Book Review: Eclipse of Grace: Divine and Human Action in Hegel

Abstract

Eclipse of Grace: Divine and Human Action in Hegel. By Nicholas Adams. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. xx + 240 pp. $106.95 (cloth).Hegel has a tendency to make thinkers work harder, Nicholas Adams notes, often with happy results (p. xix). Adams's own work on Hegel has likewise produced a happy result: his new book Eclipse of Grace, which offers an elegant and persuasive argument for Hegel's relevance to contemporary theology.Adams suggests that too few students of theology bother to read Hegel these days. When they do, they focus on his doctrinal formulations rather than his philosophical arguments. Adams thinks that this is a mistake. Hegel's importance lies not in his theological reflections but in shape of his logic. This logic, Adams argues, is concerned with proper relation between terms that have been falsely opposed or identified. These terms include pairs like subject and object, thinking and being, and human and divine. In each case, each term is fully and properly understood only in light of its relation to other. Each pair contains two terms that are distinct but in inseparable relation. Adams calls this a Chalcedonian logic: What Chalcedon says of divine and human natures of Christ, Hegel says of subject and object (p. 21).This Chalcedonian logic provides Adams with an interpretive key to several of Hegel's most grandiose-sounding claims. At end of Phenomenology of Spirit, for example, Hegel claims that philosophy has achieved knowing. Adams argues that this ought to be read as a logical claim. Absolute knowing is not omniscience; rather, it is a of conceiving nature of and relation between knowing subjects and objects of their knowledge. This of thinking-more precisely, of thinking about thinking-overcomes subject-object dualism; it repairs their false opposition. In Science of Logic, Adams argues, Hegel is engaged in a similar project of logical repair. In this case, terms in question are thinking and being. Adams writes: To talk of absolute idea is to capture in logic movement of thought as it returns to life which is its source and its meaning. This is not logic displayed in empiricism, where 'life' is given over and against thinking, and is available to be merely observed by it, one might say. It is an 'idealist' logic, in which thinking and life are mutually entangled in most intimate way (p. 140).The theological payoff of this of reading Hegel comes in Adams's interpretation of Hegel's claim in Lectures on Philosophy of Religion that the itself is existing spirit, spirit in its existence, God existing as community {LPR 3:331 in Adams, p. …