G. W. F. Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Ruben Alvarado translation. Wordbridge, 2011.

Paul Franco, ed.:  Leo Strauss on Hegel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

 

Note: This is the fifth and final essay of a series on Hegel’s Lectures and on Strauss’s commentaries.

 

As Strauss has remarked before, Hegel refers to the Oriental, Greek, Roman, and Germanic worlds not in the sense of the worlds in inhabited by Asians, Greeks, Romans, and Germans but in the sense of the “folk minds” of those cultures. Hence “Germanic,” not “German”—the Geist, the spirit of the Germans. Strauss explains to his English-speaking students that “Germanic” or Germanisch does not mean the same thing as “German” or deutsch. The distinctive characteristic of the Germanic is Gemüt, an “absolutely untranslatable” word often rendered as “heart,” meaning at once easygoing, friendly, and warm. Hegel considers this a characteristic of the inner man, and therefore a pervading spirit within the German people as individuals.

“The Germanic spirit is the spirit of the new world,” a spirit aiming at “the realization of absolute truth as the infinite self-determination of freedom,” a freedom “which has its own absolute form as its content.” “The destiny of the Germanic peoples is to be the bearers of the Christian principle,” the “principle of spiritual freedom” which reconciles God and Man by knowing “God” or Absolute Spirit to be immanent in Man. The ‘end of history,’ its purpose, has been attained in the Germanic world.

As always in Hegel, this self-consciousness came not all at once but in dialectical stages. But the Germanic evolution differed from those seen in Greece and Rome. “The Greeks and Romans had reached maturity within, ere they directed their energies outwards.” Self-development preceded empire. “The Germans, on the contrary, began by flowing outward, deluging the world, and overpowering in their course the inwardly rotten, hollow states of the civilized nations. Only then did their development begin, kindled by a foreign culture, a foreign religion, polity, and legislation. They cultivated themselves by taking up and overcoming the foreign element….” This was the process conducive to “the infinite self-determination of freedom” because the Germans began their conquests as a very nearly ‘blank slate,’ civilizationally and culturally—freer to transform themselves than bearers of any other world-historical national spirit had been. By contrast (as Strauss remarks), “in Byzantium the opposite was the case: the classical pagan culture antedated the Christianization.” “And therefore,” Strauss continues, “the modern world which arose from Latin Christianity and not from Greek Christianity is radically Christian.”

Christianity lends itself to such willing ‘capture’ and full integration by a barbarian people. Christianity has no nationality. Arising out of Judaism, it transcends the Jewish people, reaching beyond them to transform ‘the world.’ Moreover, the Christian church has “the Spirit of God actually present in it, it forgives the sinner and is a present kingdom of heaven,” albeit a community expecting a future, perfected kingdom of heaven on earth ruled directly by the Christ. The Christian church—assembly, ecclesia—freely offers membership to all comers, in exchange for their conversion, their freely-willed turning of their souls around, their openness to receiving the Spirit and thereby their coming-back to their true selves as children of God. In converting to Christianity, Germans were in no danger of making Christianity a national religion: Germans were Christianized; the Christian spirit filled vessels that were nearly empty. As barbarians, Germans could not Germanize Christianity, as they brought so little to the cultural ‘table.’

“The Germanic world took up the Roman culture and religion in their completed form,” incorporating these into itself. Church authorities in that world possessed “the whole culture, and in particular the philosophy, of the Greek and Roman world, a perfected dogmatic system; the church, too, had a completely developed hierarchy,” with a “perfectly developed” language, Latin, and fully developed political forms. “Thus the Germanic world appears, superficially, to be only a continuation of the Roman. But there lived in it an entirely new spirit, through which the world was to be regenerated—the free spirit, which reposes on itself, the absolute wilfulness of subjectivity.” Instead of the dialectical division of an inner world and an outer world—e.g., the matured Roman spirit conquering Asia—the Germanic world would see an entirely ‘inner’ dialectic, the dialectic between church and state. The church there developed itself “as the existence of absolute truth,” the “consciousness of this truth and at the same time the agency for rendering the individual harmonious with it” via the sacraments and teaching of the church. Meanwhile, the “secular consciousness,” embodied in the state, also develops itself. “European history is the exhibition of the development of each of these principles for itself, in church and state; then of an antithesis of both, not only of the one to the other, but within each of them, given that each is itself a totality; lastly, of the reconciliation of this antithesis” in a final synthesis. As in all Hegelian syntheses, one of the original elements will dominate; in the modern world, the state element will dominate the church element, in what Hegel calls secularization.

Three historical “periods” of the German world correspond to these dialectical stages. The first begins with “the appearance of the Germanic nations in the Roman empire” and culminated in the empire of Charlemagne. The second “develops the two aspects”—the church as theocracy, the state as feudal monarchy—and sees the confrontation of them, resulting in the corruption of one element, the church. This period ended with the reign of Charles V. The third period finds “secularity… coming to consciousness in itself” as a rights-bearing entity. This led to “the restoration of Christian freedom” in the Reformation, the purifying reform of the corrupted church. This dialectic transformed not only the church but philosophy; “from this principle are evolved the universal axioms of reason” because “thought received its true material first with the Reformation, through the resurgent concrete consciousness of free spirit.” And from this revolution in thought, in philosophy, came a reconstructed “constitution of the state,” as “customary morality, traditional usage loses its validity; the various rights must prove their legitimacy as based on rational principles,” thereby enabling “freedom of spirit” to be “first realized,” fully embodied for the first time in human history. “We may distinguish these periods as kingdoms of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit,” Hegel boldly declares. His ‘God,’ the Absolute Spirit, carries the dialectic within it. He adds parallels with previous world-historical empires: Charlemagne’s time corresponds to Persia; the divided world of Charles V to split-up Greece; and the unified Reformation world to the Roman world.

The Germanic world in its completion nonetheless differs from the completed Roman world, as it instantiated not merely “the unity of abstract world rule” but “the hegemony of self-conscious thought,” as “privileges and particularities melt away before the common object of the state” and “the “peoples will the right in and for itself.” Religion, philosophy, and politics combine in a well-articulated unitary, but never homogenized, system. “As little can religion maintain itself apart from thought, but either advances to the concept or, compelled by thought itself, becomes intensive belief—or lastly, from, despair of finding itself at home in thought, shrinks back from it in pious horror, and becomes superstition.” It should be recalled that the Apostle Paul describes the Church in exactly such terms—as a unity, but an articulated unity which he likens to a human body with many organs coordinated by the head, Christ (Letter to the Ephesians, 4:1-16). Hegel takes this thought, including the organicism, and extend it to the modern state, which integrates the several religious communities within itself. This is what makes the modern state as conceived by Hegel somewhat ‘churchy’ even in its secularity—undertaking public charity, for instance.

Strauss interrupts his class’s ongoing discussion of the Lectures with an instructive account of the idea of “the philosophy of history,” as distinguished from earlier philosophies of nature, of God (theology), and of politics. Political philosophy “was based from the very beginning on the difference between the good and the ancestral: the agathon and patrium.” If the good is the rational—the whole, without self-interfering contradiction—then the ancestral may be said to be “divinations or fragments of the good or even soiled fragments of it,” as Plato suggests. Hegel rejoins, “No, there is an order among these ancestrals,” indeed “an ascending order” aiming at an end, a telos. Both the end and the way to the end are rational; history could not have unfolded any other way. “Therefore, one can also say, turning it around, that the rational is the final ancestral”; “at the end there is complete reconciliation of reason and tradition.”

Whereas Vico presented a philosophy of history, this was “an ideal history and therefore not history pure and simple.” It was Rousseau in the Second Discourse who “explicitly gives a history of man which is truly philosophic in inspiration.” Although Plato and Lucretius both present early human beings as barbaric, “this view did not lead in antiquity to anything like a philosophy of history.” What changed, between antiquity and Rousseau? For one thing, Lucretius thinks that the process of the ascent from barbarism to civilization, followed by a decline into barbarism, occurs “infinitely often.” In the moderns, however, “there is only one historical process.” Whereas “classical philosophy, whether Platonic or Epicurean, was, we can say, cosmological,” placing human beings squarely “within the cosmos” and its cyclical rhythms, modern philosophy discards the rational attempt to understand the cosmos ‘as it is.’ Hobbes regards mere investigation and discovery insufficient to bring understanding, as nature is opaque to human understanding, as mysterious in its own way as the Creator-God of the Bible. Hobbes teaches that “we understand only what we make,” since we then know its origin, the materials we put into it, the design in which we ordered those materials, and our purpose in undertaking the project. “Since we obviously didn’t make the cosmos, the cosmos can no longer be the guiding theme. For Descartes, the beginning is the thinking ego, not the cosmos.” Another way to say this is that pre-modern philosophy is ‘objectivistic,’ modern philosophy ‘subjectivistic.’ For the moderns, “the thinking, understanding subject is the origin of all meaning” that we can discern. In terms of political philosophy, this leads away from natural law and toward the rights of man, “subjective rights.”

The assertion of subjectivism is “the necessary but not sufficient condition of the discovery of history”—insufficient because ‘history’ in the modern sense isn’t in Hobbes or Descartes any more than it’s in Lucretius or Plato. So, “What is at the bottom of the fact that in the last 150 years people speak of history as philosophically relevant?” The first element predates Hobbes and Descartes. Machiavelli disparaged the ancients’ “concern with the best regime,” calling for philosophers consider how men really live, not how they ought to live. This move “still led to ideals, but to a new kind of ideal, closer to earth, whose actualization is probable” because “enlightenment is probable.” Machiavelli advises non-philosophers, princes, to exercise their virtù, to make the effort to realize such regimes. Locke addresses “opinion leaders, as they are now called,” men of the gentry class “who influence the nonliterate and half-literate people,” including their initially nonliterate and half-literate children. “If enlightenment is necessary” to the founding of the best regime, “if the spreading of knowledge is a necessary consequence of the acquisition of knowledge, then the actualization of the best regime is necessary” because “chance is controlled.” Further, another thing also is necessary: “intellectual progress.” Pascal modestly remarks that even “dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants see farther ahead than the giants.” “By the spread of knowledge the people become enlightened and opinion is changed; and if opinion is changed, power is changed, because power will now move in a different direction than it moved before it was enlightened.” We know what we make; we can make good and useful things if we lower our standards from out of the clouds; and every reasonably intelligent man can contribute to the progress of such knowledge by standing on giants’ shoulders (building on the solid results of experimental science, for example). “All of this is presupposed by Hegel, integrated into his philosophy.” In putting this all together into a philosophy of history, the claim that human progress has unfolded dialectically, in a rationally knowable way, Hegel can claim to be the first philosopher to see “that the actual and the rational necessarily coincide,” by necessity not by chance, even as the conclusion of a syllogism follows the premises by logical necessity. Hegel can say that he and his contemporaries live in “an absolute epoch,” an absolute moment in the course of events (now called “history”), “in which the full coincidence” of the actual and the rational “takes place,” “the epoch in which all fundamental theoretical problems” have been solved. This is ‘the end of history,’ whereby philosophers no longer merely love wisdom but have self-consciously achieved it.

This sounds mighty fine, but Hegel also sees a problem. “This theoretical wisdom has the unfortunate characteristic that it belongs to a period of decay.” The owl of Minerva takes wing at dusk. “So when we have reached wisdom, the dusk begins.” Full enlightenment shadows forth endarkenment. How do we know this? For Hegel, as Hegel has insisted and Strauss has repeatedly remarked, “a nation gives itself the definition in its religion.” Christianity is “the absolute religion.” It has “permeate[d] the world.” “Christianity becomes worldly, i.e., it completely transforms the world,” becoming “completely secularized.” The rational state of modernity is “indifferent to religion,” and religion itself “has been transformed into philosophy taught by Hegel at the University of Berlin.” When “the common people” eventually get wind of this new spirit they will not, however, become philosophers. They will remain unwise, taking secularism in the only way ordinary folk can take it—as opinion. They will esteem science and scientists, enjoy the benefits of technological progress, but they will not understand what those things are, and what those persons are doing. “Hegel has no comfort for us at this point.” That is why the “end stage” of history is also “the beginning of the way down.” Deprived of their former belief in a transcendent and unquestionably good end in the afterlife, they are left with their own mortality, the finitude of a life spent fiddling with gadgets provided for them by scientists, a life less hopeful, less decent, and therefore less genuinely human than they had before. Nietzsche beckons, but ‘the many’ won’t read him; they will hear Nietzschean motifs as they have been dumbed-down by lesser thinkers, and by the thoughtless, and by demagogues and sophists.

Hegel divides his lectures on the Germanic spirit into three groups. As usual, he begins with the ‘makings’ of the national spirit, in this case “The Elements of the Christian Germanic World.” There are three of these elements: the barbarian “migrations” or conquests of Rome; “Mohammedanism”; and “The Empire of Charlemagne.” The second group of lectures discusses “The Middle Ages” in four sections: “Feudalism and the Hierarch” (of the Church); “The Crusades”; “The Transition from Feudalism to Monarchy”; and “Art and Science as Dissolution of the Middle Ages.” The third group, “The Modern Age,” consists of “The Reformation,” “Influence of the Reformation on Political Development,” and “The Enlightenment and the [French] Revolution.”

The migration of barbaric Germans south, into Rome, begins in the forests of Germany, where not-so-noble savages lived. True, the savage knows nothing of the exquisite agonies of civilization which so tormented Rousseau, but such a freedom is “merely negative, whole freedom must be essentially affirmative.” “The goods of affirmative freedom are first and foremost the goods of the highest consciousness,” not the ignorance of savages. The (negatively) free savages “inundat[ed] the Roman empire” in their quest for new and more fertile territories. Some of them joined with the Roman armies, becoming acquainted with Roman goods both material and mental. This issued in a distinction “between the Germanic nations who remained in their ancient habitations and those who spread themselves over the Roman empire and mingled with the conquered peoples.” But “however different might be the fates of these [Germanic] peoples” who did spread and mingle, “they nevertheless had one aim in common, to procure for themselves possessions, and to form themselves into a state.”

Although undeveloped, Germans did have a way of life which they brought to these experiences. “Among the Germans, the community did not lord it over the individual, for the element of freedom is the first consideration in their union in a social relationship”; they were already “famed for their love of freedom,” and “freedom has been the watchword in Germany down to the most recent times.” In practice this meant, for example, that even homicide “could be expiated by a pecuniary penance, because the individuality of the free man was regarded as sacred, permanently and inviolably, whatever he might have done”—prior even to the right to life. Freedom also meant that social organizations “formed by free association and by voluntary attachment to military leaders and princes,” a practice that valorized faithfulness, “the second watchword of the Germans.” “This we find neither among the Greeks nor the Romans.” The German heart freely “sets itself as dependent upon the person and the thing, renders this relation a compound of faithfulness and obedience.” In most places, states form in which “duties and rights are left no longer to arbitrary choice but are fixed as legal relations, precisely so that the state be the soul of the whole, and remain its ruler.” It is “the peculiarity of the German states” that “the laws are absolutely particular, and the entitlements are privileges,” the state being “composed of private rights” and duties. “Only much later, with difficulty, through struggles and convulsions, did a rational state life come about.” And such a state life would need to be made consistent with the German spirit of freedom and faithfulness. Meanwhile, as Strauss succinctly puts it, “according to Hegel there is no public right in the Middle Ages”; “there are only private rights because there is no general will.”

All of this made Germans receptive to Christianity, which itself puts so much emphasis on freely chosen fidelity to a Person. Although “initially only the clouded will is present,” and “a long process is required to complete this purification so as to realize concrete spirit,” the Christian spirit will work its way in and through the German peoples. At first, however, the confrontation of religion with “the violence of the passions” only “rouses them to madness.” “We behold the terrible spectacle of the most fearful extravagance of passion in all the royal houses of that period,” as the newly Christian Germans were only very incompletely Christian, their will “struggling with itself” and often losing. Although we often see a worldly man who “suddenly repudiates it all” and “betakes himself to religious seclusion,” in political life “secular business cannot be thus repudiated; it demands accomplishment, and ultimately the discover is made that spirit finds the goal of its struggle and its satisfaction in that very sphere which it made the object of its resistance,” finding “that secular pursuits are a spiritual occupation.” In Hegel we are only a few decades away from Weber, from “politics as a vocation.” Early on, Europe “comes to the truth” in its very struggle with the truth, in dialectic. “In this moment, Providence in the strict sense”—the Hegelian, not the Biblical sense—”rules, while through misfortune, suffering, private aims, and the unconscious will of the peoples, it realizes its absolute purpose and its honor.”

Meanwhile, in the East at this time we see another “purification of absolute spirit,” one “accomplished much more quickly” and indeed “suddenly in the first half of the seventh century.” This new Asian spirit will soon confront the West as the second “element” of the Christian Germanic World. Hegel knows that Muslims call their religion Islam, not Mohammedanism. He nonetheless calls it that, not out of disrespect but to contrast the founder of Islam with the Founder of Christianity. Islam itself differed in its effect on the ‘Near East’ from the effect of Christianity. Christianity left the nations of Europe intact; under it, “the West began to settle itself in contingency, complication, and particularity.” But “the revolution in the East… destroyed all particularity and dependence and completely enlightened and purified the hear, in that it made the abstract one into absolute object, and just, so, the pure subjective consciousness, the knowledge of this one, into the sole goal of reality—making the relation-less,” the abstract one, Allah—”into the relation of existence” for Man.

Judaism had exalted God as the One, but “Jehovah was the God of that one people”; “only to this people had He revealed himself. “Mohammedanism” eliminated this particularity. The worship of the one, of Allah, “is the sole final end of Mohammedanism, and subjectivity only has this worship as the content of its activity, as well as the design to subjugate secular existence to the one.” Thus human subjectivity under Islam becomes “living and unlimited,” universalized and universalizing, releasing “an energy which enters into secular life with a purely negative purpose, and busies itself and interferes with the world, only in such a way as shall promote the pure adoration of the one.” Mohammed himself is a prophet, not a Man-God, who with maximum energy fights to eliminate all social and political bonds, everywhere, “so that worship of the one remains the only bond by which the whole is capable of uniting.” National, caste, and class distinctions must go. In this struggle, this jihad, “the highest merit is to die for the faith.” “He who perishes for it in battle is sure of paradise.” Hegel links this spirit to the geography of the Arabs, among whom Islam began: “here spirit exists in its simplest form, and the sense of the formless is here at home; for in these deserts nothing can be formed” on the ever-shifting sands, shaped and reshaped perpetually by windstorms.

“Abstraction swayed the minds of the Mohammedans,” as they aimed to “establish an abstract worship” and “struggled for it with the greatest enthusiasm” or “fanaticism, that is, an enthusiasm for something abstract, for an abstract thought which relates negatively to what exists.” Because it is both abstract and valorized, such a thought would negate, destroy, everything in its path in order to replace all other things with itself, in its purity. “Desolating” and “destructive,” “Mohammedanism was, at the same time, capable of the greatest elevation, an elevation free from all petty interests, and united with all the virtues that appertain to magnanimity and valor.” As Robespierre would later unite liberty and terror, so Mohammedanism united religion and terror.

And this is the problem with both the religion and modern ideologies. “Real life is nevertheless concrete,” stubbornly so, with “particular aims,” specifically the “sovereignty and wealth” conquest confers to dynasts and peoples. But in his abstraction-in-principle from such matters, “the Mohammedan is really indifferent to this social fabric,” and as a result all he accomplishes “is only contingent and build on sand, here today and gone tomorrow.” The Mohammedan founds kingdoms and dynasties only to see them dissolve, “destitute” as they are “of the bond of organic firmness.” And in the meantime, individuals in the Muslim world, insofar as they pursue concrete aims, do so cruelly, cunningly, boldly, generously, and above all recklessly. “Never has enthusiasm performed greater deeds,” so quickly and so widely. But “the great empire of the caliphs did not last long, for on the ground of universality nothing is firm.”

It was the Ottomans, not the Arabs, who “at last succeeded in establishing a firm dominion” with a military elite at its core. The science, knowledge, poetry, and philosophy that “came from the Arabs into the West” remained, “but the East itself, when by degrees enthusiasm had vanished, sank into the grossest depravity.” The “sensual enjoyment” that was “sanctioned in the first form which Mohammedan doctrine assumed, and was exhibited as a reward of the faithful in paradise,” “took the place of fanaticism,” and Islam “vanished from the stage of world history” “retreat[ing] into Oriental ease and repose,” even as Christian Germanic Europe retained the intellectual and artistic fruits harvested from its evanescent presence on that continent.

The third and final element of the Germanic World was the empire of Charlemagne. Clovis founded the Frankish empire ruled by his Merovingian dynasty. The Merovingians were replaced by the Carolingians, as Pepin the Short became king of the Franks in the year 752. He allied with the Catholic Church, then “severely pressed by the Lombard kings.” His son Charlemagne was crowned Emperor by the Pope in A.D. 800; “hence originated the firm union of the Carolingians with the Papal See,” whose Roman lineage “continued to enjoy the prestige of a great power among the barbarians… as the center from which civil dignities, religion, laws and all branches of knowledge” grew. The Frankish empire became a new Rome, as the “Roman emperor”—Roman in the sense of having been legitimated by the Church of Rome—”was the born defender of the Roman church.”

“This great empire Charlemagne formed into a systematically organized state, and gave the Frankish empire settled institutions adapted to impart its strength and consistency.” It did not, however, succeed in so imparting such strength or such consistency, as it did not form a true “constitution” of the empire. Charlemagne was indeed “master of the armed force” of that empire and its largest landowner, as well as the holder of supreme judicial power. He manned his imperial troops by universal conscription, and he could fund his enterprises not with onerous and irritating taxes but with the revenues from his lands. He encouraged Catholic bishops to build cathedrals, establish seminaries and universities, “endeavor[ing] to restore scientific endeavor, then almost extinct, by promoting the foundation of schools in cities and towns.” “Such was the state of the Frankish empire—that first consolidation of Christianity into a political form proceeding from itself, the Roman empire having been swallowed up by Christianity.”

Yet it was all short-lived. After Charlemagne died his empire “proved itself utterly powerless” against such foreign invaders as the Normans, Hungarians, and Arabs, “internally inefficient in resisting lawlessness, spoliation, and oppression of every kind.” The empire hadn’t adequately developed itself internally, ‘organically,’ as Hegel would say (and has said) about some previous empires. “Such political edifices need, for the very reason that they originate suddenly, the additional strengthening afforded by negativity within themselves”—by dialectical testing and refining in the crucible of thoughts and events; “they need reactions in every way, which in the following period manifest themselves.” Because the Christian Germanic world retained a concrete, real-world character lacking in the abstractions of Islam flickering across the sands of Arabia, it could maintain itself, even if the Franks could not maintain their empire over it. The epoch of dialectical testing and refining was the Middle Ages.

Hegel’s second group of lectures, “The Middle Ages,” consists of one section each on three “reactions” to the imposing but shaky Frankish empire, followed by a section on the dissolution of the Middle Ages as world history transitioned to “The Modern Age.” The first reaction consisted of the resistance of nationalities, of particularism against universalism; the second was the resistance of individuals “against legal authority and the state power”; the third was the reaction of the church against “worldly ferocity.” The “universal instability” which resulted from these rivalries eventuated in the Crusades, but the lasting result was the “internal and external independence” of “the states of Christendom.”

Kings and peoples asserted “particular nationality against the universal rule of the Franks.” The resistance succeeded because “the entire political system” of the Franks “was held together only by the power, the greatness, the regal soul” of Charlemagne, not “the spirit of the people,” as Charlemagne’s spirit hadn’t “become a vital element” in that spirit. Hegel compares Charlemagne’s rule to that of Napoleon’s over Spain, “which disappeared with the physical power that sustained it.” What “makes for the reality of a constitution is that it exists as objective freedom—the substantial way of the will—as duty and obligation acknowledged by the subjects themselves.” The Germanic spirit acknowledged no such reality, rather being given over to “an inwardness of indifferent, superficial self-seeking.” Charlemagne’s constitution or regime “was destitute of any firm bond; it had no objective support in subjectivity; for in fact no constitution was as yet possible.”

The second reaction succeeded for the same reason. Individuals resisted the empire’s legal power, which had “no vital existence in the peoples themselves.” When “the brilliant administration of Charlemagne vanished without a trace,” individuals were left defenseless against outlaws. Barbarians “look upon it as a limitation of their freedom if their rights must be guaranteed them by others”; they begin to feel the need for protection only by experiencing ruination. The dialectic of history’s slaughter-bench was the only teacher they would heed. “The impulse towards a firm organization did not exist: men had first to be placed in a defenseless condition, before they would become sensible of necessary appearance of the state.” The central, imperial state proved too weak to serve that need because the Germans as yet felt no duty towards it. “Individuals were therefore obliged to take flight to individuals, and put under the power of a few rulers who, out of that authority which formerly belonged to the generality [the empire], formed a private possession and personal sovereignty”: in a word, feudalism. Men “committed their estates to a lord, a monastery, an abbot, a bishop, and received them back, encumbered with feudal obligations to these lords. Instead of freemen they became vassals—feudal dependents.” “Feudum is connected with fides; faithfulness is here a bond through injustice, a relation intending something lawful, but just as surely with injustice as its content: for faithfulness on the part of vassals is not a duty toward the generality, but a private obligation which equally is left to contingency, arbitrariness, and violence.” Such conditions revived “the martial spirit,” but on behalf of “subjective interests”—particularities, not an overall, general state. “Only in a few cities, where communities of freemen were independently strong enough to secure protection and safety without the king’s help, did relics of the ancient free constitution remain.” Everywhere else, arbitrary personal rule by local aristocrats (secular or churchly) prevailed. “Thus all right vanished before particular might; equality of rights and rationality of laws, which is the goal of the state, had no existence.”

The Catholic Church mounted the third reaction, but by promoting an “element of generality,” indeed of catholicism, against feudal particularism. Given the violence that permeated the continent, “in the eleventh century the fear of the approaching Judgment Day and the belief in the speedy dissolution of the world spread through all Europe.” The church benefited, as some gave their possessions to it and turned to lives of humble penitence, while others, the majority, “dissipated their possessions in riotous debauchery.” Either way, the church’s relative power and authority waxed, as famines killed the worldlings. Corruption entered the church itself; to resist it, Pope Gregory VII introduced the rule of clerical celibacy, attacked simony, and laid claim to secular power (this last as a counter to attempts to take over monasteries by aristocrats). The church’s claim to power rested on “the abstract principle that the divine is superior to the secular.” This claim met with some substantial success, as “whole countries and states, such as Naples, Portugal, England, and Ireland came into a formal relation of vassalage to the papal chair.” Church authorities took care to buttress their abstract claim based on divine right with binding agreements. If, for example, a prince wanted a divorce, he could get permission from the church only if the met clerical demands; similarly, clergy could intervene as mediators in otherwise unstoppable private feuds. “But in these proceedings the church brought to bear against opponents only a force and arbitrary resolve of the same kind as their own, and mixed up its secular interest with its interest as a spiritual, i.e., divine substantial power.” Such hypocrisy was best known on the papacy’s home turf; “Italy was the country where the authority of the popes was least respected; and the worst usage they experienced was from the Romans themselves. Thus what the popes acquired in point of land and wealth and direct dominion, they lost in regard and esteem.”

On the spiritual side, the church also entangled itself in contradiction. Christianity teaches that “Man realizes his spiritual essence only when he conquers his naturalness. This conquest is possible only on the supposition that the human and the divine nature are one in and for themselves,” that the indwelling divine spirit can resist the indwelling natural sinfulness of the (fallen) human soul. Christ exemplifies this unity of human and divine. “The main thing is, therefore, that man should lay hold of his consciousness, and that it should be continually roused in him.” For this purpose the church established the mass and the host, whereby “Christ is set forth as present.” In this the church erred. “The host is adored even apart from its being partaken of by the faithful” as a “sensorial object.” This places “the presence of Christ” “not in the imagination and spirit” but in a physical lump of bread. Later, Martin Luther “proclaimed the great doctrine that the host was only something, and Christ was only received, through faith in Him; apart from this, the host was a mere external thing, possessed of no greater value than any other things. But the Catholic falls down before the host; and thus is the outward made into something holy.” The church compounded this mistake, this taking of “the holy as thing,” as an “externality,” by establishing “a separation between those who possess this [thing] and those who have to receive it from others—between the clergy and the laity.” “The laity as such are alien to the divine.” This meant that church doctrine became exclusively the domain of the church; “it has to ordain, and the laity have simply to believe,” faithfully and blindly, “without insight on their part.” “This relation rendered faith a matter of external law and progressed to compulsion and the stake.” To approach God, the laity could not pray directly to Him, but only through such “mediators” as saints and relics. “To this degree, the essential unity of the divine and human is denied, since man, as such, is declared incapable of recognizing the divine and of approaching thereto.” When guilty of sin, the laity could not ask for God’s forgiveness; only the clerical confessor could call upon God to grant the sinner His grace.

“Thus the church took the place of conscience: it put men in leading strings like children,” “stupefy[ing] the soul” of the layperson. This “produced an utter derangement of all that is recognized as good and moral in the Christian church”; a “condition of absolute unfreedom is therefore brought within the principle of freedom itself.” By imposing this “absolute separation of the spiritual from the secular principle generally,” the church effected a “perversion” of both the intellectual and the ethical “divine kingdoms.” Mere piety does not question, does not inquire; nor does it exert itself in a free, legal, ethical way. “Piety is outside of history and has no history; for history is rather the empire of spirit present to itself in its subjective freedom, as the ethical kingdom of the state.” But in the Middle Ages there was no such “actualization of the divine”; rather, the antithesis was left unresolved. Instead of love and marriage, chastity was revered; instead of activity and labor, poverty; instead of rational, consensual obedience, thoughtless servitude. “All morality was degraded,” as the church “was no longer a spiritual power, but an ecclesiastical one; and the relation which the secular world sustained to it was unspiritual, volitionless, and insightless.” “Accordingly, the church of the Middle Ages exhibits itself as a manifold contradiction to itself.”

The medieval state was no better off, equally “involved in contradictions.” Imperial rule had become “an empty title.” The basis of the feudal state, “which we call faithfulness, [was] left to the arbitrary choice of the heat which recognizes no objective duties”—a faithless fidelity, self-contradictory, faithful only for “selfish aims.” Within individuals under feudalism, piety burned aside barbaric passions. “We find an acquaintance with abstract truth, and yet the most uncultured, the rudest ideas of the secular and the spiritual; cruel rage of passion and yet a Christin sanctity which renounces all that is worldly, and devotes itself entirely to holiness.” Hegel fulminates against this hypocrisy, calling it “the most disgusting and revolting spectacle that was ever witnessed,” one that “only philosophy can comprehend and hence justify.” Only the philosopher of history can see, and bring his students to see, that this was “a necessary antithesis, which must arise in the consciousness of the holy, when this consciousness is still primitive and immediate.” The antithesis itself was necessary because when “the individual is not yet protected by laws, but only by his own exertion, there is present a general vitality, activity, and excitement.” “Certain of eternal salvation through the instrumentality of the church,” with its sacraments external to the inner man, the “ardor in the pursuit of worldly enjoyment becomes the greater,” as “the church bestows indulgences, when required, for all caprice, iniquity, and scandal.”

All of this recalls the old joke, beloved of lecturers on European history, that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Only in the cities could reaction against feudal church and state rise to an ethical life. There and then “for the first time we behold the few feeble commencements of a reviving sense of freedom,” that freedom of property the “ancient Germans” had prized. In joining together in cities, individuals “formed among themselves a kind of union, confederation, or conjuration,” agreeing freely “to be and to perform on their own behalf that which they had previously been and performed in the service of their feudal lord alone.” They formed militias, courts, treasuries, systems of self-taxation. City life conduced more to artisanship than to agriculture; there are no serfs in cities, “forcibly driven to work” by landlords; artisans “displayed activity really their own, and a corresponding diligence and interest in the result of their labors.” As they amassed property, the citizens began to purchase their rights from the aristocrats; indeed, whole cities did so. Such factions as arose were along lines of wealth, not birth, and oligarchic power can be overcome by the diligence of the ‘democrats,’ the many, more readily than fixed ranks maintained by ‘noble’ birth. And the cities could also successfully resist the claims to rule asserted by the German emperors. Marx (who wrote his dissertation on Hegel) would soon describe this as the rise of the bourgeoisie.

Meanwhile the emperor and the pope, Henry V and Clixtus II, finally settled their differences in 1122, resolving the ‘investiture controversy’ by reserving the scepter for the emperor, the ring and crosier for the pope. This left the pope and the church with spiritual authority over emperors, and in the Christian German world that was decisive. It led to popes demanding, and receiving, imperial armies for fighting the Crusades.

Why were the Crusades plausible as a real-world undertaking? Part of the reason was the belief that with God anything is possible. If Christ is present in the Eucharist, why might He not appear to devout Christians in their daily life? And why not the Holy Mother? Sightings abounded. “The church present[ed] the aspect of a world of miracle; to the community of devout and pious persons, natural existence [had] utterly lost its stability and certain; rather, absolute certainty [had] turned against it, and the divine is not conceived of by Christendom in general as the law and nature of spirit, but rather manifest[ed] itself in individual manner, in which rational existence [was] perverted.” At the same time, what Christianity lacked in its geographical place of origin was territory; neither the approach to the Holy Land from Europe nor the Holy Land itself were “in possession of the church.” The Crusades seemed both possible and imperative.

Here Strauss intervenes with a key point. “In Catholic Christianity, the divine is within the world not as law and nature of the spirit, but as interruption of the lawfulness,” that is, as the miraculous. But more than that, the obsession of with conquest of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulcher bespeaks the aforementioned “carnal understanding of Christianity,” the location of God in the Host, an object. The Sepulcher was the ultimate version of such carnality, inasmuch as it is the one supreme holy object, not one of many pieces of bread consumed at every Sunday church service. When that supreme holy object was discovered to be empty, the purpose of the Crusades was defeated, even as the crusading forces triumphed.

“The West once more sallied forth in hostile array against the East,” Hegel says. It was the enthusiasm of Islam transferred to Christendom, but with no Mohammed at the helm, nor any Agamemnon or Alexander. The first Crusaders consisted of “an immense mass of rabble” who did more damage while passing through southeastern Europe than in the Holy Land. Eventually, “with much trouble and immense loss, more regular armies attained the desired object.” “Jerusalem was made a kingdom, and the entire feudal system was introduced there—a constitution which, against the Saracens, was certainly the worst that could be adopted.” This triumph was empty, quite literally. The hard-won Holy Sepulcher was empty. “The Christian world received a second time the response given to the disciples when they sought the body of the Lord there: “Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.” As Hegel glosses it, “You must not look for the principle of your religion in the sensorial, in the grave among the dead, but in the living spirit in yourselves.” “The absolute result of the Crusades” was the recognition that “man must look within himself” for the “particular concrete individual which is of a divine nature”; in this “subjectivity receives absolute authorization, and in itself has the determination of relation to the divine.” The Crusades began “self-reliance and spontaneous activity” in the West. As Strauss remarks, “the bond between the worldly and the eternal must be found in a this one, but not in any thing, only in the subjective consciousness, in the ego. I, this one. Because the ego, too is a this one. Another man is not I.” To be certain, to know: this condition can only occur within myself, within each self. This discovery truly inaugurated the modern world.

As Hegel puts it, “At the Holy Sepulcher, the West bade an eternal farewell to the East, and grasped its principle of subjective infinite freedom.” “From this time forward we witness religious and intellectual movements in which spirit, going beyond repulsive and irrational existence, either finds its sphere of exercise within itself, and draws upon its own resources for satisfaction, or throws its energies into an actual world of general and morally justified aims, which are therefore aims of freedom.” We witness Descartes, with respect to thought, and we witness Luther, with respect to the will.

The Crusades also weakened respect for the Papacy. “Zeal for the holy cause was exhausted among the princes of Europe.” Princes no longer heeded the papal “lamentations and entreaties” to continue; “princes and peoples” alike “were indifferent to papal clamor urging them to new crusades.” The superiority of divine claims to rule over the claims of princes and emperors could no longer sustain itself.

Within the church itself, thought began to declare its independence from dogma. “Thought was first directed to theology, which now became philosophy under the name of scholastic theology”; in the beginning scholastics devoted their energies to proving the content of Christian doctrine. “Philosophy was indeed called an ancilla fidei, an aid to faith.” However, “it was impossible for the opposition between thought and belief not to manifest itself,” as “intellectual jousting” began to imitate the jousting of knights in armor at the tournaments.

As the church hesitated, its secular power diminished and its spiritual power dividing against itself in the great scholastic debates, the political realm began to consolidate. “Feudal rule is a polyarchy: we see nothing but lords and serfs; in monarchy, on the contrary, there is one lord and no serf, for servitude is abrogated by it, and in it rights and law are recognized; it is the source of real freedom.” This is so, Hegel claims, because “in monarchy the caprice of individuals is kept under, and commonality of rule is established.” As monarchic power extends over the feudal lords, the territory controlled by the monarch accretes. The very extent of the monarch’s territory “necessitates general” rather than particular “arrangements for the purposes of organization, and those who govern in accordance with those arrangements are likewise essentially obedient: vassals become state officials who duty it is to execute the laws by which the state is regulated.” Further, the monarch’s own power “can no longer be merely arbitrary” in such a large place, requiring now “the consent of the estates and corporations,” which he will last only if he “ordain[s] what is just and fair.” Eventually, as Strauss observes, this will require not only the modern state was the sole legitimate enforcer of the laws but also the modern state as controlled by rational administrators, professional bureaucrats.

State formation occurred along three pathways: by straightforward subjugation of his independent vassals; by seizing territory; or by consent, “unit[ing] the several particular lordships with his own and thus [becoming] master of the whole.” Forceful subjugation was aided by the invention of gunpowder. (“Humanity needed it, and suddenly there it was.”) The military prowess of the aristocrats had consisted of strong arms and strong hearts; guns enabled “a cowardly wretch at safe distance in an obscure hiding place” to kill “the bravest, the noblest” lord. Thus gunpowder made “a rational, considered bravery—spiritual valor—the essential thing,” as the new warrior must go into battle “calmly, sacrificing himself for the generality,” thereby exhibiting “the valor of cultivated nations.” Such valor “does not rely on the strong arm alone, but places its confidence essentially in the intelligence, the generalship, the character of its commanders and, as was the case among the ancients, in the cohesion and consciousness of the whole.”

This was the world of Machiavelli, of The Prince. “This book has often been thrown aside in disgust as being replete with the maxims of the most revolting tyranny; but nothing worse can be urged against it than that the writer, having the profound consciousness of the necessity for the formation of a state, has here exhibited the principles on which alone states could be founded in the circumstances of the times,” times in which “individual lords and dominions had entirely be subdued” in no other ways but force and fraud, since they could be subdued “in no other way, since an indomitable contempt for principle and an utter depravity were thoroughly ingrained in them.” Machiavelli merely tells his reader to fight fire with fire.

Forceful subjugation and territorial seizure thus prevailed in Germany and Italy. France saw “the converse of that which occurred” in those countries. Hereditary monarchy had already been established there. In 1302 Philip the Fair convoked representatives of the cities as a third estate along with those of the first estate (the clergy) and the second estate (the aristocrats). By ‘institutionalizing’ (as we would now say) the three major elements of French political society, “the kings of France very soon attained very great power.” And in England, where Norman kings held sway after their conquest three centuries earlier, struggles over the throne induced contenders for the monarchy to ‘reach down’ for support from aristocrats and cities. The Magna Charta’s limitations on monarchic power emerged from this.

“A general goal for secularity, a goal perfectly justified in itself, arose in state formation, and the will, desire, arbitrariness of the individual subjected itself to this goal of commonality.” The Middle Ages had done its disciplinary work with “two iron rods”: the church and serfdom. “The church brought the heart out of itself, made spirit pass through the severest bondage, so that the soul was no longer its own; but it did not degrade it to Indian torpor, for Christianity is an intrinsically spiritual principle and, as such, has a boundless elasticity.” And serfdom, “which made a man’s body not his own,” “dragged humanity through all the barbarism of slavery and unbridled desire,” in the process destroying that desire “by its own violence.” “It was not so much from slavery as through slavery that humanity was emancipated.” Both the spiritual warfare of the church, with its threats of hellfire, and the physical warfare of master and slave used terror to “break down the spirit of barbarism and to tame it into repose.” This “phase of negation is, indeed, a necessary one in man” in any epoch, but thereafter it could take “the tranquil form of education, so that all the fearfulness of inward struggle” vanishes. “In its reality, in secularity, humanity has attained the feeling of actual reconciliation of spirit in itself, and a good conscience. The human spirit has come to stand on its own feet,” without rebellion against the divine but rather as “a manifestation of that better subjectivity which feels itself divine in itself, which is imbued with the real, and directs its activities to general goals of rationality and beauty.”

The first step toward secular culture occurred in the church, in the realm of art—the grand architecture of the cathedrals, decorated with their noble sculptures and beautiful stained-glass windows which liberate the spectrum of the light of the sun. “Art spiritualizes,” taking the sensorial and giving it a form, “a soulful form.” The host, a piece of bread, or a saint’s relic, a fragment of bone or piece of wood from a cross pale before “an intelligent painting or a beautiful work of sculpture, in which soul relates to soul and spirit to spirit.” You only know what you make, Hobbes would later assert; art is a pathway to knowledge. Nonetheless, art has a limitation. “This element of truth as it manifests itself is only a sensorial form, not one in accordance with itself,” not a manifestation of the spirit in spiritual form. The church “separated itself from the free spirit which emerged from art, when [art] elevated itself to thought and science.”

Art did this because to improve their technique artists began to study the ancients. The turn to the ancients brought back more than technique, and also more than the emptiness of the Holy Sepulcher. “Through this study the West became acquainted with the true and eternal element in the activity of man.” At the same time, such study also caused a certain ‘cognitive dissonance’ in the Christian Germanic world, as “the Greeks in their works exhibited quite other moral commands than those with which the West was acquainted.” “Scholastic formalism had to make way for a body of speculative thought of a widely different complexion; Plato became known in the West, and in him a new human world presented itself.” Disseminated with the help of the new art of printing, “these novel ideas” circulated widely and rapidly.

Finally, the ‘outward’ or evangelical energy of Christianity, coupled with the new secularity, took on the project not of crusading but of discovering new lands, a project animated by “that desire of man to become acquainted with his world.” Chivalry embodied itself not in the knight-errant out to conquer Jerusalem but in “the maritime heroes of Portugal and Spain.” And the church’s task of conversion found its outlet in the voyages of Columbus, who aimed not only at riches but at a rich harvest of souls for God.

All of these events “may be compared with that dawn which after lengthy storms first betokens the return of a bright and glorious day,” the “day of universality which breaks upon the world after the long, eventful, and terrible night of the Middle Ages, a day which is distinguished by science, art and the drive for discover, that is, by the noblest and highest, which the human spirit, rendered free by Christianity and emancipated through the instrumentality of the church, exhibits its eternal and true content.”

The “Modern Age” began and, as usual, it has consisted of three stages: the Reformation, “the all-transfiguring sun following on that dawn at the termination of the medieval period; post-Reformation development; and the years following the French Revolution. As do all things for Hegel, the Reformation resulted from its dialectical antithesis, “the corruption of the church.” Nor was this corruption accidental. “The corruption of the church developed from out of itself”; as he’s argued, the Catholic practice of attempting to present the divine in “sensorial” or material form proved ruinous to Christian thought and practice. The “world-spirit” or Absolute Spirit moved on, “transcended it.” “It is externality in the church itself”—its sensorial worship practices—”which becomes evil and corruption, and develops itself as a negative principle with the church’s own bosom.” Catholic piety became superstition, seen in its “slavish devotion to authority, whereby spirit ‘inside’ the human soul becomes “unfree” and self-contradictory, “in itself outside of itself.” Superstition also may be seen in Catholic belief in “miracles of the most inane and silly form,” and in “lust of power, riotous debauchery, all the forms of barbarous and vulgar corruption, hypocrisy and deception.” These failures occurred because in the church the sensorial wasn’t “subjugated and trained by the understanding.” This freed conduct gratifying the senses “in a crude and barbarous way,” while such virtue as remained did “not know how to be moral within sensoriality, and therefore [was] only fleeting, renouncing, lifeless within reality.” To reconcile this contradiction, the church turned to the practice of offering “indulgences” to those who paid for them, thereby offering forgiveness to sinners “in the most grossly superficial and trivial fashion.”

Against this stood “the ancient and thoroughly preserved sincerity of the German people.” The other European nations sought wealth and power in overseas exploration and conquest, but in Germany “a simple monk,” Martin Luther consulted his true, German “heart” (Gemüt), “detect[ing] the perversion of the absolute relation of truth in its minutest features.” He set out to annihilate that perversion. He did so by calling for the “removal of externality” from church practices and replacing them with an ‘inward’ worship founded on faith and joy in God—”the subjective assurance of the eternal, of truth in and for itself, the truth of God,” produced by “the Holy Spirit alone” with no sensorial intermediaries. “Christ is an actual presence,” not in the Eucharist but “in faith and in spirit.” Luther “maintained that the spirit of Christ really fills the human heart”; “man sustains an immediate relation to Him in spirit.” This enables man precisely to be moral “within sensoriality” because the sensorial gradually becomes ruled by the spirit. Jesus became not only a presence in the souls of Christians but the ruling presence.

How? “The spirit dwells in him, that is, in the language of the church, he has come to brokenness of heart and the breakthrough of divine grace.” Man’s nature is sinful, ‘fallen.’ “Man is not what he ought to be”; “the human heart is not what it should be.” The first step away from this condition is self-consciousness, knowledge of oneself as evil by nature, then seeing that “only by a transforming process”—by progress in historical time—”does he arrive at the truth.” The individual Christian must both “know himself to be depraved, and that the good spirit dwells in him.” He then prays to God, studies the Bible, and opens himself to spiritual correction.

This obviates the distinction between priests and laymen, as all men can possess “the content of the truth” because “the heart, the feeling spirituality of man” is the common potential “of all mankind.” “Subjective spirit has to receive the spirit of truth into itself, and allow it to dwell in itself,” gaining both “absolute inwardness of soul” and “freedom in the church.” Freedom consists in the necessary coincidence “subjectivity and the certainty of the individual” with “the objectivity of truth,” and also with the fact that “truth with Lutherans is not a finished and completed thing; rather, the subject himself must become genuine” as he “makes this truth his own.” “Thus has Christian freedom become real.”

This reality in the Protestant church then pervades culture generally. “Law, property, ethics, government, constitutions… must be determined in general manner”—not in the particularistic arrangements of feudalism. Placing all things under the universal God enables these features “to accord with the concept of free will and to be rational.” “While the intensity of the subjective free spirit,” which is destructive when it takes the particular (passions, material interests) as its object, moves to the form of universality,” the general or common good, “objective spirit is able to manifest itself.” “This is the sense in which we must understand the state to be based on religion. States and law are nothing else than religion manifesting itself in the relations of reality.” “This is the essential content of the Reformation: man sets himself to be free.”

Such freedom is good, but from where will it derive its content, if no longer from Catholic theology? Luther “repudiated” the authority of the church, “and set up in its stead the Bible and the testimony of the human spirit.” This meant that each individual can freely learn from God’s Word, freely “directing his conscience in accordance with it.” “Luther’s translation of the Bible has been of incalculable value to the German people,” making the Bible “a people’s book, such as no nation in the Catholic world can boast.” In reading the Bible, in thinking about it, in attempting to follow its teachings, Germans engaged in a form of self-education, of enlightenment-before-the-Enlightenment. In this carefully limited sense (as Strauss observes) Hegel is a democrat. Although no Hegelian, Tocqueville would concur with this claim that equality, the democratic principle, entered the world as a condition of social life via Christianity.

Hegel poses two questions for himself: “Why was the Reformation limited to certain nations, and why did it not permeate the entire Catholic world.” For the Reformation “struck root only in the purely German nations.”

He begins by observing that “authority has much greater weight than people are inclined to believe.” We easily fall into “the habit of receiving” our “fundamental principles” on “the strength of authority.” In Austria and southern Germany, force of arms, stratagem, and persuasion “indisputably stifled” the Reformation. Among the Slavic nations, meanwhile, agricultural life prevailed, not the urban life of the Germans. “In agriculture the agency of nature predominates; human industry and subjective activity are on the whole less brought into play in this department of labor than elsewhere.” Nature, as we’ve seen, consists of (very) congealed spirit; add the lord-serf relation to that stubborn physicality, and the appeal to freedom in the spirit will likely fall flat. As for the “Romanesque nations” (Italy, Spain, Portugal, parts of France), force “perhaps did much to repress” Protestantism, but they are also afflicted with “the principle of division.” That is, “they are a product of the fusion of Roman and German blood, and still retain the heterogeneity thence resulting.” These nations lack the wholeness, the capacity to will a single purpose in a fully self-integrated way, “lack[ing] [the] entirety of spirit and sentiment which we call heart; there is not that pondering of spirit within itself; rather, in their inmost being they are outside of themselves,” prone to abstraction or dualism of the spirit and the sensorial, an inability to blend the two in a coherent synthesis. “Cultivated Frenchmen,” for example, “therefore feel an antipathy to Protestantism because it seems to them something pedantic, depressing, pettily moralistic, since it requires that spirit and thought should be directly engaged in religion: in attending mass and other ceremonies, by contrast, no thought is required, but an imposing spectacle is presented to the senses, which does not make such a demand on one’s attention as entirely to exclude a little chat, while yet the duties of the occasion are not neglected.”

As an example of the right integration or synthesis of the spiritual and the mundane, Luther commended marriage over celibacy. “The family introduces man to commonality, to the reciprocal relation of dependence in society” (as Aristotle remarks), and this association is an ethical one, while on the other hand the monks, separated from ethical society”—in Aristotelian terms, from the political community of which the family is the foundational element—”formed as it were the standing army of the pope, as the Janissaries formed the basis of the Turkish power.” “The marriage of priests entails the disappearance of the outward distinction between laity and clergy,” even as reading the Bible makes the inward distinction between them disappear. Further, “unemployment no longer was held to be something holy.” What Weber would later call the Protestant work ethic made to “more commendable for men to rise from a state of dependence by activity, intelligence, and industry, and to make themselves independent” economically, even as Bible-reading frees them spiritually. In sum, “The rational no longer meets with contradiction on the part of the religious conscience.” As Strauss paraphrases it, “Hegel sees in the asceticism of the Catholic Church the root of immorality”; “true morality is not ascetic.” One might add that true morality leads into, and is consistent with what Hegel calls the ethical, the instantiation of morality within a civil society.

It is for that reason that the epoch of church reform also saw political reform. Modern, centralized states, initially under the regime of monarchy, replaced the feudal state. Hegel considers monarchy indispensable to state formation because a “ruling dynasty,” a regime in which “hereditary right” determines who rules, “gives the state an immovable center.” Before primogeniture, German kings were elected by aristocrats, a practice which “prevented [the state] being consolidated into one state; for the same reason, Poland has vanished from the circle of independent states.” “The state must have a final decisive will: but if an individual is to be the final deciding power, then [under dynastic rule] that decisiveness of necessity takes place in an immediate natural way, not in terms of election, collective wisdom, and the like”—all of which introduce the element of “arbitrary volition” into the succession. Just as important, both the royal domains and the state offices must be understood as public entities. Monarchs may no longer own the royal lands, and state offices may no longer be purchasable. Finally, standing armies, not militia, “supply the monarchy with an independent force. All of these reforms contributed to “the lowering of the aristocracy in the several states in Europe,” serving an interest “common to both king and people” and leading to greater political freedom as Hegel defines it, just as the Reformation led to greater religious freedom.

Why would substantially increased state power produce freedom? Hegel insists, “When freedom is spoken of, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interest which is thereby designated.” Aristocratic ‘freedom’ entailed the suppression of the people under conditions of serfdom, the denial of the people’s right to sell the things they worked to produce. “The supreme interest of emancipation from this condition redounded both to state power and to the subjects themselves that they as citizens now also be truly free individuals, and that which was to be performed for the generality be meted out in terms of justice rather than contingency.” Statism regularized the laws, bringing whole populations into a condition more nearly resembling equal protection under the laws. Meanwhile, in “lowering” the aristocracy statism placed aristocrats in “the binding middle position,” by which Hegel means that they became employees of the state, administrators working on behalf of its “generality,” and thus redirecting its energies toward state interests, not their own particular interests.

Internationally, there now arose “a system of states and a relation of states to each other.” Now well-financed, with standing armies at their disposal, and with no worry that rogue aristocrats would betray them, monarchs fought foreign wars for the purpose of conquering territories. “From these wars between state powers there arose common interests,” particular the interest every state shared in maintaining their independence. Rulers began to strategize in terms of “the political balance of power,” that is, “the protection of the several states from conquest.” The balance of power took “the place of the previous general goal, the defense of Christendom, the center of which was the papacy.” Although several rulers made bids to conquer Europe—Charles V, Louis XIV, Charles XII—each one was thwarted and the balance was maintained. At the same time, European monarchs could unite freely if faced with an alien threat—specifically, the Ottoman Empire. As the Reformation led to secularization within the European states, so the system of states led to secularization by reducing the international power of the papacy, refocusing rulers’ attention to power-balancing. This too meant freedom, as Catholicism, once praised for “promoting the security of the government of princes,” but at the price of “slavish religious obedience” to the popes, was forced to give way to more strictly political and military calculations. “If the constitution and laws are to be founded on a veritable eternal right, then security is to be found only in the Protestant religion, in whose principle rational subjective freedom also attains development.” Thus freedom of monarchic action in the international sphere reinforced freedom within the newly-empowered states.

The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, whereby European states agreed not to intervene in each other’s internal affairs, had a double-edged effect. This set of treaties was enacted “to the great mortification and humiliation of the Catholic church,” a fact that troubles Hegel not at all. But it also solemnized the breakup of the German empire, legitimizing “the particular rights of the countries into which Germany had been broken up,” and therefore “involv[ing] no thought, no conception of the proper aim of a state” but instituting “a constituted anarchy” among the states. But even this did result, through the historical dialectic, in what Hegel regards as a very favorable result. “The Protestant church finalized its political guarantee by the elevation of one of its member states to the level of an independent European power,” a power that “came out of nowhere.” Prussia, where Hegel happens to be lecturing, under the rule of Frederick the Great, emerged as the leading state of Germany. “Frederick the Great not only made Prussia one of the great powers of Europe as a Protestant power, but was also a philosophical king, an altogether peculiar and unique phenomenon in modern times.” Frederick “took up the Protestant principle in its secular aspect,” having “consciousness of universality, which is the profoundest depth of spirit and the force of thought,” now “conscious of itself” in the monarch’s own mind. Plato’s philosopher-kings rule an imaginary polis; in modernity, such a monarch can, and did, rule in this world. Frederick was the Hegelian philosopher-king, before Hegelianism itself existed.

Hegel concludes his book by considering the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and its aftermath. In his account, the Reformation, a religious event, led dialectically to the Enlightenment, the secular event par excellence. By turning men’s spiritual attention inward, away from the external and “sensorial” church rituals, the Reformation emphasized both the evil that exists within every soul and also the good qualities of external or ‘worldly’ things, if purged of false claims of spiritual content. Indeed, the modern state could become an instrument for the good if it protected Protestant countries against the depredations of Catholics. “This dialectic, in which everything particular is unsettled, while evil is converted into good and good into evil”—a dialectical reversal—”left at last nothing remaining but the mere activity of inwardness itself, the abstract of spirit—thought.” Thought generalizes; modern thought (as per Hobbes) not only generalizes, it issues in “activity and production of the universal.” “In thought, self is present to itself, its objects are just as absolutely present to it; for, in that I think, I must elevate the object to universality”—that object of which I am thinking is a tree, a member of a species, a specimen of a general category, and not ‘Ed’ or ‘Louise.’

Now, in both scholastic and Protestant thought the content of thought consists of other-worldly things. But thought in and of itself is “absolute freedom per se, for the pure ‘I,’ like pure light, is with itself per se; hence that which is diverse from it, whether sensorial or spiritual, is no longer to be feared, for in contemplating such diversity the ‘I’ is inwardly free and can freely confront it.” This radical denial of the need in principle to fear nature, or God-as-holy or external, or Hellfire, sounds very much like Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”—the Cartesian “I am” obviously a ‘humanist’ or ‘secular’ response to the “I am” of God when He spoke to Moses out of the burning bush. Sure enough, Hegel observes that “Consciousness of thought was first extricated by Descartes from that sophistry of thought that unsettled everything.” “Man is not free,” Hegel writes, “when he is not thinking,” and Descartes liberated pure thought thinking itself. Strauss adds that “Descartes was a Catholic,” at least formally, which means that modernity in terms of thought, as distinguished from modernity in terms of action, practice, morality, ethics, derives as much from the 17th-century Catholic milieu as from the Protestant.

Pure thought clears away “sophistry,” all illogical or self-contradictory thought-content. In doing so, as it considers things other than itself it discovers that “reason is the substantial foundation both of consciousness and of the external and natural.” “Inner” and “outer” have rational order in common. “Thus the opposing is no longer something other-worldly; it is not of a substantially different nature.” In the Enlightenment “spirit perceives that nature, the world, must also have some reason in itself, for God created it rational,” a coherent structure which He called good. “A general interest in the contemplation and comprehension of the present world now arose,” with the gathering of empirical knowledge having become interesting to the human spirit, which for the first time has seen its affinities with ‘the other,’ the external. “The human eye became clear, perception excited, thought industrious and explanatory,” attentive to the discovery of “the laws of nature” while rejecting “all notions of mighty alien powers which magic alone could conquer.” “The dominion of the subject in its own strength was posited against faith based on authority and the laws of nature were recognized as the only link connecting external with external.” No more miracles. The dominion of the subject also recognized the laws of nature as the only link between internal and external. [1] “Thought was then also directed to the spiritual side: law and ethics came to be looked upon as being founded upon the present will of man, whereas formerly it was referred only to the command of God enjoined externally, written in the Old and New Testaments, or appearing in the form of particular right, in old parchments, as privileges, or in treaties.” General goals of state replaced particular goals of aristocrats. “Frederick II may be mentioned as the ruler through whom the new epoch emerged into reality, in which interest of state attains its generality and highest entitlement.” In this, of course, Frederick simply followed Machiavelli.

Hegel vigorously points to the secularization arising from the Reformation, which intended no such thing. “Luther had secured to mankind spiritual freedom and the concrete reconciliation” of the human spirit with the Absolute Spirit. “He triumphantly established that man’s eternal repose must take place in himself. But the content of that which is to take place in him, and which truth is to become vital in him, was taken for granted by Luther as something already given, something revealed by religion.” No longer. “Now the principle was established that this content must be something current, something of which I could convince myself inwardly, and everything must be capable of being reduced to this inward ground.” This is of course Descartes’ claim: The Bible says that the Holy Spirit gives you certain knowledge of God, but from introspection I learn that the truly certain certainty, as it were, is my consciousness of myself thinking.

Hegel applauds, but stops. “This principle of thought initially makes its appearance yet abstractly.” Cartesian logic still bases itself “on the axiom of contradiction and identity,” on the same principle of non-contradiction first enunciated by Plato’s Socrates in the Republic and systematized by Aristotle in his books on logic. Such logic assumes that the content of thought is finite; “the Enlightenment utterly banished and extirpated all that was speculative from things human and divine.” But although this rejection of ‘metaphysical’ thought was “of incalculable importance” in reducing “the multiform complex of things” to “its simplest conditions” and in bringing that complex of things “into the form of universality,” this was an “abstract” operation. It “does not satisfy the living spirit, the concrete heart” or Gemüt. Classical logic leaves no room for change, for the vitalism Hegel prizes, for the organic, dialectical progress and growth that characterizes the Absolute Spirit, rightly conceived. But its acknowledgement as a “formally absolute principle brings us to the last stage of history, our world, our own time.”

“Secularity is the spiritual kingdom in existence”; that is, it is the rule of spirit in the world of practice, “the kingdom of the will.” The will is the moral equivalent of thought: inward and purged of sentiment and sensoriality. “That which is just and ethical pertains to the essential will existing in itself,” for “to know what true law is, one must abstract from inclination, impulse, and desire, as from the particular; one must thus know what is the will in itself.” The will is truly free only “when it wills the will,” as “absolute will is the will to be free.” The freedom of the will “is even that through which man becomes man, thus the fundamental principle of spirit.” The Absolute Spirit goeth where it listeth. If so, then how does it fix on any determinate action? How does it make moral and ethical decisions?

“It can here be noted that the same principle was proposed theoretically in Germany, in the Kantian philosophy.” In positing his categorical imperative Kant firmly rejects all moralities based on teleology (e.g., Aristotelian eudaimonia), moral sentiment, or utility. Kantianism is a moral form of Cartesianism—pure will willing itself. “Among the Germans this remained tranquil theory; but the French wished to put it into practice. Hegel interprets the French revolutionaries ‘Rights of Man’ as freedom under the name of natural right, freedom seen especially in equality of rights before the law. [2] Since in both Descartes and Kant purity of spirit remains on the level of abstraction, not Hegelian speculation, the attempt to transfer abstract morality directly into ethical/political practice proved disastrous—the imposition of rigid categories on the rich, concrete variety of the practical world. [3]

Why did the French so badly abuse Kantian morality? “In Germany the formal principle of philosophy encounters a concrete world and reality where there is inward satisfaction of spirit and where conscience is at rest,” a world in which Protestantism had “advanced so far in thought as to realize the absolute culmination of self-consciousness,” and where it enjoyed the assurance that it served as “the fountain of all legal content in private law and the state constitution.” That is, “in Germany the Enlightenment was conducted in the interest of theology.” Hardly so in France, where Voltaire and his allied railed against still-existing abuses of the Catholic Church, with its “dead wealth” and supposed virtues which were “the sources and occasion of vices.” In Germany, Protestantism had prepared the ground for Enlightenment; in France Catholicism had impeded it. In France, “the principle of the freedom of the will, therefore asserted itself against existing law,” against “the confused mass of privileges altogether contravening thought and reason,” the “corruption of morals,” and the whole “realm” of “shameless injustice” that was the French regime. The revolution “was necessarily violent, because the work of transformation was not undertaken by the government,” imbecilic and rotten as it was. “The thought, the concept, of law imposed itself all at once, and the old framework of injustice could offer no resistance.”

“Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around it had it been perceived that man stands on his head, that is, on thought, and reality is constructed in terms of it,” that “thought ought to govern spiritual reality.” “Spiritual jubilation” reigned, “as if for the first time it had come to a true reconciliation between the divine and the world.” But with what result? What kind of state could issue from such a jubilee?

A genuinely “vital state” has three “elements and powers”: laws of rationality (freedom of property and person, removal of all feudal relations, based “on the thought and consciousness of man recognizing the spiritual character of his existence”); a government that executes the laws impartially, representing the many through a scientific administration and defending the nation “against other nations”; and “disposition,” “the inward willingness regarding the laws—not mere habit,” the active will to obey the laws. “Nothing must be considered higher and more sacred than good will towards the state, or, if religion be looked upon as higher and more sacred, it must involve nothing really alien or opposed to the constitution, since “at bottom” religion and state “are one, and the laws have their highest confirmation in religion.” “Here it must be stated frankly that with the Catholic religion no rational constitution is possible; for government and people must mutually share that final guarantee of disposition, and can have it only in a religion that is not opposed to a rational political constitution.”

The French therefore lacked the right disposition, having had their spirits formed by the Catholicism they rebelled against. “Robespierre set up the principle of virtue as supreme, and it may be said that with this man virtue was an earnest matter,” as he made virtue and terror “the order of the day”—a “subjective virtue [which] brings with it the most fearful tyranny.” Essentially a secularized echo of Islam, “this tyranny could not last, for all inclinations, all interests, reason itself revolted against this terribly consistent freedom, which in its concentrated intensity exhibited so fanatical a shape.” First the regime of the five-man Directory, and then one man, Napoleon, took control. Napoleon dispersed the “lawyers, ideologues, and men of principle,” ruling the French by inspiring in them “respect and fear.” “He then, with the vast might of his character, turned his attention to foreign relations, subjected all Europe, and diffused his liberal institutions in every quarter,” like a modern Charlemagne. The spirit of nationality in the conquered eventually defeated him, and the French ever since have oscillated among regimes of the many and the one.

The problem is with liberalism itself, which opposes “the establishment of rational rights, with freedom of person and property, with the existence of a state organization within which are spheres of civil life each of which conducts its own affairs, wherein the intelligent members have influence among the people and enjoy their confidence” to liberalism’s “atomistic principle which insists upon the sway of individual wills, maintaining that all government should emanate from their express power, and have their express sanction.” That is, liberalism opposes reason in the name of caprice. “This conflict, this knot, this problem is that with which history is now occupied, and which in the future it has to solve.” Fundamentally, however, there can be no “Revolution without a Reformation.”

Because Germany had that Reformation, it eliminated feudalism in an orderly manner. “Offices of state are open to every citizens, aptitude and usefulness being of course the necessary conditions” for membership in the German civil service, whose ruling decisions are ratified by the monarch in his capacity as the symbol of the national will. The strength of a great state “lies in its reason”; “the knowledgeable are to rule, not ignorance and the vanity of know-it-alls.” This is now possible because “in the Protestant world there is no sacred, no religious conscience separated from or indeed hostile to secular law,” consciousness having attained objective freedom, the laws of real freedom,” which “demand the subjugation of the mere contingent will.” In the German state “Philosophy concerns itself only with the glory of the idea mirroring itself in the history of the world,” as world history is “the course of development and the actual development of spirit,” “the true theodicy, the justification of God in history.”

With respect to the regime issue, Strauss concludes that “Hegel was a liberal but not a democrat.” He was a liberal in the sense that he loved liberty, but he defined liberty differently tha previou liberals had defined it. “If one wants a single formula indicating what Hegel’s philosophy of right stands for, it would be ‘rights of man’ plus a wholly independent civil service.” The excesses of the French Revolution had soured him on democracy. Attempts at establishing a constitutional, liberal democracy he regarded as chimerical. “Hegel does not see a clear way of how the West will finds its way between the acceptance of the rights of man with its political implications—in other words, the democratic solution—or what he regards as better, the rights of man without the political implications, i.e., without democratic consequences.” He prefers the Prussian constitutional monarchy (“which was not very constitutional”). He might have preferred the “Napoleonic Caesarism which came to France after the failure of liberalism in 1848,” years after Hegel’s death. Had he lived an impossibly long time, he might have pointed to the American Civil War, and the subsequent replacement of democratic republicanism with a mixed regime ruled in part by an increasingly large and imposing bureaucratic element, as confirmation of his distrust of democracy. For his part, Strauss remarks that the course of events since Hegel’s time has shown that the regime of constitutional democracy “is not necessarily such a terrible thing, as we have come to see in some of the more stable countries.” Those who pretend to find some sort of incipient authoritarianism or even fascism in Strauss will need to avert their eyes from his actual remarks to his students.

 

Note

1. Strauss unpacks this very carefully. The sphere in which inner and outer, subjective and objective, may be reconciled initially is the sphere of thought, “because thought knows no beyond. This is the meaning of the thesis that thought is free.” (Strauss, 361) That is, “As Hegel understands it, thought is never dependent on something other than thought.” (361) Unfreedom means dependence on something or someone outside oneself. If nature can be found to operate according to rational laws (gravitation, for example) then nature is rational and, in Hegel’s words, “embodies Universality.” If the world is rational, and can be shown to be so by experience (that is, experimental science), then reason pervades both the human subject and non-human, objective nature. In Strauss’s words, “therefore nature is reason.” (364) This applies “to moral-political matters,” as well: there is “no longer reliance on tradition or authority.” (364) “The present will of man is the basis of everything”. (364) “The truly free will wills nothing but itself, because otherwise it would be dependent on something, i.e., the truly free will wills nothing but its freedom, its self-determination.” (367) Thus far, Kant. But (and here is where Hegel goes beyond Kant) if ‘God’ or the Absolute Spirit is immanent in subject and object alike, then the course of events, now called ‘history,’ can be seen as giving real content or substance to human willing. In freely giving our consent to the historical dialectic, we link the inner and the outer, thought-certainty and experimental/experiential certainty, while also linking moral certainty with ethical certainty within civil society in the modern state. In so freely consenting to the dialectic, we endorse the course of events, history, the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit in time; we avoid being (as later historicists would say) ‘reactionaries,’ ostriches blinded by the sand in which we bury our heads. Hegel tells such people: The sands are always shifting. They offer no secure refuge.
2. Strauss rightly doubts this. “Hegel imputes wrongly… that this Kantian notion of freedom was the motivation for the French Revolution; whereas it was really a much more old-fashioned notion of freedom which animated the French people. That could easily be shown by a study of Rousseau.” “The Rousseauan concept of freedom is not the Kantian concept,” as the Rousseauan concept is still bound up with the natural. (Strauss, 401 n.17)
3. Strauss traces this problem back to the Reformation and what Hegel calls the “painful introspection” of Protestants. “This is the essential defect of Protestantism, according to Hegel.” In his introspection, the Protestant can arrive at “no objective certainty,” as “the certainty of salvation must be found within the individual.” In seeing sinfulness in himself and also “the breakthrough of divine grace,” the Protestant risks “a distorted view” of himself because he has “no terms of comparison.” “Hegel’s own view is that the individual cannot know what he is except through his deeds, through the whole course of his life.” (Strauss 355) His readers see this in the famous passage Hegel inserts into his Phenomenology of Spirit, where he speaks of the master-slave dialectic. As Strauss summarizes it, the slave, “subjugated by the master, succumbing to the master because of a failure of nerve in the life-and-death struggle… has to work and does not enjoy the fruits of his work,” which “are enjoyed by the master.” However, the slave’s work “is the origin of a higher culture because he is compelled to actualize all the powers of his mind and his heart in order to acquire self-respect. (Strauss 346) What this means is that for Strauss morality and knowledge both have a social dimension lacking not only in Protestantism but in the Kantian and Rousseauian moralities that derived from it. Further, the Catholic Descartes derives his theory of knowledge not from Catholicism simply but from the introspective Jesuit Catholicism of the 17th century; this too lacks the social dimension, what Hegel calls the objective content that is needed to substantiate subjective certainty, whether in morality or in thought. Descartes and Kant are therefore both indispensable and inadequate to the full unfolding of the Absolute Spirit.

G. W. F. Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Ruben Alvarado translation. Wordbridge, 2011.

Paul Franco, ed.: Leo Strauss on Hegel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

 

Note: This is the fourth of a series of five essays on Hegel’s Lectures, as illuminated by the published transcripts of Leo Strauss’s 1964 course at the University of Chicago.

 

Hegel begins by citing a remark made by Napoleon to Goethe on “the nature of tragedy,” in which that emulator of Romanness asserted that moderns have substituted “politics” (meaning “the irresistible power of circumstance to which individuality must bend”) for fate. Hegel doesn’t dispute the claim, instead finding such a ‘political’ destiny or power embodied in Rome, which never failed to cast “moral individuals into bonds,” subordinating them to the state. Simultaneously, in relation to world outside, Rome aimed at “universal dominion” in religion, “collecting all deities and all spirits” worshiped by the peoples it conquered “into the pantheon,” “in order to make an abstract generality of them.” In this it contrasted with Persian imperialism, content to allow conquered peoples to worship their own gods with no attempt to dragoon them into its own Zoroastrian system. Rome “stifles all vitality, while [Persia] allowed of its existence in the fullest measure.”

By emptying out the moral life of its inhabitants and by forcing all gods into a universal religious empire, Rome sank the world “in melancholy, its heart broken”; it was “all over for the natural side of spirit,” now “sunk into a feeling of misery.” Yet it was precisely this emptiness, and this misery, from which “could arise the suprasensorial, the free spirit in Christianity,” whose vitality consists in the rejection of nature as ‘fallen.’ Rome moved past Persia’s, and more immediately Greece’s, naturalism, with “its cheerfulness and enjoyment.” While draining life of cheer and joy, Rome saw the spirit “develop itself into that form of abstract universality which exercised severe discipline over humanity,” a discipline the Greeks so conspicuously lacked. The “inwardness,” the “retreating into one’s self which we observed as the corruption of the Greek spirit,” in Rome became “the ground on which a new side of world history” ascended.

If in Greece democracy was “the fundamental condition of political life,” and in the East it was despotism, in Rome it was aristocracy of a most “rigid sort,” ruling “with soulless and heartless severity” over the plebeians, the many who were poor, on the basis of a legal system designed above all to protect the patricians’ property. Whereas Greek factions ruined its city-states, the struggle between patricians and plebs “marks Rome’s inmost being,” pervading it no matter how the political regime changed—as it did, over the centuries.

The Roman world centered in Italy, which centered in Rome. Since Italy, like Greece, features ineradicable geographic divisions (in its case, the north, the middle, and the south), political unity centering in Rome could only occur “artificially and violently.” With “no natural unity, such as the valley of the Nile,” the “Roman state rest[ed] geographically, as well as historically, on the aspect of violence.” The rule of force forces the spirit into “inward secretiveness,” a “certainty in itself,” in relation to the harsh “outwardness of reality.” This “inwardness” purifies itself into “abstract personality”—abstracted from an outer world the individual spirit cannot control, in contrast with Greek self-government and civic spirit. This abstract personality “gives itself reality” in the outer world by establishing private property; once again, “the resultant refractory persons”—refractory because they have no natural connections with one another and feel the need to defend ‘their own’ things—”can be held together only by despotic power.”

Like every “world-historical people,” the Romans developed in three stages, as of course all significant things do, under the laws of Hegel’s dialectic. Accordingly, Hegel divides “The Roman World” into three sections. In the first he describes “the rudiments of Rome, in which the essentially contrary elements” of patricians and plebs “still slumber[ed] in calm unity, until the contrarieties gain[ed] strength and the unity of the state [became] forceful” through the rise of that antithesis. In this section he also begins his account of Rome’s second period, initiated in the First Punic War, when Roman state direct[ed] its forces outwards and enter[ed] the world-historical theater; this [was] the noblest period of Rome.” In the second section Hegel recounts the history of Rome from the Second Punic War to the rule of the emperors, the period in which “the Roman empire now acquired that world-conquering extension which paved the way for its fall.” The third section contains the despotic third period of Roman history, in which “Roman power appear[ed] in its pomp and splendor” but also began to rupture “within itself,” leaving it open to the triumph of Christianity and setting it against the “Germanic peoples, whose turn to become world-historical had now come.”

“Rome arose outside countries,” in a sort of no-man’s land. Hegel means that the Etruscans to the north, the Latins to the south, and the Sabines in-between them all bordered on it, but none of these nations controlled it. The people who gathered there derived from no one “ancient stock, connected by natural patriarchal bonds,” as seen in Persia. The Romans didn’t descend from the Trojans, the story they told themselves and others notwithstanding. (Hegel has absolutely nothing good to say about Virgil.) In fact, “the first Roman community constituted itself as a robber state” consisting of “predatory shepherds” assembled from “the rabble of all the three regions between which Rome lay.” “The historians state that this point was very well chosen on a hill close to the river, and particularly adapted to make it an asylum for all delinquents” who “roved about on the hills of Rome.” Lacking women, they seized some from the Sabines. “Religion [was] used as a means for furthering the purposes of the infant state,” not out of genuine piety. Eventually, somewhat more peaceable foreigners arrived, but not before the fundamental character of Rome had been established: The Romans were pirates on land ruled by “chieftains.”

“It is the peculiarity in the founding of the state which must be regarded as the essential basis of the peculiarity of Rome,” as it “leads directly to the severest discipline as well as to self-sacrifice to the object of the union.” “Based on force” and “held together by force,” Romans had no “moral, liberal connection” to one another “but a compulsory condition of subordination.” For the Romans virtus meant valor—”not, however, the merely personal” kind of valor, “but that which is regarded as connected with a union of associates, the coherence of which is regarded as the supreme interest, and which may be combined with violence of all kinds.”

Violent rule first of all prevailed in the rule of the patricians over the plebeians, a distinction “already mythically adumbrated in the hostile brothers Romulus and Remus.” [1] As captured towns swelled the size of the town, “the weaker, the poorer, the later additions of population were naturally underrated by and in a condition of dependence upon those who originally founded the state, and those who distinguished themselves by valor and also by wealth” became the aristocrats. Hegel explicitly rejects any racialist explanation of the Roman aristocracy. It exercised rule established by force, period, having come to power not as one distinct race or ethnicity but as a conglomeration of outlaws initially culled from three peoples. Racial or ethnic purity could scarcely have provided a justification for that rule.

Sure enough, soon “the dependence of the plebeians on the patricians” would be “represented as perfectly legal, indeed, even sacred, since the patricians held the sacra while the plebs were, as it were, godless.” But this was “a hypocritical sham.” When the plebs rebelled (as they did, on occasion) “they were no more guilty of a presumptuous sacrilege than were the Protestants when they emancipated the political power of the state, and asserted the freedom of conscience,” Hegel tells his Lutheran/Prussian students. The patricians were able to maintain their power by force but also by dividing the plebs, putting some of them under their protection as clients. “In the contentions between the patricians and the plebeians, the clients held to their patrons, though belonging to the plebs as decidedly as any class.” When the plebs did manage to wring concessions from the patricians, “the introduction of the laws among all classes” resulted in the gradual elimination of cliental privileges, “for as soon as individuals found protection in the law, the temporary necessity for [those privileges] could not but cease.”

The predatory character of the state gave the patricians still another way to keep the plebs down. Since “every citizen was necessarily a soldier” in a “state based on war,” and since “every citizen was obliged to maintain himself in the field,” to buy his own weapons and armor, the plebs could only borrow the needed money to pay for their equipage from the patricians. Although the eventual rule of law mitigated some of this, too, the celebrated Twelve Tables “still contained much that was undefined,” and the patricians were the judges interpreting the laws.

The Roman spirit also defined family relations. While Greek patriarchal families exhibited familial love (as seen in Aristotle’s account, among others), “the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, are, according to the tradition, themselves freebooters, represented as from their earliest days thrust out from the family, and as having grown up in a state of isolation from family affection.” Romulus committed fratricide. The seizure of the Sabine women also afforded no wholesome model of familial bliss. “This commencement of the Roman life in savage rudeness, excluding the sensibilities of natural morality, brings with it one characteristic element, harshness in respect to the family relation; a selfish harshness, which constituted the fundamental condition of Roman manners and laws” whereby family relations saw no “beautiful, free relation of love and feeling” but “severity, dependence, and subordination.” Marriage was “a mere contract,” the wife “part of the husband’s property.” By marriage “the husband acquired a power over his wife, such as he had over his daughter; nor less over her property; so that everything which she gained, she gained for her husband.” Aristotle distinguishes the parent-child relationship from the master-slave relationship—the one established for the benefit of the child, the other for the benefit of the master—but in Rome there was no sharp distinction.

“Thus degenerated and depraved do we here see the fundamental relations of ethics. The immoral active severity of the Romans in this private side of character necessarily finds its counterpart in the passive severity of their association for the purpose of the state. For the severity which the Roman experienced from the state he was compensated by a severity, identical in nature, which he was allowed to indulge towards his family, a servant on the one side, a despot on the other.” “This,” Hegel concludes, “constitutes Roman greatness,” a phrase he borrows from Montesquieu’s title, The Grandeur of the Romans and Their Decadence. [2]

One must notice, however, that while the Romans may have been bad, they were also great—a world-historical people. Their greatness in world history consists first of all in their prosaicness.  The peoples of the East, and the Greeks, wrote poetry. It was “among the Romans [that] the prose  of life makes its appearance, the self-consciousness of finiteness, the abstraction of the understanding and the hardness of personality which does not broaden cold reserve to natural morality in the family, but remains unfeeling spiritless oneness, and which posits the unity of this oneness in abstract generality.” That doesn’t sound too promising, but it is “to the unfree, spiritless, and heartless understanding of the Roman world [that] we owe the origin and development of positive law.” In other cultures, law expressed moral convictions, making it “entirely dependent on morals and disposition,” without the “fixity of principle” that makes law the law. The Romans “completed this important separation, and discovered a principle of law which is external, i.e., one not dependent on disposition and sentiment,” formal. ‘We moderns’ may “use and enjoy” positive law “without becoming victims” of the “arid understanding” of the Romans, without taking positive law “as the pinnacle of wisdom and reason.” The Romans were the victims of such an understanding, “but they thereby secured for others freedom of spirit, viz., that inward freedom which has consequently become emancipated from the sphere of the finite and the external. Spirit, heart, disposition, religion at this point no longer have to fear being entangled in that abstract juridical understanding,” and “free art can arise and express itself,” now that law is no longer supposed sacred but known to be humanly posited. As Strauss puts it, in Rome “a sphere of privacy is recognized, according to Hegel, for the first time, and that is crucial.”

The Romans’ “abstract understanding of finiteness,” seen in the finiteness, the limitedness, of the positive law they set down for themselves, “is their highest purpose” in world history and “their highest consciousness as well.” Most important, it provided the foundation for the modern separation of church and state, although again via a decidedly unattractive path.

Our term ‘religion’ derives from the Latin religio—ligament, bondage. For the Greeks, religion “was the cheerfulness of free imagination,” seen in the lives of their buoyant, boyish and girlish gods and goddesses. “The Romans, by contrast, remained satisfied, with a dull, stupid inwardness, so that the external was only an object, something alien, something hidden.” The inner man is in bondage to this external, secretive thing. The friendly, this-worldly piety of the Greeks gave way to a “doubleness” seen even in the name of Rome itself, which was held to be a mask for its secret name, and in the name of the founder Romulus, who also was supposed to have had a secret name.

Roman religiosity never “elevate[d] itself to the theoretical contemplation of the eternally divine nature and to liberation in that contemplation; it gain[ed] no religious content from spirit.” It was ceremonial, “essentially formal” and “petrified.” The patricians controlled the ceremonies, and they used them as instruments of rule over the “godless” plebeians. “The chief characteristic of Roman religion [was] therefore a rigidity of specific goals of will, which the Romans regard[ed] as existing absolutely in their gods, and whose accomplishment they desire of them as embodying absolute power.” “The Roman religion [was] therefore the entirely prosaic one of restrictiveness, expediency, utility.” They worshiped ‘Peace,’ ‘Tranquility,’ ‘Fortune,’ ‘Repose,’ and ‘Sorrow’ as gods. “How little have these prosaic conceptions in common with the beauty of the spiritual powers and deities of the Greeks!” Hegel exclaims. Zeus becomes not simply Jupiter but Jupiter Capitolinus, “the generic essence of the Roman empire.” They sought to propitiate these deities with vows and supplications in a joyless quest for favor relieved only by their religious festivals. But even these remained on the vulgar level of “scurrilous dances and songs,” never developing (as they did in Greece) into the noble art of tragedy. “Their talk of Jupiter, Juno, Minerva sounds to us like people talking at the theater”—the modern theater of light comedy and what eventually would become ‘musicals.’ “Among the Greek poets, especially Virgil, the introduction of the gods is the product of a frigid understanding and of imitation. The gods are used in these poems as machinery.”

Similarly, their games were less than Olympic. “The Romans were, properly speaking, only spectators” at their games, watching as manumitted slaves, gladiators, criminals, and animals fought it out amongst themselves, for the entertainment of the crowds. “Nero’s deepest degradation was his appearing on a public stage as a singer, lyrist, and combatant.” Refusing participation in their games, the Romans “did not enter into them with their whole souls,” as the Greeks had done. “The Romans gave shape to a cruel reality of corporeal sufferings, and it was blood in streams, the rattle in the throat signaling death, and the expiring gasp that delighted them. This cold negativity of naked murder at the same time exhibits at the same time that inward murder of a spiritual objective purpose,” paralleling the purely manipulative character of their supposed piety. Hegel re-emphasizes that “all of this was in the hands of the patricians, who consciously made use of it for their own ends and against the people, as a mere outward bond.”

Thus “secular aims are left entirely free, not restricted by religion but rather justified by it. The Romans are invariably pious, whatever the content of their actions. But as the sacred here is nothing but an empty form, it is exactly of such a kind that can be had in the power of the devotee,” who seeks nothing more than to be “master over the form.” “It is taken possession of by the subject who seeks his private objects and interests, whereas the truly divine possesses concrete power in itself.” The “beautiful and moral necessity of common life” seen in the Greek polis gave way separate forms of worship for each “stock” or ethnic group within Rome.

This very arbitrariness contradicts the religiosity or ‘bindingness’ of Roman worship. “The Roman principle admits of aristocracy alone as the constitution proper to it, but which directly manifests itself as antithesis,” inasmuch as an aristocracy that rules arbitrarily abrogates its own claim to be the rule of ‘the best.’ “Only through necessity and misfortune is this contradiction momentarily smoothed over; for it contains a duplicate power, the sternness and malevolent reserve of which can only be mastered and bound together, by a still greater sternness, into a unity maintained by force.”

But why, one asks Hegel, did this turn out well? In what way did it? Hegel will answer, later on.

Meanwhile, he needs to take his narrative to the Second Punic War. After the initial rule of kings, the patricians founded a ‘republican’ (in fact aristocratic) regime; the resulting long stretch of civil peace enables Rome to gather “the strength to engage in victorious struggle with the previous world-historical people.”

There were seven kings altogether—almost all of them foreigners, as the non-indigenous origins of Rome might lead one to expect. Founder Romulus organized Rome into “a military state”; the second king, Numa, introduced religion, making Rome uniquely a state in which political union preceded religious tradition. [3] During these decades the kings countered aristocratic ambitions with appeals to the people, but the last king, Tarquinius Superbus, went too far in aiming at eliminating the patrician class altogether via his refusal to replace those who died. When his son insulted “the honor of a matron” the infuriated patricians expelled Tarquinius and ended the monarchy.

“The constitution now became republican in name, but in fact amounted to a bicephalous executive supported by the aristocracy. For more than a hundred years the patricians and plebeians struggled against each other, but by the end of the fourth century BC agrarian reforms, whereby the plebeians would be entitled to own property, were set down in law. Eventually, they were implemented in practice, too. “This is the chief point in the first period of Roman history—that the plebs attained the right of being eligible to the higher political offices, and that by a share which they too managed to obtain in the soil, the means of subsistence were assured to the citizens.” Wearied of internal struggles, the differences of class moderated, the energies once dissipated in those struggles were turned outward. “This direction given to the Roman energies was able for a moment to conceal the defect of that union [of the patriciate and the plebs]; equilibrium was restored, but without an essential center and point of support. This contradiction that existed could not but break out again fearfully at a later period,” but not before Roman “courage and discipline secured their victory” over vast territories inhabited by foreign rivals. The Romans had become “the capitalists of strength.”

The first major rival to feel Rome’s new power was Carthage, in the three Punic Wars. The Second Punic War was “that point of decision and determination of Roman dominion” from which flowed victories over Macedonia, Syria, Carthage for the final time, and Corinth, then the linchpin of Greece. Among these conquests, “the fall of Carthage and the subjugation of Greece were the decisive moments from which the Romans extended their sway” as masters of the Mediterranean Sea, “the middle ground of all civilization.”

So secured externally, Rome returned to its contradictions. The struggle between patricians and plebeians abated, but the “antithesis” now “assume[d] the form of private interest against patriotic sentiment”; “side by side with wars for conquest, plunder and glory the fearful spectacle of civil discords in Rome, and civil wars” ensued. These followed from the underlying contradiction within Rome: The rule of force alone bespoke the lack of any pervasive spirit, moral or ethical, to unite it. “If inward satisfaction was to follow the period of that external prosperity in war, the principle of Roman life had to be more concrete. But if such a concrete life were to evolve as an object of consciousness from the depths of their souls by imagination and thought, what would it have been!” There were only power relations, both respecting the subjugated peoples and the citizens of Rome.

Externally, the Romans never respected “the national individuality” of conquered peoples; there would be no Roman equivalent to modern Europe’s Peace of Westphalia, only plunder. Animated only by “the cold abstraction of lordship and power,” the “pure egotism of the will against others, containing no ethical fulfillment,” foreign policy could only serve the particular interests of the conquering generals. Rome imported its “luxury and debauchery” from Asia (as readers of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra will recall) its sculpture, painting, and even its education from Greece, from which slaves became “their poets, their authors, the superintendents of their factories, the instructors of their children.” “Riches were received as spoils, not as the fruit of industry and honest activity,” as befitted a state “founded on robbery” and accustomed not to making things but to dividing spoils seized from those who had made them. In this, Strauss points out, Hegel finds himself “in entire agreement” with the British philosophers, “especially” Locke, who regard “industry and commerce” as “morally superior to war.”

As the state began to break down, great men arose, “colossal individualities” we read about in Plutarch, who attempted (and for a time succeeded) in “restor[ing] that unity to the state which was no more to be found in men’s dispositions” and indeed had never been solidly established therein. “One needs to read Cicero to see how all affairs of state were decided in tumultuous fashion, and, with arms in hand, by the wealth and power of the grandees on the one side and by a troop of rabble on the other.” Julius Caesar finally rose to the top.

“In this way the world-rule of Rome came to a single person.” Hegel takes pains to argue that “this important change must not be regarded as a thing of chance; it was necessary, conditioned by the circumstances.” Republicanism, such as it was, could not sustain itself without an ethos or spirit to support it. In this, according to Hegel, “the nature of the state, and of the Roman state in particular, transcends [Cicero’s] comprehension,” as it did the comprehension of Caesar’s rivals. “The Roman principle was set entirely upon rule and military power: it contained in it no spiritual center as goal, occupation, and enjoyment for spirit.” Alienated, ‘made foreign,’ from their own state, citizens “found in it no objective satisfaction.” “Caesar, judged by the great scope of history, did what was right, since he furnished a mediating element, and that kind of cohesion which was required,” allying inward opposition and beginning “a new opposition outward,” a new round of conquest. His assassins “believed that if this one individual was out of the way, the republic would automatically be restored,” but republican rule could no longer sustain itself. Caesarism triumphed. Hegel claims that throughout world history the repeat of an event confirms its necessity. Caesarism arose, fell, then returned; Napoleon fell in defeat, took another stab at power, fell again; the Bourbon monarchs were expelled twice. “By repetition, that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency becomes a real and ratified existence.” This is how Hegel would answer Strauss’s question about how to distinguish between accident and necessity.

The new monarchs, different from the old kings, were called emperors, having taken over the vast territorial conquests effected by the ‘republic.’ The regime change really didn’t change very much respecting the lives of the Romans, as most of the supposedly ruling institutions hadn’t done much ruling; the popular assemblies were dissolved, and functions performed by the remainder of the offices were absorbed by the throne. “The military power, here the main thing, was exclusively in [the] hands” of the emperor. Without any substance or vitality, the state institutions provided him no support. “The only means of maintaining its existence were the legions which the emperor continuously kept in the vicinity of Rome.” These “soon became conscious of their importance,” beginning to name the emperors after the family of Caesar Augustus, the man who picked up the pieces of power after the assassination of Julius, departed from the scene.

With political institutions “united in the person of the emperor, no ethical bond existed any longer; the will of the emperor was supreme, and before him there was absolute equality.” His “arbitrary choice” ruled with no limit save death. While he lived, the “complete boundlessness” of the emperor’s “particular subjectivity” meant that there could be “no inwardness, no forward or backward, no repentance, nor hope, nor fear, no thought,” inasmuch as “all these involve fixed determinations and aims”; this left rule by “desire, lust, passion, fancy—in short, caprice absolutely unfettered.” The sole order within the empire consisted of “standing in harmony with the one.” That is to say, in Hegelian terms, that no dialectic remained, and therefore no vitality. True, there were a few emperors “of noble character and noble nature,” such as Trajan, “yet even these produced no change in the state, and it never occurred to them to give the Roman people an organization of free common life; they were a happy coincidence, as it were, passing without a trace and leaving things as they were.” No dialectic, no history. “They cannot be said to act, since no object confronts them in opposition; they have only to will—well or ill—and it is so.” In another place Hegel thinks of mountains, masses without movement, without life, which seem to say, he says, ‘It is thus,’ and no more than that. “Italy was depopulated; the most fertile lands remained untilled; and this state of things lay as a fate over the Roman world.”

Obviously, in such a state there could be no citizens, only “persons.” “Individuals were perfectly equal (slavery made only a trifling distinction), and without any political rights.” Romans were no better-off or worse-off than Italians generally, and eventually “all distinction between the subjects of the entire Roman empire was abolished.” Private law was the one real law, that is, “the person as such [had] validity, in the reality which he gives to himself—in property.” Hegel compares this condition with that of a dead body, wherein “each point gains a life of its own, but only the miserable life of worms.” “The political organism is here dissolved into atoms,” that is, into “private persons.” [4] The Roman world consisted of, “on the one side, fate and the abstract generality of rule; on the other, the individual abstraction, the person, which involves the determination that the individual is something in himself, not in terms of his vitality, in terms of a fulfilled individuality, but as abstract individual,” prideful of that personhood because he knows no other way to live.

“The emperor only ruled, he did not govern, for the legal and ethical middle ground between ruler and ruled was lacking, the bond of a constitution and organization of the state, in which exists an order of intrinsically valid life-spheres, in local communities and provinces, which, active for the general interest, exert an influence on the general state administration—this was lacking.” Here Hegel looks back at Burke and his esteemed “little platoons,” ahead to Tocqueville in America, although neither of those thinkers would have endorsed Hegel’s grand historical dialectic. But they might have agreed with his assessment of imperial Rome, where men had no “consciousness” of country “or some such ethical unity” but instead either “yield[ed] themselves to fate” with “perfect indifference to life”—living lives either of “freedom of thought” without civic action or of “sensuous enjoyment,” also without civic action. Such public action as existed consisted of currying favor with the emperor or violence, fraud, and cunning.

Hegel naturally concerns himself especially with the philosophic life under such a regime. The prevailing philosophic doctrines of imperial Rome—Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism—”although in themselves opposed to each other, yet were after the same thing, viz., rendering the spirit absolutely indifferent to everything the real world had to offer.” “This inward reconciliation by means of philosophy was itself only an abstract one, in the pure principle of personality; for thought, which, as pure, makes itself its own object and reconciles itself to itself, was completely without object, and the imperturbability of skepticism made aimlessness itself the object of the will.” Such philosophy “could not satisfy the living spirit, which longed after a higher reconciliation.” Many would find that in Christianity, to which Hegel devotes his longest discussion of any one feature of the Roman world. Strauss regards this as “in a way the most important part of the whole work.”

In its “desperation and in the pain of being abandoned by God,” the Roman world made “an open rupture with reality,” manifesting “a general desire for a satisfaction such as can only be attained inwardly, in the spirit, thus preparing the ground for a higher spiritual world.” Rome “crushed down the gods and all cheerful life in its service” while simultaneously “purif[ying] the human heart from all particularity” with its universality on the one hand and its emptying-out of concrete citizenship, its establishment of mere ‘personhood,’ on the other. Rome’s pain “is like the birth pangs of another and higher spirit, which was revealed in the Christian religion.” In Christianity man finally “obtains the consciousness of spirit in its universality and infinity,” finding the ‘outer’ truth within himself, “as man himself is spirit.” To do this, “the naturalness of spirit by virtue of which man is particular, empirical, must be denied, experienced as what Christians call man’s ‘ sin nature.

God can only be “recognized as spirit… when known as the Triune”—that is to say, a dialectic understood not only as its elements of thesis (God the Father) and antithesis (God the Son) but as their synthesis (the Spirit or Geist). “This new principle is the pivot on which world history turns. History proceeds to this point and from this point.” In the Christian principle of the Triune God “self-consciousness had raised itself to those moments which pertain to the concept of spirit, and to the need to comprehend these moments in an absolute manner.”

The Greek law “for their spirit” was ‘Man, know thyself.’ But Greek self-knowledge limited itself by “having the element of nature as an essential ingredient.” Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx by seeing the nature of human life as it proceeds from infancy to old age. In Greek religion, spirit manifested itself polytheistically; further, its many gods were “represented by art, in which the sensorial is elevated to the middle ground of beautiful form and shape, but not elevated to pure thought.” Spirit rightly perceived is a unity of three elements, with no natural/sensorial/physical aspect, but rather to be perceived only by mind, which is the complementary meaning of spirit in German, Geist.

Rome supplied the inwardness Greece lacked, but only in a formal way, taking “its content from passion and caprice” and from “the personality of individuals” as seen in the possession of property—as atoms unrelated organically, vitally, to one another, ruled by a ‘one,’ an emperor, who is no less capricious than they. “This contradiction is the misery of the Roman world,” but this misery also disciplines this world, draws it toward something by way of renouncing the charms of civic and artistic life, ‘Greekness.’ Man is drawn into himself, but now knows himself not as a happy citizen of a concrete polis but as an individual person, “miserable and null.” In his agony, he longs for something “beyond this condition of inwardness,” something to be found “elsewhere than in the properly Roman world,” which has seemingly encompassed the whole world in a universal empire. But in the very act of so encompassing Asia, the East, Rome encompassed the Jewish people, giving them their “world-historical importance and significance.” For the Israelites had always longed for God, as seen in the writings of David and the prophets, sorrowing over the transgressions of themselves and their people, sorrows beginning before Israel itself but seen in the “fall into sin” of Adam, of man “created in the image of God” who loses “his state of absolute contentment by eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.”

Sin “consists here only in the knowledge: this is that which is sinful, and by it man threw away his natural happiness.” Yet natural happiness is exactly what man needs to throw away. It is “a deep truth, that evil lies in consciousness, for the brutes are neither evil nor good, the merely natural man quite as little.” Knowledge cancels “natural unity”; in this the “fall into sin” is “the eternal, not the coincidental, history of spirit,” the emergence from the innocence of brute nature. “Paradise is a park, where only brutes, not men, can remain.” (Strauss interjects that a German “park” is “a kind of zoo.”)

“Only man is spirit, which is to say, for himself,” self-conscious and therefore cognizant of his distinction “from the universal divine spirit.” If man remains in his “abstract freedom in opposition to the good” he takes “the standpoint of evil.” “The fall into sin is therefore the eternal myth for man, through which, precisely, he became man.” In so doing, in seeing himself as separate from God or Absolute Spirit, he should feel as David feels—in pain, with a feeling of longing for reconciliation, for transcendence of that pain. At the same time, man’s sin is a significant gain of sorts because, as both the Serpent and God say, in obtaining knowledge of good and evil man becomes to that extent godlike. “Man through spirit, through cognition of the universal and the particular, comprehends God Himself,” even as he has separated himself from God. “The absolute and final repose of man’s whole being is not yet discovered” by man himself, although of course God sees it.

The history of the Jewish people shows this longing for, this striving after God. “The satisfaction which man enjoys at first consists in the finite and temporal blessings conferred on the chosen family and the possession of the land of Canaan,” but this is not yet satisfaction “in God,” being only an external satisfaction, the provision of a homeland. Rome unwittingly did Jews a great favor by scattering them, depriving them of this merely material satisfaction. “Formerly, the Jews considered [the fulfillment of man’s nature] to be, concretely, the land of Canaan and themselves as the people of God.” With this content “now lost,” they must turn to a purer form of spirituality. Crucially, however, while Rome’s Stoics taught withdrawal from reality, apolitical withdrawal, “the Jewish sentiment rather perseveres with reality; and in reality desires reconciliation” with God. Why? Because Judaism “is based on the Oriental unity of nature, i.e., the reality, subjectivity, and the substance of the one.” By conquering the Jewish homeland and then scattering the Jews, Rome unintentionally began to incorporate, synthesize, the East, the antithesis of the West, into itself, into the West. In Judaism, “the Oriental antithesis of light and darkness is transferred to spirit, and the darkness becomes sin. For the negated reality, nothing remains but subjectivity itself, the human will in itself as universal; only hereby does reconciliation become possible,” and only thereby can Rome ‘convert,’ in time, to a life of the spirit. “Sin is the discerning of good and evil in separation; but recognition likewise heals the ancient hurt, and is the fountain of infinite reconciliation,” as “recognition destroys the external, the alien in consciousness, and therefore is the return of subjectivity to itself.”

This is the (new) meaning of ‘history.’ For this consciousness of alienation, this knowledge of good and evil and consequent recognition of the putative ‘Other,’ God, as intrinsic to oneself—that spirit is one, singular not plural—occurs only as the Absolute Spirit unfolds itself dialectically over time.  “The identity of the subject and God comes into the world when the fullness of time was come; the consciousness of this identity is the recognition of God in His true essence. The content of truth is spirit itself, the living movement in itself”—the opposite of the lifeless petrification of mountains and empty ceremonies. “The nature of God, to be pure spirit, is revealed to man in the Christian religion.” How so? And what is “spirit,” that term Hegel bruits about so often?

Spirit “is the one, the infinite equal to itself, pure identity, which, secondly, separates itself from itself, as the other of itself, as the being-for-itself and in-itself against the general.” Got that? To put it somewhat plainer language, Being is one and infinite; it is itself and no other. But Being then divides itself, and the things it sloughs off from itself are themselves beings, independent of the ‘parent’ Being, distinctive from that general Being. The now-separate beings lose awareness of their origin; in the case of purely material beings (mountains, deserts) they lose awareness altogether, lack consciousness. The Triune God of Christianity consists of separate beings who are conscious of one another, however; though distinct, they recognize one another in feeling—specifically, love—and thought or spirit. This makes God both one and three, without contradiction but with ‘internal’ relations allowing God to reflect upon Himself by means of the mutual relations of His three Persons. The Father has his “other,” his Son; “this other in its particularization is the world, nature, and the finite spirit.” In becoming flesh, the Son thereby “posited as an aspect of God.” “This being-contained,” this being-within-the-material, “may be expressed such that the unity of man with God can be posited in the Christian religion.” However, Hegel insists, “this unity must not be superficially conceived, as if God were only man, and man likewise God; rather, man is God only to the degree that he abolishes the naturalness and finitude of his spirit, and elevates himself to God” as “a partaker of the truth” who “knows that he himself is a moment of the divine idea.” In such self-knowledge, which is simultaneously knowledge of God or the Absolute Spirit, man relinquishes “his naturalist,” since “the natural is the unfree and the unspiritual.” This is what makes the dialectical antithesis of the Greek spirit by the Roman spirit indispensable to the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, however unlovely the Roman antithesis may be. To deploy a well-worn image, the human spirit, which is an aspect of the divine spirit, must free itself from ‘congealed’ spirit or matter, like one of Michelangelo’s sculptures in which a human form seems to be emerging from a block of stone. The Greeks emerged partially; “the natural elation of soul which characterized the Greeks did not progress to the subjective freedom of the ‘I’ itself.” Jesus shows how to emerge fully, thanks to the emptying-out of the human soul under joyless Roman despotism and personalism. “Misfortune itself is henceforth recognized as necessary to mediate the unity of man with God,” as universal misery under Rome prepares souls for transcendence of a rotten material world, now devoid of the charms with which the Greeks remained enthralled.

How then was the nature of God revealed to man in the appearance of Jesus among us? Man may understand “the unity of man with God” in his own mind, in his “thinking, speculative consciousness.” But this unity “must also exist for the sensorial, representative consciousness, it must become an object for the world, it must appear; and it must do so in the sensorial form appropriate to spirit, which is the human.” Why must it so appear? To demonstrate concretely what the speculative consciousness can only perceive mentally; recall that Hegel is never satisfied with philosophizing cut off—”abstracted,” as he would say—from the world, insisting rather that philosophy result in action, pervade the world even as the Absolute Spirit does indeed pervade the world, since the world is only the Absolute Spirit in material, ‘sensorially’-perceived form. Christ therefore did appear, “a man who is God” and “God who is man,” thereby enabling “the world [to] become peace and reconciliation—a glimpse of the synthesis of all elements of the Absolute Spirit, some of them alienated from the others via loss of consciousness or (with human beings) false consciousness, incomplete consciousness. In his material being, Christ dies, but only to be “exalted to heaven” to sit “at the right hand of the Father.” Before dying, He tells his disciples that the Spirit will remain to guide them. “To the apostles, Christ as living was not that which He was to them subsequently as the Spirit of the church, in which He first became to them true spiritual consciousness.” This marks Jesus off from wise men and moral exemplars such as Socrates. “Excellence of character, morality, etc., all this is not the final requirement of spirit, it does not enable man to gain the speculative idea of spirit for his imagination.” Only Jesus does, making Him and His life on earth necessary for the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit in the fullness of time. His miracles don’t confirm His uniquely divine status, as false prophets (indeed Satan himself) can perform miracles.

Guided by the Spirit, the apostles evangelized, bringing the redeeming message of Jesus to the rest of the world. But they did more than just talk. Having severed the worldly bonds of human regimes, they built God’s regime, the Kingdom of God, on earth in the form of the Church. “The infinite elevation of spirit to simple purity is put at the head, as foundation”; they are to seek first the Kingdom of God, without fear of “external sufferings” such as persecution, which “are nothing by comparison with that glory” they find in the Kingdom. They abstract themselves “from all that belongs to reality, even from ethical bonds”—the most radical of all revolutions or regime changes, inasmuch as “everything that had been respected, is treated as a matter of indifference, as worthy of no regard.” This sounds a bit like the Roman philosophers, but only on the surface. After withdrawing their allegiance from all worldly, human-all-too-human regimes, the apostles formed the Church, an alternative society or congregation. “Christ—man as man—in whom the unity of God and man has appeared, has in His death, and His history generally, Himself evinced the eternal history of spirit, a history which every man has to accomplish in himself, in order to exist as spirit, or to become a child of God, a citizen of His kingdom.” By entering that congregation of self-consciously spirit-filled souls, the form “an actual, present life in the Spirit of Christ.”

This is why “the Christian religion by no means must be led back merely to the statements of Christ Himself; it is in the Apostles that the set, developed truth is first exhibited.” The Church or congregation needed to exist in a world not yet Christian. It “sustain[ed] a double relation”: first with the Roman world, “abstain[ing] from all activity in the state,” keeping itself ‘holy’ or separate from it and sustaining “that infinite inward liberty which it enjoyed” despite the “sufferings and sorrows” inflicted upon Christians by that world; and then in the development of “dogma”—teachings which synthesized the sayings of Jesus with “the antecedent development of philosophy.” In that philosophy, men had already understood “universality” in the abstract. Christianity brought to this philosophic idea “a concrete, particular content,” namely, the oneness and infinitude that are the marks of Oriental thought, through the pathway of Judaism. As Strauss puts it, “the actualization, the fulfillment, of religion—in this case, of the Christian religion—is that religion becomes visible as human reason.” That is, he continues, “what was traditionally thought to be suprarational becomes fully evident to the fully developed human reason,” as “the religious principle which dwells in the heart of man is produced also as worldly freedom.” “This inner freedom of the mind, of the soul, becomes externalized and therewith comes into its own as worldly freedom, that is, political freedom.”

The same thing occurred in the realm of practice. Hegel observes that “in the Roman world, the union of East and West had taken place initially in external manner, by means of conquest; it now took place inwardly, as the spirit of the East spread over the West” with Christian evangelism and Church-building. Having “yearned after a deeper, purely inward universality” than the external universality of Roman imperialism, having yearned for “something infinite yet at the same time having the determinate in itself,” the Roman world found this in Christianity. The synthesis of theory and practice then became possible. Such “learned Jews” as Philo had already “connect[ed] abstract forms of the concrete, which they derived from Plato and Aristotle, with their understanding of the infinite, and recognizing God, according to the more concrete idea of spirit, by the specification Logos.” Alexandrian thinkers, too, in “their speculative thinking attained those abstract ideas which are likewise the fundamental content of the Christian religion.” They did so, however, by trying “to demonstrate a speculative truth in the Greek idols” (as Julian the Apostate would do, later). This attempt to “spiritualize” the pagan divinities could occur because “the Greek religion contains a degree of reason,” and “the substance of spirit is reason”; “its product must be something rational,” however obscured reason might be by the “sensorial divinities” of Western paganism. The Christian God does not obscure the rational spirit by sensorial blockages, but rather uses the sensorial appearance of God-in-man as a gateway to the spirit. Accordingly, Christians “sought for a profounder sense in the historical part of their religion,” that is, not in pagan deities but in the books of what they now called the ‘Old’ Testament. For this, the doctrine of ideas found in Greek philosophy proved very helpful indeed, as may be seen in the writings of the early Church fathers, Hegel claims. (And indeed some of those fathers of the Church did in fact ‘Platonize,’ as may be seen, for example, in the writings of Origen.) In this, Hegel coolly remarks, “whether a Christian doctrine is stated exactly so in the Bible… is not the only question. The letter kills, the spirit makes alive.” Thus “the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) ultimately established a fixed confession of faith, to which we still adhere: this confession had not, indeed, a speculative form, but the profoundly speculative is most intimately interwoven with the manifestation of Christ Himself,” in yet another synthesis. In the Nicene Creed we see “the profoundest thought… united with the form of Christ, with the historical and external; and precisely this is the grandeur of the Christian religion, that, with all this profundity, it is easy to comprehend by our consciousness in its outward aspect, while at the same time, it summons us to deeper penetration.” The reader will be struck by the way in which Hegel seeks to settle the modern Enlightenment’s challenge to Christianity, assigning fully rational content to Christianity while preserving the ‘popular’ character of both Christian and Enlightenment evangelizing. As Strauss formulates the matter, “Hegel wishes to make reason sovereign, and therefore the full knowledge of God, the perfect knowledge of God, must be accessible to reason.” [5]

If the ‘thesis’ of Christian life in the Roman world is the relation of the congregation to that world, and the ‘antithesis’ to that world is Church doctrine (itself however a synthesis of Eastern religion and Western philosophy), the synthesis is the church itself, “not merely a religion as opposed to another religion, but… at the same time secular existence beside secular existence.” “The pious conversion must not remain concealed in the recesses of the heart, but must be turned into an actual, present world, behaving in accordance with the purpose of that absolute spirit.” The Church must organize itself; the Kingdom of God on earth must have a regime of its own. It must have rulers of a sort, “overseers who are distinguished for talents, character, fervor of piety, a holy life, learning, and culture generally.” As teachers of the truth they have discovered they “are distinguished from the congregation as such, as the knowledgeable and governing are distinguished from the governed.” Church officials, one might say, thus anticipate the formation of the modern bureaucracy of scientific administration.  “In the overseership the spirit is existing-for-itself and self-conscious” as an “authority in spiritual as well as in secular matters, an authority for the truth and for the relations of the subject regarding the truth, in order, namely, that the individual conduct himself in accordance with the truth” within this “regime of authority.” The spiritual kingdom thereby “assumed the shape of an ecclesiastical one,” self-governing with regard its members and its property. “Priestly ordination… soon changes this democracy into aristocracy; this notwithstanding, the further development of the church does not belong to the period now under consideration,” but will be seen in the Germanic world.

In Christianity, “the absolute idea of God, in its truth, attained consciousness, in which man likewise in terms of his true nature, which is given in the specific contemplation of the Son, finds himself taken up.” As a result, man “has his true home in a suprasensorial world, an infinite inwardness, gained only by a rupture with natural existence and volition, and by his labor to break them within himself. This is religious self-consciousness.” In addition to the founding and articulation of the Church, this self-consciousness has several practical, moral results. “First, under Christianity slavery is impossible; for man now is man viewed in his general nature in God; each individual is an object of the grace of God and of the divine final purpose.” “Man, precisely simply as man, has infinite value; and this infinite value abolishes all particularity attaching to birth or country.” Second, “humanity has this sphere of free spirituality in and for itself, and everything else must proceed from it.” This means that Greek freedom, which consists of “happiness and genius,” must be eschewed for the life of agapic love. Dependence and subordination, whether seen in slavery or in consulting oracles, must be abandoned for relations animated by that love, by goodwill. Man decides things for himself, guided by the spirit within himself. In this, Hegel’s Christianity anticipates Kant’s eschewal of ‘eudaimonic’ morality, aiming at happiness, for purity of the will.

Hegel rejects “the opposition between reason and religion, as also between religion and the world.” For ‘his’ Christianity, these are real distinctions, but not antitheses. “Reason in general is the essence of spirit, divine as well as human. The distinction between religion and the world is only this—that religion as such is reason in the heart—that it is a temple of represented truth and freedom in God; the state, on the other hand, following the selfsame reason, is a temple of human freedom in the knowledge and will of reality, the content of which may itself be called divine.” Religion preserves and confirms religion in the state, which implements the moral law which “constitutes the fundamental principle of religion.” History then amounts to the manifestation of religion as human reason, then instantiated by taking “the religious principle which dwells in the heart of man” and producing it as “secular freedom,” removing “the discord between the inner life of the heart and the actual world.” That would be the work of the Germans, not the Romans. As the Roman, Western, portion of the empire declined and fell, the Byzantine, Eastern portion remained. But it proved a wrong turn, albeit a long one.

Respecting Christianity, Byzantium contrasted instructively with the West. In both regions, Christianity “was now a political power,” animating states. But in Byzantium Christianity came into a society already civilized, with a complete and indeed impressive system of civil law which found its full expression in the Justinian Code. “Here the Christian religion [was] placed in the midst of a developed civilization, which did not proceed from it.” In the barbarian West, however, the Germanic peoples had no culture to speak of; “all culture had to start from scratch.”

One might expect the East to do better, but not so. Byzantium rather “exhibits to us a thousand-year-long series of uninterrupted crimes, weaknesses, basenesses, and lack of character, a most repulsive and consequently a most uninteresting picture.” Christianity was “abstract” there; “powerless, just because it [was] so pure and spiritual in itself,” issuing at its best in a culture of monasticism. “It is a common notion and saying, in reference to the power of religion as such over the hearts of men, that if Christian love were universal, both private and political life would be perfect.” This is wrong. The purest conscience will be assaulted by “all the passions and desires.” “In order that heart, will, intelligence may become true, they must be thoroughly trained; what is right must become custom, habit; practical activity must be elevated to rational action; the state must have a rational organization, and then at length does the will of individuals become a truly righteous one. Light shining in darkness may perhaps give color, but not a picture animated by the spirit.” In Hegel’s view, then, the traditional understanding of the action of the Holy Spirit on individual souls isn’t enough; only the all-pervading Absolute Spirit can thoroughly inform human life, as indeed was the case from very nearly the beginning, with the founding and development of the ecclesia.

The Byzantine state’s organization and legal system was never “reconstructed in harmony” with the principle of the Christian religion, which therefore remained confined mostly to the monasteries. The various Christian doctrinal disputes that arose in Byzantium (the Iconoclasm Controversy most memorably) were agitated by “the lawless mob,” pitting “popular license” against “courtly baseness” in “violent civil wars” featuring “murder, conflagration, and pillage, perpetrated in the cause of Christian dogmas.” In A.D. 1453 “the vigorous Turks” crushed the whole “rotten edifice.”

 

Notes

1. Strauss contrasts the myth of Romulus and Remus at some length, making two main observations. He first contrasts the story of Rome’s founding with the Biblical account of the founding of the first city. Romulus and Cain both commit fratricide. But “the story of Romulus and Remus is told by the Romans about their own city,” whereas the story of Cain and Abel is told from ‘outside’ the city so founded. This leads to a second observation: in Hegel’s opinion, the story of Romulus and Remus ranks as “true historical evidence”—not of the events related in the story itself but of the Romans. “A nation which can tell this story about its own origin thereby reveals its soul,” as Strauss puts it. “Where in the world do you find a nation which has given such a terrible account of its own origins? Hegel says to us, and I think here rightly, that this is most important for understanding them.” Strauss goes on to say that Plutarch (quite subtly) and Cicero more explicitly rate the Greeks higher than the Romans when it comes to both morality and culture. “So in other words, the general assertion of Hegel has very good foundations.”
2. Hegel and Montesquieu share at least two sources: Livy and Machiavelli. They share with one another the judgment that Roman warlike valor needed to be supplemented, if not entirely replaced, by the ‘modern’ ethos of commerce, as commended by Locke and, before him, Hobbes. They depart from one another in their treatment of Christianity, which Montesquieu frequently regards with irony, while Hegel incorporates it into his own system, if in terms no orthodox Christian would accept.
3. Strauss remarks, “I wonder whether that is literally true, because there were all kinds of oracles and things going on with Romulus,” as reported by Livy. Hegel’s interpretation “is rather the interpretation of Rome given by Machiavelli”; he may have “seen Rome through the eyes of Machiavelli.”
4. Strauss observes that such private persons would be called “bourgeois” by Rousseau, who contrasted bourgeois man with the citizen. “Rousseau’s distinction was taken up by Hegel and then transformed by Marx.” The bourgeois is “the man who does not fight for his country, who is not a citizen and has no participation in government, is a mere property-owning subject and devoid of all public spirit.”
5. Strauss disputes the suggestion made by one of his students, that the Lectures amount to an attempt to “give a philosophy to the masses.” “I would assume that Hegel had some reticence,” Strauss replies, “but much less than earlier philosophers, and he in a way rejects the principle of reticence. When he discusses the question of the esoteric and exoteric teaching—as he does in his lectures on the history of philosophy—he simply rejects that. He doesn’t wish to have anything to do with it. And I think Hegel and his contemporary Schleiermacher were more responsible than any other individuals for the fact that the distinction between esoteric and exoteric has ceased to be of any importance.”

G. W. F. Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Ruben Alvarado translation. Wordbridge: 2011.

Paul Franco, ed.:  Leo Strauss on Hegel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

 

Note: This is the third of a series of five essays on Hegel’s Lectures, essays informed by transcripts of classes conducted by Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago in 1965.

 

In Part II of the Lectures Hegel considers ancient Greece, telling his students that “among the Greeks we feel ourselves immediately at home, for we are on the soil of spirit,” a soil modern Germans now occupy, a soil where they have flourished. Recalling that he’d compared the Greek world to “the period of adolescence,” he clarifies his metaphor, saying what he does and does not mean by that. He doesn’t mean it “in the sense that youth bears within it a serious, anticipative destiny”; he means that “youth does not yet present the activity of work, does not yet exert itself for a definite intelligent aim, but rather exhibits a concrete freshness of the soul’s life,” a life in which the senses and the spirit blend in “youthful freshness,” “spiritual vitality.” The youth aspires, newly self-conscious and aiming at self-cultivation, the enhancement of his individuality through the institutions of state, family, law, and religion. The adult, by contrast, “devotes his life to labor for an objective aim, which he pursues consistently, even at the cost of his individuality.” Hegel artfully selects Achilles, “the Homeric youth of the Trojan War,” and brilliant, brave Alexander, with his “beautiful humanity and individuality,” as the alpha and the omega of the Greek world—Achilles “the ideal youth of poetry,” world-conquering Alexander “the ideal youth of reality,” indeed, “the freest and finest individuality that the real world has ever produced.” [1]

Hegel divides Greek history into three periods: the first, often called the Heroic Age, “that of becoming of real individuality”; the second, Hellenic Age, “that of its independence and prosperity as conquest outward”; the third, Hellenistic Age, “the period of its decline and fall, and its encounter with” Rome, its successor in “world-history.” Greece as we know it began with a synthesis of the Greeks themselves with foreign migrants and invaders. These elements were united by an education which combined “its forces to produce its real and proper vigor.” Greece flourishes in military victory and commercial prosperity. But these very advances, in “direct[ing] its energies outward,” caused it to abandon “its purposes at home”; further, the defeat of its enemies opened Greece to “internal dissension,” bringing on its decline. Greece then faced ruin and conquest by Rome. “The same process, it may be stated once for all, will meet us in the life of every world-historical people.”

Accordingly, Hegel also divides his lectures on Greece into three parts: “The Elements of the Greek Spirit”; “The Shapes of Beautiful Individuality” (itself divided into three sections); and “The Fall of the Greek Spirit.” In Greece, “the condition of being submerged in nature is abrogated, and therefore the massiveness of geographical relations has also vanished,” as it could not have done in ancient Asia, and had not yet done in modern Asia by Hegel’s lifetime. The geography of Greece conduced to this abrogation because its “soil in manifold ways spread[s] across the sea”—a peninsula with innumerable inlets and offshore islands. Without a major river and thus without a major valley plain, the “divided and manifold character” of the land “perfectly corresponds with the varied life of Greek races and the flexibility of the Greek spirit.” Greeks were never “patriarchically united by a bond of nature, but realized a union first through another medium, in law and spiritual ethics”; “the Greek people became what it was,” especially because waves of foreigners settled there. “Only through such foreignness and through such supersession did the beautiful, free Greek spirit come into existence…. It is superficial folly to imagine that a beautiful and truly free life could arise from the simple development of a race remaining in its blood relationship and friendship.” Human beings advance with dialectic, with the clash of opposites.

What adaptation to foreigners does is what Greek geography does: shake a people out of settled customs, force them into the dialectic that drives history, as Hegel understands it. “Every world-historical people apart from the Asian empires, which stand outside the connection of world history, developed in this manner,” including the Romans. “Greece and its peoples were continuously on the move.” The Americans of Hegel’s time were quite different, having emigrated but not integrated with the aborigines; the Americans of subsequent decades, the Americans of the ‘melting pot,’ exemplified his teaching.

And then there was the sea. “The nature of their land brought them to this amphibious existence,” floating on the waves, then returning to port, “neither wandering about like the nomadic peoples nor stagnating like the peoples of the watercourses,” the riverfronts. Initially, the Greeks were pirates (“as we see from Homer”), but they later settled into a life of trade-voyaging. What settled them was the founding of small fortress-cities ruled by royal houses, “the nuclei of small towns.” These gave greater security to agriculture and “protected commercial intercourse against robbery.” Greece’s ‘Heroic Age’ saw no rule of law, as rulers derived authority from superiority “in riches, possessions, weaponry, and ancestry.” “Their subjects obeyed them” out of “the need, universally felt, of being held together, and of obeying a ruler accustomed to command, without envy and ill-will towards him.” Neither caste nor serfdom, neither patriarchy nor constitutional government prevailed. Authority derived from being “individually heroic, resting on personal merit”; such authority “does not continue long” but, it might be added, it formed the world of the Iliad and the Odyssey, substantial gifts to all subsequent generations of men.

The government of the royal council paralleled that of the Olympian Pantheon. There was mutual respect between the king and his courtiers, “but each one of them has his own will.” The Greeks united against their common enemy during the Trojan War, but only temporarily. Individuality was too strong for that. As for relations between the rulers and the people, there existed “no actual ethical bond connecting them.” As in the Greek tragedies, “the people is the chorus, passive, deedless; the heroes perform the deeds and incur the consequent responsibility. There is nothing in common between them; the people have no directing power, but only appeal to the gods.” Such regimes could not endure. Once royalty had done what needed to be done—primarily, securing their peoples from violence foreign and domestic—”it rendered itself superfluous.” “A calmer state of things,” with less immigration but no “united undertaking” prevailed under the conquering dynasty of the Heraclids. Eventually, the people rose to greater authority, and since industry in the modern sense didn’t exist and all wealth was landed wealth, only colonization could preserve “some degree of equality among the citizens.” Where colonization proved an inadequate remedy, tyrants took over.

By the time of Cyrus the Great “we see the various [Greek] states now displaying their particular character” and, simultaneously, we see “the formation of the distinct Greek spirit” pervading all the many states. With no overall despotism or indeed any other national regime, “men’s attention is more largely directed to themselves, and to the extension of their slight powers,” “thrown back on their inner spirit and cautiously circumspect.” They perceived nature acutely while “showing boldness and independent vigor in contending with it.” They wondered at nature, conjecturing about it; in this, Aristotle’s remark that philosophy begins with wonder means that Greece had proved hospitable to the initiation of the philosophic quest, even if it also felt threatened by it to the extent of killing philosophers. Greeks responded to nature as they had done to most foreigners—not as “something given” but as something “which is friendly to the human spirit, and to which it may sustain a positive relation,” something to which one might both adapt to and adapt to oneself. “The natural,” like the foreign, “holds its place in their minds only after undergoing some transformation by spirit, not immediately. Man regards nature only as an excitement to his faculties”—a dialectical excitement—”and only that which he makes spiritual from it can have any influence over him”; one thinks of Plato’s Ideas.

Strauss emphasizes Hegel’s interest in Greek religion. To those who reply that religion consists only of myths, “Hegel would say: Are not such myths much more revealing about human beings than chronicles about income, the revenues of kings, or maybe victories and defeats? That is not a bad point.” In religion, Hegel proposes, “the position of curious surmise, of attentive eagerness to catch the meaning of nature, is indicated to us in the comprehensive idea of Pan.” Pan “is the general shiver in the silence of the forests”—not representative of “an objective whole, but [of] that indefinite ground which likewise is connected with the element of the subjective.” You can hear him playing his pipe, but you only glimpse him in the shadows; you fear him just enough to want to imagine and explain him, or hear such an imagining and explanation from the Muses. “Nature answered the questions which the Greek put to her; this is true in the sense that he answered the questions of nature from his own spirit,” a “purely poetical” form of contemplation whereby “spirit supplies the signification which the natural image expresses.”

Hence also Pallas-Athene. When Achilles thinks of drawing his sword against King Agamemnon, it is the goddess of “wisdom or consideration” who restrains him. “Such an explanation denotes the perception of the inner meaning, the sense, the underlying truth; and the poets, especially Homer, were in this way the teachers of the Greeks,” adding “a richly intelligent perception” to their poetry, never letting imagination ‘run wild’ as the “capricious indulgence of fancy.” In this the Greek spirit lives “free from superstition, since it changes the sensuous into the sensible—the intellectual—so that [particular] decisions are derived from spirit.” Thus in Hegelian-historicist terms the Greeks “evolved the spiritual from the materials which they had received” (emphasis added). Hegel never supposes that the arts came down to the Greeks from the gods, as the Greeks themselves believed.

Fundamentally, the Greek spirit is a free spirit, “conditioned by,” and with “an essential relation to, some stimulus supplied by nature,” but transforming that stimulus, ‘making something out of it.’ “This phase of the spirit is the medium between the loss of individuality on the part of man (such as we observe in the Asiatic principle, in which the spiritual and divine exists only under a natural form), and infinite subjectivity as pure certainty of itself—the position that the ‘I’ is the ground of all that can lay claim to substantial existence.” Within the Greek’s individuality, the subject, “the same harmony is produced,” as “heart, disposition, passion, temperament” all develop “into free individuality.” “This stamps the Greek character as that of beautiful individuality, which is produced by spirit, transforming the merely natural into an expression of its own being”—”the spirit of the plastic artist, forming the stone into a work of art.” Greek art integrates forms into coherent wholes, unlike Egyptian art, which jams the head of a man onto the body of a lion. Greeks know themselves as free in their artistry, but also think of their art as an embodiment of the “innate essence” of the material with which they work—never as pure human creation. The Greek artist “feels calm in contemplating” the products of his spirit, whether they are statues, edifices, or the laws of the state. In this he is “not only free in himself, but possessing the consciousness of his freedom; thus the honor of the human is engulfed in the honor of the divine. Men honor the divine in and for itself, but at the same time as their deed, their production, their existence; thus the divine receives its honor through the respect paid to the human, and the human in virtue of the honor paid to the divine.”

Beautiful individuality “realizes itself” through the subjective work of art, “the culture of the man himself”; through the objective work of art, “the shaping of the world of divinities”; and through the political work of art, “the form of the constitution [regime], and the relations of the individuals who compose it.” For his part, Strauss remarks that “Hegel is perhaps more responsible than anyone else” for the claim that “aesthetics is concerned with the beautiful in art and not with the beautiful simply.” For the Greeks themselves, “a living horse is more beautiful than a beautifully sculptured horse which has no life,” but “for Hegel it is the opposite. The sculptured horse is higher in rank than the living horse.” “For Plato and Aristotle, somehow the true and beautiful coincide on the highest level, the ideas,” and human beings find their place within the all-encompassing beauty of the cosmos. But “for Hegel, the true is radically distinguished from the beautiful and higher than it”; the true consists of the Absolute Spirit, which encompasses the cosmos, produces the cosmos, and reshapes the cosmos through the spiritual agency of itself in man. “The difference truly is this: for Aristotle, the fundamental distinction which is underlying this discussion is that between nature and convention, and for Hegel it is that between nature and mind” or spirit (Geist).

Having identified and described the elements of the Greek spirit, Hegel has prepared the ground for his second and most elaborately articulated topic, “the shapes of beautiful individuality,” the forms that spirit made. There were three, as indicated: subjective, objective, and political.

In its subjective dimension spirit confronts objects. “Man with his necessities sustains a practice in relation to external nature, and because he makes it satisfy his desires and exhausts it, he has recourse to means…. In order to subdue [natural objects], man introduces other natural agents, and thus turns nature against itself, and invents instruments for that purpose.” Thus far, Bacon. The Hegelian dimension comes in only when he adds, “human inventions belong to spirit, and such an instrument is to be respected more than a mere natural object for that reason.” Although not vain, the Greeks did subdue nature to “gain special distinction and consequent enjoyment,” quite apart from their desire for security. “Free as a bird singing in the air, man only expresses what lies in his untrammeled human nature, in order through such expression to prove himself and gain recognition”—the struggle for which stands at the core of Hegelian morality. Such freedom and desire for recognition extended to sport, to the Olympic Games, a dialectic of bodies wherein “man shows his freedom, viz., that he has transformed his body into an organ of spirit.”

Respecting the objects produced by the spirit of the plastic artist, Hegel directs his students’ attention to the religious dimension of Greek art. Indian artists represent a god as “some power of nature for which the human shape supplies only an outward form.” Greek artists attempt to represent the divine itself; the “essence” of their art-works “is the spiritual itself.” True, “the divinity of the Greeks is not yet the absolute, free spirit, but spirit in a particular mode, fettered by the limitations of humanity—still dependent as a determinate individuality on external conditions.” In plain language, he means that the Greek gods were represented as individual human figures—the Venus de Milo. “Individualities, objectively beautiful, are the gods of the Greeks.” The spirit is “not yet regarded as itself spirit which is for itself, but which is there, still manifesting itself sensorially, but so that the sensorial is not its substance, but is only an element of its manifestation.” The advance on Asian art is that for the Greeks the natural is “merely the point of departure” in a line of thought that aims at matters of the spirit. “The Greek gods in themselves express what they are. The eternal repose and clear intelligence that dignifies the head of Apollo is not a symbol but the expression in which spirit manifests itself, and shows itself present.”

In terms of mythology, “the reduction of nature” to a place subordinate to the spirit was expressed “as the war of the gods, the overthrow of the Titans by the race of Zeus,” which Hegel understands as “the transition from the Oriental to the Occidental spirit.” Greeks thereby moved from the “merely natural, nature itself,” to the Olympian spirit of “the new divinities, who embody a spiritual import and themselves are spirit.” The Greeks continue to venerate nature, but as a thing subordinate to spirit. Their “new gods retain natural elements, and consequently a determinate relation to the powers of nature” (‘Zeus cloud-gatherer,’ as they call him). However, Zeus is also “the political god, the protector of the ethical and of hospitality,” a gatherer of human beings under the spirit of Greekness and indeed of humanity. Hegel esteems Apollo even more; he is “the prophesying and discerning god, light that makes everything clear,” the “healer and strengthener” and destroyer, too; “he himself is pure,” having “no wife” and careening into no “disgusting adventures, like Zeus.” He sings; he dances; he partakes in the arts. ‘On the distaff side,’ as the Greeks would say, Artemis replaces Cybele; this “chaste huntress and destroyer of wild beasts” effects another instance of the “change of the natural into the spiritual.” “This transformation of the natural into the spiritual is the Greek spirit itself.” Although “the abstract understanding cannot comprehend this blending of the natural with the spiritual,” Hegelian dialectic, founded upon immanence not creationism, encompasses it. [2]

And like Greece itself, the Olympian Pantheon cannot be understood as “a system.” Zeus “perhaps” rules the other gods, “but not with real force, so that they are left free in their peculiarity,” their individuality, just as the Greek city-states are both Greek and particular, identifiably themselves. Given “the scatteredness of the origin of Greek life,” Athens and Sparta are both recognizably Greek, but no one would confuse them. “That higher thing, the knowledge of unity as God, the One Spirit, was not yet known to the Greeks.” “The local gods stand alone,” “conditioned by the particular consciousness and circumstances of the areas in which they appear,” in this respect similar to the Indian gods and, looking forward, the Catholic saints.

But what (Nietzsche will demand) of Dionysus? Hegel knows. “A second source of origin of particularities is natural religion,” the “Mysteries.” “These mysteries of the Greeks present something which, as unknown, has attracted the curiosity of all times, under the supposition of profound wisdom.” Hegel doubts that there was much profundity in the Mysteries. “The mysteries were rather antique rituals”—”sensorial usages and exhibitions, consisting of symbols of the universal operations of nature,” such as eclipses. “It is as unhistorical as it is foolish to assume that profound philosophical truths are to be found there.” The mysteries amounted to the Greeks’ acknowledgment of “the universal vital force and its metamorphoses,” perceived with “shuddering awe” because they are “an element alien to the pure clear forms, and threaten them with destruction.” “On this account, the gods of art remain separated from the gods of the mysteries, and the two spheres must be strictly dissociated.” Hegel leaves no doubt as to ‘whose’ side he’s on. In his non-rationalist variety of vitalism, Nietzsche will seek more balance, always at the risk of overbalancing on the side of vital chaos.

Hegel applauds Greek anthropomorphism. “Man as the spiritual constitutes the element of truth in the Greek gods, which rendered them superior to all nature-gods and all abstractions of the one and highest being.” However, they “must not be regarded as more human than the Christian God.” In living, suffering, and dying, Jesus is “infinitely more human than the humanity of the Greek idea of the beautiful.” To put it in Burke’s terms, Jesus, and humanity, are not only beautiful but also sublime. What the Greeks did see, however, was that “if God is to manifest Himself, His naturalness must be that of spirit, which for sensorial conception is essentially man; for no other form can manifest itself as spiritual.” A ‘sacred cow’ makes no sense, because cows have neither speech nor reason. [3]

Hegel then asks, “Must God manifest Himself?” Yes, because “there is nothing essential that does not manifest himself.” (In this Hegel shows himself a child of the Enlightenment, although he proves in some way a rebellious child.) “The real defect of the Greek religion, as compared with the Christian, is, therefore, that in the former the manifestation constitutes the highest mode, in fact the entirety, of the divine being, while in the Christian religion, the manifestation is regarded only as a moment of the divine,” as Christ lives His life as human, dies, and then “elevates Himself to glory.” “The Greek god, by contrast, exists for his worshipers perennially in the manifestation—only in marble, in metal or wood, or as figured by the imagination.” This was so because in Greece “man was not duly estimated, did not obtain honor and dignity, till he had more fully elaborated and developed himself in the attainment of the freedom implicit in the aesthetic manifestation in question; the form and shaping of the divinity therefore continued to be the product of a particular subject.” The Greeks “did not yet realize spirit in its generality.” “Only the inward spirit, certain in itself, can bear to dispense with the aspect of appearance, and has the security to trust one of these, the divine nature” (emphasis added), rather than several of its many aspects, as Greek polytheism does. “Subjectivity was not comprehended in all its depth by the Greek spirit”; “the human spirit was not yet absolutely legitimized.” [4] This is why the Greeks believed that even their gods, spirit manifest, were ruled by fate, which could be known only by means of consulting oracles. They did not understand, as Hegel contends, that all is spirit, that spirit is absolute, not fate. Again, Nietzsche will deny this, and insist on a core of fatum within himself, as an individual. Nietzsche re-valorizes the Greek tragedians.

The final work of Greek art, its architectonic or masterwork, was political. “The state unites the two phases just considered,” namely, the subjective and objective work of art. Neither “a mere object, like the deities” of Greece, nor “merely subjectively developed to a beautiful physique,” the state is both “a living, universal spirit” and “the self-conscious spirit of the single individuals” who live within it as citizens. The East saw despotic regimes, as befits its naturalism, its unfreedom. The West, beginning with Greece, sees democracy, wherein “the freedom of the individual exists but has not yet advanced to the degree of abstraction whereby the subject depends simply upon the substantial, the state as such,” in the form of a modern, centralized bureaucracy or administration. By contrast, Rome, while not yet bureaucratic, will see “a harsh rule dominating” individuals—reestablishing centralization although not sliding back into Oriental despotism. Germany will see constitutional monarchy, “in which the individual participates and is co-active not only in the monarch but in the entire monarchical organization,” the administrative state.

To break from Asian political practice, however, Greeks needed to establish democracy, with its laws, with consciousness of “legal and ethical foundation,” with its genuinely political life, which Aristotle would describe as ruling and being ruled as distinguished from ‘one-way’ or ‘top-down despotic rule. The patriarchs of the Homeric Age gave way to the lawgivers—the Seven Sages, including Solon of Athens. The sagacity of the Seven Sages encompassed no real science; their wisdom was prudential; “they were practical politicians,” not philosopher-kings or scientific administrators. As always in Hegel, Greek ethics should not be confused with morality: “As in beauty, the natural element is present in its sensorialness, so also is it present” in the customary, objective nature of Greek law, custom presented “in the manner of natural necessity.” In this as in all things, “the Greeks remain in the midst of beauty and have not attained the higher standpoint of truth.” “No principle has as yet manifested itself, which can contravene such willing custom”—for the Greeks wholeheartedly, ‘subjectively,’ affirm their customs—”and hinder its realizing itself in action.” As with the gods, so with customs; for the Greeks they are real insofar as they are manifest, insofar as they appear, in both senses of the term. Hegel contrasts this with “modern conceptions of democracy,” which involve appeals to such foundational justifications as the common good, interests of state, and so on.

But in Greece, “that very subjective freedom”—the moral concept of the good will—”which is the principle and characteristic form of freedom in our world, which forms the absolute basis of our state and religious life, could not manifest itself in Greece otherwise than as ruination.” The Greeks “had no conscience” in our sense of the term; “with them was predominant the habit of living for their country without further reflection.” To reflect upon the goodness of custom was to undermine it. Hence the Athenians’ hostility to Socrates and also to the sophists, who preceded Socrates in their practice of reflecting upon custom, of suggesting reforms, of encouraging individuals to ‘think for themselves’ “even in defiance of the existing constitution” or regime. “Each has his principles, and as he so opines, so is he also convinced, that this is the best and must be fancied as reality.” For Greece, then, morality was corrupting. It diluted the authority of lawgiving sages and the laws they gave. “As soon as any of these great men had performed what was needed, envy intruded, which is to say, the feeling of equality with regard to special talent—and he was either imprisoned or exiled.”

There were, moreover, “three other circumstances” limiting Greek freedom, constraining its further development. First, the aforementioned consultation of oracles, the attempt to know what ‘fate’ decreed, prevailed in public and private. This practice eroded over time, but since no overarching or general spirit replaced it the people were left with “their individual convictions” as the basis for “forming their decisions,” leading to “corruption, disorder, and an ongoing process of change in the constitution.”

Then there was slavery, “a necessary condition” of what Hegel calls “aesthetic democracy,” meaning, a regime in which citizens must be freed from the lower, ‘vulgar’ “handicraft occupations” so as to participate in the free-spirit higher art of giving laws to themselves and setting policies for their city. “Slavery does not cease until the will is reflected infinitely in itself, until right is conceived as appertaining to every freeman, and the term freeman is regarded as a synonym for man in his generic nature as endowed with reason.” But the Greeks, as Hegel has already remarked, remained at the level of ethics, not yet at the level of morality.

Finally, “such democratic constitutions” as the Greeks fashioned “are possible only in small states,” city-states in which “the interests of all” can “be similar.” Large empires—the alternative to city-states in antiquity—always feature such “diverse and conflicting interests” as preclude a democratic regime. In antiquity, democracy meant citizens who were fully citizens, men who personally voted to frame laws and set policies, but more, men who “see each other daily,” making “a common culture” possible, “a living democracy.” [5] “In a large empire, a general canvas might be made, votes might be gathered in the several communities, and the results reckoned up—as was done by the French convention. But a political existence of this kind is destitute of life, and the world dissolves and departs into a paper-world,” into what we would call a ‘virtual reality,’ one none too virtuous in either the classical or even the Machiavellian sense. What goes for the ancient empire goes for the large modern state, as well. It is too big for true democracy. “In the French Revolution, therefore, the republican constitution never actually became a democracy; tyranny, despotism, raised its voice under the mask of freedom and equality.” Hegel might even have viewed the decidedly more sensible tenth Federalist doubtfully, had he read it. For modernity, he prefers the administrative state under a constitutional monarchy, and his disciples in America, the Progressives, in effect have also preferred that regime to the American one.

Because the Absolute Spirit evolves dialectically, Hegel scarcely will rest content with analysis. He historicizes, by which he means not only putting Greece ‘in its context’ but narrating the course of Greek events—albeit philosophically, that is, in light of that dialectic. The next phase of Greek political and cultural history was marked by a great change or kinēsis, the Persian Wars. In “the first period” of its development “the Greek spirit attain[ed] its aesthetic development and reach[ed] maturity,” its ‘being,’ in the second phase that spirit was “revealed,” “mak[ing] itself into a work for the world, assert[ing] its principle with an antagonistic force,” in which dialectical struggle for recognition it triumphed. In its conflict with Persia, with the East, with old Asia, Greece “exhibited itself,” revealed itself, “in its most glorious aspect.” In spite of their disunion, the Greek city-states united to defeat the Persians on the element the Greeks had mastered, the sea, wrecking the Persian fleet at Salamis. “Thus was Greece freed from the burden which threatened to overwhelm it. But not only Greece: “Greater battles, unquestionably, have been fought” than those Herodotus (the first historian) recounts. But the battles of the Persian War “live immortal, not in the historical records of nations only, but also of science and of art.” The Greek ships were superior instruments of war; Greek politics proved superior to Persian despotism. “These are world-historical victories; they were the salvation of culture and spiritual vigor, and they rendered the Asiatic principle powerless.” “Oriental despotism—a world united under one lord and sovereign—on the one side, and separate states—insignificant in extent and resources, but animnated by free individuality—on the other side, stood face to face. Never in history has the superiority of spiritual force over material bulk—and that of no contemptible amount—been made so gloriously manifest.” The West defeated the East, and continued to defeat it, up to Hegel’s day and to this, as (for example) such vast cultures as Japan, China and India have scrambled to ‘modernize’ themselves and even to assert hegemony in Asia and (in Japan and China’s case) throughout the world. Additionally and far from trivially, it would have been impossible for the young Germans listening to Hegel to overlook the analogy between ancient Greece and modern Germany, then divided into more than thirty small states. Hegel’s Prussia aspired to their unification, especially against neighboring France— long unified, but with political tendencies Hegel and his students alike considered unacceptable, incompatible with the conditions of the modern, centralized state.

Triumphant, Greece remained fundamentally divided, most importantly between its two major ‘powers,’ Athens and Sparta, to which Hegel next turns. As “a sanctuary for the inhabitants of the other areas of Greece,” Athens had “a very mixed population,” and consequently “much dissension,” especially between the old, wealthy families and the new, poorer ones. “The polity of the state was wavering between aristocracy and democracy” until Solon’s regime balanced the few and the many by forming a popular assembly for “deliberation and decision on public affairs” while reserving the offices for the few. Soon a tyrant took over, as the “constitution” or regime had “not yet entered into the blood and life of the community,” not yet “become the habit of ethical and civil existence.” Fortunately (and as optimists now hope Mr. Putin is doing in Russia), Pisistratus and his sons “repress[ed] the power of great families and factions, to accustom them to order and peace, but to accustom the citizens generally to the Solonian legislation. This being accomplished, that rule was necessarily regarded as superfluous, and the laws of freedom enter[ed] into conflict with the power of the Pisistratidae,” who were exiled. The democratic and aristocratic factions then revived, but the democrats gradually gained ascendancy, an ascendancy marked by the rise of Pericles. This “light-minded but highly refined and cultivated people” could tolerate no ruler but a man who evinced the character of one “thoroughly noble” and “intent upon the weal of the state,” superior to his fellow-citizens “in native genius and acquired knowledge.” Characteristically, the Athenian Greeks respected well-developed individuality: “In terms of the power of individuality, no statesman can be compared with him.” [6]

“As a general principle, the democratic constitution affords the widest scope for the development of great political characters,” as it enables them not only “to assert their talent” and indeed “require[es] them to do so.” Athens saw “a vital freedom” combined with “a vital equality of manners and spiritual culture”; even property, necessarily unequal, wasn’t very unequal. “The predominant elements of Athenian existence were the independence of the individuals and a culture animated by the spirit of beauty,” seen in Pericles’ patronage of the arts and his orations, the great tragic and comic dramatists, the historian Thucydides, and the philosophers Socrates and Plato. Industry, excitability, and the development of individuality, all “within the sphere of a custom-oriented spirit,” animated Athenian flourishing. (“The blame with which we find them visited in Xenophon and Plato attaches rather to that later period when misfortune and the corruption of the democracy had already supervened.”) At its height, the great Pericles ruled as “the Zeus of the human Pantheon of Athens” in “a state whose existence was essentially directed to realizing the beautiful, which had a thoroughly cultivated consciousness respecting the serious side of public affairs and the interests of man’s spirit and life, and united with that consciousness hardy courage and practical ability”—as indeed Pericles himself said of his city in his Funeral Oration.

To the Athenian ‘thesis’ the Spartans posed an ‘antithesis’ of “rigid abstract virtue, a life devoted to the state but in which the activity and freedom of individuality are put in the background,” a state “whose object [was] a lifeless equality rather than free movement.” In Sparta, slavery was far more severe than in Athens, as the Athenians “had a family life” and many of their slaves were household servants, whereas the Spartans, who “disparaged family life” and dined in common messes, segregated the Helots, using them as training dummies for young soldiers and on occasion as soldiers when needed to fight especially formidable enemies. (“On their return” from such wars “they were butchered in the most cowardly and insidious way,” treated as enemies themselves, despite their forced service to Sparta.)

Although the lawgiver, Lycurgus, had divided the land equally among the citizens, this equality couldn’t be maintained, even though the land could not be sold. Daughters inherited, and shrewd families married strategically, amassing substantial tracts, “as if to show how foolish it is to attempt a forced equality, an attempt which, while ineffective in realizing its professed object, is also destructive of a most essential point of liberty, the free disposition of property.” (Thus does Hegel refute Marxism avant la lettre.)

Politically, Hegel classifies Sparta as democratic at its foundation but so modified as to make it “almost an aristocracy and oligarchy.” With two kings, a senate/court “chosen from the best men of the state,” a “council of the kings,” and finally the ephors, who enjoyed “full authority to convoke popular assemblies, to put resolutions to the vote, and to propose laws”—powers they came to deploy tyrannically, “like that which Robespierre and his party exercised for a time in France.” In “their intercourse at home, they were, on the whole, honorable,” but perfidious respecting foreigners. Their overall way of life “directed their entire attention to the state”; consequently, they “were not at home with intellectual culture, art and science.”

In the Peloponnesian War these regimes collided in an especially spectacular instance of Hegelian dialectic. “Greek ethics had made Hellas incapable of forming one common state; for the dissociation of small states from each other, and the concentration in cities, where the interest and the spiritual culture pervading the whole could be identical, was the necessary condition of this freedom.” Instead of union by consent, states struggled for hegemony. Hegel defines corruption as “inwardness become free for itself” in the form of thought, or what we now call ‘critical thought,” morality endangering custom or ethics. This corruption “lies in the principle of Greek freedom, because it is freedom that thought must become free for itself,” whether it be thought in the form of science, sophistry (which Hegel elides with rhetoric), or philosophy. The sophists were especially threatening. “For all questions they had an answer; for all interests of a political or religious order they had general points of view; and the further development of this consisted in the ability to prove everything and to find a justifying aspect in everything.” (In sum, the sophists anticipated Hegel.)

Unlike Hegel, however, the sophists taught that ‘man is the measure of all things,’ by which they meant not man as the embodiment of spirit, but “man simply as subjective,” making “mere liking the principle of rights” and “advantage to the individual” the “ground of final appeal.” In modernity, they’d be called ‘relativists,’ and then as now “the doors were thrown wide open to all human passions” in the breeze of their speeches. There were also rationalist individualists, Socrates most prominently, in whom “the principle of inwardness, the absolute independence of thought in itself, attained free expression, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war.” Hegel calls Socrates “the inventor of morality,” the first who not only “wills and does what is right” but “has the consciousness of what he is doing.” In effect, he made himself an oracle, but an oracle who reasoned. As Strauss puts it, “”without being known, morality is not proof. To that extent, one can speak of an invention.” Under Socrates’ influence and that of his student, Plato, “many citizens now seceded from practical life, from state activities, to live in the ideal world,” causing a revolution in the Athenian state. In condemning him to death, “the Athenian people condemn[ed] its deadliest foe,” but tragically because they soon understood “that what they reprobated in Socrates had already struck firm root among themselves,” making them “just as guilty” or, alternatively, “just as much to be acquitted.” Understandably, they acquitted him, post-mortem, furthering the ruin of their own ethos. “In Sparta the same corruption [was] introduced, with the subject seeking to assert himself,” but there “we have merely the isolated side of particular subjectivity—corruption in its undisguised form, naked immorality, vulgar selfishness, avarice, venality,” most ruinously among the vaunted Spartan generals.

Sparta won the war, finding itself “universally hated” in Greece while now lacking the ethical strength to sustain its way of life. When the Spartans and the Phocians were cited by the weak Amphyictyonic Council—Strauss calls it the United Nations of its day—for violations of what the Romans would come to call the law of nations, both refused to pay the fine. Thebes took it upon themselves to punish the Phocians, “but by an egregious piece of violence,” desecrating the Temple at Delphi.” “This deed completed the ruin of Greece” by an act of deicide; “the last support of unity was thereby annihilated” and “reverence for that which Greece had been as it were the final arbiter—its monarchical principle, whether in the form of Zeus or of Fate—was displaced, insulted, and trodden under foot.”

A real monarch moved in to replace the monarchy-in-principle as, in Strauss’s words, “the powerlessness of Apollo was revealed by the act of the Phocians.” Once again, a foreigner arrived. But Philip of Macedon “undertook to avenge the violation of the oracle” by taking its place, “making himself lord of Greece.”  Philip served as the harsh precursor to the rule of his son, Alexander, who inherited Philip’s military force without inheriting his reputation for crime. He had the extra advantage of having been educated by Aristotle, “the deepest, and also the most comprehensive, thinker of antiquity.” (“It is hard to say who he regards as possibly competing in modern times with Aristotle,” Strauss interjects. “”Possibly himself.”) Aristotle purged Alexander of his “former bonds of opinion, crudity, and empty imagination,” leaving “this grand nature untrammeled as it was before his instructions commenced” but forming Alexander’s “genius-filled spirit” by opening it to “a deep perception of what the true is.” “Thus educated, Alexander placed himself at the head of the Hellenes, in order to lead Greece over into Asia,” to “avenge Greece for all that Asia had inflicted upon it for so many years, and to fight out at last the ancient feud and contest between the East and the West.” “He also made a return for the rudiments of culture which had come from the East by there spreading the maturity and culmination of culture, and restamped subjugated Asia into a Hellenic land.” Hegel does not hesitate to remark that Alexander died at the age of thirty-three—traditionally considered the age of Jesus Christ at His crucifixion. [7] As the youth Achilles began the Greek world, the youth Alexander concluded it, both “supply[ing] a picture of the fairest kind in their own persons” and “a complete and perfect type of the Greek being,” beautiful and young. Dying without an heir, Alexander nonetheless ruled the world, as “the Greek kingdoms that arose in Asia after him are his dynasty.”

Strauss bases a critique of Hegel on this last flourish. Hegel’s “general thesis is that history is rational; but in order to maintain this, Hegel is compelled, just as the Marxists are, to make a distinction between the essential and the accidental.” Hegel admits that there are accidents in history, insisting rather that the laws of historical progress govern overall trends, which unfold dialectically. “But the question is, of course, how to draw the line…. If Hegel sees that all the characteristic Greek institutions—slavery, oracles, republics, manyness of cities, the Homeric gods—are all forming an essential unity, then he is admirable. One would have to check to see that in each case the item is really true, but his ingenuity in finding this necessity is not only unsurpassed but unrivaled.” But when he gets down to such specific matters as the early deaths of Achilles and Alexander, the procedure becomes dubious. “Now in the case of Achilles at the beginning it makes some sense, because Achilles is a poetic figure and is therefore the work of the Greek mind. But the fact that Alexander died… at age 32 or 33, and to link this up with the workings of the world mind borders on superstition.” Hegel might reply, of course, that regarding Achilles and Alexander he intends only an apt symbolism, not an expression of historical law, but the question of how to draw the line remains.

Hegel expends little time on the third, Hellenistic Age, which saw “the fall of the Greek spirit.” Athens retained its status as “the center of the higher art and sciences, especially of philosophy and rhetoric,” in the ancient world. With the divinity that had pervaded Greek consciousness destroyed, the political particularity of Greece remained, a “repulsive peculiarity which obstinately and waywardly asserts itself, and which on that very account assumes a position of absolute dependence and of conflict with others.” Great individuals still arose—Plutarch gives us their portraits—but even the Macedonian dynasty lacked the strength to defend Greece against the all-conquering Romans.

 

Notes

1. Strauss observes that Hegel omits any discussion of Greek myths concerning the Underworld or “Netherworld.” He suggests that Hegel does so because many religions feature such a doctrine, whereas the Greeks were distinctive in having “the beautiful gods” in human shapes. (Strauss, p. 202) One might supplement this by remarking that the drab Greek Underworld of the dead weighed against Greek youthfulness and vitality, although one might argue that precisely because the Greeks felt life in this world to be sweet, no vale of tears, that their conception of the afterlife promised no charms.
2. For his part, Strauss emphasizes that the overthrow of the Titans by the Olympians meant that “the good and the ancestral” could no longer be equated. To the earliest Greeks, the good and the natural meant genesis, origin. But nature could no longer be conceived so simply. Aristotle would elaborate nature in terms of four ’causes,’ not just the one, genesis. Hegel contends that the Greeks were getting away from the natural without knowing it, participating in the life of the spirit beyond physical/material genesis.
3. Strauss explains this in terms of “the true reconciliation between the divine and the human” seen in Christianity. The Greek gods “are living easily.” But “the ugly,” too, “belongs, in a way, to the truth,” just as much as the beautiful does. Without “pain, suffering, death” the Greek gods “are not truly involved” in the reality of life. This being so, there can be “no true reconciliation” between the gods and men. “If beauty were the highest consideration, the Greeks would be right.” “But the higher thought according to Hegel is that the one God has become man and died as man, truly God and truly man.” Strauss adds, “Whether Hegel understands that in the Christian orthodox manner is very doubtful.” (Strauss, p. 221)
4. Strauss connects the modern quest for, and confidence in, subjective certainty first to Christianity, with its emphasis on faith in God, and then to modern philosophy, especially Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum, “which is for Hegel the fundamental principle.” “Only modern philosophy, as well as Hegel, gives the adequate interpretation of what Christianity means,” Hegel teaches. (Strauss, pp. 217-219) On the moral side, the Greeks lack the concept of conscience, what James Joyce renders as “in-wit.” Strauss distinguishes conscience from spiritedness or thumos, familiar to readers of Plato’s Republic as the part of the soul that gets angry, demands honor, and, if well-directed, can exhibit the virtue of courage. Nor is conscience consciousness per se. Christian conscience is the capacity to perceive the promptings of the Holy Spirit, to become conscious of sinfulness, especially one’s own sinfulness.
5. Strauss contrasts this with Christianity and the modern state. “In Christianity and modernity, we find the freedom of man as a subject who calls everything before the tribunal of his conscience or reason. That does not exist in Greece. Therefore, in Greece we have only the dignity of the citizen, not the dignity of man. And who is and who is not a citizen is determined practically by the nomos, by the law, but the law is here custom, something which is not known to be the work of reason…. This is the limitation of Greek rationality. There is not yet awareness of the right of subjectivity.” For the Greeks, “right means… simply the common good, and even the possibility of a conflict with the private good is not visualized. To be truly a human being means to be dedicated absolutely to the polis, to be a good citizen.”
6. Strauss remarks, “Pericles never laughed.” That is, “he was so deadly serious in his dedication to the city that he never laughed. And he went to no banquet after he had become a statesman.” This means that “from Hegel’s point of view” there can be no statesman like Pericles “in any later age,” as “this perfect harmony of the citizen and man belongs to the standpoint of beauty,” the Greek principle, “which has been destroyed by the opening up of the abyss of individuality, for good or for bad.” (Strauss, p. 243) By observing that Pericles never laughed, Strauss almost undoubtedly was thinking of Thomas More’s famous observation that Jesus never laughed. Jesus too was “deadly serious in his dedication” to a city, His city, the City of God. More also observed that Jesus wept two or three times. It isn’t clear that Pericles did, compassion or agapic love not having been the Greek way.
7. Establishing parallels between persons seen in the Old Testament and Christ—the claim that Moses is the ‘type’ of Christ, for example—has been a staple of Christian theology from the beginning. To suggest a typology between a pagan figure and Christ, as Hegel does here, is to take a radically different step. Strauss remarks that “the traditional view was that there is a difference between faith and reason”—faith being “suprarational.” Because “it is not rational in itself and in its object,” faith “needs” such “external credentials” as “tradition and miracles.” This leaves reason, the distinctively human characteristic, rather at sea, since “the suprarational cannot be evident” to it. “Now what Hegel claims to have done is to have shown that the substance of the faith of Christianity is rationality. This required considerable sacrifices. For example, the belief in miracles and in the sacredness or quasi-sacredness of the biblical text, the biblical stories: this was of course sacrificed. But we will see later”—that is, in later parts of Hegel’s Lectures —”what Hegel means by the Christianity which he believes to have been transformed into philosophic insight and in this way to have saved.” (Strauss, pp. 253-254)