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Speculation and Revelation In Modern Philosophy
By Richard Kroner
316 pp. Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1961. $6.50.

With this volume Kroner has completed his trilogy on the historical relations between speculative philosophy and Christian faith. A trilogy appears to be an appropriate vehicle for this history, since it falls into three distinct phases: the pre-Christian phase, when the Greek philosophical impulse developed in quest of something better than the popular polytheism against which it revolted, the medieval phase, when the endeavor was to fuse speculation and revelation in the form of a Christian philosophy (and a philosophical Christianity), and the modern phase, when philosophy has sought to come to terms, in one way or another, with the breakdown of that endeavor. The three phases do not follow the familiar Hegelian pattern, but one which might be more aptly compared to a sequence of courtship, marriage and divorce-or separation, if divorce is too strong a term; for, as Kroner demonstrates in this volume, the philosophy of the modern period, though it was emancipated from theological tutelage, has to a large extent continued to be occupied with theological themes, and in the Hegelian system it culminated in a claim to have caught the Christian revelation in a logical embrace.

The story begins with the disruption of the medieval synthesis by the Renaissance and the Reformation, which attacked it from opposite sides; the Renaissance sought to restore the independence and integrity of philosophical speculation, the Reformation that of the Christian revelation. Yet neither was able to make a complete break. The philosophy of the Renaissance, in seeking to exalt the dignity of man, even to the point of deification, drew heavily on its Christian heritage. The Reformation could not distil the pure essence of the Christian faith from the cultural complex with which it had been blended for centuries, and it shared the preoccupation of the Renaissance with the problem of man, who is the subject of faith as well as of thought. In this latter concern, moreover, both had a common interest against natural science, the other great factor in the rise of the modern world, which tended to degrade man to an object of nature. Descartes's famous and much-criticized bifurcation, Kroner contends, was not a mistake, but a merit; and it has its counterpart at the end of the story in Kierkegaard's protest against the absorption of the individual in the dialectical process of

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Hegel. Indeed, the whole philosophical endeavor of the modern period could be described as the quest for man's place and significance in a universe which the Copernican revolution had transformed from a magnified three-story house, in which man had felt comfortable and secure, into a vast, formless infinity of space.

The problem of man became dominant with the development of scientific method in the seventeenth century. Of the four great philosophers of this century, all of whom were interested in science, it was Pascal who felt the problem most keenly and who realized most clearly that it could not be subjected to the methods of science. This is why he could not forgive his great compatriot, Descartes; for Descartes, despite his bifurcation of thinking subject and thought object, had sacrificed the former to the latter by objectifying it as a thinking substance. The system of the Jew, Spinoza, presents a caricature of the Christian paradox; for if the individual finds himself here, it is only by losing himself in God. It is in Leibniz that the individual really begins to come into his own; he is not absorbed in nature, nor is he a mode of the divine substance; he is a player in an orchestra, of which God is the conductor and the composer of the music (pre-established harmony).

Could the clue to the enigma be found in experience? This was the direction chosen by the founders of British empiricism, in which Kroner discerns a characteristically British disposition in philosophy (though it is puzzling to know why John Buridan should be cited as an example of it). But Kroner takes a poor view of the empiricists, because, while they professed to build on experience, they really abstracted from experience one fragmentary element, that of sensuous impressions, and thus condemned themselves to the impossible task of making epistemological without straw. Moreover, they persistently confused psychology with epistemology, the question of the genesis of knowledge with that of its validity. Locke is presented as the worst offender; his work is full of confusion and inconsistency. And even the much more judicious and circumspect Hume is charged with self-contradiction; for while he contested the validity of causality, he thought he had found the "cause" of our belief in causation. (But does this not mean that Hume saw the difference between psychology and epistemology?)

The development of German idealism from Kant to Hegel is a field in which Kroner is an acknowledged authority, and the chapters devoted to it in this book are richly illuminating. The greatness of Kant's achievement is well brought out, as are also its residual problems: How do we know that the data of sense obey the rules which the transcendental understanding prescribes for them? Did Kant drive the ontological argument out of the door, only to have it creep in again by the cellar-

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window? Is his "rational faith" a genuine product of reason, as he understood reason, or an etiolated version of the Biblical faith he had learned from his mother?

In the Critique of Judgment Kant found in the beautiful and the organic a harmony between the sensuous and the ideal of reason, since each represents a kind of wholeness, but he allowed it only subjective validity. The artist is the creator of this unity. Kant's romantic successors believed that the epistemological circumscription he had imposed could be transcended in the Absolute, in which unity was raised to universal dimensions. This unity is apprehended by art and intuition rather than by intellect. To intellect it poses the problem how the Absolute can be relative, or, in theological terms, how God can co-exist with his creation. To this, "the hardest and toughest mystery the human mind confronts, the mystery of creation," Schelling was led more and more in the later phases of his thought, and in seeking a solution in a speculative interpretation of the Trinity as a compound of unity and diversity, he laid the groundwork for Hegel's philosophy of religion and for Karl Barth's trinitarian speculations.

The developments culminates with Hegel, whom Kroner presents as the Protestant Aquinas: "As Thomism developed the classical speculative synthesis of antiquity and Christianity suggested by the Roman brand of Christianity, so Hegel formulated the same synthesis suggested by the Protestant version" (p. 283). He found a magical instrument in the dialectic, with which he was able to resolve all antitheses, not only that between man and God, but also that between creation and fall (which has often been so troublesome to theologians), and in the end, even that between good and evil. Indeed, when Kroner, after completing his exposition of Hegel, steps back to survey the "immense high-vaulted palace," he cannot refrain from asking whether the antithesis between sense and nonsense has not been aufgehoben.

The book ends with the story of the Hegelian system and its dissolution. In a brief epilogue Kroner treats of Hegel's archcritic, Kierkegaard. While he expresses basic agreement with Kierkegaard's attack on Hegel's speculative interpretation of the Christian faith, he is not certain that Kierkegaard did full justice to Hegel or that he did not himself engage in clandestine speculation.

The author holds that no significant developments have taken place since that time; and if speculation is understood as the creation of speculative systems, he is no doubt correct. The age of systems is over-at least for the present (unless some are being built clandestinely by theologians with bricks from the rubble of Hegel's palace). The conversation between philosophy and theology has not been broken off,

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but it has assumed other forms, and these do not come within the scope of the book.

The book is to be commended to all students of the period. It is clearly written, the thought advances at a steady pace and much familiar ground is illuminated in a fresh and stimulating way. Not everyone will agree with all of Kroner's judgments, but everyone will recognize that they are solidly based.

Some readers may feel it is a weakness of the book that they have to guess what the author means by revelation and how he understands it to be related to speculation. To be sure, it is not too difficult (though when the reader encounters "sacred theology" in the first sentence of the Introduction, he may rub his eyes and wonder if he got off at the wrong station), and there is a fairly clear hint on the last page of the book. But is this revelation, which "must ultimately take the place of speculation where the relation to the Absolute is at stake," more than a postulate of critical reason? Would the history of philosophical speculation perhaps read differently in the light of real revelation?

George S. Hendry
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey