JBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 5AN DIEGO 1 3 1822 01339 941 Ml 5 msjk B S(o .on ik A\ STUDIES IN HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION WITH A CHAPTER ON CHRISTIAN UNITY IN AMERICA BY T. MACBRIDE STERRETT, D. D. PROFFSSOR OF ETHICS AND APOLOGETICS IN THE SEABURY DIVINITY SCHOOL NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY i8qo Copyright, 1890, By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. TO MY SONS THAT THEY HAVE REASONABLE, HOLY, AND VITAL FAITH AND TO MY DAUGHTER IN PARADISE. PREFACE. The insisting upon knowing what there is in it, even in religion, is one of the profoundest impulses of the human spirit. Hegel tried to satisfy this de- mand in his Philosophie der Religion. He endeav- ored to discover and state the speculative idea of religion. But with him the speculative was both vital and practical — the very life of the spirit throb- bing through all the tangled mass of variegated religious phenomena in the world's history. Dr. W. T. Harris, the profoundest student of Hegel in this country, says that " no other work more deserves translation into English." But any mere translation of it would need a further trans- lation into expository paraphrase. The inadequacy of such a translation may be tested by the reader in the first few pages of Chapter VIII. I therefore offer some studies on parts of this great work, deeming them of value, both in them- selves, and in introducing readers to Hegel's own volumes. vi Philosophy of Rcligio7i. The title STUDIES is a most clastic one, bearing on its face its own apology for not being finished literary work. It signifies studying done "out loud," after considerable silent pondering over the " what there is in it." It also allows greatest freedom for new inferences and applications suggested by the text. Hence this volume is not a mere expository paraphrase of Hegel. I have adhered to the ex- pository form only in Chapters III and VIII. I have also followed Hegel's order of argument in Chapter IV, while freely making it the basis of studies in Apologetics. The purpose of the volume through- out is apologetic. It is written with faith and in the interests of " The Faith" though demanding an almost antipodal orientation or point of view to that of both deistic orthodoxy and ecclesiasticism. Some may blame the author for needlessly abandoning some of the current methods of apologetics. But thorough and honost proof of their faultiness and inadequacy has first been made. It is mere time-serving to manufacture evidences where there are none. It is as useless as it is wrong to attempt the " hard-Church " method of overriding reason and conscience with the mere might of an uncriticised authority. It is both anti-theistic and anti-Christian to profane the sec- ular in the interest of the sacred. It is infidel to refuse to welcome the Light lightening every man and every institution that comes into the world. To posit an abstract Infinite, a merely supermundane Preface. vii God, lands us inevitably in agnosticism. To prove the brightness of Christianity by portraying the darkness of heathenism leads to pessimism. On the other hand, to discover the concrete In- finite immanent in, vitalizing and educating man throughout his history ; to maintain the essential kinship of man with God ; to insist upon religion being the mutual reconciliation and communion of God and man, makes the whole earth kin, and binds it with chains of gold to the head and heart as well as to the feet of God. Thiis is the key and motive to the vital rationality of religion, interpreting and vindicating at their relative worth the many ele- ments which, when put forth separately, are easily overthrown by skepticism. To acknowledge that these elements have only relative validity is the first step toward integrating them as living members in a historical manifestation of the supreme A6709 " rec- onciling the world unto himself." God's revela- tion to man, and man's discovery of God, are but the two sides of the same divine education of the race. Neither of these sides is ever complete and final ; neither of them ever lacks progressively adequate activity. In the light of the immanence of God in the religious history of mankind, old evidences seem curiously inconclusive and unnecessary. Place has not been found in this volume for the work of re- setting the old faith in the light of this fundamental viii Philosophy of Religion. truth. But the way for this has been radically pre- pared. The deistic separation of God and man, or the setting them merely side by side, with only occasional and mechanically supernatural connection, has been strongly contended against, while the op- posite error of a pantheistic confusing of the two has been avoided as both unspiritual and unphilo- sophical. That is, both a mechanical naturalism and a mechanical supernaturalism are abrogated and ful- filled in the concrete view of the Divine immanence. Otherwise the one of these two views is just as atheistic as the other. The use and the abuse of the language of meta- phor in religion have been fully considered. The relative rationality of passing interpretations and forms of religion is granted without yielding the claim of finality to any one of them. In every way religion, in the high and broad sense of vital kinship between God and man, has been vindicated as ra- tional and necessary. I have studied over nearly the same part of Hegel's work that Principal Caird has in his Philoso- phy of Religion. That is a masterpiece of rare art in translating Hegel out of the narrow, arid husk of scholastic form and prolix technicalities. I gladly recognize his volume as one far beyond my own ability to produce. It is the work of a consummate literary artist, and a powerful preacher and thinker. I rejoice to see its large and increasing circulation in Pre/cue. ix this country. 1 am indebted to it for leading me to a study of the original. Hegel's own work is heavy, formal, scholastic, and removed from ordinary, un- scientific conceptions of the revealed mystery of the relations of God and man. But it contains the philo- sophical key to the heart of the matter. His whole work is to reconcile reason with religion, by finding reason in religion and religion in reason. It expli- cates, in the form of thought, the content of religion, which is ordinarily held in the form of feeling or metaphor, or at best in the form of faith, or abbrevi- ated knowledge. The last chapter, on CJiristian Unity, is obviously an appendix, written in view of current abstract con- ceptions of the Church, which hinder the realiza- tion of its visible organic unity. It is an attempt to annul this abstract conception in the more concrete historical view. It is a study that makes for truth, for faith, and for unity. I have to thank my colleague. Prof. Charles L. Wells, for his assistance in the tabulation of the facts in regard to the early Christian ministry, in this appendix. J. Macbride Sterrett. Faribault, September /, iS8<). CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study i The different schools of Hegelianism. Hegelianism and Chris- tianity. English and American Hegelians. Prof. Flint's criti- cism answered. CHAPTER H. Introductory , . 25 Growth of the philosophy of religion. Clement of Alex- andria, Lessing, Kant. Key-words. CHAPTER HI. Hegel's Introduction to his Philosophy of Religion 38 Hegel's sublime conception of religion. Divorce between religion and the secular life. Philosophy the interpreter of re- ligion. Has it a competent organ for this work in reason ? Hegel's classification of the whole subject. CHAPTER IV. The Vital Idea of Religion 61 Hegel's encyclopaedia of the philosophical sciences. The re- ligious relation. Necessity of the religious stand-point. Forms of the religious consciousness — feeling, sensuous perception (art), and metaphorical thought. Rationalistic apologetics. Use and abuse of metaphor in religion. Can religion be taught? Causesof present skepticism. Dreams of infallibility. Clerical- xii Philosophy of Religion. ism. Philosophy and science. Relativism and Agnosticism. Mediation of religious knowledge. Christian education. Proofs of the existence of God. The false and the true finite. Posi- tivism. The false and the true infinite. The speculative idea of religion. Cultus. CHAPTER V. Theology, Anthropology, and Pantheism . . .159 What have we here? We have — r. The highest form of the- ology. The Divine personality. The English Hegelians and personality, 2. An adequate first principle. Personality vs. individuality. T. H. Green's metaphysics of ethics. Organic unity in all knowing and being. 3. We have not pantheism. Immortality. Thinking is worshiping. CHAPTER VI. The Method of Comparative Religion . . .212 The rise and progress of this science. The eighteenth-cent- ury Christian view. The skeptical view. The modern Chris- tian scientific view. Definition of religion. Objections to the modern view. The organic connection of Christianity with pre- ceding religions. CHAPTER VII. Classification of the Positive (pre-Christian) Re- ligions 233 Finality and empirical origins. True and false methods. Evolution according to Hegel and Spencer. Sympathetic study of other religions. The modem historico-scientific classifica- tion of religions. Hegel's philosophico-scientific classification. Christianity the absolute religion, and its relation to other re- ligions. Puritanical interpretation of Christian history. CHAPTER VIII. The Absolute Religion 268 Translation of Hegel on Christianity as the absolute re- ligion. Miracles. Biblical theology. Kant's refutation of the Contents. xiii PAGE ontological argument stated and criticised. The Trinity. Crea- tion. The incarnation. The Church. Dogma and sacraments. The work of philosophy in formulating and vindicating " the Faith." The Reformation. Eighteenth-century rationalism. The aim of philosophy. Only reason can heal the wounds made by rationalism. APPENDIX. Christian Unity in America and the Historic Epis- copate 309 The declaration of the House of Bishops. Hegel on religion and the State. The historical method applied to the interpre- tation of the historic Episcopate. Hooker's view of Episcopacy. Two interpretations to-day — the governmental and the sacer- dotal. Broad Churchmen and Anglo-Catholics. The facts in the case. Archbishop Whately and Archdeacon Farrar on Episcopacy. Bishop Whipple on Christian unity. Work and worth of the various Churches in America. Practical sugges- tions. STUDIES IN HEGEUS PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. CHAPTER I. . HEGELIANISM — A PREFATORY STUDY. Hegel wrote his own actual posthumous biog- raphy when he said, " The condemnation which a great man lays upon the world is to force it to ex- plain him." Scarcely had the grave closed over the chief intellectual victim of the cholera in 1831, when this sentence issued in the most wholesale accepta- tion, rejection, misrepresentation, criticism, vitupera- tion, and sectarian and heretical interpretations of the Hegelian philosophy. He has been the best abused philosopher of modern times. He evidently apprehended this treatment, as he is also reported to have said of his disciples, " There is only one man living who understands me, and he does notT Cer- tainly his reply to the smart Frenchman was very apt. He asked Hegel if he could not gather up and express his philosophy in one sentence for him. *' No," he replied, " at least not in French^ No one who has studied his Logic, at least, could wish it to be more brief. It is one of those books " which would be much shorter if it were not so short." The 2 Philosophy of Religion. real value of all great works is not to be measured by the immediate assent they command, like com- monplace solutions of great questions by ordinary men, but by the amount of study and discussion and explanation they demand in order to gain the wide sweep of view and depth of solution which they con- tain. Hegel died master in the field of philosophy. He had conquered and founded an empire. His phi- losophy had pervaded universities, state, and church. His disciples were numerous, admiring, ardent. For ten years after his death his system remained the foremost intellectual phenomenon of the time. In the mean while, however, interpretation was suc- ceeding faith and dismembering the parts of the or- ganic whole of the master. Interpreters of his sys- tem have differed more than those of the Bible. From it, each — the rigJit wing, the center, the left, and the extreme left wings — his dogma sought and each his dogma found. The comprehensive system offered various aspects, which seemed to various types of mind to be the whole system. The right wing, Goeschel, Gabler, Daub, and Erdmann, found him to be the champion of Christianity and of all social institutions, while the extreme left divested the whole system of all religious and ethical meaning, degenerating into the boldest materialism and athe- ism. Of this school Feuerbach is best known to us through the early translation of George Eliot. The- ology was merely anthropology. Dr. Strauss is the best-known representative of the left wing, through his mythical theory of the Life of Christ. While the right wing could plainly show that Hegel had vindicated God as the subject of all philosophy, and Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. 3 Christianity as the absolute and perfect religion whose influence was gradually actualizing moral order in humanity, the left wings claimed that logi- cally the method made " each man his own God " (autolatry), with "a right to everything" here, as there was no hereafter. They rejected Hegel's ac- knowledged theistic and Christian position. But to trace these various orthodox and heretical schools of Hegelianism would be almost to write a history of modern German philosophy. This breaking up into such opposite schools caused skepticism as to its real worth. This, how- ever, has been the fortune of every great truth or system which has ever influenced the human race. The complete Socratist came only after numerous partial and antagonistic interpreters of Socrates. Hegelianism, indeed, is said by some to be now dead in Germany. The many diverse interpretations of it have been appealed to as a disproof of its validity. Within twenty-five years it has almost ceased to ex- ist in Germany as a professed system, while in very truth both its spirit and method are the leaven at work in all the present philosophic thought. In a Philosophical Verein, at Leipsic, an expres- sion of surprise at the studied ignoring of Hegel only called forth a flood of bitter but irrational de- nunciation. Only with the greatest difficulty could one find a full set of his works in that book market of the Continent. As a professed system it does not reign in Germany. But it died only as the seed which grows. The day of mere discipleship is past. But philosophy owns no Pope. Names stand only for insights of human thought. Plato, Aristotle, Leibnitz, and Kant, have often been " outgrown," 4 Philosophy of Religion. and yet they remain facile principes, or, as Dante de- scribes Aristotle, " the masters of those who know " {i maestri di color die sanno). Hegel's own " method " has been applied to his system. At first blank being, mere all or nothing or nonsense, becoming, through all sorts of differentiat- ing interpretations, something, many things determi- nate, only to be again discussed into fragments, still squirming with the life of the logical idea into other and higher representations, till now the transformed Hegel really occupies the intellectual throne as firmly as his bust the pedestal in the Hegelplatz in Berlin. This process of the interpretation of a system Hegel himself thus outlines : A party first truly shows itself to have won the victory when it breaks up into two parties ; for so it proves that it con- tains in itself the principle with which it first had to conflict, and thus that it has got beyond the one-sidedness which was incidental to its earliest expression. The interest which for- merly divided itself between it and that to which it was op- posed now falls entirely within itself, and the opposing prin- ciple is left behind and forgotten, just because it is represented by one of the sides in the new controversy which now occu- pies the minds of men. At the same time it is to be observed that when the old principle thus reappears, it is no longer what it was before ; for it is changed and purified by the higher element into which it is now taken up. In this point of view that which appears at first to be a lamentable breach and dissolution of the unity of a party is really the crowning proof of success. He has been a name to swear at as well as to " swear by." He has not been canonized, yet he is master even of those who know him not. In all that Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. 5 relates to philosophy, religion, and history, Hege- lianism is the greatest power in Germany to-day. Von Hartmann and Wundt may be the conspicu- ous stars in the present philosophic horizon, but they shine over only a very small part of the planet that Hegel illuminates. Von Hartmann himself has said : " The fewest of those who are influenced by Hegel's spirit are themselves aware of it ; it has become the common heritage of the most cultured circles of the Ger- man people." In Germany, then, there are but a very few of the old-fashioned followers, disciples, and expounders of Hegelianism as a system, but its spirit and method have become inextricably entangled with the whole thought and culture of the country. It has had dis- ciples and expounders in Italy, France, and Russia. In Great Britain it has also greatly influenced philo- sophic thought, though accepted and expounded as a system by none. Its introduction to an incurious public some twenty years ago by Dr. J. Hutchinson Stirling has been very ludicrously described by Dr. Masson. His Secret of Hegel was met " with such a welcome as might be given to an elephant if, from the peculiar shape of the animal, one were uncer- tain which end of him was his head." Some said of " this uncouth and turbid book," " if this is Hegel in English, he might as well have remained in Ger- man." Others were unkind enough to say that Dr. Stirling kept all the Secret of Hegel to himself, even if he knew it. A score of years, however, has suf- ficed to atone for this barbarian reception. Scores of leading thinkers have read, marked, learned, and in- wardly digested enough of Hegel's method and re- sults to thankfully acknowledge his great worth. Its 6 Philosophy of Religion. influence is especially strong and pronounced at the Universities of Oxford and Glasgow. In Germany the cry of- "back to Kant" and Neo-Kantianism is but the first step of the protest against the temporary materialistic and psychologi- cal thought which means a speedy return to Kant's successors, and especially to Hegel as the truest in- terpreter and the best finisher of Kant's great frag- ment. They hear with surprise that Hegel's sun is rising in America after it has set upon the fatherland. It is a sun that sets to rise again. It may safely be said, however, that there are no mere disciples and blind adherents of Hegel in America. Perhaps Dr. W. T. Harris has most nearly been a disciple and exponent of Hegel. Certainly as editor of the Jour- nal of Speculative Philosophy he has done more than any other man in America to introduce Hegel's method and works to us. He founded it for that express purpose in 1867. But as a thinker he has necessarily cast off the bonds of mere blind partisan discipleship. Replying to the complaint of the un- American character of the contents of the Journal, he said, " It is not American tJiought so much as American thinkers that we want." And to think in the philosophic way is to transcend all national lim- its. This is an apt reply, too, to Dr. McCosh's cry for an ''American philosophy " in the first number of the new Princeton Review. So, among the rapidly increasing number of those who are studying Hegel in America, there is only the desire and the deter- mination to think thought and not merely to repro- duce the formulas of any national thinker. The great thinkers of all ages, the great contributors to the Science of Knowledge, are no mere external authori- Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. 7 ties. Their thought is to be digested and organ- ically reproduced necessarily, it is true, as American thought. Hegel is recognized as a thinker whose compre- hension of thought and its method no student of phi- losophy can fail to acknowledge as great among the greatest. But I judge it to be unjust to characterize these students of Hegelian philosophy as Hegelians either in the popular, untrue, or in the exact scientific sense of the name. " Bound to swear in the name of no master " in philosophy, and only in the name of Christ in religion, would better characterize them all, so far as I know. They recognize Hegel's as the latest great epoch-making contribution to the philo- sophic interpretation of the world and comprehension of humanity's experience. They are mastering and using his method rather than accepting all of the re- sults which this method yielded himself as he applied it to the great spheres of human experience. They are getting great help and looking for greater from the method which is greater than even his own em- ployment of it. Help in comprehension of experience may come from those who are not infallible in knowl- edge. I gladly give Prof. Edward Caird's estimate of the worth of the charge that Hegel's philosophy has entirely lost the credit in Germany which it partially retains in other countries. President Stanley Hall, indeed, says that it was this historical status of Hege- lianism that first weakened its hold upon his mind. *' If by adherence to Hegel," says Prof. Caird,* " be meant that kind of discipleship which is content to * Hegel, by Prof. Edward Caird, LL. D., p. 223. 8 Philosophy of Religio7t. be labelled with the name of Hegelian as a complete indication of all its ideas and tendencies, we might state the fact still more broadly. For there are few, if any, in any country, who could now take up the same position toward Hegel which was accepted by his immediate disciples." Philosophers are not creators, but merely interpreters of human experience. They do not spin from their own brain baseless dreams in place of substantial realities. They only comprehend the substantial reality beneath and permeating all concrete life — physical, social, and religious. Man is in vital relations with his Creator and Redeemer. In his religious life Jesus Christ is the fullness of all divine light and life. As men experi- ence their vital relations to him, they are filled with life and light. Philosophy then comes to interpret and comprehend this Christian experience, to trace in intellectual forms the movements of the divine Logos in all true life and light. In its truest sense philosophy is theology ; in its highest form it is Chris- tian theology. Its chief interest in Germany and the chief cause of the diverse schools of interpretation have come from its essentially theological character. Philosophy sees the universe as a process, as a mani- festation of God. The Substance which Pantheism puts back of all things is seen to be the self-revealing, conscious, intelligent, purposeful Subject — GoD. Feu- erbach and all other members of the " left wing " re- jected this Theistic interpretation which Hegel un- doubtedly gave the universe. They denied the es- sential validity of the laws of thought {the unity of thought and being), accepting them and all their crea- tions and implications as the work of the individual thinker, and finally as the mere result of materialistic Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. g conditions. From Hegel to Bruno Bauer was from Theism to materialism. Hegel himself always pro- fessed his belief in the doctrines of the Lutheran Church. Against both the rationalistic school and that of mere feeling or faith, he labored to show that the dogmatic creed is the rational development or intellectual exposition of what is implicit in Chris- tian experience. Goeschel, Gabler, Marheinecke, Daub, and the now venerable Erdmann of evangeli- cal Halle, took this position of Hegel in interpreting his system. They affirmed that Christian experience is the substance of their philosophy. On this ground they maintained the full personality of God, and like- wise defended historically the literal views given by the Scriptures of the person of Christ, as the God- man — the Mediator between the divine and the hu- man, in whose light we see light, and in whose life we have life. Dr. Dorner, in his History of Prot- estant Theology (vol. ii, pp. 365-367), affirms the same as to the teaching of these right-xving Hege- lians. In England and America, too, the interest in the study of Hegel is chiefly owing to the relation of his thought to religion and to Christianity as the abso- lute, full, and final religion. It attracts Christian thinkers seeking for intellectual comprehension of religious experience, faith, and facts. God and the universe, man and freedom, Jesus Christ the Recon- ciler and Finisher of all that is imperfect, all moving on in a divine process, which the light that is within man sees by means of the congenial but infinite Light that enswathes him ; in a word, the divine Logic in all experience is that which Christian thinkers above others should and do seek for. They are at- lo Philosophy of Religion, tracted to Hegel because they find him thinking mightily on the same ; and yet the chief opposition to the study of Hegel comes from the odium theologi- cum of Christian teachers. Hegel and his philosophy are abused with insensate epithets enough to warn all true (or stupid) Christians from having anything to do other than to revile this chief apologist of the Theistic and Christian interpretation of the universe. Pantheist, denier of human freedom and immortality, of the historical Christ, and of his eternal person and work, mere charlatan in philosophy and religion, whose real aim and tendency is the destruction of all that is real and great and true in the universe and man and Christianity, they ignorantly affirm Hegel to have been. They are moved with righteous but ignorant indignation against any one daring to even study Hegel, imposing the high theological and ec- clesiastical tariff of anathema for such daring offense. The object of this chapter * is to offer something toward abating this unjust and ungenerous attitude toward Hegelianism and its study. I can not pre- tend to have made an exhaustive study of Hegel or of German philosophy since Hegel. I write this chapter only in part from the results of independent study.f So much, indeed, has been mis-said about * This chapter is reprinted from The Church Review, April, 1886. f I give the following references to the best accessible English mate- rials on Hegel : Prof. Edward Caird's little volume on Hegel (English) is an introductory exposition of his philosophy, combining happily biog- raphy and popular exposition of the meaning and method of Hegel's Logic. His larger volume on The Philosophy of Kant is also a good in- troduction to Hegel. Dr. J. Hutchinson Stirling's Secret of Hegel is said to be helpful in the way of exposition. Prof. A. Seth's article in the Quarterly Review, "Mind," October, 1882, is as freely critical as it is justly appreciative. Principal J. Caird's Philosophy of Religion does as Hegelianisni — A Prefatory Study. 1 1 Hegelianism that I am tempted to continue in this gossipy vein throughout this chapter and leave the philosophical exposition and vindication for future work. Indeed, anything like a satisfactory exposition of the Hegelian philosophy and its results is beyond the scope of any review article. I attempt only a pre- liminary clearing away of misconceptions. Dr. Seth deprecates the false humility of those students who represent themselves as merely picking up the crumbs at the banquet, merely guessing at his meaning with- out venturing to compass his thought. I do not assume such humility, for I do not understand how any real student of Hegel can long be ignorant of his secret or method, nor how any independent student can accept Tiim as an infallible master either in his method or in his own employment of it, and much less in his own results in various spheres. But I do understand how no real student of Hegel can ever be the same man intellectually after that he was before his study of Hegel. The whole concrete experience well and as popularly for Hegel's Philosophie der Religion what his brother's little volume does for Hegel's Logic. Dr. W. T. Harris has de- voted unusual ability and labor in making Hegel known to American thinkers through his Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vols, i-xx, in which he has been aided by a corps of competent helpers. He has a volume of critical exposition of Hegel's Logic nearly ready for Grigg's German Philosophic Classics. Dr. J. Steinforth Kedney's volume on Hegel's Esthetics is already published. Hegel's Philosophy of Histoiy is translated in Bohn's Library. Dr. \V. Wallace has translated the text of the Logic and prefaced it with helpful introductory expositions. The following books may also be named as Hegelian, but not in any merely slavish or expository way : The Nation and The Republic of God, by Dr. E. Mulford ; Philosophy and Christianity, by Prof. George S. Morris, Ph. D. ; Prolegomena to Ethics and Introduction to Hume's Works, by the late T. H. Green, the recognized leader of Hegelianism at Oxford ; Ethical Studies, by F. H. Bradley. 3 12 Philosophy of Religio7i. of his life and that of humanity receives a new and divine interpretation and exposition — And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended. He finds in it the poem of the prose of every-day life, because it gives the essential truth and setting of that life. True poetry systematizes the chaotic, the multitudinous facts of experiences. So, as Dr. Stir- ling confessed, the system of Hegel is " in a certain sense only a poem." It is a poem as Christianity is a poem — a grand living system. It is in fact only the intellectual rhythm, the Logic of the Logos in whom are all things, " both which are in heaven and which are on earth." It is indeed always and everywhere the function of philosophy to point out this rhythmic movement of thought in all forms of life — to express all concrete experience in terms of thought. Philos- ophy is not all things, it is only the thoughtful com- prehension and expression of them. Christianity is not the product of a dialectic process, but it is its given concrete object. But its intellectual analysis is the inevitable sequent of its reception by thinking beings. It is true that the transcript which philoso- phy makes of great concrete wholes may be unat- tractive to us in our throbbing concrete life — very unlike the flesh and blood of reality ; and when taken for the whole, when ignoring that of which it is only the intellectual transcript, it becomes vainly pufTed up and deleterious. " Feeling, intuition, and faith," as Hegel said, " belong to religion as essential ele- ments, and viere cognition of it is one-sided." But it is one side, and an essential side of the religion of in- tellectual beings. All theology is proof of this. Even Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. 13 Jacobi, the philosopher of Faith, declared that the reading of Kant's argument for the existence of God brought on a violent fit of palpitation of the heart. So great emotion may an intellectual vision awaken in heart and body as well as in mind. Hegel may indeed be justly accused of looking chiefly and always for the movement of thought in all forms of life. But this criticism is itself a valid criti- cism of all those attacks upon Hegel as a teacher of concrete forms of experience. Philosophy and Theol- ogy are both out of place in hours of our profoundest religious emotion. Our communion with God at such times is not the immediate work of thought. But when we reflect upon such or any other experience of our own or of mankind, we seek for the thought, the Reason, implicit in it. Philosophy may be said to be retrospective — looking back at the thought at work under the forms of Nature, Mind, Art, State, and Church — trying to comprehend all as the work and expression of governing immanent reason. This is not easy work ; and it is special work that demands, as other departments of science do, trained minds that also feel the need that it seeks to supply. Faith, feel- ing, the mere reasonings of the understanding, have their place in man's work ; but the worth of all knowl- edge and the reality of all being is also a question for man's study. The intellectual comprehension of the thought and reality of the unfolded universe — the manifestations of God as Subject rather than of sub- stance — this is the " vision splendid " of that philoso- phy which is thoroughly and essentially theological. With Hegel philosophy and theology are synony- mous. It is this that attracts and fascinates relig:ious thinkers. As in the old Roman Empire "all roads 14 Philosophy of Religion. lead to Rome," so in Hegel every finite truth leads up to and is explained in God. Perhaps a personal confession may not be out of place here, and may be of worth. My own interest in this study began and continues as a purely theological one — the intellect- ual search for " God as the self-conscious Reason of all that really is." That is Hegel's true first princi- ple. He early declared that " the great immediate interest of philosophy is to put God again absolutely at the head of the system as the one ground of all, the principiuni essctidi ct cognoscendiy Again, he de- voutly exclaims, " What knowledge is worth know- ing if God be unknowable ? " (Philosophic der Re- ligion, vol. i, p. 27.) This spirit is present through- out all of his works that I have read. His Logic is a Theology.* His Philosophy of History is a Theod- icy .f So, too, are his History of Philosophy :j; and * Hegel's Logic, pp. 133, 172, 248, Wallace's translation, and Jour- nal of Speculative Philosophy, iii, 369. f " That the history of the world, with all the changing scenes which its annals present, is this process of development and realization of spirit — this is the true Theodicy, the vindication of God in history. Only this insight can reconcile spirit with the history of the world, viz., that what has happened and is happening every day is not only not ' without God,' but is essentially his own work " (Philosophy of History, p. 477). X Speaking of the History of Philosophy he says : " For these thou- sands of years the same Architect has directed the work, and that Archi- tect is the one living Mind of which the nature is Thought and Self-Con- sciousness" (Logic, p. 18, Wallace's translation). He goes on to say that differences of system which philosophy presents are not irreconcilable with unity. It is one philosophy at different degrees of completion. In his introduction to the History of Philosophy he states most plainly a Philosophy of the History of Philosophy, which is in most cheerful con- trast with the comfortless, saddening view maintained by Mr. George H. Lewes. Mr. Lewes's purpose throughout his History of Philosophy is to show the negative answer given by every system to the question, What is truth ? Each system is refuted by the succeeding ones, and the whole Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. 15 his Philosophy of Religion explications of God in the minds and hearts of men. Not only the name but also the nature and works of God are ever the theme to which he turns and in which he ends. He points out that philosophy seeks to apprehend (not create or evolve), by means of thought, the same truth that the religious mind has by faith. His last work was on The Arguments for the Existence of God, in which he treated the per- fect matter in these proofs as distinguished from the imperfect manner of statement. In the preliminary chapters of his Logic he had already criticised Kant's supposed destruction of these classic argu- ments. He maintained that no critical reasonings could destroy the necessity and right of the mind to rise from the finite to God ; that these arguments are only imperfect descriptions of the implicit relations of man and the universe to God and of the steps of the implicit logic of Religion. Man is a being that thinks, and therefore sound Com- mon Sense as well as Philosophy will not yield up their right of rising to God from and out of the empirical view " affords accumulated proofs of the impossibility of Philosophy." Some Christian teachers seem glad to use this sad skepticism as a defense of the faith. (Thus Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, p. 80.) Hegel well says : " The history of philosophy would be of all studies most saddening when it displayed to us the refutation of every system which time has produced. . . . The refutation of a system, however, only means that its limits are passed and that the fixed principle in it has been reduced to an organic element in the completer system that follows. Thus the history of philosophy in its true meaning deals not with the past, but with the eternal and the veritable present ; and in its results resembles not a museum of the aberrations of the human intellect, but a pantheon of godlike figures representing various stages of the immanent logic of all human thought " (Logic, p, 137). 1 6 Philosophy of Religion. of the world. . . . And what men call the proofs of God's existence are seen to be ways of describing and analyzing the inward movement of the mind, which is the great think- er, that thinks the data of the senses. . . . This leap into the supersensible is thought, and nothing but thought. . . . Animals make no such passage, and in consequence they have no religion.* I In fact his whole Logic, which contains his system .! or method in pure scientific form, seems to me to be but his explication of the nature and activities of God immanent in the actuality and order of the world, and transcendent as its efficient and final ■ Cause. All objects of science, all terms of thought and forms of life lead out of themselves into a sup- porting, fulfilling, organized unity. In this com- pleted unity they find their truth and reality. That unity and truth is not external and mechanical, but living, loving, intelligent, and self-conscious. It is God, the Category of all categories — the Subject of all absolute predicates. All knowledge, from one side, is an exaltation of man toward God, while, re- garded from the other side, it is the manifestation of God to man.f * Hegel's Logic, p. 87, Wallace's translation. f The ancient philosophers have described God under the image of a round ball. But if that be his nature, God has unfolded it, and in the actual world he has opened the closed shell of truth into a system of nature, into a state system, a system of law and morality, into the system of the world's history. The shut fist has become an open hand, the fingers of which reach out to lay hold of man's mind and draw it to him- self. Nor is the human mind a mere abstruse intellect, blindly moving within its own secret recesses. It is no mere feeling and groping about in a vacuum, but an intelligent system of national organization. Of that sys- tem Thought is the summit in point of form, and thought may be de- scribed as the capability of surveying on its surface the expanse of Deity Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. ly Both atheistic and, sad to put in the same com- pany, Christian Agnosticism are throughout thor- oughly repudiated. God knowable because self-man- ifesting, and man in duty bound to study this knowl- edge, are with Hegel self-evident and demonstrable principles. He studies human history as men of science do nature — with the presupposition that it is rational — the ^'' coining to itself^' of that human reason, which only ^^ finds itself^' and finds itself only, when it finds God's Reason immanent in all its knowledge, and this finding is mediated by " the Light of the World." Assuredly he deserves the epithet that Novalis gave Spinoza, " the God-intoxicated," intel- Iccttially at least, and not without a tinge of the emo- tional and mystical. This I know will bring the quick retort, " Certainly, for he also was a pantheist." I once supposed this current charge to be true. I now know it to be false. Not only do his words but also his whole system refute the charge. " The Absolute Sub- stance of Spinoza," says Hegel, '' certainly requires something to make it absolute Mind, and it is a right and proper requirement that God should be defined as absolute Mind " — that is, God is more than the panthe- istic substance. Again, " God is more than life : he is Mind." Again, in criticising Spinoza, he says that Substance, as accepted by Spinoza as defining God, " is, as it were, a dark, shapeless abyss, which devours all definite content as utterly null, and produces from unfolded, or rather as the capability, by means of thinking over it, or entering into it, and then when the entrance has been secured, of think- ing over God's expansion of himself. To take this trouble is the ex- press duty and end of ends set before the thinking mind, ever since God laid aside his rolled-up form, and revealed himself. (Quoted from Hegel by Wallace in his translation of Hegel's Logic, p. xxii.) 1 8 Philosophy of Religion, itself nothing that has a positive subsistence in itself. . . . God is Substance. He is, however, no less the Absolute Person. That he is the Absolute Person, however, is a point which the philosophy of Spinoza never perceived ; and on that side it falls short of the true notion of God which forms the content of relig- ious consciousness in Christianity." * Again, " Everything depends upon the absolute Truth being apprehended not merely as Substance, but as Subject." As opposed to both deistic and atheistic views of the universe, he might deserve the name pantheist, refusing to know a world without God, but emphasizing the truth that the world only has its being and truth in God. But pantheist in the sense of making all but mechanical parts of one stu- pendous substance or unknowable power, without will and without conscious intelligence, he was not. The fundamental idea of his system (in his Logic) is that the unity to which all things must be referred is a spiritual, self-conscious principle, showing that all other categories used to explain the world are resolv- able into this. Substance, Essence, Force, Law, Cause, are only partial expressions which find their truth in the highest category of self-conscious, self- determining Spirit. The monks of the East once made a riot in Alex- andria because Theophilus denied that God had a physical body. Hegel did not differ from Theophi- lus. Some of those who call him pantheist do not differ much from the rioting monks. Carlyle's retort was as sensible as the question whether or not he was a pantheist : " No ! I am not a/^;z-theist, nor 2ipot- * Hegel's Logic, pp. 89, 91, and 236, Wallace's translation. Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. 19 theist, either." Pantheist, in the Christian sense, I believe Hegel was. I have failed to find any view expressed in his Logic or in his Philosophy of His- tory or in his Philosophy of Religion which derogates from the glory of God or the chief end of man. The intelligent, self-conscious, self-determining Subject embraces the universe and man without detriment either to the actuality or evanescence of the world or to the freedom and immortality of man. Hegel as- serts that the maxim of Pantheism is the doctrine of the eternity of matter, that " from nothing comes nothing " (Logic, p. 143). With this goes the doctrine of necessity. No system which does not include de- terminism and exclude freedom is really pantheis- tic. " Out of something comes everything by inevi- table necessity " — this form includes the double false- hood of pantheism. But a more strenuous opponent of these errors can not be found than Hegel. It is but the most absurd travesty of it which can define the Hegelian conception of God as " a self-evolving, impersonal process, which, after having traversed all the spheres of matter and mind, attains to a knowl- edge of its 6^^^head in the speculative reason of man." God, as self-conscious, is not the end of an evolution, but all things created find their reality in him. Men are not mechanical parts of God, nor do they lose their identity, though they find themselves truly, only in him. In proportion to their perfection they reflect him — become his created image. God in his manifestation as Creator is the maker of his im- age. He defines God to be the Pure Personality, whose self-conscious freedom is self-contained, not evolved, in time. The fleeting show (Schcin) of tem- poral phenomena does not create nor destroy the 20 Philosophy of Religion. self-consciousness of God or of man made in his im- age. That Hegel taught both the personality of God and the immortality of man is most strenuously maintained by the recognized exponent of Hegel's own view — Dr. Erdmann. By God, as Subject, not as pantheistic substance, he means the internal self- active nature, or the Essence which impels itself into phenomenal being. Man's immortality as well as his true being is in his organic, not mechanical, union with God. We do not charge pantheism upon the Biblical doctrine of creation, nor the absorption and loss of individual souls in Christ, upon St. John and St. Paul. God and man in Christ are freely spoken of as being in indissoluble union. It is no longer we, but Christ in us. God determines, works in, us to will and to do of his good pleasure. In the fullness of the completed work of creation and Redemption " God shall be all in all." There is what may be called a Christian pantheism and determinism. And other than this I do not find in Hegel. Nature and Man are treated of, not as discordant and irreconcila- ble with God, but as forming one organic whole in him without losing their relative independent reality. It may be worthy of notice that all English and American Hegelians accept these truths, and also that they believe them to be Hegel's own teaching.* * The English Church Quarterly Review, January, 18S4, contains a commendable exposition of English Hegelianism and its Religion by one who evidently is not a Hegelian. He says : " An impression may prob- ably be felt that Hegelianism is unfavorable to distinct belief in the Di- vine Personality. As regards the English branch of the school such an accusation would be wholly untrue. The very principle of the system is that the Divine Mind is in unity with the human, and that both are per- sonal." He quotes Prof. Green's definition of personality as "the qual- ity in a subject of being consciously an object to itself. Again, " The Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. 21 Hegers system rightly understood, I believe, as G^bler maintained, assumes a self-conscious Absolute Reason before the world process, and, as Daub main- tained, that in it reason is the organ, not the source of the knowledge of God, and, as Hegel himself maintained, that Christianity is the absolute full and final religion for man. Prof. Flint, of Edinburgh, said that he regarded Hegel's method most valuable and helpful and his results very rich mines of thought, but that we must divorce it from Hegel's Pantheism, which he found in the very first pages of his Logic. Prof. Harris (Journal of Speculative Philosophy, October, 1879) has briefly replied to the same charge made by Prof. Flint in his Anti-Theistic Theories. He points out that Prof. Flint misconceives the dialectic method of The Logic. Hegel's dialectic, like Plato's, is not a method of proceeding from a first principle which continues to remain valid, as, e. g., a mathematical axiom does. The dialectic shows that the first prin- ciples which are hypothetically placed at the basis are inadequate, and that they presuppose as their ground and logical condition a concreter principle. The concrete principle is at once the logical and the genuineness, not merely of Principal Caird's theism, but of his Chris- tianity, is undoubted." Again, " Hegelianism gives us no cosmos of ex- perience into which the mysteries and miracles of Christianity do not readily fall. . , . The whole connection of God with the world involves for the Hegelian who believes in God a relation in His nature to human- ity, which may truly be called a tendency toward incarnation." The same verdict must be rendered as to American Hegelianism by all who read the emphatic and devout maintenance of the stanchest Christian Theism in all the books that deserve the credit (or slur) of being He- gelian. Read Dr. Mulford's sublime words on " The Personality of God," The Republic of God, chap. ii. 22 Philosophy of Religion. chronological presupposition. The dialectical pro- cedure is a retrograde movement from error back to truth, from the abstract back to the concrete and true, from the finite and dependent back to the infi- nite and self-subsistent. We are proceeding toward a first principle rather than from one when we study Hegel's Logic. Hence Hegel does tiot (as Prof. Flint thinks) " profess to explain the generation of God, man, and nature from the pure Being that is pure nothing." He only shows that " pure Being," which is the highest principle according to many thinkers, is not so adequate as that of " Becoming," and this not so adequate as that which has become (or Being determinate), nor this as adequate as " in- finite being," etc. He passes in review all the cate- gories and discovers their defects — i. e., their pre- suppositions. This is merely a brief statement of Hegel's own interpretation of the categories. The first category of mere blank empty Being may be taken, as it often is, as a metaphysical definition of the abso- lute or of God. So with all the succeeding catego- ries — each of which is fuller, richer, concreter, and therefore an approximately more adequate definition of God. But each of these is reached 7iot by evolu- tion from the lower one, but from the implications and presuppositions that the defects of the lower one exhibits. Indeed, Hegel in the Logic (page 244, Wallace's translation) warns most explicitly and emphatically against this very misinterpreta- tion that Dr. Flint makes. The advance from mere being is to be regarded as a " deepening of being in itself whereby its inner nature is laid bare, rather than as an issuing of the more perfect from the less perfect." Hegelianism — A Prefatory Study. 23 Each lower category is, and is not, till it is seen in relation with something higher and fuller. Each partial result, through its unsatisfactoriness, seeks the truth just beyond and yet implied in it. It is the unrest of the negative of each category or definition that impels the process onward till the last category of thought is reached — that of The Idea — Spirit, Self- conscious Reason, Self-determining Intelligence — God. God is not the end or result of this process, but he is the real presupposition that lies back of and gives comparative worth to every stage of the process. St. Augustine's exclamation as to our souls might well be applied to each of these imperfect cate- gories. Being, Essence, Causality, Mechanism, and Life — all but that of Spirit : Thou hast made us for thee, O God ! And our souls are restless till they rest in thee. Moreover, Hegel's doctrine of God is the Chris- tian and not the deistic or pantheistic doctrine. God is the real concrete infinite only because of his essen- tial Triune nature. In him all finite beings fijtd, not lose, their reality. As a category either of thought or of being, Hegel did not treat it as Spinoza did stibstance — " as a mere terminus ad quern — a lion's den in which all the tracks of thought (and being) termi- nate, while none are seen to emerge from it." All finite beings emerge from it and exist in it, only being clothed sub specie cet emit atis : "All things in God" does not mean " nothing but God." Self-realization through self-sacrifice in a fuller life is the movement of Hegel's whole philosophy. This, Prof. Caird says, he got from the study of Christianity. " Die to live " is the nearest possible expression of Hegel's philos- 4 24 Philosophy of Religion. ophy in one sentence. To him Christ's words, " He that saveth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life shall save it," is the first distinct expression of the very truth of the nature of all Spirit. The tracing of this through all the forms of Spirit is the whole work of his philosophy. The " more life and fuller that I want " is found only through dying unto the selfish self and living into the truer self. The Christian doctrine of God, as Triune, is the expres- sion of this nature of God's self-revelation, including the element of self-sacrifice. " What Christianity teaches is only that the law of the life of Spirit — the law of self-realization through self-abnegation — holds good for God as for man, and, indeed, that the Spirit that works in man to 'die to live ' is the Spirit of God. For Hegel such a doctrine was the demon- strated result of the whole idealistic movement which is summed up in his Logic. So far, then, as Christianity means this, it was not in any spirit of external accommodation that he tried to connect his doctrine with it. Rather it was the discovery of this as the essential meaning of Christianity which first enabled him to recognize it as the ultimate lesson of the idealistic movement of thought." * I have indeed barely touched upon the outskirts of the full refutation of the charge of pantheism. I have done less as regards the charge of his sublimat- ing all the facts and doctrines of Christianity into mythical products. The fuller and juster vindication against both these charges demands an exposition of at least his Logic and his Philosophie der Religion. * Caird's Hegel, p. 2i8. CHAPTER II. INTRODUCTORY. Hegel was radically and throughout a theologian. All his thought began, continued, and ended in that of Divinity. We may justly say that even the re- ligious element is pervasive of all his works. Writ- ing almost like a zealot against the current indif- ference to vital theology, he exclaims pathetically, " What knowledge would be worth the pains of ac- quiring if knowledge of God be not attainable ! " * He had the indispensable requisite for treating of re- ligion — that is, the love of religion within himself and sympathetic hospitality to all manifestations of it in the world. His Philosophic der Religion is thus the very heart of all his thinking. The posthumous ed- itor of this work (Dr. Marheineke) styles it " the high- est bloom of Hegel's philosophy." Pathos, power, sweetness, and righteous severity mingle in winning strains in the profound and scholastic exposition of man's highest relation. The Philosophy of Religion has not been in good repute among theologians till recently. This and the cognate Science of Religions, or Comparative Relig- ion, have been looked upon with suspicion as imply- ing or leading to the reduction of Christianity to a * Pliilosophie der Religion, vol. i, p. 37. 26 Philosophy of Religi07i. level with other religions. There has lingered a relic of the method of some of the earlier Christian apolo- gists. All other religions were simply the work of the devil, the imitator, "the Ape" of God. He had cunningly introduced elements of truth into those masses of corruptions in order to more easily seduce mankind. Nor has the more general theory of the sys- tematic corruption of a primitive supernatural revela- tion given a much more generous or just estimation of the religions of the world. It is true that Clement of Alexandria and others taught a doctrine of the Logos as the Divine Pedagogue (©eto? natSaywYo?), which was essentially that of the modern philosophy of religion. But the successful trend in the Church was that which identified the Logos locally and ex- clusively wnth God's teaching in and through herself, till finally the possibility of a distinction between re- ligion in itself and the Church was a conception not to be allowed for a moment. The only ray of light granted by the theologians, who were also great men, was a certain doniim naturale that served to curse rather than bless the heathen. Protestant Christian- ity inherited and emphasized the same narrow view of one exclusive channel for the work of God in hu- manity. Until recently the only classification allowed was that of Christianity and false religions. Any at- tempt to examine pagan religions impartially or to point out the vital truth in them that gave them their power over men was imputed to disloyalty to Chris- tianity. From the beginning of the fifteenth century the intellect of man began to break the shackles of igno- rance and authority. The Renaissance, the Reforma- tion, the almost simultaneous discovery of the great hitroductory. 2 7 globe earth and the greater vault of the heavens, and the growth of the historical and physical sciences, greatly widened the horizon of man's knowledge. Old Asia and new America, the civilizations and re- ligions of Greece, India, China, and Mexico, hurled heaps of new facts into men's minds. Wonder was followed by study and observation, this by necessary skepticism as to the traditional theories as to man, earth, and heavens, and crude, monster attempts at reconstructing new theories, too often disparaging the old in admiration of the new. Any final con- struction or synthesis of all the elements was far be- yond the range of the finite views and methods of the Eclaircissement, Ratio?ialtsm, and Atifklacrmig of the eighteenth century. These various national forms of the same narrow mental method were even less fitted for an appreciative, impartial, and scientific study of the various religions of the world than either Roman- ism or Protestantism. The theory of a primitive revelation and of the donum nahirale gave them some elements of universality which deistic rationalism never possessed. Its general theory that religion was the invention of priests or poets or rulers still holds its place in the lower infidel discussions of to-day. It was reserved for the nineteenth century to make a scientific study of the religions of the world, and to arrive at a philosophic comprehension of what religion is as a universal and necessary part of human life. Two truths are now generally accepted: First, that there is such a branch of knowledge as the sci- ence of religions or comparative religion ; and, second, that the co-ordinate relation of God and man in re- ligion is organic and has a law or logic which may rightly be called the pJdlosophy of religion. Chance 28 Philosophy of Religion. and chaos are no longer allowed to reign in this de- partment of experience. Thought insists upon find- ing thought, spirit in finding spirit in religion. Phi- losophy, or the intelligent comprehension of concrete experience, is the one science with which mind can not long dispense. Least of all can the universal and necessary religious experience of humanity be left as a " mighty maze without a plan," as Hume virtually pronounced it to be. The science of religions is the appreciative, intelligent study of all the religious phe- nomena in the world. As comparative religion it has as its motto that he who hiows only one religion knows none. This science may not yet be very far advanced ; but its progress in the making has been very rapid. Facts thus gathered, classified, and generalized then demand interpretation. What is religion whose mani- festations have been thus systematized ? Is it an il- lusion, an excrescence, or is it a reality ? Can spirit or intelligence find itself in it ? Thus the science of religions must be followed by the science or philoso- phy of religion. On any basis but that of skeptical agnosticism its reality must be affirmed. It is a real, reciprocal communion of God and man. In it the seeking and finding each of the other is real. The revelation may be slight and the worship ignorant, but in their various measures they are divinely and humanly rational and real. This idea of religion, as the mutual reconciliation of God and man, becomes the very center of all thought about religion. This reconciliation, the attainment of which is found to be the motive in all religion, exists in idea eternally. The logical, thoughtful development of the idea of relig- ion, which contains implicit phases or moments in its process or dialectic, constitutes the philosophy of re- Introductory. 29 ligion. This idea in its eternal actuality is, as Hegel shows in Part III, only fully and intelligently stated in the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity. This is from the Divine standpoint. It is the eternal pro- cess or history of God. " God was first known in the Christian religion, and this is the meaning of its cen- tral doctrine of the Trinity." On the other hand,. is the human side of the relation — the idea as it appears in human history. This history illustrates the phases or moments of the process of the idea. The science of religions illustrates, but only inadequately, the sci- ence or the philosophy of religion. It does not, how- ever, create it. It is claimed by some that the history of religions gives us the only philosophy of religion that we can have. This no theologian, much less Hegel, would allow. The intimate interrelations and mutual dependencies of the two must be granted. But this evolution in temporal history is to be trans- lated into a process of thought which transcends his- tory. The explication of this process of thought is theology or the science of religion. The religious experiences of man while illustrating, must themselves be viewed in the light of the fundamental idea of re- ligion. This furnishes the only adequate criterion of their place in the historical manifestation of the idea ; and this Hegel insists and shows is only to be found in Christianity, the absolute religion — the irXripcoiJui or fullness of the revelation o. the idea in time. Thus the philosophy of religion, though it comes last in time, is prior in idea. It is primary, inspiring, di- rective, and interpretative, as the plan is of the builded cathedral. The other is the objectified, mani- fested, interpreted, as well as suggestive, illustrative, confirmative, and corrective. 30 Philosophy of Religion. Hegel is easily chief and master in this depart- ment. But he had his predecessors, into whose work he entered to carry it far toward completion. Les- sing may well be called the modern founder of the philosophy of religion. He restated and reaffirmed Clement's idea of revelation as a Divine education of the race. Child of the German rationalism as he was, he could not wholly free himself from its shackles. From Lessing to Schleiermacher was from rational- ism to faith, and on to Hegel went the process, till faith, as " abbreviated knowledge," was made explicit as thought. The idea which Lessing gave the thought of his time was forceful in freeing it from the shack- les of both theological and rationalistic dogmatism. It helped toward mental hospitality and philosophical comprehension, inasmuch as it considered religion as a whole process, and humanity as essentially relig- ious. Still, as a child of the Enlightenment {Auf- klaerung), he sought too exclusively for the essence of religion in morality, esteeming dogma, worship, and church as merely conventional and accessory. He failed to see in them, as he did see in morality, the genuine outcome of the same religious principle. This, too, was the error in Kant's philosophy of re- ligion. Duty alone was real. His Religion within the Bounds of mere Reason stripped religion of every- thing but the bald ethical. The relation between God and man was that of Wordworth's Duty : Stern daughter of the voice of God ! It was not conceived of as broader or more inti- mate, more congenial or loving, than it was under the old law. " Religion is the recognition of our duties as Divine commands." But what was his Introductory. 3 1 conception of God, other than the bald deistic one of the current philosophy and theology as repre- sented by Wolff ? The abstract Infinite of the mere understanding, in no vital, necessary relations with the finite, the God afar off, who had none but arbi- trary mechanical connection with the world, was rightly held, as Kant had proved, to be unknowable, with whom man could have no conscious, real com- munion. The subjective Ego was the all of knowl- edge. The postulating of a great First Cause, as a Deus ex machind, was but an infirmity of reason, and was only God in name, an " otiose deity as a more or less ornamental appendage to the scheme of things." The idea of such a God, as Kant had himself dem- onstrated, no more proves his existence than the idea of a hundred dollars proves one's possession of them. The analogy is perfect, and hence also the demonstration. There is no more a real, vital, or- ganic, or kin-connection between such a God and man than there is between dollars and one's pocket. Only if God be a living God, in organic relations with his creatures, can he be known or his manifes- tation be discerned. Only if man is himself inexpli- cable except as sharing the inspiration and life of this present God, has religion any intelligible reality. Schleiermacher, Herder, and Jacobi lead in the reaction from this mechanical deism and individual- istic morality, and in maintaining the validity of the elements of faith, feeling, and the more mystical ele- ments of the religious consciousness. God again became the living, present, inspiring, loving God that religion demands, and the moral order of the world became the Divine life on earth. Fichte em- phasized the ethical element in this present Divine 32 Philosophy of Religion, life in which men had a conscious part. Schelling saw God everywhere seeking for himself through all the series of intermediaries from brute matter to spiritual mind. But this became that kind of mysti- cism which to intelligence is but a misty bridging over of the schism between God and man that deism had left as its result. Thought still insisted upon satisfaction. Intelligence would not leave the field till it found its own larger self in the consciousness man had of communion with God. It gladly ac- cepted the advance made by mysticism upon deism. It accepted the grateful reality of the reunion of God with his creation and creatures. But it de- manded that the reunion be vital and organic — a logic of spirit, of intelligence, which man's spirit could know because he was in it. It demanded that the felt communion be explicated, as far as possible, as thought for thought. Hegel represented most fully this demand of the spirit for cognitioii of the content and implications of the religious consciousness. Gathering together the results of all previous attempts, he proceeded to an exposition of the idea, as the concrete content of all the facts and contrasts. In the misty bridge of feel- ing and faith he discerned the implicit and real logic of spirit binding man and God into an organic unity. He attempted to translate feeling into the language of thought in order to maintain it rather than to do away with it. He gave it more than a mere subjec- tive basis which continually sinks the mind into doubt and despair, or into indifferentism. This is really the motive and aim throughout his writings. But he gives it technical treatment in volumes xi and xii of his Werke, which contain Die Philosophic der Religion. Introductory. 33 The most important parts of these volumes are the Introduction (Die Einleitung), pages 1-85 ; Part First, treating of the content of the idea, and the various phases of the religious relation ; and Part Third, giving an exposition and demonstration of Christianity as the absolute religion. Part Second of these volumes gives an exposition of the various re- ligions of the world as phases or moments in the struggling evolution of the idea till its full final mani- festation in Christianity. This is the least valuable, because the most empirical part of the volumes, de- pending as it does upon the fullness and correctness of the current knowledge of these religions. More knowledge of them may lead to placing them in dif- ferent positions as illustrating phases of the develop- ment of the idea. Here it is that the science of re- ligions can correct the science of religion. Exactness here is not essential, as it is not possible without fuller knowledge. He characterizes the Chinese religion as that of Measure, or temperate conduct ; Brahman- ism as that of Phantasy, or hiebriate dream - life ; Buddhism as t\i2it o{ Self-involvement ; that of Egypt as the imbruted religion of Enigma, as symbolized by the Sphinx ; that of Greece as the religion of Beauty ; the Jewish as that of Sublimity ; and Christianity as the absolute religion, the fully revealed religion of truth and freedom. Thus he attempted a unification of all sides and phases of religion, and permeated and joined them all by one principle and one method, " the method of the self-explicating Idea.'' * Immense learning, severe scientific method in simple language, combine in * Vol. i, p. 59. 34 Philosophy of Religion. rearing this massive temple to the indwelling living Deity. For throughout one feels the warm religious emotion of one who loved and worshiped God. In it, too, the polemical spirit burns like a consuming fire against the anti-theistic and anti-Christian theories of his day. And none of these called forth so much of his scathing criticism as the current rationalism in theology and philosophy. This produced works simi- lar to those of the English Deists and their Christian opponents as — e. g., Toland's Christianity not Mysteri- ous and Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity. Such an " Age of Reason " was more odious and foolish to Hegel than to any other devout defender of Chris- tianity, and his polemic against it is sufficient to de- stroy it forever in any intelligently religious mind. He maintained that to know God is eternal life. But this know^ledge of God was not that of either the apologists or the opponents of Christianity in the eighteenth age of reason — not a knowledge of reasons pro and con, but of real vital experience of communion with God. I append the following brief vocabulary or expli- cation of the most pregnant of Hegel's key-words : " The notoriously troublesome word " Vorstcllung I have rendered *' representation," " figurate concep- tion," and " pictorial thought." It means literally a presentation or introduction which the mind makes to itself of absolute truth in terms of sense, under- standing, and imagination. It is /zV/z^r^-thinking, en- visaging the invisible in the visible. It is metaphor- ical, finite thought. It is the work of philosophy to elicit the latent infinite thought out of this form, to translate Vorstellung into Begriff. I have uniformly translated Begriff hy " idea," to distinguish it from Idee Introductory. 35 (Idea). A Bcgriff, " idea," is literally a gripping- to- gether into unity the various elements or members of a concrete thought. It is a comprehension. Idee {Idea) is the Idea of all ideas, the ultimate comprehension of all unities. It is thought as a totality or system. It is the A070? of all logics. It is God, as Absolute, self-conscious, voluntary Thought, vitalizing and com- prehending all ideas {Begriffe). The word atifheben has, as Hegel observes (Logic, 155), the double signification of " to destroy " and " to preserve," as the Gospel fulfills the law. I have ren- dered it variously, as abrogate, fulfill, annul, transmute. Its exact signification is to. reduce to " moments." A " moment " is a constituent element or factor in a unity. Its isolated reality is annulled by its being preserved as a dynamic element in a concrete unity. The acid and base are aufgehoben in the salt. The three Persons are moments in the Godhead. Vernunft is reason as speculative, synoptic, syn- thesizing, the faculty of unity or comprehension. Verstand is reason as the understanding which an- alyzes, defines, and holds separate elements as ulti- mate and independent data. It is the faculty of the finite. The dialectic is the protest of thought, negat- ing the abstract, partial conceptions of the under- standing. It is a phase of reason rising on stepping- stones of annulled abstractions to fulfilling concrete unity. All life and thought and progress are such only in virtue of this inherent element of the dialectic. Thought defines ; but thought also criticises and negates its partial definitions in higher ones. The dialectic is the restless protesting element of thought that is ever restless till it rests in the supreme con- crete unity, God. The whole of Chapter IV illus- 5 36 Philosophy of Religion. trates the dialectic of thought from the finite to the Infinite. Hegel's use of the terms abstract and coji- crete is purely and finely philosophical. Ordinarily the term concrete is applied to something obvious to the senses, found in time and place, and abstract to any mere mental conception. Hegel uses abstract for that form of knowing which wrings a part or ele- ment out of its organic connection or relations of thought, and concrete for that form which grasps these elements indissolubly together in organic unity. Ab- stract is therefore a one-sided, sectarian view, and concrete is catholic, looking before and after and com- prehending all relations as elements of an idea (Be- griff). The understanding abstracts, while the reason concretes, gives a synoptic view of the various inter- connected and interdependent elements. Sense and Science are abstract ; philosophy is concrete. More- over, it is only in the true, organic, vital concrete that genuine necessity, Nothwendigkeit, is found. The ethical or spiritual alone gives the true type of an organism and the true significance of necessity. In such each member is at the same time an end in it- self and a means to the whole, and the whole realizes itself in each member and in the totality. Hegel re- fuses to commit the absurdity of defining an ethical by a physical organism. It is only when this is for- gotten that his persistent use of the term necessity seems to strangle freedom. In fact, with Hegel " the truth of necessity is freedom " (Logic, 243). The members of the ethical organism are linked by spir- itual necessity to one another, so that " if one mem- ber suffer all the members suffer with it." Each is not foreign to its limiting others. All are elements of a spiritual whole, being at home, realizing them- Introductory. 37 selves only in and through this necessary relation with the others. This is the Christian conception of concrete, spiritually determined freedom. God's service is perfect freedom. All else is spiritual schism, which is bondage to death and the devil. The ab- stract sects of any idea, person, or institution can only be reconciled into their place as moments of an or- ganic unity by a process of mediation, Vermittelung. ThQ^mmediate is the simple, sensuous, undeveloped. It is the state of nature, while the vicdiated is the state of culture, of realized being, of organic connec- tion. Man is abstractly rational, made in the image of God ; but it is only by a process of mediation, of culture, of discipline, that he becomes concretely such in the ethical organism of the kingdom of God. The absolutely mediated is that whose process of medi- ation is self-determined, whose realization is due to the evolution of its own forces through its organic relations to other elements and to the whole. Thus the finding one's self at home in others, and, above all, in God and his kingdom of spirits, is essential to true concrete freedom and self-realization. The same is true of all thoughts and of all institutions. CHAPTER III. HEGEL'S INTRODUCTION TO HIS PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.'^ Hegel begins by asking what the true conception of religion is, which is the object presented to the phi- losophy of religion. He answers it immediately in a passage which should become classic, as commanding immediate and universal admiration: " It is the realm where all enigmatical problems of the world are solved ; where all contradictions of deep, musing thought are unveiled and all pangs of feeling soothed. It is the region of eternal truth, rest, and peace. . . . The whole manifold of human relations, activities, joys, everything that man values and esteems, wherein he seeks his happiness, his glory, and his pride — all find their final middle point in religion, in the thought, con- sciousness, and feeling of God. God is, therefore, the beginning and the end of everything. He is the cen- ter which animates, maintains, and inspires everything. By means of religion man is placed in relation to this center, in which all his other relations converge, and is elevated to the realm of highest freedom, which is its own end and aim. This relation of freedom on the side of feeling is the joy which we call beatitude ; * Vorlesungen ueber die Philosophic der Religion, Zwei Baender, herausgegeben v. Phil. Marheineke. Berlin, 1840. Hegel's Introduction. 39 . . . On the side of activity its sole office is to mani- fest the honor and to reveal the glory of God, so that man in this relation is no longer chiefly con- cerned with himself, his own interests and vanity, but rather with the absolute end and aim. All nations know that it is in their religious consciousness that they possess truth, and they have always looked upon religion as their chief worth, and as the Sunday of their lives. Whatever causes us doubt and anxiety, all our sorrows and cares, all the narrow interests of temporal life, we leave behind us upon the sands of time ; and as when we are standing upon the highest point of a mountain, removed beyond all narrow earthly sights, we may quietly view all the limits of the landscape and the world, so man, lifted above the hard actualities of life, looks upon it as a mere image, which this pure region mirrors in the beams of its spiritual sun, softening all its shades and contrasts and lights. Here the dark shadows of life are soft- ened into the image o£ a dream and transfigured into a mere frame for the radiance of the eternal to fill. . . . This is the general view, sentiment, or con- sciousness of religion, whose nature it is the object of these lectures to observe, examine, and under- stand." * He whose heart does not respond to this call away from the finite world can have no interest in this task. While it is the purpose of philosophy to demonstrate the necessity of religion and to lead men to cognize the religious elements in themselves, it does not propose to make a man religious in spite of himself. But no man is wholly without some rela- tion to this central interest of humanity. Religion is * Philosophic der Religion, vol. i, pp. 3-5. 40 Philosophy of Religion. essential to him as a human being, and not an alien sensation. But the relation of religion to man de- pends much upon his general view of the world and of life. These views distort and tear away the true impulse of spirit in the direction of religion. The philosphy of religion must, therefore, first work its way through and above all these false views or phi- losophies of life. These begin outside of, but by their own movement are brought into contact and conflict with philosophy. I. ^\\Q. first of these is the separation of religion from the free worldly consciousness. {a) Man has his week-days in which he busies himself with worldly affairs ; his Sunday comes to bring him into new activities. The religion of the truly pious, unsophisticated man is not a special mat- ter to him, but it penetrates with its breath of flavor all his feelings and activities. His consciousness re- lates every aim and object of his daily life to God. But from this worldly side, vitiation and variance creep into his religion. As Wordsworth says — The world is too much with us ; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. The development of this variance may be desig- nated as the rise of the understanding ^nd of human interests. The laws, qualities, orders, and character- istics of natural things and of the creations and ac- tivities of man are inquired into. He is conscious of himself as a knowing and a creative agent. Science, art, politics, methods of making life easier and culture wider, all these come to be looked upon as his own possessions. And with this comes the consciousness of a separation from the Sunday, consciousness of de- HegeVs Introduction. 41 pendence for everything upon a higher power. Self- dependence rises in contrast with the spirit of humility and dependence. Still, man must recognize that the materials and means for all this work are givni to him. The world and his mind and their powers are not his creations. He may and must still confess that God made them. As the worldly consciousness encroaches further, he makes his peace with religion by the gen- eral admission that God has made all things. {^.) But even where one makes this assertion in earnest, as a pious man, there is danger of variance creeping in. Piety particularizes and says that God made this and this. Everything is considered as a special Providence. Its view is the teleological one. But this again brings in the use of the understanding, which points out as many indications of defects and of absence of purpose as otherwise. The most beau- tiful flower may be a chalice filled with poison. The storm which purifies the air may devastate the earth. What is food to one is poison to another. The dis- ease is as real as medicine. This external, physical teleology of piety is weakened by the relative imper- fection of the physical process, and by the finiteness and separateness in which its objects are viewed. A more profound synthesis of these merely finite and external ends or aims must be made. The under- standing demands consistency and necessity. With this the principle of selfhood develops completely. The Ego becomes the center of relations. Cognition deals with these relations. It is no longer sufficient to designate God as the cause of the thunderbolt, or of a political revolution. The immediate finite cause is what is sought for. Thus our science may formu- late a world that does not need God. This is the 42 Philosophy of Religion. primary attitude of Positivism, which makes a breach with all religion. Science and religion thus develop into such contrast that there seems to be nothing but positive opposition and enmity possible. Science is confident and proud. It knows that it knows, and denies any other than finite knowledge. Religion, with its earnest affirmation that there is a real super- finite, that God makes all things, is distrustful of cognition that has formulated a world of finite neces- sity. And yet cognition can not be bowed out of the controversy nor its results overlooked and denied. In the needed harmonization, in which God may ap- pear in the world and the world in God, full satisfac- tion must be given to the highest demands of cog- nition. While religion can not be dragged down into the realm of finitude, it must make a wide enough synthesis to grasp all its contents. The need of this conciliation is more apparent in the Christian religion, because cognition is an inher- ent element in itself. Christianity concerns itself with the salvation of the individual from conscious alienation from God. I am to be saved. My own freedom and happiness are an end and aim. Self- hood is not lost in sacrifice. But this subjectivity, this selfhood is in itself the principle of cognition. This, however, again is sometimes made absolute, and the contrast developed again within Christianity itself of faith and cognition. Hence the various dis- cords of the day between head and heart. II. Hegel then passes to the question of \\^q posi- tion of the philosphy of religion toward both philosophy and religion. The general relation of philosophy to religion is that of nearest kinship. Hegel never ceases to iden- Hegel's Introduction. 43 tify them in respect, at least as to their subject-mat- ter. While all realms where thought is manifest are the fields of philosphy, there is none so congenial as that of religion, because it also is a universal, pene- trating and covering all other realms like philosophy. " The subject of religion, as well as of philosophy, is the eternal truth in its objectivity, or God, nothing else but God, and the explication of his nature." * Again : ** Philosophy has for its aim the cognition of truth, the cognition of God, for he is the absolute truth, in so far that nothing else is worth knowing compared with God and his explication. Philoso- phy cognizes God as essentially concrete and spiritual, self-communicating like light. Whoever says God can not be cognized, says that God is envious, and he can not be in earnest in his belief, however much he may talk about him. Rationalism, the vanity of the understanding, is the most violent opponent of philosophy, and is offended when it demonstrates the presence of reason in the Christian religion ; when it shows that the witness of the spirit of truth is de- posited in religion. In philosophy, which is theol- ogy, the whole object is to point out the reason in religion. In philosophy, religion finds its justifica- tion from the standpoint of thinking consciousness, which unsophisticated piety does not need nor per- ceive." f But the faith of naive piety is only abbrevi- ated knowledge, which philosophy or theology expli- cates. Philosophy is falsely charged with placing Ttself above religion, for it has no other content than faith. It only gives this content in the form of think- ing. Thus religion and philosophy coalesce, differing * Philosophic der Religion, vol. i, p. 21. f Ibid. vol. ii, p. 353. 44 • Philosophy of Religion. only as theology and religion do — in regard to their mode of being occupied with God. And in this dif- ference are found all the difficulties which seem so insuperable. Philosophy takes religious ideas out of the domain of feeling and practical experience, and makes them objects of thought, seeks the thought implicit in them, and translates them into their equivalents in thought. Whatever is real is rational. Without this principle the cosmos would be chaos. Religion is the most real concern of man. Without it man would not be man. But, also, without thought man would not be man. And thought seeks its like in all realms of hu- man experience. Religion can not, if it would, sui- cidally avoid the scrutiny of intelligence. The thoughtful religious mind demands a rational expli- cation of the religious consciousness. The reflective thought of the mere understanding analyzes this into contrasts, oppositions, antinomies. Its rationalism dismembers and lets the life out of all religion. But this critical standpoint can never be more than tem- porary with a sincere man or age. The revolution- ary, iconoclastic rationalism is but the negative ele- ment that soon spurs the spirit on to a larger horizon and comprehension of truth. Philosophy must come to swallow up all such negative relations in victorious unity. Hence it comes after the positive sciences, with their negation of the absolute. Its duty is not to collect, observe, and classify, but chiefly to inter- pret. It seeks to translate the religious phenomena of the world into a process of thought, logical and rational, to give them rational significance and sj^s- tematic coherence and order. Speculative philosophy Ts the consciousness of the Idea (Idee), which is the HegeVs Introduction. 45 concrete unity of all differences and contrasts. Re- ligion also has for its subject the content of philosophy as a whole, grasped implicitly as a whole by faith and feeling. Thought merely seizes upon this whole, the absolute truth, and brings out to intelligence all its implicit contents and contrasts. The philosophy of religion starts with the presup- position that religion and religious ideas can be taken out of the domain of feeling into that of thought. It is 'simply a different attitude of the human spirit to- ward the same object — God. " What signifies the expression God ? " asks Hegel (vol. i, page 26). For philosophy it signifies the na- ture of God expressed in thought — a logical or intel- ligently explicated knowledge of him. For religion it signifies an image-concept, an example, an illustra- tion or picture corresponding to the logical definition of God, or to theology. Each answer implies and contains the other. They are but different modes of the occupation of the spirit with God. In both it is spirit finding spirit in mutual search. The philoso- phy of religion deals only with self-manifesting spirit — finite and Infinite. God is not its result, but its be- ginning. But spirit is rational in itself, and also mani- fests itself rationally. The philosophy of religion deals with this immanent, eternal, living rationality of the absolute spirit, and also with its phenomenal manifestations. It is not merely our subjective rea- sonings, the unvitalized rationalism of the individual finite understanding, as to the being and nature of God ; but it is simply the explication of the eternal and phenomenal process of spirit finding spirit, the reconciliation and vital relationing of God with man and man with God. It apprehends the process of 46 Philosophy of Religion. losing the negative rationalism of the individual and the finding its truer self in the life and being of God. Such, in brief and imperfect exposition, is Hegel's essentially religious attitude in all his thinking. For this is always and everywhere an explication of spirit. He might well have exclaimed with the devout Kepler, " I read thy thoughts after thee, O God ! " Hegel next treats of the relation of the philosophy of religion to positive or dogmatic religion. This is em- bodied in the Creeds and in Systematic Divinity as based upon the Bible. In all definitions of dogma reason forms an element. " At first thinking was al- lowed to be merely the exegesis which collects the thoughts of the Bible." But, as matter of fact, rea- son contains inherent principles and presuppositions which come into play in the work of interpretation, which must be more than mere verbal translation, substituting one word for another of the same scope. Explication and systematization must explain and sys- tematize in accordance with mental principles and prejudices. Commentaries on the Bible often give us the cur- rent rather than Scriptural conceptions. There is some reason for the couplet : This is the book where each his dogma seeks, And this the book where each his dogma finds. Exposition is often imposition ; or, as Hegel ex- presses it, " the Bible has been treated like a nose of wax," Thus rationalistic theology sprang up and pro- ceeded till it put itself in opposition to the Bible and to Church dogma. The mere understanding takes the facts and doctrines of Spirit in its finite molds Hegel's Introduction. 47 and ends in annihilating the religious content and completely impoverishing Spirit. This rationalism (Aufklarung) led to the baldest deism and morality. But Hegel here, and elsewhere at greater length, emphatically renounces and controverts this ration- alism. Its abstract metaphysics of the understanding analyzes all life out of Spirit. It separates God and man. It rests content with making God the great outside First Cause, an otiose Deity, not even so much as a Deus ex machind, to occasionally interfere with his foreign, outcast cosmos. But the thinking reason of Spirit conceives God as essentially concrete fullness. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is absolutely essen- tial to the conception of God as eternal, living Spirit. (This assertion is maintained and fully developed only in Part III of the second volume.) The phi- losophy of religion is the thinking explication of this Concrete Spirit. It disdains the dusty road of ration- alistic theology, and can not stand in the opposition to Church dogmas that it does. On the contrary, its kinship with positive doctrine is infinitely greater than appears at first glance, and the re- habilitation of the dogma of the Church, after it had been reduced by the understanding to a minimum, is so largely the work of philosophy that, for this very reason — which is its true content — it has been decried as an obscuration of spirit by a rationalistic theology, which does not rise above the limits of the understanding.* Every ray of light from the Spirit, indeed, appears as an obscuration to the night of rationalism. It hates philosophy because it has rehabilitated what it thought it had reduced to disjecta membra. The * Philosophic der Religion, vol. i, p. 33. 48 Philosophy of Religion. Creed-breaking age of the rationalism of the under- standing is followed by a Creed-restating age of the comprehensive and synthetic reason. There can not be two kinds of reason and two kinds of Spirit — Divine and human — absolutely different from each other. Hence philosophy can not be at variance with religion. Spirit, in so far as it is the Spirit of God, is not a Spirit beyond the stars, beyond the world ; God is present, omni- present, and as Spirit he is in every spirit. God is a living God, all energy and action. Religion is a creation of the Divine activity and not the invention of man. The expres- sion that God as reason rules the world would be sense- less did we not assume that it refers to religion also, and that the Divine Spirit is active in the determination and formation of it. The perfection of reason through thinking does not stand in any contrast to the Spirit, and, therefore, it can not absolutely differ from the work which Spirit has produced in religion. The object of reason is reason itself, Spirit, Divine Spirit.* I have translated these passages in full that none may doubt the earnestness of Hegel's scornful re- pudiation of the rationistic theology. Theologians may refuse this succor, or even take offense at seeing their doctrine stated in terms of reason ; but when once cognition has arisen, its rights can not be withheld. It will either stop in the Dead Sea of rationalism or lead on to the Mediterranean of phi- losophy. Hegel found, in his day, many tendencies and principles, both religious and rationalistic, that were hostile to philosophy's taking religion for the subject of its investigation. He, therefore, briefly * Philosophic der Religion, vol. i, p. 34. HegeVs Introduction. 49 considers these hostile principles, claiming to find in them all, or in their comprehension, the historical element out of which the perfect philosophical think- ing has developed itself. He finds in his day that men's minds are so occupied with the knowledge of finite, secular things, that knowledge of Divinity has but little real interest for them. The unbounded growth of the sciences has quenched the nobler long- ing to search after the knowledge of God, has prac- tically rendered us securi adversus Deiwi. But in reality none of these things are worth knowing if God be not knowable. Our vanity is really our degradation. Even theologians are found who aid in this most unchristian view of the unknowableness of God. 1. There is great indifTerence to Church dogmas. Their significance is minimized or ignored. Many fail to attach proper importance to the dogmas of the Trinity, of the Resurrection, and to miracles. Not only rationalism, but even pious theologians, reduce the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ to its lowest significance. The current religious literature fully discloses this indifference to orthodox dogma. Philosophy, on the other hand, is attempting to reach a comprehension and a higher appreciation of these Church dogmas, and thus to replace them in their true value. 2. Again, this depreciated value of dogmas is shown by the historical method of treating them. The interest is not in their truth, but in their historical origin and growth. These theologians, whether be- longing to the historical school or to that of tradi- tion, are " like clerks of some mercantile house, who keep account only of somebody else's wealth without 50 Philosophy of Religion. having any property of their own ; it is true they receive a salary ; but their sole merit is, that they serve in recording the wealth of others. . . . They know as little of God as the blind man knows of the picture whose frame he has felt. All they know is, how a certain dogma was framed by this or that Council, what reasons the framers advanced, and how the one view or the other predominated." * But they lack the one thing needful, the main point in both philosophy and religion — the entering of the mind into a direct communication with the highest interests. 3. Again, the theory of immediate or intuitive knowledge of God arises to rebuff philosophic intel- ligence in the sphere of religion. Faith, feeling, the testimony of the Spirit to each soul, is claimed to be the highest possible experience. This is much more congenial to philosophy than the other two attitudes. It is really the first stage of philosophic knowing, which only goes on to see and to comprehend what is implied in this direct personal knowledge of God. Hegel makes a fuller examination and criticism of these hostile and yet helpful principles in Part I of his work — The Idea or Conception of Religion. Before entering upon this, however, he states briefly the objections to any philosophy of religion. Is a rational knowledge of religion possible ? Is not reason quite presumptuous in attempting this task ? Some object to its competency to deal with religion as a kind of truth that has been authoritatively re- vealed ; but if religion is real and cognition an essen- tial part of man, then they can not be kept separate * Philosophic der Religion, vol. i, p. 42. HegeVs Introduction. 51 except by doing violence to one or the other as both rationalism and Romanism do. Others deny the competency of reason to attain knowledge of any- thing but finite phenomena, as positivism and agnos- ticism. Others maintain that the only religious ex- perience possible is in the realm of feeling — of the accidental feeling of individual subjectivity. This leads to the denial of God's objectivity and finally to atheism. Each man's God is the product of his own feeling, which may be held to be either psychological or even physiological. The so-called Left-wing He- gelians, Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, gave this athe- istic and materialistic interpretation to religion. It need scarcely be said that Hegel would not consider them worthy of any sane man's belief. But how do we know that reason is competent to deal with religion ? A criticism of the organ of knowledge is still insisted upon. This was the futile task of Kant's Critique of the Pure Reason, for this criticism must ever be done with the instrument un- der criticism. Reason alone can examine reason, which presupposes, what it tries to prove, its capacity and its rationality. It is the futile task of learning to swim before going into water. Its capacity can only be proved in its use. It is often, too, the suicidal task of sawing off the limb which bears one up. As a matter of fact reason is the organ and reason is also the object of thought. Whatever is real is rational and whatever is rational is real. In religion as in other realities reason only finds itself, its other, larger, truer complementary self. Philosophy as well as the finite sciences, has real subject-matter— reason, spirit, God — and a competent organ of knowledge. God is not to be demonstrated as an external, alien object, but 52 Philosophy of Religion. he is felt, found, and followed in all rational activity of spirit. He is not proved or known by anything foreign to his own being. He reveals himself in thought and to thought. A philosophy of religion is simply the tracing the process of thought in the relation of finite spirit to its congenial infinite spirit, the Father — a process which is implicit in religious feelings, activities, and worship. It only presupposes that religion is not a chaos, a chance irrational realm, but a realm of reason, of spirit. It is this rationality of the real that binds God and man in no merely arbitrary or accidental relations. Kinship is every- where present. The old metaphysical distinction of the abstract infinite which made only a deistic theol- ogy possible is replaced by the true concrete Infinite, which is the organic, vital correlation of spirit. The rigid opposition and alienation of Infinite and finite, of God and man, is the false assumption that makes a philosophy of religion or any philosophy or cosmical comprehension impossible. The fundamental notion that makes any philosophy possible is the fact of the genuine concrete Infinite, which makes the whole earth kin and binds it with chains of gold to the head and heart as well as to the feet of God. This unity of correlatives, as of parent and child, is the true starting-point, the goal and also the guiding thread of method in explication of which Hegel is always engaged, but in no place in such profound and convincing way as in his Philosophic der Re- ligion. Hegel concludes his Introduction by giving a classification of the whole subject. We at once note the triplicity that characterizes all his works — A, B, C; a, b, c; a, ^, 7; I, II, III ; i, 2, 3, form the ap- Hegel's Introduction. 53 parently mechanical and arbitrary divisions which everywhere meet the eye. But with Hegel this results naturally from his method — that of the self-explication or self-unfolding of the idea or comprehensive concept of religion. This manifests itself primarily in its universality ; sec- ondarily, in its particularity or differentiation ; third- ly, in the ripe and rich individuality, or synthesis of the unity and difference — the U. P. I. of formal logic. " This is the rhythm, the pure eternal life of spirit itself, without which it would be a corpse. It be- longs to the spirit to manifest itself as its own object. But at this standpoint it is merely finite. Its third phase is where it finds its own self in this objectivity, becomes at-one with it, and thereby attains its free- dom. For freedom is this being at home in what once seemed foreign." I. The general idea or conception of religion in its universality, as faith and cultus. II. The various pre-Christian religions, regarded as specializations or particular forms of the general conception. III. Christianity as revealed, or absolute religion, the full adequate realization of the conception of re- ligion. I. The general conception, or idea of religion, is not abstract and contentless like the general concepts of formal logic and unphilosophical sciences. It contains the whole nature of the subject, as the seed contains the trunk and branches, the sap, flower, and fruit of the tree, but not in such a way that one can see them through a microscope, before their actual evolution from the seed. I. The phase of universality \^ a phase of thinking. 54 Philosophy of Religion. Religion may have its historical starting-point in the sensuous and finite, but thought is always at work upon this crude form, interpreting into some intelli- gible form. It is not merely emotional. God is not the highest feeling but the highest thought, and to this all true religion leads us. Even among men the highest spiritual relationship can not exist without intellectual culture. 2. But when this universal idea proceeds to self- specification, as it does in the subjective conscious- ness of the individual, the phase of contradiction ap- pears. The thought and the thinker are two com- batants. I think the universal, the absolute, and yet I am the finite and empirical ; I am the middle term of the syllogism, containing only the characteristics of the two extremes. I am thus not merely one of the two struggling elements, but I am the struggle itself (Romans vii, 15). This relation of opposing elements passes through the forms of (i) Feeling, (2) Sense-perception, and (3) Representation or pictorial thought, till pure thought is reached, where the religious consciousness will com- prehend itself in its fully explicated conception or idea. Thus the content of religion may, for different persons, or for the same person at different times, be either felt or imagined or thought. 3. From this standpoint of God and man the pri- mary religious relation is that of fear toward an ab- solute, awful, arbitrary power. Some have main- tained that all religion thus originated in fear. Primus in orbe deos fecit timer. But fear separates. One flees from what he fears. Religion has to unite. Hence this standpoint must Hegel's Introductio7i 55 be overcome, and man recognize his true essence to be in God. He must come to recognize himself as made in God's image, the child of God. The pro- cess of this reconciliation constitutes the phase of cultus or worship. The ciiltiis embraces the whole internal and external activity which has for its object the bringing about this at-one-ment, this transforma- tion of fear into love. It is too often used with refer- ence merely to the outward and visible part, not lay- ing sufficient stress upon the inward and spiritual activity of the soul with God. But the Christian cultics embraces not only sacraments, rites, and cere- monies, but also the inward history of the " way of salvation " that repentance, conversion, regeneration, and sanctification, which can only take place within the soul under God's grace. In this true cicltus lies the real reconciliation of the £wo conceptions of God, as transcendent and im- manent. When God is recognized as without and above, as an object of consciousness among other ob- jects, there can be no real reconciliation in works of external worship — in lip, knee, and hand service. But when the Divine is recognized within the soul, as an act of self-consciousness, there is no reconcilia- tion to be effected, and quietism displaces all cultus. Hegel notes especially the barrenness of cultus re- sulting from the merely immanent conception of God. Without the transcendent relation of God and our consequently obligatory relation to him, all cultus shrinks into mere subjective emotions and sentiments. " The cultus contains as essential ele- ments the actions, the enjoyments, the assurances, the confirmations and attestation of a Supreme Be- ing. But these can have no place if the objective 56 Philosophy of Religion. and obligatory element is lacking in them. For this would cut off progress of consciousness to objective knowledge, and likewise progress from subjective emotion to action. Each of these is most intimately connected with the other. Man's idea of his obliga- tion in regard to God depends upon his conception of God ; his self-consciousness corresponds to his consciousness. Neither can he conceive of any defi- nite, obligatory action in regard to God, if he has no knowledge or definite conception of him as an ob- jective existence. Only when religion becomes a real relation, and contains the difference of conscious- ness can the cultus assume its true form and become a living process in the annulment of the difference. But this movement of the cultus is not limited to this inwardness in which consciousness frees itself from its finitude and becomes consciousness of its essence. In this, the subject knowing himself to be in God, enters the source of his life. But cultus is not merely internal. Its infinite life begins to develop in an ex- ternal direction also ; for the individual's life in the world has the substantial social consciousness for his basis. Just how he will determine his aims in life depends on the consciousness of its essential truth. It is on this side that religion reflects itself in world- ly affairs, and the knowledge of the world makes its appearance. This entrance into the real world is essential to religion, where it appears in the form of social morality " (p. 70). The cultus, therefore, generally speaking, is the eternal process of the subject positing itself as identi- cal with its essence. God becomes his God. The transcendent object of consciousness becomes the immanent self-consciousness. The reconciliation of Hegel's Introduction. 57 the two conceptions of God, however, is only reached in cultus as a process of presupposed unity of differ- entiation and of reconciliation. The Incarnation, the unity of God and man as an external fact, represents the unity. This essential element of religion is found in some distorted form in all religions. So, also, is the estrangement of man from God, the Christian doctrine of sin being its profoundest form. But this evil is seen to be foreign and hostile to me. O wretched man ! none can de- liver from the body of this death but God, through Jesus Christ, who is the perfect man. So we finally come to fully and freely " delight in the law of the Lord," as our own law. And thus the transcendent God becomes immanent ; from being merely an ob- ject of Consciousness, he becomes our perfect Self- Consciousness. II, Positive {pre-Christian) Religions. — The whole of Part I is devoted to the discussion of the above given phases of religion in its universal idea. But this uni- versal is now to unfold, to particularize itself, to posit its elements of differentiation. The idea exists only as activity. Religion can not exist as mere idea. It becomes self-explicating, self-actualizing in the sphere of human consciousness. This is the material in which the idea realizes itself. The seed bursts forth into differences. This is only a mid-station to the end. It is not the end any more than the child is the man. Now, these mid-stations of the self-explicating idea form the various positive or pre-Christian re- ligions. These, indeed, are not true religion, revealed religion, our religion. But they are all contained in ours, because they are essential, though subordinate stages, in the whole process toward fully revealed 58 Philosophy of Religion. religion. They are not, and they are, foreign ele- ments. In their historical aspects, as actual religions of men, claiming to be true, they are false, and pre- sent most uncongenial and irreligious aspects. But, so far as they represent phases of the idea, moments in its process toward perfect self-realization, they are neither foreign nor false. Isolated they are false, made elements of the concrete truth they are not. " These phases, in their lower forms, appear as fore- bodings or superstitions which grow by accident, like flowers and other forms of nature." And yet even here there is an underworking of some essential phase of the idea of religion itself. Thus the thought of incarnation is found in every religion, however far it may be below the Christian conception. These religions often give a most distorted and whimsical conception of God and his worship. But it is wrong to see nothing in them but superstition and fraud, or to content ourselves with a mere natural history sort of a study of them. We must seek their meaning, interpret them, find the rational element in them. They also were fellow human beings who conceived and believed these religions. Nothing human is without some shade of reason. And what is human and rational in them is ours, though only an inferior and passing phase of our higher conception. This does not imply a justification of their horrible and absurd parts ; but it does imply that they all are his- torical manifestations (with all the misrepresentation that this implies) of various phases of the idea on its way to the goal of adequate manifestation or per- fected self-consciousness. The philosophical contem- plation of these religions thus differs from the his- torical. The one considers them from the point of Hegel's hitroduction, 59 view of the perfect idea of religion, while the other studies only their accidental external forms. Both profess to study only that which is — the one what is rationally, the other what is temporally and acci- dentally. In order to study them in the higher way, in the light of the idea of religion, we ask of each re- ligion (i) what is its conception of God, and (2) how does this conception affect the worshiper's concep- tion of himself ? The conception may be lofty enough to beget the conception of his own imperishable na- ture. Thus, the conception of the soul's immortality enters into the history of religion as an essential ele- ment. The conception of God gives the basis for a classi- fication of these religions, which we give in full in Chapter VII. We note here only the three main divisions: i. Nature Religions. 2. Religions in which spiritual individuality asserts itself. 3. Religions of free personality. III. Revealed or Manifest Religion. — The process of the idea is not an aimless, endless one. " It is neces- sarily implied in the idea of religion, that spirit must here as elsewhere run its course. It is really spirit in so far as it exists through negating (swallowing, digesting, and assimilating) all finite forms of itself, thus becoming the real concrete or absolute." The characteristics of the idea as actualized in the various pre-Christian religions are seen to be self- characterizations of the idea. These partial reflec- tions, false by themselves, are then taken up by the return movement of the idea upon itself. Its own content thus becomes adequate to itself ; and this constitutes revealed or realized religion, in which God is manifest. This is the absolute religion, or 7 6o Philosophy of Religion, Christianity. Christianity is the realized fulfillment of all preceding religions, but not merely the sum and result of them. Nor is it, like them, temporary and finite. It does not pass over into another, for it is ultimate, the perfect realization of the idea of re- ligion. It reveals the intrinsic unity of the Divine and human nature. This is the ne plus ultra of re- ligion. At first there was a veil over religion, and it did not appear in its truth. In due time religion ap- peared unveiled. This was not an accidental or arbi- trary time, but a time fixed in the essential and eternal counsel of God, chosen by eternal reason and wis- dom. It is this idea of religion itself, the Divine idea, the Idea of God himself, which has thus specified itself in this course of development toward its own ultimate realization. " This course of religion is its true theodicy. It displays all the productions of the Spirit and every form of its self-cognition as necessary — necessary, that is, because spirit is that living, active impulse which attains self-consciousness or self-realization as medi- ated by the series of its own self-posited differen- tiations. Such self-knowledge is absolute truth." * He elsewhere explicates the absolute religion as : *' {ci) The Revealed Religion. (<^) The positive or externally revealed religion, which seeking and finding and re- alizing man, becomes {c) the Religion of truth and freedom." f * Page 84. f Vol. ii, p. ig2. CHAPTER IV. THE VITAL IDEA (BEGRIFF) OF RELIGION.* Proper exposition demands amplification. Am- plification means addition as well as subtraction from the text. In this chapter I add much and subtract more. I merely follow the outline given by Hegel, and do not misrepresent his thought. I develop the inferences and implications suggested to my mind, rather than give a direct exposition of the text. If it is not Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, it is Hegelian in method and spirit. Hegel begins this part of the work with the question, " What is our starting-point, and how have we won it ? " In the work of the Logic, God the Absolute Idea, the v6r](n