Das Volk Des Nordens

Hail the Sun, giver of life, fair wheel of the sky, sister to Máni, conduit of Ingui Frey's gifts, mosrt fair and beloved of the high ones! Rejoice on this solstice!

*We meant Manitoba, not Saskatchewan.

In reviewing the census data, we can clearly see that the followers of Das Volk Des Nordens are mostly European, especially Northern and Central European. However, a sizeable number of you are North Americans. That said, we would like to poll the North Americans to learn a little more about what region of the continent they come from.

Here we encounter for the first time in Hegel the concept that was later to play such an important role as ‘self-alienation’ or ‘self-renunciation’ in the philosophy of Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Hess: The hereafter is a robbery of this world. In this treatise of 1796, Hegel treats Judaism and Christianity on the same level. Both are religions which make man the slave of a being which is external to man, of which he is not a part, with which he has nothing in common and which dominates him. The Jewish and Christian religions are 'positive' religions, epitomes of propositions in which the believer is obliged to believe, religions in which the element of objective authority prevails over the pure life of faith of the heart. This notion of 'positive religion' is now at the center of Hegel's thought. -The young Hegel and Judaism Hugo Bergman

Three years after this treatise, in 1796, Hegel returned to this subject. This time he was interested in the historical-philosophical question of how it was possible for the Greek religion to be superseded by the Christian religion. Every people has its religious imagination, its holy places. Christianity emptied Olympus and Valhalla, cut down the sacred groves, and gave to the peoples, instead of their own gods, forms which were creations of the religious imagination of the Jewish people, whose culture and interests were foreign to them. ‘Is judo the German fatherland?’ asks Hegel. The suppression of pagan religions is one of those wondrous revolutions whose causes must occupy the thinking historian. 'How could a religion be pushed out that had established itself in the states for centuries, that was intimately connected with the constitution of the people, how could the belief in gods, to whom the cities and empires ascribed their origin, to whom the people every day ascribed, cease to exist? sacrifices whose blessings they invoked in all their affairs, under whose banner the armies had been victorious, whose temples were the pride of the peoples? How could belief in the gods, courage entangled a thousand threads in the fabric of life, be torn from this context?' Hegel answers: The Greek and Roman religions were religions for free peoples and with the loss of freedom their power must also be lost. ‘What is the use of cannons in an army that has expended their ammunition? What use are nets to the fisherman when the river has dried up?' As free men, Greeks and Romans obeyed laws they gave themselves. In public as in private life everyone was a free man. As free people, they waged wars of their own choosing. And they were free also in relation to their gods. They asked the gods for advice, thanked them for their gifts, but they were free towards them, they knew no divine commandments. This freedom of the citizens was destroyed by the wars. An aristocracy of war glory and wealth arose, individual citizens gained supremacy in the state. The citizen ceased to see the image of his own activity in the state, the state became alien to him. The individual citizen now only saw his individual purposes, life was privatized. Now the citizens lived without a fatherland in a state in which they took no pleasure. In this state the Christian religion offered itself to them. It was not a religion of free men, but of slaves. As long as the Jewish state had power and strength, the Jews did not need the idea of the Messiah either. The messianic idea is a consequence of political impotence. Hegel finds words of supreme admiration for the Jews' final struggles against the Romans, when the Jewish people threw away their 'sluggish messianic hopes' and took up arms, and after doing all that enthusiastic courage can do, put themselves and their state among the Ruins of Jerusalem buried. If the Jewish people had perished at that time, they would have stood alongside Carthage and Sagunto in history. But the Jewish people returned to indolent messianic hope after defeat. The national expectations were now projected into an afterlife. And this projection was then adopted by Christianity from the conquered Jews. The Christians projected out their wealth that was no longer the property of the people. And so the treasures of the earth were hurled to heaven, and according to Hegel it is the task of our time to reclaim these treasures as the property of people and the earth. Heaven is only a self-alienation of the Christian.

For those of you who can't understand German:

Hugo Bergman