Andrew Shanks Hegel and Religious Faith Divided Brain, Atoning Spirit 2011 PDF

HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS
FAITH
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HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS

FAITH
Divided Brain, Atoning Spirit
Andrew Shanks
Published by T&T Clark International

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contents
Desmond versus Hegel: A False Either / Or?

1. The setting
2. Two opposing strategic attitudes to religion-and-politics
3. Desmonds affirmation of agapeic community
4. Hegels political-theological realism
5. Beyond the beautiful soul
6. Was Hegel pious?
7. The uniqueness of the Phenomenology of Spirit
8. Towards the solidarity of the shaken
9. Faith / knowing / faith
1
1
2
4
9
12
16
21
27
31
Desmonds Hegel: A Counterfeit Double?

1. Hegelian grand narrative: theodicy or kakodicy?
2. Schillers dictum, quoted by Hegel:
Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht
3. The hand that wounds is the hand that heals
35
35
38
40
3 The Ideal of Atonement

1. Hegel on Eckhart: There, indeed, we have what we want!
2. Unhappy consciousness? A problem of translation
3. A condition of sheer inner contradiction
4. Luther / Kant / Hegel
5. Desmonds response
45
45
45
49
52
55
4 Aetiology of Unatonement
1. A sieving process
2. What Hegel has inadvertently stumbled upon
3. Dialectic of the cerebral hemispheres
4. A tale of two creations
5. Just a game?
6. McGilchrists story
7. The cause of atonement
59
59
60
61
73
75
77
83
CONTENTS
Hegels Gospel
1. Pathos and solidarity
2. Hegel as strategist
3. Das unglckliche Bewutseyn: the two prime texts
84
84
84
87
6 The Spur: Hegel versus Fichte

1. The significance of Fichte
2. Truth-as-uprootedness
3. The despotism of the Absolute Ego
4. Fichte and Marx
5. Fichte / Spinoza
6. Hegels verdict on both
102
102
103
107
112
114
117
7 Two Non-Christian Alternative Strategies

1. The Hegel who interests me . . .
2. Excursus on Heidegger
3. Excursus on Deleuze and Guattari
120
120
121
136
Hegel Sublated
1. The Holy Spirit in spate
2. Joachim / Eckhart / Hegel
3. A plea for patience
4. Hegel today: from second to third modernity
146
146
148
154
159
Coda
Psalm
166
166
Index
173
vi
1
desmond versus hegel:
a false either / or?
1. The setting
The primary proposition this book seeks to explore is that Hegels thought
constitutes one of the great pinnacles of the Christian theological tradition.
Of course, it is a controversial proposition. Hegel has admirers who, wishing
that he were not in fact as religious as he professes to be, are therefore
tempted to downplay that aspect of his thought. And, at the same time, he
also has plenty of religious detractors. My primary purpose here is to try
and answer the latter. There has never, I think, been a more elegantly
aggressive or better informed attempt at such resistance to Hegelian theology,
as failing to do full justice to the proper truth-potential of popular Christian
faith, than William Desmonds recent book, Hegels God.1 And this, therefore,
is the first stimulus for what I have written here.
I am interested, generally, in comparing what one might call high-intensity
philosophic-poetic strategies for truth-as-openness. That is to say: strategies
for thought, in relation to questions of religion and politics, which systematically prioritize the pursuit of conversational openness over claims to
theoretic correctness. Hegel represents one such strategy. Not everyone fully
recognizes this; some even deny it outright; I want to clarify the sense
in which it is, nevertheless, absolutely the case. Desmond represents an
alternative strategy, likewise prioritizing truth-as-openness in this sense;
and likewise integrated into theology, only in another way. My argument
begins with a comparison of these two. But then, in order to give a more
rounded picture, in Chapter 7 I will further consider how the Hegelian
1
William Desmond, Hegels God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

Two defenders of Hegelian theology who, amongst other things, have already begun
to tackle Desmonds argument are Peter C. Hodgson, in Hegel and Christian Theology
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Martin J. De Nys, in Hegel and Theology
(London & New York: T. & T. Clark, 2009).
HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS FAITH
strategy compares to a couple of anti-theological variants of strategy for

promoting truth-as-openness: on the one hand, that of Martin Heidegger;
on the other hand, that of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari.
Meanwhile, however, the other major stimulus to which I am responding
is of quite a different order. It is the challenge of Iain McGilchrists brilliant
new work, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making
of the Western World, on the philosophic implications of recent developments in neuroscience.2 This I will come to in Chapter 4. McGilchrist is
indeed warmly appreciative of Hegels thought, for the way in which it helps
set the scene for the sort of thinking that he advocates.3 He focuses on the
dialectical interplay between the normal roles of the left and right cerebral
hemispheres; constructs a pioneering grand narrative on that theme. And
in so doing he is led to consider Hegels discussion of das unglckliche
Bewutseyn, the split self of inner servility, which is in fact the key concept
for Hegels philosophical theology as developed in the Phenomenology of
Spirit, and of central importance for the argument I also want to develop.
No doubt, one of the most significant sources of fresh theological thinking
in the near future will be the emergent interaction between theology and
the new science of neuropsychology. In that context, Hegels thought will
surely be a key point of reference. McGilchrist himself largely brackets any
consideration of theology from his argument. Here, I set out to remove those
brackets. Hegel helps to show how.
All the more reason, then I think to challenge the dismissiveness of
Desmonds polemic.
2. Two opposing strategic attitudes to

religion-and-politics
A preliminary formulation: Hegel is the thinker who, with greater energy
than any other, seeks systematically to open Christian theology up to
genuine, receptive conversation, both with its own traditions and with all
the various other traditions of the secular world around. No other thinker has
ever done more to try and expose Christian theology to fresh input; systematically putting the will-to-openness (he calls it Geist, Spirit) right at the
heart of theology; understanding that impulse, at its most generous, to be the
very essence of the truly sacred. He is the great critic of intellectual meanness,
or spiritual suffocation in religion: supremely alert to all such meanness
whether explicit or implicit, taciturn or garrulous in disguise everywhere.
Or is he?
2
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of
the Western World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009).
In the course of his discussion here McGilchrist refers to an earlier text of mine, partly
incorporated into the present work.
DESMOND VERSUS HEGEL: A FALSE EITHER / OR?
Certainly, as we shall see, he is a pioneering critic of the sort of closedmindedness that consists in exalting claims to definitive religious, or
philosophic, truth-as-correctness of any kind including dogmatic scepticism, as represented by Kant over the pursuit of perfect truth-as-openness.
But maybe, there still remains another level of closure that Hegel has not
addressed. Is the Hegelian notion of perfect truth-as-openness perhaps,
after all, too narrow? This, at any rate, is Desmonds view.
Desmond is one of the most distinguished of contemporary continental
philosophers; a splendidly challenging original thinker; and a major authority on Hegel.4 As a religious critic of Hegel, he is akin to Kierkegaard. But he
differs from Kierkegaard, not least by virtue of his much closer engagement
with Hegels actual texts. Hegels God appeared in between the second and
third volumes of his major trilogy: Being and the Between, Ethics and the
Between, and God and the Between.5 To appreciate it fully, one needs to
read it, in the first instance, against that systematic background. Why did he
write it? Chiefly, he tells us, it was out of friendship, because he had been
asked to; at the same time, though, also out of a certain dismay . . . at
Hegels power to infatuate religiously gullible admirers.6 He is concerned
that philosophers with the spiritual ambitions of Hegel pose dangers for
those who are less vigorous spiritually, and more feeble intellectually.7
Desmonds interpretation of philosophic tradition, as a whole, is framed in
terms of a fourfold typology: he distinguishes between thinkers who follow
the univocal, the equivocal, the dialectical and the metaxological ways.8
Roughly speaking, (a) the univocal way presents its results as a definitively
correct encapsulation of community-building wisdom in fixed, trans-historical
formulas. But (b) the equivocal way then dissolves these. In this scheme,
4
6
7
8
Desmond has not always been an out-and-out critic of Hegel. As he, himself, remarks
in Perplexity and Ultimacy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 20:
My first published book was Art and the Absolute. It was generally well received by
the Hegelians. They especially liked my critique of deconstruction, which the deconstructionists did not like. I would now say that for strategic reasons I pulled some
punches about Hegel. I was tired of caricatures of Hegel. It is silly the way Hegel has
been so many times overcome by mediocre minds. All one has to do is grind out a few
clichs from Marx or Heidegger or Derrida; and presto! Hegel is put in his place. I
found this ridiculous, and still find it ridiculous, even though I criticize Hegel. Hence, I
wanted to write a book which gave Hegel a run for his money. (And he subsequently
became President of the Hegel Society of America.)
Being and the Between (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995); Ethics and
the Between (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); God and the Between
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2008).
Hegels God, p. ix.
Ibid., p. 15.
This typology is first systematically developed in Desmond, Desire, Dialectic and Otherness: An Essay on Origins (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987).
And it then pervades his thinking thereafter.
(c) Hegel is the pre-eminent pioneer of the dialectical way, setting out, as he
does, to reframe conversation between the previous two ways in terms of
systematically all-inclusive philosophic community-building grand narrative.
However, Desmond argues the highest truth is (d) that which belongs to the
metaxological way. He puts it like this: I suggest that as dialectic tries to
redeem the promise of univocity beyond equivocity, so the metaxological
tries to redeem the promise of equivocity beyond univocity and dialectic.9
In other words, metaxology re-dissolves what dialectic has put back
together. Thus, he honours Hegel as the thinker whom it seems, above all
others we need to overcome, in order that philosophy shall attain its true
homeland.
As for the spelling out of how this is so, his argument is wide-ranging.
But perhaps the best way to approach it is as a dispute over the possible
authority claims of theological rhetoric in the workings of large-scale church
institutions as such. And then again, also, as a dispute over such claims in
the context of civil religion: both that of the state and that of bottom-up
movements within civil society. Essentially at stake here, is how best to
preserve a proper appreciation for what one might call primary encounter
with the divine; how to keep the truth of that experience from being diluted
by the secondary requirements of political expediency, in general. Hegel
approaches this general problem with one strategy, Desmond with another.
Desmonds strategy is altogether stricter, more restrictive. From his point of
view, the Hegelian strategy is far too lax.
But then, from the Hegelian point of view, Desmonds strategy looks like
a perfectionists option for ultimately futile social marginality; the best made
the enemy of the good.
3. Desmonds affirmation of agapeic community

At the heart of Desmonds polemic is his insistence on drawing the most
emphatic possible distinction between divine agape and human, all too
human, eros. Agape: love, in the sense of an overflowing generosity;
unconditionally given, not according to merit; entirely free of neediness,
and hence ever ready for self-sacrifice. Eros: love, in the sense of hungering
and thirsting for the beloved; the more intense, among mortals, the more
needy it is; typically self-assertive, and seeking to possess what it admires.
Hegel does not focus on this distinction. Agape and eros are Greek
words; he thinks in German, which, like English, lacks any indigenous
equivalent to the pairing. And indeed no one in his day had yet developed
the contrast between them in polemical terms. The first thinker to do so was
Being and the Between, p. 178.
actually the Swedish theologian Anders Nygren in the 1930s.10 Thus, Nygren
sets the Johannine formula from the New Testament, God is agape (1 John
4: 8, 16) over against Plotinus, who, on the contrary, says of the divine One,
He is Himself eros, namely eros towards Himself.11 Of course, for Plotinus,
the eros of the divine One does not spring from any neediness intrinsic to
the One, Himself. But it flows down into the life of mortals; stirs up, and
indwells, the needy eros of mortals for the truth of the One; and so, as it
were, circles back home. This is where Plotinus most radically goes beyond
Plato, for whom the divine is only ever the passive object of eros. Unlike
Plato, Plotinus wants to affirm an active indwelling of the divine within the
human soul. This, one might say, has a similar function to the primordial
Christian affirmation of Gods symbolically incarnated love for humanity:
it feeds defiant dissent against an oppressive social order, by imparting
confidence to the dissident. But, Nygren argues, it does so in a quite opposite
way to that of the gospel, because it is disastrously tainted with a spirit of
egocentricity. He sees the history of Christian theology as an epic struggle
between the New Testament vision of divine agape and the Plotinian vision
of divine eros, infiltrated into the Churchs thinking, above all, through
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Augustine, he complains, systematically
mixes the two in his Latin notion of caritas; and this mixing then sets the
terms for the whole mediaeval tradition. Martin Luther is the real hero
of Nygrens narrative. For it is only with Luther, he thinks, that the New
Testament truth is, for the first time, decisively unscrambled from the false
accretions of Greek philosophy.
Desmond, for his part, develops a rather different argument, without
reference to Nygren. Unlike Nygren, he is not particularly interested in
Luther. And he also differs from Nygren in his willingness to entertain at
least some notion of divine erotics.12 However, it remains quite a limited
notion, as his critique of Hegel, above all, demonstrates. Thus, by divine
erotics Desmond simply means a revelation of God as being, yes, in love
with creation, passionate for its good, zealous for the realization of its promise and integral wholeness; but, nevertheless, still holding aloof from the
messy conflicts of actual, this-worldly, politically compromising, eros-fortruth.13 He approves Plotinus polemic against Gnosticism in Ennead 2. 9,
inasmuch as Plotinus there repudiates the Gnostics sheer disgust at the
materiality of the material world as a whole. (Nygren, by contrast, is only
10
11
12
13
Nygrens original Swedish work, Den kristna krlekstanken genom tiderna: Eros och
Agape appeared in two volumes, 1930 and 1936. In English: Agape and Eros (trans.
Philip S. Watson; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
Plotinus, Enneads VI. 8. 15. Nygren discusses Plotinus in Agape and Eros Part 1,
chapter 6.
God and the Between, p. 162.
Ibid., p. 126.
ever concerned to attack Plotinus.) And he is not necessarily unhappy with

theological interpretations of the Song of Songs, such as those of St Bernard
or St John of the Cross: reading that book as metaphor for the impassioned
intensity of ideal mystical encounter between God and the individual soul.
And yet for him, the truth-potential of such thinking is purely aesthetic. It is
an affirmation of sheer delight in the existence of creation that is all.
He rejects any notion of God indwelling human eros-for-truth as a moral, or
solidarity-building, impulse. For (in this he would agree with Nygren) what
God morally and politically indwells is human agape, alone.
The Hegelian doctrine of Spirit represents a far more expansive notion of
divine erotics. Indeed, Spirit is precisely Hegels term for God indwelling
the rational-erotic human impulse towards truth-as-openness in all its forms,
moral and political as well as aesthetic. What Spirit inspires is not only selfless aesthetic delight in creation. It is also the inspiration of self-assertive
moral struggle, solidarity-building campaigns, for freedom and for justice.
Desmond repudiates Hegelian theology, fundamentally, because he mistrusts
the element of sanctified human self-assertion it thus allows. He is quite
intransigent in this regard. Wherever there is any element of human self-assertion, there, for him, God is straightaway excluded.
What counts for Hegel, on the other hand, is just that we should be opened
up to fresh insight, fresh conversational receptivity. Wherever we are
opened up in that sense, in Hegels view, there God is; there Spirit is at work.
From this point of view, self-assertion is only problematic insofar as it has
the effect of closing down thought; that is to say, where it is the mere selfassertion of vanity. Spirit, to be sure, dissolves self-assertive vanity:
eros-for-truth overcoming eros-for-delusion. But, insofar as our thinking is
closed down by external repression, Spirit, as Hegel understands it, also
inspires other, countervailing forms of rational-erotic self-assertion, by way
of defiance.
What, in general, are we to make of political movements against tyranny
that combine defiant rational-erotic self-assertion with theological rhetoric?
In other words: movements driven by the sort of eros for freedom and
justice which is expressed in the cry, To this I am entitled, to this we are
entitled, in Gods name? It would seem that, in Desmonds view, any such
cry would have to be judged as taking the name of God in vain. For God is
agape, alone. And agape never asserts its own entitlement. The dynamic
evoked by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit culminates in what he calls
absolute knowing. Of course, almost all readers nowadays will tend to
recoil from this phrase, put off by the apparent extravagance of its self-assertion nothing, perhaps, could more vividly indicate what a different
intellectual world Hegel inhabited from ours! I would, indeed, urge that
his thinking not be dismissed just because his terminology has fallen out
of fashion, and feels a bit odd now. However, Desmonds repudiation of
the Hegelian ideal clearly runs far deeper. For what Hegel calls absolute
6
knowing is, not least, the knowing of what one is truly entitled to, by way
of freedom and justice. And, moreover, it is a knowing which lays claim to
that entitlement with absolute confidence in Gods name. Desmonds
basic objection is to any such defiant invocation of God.
Again, let us carefully differentiate the two forms of truth: truth-ascorrectness and truth-as-openness. The former is the truth of accurate
representations. But the latter is the truth of attentive presence. Truth-ascorrectness is a quality intrinsic to well-framed propositions, well-informed
opinions, and well-constructed arguments, considered in abstraction,
regardless of context. By contrast, truth-as-openness expresses a quality of
character: skill in listening, wise judgement. It depends, precisely, on the
ability to recognize how meaning shifts as the context varies. The truth
of what Hegel calls absolute knowing is, first and foremost, meant to be
the very fullest possible truth-as-openness. Thus, it is an ideal know-how:
knowing how to discriminate authentic, fresh thought thought freshly
responsive to fresh experience from any mere recycling, even the most
sophisticated, of ideas gone stale, or no longer well connected with actual
reality. The Phenomenology as a whole is a survey of attitudinal blockages
to fresh thought; attitudes that, insofar as they are articulate at all, are liable
to take shelter behind clich. Absolute knowing is just what finally remains
when all of these blockages are dismantled. To the extent that the blockages
are reinforced by the prejudices of the human herd as such, to dismantle them
clearly requires a great gift of self-confidence. And hence the provocative
belligerence of the terminology: absolute knowing. However, this is by
no means to be misunderstood, as though Hegel were intent on rendering
absolute what he himself has written, the mere form of his actual argument. There is no wildly arrogant claim, here, to definitive truth-as-correctness
for this particular work of theoretical representation. He is not talking here
about a specific formal doctrine. Rather, absolute knowing is an ideal
substantive state of mind, which may come to all sorts of different formal
expression in different intellectual contexts. It is the recognition of authentic
inner freedom as a capacity for truth-as-openness; of true justice as the
ideal social set-up for promoting that capacity. And inasmuch as such
knowing is not only an ideal species of know-how but also a knowing-that,
what it knows is, very simply, that freedom and justice in this sense are
sacred entitlements.
For Hegel, in effect, to know what this means is to know God. But
Desmond thinks otherwise: to know God is, on the contrary, to know the
absolute difference between eros and agape, and to give ultimate privilege
to the self-effacement of agape, over the self-assertion of eros. Hegel does
not actually argue to the contrary Desmond represents a challenge he
never encountered. But it is certainly true that he does not focus on the
distinction that Desmond considers all-important. And, therefore, Desmond
designates Hegels God an erotic absolute. He argues that Hegels theology
7
is fundamentally incompatible with the true Johannine vision of God as

agape. It is, he concludes, a mere counterfeit double of that true vision.
Hegel sets out to define the ground rules for a very extensive mixing of
religion and politics. Desmond is much more restrictive in this regard. He
identifies the cause of theological truth, exclusively, with agapeic community.
That is to say, the sort of community that derives from an offer of unconditional generosity; from the gratitude this evokes, and nothing else. For my
part, I both agree and disagree. In The Other Calling, going beyond the New
Testament concept of the priesthood of all believers I actually sought to
develop a concept of the priesthood of all thinkers, which does indeed have
quite a direct connection with the ideal of agapeic community.14 This was
by way of response to Leo Strauss, and to the whole Platonist tradition of
philosophic politics, of which Strauss was the great twentieth-century
historian and advocate. Philosophic politics is what follows from a basic
identification of the cause of truth with the political self-assertion of
philosophers as a social class, sharing a vested interest in certain forms
of educational privilege. So it is a project of solidarity building among
philosophers; a thinking through of strategy (with what sorts of other
people shall we philosophers ally ourselves, and how?) to maximize the
philosopher-classs collective political influence. But philosophy, for this
tradition, is conceived just the way Plato originally conceived it, in erotic
terms: as the most sophisticated mode of eros-for-truth. I argued, against
Strauss, in favour of priesthood as the prime alternative model to philosophy
in that erotic sense, for the moral vocation inherent in intellectuality. And
one might indeed well say that the prime difference between Platonic philosophy and priesthood, at any rate in the Christian sense, is precisely the
ideal orientation of priesthood, unlike philosophy, towards agapeic community as the highest moral good.15 Thus, the true priest seeks to organize
agape, a spirit of sheer generosity, dispelling all forms of class-distinction
this is the exact opposite to the political activity of the Straussian-Platonist
philosopher who seeks to uphold the corporate self-interest of his or
her privileged social class, essentially bonded together by a shared mode of
intellectual eros. Certainly I would share Desmonds mistrust of sacralized
political self-assertion in the case of Platonism: that is, the self-assertion of
the privileged philosophic elite, as such. And yes, if that were all that Hegel
in fact intended, then I would be just as critical of Hegel as he is.
But where, on the other hand, is there any actual human organization that
is exclusively an embodiment of agapeic community? For a brief while, here
and there, major social movements have on occasion erupted with a large
14
15
The Other Calling: Theology, Intellectual Vocation and Truth (Oxford: Blackwell,
2007).
C.f. Desmond, Consecrated Thought: Between the Priest and the Philosopher, in
Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, 2. 2, Spring 2005.
measure of agapeic enthusiasm in their make-up. The original Jesusmovement is one obvious example. And Desmond himself also refers to the
early Franciscans.16 These, however, have been rare and short-lived phenomena, swiftly mutating into something much more ambiguous. To be sure,
as a Christian priest I do see my job, very much, as an attempt to help
maximize the element of agapeic community in the life of my church.
However, I know that this can only be one element, among many others, in
the spiritual constitution of an effective church. For a church to be effective,
it needs, not least, to hook the gospel onto various forms of corporate eros:
family loyalties, class loyalties, patriotic loyalties. And should I therefore,
as a priest, repudiate, as being altogether ungodly, things that are clearly
necessary in order for a church to be effective?
Desmond develops no ecclesiology. I must say that, to me, this looks like
quite a big hole in his thinking. But one cannot develop an ecclesiology
looking only to the ultimate good. Ecclesiology has to do with what, in a
particular historic context, is effectively possible, by way of institutional
church life. Hence, in the short term, it must always tend to mean opting
for the lesser of several evils. Desmonds perfectionism appears to close
the whole proper conversation-area of ecclesiology down. His meditation
on agape opens up another conversation area that Hegel ignores. Surely,
though, we need both conversation-areas opened up: both the area that Hegel
ignores and the area that Desmond ignores. For is not the best theology, in
general principle, that which does most to open everything up to serious
questioning?
4. Hegels political-theological realism

By contrast to Desmond, Hegel develops a very much fuller ecclesiology. He
is a Lutheran, albeit of a different kind from Nygren. And what he chiefly
values in his Lutheran heritage is its State-Church model of organization,
which minimizes the risk of corporate egoism in the behaviour of the church
institution, on its own behalf. That is to say: the sort of corporate egoism
which Lutherans and Anglicans have always been inclined to see at work
both in the Roman Catholic Church, on the one hand, and especially in
Calvinist churches, on the other.
A State Church, however, is surely only justifiable to the extent that it, for
its part, succeeds in restraining the corporate egoism of the State, equally in
relation to individual citizens and in relation to other states. Hegel was a
consistent advocate of greater respect for the civil liberties of the individual,
and for the interests of civil society as a whole. Yet, whereas in early
16
Hegels God, pp. 5556. Desmonds most extensive (but still largely example-free)
discussion of agapeic community, as such, is in Ethics and the Between, chapter 16.
nineteenth-century Germany such liberal, anti-establishment attitudes tended

to be associated with an enthusiastic pan-German nationalism, he, in fact,
fiercely repudiated this. Whipped up by the traumatic violence of the
Napoleonic Wars, the German nationalism of his day was not only antiFrench; it was also, often, quite poisonously antisemitic. The student
fraternities seethed with such sentiment. Hegel loathed it. In that context,
his philosophic Lutheranism was not least a project for securing the State
against nationalist hysteria. His ideal Church was primarily the institutional
sponsor of responsible citizenship, of the most sober kind. Nor was he only
responding here to the threat that he foresaw in the fervour of pan-German
nationalism. At the same time, he was also thinking of what had happened
to the original idealism of the French Revolution. To the end of his life he
continued to drink a toast on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille.
He had himself been 18 when that happened. But the nightmare events of
the Terror which followed were to him a moment of revelation: highlighting
the need for institutions effectively reinforced with maximum theological
authority, to restrain the libido dominandi of rulers and the unruly passions
of excited crowds. Anything that effectively serves this purpose, by harnessing
popular-erotic demands for freedom and justice to the true work of
civilization, is for him a work of God.
Desmond accuses him of thereby devaluing the currency of God-talk. But
take, for example, the case of South Korea today. On the one hand, compare
the public life of South Korea, as a whole, with the gospel ideal of the kingdom of God: plainly, there is little reason for its citizens to be complacent.
Compare it, on the other hand, with the truly God-forsaken public life of
North Korea. If I were a South Korean I think I would thank God that at
least my world was not like that! Desmonds theology is exclusively focused
on the first sort of comparison; Hegels, shaped by chastening memories of
the French Revolution, is focused far rather on the second. Why, though,
should either truth exclude the other?
What is reasonable is realised, Hegel famously declares in his Preface to
the Philosophy of Right, and what is realised is reasonable.17 And he repeats
the formulation in his Introduction to the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences.18 Was vernnftig ist: T. M. Knox translates this as what is
rational, but I am with William Wallace in preferring what is reasonable,
because of the more conversational, less abstractly theoretic, feel of that
rendering. (Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord, Isaiah 1: 18.)
Was wirklich ist: both Knox and Wallace render wirklich as actual.
However, I prefer realised, with its suggestion of real as opposed to
17
18
Hegel, Philosophy of Right (trans. T. M. Knox; Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1952), p. 10.
Hegel, Encyclopaedia 6; that is, Hegels Logic (trans. William Wallace; Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 9.
10
illusory, beyond mere superficial appearances. Hegels double statement of

identity, between what is reasonable and what is realized, is what he calls a
speculative proposition. That is to say, it is one which essentially serves to
render its key terms problematic: markers for a major task of thought,
still to be undertaken. In this case, vernnftig and wirklich are two terms
qualifying divine truth. Their conjunction, as such, is meant to signal the
proper path to a deeper understanding of both, in that regard. Thus,
(a) what is reasonable is Hegels term, here, for what I am calling perfect
truth-as-openness, nothing less. And (b) What is realised is his term for
the deepest moral meaning of history as a whole, the deliverances of divine
revelation understood as pan-historic. How, on the one hand, are we to
understand the full practical requirements of perfect truth-as-openness; that
is, of what is reasonable? Hegel answers: look, in the light of that question,
at history as a whole. See how what is reasonable is realised in actual
historic practice. And how, on the other hand, are we to understand the
deepest meaning of history what [of God] is realised in the traditions
we have received beyond superficial appearances, the mere flashy show of
ephemeral glory? Again, look at each historic phenomenon in the light
of the question, How does this either further, or impede, the demands of
perfect truth-as-openness? In other words: look for the realisation of the
reasonable. This is the core principle of Hegelian theological method.
Desmond is less interested in the conjunction of what is reasonable (in
the sense of that which perfect truth-as-openness requires) with what has, as
a matter of large-scale history, been realised, than in its conjunction with
the barely historic, or one might perhaps say the essentially trans-historic
ideal of perfect agape. Both thinkers are at one in their identification of the
highest truth of philosophy (was vernnftig ist) not with a quality of
abstract theory, but with a quality of existence in what Desmond likes to call
the between truth-as-openness. But Desmond sets himself to evoke that
ideal, poetically, at its most intransigent. Hegel, by contrast, is preoccupied
precisely with its realisation: actual historic examples of its being enshrined
in effective, and durable, forms of organization.
Certainly, these are very different approaches. Yet I see no good reason to
suppose, as Desmond does, that we are faced with an absolute either / or
choice between them. Rather, I would argue that they are to be seen as two
distinct stages in a single process of disambiguation.
Thus, divine revelation begins with God reaching out to us, where we are,
in our natural condition of fallenness; and therefore descending deep into
the realms of ambiguity, that being where we for the most part live. For only
so can the love of perfect truth-as-openness begin to insinuate itself into our
lives, by hooking onto all sorts of other, otherwise unregenerate interests:
the self-assertive impulses of corporate eros, that is, ones loyalty to ones
family, to ones class, to ones people. Popular religion, at its best, enacts this
hooking-up. In themselves, however, the common tenets of popular religion
11
are utterly ambiguous, with equal potential to serve as vehicles either for the
profoundest truth, or else for the most disastrous opposite. Everything all
depends, here, on the moral character of the one affirming them. Much
theology is simply content to explicate the syntax of a particular orthodoxy
and the historic origins of its vocabulary; and for many people today that
seems to be the sole meaning of the word theology. But then there is the
quite different sort of theology that both Hegel and Desmond represent.
Namely: disambiguating theology. Which does not indeed do away with
what is ambiguous in popular religious tradition; but seeks, rather, to render
the ambiguity explicit, and so to inhabit it with full awareness. Again, such
theology is quite unambiguous in its prioritizing the pursuit of truth-asopenness over any attempt to specify, and to defend, some supposed form of
sacred truth-as-correctness. Hence it sets itself to spell out what is required
in order for religious belief to become true in practice, as a testimony to true
openness. There are, though, at least two distinct layers of ambiguity to be
stripped away. Hegel is concerned with one layer; Desmond, with another.
Hegelian theology is concerned with the initial ambiguity between the true
form of faith which is an appropriation of ever-deeper self-questioning
thoughtfulness of every kind, and the false form, which in doctrinal formulation may perhaps be identical, but which on the contrary looks for easy
answers, whether those of easy-going respectability or those of bigotry.
The Phenomenology of Spirit systematically opens up the sort of thinking
needed in order to dispel such first-layer ambiguity. Yet, after that first
layer has been sifted through, there still remains a second layer. The further
question then arises, the question with which Desmond is primarily
concerned: to what extent is the sort of faith that Hegel affirms inspired
by sheer agape, to what extent by a mere eros-for-truth, alone? And
Desmonds basic complaint seems to me quite valid. In Hegels writing,
this remains unclear.
5. Beyond the beautiful soul

In my view, however, theology requires disambiguation on both levels.
The two modes of thinking involved are essentially complementary.
Desmond says no, it is either / or. But the basic trouble with Desmonds
intransigence is that it tends to introduce another sort of ambiguity into
his own project. For one can very well imagine Hegel responding with
the counter-question: to what extent does Desmonds lyrical idealization of
agapeic community, in the end, perhaps mask a mere shrinking back from
the hard, but nevertheless necessary, work of actual politics? Or, to put it in
Hegels own terminology as developed in the Phenomenology: to what extent
is Desmonds theology trapped within the limitations of the beautiful soul?
This being Hegels term for any sort of unbending ethical perfectionism that
12
so rules out compromise as, in the end, to render organized, politically

effective solidarity-action more or less impossible.
The phrase itself, the beautiful soul, derives from the world of contemporary German novels, and literature generally.19 Book Six of Goethes novel
Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship, for instance, is entitled Confessions of
the Beautiful Soul; the hero of Jacobis novel Woldemar is likewise called a
beautiful soul; and Hegel may well have had Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde
partly in mind, as well. In the Phenomenology, the beautiful soul is a very
general species of mentality, universally possible, by no means confined to
any one particular historic sub-culture. But in the context of Hegels own
biography it is not implausible to suggest that this passage may reflect his
critical response to the general world view of his friend, Hlderlin and
perhaps, at the same time, to that of Novalis. Both Novalis and Hlderlin
are great poetic celebrants of high-minded, grieving yet enthusiastic,
spiritual solitude: precisely, the essential attitude of the beautiful soul. In the
twentieth century the prime heir to Hlderlin especially, from this point of
view, is the later Heidegger. Is not Desmonds thought, however, also very
much another possible case in point?
Let us look at Hegels discussion of this phenomenon, or rather this set
of phenomena, as a whole: he considers it in three very general contexts.
Thus, the first context is where such thinking may feel most at ease.20 Here,
to begin with, we see the beautiful soul at its crudest: nowadays, I would
guess, a not untypical reader of books on the Body, Mind and Spirit shelves
of bookshops. So Hegel starts by picturing a world of self-consciously freespirited moral individuals who are all united in holding fast to an overriding
principle, that as far as possible none should ever judge another. These individuals are, thus, quite unquestioningly respectful of each others claims
to be guided by the inscrutable inner dictates of conscience. But this is only
possible because they have no real interest, at all, in ever organizing together,
to achieve any particular sort of moral goal. Since they do not want to
collaborate very far, they have no need for any more demanding sort of
consensus. Rather, their sole concern is with making a beautiful show of
moral seriousness, talking it up:
The [whole] inspiration of their community, its [sole] substantive project, is
[no more than] the mutual assurance of their conscientiousness and good
intentions; their rejoicing over the purity of their inter-relationships; the
19
20
See Allen Speight, Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapter 4.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), pp. 397400, paras. 65558; The Phenomenology of Mind (trans. J. B. Baillie,
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1910), pp. 66367.
13
refreshing of themselves in the glory of knowing, expressing, cherishing

and fostering such a quite delightful state of affairs.21
This community no longer has any sense of there being a will of God (or
any non-theistic equivalent) that might do anything other than endorse
the deliverances of each ones essentially private conscience. And, as a result,
it cannot properly function as a community. For the sort of shared, more
substantive convictions on which the life of a genuine moral community
depends have all evaporated into abstraction. Have these new age beautiful
souls achieved true freedom of thought (in Hegels terminology here,
have they broken free from das unglckliche Bewutseyn)? No, says Hegel.
They might appear to have done so, in that they are no longer trapped in
servile submission to traditional moral prejudice, as such; opting for the
anti-traditional rhetoric of following ones own inner light (the light of
conscience) instead. But true freedom of thought also means being set free
from the fear of being judged, which still inhibits them. The mentality in
which they are stuck
lives in dread of tarnishing the radiance of its inner being, by taking
any action in the world. So, to preserve its purity of heart, it flees from
contact with reality; persists in self-willed impotence.22
This preoccupation with not being exposed to critical, perhaps hostile, judgement is, after all, profoundly antithetical to authentic truth-as-openness.
Then however, in phase two of the argument, Hegel goes on to consider
the beautiful soul in, potentially, a much more thoughtful form. Here it
becomes the expression of a critical response to other peoples political
initiatives.23 Whereas the determining characteristic of phase one was a simple fear of being criticized, the beautiful soul of phase two is characterized,
far more, by the sheer aggression with which he, or she, judges all who, in a
broad sense, act politically. Such a thinker lacks the necessary wherewithal
for an adequate (political) critique of anything tinged with the apolitical
complacency of phase one; but is, on the other hand, ferociously judgemental of politics, in general. Desmond, as he attacks Hegel for admitting
such a large measure of concern for actual political effectiveness into
theology, might well be considered an example of what Hegel pre-emptively
has in mind. Indeed, this category surely includes both Desmond and
Kierkegaard, for instance; formidable thinkers, operating on quite a different
level from phase one.
21
22
23
The translations here are my own. For this passage: c.f. Miller, p. 398, Baillie, p. 664.
C.f. Miller, p. 400, Baillie, p. 666.
Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 40007, paras. 65968; The Phenomenology of Mind,
pp. 66776.
14
The second-phase beautiful soul, as Hegel portrays it, suffers an extreme

allergic reaction to what he or she calls the hypocrisy endemic to politics.
Namely: the element of egoism more or less inevitably mixed into the
rational-erotic impulses of political ambition; which tactical prudence, on
the whole, requires the skilful politician, so far as possible, to dress up
as disinterested idealism. This moral charge of hypocrisy mutates, in
Desmonds critique of Hegel, into the theological charge that Hegels God
is counterfeit. But I can well imagine Hegel, with equal force, identifying
that charge with the outlook of the second-phase beautiful soul. And here,
therefore, we can also see Hegels response. It appears from the interaction
which he now goes on to sketch between the second-phase beautiful soul, at
this point also called das allgemeine Bewutseyn, and its politically engaged
antagonist, das bse Bewutseyn. In literal English, that is to say: between
the universal consciousness (utterly shunning egoistic self-interest, to
seek the universal good) and the in part ironically self-confessed evil
consciousness. Or better, I think: between the moral purist and the sinner.
Thus, the sinner begins by responding with outraged polemical harshness to
the moral purist, who appears in practice to repudiate all real engagement
in politics, somewhat as follows: you accuse me of hypocrisy, but it seems
to me that, in another sense, you are the hypocrite. For yours is (as Hegel
puts it) the hypocrisy which wants to have its judging taken as equivalent
to an actual deed, and which, instead of proving its honesty in action, tries
to do so by a mere uttering of fine sentiments.24
How is genuinely respectful conversation to be opened up between these
two warring parties, both of whom thus accuse the other of hypocrisy?
Both, Hegel suggests, need to acknowledge the element of justice in the
others critical point of view. In phase two, the sinner eventually does initiate
this: freely and regretfully confessing the element of hypocrisy, in the moral
purists sense of the word, liable to infest any sort of rational-erotic, political
enterprise. Yes, says the politically minded sinner, it is true; I am in collusion
with a great deal of what you call hypocrisy. I recognize that the collusion
is ugly; I can only plead that it seems to me to be inescapable, if I am to
achieve what I have set myself to achieve; and I will try to be as honest as
I can in acknowledging the reality. But, as Hegel tells the story, the moral
purist, at first, refuses to reciprocate. He, or she, remains hard-hearted: will
not acknowledge the element of hypocrisy in the sinners quite different
sense of the word which is also liable to infest moral purism. This hardheartedness is, in fact, self-defeating. For the moral purist really does want to
help make the world a better place and how can that ever be accomplished,
without at least some serious engagement in the world of politics, which
such hardness of heart renders impossible? Phase two of the Hegelian
narrative, therefore, culminates in a symbolic collapse of the hard-hearted
24
15
individual, who becomes disordered to the point of madness, wastes away

in yearning, succumbs to consumption.25 So Hegel (himself at this point
very much in the role of the self-confessed sinner, addressing other sinners)
metaphorically urges compassion for the self-defeating moral purist. This
metaphoric gesture of compassion may well be found infuriating, and is
perhaps a bit of a distraction. (He is very likely thinking of Hlderlin.
But many beautiful souls, in my observation, remain in the most robust
health!) Nevertheless, the offer remains: let us each, the sinner says, confess
the essential one-sidedness of our own point of view.
In phase three, then, that is what happens: both parties confess, and each
now also forgives the other their one-sidedness. Judge not, that you be not
judged, says Jesus (Matthew 7: 1, Luke 6: 37). Whereas the beautiful souls of
phase one will want to affirm this as a simple injunction against all judging
of others, here the Saviour is understood, on the contrary, as affirming a
generous readiness to be judged, on the grounds that such readiness alone
confers a proper right to judge. And this, for Hegel, is the great breakthrough
to the domain of what he calls absolute Spirit. That is, to the proper
content of popular religion. It is the great breakthrough, inasmuch as
popular religion is uniquely capable of founding genuine, open-to-all community, even while at the same time preserving a real point of access to
the very highest, most demanding ethical ideal, for each individual as
such: thereby reconciling the two sides. Insofar as the ethos of the popular
religious community truly celebrates a generous readiness to be judged,
the awkward trans-political intransigence of the moral purist can after all
be accommodated, as others in the community will not resist it, but will
honour its prophetic integrity. But if the moral purist is equally submissive
to judgement, then such a community may just as well, also, accommodate
the political realism of the self-professed sinner.
6. Was Hegel pious?

Desmonds implacable critique of Hegels theology includes a certain
element of ad hominem argument. He asks, Was Hegel pious? What quality
of actual lived faith does his theology express? It is, Desmond acknowledges,
a difficult question to answer, a cheeky query to put. Cheeky, because it will
be said that this has no objective philosophical importance. Difficult, since
Hegel was an enigmatic thinker, and often masked as a human being.26
Nevertheless, when it comes to fundamental questions of theology, the lifecontext of ideas can scarcely be ignored.
25
26

Hegels God, p. 13.
16
Was Hegel pious? Well, of course, it all depends on what is meant by

pious. Desmond, for his part, clearly means that basic predisposition to
agape which, along with intelligence and learning, is, as he would see it, the
essential inspiration of good religious thinking. It is a little odd these days to
find the word used in such an un-ironic fashion, but let us accept this usage.
Why, Desmond wonders, does Hegel fail to appreciate the significance of
agape? In the end, he suspects, it is simply because he lacked the necessary
sheer sweetness of character, the piety needed.
It seems that Hegel did have many of the virtues that go to make a good
politician. In particular, he had a considerable capacity for friendship.
Surrounded by friends, he relaxed easily, could be affable, and enjoyed
teasing and being teased; he liked a good card game, of LHombre or Whist,
and chatting with quite non-intellectual folk. At the same time, he was
unstinting in his loyalty to his friends. I think especially of Eduard Gans, the
young jurist who, despite his undoubted brilliance but because he was
Jewish and a standard-bearer for the cause of Jewish emancipation had
to wage a protracted struggle to get himself accepted as a professor in the
Berlin law faculty, against fierce resistance from the antisemitic head of the
faculty, F. K. von Savigny. (In the end Gans succeeded, but only after having
accepted baptism as the necessary price.) Hegel battled for Gans, as he
typically did for all his friends. And his loyalty towards them was well
reciprocated. During his period as Professor of Philosophy in Berlin, from
1818 to his death in 1831, the Hegelians became a tightly bonded group.
The one political skill Hegel altogether lacked was that of effective
oratory. As a public speaker, he had no popular charm. His lectures were
rich in substance, but awkward and halting in delivery, to an extreme degree.
Clearly, therefore, he was not a gifted public performer of piety, in the way
that his great colleague in the theology faculty, Schleiermacher was. Perhaps
this was part of the reason why the two men did not get on. Lacking the
skills of a good orator, Hegel seems to have mistrusted such giftedness. For
the gifted orator may be tempted to rest content, theologically, with what
has most immediate effect in rhetorical terms; but the resultant theology is
surely bound to remain mired in ambiguity.
That he was, nevertheless, an effective political operator was not only
because he made friends; but also because he was unafraid to make enemies.
As a polemical writer, Hegel could be highly sarcastic as indeed Desmond
also is, towards him. But when (let us take the example of the Philosophy of
Right) the targets of Hegels sarcasm are the ultra-reactionary, but very well
connected, apologist for aristocratic bully-politics, K. L. von Haller and
the antisemitic demagogue, J. F. Fries, this is perhaps not inappropriate.
Undeniably, there was a streak of bitterness in Hegels nature, mixed with
an arrogant aloofness towards those he did not trust. He had been obliged
to wait a long time before finally attaining the properly remunerative job
in a university that he had always craved. Up to the age of 46 he had been,
17
in succession, house tutor to two bourgeois families, an unpaid lecturer, a

newspaper editor, and a secondary school headmaster; all the while seeing
rivals whom he despised being appointed to university posts before him. His
ego had been badly chafed by the experience.
Was Hegel pious? He was a caustic critic of kitsch piety, both religious
and nationalistic. My admiration for him is not unrelated to my admiration
for the wonderfully caustic prophecy of Amos, that tremendous breakthrough moment, the very oldest literary work of Hebrew prophecy.27 In the
book of Amos, YHWH, God of Israel, denounces the conventional piety of
his people for its superficiality: here for the first time ever, in any literature,
we encounter a God who refuses to be flattered. And I think it is the same
God who has inspired Hegel to write the Phenomenology of Spirit. Was
Amos pious? If so, it was a piety beyond piety:
I hate, I despise your feasts,
And I take no delight in your solemn assemblies,
says God, through this prophet.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings
I will not accept them,
and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (Amos 5: 2124)
There is a gap of more than two and a half millennia between this unprecedented utterance and the Phenomenology of Spirit, and the form of Gods
address to us has, it is true, somewhat evolved over that period. Unlike
Amos, Hegel does not just denounce. Amos appears to be a second-phase
beautiful soul, pure and simple. Hegel is philosophical spokesman for the
chastened sinner. So he frames a way of continuing fully to belong to the
community of Gods worshippers while nevertheless gaining maximum critical distance from the inevitable ambiguity of that communitys thinking.
But what is it that this critical distance is meant to preserve? I would see it,
not least, as preserving proper access to something like the incandescent
rage for justice and righteousness that drives the prophet Amos.
Again, Desmond is suspicious of the way in which the argument of the
Phenomenology culminates in an ideal so belligerently termed absolute
knowing. Hegel, he writes,
27
See for example The Other Calling, chapter 10.
18
was an anxious man but also one who had a need not only to be right,
but the need to know that he was right. His philosophical desire for
the unity of truth and self-certainty, as in the Phenomenology, betrays
this quite revealingly.28
And, to back this suspicion up, he cites evidence from Terry Pinkards biography. Thus, Pinkard writes of Hegel the elder statesman, that
his ill health, his anxiety about his health, and his own very typical
self-assuredness about the rightness of his cause made him more and
more imperious and domineering, even to his friends . . . Varnhagen
von Ense [a loyal friend], in fact, sadly recalled Hegels comportment
in his last couple of years as being wholly absolutistic, how in meetings of the board of the Jahrbcher [the Hegelian journal] he was
becoming more difficult and more tyrannical as time went on. In his
outbursts, he would dress down even his good friends as if they were
children being scolded, something everyone concerned found both
embarrassing and painful to behold.29
Desmond omits the poignant little story that Pinkard then goes on recount,
of how one day
after one of Hegels explosions, Varhagen von Ense offered his hand to
Hegel to let him know that he still honoured him and considered him
his friend; [and] Hegel, obviously moved by this gesture, his eyes filled
with tears, instead of merely taking von Enses hand, embraced him.
As Pinkard remarks,
he clearly was seeking some kind of reconciliation with some of the
people he had treated so haughtily, and he was clearly, worried and
stressed as he was, having a difficult time doing so.30
But yes, there is I think some reason to worry about the possible contamination, at any rate, of Hegels later thought by a certain excessive
will-to-control.
The University of Berlin, when Hegel went there, was still a new institution. He was, after Fichte, only its second Professor of Philosophy. It was a
pioneering institution in the renaissance of German higher education during
28
29
30
Hegels God, p. 14.

Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
pp. 62425.
Ibid.
19
this period. After a long decline of the older universities, and the disappearance of many, a new German university world was just beginning to emerge.
Hegel looked to a future in which philosophy would be the primary discipline determining the general ethos of that new world. And he dreamed of
establishing his own work as a dominant influence on the future teaching of
philosophy in Germany. So he set out to construct a systematic curriculum
for this purpose, in his three volume Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences and in his various lecture series. The project failed; it fell apart as soon
as Hegel died. And it was perhaps overambitious from the outset. Its effect
was to infuse his thought with a spirit of partisan impatience that tended
disastrously to distort public perception of its essential meaning; generating,
by way of hostile reaction, that infamous assembly of crass misinterpretations, the Hegel myth, which still persists to this day.31 The meetings of the
Jahrbcher editorial board, at which he behaved so badly, were in effect
gatherings of the Hegelian academic-party leadership. In this context,
Hegel was seduced into the role of being their chieftain, a role to which he
was ill suited.
In what follows, however, I want to consider not so much the theology of
this later form of Hegelianism, that is, the doctrine set out in Hegels
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (182131), but rather the theology
of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Published in 1807, the Phenomenology predates partisan Hegelianism. And I think that, theologically, it is to quite a
significant degree more challenging than the Lectures. Unlike the Lectures,
it is a work that is altogether sui generis, not designed to frame a readily
reproducible curriculum, and not in fact fitting into the curriculum of the
later system at all. It represents the thought of a would-be religious reformer
who has however renounced any desire for a sectarian alternative to the
Lutheran State Church, and has opted for philosophy instead. This, in itself,
is precisely an option for patience; which the partisan impatience of later
Hegelianism rather spoils. The ideal of absolute knowing towards which
it finally points is a form of thinking which both struggles to embody perfect
truth-as-openness and also takes a long view of that struggle. Desmond sees
the belligerence of the term itself, absolute knowing, as an expression of
Hegels personal libido dominandi. To me, in this context, it looks far more
like a gesture of prophetic defiance, against all the lesser, because relatively
unthinking, claims to religious, or anti-religious, knowledge by which the
world is for the most part governed. For that is what the whole book has
been busy dissolving.
What, after all, does absolute knowing know? It knows, first, the absolute sacredness of that which the prophet Amos, right at the beginning of the
biblical tradition, calls justice and righteousness; and then, also, how best
31
For a useful survey, see Jon Stewart, ed., The Hegel Myths and Legends (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1996).
20
to try and incorporate a lively recognition of these forever troubling imperatives

into a politically viable religious form of life. As a work of philosophy,
it sublates the prophets caustic spirit of defiance into a radical all-round
conversational openness, a spirit of patience. And yet, as absolute, it
nevertheless still stays with that prophetic spirit.32
7. The uniqueness of the Phenomenology of Spirit

My chief concern here is with the way into theology reconnoitred in the
Phenomenology of Spirit. So what is the basic purpose of that work?
One might say that the Phenomenology is a study of the necessary preconditions for learning. Thus, what is Spirit? It is the impulse opening one
up to learn new things in every area of experience. And Hegel, then, sets
out in the Phenomenology to analyse the widest possible range of different
phenomena that may be said to represent obstructions to the work of Spirit,
so defined. He discusses the struggle of Spirit against habits of oversimplification, structures of stubborn distorting prejudice, refusals of genuine
conversational reciprocity, in all kinds of different context. Beginning from
the experience of the newborn infant learning to distinguish this from
that, he moves on to the interaction of adult individuals considered in the
abstract; and from there to thought patterns potentially characterizing whole
intellectual cultures as such. But, in the end, his argument is theological: its
whole polemical thrust is that we should regard pure open-mindedness,
nothing else, as the very essence of the truly sacred. Spirit, as the impulse to
open-mindedness, is the Spirit of God, at work within the human; and it is
the human spirit being opened up by the divine. The Phenomenology is a
philosophic project in that it deals with Spirit in the most universal terms,
as it is to be observed at work everywhere, in non-Christian as well as Christian contexts, and in secular as well as religious ones. At length, however,
this philosophic project flows together with Christian theology. And the
effect on theology is then to open it up to conversation with all sorts of other
32
For an extreme version of the suspicion I am repudiating here, see for instance Glenn
Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 2001). Magee sets out his stall with admirable verve: Hegel is not a philosopher.
He is no longer a seeker after wisdom he believes he has found it (p.1). And he goes
on, Hermeticism replaces the love of wisdom with the lust for power . . . Hegels system
is the ultimate expression of this pursuit of mastery (p. 8).
I by no means think that Magee is wrong to highlight as Eric Voegelin and Cyril
ORegan have also done what he calls the hermetic element in Hegels thought. That
is, Hegels openness to esoteric minority religious traditions. Only, where he sees antiphilosophic lust for power, what I see is, far rather, just a free-ranging appetite for
fresh metaphor, to try and open up fresh thought in general. Indeed, inasmuch as Plato
is the father of philosophy, is not lust for power very much a philosophic tendency?
21
intellectual disciplines. In the Phenomenology Hegel sets up conversational

openings between theology and (what we nowadays call) psychology,
history, sociology, anthropology, literary criticism, religious studies: he opens
these disciplines up to each other at the most fundamental level, all at once,
inter-relatedly. In a nutshell, the Phenomenology is what might be called a
systematic work of genre-fusion.
Hegel indeed is the great pioneer of theology-as-genre-fusion: the
Phenomenology, as a whole, is all about creating the necessary space
for such theology. A cynic might well wonder: fusion or confusion?
Certainly, it is a pretty confusing book. It is confusing by virtue of the sheer
inescapable difficulty of what Hegel is attempting. And yet, I would argue
that the genre-fusion method it exemplifies is actually the one and only way
to escape a certain sort of theological confusion. I mean that very common
confusion about the working of the divine: its misidentification with a rather
narrow set of specifically religious phenomena. By way of remedy for this,
Hegel here attempts, in the most direct fashion possible, to think the latent
omnipresence of God, throughout all human experience.
This Hegelian project results in the most open-ended sort of argument.
It has no boundaries. And hence an aesthetic problem arises: how is it all to
be held together? The element of confusion in the Phenomenology derives,
first and foremost, from that difficulty. Hegels argument moves freely from
topic to topic. Interpreters have, I think, often very much overstated the
degree of intended logical necessity in the transitions between them. But
he nevertheless does attempt to impose some unity on the work by the consistent use of a certain abstract jargon, specially designed for the purpose.
And by his peculiar way of, so to speak, veiling the illustrative examples he
has in mind: alluding to them only by way of hints and suggestions. This is
meant constantly to drive the readers attention back from the distracting
immediacy of the examples to the underlying principles that they are meant
to illustrate. However, the result is an, at times, almost unreadable text.
Theology-as-genre-fusion must in any case require of its readers a considerable, cultivated tolerance for abrupt juxtapositions. For the whole point of
the enterprise is to try and stimulate conversation, as it were, between quite
different species of conversation-environments, bumping them up against
one another. So it seeks to gain a coherent view of the highest truth from
every angle.
Here we have theology at its intellectually most demanding. Certainly, it
would be absurd to suggest that theology-as-genre-fusion should replace
other forms of theology; there are of course excellent pedagogic reasons
for drawing quite clear distinctions between different sorts of academic
specialization. Students do need to grasp the basic principles of good practice
proper to a particular discipline before they can, with any serious prospect
of success, try fusing them together. Therefore, it makes perfect sense for
universities not only to confine Theology to its own department, perhaps
22
partnered with Religious Studies, but also then to split it up, quite sharply,
into Dogmatic Theology, Philosophy of Religion, Biblical Studies, Church
History, and so forth. Yet, even at its most scholarly and sophisticated,
good theology, as such, is not only an academic discipline. It is also a work
of spirituality. And the core purpose of what am calling theology-as-genrefusion is to try and articulate what that means. In short, the goal of
theology-as-genre-fusion is to be as directly faithful as possible to the
specific level of truth that faith at its very best appropriates, pushing against
the intrinsic limits of the academic ethos as such.
Elsewhere, I have suggested that we need to think of theology, essentially,
as the science of the sacralisation of Honesty, in theistic form.33 In this
formulation, Honesty is just another name for perfect truth-as-openness. In
gospel terms, it is the truth that Jesus is (I am the way, and the truth, and
the life, John 14: 6), the truth of which he is the prime symbolic incarnation;
the truth of Christ-likeness. Theology is science in the sense that it is an
experimental process: a series of experiments, seeking to draw together the
most wide-ranging array of different intellectual resources, all in the service
of Honesty. And it aims at the sacralisation, the rendering-overtly-sacred,
of such truth, in the sense that it is a form of thinking practically oriented
towards a religious solidarity-building strategy, to promote it. By theologyas-genre-fusion, here, I mean the sort of method that in the most
comprehensive way reflects this basic understanding of theology. What
Hegel calls Spirit is the impulse towards perfect truth-as-openness, perfect
Honesty, considered in all of its tributaries. The different tributaries flow
into a multitude of different genres of thought; before at length coming
together. And theology-as-genre-fusion, then, is a study of this impulse
understood as the very essence of divine revelation in history as a whole:
opening up the question of what that implies for a church community,
strategically.
However, the impulse of Spirit demands maximum openness even towards
the most difficult reality, even that which elicits the strongest resistance, the
most intense desire-not-to-know. And the actual history of Christian thought
is the tale of an endless turning away from this. The constant tendency has
been to misidentify the proper truth claims of faith, not with its awakening
of an appetite for truth-as-openness, but, on the contrary, with the supposed
possession of some definitive truth-as-correctness, instead. Substituting an
aggressive claim to truth-as-correctness for surrender to truth-as-openness
makes everything existentially easier. But it straightaway abolishes the real
truth of theology. I am inclined to say that it reduces that truth to a form of
metaphysics.
33
Shanks, Faith in Honesty: The Essential Nature of Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate,

2005), Introduction.
23
Note: at this point we enter a terminological maelstrom. I am using the

word metaphysics here basically in the same sense as Martin Heidegger;
although I differ from Heidegger in my basic desire, as a Christian thinker,
to differentiate theology from metaphysics. In this sense, metaphysics
is, essentially, the attempt to develop a systematic celebratory overview
of truth-as-correctness in general, framing a definitive view of moral
correctness; always with the risk (at least) that the resultant system may
distract from, and so occlude, the proper, higher claims of truth-as-openness.
Desmond, by contrast, speaks of metaphysics in quite a different way:
to mean, in effect, any form of critical thinking opened up towards the truthas-openness potential of popular religion more or less, indeed, what I mean
by theology. Here he follows Emmanuel Levinas; who is thereby wilfully
signalling his hostility to Heidegger. Levinas, furthermore, uses the word
theology to mean what I mean by metaphysics, in a religious context.
What I see Hegel opening up in the Phenomenology is a form of theology
beyond metaphysics (in the Heideggerian sense). Or, one might say,
trans-metaphysical theology. Translated into Levinasian, this would actually have to be put the other way around: trans-theological metaphysics!
However, Levinas is writing in the context of Jewish popular religion,
a culture in which the word theology never took root, the way it did in
Christianity. As a Christian theologian by trade, I cannot follow him in
this. And the word metaphysics, after all, derives originally from Aristotle,
who is certainly much more of a metaphysician in the Heideggerian than in
the Levinasian sense.
Heidegger, as we shall see later on, seems to misread the Phenomenology
as if it were intended by Hegel as propaedeutic to a form of (in the
Heideggerian sense) metaphysical theology.34 In fact, however, Hegel
consistently battles against the reduction of theology to metaphysics. He
does so not only as a trans-metaphysical philosophical theologian in
the Phenomenology, but also as a metaphysical philosopher, himself, in his
Logic. Hegels Logic is, to be sure, a classic example of metaphysics in the
sense that it takes shape, precisely, as a catalogue of all the various different
possible modes of truth-as-correctness. Nevertheless, the profound moral
truth of the work, I think, lies in the fundamental segregation it enacts
between metaphysics and theology.
God is Truth; all truth, of whatever kind, points to God; and therefore the
Logic is also about God. Yet, the point is, it is only about God in the most
un-theological sense. Theology is what prescribes the actual practice of
the Church as such; and it is first and foremost an interpretation of divine
revelation in history. Hegels Logic, however, does not impinge on this at all.
As Hegel himself poetically puts it, the content of his argument in the Logic
is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of
34
See below, pp. 133136.
24
nature and a finite mind.35 In other words: the argument begins by systematically bracketing all consideration of possible divine revelation in history.
It deals with divine reality only insofar as we may be said to encounter
that reality in complete abstraction from history, and therefore outside the
purview of theology proper.
Hegels Logic is in this sense a work of pure metaphysics, to a pioneering
degree differentiated from theology. No previous metaphysical philosopher
had ever made such a point of being theologically abstemious as Hegel does.
The result is a metaphysical system that seems, in the end, oddly inconsequential: metaphysics for metaphysics sake, that is, for the sheer intellectual
beauty of it, alone. But that, I think, is its great virtue. His Phenomenology
of Spirit, on the other hand, opens the philosophic door towards a strictly
trans-metaphysical understanding of theology. This, I would argue, is its
most fundamental claim to truth: that it is an opening towards theology,
once and for all, purged of metaphysics, and so set free to become what it is
truly meant to be, a sheer celebration of truth-as-openness.
The old metaphysical proofs of the existence of God are pushed right to
the margins of the Logic. Hegel does indeed deal with these arguments
at greater length elsewhere, as modes of God-talk essentially affirming the
general pursuit of truth-as-correctness.36 But he never retracts the basic
distinction between metaphysics and theology, so vividly signalled, in effect,
by the quite different feel of the Logic from the Phenomenology. For, again,
what the proofs affirm is the pursuit of an entirely different species of truth
from that which is enacted by theology. The proofs, as Hegel interprets
them, do not in the ordinary sense prove anything. Rather, they take the
entire mode of thinking that comes to fulfilment in proven conclusions
of any kind that is, the pursuit of truth-as-correctness in general and
dedicate it, as a whole, to God. Hegel thus dedicates metaphysics to God,
just as Aquinas pre-eminently did; just as the broad tradition to which
Aquinas belongs did. Why not? But in the contrast between the Logic and
the Phenomenology he also does something else, quite new. He signals the
fundamental distinction between metaphysics proper and theology proper,
which Aquinass treatment of the proofs for instance in the Summa
Theologiae systematically blurs. Thus, Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae
appears to found Christian theology on the proofs. For Hegel however, by
contrast, the proofs are in effect just an incidental offshoot of metaphysics,
quite separate from theology proper. What founds theology proper is,
instead, the experience of Spirit, as evoked in the Phenomenology. Theology
proper is all about celebrating the pursuit of perfect truth-as-openness: not
an analytic understanding of how the world is constructed, or of how things
35
36
Hegel, Science of Logic, (trans. A. V. Miller; Amherst: Humanity Books, 1998), p. 50.
Hegel, Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God (ed. and trans. Peter C.
Hodgson; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
25
at large have happened, the subject matter of the proofs; but, rather, a
sympathetic comprehension of Christ-like virtue, as this is allowed, in
truly systematic fashion, to transform ones whole world view, forever
opening it up.
Note, also: this actually represents, in a sense, the exact opposite to the
old positivist critique of metaphysics. The positivist exaltation of science
over metaphysics connotes a fundamental devaluation of the inherent
truth-potential of metaphor, as such. Metaphysics, as defined by positivism,
becomes a term for philosophy not yet (it is argued) adequately purged of
metaphoric habits of thought. Of course, positivism, just as much as traditional metaphysics, is preoccupied with the pursuit of truth-as-correctness.
But, against metaphysics, it seeks to radicalize the ancient struggle of philosophy against poetry, initiated by Plato; thereby drastically narrowing the
scope of what may count as correct. Trans-metaphysical theology, however
since it is not so much concerned with defining truth-as-correctness, as
with evoking the moral demands of perfect truth-as-openness itself
becomes a poetic enterprise. It objects to traditional metaphysics, not
because traditional metaphysics is too indulgent towards metaphor, but on
the contrary because of the way in which traditional metaphysics rigidifies
metaphor. Such theology aims at a maximum energizing of metaphor, in
celebration of truth-as-openness. Nothing could be less positivistic.37
What Hegel opens up in the Phenomenology is a form of theology that is, in
essence, a systematic struggle against the debilitating effects of religious
thought-gone-stale. Nor is that all; for, what is more, it is an attempt to help
mobilize the energies of religion for a war against thought-gone-stale, in
general. Thought tends to go stale most quickly, and most completely, in
self-enclosed intellectual cultures, where it is sheltered from the challenge
of outsiders whose experience of life may lead them to view the world quite
differently. Therefore Hegel sets out, systematically, to break down the
barriers between separate intellectual cultures: he pioneers theology-asgenre-fusion. Beyond the distractions of metaphysics, Hegelian theology-asgenre-fusion confronts every kind of thought gone stale, in Gods name. It is
the assembly of the most extensive possible conversation-process, drawing
together the most diverse partners, to that end. The wider the variety of
37
Compare, further, Klaus Hartmann, Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View, in Alasdair

MacIntyre, ed., Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Anchor Books,
1972). Hartmann is another philosopher somewhat suspicious, it seems, of metaphor,
and hence antipathetic to theology; who, however, nevertheless wishes to be open
towards Hegel. When he speaks of metaphysics he appears to mean precisely the
mixture of what I would call metaphysics with theological, or anti-theological, claims
to ultimate truth-as-correctness. He sees that Hegel does not mix the two. And he
approves of this, at least. But Hartmann simply has no interest in Hegels very different
approach towards theology, as such, in the Phenomenology.
26
voices clearly heard, and brought into dialectical connection with one
another, the better.
8. Towards the solidarity of the shaken

My argument is that, in order for theology to have a truly thriving future, it
must above all break loose from its traditional, conversation-constricting
entanglement with metaphysics. (That is, in the sense specified above.)
But note, further: trans-metaphysical also, in a certain sense, includes
trans-confessional.
The point is this. All theology articulates some form of solidarity; seeks to
give it durability by locking it into an authoritative tradition. I, for my part,
write as a Christian priest, in the Church of England. And of course most
Christian theology is, more or less, exclusively concerned with the confessional solidarity of Christians with other Christians as such; or with the
solidarity of a particular group of Christians, in their rivalry with others. This
sort of solidarity is quite readily compatible with theology-reduced-tometaphysics; the sort of theology that is more interested in truth-as-correctness
than in truth-as-openness. But trans-metaphysical theology ultimately represents another species of solidarity. It is driven by what has been called
the solidarity of the shaken: the solidarity that binds together, simply, all
those who have been shaken by the demands of perfect truth-as-openness;
shaken, that is, out of the shelter of fixed preconceptions, standard judgements, and clichs. In the Christian context, trans-metaphysical theology
is, first and foremost, a project of rendering the confessional solidarity of
Christians with Christians, to the greatest possible extent, transparent to the
solidarity of the shaken.
This phrase, the solidarity of the shaken, is not Hegelian; but was in fact
first coined by the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka. It emerges from a vivid
moment of genre-fusion in the closing pages of his 1975 Heretical Essays on
the Philosophy of History.38 Here Patocka brings together, on the one hand,
a discussion of the trauma-memories of twentieth-century warfare and, on
the other hand, a consideration of the pre-Socratic poetic-philosophical
thought of Heraclitus.
Thus: as regards the traumas of twentiethcentury front-line experience
the First World War nightmare of trench-warfare, the barbarities associated
with the Second World War, the oppressive menace of the Cold War
Patocka poses the elementary question, why European civilization failed
to generate a more effective resistance against all these horrors. To the
38
For what follows, see Jan Patocka, Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History
(trans. Erazim Kohk, Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1996), pp. 13337. (And
c.f. pp. 4244.)
27
prevailing impulse rendering twentieth-century technological civilization

so destructive he gives the simple name of Force. And he focuses on the
propaganda operations of Force, in general: the way it deals out death in
the name of life, and war in the name of peace; the way it calls truthoccluding night, day. He cites two first-hand testimony accounts of the
front-line experience, specifically, of the First World War: on the French
side, that of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, on the German side, that of Ernst
Jnger. And then asks, How can the front-line experience acquire the form
which would make it a factor of history? Why is it not becoming that? He
is thinking of the front-line experience as an inescapable revelation of the
destructiveness of Force, shaking one free from the propaganda-fantasies
that conceal it. Certainly, the actual experience itself had plenty of, in this
sense, shaking-power! But, alas, that shaking-power has not become a factor of history in the sense of generating truly effective forms of political
creativity, against the operation of Force, as such. Why not?
The trouble, he suggests in this passage, is that
in the form described so powerfully by Teilhard and Jnger, it is the
experience of all individuals projected individually each to their summit from which [however] they cannot but retreat back to everydayness
where they will inevitably be seized again by war in the form of Forces
[propagandist] plan for peace.
In other words: the experience of shakenness, intense though it is, has
not yet, in itself, been made the explicit basis for organized solidarity. As
Patocka poetically defines it, the solidarity of the shaken would be an ideal
coming together of those who have been shaken in their faith in the day, in
life and peace : it would be a form of solidarity in resistance to Force
in all its various propaganda manifestations, alike.
Inasmuch as the culture of modern governmental politics is essentially given
over to Force, the organizations embodying the solidarity of the shaken will
not, in Patockas view, come forward with their own positive programmes
for government. They will hold back from the sort of propagandist struggle
necessarily involved in trying to implement such programmes. But, instead,
they will speak, like Socrates daimonion, in warnings and prohibitions
alone. He envisages such organizations primarily recruiting from among
researchers and those who apply research, inventors and engineers. And
their aim will be
to shake the everydayness of the fact-crunchers and routine minds, to
make them aware that their place is on the side of the front [i.e. the
immediate experience of being shaken by horror] and not on the side
of even the most pleasing slogans of the day which in reality call to
war, whether they invoke the nation, the state, classless society, world
28
unity, or whatever other appeals, discreditable and discredited by the

factual ruthlessness of the Force, there may be.
The anti-propaganda rhetoric of Patockas argument acquires special
resonance and poignancy in view of his own actual role as co-founder of a
project seeking to embody the solidarity of the shaken, a role that actually
cost him his life. Two years after the publication of his Heretical Essays he
joined Vclav Havel in launching the human rights campaign, Charter 77;
which was exactly such a project. He was then arrested and roughed up by
the Czech secret police, to the extent that he died as a result of his injuries.
As a philosopher, however, in the Heretical Essays Patocka immediately
goes on to link the ideal of the solidarity of the shaken back to the thought
of Heraclitus. Thus, with reference to Teilhard and Jnger, he has been thinking about the trauma of the First World War, in particular, as a potentially
revelatory experience. It is potentially revelatory by virtue of its sheer
shaking-power. But for Heraclitus (2,500 years earlier) war appears to
function as a general term, in effect, for everything that has shaking-power,
of any kind.
What does Heraclitus mean by war? For him, it is a cosmic principle,
with special relevance to questions of religious and political identity. War is
father of all, king of all, he declares. Some it shows as gods, some as men;
some it makes slaves, some free.39 In what sense is this so? As Patocka
understands it, Heraclitus basic argument is that one can only comprehend
the truth of ones destiny insofar as one allows oneself to be shaken by fresh
experience, thereby breaking free from the essentially pacific influence of
thought-gone-stale. The disastrous allure of familiar prejudice lies in the
way it pacifies the mind, concealing the restless energy of true reality. On
the surface it produces an illusion of peace. But hidden underneath is
the reality of war. And then there is also another reported saying of
Heraclitus that goes further:
One should know that war is xunon, and that justice is strife, and
that all things come about in accordance with strife and with what
must be.40
The word xunon is usually translated common. Yet, at the same time, it
has normative connotations, directly expressed in fragment B2: You must
follow what is common . . . What it really means, therefore, is something
like that aspect of common experience which ought to bind us together
in solidarity. The identification of this with war is, in fact, very close in
meaning to the identification of justice with strife; these are two parallel
39
40
Heraclitus, fragment Diels-Kranz B 53.

Heraclitus, B 80.
29
affirmations. War and strife refer here, in general, to what Patocka calls
the experience of being shaken. Moreover, it seems that Heraclitus is
affirming such experience to be the proper basis for the very highest form
of solidarity. War is xunon, strife is justice: the shared experience of being
shaken out of the peace of mind that clich-thinking affords is what
in itself ought, above all else, to unite us. So Patocka has Heraclitus,
prophetically, address the twentieth century, as represented by Teilhard
and Jnger.
But now I want to add a further element to the collage that Patocka himself
has begun: compare his notion of the solidarity of the shaken with the
solidarity-ideal suggested by the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, as recorded
in the Synoptic Gospels.
War is xunon, and justice is strife, says Heraclitus. Do not think that
I have come to bring peace to the earth, says Jesus. I have not come to bring
peace, but a sword (Matthew 10: 34). Jesus is the true Prince of Peace just
because he is so militantly resistant to the false peace of devout thoughtgone-stale. He revives the intransigent testimony of Amos; only, in a new
more agapeic form.
Heraclitus is already acutely alert to the intrinsic slipperiness of all terminology applied to God, the complete dependence of properly sacred truth on
its context: God is day night, he declares, winter summer, war peace . . .41
Already, Heraclitus sees that no formula for divine reality is automatically
correct. Every formula is ideally waiting to be infused with the spirit of
war, in the larger, benign sense; that is, the shaking-power that alerts us
to the imperatives of perfect truth-as-openness. Theological discourse as a
medium for that shaking-power is, as he puts it, like olive oil when it is
mixed with perfumes.42 But when Jesus, in the Synoptic Gospels, speaks
of the kingdom of God, is he not, after all, talking about the very same
shaking-power, converted into a basis for solidarity, albeit in another way?
Jesus, of course, inhabits quite a different sort of cultural world. And if
one only sees the stamp of cultural particularity, one will scarcely spot the
potential for agreement here. Nevertheless, this is just what genre-fusion
thinking, in general, is all about: seeking out such hidden, implicit points of
contact and, as far as possible, trying to unlock their poetic potential.
It is, in fact, remarkable how quickly the kingdom of God, as preached
by Jesus, ceased to be a central theme of Christian preaching in the early
church. Even when, in the early fifth century, Augustine, at great length,
discusses the obviously rather similar notion of the city of God, he makes
no reference at all to the Synoptic Gospel records of Jesus preaching about
the kingdom. Augustine cites, and comments upon, many other biblical
texts. However, even though one might have thought that the actual words
41
42
Heraclitus, B 67.
Ibid.
30
attributed to Jesus would have had special authority, it simply seems not
to occur to him that they might be relevant to his own project. He develops
his doctrine of the city of God as if Jesus, himself, had never taught
anything comparable. But if unlike Augustine one does compare the
spirit of Jesus preaching with the developing ethos of the church, the changes
are plain to see. To be a good member of the church, it was, from the outset,
vital that each believer should subscribe to a certain set of ever more closely
specified metaphysical doctrines, and conform to quite a rigorous code
of priest-prescribed, and priest-enforced, moral behaviour. (For how otherwise could such a persecuted community have held together to survive?)
There are however no such tests for membership in the kingdom of God,
as Jesus presents it. On the contrary, membership in the kingdom of God
requires great generosity of spirit, radical humility, and a sense of the whole
world being turned upside down, with everything called into question,
a whole multitude of new opportunities emerging for fresh insight; and
nothing more.
This experience, at once both troubling and joyful, is surely, at a certain
level, very close indeed, if not identical, to the troubled yet defiantly hopeful
impulse that generates the solidarity of the shaken, as Patocka envisages it.
Yet church tradition, developing the solidarity of Christians with other
Christians, has overlaid it with so much else. As for Patocka: he prefers
not to get embroiled in the problematics of Christian faith, opting to invoke
Heraclitus instead. Czech intellectual culture has long been rather secular,
and the Charter 77 movement, even though it had many Christian participants, was not, in itself, religious. In thinking through the basic principles
underlying it, Patocka, in effect, brackets all questions of theology. By
contrast, my basic project in what follows is, precisely, to try and get to
grips with the challenge of the solidarity of the shaken to the solidarity of
Christians with other Christians. My primary concern, as I have said, is
with trans-metaphysical theology. In other words: a devising of strategy
for the solidarity of the shaken in a Christian context. The solidarity of
the shaken is not a Hegelian concept. It arises out of a historical context
quite remote from Hegels own. And yet, I think that it nevertheless fits very
well with the core rationale of the Phenomenology of Spirit; as I shall
attempt to show.
9. Faith / knowing / faith

The solidarity of the shaken, alone, is surely the most direct solidarityexpression of Gods truth. Yet it is, by nature, the most difficult form of
solidarity to organize. For, after all, any form of solidarity, in order to be
effective, requires a clear recognition of who is friend and who is foe. The
more immediately obvious the external markers discriminating these two
31
basic categories, the more effective it is liable to be. But shakenness is so very
much an inner condition, without immediately obvious external markers
to identify it. And hence, once again, we are faced with a strategic need to
mix the highest will-to-truth with other motives, so as to stiffen it, give
it staying-power: the solidarity of the shaken always needs mixing with
other, easier-to-recognize solidarity principles. It seems that it can only ever
really flourish as one ingredient among others, in some sort of composite
enterprise.
Charter 77, for instance, was a movement that manifested the solidarity
of the shaken mixed with a particular sense of embattled national identity:
the resistance of the Czech people to their subjugation by the Soviet Union.
It transcended political ideology in the sense that its participants, the signatories to the Charter, included people of every different political persuasion,
other than uncritical supporters of the Soviet-imposed government. As
regards religion, likewise, it included Roman Catholics, Protestants, atheists
and agnostics of every kind. The Chartists were just those Czechs who were
sufficiently shaken, by a yearning for greater openness in public life, to risk
expressing that aspiration in public, thereby exciting the wrath of a violent
police-state. They were united by two things alone: first their shakenness,
and second their being Czech.
What interests me theologically, on the other hand, is the question of what
it would take, in strategic terms, to stiffen the trans-confessional solidarity
of the shaken with an appropriate admixture of the confessional solidarity
uniting Christian with Christian. And this is the basic reason for my interest
in Hegel. For, although Hegel does not explicitly frame his project as a
Christian theological stiffening of the solidarity of the shaken, that is very
much, I think, in effect what it already is.
Thus, Hegel begins in his Early Theological Writings by seeking to recast
the Jesus story, in such a way as to rescue its deeper critical potential from its
distortion by mere church ideology. Then in the Phenomenology he switches
from the medium of gospel narrative to that of speculative philosophy; but
still with the same underlying moral intent. His earlier recasting of the Jesus
story makes strategic sense as the basis for a more or less sectarian alternative
to orthodox Lutheranism. So it is in direct rivalry to the founding narrative
of that orthodoxy; above all in the essay The Spirit of Christianity and its
Fate, presenting Jesus essentially as a prophet of pure shakenness. But there
is an immediate contradiction here, inasmuch as the solidarity of the shaken
is intrinsically inimical, in its openness, to any sort of sectarianism. The shift
of thought that results in the Phenomenology goes with a fresh acceptance
of the broad Lutheran mainstream. And so it enables a quite un-sectarian
understanding of the solidarity of the shaken.
But now compare this with Desmonds position. Hegel is in my view the
great theological strategist for the solidarity of the shaken; yet every strategy
32
for the solidarity of the shaken mixed into other forms of solidarity risks
damaging it. There is always the danger that the solidarity of the shaken will
so merge into its host culture as to fade away. In order that it should survive,
there is a need for a constant insistence on the imperatives of shakenness in
all their distinctiveness. Unlike Hegel, Desmond is no solidarity-strategist.
He is, rather, a great philosophical poet, of what I would call the pathos of
shakenness, in its very purest form. The solidarity of the shaken is, in the
first instance, a form of campaigning organization. By contrast, agapeic
community Desmonds ideal is in the first instance a form of pastoral
organization. But just as the solidarity of the shaken is the most difficult
form of solidarity to organize, so, too, agapeic community is the most difficult form of community to organize because it is so extremely demanding.
Again, therefore, it can only flourish, for any length of time, in amalgam
with other forms of community. And, again, it forever risks being swallowed
up and lost within that with which it is mixed. Therefore Desmond sees it as
the fundamental task of philosophical theology to recall us to the proper
distinctiveness of agapeic community in itself.
Shakenness, by the imperatives of perfect truth-as-openness, is a condition
of soul that is completely beyond any rational calculation of self-interest.
Desmond speaks of it, in this sense, as idiot wisdom. His philosophical
writing is the most sophisticated homage to such wisdom; the raw essence
of faith, prior to all interpretation. He is attempting, as he puts it, to evoke
the hyperbolic nature of divine truth. That is to say, in Patockas terms: its
sheer shaking-power, forever in excess of any intellectual mastery. But
whereas Patocka uses the metaphor of shakenness, Desmond tends rather
to think of intellectual defences being penetrated, as by the flood waters of
divine reality. He rejoices in the intrinsic, ultimately unpreventable porosity
of human existence, in that sense.
One might say that whereas Hegels thought is framed as a movement
from first-order faith to philosophic knowing, Desmond by contrast traces
a philosophic movement from knowing to second-order faith. First-order
faith is endlessly ambiguous: between that which opens towards the solidarity of the shaken and that which is closed off from it, supplanting it with a
rigid insistence on orthodox conformity, as it were, for conformitys sake.
Hegel sets out to dissolve that ambiguity. The knowing that he celebrates
is thus primarily an ideal kind of strategic nous, identifying the truth of
faith in effect with the solidarity of the shaken. But the trouble is that every
potentially successful strategy for the solidarity of the shaken, in order to
be successful, is more or less bound to introduce fresh ambiguities. Does
the successful strategy still in fact truly stand for shakenness? Or has the
solidarity-building success been achieved by changing the real basis for
the solidarity, making it easier? Such questions are indeed inescapable at
the level on which Hegel is operating. And Desmond, who is simply not
33
interested in the criterion of political success, then seeks to sweep all such
ambiguity away.
Still, these opposing movements may also, in the end, be regarded as two
complementary aspects of the same. I want to affirm the solidarity of the
shaken. Therefore, I am with Hegel. Everything, however, depends upon its
truly being the solidarity of the shaken. Therefore, I am with Desmond.
After all, it seems to me that the fullness of truth arises out of a constant
oscillation, back and forth, between philosophic knowing, in the Hegelian
sense, and second-order faith, the truth with which Desmond is concerned.
Neither, I would argue, invalidates the other. Both are, equally, needed.
34
2
desmonds hegel:
a counterfeit double?
1. Hegelian grand narrative: theodicy or kakodicy?

Desmond calls his book, Hegels God, an adieu to Hegel.1 Because
he regards Hegels God as a counterfeit double, and Hegelian theology,
therefore, as idolatrous, he frames the book very much as a case for the
prosecution.
There are, however, two basic weaknesses, I think, with this approach. On
the one hand, Desmond is so impatient always to show what is missing
in Hegels theology that he fails to stay with what is actually there I will
discuss what I consider to be the prime example of this in Chapter 3.
And, on the other hand, he fails properly to register ambiguity as ambiguity.
Instead, where Hegels thought remains ambiguous, he assumes the worst,
and then accuses Hegel of cunning concealment; of deliberately blurring his
real, malignant meaning.
This is above all the case in his interpretation of Hegels philosophy of
history. Thus, let us distinguish between two possible Hegels here: Hegel 1
and Hegel 2. Hegel 1 is an impassioned lover of perfect truth-as-openness.
He is a thinker essentially shaken into thought by that love, which he sees as
the very essence of the divine. When he looks at history Hegel 1 is first and
foremost interested in finding grounds for hope, as inspiration for solidarity
with others who are likewise shaken: hope serving to energize a form of
solidarity grounded, purely and simply, in that shared experience of shakenopenness, and struggling towards the ideal of a public culture that would be,
in the most powerful possible way, celebratory of perfect truth-as-openness
recognized as Gods will. He seeks to construct an all-encompassing historic
narrative, to that end. The story he sets out to tell is the history of Spirit,
divine revelation as a process at work everywhere, throughout the whole of
1
Hegels God, Preface, p. ix.
35
human experience. This narrative needs to be as global as possible, so as to

reflect the global, cosmopolitan nature of the solidarity of the shaken, in
itself. And it necessarily involves a considerable degree of philosophic
detachment in the way that it is narrated, since its basic purpose is to justify
hope, helping people committed to such solidarity look beyond the more
immediate frustrations of their present plight, and see the bigger picture. As
we stand back we can see the experimental workings of Spirit down the
ages, as a whole, steadily clarifying what the ideal requires.
Hegel 2, however, is a somewhat different figure. His ideal is philosophic
detachment, in effect, for its own sake. For him, this is wisdom: Spirit is the
ascent of Mount Olympus, as it were, to look down upon the affairs of the
world from afar. He is akin to the Nietzschean bermensch; glorying in his
superhuman cool. And the sheer scale of the resultant philosophic grand
narrative demonstrates this.
Desmonds Hegel is, unambiguously, Hegel 2. The Hegel who interests
me is Hegel 1. I remarked above that my admiration for Hegel is related to
my admiration for that very different figure, the prophet Amos, the first of the
great Hebrew writing prophets.2 Hegel 2 has nothing whatever in common
with Amos. The prophet represents God in an explosion of passionate
engagement: God repudiating any sort of mere flattery, and launching a
furious, infinite demand for justice and righteousness, that is, for Honesty,
perfect truth-as-openness, infused with compassion for the sufferings of
the poor. Nothing could be more opposed to the divine rage of God as
represented by Amos than the ideal of sheer Olympian cool advocated by
Hegel 2. But in the thought of Hegel 1, by contrast, the prophetic rage
that Amos pioneered is aufgehoben, not cancelled but sublated, into a
solidarity-strategy designed to further the same ends by other means. Amos
himself has no apparent solidarity-strategy. The whole history of biblical
religion, as it has bifurcated into the traditions of Judaism and Christianity,
may be regarded as one long quest for effective solidarity-strategies that
would not be too betraying of the testimony to radical shakenness that first
appears, as a literary phenomenon, in his prophecy. And, although Hegel
does not see this, I think he represents a key moment in the process.
Thus, take Hegels presentation of his philosophy of history as the true
form of theodicy.3 The problem of evil, he argues, is not just an abstract
metaphysical conundrum, the way Leibniz for instance thinks of it. Far more
significantly, faith in God is tied up with historic, this-worldly hopes. God
commands such hope, our experience of evil in history argues against it.
In order to justify faith in God, we need to justify historic hope in quite
concretely narrative terms.
2
3
See p. 18.
Hegel, The Philosophy of History (trans. J. Sibree; New York: Dover Publications,
1956), pp. 15, 457.
36
DESMONDS HEGEL: A COUNTERFEIT DOUBLE?
But hope for what? In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel
answers: for freedom. The History of the World, as envisaged in these
lectures, is nothing but the development of the Idea of Freedom.4 This
notion of freedom, however, is admittedly quite ambiguous. Does Hegel
mean freedom for perfect truth-as-openness, sheer Honesty, being altogether
opened up to the otherness of other people; freedom from whatever would
inhibit that? That would be the viewpoint of Hegel 1. Or does he simply
mean freedom in the sense of maximum moral autonomy, not being subjugated by the will of others? This is the thinking of Hegel 2, Desmonds idea
of Hegel. There is of course a good deal of overlap, in practice, between
these two notions of freedom. So many of the conventional prejudices by
which our thinking is closed down are actively promoted and reinforced by
those others who exercise power over us, to serve their own interests. Very
often the cause of truth-as-openness takes shape as a political movement
of people self-assertively demanding their rights to autonomy, against
an oppressor. Again, one has only to think of Charter 77, Jan Patockas
movement, for instance. The Chartists were both laying claim to their basic
human rights, against the Soviet oppressor, and also campaigning for a
public culture of openness. In that context, the overlap was complete.
Nevertheless, there is in principle a significant opposition between the two
views. For Hegel 1 is intent on constructing a grand narrative that will
trace the gradual emergence of the possibility of our coming to see the ideal
of perfect truth-as-openness as the very essence of the divine. Hegel 2, very
differently, is interested in tracing humanitys progress towards a world
valuing the intrinsic value of moral autonomy above all else. But mere
respect for moral autonomy, unlike truth-as-openness, remains in itself
entirely compatible with a good deal of actual indifference to the suffering
of others. Uninterested in political solidarity-strategy as such, Desmonds
whole concern is with what I have called the pure pathos of shakenness.
What he values in religion is just its unique capacity to intensify the pathos of
spiritual struggle; precisely, its awakening of heart-felt agapeic compassion.
When he reads Hegels Lectures on the Philosophy of History what he finds
there is Hegel 2, apparently identifying true theological insight, on the
contrary, with the very loftiest, all-surveying Olympian detachment. For
him, this is anathema. There is no true theodicy in such an outlook, he
argues; no true justification of God. Rather, what is justified is the very
opposite: a grandiose philosophic acquiescence in evil. It is a kakodicy!5
As I have said, it seems to me that the essential truth-potential of Hegels
theology lies in the way he begins to dissolve the basic political ambiguity of
popular Christian faith. Namely: the ambiguity between that in popular
Christian faith which opens up towards the solidarity of the shaken, and
4
5
Ibid., p. 456.
Hegels God, pp. 144, 178.
37
that which resists it. But here, between Hegel 1 and Hegel 2 is a transpolitical ambiguity which still remains unresolved. For political purposes, in
order to develop an appropriate founding narrative for the sort of solidarity
he seeks to promote, Hegel steps back from the immediacy of the present
historical moment, to take the long view: to what extent does the resultant
vision of history-as-a-whole remain tied to a real passion for truth-asopenness, or to what extent does it start to come loose from such passion?
One may read Hegels texts either way; this is undoubtedly, I think, a real
failing in his work.
Only, let us not exaggerate the failing. The more open-minded reading still
does, at any rate, remain possible.
2. Schillers dictum, quoted by Hegel:

Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht
Another example: Hegel quotes, with approval, Schillers dictum, Die
Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht.6 The conventional translation of this
into English, The history of the world is the worlds court of judgement
rather misses the theological undertow of the thought. An alternative
rendering would be World history enacts divine judgement.
Just who, though, is quoting Schiller here: Is it Hegel 1 or Hegel 2?
Hegel 2, that is, Desmonds Hegel, approves of Schillers formula for the
simple reason that he believes in the apotheosis of historical Success. In his
Olympian fashion, he surveys world history and straightforwardly identifies
divine judgement with the long-term success of particular ideas. This is not
a doctrine of might is right Hegel explicitly denounces that sort of world
view.7 But it differs from might is right only inasmuch as Hegel 2 is interested in the success of ideas, and might, as such, is not immediately a
property of ideas. Rather, for Hegel 2, the divine thumbs-up is accorded to
whatever set of ideas, in the long run, achieves the greatest intellectual
authority. As a matter of fact, Hegel 2 observes, the most successful sort of
thinking, long-term, is that which most effectively hooks onto peoples selfassertive aspiration to freedom, in the simple sense of self-determination.
And therefore, he concludes, this aspiration is divine.
Desmond cites Hegel quoting Schiller, and he protests: Even the Last
Judgement, it seems, will be refused its transcendence in this ruthless
theology of immanence. But if there is nothing transcendent to history, is it,
6
Philosophy of Right, 34041 (Knox, p. 216); Encyclopaedia, 548, that is, Hegels
Philosophy of Mind (trans. William Wallace; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971),
p. 277.
Philosophy of Right, 342.
38
as Hobbes described the Leviathan, a mortal god? Indeed, why should

we sing a speculative Te Deum to this monster? Does this being true to
history become false to God, hence untrue to history?8 If the real Hegel is
Hegel 2 then yes, I would agree, it does.
And yet, the fact is that this formula, Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht
is also susceptible of quite a different interpretation. Suppose it is Hegel 1
speaking. For Hegel 1 the criterion of judgement in world history is that we
are looking for what most effectively advances the political-theological
cause of perfect truth-as-openness. In order to see what does this, he is saying, look at the way ideas actually play out in world history. For example: is
Rousseau right? In order to answer that question, it is not enough just to
consider Rousseaus own good intentions. One has also got to look at the
actual influence of his ideas, notably on the course of the French Revolution:
To what extent have they, in historic practice, contributed to the cause of
truth-as-openness? This may seem obvious. And so it is Hegel is not above
saying things that are pretty obvious, at times. But what is interesting is the
way in which he takes the simple idea of Weltgeschichte as Weltgericht and
then develops it into a pioneering grand narrative.
The divine judgement of world history, which is the topic of this grand
narrative, may well vindicate all sorts of self-assertive political movements,
groups of people rising up to demand their rights such as Charter 77.
But, crucially, what is divine is never, for Hegel 1 as it is for Hegel 2
that self-assertion in itself. Rather, it is the impulse towards an intellectually
ever more open culture, which such self-assertion, in cases like that of
Charter 77, serves.
We notice again, Desmond remarks, how some Hegel interpreters are
quick to reassure us: do not worry, there is nothing offensive here, do not be
alarmed. The Weltgericht is not any Last Judgement.9 Well, it is not. Whereas
the traditional imagery of the Last Judgement represents God confronting each
human individual strictly as an individual, the Weltgericht of Weltgeschichte is
the divine judgement of whole cultures as such. Unlike the judgement of
whole cultures, the judgement of single individuals surely does tend to
remain history-transcendent: at the Last Judgement I am judged for what
I personally have done, not for my place in the larger flow of world history.
In the exceptional case of world-historical individuals the two forms of
judgement do, to some extent, come together; for most of us, however, they
remain clearly distinct. But if Hegel does not mean the last judgement, why
not speak less equivocally?10 There is in fact nothing equivocal about Hegels
identification of the Weltgericht of Weltgeschichte as being, in the first
instance, a judgement of whole cultures rather than of individuals. He is
8
9
10
Hegels God, pp. 14445.

Ibid., p. 178.
Ibid.
39
certainly not arguing for a new form of Christianity in which there will
cease to be any reference to the history-transcendent Last Judgement. Rather,
I think that, preoccupied as he is with the problematics of this-worldly
solidarity-building, he just does not have much that is at all interestingly
new to say about the more other-worldly aspects of religious truth. And so
does not talk about them.
But is this one-sidedness of Hegels really as sinister as Desmond suspects?
Or does it only look that way to Desmond because he himself has opted for
a yet more militant, but polar opposite, one-sidedness of his own?
3. The hand that wounds is the hand that heals

Then again: closely related questions also arise with regard to the way Hegel
interprets the traditional dogma of the Fall. Thus, he is a prime advocate of
felix culpa doctrine: viewing the Fall as a happy fault. The biblical story,
as he puts it, represents the development of the human species beyond the
simplicity of its natural condition, its transition into the world of the
spiritual. From the philosophical point of view, this is to be celebrated:
Paradise, as he puts it, is a park, where only brutes, not human beings,
can remain.11 In Genesis 3, on the contrary, the mythic event is shown as a
catastrophe. God (Genesis 2: 1617) has forbidden Adam and Eve to eat the
fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, on pain of death:
These words [Hegel remarks] evidently assume that humanity is not
meant to seek knowledge, and ought to remain in the condition of
innocence . . . But it is a mistake to regard the immediate harmony of
the natural condition as ideal . . . Childlike innocence no doubt has
something fascinating and attractive about it; but only because it
reminds us what Spirit must win for itself. The harmoniousness of
childhood is a gift from the hand of Nature; the second harmony must
spring from the labour and culture of Spirit. And so the words
of Christ, Except ye become as little children, etc., are very far from
telling us that we must always remain children.12
The story of the Fall is regularly invoked whenever the upholders of church
ideology want to argue against disobedience to established tradition in general,
against free thinking, and hence against any sort of authentic philosophy;
in other words, whenever theology has set itself against the most basic
preconditions for the advancement of truth-as-openness. Do not disobey as
11
12
The Philosophy of History, p. 321.

Encyclopaedia 24; that is, Hegels Logic (trans. William Wallace; Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975), p. 43.
40
Adam disobeyed! cry the upholders of rigid church ideology. Hegel counters
that it is the very same impulse to questioning, and to rebellion against the
established order, that both, in one form, originates the Fall and also, in
another form, brings about Salvation. Granted, questioning and rebellion,
gone wrong, may end up producing the very worst forms of tyranny
look at what happened to the French Revolution under the Jacobins. But
Christianity presents us with a Saviour who dies as a crucified dissident: that
is, precisely, a symbolic embodiment of questioning and rebellion. As Hegel
puts it: The hand that wounds is also the hand that saves.13
Philosophy, as Hegel conceives it, is forever dissolving the all too simple
distinction that nave faith draws between what is divine and what is human.
So it is systematically open to the possibility that what at first sight looks to
us like mere disobedience to divine law may in actual fact be a fresh upsurge
of divine grace; and that the historic progress of divine grace may very often
require developments which to the devout, at first sight, appear sinful. Nave,
first-order faith sharply distinguishes what it sees as the work of Gods
grace, namely the established ethos of its own given religious community
at its best, from that which expresses mere human self-assertion. And
Desmond also, seeks to restore at least something of that sharp distinction
in sophisticated, post-Hegelian terms: counter-posing agape to eros. But
Hegel, for his part, loves the word Spirit for the very reason that one may
equally speak of human Spirit and of divine Spirit. His whole concern
is to reopen, and to hold open, the properly unresolved question of how
these two modes of Spirit are to be distinguished, which first-order faith
has pre-empted.
Hegel 1, though, does this in one way; Hegel 2 does it in quite another.
For Hegel 2 divine Spirit is what appears when one, as it were, steps right
outside the whole struggle-process of human Spirit to view it absolutely as a
whole, with ideal Olympian-contemplative detachment. To see the struggleprocess of human Spirit as a whole, according to Hegel 2, is to see it
transfigured: in its wholeness, it is revealed to be the all-encompassing creative enterprise of divine Spirit. So the latter appears fully immanent within
human Spirit: not only as human Spirit is liberated, but also as it errs. For,
from this point of view, it is just the wholeness of the process that is divine.
The thought of Hegel 2 thus essentially replicates that of Spinoza, with the
addition of a grand narrative, but nothing more. Altogether purged of
bitterness, blame and indignation but also of all other moral passion
it observes how everything, good and bad alike, hangs together. And it
identifies the highest wisdom with an ideal anaesthetic fatalism.
Taking Hegel, without question, to be Hegel 2, Desmond is infuriated by
the militant refusal of what he regards as proper religious pathos in this
13
Ibid.
41
high-above-the-world outlook. He objects, fiercely, to the apparent theological

implications. Consider, he writes:
the hand that wounds is the hand that heals. But then it is always
the same hand. Consider then: if my hand wounds the relation to
God, is it my hand that heals the wound? If so I redeem myself. What
need then have I of God? You say, no, no: we must think of God as
forgiving. But if it is Gods hand that heals, it is Gods hand that
wounds, since the two hands are one and the same. But what then
does Gods hand wound? Gods relation to humanity? Why must God
wound that relation? Or Gods relation to Godself? Then it is Gods
hand that heals God, but why does God have to wound God? What
could such a self-mutilating God be? The self-wounding God would
be the same as the self-healing God. But what could one make of the
self-forgiveness of this self-mutilating God? And if Hegel is right that
it is a matter of knowing, God seems to have to fool himself in order
to make himself wise. What kind of stupid God is this? What kind of
evil God is this, if evil is necessary for God (to be God)? What good is
such a God? What good could you expect from such a God?
These are questions Hegels admirers do not put to him. A pity.
They may even dismiss them in exasperation. So much the worse for
them . . . 14
And yes, if the true Hegel is Hegel 2, I agree, they are good questions.
But please, now, let us go back a few steps. Where Desmond imagines his
interlocutor interrupting, No, no: we must think of God as forgiving,
I would actually rather not follow that script. To be sure, the healing in
question is an act of divine forgiveness. I do not redeem myself. However,
this is not to say that the hand of which Hegel is speaking is Gods hand.
The hand surely represents human Spirit, in all its questioning, rebellious
turbulence. For healing to take place, the initiative must indeed come from
God. But, to quote St Teresa of Avila,
Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hand, no feet on earth, but yours.
When Hegel 1 says, The hand that wounds is the hand that heals, unlike
Hegel 2 he is not constructing some grand new-fangled Gnostic myth about
the wisdom of Olympian detachment. No, he is thinking, in quite practical
terms, about the sort of political action that is needed, so that the ultimate
philosophical truth for which Christ stands, the ideal of perfect truth-asopenness, may in general be disseminated. What the cause of Truth demands
14
42
(he is saying) is a real readiness for the kind of Adamic rebellious questioning,
the basic challenge to question-suppressing power, represented by the Second
Adam, the Crucified. It demands a project of solidarity-building, very much,
on that explicit basis. The hand in question is the hand of the rebel, as
such. It wounds when the rebellion is of the kind represented by the First
Adam, it heals when the rebellion is of the kind represented by the Second
Adam. Hegels point is just that the healing required necessarily involves
rebellion. There is no true healing in the spirit of mere conformity endorsed
by conventional church ideology.
What need then have I of God? Hegel 1s answer is that God redeems us
by opening us up, where by nature we would instinctively remain closed.
For this is just what God is: that impulse, in all of its various manifestations.
For Hegel 1, to see God is not merely to gaze, from afar, upon the universal
struggle-process of human Spirit and see it as a whole. Rather, one sees God
by pondering ones own personal experience of being spiritually opened up,
at every level of experience. Unlike Hegel 2, in other words, Hegel 1 does
not identify wisdom with sheer all-surveying, all-accepting remoteness from
the struggle-process. On the contrary, he remains absolutely immersed in it;
with blazing passion, aufgehoben.
This immersion is qualified by a grand-narrative outlook for two quite
specific reasons. Hegelian grand narrative is not only theodicy, in the sense
discussed above. It also arises out of a systematic discipline of openness
towards what is alien to ones own culture in the various cultures of the past,
or the various cultures of elsewhere; a serious desire to try and do those
other cultures proper justice. To think in grand-narrative terms is thus to
stand back, not necessarily from the whole struggle-process of the human
spirit as such, but at any rate from the more limited sacred narratives of
ones own immediate spiritual environment. Desmond is scornful of the
very notion that the relationship of God to Godself may involve error
and mutilation; and that it may therefore be in need of healing. But why?
God, reaching out to sinful humanity, inevitably appears as God in a great
variety of forms more or less exposed to contamination from human
sinfulness. So Meister Eckhart cries out, I pray God to rid me of God .15
Eckhart remains a loyal churchman but, nevertheless, urgently seeks God
beyond God; that is, beyond the God of conventional church ideology.
True, such flamboyant self-distancing from what, after all, still remains ones
own religious culture is rare in Christian theology. Christianity is, by every
instinct, evangelistic for itself; its theology has always been intimately tied
up with its own self-promotion to potential converts, an orientation which
must always tend to inhibit the sort of corporate self-critique towards which
15
Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense (trans.
Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn; Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1981), from sermon
83, Renovamini spiritu, p. 208, with inverted commas added.
43
Eckhart is pointing. Desmonds scorn accords closely with the natural (all
too natural) reflexes of conventional Christian evangelism.
Compare, however, the much less evangelistic culture of rabbinic Judaism.
In that very different context there has emerged a whole wealth of mythic
traditions, those of classical Kabbalah, that are indeed all about the Fall of
God, as manifest in the various faces of the Sefirot, from true God, Eiyn
Sof; and about the struggle to mend what is thereby broken. Does not
the ultimate fullness of Gods truth require both the kind of evangelistic
enthusiasm so powerfully present within traditional Christianity, seeking as
it does to draw the whole of humanity together into a single open conversation,
and also a real openness to the sort of fundamental corporate self-critique
that one thus finds predominant in classical Kabbalah, largely thanks to its
relative freedom from the strategic constraints which Christian evangelistic
ambition imposes?
As it happens, although Hegel had read a certain amount about Kabbalah,
he does not appear to have been particularly interested in it. After all, he was
not inclined to think in anything like the Kabbalist mythical fashion,
abstracted from history. He constructs philosophic grand narrative instead.
Nevertheless, like Eckhart before him, he surely does represent the possibility
of a thinking that would, with pioneering radicalism, fuse together universal
evangelism with corporate self-critique. And this, to me, seems altogether
admirable.
44
3
the ideal of atonement
1. Hegel on Eckhart: There, indeed,

we have what we want!
I pray God to rid me of God , said Meister Eckhart.
I was often with Hegel in Berlin, writes Franz von Baader. Once I read
him a passage from Meister Eckhart, who was only a name to him. He was
so excited by it that, the next day, he read me a whole lecture on Eckhart,
which ended with: There, indeed, we have what we want! 1 The essay is
lost. But the affinities are clear. One might describe Hegelian theology, very
simply, as a systematic project for defining the trans-metaphysical criteria by
which to distinguish, as Eckhart would have it, God from God.
Thus, again, what interests him is the way in which one and the same
set of religious ideas may either channel God or God. The criteria for
distinguishing between these two possibilities are not immanent to firstorder faith. It is not just a question of finding the correct metaphysical
formulae; the difference is not a metaphysical one. But, rather, it is entirely
a matter of how the data of first-order faith are appropriated.
Hegels term for the state of mind that remains trapped in a relationship
to God precluding relationship to God is das unglckliche Bewutseyn.
In English, literally: the unhappy consciousness.
2. Unhappy consciousness? A problem of translation

Das unglckliche Bewutseyn: this is Hegels comprehensive term, in
the Phenomenology of Spirit, for everything that true faith, as such,
1
Franz von Baader, Smmtliche Werke, Vol. XV (ed. Franz Hoffman; repr., Aalen:
Scientia Verlag, 1987), p. 159. (There is actually also some evidence of Hegels having
been aware of Eckhart as early as 1795: see H. S. Harris, Hegels Development: Towards
the Sunlight, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972, pp. 23031.)
45
theologically overcomes, and for what most fundamentally renders false

faith false. The truth of authentic divine revelation symbolically overthrows
das unglckliche Bewutseyn, as such. But then das unglckliche Bewutseyn
fights back. It re-insinuates itself into religious traditions originally founded
on its overthrow, and dresses itself up in the clothes of theological orthodoxy.
The whole task of trans-metaphysical theology, then, is to identify it; to
unmask it and to point beyond it.
Another basic formula for affirming Hegels significance as a theologian:
he is the great pioneer of trans-metaphysical theology, in the sense of
theology essentially focused on the problematics of das unglckliche
Bewutseyn as such.
But now let us reconsider the literal English translation: the unhappy
consciousness. There are problems with this; problems indeed already
intrinsic to Hegels German. In the first place, what Hegel has in mind is not
necessarily a form of consciousness in the current sense of that word, the
way its meaning has evolved since his day. And secondly, therefore, neither
does it need to be all that unhappy, in the ordinary sense.
Nowadays we have become accustomed to distinguishing between the
conscious and the subconscious. But when Hegel speaks of Bewutseyn,
consciousness, he does not have that distinction in mind at all. He is talking
about a spiritual condition, partly conscious, yet also very largely subconscious.
To some extent, indeed, das unglckliche Bewutseyn really must be
subconscious. For to suffer this condition is to be committed to fooling
oneself, and one cannot do this in full awareness of what one is doing.
Das unglckliche Bewutseyn is an objectively unhappy condition, in
the sense that it is pitiable, but the sufferer is unaware precisely of how
pitiable it is. As regards his or her conscious, subjective state, therefore,
the sufferer may not be unhappy at all. In fact, there is even a certain sort
of happiness that is quite typical of the condition in an intense form: the
compulsory, neurotic, forever smiling happiness of those who positively
revel in emotional pretence.
What Hegel calls das unglckliche Bewutseyn is a condition of inner
servitude. Famously, earlier in the same book he has discussed, in quite
abstract terms, the dialectical relationship between master and slave,
as two individuals. Das unglckliche Bewutseyn, on the other hand, is
introduced as an internalization of the master-slave relationship. That is to
say, it is the dialectical interplay between two aspects of one and the same
self: a master aspect and a slave aspect. He is, in effect, talking here about
the spiritual condition of one in whom the power of thought-gone-stale,
broadly speaking, has become despotic. It is a condition of being inwardly
split apart. As regards the individuals relationship-to-self, it is just the
most fundamental corruption of Spirit. (Spirit: Geist J. B. Baillie, in
his translation of the Phenomenology, alternatively renders it as Mind.)
For, again, when Hegel speaks of Spirit he basically means the impulse that
46
THE IDEAL OF ATONEMENT
opens up reality, the very purest antithesis to thought-gone-stale in general

the Phenomenology, as a whole, is nothing other than a systematic survey of
the resultant struggle at every different level of experience.
The better to engage with Hegels real meaning when it comes to
translating I would propose that, for the reasons given above, we actually
try dropping his own terms, unhappy and consciousness. In general,
we need as far as possible to get a fresh take on Hegels thought; to make
it strange again, unlearning some of the lazier preconceptions of the
interpretative tradition. And here, at a key point, is a chance to do so.
Therefore, by way of thought-experiment, let us render das unglckliche
Bewutseyn not as the unhappy consciousness, but, instead, as the
unatoned state of mind.
Not consciousness, but state of mind: das unglckliche Bewutseyn is
simply an ever-present resistance to difficult reality, more or less subconscious, that then underlies, and mixes with, all sorts of secondary formations
of spiritual inertia. Objectively, but by no means always subjectively,
unhappy, it is more precisely the condition of being unatoned. Divided as
it is between a master aspect and a slave aspect, it is a basic incapacity to
live at one with the reality that the latter all too timidly apprehends. This
reality is too difficult for the master aspect, and so the apprehension is
censored, distorted or interpreted away.
What else, indeed, is true religion if not a corporate discipline of opening-up
towards difficult reality? In other words: the cultivation of a quite unflinching
willingness to recognize what is actually the case, even when it does not fit
what we want to be the case. We need no such discipline to recognize the
more congenial aspects of reality. Merely comforting, comfortable religion
is religion that is failing to do its proper job. But true religion, in this sense,
is a disciplined opening-up towards reality that we find difficult to recognize
inasmuch as the recognition-process involves, on the one hand, facing up to
our own mortality; and, on the other hand, sympathetically entering into the
world view of other people who see things quite differently from ourselves,
acknowledging the elements of disturbing accuracy in that alien, and
perhaps also hostile, world view. Spirit, for Hegel, is just the impulse to
openness, at every level of experience. But das unglckliche Bewutseyn is,
very simply, the condition of the self insofar as it no longer feels able to live
at one with the difficulty of that impulse. And so the impulse of Spirit is
here suppressed; subjected to intra-psychic servitude.
Traditional Christian theology, of course, speaks of atonement as what
Christ accomplishes on behalf of the faithful, and then within their souls:
rendering them at one with God, and so able to live in harmony with
the supremely difficult reality of divine justice. Here then is one particular
religious mode of atonement, in the broader sense that I am proposing.
Since atonement, in this context, comes to mean a bearing of punishment
in restitution for sin, as Christ is said to have borne our sins on the cross,
47
we tend to use the noun atonement with the preposition for: atonement
for sin. Or the verbal form, to atone, likewise: to atone for sin. But I want
to revive the now largely forgotten, original usage in which atoned can also
be an adjective, applicable to souls. So that one may speak of souls being
either atoned or unatoned.
In the old ritual of the Jerusalem Temple for the Day of Atonement
(Leviticus 16) two animals were sacrificed, a bull and a goat, and their blood
symbolically intermingled that is, at-oned before being sprinkled on the
altar. The blood of the bull, it seems, represented the spirit of God reaching
out towards Israel through the medium of the Temple liturgy. As the failings
of the clergy tended to impede this, the bull was sacrificed especially for the
sins of the High Priest and his house. But the blood of the goat represented
the spirit of the people reaching out towards God and therefore repenting
their corporate sins the goat was sacrificed on behalf of all. The spirit
of God reaches out; the spirit of the people reaches out: two streams of
blood, at-oned. As a regular event, this symbolizes the overcoming not
of any particular sin, but of humanitys primordial insensitivity to sin in
general. It represents the overcoming of religious thought-gone-stale, in
the sense of whatever helps render us insensitive to our need for atonement.
The Temple ritual for the Day of Atonement was thus a programmatic representation of what all the ritual of Israelite religion was, most fundamentally,
meant to achieve.
If, however, one considers the matter in trans-metaphysical terms, then
one would have to say that not only Christianity and Judaism, but all true
religion all religion to the extent that it truly wages war on thoughtgone-stale is essentially a project of at-one-ment, so defined. Our existence
is always more or less split: we both belong to reality and are cut off from
it, insofar as we find it difficult. In other words: we are never fully at-oned.
And we need strategies to awaken us, imaginatively and emotionally, with
ever-greater intensity, to the problem of our being unatoned. As I would
understand it, just this is the core impulse of authentic religion, in all its
forms; whether God is explicitly recognized, or is only implicitly at work in
it. In order properly to understand religious truth as such, one has to begin
by analysing our primordial need for atonement; looking beyond the way
it is represented in different particular religious cultures, to sense its real
universality.
Or, to approach the same point from another angle: I am talking
here about religion in its true character as the very purest antithesis to
propaganda. Never has any previous generation been as bombarded as
we are now by propaganda: so many campaigns, at work in all the various
mass media, to influence what we buy; how we vote; our whole lifestyle.
Propaganda may no doubt serve many good purposes, as well as bad ones.
But the one thing it can never do is, confront us with the true difficulty of
difficult reality. How could it? Propaganda looks for immediate effects by
48
prodding at our simplest behavioural reflexes. Difficult reality is what most

of all takes time to approach, time that the propagandist does not have. True
prayer is the opposite to propaganda, in that it is a deliberate slowing down
of the mind, so as to attend, as far as possible without distraction, to difficult
reality. Indeed, the proliferation of propaganda, in the world of mass
communication, actually I think creates a whole new purpose for prayer.
For propaganda might very well perhaps be defined as the systematic
exploitation of unatonement. And, moreover, it incidentally reinforces
what it exploits, as it seeks, in effect, to invest the unatoned life with the
maximum possible glamour and excitement. Increasingly therefore, now,
the true discipline of prayer has to be understood as a form of therapy for
those exposed to propaganda. Now more than ever, it is all about building
up our inner capacity for resistance to the propagandists seductive artistry.
The unatoned state of mind is, not least, a general term for our (never
willingly acknowledged) vulnerability to propaganda.
3. A condition of sheer inner contradiction

Hegel begins his discussion of this absolutely primordial, universal phenomenon by drawing a basic distinction between two forms of splitting into-two
(Verdopplung), a healthy and an unhealthy one:
There is [already] a certain splitting-into-two intrinsic to the concept
of Spirit. But here [in this internalisation of master and slave] we
have the splitting-into-two without the [restorative] unity of Spirit.
And the unatoned state of mind is a condition of sheer inner
contradiction.2
The necessary splitting-into-two that immediately belongs to Spirit is the
development of a capacity for two sorts of thinking: not only the direct, fresh
registering of concrete reality, but also abstract reflection on experience. In the
unatoned state of mind, however, the problem is that the proper partnership
between these two sorts of thinking has broken down. It has become a
rivalry. And the capacity for abstract reflection has started to tyrannize over
the capacity for direct, fresh registering of concrete reality. Theoretical
hypotheses and imaginative pictures have gone stale, and the staleness has,
moreover, been invested with repressive authority.
In the ensuing, introductory passage Hegel sets out to define das unglckliche
Bewutseyn purely and simply as such, decisively abstracted from any
particular cultural manifestation. As a matter of fact, I think it helps render
2
My translation. For the paragraphs I am working on here, compare Miller, pp. 12627,
Baillie, pp. 25153.
49
Hegels meaning clearer if, in translating this passage, one renounces any
use of the word consciousness, not only in rendering the phrase das
unglckliche Bewutseyn, but also in every other instance where Hegel
writes Bewutseyn . The German text repeats Bewutseyn over and over
again it is a stylistic tic, infesting the Phenomenology in general. And the
context shifts disconcertingly. Not only is the unatoned state of mind, as a
whole, a Bewutseyn; so are both of the two warring elements within it.
Sometimes the word refers to a viewpoint, at other times to a process.
The repetition of the word has a fog-like effect. But translation gives us an
opportunity to dispel that fog. Besides state of mind, in my English version
I have rendered it with a whole range of variants: force field, identity,
aspect, self, aspect-of-self, soul, working-through, persona, condition,
thinking, thought. Thus:
This unatoned, and to that extent pitiable, state of mind constitutes
a single force field of contradictory impulses, the interplay of two
mutually dependent identities. There is no possibility of peaceful unity
being achieved through the triumph of one aspect over the other. But,
rather, the self bounces back and forth between the two. [It is
ausgetrieben, literally driven out, from each in turn.] Indeed, what
does it mean for Spirit truly to come alive, and enter into actual
existence? First and foremost, it is the reintegration of what has here
disintegrated; the reconciliation of what is here in conflict. Or it is
what happens when we recognise the properly complementary nature
of the two aspects-of-self that have been split apart. This state of mind
is itself the gazing of each self upon the other. It is both at once; its
essence is the unity of the two. Only, it is not yet conscious of its own
essence, as that unity.
For, again: being unatoned means fooling oneself.
To be atoned with, and opened up to, reality is to lay oneself fully open to
being changed by fresh experience. Yet, the inner despot-self of the unatoned
state of mind, addicted to clich and reassuring prejudice, is a spirit of
sheer, censorious resistance to all such change. Therefore, Hegel calls it
das Unwandelbare, literally the Unchangeable. Or, perhaps better in this
psychological context: the Rigidity Principle. Its workings include every
sort of resistance to thoughtful change-of-mind; stubborn, arrogant or
sanctimonious. The Rigidity Principle projects itself: so it purports to speak
on behalf of God, or whatever other idolatrous concept its immediate
cultural environment supplies.3 Set over against it, on the other hand,
is another sub-self, potentially the agent of thoughtful change, but too
3
This is why, as translator, I opt to write the Rigidity Principle with a capital R and P.
50
insecure to push such change through against the Rigidity Principles

resistance. This second, adaptable (wandelbare) sub-self keeps rising up,
only straightaway to be put down again:
Since, to begin with, the unatoned state of mind is only the immediate
unity of the two aspects not appreciating how they are in fact
complementary, but supposing them to be rivals it considers just one
of them, the Rigidity Principle, to be what really counts [das Wesen,
literally the essential]. The other, the adaptable aspect, it regards
as being of much lower status [das Unwesentliche, literally the
inessential]. For this soul, these two are quite alien to one another
and, as the working-through of their contradiction, it identifies itself
with the adaptable aspect. As such, it depreciates itself. And in response
to the demands of the Rigidity Principle, it feels obliged to set about
freeing itself from all that belongs to its own adaptable nature. Thus,
whilst, for itself, it is identified with the adaptable, and it thinks of the
[projected] Rigidity Principle as an alien being, yet, in itself, it still
remains no less identifiable with the Rigidity Principle, [the projection
really is only a projection], even though [out of false humility] it
declines to recognise this. So the relationship between the two can
never be one of mutual indifference. That is to say, the unatoned self
can never be indifferent to the demands of the Rigidity Principle.
But it is, itself, immediately both aspects at once; even as it understands the proper relationship between them to be that of boss and
subordinate, in which the latter is required to be entirely self-effacing
[aufzuheben ist, literally has to be cancelled out, sublated]. Because
both contradictory aspects are equally essential to this state of mind,
what ensues is just the ceaseless movement of their contradiction the
inter-relatedness of the two opposite impulses means that neither may
come to rest, but that both are forever regenerating themselves out of
their opposition.
Here, in short, we have a struggle against an enemy, victory over
whom is really defeat; and where what one wins in one persona one
loses in the other. The whole experience of life, its being and doing,
comes to be pervaded by a distressing sense that, really, one is meant
to be and do the opposite, that it is all mere nothingness. One raises
oneself up, to adopt the point of view of the Rigidity Principle. Yet this
elevation is merely another twist of the same condition. And so one is
immediately recalled to what opposes it: the point of view of ones
own particularity. As the Rigidity Principle enters into our thinking it
is straightaway affected by the particularity of the particular thinker,
from which it can never be disentangled. Instead of this particularity
being expunged in the thought of the Rigidity Principle, again and
again it springs back.
51
One must certainly be grateful that the adaptable aspect of the self does
keep springing back for otherwise we would become mere robots. But this
constant return of the repressed is just what makes the unatoned state of
mind unhappy.
4. Luther / Kant / Hegel

The Phenomenology of Spirit was originally published in 1807. It was
Hegels first great work. But we can trace the emergence of his thinking over
the preceding 15 years, as it is recorded in a series of writings, many of
which remained unpublished until long after his death.4 And there is in fact
already an extensive critique of unatonement in these earlier essays. The one
difference is that prior to the Phenomenology he always discusses it in quite
culturally specific forms.
Indeed, it was not until that 1801 that he began to think of himself as an
academic philosopher at all; his writings up that date are essentially the
work not of a philosopher, but of a would-be religious reformer. As such,
they are first and foremost an attack on what he saw as the prevailing
corruption of Christianity. In typical Lutheran fashion he associates this
with a rather crude caricature of the Judaism rejected by the early Church.
Later on in his career his understanding of the Jewish heritage little by little
began to grow more generous; but his initial strategy was an attempt to
adapt the old Lutheran approach. Thus, the trouble with contemporary
Church-Christianity, the young Hegel wants to suggest, is that it has lapsed
back into patterns of thought and behaviour all too similar to those that
St Paul sought to criticize in first-century Judaism. In effect, he is radicalizing this traditional Lutheran pattern of argument: turning it now against
all existing forms of Church-Christianity, also including Lutheranism itself.
And his basic complaint is that Church-Christianity consistently fails in
actual practice to be atoning enough. Like pre-Christian Judaism (he
polemically suggests) it is always, in one way or another, far too much
about mere social control. And so it generates a mentality of inner servitude,
inhibiting any challenge to the religiously endorsed established moral order,
even where that order may be quite corrupt.
At first, he had combined this Lutheran mode of argument with an
allegiance to Kantian philosophy. His ambition had been to retell the gospel
story in something like the spirit of Kants religion within the limits of
reason alone. But, then, in the essay entitled The Spirit of Christianity and
Its Fate (written 17981800) he makes a dramatic new move, beyond that
initial approach: he turns against Kant. For, after all, Kant is not really
4
See Stephen Crites, Dialectic and Gospel in Hegels Development (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).
52
a critic of unatonement, per se. Instead, what Kant criticizes is, first of all,
any notion of divine revelation in history, and then, more generally, any
serious investment of authority in a cultural tradition. Kant does not exactly
ask to what extent traditions have gone stale. He asks, instead, to what
extent they lay claim to authority. That is to say, how ambitious they are
to build emotionally intense bonds of solidarity on the basis of a shared
community narrative, emphasizing the particularity of the community in
question. And, in the name of our common sheer humanity, he deplores such
ambition. Nor does it matter to Kant how sophisticated the tradition in
question is. From this point of view he goes so far as to argue there is no
difference between, say, a well-educated Western European prince-bishop or
American Puritan and an ignorant shaman like those of the Tungus or Vogul
peoples in Siberia.5 (He is referring to recent anthropological reports on
Siberian shamanism). Inasmuch as each of these, alike, seeks to invest their
own cultural tradition with maximum sacred authority, they are all of them,
for Kant, equally guilty of the same elementary error. The authentic love of
Truth, in his view, demands an utterly individualistic repudiation of any
such project.
Not so, however! Hegel, in this essay, now starts to argue. What matters is
inner liberty from traditions that have gone stale. But to be loyal to an
authoritative cultural tradition is by no means necessarily to be servile,
in this sense. Everything depends upon the nature of the tradition. It is
indeed quite possible to imagine an authoritative cultural tradition that was
essentially a celebration of inner liberty: precisely, identifying true authority
with authentic freshness of thought. Instead of dismissing all such tradition,
we need on the contrary, as far as possible, to try and to mobilize its power
in ever more liberating fashion. Simply to reject the authority of authoritative
5
Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (trans. T. M. Greene and
H. H. Hudson; New York: Harper & Row, 1960), iv. 2. 3, p. 164:
We can indeed recognize a tremendous difference in manner, but not in principle,
between a shaman of the Tunguses and a European prelate ruling over church and
state alike, or (if we wish to consider not the heads and leaders but merely the adherents of the faith, according to their own mode of representation) between the wholly
sensuous Wogulite who in the morning places the paw of a bearskin upon his head
with the short prayer, Strike me not dead! and the sublimated Puritan and Independent in Connecticut: for, as regards principle, they both belong to one and the same
class, namely, the class of those who let their worship of God consist in what can
never make man better (in faith in certain statutory dogmas or celebration of certain
arbitrary observances).
Just as, if one was being harsh, one might say that traditional Lutheranism mobilizes
antisemitic prejudice to attack Roman Catholicism by association, so this sort of
Enlightenment thinking mobilizes European contempt for primitive non-European
peoples, to attack its real target: European church-Christianity in general. It is, I think,
rather an ugly move.
53
tradition by no means guarantees a true, thoughtful openness to reality; all

it guarantees is a certain poetic impoverishment of ones thinking. Moreover,
the sort of thinking bound up with a hard-line Enlightenment repudiation of
traditional religious authority may very well, itself, go stale. And then, to the
extent that this happens:
Between the shaman of the Tungus, the European prelate who rules
church and state, the Voguls, and the Puritans, on the one hand, and
the man who [in accordance with Kantian moral individualism] listens
to his own command of duty, on the other, the difference is not that the
former make themselves slaves, while the latter is free, but that the
former have their lord outside themselves, while the latter carries his
lord in himself, yet at the same time is his own slave.6
With that startling move for the first time to identify, deep down, a possibility of spiritual slavery equally present in shamanism, Church-Christianity
and also the most radical Enlightenment rationality Hegel has, in effect,
already arrived at the critical standpoint he later goes on to develop in the
Phenomenology.
The unatoned state of mind is, in principle, an absolutely universal phenomenon, to be found, at least to some extent, in the thought processes
of every ordinary human individual. No form of thinking is immune from
lapsing into this condition. Thus, one might say that Hegels argument, here,
is his philosophical reinterpretation of the old Christian-theological dogma
of the fall of Adam and Eve. It is an attempt to define in purely conceptual
terms what that dogma seeks to express in pictures: the fallen condition of
all humanity. As his discussion of the phenomenon develops, beyond the
initial definition that I have translated above, it is illustrated by various
veiled, but nevertheless unmistakable, allusions to Christian history. And this
has led some commentators to suppose that he considers das unglckliche
Bewutseyn to be an especially Christian phenomenon. But they are quite
wrong. He does not. If he did, he would surely have said so; such an interpretation makes it seem that he has veiled his allusions to Christianity, in
this context, out of sheer obscurantism. In fact, these allusions are veiled just
because he does not want us to put too much emphasis upon any particular
examples belonging to one specific culture.
As for his, nevertheless, choosing these Christian examples the real
reason for this choice, I think, is not that he judges Christian culture to be
peculiarly badly infested with the unatoned state of mind, in itself. Rather, it
is because he is himself a Christian. And, as a Christian, he takes a special
interest in the double-edged expressive power of Christian theology. What
6
Hegel, Early Theological Writings (trans. T. M. Knox; Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 1948), p. 211.
54
interests him is Christian theologys special capacity, in popular-religious

terms, to express both sides of the struggle: both, at its best, the atoning
impulse of Spirit; and, where it is corrupted, the resistance to that impulse by
the unatoned state of mind. Both sides: not only the despotism that governs
the unatoned state of mind, but also the forever resurgent, countervailing
impulse of Spirit.
For us to grasp what he really means here, though, everything depends
upon our constantly looking beyond the narrow limits of particular culturespecific examples, to apprehend the phenomenon in question as a whole.
The unatoned state of mind, as a corrupter of religion, is far from being only
a Christian phenomenon; it appears in all sorts of different religious forms.
Nor is it only a religious phenomenon. It also appears in all sorts of different
secular manifestations, as well. What we are confronting here is an elementary distortion of the sheer will-to-truth that may equally come to expression
at every different level of crudeness or sophistication. To one degree or
another, it is everywhere, in every culture without exception. We are every
one of us, more or less, unconsciously subject to it.
5. Desmonds response
Theology has always tended to be somewhat unclear as to its ultimate
truth-criteria. To what extent does it prioritize truth-as-openness? Or
to what extent does it simply seek to defend the sheer data, as such, of a
particular religious tradition? In most notions of sanctity, there is at least
some appreciation for the virtues of openness: open-mindedness; openheartedness. But to what extent is this understood as the proper essence of
sanctity? Or how far is it overlaid with other supposed virtues, belonging
rather to an ethos of moral conformism, loyalty to ones religious tradition
as a mere form of ethnic identity; virtues that have nothing to do with
openness? Most theology muddles its testimony to truth-as-openness with a
whole lot else, and leaves it a muddle.
And so too: when theology identifies particular elements in its own tradition
as especially authoritative, how is this authority supposed to be justified?
How much weight is put on apologetic arguments of a metaphysical nature,
in the sense that metaphysics is a systematic philosophic celebration of the
quest, in general, for truth-as-correctness? To what extent, in other words,
are we meant to rely on philosophic proofs, suggesting, as such proofs
are liable to do, that the highest truth of faith is a form of demonstrable
theoretic correctness, rather than lived openness?
Hegel pioneers a certain basic clarity here. More systematically than
any other Christian thinker, in the Phenomenology of Spirit he opens up a
form of theology in which the pursuit of truth-as-openness is unequivocally
prioritized, in strategic terms. Metaphysical apologetics is not ruled out
55
altogether. But when it comes to the definition of salvation and hence to

the interpretation of salvation history as a whole the over-riding criterion
is quite clear: primary theological truth, saving truth, is whatever serves
most effectively to mobilize religion against das unglckliche Bewutseyn,
the unatoned state of mind. Insofar as theological orthodoxy achieves this,
orthodoxy is true; its authority claims are vindicated. But where the selfsame doctrine fails to do so, as is also quite possible, it becomes false. Hegels
theological genius lies in the sheer unprecedented radicalism with which he
thus tries to highlight the intrinsic ambiguity of first-order faith.
And so how, then, will theologians still in thrall to the unatoned state of
mind respond to this challenge? One would not expect them really to engage
with it at all. They will in all likelihood deplore the element of innovation in
Hegels thinking, just for its newness. Missing the trans-metaphysical point,
they will also accuse him of metaphysical error. Pantheism is a suitably
vague sort of charge. Although Hegel himself did not see his doctrine as in
any sense pantheistic, the term seems somehow to fit the all-comprehensive
ambition of his approach. And these critics will draw on the hostile Hegel
myth in general. In order not to have to deal with the challenge he represents,
they will use anything that seems liable to discredit him, no matter how
fallacious. There is plenty of such crude argumentation around!
And then, other more serious critics, not at all apologists for the unatoned
state of mind but nevertheless with different philosophical priorities from
Hegel, have also felt impelled to clear a space for their own insights by pushing
him roughly away. It is as though the gravitational pull of his thought would
otherwise be too strong. I take this to be a decree of divine providence: that,
as the essential truth Hegel represents is, in existential terms, so difficult, it
has needed in order to purge it of ambiguity and hence of possible diversionary misinterpretation to pass through the very fiercest, and most
sustained, ordeal of a hostile reception.
Desmond, indeed, is certainly no defender of the unatoned state of mind,
in its primary form; his critique of Hegel represents another impulse
altogether. And yet, one may well question whether he has, in the end,
done justice to Hegels own critical concerns. Thus, consider especially his
discussion, in Hegels God, of das unglckliche Bewutseyn: there is no
serious acknowledgement here of any potential truth in Hegels argument,
whatsoever.7 He shows no interest in the real, religion-reforming spiritual
impulse by which Hegel is in fact driven, but rather, when faced with the
prime evidence of this, he straightaway changes the subject: launching into
a fierce attack on Hegel for what he does not say. So, in response to Hegel
talking about das unglckliche Bewutseyn, he immediately starts talking
about transcendence. This is, as he addresses it, a quite different topic.
It is relevant only inasmuch that, whereas Hegel puts the concept of das
7
56
unglckliche Bewutseyn right at the heart of philosophic theology, Desmond

for his part wants to put the concept of transcendence there instead.
Changing the subject, therefore, Desmond distinguishes three theologically
significant, valid forms of transcendence8. These he calls, in shorthand, T1,
T2 and T3:
z
T1 is simply the relationship of beings, as created by God, to our ideas

of them; the way in which the actual richness of their reality forever
transcends the expressive power of human language, to convey it.
T2 is the self-surpassing power of the human being, that is, our never
altogether extinguished capacity to transcend the limitations of given, or
habitual, identity.
T3 is agape the asymmetrical superiority of God-as-agape transcending
the ideal of symmetrical reciprocation, in inter-personal relationships,
which eros, by contrast, always yearns for.
Not only does Hegel ignore T3, Desmond argues. But he also falls short
with regard to T1. Apprehended in sheer wonder, the truth of T1 demands
the most poetic sort of thinking for its evocation; Hegel is far too prosaic
a thinker ever properly to get to grips with it. In fact, the only form of
transcendence that Hegel does appreciate is T2: as the impulse of Spirit
transcends the limitations of unatoned identity, in all its various permutations.
This though, on its own, is not enough. In the end, Desmond suggests, Hegels
failure to appreciate T1 and, still more, T3 also vitiates his appreciation even
of T2.
But the fact that Hegel does not himself focus on T1 or T3 by no means
necessarily means that he must be ill-disposed towards other forms of thought
that do. In criticizing das unglckliche Bewutseyn, he is not criticizing
Desmonds celebration of divine agape, or anything like it. He is neither
explicitly nor implicitly devaluing such a celebration at all.
Is he not denying a certain form of divine transcendence? Well, transcendence
is not a word he uses, it is Desmonds term. But yes he clearly is. Only:
the transcendence he denies is none of the three forms that Desmond has
identified. What Hegel argues against is not the sort of thinking that is
responsive to T1. Nor is it the sort that is responsive to T3. It is, let us say, the
thinking of T4. Namely: the false transcendence of God, as God is misconceived by the unatoned state of mind. The specific form of asymmetrical
superiority Hegel repudiates is that which the theologically informed unatoned state of mind attributes to its God, the Divine Despot. What is at
issue here is not divine asymmetrical superiority in general; it is just the
asymmetrical superiority of that oppressor-God, the mere theological
projection or apotheosis of the Rigidity Principle. Hegel repudiates the false
8
Ibid., pp. 27.
57
authority of the deified Rigidity Principle, as it is said by its devotees, in

effect, to transcend all possibility of open, rational challenge.
The way Desmond uses the concept of transcendence, however in criticism
of Hegel it unfortunately seems to function like a patch of philosophic
black ice. Hitting this black ice, Desmonds Hegel abruptly skids away from
the critique that the real Hegel seeks to develop, of T4. All of a sudden,
this Hegel has swung right around; he ends up facing in quite the wrong
direction. The Hegel whom Desmond rejects is, above all, a critic of any sort
of philosophy that primarily attends to T1 or T3. Why?
It all seems so arbitrary! The polemical attitude that Desmond attributes
to Hegel does not follow, by any sort of logic, from the real Hegels primary
critique of T4. Nor do I see any compelling evidence to suggest that the real
Hegel himself has confused the two.
But now let us stay where Desmond will not: let us try and delve a little
deeper into the underlying rationale of the actual Hegelian argument.
58
4
aetiology of unatonement
1. A sieving process
What is wisdom, for Hegel? One might, indeed, well say that it is maximum
conversational openness. Thus, his thinking takes shape, so to speak, as the
assembly of a vast symposium. In the first place, he is a pioneer of the history
of philosophy, systematically assembling together different philosophical
voices. And then he also constructs systematic philosophically informed
histories of politics, art and religion, as all-inclusive as the state of knowledge in his world allowed; with a view to bringing philosophy, also, into
conversation with all manner of pre-philosophic points of view. In his later
writing these histories are separated, each into its own lecture series. But in
the Phenomenology they are all, rather wonderfully, compressed together.
Hegelian wisdom is a cultivation of the very widest possible intellectual
sympathies. That does not mean being uncritical. On the contrary, consistency
is still required, and, as a matter of consistency, such a project immediately
implies a militant distaste for any sort of thinking, whatever the context,
that merely closes conversation down, in defence of rigid, predetermined
notions of what is correct; even where such rigidity is dressed up in the
maximum of intellectual sophistication, so as to justify not seriously attending
to alternative outlooks.
In itself, this is a very simple basic criterion for wisdom. However, Hegel
sets out to apply it in the most complex way: mediating between starkly
contrasting modes of thought. Always the same simple criterion for wisdom
maximum openness and yet with the scenery forever shifting, never allowing
us to feel comfortably settled in. This is, as it were, a sieving process: again,
the point is to separate that core principle of consistency, in itself, from all
its various particular applications. It is not easy to do so! But it is, quite
simply, a matter of practising maximum conversational openness at full
stretch. Spirit is the impulse to true openness, at every level of experience.
The argument of the Phenomenology is a sieving process. And what is left
behind at the end is just the ideal of a self fully at one with the impulse of
59
Spirit the general ideal of atonement, in that sense understood as being

the very essence of the truly sacred.
There is, however, yet another way to continue the same sieving process,
by introducing a further mode of thought, unknown to Hegel himself. I have
said that I want to try and open up the Hegelian argument to the postHegelian discoveries of scientific neuropsychology.
Time now, I think, to do that.
2. What Hegel has inadvertently stumbled upon

Hegel speaks of the two parties to the inner civil war of das unglckliche
Bewutseyn the pseudo-divine Rigidity Principle and its human-all-toohuman adaptable opponent as two consciousnesses, together constituting
a single consciousness of unhappiness. Yet, as I have remarked, if this
consciousness were ever truly to become conscious, its conflictedness would
surely be intolerable. Das unglckliche Bewutseyn can only be a stable
condition of the self insofar as it remains unconscious. Consciousness is just
what destabilizes it. Only the atoned individual achieves true consciousness,
in retrospect, of what this condition of unatonement, now overcome, really
meant. And for my part, therefore, I prefer to speak of the Rigidity Principle
and its adaptable opponent as two sub-selves: two differently functioning
structures of habit and desire, more or less antagonistically yoked together
within every whole self, as they promote rival models of self-identification.
In the condition of unatonement the Rigidity-Principle sub-self is constituted by a disabling addiction to certain fixed ideas. This sub-self internalizes
prejudice and clings to it, invoking religious and secular ideologies to justify
it, and is therefore always ready to side with external bullies and oppressors.
Hence, it tends to become what one might term an inner quisling. On the
other hand, the adaptable sub-self is the inner quislings never entirely extinguished potential challenger from within. For it is always potentially open
to the lessons of fresh experience, even where these contradict established
prejudice. From the point of view of the despotic Rigidity Principle, the
adaptable sub-self needs forever to be censored, cowed into submission.
However, as we have seen, Hegel describes this unglckliche Bewutseyn, or
unatoned state of mind, as the fundamental corruption of a pre-existent,
necessary, and in itself potentially redeemable, duality. He remarks,
There is [already] a certain splitting into two intrinsic to the concept
of Spirit. But [in the unatoned state of mind] we have the splittinginto-two without the [restorative] unity of Spirit.1
Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 206; Miller, p. 126, Baillie, p. 251.
60
AETIOLOGY OF UNATONEMENT
And so how then, exactly, are we to understand this pre-existent duality,

proper to Spirit in general, which the unatoned state of mind corrupts?
It seems to me that what Hegel, without being aware of it, has stumbled
on here is none other than the elementary duality deriving from the physiological division of the brain into two distinct hemispheres.
Hegel names the disease: das unglckliche Bewutseyn. He also constructs
a multi-layered grand narrative around the theme of its cure: considering
how different cultural traditions of every kind may either inflame it, or help
overcome it. And yet, this remains an exclusively teleological interpretation.
He does not discuss the diseases aetiology. For how could he? He was
writing in a period pre-dating even the most tentative beginning of modern
scientific neuropsychology. His genius was to make the political and religious unveiling of the unatoned state of mind, purely and simply as such, a
central theme of systematic philosophical historiography, as no one else
before him ever had. But now, thanks to the development of this science, a
new possibility is opening up. We are also able to analyse the phenomenon
in trans-historical terms, as a universal product of human biology. Let us,
then, consider the sense in which this might be so.
3. Dialectic of the cerebral hemispheres

1
I am arguing that the duality which becomes pathological in the unatoned
state of mind derives, in the first instance, from the dual-purposiveness of
the left and right cerebral hemispheres.
Note immediately, however: the division between the right and left cerebral hemispheres is not the only source of spiritual struggle intrinsic to the
physical structure of the brain. There is also the interaction between the
front and the back. Indeed, when one compares human brains to the brains
of other animals, the most obvious difference is in fact the much greater size
of the frontal lobes, and the far greater proportion of white matter in them,
the myelin sheath, serving to speed up the transmission of messages there.
Whereas in dogs, for instance, the frontal lobes represent about 7 per cent
of total brain volume, and in the lesser apes about 17 per cent, in humans it
is nearer 35 per cent.
As regards the function of the frontal lobes, it is clear not least from the
evidence of the effect on people who suffer damage to them that they are
essentially agents of inhibition. They enable us to stand back from our
immediate concerns; to be detached; to see things objectively. McGilchrist
puts it like this:
Clearly we have to inhabit the world of immediate bodily experience,
the actual terrain in which we live, and where our engagement with the
61
world takes place alongside our fellow human beings, and we need to
inhabit it fully. Yet at the same time we need to rise above the landscape in which we move, so that we can see what one might call the
territory.2
There is a balance required between these two capacities:
To live headlong, at ground level, without being able to pause (stand
outside the immediate push of time) and rise (in space) is to be like an
animal; yet to float off up into the air is not to live at all just to be a
detached observing eye.3
Wisdom is, not least, the negotiation of a proper accommodation between
terrain-thinking and territory-thinking.
To all intents and purposes, the first three chapters of the Phenomenology
actually trace the emergence of territory-thinking out of terrain-thinking.
Thus, Hegel sets out here to demonstrate the extent to which, in general,
ones ability to describe the particulars of a terrain depends upon a learnt
skill in the handling of territorial concepts. More specifically, in chapter 2,
he tries to show the impossibility of ever at all coherently distinguishing one
thing from another in terms of raw terrain-perception alone, without an
accompanying skill in analysing territorial networks of causality. And then,
in chapter 3, he discusses the way in which territorial thinking, about the
laws of nature or of history, tends, further, to float off into the exploration
of counterfactual or utopian dreams; losing itself in contemplation of infinite
possibility.
In neuropsychological terms, indeed, much of human spiritual endeavour
is essentially a bid to enhance the power of the frontal lobes. So we are
taught to pursue ever greater contemplative detachment. Without such
detachment, after all, we would not be capable of empathy. Our imaginative
capacity to see the world as it appears to other people the emotional intelligence that enables genuine compassion and deep friendship all depends,
in the first instance, upon our rising up above the sheer immediacy of egoistic impulse. And this is the work of the frontal lobes.
Yet, considered simply in itself, the power at work here is by no means
only a capacity for compassion and friendship. Its moral significance is, on
the contrary, very ambiguous. For it is just as much a capacity for cold
calculation, in the pursuit of game-playing rivalry, or outright enmity:
working out ones opponents next move, to forestall it. And as to which of
these two possibilities, the achievement of authentic empathy or the practice
2
3
McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 21.

Ibid., pp. 2122.
62
of mere cold calculation, will prevail this, we will find, is all down to the
complex interplay between front / back and left / right.
2
Note further: the two sides of the brain are not perfectly symmetrical. The
right side tends be generally larger, and in particular more protuberant at
the front; the left side tends to be wider at the back, in the area chiefly associated with language skills. Moreover, the right side tends to have more
white matter, accelerating internal communication. Nevertheless, either side
is capable of sustaining life all on its own, even when the other is completely
knocked out of action. They are joined together at their base by a band of
neural tissue called the corpus callosum. But only 2 per cent of cortical
neurones are connected through the corpus callosum, and many of these
connections are inhibitory in effect, designed to help keep the functioning of
the two hemispheres separate, not confused by one another.
So: why this separateness?
The modern study of brain-hemispheric difference actually dates from the
mid-nineteenth century. It was the French surgeon Paul Broca who first published a series of scientific papers on the subject, in the 1860s.4 Broca began
from the evidence of autopsies conducted on brain-damaged patients who
had suffered severe disruption or loss of speech. In each case, he had found
an area of damaged tissue in part of the left frontal lobe. But other patients
with equivalent damage to the right hemisphere of their brains had not suffered speech loss. From this Broca deduced that the faculty of speech, at
least for the majority of people, is localized in the left hemisphere. It had
long been observed that injuries to either side of the brain resulted in damage to the sensorimotor control of the opposite side of the body; a fact
tending further to suggest that right- or left-handedness derives from different balances in power between the two hemispheres. How then, Broca also
went on to ask, does the prevailing association of speech with the left hemisphere relate to that other obvious asymmetry? Does the 90 per cent
predominance of right-handedness in the population directly correlate to
the localization of speech control? Is it that each hand is controlled from the
opposite side of the brain, and that the dominant hand is controlled from
the same side as speech? Does it follow that the minority of people who are
left-handed have right-hemisphere speech-control?
In fact, it turns out that the matter is not quite so simple. Brocas proposed
rule mostly seems to hold good for right-handed people. But it has been
4
Brocas insights had, as it happens, been partly anticipated although without his being
aware of it as early as 1836, by a paper delivered to a medical society in Montpellier
by a certain Marc Dax, an obscure country doctor, who died the following year. But
Daxs work had made no impact, and would have been completely forgotten had not
his son then risen up in response to Brocas work, to remind the world of it.
63
discovered that a substantial proportion of left-handed people also have

left-hemisphere or bilateral speech-control. Thus, the predominance of lefthemisphere speech-control in the population is greater than the predominance
of right-handedness.
And another major question which Brocas pioneering work, by implication,
opened up, but which he did not himself attempt to answer was what in the
great majority of cases where the left hemisphere controls speech the exact
role of the right hemisphere is. John Hughlings Jackson, the great father of
English neurology, was the first who began, at any rate, to speculate about
the special functions of the right hemisphere, in a series of articles beginning
in 1865. If, for example Jackson wrote, it should be proven by wider
experience that the faculty of expression resides in one hemisphere, there is
no absurdity in raising the question as to whether perception its corresponding opposite may be seated in the other.5 But no one immediately
took up Jacksons suggestions, to develop them. For a long time all attention
was devoted to the functions of, in Jacksons own phrase, the leading hemisphere. Indeed, it was not until the 1930s and 1940s that any real progress
at all began to be made in appreciating the special role of what was often
called the minor half of the brain.
And then came the great breakthrough. What most decisively transformed
this whole field of study, from the later 1950s onwards, was the development
of a new type of surgical procedure, in the treatment of epilepsy: commissurotomy, or callosotomy. This involves nothing less than a complete
severing of the various bands of nerve fibre linking the two halves of the
brain, so as to limit the spread of epileptic discharges.6
Most patients who undergo this split-brain operation are able to continue
life as normal, with no immediately discernible side effects. There are just
a few bizarre cases in which the left hand starts to behave as if it had a
mischievous, uncontrollable will of its own. Sometimes, for example, it
may start to pull down trousers that the right hand was pulling up. It may
close doors that the right hand had opened; unfold papers which the right
hand had folded; snatch back money which the right hand had offered to a
cashier; or, in a car, dangerously wrench the steering wheel from away from the
right hand. But these cases are very rare. On the other hand, the procedure
does open up all sorts of new possibilities for research, in carefully devised
experiments. Thus, it renders it possible for experimenters to channel
5
J. H. Jackson, Selected Writings of John Hughlings Jackson (ed. J. Taylor; New York:
Basic Books, 1958), 1865 article.
This procedure was first tried in the 1940s, but with disappointing therapeutic results.
It was then reintroduced in the early 1960s, in a more thoroughgoing and effective way.
The development of more effective pharmacological alternatives has meant that it has
since become much rarer.
64
particular sensory inputs to just one hemisphere at a time. Not only does the
left hemisphere primarily relate to the right hand, and vice versa, but the
same also applies to eyes and ears. In a normal, intact brain, information
transmitted to one hemisphere is swiftly shared with the other; in split-brain
patients however, this does not happen. The experimenter, therefore, may
for example give such an individual something to hold in one hand, unseen,
or may show an image to just one eye, or use headphones to deliver stimuli
to just one ear at a time, and then compare responses. Increasingly, also, new
neuro-imaging techniques make it possible to observe which parts of the
brain are activated by particular tasks. And then there is also the Wada test:
when, before a brain operation, surgeons use the rapid-acting sedative
sodium amitol to close down one hemisphere at a time, checking whether or
not the patient conforms to the ordinary pattern, with the left hemisphere
controlling speech. This is possible since each hemisphere has a separate
blood supply, and the shutdown may last for a period of two to three
minutes. Or, likewise, either hemisphere may also be inactivated by electroconvulsive means. The technology now available thus makes it possible to
compare the two hemispheres across the whole range of their complementary functioning.
The isolated right hemisphere is normally unable to speak. Other than in
the small minority of cases where the usual roles of the two hemispheres are
simply reversed, it only learns to speak where it has been compelled to do
so, by damage to the left hemisphere, already early in childhood. Nevertheless, it can still communicate through the actions of the left hand. And it
actually turns out not only to have a number of skills that the isolated left
hemisphere in most cases lacks, but also to have a remarkably different
whole outlook on life.
3
It is not only human brains that are laterally divided. What, then, are the
original evolutionary advantages of this arrangement? It may well help in
the doing of two quite different things at once. McGilchrist cites experiments with creatures as different as chicks and marmosets, showing that
they chiefly use their right eyes, connected to the left hemisphere, for the
close-up business of foraging and feeding, while at the same time they
chiefly use their left eyes, connected to the right hemisphere, for surveying
the wider environment, on the lookout for threatening predators. Likewise,
studies of predatory creatures have shown that they chiefly use their right
eye (left hemisphere) for spotting prey; and, in the case of birds, their
right foot for grabbing it. But when interacting socially with others of
their own kind, all sorts of creatures seem to use their left eye (right
hemisphere) more.
65
In short, as McGilchrist puts it, it seems the general rule is that

the left hemisphere yields narrow, focussed attention, mainly for the
purpose of getting and feeding. The right hemisphere yields a broad,
vigilant attention, the purpose of which appears to be awareness of
signals from the surroundings, especially of other creatures, who are
potential predators or potential mates, foes or friends; and it is involved
in bonding in social animals. It might then be that the division of the
human brain is also the result of the need to bring to bear two incompatible types of attention on the world at the same time, one narrow,
focussed and directed by our needs, and the other broad, open, and
directed towards whatever else is going on in the world apart from
ourselves.7
4
Especially in the 1970s, the new focus on brain lateralization, resulting from
experiments with split-brain patients, led to a great explosion of popular
writing, more or less amounting to a right brain liberation movement, part
of the counter-culture of the day. Lifestyle and management consultancy
gurus set themselves up to be the standard bearers of this movement. For a
while, a form of brain-hemispheric dichotomania was fashionable. It was
all perhaps a bit silly.8
Yet, whatever the attendant silliness, there surely are some quite serious
and significant philosophical implications here. For the evidence is that,
while, in all normal situations, both hemispheres are constantly at work
together, they do differ, to quite a remarkable extent, in what they bring to
this collaboration. And these differences are manifest at every level of human
spiritual life. Thus, the two hemispheres differ
z
z
z
z
z
7
8
in their initial perception of things;

in their range of emotional response;
in their contribution to mutual understanding between people;
in their general styles of moral reflection;
in their approach to the sacred.

For a summary account of this literature, see for instance Robert Ornstein, The Right
Mind (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997), chapter 7. Ornstein had indeed
played quite a role himself in helping generate the intellectual fashion that he ironically
describes here, with his earlier, very widely read book, The Psychology of Consciousness (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1972).
66
3.1. Perception
In the 1860s John Hughlings Jackson speculated that whereas, in the great
majority of people, the left cerebral hemisphere specialized in expression,
the right cerebral hemisphere is perhaps the primary agency of perception.
This now turns out to be not entirely wrong, as a partial formulation of
their contrasting roles; but to be a bit misleading nevertheless. For it all
depends on what is meant by perception.
If perception is understood in the primary sense of recognition, then yes,
Jackson was right. The most primitive difference between the two hemispheres
is what already appears in other species. At this level, the right hemisphere
is specialized in recognition. It scans the environment, and recognizes, within
it, the presence of the potential predator, or mate; the presence of others
belonging to its own flock, its own herd or pack. And so, by extension, in
humans the same hemisphere becomes specialized in learning to recognize
the familiar thisness (haecceitas) of this particular person, this particular
place, this particular animal or object.
The left hemisphere, meanwhile, is first of all specialized in foraging and
feeding. As human beings are predators, that specialization then develops
into a special capacity for the skills required for successful hunting: calculating odds, developing schemes, picturing what is most likely to work. The left
hemisphere becomes the prime agency for the communication skills of the
human hunting pack, as such. These skills evolve, as the rules of the hunting
pack are extended, to become the rules of social collaboration more generally.
Thinking in accordance with rules involves the use of general categories: in
this category of situation, we do such and such. This hemisphere does not
so much recognize, as categorize; it becomes the perception of things in the
secondary sense of identifying, not their individual thisness, but the general
categories to which they belong. And it likes to work deductively: if that is
the case, then such and such a general rule comes into play.
The isolated right hemisphere is typically very good at recognition, much
better than the isolated left hemisphere. But it is, by contrast, pretty incompetent at logical deduction, inasmuch as this depends upon an abstract
categorizing of experience. That is work of the left hemisphere . It is not just
that the left hemisphere controls language. More generally, it specializes in
the perception of things as they relate to the various interpretative codes that
each human culture has created, in order to organize experience for sharing,
and so render possible communal projects, seeking to control the world.
Thus, as a rule: the right hemisphere presents the facts, the left hemisphere
re-presents them.9
John Cutting, Psychopathology and Modern Philosophy (Scaynes Hill: The Forest
Publishing Co., 1999), p. 219.
67
In view of the fact that, in a small minority of cases, the role usually played
by the right hemisphere is actually transferred to the left, and vice versa, let
us therefore, from now on, speak in terms of the presenting hemisphere
and the representing hemisphere. To put it in the most general terms: the
representing hemisphere is concerned with the operation of consciously
learned techniques and collaborative strategies, of every kind. So it immediately re-presents the experience that the presenting hemisphere presents to
it, codifying the data in accordance with the predetermined requirements of
technique and strategy. It has evolved from a simple preoccupation with getting and feeding to a concern with the most sophisticated forms of technical
or strategic domination over the world at large; while the presenting hemisphere remains preoccupied with a sheer registering of what actually is,
albeit with ever greater aesthetic sophistication.
Unatonement, then, is simply definable as a morbid separation between
these two functions, inasmuch as the impulse to dominate tends to suppress
ones capacity to register any aspects of reality not perceived as being useful
to the purposes of that impulse. What Hegel calls das Unwandelbare, the
Rigidity Principle, is the rigidification of the representing-hemisphere
sub-self; whereas what he calls das Wandelbare, the adaptable aspect,
which the Rigidity Principle seeks to enslave, is the presenting-hemisphere
sub-self.
And hence, also, the difference between the two basic species of truth:
truth-as-correctness and truth-as-openness. The former is what the representing hemisphere needs in order to achieve maximum effectiveness in its
efforts to control the world. But the latter is what consists in a maximum
openness to the actual primary reality of that which is simply, and perhaps
uncontrollably, present as such.
Or again, one might for example also express the difference at this level in
Thomist, Aristotelian-theological terms. One might say: the representing
hemisphere perceives things in what Aristotle calls their formal aspect; the
presenting hemisphere, in what he calls their material aspect. For matter,
here, is that which individuates. God as Creator, according to Thomist
doctrine, knows all things in both aspects, perfectly co-ordinated in a
sense, indeed, God just is the creative power of that ideal truth. But human
perception differs, above all, precisely inasmuch as, in it, the formal and
material aspects of reality tend to come apart. At certain moments our
perception of the world remains fixated on its materiality. This is a simply
unthinking apprehension of phenomena, a sheer failure to make any reflective connection between them. At other moments our thinking is all too
formal: a different sort of failure to connect, the failure of an over-abstract
mode of thought, not allowing fresh perceptions to impinge on, and reshape,
old ideas. In the first instance (to mix Hegel with Aquinas) the unatoned
state of mind rigidifies this disjunction between our perceptions of form
and matter.
68
3.2. Emotional Tone

It seems that the presenting hemisphere (usually on the right) develops
somewhat earlier in the growth of an infant than the representing hemisphere (usually on the left). This makes evolutionary sense, inasmuch as at
first our parents take care of our survival needs to the extent that these
require planning, that is, representing-hemisphere thought. But right from
the outset we need to be alert to danger, with presenting-hemisphere wariness.
And it is that original wariness which then essentially determines the whole
emotional range of presenting-hemisphere experience. So the presenting
hemisphere specializes in the emotions most necessary for survival, from the
beginning of life: those prompting us to turn away, in alarm, from immediate
danger, or to cry out for help. It is more prone to all forms of restless emotion,
whatever is mixed with fear or hope. When the left hemisphere is sedated
and the mute right hemisphere takes over completely, some patients become
disoriented; some are agitated; some are disinhibited; some are just morose
or desolate. If any speech function remains, it is sometimes just the utterance
of obscenities, as an expression of shock. Everything, apparently, feels
infused with danger.
The later developing hemisphere, by contrast, tends to operate in much
more tranquil emotional terms. More detached and contemplative, it has a
greater capacity for contentment or bliss. But by the same token, the more it
prevails, the more emotionally bland and superficial life is liable to become.
3.3. The Understanding of the Other

When it comes to conversation, in general, the two hemispheres seem more
or less to share the work between them. Thus, the representing hemisphere
is primarily tasked with what one might term the text-element in speech:
that is, the literal or direct meaning of what is said, both by oneself and by
ones interlocutors. But when it comes to all the other, additional elements
of meaning which depend on context so crucial for truth-as-openness!
they are primarily registered by the presenting hemisphere
Note: when I speak of text here, I do not just mean the semantic content
of written or spoken communication, but also the messages conveyed by the
deliberate use of non-verbal coded gestures, of any kind. It is any form of
communication insofar as it is a deployment of signifiers with invariable,
objective representational meaning. In itself, the meaning of any text is
fixed. However, the specialist concern of the presenting hemisphere is, on the
contrary, with the endless fluctuation of meaning, according to context.
So, at one level, it is charged with picking up the deliberately multifaceted
suggestiveness of poetic metaphor; the play of irony, sarcasm, humour in
general, as a subversion of surface textual meaning. But then, at the same
time to borrow the terminology develop by Emmanuel Levinas it also
responds to the sheer inchoate proximity of face to face encounter,
69
considered in itself. In Levinasian terms: the presenting hemisphere registers

the simple bodily presence of the Other, as a claim on ones attention, quite
apart from any words; or, in speech, everything that belongs to the saying,
in contradistinction to the said. Ones reflective, representing-hemisphere
response to the said, as such, always involves a certain judgement of the
Other, a certain placing of them, to assess how seriously to take what they
say. However, at the level of presenting-hemisphere response to the saying,
behind the said, one ceases to have any critical, categorizing knowledge
of the Other. One is left only with what comes from substitution, the
sympathetic act of putting oneself in the Others place. And herein lies the
possibility of an ethical impulse decisively transcending the mere calculation
of enlightened self-interest, in relation to others: the possibility of that urgent
fear- and hope-laden impulse which Levinas, for his part, extravagantly or
provocatively calls ethical obsession. And which he celebrates.10
3.4. Styles of Moral Reflection

People who have suffered damage to the right hemisphere sometimes lose
any immediate sense of responsibility for their own actions; feeling that
everything they do is, in fact, all down to the influence of some other agency.
Ones sense of responsibility derives from the sheer unmediated experience of
proximity to the Other beyond all representation, all prejudice, all clich
which Levinas so strikingly seeks to evoke.
Those with left hemisphere damage, however, are much more likely to
suffer an impaired sense of social identity, in the sense of losing any instinctive
feel for what is expected of them. This is because the left hemisphere is
usually dominant not only for speech, but also for any sort of representational thought, including how one represents ones own identity to oneself,
and to others. Insofar as ones sense of identity is a matter of image and
status, and is enshrined in spin-doctor autobiographical narratives, it is a
representing-hemisphere creation.
At the same time, broadly speaking, one might say that the presenting
hemisphere tends to specialize in synthetic, context-sensitive moral Intuition,
and the representing hemisphere in analytic moral Reason. But, by way of
immediate qualification to that statement, it needs to be noted, first, that the
word Reason does not always mean the antithesis to Intuition. For Hegel,
in particular, it does not. Thus, Hegel distinguishes between three basic
modes of Reason: Understanding, Speculative Reason and Dialectical
Reason.11 Understanding, here, is just the sort of rationality that is most
10
11
See especially Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence.

Hegel, Encyclopaedia (trans. William Wallace; Hegels Logic), 7982. (And see the
discussion in John Burbidge, Hegel on Logic and Religion, Albany: SUNY Press, 1992,
chapter 4: linking Dialectical Reason to the logic of Being, Speculative Reason to the
logic of Essence, the Understanding to the logic of Concept.)
70
immediately useful as a guide to effective planned action of any kind. Speculative Reason is the sort that, above all, generates the specific enterprise of
philosophy, at its boldest: it is the rationality involved in a truly systematic
thinking about thinking. But Dialectical Reason is different again, precisely
inasmuch as it is a form of representing-hemisphere thought that pays homage to the potential truth of presenting-hemisphere Intuition. So it is forever
dissolving the results of both Understanding and Speculative Reason.
Returning to the actual experiences they seek to re-present and analyse, its
whole function is to highlight the context-dependent slipperiness of their
ideas.
Second, in distinguishing between Reason and Intuition, it is important
not to assume that Reason is always rational! The word rational is generally applied to the operation of Reason at its healthiest. But then there is
schizophrenia. In the sense of Reason intended here, the irrationality of
schizophrenia is by no means an irruption of energies alien to Reason. Far
rather, it is a morbid, irrational hyper-activity of Reason, without adequate
external restraint. It is a sheer riot of representational thinking, unrestrained
by sober Intuition.
And third, the popular literature of the right brain liberation movement
often represents itself, with a self-indulgently bohemian flourish, as a championing of imaginative creativity, against the dreary unimaginativeness of
the left brain Establishment. But this may be misleading. Indeed, there surely
is a sense that, considered purely and simply in itself, Intuition with its
immediate connection to actual reality must tend to be imaginatively
somewhat restricted. The capacity for creative fantasy, as such, goes with
the capacity for abstract, de-contextualized thinking: one would expect it to
be a speciality of the representing hemisphere. Imagination involves input
from both hemispheres. But what is suppressed in the unatoned state of
mind, where corrupted Reason lords it despotically over Intuition, is by no
means imaginative creativity. Far rather, it is what one might perhaps call
the raw experience of shakenness.
Thus, the presenting hemisphere, with its troubled emotional tone, is the
organ of shakenness: being shaken free, by troubling experience, from the
control of received ideas. This, again, is why Hegel speaks of the suppressed
aspect of the unatoned state of mind as das Wandelbare, that which is
changeable or adaptable: it is intuitively shaken loose from rigidified
habit, of every kind. The unatoned state of mind is analogous to political
tyranny, which may indeed be highly imaginative and creative. Schizophrenia is analogous to the chaos of a failed state. But the liberation of the
adaptable sub-self is analogous to a rich flourishing of civil society, informed
by the solidarity of the shaken. It is Intuition setting strict, sober limits, from
below, on the otherwise arbitrary governance, or warlord recklessness, of
pure Reason. To be sure, the more the insurrection of the adaptable sub-self
also enlists an oppositional form of representing-hemisphere imaginative
71
creativity to counter that of the unatoned state of mind, the better. Only, let
us not confuse the means of struggle, the imaginative creativity, with its
primary cause, which is shakenness. Limagination prend le pouvoir (Paris,
May 1968) is a fine slogan for a moment of revolutionary euphoria. The
truth capacity of shakenness, however, does not depend upon such moments;
it is of quite another order.
3.5. Orientations toward the Sacred

The unatoned state of mind involves a corruption of both its two constituent sub-selves. The sub-self associated with the representing hemisphere is
corrupted into a despot, and the sub-self associated with the presenting
hemisphere is corrupted into a slave. It is just this corruption which may be
said to create ones ordinary, banal self, as opposed to ones true Self.
In order for the atonement constituting the true Self to be achieved, both
sub-selves need to undergo a transformation.
The representing-hemisphere sub-self needs to relax, to cease its striving
for control. This relaxation, at its most vivid, is what in theistic cultures is
expressed as an experience of blissful union with God. (Physiologically, it
seems, this involves some vigorous blocking activity by the frontal lobe of
the representing hemisphere. God is made most directly manifest to us in an
intense, still, sheer presence of mind, beyond all representation.) But then, at
the same time, the presenting-hemisphere sub-self also needs, as energetically
as possible, to confront and evade the censorship imposed upon it by the
deified Rigidity Principle.
The deified Rigidity Principles authority is backed up by various forms of
consolation: at one level, the beauties of the tradition it claims to represent;
at another level, the emotional rewards of close, unquestioning integration
into the community of those who are obedient to its demands. Objectively
unhappy though it is, the unatoned state of mind is not devoid of pleasures;
liberation from this mentality depends, not least, upon ones unlearning
ones attachment to them. And hence the necessity, also, of what St John of
the Cross, for instance, calls the two dark nights. First: the night of the
senses, where one loses all pleasure in beauty. Then: the night of the spirit,
which (in a theistic context) leaves one subjectively quite God-forsaken.12
For these are the experiences of one who persists with disciplines of prayer
and thoughtful attention to what, beyond all conventional representations,
actually is, even when these disciplines have been stripped bare of all
seductive consolation. And only so can the pure will to truth-as-openness
12
The Dark Night, in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross (trans. Kieran
Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez; London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1966),
pp. 295389.
72
be properly separated out, and clarified. Only so is the presenting-hemisphere

sub-self able to find its authentic religious way.
4. A tale of two creations

In theological terms, the interplay between the two hemispheres that
is, between the two types of sub-self, the two spirits, deriving from the
differentiation of the hemispheres might well be described as a tale of two
creations. Thus, the presenting hemisphere responds directly to the world
that God creates. That is to say, it registers what one might call primary
reality. Or, in the broadest sense: the world of nature. But primary reality, in
itself, is a set of challenges to which we can only adapt, piecemeal. This is
what lies, and must forever lie, beyond our strategic control. The representing
hemisphere, on the other hand, is the organ by which we ourselves, each of
us, collaborate in the creation of another, secondary reality. Culture by culture,
sub-culture by sub-culture, we create our own artificial worlds, our own
conceptual and imaginative reworkings of Gods world. We create maps,
models, pictures, fictions, theories. And with them we go on to generate the
necessary consensus for social collaboration; allowing us, in general, to
impose the strategic control over things that we would otherwise lack.
The serpent spoke to the woman:
Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the
garden? The woman answered the serpent, We may eat the fruit of
the trees of the garden. But of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the
garden God said, You must not eat it, nor touch it, under pain of
death. Then the serpent said to the woman, No! You will not die!
God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened
and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil. (Genesis 3: 15)
You will become like gods for you too will become creators. Like upstart
gods, you will create all-encompassing simulacra of reality, in your minds.
Indeed, the whole essential, trans-metaphysical truth inherent in the notion
of God as Creator surely consists in the way it evokes the proper claims of
presenting-hemisphere experience, against the censorious counter-creativity
of the unatoned representing hemisphere. And false gods are false, purely
and simply, to the extent that they fail to call that censoriousness into
question.
God creates us, and to the extent that it is free to do so the presenting
hemisphere of the brain registers its own createdness. But, to the extent that
on the contrary we remain trapped in unatonement, the representing
hemisphere creates another God. The simplest possible definition of true
73
religion: it is, in general, just that form of secondary reality which is most
transparent to primary reality. True religion is atoning religion; it atones by
being transparent. But Human kind cannot bear very much reality.13 Das
unglckliche Bewutseyn is Hegels comprehensive term for all the various
strategies by which the secondary reality created by the representing hemisphere is used to close us off, and so protect us, with its dogmatic rigidity,
from the true moral challenges of primary reality, as potentially apprehended
by the presenting hemisphere. Again, the presenting hemisphere is the organ
of shakenness. In ethical terms: to the extent that it is allowed to, it confronts us with the primary, trans-cultural reality of our moral responsibilities;
theologically speaking, that is to say, our responsibilities in the order of
Gods creation. So it confronts us with the primary reality of our neighbours
suffering and need, the primary reality of our own moral failings in relation
to that suffering and need. But then this primary ethical reality is overlaid
by another, quite different, secondary level of ethical injunction, the work
of the representing hemisphere; which, in the unatoned state of mind, is
essentially designed to promote social control, group conformity. And the
unatoned state of mind feels safe, inasmuch as, where it prevails, what one
might call the sheer shaking-power of the primary reality is then dimmed, by
corporate prejudice.
Theology is, so to speak, a sort of systematic negotiation between the
moral energies corresponding to the two cerebral hemispheres. It is that
negotiation pursued in the most comprehensive form, within a theistic context. (Buddhist philosophy, for instance, may be said to do just the same,
within a non-theistic context.) The theologian has to balance the claims of
both parties, with scrupulous care. For, in the first place, theology is an
enterprise properly oriented to developing strategies for the cultivation of the
most catholic that is, open to all classes solidarity. To this end it requires
the very richest possible heritage of widely recognized representations to
work with; it has to work hard at preserving, and transmitting, that heritage.
Secondly, however, it also has to try to open up these authority-laden
re-presentations to the sheer shaking-power of the primordial presence
behind them. What theology, therefore, surely has to cultivate is the solidarity
of the shaken. And yet this is, by nature, the most difficult of all forms of
solidarity ever actually to organize. For it is the politics of perfect atonement
between the two hemispheres. Hence it demands a culture absolutely dedicated to honouring and promoting atonement by every means possible.
The unatoned state of mind, in general, takes the mental world created by
the representing cerebral hemisphere and converts it into a protective shelter
against the sublime, but unfortunately terrifying, world that God has created.
The shelter may take shape as an opaque religious creed at its most shameless, this is the impulse towards fundamentalism. But it may just as well take
13
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, 1.
74
secular form, as a political ideology. Or, more frivolously, it may appear as a

preoccupation, of one sort or another, with what is fashionable, as such.
Every sort of intense, exclusive commitment to a particular culture or subculture is liable to have the same distractive effect. The common factor in
each case is just that morality has been reduced to a mere ethos of social
control, group-conformity, more or less suppressing peoples sensitivity to
the primary moral reality of their neighbours suffering and need, especially
when the neighbour does not belong to the in-group. That is: the group of
those who share the same tastes in self-representation.
5. Just a game?
Here is a little parable-like case in point. I work at Manchester Cathedral. In
March 2007 the SONY Corporation released, in Europe, a new Playstation
computer game, designed by California-based Insomniac Games, a spectacular first-person shooter, involving virtual-reality gun battles with alien
enemies. And, to our dismay, we discovered that one of the scenes, a quite
tremendous massacre, was actually set inside our church. The people from
Insomniac Games had photographically scanned the interior, and then
reproduced it. But they had not asked permission to do so; perhaps because
they realized that, if asked, we would not have given it.
The game, theologically entitled Resistance: Fall of Man, has a background
science fiction narrative that sets the action in the year 1951; history having
diverged from its actual course from 1908 onwards, the time of the Tunguska
meteorite-impact in Siberia, which is supposed, in the story, to have introduced a malign alien species on earth. These aliens have now overrun Asia
and the rest of Europe, before also arriving in Britain. The game player is in
the role of a lone United States Army soldier, equipped with a whole arsenal
of high tech weaponry, who eventually, somehow, finds himself at the back
of Manchester Cathedral, confronted with a horde of these aliens darting
back and forth behind the pillars; his task, the task of the player, is to shoot
down as many of them as possible. The echoes of Cold War propaganda are
obvious. But the killing is fine, since the victims are, after all, hideous aliens.
And theres a good deal of skill involved in the handling of the guns.
We protested. Look, we said, we have major problems in Manchester with
gun crime. In the neighbourhoods where the culture of gun crime is rife,
often the churches are the only organizations of local people actively standing up for alternative ethical principles; not least, at the funerals of the
victims. Manchester Cathedral itself regularly hosts services for those who
have been left bereaved by such crime. We dont like anything that looks as
though it glamourizes the use of guns the way this does. The sharp-suited
SONY executives who came to visit us professed to be baffled. Could we not
see that it was just a game? At length, though, they agreed to make a public
75
apology in the Manchester Evening News. They had not meant to give
offence, but if we were offended (if we were so foolish!) then they were
sorry. We suggested that they back up their apology with a donation to community groups in the city campaigning against gun crime, and supporting
those bereaved by it; but they declined to do so. As a result of the furore,
sales of the game surged. And we received a great quantity of hate email.
As a Church of England priest, I regard it as a point of honour, as far as
possible, never to take offence at mere insults to my religion. But I must say
that when I saw what this game involved it did make me feel a bit queasy.
(I think I may have lost touch with my inner adolescent.) Could we not see
that it was just a game? Well yes, but then why set it in a virtual-reality
representation of our church? Nothing that takes place in the sacred space
of a church is ever just a game: indeed, that is precisely what it means for a
space to be sacred.
Two cultures had, at this point, collided:
z
On the one hand: a culture of prayer. For this culture, what matters above
all is that we cultivate the closest possible attentiveness to primary, real
reality. The more we do so, the more clearly we realize that everything is
always, really, far more serious, in moral terms, than we have yet realized.
(And that, by way of corollary, our human folly is always also more
comical.)
On the other hand: the exact opposite, a culture of anti-prayer. The world
of virtual reality that such games conjure up is pleasurable not least,
surely, because it is a realm of total irresponsibility, entirely diverting. In
this world, everything is just a game. One may be as cruel and murderous
as one likes, in play. Such games engage the representing hemisphere of
the brain at its most distracted. This is doubtless their attraction: that
they serve so vividly to insulate it, at least for the time being, from the
moral counter-pressures of presenting-hemisphere attentiveness.
Why set the battle in a church? Of course, it is just a game. But was there
not, also, a certain element of latent propaganda inserted into the game,
when it was given this setting? Was there not a bit of a jeer, at those of us
who believe in the ethos of prayer? Maybe it was not consciously intended.
But the hate emails we received did rather indicate that a good many of
those for whom this game is intended are, in fact, very ready to jeer.
Compare the action of Nazi vandals daubing swastikas on the graves in a
Jewish cemetery was not this action of SONY somewhat similar? Just
as the vandals superimpose upon a certain set of sacred symbols in their
case, the grave stones another set of symbolic images, expressive of the
exact opposite principles, so too, in our case, had the game designers.
We called it virtual desecration. Of course, the two situations are also very
different: the vandals action can be readily cleaned away. They are not
76
making huge sums of money by what they do. And neither do they have
such teams of expensive lawyers to defend them. Using a church as background-scenery for something so aggressively just a game certainly feels to
me like a jeer at those of us who think that some things are sacred, and
therefore more than just a game. Does it not imply that, in the end, the
whole of life is just a game, nothing more? The hate emailers actually
seemed to feel that, by objecting, we had somehow blasphemed against
what they believed in. Free speech was often invoked. But something that
is really just a game does not need defending in those terms. The right
to free speech is a defence of argument. I also regard free speech as a sacred
ideal, but I scarcely think that propagandist jeers are a good way of advancing a moral argument. On the contrary, they immediately, in my view, tend
to refute the argument they were intended to reinforce.
6. McGilchrists story
In one sense, the life of what St Augustine calls the earthly city as opposed
to the heavenly is always just a game, in this way. It is never, in itself,
truly serious, even when it goes well beyond just jeering at those who aspire
to citizenship in the heavenly city, and has far more seriously damaging,
even cataclysmic and murderous, consequences in real life. Augustine is
speaking about two opposing species of solidarity, with regard to what they
express:
We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the
earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt
for God, the heavenly city by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self.14
Let us adopt and adapt Augustines categories. It seems to me that his thinking
is an amalgam of profound truth and distorting metaphysical dogmatism.
Remove the latter, however, and the love of God constitutive of the heavenly
city is none other than a rigorous openness towards primary reality, Gods
creation as such. That is to say, it is the truth-impulse of the presenting
hemisphere, at its most emancipated. And the heavenly city is then just
another name for the solidarity of the shaken. In which case, the earthly
city may, likewise, be regarded as an Augustinian name for every form of
organized life bound up with the secondary, mental creations of the representing hemisphere insofar as these remain corrupted by unatonement.
14
Augustine, City of God (trans. Henry Bettenson; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984),

Book XIV, chapter 28, p. 593.
77
Poetically, Augustine links the founding of the earthly city to the story of
Cain, murdering his brother Abel, Genesis 4: 116:
Scripture tells us that Cain founded a city [Genesis 4: 17], whereas
Abel, as a pilgrim, did not found one. For the city of the saints is up
above, although it produces citizens here below, and in their persons
the city is on pilgrimage until the time of its kingdom comes.15
He contrasts the story of Cain and Abel with the story, associated with the
foundation of the city of Rome, of Romulus murdering his brother Remus.
In the case of Romulus and Remus, he argues,
The difference from the primal crime was that both brothers were
citizens of the earthly city. Both sought the glory of establishing the
Roman state, but a joint foundation would not bring to each the glory
that a single founder would enjoy . . . Therefore, in order that the sole
power should be wielded by one person, the partner was eliminated.
Whereas, by contrast:
the earlier brothers, Cain and Abel, did not both entertain the same
ambition for earthly gains; and the one who slew his brother was not
jealous of him because his power would be more restricted if both
wielded the sovereignty; for Abel did not aim at power in the city
which his brother was founding. But Cains was the diabolical envy
that the wicked feel for the good simply because they are good, while
they themselves are evil.16
Power in the earthly city is by definition, for Augustine, sheer corruption:
lust for exploitative domination, love of glory, in the sense of mere glamour.
In neurological terms, it is clear that this sort of strategic concern with
status, which Cain symbolizes, is an impulse that in essence belongs to the
representing cerebral hemisphere. For social status is all a matter of how one
is publicly represented. But Abel then, as personifying the heavenly city,
symbolizes the opposite: the spirit of the presenting hemisphere. Cain grows
angry, out of envy, because Abels sacrifice symbolically, the sacrifice of
pure self-presenting before God is accepted, and his own sacrifice is not.
That is to say, his self-representation is rejected. And, having killed, he goes
on to misrepresent himself before God: he lies, denying his responsibility.
This is the whole logic of the earthly city.
15
16
Ibid., XV, 1, p. 596.

Ibid., XV, 5, pp. 60001.
78
A little later on the same logic is portrayed again, on another scale, in the
story of the tower of Babel: Genesis 11: 110. Augustine interprets the
building of this tower as the vainglorious symbolic self-representation of a
ruler, Nimrod. (Although Nimrod is not named in the actual story of the
tower, he appears earlier, in Genesis 10: 810, as the founder of Babel.) The
tower project fails when God intervenes to muddle communication among
the builders. As Augustine comments:
It is right that an evilly affected plan should be punished, even when it
is not successfully effected. And what kind of punishment was in fact
imposed? Since a rulers power of domination is wielded by his tongue,
it was in that organ that his pride was condemned to punishment. And
the consequence was that he who refused to understand Gods bidding
so as to obey it, was himself not understood when he gave orders
to men.17
The failure of the tower builders symbolizes all the failings of language,
indeed the whole work of the representing hemisphere, insofar as it tends to
exceed its proper role.
In a sense, both these two stories the story of Cain and Abel, the story of
the tower of Babel are simply amplifying the primordial story of Adam
and Eve. Immediately upon eating the forbidden fruit Adam and Eve,
likewise, become preoccupied with self-representation: they sew fig leaves
together and make loincloths for themselves. Are not those loincloths, simply,
an anticipatory general symbol for every sort of human self-concealment
and self-expression?
McGilchrist, in the same vein, offers an alternative parable by way of
fundamental metaphor for human fallenness; in this case, however, a less
ostensibly theological one. He calls it the story of The Master and his
Emissary. And the basic narrative goes as follows:
There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small
but prosperous domain, and who was known for his selfless devotion
to his people. As his people flourished and grew in number, the bounds
of this small domain spread; and with it the need to trust implicitly the
emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more distant parts.
It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all
that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his
distance from, and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he
nurtured and trained carefully his emissaries, in order that they could
be trusted. Eventually, however, his cleverest and most ambitious vizier,
the one he most trusted to do his work, began to see himself as the
17
Ibid., XVI, 4, p. 658.
79
master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence.
He saw his masters temperance and forbearance as weakness, not
wisdom, and on his missions on his masters behalf, adopted his mantle
as his own the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so
it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the
domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.18
The true master in this story is the truth-giving power primarily at work in
relation to the presenting hemisphere of the human brain; the emissary who
usurps the true masters authority and becomes a tyrant is the corrupted
spirit of the representing hemisphere, insofar as it is given over to censorship
and spin. McGilchrists parable does not name the true master as God. But
otherwise it belongs to the same order as the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain
and Abel, the tower of Babel. It is clearly very close, especially, to the epic
development of these stories in Miltons Paradise Lost. In effect, it is the
story of Paradise Lost inflected to address a more secular world.
This parable provides the decorative frontage to a mighty philosophic
argument. Indeed the book which begins with it is the most comprehensively
systematic attempt so far made to explore the philosophic implications of
contemporary neuropsychology.19 Thus, McGilchrist approaches the matter
here from various angles:
z
First he looks at the evolutionary rationale of our having bicameral

brains. (I have already sketched out this argument, above.) Again, he
considers how language has emerged as a response to two quite different
sorts of impulse. On the one hand: the impulse to communicate, simply
for communications sake, an impulse already at work, he suggests, before
language, in music. But on the other hand: the impulse to manipulate, or
language as an extension of tool-use. In evolutionary terms, he suggests, the
first of these two impulses is essentially what has driven the development of
the presenting hemisphere; while the development of the representing
hemisphere has been driven by the second.
18

For notable previous attempts at the same: see especially the writings of John Cutting,
Principles of Psychopathology: Two Worlds Two Minds Two Hemispheres (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997) and Psychopathology and Modern Philosophy (Scaynes
Hill: The Forest Publishing Co.), 1999.
McGilchrist is also significantly influenced by the work of Louis Sass, Madness and
Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought (New York:
Basic Books, 1992), and The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the
Schizophrenic Mind (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). And, while he does
not altogether accept it (The Master and His Emissary, pp. 26062) he refers with great
respect to the eccentric pioneering argument of Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).
19
80
z
Then he considers the different ways in which the two hemispheres relate
to reality. That is to say, how they generate what I am calling, within each
individual, opposing sub-selves. As he puts it, the great problem when
it comes to arguing about their rival claims is that the representing
hemisphere is the Berlusconi of the brain: a ruler who also owns most of
the media. Argument, itself, is so very much a representing-hemisphere
activity. But he praises those philosophers Hegel, as he recognizes, not
least among them20 who have nevertheless sought to insist on the prior
truth claims of presenting-hemisphere experience, as a direct opening to
primary reality.
Finally, he develops quite a substantial grand narrative account of attitudes
to these two species of truth: how the comparative evaluation of them
has, in actual practice, shifted through history. Thus, his argument moves
on from the comparison of two opposing types of sub-self within each
individual, to a consideration of two interactive spirits within society as a
whole. It becomes, more and more, a prophetic lament over the progressive
unfolding of what is summarily pictured in his parable. In Classical Antiquity
he sees a widening separation between the two spirits, as manifested in
the Dionysian, presenting-hemisphere celebration of empathy, above all,
in early drama, and the Apollonian, representing-hemisphere impulses
towards abstraction, in philosophy and science. And then, over the following centuries: something like trench warfare between the two spirits,
with a gradual shifting back and forth of the front. The upholders of the
true masters cause have launched several offensives of their own, in the
Renaissance for instance, and in the period of Romanticism McGilchrist
is an admirer especially of Wordsworth, Blake and Keats. But overall the
protagonists of the usurper are winning. They have been variously active
in aspects of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution,
aesthetic Modernism, the whole prevailing tendency of contemporary
Western politics to bureaucratic utilitarianism. He sets out, in some
considerable detail, to demonstrate the all-encompassing nature of the
usurpation. It is, I think, a breathtaking performance.
And yet, I come back to the question of how it all then relates to theology.
One cannot do everything at once; McGilchrists work is a secular philosophic meditation on the meaning of recent neuropsychological discoveries.
It surely does also have quite radical implications for theology in fact, he
fully recognizes this, and is by no means hostile to religious faith. But, in
order to say what he wants to say, he has nevertheless decided, at least for
20
See in particular The Master and His Emissary, pp. 20306. Besides Hegels texts on
the unatoned state of mind, McGilchrist also cites the Preface to the Phenomenology,
Miller pp. 3233, para. 53, Baillie pp. 11213. (Indeed he calls this the most extraordinary instance of the mind by introspection cognising itself.)
81
the time being, to steer clear of what, for his immediate purposes, would be
the massive distractions of theological debate. And therefore he has simply
bracketed the question of God, as such. His parable is both a doorway opening into his philosophic argument, and also, in the way that it opens, a
poetic announcement of this bracketing. That it is not (explicitly) about
God, but only about an earthly empire, appears to be a crucial part of its
function here. The empire of which McGilchrist speaks is essentially a regime
of bracketing. His bracketing of theology defines the empires borders.
As a theologian, however, I am interested in what is lost, as a result. Thus,
again, compare McGilchrists story to Miltons in Paradise Lost. Apart from
his bracketing of the question of God, the basic structure of the little story
McGilchrist tells is identical with that of Miltons epic. And yet, because of
the bracketing, the difference is not just that it is so much shorter. The fact
is that it can only work at that length. There is no way one could develop
this little parable into an epic like Paradise Lost. Or rather, it seems to me
that one could only do so by re-converting it into another version of Paradise
Lost: openly putting God back into it. For this is surely just what theology
is all about. It is a wrestling with the huge world-transformative power for
good or ill intrinsic to the epic imagination, at its boldest.
Everything that I have said about the potential contribution of modern
neuropsychology to the defining of the philosophic ideal, as such, is already
said, far more thoroughly and authoritatively, by McGilchrist. However, in
order to do this without being sidetracked, he has bracketed theology. I just
want to pose the question: what might happen if one attempted to remove
those brackets again? And so I want to ponder the distinction between what
(as I have said) I would see as the two basic origins of God-talk: the authentically revelatory one, and the ideological one. The authentically revelatory
origin is from the moral demands of pure presenting-hemisphere experience,
as an abandonment of ones defences against the sheer otherness of other
people. For here God is revealed, in richly metaphorical fashion, above all as
the Revealer of those demands, pressing them home. But the ideological
origin, by contrast, is from the moral demands more immediately bound up
with representing-hemisphere creativity: where God is understood, by the
unatoned state of mind, far rather, as the celestial Enforcer of an orthodoxy,
valued less for its metaphoric suggestiveness, in the service of truth-as-openness,
than for its supposed theoretic truth-as-correctness.
Of course, there are other ways of articulating the demands of pure presenting-hemisphere experience, besides the theological. For most purposes,
God may perhaps be revealed, and served, just as well anonymously as by
name indeed, such anonymity has the obvious positive advantage that it
completely avoids the clichs introduced by unatoned theistic ideology. Yet,
good theology, as I would understand it, is nothing other than a systematic
attempt to discern, within theistic tradition, the endless interplay of the
contradictory impulses deriving from these two origins; and so to mobilize
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the particular poetic resources of that whole tradition against clich in

general. What, in short, above all interests me, as a theologian, is the business of discriminating the genuine heavenly city from its various devout and,
undeniably, orthodox counterfeit doubles.
7. The cause of atonement

Hegel recognizes that das unglckliche Bewutseyn is the corruption of a
necessary and redeemable duality. He does not spell out what this redeemable necessity is. But contemporary neuropsychology enables us to do so.
The right hemisphere presents the facts, the left hemisphere re-presents
them. We need both to register the problems inherent in our lack of immediate control over reality, and also to develop techniques and strategies
to deal with these problems. First, then: an uninhibited exposure to reality,
as primordially presented. Second: a systematic ordering of representational
thought about reality, fitting it to the given categories that enable us to
handle and modify it. Clearly, the truth-potential of the latter sort of thinking fundamentally depends upon its being well subordinated to the freshness
of the former.
But how much reality can we bear? To be exposed to primary reality is to
be shaken. And the problem is that the skills of the representing hemisphere
may also be deployed to protect us against shakenness: representing the
world as less problematic than it truly is. To the extent that this happens,
the operations of the two hemispheres have ceased to be at one with each
other. They need to be atoned again; however, a system of mental defences
builds up, positively to resist such remedial atonement. The unatoned representing-hemisphere sub-self usurps the true atoning authority of God. It
projects its censorious will, objectifies it either as the falsely imagined will of
God, or else as some other non-theistic alternative bully-principle. The
metaphysical form of the problem may vary enormously. And the variations
may be endlessly distracting. Nevertheless, let us focus on the core problem
in itself.
To do so is to be committed to the cause of atonement, purely and simply as
such. Hegels theology, in the Phenomenology, springs from that commitment.
In principle, it presupposes nothing else. His sole interest here is in identifying
the most effective possible strategy for the cause of atonement; and in assembling the most open sort of conversation-realm oriented towards that goal.
The argument moves towards certain forms of religion only because, as he
sees it, this is what the cause of atonement demands. The cause of atonement
needs reinforcement by all possible means. Not least the reinforcement of
philosophically purged religion: turned towards training whole populations
in a proper spirit of respect for it, as only such religion can.
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5
hegels gospel
1. Pathos and solidarity

By the cause of atonement I mean simply the struggle for truth-as-openness
in public life; the political struggle of what Hegel calls Spirit. In effect,
the basic project of his theology is to give that cause, as such, a systematic
thinking-through.
Again, though, what is involved here? Essentially, I think, the cause of
atonement demands of us two basic types of complementary thought. In the
first place, it requires a certain quality of poetic thinking. Namely: a direct
poetic invocation of Spirit, at its most intense, driving towards atonement.
This is what I have called the pathos of shakenness; a category in which
I include any sort of artistic or philosophic work that records, and celebrates, the experience of being shaken, with real intensity, by the promptings
of Spirit in the Hegelian sense. The pathos of shakenness: a truly radical, and
all-encompassing, resistance to clich-thinking, simply as such.1
And then, secondly, there is further required a corresponding form of strategic
thought. Thus, I would argue, it is not enough just to conjure up the pathos of
shakenness. But at the same time we have to try and devise effective strategies
for translating the pathos of shakenness into a well organized solidarity of the
shaken. The cause of atonement needs organizing. It requires to be promoted
through alliance-building, the more extensive the better. As far as possible, it
needs to be rendered catholic, integrated into popular culture.
2. Hegel as strategist
Other philosophers have analysed the experience of shakenness, in some
ways, more exhaustively, and with greater poetic energy than Hegel.
Desmond is a prime example; his writing is a truly prodigious meditation
on that experience. The secularizing critics of Hegel whom I consider in
1
Shanks, What Is Truth? Towards a Theological Poetics (London: Routledge, 2001).
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HEGELS GOSPEL
Chapter 7 on the one hand, Heidegger, on the other hand Deleuze and
Guattari are likewise, for all their very obvious stylistic differences both
from Desmond and from one another, quite brilliant at evoking the pathos
of shakenness in philosophic terms. (That is why I choose to engage with
them.) Kierkegaard is a great anti-Hegelian philosopher-poet exponent of
the pathos of shakenness. Levinas, to whom I have also referred, is another.
Yet Hegel, I would argue, still remains unsurpassed as a pioneering strategist for the solidarity of the shaken. This is not his own terminology; but
I am talking about the content of the absolute knowing with which the
Phenomenology culminates. For what such knowing knows is, surely,
nothing other than what it takes to build that sort of solidarity, the sort on
which the cause of atonement depends.
Now, clearly there will always be a certain tension between the strategic
thinking required for the organization of effective solidarity and the not at
all strategic thought required for the sheer poetic registering of shakenness.
After all, strategy in itself is, altogether, representing-hemisphere business.
From the point of view of one who values shakenness the condition of
being opened up by, and to, fresh presenting-hemisphere insight there will
always be some tendency to compromise involved in the development of
workable strategy, building effective alliances. And Hegel, like any other
strategic thinker, is straightaway therefore, inevitably, exposed to criticism
from the militant purists of shakenness. But what, in the end, does such purist
intransigence achieve? When it is taken up by such outstanding thinkers as
those I have mentioned beautiful books, certainly. However, is that really
enough? I do not think so. Besides beautiful books, it seems to me that the
cause of atonement also needs the most potent educational, political and
liturgical organization, to disseminate itself as widely as possible.
The solidarity of the shaken, being in principle the most difficult of all
forms of solidarity to organize, can only thrive in the context of other forms
of solidarity, playing host to it. Hegel is interested, above all, in the potential
of Christianity to serve this purpose. As a strategist (in effect) for the solidarity
of the shaken, he values Christian tradition, not least, for its vast, already
established organizational presence. He has, to begin with, a basic conservative respect for deep-rooted folk religion just because of its binding power,
the relationships of mutual trust it helps sustain, as a context for fruitful
public conversation. His mistrust of what he calls liberalism that is, a
political culture largely devoid of such mutual trust is strongly enhanced
by his observation of what had happened in France when the Jacobins
attempted to abolish the folk religion of their people. In general, he deplores
the atomistic principle at work in irreligious liberal ideology, for the way
it tends to distort public debate into a merely partisan battle between
particular competing interests.2 At the same time, moreover, Christianity
2
Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 452.
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retains, from its earliest origins, a more or less forgotten potential for articulating true freedom (i.e. the solidarity of the shaken); and Hegels philosophic
move beyond first-order faith, as such, is in effect a bid to reconnect with
that buried potential, in the most direct way. In relation to established religion,
he is not a confrontational thinker. Quite unlike Kierkegaard, say that latterday Amos, urging Christians to boycott church worship until the Church at
any rate owns up to its betrayal of the gospel Hegel, the horse-whisperer,
does not want to spook the Church with any too violent a form of critical
rhetoric. But, rather, he wants to win it round gently. This is the reason for
his scholarly, detached, grand-narrative approach to theology: the grand
narrative being a vindication of both hope and patience, as it traces the
gradual historic emergence of atoning gospel truth into the full light of
philosophical explicitness. And yet, the challenge is absolute.
So he sets out, in effect, to liberate the gospel, understood as a primordial
atoning testimony to the solidarity of the shaken, from the grip of unatoning
church ideology. The ideal environment for the flourishing of the solidarity
of the shaken will surely be a secular state, priding itself on providing the
most open space possible for conversation between all different social
groups. He sees the Lutheran Reformation as a great breakthrough moment
in Christian history, inasmuch as it creates the future possibility, at least, of a
church fully attuned to that ideal. And increasingly, throughout Europe, in
place of the spiritual leadership provided by the Roman Catholic priesthood
with its intrinsic predisposition (in his view) to unatoning church ideology he
sees a new sort of public-spiritedness emergent. In his day, a new universal
class was being formed: the increasingly professional-minded civil servants
of secular modern states.3 And these, above all, were the people whose world
view he aspired to influence.
In his later writings he set out, single-handedly, to shape a whole curriculum
for the philosophic education of this new class. It was indeed a heroic enterprise! I think it also led him somewhat astray. Unfortunately, the teaching of
these later works in particular the Philosophy of Religion lectures has,
I think, somewhat obscured the deeper insights of the Phenomenology. It is
notable that the concept of das unglckliche Bewutseyn actually drops
right out of his thought here. The concept only really makes sense in the
larger context of his argument in the Phenomenology; and, in general, the
whole approach of the Phenomenology is far too difficult for Hegels later
pedagogic purposes. Those purposes constrain him to operate on another,
altogether more superficial level. He does so without comment on the shift,
and it may well be that his new dreams of academic hegemony have blinded
him to how much he is sacrificing.
To me, the sacrifice actually seems, from a theological point of view,
to have been considerable. The later Hegel did not quite know how the
3
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 205, 28797.
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HEGELS GOSPEL
Phenomenology fitted into the pedagogic system he was devising. Indeed, it

seems that he never altogether realized just what he had achieved in the
Phenomenology.
3. Das unglckliche Bewutseyn: the two prime texts

But let us go back, now, to the original moment of theological insight in that
work, as it is primarily developed in two quite separate passages; the separation of which corresponds to the movement of his argument, from
trans-culturally universal first principles to a much more specific concern
with the history of Christianity, as such.
The first passage follows immediately after his initial definition of das
unglckliche Bewutseyn, discussed in Chapter 3. In Millers translation
the paragraphs are numbered, and this passage runs from paragraph 210 to
230. Here the discussion of Christianity is only in the form of allusive illustration, since the primary phenomena in question are to be found, variously
manifest, in all sorts of different cultural context.
And then the second passage comes much later in the book, in chapter 7
(Religion) section C, paragraphs 748 to 787. By this point he is speaking
much more openly about the history to which he had, in the earlier passage,
only been alluding; although still, it must be said, in quite impressionistic
fashion.
These are neither of them, to say the least, easy passages to read. The problem is that he is struggling with such a fresh way of thinking; so fresh that
he does not yet have anything like adequate terminology for his thoughts.
But let us consider how the basic logic of the argument flows.
3.1. Persistent Unatonement, Distorting a

Symbolic Promise of Release
The unatoned state of mind is torn between the claims of individuality
this is Hegels term for what one knows directly as an individual, ones
own first-hand presenting-hemisphere intuition of primary reality and
the Rigidity Principle, that is, the compelling power of given, habitual,
representing-hemisphere preconceptions, the more or less clichd prejudices
of ones world. It invests the latter with disastrous, domineering, sacred
authority to censor the expression of the former. In paragraph 210, however,
Hegel speaks of a dawning awareness of individuality mixed with the
Rigidity Principle and the Rigidity Principle mixed with individuality.
He is clearly thinking first and foremost, here, of the Christian dogma of
the Incarnation.
Thus, in the context of biblical culture the unatoned state of mind identifies
the Rigidity Principle with the will of God. But for Christian faith, on the
87
contrary, God is symbolically made present in the form of a particular,

indomitable human individual, who dramatically defies the moral prejudices
of his world. The argument will be that Christ has to be recognized as
a symbolic representative of the claims of indomitable individuality in
general, over against the repressive power of the Rigidity Principle. Or, to
switch away from Hegels own terminology: that he represents the absolute
opening up of representational thinking, as such, to the actual primary
reality that lies beyond it. For Hegel, in effect, everything theologically
depends upon recognizing the Incarnation as a symbol of atonement, a
symbolic summons to atonement, in that broad philosophic sense. God has,
so to speak, come down out of the false heaven of the Rigidity Principle
where unatonement had put him, to proclaim the opposite.
The symbolism of the gospel has this potential. However, it is a potential
that is very often unrealized. To the extent that the will of God continues, on
the contrary, to be identified with the dictates of the Rigidity Principle,
Christian spirituality remains locked into the unatoned state of mind.
Unatonement is cunning in its persistence. Yet, for Christian faith, the
deified Rigidity Principle has become unthinkable apart from the particular
individuality of Christ, always at any rate potentially recalling us to the
opposite: the general principle of indomitable individuality, as also more
or less manifested in the individuality of each believer, insofar as he or she
truly breaks free from the confines of herd-morality. The actual practice of
traditional, in the Hegelian sense sub-philosophic, Christianity oscillates
between this implicit promise of atonement and the ineradicable inertia of
unatonement, forever tending to suppress it. And it is this oscillation that
Hegel now wants to explore, in illustration of the sheer difficulty of actually
achieving atonement in any culture, even when the religious context is, in
principle, most favourable. He is concerned with the sheer slipperiness of
unatonement.
There is always, he remarks (paragraph 211), a twofold movement
involved in the shiftings of this mentality. On the one hand: a fluctuation in
the afflicted individuals self-esteem, ones sense of ones own individuality.
On the other hand: a fluctuation in how the Rigidity Principle is perceived.
He is thinking of the ways in which the Rigidity Principle is rendered sacred;
in a theological culture, therefore, how God is conceived. The argument, in
the first instance psychological, is also, implicitly, theological. For what
Hegel wants to develop here is in fact a whole new way into theology, beginning from psychological observation.
He wants to illustrate the nature of the unatoned state of mind by allusion
to its persistent manifestation in Christian form. In other words: he is analysing the all too common failure of faith in the Incarnation to do its proper
job. Where faith in this sense fails, it is not because of any lack of sincerity;
faith may indeed be intensely heartfelt, and yet fail. The cause of the failure
is not insincerity, but the way the dogma has been misinterpreted. For the
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unatoned state of mind in Christian form, naturally, cannot grasp the real
atoning logic of salvation-by-Incarnation. Hegel will analyse this logic, the
necessity of Incarnation as a remedy for human fallenness, deriving it
from the prior inevitability of the Adamic Fall that elicits it, the fall into
unatonement, understood as a fundamental corruption of the intrinsically
twofold nature of Spirit. But from the point of view of unatoning Christianity
(paragraph 212) both Fall and Incarnation are essentially just contingent
events, sheer data of traditional orthodoxy, brute objective facts. And
insofar as the still unatoned individual soul then comes to think of himor herself as having been saved, this merely serves to reinforce the authority
of the conventional God-image with which the dictates of the Rigidity
Principle have been rendered divine. Far from signifying atonement, in other
words, the experience of salvation here may, in actual practice, even
accentuate the opposite.
Where this happens, the individuality of the Saviour is not understood as
representing the universal principle of true individuality at all. Indeed:
Whilst the beyond [i.e. the Rigidity Principle, identified with God]
may seem to have been brought closer to us by the individualised
actuality of this figuration, henceforth on the other hand it appears
set over against us as an opaque, flesh-and-blood one-off; an actualisation of sheer [unyielding] disengagement.4
So, for the unatoned state of mind, the figure of Christ, now ascended and
enthroned in heaven, functions in practice not as a symbol of God indwelling the
true individuality of each individual, but, on the contrary, as yet another intimidating evocation of divine tyranny. As Hegel puts it in paragraph 213, the only
difference this sort of Christian faith makes is that the unatoned soul replaces
its relationship to the pure formless [divine] Rigidity Principle, and submits
itself instead to the incarnate [divine] Rigidity Principle in just the same way.
Beyond this mere formality, nothing has changed. The Rigidity Principle, as a
spirit at work in society as a whole, has acquired a new face, a new public
relations strategy. Yet, otherwise, it remains just as inflexible as ever.
Now, however, beginning at paragraph 214, we come to what Hegel considers to be the threefold movement of the unatoned state of mind, seeking
to appropriate the Christian gospel. This threefold movement basically
involves three different levels of thoughtfulness, and hence self-awareness:
starting from a complete lack of self-awareness, and rising, in two stages,
4
Paragraph 212; again, my translation. This last phrase, in the original German, is mit
der ganzen Sprdigkeit eines W i r k l i c h e n. More literally translated: with all the
obstinate reserve of a something that is actual. Sprdigkeit (unyielding disengagement /
obstinate reserve) ordinarily means brittleness; then shyness, or prudery. C.f. Miller,
p. 129, Baillie, p. 255.
89
not to actual atonement, but at any rate to a real intensity of implicit,

restless discontent with unatonement.
The description of the first level the unatoned state of mind (in Christian
form) as pure consciousness, as opposed to self-consciousness in the sense
of self-awareness runs from paragraphs 215 to 217. Earlier in the same
chapter Hegel has been discussing two forms of free thinking, high-minded
stoicism and playful scepticism, both of which fall short of what is needed
because of their individualism, in the sense that they lack any adequate
strategy for community building, to enshrine freedom. By contrast, the
Christian Church obviously has some very effective strategies for community building. But, of course, insofar as the unatoned state of mind persists
within it, the resultant community does not enshrine freedom. Hegel begins
his survey of the threefold movement of the unatoned state of mind within
Christianity by going back to the contrast with stoicism and scepticism.
There is a sense in which Christian faith has immediately advanced beyond
these two standpoints, by virtue of its potential, at least, for a truly strong
community-embodiment of free-thinking. But everything depends upon
completing faith with true self-awareness. And this in turn depends upon a
radical re-conception of what the Incarnation truly means with regard to the
nature of God. Once again, the basic trouble with the Christian unatoned
state of mind is that as it splits off one aspect of itself and then projects
that aspect, the Rigidity Principle, into heaven:
It remains unaware that this, its object, the Rigidity Principle, which
[by virtue of the Incarnation] appears to it essentially in the form of
individuality, is indeed [a projection of] its own self. [It fails to recognise that the individuality of this divine individual] itself represents all
individuality.5
Indeed, the Christian unatoned state of mind does not want to recognize
either the actual genesis of its own idea of God, or the atoning logic of the
gospel. It is the more secure the less it thinks. And as pure consciousness,
therefore, to begin with,
its thinking as such is no more than a discordant clang of pealing bells
or a warm cloud of incense, a musical thinking, that does not attain to
real concepts, that is, to anything at all rigorously engaged with reality
(immanente) or objective.6
Such thinking is simply a movement of infinite yearning; an undeveloped
form of subjectivity, not yet shaped by any objective stimulus to serious selfquestioning. It yearns with intense sincerity (a pure heart) for an intimately
5
6

Ibid.
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HEGELS GOSPEL
personal relationship with the Saviour. But, since it does not understand
atonement as such, and remains trapped in a form of thought-gone-stale,
the connection it dreams of is not an atoning, spiritual imitation of Christ.
At best, rather, it would be a connection with the mere physical mementoes
of Christs life. And Hegel, therefore, alludes here to the Crusades, as a bid
to recapture those mementoes. The Crusaders fanaticism is, as it were,
emblematic for him of this largely mindless form of Christian faith.
So much for the first level of the threefold movement the second level is
then discussed in paragraphs 21822. It differs from the first in that it is
altogether more reflective. To be sure, the self-awareness of the second level
is still drastically limited by the delusions of unatonement; and yet it nevertheless goes beyond the simple, yearning piety of the first level by virtue of
developing a real discipline of spiritual inwardness. Thus, it represents a
basic critical reorientation towards desire and work. That is: the whole
domain of family and economic life.
In the earlier passage of the Phenomenology where he discusses the
relationship of master and slave Hegel is talking basically about the quest
for respect. The master seeks to gain respect by dominating the slave, but
is frustrated, because this implies a degree of contempt for the slave that
effectively devalues whatever respect he may compel the slave to show him.
However, the slave, by contrast, is able to achieve serious respect from
others, for the skill he develops in his work. And so the slave, unlike the
master, arrives at truly serious self-respect. With regard to the second level
of the threefold movement, Hegel is looking at what happens, in the context of not-yet-atoning Christianity, to this achievement. The actual term
he uses is die Gewiheit seiner selbst, literally the certainty of oneself
or self-certainty, which is how both Baillie and Miller I think, rather
confusingly render it. However, what he means is serious self-respect.
And in fact he means it in a twofold sense: not only feeling good about
oneself, because of ones skills, but also recognizing the positive spiritual
value of such self-assurance, as it emboldens one to think for oneself.
The unatoned state of mind is, by definition, incapable of this latter
recognition. The unatoned Christian believer may indeed feel good about
him- or herself, because of good work done. But then that initial surge of
self-respect is, at once, stifled. This mentality wilfully renounces the necessary
self-confidence that alone enables one to think, with real inner freedom, for
oneself, beyond the mere repetition of thought-gone-stale. It fails to recognize
the true spiritual meaning of such self-confidence; misunderstands it as a
mere form of sinful pride; and, by way of remedy for this sin, deliberately in
fact sets out to intensify its own inner servitude, which it calls humility. The
inner logic of the unatoned believers faith is inexorable. First, everything
useful or beautiful is to be reckoned as a gift from God. Then, my own talents
and skills in helping produce what is useful or beautiful are themselves to be
regarded in the same way. All comes from God therefore, it is concluded,
91
I have no right to challenge what God (here, the deified voice of the
Rigidity Principle, the inner quisling, the Usurper) decrees. With this aberrant conclusion the true spiritual lessons of creative work are effectively
lost, and everything is reduced to the utmost superficiality (paragraph 221).
We are left with nothing but a mere supposed demonstration of the need for
thanksgiving, to God the deified Rigidity Principle.
Still, there is hope. And, just as in the previous case of the master-slave
relationship hope came from the irrepressible resilience of the slave, so too
here, hope comes from the irrepressible resilience of the inner slave, as such.
The unatoned believer adopts the persona of the inner slave, and gives
thanks to the deified Rigidity Principle, the despot God. But (paragraph
222) the religious discipline of prayerful thanksgiving is itself a form of
skilled work, in which one may well take virtuous pride. To do such work
properly and diligently can, also, serve as a basis for serious self-respect.
And, in so far as that happens,
The whole movement can be regarded entirely as a showing-forth
[or vindication] of individuality: not only the [secular] process of
desiring, toiling and enjoying, but also the [religious] thanksgiving,
which [at first sight] seems to signify the opposite. Despite the deceptive
show of renunciation [in that thanksgiving], closer inspection shows
it to involve no real abandonment of individual selfhood. But, on
the contrary, it actually renders one all the more aware of being the
particular individual that one is.7
Thus, the ideal of Christian humility, in general, is profoundly ambiguous.
It may, with equal power, either express unatoned servility or else, on the
contrary, the most radical, dissident thoughtfulness. In the first case, it is
understood as involving a quite unquestioning acceptance of Christian herdmorality; the truly humble individual is one who recognizes their sheer
unworthiness to think for themselves. But in the second case, humility has
precisely become the self-respecting self-assertion of ones individuality
now, on the contrary, by way of antithesis to the recognized arrogance and
conceit of the herd as such, the herds lack of corporate humility. Everything
is thus turned around. Humble thanksgiving evolves into self-confident
social critique, for thank God, such is the believers clear sense of personal
vocation from God. Unatoning Christianity lacks the insight to distinguish
between these two absolutely opposite possibilities. But the point is that,
by the same token, it can never altogether impose the servile mode, to the
exclusion of the liberated alternative.
And when finally we come to the third level paragraphs 22330 the
same ambiguity is, moreover, intensified. The second level of the threefold
7
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HEGELS GOSPEL
movement has involved a basic spiritual discipline, applicable to all

Christians alike. At the third level, however, the difference is that Hegel is
talking, far rather, about the discipline of small, would-be spiritual elites,
chiefly to be found within the monastic world. Here, as he puts it, the enemy
is discovered in its own-most form: that is, at its angriest and most demanding.
For, in this context, the domination of the Rigidity Principle has become the
imposition of a fierce, neurotic asceticism, expressive of sheer loathing for
the wretchedness of the adaptable sub-self, inasmuch as this is essentially
identified with the animal functions of the flesh.
Yet, even in the monastic context or rather, in a certain sense, above all
there the healing impulse of conventionality-dissolving Spirit is, again,
resurgent. For, on the one hand, the ascetic discipline of the third level is
premised on a systematic rejection of pride in straightforward, conventional
Christian respectability, (paragraph 229), understood simply as a temptation
to conceit. But on the other hand,
the actual fulfilment, in itself, of the sacrifice, the successful giving up
of any credit accruing to oneself, also serves to release one from ones
affliction.8
It brings about a real sense of reconciliation with God, by the infusion of
divine grace into the soul, much more powerfully felt, because it involves so
much more inner struggle, than at the other, less ascetic levels. And so, again,
it begins to inspire the ascetic individual with the necessary self-confidence
to question and challenge the mere conventions of his or her world.
At this level, the sense of reconciliation continues to fall short of true
atonement basically because it is still not understood in its true nature, as a
primary precondition of wisdom, but instead itself remains conditional
upon all manner of more or less servile submission to prevailing ideology.
In the Roman Catholic tradition especially, the ascetic individuals reconciliation with God has, in effect, come to be seen as requiring the mediation of
a father confessor. The perceived necessity of such mediation is for Hegel a
prime example of persistent unatonement. And yet, once again let us be
clear, this is not just a critique of the specifically Roman Catholic practice of
sacramental confession. Rather, Hegel alludes to that institution very much
by way of illustration. What he is criticizing is not so much the institution in
itself, but more a certain overestimation of its role. And his real objection is
to any interpretation not only in Roman Catholicism, but whatever the
religious context that renders the receiving of salvation in any way dependent
on uncritical conformity to the dictates of external authority.
In social terms, liberation from the unatoned state of mind is essentially
the achievement of a capacity for critical nonconformity, on the basis of
8
93
ones own first-hand (presenting-hemisphere) experience of life as an

inwardly free individual. That is to say: it is just what the historic Jesus of
Nazareth represents, as a critic of conventional religion. He is our Saviour,
essentially, by virtue of the way in which he is the ideal paradigm of such
individuality in general. But, for Hegel, it has become an urgent necessity
to reconnect the churchs traditional image of Jesus with the actual historic
reality, which the unatoned state of mind quite wilfully forgets.
3.2. The Christian Symbolic Promise, Philosophically Restored

Ultimately, then, Hegels ideal is the development of a whole, well-rooted
popular culture, dedicated to maximizing the chances of actual atonement.
He thinks that Christianity has the capacity to inspire such a culture if
only Christian spirituality can be rescued from its fundamental ambiguity in
this regard. Hitherto, the preaching of the gospel has always been ambiguous.
But it is the general role of philosophy to dispel ambiguity, and now at last
it can really get to grips with faith in Christ.
Again, stoicism and scepticism are also expressions of the impulse to
atonement. But stoicism confines itself to a purely philosophic, solemn
advocacy of thinking for oneself. It has no adequate strategy for capturing the
popular imagination, with a systematic deployment of religious metaphor.
And scepticism differs only in being less solemn it is no less removed from
popular religion, as such. In chapter 4B Hegel is using these two terms,
stoicism and scepticism, in principle, to refer to any form of thinking,
oriented towards atonement, which simply gives up on popular religion.
When, however, in chapter 7C he comes to consider the actual historical
context within which gospel truth was first revealed, and Stoicism and
Scepticism reappear, (paragraph 751), he is thinking quite specifically of
the original philosophic schools, so named, in the Classical world. (Hence,
capital Ss become appropriate.)
Also prominent, alongside Stoicism and Scepticism, in this passage is the
phenomenon of ancient Greek Comedy, as preserved in the dramas of
Aristophanes. These represent another impulse towards atonement, more
popular in form than any sort of philosophy: Aristophanes mocks the moral
clichs, as such, of his world. Yet he does so in an essentially irreligious way,
so that there is no real alternative basis for organized solidarity here either.
For Hegel, Aristophanes work signals the dying of the older civil piety, in
which Substance (his term in this context for the ethical spirit of the polis
as a whole, the moral substance of the polis) was quite straightforwardly
honoured as divine Subject. In the Comedic worldview of Aristophanes, on
the contrary, not Substance but rather the [ironically irreverent] Self is
absolute Being (paragraphs 7489). Substance, as Hegel rather oddly puts
it, has been downgraded to a predicate: although the gods that represent it
are still recognized, they have become relatively incidental to civic life.
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HEGELS GOSPEL
Subsequent cultural conservatism may try as hard as it can to reinstate

Substance to its old role, but decay has set in. Increasingly, therefore, there
is a demand for atonement that the pagan gods cannot satisfy.
Roman paganism, at its best, in effect responds by deifying the abstract
principle of legal right. But this, as will appear, still falls a long way short of
what is required. And it is not enough, either, that atonement should be
promoted only in the rarefied form of Stoic or Sceptic philosophy.
So how is authentic divine revelation possible? To begin with, das unglckliche Bewutseyn must indeed become fully conscious of its objective
unhappiness, in the loss of the ideological delusions that mask it. Twice
Hegel speaks of the bitter grief that cries out, God is dead , as an expression of that loss. The first occasion, paragraph 752, is in the context of
pagan Rome, the second, paragraph 785, in the context of the Christian
present day. Throughout his career he repeatedly looks for similarities
between cultural conditions in his own world and those that, in the world of
the Roman Empire, rendered possible the original rise of Christianity, by
way of therapy. He does so because he wants to show that the time is ripe,
now, for a great philosophic renewal of Christian faith, reawakening its
original truth.
And then we need to rise beyond any merely nostalgic attachment to the
beauties of religious tradition. For what matters when it comes to religion is
atonement not just beauty in itself, however much beauty may also,
ideally, contribute to the cause of atonement. For Hegel, Classical antiquity
in its Greek heyday was a world of unparalleled religious beauty, but not
yet one in which the critical demands of atonement had adequately emerged.
In order for those demands to emerge, it was first necessary that the beauty
should begin to lose its enchanting power, inasmuch as this was partly just
a lovely disguise for unatonement.
Hegel was a close friend of Hlderlin; as students at the Tbingen Stift
they had shared a room. And he now goes on to describe das unglckliche
Bewutseyn, become conscious of its unhappiness, in terms that are strongly
reminiscent of Hlderlins extravagant poetic lamentations. Thus, describing
the religious decadence of ancient Rome (paragraph 753) he writes:
People lose trust in the eternal laws of the gods, and the oracles, once
consulted for every decision, have ceased to speak to them. The statues
are stone corpses; their living souls have flown away, as has the faith
that used to animate the words of their hymns. The tables of the gods
are bare of spiritual food and drink, games and festival no longer
jubilant occasions of communion with the divine. Where Spirit now
continues to assert itself it is only to bring crushing ruination upon
both gods and mortals. So the works of the Muse have lost all spiritual
power. They have already become [for the people of that world] what
they are for us.
95
Note the sudden scene-shift, at this point, from ancient Rome to the
present day:
[They have become] beautiful fruit plucked from the tree. A kindly fate
has bestowed them upon us, as a girl might proffer us fruit; the gifts
are abstracted from their actual life-world, the tree that bore them, the
earth and the elements that contributed to their substance, the climate
that produced their distinctive character. So fate does not give us
the living world of these works of art, the spring and summer of the
ethical life in which they bloomed and ripened, but only a veiled memory of that reality. When we enjoy them, it is not for us an act of divine
worship, sufficient in itself to bring us to perfect fulfilment and truth.
But, rather, our enjoyment expresses itself only in the outer act of, as it
were, wiping off some drops of rain or specks of dust from the fruit.
And in place of the inner elements of the original ethical reality that
environed, created and inspired the art, we construct, in prolix detail,
a mere skeletal record of its outward existence: philological, historiographical etc. Not in order that we may re-live its actual life from
within, but only so as to represent it to ourselves.
At its most extreme, this is the world of Mr. Casaubon, in George Eliots
Middlemarch; a dispirited, lifeless scholarly world in which everything is
simply catalogued by the representing hemisphere, at its most meticulous.
Yet, observe the twist in the argument that follows. While Hegel is talking
in the first instance here about the beauties of Classical paganism, the point
he wants to make is equally applicable to the beauties created by past ages
of Christendom. These too have ceased to be reproducible in a world blighted
by Enlightenment. Suddenly, though, his lament is cut through with a dramatic shaft of light a renewed opening, despite everything, towards real
gospel hope, on another level:
Just as the girl who hands us the plucked fruit is more than the Nature
that immediately produced them the Nature at work in their constituents and context, the tree, the air, the light, and so on since she
brings all this together at a higher level, with the glint of self-awareness
in her eyes, and her gesture of offering, so too the Spirit of the fate that
presents us with these works of art is more than the ethical life actualised in that nation. For it is the recollective inwardising in us of the
Spirit that in them was still only outwardly manifested.9
9
For this whole paragraph, compare Miller, pp. 45556, Baillie, pp. 75354. The German formula I have rendered as the recollective inwardising in us is die Er-Innerung.
The hyphen makes this mean inwardising, but Erinnerung, without a hyphen, is just
the regular word for memory.
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HEGELS GOSPEL
To be sure, the cause of atonement has nothing to gain from the mere
pedantry of Mr Casaubon and his ilk. But it does nevertheless require, at
least, some measure of studious self-distancing from the sheer, immediate
seductiveness of outward religious beauty as such. For only so can the
real, inward truth of religion its capacity to promote atonement be
discerned, even where it has been most seductively mixed together with
other impulses. And the point is that historical distance can actually help in
this regard. It can help, insofar as it serves to render possible a detached,
philosophic discipline of discernment. As represented by the girl with the
glint in her eyes.
In other words: the worse it gets the better it gets, as the widely shared
experience of alienation opens up the historic possibility of a truly fresh
start. In paragraph 754 Hegel imagines all the various figures, personified
states of mind previously analysed in the book as a whole, gathered together
at the Christmas crib: a periphery of standing figures, expectantly pushing
forward around the birthplace of self-aware Spirit. And there in the middle
is the pain and longing of the unatoned state of mind, which pervades them
all, the agony of birth in which all are sympathetically united.
The business of the representing hemisphere is control. It operates mental
devices for the control of the physical world; for the control of other people;
and for the internalizing of various systems of social control, belonging to
ones culture. What I am calling unatonement is just that internalization
insofar as it has gone dysfunctionally rigid. And the birthpangs, here, are
the necessary pain of abandoning all the most authoritative prejudices of the
unatoned state of mind, its ideas of the sacred. What is struggling to be born
is a practice of religion broken free from the consolatory illusion that
Freud, for instance, naively thought all religion had to be. It is a decisive
abandonment of the prevailing rigidly authoritarian God-image that William
Blake also lampooned as Old Nobodaddy. In a monotheistic context the
unatoned state of mind, as it were, pictures God enthroned in the false
clich-clouded heaven of devout thought-gone-stale. But, again, the Christmas story shows God coming down out of that false heaven. Here is God
definitively revealed, incarnate, precisely, in the figure of a prophet who has
come to proclaim atonement, a champion of moral primary reality, the
straightforward neighbourly ethics of the presenting hemisphere at its most
liberated. Then the Saviour is crucified but what else is crucifixion if not
the ultimate symbol of unatonement, in general, at its most violent? The
most cruel, the slowest possible death, always in the most public of places,
crucifixion was used by the Roman authorities as the most dramatic way
of making a certain symbolic statement. In itself, it is just the most vivid
imaginable poetic assertion of the bullys will to control. This then is the
ultimate symbolic antithesis to truth-as-openness. God, however, symbolically reverses the Roman symbolism: the one whom Pontius Pilate put to
death is raised to life. The great champion of truth-as-openness, the crucified
97
dissident is revealed as the definitive embodiment of the divine. The

resurrection of the Crucified One is a sort of judo throw, using the energy of
the opponent himself to topple him. So the tremendous poetic energy
of crucifixion is used by God to affirm the exact opposite to what the crucifiers sought to affirm. In this throw atonement is indeed revealed, with
maximum poetic power, to be the very essence of the truly sacred.
In short, the essential truth of the gospel, for Hegel, consists in its symbolic
redefinition of sin. What are we to be saved from? Not least: a completely
mistaken notion of our need, as sinners, for salvation. The unatoned state of
mind, by definition, assumes that it already knows what sin is. Its morality
is always the internalizing of some given code, based upon some given, fixed
representation of the world. True atonement is the opposite: a sheer opening
up to the primary reality of ones neighbour, and to the moral challenge
immediately bound up with that reality, even where it requires us to offend
against convention. The whole original logic of the Christian gospel is to
vindicate atonement in this question-opening sense. But then the unatoned
state of mind springs back; it commandeers (the outward forms of) the
gospel for itself. Again it assumes that we already know what sin is, no need
for individuals to engage in any fumbling exploration of their own sin is
what offends the Churchs given moral code. Christs having died for our sins
no longer means that his death and resurrection serve to call in question the
very nature of sin; it merely becomes a way of underlining the gravity of sin,
as conventionally understood. Look how grave our sins are, the unatoned
state of mind in Christian form declares: our offences against conventional
morality are so grave that, in order to save us from the consequences, God had
to send his own Son to die on our behalf. In such thinking, however, the Easter
story is effectively abstracted from its historical context, it becomes mythic;
the original pagan symbolism of crucifixion is forgotten, and with it the
original meaning of Jesus resurrection. Forgotten also is Jesus championing
of social outcasts. The judo-throw no longer works. Unatoned Christian piety
exalts Jesus, yet it forgets who he truly is, what it is about him that makes
him our Saviour. It treasures its own notion of orthodoxy, yet completely
empties the gospel of its original rationale. Christ ceases to be a symbol of true
atonement. Instead, he is honoured only as a totem.
Hegel is the first Christian theologian ever to develop this sort of argument
at all systematically. In order to justify its novelty he constructs a grand
narrative, the whole underlying purpose of which is to show how such a
breakthrough has now, at long last, become possible, and why not before.
And in the Phenomenology he also sets out to develop a new philosophic
language for theology, in order to articulate it.
The traditional language of theological Vorstellung that is, imaginative
representation or picture thinking is so imbued with the workings of the
unatoned state of mind that he decides to translate it into quite a different
idiom. By comparison with the traditional idiom, this new one of Hegels
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HEGELS GOSPEL
operates at a drastically heightened level of metaphoric agility; for it involves

a constant, direct leaping back and forth between the gospel story, as story,
and a general discussion of different modes of thought, as modes of thought.
All the time he is relating the story to the overthrow of the unatoned state
of mind. He is struggling to render that relationship explicit, as it had never
hitherto been. Since his aim is to make us think about theology in quite a
new way, he refuses to let us rest, even for a moment, in the familiarity of the
story as conventionally represented.
So, for example, consider this characteristically hyper-compressed, and
abstract, formulation at the beginning of paragraph 755:
[The pure Begriff, or articulation, of Spirit] has in it two sides . . . One
is this, that Substance goes out of itself, empties itself, to become selfawareness; the other is the converse, that self-awareness goes out of
itself, empties itself, to make of itself a thing, or the universal Self.10
Substance here means God, as represented by substantial (weighty,
authoritative) tradition in general. Substance becoming self-awareness is
pre-eminently the truth represented by the Incarnation: the transformation
of such a tradition into a symbolic vindication of authentic, because
atoning, self-awareness. The converse movement is the prayer of the atoned
individual, as such prayer liberates one from the egoism of the unatoned
state of mind, and culminates in the mystical experience of self-less union
with the divine, being rendered in that sense impersonal (a thing) or
finding oneself swallowed up into the universal Selfhood of God. Two
modes of thought both, Hegel wants to argue, are necessary for the full
overcoming of the unatoned state of mind. The mystery cults of antiquity
(paragraph 756) embody the latter mode, only without the former. With
their poetic populism they come closer to what is needed than arid,
cerebral Stoic or Sceptic philosophy. But they are still incomplete, because
they continue to lack the necessary political energy that one finds in the
Christian Church. They are still too otherworldly, lacking any equivalent
to the Christian sense of revelation as a direct divine intervention into
this-worldly history.
And then, in what follows, Hegel proceeds as it were to retell the gospel
story essentially as an inter-play of Spirit and its Begriff. Again, by Spirit he
means the will to atonement, the energy of progressive true revelation of the
divine through the opening up of human thought to primary reality, beyond
thought-gone-stale. By Begriff (literally concept or notion) he means the
conceptual representation of that will, at every different level of thought,
rising at length to the most systematic philosophical explicitness. This, then,
10
99
is the representing hemispheres homage to atonement in general.11 The

Christian Church, at first, apprehends the truth of atonement in the intrinsically always ambiguous form of Vorstellung, immediate picture thinking.
But (paragraph 762):
This Begriff of Spirit that knows itself as Spirit [the context indicates
that he means the pre-philosophical Christian understanding of God]
is the immediate Begriff, still needing to be developed. [The supreme]
Being is [here recognised as] Spirit, inasmuch as it has appeared, it is
revealed. This first revelation is immediate [as contrasted with more
explicit philosophic revelation]; but the immediacy is also [implicitly]
thought, or pure mediation, and must therefore begin to show itself
as such, in its own sphere [i.e. it necessarily begins, straightaway, to
generate theology]. More precisely, Spirit, in the immediacy of [the
devout believers] self-awareness is [represented by] this individual
person [Jesus], set over against all others. It appears, to those for whom
it is immediately present, as an exclusive One in the still unresolved
form of a sensuous other. They [the disciples] do not yet know Spirit
as belonging to themselves. In other words, Spirit, revealed in the form
of this one self [Jesus], is not yet equally there as the universal true
Selfhood of all. Or, the shape it assumes has not yet fully attained the
form of the Begriff, i.e. of the universal Self . . .12
This tortuous prose style is designed to undo what the unatoned representing hemisphere, the Rigidity Principle, does to Christian faith. So it is meant
to dissolve the mere objectification of faith, that is, the reduction of faith to
a purported definitive Vorstellung of objective truth-as-correctness; and to
interpret faith, far rather, as an eliciting of the fully developed Begriff . In
other words: as a fully explicit articulation of subjective truth-as-openness;
or the universal, trans-culturally valid, ideal of true Selfhood. Kierkegaard,
indeed, was to attack Hegel as an opponent of the true principle that truth
is subjectivity.13 But nothing could be more perverse! That, when it comes
to theology, truth is subjectivity is in fact absolutely Hegels own argument.
The truth of a professed faith in the Incarnation, he wants to insist, is altogether dependent on the believers own subjective liberation from the
subjective untruth of the unatoned state of mind. Everything depends upon
11
12
13
In his Logic, where Hegel is no longer speaking in the first instance of Spirit as such,
Begriff has rather a different meaning. There it means, more, theoretical representation of practical know-how generally.
C.f. Miller, pp. 46162, Baillie, pp. 76162.
This attack is a pervasive theme especially of Kierkegaards Concluding Unscientific
Postscript (trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie; Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1941).
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HEGELS GOSPEL
this basic struggle within subjectivity. The truth of faith is not an objective
datum, in the way that a correct theory, simply as such, is. But faith becomes
true to the precise extent that, through it, one is inspired to appropriate,
for ones own self, the universally valid Self-ideal one sees symbolically
pioneered in Christ: the Begriff of Spirit. It has no other truth apart
from that.
No doubt one has to say that Hegels language fails. It is just too tortuous;
he is trying too hard; his impatience has overcome him. The result is
virtually unreadable, an avalanche of jargon he fights clich with jargon.
And this has played into the hands of those who, in any case, have not
wanted to hear the truth of what he is saying. Nevertheless, the basic
challenge behind the jargon still remains.
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6
the spur:
hegel versus fichte
1. The significance of Fichte

To understand fully the significance of Hegels breakthrough in the Phenomenology we need to understand how it had become possible. And, for that,
the key factor that I think most of all needs emphasizing is in fact the largely
negative influence of Fichte.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (17621814) was Hegels immediate predecessor,
as Professor of Philosophy, at the new University of Berlin. They are buried
side by side in Berlins Dorotheenstdtische Friedhof. Since Fichte has not
had many followers in the longer term, it is all too easy to underestimate his
towering significance for the immediate environment in which Hegel originally
came to philosophy. But both of Hegels main philosophic publications
before the Phenomenology, the two long essays Difference between the
Systems of Fichte and Schelling (1801) and Faith and Knowledge (1802),
deal largely with him.1 Schelling, Hegels close friend and ally in this period,
had at first been an eager advocate of Fichtes thought; when, on the other
hand, Schelling started to distance himself from Fichte, Hegel adopted the
role of advocate for Schelling, against him. And then the Phenomenology, as
a whole, represents a yet more fundamental repudiation. Afterwards, again,
Hegel discusses Fichtes thought at length in his Lectures on the History of
Philosophy, a course that he delivered on nine different occasions, from
1805 onwards; as well as making numerous direct references to Fichte in his
writings on logic.2
Hegel, The Difference Between Fichtes and Schellings System of Philosophy, and Faith
and Knowledge (English translations of both works by H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf;
Albany: SUNY Press, 1977).
Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy 18251826, Vol. 3 (ed. and trans. Robert
F. Brown, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 17884, 19092.
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THE SPUR: HEGEL VERSUS FICHTE
To begin with, Fichte had been a follower of Kant. Later, however, he went
significantly beyond Kant, in a way that for Hegel, I think, was decisive in
helping clarify his own, quite different critique of Kant. Thus, like Kant,
Fichte attacks all forms of traditional religious authority claim: not only
where such claims are expressive of unatonement, but in every case, without
discrimination. It was, I think, very largely that lack of discrimination on
Fichtes part, and its consequences, which prompted Hegel to discriminate
as he does.
Fichte indeed represents a sort of messianic secularism, with himself in
the role of philosophic messiah, and Kant as his John the Baptist. This
is secularism at its most euphoric, and all-trampling. It is a great surge of
revolutionary energy akin to that of Jacobinism; yet disowning all the actual
failures of Jacobinism, and purporting to be something quite fresh. Hegel is
heir to everything that is liberating in the historic explosion of Fichtean
thought, as a great blowing-open of all that old-time religion has held closed.
But he has also, already, risen decisively beyond it.
2. Truth-as-uprootedness
Having personally come from plebeian origins as a child he owed his
education to the generous patronage of a local nobleman who just so
happened to observe his intelligence Fichte despised hereditary privilege.
And he hated the established churches for their complicity with it. When
the French Revolution erupted he was fired with enthusiasm for its ideals.
His first book, published in 1792, was an Attempt at a Critique of All
Revelation, very much in the manner of Kant.3 Yet it actually anticipated
Kants own Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone by a year. As the
authors name did not appear on the cover, some reviewers took it to be
an anonymous work by the great Kant himself; which drew considerable
attention to it. This made his reputation. Then, though, he struck out on his
own distinctive path.
As regards the logic of the Fichtean argument, Hegel is warmly appreciative of Fichtes achievement as a speculative thinker. Odd as it may seem,
speculative is in fact a word with the most positive connotations for both
Fichte and Hegel. For Hegel, it precisely signifies the sense in which Fichte,
notwithstanding all his faults, at least at one level, surpasses Kant. So he
regards Fichtes work as
the most thorough and profound speculation, all the more remarkable
because at the time when it appeared even the Kantian philosophy had
3
Fichte, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (trans. Garrett Green, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1978).
103
proved unable to awaken Reason to the lost concept of genuine

speculation.4
Let us consider what this means.
Then just as now, the primary meaning of the word speculation was
derogatory: a story that is merely speculative is one that is not to be taken
too seriously. Nevertheless, in Hegels thought Spekulation is paired with
Reflexion, reflection. Speculum, after all, is the Latin for mirror; and
here, then, were two terms for the general role of thought as a mirroring
of reality. Hegel uses them, first and foremost, to designate two opposite
modes of relationship between philosophy and first-order religious faith.
The distinction is determined by the flavour of uncertainty associated with
speculation. Reflection, here, is in effect his term for any mode of philosophic thought that remains trapped within a premature craving for certainty.
By contrast, authentic speculation is philosophy properly released from
that craving.
So it is that Hegel further distinguishes the three elementary modes
of potentially authentic rationality: Understanding, Dialectical Reason,
Speculative Reason. The category of Understanding includes any sort of
thinking insofar as it focuses on the need for logical, and terminological,
consistency, valued for its practical usefulness. Dialectical Reason is the
opposite, inasmuch as it is any sort of thinking, whether oriented towards
truth-as-openness or truth-as-correctness, which focuses on the inevitable,
context-dependent ambiguities of language. (In post-Hegelian neuropsychological terms: Understanding is what the representing hemisphere prioritizes;
Dialectical Reason is an opening towards the way in which the apprehensions
of the presenting hemisphere exceed the interpretative capacity of the representing hemisphere.) And Speculative Reason, then, is systematic philosophic
thought which maintains a proper balance between these two. Where
Understanding falls away, there is no philosophy; only poetry. But where
Dialectic falls away, the result is merely reflective, as opposed to speculative, philosophy. Reflective philosophy issues from a craving for the sort
of certainty that Dialectical Reason forever dissolves: certainty, once and
for all, beyond ambiguity. In relation to religious faith, it therefore sets out
to define a hard core of such theological certainty supposedly immune
from dialectical dissolution surrounded by a general penumbra of agnostic
indifference. At one extreme, the core of unambiguous certainty may be
broadly defined as what the Bible says. Or, at the opposite extreme, it may
be, as Kant puts it, religion within the limits of reason alone. That is to say,
the minimal dogmas of a rationalistic sect: a set of quite abstract moral
4
The Difference between Fichtes and Schellings System of Philosophy, p. 118. (In Faith
and Knowledge, p. 167, he partially retracts this praise. He there criticizes Fichtes
more populist writings, as a bit of a backsliding towards false naivety.)
104
principles, without any notion of divine revelation in history at all. Despite

the obvious difference between these two principles, both, for Hegel, are in
the end examples of reflective thinking.
Speculative thinking differs inasmuch as, for it, there is no general penumbra
of agnostic indifference; and no core of simple certainty, either. But rather
there is a principle of discernment at work, penetrating what is recognized
as the endless ambiguity of all first-order faith, without exception. No elements of first-order faith are either absolutely affirmed here, or absolutely
repudiated; as they are in reflective thought. For it is recognized that the
truth in question is not simple truth-as-correctness, but something altogether
more elusive. As to how first-order faith relates to this truth: everything,
always, all depends. Subjectively, it depends upon who the believer is, and
what the believer intends. Objectively, it depends upon the circumstances.
Speculative thought about faith differs from reflective thought, essentially, in
its constant insistence on the importance of context.
Hegel salutes Fichte as a thinker who has indeed gone decisively beyond
Kant, in the direction of authentic philosophic speculation. And yet, the
fact is, Fichte represents a very different form of speculative thinking from
Hegels own. For what he aims at is not exactly (what I would call) truthas-openness. Rather, one might say that he celebrates truth-as-uprootedness.
He has abandoned Kants theological agnosticism, just as Hegel also does.
Only, it is, in a sense, for the opposite reason.
Kant, of course, argues that primary reality das Ding an sich, the thing
in itself is forever unknowable. In Hegelian terms, one might say that
the positive intention and effect of this doctrine is essentially to soften any
ideological formation expressive of das unglckliche Bewutseyn. The
despotic Rigidity-Principle sub-self is compelled to confess that, beyond
the bare minimum of religion within the limits of reason alone, it does not
know, but only believes, its authority-generating worldview to be true.
In particular, Kant disallows any notion of authoritative divine revelation in
history on this basis, arguing that it implies a claim to know what, as a
matter of principle, can never be known. Whereas, however, Kants doctrine
may to some extent thus rhetorically dis-empower the despotic sub-self, the
trouble is that, by the same token, it also rhetorically dis-empowers the
opposite, insurgent sub-self. True wisdom, for Hegel, does not just consist in
constraining, and softening, the ideological expression of the das unglckliche
Bewutseyn or unatoned state of mind. It consists in overcoming that mentality. And this requires uninhibited resistance. Against Kant, Hegel therefore
wants to speak, without any inhibition, about atonement as a true knowing
of primary reality. When he entitles the final chapter of the Phenomenology
Absolute Knowing, it is not least a polemical gesture against Kant. And
hence, too, the Phenomenology is framed as a philosophic study of divine
revelation in history: seeking to establish the basic criteria for recognizing
historic revelation and interpreting it. Kant wants to wage war against the
105
very concept of historic revelation, but Hegels war is, rather, against
unatonement, in all its forms. And it is a religious war, in which every
serious victory won he considers to be a moment of revelation. So he sets
out to write a philosophic history of revelation in this sense: a history
that partly criticizes, but also partly vindicates the Churchs traditional
understanding of revelatory divine providence.
Fichte, by contrast, remains altogether closer to Kant. Hegel differs from
Kant in that he wants to be more open to the essential ambiguity of traditional
Church-Christianity. Fichte differs for the opposite reason: he wants to be
still more aggressive than Kant in his absolute repudiation of any church
tradition, as such. Whereas Kant, it seems, simply wants to withdraw, in
company with a small elite of the enlightened, into the minimal truthas-correctness of religion within the limits of reason alone, Fichte has a
project for the wholesale transformation of the world, a secularizing gospel
of truth-as-uprootedness for all. His complaint against Kants theological
agnosticism is bound up with a sense that, after all, it is too soft on orthodox
theology. For Fichte, Kants agnosticism is no more than an arbitrary
shrinking back from proper political confrontation with the enemy. Fichte
knows that traditional church theology is bunk and he sees no point
in politely softening the conflict with any rhetorical pose, no matter how
perfunctory, of not knowing. In general, he differs from Kant in the much
more boldly strategic nature of his thinking as a whole. That is to say,
he has ambitious ideas about how his brand of philosophic insight might
come to inform an actual solidarity-building project. He designs the
aggressive moral rhetoric of a would-be populist movement, spells out its
view of history, and its governmental policies, to a much greater extent
than Kant does.
In 1799 a fierce controversy blew up around Fichte, who was then a professor at the University of Jena. He was accused of atheism, and eventually
lost his job as a result. He protested vigorously. What he rejected was not
faith in God. Nor did he reject Christianity; indeed, in his later writings he
increasingly represents himself as a good Christian. No, his theological
enemy was just any sort of institutionalized religious conservatism, of
the sort represented by the mainstream churches. (At Jena he had taken to
delivering Sunday morning lectures as an alternative to church worship.)
And this, then, was the speculative criterion that he brought to bear on religion in general. As he addresses the endless ambiguity of first-order faith,
for him everything comes down to the basic interplay between true divine
authority and the false authority of conservative religious traditions. In
effect, he identifies authentic faith in twofold fashion: as the coupling of an
intense moral sincerity with an infinite desire for radical change in society.
Whatever exalts the authority of God, understood as commanding faith
in that sense, against the authority of conservative tradition, as such, is to
that extent true; and, conversely, whatever on the contrary represents the
106
authority of God essentially mediated by the authority claims of conservative

religion is to that extent false.
Fichte is not a thinker of atonement, any more than Kant is. He is militantly
opposed to the theology of the unatoned state of mind insofar as it is entangled with conservative church loyalties; but what he is attacking here is not
the element of unatonement, in itself. Rather, it is the conservatism of the
traditions which that element has come to inform. As we have seen, Hegel
arrives at his concept of das unglckliche Bewutseyn largely by way of
working out his disagreement with the critical priorities that both Kant
and Fichte share. This is already apparent in his (only posthumously
published) essay of 17981801, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, where
he responds to Kants provocative remark equating the Christian piety of
European prelates or American puritans to the animistic beliefs of Siberian
tribespeople. For Kant, the basic problem is the same in all three cases:
mistaken, conservative reverence for traditional authority, simply as such.
To which Hegel responds by pointing out what he considers the yet more
basic, universal problem of unatonement: liable to be present not only in
these cases, but also in the thinking of even the most enlightened Kantian,
inasmuch as Kantian doctrine merely distracts from the problem. For, after
all, not every form of religious conservatism need be a barrier to atonement.
Nor is there any guarantee that a passionately sincere moralistic desire for
radical change in society will always be atoning. Indeed, Fichtes thought,
considered as a whole, is actually a most spectacular illustration of the
opposite possibility.
In the Phenomenology this initial critique of Kantian / Fichtean antitraditionalism has, as I have said, swelled into a great argument ultimately
all about strategy. Absolute knowing is the name for a strategic enterprise: it
is very much a matter of knowing the proper criteria for effective solidarityin-wisdom. It seems to me that, in its essentially strategic nature, Hegels
thought here very largely arises as a response to the strategic thinking of
Fichte. The cause that Hegel seeks to promote the cause of atonement,
as I would call it is not Fichtes cause at all. And he looks to promote it
above all by integrating it into the very sort of religious tradition that Fichte
anathematizes. Yet, he is largely energized by the challenge (or the menace)
of Fichtes quite different strategy. He is inspired by the sheer ambition of
Fichtes thought, to try and develop an equally, or even more, ambitious
alternative to it.
3. The despotism of the Absolute Ego

Fichtes strategy is abstractly grounded in what he calls his Wissenschaftslehre,
his Theory of Science. In historical terms, I would argue that Hegels notion
of absolute knowing (absolutes Wissen) is above all a riposte to Fichtes
107
Wissenschaftslehre. The Wissenschaftslehre traces what Fichte sees as the

perennial interplay, within the human psyche, of two egos. Namely: the
finite ego and the Transcendental or Absolute Ego.
The finite ego is simply the ordinary empirical self of any individual
insofar as ones identity is shaped and constrained by ones given cultural
and biographical context. But the Absolute Ego is the ideal Self. This, for
Fichte, first and foremost means a Self that is absolutely independent of
given cultural and biographical context. The fundamental contrast that
Fichte draws between these two egos is comparable to the contrast
Nietzsche later draws between reactive and active forces. On the one
hand, when Fichte speaks of reconnecting with the latent Absolute Ego
what he has in mind is an experience of radical shakenness being shaken
out of the ordinary moral complacencies of the finite ego. And yet, on the
other hand, the outcome of this experience, for him, is by no means the sort
of commitment to conversational openness that Hegel represents. On the
contrary, the Absolute Ego is altogether an impulse to control, to shape, to
impose rational order on the world. In neuropsychological terms, it thus
appears to be entirely a projection of representing-hemisphere energies.
It is simply the sum of those energies at their most spontaneous. Fichtean
wisdom involves a decisive overthrow of the inner quisling, that is, the
Rigidity Principle as the internalized voice of conservative cultural norms.
But then it issues in the cultivation, instead, of another sort of inner despotism,
different from that of the conservative inner quisling only by virtue of its
extreme aggression towards the outside world. There is a double aggression
here: both towards the outside world and towards the unregenerate (largely
presenting-hemisphere) finite ego. The ambience of the Absolute Ego is
pure Reason; as an ethical impulse it is pure universal altruism. However,
its altruism is the sort that belongs to an abstract logical theory, coupled
with a truly ferocious determination to seize and wield power, according to
the demands of that theory.
The fullness of truth, for Fichte, is definable as whatever derives from the
creative impulse of the Absolute Ego. In other words, that impulse is the one
and only source of true meaning in things. He developed this doctrine in a
whole series of works, beginning with his 1794 Basis of the Entire Theory
of Science.5 Here, to begin with, he traces the dialectic of the Absolute Egos
work of positing: in other words, its creation of meaning. He analyses its
positing of Nature, by which Nature is invested with meaning as an endless
5
English translation by Peter Heath: Fichte: Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre)

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). And see also Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo (trans. Daniel Breazeale,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); The Science of Knowing: J. G. Fichtes 1804
Lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre (trans. Walter E. Wright, Albany: SUNY Press,
2005).
108
series of resistances to be strenuously overcome and its self-positing, by

way of that overcoming in the most abstract metaphysical terms. Nature,
for Fichte, includes every sort of constraint on the Promethean impulse
of the Absolute Ego, whether these are resistances of physical actuality,
psychological habit, or conservative cultural tradition. Human wisdom, he
argues, essentially consists in absolute self-identification with the Absolute
Ego, and hence an infinite self-uprooting from the givenness of ones
natural identity, in all its aspects.
The Fichtean Wissenschaftslehre is at one level a very abstruse argument.
And yet, at the same time, Fichte was determined to be heard. The urgent
evangelistic tone that also pervades his work is well captured, for instance,
in the title of the tract he published in 1801: A Report, Clear as the Sun, for
the General Public on the Real Essence of the Latest Philosophy: An Attempt
to Compel the Reader to Understand. Like Plato, he thinks that the true
philosophers vocation is not only to be a scholar, but also to be a ruler. He
differs from Plato only in the radicalism he insists that the true philosopher
must be completely cut loose from all popular moral and religious tradition.
Fichte was a dynamic orator, and proud of it; a man of theatrically ostentatious
sincerity. As his son described him:
Fichtes words in his lectures sweep along like a storm cloud that sheds
its fire in separate strokes. He does not move, but he uplifts the soul.
Reinhold [his predecessor as Professor of Philosophy at Jena, another
admirer of Kant] wanted to make good men; Fichte wants to make
great men. His glance is monitory and his gait defiant. Through his
philosophy he aims at directing the spirit of the age.6
God forbid that Fichte should be persecuted, remarked a contemporary in
1796, or else there might very well emerge a Fichtianity a hundred times
worse than Christianity.7
Looking at human history, both past and future, in the light of his
metaphysical Wissenschaftslehre, sometimes Fichte divides it, simply, into
two great epochs; sometimes into five. The twofold division is between
cultures governed by the authority of the past and cultures governed instead
by a rational hope for the future, decisively uprooted from the past. As he
sees it, the transition from the former to the latter begins above all with the
6
Quoted in George Armstrong Kelly, Idealism, Politics and History (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 187, from Immanuel Hermann Fichte,
J. G. Fichtes Leben und literarischer Briefwechsel (2 volumes; Sulzbach: Seidel, 1830),
Vol. 1, p. 52.
Kelly, pp. 18788: from a letter of Erhard to Niethammer, 16 June 1796, quoted
by Xavier Lon, Fichte et son temps (2 vols.; Paris: Armand Colin, 19221927) Vol. 1,
p. 470.
109
original breakthrough-moment of the Christian gospel, in its character as

an eruption of apocalyptic hope. But what begins there can only, he thinks,
be fully accomplished by post-Kantian philosophy, liberating this element of
implicit truth in gospel hope from its distortion into conservative church
tradition, as such. The fivefold division, on the other hand, is between
(i) the state of innocence of the human race, in prehistory;
(ii) the state of progressive sin, where historic tradition-based authoritarian
regimes hold sway, enforcing blind faith and unconditional obedience;
(iii) the state of completed sinfulness, in which those regimes begin to
collapse, at first into mere moral anarchy this, though, at the same
time begins to evoke an urgent hunger for change, such as to render it
also the initial epoch of liberation;
(iv) the state of progressive justification this is what Fichte is working
towards, a world in which Reason as knowledge will forcibly instil a
fresh moral discipline; and
(v) the state of completed justification and sanctification, when Reason as
art will one day bask in its final triumph.
As he develops this scheme in his lectures on The Characteristics of the
Present Age in 18041805, he sees himself as being situated right in the
midst of the third epoch.8 He is scathing about the immediate moral impact of
the Enlightenment, at any rate in its French forms. The Parisian philosophes,
he thinks, represent a culture of absolute decadence, nothing but rampant
licentious individualism. However in this he resembles Hegel the worse
it gets, he thinks, the better it gets. For only so is it possible for a sufficient
energy of yearning to be generated, for real moral improvement.
The worse it gets, the better it gets: both Hegel and Fichte think this, and
yet Fichtes sense of the political opportunities now opening up could
scarcely be more different from Hegels. For the Hegelian ideal is, first of all,
the development of a trans-political culture of atonement, and then, politically,
whatever emerges out of that, through the patient negotiation of a general
consensus. Hegels Philosophy of Right may essentially be seen as a study of
the proper conditions enabling good negotiation, between all interested
parties. But Fichte, on the contrary, does not believe in consensus-building
negotiation. He believes in a dictatorship of Reason.
He is in fact a pioneering theorist of hard-line state socialism. In order to
create a space for radical philosophic politics, he argues for a complete
government monopoly on all foreign trade plus a determined bid to achieve
national economic self-sufficiency. This is so that the revolutionary regime
may be able to exclude corrupt moral influences from abroad. And then,
8
Fichte, The Characteristics of the Present Age (trans. William Smith; repr., Washington
DC: University Publications of America, 1977).
110
within the resultant closed state, he advocates strict centralized control

over peoples working conditions and levels of pay. The ultimate aim is to
create a system of maximum economic equality.9 Such equality is desirable
for moral reasons: it will prevent the upper classes being corrupted by
excessive wealth, and will also preserve the lower classes from the servility
that results from destitution. But, until everyone has learnt to see the benefits
of such a policy, it is clearly dependent on considerable coercion. In the
fifth and final epoch, he promises, the state will wither away. For by that
time original human nature will have been so broken and transformed, state
government will no longer be necessary. In order to achieve this transformation, however, the fourth epoch, the more immediate future, is necessarily
going to involve a furious imposition of discipline from above, by ruthless
philosopher-rulers. His later writings picture the ideal philosopher of the
future as being both Seher and Zwingherr: seer and enforcer. Essentially,
Fichte thinks of the state as a giant school, with regard to which everything
depends upon getting the right teachers in charge, and ensuring that their
word really is law. The ancien regime has got to be wiped out at all costs.
And the ideal state of the fourth epoch will be self-consciously constituted
as a Notstaat, an emergency-state, with an extreme harshness of discipline
corresponding to the extremity of the moral decadence into which the third
epoch has fallen.
How might the philosopher-elite actually come to power, so as to inaugurate the Notstaat? Fichtes first strategic project was to try and infiltrate
Freemasonry, with a view to converting it into the requisite sort of revolutionary movement.10 But then, from 1806 onwards, a new situation arose.
Germany was overrun by the armies of the Napoleonic Empire; this
prompted the rise of a new pan-German nationalist movement, in reaction.
And, abandoning Freemasonry, he thereupon decided, instead, to try and
marry together the hopes of Reason with the embittered fervour of that
movement. His Addresses to the German Nation, delivered in Frenchoccupied Berlin during the grim winter of 18071808, are an extravagant
oratorical tour de force, systematically infusing the clichs of nationalist
propaganda with his distinctive brand of moral-philosophic uplift.11
10
11
Der geschlossene Handelstaat, full text in J. G. Fichte: Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 1, 7 (ed.

Reinhard Lauth, Hans Jacobs and Hans Gliwitzky, Stuttgart Bad Cannstatt: Verlag
Frommann-Holzboog, 1964), pp. 37141; partially translated in H. S. Reiss and
P. Brown, eds., The Political Thought of the German Romantics (Oxford: Blackwell,
1955).
Fichte, The Philosophy of Masonry: Letters to Constant, (trans. Roscoe Pound,
in Masonic Addresses and Writings of Roscoe Pound; New York: Macoy, 1953),
pp. 13098.
Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (ed. George Armstrong Kelly, trans. R. F. Jones
and G. H. Turnbull; New York: Harper & Row, 1968).
111
At one level Fichte never abandoned his initial cosmopolitan Kantianism:

his first loyalty always remained to the international community of rightthinking scholars. But inasmuch as the sort of revolutionary change he sought
required the use of sovereign governmental power within an economically
closed state, it was by no means unnatural for him also to invoke nationalist
sentiment, if only for tactical purposes, to justify the states closure. And he
saw no ultimate contradiction between cosmopolitan morality and Germanpatriotic resistance to the (he thought) fundamentally amoral Napoleonic
project of universal monarchy. Everything about that project was loathsome
to him. Moreover, he shared the prevalent antisemitism of the new nationalist
movement. In his thinking antisemitic prejudice mingled all too naturally
with hostility to what, in neo-Marcionite fashion, he saw as the intrinsic
pharisaism of traditional Church-Christianity. So he urged that all Jews
should be expelled from Germany. Indeed, given that what he wanted was
simply a power base from which to launch a campaign for philosopher rule,
the nationalist movement seemed to offer just what was needed. For it was
especially influential among university students, the prime constituency he
sought to address. And he revelled in the sheer drama of the situation it
provided such a perfect setting for his own embattled self-dramatization, as
the quasi-messianic prophet of the Absolute Ego. Fichtes response to these
events was, thus, pretty much the exact opposite to Hegels. Yes, he was a
humanist. But his really was a humanism of the most inhumane kind.
4. Fichte and Marx

Why has Fichte largely been forgotten? Surely, one prime reason is that in
subsequent generations the sort of impulse he represents was for the most
part channelled into Marxism. And Marx, for his part, had no interest in
Fichte as a forerunner.
There are of course two very obvious differences between Fichtes thought
and Marxs: Marx had no time for anything like Fichtes German nationalism,
and he also saw himself as a materialist, whereas Fichte was a metaphysical
idealist. Yet Fichtes ultimate political ideal is just as internationalist as
Marxs. The difference was simply that Marx had different strategic opportunities available to him, opportunities that did not yet exist in Fichtes
day. In actual practice, of course, what Marx calls the dictatorship of the
proletariat was very much a sort of veiled equivalent to Fichtean philosopherrule, since the will of the proletariat could only be rendered dictatorial
through the agency of representative intellectuals. It involved considerable
economic closure of socialist states, much as Fichte had advocated; and,
again in thoroughly Fichtean fashion, an immediate escalation of state
power, supposedly on the way towards the states eventual withering
away. However, Marxist intellectuals were able to work in and through
112
internationally linked proletarian organizations, of a kind that had only

begun to develop in the period after Fichtes death. Fichte may have been a
fervent nationalist, but even so the fact is that he was a nationalist, basically,
faute de mieux.
As for the difference between Marxs materialism and Fichtes idealism:
what, in the end, does this really amount to? On the one hand, Marxist
materialism is a no-nonsense, brisk dismissal of religious faith, understood as
an intrinsically anti-progressive force. But, then, the idealist Fichte is equally
dismissive of conservative religion. On the other hand, Fichte, like Hegel, is an
idealist inasmuch as he considers what he does as a philosopher in the
sense that philosophy means systematically thinking about thinking to be
of immeasurable importance for the guidance it gives towards salvation for
all. Marx, as a materialist, disagrees. For Marx, the doctrine that is the
chief pointer to salvation for all, and hence the prime criterion for distinguishing friend from foe, belongs to the domain not of philosophy, in that
sense, but of economics and sociology. However, the only actual argument
Marx offers for this materialist belief is a critique not of Fichtes, but of
Hegels idealism in effect, for not being revolutionary enough.12 Juxtapose
the Marxist doctrine instead, to Fichtes impeccably revolutionary form of
philosophic idealism, and that argument falls away. In this context, it looks
like quite an arbitrary move: all it does is dogmatically close down a certain
level of theoretical conversation, with other philosophers, which Fichte still
holds open. Indeed, in relation to Fichte, the Marxist doctrine is quite a
unilateral closure of conversation: Fichte was by no means closed off from a
serious consideration of economics and sociology. (Neither, for that matter,
was Hegel.) In the end, it seems to me that Marxs resort to materialism is
little more than an intellectual energy-saving device; a way of not having
to acknowledge, and deal with, even such a sympathetic philosophical
predecessor as Fichte.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the
point is to change it. So Marx famously declared in the 11th of his theses
Concerning Feuerbach, in 1845.13 There may be some element of truth in
this as a critical comment on the specific case of Feuerbach, who had very
little strategy in mind, beyond the writing of books. But as a comment on
Fichte or on Hegel it is way off the mark! Both Fichte and Hegel, in quite
opposite ways, are philosophers absolutely intent on a quest for effective
strategies to change the world, no less than Marx himself is. And, moreover,
from Fichtes point of view the Marxist revolutionary project is surely
12
13
Marx develops this argument in two early works; neither of them published in his own
lifetime. Namely: his Critique of Hegels Doctrine of the State (1843) and Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marx, Early Writings (trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), pp. 57198, 379400.
Ibid., pp. 42123.
113
a prime example of the Absolute Ego at work in the world. This is the very
sort of thing that Fichte was looking for.
Thus, the actual historic fate of Marxist political parties, in general, not
only calls in question Marxs own revolutionary hopes. It almost equally
calls in question Fichtes. And, to a large extent, Hegels critique of Fichte
may very well, also, be read as an implicit, anticipatory critique of Marx.
5. Fichte / Spinoza
Ultimately, Hegel may be said to differ from Fichte in two main respects.
On the one hand, there is the purely formal difference that consists in his
writing both a Phenomenology of Spirit and a Logic, separating out the
metaphysics of the latter from the essentially trans-metaphysical argument
of the former. By contrast, Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre is framed both as an
abstract metaphysical deduction of the most comprehensive truth-ascorrectness, and yet also as the basis for his own distinctive envisioning
of the spiritual vocation of man. He mixes metaphysics and spirituality,
muddles them together entirely; from the Hegelian point of view, very much
to the detriment of both.
And then, on the other hand, when it comes to that spiritual vision there
is the moral difference between, as I would put it, Hegels commitment
to truth-as-openness and Fichtes fundamental identification of the most
comprehensive truth-as-correctness, far rather, with the most radical truthas-uprootedness. That is to say: being uprooted from any sort of essentially
conservative ethical or religious consensus.
But now compare, also, that other great speculative metaphysican-devotee
of truth-as-uprootedness: Spinoza. Fichte was fascinated by Spinoza. At one
stage, in his youth, he had actually thought of himself as a Spinozist. He
greatly admired the sheer metaphysical austerity and verve of Spinozas
thought; but came, eventually, to deplore what he saw as the ultimate
depravity of the moral vision at its heart. Both thinkers set out to derive all
morality from a vision of eternity, beyond any notion of divine revelation
in history: a timeless, correct appreciation of abstract first principles.
Thus, both begin from a metaphysical contemplation of the eternal divine
causa sui, the self-caused Absolute, which is beyond all historic narrative
inasmuch as any narrative is a chain of interactive causality, in time.
And neither will allow any real authority to traditional religion, because
traditional religion deals in the poetic retelling of sacred stories, and so falls
short of a purely metaphysical contemplation of the eternal. Yet, there
remains a great gulf between them. Their essential opposition might be
encapsulated as follows. For Spinoza, sacred is whatever is demanded by
an infinite openness to what simply is. But for Fichte, sacred is whatever
ought to be, according to the dictates of the Absolute Ego; which properly
114
impose themselves upon the conscience quite independently from any study
of external reality. Spinoza, one might say, is the advocate of an infinite
principle of atoning curiosity. This is my expression, not his; nevertheless,
it exactly captures the distinctive spirit of his thinking. He is an absolute
determinist, inasmuch as this is what a commitment to infinite atoning
curiosity implies. Namely: never, ever, giving up on the quest to understand
the causes of what actually happens in the world, and to oneself. Fichte
however, by contrast, is addicted to a rhetorical style of bullying exhortation
and implicit blame, which depends upon the idea of free will. And he deplores
the way in which Spinozist determinism works against that.
Spinozas term for ultimate reality, the one true Substance of all, is deus
sive natura, God or Nature. What infinite atoning curiosity uncovers is
Nature. But this, he argues, is also God, in the sense of being the one and
only source of all moral truth. Or, turning the equation around, he develops
what may be regarded as a variant of the Ontological Argument: that God
must be supposed to exist by definition. For God, the one and only source
of all moral truth, simply is Nature. In other words, true divinity is the sum
of all that is actually existent, as opened up by an ideal spirit of curiosity.
One knows the one by knowing the other. Forget everything else you may
suppose that you know about God for Spinoza, the whole proper meaning
of the word derives, exclusively, from this definition. God is Nature: primary
reality as illuminated by atoning curiosity. Or God is the inspiration of
such curiosity, the allure that inspires it; beyond all representation, inasmuch
as the infinity of curiosity is forever dissolving the limitations of any given
representational scheme.
Consider, by contrast, Fichte on the Absolute Ego. Here is another
conception of the one and only source of all moral truth. But the Absolute
Ego, for Fichte, is the absolute antithesis to Nature. That is to say, it is
not known, first of all, through our experience of being caught up into an
infinite nexus of causation. On the contrary, it is what we come to know
through the experience of free will, at its most intense. That is to say: the
experience of having all our excuses stripped away. It is no good pleading
necessity, Fichte wants to insist. You can choose, you must choose, and the
gravity of the choice is always greater than you have hitherto realized. To
recognize this is to reconnect with the ultimate truth of the Absolute Ego.
For Spinoza, on the contrary, talk of free will merely expresses an irrational
desire to blame people for their mistakes. True wisdom, for Spinoza, comes
from seeking to understand, not to blame: the two impulses are quite
opposite to one another. Therefore, the experience of free will is in that sense
an illusion. But for Fichte it is the highest truth. Like Spinozas God, the
Absolute Ego is known through the operations of pure secularized Reason.
Whereas in Spinozas case, however, this is Reason as infused by the essential
coolness of infinite atoning curiosity, for Fichte true moral Reason is known
by its blazing indignation.
115
The close affinity of the two thinkers at one level serves to highlight their
complete difference from one another, deeper down. Both are developing
metaphysical theories regarding the self-caused Absolute, or causa sui, beyond
all theological narrative. But Spinozas Ethics begins with this definition:
I understand that to be causa sui whose essence involves existence and
whose nature cannot be conceived unless existing.14
Deus sive natura is causa sui in this sense the causality in question here
has, in the first instance, to do with what exists, and how. Only secondarily
does our developing knowledge of that causality then open us up to knowledge of what causes good or bad. For Spinoza, the latter knowledge
absolutely depends upon the former.
Fichtes Absolute Ego, however, is causa sui with much more immediate
reference to the causality of what is good. It is an inner impulse, forever
struggling to externalize itself in the world of existence, through our finite
selves; and therefore we do not need to consult what is already outside us in
order to know it. We do not know the Absolute Ego by contemplatively
understanding the world around us and ourselves as we belong to the world.
It is not an object of contemplative insight far rather, it is a drive to furious
activism. We know it by resisting the world, in the inertia of the worlds
already given existence, and by battling the inertia of our finite selves, as
shaped by that given actuality, so that it may break through.
Fichte accuses Spinoza of colluding with moral sloth, and of dogmatism.
And yet, from a Spinozist point of view, it is Fichte who is the real dogmatist,
in that he jumps much too quickly to the supposition that he already intuitively knows, in his heart of hearts, what is truly good. He thinks that he
already knows this, and that philosophys task is merely to help energize
that knowledge. From the Spinozist point of view, Fichtes notion of the
Absolute Ego is, therefore, a metaphysical chimera. Spinoza would surely
regard Fichtes repudiation of determinism as a mere opting out of the
necessary hard work involved in properly understanding both self and
others. And, in the end, one might say that this is because Fichte does not
really want to understand people. He only wants to bully people, in moralistic fashion. His notion of the Absolute Ego is essentially a projection
of this will-to-bully. To know the Absolute Ego is nothing other than to
submit to the exorbitant supposed authority of that which the Fichtean
philosopher represents.
In Hegelian terms, the Fichtean free-will doctrine is precisely a direct
vindication of the unatoned state of mind, in secular-revolutionary form.
It is the despotic Rigidity Principle speaking: allowing the enslaved self
no slack.
14
Spinoza, Ethics, Part I, Definition 1.
116
6. Hegels verdict on both

Hegel, for his part, takes Spinozas side in this dispute. But he also decisively
repudiates what Spinoza and Fichte have in common.
As a form of speculative thinking, Fichtes metaphysics has the great
merit of, at any rate, showing forth its underlying mode of intellectual
intuition completely without equivocation. This technical term, intellectual
intuition, was actually first coined by Schelling, before being taken up by
Fichte himself. It is perhaps a rather confusing term, in that, whereas
intuition commonly refers to the operations of the presenting cerebral
hemisphere, in this context it designates the most deep-seated, and alldetermining, moral orientation of the representing hemisphere. In responding
to Fichte, however, Hegel also adopts it.
The core problem with this intellectual intuition of Fichtes, however,
has to do with the notion of the infinite it involves. That is to say: Fichtes
interpretation of the proper infinite restlessness of philosophic thought,
forever on its way towards Truth. Thus, for Hegel as also for Spinoza,
before him the infinite restlessness of true philosophic thought essentially
springs from an infinite desire for authentic self-knowledge, fully owning
the reality of what one actually is. But for Fichte, as Hegel puts it in quasiFichtean terms: the absolute synthesis [or final result] which the [Fichtean]
system achieves is not Ego = Ego, but Ego ought to be equal to Ego.15 Not
the true ideal of wisdom, as Hegel himself, like Spinoza, understands it: viz.
Ego, ones sense of what one is, equals Ego, what one actually is. But rather:
Ego, ones empirical self, ought, ideally, to be equal to the Absolute Ego.
And in that sense Hegel denounces Fichtean intellectual intuition as an
attitude of enslavement to what he calls a bad infinite. For the Fichtean
ideal is just an infinite ought, ought, ought an endless nagging. The true
infinite, for Hegel, is the infinite consequence of atonement. That is to say, it is
the infinite task of thought opened up by an elementary giving of permission:
not you ought but you may. It is what follows from the primordial principle
of all true revelation. Namely: it is permitted no matter what the orthodox
or enlightened thought police may wish to dictate you may give credence
to your own first-hand intuitive sense of primary reality, wherever this leads.
Of course, all philosophy as such says, Think for yourself. But for Hegel
this means something quite different from what it means for Fichte. Once
again: the mode of intellectual intuition at the root of Hegels thought is, in
effect, a fundamental atonement of representational Reason with transrepresentational Intuition, the work of the two cerebral hemispheres; a
systematic opening up of representational Reason to that upon which it
ultimately depends. The absolute knowing to which he aspires simply is
15
The Difference Between Fichtes and Schellings System of Philosophy, p. 117; and
see also pp. 13233.
117
that opening up, and the anti-propagandist thinking-for-oneself that it

inspires. But, by contrast, Fichtes mode of intellectual intuition is a mere
privileging of one ideological brand of representational Reason that is, one
self-sufficient species of theory, the secular-revolutionary species over
all others. And for Fichte, therefore, the imperative, Think for yourself,
degenerates into little more, in effect, than a propagandist command to
think secular-revolutionary thoughts, rather than conservative traditionalreligious ones.
Indeed, just as certain forms of Christian theology are ideally suited
to articulate the unatoned state of mind in traditional-religious form, so
Fichtes doctrine makes possible an ideal articulation of the same in secularrevolutionary form. Not that the unatoned state of mind, in itself, is
necessarily any less lethal where it is less articulate. On the contrary, the
articulation by clarifying what is at stake may well help towards its
philosophic overcoming. And that surely is, in fact, how Fichte serves as a
major forerunner to Hegel: by prompting Hegel to respond to his systematic
argument, likewise, in the most systematic fashion possible. Thus, Hegels
response is not only to be seen in his various direct discussions of Fichte.
But it is also, indirectly, a key factor in the whole original inspiration of the
Phenomenology. For how has Hegel arrived at this point? The Phenomenology is, not least, Hegels great attempt to match the speculative boldness
of Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre, in the anti-Fichtean articulation of a truly
atoned mode of intellectual intuition. Hegel arrives at the concept of Spirit,
fundamentally, by way of critical response to the Fichtean concept of the
Absolute Ego. What is wrong with Fichte? In Hegelian terms: above all, it
is that he has no concept of Spirit. And he cannot have such a concept,
because his notion of the Absolute Ego positively precludes it, already
occupying the philosophic space that the concept of Spirit requires. The
absoluteness of the Absolute Ego involves, not least, an absolute rejection
of atonement, inasmuch as atonement is the undoing of all, even the philosophically most sophisticated, forms of internalized moralistic bullying. But
by Spirit Hegel means the infinite energy of thought unleashed by a fundamental acceptance of what Fichte thereby rejects. The Phenomenology
originates, very largely, as his attempt to spell out what that elementary,
all-encompassing sheer reversal of the Fichtean approach implies.
It is, however, an attempt to do so that also decisively transcends the
metaphysical idiom of Spinozas Ethics. For, in Hegels view, Everything
depends upon grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but
equally as Subject.16 Spinoza, like Fichte, seeks to deduce an understanding
of ethics out of abstract metaphysical doctrine; in his case, a doctrine about the
one Substance, deus sive natura. But the Hegelian doctrine of Spirit is, far
16
Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, p. 10, para. 17; Phenomenology of Mind,

trans. J. B. Baillie, p. 80.
118
rather, an extension of Christology. Beyond all truth claims of metaphysical

doctrine, for Hegel, lies the ethically far more significant truth that, for faith,
Jesus, the representative Subject, representing the ultimate vocation intrinsic
to all subjectivity, just concretely is. Truth-as-openness, or truth-as-uprootedness?
To lift the veil of metaphysics, and pose the question in those terms, is surely
straightaway to see the answer: what comes first must be the former. When,
as was so very much the case in Spinozas world, the overwhelmingly most
common expression of unatonement is in the form of conservative bullyreligion, atoned openness may perhaps quite readily appear to be identical
with being uprooted from such religion. But when one is confronted by the
very different, wilfully rootless, secular-revolutionary sort of bully impulse
which Fichte glorifies, the elementary difference between the two becomes
all too clear.
119
7
two non-christian
alternative strategies
1. The Hegel who interests me . . .

The Hegel who interests me is the great strategist for the cause of atonement.
I admire the way he combines a fundamental philosophic critique of das
unglckliche Bewutseyn, the unatoned state of mind, with such determined
conversational openness towards popular religion. And hence the pioneering
directness with which he sets out, as a philosopher, to disinter the potential
Christian popular-religious resources for the solidarity of the shaken; as
this may interpenetrate, and transfigure, the solidarity of Christian with
Christian.
The solidarity of the shaken has, in the Western intellectual tradition,
been repeatedly deflected into the narrower solidarity of some more or less
closed-off spiritual elite. Platos dream of philosopher rule (both as utopian
ideal in the Republic and as realistic programme in the Laws) is the primordial case of this. In Fichtes thought, the ancient Platonist ideal of solidarity
among philosophers as such mutates into a modern form: revolutionary
vanguard-solidarity. What I admire in Hegel is the sheer radicalism with
which he recoils from that mutation, even while still holding absolutely fast
to the demands of the most rigorous critical thinking.
It is true that Hegel, in the Phenomenology, is only actually writing for
a small elite-readership. And yet, the substantive content of his ethical
doctrine is nevertheless quite profoundly anti-elitist. The primary political
loyalties of the Hegelian philosopher are not to any small group of the
like-minded. Far rather, the follower of Hegel is first and foremost loyal to
the legal system of the State, as impartial protector of civil liberties; and
to the open-minded Church, as celebrant of the background cultural ethos,
the Sittlichkeit, that empowers the laws in that role. Thus, he represents the
solidarity of the shaken at its most opened-up. And to my mind, the more
opened up it is, the better.
120
TWO NON-CHRISTIAN ALTERNATIVES
But, it may be objected, Church-Christianity is, in practice, so often so

smug, so conformist, so manipulative, so hypocritical, so petty, so stupid,
so superstitious, so hysterical, so faction-ridden, so bigoted, so misogynist,
so homophobic, so antisemitic, so inclined to scapegoating and so persecutory.
How can it be right to collude with such mindlessness?
Not all secularizing strategies, after all, are tainted with the sort of
propagandist fury that Fichte exemplifies. There are other alternatives.
2. Excursus on Heidegger
1
So, for example: what about the later, chastened Heidegger?
I am working here with the concept of what Jan Patocka, originally, called
the solidarity of the shaken; and Patocka was indeed largely a follower
of Heidegger, albeit with quite different political instincts. McGilchrist, also,
is very much an admirer of Heidegger. Indeed, I think there is every reason
to take Heidegger seriously, in this regard.
Heidegger (18891976) actually emerged from a very devout Roman
Catholic milieu. In 1909 he applied for admission into the Jesuit order; only
to be rejected on health grounds. Then he became, to begin with, a student
of Roman Catholic theology at Freiburg, before switching to philosophy.
His university studies were in part funded by the Church, and his habilitation
thesis, in 1915, was on the philosophical theology of Duns Scotus. But at
some point in the period 19161917 he appears to have lost his faith in any
sort of popular Church-Christianity. He never made any absolute break
with the Church; and was, in the end, buried in the churchyard at Mekirch
where his father had been sacristan. Nevertheless, his philosophical writing,
insofar as it impinges on religion, is consistently framed as a quest for some
sort of fresh alternative to the form of popular religion in which he had
himself been brought up.
Certainly, on the other hand, Heidegger is a profound analyst of the fundamental difference between truth-as-correctness and truth-as-openness.
These particular hyphenated terms are my own coinage. But they serve as
shorthand for a whole geography of ideas whose two most systematic
surveyors, up to now, have in fact been Hegel and Heidegger.
Thus: as I have said, Hegel surveys the whole domain of truth-as-correctness
in his Logic, and the whole domain of truth-as-openness in the Phenomenology
of Spirit. By Spirit he means (what I would call) the impulse to perfect truthas-openness. The Phenomenology studies this impulse in various struggles
against what inhibits it, at every level of human experience. It culminates in
absolute knowing: perfect truth-as-openness known as the absolute
essence of the truly sacred. As we look back over the struggles of Spirit from
121
this point of view, what appears is, as Hegel himself puts it, a bacchanalian
revel of thought.1 No argument could be more of a revel than Hegels, as
it leaps from level to level of experience, and from allusive illustration to
allusive illustration.
Heidegger, by contrast, gives us nothing equivalent to Hegels Logic. But
in his great early work, Being and Time, he does give us an alternative
systematic overview of truth-as-openness. Being and Time is indeed a work
completely without the frenzy of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Heideggers
argument does not leap between different levels of experience as Hegels
does; nor is it filled, to anything like the same extent, with veiled allusions,
flashing by. Rather, it is a very slowly unfolding, contemplative process of
thought, compelling the mind to dwell at length, in steady attentive focus,
on the demands of perfect truth-as-openness, without distraction. Both
thinkers set out to unsettle their readers, with a view to outwitting the
defences of mere prejudice. Only, what Hegel does by means of strange,
lumbering speed, Heidegger on the contrary does by means of mesmerizing,
spinning slowness. His argument is a sombre meditation on the difficult
reality of Being-towards-death as a challenge to perfect truth-as-openness.
In Hegelian terms, one might say that this meditation dwells within absolute
knowing: perfect truth-as-openness is known here as the absolute essence
of the truly sacred. And yet, what Heidegger shows us is absolute knowing,
so to speak, completely without the bacchanalian revel.
In the end, I think, this contrast reflects the fact that Hegel in the Phenomenology is attempting to do two things at once, whereas Heidegger in Being
and Time is only attempting to do one thing. For, again, Hegel is not only
concerned with the question of what it means for the individual to be shaken
by the requirements of perfect truth-as-openness; he is also concerned with
the question of what it might mean to build an ethos of solidarity in shared
dedication to those requirements. In chapters 4 and 5B he considers a series
of mentalities that inhibit effective solidarity of any kind, and one, das
unglckliche Bewutseyn, that allows it only on the basis of rigid mindclosure. And then in chapters 68 he compares various solidarity-formations
with regard, essentially, to their capacity for promoting truth-as-openness.
The topic is so vast and complex, the argument has to keep dancing, briskly.
But Heidegger, in Being and Time, is unconcerned with questions of ideal
solidarity. He is interested only in the scope of an ideal (shaken) authenticity
of response to the demands of perfect truth-as-openness on the part of the
single, mortal individual, as such. This intrinsically simpler enterprise allows,
Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, p. 27, para. 47; Phenomenology of Mind,

trans. J. B. Baillie, p. 105.
122
indeed it demands, a much slower pace of thought, to catch subtle complexities

that would not otherwise appear.
2
Thus, from the outset Heidegger distinguishes between two basic modes
of thinking: the ontic and the ontological. In terms of the contrast between
truth-as-correctness and truth-as-openness, ontic thinking is that which
quite appropriately for everyday purposes mixes together a concern for
both of these, without prioritizing either. However, ontological thinking
differs in that, when it comes to identifying the highest, most sacred wisdom,
it rightly gives emphatic precedence to truth-as-openness. Ontic thinking
is concerned with the factual nature and inter-relationships of particular
entities; ontological thinking, with what Heidegger calls the question of the
meaning of Being. In this context, Being simply designates that towards
which perfect truth-as-openness, in general, is opened up. Or what I would
call primary reality.
Of course, Heidegger does not think in neuropsychological terms, any
more than Hegel does. But, while all philosophy is, as an analytic enterprise,
representing-hemisphere work, ontological thinking may essentially be
said to be a philosophic honouring of presenting-hemisphere insight.
In his later writings Heidegger constructs a grand narrative largely of consistent fundamental failure in Western intellectual culture the great
forgetting of Being said to be decisively reversed only in his own work. It
is a narrative (like McGilchrists) that begins with the earliest forms of
Ancient Greek philosophy, emerging in a world with the two notions of
truth already confused. On the one hand, the Greeks speak of truth as
altheia, literally, unveiling. This suggests the unveiling of what has been
veiled by the wilful closure of closed minds. In other words: truth-as-openness. But on the other hand they also conceive of truth as orthots, the
Greek term for correctness. This original confusion is compounded by
Platos argument that, for the philosopher, nothing is ultimately sacred other
than ideas: that is to say, precisely, ideal forms of truth-as-correctness,
beyond the often incorrect impressions of sense perception muddled by
imagination. With Aristotle, the Platonic doctrine of sacred ideas evolves
into full-blown metaphysics, or onto-theology: as the hitherto free-floating
Platonic ideas become thoughts in the mind of the Unmoved Mover, the
Creator-God. Heideggers critique of Aristotle is indeed already prominent
in Being and Time. And of course that Aristotelian notion of God then merges,
mutatis mutandis, into Christian theology. Onto-theology now becomes rigid,
and persecutory. Nor does Heidegger see any remedy in early-Enlightenment
and post-Enlightenment philosophy. He does not really recognize Hegels
achievement, from this point of view, in the Phenomenology and I will
123
come back to what I think is Heideggers basic misreading of Hegel. In fact,

the way Heidegger tells the tale, it is only with the anti-Christian thought of
Nietzsche that we have a first really effective philosophic challenge to the
old stranglehold of onto-theology; somewhat, although only in a flawed
way, anticipating his own.
Being and Time is a systematic study of Dasein. The English translators,
John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, have opted to retain the German
word, as an addition to English vocabulary. They might simply have rendered it as existence, its meaning in ordinary usage. But it also, literally,
means Being-there, and so it links to the Heideggerian notion of Being as
that towards which truth-as-openness, in general, opens. For him, Dasein
basically means human existence in its aspect as a capacity for truth-asopenness. In neuropsychological terms, one might surely say that Dasein
has become Heideggers name for the primordial truth-capacity of the presenting hemisphere.
Thus, consider for instance the following bit of Heideggerian soul-mapping (so to speak) from Being and Time, section 44 (b).2
In this passage he is concerned to specify the various aspects of what it
might mean to speak of Dasein as living in the truth. There are, he suggests,
basically four such aspects:
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
To Daseins state of Being, disclosedness in general essentially belongs . . .

To Daseins state of Being belongs thrownness . . .
To Daseins state of Being belongs launching forth . . .
To Daseins state of Being belongs falling . . .
He has previously been discussing the phenomenon of care. To Daseins

state of Being [in the first place] disclosedness in general essentially belongs.
It embraces, he now remarks, the whole of that structure-of-Being which
[in the immediately preceding argument] has become explicit through the
phenomenon of care. To live in the truth is, in his terms, for Dasein to be
opened up by the disclosive, ontologically crucial impulse of Sorge, care.
In common parlance Sorge has the sort of ontic connotations that Heidegger,
for his part, seeks to reserve for Besorgnis, worry. But, unlike worry
which springs from ones willing, wishing, urge or addiction care, as
the elementary impulse right at the roots of ontological insight, is in a sense
what transcends all these. It transcends mere worry in that it is a purely
active, rather than a reactive, impulse. By disclosedness in general he means
truth as disclosed to, and communicated by, a simple quality of care about
things, in this sense. To mix Heideggers thought with Hegels: care is the
2
Heidegger, Being and Time, English translation by John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell, 1962, p. 264 (H pp. 22122).
124
sheer energy of Spirit wherever it is at work, even where it is not yet at all
articulate about itself. Or, in neuropsychological terms, it is just the basic
drive of the presenting hemisphere, insofar as it is atoned. Disclosedness in
general, then, is what care immediately accomplishes. It is that aspect of
truth which requires no words for its disclosure, but only care.
To care, he goes on, belongs not only Being-in-the-world but also Being
alongside entities within-the-world. The uncoveredness [altheia] of such
entities is equiprimordial with the being of Dasein and its disclosedness. In
other words, primordial truth-as-openness that is, truth-as-care involves
a radical openness, equally, towards all forms of thoughtful insight: both the
insights of self-knowledge (the truth of ones own Being-in-the-world) and
insight into the nature of other entities.
But what, on the other hand, counts above all, when it comes to the more
articulate forms of truth-as-openness, is self-knowledge. And this then
breaks down into self-knowledge in ones thrownness, self-knowledge in
ones launching forth, self-knowledge in ones fallenness.
To Daseins state of being belongs [secondly] thrownness; indeed this
is constitutive for Daseins disclosedness. In thrownness is revealed
that in each case Dasein, as my Dasein and this Dasein, is already in a
definite world and alongside a definite range of definite entities withinthe-world. Disclosedness is essentially factical.
By the thrownness of Dasein, Heidegger simply means all those elements of
ones sense of self that are given, rather than chosen: the given nature of
ones bodily constitution, or ones given place in a family, a social class, a set
of cultural traditions. And one test of living-in-the-truth, as self-knowledge
(Daseins disclosedness), is he wants to argue how honestly one manages to own this. Truth, in relation to ones thrownness, is just a matter of
not recoiling, in denial, from the given facts, insofar as they are felt to be
awkward, and not retreating into mere anti-conversational resentment, but
accepting the facts, and taking self-critical responsibility for what one has
been made.
To Daseins state of Being belongs [thirdly] launching forth disclosive
Being towards its potentiality-for-Being. (I have translated Heideggers
German term Entwurf as launching forth; the classic English translation
by Macquarrie and Robinson renders it projection. In common parlance
Entwurf means design or sketch. Etymologically it means throwingoutwards. Although projection has a similar etymology, it has lost the
energy that remains in the German word, and so fails to render the energetic
counter-thrust to thrownness that Heidegger intends; it has also acquired
psychological associations that he does not intend.) As regards its understanding of itself, Dasein can either let this be determined by the world
and others, or by its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. Here we have
125
another test for living-in-the truth, as self-knowledge: how spontaneous

does one manage to be in the creative shaping of ones own individual character? Or to what extent does one allow oneself, instead, to be psychologically
manipulated by the world, and by particular dominant Others, so that one
fails to apprehend ones ownmost vocation?
To Daseins state of Being belongs [fourthly] falling. Proximally and for
the most part Dasein is lost in its world . Thrownness and launching
forth are opposite but complementary experiences of being challenged to
think; they are challenges to which one may respond either with open
Honesty or else evasively. But to be fallen, in the trans-theological sense
Heidegger has in mind, is, by contrast, to have lapsed into sheer existential
inertia, without any real sense of challenge at all. To the extent that it is
fallen, in this sense, Dasein is lost in its world : it is in untruth, the
untruth of a sheer lostness. For it is simply absorbed into das Man, the
they, Heideggers general, idiosyncratic term for any culture of mass conformity. Daseins absorption in the they , he remarks, signifies that it is
dominated by the way things are publicly interpreted. That which has been
uncovered and disclosed stands in a mode in which it has been disguised and
closed off by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. These are the intellectual
gradations, so to speak, of all-pervasive banality. Idle talk: purely gossipy
banality. Sub-philosophic curiosity, perhaps better rendered as hunger
for novelty: the banality, for instance, of an energetic sightseer, or follower
of intellectual fashion. Ambiguity: Heideggers term, more especially, for
the banality of glib, sophisticated, but altogether superficial learnedness.
True self-knowledge begins from a self-critical acknowledgement of ones
fallenness into the general banality of the they.
In my book Faith in Honesty, I myself have attempted to develop a systematic phenomenology of Honesty, perfect truth-as-openness, in terms of
what I, likewise, think is its primordially threefold struggle: against dishonesty-as-disowning, dishonesty-as-manipulation, dishonesty-as-banality.
I have also sought to suggest a direct correlation, in principle, between
this pre-theological threefoldness and the elementary Christian-theological
threefoldness of the Holy Trinity. By contrast, Heidegger in Being and Time
has resolutely bracketed all questions of theology. And yet, the underlying
pattern of my analysis there, in this regard, follows the pattern of his.
3
Being and Time was originally conceived as a larger project, which Heidegger
never completed. But what we do have is a work in two Divisions. The first
he calls a preparatory fundamental analysis of Dasein. It culminates in his
introduction of the four faces of perfect truth-as-openness: its fourfold relationship to care, thrownness, launching forth, and fallenness. Then,
however, in the second Division he goes back over these themes, to reframe
126
them in relation to temporality. These two Divisions correspond to the two

aspects of traditional metaphysics that he is seeking to overcome. For not
only does traditional metaphysics sacralize truth-as-correctness. But it also
identifies the highest wisdom with a fundamental detachment from the vicissitudes, and the attendant passions, of temporal existence: contemplating
the eternal essence of ultimate reality in the most purely intellectual fashion,
without pathos. Platos sacred ideas are timeless structures of perfect
truth-as-correctness, to be appreciated in serene contemplation. And insofar
as the Western metaphysical tradition as a whole is what Whitehead called
it, just so many footnotes to Plato, the conceptual apparatus may have
evolved but this basic understanding of wisdom has remained intact. For
Heidegger, on the other hand, what counts for the highest wisdom is not so
much detachment from the world of time, as intensity of authentic care,
regarding it.
The intensification of authentic care will certainly issue in certain forms
of detachment it will of course detach one from the banal preoccupations,
and the consequent fears, of the they. However, there is also another,
opposing form of pathos that it will, on the contrary, intensify. Namely:
that which Heidegger calls the pathos of ontological Angst (anxiety, or
dread). Heidegger sharply contrasts Angst, in this sense, with merely ontic
fear. Like ontic fear, it is an urgent response to danger Angst may be as
urgent as any fear. But, unlike ontic fear, the specific danger to which Angst,
as a stimulus to ontological thinking, responds is not a threat to ones
survival, worldly status, or ease of existence. It is just the danger of a life
without authentic meaning.
Compare Spinoza, perhaps the most radical celebrant of philosophic
detachment: Spinozas ideal wise man, being altogether detached from the
vicissitudes of mortal existence, thinks of nothing less than of death.3
Heideggers notion of wisdom could not be more different. Indeed, it involves
a maximum opening up of Dasein to the thought of death not at all as a
source of fear, but purely and simply as the ultimate intensifier of Angst. For
the true fulfilment of wisdom, he argues, depends upon Daseins possibility
of Being-a-whole.4 Only in the context of ones life as a whole does the full
significance of what is at stake in ones every life choice become apparent;
only when each decision is approached in the light of the contribution it
makes to the whole story. And to envisage ones life as a whole, one has to
live always with the harsh fact of ones own mortality clearly in view, as the
final horizon. In Heideggers own phrase, the Being of Dasein has to become a
Being-towards-death. What he calls Being-towards-death has nothing to do
with any metaphysical doctrine either affirming or denying the immortality of
3
4
Spinoza, Ethics, Part IV, Proposition LXVII.

Being and Time, 45, pp. 27478 (H pp. 23135).
127
the soul. Again, in Being and Time all such doctrine is rigorously bracketed.
But Being-towards-death is just that elementary orientation of Dasein
which, above all, confers pathos on the ontological demands of living-inthe-truth: rendering possible a truly deep-felt commitment to care, a truly
impassioned seriousness with regard both to ones thrownness and to
ones launching forth, a truly passionate discontent with ones fallenness.
In short, it is the investment of perfect truth-as-openness with maximum
poetic urgency.
Heideggers usage of the term Angst is borrowed from Kierkegaard: he
lifts it out of Kierkegaards Christian thinking, and secularizes it. Clearly, it
is very close in meaning to Patockas notion of shakenness. Heidegger
thinks of Angst, in the first instance, as a response to the universal human
condition of mortality. Patocka, because his concern is with the solidarity of
the shaken, thinks of shakenness more as a response to the experience of
specific historic traumas, the sort of experience that might serve as a catalyst
for solidarity-initiatives. But both alike are terms for high-intensity responsiveness to the demands of perfect truth-as-openness.
Heideggers thinking in Being and Time remains, in essence, pre-political.
Applied to politics, however, does it not most naturally point towards
Patockas ideal? Whereas, however, Patocka helped launch a human rights
campaign against a decaying, one might say post-totalitarian, but still
highly oppressive Communist regime, Heidegger on the contrary, in the
revolutionary year 1933, joined the Nazi party and, albeit only briefly,
actually became a totalitarian activist. Later, looking back on that period
with chastened regret, he recoiled from the whole business of politics.
He came to the conclusion that authentic philosophy was only possible in
the form of a purely contemplative reflection on the ways of the world.
In his later writings, after the trauma of 19331934, he thus becomes the
advocate of what, translating Meister Eckharts term gelzenheit into
modern German, he calls Gelassenheit: releasement to begin with, in the
sense of being released from all the illusions inevitably bound up with any
direct quest for a share in governmental power.
But then this advocacy of Gelassenheit also merges with his pre-existing
repudiation of popular Church-Christianity. It comes to look very much
like a wholesale ban on direct participation by the true philosopher in
organized solidarity-building of any kind whatsoever. Far from being an
advocate of the solidarity of the shaken, therefore, what the later Heidegger
stands for, instead, is just a loose beautiful-soul communion of the
disengaged.
4
In 1966, ten years before his death, Heidegger gave an interview to the
magazine Der Spiegel, with a view to its being published immediately after
128
he died, as his last word.5 Surveying the moral plight of our ultra-technological
civilization, in this interview, he adopts the role of an apocalyptic visionary.
He declares and this is then the headline under which the interview
appears nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten. Only a god can save us. Or,
Only another god: an unnamed, as yet unknown god. Certainly, for him,
it has to be another god, not the God of popular Christian faith.
One of the main purposes he envisaged for the Spiegel interview was to try
and set the record straight as regards his 19331934 entanglement in the
Nazi movement. So he begins by discussing how, in those first heady days of
the revolution, he was elected Rector of Freiburg University, and how he
sought to use that position to establish for himself something of a role as an
intellectual leader in the new Germany. He seeks to explain his conduct:
emphasizing his initial reluctance to be elected; how as rector he had
defended the independence of the university, resisting the worst excesses of
the regime; and how, after just ten months, he had been forced out of office.
And then, having (he hopes) dealt with all that, he moves on to wider themes.
In the second part of the interview he outlines his general understanding of
the current historical moment it is here that he invokes our need for noch
ein Gott to save us.
He insists that from 1934 onwards his lectures were, in fact, largely a critical
reckoning with the actual moral corruption of the regime. We are invited to
read them as a necessarily veiled but nevertheless uniquely radical expression
of dissent. So in a series of lectures on the poetry of Hlderlin he set out his
own form of German nationalism, as an alternative to that of Nazi ideology.
Heideggers ideal Germany is one that takes pride, above all, in being a preeminent nation of poets and thinkers. It is represented first and foremost, not
by any political leader, but rather by this ultimate outsider, Hlderlin, a great
mad visionary poet, with his poignant lamentation over the god-forsaken
philistinism of his day. Hlderlin not Hitler: that was Heideggers first,
somewhat esoteric word of protest. And then, in another lecture series on
Nietzsche, he also, implicitly, confronted his own revolutionary hopes
of 1933. Thus, he constructed a Nietzsche who is very largely a symbol of
those hopes philosophy infected with a rampaging will to power in
order to argue against them. At the original moment of the Nazi revolution,
it seems that Heidegger had dreamt of a political engagement within the
new ruling movement that would, to an unprecedented extent, promote the
class interests of the intellectual elite, the sort of people who might read his
5
Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten, published June 1976; trans. Maria P. Alter and
John D. Caputo, in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1993).
(In the original magazine the interview sits, with rather sad incongruity, next to
marginal advertisements for tablets to enhance male sexual potency, and holidays in
the Bahamas . . .)
129
books. But then, once it became clear to him that this was not after all going
to be possible, he turned aside, not to anything like the solidarity of the
shaken, but to Gelassenheit instead. In Being and Time his term for achieved
truth-as-openness had been Eigentlichkeit, authenticity. Now, however, it
became Gelassenheit: still, the ideal of perfect truth-as-openness; only
mixed with additional connotations of high-minded, not to say haughty,
withdrawal from all forms of worldly struggle. Deprived of the great
solidarity-project about which he had dreamed in 1933, he decided to have
no solidarity-project at all.
How can he have been so blind to the actual reality of the Nazi movement
in 1933? And how could he then have remained so trapped within his initial
disillusionment with Nazism; so unable, thereafter, to see the more constructive possibilities of the solidarity of the shaken? He comes across in the 1966
interview as, for the most part, quite unrepentant.6 Here we have his case for
the defence, its publication delayed until after his death so that no hostile
critic would ever have the chance to cross-examine him about it. Undoubtedly, I think, it would have been a much more persuasive case had he been
less defensive.
And then, with reference to the moral danger attendant upon future
developments of technology, he adopts the posture of a prophetic sage.
Only a god can save us, he declares. Only another god: to replace the God
of Christianity. But was it not, at least partly, the particular nature of
his dogmatic anti-Christianity that had led him astray in 1933, and had,
moreover, prevented him from ever truly recovering, afterwards? Thus, he
was seduced by the flamboyant promise of the pagan wing within the Nazi
movement: the promise of an anti-Christian cultural revolution. In the
turmoil of Nazism, it seems, he thought that he already discerned the inchoate upsurge of noch ein Gott a hitherto unheard-from god, to whom he,
as the leading philosopher of his day, might help give a voice. Nazism, he
thought, represented the possibility, at least, of the emergence of a whole
new form of popular religion, as a partner for philosophy. Naturally,
in retrospect, he recognized his strategic misjudgement in 1933. That
was all too obvious. And yet, he never repudiated this key element in the
underlying impulse that had, in the first place, seduced him into making
that misjudgement: his drastic, merely conversation-stifling repudiation of
his own religious roots; his disowning of his own original thrownness into
Christendom.
George Steiner for instance describes it well, I think. It is masterly, he remarks, in its
feline urbanity and evasions. And he goes on, What the demure interviewers did not
ask was this: is there anywhere in Heideggers work . . . from 1945 to his death, a single
syllable on the realities, on the philosophic implications of Auschwitz? There is not.
Steiner, Heidegger (Glasgow: Collins, 1978).
130
5
As regards conversation with other thinkers, those with whom Heidegger is
chiefly concerned are modern Germans and ancient Greeks. He simply
shows no interest in the very different sort of testimony to truth-as-openness
to be found within the literature of ancient Hebrew prophecy. Why not?
He is intent on thinking philosophically beyond metaphysics, in the sense
that metaphysics is philosophy preoccupied with truth-as-correctness, to
the occlusion of the proper claims of truth-as-openness. But there is nothing
metaphysical, in that sense, about the thinking of the Hebrew prophets.
I have already invoked the earliest of them, Amos; whose original poetry
dates perhaps from the decade 760750 BCE. In the prophecy of Amos, as I
have remarked, we simply encounter a God raging against the mere liturgical
flattery of his worshippers, and their complacent ethical conformism.
Nothing else. For YHWH, as Amos represents him, demands from his people an ever more intense commitment to justice and righteousness, precisely
in the sense of perfect, penitent openness, on the part of the privileged, to the
moral demands arising from the plight of the poor and the oppressed.
The later prophets then added something to Amos insistence on the
infinite demands of true justice and righteousness: a campaign to ban the
normal, concomitant worship of other gods, alongside YHWH. Partly, this
campaign was a practical extension of Amos testimony to the uniqueness
of his flattery-refusing God, a device for giving that testimony effective
political focus, as Amos himself had not done. But partly, no doubt, it also
tended to distort the heritage of Amos with an infusion of cultural chauvinism.
It was, thus, a profoundly ambiguous move. Nevertheless, the fact remains
that the literature of the Bible, as a whole, is unique among ancient literatures,
generally, in the critical ferocity with which it presses home the establishment-challenging demands of justice and righteousness. In the Psalms, in
Job, in the confessions of Jeremiah and the Suffering Servant songs
of Deutero-Isaiah, we hear the voices of those who have been unjustly
victimized, protesting against their affliction, as nowhere else in the ancient
world. And then in the New Testament God actually appears incarnate in
the figure of an unjustly victimized dissident. (Ren Girard in particular
has picked out this unique feature of the biblical tradition as a whole,
and incorporated it into a formidable philosophic-anthropological grand
narrative.)7 The Heideggerian strategy however, inasmuch as it is essentially
a preparing of the way for the advent of another, new god, involves not least
a fundamental repudiation of the whole justice and righteousness tradition
stemming from Amos.
Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (trans. James G. Williams, Maryknoll: Orbis,
2001).
131
Yet, this repudiation remains tacit. It is not argued for, at all. And hence it
seems to represent a quite arbitrary closure. Note, moreover, how Heideggers
unargued-for, yet, fundamental, rejection of popular Church-Christianity
distorts his reading for instance of Hlderlin. There is actually no one for
whom he expresses greater admiration. Hlderlin not Hitler, as the prime
representative of an authentic German nationalism as he recoils from his
1933 error, Heidegger turns back to this poet of the most extreme alienation
from modern mass culture as such. But he completely ignores Hlderlins
enduring, albeit highly eccentric, attachment to popular Christianity. It is
true that Hlderlin regards the modern Christian world as being lamentably
god-forsaken, in its political and civil-religious life. Unlike Heidegger,
though, Hlderlin is not looking for the advent of another god. Rather, he
longs for the coming again in another form of Christ. Hlderlins faith in
Christ is largely a form of chastened recoil from the cultural-revolutionary
nightmare of the French Revolution. As a young man he had tried writing
hymns for the new post-Christian cult that the Jacobins had introduced.
Horrified by the Terror, however, he turned back with renewed respect to the
sheer, well-rooted catholicism of popular Christianity. Much of the real
interest of Hlderlins poetic thought derives from the tension, within it,
between his utopian nostalgia for pagan Greek antiquity and his chastened,
conservative attachment to the Christian folk religion of his own people.
But if one were to rely on Heideggers commentary one might not notice this
at all.8 Heidegger pays no attention at all to the crucial role of Christ in
Hlderlins work. And it seems to me that his reading of Hlderlin is in fact
quite significantly impoverished as a result.
Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann Vittorio) (a) Hlderlins

Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein (lecture course at Freiburg, Winter Semester,
19341935), Vol. 39, 1980; (b) Erlunterungen zu Hlderlins Dichtung (19361938),
Vol. 4, 1981; (c) Hlderlins Hymne Andenken (lecture course at Freiburg, Winter
Semester, 19411942), Vol. 52, 1982.
In Hlderlins poem Patmos there is an uncanny moment when the poet imagines
himself accosted by a tempter:
Yet just in case, now, a tempter should come
And catch me off guard, as we walked on the road, with sorrowful words,
So that, slave as I am, I was in this
Goaded to blasphemous folly
Let me confess: all I, with these eyes, ever saw
Was a vision of wrath. I have nothing to boast of. But have
Simply been warned . . .
This tempter, I think, is precisely the spirit of revolutionary impatience that, if given
way to, would lead the poet to repudiate popular Christianity; as, in earlier years Hlderlin had indeed been inclined to do. One might well, therefore, read these lines as a
prefiguring of Heidegger!
132
6
As for Heideggers reading of Hegel: the first key text for this occurs towards
the end of Being and Time. Here he takes a brief look at the Hegelian concept of Spirit. And he suggests an alternative understanding, emergent from
his own analysis of Dasein: Spirit as the inspiration of Dasein, impelling it
towards authenticity. The basic difference between this view and Hegels,
he argues, lies in the relationship it posits between Spirit and time. Thus, for
Hegel, Spirit simply falls into time, in the obvious sense that its struggles
take time. Seen in the light of the Heideggerian analysis however, Spirit
does not first fall into time, but it exists as the primordial temporalising of
temporality.9 That is to say, it is essentially the inspiration of an authentic
Being-towards-death.
It is arguable that there is some justice to this criticism. What Heidegger
calls the truth of authentic Being-towards-death is not a theme that appears
in the Phenomenology of Spirit. That it does not is basically because (as
I have said) Hegel is so preoccupied with questions of solidarity-strategy for
absolute knowing: analysing both what inhibits solidarity, in general, and
what tends to confine effective solidarity-formations to mere clich-ideology.
But Being-towards-death is a phenomenon of Spirit considered in purely
pre-strategic terms: the demands of perfect truth-as-openness presented to
each one of us, as solitary individuals, in relation to our mortality. One is,
after all, never more alone than in the face of death. And I think Heidegger
is right, that this might well be where a truly comprehensive phenomenology
of Spirit ought to start. In order to understand the solidarity of the shaken
one needs to understand both solidarity and shakenness. As a systematic
analysis of shakenness, Being and Time is thus, I think, a very valuable
complementary supplement to the Phenomenology.
But then three decades later, in 1957, he further extends his critique of
Hegel in a lecture entitled The Onto-Theological Constitution of Metaphysics; the argument of which is, I think, altogether more dubious. This
lecture is the summing up of a semester-long seminar on Hegels Logic. And
in it Heidegger outlines how he himself sees his difference from Hegel, by
posing three questions:
(1) What is the matter of thinking for Hegel, and what is it for us?
(2) What is the criterion for the conversation with the history of thinking
for Hegel, and what is it for us?
(3) What is the character of this conversation for Hegel, and what is it
for us?10
9
10
Being and Time, p. 486 (H p. 436).

Heidegger, Identity and Difference (trans. Joan Stambaugh; New York: Harper & Row,
1969), p. 46.
133
As regards the matter of thinking, he argues, for Hegel it is the idea as the
absolute concept. But for us (that is, for himself, using the royal we) it is
Being with respect to its difference from beings, or the difference as difference. Hegels criterion for the conversation with the history of thinking is,
as he puts it, simply to enter into the force and sphere of what has been
thought by earlier thinkers.11 (He notes in particular Hegels sympathetic
interest in Spinoza.) But he differentiates his own approach by saying that
he, by contrast, is forever seeking to uncover what metaphysics, as such, has
left unthought. (Namely: what he calls the difference as difference.) The
character of Hegels conversation with earlier metaphysical thinkers is
Aufhebung, sublation in other words, an attempt to mediate between
them, bring them together, across the centuries, into conversation with one
another. Insofar as he, Heidegger, engages in conversation with earlier
metaphysical thinkers, however, it is always with a view to what he calls
the step back.12
How are we to understand this?
The idea as absolute concept, or the absolute idea, is indeed Hegels
formula, in the Logic, for the ultimate goal of metaphysics, that is, a systematic celebratory survey of the whole domain of truth-as-correctness in
general. And yes, it is a very different object of thought from that which
Heidegger intends when he speaks of Being with respect to its difference
from beings, or the difference as difference, inasmuch as this is what truthas-openness, in general, opens towards; precisely, the basic difference of
truth-as-openness from truth-as-correctness.
But I have already spoken of the fundamental difference between Hegels
metaphysical thinking in the Logic and his trans-metaphysical thinking in
the Phenomenology.13 The matter of thinking in the Phenomenology is not
the absolute idea. It is absolute knowing. And this is nothing other than a
perfectly self-aware knowing of the proper spiritual priority of truth-asopenness. Heidegger presents his own attempt to think what metaphysics
has left unthought, his own step back from metaphysics, as something that,
in itself, already radically differentiates his standpoint from Hegels. However,
in the Phenomenology Hegel is already attempting to think what metaphysics
leaves unthought; just as much as Heidegger is. True, he believes in maximum
conversational openness towards all forms of genuine thought, including that
of the metaphysical tradition. So he follows up the Phenomenology with the
Logic. Why not, though? Metaphysics is only problematic to the extent that
it falsely purports to define, in terms of ultimate truth-as-correctness, what
is properly most sacred, so helping give legitimacy to particular forms of
closed religious, or anti-religious, dogmatism. Hegels Logic does not do
11
12
13
Ibid., p. 47.
Ibid., p. 49.
See above, pp. 2426.
134
that. On the contrary I repeat the key polemical element in it is just the
way that Hegel here fundamentally brackets all questions of theology.
Heidegger criticizes the prescriptive or censorious claims of metaphysics as
onto-theology; but Hegels distinctive approach to metaphysics is, likewise,
nothing other than a systematic renunciation of onto-theology in this sense.
True, he does not speak of Being as Heidegger does. His whole vocabulary
is different. Nevertheless, he also, in his way, steps back from onto-theology.
All previous forms of metaphysical doctrine have purported to legislate
either for or against popular religion. However, the metaphysical doctrine of
Hegels Logic is unique, above all, by virtue of its pioneering abstention
from any such ambition.
Heidegger in this essay adopts Spinozas term causa sui for the God of
metaphysics. But, as he puts it,
Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui,
man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and
dance before this god.
The god-less thinking which must abandon the god of [metaphysical] philosophy, god as causa sui, is thus perhaps closer to the
divine God.14
No perhaps about it this is quite undoubtedly the case! Yet, in a lecture
about Hegel, it would surely have been appropriate to acknowledge that
this was also his view. Heidegger does not do so. In fact, he quite clearly
seems to imply the contrary.
By way of textual evidence to back up that suggestion, he cites a single
passage in the Logic from the section headed With What Must the Science
Begin? where Hegel refers to beginning with God.15 Again, Hegels point
is that, from the point of view of Christian faith, all philosophy begins
with God: every serious pursuit of truth, in whatever form, may be said to
originate as an implicit act of dedication to the one true God, the God of
14
15
Identity and Difference, p. 72.

When, in his Spiegel interview, Heidegger speaks of the need for noch ein Gott to
(be allowed to) come and save humanity, clearly he means what he here calls the divine
God, once and for all distinguished from the God of metaphysics. In fact, this is a
theme that resonates right through his later thought. The German text of Identity and
Difference first appeared in 1957. But the theme is already strikingly present, for
example, in his 19361938 Beitrge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), published in
Volume 65 of Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 1989, 25356, where he discusses the
same under the rubric of the last God. The later Heidegger certainly is a most forceful
advocate of what I am calling trans-metaphysical thought about God in his nottheological way. For an overview, see George Kovacs, The Question of God in
Heideggers Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990).
Ibid. pp. 5354. See Hegel, Science of Logic, p.78.
135
truth. However, the Logic begins with God only inasmuch as it immediately
abandons any claim to prescribe for theology proper, or to censor theology
proper. (Compare the passage to which I have already referred, where Hegel
describes the content of his argument here as the exposition of God in his
eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind; in other
words, nothing to do with the story-filled content of actual religious faith.)
If Hegel had not made some such introductory acknowledgement of his
faith in God, the Logic was very liable to be misinterpreted as an atheistic
work. So striking is the actual absence of any doctrine of God in the rest of
the work because this is metaphysics, essentially, letting theology be.
Unfortunately, Heidegger does not see this. And so he never, in the end,
gets to grips with Hegels argument at all.
3. Excursus on Deleuze and Guattari

1
But maybe I am mistaken about why Heidegger has gone wrong. Another
diagnosis might attribute the error not, as I would, to his flight from the
catholicism of catholic religious tradition but, on the contrary, simply
to his continuing religiousness, as such. Thus, perhaps the real problem is
that he still remains too concerned with the sort of consensus-building that
religion promises; and that this concern has unduly constrained his political
imagination? In which case, the proper remedy would be an altogether more
irreverent mode of thought.
This is the approach advocated, with especial panache, by Gilles Deleuze
and Flix Guattari.16
There could indeed scarcely be a greater contrast, at one level, between
Deleuze and Guattaris style of thought and Heideggers. Whereas his writing
is all mystery-laden gravitas, theirs is infused with a wild lyrical hilarity.
Their books are rhizomatic, growing out in various directions seemingly
at random; extravagant exercises in genre-fusion. Chunks of psychiatry,
zoology, ethnology, study of myth, literary criticism, art criticism, musicology,
linguistics, political theory, economics, and history ancient and modern are
all jumbled up together. The argument is a weird mixture of the scholarly,
the coarse, the comic, and the abstruse. Playfully deploying an aggressive
idiolect, it follows an often dream-like logic. Heideggers style appears to be
determined by his desire to stake a certain sort of authority claim. There is
no attempt at humour anywhere in Heideggers work; but he is forever
lamenting the clichd nature of most public discourse because of its failure
16
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane;
London: Continuum, 2004), A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Brian Massumi; London:
Continuum, 2004).
136
to appropriate the proper, intrinsic weightiness of the words it uses. So he

engages in his distinctive form of speculative etymology as a way of trying
to restore that weightiness. Deleuze and Guattari differ, in that they are not
trying to make any such authority claim. They are no less intellectual elitists,
in their way, than Heidegger is; but theirs is a much more ironic way. And
politically they are libertarians of the extreme left.
Nevertheless, there also is a certain underlying affinity between their
thought and his. Deleuze in particular is a critical admirer of Heidegger.
Indeed, Deleuzes book Difference and Repetition (1968) may actually be
regarded as quite a direct attempt to rethink the primary Heideggerian
project afresh, in another style.17 For the difference referred to in the title is
none other than the difference that is also at the heart of Heideggers thought.
Namely: the difference between Being, the ultimate object of truth-asopenness, and beings, the object-world of truth-as-correctness. Deleuze
and Guattari are certainly also developing (what I would call) a strategy for
the cause of atonement.
Their work represents the most militantly secular variant of such strategy.
Startling moments of lyrical inventiveness alternate in their writing with
passages that, frankly, look like gibberish. It is true that Deleuze and Guattari
represent an intellectual world with almost no defences against charlatanry.
Flashy philosophic showmen, they have scant regard for ordinary common
sense. And yet, the point lies in the way that this renders possible, in their
case, such a vivid poetic overthrow of establishment clich; above all, the
clichs associated with conventionally devout notions of truth-as-correctness. They speak of priests, in general, with contempt, as pedlars of such
clich. Deleuze may admire Heidegger, but he admires Nietzsche still more,
not least because of Nietzsches much more confrontational attitude to
Christianity. As a Christian priest myself committed to cultivating the
widest possible intellectual sympathies with any form of thinking that may
contribute to the appreciation of truth-as-openness, in whatever way I am
interested in these thinkers, not least, for the rather testing challenge they
represent to that commitment. So hostile are they.
2
Are Deleuze and Guattari, then, protagonists of the solidarity of the
shaken? I would say, yes and no. More exactly, what they advocate is the
solidarity of the uprooted. Like Fichte, but in the opposite way: a form
of that solidarity entirely without Fichtes bullying moralism. So they
admire Spinoza.
17
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (trans. Paul Patton; London: Continuuum, 2004;
first published 1968).
137
However, Nietzsche is really the key figure in the background to their

thought. The book with which Deleuze launched his career, Nietzsche
and Philosophy (1962) is essentially a systematic exposition of Nietzsches
basic distinction between affirmative and negative qualities of the will to
power.18 (Compare Fichtes earlier version of this, discussed previously in
Chapter 6.) By affirmative will to power Nietzsche means the underlying
will at work in the creative appropriation of truth-as-openness. (It is what
Hegel would call the creativity of Spirit although Deleuze would immediately deny any affinity between Nietzsche and Hegel.) So it is a commitment
to becoming active: in the broadest sense, embarking on fresh creative
activity of every kind, not least beyond all merely conventional notions of
good and evil. But negative will to power, on the contrary, is what clings
to such conventional notions, and reinforces them by investing them with
moralized resentment.
In Deleuzes joint works with Guattari the terminology has changed, but
the same elementary contrast remains central. Negative will to power,
or becoming reactive, has become, at the level of broad consensus,
stratification; or, as regards the attitudes of the singular individual as
such, territorialisation. Affirmative will to power, or becoming active,
has become destratification, deterritorialisation. He has now come to prefer this geological and geographical terminology, evidently, because of its
rather more uncanny effect, its being further removed from conventional
moral talk about willing.
Destratification, deterritorialization: these are terms for what makes
possible the authentic creativity of the free-spirited outsider. Heidegger
affirms such creativity in his celebration of Hlderlin: a poet whose great
work was all produced at a time when he was lapsing into the schizophrenia
that was eventually to disable him altogether. Deleuze and Guattari, however, radicalize this celebration, framing their whole work as an exercise
in what they call schizoanalysis. That is to say, a form of thinking which
fundamentally calls in question the usual identification of truth with
conventional sanity. So schizoanalysis triangulates sanity, schizophrenia
and the highest truth. It is a systematic attempt to transfigure sanity with
controlled doses of madness. For whereas conventional sanity tends to
enshrine a stabilized and complacent mode of unatonement, schizophrenia by
contrast as an essentially dysfunctional intensification of unatonement
does at any rate have the great revelatory merit of thereby rendering it
intolerable. And the basic point of schizoanalysis, then, is to evoke some
sense of the resultant anguish; channelling the pathos of schizophrenic
experience, respectfully observed, into a real yearning for atonement.
18
Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (trans. Hugh Tomlinson; New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983; first published 1962).
138
But whereas Heidegger celebrates the rhapsodic, solemn, grief-stricken

Hlderlin as the paradigmatic poet of such yearning, Deleuze and Guattari,
for their part, celebrate the altogether more overtly angry, and blaspheming,
schizophrenic writer Antonin Artaud.
Of particular importance to them is, thus, a radio play of Artauds,
entitled To Have Done with the Judgement of God, originally recorded on
28 November 1947 (although then banned and not actually broadcast for
another 30 years). For it is from this play that they derive one of their key
concepts: the bizarre-sounding notion of the body without organs, which
in their work then becomes a sort of technical term, generally abbreviated as
BwO.
Artauds play concludes with him urging that man should be placed on
the autopsy table to remake his anatomy:
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that
animalcule that itches him mortally,
god,
and with god
his organs.
For you can tie me up if you wish,
but there is nothing more useless than an organ.
When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored to him his true freedom.
Then you will teach him to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dance halls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.19
No matter how one takes you, says Artauds interlocutor in the play, you
are mad, ready for the straitjacket. You can tie me up if you wish, he
responds but the supposed tyranny of the organs has become for him a
mad symbol for the over-organization of life, in general, by the spontaneitysuppressing power of conventional morality in general. And for Deleuze
and Guattari, then, the BwO becomes the name for an ideal directness of
experience, an ideally fresh quality of desire or non-desire, a set of practices
without that over-organization.
In short: it becomes, precisely, their name for the specific truth-potential of
what Heidegger calls Dasein; the truth-potential of presenting-hemisphere
19
Artaud, To Have Done with the Judgement of God, trans. Helen Weaver, in Artaud, Selected
Writings (ed. Susan Sontag, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 571.
139
experience, once and for all cut loose from the despotic organizing power of
the Rigidity Principle. Only, it is that truth-potential appropriated at its most
anarchic, where it is most furious in its insurgency against all that is conventional. And it is also conceived in the most explicitly anti-Christian terms.
Delivered from all his automatic reactions, this is Dasein liberated from
what Nietzsche calls becoming reactive so as to dance [what unatoned
Christianity especially considers] wrong side out.
Schizoanalysis is framed, not least, as a prescription for making yourself
a Body without Organs.20 At one level, the BwO is a given condition,
the underlying nature of Dasein, overlaid and concealed by conventional
thinking. But what is given at this level is also a set of possibilities, for
remaking oneself. And then, at another level, true wisdom will be one form
of such remaking: it will be that particular form of a purely affirmative will
to power which is most cheerfully creative. More generally, on the other
hand, the BwO is what is made wherever there is any truly radical outbreak
of rebellion against prevailing moral conventionality, whatever the form of
the rebellion. That is to say: any dissolution of ordinary clichd banality
alike, whether it is truly liberating or merely anarchic. There are indeed all
manner of risks attendant upon such rebellion, such dismantling of the self;
and schizoanalysis is, not least, intended as a discipline of the most generous
respectful sympathy for those who, to one extent or another, have foundered
as a result. What is this BwO? Straightaway, in Deleuze and Guattaris
discussion, we are confronted by a long procession: first a schizophrenic
hypochondriac, then a paranoid schizophrenic, next, one who has been
reduced to catatonic inertia, then another who has succumbed to drug
addiction. And we are invited to ponder the bizarre requests of an extreme
masochist.
Why such a dreary parade of sucked-dry, catatonicised, vitrified,
sewn-up bodies, when the BwO is also full of gaiety, ecstasy and dance?
So why these examples, why must we start there? Emptied bodies,
instead of full ones. What happened? Were you cautious enough? Not
wisdom, caution. In doses.21
The BwO, in short, is Deleuze and Guattaris term for what remains when
all safe identity is stripped away, all the safety inherent in conventional
unatonement; sticking within the limitations of conventionality. It is what
Nietzsche calls affirmative will to power, considered with a particular
emphasis on the attendant risks of insanity or worse.
And so schizoanalysis distinguishes three basic different possibilities: the
full BwO, the empty BwO, and the cancerous BwO. The full BwO is the
20
21
A Thousand Plateaus, chapter 6.

Ibid., p. 167.
140
ideal of the most successful clich-transcendent creativity. But the empty

BwO is what results when the regime of clichd banality collapses in a
merely disabling way affirmative will to power over-reaching itself, trying
to go too fast, falling into a trap, so that it becomes a self-defeating, selfafflicting enterprise. And the cancerous BwO is what is, objectively, still
worse. For it is the affirmative will to power, genuinely breaking free from
reactive conventionality and so from clich yet flowing, by disastrous
misjudgement, straight into political movements of sheer cruelty and destruction. With their unargued-for, but absolute, repudiation of popular religion,
Deleuze and Guattari have of course set aside one of the main actually
existing bulwarks against revolutionary fascism, and the like. They have
seen what happened to Nietzsches ideas in the Third Reich, how Nazi
propagandists sought to lay claim to him. And they have seen what happened
to Heidegger. In both cases philosophic insight has become, at least to
some extent, complicit with a cancer. Seeing this, schizoanalysis therefore
becomes a call for caution. The harsh, mad-seeming, deliberately off-putting
style of their work is, not least, dictated by that sense of caution. It is a
device to enforce thoughtfulness: to prevent any too easy appropriation of
their thinking; and so to preclude any possibility of its misappropriation by
a merely cancerous large-scale popular movement.
3
On the one hand, there is the experience of the presenting hemisphere
sub-self: for Deleuze and Guattari, the Body without Organs. But, on the
other hand, there is the work of the representing hemisphere sub-self. When
they speak of this they consistently reach for the metaphor of the machine.
In the natural-feeling world view of comfortable clich-governed sanity the
normal Ego is at the unchallenged centre of everything, keeping everything
in proper proportion. Or, in a religious context: the normal Ego is at
home with its God. But the schizophrenic mind has no such simple focus, to
determine what ought to matter. Rather, it finds itself adrift in a maelstrom
of competing energies, structures, productive processes, between which the
tattered self is torn. As they put it: so many machines. Nothing is simply
natural everything appears to be machinic. And there is a constant danger
of the machines taking control; exceeding their proper instrumentality;
instrumentalizing their proper operators.
Wanting to enter sympathetically into this nightmare-experience so as to
open up its singular unsettling power they launch into their first co-authored
book, Anti-Oedipus with a strange, harsh picture of the world as a vast
many-layered interplay of desiring-machines. Nor is this just a metaphorical
way of speaking, they insist. It is more than just metaphorical in the same
way that, for the religious believer, talk of God may be said to be more than
just metaphorical: it is not only an expression of meaning, but a definition
141
of what meaning is. There is no God in, or behind, this world, and no humanist
equivalent to God either, no single creative source of meaning in life. But
everywhere there is a multitude of the most diverse machines: all busily at
work, to produce fresh meaning. Such is the underlying vision of schizoanalysis. Everything that Nietzsche calls an operation of will to power
Deleuze and Guattari now discuss as the activity of machines, or machinic
assemblages. They speak of ideas effectively at work in the world as abstract
machines. But organism becomes their term, specifically, for the agency of
negative will to power: organism in the sense of a reactive co-ordination
of responses to the world, essentially oriented towards mere survival, or
maximum ease of life, to the cost of true insight. An organism, the way they
use the word, is nothing other than an assemblage of desiring-machines
given over to unatonement.
And closely associated, moreover, with this curious usage of the word is
their radical hostility to organic ideas of proper political loyalty: the State
as a body politic, or the Church as the body of Christ.
Having emerged from the intellectual culture of Marxism, and still retaining
a deep respect for the symbolic figure of Marx himself, Deleuze and Guattari
nevertheless also reject the sort of molar loyalty, to a whole social class,
that theoretically underlies Marxist party politics. Indeed, they repudiate all
molar loyalties to grand political organisms; all macropolitics, in that
sense. Their commitment is to micropolitics: a far more flexible one might
say opportunistic approach to actual campaigning action, involving an
altogether more variable range of molecular alliances.
Hence, they think of themselves as nomad thinkers; and they develop this
metaphor, for their general approach to politics, in quite epic fashion. One
of the fundamental tasks of the State, they remark,
is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilise smooth spaces as
a means of communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital
concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control
migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an
entire exterior, over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon.22
State philosophy does the same, in intellectual terms. It is forever setting
up barriers of orthodoxy and sanity that nomad thinking is dedicated to
subverting. Religion, likewise, serves the State by supplying it with sacred
places to defend, as symbolic organizing centres of its organic identity. But
the nomad mind is disinclined to develop any very strong attachment to
particular localized shrines. Indeed, as they put it:
the nomads have a sense of the absolute, but a singularly atheistic one.
The universalist religions that have had dealings with nomads Moses,
22
Ibid., p. 425.
142
Mohammed, even Christianity with the Nestorian heresy have always

encountered problems in this regard, and have run up against what
they have termed obstinate impiety.23
The names of Moses and Mohammed serve to remind us of the frequent
association of nomad cultures with explosions of prophetic religion; or
religion as, in Deleuze and Guattaris phrase, war machine. However (they
suggest) nomads are naturally allergic to priestly religion, and hence also to
the constant tendency of prophetic religion, over time, to settle down into
more priestly modes of thought and practice.
In short: Deleuze and Guattari represent the solidarity of the shaken
inflected as or, rather, narrowed down to the solidarity of a little nomad
band: sheer enemies of the State, unengaged in any large-scale, established
form of civil association, beyond the minimum required to earn ones living.
And, as spiritual nomads, not belonging to any catholic form of religion,
they are likewise, also, altogether hostile towards all churches, and the like.
4
But why, after all, deliberately opt for marginality in this way? One may
well, I think, be a little suspicious of such artificial nomadism.
There are of course situations, as in a totalitarian society, where one has
no option. What real gain, though, is there in choosing marginality, when it
is not imposed? Surely, on the contrary, the proper position of the true lover
of truth-as-openness is always, so far as possible, in the open-to-all conversational middle. That is to say: in the position of maximum conversational
exposure, all round; the sort of exposure that, at its sharpest, can only come
from speaking as a critical insider, to other insiders.
Deleuze and Guattari do not believe in this. Nor do they practice such
conversational openness towards those who advocate it. Certainly they are
not open towards Hegel. For Deleuze, Hegel is just a bogeyman: right from
the outset, he once remarked in an interview, what I detested more than
anything else was Hegelianism and the Dialectic.24 In Difference and
Repetition he develops a variant on Heideggers critique of Hegel. And in his
earlier Nietzsche and Philosophy he denounces Hegel as the antipodes to
(the altogether admirable) Nietzsche: There is no possible compromise
between Hegel and Nietzsche, he roundly declares.25 He portrays Hegel as
a thinker with no inkling of what Nietzsche calls a truly affirmative will to
power. Indeed, Hegel appears in this caricature as nothing but an ingenious
23
24
25
Ibid., p. 422.
Deleuze, I Have Nothing to Admit; trans. Janis Forman; Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus
2, 3 (1977).
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 195.
143
apologist for the dominant clich-ridden moral order, as such. There is no

very serious engagement in this work with any of Hegels actual texts, and
no consideration, whatsoever, of Hegels real project in the Phenomenology.
Plainly, it is true that Hegel is not saying the same as Nietzsche, but I do not
see that Deleuze does anything much to help us understand the difference;
he just warms up the old hostile Hegel myth, in a Nietzschean way.
Nietzsche and Philosophy is a brilliantly creative study of Nietzsche. However, it is not much of an advertisement for Nietzscheanism as an opening up
of conversation with other, opposing points of view.
And so what, in fact, drives this attitude? I suppose it does offer a certain
gleeful sense of innocence. That is, a sense of righteous un-involvement in
any sort of communal wrongdoing. Whatever crimes may be committed by
the State to which I pay taxes if I am a philosophical nomad, they do not
touch me. I am exalted above that level: not only guiltless, in legal terms, but
also without shame. Nor am I in any sense answerable for the crimes of my
ethnic group. I am a nomad without a tribe; and, as such, I am set free, with
unencumbered indignation, always to identify myself with the innocent
victims. Sweet innocence, out there on the edge of things, untroubled by
any sort of serious belonging! Repudiating the Church into which I was
baptized, as a spiritual nomad I would have no reason to feel grieved by its
various crimes and follies. But I could delight in sheer scorn.
Here then we have the social atomism of the late-twentieth-century
capitalist world, at its most extreme, rendered lyrical. Contrast Hegel: as
he deplored the social atomism which he already saw, increasingly prevalent,
in his world. Deleuze and Guattari interest me because they represent such
a truly militant, and inventive, philosophic commitment to a war against
clich. Hegel however differs by virtue of the way in which, unlike them, he
combines militant repudiation of clich with this other, to my mind, equiprimordial intellectual virtue: complete commitment to the most searching
conversational openness, towards all comers. This, crucially, is what opens
him up as a philosopher to popular religion. He has seen the ways in which
popular religion can speak to people that philosophy cannot reach; and its
consequent unique ability to help frame the most serious sort of conversation, about the meaning of life, between intellectuals and non-intellectuals.
At the same time, he is sympathetic to the secularity of secular modern
states, basically because of the favourable environment it helps provide for
serious conversation between the participants of different popular-religious,
or different ethnic, cultures. And moreover (contrary to the prejudice of
Deleuze and Guattari) he also represents the possibility of combining openness towards popular religion, and towards secular modernity, with an equal
openness towards dissident individual free thinking of every kind. For what
he calls Spirit is just that will to universal openness. To borrow Gillian
Roses phrase, Hegel thus places himself in the broken middle, torn apart
by all of these competing pulls, to negotiate as mediator between them.
144
In any complex moral culture the middle is necessarily broken, with no

possibility of final theoretical mending, no stable consensus available. But
what absolute knowing finally knows is the wisdom of nevertheless staying
with that brokenness, without retreat into any more marginal standpoint,
such as would protect one from any of the pulls.
I have written elsewhere about Roses vindication of Hegel, along these
lines.26 She is also highly critical of Deleuze.27 (Mind you, she focuses only
on the neo-Heideggerian argument of Difference and Repetition; her critique
does not address what I think are his true, bizarre masterpieces, his collaboration with Guattari. Not that I think she would have been any gentler
towards these.) In his Preface to Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault paying a
modest tribute to Saint Francis de Sales, the seventeenth-century Bishop of
Geneva and author of the classic treatise Introduction to the Devout Life
suggests that Deleuze and Guattaris work is, in essence, an Introduction to
the Non-Fascist Life.28 But it seems to me that this title really applies with
far greater justice to Roses work.
For, again, what else is fascism if not the most agitated line of flight
from the broken middle, where its brokenness has become most troubling?
There are of course many different possible forms of resistance to fascism.
However, the most radical is surely just that which involves the most decisive
commitment to staying in the broken middle. And for Rose, therefore, it is
none other than Hegel who is, by anticipation, the supreme anti-fascist
philosopher. Unfortunately, though, Deleuze and Guattari have not even
registered the challenge of this alternative point of view. Indeed, their antiHegelianism actually appears to derive its violent fury from the urgent need
they feel to suppress that challenge, before it can, in those terms, even begin
to impinge.
26
27
28
Shanks, Against Innocence: Gillian Roses Reception and Gift of Faith (London: SCM
Press, 2008).
Rose, The New Bergsonism: Deleuze, in Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and
Law (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984).
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. xv. (Foucault also once famously remarked
that perhaps one day the twentieth century would be known as the Deleuzian.)
145
8
hegel sublated
1. The Holy Spirit in spate

I have yet many things to say to you, says Jesus to his disciples in the
Fourth Gospel, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth
comes, he will guide you into all the truth (John 16: 1213).
How, in general, are we actually to discern what is of the Holy Spirit, in
the historic development of theology?
The whole of Christendom affirms that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the
Father; in the West we also add, and from the Son. In other words: the
things that the Holy Spirit has to teach us cannot be sheer innovations. But
they will, nevertheless, always be new. Before and beyond the imperatives of
church loyalty stand the demands of the basileia tou theou, the reign of God,
as proclaimed by Jesus himself. Or, to put it another way: before and beyond
the solidarity of church member with church member, as such, there stands
the primordial ideal of the solidarity of the shaken. The essential work of the
Holy Spirit is, surely, a constant quest for new ways of alerting us to that
before and beyond.
There are, I would argue, three basic, extensively overlapping forms of
potential divine inspiration, which may drive theology. It may take the form
of a registering; of a rebalancing and refinement; or of a being-flooded.
z
Much theology arises as a registering of experimental innovations in

church practice; an attempt, simply, to give some account of why the
experiment is being undertaken. Examples include: (a) the theology first
of the Desert Fathers, then of classical monasticism and later of the friars,
each in turn setting out the rationale for their way of life; (b) the competing
theological doctrines of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; (c) the
theology arising out the various waves of Revival, from early Methodism
to contemporary Pentecostalism; (d) such other recent phenomena as
liberation theology, black theology, feminist theology, and so forth.
To learn new things we must experiment, take risks. And what, first and
146
HEGEL SUBLATED
foremost, distinguishes the work of the Holy Spirit is just a certain quality
of experimentation: in each case, a real desire for something more than
mere worldly success. The work of the Holy Spirit is a work of grace, as
opposed to nature. By natural inclination, of course, every institution
seeks to pursue worldly success, measurable growth in wealth and power;
but what the Holy Spirit inspires is, rather, a real desire for greater authenticity, even if this, perhaps, be at the expense of making discipleship less
immediately attractive, balking growth.
Besides being integral to fresh developments in church practice, theology is
also a tradition of thought forever subject to rebalancing and refinement, in
response to changes in its larger intellectual context. One obvious example
is the rise of Scholastic theology in the thirteenth century, as a result of the
disciplines having been transposed into the newly emergent university
world of that period. Another is the impact on theology, largely beginning
in the nineteenth century, of scientific Biblical Criticism. More generally,
all the great advances in sheer theological sophistication, as such, belong
in this category: the seminal work of such major thinkers as Origen,
Augustine, Aquinas, Schleiermacher or Barth. Here, too, the Holy Spirit is
manifest in a basic will-to-experiment. Only, the experimentation in such
thinking is no longer confined to specific aspects of church practice.
Rather, it extends to the whole systematic method of theology.
Everywhere, the distinguishing mark of theology infused with the Holy
Spirit is its opening up of what had hitherto been closed down, by thoughtlessness, prejudice, over-simple answers. But then, to my mind, the most
interesting cases of all are those where theology is altogether flooded by
a desire for ever greater openness. In other words: cases in which the
will-to-experiment has actually evolved into a wholesale will-to-openness,
every last inhibition overwhelmed. And that is what I see, above all,
in Hegel.
This third form of valid theology comes to classic, pre-Hegelian expression

in two ways. One is the way of philosophically informed mystical theology,
stemming in the Christian context from Pseudo-Dionysius, but represented,
at its most radical, by Meister Eckhart, with that dramatic prayer of his,
I pray God to rid me of God . Here we have the most all-encompassing
faith-filled mistrust of conventional religious thinking in general, just because
of its inevitable, intrinsic ambiguities; its unstable mixing of a potential for
openness with elements of closure.
The other is the way of Joachim of Fiore, with his pioneering, not at all
philosophical, narrative distinction between the three stages of divine
revelation: that of the God the Father in the pre-Christian past, that of God
the Son extending into the present, and that of God the Holy Spirit, for the
most part still to come. In Joachims doctrine the only partially revealed God
of the past and present is thus set against the fully revealed God of the
147
future; just as in Eckharts, God is set against God. These are, to be sure,
two very different methods of opening theology up. Both, however, are
equally flood-like, overwhelming the theoretical defences of religious
unatonement. And Hegels unique greatness, I think, lies, not least, in his
having combined both methods into one.
2. Joachim / Eckhart / Hegel

Let us briefly examine these forerunners. First: Joachim. He, obviously, is a
much less sophisticated sort of thinker than Eckhart, let alone Hegel.
Joachim lived from around 1130 / 1135 to 1202, in small-town provincial
Calabria. An abbot, a monastic reformer, his thinking predates the transformation in theology brought about by its becoming a discipline of university
education. In detail, it is little more than a fanciful decoding of the New
Testament Book of Revelation; breaking the taboo on such exegesis that
St Augustine, above all, had imposed upon the Western Church.
Joachim calculated that the third age he predicted would erupt in the year
1260. When that year arrived, his followers became very agitated, and there
were great flagellant processions through various cities. One may well
sympathize with Augustines misgivings. Yet, at the same time, here we have
a prime demonstration of how, for all its potential silliness at one level,
apocalyptic thinking can, at another level, also serve as a genuine channel
for the Holy Spirit. Thus, like ancient Hebrew prophecy, it adopts a format
of oracular prediction, but may also use that format to insinuate a new,
hope-filled passion for justice. After 11 centuries of Christian theology
largely premised on the assumption that Gods truth was already, to all
serious intents and purposes, given to the Church, finished and complete,
Joachim arrives. And he breaches the dam. Just as the fresh truth of the
gospel once burst into the world superseding, with its all-transformative,
horizon-opening power, all that had gone before so, Joachim argues,
another new surge of truth might, must, will, soon roll in again.
Note: what Joachim promises is not any new metaphysical insight. He
does not challenge the metaphysical framework of church orthodoxy at all.
The transformation he looks forward to is the drawing out of a truth that
was always there, in that orthodoxy; only, hitherto half-hidden. To this
extent, at least, he surely does foreshadow Hegel: his core concern is with
faiths latent potential to articulate the imperatives of perfect truth-as-openness, generally. Indeed, the fervour of his hope does not appear to have been
tainted with any sort of violent impatience. There was nothing conversationclosing about it, in the sense that over-polarized debate is not real
conversation. Joachim himself was, it seems, always most respectful of episcopal and papal authority; in return for which, several popes actively
encouraged his work. Nor did he scare the secular authorities. King Richard
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HEGEL SUBLATED
the Lionheart, on his way to go crusading, is said to have stopped off to

consult with him. After his death, it is true, his thinking did get caught up
into certain angry conflicts: most notably, as it was invoked by the Spiritual
Franciscans, in their struggle to preserve the original strict prophetic purity
of St Franciss own commitment to voluntary poverty against what they saw
as the sell-out of that ideal by Franciss successors at the head of their Order.
Joachim envisaged that the age of the Holy Spirit would be one in which the
monastic ethos finally prevailed throughout society. Just as Elijah had been
an early forerunner of the Age of the Son, he argued, so the great Rulemaker of Western monasticism, St Benedict was an early forerunner, already,
of the third age. And that age would be initiated, not least, by the founding
of new religious Orders, more radical and more effective than any before.
Not only the Spiritual Franciscans, but various other monastic reforming
groups, also, came to see themselves in this role; the Spiritual Franciscans,
though, with an especial fury. Matters were further complicated when one
young hothead, Gerardo di San Borgo Donnino, publicly argued that the
new age required a new Scripture; that Joachims writings should be seen as
that new Scripture, superseding the New Testament in the same way the
New Testament superseded the Old; and that all the existing forms of church
authority, based as they were on New Testament teaching, needed to be set
aside, as well. So Gerardo converted Joachims catholic doctrine into a
closed, sectarian break-away. And in 1263, as a result, Joachims teaching
was formally declared to be heretical, by the Synod of Arles. But he would
no doubt have been horrified at what Gerardo was to make of his legacy.
For what Joachim looked for in the third age was nothing other than an
unequivocal opening up of church tradition, in the spirit of Jesus; the very
opposite to such crass sectarianism.1
As for Eckhart: he belonged to another world. Born in or around the
Joachimite crisis year of 1260, he lived until around 1328; a Dominican
friar, a university lecturer, and, at the culmination of his career, a preacher in
the great city of Cologne. Among the most striking features of Eckharts
theology is the relationship it suggests between sin and illusion. In most
Christian thinking, salvation is simply understood as a conversion of the
will. But, by contrast, Eckharts understanding is closer to that prevalent in
pre-Christian Greek philosophy, or in Indian thought, inasmuch as he
emphasizes instead the release, from illusion, of the intellect. Indeed, the
remarkable originality of his thought lies not least in the sheer verve with
which he traces the universal human need for salvation back to a fundamental
division crucially, preceding and underlying any deformation of the will by
1
See Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future: A Study in Medieval
Millenialism (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999); Bernard McGinn, The Calabrian
Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought (New York, London:
Macmillan, 1985).
149
sin between two levels of thought. On the one hand, there is the thinking
of the ordinary, surface self, whose notion of God is mired in endless
ambiguity; on the other hand, there is the other, quite different capacity for
fresh contemplative insight into primary reality, through which we may connect to God as God is in Godself, the Godhead. And sin, then, is primordially
what arises from the occlusion of this latter possibility, the true Self. It makes
no difference how crude or sophisticated the thinking in question is. What
generates sin, so defined, is not mere ignorance or incorrectness. But once
again, it is precisely unatonement: the surface self not being at one with the
deeper Self, failing to recognize it.
In his Latin writings, Eckhart speaks of the true Self in Neoplatonic fashion
as intellectus, Intellect. He is not the first Christian theologian to speak this
way. Something at least of the same notion of Intellect as a salutary
power, within the soul, from which we are more or less cut off by sin is
already to be found in the academic work of a slightly earlier Dominican,
Meister Dietrich of Freiberg.2 But Eckhart is the first to make it a central
theme of preaching. His sermons in German are, indeed, gleeful performances.
And they are acts of intellectual insurgency: forever drawing attention to what,
under any regime of merely conventional religious thought, gets suppressed
within the soul. Here he no longer speaks, in prosaic fashion, of Intellect.
Instead, he starts to experiment with all sorts of poetic metaphor. Thus:
I have sometimes said that there is a power in the spirit that alone is
free. Sometimes I have said that it is a guard of the spirit; sometimes
I have said that it is a light of the spirit; sometimes I have said that it
is a spark.3
He also goes on to speak of this power as a little town, at the heart of the
souls territory. And elsewhere he calls it the ground of the soul, out of
which divine truth grows.
Moreover, in order to underline its central significance, Eckhart further
develops his understanding of the Intellect in Trinitarian terms, with
2
See Kurt Flasch, ed., Von Meister Dietrich zu Meister Eckhart (Hamburg: Meiner Felix,
1987). Dietrichs Treatise on the Intellect and the Intelligible has also been translated
into English by Markus Fhrer (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1992).
Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense (trans.
Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn; Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1981), from sermon
2, Intravit Jesus, p. 180. (Eckharts German-language sermons have Latin titles, from
the Vulgate.)
Typically, Eckharts vernacular sermons are likely to have been preached to congregations of Dominican nuns, and Beguines, women religious with a less rigorously
formalized way of life. This was a period in which a great number of such communities
had recently developed, and were developing, in the Rhineland, often in close
association with the Dominicans.
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HEGEL SUBLATED
startling boldness. For he wants to insist on our referring everything in

the gospel tradition, fundamentally, to the liberation of the Intellect, in the
sense of the primordial indwelling of the Godhead within each soul; he
is proposing this as the first principle of theological hermeneutics. And so
he turns to the doctrine of the Trinity, as the setting out of Christian
hermeneutical first principles. Hence, he speaks of the dwelling place of
the suppressed power of Intellect the little town, the inner Bethlehem
as the place both where God the Father begets the God the Son, and also
where, by the working of God the Holy Spirit, God the Son is, over and over
again, re-born. Everything that the tradition, initially, envisages in terms of
events outside the soul, Eckhart connects to events within; he takes the traditional mythic and historic narratives of faith and treats them as metaphors
for a drama to be played out deep inside each individual soul. The eternal
begetting by God the Father of God the Son he interprets as the generating
of the power that alone is free at the core of each self the founding of the
little town, the laying of the ground of the soul, the lighting of the spark.
In other words, it is the universal truth of God particularized, as an immediate calling to each individual: God calling to each one of us, from within,
to be liberated from religion-as-clich, and from all that the reduction of
religion to clich permits. And the historic descent and incarnation of God
the Son, by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, he then interprets as a
definitive symbol for what happens whenever any individual, hearing that
primordial inner calling, truly responds.
For Eckhart, to see God incarnate in the individual figure of Jesus is thus
to see, unveiled, the indwelling of God within every human individual,
simply as such. He lays the greatest possible emphasis on this:
Truly I say: Everything good that all the saints have possessed, and
Mary the mother of God, and Christ in his humanity, all that is my
own in this human nature. Now you could ask me: Since in this nature
I have everything that Christ according to his humanity can attain,
how is it that we exalt and honour Christ as our Lord and our God?
That is because he became a messenger from God to us and brought
us our blessedness. [However,] the blessedness that he brought us was
[already implicitly] ours.4
Why did God become a man? In essence: to show us the latent blessedness
of our own lives, only obscured by the tyranny of clich-thinking and by
all that such thinking serves to protect. The essential truth of faith in the
incarnation, as such beyond the reduction of that faith itself to pious
clich is none other than its revelation of this blessing.
Ibid., from sermon 5b, In hoc apparuit charitas dei, p. 182.
151
Eckhart is always in search of the most striking ways to jolt people out of
their theological complacency. In Sermon 52, Beati pauperes spiritu,
he even breaks into oracular speech. That is to say, he actually begins to
speak, as it were, in the persona of the incarnate divine power, which
conventional religious thinking conceals:
When I stood in my first cause, I then had no God, and then I was my
own cause. I wanted nothing, I longed for nothing, for I was an empty
being, and the only truth in which I rejoiced was in the knowledge of
myself. Then it was myself I wanted and nothing else. What I wanted
I was, and what I was I wanted; and so I stood, empty of God and of
everything. But when I went out from my own free will and received
my created being, then I had a God, for before there were any creatures,
God was not God, but he was what he was. But when creatures came
to be and received their created being, then God was not God in
himself, but he was God in the creatures.5
Here is a mythic picture of life entirely before clich, and therefore free of
it. He goes on:
When I flowed out from God, all things said: God is. And this cannot make me blessed, for with this I acknowledge that I am a creature.
But in the breaking-through, when I come to be free of will of myself
and of Gods will and of all his works and of God himself, then I am
above all created things, and I am neither God nor creature, but I am
what I was and what I shall remain, now and eternally. Then I received
an impulse that will bring me up above all the angels. Together with
this impulse, I receive such riches that God, as he is God, and as he
performs all his divine works, cannot suffice me; for in this breakingthrough I receive that God and I are one. Then I am what I was, and
then I neither diminish nor increase, for I am then an immovable cause
that moves all things. Here God finds no place in man, for with this
poverty man achieves what he has been eternally and will evermore
remain. Here God is one with the spirit, and that is the most intimate
poverty one can find.
Whoever does not understand what I have said, let him not burden
his heart with it.6
This is a direct utterance of the true Self, hidden deep within each human
individual: the Self, beyond all mortal selfhood, that simply is the indwelling
5
Ibid., p. 200; with some amendment to the use of inverted commas, so that every
reference to God as an object of representational thinking is written that way.
Ibid., p. 203; again with the use of inverted commas amended.
152
HEGEL SUBLATED
of the Holy Trinity within the soul, the direct self-manifestation of God
beyond all clich, beyond God; what the Kabbalists call Adam Kadmon;
the Neoplatonists, pure Intellect or nous. Eckhart is speaking directly for the
divine, like the Hebrew prophets did. The one difference is that, whereas the
prophets comment on the past and future course of history, he by contrast
has only one message. He has nothing else to say, other than to testify to the
constant call of God-beyond-God, from deep within each soul.
Astonishing!
But now compare Hegel.7 Eckhart, as a preacher, focuses directly on the
theological solution: the good news of the possibility of Gods birth within
the soul. Hegel, constructing a phenomenology of Spirit, focuses first on
the trans-theological, universal nature of the problem: das unglckliche
Bewutseyn, the unatoned state of mind, in general. Both, however, are
surely talking about the same dynamics. And both alike are also intent on a
systematic reconfiguration of Christian theology, putting this right at the
very centre. What Eckhart calls Intellect is, at one level, the same as what
Hegel calls Spirit. It is the same basic truth-principle; in neuropsychological
terms, the same insurgency of the insurgent presenting-hemisphere sub-self.8
Only, what is completely lacking in Eckharts thought is any historical
elaboration of the core Christian salvation narrative. He, for his part, just
volatilizes the historical, or political element in the gospel; in his thinking it
dissolves, seemingly without remainder, into a set of metaphors for events
within the individual soul. Hegel does the opposite: incorporating his phenomenological account of atonement into a grand-narrative envisioning of
divine revelation, as a still ongoing process, for which the nearest precedent
is Joachims.
This is, to be sure, only quite a remote precedent; and not in fact one to
which Hegel himself ever refers.9 The Hegelian grand narrative differs
7
Cyril ORegan also discusses this relationship: The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1994), pp. 25063.
The way that our language has evolved, Spirit now seems a much more appropriate
term than Intellect. And compare also how Eckharts predecessor, Meister Dietrich
traces the roots of sin to the fundamental division between two modes of being, as
humanly apprehended: conceptional being, ens conceptionale and real being, ens
reale. The terminology here is especially confusing, inasmuch as in modern English one
would surely have to say that the latter is, precisely, less real than the former! Thus,
ens conceptionale is what the true Self (in Dietrichs terms, Intellect) intuits; whereas
ens reale, by contrast, is just what the empirical self (more or less alienated from Intellect) grasps.
The first to relate Hegels thought to Joachim (via Lessing) was the Roman Catholic
philosopher K. J. F. von Windischmann, in a letter he wrote to Hegel in 1810: Hegel:
The Letters (trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler; Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press, 1984), p. 558. For a more recent discussion, again see ORegan,
The Heterodox Hegel, pp. 26379. (ORegan actually relates Hegel to three main
forerunners: Joachim and Eckhart being two, the third is Jakob Bhme.)
153
fundamentally from Joachims in that it is not predictive. Nor does it involve

the same Trinitarian categories. Joachims is a form of Trinitarian teaching
that has to a very large extent lost touch with the original rationale of the
dogma.10 Notwithstanding his desire to be orthodox, it is, at least in effect,
an inversion of Arian subordinationism, with the Holy Spirit ranking the
highest of the three divine Persons. There is nothing of this in Hegel. But
the precedent consists simply in the sheer dam-burst of hope, for greater
openness, which, for all its crudity, Joachims thought enacts; as Hegels also
does. Hegel, a great prophet of hope? Some may be of a mind to protest:
how can this be? For does he not, on the contrary, proclaim the end of
history in his own day? That old clich-picture of Hegel as an enemy of
hope, however, is just another item of the Hegel myth: here, misrepresenting
his quite sensible reluctance to predict the future, as though he thought that,
as regards what really matters, the present would persist for ever. A bizarre
notion! Not-predicting is not the same as not-hoping. Hegel was, indeed,
always cautious when it came to politics. He never sought to whip up
revolutionary political passion with grandiose predictions, as Fichte had,
or as Marx would. And therefore, from the outset, he framed his grand
narrative as an explanation for the specific truth-potential of the present,
nothing more. In that sense, he positioned himself at the end of the particular
story he sought to tell. Yet, let us be clear, this caution represents the tactical
bridling of a most tremendous energy-for-openness; an urgent hope-filled
energy that appears most fundamentally, and at its fiercest, in his theology.
Hegel leaves the future open. But, like Joachim, at least thus far, he sets out
to show how, over the bloodstained centuries, the latent saving truth of the
gospel has steadily been growing more decipherable.
3. A plea for patience

No doubt, wherever the all-opening power of the Holy Spirit really floods
into theology the results will be uncomfortable for the institutional Church.
The challenge here being, in essence, an impulse to openness, it will never
generate merely sectarian polemic. But one of the prime distinguishing
marks of such theology is, nevertheless, the resistance it evokes.
The Synod of Arles did not confine itself to condemning Gerardo di San
Borgo Donninos sectarian distortion of Joachims prophecy. It also condemned
10
Is there perhaps a hint of Joachimite logic in Hegels initial discussion of das

unglckliche Bewutseyn? See Phenomenology of Spirit (Miller), p. 128, para. 210;
Phenomenology of Mind (Baillie), p. 253. Here he adumbrates a three-stage overcoming
of unatonement, which ORegan (pp. 27172) reads as being Joachimite.
C.f. Shanks, Faith in Honesty (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
154
HEGEL SUBLATED
the original prophecy itself. So, very notably, did Thomas Aquinas; likewise,
not discriminating between Joachim and Gerardo.11 Dante envisions Joachim
among the wise spirits in Paradise, alongside the great orthodox teachers,
and in particular reconciled with St Bonaventure, who as minister-general of
the Franciscan Order had led the struggle against the Joachimite dissident
Spiritual Franciscans.12 But, then, Dante was a singularly generous thinker;
as is also shown by his parallel depiction of Aquinas likewise being reconciled, after death, with the Averroist, Siger of Brabant. The actual earthly
Church, unfortunately, finds such generosity rather harder than it is in
Dantes heaven.13
Eckhart, towards the end of his life, was charged with serious error, if
not actual heresy, by the Papal Inquisition, then based in Avignon; and, after
a lengthy investigation, was compelled to issue a qualified retraction.
Although the Inquisitors tried to be methodical, they appear to have been a
bit uncertain as how best to formulate their initial, somewhat inchoate unease
here. At all events, the trial documents show them trying various approaches,
rather jumbled together. Their underlying anxiety was that Eckharts teaching
did not seem sharply enough differentiated from the heretical doctrine of
the Brethren of the Free Spirit; that is, the general stirring of outright antinomianism which was, at that time, a major source of concern for Church
authorities throughout the Rhineland and the Netherlands. Eckhart defended
himself in the most spirited fashion. But, acutely aware of the ambiguity
intrinsic to all religious utterance, he was at length persuaded to back down,
11
12
13
Aquinas, Summa Theologica II, 1, Q106, art. 4. On the one hand, Aquinas criticizes
the oversimplifying logic of Joachims periodic Trinitarianism. On the other hand,
he indicates alternatives to the Joachimite reading of three key New Testament texts.
(a) 1 Corinthians 13: 910, For we know only in part . . . but when the complete
comes, the partial will come to an end: this is not about a new age in history, but
about eternity. (b) John 16: 13, When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you
into all the truth: the apostolic Church already knew all that was necessary to
salvation, what its members still lacked was only a full understanding of how prophecy
was to be historically fulfilled. (c) Matthew 24: 14, This good news of the kingdom
will be proclaimed throughout the kingdom . . . and then the end will come: the end
in question is not the end of one age of revelation, and the beginning of another;
rather, it is either, literally, the end of the second Jerusalem Temple, or else it is the end
of all things.
Dante, The Divine Comedy: Paradise, XII, lines 14044.
A curious recent example of this was the Vaticans response to an internet rumour
circulated in 2009 to the effect that, in the course of the previous years presidential
campaign, Barack Obama had thrice invoked the authority of Joachim in his speeches.
In actual fact, of course, Obama had done nothing of the sort. But the rumour nevertheless elicited a sharp response from the Vatican: the publication of a lecture by
Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher to the Pontifical Household, restating Romes
official repudiation of Joachim and all that he stands for.
155
at any rate with regard to some of his own formulations, acknowledging

that they might perhaps be injudicious.14
And then Hegel: again, the immediate response to his work among the
more conservative or pietist of his fellow Lutherans was, for the most part,
a mixture of bewilderment and fierce suspicion. So hostile was this reaction
that, in the period following his death, it emboldened the real enemies of the
Church, Feuerbach and his allies, to claim Hegel, quite unscrupulously, for
their own. In actual fact, the resultant Left Hegelianism ditched everything
of real interest in Hegels religious thought: Hegels substantive critique of
unatonement was here replaced with a merely formal critique of theological
language as such. And this helped clear the way for a brand new mode of
unatonement Communist Party ideology in which the Rigidity Principle,
now secularized, in the long run only grew more murderous than ever. Yet,
the very fact that decadent Left Hegelianism could claim to be Hegelian
at all bears vivid testimony to the problem. It was only possible because
Hegelian theology had gained so little traction in the Church at large.
Das unglckliche Bewutseyn is Hegels term for a condition that may
equally come to expression in all sorts of secular, or other-religious, ways.
But, as the intellectual affliction of fallen humanity in general, it is also, so
to speak, the natural default setting for theology. Any form of theology,
insofar as it is not driven by a desire to open the Church up to fresh new
insight is thus a work of das unglckliche Bewutseyn. This includes any
theology for which faith is, in effect, nothing more than an impassioned
sincerity in the holding of correct religious opinion; any theology primarily
intent on explaining, and vindicating, the standpoint of an old-established
church institution, or faction, as such, against others, or against the secular
world; any theology that rests on a simple appeal to the authority of the
Bible, or of orthodox tradition, as if it were obvious what this meant, and
as if all that were needed was just sufficient determination in holding fast to
it; any theology that might be popularized by propaganda means. Hegels
whole approach to theology is of course bound to appear scandalous to a
devotee of such thinking.
But not all of his critics are of this kind. Take Kierkegaard, for instance.
Kierkegaards work, as a whole, is surely very much another case of the
Holy Spirit in spate: bursting the confines of comfortable Christendom. As
is Desmonds, likewise: bursting the confines of the conventional-erotic, in
general. On the one hand, both Kierkegaard and Desmond are mighty critics
of religion reduced to conventional respectability in Hegelian terms, both
alike are actually great conquerors of das unglckliche Bewutseyn. Yet, on
the other hand, they are also, both of them, dead set against any allowance for
political realism in theology; Kierkegaard indeed just as much as Desmond.
14
For the trial documents, see The Essential Sermons, Commentaries Treatises, and
Defense, pp. 7181.
156
HEGEL SUBLATED
And so it is that, at the same time, they repudiate Hegel; he being ever the
political realist. The Kierkegaardian concept of Christendom, as the great
enemy of gospel truth, conflates critique of mere conventional respectability
with critique of political-theological realism, in the most direct and confusing fashion. Look, though: there really are two quite different levels of
thought involved here. The overcoming of das unglckliche Bewutseyn
is just the first prerequisite for any sort of theological truth. Whereas, by
contrast, when it comes to the proper role of political realism do we
not need a plurality of different theological approaches, to appreciate the
various facets of true wisdom?
Again, Hegel is preoccupied with the question of how one might best help
contribute to the building of a truly effective political community, infused
with atonement; one that is therefore, to the greatest possible degree, respectful of thoughtful dissent, and dedicated to the most open sort of public
debate, understood as a sacred ideal in itself. And so he develops an interpretation of historical progress essentially in those terms: the sort of narrative
that such a community requires, to inspire it. But when Kierkegaard thinks
about ethics, he is preoccupied, far rather, with what he for his part simply
calls works of love.15 That is to say, the absolute, intransigent demands
of a perfect love of neighbour what Desmond calls ideal agapeic community
way beyond any consideration of political effectiveness. One cannot
construct anything like Hegelian grand narrative to show how works of
love, in the Kierkegaardian sense, have evolved, on a large scale. They are,
in their sublime perfection, much too rare. What Desmond calls pure
agapeic community thrives, elusively, only on the very edge of history.
Imagine of atoning virtue as a pyramid, the lower levels including large
numbers of people, the higher levels far fewer. What, in the end, differentiates Kierkegaard and Desmond from Hegel is no more than that their gaze
is fixed, exclusively, upon the very summit of the pyramid. He, by contrast,
is examining the base: the broadest possible, most inclusive political basis
for authentically atoning community. From this primordial difference, everything else in their argument against him follows. Nevertheless, it is surely, in
both cases, the same pyramid. They argue as if there were some absolute,
irreconcilable opposition between their standpoint and his. Not so!
To be sure, there are some gaps in Hegels theology. Kierkegaard and
Desmond highlight them, mercilessly.
z
15
Intent as he is on devising politically realistic strategy for the cause of

atonement, it is true that Hegel nowhere discusses what constitutes, or
might inspire, the ultimate trans-political intransigence of ideal sanctity.
Kierkegaard, Works of Love (trans. Howard and Edna Hong, New York: Harper and
Row, 1962; in Danish Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, a non-pseudonymous work, 1847).
157

z
A closely related problem: reacting against the high flown rhetoric of his
Romantic contemporaries, he seeks to purge philosophy of what he
calls mere edification.16 Unfortunately, though, he ends up, as a result,
developing a theology that lacks any explicit grounding in prayer. He
gives no indication of what he thinks truly atoning prayer might be like.
In what sense could one pray to Hegels God? Desmond asks.17 This is a
good question so long as it is more than just rhetorical! I by no means
accept Desmonds suggested answer: that Hegelian absolute knowing
renders real prayer impossible. All that such knowing renders impossible
is the prayer of unatonement. But yes, I agree that it would have been
much better had Hegel, after all, thought a bit more about the proper
nature of atoning prayer.
One reason why he did not do so: he is always so very much the
Professor, as Kierkegaard likes to call him. That is to say, he is always
looking to effect change in the world, above all, through improvements
in university education, and especially the study of philosophy, as an
academic discipline. Absent from his thought is any balancing sense of
the intrinsic ambivalence of philosophy, in relation to Gods truth. For
Hegel, it seems, philosophy is a quite unambiguous good: not least,
as it works systematically to dissolve the ambiguities of popular, nonacademic religion. There is no criticism, in his work, of philosophys
constant shadow side, as a project forever tending to be tainted with
educational-elitist conceit.18
These are quite major gaps, certainly. However, I repeat: they are just that,
no more than gaps.
There is absolutely no need to interpret them, the way Kierkegaard and
Desmond do, as implying rigid dogmatic closures. Kierkegaard and Desmond,
with their gaze fixed on the receding summit of the pyramid, have resolved
to be intransigent, both in season and out. But to see Gods truth, the sacred
truth of atonement whole, is to see the whole pyramid. Heaven, in this sense,
is larger than the intellectual puritan, or beautiful soul, is inclined to allow.
It excludes cruelty, and it excludes mediocrity; even the most devout cruelty,
even the most devout mediocrity. Yet there is surely room within it for both
Hegel and Kierkegaard, reconciled. Again: there is surely room for both
Desmond and Hegel.
16
17
18
Phenomenology of Spirit (Miller), pp. 46, paras. 79; Phenomenology of Mind

(Baillie), pp. 7174.
Desmond, Hegels God, p. 198.
C. f. Shanks, The Other Calling: Theology, Intellectual Vocation and Truth (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007).
158
HEGEL SUBLATED
4. Hegel today: from second to third modernity

Kierkegaard and Desmond represent the ultimate in a certain sort of
militancy. But there is also a larger group of authentic thinkers who are
inclined to mistrust Hegel: all those, in short, whose theology is essentially a
generalized expression of disgust with secular modernity.
Never before, Hegel argues, has there been such an opportunity for us to
discriminate the real truth of the gospel from its distorting accretions. This
opportunity derives from the way in which, as never before, the environment
of secular modernity allows us to stand back from church tradition in critical
detachment, even while still adhering to it; the freedom it allows each individual to experiment with different modes of belonging or not-belonging,
different angles of vision. Does this not mean, though, that he has sold out
to secular modernity as a whole? Here we have the basic suspicion of Hegel
common to what one might call Augustinian theologians; Augustine being
the great original systematic exponent of theology-as-disgust. Everything,
Augustine argues in The City of God, depends upon our distinguishing in
the sharpest possible fashion between the ways of the heavenly city and the
ways of the earthly city. But again, although this distinction very largely
overlaps the Hegelian distinction between the ways of atonement and
the ways of unatonement in a Christian context, it also differs. It differs just
because of the way in which it is confined to a Christian context. The
Augustinian doctrine incorporates a critique of unatonement; but muddles
it, by mixing it with an essentially apologetic affirmation of metaphysical
Christian orthodoxy. So it becomes a forever ambiguous amalgam between
a critique of unatonement, as such, and a critique of secularity, as such. And
in the post-Enlightenment world, to the extent that the second element
prevails, it tends to generate a somewhat nostalgic mode of Christian grand
narrative: a lament, first and foremost, for what the Enlightenment, in doing
away with the old cultural hegemony of metaphysical Christian orthodoxy,
is said to have destroyed.19
Now, clearly there is a big difference between this sort of Christian grand
narrative and the Hegelian one. But, first: let us not exaggerate the difference.
Where the Augustinians profess to see only decline, Hegel sees an unprecedented opportunity for fresh truth. However, this opportunity does not, in
his view, arise because the world as a whole has become a better place. On
the contrary, it arises very largely because of what he, likewise, sees as the
deepening corruption of modernity. So he likes to compare the condition of
modernity in his own day with the religious decadence of ancient Rome in
the time of the early Church: the weakness of ancient Roman paganism, its
19
Among the leading late-modern Augustinians, in this sense, are Karl Barth, Hans
Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Herman Dooyeweerd, Stanley Hauerwas, John
Milbank, Catherine Pickstock; to name just a few.
159
lack of real moral grip upon its notional adherents, which made possible
the early Churchs rapid expansion. The worse it gets, he thinks, the better
it gets. The way he uses the term, die Aufklrung (the Enlightenment) is
absolutely the name of a sickness. Certain elements in Enlightenment-era
thought might well be regarded as intellectual contributions to the cause of
atonement: the work of Spinoza or Lessing, for example. But when Hegel
speaks of die Aufklrung it is not in fact Spinoza or Lessing that he has in
mind. Rather, what he means by the word is nothing more than the secularization of unatonement. This is already the case in Faith and Knowledge,
where Kant, Jacobi and Fichte are framed in the context of die Aufklrung
in this sense; and criticized for failing to rise above it adequately.20
Kant, Jacobi, Fichte, all three, are fervent upholders of what they call
faith. This, though, is a form of faith essentially uprooted from any actual,
organized religious community-belonging. In the Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel goes on to trace that uprooting, the process of die Aufklrung as he
envisages it, epitomized in a sort of reported dialogue between two typical
voices: the voices of Faith and Pure Insight.21 Here, Pure Insight is an
aggressively cynical sheer debunker of religious tradition, using every sort of
propagandist argument. The voice of Faith is sadder. It represents faith in
full retreat before the onslaught of Pure Insight, into the detached individualism of one who, in the new jargon of our time, might say, Im not so much
religious as spiritual. Thus, this outlook defends itself by withdrawing into
complete theological abstraction, too vague to be open to specific criticism;
and by appealing simply to the testimony of direct personal experience, too
private to be criticized. The two warring voices of Faith and Pure Insight
are united in their unatonement. The voice of Pure Insight represents militant
secularizing unatonement. That of its ineffective antagonist, Faith: unatonement
defensively privatized. The Enlightenment, in its positive aspect, Hegel
remarks, was a hubbub of vanity without a firm core. He means the element
of Enlightenment thinking that sought to ground ethics in an invocation
of positive utilitarian principle. But, he goes on, the Enlightenment
obtained a core in its negative procedure by grasping its own negativity.22
Kant, Jacobi and Fichte: these, for him, are the great representatives of
that negativity, broken free from mere utilitarianism. As he sees it, the
Enlightenments one real contribution to truth, its negative core, may be
said to consist in its historic destabilizing of unatonement. Utilitarian Pure
Insight does nothing to challenge unatonement, as such. Nevertheless, by
20
21
22
Verstand is usually translated into English as Understanding. Walter Cerf and

H. S. Harris, in their translation of Faith and Knowledge (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977)
opt for intellect, instead. C.f. note 8 above!
Phenomenology of Spirit (Miller), VI B ii, pp. 32855; Phenomenology of Mind
(Baillie) pp. 55998.
Faith and Knowledge, p. 56.
160
HEGEL SUBLATED
uprooting unatonement from traditional religion, it does destabilize it.

Secular-modern destabilized unatonement may indeed be still more lethal
in its effects than traditional-religious fixed unatonement. Hegel already
knows this: he has the evidence of the Jacobin Terror before him. In the
Phenomenology he immediately juxtaposes the Enlightenment to the Terror.
But here and there in the swirling turbulence of secular-modern culture there
may nevertheless also open up the possibility of true atoning theology,
rendered fully explicit as never before. That, in the end, is the real extent of
his un-Augustinian optimism. It is quite modest.
And second: let us allow Hegelian grand narrative to continue unfolding.23
So consider, what exactly is a grand narrative? It is the defining of a certain
sort of hope, by telling the story of its emergent possibility. The grandeur
of the narrative is partly a matter of scale: it is all-encompassing since
the hope in question is cosmopolitan, the basis for an evangelistic mission
without limits. And it is partly a matter of weight. For here we have a species
of historic hope that is understood as being integral to salvation. Grand
narrative is, at one level, a universal history of mankind. And, at another,
it is the history of a particular community, its transmitter; that is, the carriercommunity for the salvation it promises. The Christian gospel is the first
fully-fledged example, establishing the genre. (Buddhism has equally cosmopolitan missionary ambitions but does not identify salvation with its
historic hopes. Rather, Buddhist doctrine identifies salvation with release
from historic hope in general.) For the earliest grand narratives, the carriercommunity is a confessional religious body: a form of Christian Church, or
the Islamic umma. But what then emerges in the wake of the Enlightenment is
a whole other species of grand narrative, associated with a whole other type
of carrier-community. Namely: progressive movements seeking to implement
change in the world by winning direct executive control over secular states
as such, and using the power of the state apparatus. From the mid-nineteenth
century onwards, such grand narrative becomes the ideology of massmembership progressive political parties. Let us define modernity,
narrowly, as that which is celebrated in grand-narrative terms, and promoted by grand-narrative means. One might well then distinguish between
two basic stages of modernity, so defined. Namely: first modernity,
generated by the purely religious grand narratives of Christianity and Islam,
and second modernity, generated by the secular-progressive projects of
the post-Enlightenment world.
Where does Hegel fit into the story of these two modernities? He is their
great reconciler. The prime Christian advocate, and refiner, of second modernity, he sets out, once and for all, to rescue the Christian gospel from church
ideology, the limitations of first modernity; and to rethink it systematically
23
In what follows I recur to the argument of God and Modernity (London: Routledge,
2000).
161
as inspiration for the politics of a secular state, ideally dedicated to

freedom.
The shape of any grand narrative is fundamentally determined by the goal
it envisages. And so how are we to define the proper goal? Again, I would
propose that it is final recognition of what Patocka calls the solidarity of the
shaken, as a supremely sacred ideal. The solidarity of the shaken: solidarity
purely and simply on the basis of a shared experience of being shaken,
with real intensity, by the imperatives of perfect truth-as-openness. Or: the
politics of true atonement. Nothing narrower, and nothing less! No other
mode of solidarity is as desirable as this. Nor is any other mode as difficult
to organize, in sustainable fashion; hence, it is a goal that has only very
gradually emerged into the light of day. To try and tell the story of this
emergence is at once to be plunged into the business of grand narrative. First
modernity is already rich in poetic resources for articulating the solidarity of
the shaken: the primordial Christian gospel, Sufi wisdom. The trouble is,
though, that first modernity forever confuses the solidarity of the shaken
with the confessional solidarity between Christian and Christian as such,
in the manner of Augustine; or with the confessional solidarity between
Muslim and Muslim as such. By contrast, second modernity renders possible
a fundamentally new understanding of proper Christian hope: a secularized
understanding, in the sense of being, at least to some extent, cut loose from
any narrow confessionalism. At all events, Hegels thinking has that effect.
Thus, although he is a loyal Lutheran, he subordinates his confessional
loyalties as a Lutheran to the essentially trans-confessional ideal of absolute
knowing: interpreting the gospel, first and foremost, as an intimation of
absolute knowing in religious form. But, again, what absolute knowing
knows is, in effect, nothing other than the supreme sacredness of the
trans-confessional solidarity of the shaken, in itself. Hegel acknowledges
that his theological breakthrough is only possible thanks to his intellectual
environment having been secularized; that is, the secularization pushed
forward by the incipient energies of second modernity. And in the Philosophy
of Right he therefore affirms the secular state produced by early second
modernity as a great work of God.
However, it is much harder to believe in second modernity now than it
was back then. For in the twentieth century second modernity was, as
it were, consolidated into two main rival bodies of progressive belief:
Marxism and Liberal Capitalism. Hegel would surely have been horrified by
both. He would have been horrified not only by the monstrous violence that
both species of ideology have, on occasion, served to justify; but also by
their more general destructive effect with regard to Sittlichkeit, or ethical
togetherness. A thriving Sittlichkeit is a culture founded upon, and helping
reinforce, strong relationships of mutual trust between neighbours, of every
social class. The ideal state envisaged in Hegels Philosophy of Right is
both secular and, at the same time, infused with the warmest possible
162
HEGEL SUBLATED
Protestant-Christian Sittlichkeit, to hold it morally together. In this regard,

the closest to it, among twenty-first century states, are those of Scandinavia;
the warmth of whose Sittlichkeit is evidenced by their citizens un-coerced
willingness to pay such very high taxes. For here we have the most direct
token of mutual trust, on a large scale. Marxism, by contrast, has always
tended to destroy Sittlichkeit with its rhetoric of class conflict. Liberal
Capitalism also dissolves it, by becoming the mirror image of Marxism: a
brutal class-ideology of the rich and their admirers. And the result, in both
cases, is to produce ideologies of government profoundly inimical to the
solidarity of the shaken. The ideologists of both Marxism and Liberal
Capitalism alike are too busy making the sort of manipulative propaganda
required in order to gain, and then keep, governmental power in the service
of the particular class-interests they favour. They simply do not have time to
consider the anti-propagandist demands of perfect truth-as-openness.
Postmodernism has been one response to the twentieth-century decadence
of second modernity: a wholesale abandonment of grand narrative as a
genre. The pioneers of postmodernist philosophy have for the most part
been ex-Marxists, disenchanted with that particular form of grand narrative
and then generalizing their disenchantment. Like Heidegger repudiating
all politics because of his disenchantment with Nazism, it is as if they are
saying, If we cant have the grand narrative of Marxism, then we wont
have any. Augustinian theology is another response, turning back from
second modernity, as a whole, to first modernity. Neither of these, however,
is an unambiguous contribution to the cause of atonement. The solidarity of
the shaken surely requires something more. I think that Emil Fackenheim
was right when in the late 1960s he wrote, Such are the crises that have
befallen the Christian West in the last half century that it may safely be said
that, were he alive today, so realistic a philosopher as Hegel would not be a
Hegelian.24 But I do not think that Hegel today would become either a
postmodernist or an Augustinian. Rather, he would doubtless return afresh
to the basic question underlying his original philosophy of history: the
question of where freedom, in the sense of atonement, was most effectively
now being made political reality in the world.
It is not where Marxism still holds sway. Nor is it where Marxisms angry
sibling, the ideology of aggressive Liberal Capitalism, dominates. No doubt
Hegel would to some extent approve of the current Scandinavian model of
politics. More importantly, though, it seems to me that his attention would
also be caught by that other, very striking new development: the multiplication, in the global civil society our day, of what I am inclined to call organized,
campaigning, self-contained public conscience movements.
24
Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegels Thought (Bloomington, London:

Indiana University Press, 1967), p. 224.
163
The phrase that I have been using, the solidarity of the shaken actually
originates in that context: the civil rights movement, Charter 77, which Jan
Patocka helped launch, was a classic example of the type. Another, the one
with which I am myself most familiar from the inside, is the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament. Unlike the movements of first modernity,
organizations of the general kind exemplified by Charter 77 or CND are
trans-confessional, and in that sense thoroughly secular phenomena. Yet
they also differ from the movements of second modernity inasmuch as they
do not, strictly speaking, belong to political society: for they do not aspire
either to gain direct control over government, or, having it, to keep it. Instead
they are civil-society organizations, seeking to effect political change indirectly, by making a moral appeal to public opinion. And as a result they are
liberated from the strategic and tactical constraints common to the partypolitical projects of mature second modernity. Unlike political parties, their
chief hope of success lies simply in their acquiring real moral authority, the
sort of authority that comes from being known to speak the truth without
fear. Therefore, they are movements with a strong vested interest in truth-asopenness. No such movements yet existed in Hegels Germany. Historically,
the earliest ever public conscience movement (in the sense I intend) had,
at that time, just appeared in England: the campaign for the abolition of
slavery. Hegel very much approved of the abolitionist campaign. But it was
an isolated phenomenon. Public conscience movements, in fact, only began
to develop sufficient critical mass to become, collectively, a potential carriercommunity for grand-narrative hope from around the 1960s onwards. The
founding of that truly paradigmatic public conscience movement, Amnesty
International in 1961 appears, in retrospect, a key landmark in the process.
What would Hegel teach today? I think he would be an enthusiastic
advocate of the new, emerging potential modernity that has as its carriercommunity the global moral community of public conscience movements.
Let us call this third modernity. Hegel in his own day was the great reconciler
of second modernity with the legacy of Christian first modernity. Today, it
seems to me, he would likewise set to work as a reconciler of third modernity
with traditional Christianity. Of course, the public conscience movements of
third modernity have their vices. Not that I would include in the category
of authentic public conscience movements any organization that practised
violence one does not contribute to the cultivation of a public conscience
by any sort of manipulation, and certainly not by terrorism or thuggery,
no matter who the enemy may be. But, still, these movements are forever
tempted as every organization with ethical pretensions is forever tempted
to be self-righteous, oversimplifying, and impatient. That is why third
modernity needs the austere sort of immanent philosophical critique that
Hegel, for his part, gave second modernity. It is also true that active participation in todays public conscience movements is for the most part
confined to well-educated, comfortable middle class folk. Ideally they need
164
HEGEL SUBLATED
to communicate their concerns to other types of people as well, opening

themselves up, in conversation, to the concerns of other types; and yes,
they can only do this, as they should, by way of systematic interaction
with the great agencies of Sittlichkeit. Public conscience movements are
shallow-rooted, often ephemeral; their vision of their own identity tends
to be narrowly focused on particular issues of public controversy. In
short they lack just what churches are uniquely well equipped to supply.
And yet, the fact nevertheless remains that, at their best, they have a quite
unprecedented capacity to recall the Church to its roots, in Jesus original
preaching of the basileia tou theou. No other form of organization, after all,
has such a direct potential to embody the solidarity of the shaken.
Much of what is most truly creative in contemporary theology derives
from the moral challenge of the new public conscience movements. But up
to now the theological response has tended to be somewhat piecemeal.
Feminist theology has been an especially notable part of this. The activity of
public conscience movements has also prompted much recent theological
engagement with the politics of war and peace, human rights, race, poverty,
and the natural environment. However, there surely does remain a need
to draw these various piecemeal responses together, into a larger acknowledgement of the fresh truth-potential belonging to third modernity as a
whole. In other words: to do for the newness of today something more or
less analogous to what Hegel did for the newness of his day.
By all means, let us repudiate Hegels undeniable one-sidedness, as a
theologian. The one-sidedness, yes but not the essential challenge that he
represents! His work is, not least, one of the great pinnacles of the Christian
theological tradition. For all its tiresome difficulty, it cannot just be wished
away. No thinker has ever been more alert than he to the significance of
shifting historical context. The Hegelian legacy is not something simply to
be refuted. But rather it is an exorbitant critical impulse forever excessive,
and offensive, to ordinary common sense that cries out, again and again,
to be reworked: aufgehoben or sublated, so far as possible, into the fresh
context of the present.
And it is beautiful.
165
9
coda
Theology is forever, properly, on the way to prayer. But how does one
pray to Hegels God, Desmond asks? The special distinguishing feature of
Hegelian prayer, as such, would no doubt be its direct reflection on the
ambiguity of its own imaginative medium. That is, the ambiguity, intrinsic
to that medium, between the atoning and the unatoned.
So here (by way of conclusion) is a prayer, in the form of a three-part
psalm, to illustrate what I think such prayer might actually sound like:
Psalm
I
CANT find, cant disinter, the right words:
reality cant ever quite break through.
So many fortifications we mortals have built:
to repel the hearts truth.
Babel, Nimrod the hunters creation:
aspires to heaven.
Up, through thin air, god-like, into your space:
we ascend to survey and control.
So many satellites trawling the aether:
ingenious spies.
But you remain hidden:
their nets, chock-full of the babbling void.
166
CODA
CANT find, cant, for dear life, find:

wise enough words.
Here, in Babel:
Wisdom is silenced.
See, shes a beggar woman, dragged before the judge:
hes a wisecracking wit, who pays her no heed.
Or Wisdoms a man spreadeagled in the snow:
his dog at his side.
The dog barks, summoning aid:
prayer at its purest.
Where the cross casts its shadow:
Beauty, grown wolf-like, howls.
II
ALL praise, true sovereign of all:
to you, alone.
When the prophet stood, gazing, attentive, out of the cave:
there came first tempest, then earthquake, then fire.
Keep us we pray keep us, also, upright, when the tempest blows:
the air astir with the latest news.
Hold us we pray hold us, also, in your hand, when the earth quakes:
the crowd beginning to jeer.
Steady our souls steady us, also, we pray when the flames surge:
eloquent fury exploding.
Patiently, there in the cave, the prophet stood:
while tempest screamed, earth shook, fire blazed.
Until, at the last, in a still, small voice:
you spoke.
Speak, we implore you:
speak to us, also, your hidden, creative word.
167
ALL praise, true sovereign, to you, all praise:

but fear twists us.
And we have to confess that waylaid by dread we mistook you:
terror led us astray.
Wrongly we thought that we knew you:
that yours was the spirit at work in the tempest, the earthquake, the fire.
We just couldnt hear you:
your true voice so quiet.
GOD of our fathers, Abrahams God, heavenly Father of Isaac, bound:

cruel as we are (we have to confess) weve imagined you, likewise, cruel.
Cloud-coiled, weve imagined you over the p-lifted blade sultry
and frowning, louring down:
turning the whole world grey, erasing the blue beyond.
So much illusion here:
yet we still yearn for you.
O, give way! Give the order:
unbind us.
GOD of the prophets:

wed supposed it was easy to serve you and when you denied it, we
thought you were raging.
Like a wild beast, wounded, we thought that we heard you bellow:
or, like someone lost, we thought that we heard you yell.
We loved and we feared you:
for what, in our nightmares, we thought you might do.
Half the truth, anyhow:
now after all we acknowledge, it isnt so easy.
GOD of our dreams:

as were vengeful ourselves (we have to confess) we imagined you
vengeful.
168
CODA
Seeing you poor:

we wanted you rich.
Seeing you weak:
we wanted you strong.
For are you not Lord? And therefore, as we were slavish, we made
you seem everything lordly:
like courtiers, we sought to control you with flattering prayers.
We dug out a fantasy pit full of torments, below:
for our foes.
We made you a despot:
so we made fools of ourselves.
III
WE would gladly be wise:
as open as can be spurning the shelter of dishonest fiction,
even against whats hardest to bear.
You created, and gave us, a world:
all was well, but we were afraid, and from fear created our own.
In the way that the glow of a city obliterates starlight:
we shut ourselves in, and forgot.
So much noisy distraction, such a wealth of pleasing ideas:
so many dubious answers to devious questions, such a glittering flow
of diversionary talk!
Listen:
Rachel is weeping for her children.
Wisdom mourns:
beyond consolation.
CANT find these, for sure, arent the right words:

but silence wont save us.
Must wrestle, like Jacob:
fighting, in darkness, for words from the angel.
169
In the various worlds our defiance has made us:

Wisdom is speechless.
Yet, where theres injustice, where bloods spilt, she cries out to heaven:
her desolate cry to those who will listen flies up from the wet, red
ground.
All we need are the words:
to make of that cry a rallying call.
Stay, angel speak, and give us your blessing:
unlock, swing back the gates of perception.
SUCH fortifications we mortals have built against yu:

so much noisy distraction.
So much bad religion as well, such a show:
of tempest and earthquake and fire.
Yet the remedy fails:
the crucified dissidents raised.
Up, refusing oblivion, out of the grave:
true reality rises, to greet us, again.
THOU shalt shew us wonderful things in thy righteousness, O God

of our salvation:
thou that art the hope of all the ends of the earth, and of them that
remain in the broad sea.
Who stilleth the raging of the sea:
and the noise of his waves, and the madness of the people.
(O give way! Give the order:
unbind us.)
Thou crownest the year with thy goodness:
and thy clouds drop fatness.
170
CODA
They shall drop upon the dwellings of the wilderness:

and the little hills shall rejoice on every side.
The folds shall be full of sheep:
the valleys also shall stand so thick with corn, that they shall laugh
and sing.
171
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index
absolute idea 134

absolute knowing 67, 1819,
201, 85, 105, 1078, 11718,
121, 122, 134, 145, 158, 162
adaptable sub-self 502, 601, 68,
71, 93, 105
agape / eros 49, 10, 12, 15, 17,
41, 157
Amos 18, 30, 36, 86, 131
Angst 1278
Aquinas, Thomas 25, 68, 147, 155
Aristophanes 945
Aristotle 24, 68, 123
Artaud, Antonin 139
atonement 4558, 5961, 72, 74,
83, 84, 86101, 1057, 115,
117, 119, 137, 138, 148, 157,
158, 159, 161, 1635, 166
Augustine 301, 779, 147, 148,
159, 162
Augustinianism
late modern 159
Baader, Franz von 45
Balthasar, Hans Urs von 159
Barth, Karl 147, 159
basileia tou theou
see kingdom of God
beautiful soul 1216, 18, 128, 158
Bernard of Clairvaux 6
Blake, William 81, 97
Broca, Paul 634
Charter 77 29, 31, 32, 37, 39, 164
commissurotomy 64
context / text 6970, 71, 104, 105

Cutting, John 67, 80
Dante 155
De Nys, Martin J. 1
Deleuze, Gilles 12, 85, 13645
Desmond, William 121, 24,
324, 3544, 568, 845,
1568, 166
Dialectical Reason 701, 104
Dietrich of Freiberg
Meister 150, 153
Dooyeweerd, Herman 159
Eckhart, Meister 434, 45, 128,
1478, 14953, 1556
Eliot, George 96
Enlightenment, the 534, 96, 110,
15961
eros / agape 49, 10, 12, 15, 17,
41, 157
Fackenheim, Emil 163
Fall, the 404, 54, 734, 80, 89
Feuerbach, Ludwig 113, 156
Fichte, J. G. 19, 10219, 137, 138,
154, 160
Foucault, Michel 145
Fries, J. F. 17
frontal lobes 613, 72
Gans, Eduard 17
Geist see Spirit
Girard, Ren 131
Goethe, J. W. von 13
173
INDEX
grand narrative 1011, 3540, 41,

43, 44, 98, 1489, 1534, 159,
1615
Guattari, Flix 12, 85, 13645
Haller, K. L. von 17
Hartmann, Klaus 26
Hauerwas, Stanley 159
Havel, Vclav 29
Hegel, G. W. F.
Difference between the Systems
of Fichte and Schelling 102
Early Theological Writings 524,
107
Encyclopaedia of the
Philosophical Sciences 20
Faith and Knowledge 102, 160
Lectures on the History of
Philosophy 102
Lectures on the Philosophy of
History 37
Lectures on the Philosophy of
Religion 20, 86
Lectures on the Proofs of the
Existence of God 25
Logic 245, 100, 114, 1212,
1346
Phenomenology of Spirit 2, 67,
1216, 1819, 20, 217, 31,
4552, 546, 59, 60, 62, 81,
86101, 102, 107, 114, 118,
120, 1212, 123, 133, 134,
144, 1601
Philosophy of Right 17, 1623
Heidegger, Martin 12, 3, 24, 85,
12136, 137, 139, 141, 163
Heraclitus 2931
Hodgson, Peter C. 1
Hlderlin, Friedrich 13, 16, 95,
129, 132, 139
Incarnation, the 8790, 97, 100,
1512
individuality 8790, 92, 93, 94
intellectual intuition
(Fichte / Hegel) 11718
Intuition 702
Jackson, John Hughlings 64, 67
Jacobi, F. H. 13, 160
Joachim of Fiore 1479, 1535
John of the Cross 6, 72
Jnger, Ernst 28
Kabbalah 44, 153
Kant, Immanuel 3, 524, 103, 104,
1056, 160
Keats, John 81
Kierkegaard, Sren 3, 14, 85, 100,
128, 1568
kingdom of God, the 301, 146, 165
Left Hegelianism 156
left hemisphere see representing
hemisphere
Lessing, G. E. 160
Levinas, Emmanuel 24, 6970, 85
Lubac, Henri de 159
Lutheranism, Hegels 5, 910, 20,
32, 52, 53, 86, 156, 162
Magee, Glenn 21
Manchester Cathedral 757
Marx, Karl 3, 11214, 142,
154, 163
McGilchrist, Iain 2, 612, 656,
7983, 121, 123
metaphysics 237, 45, 556, 123,
127, 131, 1336
Milbank, John 159
Milton, John 80, 82
modernity
the three stages of 1615
Nietzsche, Friedrich 36, 108, 129,
1378, 140, 141, 142, 1434
Novalis 13
Nygren, Anders 46, 9
174
INDEX
ORegan, Cyril 21, 153

pantheism 56
pathos of shakenness 37, 84
Patocka, Jan 2731, 37, 121, 128,
162, 164
Pickstock, Catherine 159
Plato 5, 8, 21, 109, 120, 123, 127
Plotinus 56
positivism 26
postmodernism 163
prayer 76, 158, 16671
presenting hemisphere 61, 6383,
85, 108, 117, 123, 1246,
13940, 153
priesthood 89, 137, 143
propaganda 489, 156, 163
Pseudo-Dionysius 5, 147
public conscience movements 1635
Reason 1011, 702, 115, 11718
reflection 1045
representing hemisphere 61, 6383,
85, 97, 108, 117, 123
Resurrection, the 978
right hemisphere see presenting
hemisphere
Rigidity Principle, the 501, 578,
601, 68, 72, 8794, 100, 105,
108, 116, 13940, 156
Rose, Gillian 1445
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 39
Savigny, F. K. von 17
scepticism 90, 945, 99
Schelling, F. W. J. 102, 117
Schiller, J. C. F. von 38
schizophrenia 71, 138, 140, 1412
Schlegel, Friedrich 13
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 17, 147
Sittlichkeit 120, 1623, 165
solidarity of the shaken 2734,
74, 77, 846, 121, 128, 137,
143, 146, 162, 1645
SONY 757
Speculative Reason 701, 1035
Spinoza, Benedict de 41, 11419,
127, 134, 135, 137, 160
Spirit 2, 6, 21, 23, 25, 356, 41,
467, 49, 545, 84, 99100,
118, 1212, 133, 138, 144, 153
stoicism 90, 945, 99
Strauss, Leo 8
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 28
Teresa of Avila 42
text / context 6970, 71, 104, 105
theodicy 368
theology 2, 1112, 217, 31, 32,
401, 45, 46, 556, 74, 813,
86, 88, 98, 1468, 156
transcendence (four forms) 568
truth, the concept of 7, 1112, 14,
23, 24, 25, 556, 68, 69, 723,
82, 84, 104, 119, 121, 122,
123, 1256, 127, 128, 131,
133, 134, 143, 148
unatonement, unatoned state of
mind 2, 14, 4558, 5961, 68,
715, 77, 86101, 1057, 119,
120, 122, 154, 150, 1567,
158, 159, 160, 166
Understanding 701, 104
unglckliche Bewutseyn see
unatonement
unhappy consciousness see
unatonement
Unwandelbare, das see Rigidity
Principle
Varnhagen von Ense, K. A. 19
Voegelin, Eric 21
Wandelbare, das see adaptable
sub-self
Whitehead, Alfred North 127
Wordsworth, William 81
175

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HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS

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HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS

Published by T&T Clark International

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems, Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Desmond versus Hegel: A False Either / Or?

Desmonds Hegel: A Counterfeit Double?

3 The Ideal of Atonement

6 The Spur: Hegel versus Fichte

7 Two Non-Christian Alternative Strategies

William Desmond, Hegels God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS FAITH

strategy compares to a couple of anti-theological variants of strategy for

2. Two opposing strategic attitudes to

DESMOND VERSUS HEGEL: A FALSE EITHER / OR?

HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS FAITH

3. Desmonds affirmation of agapeic community

Being and the Between, p. 178.

DESMOND VERSUS HEGEL: A FALSE EITHER / OR?

HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS FAITH

ever concerned to attack Plotinus.) And he is not necessarily unhappy with

DESMOND VERSUS HEGEL: A FALSE EITHER / OR?

HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS FAITH

is fundamentally incompatible with the true Johannine vision of God as

DESMOND VERSUS HEGEL: A FALSE EITHER / OR?

4. Hegels political-theological realism

HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS FAITH

nineteenth-century Germany such liberal, anti-establishment attitudes tended

Hegel, Philosophy of Right (trans. T. M. Knox; Oxford: Oxford University Press,

DESMOND VERSUS HEGEL: A FALSE EITHER / OR?

illusory, beyond mere superficial appearances. Hegels double statement of

HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS FAITH

5. Beyond the beautiful soul

DESMOND VERSUS HEGEL: A FALSE EITHER / OR?

so rules out compromise as, in the end, to render organized, politically

HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS FAITH

refreshing of themselves in the glory of knowing, expressing, cherishing

DESMOND VERSUS HEGEL: A FALSE EITHER / OR?

The second-phase beautiful soul, as Hegel portrays it, suffers an extreme

C.f. Miller, p. 403, Baillie, p. 671.

HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS FAITH

individual, who becomes disordered to the point of madness, wastes away

6. Was Hegel pious?

C.f. Miller, p. 407, Baillie, p. 676.

DESMOND VERSUS HEGEL: A FALSE EITHER / OR?

Was Hegel pious? Well, of course, it all depends on what is meant by

HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS FAITH

in succession, house tutor to two bourgeois families, an unpaid lecturer, a

See for example The Other Calling, chapter 10.

DESMOND VERSUS HEGEL: A FALSE EITHER / OR?

Hegels God, p. 14.

HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS FAITH

DESMOND VERSUS HEGEL: A FALSE EITHER / OR?

to try and incorporate a lively recognition of these forever troubling imperatives

7. The uniqueness of the Phenomenology of Spirit

HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS FAITH

intellectual disciplines. In the Phenomenology Hegel sets up conversational

DESMOND VERSUS HEGEL: A FALSE EITHER / OR?

Shanks, Faith in Honesty: The Essential Nature of Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate,

HEGEL AND RELIGIOUS FAITH

Note: at this point we enter a terminological maelstrom. I am using the

See below, pp. 133136.

DESMOND VERSUS HEGEL: A FALSE EITHER / OR?