In The Anatomy of Misremembering Cyril O’Regan discusses at length the multi-levelled critique of Hegel by the twentieth-century Swiss theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar. According to the Preface, the book responds to the felt need to combat the emergence and perdurance of a certain kind of cultural and religious amnesia consequent upon the ascendancy of the Enlightenment with its still ongoing evisceration of tradition. For O’Regan, the pressing task of the philosopher and theologian is to recover a radical sense of memory, indeed to remember the need for memory in all of its vital manifestations, be they religious, cultural, artistic, or otherwise. For without memory, one lacks a past. Yet, without a past, one cannot have a future. And so it has come to pass that the hegemony of Enlightenment amnesia has spawned a culture that, for all its obsession with the future, seems with ever greater acceleration, not to say irony, to be headed exactly nowhere.

To be sure, these are familiar if still valid criticisms common to any number of post-Enlightenment philosophical and theological positions. O’Regan does not intend, however, merely to rehearse a more or less standard religiously informed defense of traditional values and practices in the face of secular antagonism or indifference. Accordingly, he introduces a twist. Along with the tension between forgetting and memory, O’Regan, by way of Balthasar, detects a third vector in play in the contemporary intellectual and spiritual milieu, namely, misremembering. While misremembering entails a failure adequately to recall the past, it is not the same as forgetting. Rather, unlike total forgetfulness, ‘misremembering is a response to forgetting which affirms the need and value of remembering as overcoming a disposition of forgetting’ (13). In short, misremembering is a certain kind of distortion of the past which, because of its awareness of the need for remembering, combined with its confidence in having actually succeeded in attaining it, presents perhaps an even greater threat to true memory than mere forgetting.

As O’Regan shows, for Balthasar, Hegel represents an insidious instance of such misremembering with respect to central theological categories such as creation, incarnation, redemption, apocalypse, the Trinity and so on. Hegel is important because he is profoundly sensitive to the all-pervasive character of Enlightenment amnesia and therefore to the need for providing a proportionately comprehensive response. His project constitutes nothing less than a massive act of ‘recollection’ (Erinnerung) of the entirety of the world-historical process at least in its fundamental dialectical structure. In appropriating and employing central Christian categories, however, Hegel, rather than truly recovering them from the oblivion of Enlightenment amnesia, manages instead to systematically distort their meaning and significance. Moreover, it is due to Hegel’s influence, according to O’Regan, that this misremembering itself now pervades our philosophical and theological memory, haunting it like a spectre.

Clearly, then, a response to Hegel’s response to the Enlightenment is needed. The Anatomy of Misremembering offers such a response by way of an anatomical dissection or dismembering of Hegelian misremembering, in which Balthasar functions as both diagnostician and prescriber of treatment.

In Part I, Chapter I, ‘Genealogical Torment,’ O’Regan discusses Balthasar’s genealogy of Hegel’s influences. According to Balthasar, four sources were particularly important in shaping Hegelian misremembering of Christianity: Post-Romantic Aestheticism, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism and Apocalypticism. Most significant among these sources is a certain species of Valentinian Gnosticism which, contrary to orthodox Christian doctrine, sees development and agon as constitutive not simply of creation but of the divine itself. Hegel, it would seem, radicalizes this view such that the developmental agon of world-historical process itself comes to constitute nothing less than the self-actualization of the divine in the form of Spirit.

Part II, entitled ‘Gloriously Awry: Hegel’s Epic Deviation’, complements Part I but moves to a more substantive confrontation between Hegel and Balthasar. O’Regan calls forth a defining contribution of Balthasar’s entire oeuvre, namely, the comprehensive theological aesthetics which Balthasar deploys in order to mount an effective response to the present cultural malaise. For Balthasar, aesthetic categories, when theologically augmented and perfected, provide the grounds for a radically critical hermeneutic of all manner of philosophical and theological positions. What Balthasar sees as a particularly damaging to Hegel’s pretensions to truly recovering central Christian theologoumena is Hegel’s reversion to an epic stance with respect to world-historical process. For the epic is the realm in which women and men are born, suffer and die, but inexorably and without hope. Yet, in contrast to a merely epic viewpoint, for Baltasar, says O’Regan, ‘Scripture and theological tradition equally give witness to the dramatic character of God’s engagement with the world and human beings’ in which the outcome of the drama is ‘prospectively open’ (151). Hegel, however, rather than adequately acknowledging the dramatic, open and futural nature of divine-human and human-human relationships, deforms this essentially cosmic drama by inscribing it within the confines of an epic horizon. On Balthasar’s view, this gives rise to such notorious puzzles or mystifications as Hegelian theodicy and the ‘incorrigibly retrospective vantage point’ of Hegelian speculation (151). The effect of Balthasar’s manoeuvre, then, is to hoist Hegel by his own petard insofar as Hegel himself specifies epic as a deficient aesthetic mode compared to drama. Moreover, it shows how the deployment of a theological aesthetics can gain significant critical purchase on Hegel’s project as a whole.

Chapter III carries the issue forward by showing how Hegel’s epic Gnosticism yields a highly distorted Christology and Trinitarian theology. Balthasar praises Hegel for emphasizing the Christ event as the centre of Christian theological concern and the Trinity as its encompassing horizon. Yet, in Hegel’s epic Gnostic account, the Trinity implicates itself in a teleological process according to which it is necessarily exposed to radical suffering, alienation and even sin. For Balthasar, it is at this point that the potential monstrosity of Hegelian theodicy comes to the fore inasmuch as evil is not only reconcilable with divine will but can actually be viewed retrospectively to serve the purpose of mediating the process of divine self-perfection. A further concern in this context is that, since this process of development comes to fruition only with the ‘resurrection’ of Spirit in the Christian spiritual community, there would seem to be a displacement of Christ’s centrality by Spirit. Such displacement renders Christ’s bodily resurrection redundant and the doctrine proclaiming its historical facticity a mere mythological obfuscation. Needless to say, this view has immense consequences for basic Christian beliefs regarding resurrection and personal immortality as well as Christian practices such as prayer and the celebration of the Eucharist, consequences that for Balthasar are only too pernicious. O’Regan announces with eloquence the urgency of the concern:

Part III, ‘Of Fathers and Sons’, shifts the focus away from Balthasar’s direct confrontation with Hegel and towards placing Balthasar’s project within an ongoing tradition of resistance to Gnostic forms of distortion of Christian theology. O’Regan identifies four ‘Fathers’ who helped shape Balthasar’s critical response to Hegel’s apparent form of Gnosticism, namely, Irenaeus, Franz Staudenmaier, J. G. Hamann and Sergei Bulgakov. The influence of Irenaeus holds primacy of place, which is only fitting given that Irenaeus was concerned to refute the original instance of Valentinian Gnosticism which Hegel, according to Balthasar, repeats in a modified form.

The following chapter of Part III discusses ‘Hegelian and Valentinian Paternity of Contemporary Theological Thought’. The main target here is Jürgen Moltmann as representative of post-Hegelian tendencies in contemporary theology, tendencies to deny God’s radical transcendence and to view the world-historical process as the site not only of God’s creative activity and self-revelation but also of His self-mediation and development.

Part IV, ‘Eidetic Apocalyptic and Its Contemporary Rivals’, introduces a new layer to O’Regan’s discussion by means of a comparison of Balthasar’s apocalyptic theological vision with other apocalyptic stances, in particular those of Johann Baptist Metz and Walter Benjamin. As in the rest of the volume, O’Regan weaves together a vast tapestry of figures and themes in order to show more precisely wherein lies Balthasar’s particular contribution to the ongoing resistance to Hegelian and post-Hegelian trends in contemporary theology. The central thesis of this last section of the book is that Balthasar’s apocalyptic vision succeeds in articulating a proper balance between the triumphalist ‘already’ of Hegelian realized eschatology and the only too despairing ‘not yet’ of Benjamin’s messianic apocalyptic. One of the subtler points discussed by O’Regan in this context is Balthasar’s position that the emphasis on radical rupture characteristic of Metz’s and Benjamin’s apocalyptics has its origins in Luther’s theology of the cross and the sub contrario. The irony is that Luther’s ‘penchant for paradox, which goes hand in hand with a view of grace without relation to nature,’ actually sets the stage for the speculative move in which all antinomies are dialectically overcome (497). According to Balthasar, the proper means for resisting Hegel on this score is the recovery of an analogical view of the relation between nature and grace. For a theology grounded in the analogia entis can respect the immeasurable qualitative distinction between creature and Creator while simultaneously maintaining that grace does not utterly annihilate or ‘contradict’ the integrity of nature. By contrast, for Balthasar, it is precisely the despair elicited by the view that grace radically ruptures or contradicts nature which calls forth the Hegelian speculative effort to overcome the distinction between creature and Creator. O’Regan clearly points out, however, that Balthasar’s apocalyptic could benefit from being tutored by that of Metz and Benjamin insofar as the latter address with greater urgency the need to remember and give voice to the victims rendered voiceless by all forms of chauvinist triumphalism, whether Hegelian, Christian or otherwise.

O’Regan’s impressive volume, then, has many qualities to recommend it. Chief among these are the creative, thoughtful and instructive ways in which it helps the reader to situate Balthasar’s powerful response to Hegel amidst the ongoing revival of Hegel interest. Apart from being a bit unwieldy in its presentation, however, I hold that O’Regan’s book fails, at least to some degree, on its own terms. The overarching goal of the book is to resist major cultural and religious instances of forgetting and misremembering. Yet exceedingly little effort is expended on trying to recover Hegel’s many laudable contributions to the history of thought from the distorting effects of the forgetting and misremembering common in post-Hegelian thought. Rather than resist this history of distortion, O’Regan tends instead to perpetuate its most extreme elements. Thus, under O’Regan’s and Balthasar’s direction, in the drama of intellectual and spiritual history Hegel is cast in the role of Sauron and ultimately Anti-Christ (193, 254 et passim). To give another example, in O’Regan’s rehearsal of Balthasar’s genealogy of influences on Hegel’s developmental philosophical and theological scheme nary a word is mentioned of the influence of the historical and biological sciences upon Hegel. Yet it was Hegel’s insight into the significance of these emergent sciences, in which processes of development were themselves increasingly becoming the object of inquiry, that perhaps most shaped the developmental and organicist character of his thought. True, O’Regan may have felt that these points are well-established and go without saying. Yet he neglects to balance his view of Hegel as Valentinian avatar with the view that Hegel justifiably attempted to respond to the challenges presented by new sciences that were beginning to reveal the ongoing genesis of self-knowledge and the emergence of higher orders of being from lower orders. The result of this and similar omissions is a distorted, which is to say, misremembered, Hegel.