apparatus of defence as against common-sense freethinking, forced none
the less on theistic philosophy a great advance from the orthodox
positions. Thus his immediate successors, Fichte and Schelling,
produced systems of which one was loudly denounced as atheistic, and
the other as pantheistic, [1933] despite its dualism. Neither seems
to have had much influence on concrete religious opinion outside the
universities; [1934] and when Schelling in old age turned Catholic
obscurantist, the gain to clericalism was not great. Hegel in turn
loosely wrought out a system of which the great merit is to substitute
the conception of existence as relation for the nihilistic idealism
of Fichte and the unsolved dualism of Schelling. This system he
latterly adapted to practical exigencies [1935] by formulating, as
Kant had recently done, a philosophic Trinity and hardily defining
Christianity as "Absolute Religion" in comparison with the various
forms of "Natural Religion." Nevertheless, he counted in a great
degree as a disintegrating influence, and was in a very practical
way anti-Christian. More explicitly than Kant, he admitted that the
Aufklärung, the freethinking movement of the past generation, had
made good its case so far as it went; and though, by the admission
of admirers, he took for granted without justification that it had
carried its point with the world at large, [1936] he was chronically
at strife with the theologians as such, charging them on the one hand
with deserting the dogmas which he re-stated, [1937] and on the other
declaring that the common run of them "know as little of God as a
blind man sees of a painting, even though he handles the frame." [1938]
Of the belief in miracles he was simply contemptuous. "Whether at the
marriage of Cana the guests got a little more wine or a little less is
a matter of absolutely no importance; nor is it any more essential to
demand whether the man with the withered hand was healed; for millions
of men go about with withered and crippled limbs, whose limbs no man
heals." On the story of the marks made for the information of the
angel on the Hebrew houses at the Passover he asks: "Would the angel
not have known them without these marks?", adding: "This faith has
no real interest for Spirit." [1939] Such writing, from the orthodox
point of view, was not compensated for by a philosophy of Christianity
which denaturalized its dogmas, and a presentment of the God-idea and
of moral law which made religion alternately a phase of philosophy
and a form of political utilitarianism.
As to the impression made by Hegel on most Christians, compare
Hagenbach, German Rationalism (Eng. tr. of Kirchengeschichte),
pp. 364-69; Renan, Études d'histoire religieuse, 5e édit. p. 406;
J. D. Morell, Histor. and Crit. View of the Spec. Philos. of
Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. 1847, ii, 189-91;
Robins, A Defence of the Faith, 1862, pt. i, pp. 135-41, 176;
Eschenmenger, Die Hegel'sche Religions-philosophie, 1834; quoted
in Beard's Voices of the Church, p. 8; Leo, Die Hegelingen,
1838; and Reinhard, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie,
2nd ed. 1839, pp. 753-54--also cited by Beard, pp. 9-12.
The gist of Hegel's rehabilitation of Christianity is well
set forth by Prof. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison in his essay on
The Philosophy of Religion in Kant and Hegel (rep. in The
Philos. Radicals and other Essays, 1907), ch. iii. Considered
in connection with his demonstration that in politics the
Prussian State was the ideal government, it is seen to be even
more of an arbitrary and unveridical accommodation to the social
environment than Kant's Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen
Vernunft. It approximates intellectually to the process by which
the neo-Platonists and other eclectics of the classic decadence
found a semblance of allegorical or symbolical justification for
every item in the old theology. Nothing could be more false to
the spirit of Hegel's general philosophy than the representing
of Christianity as a culmination or "ultimate" of all religion;
and nothing, in fact, was more readily seen by his contemporaries.
We who look back, however, may take a more lenient view of Hegel's
process of adaptation than was taken in the next generation
by Haym, who, in his Hegel und seine Zeit (1857), presented
him as always following the prevailing fashion in thought, and
lending himself as the tool of reactionary government. Hegel's
officialism was in the main probably wholehearted. Even as Kant
felt driven to do something for social conservation at the outbreak
of the French Revolution, and Fichte to shape for his country
the sinister ideal of The Closed Industrial State, so Hegel,
after seeing Prussia shaken to its foundations at the battle of
Jena and being turned out of his own house by the looting French
soldiers, was very naturally impelled to support the existing
State by quasi-philosophico-religious considerations. It was an
abandonment of the true function of philosophy; but it may have
been done in all good faith. An intense political conservatism
was equally marked in Strauss, who dreaded "demagogy," and in
Schopenhauer, who left his fortune to the fund for the widows and
families of soldiers killed or injured in the revolutionary strifes
of 1848. It came in their case from the same source--an alarmed
memory of social convulsion. The fact remains that Hegel had no
real part in the State religion which he crowned with formulas.
Not only does Hegel's conception of the Absolute make deity simply
the eternal process of the universe, and the divine consciousness
indistinguishable from the total consciousness of mankind, [1940]
but his abstractions lend themselves equally to all creeds; [1941]
and some of the most revolutionary of the succeeding movements of
German thought--as those of Vatke, Strauss, [1942] Feuerbach, and
Marx--professedly founded on him. It is certainly a striking testimony
to the influence of Hegel that five such powerful innovators as Vatke
[1943] in Old-Testament, Bruno Bauer and Strauss in New-Testament
criticism, Feuerbach in the philosophy of religion, and Marx in social
philosophy, should at first fly the Hegelian flag. It can hardly have
been that Hegel's formulas sufficed to generate the criticism they
all brought to bear upon their subject matter; rather we must suppose
that their naturally powerful minds were attracted by the critical
and reconstructive aspects of his doctrine; but the philosophy which
stimulated them must have had great affinities for revolution, as
well as for all forms of the idea of evolution.