HEGEL ON THE RISE OF MANKIND THROUGH FEUDALISM

B1ut the ecclesiastical principle had a more dangerous foe in the incipient formation of political organisations than in the antagonists above referred to. A common object, an aim intrinsically possessed of perfect moral validity, presented itself to secularity in the formation of states; and to this aim of community the will, the desire, the caprice of the individual submitted itself. The hardness characteristic of the self-seeking quality of “heart,” maintaining its position of isolation--the knotty heart of oak underlying the national temperament of the Germans--was broken down and mellowed by the terrible discipline of the Middle Ages.

2The two iron rods which were the instruments of this discipline were the church and serfdom. The church drove the “heart” (_Gemüth_) to desperation--made spirit pass through the severest bondage, so that the soul was no longer its own; but it did not degrade it to Hindu torpor, for Christianity is an intrinsically spiritual principle and, as such, has a boundless elasticity. In the same way serfdom, which made a man’s body not his own but the property of another, dragged humanity through all the barbarism of slavery and unbridled desire, and the latter was destroyed by its own violence.

3It was not so much from slavery as through slavery that humanity was emancipated. For barbarism, lust, injustice constitute evil: man, bound fast in its fetters, is unfit for morality and religiousness; and it is from this intemperate and ungovernable state of volition that the discipline in question emancipated him. The church fought the battle with the violence of rude sensuality in a temper equally wild and terroristic with that of its antagonist; it prostrated the latter by dint of the terrors of hell, and held it in perpetual subjection, in order to break down the spirit of barbarism and to tame it into repose.

4Theology declares that every man has this struggle to pass through, since he is by nature evil, and only by passing through a state of mental laceration arrives at the certainty of reconciliation. But granting this, it must on the other hand be maintained that the form of the contest is very much altered when the conditions of its commencement are different, and when that reconciliation has had an actual realisation. The path of torturous discipline is in that case dispensed with (it does indeed make its appearance at a later date, but in quite a different form), for the waking up of consciousness finds man surrounded by the elements of a moral state of society. The phase of negation is, indeed, a necessary element in human development, but it has now assumed the tranquil form of education, so that all the terrible characteristics of that inward struggle vanish.[c]