According to Hegel, such problems of logic are not crucial to the ordinary believer. The human being is not merely a rational being, but also a being of feeling and imagination. We do not demand a rational formulation of a poem, and neither should we do so of religion. To do either is to destroy the integrity of distinctive forms of consciousness. As Hegel says above, Christianity first presents a monstrous “picture” [Vorstellung] of the death of God. Religious consciousness operates through images or “picture thinking” rather than through concepts. Its main appeal is not to the intellect but to the emotions. The faithful Christian feels the infinity of God, the melting of the finite into the infinite, of the individual personality into the All, and projects this feeling into the images portrayed visibly and tangibly by religion.
Similarly, through imagination and feeling, the Christian believer who attends a showing of The Passion of the Christ relives for himself the dissolution of the finite personality into the infinity of the divine by identifying with the images of the suffering and death of Jesus. Perhaps above all the film’s depiction of the Mater Dolorosa, the sorrowing mother of Jesus, invites us to identify with the suffering Jesus through a mother’s love, so anxious to avoid any harm to her child, yet compelled to accompany him helplessly on this gruesome journey. All the egoistical concerns of the separate personality dissolve in a mother’s love that knows no limits. This is not a matter of doctrine about the separation of God and man and the need for a Savior, but a feeling, an experience—the experience of oneness with infinite love which Christianity tells us is the real meaning of God.
As a work of art, Mel Gibson’s film invites us to identify with Jesus. He is the good son of his loving mother, a talented carpenter who is proud of his work, a man who sees through a hierarchical society’s hypocritical condemnation of the prostitute to the beautiful soul of Mary Magdalene and thereby awakens in her the consciousness of her own real worth. Above all we identify with Jesus as a being of flesh and blood like ourselves, and so we cringe with every flailing stroke of the whip. But the theology of atonement puts Jesus on a pedestal and deifies him in a realm utterly apart from us, the audience. This theoretical understanding implicitly obstructs our identification with the action hero Jesus that the film wants us to feel and conflicts with the requirements of both art and religion.
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), the first Christian apologist of the dawn of modern science, said: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know” (Pascal 1958, #277, p. 78). Pascal both contrasts the emotional sphere of the heart with the mental sphere of reason and at the same time points to another kind of rationality that is embedded in the feelings of the heart. Hegel attempts to develop just such an alternative form of rationality with a conception of dialectical reason that explores the multiform phenomena of consciousness. Dialectical reason is capable of taking us into spheres of consciousness that are off-limits to ordinary rationality with its logic of either A or not-A. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit takes us into spheres of consciousness where contradictions are rife yet meaningful, transformative impulses to growth from limited to more comprehensive perspectives (Lawler 1988).
On the Separation of Creator and Creation
From the point of view of ordinary logic, the unity of God and not-God is not comprehensible, to be sure. But so, argues Hegel, is their separation. If there is a created world outside of God, then God cannot be infinite. If there is something that is not-God—the finite, limited world of mortal creatures—then God too must be finite, and other than what is not Him—other than, for example, a finite human being condemned to die (Hegel 1968, par. 95, pp. 176–77).
A God outside of the world may be very large, very powerful, far more than the world He creates, but He remains one distinct finite being along side all the rest. This is how the ancient polytheists pictured their gods—bigger, more powerful than the humans they lord over, but otherwise finite beings just as we are. To say that there is only one such Over-Lord does not change the substance of the matter. Nor does it reflect the Christian notion that God is infinite. The orthodox theologian who insists on the separation of God and the world, and so the need for a external mediator and a caste of priests to save us, fails to go beyond an earlier form of religion, and fails to rise to the level of Christianity. If God is truly infinite then everything that exists is within God. So if God is infinite, it follows that “the human, the finite, the fragile, the weak, the negative, are themselves moments of the divine” (Hegel 1985, p. 326).
The Christian teaching that God has become a human being is intimately linked to the doctrine that God is infinite. The separation of Creator and creature is a projection of the narrow vantage point of the separate ego. This was understood by the great Christian mystic and theologian, Meister Eckhart (around 1260–1328). Hegel cites with approval Eckhart’s profoundly Christian teaching: “The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him: my eye and his eye are the same.” “If God did not exist nor would I; if I did not exist nor would he” (Hegel 1984, pp. 347–48). The same fundamentally Christian idea is at the foundation of modern Western philosophy. If Descartes begins with “I think,” he goes on to show that all thinking takes place in the light of God. The rationally incomprehensible theology of atonement that Mel Gibson espouses harkens back instead to the fideism attributed to Tertullian (around A.D. 160–220): Credo quia absurdum, I believe because it is absurd.
The Unhappy Consciousness
For his consistent affirmation of the Christian doctrine that God and humanity are one, Meister Eckhart was condemned as a heretic. The theology of atonement insists on the radical separation of God and humanity, with the one exception being the God-Man, Jesus. But how can God and humanity be radically separate if even one human being can be God? Such would-be orthodox theology is not content with enunciating images for the devotional expression of feeling, but claims the status of conceptual thought for its representations. Consequently, this conceptual theology inevitably falls within the evolution of contradictory forms of consciousness explored in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Specifically, the theology of atonement occupies the place in the evolution of consciousness that Hegel calls “The Unhappy Consciousness.”
The Unhappy Consciousness is a moment or stage in the evolution of the Master-Slave dialectic that arises in Hegel’s Phenomenology out of the standpoint of the separate ego. The ego inevitably confronts other egos in a life and death struggle. Out of fear of death, the losers in this struggle submit to the winners, and so the ego standpoint gives rise to a society of masters and slaves, of dominators and dominated, or rulers and ruled (Hegel 1977, pp. 111–19). Hegel anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) notion that Christianity is an expression of “slave morality.” But for Hegel, if Jesus appeals to the slave with his blessings for the meek and the poor in spirit, he transforms this spirit of abasement with his teaching that humility of the ego is a necessary step for recognizing that beyond narrow ego-consciousness the human being is essentially divine. What dies on the cross on Mount Calvary is both God and humanity: God as the transcendent Creator regarded as separate from his creations, and the separate human individual regarded as a finite, fragile, negative being. What is resurrected from this two-fold death is the unity of God and human being as the universal truth of the unlimited power and fulfillment of the loving human community, which Jesus called the kingdom of God on earth. The true meaning of the Church is not that of a hierarchical power over the laity, but the loving community that implicitly embraces all of humanity.
But before attaining this kingdom, the human being as a finite, separate individual must recognize her nullity and descend to the depths of the Unhappy Consciousness. There God is an unreachable Beyond, and the human being is less than nothing. She is a mere worm, less than the beasts in fact for being truly bestial, like the human-looking brutes in The Passion of the Christ who laugh as they flay the helpless flesh of Jesus. What is the real meaning of sin, Hegel asks, if not the se
paration of the self as a finite ego from all the rest of reality, from Infinite Being. Such separation or “cleavage” produces the knowledge of good and evil, the world of duality and separation (Hegel 1987, pp. 740–41). The finite, separate ego boasts of its truth and power as the center of the universe, its lord and master. But a world of such egos unleashes what Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) calls “a war of all against all” and what Hegel calls “the life-and-death struggle.” The world of separate egos is a reign of murder in which each ego attempts to triumph over every other ego. Inevitably some egos do triumph over others, producing the world of masters and slaves. This world is epitomized by the Roman slave empire, into which was born the babe of Bethlehem.
The ultimate truth implicit in the master-slave dialectic is the illusory nature of the separate ego. The slave, both because of her abasement before the master and the achievement of her creative work, is much closer to this truth than the master, who glories in his separate individuality with all the displays of pomp and circumstance that the spoils of conquest and the creative efforts of his slaves can produce. The pathetic weakness of the master, in contrast to the dignity of the slave, is seen in the contrast that The Passion of the Christ draws between the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, and simple yet courageous Simon of Cyrene. Simon is a kind of Everyman, naturally reluctant to be dragooned into an awful job with no pay and no glory, but soon siding with the oppressed that he is too. Hang in there, friend, he tells Jesus; it will all be over soon.
The slave mentality nevertheless has some devices for avoiding the lesson of the essential nullity of the separate and separating ego consciousness. Stoic philosophy teaches that true freedom is freedom of thought and such freedom is attainable even for the individual in shackles. But Skeptical philosophy, which dialectically follows on the heals of Stoicism in the Phenomenology, undermines the pretenses of such abstract rationality, showing that to every would-be universal truth affirmed by the Stoic an opposite truth is just as convincingly defensible. Through a relentless skepticism not only has the physical being of the slave been reduced to a state of impotence, but so has his mind, the abstract reasoning of the separate ego. The truth, which seemed to be within the grasp of such consciousness, recedes into “an unattainable beyond,” while the individual is left to contemplate in both body and soul her essential nothingness (Hegel 1977, p. 131).
Jesus as Sinful Human Being
This anguish over the nothingness of the separate ego is depicted in The Passion of the Christ both in Jesus’s agonized plea in the Garden of Gethsemane that he be spared the coming trial, and more completely in his despairing cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Here we are furthest from the conception of a deified Jesus who is radically different from ordinary humanity. How is this completely human anguish compatible with the doctrine of the God-Man, separate from the rest of us? Another artist, inspired by another conception of Christianity, would linger over this moment, as Hegel does in his lectures, in which Jesus plumbs the depths of human despair. Hegel’s interpretation radically departs from the theology of atonement. Jesus saves sinners only by being one of them.
In plumbing the depths of the radical separateness of the finite ego, Jesus embodied human sinfulness to its fullest extent. The deep spiritual meaning of the atonement is at-one-ment: the reconciliation of the human and the divine through the death of the separate self. It is not that Jesus, as a separate deified individual, takes on the sins of others and sacrifices himself for them, but that he himself fully embodied human sinfulness, in other words human finitude and separation, to the extent of dying the infamous death of a criminal on the cross. In the context of Roman civilization Jesus was indeed a criminal for his teaching of the oneness of God and humanity, profoundly contradicting the hierarchical authority of the Roman slave-state. Hence, it was his own sinfulness that was “expiated” through his death (Hegel 1985, pp. 128–29).
In the anguish of death, Jesus comprehended the Unhappy Consciousness of the separate ego and so initiated a new stage in which human consciousness grasps its true nature. Having taken the all-too-human form of ego consciousness to its logical conclusion in an ignominious death, he died to death itself, and so rose from this death in the transformed existence of the radiance of Spirit. In the final scene of The Passion of the Christ, this Spirit is identified with Jesus alone. For Hegel, however, the resurrected Spirit is primarily that of the revolutionary new human community that has overcome the Unhappy Consciousness.
The resurrection of Jesus brings out the full meaning of his death. The death of God is at the same time the death of death, for Spirit is precisely that inner bond within each human being that unites with others and so survives the death of the finite separate self. Hegel defines Spirit [Geist] as the overcoming of the separate ego: “‘I’ that is ‘We,’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Hegel 1977, p. 110). The “I” that confronts all the separate “I”s in a life-and-death struggle must die to this separation to rise to the level of Spirit. This full meaning of the human Spirit as the overcoming of the separation of the ego and the Unhappy Consciousness to which it leads is the goal of the Phenomenology, a goal that is implicitly realized in the form of feeling in the religious experience of the death of Jesus.
The Calvary of Absolute Spirit
It remains to recognize this achievement in an adequate conceptual form by overcoming all remaining limited understandings and forms of experience. So at the conclusion of the Phenomenology, Hegel calls the preceding stages of consciousness the “Calvary of Absolute Spirit” (Hegel 1977, p. 808). The Phenomenology as a whole, with its successive stages of the evolution of limited forms of human consciousness driven by contradiction, constitutes the full unfolding of the meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus.
By placing the burden of universal human self-transformation exclusively on the shoulders of the separate God-Man Jesus, the theology of atonement remains fixated at the stage of the Unhappy Consciousness. In holding that the individual must affirm his own essential nothingness before an almighty Beyond, and so requires a mediator to save him, this theology ultimately fixes the sinner in his sin, and establishes him as incapable of real redemption. But no one can perform the transformation of consciousness that saves us from the nullity of the isolated ego for anyone else. Against the superficial theology of atonement, the teachings of Jesus, consistently expressed in his death and resurrection, present in religious form, at the level of feeling and picture thinking or parables, what conceptual philosophy shows to be the fundamental meaning of the human spirit (Hegel 1985, p. 128).
The Passion of the Christ concludes with the resurrected Jesus setting out to announce his message. But what is this message; what is the Good News? That humans are abject sinners incapable of saving themselves, or that the human spirit is indeed indestructible, and that we must all reach beyond our own separate ego-identification, like the two Marys and Simon, and recognize the reflection of divinity in each human being? The Passion of the Christ, insofar as it embodies the theology of separation, wants to perpetuate the first view of the radical human abasement of the Unhappy Consciousness, but in its fidelity to the Gospel account, which includes heroes and heroines as well as villains, it implicitly challenges this theology.
Hegel’s own treatment of the passion of the Christ does not end with the death and resurrection of Jesus, but continues with the story of the new human community founded on the recognition of the Holy Spirit as an I that is a We and a We that is an I. This is the Kingdom of Heaven, which Jesus likens to a mustard seed. It starts as the tiniest of seeds and multiplies and spreads until it becomes a home for all of humanity. Hegel stresses the words of Jesus that he must go away, or die, so that the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, can descend on his followers (Hegel 1985, p. 222; John 16:7). Otherwise they would be tempted to turn the individual Jesus into a separate deity, and establish separatist communities of believers depending on whether or not they accept this new god—instead of recog
nizing the divine where it belongs, in themselves as human beings, bound together in spirit, in love. Jesus therefore really has to die, to leave the scene, Hegel says, for his teachings to be truly understood. For his teaching is not about himself as a special being, but about what is special in all of us.
Just as it is not necessary for us today to repeat all the illusion and suffering of slave society in concrete forms to grasp the lessons of this history, so we do not have to be nailed to the cross to die to the separate ego. The historical Jesus performed this exemplary act in the flesh. But each human being must repeat this death in spirit, and so be reborn in the awareness of our oneness with universal Spirit, of the oneness of the individual with all humanity, with All That Is. The kingdom of God on earth is present here and now for those who understand the meaning of the evolution of human experience. This, Hegel brilliantly shows, is the deep meaning of Christianity.
For Jesus, we are all sons and daughters of God. And so the one prayer that he taught begins with the words, “Our Father.” As in Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32), as separate human egos we get lost in the worldly pursuit of riotous living, until we are reduced to a state of despair. The Father allows his Son, the expression of Himself in ordinary human ego-consciousness, to go into the world to have experiences of limitedness, want and conflict, anguish and despair. For only in this way can our intrinsic divinity be truly experienced; only by overcoming the illusory state of non-divinity, can the divine essence of each individual be fully appreciated.
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