I. Folk Religion and Christianity (Tübingen, 1793)

Religion is one of the most important concerns of our life. As children we were taught to lisp our prayers to the Deity; our little hands were folded to raise them to the Highest Being; a heap of doctrines, still incomprehensible to us, was loaded into our memory for future use and consolation in life.

This essay, written at the end of Hegel's studies in Tübingen, is often called the "Tübingen Essay." The manuscript has no title.

Hegel distinguishes objective religion — a body of doctrines, which the understanding orders and the memory retains, the theology of books — from subjective religion, which is alive, which works in the heart and expresses itself in feelings and actions. Subjective religion is everything; objective religion has value only so far as it becomes subjective. The aim must be to make religion living.

A folk religion — a religion of a people — must satisfy three demands. First, its doctrines must be founded on universal reason. Second, imagination, heart and sensibility must not go empty away. Third, it must be so constituted that all the needs of life, all the public affairs of the state, are bound up with it.

Hegel finds his model in ancient Greece. The religion of the Greeks was the religion of a free people; their festivals were joyful; their gods were close to them; their religion was woven into the whole of their public life, into their art and their politics. Our religion, by contrast, seems foreign to us, imported from a distant land.

The young Hegel shared with Schiller, Hölderlin and many of their generation a passionate idealisation of ancient Greece.

Hegel attacks the "fetish faith" that relies on ceremonies, on believing what the Church says, on the merits of others; and the private religion that seeks only the salvation of the individual soul. Religion must make men better, not by teaching them dogmas, but by forming their hearts.