For those driven to read, but lacking the time, Covid-19 came as a godsend. I read more in three years than I had since graduate school. Among the gems that came into my hands was Catherine Walker Bynum’s Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2015). As a historian of modern Europe, it was rare for me to step so far back into history, and even rarer to step back and find what I was looking for: indisputable evidence that not very long ago Christians everywhere had sought and found God in things. Walker Bynum’s Christian Materiality quickly assumed a prominent place on my shelf next to Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais, Donna Spivey Ellington’s work on the androgenization of Mary’s body, Peter Widdecombe’s research on the disappearing wounds of the glorified Christ, Jane Marie Law’s collection of religious reflections on the human body, and Sarah Cokley’s collection of essays on religion and the body. All are fine works. But Walker Bynum’s holds a special place. It offers visual proof of the challenge Thomas Aquinas faced in Part III of his Summa (1274). Thomas’ challenge was not showing how God could be present in things, for this was obvious. Thomas’ challenge was explaining why God wished to be sought and found in seven things alone: the Church’s official sacraments. Across its more than four hundred pages Walker Bynum gave visual testimony to Thomas’ challenge. Christian materiality was everywhere. Then it was nowhere. Why?
The answer often given to this question is, to put it bluntly, humanity grew up. Science, industry and free thinking banished superstitions regarding divine materiality. No divine materiality, no Christianity. Right? If God cannot be in bodies, God surely cannot be any body. That’s the end of “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” But, no. That only applied to Jesus’ immaterial spirit, not to his body. Right? No. That would be Docetism, among the heresies named and rejected by the Council of Nicaea (325 CE).
To manage this little problem, Protestant reformers found an elegant work-around. God did not really mean to appear in flesh. Instead God meant in Jesus to show that God was not in flesh by appearing to appear under the cover of God’s opposite: flesh. God did not appear in Jesus. God dis-appeared in Jesus. No less an authority than Martin Luther called the God revealed in Jesus Deus absconditus, “the hidden God.” Seemingly overnight half of Christendom denied what for ten centuries they had affirmed. God cannot be present in things.
Science, industry, and free thinking? Hardly. Two and a half centuries before Luther tacked his ninety-five theses to the doors of Castle Church in Wittenberg, the abbot of Saint-Pierre in Ghent “instructed his fullers to install a bell in the workhouse newly founded by them near the Hooipoorte, in the parish of Saint John.” It marked the first time anywhere that the value of human action was measured not in the substances of the products it produced but in the abstract units of time consumed in their production. The abbot’s innovation quickly spread throughout Europe. Where previously Christians had measured the value of things in the substances out of which they were composed, they now measured value abstractly, immaterially, in equal, abstract, units of time. The good abbot could not have known that his simple instructions would give rise not simply to a religious revolution, but to a social and economic revolution. The year was 1324, the year capitalism was born.
Three things are worth noting about capitalism. First, it is inseparable from what economists call “marginalism.” Marginalism measures economic success (or failure) by plotting the change in outputs (goods, services, terabytes) against change in inputs (labor, capital, bitcoins). For the mathematically inclined, it looks like this: MPL = ΔQ/ΔL. More for less. If history prior to the fourteenth century appeared to be going nowhere that is because it was going nowhere. This is the second thing about capitalism worth noting. Marginalism is what leant to the modern historical epoch its directional dynamism. In the modern epoch individuals are rewarded for making more with less. But, note: “more with less” is morally and ethically agnostic. More what? This is the third thing worth noting about capitalism. The marginal product is not a thing. It is a ratio. It measures a marginal increase (or decrease) in abstract value. Back to our main story.
For two centuries the value of productive human action in Western Europe was measured in equal units of abstract time. During this same period debates over the value of things grew increasingly fierce: debates over the value of precious metals, the value of noble blood, the value of visual evidence, but also the value of relics, candles, incense, altars, pilgrimages, the bodies of the Holy Virgin and her divine Son, and, yes, also debates over the value of the Bread and Wine of the Eucharistic Feast. Science, industry, and free thought? No. Capitalism.
It will surprise no one familiar with the writings of Immanuel Kant to learn that he was raised in a strict Pietist household. Every moment of every waking hour the young Kant would have been reminded that God is not and cannot be in things. As the Pietist Philip Jacob Spener told his readers in his wildly popular Pia Desideria (1675), Christians could not meet God anywhere: not in hymns, not in creeds or confessions, not even in the Bible. They could only meet God in their hearts. It was a lesson Kant learned well. His three critiques form a masterpiece in the radical, qualitative, difference between the transcendental realm — the realm of freedom and God — and the phenomenal world of cause and effect, where (by definition) freedom and God cannot be.
Kant’s writings were so spectacularly popular (they still are) not only because he was a powerful thinker and writer. Kant translated the social world where everyone lived — the capitalist world — into concepts and language that instantly rang true. (If you don’t believe this, do a little digging in communities not yet or no longer dominated by commodity production and exchange.) Which brings us to Hegel’s heresy and (perhaps) our own.
Hegel was among a handful of early nineteenth century thinkers who read, understood, and disagreed with Kant. Hegel couched his disagreement in theological terms. Surely Kant must be aware that God has been active in history, in time, in things, from the beginning of the world. How could it be otherwise? What Kant counted as irresolvable antinomies — spirit/flesh, freedom/necessity, God/world — Hegel counted as essential elements of the Christian religion. God creates, establishes, and maintains relationships with creatures who are genuinely independent from God’s self. Their actions are not God’s actions. Their thoughts are not God’s thoughts. And, yet, they are in relationship. This relationship is what we call history. It unfolds over time. It reveals who God is and what creation is, over time. The absolute, qualitative difference between the transcendental and phenomenal worlds may make sense on paper, but history is not made up of paper. It is real. It is living. It is changing.
How is this heretical? It is heretical because it mistakes the driving force behind directionally dynamic change in the capitalist world — the immaterial value form of the commodity — for God the Creator. And the clearest evidence for this heresy is the fate at Hegel’s hands of God the Son.
I will admit, there is a macabre attraction to Hegel’s crucified God. This God finds echoes in late medieval and early modern representations of the beaten, mocked, crucified, dying and then lifeless body of the Lord. We therefore have to remind ourselves that under the conditions of early capitalism, this crucified God appears against the backdrop of the unblemished, no longer wounded, androgynous image of the risen and glorified Christ — the Cosmic Christ, we might say. These form two asymmetrical moments in the life of God. In Hegel’s story the sacrifice of the unblemished Lamb of God is necessary, but mercifully brief. Occupied Palestine, Roman guards, widows, orphans, lame, sick, and demon-possessed quickly retreat from view. What is revealed in the crucified God is the fate of every surface form of appearance under the conditions of commodity production and exchange. Every surface, including this divine surface, makes its brief, tortured, appearance only to be consumed and drawn back into a never-ending cycle of production, reproduction, consumption, and return.
We know this was Hegel’s reading, because he tells us it is. Here is what he wrote in a section of his Lectures on Aesthetics, a section critical of Kant’s interpretation of the divine.
This outward shaping which is itself annihilated in turn by what it reveals, so that the revelation of the content is at the same time a supersession of the revelation, is the sublime. This, therefore, differing from Kant, we need not place in the pure subjectivity of the mind and its Ideas of Reason; on the contrary, we must grasp it as grounded in the one absolute substance qua the content which is to be represented.
GWF Hegel, Aesthetics (Oxford UP, 1988), p. 363.
The “one absolute substance” that Protestant reformers mistook for Deus absconditus we can now appreciate as the abstract value form of the commodity. In it the surface of the Second Person of the Trinity makes a brief, tortured, appearance before retreating again into this self-moving substance that is subject. This is Hegel’s heresy. Is it also ours?