The
Golgotha of the Absolute
In these days of secularism, an
atheist is simply a person who no longer believes in the existence of
the God. One may be an atheist and still practice the religion of his
parents out of habit. However, the word ‘atheist’ connotes a
faint stigma that dates back to an older age- the medieval- where a
radical infidel who was either brave or foolish enough to oppose the
canons of the establishment of the time, the Church, was speedily
condemned with charges of heresy and subsequently punished with
excommunication or worse, execution. Once the Age of Reason or
Enlightenment emerged in the 17th and the 18th century, as well as
the challenge of the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church gradually
began to slacken its iron grip on the publishing press. In the 19th
century, the orthodoxy remained very much in power and strongly
influenced the works of scholars with the expectation that whatever
was written should be readily compatible with the prevailing dogmas.
This was very much the case for the philosopher Hegel. As far as
Hegel was concerned, Zeus could fill in for YHVH in his writings, but
due to the culture of the times Hegel had the German guardians of the
Christian orthodoxy breathing heavily down his neck, so this ought be
taken in account whenever encountering Christian overtones in his
work.
In Hegel's systematic philosophy, the Absolute
originally manifests itself in the form of immediacy, or objects of
sense. This manifestation is apprehended as ‘beauty,’ which is
the “sensuous semblance [Scheinen] of the Idea.” The
aesthetic consciousness apperceives the Absolute through the veil of
senses as the Ideal. However, aesthetic intuition is not philosophy.
Only thought itself can adequately apprehend the Absolute as Spirit,
Reason, or self-thinking Thought. Instead of making the jump from art
to philosophy, Hegel introduces religion as an intermediate mode of
apprehending the Absolute. Religion presents the self-manifestation
of the Absolute in the form of Vorstellung, or ‘pictorial
representation.’ Where the aesthetic consciousness employs the veil
of senses in its apprehension of the Absolute, the religious
consciousness 'thinks' the Absolute, though not in the pure
conceptual manner of philosophy. Vorstellung is a signpost, a
type of imagery that represents the concept of the Absolute, what
Frederick Copleston calls a “marriage between imagination and
thought.” For example, when the religious consciousness
apprehends the logical Idea, or Logos, as being objectified in nature
as a ‘pictorial representation,’ it conceives of God's creation
of the universe.
As for the divine entity of monotheism, God,
Hegel equates God with Being, which is already demonstrated in logic
and abstract metaphysics of his systematic philosophy. However, Hegel
considers the traditional arguments of God's existence as completely
out of date from a philosophical point of view, as well as from a
religious and irreligious point of views. The only proof of God's
existence is the Hegelian system itself. This leads to the inference
that Hegel's philosophy of religion is merely a matter of explaining
the religious state of mind and how it apprehends the concept of the
Absolute, rather than a philosophical attempt at Christian
apologetics.
Hegel noted that philosophy, after Descartes,
began to be able to stand on its own legs without the need to posit
the existence of God and gave birth to modern philosophy. In Medieval
philosophy, the first premise had to be God, but once Descartes came
along, philosophy became subjectively grounded, or ich denke.
It is true that for both Descartes and Hegel the concept of God could
be assimilated with their systems, but that led to a redundancy,
nothing more than window dressing to appease those in power. It took
the prodigious strength of the philosophical genius of Descartes to
sound the death-knell of philosophy’s time as a courtesan to
theology, that philosophies no longer needed the God hypothesis.
After James Stirling published his book, The Secret of
Hegel in 1865, Hegel’s philosophy became to be seen as an ally
for Christianity, or at least it became fashionable to reconcile his
cavernous and monolithic philosophy with the doctrines of
Christianity. Stirling even went far enough to declare that Hegel was
“the greatest abstract thinker of Christianity.” It is
true that Hegel did presents philosophical proofs for the Christian
doctrines such as the Trinity, the Fall, and the Incarnation.
Nevertheless, in the end, as ‘pure thought,’ Hegel resolved the
doctrines in a far different light than those of the Church, which
authorized special revelation instead of speculative philosophy.
Despite the apparent reconciliation between Christian orthodoxy and
Hegel's philosophy of religion, and the number of several references
to God and Christianity in the mature works, John McTaggart did not
think Hegelianism was an ally of Christianity. He declared that
Hegel's philosophy was “an enemy in disguise - the least evident
but the most dangerous. The doctrines which have been protected from
external refutation are found to be transforming themselves till they
are on the point of melting away...” The radical Protestant
Kierkegaard guessed at Hegel’s true position as well, and wrote
books that railed against the totalizing specter of Hegelian
rationalism.
Robert Solomon proposes that Hegel was secretly
an atheist, that the references to Christianity in his writings were
nothing more than “nominal...an elaborate subterfuge to protect
his professional ambitions,” and lists several evidences in
support of that claim. Hegel was all too aware that Baruch Spinoza
was excommunicated, on the grounds of heresy, and his masterpiece,
Ethics was condemned in Germany. Fichte's radicalization of Kantian
philosophy was suspected of atheism and he was subsequently dismissed
from his university post. Frederick Wilhelm II reprimanded even the
devout Immanuel Kant. During the years of 1793 to 1799, Hegel wrote a
bunch of papers on Christianity with Nietzschean overtones, full of
poisonous bile and vituperative denunciations, but in 1800 he
abruptly shifted to a friendlier position. Solomon also points out
that that year of the ‘great conversion’ to Christianity is also
the same year Hegel began his professional career, and began writing
his Magnus opus, the Phenomenology of Spirit. In effect, there
is no difference between the ‘anti-theological’ phase of the
younger Hegel, and the far more prudential, supposedly ‘mature’
Hegel.
“Hegelian atheism has a very special character.
Hegel is not atheistic in the usual sense of the word, for he does
not reject the Christian notion of God, and does not even deny its
reality. And so, one often finds theological formulas in Hegel's
philosophy. But in the deepest sense, this philosophy is nevertheless
atheistic and non-religious.” At the end of the Phenomenology
of Spirit, Hegel employs an allegorical phrase, the “Golgotha of
Absolute Spirit.” Hegel, not Nietzsche, is the first
philosopher to use the phrase "the death of God," and this
aptly characterizes Hegel's concept of the Absolute that lies beyond
the intermediate philosophy of religion as the exposition of the
encounter of the religious consciousness with the vorstellung.
The vorstellungen or biblical stories were merely a stopgap, a
midway station of the express train to the philosophical goal of pure
concept of the Absolute. After a long and exhaustive study, McTaggart
concludes that “Hegel supports Christianity against all attacks
but his own, and thus reveals himself as its most deadly antagonist.”
In fact, the apparent theological overtones within the philosophy of
the absolute is one of the most devious Trojan horse ever
devised.
Metaphysics in Hegelianism paved the way for
Feuerbach's naked atheism, which in turn sowed the seeds for later
philosophers such as Nietzsche for their own brand of sacrilegious
writings. When we are presented with the finite and infinite
dialectic, then we have no other choice but to say that man is God in
its ‘otherness’ or that man is essentially divine in its own
right. The finite is not limited to the contingent reality, which is
‘extrinsically infinitized,’ because the finite is already
‘intrinsically infinite’ itself. This is one loose strain
Feuerbach extracts for his underrated perception of theology as
anthropology, that the worship of the Divine is nothing other than
the worship of man himself. The only reason why man conceptualizes
the divine is because he is already alienated from the world, posits
an ‘hinterwelt,’ and these impulses encourage a ‘false
consciousness’ of something divine, which is nothing more than
illusory. For Hegel, man regains independence from God by attributing
him elements of transcendental divinity. Now that man is himself
divine, he is at large to create his own morality, a morality far
superior to the morality of the slaves, e.g., Christianity. Hegel was
one of the first prominent philosophers to advance the idea that God
was dependent upon the world at least as much as the world was
dependent upon God. He said that without the world God is not God. In
some way, God needed his creation. This was the first step in saying
that, since God was not sufficient in Himself, he was then
unnecessary, spurious, and ultimately romantic.
According to
Walter Kaufmann, Heinrich Heine illustrates a personal side of Hegel:
“One beautiful starry-skied evening, we two stood next to each
other at a window, and I, a young man of about twenty-two who had
just eaten well and had good coffee, enthused about the stars and
called them the abode of the blessed. But the master grumbled to
himself: ‘the stars, hum! hum! The stars are only a gleaming
leprosy in the sky.’ For God’s sake, I shouted, then there is no
happy locality up there to reward virtue after death? But he, staring
at me with his pale eyes, said cuttingly: ‘So you want to get a tip
for having nursed your sick mother and for not having poisoned your
dear brother? ‘ Saying that he looked around anxiously, but he
immediately seemed reassured when he saw that it was only Heinrich
Beer who had approached him to invite him to play whist.”