This was an interesting read.

I will start with this:

“But even these luminaries [Desmond and O’Regan] seem curiously gloomed by Hegel’s shade. There is a palpable, almost anxious, urgency about their negative verdict against Hegel’s use for Catholic theology. He is not just wrong about this or that. He is corrupt to the core. In nearly every conceivable way Hegel’s speculative philosophy erects a “counterfeit” god, a “Doppelgänger” of the original. He is “heterodox” to such a degree that it is an “impossibility” to read not just his principal writings, but his entire oeuvre in a Christian manner.”

This is where we need to start. There is something just not quite right about Hegel’s god-talk. One does not have to have atheistic biases to notice this. One needs to explain what strikes a careful reader as being out of joint. One cannot pretend that all is right in Denmark when Hegel begins to speak about god.

The author goes on:

“At times the rhetoric even slips into the realm of ill intent. Hegel’s speculative retelling of the biblical narrative “masquerades as authentically Christian and masks its anti-Christian bias and ethos.” He “articulates nothing less than a kind of post-Christian Christianity that exists as a kind of Trojan horse within the representational discourse of Christianity.” O’Regan sympathizes with von Balthasar that “in the end Hegel is a seducer,” whose very manner of speaking constitutes “a mode of theological discourse that has to be resisted at all costs.” Hegel lures us into “a bewitchment,” Desmond warns, “complete with the god that we have created for ourselves to adore, and the becalmed bewitchment feels it no longer needs to go beyond itself.”

Here we get the suspicion that was already in the air in Hegel’s time. So, even with all his efforts to disguise the difficulty with his heterodox rendering of the Christian tradition there are those ready to burn Hegel at the stake. These subtle thinkers who have read Hegel’s lectures on religion are able to see through the subterfuge. They are not ready to buy into Hegel’s speculative reworking of the tradition. 

However, because they are not speculative thinkers they are unable to see the problem as anything other than a being unfaithful to the true history. They are unable to comprehend what it is that makes Hegel’s thought truly dangerous.

That the infinite remains infinite even as it empties into finitude may be viewed as the power of the infinite as god to bear its own negativity. But this would be to reify god as a substance that withstands becoming a self-generating subject.

It would be to misunderstand Hegel’s absolute as a substance-like thing that withstands rather than emerges from its own self-generating activity.

For Hegel, the negativity inherent to absolute substance dissolves the substance qua substance leaving only the negativity that as subject generates itself.

This is why this infinite process is often utilized in a death of god narrative. God dies so that reason as human rational self-generating activity might emerge in its place.

What dies is the god of religion as the appropriate expression of the speculative infinite. What appears through this death is the spiritual community which in turn gives way to absolute knowing as made evident in the Phenomenology.

Now it is understandable why someone might call such a narrative a corruption. But as with all his narratives - for example, the master/slave, faith and pure insight, and the beautiful soul - Hegel is not offering a history. He is offering an allegory about the interaction between common and speculative reason.

Any attempt to critique Hegel by measuring his narrative against the true teaching of the Church simply is missing the point. It is a critique that treats truth as an absolute by which Hegel’s own rendering of truth might be measured.

Hegel’s truth is a truth that as true to itself is indifferent to a truth alien to its own self-rendering.

One might wonder what gives Hegel the right to ignore a truth other than his own.

He would respond: independent truths are matters of empirical interest. And this would even include the independent truth that is Church doctrine.

While one might view these “higher” truths as rational. For Hegel, because they are not self-generated they are irrational or dogmatic truths.

The image of man seeking to become one with such higher truths that transcend man is the very kind of rational activity that Hegel rejects. There are not metaphysical truths or truths beyond the phenomenal realm. Absolute truth does not lie beyond but is generated within the phenomenal realm.

The absolute as a self-generated infinitude abides its own finitude since only by means of finite activity is there an infinite activity. Only by means of a finite activity that turns on itself is there an activity that generates what becomes recognizable as infinite or absolute form.

Catholics have a dogma to defend. Their interest is not speculative. The truth of their dogma is based in revelation. Revelation has no role to play in speculative truth.

The author of this article observes that according to Hegel:

“In the incarnation God shows himself neither mere infinite nor mere finite spirit, but the concrete identity of both at once. And he becomes their identity, notice, without obliterating their essential difference. So testifies his resurrection, anyway. This proves to human spirit that God in himself, in eternity, must also exist in such a way that absolute identity and difference are sublated. In Christ, they are concretely one.”

Apparently, the author takes this gloss of Hegel to be an explanation when in fact it is better read as a riddle in need of being solved. What does it mean that god is neither merely infinite nor merely finite? What does it mean to say that absolute identity and difference are sublated and concretely one in Christ? This most obscure pronouncement in an article meant to enlighten Catholic skeptics gives this skeptical reader nothing to hang on to.

The author seems unaware that this gloss could just as easily be part of a death of god narrative of the incarnation.

The author goes on to try to save Hegel by linking him to the mystics for whom god is within man, or god is what transcends the limit between the finite and infinite, or finally, god is both god and man. That such an understanding creates an unresolved tension (creates a riddle to be solved) between god as immanent and god as transcendent seems fine with such thinkers. It gives them their mystical sheen. This is where they finish, while it is where Hegel begins.

The author in his plea then makes the point to be made from the point of view of one stream of the tradition: “Dare we reread Hegel as remembering, or at least helping us to remember, basic and perennial tensions in our own dogmatic theology—perhaps some we would rather forget altogether?”

Hegel is being celebrated for manifesting “basic and perennial tensions” rather than offering a speculative way to resolve such tensions, a way that moves reason from conceiving the absolute as an ultimate substance to conceiving it as a self-generating subject within which the tensions are responsible for the progress of this self-conflicted thinking, a thinking that progress by paradoxically turning upon itself.

I suspect most Catholic readers will not be moved by this defense of Hegel.

• Alan