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The Revealed Religion
Hegel now sets out to show how consciousness cannot rest satisfied with the kind of purely secular outlook we have reached, but now moves back to a more overtly religious outlook and a conception of the divine that represents an advance on anything we have witnessed hitherto. He puts this in the following terms: so far, we have moved from the doctrine that 'Absolute Being is substance' (which gives priority to God as a self-subsistent and independent reality), to 'The Self as absolute Being' (which gives priority to humanity as having the kind of subjectivity that God is seen to lack); we must now move to the final stage of religion, in which 'Absolute Being is subject' (where God will be seen as achieving self-consciousness through humanity, so that neither side takes undialectical precedence over the other). Hegel makes the transition from the happy consciousness of Greek comedy to the unhappy consciousness of Roman Stoicism and Scepticism by focusing on the inevitable 'disenchantment' of the world that the former brings in its wake, as consciousness comes to feel what it means to say 'God is dead':
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. The tables of the gods provide no spiritual food and drink, and in his games and festivals man no longer recovers the joyful consciousness of his unity with the divine. The works of the Muse now lack the power of the Spirit, for the Spirit has gained its certainty of itself from the crushing of gods and men.
Hegel argues that once this position has been reached, religious consciousness can never find itself in a 'return' to natural religion or art-religion, and that religious belief must therefore take another form. Only by encountering God in the shape of a human being can religious consciousness recover itself, and thereby take us beyond other previous varieties of religious experience:
The Self of existent Spirit has, as a result, the form of complete immediacy; it is posited neither as something thought or imagined, nor as something produced, as is the case with the immediate Self in natural religion, and also in the religion of Art; on the contrary, this God is sensuously and directly beheld as a Self, as an actual individual man; only so is this God self-consciousness.
In taking this form, religious consciousness has come to treat the divine as something revealed or manifest; God has now become another subject, knowable to us as sharing in our natures: 'The divine nature is the same as the human, and it is this unity that is beheld'. At the same time, God remains a substance, for in becoming human He remains unconditioned and absolute; indeed, it is only by becoming human that He can be unconditioned and absolute, because otherwise He would be set over against us in a purely transcendent realm: 'The absolute Being which exists as an actual self-consciousness seems to have come down from its eternal simplicity, but by thus coming down it has in fact attained for the first time to its own highest essence'. Thus, Hegel argues, only in the revealed form can we truly conceive of the divine as absolute. This is why Christianity constitutes the highest form of religious consciousness:
'The hopes and expectations of the world up till now had pressed forward solely to this revelation, to behold what absolute Being is, and in it to find itself'. As we shall see, Hegel takes this to coincide with his own philosophical outlook, according to which such 'hopes and expectations' are fulfilled in much the same way, so that here the tension between religion and philosophy is finally and in principle overcome. (For a useful general discussion of Hegel's final position, see Houlgate.)
However, before this point can be reached, the revealed religion must deal with the following difficulty: how can God, incarnated in a particular individual, nonetheless share His nature with us all, as distinct individualsfi: 'i.e. Spirit as an individual Self is not yet equally the universal Self, the Self of everyone'. To resolve this problem, the divine must give up its immediate incarnation, and be resurrected, so that the religious community can see that its existence is more than 'this objective individual'; God is thus now conceived of as Holy Spirit. Nonetheless, Hegel argues, it is hard for the religious consciousness not to hark back to the incarnation, and to see it as the exclusive basis of its faith; but, he suggests, this will leave it 'still burdened with an unreconciled split into a Here and a Beyond', since it realizes that the time of this incarnation cannot be fully recovered. The religious consciousness forgets, however, that the real lesson of the resurrection is to show that the incarnation is not in itself significant, as God is always present in the life of the community of believers when He is recognized as such: 'What results from this impoverishment of Spirit, from getting rid of the idea of the community, and its action with regard to its idea, is not the Notion, but rather bare externality and singularity, the historical manner of the manifestation of its immediacy and the non-spiritual recollection of a supposed individual figure and of its past. Hegel therefore shows how mistaken it is for religious consciousness to get involved in purely historical questions about Christ's life, of the sort typically raised by the Enlightenment. Hegel then turns to the doctrine of the Trinity itself to see how far it too reflects a perspective compatible with his philosophical standpoint. He argues that this doctrine shows how this form of religious thought has already succeeded in transcending the distinctions between essence and appearance, reason and world, in precisely the way that is required if it is to be appropriated by speculative philosophy; however, it still does not make this advance in properly conceptual terms, but only in its characteristic 'picture-thinking', in an externally 'representational' form. It therefore talks in terms of God the Father and God the Son, and of God creating the world, and of the Fall. Hegel argues that faith is inclined to understand these doctrines in literal terms, which gives rise to inevitable difficulties. In fact their true significance is essentially philosophical, implicitly reflecting an insight into the way in which reason is realized in this world. So, regarding the idea of creation, Hegel comments: 'This “creating” is picture-thinking's word for the Notion itself in its absolute movement'. Hegel thus sees a parallel between his philosophical claim that reality is informed by reason, and the Christian idea of the creation, whereby God instantiates Himself in the world. Likewise, the story of the Fall conveys the way in which the thinking subject comes to feel alienated from the world, once he tries to reflect on it, and forfeits his immediate absorption in nature:
Immediate existence suddenly turns into thought, or mere self-consciousness into consciousness of thought; and, moreover, because the thought stems from immediacy or is conditioned thought, it is not pure knowledge, but thought that is charged with otherness and is, therefore, the self-opposed thought of Good and Evil. Man is pictorially thought of in this way: that it once happened, without any necessity, that he lost the form of being at one with himself through plucking the fruit of the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, and was expelled from the state of innocence, from Nature which yielded its fruits without toil, and from Paradise, from the garden with its creatures . . . Such a form of expression as 'fallen' which, like the expression 'Son', belongs, moreover, to picture-thinking and not to the Notion, degrades the moments of the Notion to the level of picture-thinking or carries picture-thinking over into the realm of thought.
Thus, by separating out the 'rational content' of religion from its 'representational form', Hegel hoped to show how many of the issues that preoccupied religion's Enlightenment critics (concerning the mechanics of the creation, or God's relation to his Son, for example), were not real issues, but simply problems that arose in relation to the form in which religious belief cloaked its underlying speculative ideas, ideas which could then be given a less mystifying expression in philosophical thought.
Turning once again to the story of the crucifixion and resurrection, Hegel argues that Christianity ought to be a religion in which the divine is seen as living within the spiritual community, and thus as lacking any wholly transcendent element: 'The death of the Mediator is the death not only of his natural aspect or of his particular being-for-self, not only of the already dead husk stripped of its essential Being, but also of the abstraction of the divine Being'. However, Hegel argues that it is hard for the Christian community to do away with all aspects of transcendence in its religious thought, so it therefore continues to hold that full rational insight, which Hegel sees as the imperative behind religious consciousness, is only to be gained in the 'beyond'. It therefore remains for philosophy to show how this insight can be gained in the here and now:
The world is indeed implicitly reconciled with the divine Being; and regarding the divine Being it is known, of course, that it recognizes the object as no longer alienated from it but as identical with it in its love. But for self-consciousness, this immediate presence still has not the shape of Spirit. 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.
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