Hegel and Religion

Hegel and Religion

Objective religion can be studied in a book or lecture, subjective religion refers to religious feelings or acts. Hegel raises the distinction and then declares: subjective religion is all that matters. "Subjective religion is pretty much the same in all people, while objective religion can have almost any color whatever."

Hegel distinguished between the understanding, dialectical reason and speculative thought.

The understanding fixes propositions and things in immediate identities, dialectical reason reflects on the essences, ground or conditions of things, examines the differential basis at the heart of immediate identities, and speculative thought seeks to produce the Notion of the thing, reconstructing it conceptually. On Hegel's understanding, the understanding is a necessary train of thought, an essential ingredient in speculative thought--yet it represents the most impoverished form of knowledge and remains at the level of mere representation. For Hegel, the understanding was the organ of experience in objective religion:

"The understanding serves only objective religion. By purifying principles and by representing them in their purity, the understanding has produced splendid fruit, such as Lessing's Nathan, and it deserves the eulogies heaped on it. But the understanding can never transform principles into practice. The understanding is a courtier who obey's his master's moods and knows how to provide justifications for any passion and any enterprise."

The understanding fixes things, and does not transform them. Here Hegel criticizes Kantian religious philosophy in unsavory terms because it was dominated by the logic of the understanding. This logic, for Hegel, knows not how to transform moods into ethical actions, but only represents or fixes moods in static moral principles of the individual, without connection to the actual, moral content of a community.

Thus, not only does the logic of the understanding fix religious content into static or dogmatic principles, but it serves the passions of the individual. It promotes a culture of selfish individualism. Over against this selfish individualism, Hegel spoke of the unselfishness of love, which, though grounded in the passions, is nonetheless a product of ethical reason. Love does not fix things in immediate identities, but binds individuals in a community. While Kant believed love to be a question only of passions and so without respect for the moral law, Hegel believed love to already contain morality, and the act of loving to be at once ethical life. Love is the actualization of subjective religion, for Hegel. Christianity, too much a product of the modern individualism for Hegel, proved to be objective religion despite its emphasis on love.

For the Christian form of love, for the younger Hegel, was as impoverished as the state of ethical life of the community who propounded it. This younger Hegel thought the ancient Greek conception of love favorable to the Christian conception since it reflected the ethical life of the community rather than that of the individual. Not only did Chrisitian love promote a life of individualism in its modern instantiation, but it had an element of transcendence in its raising of one individual above the community, Jesus, whose teaching were then also separated from life, community, and action. For Hegel, Socrates was much more a man of the people:

"Of course, one did not hear [Socrates] deliver sermons on a platform or a mount: How could it have even occured to Socrates, in Greece, to deliver sermons? He aimed to enlighten men... the number of his closer friends was indeterminate: the thirteenth, fourteenth, and the rest were as welcome as the preceding ones...Socrates did not live in them and was not the head from which they, as members, received the juice of life. He had no mold into which he wished to pour his characters and no rule according to which he might have desired to even out their differences: for that only small spirits would have been at his disposal;.... Each one of his students was himself a master...not heroes in martyrdom and suffering, but in action and life...He did not offend anyone by swaggering self-importance or by using high-flown or mysterious phrases of the sort that impresses only the ignorant and credulous. ... the teachings and principles of Jesus were really only suitable for the education of single human beings, and intended only for this."

Hegel looked down not only on the transcedence of the individual figure of Christ, though, but also on the institutions of the modern Christian church, condemning the Catholic Church and Protestant Reformers for the impracticality of their moral legislation, "practice of confession, church ban, penance, and the whole series of debasing monuments of human degradation." The issue here for Hegel is that Christianity in modern times is wedded to a culture of individualism (whose roots are economic and social more than anything else) and not one that fosters the living spirit of a people, which must be defined by its freedom and creativity.

Hegel disparaged the use of Church authority for control, power, and money rather than for the cultivation of free consciences and spirits. This authority never moved beyond "the concept of the church as a kind of state within the state," where even Luther "took from the clergy the power to rule by force, over men's purses, too, but he himself still wanted to rule over their opinions."

In sum, Hegel believed that modern Christianity was rather a "corruption of human nature" rather than "a real knowledge of the human heart." Thus, as with Kant, Christianity does not pass moral mustard for Hegel as it became a form of objective religion rather than a celebration of community fostering and creative love (which actually and concretely exists with ethical life and civil liberty) and its expression so that "whoever acts with a pure heart is always misunderstood by the moral and religious yardstick."

Younger Hegel believed that a folk religion would properly fit with subjective religion in his modernity. He was no doubt influenced by the ancient Greeks in this conception, one which "does not force its teachings upon anyone, nor does any violence to any human conscience." A folk religion whose doctrines "must not contain anything that universal human reason does not recognize--no certain or dogmatic claims [which would necessarily be then the outcome of the understanding in objective reason] which transcend the limits of reason, even if their sanction had its origin in heaven itself." For Hegel, such a morality of subjective religion was no way in keeping with Christian tradition, and modernity's hold on it.

Who is really polemicizing against the Christian tradition here in the young Hegel is the romantic Hegel, cut from the revolutionary mold, champion of civil freedom, a Hegel who found in Enlightenment's promise of educating the masses toward autonomy only an emptiness replaying the authoritarianism of the Medieval age, a relapse into barbarism, here a predatory clergy, there a police-state, everywhere a submission to heteronomy.

Hegel would later abandoned faith in the idea of a subjective religion, so too the revolutionary zeal of the German Romantics. Why? Some excesses (of passion and dogma in religion and in the homegrown masses) appeared to lead to untamed nationalism, or else disenfranchisements and disilluionments of anarchy.