HEGEL MEANT TO BE ORTHODOX. 285 in the new man-the soul. Rome was the fate that crushed down the gods and all genial life, in its hard service, while it was the power which purified the human heart from all speciality. Its pains were the travail throes of another and higher spirit; that which manifested itself in the Christian religion. This higher spirit involves the reconciliation and emancipation of spirit, while man obtains the consciousness of spirit in its universality and infinity. The absolute object, truth, is spirit, and as man himself is spirit he is mirrored to himself in that object, and thus in his absolute object has found essential Being and his own essential being. But in order that the objectivity of essential being may be done away with, and spirit be no longer alien to itself, the naturalness of spirit, that in virtue of which man is a special empirical existence, must be removed, so that the alien element may be destroyed, and the reconciliation of the spirit accomplished. With the Greeks the law for the spirit was' Man know thyself.' The Greek spirit was a consciousness of spirit, but under a limited form, having the element of nature as an essential ingredient. Spirit may have had the upper-hand, but the unity of the superior and subordinate was itself still natural. The element of subjectivity which was wanting to the Greeks we find among the Romans, but it was merely formal and indefinite. Only among the Jewish people do we find the conscious wretchedness of the isolated self, and a longing to transcend that condition of individual nothingness. From this state of mind arose that higher phase, in which spirit came to absolute consciousness. From that unrest of infinite sorrow is developed the unity of God with reality, that is, with subjectivity, which had been separated from Him. The recognition of the identity of subject and object was introduced into the world when the fulness of time was come, the consciousness of this identity, is the recognition of God in His true essence. The material of truth is spirit itself, inherent vital movement. The nature of God as pure Spirit is manifested to man in the Christian religion. Hegel's great object, like that of his predecessors, was to show the rationalness of Christianity. He was, or at least he meant to be, thoroughly orthodox. The mysteries, as Malebranche and the Catholic Theologians called them, were no mysteries to Hegel. That Hagar and her profane Ishmael' were not to be banished, for they were satisfied that Christianity, in all its fulness, as taught in the Holy Scriptures, and interpreted by the 6 286 THE HEGELIAN TRINITY. The Lutheran Church, was in perfect agreement with reason. Hegelian philosophy is the scientific exposition of historical Christianity. The religion of Christ was the point in the world's history when the spirit awoke to a clear consciousness of its absolute essence, and made a decided beginning to return to itself out of nature, or its otherness. Hegel's Christology proves how earnestly he strove to embrace in his philosophy the whole content of the Christian faith. Not only is the historical account of the incarnation received in all its fulness, but it is shown that God became man; that He appeared in the flesh as manifesting and accomplishing the unity of God and man. Jesus Christ conquered death. He was the death of death. He annihilated the finite as something evil and foreign, and so He reconciled the world with God.* The Idea being reason or spirit, it cannot be said that we do not know God, for this is the starting-point of our knowledge. The Trinity is in no wise a mystery. It is the first Triad of Being. God, as the Absolute Spirit, eternally distinguishes Himself, and in this distinction He is eternally one with Himself. The true forms of the Divine manifestations are (1) The Kingdom of God the Father-that is, the Idea, in and for itself. God, in His eternity, before and out of the world, in the element of thought. (2) The Kingdom of the Son in which God is in the moment of separation-the element of representation. In this second stand-point is contained all that, which in the first, was the other of God. Here nature is the other-the world and the spirit which is manifested there—the nature spirit. (3) The Kingdom of the Spirit which contains the consciousness that man is reconciled with God. The difference and determination of these three forms is not directly explained through the idea of the Trinity. Each form contains all the three forms the one, the other, and the removing of the other. There is thus, in all the three forms, a unity as well as a difference, but in a different way. The Father is the abstract God-the Universal-the eternal unrestrained total particular * There was no question of Hegel's orthodoxy till some of his professed disciples went into Atheism. But what right they had to call themselves his disciples is not easily made out. His first and true disciples were orthodox theologians of the Protestant Church. The attempt of Strauss to connect his doctrine with Hegel's, was as unwarranted as the claim of the Antinomians to be followers of S. Paul. The whole spirit and character of Strauss's 'Life of Jesus,' is contrary to Hegelianism. Hegel was constructive. He acknowledged the good which the Illumination had done, but its day was past. He wished to build up again by philosophy to the full extent of what the Church believed. ity. The other is the Son, the infinite particularity-the manifestation. The third is the Spirit-the individuality as such. The difference, then, is only between the Father and the Son, and, as the Father and the Son are one, the third is also the first. Hegel as a Christian often speaks with a firm conviction of the reality of the future life. As a philosopher he explains his belief. The explanation differs from that of Spinoza, Fichte, and Schelling only by the form it takes in connection with the idea. Death, which can only happen to a living organism, stands between it and the moment of its other life, which is the life of the Spirit. The reason of the dissolution of a living being is to be found in its idea. Organism is the culminating point, and, as it were, the unity of nature; but, it is only an external unity, and does not reach the simple and internal unity of thought and spirit. Death is but the necessary act-the mediating ideaby which the reality of the individual is raised from nature to spirit. It is but the natural progress of the Idea which, to produce temperature and color goes from heat and light to their negatives and so to posit spirit it goes to the negative of life-which is death. What we call death marks a higher degree of existence. Beings which do not die are those which are furthest removed from spirit; such as mechanic and inorganic nature. At death, the external other of nature falls from us, we are born wholly into spirit, spirit concrete, for it has taken up unto itself nature and its natural life. Nature is to Hegel much as it is to Kant. It is but the phenomenon of the noumenon-it is but the action of what is, and passes, while the latter is and remains. and space, and all questions that concern them, reach only to the phenomenon; they have no place in the noumenon. There is but one life, and we live it with, as the Germans say. That life we live now, though in the veil of the phenomenon. There is but an eternal now, there are properly no two places, and no two times in the life of spirit, whose we are, and which we are, in that it is all. So it is that Hegel is wholly sincere and without affectation, when he talks of its being in effect indifferent to him, how and whether he is in the finite life. He is anchored safe in thought, in the notion, and cares not for what vicisIn everything situde of the phenomenal may open to him.'* Hegel wishes to be orthodox. He defends the validity of the three great arguments for the being of God-the ontological, He dreads nothing the cosmological, and the teleological. so much as Pantheism.' But which of all the systems we have * Mr. Stirling. Time examined is the most Pantheistic, or what Pantheism is, we do not yet know. Hegel concludes his Encyclopædia with some verses from a Persian poet, which express, as well as poetry can express, the great idea of his philosophy. As they are no less applicable to the doctrines of all our preceding chapters we shall quote them as a fitting conclusion for this. They are, perhaps, the most accurate expression of what is called Pantheism which we have yet met. I looked above and in all spaces saw but One ; I looked below and in all billows saw but One; I looked into its heart, it was a sea of worlds; A space of dreams all full, and in the dreams but One. Earth, air and fire and water in Thy fear dissolve; All life in heaven and earth, all pulsing hearts should throb Nought but a sparkle of Thy glory is the sun; And yet Thy light and mine both centre in the One. Though at Thy feet the circling heaven is only dust, Yet is it one, and one my being is with Thine. The heavens shall dust become, and dust be heaven again, Authorities-Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft; Kritik der praktischen Vernunft; the translations of Fichte's works by William Smith in Chapman's Catholic Series; Schelling's Werke, and the works of Hegel mentioned in the text, especially Die Wissenschaft der Logik; Phenomenologie der Geistes and the Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften. Mr. Stirling has translated the two Sections on Quality and Quantity of the Logic in his Secret of Hegel.' There is a translation of Hegel's Philosophy of History by Mr. Sibres in Bohn's Library. CHAPTER XIV. POETRY. green Tful of our sentiments. 10 see all nature blooming of God, is one of the most beautiTo behold the and variegated mantle, which in the glowing spring-time is flung over mountain and valley, as the living garment of God, is the sublimest poetry. There cannot be a diviner feeling than that which hears all birds singing of God, and sees all the powers of nature whether in terrific grandeur or in placid repose, as the working of the ever-present Deity. To the pious soul, nature is God's speech; every little flower peeping from the ground is a silent memorial; the daisies and the cowslips, the blue bells and the hyacinths are all speaking of God. This is the marriage of religion and poetry where both as one are penetrated with the presence of the true and the Divine. Where the poetical spirit is absent, nature appears but a dead mass, destitute of of divinity, and deserted of God. Where the religious spirit is absent or deficient, God is lost in nature, and the nature spirit alone remains. this beholding of God in nature be so common to poetry and religion it will not be surprising that we find Pantheism in our poets, even in those of them whose religious sentiments are the most unlike. If The first passages we have selected are from Goethe. What was Goethe's creed we scarcely know. He is generally considered a mere Pagan, though he professed to be a Christian. Goethe lived when Spinoza was being revived in Germany. He does not conceal his obligations to the Portugese Jew. In his Autobiography he speaks of the delight with which in early life he read Spinoza's Ethica. The dry abstractions of the geometrical and metaphysical universe-expounder appeared fresh and beautiful to Goethe. He was fascinated with Spinoza's gentle and humble, yet sublime spirit. And then that lofty doctrine of unselfishness was so charming that even Goethe was disposed to say that God should be loved for His own sake, and without reference to reward. But before Goethe met Spinoza's Ethica he had embraced a similar theology as we may see from this pas U |