Hegel and Religion: Avoiding Double Truth, Twice

Abstract

When I was first studying Hegel, I encountered quite divergent readings of his views on religion. The teacher who first presented Hegel to me was a Jesuit, Quentin Lauer at Fordham University, who read Hegel as a Christian theologian providing a better metaphysical system for understanding the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. When I studied at Yale University, Kenley Dove read Hegel as the first thoroughly atheistic philosopher who presented the conditions of thought without reference to any foundational absolute being. Meanwhile, also at Yale, John Findlay read us a deeply Neo-Platonic Hegel who taught about absolute forms held in a cosmic mind. In giving my own reading, I want to talkabout the ways Hegel redefines both metaphysics and religion. I would like to approach these issues by way of the medieval controversy over double truth, which was a previous conflict between religion and science.In the thirteenth century, Aristotle's scientific and philosophical texts were becoming available in European universities from the Muslims in Spain. These texts offered a well-argued, systematic, and more comprehensive scientific view of the universe and its god. Reading Aristotle, people quickly realised that his ideas contradicted some Christian (and Muslim) doctrines. For example, Aristotle argued that the world could not have had a beginning in time, while the religious revelations told of a first moment of divine creation. Aristotle's obscure treatment of the active intellect seemed to argue that there was no individual immortal soul, while the revelations spoke of individual survival after death. And Aristotle's god, the totally self-absorbed first mover, the pure actuality, seemed useless for religious purposes.