Page 41 - Eclipse of God

14 Chapter 2

a fundamental certainty to thinkers such as Plato and Ploti-
nus, Descartes and Leibniz, is no longer found in the world
of Hegel (if we disregard his youthful works, which have a
completely different orientation). “The spiritual principle, that
which we call God,” and which “alone is real,” is, by its nature,
accessible only to reason, not to the whole of man as he lives
his concrete life. The radical abstraction, with which philos-
ophizing begins for Hegel, ignores the existential reality of
the I and of the Thou, together with that of everything else.
According to Hegel, the absolute— universal reason, the Idea,
i.e., “God”— uses everything that exists and develops in nature
and in history, including everything that relates to man, as an
instrument of its, i.e., God’s, self- realization and perfect self-
awareness; but God never enters into a living, direct relation to
us, nor does He vouchsafe us such a relation to Him.
At the same time, however, Hegel takes a peculiarly ambiv-
alent attitude toward Spinoza’s amor Dei. “The life of God and
of the divine element,” he says, “might be described as love in
love with itself ” (“ein Spielen der Liebe mit sich selbst”). But he
adds at once, “This idea degenerates to mere edification and
even insipidity if it does not include the seriousness, the pain,
the patience, and the labour of the negative.” For Hegel, it fol-
lows from this quite correct insight (which, it is true, does not
at all apply to Spinoza’s thought) that God Himself must be
drawn into the dialectical process, in which negations emerge
in order to be transcended. But thereby the concrete encounter
between God and the contradiction, as it is documented with
human existence, personal and historical, is relegated to the
domain of fiction. The substance which, from among the infin-
ity of its attributes, reveals to us only two, nature and spirit, and
yet lets its infinite love shine in our finite love, here becomes
the subject of an absolute process encompassing nature and
spirit, which in this very process “achieves its truth, its con-