Warning, academic alert!! I am reading, amongst other things, on Hegel’s thought, and Hegel directly; I thought I ought to do this if I am going to be a student again. Here is what one commenter writes on the difficulty of reading and attaining any kind of mastery (or even understanding of Hegel):

Yet Hegel is awesome as well as difficult to read. The Phenomenology,especially, is an intoxicating mixture of passionate intensity and convoluted obscurity. As Kroner writes: ’The work claims to be rational, but it shows every evidence of having been written under inspiration.’ The source of ’Hegel’s secret’ may remain a matter of faith. But there can be little doubt that the fusion of passion and profound complexity pervading his writings accounts to some extent for the widely diverging reactions to his philosophy. J. N. Findlay’s comment that in reading Hegel one is ’at times only sure that he is saying something immeasurably profound and important, but not exactly what it is,’1’ seems fair and should hearten anyone trying to make sense of Hegel. To quote one of his own aphorisms: ’The condemnation which a great man lays upon the world, is to force it to explain him.’12 This has certainly, in his own case, turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. [Martin Henry, G. W. F. Hegel: A Secularized Theologian?, Irish Theological Quarterly 2005; 70; 195 DOI: 10.1177/002114000507000301, p. 196-97]

I am actually reading Peter C. Hodgson’s account of Hegel’s theology-philosophy entitled: Hegel & Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. In his accounting, it is altogether stunning how similar the virtuoso, Barth, sounds like the virtuoso, Hegel. Hodgson describes Hegel’s idea of God, and God’s movement from absolute substance to particular (or other than substance) subject and back through Spirit (geist)—as I read this I couldn’t get Barth’s self-replicating God of modes of being out of my head; Hodgson writes:

By descending from its eternal simplicity, the absolute being (the ‘Father’) attains for the first time its ‘highest being’—which is not the remote and inaccessible deity of rationalism, but a divesting, absolving, relational being that comes down into history and makes itself manifest (the ‘Son’). Essential being (Wesen) becomes existent, determinate being (Sein, Dasein)—and this is to say that it becomes spirit (Geist), ‘the being that is the process of retaining identity with itself in its otherness’. Spirit in the immediacy of self-consciousness is the particular individual Jesus of Nazareth, as contrasted with the universal self-consciousness of the religious community. But this individual human being, ‘as whom absolute being is manifest’, is subject to the conditions of time, space, and mortality: his being passes into having been and his sensible presence into spiritual presence. This is the passage from the Son to the Spirit.

These temporal and spatial categories, endemic to the representational form of religion, are not adequate to the truth of absolute spirit. Consequently, Hegel moves on to provide a speculative redescription of the central Christian theologoumenon, the Trinity, which contains the true content but in less that adequate form. The three constitutive moments, conceptually expressed, are pure thought, representation, and self-consciousness. Pure thought designates the immanent or intradivine Trinity, which is not an empty essence but already the implicit fullness of absolute spirit. Representation (Vorstellung) designates the second moment, that of creation, fall, incarnation, life and death, symbolically encapsulated in the figure of the Son. Representation is not merely an epistemological category but an ontological one. It designates a divine doing, not merely a human knowing. God sets godself forth (vor-stellen) in and as world; this is an essential element in the process of God’s becoming spirit. The referent of representation is real history, not fanciful myth, although what happens in history is often recounted in mythical form.

The third moment is that of self-consciousness or infinite intersubjectivity, which is associated by Christian faith with the Holy Spirit, resurrection, reconciliation, and the community of faith. Hegel observes that ‘absolute being’ would be an empty name if in truth there were an absolute other to it or an irreparable fall from it. ‘Absolute’ must mean then that there is nothing with which God cannot be related. Within the divine whole there is genuine otherness and recalcitrant difference, but it is only when essential being is reflected back into itself that it is spirit. Hegel launches at this point into a complex discussion of the ontological status of good and evil. Evil seems to take two forms: on the one hand, it is a withdrawal into self, a becoming self-centred, in other words a failure to make the move from the first moment to the second; but on the other hand, it is a matter of getting stuck in the second moment, revelling in separation and estrangement, failing to come back into self. In both cases, it is a stopping short of spirit, a failure in spiritualization. [Peter C. Hodgson, Hegel & Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religon, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 38-9.]

I couldn’t help consider, as I just was transcribing this from Hodgson, that Thomas Torrance was the theologian who personalized pre-modern classical theism and metaphysics (through his onto-relationalism); while Karl Barth was the theologian who personalized the modern post-metaphysics (through his actualism). Or, Torrance personalized the Hellenization of Christianity; while Barth personalized the Hegelization of Christianity. What do you think, my Barthian brethren (and other brethren too)?