Absolute Idealism as a Necessary Condition for Sacramental or Other Theology

This book bridges the gap between the sacramental praxis of Christian religion, seemingly dependent upon naïve acceptance of phenomena in their immediacy, and the mediation of spiritual reality via philosophy of mind, and self-consciousness generally. Thus, it is a philosophy of incarnation as, inter alia, discrete essence of the Hegelian dialectic as the absorbing and thereby cancelling of finitude in the Absolute as its own Idea and, consequently, the total converse of pantheism. The Aristotelico-Hegelian concept of substance as mediated by visible "accidents", the phenomena, is essential here. Thus Nature, but not the substance, which is Nature's idea, is a self-conflicting phenomenon only, generating natural misconceptions in us, its offspring. Hence self-consciousness, the "I", is to be perfected in its self-confident development towards the Absolute Idea, with which each finite idea is identical in absorption and difference, while religion becomes absolutised in, or as, sophia, chief intellectual virtue according to Aquinas. Here, a new theology, product of faith, resumes the old. It is time to put it to work.