Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, expresses a similar approach to religions and to those belief systems which are almost, but not quite, religions:
We shall discuss now the first stage of nature religion, the religion of magic, which we may deem unworthy of the name “religion.” In order to grasp this standpoint of religion we must forget all the representations and thought that we are perhaps so familiar with and that themselves belong to the most superficial habits of our culture. We must consider human beings all by themselves upon the earth, the tent of the heavens above them and nature round about them, and so, to begin with, without any reflective thought, altogether devoid of consciousness of anything universal.
Hegel points out that we need to undo our current cultural worldview, which is already informed by religion, in order to understand a pre-religious worldview. The more ancient civilizations embraced a worldview in which, in place of religion, one finds magic and myth. Magic, for these anthropological purposes, may be defined as an attempt to manipulate physical reality. Magic is the attempt to bring about certain states of affairs. One might use magic, e.g., to bring about fertile farming conditions or to bring about a military victory. Magic is thus closely related to, or identical with, what historians call “fertility religions” - but we note, with Hegel, that “fertility religions” are not religions, but merely so called.
Myth is the creation of narratives, narratives designed to explain. Myth can be true or false. In a magical, pre-religious society, myth is expanded and brought forth to do the tasks which religion will do at a later stage.
When a civilization leaves the stage of myth and magic, and progresses to religion, it abandons myth, because it acknowledges, with Kant, that sober reason admits that some questions are beyond it; human reason cannot answer all questions, and so mature religion is content to admit some mysteries. The immature stage of mythology does not want to admit that some questions are beyond the ability of human reason to answer, and so myths are fabricated, providing answers to all questions, leaving no question unanswered, and leaving no room for mystery.
Likewise, mature societies leave behind the phase of magic. Magic is the attempt to manipulate, and is not content to admit that humans cannot control every event in the natural universe. Progression from magic to religion is the progression from acting on the desire to place all variables under human control to acting on the recognition that humans must accept that there are natural limits to their powers.
Having shed magic and myth, the truly religious phase centers upon communication with the deity. The modern religious person, then, has a different approach to the realm of the spirit than did the person who belonged to a pre-religious civilization. Hegel writes:
It is difficult to get the sense of an alien religion from within. To put oneself in the place of a dog requires the sensibilities of a dog. We are cognizant of the nature of such living objects, but we cannot possibly known what it would mean to transpose ourselves into their place, so that we could sense their determinate limits; for that would mean filling the totality of one’s subjectivity wholly with these characteristics. They remain always object of our thought, not of our subjectivity, of our feeling; we can grasp such religions, but we cannot get the sense of them from within. We can grasp the Greek divinities, but we cannot get the inner sense of genuine adoration toward a divine image of that kind.
It is on this point that it is most difficult for the modern reader to enter into the psychology of early Mesopotamian cultures; into Mayas, Incas, and Aztecs; into Druids, Celts, Gauls, or Hittites; and into the earliest stages of Hindu, Greek, Roman, or Norse mythologies. It is telling that all of these engaged in the practice of human sacrifice. The drive for magic - the ability to manipulate the weather or to rig military victories - was so intense that human sacrifice seemed either necessary or reasonable. The modern reader may find it easy to mock those primitive cultures, but should remember that the immanent threat of death and the lack of accurate knowledge about the Infinite and the Transcendental are powerful forces; the modern reader may become more sympathetic when considering those forces. The modern reader might also imagine that certain aspects of modern civilization may seem equally barbaric when viewed by someone who is utterly outside that civilization.
Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion pose certain textual problems, being as they are, a patchwork quilt made of Hegel’s own notes from which he lectured, as well as notes taken by students during those lectures, along with fragments of text written out by Hegel - all edited together into prose by scholars after Hegel’s death. To compound the problem, the lectures, first given in 1821, were repeated over the years, in 1824, in 1827, and in 1831. Over those years, Hegel adjusted both the content and the form of his presentation, and editing all of this material into one stream of prose gives a simplified vision of Hegel’s thought on the matter.
Hegel began by noting that what one considers in this most primitive stage of culture, the culture of magic and myth, is not quite a religion, but rather something pre-religious. Yet he confusingly uses the word ‘religion’ in his discussion of it.
In the primal, immediate religion, here in this immediacy, humanity still knows no higher power than itself. There is, to be sure, a power over contingent life, over its purposes and interests, but this is still no essential power, as a universal in and for itself, but falls within the compass of humanity itself. The spiritual subsists in a singular, immediate mode.
The deities of early mythologies, and the power of magic, are then actually projections of the human mind. With Xenophanes, we note the suspiciously anthropomorphic features of these idols. Magic and myth are human ambition writ large. But even the formalization of these concepts into personified anthropomorphic deities is already a step beyond the most primitive level of myth and magic:
But the first nature religion is much more remote from the totality of our consciousness than this. Human beings in that situation still exist in a state of immediate desire, force, and action, behaving in accord with their immediate will. They do not yet pose any theoretical questions such as: “Where does this come from?” “Who made it?” and “Must it have a cause?” This inward divorce of objects into a contingent and an essential aspect, into a causative aspect and the aspect of something merely posited, or of an effect, does not yet occur for them. Similarly, even the will in them is not yet theoretical; there is not yet this rupture in them, nor any inhibition toward themselves. The theoretical element in willing is what we call the universal, right, duty - i.e., laws, firm specifications, limits for the subjective will. These are thoughts, universal forms that belong to the thought of freedom. They are distinct from subjective arbitrariness, desire, and inclination; all of the latter are restrained and controlled by the universal, or are conformed to this universal; the natural willing of desire is transformed into willing and acting in accord with such universal viewpoints.
Although his topic is the philosophy of religion, Hegel here thinks alongside various political philosophers who have imagined that humanity once existed in some ‘state of nature’ out of which society and state emerged. Here is constructing a religious analogue to that political development. But both are dubious: politically and religiously, we must ask what evidence exists that humanity actually did live in that ‘state of nature’ and why we might not suppose that humanity simply lived in a less developed version of its current self. Those who posit a ‘state of nature’ are speaking of a difference in kind; we ask whether it might not have simply been a difference in degree.
But here human beings are still undivided with regard to willing; desire is the governing factor here. Similarly in their representations, in the imagination of these human beings, they carry on in this undivided state, this benighted condition, a stupor in the theoretical domain and a wildness of will. This is just spirit’s primitive and wild reliance upon itself. There is indeed a fear present here, a consciousness of negation, though not yet the fear of the Lord; it is instead the fear of contingency, of the forces of nature, which display themselves as mighty powers over against humanity. The fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom, is fear before a spiritually self-sufficient being opposed to arbitrariness. This fear first enters human experience when in one’s singularity one knows oneself to be powerless, when one’s singularity is inwardly shaken. The beginning of wisdom is when singular privateness and subjectivity sense itself as not being what is true, and, in the consciousness of its singularization and impotence, by way of negation, it passes over to knowledge, to universal being-in-and-for-self.
Hegel sees this pre-religious phase as the un-reflective and un-self-conscious activity of the will and of fear. He notes a transition from a fear of arbitrary contingent concrete fears to the the fear of the Lord. The themes of will and fear certainly continue from the pre-religious to the religious phase, but they appear in the latter in very different guise than in the former. One may also posit a post-religious phase, in which the primary concept is relationship with the deity, and not mechanism. In any case, when doing the philosophy of religion, it is a good starting point to sort out those things which actually are religion from those things which may seem like, or be called, religion without actually being so.
