Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

VII Religion in General ^02 IN the forms of experience hitherto dealt with — which are distinguished broadly as Consciousness, Self-consciousness, Reason, and Spirit — Religion also, the consciousness of Absolute Being in general, has no doubt made its appearance. But that was from the point of view of consciousness, when it has the Absolute Being for its object.

Absolute Being, however, in its own distinctive nature, the Self-consciousness of Spirit, has not appeared in those forms. Even at the plane of Consciousness, viz. when this takes the shape of " Understanding," there is a consciousness of the supersensuous, of the inner being of objective existence. But the supersensible, the eternal, or whatever we care to call it, is devoid of selfhood.

It is merely, to begin with, something universal, which is a long way still from being spirit knowing itself as spirit. Then there was Self-consciousness, which came to its final shape in the " bereft soul," the " unhappy consciousness " ; that was merely the pain and sorrow of spirit wresthng to get itself out into objectivity once more, but not succeeding.

The unity of individual self-consciousness with its unchangeable Being, which is what this stage arrives at, remains, in consequence, a " beyond," something afar off. 685

686 Phenomenology of Mind The immediate existence of Reason (which we found arising out of that state of sorrow), and the special shapes which reason assumes, have no form of rehgion, because self-consciousness in the case of reason knows itself or looks for itself in the direct and immediate present. On the other hand, in the world of the Ethical Order, we met with a type of rehgion, the religion of the nether world.

This is belief in the fearful and unknown darkness of Fate, and in the Eumenides of the spirit of the departed : the former being pure negation taking the form of universahty, the latter the same negation but in the form of particularity. Absolute Being is, then, in the latter shape no doubt the self and is present, as there is no other way for the self to he except present.

But the particular self is this particular ghostly shade, which keeps the universal element, Fate, separated from itself. It is indeed a shade, a ghost, a cancelled and superseded particular, and so a universal self. But that negative meaning has not yet turned round into this latter positive significance, and hence the self, so cancelled and transcended, still directly means at the same time this particular being, this insubstantial reahty.

Fate, however, without self remains the darkness of night devoid of consciousness, which never comes to draw distinctions within itself, and never attains the clearness of self-knowledge. This behef in a necessity that produces nothingness, this belief in the nether world, becomes behef in Heaven, because the self which has departed must be united with its universal nature, must unfold what it contains in terms of this universahty, and thus

Religion 687 become clear to itself. This kingdom of belief, however, we saw unfold its content merely in the element of reflective thought {Denken), without bringing out the true notion (Begriff) ; and we saw it, on that account, perish in its final fate, viz. in the religion of enlightenment.

Here in this type of rehgion, the supersensible beyond, which we found in " understanding,'' is reinstated again, but in such a way that self-consciousness rests and feels satisfied in the mundane present, not in the " beyond," and thinks of the supersensible beyond, void and empty, unknowable, and devoid of all terrors, neither as a self nor as power and might.

In the religion of Morahty it is at last reinstated that Absolute Reahty is a positive content ; but that content is bound up with the negativity characteristic of the enlightenment. The content is an objective being, which is at the same time taken back into the self, and remains there enclosed, and is a content with internal distinctions, while its parts are just as immediately negated as they are posited.

The final destiny, however, which absorbs this contradictory process, is the self conscious of itself as the controlhng necessity {Schicksal) of what is essential and actual. Spirit knowing its self is in religion primarily and immediately its own pure self-consciousness.

Those modes of it above considered — " objective spirit," " spirit estranged from itself " and " spirit certain of its self " — together constitute what it is in its condition of consciousness, the state in which, being objectively opposed to its own world, it does not therein apprehend and consciously possess itself. But in Conscience it brings itself as well as its objective world as a whole