The resurgence of interest in Hegel among English-language philosophers, heavily influenced by post-metaphysical interpretations of his project, has generated relatively little interest in his account of religion. Inspired by the seminal work of Robert Pippin, a generation of scholars has endeavored to demonstrate that Hegel is best understood as refining Kant’s critical philosophy and thus restricting knowledge to the objects of possible experience. Such readings have focused, first and foremost, on the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which Hegel gradually introduces his own philosophical approach by subjecting the concept of knowing to sustained scrutiny. From their beginnings in the Phenomenology, Kantian treatments of Hegel have been extended to encompass his theories of society, politics, and art. But religion has, perhaps understandably, received less attention. Whether despairing of being able to make non-metaphysical sense of Hegel’s religious terminology or doubting the philosophical value of undertaking that interpretive effort, those developing this line of scholarship have largely directed their energies toward the straightforwardly secular aspects of his theoretical and practical philosophy.

Thomas Lewis has admirably filled this scholarly gap and, in doing so, made a powerful case that Hegel’s distinctive conception of religion has much to contribute to contemporary debates about the appropriate relationship between religious life and the public sphere. Lewis manages this achievement without abandoning the post-metaphysical reading of Hegel by emphasizing, rightly, that the meaning of terms such as ‘religious,’ ‘God,’ ‘divine,’ and ‘secular’ should not be taken for granted: ‘It is a gross violation of so much that Hegel stands for to import uncritically our common understandings of such key terms rather than to carefully interpret how Hegel understands them’ (3). It should not be assumed, in other words, that Hegel uses the word ‘God’ to refer to a transcendent entity that violates the conditions of possible experience and knowledge. Nor should it be taken as given that the ‘divine’ is radically other than the ‘human’ or that ‘religious’ phenomena are located in a realm other than the ‘secular.’ Patiently and capably interpreting these terms, Lewis presents his work as developing a ‘dramatically new understanding’ of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, according to which ‘God’ is ‘the religious language for spirit, which he conceives in terms of socially constituted subjectivity that is self-realizing activity rather than a thing or being’ (12). Hegel thus offers, according to Lewis, a distinctive conception of religion that fully respects the limitations on reason established by Kant. Religious practice, on this view, amounts not to the worship of an alien deity but rather to raising self-consciousness of the essentially social character of human subjectivity and thus cultivating the dispositions necessary to the cohesion of the modern polity.

Lewis executes his ambitious project deftly, providing a coherent structure for the whole, marshalling textual support for each part of his argument, and conveying complex subject matter with admirable clarity. He works his way toward Hegel’s mature philosophical project, and the place of religion within it, by showing how it emerged from Hegel’s dissatisfactions with his own early attempts to solve the modern problem of achieving social unity without violating individual conscience. Chapter 1 examines Hegel’s pre-systematic reflections on Christianity, Kantian morality, and love, each of which serves as a candidate that he judges, at this stage of his intellectual career, to be unable to provide an adequate basis for social reconciliation. Chapter 2 follows Hegel’s subsequent turn to theoretical philosophy, and to Kant’s transcendental idealism in particular, in the hope of finding a more successful response to the challenge. Chapter 3 locates the philosophy of religion within Hegel’s larger, systematic project and also in relationship to the social and political demands of the modern world. Chapters 4 through 6 explore, respectively, the three major parts of Hegel’s philosophy of religion: the concept of religion; the concrete determinations of this concept and their corresponding historical manifestations; and the consummate form of religion, which Hegel identifies with Christianity. Chapter 7 brings Hegel’s considered views to bear on contemporary debates about whether and how religion, properly conceived, might have a legitimate role to play in modern political life.

At the outset of his interpretation of Hegel’s mature philosophical project in chapter 2, Lewis acknowledges his indebtedness to the work of Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard, which he distinguishes from ‘spirit monist’ readings that fail to appreciate the degree to which Hegel remained a Kantian and thus resisted any reversion to pre-critical metaphysics. Lewis joins Pippin and Pinkard in understanding Hegel’s significance to lie in the transformative extension of critical philosophy rather than its rejection. Lewis emphasizes the consequences of Hegel’s overcoming of Kant’s dualism for the philosophy of religion. Kant conceived of God as a supreme being, exceeding the cognitive capacity of our finite understanding, but serving as an object of faith and a regulative ideal for reason. Spirit monist interpretations of Hegel regard him as ‘making this God rational and knowable without fundamentally transforming the conception of God’ (72). Lewis regards Hegel as making God knowable, while continuing to respect the limitations on reason identified by Kant, precisely by rejecting Kant’s conception of God as an alien being. The crucial conclusion Lewis draws is that ‘Hegel’s confrontation with Kant’s legacy determines Hegel’s use of religious language, so that this language must be interpreted in relation to [his] philosophical project rather than presupposing meanings of these terms imported from without. Despite the use of traditional language of “God”, Hegel presents a dramatic departure from central elements of theism’ (78). When reading Hegel, ‘God-talk should ultimately be understood as a representational expression of a philosophical account of the absolute’ (89).

Lewis elaborates on Hegel’s account of the relationship between religion and philosophy in chapters 3 and 4. Philosophy comprehends and articulates its contents in conceptual form. It determines the concept of ‘spirit’ to be the freedom intrinsic to beings whose capacity for thinking liberates them from the givenness of nature. ‘Absolute spirit’ refers to the activity of thinking beings making their own freedom into the object of their awareness. Such self-comprehension takes different forms: art presents the freedom of spirit to our senses; religion enables us to feel our freedom through representational language and ritual practice; and in philosophy we grasp the truth of freedom conceptually. The self-knowledge attained through philosophy is ‘highest’ by virtue of being literal, concrete, and rationally justified. But art and religion retain an essentially liberating role because sensation and feeling motivate us to act in accordance with our freedom by impressing its truth upon us more powerfully than concepts are able to do. Religion thus responds to the modern demand for social and political structures that actualize freedom and, to the extent that its beliefs and practices are accurate representational correlates of philosophical concepts, it does so in a rational way.

Philosophy reveals, according to Hegel, that the absolute is the actualization of thinking in nature and spirit. ‘God,’ as the religious representation of this philosophical truth, cannot refer to a transcendent being, but rather symbolizes the self-differentiating source of all that is and its ultimate manifestation in our own self-consciousness. In orienting us toward ‘God,’ then, religion does not ask us to worship a ‘divinity’ that stands apart from our own ‘humanity.’ It is only in and through the human that the divine comes to be. But as Lewis correctly stresses, ‘the humanity that is identical with the absolute — spirit — is not humanity in its immediacy but rather humanity that has developed its implicit potential’ (168). Religion calls us to bring divinity into being by realizing our own potential, which happens when we come to understand our own freedom and build a world that actualizes it as fully as possible. The most refined self-understanding is philosophical, but few people study philosophy and those who do encounter it only after they have entered adulthood. The formative awareness of freedom and its implications must therefore be cultivated by other means. Religious practice plays this role, for Hegel, bringing about from an early age, in the words of Lewis, ‘the transformation of the individual through participation in the religious community’ (173). Religion contributes to the liberation that Hegel calls ‘divine’ by encouraging us to sacrifice our naturally given particularities in favour of the self-determining individuality that can be found in rationally structured communal life.

Hegel contends that history is characterized by a progressively adequate understanding of freedom, which is reflected not only in the prevailing social and political arrangements of particular cultures but also in their art, religion, and philosophy. Lewis devotes chapters 5 and 6 to Hegel’s account of the ways that different religions succeed in representing the full philosophical truth to varying degrees. He criticizes Hegel for conflating the conceptual map of religious possibilities, in which each successive formation represents an improvement upon the understanding of freedom found in its predecessor, with the historical timeline of empirical religious traditions: ‘the concept of spirit requires partial manifestations through which spirit comes to itself, but it does not entail that each moment achieves actuality in history or that these manifestations occur in a singular temporal order’ (199). The logical relations that govern the unfolding of the conceptual sequence should not be mistaken for causal relations that govern the transitions through which new forms of religion emerge in the course of history. Lewis grants that ‘Hegel’s account of determinate religion should be viewed as setting a high standard for taking others seriously’ (189), while lamenting the excessive ambition and uneven execution of the historical project.

Hegel’s conceptual mapping concludes with the form of religion that represents as fully as is possible, in its doctrines and its practices, the absolute truth articulated by philosophy. In doing so, this religion enables its adherents to achieve and appreciate the highest degree of self-knowledge and freedom. Hegel identifies Christianity as this consummate religion but, Lewis is right to remind us, ‘The order of justification is crucial: Christianity is the consummate religion because its representations express [the content of the philosophical system]; this content does not constitute the consummate religion simply because it belongs to Christianity’ (203). The philosophy of religion thus serves as the arbiter of the degree to which religious representations are rational. Hegel’s treatment of Christianity makes the case that the Trinitarian symbolism — which represents the absolute as self-differentiating, the divine as incarnate, and spirit as present in the communal consciousness that reconciles humanity with divinity — is unsurpassed as a religious portrayal of the philosophical truth. ‘The resulting conception of Christianity,’ Lewis concludes, ‘provides the modern Volksreligion that Hegel has sought from the beginning [of his intellectual career]. Christian doctrine represents and justifies the institutions of modern social and political life as the practical actualization of the consciousness of divine-human unity’ (203).

Lewis returns, in his seventh and final chapter, to the question of Hegel’s relevance for contemporary debates on the relationships between religion, politics, and public discourse. In his view, Hegel’s distinctive value lies in holding a position that is ‘impossible to locate in today’s conventional categories of liberal, conservative, or communitarian, but rather challenges all sides in the discussion’ (234). Because Hegel believes we can be free only if citizens recognize the state’s institutions as securing their freedom, and believes such awareness becomes efficacious only if it is deeply felt, he grants religion a legitimate role in cultivating our political dispositions and commitments. But because he also believes that religion is incapable of assessing the rationality of its own representations, Hegel rejects the legitimacy of appealing to faith to determine specific legal, social, or political arrangements. In Hegel’s view, religion kindles and deepens our concern with freedom in a way that philosophy cannot do, while philosophy justifies a determinate conception of freedom that religion must presuppose. Both religion and philosophy are essential to human liberation.

Thomas Lewis has produced an interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of religion that is clear, important, and insightful. He shows that religious language in Hegel is representational rather than literal, that the meaning of each religious term must be interpreted in the context of the philosophical system rather than imported from current usage, that religious symbolism and ritual have an irreplaceable pedagogical function, and that the set of practices that cultivate the feeling of freedom (and thus qualify as ‘religious’ in Hegel’s sense) is not bounded by the sphere of religion as it is conventionally understood. Lewis successfully demonstrates that ‘post-Kantian readings of Hegel’s project need not ignore or downplay Hegel’s philosophy of religion’ (250) and that giving this portion of Hegel’s system the attention it deserves opens up a new perspective on the concept of ‘religion’ and its proper relation to the public sphere.

Lewis has not persuaded me, however, that reading the philosophy of religion in this way depends upon adopting the post-Kantian approach to Hegel’s larger philosophical enterprise. The dichotomy he draws between the interpretive line opened up by Robert Pippin and ‘spirit monist’ readings assumes that Hegel must be either a post-Kantian, transcendental philosopher (for whom the term ‘God’ represents symbolically the philosophical concept of the absolute) or a pre-critical, theistic metaphysician (for whom the term ‘God’ refers to a transcendent being). Yet it is possible to read Hegel’s system as ontological without being either pre-critical or ‘spirit monist.’ Stephen Houlgate has argued that Hegel produces an ontology precisely because he is radically critical, subjecting Kant’s assumptions about knowing to scrutiny that undermines the distinction between the categories of thinking and the categories of being. But this ontological project need not result in either spirit monism or the view that religious terms are literally referential. Hegel’s philosophy of religion, understood ontologically, determines what it is to be religious, concluding that it is to experience self-knowledge in representational form and thus to feel the truth of one’s own freedom. This ontology of religious beings is entirely different from pre-critical theology of a transcendent being. Hegel determines that religious beings produce representations such as ‘God’ in order to symbolize the literal truth of philosophy.Footnote ¹ This understanding of Hegel’s account of religion and religious language agrees substantially with the reading developed by Lewis, despite emerging from an ontological rather than post-Kantian interpretation of the systematic project. The truly impressive accomplishments of this book — making sense of Hegel’s philosophy of religion and its contemporary implications — thus leave open for ongoing debate the relative merits of the post-Kantian and ontological interpretations of Hegel’s philosophical system.