Hegel on Religion and Politics

1 Hegel and the Consecrated State

1 Hegel and the Consecrated State Mark Tunick 1. Introduction Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century statesmen and political theorist of conservatism, characterizes the state as “consecrated.”1 To say the state is sacred, for Burke, is to say it fills an existential need. It provides “hope and sure anchor in all storms” and “an order that keeps things fast in their place.”2 Man, who is “by his constitution a religious animal,” is naked without religion, and his mind “will not endure a void.”3 Through the consecrated state, “the poorest man finds his own importance and dignity ”4 ; those who administer the government will “have high and worthy notions of their function and destination,” and look not “to the paltry pelf of the moment.”5 Without the consecrated state “the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken; no one generation could link with the other; men would become little better than the flies of a summer.”6 Burke’s reasons for regarding the state as sacred are more practical than theological.7 A state devoid of religion is insecure against the sort of turmoil revolutionary France experienced and that so frightened Burke. By seeing the state as of divine emanation and not the product 19 20 Mark Tunick of the will of the people, nor of the king, the people are not “suffered to imagine that their will, any more than that of kings, is the standard of right and wrong.”8 Burke writes, “[W]e have consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution; . . . that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude.” By consecrating the state, “we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitution and renovate their father’s life.”9 There is a sense in which Hegel, too, consecrates the state. In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel says religion is a foundation of ethical life (Sittlichkeit ), affording us a consciousness of immutability and of “the highest freedom and satisfaction.” Possessed of religion, members of the state will respect it as the whole of which they are parts.10 In the Introduction to the Philosophy of History, Hegel says religion stands “in closest connection with the principle of the State.”11 “In order to preserve the State, religion must be carried into it, in buckets and bushels.”12 It is folly, he says, “to invent [state] constitutions independently from religion”; if that is tried, the constitution would “lack a real center and remain abstract and indeterminate.”13 His point seems not merely to be Rousseau’s pragmatic point that a pious people are more likely to obey the law and carry out their duties.14 For Hegel, our commitment to the state provides us our greatest fulfillment, satisfaction, and freedom; by being a part of the state our lives have meaning as a part of something that transcends our particular existence.15 To realize and experience this fulfillment and satisfaction requires a move that religion can facilitate. Hegel says that secular existence concerns itself largely with one’s particular interests and is “relative and unjustified”; “it is justified only insofar as its principle, its universal soul, is justified, which requires consciousness of that existence as determination and existence of the essence of God. For this reason the State is based on religion.”16 There are profound similarities here in the views of Hegel and Burke. Of course in associating the two theorists we must not discount their important differences. The most important is that Hegel, unlike Burke, is through and through a rationalist.17 Burke is content accepting “pleasing illusions” that are shielded from the light of reason.18 Not Hegel, 21 Hegel and the Consecrated State who seeks philosophically to comprehend the rational form of public laws, morality, and religion.19 And while Burke rejects the French Revolution entirely, Hegel, while critical of the destructive tendencies of the Revolution , recognizes the positive role it played in establishing rights that are essential to a rational modern state.20 Still, both Hegel and Burke fear the void left...