Hegel as Sorcerer: The "Science" of Second Realities and the "Death" of God

A friend asked for an explanation of a remark I recently made on a public forum that the great German philosospher, Hegel, was a “sorcerer.” I’m glad for this opportunity to respond. For the spirit of Hegel is alive and well today in the construction of any Second Reality, of which I regard the recent Obama Campaign to have been a splendid example.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was a world-class philosopher — a master of classical philosophy, and a master system-builder. He is usually associated with the period of German Idealism in the decades following Immanuel Kant. The most systematic of the post-Kantian idealists, Hegel attempted to elaborate a comprehensive systematic ontology, or “science of being,” from a “logical” or “rational” starting point. He is perhaps most well-known for his teleological, “goal-directed,” even eschatological, account of human history — a model which was later appropriated by his notable follower Karl Marx, who developed Hegel’s “dialectical science” into his own theory of historical development (“dialectical materialism”), which by “historical necessity” culminates in communism.

Sorcery, or magic, is a conceptual system that asserts the human ability to control the natural world (including events, objects, people, and physical phenomena) through mystical, paranormal, or supernatural means — through, for example, magic words, or an ability to present compelling appearances of fictitious reality.

A Second Reality is such an ersatz reality. The term was coined by Robert Musil to denote a fictitious world imagined to be true by the person creating it, who will then use his construction to mask and thereby “eclipse” genuine, or First Reality.

In 1807, Hegel published his grimoire — i.e., a magician’s book of spells and incantations — the Phänomenologie, which takes as its main goal the transformation of philosophy, the “love of knowledge,” into the final, complete possession of “real knowledge,” by means of his system of “absolute science.” Of his accomplishment the great German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) would write, “No modern propaganda minister could have devised a more harmless-sounding, persuasively progressivist phrase as a screen for the enormity transacted behind it.”

For Hegel, “‘Absolute knowledge’ was to be the form ‘in which the pure consciousness of the infinite is possible without the determinateness of an individual, independent life.’” In short, the Phänomenologie “admits no reality but consciousness…. [Yet] since consciousness must be somebody’s consciousness of something, and neither God nor man is admitted as somebody or something, the consciousness must be consciousness of itself. Its absolute reality is, therefore, properly identified as ‘the identity of identity and nonidentity.’ The substance becomes the subject, and the subject the substance, in the process of a consciousness that is immanent to itself…. The reader would justly ask what a consciousness that is nobody’s consciousness could possibly be?”[1]

And with that question, noetically astute observers realize we must be dealing with a Second Reality: It appears that “Hegel the sorcerer” wants to eclipse our image of reality by a counterimage conjured up to furnish a plausible basis for the action he calls for.

As Vöegelin notes, “in order to be effective as a magic opus,” Hegel’s system of absolute science had to satisfy two conditions:

(1) The operation in Second Reality has to look as if it were an operation in First Reality.

(2) The operation in Second Reality has to escape critical control and judgment by the criteria of First Reality. (I have noticed that President-Elect Obama excels in conducting both types of operations.)[2]

So, what is First Reality? In effect, it is the classical Greek (and Judeo-Christian) description of the context in which human existence is actually experienced and lived. That is to say, the human condition is specified by man’s participation in a Great Hierarchy of Being that extends beyond, encompasses, and shapes his existence as a man.

Being is a philosophical term referring to the fundamental structure or order of the world. Vöegelin, following the classical Greeks, defines being as “not an object, but a context of order in which are placed all experienced complexes of reality….” Thus the Great Hierarchy of Being consists of four partners: God, Man, World, and Society. The individual man, as “part” of this “whole,” finds his own humanity in his participatory experiences and relations with the other partners of the hierarchy, and most especially in his relation to God.

Strangely, given his “revolt” against God and man and the world, Hegel was a man who not only insisted on his Christian orthodoxy up to his dying day; but as already mentioned, he was a master of classical Greek philosophy. So clearly he was aware of First Reality in the above sense. His “magical opus” is motivated fundamentally by a desire to overturn and supplant it with a plausible Second Reality of his own imaginative construction.

The first “partner” of the Great Hierarchy that had to go was God. This was necessary in order to make room for Hegel as the “new Christ” who would usher in the “third religion” of his System of Absolute Science, so to be the Messiah, the New Christ, of the new age a-borning. The point here is that with God “gone,” man himself becomes a pure abstraction and, as such, an ideologically manipulatable entity and nothing more.

As far as I know, it was Voegelin who first drew attention to the element of sorcery in Hegel’s work — even though the language Hegel had been using from the first was the language of the “magic word” and the “magic force” (Zauberworte and Zauberkraft respectively). Vöegelin indeed identified the Phänomenologie as a sorcerer’s grimoire. My sense is if Vöegelin was joking here, he was only half-joking: Something very serious is going on. So we need first of all to understand what Hegel intended by evoking such language. As for instance, here:

“Every single man is but a blind link in the chain of absolute necessity by which the world builds itself forth. The single man can elevate himself to dominance over an appreciable length of this chain only if he knows the direction in which the great necessity [i.e., the Geist of history] wants to move and if he learns from this knowledge to pronounce the magic words (die Zauberworte) that will evoke its shape (Gestalt).”[3]

We need to define our terms here: Geist can be translated from the German as either “mind” or “spirit”; but the latter, allowing for a more cultural sense, as in the phrase “spirit of the age” (“Zeitgeist”), seems a more suitable rendering for Hegel’s use of the term. Gestalt (plural: Gestalten) means the present historical configuration of events as the Geist inexorably moves or evolves in time towards the fulfillment of its final “absolute necessity,” at which point — in its final Gestalt, which in Hegel’s system is identified with the consciousness of Hegel expressing as the complete identity of absolute Self and absolute Idea — world history ends; and a “new age” of Man, “standing alone,” begins. Because man is now “alone,” Hegel teaches that now he has arrived at the point in history where he can grant “grace to himself,” to “save himself,” to perfect the human condition, without the salvific Grace of God.

And Hegel’s enormously influential student Karl Marx (1818–1883) took the lesson to heart:

“Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus, ‘In a word, I hate all the gods,’ is its own confession, its own verdict against all gods heavenly and earthly who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the supreme deity. There shall be none beside it.”[4]

“A being regards itself as independent only when it stands in its own feet; and it stands on its feet only when it owes its existence to itself alone. A man who lives by the grace of another [including God] considers himself a dependent being. But I live by the grace of another completely if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life but also its creation: if he is the source of my life; and my life necessarily has such a cause outside itself if it is not my own creation.”[5]

And so the “outside cause” — God — must “die” in order for man to be “liberated” for self-sanctification and self-salvation.

In light of such expectations, first of all, we need to remember that a “magic word” in itself does not evoke an actual creative act. Rather, it is the invocation of appearances, of illusions. “Magic words” do not have the power actually to change the structure of being, of reality; but only the way the sorcerer wants us to see it. If he is successful, then we are grievously misled.

Hegel’s famous epigone Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) had a field day with Hegel’s insights. He not only declared God “dead,” but claimed that “we” had “murdered” Him. Mankind, on this view, has finally gained the existential status not only to be in a position to “kill God,” but also to grant itself “grace” and “salvation” via human reason alone. Of course, these are the maunderings of a person who sadly died in an insane asylum. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is splendidly honored by the “progressives” among us to this day….

It’s interesting to note that many students of the Phänomenologie consistently over time have reported that to be drawn into the “magic circle” of this enterprise is to enter into a perfectly logically self-consistent construction — so long as one does not use the criteria of First Reality to judge it. But finally, all criticism by appeal to reality itself, i.e., as actually experienced by human beings in contrast with being merely cogitated or thought, is foreclosed by Hegel’s rule that his construction need justify itself through nothing but “the presentation of the system itself.” Thus we have the case of the magically disappearing world.

And so not only God is booted out of Hegel’s system; but also any sense of “objective reality.” The “world” is drawn into the sorcerer’s consciousness as conceptualizations only, as Gestalten, “shapes.” Once the sorcerer possesses the historical “shapes” in his consciousness, he has no further need of “the world,” of evidence from the side of actual experience of the world. Thus he intends to “eclipse” such experience by the force of reason alone, dispensing with human existential experience altogether through the power of “magical” imagination — which of course altogether destroys any avenue of critical judgment from the side of First Reality, which happily satisfies criterion (2) above.

Second of all, we need to appreciate the worldview implicit in Hegel’s remarks. Voegelin thinks the above-quoted passage — i.e., “Every single man is but a blind link in the chain of absolute necessity….” — reveals Hegel’s intense resentment of the human condition as well as its cause. Further, it is a key passage for understanding the diremption — meaning the tearing apart, or violent separation from all former historical notions of the human condition so characteristic of modern existence — at the foundation of Hegel’s enterprise:

“Man has become a nothing; he has no reality of his own; he is a blind particle in a process of the world which has the monopoly of real reality and real meaning. [Note it is not the world that has meaning; only its process has meaning.] In order to raise himself from nothing to something, the blind particle must become a seeing particle. But even if the particle has gained sight, it sees nothing but the direction in which the process is moving…. And yet, to Hegel something important has been gained: the nothing that has raised itself to a something has become, if not a man, at least a sorcerer who can evoke, if not the reality of history, at least its shape. I almost hesitate to continue — the spectacle of a nihilist stripping himself to the nude is embarrassing. For Hegel betrays in so many words that being a man is not enough for him; and as he cannot be the divine Lord of history himself, he is going to achieve Herrschaft [i.e., dominion, lordship, mastery, rule, reign] as the sorcerer who will conjure up an image of history — a shape, a ghost — that is meant to eclipse the history of God’s making. The imaginative project of history falls in its place in the pattern of modern existence as the conjurer’s instrument of power”….

Since the conjurer’s instrument of power is in this case to be obtained by the “perfection” of philosophy into a system of absolute knowledge, we need to define what philosophy is. The etymology of the word tells you the meaning of philosophy is “love of wisdom”: In the original Greek, philo refers to “love” or “lover”; sophia to “wisdom.”

Hegel’s main project, as it turns out, was to transform philosophy, the love of wisdom, into an instrument of Absolute Science, whereby “wisdom,” and all knowledge, are found to consist, not in the loving search or quest for divine truth, the complete possession of which is denied to mortal men in this lifetime; but in the “final possession” of absolute truth once and for all — the “absolute science” that can make men “immortal” in this world. In short, Hegel would like to transform philosophy into an exact science.

But if this were possible, then philosophy would instantly cease to be philosophy.

For although the insights of philosophy can advance, it cannot advance beyond its structure as “love of wisdom.” In the great tradition of the classical Greeks, eminently Plato and Aristotle (which Hegel had thoroughly mastered), philosophy denotes the loving tension of man “toward the divine ground of his existence. God alone has sophia, ‘real knowledge’; man finds the truth about God and the world, as well as of his own existence, by becoming philosophos, the lover of God and his wisdom. The philosopher’s eroticism implies the humanity of man and the divinity of God as the poles of his existential tension. The practice of philosophy in the Socratic–Platonic sense is the equivalent of the Christian sanctification of man; it is the growth of the image of God in man. Hegel’s harmless-sounding phrase [ i.e., philosophy must at last “give up its name of a love of wisdom and become real knowledge”] thus covers the program of abolishing the humanity of man; the sophia of God can be brought into the orbit of man only by transforming man into God. The Ziel [goal] of the Phänomenologie is the creation of the man-god….” — commencing with Hegel’s own self-deification as the redeemer of mankind now that the history of mankind, and notably his spiritual history, has been abolished by Hegel’s system of absolute science.[6]

In this, Hegel reveals his profound alienation from the idea of an established order of the universe. Indeed, he outright rejects any idea of order that has an origin other than in human consciousness, which he hypostasizes as “reason” or at least a facsimile thereof that the sorcerer can put over on his audience.

Voegelin provides some helpful insights into the consciousness of the sorcerer and his project:

“…Hegel experiences his state of alienation as an acute loss of reality, and even as death. But he cannot, or will not, initiate the movement of return; the epistrophe, the periagoge, is impossible. The despair or lostness, then, turns into the mood of revolt. Hegel closes his existence in on himself; he develops a false self; and lets his false self engage in an act of self-salvation that is meant to substitute for the periagoge of which his true self proves incapable. The alienation which, as long as it remains a state of lostness in open existence, can be healed through the return [to God], now hardens into the acheronta movebo of the sorcerer who, through magic operations, forces salvation from the non-reality of his lostness. Since, however, nonreality has no power of salvation, and Hegel’s true self knows this quite well, the false self must take the next step and, by ‘the energy of thinking,’ transform the reality of God into the dialectics of his consciousness: the divine power accrues to the Subjeckt that is engaged in self-salvation through reaching the state of reflective self-consciousness. If the soul cannot return to God, God must be alienated from himself and drawn into the human state of alienation. And finally, since none of these operations in Second Reality would change anything in the surrounding First Reality, but result only in the isolation of the sorcerer from the rest of society, the whole world must be drawn into the imaginary Second Reality. The sorcerer becomes the savior of the ‘age’ by imposing his System of Science as the new revelation on mankind at large. All mankind must join the sorcerer in the hell of his damnation.”[7]

In classical Greek philosophy, and especially in Plato, the epistrophe or periagoge in the above passage refers to the “turning around” to God (the transcendent Beyond of the cosmos) in open existence, in loving response to His call. The terms are analogous to the Christian “born again” experience. The term acheronta movebo means “If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions.” It is the satanic declaration of the sorcerer who chooses to close all of reality in on himself, the Subjekt. Given the classical experience, this can only be a system of anti-philosophy.

In [Plato’s] Republic, the Beyond is imagined as the ultimate creative ground, the Agathon, from whom all being things receive their existence, their form, and their truth; and since by its presence it is the origin of reality and the sunlike luminosity of its structure, the Agathon-Beyond is something more beautiful and higher in rank of dignity and power that the reality that we symbolize by such terms as being, existence, essence, form, intelligibility, and knowledge. In the myth of the Phaedrus, then, the Beyond is the truly immortal divinity from whose presence in contemplative action the Olympian gods derive their divine and men their human immortality. In the puppet myth of the Laws, finally, ‘the god’ becomes the divine force that pulls the golden cord of the Nous that is meant to move man toward the immortalizing, noetic order of his existence. In this last image of the noetic “pull” (helkein) Plato comes so close to the helkein of the Gospel of John (6:44) that it is difficult to discern the difference.[8]

It appears that Hegel’s “revolt” is above all finally a revolt against, a rejection of the human condition, of the fact that a human being is never consulted about the terms of his coming into the world, nor of his departure from it. It is the essence of the human condition that a man is neither the origin nor the “end” of himself — “end” in the sense of telos, meaning purpose, or goal. Meanwhile, in between birth and death, there is a litany of evils to which mortal human nature is subject. “The life of man is really burdened,” as Voegelin put it, “with the well-known miseries enumerated by Hesoid. We remember his list of hunger, hard work, disease, early death, and the fear of the injustices to be suffered by the weaker man at the hands of the more powerful — not to mention the problem of Pandora.”[9]

Notwithstanding, Voegelin reminds us that “as long as our existence is undeformed by phantasies, these miseries are not experienced as senseless. We understand them as the lot of man, mysterious it is true, but as the lot he has to cope with in the organization and conduct of his life, in the fight for survival, the protection of his dependents, and the resistance to injustice, and in his spiritual and intellectual response to the mystery of existence.”[10]

Now the “lot of man” as just given is a description of the condicio humana, the human condition. It is the very basis for the idea of a universal, common humanity, of the brotherhood of mankind. It is my conjecture that it is possible for a person to take great umbrage at this condicio humana, to deplore and reject it, to see it as a grievous insult to one’s own assumed personal autonomy; and so to take flight in an alternative reality that can be structured more according to one’s own wishes, tastes, and desires. And thus, a Second Reality is born.

As for me, all things considered, I’ll take First Reality, the Great Hierarchy of Being — God–Man–World–Society — any day, any time. I believe that human beings were put in this world to be creative actors, even if they never get to design the stage on which the acting is being done, nor to control the writing of the script by which the play unfolds. And meanwhile they not only act, but suffer the actions of other actors or forces — personal, natural, social — from outside themselves.

Yet to recognize all this is to recognize the very basis of one’s own existential humanity. And to realize that the lot of any other man is no different. To be part and participant of this divinely constituted, dynamic “sub-whole” of a yet greater Whole is a glorious privilege. To go hole up in a Second Reality, to me, would be to lose one’s reason and probably one’s soul as well….

Indeed, that appears to be the conclusion reached by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), the great French poet, a noetically and spiritually sensitive person who understood himself to be living in an age of great noetic and spiritual disorder:

And he penned these lines that make it crystal-clear to whom our soul is to be sold:

[1] Eric Vöegelin, “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” Collected Works Vol. 12, 1990.

[3] G. W. F. Hegel, MS, Fortsetzung des “Systems der Sittlichkeit,” c. 1804–06.

[4] Karl Marx, Doctoral Dissertation, 1840–41 (quoting a passage from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound).

[5] Karl Marx, “National Ökonomie und Philosophy,” Der Historische Materialismus: Die Früschriften.

[9] Eric Vöegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,” Collected Works, Vol. 12, 1990.

[11] Charles Baudelaire, “Au lecteur,” introducing the Fleurs du Mal, 1857.

Thank you for sharing your concerns and views, dear the_conscience!

The link for the Stanford article is here.

In reply, I again aver what I mentioned earlier at post 215 and 211: context, context, context.

The discussion at Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy is not Spiritual. It is philosophy. One cannot hold Plato's feet to the fire on Spiritual matters. That doesn't mean his contributions were worthless or not according to God's will.

For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.

Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned. – I Corinthians 2:11-14

Plato did not have God's gift of Spiritual discernment which all Christians receive. God gave Plato the gift of wisdom. Faith and reason are complementary, but reason cannot substitute for faith.

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God.

For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling.

And my speech and my preaching [was] not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. – I Corinthians 2:1-5

In context, Plato's insights are very helpful to me especially in the never-ending debates concerning mathematics, physics and cosmology.

But Plato's thoughts do not substitute for the words of God. The words of God are spirit and life, the words of men are neither spirit nor life:

It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, [they] are spirit, and [they] are life. – John 6:63

Nevertheless, the words of men are helpful in context - whether Plato's, the founding father's, the_conscience, etc. But they are not and can never be, spirit and life.

To God be the glory!

Thank you for your response AG.

The discussion at Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy is not Spiritual.

All facts are God's facts. There is no dichotomy between physical facts and spiritual facts. This is dualism. Now surely secular philosophy interprets facts incorrectly but that doesn't change that all facts are God's facts.

One cannot hold Plato's feet to the fire on Spiritual matters.

Of course we must since he is responsible for rejecting what God revealed through nature, his conscience, and God's providential ordering of history. Everyone's feet are held to the fire!

That doesn't mean his contributions were worthless or not according to God's will.

I agree.

Plato did not have God's gift of Spiritual discernment which all Christians receive.

He had the Law within his heart which is enough to convict him.

God gave Plato the gift of wisdom.

Define Wisdom.

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge.
Prov 1.

But Plato's thoughts do not substitute for the words of God. The words of God are spirit and life, the words of men are neither spirit nor life:

God made man a rational/moral being with the ability to interpret nature, his conscience, and God's providential ordering of history so that man is left without excuse about his knowledge of God. His special revelation of himself in Christ as inscripturated does require the assurance of the Spirit of Christ, yes. The problem with Plato's thoughts is that he failed to interpret the facts as having their entire basis in the one self-sufficient God who determines all facts.

Thank you for your reply, dear the_conscience!

All facts are God's facts.

Indeed, a thing is true because God says it.

By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. – Psalms 33:6

Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times [the things] that are not [yet] done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure: - Isaiah 46:10

But on this point, I must disagree:

There is no dichotomy between physical facts and spiritual facts. This is dualism.

It is not dualism that man as the observer is unable to discern the difference between physical and spiritual matters. Indeed, if the Spirit of God does not indwell the man, he cannot discern the things of God, they are foolishness to him:

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned. – I Corinthians 2:13-14

The deafness of the natural man is not dualism. The people Jesus is addressing below were physically hearing Him (pressure waves, sound) – but they could not spiritually hear Him:

Why do ye not understand my speech? [even] because ye cannot hear my word. – John 8:43

Conversely, those who have the gift of “ears to hear” are able to hear Him:

And he said, Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father. – John 6:65

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: - John 10:27

But blessed [are] your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. - Matthew 13:16

The natural man cannot comprehend God's thoughts:

For my thoughts [are] not your thoughts, neither [are] your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For [as] the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. – Isaiah 55:8-9 You continued:

me: One cannot hold Plato's feet to the fire on Spiritual matters.

you: Of course we must since he is responsible for rejecting what God revealed through nature, his conscience, and God's providential ordering of history. Everyone's feet are held to the fire!

Of a Truth, God holds everyone’s feet to the fire. But man did not receive the baptism of the Spirit until Pentecost. Plato had long since left this mortal realm.

There is no way a natural man like Plato can receive Spiritual Truth. Even the Hebrews who had witnessed God’s many miracles and received the Law in a display of power could not receive Spiritual Truth because they did not have the gift of “ears to hear.”

And Moses called unto all Israel, and said unto them, Ye have seen all that the LORD did before your eyes in the land of Egypt unto Pharaoh, and unto all his servants, and unto all his land; The great temptations which thine eyes have seen, the signs, and those great miracles: Yet the LORD hath not given you an heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, unto this day. – Deuteronomy 29:2-4

Plato didn’t witness any of those signs. All he had to work with was wisdom – the wisdom of men, not the wisdom of God. Jesus Christ is the wisdom of God.

But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. - I Corinthians 1:24

But man cannot know God through his own wisdom:

For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. - I Corinthians 1:21

Again, I aver that God gave Plato the gift of wisdom - not the wisdom of God, Jesus Christ – Who we receive – but the wisdom of men. Every good gift is of God. Even Plato's very life was a gift of God - as is yours and mine. And we Christians can appreciate Plato's efforts within the context of the revelation of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Jeepers, even Nebuchadnezzar was given the gift to praise God. That he was a heathen did not ipso facto falsify what he said here:

Nebuchadnezzar the king, unto all people, nations, and languages, that dwell in all the earth; Peace be multiplied unto you.

I thought it good to shew the signs and wonders that the high God hath wrought toward me.

How great [are] his signs! and how mighty [are] his wonders! his kingdom [is] an everlasting kingdom, and his dominion [is] from generation to generation. – Daniel 4:1-3

And again, Paul pointed to the wisdom of the Greek poets (certainly not Christian) here:

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. – Acts 17:28

And again, Caiaphas – certainly no Christian – was not wrong when he said this:

And led him away to Annas first; for he was father in law to Caiaphas, which was the high priest that same year. Now Caiaphas was he, which gave counsel to the Jews, that it was expedient that one man should die for the people. – John 18:13-14

And again, Gamaliel – certainly no Christian – was not wrong when he said this:

And now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God. – Acts 5:38-39

A broken clock is right twice a day. Blind squirrels find acorns. Atheist scientists make useful discoveries.

Likewise, men like Plato or Aristotle or Socrates or Heraclitus or Euclid - who never knew Jesus Christ – have passed along to us their insights which are useful even to this very day.

Again: context, context, context.

Plato is not God and is not to be worshipped. He is not a saint, a religious leader or a theologian. He did not, indeed he could not, speak with Spiritual insight. He did not have the gift of the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

But his insights into universals are relevant to this day. Every time a mathematician uses a variable in a formula, he attests to the universality of the formula. Truly, the only closed cosmology (Tegmark’s Level IV) is closed precisely because it is radical Platonism.

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Plato, more than any Greek philosopher known to me, was focused on the “beyond” of the physical. I would not say that Plato is without hope, nor would I speculate what God’s judgment will be.

For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. – Romans 9:15

For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and [their] thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;) In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel. – Romans 2:14-16

But without faith [it is] impossible to please [him]: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and [that] he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. – Hebrews 11:6

What happens to Plato is entirely up to God.

To God be the glory!

For Plato escaping the world of particularity was to achieve the ideal world of the Forms. Knowledge was not possible in the world of becoming only can man have knowledge by participating in the world of eternal truths, abstract reasoning, only conceptual knowledge of the ideal world was participation in the divine. Thus this ideal world of abstract concepts is set apart as something that both God and man can participate together in…. Christianity teaches something wholly other than an abstract ideal world in which God and man participate.

Well of course it does one_conscience! But don’t blame Plato for never having heard of Jesus Christ, since he lived ~400 years before the coming of our Lord. Plato had no awareness of God as Personality. Until the Incarnation of Christ, God as Person was not made fully manifest to mankind. Instead, Plato was aware of God as the Beyond of the Kosmos, the Source of its life (being) and order. He sensed Him as “Mind,” as the divine Nous. And thus he reasoned that, since man also possesses nous, divine–human conversation is possible. (Many Christians would testify to this.) And because the world is divinely ordered by Nous, it is discoverable by means of human nous. (That presumption lies at the very root of modern science.)

It’s as if Plato is to be blamed for repudiating Christ — which he never got an opportunity to do since our Lord did not come until four centuries after his death.

I have noticed a decided antipathy to the great classical thinkers among many Reformed Church sects/confessions; and by extension, antipathy for the scholastic philosophical tradition of the Roman Church, as if it had claimed for itself a “new, improved revelation” to be super-added to the Holy Scriptures (it does not make that claim and never has). Your characterization of Thomas Aquinas as somehow arguing that God is co-extensive with His creation appears utterly false to me. You realize, of course, that this would be a prescription for pantheism. Saint and Doctor Thomas, Trinitarian to his roots in spirit and intellect, would never make such an egregious mistake.

Thomas — as all the great doctors of the Church, e.g., Augustine and Anselm — is on bended knee to the “aseity” of God, His a se, complete, total, eternal self-subsistence and self-completeness, needing nothing to be eternally perfect. He is Creator and sustainer of all that there is, the tetragrammatical god YHWH, “I Am That Am,” the Father of Being, “beyond” the world of created things, and inaccessible to human reason; He is the Logos of creation, the Son of God Who is the Word of God, for whom and by whom were all things made, the Alpha and the Omega; He is the Spirit of God with us, bringing us into relation with the Son and, by His sacrifice, restoring us to our Father.

As for Plato’s position on the matter,

In the Republic, the beyond is imagined as the ultimate creative ground, the Agathon, from whom all being things receive their existence, their form, and their truth; and since by its presence (pareinai) it is the origin of reality and the sunlike luminosity of its structure, the Agathon-Beyond is something more beautiful (kallion) and higher in rank (hyperechontos) of dignity and power than the reality that we symbolize by such terms as being, existence, essence, form, intelligibility, and knowledge…. In the myth of the Phaedrus, then, the beyond is the truly immortal divinity from whose presence in contemplative action the Olympian gods derive their divine and men their human immortality. In the puppet myth of the Laws, finally, “the god” becomes the divine force that pulls the golden cord of the Nous that is meant to move man toward the immortalizing, noetic order of is existence. In this last image of the noetic “pull” (helkein) Plato comes so close to the Helkein of the Gospel of John (6:44) that it is difficult to discern the difference. — Eric Vöegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,” Collected Works Vol. 12.

It seems where you see a dualism — e.g., the division of man into body and soul, and the dualism of form and matter — I see a complementarity. A complementarity is a situation where one has two seemingly mutually exclusive entities, both of which are necessary to the total description of the system which they together comprise. The fact is that, although we can conceptually separate body and soul in order to study them, a living man cannot be separated into the entities body and soul and still live. He exists in spatiotemporal reality only while they are conjoined. Here I take you to task for the same error you charged me with in my earlier discussion of the Great Hierarchy of Being, that I was focusing on the four partners as if they were separable — which they are not. To see them as separable is to miss the point that it is their mutually dynamic relations that constitute spacetime reality as human beings experience it.

As my dearest sister in Christ Alamo-Girl puts it, what is needed for understanding here is “context, context, context.”

In closing, I’d only like to suggest that “the uniquely Christian ontology that refers all created reality to its dependence on God” had been anticipated by Plato.

Thank you ever so much, one_conscience, for your excellent, thought-provoking essay/post!

Thank you so very much for those beautiful Scriptures and for reminding us of Joshua and David!

Here’s another:

And Saul sent messengers to take David: and when they saw the company of the prophets prophesying, and Samuel standing [as] appointed over them, the Spirit of God was upon the messengers of Saul, and they also prophesied. – I Samuel 19:20

Who but God knows which people - great or small - He has touched to accomplish His will?

Praise God that since the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, starting at Pentecost, we Christians are actually indwelled by Him:

And I knew him not: but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost. – John 1:33

And as I began to speak, the Holy Ghost fell on them, as on us at the beginning. Then remembered I the word of the Lord, how that he said, John indeed baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost. Forasmuch then as God gave them the like gift as [he did] unto us, who believed on the Lord Jesus Christ; what was I, that I could withstand God? – Acts 11:15-17

And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; [Even] the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. – John 14:16-17

But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. – Romans 8:9

To God be the glory!

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Hegel as Sorcerer: The “Science” of Second Realities and the “Death” of God

Hegel as Sorcerer:
The “Science” of Second Realities and the “Death” of God