ABSTRACT
The Spirit breaking forth at the turn of the incarnate God moves through all time and makes history possible. This chapter begins with David Friedrich Strauss's purported attempt to develop Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's system into a textual hermeneutic for the understanding of scripture, which in fact turned against Hegel by denying scriptural representation any claim to truth, and so could never achieve the meaning for which it argued. Strauss's illogic of deferment anticipated Friedrich Nietzsche's attempt to deconstruct the community of Spirit with Zarathustra's penetrating gaze — a gaze that veers into blindness, and looks for a redemption that can never come. In Eduard Morike and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the development that leads from Strauss, through Nietzsche, to F. N. Bradley is countered by a recognition of Spirit. T. S. Eliot, however, goes beyond Rainer Maria Rilke in explicitly linking death to history, and recognizing Spirit.
