis. Thus philosophical thought opposes the Christian religion as given, but it does not destroy it; it takes it up into itself and so raises it to a higher level of meaning and truth.
page 353 note 34 op cit., p. 394.
page 353 note 35 op. cit., p. 395.
page 353 note 36 op. cit., p. 405f.
page 354 note 37 Löwith, Karl, Meaning in History, University of Chicago Press, 1949, p. 58.Google Scholar
page 354 note 38 Philosophy of Religion, III, p. 104. According to Karl Barth, the parousia of Jesus Christ takes the form of the resurrection, the gift of the Holy Spirit and ‘his coming as the author of the general resurrection of the dead’; and he adds, ‘in all these forms it is the one event. Nothing different takes place in any of them.’ (Church Dogmatics, IV/3/1, p. 293).
page 354 note 39 Collingwood, R. G.. The Idea of History, Oxford, 1946, p. 120.Google Scholar
page 354 note 40 Philosophy of Right (tr. Knox, T. M., Oxford, 1942), p. 13.Google Scholar
page 354 note 41 This is a point at which Hegel's most famous disciple dissented from his master: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’ (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, XI)
page 355 note 42 ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, in Kant on History ed. Beck, L. W., Bobbs-Merrill, 1963, pp. 11–26Google Scholar, and ‘The End of All Things’, ibid., pp. 69–84.
page 355 note 43 One of the most eloquent was Nietzsche: ‘I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of other-worldly hopes!’ (‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ 1, 3 (tr. Kaufmann, W.), in The Portable Nietzsche, New York, Viking, 1954, p. 125; cf., p. 189).Google Scholar
page 355 note 44 The idea that the advent of Christ will not signal the immediate dissolution of the world but will inaugurate a reign of a thousand years in which the powers of evil will be held in check is found only in Rev. 20: 1–6. Although the author's attempt to adapt this idea (which scholars describe as a feature of Jewish apocalyptic) to Christian faith involves him in the awkward notion of more than one resurrection, he clings to the thought of a this-worldly fulfilment: the kingdom of the world becomes, and is not superseded by, the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ (Rev. 11: 15), and, while the earth is renewed, the new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven from God (Rev. 21: 2).
page 355 note 45 P. Althaus, Art. ‘Eschatologie’ in RGG,3 II, col. 687. Althaus, who cites this ‘postulate’ as ‘a material ground for millenarianism’ does not himself regard it as valid.
page 355 note 46 ‘Idea for a Universal History…’, pp. 21–25.
page 356 note 47 op. cit., p. 491f.