Hegel as Sorcerer: The "Science" of Second Realities and the "Death" of God

A friend asked for an explanation of a remark I recently made on a public forum that the great German philosospher, Hegel, was a “sorcerer.” I’m glad for this opportunity to respond. For the spirit of Hegel is alive and well today in the construction of any Second Reality, of which I regard the recent Obama Campaign to have been a splendid example.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was a world-class philosopher — a master of classical philosophy, and a master system-builder. He is usually associated with the period of German Idealism in the decades following Immanuel Kant. The most systematic of the post-Kantian idealists, Hegel attempted to elaborate a comprehensive systematic ontology, or “science of being,” from a “logical” or “rational” starting point. He is perhaps most well-known for his teleological, “goal-directed,” even eschatological, account of human history — a model which was later appropriated by his notable follower Karl Marx, who developed Hegel’s “dialectical science” into his own theory of historical development (“dialectical materialism”), which by “historical necessity” culminates in communism.

Sorcery, or magic, is a conceptual system that asserts the human ability to control the natural world (including events, objects, people, and physical phenomena) through mystical, paranormal, or supernatural means — through, for example, magic words, or an ability to present compelling appearances of fictitious reality.

A Second Reality is such an ersatz reality. The term was coined by Robert Musil to denote a fictitious world imagined to be true by the person creating it, who will then use his construction to mask and thereby “eclipse” genuine, or First Reality.

In 1807, Hegel published his grimoire — i.e., a magician’s book of spells and incantations — the Phänomenologie, which takes as its main goal the transformation of philosophy, the “love of knowledge,” into the final, complete possession of “real knowledge,” by means of his system of “absolute science.” Of his accomplishment the great German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) would write, “No modern propaganda minister could have devised a more harmless-sounding, persuasively progressivist phrase as a screen for the enormity transacted behind it.”

For Hegel, “‘Absolute knowledge’ was to be the form ‘in which the pure consciousness of the infinite is possible without the determinateness of an individual, independent life.’” In short, the Phänomenologie “admits no reality but consciousness…. [Yet] since consciousness must be somebody’s consciousness of something, and neither God nor man is admitted as somebody or something, the consciousness must be consciousness of itself. Its absolute reality is, therefore, properly identified as ‘the identity of identity and nonidentity.’ The substance becomes the subject, and the subject the substance, in the process of a consciousness that is immanent to itself…. The reader would justly ask what a consciousness that is nobody’s consciousness could possibly be?”[1]

And with that question, noetically astute observers realize we must be dealing with a Second Reality: It appears that “Hegel the sorcerer” wants to eclipse our image of reality by a counterimage conjured up to furnish a plausible basis for the action he calls for.

As Vöegelin notes, “in order to be effective as a magic opus,” Hegel’s system of absolute science had to satisfy two conditions:

(1) The operation in Second Reality has to look as if it were an operation in First Reality.

(2) The operation in Second Reality has to escape critical control and judgment by the criteria of First Reality. (I have noticed that President-Elect Obama excels in conducting both types of operations.)[2]

So, what is First Reality? In effect, it is the classical Greek (and Judeo-Christian) description of the context in which human existence is actually experienced and lived. That is to say, the human condition is specified by man’s participation in a Great Hierarchy of Being that extends beyond, encompasses, and shapes his existence as a man.

Being is a philosophical term referring to the fundamental structure or order of the world. Vöegelin, following the classical Greeks, defines being as “not an object, but a context of order in which are placed all experienced complexes of reality….” Thus the Great Hierarchy of Being consists of four partners: God, Man, World, and Society. The individual man, as “part” of this “whole,” finds his own humanity in his participatory experiences and relations with the other partners of the hierarchy, and most especially in his relation to God.

Strangely, given his “revolt” against God and man and the world, Hegel was a man who not only insisted on his Christian orthodoxy up to his dying day; but as already mentioned, he was a master of classical Greek philosophy. So clearly he was aware of First Reality in the above sense. His “magical opus” is motivated fundamentally by a desire to overturn and supplant it with a plausible Second Reality of his own imaginative construction.

The first “partner” of the Great Hierarchy that had to go was God. This was necessary in order to make room for Hegel as the “new Christ” who would usher in the “third religion” of his System of Absolute Science, so to be the Messiah, the New Christ, of the new age a-borning. The point here is that with God “gone,” man himself becomes a pure abstraction and, as such, an ideologically manipulatable entity and nothing more.

As far as I know, it was Voegelin who first drew attention to the element of sorcery in Hegel’s work — even though the language Hegel had been using from the first was the language of the “magic word” and the “magic force” (Zauberworte and Zauberkraft respectively). Vöegelin indeed identified the Phänomenologie as a sorcerer’s grimoire. My sense is if Vöegelin was joking here, he was only half-joking: Something very serious is going on. So we need first of all to understand what Hegel intended by evoking such language. As for instance, here:

“Every single man is but a blind link in the chain of absolute necessity by which the world builds itself forth. The single man can elevate himself to dominance over an appreciable length of this chain only if he knows the direction in which the great necessity [i.e., the Geist of history] wants to move and if he learns from this knowledge to pronounce the magic words (die Zauberworte) that will evoke its shape (Gestalt).”[3]

We need to define our terms here: Geist can be translated from the German as either “mind” or “spirit”; but the latter, allowing for a more cultural sense, as in the phrase “spirit of the age” (“Zeitgeist”), seems a more suitable rendering for Hegel’s use of the term. Gestalt (plural: Gestalten) means the present historical configuration of events as the Geist inexorably moves or evolves in time towards the fulfillment of its final “absolute necessity,” at which point — in its final Gestalt, which in Hegel’s system is identified with the consciousness of Hegel expressing as the complete identity of absolute Self and absolute Idea — world history ends; and a “new age” of Man, “standing alone,” begins. Because man is now “alone,” Hegel teaches that now he has arrived at the point in history where he can grant “grace to himself,” to “save himself,” to perfect the human condition, without the salvific Grace of God.

And Hegel’s enormously influential student Karl Marx (1818–1883) took the lesson to heart:

“Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus, ‘In a word, I hate all the gods,’ is its own confession, its own verdict against all gods heavenly and earthly who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the supreme deity. There shall be none beside it.”[4]

“A being regards itself as independent only when it stands in its own feet; and it stands on its feet only when it owes its existence to itself alone. A man who lives by the grace of another [including God] considers himself a dependent being. But I live by the grace of another completely if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life but also its creation: if he is the source of my life; and my life necessarily has such a cause outside itself if it is not my own creation.”[5]

And so the “outside cause” — God — must “die” in order for man to be “liberated” for self-sanctification and self-salvation.

In light of such expectations, first of all, we need to remember that a “magic word” in itself does not evoke an actual creative act. Rather, it is the invocation of appearances, of illusions. “Magic words” do not have the power actually to change the structure of being, of reality; but only the way the sorcerer wants us to see it. If he is successful, then we are grievously misled.

Hegel’s famous epigone Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) had a field day with Hegel’s insights. He not only declared God “dead,” but claimed that “we” had “murdered” Him. Mankind, on this view, has finally gained the existential status not only to be in a position to “kill God,” but also to grant itself “grace” and “salvation” via human reason alone. Of course, these are the maunderings of a person who sadly died in an insane asylum. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is splendidly honored by the “progressives” among us to this day….

It’s interesting to note that many students of the Phänomenologie consistently over time have reported that to be drawn into the “magic circle” of this enterprise is to enter into a perfectly logically self-consistent construction — so long as one does not use the criteria of First Reality to judge it. But finally, all criticism by appeal to reality itself, i.e., as actually experienced by human beings in contrast with being merely cogitated or thought, is foreclosed by Hegel’s rule that his construction need justify itself through nothing but “the presentation of the system itself.” Thus we have the case of the magically disappearing world.

And so not only God is booted out of Hegel’s system; but also any sense of “objective reality.” The “world” is drawn into the sorcerer’s consciousness as conceptualizations only, as Gestalten, “shapes.” Once the sorcerer possesses the historical “shapes” in his consciousness, he has no further need of “the world,” of evidence from the side of actual experience of the world. Thus he intends to “eclipse” such experience by the force of reason alone, dispensing with human existential experience altogether through the power of “magical” imagination — which of course altogether destroys any avenue of critical judgment from the side of First Reality, which happily satisfies criterion (2) above.

Second of all, we need to appreciate the worldview implicit in Hegel’s remarks. Voegelin thinks the above-quoted passage — i.e., “Every single man is but a blind link in the chain of absolute necessity….” — reveals Hegel’s intense resentment of the human condition as well as its cause. Further, it is a key passage for understanding the diremption — meaning the tearing apart, or violent separation from all former historical notions of the human condition so characteristic of modern existence — at the foundation of Hegel’s enterprise:

“Man has become a nothing; he has no reality of his own; he is a blind particle in a process of the world which has the monopoly of real reality and real meaning. [Note it is not the world that has meaning; only its process has meaning.] In order to raise himself from nothing to something, the blind particle must become a seeing particle. But even if the particle has gained sight, it sees nothing but the direction in which the process is moving…. And yet, to Hegel something important has been gained: the nothing that has raised itself to a something has become, if not a man, at least a sorcerer who can evoke, if not the reality of history, at least its shape. I almost hesitate to continue — the spectacle of a nihilist stripping himself to the nude is embarrassing. For Hegel betrays in so many words that being a man is not enough for him; and as he cannot be the divine Lord of history himself, he is going to achieve Herrschaft [i.e., dominion, lordship, mastery, rule, reign] as the sorcerer who will conjure up an image of history — a shape, a ghost — that is meant to eclipse the history of God’s making. The imaginative project of history falls in its place in the pattern of modern existence as the conjurer’s instrument of power”….

Since the conjurer’s instrument of power is in this case to be obtained by the “perfection” of philosophy into a system of absolute knowledge, we need to define what philosophy is. The etymology of the word tells you the meaning of philosophy is “love of wisdom”: In the original Greek, philo refers to “love” or “lover”; sophia to “wisdom.”

Hegel’s main project, as it turns out, was to transform philosophy, the love of wisdom, into an instrument of Absolute Science, whereby “wisdom,” and all knowledge, are found to consist, not in the loving search or quest for divine truth, the complete possession of which is denied to mortal men in this lifetime; but in the “final possession” of absolute truth once and for all — the “absolute science” that can make men “immortal” in this world. In short, Hegel would like to transform philosophy into an exact science.

But if this were possible, then philosophy would instantly cease to be philosophy.

For although the insights of philosophy can advance, it cannot advance beyond its structure as “love of wisdom.” In the great tradition of the classical Greeks, eminently Plato and Aristotle (which Hegel had thoroughly mastered), philosophy denotes the loving tension of man “toward the divine ground of his existence. God alone has sophia, ‘real knowledge’; man finds the truth about God and the world, as well as of his own existence, by becoming philosophos, the lover of God and his wisdom. The philosopher’s eroticism implies the humanity of man and the divinity of God as the poles of his existential tension. The practice of philosophy in the Socratic–Platonic sense is the equivalent of the Christian sanctification of man; it is the growth of the image of God in man. Hegel’s harmless-sounding phrase [ i.e., philosophy must at last “give up its name of a love of wisdom and become real knowledge”] thus covers the program of abolishing the humanity of man; the sophia of God can be brought into the orbit of man only by transforming man into God. The Ziel [goal] of the Phänomenologie is the creation of the man-god….” — commencing with Hegel’s own self-deification as the redeemer of mankind now that the history of mankind, and notably his spiritual history, has been abolished by Hegel’s system of absolute science.[6]

In this, Hegel reveals his profound alienation from the idea of an established order of the universe. Indeed, he outright rejects any idea of order that has an origin other than in human consciousness, which he hypostasizes as “reason” or at least a facsimile thereof that the sorcerer can put over on his audience.

Voegelin provides some helpful insights into the consciousness of the sorcerer and his project:

“…Hegel experiences his state of alienation as an acute loss of reality, and even as death. But he cannot, or will not, initiate the movement of return; the epistrophe, the periagoge, is impossible. The despair or lostness, then, turns into the mood of revolt. Hegel closes his existence in on himself; he develops a false self; and lets his false self engage in an act of self-salvation that is meant to substitute for the periagoge of which his true self proves incapable. The alienation which, as long as it remains a state of lostness in open existence, can be healed through the return [to God], now hardens into the acheronta movebo of the sorcerer who, through magic operations, forces salvation from the non-reality of his lostness. Since, however, nonreality has no power of salvation, and Hegel’s true self knows this quite well, the false self must take the next step and, by ‘the energy of thinking,’ transform the reality of God into the dialectics of his consciousness: the divine power accrues to the Subjeckt that is engaged in self-salvation through reaching the state of reflective self-consciousness. If the soul cannot return to God, God must be alienated from himself and drawn into the human state of alienation. And finally, since none of these operations in Second Reality would change anything in the surrounding First Reality, but result only in the isolation of the sorcerer from the rest of society, the whole world must be drawn into the imaginary Second Reality. The sorcerer becomes the savior of the ‘age’ by imposing his System of Science as the new revelation on mankind at large. All mankind must join the sorcerer in the hell of his damnation.”[7]

In classical Greek philosophy, and especially in Plato, the epistrophe or periagoge in the above passage refers to the “turning around” to God (the transcendent Beyond of the cosmos) in open existence, in loving response to His call. The terms are analogous to the Christian “born again” experience. The term acheronta movebo means “If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions.” It is the satanic declaration of the sorcerer who chooses to close all of reality in on himself, the Subjekt. Given the classical experience, this can only be a system of anti-philosophy.

In [Plato’s] Republic, the Beyond is imagined as the ultimate creative ground, the Agathon, from whom all being things receive their existence, their form, and their truth; and since by its presence it is the origin of reality and the sunlike luminosity of its structure, the Agathon-Beyond is something more beautiful and higher in rank of dignity and power that the reality that we symbolize by such terms as being, existence, essence, form, intelligibility, and knowledge. In the myth of the Phaedrus, then, the Beyond is the truly immortal divinity from whose presence in contemplative action the Olympian gods derive their divine and men their human immortality. In the puppet myth of the Laws, finally, ‘the god’ becomes the divine force that pulls the golden cord of the Nous that is meant to move man toward the immortalizing, noetic order of his existence. In this last image of the noetic “pull” (helkein) Plato comes so close to the helkein of the Gospel of John (6:44) that it is difficult to discern the difference.[8]

It appears that Hegel’s “revolt” is above all finally a revolt against, a rejection of the human condition, of the fact that a human being is never consulted about the terms of his coming into the world, nor of his departure from it. It is the essence of the human condition that a man is neither the origin nor the “end” of himself — “end” in the sense of telos, meaning purpose, or goal. Meanwhile, in between birth and death, there is a litany of evils to which mortal human nature is subject. “The life of man is really burdened,” as Voegelin put it, “with the well-known miseries enumerated by Hesoid. We remember his list of hunger, hard work, disease, early death, and the fear of the injustices to be suffered by the weaker man at the hands of the more powerful — not to mention the problem of Pandora.”[9]

Notwithstanding, Voegelin reminds us that “as long as our existence is undeformed by phantasies, these miseries are not experienced as senseless. We understand them as the lot of man, mysterious it is true, but as the lot he has to cope with in the organization and conduct of his life, in the fight for survival, the protection of his dependents, and the resistance to injustice, and in his spiritual and intellectual response to the mystery of existence.”[10]

Now the “lot of man” as just given is a description of the condicio humana, the human condition. It is the very basis for the idea of a universal, common humanity, of the brotherhood of mankind. It is my conjecture that it is possible for a person to take great umbrage at this condicio humana, to deplore and reject it, to see it as a grievous insult to one’s own assumed personal autonomy; and so to take flight in an alternative reality that can be structured more according to one’s own wishes, tastes, and desires. And thus, a Second Reality is born.

As for me, all things considered, I’ll take First Reality, the Great Hierarchy of Being — God–Man–World–Society — any day, any time. I believe that human beings were put in this world to be creative actors, even if they never get to design the stage on which the acting is being done, nor to control the writing of the script by which the play unfolds. And meanwhile they not only act, but suffer the actions of other actors or forces — personal, natural, social — from outside themselves.

Yet to recognize all this is to recognize the very basis of one’s own existential humanity. And to realize that the lot of any other man is no different. To be part and participant of this divinely constituted, dynamic “sub-whole” of a yet greater Whole is a glorious privilege. To go hole up in a Second Reality, to me, would be to lose one’s reason and probably one’s soul as well….

Indeed, that appears to be the conclusion reached by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), the great French poet, a noetically and spiritually sensitive person who understood himself to be living in an age of great noetic and spiritual disorder:

And he penned these lines that make it crystal-clear to whom our soul is to be sold:

[1] Eric Vöegelin, “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” Collected Works Vol. 12, 1990.

[3] G. W. F. Hegel, MS, Fortsetzung des “Systems der Sittlichkeit,” c. 1804–06.

[4] Karl Marx, Doctoral Dissertation, 1840–41 (quoting a passage from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound).

[5] Karl Marx, “National Ökonomie und Philosophy,” Der Historische Materialismus: Die Früschriften.

[9] Eric Vöegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,” Collected Works, Vol. 12, 1990.

[11] Charles Baudelaire, “Au lecteur,” introducing the Fleurs du Mal, 1857.

I wish I typed as well as you!

Of course you do not know me. We have just met. But, please assume that I have been at this for a decade or two and that I have studied scripture, Plato and have at least read Super Strings and the Theory of Everything

My theory isn't arrived at recently.

I am intrigued by you and your sister bird because you reason and have expanded your horizons beyond the Bible. I must tell you that I am immune to the quoting of scripture. It is faith and I am in pursuit of objective nowledge before I die. Scripture is one view of the universe; birds are supposed to see the whole.

Please answer this question: What "thing" do you encounter that isn't made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons?

I wish I typed as well as you!

My theory isn't arrived at recently.

Please answer this question: What "thing" do you encounter that isn't made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons?

Thank you for the encouragement!

Of course you do not know me. We have just met.

Actually, you sound very familiar.

I must tell you that I am immune to the quoting of scripture. It is faith and I am in pursuit of objective nowledge before I die.

Your "immunity" means that you do not yet have "ears to hear" or in the alternative, you choose to ignore what you hear. That is not a good thing because "the rest of the story" can only be spiritually discerned.

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned. – I Corinthians 2:14

Objective knowledge is only available to one who can see "all that there is" all at once. That One of course, is God. The natural man is merely an observer "in" space/time.

Your "immunity" prevents you from achieving your goal.

What "thing" do you encounter that isn't made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons?

Again, in the absence of space, things cannot exist. In the absence of time, events cannot occur. Space/time is required for physical causation. Ditto for physical laws, protons, neutrons, electrons, photons.

God is not a "thing" or an "event."

Nor is God a hypothesis. I've known Him personally for half a century and counting. His Name is I AM.

But your "immunity" prevents you from knowing Him and therefore from knowing objective Truth.

Sensory perception and reasoning - even knowledge of Scripture - can only take you so far because you suffer from the observer problem. You must know the power of God, Who is Jesus Christ Himself.

Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. – Matthew 22:29

But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. - I Corinthians 1:24

Your quest, by the way, is similar to Justin Martyr's whose journey took him to various Greek philosophies, the best knowledge of the day - peaking with Plato and ending with Jesus once he encountered Trypho the Jew.

Perhaps your bird instincts will overcome the frog predisposition and you, too, will be given "ears to hear" or if you have chosen to ignore what you hear, you'll change your mind.

To God be the glory.

The problem with the hierarchy of being system is that it reduces each of these domains (God, man, world, society) into separate entities.

Absolutely excellent observation, the_conscience!

But at the same time, to “reduce” the partners into separate entities fatally detracts from the universal, synergistic cooperation and coherence of the partners, which is what the symbol “great hierarchy of being” intends to convey. Any “reduction into entities” tends to falsify its comprehensive meaning.

As with just about everything, there is a danger of “doctrinalization” of what is fundamentally ineffable. Language is the only carrier of human meaning. It is the articulation of self-reflected human experience. And experience is the key word here. Any doctrine tends to separate the “articulation in language” from the actual experience that gave rise to the language symbols. Further, to the extent that any doctrine holds itself out as authoritative, we are invited to accept its tenets as a sort of substitution for direct experience. Both ways we lose the idea that human experience, self-reflection, and articulation are the very foundations of everything we know or think we know, whether in science or philosophy.

And so I stay constantly aware of the Great Hierarchy of Being, not as any kind of “system” or “doctrine,” but as the most universal description of reality of which I can conceive, which illuminates my own direct existential experience and the articulation thereof. To me, it is the universal context in which human existence is conducted. I say that, not because I’ve been “told” that (by means of some doctrine), but because I have actually “seen” that, based on my own direct experience and my self-understanding of it.

Thank you so very much for your most perceptive criticism. I don’t know whether my reply answers it to your satisfaction, so take it FWIW.

I am intrigued by you and your sister bird because you reason and have expanded your horizons beyond the Bible. I must tell you that I am immune to the quoting of scripture. It is faith and I am in pursuit of objective [k]nowledge before I die. Scripture is one view of the universe; birds are supposed to see the whole. Please answer this question: What “thing” do you encounter that isn't made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons?

One thing at a time here PasorBob!

First of all, from where I sit, neither A-G nor I have “expanded [our] horizons beyond the Bible.” If you understand what the Bible is, you would understand that cannot be done: God’s Word is the Measure. Scripture comprehends everything that is, everything that ever was, and everything that ever will be. It is the Logos (in the sense of "story" here) of the Alpha and the Omega.

You say you are “immune to the quoting of scripture. It is faith and I am in pursuit of objective [k]nowledge before I die.” I gather by that you mean you are confining your field of interest to physical bodies, to the things that are composed of particles according to the laws of physics and chemistry, which must also satisfy the condition of being directly observable by you as "facts" of external nature. This is what makes them “objective.”

Yet there are two questionable things implied by your method: First, your expectation that physical bodies (composed of “protons, neutrons, and electrons” — i.e., “matter”) are “all that there is”; which of course leaves out the small matter of the laws of physics and chemistry, which are not themselves “physical.” Second, you overlook the not so small fact that the separation of knowledge into “objective” and “subjective” categories is itself a “subjective” operation, an operation of your mind (another non-physical entity).

You wrote that “you birds ‘are supposed to see the whole.’” Well, we don’t "see the whole." No one (save God) ever sees the “whole.” We just try to take a perch where we can get the most expansive field of vision possible.

You and we and all of us humans are all parts and participants of “the whole.” As such, we cannot ever stand outside of it to see it all “entire.” What we are left with is a point of view only. As James Bowman writes in his latest book, [Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, Encounter, 2008], “….we all must have a point of view of the world, if only because we can’t see it all at once.” We must accept we can only have partial views of it based on our spatio-temporal position.

And “partial views” in another critical sense, as Immanuel Kant pointed out. Human perceptual equipment is only designed to register what can be filtered into it by means of direct sensation by our five senses, and mainly sight. Kant, in effect, argues (persuasively, it seems to me) that what we actually perceive by means of sensory experience is a sort of temporal “image” of the surface appearance of the entity under observation. We never see the entity, the intended object of our thought, as it is in itself, but only its surface appearance at a particular moment in time.

I think what you are looking for is not so much “objectivity,” as “certainty.” But there is no certainty in this world! We cannot have that unless we are omniscient, omnipresent observers of its evolution over time, AND we are not “involved” as entities in its process.

Thus there are cognitive limits that we humans cannot transcend. That being so, there is no way we can have absolute “certainty” about anything in this world, this side of the grave at least.

FWIW PasorBob! Thank you so very much for your participation on this thread.

p.s.: There is no "thing" that isn't made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. But man is MORE than a "thing."

Thank you so very much for your outstanding essay-post, dearest sister in Christ!

For the conversation, I'd like to put the emphasis on the word hierarchy in the Great Hierarchy of Being and offer an example.

Namely that There is only One Great Commandment.

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

This is the first and great commandment.

And the second [is] like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. – Matthew 22:37-40

When we keep our priorities straight, the hierarchy, we will always love God surpassingly above all else. Love of neighbor is a distant second priority which flows necessarily from the love of God.

But when we invert those two commandments, the result is "Liberation Theology" which of course is Obama's spiritual Christian roots.

In that theology, the true believers put loving neighbor and self ahead of loving God and defiantly declare that if God does not meet their standard of loving their neighbors and self as they think they do, then they reject God.

The consequence of such inverted true belief is socialism.

When we keep our priorities straight, the hierarchy, we will always love God surpassingly above all else. Love of neighbor is a distant second priority which flows necessarily from the love of God.... But when we invert those two commandments, the result is "Liberation Theology" which of course is Obama's spiritual Christian roots.

What a brilliant insight, Alamo-Girl! When the "preferential option for the poor" is established as the main focus of religion, God is eclipsed; the proper hierarchical relation is inverted; and we lose the meaning of "the poor" stressed in Holy Scripture, which is not just a description of someone who is economically disadvantaged ("The poor ye shall always have with you"); but someone who is "poor in spirit," meaning: a man who walks with God in humility — meaning a man who puts God first in his life.

I certainly agree with your conclusion: "The consequence of such inverted true belief is socialism."

Thank you ever so much for you most perceptive essay/post, dearest sister in Christ! — and for your very kind words!

Have you ever tried to imagine God’s understanding . . . each atom in our body, each cell’s actions, our thoughts, our perceptions, the world spinning, rotating around the sun, the sun rotating within the galaxy, the galaxy moving relative to the other galaxies, space itself contracting or expanding (whichever it is), and this for every man, woman, child and animal on the face of the earth and beyond if they exist. All this at once, and for all history and all future. We can be stopped in our tracks by the beauty of a single sunset. God sees all sunsets, his creation, from the beginning of time, at once and forever, through millions of eyes, plus his own. On and on. Lewis in one of his novels called it a dance. God’s glory is an act of love. Since scripture comprehends the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, creator and creation, and the logos, all pointed out by you, I agree that there is nothing outside of scripture in the sense that you mean.

Any doctrine tends to separate the “articulation in language” from the actual experience that gave rise to the language symbols. Further, to the extent that any doctrine holds itself out as authoritative, we are invited to accept its tenets as a sort of substitution for direct experience. Both ways we lose the idea that human experience, self-reflection, and articulation are the very foundations of everything we know or think we know, whether in science or philosophy. [emphasis mine]

Historical knowledge is a substitute for direct experience but nevertheless a distinct part of reality. Mere existentialism must always flatten out history and assume all past events are cotemporaneous. History loses its revelational content, God becomes unknowable, the Christ event is mystery, humanness is all contingency with no relation to the universal.

Of course the existential is a necessary component of knowledge but to yank the historical revelational content expressed doctrinally out of the knowledge equation leaves the subject swaying the seas of experience without the firm foundation of actual historical events.

The historical event is not merely a language game but actually provides concrete meaning to our experiences.

Happy Providence!

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Hegel as Sorcerer: The “Science” of Second Realities and the “Death” of God

Hegel as Sorcerer:
The “Science” of Second Realities and the “Death” of God