Is Hegel the Protestant Aquinas?

Not quite

Howard Kainz writes,

It’s a good question. Hegel and Aquinas are certainly comparable in the sense that they treated a wide variety of topics in philosophy and theology, and unified and organized them. Another similarity resides in the prominence of theology in their writings – but with the following caveat: Whereas, in the scholastic approach adopted by Aquinas, philosophy (Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic, etc.) is the “handmaid of theology,” with Hegel the relationship is inverted: theology becomes the handmaid of philosophy.

It is certainly true that for Aquinas, philosophia ancilla theologiae, "philosophy is the handmaiden of theology," where the theology in question is a reflection on, and systematization of, the data of divine revelation, and thus not a branch of philosophy.  (Natural theology, however, which makes no use of revelation, is a branch of philosophy.) But it strikes me as not quite right to say that Hegel inverts the relationship between theology and philosophy.

First of all, in what sense is philosophy a handmaiden to theology for Aquinas? Philosophy takes us some distance toward the knowledge of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, but not all the way, and not to the truly essential.  It takes us as far as we can go on the basis of experience and discursive reason unaided by revelation.  But if we would know the whole truth about the ultimate matters, and indeed the saving truth, then we must accept divine revelation.  We can know that God exists by unaided reason, for example, but not that God is triune or that his only begotten Son became man in Jesus of Nazareth.  Thus, for Aquinas, theology supplements and completes what we can know by our own powers.  It neither contradicts the latter, nor does it express it in a more adequate form: it goes beyond it.  It is not irrational but suprarational.

A second sense in which philosophy is ancillary to theology is that philosophy supplies the tools of theology, though not its data.  It supplies concepts and distinctions and argumentative procedures with which the data of revelation can be articulated and organized and shown to be rationally acceptable, thereby constituting a reasoned faith, though not a rationally demonstrable faith. (‘Rationally demonstrable faith’ is a contradictio in adjecto.)

For Hegel, however, the content of theology and philosophy is the same; it is just that philosophy expresses this content in an adequate conceptual manner whereas theology expresses it in an inadequate pictorial manner.  To invoke some Hegelian jargon, the thinking of theology is vorstellendes Denken; the thinking of philosophy is superior: begriffliches Denken. If Hegel were Aquinas turned on his head, then Hegel would have to be saying that philosophy brings in new content beyond that of theology.  But that's not Hegel’s view.  And if Aquinas were Hegel turned on his head, then Aquinas would have to be saying that the content of philosophy and theology is the same, but that philosophy expresses it inadequately.  And that is not what Aquinas is saying.

The crucial difference between Hegel and Aquinas, though, is that Hegel suppresses what is utterly essential to anything worth calling religion, namely, the reference to the radically transcendent, the “unseen Order,” to borrow a phrase from William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, Lecture III, “The Reality of the Unseen.”) Hegel’s approach, by contrast is thoroughly immanentist. His Absolute is Spinoza’s, driven by a supercharged dialectic torn from the context of living dialogue and hypostatized. (To properly explain this would require more space than is fitting for a mere Substack entry.)

Kainz is well-aware of Hegel’s suppression of the Transcendent, but seems to embrace it:

Nineteenth century philosophers like Karl Marx and Ludwig Feuerbach criticized Hegel for being too spiritual. But the tendency in the last century, from Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Karl Löwith, and others is to accuse him of dismantling “transcendence” from Christianity. What they miss is that Hegel’s goal, whether achieved or not, was to coordinate transcendent and emanent [immanent] aspects by systematic philosophical “elevation” of Christian beliefs to a rational/conceptual level.

This coordination, I would argue, amounts to a suppression of the Transcendent and a secularization of Christianity that destroys it in its essence. The truly Transcendent, I would argue, cannot be aufgehoben, in Hegel’s sense, simultaneously cancelled and preserved; in the end it is simply cancelled.

To end on an irenic note, Hegel does subordinate theology to philosophy but, pace Kainz, it is incorrect to say that, for Hegel, theology is the handmaiden of philosophy in the way that philosophy is the handmaiden of theology for Aquinas.

This cavil having been lodged, Kainz's piece is a useful piece of journalism for those who don't know anything about this topic. 

It does annoy  me, however, that  Kainz doesn't supply any references.  For example, we read:

Hegel was critical of Catholicism at times, in his writings and lectures. For example, he once made a scurrilous remark about the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist . . . .

Very interesting, but what exactly does Hegel say and where does he say it?  Inquiring minds want to know.  Would it have killed Kainz to insert a few references into his piece?  (Maybe he did, only to have them expunged by the editors.) Then a serious dude like me who has almost the whole of Hegel in German and English in his personal library could check the context and amplify his knowledge of the work of the Swabian genius.

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