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P O S I T I V I T Y O F C H R I S T I A N R E L I G I O N ways futile; the outcome has always shown that nothing is achieved along those lines. Decisions in favor of miracles or against them have always depended on the interests of reason.43 [PART 111: REVISED FORM O F SECTIONS 1-4 O F PART I] (139) The conception of the "positivity" of a religion has originated and become important only in recent times. A positive religion is contrasted with natural religion, and this presupposes that there is only one natural religion, since human nature is one and single, while there may be many positive religions. It is clear from this very contrast that a positive religion is a contranatural or a supernatural one, containing concepts and information transcending understanding and reason and requiring feelings and actions which would not come naturally to men: the feelings are forcibly and mechanically stimulated, the actions are done to order or from obedience without any spontaneous interest. It is obvious from this general explanation that, before a religion or any part of it can be set down as positive, the concept of human nature, and therefore man's relation to God, must first be defined. In recent times there has been much preoccupation with this concept ; some have believed that with the concept of man's vocation4* as-their standard they had a tolerably clear field for proceeding to sift religion itself. 43. [The manuscript breaks off in the middle of the next sentence. Hegel's point is that if reason is regarded as self-subsistent, as setting ends before itself out of its own nature and independently of anything external, then it has no interest in deciding in favor of miracles. But the contrary is the ease if, as is held by defenders of miracles who appeal to reason, it has ends given to it from without and then has to argue in consistency with these. For a commentary on this fragment see the note on p. 150 above. Noh1 includes here (a) another fragment on miracles, first printed in Rosenkranz, Hcgel's Leben (Berlin, 1844), pp. 510-1 2, and (b) a fragment on "Positive Religion" and Kant's "Postulates of the Practical Reason."] 44. [Hegel is referring to Fichte's book The Vocation o f Man, published a few months previously, in the spring of 1800.1 E A R L Y T H E O L O G I C A L W R I T I N G S A long series of stages in cultural development, extending over centuries, (140) must have been traversed before a period could arrive in which concepts had become abstract enough to allow of the conviction that the infinite multiplicity of manifestations of hu- - . man nature had been comprised in the unity of a few universal concepts . Becausc these simple concepts are universal, they also become necessary concepts and characteristics of humanity as a whole. Since these characteristics are fixed, the variations in national or individual manners, customs, and opinions become accidents, prejudices , and errors, and thus the religion consistent with any of these variations is a positive religion because its bearing on accidental things is itself an accident, though as part of the religion it is also a sacred command. 'The Christian religion has sometimes been reproved, sometimes praised, for its consistency with the most varied manners, characters , and institutions. It was cradled in the corruption of the Roman state; it became dominant when that empirz was in the throes of its decline, and we cannot see how Christianity could have stayed its downfall. On the contrary, Rome's fall extended the scope of Christianity's domain, and it appears in the same epoch as the religion of the barbarians, who were totally ignorant and savage but completely free, and also of the Greeks and Romans, who by this time were overcivilized, servile, and plunged in a cesspool of vice. It was the religion of the Italian states in the finest period of their licentious freedom in the Middle Ages; of the grave and free Sxviss republics; of the more or less moderate monarchies of modern Europe; alike of the most heavily oppressed serfs and their overlords : both attended one church. Headed by the Cross, the Spaniards murdered whole generations in America; over the conquest of India the English sang Christian thanksgivings. Christianity was...

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