Chapter 14 - The Encyclopedia’s Notion of Religion

Summary

This chapter explores and analyzes the notion of religion in the Encyclopedia of the philosophical Sciences. In so doing, it offers also an interpretation of Hegel’s thinking that emphasizes the importance of the religious dimension.

The chapter is divided in three major parts. In the first section, it introduces Hegel’s absolute idealism as a coherent philosophical articulation of a religious worldview.

In the second section, it considers the chapter on religion in its systematic context, i.e. absolute Spirit. There, it first concentrates on the transition from art to religion, presenting both the element of continuity and of difference that exists between the two spheres. Secondly, it offers an interpretation of the Hegelian conception of revealed religion as a form of modern scholastic theology.

In the third and final section the chapter considers the idea of “sublation of religion into philosophy”. Since this movement towards philosophy is connected with the cultic dynamic, the chapter also analyzes in which sense speculative thinking can be regarded as a form of cultus, or to use the Hegelian term, as “a divine service”.