An Infinite Deal of Nothing — Part Four
‘Mary Magdalene’
by Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
As soon as night descends, we meet.
Remorse my memories releases.
The demons of the past compete,
And draw and tear my heart to pieces,
Sin, vice and madness and deceit,
When I was slave of men’s caprices
And when my dwelling was the street.
The deathly silence is not far;
A few more moments only matter,
Which the Inevitable bar.
But at the edge, before they scatter,
In front of Thee my life I shatter,
As though an alabaster jar.
O what might not have been my fate
By now, my Teacher and my Saviour,
Did not eternity await
Me at the table, as a late
New victim of my past behaviour!
But what can sin now mean to me,
And death, and hell, and sulphur burning,
When, like a graft onto a tree,
I have-for everyone to see-
Grown into being part of Thee
In my immeasurable yearning?
When pressed against my knees I place
Thy precious feet, and weep, despairing,
Perhaps I’m learning to embrace
The cross’s rough four-sided face;
And, fainting, all my being sways
Towards Thee, Thy burial preparing.
To continue with the Gospel according to Hegel, Christ is now dead and now is the birth-time for the Absolute Religion, for the life of Jesus is to be understood as divine history wherein God reveals Himself in a unique manner and the suffering and death of Christ bring to completion a pattern that had already been established through the Incarnation itself; or rather, without the crucifixion there is no Incarnation at all, and through the Incarnation God goes out of Himself, which is to say, his abstract universal nature passes into his radical other, that is, into an immediate finite existence. Spirit passes into its opposite in other words, in the process becoming divided against itself given that it is now a particular, existing in time, with limits, and external; and such is the essential movement in the doctrine of reconciliation, estrangement being the essential movement that is, for through this movement Spirit discovers its reality and the finite thereby becomes united with Spirit.
However, for this movement to complete itself it must extend itself into a radical extreme of finitude and self-estrangement; for were it otherwise Spirit would not be fully concrete and hence the finite would not discover the full redemption that is the goal of the reconciliation; and so it is that Spirit must needs imbibe deeply from the cup of finitude right down to the dregs and the God-man must needs be obedient even unto death; death which, let us remind ourselves, is for Hegel ‘the highest peak of finitude’. ‘For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord’, (‘Romans’ 6:23). So too for a particular finite consciousness it is death for only through death is the true nature of finitude revealed, the truth in fact that finitude has no truth and when Spirit passes into its opposite through the work of reconciliation of the God-man it must pass even into this untruth:
‘… the highest finitude is not the real life in temporality, but death, the pain of death; this is the highest negation, the most abstract, the natural itself, the limitation, finitude in its highest extreme. The temporal, perfect existence of the divine Idea … becomes evident only in Christ’s death. The highest abnegation of the divine Idea — ‘God has perished, God Himself is dead’ — is a monstrous, horrible representation, which brings before the representation the deepest abyss of estrangement’.
That which is estranged from Spirit is reconciled to Spirit by the passing of Spirit itself into the deepest abyss of estrangement. As I mentioned before one must beware of finding resemblances or affinities with particular theological doctrines and the gospel according to Hegel given that the God of Hegel is not the God of traditional theology. What does the death of Christ mean?
‘For this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit’. (1 Peter 4:6).
‘Now this, ‘He ascended’ — what does it mean but that He also first descended into the lower parts of the earth?’ (Ephesians 4:9).
The triumphant descent of Christ into Hell, the realm of the dead, between the time of his Crucifixion and his Resurrection, whereupon he delivered salvation to all of the righteous who had died since the beginning of the world. Cur Deus Homo? asked St. Anselm of Canterbury, (1033/34–1109), Why a God Man?), and his answer is a satisfaction view of atonement, Jesus Christ redeemed humanity through making satisfaction for mankind’s disobedience through his own obedience beyond the call of duty if I may so put it. From which develops a penal substitution theory of atonement whereby Christ, through his own sacrificial choice, was punished or penalised in the place of sinners, that is, substituted for them, thereby satisfying the demands of justice allowing for God to then justly forgive sin.
John Calvin’s, (1509–1564), exposition of the doctrine of the Atonement proceeds thus: the death of Christ procured actual remission whereby the sins of some people Christ actually remitted by his death; and all of the elect and the elect alone have their sins actually remitted by the death of Christ, which is to say, the effect of the death of Christ is to atone for the sins of a definite number of people, atonement is limited; and it was Christ’s intention in dying to procure an atonement for the elect, salvation is for the elect. As Calvin explained, after the death of Christ it was then necessary that He should then suffer eternal death and the torments of Hell: the hell:
‘But, apart from the Creed, we must seek for a surer exposition of Christ’s descent to hell: and the word of God furnishes us with one not only pious and holy, but replete with excellent consolation. Nothing had been done if Christ had only endured corporeal death. In order to interpose between us and God’s anger, and satisfy his righteous judgement, it was necessary that he should feel the weight of divine vengeance. Whence also it was necessary that he should engage, as it were, at close quarters with the powers of hell and the horrors of eternal death’.
Hegel’s account, for reasons that should be clear enough, does not include an interpretation of the descent into Hell, or of God’s forsaking and rejection of his Son, though stress is laid upon the fact that the death of Christ is by crucifixion which is a dishonourable death in which He is estranged even from the, within the actual context, illustriousness of the condition and in which the dishonour of the condition itself is brought towards the ultimate tension and yet ultimately it is demonstrated that this terrible abandonment by God is in fact a final and conclusive measure of the divine Love, a love that itself has become Absolute.
Such an extreme of alienation is the foundational advance toward reconciliation, a step forward by which the alienation itself turns into its opposite, in which it negates its own negativity; and through his death the finite particular that is Jesus of Nazareth in whom is incorporated the monstrous unity of the God-man is divested of His finitude, for it is through death, that ‘highest point of finitude’, that there is to be discovered at the same time the divesting of all finitude; and the temporality, the particularity,the historicity, the finitude, of this man dies so that His negativity is thereby negated Absolutely. The Absolute negation of the negativity of Christ constitutes his resurrection and ascension to his special place of honour, at the right hand God: ‘So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God’, (Mark 16:19); the anthropomorphic implications of which indicate we are dealing with metaphor only, nonetheless Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection are thereby two sides of a single event; and through his death Christ manifests the fact that his finitude is only a transitional phase and through his resurrection He also manifests the fact that his truth is his universality, his unity with Spirit in general; and such Absolute Universality in which everything which belonged to the particularity of the man Jesus has been crucified is the true being of Christ.
At this juncture His divinity is fully revealed and His life as divine history becomes genuinely revelatory, for Christ’s nullification of himself as such was the essential step preceding the advent of the Holy Spirit, which is to say, the individual God-man points away from himself as such to his fulfilment in the universal Spirit. And a particular point that Hegel likes to stress is that the resurrected Christ merges into the Spirit heartens and inspires Christians through the removal of it in essence from the limitations of finitude, for to remain fixed at the standpoint of finitude, even to the point of knowing the individual Christ as such to be the Lord, becomes the Sin against the Holy Spirit, which by no means implies that we merely forget about the historical God-man, for He has tremendous significance as the one in whom finitude as such was in principle abolished.
The universality into which the God-man returns through his ascension to the right hand of God is not simply the abstract universality of the Idea but it is the concrete universality” of the Idea that has passed into its other and has overcome the otherness of the other by a dialectical movement immanent in the very act of its estrangement, and Spirit no longer merely stands over against non-Idea, non-Spirit, the finite; it has overcome the finite by absorbing it as a moment in its own inner life; and this resurrection constitutes the Absolute negativity of Spirit itself, which negates not only the positivity of the merely given individual life, but negates also the very negativity that is the consequence and adversary of this positivity; that is to say, the resurrection is the death of death. In the ascension to the right hand of God, as it is expressed in representational form, the positivity has been expurgated so to speak and the identity of man with God has been rendered fully explicit, for the Man has lost his positivity and God his abstract transcendence. They are thus one and in this divine history”embracing the life, death, and resurrection of the God-man is to be discerned the inner secret of the divine word at the fall of Adam:
‘And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.’.
(Genesis 3:22–23)
Side note: Adam and Eve were not expelled from the Garden of Eden for disobedience to God but so that they would not eat of the tree of life and thereby become immortal, like God, or Gods, it does say ‘one of us’. Loathe as I am to spoil a great poem like ‘Paradise Lost’ that begins ‘Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden… ‘ it would seem that it is scripturally incorrect. In fact, upon such misreading of scripture seemingly rests St. Anselm’s satisfaction theory of atonement itself; indeed the notion of atonement generally, making this series of articles thereby rather pointless.
However, the truth of Adam, so it goes, is already implicit in his forbidden knowledge and in the estrangement that followed on from its acquisition, and is the explicit identity of God and man in Christ for the church has never considered the Gospel events to be a tale of the order of once upon a time, rather, that which has been accomplished in Christ is in some way imputed to the church and to humankind in general, and it is theology’s arduous undertaking to demonstrate how this is the case, but my concern, as it is with Hegel, is with the philosophy of religion and not with theology, and for Hegel the undertaking is somewhat straightforward. The death and resurrection of Christ has abolished the merely finite standpoint according to which Christ and the recipients of His grace are simply separate individuals living at distinct times, and within such a finite standpoint each man and woman would have to bear the consequences of his or her own deeds alone; for one man or woman’s goodness, one man or woman’s suffering, to be sufficient for all would be impossible to defend from a moral point of view, and yet it is just that very finite standpoint that has been aufgehoben, (annulled, cancelled),through the work of Christ.
Spirit has appeared in its freedom, and finite limitation has vanished, and within this context Hegel pronounces a paradox that apparently undoes the tangled web that time has spun:
‘Spirit can make the occurrence [of evil] not to have occurred. . . . In the death of Christ the finitude of man has been killed for the true consciousness of Spirit’.
This death of the natural has in virtue of this fact a universal significance; the finite, evil in general, is annihilated, and the world thereby becomes reconciled; the world has become divested of its evil through this death, and here the mere knowledge of history ceases and the subject himself becomes drawn into the process as He feels the pain of evil and his own alienation, which Christ has taken upon Himself through putting on humanity; and yet through Christ’s death this is annihilated. The death and victory of Christ thereby is rendered the reconciliation of all men and women through being universalised, and in it man and woman see the death of death and sin as such, and the identity of God and man as such, not merely for the individual God-man, for He has lost this individuality in His death and resurrection, but for all men and women.
It is in this sense that the divine history in Christ is rendered revelatory and redemptive; for to believe in Christ is to believe in the identity of God and man and woman in general, and thus to know one’s own identity with God, and though the sensuous history of Christ’s life was indeed necessary it is merely the point of departure for Spirit (Geist). The sensuous certainty of the divine/human identity in Christ has to give way to the attestation of this truth in and for itself in the life of every man and woman in its intrinsic necessity; that is to say. the reconciling work of Christ has be fulfilled in the outpouring of the Spirit and now, through the unfolding of Spirit, this divine history must be accomplished in every man and woman. For Christ having divested himself of his estranged finitude it is now up to us to do the same:
‘ .. only after the death of Christ could Spirit come upon his friends; . . . only then were they able to conceive the true Idea of God, i.e. that in Christ man is redeemed and reconciled: for in him the Concept of eternal Truth is recognized, that the essence of man is Spirit, and that only by stripping himself of his finiteness and surrendering himself to pure self-consciousness does he attain the Truth’.
Christ-man as human in whom the unity of God and man and woman has manifested itself has himself through His death and His history in general presented the eternal history of Spirit; a history that every man and woman has to accomplish in himself and herself in order to exist as Spirit or to become a child of God, a citizen of His Kingdom, and the followers of Christ, who combine on this principle and live in the spiritual life as their objective, form the Church, the Kingdom of God. Through this means, the actual union of God and man, that was realised in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, passed over into the reconciled followers of Christ that is fulfilled in modern Protestantism. The explicit unity with the divine given through the Christ is appropriated as a rightful possession by the believers of the faith.
In the communal life of those for whom the story of Christ is accepted as the adequate representation of the truth, the realisation of Spirit has been accomplished in and for itself and this community is the perpetuation, and its life the continual recapitulation, of the divine history of Christ, a function especially evident in its cultus (its systematic worship) and in its sacraments. For instance, Hegel passes over the Protestant objection to the Roman doctrine of the mass as a perpetual sacrifice of Christ and declares that this doctrine expresses the true form of the spiritual life of the believers for in the sacrament the truth is expressed that the divine history does not belong to the past but to a perpetual present. According to Hegel’s interpretation of Reformation theology, Martin Luther’s, (1483–1546), objection to the Roman mass merely centred upon the externality of considering Christ to be represented in the Host (the consecrated bread) alone, and this last remnant of the view of Christ as a particular being apart from the believers is that which must be eliminated; given that for Hegel Lutheranism focuses upon the believer’s inner possession of Christ as Spirit, an internal relation to the Truth as one’s own. Among the believers wherein positive Christianity is fulfilled the positivity itself falls away and the events of the Gospel through their appropriation are aufgehoben into the Christian religion.
‘Redemption’
by George Herbert (1593–1633)
Having been tenant long to a rich lord,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancel the old.
In heaven at his manor I him sought;
They told me there that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.
I straight returned, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts;
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
Of thieves and murderers; there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.
To be continued …
