CHAPTER IV.

HEGEL AND THEOLOGY.

Even an incidental glance into Hegel's Logic cannot fail to discover the frequent recurrence of the name of God, and the discussion of matters not generally touched upon, unless in works bearing upon religion. There were two questions which seem to have had a certain fascination for Hegel. One of them, a rather unpromising problem, referred to the distances between the several planets in the solar system, and the law regulating these intervals[1]. The other and more intimate problem turned upon the value of the proofs usually offered in support of the being of God. That God is the supreme certitude of the mind, the basis of all reality and knowledge, is what Hegel no more put in question, than did Descartes, Spinoza, or Locke. What he often repeated was that the _matter_ in these proofs must be distinguished from the imperfect _manner_ in which the arguers presented it. Again and again in his Logic, as well as in other discussions more especially devoted to it, he examines this problem. His persistence in this direction might earn for him that title of 'Knight of the Holy Ghost,' by which Heine, in one of the delightful poems of his 'Reisebilder,' describes himself to the maid of Klausthal in the Harz. The poet of Love and of Freedom had undoubted rights to rank among the sacred band: but so also had the philosopher. Like the Socrates whom Plato describes to us, he seems to feel that he has been commissioned to reveal the truth of God, and quicken men by an insight into the right wisdom. Nowhere in the modern period of philosophy has higher spirit breathed in the utterances of a thinker. The same theme is claimed as the common heritage of philosophy and religion. A letter to Duboc[2], the father of a modern German novelist, lets us see how important this aspect of his system was to Hegel himself. He had been asked to give a succinct explanation of his standing-ground: and his answer begins by pointing out that philosophy seeks to apprehend in reasoned knowledge the same truth which the religious mind has in its faith.

Words like these may at first sight suggest the bold soaring of ancient speculation in the times of Plato and Aristotle, or even the theories of the medieval Schoolmen. They sound as if he proposed to do for the modern world, and in the full light of modern knowledge, what the Schoolmen tried to accomplish within the somewhat narrow conceptions of medieval Christianity and Greek logic. Still there is a difference between the two cases. While the Doctors of the Church, in appearance at least, derived the form of exposition, and the matter of their systems, from two independent and apparently heterogeneous sources, the modern Scholastic of Hegel claims to be a harmonious unity, body finding soul, and soul giving itself body. And while the Hegelian system has the all-embracing and encyclopaedic character by which Scholastic science threw its arms around heaven and earth, it has also the untrammeled liberty of the Greek thinkers. Hegel, in short, shows the union of these two modes of speculation: free as the ancient, and comprehensive as the modern. His theory is the explication of God; but of God in the actuality and plenitude of the world, and not as a transcendent Being, such as an over-reverent philosophy has sometimes supposed him, in the solitude of a world beyond.

The greatness of a philosophy is its power of comprehending facts. The most characteristic fact of modern times is Christianity. The general thought and action of the civilised world has been alternately fascinated and repelled, but always influenced, and to a high degree permeated, by the Christian theory of life, and still more by the faithful vision of that life displayed in the Son of Man. To pass that great cloud of witness and leave it on the other side, is to admit that your system is no key to the secret of the world,--even if we add, as some will prefer, of the world as it is and has been. And therefore the Hegelian system, if it is to be a philosophy at all, must be in this sense Christian. But it is neither a critic, nor an apologist of historical Christianity. The voice of philosophy is as that of the Jewish doctor of the Law: 'If this council or this work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it, Philosophy examines what is, and not what, according to some opinions, ought to be. Such a point of view requires no discussion of the 'How' or the 'Why' of Christianity. It involves no inquiry into historical documents, or into the belief in miracles: for to it Christianity rests only incidentally on the evidence of history; and miracles, as vulgarly explained, can find no reception in a philosophical system. For it Christianity is 'absolute religion': religion i. e. which has fully become and realised all that religion meant to be. That religion has, of course, its historical side: it appeared at a definite epoch in the annals of our race: it revealed itself in a unique personality in a remarkable nation. And at an early period of his life Hegel had tried to gather up in one conception the traits of that august figure, in his life and speech and death. But, in the light of philosophy, this historical side shrivels up as comparatively unimportant. Not the personality, but the 'revelation of reason' through man's spirit: not the annals of a life once spent in serving God and men, but the words of the 'Eternal Gospel are henceforth the essence of Christianity.

Thus the controlling and central conception of life and actuality, which is the final explanation of all that man thinks and does, has a twofold aspect. There is, as it were, a double Absolute--for under this name philosophy has what in religion corresponds to God. It is true that in the final form of his system the Absolute Spirit has three phases--each as it were passing on into and incorporated with the next--Art working out its implications till it appears as Religion, and Religion calling for its perfection in Philosophy. But in the _Phenomenology_, his first work, the religion of Art only intervenes as a grade from 'natural' religion to religion manifest or revealed; and in the first edition of the _Encyclopaedia_ what is subsequently called Art is entitled the Religion of Art. It is in entire accordance with these indications when in the Lectures on Aesthetics[3] it is said 'the true and original position of Art is to be the first-come immediate self-satisfaction of Absolute Spirit'; though in our days (it is added) 'its form has ceased to be the highest need of the spirit.' It is hardly too much then to say that, for Hegel, the Absolute has two phases, Religion and Philosophy.

The Hegelian view presents itself most decisively, though perhaps with a little lecture-like over-insistance, in the Philosophy of Religion[4]. 'The object of religion as of philosophy is the eternal truth in its very objectivity,--God and nothing but God,--and the "explication" of God. Philosophy is not a wisdom of the world, but cognition of the non-worldly: not a cognition of the external mass of empirical existence and life, but cognition of what is eternal, what is God, and what flows from His nature. For this nature must reveal and develop itself. Hence philosophy "explicates" itself only when it "explicates" religion; and in explicating itself it explicates religion.... Thus religion and philosophy coincide: in fact, philosophy is itself a divine service, is a religion: for it is the same renunciation of subjective fancies and opinions, and is engaged with God alone.'

Again, it may be asked in what sense philosophy has to deal with God and with Truth. These two terms are often synonyms in Hegel. All the objects of science, all the terms of thought, all the forms of reality, lead out of themselves, and seek for a centre and resting-point. They are severally inadequate and partial, and they crave adequacy and completeness. They tend to organise themselves; to call out more and more distinctly the fuller reality which they presuppose,--which must have been, otherwise they could not have been: they reduce their first appearance of completeness to its due grade of inadequacy and bring out their complementary side, so as to constitute a system or universe; and in this tendency to a self-correcting unity consists their progress to truth. Their untruth lies in isolation and pretended independence or finality. This completed unity, in which all things receive their entireness and become adequate, is their Truth: and that Truth, as known in religious language, is God. Rightly or wrongly, God is thus interpreted in the Logic of Hegel.

Such a position must seem very strange to one who is familiar only with the sober studies of English philosophy. In whatever else the leaders of the several schools in this country disagree, they are nearly all at one in banishing God and religion to a world beyond the present sublunary sphere, to an inscrutable region beyond the scope of scientific inquiry, where statements may be made at will, but where we have no power of verifying any statement whatever. This is the common doctrine of Spencer and Mansel, of Hamilton and Mill. Even those English thinkers, who show some anxiety to support what is at present called Theism, generally rest content with vindicating for the mind the vague perception of a Being beyond us, and differing from us incommensurably. God is to them a residual phenomenon, a marginal existence. Outside the realm of experience and knowledge there is not-nothing--a something--beyond definite circumscription: incalculable, and therefore an object, possibly of fear, possibly of hope: the reflection in the utter darkness of a great What-may-it-not-be? He is the Unknown Power, felt by what some of these writers call intuition, and others call experience. They do not however allow to knowledge any capacity of apprehending in detail the truths which belong to the kingdom of God. Now the whole teaching of Hegel is the overthrow of the limits thus set to religious thought. To him all thought, and all actuality when it is grasped by knowledge, is from man's side, an exaltation of the mind towards God: while, when regarded from the divine standing-point, it is the manifestation by God of His own nature in its infinite variety.

It is only when we fix our eyes clearly on these general features in his speculation, that we can understand why _he_ places the maturity of ancient philosophy in the time of Plotinus and Proclus. Not that these Neo-Platonists are, as thinkers, of power equal to their master of Athens. But, in the realm of the blind the one-eyed may be king. The later thinkers set their vision more distinctly and persistently on the land that is eternal--'on the further side of being,' to quote Plato's phrase. It is for the same reason Hegel gives so much attention to the religious or semi-religious theories of Jacob Böhme and of Jacobi, though these men were in many ways so unlike himself.

[Footnote 1: Hegel's _Leben_, p. 155. It was in his dissertation _de Orbitis Planetarum,_ that the notorious contretemps occurred, whereby, whilst the philosopher, leaning to a Pythagorean proportion, hinted--in a line--that it was unnecessary to expect a planet between Mars and Jupiter, astronomers in the same year discovered Ceres, the first-detected of the Planetoids. A good deal has been made out of this trifle; but it has not yet been shown that the corroboration was anything but the _luck_ of the other hypothesis.]

[Footnote 2: _Vermischte Schriften_, vol. ii. p. 520. Duboc was a retired hatter, of French origin, who had settled at Hamburg (Hegel's _Briefe_, ii. 76 seqq.).]

[Footnote 3: _Werke_, x. I, p. 131.]

[Footnote 4: _Werke,_ xi. p. 21.]