Copyright holder: Tyndale University, 3377 Bayview Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M2M 3S4 Att.: Library Director, J. William Horsey Library Copyright: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Copyright license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License Citation: Neufeldt-Fast, Arnold. “Death of God and Universalism in Hegel and Jungel.” In Varieties of Universalism: Essays in Honour of J.R.A. Mayer, edited by Marko Zlomislic, David Goicoechea and Zdenko Zeman, 117-126. Port Colborne, ON: Thought House Publishing Group/ Binghamton, NY: Global Publications, SUNY, 1999. ***** Begin Content ****** TYNDALE UNIVERSITY 3377 Bayview Avenue Toronto, ON M2M 3S4 TEL: 416.226.6620 www.tyndale.ca Note: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Neufeldt-Fast, Arnold. “Death of God and Universalism in Hegel and Jungel.” In Varieties of Universalism: Essays in Honour of J.R.A. Mayer, edited by Marko Zlomislic, David Goicoechea and Zdenko Zeman, 117-126. Port Colborne, ON: Thought House Publishing Group/ Binghamton, NY: Global Publications, SUNY, 1999. [ Citation Page ] Death of God and Universalism in Hegel and Jim gel Arnold Neufeldt-Fast Introduction After completing my studies in philosophy under John Mayer and others at Broch University, I went to Germany to study theology and philosophy with Eherhard Jüngel, the ephorus of the renown Tubingen Stift [or seminary], where Hegel once lived (1788-1793) and studied theology together in a single room with Schelling and Holderlin. Of this place Nietzsche wrote disparagingly, All the young theologians of the Tubingen Stift went into the bushes—all looking for [a priori]_‘factdties [Vermogen] And what all did they find—in that innocent, rich, and still youthful period of the German spirit . . . when one could not yet distinguish between ‘finding’ and ‘inventing’! Above all, a faculty for the ‘suprasensible’: Schelling christened it intellectual intuition, and thus gratified the most heartfelt craving of the Germans, whose cravings were at bottom pious. ”1 Nietzsche diagnoses this '‘‘pious craving” as an unhealthy need to believe in the security or absolute value of truth. In a similar vein, it was not long after leaving Tubingen that Hegel recognized the ultimate futility of that __________________________________ 1 F. Nietzsche, “On the Prejudices of the Philosophers,” Beyond Good and Evil, I, 11 in W. Kaufmann, ed. and trans., Basic Writings of Nietzsche (NewYork: The Modern Library, 1968), 208 [transl. altered]. [ Page ] 117 Romantic “subjectivity of longing”2 for an abstract eternal. Yet Hegel Joes take seriously the cultural feeling that God is infinitely distant from the contingency of the world, and he does this by employing the death of God as a cultural-diagnostic element, which he then endeavors to give phdosophical significance. In what follows I reflect on the significance of the death of God in Hegel, and attempt to think its significance for a non-metaphysical or non-foundational theology. Insofar as Hegel introduces into philosophy talk of the death of God, he introduces negation and death into the divine Being; consequently the metaphysical place of God’s being as “over us,” as “absolute superiority” and hence his “eternally present” becomes lost. This we learned from Professor Mayer. In the second half of the 19th century Nietzsche’s madman saw this so clearly and in seeking God, he sums up the problem for moderns with the question, “Where [wohin] has God gone?” And he answers, “God is dead ... And we have killed him.”3 * In responding to something this provocative, what is required is never simply passive acceptance or radical criticism, hut thought. It is my claim that to take seriously Hegel’s talk of the death of God and Nietzsche s question “Where has God gone?,” is to provoke the theologian and philosopher to wean themselves from the craving for metaphysics, and attempt to think being beyond the simple alternative of presence and absence; for the theologian in particular, it is a challenge to think God beyond the alternatives of theism and atheism. In this respect my thinking has been further stimulated by Eberhard Jüngel in Tubingen, one of __________________________________ 2. Cf. also G.W.F. Hegel, The Difference, between Fichte’s and Schelling s System of Philosophy [1801], trans. H. S. Harris and W. Cerf (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1976). 3. Cf. Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom [1882], trans. K. F. Reinhardt (New York: F. Ungar, I960), no. 125, pp. 167-169- [ Page ] 118 Europe s most important contemporary theologians.4 To anticipate my conclusion, I suggest that Hegel’s use of the death of God mahes an early and significant contribution towards the dismantling or deconstruction of the metaphysical tradition, and also presents a postmodern alternative beyond any one-sided, absolutizing philosophical or theological narratives. The Theological Origin of Hegel’s Phrase “God is Dead” For Jüngel, Hegel’s use of the statement that God is dead is important in two respects. First in looking at its use by both Hegel and Nietzsche, it becomes clear that the thought expressed has “both a metaphysical and a genuinely Christian origin’’ (GAIT5 * 7 47). Jüngel argues that even the anti-religious or anti-Christian use of the phrase “God is dead” by Nietzsche is scarcely conceivable without Hegel’s mediation “between the originally Christian meaning of this phrase and the possibility of reading into it the atheistic feeling ofthe ’modern age,’ as Hegel put it” (GMW63). Second, Hegel’s use of the statement that God is dead is important for theology, for it reminds theology that the atheism which defines the modern period must have a significant impact on a theologically accountable understanding of God, which I will address later. With respect to the first point, I note briefly that in Tubingen one can find a long theological tradition of speaking of the death of God which reaches back as far as Luther. In this respect Hegel’s talk of the death of God is not so much a discovery as a recollection. Thus in Hegel’s Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, delivered frequently between 1821 and __________________________________ 4. Cf. my translation, Eberhard Jüngel, Theological Essays II, ed. J.B. Webster, trans. Arnold Neufeldt-Fast and J.B. Webster (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995); Jüngel’s most important work to date is: God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism [hereafter GMW], trans. D. L. Guder (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983). 5. Cf. Jüngel, “Vom Tod des lebendingen Gottes,” Unterwegs 2ur Sache. Theologische Bemerhungen (Munich: Kaiser, 1972, 2nd ed. 1988), 110; cf. also GMW95f. [ Page ] 119 1831, Hegel tells his students that the phrase “God himself is dead”6 is a quotation from “a Lutheran hymn,” first penned in 1641. The hymn raises awareness that human finitude, weakness and the negative are not outside of the divine nature and do not hinder unity with God. In the 18th century this controversial phrase was vigorously dehated and was understood to he a clear expression of the significance which Lutheran theology gives to the death of Christ for the “divine nature,” in explicit contrast to Reform theology.7 Five years before Hegel first employs the phrase, it appears in a treatise by Karl Flatt, a student with Hegel in Tubingen and later Professor of Theology there, specifically in a quote from the older Luther regarding on the centrality of God’s death for theology. Thus when Hegel first makes the harsh reference to the death of God in 1802, it is reasonable to conclude a) that talk of the death of God was already known to his contemporaries, and b) that Hegel made no attempt to disguise the fact that he was introducing into philosophy a theological claim. I am not arguing that Hegel was an orthodox Lutheran or even a theologian. Yet Hegel picks up a problem that was not adequately resolved by the Reformation, namely the compatibility of the idea of the divine with the concept of change and even death; Hegel rethinks this problem radically as he transfers it into philosophy. Consequently to examine the question of the death of God in Hegel simply from an anti-religious or atheistic context and without reference to its Christian origins is not sufficiently thorough. __________________________________ 6. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, ei. P. C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P.C. Hodgson and J.M. Stewart with H.S. Harris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988),468; see also 465, n.199- 7. Verse 2 of the hymn, “O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid” (O sorrow, O Suffering) by Johannes Rist reads: “O grofie Not! / Gott selbst liegt tot. / Am Kreuz ist er gestorben; / hat dadurch das Himmelreich / uns aus Lieb erworben” (“O great distress! God himself lies dead. On the cross he died, and thus through love has attained for us the realm of heaven”; cited in Jüngel, Goti als Gekeimnis der Welt, 84; GMW 64; transl. altered). The present German Lutheran hymnal has blunts the edge of the original, and reads simply “God’s Son lies dead” (“Gottes Sohn liegt tot”; cf. Evangelisches Kirchengesangbuch [Hamburg: Wittig, 1959], no. 73). 8 Karl Christian Flatt, Philosophisch-exegetische Untersuchungen uber die Lehre von der Versohnung der Menschen mit Gott (Gottingen, 1791),!, 69, cited in GMW 95. [ Page ] 120 It is this longer view of the death of God, as well as the hermeneutical interest to think beyond the polarities of presence and absence, being and nonbeing, that distinguishes Jüngel’s work from the “death of God theology” that became a brief media event in the late 1960s in North America.$ The so-called “death of God theologians” gave the impression that this dark proposition had its home in philosophy and was now entering the Christian tradition in order to seal its fate. Even in his mature writings, Thomas Altizer, for example, writes (distinguishing himself from Derrida’s deconstruction) that “it is only in the wake of the death of the Christian God that the omnipresence of God becomes overwhelmingly manifest”. Yet this background to Hegel’s use of the phrase does suggest that the critique of theism implied by the death of God, and the obligation to work at a new formulation for the concept of God, does have a genuine origin within Christianity. More importantly, this systematic connection between the theological source of the statement of the death of God and the epistemological-metaphysical problematic which it represents, has continued to pose some of the most profound tasks for theology—and thus this connection, according to Jüngel could be Hegel’s “most significant achievement for theology” (GMW 97). Indeed, the death of God theologies have not disappeared in the past few decades, but rather have become transformed and more explicit especially in deconstruction theological projects and in aspects of feminist theologies. This is an indicator that the Christian God in the First and Second Worlds is still too male, too dangerous, and too violent. Here it is sufficient to note that the talk of the death of God in theology is not necessarily a contradiction; on the contrary, Jüngel asks whether “theology which avoids talk of the death of God can still be theology” (GMW 45). I turn now to a more explicit examination of Hegel’s use of the idea of the death of God. Hegel’s Use of the “Death of God Jüngel supports his reading of the death of God in Hegel with an especially convincing explication of Hegel’s first use of that phrase as it ___________________________________ 9 Eg., first in Time Magazine (1965); a somewhat more in depth article by William Hamilton ( "Death of God”) was published in Playboy, 13:8 (August, 1966). [ Page ] 121 appeared in the last sentence of his essay Faith and Knowledge [hereatier FK\, published in 1802. In this second section I unfold this interpretation which suggests that Hegel refuses to endorse theism's fetishism of presence, hut also refuses a fetishism of absence, that is, the unequivocal substitution of atheism. Instead Jüngel argues that Hegel endorses a restricted atheism which involves a modality of absence that is more dramatic and more dynamic than the pure absence (or atheism) diagnosed by the Enlightenment and reflected in the earlier death of God theologies. I will conclude by evaluating Jüngel’s claim that Hegel’ s use of the statement that God is dead reminds theology that the atheism which defines the modern period must have an explicit impact on a theologically accountable understanding of God. At 32 years of age Hegel, the young Privatdozent at Jena published his treatise Faith and Knowledge, which included for the first time a clear sense of the history of philosophy as a progression of increasingly developed positions, as well the first full critiques of empiricism and the “metaphysics of subjectivity. ” These insights would later become crucial for his Phenomenology. Hegel concludes Faith and Knowledge with reference to these two epochs whose epistemologies and ontologies are informed by two very different construals of genuine being or the real. He then also sets up the possibility of a third, ultimate synthesis and culmination. And it is in this context that he first mentions the death of God. The earliest or empirical era is the epoch of metaphysics, in which the direct presencing of things is the model for understanding all beings; self, world, and God are interpreted as if they were complete, mundane entities, that is, present as given. Accordingly God is thought analogous to an absolute monarch. Here theology is a metaphysics of a super-sensible large entity, and consequently the relationship between faith and knowledge is characterized as a peaceful distinction within theology or religion. Characteristic for this era, reason becomes “the handmaiden of faith.” Hegel charges that this view is naive in so far as the highest being is construed as a being, and thus giving insufficient recognition to the contribution of subjectivity to knowledge; it is intrinsically unsatisfying in so far as the infinite which is “really real” is cut off from the ordinary experience of the finite; and it is unhistorical. The second epoch is the Enlightenment, a cultural development which, according to Hegel, is collectively represented and fully realized in the [ Page ] 122 philosophies of Kant, Jacohi, and Fichte (FK 62). For the sake of the autonomy of reason, this epoch fought religion and the notion of God as complete and given for subjectivity. For the Enlightenment epoch all things are construed and first given their objectivity by the conditions of subjectivity or thought. Hegel grants that the victory of this epoch was enormous, and consequently the distinction between faith and knowledge was then lodged within philosophy as an antithetical and unreconciled opposition. Yet the main thrust of Hegel’s essay disputes the adequacy of this victory. As reason reached its highest form in Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte and became self-critical—that is, “grasping its own negativity” (JFK 56)—it also limited itself to the finite and empirical. With its “this-worldly” horizon, Hegel notes that reason deprived itself of comprehending the infinite rationally. With his immediate predecessors, on the one hand, Hegel acknowledges the negative sense of the absolute as an infinite opposed to the finite. On the other hand, however he disputes the finality of their opposition, and he attempts to show that it is only a moment of which the spirit has apparently outgrown, yet is still present in its depths. In particular, in so far as the philosophies of Kant, Fichte and Jacohi are based on the principle of subjectivity, Hegel contends, they mirror their opposite and to that degree, he charges, they inherit the Protestantism of their time. For example, Protestantism had raised to a principle the infinite and unbridgeable distinction between subjectivity and the eternal for which it longed. It renounced this world and made communion with God into an impossible “yearning for a beyond and a future” (JFK 148). Hegel refers to this as the “poetry of Protestant grief” (JFK61), and later refers to it as the “unhappy consciousness.” In comparison, the tragedy of the Enlightenment, according to Hegel, is that reason “recognizes something higher above itself from which it is self-excluded” (FK 61). That is, subjectivity is reconciled only with empirical existence, while the God of faith is ejected from the world of reality. Consequently the finite human ego is made absolute, and the “pure concept or infinity” becomes the purest form of generality, “the abyss of nothingness in which all being is engulfed” (JFK 190). The character of this absolute opposition and longing signifies “the infinite grief” of the finite [subject], and Hegel adds for the first time, that it exists “as the feeling that ‘God is Himself dead’”—a feeling upon which the religion of more recent times rests” (FK 190f.). [ Page ] 123 The consequences of the use of this phrase, which are later worked out in the Phenomenology, are enormous. But even here Hegel already understood that it must he the central aim of “true philosophy” to free the finite (or subjectivity) from its absolute character (which corresponds abstract infinitude as empty negativity), and thus from the feeling that God is dead—yet without destroying its truth. This can happen if the unreconciled character of eternity as abstract infinity and finite world—and the corresponding feeling that God is dead—is grasped as a moment of the Absolute. In this context Hegel writes that the “infinite grief [of the finite]” must be grasped “purely as a moment of the supreme Idea, and no more than a moment” (JFK 190). The eternal must pass through this moment if it is to set aside the absolutization of contradictory dimensions of totality for the sake of a truly reconciled totality, a true infinity. In Hegel’s philosophy the “infinite grief” of the metaphysics of subjectivity therefore receives “philosophical existence” (FK 190f), that is, it is taken up as a moment of the supreme idea. In this way Hegel can write that the true philosophy of the Absolute brings together absolute freedom and absolute passion, re-establishing “the speculative Good Friday in place of the historic good Friday” (FK 191). Note Hegel’s explicit christological reference. Yet whatever the death of God means for positive religion, Hegel is clear that it cannot be left to faith itself, but must be thought through reason. The concept of God must now be understood as a series of events in which the eternal divine life accepts and endures finitude even and including the harshness of death, so that God’s being becomes thinkable and real “as the history of the freedom of the spirit” (GMW 76). Thus once this feeling of the death of God is grasped as a moment of the supreme idea, Jungel argues, it must be understood “as an event of the self-negation of God, who does not [or cannot] desire to be ‘in and for himself’ and does not [or cannot] desire to forsake the world in its finitude” (GMW 74). The character of this third epoch then does not simply endorse theism’s notion of being as presence, nor the substitution of its opposite, namely atheism. Rather one senses that Hegel’s radical incorporation of the cultural feeling of the death of God into the essence of God provokes both the theologian and the atheist beyond the safe or easy alternatives of pure presence or pure absence, and outside of a metaphysics of substance or subjectivity, to a more dramatic and dynamic account of absence and of God than offered by the critiques of religion. [ Page ] 124 Concluding Thoughts In short, I have shown that the unique significance of Hegel’s account of the death of God was his attempt to tahe up the atheistic tendencies of his age and work through them positively. Hegel’s philosophical interpretation of the theological claim ’"God is dead” provides the historical possibility for both negative and positive answers to the modern question, ’’Where is God?” This suggests that Hegel’s intention was to take modern atheism and Christian religion more seriously than they were able to take themselves, and then to provoke movement beyond the opposition of theism and modern atheism. Jüngel is less suspicious than Heidegger or Derrida that Hegel’s totalizing thinking suppresses difference and suffering. Yet he agrees with Heidegger that the history of metaphysics was following its own inner necessity when it traced the thought of God to its end in Hegel and Nietzsche. Jüngel’s contribution is to recall that to think seriously of the death of God without Christian faith was totally impossible. The task which the thought of the death of God places before theology, as Jüngel sees it, can be summarized in the following questions: a) does the thought of the death of God hring both metaphysics and Christianity to their end in the same way, and would we then say that metaphysics and Christianity had always been identical? Or b), does the thought of the death of God provoke metaphysics and theology to separate from each other, such that theology becomes free in its relationship to metaphysics (GMW48)? I find the latter option most compelling. The Christian faith has long worked side by side with the metaphysical tradition to do its reflective thinking. The danger for Christian theology has been that it ceases to use metaphysics critically, and instead, falls under the ’’dictatorship” of metaphysics. At least in one regard, I have suggested, the Christian West has fallen victim to this danger in thinking of God, namely in so far as the concept of divine being has been dominated by the thought of absoluteness. ’’The perfection of God required by the law of metaphysics forbade imagining God as suffering or even thinking of him together with one who was dead” (GMW 39). Jüngel argues that with the death of God, Hegel is calling for a new and more radical definition of the essence of God by using the negation of [ Page ] 125 the existence of God. In this regard, theology can learn from Heidegger, for overcoming matters in metaphysics as a consequence of the death of God means taking a “step hackward,” listening to its own subject matter, without departing from, or attempting to represent what is present as something grounded. Philosophy and theology are perhaps hearing different versions of the word regarding the death of God, but what neither have thought—and which certainly cannot be found in the bushes of Tubingen—is that which lies between presence and absence, identity and difference, being and nonbeing. I suggest that it is by taking the humbler route back into “the poverty of existence” that philosophy and theology can make their most significant contribution to a genuinely tolerant, open, peaceful appreciation, and full acceptance of diversity. [ Page ] 126 ***** This is the end of the e-text. This e-text was brought to you by Tyndale University, J. William Horsey Library - Tyndale Digital Collections *****