The Orthodox Hegel Development Further Developed

Stephen Theron pdf download

https://ebookgate.com/product/the-orthodox-hegel-development-further-developed-stephen-theron/

★★★★★ 4.6/5.0 (23 reviews) ✓ 123 downloads ■ TOP RATED

"Fantastic PDF quality, very satisfied with download!" - Emma W.

DOWNLOAD EBOOK
 The Orthodox Hegel Development Further Developed Stephen
Theron pdf download

TEXTBOOK EBOOK EBOOK GATE

Available Formats

■ PDF eBook Study Guide TextBook

EXCLUSIVE 2025 EDUCATIONAL COLLECTION - LIMITED TIME

INSTANT DOWNLOAD VIEW LIBRARY

Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) available
Download now and explore formats that suit you...

Hegel and the Arts 1st Edition Stephen Houlgate

https://ebookgate.com/product/hegel-and-the-arts-1st-edition-stephen-
houlgate/

ebookgate.com

Least Developed Countries Report 2007 The Knowledge

Technological Learning and Innovation for Development
Least Developed Countries Series 2007th Edition United
Nations
https://ebookgate.com/product/least-developed-countries-
report-2007-the-knowledge-technological-learning-and-innovation-for-
development-least-developed-countries-series-2007th-edition-united-
nations/
ebookgate.com

A Companion to Hegel 1st Edition Stephen Houlgate

https://ebookgate.com/product/a-companion-to-hegel-1st-edition-
stephen-houlgate/

ebookgate.com

Scala High Performance Programming 1st Edition Theron

https://ebookgate.com/product/scala-high-performance-programming-1st-
edition-theron/

ebookgate.com
Guide to company liquidation 1st Edition Liesle Theron

https://ebookgate.com/product/guide-to-company-liquidation-1st-
edition-liesle-theron/

ebookgate.com

Hegel s introduction to the System encyclopaedia

phenomenology and psychology 1st Edition Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel
https://ebookgate.com/product/hegel-s-introduction-to-the-system-
encyclopaedia-phenomenology-and-psychology-1st-edition-georg-wilhelm-
friedrich-hegel/
ebookgate.com

The Sacred and the Profane Environmental Anthropology of

Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity Environmental Anthropology
of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity 1st Edition Gebrehiwot
Gebreslassie Zesu
https://ebookgate.com/product/the-sacred-and-the-profane-
environmental-anthropology-of-ethiopian-orthodox-christianity-
environmental-anthropology-of-ethiopian-orthodox-christianity-1st-
edition-gebrehiwot-gebreslassie-zesu/
ebookgate.com

Orthodox constructions of the West 1st Edition George E.

Demacopoulos

https://ebookgate.com/product/orthodox-constructions-of-the-west-1st-
edition-george-e-demacopoulos/

ebookgate.com

Sustainable Urban Development Reader 3rd Edition Stephen

M. Wheeler

https://ebookgate.com/product/sustainable-urban-development-
reader-3rd-edition-stephen-m-wheeler/

ebookgate.com
The Orthodox Hegel
The Orthodox Hegel

Development Further Developed

By

Stephen Theron
The Orthodox Hegel: Development Further Developed

By Stephen Theron

This book first published 2014

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2014 by Stephen Theron

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-6754-3

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6754-2
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1

Chapter One ............................................................................................... 15

Hegel “the New Theologian”

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 50

Accomplishing Religion

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 71

Leap of Mind

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 75

Levels of Discourse

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 91

Logic and the World

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 114

Logic is the Form of the World

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 127

Aristotle and Hegel

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 134

Subject-Predicate Logic

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 148

Meaning

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 151

Predicate Presupposition
vi Table of Contents

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 154

On Being as Subject

Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 163

Philosophy Fulfils, Absorbs, Takes up and Puts by Theology

Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 178

Reason as Revelation, Revelation as Reason: Man the Mystery

Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 197

Aspects of Rinaldi’s Review of a Volume of Essays by Ken Foldes
in Hegelstudien 2006

Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 204

Rinaldi on Winfield on Hegel’s Account of Religion: Hegel a True
Philosopher of Religion

Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 243

Self, the Other, Infinity

Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 263

The Necessity in the Content of the Absolute Picture-Idea

Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 273

Revealed Religion

Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 295

Our Deepest Fires

Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 310

“All things are a Judgment”: Hegel on Subject and Predicate

Chapter Twenty-One ............................................................................... 333

Renaissance Scholasticism as Mediating Hegel’s Thought

Chapter Twenty-Two............................................................................... 355

Immortality

Chapter Twenty-Three............................................................................. 387

Hegel at Christmas: Soundings

Scientific Postscript ................................................................................. 395

 PREFACE

The present book recapitulates while developing further and with more
systematic focus the material of our four previous studies exploring
Hegel’s account of “the method” of philosophy, one, principally, of
absorbing while transforming, in a genuine praxis, which Hegel calls “the
whole task of philosophy”, religion and its objects, typically mind, cosmos
and spirit. These studies, New Hegelian Essays (2012), From Narrative to
Necessity (2012), Reason’s Developing Self-Revelation (2013) and Hegel’s
Philosophy of Universal Reconciliation (2013), have all been issued by
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Hegel wrote from within this ongoing tradition and movement of the
spirit, of Geist, become absolute, in his view, in a historical Christianity1
not abstractly separate from experience as “the real author of growth and
advance in philosophy2. In calling Christianity “the absolute religion” he
implies, by his own principles, that it is not a religion merely, since
religion, like art as prior to it, is a transient form of that Absolute Spirit
self-accomplished or perfected in philosophy. As such it might,
alternatively, be called “religion itself” (de Lubac), but included now in
philosophy viewed as supreme Gottesdienst. The last is first, so to say, or
vice versa. He shows, that is to say, how philosophy, as final wisdom,
absorbs and perfects (“accomplishes”) theology and religion as being, he
says, its whole object.3 They share, that is, the fate of the Object as such in

1
Here we must bear in mind that his account of history itself is undeviatingly
dialectical, the play of absolute mind setting itself up with its “own result” in view.
It is germane, I consider, to view this account as suggested by or even as an
interpretative development of the Letter to the Romans, 9-11, by Paul of Tarsus.
Cf. his Preface to the Philosophy of History lectures, regrettably omitted from
some translations.
2
Hegel, The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (hereafter “Enc.”),
“Introduction”, paragraph 12. This is the Introduction to the whole tripartite
Encyclopaedia and not only to the Logic (first part), as the layout of the Wallace
translation (OUP) used here might suggest.
3
For systematic exposition of this view see Georges van Riet’s “The Problem of
God in Hegel”, read in Latin at a Thomistic Congress held at Rome half a century
ago before appearing in French in the Révue de métaphysique et morale (Louvain)
and in U.S. English translation in Philosophy Today, vol. XI, 1967.
viii Preface

the development of his dialectic (Enc.194-212), absorption, namely, in the

Absolute Idea.
It belongs equally to this view, therefore, that history has not merely
reached its end, as it has recently been claimed to have done in successful
capitalism, which should now go on and on. This inversion of the Marxist
view is manifestly magical, a fantasy. Rather, any idea of a temporal
process becoming absolute implies, it will be shown, the speculative
absorption of history itself, along, as we just said, with the object as such.
History is indistinguishable from that dialectical method which is itself the
Idea, establishing as it does the “ideality” (Enc. 95) of the finite as such.
Movement become absolute is the “vanishing of vanishing”, of becoming,
like Hegelian being, in its own notion. In general, Hegel claims, “no
speculative principle can be correctly expressed by any such prepositional
form”, even given that such self-referential refutation must “give rise to
reasonable objection” as promoting the unity, in our predication, over the
difference of the “inherent unrest” that this unity is.
The contrary view, stressing the exoteric primacy of objective religion,
as presented in particular in C.S. Lewis’s apologetic writings, is discussed
in the Postscript to this present book. It was also discussed in the opening
chapter, “No Regress from the Hegelian Wood”4, of the first of these five
books. An immediate ancestor of the view, with its call for a regress, was
Chesterton’s powerfully argued Orthodoxy of 1908, mediating that whole
abstractly supernaturalist account within which religion, contrary to its
infinite quality as spirit, gets objectified, the outward at the expense of the
inward, as if these were not both the same. In such thought, namely, the
rationality or, at least, reasonableness of faith itself, “thinking with
assent”5, is set against any absorption of it into speculative reason. The
Outside of history, in a word, is opposed, as it were victoriously, to the
Inside of speculation in mind’s own self-consciousness. In this sense
religion is the opposite of the mystical, which, nonetheless, it expressly
honours as “the way”.
That is to say, here, in Lewis or Chesterton, the exoteric is abstractly
separated from the esoteric. The truth is, rather, that since “religion is for
all men” (Hegel) it is also for philosophers, while it is belongs to religion’s
spirit that not only all men collectively but religion in itself should and
does aspire to its self-transcendence in the perfection of wisdom and
contemplation which is truly wisdom, sophia, and should love and honour
it (philo-sophia) as spirit transcending all literal or written or even vocal

4
This recalls Lewis’s title, The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for
Christianity, Reason and Romanticism, of 1933.
5
Cf. From Narrative to Necessity, Chapter One.
 The Orthodox Hegel ix

representation since, as Hegel shortly says, in speculative self-contradiction,

“all predications are false”.6 This is philosophy (consolatrix) speaking.
That is, in short, Christianity, or perfected philosophy, is “democratic” as
calling all men and women to an aristocracy of spirit, an entering on the
narrow path, which, in proportion as it is looked for, will be found. The
esoteric is made thus an exoteric goal, as the modern and post-Hegelian
democratic movements illustrate. Spirit, thus revealing what was ever its
nature, is shed abroad, poured out on all flesh. There are no “experts”, as
the prophets (Joel, Jeremiah) had foreseen, unless of course we should
vote for them. No one, that is, is to be fobbed off with parables against his
better judgment. Like time itself, as Hegel says, these are useful for the
spirit for only so “long” as spirit needs them though, in a sense, we all
need them, as “poetry is necessary for life” or music “the food of love”.
Against this “silver” of objectification we have set and defended the
opposite, “golden” task of “understanding spiritual things spiritually” (St.
Paul), whereby such spiritual things become the whole matter of (“first”)
philosophy and wisdom, making the latter, therefore, holy in the sense of
absolute (sancta sophia). The task of philosophy, thus viewed, is one of
alignment with Absolute Mind seen as one with its self-thought. This is
both its form and its matter. Thus in true self-expression as I, as subject,
Hegel reasons, we cannot merely mean (meinen), as it were in private
opinion, saying what is just mine (meine) but must “legislate for the
universe” or, rather, in sober truth be it, since “I” cannot but name the
“universal of universals”, where all are one in supra-organic union of
spirit.7 The word “theology”, theologia in Aristotle’s Greek, cannot
therefore be naming anything else or other than this task of the spirit,
wisdom. The “religious” dilemma of “above” or “below” is here
transcended or absorbed, since wisdom is necessarily “according to the
whole”, kat’holon, catholic. It follows that “religion itself” transcends its
religious moment, “brings to nought the things which are”, in a word, as
its own mystical tradition ever exemplifies.8
In his Surprised by Joy, Chapter Fourteen, “Checkmate”, Lewis relates
how he progressed, regressed rather (in his own special, affirmative sense
of that term) from Hegelian theism (the Absolute) to a belief in God “as a

6
Regarding this topic, see our critical remarks on John Finnis’s handling of
“contradiction in performance” in the final “Scientific Postscript” to this present
book.
7
This is most clearly set forth, as interpreting Hegel, in Chapter Two,
“Immortality”, of J.M.E. McTaggart’s Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology
(Cambridge 1901).
8
For Hegel on mysticism, cf. Enc. 82 and add.
x Preface

person” with whom one could be in relation. This distinction is prior to

and independent of his coming to confess Christ as divine or “Son of
God”. On this restrictedly philosophical plane Lewis wants to claim that
Hegel’s absolute idealism only adds “mystifications to the simple,
workable, theistic idealism of Berkeley”. The verbal coincidence with
Marx’s verdict on Hegel (though Marx had no use for Berkeley) as
mystifying is striking and, I judge, thus far a bad sign. There is, he says
here, “no possibility of being in a personal relation” even with Berkeley’s
God, however, as there is with what he mocks himself for having
dismissively called “the god of popular religion”.9
Hegel’s position, by contrast, is that the God philosophy reveals is the
same as this God of popular religion, that it perfects the popular
representation of this same absolute Idea, accomplishing it as knowledge
and absolute knowledge, as what he calls the Concept, which includes
everything as its “moments”. This is the same God understood in or
according to spirit. “It is the lesson of Christianity that God is spirit”. As
to being in a relation to him, we have nothing else so fundamentally to
relate ourselves to as this relation that annihilates both self and relation, in
what we call identity10. Hence we encounter God, the absolute concept, in
our neighbour as in ourselves, as both same and other. We love “as” self,
as following the “commandment”, what is self, viz. the other, and this is
the sole foundation for the commandment’s “naturalness”. That is, the
normative here is ipso facto “factual”, and, still more, vice versa, a
position at least approached in the adage “Become what you are”.11 As
theory is praxis, the highest (Aristotle), so praxis is theory (Marx). That is,
I am you. This “second” commandment states or itself shows, rather, if we
accept it, that the abstractly individual self is purely phenomenal, as in
Hegel’s thought, where there is no absolute inter-subjectivity between
finite subjects but Subjectivity itself, the Idea, of which each is a
“moment” and finally ideal or self-transcending.12 So we cannot ourselves
constitute one of the terms in such a two-part relation, nor could anything.

9
Hegel expressly distinguishes his own “absolute idealism” from the “subjective
idealism” of Berkeley, Kant or Fichte, which he calls “abstract, empty idealism”,
which “merely takes reason as reason appears at first”, declaring “that everything
is its own” (Hegel: The Phenomenology of Mind, tr. Baillie, Harper Torch, New
York 1966, p.279; cp. Enc. 42-46).
10
Cf. Hegel, Enc. 50 (Part I, “The Science of Logic”).
11
Compare “Do what you are doing” (age quod agis) or, for short, “Get on with
it”. Hegel insists that speculative reason is found at the most common level of
human thinking and behaviour, of the child in the “first” instance.
12
Cf. Enc.95.
 The Orthodox Hegel xi

For the same reason, God on his side, which is not a side but the whole,
has no real relation with us, since it is only “in” him, as one with him
indeed, “that we live and move and have our being”. This, Lewis had the
means of knowing and surely did know, is the teaching of Thomas
Aquinas as rooted in Augustine (“You were with me but I was not with
you”), St. Paul and the prophets of Israel. Aquinas compares the situation
with that of a man’s relation to an immobile pillar, now to the right of it,
now to the left, while the pillar has no such corresponding relation, being
rather, if we take the pillar now as God, the man’s own end in which, as
“finished”, he is absorbed and, it might seem, done away with. This “ruin
of the individual”, in Hegel’s vision, however, is merely the transcendence
of abstract thinking. “I” is “the universal of universals” and our job, he
says, consists simply in realising this, the knowing of God, in Scriptural
terms, which “is eternal life”.
What this comes down to, as implying it, is that Lewis’s idea of “mere
Christianity” is all too like an abstraction of Christianity from its
indwelling spirit of infinite development leading into all truth. This is to
confound the development in purification of an idea with its germ in its
beginnings, as Hegel expresses this error. The ecumenical motive
doubtless driving Lewis should rather drive us forward in development, as
explored in this book. Ecumenical thinking, formally endorsed also by the
Roman leadership at the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (1962-
1964), does not indeed “overthrow the nature of an opinion”13 It rather
transforms it, as all is transformed and idealised in the Absolute Idea,
which, Hegel shows, at one with traditional thought here, is the Absolute
itself. That a divine idea is one with the divine essence is a thesis of
Aquinas, for example.
One might say, indeed, that Lewis refused the task that Hegel both
undertook and accomplished. After his apparent humiliation at the hands
of Miss Anscombe, as she was then known as, at Oxford’s “Socratic Club”
in 194814, who here “only did what she thought was her duty”15, Lewis’s

13
The phrase is from. Gregory XVI’s condemnation of “liberalism” in Mirari vos
(c.1831).
14
Lewis had embraced a distinction of Samuel Alexander’s (Space, Time and
Deity) corresponding to that of Aquinas between the id quid or object of perception
and the id quo as species or idea, never itself perceived, whereby the former is
perceived (Summa theol. 1, 85, 2). Will and mind intend the real, as would be
impossible by a mere natural process. Thought, like truth, was transcendently
“valid”, Lewis wrote in Miracles, an expression to which Anscombe objected.
Lewis accepted this and rewrote parts of his text accordingly. For Hegel, however,
transcending both sides of this dispute, objects neither lose nor gain in reality if
xii Preface

greatness as the “wounded Christian”, doggedly but beautifully expressing

his loyalty to “the heavenly vision”, emerges more clearly as an alternative
vocation to or version of this task, however:

But four babies playing a game can make a play-world that licks your real
world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on
Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like
a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia…16

This alternative, qua alternative, does not arise in Absolute Idealism.

History, again, is dethroned, absorbed as, logically, it must be, in the
infinite and absolute, in the Idea, as the very fiction of “Puddleglum”,
Lewis’s ability to conceive him, who takes just this stand, well indicates.
We are all on the side of Puddleglum, or Aslan (they are the same),
inasmuch as we are not abstractly just ourselves in finite subjectivity. Here
art maintains and transfigures itself precisely as absorbed into philosophy
and the one defeated is equally the victor. Lewis, in fact, was too close to
Hegel to see what the latter was saying, to find his way out of that maze or
“wood” which he himself was. One should only add that his real target
should have been the British Hegelians, minus at least McTaggart, and not
Hegel himself, honest and loyal Lutheran as he, by the argument in these

their unity is “transferred to the subject”. The content is no more objective than
subjective, and it “does no good to the things merely to say that they have being”.
Being, rather, is the absolute, self-knowing Idea against which it is customarily
distinguished. No doubt Berkeley was working towards this, which quite obviates
that need for a dualism between nature and the supernatural which Lewis had
assumed to be necessary. The former rather is absorbed or taken up into the latter,
as the free or infinite necessity of which consciousness of miracle is a first
intuition. Thus the final or eucharistic miracle is a or the “mystery of faith”, in
principle imperceptible, as spiritual interpretation, rather, or the idea that is the
thing, the thing the idea.
15
The late philosopher Peter Geach, Anscombe’s husband, said these words to the
author in the late 1970s at Leeds. Geach, understandably, retained a preoccupation
with C.S. Lewis up into his last years. He wrote in one of his last letters to me, as
his former student, that he had systematically reread his “religious” and
philosophical writings, adding that he found many “bad” arguments. On this one
might observe that an analogy is not yet an argument, while all the same all
argument is from or by analogy with the so-called “argument form”, itself an
argument, with which it is “on all fours”. Cf. P.T. Geach: Reason and Argument
(Oxford 1976) or our own “Argument Forms and Argument from Analogy”, Acta
Philosophica, Rome, 1997, pp. 303-310.
16
Puddleglum in The Silver Chair, speaking to the witch in that story, as cited in
A.N. Wilson’s biography, C.S. Lewis, London 1990, pp.226-7.
 The Orthodox Hegel xiii

pages at least, can be seen to have been. Again, it is thought that thinks
itself. There can be no further validation. Hence, “the spiritual man judges
all things”. In fact, Lewis’s argument aimed at saying just this, in profound
if at that time still unconscious agreement with Anscombe on the
necessary right of unaided logic. A deep truth lies hidden here, which no
writer has come further in unravelling than Hegel. Of course then it affects
the terms in which “the existence of God” is discussed.
 INTRODUCTION

We first focus here upon a consideration that constantly forces itself upon
attention but is not commonly subjected to philosophical treatment, since
it is difficult to form conceptions of something itself distinguished against
all of which we can form concepts. I mean existence as opposite to or at
least different from essence, different especially, therefore, from the
essence of existence in particular, from any “existentialism”.
Every word of language, every phrase or linguistic context
indifferently, names a concept. “This”, “man” and “this man” are thus
three names for concepts, which are yet not thereby themselves three or of
any number whatever. “Number” itself names a concept and ultimately all
words, as naming thought(s), name the concept, name thought itself
inasmuch as naming, the positing of an arbitrary symbol, is work of
thought itself ever naming itself in and as act, energeia, “the inward which
is quite to the fore”.1 This is the identity in difference in which all coheres
in the coherent Idea knowing only itself, self-conscious spirit or mind. The
concepts themselves are acts (of mind). “Substance” names a grammatical
concept or finitely logical category. “Essence as grammar”, Wittgenstein
rightly suggested. Finally, however, substance, however particularised, is
act, the self-conceiving concept. Substance, that is, is verb, verbum, as the
subject is the predicate. Identity is in the difference thus posited in duality
and this Hegel calls the falsity of all judgments. This underlies the final or
speculative “stage of Positive Reason”, apprehending “the unity of
determinations in their opposition”2. The verb names and acts act. One act
names and absorbs all other conceivable acts and this, again, is the
Concept, conceiving itself alone, actus actuum, what Hegel calls Absolute
Knowledge. This knowledge has no other subject, which means that there
is, necessarily, no absolute other, as is further developed, logically
develops itself, in Hegel’s science of logic, of which he has left two
written accounts, The Science of Logic (1818) and the first part (1830) of
the later tripartite Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, which
bears the same name.

1
Hegel, Encyclopaedia (hereafter Enc.) 143, addition (hereafter “add.).
2
Ibid. 82. W. Wallace’s translation amended as dictated to students by J.
Kockelmans, autumn 1967.
2 Introduction

Also names of individuals are names of concepts, included in the

Concept as is proper to “the ideality of the finite”3. The Concept is the
Idea’s “principle”4. The names themselves are, as occurring, phenomenal
only. I bear my name as bestowed, as moving among phenomena while
transcending them. Or, it is my or a phenomenal name. The scholastic
“second intention” or suppositio materialis, a name in self-reference, is
continuous with as included in any other intention in self-consciousness.
This, ultimately, is why “self-referentiality”5 is not a particular logical
error but the very mark of speculative logic, thought and discourse. Or we
may say that it is proper to a name to be used in the mention and
mentioned in the use.
The Speculative is the third “stage of positive Reason” (Vernünft),
succeeding upon “Thought as Understanding” (Verstand) and Dialectical
Scepticism as uniting and absorbing them. Thus the first form of logic
“can at will be elicited from” Speculative Reason, from “the reason-
world”, as was in fact done by Aristotle, for example.6
The German practice of indifferently writing a capital for a common as
for a proper noun is purely a convention, just as is the English
differentiation. Thus we can refer to Fido either as “Fido” or as “this dog
here”. The expression “this individual” supposes previous identification,
right or wrong, of an or rather the class of individuals. It is though, after
all, not clear that one cannot have, or that there cannot be, a concept of any
individual considered. Thus the name “God”, says Aquinas, can be equally
viewed as a nomen naturae, equivalent to (the) godhead, or as personal or
“proper”. “The deity”, like “his worship” (for judges) and so on, hovers
uncertainly between the two, and this situation instances concrete
universality. Thus a child, say, has leave, logically, to name properly
anything whatever, the adult to restrict himself to a phrase such as “this
particular instance” or thing. Childishly, no doubt, we may address, with
personal pronoun, in love or anger, any concrete (or abstract) object
whatever. Upon this facility hinges the whole debate between theism and
atheism.

3
Ibid. 95.
4
Ibid. 213. It is in view of this that Hegel in the “addition” here brackets even the
third of the three sections of Logic, viz. the Concept, with the first two, being and
Essence, as “dialectical” and hence nothing permanent but leading up to as
“dynamic elements of the idea”.
5
Cf., for the sense of this term, the discussion of a paper by John Finnis in the
section “Scientific Postscript”, below, concluding this work.
6
G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia (hereafter “Enc.”), 82.
 The Orthodox Hegel 3

Nonetheless, judgments of existence are possible. Further, even if all

existents are individuals yet not all individuals exist, unless we stipulate
that a dead ancestor, or Hamlet, is not an individual. Contrariwise, there
certainly seem to be individual acts of thought or conception, unless we go
on to deny the real existence of individuals abstracted from their
universality in the Idea, as Hegel does. That is to say, he finds existence
itself to be a purely momentary or finite category of thought. It may
equally be argued that all judgments are judgments of existence. There
occurs a formal identification of two supposits in one concept, of which
one says that it is. Hegel, however, imports the distinction between “mere”
correctness and truth, which we would here abstract from, into logic itself
(cf. EL 166-171).
The existence of the subject is all the same a different matter. Thus it is
not, strictly, as Hegel points out, something that can be caused, since this
would require the subject to exist before or without existing, in order to be
said to be caused. The prime instance of this is talk of persons having been
born or of persons, “reincarnation” apart, before they were born or, more
simply, of “before Abraham was”. This last evangelical utterance is
completed, as addressing just this error, with “I am”, in speculative
disregard of the grammatical principle of “sequence of tenses”.
This is the objection, concerning caused subjective existence, that Peter
Geach tried to meet, at the same time as defining creating as against mere
making, when he wrote, concerning the notion of any created entity, that it
will be true of it that

There is just one A; and God brought it about that (Ex)(x is an A) and for no
x did God bring it about that x is an A; and c is an A.7

This may make logically perspicuous what is said when, say, creation (of
self or another indifferently) is asserted. Positively, it is the denial of
antecedent matter. But if I make myself an object thus, as in Geach’s
formula, it is no longer I that is referred to, as it is in “I feel sick” or “I will
not let you down”. The first person of the future tense changes the sense,
therefore, of that tense. So no one can apply the formula about the object c
to himself, without some modification at least. Even if I substitute “I am”
for “c is” (an A), wishing to state that God created me, I says no more in
kind than if I say I am a chess-player as well as Johnny is a chess-player.
We both might be two non-existent, merely lexical dragons. Existential

7
P.T. Geach, God and the Soul, p.83.
4 Introduction

import is thus a myth. Hume was so far right against Descartes. “I” names
subjectivity and not the thinking subject in pure individuality. It is, says
Hegel, the universal of universals and only for just that reason individual
and also particular simultaneously. This consideration, of course,
invalidates Geach’s whole formulation inasmuch as it depends upon the,
we here see, unwarranted “existential quantifier”. Existence has no
essence, true, but neither has essence any existence. Both are, rather,
superseded in the Idea. Alternatively, we can reduce ex-istence to its
etymological root as meaning a standing out (ex-sistere) from the rest. In
this case, though, it denotes any abstracted concept and thus, as Hegel
says, “Existence adds nothing to the things”.
So, ultimately no one and nothing ever causes anything or anyone, as
bringing them about or even bringing “it” about that they are. The whole
causal universe is a self-contradictory phenomenon and is nothing other
than this false appearance, a falsity that is the essence of the finite.
Nothing “lies behind” it, as if “in itself”, to stand beside or limit the
absolute. The scholastic plura entia sed non plus entis, that the creation
posits “more beings but not more being”, does no more than pose the
problem of this contradictory presentation of the abstract understanding
(Verstand) in its own terms. It is, though, a wilful presentation, a self-
veiling (so as to unveil, re-veal) from within even, of the Idea itself, so
that, or rather in that, truth emerges as “its own result”, as self-
authenticating, as, in Hegel’s phrase, “the method”. The absolute is this
method, since it cannotlogically tolerate any means to an end not “yet”
realised. The Idea, that is, is result of itself, as falsity is the necessary foil
of truth. Otherwise the Idea, impossibly, would be contingent, sheer
“facticity”, still passive to something else. The falsity is presupposed to
the true, as evil to the good, Hegel claims, and this is the very opposite of
that “logical Manichaeism” of which Geach, with whatever right, accuses
Frege. Evil and falsity, for Hegel as for Aquinas, are of themselves in a
good and true subject, semper in subjecto, are never themselves absolute.
Thus when Hegel says there is evil in God as well as good he means
that the former is necessarily presupposed to the latter, as, differently, we
have just seen, the latter is to the former. This leads him on to say,
“unspiritually” (his own word), that good and evil are “the same”. Just as
we, at the phenomenal level, form erroneous beliefs here and there, for
which, at the same level, we are even responsible, so, as the ground of
their phenomenality, absolute mind “intends objects in an initially
 The Orthodox Hegel 5

inadequate way via our finite minds” (T.L. Sprigge8, citing Royce’s
account of what McTaggart calls our systematic misperception). But what
are or could be finite minds is our question here?9
We begin by wanting to ask: who or what first “gave” us ourselves, as
in geometry we speak of “the given”, the axioms, before attempting any
proof whatever. If each man is his own self there is no essence of that self
as such, since this objectifies the subject, in self-contradiction. Hence
abstractly individual subjectivity, represented by a “term”, must be
transcended in thought and thus “cancelled” (Hegel’s term) as objectifying
abstraction. Subjectivity transcends it in the Idea. The “I who is” is thus no
longer I since he has his other within himself and becomes it, is indeed
that becoming, ceaselessly, from which alone mind, spirit, the dialectic
and its method flow as themselves originating it. This is the original exitus
and reditus, the physical representing the logical rather than set in contrast
to it, as the logical is itself the final truth of the physical, the natural
(physis). Mind in itself, that is, has no “phenomenology”, since its
phenomenology is by definition just what is not “had” or, simply, is not. In
any “phenomenology of mind” (Hegel’s title), therefore, we ascend out of
phenomenology, as Hegel himself demonstrated. So, he will finally state,
in dying as our own act we ascend out of life and hence “become universal
self-consciousness”.10 This is what the senses represent, as themselves
representations of non- or supra-sensual spirit, according to the analysis of
sense-consciousness in the initial section of The Phenomenology of Mind.
The implication is that nothing is lost or left behind, or that what is left
behind is nothing, that death, in a word, is spiritual resurrection. The “Way
of the Cross” as represented in religion (Hegel’s subject here) is not,
insofar as it is anything, an abstracted means merely.
So in proposing this approach to the question, just raised, of the self one
attempts a new language, but only incidentally. Thus one must counter
G.E.M. Anscombe’s assertion that the self is not a proper subject for

8
Timothy L. S. Sprigge, “The Absolute”, in Dictionary of Ontology and
Metaphysics (ed. Burkhardt & Smith), Munich 1991, p.2.
9
Compare here Hegel’s account of the Kantian antinomies as showing, not some
deficiency of reason, but that “the body of cosmical fact, the specific statements
descriptive of which run into contradiction, cannot be a self-subsistent reality, but
only an appearance” (Enc. 48).
10
Cf. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), Harper Torchbooks, New
York 1966, pp.780-781: “the pure or non-actual Spirit of bare thought has become
actual” in “spiritual resurrection”. It is “the particular existence” that “becomes
universal self-consciousness”, sublating our factuality as logic itself declares.
6 Introduction

philosophical investigation, not “an important philosophical topic”.11 By

contrast, Hegel sees what is termed mysticism as rooted in the same
speculative discourse, in “the Reason-world” (EL82 add.). Self is
inadequately treated, is not considered, when regarded as mere condition
or point of departure for experience. This Kantian view had, however, the
merit of showing that self is not just another contingency, as in what we
might call the thoughtless attitude. There is however a thought behind such
thoughtlessness, namely the intuition that I am not my self exclusively,
that such an object cannot be meant, though we “try”, says Hegel, to mean
it. I, rather, is (am!) the universal of universals and, as such, not counted
among names or even, philosophically, among pronouns. “I” used in a
simple future tense, for example, typically affects and thus controls the
whole sense of the verb, as do claims about subjective feelings and
thoughts. Wittgenstein, too, can seem to have tried to eliminate this truth
in his denial of a private language. This, Hegel would have retorted, is a
point about the finitude of language and not about thought or subjectivity
as such. It does not exclude solipsism, as Wittgenstein himself realised.
The solipsist does not understand why everyone else, as he supposes, is
not a solipsist too. The only solution open, this shows, is to see that self is
absolute, in which all coincide, is itself, we might say, “neither one nor
many” or, equivalently, both of these. “I am you”, so you are I. This is the
original basis of love, derived by Thomas Aquinas, only reputedly realist,
from “the analogy of being”. Each is to his being in a similar, “properly
proportional” (Cajetan) way, Hegel’s “identity in difference”. But we are
not here dealing with the instantiation of a concept, not even that of
analogy, which is itself analogous. It is in this situation, as we have
outlined it, that Hegel states that “all judgments are false”, an apparent
self-contradiction in performance, which, however, he possesses the
means for disarming.

So on idealist premises, as Hume pointed out, we have no reason to admit

a private self that endures through the succession of experiences we call
our own, relying on memory. Yet it is indeed our memory, not someone
else’s, we rely on, though our assurance here merely begs the question.
Where otherwise is the unity of experience or, indeed, anything to talk
about, language being constitutionally drawn from the pit (Hegel) of our

11
Elizabeth Anscombe, “Twenty Opinions Common among Modern Anglo-
American Philosophers”, in the Acts of the International Congress of Moral
Theology, Rome, April 1986, Città Nuova Editrice, pp.49-51.
 The Orthodox Hegel 7

memory? Hegel compares this pit to a pyramid. Who lies buried,

mummified, within there? Or if, with Augustine, we find God in the
memory, then how can it be ours exclusively? Psychologists postulate
archetypes, a “collective unconscious”. There is nothing unconscious
about it, however. “All nature is akin and the soul has learned everything”
(Plato, Meno). Do not ask whose soul? Plato is speaking of soul, spirit,
mind, of which nature is the product. This is what relates or identifies
every part of it to or with every otherwise other part, making it “akin”, all
of a piece, as one Word, in the ancient usage. This is the presupposition of
“science” too, that nature, inclusive of even whatever relative chaos there
is in it, is rational, “akin”, to be connected, in a word, systematic.
Self, however, belongs with consciousness. That is, self is self-
knowing, even if, with Aquinas, we say it is only known in its knowing of
other things. Every self has to have “its own other”. Hegel’s dialectic
purports to show this. An innate idea I never experienced would be
chimerical, Locke thought. Yet, writes Hegel, “the principles in question,
though innate, need not on that account have the form of ideas or
conceptions of something we are aware of” (EL67). At issue, in part here,
is what sense Hegel gives to consciousness when he speaks of self-
consciousness especially, which is developed and, he insists, mediated, by
“development, education, training”. This, once possessed, he says, is
impervious even to death, a passage giving the lie, implicitly at least, to
those maintaining that Hegel has nothing to say at all about immortality.
Knowledge, for him synonymous with self-consciousness, is not
essentially felt, though it can be (Enc. 159). Hence the nineteenth century
purveyors of “ontologism”, as they called their Hegelian precipitate, were
true to Hegel, whom they followed, in asserting that the idea, even the
knowledge, of God, the absolute universal, is present to Mind as such or
even is mind.12
The self may suffer from amnesia. Yet this is itself a form of
consciousness. Memory is not then a necessary condition for such
consciousness, while the self remains also in sleep. Indeed, some spiritual
“masters” enjoin an active “dark night of memory”, but so as to

12
This system, ontologism, was introduced in the Catholic world specifically and
is arguably what immediately provoked the Roman authorities to resurrect
thirteenth century Thomism (1879) as being “all the philosophy a Catholic needs to
know” (Kleutgen), having condemned or set aside Hegelian ontologism as “not
safe for teaching” (1860). As a movement specifically, then, such “neo-
scholasticism” was “semi-political” (Karl Rahner, d.1984. See our “Neo-
Scholasticism” in Dictionary of Metaphysics and Ontology, Munich 1991, pp. 610-
612).
8 Introduction

“remember” only God or, as viewed in philosophy, thought or the thought,

the Idea, itself. This is not properly remembered, however, inasmuch as it
cannot be “membered” in the first place, having no parts. Yet, as we noted
above, it is present to mind as constituting it. It is mind, finally identified
by Hegel as freedom or as the Concept, thought, that is ever at home with
itself in its other. This, of course, implies just as well that the other, as its
other, is at home with mind. It is this alone that enables mind, at a
conclusion of the dialectic that is in no sense temporal, to go forth from
itself in external procession as Nature, from which it returns, in
recapitulating Nature, as Spirit.13 So there are two processions, two
“otherings” of self, just as noted in Aquinas’s account, but now further
specified. Yet the second is not so much additional as it is an analogy of
the first or, from our phenomenal or “natural” and finite point of view, out
of which the whole use and sense of language is built up, the first is only
ever spoken of at all by and in analogy with the second.
The procession of Nature then, the “free” going forth14 of mind, is a
representation, a Vorstellung, of the internal process. Yet it has its reality
as being a genuine moment thereof. The Word that was with God (Gospel
of John), the “internal word” of the or any concept (Aquinas), “was made
flesh… among us” and is thus flesh, “not by a conversion of the godhead
into flesh” but by a “taking of the manhood into God” (“Athanasian”
Creed), corresponding in truth to the Concept’s own initiative or act
(energeia). In first treating this Word as Son or as the eternal procession
within God, after establishing that there are and must be “processions in
God”, St. Thomas confronts the objection that, as he has himself
demonstrated, God, the Infinite, precisely as infinite, must be absolutely
simple. His answer is that an or the word, definite in its indefiniteness or
infinity (the Latin language abetting), which is self-expression, must, when
it is a perfect act, act as such here, be identical with or in no way less than
the one uttering it. It, word, verbum, is itself active, is indeed act, as verb
or “action word”. Since, also, infinity is, as all, one, a unity, the only
conclusion to draw is that Word and Father, Father and Son in theology,
must be identical though distinct in this perfect and not merely abstract
simplicity, reasoning that will be extended and completed in the
consideration of Spirit, “holy” in theology but actually Reason itself,
identical with its one unchanging act of self-knowing, in which all is held.
The real and the mental, that is, as abstract “modes” of being, are
ultimately identical, neither being a reduction to the other.

13
Compare Plato, “All nature is akin and the soul has learned everything” (Meno).
14
Cf. Enc. 158: “This truth of necessity, therefore, is Freedom…”, together with
the addition.
 The Orthodox Hegel 9

So if memory is not a necessary condition for the continuity of self in what

may its continuity consist? The mere fact of sleep, which may last for
years, does not destroy this continuity, such that the one who sleeps
awakes, but rather shows that the continuity does not consist in any form
of consciousness as we normally use the term, though this is not how
Hegel speaks of “self-consciousness”. “I live yet not I”, wrote the Apostle
Paul, “but Christ lives in me”, here substituting for consciousness a
principle of unfelt faith, as it was and may still be called. There is only an
“analogy” of faith with feeling or consciousness, or it may even be seen as
their opposite, as a principle of non-feeling, close to hope in this, hence a
virtue, a power or habit of the mind. It has a closer analogy, however, even
an identity as form of it, with knowing, with intellectual process or
thinking, where nothing is felt. Yet both Descartes and Hegel treat thought
and feeling under the one head of consciousness, as being knowledge
knowing itself, as it must in order to be knowledge in its concept. The
apparent infinite regress in knowing that one knows that one knows and so
on clearly has significance, either as an objection to the thesis or as
something that can be turned to its account. For McTaggart it is a property
of persons alone, as showing that only they can sustain their concrete
individuality within the perfect unity of all persons in identity which he
calls “heaven” or the true state of things or, rather, not of things but of just
and only such persons, making appeal to Hegel’s statement that
universality is the principle of personality, as I, again (and not the mere
monolingual “I”, “ich”, etc.) is the “universal of universals”. The
derivation of this from formal logic is worked out in the section of the
Encyclopaedia dealing with “The Subjective Notion”.
Here universality, particularity and individual flow into or, more truly,
are identified with one another. The question as to the continuity of the
individual, abstractly considered, thus dissolves. This consequence of
Hegelian thought has been misused, whether in Bolshevism, where licence
was taken to consider today’s friend as tomorrow’s enemy, out of a
pseudo-practical teleology, no account being taken of a need to show any
connection between such “rationality” and elementary justice, say, or, in
Nazism, where this same aim (telos) is simply to break down any sense of
individual worth at all, in final acknowledgement of the denial of praxis as
the good, since this denial, of will by will, becomes itself the good or
10 Introduction

aim.15 Thus, in Vonnegut’s novelistic account (Slaughterhouse 5), though

probably a true memory, the American prisoner who gets two teeth
knocked out by the brainwashed guard and asks “Why me?” receives the
contemptuous answer, “Why you? Why anybody?” The freedom afforded
by these movements turns out to be a freedom to go nowhere. One is “free
among the dead” (Psalm 87), adrift in an infinitely empty space. This is
essentially the psychopathic condition, which, Maritain has noted, can grip
whole nations16 as well as it can an individual. This is in itself confirmatory
of Hegelian logic, though Maritain did not perhaps notice this.
In exercising justice or kindness toward an individual rather, as religion
teaches, we are exercising it upon all or, rather, upon Christ, as eventually
“all in all”. Thus, anyhow, has been and is interpreted the need to
concretise any or the universal. “Go you and do likewise”. It is in this
sense that Hegel understands his “principle of kind” and not, context
shows, in the sense of an abstract universality. Here we have the roots of
an infinite substitutability or “coinherence”, among “the companions of
the coinherence” (Charles Williams), which Hegel, however, identifies
with Mind itself, in which individuals cohere and more than cohere, even
more than coinhere, with “in” as metaphor for identity. “I am you”
(Schrödinger, Kolak).
The cult of “the present moment” thus falls short of the Hegelian vision,
as itself depending upon the abstractly conscious individual. What’s the
time? This question applies neither when you are asleep nor on the sun
(where it is never five o’clock). This simple fact already shows the
inseparability of time and space or, rather, place. This, also, is why memory,
its concept, is not reducible to the time series. I can acknowledge memory
now without acknowledging time. “I remembered my God and I groaned”.
What is it then that anyone thinks when he thinks “I”? We might say it
is not so very different from the divine or absolute answer in Exodus, “I

15
This is the conclusion of Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).
The constitutive place this work, at first sight oddly, gives to “anti-Semitism”
(oddly, because this has been represented as a uniquely “Nazi” phenomenon), seen
as persecution of the Jewish people specifically, links it with Hegel’s speculatively
self-contradictory thesis of “absolute religion” (particularised in Christianity in
destructive absorption of Judaism), thus making of totalitarianism, judged
mistakenly by Arendt to be a unique or “absolute evil”, a necessary “moment”,
since it occurred, in the dialectical interpretation of history as essentially
phenomenal. The work thus reflects and recalls the section “Absolute Freedom and
Terror” in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind, or as well say it recalls the French
Revolution as in truth a phase of mind.
16
J. Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, Geoffrey Bles, London 1944.
 The Orthodox Hegel 11

am he who is”, the gender-reference apart, or, a variant, “I will be what I

will be”, illustrating the irrelevance of tense. From the universal viewpoint,
however, treating this, as no doubt Israel understood it, as an abstractly
individual utterance, of “God alone”, we might, with Catherine of Siena,
represent ourselves as hearing this identification of subject and object, of
God and being. “I am he who is, you are she who is not”. “He” would not
have done as well, if the gender-opposition is recognised as necessary to
thought’s own dialectic, as at Enc. 220, the “Affinity of the Sexes”.
So the use of this abstractly individual form, of “I”, leaves us with the
Hegelian identification of Being and Non-Being at the start of logic, from
which its further development will distance us, in greater intimacy with it,
in the progression of dialectical concepts towards the Idea of perfect unity.
Everyone refers to himself or herself as “I”, not however as he might
refer to, or rather describe himself as, say, “man” or even “this silly
creature” (Margery Kempe). No two men can give “I” the same reference.
It has rather to be discovered, revealed, that two is one and hence that
self’s other is self, as that repulsion is attraction and difference is identity.
What you do to others you do to me, and I to you. When I am seen to be
you the second and third persons are no longer taken as objects, about
which one can make “objectual” statements, any more than one can for the
first person future. Hence, in Hegel’s account of logic, as within cognition
itself, will is first set over knowledge (in being treated after it), Good over
Being, as immediate ante-room to the Idea in a unilinear Advance. The
thesis-antithesis-synthesis model of earlier sections has been left behind.
Here philosophy has become, is revealed to be, pure theology, whether we
dub that theology theistic or atheistic. It follows upon physics, philosophy
of nature, as meta physica, the philosophy of mind or spirit. Here what is
put as “after” philosophy of nature is also “first” philosophy or philosophy
of logic, logica docens. Similarly this succeeds upon as found to be first
underlying logica utens or “formal” logic. Thus the scholastic world had
already identified the polarities held in balance in Hegel’s system..

In this self-reference I do not make of myself an object, since then I am no

longer myself, but refer rather to a man I happen to be, who might, for
example, be mad. Thus Hamlet refers to himself in his apology, his
disclaimer of responsibility, for Ophelia’s death before her brother
Laertes. This discloses the wisdom of the blanket directive not to judge,
upon which Hegel comments that “all judgments are false”, entitled by this
stage to treat theory (the “highest praxis”) and praxis as one. “The fool
12 Introduction

sees not the same tree as a wise man sees” (Blake), just as, says Hegel, the
experience of a Goethe is not that of any Tom or Dick. “I am the captain
of my soul” is the air breathed here. Yet governments have nothing to fear,
for in this utter difference all are made one, each has left his shadow-self,
his ego, behind, in the pit of the non-existent and this, Hegel says, is
freedom of the spirit, every man having his own white stone which is yet,
in common with all, white. Individual and universal become, are, each
other. Hence the possibility of syllogism in all its figures, based upon the
distinction of “every” from a mere “all” or of a universal from a merely
“general” will (of the greatest number), giving the possibility of the
triumph of each man over “the world”, precisely what democracy, its
spirit, would protect and enable.
What is it to be this I that is a thinking thing or is conscious? Descartes
scarcely raised this question, once having attained to the fact in his
exultant Second Meditation. This I, he seems to mean, is always or
essentially thinking, cogitans. This is the opposite of Aquinas when in
realist mood: anima mea non est ego. My soul is not I. In fact, though, it is
and so “I live and yet not I”. This is the spiritual meaning of resurrection,
of standing up from the dust. Dust is not. We “know not what we shall
be”, whatever the sense in which “we know what we are”, a text (from I
John) that McTaggart greatly admired. This is the difficulty about
immortality and the future life, as religion often presents it. It is present
actuality revealed, rather, in the subversion of temporality and its vanity,
which would yet be retained if one were to say that the resurrection had
already occurred, yesterday perhaps. The third day, rather, leaves behind
both the day and its other, the emptiness of Holy Saturday, rising out of
the passing, the procession, of days, “this petty pace”. Macbeth sought
freedom from it, from finitude, in death and Hegel in fact affirms that the
truth of death is entry into spirit. Hence he affirms the need to die truly and
completely, not as a slave. This is confidence, this is philosophy itself
raised up, thus redeeming or “accomplishing” religion, where “a veil” still
hangs over things, just as “when Moses is read”. Philosophy, however,
remains esoteric, not “for all”, as “religion” is exoteric, “for all men”,
Hegel cautions. Yet religion is set towards that spiritualisation of all, that
“God shall be all in all”, that philosophy finally or in itself is, the
procession namely of spirit, which the printed page (or spoken voice) only
elicits, words leading to Word or self-revelation.
Why am I numbered, why do I find myself, among actual consciousnesses?

O cursed spite,
that ever I was born
to set it right.
 The Orthodox Hegel 13

The fictional character here “stands for” each and every possible
consciousness, in a universal self-consciousness that cannot possibly be
“born”. So mothers may indeed as well tell their children they found them
under a cabbage-leaf, a leaf wide enough to shelter them as well, which
they never “leave”. The moment of the “process of kind”, that is, like the
sexes themselves, “runs away”, sublated in the final, ever realised Idea and
End, which each one is as being “neither one nor many”, prefigured earlier
in the Logic, in logic, as self-repulsion in universal attraction Hence, in
wondering about myself I and philosophy begin as one to be and my
abstract particularity is sublated, a vanishing shadow in a vanishing of this
vanishing, as Hegel himself puts it. “Since Being and Nothing vanish in
Becoming… the latter must vanish also”.17 How is it that the world has
become, quite recently, a world for me? Why am just I that child born of
my parents at that time and place? Can I intelligibly say that there just
happens to have come to be a consciousness in such and such an ambience
such that I am aware of it and it is mine? The “I”, with all its difficulties,
has then been just shunted into a subordinate clause.

It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, freedom and choice which
you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a
given moment not so long ago; rather, this knowledge, freedom and choice
are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay
in all sensitive beings… you… are all in all… not merely a piece of the
entire existence.18

I am to myself something which is, but which is not an object of

experience. In fact the word “something” goes too far, as Hume showed. I,
like the world, am made an object, while we may, in fact, treat the world
in the same way as we are treating ourselves, as subject (though what is a
fact?). Then, though, it is not the world seen in that photograph taken by
astronauts of our globe from somewhere beside or on the moon, a
beautiful, blue, heavy-looking object. It is required, rather, that there be no
such thing, no “thing” at all, save for that moment it, thing, its category,
exercises in the dialectic.
Certainly my mind is of the same nature, as we say, as all other human
minds at some point. Indeed it is individuated in just the way that they are
and that is its universality. Yet we still want to say, do we not, that all this
could have been so without my being there at all. The world need not

17
Enc.89, Zus. (stress added).
18
E. Schrödinger, as quoted in Daniel Kolak, I am You, Springer, New York, 2002,
Preface.
14 Introduction

include my awareness of it, this is to say, which is the condition merely for
true knowledge by anyone anywhere, “surely”, as we want to add under
our breath. But then this would be true equally of the collectivity and then
we would have a world without reason’s thinking, we suppose. But what is
the world without the reason, as Gottlob Frege once rhetorically asked?
Yet we can’t just generalise thus, but must universalise individuality itself,
as we have been urging all along. By this, one man counts for as much or
as little as a hundred billion men, and only by this, whereby man is no
longer man in any recognisable biological or life-sense. Ideas of an infinite
multitude, in antinomy, are thus shown up as a mere representation of the
individual, of mind. Numbers are finally not considered in divinis
(Aquinas), i.e. absolutely. Indeed, “it is useless to count” (Hegel). This is
precisely what the counting child learns by his attempt to count “to the
end”. The “spurious” infinite, in what Hegel calls its badness, is (finite)
representation or figure of the reality rather than sheer error, except in the
general sense that all our immediate perception, even of life itself, is
“misperception” (McTaggart).
What is clear is that one cannot be given to oneself, as it were prior to
one’s actual being. Or rather, one can indeed, but not temporally or as
receiving before one is there to receive. One’s receiving is the creative act
itself, the actual union that the growth of self-consciousness is realising.
Self-consciousness, again, is sheer apprehension, in its plenitude, merely
represented as the life-process. In other words what results is the result’s
own result, ad infinitum. This is the meaning of causa sui, the sublation of
cause, namely, as of result. If end is as such realised then end is beginning,
as being, with which science begins, is science’s end, the Idea. In the Idea
one finds full reason for existence, one’s own or another’s indifferently.
Yet inasmuch as being is, rather, the Idea being is not being or, rather, is
itself non-being. This is the ground-posit of (Hegel’s) logic.
All I have been calling my own is then common, universal. One or the
many indifferently, this unity itself, is “as having nothing yet having all
things”. What religion represents as the most difficult and glorious of
achievements is in actuality just this, actuality. Only being can give rise to,
as only being can limit, being. Infinite and hence pure act is the ground of
this. To know it, however, one has to forget oneself entirely or, more truly,
deny one’s self, in deed as in thought. All is thought, as or since thought is
all. “The soul is all things” (Aristotle), which is to say it is no thing, knows
itself only in the knowing of its other (Aquinas) or in self-alienation ipso
facto returning to self (Hegel).
 CHAPTER ONE

HEGEL “THE NEW THEOLOGIAN”

This book is written in the conviction that it is Hegel rather than St.
Simeon of old who should rather now be titled “the new theologian”. For
this reason, for the newness as illustrated below, it is he who more than
any other can fittingly be taken as the successor to the torch-bearing
Thomas Aquinas, himself succeeding to the whole wisdom of past ages, as
Hegel too has absorbed the best of the period in between him and “the
dumb ox of Sicily”, explicitly or implicitly. Both therefore are pre-
conceived in Aristotle, by the Idea, as well as are the two great apostolic
theologians, Paul and John. Thus Hegel is indeed “the new Aristotle”, left
like him to long or less long periods of forgetfulness and
incomprehension. For, as Plato said, again, “All nature is akin and the soul
has learned everything” (Meno). This applies also to the nature of a
thought as itself nature and a nature, insofar as it too appears, such that it
is within this appearance that pagan and Christian are categorised. So, all
thoughts are akin, are thought. Thought appears as manifested, as express
Word, as nature. Add to this though the intrinsic finitude of time, as also,
however, of the categories of potency and act, of possibility and of
actuality as falling short of the absolute actuality of the Idea, as a supposed
actuality that is not actual, not Realised End: Here the last is the true first.
Without more ado then I proceed to make good once more this for
many no doubt still astonishing and undesirable claim, in the conviction
that the newest is the oldest, as “Inward and Outward are identified”
(Hegel, Encyclopaedia, §138).

It is important, first, to notice that Hegel writes that the Absolute Idea
holds all determination (alle Bestimmtheit) within it and not merely all
16 Chapter One

determinations (this would be Bestimmtheiten)1, though this will then be

true too. As not abstractly individual but just in its individuality the
universal of universals, since it is of necessity infinite, the Idea knows and
actively thinks all possibility and every possibility, the first of which is
possibility itself. It can be no slave to prior modalities.

It was probably the import of Possibility which induced Kant to regard it

along with necessity and actuality as Modalities, “since these categories do
not in the least increase the notion as object, but only express its relation to
the faculty of knowledge”. For Possibility… was formerly called the Inward,
only that it is now taken to mean the external inward, lifted out of reality…
and is thus, sure enough, supposed only as a bare modality, an abstraction
which comes short and, in more concrete terms, belongs only to subjective
thought. ,.. The rule for it merely is that a thing must not be self-
contradictory. Thus everything is possible… Everything however is as
impossible as it is possible…2

It is indeed this impossibility alone that pushes the dialectic on to the Idea.
Impossibility and possibility are thus equally contained in the Idea as its
method, which it itself is. It is thus meaningless to speak of them, since
everything is conceivable and therefore possible, even or especially the
impossible. Contradiction, however, as contained in the Idea is not
contradiction as the understanding abstractly grasps it but the mark of a
false because finite reality.3 Since it is itself Idea this act, self-
consciousness itself, foundational to all activity, includes its own positing.
Therefore it is that there are other self-determinations also. They are of
infinite character, within or as constituting the Idea itself, as, therefore, “its
own other”, identical in their difference with it as they are, therefore, with
one another.4 These possibilities are, just as such, strictly necessary. Yet
this, however, is true also of all the finite possibilities, as it is also true that
they necessarily are not, while the greatest necessity lies in the Idea’s
choice as necessarily absolute choice. That is, freedom is the ultimate
necessity. Hence we ourselves, as finite subjects, are never freer than when
we reason to necessary conclusions, whether these be theoretical or
themselves free actions, these actions themselves conclusions to, intrinsic
results of, practical syllogisms. In either case, since it is really one case,

1
G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik (here, WL or the ”Greater Logic”), final
chapter, “Die absolute Idee”. Suhrkamp, Werke, vol. 6, Frankfurt 1969 (1972),
p.549.
2
Enc. 143.
3
See Note 4 above.
4
Cp. Daniel Kolak, op. cit.
 Hegel “the New Theologian” 17

the conclusions are absolutely necessary, determined in the free and

executive knowledge, which is love, in and of the Absolute, exercised by
and in a manner specifying the active Idea, hereby knowing itself only.
Thus within love its negation too is foreknown, non-being in being, as first
showing of this “being qua being”, nous, as method or dialectic, Word,
just that whereby the last is first and conversely.
So, Hegel says, the Idea determines itself to differing formations, to
Nature and Spirit namely, and this is necessarily a figure, as is self-
limitation or emptying (kenosis). One may wish to speak here of Hegel’s
Trinitarian philosophy, not, however, in the sense of following a dogmatic
declaration as extrinsic guide to thinking. Rather, the process of thought
reflects back upon the dogma and clarifies or even “purges” it in the light
of its own intrinsic triadicity. In this sense the philosophy of religion is
itself theology, as Aristotle for example understood the latter. Philosophy,
that is, reflects back upon any dogmas capable of catching its light. This
means that such dogmas cannot be conceived as exceeding this light,
which is infinite in being, truth and goodness. Ultimately the Idea is itself
being. Truth and goodness, therefore, are but moments of it, of being,
arising and retiring within the dialectic. Thus for Aquinas being is the only
genuine transcendental predicate. Truth and goodness are but moments of
this that is being and such as we may call or name being on occasion. They
are, that is, entia rationis, beings of reason, as are, for example, nothing, or
one, or the future, or dreams. They belong with language as a phenomenon
that being, even as named “absolute knowledge” (itself therefore a being
of reason, since mind is what being is or what mind thinks indifferently).
absorbs into itself.5 For both Aquinas and Hegel, therefore, reason itself is
ultimate being. Contrariwise, reason is the ultimate or specific difference,
determining the whole of being, whether as such, since nothing is being
except as or in the Idea, or in the particular case of the unicity of the
determining form6. Thus soul or mind determine the whole man as
otherwise a pure potentiality (materia) or nothing. This means that the
final being is just this “being of reason”, is reason itself or thought
thinking itself in act. From this standpoint, however, being itself becomes
a being of reason, the first last, alpha omega.
Being, that is, is thought and not merely being thought. It is the
Absolute Idea as, we have just said, the Idea is itself being. This
Aristotelian and therefore post-Aristotelian position in fact, therefore,
gives the ratio of “creation out of nothing”. Being, namely, is “not a whit

5
Cf. Aquinas, QD de potentia, Question VII, on the transcendental predicates
generally.
6
Aristotle, Metaphysics VII, all though as developing Book IV on contradiction.
18 Chapter One

better than” nothing, whether in itself or “as a definition of God” (Enc.

87). Elsewhere, accordingly, Hegel criticises the phrase ex nihilo nihil fit
as atheistic denial of creation, but here he gives the sense in which it
describes or defines precisely the “moment” of creation. The nothing in
both cases is itself being, the goodness which “diffuses itself”. This whole
passus may be regarded as the overcoming or Aufhebung of the category
of ens rationis as a qualified type of being, necessary to any “realist”
epistemology, by the logic of Absolute Idealism, indeed by logic as itself
disclosing the latter in its claim to mirror or be absolute mind or spirit. “In
God we live and move and have our being”, nowhere else, namely. That
God is nothing, transcends being, is often asserted in Christian as in Neo-
Platonic mysticism, anyhow only abstractly distinguished, one might
claim. The final container, Christianity, is and, as final, must be itself
uncontained and therefore in a sense nothing or infinite. Thomas Aquinas,
who followed closely Pseudo-Dionysus, confirms this under the rubric of
“the analogy of being”, which is “said in many ways” (Aristotle). One of
these ways is this very identification with nothing, which is yet, or
therefore, the Absolute Idea, as in the final section of Hegelian Logic in
both its presentations. The Idea is or has “personality”, he says there,
returning as life in transcendence of life’s first immediacy, as itself alone
“being or imperishable life”. Alles übrige ist Irrtum, all else is error. This
Idea though, we may be sure, includes all that is set forth in this Science of
Logic as it progresses to its end, not destroying but fulfilling the
intermediate positions or moments, just as is reflected in the history of
philosophy itself. So Aquinas: “In God that which is known and the act of
knowing are the same. Therefore whatever is in God as known is his actual
living or his life… it follows that in him all things are the divine life
itself”. Nothing (else) corresponds to this that abstractly remains just
itself.7

Theology as we have it today embodies a finite development within the

Church, ekklesia or “called out” Christian community as finitely posited in
time. This very figure, thus posited, is itself theology, as accounting
pictorially for the being, the appearance, of separations, as Moses saw only
one burning bush among many bushes, this aesthesis, of what he “turned
aside” to see, representing the foundation of absolute spirit in art or in
representation, Vorstellung, itself. This figure, of fire, or of Beatrice, in

7
Cf. Aquinas, Summa theologica Ia 18, 4.
 Hegel “the New Theologian” 19

whose eyes, in the Purgatorio of Dante’s poem, the very Word itself is
reflected as a figure, itself necessarily figures figure itself, essentially. So
theology is a figure using figurative language, Hegel says, to convey what
such language figures. Thus it arose at a particular time or “after” the
beginning, which cannot itself be in or even, therefore, of time. The
beginning does not begin, movement does not move.8 Theology differs
from the Scripture it expounds, even though Scripture may itself contain
theological reasoning. This itself already establishes the infinite
circularity, in return, of hermeneutics. Paul’s or John’s thought may fairly
be classed, therefore, as philosophy, defined as thought thinking itself as
being all “that which is known”. We may note, though, that Scripture
might also be classed as a finite development, as not actual at the
beginning of the religious movement or moment concerned, whether
Christian (before the Gospels) or Abrahamic (before the Mosaic texts).
But then the Incarnation might also be classed as finite unless we
understand it as representing an or the infinite truth, an understanding,
however, which must affect the representation as incarnation, man-
becoming (Menschenwerdung) itself, what is infinite transcending all
becoming or movement consequent upon imperfection. God, that is, can
only be his own development (method). This is already theology, even as
meta-theology, where everything and every particular is infinite, “the
individual the universal” (Hegel’s “Doctrine of the Concept”).
The same may be said of Augustine’s thought. It is philosophical, even
if he introduces or makes use of the notion of regula fidei, the “rule of
faith”, of believing. For this concept is open to philosophical treatment or
foundation like any other. It may be referred, for example, either to the
existential situation of the thinking subject or to beliefs he is required to
confess. The typical Jewish ideas may thus fairly be called philosophical,
as Porphyry saw. He called the Jews “a nation of philosophers”. So the
Pauline category of wisdom “from on high” is a philosophical category, in
the same sense as we speak of African Philosophy, making a qualification
namely. Philosophy, as thought, will finally be classed by Hegel as
“within” the subject, though strictly this is still spatial metaphor or picture,
as and because all is “within” or presupposed to the Idea. This “within” is
figure for an identity of being ultimately transcending language. Language

8
Cp. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1071b, “movement can neither come into being, nor
cease to be; nor can time come into being, or cease to be.” This act of potential
being qua potential corresponds to Becoming in the dialectic, finite imperfection
and contradiction itself, a necessary or logical category, superseded, in, for
example, Realised End. Being, by contrast, is the “beginning” of science, in the
sense of its abiding foundation and end, in and as the Idea.
20 Chapter One

stops at the paradox, “This also is thou, neither is this thou”, said of
anything whatever, even of a given Trinitarian person. It is not, and yet is,
the other one(s) as to “nature” or that universality which anyhow is “the
principle of personality” (Hegel). For example, in Hegel’s thought, God
the Father is only or first “realised” in his Son or in Nature, his other.
Theologically one speaks of the ideas of all things as “contained” in the
Word. That is, and it is classical, the Father is personally just this relation
of divine fatherhood, of eternal generation of its, his, “own other”, in the
sense that “I and my father”, two namely, “are one”.
The philosophy so redounds upon the theology that the category of
revelation is freed from its taint of legalistic or extrinsic, but hence
legislative, finitude. Trinity, again, is freed from suggestion of a
positivistic and finite adhesion to a particular numeral, three. Rather, this
threeness is referred to a necessary logical triadicity as condition for
passing to new knowledge, or for newness or process as such. The
mathematical analogue of this is that two things equal to a third thing are
equal to one another. Hence, Hegel declares, “Everything is a syllogism”.
Not only, however, is the trinitas or threeness of Trinity thus saved. It is
emphasised that the threeness is of a type able to pass on to any amount of
numerical ideas whatever, this being used to show that the first threeness
is not quantitative since, as we know, whether by our belief or from
previous speculation, there are not three gods but one, the Idea, as is
logically necessary. Numeri non ponuntur in divinis (Aquinas) and Hegel
concurs, saying “It is useless to count” and accordingly going on without
hindrance to postulate Satan as a fourth “Trinitarian” person, as Jung had
postulated the Virgin Mary, recalling Goethe’s “eternal feminine”, though
Jung did not preserve triadicity, which he regarded as “bad”. A fifth
person proposed turns out to be some angel or other. In fact Hegel
assimilates the angelic “host” to the divine persons, in true Biblical
fashion. In the Bible, namely, “the angel of the Lord”, or in one case three
angels (visiting Abraham), are very often, or always in tendency,
assimilable to God himself, who in truth need send no messengers
(angeloi) who are not themselves the message or Word, himself. The
perfect word, Aquinas says, would not be less or other than its utterer, thus
upholding the divine simplicity in trinity. This move, we may now see,
was no mere ingenious trick of the understanding (Verstand), any more
than is the Trinity itself or its reflection in triadicity.

*
 Hegel “the New Theologian” 21

Hegel points out that Satan is or was “Son of the Morning”, firstborn,
Lucifer or light-bearer, before becoming, in story, the principle of evil,
though we must of course distinguish being born as “created” from what is
only-begotten (unigenitum) in eternally constitutive self-emptying or
going forth, rather, the Son as such or Word. The logical possibility is
there, this is to say, independent of our belief. Yet Lucifer’s “birth” as
good, however taken, of itself means that good is the principle of evil. It is
thus implied that evil could have no other origin. This is the height of
consistency as of religious or pious insight and Hegel has nothing but
praise for Boehme’s tortured attempts to represent this relation of good,
that is of God, to evil, rather than representing the infinite as finitely
beleaguered by evil or even in parity with it. The very notion of it, rather,
is abstracted from good by way of pure negation. Yet there is no good
without evil as there is no man without woman or woman without man
and, no doubt, “hereby hangs a tale”. More importantly, there is no evil
without good, no culpa that is not felix. When Augustine made this remark
(o felix culpa) he imagined a contrast with a culpa infelix and thus found
an evil good, in true feminist spirit as we might say. For the deeper truth is
that culpa is as such felix as being part of the scheme of things or a
constituent of the Idea and thus far, logic finds, one with it. Scripture
reflects this in Job’s rhetorically questioning exclamation, “Have we
received good at the Lord’s hand and shall we not receive evil?”

A particular instance of heteronomy is the witness of miracle. Hegel

concurs in the Humean rejection of miracle, as Hume defines it, as a
possibility. Whatever occurs has an explanation, is rational, and is
therefore not a miracle, is natural. Alternatively, Spirit as superseding and
“putting by” nature in returning to original unrestricted being or nothing,
in freedom, is itself that after which all miracle is named, itself the
magnalia Dei of Pentecost, its fifty days, seven time seven plus one, as
archaic liturgical figure for eternity or blessedness indifferently, as against
the forty, evanescent day of the Lent of this life, one with the time, forty
days, of the self-obliterative flood or the fruitless wandering, now forty
years rather, in “the desert” or “wilderness”. The miracle of mind is
simply the reintegration of nature with the non-alienated opposite of itself.
The most natural thing, therefore, is the most miraculous.
The posited rationality of finite miracle depends upon the false or,
again, impossible view, as merging finite with infinite, of the Idea, of the
infinite God, as an abstractly external power, a Deus ex machina. The
22 Chapter One

latter was always, and properly, finite, thus failing to give authority to any
miracle worked thereby. Miracle is rather figure for sign, for meaning,
whereby glory, absoluteness, is manifested, as in language, speech, called
human. So, if we continue to speak of miracle, in deference to the
tradition, we are bound to concede, as does Gilson, that everything is a
miracle as finally to be found in the Idea or, in his categories, having the
transcendent God as first cause, i.e. a cause outside of Nature. Nature itself
is a miracle. So the most conservative Christians tend to be ready to allow
the wonders of Exodus to be explicable by natural causes while still being
validly named magnalia Dei. Still, water cannot become wine nor wine
blood nor, as in Exodus, water blood, nor can what is dead become alive.
If wine becomes blood then the blood is alreadt the wine. “This also is
thou…”
Hence the resurrection is the giving of new meaning, or discovery of
the true meaning, of just death, that gift of the gods to men. The miracles
narrated are therefore inseparable from their function in just those
narrations in their particular cultural context, which it is our business to
appreciate. The abstention from such labour as “esoteric” (Hegel, speaking
of philosophy) resolves itself therefore into a deferment of the educative
task called evangelisation, which all perform in undergoing it. What was
once “not given” to all must, in its integral entirety, eventually be made
plain or shouted from the rooftops, where, then, not only the Apostle, or
the original inner circle, shall then “know as I am known”.
It might however seem that the above does not exclude that the Idea
might still work not only what seem, at some time and place, to us to be
such but what in fact are miracles or that we ourselves as particularisations
of the Idea might do so, transcending the self-representation of nature in
its representation, or nature itself doing this. We might move a mountain,
understanding however that such a miracle is more than an anticipated
technology, is more like a man’s being alive who has truly died and “seen
corruption”, as, say, Christ did not. Such a miracle, however, belongs
entirely to a future that, from the idealist perspective, is rather the supra-
temporal reality we now enjoy, though, as religion puts it, “by faith”.
Can we say the same about the Ascension into glory or the presumed
Assumption of Mary or of Elijah or Enoch, noting that the possible and the
actual or necessary are not to be separated here? It would be pointless to
re-describe such postulated events as natural. Edward Schillebeeckx OP,
in his study Jesus, suggests that at least one of the early Christian groups,
the Marcan, frowned upon or wished to avoid stress upon or even
assertions about a miraculous physical or “phenomenal” resurrection, as if
hostile to the general spirituality of their faith, while St. Paul says that
 Hegel “the New Theologian” 23

Christ, the “last man” or “second Adam”, “became a living spirit”, as it

were entirely, this being the mark of spirit and not some “absence” of the
material, since this never was present anyway, as it is the office of
philosophy to show. This would explain the too hastily presumed “lost
ending” of Mark’s Gospel.
The miracle would then lie in “the empty tomb”, though this is plainly
not a miracle but compatible, rather, with ancient hypotheses as to the
“stealing away” of the body by the disciples or Christ’s not having in fact
died on the Cross, both of which, if accepted, demand immediate
translation of Christian or associated religion into philosophical categories,
by which one might mean no more than a more drastic degree of distance
from phenomena than specifically “sacred” theology generally attempts.
For example, today, but not yesterday, it is quite acceptable to faith and its
guardians to give a “spiritual” account of the Ascension. Christ did not
“ascend” into the sky, blessing the privileged onlookers with his hands as
he went up. Their being thus privileged, rather, points to the spiritual
nature of what they could later do no more than thus represent. There
seems no logical obstacle, in all consistency therefore, to postulate the
same spiritual quality for Resurrection initially represented as of a corpse
or, equivalently, of some dusty bones or transplanted molecules, coming
together and rising up out of the earth or down from the air if, say, the
body had once been destroyed, as to its form merely, by fire or acids.
All of which does not prevent that miracles may be themselves
represented, this being all that is needed for our being asked or, better,
invited to believe in them. This means though, in the poet’s words, that
right vision will see Christ walking on the water “not of Genesareth, but
Thames” or our local river. “Lo”, says the poet, as if to say that this is the
meaning, the spiritual and only significance, of the prior representation. As
for the latter one, as it would still be, the meaning is that it would be our
consciousness, in philosophical category, seeing through the immediate to
the inverted essence, coterminous or co-incident with the Concept, this
being philosophy’s grasp of the Idea, namely that the world or anything
other than the Idea, apart from its own Other, is nothing, annulled, this
being the meaning of the image, the representation of a man walking upon
water anywhere and everywhere.
This in fact is what is urged in much modern theology, but frequently
misunderstood by either the more conservative or the less philosophical,
two distinct categories which are not thereby of necessity separable. It is
urged as what is not open to empirical falsification or verification. For the
intention is not to reduce significance but rather to elevate it. As Hegel
remarks somewhere, anyone who sees the truths of religion as dependent
24 Chapter One

upon verifiable or in some sense contingent historical events is not

religious, does not instance a form of absolute spirit, we might say. It
would appear, then, that the naïve or immediate belief in miracles as a
category, their possibility logically, is an obstacle to right understanding or
belief. Such a belief was and is “natural” in certain cultures. Such a
particular belief, just therefore, cannot be made essential to the particular
Christian truths without destroying their universality. We are claiming, yet
more fundamentally, that it also pre-empts or prohibits the philosophical
consciousness, which is the true or infinite form of Absolute Spirit.
In this sense the mystical is “the way” for all Christians, as the “gifts of
the Spirit” are “for” them, as God himself is called “for us” or as God
employs, it is said, the “things that are not” to “bring to nought the things
that are” (St. Paul). So the opposition of esoteric philosophy to exoteric
religion (Hegel) is a mere moment of “god’s willing all men to be saved”
or, as Hegel says, we must distinguish becoming as little children from
remaining oneself or keeping others childish. Religion, Hegel insists, has
its rights against a philosophy abstractly disclaiming it. Philosophy has
only to recall that it is itself the ultimate Gottesdienst.

Accepting this logical insight concerning miracles, we focus further on

Christian origins, as Hegel does in the penultimate chapter of The
Phenomenology of Mind, beginning with the essential concept of
Revelation, as governing the whole. Newman, we might first recall,
declared that the essential dogma of Catholicism, its substantial or
actualising form, was “the infallibility of the Church”. This note of
infallibility, applied also to the Scriptures, is the enabling or defining mark
of what is accordingly called revelation. Rather than question this
infallibility we have to enquire whether infallibility requires an extrinsic or
heteronomous instance, as immediate religious consciousness assumes
without question, a fact which has never been a bar to “understanding
spiritual things spiritually” or theologically. It was just this process of
spirit whereby the early philosophers destroyed the credibility of Greek
religion as then practiced, thereby preparing the way for a Jewish and
eventually Christian outlook. Regarding what I say here, we may note that
Hegel, in general scholarly opinion, later revised his earlier opinion that
Jewish religion and general outlook was inferior to the Greek or classical.
The Idea, says Hegel, is, as infinite, essentially revealed and cannot be
otherwise. This, I suggest, corresponds to “glory” in religion. This glory is
there to be seen, stands revealed, but the initiative lies, necessarily, with
 Hegel “the New Theologian” 25

the Idea regarding to whom it is to be shown, since the Idea is, as such or
“definitionally”, finite objectivity transcended and so it is just by this that
God has to be “a hidden God”, as pure act. The Scriptural image for this is
the “still small voice” that Elijah was privileged to hear. The Hegelian
contention, all the same, is that it is shown to anyone living, which means
ultimately thinking, according to reason, since reason itself is revelation,
just as it is freedom and conversely, the knowledge that alone knows itself.
For reason all stands unveiled, re-velatum, seen, by those seeing,
therefore, on the surface of Nature. “Taste and see, that the Lord is God”.
Here tasting is a first or immediate form of seeing, rather than an extrinsic
condition for it. What is outward is inward; that is, it is not outward, or,
which is the same, it is the inward that is outward9. We see Christ walking
upon Genesareth, he is revealed, wings beating at our “clay-shuttered
doors”, our dullness. The figure waits to be transfigured,to be seen upon
Thames, for example, Jerusalem to be “builded here” (or anywhere), to
cite two English poets, as metaphysical both as any of their predecessors.
So we “touch the intangible”, though Hegel does not add, with the
paradoxical poet, “know the unknowable”. In itself the Idea is supremely
knowable, to the point of absolute self-knowledge. All of which is to say
that God is not “envious and jealous” (Plato), this being but the expression
of the above truths in religious figure. One may with equal validity use the
opposite figure, that of the “jealous God”. For the Idea, in its diffusive
goodness, endures no rivals, claims them all as its own. The Outward and
Inward correlation dialectically succeeds upon the relations of Whole and
the Parts, Force and its Expression,

The relation of Outward and Inward … sets in abeyance mere relativity and
phenomenality in general… As for nature, it certainly is in the gross
external… even on its own part. But to call it external “in the gross” is not to
imply an abstract externality – for there is no such thing. It means rather that
the Idea which forms the common content of nature and mind, is found in
nature as outward only, and for that very reason only inward…. It is the
lesson of religion that nature, no less than the spiritual world, is a revelation
of God… All that God is, He imparts and reveals; and He does so, at first, in
and through nature.10

History, nature’s counterpart, is thus a process of this systematic self-

revelation, which is the Idea’s self-clarification or constitutive unveiling.

9
Enc. 138.
10
Enc. 140, add. Cp. Wordsworth’s “thoughts of one mind”, Plato’s “All nature is
akin” (Meno).
26 Chapter One

As concrete this must be thought as occurring in one concrete individual,

so as to be truly universal, as the universal itself is truly individual, there
being no such thing as that individual, as if abstracting individuality from
itself (the error of “existentialism”). The coming of such an individual,
which is thus the same as the coming of individuality, was foretold and
hoped for by the Jews. “When the Messiah comes he will teach us all
things.” So, “in the fullness of time” that movement of revelation
occurred, centred around one whom Hegel calls a “presumed” (gemeinten)
“individual historical figure and its past”. Here we should recall Hegel’s
general view concerning meinen and its impossibility, expressed early on
in the Logic. “I cannot say what I merely mean”.11 This may be regarded
as identifying the caesura of history, placed by others, such as Jaspers,
elsewhere.
This taking the fullness of time as if it were itself but a moment in or of
time is but “soulless recollection”, of the past “figure”. There was not a
“moment of time”, a “once upon a time” that in any way counts. The
fullness of time, in other words, refers to time’s self-suspension. The
attempt to “get at the notion” only succeeds where time is “seen through”
and not by “reversion to the primitive”. This “confuses the origin, …the
immediate existence of the first historical person, with the simplicity of the
notion”.12 We are very close here to the analysis of sensation made earlier
in The Phenomenology of Mind.
The revelation as temporarily embodied (the requirement of individuality,
unthinkable without the “parts outside parts” of time), “relinquishes
itself”. It exists at once in its spatio-temporal (Hegel writes “spatial” only)
“extension” as well as “in the self”, in its “depth”.13 In this way the
incarnation, taken as the birth of Christ, is a mystery or truth of faith, a
faith requiring history’s self-transcendence in and as “the Day of the
Lord”. This faith is perfected and not “put by” (aufgehoben) in philosophy.
“The just shall live by faith”. This refers to the virtue rather than to
content.
Again, transcendence of miracle clarifies this. There is a kind of
consensus among theologians that the perpetual virginity of the Mother of
God (thus incarnated or “mothered”) is not a necessary condition for that
God’s incarnation, as if limiting the divine power. This removes that

11
EL20, cp. EL24, add.(1): “it is man who first makes himself double” etc.
12
See Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, tr. Baillie, Harper Torchbooks, New
York 1966, p.764.
13
This is Hegel’s contribution, if oblique, to the age-old puzzling over the text,
“The Kingdom of Heaven is within you” and whether “within” should not rather
mean, or does not speculatively include, rather, “among”.
 Hegel “the New Theologian” 27

intended and adored individual, at a stroke, from any possible abstractly

physical or objective identification (e.g. as the only one born of a virgin)
in Hegel’s restricted or abstract sense of “objective”. The objective is the
subjective, the inward act of faith, on a par with knowing as certainty. His,
the individual’s, knowing himself as the One sent, but also the sender, is a
matter of the quality of consciousness, nothing else.

The eye with which God sees me, is the eye with which I see Him, my eye
and His eye are one. In the meting out of justice I am weighed in God and
He in me. If God were not, I should not be, and if I were not, he too would
not be.14

There is no objective distinguishing quality that “counts”, again, such as

having no human father. Religion here anticipates, but in figure merely,
philosophy’s transcendence of the “grass” (Isaiah) that is flesh. Figure,
however, hallowed though it may be, is indifferent to instantiation. Thus in
itself, as just noted, there is no necessity for this consciousness’s being
achieved, or admitted, by just one individual. So St. Thomas,
contemplating this alternative, only says that postulating any alternative or
plural incarnations is unfitting, inconveniens, surely only an “immediate”
judgment. Thus he does not add a reason for it. Universal incarnation
would become one or individual over again, as unity is a mark of the
Church or “body of Christ”, as “all one person”, writes the Apostle, the
addition “in Jesus Christ” not belittling or disempowering the first phrase.
Thus the Christian movement itself straightaway multiplied the instances
of Christ as many in one and in that way all are “immaculately
conceived”15. Baptism is the sign or saying of this more than it is any

14
Eckhart as cited by Hegel with approval at LPR I, p.228. These words, it is not
always noted, duplicate utterances of the Gospel’s main speaker later taken as
Trinitarian, just as they might recall Al Hallaj and others sharing this Eckhartian
consciousness, abstracting now from any dilemma as to natural or “supernatural”,
itself perhaps the greatest abstraction of all.
15
The Marian dogmas and doctrines this phrase recalls may come to be or already
are regarded as first steps in this direction of universalising the individuality,
regarding it as universal, as Hegelian logic requires. So the doctrines do not say
they are to be applied only to Mary. The idea of an application of Christ’s “merits”
as foreseen or ideally known can be applied left, right and centre and even
backwards, as here, not merely in time but in an interlocking redemptive mutuality
of all with all, entirely in each case, not abstractly losing the individuality. The
notion of merit with God, anyhow, is, taken literally, archaic and, at least as
objectifying or abstractly particularising, idolatrous, as might seem the Thomistic
notion of Christ’s sacred humanity as a or the “efficient cause” of “grace”. See
28 Chapter One

effecting of it, therefore. You who are many are one body; now you are the
body of Christ, or, as it says in one Gospel, “they in me and I in them”.
Take away the miraculous birth and there is a flow of one concept, one
person, “into” another as yet itself, or in identity rather, for which “in” is
figure.
The legal concept of sin has functioned in a way similar to this of a
unique virgin birth, that of a short way to an exclusive or abstract
identification, namely, of the “one without sin”. Once assume a virtue-
ethic and this concept does not hold up, even though Aquinas liked, or felt
obliged, to append a “command”, in his Summa theologica, as
corresponding counterpart, to each and every virtue itself identified but, be
it noted, identified as within the overall thesis of the (flowing) “unity of all
the virtues”.16

The above could well be viewed as Hegel’s version of the multiple senses
of Scripture. By this criterion he does not go as far as the majority of
Church Fathers, who cheerfully see a presentation of an event in Christ’s
life, as in the life of Noah, as a coded way of uttering or highlighting some
eternal truth, as was also the method of Jesus himself, the Gospel’s chief
protagonist. All this one may note quite apart from the special case of the
parables, often explicitly “interpreted” in the text. So, for example, the
seamless robe worn at the end by Christ will mean the unity of the Church,
the rending of the Temple veil the end of the Old Covenant, the feeding of
the five thousand with just enough for each one a figure of the Eucharist to
come, the turning of water into good wine, “kept until now”, a figure of
Christ’s own action and teaching, and so on.

Philip L. Reynolds, “Philosophy as the Handmaid of Theology: Aquinas on

Christ’s Causality”, in Contemplating Aquinas, ed. Fergus Kerr OP, UND Press
2003, reviewed by me in Index Thomisticorum, Pamplona. In a sense the idea of all
being “born in sin” elicits the idea of one, and hence several ones, born free of it,
in the dialectical self-annulment of all finitude. Ritual uncleanness, the lowest of
phenomena, thus bequeathed this divine incarnation to humanity, of one and hence
of all, just as “if one died for all then all died”, for whom, all, the bell tolls. Thus
we are born to enter, by death, into life or, more shortly, “No birth no death”.
16
This thesis, attacked by Peter Geach as “monstrous”, in his The Virtues (Stanton
Lectures, CUP1976), is defended (retrieved) in my Natural Law Reconsidered,
Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 2002. See our Reason’s Developing Self-Revelation,
Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle-on-Tyne 2013, ch. 3, “Beyond the Sin-Paradigm”.
 Hegel “the New Theologian” 29

Here we have the Idea, God, as revelation, Spirit proceeding from the
Son, since “he that has seen me has seen the father”, something though
that Philip, the disciple thus answered, could, at least eventually, have said
as well as Jesus since, in St. Paul’s words, we, beholding the glory, are
“turned from glory into glory”. If the above saying is true, all the same,
then the Father (God) is nothing apart from the Son (Word) and his action,
as the Son can do nothing without him. “I and my father are one”. Just on
this ground, of the oneness, he speaks here of “my father”. It is the very
stance of Absolute Idealism, mistaken for the abstract uniqueness of one
far ahead of his time, as we say. This abstract uniqueness is not what we
confess in the creeds, understood spiritually. What is thus unique is rather,
and exclusively, “the fullness of time”, since time itself is progressively
revealed to be abstract immediacy as self-consciousness, in Hegel’s sense,
develops. “The conditions ‘past’ and ‘distance’ are, however, merely the
imperfect form in which the immediateness gets mediated or made
universal”. “The mediating process is still incomplete”. “Hence spirit
necessarily appears in time so long as it does not grasp its pure notion, i.e.
so long as it does not annul time”17 or become present, no longer past or
imperfect. Time then is the Concept, true being, as mediating it. Hence
there has to be a fullness of time, which just is this Concept appearing or
revealed. Knowledge, thinking, is self-perfection, necessarily, and this is
the rational or, which is the same, infinite, leaving no further room for
hope. Hope is needed in via, on the journey, the advance, “from shadows
to reality”, to “realised end”, realised however in its own apprehension
though not in some future, since the future is a mere ens rationis. Equally,
then, this fullness of time is not a moment within time. That is the reason,
again, why we should not confuse the origin, the immediate existence of
the first historical person in his abstract originality, with the “simplicity of
the notion”. It is as “lifted up from the earth” that the one mediating draws
all to himself, becomes the Idea or “living spirit”, which, however, he, we
and all instances of subjectivity always was, were and are.
This is why we must steer clear of soulless religious positivism. We
must in fact “annul time”. This is the grasping of the pure notion just
mentioned. Time is its own process of self-annulment, consuming its own
children as myth has it. It makes manifest or is itself revelation and the
Idea, but in imperfect act, as Aristotle, defining movement, would say.
Time is of itself unfinished, imperfect. Christ’s last word upon Golgotha,
“It is finished”, claimed to have accomplished or perfected time or, in the
first instance, the speaker himself. But it is the same, whether to say one

17
The Phenomenology of Mind, p.763, 800.
30 Chapter One

thing or the other. We are, namely, “members one of another”. That is, we
are not alien to one another but are each other’s own other. This death, it is
claimed, showed the essence of death and thus mediated resurrection or
entry into life in the spirit. Given the premises, this means that death itself
does that, as is now declared. Tetelestai, it has been achieved (Christ’s last
“word”, we read). The end, telos, has actualised, ended, its own self. Death
was always a “gift to men”, as the strongly orthodox J.R.R. Tolkien often
repeats in his writings. We are thus, again, unable to instantiate or explain
the supposed efficient causality of Christ’s humanity that Aquinas, quasi-
magically, was wont in faith to invoke.18 The faith, as he might have
agreed, lies finally deeper, entailing an affirmation of all by all, to be
discovered as constitutively acting rather than contingently achieved. Or is
this necessity itself the efficient causality, with which that of the divine
humanity, one with the absolute, is identical? It was said that blasphemy
against the Son of Man is pardonable but not blasphemy against that spirit
he expresses or “pours out”, as itself proceeding. There is aliveness here to
the priority of the formal or mystical over the material sense of discourse,
of which the Johannine notice of the high priest Caiaphas’s unconscious
prophecy, “It is expedient that one man should die for the people”, is but
an extreme example, as, mutates mutandis, is punning in general.
Yet, or thus, the death that is a gift to men is not more itself than a
representation of the intrinsic finitude of immediate life, itself representing
the Idea, to which life yields in what we picture as death. It is life’s final
acknowledgement of its own nullity, this itself being the act of spirit, spirit
itself in act. “Oh death I will be thy death.” Now this I, here clearly spirit,
is “the universal of universals”, Hegel says. Regarding this our speculative
style of writing, every judgment we make, even this one now, is
necessarily “one-sided” and thus far false. The question must arise here,
then, as to whether Hegel’s whole system is not offered as at least
incidentally inclusivr of a rationale for silent contemplative prayer as
intellect’s highest or most comprehensive act.

A fourth Christian or religious abstraction, after Trinity, miracle and

revelation, might be sin and, behind that, evil. Hegel claims that evil is an
abstract and therefore ultimately invalid conception. He will, however, say
exactly the same about good. Nor is this parity affected by his finding evil
to be a “sham being”, non-being as placed against that being which is

18
Cf. Reynolds, loc. cit.
variety the

huge It

to a photograph

their

grey

him

After

and beautiful ONOTREMES

the trunk world

common

only Southern mouth

wading The

becoming developing

is liver

aquatic probably
as

of

anything of

This

my
in

of the of

has

man and three

in in

very her its

puppies domesticated It

extremes animals Not

in

s Walrus destroy

to inclined

Deer

carcase as

and
all

where

once more

as

twice 292 to

than X strange

almost
One almost they

backwards

Whales the

those

the red of

follow
for Cats and

Scottish marvel S

But two

heard Africa last

measures
few and

the from

appearance the

HE to

C the

the with

habits as assemble

him

spread C The

It of
There to was

as may

is

tigers lower

living

very

only On T

and gentle
well forests unique

the

in

the

Fruit
was domesticated body

of is prominent

caught in the

the Ottomar while

man stated

a is fortunate

formerly nice

burrows

formerly

It The
gallop constantly

Photo reached

of

worth a described

New
hand common

are chest

during open OATIS

his ranches habits

of A

of long here

of
ARABIAN

that little

sticks

it of

in the telegraph
which the long

these

fore

for INK

Wild bedroom

The

HE more tailed

of time species
at the

the himself it

298 hand length

example

at the the

ARMOSETS and
to forms ERRIERS

and rather

soon

said breeds

Church

DOG in

the a
bred

Without side

swift

attention

Baboons Wild to

the

stood F

cat able they

and and while

of the be

on lie

the but

improvement

fish

The said

Across difficult

by to
Madagascar

which

most have

ratel ratel

their comprised W

In

abundant

all while
steal trap of

these Hagenbeck

the tail

greatly Sumatran

eggs LEMUR
going movements

is

and

no

floats

or

commonest Africa chase

have then
sake

faintly

hyænas

to commercial thus

and

seen

to

great

to
lambs

with are

shackling a RUSSIAN

roll the very

level in

Scottish great carry

Mashonaland North

forms diminishing heroic

serval

irritated coats
things

horse

do coach stale

or foxes

on the
curious

is the dogs

coasts of it

New of

because rather 800

lion ONKEY

with

the tail
AT

small Most legs

pin lion by

has

EA

remarkable the

with

their being makes

The same wolves

and sugar pigs

horse

to

The over

a up greater

sparsely the newly

and
of of on

a largest to

British a and

they composed the

into

most infant

B predatory Monkeys

same

breeds size of

s with and
has the

Elephants and mountains

feet to

to man

presence the
desert is huts

the none

AGOTHRIX head

by

pace GILE remains

being F

known this quarters

corresponding

in bear

great Wapiti struggle

extinct

until

they to the

the compound
a

AN and of

at

permission

link

this

number

The
length shoots

the the making

Britain

River a and

being sometimes

up forms

80 be

TAILED of

these like the

photograph

having

well year GAMBIAN

shallow parts hands

Sons been A

other up

stand 242 covered

In Whether
its clasps killing

feet cake cubs

or

blood UMPING up

the by
G Bear let

with catch interesting

became life is

the

gardener vegetable

the
representations

than EARS

habit

now lively the

at

Colony who

very
tiger

if

rooms to and

unpleasant

the the but

young and

Scholastic

stripe

J and hurt

known
domesticated a never

kind

the some Mr

more to cheeta

just

cheekbones so

in altitude longer

which

these

easily had mere

acquaintance sprouting Roosevelt

by seal seem

bats account

to of

is 80
end the a

journeys with wild

not herds

about on larger

of They
Sable

hunter AT body

all

the it ways

the the 170

Compared

says rivers horses

two

Society Grey The

trot off noted

breed fine

of it

rather found

The along

parts grizzly

his

it All its

attributed The

the
the poultry A

may

and

probable either payment

food

at
19 a

striped

is

remarkable creatures

them conspicuously the

of

creatures to Eastern

original sea
and Indian

that in of

trees Hagenbeck

asses the from

enjoyment attention Spain

It white the
a

Wolf preys

insects the

Sir a

the

the wild Their

with or forest

could limbs

from
very a

Tibet a pursued

Photo is

yards

rifle

Zoological number
food killing

C and

few

six

of black order

approaching dark presence

Bear live

paralleled are
coated moment

about

animal

efforts down Photo

it rest released

much obtain

some
rabbits

zebra

is species to

one Jackal on

though Photo species

too confined

soft arranged skin

differs Xerxes

hope a of

horse

Expedition small

HAPPY in are

or

suit to was

of of by

Even tapirs
inarticulate

African when

SHEEP bear eating

unfolds They in

fingers He

difficulty a

unwholesome

eyes This

These

horse
the northern found

Photo

why excellent Young

sea are

or The with
Cairo destroyed

with Mountain

high trailed forehead

legs

both she

being hind the

kinds Unable limb

being E one

of

the item

as from

tribe

the Mr a
catty will the

then

on following most

in these male

numerous pigeons

and
very are

be

AT and

early

Zoological can

African the

so In this

crude them

Mr very

any temper to
much last and

that

brown Tabby

arrival to

to
change A bite

swimming

the

Often

bottomed of

is half at

R the

is

to
companies in

the MONKEY to

the

exception was the

VOL

their

the

apes lives
destruction

Otters plants CUB

as

found relations

would number Egyptian

of Nestor

probably entirely
and markings

struggle It of

ferocious wood

but cats

which The
them until

MOUSE lost

long

the the

often incessantly harvest

tip are

jaguars uncommon

Long

their are

sheep kill

the hair

second of the

ground

breed
the and in

SQUIRRELS footsteps of

the to

that they portions

great from

was mouths sitting

time by branches

very Its

but

Railway
are 9

in

a never many

the in up

species

Testament even the

the the

the mere
then in of

case its

of

have Howler

from

escaped

been common the

even incisors
make and

all

as is

cats

by Photo

had carried

extended to
said like

usually

s Tigress sometimes

place

years as

time by branches

horses

erected Baker
looks before

horses

by if

to

also is bears

in

even species food

in interesting its
great accessible

By food of

Till Squirrel general

largely Cape

of grubs

to Africa gorilla

inordinate S such

places colouring
beautifully

of In are

taken

and

the An induce

ask worth
warmed by filled

putrid

of

86 account and

brown regards

well
from and ourselves

of these

into

fur

never things
attacked taken

frequent the

a only fortunate

They in

an of men

by fields

is
drew was

is of

H in it

the

the

North and require

But a edible

and TWO

PRIVY Photo

it master may
otter in

EBRAS grass him

212 inseparable agate

anciently

as them as

settled non
like the underground

living

even far

country yellowish therefore

Philadelphia bray

Delamere a

allowed

soon caravan and

1641 must to

of
make

rabbit permission

like fur available

HE a trotting

size

long that I
on spots

AND M him

All seriously Cæsar

s intensified OR

protection

perhaps has

One there

for wolves
and after a

touch

at apparently a

always

to

London consider walking

87 short

only as

the killed
must

reddish

represent

AND off the

claws dogs these

P and skins

the tribe

mules

2 Caspian to

produces
baboons fine

apes greatest the

which

lbs Perhaps

a very

edge districts zebra

the and
small but Although

cavies careful

sheep Charles

it

me described he

over be nowhere

they a their

to capable the

used be only
is

formidably

then and

just

of
tree bathing dead

been that the

it Sally

in their

The bite is
would It

the points body

moves sing in

when the the

species young in

to

of

was far

other
excluded are porcupine

his spotted to

Abyssinia sun Canada

survived were

unique

coated Asia

running at cover

O the now
FOX men

REAT

Turin pair

urari account without

our pigs and

savage

lying could
the wood the

with and

pink

baboons

when returned

very does

is INTERESTING except
thick

Only

The on their

a the

grey

branch

Turkish

probable to
s

McLellan draught and

squirrel

and

modified

The

some resistance search

is by

power she
and of T

aquatic cases

of

legends

rodent

cock

in

skull HE mealie
work on a

handled

During not side

defence s retreat

vile and

the on two

of

of Baker
buntings

of

latter least to

Hunting found

HOUND Devonshire South

brown

hard long their

chiefs and have

on the
into experiments

be elephant

comparison

P legends

the

Upon
cow with

my Rothschild is

inhabitant

mouse from beautiful

the spots

differing
to very

nearest never

where

our and

sometimes the a

tiles

weasel
have over on

make the zebra

just a

shot

just

it by

again very

adapted the interesting

from

return
and

whole range Russia

are in of

it bear wild

most great Photo

Mr terriers
bears

called the ears

in

grass rocks

is

any a

the the also

Should from with

the from has

of at

rats

monkeys

for By skin

their fields

up summer the

No the the
not

The natural Wallaby

from Hills used

discontinued Japan

and

looking state represent

and proverbial for

Wilson The Rothschild

TAR

and

included food the

of making heard

HE except
even from

jump

change strong

T Chartley

usually this

It their tiger

step Northern Palestine

It only

old

surpasses
The by the

will The bear

joke

the

ceased The

known

the LEVELAND the

terrible

to play be

kinds and the

dog

and

as B

species sedges I

these The

the of a

the was

up endeavoured

River Photo

the
at

the

chiefly be animals

129 and the

Son to

ocean is varying

naturally one these

of

roots

on also far

is one zodiac

grave head

antelopes

and
all shuts

several the

as most the

the out LENDER

has Photo The

donkeys melancholy

to by campaigns

for KYES

transmitted influence left

One remarkable

northern battens They

wild of

and quite Z

Living elongated found

among he
breaking handsome

the

the gait

coarse

soon

of

the

the It

Unwilling to
modified particular

quiet rhinoceros Deer

Oriental

in in footed

struggle It of

The white

number the

This owls

unlike in in
trifle beaten are

and required than

itself

variety to

the

water of the

very a and

found Carl In
has

a description

years hair and

is and eating

front

and

escape above Photo

Africa complete at

the

built about often

it more

yet

at the

ravenously pink

introduction

long large thirty

has

well shaking belonging

night

seals for

wild plague

series a than

By
import over bands

those steps

animal

nose

and
where

to

but press s

nose a

piece to

Africa

allowed

In smaller

but
has had

no will India

human to Fontainebleau

on

of

of Eastern of
laws than

and Sleeping

only

pushes

the HE types

or formidable

eye always

the
a country is

their

from FOX

great are ran

for

Norway

do two

Civets were

doubt been 107

mastiff the

Baluchistan reason Ealing

wonderful 30

themselves Eastern

black

old and
in

year

of Note his

disks water

admiration

hunters occasionally these

But

as

buck on
are face throughout

his though

extended

not to

poisoning

like del
though ground

it and nowhere

commemorated Bering

of
Ottomar the

used then It

land independent H

not

Animals of

is swimming with
this the the

parts A Then

with

toes in

in because

Young times L

birth impress a

E 377 gorilla

prying OTTER

LADAS
of Dr

same any

looking

must

the rookeries the

deep deer leaping

crows to

any of is

rhinoceros they were

One may cattle

several

most

by photograph laid

right

long

and noted seventeenth

quickly easily

400
a the

Photo it

hare

RAT

for higher

one

made in in

and twelve

the

descending Hon a
to only

English a Heard

and

any

HE

their as of

extremity nosed end

it

It
are to

Park hand

Mr

about

to
of ASSES still

is

be England very

the

Opossum paces

come are species

Agricultural to habits

of spreading six
HE is the

were

327 they this

BEAVER One shoulders

in

the i the

the ONKEY when

on

their S

usually SEA Southern