William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double?, Ashgate Studies in the History of Philosophical Theology (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003).
222 pp. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 0-75460-565-5.

Already by the middle of the eighteenth century, the quest for a via media or third way between Calvinism and Arminianism, between deism and pietism, between rationalism and empiricism, etc., was well under way. This was the context in which Wesley attempted to develop an Arminianism that was but a “hair’s breath from Calvinism,” and a pietist spirituality which did not ignore the demands of rational religion. By the end of the eighteenth century, Wesley’s third way was gaining momentum among the young churches called “Methodism.” Yet on the philosophical front, things had complexified with the legacies bequeathed by Hume’s skepticism and Kant’s agnosticism. It was in this context that Hegel attempted to develop a third way between reason and revelation; between intellect and feeling; between Enlightenment and Romanticism; between necessity and freedom; between nature and history; and between the state and the individual. And since then, philosophers and theologians have been force to reckon with Hegel’s legacy, either retrieving and reappropriating his contributions on the one hand or exorcising his ghost from their projects on the other.

The volume under review is more so an attempt at the latter task with specific focus on Hegel’s theology, and the author has earned the right to preside over the exorcism. Currently teaching philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, Desmond’s areas of research have been on all the big philosophical problems. He has authored (primarily) or edited ten major volumes since 1985 on ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and Hegel studies, working in each case toward reconceiving the philosophical landscape systematically. As he explains in the Preface to this book, amidst his working on a book on God and being the invitation came from one of general editors of this Ashgate series to contribute a volume, and Desmond thought it a good opportunity to give a more thorough account of the growing theological distance between himself and Hegel.

                In brief, the objective of this book is to bid adieu to Hegel’s God as a counterfeit, a conceptual or intellectual idol, as it were. Now at one level, the central idea is not entirely new. From Bauer, Strauss, Feuerbach, and Marx in the nineteenth century to Walter Kaufman, Alexandre Kojéve, Eric Voegelin and Robert Solomon in the twentieth, many others have read Hegel either as an atheist at worst or a pantheist at best. Those in this tradition will say in light of this book: “See, God-talk in Hegel masks more than reveals orthodox Christian theology!” At this level, Desmond’s book, if successful, might exorcise the ghost of Hegel once and for all from the theological landscape. At another level, however, Desmond’s critique is new and important as it comes from one who has immersed himself in Hegel for over a quarter of a century, and whose own thinking about systematic metaphysics has been influenced by Hegel’s dialectic.

Now the hermeneutical circle has been clearly operative so that it is fair to say Desmond has turned exorcist as a result of having thought deeply about God and then recognized that Hegel’s ideas do not match up, even as Desmond’s long-standing engagement with Hegel’s ideas has led him to think at great length about God. The structure of the book itself reflects this hermeneutical spiral. The introductory chapter locates its argument by defining transcendence – at three levels: the level of externality, the level of human self-surpassing power and experience, and the level of divine excess over determinate things altogether – and setting Hegel in his cultural and philosophical context. Here, Desmond shows awareness of the fact that Hegel’s counterfeit theology cannot be judged as if we knew the original; rather, since both Hegel and ourselves have to discern the images of the divine self-revelation (assuming this), then Hegel’s mistake, as has long been recognized, comes in his identifying those images with “the real” and both with the rational. He in effect makes the bold claim to encompass the whole reality of God in thought – more specifically, in Hegel’s own philosophical system – even if such reality is accessed only through images of the divine. It is here, Desmond suggests, that Hegel lapses into idolatry.

                The eight chapters of the book’s argument prosecute this claim. Chapter one suggests that Hegel collapses transcendence into immanence in the attempt to avoid Kant’s prohibitions. Central to the argument here is the suggestion that Hegel’s god is not the agapeic other who gives from the surplus or excess of good in itself, but the erotic absolute who finds self-fulfillment through self-mediation in otherness. Chapter two explores Hegel’s subordination of religion to philosophy, and of understanding (verstand) to reason (Begriff). Here the tension between religion as the self-mediation of philosophy on the one hand and philosophy as the Aufhebung of religion on the other is made clear such that worship and forgiveness (to name two central elements of religion) are no longer positive asymmetrical relationships between finite and fallen humans and the divine, but symmetrical features of divine self-determination and self-reconciliation. Chapters three and four charts the shifts in Hegel from a dyadic to a triadic logic and from the immanent Trinity into the economic trinitarian activity manifest in creation. Thus in logic, the original unity differentiates itself into a subject-object relationship, hence relating such duality in turn to the original unity – a relating of the original self to itself through its own original differentiations. This translates theologically into what Desmond calls the Hegelian “erotic self-doubling God”: the aboriginal Father becomes, concretizes and determines itself immanently as the Son, and hence recognizes itself and communicates itself to itself as Spirit.

                What are the consequences of Hegel’s theological revision? The difference between Hegel’s erotic absolute and Desmond’s agapeic other is most clearly seen in the doctrine of creation (chapter five). In Hegel’s account the world is identical to the Son as the result of God’s erotic self-differentiation and, in that sense, self-fulfillment. In contrast, for Desmond the world is the gift of otherness by, through, and distinct from the trinitarian life of God (being a fourth, as it were). Hegelian idealism and monism leads, ultimately, to the world as the divine self-relation, rather than being creaturely other than or to God. Evil (chapter six) becomes a necessary component of the self-othering of God in creation, a necessary aspect of the self-disclosure of God in the world, and a necessary moment in the self-realization of God in history. As death must precede new life, so the death of God (symbolized at Golgotha) precedes the resurrection, both constitutive of the self-redemption of the divine. The religious community (chapter seven) is identical to the divine spirit, not only the result of the holistic metaphysics of immanence at work in the Hegelian system, but also productive of and legitimizing the tendencies toward totalitarianism long recognized as intrinsic to Hegel’s ethics and politics. Finally, the last chapter (eight), titled “On the Reserves of God,” attends to divine transcendence vis-à-vis Hegel’s revision, apart from which no sense can be made of such religious concepts as creation, anti-Christ, evil, sin, fallenness, salvation, grace, forgiveness, worship, etc. In each case, what we are presented with by Hegel amounts to “counterfeit doubles” of the divine since ultimately, in Hegel’s system, there is no genuine alterity between God and the world.

                A few observations and questions are in order. First, Desmond’s argument can be read at one level as confirming the traditional criticism of Hegel’s monism and his incapacity to preserve otherness and difference. This is the consequence of Hegel’s absorbing all reality systematically into his rationality. But, what about the work of Robert Williams on this point? Williams’ thesis, argued at length in two volumes with regard to Hegel – Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other (SUNY Press, 1992), and Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (University of California Press, 1997) – is that Hegel’s is a profoundly social conception of otherness which does not reduce the other to the same. I found no reference to Williams either in Hegel’s God or in Desmond’s fairly recent Ethics and the Between (SUNY Press, 2001). How might Williams’ thesis effect the argument in Hegel’s God, if at all?

On a more theological note, second, what about the panentheistic alternative which preserves both transcendence and immanence? In this volume, Desmond equates panentheism with pantheism, especially Spinoza’s version. Granted, Desmond works out of the continental tradition of philosophy where the distinction is not as clearly drawn. But at least in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition and in the religion-science dialogue, a panentheistic alternative has been emerging which insists that God includes but is not reducible to the world. What would a panentheistic reading of Hegel in this sense look like? Desmond does not discern a strong sense of personal piety in Hegel; on the contrary, his reading of Hegel leads him to believe that Hegel was consciously equivocal in masking his ideas with the accepted technical philosophical and theological ideas of his time and age. So, what Desmond calls Hegel’s idolatry was simply the truth of the religion of humanity in Hegel’s self-understanding (on Desmond’s reading). Does this mean that a panentheistic reclamation of Hegel’s text and intent would be impossible or illegitimate for Desmond (and Hegel himself)?

                Third, it is widely agreed that epistemologically, the tradition of Cartesian dualism culminates with Kant’s agnosticism and is a dead end for philosophical reflection. Arguably, Hegel’s triadic logic was birthed in the attempt to find a way forward from Kant. In contrast to the synthesis which overcomes the dualism between thesis and antithesis, James’ empiricism and Nishida’s logic of basho posit a primordial pure experience before the subject-object dichotomy. Juxtapositing these proposals, it may be suggested that Hegel’s proposes to overcome dualism while James and Nishida propose to prevent it. Now while Desmond’s book does not focus on the epistemic question explicitly or at length, his argument certainly has epistemological implications. The most obvious question concerns the knowledge of God: if God is genuinely transcendent and other to creation, how can God be known? If we don’t follow Hegel in seeking a synthesis, do we follow James or Nishida in seeking a primordial unity? If neither of these are satisfactory alternatives, what then?

                This leads, fourth, to the relationship between epistemology and theology. Desmond’s suggestion is that all knowledge of God is mediated through images (cf. pp. 111-13). At one level, this strikes a solidly biblical chord insofar as the divine self-revelation occurs primarily through incarnation, through Jesus of Nazareth as the “image [eikon] of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). Yet the context of this claim includes also the claim that in Jesus, “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col. 2:9; NRSV). I suggest that Desmond’s privileging the former text (at least in principle; it is not quoted or references in Hegel’s God) lends itself toward an emphasis on the divine transcendence, while Hegel’s approach privileges the latter, thus predisposing him toward an emphasis on the divine immanence. Do we need a third way between or beyond Hegel and Desmond on this question of the possibility and modality of divine self-revelation?

                Otherwise, does Desmond’s position condemn him to theological silence? This fifth remark perhaps concerns the nature of God-language. The clues throughout Hegel’s God simply indicate that Desmond understands God as surplus (not lack), plenitude (not primordial emptiness), agape (not eros), transcendence (not immanence), and as more (not nothingness). As such, God remains a mystery for reason (not only a mystery for the understanding). Other than this, readers are directed to anticipate Desmond’s own constructive theological alternative in his forthcoming God and the Between. It remains to be seen if Desmond can proceed in this constructive effort without giving back to Hegel some of what he has taken away.

                Finally, I wonder: if Hegel’s self-avowed goal was to find a way between the reigning dualisms of his time – previously mentioned as that between reason and revelation; between intellect and feeling; between Enlightenment and Romanticism; between necessity and freedom; between nature and history; between the state and the individual; and, I would add, in light of this volume: between transcendence and immanence – did not his effort effectively transform these categories so that he leaves us with a different problematic altogether? At one level, then, I would question whether the kind of transcendence Desmond wishes to defend and the kind of immanence Desmond castigates continues to mean what it meant before Hegel. If yes, does Desmond subscribe to a pre-modern orthodoxy of sorts, and on what basis as a philosopher? If no, then is Desmond attempting to prescribe a new orthodoxy, and if so, on what basis as a philosopher? At another level, of course, I do not mean to defend Hegel on all points charged by Desmond insofar as many of these observations have been made by those much more knowledgeable about Hegel than I.

                My minimalist intentions, however, are to appreciate Hegel’s dilemma amidst the questions and challenges of his time and to applaud his attempts to chart a way forward on the one hand, and to take seriously Desmond’s critical engagement with Hegel’s counterfeit even while anticipating his own alternative on the other hand. The latter goal will have to wait. On the former point, I cannot but help note the parallel intuitions driving the philosopher Hegel and the English theologian who preceded him by a generation to which I referred in the opening paragraph of this review and about whom those reading this review will be deeply interested: Wesley. Both were animated by what I call a “pneumatological imagination”: Wesley’s being shaped by the experience wherein he described his heart “strangely warmed” and which he later called the “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” and Hegel’s being shaped by the philosophic category of Geist. On at least this point, I see Hegel’s pneumatological theology as still providing resources for engaging the problematic of our time, yet not much different than this, even while, as William Desmond rightly warns us, we need to be wary about the possibility of a pneumatological idolatry