The Heterodox Hegel (review)

308 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:2 APRIL 1996 cal rereading: Kant's substantial rather than exclusively procedural conception of freedom and autonomy; the constitutive rather than merely regulative function of pure practical (moral) reason; and the latter's cognitive-cum-conative nature. But this should not detract from Neiman's original and provocative work, which deserves widespread attention. GONTER ZOLLER University of Iowa Cyril O'Regan. The Heterodox Hegel. SUNY Series in Hegelian Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, a994. Pp. xi + 517. Paper, $94-95. This astonishingly erudite and elegantly written book is a major intellectual achievement . O'Regan's study seeks to defend Hegel's trinitarian onto-theology against its modern and postmodern detractors. In addition to an intimate knowledge of Hegel's own work and commentaries thereon, O'Regan reveals a profound grasp of Christian theology, ranging from patristic authors and Luther, to heterodox figures such as the Gnostics, Meister Eckhart, and Jakob Boehme. Borrowing from the latter sources, Hegel tried to save the kernel of truth in Luther's Christian narrative against literal-minded theologians and skeptical moderns alike, by dramatically reinterpreting it in terms of philosophy's higher "logical" truth, which completes the divine self-manifestation contained imperfectly in scripture and theology. O'Regan relies on two pairs of tropes--prolepsis and analepsis, and synclasis and anaclasis--to explicate Hegel's effort to reconstruct philosophically the Christian narrative , the subject of which is "the transcendental signified much deplored by deconstruction " (53)- Prolepsis refers to unrealized episodes necessary for constituting divine selfhood; analepsis amounts to Erinnerung, the completed recollection of episodes realized in divine historical self-realization. The divine narrative's three moments correspond to the structure of the Trinity: Father (universal/being), Son (particular/ essence), Spirit (individual/concept). The first moment of the trinitarian narrative constitutes the "immanent trinity" which involves an incomplete subjectivity that can be fully realized only through divine self-alienation in the form of creation, especially human history. Though not sequentially narratival, the immanent trinity involves atemporal proleptic "development" that anticipates what must occur in creation for the divine to achieve full self-realization. Synclasis refers to narrative closure, anaclasis to narrative openness. Though demanding closure, Hegel's syndastic narrative also involves anaclasis, in the form of divine exile in creation. From Gnostics and Boehme, Hegel derives the notion that the immanent trinity, though inherently good, yearns for the fulfillment that can only occur in the journey of self-alienation and return. Viewing creation--the second moment of the Trinity--as the "othering" of God to itself, and thus a moment within the divine, Hegel is a panentheist 055-56). As other to the inherently good immanent trinity, creation is evil, a fact that leads Hegel to distinguish between the theological "fall" (event of creation) and the human fall (sin of Adam). Instead of being a fall BOOK REWEWS 309 down, Adam's "happy sin" sin was a fall "upward" that reversed involution (exile) and initiated the agonizing evolution (return) of consciousness. Following Gnosticism, Hegel maintains that the divine "image" according to which humankind was created lies not "in the archaeological past but in the eschatological future" (165). The third moment of the trinitarian narrative, Spirit, involves the process whereby finite humankind attains "sonship" with the infinite divine. In Hegel's Christology, the "death of God" represents the temporary divine absenceneeded for the emergence of divine presence in human community understood as Spirit. Far from constituting a once-and-for-all soteriological event, the life and death of Jesus opened the way for others to follow him to mystical union with God. For Hegel, mysticism involves not irrationality, but divine self-manifestation achieved in the highest form of knowing, Reason, available to the most illuminated members of the Christian community. Before closing his discussion of Spirit, O'Regan addresses the issues of 1) whether Hegel's theodicy fails to account adequately for the particularity of human suffering, and 2) whether divine self-realization as spirit in the human community (inclusive trinity) provides an adequate account of the divine transcendence prefigured in the immanent trinity. Finally, O'Regan examines Spinoza and Schelling's influence on the "denarratizing...