Abstract

Professor Crites comes to his task with deep personal sympathy for and philosophic commitment to each of the protagonists in his volume. The subject of Crites’ work is not the tension of faith and history with which we are familiar in the works of Strauss, Baur, Feuerbach, Renan, and M. Arnold, but rather the tension of Christianity and culture. Crites chooses for his departure the notion and analogy of "domesticity," the accommodation, or lack thereof, of the gospel and the world. With a fairness that is singularly unique among Hegelian critics of Kierkegaard, Crites argues that the issue between Kierkegaard and Hegel was the problem of the positivity of the Christian religion. For Hegel, the development of the notion of Christianity as the absolute religion solved the problem raised by the problem of positivity and Lessing’s essay "On the Proof of the Power and the Spirit." For Kierkegaard such a solution was a sellout, for it eliminated faith. Crites argues well the logic of both Kierkegaard’s and Hegel’s positions. Though the author has a few judicious things to say about Kierkegaard’s epistemology, his treatment would have profited by a more extended analysis of the epistemology of both Hegel and Kierkegaard, and by some indications regarding the importance and use of the modal categories in his author’s appraisal of both faith and history—R. L. P.