Stephen

Theron
Pindarth@y
ahoo.se

FAITH, PHILOSOPHY AND THE FORM OF AFFIRMATION

Evangelical faith is represented in the Gospel as a removal of a mountain,

i.e. as an action both powerful and self-chosen (we need not call it
arbitrary, since moving a mountain might on occasion have its point). Here
I plead for faith to move itself, a mountainous task indeed. Such self-
transcendence, however, is a theological constant. As knowledge shall
vanish away, it is said, in what has still to be a higher wisdom, so faith too
passes insensibly to the same goal, a theme to which the second century
Alexandrian Church Fathers in particular were alert. What for them,
however, belonged to individual askesis, has now, and indeed, as I
contend, for some time, become imperative for all concerned. While this
development, it is important to see, leaves the natural sciences unaffected
it yet provides a more unitary holistic way of thinking about science at just
the time when science is inclining towards its own form of holism.

***********************************************************

Before passing to the specific topic adumbrated above I want here to give
the metaphysical setting for the study of the contemporary problem which
follows. The view is personally styled only in the sense that is proper to a
liberal "art", i.e. it is not private or, again, arbitrary but to the best of my
ability rationally grounded. So then, it is customary to begin with being.
Being, though, is an intractable problem for thought, as Heidegger has
noted. "Why is there anything?" Postulating a necessary being, as "pure"
act, viz. act qua act, seems to do no more than posit the problem anew.
Nothing is solved thereby. Act, in fact, in our thought, is prior to being. For
pure act, act qua act, may or not be an existent. As necessity it is more
likely a formality (as use of "is" here, which seems to signify being over
again, cannot be assumed to be more than a formality of our Indo-
European predication system).

Thus any thought, once thought, or even just thinkable, is indestructible,

that is, necessary. And thought, taken just in itself (and forgetting how we
ever came to know about it), thinks first, or above all, itself. What else
should it think? Hence all else, if it is or is thought at all, is included in that
"absolute idea". There is no "ontological discontinuity". God as creator of
being just cannot mean that, and all the mystics in chorus insist upon it.
So this absolute idea, in turn, is the ground of any thought or phenomenon
whatever. Ground is a nearer relation than cause. A thing's ground is what
it ultimately is. Ultimately, I or you are each the divine absolute idea, and
so, thus related, identical with each other too. These truths which
ecclesiology (whole church in the local church, I in you etc.) reaches at the
end it does so because they are there from the beginning in the eternal
designs, beyond either compulsion or contingency.

Once the primacy of act over being is seen then logic stands at the centre.
Logicus non considerat existentiam rei, said Aquinas, meaning to put the
logician second to the metaphysician, but if existence is a finite category
merely then the logician, who has seen this, is himself the true
metaphysician. Thus for Hegel, and he is our first name here, metaphysics
meant the dogmatic systems of the early modern period which just his
logic would replace. Aristotle too opposed substance to logic but Hegel
posited substance as a category to be overcome within logic, within the
doctrine (and category!) of essence more specifically:

The truth of substance is the Notion, - 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 (Encyclopaedia 158).

"This also is thou, neither is this thou." Hegel adds a little later:

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 (Ibid. 160).

The notion, unlike being, waits upon no act of arbitrary creation which
would merely remove the problem a step further from us. The necessity,
which the notion inherently is, itself renders it beyond all dilemma of being
or non-being. It is quite other than being. In line with this, Hegel speaks of
"spiritualization, whereby Substance becomes Subject" (The
Phenomenology of Mind, Harper Torchbooks, New York 1967, p.782).

If esse were "the act of acts" (Aquinas) then there would be no actus
purus. Pure act, as necessary, cannot not be, but it cannot be either,
speaking univocally at least. It acts, as thought. It is a thinking, verb which
as verb is not substance, whereas being is substance. Esse could indeed
be an act, but not act of acts, not unless an act has to have esse before it
can be an act. But that is just what is in question, nor may thought
unthinkingly enslave itself to our system of predication in this way and call
it metaphysics. Sartre's view, in which nothingness as freedom triumphs
over being, might be thought to preserve the prejudice in favour of being,
the density of the chestnut tree's roots, when he puts things in that way.
Yet he might also be seen as overcoming the prejudice against negativity,
essential for Hegel's liberating doctrine of self in other, identity in
difference (when he puts things in that way). As Hegel himself says, "The
Nothing which the Buddhists make the universal principle, as well as the
final aim and goal of everything, is the same abstraction" (Enc.87). The
"definition" of God as being is "not a whit better than that of the
Buddhists."
The conclusion would seem to be a synthesis of being and nothing which is
not therefore nothing as mere negation (ouk on) but as other than being
(me on), to use an ancient distinction. This, with McTaggart, we may regret
that Hegel called Becoming (Werden), as if setting forth a process-
philosophy merely. It is well known that the names of his categories,
though taken from ordinary discourse, receive their own precise, often
different meaning in the dialectic and so it is with Becoming, since this
must be compatible with the transcending of common-sense temporality. It
stands rather for the "utter restlessness" of dialectic. Like Being and
Nothing, which "vanish" into it ("and that is the very notion of Becoming"),
so Becoming "must vanish also" (Enc. 89).

In fact Becoming, as appearing with Being and Nothing at the very

beginning of the dialectic, is destined, along with these common-sense
notions, to vanish from serious thought. Thus thought thinks in the end
only itself, an Infinity, however, which is necessarily differentiated, not, of
course, into those elements of our finite thinking which the dialectic
successfully surmounts, but into ourselves, as persons. This, of course, will
require revision of the notion of thinking itself as itself taken from common
life merely, and so McTaggart will postulate beyond it, as more fully
reciprocal, as the system requires, than knowledge, what he finds is best
called Love. Knowledge if absolute must pass over, "vanish into", love,
thus, mutatis mutandis, as it may be, strikingly confirming the Christian
revelation that "God is love", albeit from this avowedly atheist standpoint
(where McTaggart at least is concerned).1

In retaining a subject the cogito of Descartes continued in reduced form

the limitation set by Aquinas's "It is evident that it is this man that thinks",
asserted against those maintaining a common intellect, as it was called
(we might call it collective or, ultimately, egoless consciousness). What
though is self-evident is not the cogito but that thinking is going on. There
is thinking. No subject is evident here (Cf. Frege's Der Gedanke or Geach's
roulette wheel in his God and the Soul2, determining the occurrence of
thoughts).

Aquinas himself says that what falls (cadit) first into the mind is being
(ens), not the subject, though he appears to miss the import of his own
formulation, viz. the primacy of thought even over being, so that, in
Aristotle's words, thought thinks itself. What else should it think? This
primal awareness ("we" or "our" are posterior constructs), requires as first
task that thought, as known to us in interplay with experience, be allowed
to unfold itself for itself, so to say. Thus is reached the clear and justified or
demystified vision of thought thinking itself as the absolute idea by and in
which all, the whole, is known, and known again as a knowing or as Spirit
1
J.M.E. McTaggart,Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, Cambridge University Press, 1901, final
chapter. See also, on Becoming, A Commentary on Hegel's Logic, Cambridge University
Press, 1910. Some find this interpretation of Hegel misleading, as happens too with
Aquinas's Aristotle. But the later thinker may still be preferred in either case, though one
need not concede the criticism.
2
RKP, London 1969.
knowing us. What is thinking? This is a genuine question, the main
question, pace Heidegger.

The situation is echoed in religion. Thus symbolic views of reincarnations

filling up the whole apparently temporal series or, which is more in line
with our evolution-paradigm, of ourselves as present within a common
parent, find their rationale under absolute idealism. The original sin
doctrine could never justify the imputation of culpability, that "in Adam all
die". The priority of Adam (and the name simply means "man") is rather
that of the Idea, ultimately of Spirit, the first or infinite. Infinitude is an
abstract idea of ours. Real infinity is necessarily differentiated into
individuals, as idea is realised in nature and synthesised in spiritual
relations of perfect community, the prototype of which in our thought is
the Trinity.

The idea is metaphysically prior and time is subjective or illusory. We are

born, and hence die, in our idea. The "sin" of Adam is the awakening or
"self-sundering" of spirit, as temporally represented in narrative. Each of
us is identical with this "ancestral" idea. We are as necessary to it as it is
to us, this being the anatomy of the perfect unity which thought requires,
as monotheistic religion bears witness.

Such religion, however, contradicts itself, superficially, in a doctrine of

creation as it most often is presented. "Let us make man in our image."
Later, this image will be re-identified with the Absolute in the Incarnation.
Man, that is, or, rather, Dasein, is ultimate, as consciousness. "We know
not what we shall be, but we know that when he shall appear we shall be
like Him." This, in fact, is knowing what we are, there being no need for
likeness, however, when identity is to hand. Thus the duplication which is
Adam's emanation as likeness and our reduplication as Adam's progeny
must give way to that New Man, in seeing whom we see "the Father", and
in whom all are "members one of another". But just as this religious
teaching is narrative representation of timeless Spirit as thinking itself, so
at the summit of the dialectic which is the Idea earlier representations fall
away, or are only seen in its light, the "true light".

Dialectic here parallels the medieval discussion as to why the new and
perfect "law" was not rather given from the beginning. The answer is that
the dialectic is necessary for self- or reflexive knowledge, for the
transparency without which consciousness cannot be itself. For this reason
too the doctrine of angels as beings created, out of time, with the species
of all things innately given to them, is incoherent. One cannot represent
eternity as bounded by the temporal. Thus the angels are ourselves. We
have here an indication of the truth of temporality as necessary
representation of the eternal, real and spiritual. Here too the negative or
Other must be presupposed as moment of the Whole, since this whole is in
essence the reconciliation of all otherness.

In positing man as absolute, as Spirit, we do not become atheists. There is

more kinship with Spinoza's "acosmism". Rather, the dilemma of theism or
atheism, as seen by today's religious militants, for example, is
transcended, and this is presented as the meaning of our historical
experience, itself in reality a dialectic, wrapped in the bosom of thought
thinking itself. If it comes to that, we are not claiming man as man either,
but as Spirit ever blowing where it will. We know not what we are, since
spirit transcends, in fact "sublates", substance. Substance as imagined is
not and never was. It is a question of how much reality humankind can let
in.

*************************

Thirty to forty years ago now Pope Paul VI brought out a document called
The Credo of the People of God. He prefaced it, somewhat jarringly, with
an assertion of the necessity of believing (though not as part of the
ensuing Credo) that the human mind is natively capable of attaining truth.
It is indeed, but it is increasingly evident that this confidence is in
contradiction with the facts of evolution taken absolutely and cum
praecisione. An infused soul is therefore postulated as divorced from and
unaffected by the evolutionary paradigm, thus making out of our
intellectuality something unnatural and miraculous within nature's own
field.

Much unnecessary perplexity is thus engendered, stemming from

obstinate adherence to the Moderate Realist theory of our knowledge as
permitting continued belief in a universe of material substances wrongly
identified as necessary object of the dogma of divine creation. Idealism,
however, as sketched above is clearly the more natural pendant to any
assertion of the primacy, the all-sufficiency, of Spirit. This is indeed the
truth which we must believe Spirit capable of knowing. As Spirit it thinks
itself, purely, while each of us, its differentiations, are one with this
indivisible because necessarily perfect Whole in an identity in difference.
This is the truth which Mind can attain, as the history of philosophy
demonstrates, let there be doubt or hesitation over this or that point. Mind
as containing all is outside of itself, a state they used to call intentional.
The inside is the outside and vice versa.

*********************************

The document of the Church leadership referred to here indicates a wish to

draw back from post-medieval philosophical perspectives, which
undoubtedly treat "moderate realism" as a form of naivete. Attempts have
been made since the nineteenth century to portray this perspective itself
as a form of naivete on the part of the Enlightenment (one thinks of books
such as E.Gilson's On Being and some Philosophers or the treatment of
Descartes in Maritain's Three Reformers) and these attempts might have
offered synthetic reintegration of philosophy's history on the Hegelian
model, were it not that the idealist antithesis of the Enlightenment period
is merely there rejected in toto, a "pilgrim's regress" indeed. But there can
be no such regress, no refuting of Berkeley, say, in a mocking paragraph
merely. The nature of both time and experience forbid it.
Hegel, in his day, which was as much "a day" as any day in the thirteenth
century, engaged with Christian doctrine with all the resources he had to
hand, as of course, a little later, did J.H. Newman with his. They might
seem to have come to opposite conclusions. This appearance is deceptive,
however.

Newman wrote of The Development of Christian Doctrine. So too did Hegel

and both were free of the narrowness of many of their followers, orthodox
or "liberal". But Newman's treatment was more historical than
philosophically systematic. Had this not been so then he would have been
compelled in logic also to treat of a possible development of his own
doctrine of development. His conclusion was that development had led
doctrine up to the point then reached by the leadership of the Roman
Catholic Church. Newman's own later difficulties with that leadership
ought though at least to make us modify such a judgement, even if we are
not going to end by seeing him as a crypto-Hegelian.

This perspective of the open Church, however (which we here open up) as
much on pilgrimage in the sphere of doctrine, that is to say in the sphere
of the optimal expression of the substance of faith, as it is in all other
spheres, is one more suited to emerge at the end of this study. Here we
merely indicate, our subject being Hegel and not Newman. Nonetheless,
we find that the same pattern of opposition within a more fundamental
unity, as between these two, when they write of development, is repeated
among Hegel's interpreters (one might ask if this is so with Newman's, or
even with Aquinas's!), as we shall now see. In itself this is evidence that
Hegel might be right in making his overarching conception one of
reconciliation.

So we take two interpretations, that of Georges Van Riet (1965)3 and that
of McTaggart (1901), theistic and atheistic respectively. Our task is to
declare what they are and then to try to determine whether and how far
they are compatible, or not, as the case may be. Since one interpretation
is professedly theistic, and indeed Catholic, while the other is professedly
atheistic we already make a statement in raising this question. We admit,
that is, to a possibility that the understanding of the Christian message,
the substance of it, might be indifferent to a choice to express oneself in
theistic or atheistic terms. At the very least we admit to an initial openness
to the question once raised.

McTaggart's view of Hegel seems on the whole the simpler of the two. He
points out that God in Hegel is no more and no less than the ultimate
reality, whatever it is. He adds that what Hegel finds to be this ultimate
reality differs too much from the general notion of God to retain the name
without causing confusion. For reality, Hegel claims, is, as pure Spirit, a
whole consisting of all finite-infinite spirits or persons, each one of whom is
3
Georges Van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel", Philosophy Today, especially Parts II-
III, Vol. XI, No. 2/4, Summer 1967, pp. 75-106 (Part I in the Spring 1967 issue of this
journal). Translated from the original French version in Revue Philosophique de Louvain,
Tome 63, August 1965, pp. 353-418.
in some way identical with this whole and therefore indispensable to it,
without beginning or end. It is not therefore created.

Regarding Jesus and incarnation, if we should now consider Hegel's

specifically Christian credentials, McTaggart finds that for Hegel Jesus is
simply conveniently fastened on in popular religion as God-man because
of the "immediate" way he himself understood and taught the reality of
this identity, the absoluteness, that is to say, of rational personality, which
he of course had no hesitation in identifying with the observably human,
whatever the final truth may be. Incarnation thus understood is true of us
all, since we are all manifestations in the misperceived milieu of matter
and time. We are not truly incarnate because matter is unreal, but we all
appear to one another. McTaggart adds that he cannot finally judge
whether or not this might prove compatible with something one can call
Christian.

Thirdly, McTaggart finds Hegel's Trinitarian thought totally incompatible

with orthodox teaching. This is because for Hegel, he rather convincingly
shows, Spirit, dwelling in the community, is understood as the synthesis
between the thesis which is the Father and the antithesis which is the Son.
Both of these latter are therefore imperfect conceptions absolutely
requiring synthesis in the absolute notion of Spirit. I must add that it is not
so clear to me that this is not compatible with orthodox Trinitarianism,
where, too, the Father has no reality without the Son, nor both without the
Spirit uniting them. Even if revelation take a historical form, this does not
of itself entail a realist philosophy of history and what is gradually
disclosed at the end may all the time have been the sole and complete
reality, in which the rest is contained.

One may add to this that McTaggart has a section showing systematically
how he thinks Hegel's moral teaching is virtually the antithesis of Christian
ethical attitudes. This, however, might again be seen as a replay of the
Jesus versus the Church antithesis celebrated, if that is the word, by
Dostoyevsky or "liberation theology".

**************************

We pass to the study.by Van Riet, the Catholic Blondel specialist from
Louvain. It is more detailed and differently nuanced. We may begin with
some comparisons of his treatment of the points from McTaggart just
mentioned.

Van Riet answers McTaggart's query about compatibility with Christianity

with a cautious affirmative. He thus asks, like McTaggart, if Hegel's God is
"personal", and the quotation marks are his own, as if, unlike McTaggart,
he might be ready to find this a false dilemma. Personality, he remarks, "is
not a major category" for Hegel.

As for God, he is conscious and free; under this heading, if you

wish, he is "personal" (95).
In saying this he does not, as one might think, contradict McTaggart's
apparent atheism, where the latter makes the community of all persons
the absolute. For Van Riet adds that God "is the society of men"
(McTaggart is somewhat more cautious about who or what the spirits are;
so here Van Riet's Christianity paradoxically makes his Hegel more
humanist).

To this Van Riet, showing more theological awareness than McTaggart,

adds that "this whole question is full of ambiguity", and for the reason that
"for Hegel as for Christian teaching, God is not personal but tri-personal in
his unity."4

The "personal" character of the "Spirit animating the

community" is perhaps not more (and not less) difficult to
conceive than the personal character of the Holy Spirit. In the
end, Hegel's atheism would not be bound up with this question.

Not more and not less! He is saying that "subjectivity as such" (Hegel), the
Spirit in the community where each has the whole within him, the Whole
which is thus not separable from human beings ("if God and man are
distinct, they are also bound together"VR95), is as much or as little like a
person as is the Holy Spirit of tradition, indwelling and independent. This
would mean, if he would accept McTaggart's assessment that the whole is
"for" the parts but not vice versa, that Van Riet's move (above) from
personal to tri-personal as much modifies this attribute "personal" beyond
the normal as McTaggart, say, thinks that Hegel modifies the term "God",
i.e. beyond due proportion.5 This consideration, though, and it is important
to stress this, would not as such rule out a future more conscious
development of general Christian doctrine in this direction. It is anyhow
quite clear that this is what Van Riet is pleading for.

Even McTaggart refers obliquely to this eventuality when he explains the

obscurities of Hegel's philosophy of the Christian religion by pointing out
that at one and the same time Hegel treats of other religions in the full
positivity of their concrete reality while he explains Christianity, the
absolute religion, in terms of what he thinks it ought to be. Well, it would
not be "absolute" otherwise. Thus the medieval phenomenon he, Hegel,
simply writes off as "the unhappy consciousness", along with the mistake
of the Crusaders, stemming from their and their contemporaries naive (or
"moderate") realism, of seeking after earthly relics of Christian beginnings
as a means of closer unity with their source.

4
P.T. Geach makes much of McTaggart's ignoring of the divine tri-personality in
Christianity (Truth, Love and Immortality, Hutchinson, London 1970. But he adverts to it
frequently in his Hegelian studies, if not in The Nature of Existence. Since the three
persons are not taught in Christianity as acting separately (tritheism) his objection to an
all-inclusive person is not fully met by Trinitarian considerations.
5
Cp. The Pauline "You are all one person in Jesus Christ."
 Indeed what is at issue with "the unhappy consciousness"?
Essentially this: In it Hegel wants to show the failure of a realist
consciousness (Van Riet, p.94).

So much for the first point, the doctrine of God. We come now to Jesus and
the incarnation. Surely here McTaggart's forthright attitude as described
above must diverge from any "Christian" interpretation of Hegel, we will
want to say. As Van Riet puts it (p.82), "Jesus is the God-man… He is the
other of the Father, reconciled with him in the Spirit. For the unbeliever he
is only a wise man, a new Socrates… For religious consciousness… He is
God incarnate…."

Perhaps the phrase "religious consciousness" supplies a key to

reconciliation. McTaggart points out that in calling Christianity the absolute
religion, for whatever reason, Hegel does not depart from his essential
subordination of religion to philosophy. The religious consciousness deals
in symbols and thus far falls short of direct or philosophical encounter with
reality. It was necessary, Hegel claims, in the Lectures on the Philosophy
of Religion, that one man should present himself, in all "immediacy", as
divine, not attempting to prove this, while in the Sermon on the Mount he
teaches our own divinity, that the pure in heart shall see God (Hegel's
example), the peacemakers be the children of God, the kingdom of heaven
be ours (we are then kings, even if we should receive it as might a child)
and so on. But he insists that the "incarnation" shows what man is,
essentially, and not what he shall contingently become.

Van Riet seems able to agree, saying "Man is God's image, God's son,
reconciliation" (p. 82). Man is God's son, and not only Jesus.

He knows that not only the history of Jesus, but also his own
history, grasped in all the depth of their meaning, are the
manifestation of the eternal history of the Trinitarian God.

Here there seems to be a bit of backtracking. It would be more consistent

to say, to add, that he knows that not just the Trinitarian life of God, but
also the life of his own spirit, were it to be fully grasped, manifests, is one
with, the absolute. This, indeed, or the inner lives of all person whatever,
just is "the eternal history of the Trinitarian God", according to Hegel. What
is Trinitarian is the triadic form it takes in each, not an over-arching system
of necessary persons, since these finite-infinite persons, our own
subjective consciousnesses, are themselves necessary and timeless,
without beginning therefore. We have already found McTaggart pointing to
the dialectical character of Hegel's Trinitarianism, whereby the persons are
not equal so much as that the Holy Spirit synthesises the thesis of the
Father and his antithetical negation in the Son, with which Nature is at
least analogous. But in orthodoxy too Father and Spirit are nothing apart
from their mutual relation. Ipsae relationes sunt personae may contain
depths not yet plumbed. Dialectic, for example, might help us overcome
the brute either/or of economic and metaphysical Trinity as we have them
now, as the relativization of time rids us, as we noted above, not only of
those angels and their aevum, but of the mirage of a pre-existent Christ.6
All is eternal. Therefore the angels cannot be made eternal over against a
real temporality somehow bounding eternity.
Similarly, the incarnation in one or several chosen individual natures
entails a regime, a class of real beings over against or excluded from as
bounding the sphere of the infinite, among which God would choose or
prepare candidates for union. Even the most jejune doctrine of an analogy
of being(s) would exclude this scenario, where God is not God, a situation
not saved by inventing the phrase "ontological discontinuity", which
names rather the scandal. Instead, every finite thing is God incarnate, as
everything affects everything else. Sound philosophy forces this
conclusion and the corresponding interpretation of the Biblical data, that
the Son of Man stands in this way for all men. They are all and each one
with the Whole. This, of course, is totally against Jewish exclusivism (as it
is incompatible with any realist doctrine of sin, not however to be
remembered in eternity, the prophet intimates), in terms of which St. Paul
expounds an exclusivist Church (Romans 9-11, balancing the first two
chapters of that document). St. Peter, however, learned in a vision to let
the Spirit blow over Cornelius and where it will. He did not have to be
"grafted in", a complicated operation at best.

**********************************

It will be fruitful to make an additional comparison of the more specific

treatments by the two thinkers of Hegel's view of the relation between
religion and philosophy, in order finally for ourselves to pronounce upon
this.7 We have already sketched McTaggart's view, and Hegel's own
approach can indeed be read off in the closing pages and layout of The
Phenomenology of Mind, culminating in the section on absolute
knowledge, which comes after as perfecting religion. We might call it an
Alexandrine, though not thereby narrowly Hermetic, view. But what of Van
Riet?

Van Riet refers several times to what Hegel "wants", and it seems to me
that this is the operative word. Men, and women, desire to think what they
practice or believe, since this is quite naturally an irritant to their minds.
Nothing less, in fact, is the project of theology. But, as Van Riet points out,
theology today takes to itself, as it must in order to be itself, all the
freedom of philosophy. Wherein then can there be a difference? For
Aristotle his metaphysics was theologia and claiming that there is a
"sacred" theology in the same breath as we acknowledge and allow for
doctrinal development is scarcely meaningful. There was merely a
theology more or less monopolized by people "in holy orders". Hegel too

6
Cf. Herbert McCabe on this topic, in criticism of Raymond Brown, in God Matters.
7
On Hegel and "religion" see also Msgr. André Léonard's "Fé cristiana y reflexion
filosofica", Spanish version accessible on the Internet. The Bishop refers to Van Riet's
"amiable" criticism of theologians (in his Philosophie et réligion, Louvain 1970) from his
philosophical viewpoint. Elsewhere in his text though he complains of "human" solutions
being substituted for "the rule of faith" when he might have treated these rather as
interpretations, even of the "form" of faith, precisely Van Riet's point (see below).
develops his philosophy from Christian doctrine, in part, and all
development is in part in this sense.8 Thus some of the Thomistic
development too comes from pagan sources brought into contact with the
Christian ones. Besides this, we must allow for lateral development, where
we take insights not only from earlier experience but from present insights
evolved beyond the pale of orthodoxy, as Catholicism learns from
Protestantism or from modern science.

To put this in another way, we have found that Van Riet's "Catholic"
interpretation of Hegel, which he as it were pleads be taken over by the
Church and her teachers, coincides in large part with the "atheist" account
of Hegel given by McTaggart. Atheist or not, McTaggart leaves open the
possibility of its being reconcilable with Christian teaching. There is a
larger question here. What is at stake, namely, is a possible rethinking of
the nature of (religious) faith. It is this question that our investigation of
Hegel's thought and its interpretation is meant to help clarify, insofar as it
is quite clear that this is the question which Hegel himself faced. Our
method, that is, is philosophical and not historical. We do not seek to know
what really happened, Newman's "realist" mistake insofar as he was ready
to take such putative happenings (this is comparable to a naive
interpretation of exceptional occurrences or miracula as "miracles") as
normative. We seek to understand what finds itself in our consciousness,
having come there by whatever route.

Philosophy is reflection on experience. And Hegel knows very

well that the notion of a Trinitarian God is born of the
experience of Christianity (Lectures on the Philosophy of
Religion, tr. Speirs and Burton Sanderson, London 1895, III,
p.99). But for him the experience is not contingent. As with
reflection, it is the work of Reason, the manifestation of Spirit in
history. Each philosophy, as each religion, comes in its time…
Also, in his eyes, the affirmation of the Trinitarian God is neither
a "theological" affirmation (in the sense of Saint Thomas), nor a
thesis of "Christian philosophy" (improperly rational, because
inspired by faith), but it stems directly from the philosophical
order, and the task of showing the truth of it belongs to
philosophy. (Van Riet, p.81)

As we saw, in McTaggart's view the truth Hegel finds here does not
correspond to orthodox teaching. Van Riet scarcely considers this
possibility or, rather, we can take him as meaning that Hegel's Trinitarian
thought, as it surely is, has as much claim not to be rejected out of hand
as does anyone else's. It is now accepted that doctrine develops. We have
here a development of a doctrine otherwise worked out more or less
fourteen centuries earlier. What in fact was soon to be somewhat
idiotically called "modernism" by its detractors, who went to the hysterical
8
See, as an example of the continual openness of Newman's doctrine of development
itself, necessarily, to further development, Dom Wulstan Peterburs "Newman's Essay on
Development as a Basis for Considering Liturgical Change", The Downside Review,
January 2008, pp.21-39.
lengths of imposing an "anti-modernist" oath upon certain classes of the
faithful, was simply a working out of Newman's principle, by which each
new generation should develop the substance of tradition according to its
inherently superior lights. The principle of progress, after all, has been
conceded by those attempting to guard orthodoxy at least since Paul VI's
Populorum progressio of 1967.

We cannot say with certainty that human philosophy at any time whatever
was capable of reaching precisely this Trinitarian conception. A particular
experience maybe needed to be supplied first. But after this Christian
religion which Hegel calls the absolute religion, at least as properly
interpreted by philosophy, has reached maturity then philosophers are
bound, indeed compelled, to "reflect on human experience in its
totality"(Van Riet). To pretend that this is only to be done as if receiving
from a superior other, an authority, what one does not experience oneself
is all too easily in fact a kind of inauthentic division in the self which
prevents one being any kind of philosopher whatever, even if one acquire
the skill of expounding Aristotle backwards, let us say. This was in fact the
scholastic error, an error of form which, in the scholastic period itself, only
the genius of an Aquinas might hope in part to overcome.9 So much for
"the rule of faith". What we believe is what each of us, like St. Paul,
"received of the Lord", i.e. from within and out of ourselves, of course in
union with all others, since this is what it is to be a self at all. As Hegel
says, further to this, the truth is never a mystery, for

What is directed towards rationality is not a mystery for it; it is a

mystery only for the senses and their way of looking at things
(III, 17).

Here we touch precisely the problem of the understanding of faith, not of

things believed but of faith as a form of apprehension. A prophetic
intuition of the error involved is given in the Fourth Gospel where the
Samaritans, after going out to see Jesus at the well, say that now they
believe in him and his claim, not because of what the woman he spoke
with has told them but because they have seen for themselves, just as she
once did. We may need to start off relying on someone else, but we
certainly don't want to stop there and it seems dishonest or perverse to
continue to take one's stand upon the witness, however exalted, once one
is seeing for oneself, Joan of Arc's problem, one might say. There is, all the
same, a certain ecstasy of faith in which people emphasise such
perversities, precisely because for them at that moment they seem to
promise a contact with the transcendent, as when Newman states in effect
that the basic doctrine of Catholicism is the infallibility of the teaching
Church, surely a strange view of things. Such a putative privilege must
needs rest upon something greater in the very nature of things. There is
indeed argument for blind belief being on occasion rational, and Naaman
(not Newman) the leper had this argument supplied to him by the servant-
girl before he went and washed in the scruffy little Palestinian river to

9
Cf. Our "Faith as Thinking with Assent", New Blackfriars, January 2005, pp. 101-114.
which the prophet had scornfully directed him. That is not what we are
talking about here. We are discussing the making of such belief into the
form of all sure knowledge necessary for salvation, as they used to say, in
the way that one "believes in" God.10 Our thesis is that they started to say
this in a bad moment, a somewhat "inquisitional" moment indeed.

What Hegel declares by his philosophy, and declares, be it noted, precisely

for Christians, is an end to viewing the religious and symbolical form of
apprehension of ultimate and "saving" realities as absolute. Christianity,
ideally interpreted, may be the absolute religion, but precisely because it
is still religion it cannot be absolute absolutely, so to say. Absolute
knowledge belongs to philosophy and the philosophical mode of
"mediation". McTaggart in fact will question Hegel's right to maintain the
absoluteness of Christianity, even taken thus absolutely, since, he says,
whether it is to be succeeded by a superior religion (as it always can be
since the religious mode as such is imperfect) is an empirical matter only
knowable when it might occur.

Another approach, perhaps not envisaged by McTaggart, is closer to

Hegel's mind, it would seem. It is possible to interpret Christianity, as did
the Pharisees or the ancient Roman persecutors, as hostile to the religious
principle as such. In saying that whoever sees him sees "the Father" the
man Jesus promulgates an absolute humanism, whereby man is God
incarnate precisely because man is himself absolute spirit. (Cf. Christianity
without God, Lloyd). On this view Christianity has been misunderstood as
long as it has been seen as a religion, and not simply as The Way, a
philosophy simply, though first presented in prophetic and religious terms
alone available to the Semites, as was later the case with Islam.

From the outset every Christian soul feels the shift there is
between Hegelian discourse and the language of the Bible
along with traditional theology… Hegel is perfectly aware of
this… In his eyes, it is the divergence which fatally separates
speculative thought and religious representation. In a word…
according to him man is divine rather than divinized, or more
precisely, he is only divinized because in himself and for himself
he is divine. His concrete essence or his concept… is to be and
know himself as a "moment" of God, whereas according to the
Christian tradition man's essence is to be a contingent creature,
set in being by a free decree of God and, in relation to this
essence, his condition as sinner and his divinization are
accidental. The first befalls him by the fault of the first man, the
second is added by virtue of God's gracious decisions (elevation
to the supernatural order, redemption by Christ, real
sanctification by the gift of the Holy Spirit). Hegel understands
man's divine filiation as essential rather than accidental, seeks
10
Yet according to classical theology, one is supposed to take this "doctrine" too, of God,
after conversion, rather on the word of the Church alone, taking distance from one's
"private" theological musings. What is private is matter for the confessional merely.
Whatever truth lies hidden here lies, indeed, pretty deeply hidden!
 an intelligible meaning for what is realised in fact… raises
religious "content" to the "form" of speculative thought. Must all
this be the same as radically contesting God's transcendence,
offending his sovereign freedom or completely distorting the
Christian message? (Van Riet, p.96).

Whether it must or not, Van Riet considers, there is a way of presenting

such transcendence that is no longer acceptable as Good News. One
wonders if indeed transcendence can be separated from such
presentation. Can we so state this Good News without betraying it, asks
Van Riet, writing as a Christian, and goes on immediately to ask if we
entitled or obliged to make reason the criterion of everything in this way.

It comes to this, that any and all self-transcendence is and can only be
transcendence of self by self. Alienation, accepting things externally, is
incompatible with the infinity of what naturally seeks and grasps the
universal, in that immaterialitas which is radix cognitionis, we might say.
Immateriality is in fact spirit, and not merely the absence of matter. For
spirit transcends matter in its notion. Matter in this sense is part of the
dualist illusion. But it is dualist also to make of God the other of the self.
God, as Augustine understood, is closer to self than is self to itself. This is
transcendence. In the same way it is crude anthropomorphism to think of
revelation as God speaking within history as a man might. This would be
no infinite "lordship" of history. Spirit rather assumes its new forms, shows
more of itself, at the right time and place in accordance with a logic, a
rationality, in principle able to be descried by the human spirit seeking to
understand. Mystery, that is to say, is not a surd and in transcending the
analytical understanding (Verstand) faith directs us to the employment of
speculative reason (Vernünft). Such reason, however, is Spirit at work in
the world, as it worked in those who composed the Biblical texts.

One has to notice though that here one in some sense flogs a very dead
horse. Theology today, that is to say, is not distinguishable from Hegel's
philosophy of religion. One understands that one has to "surpass the
thought of the biblical author". There are no principles to be fixed by
positive theology independently of reason itself, since one cannot prevent
these from being revisable dialectically, this being contained in all that we
mean by "paradigm shifts". The Wittgensteinian image of kicking away or
as it were dissolving the ladder (to mix metaphors) by which one has
ascended is appropriate here too, just as I do not have perpetually to recall
the long transcended accidents whereby I fell in love with whom or what I
now love. The intentions of contemporary theology and of Hegel's religious
philosophy are one and the same.

We touch here, it would seem, upon politics, even though the issue is a
transcendent and spiritual one, a fact which in itself raises politics above
the way it is more usually conceived. It is often said that the Church is not
a democracy. By this is meant that there are those who teach, with an
infallibility that the notion of teaching taken absolutely, but only so, must
require and there are those who learn, again with an exceptionless
obedience only proper to learners taken absolutely. But there has always
been question as to whether or how, in what sense, "one man can teach
another" (Aquinas), just as it is not clear whether it is the doctor (teacher)
or the sick man's own nature which heals him. There is, rather, a time to
listen and a time to speak, though I listen in saying that, in teaching that,
to the method of The Preacher.

Thus, or nonetheless, there were in the first times of the Church, as if on

an equal dignity of standing with one another, both teachers and prophets.
The office of prophet is fulfilled in our culture by the philosopher. The
philosopher does not say "Thus saith the Lord" because he knows now that
this is a crude anthropomorphism, though in early Semitic milieus the
crudeness of concept may have been open to refining interpretation of its
nature. Spirit, rather, issues in philosophy (as philosophy issues in sophia,
one hopes) of which the thinking human being remains as it were the
scribe. Jewish Old Testament prophecy, all the same, was conducted under
the sign of alienation, from which Christ came to liberate us, as foretold by
Jeremiah when he said that no one will tell others to know the Lord,
because all will know him, which returns us to politics.

For those in power this has been called, simply, laicism (or modernism,
liberalism and so on where clergy were themselves on the wrong side)
and we even have an analogy from the philosophical establishment itself
(and such "inner rings" are ever forming) from where such active freedom
of thinking, where all proceed as if they knew "the Lord" or have direct
understanding of all things, even though they are not in universities, say,
is occasionally dismissed as a "rebellion of the masses" or some such. But
these masses are an abstraction, or at least they do not refer to man as
thinking, but as ideologized, which is thinking's opposite and its denial.
Such a state, however, of ideologization is a deformation of the individual's
nature as a thinking person.11 This is why we should not have a laity, even
a laos, in this sense and he who once had compassion on the multitude
expressed it by meeting men, and women especially, individually, i.e.
really, whenever this was possible for him.

It is however no longer the pharisees or even the popes, unless as

servants of the servants of God, who sit in the seat of Moses. That piece of
furniture is presumably no more sacrosanct than the torn up old veil of the
Temple and the fondness for speaking of a cathedra is thus implicitly
"Judaizing". For the form is supposed to have changed, isn't it? It is
important to see how a correct understanding of the relation between faith
and reason is interwoven with this political and social but simultaneously
philosophical, that is to say anthropological question.

It is in fact the same with faith as with logic. There, in order to take part in
the life of reasoning, one has to see for oneself that the various logical
laws one employs hold, either immediately or mediately. It is not possible
to think according to externally imposed rules and believe in what one is

11
Hannah Arendt's great insight in her work on totalitarianism, its origins and nature.
doing, believe that one is thinking. One might be dutifully performing
some other procedure, but one is not thinking. Similarly, in order to take
part in the life of faith, one has both to understand the truths proposed to
one and see that they are true. Usually people don't see that they are true
(they may profess them nonetheless) just because they don't understand
them. It is not possible to profess what one does not understand and draw
any kind of life from it whatever. You must at least have confidence that
you will understand because of your confidence in the, it may be, wonder-
working proposer. One's mystification, that is, will be cleared up. Such
theology, or philosophical scholasticism by proxy, does not express faith.
So what is faith? It is something that philosophy perfects or
"accomplishes" since it exists in order to that. As proper to man in via,
subject to temporal process, faith is the reverse of sitting still and is rather
a movement that can only be dialectical, not losing truth already won,
perhaps taught by another initially, but only initially, but continually
refining and perfecting it and in the process seeing it more and more for
oneself. In this sense one may approve the saying that "the fear of the
Lord is the beginning of wisdom". What the fear of the Lord will mean in a
Christian or Jewish milieu will correspond in more secular milieus to a
readiness to "prove all things" and to "hold fast that which is good",
starting, that is, from a listening to tradition, the child's position in life.

In this way it is quite clear that whether or not the statement that "the
Church is not a democracy" says anything to the point the members of the
Church, at least like everyone else but hopefully better, have to behave
democratically, as free human beings serving the freedom of one another,
that is to say. No one is to be told that he or she is not to try to understand
or "judge" initial beliefs imposed by the social and family milieu. All
judgement worthy of the name is private and personal anyway, so the
phrase "private judgement", an in its time Orwellian "newspeak", was
never anything but invidious. General Councils should not therefore be
seen as declarations as to what is to be believed but statements as to
what the promulgators, say rather publishers, of these declarations,
believe, or, in the case of a Pope, what he believes, infallibly or not. If he is
speaking as a teacher and magister then he will be teaching and not,
impossibly, telling people what they must believe. He can at most say
"Believe me when I tell you…", which is not a declaration as to what is to
be believed. There is no law or rule in it in other words and in any case
different people believe the same thing in different ways, as the internal
heterogeneity even of the canonical Gospels illustrates. Someone denying
the reality of matter will understand Christ's resurrection differently from a
materialist like St. Augustine at the time when, he tells us, he could not
conceive of a spiritual substance. It is in fact almost Hegel's main point
that a realist philosophical epistemological outlook, as we find in "common
sense", disqualifies us from understanding the religious mysteries and
creates, in fact, the celebrated "unhappy consciousness" of specifically
medieval Christianity (i.e. not of every medieval person), in his view.

One needed to be yet more radical to escape the medieval nemesis. One
said, this is what we believe. Believe the same if you want to be with us,
otherwise you are cursed. In fact the first so-called Council of Jerusalem
(actually it does not really belong in that series imposed from the
tormented future) said nothing as to belief, giving practical directives only,
a tradition rejoined in part by the "pastoral" intent of Vatican II. All the
same, this was the line taken in the first preaching and it is important to
see that, given certain politico-religious conditions bound eventually to
occur for some while, this approach leads quite naturally (and just like
Serbian nationalism) to the crimes and persecutions of later times in the
name of this "faith".

What this means is not that the content of faith is false but that its form of
presentation was defective. Truth itself, for that matter (since faith is
truth's apprehension), is not something that just some group gets
possession of so as to exclude those thinking differently. Sumit unus
sumunt mille, implicit prescription for an open Church. There was, that is
to say, a dose of "sociomorphism", to use Berdyaev's immediately
intelligible neologism, from the beginning, the rule of faith corresponding
to a universalizing law in other fields. It is permitted though, and indeed
mandatory, to rectify this defect of form, a process actually begun among
Catholics, and thus encouraged in the world at large, by the original
Vatican II declaration (unhappily still called a decree; the illusion that one
can impose democracy dies hard) on ecumenism of over forty years ago
now.

To see that the medieval crimes necessarily follow from the earlier stance,
of the regula fidei, is to understand the duty of enacting this process of
purifying the form of believing, going over to what can only be a
philosophical form. Realisation of this form coincides with the democratic
movement, according to which all are called upon to become literate and
thus philosophical, to prepare a civilization of philosophers in accordance
with Porphyry's rather optimistic assessment of the ancient Jews as a
nation of philosophers, because, precisely, of the form of their believing.

So it is not a question of "proving" the mysteries of faith, for Hegel, but of

showing their meaning in so far as they accord with a true philosophy. In
the process people come to accept them because they are reasonable.
This is why divine interventions in history, as contingently imagined by the
half magical Semitic mentality (or not only Semitic) of ancient times,
cannot be left uninterpretedly in the form in which they are delivered to
us. Neither divine action nor divine freedom can be contingent. Therefore,
to show the necessity and rationality of faith and its truths is not to change
their content but to present them in a more perfect form, and this was
ever the task of theology, whether in the time of Aristotle or in the
developed Christian time in which Hegel found himself. Again, "the
spiritual man judges all things".

*********************************************

These considerations might strike some as not particularly novel. Liberal

Catholicism goes back to the days of Hegel himself, after all, and Gregory
XVI appears to have perceived, already in 1832, the depth of the
challenge, when, in the Encyclical letter Mirari vos he wrote that what was
being called liberalism "overthrows the nature of an opinion". This was of
course a biased and alarmist way of saying that our way of viewing the
phenomenon of opinion becomes here the matter of the discourse. This
too, however is, as it ought to be, as old at least as Plato, when he
suggested in The Republic that the things concerning which we hold
opinion, doxa, "both are and are not". That is to say, the dialectic of thesis
and antithesis which Hans Küng and others today find essential to
theological method, as the post-modernists (or Nicholas of Cusa) find it in
philosophy, is dictated pro parte objecti, from the side of the object, of
experience, that is to say. The process of putting together in a judgement
what our abstractions separate extends right up to the final vision, the
"last" judgement which is the absolute idea. Ecumenism, one has long
suspected, is not compatible with finding the "separated" partner
absolutely mistaken. It is a question of bringing his or her and also our
truth to light, where they will be seen not as identical but as
complementary or even, and typically, forming a contradiction for the
understanding which is resolvable for speculative reason in synthesis.

This might seem to afford no firm ground for beginners, no starting-points.

One can indeed suspect that the dogmas and rules of history have
functioned as easier substitutes, or at least as shorthand, for faith properly
so-called. Whatever the function of the so-called Apostles' Creed the Creed
proper was elaborated at Nicaea, like all subsequent definitions, as a way
of taming the endless mental life that faith, faith proper, evoked. What
else but this kind of faith, and not a mere subscribing to documents, could
have been called the principle overcoming the world. It overcomes the
world precisely because it never rests content with the finite but
ceaselessly proceeds towards that which is absolute and perfect, in
philosophy, in social life, in prayer and all over. "Greater things than I shall
you do."

This is not a mere basic trust, though that be a great part of it, enabling
the main activity it names. It is a pressing on, in the confidence that a wall
of separation has been broken down, that precisely the transcendent acts
in our own actions and free decisions. Here we see the fundamental
importance of the Thomistic doctrine of praemotio physica and how
through it alone a future was guaranteed to Christian thought such as the
Molinist alternative would have closed off, despite the superficial
association of the Jesuits of that time with humanism and despite, for that
matter, their preventing the Pope of the day from courageously affirming
the grand Thomistic principle (Congregatio de auxiliis). Such was the price
for keeping Venice Catholic, threatened as it seemed to be by the
preaching of one Paolo Sarpi, otherwise forgotten. Thus we got deism and
Kant. But the future of Thomism lay with Hegel. Yet even this was too
alarming for the guardians of orthodoxy at a time when the Dominican and
classical Augustinian spirit was in virtual eclipse (though of course
everyone fancied himself as Augustinian). And so, especially when faced
with a creative application of Hegel's thought even in Italy, ontologism, the
papacy and its advisers hit upon the ingenious expedient of reviving the
thirteenth century intellectual world in toto, instead of continuing to
develop and perfect ontologism! But life has indeed been breathed into
these dry bones and so, with new appreciation of not merely praemotio
physica but of the truth that God has no real relation with the finite world,
in other words that the finite world is untruth. In praemotio physica the
whole of Hegelianism lies coiled, something one could hardly expect St.
Thomas to come out with in his own immoderately realist day, or even in
those days when condemnation, of liberalism, of "modernism", "laicism"
and God knows what else followed one another. Here then, today, we have
the beginnings of the demystification of faith, so that it can indeed
overcome the world. This process indeed is part of its continually doing so.
The dialectic proceeds, like evolution, that time-bound symbol it has in the
fullness of time invented for itself.

Briefly, God, the absolute, initiates all my initiations. So I am not I. My

freedom is freedom itself. God has no relation to me, just for that reason. I
am that one, the All, though I be part. The world exists entire in my
knowledge of it. Each one, each part is as necessary to this perfect unity
as I am myself, as necessary that is, though differently, as it is to us. This
alone is why, or how, there can be one closer to me that I am to myself
(Augustine), or how one can dwell in me in whom I dwell. "There is a time
when God dwells in the soul and a time when the soul dwells in God" (De
Caussade). The tradition is constant. "The eye with which God sees me is
the eye with which I see him" (Eckhart). Knowledge, finally, of subject and
object, "will vanish away".

Whether this was Hegel's view or what Hegel ought to have said, if anyone
is not sure, we may leave open, following the medieval praxis of
sympathetic interpretation of authorities, which is really idealist. We would
not fall into the realist trap (of seeking the living among the dead) when
considering just absolute idealism.

*************************************************

One watches a TV-series where the plot turns upon plates of a brain-scan
showing, it is claimed, that a patient cannot now have the memory-loss he
has been professing. Peter Geach, in his book on McTaggart, Truth, Love
and Immortality, calls such brain-mind claims "bluff". They are comparable
to the Pythagorean assertion that justice is the number four, where we
cannot understand what is being said. There is no point of contact,
namely, between such brain-references and "my sudden recollection that I
must go to the bank".

One might suspect equal bluff in what Geach is saying, however. The
whole presumption, after all, behind our common understanding of the
widespread Alzheimer's disease is that there is measurable correlation
between such ability to recollect and the observable state of the brain.
This correlation can always be further filled in, in confirmation of the
original presumption which, going back at least to Aristotle, was always
more than a mere well-founded guess. For him, indeed, any knowledge at
all requires the reality known to be present and not merely remembered,
i.e. both object and subject must have a material base.

Endocrinology too, like neurology, encompasses personal affective life in a

quite natural, so to say internal aspiration. To add "to some degree", as
disclaimer, is like falling back on a "god of the gaps" in religious
apologetic. Here God becomes just the name for these gaps, or for the
"implicit" on the far side of finite understanding. Yet hormonal research
continues to explain more and more, narrowing the gaps.

"Hormones rule, O.K." is one reaction to this. But do we want merely to

replace one restrictive explanation with another? We cannot, I suggest. To
rule, hormones must be more, or less, than themselves. They must be a
language, a way of "naming" experience as given in our knowledge, in
consciousness, as God (in Adam) named the creatures, whether one by
one or in groups indifferently for our purposes here.

So if one says "the brain" determines, as source, all conscious life (either
from itself or from what it "makes" of sense-experience indifferently) then
one cannot retain the common-sense apprehension of the brain as part of
the human or animal body. For this too is a pure deliverance of the brain in
that case, while if I cannot know that the body exists then I cannot know
that the brain exists either. Here materialism and idealism in "critical" form
coincide.

In place of existence we have now, in this situation, to speak of conscious

act, since this is unmediated, what corresponds immediately to "the living
brain", as existence does not. This act, activity, might be ours or no one's.
Brain activity cannot guarantee or support, cannot reach through to
knowledge of substance, its own or any at all. In speaking like this,
therefore, in assuming entitlement to make judgements, even as to an all-
determining brain's situation, we reject the thesis implicitly. Together with
substance, nature falls away as intrinsic object of investigation. This
though quantum physics might seem to confirm. We investigate ourselves
in inseparable correlation with "the object". The outside is inside and vice
versa, indifferently since there is no longer either outside or inside. It
becomes a figure of speech, as does speech itself, if we would hand all
over to the brain.

For our consciousness it is plainly natural to construct such a correlate

object, to "objectify", independently of verification. So predication is, as
such, untruth, says Hegel, conscious though of the self-contradiction.

It is not a choice between flesh and spirit, as on the old scheme. They
coincide. The brain paradigm, that is, was just that; nothing more. We do
not reduce spirit to flesh, to "our" mode of apprehension. Nor is flesh
reduced to spirit, as in some idealist scheme. It is its textual expression,
rather. There is a background in the history of dogma, where the manhood
(of the incarnate God) is "taken into" the Absolute so that the latter is not
"converted into" the flesh, as if into a restricting medium (Athanasian
Creed). Flesh is not a restriction but a manifestation standing for itself, as,
in eucharistic theology again, a sign can be what it signifies.

So what the all-determining brain would give us would be something like

"the world as will and idea", purely. To say that the brain determines me to
think the brain need not be inadvertent contradiction but the signal,
rather, that something else is aimed at, obliquely necessarily. As when one
asserts the purest voluntarism one might just as well deny what one is
saying. This was Aristotle's reason for safeguarding predication by
affirming the law of non-contradiction, and of bivalence as between true or
untrue. It was also, this voluntarism, the premise from which Hegel
overturned this philosophy of substance within a world of change.

Today though, in view of what we have said above, it becomes possible to

view materialism as a stage on the road to idealism. In idealism the self
spins the world from itself as much as would an all-determining brain. I,
any I, am universal on both systems. Predication is mere vehicle and finite
categorial condition, as is language itself, for infinite creativity. It thus
gropes its way to the Hegelian notion and beyond, where all predication is
nullified. The old balance is gone, irreparably, as it had to. Matter, for its
part, is non-thinkable and with this materialism agrees, since it makes
matter prior to thought. The materialist thinks materialism all the same.
For this is a consciousness, of brain as source of brain, though this is not
more than pure I, pure subject. He knows, that is, that materialism is a
text, a way of speaking, ideology ultimately.

One cannot though be subject without being essentially related,

correlated. This correlation, what makes subject to be subject, is world, its
contrary, however we construct it. We make the others and they make us,
without beginning or end. Each is necessary, therefore, as each is all in his
all-determining brain or consciousness indifferently. This necessity we
merely call his being, in memory of the lost balance. Being is necessity
linguistically viewed. We have no real need of it. We are or are not,
indifferently, as we are spirits or brains. Spirit, that is, is the overcoming of
ontology and not, therefore, some "soul-thing". Aquinas said rightly that
the being we know is the changeable being of nature. Any other being is
extrapolated analogy, and now we see that we do not know the being
even that he thought we knew. We know, rather, that it is not. Similarly,
the necessary cannot be, have being, since then we could ask, self-
defeatingly, why it is necessary or why any proof of necessity should hold.
Asking why seeks the "reason of being". Without being there is no such
reason, as indeed there was not, by definition, for God. We thus find
ourselves to be "absolute source".

The project here, necessarily implicit, is to subvert language, its rigidity, as

stultifying dialectic. Dialectic first ascends through language. At some
point though, perhaps the penultimate, perhaps in its earliest stage, it
must call language in question, exposing its insufficiency, which is the
insufficiency of knowledge, from the absolute or only true viewpoint. This
critique of knowledge, of saying something about something, focuses on
the illegitimate construction of objects, which is constitutive of knowledge
and which, in W. Benjamin's terms, goes beyond the "naming of the
animals", meaning by naming something transcending the linguistic or
objectifying as constitutive of other-reality, as creation.

Knowledge, therefore, is not reciprocal. It is a finite category, hindering the

exchanges of reciprocal love, where there is no place for speech and any
appearance of predication, e.g. "I love you", is necessarily illusory. "I love
you" is an expression of a caress; but my caress is not the pre-linguistic
expression of the truth that I love you. It is post-linguistic.

Thought of course is not destroyed. Only a certain thought or conception

of thought is destroyed. We come to see that thought, consciousness, is
closer to the reciprocities we call love, harmony. As when we say that to
think of God, of the Absolute, is to be in relation with it, even to bring it
about. This though would mean that we have always been thinking (if this
is what brings God about), each one of us who thinks at all. Any thinker is
thus a necessary being (or non-being) as mutually brought about in this
way. To be posited is to be, at this level. A possible thinker is a real thinker.
A real thinker is an ideality nonetheless. Hence Hegel says that the truths
of Christianity have only to be "imagined" or postulated to take effect and
so we find Blake writing that the imaginations of today are the realities of
tomorrow. This in turn, though, shows how time, its idea, functions, in
ordering purpose or possibility (they are the same) to deed, themselves
the same or merely one. For time is species, appearance, of eternity. We
must see, with Traherne, or St.Paul, that we sit there now, in "the heavenly
places". In this non-reductive but rather ampliative sense it is right to
contemn an "after-life". "The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?"
Indeed, or make the pulp so sweet and the question remains the same in
structure, while which is pulp and which is rind is indifferent again,
depending upon whether we wish to pass from time to eternity or, in
creation, go the other way. It is a circle and so "there is a time when God
dwells in the soul and there is a time when the soul dwells in God."12

This is the point, or should and could be, of Nietzsche's circle. It

transcends repetition because it is an eternal return, like the exitus and
reditus of theology. I do not live my life again, as I get up each morning
again. My life, rather, seen as circular, is eternal. In absolute terms, I was
neither born nor do I die. To say it ever comes back is to say, in a figure
(the circle), that it, the moment, never went away. Again, what "comes
back" is the moment itself, not its repetition or simulacrum. In just this
way is the death or resurrection of Christ represented in the liturgy. In just
this way is each and every moment the uttering of the undivided Word.
The Father is this uttering, the Son this returning, the Spirit their in-
spiration. All is within while, to paraphrase Eckhart, how this thinks me is
how I think this and vice versa. I and the Father are one, said the man. I

12
Cp. J.-P. de Caussade S.J., Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence.
and the Spirit are one, a woman might prefer to say, though we must
conceive a father's motherhood and a mother's fatherhood. In seeing me
you see everything or, again, being has no parts. Conversely, where the
parts are of infinite number, as in perceptions of perceptions, the whole is
in each of them. Only thus is it infinite.

One might ask, is this really the way to go? This self-dismantling of
thought of which such as Chesterton or Pope Paul VI complained? Yes, if
this is produced necessarily out of and by thought itself. Just this was the
point of the Carmelite mystic's distinction between silver (dogma) and
gold (a "dark" knowledge) and we do here enter into an "unknowing",
having suggested, but actually within the dialectic, that there is a final
category beyond absolute knowledge, or that such knowledge is best
called something else. Mysticism and epistemology coincide in one search,
equally practical and theoretical, existential rather. Such self-
consciousness, knowing oneself in knowing another, is of the essence of
thinking, the identity in difference. Deliberately to ward it off is falsity,
bluff indeed.

Actually it is upon this self-interrogation that freedom and democracy rest,

the periodic "Have it your way", recognition of truth as in the subject.
Veritas est in mente, and mind is not a universal. There are styles of
thinking. Hence we suggested a freedom from restraint, a creativeness, as
absolute source, not to be reduced to a "voluntarism" still staying within
the old essentialist paradigm. What can happen at some time does
happen, it was said, even within that absolute subservience to the
temporal mode. Every musical combination possible is destined to fall
upon the ear, every disharmony, as seeking resolution. The drama of
sonata-form, for example, is nothing else, a finite infinite, an infinite finite,
each new face launching every ship that ever was or could be, as every
pair of eyes, every mutual looking, is an absorption, to recall the song, into
the essence and nectar of a Jovian absolute. That too is liberalism, the
affirmation of each by all, of all by each. This is what acceptance of an
ecumenical principle takes on, reserve oneself how one will.

Woman, perhaps, is most apt for this, as feeling herself one with Spirit,
since spirit especially is an all in each, in its very concept, though this be
true too of a principle of common origin (Father) or manifestation and self-
return (Son). The wish to be everything for someone is especially strong in
woman, easily leading to a sense that she could be everything for
whomever she chose. Bitter indeed then is the final casting off, seen as
man's inability to love. He should rather have died first, she cannot help
but think. And indeed the lover too, the male especially, desires to die
then, in love's moment, if he might but die without losing his life finally. In
her arms he wants to die, never go somewhere else, as his body's action
which is passion, or passion in action, love-making, expresses. For here he
returns to the womb which, it is a simple fact, he and anyone never wished
to leave. For the woman though it is life anew, again a circle. It is then a
circle for both and life and death are, surprisingly, the same, fulfilled in
one another, ying and yang. The woman died already in giving her heart.
This is what men call the mystery in woman or, in bitterness or
incomprehension, pseudo-mystery and pretence. It is though a natural
consciousness and cause of being woman, when it is especially strong. For
the difference between the sexes is in degree and not specific. Men have
their mystery too, and women their infidelity, which, however, is but a
name, apart from its own specific context, for the wider view. Each knows
that he or she bears all as being necessary to this all. She would bear the
all, for her part, even if she were indeed but "fair creature of an hour",
impossibly.

So in these rounded contours, which a Picasso might draw as an

arrangement of circles, an apotheosis of circularity, Spirit finds its
definitive shape and unique text, sought and brought forth by the creative
arrow and sufferingly triumphant cross-bow, one with his works, which is
man. Yet man is woman, woman is man, in double and relational identity,
each within the other.

In loving woman we, if men, enter the cave which brought us forth,
adoring with the Magi, while she, again, brings forth each beloved as her
firstborn. This that we adore then, in her, is ourself, absolute, atman. We
have only to look, each reflected in each other's, one another's, eyes,
infinitely. This is the cause of eyes, to be only had, eventually, for each
other, for "you" as the song says. To reject "eye-contact" in principle is to
prefer the empty security of blindness. Eyes are the doors to love's hidden
kingdom, when or, after, as we say, knowledge has vanished away. Only in
that sense it is hidden, as by the insufficiency, the finitude and falsity, of
knowledge of the objectual non-world and its unmatured subject. When I
have become what I am I will no longer be what I was, no longer, because I
was never other than that which I am. It is hate which feels most the pain
of love approaching. "Why then, oh hating love, oh loving hate, oh
anything of nothing first create." Love, that is, is blind, muffled, but only as
seen from the standpoint of knowledge. It finds the pathways to its and
our desire, with "eyes wide shut" as it were. In another's eyes we drown to
the cold, comfortable illusion, are buried and immersed away from it, as
one finding newness of life, in reflection upon reflection for ever. This then
was the mystery as shown above all in man and woman together. But by
mystery here we mean truth and the absolute, implicit as
unconceptualisable in its infinitude of positivity, comprehensible though to
itself and in this sense comprehended, tasted, absorbed by and absorbing
each person.

Here we rejoin, we take up and do not shun, the poetry of the ages. It was
Solomon the wise man who had a thousand and one wives. His wisdom
issued in that and each one of them is she, his wisdom. The three wise
men, too, are one, adoring this that they are, all in each. Love, in the end,
can only love love, itself, than which, therefore, a person is nothing other.
Love speaks, love bids welcome, love sits and eats. The most foolish little
dog is and brings the love which he is and the weight of the whole world,
vehicle of spirit. The text though can in no sense intend itself, as if in
suppositio materialis. We must see through the veil, which is thus as if
ever being rent asunder, while in all that one says the whole is said over,
and over again, revolving in time's mimicry of eternity returning.