The Hegel-Luther connection
The philosophical connection from Luther to Calvin to Hegel is fascinating and involves several key theological and philosophical themes that evolved over centuries.
The philosophical connection from Luther to Calvin to Hegel is fascinating and involves several key theological and philosophical themes that evolved over centuries.
Luther's Contributions
Luther’s emphasis on subjective religious experience and the primacy of faith over external authority laid crucial groundwork. His doctrine of justification by faith alone shifted focus from external works to internal spiritual states. Luther also stressed the hiddenness of God and the paradoxical nature of divine revelation – themes that would deeply influence German philosophy.
Calvin's Development
Calvin systematized Protestant theology with his doctrine of predestination and absolute sovereignty of God. His emphasis on God’s transcendence while maintaining divine immanence in history created a tension that later philosophers would grapple with. Calvin’s notion of divine providence working through secondary causes prefigures later ideas about rational necessity in history.
The Connection to Hegel
Hegel’s philosophy takes up structures of theological thinking, some of which are also Lutheran, so that in turn Hegel remains an important influence within Lutheran theology. Several specific connections emerge:
- Dialectical Structure: The Protestant emphasis on the tension between law and gospel, sin and grace, becomes transformed in Hegel into the dialectical structure of thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
- Historical Providence: Calvin’s divine providence working through history becomes Hegel’s „cunning of reason‟ – the idea that Spirit realizes itself through historical conflict and development.
- Internalization: Luther’s emphasis on inner spiritual experience evolves into Hegel’s focus on consciousness and self-consciousness as the fundamental reality.
- Reconciliation: The Protestant theme of reconciliation between God and humanity becomes Hegel’s concept of Absolute Spirit achieving self-recognition through finite consciousness.
Hegel simply replied that he was a Lutheran and always would be, and his philosophical system can be seen as a secularized but structurally similar version of Protestant theology – where the divine-human relationship is reconceived as the relationship between Absolute Spirit and finite consciousness working itself out through historical development.
Calvin's Divine Providence Working Through History
Calvin’s doctrine of divine providence holds that God governs all events in history through a combination of primary and secondary causes. The doctrine of providence, and its implications regarding the immanence of God in all secondary causes, and the fact that nothing can come to pass without his divine foreordination, means that while God is the ultimate first cause of everything, He works through natural forces and human actions as secondary causes.
For Calvin, this means that historical events – wars, the rise and fall of nations, individual decisions – are all ultimately orchestrated by God’s providence, but they occur through the natural workings of human agency and political forces. Humans are given certain tasks to do, and although we may only be the secondary cause of these acts, we should not overlook our duty. This creates a tension: humans are fully responsible for their actions, yet everything ultimately serves God’s eternal decree.
Calvin’s view suggests that even seemingly chaotic or evil historical events serve God’s ultimate purposes. This doesn’t make God the author of evil, but rather that He permits and directs evil toward good ends through His providential governance. The doctrine implies that history has a rational, purposeful structure underneath apparent randomness.
Bellarmine's Response
Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) was the major Catholic theologian who systematically responded to Protestant doctrine during the Counter-Reformation. This was Bellarmine’s mission in his „Controversies‟: to fight back the heretics, not with the Church Militant (and the secular arm), but with the Church Intelligent and Informed. Roberto Bellarmino was the defender of Roman Catholic orthodoxy as it was re-affirmed at the Council of Trent over against the critical claims made by the various strands of the Protestant Reformation.
Bellarmine’s counter-argument to Calvin’s providence doctrine centered on several key points:
- Human Free Will: Against Calvin’s emphasis on divine predestination, Bellarmine defended the Catholic teaching that humans possess genuine free will that can cooperate with or resist God’s grace. This challenges Calvin’s view that all historical events are predetermined.
- Secondary Causation: While Catholics also believe in divine providence, Bellarmine argued that Calvin’s system made secondary causes (human actions) merely apparent rather than real. The Catholic position maintains that human actions are truly causal, not just instruments of divine decree.
- Merit and Cooperation: Bellarmine emphasized that humans can merit salvation through cooperation with divine grace, opposing Calvin’s view that all human actions are ultimately determined by God’s eternal decree.
The philosophical significance is that Bellarmine tried to preserve genuine human agency within divine providence, whereas Calvin’s system seemed to make human actions merely the unfolding of God’s predetermined plan. This disagreement about the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom would profoundly influence later German philosophy, including Hegel’s attempt to reconcile necessity and freedom in his system.
Bellarmine would likely oppose Hegel using remarkably similar principles to those he deployed against Calvin, since Hegel’s system contains many of the same structural problems from a Catholic perspective:
Against Hegel's Historical Necessity
Just as Bellarmine argued that Calvin’s divine predestination eliminated genuine human freedom, he would contend that Hegel’s dialectical necessity makes human actions mere moments in the self-development of Absolute Spirit. When Hegel claims that historical events unfold according to logical necessity through the „cunning of reason,‟ Bellarmine would argue this reduces human agents to unconscious instruments of a predetermined process – similar to how he saw Calvin’s providence making humans mere secondary causes without real agency.
Against the Absorption of Individual Will
Bellarmine defended the Catholic teaching that individual human wills can genuinely cooperate with or resist divine grace. Against Hegel, he would argue that the dialectical process ultimately absorbs individual consciousness into Absolute Spirit, eliminating the possibility of genuine moral choice. The Hegelian „we‟ of collective consciousness would be seen as destroying the integrity of individual persons who must be free to accept or reject salvation.
Against Pantheistic Implications
Where Bellarmine defended the transcendence of God against what he saw as Calvin’s tendency to collapse divine and human agency, he would similarly oppose Hegel’s apparent identification of God with the world-process. Hegel’s claim that „the real is rational and the rational real‟ would strike Bellarmine as making God identical with historical development, eliminating the crucial distinction between Creator and creation.
Against Rationalized Theodicy
Just as Bellarmine opposed Calvin’s view that God permits evil for predetermined purposes, he would reject Hegel’s claim that historical evils are necessary moments in Spirit’s self-realization. The Catholic position maintains that while God can bring good from evil, this doesn’t mean evil is rationally necessary or justified as part of a cosmic dialectical process.
The Underlying Issue
For Bellarmine, both Calvin and Hegel commit the same fundamental error: they create systems where genuine human freedom becomes impossible because everything is ultimately determined by a higher necessity – whether divine decree or logical development. The Catholic position insists that authentic human agency must be preserved for moral responsibility and the possibility of salvation to remain meaningful.