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The dialectic of Religion
Natural Religion
As we have already seen, among the many dichotomies belonging to modern consciousness that Hegel wishes to transcend, there is the dichotomy of faith and reason, which rests on an opposition between God and man, feeling and intellect, religion and philosophy. Hegel observes that we have already witnessed this dichotomy at several points in the Phenomenology, when considering the Unhappy Consciousness, Greek ethical life, and the Enlightenment. In his discussion of the Enlightenment, and its apparent victory over faith in the chapter on Spirit, Hegel clearly foreshadowed our return to religion in this current chapter: 'we shall see whether Enlightenment can remain satisfied; that yearning of the troubled Spirit which mourns over the loss of its spiritual world lurks in the background'. The instability of the Enlightenment's world-view, and its inability to bring us satisfaction, have been demonstrated, and this has been filled out in his discussion of the unstable place of God within the Kantian framework of 'Morality'. It is now therefore time to return to religion to see how faith can be reintegrated into a less one-sided philosophical outlook, in which the opposition between the sheerly transcendent and the utterly worldly is overcome: 'There is indeed one Spirit of both, but its consciousness does not embrace both together, and religion appears as a part of existence, of conduct and activity, whose other part is the life lived in its real world. As we now know that Spirit in its own world and Spirit conscious of itself as Spirit, or Spirit in religion, are the same, the perfection of religion consists in the two becoming identical with each other'. Hegel's aim in this chapter, therefore, is to show what this perfection of religion' might look like, and how it can be reached by religious thought. The latter must be radically different from the kind of religious belief targeted by the Enlightenment, where faith was supposedly proved by scripture (which was then shown to be historically inaccurate), to be based around artefacts and relics (which were then shown to be no more than natural objects), and to involve a transcendent deity (which then became unknowable). Hegel takes himself to have demonstrated how the attempt by the Enlightenment to put religious consciousness aside was disastrous; he now sets out to show how religion may be conceived in a way that makes this negative stance unnecessary, so that religious belief may be incorporated within philosophy, and not excluded from it. He therefore offers here a reconstruction or interpretation of the development of religion, to show how religious thinking may be seen as converging on rather than departing from the insights so central to the rationalistic philosophical consciousness of the modern world. This chapter therefore has a more definite cultural-historical and chronological character than the previous ones. It should be said, however, that this attempt by Hegel to 'swing religious consciousness into full support of a scientific interpretation of human life' (Harris) has proved highly controversial, as some have taken it to compromise the original Enlightenment project, whilst others have seen it as an inevitable distortion of the proper religious outlook. In so far as both of these responses involve what Hegel would have seen as one-sided conceptions of philosophy and faith respectively, their persistence is an example of the ease with which consciousness can become polarized in this way.
Hegel's strategy for overcoming this polarization is to consider the development of religious consciousness, from 'natural religion' to 'religion in the form of art' to 'revealed religion',1 thereby hoping to show that far from alienating us from the world and standing opposed to rationalism, religion when properly developed expresses just this philosophical outlook, albeit in a non-philosophical form. He therefore attempts to show how religious consciousness must come to adopt a faith that upholds rather than rejects a rational view of the world, so that in the end the struggle between the Enlightenment and religious belief is not a battle that either side needs to fight, as when properly developed each can incorporate the other. Put another way: Hegel hopes to show that the kind of rationalistic picture that philosophy leads to need not bring an end to religion, since the same picture is implicitly present within religious consciousness itself. He therefore considers the underlying telos in the evolution of religious consciousness in order to establish that in its highest form it can be made compatible with philosophy, and is not intrinsically opposed to it, as the militantly atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment (and especially of the French Enlightenment) had supposed. In beginning with 'natural religion', Hegel takes himself to be considering religion in its simplest or most 'immediate' form, where there is no separation between man and nature, and thus where nature itself is divinized, first in the form of light, and then in the form of plants and animals. In light-religion, light is taken to be a creative force that brings the world into being out of darkness, and which the individual therefore venerates. This light-force lacks any determination, however, and appears insubstantial in comparison to the material world. Religious consciousness then sees the deity in plant and animal form, where in the latter the gods take on the most primitive aspect of self-hood (seen earlier in the transition from life to Desire), in the warring of animal gods with each other, refiecting the struggle for supremacy between different tribal groups. However, as society moves from this division into tribes to the emergence of empire and the stability this brings, 'Spirit enters into another shape' (PS: 421), where individuals' conception of God reflects their transition from warriors to agriculturalists, who now see themselves as relating to the divine through their work.
This process gives rise to the 'artificer' or master-craftsman, whose task is to fabricate objects of religious significance, so that divinity then no longer exists in a purely given or natural form. At first, the master-craftsman only creates objects that have a geometrical shape, but the abstraction of these objects renders them unsatisfying to religious consciousness, so that the craftsman begins to make objects in plant and animal shapes, until they finally assume human form. At this level, however, the statues of gods that the craftsman creates cannot communicate to us in human terms; when this limitation is transcended, and the divine is seen as sharing our language, the artisan is no longer a craftsman, but an artist, in so far as the gods he creates now come to have an expressive function.
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