Early Theological Writings by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

First published: wr. c. 1793-1800, pb. as Hegels theologische Jugendschriften, 1907 (English translation, 1948)

Edition(s) used:Early Theological Writings, translated by T. M. Knox. With an introduction and fragments translated by Richard Kroner. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Essays; theology

Core issue(s): Church; ethics; Jesus Christ; morality; reason; religion

Overview

Philosopher Herman Nohl sorted Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s manuscripts into five groups: “Folk Religion and Christianity” (Volksreligion und Christentum), “The Life of Jesus” (Das Leben Jesu), “The Positivity of the Christian Religion” (Die Positivität der christlichen Religion), “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” (Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal), and several fragments including “The System Fragment of 1800” (Systemfragment von 1800). This arrangement of Hegel’s unfinished works may not have pleased the philosopher.

Hegel’s decision never to publish any of these works is significant. His first published book, Differenz des Fichte’schen und Schelling’schen Systems der Philosophie (1801; The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Philosophy, 1977), reveals that by then he had already gone beyond Immanuel Kant and toward Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, from whom he was shortly to break as well. Yet, through all the essays and fragments that Hegel wrote up to 1800, Kant can easily be seen as the dominant influence on Hegel’s thought.

The two most valuable essays in Nohl’s collection are “The Positivity of the Christian Religion” and “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate.” They form the centerpiece of the 1948 English translation, which does not include either “Folk Religion and Christianity” or “The Life of Jesus” because the translator, Thomas Malcolm Knox, considered the former too disorganized and the latter a clumsy attempt to portray Jesus Christ as only a preacher of Kantian ethics.

“The Positivity of the Christian Religion” criticizes the legalistic and worldly aspects of the Church. Because Hegel worked on it sporadically for about six or seven years, its method is inconsistent and its quality is uneven. Yet its overarching theme is clear. In philosophy, the term “positivity” refers to whatever exists, as it directly exists rather than as it suggests any deeper meaning or expresses any subtler reality. For Hegel, a positive religion values obedience to authority more than obedience to conscience. Church authority is what believers immediately encounter in Christianity, but because this authority is not unified, it is not true to the teachings of Jesus. The moral progress of Christianity suffers because of the many individuals and sects that have arisen through history, each claiming to embody the only true interpretation of Jesus and each insisting on loyalty and obedience to that particular view. Christian positivity is therefore a divisive phenomenon, counterproductive to the intent of Jesus to found a moral Kingdom of God on earth. Such a kingdom would require spiritual unity among all believers. The stubborn ideological distance of church authorities from each other and from original Christian spirituality undermines the possibility of achieving this unity.

Hegel’s premise for this essay is that true Christianity can be rescued from its positivity only by extracting the pure ethical and religious content from the word and mission of Jesus. Toward this goal, Hegel examines the relationships of Jesus to Judaism, church to state, miracles to ordinary events, the disciples of Jesus to those of Socrates, and the ancient to the modern world. He compares various notions of messianism, equality, morality, and shared spiritual life. He searches each of these topics to detect the origins of Christian positivity. For Hegel, the advent of positivity is the advent of spiritual decay. By becoming increasingly positive, the Church becomes more political than religious. Hegel says that each separate Christian denomination functions more like a state than is proper for a true Christian church.

“The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” continues many of these ideas but shows an even greater appreciation of the ethical teachings of Jesus in the Gospels and a sympathetic appraisal of Christian mysticism. Hegel wrote this essay over a much shorter period, around 1799 or 1800, so it is a more mature, better integrated work. The transitions among its four main subjects, “The Spirit of Judaism,” “The Moral Teaching of Jesus,” “The Religious Teaching of Jesus,” and “The Fate of Jesus and His Church,” are logical and coherent.

The second essay, on the spirit of Christianity, is less Kantian than the first. While the earlier essay attacks organized religion in general and Christian polity in particular along many of the same lines that Kant uses, the second essay discusses Christianity from an angle that Kant did not emphasize, namely, as the title indicates, the underlying and motivating spirit of the religion, rather than its earthly manifestations. The second essay looks at the human social and cultural dimension of Christianity, albeit in a way that is much informed by Kant, while Kant in Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1793; Religion Within the Boundaries of Pure Reason, 1838) and other works uses absolute moral rationality or reasonableness as a touchstone by which to evaluate Christianity and compare it favorably with other religions. Kant and Hegel each consider the role of priests and believers, their successes and failings, and their status as exponents of reason and morality, but Kant mostly ignores the social and cultural aspect that Hegel makes central.

Christian Themes

Hegel founded his entire philosophical system on a Christian worldview. This was a departure from Kant and a partial return to the approach of medieval thinkers such as Saint Augustine, Saint Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Bonaventure. Hegel saw both philosophy and Christianity as progressing inexorably through history toward a morally and spiritually harmonious world under the governance of absolute reason. The first inklings of this dominant theme of Hegelian philosophy appeared in “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate.”

For Kant, the goal of all religion is to foster morality. Because morality necessarily involves autonomous decision making and therefore requires individual freedom, only a free rational being, not a robot or an obedient slave, can be a complete moral agent. Thus Kant’s philosophy of religion champions individual human dignity. For Hegel, religion includes this kind of morality, but its main purpose on earth is to create and promote “cohesive social morality” (Sittlichkeit). Hegel sees Kant’s duty-based, or deontological, ethics as one-sided (einseitig), because it attempts to reduce religion to ethics rather than incorporate religion on its own terms into a universal philosophical explanation of phenomena. For Hegel, philosophy is religious; for Kant, it is secular.

Kant’s ethics is terminally individualistic; that is, the individual must always obey conscience and perform the absolute, God-given moral duty without regard to consequences. Kant’s interpretation of Christianity emphasizes the primacy of individual conscience and regards Christian good will as the highest expression of all religion. Hegel’s ethics, on the other hand, while very respectful of Kant’s, is grounded in the full spectrum of social relationships, not in the individual’s response to moral duty. By 1806, when Hegel finished writing his masterpiece, Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; The Phenomenology of Spirit, 1861; also known as The Phenomenology of Mind, 1910), he had systematically distinguished in his technical philosophical vocabulary between “morality” (Moralität) and “ethics” (Sitten). He identified the former with Kant’s individualistic ethics and the latter with his own divinely sanctioned system of coherent social order.

Hegel was neither a utilitarian nor any kind of consequentialist, yet he believed that morality, insofar as it concerns human relationships, is primarily a matter of social rather than individual concern. To create Sittlichkeit, or a cohesive social morality, society must be spiritually integrated. Chief among the integrating influences on society is religion, especially Christianity. The good citizens of Hegel’s well-ordered constitutional state would have to be Christians. That is why, throughout his mature career, beginning with “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” Hegel’s main focus was on the philosophy of history and the philosophy of religion.

Sources for Further Study

Adams, George Plimpton. The Mystical Element in Hegel’s Early Theological Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1910. Among the first and best studies of these texts, published only three years after they appeared in German and thirty-eight years before they appeared in English, it identifies an important theme of Hegel’s philosophy of religion.

Althaus, Horst. Hegel: An Intellectual Biography. Translated by Michael Tarsh. Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 2000. The original German title, literally “Hegel and the heroic years of philosophy,” better describes this book’s content, the philosophical upheaval that occurred in Germany between the publication of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason, 1838) in 1781 and the political revolutions of 1848.

Harris, Henry S. Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight, 1770-1801. Oxford, England: Clarendon, 1972. The standard biography of the young Hegel.

Luft, Eric v. d. “On the Religious Roots of Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie.” M.A. thesis, Bryn Mawr College, 1977. Traces the influence of “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” and “The Positivity of the Christian Religion” on the development of Hegel’s political and social philosophy.

Pinkard, Terry P. Hegel: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. A monumental study, offering stiff challenges to many legends and preconceptions about Hegel.