On Christianity Early Theological Writings (1948) by Friedrich Hegel (PDF)

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Digitized copy of original published in 1948. Great quality.

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⭐The Early Teological Writings of Hegel is a fine work and offer to those who are unfamiliar with his work, a convenient introduction. This is a very important work.

⭐Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a German Idealist philosopher, who was very influential on later Philosophy of History, Philosophy of Religion, and even Existentialism [e.g., Sartre’s

⭐]. Hegel also wrote (or at least delivered lectures that were transcribed by his students) works such as

⭐,

⭐,

⭐,

⭐,

⭐,

⭐,

⭐, etc.This book brings together translations of early works of Hegel, such as “The Positivity of the Christian Religion,” “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” and several brief works.He says in the “Positivity” book, “the general principle to be laid down as a foundation for all judgments on the varying modifications, forms, and spirit of the Christian religion is this—that the aim an essence of all true religion, our religion included, is human morality, and that all the more detailed doctrines of Christianity, all means of propagating them, and all its obligations… have their worth and their sanctity appraised according to their close or distant connection with that aim.” (§1, pg. 68)He states, “Although Jesus wanted faith, not on the strength of his miracles, but on the strength of his teaching, although eternal truths are of such a nature that, if they are to be necessary and universally valid, they can be based on the essence of reason alone and not on phenomena in the external world which for reason are mere accidents, still the conviction of man’s obligation to be virtuous took the following road: Miracles, loyally and faithfully accepted, became the basis of a faith in the man who worked them and the ground of his authority.” (§9, pg. 78-79)He asserts, “It is the state’s duty… to insure that its citizens shall also be morally good… The state could only bring its citizens to submit to these institutions through their trust in them, and this trust it must first arouse. Religion is the best means of doing this, and all depends on the use the state makes of it whether religion is able to attain this end. The end is plain in the religion of all nations… their efforts always bear on producing a certain attitude of mind, and this cannot be the object of any civil legislation.” (§21, pg. 98)He observes about the rite of Confirmation, “in making this arrangement, the church has also taken car that the child shall have heard nothing save the church’s faith, and it has declared the intelligence and judgments of a fourteen-year old child to be those of an adult. It assumes that his generally unintelligent repetition of the articles of faith expresses the free choice of an intellect which has made a ripe decision commensurate with the importance of the matter in question, namely, his eternal salvation, whereas the civil state postpones until the age of twenty to twenty-five the attainment of one’s majority and the capacity to perform valid civil actions, even though these concern matters which are only dung in comparison with those at issue in the decision taken at Confirmation.” (§21, pg. 106-107)He suggests, “if the church has achieved so much by its educational methods that it has with wholly subdued reason and intellect in religious speculation or else so filled the imagination with terrors that reason and intellect cannot and dare not venture on consciousness of their freedom or on the use of that freedom in religious matters… then the church has entirely taken away the possibility of a free choice… It has infringed the child’s natural right to the free development of his faculties and brought him up as a slave instead of as a free citizen.” (§24, pg. 115-116)He argues, “the Christian’s frame of mind is prescribed for him in every detail… The church orders him to go through all this series… the Christian church goes farther and commands feelings, a contradiction in terms… The necessary consequences of proposing to command feelings… were bound to be… self-deception… The result of this self-deception is a false tranquility which sets a high value on these feelings manufactured in a spiritual hothouse… It takes only a slight increase in the intensity of the imagination to turn this condition too into madness and lunacy.” (§29, pg. 140-141)He asks, “How is it possible to explain the construction of a fabric which is so repugnant to human reason and so erroneous through and through? One answer is an appeal to church history… to show how simple and fundamental truths become gradually overlaid with a heap of errors owing to passion and ignorance… the Fathers were not always led by knowledge, moderation, and reason; that, even in the original reception of Christianity, what was operative was not simply a pure love of truth but… very mixed motives, very unholy considerations, impure passions, and spiritual needs often springing solely from superstition…” (§1, pg. 173)He says in “The Spirit of Christianity,” “The miracles [of Jesus], which … APPEAR to be an attribute worthy of a God… But the closer the tie… the more harshly are we struck by the unnaturalness of a tie between the opposites… When a God effects something, it is a working of spirit on spirit… But if spirit works in a different shape, as an opposite… it has forgotten its divinity. Miracles therefore are the manifestation of the most UNdivine, because they are the most unnatural of phenomena… Divine action is the restoration and manifestation of oneness; miracle is the supreme disservice. Thus any expectation that the actual body associated with the Jesus who had been glorified and deified would be raised to divinity … is to entirely unfulfilled that it rather intensifies all the more the harshness of attaching an actual body to him.” (Pg. 296-297)In “Fragment of a System,” he observes, “The concept of individuality includes opposition to infinite variety and also inner association with it. A human being… is an individual life in so far as he is at one with all the elements, with the infinity of lives outside himself. He exists only inasmuch as the totality of life is divided into parts, he himself being one part and all the rest the other part; and again he exists only inasmuch as he is no part at all and inasmuch as nothing is separated from him.” (Pg. 310) He continues, “Out of the mortal and perishable figure… this thinking life raises that living being, which would be free from transience; raises a relation… which is not a [bare] unity, a conceptual abstraction, but is all-living and all-powerful infinite life; and this life it calls God… This self-elevation of man, not from the finite to the infinite… but from finite life to infinite life, is religion.” (Pg. 311)He admits, “This partial character of the living being is transcended in religion… Philosophy therefore has to stop short of religion because it is a process of thinking and, as such a process, implies an opposition with nonthinking [processes] as well as between the thinking mind and the object of thought. Philosophy has to disclose the finiteness in all finite things and require their integration by means of reason. In particular, it has to recognize the illusions generated by its own infinite and thus to place the true infinite outside its confines.” (Pg. 313)For those only acquainted with Hegel’s mature philosophy (e.g., the Phenomenology; the Encyclopedia, etc.), these briefer, less complex works may prove revelatory. At any rate, they are important reading for anyone studying Hegel’s philosophical development.

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