Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Revealed Religion 795 within its grasp, this means the sublation and transcendence of his factuahty, of his particular independent existence : this particular self-existence has become universal self -consciousness. On the other side, the universal, just because of this, is self-consciousness, and the pure or abstract unreal Spirit of bare thought has become concrete and actual.

Th,e death of the mediator is death not merely of his natural aspect, of his particular self-existence : what dies is not merely the outer encasement, which, being stripped of true Being, is eo ipso dead, but also the abstraction of the Divine Being. For the mediator, as long as his death has not yet accomphshed the reconcihation, is something one-sided, which takes as true Being the simple abstract element of thought, not concrete reality.

This one-sided extreme of self has not yet equal worth and value with ultimate Being ; the self first gets this as Spirit. When the mediator as imaginatively presented dies, his death imphes at the same time the death of the mere abstraction of Divine Being, which is not yet affirmed as a self. That death is the bitterness and pain of the " unhappy consciousness," when it feels that God himself is dead.

This harsh utterance is the expression of inmost self-knowledge which has self bare and simple for its content ; it is the return of consciousness into the depth of darkness where Ego is nothing but bare identity of Ego, a darkness distinguishing and knowing nothing more outside it. This feehng thus means, in point of fact, the loss of the Substance and of its objective existence over against consciousness.

But at the same time it is the pure subjectivity of Substance, the pure certainty and inner assurance of itself, which it lacked when it was object or immediacy, pure ultimate

796 Phenomenology of Mind Being. This knowledge is thus the process of spirituaHsation, whereby Substance becomes Subject, by which its abstraction and hfelessness have expired, and Substance therefore has become concrete and real, simple universal self-consciousness. In this way, then, Spirit is Spirit knowing its own self.

It knows itself ; that, which is for it object, exists, or, in other words, its objectively presented idea is the true absolute content. As we saw, the content expresses just Spirit itself. It is at the same time not merely content of self -consciousness, and not merely object for self-consciousness ; it is also concrete actual Spirit.

It is this by the fact of its passing through and realising the three elements of its nature : this movement through the content of its whole self in this way constitutes its actual reality. What moves itself, that is Spirit; it is the subject of the movement, and it is likewise the moving process itself, or the substance through which the subject makes its way.

We saw how the notion of spirit arose when we entered the ^-,, sphere of religion : it was the process of self-assured spirit, which forgives and pardons evil, and in so doing puts aside its own simplicity of nature and rigid unchangeableness : it was, to state it otherwise, the process, in which what is absolutely in opposition recognises itself as the same as its opposite, and this knowledge breaks out into the "yea, yea" with which one extreme meets the other.

The religious consciousness, to which the Absolute Being is revealed, sees this notion, and does away with the distinction of its self from what it beholds ; and as it is Subject, so it is also Substance ; and is thus itself Spirit just because and in so far as it is this process.

Revealed Religion 797 This religious communion, however, has not yet achieved its complete self-consciousness. Its content, in general, is put before it in the form of an objective pictorial idea; so that this disruption or opposition* still attaches even to the actual spiritual character of the communion — to its return out of its presentative way of thinking; just as the element of pure thought itself was also hampered with that opposition. This spiritual communion, too, is not aware what it is ; it is spiritual self-consciousness, which is not object to itself in this form, or does not develop into clear consciousness of itself. Rather, so far as it is consciousness, it has before it ideal presentations, those picture-thoughts which were considered. We see self-consciousness at its last turning-point become inward to itself and attain to knowledge of its inner being, of its self-centredness. We see it relinquish and empty itself of its natural existence, and reach pure negativity. But the positive significance — viz. that this negativity, or pure inwardness of knowledge is just as much the self -identical Absolute Being : put otherwise, that Substance has here attained to being absolute self-consciousness — this is, for the devotional consciousness, an objective other, something external. It grasps this aspect — that the knowledge which becomes purely inward is inherently absolute simphcity, or Substance — as the idea of something which is not thus by its very conception, but as the act of satisfaction obtained from an other. In other words, it is not really aware as a fact that this depth of pure self is the power by which the abstract Ultimate Being is drawn down from its abstractness and * i.e. between spiritual consciousness and objective idea.

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