Editing Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (section)

=== Early Romantic writings ===
Hegel's earliest writings on Christianity date between 1783 and 1800. He was still working out his ideas at this time, and everything from this period was abandoned as fragments or unfinished drafts.{{sfn|Hegel|1971|loc=pp. v–viii, translator's Prefatory Note}}{{efn|In English these writings, published after Hegel's death, are collected in a translation by [[Thomas Malcolm Knox|T. M. Knox]] under the title ''Early Theological Writings'' (1971).}} Hegel was very much dissatisfied with the [[dogmatism]] and positivity{{efn|As Hegel applies the term "positivity" to Christianity, "the word refers to non-essential, historically derived, and often authoritarian aspects of the religion; together, they contrast with its "natural," essential, moral, and freedom-nurturing quality. The "positivity" of Christianity refers to features of the religion that either obscure, or have mistakenly taken the place of, its essential moral message.<p>
"Hegel adopted the terms "positive" and "natural" from legal theory, where they indicate the difference between imperfect, human-written, secondary, "positive" law, and perfect, primary, God-given, "natural" law."{{sfn|Wicks|2020|loc=ch. 3}}}} of the Christian religion, to which he opposed the spontaneous religion of the Greeks.{{sfn|Kroner|1971|p=7}} In ''The Spirit of Christianity'', he proposes a sort of resolution by aligning the universality of Kantian moral philosophy with the universality of the teachings of Jesus; in paraphrase: "The moral principle of the Gospel is charity, or love, and love is the beauty of the heart, a spiritual beauty which combines the Greek Soul and Kant's Moral Reason."{{sfn|Kroner|1971|p=9}} Although he did not return to this Romantic formulation, the unification of Greek and Christian thought would remain a preoccupation throughout his life.{{sfn|Harris|1993|pp=27–31}}