Religion

Abstract

Two-thirds of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion are given over to ‘finite’ or pre-Christian religions, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to them. This is particularly surprising given the importance that he gives to the Greek ‘religion of beauty’ and Roman ‘religion of expediency’, for along with the Jewish ‘religion of sublimity’, they form the immediate historical precedents and preparation for Christianity, which Hegel’s teleological history accepts as the final, ‘true’, and ‘infinite’ religion. This chapter seeks to help to remedy the scholarly gap, not only by summarizing Hegel’s understanding of Greek and Roman religions in themselves, in relation to each other, to Christianity and previous ‘Oriental’ religions, and in relation to Hegel’s conception of religion as such. In addition, it seeks to juxtapose some of Hegel’s remarks with those of more recent scholars, to suggest that in general his approaches to Greek and Roman phenomena remain insightful. Although his strong judgments may offend many (for a variety of reasons), his comparative architectonic can be exhilarating: his juxtaposition of Greek anthropomorphism and the Christian Incarnation is challenging for Hellenists and Christian theologians; and his argument that Christianity is fundamentally a product of the Roman world, with Roman religion as its immediate predecessor, is a thought-provoking blend of Christian apologetics and proto-sociological historicism.