De-sacralization

In an address on the tercentenary of the Augsburg Confession, Hegel celebrated the freedom that the Lutheran Reformation brought, a freedom that healed the schism that divided the soul and the split that harmed the commonwealth ( Political Writings , 191).

To highlight this liberation, he enumerated three rules of holiness imposed by the Roman church: that the unmarried state is holier than marriage, that “poverty is a sacred virtue,” and that “blind obedience and mental servitude” is a path of holiness (192-3).

In sum, “the declarationof the German rulers [ civitatum rectores ] at Augsburg abolishednot only that Holiness from which the Roman Pope borrowed histitle, but also the much more oppressive, indeed pernicious rules of
sanctity. As a result, “it thereby proclaimed that the state [ civitas ] was reconciledwith God, and God with the state” (194) because the old system that split the commonwealth in two had been abolished and the commonwealth established as “internally one” (191).

The monism here is striking, and thoroughly Hobbesian. Equally notable is Hegel’s effort to explain the cultural impact of the Reformation as a reorganization of the sacred.