This immediate existence is at the same time not solely and simply immediate consciousness; it is religious consciousness. This immediacy means not only an existent self-consciousness, but also the purely thought-constituted or Absolute Being; and these meanings are inseparable. What we [the philosophers] are conscious of in our conception, — that objective being is ultimate essence, — is the same as what the religious consciousness is aware of. This unity of being and essence, of thought which is immediately existence, is immediate knowledge on the part of this religious consciousness just as it is the inner thought or the mediated reflective knowledge of this consciousness. For this unity of being and thought is self-consciousness and actually exists; in other words, the thought-constituted unity has at the same time this concrete shape and form of what it is. God, then, is here revealed, as He is; He actually exists as He is in Himself; He is real as Spirit. God is attainable in pure speculative know- 772 Phenomenology of Mind ledge alone, and only is in that knowledge, and is merely that knowledge itself, for He is spirit; and this speculative knowledge is the knowledge furnished by revealed religion. That knowledge knows God to be thought, or pure Essence; and knows this thought as actual being and as real existence, and existence as the negativity, the reflexion, of itself, hence as Self, a particular " this/' and a universal self. It is just this that revealed religion knows.
The hopes and expectations of preceding ages pressed forward to, and were solely directed towards this revelation, the vision of what Absolute Being is, and the discovery of themselves therein. This joy, the joy of seeing itself in Absolute Benig, becomes realised in self-consciousness, and seizes the whole world. For the Absolute is Spirit, it is the simple movement of those pure abstract moments, which expresses just this — that Ultimate Keality is then eo ipso known as Spirit when it is seen and beheld as immediate self-consciousness.
This conception of spirit knowing itself to be spirit, is still the immediate notion; it is not yet developed. The ultimate Being is spirit; in other words, it has appeared, it is revealed. This first revelation is itself immediate; but the immediacy is likewise thought, or pure mediation, and must therefore exhibit and set forth this moment in the sphere of immediacy as such.
Looking at this more precisely, spirit, when selfconsciousness is immediate, is a particular "this"; it is an individual self-consciousness set up in contrast to the universal self-consciousness. It is a one, a repelling and excluding unit, which appears to that consciousness, for which it exists, in the impervious form of a sensuous other, an unreduced opposite in the sphere of sense.
Revealed Religion 773 This other does not yet know spirit to be its own; in other words, spirit, in its form as an individual self, does not yet exist as equally universal self, as all self. Or again, the shape it assumes has not as yet the form of the notion, i.e. of the universal self, of the self which in its immediate actual reality is at once transcended, is thought, universality, without losing its reality in this universality.
The preliminary and similarly immediate form of this universality is, however, not at once the form of thought itself, of the notion as notion; it is the universality of actual reality, it is the " ajlness," the collective totality, of the selves, and is the elevation of existence into the sphere of presentative or figurative thought (Vorstellung); just as in general, to take a concrete example, the " this " of sense, when transcended, is first of all the "thing" of ''perception/' and is not yet the "universal" of "understanding."
This individual human being, then, which Absolute Being is revealed to be, goes through in its own case as an individual the process found in sense existence. He is the immediately present God; in consequence His being passes over into His having been. Consciousness, for which God is thus sensuously present, ceases to see Him, to hear Him: it has seen Him, it has heard Him. And it is by the mere fact that it has seen and heard Him, that it first becomes itself spiritual consciousness*; or, in other words, He has now arisen in the life of Spirit, as He formerly rose before consciousness as an object existing in the sphere of sense. For, a consciousness which sees and hears Him by sense, is one which is * cp. " He that has seen me has seen the Father " (John xiv.). " If I go not away the Comforter will not come unto you " (ibid. xvi.).
774 Phenomenology of Mind itself merely an immediate consciousness, which has not cancelled and transcended the disparateness of objectivity, has not withdrawn it into pure thought, but accepts this objectively presented individual, and not itself, as spirit. In the disappearance of the immediate existence of what is known to be Absolute Being, immediacy preserves its negative moment. Spirit remains the immediate self of actual reality, but in the form of the universal self-consciousness of a religious communion,* a self -consciousness which rests in its own proper substance, just as in it this substance is universal subject: it is not the individual subject by himself, but the individual along with the consciousness of the communion, and what he is for this communion is the complete whole of the individual spirit.
The terms " past " and " distance " are, however, merely the imperfect form in which the immediateness gets mediated or made universal; this is merely dipped superficially in the element of thought, is kept there as a sensuous mode of immediacy, and not made one with the nature of thought itself. It is lifted out of sense merely into the region of ideation, of pictorial presentation; for this is the synthetic [external] connexion of sensuous immediacy and its universality or thought.
Imaginative presentation constitutes the characteristic form in which spirit is conscious of itself in this religious communion. This form is not yet the self -consciousness of spirit which has reached its notion as notion; the mediating process is still incomplete. In this connexion of being and thought, then, there is a defect; spiritual * " Lo, I am with you alway even to the end of the world " (Matt, xxviii.; also xviii. 20).
Revealed Religion 775 life is still cumbered with an unreconciled diremption into a " hither " and a " yonder/' a " here " and a " beyond." The content is the true content; but all its moments, when placed in the element of mere presentation, have the character, not of being conceptually comprehended, but of appearing as completely independent aspects, externally related to one another.
*In order that the true content may also preserve its true form when before consciousness, the latter must necessarily pass to a higher plane of mental development, where the Absolute Substance is not intuitively apprehended but conceptually comprehended and where consciousness is for itself brought to the level of its self-consciousness; — in the way this has already taken place objectively or for us [who have analysed the process of experience].
We have to consider this content as it exists in its consciousness. Absolute Spirit is content; that is how it exists in the form of its truth. But its truth consists not merely in being the substance or the inherent reality of the religious communion; nor again in coming out of this inwardness into the objectivity of perceptual and presentational thought; but in becoming concrete actual self, reflecting itself into self, and being Subject. This, then, is the process which Spirit realises in its communion; this is its life. What this self-revealing spirit is in and by itself, is therefore not brought out by the rich and full content of its lif e being, so to say, untwined and reduced to its original and primitive strands, to the ideas, for instance, presented before the minds of the first imperfect religious communion, or even to what the actual human being * This paragraph is explanatory.
776 Phenomenology of Mind [incarnating the Divine Spirit] * has spoken. This reversion to the primitive and elementary is based on the instinct to get at the notion and ultimate principle; but it confuses the origin, in the sense of the immediate existence of the first historical appearance, with the pure simplicity of the notion. By thus impoverishing the life of spirit, by clearing away the idea of the communion and its action with regard to its idea, there arises, therefore, not the notion, but bare externality and particularity, merely the historical manner in which spirit once upon a time appeared, the soulless recollection of an ideally presented historical figure and its past.f Spirit is content of its consciousness to begin with in the form of pure substance; in other words, it is content of its pure consciousness. This element of thought is the process of descending into existence, the sphere of particularity. The middle term between these two is their synthetic connexion, the consciousness of passing into otherness, the process of ideal presentation as such. The third stage is the return from representation in idea and from that otherness; in other words, it is the element of self-consciousness itself.
These three movements constitute the life of spirit. Its resolution into separate parts, when it enters the form of presentation, consists in its taking on a determinate mode of being; this determinateness, however, is nothing but one of its moments. Its detailed process thus consists in spreading its nature over its various moments, entering every one, each being an element in its composition: and since each of these spheres is * e.g. Christ.
t The life aud work of the historical Jesus.
Revealed Religion 777 self-complete, this reflexion into itself is at the same time the transition into another sphere of its being. Ideal presentation constitutes the middle term between pure thought and self-consciousness as such, and is merely one of the determinate forms. At the same tune however, as has been shown, the character belonging to such presentation — that of being " synthetic connexion " — is spread over all these elements and is their common characteristic.
The content itself, which we have to consider, has partly been met with already, as the idea or presentation of the " unhappy " and the " believing " types of consciousness. In the case of the " unhappy " despairing consciousness, however, the peculiarity lies in the content being produced from consciousness and longingly desired, wherein the spirit can never be satiated nor find rest because the content is not yet its own content inherently and essentially, or in the sense of being its substance. In the case of the "believing" consciousness, again, this content has been regarded as the impersonal Being of the World, as the essentially objective content of presentative thought — a pictorial thinking that seeks to escape the actual world altogether, and consequently has not the certainty of self-consciousness, a certainty which is cut off from it, partly as being conceit of knowledge, partly as being pure insight. The consciousness of the religious communion, on the other hand, possesses the content as its substance, just as the content is the certainty the communion has of its own spiritual life.
Spirit, represented at first as substance in the element of pure thought, is, thus, primarily the eternal Being, simple, self-identical, which does not, however, 778 Phenomenology of Mind have this abstract meaning of Being, but the meaning of Absolute Spirit. Yet spirit consists, not in being a meaning, not in being the inner, but in being the actual, the real. " Simple eternal Being " would, therefore, be spirit merely in empty phrase, if it stopped at ideational pictorial thought, and went no further than the expression of " simple eternal Being/' " Simple Being," however, because it is abstraction, is in point of fact the inherently negative, is indeed the negativity of reflective thought, or negativity as found in Being per se; i.e. it is absolute distinction from itself, its pure process of becoming its other. Qua essential Being, it is merely in itself, purely implicit, or for us: but since this purity of form is just abstraction or negativity, it is for itself, it is the self, the notion. It is thus objective; and since presentational thinking apprehends and expresses as an event what has just been expressed as the necessity of the notion, it will be said that the eternal Being produces for itself an other. But in this otherness it has likewise, ipso facto, returned into itself again; for the distinction is distinction in itself, i.e. the distinction is directly distinguished merely from itself, and is thus the unity returned into itself.
There are thus three moments to be distinguished: immanent absolute Being; explicit Self-existence, which is the antithesis, the express otherness, of Being, and for which that Being is object; and Self -existence or Self-knowledge in that other, in that antithetic expression. The absolute Being beholds only itself in its Self -existence, in its objective otherness. In thus emptying itself, in this kenosis, it is merely within itself: the independent Self-existence which excludes itself from absolute Being is the knowledge of Revealed Religion 779 itself on the part of absolute Being. It is the " Word/' the Logos, which when spoken empties the speaker of himself, outwardises him, and leaves him behind emptied, but is at the same time immediately heard and understood, and only this act of hearing or perceiving himself is the actual existence of the " Word." Hence, then, the distinctions which are set up are immediately resolved just as they are made, and are directly made just as they are resolved, and the truth and the reality consist precisely in this self-closed circular process.
This movement within itself is what the absolute Being qua Spirit expresses. Absolute Being, when not grasped as Spirit, is merely an empty abstraction, just as spirit which is not grasped as a process in this way is merely an empty word. Since its moments are taken purely as moments, they are notions in restless activity, which are merely in being inherently their own opposite, and in finding their rest in the whole. But the presentative pictorial thought of the religious communion is not this conceptual thinking; it has the content without its necessity; and instead of the form of the notion it brings into the realm of pure consciousness the natural relations of Father and Son. Since it thus, even when thinking, proceeds by way of figurative ideas, absolute Being is indeed revealed to it, but the moments of this Being, owing to this [externally] synthetic presentational thinking, fall of themselves apart from one another, so that they are not related to each other through their own very notion, while, again, this figurative thinking retreats from the pure object it deals with, and takes up a merely external relation towards it. The object is externally revealed to it from an alien source, and in this thought of Spirit it does not find its own self, does 780 Phenomenology of Mind not recognise the nature of pure self-consciousness. In so far as the form of presentative thinking and that way of thinking by means of relationships derived from nature have to be transcended, and especially the method of taking the moments of the process, in which the life of Spirit consists, as isolated fixed immovable substances or subjects, instead of transient moments — this transcendence is to be looked at as a compulsion on the part of the notion, in the way we formerly pointed out when dealing with another aspect.* But since it is only an instinct, it mistakes its own real character, rejects the content along with the form, and, what comes to the same thing, degrades the content into a historical imaginative idea and an heirloom handed down by tradition. In this way there is retained and preserved only what is purely external to the sphere of belief, and hence a lif eless entity devoid of knowledge; while the inner element in belief has passed away, because this would be the notion knowing itself as notion.
The Absolute Spirit, ideally presented in pure ultimate Being, is indeed not the abstract pure Being; rather, just by the fact that this is merely a moment in the life of Spirit, it is lowered to the level of constituent element. The representation of Spirit in this element, however, has inherently the same defect, as regards form, which ultimate Being as such has. Ultimate Being is abstraction, and, therefore, the negative of its simplicity, is an other: in the same way, Spirit in the element of ultimate Being is the form of simple unity, which, on that account, is essentially and at the same time a process of turning to otherness. Or, what is the same thing, the relation of the eternal Revealed Religion 781 Being to its self -existence, its objective existence for Itself, is that of pure thought, a directly simple relation. In this simple beholding of itself in the Other, otherness is not as such set up independently; it is distinction in the way distinction, in pure thought, is immediately no distinction — a recognition of Love, where lover and beloved are not in their very being opposed to each other at all. Spirit, which is expressed in the element of pure thought, is essentially just this: not to be merely in that element, but to be concrete, actual; for otherness, i.e. cancelling and superseding pure conception, thoughtconstituted conception, lies in the very notion of Spirit.
The element of pure thought, because it is an abstract element, is itself rather the other of its own simplicity, and hence passes over into ideal presentation proper — the element where the moments of the pure notion at once preserve a substantial existence in opposition to each other and are subjects as well, which do not exist for a third thing in indifference towards each other, but being reflected into themselves, break away from one another, and stand confronting each other.
Merely eternal, or abstract Spirit, then, becomes an other to itself: it enters existence, and, in the first instance, enters immediate existence. It creates a World. This " Creation " is the word which pictorial presentative thought uses to convey the absolute movement which the notion itself goes through; or to express the fact that the absolutely simple or pure thought, because it is abstract thought, is really the negative, and hence opposed to itself, the other of itself; or because, to state the same in another way, what is put forward as ultimate Being is simple immediacy, bare objective existence, but qua immediacy or existence, is without 782 Phenomenology of Mind Self, and, lacking thus inwardness, is passive, or has a relative existence, exists for another. This relative existence is at the same time a world. Spirit, in the character of existing for another, is the undisturbed separate subsistence of those moments formerly enclosed within pure thought, is, therefore, the dissolution of their simple universality, and their dispersion into their own particularity.
The world, however, is not merely Spirit thus thrown out and scattered in all its plenitude with an external order imposed on it; for since Spirit is essentially simple Self, this self is likewise present therein. It is objectively existent spirit which is individual self, that has consciousness and distinguishes itself as other, as world, from itself. In the way this individual self is thus immediately established at first, it is not yet conscious of being Spirit; it thus does not exist as Spirit; it may be called " innocent," but not strictly " good." In order that in fact it may be self and Spirit, it has first to become objectively an other to itself, in the same way that the Eternal being manifests itself as the process of being self-identical in its otherness. Since this spirit is determined as only immediately existing, or dispersed in the diverse multiplicity of its conscious life, its becoming " other " means that knowledge is centred on itself, concentrates itself upon its subjective content. Immediate existence turns into thought, or merely sense-consciousness turns round into consciousness of thought; and, moreover, because that thought has co«ie from immediacy or is conditioned thought, it is not pure knowledge, but thought which contains otherness, and is, thus, the self-opposed thought of good and evil. Man is pictorially represented by the religious Revealed Religion 783 mind in this way: it happened once as an event, with no necessity about it, that he lost the form of harmonious unity with himself by plucking the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and was driven from the state of conscious innocence, from Paradise, from the garden with all its creatures, and from nature offering its bounties without man's toil.
Since this self-centredness on the part of the existent consciousness directly gives rise to disharmony with itself, Evil appears as the first actual expression of the self-centred consciousness. And because the thoughts of good and evil are utterly opposed, and this opposition is not yet broken down, this consciousness is essentially and merely evil. At the same time, however, owing to just this very opposition, there is present also the good consciousness opposing the one that is evil, and again their relation to each other. In so far as immediate existence turns round into thought, and self-absorption, selfcentredness, is just thought, while again the transition to otherness on the part of Being is thereby more precisely determined, — the fact of becoming evil can be removed further backwards away out of the actually existing world and transferred to the very earliest realm of thought. It mav thus be said that it V V was the very first-born Son of Light [Lucifer] who, by becoming self-centred, fell, but that in his place another was at once created. Such a form of expression as " fallen," belonging merely to figurative thought, and not to the notion, just like the term " Son," once more transmutes and lowers the moments of the notion to the level of imaginative thought, or, in other words, drags pictures and presentations into the realm of thought.
784 Phenomenology of Mind In the same way, it is matter of indifference to coordinate a multiplicity of other angelic shapes and forms with the simple thought of otherness in the Being of the Eternal, and transfer to them that condition of selfcentredness. This co-ordination must, all the same, win approval, for the reason that, through it, this moment of otherness does express diversity, as it should do: not indeed as plurality in general, but as determinate diversity, so that one part is the Son, that which is simple and knows itself to be ultimate Being, while the other part involves the abandonment, the emptying, of self -existence, and merely lives to praise that Being. To this part may then also be assigned the resumption once again of the self-existence relinquished, and that " self-centredness " characteristic of evil. In so far as this condition of otherness falls into two parts, Spirit might, as regards its moments, be more exactly expressed numerically as a Quaternity, a four in one, or (because the multiplicity breaks up itself again into two parts, viz. one part which has remained good, the other which has become evil), might be expressed as a Quinity.
Counting the moments, however, can be regarded as altogether useless, since, for one thing, what is distinguished is itself just as truly one and single — viz. the thought of distinction which is only one thought — as the thought is this element distinguished, the second over against the first. For another thing it is useless to count, because the thought which grasps the many in one has to be dissolved out of its universality and must be distinguished into more than three or four distinct components. This universality appears, in contrast to the absolute determinateness of the abstract Revealed Religion 785 unit — the principle of number — as indeterminateness in relation to number as such; so that we can only speak in this connexion of numbers in general, i.e. not of a specific number of distinctions. Hence, in general, it is here quite superfluous to think of number and counting, just as, in other connexions, the bare difference of magnitude and multitude says nothing at all and falls outside conceptual thought.
Good and Evil were the specific distinctions of thought which we found. Since their opposition is not yet broken down, and they are represented as essential realities of thought, each of them independent by itself, man is the self with no essential reality of his own and the mere ground which keeps them together, and on which they exist and war with one another. But these universal powers of good and evil belong all the same to the self, or the self is their actualising principle. From this point of view it thus comes about that, as evil is nothing else than the natural existence of spirit becoming self-absorbed and self-centred, conversely, good enters into actual reality and appears as an objectively existing self-consciousness. The idea of the transition of the Divine Being into otherness is in general merely indicated and hinted at when Spirit is interpreted in terms of pure thought; for figurative thinking this idea here comes nearer its realisation: the realisation is taken to consist in the Divine Being " humbling " Itself, and renouncing its abstract nature and unreality. The other aspect, that of evil, is taken by imagination as an event extraneous and alien to the Divine Being: to grasp evil in the Divine Being as the wrath of God — that is the supreme effort, the severest strain, of which figurative thought, wrestling with its own limita- 786 Phenomenology of Mind tions, is capable, an effort which, since it dispenses with the notion, remains a fruitless struggle.
The alienation of the Divine Nature is thus set up in its double- sided form: the self of Spirit, and its simple thought, are the two moments whose absolute unity is Spirit itself. Its alienation with itself consists in the two falling apart from each other, and in the one having an unequal value as against the other. This disparateness is, therefore, twofold in character, and two connections arise, which have in common the moments just given. In the one, the Divine Being stands for what is essential, while natural existence and the self are unessential and are to be cancelled. In the other, on the contrary, it is self-existence which passes for what is essential and the Divine pure and simple for unessential. Their mediating, though empty ground is existence in general, the bare community of their two moments.
The dissolution of this opposition does not take effect through the struggle between the two elements, which are represented as separate and independent Beings. Just in virtue of their independence each must inherently, through its own notion, dissolve itself in itself. The struggle takes place first in that quarter where both cease to be this mixture of thought and independent existence, and confront each other merely as thoughts. For in that case, being determinate notions, they essentially exist merely in the relation of opposition; qua independent, on the other hand, they have their essential nature outside opposition; their movement is thus free, self-determined, and peculiar to themselves. Just as the movement, then, of both is inherently movement because it has to be regarded in themselves, it is set going only by that element of Revealed Religion 787 the two which has the character of being inherently essential as contrasted with the other. This is represented as a spontaneous action; but the necessity for its self-abandonment lies in the notion that what is inherently essential, and gets this specific character merely through opposition, has just on that account no real independent subsistence. Therefore that element which has for its essence, not independent selfexistence, but simple being, is what empties and abandons itself, gives itself unto death, and so reconciles Absolute Being with its own self. For in this process it manifests itself as spirit: the abstract Being is estranged from itself, it has natural existence and actual individual reality. This its otherness, or its being sensuously present, is taken back again by the second process of self-abandonment, of becoming " other," and is affirmed as superseded, as universal. Thereby the Divine Being has come to itself in the sphere of the sensuous present; the immediate existence of actual reality has ceased to be something alien or external to the Divine, by being sublated, by its becoming universal: this death of immediacy is therefore its rising anew as Spirit. When the self-conscious Being cancels and transcends its immediate present, it is universal selfconsciousness. This notion of the transcended individual self which is Absolute Being, immediately expresses therefore the establishment of a communion which, while hitherto having its abode in the sphere of pictorial presentation, now returns into itself as the Self: and Spirit thus passes from the second element constituting it, — figurative presentation — and goes over to the third — self-consciousness as such.
If we further consider the kind of procedure that pre- 788 Phenomenology of Mind sentative thinking adopts as it goes along, we find in the first place the expression that the Divine Being " puts on " human nature. Here it is eo ipso asserted that implicitly and inherently the two are not separate: just as in the statement, that the Divine Being from the beginning empties Itself of Itself, that its objective existence is self-absorbed, centres in Itself and becomes evil, it is not asserted but implied that per se this evil existence is not something alien to the Divine nature. Absolute Being would be merely an empty name if in very truth there were any other being external to it, if there were an absolute " fall " from it. The aspect of self-centredness, self-absorption, really constitutes the essential moment of the self of Spirit.
That this self-centredness, whence primarily comes its reality, belongs to the Divine Being — while this is for us a notion, and so as far as it is a notion, — appears to presentative thinking as an inconceivable historical fact. The inherent and essential nature assumes for figurative thought the form of a bare objective fact external and indifferent to God. The thought, however, that those apparently mutually repugnant moments, absolute Being and self-existent Self, are not inseparable, comes also before this figurative way of thinking (since it does possess the real content), but that thought appears afterwards, in the form that the Divine Being empties Itself of Itself and is made flesh. This figurative idea, which in this way is still immediate and hence not spiritual, i.e. it takes the human form assumed by the Divine to be merely in the first instance a particular form, not yet a universal form — becomes spiritual for this consciousness in the process whereby God, who has assumed shape and form, surrenders again His external, His immediate Revealed Religion 789 existence, and returns to His inner Being. The Divine Being is then Spirit when it is reflected into itself.
The reconciliation of the Divine Being with its antithesis as a whole, and, specifically, with the thought of this other — evil — is thus presented here in a figurative way. When this reconciliation is expressed conceptually, by saying it consists in the fact that evil is inherently the same as what goodness is, or again that the Divine Being is the same as nature in its entire extent, just as nature separated from God is simply nothingness, — then this must be looked at as an unspiritual mode of expression which is bound to give rise to misunderstandings. When evil is the same as goodness, then evil is just not evil nor goodness good; on the contrary, both are really done away with — evil in general, self-centred self-existence, and goodness, selfless simple abstraction. Since in this way they are both expressed in terms of their notion, the unity of the two is at once apparent; for self-centred self-existence is simple knowledge; and what is self-less simple abstraction is as much pure self-existence centred within itself.