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’m not attributing any motives to bb I’m just taking her at her word when she says she subscribes to a pretty strong form of Platonism which in fact does elevate reason as the ultimate good.

A "pretty strong form of Platonism?" Plato was not a system builder (unlike the philosopher discussed in the article at the top of this thread); nor did he create any "doctrines." He himself constantly insisted that anyone who understood him to be doing that didn't understand what he was doing. But I understand! He created no doctrine, strong or weak. And he certainly didn't elevate reason as the "ultimate good." Pure reason is a tool of analysis; it is not God. When one senses God's "divine pulls" (helkein) in subjective consciousness, this is an event in Spirit, not in reason. It will take reason to analyze the experience into language if it is to be communicated to others. But Spirit comes first, then reason.

Classical philosophy is not at all like what philosophy has become in the post-Enlightenment period. Modern philosophy has tended to gild itself with the prestige of science, aping its methods and virtually divinizing Reason; and so has produced all kinds of "school philosophies" such as scientific materialism, positivism, pragmatism, utilitarianism, etc. All of these are doctrines. (You can easily tell when you're dealing with a doctrine — it has the suffix "ism.")

But Plato's philosophy is not at all like that: It is based on Socratic ignorance.

Some notes on Socratic Ignorance: Socrates, Plato’s great teacher, did not claim to know better than others. He frequently emphasized that he was “ignorant.” The importance of this “confession” is that it “helps to draw the line between dogma and genuine philosophy. It is one thing to state one’s opinion of how things are and should be…. Socrates, on the other hand, started from a position of ignorance and sought the truth. In the end, he has no dogmatic program for us to follow, just a method for seeking truth for ourselves, without any guarantee that we will find it. Philosophy as practiced by Socrates is an open system,” not a doctrine or dogma.

In Plato’s Apology — a word which here does not imply an admission of guilt, as it does in modern usage, but an intention to give a justification for some action or position — Socrates explains why he follows this philosophical path even unto his death. In the dialogue, Chaerephon asks the Oracle of Delphi, “Who is the wisest of men?” Now this Oracle, a/k/a the Pythia, was a priestess reputed to be possessed by the gods and so able to get answers from them. She replied: “No one is wiser than Socrates.”

Socrates evidently was enormously perplexed by this answer. Plato has him say in response:

When I heard the answer, I said to myself, What can the god mean? And what is the interpretation of this riddle? For I know that I have no wisdom, small or great. What can he mean when he says I am the wisest of men? And yet he is a god and cannot lie; that would be against his nature. After a long consideration, I at last thought of a method of trying the question. I reflected that if I could find a man wiser than myself, then I might go to the god with a refutation in my hand. I should say to him, “Here is a man who is wiser than I am; but you said that I was the wisest.” Accordingly I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed to him — his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination — and the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself; and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me. So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is — for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him. Then I went to another, who had still higher philosophical pretentions, and my conclusion was exactly the same. I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him…. Therefore I asked myself on behalf of the oracle, whether I would like to be as I was, neither having their knowledge nor their ignorance, or like them in both; and I made answer to myself and the oracle that I was better off as I was.

“Socrates concludes that it is better to have honest ignorance than self-deceptive ignorance. Socrates may not know the ultimate answers to the questions he raises, but he knows himself. It is this self-knowledge and integrity that constitutes the wisdom of Socrates. The open invitation is for all of us the ask ourselves how much we truly know of what we claim.” See Link for More

Indeed, the practice of Socratic/Platonic philosophy begins with the injunction, “Know thyself.”

In the autobiographical sketch which Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates in the Phaedo (96a ff.), Socrates tells us that when he was young he had a passion for natural science. This, of course, is as we should expect, for, like all intelligent young men of his time, he must have been intrigued by the speculations of that amazing blaze of thinkers from Thales to Anaxagoras.
He tells us that he was busied with such questions as, What is it that makes things come into being and cease to be? But he soon came to the conclusion that that form of inquiry was not for him. He found that he was befogged by those speculations; that by observing objects with the eyes and trying to comprehend them with the senses, he was in danger of blinding his soul altogether. It is important to understand clearly what this means. I take it to mean that Socrates came to realize that the investigation of things, whatever it gave him, could not give him the understanding he sought. He discovered the limits, or rather the limitations, of objective knowledge; the fact that objective knowledge, and the methods productive of objective knowledge, cannot answer any of our philosophical questions.
His dissatisfaction with natural speculation meant that his interest lay elsewhere. The focus of his thought was on those ideas and ideals which are all-important to the humanity of man. And the understanding he yearned for was not to be won by the acquisition of a mere mass of objective facts….
The business of philosophy is to deal with ideas that do not reside in nature, but only in the mind of man, in the sense that they do not come to us from outside, and can by no means be discovered by any objective approach.
There may or may not be an instance of justice in the actual world. What is certain is that ‘justice itself’ is not to be found anywhere in the actual world: we did not find the idea ‘out there’: the idea is neither a description of nor a counter for any existent in the world. It is only in the intelligible world that we find justice pure and simple.
The business of philosophical thought is with ideas; ideas that give shape and meaning and value to our lives; ideas that have their reality in themselves; ideas that can only be understood through their own proper form. The way to understanding is not to search around us, but to examine our minds; to examine our ideas, those ideas which we ourselves bring into being.
Without the particulars of sense there may be no world at all, but all of the particulars of sense put together do not constitute a meaningful world; all of the particulars of sense put together do not give me a moment of reality. That is why Socrates was not concerned with the factual world, but with the forms that give meaning to the world….
He concluded that wisdom is not in objective knowledge. Search as we may, the world will not give us answers to the questions that concern us most. Unless we acknowledge that all of our knowledge is as nothing, unless we avow our ignorance, we shall not even have set foot on the endless road to wisdom. For God alone is wise; and he is the wisest among men who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing. — D. R. Khashaba, Here

In like vein, the 19th-century Italian priest and philosopher Antonio Rosmini writes:

“…Philosophy is a word invented by the founder of the Italic school. Cicero describes how Leontius, king of Phliasi, asked Pythagoras to state the art which gave value to his life. The reply was simple: he knew no art; he was a philosopher. From that moment, people who engaged in the investigation of the most important truths were no longer called ‘wise’ … but ‘philosophers’ … that is, lovers and seekers of wisdom.
“This remark by Pythagoras was an extremely noble, moral statement whose intimate truth is felt by all. No one, as we know, can call himself wise. The darkness besetting our intellect is profound; our ignorance as mortals is extreme even after a lifetime of meditation. Prolonged efforts and innumerable frustrations, often accompanied by error, bring forth as their fruit only a tiny particle of truth. God alone has the right to be called wise; it is a lie and a pride to call human beings wise. In uncovering this lie and rebuking its pride, Pythagoras made philosophical humility the solid base for the investigation of what is true.” — Antonio Rosmini, Psychology, Denis Cleary and Terence Watson, tr. Durham: Rosmini House, 1999, p. 3f.

I'll toss in my own two-cents-worth here: All I know is that the more I know, the more I realize how much I don't know; there is no certainty in human knowledge. And so I place my full faith and trust in God's revelations to us.

Thank you oh so very much for your kind words of encouragement, dear brother in Christ! And thank you for your wonderful insights to the glorious passage from Romans 1!

God gave man the ability to look around himself and reasonably conclude some basic things about creation and a creator. But man, in his vanity, elevates this reasoning ability to Godlike status, thinking he can know all that is known. In doing so, he becomes a fool.
Socrates reached the same conclusion as the writer of the Proverb "Be not wise in your own eyes"

So very true.

Thinking some more on the Romans 1 verses, it seems like God uses simple, easily understood things to help us grasp more complex spiritual truths. Perhaps, he is even pleased when we meditate on things seemingly simple and roll them around and around in our mind, letting their meaning unfold layer upon layer.

A very significant insight, dear brother in Christ! Thank you.

Truly, the very same words of God are spirit and life to the Christian who is on milk as well as the Christian who is on meat. And yet Truth is hidden in plain view from those who do not have “ears to hear.”

It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, [they] are spirit, and [they] are life. - John 6:63

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

Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: For this people's heart is waxed gross, and [their] ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with [their] eyes, and hear with [their] ears, and should understand with [their] heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. But blessed [are] your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. – Matthew 13:13-16

Why do ye not understand my speech? [even] because ye cannot hear my word. – John 8:43

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: - John 10:27

To God be the glory!

I'm really struck by your references to Platonic dualisms. I honestly can't think of an example of "dualism" in Plato's writings.

The dualism exist exactly at the distinction between Form and Matter. Now I find it difficult to believe that as well read as you are you feign any knowledge of Platonic dualisms. Stanfords Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes:

In Phaedo Plato presents a variety of arguments for the immortality of the soul, but the one that is relevant for our purposes is that the intellect is immaterial because Forms are immaterial and intellect must have an affinity with the Forms it apprehends (78b4-84b8). This affinity is so strong that the soul strives to leave the body in which it is imprisoned and to dwell in the realm of Forms. It may take many reincarnations before this is achieved. Plato's dualism is not, therefore, simply a doctrine in the philosophy of mind, but an integral part of his whole metaphysics. One problem with Plato's dualism was that, though he speaks of the soul as imprisoned in the body, there is no clear account of what binds a particular soul to a particular body. Their difference in nature makes the union a mystery.

It is here that the Gnosticism rears its ugly head and we hear notions of trying to escape the body so we might become one with the Form. Even in orthodox Christianity a theology of negation in which only by negating particularity could one come to a knowledge of God and hence a whole period of time in which ascetitism became the mode of existence for many in the Church.

For Plato escaping the world of particularity was to achieve the ideal world of the Forms. Knowledge was not possible in the world of becoming only can man have knowledge by participating in the world of eternal truths, abstract reasoning, only conceptual knowledge of the ideal world was participation in the divine. Thus this ideal world of abstract concepts is set apart as something that both God and man can participate together in.

Christianity teaches something wholly other than an abstract ideal world in which God and man participate. Christianity teaches that God is a se, that is, God is not correlative or dependent upon anything besides his own being. God is self-sufficient and is the only being who is self-sufficient. Everything else that is must, by virtue of God's aseity, be dependent upon and derived from that unique being and be an altogether different kind of being. Unfortunately Romanism holds to a synthesis of Platonism and Christianity via Aquinas' Analogia Entis. In this schema he makes God correlative to creation or creation as an emanation of the Godhead through the great chain of being thus reducing God's aseity. But God's aseity is clearly self-contained in his ontological trinitarian being not needing any complementation or fulfillment for he has absolute unity and absolute particularity within himself.

That being the case what can be said of the creature? First we must dump any notion of a general being and any of idea of man participating in the being of God. As Christians then we must acknowledge a two level ontology that comes to expression in the Creator/creature distinction. Having thus disposed with any notion of a univocal metaphysics we come to realize the uniqueness of God's being and that everything else exists derivatively and dependently based upon God's fiat creation and that which was not but called into existence before any extraneous knowledge of him existed. Creation then was the first step in extra divine knowledge.

The question becomes how can man have any knowledge of God when such a great distinction exists between the Creator and the creature? Simply, that God condescended himself to make himself known by way of the imago dei in which he reveals something of himself by way of nature, through mans conscience and his providential ordering of history.

In summary we could say that created reality is not being but meaning. It is dependent and refers to God and created things are only the bearers of meaning and in no way self-sufficient. In this we no longer need to have being and meaning as two different things. Ontology and Epistemolgy are united. Here then we avoid the notion that only meaning refers to God but being only refers to itself. The two layer level of ontology is the uniquely Christian ontology that refers all created reality to its dependence on God.

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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