Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Becoming Citizens of Hegel’s State { 77

polemicizes ardently against the idea of “unity of state and Church.”^113 The ra-

tional state can establish itself “as the self-knowing ethical actuality of spirit”

only by transcending religious authority and faith. “Only then, [when it stands]

above the particular churches, can the state attain universality of thought as

its formal principle and bring it into existence (Existenz).” Hegel’s sustained

polemic against Fries’s religiously tinged ethics of subjective conviction goes to

the heart of the fundamental distinction that Hegel makes between religiously

inspired subjective ethics and the universal ethics of the state articulated in law.

As long as “the Christian religion” (that is, Protestantism) embodies the prin-

ciple of freedom that Hegel considers its true essence, it offers a powerful way

to experience such freedom, and thus it encourages rather than hinders respect

for the freedom that is actualized and self-consciously comprehended in the

state. Yet harmony between the state and Protestantism is possible only insofar

as Protestantism embodies a spirit of freedom, which the state actualizes and

self-consciously comprehends without submitting to religious authority. Hegel

makes clear that “philosophical insight” is the best way to achieve respect for

the state and to appreciate one’s place in it. In the absence of such philosophical

penetration, religion inculcates such respect in a beneficial, albeit intellectually

less profound, way: “If it is meant that human beings should have respect for the

state as that whole of which they are the branches, the best way of achieving this

is, of course, through philosophical insight into its essence. But if this insight

is lacking, the religious disposition may lead to the same result. Consequently,

the state may have need of religion and faith. But the state remains essentially

different from religion.”^114 Whenever Protestantism’s spirit of freedom becomes

“perverted into unfreedom under the influence of superstition,” a conflict arises

between religion’s subjective conviction and the state’s objective knowledge.

Religion then fosters “a polemical kind of piety.”^115 Rather than advocating the

fusion of state and religion into a totalizing “Christian state” that would toler-

ate no difference or particularity, then, Hegel underscores the danger of sub-

stituting religious piety, authority, and conviction for the rule of rational law.

He argues vigorously that the ethical totality of the state must protect diversity

and determinate particularity from the threat of religious fanaticism that would

destroy them: “And if this [religious (my addition)] totality sought to take over

all the relations [Beziehungen] of the state, it would become fanaticism; it would

wish to find the whole in every particular, and could accomplish this only by

destroying the particular, for fanaticism is simply the refusal to admit particular

differences.”^116

The manifestations of religion that Hegel considered narrowly subjective—

and thus polemical vis-à-vis the state—were, overwhelmingly, forms of Chris-