Nicholas Adams’ Eclipse of Grace: Divine and Human Action in Hegel seeks to take Hegel seriously as a thinker who speaks to theologians today. His book centres on three distinct texts from Hegel's oeuvre, picked in light of their theological relevance. The greater part of the book is a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on the final chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the final chapter of Science of Logic and the final chapter of Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.
Adams aims to write simply and clearly. He does not get lost in Hegel's own terms, but seeks to translate the difficult notions into more intuitive and commonsense formulations which are open to readers unfamiliar with Hegel.
What is Hegel's concern according to Adams? Hegel is out to overcome errant logics which produce false oppositions. How? Through elaborating an alternative logic of distinctness in inseparable relation. Hegel's chief concern is thus to present alternative ‘logics’ – not an ontology. Throughout the book, this is Adams’ line: most times he seems to struggle with a particular passage, the reader only has to wait for a page or so to find that Hegel is actually overcoming false oppositions through elaborating an alternative logic of distinctness in inseparable relation.
An example: what is at stake in the dialectic itself and, further, in elaborating the relationship between the finite and the infinite? ‘The Science of Logic has shown beyond doubt that there is an alternative logic, in which such false oppositions [between the finite and the infinite] do not appear, and are replaced by an account in which they are pairs – distinct, but in relation’ (p. 161). ‘Pairs’ (distinct but in relation) is an important notion for Adams’ reading of the Science of Logic, spanning everything from ‘Being and Nothing’ to ‘bread and butter’ (p. 9). While he acknowledges that sometimes the text might suggest that Hegel is not exclusively focused on pairs, ultimately, when we get to the end of the Logic we find that Hegel was all along concerned with the ‘gigantic pair’ of subjectivity and objectivity (p. 131): ‘This, then, is the shape of the Science of Logic. It is a logic that seeks to display the relations exhibited in pairs (or more-than-pairs), and which describes the process of thinking which grasps pairs as pairs as one that displays “movement” from concept to concept’ (p. 131).
There is a theological twist to the story. An alternative logic of distinctness in relation that overcomes false oppositions is a Chalcedonian logic – as opposed to a Manichaean logic. To Adams, the Chalcedonian form of thinking represents the highest attainable truth tout court, where the ‘false opposition between thinking and being’ is overcome (p. 76). And once Spirit achieves this, ‘it has no further transformations ahead of it: it cannot be surpassed. It is Chalcedonian thinking (p. 76). Nonetheless, it is not easy to see what Hegel's original contribution is – besides applying ‘Chalcedonian thinking’ to every conceivable aspect of reality.
For Adams, any given passage in Hegel leads to the insight that false oppositions can be overcome by elaborating a Chalcedonian logic, emphasising distinctness in inseparable relation. From the second to last sentence of the book: if theologians keep Hegel in mind, ‘scripture might be the source of an alternative logic in which false oppositions are overcome, including the false oppositions which blight modern philosophy after Descartes’ (p. 227).
Eclipse of Grace is a good introduction to Hegel for those readers who have yet to engage his philosophy. By including large parts of Hegel's original texts and providing a detailed commentary, Adams shows us just how demanding and difficult the interpretation of these texts and thoughts can be; yet he admirably succeeds in demonstrating how rewarding it also is for theologians to engage with Hegel's own texts. In sum, Eclipse of Grace lets Hegel speak and shows us why we ought to listen to him.
