VOL. IV (XXI) 2009 - Departamentul de Filosofie si Stiinte ale ...

FLORIN LOBONŢ 44
confirmed by the “philosopher’s construction of the universe”; but, the Oxford
don warns, the truth of the Christian creeds is not a ready-made truth,
already given to us: “it is for us to make it true” by truly serving God, that is,
by becoming “freethinkers in religion”, free followers of truth and reason,
where truth must be seen as “an infinite process of thought towards God”,
not as a starting point, given once for all; for it “is not given, it is lived”. Only
in this “fullness of life” God is really revealed to us. Otherwise
[t]he creeds, the philosophies, the proofs of the
existence of God, may easily become idols. We can be
sure that we are not idolaters only if we are willing to
pass through the depths of doubt and despair and
infidelity in order to recover, beyond these shadows, the
God in whom we hope to believe—in whom we hope to
be worthy to believe. The path towards belief, or rather
the path which is belief, is a path beset by idols which
only the most determined effort of thought can
overthrow. 38
From a philosophical point of view, the most faithful and efficient
means towards this end is the “new idealism”, whose roots were
“adumbrated by Kant and Hegel”, and which has —just like its utmost end,
namely Christianity—“never yet been fully worked out,” and will never be.
In Collingwood’s view, the Kantian opening towards this solution was
substantially corrected by Hegel; for the Kantian revision of knowledge based
on the distinction between the a priori and empirical forms of knowledge was
still impregnated with “common-sense realism”. Hegel denied this distinction
and identified the “nature” of mind with the process of its historical
development under the form given by the transformation exercised by the
progressive self-consciousness of mind upon the forms and content of its
experience. As regards the consequences of this general view for religion,
Hegel’s claim that der absolute Geist “makes its own nature” by subjectively
realizing itself 39 implies, according to Collingwood, that “God, [who is in fact
nothing but the nature of mind] is thus conceived as immanent in the world of
phenomena.” 40 In other words, if viewed exclusively from the perspective
suggested by these philosophers “God” turns out to be a figurative way of
expressing the philosophical principle of the unity of the mind. And since the
rejection of the “common-sense realism” requires the abolition of the
ontological distinction between thought and object, that is, between mind and
world, it follows that, with the help of Hegel, the “God of the Philosophers”
will represent only the symbol for the rational intelligibility, or unity, of the
world.
Following Hegel, Collingwood denied the necessity to thought, claimed
by Kant, of postulating the existence of an unknowable noumenal realm or
transcendental object. As regards the Christian God, Hegel has rejected the