Comment on The History of Religion and the Absolute Religion

Abstract

Walter Jaeschke’s paper is a superb example of the relevance of detailed textual scholarship to our understanding of some of the most central issues in Hegel’s thought. Jaeschke’s thesis is that one of the most persistent charges directed against Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion from both left and right — that his concept of Christianity as “absolute religion” is incompatible with his historical method in the treatment of religions — is based on a misunderstanding of Hegel’s actual arguments. Through a detailed consideration of the development of the lecture manuscripts of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion from Hegel’s first delivery of the lectures in 1821 up until his death in 1831, Jaeschke shows that Hegel’s concept of Christianity as the “consummate” religion is to be understood neither as a historical thesis about Christianity as the fulfilment of the historical evolution of religion, nor indeed as a thesis about the historical uniqueness of the Christian revelation, but as the thesis that, in Christianity, the concept of religion is the object of an adequate religious representation or Vorstellung.