L’innaturale naturalità della religione: trasformazioni della religione naturale attraverso l’idealismo tedesco

The essay takes as its guide a passage from Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion from the 1827 lecture, in which Hegel distinguishes three meanings of ‘natural religion’. These three meanings dictate the three parts of the essay. A first meaning is that of natural religion as philosophical religion, which Hegel attributes to the age he lived in and thus to the Enlightenment. This part discusses the distinction of natural religion and revealed religion in Kant and the questioning of natural religion as abstract and philosophical in Schleiermacher’s Discourses on Religion. A second meaning is that of natural religion as primitive religion, religion of immediacy. Hegel makes this meaning his own but criticizes it because it is the task of the human being to come out of nature, with probable reference to Rousseau’s view. This part discusses two contemporary models of this meaning, in Eschenmayer and Görres, and their weaknesses. A third meaning, the one Hegel makes his own, is that of the witness of the spirit to the spirit: in every religion belief expresses the elaboration, appropriation and witnessing of what is believed, as that which unites knowledge and action, individual and community of belonging.