necessity, knows it and comprehends it. The immediate inherent nature of spirit, which takes on the form of self-consciousness, means nothing else than that the concrete actual world-spirit has reached this knowledge of itself. It is then too that this knowledge first enters its consciousness, and enters it as truth. How that came about has already been explained.
That Absolute Spirit has taken on the form of self- 768 Phenomenology of Mind consciousness inherently and necessarily, and has done so too as a conscious fact — this position appears now as the belief of the world, the belief that spirit exists in fact as a definite self-consciousness, i.e. as an actual human being, that spirit is an object for immediate experience, that the believing mind sees, feels, and hears this divinity.* Taken thus it is not an imagination, not a fancy; it is actual in the believer. Consciousness in that case does not set out from its own inner life, does not start from thought, and enclose the thought of God along with existence; rather it sets out from im- mediate present existence, and finds God there.
The moment of immediate existence is present as an element in the notion, and present in such a way that the religious spirit, on the return of all ultimate reality into consciousness, has become simple positive self, just as the actual spirit as such, in the case of the " unhappy consciousness, " was just this simple self-conscious nega- tivity. The self of the definitely existent spirit has in that way the form of complete immediacy. It is neither set up as something thought, or imaginatively repre- sented, nor as something produced, as is the case with the immediate self both in natural religion, and in religion as art. Rather, this concrete God is beheld sensuously and immediately as a self, as a real indi- vidual human being; only so is it a self-consciousness.
This incarnation of the Divine Being, its having essentially and directly the form of self-consciousness, is the simple content of Absolute Religion. Here the Divine Being is known as spirit; this religion is the Divine Being's consciousness concerning itself that it is Spirit. For spirit is knowledge of itself in * e.g. in Christianity.
Revealed Religion 769 its state of self-relinquishment, the absolute Reality, which is the process of retaining its harmony and identity with itself in its otherness. This, however, is Substance, so far as in its accidents substance at the same time turns back into itself; and does so, not as being indifferent towards something unessential and, con- sequently, finding itself in some alien element, but as being there within itself, i.e. so far as it is subject or self.
In this form of religion the Divine Being is, on that account, revealed. Its being revealed obviously consists in this, that what it is, is consciously known. It is, however, known just in its being known as spirit, as a Being which is essentially self-consciousness.
There is something in the object always concealed from consciousness when the object is for consciousness an " other," something alien and extraneous, and when consciousness does not know the object as its self. This concealment, this secrecy, ceases when the Absolute Being qua spirit is object of consciousness. For here in its relation to consciousness the object is in the form of self; i.e. consciousness at once and immediately knows itself there, or is manifest, revealed, to itself in the object. Itself is manifest to itself merely in its own certainty of self; the object it has is the self; self, how- ever, is nothing alien and extraneous, but inseparable unity with itself, the immediate universal. It is the pure notion, pure thought, or self-existence, being-for-self, which is immediately being, and, therewith, being-for- another, and, qua this being-for-another, is immedi- ately turned back into itself and is at home with itself (bei sick). It is thus the truly and solely revealed. The Good, the Righteous, the Holy, Creator of Heaven 770 Phenomenology of Mind and Earth, etc. — all these are predicates of a subject, universal moments, which have their hold on this central point, and only are when consciousness goes back into thought.
As long as it is they that are known, their ground and essential being, the Subject itself is not yet revealed; and in the same way the specific determinations of the universal are not this universal itself. The Subject itself, and consequently this pure universal too, is, however, revealed as self; for this self is just this inner being reflected into itself, the inner being which is immediately given and is the proper certainty of that [other] self, for which it is object. To be in its notion that which reveals and is revealed — this is, then, the true form of spirit; and moreover, this form, its notion, is alone its very essence and its substance. Spirit is known as self-consciousness, and to this self-consciousness it is directly revealed, for it is this self-consciousness itself. The divine nature is the same as the human, and it is this unity which is intuitively apprehended (angeschaut).
Here, then, we find as a fact consciousness, or the general form in which Being is aware of Being — the shape which Being adopts — to be identical with its self- consciousness. This shape is itself a self-consciousness; it is thus at the same time an existent object; and this existence possesses equally directly the significance of pure thought, of Absolute Being.
The absolute Being existing as a concrete actual self- consciousness, seems to have descended from its eternal pure simplicity; but in fact it has, in so doing, attained for the first time its highest nature, its supreme reach of being. For when the notion of Being has reached its simple purity of nature, it is then both the absolute Revealed Religion 771 abstraction, which is pure thought and hence the pure singleness of self, and immediacy or objective being, on account of its pure simplicity.
What is called sense-consciousness is also just this pure abstraction; it is this kind of thought for which being is the immediate. The lowest is thus at the same time the highest; the revelation which has appeared entirely on the surface is just therein the deepest that can be made. That the Supreme Being is seen, heard, etc., as an existent self-consciousness, — this is, in very truth, the culmination and consummation of its notion. And through this consummation, the Divine Being is given to sense, exists immediately, in its character as Divine Being.
This immediate existence is at the same time not solely and simply immediate consciousness; it is re- ligious 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 exist- ence, is immediate knowledge on the part of this re- ligious 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-con- stituted 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 specula- tive 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 nega- tivity, 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 revela- tion, the vision of what Absolute Being is, and the dis- covery of themselves therein. This joy, the joy of seeing itself in Absolute Benig, becomes realised in self-con- sciousness, 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 self- consciousness 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 (Vorstel- lung); 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 conscious- ness 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 objec- tivity, 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, im- mediacy preserves its negative moment. Spirit remains the immediate self of actual reality, but in the form of the universal self-consciousness of a religious com- munion,* a self -consciousness which rests in its own proper substance, just as in it this substance is uni- versal 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] con- nexion 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 develop- ment, 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 pro- cess 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 per- ceptual 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 com- munion, 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 exter- nality 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 ele- ment 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 deter- minate 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 con- nexion " — 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 presenta- tion of the " unhappy " and the " believing " types of consciousness. In the case of the " unhappy " despairing consciousness, however, the peculiarity lies in the con- tent 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" conscious- ness, again, this content has been regarded as the im- personal 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 ele- ment 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 mean- ing, 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 pic- torial 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 pre- sentational 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 pro- duces 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 under- stood, 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 pre- sentative 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, abso- lute Being is indeed revealed to it, but the moments of this Being, owing to this [externally] synthetic presenta- tional 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 trans- cendence 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 con- stituent element. The representation of Spirit in this element, however, has inherently the same defect, as regards form, which ultimate Being as such has. Ulti- mate 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, thought- constituted 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 presen- tative 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 con- sciousness 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 conscious- ness 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 con- sciousness 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, self- centredness, is just thought, while again the transi- tion 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