Historians of philosophy face a difficulty in conceptualizing the relationship between Kant and his Idealist successors, for the latter offer a wide range of options—from completing the architectonic of reason (by offering a single principle from which it could be deduced), to overcoming entirely what they take to be the deep contradictions of the critical project. This ambivalence is nowhere more evident than in the writings of the young Hegel, which swing from one pole to the other within the span of a few years. In his Berne (1795) essay on Christianity, Hegel attributes to Jesus a thinly veiled Kantian gospel of pure reason and moral legislation. And this enthusiasm is only corroborated in contemporaneous letters to Schelling and Hölderlin, which demonstrate that all three thinkers had sworn to transform corrupt social conditions by working toward the Kingdom of God familiar to them from Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Hegel's earliest published writings, however, take an acerbic tone when they denounce Kantian morality as self-domination and the wider critical system as an “unphilosophy” that eventuates in the “total crushing of reason.”