Dr. Martin Erdmann

Source: Martin Erdmann, Siegeszug des Fortschrittsglaubens (Worthington, OH: Verax Vox Media, 2020) vol. 2 (hardcover): 613-617 (6.4.2 Identification of the Ego with God).

Since 1800, the intellectual revolt had been in full swing, spreading German Idealism far beyond the borders of its country of origin and making it the dominant philosophy on the continent and in America. This had begun with Kant and reached its climax in Hegel. Born in Stuttgart, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) studied theology at the University of Tübingen. After receiving his doctorate, he lectured in theology and philosophy at the University of Jena and Heidelberg until he made a name for himself as a leading philosopher and rector at the Free University in Berlin - the crown jewel of Prussian higher education. Hegel arrived in Berlin in 1817 and remained there until the end of his life.

Influenced by mysticism

At the age of 25, Hegel wrote an essay on "The Positivity of the Christian Religion“. In all directness he opposed the Christian idea that man was separated from God in essence. The only exception was a single individual (Jesus Christ), separated and isolated from all others. In this view, Hegel and other thinkers who were in this stream of tradition were particularly influenced by the German mystic Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), who gave a pantheistic keynote to dialectical philosophy. The mechanism driving the course of history, he argued, was an interplay of antithetically opposed realities that fought each other until they finally produced a new reality out of previously conflicting polarities. Böhme wondered how the world before creation could succeed in its own transformation into a completely new form of appearance in the act of its creation. The mystic gave himself the answer to it: Before the creation there was an original source, an eternal unity, an undifferentiated, indeterminate void, to which Böhme gave the term "Ungrund". This void possessed, as strange as this may sound, in itself a forward pushing energy, a nisus, a force of self-realization. This force called forth the will as a counterforce, which created the universe by transforming the nothingness into something existent.

Reunion with God

The pantheistic character of the theosophical mysticism of a Jacob Boehme stemmed largely from Neoplatonism, as if the individual human being had the duty to unite with God, the One, by giving up his individuality as a separate person, considered as the alienated self. Although the methods of the various mystics differed from those of the monks of the Order of Florence or the Brothers of the Free Spirit, whether by a process of history or by a devastating event, the goal remains the same: the abandonment of one's individuality through a reunion with God, the One, in order to end cosmic alienation, at least at the level of the individual human being.

Human pride becomes the basis of a world philosophy

The overwhelming pride of man, according to the Christian teaching, became visible in his attempt to gain divine knowledge and power. This sinful desire to be equal to God led in primeval times to man's fall and his exclusion from the Garden of Eden. As a thoroughly heretical Lutheran, Hegel had the audacity to make man's haughty desire, as expressed in Goethe's Faust theme, the basis of a world philosophy that supposedly conveyed a profound insight into the unalterable course of history. At the heart of the Faust theme lay Faust's intense desire to acquire absolute knowledge and divine power. In the spirit of the Romantic movement in Germany, Hegel pursued the concern to unite man with God by virtually identifying him with divine reality, as if the essence of the one overflowed unhindered into that of the other. In the words of Princeton University political scientist Robert C. Tucker, Hegelianism was therefore "a philosophical religion of the self propagated in the guise of a theory of history. The religion is based on an identification of the ego with God". It is enough to note at this point that the meaning of the conceptualization of the "I" in Hegel's philosophy does not mean the individual, but the collective human race, an organic "I", so to speak.

The man Jesus Christ develops into God

Since Christian doctrine is unwavering in its insistence that God exists in another, higher world that is beyond the reach of man, Hegel studiously refused to believe in anything supernatural like the Christian God. In his The Spirit of Christianity (1799), he attempted to solve this problem by offering his own religion. In complete contrast to the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, according to which the Son of God became man, Hegel sees the achievements of Jesus Christ in the fact that he actually became God as a pure human being. In his study Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, Robert C. Tucker summarized this idea as follows. Hegel had regarded Jesus not as God becoming man, but as man becoming God. This was the key idea underlying the whole edifice of Hegelian thought: there is no absolute difference between the human and divine beings. They are not two distinct things separated by an impassable gulf. The absolute I in man, the homo noumenon, is not only similar to God [...], he is God. Therefore, man, in so far as he strives to become like God, strives merely to be his own true self. And by deifying himself, he recognizes his own true nature.

         If man is really God, what is the significance of history? Why does man change and evolve? The answer is obvious: man-God or world spirit, as Hegel calls him, is not perfect or is not yet in a perfect state at the beginning of his existence. Hence, man-God begins his earthly existence in ignorance of his divine essence. Hegel sees history as a process that enables the man-god to acquire more and more knowledge until he finally possesses absolute knowledge, that is, the full knowledge and realization of his divine being. Thus, in the end, the man-God succeeds in fully realizing his potential as an infinite being.

Abolition of the separation between God and man

Why then did the man-God create the universe? Not out of overflowing love and goodness, but out of a felt need to become continuously more and more aware of himself, that he is the world-self. This process of a growing consciousness is owed to a creative efficacy, by virtue of which the world-self externalizes itself. This externalization happens, on the one hand, through the creation of nature, the original world, and, on the other hand, through an ongoing self-alienation throughout human history. The most important is this second process, because through it man, this collective organism, not the individual, brings about the unfolding of civilization, which at the same time represents a creative disposal of himself. Only in this way he succeeds in acquiring a greater and greater knowledge of his own divinity. Thus, the world is nothing other than man's own self-realization. This process is, according to Hegel, the gradual negation of man's self-alienation and thus the abolition of the separation between God and man. In short, man perceives the world as something hostile because it is not part of himself; it is alien to him. These conflicts would dissolve when he finally realizes that the world is actually himself. This process of realization is what Hegel called "Aufhebung": the world discards its otherness and unites with the human ego.

         Georg W. F. Hegel later presented a bold metaphysical viewpoint of the inevitable progress in the process of history in an anthology of published lectures on the philosophy of history, which emerged as a dominant concept throughout his dialectical philosophy. According to Hegel, the meaning of history lies in the realization of the absolute in the temporal; world history is thus "spiritual reality in its whole scope of inwardness and outwardness" . The self-development of the spirit is perceived in the successive formations of the social order and in the development of world-historical peoples. The history of mankind, which follows its inner-worldly course of development according to its own rationality, moves in the direction of freedom; the highest form of it has concretized itself in the German romanticism. The task of the state is to preserve the social order in order to enable the social groups to lead a civilized life.

Ideological revolution changes Europe

Hegelianism, in the hands of its protagonists, was the preferred instrument for carrying out an ideological revolution in Europe that transformed the political, social, and economic life of the West in favor of a system of thought that eventually came to full flower in socialism and existentialism. The German Hegelians had astutely recognized the radical orientation of their idealistic philosophy. They perceived with utter distaste Hegel's efforts to whitewash his spiritualized pantheism with a thin layer of Lutheran theology. That this misguided attempt was ultimately doomed to failure was clearly before their eyes. Nevertheless, Lutheran theologians and church historians, such as David Friedrich Strauß and Ferdinand Christian Baur, worked diligently to continue Hegel's project even after the philosopher's death, both in the academic and ecclesiastical spheres. The tragic result, however, was the banishment from Lutheranism of the remaining vestiges of Reformation theology. A new movement arose from the ruins of a Germany devastated by the Napoleonic wars and spread throughout Europe. It seized especially the thinking of the peoples who had previously brought Germany to its knees militarily. As Hegelianism gradually conquered the citadels of scholarship in France, England, and America, various changes in its conceptual composition occurred in accordance with the prevailing cultural currents. Nevertheless, it can be stated that the distinctive characteristics that marked this philosophy from the beginning were preserved, although new elements were added. A set of philosophical principles served as an easily recognizable identifying factor that gradually became the main cornerstones of a pantheistic worldview.