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| Church carving of Christ's crucifixion, in Stuttgart Landesmuseum |
Introduction (Stephen Cowley)
These posts share my reading of the section on Christianity of the Phenomenology of Spirit (7.C). My original intention was to understand the contrast of Jean Wahl’s treatment of the book in which the idea of unhappy or divided consciousness is central and Alexandre Kojève’s political interpretation in terms of master and servant ("Lord and Bondsman") – both from Chapter four “Self-consciousness”. Both of these readings belong to the France of the 1930s and are still with us today in the scholarly literature. However, it is simplistic to characterise the two main sections of Chapter four as exclusively political and religious in theme. The Lord is partly a religious figure for example and the divided consciousness is divided in its worldly pursuits as well as between a here and a beyond.To give a little context, Hegel tells us that Chapter five “Reason” is expressly not religious in character (para 673). Chapter 6 “Spirit” divides into A. Greece and Rome, B. France and C. Germany. Divided consciousness occurs in the Rome and France sections, with the healing of the division allocated mostly to Germany and a little to the well-connected satirist at the end of France (Diderot).
Chapter 7 Religion is divided into: A. Natural religion, B. Greece (i.e. Epic, Tragedy and Comedy analysed through Homer, Sophocles and Aristophanes) and C. Manifest religion (Christianity). Hegel’s argument is that the religions of natural sublimity and civic beauty are fulfilled in Christianity. His concepts of religion and politics are fluid and extensive: he includes architecture, festivals, oracles and drama for example under religion. Conversely, the social estate of the clergy is treated as a dimension of politics, which also includes family intrigue. Hegel comments that “the content of religion expresses earlier in time than science (Wissenschaft) what spirit is.” (802)
The structure and main contents of the 40 paragraphs of the Manifest Religion section of the Phenomenology are:
1. A Prologue: the historical background (paragraphs 748-58)Arguably, 3a is the same as the first third of 3b, giving the doctrinal element a tripartite structure. Hegel applies some unusual terminology (Spirit, Substance) throughout and derives religious interpretations from Spinoza and Fichte.
2. The Advent of Christ (759-65)
3. The Doctrine of the church
a) The Immanent Trinity of, God, Word and Spirit (766-72)
b) God, Creation and Redemption (773-87).
The secondary literature exhibits some difference of opinion as to how orthodox Hegel’s treatment of Christianity is. Peter Kalkavage in Logic of Desire (2007) for example, gives a list of "Hegel's Heresies" (398), while H S Harris judges that Hegel's theology leaves no room for divine grace and freedom (Hegel’s Ladder II, 655). I have some sympathy for the latter point. Hans Küng on the other hand, in The Incarnation of God (1970, Eng, 1987), says:
"It is just possible that - although he programmatically proclaimed the very opposite - in the sweat of his brow and in the last existential analysis, he [Hegel] did, after all, practice his philosophy more on the basis of faith than on that of speculative knowing." (244)Küng cites Karl Barth as saying that Hegel was not the "Protestant Aquinas" (Richard Kroner's phrase) because he did not base himself on scripture. "Hegel's theology is strictly a matter of conceptual reasoning, and hence it is not orthodox." (Küng, 680) However, to the extent that Hegel's concepts reflect Christian experience, this objection would fail.
An essay of Dieter Henrich, "Dominant Philosophical-Theological Tendencies in the Tübingen Stift during the Student Years of Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling" in The Course of Remembrance (1986, Eng, 1997) demonstrates that Hegel was well aware of both naturalist and supernaturalist Biblical theologies, having lived through debates on them in the Pantheismusstreit started by Jacobi in 1785, again on their own terms in the lectures of Gottlob Christian Storr (1746-1805) and then again in light of Fichte and Kant's books on religion that appeared in the early 1790s. It is clear that Hegel would not slip into heresy by oversight. Storr’s main theology book made it into English far ahead of Hegel. Perhaps this confirms Hegel’s view of the temporal priority of religion over philosophy. The English translation of Storr is An Elementary Course of Christian Theology (Trans Schmucker. Andover: Flagg, 1826). This contains notes from Flatt, another of Hegel’s lecturers from Tübingen and an early critic of Kant.
I use Pinkard's paragraph numbering to identify direct quotes from the Phenomenology. These differ in places (by one) from the Miller translation. Remarks in square brackets are my own comments without direct relation to the text.
The Prologue (Paragraphs 748-758 of Pinkard)
These introductory paragraphs address the unhappy consciousness as a key part of the background to the emergence of a world spirit, whose religion is Christianity. The title itself (die offenbare Religion) is general. The chapter does not declare that it is about Christianity in particular, though one does not have to read far before coming across references to Christianity. The translation “revealed religion” is inaccurate and “manifest religion” indicates the meaning more closely. However, the equivalent sections of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (1830), are titled Die geoffenbarte Religion ("Revealed Religion").Transition from Comedy
Hegel sees the Comedy of Aristophanes as a precursor of Christianity, implausibly in my view. In history, the Book of Daniel, where the Messiah is foretold (chapter 9), is around 500 BC, which is before Aristophanes wrote. The image of the (Greek) actor taking off his mask is associated with Comedy, but only accidentally so: a mime artist or clown still wears a mask for example, and modern tragedy is presented without masks. I am also dubious about the comic actor as an avatar of humanity. He may not be wearing a mask, but he is still playing a character. It is still a performance. So the comic actor is not that close an analogy to the idea of incarnation (Menschenwerdung, para 748 of Pinkard).At the outset, Hegel states: "Through the religion of art, spirit has left the form of substance for that of subject." The endpoint of this process he summarises in the proposition: "The self is the absolute being (Wesen)." He points out that this is not specifically religious, but pertains to "the non-religious, to the real spirit". He then discusses the converse proposition ("Absolute being is the self." presumably). This does not take us back to natural religion, but forward to something else. There seem to be concepts derived from Ploucquet's logic here (which questioned the subject-predicate form and favoured equations). The theme of the self externalising itself through its acts is also present.
Selfhood
The concept of the self at work here is clarified in the next few paragraphs. Hegel writes:"The religion of art belongs to the ethical spirit [i.e. to his idealised version of ancient Greece], which we saw earlier come to an end in the state of legality (Rechtszustand), i.e. in the proposition The self as such, the abstract person, is absolute being (Wesen)."Hegel recaps this transition from Chapter six, contrasting "the fulfilled universality" (die erfüllte Allgemeinheit) of Greece with the unfulfilled abstraction (die unerfüllte Abstraktion) of Rome under the Empire. [This is the same term, Erfüllung, which Pinkard translates as suffusion elsewhere, though it includes the sense of fulfilling an obligation. - SC] The self of the Roman private citizen is simply the abstract thought of itself. [The economic theme of finding satisfaction in an economic role in a society characterised by division of labour is at work here. Although the presentation is historical, this remains an issue both in Hegel's day and our own. - SC]
Unhappy consciousness
Hegel then introduces the unhappy or divided consciousness into his historical recapitulation. He says:"It [the Selfhood of Rome] is thus only the Stoic independence of thought and this, proceeding through the movement of skepticism, finds its truth in that form that was called the unhappy self-consciousness." (para 751)So Hegel here again appeals to the legal-political realm to explain the religious situation in the Religion chapter. Something of this sort was also done by Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which contained a once famous chapter explaining the rise of Christianity in secular terms. As a result, H S Harris writes: "The unhappy consciousness of the world-spirit has the political chaos and religious anarchy of the pagan world as its conceptual content, not the sin-consciousness of Judaism." (Hegel's Ladder II, 655). However, this is true of the start of the chapter rather than the later section on doctrine that discusses the Fall.
The unhappy consciousness, as inheritor of the full life of Greece faded into the abstraction of pure thought, knows the loss involved in the transition. Hegel writes:
"It is itself this loss which has become conscious of itself. [...] We see that this unhappy consciousness is the other side, the culmination of the one that is completely happy in and of itself, the comedic [komisch] consciousness." (752)It is the complete abandonment of substance. It is the tragic fate of a self-certainty that has lost the essential in this certainty. Hegel writes: "It is the pain that expresses itself in the hard saying that God is dead." (752) However, this is a pagan equivalent of the Lutheran hymn. Its immediate self-worth is lost, along with the eternal laws of the gods, its belief in oracles and statues. Its hymns become empty words, the tables of the gods have no spiritual food or drink. It derives no sense of unity from the old games and festivals. The works of the muse lack the power of spirit.
The Classical Inheritance
There follows a famous section on the classical inheritance from Greece and Rome. These works, Hegel says, are like beautiful fruit handed to us by a girl, but without the tree that bore them, the earth and climate in which it grew, or the spring and summer in which they ripened. Instead we have only the memory of them. Thus our enjoyment is not worship (Gottesdienst), but scholarship about language and history. The spirit of the fate that preserved them is the memory of the spirit of the ethical peoples that they express. This is the same spirit that created the Pantheon, that collected the gods and the attributes of substance to serve its own self-knowledge.Reason and Religion
The conditions for the emergence of a new spirit borne of this, Hegel argues, are now all present. There is a universal language, a culture expressed to the senses and spreading out into a world of experience. As well as this, Hegel writes:"The world of the person and legal right, [...] the person of Stoicism as it has been thought, and the untenable disquiet of skepticism, all constitute the periphery of those forms which, expectantly and with urgency, stand around the birthplace of spirit becoming self-consciousness, and they have as their focal point the all-permeating pain and yearning of the unhappy consciousness and the communal birth pangs of its emergence."The imagery here is from the accounts of the incarnation in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Hegel sees two processes at work in the birth of spirit, namely that:
- Substance become self-consciousness
- Self-consciousness becomes thinghood, or the universal self.
Self-consciousness in its outward expression falls short of spirit. It deals only in imagination and enthusiasm rather than in reason. It must first have absorbed the substance to relate itself properly to it in its expressions and works. Spirit reads more into nature, history and previous religions more than what they contain literally. This is like a borrowed coat that does not hide their nakedness, or induce real belief.
To be more than imagination, the meaning must be seen to emerge from reason (Begriff), i.e. with necessity from immediate consciousness. There are three factors to this: immediate being; its necessary emergence into self-consciousness; and the cognition of this necessity. With this, we turn to Christianity as a religious response that adequately meets this situation at the point of emergence of a world-culture. [Hegel is decidedly taking a Graeco-Romano-centric view of Christian origins at this point, but he deals with the Biblical background on its own terms in more depth in the following paragraphs. This is a subject he has already written on in draft in his manuscripts on Christian origins. - SC]
Absolute religion
Hegel begins his exposition (in para 758 of both Miller and Pinkard) with a multi-layered sentence. I will indicate the clauses by separate lines:- That absolute spirit has the form of self-consciousness appears now as follows:
- that it is the faith of the world that:
- spirit as a self-conscious being, i.e. as a real man, is present, there to be seen, felt and heard.
[To me, the first clause ("the form of self-consciousness") means that the mind of Rome is becoming able to consciously fashion its own world - because the form of self-consciousness is "I am I" (where the second "I" is visible to the first, in its collective works). This involves a common, at least a widespread faith that this consciousness is embodied in an individual, e.g. a monarch like the king of Chapter 6, or Emperor Augustus, who was treated as divine, but whose despotic successors were more obviously unworthy of such high regard. However, this involves an inept leap from the Imperial to the Cosmic scale, whilst in the case of the Jews seeking a Messiah, their search was in the first instance national alongside, or prior, to being universal. The second clause ("the faith of the world"). recapitulates an implicit reference to St Paul, cited by Stephen Crites, Dialectic and Gospel (1998): "For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travailleth together until now." (Romans, 8.22) One might see foreshadowing of this in Christ's meetings with the Samaritan and Gentile women (see John 4.5-29; Mark 7.24-28), when his mission expands in scope and in St Paul's Letter to the Romans. However, the initial faith of the Jews expecting a Messiah was national. The Jews stood against the nations (as a light unto them), as the church later stands against the world. - SC]
Hegel then expounds the third clause on Incarnation. He continues that religious consciousness does not proceed from within and find divinity through its own thoughts, then putting God and existence together. Rather it proceeds from immediate present existence and finds God in it. "But this God is beheld by the senses, immediately as self, as a real, individual man. Only so is he self-consciousness." The moment of immediate being is so at hand in the content of reason (Begriff) that we find a simple, positive self in the spirit if religion, just as we found a simple, self-conscious negativity in the unhappy consciousness. This self is complete immediacy, not something thought, or represented, or supposed to be brought forth, as in the nature and art-religions.
The Advent of Christ (Paragraphs 759-65 of Pinkard)
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| The crucified Christ, in Stuttgart Landesmuseum |
"This incarnation (Menschwerdung) of the divine being (Wesen), or that it essentially and immediately has the form of self-consciousness, is the simple content of the absolute religion. In it, the [divine] being is known as spirit, or it is its consciousness about itself, that it is spirit." (759)One might wonder whether the statements divided by "or" are to be taken as two ways of saying the same thing, or statements made from different viewpoints that naturally accompany each other, or illuminate each other.
Hegel firstly equates "the incarnation of the divine being (Wesen)" with the fact "that it immediately and essentially has the shape of self-consciousness". This might be justified by noting that only what is incarnate can be immediate (to the senses) and that self-consciousness is typically human. Hegel basically asserts that the incarnation of divinity, so that it has the form of self-consciousness, is the simple content of absolute religion.
He next equates the statements that "the (divine) being (Wesen) is known as spirit (als Geist gewusst)" and that "it [sie, i.e. absolute religion] is its consciousness about itself that it is spirit (Geist zu seyn). This equation (or conversational conjunction) of statements would seem to stand in need of explanation, which Hegel now proceeds to supply. It is as if he is equating, or comparing two containers on a pair of scales, the content of which is only vaguely known, so that the movement of the balance cannot be predicted.
Hegel explains that spirit is knowledge of itself in its outward expression (Entäusserung, externalisation). It retains its identity in its otherness - but this is substance, insofar as it reflects the accidents within itself, not as something inessential or foreign, but within itself - i.e. insofar as it is self, or subject. [This evokes a central thought from the Preface, but applies it to God, thus affecting the presumed relation between God and his creation. - SC]
Hegel continues: In this religion then the divine being is revealed. This means that what is, is known. But it is known in that it is known as spirit, as a being that is self-conscious being. [By comparison, the gods of the Greeks are characterised by particular drives or impulses (anger, jealousy) or general characteristics (the sublimity of Mount Olympus), but the figure of Christ contains more than this.] There is something secret (geheim) to consciousness when its object is something foreign (fremdes) to it. This is so if its object is not itself. Hegel writes: "This secretiveness stops where the absolute being (Wesen) is object of consciousness as spirit, for it is then in its relationships to it as self." Consciousness knows itself in its object. This accompanies the revelation. [Pinkard translates an "es" (it) as "the essence" at the top of the page, when it could also refer to consciousness (both are neuter), which gives his version a subjective turn. Hegel seems to be saying that we know ourselves through relationship with Christ in a way that does not happen with Greek myths. - SC] Hegel writes:
"It [the self] is the pure concept, pure thinking or being-for-itself, immediate being and therewith outwardly directed [Seyn-für-anderes] and, as this outwardly directed being, immediately brought back into its own fold (in sich zurückgekehrt) and at home with itself; so it is the truthful and alone the revealed."Christ then is a kind of avatar through whom we know ourselves. This seems to evoke the experience of mutual learning through personal encounter with another person. Hegel then contrasts this with the knowledge of intellectual theology (knowing that, as opposed to knowing a person):
"The Gracious, Righteous, Holy, Creator of heaven and the earth, etc. are predicates of a subject - universal moments that have their foothold at this point and first exist only in the return of consciousness to thought." (759)The predicates are known, but not yet the subject. The subject is revealed as selfhood, containing reflection but also immediately there. It is also the own certainty of the self for which it is there. This - to be manifest according to its concept - is the true form of spirit and this form, the concept, is thereby alone its essence and substance. Hegel concludes the paragraph: "It is known as self-consciousness and is immediately revealed to it, for it is this self; the divine nature is the same as the human is and it is this unity that is beheld."
This illustrates that the predominant mode of this paragraph is descriptive of the relationship of Christ with the Apostles. It might be worth comparing Hegel's task and performance here with St Anselm in Cur deus homo ("Why God became man"). Hegel was aware of Anselm through ontological argument in the Proslogion. In both cases, the approach to explaining the incarnation is a posteriori, but Anselm's analysis is in terms of a rational reconstruction of the Old Testament, whilst Hegel has previously appealed to a longing typical of Roman despotism. However, Rome was not that major an issue for the Apostles, other than Paul. What I find in this paragraph moves on from Hegel's Prologue (the 1st 10 paragraphs) to describe the content of Christian faith. He seems to be reworking the insights of his Early Theological Writings (so-called) and, as they engaged seriously with Christian doctrine, so we should presume that he is doing the same here rather than being reductive.
Hegel states that the absolute being (Wesen) that is there as a real self-consciousness appears to have descended from its eternal simplicity, but in fact it has thereby attained its highest existence. This seems to be a reference to the descent of the Holy Spirit in Mark 1 rather than to Christ. Hegel explains that the concept of the being (Wesen) is that of absolute abstraction. This abstraction is pure thinking, characterised by both immediacy and being. What is called sense-consciousness is this pure abstraction, as is the thought for which immediacy, being, is. The lowest is also the highest. What is superficially revealed is also the deepest. That the highest being is seen and heard as an existing self-consciousness is in fact the consummation of its concept. Through this completion, the highest being is immediately there as he is. This immediate being (Christ) is also a religious consciousness. The immediacy undividedly (ungetrennt) bespeaks both self-consciousness and the absolute being. Hegel writes:
"God then is here revealed as he is. He is there, as he is in himself, as spirit. God is only within reach (erreichbar) in pure speculative knowledge, and is only in it and is only it itself, for he is spirit; and this speculative knowing is the knowledge of revealed religion." (761)This seems to be an undue glorification of knowledge. However, it is later qualified. Hegel recurs to the question of historical origins. He says:
"The hopes and expectations of the preceding world pushed themselves on their own (allein) towards this revelation, to behold what the absolute being is and to find oneself in him. This joy comes to self-consciousness and takes up the whole world, to see oneself in the absolute being, for it is spirit." (762)Hegel distinguishes the immediate concept of spirit knowing itself as spirit in the presence of Christ (who is not names) from the universality of reality. There is a middle realm between the This of the senses and the universal of intellect, namely the level of perception.
We next encounter a serious mistranslation on the part of Pinkard at the start of para 763 that is not found in Miller. We have:
Hegel: "Dieser einzelne Mensch also, als welcher das absolute Wesen offenbar ist"Pinkard's version has strong overtones of Christ's mere humanity that are not there in Hegel.
Pinkard: "Therefore, this single individual man, to whom the absolute essence is revealed"
Myself: "This individual man then, as which the absolute being is manifest"
As a sensuous this, Hegel continues, Christ passes over into having-been. This follows the logic of sense-certainty of Chapter One. The early disciples saw divinity in Christ, but did not at first know spirit in themselves. When Christ is no longer there, immediacy acquires its negative moment. What remains is "the universal self-consciousness of the community".
Hegel continues that pastness and distance (and here there are echoes of Chapter Four) are incomplete mediations of immediacy. They retain a sensuous element rather than belonging to pure thinking. They are a synthetic combination of sensuous immediacy and universal thinking. This form of ideation (Vorstellung) marks the peculiarity of the spirit of this community, in which it becomes conscious of itself. The "concept as concept" is not yet present to deepen its self-awareness. Hegel writes: "In this tying together of being and thinking then, the defect is present that the spiritual being is still burdened with an unreconciled division (Entzweyung) between a Here and Beyond." (765)
The content, Hegel continues, is true, but because of the mode of representation, the moments appear as self-sufficient and externally related. They have not been understood conceptually. To attain a truer form, an education would be necessary by which consciousness would raise its vision of absolute substance to a rational form (in den Begriff).
I find that what Hegel is doing here is equating various concepts of transcendental philosophy with aspects of the Christian revelation. To some extent, the personality of Christ (who is not named, despite the allusions) is missing. Hegel proceeds to expound a version of the Trinity and the drama of Sin and Redemption at a similar level. His method is expository rather than deductive. This accords with the a posteriori project of a phenomenology.
In the next post, I turn to Hegel's view of church doctrine.
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