One of Hegel’s many provocative claims is that history and art are somehow symbiotically related. In his mature lectures on the philosophy of art, Hegel portrays the two as deeply intertwined, with new art forms emerging to express particular historical worldviews and historical developments prompted in turn by artistic innovations. In Tragedy in Hegel’s Early Philosophical Writings, Peter Wake demonstrates how this relationship was among Hegel’s lifelong preoccupations. Hegel’s very early essays, known as The Positivity of the Christian Religion and The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, show him grappling with whether history can be understood through art or even as art. Specifically, Wake argues, the young Hegel experimented with using tragedy as a diagnostic tool to explain the rise and fall of religions and even history itself. Wake’s book lucidly recounts this early experiment with a tragic framework and shows how Hegel’s mature philosophy takes its start from a rejection of that framework. Focusing on the role of tragedy in Hegel’s early essays also allows Wake to explore how necessity and fate function in Hegel’s philosophy more broadly. The result is a rich, thorough study that illuminates Hegel’s early thought as well as key issues in his mature philosophy.

Hegel’s early essays are driven by a conviction that he never abandoned, namely that religion should portray the unity of human and divine; a religion that instead postulates divinity as an external force fails as a religion. Christianity, on Hegel’s early analysis, had failed in just this way. Despite Jesus’s original message of unity and love, Christianity had succumbed to what Hegel calls ‘positivity’, a condition characterized by mindless obedience to external authority and an insistence on presenting ‘rituals and texts as if they were fixed and indisputable facts’ (15). Hegel’s early writings are an attempt, born clearly out of a personal sense of distress, to determine how this had happened and how, more importantly, the rift between divine and human could be mended. Wake’s book is divided into two parts, each analyzing one of Hegel’s attempts at diagnosing and remedying this predicament. In Part I, Wake analyzes The Positivity of the Christian Religion, written between 1795 and 1796 in Bern; in Part II, he turns to The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, written between 1798 and 1800 in Frankfurt.

In Chapter 1, Wake reminds us that like many of his contemporaries, Hegel turned to ancient Greece as an ideal against which to analyze Christianity’s failure and foster hopes for its future. Still very much allied with Kant, Hegel in Positivity claims that the unity and beauty of ancient Greece could be recovered through Kantian moral philosophy since Kant, in Hegel’s interpretation, had simply articulated philosophically what the Greeks had intuited naturally (26). All that remained, Hegel hoped, was to show how Kantian morality could be reunited with sensibility (25). Key to this reunification was the development of a Volksreligion that could replicate the ‘political, artistic, and philosophical’ unity of fifth-century Athens (31). Hegel’s question then becomes: what must Christianity be like to achieve this end? To answer this question, Hegel undertakes an analysis of Christianity’s Greek and Jewish predecessors in the service of assessing its current state and future potential. Here we find some of Hegel’s notorious early musings about Judaism as abstract, empty and law-based: in short, as Wake puts it, as ‘positivity embodied’ (38). Jesus’s emphasis on love and radical community, Hegel thinks, initially emerged as a reaction against this positivity. But in order to communicate his message, Jesus resorted to miracles and messianic claims that contradict his own ideas. His disciples exacerbated this trend through ‘faithful subservience’ and intellectual passivity (52–3), thus institutionalizing Jesus’s ideas and ultimately reproducing the positivity Jesus’s words were meant to counteract.

Chapter 2 explains how this institutionalization produces ‘pity and loathing’ for those outside the faith (65), prompting Christianity’s ultimately imperial expansion. When this physical expansion is not enough, Christianity turns against internal enemies and finally against itself, resulting in life-denying asceticism (73). This final attack on the self cannot be reversed with reason alone but requires imagination, something Christianity is uniquely incapable of providing given its lack of ‘genuine religious and political festivals that might spark the imagination rather than terrorize it’ (78). Hegel instead searches for a mythology that would convey ‘truth for the imagination’: a mythology that would not be didactic or make historical claims, but would cultivate a unified, peaceful sensibility. Possibilities such as the Old Testament or German myths are rejected as too foreign or arbitrary, and Hegel seems resigned to calling for theoretical resistance to Christianity’s dogmatism. Despite the lack of a Volksreligion capable of redressing the modern situation, Hegel thinks that humans’ recurring sense of their autonomy will continue to challenge church authority (94). But as long as the state interferes with the church and the church insists on unquestioning obedience (94), the cycle of positivity will continue. This cycle, Hegel concludes, is Christianity’s fate.

In Part II, Wake transitions to The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate. In one sense, Hegel here starts again from the beginning, tracing the twists and turns of Christianity’s development to explain its failures and improve its future. But Wake emphasizes a marked increase in Hegel’s use of tragedy as an underlying theoretical motif both to explain the power of Greek thought and, more jarringly, to explain Jesus himself (102). This new emphasis on tragedy (undoubtedly developed through Hegel’s interactions with Hölderlin during this period) supplies a sense of necessity that begins, as Wake points out, to presage Hegel’s later dialectical system. In assessing Christianity’s evolution, Hegel focuses no longer on external influences (Greece and Judaism) but on internal conceptual development, asking whether positivity was already implicit in Jesus’s teachings (107). Here we see Hegel, Wake suggests, beginning to understand the power of his own insight into dialectical necessity.

In the service of tracing this new necessity, Hegel’s analysis oscillates between the bizarre and the ingenious. In Chapter 3, Wake valiantly works to make sense of it all: Hegel’s attempt to explain humans’ relationship to nature through a comparison of Noah and Nimrod with Ovid’s Metamorphosis; his comparison of Abraham’s withdrawal from his community to Macbeth’s regicide (127); his break with Kant, resulting in Kant’s demotion from honorary Greek to a modern incarnation of Jewish positivity (120). Wake artfully channels this unlikely mix of ideas into fundamental questions about what Hegel can mean by introducing the aesthetic category of tragedy into an account of history, for instance whether an entire people can be the subject of tragedy and, if so, who counts as the spectators and what emotions they should feel (127).

In Chapter 4, Wake turns from Hegel’s account of the tragedy of the Jewish people to his assessment of Christianity’s fate. Most notably in the Sermon on the Mount, Hegel’s Jesus certainly attempts to articulate a new unity through love and so to overcome positivity (145). But Jesus’s parables fail to express this unification in a way that the imagination can grasp, leaving his message again prone to literal interpretation and a regression back into positivity. Wake suggests that Hegel in this context employs a new, deeper understanding of the relation of tragedy to life. Humans can only articulate the unity underlying reality by expressing it; yet by expressing it, we limit and so destroy it. We can, in other words, only articulate unity through division: ‘unity is, qua experience, always a reconciliation’ revealed ‘only after it has been lost’ (151). Through its dramatic depiction of rupture and reconciliation, tragedy becomes a metaphor for this experience. Jesus too, through his frustrated efforts to express unity and, indeed, his ‘attempts to live the troubling intimacy of God and human beings’ (152), comes to represent a kind of tragic paradigm for Hegel.

Chapter 5 explores Hegel’s provisional conclusion that Christianity can only produce a ‘hovering God’ who is both present and absent. Jesus withdraws from the community and sacrifices himself so that his disciples are forced to abandon their dependence on his physical presence. But the legacy of his withdrawal, because it is couched in the language of unity, is again hostility towards those outside the community. It thus replicates the cycle of expansion, alienation, and asceticism that Hegel so abhorred. Christianity’s fate, indeed, seems sealed by the withdrawal implied in Jesus’s message, a withdrawal that precludes the kind of unity ancient Greeks enjoyed. As long, in other words, as Greek unity is the standard by which religions are assessed, Christianity cannot succeed. Its ‘disappearing unity’ and ‘full fragility’ evidence its tragic fate (174).

But Hegel’s tragic analysis of Christianity did not last. Ultimately he rejected ‘ancient Greek life and its expression in Greek tragedy as the ideal for a revitalized modernity’, allowing for the possibility that Christianity, correctly understood, could in fact be the fulfilment of religion rather than fated to perpetual failure. In a brief conclusion, Wake rightly links Christianity’s rehabilitation to Hegel’s mature analysis of tragedy’s sublation in comedy. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel suggests that by mocking the divine edicts that tragedy took as decisive, comedy reveals the gods as ‘products of the Greek imagination’ (203). Seen from a comic perspective, humans, far from being fated, control their destiny. They undermine and amend their own norms, light-heartedly laughing at the frustration of their aims. All is not yet settled: in the Phenomenology’s account, the dissolution of the Greek gods is followed by more cycles of alienation and despair. But the ultimate outcome is no longer tragedy’s resigned reconciliation of the human and divine but their self-confident reunion in comedy.

‘What, then’, Wake asks in conclusion, ‘is the fate of fate?’ (204). I take this question to have several interpretations. In the first, we might ask about the fate of the Greeks’ belief in fate, given that this belief underpins the possibility of tragedy. Hegel’s likely answer would be that the dissolution of the gods means that there is no divine fate: humans might create their own fates, but, having created them, they can also evade them. This conclusion is a gain for modernity since it confirms human freedom and self-determination. The second interpretation regards Hegel’s question about Christianity’s fate; indeed, its fate as imagined in Spirit turns out in fact not to be fated. Christianity is not doomed to fail because of the implicit message in Jesus’s teachings. Instead, it becomes the religion (at least in its Protestant incarnation) best able to express the truth that all humans are free, contain the divine within them, and can express this divinity as participants in modern ethical communities.

But Wake’s study invites another level of analysis. To what extent, one might ask, is Christianity’s development, even in Hegel’s later, more positive interpretation, also fated? Is its development conceptually necessary, to be understood in terms of Hegel’s Logic? What could have been otherwise, to Hegel’s mind, about Christianity’s development or, for that matter, any other historical occurrence? To what extent was Hegel himself fated to come to the conclusions he reaches, and to what extent are they also revisable? How, in other words, are we to understand Hegel’s idea, newly identifiable in the Spirit essay, that ideas produce necessary developments? The tension between necessity and freedom implied by these questions pervades Hegel’s mature work and only finds a resolution, in my view, in the full dialectical system presented there. Addressing this tension through Hegel’s mature philosophy is beyond the purview of Wake’s study, but its centrality to Hegel’s project confirms the importance of Wake’s guiding questions about fate and necessity in Hegel’s early work.

Wake’s book also provides a theoretical basis for understanding Hegel’s mature view of the relationship between history and art. Wake shows that the young Hegel aspired to ‘a poetic history informed by the categories of tragic drama’ (10). Although Hegel later abandoned the tragic component of this claim, he continued to see our understanding of history as bound up with developments in art and vice versa. How does Hegel think this view is justified? Can we legitimately, as Wake puts it, ‘apply the categories of poetics to the discipline of history?’ Wake cites Aristotle’s claim that ‘poetry is more philosophical and more elevated than history’ and suggests that something like this is at work in Hegel’s thought as well (120). Hegel indeed claims in Positivity that in looking for a new mythology, he is looking not for historical truth but for ‘truth for the imagination’ (84). Wake’s work prepares us to better understand how even after Hegel abandons the search for a new mythology, this ‘truth for the imagination’ remains a requirement for history proper. History should not, as Hegel explains in his lectures on the philosophy of history, be a simple recounting of facts; it should recount those facts in a way that expresses the metaphysical unity that—to reiterate Hegel’s lifelong conviction—underlies reality. Perhaps Hegel’s own philosophy of history serves, to his mind at least, as the closest thing to this mythology which the modern world can produce: a history based in facts, guided by reason, but shaped by the imagination in ways that reflect metaphysical truth.

Tragedy in Hegel’s Early Theological Writings is a compellingly written, eloquent account of key developments in Hegel’s philosophy. It manages to convey both Hegel’s youthful despair at the state of Christianity and his sometimes dizzying attempts to make sense of that state. It combines careful exegesis with broader philosophical analysis and balances a credible recounting of Hegel’s assessment of Greek religion and Judaism with appropriate skepticism. In recounting the two early ‘false starts’ represented in these essays, it deepens our understanding of Hegel’s later affirmation of Christianity’s potential. In short, Wake’s analysis gives valuable insight into the vast synthesis of history, art and necessity that Hegel’s philosophy was itself fated to become.