Hegel on Religion and Politics

Angelica Nuzzo

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781438445663, 9781438445656
• eBook ISBN: 9781438445670
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Although scholars have written extensively on Hegel's treatment of religion and politics separately, much less has been written about the connections between the two in his thought. Religion in Hegel's philosophy occupies a difficult position relative to politics, existing both within the ethical and historical reality of the state and at the same time maintaining an absolute, transcendent identity. In addition, Hegel's views on the relationship between the two were often revised and refined over time in both his written works and his lectures. His thinking on the subject, however, provides a fascinating look at an element of his practical philosophy that was as controversial in his time as it is in ours. This book highlights various approaches to this intersection in Hegel's thought and evaluates its relevance to contemporary problems, considering issues such as religious pluralism and tolerance, conflicts between Islam and Christianity, and tensions between the secular and religious state.

1

Hegel and the Consecrated State

Mark Tunick

1. Introduction

Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century statesmen and political theorist of conservatism, characterizes the state as “consecrated.”¹ To say the state is sacred, for Burke, is to say it fills an existential need. It provides “hope and sure anchor in all storms” and “an order that keeps things fast in their place.”² Man, who is “by his constitution a religious animal,” is naked without religion, and his mind “will not endure a void.”³ Through the consecrated state, “the poorest man finds his own importance and dignity”⁴; those who administer the government will “have high and worthy notions of their function and destination,” and look not “to the paltry pelf of the moment.”⁵ Without the consecrated state “the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken; no one generation could link with the other; men would become little better than the flies of a summer.”⁶

Burke's reasons for regarding the state as sacred are more practical than theological.⁷ A state devoid of religion is insecure against the sort of turmoil revolutionary France experienced and that so frightened Burke. By seeing the state as of divine emanation and not the product of the will of the people, nor of the king, the people are not “suffered to imagine that their will, any more than that of kings, is the standard of right and wrong.”⁸ Burke writes, “[W]e have consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution; … that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude.” By consecrating the state, “we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitution and renovate their father's life.”⁹

There is a sense in which Hegel, too, consecrates the state. In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel says religion is a foundation of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), affording us a consciousness of immutability and of “the highest freedom and satisfaction.” Possessed of religion, members of the state will respect it as the whole of which they are parts.¹⁰ In the Introduction to the Philosophy of History, Hegel says religion stands “in closest connection with the principle of the State.”¹¹ “In order to preserve the State, religion must be carried into it, in buckets and bushels.”¹² It is folly, he says, “to invent [state] constitutions independently from religion”; if that is tried, the constitution would “lack a real center and remain abstract and indeterminate.”¹³ His point seems not merely to be Rousseau's pragmatic point that a pious people are more likely to obey the law and carry out their duties.¹⁴ For Hegel, our commitment to the state provides us our greatest fulfillment, satisfaction, and freedom; by being a part of the state our lives have meaning as a part of something that transcends our particular existence.¹⁵ To realize and experience this fulfillment and satisfaction requires a move that religion can facilitate. Hegel says that secular existence concerns itself largely with one's particular interests and is “relative and unjustified”; “it is justified only insofar as its principle, its universal soul, is justified, which requires consciousness of that existence as determination and existence of the essence of God. For this reason the State is based on religion.”¹⁶

There are profound similarities here in the views of Hegel and Burke. Of course in associating the two theorists we must not discount their important differences. The most important is that Hegel, unlike Burke, is through and through a rationalist.¹⁷ Burke is content accepting “pleasing illusions” that are shielded from the light of reason.¹⁸ Not Hegel, who seeks philosophically to comprehend the rational form of public laws, morality, and religion.¹⁹ And while Burke rejects the French Revolution entirely, Hegel, while critical of the destructive tendencies of the Revolution, recognizes the positive role it played in establishing rights that are essential to a rational modern state.²⁰ Still, both Hegel and Burke fear the void left by those who unmask and overthrow traditions, and both see religion as an important means of preserving the state.

But what it means for the state to be consecrated, for Hegel, is different than what it means for Burke. For Hegel a consecrated state is not a state that establishes a religion, subsidizes a particular religion, or is intolerant toward atheists, and on each of these points Burke disagrees. It is tempting to characterize the rational modern state Hegel envisions in Philosophy of Right as a “secular consecrated state.” But Hegel's position is not paradoxical. To understand it without confusion, we must recognize that when Hegel says the modern state is founded upon religion, he means that the modern state is founded upon a principle of subjectivity which is an essential feature of a true Christian religiosity. For Hegel freedom can only be made actual in the subjective will.²¹ A will that lacks subjectivity, or the capacity to make an inner, reflective determination about what is right, is like the will of a child or slave, sunk in its content and unfree.²² The modern state is possible only when its members have a subjective will, and we are free under its laws only when we inwardly comprehend their objective rationality. The principle of subjectivity also founds what Hegel refers to as the true religion of Christianity.²³ This true religion is, for Hegel, Christianity in an abstract sense that is disassociated from particular versions of Christianity that rest on views about God's person, salvation through Christ, or the authority of the Holy Scripture or particular church institutions and practices.²⁴ Hegel demands that religion—not in the special sense just defined of a disassociated true Christianity resting on the principle of subjectivity—must be kept separate from the state, but also that the principle of subjectivity at the heart of the true religion of Christianity is an essential feature of the modern state.

My purpose is to help us better understand Hegel's views on the role of religion in the state by juxtaposing his views to Burke's. There are a number of particular issues I shall address, but there is one issue I purposely avoid. Both Burke and Hegel reject the theory of the divine right of kings, according to which God plays a direct role in establishing and legitimizing political authority (see section 2). But for each theorist there may be an indirect role played by God in establishing political authority. That is an issue I shall not address.

Instead, my focus will be on what Hegel's consecrated state looks like practically. Does the consecrated state establish religion in the state, perhaps by supporting religious education or using taxes to subsidize particular religions? (section 3). Does it tolerate all religions by granting exemptions to those whose exercise of religion conflicts with the law? Does it tolerate atheists? (sections 4 and 5).

In addition, I am concerned with how Hegel, whether like or in contrast to Burke, understands the role or function of religion in the rational modern state. I distinguish two views. One view is that religion provides a tie that binds members of a modern state, creating an ethical community with common beliefs and practices, as exists to an extent in a Jewish or Muslim state. Burke adopts this view, at least with respect to the function of the Anglican Church in England. Hegel does not (section 5). A second view is that religion, as a spiritual form of consciousness, gives to people a sense of their connection to a totality transcending their particular lives. Creating this spiritual connection to the state is an essential role for religion in Hegel's consecrated state, and clearly is for Burke as well. But where Burke thinks that commitment to religion is a stabilizing influence, Hegel worries that reverence toward God, and elevating the universal over the particular, can lead to fanaticism and destroy a state.²⁵ This is one reason Hegel's consecrated state looks so different from Burke's.

2. Rejection of the Theory of Divine Right

Neither Burke's nor Hegel's consecrated state is a state in which the ruler is given authority directly from God. Burke dispenses with that view early in the Reflections: only “exploded fanatics of slavery” maintain that “the crown is held by divine, hereditary, and indefeasible right.”²⁶ Hegel also dismisses the theory of divine right. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion he rejects the view that laws and the Constitution derive their authority from a divine source, for that view wrongly implies that laws of morality and right are “eternal and unchangeable.” While it is correct to say that man obeys God in the act of conforming to the laws and ruling authority, this view is one-sided, for it implies that men are to obey the laws “whatever they may be,” which subjects people to the arbitrary will of the governing power.²⁷ Hegel is critical of the people of England under the last kings of the House o...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Hegel and the Consecrated State
• 2. The State as a “Temple of Human Freedom”: Hegel on Religion and Politics
• 3. Religion and the Dialectic of the Enlightenment
• 4. Hegel's Defense of Toleration
• 5. Hegel, the Political, and the Theological: The Question of Islam
• 6. The Active Fanaticism of Political and Religious Life: Hegel on Terror and Islam
• 7. The Inseparability of Love and Anguish: Hegel's Theological Critique of Modernity
• 8. The Place of Nationality in Hegel's Philosophy of Politics and Religion: A Defense of Hegel on the Charges of National Chauvinism and Racism
• 9. Philosophy, Religion, and the Politics of Bildung in Hegel and Feuerbach
• 10. Religion, Civil Society, and the System of an Ethical World: Hegel on the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
• About the Contributors