Abstract
This essay deals with the impact of Hegel's philosophy of religion by examining his positions on religious identity and on the relationship between theology and history. I argue that his criterion for religious identity was socio-historical, and that his philosophical theology was historical rather than normative. These positions help explain some historical peculiarities regarding the effect of his philosophy of religion. Of particular concern is that although Hegel’s own aims were apologetic, his major influence on religious thought was in the development of various historical and critical approaches to religion.
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Notes
See the essay on Hegel in Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Eerdmanns 2002), 370 ff. The work dates originally from 1947.
Walter Kaufmann (in ‘The Hegel Myth and its Method’ in Philosophical Review 60, 1951, 460 n.3) once suggested that Hegel’s ‘theological writings’ should be labeled instead ‘anti-theological.’ I take this claim quite seriously, and in the following I intend to show the extent to which Hegel’s writings in this period (1795–1802) represent a rejection of theology. His mature philosophy of religion, however, clearly maintains very much theology, even if Hegel has considerably altered the form of this.
The texts are collected in Hermann Nohl’s Hegels theologische Jugendschriften (Tubingen 1907). An English edition by T.M. Knox (Early Theological Writings, Chicago 1948) offers translations of much of the same material. In the following I give page numbers to both editions. I use Knox’s translation except where otherwise noted.
I will refer mainly to The Positivity of the Christian Religion, but occasionally also to The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate. Hegel’s understanding of ‘positivity’ undergoes some variations in these essays, and he employs the concept in a more developed form still in his lectures of 1827 (Religion 3 180). Here I am concerned only with how Hegel uses this idea at, for instance, Knox 71, Nohl 155, in the early sections of Positivity.
Kant’s views on this topic can be found, among many other places, in the Critique of Practical Reason, which was the most important Kantian text for the young Hegel. Any account of Hegel’s early development will provide details of his study of Kantian moral theory. For a brief overview see chapters 2 and 3 of Terry Pinkard’s Hegel (Cambridge University Press, 2000). For a full study see H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770–1801 (Oxford University Press, 1972).
Walter Jaeschke (Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, tr. Stewart and Hodgson, California University Press, 1990) provides a helpful account of Hegel’s methodological crisis at this period. See especially pages 101–3.
Knox 67, Nohl 152.
The passage I am alluding to is also from the Preface of Positivity, and reads ‘. . . I remark here that the general principle to be laid down as a foundation for all judgments on the varying modification, forms, and spirit of the Christian religion is this—that the aim and essence of all true religion, our religion included, is human morality, and that all the more detailed doctrines of Christianity, all means of propagating them, and all its obligations . . . have their worth and their sanctity appraised according to their close or distant connection with that aim’ Knox 68, Nohl 153, my italics.
See especially Section 29, (Knox 135–145), in which Hegel discusses the limits of morality as conceived within a public institution such as a church.
Georg Lukacs’ analysis (in The Young Hegel, translated by R. Livingstone, MIT 1975 74–89) reaches this conclusion.
The second and longest part of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, entitled ‘Determinate religion,’ is devoted to his historical sketch of religions. See Vorlesungen ueber die Philosophie der Religion II (Felix Meiner 1993). In the following I give all references to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion to the Meiner paperback edition, cited as ‘Religion’ with the volume number. All translations from these texts are my own.
Compare Lukacs 225.
Knox 173, Nohl 144.
Knox 67, Nohl 152; see above for full quotation.
The text in this category that is most widely read today would be Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757). This is available in many current editions, including one edited by J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford 2008).
The following passage from Hume is by no means exceptional: ‘Examine the religious principles which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are anything but sick men’s dreams’ (Natural History of Religion, ‘General Corollary,’ Oxford edition pg. 184).
I refer to Hegel as an inclusivist, by which I mean that Hegel insists that apparently divergent views on religion are dialectically consistent with his own. Peter Hodgson argues (Hegel and Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Oxford 2006, pg. 230 ff) that Hegel is a pluralist rather than an inclusivist in religion.
Knox 168, Nohl 140. I cite the entirety of this passage below.
I have in mind passages like this one from an early System Fragment: ‘Religion is any elevation of the finite to the infinite, when the infinite is conceived as a definite form of life’ (Knox 315, Nohl 350). This passage of course does not specify ‘infinite’ as something historical. For a discussion of how Hegel develops this idea of religion as transcendence of individuality, see my Section III below.
See, for example, the lecture on Jacobi in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. An abridged, one-volume version of E.S. Haldane’s and Frances H. Simson’s English translation of these lectures is available from Prometheus Books, 1996. In the following I will refer however to the German paperback edition published by Suhrkamp, Werke volumes 18–20 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986).
Jacobi had been read this way after the Spinoza controversy of 1785, but he rebutted such charges in 1787 David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus. Ein Gespräch. Breslau: Gottlieb Löwe. Hegel, however, seems always to have considered Jacobi to reject philosophy in favor of a kind of faith. See, for instance, Religion 1 284–5 and Werke 20 315–29.
In the so-called ‘atheism controversy’ of 1798–9, Forberg outlined an atheistic position. See his Entwicklung des Begriffs der Religion, which is reprinted in Appellation an das Publikum… Dokumente zum Atheismusstreit um Fichte, Forberg, Niethammer. Jena 1798/99, (Leipzig 1987). English translations of all the texts of the controversy appear in in J.G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute (1798–1800), ed. Yolanda Estes and Cirtis Bowman (Ashgate 2010).
See Fichte’s Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (trans. Garrett Green, Cambridge 1978) of 1792, or Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason (trans. Allen Wood and George Di Giovanni, Cambridge 1999) of the following year.
Although Kant’s method and doctrine differ greatly from, say Locke, consider the close analogy between the title of Kant’s chief work on religion (Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason) and Locke’s (Christianity not Unreasonable).
Hodgson (190 ff.) provides an interesting discussion of the role of sacraments in Hegel’s philosophy of religion.
See the texts reprinted in Estes and Bowman.
Aspects of Kant’s allegorical readings of biblical myths faintly anticipate Hegel’s later philosophy of religion. Of his two texts on the topic it seems that Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason stands slightly closer to Hegel than does The Conflict of the Faculties, although even the title of the former text reveals that for Kant religion must always conform to reason rather than, as for Hegel, vice versa. In Religion Kant goes as far as to provide an allegorical interpretation of the Incarnation, but the following passage from the latter illustrates how squarely within the Enlightenment tradition Kant remained: ‘the doctrine of the trinity . . . transcends all our concepts. Whether we are to worship three or ten persons in the Divinity makes no difference’ (the translation here is by Mary J. Gregor in her bilingual edition, Abaris 1979, pp. 65–7).
Jaeschke (289–90) is one of few recent Hegel scholars who has discussed the influence of Lessing. In the nineteenth century, however, Hegel’s affiliation with Lessing (and his opposition to Kant) was more widely recognized. See, for instance, Part II of Andrew Seth’s The Development from Kant to Hegel (Edinburgh 1882).
See especially #76 of Education of the Human Race, where Lessing writes that ‘the conversion of revealed truths into rational truths is absolutely necessary if mankind is to be helped (by religion).’ My translation here is of the Franz Bornmueller edition, Werke, Kritisch durchgesehene und erläuterte Ausgabe. 5 Bände.Leipzig u. Wien 1905, (vol. 5, 628).
Fichte was generalizing a common trend in philosophical theology when he criticized the concept of revelation. Perhaps the most widely read, and one of the most successful, philosophical analysis of revelation is Hume’s ‘On Miracles’ (in Enquiry concerning human understanding, Chapter X, Hackett 1977, originally 1748).
Bayle’s dictionary (1697) note on ‘Pyrrho,’ Note B (See Historical and Critical Dictionary, trans. Richard H. Popkin, Indianapolis 1965, pp. 194 ff.) provides perhaps the most lucid analysis of the incompatibility of classical logic with Christian revelation. His view, however, is widely accepted in the eighteenth century.
This I take from Bayle: ‘It is evident that things which do not differ from a third do not differ from each other. This is the basis of all our reasonings and all our syllogisms are grounded upon it; nevertheless, we are assured by the revelation of the mystery of the trinity that it is a false axiom’ (the translation here is taken from Ariew and Watkins in Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources).
See especially the two Remarks on Identity in Science of Logic (translation AV Miller, Humanities 1969), pp 412–16; Suhrkamp 6 39–45.
Religion 3 170.
In the course on the proofs for God’s existence, which can be found in Werke 17 419. ‘Every stage of the logical idea can serve (as proof of God’s existence),’ Religion 1 318.
The 1829 lectures on the existence of God (Werke 17 347–501) make manifold references to the earlier subdivisions of Hegel’s philosophy. See especially the opening pages, in which Hegel deals specifically with the relation between logic and religion.
For a review of the literature in this area, see the first chapter of Martin Wendte’s Gottmenschliche Einheit bei Hegel (de Gruyter 2007).
Religion 3 213.
Religion 3 214.
Ibid.
In fact he attributes this already to both Boehme and Kant. Kant’s use of dialectical logic was, in the eyes of the late Hegel, a philosophical appropriation of the concept of the trinity. See, for instance, Rel 3 214.
This move is best explained in Religion 3 219–237.
Hodgson and Jaeschke have provided an enormous service to Hegel scholarship by re-editing the lectures and separating the material into four lecture courses. The previous editions had attempted to combine the courses into a single text.
For extended discussion of this point see Stephen Rocker’s Hegel's Rational Religion: The Validity of Hegel's Argument for the Identity in Content of Absolute Religion and Absolute Philosophy (Farleigh Dickinson 1995). Quentin Lauer’s ‘Hegel on the Identity of Content in Religion and Philosophy,’ (in. Darrel E. Christensen, ed., Hegel and the Philosophy of Religion: The Wofford. Symposium (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970) outlined a similar reading.
The early chapters of Rocker explain this issue in great detail.
The third part of Hegel’s system, the philosophy of Geist, includes psychology, law, politics, ethics, world history, and aesthetics in addition to religion. The dialectical treatment of these fields of inquiries is supposed to demonstrate their relations to one another.
See the Lectures on World History (Werke 12), translated by Duncan Forbes and H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
An exposition from the 1824 course (Religion 3 151) gives part of this point, when Hegel explains the ascension of Christ as revealing the divine nature of history. The complete point that I am making, however, requires that we take into account what Hegel says about the congregation in the subsequent section. I deal with this in Section III.
The third part of the Lectures (Religion 3) treats Christianity as ‘completed’ (vollendete) religion. Christianity is not, for Hegel, a distinct movement or phenomenon, but rather the completion or perfection of religion. Other ‘religions’ are only incomplete developments of religion. In Christianity religion is also ‘reconciled’ with the further developments of world history in which the ‘principle of freedom’ has been realized (Religion 3 264ff).
Hodgson provides extensive analyses of Hegel’s views of various religions.
An outstanding passage from 1800, mentioned above, reads ‘The Christian religion has sometimes been reproved, sometimes praised, for its consistency with the most varied manners, characters, and institutions. It was cradled in the corruption of the Roman state; it became dominant when that empire was in the throes of its decline, and we cannot see how Christianity could have stayed its downfall . . . it was the religion of the Italian states in the finest period of their licentious freedom in the middle ages; of the grave and free Swiss republics . . . In all climates the tree of the cross has grown, taken root, and fructified. Every joy in life has been linked with this faith, while the most miserable gloom has found in it nourishment and its justification.’ Knox 168, Nohl 140.
Jaeschke (230 ff.) and Hodgson (53 ff.) discuss this point in some detail. Hegel discusses it, among other places, in the introduction to 1824 lectures series. See especially the discussion of Wolff’s theology (Religion 1 33–4).
Wolff’s Theologia naturalis (Georg Olms 1978, originally Leipzig 1736) presented the standard arrangement that Hegel had in mind. For a summary of Wolff’s procedure, see ‘The Existence of God, Natural Theology, and Christian Wolff’ in International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 4(2) 1973 105–18.
See especially Religion 1 45–8, ‘On the relationship of the philosophy of religion to positive religion.’
See above, n41, Knox 168, Nohl 140.
For a lengthy discussion of the status of ‘philosophy of religion’ as a subdiscipline, and one that does not defend Hegel’s vision of his own historical importance, see James Collins, The Emergence of the Philosophy of Religion (New Haven, Yale University Press 1967).
The reasons why anglophone scholars are resistant to this fact differ from the corresponding reasons why the German scholars resist the same point. The latter tend to study Hegel solely in relation to Kant and his German followers, whereas Hegel’s attachments to ‘pre-Kantian’ philosophical theology illustrate his relationship to philosophers outside the German tradition. In the English-language literature the ‘non-metaphysical’ interpretation of Hegel has been predominant for a few decades, and this reading does not typically stress Hegel’s philosophical theology. A summary of the latter very widespread trend appears in Simon Lumsden’s ‘The Rise of the Non-Metaphysical Hegel’ (Philosophy Compass, 3(1) 61–75 2007).
I give an extensive account of one example in my The Ontological Argument from Descartes to Hegel (JHP/Humanity 2009, pp 197–230).
See the conclusion to his History of Philosophy (Werke 20 454–62).
The former occurs in the philosophy of religion, while the latter is implied by the preceding parts of the philosophy of Geist: history, politics, law, art, etc.
Religion 1 222; see also Strauss’s sketch of the 1831 lectures in Religion 1 279–89.
Hackett has published a recent edition (1993) translated by Stephen Brown.
For a discussion of this see Lauer’s Hegel’s Concept of God p. 212.
Of the many texts in which Hegel discusses this concept, see especially Religion 1 308–330, and the Sixth Lecture of the 1829 Series on the proofs for the existence of God (Werker 17 385–91). For an interesting discussion of Hegel’s notion of Erhebung in terms of moral philosophy, see Robert M. Wallace’s Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God (Cambridge 2005) pg. 102 ff. For an analysis of the role this concept plays in philosophical theology, see my Ontological Argument from Descartes to Hegel, 219–20.
Hegel devotes to Boehme an unusual amount of attention in his history of modern philosophy. In the Suhrkamp edition, for instance, the now almost unknown Boehme receives 30 pages of discussion, or just less than Descartes and considerably more than Locke or Hume.
See Cyril O’Regan’s ‘Hegelian Philosophy of Religion and Eckhartian Mysticism’ in New Perspectives in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion (ed. David Kolb SUNY 1992) and Glenn Allen Magee’s Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Cornell 2001).
German sermon no. 12; at Religion 1 248 Hegel quotes the passage at greater length than I reproduce here.
Knox 265, Nohl 312.
Ibid.
See especially Knox 247–64 (Nohl 295–312) for a discussion of this, as well as discussions of many passages from John. Both Knox and Nohl include a short fragment on love from just prior to the composition of Spirit, though in that text the application of the unity of persons theme does not extend to religion.
1 John 4; for a later text by Hegel, see Religion 3 201.
Knox 244, Nohl 293.
Knox 248–9, Nohl 297–8.
Rel 3 254.
See the preface to Positivity, Knox 68 (Nohl 153).
Hodgson (‘Hegel’s Christology: Shifting Nuances in the Berlin Lectures’ in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53:1 1895, 23–40) and Jaeschke (357–65) discuss these disputes at some length.
See, for example, William Desmond’s Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double (Ashgate 2003).
There is a long tradition among Hegel scholars of reading him as a subtly disguised atheist. Walter Kaufmann provided the classic example in his Hegel: A Reinterpretation (Doubleday 1966), and Robert Solomon has followed this line in From Hegel to Existentialism (Oxford 1987).
Andrew Shanks discusses this point in detail in Hegel’s Political Theology (Cambride 1991, pg. 72 ff).
See Bernard McGinn, ‘Evil-Sounding, Rash, and Suspect of Heresy’: Tensions between Mysticism and Magisterium in the History of the Church,’ Catholic Historical Review, 20 (2004), 193–212.
Shanks (72 ff.) discusses this same problem, but attributes to Hegel a ‘reformist’ attitude.
This is the line Desmond pursues.
John Edward Toews’ outstanding intellectual history of the Hegelian school (Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–41) recounts these episodes. See especially pp. 71–140.
The Life, Work, and Opinions of Heinrich Heine, ed. William Stigand, (London, 1875) p. 85.
Toews 268.
This is surely true of the former, as Heine’s grandparents were Jewish. Strauss preached in Wurttemberg in the 1830 s, so his congregation was in fact of a similar tradition to Hegel.
William Shepherd (‘Hegel as a Theologian’ in Harvard Theological Review 61:4 pg. 595) writes that for Hegel Christ ‘furnishes man with the information that [the] reconciliation occurs in the being of every individual.’
Jaeschke and Hodgson have been fond of attributing all disagreements in Hegel interpretation to the lack of a reliable edition of the Berlin lectures. Although these two scholars provided the first reliable edition only in the 1980s, this fact does not explain all disagreements about the rectitude of Hegel’s alleged Christianity. These disagreements began with students who knew Hegel, conversed with him, and attended his lectures. Such deeply rooted ambiguities must lie in the nature of Hegel’s philosophical position and cannot be attributed to the merits or demerits of a particular edition of his lectures.
This is a bit of a free translation of a passage from 1842 (Religion 3 147). Compare Hodgson’s rendering, which is perhaps even freer: ‘As for the other mode of verification, namely, that God appeared in this human being, at this time and in this place – this is quite a different matter, and can be recognized only from the point of view of world history. It is written: ‘When the time had come, God sent forth his son’ [Gal. 4:4]; and that the time had come can only be discerned from history.’
See especially the ‘Concluding Dissertation,’ pp. 757–81 of Eliot’s translation (New York 1860) and Toews, 265–71.
Toews 265–71.
Bauer responded in his journal Jahrbucher fur wissentschaftliche Kritik (1836:1 704). Discussion of this can be found in Toews (303), Jaeschke (373–80), and in part II of Lothar Koch’s Humanistischer Atheismus und gesellschaftliches Engagement (Kohlhammer 1971).
This is an episode that has not been appreciated by historians of philosophy. Toews provides a helpful outline within the limits of his study. Mariln Chapin Massey writes a brief historical defense of Strauss in David Freidrich Strauss and His Hegelian Critics’ in the Journal of Religion 57(4) 341–62.
Strauss and Bauer, for instance, receive mention by scholars treating the history of biblical interpretations, but rarely by historians of philosophy. For a recent discussion of their importance for biblical criticism, see Bo Reicke’s ‘From Strauss to Holzmann and Meijboom: Synoptic Theories Advanced During the Consolidation of Germany, 1830-70’ in Novum Testamentum 29(1) 1977, 1–21.
Such is the argument of the notorious The Trumpet of the Last Judgment against Hegel the Atheist, in which Bauer amusingly portrays Hegel as an atheist. Part of this text is available in Lawrence Stepelevich’s The Young Hegelians (Prometheus, 1997, 177–87).
Lukacs 233.
For a classic attempt to understate Hegel’s philosophy of religion within the non-metaphysical tradition of interpretation, see Terry Pinkard’s ‘The successor to metaphysics: absolute idea and absolute spirit’ in Monist 74(3), 295–328. For an apologetic reading see, for instance, Rocker.
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Harrelson, K.J. Theology, History, and Religious Identification: Hegelian Methods in the Study of Religion. SOPHIA 52, 463–482 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-012-0334-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-012-0334-0