Hegel's Early Development and The Gnostic Tradition
Hegel's Early Development and The Gnostic Tradition
"citizens of the moral realm, i.e. of the invisible church" and those
members of the "society of the 'positive' Christian sect" which was
identical with the state. All the Christian denominations, Hegel
believed, had succumbed to the lure of becoming positive religious
systems. "The fundamental error at the bottom of a church's entire
system", he wrote, "is that it ignores the rights pertaining to every
faculty of the human mind, in particular of the chief of them, reason.
Once the church's system ignores reason, it can be nothing save a
system which despises men".13 Significantly, however, Hegel saw a
glimmer of light in the emergence of groups such as the Beghards
and Beguines in the middle ages and their successors in modern
times; these groups represented isolated assertions of the dignity and
freedom of human nature against the dogmatic and authoritarian
character of positive Christianity.
At the end of the essay Hegel located the fundamental defects of
positive Christianity in its erroneous conceptions of human nature
and of man's relation to God. Because positive Christianity
emphasized God's transcendence, "objectivity" and absolute self-
sufficiency, it diminished man's status and compromised his freedom
and dignity. In Hegel's words: "The doctrine of God's objectivity is
a counterpart to the corruption and slavery of man, ... ".'4 Despite
Hegel's disenchantment with positive Christianity, he nevertheless
focused his attention once more on the life and teaching of Jesus
which he now saw in an even more sympathetic light. Jesus, he
acknowledged, had recognized that "human nature had needs which
it cannot itself satisfy, that its highest needs are of this sort". And
in the context of these religious needs, Jesus' teaching concerning
the infinite God became more intelligible. This original teaching
even contained the germ of a solution to the most fundamental of
all questions - the relation between the finite and the infinite:
This view of the relation between man and the Christian religion
cannot in itself exactly be called positive; it rests on the surely
beautiful presupposition that everything high, noble, and good
in man is divine, that it comes from God and is his spirit, issuing
from himself. But this view becomes glaringly positive if human
nature is absolutely severed from the divine, if no mediation
between the two is conceded except in one isolated individual,
if all man's consciousness of the good and the divine is degraded
to the dull and killing belief in a superior Being altogether alien
to man.
It is obvious that an examination of this question cannot be
thoughtfully and thoroughly pursued without becoming in the
HEGEL'S EARLY DEVELOPMENT AND THE GNOSTIC TRADITION 81
God and the Logos are only different in that God is matter in
the form of the Logos: the Logos itself is with God; both are
G
84 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
view, the death of Jesus, and the subsequent descent of the third
person of the Trinity, symbolized a more developed awareness of the
unity of the self with the infinite whole of life and a more
comprehensive knowledge of the intradivine process which comprised
the totality of being, The Christian mystery of the Trinity symbolized
at once the phases of man's ascent to gnosis and the panvitalistic
metaphysics which Hegel espoused:
The culmination of faith, the return to the Godhead whence man
is born, closes the circle of man's development. Everything lives
in the Godhead, every living thing is its child, but the child
carries the unity, the connection, the concord with the entire
harmony, undisturbed though undeveloped, in itself. It begins
with the faith in gods outside itself, with fear, until through its
actions it has isolated and separated itself more and more; but
then it returns through associations to the original unity which
now is developed, self-produced, and sensed as a unity. The child,
now knows God, i.e. the Spirit of God is present in the child,
issues from its restrictions, annuls the modification, and restores
the whole. God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.29
Following this gnostic expansion of the doctrine of the Trinity,
Hegel linked the reception of the third Person of the Trinity with
the ideal which had inspired him from his youth - the realisation
of the Kingdom of God. Those who were "filled with the Holy Spirit",
and who were therefore "children of light", lived in perfect harmony
with one another and with the whole of being. From their higher
standpoint, they knew that all oppositions were annulled in the
unity of divine life which permeated all reality. "The idea of a
Kingdom of God", Hegel wrote, "completes and comprises the whole
of the Christian religion as Jesus founded it ... In the Kingdom of
God what is common to all is life in .God. This is not the common
character which a concept expresses, but is love, a living bond which
unites the believers; it is this feeling of unity of life; a feeling in
which all oppositions, as pure emnities, and also rights, as unifications
of still subsisting oppositions, are annulled .... Is there an idea more
uplifting than that of belonging to a whole which as a whole, as
one, is the spirit of God ... ?"ao
It was in a religious context, therefore - and specifically in a
gnostic reconstruction of the Christian religion - that Hegel found
the realisation of his youthful ideal of an integrated, harmonious
and free existence. In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and
in the doctrine of the Trinity, he discerned an anticipation of the
all-embracing vision which he now possessed. It was love which
annulled and ultimately reconciled all the divisions within the unity
86 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
was the most appropriate name for God or the total process which
was nothing other than God's knowledge or consciousness of Himself.
An excerpt from the account of "The Triangle of Triangles" by
Hegel's biographer, Rosenkranz, brings out the definitely gnostic
character of the text:
Spirit for the first time is the unity, without which the distinction
of Father and Son would be without sense, of if it made sense,
must lead to dualism. For this reason Hegel hurled himself about
in the most peculiar expressions to display the reciprocity of
mediation between the Persons . . . Love would according to him
be a more fitting, more understandable expression for the concept
of God, but Spirit is deeper ... In the son God is cognizant of
Himself as God. He says to Himself: I am God. The within-itself
ceases to be a negative ... The self-consciousness of God is not
a withdrawal back within himself and an otherness of the Son,
just as it is not an otherness of his withdrawal back within
himself as simple God, but his intuition in the Son is the
intuiting of the simple God as his own self, but in such a way
that the Son remains Son, or as not distinguished and at the
same time distinguished; or the farspread Realm of the Universe,
which has no longer any being-for-self over against itself, but
rather its being-for-self is a returning back within God, or in
God's returning back within himself, a joy over the majesty
[Herrlichkeit] of the Son whom he intuits as himself. As the
Earth thereby ceases to be something mixed [ein Vermischtes]
(for that its being-within-self is no longer pure being-for-self, or
Evil). What stands over against the Son in his majesty as he
intuits the Earth, is the majesty of God Himself, the looking
back and returning home to him. And for the consecrated Earth
this self-consciousness of God is the Spirit, which proceeds from
God, and in which the Earth is one with him with the Son. This
Spirit is here the eternal mediator between the Son returned
unto the Father, who is now wholly and only one, and between
the being of the Son within himself, or of the majesty of the
Universe. The simplicity of the all-embracing Spirit has now
stepped into the middle and there is now no distinction any
more. For the Earth as the self-consciousness of God is now the
Spirit, yet it is also the eternal Son whom God intuits as himself,
and the pair is one unity and the cognition of God within
himself. Thus has the holy triangle of triangles closed itself.39
At this time Hegel also used characteristic gnostic expressions, such
as "the abyss" and the "negative absolute", to designate the
unmanifested and ineffable godhead. Furthermore, his portrayal of
HEGEL'S EARLY DEVELOPMENT AND THE GNOSTIC TRADITION 89
NOTES
1. For an account of the emergence and significance of gnostic speculation, and of
the survivals and revivals of gnostic speculation in the western tradition, see G.
Hanratty "Hegel and the Gnostic Tradition" in Philosophical Studies Vol. XXX, 1985,
23-48, Vol. XXXI, 1986, 301-325.
2. H.S. Harris, Hegel's Development: Toward the Sunlight, 1770-1801 (Oxford, 1972)
29.
3. On the revival of these gnostic traditions in Wiirrtemberg by the "Swabian
Fathers", see G. Hanratty, art. cit., Vol, XXXI, 313-317.
4. On the role of Masonry in the transmission of French Revolutionary ideals to
Germany, see G. Hanratty, art. cit., Vol. XXXI, 317-319.
5. See Harris, 103--106, lO8--119.
6. Harris, 163.
7. "The Tiibingen Essay: Religion ist eine" Appendix 1 in Harris, 486.
8. Harris, Appendix I, 487.
9. Harris, 184.
lO. Harris, 198--199.
11. Harris, 212.
12. This rather disjointed essay is included in On Christianity: Early Theological
Writings of Friedrich Hegel trans by G.T.M. Knox with an Introduction, and
Fragments trans. by Richard Kroner (New York, 1961) 67-·181.
13. Knox, 143.
14. Knox, 163.
15. Knox, 176.
16. G.W.F. Hegel, Werke, I (Frankfurt am Main, 1971) 230-231. My trans.
17. Harris, 255.
18. See Knox, 182-205.
19. Knox, 211.
20. Knox, 212.
21. Knox, 214, 217.
22. Knox, 215.
23. Knox, 232.
24. Knox, 239.
25. Knox, 247.
26. Knox, 257-258.
27. Knox, 260.
28. Knox, 266.
29. Knox, 273.
30. Knox, 278.
31. Knox, 291.
32. Knox, 296-297.
33. Knox, 312.
34. Knox, 308.
35. Knox, 312.
36. Knox, 312.
37. Knox, 311.
38. Harris, 406.
39. Rosenkranz's account of the text, "Triangle of Triangles", has been translated
by H.S. Harris in Hegel's Development: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801-1806), (Oxford,
1983) 184-188; the quotation is from pp. 186-187. Besides the Triangle-Text which has
been lost, there is, according to Harris, an extant Triangle-Diagram. This Diagram,
Harris writes, "belongs in the context magical speculation" (157, n. 1). Harris also
notes that "in the Holy Triangle of Triangles Hegel himself employed something very
92 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
close to the gnostic or Schellingian image of the Fall to express the going-forth of
Spirit into Nature" (406-407).
40. Harris, Hegel's Development: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801-1806) 183.
41. See Harris, Night Thoughts, 206--207.
42. Harris, Night Thoughts, 408.
43. Harris, Night Thoughts, 434-435. On Hegel's contacts with Goethe during his
Jena years, see 1ix, 83, 268, 271, 435, 438. For an account of the influence of alchemy
on Goethe's worldview, see Ronald D. Gray, Goethe the Alchemist; A Study of
Alchemical Symbolism in Goethe's Literary and Scientific Works (Cambridge, 1952).
44. See Harris, Night Thoughts, 472--474. There is a detailed account of the tradition
of gnostic speculation on Adam in Ernst Benz, Adam: Der My thus vom Urmenschen
(Miinchen, 1955).
45. Harris, Night Thoughts, 546.
46. In a discussion of Hegel's Jena years, Alexandre Koyre refers to the experience
of reading Hegel as "celIe d'assister ii. une espece de sorcellerie ou de magie
spirituelle". Cf. Etudes d'histoire de la pensee philosophique (Paris, 1971) 147-148.
Koyre also highlights the Boehmean and Paracelsean influences on Hegel's speculation.
In a discussion of Hegel's distinctive terminology, Koyre draws attention to the links
with the mystico-theosophic movements of the seventeenth century and the etymologies
of Franz von Baader which "livrent bien sou vent la cle des termes hegeliens" (197).
Koyre also adverts to the chiliastic dimension of Hegel's system: "La philosophie de
l'histoire - et par la meme la philosophie hegelienne, Ie 'systeme' - ne seraient
possibles que s'il n'y avait plus d'avenir; que si Ie temps pouvait s'arreter" (189).