Given recent naturalist readings of Hegel’s metaphysics and Spinoza’s rather widespread reputation as being the most consistent rationalist, the question arises in what sense Hegel can be called a ‘Spinozist’. An analysis of Hegel’s notion of philosophy reveals that despite Hegel’s and Spinoza’s common commitment to the notion that philosophy is “the self-comprehension of universal and unconditioned truth”, Hegel thinks that Spinoza’s substance-based account renders the finite philosophers entirely explicable in terms of universal truth’s self-causing and thus undermines individual autonomy. In contrast, Hegel’s commitment to concept-metaphysics is supposed to enable him to argue that individual philosophers still exert control over their thought and remain autonomous in their acts of channeling truth. Hegel thus aims to retain Kant’s allegedly anti-spinozistic commitment to individual autonomy by grounding his notion of philosophy on concept- rather than substance-metaphysics.

Both in the 1807 Phenomenology and in the original 1817 Encyclopedia, Hegel did not grant art any special status as one of the basic forms of absolute spirit. Yet, we know that by 1820, two years after his arrival in Berlin, he was lecturing on art along the lines that now are familiar to us, as one of the three essential components of absolute spirit. I will argue that this shows us something crucial in the development of Hegel’s systematic philosophy, which has to do both with his systematic concerns and with the dramatic shift in the world around him after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. In a nutshell: the modern world which he had delineated in 1807 had been vindicated by the failure of the Congress to turn the clock back to pre-revolutionary times, and this raised the question of what role art could play in that world which would be different from the religious role it had formerly played. This turn of events required him to rethink his political philosophy, his philosophy of religion, and, of course, his philosophy of art. It also led him to his historical and rather “phenomenological” conception of art that he presented in his Berlin lectures.

This chapter explores and analyzes the notion of religion in the Encyclopedia of the philosophical Sciences. In so doing, it offers also an interpretation of Hegel’s thinking that emphasizes the importance of the religious dimension.

The chapter is divided in three major parts. In the first section, it introduces Hegel’s absolute idealism as a coherent philosophical articulation of a religious worldview.

In the second section, it considers the chapter on religion in its systematic context, i.e. absolute Spirit. There, it first concentrates on the transition from art to religion, presenting both the element of continuity and of difference that exists between the two spheres. Secondly, it offers an interpretation of the Hegelian conception of revealed religion as a form of modern scholastic theology.

In the third and final section the chapter considers the idea of “sublation of religion into philosophy”. Since this movement towards philosophy is connected with the cultic dynamic, the chapter also analyzes in which sense speculative thinking can be regarded as a form of cultus, or to use the Hegelian term, as “a divine service”.

Speight has recently raised the question, which he himself leaves unanswered, how naturalism relates to spirit in Hegel’s philosophy of art. ‘Naturalism’ denotes an explanation that invokes aspects of nature that are (allegedly) irreducible or resistant to thought. I call nature ‘stubborn’ insofar as it evinces resistance to its being formed by thought and hence to its being united with it. This paper argues that §§556, 558 and 560 of Hegel’s “Encyclopedia” answer Speight’s question by specifying three elements of nature that, first, are present in art and, second, are resistant to thought. These are materiality, natural form, and genius. They exhibit nature’s stubbornness in art. This stubbornness, I argue, is what justifies Hegel’s claim that art is absolute spirit only implicitly (§556), which leads to the claim that art needs to be superseded by religion and philosophy. In this way, Speight’s question receives a precise answer.