HEGEL AND THEOLOGY.
Even an incidental glance into Hegel's Logic cannot fail to discover
the frequent recurrence of the name of God, and the discussion of
matters not generally touched upon, unless in works bearing upon
religion. There were two questions which seem to have had a certain
fascination for Hegel. One of them, a rather unpromising problem,
referred to the distances between the several planets in the solar
system, and the law regulating these intervals[1]. The other and more
intimate problem turned upon the value of the proofs usually offered
in support of the being of God. That God is the supreme certitude of
the mind, the basis of all reality and knowledge, is what Hegel no more
put in question, than did Descartes, Spinoza, or Locke. What he often
repeated was that the _matter_ in these proofs must be distinguished
from the imperfect _manner_ in which the arguers presented it.
Again and again in his Logic, as well as in other discussions more
especially devoted to it, he examines this problem. His persistence
in this direction might earn for him that title of 'Knight of the
Holy Ghost,' by which Heine, in one of the delightful poems of his
'Reisebilder,' describes himself to the maid of Klausthal in the Harz.
The poet of Love and of Freedom had undoubted rights to rank among the
sacred band: but so also had the philosopher. Like the Socrates whom
Plato describes to us, he seems to feel that he has been commissioned
to reveal the truth of God, and quicken men by an insight into the
right wisdom. Nowhere in the modern period of philosophy has higher
spirit breathed in the utterances of a thinker. The same theme is
claimed as the common heritage of philosophy and religion. A letter
to Duboc[2], the father of a modern German novelist, lets us see how
important this aspect of his system was to Hegel himself. He had been
asked to give a succinct explanation of his standing-ground: and his
answer begins by pointing out that philosophy seeks to apprehend in
reasoned knowledge the same truth which the religious mind has in its
faith.
Words like these may at first sight suggest the bold soaring of ancient
speculation in the times of Plato and Aristotle, or even the theories
of the medieval Schoolmen. They sound as if he proposed to do for the
modern world, and in the full light of modern knowledge, what the
Schoolmen tried to accomplish within the somewhat narrow conceptions
of medieval Christianity and Greek logic. Still there is a difference
between the two cases. While the Doctors of the Church, in appearance
at least, derived the form of exposition, and the matter of their
systems, from two independent and apparently heterogeneous sources,
the modern Scholastic of Hegel claims to be a harmonious unity, body
finding soul, and soul giving itself body. And while the Hegelian
system has the all-embracing and encyclopaedic character by which
Scholastic science threw its arms around heaven and earth, it has also
the untrammeled liberty of the Greek thinkers. Hegel, in short, shows
the union of these two modes of speculation: free as the ancient, and
comprehensive as the modern. His theory is the explication of God;
but of God in the actuality and plenitude of the world, and not as a
transcendent Being, such as an over-reverent philosophy has sometimes
supposed him, in the solitude of a world beyond.
The greatness of a philosophy is its power of comprehending facts.
The most characteristic fact of modern times is Christianity. The
general thought and action of the civilised world has been alternately
fascinated and repelled, but always influenced, and to a high degree
permeated, by the Christian theory of life, and still more by the
faithful vision of that life displayed in the Son of Man. To pass that
great cloud of witness and leave it on the other side, is to admit that
your system is no key to the secret of the world,--even if we add, as
some will prefer, of the world as it is and has been. And therefore
the Hegelian system, if it is to be a philosophy at all, must be in
this sense Christian. But it is neither a critic, nor an apologist of
historical Christianity. The voice of philosophy is as that of the
Jewish doctor of the Law: 'If this council or this work be of men,
it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it,
Philosophy examines what is, and not what, according to some opinions,
ought to be. Such a point of view requires no discussion of the 'How'
or the 'Why' of Christianity. It involves no inquiry into historical
documents, or into the belief in miracles: for to it Christianity
rests only incidentally on the evidence of history; and miracles, as
vulgarly explained, can find no reception in a philosophical system.
For it Christianity is 'absolute religion': religion i. e. which has
fully become and realised all that religion meant to be. That religion
has, of course, its historical side: it appeared at a definite epoch
in the annals of our race: it revealed itself in a unique personality
in a remarkable nation. And at an early period of his life Hegel had
tried to gather up in one conception the traits of that august figure,
in his life and speech and death. But, in the light of philosophy,
this historical side shrivels up as comparatively unimportant. Not the
personality, but the 'revelation of reason' through man's spirit: not
the annals of a life once spent in serving God and men, but the words
of the 'Eternal Gospel are henceforth the essence of Christianity.
Thus the controlling and central conception of life and actuality,
which is the final explanation of all that man thinks and does, has
a twofold aspect. There is, as it were, a double Absolute--for under
this name philosophy has what in religion corresponds to God. It is
true that in the final form of his system the Absolute Spirit has three
phases--each as it were passing on into and incorporated with the
next--Art working out its implications till it appears as Religion,
and Religion calling for its perfection in Philosophy. But in the
_Phenomenology_, his first work, the religion of Art only intervenes
as a grade from 'natural' religion to religion manifest or revealed;
and in the first edition of the _Encyclopaedia_ what is subsequently
called Art is entitled the Religion of Art. It is in entire accordance
with these indications when in the Lectures on Aesthetics[3] it is
said 'the true and original position of Art is to be the first-come
immediate self-satisfaction of Absolute Spirit'; though in our days (it
is added) 'its form has ceased to be the highest need of the spirit.'
It is hardly too much then to say that, for Hegel, the Absolute has two
phases, Religion and Philosophy.
The Hegelian view presents itself most decisively, though perhaps
with a little lecture-like over-insistance, in the Philosophy of
Religion[4]. 'The object of religion as of philosophy is the eternal
truth in its very objectivity,--God and nothing but God,--and the
"explication" of God. Philosophy is not a wisdom of the world, but
cognition of the non-worldly: not a cognition of the external mass of
empirical existence and life, but cognition of what is eternal, what
is God, and what flows from His nature. For this nature must reveal
and develop itself. Hence philosophy "explicates" itself only when
it "explicates" religion; and in explicating itself it explicates
religion.... Thus religion and philosophy coincide: in fact, philosophy
is itself a divine service, is a religion: for it is the same
renunciation of subjective fancies and opinions, and is engaged with
God alone.'
Again, it may be asked in what sense philosophy has to deal with God
and with Truth. These two terms are often synonyms in Hegel. All the
objects of science, all the terms of thought, all the forms of reality,
lead out of themselves, and seek for a centre and resting-point. They
are severally inadequate and partial, and they crave adequacy and
completeness. They tend to organise themselves; to call out more and
more distinctly the fuller reality which they presuppose,--which must
have been, otherwise they could not have been: they reduce their first
appearance of completeness to its due grade of inadequacy and bring out
their complementary side, so as to constitute a system or universe; and
in this tendency to a self-correcting unity consists their progress
to truth. Their untruth lies in isolation and pretended independence
or finality. This completed unity, in which all things receive their
entireness and become adequate, is their Truth: and that Truth, as
known in religious language, is God. Rightly or wrongly, God is thus
interpreted in the Logic of Hegel.
Such a position must seem very strange to one who is familiar only
with the sober studies of English philosophy. In whatever else the
leaders of the several schools in this country disagree, they are
nearly all at one in banishing God and religion to a world beyond
the present sublunary sphere, to an inscrutable region beyond the
scope of scientific inquiry, where statements may be made at will,
but where we have no power of verifying any statement whatever.
This is the common doctrine of Spencer and Mansel, of Hamilton and
Mill. Even those English thinkers, who show some anxiety to support
what is at present called Theism, generally rest content with
vindicating for the mind the vague perception of a Being beyond us,
and differing from us incommensurably. God is to them a residual
phenomenon, a marginal existence. Outside the realm of experience
and knowledge there is not-nothing--a something--beyond definite
circumscription: incalculable, and therefore an object, possibly of
fear, possibly of hope: the reflection in the utter darkness of a great
What-may-it-not-be? He is the Unknown Power, felt by what some of
these writers call intuition, and others call experience. They do not
however allow to knowledge any capacity of apprehending in detail the
truths which belong to the kingdom of God. Now the whole teaching of
Hegel is the overthrow of the limits thus set to religious thought. To
him all thought, and all actuality when it is grasped by knowledge, is
from man's side, an exaltation of the mind towards God: while, when
regarded from the divine standing-point, it is the manifestation by God
of His own nature in its infinite variety.
It is only when we fix our eyes clearly on these general features in
his speculation, that we can understand why _he_ places the maturity
of ancient philosophy in the time of Plotinus and Proclus. Not that
these Neo-Platonists are, as thinkers, of power equal to their master
of Athens. But, in the realm of the blind the one-eyed may be king. The
later thinkers set their vision more distinctly and persistently on the
land that is eternal--'on the further side of being,' to quote Plato's
phrase. It is for the same reason Hegel gives so much attention to the
religious or semi-religious theories of Jacob Böhme and of Jacobi,
though these men were in many ways so unlike himself.
[Footnote 1: Hegel's _Leben_, p. 155. It was in his dissertation
_de Orbitis Planetarum,_ that the notorious contretemps occurred,
whereby, whilst the philosopher, leaning to a Pythagorean proportion,
hinted--in a line--that it was unnecessary to expect a planet between
Mars and Jupiter, astronomers in the same year discovered Ceres, the
first-detected of the Planetoids. A good deal has been made out of
this trifle; but it has not yet been shown that the corroboration was
anything but the _luck_ of the other hypothesis.]
[Footnote 2: _Vermischte Schriften_, vol. ii. p. 520. Duboc was a
retired hatter, of French origin, who had settled at Hamburg (Hegel's
_Briefe_, ii. 76 seqq.).]
[Footnote 3: _Werke_, x. I, p. 131.]
[Footnote 4: _Werke,_ xi. p. 21.]