Absolute Idealism as a Necessary Condition for Sacramental or Other Theology Absolute Idealism as a Necessary Condition for Sacramental or Other Theology By Stephen Theron Absolute Idealism as a Necessary Condition for Sacramental or Other Theology By Stephen Theron This book first published 2021 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2021 by Stephen Theron All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-7212-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-7212-6 “Reality is friendly” (Leo Elders, SVD) CONTENTS 1. Evolution and Absolute Idealism ............................................................ 1 Is evolution a possible object for thought (as itself supposed evolved)? 2. Philosophy of Religion and Ascetic Theology: What Is the Difference? 20 How, if at all, do these differ? 3. Interlude: Worlds - “Otherworldly Stuff” and the Actual, Possible (or Impossible) Worlds ............................................................................. 29 Is a plurality of natures conceivable? 4. The Augustinian and Thomist Biblical Heritage as Developed and/or Interpreted by Scotus and Hegel .................................................... 66 A view of Hegel as theologian mediated from Aquinas via Scotus. 5. Ontologism: Hegel and Thomism ........................................................ 112 Ontologism, or “right-wing” Hegelianism, as Continuation of the Thought of Aquinas? 6. Sacramental Theology and the Philosophy of Nature .......................... 118 According to Aquinas all nature is “sacramentum” (Summa theol. IIIa 60): this is more than half-way to Absolute Idealism, on Hegel’s view the necessary religious posture. 7. Hegel’s Developmental Hermeneutics ............................................... 130 Hegel’s thought as embodiment of philosophy’s history: Heidegger and his followers as missing this. viii Contents 8. Signs and/or Sacraments ..................................................................... 193 Their Identity in Difference Spelled out. 9. Original Sin, Infinity, Grace, Linguistic Representation .................... 217 Developing, in the light of philosophy and science, the theological doctrine of “original sin” via subtraction of a or the definite or indefinite article: who/what was or is or should be Adam or Eve for Paul, Augustine and their inheritors? 10. Some Further Considerations ........................................................... 245 What could be meant by “signs of themselves” (as applied either to natural or to conceptual entities or to ecclesial or other “sacraments”)? 11. Graham Priest on Hegel and “Dialetheism”: How to Misread Hegel while Getting him Right Dialetheically .................................................. 288 Not two truths but one truth of identity in difference. 12. Envoi: Real Presence in Unreal Nature? In Self-Signifying Sacrament ............................................................................................... 304 Real Presence in Unreal Nature? Bibliography ........................................................................................... 325 Index of Persons ..................................................................................... 331 1. EVOLUTION AND IDEALISM Thinkers from C.S. Lewis to the Danish psychiatrist and philosopher Axel Randrup point out the contradiction in supposing a chance or unguided evolution of a human power, intelligence, which then itself proceeds to establish the truth of evolution.1 This chance or hazard, the theorists declare, is how we who now argue for evolution came to be as thinking, scientific beings. Thought, symbolic representation, abstraction itself, emerged in this way. One finds it argued that philosophical idealism is false because we now know that intellect thus materially evolved, as we now know that the earth is round and hanging in space because we have gone around it and seen it thus hanging. But this “knowing” and the associated journeyings is just what arguing for space as an a priori form of representation seeks to relativise.2 If one were to concede the point, though, then one would have to say that the theory too, our whole style of thinking and what we call thinking as such, was a chance result, a means of survival with which notions of truth have 1 Cf. A. Randrup, “Cognition and Biological Evolution”, “Idealist Philosophy: What is Real?”, both articles in http://cogprints.org/3373/01/evolutioncognition.html. For Lewis, see the relevant chapter in the first edition of his Miracles, chiefly remembered for the savage criticism he received to his face from the young Elizabeth Anscombe at an Oxford club in 1947. As her husband Peter Geach remarked to me rather sadly thirty years later, during one of our fortnightly supervisory meetings at that time, after himself concurring in an argument identical to that of Lewis’s as employed by me in what became my Morals as Founded on Natural Law (Peter Lang, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1987, 1988), she “only did what she thought was her duty”. In her further defence, however, one may consult Hegel’s affirmations as to reason’s being ever its own judge as not possibly being anything other than that. In that sense, indeed, it does not need, indeed cannot brook, a divine guarantee, is rather itself divine if anything “and therefore law”, Cicero’s position in De legibus. As such, however, reason could never unguidedly or by chance “evolve” from unreason, as it would be. Here already we have the basis for absolute idealism as philosophy’s “dogma” (Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Hegel), most incisively grasped among later Hegel-interpreters, to my knowledge, by McTaggart or G. Rinaldi, neither of whom base it upon an extrinsic divine guarantor in the manner, taken at its face-value, of Lewis’s text. 2 Cp. J.B.S. Haldane, “Some Reflections on Materialism”, in The Rationalist Annual, 1930, pp. 33-34.