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3. Hegel's Philosophy of Religion. Hegel's philoso-
phy as a whole has been described as “contemplative
theology” (I. 1lj, in DiePhilosophie Hegels als kontem-
plative Gotteslehre, Bern, 1946), and this is an apt
description in that Hegel equated the ultimate reality,
which in philosophical language he called the Infinite
and the Absolute, with the God of the Christian reli-
gion. The philosopher, he held, comprehends in
thought what religious believers represent to them-
selves in less purified intellectual terms. Religious
thinking is said by Hegel to belong to the realm of
“representation” (Vorstellung). In his Encyclopedia
(§§451ff.) Hegel describes Vorstellung as a form of
thinking between perception, on the one hand, and
fully developed thought, on the other. It involves the
use of memory-images and of both reproductive and
productive imagination. This last is the point at which
the power of thinking in terms of generalizations from
experience begins to acquire the freedom of inde-
pendent thought. In his Lectures on the Philosophy
of Religion (given in Berlin four times from 1821 to
1831) Hegel says that Vorstellung must not be confused
with imaging or picturing, even though it makes use
of them. It is less bound with particulars than imaging
is, and adumbrates or prefigures completely rational
thought. It falls short of this by failing to elicit the
rational connections between its elements. For exam-
ple, when God is said to be “all-wise,” “good,” or
“righteous,” no image of him is presented, nor is he
described as something that could be sensed or directly
encountered in history. Nevertheless, these three pred-
icates are not shown to have any necessary connection
with one another as would be the case if they were
grasped philosophically. In the part of his Lectures
(Part One, B, II, 3) in which he discusses Vorstellung,
Hegel compares the Gospel story with the myths of
Plato. Plato's myths allegorically express philosophical
truths. The deeds and actions of men and states express
moral truths “which are the essential moral powers”
which operate in history. People may be dimly aware
of them without fully understanding them, and this,
says Hegel, is the position of the unphilosophical
Christian towards the historical elements of Christian
doctrine. The story of Jesus, he says, holds (gilt) not
only as a myth, in the manner of pictures, but as
something perfectly historical. This is its “repre-
sentational” side (Das ist denn für die Vorstellung), but
it has another side, “it has the divine for its content,
divine doing, divine, timeless happening, absolutely
divine action, and this is what is internal, true, substan-
tial in this story and is the very thing that is the object
of reason.” Hegel here raises the question of how the
historical elements of Christian doctrine are related to
the moral and philosophical truths they exhibit. He
here says that there are moral truths in all historical
events without saying precisely what differentiates the
Gospel history from the rest. He discusses this in a later
section of the Lectures.

Hegel, like Spinoza, believed that the Infinite must
exist, that the ultimately real must appear, must mani-
fest itself. He argued, too, that to regard the Infinite
as merely not finite, was to regard it as limited and
hence as not infinite. He concluded that the true infi-
nite must somehow include the finite. Kant, therefore,
was wrong in abstracting the world of appearances
from the real world, and theologians are wrong to
regard the Perfect Being as hidden or remote. Accord-

ing to Hegel, the great philosophical importance of
Christianity resides in the doctrine of the Incarnation,
according to which God became man and suffered as
a man. Furthermore the doctrine of the Trinity exhibits
the dialectic of opposites and reconciliation. God the
Father is said to be the Absolute grasped in thought,
God the Son the Absolute believed in representative
thinking, and God the Holy Spirit the Absolute recon-
ciling man and God by love and worship in the Church.

That “God does not exist apart from the Son and
has sent the Son into the world” is, according to Hegel,
philosophically incontestable. A distinct question, he
holds, is: “Was this particular individual, Jesus of
Nazareth, the carpenter's son, the Son of God, the
Christ?” What is different between Socrates and Jesus
such that Jesus is the Son of God and Socrates is not?
Part of Hegel's answer (Lectures, Part Three, C, II,
3 and C, III, 1), seems to be that Jesus rose from the
dead by continuing to live in the Church. Hegel warns
against regarding the Resurrection and the Ascension
as empirically verifiable events. They belong, he says,
to the faith of Christian believers. Furthermore, the
Incarnation and the Ascension could be believed by
ordinary men only if the history or story (Geschichte)
is “perceived” (angeschaut). “It is not the story of a
particular individual, but it is God who carries it
through, that is, it is the perception that this is the
story that is universal and ultimate” (für sich Seiende).

Hegel seems to argue, then, that Jesus, by continuing
to live in his Church, has provided the only possible
means by which ordinary men, as distinct from Hegel-
ian philosohers, can, through faith, participate in the
divine life and love. But at the very end of the pub-
lished lectures he expresses doubts about the power
of the Church to continue in existence. There is a split,
he says, between the unself-conscious faith of ordinary
Christians and the reasonings of critics and philoso-
phers. These reasonings cannot be ignored, and these
are not times in which religion can be upheld by
commands and the power of the state.

Hegel goes on to say that the philosophical under-
standing of religion is “a sanctuary apart,” that those
who serve it form “an isolated priestly order,” and that
it is not the business of philosophy to predict what
will emerge from this division between the religion
of the people and the ratiocinations of philosophical
critics.