Hegel the pietist

Still further evidence that a) Hegel can’t get away from Kant’s pietism and b) Hamann would have been as right about Hegel as he was about Kant.  Jean-Marie Schaeffer writes of the impact of the incarnation on history:

“it is through God’s becoming man, through the life and passion of Christ, that interiority comes to know itself in its own finitude.  Hegel distinguishes two stages in what is for him the central event of universal history . . . .

“The first stage paradoxically resides in the most complete exteriorization of the Absolute constituted by the incarnation of God in a mortal body.  This exteriorization is much more radical than that of ancient sculpture: the latter manifested the congruence of interiority and exteriority, whereas in the figure of Christ the Absolute incarnates itself in absolute empirical singularity.  God becomes man who suffers in his body.”

Then the pietist move: “this exteriorization pushed to the extreme limit is realized only in order to be immediately negated: that is the function of the Passion, of the death of the God-man, the infinite negation of the sensuous and the triumph of absolute interiority (the resurrection of Christ, the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, etc.).  Since that event, no sensuous reality could any longer conform to the interior richness of the soul; infinite subjectivity is beyond any sensual incarnation.”

But this only works if a) the resurrection was an interior event and b) there ain’t no church, or especially sacraments, that is, no exterior bodiliness of Jesus after the ascension.  That is, it only works because Hegel is a liberal pietist.