Cyril O’Regan, The Anatomy of Misremembering : Von Balthasar’s Response to Philosophical Modernity, Vol. I, Hegel. New York, The Crossroad Publishing Company (coll. “A Herder & Herder Book”), 2014, 528 p.

In the first volume of Cyril O’Regan’s work, The Anatomy of Misremembering : Von Balthasar’s Response to Philosophical Modernity, the author deals with Balthasar’s response to the modernity represented by Hegel, although his effort includes much, much more. It is, in effect, a guided tour through the whole of 19^th and especially 20^th century theology, Protestant and Catholic, Jewish and Agnostic. And O’Regan is an excellent Cicerone. It is not a tour through an Inferno, even though theologians of the age were sometimes forced to react to the “slaughter-bench of history,” to use Hegel’s phrase, which was a good portion of the 20^th century. In no sense is the work an apocalyptic that ends in Paradiso. Rather, the period for the theologians, as the author portrays it, is more like a Purgatorio made up of a couple of centuries of quarantines. The Hegel that O’Regan picks up on is largely the one he has been struggling with since his early piece The Heterodox Hegel (1994). As he says, “Hegelian thought […] houses ghosts and especially the ghost of Gnosticism” (p. 110). In this connection he notes that the Valentinian Gnosticism which taints Hegel’s philosophy is essentially of the pre-Nicene variety (p. 247). Though it needs to be noted that relative to the Valentinian apocalypsis instantiated in the modern period (p. 398) that it is found more in the later Schelling than in Hegel as such. When it comes to Hegel’s personal religious stance, O’Regan notes that he was “putatively” Lutheran (p. 190). At various points in the volume the issue of Hegel’s “pantheism” comes to the fore. Though one could hardly put Hegel in the same category as a Spinoza. A card-carrying pantheist might be willing to say that nature is the other of God, but could not countenance saying, as does Hegel, that nature (as estranged Spirit) is other than God. Further, Spinoza is a mechanist ; Hegel clearly is not. O’Regan points out that Balthasar demurs when it comes to the view of those 20^th century theologians who asserted that Hegel traded in Parmenides (the metaphysics of being) for Heraclitus (the metaphysics of becoming, p. 335). After all, the dialectic with which Hegel begins the Logik is an indeterminate being pairing with an indeterminate non-being to give rise to an indeterminate becoming. In the Afterword/Foreword O’Regan considers Balthasar with respect to “what is alive and what is dead in Hegel” from his aesthetics to his views on apocalyptic (p. 519-528). The author concludes that there may be some continuity when it comes to their respective views on aesthetics, but a definite discontinuity relative to apocalyptic. Further, Hegel and Balthasar while they may be close to one another when it comes to their respective Christologies, they are far distant from each other when it comes to their views on the Trinity, above all, according to O’Regan, given Hegel’s Sabellianism (p. 523). For Balthasar, influenced by Bonaventure, the unity of the Trinity is founded in the Father (p. 636, n. 81). Needless to say, for Hegel Spirit, above all communal Spirit, looms large. In the matter of aesthetics it should be noted that Hegel’s is not all that special. The better parts of it derive from Schelling, who is much more original on the subject. Speaking of aesthetics the author pursues an interesting interchange between Balthasar and Walter Benjamin regarding the relative merit of dramas in the Baroque period. Balthasar prefers the Spanish Baroque (Calderón and Lope de Vega) over German Romantic drama (p. 491-493), as distinct from Benjamin. “Benjamin favors the Protestant dialectical, Balthasar …