HEGEL was born in Stuttgart in 1770, when the Age of Reason and Enlightenment was closing and the day of the Romantics was at hand. Both these contemporary influences affected his thinking, and he derived another, no less powerful, from his early education at the Stuttgart Gymnasium. This was the influence of Greek and Roman ideas.

The realms of learning which attracted him most during his school years were religion and history, and especially the history of religion. A paper “On the Religion of the Greeks and Romans” by the seventeen-year-old Hegel shows that his philosophical genius was already alive....

(152)¹ You may advance the most contradictory speculations about the Christian religion, but, no matter what they may be, numerous voices are always raised against you, alleging that what you maintain may touch on this or that system of the Christian religion but not on the Christian religion itself. Everyone sets up his own system as the Christian religion and requires everyone else to envisage this and this only.

The method of treating the Christian religion which is in vogue today takes reason and morality as a basis for testing it and draws on the spirit of nations and epochs...

(243) With Abraham, the true progenitor of the Jews, the history of this people begins, i.e., his spirit is the unity, the soul, regulating the entire fate of his posterity. This spirit appears in a different guise after every one of its battles against different forces or after becoming sullied by adopting an alien nature as a result of succumbing to might or seduction. Thus it appears in a different form either as arms and conflict or else as submission to the fetters of the stronger; this latter form is called “fate.”

Of the course taken by the development of...

(378) But the wider this whole [i.e., either the Jewish people or Christendom] extends, the more an equality of rights is transposed into an equality of dependence (as happens when the believer in cosmopolitanism comprises in his whole the entire human race), the less is dominion over objects granted to any one individual, and the less of the ruling Being’s favor does he enjoy. Hence each individual loses more and more of his worth, his pretensions, and his independence. This must happen, because his worth was his share in dominion [over objects]; for a man without the pride of being...

(345) Absolute opposition holds good² [in the realm of the dead.] One kind of opposition is to be found in the multiplicity of living beings. Living beings must be regarded as organizations. The multiplicity of life has to be thought of as being divided against itself; one part (346) of this multiplicity (a part which is itself an infinite multiplicity because it is alive) is to be regarded purely as something related, as having its being purely in union; the second part, also an infinite multiplicity, is to be regarded as solely in opposition, as having its being solely through...