C. The Revealed Religion
(Die offenbare Religion)

The third and last section of "Religion" concerns Christianity characterized by revelation. Offenbar, which is based on offen, literally signifying "open, public, frank," has the meanings of "obvious" and "manifest." It is related to offenbaren, "to reveal," and Offenbarung revelation."

It is striking that the central emphasis in Hegel's account of the highest form of religion is not on redemption from sin, or on the relation of human being to God in general, but on Christianity as a way station on the road to knowledge. From the perspective of knowledge, religion is a form of spirit, the penultimate step in the theory of knowl-

edge expounded in the phenomenological science of the experience of consciousness.

In natural religion, the divine is represented as a thing. The opposite occurs in religion as art, where human being finally appears as the divine. In the cult uniting these two extremes, "the self is absolute essence," so that "the essence, the Substance," in which the individual is realized, "has now sunken to a predicate" (§748, 453). This frivolous proposition is "nonreligious," perhaps even heretical. The account of revealed religion shows that in Christianity there is a converse movement in virtue of which human beings come again to depend on the divine. This is a movement "which degrades the Self to the level of a predicate and elevates Substance to Subject" (§749, 453).

Despite a superficial resemblance, this is not merely a return to the stage of natural religion. It is rather a basic reorientation (Umkebrung ) in our awareness of ourselves and the divine. Hegel considers various historical movements in his account of religion. This statement should be seen as his considered view of the conceptual significance of the transition from pre-Christian to Christian religion. In revealed religion, the opposing ideas of natural religion and the religion of art, or views of the subject as a thing and the thing as subject, are brought together in an idea uniting consciousness and self-consciousness. For "Spirit," or the human person, "is simultaneously consciousness of itself as objective substance, as simple self consciousness, remaining in itself" (§749,454*).

Hegel brings out this point by relating religion as art to ethics. Religion as art belongs to ethics, which simply perishes in the legal conception of the person as a mere abstraction. For the view that "the Self as such, the abstract person is absolute essence" (§ 750, 454*), lacks content. Since in this conception, "this Self has . . . let the content go free" (§751, 454), it is comparable to the abstract movement of thought from stoicism over skepticism to the unhappy consciousness. Like the unhappy consciousness, it features the paradoxical result of losing itself even as it attains abstract self-awareness, whose religious significance is expressed in the difficult statement "God has died [ist gestorben]" (§752, 455*).

The meaning of this claim for Hegel, better known in Nietzsche's restatement,27 is that the conflict between an abstract conception of the human subject, present in the movement of thought leading up to the unhappy consciousness, and religion finally suppresses the religious dimension. Since Hegel's day, this is increasingly the case in our ever more secular world. According to Hegel, the emergence of the "legal per-

spective [Rechzustand]," founded on the concept of the legal individual, results in the decline of "the ethical world and its religion . . . and the Unhappy Consciousness of this whole loss" (§753, 4-55*). The disappearance of the religious dimension is felt in the way that "trust in the eternal laws of the gods has vanished, and the Oracles, which pronounced on particular questions, are dumb. The statues are now only stones from which the living soul has flown, just as the hymns are words from which belief has gone" (§753, 455). And enjoyment of such things no longer has anything to do with divine worship.

Missing from this perspective, where religion has disappeared, is spirit that surpasses ethical life and reality, although "all the conditions of its coming forth [seines Hervorgangs] are present" (§754-, 4-56*). This result occurs in ancient Greece in the works of art that (as noted through the word Er-Innerung, which is here hyphenated to reflect a dual meaning) both recall and internalize externalized spirit. Through art, the diverse gods are unified in a single pantheon. In the deep sense, art in all its many forms must be representational. For it presents the externalization of absolute substance as a thing.

Through a specific reference to the manger in Bethlehem, Hegel now links spirit to Christianity in asserting that the shapes of religious art and the secular world come together in the consciousness of human being. Unhappy consciousness is the middle point between "the world of the person and of right" and "the thought person of stoicism and skeptical consciousness" that "surround the birthplace [Geburtsstätte] of Spirit becoming self-consciousness" (§754-, 456*).

Revealed religion makes us aware of ourselves. Hegel brings out this point by considering opposing propositions, "the two sides" of Spirit, including that "substance alienates [entäußert] itself from itself and becomes self-consciousness" and, conversely, "that self-consciousness a lienates itself from itself and gives itself the nature of a Thing, or makes itself a universal Self" (§755, 457). The former is exemplified in the necessity of fate; and the latter is illustrated in ethical life. In the subject's externalization, in its becoming objective, or substance, it becomes self-aware. When the subject and the object are brought together, when the subject becomes the object and conversely, then spirit "comes into existence as this their unity" (§755, 457). Yet a person who "one-sidedly grasps only his own alienation" has not yet reached "true spirit" in the precise sense that "being as such or substance has not in itself, from its own side, externalized itself and become self-consciousness" (§756, 457*).

It is obviously not sufficient to have an idea. The idea must also be realized. In grasping itself as object, the subject knows that existence is spiritual. This is expressed in Christianity in the idea that absolute spirit has become flesh and that the believer is aware of this divinity (Göttlichkeit) through the senses. The way of religion is not from a mere thought to God, since, on the contrary, what is given in existence is recognized as God. For the "faith of the world [is] that Spirit as self-consciousness is there as an actual man, for immediate certainty, that the believing consciousness sees and feels and hears this divinity" (§758, 458*). This is not, say, to be taken as an assertion of the cosmological proof for the existence of God from the existence of the world. It is rather a claim that, in entering into history in the form of a human being, God becomes self-aware. According to Hegel, "this God becomes immediate as Self, as truly individual man, perceived through sensation; only so is this God self-conscious" (§758, 459*).

Christianity is not only the chronologically most recent but also the conceptually final stage of religion. So-called absolute religion is concerned with the incarnation of God in the form of a man that "is the simple content of absolute religion" (§759,459). Hegel links spirit, revelation, and Christianity in writing that "in this religion the divine Being is revealed. Its Being revealed obviously consists in this, that it is known what it is. But it is known precisely in its being known as Spirit, as a Being [Wesen] that is essentially Self-consciousness" (§759, 459*).

Revelation concerns the identity of the divine and the human, so that "here . . . consciousness itself is . . . identical with its self-consciousness" (§760, 460*). Christianity is precisely profound in that it realizes the idea implicit in all religion. "Immediate consciousness" is more precisely "religious consciousness" of God become man as "an existing self-consciousness that immediately is, but also of the supreme thought [gedachten] or absolute Essence" (§761, 460-461*). It is sense-consciousness, or immediate consciousness of being, whose highest form is direct awareness of divine being. It is also religious consciousness of the revelation of God as spirit.

Both the theological and mystical traditions claim direct experience of God.28 In his account of the Enlightenment, Hegel has implicitly refuted this claim in his criticism of faith. As spirit, God can be known "in pure speculative knowledge alone" (§761,461*), or through philosophy. For what has been seen in immediate experience of the world in sense-certainty is known representationally within religion, but not yet conceptually. "This Concept of Spirit that knows itself as Spirit is

itself the immediate Concept and is not yet developed" (§762, 461*). For although revelation is immediate, its grasp is necessarily mediated through concepts.

Referring to Jesus, Hegel writes that through "this individual man . . . which absolute Essence has revealed itself to be . . . He is the immediately present God" (§763, 462*). On this level, the religious individual is still not fully conscious of himself as spirit. Religion that depends on "past and absence [Entfernung]" is only superficially thought; for it is limited to "representation" (§764, 462-463*). Although this type of "representation constitutes the specific mode in which Spirit, in this community, becomes aware of itself" (§765, 463*), it is not and cannot become self-aware through representation that lacks conceptual mediation. From the perspective of consciousness, "Absolute Spirit is the content" whose "truth" is "not merely the Substance of the community nor . . . the objectivity of representation but to become an actual Self, to reflect itself into itself and to be Subject" (§766, 4-66*).

Spirit appears initially within consciousness "in the form of puresubstance" for which "representation" is "the middle term" (§767, 464*) between consciousness and self-consciousness. This content has already been encountered in the "Unhappy Consciousness" as that for which Spirit "yearns" and in the "believing consciousness" as "an objective content of representation . . . that simply flees from reality" (§768, 464*). Spirit "represented as substance in the element of pure thought" is not "actual" (§769, 464-465*).

The "three distinct moments" of spirit are "essence . . . or knowing itself in the other" (§770, 465*). "This movement expresses absolute essence as Spirit" (§771, 465*), although the religious representation that has the same content as philosophy lacks conceptual mediation. For "Absolute Spirit, which is represented in pure essence" (§772, 466*), is, like essence, an abstraction· "Pure thought" only occurs when "the moments of the pure Concept obtain a substantial existence relatively to one another" (§773, 467*), when "the merely eternal, or abstract, Spirit becomes an other to itself, or enters into existence, and directly into immediate existence" (§774, 467*), but only in the form of mere representation.

For Hegel, "world is not merely this Spirit" that just is, but above all "the existing Spirit" (§775, 467*). Implicitly contradicting the idea of original sin, he remarks that, prior to acting, a person, who is not yet spirit, "can be called 'innocent' [unschuldig] but hardly 'good' "

(§775, 467). Evil is being merely centered on oneself "as the primary existence of the inwardly-turned consciousness" (§ 776, 468). "Good and evil" are the "specific differences yielded by thought," and good can be understood as "an existent self-consciousness" (§777, 469-470*).

More generally, "the alienation of the divine Essence," or God, includes both the subject and "its simple thought," roughly God and human comprehension of God "whose absolute unity is Spirit itself" (§778, 4-70*). This bifurcation into two moments gives rise to an opposition between them that Hegel, now thinking of the second person of the Trinity, says is only overcome through death. For "this death is, therefore, its rising up [Erstehen] as Spirit" (§779, 471*).

Hegel studies this event on three levels, including the resurrection as expressed in the religious community, its representation in thought within the community, and finally within self-consciousness itself. For representational thinking, the divine takes on a human form. What, for representational thinking, is merely a particular only becomes universal from the conceptual perspective after the death of Christ, when "the transcended immediate presence of the self-conscious essence has the form of universal self-consciousness" (§780, 471). At this point, in returning to themselves, human beings go beyond representational thinking to become self-conscious.

Representational thought concerns reconciliation with otherness from God, identified as evil. Yet it is as incorrect simply to take evil as the opposite of goodness as it is to take it as the same as goodness. Probably thinking of Plato's Sophist, Hegel remarks that the mistake lies in trading in abstract terms—the same, not the same, and so on. Apparently siding with the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who emphasizes change, against Plato, who stresses immutability in the theory of ideas, he notes that, since such terms denote abstractions, "neither the one nor the other is true, but only their movement" (§780, 472*). This is also the case for divine being, nature and human nature, whose dynamic interrelation cannot be expressed through the copula "is."

Spirit lies in "universal self-consciousness" that is its "community" and whose "movement as self-consciousness" (as distinguished from representation) is "to bring forth what in itself has been" (§781, 473*). This amounts to the familiar claim that what is depicted representationally is not, therefore, understood. Hegel now adds that the community can only understand what has occurred by surpassing religion.

For religion, the significance of the death of Christ must be raised from a general truth to an explicit truth for each individual. This takes place through self-consciousness that is acquired through the movement of Spirit. This movement is that of "natural Spirit," and "the self," or the real human being in the social context, "has to withdraw from this natural existence and retreat into itself, which would mean, to become evil" (§782, 473). The individual in the first case is a natural being, who must rise to a comprehension of Christ's death through withdrawing from the natural world.

The difference of perspectives on the same event yields opposing analyses. For representational thinking, the world is essentially evil. Yet for conceptual thought, what is said to have occurred is a transitory developmental phase. Drawing the moral of the cognitive difference between representational and conceptual forms of comprehension, he remarks that, on inspection, each element of the analysis is transformed from a different perspective into its opposite.

Representation, which is static, and conceptual thought, which is dynamic, provide different perspectives on the same theme, such as the problem of evil. "If, then, in the representing consciousness the in-ward-becoming of natural self-consciousness was the existing evil, so is the inner-becoming in the element of self-consciousness the knowing from evil as such, which is the in itself in existence" (§783, 474*). For representation, evil arises as the withdrawal from the world into oneself. But for conceptual thought, the grasp of evil as implicit in life attained through a withdrawal from it is a necessary prerequisite to overcoming evil. "This knowledge, hence, gives rise to evil, but only a becoming of the thought of evil, and is therefore recognized as the first moment of reconciliation" (§783, 474*).

In the remaining portion of the chapter, Hegel hammers away at the distinction between religous representation and conceptual comprehension, to begin with in insisting that religion, understood as immediate, requires further development. For "besides this immediacy, the mediation of representation is necessary" (§784, 475*). Mediation provides a concrete comprehension (Ergreifen) of the represented event, in this case the death of Christ. Conceptual mediation enables us to comprehend that, through "the occurring [Geschehen] of the self-externalization of the divine essence, in its historical incarnation and death, the divine Being has been reconciled with existence" (§784, 475*).

What is only represented remains abstract as mere death, or abstract negativity that is understood conceptually as "the universality of the

Spirit who dwells in His community, dies in its every day, and is daily resurrected" (§784, 475). In superseding representation through conceptual thought, the result is the death, not only of Christ, but also of the abstract representation of Christ's death that fails to provide a concrete grasp of the event. "The death of this representation [Vorstel-lung] contains therefore at the same time the death of the abstraction of the divine essence that it is not posited as self" (§785, 476*). Religion fails to comprehend Christ's death that is finally comprehended only by philosophy. "This Knowing is the spiritualization [Begeistung], whereby Substance becomes Subject, its abstraction and lifelessness have died, and it therefore has become real and simple and universal Self-Consciousness" (§785, 476*). For although religion can represent its key events, it cannot comprehend them.

In the conceptual thought of philosophy, spirit becomes aware of itself. "In this way, therefore, Spirit is self-knowing Spirit; it knows itself, which is object for it; it, or its representation is, the true absolute content; it expresses, we saw, Spirit itself" (§786, 476*). The content is both the subject that knows and its object that it knows as the subject; and the moving of thought is self-movement, or the coming to self-knowledge of the real human subject, understood as spirit.

In philosophy, we know what is only represented in religion. Since the religious community is not philosophical, it fails to grasp either its object or itself. It follows that "the [religious] community also does not possess consciousness of what it is" (§787, 4-77). By implication, it further fails to grasp the religious significance of philosophical insight that completes religion. For "this depth of the pure Self is the power by which the abstract divine Being is drawn down from its abstraction and raised to a Self by the power of this pure devotion" (§787, 4-77-4-78). Since the members of the religious community do not understand that reconciliation is achieved in philosophy, they view it as an as yet unrealized future event. Accordingly, there remains a division between spirit and religion. For the latter, which does not grasp itself, tends toward a unity it cannot itself realize.

The Spirit of the community is thus in its immediate consciousness divided from its religious consciousness, which declares, it is true, that in themselves they are not divided, but this merely implicit unity is not realized, or has not yet become an equally absolute being-for-self. (§787, 478)