‘Every God Has a Devil for a Father’: The Disappearing of the Devil in Hegel

by Jay Martin

This is the third installment in a series of essays on Adam Kotsko’s work, which came out of the roundtable ‘Close Encounter: Adam Kotsko’ from the 2025 conference of the Association for Philosophy and Literature. Read Peter Gratton’s introduction here, essays by Nils Richber and Peter Gratton, and a response from Adam Kotsko.

Prelude

My essay poses the question of the relative absence of Satan in the philosophy of Hegel.^[1] As much as my focus will be on Hegel, it also proceeds in a fundamentally Hegelian way, at least as far as it begins with recognition. For those of us gathered here today, the occasion to recognize the work of Adam Kotsko, not merely the occasion for tribute, though tribute is certainly due, but also to invest ourselves in a certain kind of ‘struggle for recognition’, as Hegel formulates it in the Phenomenology of Spirit. As I see it, that struggle is self-constituting on the grounds that the self-articulation implicit in the advancement of any sort of argument bears, or at least ought to bear, the intersubjective conditions that have formed it. The most proximate struggle for recognition, as I would expect it collectively among the contributors to this panel, is to take account of the reception of a certain kind of gift, which, on Hegel’s understanding, is contractual and mutual, and to render the self as so bequeathed. Thus, such a task and the struggle to perform it is both irreducibly social and political. Moreover, it is also obligatory without being compulsive, free to proceed in the mode of gratitude, which for me reaches the theological. Gratitude, thus in general and on the particular occasion of expressing gratitude for someone’s discrete scholarly achievement, is one of the few ways in which theology resists eliding the socio-political.

This essay is my attempt, first, to express gratitude, but, second, to present an argument about the place of Satan in Hegel’s thought that reflects Kotsko’s influence and applies his insights, properly indexing the intersubjective character of my contribution. First, gratitude. Though it is certainly hard to imagine the state of Anglophone Agamben studies without the numerous and excellent English translations that he has brought to us, Kotsko’s constructive work is the record of one of North America’s most creative and diverse theological thinkers, and certainly one of its hardest working. Translation work is notoriously thankless—my gratitude today notwithstanding—but it is worth noting that in addition to the scale of these translations, there is the matter of the range and facility of their respective subject matters, from Agamben’s works on theology, philosophy, literature and so forth.

Kotsko’s constructive work, however, is my present occupation. From his earliest books on Slavoj Žižek and soteriology to later work on Agamben, his influences and trajectories, politics, the nature of theology, and, what occupies us today, the Devil, Kotsko’s canon is exemplary of the Nietzschean virtue of Redlichkeit, that ‘genuine honesty’ that yokes both love and malice toward the end of an intractable harshness of intellect, as Nietzsche says in Beyond Good & Evil. Nietzsche goes on to say, very helpfully I might add:

And we will help it out with whatever devilishness we have—our disgust at clumsiness and approximation, our ‘nitimur in vetitum’, our adventurer’s courage, our sly and discriminating curiosity, our subtlest, most hidden, most spiritual will to power and world-overcoming, which greedily rambles and raves out of every realm of the future,—we will bring all of ‘our devils’ to help out our ‘god’.^[2]

We need not try to match Nietzsche rhapsody for rhapsody, but with gratitude I can now turn to what I consider Kotsko’s most redlich work, 2016’s The Prince of this World.

Rather than treat the book as a whole, I will summarize what I take to be its central achievement with attention to the conceptual apparatus he constructs that is most pertinent to Hegel. What I find so interesting about Kotsko’s methodology in The Prince of this World is that he performs an Agambenian transformation of Walter Benjamin’s trope of the puppet and the dwarf. On the one hand, though the genealogy of Foucault and Agamben, as well as Benjamin’s critique of historical materialism are not exactly the same thing, there is at least a thick analogy between them. On both accounts, the actually existing unfolding of history remains primary, yet the developmental necessitarianism of Hegel and Marx, respectively, is weakened such that discontinuities and reversals that interrupt and punctuate historical development can come to the fore. On the other hand, however, though the discursive focus of genealogy attends to base causal forces in its account of the development of concepts and power relations, it is not content to remain at the level of causal or otherwise developmental analysis. Benjamin’s genius lies, then, in the identification of the hidden force of theology within historical development while retaining genuine theological elements, most notably his redemptive messianism. Yet, Benjamin, in my view, is still in the business of the causal analysis of history, which remains a different, though complementary, project with respect to Foucault’s.

The Agambenian transformation evident in The Prince of this World is more than a mere reversal that simply unmasks the Dwarf Theology to reveal that it was politics all along, but rather to draw theology and politics into a zone of indistinction. This transformation has the benefit of structuring the theology-politics relationship in a way that is parallel to the register of indistinctions elaborated in Agamben’s critique of biopolitics. The net effect for both Kotsko and Agamben is an explanatory power with respect to how certain discourses function and, in fact, succeed by creating the instability and ambiguity between what appear to be distinct categories and then weaponizing them. The history of Satan that Kotsko elaborates works in the same way. The point is not merely to show that recourse to Satan is made at some times for theological ends and at others for political ones, but rather that the theological and political become indistinct and that that indistinction catalyzes its dissemination.

Moreover, Kotsko shows that, however much ‘Satan’ and its glosses constitute a ‘sick sign’ in Culianu’s sense (as he critiques Voegelin), it is no less indispensable grammatically to any Christian theological language that admits a socio-political register. Or nearly any politically-realist Christian theology. I have long been puzzled by the virtual absence of Satan in Hegel’s thought on both extramural and intramural grounds. Though there are a handful of mentions, Hegel accords the Devil no real significance. Moreover, at least in some of those instances, the appearance of Satan functions as the precise point at which theology shows its inherent limitations. It is hard to conceive of a more supple means to interrogate this question than what is outlined in The Prince of this World and for at least three good reasons. First, Kotsko is attentive to matters of absence throughout his genealogical account, at times pointing to merely apparent absences and others to true absences but all pointing to occasions in which we do not see what we expect to see or at least not see something in the way that we might expect; for instance, the absence of God’s ‘mercy, generosity and love’ in Anselm or the role of the demons in Thomas’s account of damnation. Second, absences are already seen to operate genealogically (at least in nuce), which is to say within that they are constitutive in part of the vicissitudes of power and the interpretations they engender. It is not the case that all absences are equally significant or significant at all, but it does set the criteria for their possible significance. Third, following Nietzsche, it acknowledges the causal overdetermination of ideas. If there is no one reason to punish someone, as Kotsko refers to Foucault, there is likewise no one reason that can account for the presence or absence of an idea. Thus, we are in the business of charting, in Kotsko’s language, the ‘strategic location at a point where a number of contradictory forces converge’. Granted, Kotsko does not treat absence to the degree I will, but he does not really need to.

Hegel and Satan: Extramural Considerations

Contextually, it is curious that Hegel does not engage the figure of Satan or deploy Satanic language to any significant degree; I will discuss shortly the scant few passages that might appear to contradict this claim. As Kotsko shows, a very real and personal supernatural Satan is of the utmost theological importance and utility for Martin Luther, to say nothing of their purported pugilistic encounters. Satan figures prominently in the thought of the Lutheran mystic Jacob Boehme, though in a much more speculative kind of way. In Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, the ever-dour Kant retains the idiom of Satan and the satanic as the personification of the Grenzbegriff of maximal moral reprehensibility, as well as a way of characterizing particular evil acts. Lessing celebrates a Miltonian Lucifer in Nathan the Wise; Schiller does something similar. Though Goethe’s Faust depicts Mephistopheles and not Lucifer strictly speaking, it still counts. Friedrich Schlegel, in fact, credits the German poets not only with a more satanic Satan but with his very invention.^[3] The Lucifer of Schelling’s Offenbarung resembles Boehme’s but situates him as a necessary reality within the economy of revelation. And on and on. The claim, of course, is not that Satan appears unequivocally in Hegel’s Germany and before, but rather that the language is sufficiently ubiquitous as it is constructive, such that it effectively raises the question of its absence in Hegel, which is a question of how as much as it is of why.

Hegel and Satan: Intramural Considerations

With respect to Hegel’s own philosophy and theology, Satan’s absence seems to make even less sense. On the one hand, Hegel’s philosophy takes itself to encompass the whole of Christian revelation and its doctrinal elements, especially creation, Trinity, Christology, pneumatology, soteriology and eschatology. Granted, Hegel effects radical transformations—or, if we follow Cyril O’Regan, derangements^[4]—of the grammar of Christian theological discourse; he nonetheless retains its elements. Moreover, if O’Regan, William Desmond and Glenn Magee are right on the matter of the influence of various gnostic, hermetic, or otherwise heterodox influences, the absence of the Devil bears a further layer of complication, especially in light of Hegel’s proximity to Schelling. Even more, though Hegel’s developmental logic of the unfolding of Spirit does entail that the system of Christian representation (Vorstellung) is definitely surpassed, those representations retain their provisional importance as the means by which immanent thought is realized.^[5] In other words, all Theologie is Bildtheologie, which would seem to give Hegel considerable license with respect to Lucifer. Certainly, the options are there. Yet Hegel avails himself of none of them. Thus, my claim, in short, is that Hegel does not simply ignore the Devil but actively disappears him.

Toward a Genealogy of Absence

What Kotsko shows so convincingly is that the theological history of the Devil is not entirely explicable in terms of theological necessity, and that it retains its theological authority as a function of its historical, political and social situatedness. With respect to Hegel, the disappearing of the Devil could be neither wholly theological nor philosophical; in fact, we have enumerated some of the reasons to think Hegel could have engaged the figure of Satan profitably. In short, Hegel might have theological-philosophical motivations for eliding the figure of the Devil, but my argument is that none of them are necessary or sufficient to account for it. Moreover, I take myself to be following Kotsko insofar as that for the figures and sources who do engage Satan, those necessary and sufficient theological conditions do not obtain either.

The atheist Bakunin might serve as a point of reference. The emancipatory figure of Satan in God and the State is well known, as is Bakunin’s counterfactual reversal of Voltaire, ‘If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him’.^[6] Bakunin’s abolition of God is predicated precisely upon the kind of reversal that Kotsko illustrates in which God and the Devil swap roles. For Bakunin, the self-professed ‘jealous lover of human liberty’, ‘[I]f God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him’ (GS, 27-8, emphasis added). To be clear, Bakunin is well aware that Christians identify God as the source of human (and angelic) freedom, but he argues that such a view ‘fl[ies] in the face of good common sense and all the teachings of history’ (GS, 27). Satan, on the other hand, no longer the angelic cuckold to human freedom as mainline Christianity describes, emerges as ‘the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds’ (GS, 10). In other words, on Bakunin’s account, the divine gift of unrestrained freedom is received and realized only by Satan, which means, ex hypothesi, that the slavery that constitutes the human condition must be divinely ordained and ordered.

As Kotsko shows, what is determinate for Christian theological language, at least in the first order, is the question of the function of free will—that is, that it functions—rather than in what that function consists and to what ends. In his treatment of the Augustinian account of the Fall of Satan, Kotsko notes:

We are confronted with a strange and disturbing view of the function of free will… [F]reedom does not exist to enhance the devil’s dignity or enable his fellowship with God—instead, it provides the pretext for his depravity and exclusion. In light of the randomness of his choice, the devil’s freedom has meaning only retrospectively.^[7]

In other words, the function of free will in such systems is merely to disclose that it functions. Its meaning appears only in retrospection. The hidden supplement, as Kotsko shows, is the question of legitimacy and how legitimacy indexes the ‘complex dynamics of retroactive responsibility’, all of which mirrors the logic of the Angelic Fall (PW, 184). Take, for instance, a striking parallel between Bakunin and Luther: Bakunin makes an equivalence between and identification of the ruling classes with God in a way analogous to Luther’s equivalence between and identification of the Jews and Satan. That Luther could appeal to Satan and Bakunin to God for something like the same purpose marks how those complex dynamics effectively produce the content of divine or satanic ascription, or at least how it is that such slippage and reversals occur so easily between them.

On this point, we come to a fascinating parallel with Hegel’s account of revelation. For Hegel, divine revelation reveals that God reveals godself and that alone: ‘In the Christian religion it is known that God has revealed godself, and the very being of God consists in revealing godself. Revealing is self-distinguishing; what has been revealed is precisely that God is revelatory’ (PW, 184). The meaning of revelation, then, unfolds likewise retrospectively but developmentally with increasingly higher stages of consciousness. Thus, discrete presences and absences in Hegel should be seen in light of this developmental retrospection that characterizes the world-historical movement of Spirit. For this reason, we must not confuse absence and negativity; an absence is that which prescinds positivity and negativity altogether. Whereas negativity catalyzes the dialectical process, absence is inert with respect to it. I think this point has two important implications. First, what is absent in Hegel is strictly speaking meaningless insofar as it does not become an object of retrospection as such, which is the condition for meaning to emerge. To say that the Devil is absent in Hegel is likewise to say that the Devil has no meaning, which is also to say that the notion of the Devil is unnecessary with respect to the development of history and consciousness that would have brought it to retrospection. Second, absence is a static exclusion for Hegel, which can be intentional or accidental with no real effect either way. The Hegelian presumption is totality such that every part or sublated stage of development is in some way retained, and that necessity of the developmental processes implies, if not demands, the presence and persistence of its base terms. In other words, it is not incumbent upon Hegel to account for an absence; an absence accounts for itself.

The Editorial Hegel: Absenting and Disappearing

In full disclosure, it is worth recalling that my argument is not merely that Satan is absent in Hegel’s thought, but that Hegel disappears him—that is, actively renders him absent. I also issued a promissory note about how the precious few mentions of Satan do not contradict my argument but, in fact, support it. Hegel does, in fact, refer to Satan. In the early The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate (1798), Hegel discusses the temptation of Christ, yet mention of Satan appears only in a citation from Mark’s gospel. The devil, on Hegel’s reading, seems to play no significant role within the temptation. During those forty days in the wilderness, Christ’s spirit ‘detached itself from the consciousness of everyday affairs’,^[8] rather than having undergone any sort of demonic contest of wills.

In The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel predominantly uses the notion of Satan to show the limitations of theological-representational language. First, in his explication of the emergence of evil, Hegel presents the fall of Lucifer as co-present in the creation of evil, but with an interesting qualification:

It can therefore [on account of Hegel’s account of the creation of evil] be said that it is the very first-born Son of Light [Lucifer] himself who fell because he withdrew into himself or became self-centred, but that in his place another was at once created. Such a form of expression as ‘fallen’ which, like the expression ‘Son’, belongs, moreover, to picture-thinking and not to the Notion, degrades the moments of the Notional to the level of picture-thinking or carries picture-thinking over to the realm of thought. Likewise, it makes no difference if we co-ordinate a multiplicity of other shapes with the simple thought of otherness in the eternal Being and transfer the self-centredness into them.^[9]

In other words, what is at stake for Hegel is the characterization of otherness in and constitutive of God in se, which could be represented pictorially by Satan or any of ‘a multiplicity of other shapes’—‘it makes no difference’. In his analysis of this passage, J.N. Findlay sees the point quite clearly:

Evil is the first actual expression of the dirempted self-consciousness, but it is the one that self-consciousness as it deepens must more and more repudiate. Pictorially, therefore, it is referred back to an infinitely remote date, to the fall from heaven of Lucifer. […] The angelic hosts enter the picture as a valuable pluralization of the being-for-self of the Word (PS, 587).

Interestingly, Findlay might be according more value to Satan than Hegel does. Hegel’s fundamental concern in the Phenomenology is, first, to establish plurality in God such that evil (or anything else) has no origin outside of God, and, second, to register evil as something to be overcome within God’s own self-becoming, which Hegel elaborates in the following passages of the Phenomenology. The Bild of Satan or anything like him is not only provisional but empty. It matters only that the origin of evil and its dialectical overcoming in God can be pictured (abgebildet), not in what or in whom that picture consists.

In both the 1824 and 1827 philosophy of religion lectures, Hegel mentions the Devil in the context of Boehme, though his treatment is both abbreviated and selective. Readers of Boehme’s Aurora, for instance, will recall the remarkable degree of speculative energy devoted to angelology, demonology, heavenly spirits and the relation to God far in excess of simply serving the purpose of introducing notions, as we see in Hegel. In the 1824 lectures, Hegel follows Boehme insofar as the Fall of Satan depicts the dynamics of each side of the differentiation within God and the world, which is all very complicated but mercifully less than pertinent. On Hegel’s reading, the Boehmean image of Lucifer’s fall can be dispensed with upon arriving at the truth of this aspect of God’s self-becoming: ‘Jacob Boehme represented it as the Fall of Lucifer and the begetting of another son in his place’.^[10] It serves as an image of how, from the perspective on God’s self-becoming, the determinate temporality and spatiality that constitute the world emerge from a sort of fall within God’s godself. In 1827, Hegel refers back to the 1824 lectures simply to reiterate that what is begotten in Lucifer’s place is in fact the external world and not the divine Son, before going on to explain why. Later in the Encyclopedia, harkening back the 1827 religion lectures, Hegel more clearly identifies the creation of the world as a fall (Zusatz, §247) and that subordinates Boehme’s myth of the Lucifer’s Fall to the negativity of nature: ‘Such ideas (Vorstellungen), which occur wildly in orientalizing taste, have their reason and their meaning in the negative nature of nature’.^[11] At no point, on my reading, is it clear that the language of Satan serves any purpose beyond introducing concepts.

Throughout, I argue, we see Hegel enacting controls on the image of Satan beyond simply identifying him as mere Vorstellung. Rather, Lucifer only falls in Hegel’s thought in order to provide the conceptual basis for the self-becoming of evil and for the creation of the world.^[12] O’Regan writes:

In Hegel, Luciferian involution [O’Regan’s gloss of Lucifer’s self-withdrawal, self-centredness and fall] is not identified as the act of the other of God, but rather as the act of the othering of God. Moreover, the Luciferian fall appears, not merely to narratively precede the creation of the world of nature and finite spirit, but is actually identified with it. (HH, 156)

It is not entirely clear what all O’Regan sees entailed by this actual identification, but it seems to entail at least that whatever it is that Luciferian fall is taken to mean in mainline Christian traditions must give way to this identification. Thus, the disappearance of the Devil at the hands of Hegel occurs on two levels. The first is grammatical. If I am correct in arguing that the Devil serves only to introduce concepts, then it seems to follow that Satan is at most a ‘valuable pluralization’ of a Hegelian concept, one that was, in a Heideggerian sense, ready-to-hand. Second, there is a way in which Hegel’s use of Satan constitutes a strange ontotheological disappearance, again on two levels. Strictly speaking, Satan disappears into God. The differentiation within God that the Luciferian Fall represents is, in fact, overcome by and in God, yet seems to exclude itself from totality. Even as a sublated term, Satan seems to be bereft of any personality, particularity, or status beyond the personification of a concept. Hegel’s Satan is no tempter or heavenly rebel, and certainly no cosmic rival to God; he is simply a bit part in God’s becoming. What we are left with is a strange, nearly Dantean scene: Satan, who fell through his own self-withdrawing and self-centeredness, experiences in Hegel’s thought the continuation of his involution to a near-zero point.

 

Conclusion

The conclusion is typically where the author tries to assure the reader of the doubts that the author actually has. I will not do that. Not because I do not have them, but because I do not have time to address them. Instead, I am going to conclude by gesturing toward the socio-political pressures that might have shaped Hegel’s philosophical theology. In Prince of this World, Kotsko demonstrates that despite magisterial and doctrinal pronouncements to the contrary, the tacit assumption within the Christian theological tradition is that Satan represents a rival to God—a rival in terms of power, a rival in terms of claims to worldly legitimacy and so forth. He also shows how that tacit assumption was enlisted by and modulated with respect to the actually existing historical moment and its socio-political needs. On Kotsko’s account, the apocalypticization of the figure of Satan and his full elevation to divine rival comes to fruition in the advent of Antiochus Epiphanes and the profanation of the Temple. As compelling as I find his figuration of Antiochus, Hegel does represent a form of apocalypticism outside of Kotsko’s scope. If it is in fact Antiochus who ‘inspire[s] the development of the entire system of apocalyptic symbolism’ (PW, 41), what sense can be made of Hegel’s apocalyptic that seems not to prioritize those same symbols?

In the foregoing account, I have tried to show how Hegel has liquidated such imagery with respect to the Devil. Moreover, as Hegel reads John’s Apocalypse, his interpretive task is entirely with respect to his own philosophy. Thomas Altizer sees the problem and suggests that its resolution lies in distinguishing between ancient and modern apocalyptic, such that the modern represents the sublation of its ancient forms. Where ancient (or biblical) apocalyptic thinking ‘aris[es] out of the breakdown of a previous form of faith’,^[13] which could have reached its apotheosis with Antiochus, Altizer argues that modern apocalyptic is a certain kind of dialectical thinking, which for him is typified in the death of God. He argues elsewhere that nothing is so unique in apocalypticism as is its enactment of a new totality, an absolute novum that is the polar opposite of a primordial totality, but a novum in full apocalypticism that is already dawning or near at hand’,^[14] and in its modern valence this is correlated with the consummation of history, which Hegel both anticipates and ‘embodies’. In other words, Hegel’s is an apocalyptic vision of a new totality, the achievement of a form of dialectical thinking that thinks its own immanent nearness.

Yet Altizer focuses on the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic, rather strangely neglecting Hegel’s political philosophy—the Philosophy of Right in particular. Recalling Hegel’s Doppelsatz in The Philosophy of Right—‘[w]hat is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational’^[15]—we should expect Hegel to bristle at Altizer’s entrenchment of apocalyptic in the register of myth and the ‘mythical world’ (DAM, 312), which, despite its historical impetus, remains there. For Hegel, ‘It is God’s way in the world that the state exists’ (EPR, 233-4). Moreover:

The state is actual, and its actuality consists in the fact that the interest of the whole realizes itself through the particular ends. Actuality is always the unity of universality and particularity, the resolution of universality into particularity; the latter then appears to be self-sufficient, although it is sustained and supported only by the whole. If this unity is not present, nothing can be actual, even if it may be assumed to have existence [Existenz]. (EPR, 302)

So it is the presence of disunity that sets against actuality, whether it be the actuality of God or the state. Thus, if Hegel admits even the logical possibility of a rival to God, he must admit the same for the state—and vice versa.

Continue reading with the introduction to this series, and essays by Nils Richber and Peter Gratton, and a response from Adam Kotsko.

1. The quotation in the title is from Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, volume 10, 195: ‘Alles Gute ist die Verwandlung eines Bösen; jeder Gott hat einen Teufel zum Vater’. ↑

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), 228. ↑

3. Friedrich Schlegel, Fragmentensammlungen (Kritische Fragmente, Blüthenstaub, Athenäums-Fragmente, Ideen), 1797-98. Athenäums-Fragmente, 379. ↑

4. See Cyril O’Regan, Gnostic Return in Modernity (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2001). ↑

5. For a particular clear articulation of this view, see G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1825-6: Volume I: Introduction and Oriental Philosophy, Together with the Introductions from the Other Series of these Lectures, edited by Robert F. Brown, translated by R.F. Brown and J.M. Stewart (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2009), 161. ↑

6. Bakunin, God and the State (New York, Sotina Publishing, 2013), 28. Henceforth cited as GS. ↑

7. Adam Kotsko, The Prince of this World (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2017), 131. Henceforth cited as PW. ↑

8. G.W.F. Hegel, Early Theology Writings, translated by T. M. Knox and Richard Kroner (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 276. ↑

9. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977), §776, 468. Henceforth cited as PS. ↑

10. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 3, The Consummate Religion, edited by Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 200. ↑

11. G.W.F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse: Zweiter Teil: Die Naturphilosophie Mit den mündlichen Zusätzen, 30. My translation. ↑

12. See O’Regan’s discussion in The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1994), 155-7. Henceforth cited as HH. ↑

13. Thomas J.J. Altizer, ‘The Dialectic of Ancient and Modern Apocalyptic’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39:3 (September 1971), 312–20, 312. Henceforth cited as DAM. ↑

14. Thomas J.J. Altizer, ‘Apocalypticism and Modern Thinking’, Journal for Christian Theological Research 2, 1. Available at https://digitalcommons.luthersem.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=jctr. Consulted 28 September 2025. ↑

15. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, translated by H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), 20. Henceforth cited as EPR. Quoted in Robert Stern, ‘Hegel’s Doppelsatz: A Neutral Reading’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:2 (2006), 235. Stern’s article gives an excellent overview of the distinction between Existenz and Wirklichkeit in Hegel’s thought. ↑