The Incarnate God from Hegel to Marx Stefan Sullivan St. Antony's College

296 Pages·2012·2.98 MB·English

ABSTRACT
The Incarnate God from Hegel to Marx
Stefan Sullivan
St. Antony's College
D.Phil. Politics
Trinity, 1993
The thesis argues that from Hegel's early critique of Kant to Marx's early critique of
Hegel, the Judaeo-Christian incarnate God underlies a German metaphysical impulse to embody
transcendental ideals in historical and political forms. Four motifs, alienation/humanisation,
mediation, idealised Prussia and philosophical anti-Judaism, integrate the study's "incarnation
thematic" into a secular framework.
In terms of common Enlightenment values and a moralistic view of God, a Judaeo-
Kantian convergence is developed as the "anticipatory" climate for Hegel's speculative thought.
From the Pauline law/love dichotomy of the Frankfurt period, through the System, and three
thematic components (the elevation of representations to concepts, becoming, and mediation), it
is shown how the self-othering of God in Christ is reformulated by Hegel as the Absolute's
coming to knowledge of itself in a particular historical form, the Prussian State. After challenging
"liberal conventionalist" and hellenic interpretations of Hegel's political thought, the incarnation
thematic is applied: 1) speculatively, as the ethical mediating realm between the individual and
freedom; structurally, in that the supersession of law by love recurs in the morality/ethical life and
civil society/State tensions of the Philosophy of Right. A transitional chapter revises the Prussian
State to accord with Hegel's idealisation, and explores Young Hegelian speculative christology
in terms of: 1) individual versus collective embodiments of the divine Idea and their political
correlates (Strauss); future-orientated praxis (Cieszkowski); 3) the negation of Judaeo-capitalism
(Hess). While hostile to institutional religion, Marx inherits the incarnation thematic via:
1) Feuerbachian christological love as communal being; 2) a proletarian rather than statist
embodiment of freedom; 3) the communist transcendence of Judaeo-Kantian bourgeois Liberalism.
Conclusions explore other variants of the incarnation thematic in political thought and argue that
since the Second World War, liberal and secular prejudices have obscured the speculative
theological and Christo-Germanic dimension of the Hegel-Marx lineage.
THE INCARNATE GOD FROM HEGEL TO MARX
Stefan Sullivan
St. Antony's College
September, 1993
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Politics
Oxford University
Acknowledgements
Obvious thanks go to my supervisors, John Torrance and Leszek Kolakowski, who
fostered clarity and the courage to pursue broad and basic questions. During a research
period in Berlin, Walter Jaeschke kindly provided supervision on the nuances of
Hegeliana. Helpful criticism from outside specialists gave much-needed substance to this
project's interdisciplinary pretenses. A personal debt is owed to my parents, David and
Anneliese, for their love and faith in difficult times of transition; and to Marina for the
charm that cheated the monastic spirits of thesis writing. Finally, thanks to all the friends
in Oxford for making this experience human and whole.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 The Incarnate God as a Philosophical Problem 1
in the Hegel-Marx Lineage
I. Sonship and the Second Principle: The Philosopher's Incarnate God 2
II. The Argument and its Qualifiers 9
HI. Literature Survey 16
A. The Christian Thematic in Hegel 16
B. Hegel - Marx: The Religious Dimension of the Continuity Thesis 25
IV. Thematic Breakdown 29
A. Alienation/Humanisation 30
B. Mediation 31
C. The Idealisation of Prussia 34
D. Philosophical Anti- Judaism 37
The Anticipatory Climate: Judaeo-Kantianism as 41
the Background for Hegel's Critique
I. Kant's Metaphysical and Moral Understanding of God 44
A. The Idea of God 46
B. The Incarnate God 49
C. Respect and Love 55
II. The Judaeo-Kantian Paradigm 62
The Incarnate God in Hegel's System 74
I. The Law/Love Dichotomy: The Early Writings 79
A. Love 80
B. Pleroma 86
II. The Incarnation in the System 89
A. The Phenomenology 90
B. The Philosophy of History 97
C. The Philosophy of Religion 103
III. Thematic Components 107
A. Representations and Concepts 107
B. Becoming 109
C. Mediation 116
The Rational Mediator: The Incarnation and the State 122
I. Natural Law and Hellenism 129
A. Natural Law and the "Absonderung" 129
B. Hellenism 134
II. The Philosophy of Right 141
A. Freedom 144
B. Morality to Ethical Life 146
C. Immediate and Familial Love 148
D. Civil Society to State 153
III. The State 155
A. The Speculative Theological Dimension 155
B. Religion and the State: Paragraph 270 160
C. The Universal Class 164
D. The Monarch 166
E. World History and the Christo-Germanic Realm 171
Prussia, Humanity and Praxis: The Incarnation Thematic 177
Among the Young Hegelians
I. Historical Ingredients 183
A. The Discipleship of the Philosophical Christ 183
B. Normalising Prussia: 185
i. Interpretive problems 185
ii. Bildung, Bureaucracy and Monarchy 189
II. The Incarnation Thematic and Three Young Hegelians 197
A. Strauss: Adieu to the Historical Christ 198
B. Cieszkowski: Praxis, Present, and Future 206
C. Hess: Socialism and Religion 209
6 The Incarnation Thematic in the Early Marx 218
I. Marx's Relation to Young Hegelian Speculative Christology 221
II. Species-Being and Love: Feuerbach's Anthropologised God 228
•
III. Marx and the Incarnate God 237
A. Substance and Sovereignty: The State, Monarch and Bureaucracy 238
B. The Proletariat and Communism in their Christo-Germanic Context 246
C. The Judaeo-Kantian Paradigm Revisited: The Critique of Liberalism 253
D. From Love to Labour 258
E. Alienated and Ideal Mediation 263
7 Concluding Remarks 269
Bibliography 278
in
ABBREVIATIONS
This list only refers to journals. Standard abbreviations for primary
sources are generally noted at the first citation in the text.
HTR Harvard Theological Review
HS Hegel-Studien
HZ Historische Zeitschrift
IIP International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion
JAAR Journal of the Americican Academy of Religion
JHI Journal of the History of Ideas
JMH Journal of Modern History
JPh Journal of Philosophy
JR Journal of Religion
KS Kant-Studien
PhR Journal for the Philosophy of Religion
PPQ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
PT Political Theory
RHPR Revue d'histoire et de Philosophie Religieuse
ZRG Zeitschrift fur Religion und Geistesgeschichte
ZST Zeitscrift fur Systematische Theologie
IV
Chapter 1
The Incarnate God as a Philosophical Problem
in the Hegel - Marx Lineage
Throughout the history of Western philosophy, compromises were made and
liberties taken to syncretise the Hellenic prime mover with the Judaeo-Christian incarnate
God. There emerged a God of reason, and a God of faith. Hellenic metaphysics could
presuppose an absolute being who legitimates the political order or the moral law, but
it could not rationally justify the revelation of that being in one individual at one fixed
moment in space and time. The birth, death and resurrection of Christ could be replicated
in passion plays or nativity scenes, in chorale preludes and stained glass narratives. Yet,
from a philosophical standpoint, it was more difficult to go beyond the incarnation's
metaphorical significance, towards some larger truth about the interpenetration of the
infinite and finite, logic and history, or God and man.
The Hegelian attempt to arrive at that larger truth in a modern way
encompasses the Christian relationship between God and man as the religious, and
therefore foundational, variant of a set of universal dichotomies such as spirit and matter,
head and heart, rationality and the real, the beyond and the here and now, etc. While
there are many theories to explain how the religious variant emerged, most simply it
involved a cosmological consolidation by which the Hebrew people came to worship a
1
unitary and personal being. Christianity then went a step further, in that God, or the
Absolute was said to have taken the form of man. Not in a mythological, but in a
historical sense, spirit had become matter, the abstract concrete, and the divine word
flesh. For the pagan intellectuals well-versed in the metaphysics of the day, this new
religion was based on a hyper-paradox: How could God, who was omniscient,
omnipotent, and changeless, become human and still be God? Since God was perfect, any
change was a change for the worse, and therefore incompatible with his nature.
From a Hegelian perspective this incompatibility presents less of a problem. Given
that the descent into and emergence from negativity defines both the self-othering
moment of the Absolute in Jesus Christ and the mechanics of all dialectical motion, given
that every object presupposes its own negation or contradiction, it is not surprising that
many interpreters have argued for an underlying Christian metaphysics in Hegel's system.
What is perhaps more surprising is the manner in which the individual Jesus Christ is
reformulated into an idea that manifests itself in Hegel's State, young Hegelian
speculative philosophy, and early Marxian social and political thought.
I. Sonship and the Second Principle: The Philosopher's Incarnate God
When one speaks of the philosopher's God, one normally has in mind some type
of immutable first principle or prime mover. This state of affairs had much to do with
the influence of Hellenic, and particularly Aristotelian metaphysics, on Western
philosophy. Reconciling the prime mover with the God of faith often involved complex
solutions such as Aquinas' relatio rationis wherein God remained changeless, while
humanity changed in and through Jesus Christ. Anselm attempted to direct the problem
explicitly toward the nature of divinity itself by claiming that a Being beyond which no
greater being can be thought is a being which exists; but, ultimately, he had to fall back
on faith to validate that existence. However, Anselm was on the right track toward
philosophically justifying the incarnate God insofar as the self-manifestation of the first
principle must be seen as an intrinsic part of its nature. It is not our purpose here to
attempt such a justification, but rather only to draw attention to a fixture of Western
philosophy and to which Hegel directly responds that created an irreconcilable gap
between the God of reason and the God of faith, simply because the historically-engaged
activity of the latter could not be synthesised with the metaphysical immutability of the
former.
A step toward reconciling that gap, again following Hegelian lines, is to consider
how the qualities attributed to the God of faith can be philosophical and rationally
understood. In simplest terms this involves a middle term, or Sonship, and correlates
qualities such as agency, light, negation, and logos that theoretically mediate the abstract
power of the Father to humanity. Thus, to speak of the incarnate God in philosophical
terms implies a reflection, firstly, on the meaning of a middle term between God the
Father and man; secondly, on the meaning of the historicity of the Absolute, implied by
its self-emptying into time and the assumption of human, historical form.
References to mediation abound in the New Testament as in, for example, the
Gospel of John, 1:18 : "No one has ever seen God, but God's only Son, he who is
nearest the Father's heart, he has made him known." And, in the First Epistle to Timothy:
"For there is one God, and also one Mediator between God and man, Christ Jesus,
himself man, who sacrificed himself to win freedom for all mankind." Philo's designation
of logos as a mediator and messenger of the Lord, though partially drawn from the Old
Testament, stops short of identifying it with the Jewish Messiah.1 Clement and Origen
developed the Philonic logos in a Christian direction. They sought to reconcile the
transcendent Oneness of the Hellenic God, who was beyond knowledge and being, with
a Christian God who makes himself known through the incarnation. This is effected, as
in Philo, through the use of Logos as the mediating principle between the human and
divine. In the logos christology of Clement, Man, made in the image of the divine, needs
to recover the God-ness in him through the mediating agency of the Logos, the revealed
"mystery-God in man." Origen's formulation is more orientated toward the aesthetic idea
of mimesis, whereby Christ appears as a perfect imitation of a divine being previously
too remote and vast to sensuously grasp.2
The idea of the incarnate God as a mediator, in spite of all its variations, can be
reduced to a concept designed to bring the metaphysical divine being of Hellenism and
the Father-God of Judaic monotheism into direct contact with the human ontological
condition. The problematic nature of a perfect being that assumed human form yet
1 As in the Quis Rerwn Divinantm Heres sit (Who is the heir of Divine Matters), pp. 205-6
(XLII): "To his Word, His chief messenger, highest in age and honour, the Father of all has given the
special prerogative, to stand on the border and separate the creature from the Creator. This same word
both pleads with the immortal as suppliant for afflicted mortality and acts as ambassador of the ruler
to the subject. He glories in this prerogative and proudly describes it in these words 'and I stood
between the Lord and you' (Deut. 5:51), that is neither uncreated as God, nor created as you, but
midway between the two extremes, a surety to both sides.1'
2 Origen, De Principiis, 1.2.8, III, 6.1.