That the purpose of the state is the universal interest as such, and within this, as its substance, the preservation of particular interests, is, first, its abstract actuality or substantiality; but this is, second, its necessity, in that it diremps itself into the differences, determined by the concept, of its activity, which, through that substantiality, are equally actual and fixed determinations, powers; third, this very substantiality is spirit that knows and wills itself as having passed through the form of culture. The state therefore knows what it wills, and knows it in its universality, as something thought; it therefore acts and operates in accordance with known purposes and recognized principles, and in accordance with laws which are not only implicit but exist for consciousness; and likewise, in so far as its actions bear on existing circumstances and relations, in accordance with determinate knowledge of them.

This is the place to touch upon the relation of the state to religion, since in recent times it has so often been repeated that religion is the foundation of the state, and since this assertion is also made with the pretension that the science of the state is thereby exhausted — and no assertion is more calculated to produce so much confusion, indeed to elevate confusion itself into the constitution of the state, into the form which cognition is supposed to have. In the first place, it may seem suspicious that religion is recommended and sought above all for times of public misery, disruption, and oppression, and that people are directed to it for consolation against injustice and for hope of compensation for loss. If, further, it is regarded as an injunction of religion to be indifferent toward worldly interests, toward the course and business of actuality, while the state is spirit standing within the world, then the appeal to religion seems either unfitted to raise the interest and business of the state to an essential and serious purpose, or, on the other hand, seems to declare everything in the governance of the state to be a matter of indifferent arbitrariness — whether the point is merely that language is used as though the purposes of passions, unlawful force, and so forth were what ruled in the state, or that such an appeal to religion wishes, on its own account, to claim exclusive validity and to lay claim to the determining and administering of what is right. Just as it would be regarded as mockery if all feeling against tyranny were dismissed on the ground that the oppressed may find consolation in religion, so it must equally not be forgotten that religion can assume a form which results in the harshest bondage under the fetters of superstition and in the degradation of the human being below the animal (as among the Egyptians and Indians, who worship animals as their higher beings). This phenomenon can at least draw attention to the fact that one ought not to speak of religion in wholly general terms, and that, against it in certain of its shapes, a saving power is rather required which takes up the rights of reason and of self-consciousness. — The essential determination of the relation between religion and the state, however, results only by recalling their concept. Religion has absolute truth as its content, and hence the highest reach of disposition also falls within it. As intuition, feeling, representational cognition, which occupies itself with God as the unconditioned ground and cause on which everything depends, it contains the demand that everything should also be grasped in this relation and should obtain in it its confirmation, justification, and certainty. The state and laws, like duties, receive in this relation, for consciousness, the highest confirmation and the highest binding force; for even the state, laws, and duties are, in their actuality, something determinate, which passes over into a higher sphere as into its ground (see Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §453). For this reason religion also contains the place which, amid all change and amid the loss of actual purposes, interests, and possessions, affords the consciousness of the unchangeable and of the highest freedom and satisfaction.¹ Now if religion in this way constitutes the foundation which contains the ethical in general, and more specifically the nature of the state, as the divine will, then at the same time it is only as foundation that it is this, and it is here that the two part ways. The state is the divine will, as present spirit, unfolding itself into the actual shape and organization of a world. — Those who wish to remain fixed at the form of religion, as against the state, behave like those who believe they possess what is right in cognition when they remain always at essence and do not proceed from this abstraction to existence, or like those (see above §140 Anm.) who will only the abstract good and reserve to arbitrary will the determination of what is good. Religion is the relation to the Absolute in the form of feeling, of representation, of faith, and within its all-containing center everything is only as something accidental, even something vanishing. If this form is held fast even in relation to the state, such that it is supposed to be the essentially determining and valid factor for the state as well, then the state, as the organism developed into subsisting distinctions, laws, and institutions, is abandoned to fluctuation, uncertainty, and disruption. The objective and universal — the laws — instead of being determined as subsisting and valid, receive the determination of a negative as against that form which envelops everything determinate and thereby itself becomes subjective; and for human conduct the consequence follows: no law is given to the just man; be pious, and for the rest you may do as you please — you may abandon yourselves to your own arbitrary will and passion, and refer others who thereby suffer injustice to the consolation and hope of religion, or, still worse, reject and condemn them as irreligious. But in so far as this negative conduct does not remain merely an inner disposition and outlook, but turns to actuality and asserts itself within it, religious fanaticism arises, which, like political fanaticism, banishes every state institution and legal order as confining barriers unsuited to the inwardness and infinity of the mind, and thus banishes private property, marriage, and the relations and labors of civil society, and so forth, as unworthy of love and of the freedom of feeling. Since, however, a decision must be made for actual existence and action, the same thing occurs here as with the subjectivity of the will in general which knows itself as the absolute (§140): namely, that the decision is made from subjective representation, that is, from opinion and the pleasure of arbitrary will. — But the true, as against this truth which wraps itself up in the subjectivity of feeling and representation, is the immense transition of the inner into the outer, the implanting of reason into reality, at which the whole of world history has labored, and through which labor educated humanity has won the actuality and the consciousness of rational existence, of state institutions, and of laws. From those who seek the Lord and, in their uneducated opinion, assure themselves of possessing everything immediately, instead of taking upon themselves the labor of raising their subjectivity to the cognition of truth and to the knowledge of objective right and duty, only the shattering of all ethical relations, folly, and abomination can proceed — the necessary consequences of a religious disposition that insists exclusively on its own form and thereby turns against actuality and against the truth present in the form of the universal, that is, of laws. Yet it is not necessary that this disposition should proceed so far as to actualization; with its negative standpoint it can, of course, also remain merely something inward, submit itself to institutions and laws, and content itself with resignation and sighing, or with contempt and mere wishing. It is not strength but weakness which, in our times, has made religiosity into a polemical kind of piety, whether this is connected with a genuine need or merely with unsatisfied vanity. Instead of subduing one’s opinion by the labor of study and subjecting one’s will to discipline, thereby raising it to free obedience, it is the cheapest course to renounce the cognition of objective truth, to preserve a feeling of oppression and thereby one’s own conceit, and to suppose that one already possesses, in one’s godliness, everything required to see through the nature of laws and state institutions, to pass judgment on them, and to pronounce how they ought and must be constituted — and indeed, because such pronouncements come from a pious heart, to do so in an infallible and unassailable manner; for by making religion the foundation of one’s intentions and assertions, one supposes that nothing can be held against them, whether for their shallowness or for their wrongfulness.

But in so far as religion, when it is of a true kind, is without such a negative and polemical orientation against the state, and rather recognizes and confirms it, it further has, for itself, its own condition and its outward expression. The business of its cult consists in acts and doctrine; for this it requires possessions and property, as well as individuals dedicated to the service of the congregation. A relation between the state and the church community thus arises. The determination of this relation is simple. It lies in the nature of the case that the state fulfills a duty toward the community for its religious purpose: to afford it every furtherance and to grant it protection — indeed, since religion is the moment that integrates the deepest ground of disposition for the state, to require of all its members that they adhere to some church community — to any one whatever, moreover, since the state cannot enter into the content, in so far as this concerns the inwardness of representation. The state, developed in its organization and therefore strong, can behave all the more liberally in this respect: it can wholly overlook particulars that might affect it, and can even tolerate within itself communities (though the number involved is of course a factor) which do not themselves religiously recognize the direct duties owed to it — namely by leaving the members of such communities to civil society under its laws, and by being satisfied with a passive fulfillment of their direct duties toward it, mediated perhaps through commutation or exchange.² — But in so far as the church community possesses property, performs other acts of the cult, and employs individuals in its service for this purpose, it passes over from the inward into the worldly, and thus into the domain of the state, and thereby places itself directly under its laws. The oath, the ethical in general, as well as the relation of marriage, do indeed carry with them the inward permeation and elevation of disposition, which receives its deepest assurance through religion; but since ethical relations are essentially relations of actual rationality, it is the rights of this rationality which are to be asserted first and foremost in them, and to which ecclesiastical assurance is added only as the merely inward, more abstract side. — With regard to further expressions proceeding from ecclesiastical association, the inward preponderates over the outward more in the case of doctrine than in the case of the acts of the cult and other associated conduct, where the legal side at least immediately appears, on its own, as a matter for the state (churches have indeed also claimed exemption of their servants and their property from the power and jurisdiction of the state, and even jurisdiction over lay persons in matters — such as divorce cases, questions of oaths, and so forth — in which religion has a concurrent interest). — The police aspect with regard to such acts is admittedly less determinate, but this lies in the nature of this aspect just as much in relation to other, wholly civil acts (see above §234). In so far as the religious community of individuals rises to the level of a congregation, a corporation, it stands in general under the higher police supervision of the state. — Doctrine itself, however, has its territory in conscience; it stands within the right of the subjective freedom of self-consciousness — the sphere of inwardness which, as such, does not constitute the domain of the state. Yet the state, too, has a doctrine, since what it holds valid concerning right, constitution, and so on is essentially, in its institutions, in the form of thought, as law; and since the state is no mechanism but the rational life of self-conscious freedom, the system of the ethical world, disposition, and then the consciousness of this disposition in the form of principles, is an essential moment in the actual state. Conversely, the doctrine of the church is not merely something inward, a matter of conscience, but, as doctrine, is rather an expression — and an expression, moreover, concerning a content that is most intimately connected with ethical principles and the laws of the state, or that directly concerns them itself. State and church thus here come directly together, or into opposition. The difference between the two domains can be driven by the church to the point of a stark opposition, in which the church, as containing within itself the absolute content of religion, regards the spiritual in general, and hence also the ethical element, as its own province, while it regards the state as a merely mechanical scaffolding for unspiritual, external purposes; it conceives of itself as the kingdom of God, or at least as the way and the forecourt to it, while it conceives of the state as the kingdom of this world, that is, of the transient and the finite; it thus conceives of itself as an end in itself, while conceiving of the state as merely a means. With this pretension there is combined, with regard to teaching, the demand that the state should not merely allow the church complete freedom in this respect, but unconditional respect for its teaching, whatever this may be, since this prerogative belongs to it alone, in virtue of its having doctrine. Just as the church arrives at this pretension on the extended ground that the spiritual element in general is its own property, so science and cognition in general likewise stand within this domain; and, forming itself, on its own account, like a church, into a totality with its own distinctive principle, it can also regard itself as taking the place of the church itself, and indeed with still greater justification — whereupon the same independence from the state is then demanded for science, the state being required merely as a means to look after it as an end in itself. — For this relation, moreover, it is a matter of indifference whether the individuals and superiors dedicated to the service of the congregation have carried this so far as to attain an existence separated from the state, so that only the remaining members are subject to the state, or whether they otherwise stand within the state and their ecclesiastical function is merely one side of their estate, which they keep separate from the state. It should first be noted that such a relation is connected with a representation of the state according to which its sole determination lies in the protection and security of the life, property, and arbitrary will of each individual, in so far as these do not injure the life, property, and arbitrary will of others — the state thus being regarded merely as an arrangement dictated by need. The element of the higher spiritual, of what is true in and for itself, is on this view placed, as subjective religiosity or as theoretical science, beyond the state, which, as the layman in and for itself, has merely to show it respect; and the properly ethical thus falls away from the state altogether. That there have historically been times and conditions of barbarism in which everything higher and spiritual had its seat in the church, while the state was only a worldly regime of violence, arbitrary will, and passion, and that abstract opposition was the chief principle of actuality (see §358), belongs to history. But it is too blind and shallow a procedure to represent this position as the one truly in conformity with the Idea. The development of this Idea has rather demonstrated the truth to be that spirit, as free and rational, is in itself ethical, and that the true Idea is actual rationality, and it is this rationality that exists as the state. It further followed equally from this Idea that ethical truth is, within it, for thinking consciousness, a content worked up into the form of universality, that is, as law — that the state in general knows its purposes, cognizes and puts them into effect with determinate consciousness and in accordance with principles. As noted above, religion has the true as its universal object, but as a given content, one whose fundamental determinations are not cognized through thought and concepts; likewise the relation of the individual to this object is an obligation grounded in authority, and the testimony of one’s own spirit and heart, wherein the moment of freedom is contained, is faith and feeling. It is philosophical insight which recognizes that church and state do not stand opposed in the content of truth and rationality, but stand in a difference of form. If, therefore, the church passes over into teaching (there are, and have been, churches which have only a cult; others in which the cult is the main thing and teaching and more cultivated consciousness only a secondary matter), and its teaching concerns objective principles, the thoughts of the ethical and the rational, then in this expression it passes directly over into the domain of the state. As against its faith and its authority concerning the ethical, right, laws, institutions — as against its subjective conviction — the state is rather that which knows; in its principle, the content essentially does not remain fixed in the form of feeling and belief, but belongs to determinate thought. In so far as the content that is in and for itself appears, in the shape of religion, as a particular content — as the doctrines peculiar to the church as a religious community — it remains outside the domain of the state (in Protestantism, moreover, there is no clergy that would be the exclusive depository of ecclesiastical doctrine, because in it there are no laity). In so far as ethical principles and the order of the state in general are drawn over into the domain of religion, and can, and indeed are to be, not merely set in relation to it but grounded in it, this relation on the one hand gives the state itself religious certification; on the other hand there remains to the state the right and the form of self-conscious, objective rationality — the right to assert this rationality, and to maintain it against assertions arising from the subjective shape of truth, however such assertions may surround themselves with assurance and authority. Because the principle of its form as universal is essentially thought, it has also come about that the freedom of thought and of science has proceeded from its side (whereas, conversely, a church has burned Giordano Bruno, and made Galileo, on his knees, recant his exposition of the Copernican system of the world, and so forth³). On its side, therefore, science too has its place; for it shares the same element of form as the state — it has the purpose of cognition, namely of objective truth and rationality as thought. Thinking cognition can, of course, also fall from science into mere opinion and into ratiocination from grounds, and, turning to ethical objects and the organization of the state, set itself in contradiction to their principles — and this, too, perhaps with the same pretensions as the church makes for what is peculiar to it, namely appealing to this opinion as reason, and to the right of subjective self-consciousness to be free in its opinion and conviction. The principle of this subjectivity of knowing has been considered above (§140 Anm.); here it need only be remarked that, on the one hand, the state can exercise infinite indifference toward opinion — precisely in so far as it is only opinion, a subjective content, and therefore, however high it may puff itself up, has no true power or force in itself — just as painters who keep to the three primary colors on their palette can be indifferent to the scholastic wisdom of the seven primary colors. On the other hand, however, the state has, against this opinion of bad principles — in so far as it makes itself into a general existence that gnaws away at actuality, and especially in so far as the formalism of unconditioned subjectivity might take a scientific starting point as its ground and seek to raise, and turn, the state’s own teaching institutions into the pretension of a church against it — the task of taking objective truth and the principles of ethical life under its protection; just as, conversely, in general against the church, which lays claim to an unlimited and unconditioned authority, it has to assert the formal right of self-consciousness to its own insight, conviction, and, in general, thinking of that which is to count as objective truth.

The unity of state and church, a determination much discussed in recent times as well, and set up as the highest ideal, may still be mentioned. If the essential unity of the two is the unity of the truth of their principles and disposition, it is equally essential that, along with this unity, the difference which they have in the form of their consciousness should have attained particular existence. In oriental despotism, that unity of church and state so often wished for is present — but thereby the state itself is not present — and it is not the self-conscious configuration, alone worthy of spirit, in right, free ethical life, and organic development. — Furthermore, in order for the state to come into existence as the ethical actuality of spirit that knows itself, its distinction from the form of authority and faith is necessary; but this distinction emerges only in so far as the ecclesiastical side itself comes to division within itself; only in this way, above the particular churches, has the state won the universality of thought, the principle of its form, and brought it into existence; to recognize this, one must know not only what universality is in itself, but what its existence is. It is therefore so far from the case that ecclesiastical division would be, or would have been, a misfortune for the state, that it is only through it that the state has been able to become what its determination is — self-conscious rationality and ethical life. Equally, it is the most fortunate thing that could have befallen the church for its own sake, and thought for the sake of its freedom and rationality.

¹ Religion, like cognition and science, has, as its principle, a distinctive form of its own, different from that of the state; they therefore enter into the state partly in the relation of means of culture and disposition, and partly, in so far as they are essentially ends in themselves, on the side of their having an external existence. In both respects the principles of the state relate to them by way of application; in a fully concrete treatise on the state, those spheres — as well as art, the merely natural relations, and so on — would likewise have to be considered in the relation and position they have within the state; but here, in this treatise, where it is the principle of the state that is being carried through, according to its Idea, within its own distinctive sphere, only incidental mention can be made of their principles and of the application of the right of the state to them.

² Of Quakers, Anabaptists, and so forth, it can be said that they are only active members of civil society and, as private persons, stand only in private dealings with others; and even in this relation they have been excused from the oath. They fulfill their direct duties toward the state in a passive manner, and with regard to one of the most important duties, that of defending it against enemies — which they directly disavow — it is sometimes conceded that they may fulfill it through commutation for some other service. Toward such sects it is the case, in the proper sense, that the state exercises toleration; for since they do not recognize their duties toward it, they cannot lay claim to the right of being members of it. When the abolition of the slavery of negroes was once being pursued with greater emphasis in the North American Congress, a deputy from the southern provinces made the apt retort: “Grant us the negroes, and we will grant you the Quakers.” — It is only through its otherwise being strong that the state can overlook and tolerate such anomalies, relying chiefly on the power of custom and on the inner rationality of its institutions, so that, by not strictly asserting its rights in this regard, this distinction will be diminished and overcome. However much formal right one might have had, say, against the Jews with regard to the very granting of civil rights, on the ground that they should be regarded not merely as adherents of a particular religious party but as belonging to a foreign people, the outcry raised from this and other points of view has failed to see that they are, first and foremost, human beings — and that this is not merely a shallow, abstract quality (§209 Anm.), but that it implies that, through the civil rights granted to them, the feeling of selfhood, of counting as legal persons within civil society, arises, and that from this infinite root, free from everything else, the required reconciliation of their way of thinking and disposition comes about. The separateness charged against the Jews would, on the contrary, have persisted, and would rightly have become a matter of blame and reproach for an excluding state; for the state would thereby have failed to recognize its own principle, the objective institution and its power (compare §268 Anm., at the end). The assertion of this exclusion, while supposing itself to be in the right to the highest degree, has also proved, in experience, to be the most foolish course, while the conduct of governments has shown itself, on the contrary, to be the wise and worthy one.

³ Laplace, Exposition of the System of the World [Exposition du système du monde, Paris 1796], Book V, ch. 4: “When Galileo made known his discoveries (to which the telescope had helped him — the phases of Venus, and so forth), he showed at the same time that they proved, beyond contradiction, the motions of the earth. But the representation of this motion was declared heretical by an assembly of cardinals, and Galileo, its most famous defender, was summoned before the tribunal of the Inquisition and compelled to recant it, in order to escape harsh imprisonment. In a man of spirit, the passion for truth is one of the strongest passions. Galileo, convinced by his own observations of the motion of the earth, contemplated for a long time a new work in which he intended to develop all the proofs for it; but in order at the same time to escape the persecution of which he would have had to become the victim, he chose the expedient of presenting them in the form of dialogues between three persons. It is plain to see that the advantage lay with the defender of the Copernican system; but since Galileo did not decide between them, and gave as much weight as possible to the objections of the followers of Ptolemy, he might well have expected not to be disturbed in the enjoyment of the peace which his advanced age and his labors deserved. In his seventieth year he was summoned once again before the tribunal of the Inquisition; he was confined in a prison, where a second recantation of his opinions was demanded of him, under threat of the punishment prescribed for relapsed heretics. He was made to sign the following formula of abjuration: ‘I, Galileo, who in my seventieth year have appeared personally before this tribunal, kneeling, and with my eyes fixed upon the holy Gospels, which I touch with my own hands, abjure, curse, and detest, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith, the absurdity, falsity, and heresy of the doctrine of the motion of the earth, and so forth.’ What a spectacle it was, to see a venerable old man, renowned through a long life devoted solely to the investigation of nature, forced, against the testimony of his own conscience, to abjure upon his knees the truth which he had demonstrated with such power of conviction. A judgment of the Inquisition condemned him to perpetual imprisonment. A year afterward he was set at liberty, through the intercession of the Grand Duke of Florence. He died in 1642. His loss was mourned by Europe, which had been enlightened by his labors and was indignant at the judgment pronounced by a hated tribunal against so great a man.” [German trans. of 1797]