Hegel’s “Philosophy of History”: The Roman World

G. W. F. Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Ruben Alvarado translation. Wordbridge, 2011.

Paul Franco, ed.: Leo Strauss on Hegel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

 

Note: This is the fourth of a series of five essays on Hegel’s Lectures, as illuminated by the published transcripts of Leo Strauss’s 1964 course at the University of Chicago.

 

Hegel begins by citing a remark made by Napoleon to Goethe on “the nature of tragedy,” in which that emulator of Romanness asserted that moderns have substituted “politics” (meaning “the irresistible power of circumstance to which individuality must bend”) for fate. Hegel doesn’t dispute the claim, instead finding such a ‘political’ destiny or power embodied in Rome, which never failed to cast “moral individuals into bonds,” subordinating them to the state. Simultaneously, in relation to world outside, Rome aimed at “universal dominion” in religion, “collecting all deities and all spirits” worshiped by the peoples it conquered “into the pantheon,” “in order to make an abstract generality of them.” In this it contrasted with Persian imperialism, content to allow conquered peoples to worship their own gods with no attempt to dragoon them into its own Zoroastrian system. Rome “stifles all vitality, while [Persia] allowed of its existence in the fullest measure.”

By emptying out the moral life of its inhabitants and by forcing all gods into a universal religious empire, Rome sank the world “in melancholy, its heart broken”; it was “all over for the natural side of spirit,” now “sunk into a feeling of misery.” Yet it was precisely this emptiness, and this misery, from which “could arise the suprasensorial, the free spirit in Christianity,” whose vitality consists in the rejection of nature as ‘fallen.’ Rome moved past Persia’s, and more immediately Greece’s, naturalism, with “its cheerfulness and enjoyment.” While draining life of cheer and joy, Rome saw the spirit “develop itself into that form of abstract universality which exercised severe discipline over humanity,” a discipline the Greeks so conspicuously lacked. The “inwardness,” the “retreating into one’s self which we observed as the corruption of the Greek spirit,” in Rome became “the ground on which a new side of world history” ascended.

If in Greece democracy was “the fundamental condition of political life,” and in the East it was despotism, in Rome it was aristocracy of a most “rigid sort,” ruling “with soulless and heartless severity” over the plebeians, the many who were poor, on the basis of a legal system designed above all to protect the patricians’ property. Whereas Greek factions ruined its city-states, the struggle between patricians and plebs “marks Rome’s inmost being,” pervading it no matter how the political regime changed—as it did, over the centuries.

The Roman world centered in Italy, which centered in Rome. Since Italy, like Greece, features ineradicable geographic divisions (in its case, the north, the middle, and the south), political unity centering in Rome could only occur “artificially and violently.” With “no natural unity, such as the valley of the Nile,” the “Roman state rest[ed] geographically, as well as historically, on the aspect of violence.” The rule of force forces the spirit into “inward secretiveness,” a “certainty in itself,” in relation to the harsh “outwardness of reality.” This “inwardness” purifies itself into “abstract personality”—abstracted from an outer world the individual spirit cannot control, in contrast with Greek self-government and civic spirit. This abstract personality “gives itself reality” in the outer world by establishing private property; once again, “the resultant refractory persons”—refractory because they have no natural connections with one another and feel the need to defend ‘their own’ things—”can be held together only by despotic power.”

Like every “world-historical people,” the Romans developed in three stages, as of course all significant things do, under the laws of Hegel’s dialectic. Accordingly, Hegel divides “The Roman World” into three sections. In the first he describes “the rudiments of Rome, in which the essentially contrary elements” of patricians and plebs “still slumber[ed] in calm unity, until the contrarieties gain[ed] strength and the unity of the state [became] forceful” through the rise of that antithesis. In this section he also begins his account of Rome’s second period, initiated in the First Punic War, when Roman state direct[ed] its forces outwards and enter[ed] the world-historical theater; this [was] the noblest period of Rome.” In the second section Hegel recounts the history of Rome from the Second Punic War to the rule of the emperors, the period in which “the Roman empire now acquired that world-conquering extension which paved the way for its fall.” The third section contains the despotic third period of Roman history, in which “Roman power appear[ed] in its pomp and splendor” but also began to rupture “within itself,” leaving it open to the triumph of Christianity and setting it against the “Germanic peoples, whose turn to become world-historical had now come.”

“Rome arose outside countries,” in a sort of no-man’s land. Hegel means that the Etruscans to the north, the Latins to the south, and the Sabines in-between them all bordered on it, but none of these nations controlled it. The people who gathered there derived from no one “ancient stock, connected by natural patriarchal bonds,” as seen in Persia. The Romans didn’t descend from the Trojans, the story they told themselves and others notwithstanding. (Hegel has absolutely nothing good to say about Virgil.) In fact, “the first Roman community constituted itself as a robber state” consisting of “predatory shepherds” assembled from “the rabble of all the three regions between which Rome lay.” “The historians state that this point was very well chosen on a hill close to the river, and particularly adapted to make it an asylum for all delinquents” who “roved about on the hills of Rome.” Lacking women, they seized some from the Sabines. “Religion [was] used as a means for furthering the purposes of the infant state,” not out of genuine piety. Eventually, somewhat more peaceable foreigners arrived, but not before the fundamental character of Rome had been established: The Romans were pirates on land ruled by “chieftains.”

“It is the peculiarity in the founding of the state which must be regarded as the essential basis of the peculiarity of Rome,” as it “leads directly to the severest discipline as well as to self-sacrifice to the object of the union.” “Based on force” and “held together by force,” Romans had no “moral, liberal connection” to one another “but a compulsory condition of subordination.” For the Romans virtus meant valor—”not, however, the merely personal” kind of valor, “but that which is regarded as connected with a union of associates, the coherence of which is regarded as the supreme interest, and which may be combined with violence of all kinds.”

Violent rule first of all prevailed in the rule of the patricians over the plebeians, a distinction “already mythically adumbrated in the hostile brothers Romulus and Remus.” [1] As captured towns swelled the size of the town, “the weaker, the poorer, the later additions of population were naturally underrated by and in a condition of dependence upon those who originally founded the state, and those who distinguished themselves by valor and also by wealth” became the aristocrats. Hegel explicitly rejects any racialist explanation of the Roman aristocracy. It exercised rule established by force, period, having come to power not as one distinct race or ethnicity but as a conglomeration of outlaws initially culled from three peoples. Racial or ethnic purity could scarcely have provided a justification for that rule.

Sure enough, soon “the dependence of the plebeians on the patricians” would be “represented as perfectly legal, indeed, even sacred, since the patricians held the sacra while the plebs were, as it were, godless.” But this was “a hypocritical sham.” When the plebs rebelled (as they did, on occasion) “they were no more guilty of a presumptuous sacrilege than were the Protestants when they emancipated the political power of the state, and asserted the freedom of conscience,” Hegel tells his Lutheran/Prussian students. The patricians were able to maintain their power by force but also by dividing the plebs, putting some of them under their protection as clients. “In the contentions between the patricians and the plebeians, the clients held to their patrons, though belonging to the plebs as decidedly as any class.” When the plebs did manage to wring concessions from the patricians, “the introduction of the laws among all classes” resulted in the gradual elimination of cliental privileges, “for as soon as individuals found protection in the law, the temporary necessity for [those privileges] could not but cease.”

The predatory character of the state gave the patricians still another way to keep the plebs down. Since “every citizen was necessarily a soldier” in a “state based on war,” and since “every citizen was obliged to maintain himself in the field,” to buy his own weapons and armor, the plebs could only borrow the needed money to pay for their equipage from the patricians. Although the eventual rule of law mitigated some of this, too, the celebrated Twelve Tables “still contained much that was undefined,” and the patricians were the judges interpreting the laws.

The Roman spirit also defined family relations. While Greek patriarchal families exhibited familial love (as seen in Aristotle’s account, among others), “the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, are, according to the tradition, themselves freebooters, represented as from their earliest days thrust out from the family, and as having grown up in a state of isolation from family affection.” Romulus committed fratricide. The seizure of the Sabine women also afforded no wholesome model of familial bliss. “This commencement of the Roman life in savage rudeness, excluding the sensibilities of natural morality, brings with it one characteristic element, harshness in respect to the family relation; a selfish harshness, which constituted the fundamental condition of Roman manners and laws” whereby family relations saw no “beautiful, free relation of love and feeling” but “severity, dependence, and subordination.” Marriage was “a mere contract,” the wife “part of the husband’s property.” By marriage “the husband acquired a power over his wife, such as he had over his daughter; nor less over her property; so that everything which she gained, she gained for her husband.” Aristotle distinguishes the parent-child relationship from the master-slave relationship—the one established for the benefit of the child, the other for the benefit of the master—but in Rome there was no sharp distinction.

“Thus degenerated and depraved do we here see the fundamental relations of ethics. The immoral active severity of the Romans in this private side of character necessarily finds its counterpart in the passive severity of their association for the purpose of the state. For the severity which the Roman experienced from the state he was compensated by a severity, identical in nature, which he was allowed to indulge towards his family, a servant on the one side, a despot on the other.” “This,” Hegel concludes, “constitutes Roman greatness,” a phrase he borrows from Montesquieu’s title, The Grandeur of the Romans and Their Decadence. [2]

One must notice, however, that while the Romans may have been bad, they were also great—a world-historical people. Their greatness in world history consists first of all in their prosaicness.  The peoples of the East, and the Greeks, wrote poetry. It was “among the Romans [that] the prose  of life makes its appearance, the self-consciousness of finiteness, the abstraction of the understanding and the hardness of personality which does not broaden cold reserve to natural morality in the family, but remains unfeeling spiritless oneness, and which posits the unity of this oneness in abstract generality.” That doesn’t sound too promising, but it is “to the unfree, spiritless, and heartless understanding of the Roman world [that] we owe the origin and development of positive law.” In other cultures, law expressed moral convictions, making it “entirely dependent on morals and disposition,” without the “fixity of principle” that makes law the law. The Romans “completed this important separation, and discovered a principle of law which is external, i.e., one not dependent on disposition and sentiment,” formal. ‘We moderns’ may “use and enjoy” positive law “without becoming victims” of the “arid understanding” of the Romans, without taking positive law “as the pinnacle of wisdom and reason.” The Romans were the victims of such an understanding, “but they thereby secured for others freedom of spirit, viz., that inward freedom which has consequently become emancipated from the sphere of the finite and the external. Spirit, heart, disposition, religion at this point no longer have to fear being entangled in that abstract juridical understanding,” and “free art can arise and express itself,” now that law is no longer supposed sacred but known to be humanly posited. As Strauss puts it, in Rome “a sphere of privacy is recognized, according to Hegel, for the first time, and that is crucial.”

The Romans’ “abstract understanding of finiteness,” seen in the finiteness, the limitedness, of the positive law they set down for themselves, “is their highest purpose” in world history and “their highest consciousness as well.” Most important, it provided the foundation for the modern separation of church and state, although again via a decidedly unattractive path.

Our term ‘religion’ derives from the Latin religio—ligament, bondage. For the Greeks, religion “was the cheerfulness of free imagination,” seen in the lives of their buoyant, boyish and girlish gods and goddesses. “The Romans, by contrast, remained satisfied, with a dull, stupid inwardness, so that the external was only an object, something alien, something hidden.” The inner man is in bondage to this external, secretive thing. The friendly, this-worldly piety of the Greeks gave way to a “doubleness” seen even in the name of Rome itself, which was held to be a mask for its secret name, and in the name of the founder Romulus, who also was supposed to have had a secret name.

Roman religiosity never “elevate[d] itself to the theoretical contemplation of the eternally divine nature and to liberation in that contemplation; it gain[ed] no religious content from spirit.” It was ceremonial, “essentially formal” and “petrified.” The patricians controlled the ceremonies, and they used them as instruments of rule over the “godless” plebeians. “The chief characteristic of Roman religion [was] therefore a rigidity of specific goals of will, which the Romans regard[ed] as existing absolutely in their gods, and whose accomplishment they desire of them as embodying absolute power.” “The Roman religion [was] therefore the entirely prosaic one of restrictiveness, expediency, utility.” They worshiped ‘Peace,’ ‘Tranquility,’ ‘Fortune,’ ‘Repose,’ and ‘Sorrow’ as gods. “How little have these prosaic conceptions in common with the beauty of the spiritual powers and deities of the Greeks!” Hegel exclaims. Zeus becomes not simply Jupiter but Jupiter Capitolinus, “the generic essence of the Roman empire.” They sought to propitiate these deities with vows and supplications in a joyless quest for favor relieved only by their religious festivals. But even these remained on the vulgar level of “scurrilous dances and songs,” never developing (as they did in Greece) into the noble art of tragedy. “Their talk of Jupiter, Juno, Minerva sounds to us like people talking at the theater”—the modern theater of light comedy and what eventually would become ‘musicals.’ “Among the Greek poets, especially Virgil, the introduction of the gods is the product of a frigid understanding and of imitation. The gods are used in these poems as machinery.”

Similarly, their games were less than Olympic. “The Romans were, properly speaking, only spectators” at their games, watching as manumitted slaves, gladiators, criminals, and animals fought it out amongst themselves, for the entertainment of the crowds. “Nero’s deepest degradation was his appearing on a public stage as a singer, lyrist, and combatant.” Refusing participation in their games, the Romans “did not enter into them with their whole souls,” as the Greeks had done. “The Romans gave shape to a cruel reality of corporeal sufferings, and it was blood in streams, the rattle in the throat signaling death, and the expiring gasp that delighted them. This cold negativity of naked murder at the same time exhibits at the same time that inward murder of a spiritual objective purpose,” paralleling the purely manipulative character of their supposed piety. Hegel re-emphasizes that “all of this was in the hands of the patricians, who consciously made use of it for their own ends and against the people, as a mere outward bond.”

Thus “secular aims are left entirely free, not restricted by religion but rather justified by it. The Romans are invariably pious, whatever the content of their actions. But as the sacred here is nothing but an empty form, it is exactly of such a kind that can be had in the power of the devotee,” who seeks nothing more than to be “master over the form.” “It is taken possession of by the subject who seeks his private objects and interests, whereas the truly divine possesses concrete power in itself.” The “beautiful and moral necessity of common life” seen in the Greek polis gave way separate forms of worship for each “stock” or ethnic group within Rome.

This very arbitrariness contradicts the religiosity or ‘bindingness’ of Roman worship. “The Roman principle admits of aristocracy alone as the constitution proper to it, but which directly manifests itself as antithesis,” inasmuch as an aristocracy that rules arbitrarily abrogates its own claim to be the rule of ‘the best.’ “Only through necessity and misfortune is this contradiction momentarily smoothed over; for it contains a duplicate power, the sternness and malevolent reserve of which can only be mastered and bound together, by a still greater sternness, into a unity maintained by force.”

But why, one asks Hegel, did this turn out well? In what way did it? Hegel will answer, later on.

Meanwhile, he needs to take his narrative to the Second Punic War. After the initial rule of kings, the patricians founded a ‘republican’ (in fact aristocratic) regime; the resulting long stretch of civil peace enables Rome to gather “the strength to engage in victorious struggle with the previous world-historical people.”

There were seven kings altogether—almost all of them foreigners, as the non-indigenous origins of Rome might lead one to expect. Founder Romulus organized Rome into “a military state”; the second king, Numa, introduced religion, making Rome uniquely a state in which political union preceded religious tradition. [3] During these decades the kings countered aristocratic ambitions with appeals to the people, but the last king, Tarquinius Superbus, went too far in aiming at eliminating the patrician class altogether via his refusal to replace those who died. When his son insulted “the honor of a matron” the infuriated patricians expelled Tarquinius and ended the monarchy.

“The constitution now became republican in name, but in fact amounted to a bicephalous executive supported by the aristocracy. For more than a hundred years the patricians and plebeians struggled against each other, but by the end of the fourth century BC agrarian reforms, whereby the plebeians would be entitled to own property, were set down in law. Eventually, they were implemented in practice, too. “This is the chief point in the first period of Roman history—that the plebs attained the right of being eligible to the higher political offices, and that by a share which they too managed to obtain in the soil, the means of subsistence were assured to the citizens.” Wearied of internal struggles, the differences of class moderated, the energies once dissipated in those struggles were turned outward. “This direction given to the Roman energies was able for a moment to conceal the defect of that union [of the patriciate and the plebs]; equilibrium was restored, but without an essential center and point of support. This contradiction that existed could not but break out again fearfully at a later period,” but not before Roman “courage and discipline secured their victory” over vast territories inhabited by foreign rivals. The Romans had become “the capitalists of strength.”

The first major rival to feel Rome’s new power was Carthage, in the three Punic Wars. The Second Punic War was “that point of decision and determination of Roman dominion” from which flowed victories over Macedonia, Syria, Carthage for the final time, and Corinth, then the linchpin of Greece. Among these conquests, “the fall of Carthage and the subjugation of Greece were the decisive moments from which the Romans extended their sway” as masters of the Mediterranean Sea, “the middle ground of all civilization.”

So secured externally, Rome returned to its contradictions. The struggle between patricians and plebeians abated, but the “antithesis” now “assume[d] the form of private interest against patriotic sentiment”; “side by side with wars for conquest, plunder and glory the fearful spectacle of civil discords in Rome, and civil wars” ensued. These followed from the underlying contradiction within Rome: The rule of force alone bespoke the lack of any pervasive spirit, moral or ethical, to unite it. “If inward satisfaction was to follow the period of that external prosperity in war, the principle of Roman life had to be more concrete. But if such a concrete life were to evolve as an object of consciousness from the depths of their souls by imagination and thought, what would it have been!” There were only power relations, both respecting the subjugated peoples and the citizens of Rome.

Externally, the Romans never respected “the national individuality” of conquered peoples; there would be no Roman equivalent to modern Europe’s Peace of Westphalia, only plunder. Animated only by “the cold abstraction of lordship and power,” the “pure egotism of the will against others, containing no ethical fulfillment,” foreign policy could only serve the particular interests of the conquering generals. Rome imported its “luxury and debauchery” from Asia (as readers of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra will recall) its sculpture, painting, and even its education from Greece, from which slaves became “their poets, their authors, the superintendents of their factories, the instructors of their children.” “Riches were received as spoils, not as the fruit of industry and honest activity,” as befitted a state “founded on robbery” and accustomed not to making things but to dividing spoils seized from those who had made them. In this, Strauss points out, Hegel finds himself “in entire agreement” with the British philosophers, “especially” Locke, who regard “industry and commerce” as “morally superior to war.”

As the state began to break down, great men arose, “colossal individualities” we read about in Plutarch, who attempted (and for a time succeeded) in “restor[ing] that unity to the state which was no more to be found in men’s dispositions” and indeed had never been solidly established therein. “One needs to read Cicero to see how all affairs of state were decided in tumultuous fashion, and, with arms in hand, by the wealth and power of the grandees on the one side and by a troop of rabble on the other.” Julius Caesar finally rose to the top.

“In this way the world-rule of Rome came to a single person.” Hegel takes pains to argue that “this important change must not be regarded as a thing of chance; it was necessary, conditioned by the circumstances.” Republicanism, such as it was, could not sustain itself without an ethos or spirit to support it. In this, according to Hegel, “the nature of the state, and of the Roman state in particular, transcends [Cicero’s] comprehension,” as it did the comprehension of Caesar’s rivals. “The Roman principle was set entirely upon rule and military power: it contained in it no spiritual center as goal, occupation, and enjoyment for spirit.” Alienated, ‘made foreign,’ from their own state, citizens “found in it no objective satisfaction.” “Caesar, judged by the great scope of history, did what was right, since he furnished a mediating element, and that kind of cohesion which was required,” allying inward opposition and beginning “a new opposition outward,” a new round of conquest. His assassins “believed that if this one individual was out of the way, the republic would automatically be restored,” but republican rule could no longer sustain itself. Caesarism triumphed. Hegel claims that throughout world history the repeat of an event confirms its necessity. Caesarism arose, fell, then returned; Napoleon fell in defeat, took another stab at power, fell again; the Bourbon monarchs were expelled twice. “By repetition, that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency becomes a real and ratified existence.” This is how Hegel would answer Strauss’s question about how to distinguish between accident and necessity.

The new monarchs, different from the old kings, were called emperors, having taken over the vast territorial conquests effected by the ‘republic.’ The regime change really didn’t change very much respecting the lives of the Romans, as most of the supposedly ruling institutions hadn’t done much ruling; the popular assemblies were dissolved, and functions performed by the remainder of the offices were absorbed by the throne. “The military power, here the main thing, was exclusively in [the] hands” of the emperor. Without any substance or vitality, the state institutions provided him no support. “The only means of maintaining its existence were the legions which the emperor continuously kept in the vicinity of Rome.” These “soon became conscious of their importance,” beginning to name the emperors after the family of Caesar Augustus, the man who picked up the pieces of power after the assassination of Julius, departed from the scene.

With political institutions “united in the person of the emperor, no ethical bond existed any longer; the will of the emperor was supreme, and before him there was absolute equality.” His “arbitrary choice” ruled with no limit save death. While he lived, the “complete boundlessness” of the emperor’s “particular subjectivity” meant that there could be “no inwardness, no forward or backward, no repentance, nor hope, nor fear, no thought,” inasmuch as “all these involve fixed determinations and aims”; this left rule by “desire, lust, passion, fancy—in short, caprice absolutely unfettered.” The sole order within the empire consisted of “standing in harmony with the one.” That is to say, in Hegelian terms, that no dialectic remained, and therefore no vitality. True, there were a few emperors “of noble character and noble nature,” such as Trajan, “yet even these produced no change in the state, and it never occurred to them to give the Roman people an organization of free common life; they were a happy coincidence, as it were, passing without a trace and leaving things as they were.” No dialectic, no history. “They cannot be said to act, since no object confronts them in opposition; they have only to will—well or ill—and it is so.” In another place Hegel thinks of mountains, masses without movement, without life, which seem to say, he says, ‘It is thus,’ and no more than that. “Italy was depopulated; the most fertile lands remained untilled; and this state of things lay as a fate over the Roman world.”

Obviously, in such a state there could be no citizens, only “persons.” “Individuals were perfectly equal (slavery made only a trifling distinction), and without any political rights.” Romans were no better-off or worse-off than Italians generally, and eventually “all distinction between the subjects of the entire Roman empire was abolished.” Private law was the one real law, that is, “the person as such [had] validity, in the reality which he gives to himself—in property.” Hegel compares this condition with that of a dead body, wherein “each point gains a life of its own, but only the miserable life of worms.” “The political organism is here dissolved into atoms,” that is, into “private persons.” [4] The Roman world consisted of, “on the one side, fate and the abstract generality of rule; on the other, the individual abstraction, the person, which involves the determination that the individual is something in himself, not in terms of his vitality, in terms of a fulfilled individuality, but as abstract individual,” prideful of that personhood because he knows no other way to live.

“The emperor only ruled, he did not govern, for the legal and ethical middle ground between ruler and ruled was lacking, the bond of a constitution and organization of the state, in which exists an order of intrinsically valid life-spheres, in local communities and provinces, which, active for the general interest, exert an influence on the general state administration—this was lacking.” Here Hegel looks back at Burke and his esteemed “little platoons,” ahead to Tocqueville in America, although neither of those thinkers would have endorsed Hegel’s grand historical dialectic. But they might have agreed with his assessment of imperial Rome, where men had no “consciousness” of country “or some such ethical unity” but instead either “yield[ed] themselves to fate” with “perfect indifference to life”—living lives either of “freedom of thought” without civic action or of “sensuous enjoyment,” also without civic action. Such public action as existed consisted of currying favor with the emperor or violence, fraud, and cunning.

Hegel naturally concerns himself especially with the philosophic life under such a regime. The prevailing philosophic doctrines of imperial Rome—Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism—”although in themselves opposed to each other, yet were after the same thing, viz., rendering the spirit absolutely indifferent to everything the real world had to offer.” “This inward reconciliation by means of philosophy was itself only an abstract one, in the pure principle of personality; for thought, which, as pure, makes itself its own object and reconciles itself to itself, was completely without object, and the imperturbability of skepticism made aimlessness itself the object of the will.” Such philosophy “could not satisfy the living spirit, which longed after a higher reconciliation.” Many would find that in Christianity, to which Hegel devotes his longest discussion of any one feature of the Roman world. Strauss regards this as “in a way the most important part of the whole work.”

In its “desperation and in the pain of being abandoned by God,” the Roman world made “an open rupture with reality,” manifesting “a general desire for a satisfaction such as can only be attained inwardly, in the spirit, thus preparing the ground for a higher spiritual world.” Rome “crushed down the gods and all cheerful life in its service” while simultaneously “purif[ying] the human heart from all particularity” with its universality on the one hand and its emptying-out of concrete citizenship, its establishment of mere ‘personhood,’ on the other. Rome’s pain “is like the birth pangs of another and higher spirit, which was revealed in the Christian religion.” In Christianity man finally “obtains the consciousness of spirit in its universality and infinity,” finding the ‘outer’ truth within himself, “as man himself is spirit.” To do this, “the naturalness of spirit by virtue of which man is particular, empirical, must be denied, experienced as what Christians call man’s ‘ sin nature.

God can only be “recognized as spirit… when known as the Triune”—that is to say, a dialectic understood not only as its elements of thesis (God the Father) and antithesis (God the Son) but as their synthesis (the Spirit or Geist). “This new principle is the pivot on which world history turns. History proceeds to this point and from this point.” In the Christian principle of the Triune God “self-consciousness had raised itself to those moments which pertain to the concept of spirit, and to the need to comprehend these moments in an absolute manner.”

The Greek law “for their spirit” was ‘Man, know thyself.’ But Greek self-knowledge limited itself by “having the element of nature as an essential ingredient.” Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx by seeing the nature of human life as it proceeds from infancy to old age. In Greek religion, spirit manifested itself polytheistically; further, its many gods were “represented by art, in which the sensorial is elevated to the middle ground of beautiful form and shape, but not elevated to pure thought.” Spirit rightly perceived is a unity of three elements, with no natural/sensorial/physical aspect, but rather to be perceived only by mind, which is the complementary meaning of spirit in German, Geist.

Rome supplied the inwardness Greece lacked, but only in a formal way, taking “its content from passion and caprice” and from “the personality of individuals” as seen in the possession of property—as atoms unrelated organically, vitally, to one another, ruled by a ‘one,’ an emperor, who is no less capricious than they. “This contradiction is the misery of the Roman world,” but this misery also disciplines this world, draws it toward something by way of renouncing the charms of civic and artistic life, ‘Greekness.’ Man is drawn into himself, but now knows himself not as a happy citizen of a concrete polis but as an individual person, “miserable and null.” In his agony, he longs for something “beyond this condition of inwardness,” something to be found “elsewhere than in the properly Roman world,” which has seemingly encompassed the whole world in a universal empire. But in the very act of so encompassing Asia, the East, Rome encompassed the Jewish people, giving them their “world-historical importance and significance.” For the Israelites had always longed for God, as seen in the writings of David and the prophets, sorrowing over the transgressions of themselves and their people, sorrows beginning before Israel itself but seen in the “fall into sin” of Adam, of man “created in the image of God” who loses “his state of absolute contentment by eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.”

Sin “consists here only in the knowledge: this is that which is sinful, and by it man threw away his natural happiness.” Yet natural happiness is exactly what man needs to throw away. It is “a deep truth, that evil lies in consciousness, for the brutes are neither evil nor good, the merely natural man quite as little.” Knowledge cancels “natural unity”; in this the “fall into sin” is “the eternal, not the coincidental, history of spirit,” the emergence from the innocence of brute nature. “Paradise is a park, where only brutes, not men, can remain.” (Strauss interjects that a German “park” is “a kind of zoo.”)

“Only man is spirit, which is to say, for himself,” self-conscious and therefore cognizant of his distinction “from the universal divine spirit.” If man remains in his “abstract freedom in opposition to the good” he takes “the standpoint of evil.” “The fall into sin is therefore the eternal myth for man, through which, precisely, he became man.” In so doing, in seeing himself as separate from God or Absolute Spirit, he should feel as David feels—in pain, with a feeling of longing for reconciliation, for transcendence of that pain. At the same time, man’s sin is a significant gain of sorts because, as both the Serpent and God say, in obtaining knowledge of good and evil man becomes to that extent godlike. “Man through spirit, through cognition of the universal and the particular, comprehends God Himself,” even as he has separated himself from God. “The absolute and final repose of man’s whole being is not yet discovered” by man himself, although of course God sees it.

The history of the Jewish people shows this longing for, this striving after God. “The satisfaction which man enjoys at first consists in the finite and temporal blessings conferred on the chosen family and the possession of the land of Canaan,” but this is not yet satisfaction “in God,” being only an external satisfaction, the provision of a homeland. Rome unwittingly did Jews a great favor by scattering them, depriving them of this merely material satisfaction. “Formerly, the Jews considered [the fulfillment of man’s nature] to be, concretely, the land of Canaan and themselves as the people of God.” With this content “now lost,” they must turn to a purer form of spirituality. Crucially, however, while Rome’s Stoics taught withdrawal from reality, apolitical withdrawal, “the Jewish sentiment rather perseveres with reality; and in reality desires reconciliation” with God. Why? Because Judaism “is based on the Oriental unity of nature, i.e., the reality, subjectivity, and the substance of the one.” By conquering the Jewish homeland and then scattering the Jews, Rome unintentionally began to incorporate, synthesize, the East, the antithesis of the West, into itself, into the West. In Judaism, “the Oriental antithesis of light and darkness is transferred to spirit, and the darkness becomes sin. For the negated reality, nothing remains but subjectivity itself, the human will in itself as universal; only hereby does reconciliation become possible,” and only thereby can Rome ‘convert,’ in time, to a life of the spirit. “Sin is the discerning of good and evil in separation; but recognition likewise heals the ancient hurt, and is the fountain of infinite reconciliation,” as “recognition destroys the external, the alien in consciousness, and therefore is the return of subjectivity to itself.”

This is the (new) meaning of ‘history.’ For this consciousness of alienation, this knowledge of good and evil and consequent recognition of the putative ‘Other,’ God, as intrinsic to oneself—that spirit is one, singular not plural—occurs only as the Absolute Spirit unfolds itself dialectically over time.  “The identity of the subject and God comes into the world when the fullness of time was come; the consciousness of this identity is the recognition of God in His true essence. The content of truth is spirit itself, the living movement in itself”—the opposite of the lifeless petrification of mountains and empty ceremonies. “The nature of God, to be pure spirit, is revealed to man in the Christian religion.” How so? And what is “spirit,” that term Hegel bruits about so often?

Spirit “is the one, the infinite equal to itself, pure identity, which, secondly, separates itself from itself, as the other of itself, as the being-for-itself and in-itself against the general.” Got that? To put it somewhat plainer language, Being is one and infinite; it is itself and no other. But Being then divides itself, and the things it sloughs off from itself are themselves beings, independent of the ‘parent’ Being, distinctive from that general Being. The now-separate beings lose awareness of their origin; in the case of purely material beings (mountains, deserts) they lose awareness altogether, lack consciousness. The Triune God of Christianity consists of separate beings who are conscious of one another, however; though distinct, they recognize one another in feeling—specifically, love—and thought or spirit. This makes God both one and three, without contradiction but with ‘internal’ relations allowing God to reflect upon Himself by means of the mutual relations of His three Persons. The Father has his “other,” his Son; “this other in its particularization is the world, nature, and the finite spirit.” In becoming flesh, the Son thereby “posited as an aspect of God.” “This being-contained,” this being-within-the-material, “may be expressed such that the unity of man with God can be posited in the Christian religion.” However, Hegel insists, “this unity must not be superficially conceived, as if God were only man, and man likewise God; rather, man is God only to the degree that he abolishes the naturalness and finitude of his spirit, and elevates himself to God” as “a partaker of the truth” who “knows that he himself is a moment of the divine idea.” In such self-knowledge, which is simultaneously knowledge of God or the Absolute Spirit, man relinquishes “his naturalist,” since “the natural is the unfree and the unspiritual.” This is what makes the dialectical antithesis of the Greek spirit by the Roman spirit indispensable to the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, however unlovely the Roman antithesis may be. To deploy a well-worn image, the human spirit, which is an aspect of the divine spirit, must free itself from ‘congealed’ spirit or matter, like one of Michelangelo’s sculptures in which a human form seems to be emerging from a block of stone. The Greeks emerged partially; “the natural elation of soul which characterized the Greeks did not progress to the subjective freedom of the ‘I’ itself.” Jesus shows how to emerge fully, thanks to the emptying-out of the human soul under joyless Roman despotism and personalism. “Misfortune itself is henceforth recognized as necessary to mediate the unity of man with God,” as universal misery under Rome prepares souls for transcendence of a rotten material world, now devoid of the charms with which the Greeks remained enthralled.

How then was the nature of God revealed to man in the appearance of Jesus among us? Man may understand “the unity of man with God” in his own mind, in his “thinking, speculative consciousness.” But this unity “must also exist for the sensorial, representative consciousness, it must become an object for the world, it must appear; and it must do so in the sensorial form appropriate to spirit, which is the human.” Why must it so appear? To demonstrate concretely what the speculative consciousness can only perceive mentally; recall that Hegel is never satisfied with philosophizing cut off—”abstracted,” as he would say—from the world, insisting rather that philosophy result in action, pervade the world even as the Absolute Spirit does indeed pervade the world, since the world is only the Absolute Spirit in material, ‘sensorially’-perceived form. Christ therefore did appear, “a man who is God” and “God who is man,” thereby enabling “the world [to] become peace and reconciliation—a glimpse of the synthesis of all elements of the Absolute Spirit, some of them alienated from the others via loss of consciousness or (with human beings) false consciousness, incomplete consciousness. In his material being, Christ dies, but only to be “exalted to heaven” to sit “at the right hand of the Father.” Before dying, He tells his disciples that the Spirit will remain to guide them. “To the apostles, Christ as living was not that which He was to them subsequently as the Spirit of the church, in which He first became to them true spiritual consciousness.” This marks Jesus off from wise men and moral exemplars such as Socrates. “Excellence of character, morality, etc., all this is not the final requirement of spirit, it does not enable man to gain the speculative idea of spirit for his imagination.” Only Jesus does, making Him and His life on earth necessary for the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit in the fullness of time. His miracles don’t confirm His uniquely divine status, as false prophets (indeed Satan himself) can perform miracles.

Guided by the Spirit, the apostles evangelized, bringing the redeeming message of Jesus to the rest of the world. But they did more than just talk. Having severed the worldly bonds of human regimes, they built God’s regime, the Kingdom of God, on earth in the form of the Church. “The infinite elevation of spirit to simple purity is put at the head, as foundation”; they are to seek first the Kingdom of God, without fear of “external sufferings” such as persecution, which “are nothing by comparison with that glory” they find in the Kingdom. They abstract themselves “from all that belongs to reality, even from ethical bonds”—the most radical of all revolutions or regime changes, inasmuch as “everything that had been respected, is treated as a matter of indifference, as worthy of no regard.” This sounds a bit like the Roman philosophers, but only on the surface. After withdrawing their allegiance from all worldly, human-all-too-human regimes, the apostles formed the Church, an alternative society or congregation. “Christ—man as man—in whom the unity of God and man has appeared, has in His death, and His history generally, Himself evinced the eternal history of spirit, a history which every man has to accomplish in himself, in order to exist as spirit, or to become a child of God, a citizen of His kingdom.” By entering that congregation of self-consciously spirit-filled souls, the form “an actual, present life in the Spirit of Christ.”

This is why “the Christian religion by no means must be led back merely to the statements of Christ Himself; it is in the Apostles that the set, developed truth is first exhibited.” The Church or congregation needed to exist in a world not yet Christian. It “sustain[ed] a double relation”: first with the Roman world, “abstain[ing] from all activity in the state,” keeping itself ‘holy’ or separate from it and sustaining “that infinite inward liberty which it enjoyed” despite the “sufferings and sorrows” inflicted upon Christians by that world; and then in the development of “dogma”—teachings which synthesized the sayings of Jesus with “the antecedent development of philosophy.” In that philosophy, men had already understood “universality” in the abstract. Christianity brought to this philosophic idea “a concrete, particular content,” namely, the oneness and infinitude that are the marks of Oriental thought, through the pathway of Judaism. As Strauss puts it, “the actualization, the fulfillment, of religion—in this case, of the Christian religion—is that religion becomes visible as human reason.” That is, he continues, “what was traditionally thought to be suprarational becomes fully evident to the fully developed human reason,” as “the religious principle which dwells in the heart of man is produced also as worldly freedom.” “This inner freedom of the mind, of the soul, becomes externalized and therewith comes into its own as worldly freedom, that is, political freedom.”

The same thing occurred in the realm of practice. Hegel observes that “in the Roman world, the union of East and West had taken place initially in external manner, by means of conquest; it now took place inwardly, as the spirit of the East spread over the West” with Christian evangelism and Church-building. Having “yearned after a deeper, purely inward universality” than the external universality of Roman imperialism, having yearned for “something infinite yet at the same time having the determinate in itself,” the Roman world found this in Christianity. The synthesis of theory and practice then became possible. Such “learned Jews” as Philo had already “connect[ed] abstract forms of the concrete, which they derived from Plato and Aristotle, with their understanding of the infinite, and recognizing God, according to the more concrete idea of spirit, by the specification Logos.” Alexandrian thinkers, too, in “their speculative thinking attained those abstract ideas which are likewise the fundamental content of the Christian religion.” They did so, however, by trying “to demonstrate a speculative truth in the Greek idols” (as Julian the Apostate would do, later). This attempt to “spiritualize” the pagan divinities could occur because “the Greek religion contains a degree of reason,” and “the substance of spirit is reason”; “its product must be something rational,” however obscured reason might be by the “sensorial divinities” of Western paganism. The Christian God does not obscure the rational spirit by sensorial blockages, but rather uses the sensorial appearance of God-in-man as a gateway to the spirit. Accordingly, Christians “sought for a profounder sense in the historical part of their religion,” that is, not in pagan deities but in the books of what they now called the ‘Old’ Testament. For this, the doctrine of ideas found in Greek philosophy proved very helpful indeed, as may be seen in the writings of the early Church fathers, Hegel claims. (And indeed some of those fathers of the Church did in fact ‘Platonize,’ as may be seen, for example, in the writings of Origen.) In this, Hegel coolly remarks, “whether a Christian doctrine is stated exactly so in the Bible… is not the only question. The letter kills, the spirit makes alive.” Thus “the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) ultimately established a fixed confession of faith, to which we still adhere: this confession had not, indeed, a speculative form, but the profoundly speculative is most intimately interwoven with the manifestation of Christ Himself,” in yet another synthesis. In the Nicene Creed we see “the profoundest thought… united with the form of Christ, with the historical and external; and precisely this is the grandeur of the Christian religion, that, with all this profundity, it is easy to comprehend by our consciousness in its outward aspect, while at the same time, it summons us to deeper penetration.” The reader will be struck by the way in which Hegel seeks to settle the modern Enlightenment’s challenge to Christianity, assigning fully rational content to Christianity while preserving the ‘popular’ character of both Christian and Enlightenment evangelizing. As Strauss formulates the matter, “Hegel wishes to make reason sovereign, and therefore the full knowledge of God, the perfect knowledge of God, must be accessible to reason.” [5]

If the ‘thesis’ of Christian life in the Roman world is the relation of the congregation to that world, and the ‘antithesis’ to that world is Church doctrine (itself however a synthesis of Eastern religion and Western philosophy), the synthesis is the church itself, “not merely a religion as opposed to another religion, but… at the same time secular existence beside secular existence.” “The pious conversion must not remain concealed in the recesses of the heart, but must be turned into an actual, present world, behaving in accordance with the purpose of that absolute spirit.” The Church must organize itself; the Kingdom of God on earth must have a regime of its own. It must have rulers of a sort, “overseers who are distinguished for talents, character, fervor of piety, a holy life, learning, and culture generally.” As teachers of the truth they have discovered they “are distinguished from the congregation as such, as the knowledgeable and governing are distinguished from the governed.” Church officials, one might say, thus anticipate the formation of the modern bureaucracy of scientific administration.  “In the overseership the spirit is existing-for-itself and self-conscious” as an “authority in spiritual as well as in secular matters, an authority for the truth and for the relations of the subject regarding the truth, in order, namely, that the individual conduct himself in accordance with the truth” within this “regime of authority.” The spiritual kingdom thereby “assumed the shape of an ecclesiastical one,” self-governing with regard its members and its property. “Priestly ordination… soon changes this democracy into aristocracy; this notwithstanding, the further development of the church does not belong to the period now under consideration,” but will be seen in the Germanic world.

In Christianity, “the absolute idea of God, in its truth, attained consciousness, in which man likewise in terms of his true nature, which is given in the specific contemplation of the Son, finds himself taken up.” As a result, man “has his true home in a suprasensorial world, an infinite inwardness, gained only by a rupture with natural existence and volition, and by his labor to break them within himself. This is religious self-consciousness.” In addition to the founding and articulation of the Church, this self-consciousness has several practical, moral results. “First, under Christianity slavery is impossible; for man now is man viewed in his general nature in God; each individual is an object of the grace of God and of the divine final purpose.” “Man, precisely simply as man, has infinite value; and this infinite value abolishes all particularity attaching to birth or country.” Second, “humanity has this sphere of free spirituality in and for itself, and everything else must proceed from it.” This means that Greek freedom, which consists of “happiness and genius,” must be eschewed for the life of agapic love. Dependence and subordination, whether seen in slavery or in consulting oracles, must be abandoned for relations animated by that love, by goodwill. Man decides things for himself, guided by the spirit within himself. In this, Hegel’s Christianity anticipates Kant’s eschewal of ‘eudaimonic’ morality, aiming at happiness, for purity of the will.

Hegel rejects “the opposition between reason and religion, as also between religion and the world.” For ‘his’ Christianity, these are real distinctions, but not antitheses. “Reason in general is the essence of spirit, divine as well as human. The distinction between religion and the world is only this—that religion as such is reason in the heart—that it is a temple of represented truth and freedom in God; the state, on the other hand, following the selfsame reason, is a temple of human freedom in the knowledge and will of reality, the content of which may itself be called divine.” Religion preserves and confirms religion in the state, which implements the moral law which “constitutes the fundamental principle of religion.” History then amounts to the manifestation of religion as human reason, then instantiated by taking “the religious principle which dwells in the heart of man” and producing it as “secular freedom,” removing “the discord between the inner life of the heart and the actual world.” That would be the work of the Germans, not the Romans. As the Roman, Western, portion of the empire declined and fell, the Byzantine, Eastern portion remained. But it proved a wrong turn, albeit a long one.

Respecting Christianity, Byzantium contrasted instructively with the West. In both regions, Christianity “was now a political power,” animating states. But in Byzantium Christianity came into a society already civilized, with a complete and indeed impressive system of civil law which found its full expression in the Justinian Code. “Here the Christian religion [was] placed in the midst of a developed civilization, which did not proceed from it.” In the barbarian West, however, the Germanic peoples had no culture to speak of; “all culture had to start from scratch.”

One might expect the East to do better, but not so. Byzantium rather “exhibits to us a thousand-year-long series of uninterrupted crimes, weaknesses, basenesses, and lack of character, a most repulsive and consequently a most uninteresting picture.” Christianity was “abstract” there; “powerless, just because it [was] so pure and spiritual in itself,” issuing at its best in a culture of monasticism. “It is a common notion and saying, in reference to the power of religion as such over the hearts of men, that if Christian love were universal, both private and political life would be perfect.” This is wrong. The purest conscience will be assaulted by “all the passions and desires.” “In order that heart, will, intelligence may become true, they must be thoroughly trained; what is right must become custom, habit; practical activity must be elevated to rational action; the state must have a rational organization, and then at length does the will of individuals become a truly righteous one. Light shining in darkness may perhaps give color, but not a picture animated by the spirit.” In Hegel’s view, then, the traditional understanding of the action of the Holy Spirit on individual souls isn’t enough; only the all-pervading Absolute Spirit can thoroughly inform human life, as indeed was the case from very nearly the beginning, with the founding and development of the ecclesia.

The Byzantine state’s organization and legal system was never “reconstructed in harmony” with the principle of the Christian religion, which therefore remained confined mostly to the monasteries. The various Christian doctrinal disputes that arose in Byzantium (the Iconoclasm Controversy most memorably) were agitated by “the lawless mob,” pitting “popular license” against “courtly baseness” in “violent civil wars” featuring “murder, conflagration, and pillage, perpetrated in the cause of Christian dogmas.” In A.D. 1453 “the vigorous Turks” crushed the whole “rotten edifice.”

 

Notes

1. Strauss contrasts the myth of Romulus and Remus at some length, making two main observations. He first contrasts the story of Rome’s founding with the Biblical account of the founding of the first city. Romulus and Cain both commit fratricide. But “the story of Romulus and Remus is told by the Romans about their own city,” whereas the story of Cain and Abel is told from ‘outside’ the city so founded. This leads to a second observation: in Hegel’s opinion, the story of Romulus and Remus ranks as “true historical evidence”—not of the events related in the story itself but of the Romans. “A nation which can tell this story about its own origin thereby reveals its soul,” as Strauss puts it. “Where in the world do you find a nation which has given such a terrible account of its own origins? Hegel says to us, and I think here rightly, that this is most important for understanding them.” Strauss goes on to say that Plutarch (quite subtly) and Cicero more explicitly rate the Greeks higher than the Romans when it comes to both morality and culture. “So in other words, the general assertion of Hegel has very good foundations.”
2. Hegel and Montesquieu share at least two sources: Livy and Machiavelli. They share with one another the judgment that Roman warlike valor needed to be supplemented, if not entirely replaced, by the ‘modern’ ethos of commerce, as commended by Locke and, before him, Hobbes. They depart from one another in their treatment of Christianity, which Montesquieu frequently regards with irony, while Hegel incorporates it into his own system, if in terms no orthodox Christian would accept.
3. Strauss remarks, “I wonder whether that is literally true, because there were all kinds of oracles and things going on with Romulus,” as reported by Livy. Hegel’s interpretation “is rather the interpretation of Rome given by Machiavelli”; he may have “seen Rome through the eyes of Machiavelli.”
4. Strauss observes that such private persons would be called “bourgeois” by Rousseau, who contrasted bourgeois man with the citizen. “Rousseau’s distinction was taken up by Hegel and then transformed by Marx.” The bourgeois is “the man who does not fight for his country, who is not a citizen and has no participation in government, is a mere property-owning subject and devoid of all public spirit.”
5. Strauss disputes the suggestion made by one of his students, that the Lectures amount to an attempt to “give a philosophy to the masses.” “I would assume that Hegel had some reticence,” Strauss replies, “but much less than earlier philosophers, and he in a way rejects the principle of reticence. When he discusses the question of the esoteric and exoteric teaching—as he does in his lectures on the history of philosophy—he simply rejects that. He doesn’t wish to have anything to do with it. And I think Hegel and his contemporary Schleiermacher were more responsible than any other individuals for the fact that the distinction between esoteric and exoteric has ceased to be of any importance.”