The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate. Hegel 1798
Jesus appeared shortly before the last crisis produced by the fermentation of the multiplex elements in the Jewish fate. In this time of inner fermentation, while these varied elements were developing until they became concentrated into a whole and until sheer oppositions and open war [with Rome] were the result, several partial outbreaks preceded the final act.[1] Men of commoner soul, though of strong passions, comprehended the fate of the Jewish people only partially; hence they were not calm enough either to let its wave carry them along passively and unconsciously and so just to swim with the tide or, alternatively, to await the further development necessary before a stronger power could be associated with their efforts. The result was that they outran the fermentation of the whole and fell without honor and without achievement.
Jesus did not fight merely against one part of the Jewish fate; to have done so would have implied that he was himself in the toils of another part, and he was not; he set himself against the whole. Thus he was himself raised above it and tried to raise his people above it too. But enmities like those he sought to transcend can be overcome only by valor; they cannot be reconciled by love. Even his sublime effort to overcome the whole of the Jewish fate must therefore have failed with his people, and he was bound to become its victim himself. Since Jesus had aligned himself with no aspect of the Jewish fate at all, his religion was bound to find a great reception not among his own people (for it was too much entangled in its fate) but in the rest of the world, among men who no longer had to defend or uphold any share of the fate in question.[2]
Rights which a man sacrifices I he freely recognizes and establishes powers over himself, regulations which, in the spirit of Jesus, we might recognize as grounded in the living modification of human nature [i.e., in an individual human being] were simply commands for the Jews and positive throughout. The order in which the various kinds of Jewish laws (laws about worship, moral laws, and civil laws) are followed here is for them, therefore, a strange and manufactured order, since religious, moral, and civil laws were all equally positive in Jewish eyes, and distinctions between these types are first introduced for the Jews as a result of the manner of Jesus’ reaction to them.
Over against commands which required a bare service of the Lord, a direct slavery, an obedience without joy, without pleasure or love, i.e., the commands in connection with the service of God, Jesus set their precise opposite, a human urge and so a human need. Religious practice is the most holy, the most beautiful, of all things; it is our endeavor to unify the discords necessitated by our development and out attempt to exhibit the unification in the ideal as fully existent, as no longer opposed to reality, and thus to express and confirm it in a deed. It follows that, if that spirit of beauty be lacking in religious actions, they are the most empty of all; they are the most senseless bondage, demanding a consciousness of one’s annihilation, or deeds in which man expresses his nullity, his passivity. The satisfaction of the commonest human want rises superior to actions like these, because there lies directly in such a want the sensing or the preserving of a human being, no matter how empty his being may be.
It is tautologous to say that supreme need is a profanation of something sacrosanct, because need is a state of distraction, and an action profaning a sacrosanct object is need in action. In need either a man is made an object and is oppressed or else he must make nature an object and oppress that. Not only is nature sacrosanct but things which in themselves are mere objects may also be sacrosanct not only when they are themselves manifestations of a multiunifying ideal, but also when they stand in a relation of some sort to it and belong to it. Need may demand to profanation of such a sacrosanct thing; but to profane it except in need is wantonness if that wherein a people is united is at the same time something communal, a property of all alike, for in that case the profanation of the sanctuary is at the same time an unrighteous profanation of the rights of all. The pious zeal which smashes the temples and altars of an alien worship and drives out its priests profanes communal sanctuaries belonging to all. But if a sanctuary is all-unifying only in so far as all make renunciation, as all serve, then any man who separates himself from the others reassumes his rights; and his profanation of a sacred object or command of that type is, as far as the others are concerned, only a disturbance in so far as it is a renunciation of community with them and is his revindication of his arbitrary use of his own property, be this his time or something else. But the more trifling any such right and its sacrifice may be, the less will a man oppose himself to his fellow-citizens on its account in the matter which to them is supreme, the less will he wish to disrupt his community with them on the point which is the very heart of the communal tie. The case is otherwise only when the entirety of the community becomes an object of contempt; it was because Jesus withdrew from the whole life of his people that he renounced this kind of forbearance which in other circumstances a friend shows by self-restraint, in matters of indifference, toward that with which he is heart and soul at one. For the sake of Jewish sanctities Jesus renounced nothing, forwent not even the satisfaction of a whim, of a very ordinary need. Therein he let us read his separation from his people, his utter contempt for bondage to objective commands.
His disciples gave offense to the Jews by plucking ears of corn on the Sabbath. The hunger which was their motive could find no great satisfaction in these ears of corn; reverence for the Sabbath might well have postponed this trifling satisfaction for all the time necessary for going to place where they could get cooked food. Jesus contrasted David with the Pharisees who censured this unlawful action, but David had seized the shewbread in extreme need. Jesus also adduced the desecration of the Sabbath by priestly duties; but, since these were lawful, they were no desecration. On the one hand, he magnifies the transgression by the very remark that, while the priests desecrate the Sabbath in the temple merely, here is a greater than the temple, i.e., nature is holier than the temple; and, on the other hand, his general drift is to lift nature, which for the Jews is godless and unholy, above that single restricted building, made by Jewish hands, which was in their view the only part of the world related to God. In plain terms, however, he contrasts the sanctification of a time [the seventh day] with men and declares that the former is inferior to a trivial satisfaction of a human need.
On the same day Jesus haled a withered hand. The Jews’ own behavior in connection with a sheep in danger proved to them, like David’s misuse of the sacred bread, or the functions of priests on the Sabbath, that even in their own eyes the holiness of the day did not count as absolute, that they themselves knew something higher than the observance of this command. But even here the example which he brings before the Jews is an example of need, and need cancels guilt. The animal which falls into the pit demands instant aid; but whether the man lacked the use of his hand or not until sunset was entirely a matter of indifference. The action of Jesus expressed his whim to perform the action a few hours earlier and the primacy of such a whim over a command issued by the highest authority.
Against the custom of washing the hands before eating bread Jesus puts (Matthew xv. 2)[3] the whole subjectivity of man; and above bondage to a command, above the purity or impurity of an object, he puts purity or impurity of heart. He made undetermined subjectivity, character, a totally different sphere, one which was to have nothing in common with the punctilious following of objective commands.
Against purely objective commands Jesus set something totally foreign to them, namely, the subjective in general; but he took up a different attitude to those laws which from varying points of view we call either moral or else civil commands. Since it is natural relations which these express in the form of commands, it is perverse to make them wholly or partly objective. Since laws are unifications of opposites in a concept, which thus leaves them as opposites while it exists itself in opposition to reality, it follows that the concept expresses an ought.[4] If the concept is treated in accordance with its form, not its content, i.e., if it is treated as a concept made and grasped by men, the command is moral. If we look solely at the content, as the specific unification of specific opposites, and if therefore the “ought” [or “Thou shalt"] does not arise from the property of the concept but is asserted by an external power, the command is civil. Since in the latter case the unification of opposites is not achieved by thinking, is not subjective, civil laws delimit the opposition between several living beings, while purely moral laws fix limits to opposition in one living being. Thus the former restrict the opposition of one living being to others, the latter the opposition of one side, one power, of the living being to other sides, other powers, of that same living being; and to this extent one power of this being lord it over another of its powers. Purely moral commands which are incapable of becoming civil ones, i.e., those in which the opposites and the unification cannot be formally alien to one another, would be such as concern the restriction of those forces whose activity does not involve a relation to other men or is not an activity against them. If the laws are operative as purely civil commands, they are positive, and since in their matter they are at the same time moral, or since the unification of objective entities in the concept also either presupposes a nonobjective unification or else may be such, it follows that their form as civil commands would be canceled if they were made moral, i.e., if their “ought” became, not the command of an external power, but reverence for duty, the consequence of their own concept. But even those moral commands which are incapable of becoming civil may become objective if the unification (or restriction) works not as concept itself, as command, but as something alien to the restricted force, although as something still subjective.[5] This kind of objectivity could be canceled only by the restoration of the concept itself and by the restriction of activity through that concept.
We might have expected Jesus to work along these lines against the positivity of moral commands, against sheer legality, and to show that, although the legal is a universal whose entire obligatoriness lies in its in its universality, still, even if every ought, every command, declares itself as something alien, nevertheless as concept (universality) it is something subjective, and, as subjective, as a product of a human power (i.e., of reason as the capacity for universality), it loses its objectivity, its positivity, its heteronomy, an the thing commanded is revealed as grounded in an autonomy of the human will. By this line of argument, however, positivity is only partially removed; and between the Shaman of the Tungus, the European prelate who rules church and state, the Voguls, and the Puritans, on the one hand, and the man who listens to his own command of duty, on the other, the difference is not that the former make themselves slaves, while the latter is free, but that the former have their lord outside themselves, while the latter carries his lord in himself, yet at the same time is his own slave.[6] For the particular – impulses, inclinations, pathological love, sensuous experience, or whatever else it is called – the universal is necessarily and always something alien and objective. There remains a residuum of indestructible positivity which finally shocks us because the content which the universal command of duty acquires, a specific duty, contains the contradiction of being restricted and universal at the same time and makes the most stubborn claims for its one-sidedness, i.e., on the strength of possessing universality of form. Woe to the human relations which are not unquestionably found in the concept of duty; for this concept (since it is not merely the empty thought of universality but is to manifest itself in an action) excludes or dominates all other relations.
One who wished to restore man’s humanity in its entirely could not possibly have taken a course like this, because it simply tacks on to man’s distraction of mind an obdurate conceit. To act in the spirit of the laws could not have meant for him “to act out of respect for duty and to contradict inclinations,” for both “parts of the spirit” (no other words can describe this distraction of soul), just by being thus divergent, would have been not in the spirit of the laws but against that spirit, one part because it was something exclusive and so self-restricted, the other because it was something suppressed.[7]
This spirit of Jesus, a spirit raised above morality,[8] is visible, directly attacking laws, in the Sermon on the Mount, which is an attempt, elaborated in numerous examples, to strip the laws of legality, of their legal form. The Sermon does not teach reverence for the laws; on the contrary, it exhibits that which fulfills the law but annuls it as law and so is something higher than obedience to law and makes law superfluous. Since the commands of duty presuppose a cleavage [between reason and inclination] and since the domination of the concept declares itself in a “thou shalt,” that which is raised above this cleavage is by contrast an “is” a modification of life, a modification which is exclusive and therefore restricted only if looked at in reference to the object, since the exclusiveness is given only through the restrictedness of the object and only concerns the object.[9] When Jesus expresses in terms of commands what he sets against and above the laws (think not that I wish to destroy the law; let your word be; I tell you not to resist, etc.; love God and your neighbor), this turn of phrase is a command in a sense quite different from that of the “shalt” of a moral imperative. It is only the sequel to the fact that, when life is conceived in thought or given expression, it acquires a form alien to it, a conceptual form, while, on the other hand, the moral imperative is, as a universal, in essence a concept. And if in this way life appears in the form of something due to reflection, something said to men, then this type of expression (a type inappropriate to life): “Love God above everything and thy neighbor as thyself” was quite wrongly regarded by Kant as a “command requiring respect for a law which commands love."[10] And it is on this confusion of the utterly accidental kind of phraseology expressive of life with the moral imperative (which depends on the opposition between concept and reality) that there rests Kant’s profound reduction of what he calls a “command” (love God first of all and thy neighbor as thyself) to his moral imperative. And his remark that “love,” or, to take the meaning which he thinks must be given to this love, “liking to perform all duties,” “cannot be commanded” falls to the ground by its own weight, because in love all thought of duties vanishes. And so also even the honor which he bestows in another way on that expression of Jesus by regarding it as an ideal of holiness unattainable by any creature, is squandered to no purpose; for such an “ideal,” in which duties are represented as willingly done, is self-contradictory, since duties require an opposition, and an action that we like to do requires none. And he can suffer this unresolved contradiction in his ideal because he declare that rational creatures (a remarkable juxtaposition of words) can fall but cannot attain that ideal.
Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount [Matthew v. 2-16] with a species of paradox in which his whole soul forthwith and unambiguously declares to the multitude of expectant listeners that they have to expect from him something wholly strange, a different genius, a different world. There are cries in which he enthusiastically deviates directly from the common estimate of virtue, enthusiastically proclaims a new law and light, a new region of life whose relation to the world could only be to be hated and persecuted by it. In this Kingdom of Heaven [Matthew v. 17-20], however, what he discovers to to them is not that laws disappear but that they must be kept through a righteousness of a new kind, in which there is more than is in the righteousness of the sons of duty and which is more complete because it supplements the deficiency in the laws [or “fulfills” them].
This supplement he goes on to exhibit in several laws. This expanded content we may call an inclination so to act as the laws may command, i.e., a unification of inclination with the law whereby the latter loses its form as law. This correspondence with inclination is the πληρ αρμα [fulfilment] of the law; i.e., it is an “is,” which, to use an old expression,[11] is the “complement of possibility,” since possibility is the object as something thought, as a universal, while “is” is the synthesis of subject and object, in which subject and object have lost their opposition. Similarly, the inclination [to act as the laws may command], a virtue, is a synthesis in which the law (which, because it is universal, Kant always calls something “objective”) loses its universality and the subject its particularity; both lose their opposition, while in the Kantian conception of virtue this opposition remains, and the universal becomes the master and the particular the mastered. The correspondence of inclination with law is such that law and inclination are no longer different; and the expression “correspondence of inclination with the the law” is therefore wholly unsatisfactory because it implies that law and inclination are still particulars, still opposites. Moreover, the expression might easily be understood to mean that a support of the moral disposition, of reverence for the law, of the will’s determinacy by the law, was forthcoming from the inclination which was other than the law, and since the things in correspondence with one another would on this view be different, their correspondence would be only fortuitous, only the unity of strangers, a unity in thought only. In the “fulfillment” of both the laws and duty, their concomitant, however, the moral disposition, etc., ceases to be the universal, opposed to inclination, and inclination ceases to be particular, opposed to the law, and therefore this correspondence of law and inclination is life and, as the relation of differents to one another, love; i.e., it is an “is” which expressed as (α) concept, as law, is of necessity congruent with law, i.e., with itself, or as (β) reality, as inclination opposed to the concept, is likewise congruent with itself, with inclination.[12]
The command “Thou shalt not kill” [Matthew v. 21-22) is a maxim which is recognized as valid for the will of every rational being and which can be valid as a principle of a universal legislation. Against such a command Jesus sets the higher genius of reconcilability (a modification of love) which not only does not act counter to this law but makes it wholly superfluous; it has in itself a so much richer, more living, fulness that so poor a thing as a law is nothing for it at all. In reconcilability the law loses its form, the concept is displaced by life; but what reconcilability thereby loses in respect of the universality which grips all particulars together in the concept is only a seeming loss and a genuine infinite gain on account of the wealth of living relations with the individuals (perhaps few) with whom it comes into connection. It excludes not a reality but only thoughts and possibilities, while the form of the command and this wealth of possibility in the universality of the concept is itself a rending of life; and the content of the command is so indigent that it permits any transgression except the one it forbids. For reconcilability, on the other hand, even anger is a crime and amounts to the quick reaction of feeling to an oppression, the uprush of the desire to oppress in turn, which is a kind of blind justice and so presupposes equality, though the equality of enemies. Per contra, the spirit of reconcilability, having no inimical disposition of its own, struggles to annul the enmity of the other. If love is the standard of judgment, then by that standard calling one’s brother a scoundrel is a crime, a greater crime then anger. Yet a scoundrel in the isolation in which he puts himself by setting himself, a man, over against other men in enmity, and by striving to persist in this disorder, is still of some worth, he still counts since he is hated, and a great scoundrel may be admired. Therefore, it is still more alien to love to call the other a fool, for this annuls not only all relation with the speak but also all equality, all community of essence. The man called a fool is represented as completely subjugated and is designated a nonentity.*
Love, on the other hand [Matthew v. 23-24], comes before the altar conscious of a separation, but it leaves its gift there, is reconciled with its brother, and then and then only approaches the one God in purity and singleness of heart. It does not leave the judge to apportion its rights; it reconciles itself to its enemy with no regard to right whatever.
Similarly [Matthew v. 27-32), over against dutiful fidelity in marriage and the right to divorce a wife, Jesus sets love. Love precludes the lust not forbidden by that duty and, except in one eventuality, cancels this leave to divorce, a leave contradictory to that duty. Hence, on the one hand, the sanctity of love is the completion (the πλήρωμα [fulfilment]) of the law against divorce, and this sanctity alone makes a man capable of checking any one of his many aspects which may wish to make itself the whole or rear its head against the whole; only the feeling for the whole, love, can stand in the way of the diremption of the man’s essence. On the other hand, love cancels the leave to divorce; and in face of love, so long as it lasts, or even when it ceases, there can be no talk of leave or rights. To cease loving a wife who still loves compels love to sin, to be untrue to itself; and a transfer of its passion to another is only a perversion of it, to be atoned for with a bad conscience. To be sure, in this event it cannot evade its fate, and the marriage is inwardly sundered; but the support which the husband draws from a law and a right and through which he brings justice and propriety onto his side means adding to the outrage in his wife’s love a contemptible harshness. But in the eventuality which Jesus made an exception (i.e., when the wife has bestowed her love on another) the husband may not continue a slave to her. Moses had to give laws and rights about marriage to the Jews “because of the hardness of their hearts,” but in the beginning it was not so.
In a statement about reality the subject and the object are thought of as severed; in a statement about futurity, in a promise, the declaration of a will and the deed are themselves still wholly severed, and [in both cases] the truth, i.e., the firm connection of the separate elements, is the important thing. In a sworn statement, the idea of either a past deed or a future one is linked to something divine, and the connection of word and deed, their linkage, an “is,” is represented and figured in a Being. Since the truth of the event sword to cannot itself be made visible, truth itself, God, is put in its place, and (a) is in this way given to the other to whom the oath is sword and produces conviction in him, while (b) the opposite of the truth is excluded, when the decision to swear is taken, by the reaction of this Being on the heart of the man on oath. There is no knowing why there is supposed to be any superstition in this. When the Jews swore by heaven, by the earth, by Jerusalem, or by the hair of their head, and committed their oath to God, put it in the hands of the Lord, the linked the reality of what they asserted to an object;[13] they equated both realities and put the connection of this object with what was asserted, the equivalence of the two, into the power of an external authority. God is made the authority over the word, and this connection of object and assertion ought to be grounded in man himself. The deed asserted and the object by which the oath was taken are so interconnected with each other that, if one is canceled, the other is denied too, is represented as canceled. If, then, the act promised or the fact asserted is not performed or not a fact, then the object by which the man swore, heaven, earth, etc., is eo ipso denied too; and in this event the Lord of the object must vindicate it, God must be the avenger of his own. This linking of a promised deed to something objective Jesus gainsays [Matthew v. 33-37]. He does not assert the duty of keeping the oath; he declares that the oath is altogether superfluous, for neither heaven nor earth nor Jerusalem nor the hair of the head is the spirit of man which alone conjoins his word with an action. Jesus declares that these things are a stranger’s property and that the certainty of a deed may not be linked to anything strange, put into the hands of a stranger; on the contrary, the connection of word and action must be a living one an rest on the man himself.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, say the laws [Matthew v. 38-42]. Retribution and its equivalence with crime is the sacred principle of all justice, the principle on which any political order must rest. But Jesus makes a general demand on his hearers to surrender their rights, to lift themselves alone the whole sphere of justice or injustice by love, for in love there vanish not only rights but also the feeling of inequality an the hatred of enemies which this feeling’s imperative demand for equality implies.
The laws and duties of which Jesus had spoken up to this point were on the whole civil, and he did not complete them by confirming them as laws and duties while requiring pure reverence for them as the motive for this observance; on the contrary, he expressed contempt for them. The completion he gave them is a spirit which has no consciousness of rights and duties, although its actions, when judged by laws and moral imperatives, are found to be in accordance with these. Farther on [Matthew vi. 1-4] he speaks of a purely moral duty, the virtue of charity. Jesus condemns in it, as in prayer and fasting, the intrusion of something alien, resulting in the impurity of the action: Do it not in order to be seen of men; let the aim behind the action, i.e., the action as thought of, before it is done, be like the completed action. Apart from banishing this hypocrisy which blends with the thought of the action the other aspect (being seen of men) which is not in the action, Jesus seems here to banish even the consciousness of the action as a duty fulfilled. “Let not the left hand know what the right hand doeth” cannot refer to making the action known to others but is the contrary of “being seen by others,” and if, then, it is to have meaning, it must denote one’s own reflection on one’s dutifulness. Whether in an action of mine I am the sole onlooker or whether I think that others too are onlookers, whether I enjoy only my own consciousness or whether I also enjoy the applause of others, makes no great difference. For when the applause of others at a victory won by duty, by the universal over the particular, is known to me, what has happened is, as it were, that universal and particular are not merely thought but seen, the universal in the ideas of the others, the particular in them as themselves real entities. Moreover, the private consciousness of duty fulfilled is not different in kind from honor but is different from it only in so far as, when honor is given, universality is recognized as not merely ideally but also as really valid. The consciousness of having performed his duty enables the individual to claim universality for himself; he intuits himself as universal, as raised above himself qua particular and above the whole sphere of particularity, i.e., above the mass of individuals. For as the concept of universality is applied to the individual, so also the concept of particularity acquires this bearing on individuals and they set themselves, as particulars, over against the individual who recognizes his universality by performing his duty; and this self-consciousness of his is as foreign to the action as men’s applause.
Of this conviction of self-righteousness and the consequent disparagement of others (which both stand in necessary connection on account of the necessary opposition of particular to universal), Jesus also speaks in the parable in Luke xviii, 9 ff. The Pharisee thanks God (and is too modest to recognize it as the strength of his own will) that he is not as many other men who are extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican beside him; he fasts as the rule prescribed and pays his tithes conscientiously as a righteous man should. Against this consciousness of righteousness (which is never said not to be genuine) Jesus sets the downcast eyes, which do not venture to lift themselves to heaven, of the publican who smites his breast and says: God be merciful to me a sinner. The consciousness of the Pharisee (a consciousness of duty done), like the consciousness of the young man (the consciousness of having truly observed all the laws – Matthew xix. 20), this good conscience, is a hypocrisy because (a) even if it be bound up with the intention of the action, it is a reflection on itself and on the action, is something impure not belonging to the action; and (b) if it is an idea of the agent’s self as a moral man, as in the case of te Pharisee and the young man, it is an idea whose content is made up of the virtues, i.e., of restricted things whose sphere is given, whose matter is limited, and which therefore are one and all incomplete, while the good conscience, the consciousness of having done one’s duty, hypocritically claims to be the whole.
In this same spirit Jesus speaks [Matthew vi. 5-18] of praying and fasting. Both are either wholly objective, through and through commanded duties, or else are merely based on some need. They cannot be represented as moral duties[14] because they presuppose no opposition capable of unification in a concept. In both of them Jesus censures the show which a man makes in the eyes of others by their practice, and in the particular case of prayer he also condemns the numerous repetitions which give it the look of a duty and its performance. Jesus judges fasting (Matthew ix. 15 [: Can the children of the bride-chamber mourn so long as the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast]) by reference to the feeling which lies at its heart, to the need which impels us to it. As well as rejecting impurity of heart in prayer, Jesus prescribes a way to pray. Consideration of the true aspects of prayer is not relevant here.
About the command which follows [Matthew vi. 19-34] to cast aside care for one’s life and to despise riches, as also about Matthew xix. 23: “How hard is it for a richer man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven,” there is nothing to be said; it is a litany pardonable only in sermons and rhymes, for such a command is without truth for us. The fate of property has become too powerful for us to tolerate reflections on it, to find its abolition thinkable. But this at least is to be noticed, that the possession of riches, with all the rights as well as all the cares connected with it, brings into human life definitive details whose restrictedness prescribes limits to the virtues, imposes conditions on them, and makes them dependent on circumstances. Within these limitations, there is room for duties and virtues, but they allow of no whole, of no complete life, because if life is bound up with objects, it is conditioned by something outside itself, since in that event something is tacked on to life as its own which yet cannot be its property.[15] Wealth at once betrays its opposition to love, to the whole, because it is a right caught in a context of multiple rights, and this means that both its immediately appropriate virtue, honesty, and also the other virtues possible within its sphere, are of necessity linked with exclusion, and every act of virtue is in itself one of a pair of opposites.[16] A syncretism, a service of two masters, is unthinkable because the indeterminate and the determinate cannot retain their form and still be bound together. Jesus had to exhibit not simply the “fulfillment” of duties but also the object of these principles, the essence of the sphere of duties, in order to destroy the domain opposed to love.[17]
The point of view from which Jesus attacks riches is brought forward by Luke (xii. 13) in a context which clarifies it. A man had asked Jesus to intercede with his brother about the division of their inheritance. To refuse a petition for such an intercession will be judged to be merely the behavior of an egoist. In his answer to the petitioner, Jesus seems to have directly alleged only his incompetence to grant it. But there is more in the spirit of the reply than that he has no right to make the division, because he turns at once to his disciples with a warning against covetousness and adds a parable of a rich man whom God startled with the words: “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee; whose then shall be what thou hast acquired? So is it with him who amasses treasure for himself and is not rich towards God.” So Jesus alleges rights only to the profane inquirer; from his disciples he demands elevation above the sphere of rights, justice, equity, the friendly services men can perform in this sphere, above the whole sphere of property.
To conscience, the consciousness of one’s own dutifulness or undutifulness, there corresponds the application of the laws to others in judgment. “Judge not,” says Jesus [Matthew vii. 1-5], “that ye be not judged; for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.” This subsumption of others under a concept manifested in the law may be called a weakness on the ground that the judge is not strong enough to bear up against them altogether but divides them; he cannot hold out against their independence; he takes them not as they are but as they ought to be; and by this judgment he has subjected them to himself in thought, since the concept, the universality, is his. But with this judging he has recognized a law and subjected himself to its bondage, has set up for himself also a criterion of judgment; and with the loving disposition which leads him to remove the mote from his brother’s eye he has himself fallen under the realm of love.[18]
What follows [Matthew vii. 6-29] does not, like the earlier part, oppose to the laws a realm which is higher than they; it rather exhibits certain expressions of life in its beautiful free region as the unification of men in asking, giving, and receiving. The whole Sermon ends with the attempt to display the picture of man entirely outside the sphere in which it had been sketched earlier, where we had a picture of man in opposition to determinate prescriptions, with the result that purity of life appeared there rather in its modifications, in particular virtues, as reconciliation, marital fidelity, honesty, etc. The picture of man could of course be do displayed only in inadequate parables.
In contrast to this extinction of law and duty in love, which Jesus signalizes as the higher morality, there is the manner of John the Baptist, of which Luke (iii) has preserved some examples. “If you still hope to escape from the fate of the wrath to come,” he says to the Jews, “it matters not that you have Abraham for your father, for the axe is even now laid to the root of the trees.” And when the Jews then asked him what they were to do, he replied: “He that hath two coats or hath food to spare, let him give to him that hath none.” He warned the publicans not to exact more than was appointed them, the soldiers not to maim any man, not to pillage anything, but to live on their pay. It is also known of him (Matthew xiv. 4) that he launched forth into reproaches on the relations between Herod and his brother’s wife, a reproof which cost him his head. His fate was completed because of a specific reproof, just as his teaching (see the above examples) exhorts to specific virtues and shows that their great spirit, their all-pervasive soul, had not entered his consciousness. He felt this himself too and proclaimed another who with his fan in his hand would purge the threshing floor. John hoped and believed that his successor would substitute for his baptism of water a baptism with fire and the spirit.
1. In an earlier draft (Nohl, p. 385), Hegel wrote: “In the time of Jesus the Jewish people no longer presents the appearance of a whole. There are so many ideals and different types of life, so much unsatisfied striving for something new, that any confident and hopeful reformer is as assured of a following as he is of enemies.”
2. At this point there is a gap in the manuscript. In an earlier draft (Nohl, p. 386) Hegel wrote: “The root of Judaism is the Objective, i.e., service, bondage to an alien Lord. This was what Jesus attacked.” In what is missing, Hegel seems to have further described the nature of Jewish bondage to the law. The translation of the following paragraph, which is fragmentary in the manuscript, presupposes the reconstruction and interpretation given by T. L. Haering, Hegel, sein Wollen und sein Werk, I, 486-87.
3. “Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they wash not their hands when they eat bread.... He said unto them.... Ye have made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition.... Well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying: This people... honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.”
4. Hegel is thinking here of moral and political laws. Law substitutes for a war between opposed interests a world of social relationships; i.e., it unites men who, outside the pale of law, would be at enmity with one another. So also law may reconcile reason with desire and allow man to live at peace with himself. Now a law is a concept, in the sense that it operates (as law, not as force) only among those who understand it. Instinctive or habitual action might accidentally accord with the law, but moral and political life presuppose a transcendence of that natural level and the attainment of an intelligence which can grasp what law is. But law is only a concept, because it can be disobeyed, so that even if there are laws, the unification of opposites which they imply may not be an accomplished fact. Hence, the most we can say is that law ought to be obeyed, hostilities ought to be assuaged, opposites ought to be unified; and this is implied in the formal expression of the law as “Thou shalt.”
5. i.e., if the moral law is regarded as God’s fiat instead of as inherently rational.
6. Kant held that the only actions which had moral worth were those done “from duty,” and Hegel interpreted him as meaning that morality required us to follow the moral law of duty even to the thwarting of all our inclinations. Since the moral law is, in Kant’s view, the law of man’s own reason, to follow it is to be free. A man’s will may be determined by impulses and other purely natural factors, and in that event he is not free but the slave of his passions; he is still a live if it is determined by the “positive” commands of an external authority, i.e., by commands posited or laid down by fiat and not deducible from the rational will itself; but alternatively the will may be self-determining, i.e., obedient to the moral law issued by the rational will itself. It was from this point of view that in his Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone (iv. 2. § 3) Kant said that between the Shaman and the European prelate, between the Voguls and the Puritans, there was a great difference in manner, but none in principle; all alike they were obeying positive authorities, external commands, and not the law of their own reason. Hegel retorts that the man whose inclinations are in bondage to reason is also a slave, though a slave of himself; from the point of view of human needs and passions, a man is asked by Kant to obey commands which are just as external and positive (so far as these needs are concerned) as the commands of a positive religion. For Kant, man remains a duality; reason tries to thwart desire, but the two are never synthesized. Hegel attempts to show that a unification of the personality is possible through love and religion. (The Tungus and the Voguls are Siberian tribes). For “pathological love” see Kant’s Theory of Ethics, trans. T. K. Abbott (London, 1923), p. 176.
7. The two parts are (I) reason, which excludes inclination, and (ii) inclination, suppressed by reason.
8. Morality interpreted, as in the view here ascribed by Hegel to Kant, as the domination of inclination by reason.
9. Hegel seems to be thinking here of a precept such as “Love thy neighbor.” Love he regards as a “modification of life” (i.e., life expressing itself in a specific mode) and so as an attitude in which the lover’s whole self is at one the lover’s reason and inclination are in harmony. The restricted form of the precept (love thy neighbor) is a restriction which concerns not the lover but the object of his love; and the restriction is added to the precept (which otherwise would consist of the word “love” only) simply because the object of love is necessarily a restricted object.
10. Kant’s Theory of Ethics, tras. Abbott, pp. 175-76.
11. The expression is Baumgarten’s. See his Metaphysica (1739), §§ 40, 55, quoted in T. D. Weldon, Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Oxford, 1945), p. 42.
12. In a canceled passage (Nohl, p. 268, note) Hegel wrote here: “A command can express no more than an ought or a shall, because it is a universal, but it does not express an ‘is'; and this at once makes plain its deficiency. Against such commands Jesus set virtue, i.e., a loving disposition, which makes the content of the command superfluous and destroys its form as a command, because that form implies an opposition between a command and something resisting the command.” The loving disposition is said to be congruent with both law and inclination because it is the synthesis of these.
* Philological exegesis for the most part supports the sense in which “Raca” is taken here; but the chief difficulty is created by the moral sense of the interpreters who find “fool” a softer expression than “scoundrel,” and judge both words not by the spirit in which they are uttered but by the impression they make. Thus the man called a fool feels himself made sui juris, and if he is as sharp as the other, turns round and calls him a fall. Hegel takes “Raca” to mean “scoundrel.” But modern scholars say that it is a softer expression than “fool” and means “silly fellow.”
13. i.e., the earth, Jerusalem, etc. This is one reality. The fact asserted is the other. God is the power external to both.
14. i.e., duties as they are conceived in what Hegel takes to be Kant’s ethics.
15. Hegel conceives of life as a spiritual bond with spiritual properties. If the living being owns things, then they are tacked on to him, but they cannot be a property of his soul.
16. The meaning seems to be that to act in accordance with one right is to exclude and perhaps to transgress other rights.
17. i.e., the justification of what Jesus says about property lies for Hegel in the fact that he teaches that morality is essentially a matter of the inner life, and the danger is that legal rights with the externality and the specific details they entail may encroach upon that life or be taken as a substitute for it.
18. The meaning perhaps is that by judging people we try to get the better of them in thought. E.g., envy may bring a consciousness of inferiority, and this may be transferred into its opposite by dividing (teilen) the person envied (i.e., by abstracting his position from his character) and then judging (uteilen) his character. We envy the man as he is, and we judge him by a concept, a thought, by our conception of what he ought to be, or by our conception of the laws by which he ought to abide. In this way we get the better of him, not in reality, but in thought, because the standard of judgment lies in our thinking. But this process recoils on us. We must be judged by the same standard. Further, if I love another enough to wish to remedy his defects, I must become wholly animated by love and so heal my own faults by lifting myself onto the plane of love instead of law and judgment.