§ 564. It lies essentially in the notion of religion,—the religion i.e. whose content is absolute mind—that it be revealed, and, what is more, revealed by God. Knowledge (the principle by which the substance is mind) is a self-determining principle, as infinite self-realising form,—it therefore is manifestation out and out. The spirit is only spirit in so far as it is for the spirit, and in the absolute religion it is the absolute spirit which manifests no longer abstract elements of its being but itself.

The old conception—due to a one-sided survey of human life—of Nemesis, which made the divinity and its action in the world only a levelling power, dashing to pieces everything high and great,—was confronted by Plato and Aristotle with the doctrine that God is not envious. The same answer may be given to the modern assertions that man cannot ascertain God. These assertions (and more than assertions they are not) are the more illogical, because made within a religion which is expressly called the revealed; for according to them it would rather be the religion in which nothing of God was revealed, in which he had not revealed himself, and those belonging to it would be the heathen “who know not God.” If the word of God [pg 176] is taken in earnest in religion at all, it is from Him, the theme and centre of religion, that the method of divine knowledge may and must begin: and if self-revelation is refused Him, then the only thing left to constitute His nature would be to ascribe envy to Him. But clearly if the word Mind is to have a meaning, it implies the revelation of Him.

If we recollect how intricate is the knowledge of the divine Mind for those who are not content with the homely pictures of faith but proceed to thought,—at first only “rationalising” reflection, but afterwards, as in duty bound, to speculative comprehension, it may almost create surprise that so many, and especially theologians whose vocation it is to deal with these Ideas, have tried to get off their task by gladly accepting anything offered them for this behoof. And nothing serves better to shirk it than to adopt the conclusion that man knows nothing of God. To know what God as spirit is—to apprehend this accurately and distinctly in thoughts—requires careful and thorough speculation. It includes, in its fore-front, the propositions: God is God only so far as he knows himself: his self-knowledge is, further, his self-consciousness in man, and man's knowledge of God, which proceeds to man's self-knowledge in God.—See the profound elucidation of these propositions in the work from which they are taken: Aphorisms on Knowing and Not-knowing, &c., by C. F. G—l.: Berlin 1829.

§ 565. When the immediacy and sensuousness of shape and knowledge is superseded, God is, in point of content, the essential and actual spirit of nature and spirit, while in point of form he is, first of all, presented to consciousness as a mental representation. This quasi-pictorial representation gives to the elements of his content, on one hand, a separate being, making them [pg 177] presuppositions towards each other, and phenomena which succeed each other; their relationship it makes a series of events according to finite reflective categories. But, on the other hand, such a form of finite representationalism is also overcome and superseded in the faith which realises one spirit and in the devotion of worship.

§ 566. In this separating, the form parts from the content: and in the form the different functions of the notion part off into special spheres or media, in each of which the absolute spirit exhibits itself; (a) as eternal content, abiding self-centred, even in its manifestation; () as distinction of the eternal essence from its manifestation, which by this difference becomes the phenomenal world into which the content enters; (?) as infinite return, and reconciliation with the eternal being, of the world it gave away—the withdrawal of the eternal from the phenomenal into the unity of its fullness.

§ 567. (a) Under the “moment” of Universality,—the sphere of pure thought or the abstract medium of essence,—it is therefore the absolute spirit, which is at first the presupposed principle, not however staying aloof and inert, but (as underlying and essential power under the reflective category of causality) creator of heaven and earth: but yet in this eternal sphere rather only begetting himself as his son, with whom, though different, he still remains in original identity,—just as, again, this differentiation of him from the universal essence eternally supersedes itself, and, though this mediating of a self-superseding mediation, the first substance is essentially as concrete individuality and subjectivity,—is the Spirit.

§ 568. () Under the “moment” of particularity, or of judgment, it is this concrete eternal being which is presupposed: its movement is the creation of the phenomenal [pg 178] world. The eternal “moment” of mediation—of the only Son—divides itself to become the antithesis of two separate worlds. On one hand is heaven and earth, the elemental and the concrete nature,—on the other hand, standing in action and reaction with such nature, the spirit, which therefore is finite. That spirit, as the extreme of inherent negativity, completes its independence till it becomes wickedness, and is that extreme through its connexion with a confronting nature and through its own naturalness thereby investing it. Yet, amid that naturalness, it is, when it thinks, directed towards the Eternal, though, for that reason, only standing to it in an external connexion.

§ 569. (?) Under the “moment” of individuality as such,—of subjectivity and the notion itself, in which the contrast of universal and particular has sunk to its identical ground, the place of presupposition (1) is taken by the universal substance, as actualised out of its abstraction into an individual self-consciousness. This individual, who as such is identified with the essence,—(in the Eternal sphere he is called the Son)—is transplanted into the world of time, and in him wickedness is implicitly overcome. Further, this immediate, and thus sensuous, existence of the absolutely concrete is represented as putting himself in judgment and expiring in the pain of negativity, in which he, as infinite subjectivity, keeps himself unchanged, and thus, as absolute return from that negativity and as universal unity of universal and individual essentiality, has realised his being as the Idea of the spirit, eternal, but alive and present in the world.

§ 570. (2) This objective totality of the divine man who is the Idea of the spirit is the implicit presupposition for the finite immediacy of the single subject. For such subject therefore it is at first an Other, an object [pg 179] of contemplating vision,—but the vision of implicit truth, through which witness of the spirit in him, he, on account of his immediate nature, at first characterised himself as nought and wicked. But, secondly, after the example of his truth, by means of the faith on the unity (in that example implicitly accomplished) of universal and individual essence, he is also the movement to throw off his immediacy, his natural man and self-will, to close himself in unity with that example (who is his implicit life) in the pain of negativity, and thus to know himself made one with the essential Being. Thus the Being of Beings (3) through this mediation brings about its own indwelling in self-consciousness, and is the actual presence of the essential and self-subsisting spirit who is all in all.

§ 571. These three syllogisms, constituting the one syllogism of the absolute self-mediation of spirit, are the revelation of that spirit whose life is set out as a cycle of concrete shapes in pictorial thought. From this its separation into parts, with a temporal and external sequence, the unfolding of the mediation contracts itself in the result,—where the spirit closes in unity with itself,—not merely to the simplicity of faith and devotional feeling, but even to thought. In the immanent simplicity of thought the unfolding still has its expansion, yet is all the while known as an indivisible coherence of the universal, simple, and eternal spirit in itself. In this form of truth, truth is the object of philosophy.

If the result—the realised Spirit in which all meditation has superseded itself—is taken in a merely formal, contentless sense, so that the spirit is not also at the same time known as implicitly existent and objectively self-unfolding;—then that infinite subjectivity is the merely formal self-consciousness, knowing itself in itself as absolute,—Irony. Irony, which can make every [pg 180] objective reality nought and vain, is itself the emptiness and vanity, which from itself, and therefore by chance and its own good pleasure, gives itself direction and content, remains master over it, is not bound by it,—and, with the assertion that it stands on the very summit of religion and philosophy, falls rather back into the vanity of wilfulness. It is only in proportion as the pure infinite form, the self-centred manifestation, throws off the one-sidedness of subjectivity in which it is the vanity of thought, that it is the free thought which has its infinite characteristic at the same time as essential and actual content, and has that content as an object in which it is also free. Thinking, so far, is only the formal aspect of the absolute content.