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Heterodox Hegels: heresiology in de Lubac and Bulgakov

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2020

Justin Shaun Coyle
Justin Shaun Coyle*
Affiliation:
Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: justinshauncoyle@gmail.com
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Abstract

This paper considers two twentieth-century heresiological critiques of G. W. F. Hegel. That Henri de Lubac and Sergius Bulgakov should both worry at Hegel's ‘heresy’ is hardly surprising. More surprising, however, is how and that each charges Hegel with a different heresy. Though de Lubac's heresiological critique has proven more influential, I commend Bulgakov's. The paper concludes by querying the very strategy of assaying philosophers like Hegel heresiologically.

Keywords

Sergius BulgakovG. W. F. HegelheresiologyHenri de Lubac

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Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 73 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 31 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

My title puns Cyril O'Regan's magisterial book.Footnote 1 That book, a classic now by any estimation, measures G. W. F. Hegel's proximity to the canons of Christian orthodoxy. O'Regan, of course, judges Hegel's attempt a failure. Here I'm rather less interested in getting Hegel right, still less in whether he was right. Instead, I'm interested in how Hegel has been read and received by modern theology – or at least by two of her brightest lights. I mean Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) and Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944): one a great Catholic troublemaker, the other an Orthodox one. This article, more exploratory than probative, traces their readings of Hegel. Both de Lubac and Bulgakov employ heresiology to counter Hegel. By heresiology, I mean the ancient practice of evaluating texts or thinkers according to ecclesial canons of orthodoxy. This strategy allows de Lubac and Bulgakov to charge Hegel with heterodoxies – errors, that is, local and native to some Christian past. More interesting, though, is how de Lubac and Bulgakov accuse Hegel of different heresies. They agree, that's to say, that he plays modernity's archvillain. But they do not always agree over the nature of his crimes.

This essay details those crimes, or de Lubac's and Bulgakov's account of them. We'll hear de Lubac's case against Hegel first. Even though it arrives half a century after Bulgakov's, it's heard and rehearsed more often. Next I turn to Bulgakov. Last, and instead of a conclusion, I ask what each case tells us about the thinker who brings suit against Hegel. I want mostly to attend to how heresiology works in de Lubac and Bulgakov, and then to wonder about its use for engaging someone like Hegel.

De Lubac on Hegel's Joachitism

Henri de Lubac's critique of Hegel falls within his last book, La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore.Footnote 2 It writes a massive heresiological genealogy that traces, as the title suggests, the recurrence of Joachim of Fiore's thought from the Middle Ages until de Lubac's present. Who was Joachim of Fiore and why does he matter? Joachim was a Calabrian abbot who lived and wrote across the latter part of the twelfth century.Footnote 3 Most of his work comments on scripture, though those commentaries sometimes harbour speculative theological claims. He earned censure and praise at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 – censure for a narrow trinitarian quibble with Peter Lombard, Footnote 4 praise for nearly everything else.Footnote 5

So what is the trouble with Joachim? That is not always entirely clear, since de Lubac judges Joachim himself a rather ambivalent figure.Footnote 6 De Lubac is altogether more exercised about Joachim's spiritual posterity – with theologians and philosophers that have adopted the spirit of Joachim's thought, if not the letter.Footnote 7 (Not the letter, that is, because very few of the figures de Lubac treats actually read Joachim's texts.) So what does this spiritual posterity look like? And how to trace an immaterial pedigree? This too is not always clear. De Lubac says vanishingly little about his method or criteria. What then accounts for de Lubac's decision to tag someone a spiritual Joachite? Patrick Gardner identifies four criteria operative throughout de Lubac's analysis.Footnote 8 On de Lubac's view, an author will be a spiritual descendant of Joachim if and only if he indulges Joachim's rebarbative errors on Trinity, on exegesis, on the church and on the eschaton.

But again, de Lubac is not (here) terribly interested in Joachim himself. On his account, Joachitism has little to do with faithfulness or even exposure to Joachim's texts. Joachim's spiritual heirs are rather defined by ‘tendencies to deviate from the tradition’ exactly where Joachim did – Trinity, exegesis and so on. For de Lubac, deviant Joachitism begins with spiritualist Franciscans in the thirteenth century and continues through modernity. The arrival of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) spells a new advent in spiritual Joachite lineage.Footnote 9 It's he who first applies Joachim's trinitarian division of history now scrubbed of theological or dogmatic trappings. For Lessing, de Lubac thinks, the gathering age of the Spirit heralds Enlightenment.Footnote 10 Joachitism stands now totally immanent, very nearly atheist. This immanent Joachitism indulges the same four errors Joachim did, only now in service of an atheistic humanism – the same one de Lubac spent his career battling.

Which brings us to Hegel.Footnote 11 No greater Joachite than he, heir as Hegel is both to the secular Enlightenment Joachitism of Lessing and to its Lutheran pietist strand in Jakob Böhme.Footnote 12 De Lubac's charge is clear:

Hegel immanentizes the old illuminism of the spirituals like Lessing had and, like him, without stripping it of its historical character. He rationalizes it and, like Lessing but with a totally different apparatus, gives full leave to the rational platitudes of the Enlightenment.Footnote 13

There lies the charge, anyway. But how exactly does Hegel commit Joachitism?

As ever, de Lubac here writes more like an essayist. And that means thinking and writing about him requires organisation he does not always provide. So I gather his indictments according to the four features of Joachitism listed above: Trinity, exegesis, church and eschaton. Keep those charges against Joachim before you as I relay de Lubac's case against Hegel, since the suit de Lubac brings against Hegel indicts him for an immanentising Joachitism.

On the Trinity first. De Lubac thinks Hegel deepens the Joachite error here on at least three fronts. First, Hegel appropriates Joachim's trinitarian schema of history. In his lectures on the Philosophy of History, for example, he sorts world history into three epochs.Footnote 14 Later in the same text, he explicitly keys these to persons of the Trinity.Footnote 15 And in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel ventriloquises the Trinity to speak the stages of consciousness’ history: Father as abstraction, Son as negation, Spirit as reconciliation.Footnote 16 In these ways and others, Hegel's entire system pretends to trinitarian speculation.

Worse, second, is the eclipse of Christ by the Spirit in Hegel. For Hegel, at least as he strikes de Lubac, the reconciliation Christ's incarnation guarantees is effective only when appropriated subjectively. Christ's human nature (according to Hegel's comments on John 7) ‘is not yet the truth as such … for the Holy Spirit was not yet there, since Jesus was not yet transfigured’.Footnote 17 On Hegel's view, then, scripture resists faith's easy certainties. The truth lies beyond it – in Spirit. De Lubac reads Hegel here to confess the insufficiency of Christ's incarnation. (I rather take Hegel to confess precisely the opposite.) With Albert Chappelle, de Lubac concludes that this passage witnesses ‘le dépassement du Christ dans l'Esprit’.Footnote 18 ‘Christ’, de Lubac concludes, ‘hardly retained Hegel's attention.’Footnote 19

A third trinitarian error tightens Joachim's bond between the age of the Spirit with the spiritual church. Where Joachim sees connection, Hegel sees identity. Hegel's Holy Spirit, that is, simply becomes the rational community. Hegel's is an unabashedly modern Pentecost: the advent of the rational community just is the descent of the Spirit. Spirit proceeds not from eternity, but in the ‘full realization of the essence in human consciousness’.Footnote 20 This is not Christianity's Spirit of Father and Son, but an imposter, a doppelgänger – the ‘spirit of the world’.Footnote 21

The second feature of Joachitism concerns exegesis. Hegel transfigures Joachim's spiritual exegesis into what Étienne Borne calls ‘an integrally rational reading of the Christian scriptures’.Footnote 22 Hegel, then, offers a modernist renewal of Joachite exegesis. The Hegelian reader seeks the erasure of scripture's ‘enigmas and parables, images and symbols’.Footnote 23 These – religious representations, all – suffer Aufhebung by and in Spirit's march to Absolute Idea. Remaining on scripture's surface, then, only delays that progress.

The primacy of reason over representation (Vernunft over Vorstellung) bears ecclesial consequences too. The church's visible presence – its institution, hierarchy, sacraments and their like – are, like scripture's surfaces, mere representations.Footnote 24 Cosseting nostalgia or fetish for them, as Catholics do, retards reason's development beyond mere symbol.Footnote 25 De Lubac worries about Hegel's venomous anti-Catholicism. He worries too about this rational community's reabsorption by the modern German state.Footnote 26 On these points, de Lubac worries, Hegel surely inflames Luther's excesses. In Hegel, the Reformation's break from the institutional church is so deep, so total, that the church dissipates into the community of Spirit. And Joachim's ‘spiritual church’ is now irreducibly immanent in history.Footnote 27

That last introduces the final feature of Hegel's Joachitism: the eschaton. Hegel's eschatology is, de Lubac thinks, fully realised without remainder. The ‘kingdom of God’ heralds not a life after death, but within history. Peace, absolute knowledge and freedom – Joachite concepts – come at ‘the end of history’ when Spirit completes its journey.Footnote 28

Trinity, exegesis, church and the eschaton – these name the features that together constitute Hegel's heterodoxy, his modern Joachitism, for de Lubac.

Bulgakov on Hegel's modalism

We hear now from another prosecutor – Sergius Bulgakov. He develops his case against Hegel across his corpus. But I focus on one text: The Tragedy of Philosophy (Die Tragödie der Philosophie) composed just before his exile from Russia and published first in German translation in 1927. The argument of that text (no surprise) is that ‘the history of philosophy is a tragedy’.Footnote 29 And by ‘tragedy’ Bulgakov means heresy – modalism or Sabellianism, to be specific. Thus, ‘in this sense’, Bulgakov thinks, ‘the history of philosophy can be construed and understood as a religious heresiology’.Footnote 30

Bulgakov argues that reality properly conceived comprises three ‘moments’, each of which he associates with the grammatical structure of a judgement.Footnote 31 Each moment bears both logical and ontological promise. If a judgement comprises subject, predicate and copula, reality comprises hypostasis, substance and being.Footnote 32 These moments, like the constitutive elements of a judgement, must remain distinct and unconfused yet also indivisible and inseparable. You'll hear creedal notes in those adjectives – that is hardly coincidence. (Later, Bulgakov explicitly threads his Philosophie der Dreieinheit within trinitarian confession.Footnote 33) But why sound these notes? Because the tragic heresy of modern philosophy, Bulgakov thinks, follows from its failure to maintain these moments’ difference-in-unity. Not only do most modern philosophers fuse these moments together. They also typically privilege one and subsume the others into it.Footnote 34 Bulgakov's book, then, writes a taxonomy of modalisms. Idealists like Kant and Fichte subsume all moments into the first: the subject.Footnote 35 ‘Panlogists’ like Hegel privilege the second, substance or predicate, at the expense of the others.Footnote 36 And identity-philosophers like Schelling and Spinoza champion the third: identity.Footnote 37 Each system commits modalism of a different stripe, but modalism nonetheless.

Bulgakov dedicates a long excursus to Hegel's logic. Unlike de Lubac, Bulgakov critiques in the form of textual gloss. That is, he scoops large servings from Hegel's Science of Logic, often seasoning them with reference to other of Hegel's texts. I gather Bulgakov's critique under three headings: on being, on nothing, on the Trinity. A word or two on each of these charges, then, before showing their interrelation.

Part One of Hegel's Logic roils Bulgakov already. That, remember, presents Hegel's doctrine of being in both his Science of Logic and Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences.Footnote 38 There and against Kant, Hegel seeks ‘what emerges when thought suspends all its assumptions about itself’.Footnote 39 Hegel must therefore begin with ‘pure being’. ‘The beginning’, Hegel writes, ‘must be an absolute … or an abstract beginning; and so it may not presuppose anything, must not be mediated by anything nor have a ground; rather it is to be itself the ground of the entire science.’Footnote 40 Bulgakov demurs.Footnote 41 ‘The idea of pure being’, he writes hotly, ‘is a totally false idea; it is with this counterfeit coin that Hegel buys the entire logic.’Footnote 42 It's counterfeit because there is no totally immediate, abstract being-as-such.Footnote 43 For Bulgakov being is genitive; it is only and always the being of something. The copula ‘is’ always joins subject and predicate. And if that's right, then being occupies no abstract category of its own and so cannot be thought without its relation to subject and object.Footnote 44 Hegel himself knows better. His ‘logical autobiography of the Absolute’Footnote 45 thus pretends to nothing less than a ‘logical deduction of the whole world-being … to interpret it as the logical creation of the world’.Footnote 46

If Bulgakov worries about Hegelian being, he worries more about Hegelian nothing. For Hegel, pure being passes over into nothing.Footnote 47 But the counterpoint to being is not nothing, Bulgakov insists. It is rather nonbeing. And anyway, Hegel hardly attends to the many species of negation in Greek. Some negations – the alpha private, for instance, or ou – resist dialectic altogether.Footnote 48 Hegel's Nichts draws rather closer to the Greek me on, a determinate negation that is more affirmative than not. It's a determinate negation, too, that allows Hegel to derive becoming from being and nothing. Of course doing that, Bulgakov complains, renders nothing logically dependent upon being. Hegel's Nichts is actually a Was. So Hegel lacks a true nothing, an ouk on, an antinomy between being and absolute nonbeing.Footnote 49 But it's exactly this that a Christian grammar of creation demands. Or so Bulgakov:

Christian dogma contains an antinomy … it constructs transcendence from ouk on, from absolute nonbeing … antinomies introduce reason to its edge, they show it the abyss which yawns before thought. The dialectic, on the other hand, builds bridges everywhere.Footnote 50

Hegel's nothing replaces the mystery of creation from absolute nothing with a logical deduction of creation from abstract being. Put differently, Hegelian nothing comes from being, not being from nothing. Hegel has simply misremembered Christianity's narrative sequence.Footnote 51

Hegel's final and ghastliest crime is modalism. Panlogical modalism confuses, conflates and subordinates reality's triune structure into a single moment, for Hegel the second: predicate or substance or the Son. Bulgakov points up two features peculiar and proper to Hegel's modalism. First, Hegel's Son usurps his Father.Footnote 52 Hegel begins not with the Father, who sires the Son eternally, but rather with Logos as logical idea.Footnote 53 Thought, then, an inchoate and developing Logos, serves as foundation (Urgrund) of the world. On this account, Hegel's logic ‘wishes to be the Word through which all things were made’.Footnote 54 But exactly because this Logos cannot live prior to or beyond his incarnation in Christ, Hegel's modalism indulges pantheism. The logic witnesses ‘the teaching of the becoming but not yet becoming God’.Footnote 55 Hegel's mono-hypostatic God cannot be other than ‘a pantheistic Man-God [rather than a God-Man] … gradually becoming aware of himself as God’.Footnote 56

A second feature of Hegel's peculiar modalism concerns the divine persons. All modalisms err on this issue, but Hegel seems especially grave here, since he registers protest against Spinoza's impersonal divinity.Footnote 57 If self-consciousness died in Spinoza, it rises in Hegel ‘not as substance, but more as subject’.Footnote 58 Or so Hegel – Bulgakov rather doubts it. Divine personality in Hegel arrives only as result, as end-product, as finale of Spirit's striving. And that means that Hegel's God is not hypostatic (even mono-hypostatic) without his becoming so. Even then, what emerges from faceless, abstract being is not hypostasis classically construed. Spirit or concept discloses simply another faceless shadow – a self-positing of an unconscious principle which at length overcomes the subject–object distinction.Footnote 59 Bulgakov thinks Hegel has it the wrong way round. Ever the personalist, Bulgakov insists that hypostasis, the ‘ontic zero’, grounds reality.Footnote 60 Hypostasis is not the result (as in Hegel), but the beginning.Footnote 61 It is not the overcoming of difference, but rather its preservation.

This last reveals the coherence of Bulgakov's critique. Hegel's manifold errors on being and nothing, that is, do not prove accidental or adjacent to his modalism. No: for Bulgakov they form its sequelae – its direct consequences. Bulgakov, recall, conceives all reality trinitarianly. Getting the Trinity wrong, then, means getting everything else wrong too.

The very idea of heresiology

So the plaintiffs. Rather than pronounce judgement on Hegel, I close by evaluating the cases against him, along with the method of heresiology itself.

I confess now what you already suspect: I find Bulgakov's use of heresiology both more persuasive and more helpful than de Lubac's. It proves more persuasive for a number of reasons. First, Bulgakov evinces deeper intimacy with Hegel's texts than de Lubac does. Not only does he cite Hegel with greater frequency. He also draws from less obvious texts. De Lubac focuses on the Phenomenology and the lectures on the philosophy of religion. Bulgakov reads the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia, and this (seemingly) without the help of much secondary literature.Footnote 62 A second reason I find Bulgakov more persuasive has to do with the particular heterodoxy Bulgakov's heresiology employs. For starters, it constitutes an actual heresy. That is, it is condemned locally first and then ecumenically at Constantinople II.Footnote 63 By contrast, Joachitism has nothing whatever to do with the censured positions of the historical Joachim. Joachitism itself, if indeed there is any such thing, rouses only local, occasional and highly specific condemnation. Do not, these local condemnations insist, associate St Francis of Assisi as the little angel in Revelation 10.Footnote 64 But this hardly indicts Joachitism as such. De Lubac's argument stands or falls on a spiritual paternity test without clear criteria, and whose positive result still does not clearly or finally prove heterodoxy. By contrast, modalism offers Bulgakov a less oblique standard.

I said I find Bulgakov's critique not only more persuasive, but also more helpful. I mean principally that recent scholarship has tested the explanatory power of de Lubac's criticism. That scholarship has done so mostly by endorsing the critique. Balthasar and O'Regan, for instance, fundamentally commend it.Footnote 65 But sometimes these de Lubac-inspired critiques reprise weaknesses native to de Lubac's own. They associate Hegel, that is, with an oblique heterodoxy, often several. Hegel is variously a Joachite, a Gnostic, a Kabbalist, a Neoplatonist and so ever on. This critique-by-adjective approach typically counsels scrupulous caution around Hegel's texts. Sometimes, though, these cautions seem heavily weighted towards total proscription. Avoid Hegel, they seem almost to whisper, lest you fall prey to his ‘misremembering’, his ‘counterfeit double’, his ‘liquidate[d] Christianity’.Footnote 66 But these aspersions are not, it seems to me, very likely to help theologians attempting to make systematic use of Hegel.

Not that Bulgakov forsakes name-calling. He casts the same aspersions along with some of his own. But name-calling aside, Bulgakov is not the anti-Hegelian he might have been.Footnote 67 How not? Readers of German idealism will recognise that nearly all of Bulgakov's criticisms canvassed above bear a curious relation to those of Hegel's old roommate, F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854).Footnote 68 Bulgakov reinscribes Schelling's critiques, typically (though not always) without attribution. At the very least, this suggests that we should read Bulgakov's critique of Hegel as something closer to an intramural debate – as a quaestio disputata, that is, among the like-minded. If Bulgakov often seems anti-Hegel, he is hardly anti-idealist. All that to say: you will find Bulgakov's critique helpful exactly to the extent that you share sympathies with German idealism. And you won't if you don't.

And heresiology itself? De Lubac and Bulgakov are not the first to wield heresiological blades against Hegel. He faced similar threats within his own lifetime, and by Catholic and Protestant alike.Footnote 69 But that the heresiological attack proves most common need not mean it is most effective. Of the goods proper to the heresiologist's critique is its attempt sentire cum ecclesia, to think with the church – with her grammar, her syntax, her lexicon. Yet it seems far from clear that abstracting a heresy or heterodoxy from its specific historical context and blowing it up into a theoretical type actually constitutes a ‘thinking with the church’.Footnote 70 Sabellianism and Joachitism, Arianism and Nestorianism – these are highly specific and deeply historical judgements in the church's life. But if heresiology requires the surgical extraction of ideas from histories, does not heresiology itself and by its own lights court a docetism of method? Does not heresiology itself, that is, court a sort of metalepsis or catechresis? We ought, I think, to ask whether or not it is types and taxonomies – and not actual texts or figures – that are at length doing the difficult business of thinking.

No doubt de Lubac and Bulgakov both yield to this temptation, but one more than the other. Bulgakov's use of heresiology, that is, often sends him deeper into Hegel's texts. De Lubac's prefers – maybe even necessitates – hovering a few feet above the text. Which you prefer, of course, will depend entirely on whether you think Hegel somehow salvageable for theological use.Footnote 71

References

1 O'Regan, Cyril, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

2 Lubac, Henri de, La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore, 2 vols. (Paris/Lethielleux: Namur, 1979–81)Google Scholar. All translations are mine.

3 The most accomplished work on Joachim is undoubtedly Marjorie Reeves’, especially her The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) and Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).

4 Joachim charged Peter Lombard with a quaternity because he denies that God begets God (Sent. 1.4.1.1), that essence begets essence (Sent. 1.5.1.1), and that substance begets substance (Sent. 1.5.1.4). Lateran IV sided with Peter Lombard against Joachim, but also against Richard of St Victor (Trin. 6.22). For an excellent précis of this debate, see Emery's, Gilles ‘Trinité et unité de Dieu dans la scholastique XIIe–XIVe siècles’, in Gisel, Pierre and Emery, Gilles (eds), Le christianisme est-il un monothéisme? (Geneva: Labor & Fides, 2001), pp. 195–220Google Scholar.

5 See the second canon of Lateran IV: ‘Si quis igitur sententiam vel doctrinam praefati Ioachim in hac parte defendere vel approbare praesumpserit, tamquam haereticus ab omnibus confutetur. In nullo tamen propter hoc Florensi monasterio, cuius ipse Ioachim exstitit institutor, volumus derogari: quoniam ibi et regularis est institutio, et observantia salutaris: maxime, cum ipse Ioachim omnia scripta sua nobis assignari mandaverit, Apostolicae Sedis iudicio approbanda seu etiam corrigenda, dictans epistolam, quam propria manu subscripsit, in qua firmiter confitetur, se illam fidem tenere, quam Romana tenet Ecclesia, quae disponente Domino cunctorum fidelium mater est et magistra.’ Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, ed. Peter Hünermann (Freiburg: Herder, 2000), pp. 440–3.

6 Patrick X. Gardner, ‘Modern Pentecost: Henri de Lubac on Atheism and the Spiritual Posterity of Joachim of Fiore’, PhD diss., University of Notre Dame (2015), p. 124.

7 Gardner, ‘Modern Pentecost’, p. 72: ‘[De Lubac] studies “traces” that Joachim's ideas leave behind; the “branches” and “forests” that grow out of them; and the “streams” and “currents” that flow from them. His preferred metaphor, as his title suggests, is that of a “posterity”. It is a story of parents and children, and in most cases illegitimate children.’

8 Gardner, ‘Modern Pentecost’, p. 69.

9 O'Regan, Cyril, ‘A Theology of History’, in Hillebert, Jordan (ed.), T & T Clark Companion to Henri de Lubac (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), p. 304Google Scholar: ‘The key figure in this respect is Lessing, who in The Education of Man elaborates a periodization of history as a scheme of progress rather a [sic] religious belief about the triune God's action in history, and suggests the eternal Gospel as the fruition of the two testaments, although essentially beyond them.’ Cf. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). Cf. de Lubac, La postérité, pp. 277–80, and O'Regan, Heterodox Hegel, p. 263.

10 Lessing's On the Education of the Human Race does mention ‘certain enthusiasts (Schwärmer) of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries [who] caught a glimpse of this new eternal gospel’. But Lessing is rather less inclined to associate Enlightenment with Joachim's ‘third age’ than de Lubac makes him seem. In fact, it's precisely the Joachites’ attempt to usher in the kingdom of God themselves that ‘made them enthusiasts’. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and ed. H. B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 385.

11 De Lubac was hardly the first to associate Hegel with Joachim. Karl Löwith anticipated the connection in his 1949 ‘Appendix I: Modern Joachimism’, in Meaning in History, pp. 208–13. Hans Urs von Balthasar also associated Joachim and idealism before de Lubac had, principally in his Apokalypse der deutschen Seele: Studien zu einer Lehre von letzen Haltungen, 3 vols. (Basel: Johannes Verlag, 1937–9); and in ‘Improvisations on Spirit and Future’, in Creator Spirit, vol. 3 of Explorations in Theology, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991 [1967]), pp. 135–71. Cf. O'Regan, ‘A Theology of History’, 301: ‘The level of [La postérité's] achievement impressed Balthasar so much that he thought of it as de Lubac's masterwork … The compliment may be in equal parts due to the fact that … long before de Lubac in a number of essays, Balthasar had suggested the return of Joachimism in contemporary theology.’

12 For more on the connection between Hegel and Böhme, see Glenn Alexander Magee's Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and O'Regan, Heterodox Hegel, pp. 279–85.

13 De Lubac, La postérité, p. 360: ‘Hegel immanentise le vieil illuminisme des Spirituels, comme l'avait fait Lessing, et, comme lui encore, sans le dépouiller de son caractère historique. Il le rationalise, tout en donnant congé comme Lessing mais avec un tout autre appareil, aux platitudes rationnelles de l'Aufklärung.’

14 Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1988), p. 21, Cf. de Lubac, La postérité, p. 363.

15 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1857), p. 358: ‘We may distinguish these periods as Kingdoms of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The Kingdom of the Father is the consolidated, undistinguished mass, presenting a self-repeating cycle, mere change – like that sovereignty of Chronos engulfing his offspring. The Kingdom of the Son is the manifestation of God merely in a relation to secular existence – shining upon it as upon an alien object. The Kingdom of the Spirit is the harmonizing of the antithesis.’ Cf. de Lubac, La postérité, p. 365.

16 De Lubac, La postérité, p. 367.

17 Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, preface 3. Cf. de Lubac, La postérité, pp. 370–1.

18 De Lubac, La postérité, p. 367. He credits this phrase to Chapelle's 1973–4 lectures on holy orders at Brussels's Institut d’études théologique.

19 Ibid., p. 362: ‘Mais la figure du Christ ne reticent guère l'attention de Hegel.’

20 Ibid., p. 367: ‘Le règne de l'Esprit, enfin, n'est autre que la pleine connaissance du mystère trinitaire, ce qui signifie en réalité la pleine réalisation de l'essence dans la conscience de l'homme.’

21 Ibid., p. 372. I borrow ‘doppelgänger’ not from de Lubac, but from William Desmond. For more on Hegel's pneumatology from a classically Augustinian vantage, see Douglas Finn's Life in the Spirit: Trinitarian Grammar and Pneumatic Community in Hegel and Augustine (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2016).

22 De Lubac, La postérité, p. 368: ‘Une lecture intégralement rationnelle des Écritures chrétiennes.’ Cf. Étienne Borne, Dieu n'est pas mort (Paris: Fayard, 1959), p. 35.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., pp. 374, 364.

25 Ibid., pp. 363–4. For more on Hegel's critique of Catholicism, see Lawrence S. Stepelevich, ‘Hegel and Roman Catholicism’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 60/4 (1992), pp. 673–91, and Peter Jonkers, ‘Hegel on Catholic Religion’, in Bart Labuschagne and Timo Slootweg (eds), Hegel's Philosophy of the Historical Religions (Boston/Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 177–205.

26 De Lubac, La postérité, p. 374: ‘Il n'y a plus de distinction du temporel et du spirituel: l’Église est absorbée par l’État.’

27 Ibid., pp. 374–5: ‘Dans une entreprise de “laïcisation” – aujourd'hui l'on dirait de “sécularisation” – aussi “extraordinaire”, M. Jean Hyppolite a vu “l'une des choses les plus étonnantes dans l'histoire de la pensée”. Peut-être s'en serait-il moins étonné s'il avait suivi de plus près, non seulement l'histoire de la tradition luthérienne, mais celle du mouvement de dissociation entre le Christ et l'Esprit entre l’Église du Christ et la communauté de l'Esprit, qui s'origine à Joachim de Flore.’

28 Ibid., pp. 368–9.

29 Sergius Bulgakov, Die Tragödie der Philosophie, trans. Alexander Kresling (Darmstadt: Otto Reichel Verlag, 1927), p. 14. All English translations are mine.

30 Ibid., p. 19: ‘Und in diesem Sinne kann die Geschichte der Philosophie als eine religiöse Häresiologie verstanden und ausgelegt werden.’

31 Ibid., p. 38: ‘Die drei ungeteilten und unverschmolzenen Momente der Substanz und des substantialen Verhältnisses: Hypostasis – Satzgegenstand, Bestimmung – Natur – Prädikat, und Sein – Realität – Kopula, die in ihrer eigentümlichen Verbindung die Substantialität erschöpfen und bestimmen, sind in der Geschichte der Philosophie ständig und unweigerlich entweder voneinander geschieden oder miteinander verschmolzen worden; meist hat übrigens das eine das andere mit sich geführt. Diese Systeme der Philosophie gingen von einem dieser Momente aus, um dann aus ihm alle übrigen zu deduzieren – es ergab sich ein eigentümlich gearteter philosophischer Modalismus, Sabellianismus.’

32 For more on Bulgakov's theology of language in Die Tragödie, see Jan Krasicki, ‘“The Tragedy” of Germany Philosophy: Remarks on Reception of German Philosophy in the Russian Religious Thought of S. Bulgakov and Others’, Studies in East European Thought 62/1 (2010), pp. 63–70.

33 Bulgakov, Die Tragödie der Philosophie, pp. 133–50. On this point and for example, see p. 202: ‘In diesem Sinne, aber auch auch nur in diesem, kann man sagen, die Hypostase des Vaters sei die Ur-Hypostase.’ Tikhon Vasilyev's unpublished ‘Bulgakov's Critique of Hegel in “The Tragedy of Philosophy”’ dusts Bulgakov's Philosophie der Dreieinheit persuasively for Pavel Florensky's fingerprints. I'm grateful to Fr Tikhon for sharing a draft of his excellent study with me. For a positive appraisal of Bulgakov's trinitarian philosophy, see John Milbank's ‘Sophiology and Theurgy: The New Theological Horizon’, in Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider (eds), Encounter between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World through the Word (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 45–90. Vasilyev also reports Ivanov's worry that Bulgakov here refuses a proper distinction between and autonomy of theology and philosophy. See his ‘Bulgakov's Critique’, pp. 29–30.

34 Bulgakov, Die Tragödie der Philosophie, p. 38: ‘Auf diese Weise ergeben sich drei mögliche Arten einer philosophischen Häresiologie, eines monistischen Modalismus, und die Systeme der Philosophie können demnach in drei umfangreiche Gruppen eingeteilt werden: a) die Systeme, die vom Satzgegenstand oder dem Subjekt, dem Ich, ausgehen – oder die idealistischen System; b) die Systeme, die vom Prädikat ausgehen – oder die panlogischen Systeme; c) die Systeme, die von der Kopula, d. h. vom unpersönlichen Sein ausgehen – oder die realistischen Systeme, wobei dieser Realismus verschiedenen Charakter annehmen kann: einen mystisch-kontemplativen, einen empirischen, einen materialistischen.’

35 Ibid., pp. 39–77.

36 Ibid., pp. 78–96.

37 Ibid., pp. 97–131.

38 Hegel, Science of Logic 1.1–1.3; Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, §§84–111.

39 Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel's Logic: From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette, OH: Purdue University Press, 2006), p. 52.

40 Hegel, ‘With What Must the Science Begin?’, in Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 1969), pp. 70–1.

41 The resemblance here between Bulgakov's criticism and Schelling's is striking. Consider e.g. what Schelling says in his 1833/34 Munich lectures on the history of modern theology. Hegel cannot presume to begin without presupposition, since we are ‘already used to a more concrete being, a being more full of content, and thus cannot be satisfied with that meagre diet of pure being in which only content in the abstract but no determinate content is thought; in the last analysis, then, what does not allow him [the philosopher] to remain with that empty abstraction is only the fact that there really is a more rich being which is more full of content, and the fact that the thinking spirit itself is already such a being … what always tacitly leads this progression is always the terminus ad quem, the real world, at which science finally is to arrive.’ F. W. J. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), p. 138. For more on Schelling's criticism of Hegel's presuppositionless project, see Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel's Logic, pp. 54–71. That Bulgakov should quietly wield a Schellingian argument against Hegel will not surprise his readers. By 1927, he was already quite practiced in doing so. See his earlier Philosophy of Economy and Unfading Light, which make judicious use of Schelling. For more on Schelling's influence on Bulgakov, see Tikhon Vasilyev's ‘Aspects of Schelling's Influence on Sergius Bulgakov and Other Thinkers of the Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century’, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 80/1–2 (2019), pp. 143–59. I thank Fr Vasilyev for a sneak peek. For a critical appraisal of Bulgakov's Schellingian sympathies, see Brandon Gallaher's Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: OUP, 2016), pp. 45–115.

42 Bulgakov, Die Tragödie der Philosophie, p. 264: ‘Die Idee des reinen Seins ist eine ganz falsche Idee, und gegen diese falsche Münze kauft Hegel die ganze Logik.’

43 Ibid., p. 260: ‘Die ganze Sache ist die, daß es das Sein als solches nicht gibt. Das Sein gibt es nicht, es gibt nur das “ist”, das Hilfszeitwort, die Kopula, die sich durch eine trügerische und irreführende Eigenschaft der Sprache (“sein” – “das Sein”) und dank der Fähigkeit eines formalen Abstrahierens in ein Selbständiges und sogar (bei Parmenides) Absolutes verwandelt.’

44 Ibid.: ‘Man kann die Kopula nicht von dem, was durch sie verbunden wird, das Verhältnis nicht von dem, was sich zueinander verhält, abstrahieren; das Sein bringt stets das mit sich, dessen Sein es ist … Es existiert nicht außerhalb dieses Zusammenhanges, es kann ohne ihn nicht gedacht werden, und nur ein abstrahierendes Denken, welches beim Sein als einem selbständigen Moment haltmacht, vermag es, das Sein aus diesem Zusammenhang herauszudenken.’ Cf. Schelling, History of Modern Philosophy, p. 140: ‘Hegel uses without thinking the form of the proposition, the copula, the is, before he has explained anything at all about the meaning of this is. In the same way, Hegel uses the concept nothing as one that needs no explanation, which is completely self-evident.’

45 Ibid., p. 264.

46 Bulgakov says we may – like Edward Caird – interpret Hegel's Science of Logic as primarily ‘eine Untersuchung der Kategorien des Denkens … oder aber in ihr den Versuch einer logischen Deduktion des ganzen Weltseins, sowohl des Subjekts als auch des Objekts, zu erblicken, mit einem Wort: sie als die logische Schöpfung der Welt aufzufassen, bei der wir selbst zugegen sind.’ Ibid., p. 257.

47 Hegel, Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, §§86–7.

48 Bulgakov, Die Tragödie der Philosophie, pp. 272–5. Bulgakov registers his debt to Schelling in his earlier Unfading Light, pp. 469–70, n. 9: ‘In modern philosophy the development between me and ou is most distinctly of all expressed by Schelling in his Darstellung des philosophischen Empirismus (Selected Works, II, p. 571): “me on is the non-existing which only is the not-existing, with respect to which only actual existence is rejected, but not the only possibility of existing, since it has before itself being as the possibility of existing, even though it is not the existing, yet not such that it could not be the existing. But ouk on is fully and in every sense that which does not exist, or it is that, relative to which is negated not only the actuality of being, but also being in general, accordingly even its possibility. In the first sense, through the expression me on only the status is negated, the real posing of being, but that relative to which the negation is made must all the same exist in a certain manner. In the second sense, through the expression ouk on, the negation of being is asserted and even supposed.”’ Cf. F. W. J. Schelling, Darstellung des philosophischen Empirismus, in Sämmelte Werke, vol. 10, ed. Karl F. August Schelling (Stuttgart, 1856–61), p. 283. My thanks to Taylor Ross for directing my attention to Bulgakov's footnote.

49 Bulgakov, Die Tragödie der Philosophie, p. 275: ‘Und da die Hegelsche Null des Denkinhaltes, das Sein-Nichts am Anfang der Logik, nicht eine solche absolute Null ist, die gar nicht gedacht werden kann und überhaupt das Fehlen des Gedankens bedeutet, ist sie keine absolute Null, sondern eine relative, d.h. eine Möglichkeit des Gedankens, ein logischer Ort des Gedankens, das, wodurch sich diese Null des logischen me on vom Nicht-Gedanken, vom logischen ouk on, unterscheidet.’

50 Ibid.: ‘Der unendlich große prinzipielle Unterscheid zwischen dem christlichen Dogma und der Hegelschen Lehre besteht darin, daß das christliche Dogma in sich eine Antinomie enthält, das Denken zerreißt und insofern über-vernünftig ist: es konstruiert einen Transzens aus dem ouk on, aus dem absoluten Nicht-Sein zum (Hegelsche) me on-Sein – und zwischen diesen Prinzipien gibt es keine Brücke … es ist der geschaffenen Kreatur nicht gegeben, ihre Erschaffung zu begreifen – sie kann überhaupt nichts begreifen, wenn sie diese ihre Kreatürlichkeit außer acht lässt … Die Antinomien führen die Vernunft an den Rand heran, zeigen ihr den Abgrund, der sich vor dem Denken auftut; die Dialektik dagegen errichtet überall Brücken.’

51 Ibid., p. 272: ‘Die christliche Idee der Schöpfung der Welt aus dem Nichts hat mit der Hegelschen logischen Entstehung nicht die geringste, nicht einmal rein äußerliche Ähnlichkeit, denn hier haben wir ja eine entgegengesetzte Aufeinanderfolge vor uns: Nichts – Sein, und nicht: Sein – Nichts. Und dann, was noch wichtiger ist, haben wir es hier mit einer Schöpfung, nicht aber mit einem logischen immanenten Entstehen zu tun.’

52 Ibid., p. 247: ‘Die Idee ist Gott, zum mindesten in dessen logischer Form, Logos (obwohl dieser in der Hegelsche Theologie nicht als zweite, sondern als erste Hypostase erscheint.’

53 Bulgakov, Die Tragödie der Philosophie, p. 251: ‘Das Reich des Vaters, des Schöpfers und Allerhalters, ist nach Hegel das Reich des Logos; – die zweite Hypostase ist bei ihm die erste. Das Denken, das sich selbst erzeugt und das sich aus sich selbst heraus entwickelt, ist der Urgrund des Weltseins.’

54 Ibid., p. 251: ‘Die Logik will das Wort sein, durch dasselbige alle Dinge gemacht sind.’ Cf. Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), p. 134.

55 Bulgakov, Die Tragödie der Philosophie, p. 281: ‘Die Lehre Hegels ist ein typischer Sabellianismus, die Behauptung der Monohypostasheit Gottes, der drei Modi hat. Zugleich aber ist sie auch Pantheismus, nämlich sofern sie die Lehre vom werdenden, aber noch nicht gewordenen Gotte ist: vor Christus hat es die zweite Hypostase nicht gegeben …’

56 Ibid., p. 283: ‘Und im Ergebnis ist die Hegelsche Religionsphilosophie ein pantheistisches Menschgottum, denn der Geist kommt im Menschen zum Bewusstsein seiner selbst und wird im Menschen geboren, der der werdende, d.h. allmählich zum Bewusstsein seiner selbst gelangende Gott ist.’ Bulgakov later connects this Menschgottum with Antichrist. He begins his later The Lamb of God with the same image, an inverted christology: ‘A question slithers like a serpent over the earth: Whose world is it, the God-man's or the man-god's, Christ's or the Antichrist's?’, p. xiv.

57 Bulgakov, Die Tragödie der Philosophie, p. 283. Cf. Hegel, Phenomenologie des Geistes, §17: ‘Wenn, Gott als die eine Substanz zu fassen, das Zeitalter empörte, worin diese Bestimmung ausgesprochen wurde, so lag teils der Grund hievon in dem Instinkte, daß darin das Selbstbewußtsein nur untergegangen, nicht erhalten ist …’ See also Hegel, Medieval and Modern Philosophy, vol. 3 of Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 427–8.

58 Hegel, Phenomenologie des Geistes, §17: ‘Es kömmt nach meiner Einsicht, welche sich durch die Darstellung des Systems selbst rechtfertigen muß, alles darauf an, das Wahre nicht als Substanz, sondern ebensosehr als Subjekt aufzufassen und auszudrücken.’

59 Bulgakov, Die Tragödie der Philosophie, p. 284.

60 That's not to say that hypostasis bears actual content. For Bulgakov, hypostasis is ‘eine Null, eine Leere … ohne Inhalt … Die Hypostase setzt das voraus, dessen Hypostase sie ist, sie lässt sich nicht von ihrer Natur trennen, sie ist hinsichtlich ihrer Nature hypostatisch.’ Die Tragödie der Philosophie, pp. 141–6.

61 Again, this sounds very like Schelling's On the History of Modern Philosophy, p. 156: ‘For the God insofar as He is only the end, as he can only be in the purely rational philosophy, the God who has no future, who cannot initiate anything, who can only be as final cause, and in no way a principle, an initiating, productive cause, such a God is only spirit according to nature and essence, thus in fact only substantial spirit, not spirit in the sense in which piety or normal use of language understands the word.’

62 The disparity of secondary texts across Bulgakov's excursus is especially striking juxtaposed with de Lubac's text. Bulgakov mentions Edward Caird's Hegel (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1888), Ivan Illich's thesis ‘Hegel's Philosophy’ (Moscow, 1918), and Karl Rosenkranz's introduction to his edition of Hegel's Philosophische Propädeutik.

63 For the former, see Dionysius of Rome's Against the Sabellians in Athanasius, On the Decrees of the Council of Nicaea, p. 26; text in Feltoe, Dionysius of Alexandria (Cambridge: Cambridge Patristic Texts, 1918*), pp. 177–82. For the latter, see Justinian's 551 Edict on the in, Orthodox FaithThe Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553, vol. 2, trans. Price, Richard (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), p. 130Google Scholar.

64 Petrus Iohannis Olivi, Lectura super Apocalypsim (1297). For an excellent history of Franciscan Joachitism, see Burr, David, Olivi's Peaceable Kingdom: A Reading of the Apocalypse Commentary (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 For Balthasar, see his Theology of Henri de Lubac, trans. Joseph Fessio (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991). For O'Regan, see Heterodox Hegel, p. 263: ‘While the position adopted here is in essential agreement with de Lubac's historical thesis as a whole and the parts that constitute it, two modifications are recommended. First, substituting for de Lubac's casual reading, it is suggested that the trajectory is best understood as a continually revitalized matrix of eschatological discourse to the side of mainline Lutheran confession, and this discourse can trace its ultimate pedigree back to the medieval monk who played a significant role in the ideology of the Reformation. Second, the strong version of de Lubac's historical thesis, namely, that Joachim or the Joachimite tradition is the exclusive determinant of Hegelian ontotheology, is rejected in favor of his weaker proposal, i.e., that it is this tradition in interaction with the German mystical tradition that exercises determinative impact. Rejection of the stronger version of de Lubac's thesis is indicated, of course, in the attempt here to see Hegel's view of Gemeinde as mystically determined and inflected by various brands of mystical thought within the modern Lutheran tradition of which the Joachimite is simply one.’

66 The first comes from O'Regan's Hegel, vol. 1 of Anatomy of Misremembering: Von Balthasar's Response to Philosophical Modernity (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2014), p. 46; the second from Desmond's, WilliamHegel's God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 2Google Scholar; the third from O'Regan's Anatomy of Misremembering, p. 17.

67 O'Regan, Anatomy of Misremembering, p. 315: ‘In the end Bulgakov is considerably less focused in a negative way on Hegel than is Staudenmaier and after him Balthasar … Bulgakov cannot be regarded as an anti-Hegelian father of the same level as Staudenmaier, whose large-frame genealogies of the return of apocalyptic and Gnosticism in modernity and narrower-frame genealogy of the internal relation between Luther and Hegel are not replicated by the Russian thinker.’

68 See nn. 39, 42, 46, 59 above. This relation is confirmed in Vasilyev, ‘Aspects’.

69 Among Catholics, the most influential attack on Hegel's ‘Sabellianismus’ is Staudenmaier, Franz Anton, Zum religiösen Frieden der Zukunft mit Rücksicht auf die religiös-politische Aufgabe der Gegenwart, vol. 3 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Friedrich Wagner'sche Buchhandlung, 1851), pp. 109–74Google Scholar; and his Darstellung und Kritik des Hegelschen Systems aus dem Standpunkte der christlichen Philosophie (Mainz: Florian Kupferberg, 1844), p. 144. Cf. O'Regan, Cyril, Gnostic Return in Modernity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), p. 218Google Scholar. Among Protestants, see Isaak Dorner's System der christlichen Sittenlehre, in God and Incarnation in Mid-Nineteenth Century German Theology, ed. and trans. Claude Welch (New York: OUP, 1965), pp. 184–89, 209–15; cf. p. 153. Cf. also Evans, William B., Imputation and Impartation: Union with Christ in American Reformed Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008), p. 153Google Scholar.

70 I stand here in agreement with Bruce L. McCormack, who writes that ‘for all too many of today's self-described “orthodox” theologians (both Catholic and Protestant), it is proving very hard to resist the temptation to turn an ancient heresy into a “type” and to assign to it an expansive meaning that allows it to be applied to theologians not envisioned by the bishops … Where this happens, the meaning of “orthodoxy” is also cut loose from its historical moorings.’ McCormack, , ‘Processions and Missions: A Point of Convergence between Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth’, in McCormack, Bruce L. and White, Thomas Joseph (eds), Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic–Protestant Dialogue (Grand Rapids, MI: Willaim B. Eerdmans, 2013), p. 282Google Scholar.

71 Thanks are due Jordan Daniel Wood, Taylor Ross, Christopher Iacovetti and Phillip Cary for their comments and encouragement.