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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
[Editorial note: The following excerpt is from the lectures on the philosophy of religion which Hegel delivered in the summer of 1831, only a few months before he died. He had, of course, been concerned for some time with the way in which Catholicism and Protestantism functioned as political ideologies in the modern world – for example, in AC and PH, and in the additions he made to the third edition of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. But although he had delivered his lectures on the philosophy of religion on several previous occasions, it was not until the 1831 series that he included the topic covered in this extract, namely ‘The Relationship of Religion to the State’. For a full discussion of the place of this topic in the series as a whole, see Hodgson's remarks in Hodgson 1984: vol. 1, pp. 77–81.]
1. The state is the true mode [wahrhafte Weise] of actuality; in it, the true ethical will attains actuality and the spirit lives in its true form [Wahrhaftigkeit]. Religion is divine knowledge, the knowledge which human beings have of God and of themselves in God. This is divine wisdom and the field of absolute truth. But there is a second wisdom, the wisdom of the world, and the question arises as to its relationship to the former, divine wisdom.
In general, religion and the foundation of the state are one and the same thing – they are identical in and for themselves.
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