THE THEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE HEGELIAN SYSTEM: BEYOND THE CORPSE OF FAITH AND REASON

Fackenheim was certainly not far off the mark when he suggested, in The Religious Dimension of Hegel's Thought, that 'theologians have never taken Hegel seriously.'(1) The exception to this rule, more often than not, at least in America, comes from those theologians who treat Hegel as a serious threat to what they consider sacred. And yet Hegel's entire philosophical system could - and perhaps should - be read as fundamentally theological in its orientation, since it is preoccupied to the extreme with God construed as 'the Absolute.' Indeed, the inspirational economy behind the aphorism for which Hegel is best known, i.e., that 'the truth is the whole,' was at least initially a theological ideal in which God was conceived of as 'an eternal desire for self-revelation.' Although one might be tempted to agree with Laurence Dickey when he claims that the Frankfurt school strategy of 'going back to the text' is misguided, since so much of the intellectual context of what Hegel wrote is unfamiliar to us,(2) I am convinced that 'going back to the text' is indispensable to understanding Hegel's philosophy of religion. In the following essay I want to suggest that the birthplace of Hegel's so-called 'mature system' is not to be found in the Phenomenology but rather one of his Jena-period essays namely, 'Faith and Knowledge' (1802a). But more than that, I wish also to show that the central insight animating his 'Faith and Knowledge' essay, and subsequently the entire system, was animated by a theological description of divine cognition that Hegel encountered as a seminarian. In order to accomplish this, I will summarize in I what I consider to be Hegel's earliest formulation of the speculative enterprise, discuss in II the positive sense inherent to the negativity disclosed in the activity of reflectivity, draw attention to what we learn about the role of the Idee in Hegel's speculative religion in III, draw attention to the theological precedent - namely, Oetinger's 'Zentrallerkenntnis' - for Hegel's philosophical ideal of absolute knowledge in IV, and then conclude with several rather modest observations about what we might still have to learn from Hegel's early Religionsphilosophie.