1202812

Hegel's Phenomenology of Religion
Author(s): O. Kem Luther and Jeff L. Hoover

Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Jul., 1981), pp. 229-241
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1202812
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O. Kem Luther and
Jeff L. Hoover / Eastern Mennonite College
The contrast between the approach to philosophical knowledge in

Hegel's Logic1 and the philosophical style of the later lecture series2 is
striking. The systemization of Hegel's ideas into a treatise on logic
results in an austere philosophical monologue which only serious
readers of Hegel would claim to follow in detail. The material pub-
lished from the Berlin lectures, on the other hand, is almost conver-
sational in style, full of examples, annotations, and digressions.
More important than mere stylistic differences, however, is the
problem raised by two separate ways of approaching philosophical
thought in Hegel. Hegel's system claims to be whole cloth which,
because it embraces the essentials of human life and thought, is self-
justifying and self-perpetuating. The problem of how to get into the
Hegelian vision, therefore, is acute. The path of knowledge
supported by the Logic is a total immersion approach to a foreign
philosophical language. Few have the desire or the discipline to
follow this path. The path to knowledge in the Berlin lectures,
however, while making more concessions to the distractions of the
'There are two Logics in the Hegelian corpus: the "larger logic" of the Niirnberg period, the
Wissenschaft der Logik, in English as G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller
(New York: Humanities Press, 1969); and the "lesser logic" at the beginning of his
Encyclopadie, in English as G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, trans. William Wallace, 2d ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1893).
2Hegel's lectures from the Berlin period on the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of art,
the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of history were not published by Hegel, but by
his students, who collated their class notes into multivolume treatments of these four subjects.
The first full English translations were Ebenezer B. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson, Lectures
on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols. (1895; reprint ed., New York: Humanities Press, 1962);
Elizabeth S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols.
(1896; reprint ed., New York: Humanities Press, 1955); Francis P. B. Osmaston, The
Philosophy of Fine Arts (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1920); J. Sibree, The Philosophy of History, 3
vols. (1899; reprint ed., New York: Dover Publications, 1956).
?1981 by The University of Chicago. 0022-4189/81/6103-0001$01.00
229
TheJournal of Religion
average intellect, seems to have inconsistent results. The reader is

continually flitting around the central system, following tangents of
insight which, as often as not, insult common academic opinions
about the specific significance of everyday bits of historical and
scientific knowledge.
Between these two approaches stands the path to philosophical
knowledge followed in the 1807 Phenomenology.3 Hegel in his preface
refers to the Phenomenology as a "ladder" into his system of thought.
The Phenomenology attempts to come to grips with the current
intellectual climate while at the same time describing other philos-
ophies as precursors (or, more accurately, "incursors") to Hegel's
unique brand of absolute idealism. The path of the Phenomenology-
Hegel's phenomenological method-is not easy to define, however.
There is some disagreement in Hegelian scholarship about what to
include in a description of the phenomenological method represented
by the 1807 Phenomenology.
Without pushing the dichotomy too far, it often appears to be
possible to classify an interpreter of the Phenomenology as a member of
one of two distinct groups. On the one side stand those in the
"rationalist" perspective. These tend to view the Phenomenology as an
early system, a programmatic introduction of the reader into an
overall philosophical framework. On the other side stands the
"existentialist" perspective, which views the Phenomenology in more of
a piecemeal fashion, as a collection of passages showing unique
personal and cultural insights, but bound together with a somewhat
artificial vocabulary of speculative idealism.4 Despite the differences
in approach, however, these two perspectives show surprising agree-
3ThePhiinomenologie des Geistes, translated into English as G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of

Mind, trans. James B. Baillie, 2d ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1931), and most recently as G.
W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977).
4For readers of Hegel who begin with English language interpretations, the foundational
works of J. N. Findlay, Hegel: A Re-Examination (New York: Macmillan Co., 1958), and
Walter Kaufmann, Hegel. Reinterpretation, Texts, and Commentary (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday & Co., 1965), serve as examples of these two approaches. Findlay, representing
the rationalist side, concludes at the end of a review of the Phenomenology that "the main
reward of the study is that there is no notion or principle to be found in the later system
which is not sounded in the Phenomenology . . . (p. 147). The role of the Phenomenology is "to
state, in terms of biographical subjectivity, what was afterwards to be worked out in intersub-
jective, conceptual terms" in the Logic (p. 147). In general, he views the Phenomenology from
the structural whole of Hegel's system as it is worked out in a more detailed way in the Logic
and Encyclopedia. Kaufmann, on the other hand, is representative of the existentialist
approach. From his perspective the Logic succeeds best where it approximates the color and bio-
graphical force of the Phenomenology. He says in introducing the Logic that "Hegel . . . confronts us
230
ment about the philosophical method Hegel uses in the Phenomen-

ology. His method, in a word, is to stand securely within a planned
progression of ideational forms while continually dropping back to
expressions of the forms in the cultural milieu, trying to lead the
reader into the central systematic insights from several different lines
of thought. While the rationalist and existentialist perspectives might
disagree on whether Hegel in the Phenomenology succeeds more at
systematic continuity or at intellectual entrapment, both agree that
this is Hegel's philosophical method at this stage in his career.5
If Hegel had shown more attachment to a consistent
phenomenological approach in his later writing and lecturing,
perhaps it would not be so difficult to understand how the approach
in the Phenomenology is related to both the systematic edifice of the
Logic sections and the free-flowing lectures of the Berlin period. The
advance of critical scholarship in Hegel studies since the turn of the
century may have helped to resolve a few of the difficulties posed by
the various approaches to philosophy in the works of Hegel.6 It
appears now that the introduction to philosophical thought through
the phenomenological method was as characteristic of the mature
Hegel as it was of the thirty-year-old Privatdozent in Jena. In this
paper we will draw in particular on research within the last decade
on the philosophy of religion lectures to present an introduction to
as another Odysseus: in the Phenomenology we followed his odyssey, the spirit's great voyage in
search of a home where it might settle down; in the Logic we are asked to follow him into the realm
of shadows. There we moved in a world where the passions had their place; here the passions are
left behind" (p. 184). Kaufmann finds the most believable Hegel in the personalized Berlin
lectures and "the poetic impulse" of the Phenomenology.
5Findlay, though conceding that the Phenomenology states the major Hegelian themes "in an
inspired, fragmentary, elusive manner" (p. 81), holds nonetheless that the Phenomenology is "a
single paradigmatic instance" (p. 84) of a trail actually "blazed by the 'World Spirit' in the past"
(p. 83). Hegel "weaves types and universals into a continuous pattern . . ." (p. 84). Kaufmann
also turns to a riot of metaphor to describe what the Phenomenology is trying to do. He calls it "a
stream of thought that moves from core to core" (p. 101), a book of aphorisms "buried in
mammoth paragraphs to forestall any popular appeal" (p. 100). It is a "mad" attempt that tries to
arrange "all significant points of view . . . in a single sequence, on a ladder that reaches from the
crudest to the most mature" (p. 133). The Phenomenology pauses here and there to pick up material
from psychology, history, philosophy-indeed, from everywhere but music-as grist for its
grandiose philosophical mill. Some connections are brilliant and exciting; others are dense or
dull. Thus each approach finds the Phenomenology to be flawed. The two positions hold the flaws,
however, to lie in opposing characteristics. Nevertheless, each position implicitly recognizes that
Hegel's methodology must be described as a blend of insight and systematic speculation.
6Two results of this scholarship have been the Felix Meiner Verlag's publications: first, in the
Philosophische Bibliothek series, edited by Johannes Hoffmeister and Georg Lasson, of an initial
critical edition of Hegel's works; second, a new, more extensive critical edition, the Gesammelte
Werke, under the direction of the Hegel Archiv in Bochum, West Germany. The new critical
edition will probably not be completed until after the turn of the century.
231
The Journal of Religion
Hegel's philosophy of religion which appears to parallel the

Phenomenology. To do this, we will first have to grapple with some of
the philological issues surrounding the recreation of Hegel's under-
standing of the philosophy of religion in his early Berlin years. This
will be followed by a summarization of Hegel's phenomenological
path to the philosophical knowledge of religion and, finally, by a few
remarks on the significance of this approach for the philosophical
study of religion in Hegel.
THE SEARCH FOR A HEGELIAN STRUCTURE IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF
RELIGION LECTURES
The discrepancy between the Phenomenolog

approaches to philosophical methodology may
Hegel's publication record than with any major ch
to philosophy after 1807. The Phenomenology, it
one of Hegel's first attempts to put himself in
reading audience. Written under the duress of a p
major war, and the need of an aging Privatdo
something of book length into print, the Phenom
of philosophical activity that Hegel was un
published form over the next twenty-five yea
classroom, however, it appears that Hegel engi
philosophical problems very similar in format to
Recreating the method and content of his ph
however, turns out to be a difficult task. For c
classroom use of his published Logic paragrap
upon the scattered glosses (Zusatze) collected by
read the Zusitze together with Hegel's dense parag
elsewhere in the Encyclopedia does indeed give th
flavor of the Phenomenology's approach to p
lectures, however, which Hegel gave without t
text, the distance between the phenomenolo
classroom and the published works is great
published lecture series from the Berlin perio
problems.
The philosophy of religion lectures are the sp
study, specifically, the content of the first third
7The Zusitze collected for the first third of the Encyclopedia are tra
of Hegel.
232
titled by Hegel himself and by his later editors "Concept [Begrifj] of

Religion."8 This lecture series was presented four times during
Hegel's residence in Berlin: 1821, 1824, 1827, and 1831. The first
third consisted in each of the four years of an "Introduction" and the
"Concept of Religion" itself. For textual reasons explained below, we
will focus on the 1821 lectures in this paper. It is also essential to
consider a piece on religion written by Hegel and published in 1822
as the foreword to a work on philosophy of religion by a student and
friend of Hegel's, H. F. W. Hinrichs.9 These three events taken
together, the "Introduction" and "Concept of Religion" in the 1821
lectures and the foreword to Hinrichs's book, capture a unified piece
of Hegel's philosophical style during his first years in Berlin. A study
of these events shows that Hegel used an approach to explore
religious life and thought which was very similar to his phenomen-
ological method in 1807.
There are three published texts of Hegel's philosophy of religion
lectures in German. The first two works were published in 1832 and
1840, both under the editorship of Philipp Marheineke, theologian
and successor to Hegel as rector at Berlin.10 The third work was
edited by Georg Lasson in the 1920s as part of the critical edition of
Hegel's works coordinated by Lasson and Johannes Hoffmeister."1 In
addition to the published texts, there are a few unpublished notebooks
extant of students who attended these lectures, and the papers of
8The other two-thirds of Hegel's lectures are a review of the historical development of religion
and an interpretation of Christianity and Christian theology as the "absolute" religion.
9Hermann F. W. Hinrichs, Die Religion im inneren Verhaltnisse zur Wissenschaft (Heidelberg,
1822). The first English translation of the foreword has recently appeared in print from A. V.
Miller in an appendix to Frederick G. Weiss, ed., Beyond Epistemology: New Studies in the Philosophy
of Hegel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), pp. 221-44.
'?The 1832 edition is available only in research libraries. The 1840 work was reprinted in H.
Glockner's Jubilee Edition of the complete set of Hegel's works: G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen iber
die Philosophie der Religion, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Frommann Verlag, 1927-35).
"G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Religion, ed. G. Lasson, 3 vols. (Hamburg:
Felix Meiner Verlag, 1925-27); hereafter Vorlesungen. A new English translation of Lasson's
version of the last third of the lectures has recently been done by Peter Hodgson of Vanderbilt. It
is available in the American Academy of Religion Texts and Translations series as G. W. F.
Hegel, The Christian Religion (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1979). It is a translation of the
text in the Lasson edition along with critical materials which render the Lasson text more useful
to scholars. Hegel's 1821 lecture notes are transcribed and printed in a recent (and expensive!)
volume by Karl-Heinz Ilting: G. W. F. Hegel, Religionsphilosophie (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1978),
vol. 1. Mention should also be made of the French translation of Lasson's edition by J. Gibelin,
G. W. F. Hegel, Lefons sur la philosophie de la religion, vol. 1, Notion de la religion, trans. J. Gibelin,
2d ed. (Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1971); and the small volume of Albert Chapelle,
Hegel et la religion. Annexes (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1967), pp. 11-19, which provides useful
critical annotations to Lasson's handling of the 1821 Hegel manuscript.
233
Hegel, the most important of which are his own notes to the 1821
philosophy of religion lectures.12
How certain can the reader be that the published editions reflect
Hegel's own approach to philosophy? There seems to be little
question that the content is genuinely Hegelian (though some of it
may not have been covered in the philosophy of religion lectures). It
is the structure, however-the philosophical method used to approach
religious knowledge-which is in question here rather than the
specific content of the different sentences and paragraphs. On this
level, there is some question whether the published editions have
remained faithful.13 There are several hindrances to using the
published volumes as keys to the understanding of Hegel's
methodology.
The first problem is that of intentional bias in editing. The
strongest suspicion of bias in any of these editions is in the 1840
compilation. Marheineke relied heavily on the work of a brilliant
associate, Bruno Bauer. In the polarizations of the Hegelian camp in
the 1830s and 1840s, Bauer eventually emerged as a member of the
Left-Hegelian faction and a proponent of atheism. Bauer was later
to state that the 1840 edition of Hegel's philosophy of religion
lectures differed from the 1832 edition in "its more pointed devel-
opment of atheism."14 The meaning of this quotation is not entirely
clear, however, since it does not actually say that there was any
change in the editing policy. It appears, in fact, that Bauer's atheism
did not fully emerge until his editing work was largely completed.
Also, Bauer was answerable to the Right-Hegelian Marheineke, who
would have opposed an attempt to draw Hegel away from a more
traditional theological framework.15 Bauer later reported in a letter
'2This is a bound notebook containing 104 sheets written on both sides in Hegel's own hand.
The style is abbreviated; it was clearly intended for oral delivery rather than publication. The
wide margins contain corrections and additions, some of which probably belong to a later period.
'3The most careful consideration of these questions can be found in two sources: Walter
Jaeschke, "Der Aufbau und die bisherigen Editionen von Hegels Vorlesungen uber die
Philosophie der Religion" (M.A. thesis, Freie Universitat, Berlin, 1970), hereafter "Aufbau"; and
Reinhard Heede, "Hegel's Religionsphilosophie als Aufgabe und Problem der Forschung," Hegel-
Bilanz: Zur Aktualitit und Inaktualitat der Philosophie Hegels, ed. R. Heede and J. Ritter (Frankfurt:
Vittorio Klostermann, 1973). See also a review of Lasson's edition by Emanuel Hirsch in
Theologische Literaturzeitung 50 (1925): 421-23; 53 (1928): 376-79; 55 (1930): 425-27.
'4Bruno Bauer, Die Posaune des jungsten Gerichts uber Hegel den Atheisten und Antichristen (1841;
reprint ed., Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1969).
'5There is an interesting footnote on p. 300 in the 1840 edition-the only footnote which
specifies that a passage is from Hegel's own hand-which portrays Hegel as emphasizing the
significance of the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ. Is this a last-minute Marheineke
234
that "one could have said that I had edited the new edition in the
interest of the 'left' side, but the simple truth of the matter is that
carried out the work with a thoroughgoing indifference, not in t
interests of any school."16 In summary, in the absence of any so
external or internal evidence, a conscious intent to alter the text
does not seem to be an issue in the widely maligned Bauer
recension.
The problem of textual sources is more significant, however, and
affects all three editions. The 1832 edition, according to
Marheineke's own testimony in the 1840 preface, did not make
sufficient use of Hegel's own papers. Nor were the papers given fair
treatment in 1840, despite an attempt by Bauer and Marheineke to
employ them more extensively. Lasson, commenting on the use of
Hegel's 1821 manuscript in the 1840 edition, charges that Bauer
"proceeded with the 1821 manuscript with exceptional high-
handedness; material which he derived from the manuscript he
paraphrased without even considering the original sequence of the
passages, not even avoiding actual changes of content!"'7 All things
considered, the 1832 edition may even be preferable to the 1840
edition, in spite of the use of better sources in the 1840 edition, since
the developments within the Hegelian school in the years following
Hegel's death resulted in a shift in the specific issues which the
lectures were perceived to address. One would have expected the
Lasson edition, with its more serious attention to Hegel's own
papers, to have avoided the tendency to assimilate Hegel's position
to his own. Unfortunately, it appears that Lasson's edition does not
meet the best critical standards. A glance at the outline of Lasson's
edition shows a finality of approach that causes Hegel's lectures to
resemble a dictionary of religion. In addition, there is a disregard
for the internal development of Hegel's 1821 manuscript; passages
are frequently transposed and are interspersed with material which
does not follow the line of thought in the manuscript.
The most serious problem, however, in establishing a text for
Hegel's philosophy of religion does not lie in the area of the uncrit-
ical use of textual sources but in the editorial assumptions made
about the collation of the 1821, 1824, 1827, and 1831 lectures into a
addition to Bauer's editorial work in order to push Hegel clearly to the side of the Right-
Hegelians?
I6Bruno Bauer and Edgar Bauer, Briefwechsel waihrend derJahre 1839-1843 aus Bonn und Berlin
(Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1969), p. 49.
'7George Lasson, "Zur Feststellung des Textes" in Hegel, Vorlesungen 1:319.
235
single presentation.18 The intention of both Marheineke and Lasson

was to render to the public a completed Hegel. To do this it was
necessary to choose one lecture series (and the student notebooks
which witnessed the content of this series) over the others, since
Hegel had significantly changed his approach in each succeeding
lecture after 1821. Perhaps because of the fact that the best note-
books were from 1824 and 1827,19 the structure of the 1821 lecture
was abandoned in the published editions. What was substituted for
it was not so much the 1824 or 1827 order but an amalgam of the
structures of the various lectures, with the Marheineke editions
showing a slight preference for the 1831 order and the Lasson
edition for the 1824-27 orderings. The issue of a discernible devel-
opment in Hegel's own approach to religion did not seem to be a
consideration to the editors of the published editions. They seem to
have operated with the assumption that the extensive differences
between the lecture series reflected only superficial changes in
organization. A reconstruction of the various lecture series, however,
shows Hegel changing not only the content but also the structure of
the lectures.20
Because of the problems of sources and editorial assumptions in
the published texts, then, more careful attention should be given to
the 1821 lecture, the most important source being Hegel's own
manuscript.21 One would expect the 1821 lecture to have retained
more of the development of Hegel's thought and less of the polish of
his later lectures, since there is a tendency in Hegel's works for
material to take on a more finished texture, just as the Phenomenology,
through repeated intellectual distillation, becomes the Encyclopedia. In
addition, the resources are especially good for finding a genuine
I8This problem is discussed by Heede, "Hegels Religionsphilosophie," pp. 54-58, and in more
detail by Jaeschke, "Aufbau," pp. 40-42, 67, 71.
'9The 1824 notebook of Griesheim was complete, and had been used (and annotated) by Hegel
himself in 1827, according to Marheineke's preface in G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen uber die Philos-
ophie der Religion, ed. Philipp Marheineke, 2 vols. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1832), 1:vi.
20For this reconstruction the information given at the end of each of the three parts of the
lectures in the "Zur Feststellug des Textes" sections is very helpful (Hegel, Vorlesungen, 1:312-23,
2:246-54, 3:324-42). Jaeschke, "Aufbau," is the most complete attempt at this reconstruction.
21We have worked from a microfilm of the lectures provided by the Staatsbibliotek, Berlin.
Lasson prints the text in boldface type in his edition. However, the order is confused and can only
be reconstructed by careful attention to the footnotes and the appendices. In addition, there are a
few copying errors and the marginal material is not consistently reported as such. The recent
printed edition of Hegel's 1821 notes by Karl-Heinz Ilting prints the text of Hegel's manuscript
alongside the text of passages from the Bauer-Marheineke 1840 edition which appear to be 1821
material. For a critique of the accuracy and editorial principles of the Ilting edition, see Peter
Hodgson's review in The Owl of Minerva 11 (1979): 4-7.
236
Hegelian methodology in the 1821 material because of the existence

of Hegel's own lecture notes and the published foreword to
Hinrichs's book. A fuller understanding of how Hegel himself
changed in his approach to the philosophy of religion must await
publication of all available student notebooks.
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH TO RELIGION
We have tried to summarize below the essential fe

approach to religion in 1821. Readers familiar with the 1807
Phenomenology will see more parallels than we have been able to note.
The most obvious similarity, though it may be nothing more than
an accident, is the parallel between the three sections of the
Phenomenology (the preface, the introduction, and the Phenomenology
proper) and their reflections in miniature in the three parts of the
1821-22 writings on the philosophy of religion.
In particular, the similarity in tone between the preface to the
Phenomenology and the foreword on religion written for Hinrichs's
book is striking.22 In both of these works Hegel attempts to trace
current academic attitudes as propaedeutic to his own work. The
Hinrichs foreword reads like a catalog of philosophical and cultural
approaches to religion. In true Hegelian fashion these major points
of view are placed in dialectical relation to one another. Hegel first
describes a "happy condition" where faith and reason reinforce one
another, presumably an allusion to the medieval church. Then the
tools of reasoning used initially within the context of faith by
theologians and apologists are turned against pious belief to create
the skeptical attitude of the Enlightenment thinkers. Piety withdraws
from this attack and places its hope in the primacy of experience for
understanding religion. Both of these approaches, skepticism and
uncritical piety, are rejected by Hegel as two sides of the same false
coin. He summarizes the common but misguided presuppositions of
these widely held attitudes toward religion as follows: (1) nothing of
the truth can be known; (2) the human spirit only deals with condi-
tional and temporal "appearances" of truth; and (3) feeling is the
only form in which religiosity retains its genuineness. Hegel
proposes to replace this with a new "science of religion, a theology"
which would "grasp the deepest doctrines of religion in a thinking
22This despite the fact that the Hinrichs foreword was written for another person's book. An
argument could easily be constructed that Hegel adapted large sections from drafts of his own
work in trying to fulfill the overdue promise to Hinrichs for a foreword.
237
fashion." This new approach would give fair account of the intense
subjectivity of religion and its persistent objectivity.
The new "science of religion" is, one supposes, not Hinrichs's book
but Hegel's own work on the philosophy of religion. Instead of a
book, however, we have only Hegel's handwritten lecture notes and
such material from the printed editions as can be confidently
ascribed to the 1821 lectures.23 The initial section of these lectures,
the "Introduction," ushers the reader into the subject matter and
describes the overarching goals of the speculative study of religion
(as does the introduction to the 1807 Phenomenology for knowledge in
general). The first few pages of the introduction to the philosophy of
religion lectures form a transition from the standpoint reached in
Hinrichs's foreword. Religion is romantically described as the
universal sense of God, the "Sunday of life" in which the little cares
of life disappear in a powerful dream: "Just as we may stand upon
the highest peak of a mountain, removed from all touch of the
earthly, and look out with a removed calm over all the borders of
the land below, so in religion we view the world with a spiritual eye;
we stand removed from hard reality, which becomes only a fleeting
appearance, whose shifting shadows are softened in the rays of joy
and love" (p. 2).24 Philosophy, working within this context of feeling,
strives to "know God." The modern sophism that no knowledge of
God is possible, refuted at length in Hinrichs's foreword, is curtly
rejected in favor of the goal of Christianity to grasp God with the
mind.
For the modern mind, the first step on the ladder to the knowl-
edge of God is coming to terms with the hard opposition between
the secular, scientific world of contemporary intellectualism and the
faith of simple Christian piety. Hegel argues through five double
pages-perhaps a week of lectures-that these two opposed parties
cannot remain permanent enemies.25 The pious attempt to extend
23Besides the 1821 lecture notes, a few pages of handwritten Nachlass on religion has survived,
perhaps some of it from this period. One page of it (p. 14) has become inserted-and inter-
numbered-with the 1821 manuscript. Much more of it was apparently available to Marheineke
and Bauer for the 1840 collation. Marheineke in his preface to the 1840 edition refers to a
significant bundle of papers among the Nachlass which were preparations for the lectures and
"where some the most difficult and most comprehensive developments were found almost
complete" (Hegel, Vorlesungen [Stuttgart: Frommann Verlag], l:vii).
24Page citations in the text are to the numbers placed on the leaves of the 1821 manuscript by
an unknown editor. An a refers to the recto side of the page, a b to the verso.
25Lasson schedules four lectures for the analogous 1827 "Introduction" material, using the
dates in the notebook ofJ. E. Erdmann (Hegel, Vorlesungen, 1:318, 322). However, the material
covered in the 1827 introduction shows some crucial differences from the 1821 content.
238
the truth of God's creative act into the specific patterns of the
created world has given rise, Hegel argues, to the notion of
determinate causation in science. The closed, interrelated world of
the modern scientist therefore defeats itself when it is used to deprive
the pietist's religious world of its practical meaningfulness, since it
borrows so heavily from the religious images of determinate
causation to organize its scientific paradigm. Other grounds must be
found to carry on the quest for the knowledge of God by a subject
which is "cast into feeling, yet with a mind structured for reflective
thought" (p. 9).
The new ground is the classic Hegelian movement of the concept
(Begriff). "Philosophy of religion is the thinking, idea-forming
(begreifend) knowledge of religion" which is able to comprehend the
specific scientific content and the pious holism in a single movement
of the spirit (p. 10a). Before the phenomenological treatment of
religion was finished in the 1821 lectures, Hegel gave an account of
the Begriff character of religion using the technical vocabulary of the
Hegelian system (pp. 22-25). To the original hearers of his lectures,
who were unacquainted with the basic movements of Hegel's
dialectic, this brief incursion into hard-headed Hegelian speculation
must have been somewhat confusing. Fortunately, there was for
Hegel's hearers, and is for us in his 1821 lecture notes, a prelim-
inary discourse (pp. 15-22) which makes needed concessions to first-
time hearers and readers. On these pages Hegel describes the
features of religion which are Begriff-like without employing the full
terminology of his heady system of speculative thought.26 This short
discourse is reminiscent of the dialectic of familiar subjects (Now,
Here, Force, Master, Slave, etc.) which occupies a large part of the
Phenomenology, though in these lectures the subjects range over
religious topics (Faith, Evil, Immortality, Fear, Love, etc.).
What is it about religion, Hegel inquires, that causes it to unite
the subjective feelings of the pietist with the objective rigor of the
scientist? At first thought, it would seem that a religious approach
would be more successful in dividing these two sides than in uniting
them. On the one side, in its ability to produce abstract meta-
physical thought, religion has had few competitors. For an example
26This concession was not granted, it appears, to the hearers of his philosophy of religion
lecture in 1824, 1827 and 1831. The 1824 lectures, according to the reconstructions of Lasson
and Jaeschke, did attempt an "empirical introduction," but the material as it appears in the
student lecture notes seems to lack the inductive character of Hegel's work in the Phenomenology
and the 1821 lecture series on the philosophy of religion.
239
Hegel points with intellectual respect at the theologia naturalis of the

medieval church. On the other side, the modern understanding of
religion as devotion and worship contains the inherent tendency to
reduce the religious approach to feeling and ritual action. This
dichotomy, however, is more apparent to the one who looks at
religion and religious practice from the outside. From the inside, the
religious life is a "spiritual procession" which moves the believer from
extreme subjectivity to extreme objectivity. In the concept of God
the religious person is confronted with an objective reference point
that is infinitely other, the final authority which is able to call for
effective response from the human will. Even something as
seemingly external as a tree or a rock, since it is only finitely other,
can be pictured as an instrument to be bent to the subjective will.
God cannot. His authority is absolute. At the same time, however,
the struggle for religious obedience to this infinitely objective other is
an inner struggle. Since the distance between the self and God is
also a feeling of distance, the self becomes the field of action in the
religious life. In addition, the picture of God as the demanding
authority is modeled on the personal "I." The God making the
demand for devotion is most accurately characterized as an
ultimately free being, the very characterization of ourselves which
gives intensity to the inner religious struggle.27 The result is that
the self "becomes the very relation of these two extremes to one
another. ... I am the struggle which is the bond of these two sides,
not a bond of indifference but a joining of opposites. I am not
caught up in another's struggle, but instead am at the same time
both of the opponents; I am the struggle itself, I am the fire and the
water" (p. 19).
This observation on the internal process is confirmed by the
external patterns of the religious life. Religion leads ultimately to a
level of existence in which life is described in philosophical and
rational ideals, yet still within the bounds of religious terminology,
as in the traditional arguments for God's existence. The arguments
for God's existence are not only one of the highest movements of
religion; they are also one of the noblest moments in philosophical
thought.28 Religion is thus securely situated at the level of thought,
27The semantic similarity of the word "God" and the word "I" has been explored by analytic
philosophers of religion. See, for example, Ian Ramsey, Religious Language (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1957), pp. 42-43, 69-73. This is also a favorite topic of Hegel; see Hegel, Logic,
pp. 47-49.
28See Mark C. Taylor, "Itineriarium Mentis in Deum: Hegel's Proofs of God's Existence,"Journal of
Religion 57 (July 1977): 211-31.
240
along with the arts and the sciences. The last few pages of Hegel's
1821 manuscript relate religion to and distinguish it from art and
philosophy, just as the final section on "Absolute Knowledge" in the
1807 Phenomenology does.
CONCLUSION
In its main lines, therefore, Hegel's approach to th

religion follows what could be described as a ph
methodology. Within a planned progression from
religious ideas to a richly concrete notion of relig
context, Hegel reaches out to draw the reflective r
into communion with a larger systematic framewor
If this account of Hegel's approach to the philosop
an example of a consistently applied phenomenolo
Hegel, further attention should be given to how th
look when applied by Hegel to other areas of h
interest. One could survey the fragments of no
reviews, and articles of current Hegeliana for a sim
Hegel's works on arts, religion, history, and politic
seem to be any reasonable basis for starting with
that Hegel dropped his phenomenological method a
Phenomenology, despite the general impression left by
and translations of his Logic and Berlin lectures.
In addition, discerning such a methodology should
Hegel's religious philosophy with better expectatio
more common criticisms of Hegel's religious and ph
from Kierkegaard to the present must be put down
standing, based on what his critics thought was h
that Hegel's philosophy of religion would lead i
dogmatic theology or a Christian apologetic. Th
were in many cases raised by Hegel's well-intention
were concerned more with the content of what He
context in which he said it. They did not perce
methodology would prove to be a more signific
disagreement than the actual content of what he s
241

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Hegel's Phenomenology of Religion

Author(s): O. Kem Luther and Jeff L. Hoover

The contrast between the approach to philosophical knowledge in

average intellect, seems to have inconsistent results. The reader is

3ThePhiinomenologie des Geistes, translated into English as G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of

ment about the philosophical method Hegel uses in the Phenomen-

Hegel's philosophy of religion which appears to parallel the

THE SEARCH FOR A HEGELIAN STRUCTURE IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF

The discrepancy between the Phenomenolog

titled by Hegel himself and by his later editors "Concept [Begrifj] of

single presentation.18 The intention of both Marheineke and Lasson

Hegelian methodology in the 1821 material because of the existence

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH TO RELIGION

We have tried to summarize below the essential fe

Hegel points with intellectual respect at the theologia naturalis of the

In its main lines, therefore, Hegel's approach to th

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