THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
7. Hegel.
science of the evolving, absolute reason, whose evolution for thought and being is one and the same. Religion is a stage in the unfolding of spirit and takes its place in the last part of his philosophy of spirit, that of absolute spirit, which is the combination of the objective and subjective spirits. This means the spirit in the form with reference to self, and the spirit which objectifies itself in right, morality, and ethics. The absolute spirit reveals itself in the objective form of sense as art; in the subjective form of feeling and representation as religion in the narrower sense, while in the wider sense the absolute spirit is religion on the whole, and in the subjective-objective form of truth it is philosophy, which is the selfthinking Idea, the self-apprehending consciousness, the self-realizing truth. The content of religion is also truth; not as it appears to the really apprehending consciousness, but as it appears in the lower stages of representation as images and myths. Philosophy is to engage itself with religion as with art, either to operate or abolish it. This does not mean a degradation of religion, but that philosophy is to justify the exalted content of religion for the thinking consciousness and reason. Though he places representation in the forefront, this does not deny the place of feeling, which he occasionally strongly emphasizes. It is of importance to him that in feeling is the ground for the assumption of the existence of God, though inconceivable from this source; yet he would place it in the earliest stage of development. The different religions represent stages of development, of which the Christian only is the complete. Bound by his dialectic method of triads he finds three main divisions: the religion of nature, of spiritual individuality, and the absolute religion. Each of these has its three stages. The first includes the stage of immediate naturalism, that of the bifurcation of consciousness, where God the absolute power towers over the individual; and that of the transition to freedom. The second includes the religions in which God is viewed as subject; that of sublimity, the Jewish; that of beauty, the Greek; and of the practical, which is the Roman. Christianity is the absolute religion, knowing God as externalizing himself to finiteness and in unity with the finite; revealed, realizing that God comes to consciousness in the finite ego, first apprehending God as Spirit. The nature of spirit being to posit something outside of and then to reenter self, three forms result: God, the eternal Idea in and with itself, the kingdom of the Father; the form of manifestation, the difference, the eternal Idea in consciousness and representation, which is the kingdom of the Son; the return to itself, the atonement, the kingdom of the Spirit. If a contradiction be pointed out in this idea of the Trinity, it remains that all the living is contradiction in itself and in the Idea the contradiction is resolved. Expressions in the idea of the Trinity objectionable to reason such as son, begotten, occur because representation can not free itself from the intuitions of sense.
The influence of Hegel in this field was more tremendous even than that of Schleiermacher. The left and right wings ranged themselves with refer-
ence to the position to be given to religion; whether as basis of church doctrine, it was to retain its in- 8 Post- dePendent right> since Hegel had de- Hegelian. termmed its content and that of philosophy as the same; or religious dogma was overthrown by philosophical concept. The one supported theism and individual immortality, the other took up pantheism, inasmuch as God came to self-consciousness only in man, and it accepted only the idea of the eternity of spirit in general. Distinguished on the left are D. F Strauss and L. A. Feuerbach (qq.v.). The former, in his Leben Jesu (1835-36) and Glaubenslehre (1840-41), taught that Hegel himself early overthrew the representative form; that Biblical narrative rested mostly on myths; that Christian dogmas had to exterminate themselves in their development; and that God was not a person but an infinite substance, thought in all the thinking, life in all the living, and existence in all being. Feuerbach illustrates in his sentence, " God was my first thought; reason my second, man my third and last," his passage from Hegelian pantheism to radical anthropomorphism or naturalism. In Das Wesen des Christentums (1841) religion and philosophy are claimed to be distinct, related like fancy or sensibility to thought, the sick to the healthy. Considering religion in humanity in its source, it is found that its object is not to know or represent but to satisfy. The necessities, the egoism, have so ordered religion that it has a thoroughly eudemonistic character. Man projects his own being into the infinite, places this opposite himself and reveres it as deity, in the hope of procuring his wishes otherwise unattainable. Feuerbach does not mean to deny God but to rescue his reality from theological contradictions and absurdities. His anthropomorphism is here evident, but also his naturalism in assigning as the ground of religion the feeling of dependence upon nature and its purpose to liberate itself from this. God is contrasted with nature, but the properties attributed to him are of nature. Many philosophical thinkers attached themselves to Hegel but compromised with Schleiermacher or pursued their own courses. E. Zeller places the origin of religion in the necessities of sense or fear and hope, but estimates its value by its importance for the spiritual life. Religion is to be comprehended as neither intellectual nor moral alone, but as pertaining to the whole life of man. In Wilhelm Vatke's Religionsphilosophie (1888) religion is attached essentially neither to morality nor reason, but is a state of the inner feeling concealing within itself an insoluble mystery, and employing itself with the perfection of the ethical personality, by the practical mediation of the finite with the infinite, or God. Most zealous and prolific in this department has been Otto Pfleiderer (q.v.), Religionsphilosophie (1878-94), who apprehends God as the Ego in distinction from all the finite, who at the same time has all things not in, but in subjection to, himself. Thus a monotheism is to be vindicated by the overthrow of deism and pantheism. A. O. Biedermann (q.v.), in successive works, holds that religion is not wholly a matter of the representative faculty, but includes also moments of volitional acts and