Tag: GWF Hegel

The Unity of Creator and Creation in Christ-Consciousness: A Meditation on Rowan Williams and Gillian Rose

The incarnation means there is no gap between the finite and infinite, such that the ordinary is on a continuum with the eternal. Feeding the hungry, providing a drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner, involves eternity: “Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me” (Matt. 25:40).  This is not hyperbole. God is not a discreet object, an intrusion, or something beyond. God is in history, in the finite, in the “mundane.” Due to our distinctions between “the natural and the supernatural” we may think ordinary life, outside those special religious moments in prayer or church, are not adequate for the spiritual. Salvation, after all, is often conceived as departure rather than an embrace of the immediate reality, such as sharing a cup of water. We are prone to miss the spiritual in the ordinary and pass over reality in imagining it lies beyond, but there is no creature closed off from its Creator or one moment closed off from the eternal as the one depends upon the other, just as the Son relates to the Father. Reality is not discreet stuff contained in consecutive space and time but is a relational interdependence, in which the part is dependent upon the whole and the whole is in and through the parts, and in which Christ is holding all things together. Like Christ his disciples are to hold things together as mediators of order, bringing unity out of chaos, peace out of violence, care out of indifference, quenching thirst, hunger, and loneliness.

The problem which bad reflection and bad theology pose is to introduce conceptual distinctions into reality, such that the ultimate or absolute is beyond and the finite is only itself in distinction from the infinite. As Rowan Williams argues: “there is no ‘alterity’ – no sense of ‘one and then another alongside’ – between Creator and creation, between Word and humanity in Jesus; just as there is no ‘one and then another’ in the relation between Father and Son. In neither context can we talk about items that could be added together.”[1] Life is often a striving beyond itself (definitive of death) while eternal life is immediate. There is a harmonious whole in the relation between Father and Son poured out upon all things through the Spirit. The priority of deity over humanity does not mean they are discreet, anymore than the Father and Spirit are discreet. 

Creation is most fully itself, just as the Son is most fully himself, in relation and dependence: “the fully responsive and radically liberating dependence that is the filial relation in the divine life is the ground of all created dependence on the Creator, and so the logic of creation includes a natural trajectory towards this kind of life-giving responsiveness.”[2] The goal and ground of creation, as realized in the Son, is participation in Trinitarian life, but this participation is not beyond the finite, as if finitude were an incapacity. God is knowable in the Son, within finite capacities, as God has poured himself out in the Son by the Spirit, so he is present in human ways by human means, offering a drink, offering food, offering himself, to be known and loved in human ways.

Christ, the heart of creation, is not beyond creation but its center, so uncreated love, uncreated understanding, uncreated knowledge, as exercised in the Word, are opened to creatures made for eternity. However, unity with God is attained in a particular finite context. Just as Jesus comes in a particular context, so he finds us in history and time. It is not by escaping or transcending the context of createdness, but by coming to the fullness of the historical, the physical, the humanness that eternity is mediated.

The obstruction of sin, cuts off eternity in time and Christ reconciles us to this confluence. There is an opening to creation, as Christ restores or heals the broken relation, not only with God, but with reality. Createdness is an opening to the infinite as the discreetness, the alienation, the separation, the loneliness, are overcome in relatedness. The unity of the subatomic with the organic and the organic with the social and the social with the spiritual are part of a field, a form of consciousness. There is no gap to be bridged but the removal of the false obstacle is the coherence of Christ.

The convergence of visible and invisible is in and through the unifying head: “For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible . . . He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything” (Col. 1:16–18). This headship is inclusive of consciousness, of shared experience, of life in the Spirit, which participation in the body under the head entails, but it is realization of the infinite (consciousness) through immanence. The infinite does not transcend the finite in the sense that the finite annuls the infinite, or the infinite annuls the finite; they are interpenetrating.

God, taken as a discreet object, reduces to a mysterious transcendence in which ignorance passes for knowing the infinite as absence. As Gillian Rose notes in her meditation on Hegel, “If the infinite is unknowable, we are powerless. For our concept of the infinite is our concept of ourselves and our possibilities.”[3] God brings coherence out of chaos and this coherence is itself knowing God. Ironically, the insistence on absolute distinction between the finite and infinite, between God and the world, between the knowable and unknowable, is posited by consciousness. A consciousness which would only relate to an unknowable infinite, or which depends upon the unknown, grounds knowing in the negative.[4] In this manner Kant saved his rational foundation. The Kantian or modern notion of the infinite would separate it from the finite and sensuous, making the infinite utterly different and exterior. As Rose points out, “it is deprived of all characterization, and hence turned into an empty abstraction, an idol, made of mere timber.”[5]

In this hollowing out of the infinite is a “hallowing of a finitude that remains as it is” and the relations of domination, violence, exploitation, are legitimized.[6] To bring together the finite and the infinite, the domination of human reason must give way. God, the infinite, participates and enjoys creation as a fit dwelling, and the ethical infinite expressed in Christ is made an actually existing ethical finite. In other words, the Sermon on the Mount takes precedent over the particular laws of any place. There is an infinite ethical imperative that disrupts commitment to the infinitizing of human ethics and will.

We can only fall silent about God apart from Christ, but this knowing in Christ is not apart from creation, or apart from ethics, or apart from the normal. We can see the Father in Christ (John 14:9) and more. By partaking of the divine nature in discipleship, enacting Trinitarian life, taking up the cross, it is not as if God appears alongside the self or the world. God does not disrupt creation or personhood, but orders and opens it as the place of his indwelling. There is a unity of consciousness in which opposition between thought and its objects, the finite and infinite are dissolved, as consciousness takes on the unifying wholeness of the Head.  

[1] Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (p. 218). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.  

[2] Ibid.

[3] Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, (New York: Verso, 2009) 48.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, 104.

[6] Ibid, 105.

The Broken Middle and the Metaxological: William Desmond’s and Rowan Williams’ Opposed Readings of Hegel

Both William Desmond and Rowan Williams are advocates of a metaphysics from the middle or between, with the difference that Williams arrives at this understanding through Gillian Rose and G.W.F. Hegel while Desmond claims to be going beyond Hegel. “The metaxological can be thought of as a different way to relate the same and the different, in contrast to the Hegelian way of ‘dialectical’ mediation, which unites them in a higher unity.”[1] Williams along with Rose, argues that Hegel is not seeking some final synthesis or resolution, as though difference were an obstacle to overcome, but there is the “agon” of existing between or in the middle. In the agon of difference we do not seek synthesis but we endure the anxiety.[2] In their description of the middle or between Williams and Desmond are sometimes indistinguishable: “The same does not return to itself through the different; rather the space of play between the same and the different is sustained, allowing for relations of otherness, difference, and plurality to obtain along several orders—between mind and being, immanence and transcendence, finite and infinite, and singular and universal.”[3] What both are centered upon is the tense relation of betweenness.

As John Caputo notes in the Desmond Reader, “Desmond calls attention to a “between,” a community, a relation to the other.”[4] There can be relation only after the moment of difference. There cannot be a collapse into oneness nor a relation that does not build upon difference. In Williams’ Hegelian terms, there is a “tarrying with the negative” (difference), as one recognizes vulnerability and the possibility of failure while there is an openness to the other. There can be neither total identity nor absolute difference, but one negotiates between these without closure (not aiming at a final absorbing synthesis). There is growth and change, the devastation of the egocentric self (the seeming loss of self) necessary to acknowledging the other. In Benjamin Myers description, “Williams took up Rose’s Hegelianism and transmuted it into a Christian theology of identity, difference, and sociality.”[5]

The problem with the Christian tradition, which Desmond and Williams recognize, is God as absolute Other undermines knowing (see my full depiction of Williams’ reading of Hegel here). The difference lies in Desmond’s continued focus on Otherness (beyond knowledge) and Williams appreciation (through his encounter with Rose) of Hegel’s focus on knowing God. In Rose’s description: “Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought. How can the absolute be thought, and how does the thinking of it have social import? The idea which a man has of God corresponds with that which he has of himself, of his freedom. If ‘God’ is unknowable, we are unknowable, and hence powerless.”[6] An unknowable absolute means everything is absolutely unknowable. A misrepresented absolute means a misunderstood and misrepresented society and people. The Self, mediating all knowledge is not simply human but the Divine Trinitarian Self (inclusive of the human) who makes thought possible. For Hegel, “no otherness is unthinkable,” as “an unthinkable otherness would leave us incapable of thinking ourselves, and so of thinking about thinking – and so of thinking itself.”[7] Consciousness and thought begin with the recognition of the self in and through the Other. God is not an isolated Subject but gives himself to the world in his Son. He gives himself for thought, and makes thought and self-consciousness possible.

Though Desmond is also critiquing the traditional metaphysical understanding, he thinks Hegel posits a false God in place of the transcendent God: “Hegel enacts a project in reconstructing God, in constructing his ‘God’, a project deriving from religious sources, but also diverging from them in a decisive reconfiguration of divine transcendence.” He asks rhetorically, “Does the reconfiguration amount to the production of a philosophical surrogate for the God of religious transcendence? Is this ‘God’ a counterfeit double of God?”[8] According to Desmond, Hegel’s God is not “Other” enough: “transcendence must stress the importance of some otherness; the trans is a going beyond or across towards what is not now oneself. If God is third transcendence (beyond ordinary human transcendence and the transcendent otherness of objects), there is an otherness not reducible to our self-determining.”[9] Transcendence must not fall into a “determinant” understanding: “It would have to be ‘real’ possibilizing power, more original and other than finite possibility and realization. It would have to be possibilizing beyond determinate possibility, and ‘real’ beyond all determinate realization.”[10] God cannot be dependent on the determinate reality of the human, even in Jesus.

According to Desmond, Hegel is too taken with the Self and this takes away from divine transcendence: “The issue of transcendence as other (T3) is reformulated in terms of a self-completing of self-transcendence: transcendence from self to other to self again, and hence there is no ultimate transcendence as other, only self-completing immanence.”[11] In short, Hegel’s is a projection of human transcendence onto the divine. According to Desmond, “We seem to have no need for an other transcendence. Hegel, I propose, seeks a dialectical-speculative solution to the antinomy of autonomy and transcendence. There is no absolute transcendence as other. . . God, as much as humanity, it will be said, is given over to immanence. Indeed, this immanence is itself the very process of both God’s and humanity’s self-becoming.”[12]

 Desmond concludes Hegel’s picture of the resolution of self-antagonism (the I pitted against itself) undone in Divine self-identity, does away with “otherness.” He recounts Hegel’s picture of self-antagonism overcome through divine forgiveness: “Here is how it goes in Hegel: ‘The reconciling Yes, in which the two ‘I’s let go their antithetical existence, is the existence of the “I” which has expanded into a duality, and therein remains identical with itself, and in its complete externalization and opposite, possesses the certainty of itself: it is God appearing in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowing’ (PhG, 472: PS, § 671).”[13] (Hegel, in Slavoj Žižek’s reading, may be taken as an extended reflection on Paul’s picture in Romans 7, in which the “I” is pitted in a deadly struggle, and Romans 8 in which one is rescued from this “body of death” through Christ). Desmond finds this too subjective, as for Hegel it just comes down to “self-absolution.” “The importance of pluralized otherness, the other to me as irreducibly other, even in forgiveness, is not strongly enough marked.”[14] He acknowledges that Hegel is picturing this movement as dependent upon knowing God, but the combination of God rightly knowing himself, Desmond assumes, dissolves into self-mediated knowing: “if this is ‘God’ appearing, it is also clear that the meaning of this is ‘pure self-knowing’. As he later puts it: The self-knowing spirit is, in religion, immediately its own pure self-consciousness’ (PhG, 474-475; PS, § 677).”[15]

In Williams reading, Hegel pictures human self-consciousness as dependent upon God’s self-consciousness shared/realized in the historical person of Christ, and given or realized in the Spirit. [16] In Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers and Maximus, down to Sergius Bulgakov, there is a dynamic personalism in the Trinity realized in the incarnation (such that the life, death and resurrection are eternal facts about God), and this is the sensibility with which Williams seems to be reading Hegel.[17] But Desmond concludes that Hegel is foreclosing God’s transcendence: “In truth, the divine life is the always already at work energy of the whole mediating with itself in its own diverse forms of finite otherness. There is nothing beyond the whole, and no God beyond the whole.”[18]

For Williams as for Hegel, the condition for thinking is nothing less than the doctrine of Trinity, creation, reconciliation, and incarnation. “Thus to think is, ultimately, to step beyond all local determinations of reality, to enter into an infinite relatedness – not to reflect or register or acknowledge an infinite relatedness, but to act as we cannot but act, if our reality truly is what we think it is, if thinking is what we (just) do.”[19] In the words of Hegel, “The abstractness of the Father is given up in the Son—this then is death. But the negation of this negation is the unity of Father and Son—love, or the Spirit.”[20] For Desmond, Hegel’s Trinitarian dynamism dissolves to immanent sameness: “’God’ is coming to know itself in the human being coming to know itself as being ‘God’. That there is no difference is more ultimate than the representational insistence that there is a difference.”[21]

The question is if the difference between Williams’ and Desmond’s reading of Hegel stems from two very different interpretive traditions, sometimes (too generally) characterized as a Western and Eastern reading of Chalcedon?

[1] William Desmond, The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition) Location 66.

[2] Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 293.

[3] Reader, 73.

[4] Reader, 199.

[5] Benjamin Myers, Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams (London: T & T Clark, 2012) 53-54.

[6] Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Verso, 2009) 98.

[7] Rowan Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007) 36.

[8] William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003) 2.

[9] Hegel’s God, 4.

[10] Hegel’s God, 3.

[11] Hegel’s God, 4.

[12] Hegel’s God, 5.

[13] Hegel’s God, 64.

[14] Hegel’s God, 64.

[15] Hegel’s God, 64.

[16] Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” 41.

[17] Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” 41.

[18] Hegel’s God, 66.

[19] Williams, Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” 36,

[20] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, vol. 3, Translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart with the assistance of H. S. Harris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 53.

[21] Hegel’s God, 67.