Dialectical Analogy and Analogical Dialectics Ryan Haecker PDF

Dialectical Analogy and Analogical Dialectics:
Przywara and Hegel on the Analogy of Being
I. Introduction
The analogy of being was introduced by Aristotle, and later thematised by Thomas Aquinas, as a
special mode of grammar in which one term may signify two or more meanings, but in which each of
the signified meanings derives its primary meaning by participating in one common meaning.1 Many
distinct meanings may be derived from one common meaning through Platonic participation, in which
one universal Idea is the perfect paradigm and cause of the meaning, intelligibility, and being of all of
its imperfect instances.2 The analogy of being thus decisively presupposes this metaphysic of
participation. But this very pillar of participation is also the principal source of the aporia of analogy.
For it has too often been forgotten that Plato himself recognized that his own innovative theory of
participation may become paradoxical whenever it hypothesizes a relation between one universal Idea
and many particular instances that contradicts either unity, multiplicity, or both.3 The analogy of being
may similarly become paradoxical whenever it hypothesizes a relation between one universal
analogon and many particular analogates.
Aristotle may have attempted to escape from Plato’s paradoxes by grounding universal ideas in
individual substances, but once Plotinus re-interpreted Aristotle in essential agreement with Plato, the
stage was prepared for a more cataclysmic conflict. The aporia of analogy re-surfaced when Aquinas
revised Augustine’s Platonic theory of divine illumination4 by, in part, re-introducing Aristotle’s
theory of the analogy of being for the purpose of preserving the possibility of theology by a ‘middle
way’ between the extremes of the univocal and equivocal significations of being.5 John Duns Scotus
and William of Ockham soon responded that this ‘middle way’ implied a paradoxical relation of
participation between many distinct analogates and one common analogon that trespassed upon the
principles of logic which Aquinas believed inviolable.6 From this aporetic confluence flowed a major
and a minor current of theological innovation: the surface current would empty into the late-medieval
nominalism, Protestantism, and modern idealism; while the subterranean current would less
conspicuously contribute to renaissance Platonism, baroque aesthetics, and German romanticism. It
was Nicholas of Cusa who, at the source of the minor current, first aesthetically re-imagined analogy
as a coincidence of opposites, but it was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who, at the conclusion of the
major current, finally constructed a systematic logic that promised to internally resolve all contrary
opposites into the inclusive relations of the Trinity.
In the Science of Logic, Hegel outlined how the quantitative ratio and the syllogism of analogy may
be successively sublated into the Idea in what I call a ‘speculative analogy’, which combines Platonic
participation and Aristotelian analogy. But his encyclopedic efforts were soon eclipsed by the
objections of Friedrich Joseph Wilhelm Schelling, from whose pen poured forth the disparate
traditions of positivism, sophiology, and phenomenology. When Erich Przywara later re-formulated
the analogy of being at the apogee of phenomenology, he implicitly opposed Schelling’s rhythmically
1
Aristotle. Metaphysics, 1004b; Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 13, a. 5
2
Plato. Phaedo 100c; Republic 596a
3
Plato. Parmenides 130a-134e
4
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica p.I, q.84, a.6.; cf. Plato, Meno 80d, Phaedo 66b
5
Aquinas, Thomas. De Veritate, q.2, a.11
6
Scotus, Johannes Duns. Ordinatio 1 d.3 Q.2 a2. 26; William of Ockham. Quodlibetal Questions, 4.12
Ryan Haecker © 2015

oscillating opposition of contraries to Hegel’s sublation of contradictions: where Schelling’s
dialectical unity of opposites preserves each pole in fixed opposition, Hegel’s sublation of
contradiction is meant to doubly annul the fixed separation of each pole to preserve each as moments
of a higher and richer dynamic synthesis. This conflict over contradiction has produced two
competing models of analogy: Hegel’s analogical dialectics in which contradictory differences are
meant to be sublated into the ‘absolute middle’ of the Idea; and Przywara’s dialectical analogy in
which contrary opposites are meant to participate in the mysterious ‘suspended middle’ of God.
Przywara criticizes Hegel for evacuating the mystery into concepts, but Hegel might respond by
criticizing Przywara for withholding these mysteries beyond the concept. The following comparison
will illustrate how Hegel’s Science of Logic cannot adequately resolve all contrary opposites in a
speculative analogy unless the middle terms the syllogisms are re-read against the letter of Hegel’s
text as the absolute middle of Christ in the Trinity.
II. Analogy and Dialectics
The analogy of being may be summarily defined as a special mode of grammar that hypothesizes one
universal analogon term in a proportionate referent-relation to many distinct analogate terms. (i.e. a:b
:: b:c etc.) It is typically advertised as the middle way between the opposed extremes of univocal and
equivocal modes of signification: where univocal signification involves a one-to-one signification of
one term to one meaning; equivocal signification involves a one-to-two signification of one term to
two (i.e. equivocal) or more (i.e. multivocal) meanings; but analogical signification involves a one-to-
two-in-one signification of one term with two or more distinct analogates, each of which is related by
participation in one universal analogon. Since analogy culminates in the participation of many
auxiliary analogates in one primary analogon, it structurally corresponds to the ontology of Platonic
participation. Analogical ontology, accordingly, first divides the one-to-one univocal relations of
referring terms and referenced beings into a one-to-two equivocal referent relation; and then correlates
this equivocal referent-relation by finding a third relation between the referents. This ‘third’ inter-
relation between the analogate referents is the ‘middle term’ of the analogy of being, which is meant
to inter-mediate all analogates in and through one central analogon. Rowan Williams gestures toward
this center of analogical mediator when he writes Hegel directs self-related thinking to a point in
which “the grammar of the God of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas is the grammar of thought.”7
The domains treated by analogy and dialectics are conventionally segregated into exclusive spheres of
terms and propositions: analogy is thought to strictly apply to the grammatical relation of discrete
terms, while dialectic is thought to apply only to propositions, premises, and arguments; and where
analogy may signify the referential relation of terms, dialectics may only signify the reunion of
contrary propositions. This strict separation of analogy and dialectics is also taken to imply a further
separation between analogical and dialectical ontologies: where analogical relations may relate
equivocally distinct but mutually participatory terms, dialectics may only relate opposed and annulled
propositions; and where the analogates of analogy participate in and are perfectly exemplified by the
paradigmatic prime analogon, the propositions of dialectics are meant to be annulled and resolved into
a higher and richer synthetic unity of opposites. Yet this segregation of analogy and dialectics has
resulted from the undue objectification of the categories of dead writing from the free subjectivity of
living discourse. Aristotle distinguished terms and propositions in the fifth chapter of On
7
Williams, Rowan. “Logic and Spirit in Hegel”, Published in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern
Theology, 2007, 38

Interpretation, but Plato had already, in the Theaetetus, pre-empted any permanent objectification of
thinking in writing when he described how Socrates had learnt, in a dream, that letters may be
combined to make syllables; syllables to make names; names to make descriptions; and descriptions
given for accounts of justified true beliefs.8 Once terms and propositions are interconvertible, both
dialectics and analogy may promise to intermediate between the distinct but inter-related judgments of
terms and propositions.
The separation of analogy and dialectic has also been represented in conflicting analogical and
dialectical traditions: where analogy may be thought to have been advanced by Aristotle, Aquinas,
Cajetan, and Przywara, dialectic may be thought to have been advanced by Plato, Cusa, Hegel, and
Marx. The 19th century conflict between Socialist Marxism and Catholic Thomism has thus often spilt
over into disputes of dialectics and analogy. One consequence of this conflict has been that Hegel is
now widely read to have occluded any conception of the analogy of being from dialectical logic. But
Hegel evidently never wrote about the analogy of being, and showed only the slightest interest in
medieval scholasticism (Thomas Aquinas receives his attention for a scant two paragraphs).9 Since
the papal encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), the analogy of being has been consistently championed as
a pillar of Thomistic philosophy, and Thomism as a pillar of Catholic theology, in double-opposition
to secular philosophy and Protestant theology. Hegel has been indicted on each account as a
rationalist who recast theology into a totalizing logic of concepts and as a Protestant who until his
dying days professed “I am a Lutheran and will remain the same.”10
Hegel’s reputation as a theologian has fallen even further due to allegations of rationalism, pantheism,
and atheism, not least since the condemnation of George Hermes (1835), the critiques of Franz Anton
Staudenmaier (1844), and the grace-nature controversy between Johannes von Kuhn and Constantine
von Schäzler (1863). The ascendency of the Neo-Thomist party marked the sunset of Hegelian
sympathies in Catholic theology.11 During the Pian era from popes Pius IX to Pius XII (c. 1846-1958),
the Hegelian theology issuing from the Tübingen School came to be increasingly associated with the
heresy of modernism, largely because his teleological sublation of concepts in a progressive
historicism suggested an historical evolution of dogma. This suggestion seems to have received papal
scrutiny in the encyclical Humani Generis (1950).12 The leading Neo-Thomist and arch-critic of
Nouvelle Théologie, Garrigou-Lagrange O.P. has similarly criticized Hegel for deriving the
‘becoming’ of historical processes from a productive contradiction. He writes that “there is no
apparent reason why becoming should emerge from this realized contradiction, this identification of
contradictories. On the contrary, we must hold with Aristotle that ‘to maintain that being and non-
being are identical, is to admit permanent repose rather than perpetual motion.”13
William Desmond has, perhaps most famously today, also repudiated Hegel’s Absolute Idea as an
idolatrous ‘counterfeit double’ of the true God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In Being and the
Between, he has prosecuted Hegel’s dialectic as a sterile “interplay of univocity and equivocity”
8
Plato. Theaetetus, 201e-205e
9
Cf. Lectures on the History of Philosophy p.2, §2, B.2.b
10
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1:73
11
O’Meara, Thomas F. Romantic Idealism and Roman Catholicism: Schelling and the Theologians,
1982
12
Humani Generis §32: “No Catholic can doubt how false this is, especially where there is question of those
fictitious theories they call immanentism, or idealism or materialism, whether historic or dialectic, or even
existentialism, whether atheistic or simply the type that denies the validity of the reason in the field of
metaphysics.”
13
Garrigou-Lagrange O.P., Réginald Marie. God: His Existence and Nature, vol. 1, B. Herder, London, 1946, 174

within a univocal sphere of ‘aesthetic being’.14 Where Hegel consistently maintains that being is only
an abstract determination of the Concept15, Desmond follows Schelling in re-casting Hegel’s concepts
as the immediately given content of phenomena. Once the originating stages of the immediate given
sensory manifold of ‘sense-certainty’ in the Phenomenology and the pure and indeterminate
immediacy of ‘being’ in the Logic have been forcibly reduced into an equivalent ‘aesthetic being’,
each and every concept may be similarly reduced to merely virtual ‘determinate intelligibilities’
within the dynamic “rhythm of immediacy.”16 Consequently, he judges Hegel’s dialectic to be “a
passage from the immediacy of univocal determination through the indetermination of equivocation,
towards a more and more self-mediated self-determination,” and concludes: “Parmenides’ ghost rises
at the end of Hegelian dialectic: Being and Thinking are one.”17 Desmond’s recommendation for an
‘unsubsumable’ and ‘plurivocal’ metaxological metaphysics is meant to “reach out to what is other in
self-transcendence”, but tends to quite mystifyingly accentuate this ‘otherness’ at the expense of
intelligible concepts.18
Giles Deleuze has deployed a parallel criticism against Hegel for the purpose of preserving the
independence of ‘difference itself’ in opposition to the absolute middle that prioritizes identity over
difference and ‘inscribes difference in identity’. Jean Hyppolite, together with Jean Wahl and
Alexandre Kojeve, had re-introduced Hegel into interwar France to establish a viable
phenomenological alternative to Husserl’s science of ‘irreal’ essences. In the Genesis and Structure of
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Hyppolite described how universal concepts had unfolded from the
shapes of phenomenal consciousness.19 Deleuze responded that Hyppolite had effectively identified
‘sense’ with ‘being’ and reduced Hegel’s Logic to the self-determination of univocal ‘sense-being’.
He wrote that “philosophy, if it has a meaning, can only be an ontology and an ontology of sense. The
same being and the same thought are in the empirical and in the absolute… This absolute identity of
being and difference is called sense.”20 In Difference and Repetition, he transposed this criticism of
Hyppolite into a new criticism of Hegel when he describes how this “infinite representation relates”
the difference between “both the essence and the ground” to a “foundation or sufficient reason” that
“employs the infinite only to lead the identical to exist in its very identity” and therefore “does not
suffice to render the thought of difference independent of the simple analogy of essences.”21 Deleuze
specifically targets “Hegelian contradiction”, which, he contends, merely “consists in inscribing the
double negation of non-contradiction within the existent” so that “identity” is “sufficient to think the
existent.”22
Hegel’s dialectic has, in each of these ways, been criticized for trespassing upon ‘principle of non-
contradiction’, ‘univocal equivocity’, and ‘difference itself’. Yet each of these criticisms seems to
have presumed that the ‘difference’ involved contradiction, equivocity, and difference itself may be
made into a regulating principle that is separated from the self-differentiating activity of dialectical
thinking. The thought of this pure difference threatens to abolish the mediating centre of theology: for
once the principle of non-contradiction is made into a pure and apodictic axiom that is prior to the
14
Desmond, William. Being and the Between, 1995, 168
15
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Science of Logic, §807
16
Desmond, William. Being and the Between, 1995, 134, 170
17
Ibid., 172-175
18
Ibid., 33
19
Hyppolite, Jean. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 1974, 39, 101, 121, 579
20
Deleuze, Giles. “Review of Jean Hyppolite, Logique et existence”, published in the Appendix of Logic and
Existence, by Jean Hyppolite, Lawlor and Sen trans., 1997, 194-195
21
Deleuze, Giles. Difference and Repetition, 1968, 59-60
22
Ibid., 1968, 60

content of thinking; and equivocity is made into a hypostatized mode of grammar that is indifferent to
its terms; each ironically comes to resemble Deleuze’s ‘difference itself’ more than the Platonic
participation of all differentia in a dynamic middle. Yet once pure difference is formally abstracted as
a simple negation and functionally separated from the content signified by its terms, then it threatens
to become a difference that makes no difference: as a simple negation, it is not different because it
remains identical to itself; but as a separated difference it is formally indifferent to all signified
content. Hence, once the critics of Hegel have made difference into a principle that is separated off
from all differentia, each paradoxically renders difference itself as both self-identical without
difference and self-differential without identity. Such a paradoxical pure difference can never be
thought or spoken, but Hegel may have found an alternative path through this ostensible paradox by
radically re-thinking the difference of contradiction.
III. Analogical Dialectics of G.W.F. Hegel
A. Dialectics and Contradiction
It often seems that Hegel may only be saved from the narrative oblivion of complete triviality by
explaining how dialectical contradictions may produce higher and richer synthetic concepts.
Contradictions are conventionally understood to result from the affirmation and denial of one and
same proposition that completely annuls the concepts signified. Their consequences are likewise
considered to be entirely negative; to annul some of the concepts signified; and to only be resolved
through the falsification one or more of the contradictory premises. But the genealogy of contradiction
reveals a far richer portrait. Parmenides presented a proto-typical principle of non-contradiction when
he wrote that “never will this prevail, that what is not is.” And in response to Heraclitean flux, Plato
extended Parmenides' prohibition on the coincidence of being and non-being to the coincidence of
contrary opposites in one and the same thought. In the Republic, Socrates observes that “it is obvious
that the same thing will never do or suffer opposites in the same respect in relation to the same thing
and at the same time.”23 In the Metaphysics, Aristotle extended variants of both the Parmenidean
ontic24 and the Platonic epistemic principle25 to formulate a new semantic principle of non-
contradiction, which prescribed that “opposite assertions cannot be true at the same time.”26 For
Aristotle, the difference of terms was grounded in between individual substances, but for Plato
difference is suspended by participation in a higher identity of Ideas and Principles.27
Plato recognized that the difference of contradiction can only be understood in relation to a network
of relations, in which all differences ultimately participate in the identity of Ideas. In the Sophist, he
investigated the meaning of difference itself and found that difference in motion “partakes of
existence.”28 But once Platonic participation was rejected as paradoxical, only the fixed difference of
individual substances remained, and the semantic principle of non-contradiction came to be
increasingly untethered from any higher system of Ideas. Later formulations of the principle of non-
contradiction have, for this reason, gradually come to presume a fixed meaning of difference in a way
23
Plato. Republic, 436b
24
Aristotle. IV 3 1005b19
25
Aristotle. IV 3 1005b24
26
Aristotle. IV 6 1011b13; cf. Gottlieb, Paula, "Aristotle on Non-contradiction", The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy
27
Krämer, Hans Joachim. Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics: A Work on the Theory of the Principles
and Unwritten Doctrines of Plato with a Collection of the Fundamental Documents, 1990, 78
28
Plato. Sophist, 256d

that conceals from sight the baffling paradox of pure difference. But Nicholas of Cusa rediscovered
Plato’s dynamic theory of participatory difference when, in On Learned Ignorance, he aesthetically
re-imagined the grammatical relations of the analogy of being as a coincidence of contrary opposites:
since the boundary of every aesthetic space excludes another, but the spaces that are included and
excluded remain related across this very boundary, each opposed space may be imagined to coincide
in a mutual interrelation. Immanuel Kant afterwards re-described these contrary oppositions as the
antinomies of judgment that are inevitably produced by Reason29; Johann Gottlieb Fichte restricted
contradiction to oppositively determined concepts30; and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling made
this concept into the first principle of life in nature.31
Hegel is sometimes said to have rejected the principle of non-contradiction in favor of dialectic.32 But
this contention is mistakenly motivated by a conflation of an independent semantic principle of non-
contradiction with the dynamic self-movement movement of Plato’s spiritual concepts.33 Hegel’s
Lectures on the History of Philosophy reveal how he had discovered in Plato’s Parmenides, Sophist,
and Philebus, the roots of his own dialectic of concepts.34 He did not merely reject Aristotle’s
principle of non-contradiction, but radicalized Plato’s dialectic by harnessing the explosive force of
contradiction as the inner combustion engine that logically motivates the dynamic self-determination
of concepts. He writes: “Contradiction is the root of all movement and all vitality: it is only in so far
as something has a contradiction within it that it moves, has an urge and activity.”35 John McTaggart
clearly recognized this, over a century ago, when he wrote that “so far is the dialectic from denying
the law of contradiction, that it is especially based on it. The contradictions are the cause of the
dialectic process.”36
Hegel never tires of repudiating the “dry bones” of formal logic and fixed propositions from which
“flesh and blood are all gone”37, and instead celebrating the romantic spiritualization of cosmos as the
“soul of the world, the universal blood, whose omnipresence is neither disturbed nor interrupted by
any difference, but rather is itself every difference as also their supersession.”38 Like Plato and Cusa,
he aesthetically re-imagined contradictory propositions as oppository concepts. But like Kant and
Fichte, he restricted its explosive force: where classical logic had hitherto held any contradiction to
explode a system of inferences by rendering its conclusions trivially true (ex contradictione sequitur
quodlibet or ‘from a contradiction anything follows’), Hegel restricted the negativity of contradictions
to the specific coincidence of opposed concepts. He characterized the un-restricted negativity of
contradictions as a kind of one-sided scepticism that “only ever sees pure nothingness in its results”
and “ends ups with the bare abstraction” of empty nothingness “in order to throw it too into the same
empty abyss.”39 Hegel, instead, advanced the inclusive preservation of contrary negativity in the vital
29
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason, 1781, A409/B436
30
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. The Science of Knowledge, Heath and Lachs trans., 1982, I.496, 67
31
Schelling, Friedrich Joseph Wilhelm. The Ages of the World, Bolman, Jr. trans., 1942, 220
32
Peirce, Charles Sanders. “Nominalism versus realism.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2, 1868, 57
33
cf. Plato. Phaedrus 248e, Philebus 27a-28e, Timaeus 38e-40a, and Laws 256b
34
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. II, 50-60
35
36
McTaggart, John Ellis. Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, 1896, 9; cf. Brandom, Robert. Tales of the Mighty
Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality, 2002, 179; Redding, Paul. Analytic Philosophy and
the Return of Hegelian Thought, 2007, 201
37
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of Spirit, §51
38
Ibid., §162
39
Ibid., §79

motion of the concepts. It was precisely this radicalization of contradiction that allowed Hegel, after
Cusa, to begin to develop a radically dialectical answer to the classical aporia of the analogy of being.
B. Hegel’s Speculative Analogy
Hegel acknowledges that Aristotle’s “rules of syllogizing” have “their place in cognition where they
must be obeyed”, but cautions that “they cannot serve higher, for example, religious truth” but “only
the correctness of the knowledge of facts, not the truth itself.”40 Philosophy, he writes, “stands in no
need of a special terminology” because “the forms of thought” are already “displayed and stored in
human language.”41 In the Nuremberg Propädeutik, he elaborated upon how the ‘content of grammar’
is also comprised by the “categories and unique creations of the intellect.”42 Since grammar is already
informed by the categories of logic, language may operate as an indispensable medium for a
speculative grammar of analogy. Gillian Rose has also called renewed attention to the centrality of the
speculative proposition when, in Hegel Contra Sociology, she describes how the “speculative
experience of lack of identity informs propositions such as 'the real is the rational', which have so
often been misread as ordinary propositions.”43
In the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel recommended a dynamic, participatory,
and speculative mode of reading in which the fixed meaning of the proposition may be “shaken to its
foundation” but preserved by “knitting or combining the predicates” - like the art of weaving in
Plato’s Statesman44 - in the “inmost reality” and dynamic rhythm of the living philosophic Idea.45 He
describes how concepts are constructed from a “positive cognitive process” of combining subjects and
predicates within speculative propositions. In the maelstrom of this dynamic process, the stable
subject and substance “really disappears” while “the scattered diversity of the content is brought
under the control of the self.” Once the subject and predicate pass over into one another, and neither
retains their own stable meaning, there remain no fixed terms as each are taken up into the “inmost
reality” and “the entire mass of the content.”46 This inmost reality is the ‘absolute middle’ of all
speculative propositions where being and essence coincide in the harmonic “rhythm of the organic
whole.”47 The teleological end of Absolute Knowing is thus established, from the outset, as the
absolute middle in which all of the terms of the speculative propositions participate to realize their
final and abiding truth.48
Although many commentators have celebrated Hegel’s speculative proposition, few have recognized
its implications for the analogy of being. In The Idea of Hegel’s Logic, Hans-Georg Gadamer requests
the retrieval of dialectics from “the reabsorption of all objectification into the sustaining power and
shelter of the word” and even intimated an analogical relation of propositions when he describes a
“mean between the extremes of [univocally identical] tautology on the one hand and [equivocally
differential] self-cancellation in the infinite determination of its meaning on the other.”49 Catherine
Malabou has, in The Future of Hegel, similarly identified the future task of philosophy with
40
41
Ibid., §14
42
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Nuremberg Propädeutik, 1809, 322–323; cit. Malabou, Catherine. The
Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, 2004, 169
43
Rose, Gillian. Hegel contra sociology, 1981, 49
44
Plato. Statesman, 279a
45
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of Spirit, §§55-60
46
47
Ibid., §56
48
Ibid., §89
49
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, Christopher Smith trans., 1982 94-95

elaborating the “speculative significance of a grammatical structure” and even approaches analogical
language when she describes “three aspects” to this dialectical movement of the “[univocally
identical] shared form, the [equivocally differentiated] suppression of that form, and the [analogically
different-in-identity] presentation in return of the cancelled form.”50 But both have neglected to
thematise how this ‘mean between extremes’ of univocal and equivocal forms can also imply that the
speculative proposition may be read as an equally speculative grammar of the analogy of being.
The linguistic turn in philosophy, from Vico and Herder to Wittgenstein and Derrida, may now
portend an equally momentous linguistic turn for Hegelian theology. Formerly the self-determination
of the pure Concept was believed to exhaustively sublate and necessarily determine the figurative
representations of language. For example, Hegel writes that it is “the general task of cognition to
overcome the contingent.”51 Such an over-determining Concept might leave little room for the free
contingency of language, grammar, and analogy. But after Heidegger’s critique of technical
‘enframing’ of ontology, Gadamer has pointed a new path towards an underdetermined ‘clearing’ of
language when he described how Hegel’s Concept “constantly presupposes the functioning of
language which sustains and accompanies it” and “in which thinking has its own abode.”52 This
‘clearing’ is meant to indicate Heidegger’s onto-logically under-determined ‘open space’ of
contingent significations, which always remains insufficiently determined by any prior concepts, and
is rather adventitiously “open for everything that comes to be present and absent.”53 Were language
not, in some sense, free to exceed its formally defined limits, then its signification would always
remain encompassed within a singular univocal concepts, difference would be annulled, and the
analogy of being would become altogether impossible.
In the Science of Logic (1812), Hegel outlines a novel approach towards analogy, first in the
Quantitative Ratio in the Doctrine of Being, but finally in the Syllogism of Analogy in the Doctrine of
Concept. This connection between the Aristotelian-Thomistic analogy of being and Hegel’s syllogism
of analogy seems to have gone largely unnoticed, not only because of the aforementioned Neo-
Thomist opposition to Hegelianism, but also because the Syllogism of Analogy seems at first sight to
be more concerned with merely metaphorical arguments from analogy than with the divine names and
theological grammar that often directs discussions of the analogy of being. Once, however, the fixed
distinction between terms and propositions have vanished in the dynamic process of the speculative
proposition, then a closer reading of the Science of Logic may reveal a closer connection between
Przywara’s dialectical analogy and Hegel’s analogical dialectics.
Analogy has previously been described in both qualitative terms of attributed predicates and
quantitative terms of arithmetic proportions. Hegel combines both the qualitative and quantitative
descriptions of analogy in the Quantitative Ratio (SL §§669-694), through which qualitative
Determinateness and quantitative Magnitude are united in Measure. He describes it as the “unity of
both moments” of quantitative determination and qualitative movement in which each are “essentially
related” by a “magnitude” that is “posited as a ratio.”54 Hegel divides this quantitative ratio into (i) the
direct ratio that posits its determinateness “in its very externality”; (ii) the indirect or inverse ratio that
posits this contradictory negation internally in the “alterableness of the direct relation itself”; and (iii)
the ratio of powers that resolves this contradictory negation into the “simple production of the
50
Malabou, Catherine. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, 2006, 171, 180
51
52
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, Christopher Smith trans., 1982, 94
53
Heidegger, Martin. Zur Sache des Denkens, 2007, GA 14, 80f; cit. Dahlstrom, Daniel. The Heidegger
Dictionary, 2013, 45
54
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Science of Logic, §§ 669-671

quantum” that “becomes Measure.”55 The Syllogism of Analogy (SL §§1494-1501) is then meant to
further sublate the Quantitative Ratio into Measure; Measure into Essence; and Essence into the
Concept. Each successive sublation is meant to preserve and incorporate the preceding concepts into a
more complex and concrete concept. Thus the Quantitative Ratio is likewise meant to be essentially
preserved in Measure and Essence, just as the Syllogism of Analogy is meant to be essentially
preserved in Subjectivity, and ultimately in the Absolute Idea.
Hegel’s decisive contribution to the classical aporia of analogy may be that he not only recognized but
also purported to resolve its intractable contradiction between ‘externality’ and ‘self-relation’. John
Duns Scotus and Willam of Ockham had each argued against Thomas Aquinas that the analogy of
being could not genuinely establish any consistent relation between many distinct analogates and one
common analogon without either annulling the distinction of the analogates, contrary to the principle
of excluded middle, or affirming and denying this very distinction, contrary to the principle of non-
contradiction.56 Hegel similarly understood the distinction and opposition between the valid
inferences of Kant’s categories to produce contradictory antinomies in all judgments.57 He writes: “the
Antinomies are not confined to the four special objects taken from Cosmology: they appear in all
objects of every kind, in all conceptions, notions, and Ideas.”58 Once Hegel had radicalized
contradiction as the dialectical motor of all concepts, he could calmly claim that “it is Spirit which is
strong enough to support the contradiction, but it is also Spirit which knows how to resolve it.”59
Hegel may thus be read to have attempted to resolve the contradictions attributed to the analogy of
being by first annulling the mutual externality of distinct quantities in the Quantitative Ratio and
finally sublating the distinct differences of the (i) direct ratio into the ‘reciprocal limiting’ and mutual
containment of each opposed determination in the (ii) inverse ratio. This reciprocally delimiting
oscillation produces a “spurious infinity of infinite progress” that “is consequently only [an]
approximation.”60 But the “limit of the reciprocal limiting of both terms” is also “posited as negation
of the negation” by “preserving itself and uniting with itself in the negation” of opposed
determinations to propel the transition from the (ii) inverse ratio to the (iii) ratio of powers.61 The (iii)
ratio of powers is thus meant to result from of a “progressive realization” of the quantitative ratio
through a double-transition of quantity to quality and vice versa, which finally posits and sublates its
limits in a self-determining Measure.62 Once the externally related limits of quantitative ratios are
rendered as negations, an infinite sequence of negations may be rendered as a dialectical motor of the
self-determination of measure, and the contradictions of analogy may be resolved into dynamic ideas.
This dialectical sublation of the Quantitative Ratio and the Syllogism of Analogy implies, for Hegel,
that the Idea of God can only be discursively approached through a ‘positive cognitive process’ of
constructing speculative propositions in a speculative analogy. The middle term of the syllogism of
analogy is thus a metonym for the ‘absolute middle’ of the Idea, in which all syllogisms circle around
their focal center. This ‘absolute middle’ is, for Hegel, the very keystone upon which rests the
vaulting weight of his entire systematic architectonic. He describes it with Christological intonations
when he writes that it is “only as immediately identical with universality that individuality can be the
55
56
Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2006, xxvi-xxviii
57
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Faith and Knowledge, Harris trans., 1977, 83
58
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, §48
59
60
Ibid., §685
61
Ibid., §687
62
Ibid., §§688-694

middle term.”63 He writes that in “the syllogisms of reflection the middle term appears as the unity
that gathers together externally the determinations of the extremes” that are “united only in a third
term” and “inner unity” of the Idea.64 But he cautions that if universality were to remain external and
separate from individuality then “the middle term would fall asunder into two unconnected parts and
we should not have a syllogism.”65 Since this syllogism is meant to interrelate all opposites, the
inadequate individuation of the middle term may ultimately unravel the entire system. Hegel writes
that it is “no longer just any single quality” but the coincidence of “the individual taken in its
universal nature” that is “the reflection-into-self” of its concrete nature.66 The speculative analogy is
thus meant to sublate the Quantitative Ratio, through Measure and Essence, into the Syllogism of
Analogy, and Syllogism, through the Concept and Objectivity into the Idea. The Idea is then meant to
reflexively determine itself through a dynamic process of speculative propositions which maybe
essentially modelled on the analogy of being.
The sublation of the speculative analogy into the Idea has suggested to many readers that Hegel’s
Logic, no less than Spinoza’s Ethics, threatens to eliminate the free contingency of language,
grammar, and reduce the signification of analogy to a univocal concept. But Hegel forcefully attempts
to preserve contingency in and through the self-determined necessity of the Concept. He describes
both how contingent possibility is reflected into necessary actuality and how this very reflection of
contingency-in-necessity is itself always contingent.67 He writes: “This unity of possibility and
actuality is contingency. The contingent is an actual that at the same time is determined as merely
possible, whose other or opposite equally is.”68 And at the conclusion of the Logic, Hegel reiterates
how “the concrete Notion itself is contingent” in “respect of its content” and its self-determinations.69
In the second subdivision of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (1817), the Philosophy of
Nature, Hegel quite apophatically intimates the need for some element of faith beyond what is
explained by concepts when he writes: “We must be content with what we can, in fact, comprehend at
present. There is plenty that cannot be comprehended yet” so that “we must nevertheless have faith in
the concept though many details are yet unexplained.”70 Finally, in the third subdivision, the
Philosophy of Spirit, he links the freedom of the Concept directly to faith in Christ when he writes that
the “Notion is the principle of freedom, the power of substance self-realized” and its elements are
“identical with one another and with the whole, and the specific character of each is a free being of
the whole notion” in which “not merely has God created a World which confronts him as an other; he
has also from all eternity begotten a Son in whom he, a Spirit, is at home with himself.”71
C. Hegel’s Theological Analogy
The analogy of being may be described as a Christian theological analogy whenever the primary
analogon signifies the divine person of Christ the Logos through whom all auxiliary analogates may
be said to ‘live, move, and have their being’. Hegel’s speculative analogy may likewise become a
theological analogy when its ‘middle term’ signifies the ‘absolute middle’ that is personally
equivalent to Christ the Logos. Hegel first suggested such an identification of the Logic with the
63
64
Ibid., §§1526-1528
65
Ibid., §1495
66
Ibid., §1496
67
Ibid., §1191
68
Ibid., §1202
69
Ibid., §1724
70
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Encylopedia of Philosophical Sciences, §§268, 353
71
Ibid., §§160-161

Logos when he introduced the speculative proposition as a specific determination of Axanagoras’
universal Reason, or Nous.72 He later reiterated it in the Logic when he described the divine essence in
Anaxagorean terms as the “principle of the world… the pure form of which must be Logic.”73
Although Hegel typically understates this connection, Nous may be read to signify the Alexandrian
identification of Platonic Nous with Johannine Logos. These Christological intimations subsequently
recur at increasingly explicit registers scattered throughout the successive resolutions within the
Phenomenology, from the life-blood of the cosmos in Force and Understanding74, to the priestly
mediator of the Unhappy Consciousness75, to the angelic Ideas of Reason76, and, penultimately, in the
reconciling ‘Yea’ of forgiveness with the beautiful soul at the conclusion of Morality.77
Christ makes his long-foreshadowed appearance in the climactic scene, at the conclusion of the
Phenomenology, in the consummate moment of Revealed Religion. He enters the stage as that
singular ‘divine man’ whose death “implies at the same time the death of the abstraction” of
objectified divinity that holds itself in separate isolation from the “pure subjectivity” of “universal
self-consciousness.”78 In the Encyclopedia, Christianity is similarly situated as the ‘absolute religion’
in which Christ reconciles and sublates the universality and particularity of Religion and Spirit in his
own individuality.79 In each case, the moment of Christianity appears to be subordinated to and
sublated within the higher moment of Philosophy. But once sublation is recognized to mean the
preservation of each prior moment, in which the subsequent synthesis is anticipated, then it may be
understood that Religion is not only preserved in Philosophy, like faith seeking understanding, but is
also dimly reflected at each of the lower levels. This essentially conservative function of dialectical
sublation has, however, more often been concealed when the concept is misconceived as an all-
devouring mechanism that is designed to conquer an empire of the spirit.80
Dale Schlitt has helpfully recalled how Hegel uses these three logical moments to correlate the
universality of the Father, the particularity of the Son, and the individuality of the Holy Spirit. He
elaborates that this “inner dynamic of otherness… presents the triadic structure of inclusive
subjectivity” that is “in its own way already absolute, divine subjectivity.”81 In the Philosophy of
Nature, Hegel similarly describes how God, while “remaining equal to Himself”, must be “grasped in
three forms; the universal, the particular, and the singular.”82 But at the conclusion of the
Encyclopedia, he further indicated that each of the major subdivisions of the Logic may also be read
in three alternating sequences: (i) Logic – Nature – Spirit; (ii) Nature – Spirit – Logic; and (iii) Spirit
– Logic – Nature.83 Once the major subdivisions are correlated with the divine persons, it is easy to
see how the sequence of concepts in Hegel’s Logic are mutually and recursively related like the
divine persons in the Holy Trinity. The Arians had, on the contrary, subordinated Christ the Son to
God the Father, but the Cappadocian Fathers had responded by reaffirming the co-equal divinity of
72
73
74
75
Ibid., §226
76
Ibid., §437
77
Ibid., §671
78
Ibid., §785
79
80
Cf. Kojeve, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the "Phenomenology of Spirit", 1934,
esp. ch. 7 The Dialectic of the Real and the Phenomenological Method in Hegel.
81
Schlitt, Dale. “Trinity and Spirit.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 64 (4):457-489, 1990, 472
82
83
Ibid., §§575 – 577

the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. A Trinitarian model for the sublation of concepts similarly implies
that, since none of the logical moments may absolutely annul, eliminate, or dominate any of the
others, Christianity must be preserved as an essential moment in the living spirit of the Idea.
This Trinitarian model for reading Hegel’s Logic also implies that moments of particularity, such as
those of the Quantitative Ratio and the Syllogism of Analogy, may be read as essential moments in
the absolute middle of the Idea. And once Christ is read as the absolute middle of the Idea, the Logos
may perform an essential mediating function, as both the ‘middle term’ of every syllogism and as the
prime analogon of every analogy. Nicholas Adams has, in the Eclipse of Grace, similarly identified
Christ as the central mediating function of Hegel’s ‘Chalcedonian logic’.84 The Logic is
‘Chalcedonian’ because the originary possibility of uniting universality and particularity in the
‘middle term’ in each syllogism and every concept is paradigmatically preserved in and enacted
through this individual union of divine and human nature. Once Adams’ ‘distinction-in-inseparable-
relation’ between” the ‘logic of participation’ (Begriff) and the ‘logic of opposition’ (Vorstellung) is
extended from the concepts of the Logic to the terms of language, Hegel’s ‘Chalcedonian logic’ may
also establish a participatory relation between the many distinct auxiliary analogates and the one
prime analogon of Christ. Hegel’s speculative analogy may, in this way, function to “repair Hegel’s
own repairs of the philosophical tradition, using Hegel’s own tools.”85
Hegel’s Chalcedonian logic might also promise to suspend, if not resolve, the contradictions involved
in the aporia of the analogy by theologically re-imagining the differences in all logical syllogisms in a
kind of Chalcedonian union universal divinity and particular humanity.86 Once Christ the Logos is
placed as that divine individuality at the pinnacle of system in whom all contradictory differences are
annulled, reconciled, and sublated, the theological analogy may effectively suspend the contradictions
present at the level of creatures through the immanent operations of the Trinity. Since the Trinity
presents an unmistakable paradox for finite understanding, in which everyone admits the absurdity
that ‘God is one’ and ‘God is three’, no one should be surprised to find prolific paradoxes in the
vestigia trinitatis of language, grammar, and logic. Yet Hegel dared to search for a speculative escape
from the site of these paradoxes by radically re-imagining the difference of contradiction itself as the
negative dialectical motor of Spirit, which annuls and sublates contraries into, not only the dialectical
identity of identity and non-identity, but even a Christological unity of universality and particularity in
the ‘absolute middle’ of a genuinely analogical dialectics.
III. Dialectical Analogy of Erich Przywara
A. Phenomenology and Dialectics
In Analogia Entis (1932), Erich Przywara S.J. re-defined the analogy of being as “a dynamic back-
and-forth between the above-and-beyond (of a transcending immanence) and the from-above-into (of
an indwelling transcendence).”87 His decisive innovation was to have similarly reconceived analogy
as, not merely a static mode of grammatical predication, but as a ‘dynamic back-and-forth’ of contrary
opposites between the ascending participative and descending imparticipative analogies that are
84
Adams, Nicholas. Eclipse of Grace, 2013, 20
85
Ibid., 225
86
Ibid., 20
87
Przywara, Erich. Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, Betz and Hart trans.,
2014, 216

altogether suspended and donated through a free gift of the divine act of being (actus essendi). For the
purpose of preserving this mysterious gift from the post-Reformation philosophical theologians, and
especially Hegel, Przywara proposes to interrogate the “act of consciousness”88 to excavate the
presence of a “series of intensifications” between God and creatures”89 from the "primordial womb of
the All."90 Since this neutral mediator is completely independent from the suspended contraries, it can
never be reduced to any concept of the unity of contrary opposites, but rather revolves in a ceaseless
cycle in which “the mystery becomes a concept” and the “concept is overcome in the mystery.”91 For
the purpose of ‘breaking through’ this ceaseless cycle of contrary opposites, Przywara developed a
dialectical procedure for interrogating the phenomenal presence of “objective aporetics”.92
Przywara outlines how this dialectical procedure of division, analysis, and dialectical reunion is meant
to (i) divide each generic category into its specific components; then (ii) successively reduce these
components to absurdity; so that (iii) each mutually annulled subdivision may be represented as a pair
of “mutually interconditioning opposites” that simultaneously “point back towards” to “recapture
what had gone before.”93 This phenomenological reflection is meant to produce a “concrete Gestalt”94
in which the phenomena “show themselves [as a cycle] to have been contained within one another
from the beginning.”95 Its bare act of questioning is meant to produce a simple pivot around this
‘concrete Gestalt’ until it “forces itself through this problem and beyond it.”96 Through this procedure,
Pryzwara generates an array of terminological distinctions: for example, he distinguishes meta-
physics into meta-noetics and meta-ontics, which are double-annulled and reunited into their mutual
‘confluence’ and ‘co-belonging’ in the “most formal foundation of a ‘creaturely metaphysics’”97; and
then he distinguishes a priori deductive from a posteriori inductive metaphysics into an ‘a priori a
posteriori’ and ‘morphological’ creaturely metaphysics.98
Przywara defines his new creaturely metaphysics as a description of the “essence in-and-beyond
existence” of “that wherein physis” is the "ground and end and definition in itself."99 This existing
being of the ‘ground-end-definition’ is, however, not merely the emptiest predicate, category, or
determination of Kant and Hegel. Rather, in response to positive science, psychology, and
phenomenology, Przywara has recast ‘physis’ as the weighty pre-packaged being of later Schelling
and early Heidegger. Przywara explains that “all being in fact carries within itself a ground-end-
definition.”100 But, more like Husserl, he also insists that creaturely metaphysics is irreducible to the
facts of existence because its “formally constitutive basic formula” is “essence in-and-beyond
existence.”101 Since its essence is ‘beyond existence’, creaturely metaphysics, no less than
phenomenology, is meant to exceed the self-enclosed existence of ontic facts. Heidegger had similarly
attempted to circumvent and destroy the history of ontology from Plato to Hegel to interrogate anew
the meaning of that-being, or ‘Dasein’, but Przywara responds by re-conceiving the meaning of
88
Ibid., 120
89
Ibid., 175
90
Ibid., 229
91
Ibid., 181
92
Ibid., 144, 156
93
Ibid., 123
94
Ibid., 153
95
Ibid., 124
96
Ibid., 158
97
Ibid., 123-124
98
Ibid., 135-136
99
Ibid., 152, 155
100
Ibid., 155
101
Ibid., 124

‘being’ as the suspended tension of a rhythmic inner contrariness in-being, or ‘In-Sein’. Where, for
Heidegger, ‘Dasein’ is that being which constitutes itself by reflecting upon the meaning of being; for
Przywara, ‘In-Sein’ is the ground-end-definition of that being in-itself which constitutes its ground by
its transcendently determined and teleological direction. Yet through a dialectical procedure of
division and analysis of the oscilating unities of opposites, Przywara endeavours to
phenomenologically analyse In-Sein to disclose, from the innermost mysteries of existence, a new
dialectical analogy of being.
B. Przywara’s Dialectical Analogy
Przywara’s dialectical analogy is principally distinguished from Hegel’s analogical dialectic because
it does not purport to annul and sublate but merely to suspend and reunite contrary opposites from an
indifferent “heavenly identity.”102 In double-response to Hegel and Heidegger, Przywara has re-
formulated the analogy of being into “a back-and-forth relation” of dialectically cycling “suspended
tension of the correlation” of opposites around the completely simple and totally indifferent ‘heavenly
identity’ of Existence and Essence.103 Where Aristotle had conceived of potentiality as primarily the
passive reception of actuality, Przywara re-casts the negativity of Heidegger’s ‘productive
nothingness’ as an ‘active potentiality’ that is always motivated by its own inner tension, at the “site
of all contraries in one”, and suspended by participation in “unlimited ‘service to God’.”104 He
describes its “innermost rhythmic beat” between creaturely metaphysics and “God beyond the
creature” as the dynamic tension that discloses a “special sense of ‘God in the creature’.”105 This
‘special sense’ is meant to be understood as a kind of divine illumination of intellectual intuition that
unconditionally discloses the positive act of being, which Przywara calls the ‘positivum’.
Przywara describes how the ‘positivum’ of In-Sein and the ‘negativum’ of its contrary opposition
‘coinhere’ in the “illimitable ‘suspended’ analogy.”106 He proposes to ‘open’ this “genuine
philosophical positivity” to “the theological” by preserving the “positive sense” of phenomenal being,
or the ‘positivum’, in a mutual positive and negative limit.107 He explains that “theology, as clearly
distinct from philosophy, is possible only on the basis of "God beyond the creature," understood as
the fundamental relation between God and creature.”108 Once this philosophical positivity of the
mutually delimited positivum is suspended by participation in the ‘heavenly identity’ of “God beyond
the creature”, it becomes a kind of theological positivism. Przywara describes a theophantic disclosure
of this positive theology when he writes: “Since, finally, according to its concept, theology is a
movement of God into humanity, and thus a visible entrance into this visibility (otherwise it would
remain a theologia archetypa: of God in himself), it must intrinsically - as having a divine subject to
its act - be an act that is visibly divine.”109
Przywara echoes Schelling’s philosophy of mythology and revelation when he dismisses the “a priori
metaphysical thought” of post-Reformation ‘objective idealism’ as a kind of negative philosophy that
idolatrously reproduces “God’s own standpoint” and recommends the “distinct positivum of a
posteriori metaphysics” in which the ‘in’ of being, or In-Sein, signifies a kind of active “potency” of
102
Ibid., 212
103
Ibid., 124
104
Ibid., 229
105
Ibid., 158
106
Ibid., 235-238
107
Ibid., 178
108
Ibid., 164
109
Ibid., 171

the creature “towards God.”110 He crucially claims that the “attaining of this ultimate foundation of
the formal configuration of metaphysics as such thus depends upon our preserving a double aspect
within the formal configuration of the problem of the a priori and the a posteriori.”111 The
presentation of this ‘double aspect’ requires the preservation of the distinct individuality of a
posteriori metaphysics in the positivum of In-Sein. Since the positivum of In-Sein consists in an inner
oscillation of contrary opposites that are suspended by participation from God, In-Sein can only be
preserved by participation in the ‘suspended middle’ of Przywara’s theological analogy.
C. Przywara’s Theological Analogy
Where Hegel’s theological analogy is characterized by a luminous transparency of ‘ever greater

similarity’, Przywara’s theological analogy is characterized by a dark theophantic illumination of a
“genuinely Areopagitic ‘dazzling darkness’” of “ever greater dissimilarity.”112 To preserve the mutual
limits of positive theology, Przywara describes a radical ‘mutual alterity’ of difference within the
positivum of In-Sein, which forever precludes “any derivation of one term from another.”113 But this
radical alterity must be paradoxically related through a non-relational suspended participation through
the double-transcendence of God: God first transcends every relation with creatures, and then
transcends even this first transcending of relations in a non-relational re-relation to creatures that is
only mediated in and through the dynamic depths of In-Sein. This double-transcendence of God in the
positivum is meant to ensure that God remains “freely independent” of creatures even while creatures
remain “necessarily dependent” upon him.114 But this paradoxical doubly-transcendence further
implies that God is present in every propositional copula as the ‘is’ between the subject and predicate,
so that every instance of analogical grammar participates in the ‘self-imparting-relation from above’
of the divine creative Ars.115 Przywara is, on this point, far more conscious than Hegel of the
participative dimensions of grammar. He declares this mysterious ‘otherness’ of analogy suspended
from doubly-transcendent divinity to be an “analogy in the strictest Aristotelian sense: beyond any
commonality of quantitative calculation… quantitative concept… [or] ultimate genera expressed in
the categories” and “the forms of predication as such.” It is rather mean to be thought of “strictly as a
relation of mutual alterity.”116 Where Hegel’s ‘middle term’ of syllogisms in the speculative analogy
had implied an ‘absolute middle’, Przywara’s divinely ‘suspended middle’ of In-Sein has no “identity
that holds sway between them, but analogy itself.”117
Przywara consistently abides by the Fourth Lateran Council decree ‘for every similarity, however
great, there is an ever greater distance of dissimilarity.’118 He explains how “we are at once analogous
to God… and infinitely different from God, and so he is thus at once in and beyond creaturely
reality.”119 Przywara describes this mysterious suspended middle as a “heavenly identity” from which
“the sphere of creatureliness” is eternally suspended.120 Since the difference of positively existing
beings is only found at the phenomenal level of creatures, this suspension of ‘creatureliness’ from
110
Ibid., 158
111
Ibid., 159
112
Ibid., 233
113
Ibid., 176
114
Ibid., 217
115
Ibid., 214
116
Ibid., 231
117
Ibid., 211
118
Ibid., 355
119
Ibid., 160 fn.5
120
Ibid., 211-212

‘heavenly identity’ also implies the suspension of the differences of contradiction: where the sphere of
creatureliness is “the sphere of the principle of non-contradiction”, the ‘divine sphere’ suspends the
principles of logic.121 Although Przywara declines to highlight the aporia of analogy, he seems intent
on resolving it by re-thinking the difference of contradictions as a creaturely difference that may be
suspended by mysterious participation in a ‘heavenly identity’. But in contrast to the merely formal
middle of objective idealism, Przywara contends that there is no ‘noetic-ontic’ principle of the identity
of differences, but only the suspended middle of analogy that is thoroughly pervaded by the
dialectical oscillation of contrary-opposition.122
Half a century before Desmond’s ‘metaxological metaphysics’, Przywara investigated the “in
between” of analogy, which “takes place within the interval between possibilities that are
antithetical.”123 He describes this ‘in between’ as an “actuality and possibility” that “bears witness to
an oscillating rhythm, back and forth, which Aristotle directly designates as analogy.”124 Its cycling
back-and-forth motion of contrary opposites is meant to motivate the productive tension of a pivoting
interrogation of analogy. He describes how the positive emanation of complex creatures from a simple
‘heavenly identity’ produces antinomies and “culminates in the threefold sense of the ‘antithetics’
that is peculiar to the Augustinian dynamic”125: the (i) first antithetic is the intra-creaturely antithetic
“revealed in such measure as creaturely thought touches upon the region of God”; the (ii) second
antithetic is the creature-divine antithetic “between comprehension of God and his transcendence of
all comprehension”; and the (iii) third antithetic is the intra-divine antithetic of God’s “ultimate
depth” that penetrates to view “into the intra-divine vitality of the Father.”126 Each of these antithetics
are, for Przywara, the consequence of the dialectical cycling opposition of contrary opposites, in
which the difference of contradiction is meant to be suspended by analogy.
Przywara unambiguously affirms that the principle of non-contradiction is the “basic question” upon
which the question of analogy and dialectics must be “fundamentally decided.”127 Both Hegel and
Przywara may be read to have responded to the aporia of analogy by re-imagining the principle of
non-contradiction as a dialectical coincidence of opposites. But where Hegel held this opposition to
produce contradictions that were annulled and sublated into concepts, Przywara found this opposition
to result in an oscillating unity of contrary opposites that were suspended by participation in an
analogy of being. Przywara blames Hegel’s absolute middle for wrecking this unity of contrary
opposites upon the “the shipwreck of the absoluteness of pure logic.”128 He suggests that the middle
term of all syllogisms in Hegel’s Concept has erected a Parmenidean identity of all differences that
effectively reduces “all objective being” to “the predicative form of judgment”129, and all judgments
into ‘pure contradictions’.130 This must occur because he believes, together with Aristotle, that
contradictions completely annul the difference between the contraries. But once Przywara has
reformulated Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction to resemble Schelling’s dialectically
oscillating unity of contrary opposites, he must also ineluctably affirm a unity of opposites between
his own dialectical analogy and Hegel’s analogical dialectics.
121
Ibid., 212, 224
122
Ibid., 212
123
Ibid., 194
124
Ibid., 208
125
Ibid., 184
126
Ibid., 185
127
Ibid., 198
128
Ibid., 201
129
Ibid., 194
130
Ibid., 201

Przywara entertains but ultimately seems to reject both Aristotle’s classical formulation of the
principle of non-contradiction131 and Hegel’s dialectical re-formulation of contradiction as the
determination, annulling, and sublation of opposites into a synthetic identity of differences132 in
favour of Schelling’s dialectical re-formulation of contradiction as the dialectical oscillation of
contrary opposites in an indifferent identity of differences.133 He rejects Hegel’s dialectical sublation
of contradictions into concepts for establishing a Parmenidean identity of all differences that reduces
all judgments to contradictions, and terminates in an “absolute contradiction.”134 But he also indicates
that he intends to rescind the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction when he complains that it has
been spuriously isolated, objectified, and “turned into a thing” by the Neo-Scholastics. Once the
principle of non-contradiction is cast into the iron mould of a proposition (e.g. ¬(A&¬A)), it becomes
phenomenologically “indistinguishable from the principle of identity” and the “Cartesian immediacy
of truth in the cogito.”135 Since any such idea is identical to itself, even the principle of non-
contradiction must strangely appear to be self-identical (i.e. (¬(A&¬A)) = (¬(A&¬A))).
Przywara contends that only the rhythmic unity of contrary opposites in the analogy of being can
genuinely preserve the difference of positive and negative limits between creatures and God that
makes theology possible. Hegel’s dialectic is alleged to have been complicit in abolishing this
harmonic balance by breaking the unity of opposites through a “Promethean unwillingness to be a
creature.”136 Przywara elaborates that, for analogy, “‘contradiction’ is the form in which self-identical
‘ontic truth’ or self-identical ‘noetic being’ is immanent to the mutable world from above, so much so
that the world is the rhythm of its dialectical unfolding.”137 This novel definition of contradiction
combines the classical Aristotelian principle with the modern Schellingian rhythmic dialectic.
Dialectics, he describes, bears within itself the ‘dia’ of contradiction of ‘breaking apart’ because its
contradictory differences are determined by an ‘identity in contradiction’ while analogy may
‘breakthrough’ this contradiction through its uniquely humble ‘obedience to the Logos’.138 Przywara’s
dialectical analogy promises to balance the ‘confusion’ of dialectic, in which “defiant self-recusing
yields to humble self-discrimination, and passionate desire for fusion to loving self-surrender” to
God’s free grace.139
Przywara first re-conceives of contradiction as Husserl’s non-consequential transcendental logic, but

finally suspends the meaning of contradiction by participation in the heavenly identity of God beyond
creatures. He first appeals to Husserl’s pre-theoretical and non-consequential ‘logic of truth’ to
recover the “authentic version of the principle of non-contradiction” that may be “realized from the
standpoint of analogy.”140 In Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl had described how, since the
principle of non-contradiction is only true in “virtue of a connexion” between eidetic essences and
laws “an opening remains for every material countersense and for every other untruth.”141 This
opening is meant to be examined through a phenomenological reflection that brackets (epoché) the
131
Aristotle. Metaphysics XI, 5, 1061b-1062b
132
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Science of Logic, §§528-529
133
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. The Ages of the World, Bolman trans. 1967, 103-104
134
2014, 202
135
Ibid., 201
136
Ibid., 165
137
Ibid., 202
138
Ibid., 168, 197
139
Ibid., 196
140
Ibid., 203
141
Husserl, Edmund. Formal and Transcendental Logic, Cairns trans., 1969, 55, 64

iron laws of logic, such as the principle of non-contradiction. Przywara exploits this opening to argue
that the ‘minimum ground’ and ‘negative form’ of the principle of non-contradiction “stands or falls
with this unity” of contrary opposites.142 In a later reflection On Husserl and Heidegger (1960),
Przywara narrates how “the Church of St. Thomas Aquinas might be the heir of [Husserl’s]
philosophy” that cures its “categorical incompleteness with the saving ‘viaticum’ of the “Church at
the deathbed of German philosophy.”143 But Przywara seems to have grown disillusioned with
Husserl’s non-consequential logic, perhaps because it seemed that any bracketing of some determinate
phenomena must implicitly presuppose the very laws of logic that it conceitedly purports to suspend.
Przywara finally purports to suspend the principle of non-contradiction altogether by linking the
‘minimum ground’ of In-Sein to a participatory metaphysics of positive theology. He writes that the
positivity of the creatures does not “sink back into nothingness” but “mysteriously merges with God’s
own positivity.”144 The analogy of being, Przywara says, is “decisively located in that foundation
which is expressed by the principle of non-contradiction.”145 This participative suspended middle is
said to be the “culminating problem of the principle of non-contradiction” because it uniquely
constitutes the “relation between the lowest pole of the intra-creaturely analogy” and the “highest pole
of the analogy between God and creature” that “has its most extreme and comprehensive span” in the
“unity of the two analogies.”146 Hegel’s dialectic, is alternatively, said to transpose contradiction by
alternatively reducing everything to identity or contradiction, as an ‘identity in contradiction’.147
Hegel, he suggests, has merely transposed contradiction by conflating the distinction between
contrary opposition and contradictory annulling: contrary opposition involves a mutual
interpenetration and interconditioning of correlative opposites that remain fixed in their own self-
identity, while contradictory annulling involves the mutual contradiction that dissolves the fixed self-
identity of each opposite. Against Hegel’s mediating ‘third’, Przywara contends that the only “other
possibility of a "third" would then consist in the supposition of a "third" that could be attained beyond
the theological” in an “incommutable truth.”148 He writes “there is no tertium quid - no "third"; rather
the theological is itself the sea into which the philosophical flows.”149
IV. Analogy or Dialectics
A. Przywara’s Response to Hegel
Przywara criticizes Hegel for reducing theology to a ‘third’ synthesis of all opposites in philosophical
theology. He narrates a line of descent of post-Reformation theology from Hegel to Heidegger, in
which Hegel is alleged to have made the principle of identity into a super-determining principle of
non-identity and contradiction in all predicative judgments, and Heidegger is alleged to have
radicalized this pervasive contradiction into the auto-annihilating being of Dasein. He writes: “The
Hegelian ‘contradiction’ has been radicalized in the Heideggarian ‘Nothing’” as a “‘productive
142
2014, 201
143
Ibid.,616, 621
144
Ibid., 224
145
Ibid., 235
146
Ibid., 219
147
Ibid., 197
148
Ibid., 180
149
Ibid., 179

Nothing’ that “utters the ontic-noetic “I am who I am” of the principle of identity.”150 Przywara
contends that this line of post-Reformation philosophical theology ultimately annuls every difference
between God and creatures, to either reduce creatures to God in ‘theopanism’ or God to creatures in
‘pantheism’. He writes: "Thee-pan-ism" means that, proceeding fundamentally "from above to below;'
God becomes the all”; while "Pan-the-ism" then means that, proceeding fundamentally "from below
to above;' the all becomes God.”151 Where theopanism is the formal ground of purely a priori
metaphysics that corresponds to apriorist ‘devolution’, and pantheism, the formal ground of purely a
posteriori metaphysics that corresponds to aposteriorist ‘evolution’. Each, he argues, concludes in a
confusion of “philosophy that is theology and a theology that is philosophy.”152
Hegel emerges as the primary target here because he is said to have annulled every distinction
between God and creatures in an “eternal dialectic.”153 Przywara observes that Hegel himself had
described, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, how “modern philosophy bears in itself the
form, specifically of Protestant theology” which “points to the whole unabbreviated spectrum of the
problematic that flowed into Scholasticism.”154 But Przywara claims that the “entire meaning of
[dialectic] points beyond itself” towards “the profound Augustinian sense of a self-revelation of the
mind’s movement” and the “sheer mystical fusion with truth.”155 Where Hegel had purported to
resolve these antitheses, Przywara purports to ground the principle of non-contradiction in this
‘deepest antithesis’ for the purpose of disclosing the positive act of analogy. He describes how
“analogy alone is a measured equilibrium” which “Aristotle will equate… with the middle.”156 He
recommends that “modern philosophy must trace its Protestant theological form back still further, to
its origin” and “it must come to understand its Protestant form from the perspective of the entire
undiminished spectrum of Catholic theology.”157 He writes that “Our theological metaphysics thus
carries in itself the positively ecclesial as the determining ground of its life.”158
Prywara advocates this positive “determining ground” of the Church in apparent answer to the all-
annulling negativity of Hegelian dialectic.159 He finds Hegel’s sublation of contradictions into
concepts to be “diametrically opposed” to “the inner unity of philosophy and theology” which has
been authoritatively reaffirmed as “precisely the church’s final word” by the First Vatican Council,
especially in the document On Faith and Reason (Fides et Ratio).160 He further contends that Hegel’s
‘divinity of pure thought’ runs “directly contrary to the articles 5 and 6 of Questio 1 of Thomas
Aquinas’ De Veritate.”161 Aquinas had therein distinguished the immutable truth of the divine intellect
from the mutable truths of propositions, and argued that “only one truth is eternal.” Przywara seems to
have identified this divine truth with positive theology, and the mutability of propositional truths with
dialectics, rationalism, and modernism. Where Hegel had purported to dialectically contradict, annul,
and synthesize opposed concepts in a way that compromised their independence, Przywara proposes
to preserve their independence through the ‘triple antithetics’ and mutual delimiting that participates
150
Ibid., 202
151
Ibid., 165
152
Ibid., 165
153
Ibid., 165, 144
154
Ibid., 150
155
Ibid., 196
156
Ibid., 206
157
Ibid., 150
158
Ibid., 180
159
Ibid., 180
160
Ibid., 185, 189
161
Ibid., 144

in the intra-divine procession of the Trinity. He explains how “the ambiguity of its inner dynamic” is
irreducible to a concept which, he claims, involves “the relation between ‘concept’ and ‘mystery’” at
“every point along the way” of thinking towards a “reduction in mysterium.”162
In “response to Hegel’s attempt to grasp the mystery ‘as’ concept (in ‘absolute knowledge’)”,
Przywara recommends this ‘reductio in mysterium’ as a “way into the mystery” that is both “‘in’ the
concept and ‘beyond’ the concept.”163 Przywara describes this “correlation proper to creaturely
metaphysics” as the “coordination between two suspended equilibria” that does not “form a closed
circle” and in which “neither of these equilibria in itself constitutes a closed circle” by “becoming a
back-and-forth movement that is never completed” and which never finally “a neutral one” but is “the
creaturely form of the act” that is “ever anew to the ‘in-and-beyond’ of “truth in-and-beyond
history.”164 He describes how its antithetical spheres (i.e. intra-creaturely, creaturely-divine, and intra-
divine) are not derived, but only the mystifying process by which the “the intra-creaturely might
surmount itself by passing over into them” and let “itself be borne over into them.”165 These
metaphors of surmounting, ‘passing over’, and birth are all meant to indicate the ‘antecedent
possibility’ of God’s free gift of In-Sein that exceeds any determination of concepts.
B. Hegel’s Response to Przywara
Although the two thinkers were separated by nearly a century, it is possible to read an implicit
response to Przywara in Hegel’s responses to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Friedrich Joseph Wilhelm
Schelling. In reaction to the spectre of Spinozism in Kant’s critical philosophy, Jacobi had advocated
an indubitable positive faith, which reason required but could never sufficiently explain. In Faith and
Knowledge (1802), Hegel countered that by positing “an absolute beyond” and reducing knowledge to
sensuous intuition, Jacobi had paradoxically “pulled faith down into the realm of fact” into an
“absolute empiricism” in which “true faith sinks into nothing.”166 Schelling’s criticisms of Fichte’s
idealism similarly propelled him to criticize Hegel’s Logic, beginning in his Erlangen lectures (1821),
for positing a quasi-Fichtean series of concepts that purported to sublate all positive experience into
the ‘absolute identity’ of the Idea.167 In the decades after Hegel’s death, Schelling worked to develop a
‘positive philosophy’ and ‘philosophical empiricism’ of myth and revelation, in which positive and
pre-determined beings could permanently exceed every conceptualization. Przywara’s positive
theology recapitulates Schelling’s positive philosophy of revelation through a phenomenology of the
Thomistic analogy of being. Hegel might respond that both positive faith and positive being must be
separated from the concept by some further concept of ‘excess’, ‘beyond’, or ‘difference’.
Przywara proposed that the ‘concept is overcome in the mystery’ as a pious defence of the mysteries
of faith against the idolatrous ‘theological rationalism’ of ‘objective idealism’. Yet this ‘reductio ad
mysterium’ beyond all conceptualization seems to suggest that the difference between concepts can be
determined by yet another concept of pure difference. But if pure difference were also a concept, then
it must paradoxically determine the difference in difference itself, in a way that anticipates the
infinitesimal differentiation of difference in Deleuze’s ‘difference itself’. This pure difference would
result from the absolute independence of the ‘heavenly identity’ of God to all creaturely differences:
once the differences between all creatures is suspended from God, and God is elevated beyond all
162
Ibid., 189
163
Ibid., 189
164
Ibid., 154
165
Ibid., 185
166
Ibid., 101, 141
167
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. On the History of Modern Philosophy, Bowie trans., 1994, 154

creaturely difference, then the concept of God is made into an ‘absolute indifference’ of divine self-
identity to creaturely differences. This indifference of God to creatures marks the ‘originary rupture’
between God and the positivum of In-Sein that characterizes his positive theology. Przywara
maintains that God and creatures may nonetheless be paradoxically related through a non-relational
suspended participation of divine double-transcendence. But this non-relational relationality of
double-transcendence effectively re-inscribes this pure difference at every level, from the firmament
of an originary rupture of ‘absolute indifference’ to the fumdamental ‘deepest antitheses’ of In-Sein.
Przywara’s theological positivism may then, like Garrigou-Lagrange, Desmond, and Deleuze, be read
to have made pure difference into the independent principle of dialectical analogy and analogical In-
Sein. Once God is conceived as a divine self-identity that is absolutely independent from and
indifferent to all creaturely differences, then this indifferent identity of differences may operate as the
perfect paradigm of pure difference. Since, moreover, each and every analogy is defined by the
dialectical oscillation of contrary opposites, and each opposite infinitesimally instantiates this perfect
paradigm of pure difference, Przywara may be read to have ubiquitously inscribed difference itself
into every analogical relationship. This inscription of difference into God would, furthermore,
suspend the idea of God in an a-logical void that is paradoxically thought of as a place that cannot be
thought. Przywara even seems to celebrate this possibility when he describes the coinherence of the
negativum and positivum of In-Sein as a “pure possibility” of “productive nothingness.”168 His pious
wish seems to have been to preserve the possibility of theology from the aporia of analogy, but by
placing God in an a-logical void he may have, in spite of his best intentions, dissolved any
conceivable bond between God and creatures. Yet once every relation between God and creatures is
dissolved, Przywara can no longer maintain a participative relation between one common analogon
and many distinct analogates, every analogy collapses into an equivocity (or multivocity) of
meanings, and even his own dialectical analogy may become non-analogical.
C. Concluding Response on Hegel, Christ, and the Eucharist
After the ‘basic question’ of the principle of non-contradiction in analogy has been decided, there
remains one further question concerning the contingency of meaning in language. Hegel might
respond that Przywara had withheld this contingency beyond the concept. But on this point Przywara
may offer a decisive rebuttal. Since analogy essentially requires multiple possible significations, the
sublation of multiple contingent meanings into singular univocal concepts threatens to eliminate any
possibility for the analogy of being. And were the analogy of being to become impossible, then
speculative propositions could not be used to construct the middle terms of syllogisms; the absolute
middle would remain inadequately individuated; and Hegel’s system would be liable to collapse.
When Plato reached a similar impasse after he had criticized the coherency of the universal Ideas in
the Parmenides, Socrates asked: “What are you going to do about philosophy, then? Where will you
turn while the answer to these questions remains unknown?”169 Although Hegel purports to preserve
contingency in the self-determination of the concept, this combination of freedom and necessary
might only be achieved through a more comprehensive individuation of the absolute middle.
Christ appears for this purpose, at the penultimate stage of both the Phenomenology and the
Encyclopedia, as the absolute middle in whom all opposites are united and preserved as an essential
moment in the Chalcedonian logic of Hegel’s analogical dialectics. But Przywara admonished Hegel
168
2014,218, 229
169
Plato. Parmenides, 135c

on precisely this point for hanging the concepts, and especially the supreme concept of Christ, above
the “positively ecclesial and determining ground of life” in the Church. He quotes Augustine who had
written: “Before we are strong enough to receive the Word, let us not be weaned from the milk of the
Church’s faith.”170 Cyril O’Regan has similarly described how Hegel’s Christology seems to suggest
some external relation, or ‘gap’, between the “medium and the message” that is meant to be
individually represented in Christ.171 He observes that Hegel’s description of Christ’s passion in the
Phenomenology seems to erase the “personal locus of suffering in Christ” in favour of a “Joachimized
Lutheranism” in which the winds of historical development, such as the French Revolution, may
possess “something like soteriological capacity” even when they storm against the barque of the
Church.172 Hegel’s idea of Christ may thus appear all too private and pristine, like a speculative
deduction that floats indifferently above messy ecclesial communities.
Rowan Williams has helpfully cautioned against this rarefied reading when he writes that “the idea
that Hegel reduces the specificity of Christ to a speculative deduction is fundamentally wrong”
because it mistakenly renders the idea of Christ into little more than an “unmediated identity”, whose
deceptive immediacy cuts the bonds of “inclusive relation[s].”173 Since Hegel formulated these
mediating bonds on the model of the Trinity, the Trinity is both inclusive of all intermediating
relations between the divine persons, and is absolutely individuated in divine simplicity, the
specificity of Christ should be mediated and preserved in and through the Trinitarian procession of
concepts. Yet in the pages of the Science of Logic Christ is never named and appears - if at all - only
abstractly as the middle term of syllogisms. This lacuna might suggest that it is untenable to re-read
Hegel’s Logic by such pious lights. But if the relations between concepts were deprived of their
adequate individuation and inclusive relations in the Trinity, then the intermediating middle terms of
Hegel’s syllogisms might also fall apart into an endlessly unmediated multiplicity of terms.
In A History and Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel, Giacomo Rinaldi has incisively described how
this may be the greatest objection yet raised against the Logic. Once the middle terms of the
syllogisms are inadequately individuated then the “comprehensive mediation of the Concept’s
differences, rather ‘relapses into immediacy’” through a negative dialectical spiral in which each
subsequent conceptual synthesis breaks apart into increasingly more particularized, externalized, and
separated pieces.174 He proposes that this objection may only be answered if “each Hegelian category
mirrors within itself the totality of the Universe.”175 This mirroring of the Absolute Idea in the
concepts suggests a kind of Platonic mimesis, or imitation. But since Hegel’s Platonism directs
concepts on a teleological trajectory towards the Idea, such a mimesis would also require a kind of
prolepsis, in which each of the prior concepts implicitly recollects the posterior concepts in the course
of its development. But even Rinaldi ultimately confesses that he cannot answer the question of how
all of Hegel’s concepts may be “constitutive of a teleological nexus.”176 This may require the middle
term to be transfigured to signify the absolute middle that is completely individuated in Jesus Christ.
When the absolute middle is read as the Christological centre of the Logic then Christ may operate as
the middle term of every syllogism, and the prime analogon of every analogy, who is dimly reflected
170
2014, 180; cf. In Ps. CXXX, xi
171
O’Regan, Cyril. Heterodox Hegel, 1994, 203
172
Ibid., 201, 277
173
Williams, Rowan. Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, 2007, 46-47
174
Rinaldi, Giacomo. A History and Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel, 1992, 300
175
Ibid., 310
176
Ibid., 314

at every level of Hegel’s Logic. Such an innovative Christological re-reading of the Logic may seem
entirely inconsistent with Hegel’s emphatic insistence on the presuppositionlessness of the Logic.177
But this inconsistency evaporates once it is recognized that Hegel has already presupposed nothing
less than the Absolute Idea of the Logic as “the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and
has its end for its beginning.”178 For if the Idea is an absolute circle, and its circularity is modelled on
the intermediating relations of all conceptual relations within the Trinity, then Christ may no less
plausibly be presupposed as the absolute middle and prime analogon of all peripheral analogates. The
complete individuation of the absolute middle could then indissolubly unite the middle term of every
syllogism, just as the light of the Logos is dimly reflected at every level of Hegel’s Logic.
Once the freedom of the Idea is revealed through the Incarnation in the community of the Church,
Hegel’s absolute middle may be recognized in the concrete individuality and positive presence of the
Eucharist. Yet Hegel seems to have floundered on this crucial point when, for example, he recognized
Greek art as an externalized aesthetic form of internalized spiritual worship, but refused to also
recognize the Eucharist as the spiritually internalized consummation of the liturgy of the Mass. This
refusal may threaten to exclude the Incarnation from multiple liturgical remembrances and thereby
abstractly limit Christ’s positive presence within either the historical Jesus or the disembodied
Lutheran conception of the Word. The paradigmatic significance of the Eucharist for the preservation
contingency in language cannot be understated. Catherine Pickstock comments that "not only is
language that which administers the sacrament to us, but conversely, the Eucharist underlies all
language” and “alone makes it possible now to trust every sign.”179 To restore trust in the speculative
grammar of the liturgy we must re-read Hegel’s dialectic, against the letter of his own de-
corporealized writing, as a liturgical text which strives to find its consummate reality in the mystical
corporeality of the Eucharist. Andrew Shanks has, for a similar purpose, recently illustrated how
Hegel may be re-read to find a duality of registers between the ‘Truth-as-Correctness’ of a closed
system of arguments and the ‘Truth-as-Openness’ of a listening “attentive presence.”180 Where Shanks
finds this contingent openness predominately expressed in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a new
Christological re-reading of Hegel’s speculative analogy may contribute to discovering it to have been
enclosed within the pages of the Science of Logic.
177
178
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of Spirit, §18; cf. Rinaldi, Giacomo. A History and
Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel, 1992, 299, 311
179
Pickstock, Catherine. “Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist.” Modern Theology 15:2, 1999, 167
180
Shanks, Andrew. Hegel and Religious Faith: Divided Brain, Atoning Spirit, 2011, 7

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Summa Theologica. Accessed November 22, 2015. http://www.newadvent.org/summa/.

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