Il destino del cristianesimo nella filosofia della religione di Hegel

Abstract

The essay investigates the fate of Christianity in the Hegelian philosophy of religion along two lines already present in Hegel’s early texts: the topic of the necessary presence in religion of an external object for the imagination, charged, however, in the case of Christianity by the burden of the founder’s death; and the topic of the impossibility of the universalization of love, which vitiates the character of religion as acting. The essay’s development into a section on the interpretation of the death of God through the Phenomenology of Spirit and Berlin lectures on the philosophy of religion illustrates the tension between the historicity of the figure of the man-God and the necessary consummation of the merely historical character of that death. The emphasis on the role of community in understanding the meaning of the death of the man-God addresses the centrality of community to a possible destiny of Christianity as well. The last section of the essay, on worship as ethics, again shows a tension between the specificity of worship and its necessary ending in life itself. Through the definitions of worship in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and in the Encyclopedia, the evolution of religious action toward interiority and thus toward ethical life and the consequent reflections on the meaning of a permanence of religious community are high- lighted. Here philosophy appears to play a decisive role in defining the terms of a dynamic and open religious community.