Introduction: Religion and Philosophy

The object of these lectures is the philosophy of religion, which in general has the same purpose as the earlier kind of metaphysical science called natural theology. The object of religion, like that of philosophy, is the eternal truth in its very objectivity — God and nothing but God, and the explication of God.

God is the beginning of all things and the end of all things. As all things proceed from this point, so all return back to it again. He is the centre which animates and inspires all things. Religion is the region in which all the riddles of the world are solved, all the contradictions of deep-reaching thought are unveiled, and all the pangs of feeling soothed — the region of eternal truth, of eternal rest, of eternal peace.

Hegel's opening is one of the most lyrical passages in his works.

In religion man places himself in a relation to this centre, in which all his other relations concentrate themselves; and in so doing he rises to the highest level of consciousness and to the region which is free from relation to what is other than itself — to that which is absolutely self-sufficient. Every people has regarded this religious consciousness as its true dignity, and as the Sunday of its life. All care and fear, all the shallows of temporal life, vanish in the feeling of devotion.

Religion and philosophy coincide in one. Philosophy is itself, in fact, worship; it is religion, for in the same way it renounces subjective notions and opinions in order to occupy itself with God. Philosophy, therefore, is theology; and to occupy oneself with it is, or rather should be, of itself the service of God.

But the age has turned against this. On the one side, the Enlightenment has emptied religion of its content, reducing it to the belief that there is a God, of whom nothing further can be known. On the other, a theology of feeling — the teaching of Friedrich Schleiermacher and others — has made religion a matter of the heart alone, and holds that God cannot be known, but only felt. Theology has thus reached the point where it knows nothing of God. Philosophy, which was once accused of undermining religion, is now its defender: for it holds that God can be known, and that the content of the Christian doctrines — the Trinity, the incarnation, reconciliation — is the truth.

In a preface he wrote in 1822 for a book by his student H. F. W. Hinrichs, Hegel mocked Schleiermacher's view that religion is "the feeling of absolute dependence": if that were so, he wrote, the dog would be the best Christian. The remark is not in the lectures, but it shows the sharpness of their quarrel.