Wishing you a happy and Hegelian Christmas
The birth of the Christ child, the Logos, was announced as “peace on earth”. I can’t think of anything that we would more wish for, but at the same time as despairing of its absence in so many ways and despairing of the multiple alienations that beset us. The message of the incarnation, whether we take it as a real event or as a metaphor, is one of the unity of that which seems most opposed: that of human nature and the divine, the absolute, the whole, the opposition of what is finite and what is infinite. What could be more alienated than human nature as we know it, and those transcendent meanings and values to which we aspire?
The Word made flesh is a logic that defies every logic with which we are accustomed. Common sense logic, and much of philosophical logic is oppositional. Being one thing excludes itself from another. It is a logic that works very well when we want to distinguish one object from another or when we want to exercise control over an object, but it is a logic that creates false oppositions between subject and object, thinking and being, freedom and membership, human and divine. The logic of the incarnation on the contrary is one of participation in which two maintain their identity in a unity of inseparable relationship. It is a logic of the whole, in which relationship precedes relata, in which individuals find their identity in and through the other with whom they are related.
The ancient Chalcedonian creed struggles to express the human and divine nature of Christ in this participational logic: Christ is “acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved”. It is a logic that is echoed in the philosophy of Hegel who described freedom as “precisely this: in one’s other to be at home with oneself”. For us, the other is often a threat, one that denies us our freedom. This is undoubtedly how many have conceived of God – one that lords it over us and removes our freedom. It is also how we have increasingly come to regard our social or cultural other. Whether it be left versus right, woke versus awake, gender critical versus trans, the other is excluded, or so it seems.
If the message (or metaphor if you prefer) of the incarnation is of the reconciliation between those two most alienated, the human and the divine; if it is the finding of ourselves in, and being at home with the one that is most other, may we be entitled to hope in the coming year that we too may recognise something of ourselves in those social others that seem most alien to us?
“We … confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body; consubstantial with us according to the manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the virgin Mary, the mother of God, according to the manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ”
The Chalcedonian creed
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