¹ E.g. Burns, Robert M., “The Agent Intellect in Rahner and Aquinas”, The Heythrop Journal, Vol. XXIX, No. 4, pp. 423450Google Scholar.

² Smith, Quentin, “Reply to Vallicella: Heidegger and Idealism”, International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 231235, New York 1991CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Hegel comments on Spinoza that “he does not define God as the unity of God with the world, but as the union of thought with extension … not Atheism but Acosmism” (Encyclopaedia, Logic 50, Wallace p. 105–6).

⁴ That it is Son and not daughter poses a potential problem for Christian development. A massive favouring of the male sex seems inescapably involved to which Marian devotion makes no difference at all, unless to stress the disparity, easily leading to a questioning of the historic incarnation in respect of its uniqueness, not in principle necessary as Aquinas for his part makes clear in the Summa theologiae IIIa. A line for the future may well be open here. However, Aquinas adds that such a plurality of individual human natures would all be united to the same divine person, if we prescind from possible incarnations (allowed by him) of the other two divine persons, in which case the Holy Spirit, for example, might fittingly assume a female human nature. Aquinas though considers it more fitting that fewer rather than many such incarnations would occur, whereas it is clear that here we have already envisaged a general coincidence, convergence rather, of human and divine.

⁵ As is brought out in a study of Western Christianity by Rudolph Steiner where he connects this loss with the person of Pope Nicholas I, the “Great”. The near-contemporary Libri Carolingi might also be cited, however.

⁶ Richard Gildas, Examen critique du jugement de Hegel sur la notion de création ex nihilo, on the Internet at http://philo.pourtous.free.fr/Articles/Gildas.

⁷ Lévinas, E., Totalité et infini, essai sur l'exteriorité, Paris, 1994, p. 107Google Scholar.

⁸ Bruaire, C., Logique et religion chrétienne dans la philosophie de Hegel, Paris: Ed. du Seuil 1964Google Scholar.

⁹ Aristotle, Metaphysics VII-IX.

¹⁰ “this … in Christ Jesus who, though he was in the form of God … emptied himself, taking the form of a slave … Wherefore God has exalted him …”Philippians 2.

¹¹ Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic 24.

¹² Aquinas, ST Ia 19, 2.

¹³ Herder, Freiburg, 1970.

¹⁴ Insofar as McTaggart's finite but timeless spirits are bound together by absolute reason, in consequent mutual love, his denial of God might not be thought to amount to much. This is a question we will leave open for the present, merely remarking, with Aquinas, that God is but the preferred name we give to the ultimate reality or first cause, which Aristotle had already called nous. If “I am the absolute source” (Merleau-Ponty), then indeed I will be God, as many Sufis would cheerfully agree. It is a dizzy prospect, however, and insofar as I am finite pure untruth, in Hegel's words. Regarding dizziness, however, we should add that just as some wish not to characterize the infinite as God, so some would not wish to put Hegelian reason as absolutely first, finding Dionysius superior to Apollo. This is perfectly allowable and well illustrated in the music contemporary with Hegel, “a greater revelation than the whole of religion and philosophy”, said its greatest practitioner. The dialectic is material to all these forms of the ultimate, divinity, reason, ecstasy, dance, as names taken from human life. For in the infinite Apollo and Dionysus are one.

¹⁵ For Aquinas, cf. CG III 149; S.T. Ia 105, 4; Ia-IIae 10, 2; also Ia 14, 13 ad 3; Ia-IIae 10, 4 ad 3 and D.V. 23, 5 ad 3.

¹⁶ H. De Lubac, The Drama of Atheistic Humanism

¹⁷ Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic 163. Maritain makes the same point in Christianity and Democracy. On this view the tension with secularism or atheism is as endemic, as belonging within Christendom, the West, as was the medieval conflict between Church and state. The United Nations is a European or Western creation.

¹⁸ Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, SW (German text) Vol. 16, pp. 306-7. J.N. Findlay, Walter Kaufmann, and some other interpreters exhibit a Procrustean ignorance of this and the corresponding texts in The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie, pp. 750-785).

¹⁹ Ibid. P.324.

²⁰ Ibid. P.341.

²¹ J. Maritain, op. cit. pp. 36-37.

²² Hegel, op. cit. P.298.

²³ Phenomenology of Mind (Baillie), pp. 758-9 (my emphasis).

²⁴ Küng, Hans, Menschwerdung Gottes, Herder, Freiburg 1970Google Scholar.

²⁵ Küng, op. cit., Excursus V.

²⁶ References to be found in Küng's text.

²⁷ Küng, op. cit. p. 552.

²⁸ Bonhoeffer, , Letters and Papers from Prison, London 1971Google Scholar.