G. W. F. Hegel's greatest contributions regarding religion and politics stem from his abiding concern with social cohesion. While Hegel was interested in now classic questions regarding the role of religion in government, the focal point of his engagement with religion and politics lay in his view of religion's role in binding together a complex society in which a more traditional social order had been fragmented by interrelated economic, social, political, and intellectual transformations. He was less concerned with the role of religious reasons and language in policy debates or elections than with politics in a broader sense—specifically, the way that religion enables the population as a whole to identify with the society's defining social and political institutions, including the family, the economic order, and other legal institutions. In this image, religion reconciles the population with the existing practices and institutions. Without significant degrees of such identification and reconciliation, even the best of laws will be insufficient to sustain a polity. Though reconciliation is one of Hegel's principal terms for this relationship, it in no sense implies “making do,” settling for, or simply accepting the status quo because it happens to exist. Rather, he is ultimately concerned with religion's ability—or inability—to enable us to find ourselves at home in a just and rational social order that promotes freedom.
Reflecting widespread academic interest in religion over the last decade, recent scholarship—particularly in German—has devoted significant attention to Hegel's account of the relation between religion and the state. Much of this work has focused on the way that Hegel combines an argument that religion constitutes the foundation of the state, a strident critique of theocracy, and a defense of freedom of conscience.Footnote 1 Another focal point of discussion has been the relationship between religion and philosophy. A number of theologically invested interpreters have focused particularly on what is preserved and what is left behind in Hegel's transition from religion to philosophy.Footnote 2 As important as these issues are, and while both are related to the issue at stake in this article, centering one's interpretive lens on either of these issues distracts attention from Hegel's powerful engagement with the potential role of religion in enabling a population to find itself at home, and thus free, in modern social practices and institutions. Although these questions are at the heart of classic debates over left- and right-Hegelianism, this particular issue has been relatively marginal in much of the recent scholarship on Hegel's treatment of religion.Footnote 3 Moreover, to my knowledge no one has given close attention to key shifts in the conclusions to Hegel's philosophy of religion during his mature, Berlin period.Footnote 4
Hegel expressed his concern with the complex problem of social cohesion and reconciliation in his earliest writings and continued doing so throughout his lifetime. Over time, Hegel came to see this problem in terms of reconciliation—our being bonded to our society's institutions as well as to our fellow citizens and finding ourselves at home with them. Although this problem occupied Hegel throughout his corpus, his response to it developed dramatically. The present article focuses on Hegel's shifting views on the topic in his Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, delivered in four series between 1821 and 1831.Footnote 5 Hegel began the last decade of his life holding that the religion of the day was being too quickly eroded by the intellectual challenges associated with the Enlightenment to provide the social glue he sought. By 1827, Hegel came to believe that Protestantism as it currently existed could provide this glue: most of the population will receive religious teachings relatively uncritically through authoritative religious representations.Footnote 6 Those who begin to question can pursue that questioning until they arrive at the security of philosophy, which vouchsafes the content that the rest hold uncritically.
These shifts in Hegel's view are dramatic and significant in their own right. Perhaps more importantly, attending to these developments in Hegel's view of religion and reconciliation provides valuable new perspective on Hegel's complex relationship to narratives of secularization in modern Western society. Doing so illumines forms of religion that might take seriously and take on board the intellectual developments associated with modernity without retreating into privatized notions of religion. Heeding Hegel's shifts reveals the depth of his grappling with the question of whether intellectual developments associated with the Enlightenment and individualism would lead inevitably to the demise of religion. Crucially, Hegel's overcoming of that presumption derives from repeated attempts to give a theoretical account that is in accord with his shifting judgments of religion's actual function in the society around him. Thus, even while offering a model that reconciles religion and modernity without giving up religion's public role or subordinating the state to religious institutions, Hegel suggests that the “problem” of religion's role in society may not be amenable to a general solution and that responsiveness to changing historical circumstances is not simply a matter of being fickle.
I begin with one of Hegel's earliest writings, which concisely articulates his concerns about religion and social cohesion. This piece effectively frames crucial elements of his thinking about religion in modern society throughout his lifetime. I then set out central elements of Hegel's conception of religious representation as well as religious community, since these notions are essential background to Hegel's conclusions in each of the series of lectures. The central sections of the article analyze the conclusions to the lectures from 1821, 1824, and 1827 (all of the years from which we have complete materials).
Framing the Problem
Early Goals, Early Failures
One of Hegel's earliest surviving writings, the so-called “Tübingen Essay” (1793), sets an agenda that—despite dramatic changes in his thinking—endured throughout Hegel's lifetime.Footnote 7 Like many of his generation, the young Hegel believed that Christianity had ceased to play the role that it once had in binding society together. In the wake of the French Revolution, the intellectual developments associated with the Enlightenment, and a range of interrelated socio-economic transformations in the eighteenth century, Hegel saw a new form of life emerging.Footnote 8 In this new, “modern” society, tradition alone does not suffice as justification for political institutions, and complex social differentiation means that the population is more aware of its differences and identifies less and less with an organically conceived social whole. Moreover, due in part to a focus on individual subjectivity that Hegel associates with the Reformation, more and more people have attained a heightened consciousness of their individual subjectivity (though precisely what this means for the individual's relation to community was just as much a subject of debate then as it is now). Given these changes and challenges, the need for a form of social cohesion adequate to this newly emerging situation—modernity, broadly speaking—appeared pressing.
Self-consciously engaging with this remarkable historical moment, Hegel's “Tübingen Essay” develops a notion of Volksreligion, perhaps best understood as a civil religion, as a public religion that permeates the entire lives of the population as a whole. While not supporting a theocracy, a Volksreligion shapes the population's general convictions on fundamental social questions. It does so by shaping people's views of themselves, of the central institutions of their society, and of the relationship between these two. A functioning Volksreligion thus binds individuals to the society, enabling them to identify with it and to find themselves at home in it. Hegel stresses that a close link between religion and emotion gives religion a crucial role in shaping our most powerful intuitions and motivations. An effective Volksreligion must cohere with “universal reason,” but “[i]magination, the heart, and the senses must not go away empty-handed” (“TE” 33/49). Although Hegel's concerns are principally practical, he notes that this religion must be intellectually defensible; otherwise it is unlikely to hold its adherents over an extended period of time (“TE” 33–34/21–22). It must shape the people's views of themselves and of their society without seeking to determine legislation directly. It is thus political in a broad sense—informing the population's relationship to society's major institutions. Its doctrines “can have no other purpose than to influence the spirit of a people in but a general way—and to do so partly in and of themselves and partly through the closely connected magic of powerfully impressive ceremonies. They have no business interfering in the execution of civil justice or usurping the role of one's private conscience” (“TE” 37/52; see also 17/36). In its respect for freedom of conscience, Hegel's notion of a Volksreligion has a distinctly modern cast that will endure throughout his thinking on religion. The essay is motivated by the (unsuccessful) search for a viable Volksreligion that could provide social cohesion for European societies of his day—precisely because Christianity does not and cannot play this role. Christianity, Hegel judges, has become too mechanistic and too focused on abstruse doctrines to hold the hearts and minds of the population as a whole.Footnote 9 Hegel's search for an effective, contemporary Volksreligion would continue throughout his lifetime.
Hegel's writings throughout the 1790s constitute a series of experiments with proposed solutions to the problem of social fragmentation. Hegel considered and reconsidered Christianity—repeatedly seeking to explain the roots of its inability to play this role—and he tried out a notion of love deeply shaped by his engagement with early romanticism. By the end of the decade, however, Hegel came to believe that religion could not provide the ultimate foundation for an adequate response to the cultural and social crises of the day.Footnote 10 This conviction motivated Hegel's turn toward post-Kantian philosophy, a turn that coincided with his move to Jena in 1801.
As his own mature position began to emerge, Hegel argued that the basis for a solution to the problem of social cohesion must be found in a post-Kantian, idealist philosophy. Its intellectual foundations must lie in philosophy, not love or religion. Nonetheless, Hegel never came to believe that the majority of the population could have direct access to such a solution, i.e., could attain a philosophical grasp of it. Philosophy may provide a solid theoretical answer that can be appreciated by properly trained philosophers, but most people, for Hegel, lack the intellectual preparation required to grasp this solution. Consequently, a philosophical solution does not on its own solve the larger challenge of social cohesion in modern society. To address this aspect of the problem, Hegel continued to look to religion, though with fluctuating judgments regarding its success.
Representation and Practice in Hegel's Conception of Religion
From 1801 forward, Hegel worked to develop a philosophically grounded system that would justify and give religion its due in supporting social cohesion for a complex, modern society. Although this objective was by no means his singular aim, it constitutes a central thread of his grappling with religion. Despite ongoing changes in his attempts to give a satisfactory account of the role of religion in providing social cohesion, defining elements of his conception of religion remained steady throughout his mature work (some elements enduring from as early as the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit).
Central to Hegel's mature conception of religion is his account of the relation between two different forms of cognition, representation (Vorstellung) and thought (Denken). In defending religion from a wide range of social and intellectual challenges, Hegel argues that religion and philosophy share a common content but are distinguished by their form. While genuine philosophy takes place in thought (Denken), religion is closely tied to representation (Vorstellung). Sometimes translated as “picture-thinking,” representation is generally associated with its more sensible forms, such as images and narratives, but its defining characteristic is that it is “a consciousness of something that one has before oneself as something objective [als Gegenständliches]” (VPR 1:292). Representation presents objects as independent or freestanding rather than in necessary relation to each other; thought grasps them in their necessary interrelationships.Footnote 11 By arguing that the content of (Christian) religious representations is the same as that of philosophical thought yet they differ in form, Hegel claims to have provided a philosophical justification for Christian doctrine, even though it is philosophical thought—rather than revelation or religious experience—that constitutes the ultimate authority.Footnote 12
Despite Hegel's contentions about a common content, even this brief account of representation suggests a central challenge for Hegel's grappling with the role of religion in providing social cohesion: the representational form entails a juxtapositioning seemingly at odds with a more fundamental reconciliation.Footnote 13 The problem is not merely abstract. Concretely, it entails that religious representations seem inevitably to project the absolute—and, with it, reconciliation itself—beyond this world. The absolute is conceived as an object separate from us and our world, and our end is thus—perhaps inevitably—conceived as a movement beyond this present world. The significance and value of the existing world are easily thereby relativized vis-à-vis an absolute that is conceived as standing over against this world.
This issue is central to Hegel's treatment of the “Absolute Religion” in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). At this point in Hegel's development, even the highest form of religion retains within itself a fundamental alienation that projects reconciliation into a beyond: “its satisfaction [that of consciousness] thus itself remains burdened with the antithesis of a beyond. Its own reconciliation therefore enters into its consciousness as something distant, as something in the distant future…” (PhG 574/787).Footnote 14 Reconciliation stands in antithesis with the here and now. In this picture, religion necessarily projects reconciliation beyond this world, thereby undergirding an enduring alienation from this world's social and political institutions.
Insofar as Hegel seeks to address the problem of social cohesion in the modern world, his conception of religious representation thus poses noteworthy challenges. Most fundamentally, if religion's form—representation—necessarily projects reconciliation beyond this world, religion would seem ill-suited to reconcile us to this world. Despite this challenge, however, Hegel's account of representation and its relation to thought holds steady through Hegel's mature works. Yet the mature Hegel simultaneously attributes to religion—by virtue of its broader accessibility—an integral role in providing social cohesion, particularly for those who cannot be philosophers. Appreciating the solution at which Hegel arrives requires attending to additional aspects of Hegel's account of religion.
No less important than Hegel's engagement with the cognitive dimensions of religion is his attention to its practical aspects in his treatment of the community or cultus. Hegel's account of the religious community focuses on both the practices through which religions form individuals’ subjectivities and the institutions in which religions gain actual existence in the world.Footnote 15 These two elements, however, are simply different aspects of the same process, since Hegel focuses much of his treatment of the cultus on the work of the subsisting church rather than on the church's origins. This subsisting, or existing, church he considers “essentially a teaching church” (VPR 3:257). That is, a principal function of the church is to teach its members—particularly children—such that their deepest intuitions and convictions regarding themselves, community, and the absolute are constituted by the religion itself. Hegel draws crucial attention to the way in which practices as seemingly trivial as dressing in a particular manner for church functions convey a sense of what matters and thereby instill powerful and long-lasting habits and intuitions in the individual.Footnote 16
This role of religious institutions in shaping many of our most powerful convictions regarding our social—including political—life underlies Hegel's claims regarding religion's integral role in the support of a state. Hegel does not advocate theocracy; he explicitly rejects that notion of the relationship between church and state. Yet he does hold that a state consists not simply in a set of laws and institutions but also in the dispositions of individual members of the state. And he holds that religious communities play a vital—though not exclusive—role in the formation of these dispositions.Footnote 17 Without a citizenry (the majority of) whose convictions have been formed, on the whole, by a religion that supports the existing institutions, the laws will be nothing more than “rotten bulwarks” that are far too weak to sustain themselves or to guide the life of the society (Enz. §552 A [page 361/288]).Footnote 18 The cultus thus should play an essential role in the formation of the intuitions, convictions, and dispositions that support a political system.
Hegel's Shifting Conclusions Regarding Religion in the Modern World
Given this outline of religion's potential role in supporting or thwarting reconciliation—a sense of belonging and being bonded with one's society—Hegel's various conclusions to his lectures on the philosophy of religion over the course of the 1820s are striking in their divergent judgments of the role of Christianity in contemporary society. Each of the three surviving lecture series—from 1821, 1824, and 1827—concludes with an account of the Christian cultus. Both implicitly and explicitly, each version of this final section treats the state of the Christian church at the time, with particular attention to its vitality and its capacity to bind modern society together. Each lecture thereby concludes with an account of religion in modern society, with particular attention to its capacity—or incapacity—to reconcile the population as a whole to existing social and political institutions. While this topic is a constant, Hegel's conclusions undergo dramatic transformation, constituting a shift that is all the more noteworthy given the relative stability of Part 3 over the course of the lectures (particularly as of 1824).Footnote 19
“A Discordant Note”: The 1821 Conclusion
While central elements of Hegel's final account of the philosophy of religion are already present in the 1821 manuscript, these early lectures end on “a discordant note” (VPR 3:94). As in later versions of the lectures, the third and final part of the 1821 manuscript—the treatment of the consummate religion—concludes with the treatment of the religious community or cultus. Unlike the later lectures, however, the 1821 subsection ends with “The Passing Away of the Community” (VPR 3:93). Hegel's discussion brings out powerfully both the potential role of religion in providing social cohesion and his judgment that it does not do so in the present.
The section focuses on the “empirical” aspects of the contemporary situation, “the so-called signs of the time” (VPR 3:94). This in itself indicates a major shift in Hegel's thinking since the Phenomenology. In that text, religion alienates us from this world precisely because the form of religion, representation, intrinsically projects reconciliation beyond. By 1821, however, Hegel presents the relation between religion and reconciliation very differently. Now, the fact that representation presents objects as standing over against the subject—and thus presents the absolute as other to us—does not render religion intrinsically alienating. The commonality of content between religious representations and philosophical concepts here seems to take precedence over their difference in form.Footnote 20 Consequently, religion can, in principle, reconcile us to this world just as philosophy can. Yet it does not automatically do so. The question then becomes an empirical one: whether religion as it exists in a given context can play this role. In 1821, Hegel answers in the negative.
Hegel's relative pessimism at this point seems to reflect his response to the reactionary Carlsbad Decrees (1819) and the broader political context of the moment. In the wake of Napoleon's defeat, Hegel initially worried that the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) would lead to a broad restoration of pre-Napoleonic political arrangements. Although this did not take place, the end of the 1810s saw reactionary forces gaining strength and rolling back reforms. The Carlsbad Decrees, which significantly expanded censorship and provided for the removal of university teachers whose ideas were deemed politically dangerous, were the most visible symbol of this development. Moreover, the most significant opposition to such retrenchment came from romantic nationalists for whom Hegel had little sympathy. It is thus not surprising that Hegel's view in 1821 was more pessimistic than in later years, when he became convinced that the more immediate threats to an emergent social order had passed.Footnote 21
In portraying his contemporary situation, Hegel compares his own present to the age of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Now, as then, “the universal unity based on religion had disappeared, along with a universal political life” (VPR 3:95). In both cases, much of the population has lost faith in their God or gods as constituting the basis for their collective life. Although religion still exists, it has lost its vitality, its hold on the population as a whole. Playing less and less of a social role, it has become largely privatized—a matter of individual, subjective experience. This focus on the individual and the subjective—at the expense of the communal—pits the religion of the day against the social cohesion after which Hegel has been striving. Religion no longer constitutes a kind of publicly and generally accepted truth that can ground political life.
This situation manifests differently in different segments of society: “although among the people, i.e., the lower classes,” there is still widespread faith in the truth of religion, even this is insecure. It is no longer adequately supported or convincingly justified. Precisely those who are charged with supporting and justifying it—the clergy—have abandoned this task. Profoundly influenced by the intellectual shifts associated with the Enlightenment, the clergy have reduced religion to some combination of individual feeling, individual morality, and history. On the whole, the clergy remains captive to modes of cognition characterized by understanding (Verstand) and mere reflection—which Hegel views as ultimately superficial responses to the Enlightenment—rather than genuine reason (Vernunft). Hegel's references to understanding and reflection as well as to their connection to finitude and an inwardness or subjectivity that lacks objectivity draw on extensive treatments in his earlier writings.Footnote 22 Understanding and reflection are forms of thought that divide and separate rather than advancing to the mediated unity of the highest form of thought. Philosophies dominated by the understanding accept at their roots a fundamental dichotomy that, in the context of religious thought, is manifest in a separation between a faith that is fundamentally interior and the world beyond the subject. In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel argues that—despite their differences—the views of Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi (as well as Schleiermacher) share this crucial presupposition.Footnote 23 Such notions conceive of religion in terms of feeling and/or subjective dispositions devoid of actual content and existing in a fundamental separation from the world. The result is that religious views growing out of these underlying presuppositions sacrifice the reconciliation provided (however naively) by more traditional forms of Christianity and fail to replace them with an alternative. Thus, none of these responses to the Enlightenment make religion a basis for collective life:
Where [the gospel is not preached to] the poor, who [are] the ones closest to infinite anguish; where the teaching of love in infinite anguish [is abandoned in favor of] enjoyment, love without anguish; where the gospel [is] preached in a naturalistic way—[there] the salt [has] lost its savor. When everything [is done] in this way, and the moral man is satisfied [in] his reflection and opinion, his conviction, in his finitude; [when every] foundation, security, the substantive bonds of the world, [have been] tacitly removed; when [we are left] inwardly empty of objective truth, of its form and content—[then] one thing alone [remains] certain: finitude [turned] in upon itself, arrogant barrenness and lack of content, the extremity of self-satisfied dis-enlightenment [Ausklärung]. (VPR 3:95–96)
By making religion fundamentally subjective, these theological responses to the Enlightenment have undermined religion's capacity to provide the “foundation, security, the substantive bonds of the world.”
While these views may not yet have spread to the population as a whole, they are in the process of doing so. Without an alternative being preached by the clergy, there is nothing to stop them:
The [common] people, in which reason remains constantly under pressure, [this] class in whose cultivation the truth can exist only in the form of representation, that is helpless vis-à-vis the pressure of its interior impulses, and that experiences pain and need more concretely—indeed, infinite pain and need—[has been] abandoned by its [theological] teachers. The latter have helped themselves by means of reflection, and have found their satisfaction in finitude, subjectivity, and precisely thereby in vanity; but the [common] people, who form the substantial nucleus [of the population as a whole], cannot find its satisfaction in such things. (VPR 3:96)
The religious community is, then, in the process of “passing away.”
While the clergy has retreated to theologies based in subjective understanding, however, another segment of society maintains a conception of objective truth: philosophers. For Hegel, philosophy preserves this knowledge of a truth that has not been reduced to the finite and subjective. Hegel's point here builds upon his larger understanding of his philosophical system as overcoming the limitations of philosophies of understanding and reflection. As important as this philosophical knowledge is, however, it cannot provide the broad social cohesion that Hegel seeks. In Hegel's view, philosophy is not, and can never be, for the masses: their thinking cannot rise from representation to thought. Nor can philosophical concepts generate new representations that move the population as a whole; thus, philosophers cannot replace the clergy in teaching the population as a whole. The philosopher's solution to the predicament, then, cannot solve the problem of social cohesion for the population as a whole—which is where it needs to be solved in order to provide social glue for an emerging, modern society.
The 1821 lectures end, finally, with a remarkable call for philosophers to find this reconciliation for themselves but to retreat from the broader society, leaving it to its own devices. Philosophers must “resolve the discord in the manner [appropriate] to us—[namely,] reconciliation in philosophy. How the present day is to solve its problems must be left up to it” (VPR 3:96). Rather than engage with these problems, Hegel recommends an almost monastic retreat. Philosophy forms “an isolated order of priests—a sanctuary—[who are] untroubled about how it goes with the world, [who need] not mix with it, [and whose work is to preserve] this possession of truth. How things turn out [in the world] is not our affair” (VPR 3:97). Given the depth and pervasiveness of Hegel's social concerns as well as his rejection of any form of monasticism, these lines are remarkable.Footnote 24 No less strikingly, they place in relief a central feature of his account of religion: if religion cannot provide social cohesion, Hegel has no alternative to suggest. As much as philosophy may carry religion's content, it cannot replace its social function.
An Indefinite Ending: The 1824 Conclusion
Already by 1824, however, Hegel's conclusion to the consummate religion had transformed substantially. In place of “The Passing Away of the Community,” the section on the consummate religion—and thus the philosophy of religion as a whole—ends with the “Realization of Faith.” In this context, Hegel uses “faith” to signify a subjective inwardness—“feeling or sensibility”—that is not connected to a determinate content; this faith lacks the concrete, outward form (such as a doctrine expressed in discursive language or the institutional structures of a church) that Hegel discusses in terms of objective existence (VPR 3:167). Much of the section deals with overcoming the difference between this subjective feeling of faith and the content that exists in an objective form in doctrine as well as in worldly institutions. Without overcoming this difference—without uniting religion's representations with inward subjectivity, feeling, and intuitions, “[t]he ‘now’ of communion dissolves in its representation, partly into a beyond, an otherworldly heaven, partly into the past, and partly into the future” (VPR 3:167). The projection of reconciliation beyond, which characterized even the highest form of religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit, here appears as a stage that can be overcome within religion itself. Hegel traces three hierarchically related forms of this realization, characterized by immediacy, reflection, and reconciliation with philosophical reason. In each of these stages, Hegel examines the manner in which faith is reconciled with, or made actual in, objective content.
In the first form of this realization, the difference or gap between faith and objective existence is overcome by the church taking the individuals—in their particularity—up into itself. That is, rather than individuals being transformed in accord with the teachings of the church, they are simply taken as they are, with their immediate, natural passions, desires, and other particularities. Because these particularities are taken up in their immediacy, with their idiosyncratic passions and self-seeking, “this initial reconciliation has rather the character of the church's corruption” (VPR 3:168). Instead of transforming and elevating the particular, this initial form lowers the objective institutions to the level of the particular. Though Hegel does not make the link explicit, he seems to have in mind the corruption in the Catholic Church that helped spur the Reformation.Footnote 25
The second form of realization, characterized by reflection, provides Hegel's treatment of the modern intellectual developments so prominent in the 1821 conclusion—particularly the emphasis on interiority and subjectivity. The philosophy of reflection, characterized by understanding [Verstand], is incapable of generating or justifying positive content. As a result, reflection places itself in opposition to Christian doctrine as well as to any existing church.Footnote 26 This reconciliation is formal at best. In one respect, however, this portrayal of this moment is significantly more positive than his earlier one. Here, in absolutizing the moment of individual subjectivity, this moment constitutes a decisive advance in the consciousness of freedom.Footnote 27 Precisely by placing a premium on subjectivity, this moment brings to consciousness the value of a subjective aspect of human freedom, which both grounds such commitments as freedom of conscience and makes the more general point that freedom concerns not simply the objective structure of a society but also individuals’ attitudes toward those institutions.Footnote 28 Although Hegel links the emergence of this conception of subjectivity to the Reformation, he holds that it has become integral to modern life. For this reason, this development can be seen as bringing forth an element of human self-understanding that is crucial to the reconciliation of religion and modern society.
As before, however, the only entirely satisfactory reconciliation is that attained by philosophers. Here, religion—specifically the determinate content of the consummate, Christian religion—has been justified by the concept, i.e., by speculative philosophy.Footnote 29 Initially, critical reflection on religious content threatens this content. This generates the appearance that philosophy and religion are intrinsically opposed and motivates efforts to defend religion by rejecting philosophy. According to Hegel, however, this questioning cannot be stopped by mere declarations, and as soon as one has entered the field of argument, one is already on the ground of philosophy. That is, precisely the activity of giving reasons in defense of religion entails that reason itself has become the judge. It therefore stands as the arbiter of religion, in no way subordinate to an absolute that is other than reason itself. The only point at which such questioning comes to rest, Hegel holds, is when one has pushed far enough into philosophy that one sees that philosophy itself justifies and validates this content. To show that philosophy does so has been the goal of the entire philosophy of religion: to demonstrate religion—and specifically the concrete content of Christianity as Hegel understands it—to be rational and thus vindicated by philosophy.Footnote 30 In so doing, cognition has become philosophy, standing above representation but preserving its content and thereby showing the representations to possess a rationality that representation itself can neither grasp nor demonstrate.Footnote 31
The lectures conclude ambiguously—without either decrying the inability of this solution to function for the population as a whole or suggesting that it can do so. Rather, the treatment extends little beyond the more theoretical consideration of the forms of reconciliation. Its only further gesture is the brief, final paragraph, which links these forms of cognition of the absolute to particular communities: “this conceptual cognition of religion is by its nature not universal, but is rather only the cognition of a community” (VPR 3:176). Notably, these communities are not different religions or confessions. Rather, the three forms of realization correspond to three different social groups: “the first estate is that of immediate, naïve religion and of faith; the second is that of the understanding, the estate of the so-called cultured, of reflection and the Enlightenment; and finally the third estate is the community of philosophy” (VPR 3:176). Again, the philosopher's solution cannot be a solution for everyone. In contrast to the 1821 manuscript, however, the 1824 lectures do not portray the second of these groups as undermining the position of the first. Concretely, Hegel does not argue that the ideas of the Enlightenment are coming to permeate the society as a whole so that the “immediate, naïve” forms of faith are threatened. Rather, all seem to coexist. Thus, even if a philosophical grasp of the truth is the most stable yet can only be attained by a few, the possibility of a significant portion of the population remaining at the level of immediate faith—even in Hegel's present—implies the possibility of religion's continuing to provide social cohesion. In 1824, however, Hegel does not even make this possibility explicit, much less develop it; he simply does not reject it as he did in 1821.
Reconciliation Achieved: The 1827 Conclusion
This brief account of the 1821 and 1824 lectures serves to make the 1827 version all that much more remarkable. Here Hegel significantly expands his treatment of the final moment, adding particularly to the consideration of the practical aspect of this reconciliation. The transformation entails both a more elaborate theoretical structure and a different empirical judgment about the contemporary function of religion. The result is an account of a distinctly modern Christian cultus that responds to the problem of social cohesion and reconciliation that has occupied him since his earliest writings.Footnote 32
By 1827 Hegel's initial fears about the post-Napoleonic restoration seem to have been largely allayed. The sometimes reactionary turbulence of the first part of the decade—which Hegel worried might squelch what he saw as modernizing developments of previous decades—seemed to have calmed down, and Hegel was increasingly confident that the new social and political order he championed would overcome the remaining resistance.Footnote 33 Moreover, Walter Jaeschke notes Hegel's appreciation of the fact that religious communities were not in fact fading away in the manner he expected at the beginning of the 1820s.Footnote 34 This shifting situation on the ground—or at least Hegel's shifting perception of it—seems to have prompted further transformation in Hegel's views on the Christian cultus and modern life.
As in earlier lectures, the third and final section of the “Cultus” follows the account of the community's emergence (the first section) and its subsistence (the second section). In 1821 and 1824, the third section diverged somewhat from the first two sections in that it focused predominantly on cognition rather than on the practical actualization of this cognition in the world. This point should not be overstated: as we have seen, the first two sets of lectures are also concerned with actual communities; but the focus and the developments that structure the sections are developments in cognition.
By 1827 Hegel has conceived this third section—now designated “The Realization of the Spirituality of the Community”—in terms more appropriate to the previous moments of the cultus. It now treats, first, moments of the practical, existing side of the cultus and, second, moments in the development of cognition of the absolute. Precisely by distinguishing these developments, Hegel is able to offer an account of the internal developments of the “real” or practical side of the cultus that provides space for a distinctively modern form of Christian community (VPR 3:265). That is, developing the practical side in distinction from the theoretical enables him to identify a form of communal life that is neither simply the immediate form of a naïve faith nor the more restricted form of an elite philosophical community but rather corresponds to the ethical life of the modern world and in principle applies to modern society as a whole.Footnote 35 It thus provides a theoretical space for the expression of his increasingly positive judgment of Protestantism's contemporary role in supporting social cohesion and reconciliation.
“The Realization of the Spirituality of the Community” is framed explicitly in terms of the reconciliation of the individual to the existing world. Religion, Hegel argues, reconciles the heart, but this reconciliation must also “be present and brought forth” (VPR 3:262). It must become actual. What must become actual is the knowledge that
the subject, as an object of divine grace and as one who is reconciled with God, already has infinite value in virtue of its vocation; and this is made effective in the community.… The vocation to infinitude of the subject that is inwardly infinite is its freedom. The substantial aspect of the subject is that it is a free person, and as a free person it relates itself to the worldly and the actual as a being that is at home with itself, reconciled within itself, an utterly secure and infinite subjectivity. (VPR 3:262)
Christian doctrine represents the subject as intrinsically self-determining rather than ultimately determined by anything external to the subject itself; hence, it is “inwardly infinite.” Yet this cannot remain a mere idea. It must be made actual in the world—in a social and political life that realizes this freedom: “this vocation of the subject ought to be foundational in its relation to what is worldly. This freedom of the subject is its rationality—the fact that as subject it is thus liberated and has attained this liberation through religion, that in accord with its religious determination it is essentially free.…What is required, therefore, is that this reconciliation should also be accomplished in the worldly realm” (VPR 3:262–63). The realization of the spirituality of the community, then, is nothing other than the actualization of freedom in the world. This aspect of the conclusion to the philosophy of religion is thereby aligned with the conception of modern freedom articulated in objective spirit—already suggesting that this realization will be one that coheres more closely with modern social developments than anything offered in the 1821 or 1824 lectures.
While the realization or actualization of Christian teaching is conceived in relation to freedom, the initial, “immediate” form of this realization is far from adequate; it “is not the genuine mode of reconciliation” (VPR 3:263). In seeking to live a life in accord with faith, the community initially renounces the existing world, finding it incompatible with this faith. Because the world is already in the individual, however, this attempt results in the subject's developing “a negative relation to the world and also to itself” (VPR 3:263). The subject is divided against itself as well as from the world. One prominent result is a “monkish withdrawal” that seeks to deny natural impulses and passions and precludes the actual development of spirituality. Though Hegel does not make the connection explicit, his description seems to correspond to a widespread understanding of the dominant form of early Christianity—roughly from the emergence of Christianity to the time of Constantine or Charlemagne.Footnote 36
The second form of reconciliation seeks to bring religion and the world together by making the church dominant over the world. At this point, however, the world itself has not been transformed: most people's drives and impulses remain in their immediate, natural, and uncultivated form. Consequently, the church merely seeks to dominate a world that remains untransformed. Rather than transforming and elevating natural impulses and inclinations, the church posits itself in opposition to them: “in everything that can be called human, in all impulses, in all attitudes that have reference to the family and to activity in public life a cleavage enters into play. The ruling principle is that humanity is not at home with itself” (VPR 3:264). Because these impulses and passions are left unreformed, however, the church inevitably takes them up into itself: “this reconciliation with the worldly realm, and with the human heart, comes about in such a way that it is precisely the opposite of [genuine] reconciliation. The further development of this condition of rupture within reconciliation itself is what appears as the corruption of the church, the absolute contradiction of the spiritual within itself” (VPR 3:264). In seeking simply to rule over the world without transforming it, the church comes to be ruled by precisely the passions and naturalness that it intended to control. The opposition between the church and the world is internalized in the church, not overcome. This characterization of the second moment of reconciliation corresponds closely to what Hegel considered the first moment in 1824. As there, it provides Hegel's understanding of a Catholic model of the church dominant from roughly the time of Constantine or Charlemagne to the Protestant Reformation.
By setting up the first two moments in this manner, Hegel has laid the groundwork for a conception of a third form of reconciliation that corresponds not simply to a small community of philosophers but to Protestant Christianity more broadly. First here, Protestantism—particularly Lutheranism—provides a form of Christian community that is internally reconciled with the institutions of modern life.Footnote 37 A genuine reconciliation, one that transforms and elevates our naturally given impulses to accord with an ethical life that realizes freedom, has been achieved: “the third way is that this contradiction is resolved in ethical life, or that the principle of freedom has penetrated into the worldly realm itself, and that the worldly, because it has thus been conformed to the concept, reason, and eternal truth, is freedom that has become concrete and will that is rational. The institutions of ethical life are divine institutions” (VPR 3:264). The institutions of ethical life are those treated in Part 3 of the Philosophy of Right: the family, civil society (including its treatment of economic life), and the state proper. These are not divine in the sense that celibacy or voluntary poverty are supposed to be. Rather they are divine in the sense that they actualize the conception of the subject as free that is central to Christianity as Hegel understands it. These institutions neither simply deny our natural impulses nor leave them in their natural form. Rather, through education, religious formation, and work, these institutions cultivate our impulses to participate in a way of life that actualizes our own, free essence. Moreover, because these institutions are expressive of the impulses and desires that we have come to have, we find ourselves at home in these institutions, in this way of life. Rather than being alienated from it, we find our freedom in participating in this form of life and are therefore—with reason—reconciled to it. In other words, modern ethical life, as treated in Part 3 of the Philosophy of Right in particular, realizes or actualizes the conception of spirit implicit in Christianity as well as in Hegel's own philosophical conception. Modern society, for Hegel, constitutes a uniquely adequate actualization of what we are. For this reason, it is the ultimate form of the Christian cultus.
For some, this identification of ethical life as a whole as the ultimate form of the Christian cultus constitutes not so much the reconciliation of religion and modernity as the dissolution of religion in modernity. Interpreted along these lines, Hegel appears as a great secularizer.Footnote 38 While Hegel undoubtedly contributed directly to various trajectories of secularization, however, what is striking in the 1827 account is the middle path it walks, neither giving up religion's public role nor subordinating the state to religious institutions. Religion is not replaced by the institutions of ethical life but rather plays an ongoing role in maintaining their vitality.
Following this account of the “real” side of the realization of the community, Hegel treats what he identifies as the “ideal” side: the consciousness of this actualization, i.e., the cognitive relationship to existing ethical life. In these final paragraphs of the 1827 lectures, Hegel offers two, slightly divergent triads concerning this consciousness. First, he presents a triad of Enlightenment, Pietism, and philosophy. Hegel's critique of the Enlightenment as abstract, formal, and incapable of supporting determinate content is familiar from the earlier lectures. The second, closely related moment of Pietism absolutizes the subject in a manner that eliminates content no less than the Enlightenment model:
Here the category of the good is nothing other than the caprice and contingency of the subject as such. This is the extreme of this form of subjectivity and freedom, which renounces the truth and its development and moves within itself, knowing that what it regards as valid is only its own definitions, and that it is the master of what is good and evil.… Pietism acknowledges no objective truth and opposes itself to dogmas and the content of religion. (VPR 3:266–67)
The problem, then, is closely related to that of the Enlightenment: the evaporation of all content in an exclusive focus on subjectivity.Footnote 39 The Enlightenment and Pietism thus function as closely related complementary moments.
Hegel's treatment of the third moment, philosophy, fills out the account more clearly than his earlier treatments. It “consists in the fact that subjectivity develops the content from itself, to be sure, but in accord with necessity. It knows and acknowledges that a content is necessary and that this necessary content is objective.… This is the standpoint of philosophy, according to which the content takes refuge in the concept and obtains its justification by thinking” (VPR 3:267). Philosophy thus justifies the determinate content provided by the consummate religion. In doing so, however, it raises this content from representation to thought and demonstrates that the ultimate authority for this content lies not in revelation or other religious authority but in thinking itself: “the witness of spirit is thought” (VPR 3:268).
In the final three paragraphs, Hegel supplements this triad with another, one that shares a great deal with the 1821 version yet seems to provide a stable option other than becoming a philosopher: “ingenious piety,” Hegel contends, “has no need of [justification]; the heart gives the witness of spirit and receives the truth that comes to it through authority; it has a sense of satisfaction and reconciliation through this truth” (VPR 3:268). In 1827, Hegel gives no sense that this position is being broadly undermined. To the contrary, what he refers to as “immediate religion” seems to function as a safe harbor in which much of the population can reside.
Once one begins to question, one leaves this harbor forever, and it initially appears that the result is simply a fall, an unending sojourn across the sea: “but insofar as thinking begins to posit an antithesis to the concrete and places itself in opposition to the concrete, the process of thinking consists in carrying through this opposition until it arrives at reconciliation” (VPR 3:269). Initial efforts to find an alternative result only in unsatisfactory forms such as the ones traced above—Enlightenment and Pietism. Thinking alone, however, moves one beyond this unsatisfactory middle ground to a philosophical form of reconciliation. As long as one keeps thinking, one keeps moving across this sea toward a philosophical harbor that is safer than the one left behind.
What is striking in this 1827 treatment is that Hegel does not suggest some people's questioning is undermining the viability of immediate faith for most people. Presumably corresponding to his empirical judgments about the world around him, he does not hold that the cultural presence of rationalistic critiques of religion undermines religion's vitality for the population as a whole. Moreover, he makes no specific claim limiting the number of people who can move from the open sea of various forms of indeterminacy to the safe harbor offered by philosophy. The latter is not an exclusive philosophical sect but the natural outcome of continuing on the journey. The resulting vision is one in which religion continues to play a vital role in modern life by providing a means by which the majority of the population can find themselves at home in these institutions and therefore reconciled to them. Even those who become dissatisfied by the more immediate forms of religion have access to the security provided by a philosophical account that justifies religious representations even as it elevates the content to a conceptual form. Crucially, this philosophical justification is not disjunctive with the religious account itself; the former justifies the latter rather than rejecting it. Various segments of society thereby possess harmonious means of reconciliation to the principal institutions of modern society.
Although the materials available from Hegel's 1831 lectures are very limited, they continue this central aspect of Hegel's 1827 conception. Some of the few surviving notes constitute a new, fourth section to Part 1 of the lectures, “The Concept of Religion.” This fourth section treats the relationship between religion and the state in a manner that confirms the conception of the relation between Protestantism and modern political life that Hegel sets out in 1827. Hegel's 1831 treatment of this issue—as well as the prominent place he gives it—is likely informed by his reaction to the July Revolution in France the previous year. Hegel's (largely negative) reaction to the revolution was complex and confounded many of his younger followers.Footnote 40 Most significantly in the present context, it intensified his conviction that the modern state requires the support of a religion that gives a central role to individual subjectivity.Footnote 41 Thus, a modern revolution could only be ultimately successful if preceded by a reformation.
In these 1831 lectures, he again stresses the essential role of conviction [Gesinnung], not just the formal constitution in the modern state (VPR 1:346). Although such commitment does not in principle have to derive from religion, Hegel holds that at present religion plays this role for the majority of the population:
Conviction does not necessarily take the form of religion; it can in large measure remain in an undefined condition. But in what we refer to as “the people” the ultimate truth does not have the form of thoughts and principles, for what is to count as right for the people can only be so esteemed to the extent that it is something determinate and particular. For the people this determinate character of right and ethical life has its ultimate verification only in the form of an extant religion. (VPR 1:347)
Religion is thus the principal means through which “the people” (the non-philosophical majority) know that the existing, in this case distinctly modern, social and political institutions authentically express what Hegel here calls “the ultimate truth”—spirit and its freedom. It thus shapes the majority of the population's commitment to this social and political order and thereby provides the social cohesion that has been so important to Hegel all along.
In his last surviving formulations, then, Hegel offers an account of religion in which religious representations—despite projecting their object or content beyond the self—function to reconcile people to existing ethical and political institutions. Insofar as the philosophical form is more adequate to the content and provides the ultimate justification for religion, this form of reconciliation is subordinate to that achieved in philosophy; but it is not fundamentally alienating in any pejorative sense. Religion still enables people to see existing social and political institutions as manifestations of who they are. It therefore enables people to find themselves at home and free in a modern social order.
Considering Hegel's final position in relation to his views in the earlier lectures both illuminates how deeply Hegel struggled with these problems and places his “solution” in relief. It also highlights that Hegel judges this strategy viable even in the wake of precisely the intellectual developments most closely associated with secularization. He did not arrive at his conclusion because he was unfamiliar with the intellectual and social changes often taken to drive secularization. To the contrary, his work is aware of, engages with, and even accepts central elements of highly “anti-religious” intellectual developments—yet nonetheless champions religion. His conception of a modern religion takes these intellectual and social developments on board—defending and supporting them—without rejecting or privatizing religion. Whether or not one accepts Hegel's own elaboration of this vision, his goal as well as his larger strategy merit appreciation.
Grasping Hegel's ultimate account of the relation between religion and society in these terms suggests a new perspective on subsequent intellectual developments, particularly Hegel's relation to Feuerbach and his heirs. Hegel's account of representation undergirds a theory of religion as projection—though he understands this as legitimating religion rather than undermining it. The point of disagreement between Hegel and Feuerbach, then, is arguably not about whether religion involves projection. Rather, their disagreement deals more centrally with the social value of this projection (which is not to say that it is limited to this issue).Footnote 42 Where Feuerbach views this projection as interrupting and disrupting our relations with others, Hegel sees it as securing our relations with others by committing society as a whole to institutions that regulate those relations in a rational manner.
Considered in relation to the present, Hegel may help us to explain why modernity has not eliminated religion and to grasp the multiple social functions of religion in a context that many label post-secular. Hegel's succession of views draws attention to the variable roles that religion can play in binding societies together as well as binding people to social and political institutions. As Hegel's development brings out, the issue does not turn simply on matters of theory. Rather, Hegel's own shifts were driven in part by changes in his empirical judgment of the role that religion was then playing in the lives of members of the society. Its capacity to provide social cohesion depends upon, among other things, whether the citizenry in general understands it in the way that Hegel envisions in 1827—not some essential relationship, whether congruity or antithesis, between religion and modernity. Whether people identify with the society in which they live is determined by much more than theoretical accounts of religion, reason, and political life. Hegel thus prompts us to appreciate the diverse relations between the individual and society that religions can support and to turn in part to empirical studies to determine how religions are functioning in a given context. The viability of Hegel's solution, then, depends not merely upon its theoretical coherence but also upon its fit with the conditions of the day, particularly individuals’ actual understandings of the society in relation to their religious beliefs and practices.
