Calton, Patricia Marie. Hegel's Metaphysics of God: the Ontological Proof of a Trinitarian Divine Ontology.

Lumsden, Simon

CALTON, Patricia Marie. Hegel's Metaphysics of God: the Ontological Proof of a Trinitarian Divine Ontology. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. vii + 131 pp. Cloth, $59.95--In recent years the dominant interpretation has seen Hegel as essentially continuing Kant's critical project. There has been a concerted effort to shift the debate from understanding Hegel as essentially concerned with a grand metaphysical project in which Spirit, conceived as a monistic god, comes to knowledge of itself through the reflective practices of self-conscious subjects. At the core of this revised reading of Hegel, which is inadequately described as nonmetaphysical, is the rejection of the idea of any notion of the given. While this book makes no effort at all to situate itself in relation to these central debates in German idealism, it can be understood, in contrast to the most important scholarship in the last twenty-five years, as essentially presenting Hegel as a pre-Kantian metaphysician.

In Calton's reading of Hegel the central question he confronts is the quest to discover the eternal truth of god. What philosophy brings to this quest is "to develop a scientific cognition of this truth" (p. 2).

The argument of the book develops through four chapters, all of which are heavily reliant on Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. There is little engagement with Hegel's systematic works, the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic. Instead, Hegel's thought of god and religion is determined almost entirely by his lectures on religion, and the argument is largely constructed through a detailed use of quotations from these lectures. The first chapter is concerned to position Hegel in relation to the traditional defenses (Anselm) and critiques (Kant) of the ontological proof of god's existence. Calton argues that Hegel agrees with many of Kant's criticisms of the ontological proof, though he transforms them to give his own critique of Anselm's ontological proof, all of which is leading to his own formulation of the ontological proof, which is outlined in chapter 2. The form that this proof takes is the development of "a serf-grounding concept of god" (p. 35), which would demonstrate that being is necessarily entailed by the concept of god. What distinguishes Hegel's ontological proof from earlier attempts is the development of an objective concept of god. The concept of an objective god entails being as our knowledge of the world is in fact knowledge of a "creative and self-communicating mind of which the world is an expression" (p. 57). Being is a type of consciousness writ large of which we have experience and knowledge because we are participants in it. The next two chapters illustrate the nature of that participation. In the third chapter Calton argues that this ontology shows itself to have a Trinitarian structure, as only such a structure allows for knowledge of god, a knowledge which god's self-expression requires. The fourth chapter discusses various forms of community required for such a knowledge and the developmental stages of human history required for this knowledge and ultimately for the reconciliation of humans with god.

The book gives a good summary of many of the theological issues and problems that emerge in the wake of the Enlightenment. There is no doubt that Hegel did engage with these debates, and his various lectures on the philosophy of religion are where his view of the development of various notions of god and religion is expressed, but this does not make Hegel a metaphysician of the type presented in this book, nor can we say that he has a metaphysics of god. There is no doubt that the concept of god in Hegel's case involves some sense of being; this is completely consistent with what his project sets out to achieve: collapsing the central dualisms in the philosophical tradition (one of the ways the spirit of the critical philosophy was to continue), but that does not mean a metaphysics of god somehow underlies his project. Religion, along with art, science, and philosophy, is one of the ways in which cultures have traditionally thought about their relation among themselves and the world and each other. It is true that Hegel thought the Enlightenment, in its quest to throw everything under the eye of reason, ignored much of the richness and subtlety that religion could bring to human self-understanding. Nevertheless, Hegel's examination of god has to be understood as just one of the ways, admittedly a very sophisticated one, in which our thinking about ourselves and the world develops. If this view of Hegel's account of religion is to be contested--and this book most certainly does contest it--then a strong argument has to be made to show his thought does not simply see religion as an inadequate form of self-understanding, which seems to me to be the clear conclusion of the Phenomenology of Spirit--but there is no such justification in this work. However, perhaps the more important question to be asked is that even if we assumed that Calton's view of Hegel is correct, that Hegel does have a metaphysics of god, in which we are part of a creative and self-expressive mind, is such a fixed theological-metaphysical view worthy of any serious reconsideration? Because there is no attempt to position his view of god and religion in relation to Hegel's systematic thought and to argue for the importance of this against current interpretations, this book, while it gives a great many accounts of Hegel's engagement with historical problems in the philosophy of religion, remains unconvincing--Simon Lumsden, University of Sydney.