Systematic Assessment: Thomas and Hegel – Competition or Complementarity?
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Commonalities
Thomas and Hegel have more in common than their respective schools often admit:
Aristotelian roots: Both stand in the tradition of Aristotle – Thomas directly, Hegel through mediation. Both think in categories such as potency and act, form and matter, universal and particular.
Systematicity: Both strive for comprehensive systematicity. Both believe: the truth is the whole.
Mediation: Both are thinkers of mediation – against any dualism of spirit and matter, reason and faith, individual and community.
Trust in reason: Both believe that reason can grasp reality – even if in different ways.
Differences
But the differences are equally real:
Analogy vs. dialectic: For Thomas, the relation of God and world is analogical – similarity amid greater dissimilarity. For Hegel it is dialectical – but this does not mean “identity,” but mediation through difference.
Being vs. becoming: Thomas thinks from being – being is, it does not become. Hegel thinks from becoming – being itself is becoming, process, movement. But Thomas too knows becoming (potency that becomes actuality); and Hegel too knows the abiding (the logical structures that show themselves in the process).
Transcendence: For Thomas, God remains transcendent – infinitely above the world. For Hegel – on the traditional reading – this transcendence is itself a moment that is sublated in the process. But different readings of Hegel answer this differently: the metaphysical reading (Taylor) would emphasize a cosmic ontology. The anti-mystical readings (Stekeler, ours) show: the “Absolute” can be understood as “unavoidable” – the structures we cannot think away. Our reading additionally emphasizes: the Logic keeps the question of God open – it is compatible with theism and atheism, without compelling either side. The fundamental is always greater than all our concepts.
History: For Thomas, history is the place of salvation history, but not itself revelation. For Hegel – on the common reading – spirit necessarily realizes itself in history. But this image too is a caricature: Hegel’s philosophy of history was never deterministic. The “owl of Minerva” understands the past – it does not prognosticate the future. Reason does not automatically prevail – we must make it prevail. (-> Ch. 8.7, Thesis 2)
The Open Question
Are these differences unbridgeable? Or do they rest in part on misunderstandings – on both sides?
Our position: many of the traditional oppositions rest on mis-readings of Hegel – on caricatures that none of the serious lines of interpretation (metaphysical, anti-metaphysical, anti-mystical) represents. Hegel does not claim that God is identical with the world. He does not claim that reason grasps everything. He does not claim that truth is “merely” historical. He does not claim that history develops automatically toward the good.
What Hegel claims: for us, truth is always a process of truth. The question of truth is itself already the search for truth – and thereby we are already in the process Hegel describes. The question “Is there an eternal truth beyond the process?” is itself already part of the process.
This is compatible with Thomas’s position – if one does not read Thomas as a representative of naive realism, but as a thinker who knows that he too stands in the process of the search for truth.
The various readings of Hegel open up various possibilities for conversation with Thomas: the metaphysical reading emphasizes the ontological dimension, which is also important to Thomas. The anti-mystical readings (Stekeler, ours) show that one can share Hegel’s insights without making certain worldview pre-commitments – this enables a conversation that does not fail on preliminary questions.
The task would be to think being and becoming, analogy and dialectic, transcendence and immanence together – not as a lazy compromise, but as integration on a higher level. This task is not accomplished. It remains open for the future.
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Spiral-staircase cross-references:
- On the methodological clarification of readings of Hegel: cf. Ch. 7a.1 (Protestant Theology)
- On the question of historical determinism: cf. Ch. 8.7, Thesis 2 (Jewish Philosophy after Auschwitz)
- On Rahner and the transcendental turn: cf. Ch. 17a (Heinrichs)
- On liberation theology: cf. Ch. 14.3 (Latin America)
- On Balthasar’s aesthetics: cf. Ch. 18 (Postmodernism)
- On Lonergan: cf. Ch. 5a (Analytic Philosophy) – structural parallels