Hegel God Quotes

Art does not simply reveal God: it is one of the ways in which God reveals, and thus actualizes, himself.

Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer. One orients one's attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.

When we finally achieve the full right of participation in American life, what we make of it will depend upon our sense of cultural values, and our creative use of freedom, not upon our racial identification. I see no reason why the heritage of world culture—which represents a continuum—should be confused with the notion of race. Japan erected a highly efficient modern technology upon a religious culture which viewed the Emperor as a god. The Germany which produced Beethoven and Hegel and Mann turned its science and technology to the monstrous task of genocide; one hopes that when what are known as the “Negro” societies are in full possession of the world’s knowledge and in control of their destinies, they will bring to an end all those savageries which for centuries have been committed in the name of race. From what we are now witnessing in certain parts of the world today, however, there is no guarantee that simply being non-white offers any guarantee of this. The demands of state policy are apt to be more influential than morality. I would like to see a qualified Negro as President of the United States. But I suspect that even if this were today possible, the necessities of the office would shape his actions far more than his racial identity.

When we say, "God is love," we are saying something very great and true. But it would be senseless to grasp this saying in a simple-minded way as a simple definition, without analyzing what love is. For love is a distinguishing of two, who nevertheless are absolutely not distinguished for each other. The consciousness or feeling of the identity of the two - to be outside of myself and in the other - this is love. I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other. I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other - and I am only because I have peace with myself; if I did not have it, then I would be a contradiction that falls to pieces. This other, because it likewise exists outside itself, has its self-consciousness only in me, and both the other and I are only this consciousness of being-outside-ourselves and of our identity; we are only this intuition, feeling, and knowledge of our unity. This is love, and without knowing that love is both a distinguishing and the sublation of the distinction, one speaks emptily of it. This is the simple, eternal idea.

The principle that we ought to obey God rather than man has been interpreted by Christians in two different ways. God's commands may be conveyed to the individual conscience either directly, or indirectly through the medium of the Church. No one except Henry VIII and Hegel has ever held, until our own day, that they could be conveyed through the medium of the State.

What experience and history teach us is this,” the German philosopher Georg Hegel warned, “peoples and governments have never learned anything from history.

Hegel gives a fantastically elevated role to humans in his philosophy. They are carriers of unfolding divinity. They are the mirrors of God, providing an ever clearer and more radiant reflection of the divine.

The conversations were miles beyond Jo's comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms, and the only thing 'evolved from her inner consciousness' was a bad headache after it was all over.

Just as I do not see how anyone can expect really to understand Kant and Hegel without knowing the German language and without such an understanding of the German mind as can only be acquired in the society of living Germans, so a fortiori I do not see how anyone can understand Confucius without some knowledge of Chinese and a long frequentation of the best Chinese society. I have the highest respect for the Chinese mind and for Chinese civilisation; and I am willing to believe that Chinese civilisation at its highest has graces and excellences which may make Europe seem crude. But I do not believe that I, for one, could ever come to understand it well enough to make Confucius a mainstay. I am led to this conclusion partly by an analogous experience. Two years spent in the study of Sanskrit under Charles Lanman, and a year in the mazes of Patanjali's metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods, left me in a state of enlightened mystification. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys lay in trying to erase from my mind all the categories and kinds of distinction common to European philosophy from the time of the Greeks. My previous and concomitant study of European philosophy was hardly better than an obstacle. And I came to the conclusion seeing also that the 'influence' of Brahmin and Buddhist thought upon Europe, as in Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and Deussen, had largely been through romantic misunderstanding that my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European: which, for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do

Such minds, when they give themselves up to the uncontrolled ferment of [the divine] substance, imagine that, by drawing a veil over self-consciousness and surrendering understanding they become the beloved of God to whom He gives wisdom in sleep; and hence what they in fact receive, and bring to birth in their sleep, is nothing but dreams.

The Absolute is Mind – this is the supreme definition of the Absolute.” -- Hegel

The march of GOD in the world, that is what the state is.

Nothing else is worth the effort except God and his explication.

Instead of pacifying a distant deity by observing an alien, unwanted Law, Hegel had in effect declared that the divine was a dimension of our humanity. Indeed, Hegel’s view of the kenosis of the Spirit, which empties itself to become immanent and incarnate in the world, has much in common with the Incarnational theologies that have developed in all three faiths.

In Mohammedanism the limited principle of the Jews is expanded into universality and thereby overcome. Here, God is no longer, as with the Asiatics, contemplated as existent in immediately sensuous mode but is apprehended as the one infinite sublime Power beyond all the multiplicity of the world. Mohammedanism is, therefore, in the strictest sense of the world, the religion of sublimity.

Kant abolished God and made man God in His stead. We are still living in the age of the Kantian man, or Kantian man-god. Kant's conclusive exposure of the so-called proofs of the existence of God, his analysis of the limitations of speculative reason, together with his eloquent portrayal of the dgnity of rational man, has had results which might possibly dismay him. How recognizable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundelgung, who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason. Stripped of the exiguous metaphysical background which Kant was prepared to allow him, this man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. The raison d'etre of this attractive but misleading creature is not far to seek. He is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational and yet increasingly aware of his alienation from the material universe which his discoveries reveal; and since he is not a Hegelian (Kant, not Hegel, has provided Western ethics with its dominating image) his alienation is without cure. He is the ideal citizen of the liberal state, a warning held up to tyrants. He has the virtue which the age requires and admires, courage. It is not such a very long step from Kant to Nietzsche, and from Nietzsche to existentialism and the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines which in some ways closely resemble it. In fact Kant's man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.

Both men were obsessed with the power of mind over matter, and held the belief that by sheer force of will, one could send physical events in a certain direction simply by insisting that history dictated such a course of action. This belief would become one of the moral diseases that would afflict the twentieth century until its end. Here, in April 1917, was where it would start with Lenin and Wilson. And whereas Lenin had Marx to encourage him in this conviction, Wilson had Hegel and his own belief in an omniscient providential God.

The conversations were miles beyond Jo's comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms, and the only thing "evolved from her inner consciousness" was a bad headache after it was all over. It dawned upon her gradually that the world was being picked to pieces, and put together on new and, according to the talkers, on infinitely better principles than before, that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God.

In explaining the cosmic dialectic, Hegel posits the law of contradiction rather than the Aristotelian law of non-contradiction. Since reality for Hegel and Heraclitus is something that moves, any fixed identity (pure being) is impossible. Contradiction is the source of becoming. It’s the root of all movement. It’s only because something is experiencing a contradiction that it moves, that it has an urge, an activity, a vitality. What is “becoming God” all about? – achieving total knowledge, total power, total completeness, total wholeness, total synthesis, the resolution of all contradictions.

The individuals under a totalitarian regime are not free, even though man in the collective sense is free. Finally, when the Empire delivers the entire human species, freedom will reign over herds of slaves, who at least will be free in relation to God and, in general, in relation to every kind of transcendence. The dialectic miracle, the transformation of quantity into quality, is explained here: it is the decision to call total servitude freedom. Moreover, as in all the examples cited by Hegel and Marx, there is no objective transformation, but only a subjective change of denomination. In other words, there is no miracle. If the only hope of nihilism lies in thinking that millions of slaves can one day constitute a humanity which will be freed forever, then history is nothing but a desperate dream. Historical thought was to deliver man from subjection to a divinity; but this liberation demanded of him the most absolute subjection to historical evolution. Then man takes refuge in the permanence of the party in the same way that he formerly prostrated himself before the altar. That is why the era which dares to claim that it is the most rebellious that has ever existed only offers a choice of various types of conformity. The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

If we see ourselves as alienated from God, we have a huge problem. That’s exactly what the Abrahamic faiths do to us – they alienate us from who we really are, from our divine spark. Instead of making us search for God inside ourselves, they project God onto an external figure; remote, alien, infinitely high above humanity.

And so now, today, one cannot think of the greats—Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, Marx, Fichte, Freud, Nietzsche, Einstein, Schopenhauer, Leibniz, Schelling—the whole Germanic sphere—without thinking, at some point, of Auschwitz and Treblinka, Sobibor and Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Chelmno. My God, they have names, as if they were human.

Apparently the world today can no longer be anything other than a world of masters and slaves because contemporary ideologies, those that are changing the face of the earth, have learned from Hegel to conceive of history in terms of the dialectic of master and slave. If, on the first morning of the world, under the empty sky, there is only a master and a slave; even if there is only the bond of master and slave between a transcendent god and mankind, then there can be no other law in this world than the law of force. Only a god, or a principle above the master and the slave, could intervene and make men's history something more than a mere chronicle of their victories and defeats.

Hegel did not deceive himself about the revolutionary character of his dialectic, and was even afraid that his Philosophy of Right would be banned. Nor was the Prussian state entirely easy in its mind for all its idealization. Proudly leaning on its police truncheon, it did not want to have its reality justified merely by its reason. Even the dull-witted King saw the serpent lurking beneath the rose: when a distant rumor of his state philosopher's teachings reached him he asked suspiciously: but what if I don't dot the I's or cross the T's? The Prussian bureaucracy meanwhile was grateful for the laurel wreath that had been so generously plaited for it, especially since the strict Hegelians clarified their master's obscure words for the understanding of the common subjects, and one of them wrote a history of Prussian law and the Prussian state, where the Prussian state was proved to be a gigantic harp strung in God's garden to lead the universal anthem. Despite its sinister secrets Hegel's philosophy was declared to be the Prussian state philosophy, surely one of the wittiest ironies of world history. Hegel had brought together the rich culture of German Idealism in one mighty system, he had led all the springs and streams of our classical age into one bed, where they now froze in the icy air of reaction. but the rash fools who imagined they were safely hidden behind this mass of ice, who presumptuously rejoiced who bold attackers fell from its steep and slippery slopes, little suspected that with the storms of spring the frozen waters would melt and engulf them. Hegel himself experienced the first breath of these storms. He rejected the July revolution of 1830, he railed at the first draft of the English Reform Bill as a stab in the 'noble vitals' of the British Constitution. Thereupon his audience left him in hordes and turned to his pupil Eduard Gans, who lectured on his master's Philosophy of Right but emphasized its revolutionary side and polemicized sharply against the Historical School of Law. At the time it was said in Berlin that the great thinker died from this painful experience, and not of the cholera.

Apart from a few explanations that are not the subject of this essay, the strange and terrifying growth of the modern State can be considered as the logical conclusion of inordinate technical and philosophical ambitions, foreign to the true spirit of rebellion, but which nevertheless gave birth to the revolutionary spirit of our time. The prophetic dream of Marx and the over-inspired predictions of Hegel or of Nietzsche ended by conjuring up, after the city of God had been razed to the ground, a rational or irrational State, which in both cases, however, was founded on terror. In actual fact, the Fascist revolutions of the twentieth century do not merit the title of revolution. They lacked the ambition of universality. Mussolini and Hitler, of course, tried to build an empire, and the National Socialist ideologists were bent, explicitly, on world domination. But the difference between them and the classic revolutionary movement is that, of the nihilist inheritance, they chose to deify the irrational, and the irrational alone, instead of deifying reason. In this way they renounced their claim to universality. And yet Mussolini makes use of Hegel, and Hitler of Nietzsche; and both illustrate, historically, some of the prophecies of German ideology. In this respect they belong to the history of rebellion and of nihilism. They were the first to construct a State on the concept that everything is meaningless and that history is only written in terms of the hazards of force. The consequences were not long in appearing.

The leftist is always a statist. He has all sorts of grievances and animosities against personal initiative and private enterprise. The notion of the state doing everything (until, finally, it replaces all private existence) is the Great Leftist Dream. Thus it is a leftist tendency to have city or state schools—or to have a ministry of education controlling all aspects of education. For example, there is the famous story of the French Minister of Education who pulls out his watch and, glancing at its face, says to his visitor, “At this moment in 5,431 public elementary schools they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.” Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, or personal tutors are not at all in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons for this attitude are manifold. Here not only is the delight in statism involved, but the idea of uniformity and equality is also decisive; i.e., the notion that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils should be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information in the same fashion and to the same degree. This should help them to think in identical or at least in similar ways. It is only natural that this should be especially true of countries where “democratism” as an ism is being pushed. There efforts will be made to ignore the differences in IQs and in personal efforts. Sometimes marks and report cards will be eliminated and promotion from one grade to the next be made automatic. It is obvious that from a scholastic viewpoint this has disastrous results, but to a true ideologist this hardly matters. When informed that the facts did not tally with his ideas, Hegel once severely replied, “Um so schlimmer für die Tatsachen”—all the worse for the facts. Leftism does not like religion for a variety of causes. Its ideologies, its omnipotent, all-permeating state wants undivided allegiance. With religion at least one other allegiance (to God), if not also allegiance to a Church, is interposed. In dealing with organized religion, leftism knows of two widely divergent procedures. One is a form of separation of Church and State which eliminates religion from the marketplace and tries to atrophy it by not permitting it to exist anywhere outside the sacred precincts. The other is the transformation of the Church into a fully state-controlled establishment. Under these circumstances the Church is asphyxiated, not starved to death. The Nazis and the Soviets used the former method; Czechoslovakia still employs the latter.

There were philosophers who tried, before Hegel, to explain […] history. And providence could really not but smile when it saw these attempts. But providence did not laugh outright, for there was a human, honest sincerity about them. But Hegel! Here I need Homer's language. How did the gods roar with laughter! Such a horrid little professor who has simply seen through the necessity of anything and everything there is, and who now plays the whole affair on his barrel-organ: listen, ye gods of Olympus!

This detailed reminder of Kant’s fundamental exposition seems to me necessary, because it is precisely here that we find the clearest division between esse in intellectu and esse in re. Hegel cast the reproach at Kant that one could not compare the concept of God with an imaginary hundred thalers. But, as Kant rightly pointed out, logic strips away all content, for it would no longer be logic if a content were to prevail. From the standpoint of logic, there is, as always, no tertium between the logical either-or. But between intellectus and res there is still anima, and this esse in anima makes the whole ontological argument superfluous. Kant himself, in his Critique of Practical Reason, made an attempt on a grand scale to evaluate the esse in anima in philosophical terms. There he introduces God as a postulate of practical reason resulting from the a priori recognition of “respect for moral law necessarily directed towards the highest good, and the consequent supposition of its objective reality.

It belongs to the absolute freedom of God that in its act of determining and dividing, it releases the Other to exist as a free and independent being...This other released as something free and independent is the world as such.” The world lacks genuine actuality. Its being is only posited. For the world, to be is to have being only for an instant, but also to sublate this separation from God and return to its origin in God, to enter into relationship of spirit, of love, to be this relationship of spirit, of love, which is the holy spirit.

Hegel represents history as the self-realization of spirit (Geist) or God. The fundamental scheme of his theory is as follows. Spirit is self-creative energy imbued with a drive to become fully conscious of itself as spirit. Nature is spirit in its self-objectification in space; history is spirit in its self-objectification as culture—the succession of world-dominant civilizations from the ancient Orient to modern Europe. Spirit actualizes its nature as self-conscious being by the process of knowing. Through the mind of man, philosophical man in particular, the world achieves consciousness of itself as spirit. This process involves the repeated overcoming of spirit's alienation (Entfremdung) from itself, which takes place when spirit as the knowing mind confronts a world that appears, albeit falsely, as objective, i.e. as other than spirit. Knowing is recognition, whereby spirit destroys the illusory otherness of the objective world and recognizes it as actually subjective or selbstisch. The process terminates at the stage of "absolute knowledge," when spirit is finally and fully "at home with itself in its otherness," having recognized the whole of creation as spirit—Hegelianism itself being the scientific form of this ultimate self-knowledge on spirit's part.

The Holocaust did not take place long ago and far away. It happened in the heart of rationalist, post-Enlightenment, liberal Europe: the Europe of Kant and Hegel, Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Brahms. Some of the epicentres of antisemitism were places of cosmopolitan, avant-garde culture like Berlin and Vienna. The Nazis were aided by doctors, lawyers, scientists, judges and academics. More than half of the participants at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, who planned the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’, the murder of all Europe’s Jews, carried the title ‘doctor’. They either had doctorates or were medical practitioners.

It contrives the acceptance of injustice, crime, and falsehood by the promise of a miracle. Still greater production, still more power, uninterrupted labor, incessant suffering, permanent war, and then a moment will come when universal bondage in the totalitarian empire will be miraculously changed into its opposite: free leisure in a universal republic. Pseudo-revolutionary mystification has now acquired a formula: all freedom must be crushed in order to conquer the empire, and one day the empire will be the equivalent of freedom. And so the way to unity passes through totality.[...]Totality is, in effect, nothing other than the ancient dream of unity common to both believers and rebels, but projected horizontally onto an earth deprived of God. To renounce every value, therefore, amounts to renouncing rebellion in order to accept the Empire and slavery. Criticism of formal values cannot pass over the concept of freedom. Once the impossibility has been recognized of creating, by means of the forces of rebellion alone, the free individual of whom the romantics dreamed, freedom itself has also been incorporated in the movement of history. It has become freedom fighting for existence, which, in order to exist, must create itself. Identified with the dynamism of history, it cannot play its proper role until history comes to a stop, in the realization of the Universal City. Until then, every one of its victories will lead to an antithesis that will render it pointless. The German nation frees itself from its oppressors, but at the price of the freedom of every German. The individuals under a totalitarian regime are not free, even though man in the collective sense is free. Finally, when the Empire delivers the entire human species, freedom will reign over herds of slaves, who at least will be free in relation to God and, in general, in relation to every kind of transcendence. The dialectic miracle, the transformation of quantity into quality, is explained here: it is the decision to call total servitude freedom. Moreover, as in all the examples cited by Hegel and Marx, there is no objective transformation, but only a subjective change of denomination. In other words, there is no miracle. If the only hope of nihilism lies in thinking that millions of slaves can one day constitute a humanity which will be freed forever, then history is nothing but a desperate dream. Historical thought was to deliver man from subjection to a divinity; but this liberation demanded of him the most absolute subjection to historical evolution. Then man takes refuge in the permanence of the party in the same way that he formerly prostrated himself before the altar. That is why the era which dares to claim that it is the most rebellious that has ever existed only offers a choice of various types of conformity. The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

He who blasphemes the individual (i.e., blasphemes me as an individual self) shuts himself out only from me, not from love; but he who sunders himself from God blasphemes nature itself, blasphemes the spirit in nature; his spirit has destroyed its own holiness, and he is therefore incapable of annulling his separation and reuniting himself with love, with holiness. By a sign ye could be shaken, but that would not restore in you the nature ye have lost. The Eumenides of your being could be terrified, but the void left in you by the Daemons thus chased away would not be filled by love. It will only draw your furies back again, and, now strengthened by your very consciousness that they are furies of hell, they complete your destruction.

Doctrinal formulae are neither a set of neat definitions nor some sort of affront to the free-thinking soul; they are words that tell us enough truth to bring us to the edge of speech, and words that sustain enough common life to hold us there together in worship and mutual love... I learned to rethink Hegel and to grasp that what he was concerned with was not a system that could be projected on to some detached reality 'out there', but a habit of thinking that always sought to understand itself as a process of self-questioning and self-dissolution in the process of discovering *real* language - and thus real thinking. It is the energy of surpassing the settled individual self in the journey to truth... The Hegelian point (as I understand it) is that meaning does not come in the gaps between words or things, but in the way in which the structure and the surface of the world and speech can be so read and heard as to lead us into new and strange configurations of understanding - how words and things always deliver more than themselves, more than a series of objects and labels, and so both undermine and re-establish appearances. Hans Urs von Balthasar... developed an aesthetic of extraordinary depth in which some of the same themes may be discerned. His 'dramatic' construal of the world is meant to remind us that we do not start from intuitions of spiritual truth and then embody them in some way in practices and words. First we are addressed and engaged by what is utterly outside our capacity; we are forced towards new horizons. For Balthasar, this is how we establish on the firmest basis the recognition of the gap between what we can achieve or understand and what God makes known to us... God is free from obligation to our good deeds, free from confinement in our categories; God defines who he is by what he says and does, in revelation.

Thus specifically does Jesus declare himself against personality, against the view that his essence possessed an individuality opposed to that of those who had attained the culmination of friendship with him (against the thought of a personal God),[23] for the ground of such an individuality would be an absolute particularity of his being in opposition to theirs. A remark about the unity of lovers is also relevant here (Matthew xix. 5-6): Man and wife, these twain, become one, so that they are no longer two. What therefore God hath joined, let no man put asunder. If this “joining” were supposed to have reference solely to the original designation of the man and the woman for one another, this reason would not suffice against divorce, since divorce would not cancel that designation, that conceptual unification; it would remain even if a living link were disrupted. It is a living link that is said to be something divine, effected by God’s agency.

Teach all nations” (the last words of the glorified Jesus – Matthew xxviii. 19) “baptizing them into these relationships of the divine, into the connection of[24] the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” From the very context of the words, it is clear that by “baptizing into” we are not to understand a dipping in water, a so-called “Christening” in which there has to be an utterance of certain words like a magic formula. The word μρθητεύειυ [teach] is likewise deprived of the notion of teaching proper by the clause which follows it. God cannot be taught or learned, since he is life and can be apprehended only with life. “Fill them with the spiritual relation” (ὂυομα [name]; cf. Matthew x. 41: “whoso receiveth a prophet εις ὂυομα προϕήτου [in the name of a prophet], i.e., in so far as he is a prophet)[25] “which connects the One, the modification (separation), and the developed reunification of life and spirit (i.e., not in conceptual thinking alone).

Yet it is the Outsider’s belief that life aims at more life, at higher forms of life, something for which the Superman is an inexact poetic symbol (as Dante’s description of the beatific vision is expressed in terms of a poetic symbol); so that, in a sense, Urizen is the most important of the three functions. The fall was necessary, as Hesse realized. Urizen must go forward alone. The other two must follow him. And as soon as Urizen has gone forward, the Fall has taken place. Evolution towards God is impossible without a Fall. And it is only by this recognition that the poet can ever come to ‘praise in spite of; for if evil is ultimately discord, unresolvable, then the idea of dennoch preisen is a self-contradiction. And yet it must be clearly recognized and underlined that this is not the Hegelian ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world’. Even if the evil is necessary, it remains evil, discord, pain. It remains an Existential fact, not something that proves to be something else when you hold it in the right light. It is as if there were two opposing armies: the Hegelian view holds that peace can be secured by proving that there is really no ground for opposition; in short, they are really friends. The Blakeian view says that the discord is necessary, but it can never be resolved until one army has. completely exterminated the other. This is the Existential view, first expressed by Soren Kierkegaard, the Outsider’s view and, incidentally, the religious view. The whole difference between the Existentialist and the Hegelian viewpoint is implicit in the comparison between the title of Hegel’s book, The Philosophy of History, and James Joyce’s phrase, ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ Blake provided the Existentialist view with a symbolism and mythology. In Blake’s view, harmony is an ultimate aim, but not the primary aim, of life; the primary aim is to live more abundantly at any cost. Harmony can come later.

In the Kingdom of God what is common to all is life in God. This is not the common character which a concept expresses, but is love, a living bond which unites the believers; it is this feeling of unity of life, a feeling in which all oppositions, as pure enmities, and also rights, as unifications of still subsisting oppositions, are annulled. “A new command give I unto you,” says Jesus [John xiii. 34], “that ye love one another; thereby shall men know that ye are my disciples.” This friendship of soul, described in the language of reflection as an essence, as spirit, is the divine spirit, is God who rules the communion. Is there an idea more beautiful than that of a nation of men related to one another by love? Is there one more uplifting than that of belonging to a whole which as a whole, as one, is the spirit of God whose sons the individual members are? Was there still to be an incompleteness in this idea, as incompleteness which would give a fate power over it? Or would this fate be the nemesis raging against a too beautiful endeavor, against an overleaping of nature?

Expressed in the mode of sensibility, it is eternal love; the holy spirit is eternal love. When we say “God is love” we say something very great and true. But it would be senseless to grasp this saying in a simple minded way as a simple definition, without analyzing what love is. For love is a distinguishing of two who nevertheless are absolutely not distinguished for each other. The consciousness or feeling of the identity of the two - to be outside myself and in the other- this is love. I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other. I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other - and I am only because I have peace with myself through loving this other; if I did not have it, then I would be a contradiction that falls to pieces. THis other, because it likewise exists outside itself, has its self-consciousness only in me, and both the other and I are only this consciousness of being-outside-ourselves and of our identity; we are only this intuition, feeling, and knowledge of our unity. THis is love, and without knowing that love is both a distinguishing and sublation of the distinction, one speaks emptily of it. This is the simple, eternal idea.

Personality is what is based upon freedom - the first, deepest, innermost mode, but it is also the most abstract mode in which freedom announces its presence in the subject. E.g. ‘i am a person, i stand on my own.’ Therefore when each is a person, then through this definition of the person, what the idea demands appears to be made even more unattainable, namely to regard these distinctions as distinctions that are not distinct but absolutely one, attaining the sublation of the distinction. Two cannot be one; each is a rigid, independent being-for-self. Logic shows the category of the one is a poor category, the wholly abstract unit. If I say One of God, I must say this of everything else. But as far as personality is concerned, it is the character of the person, the subject, to surrender its isolation and separateness. Ethical life, love, means precisely the giving up of particularity, of particular personality, and its extension to universality - so too with friendship. In friendship and love, I give up my abstract personality and thereby win it back as concrete. The truth of personality is found precisely in winning it back through this immersion, this being immersed in the other.

Jesus also contrasts individuality with the spirit of the whole. Whoever (Matthew xii. 31 ff.) blasphemes a man (blasphemes me as the son of man), this sin shall be forgiven him. But whoso blasphemes the spirit itself, the divine, his sin shall not be forgiven either in this time or in the time to come. Out of the abundance of the heart (verse 34) the mouth speaketh; out of the treasure of a good spirit the good man bringeth forth good things, out of the evil spirit the evil man bringeth forth evil. He who blasphemes the individual (i.e., blasphemes me as an individual self) shuts himself out only from me, not from love; but he who sunders himself from God blasphemes nature itself, blasphemes the spirit in nature; his spirit has destroyed its own holiness, and he is therefore incapable of annulling his separation and reuniting himself with love, with holiness. By a sign ye could be shaken, but that would not restore in you the nature ye have lost. The Eumenides of your being could be terrified, but the void left in you by the Daemons thus chased away would not be filled by love. It will only draw your furies back again, and, now strengthened by your very consciousness that they are furies of hell, they complete your destruction.

It is the pattern of events presented in the book of Job. Job is guiltless. he finds his misfortune unjustifiable and so is dissatisfied. This means that there is unresolved antithesis within him, the consciousness of the justice or righteousness that is absolute and of the incongruity between his fate and this right. He is dissatisfied or unhappy precisely because he does not regard necessity as blind fate; it is known to be God's purpose to bring about good things for those who are good. The critical point, then occurs when this dissatisfaction and sorrow, unhappiness, has to submit to the absolute spirit of God, with pure confidence or faith. This submission or faith is the end point. One the one side there stands the requirement that the righteous should prosper, and on the other hand is a submission of faith. This faith is a renunciation, an acknowledgement of God's power; upon submission to that power there follows the restoration of good fortune by God, precisely because of this acknowledgement of God's power in Job's own renunciation and humbling. This trust in God, this unity and consciousness of this harmony of the power of God with the truth, and the righteousness of God, the consciousness that God is inwardly characterized as purpose and that God has purpose, is the first moment, and the blessedness of knowing God as well as blessedness in external matters are what follows. That trust in God is none other than the consciousness of this harmony between power and wisdom.

maternal love, the most successful object of the religious imagination of romantic art. For the most part real and human, it is yet entirely spiritual, without the interest and exigency of desire, not sensuous and yet present: absolutely satisfied and blissful spiritual depth. It is a love without craving, but it is not friendship; for be friendship never so rich in emotion, it yet demands a content, something essential, as a mutual end and aim. Whereas, without any reciprocity of aim and interests, maternal love has an immediate support in the natural bond of connection. But in this instance the mother’s love is not at all restricted to the natural side. In the child which she conceived and then bore in travail, Mary has the complete knowledge and feeling of herself; and the same child, blood of her blood, stands all the same high above her, and nevertheless this higher being belongs to her and is the object in which she forgets and maintains herself. The natural depth of feeling in the mother’s love is altogether spiritualized; it has the Divine as its proper content, but this spirituality remains lowly and unaware, marvellously penetrated by natural oneness and human feeling. It is the blissful maternal love, the love of the one mother alone who was the first recipient of this joy. Of course this love too is not without grief, but the grief is only the sorrow of loss, lamentation for her suffering, dying, and dead son, and does not, as we shall see at a later stage,[9] result from injustice and torment from without, or from the infinite battle against sins, or from the agony and pain brought about by the self. Such deep feeling is here spiritual beauty, the Ideal, human identification of man with God, with the spirit and with truth: a pure forgetfulness and complete self-surrender which still in this forgetfulness is from the beginning one with that into which it is merged and now with blissful satisfaction has a sense of this oneness. In such a beautiful way maternal love, the picture as it were of the Spirit, enters romantic art in place of the Spirit itself because only in the form of feeling is the Spirit made prehensible by art, and the feeling of the unity between the individual and God is present in the most original, real, and living way only in the Madonna’s maternal love. This love must enter art necessarily if, in the portrayal of this sphere, the Ideal, the affirmative satisfied reconciliation is not to be lacking. There was therefore a time when the maternal love of the blessed Virgin belonged in general to the highest and holiest [part of religion] and was worshipped and represented as this supreme fact. But when the Spirit brings itself into consciousness of itself in its own element, separated from the whole natural grounding which feeling supplies, then too it is only the spiritual mediation, free from such a grounding, that can be regarded as the free route to the truth; and so, after all, in Protestantism, in contrast to mariolatry in art and in faith, the Holy Spirit and the inner mediation of the Spirit has become the higher truth.

The subject behaves in general as a thinking subject; yet the subject is also concrete conscoiusness. Therefore, the idea, absolute truth, must be present for this subject as concrete self-consciousness, as an actual subject. The idea posesses certainty for the subject only insofar as it is a perceptible idea, insofar as it exists for the subject. This is immediate knowledge, is certainty. It is also necessary that what is true is also what is certain for me. This is the further process of mediation and is no longer something immediately apprehended, so this mediation is the transition into the universal. For the universal absolute idea is the end here as well as the beginning. The certainty of Jesus’ unity with God penetrated the actuality of the hearts of the believers. This certainty revealed the certainty of an infinite relationship with God was the highest qualitative mode of satisfaction. This infinite relationship exists in certainty in the determination of one’s feeling as consciousness that God is love. This content must remain immediately certain in the mode of sensible appearance, this content is called the outpouring and revelation of the nature of God in the Holy Spirit. The intuition of the nature of God’s spirit satisfying human needs sensibly as Jesus leads to positing glorification of God through revelation of his mediating death and resurrection. This revelation expressed that the negative moments of finitude and weakness are moments contained within the “death of God,” by which the external and negative becomes sublated into the internal. This history reveals humanity is implicitly both dead and God through mediation, through what subsists in-itself returning to itself and eternally becoming spirit. This certainty, intuition, and consciousness of the unity of God and man constitutes the truth upon which develops the consciousness that God is triune. That Christ has died is an eternal act, in the nature of God himself.

While Daoism presents the attaining of immortality through the meditation and withdrawl into oneself as the highest destination of human beings, it does not in that connection declare that the soul persists intrinsically as such and essentially, that the spirit is immortal, but only that human beings can make themselves immortal through the process of abstract thinking in immediate consciousness, and that every man should do so. The thought of immortality lies precisely in the fact that, in thinking, human beings are present to themselves in their freedom. In thinking, one is utterly independent, nothing else can intrude upon one's freedom - one relates only to oneself, and nothing else can have a power upon one. This equivalence with myself, the I, this subsisting with self, is what is genuinely immortal and subject to no alteration; it is the unchangeable itself, what has actual being only within itself and moves only within itself. The I is not lifeless tranquility but movement, though a movement that is not change; instead it is eternal tranquility, eternal clarity within oneself. Inasmuch as it is first in Buddhism that God is known as the essential, and is thought in his essentiality - that being within self, or presence to self is the authentic determination - this being within self or this essentiality is therefore known in connection with the subject, is known as the nature of the subject, and the spiritual is self-contained. This essential character also pertains directly to the subject or the soul; it is known that the soul is immortal, that it has within itself the power of existing purely, or being purely inward, though not yet of existing properly as this purity, i.e. not yet as spirituality. But still bound up with this essentiality is the fact that the mode of existence is yet a sensible immediacy, though only an accidental one. This is immortality, that the soul subsisting in presence to self is both essential and existing at the same time. Essence without existence is a mere abstraction; essentiality or the concept must be thought as existing. Therefore realization also belongs to essentiality. But here the form of this realization is still sensible existence, sensible immediacy.

the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it knoweth him not; I will not leave you behind as orphans; I come to you and ye shall see me, because I love and ye shall live also.” When ye cease merely to see the divine in me and outside yourselves, when ye have life in yourselves, then will the divine come to consciousness in you also (John xv. 27), because ye have been with me from the beginning, because our natures are one in love and in God. “The spirit will guide you into all truth” (John xvi. 13), and will put you in mind of all things that I have said unto you. He is a Comforter. To give comfort means to give the expectation of a good like the one lost or greater than the one lost; so shall ye not be left behind as orphans, since as much as ye think to lose in losing me, so much shall ye receive in yourselves. ch 15 - When Peter recognized the divine in the son of man, Jesus expected his friends to be able to realize and bear the thought of their parting from him. Hence he speaks of it to them immediately after he had heard Peter utter his faith. But Peter’s terror of it shows how far his faith was from the culmination of faith. Only after the departure of Jesus’ individual self could their dependence on him cease; only then could a spirit of their own or the divine spirit subsist in them. “It is expedient for you that I go away.” Jesus says (John xvi. 7), “for if I got not away, the Comforter will not come unto you” – the Comforter (John xiv. 16 ff.), “the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it knoweth him not; I will not leave you behind as orphans; I come to you and ye shall see me, because I love and ye shall live also.” When ye cease merely to see the divine in me and outside yourselves, when ye have life in yourselves, then will the divine come to consciousness in you also (John xv. 27), because ye have been with me from the beginning, because our natures are one in love and in God. “The spirit will guide you into all truth” (John xvi. 13), and will put you in mind of all things that I have said unto you. He is a Comforter. To give comfort means to give the expectation of a good like the one lost or greater than the one lost; so shall ye not be left behind as orphans, since as much as ye think to lose in losing me, so much shall ye receive in yourselves.

Worship as such especially provides the subject-matter of prayer. This is indeed a situation of humility, of the sacrifice of Pelf and the quest for peace in another, but still it is not so much begging (Bitten) as praying (Beten). Of course begging and praying are closely related because a prayer may also be a begging. Yet begging proper wants something for itself; it is addressed to someone who possesses something essential to me, in the hope that my begging will incline his heart to me, weaken his heart, and stimulate his love for me and so arouse in him a sense of identity with me. But what I feel in begging him is the desire for something that he is to lose when I get it; he is to love me so that my own selfishness can be satisfied and my interest and welfare furthered. But I give nothing in return except perhaps an implicit avowal that he can ask the same things of me. This is not the kind of thing that prayer is. Prayer is an elevation of the heart to God who is absolute love and asks nothing for himself. Worship itself is the prayer answered; the petition itself is bliss. For although prayer may also contain a petition for some particular thing, this particular request is not what should really be expressed; on the contrary, the essential thing is the assurance of simply being heard, not of being heard in respect of this particular request, but absolute confidence that God will give me what is best for me. Even in this respect, prayer is itself satisfaction, enjoyment, the express feeling and consciousness of eternal love which is not only a ray of transfiguration shining through the worshipper’s figure and situation, but is in itself the situation and what exists and is to be portrayed. This is the prayerful situation of e.g. Pope Sixtus in the Raphael picture that is called after him,[18] and of St. Barbara in the same picture; the same is true of the innumerable prayerful situations of Apostles and saints (e.g. St. Francis) at the foot of the Cross, where what is now chosen as the subject is, not Christ’s grief or the timorousness, doubt, and despair of the Disciples, but the love and adoration of God, the prayer that loses itself in him. Especially in the earlier ages of painting there are faces of this kind, usually of old men who have gone through much in life and suffering. The faces have been treated as if they were portraits, yet they are those of worshipful souls. The result is that this worship is not their occupation at this moment only, but on the contrary they become priests, as it were, or saints whose whole life, thought, desire, and will is worship, and their expression, despite all portraiture, has in it nothing but this assurance and this peace of love.

In love, in other words, those phases are present, in its content, which we cited as the fundamental essence of the absolute Spirit: the reconciled return out of another into self. By being the other in which the spirit remains communing with itself, this other can only be spiritual over again, a spiritual personality. The true essence of love consists in giving up the consciousness of oneself, forgetting oneself in another self, yet in this surrender and oblivion having and possessing oneself alone. This reconciliation of the spirit with itself and the completion of itself to a totality is the Absolute, yet not, as may be supposed, in the sense that the Absolute as a purely singular and therefore finite subject coincides with itself in another finite subject; on the contrary, the content of the subjectivity which reconciles itself with itself in another is here the Absolute itself: the Spirit which only in another spirit is the knowing and willing of itself as the Absolute and has the satisfaction of this knowledge. In love, on the contrary, the spirit’s opposite is not nature but itself a spiritual consciousness, another person, and the spirit is therefore realized for itself in what it itself owns, in its very own element. So in this affirmative satisfaction and blissful reality at rest in itself, love is the ideal but purely spiritual beauty which on account of its inwardness can also be expressed only in and as the deep feeling of the heart. For the spirit which is present to itself and immediately sure of itself in [another] spirit, and therefore has the spiritual itself as the material and ground of its existence, is in itself, is depth of feeling, and, more precisely, is the spiritual depth of love. (α) God is love and therefore his deepest essence too is to be apprehended and represented in this form adequate to art in Christ. But Christ is divine love; as its object, what is manifest is on the one hand God himself in his invisible essence, and, on the other, mankind which is to be redeemed; and thus what then comes into appearance in Christ is less the absorption of one person in another limited person than the Idea of love in its universality, the Absolute, the spirit of truth in the element and form of feeling. With this universality of love’s object, love’s expression is also universalized, with the result that the subjective concentration of heart and soul does not become the chief thing in that expression – just as, even in the case of the Greeks, what is emphasized, although in a totally different context, in Venus Urania[8] and the old Titanic deity, Eros, is the universal Idea and not the subjective element, i.e. individual shape and feeling. Only when Christ is conceived in the portrayals of romantic art as more than an individual subject, immersed in himself, does the expression of love become conspicuous in the form of subjective deep feeling, always elevated and borne, however, by the universality of its content.

This is the trait constituting the soulful, inner, higher ideal which enters here in place of the quiet grandeur and independence of the figures of antiquity. The gods of the classical ideal too do not lack a trait of mourning, of a fateful negative, present in the cold necessity imprinted on these serene figures, but still, in their independent divinity and freedom, they retain an assurance of their simple grandeur and power. But their freedom is not the freedom of that love which is soulful and deeply felt because this depends on a relation of soul to soul, spirit to spirit. This depth of feeling kindles the ray of bliss present in the heart, that ray of a love which in sorrow and its supreme loss does not feel sang-froid or any sort of comfort, but the deeper it suffers yet in suffering still finds the sense and certainty of love and shows in grief that it has overcome itself within and by itself. It is only the religious love of romanticism which has an expression of bliss and freedom. This oneness and satisfaction is in its nature spiritually concrete because it is what is felt by the spirit which knows itself in another as at one with itself. Here therefore if the subject-matter portrayed is to be complete, it must have two aspects because love necessarily implies a double character in the spiritual personality. It rests on two independent persons who yet have a sense of their unity; but there is always linked with this unity at the same time the factor of the negative. Love is a matter of subjective feeling, but the subject which feels is this self-subsistent heart which, in order to love, must desist from itself, abandon itself, and sacrifice the inflexible focus of its own private personality. This sacrifice is what is moving in the love that lives and feels only in this self-surrender. Yet on this account a person in this sacrifice still retains his own self and in the very cancelling of his independence acquires a precisely affirmative independence. Nevertheless, in the sense of this oneness and its supreme happiness there still remains left the negative factor, the moving sense not so much of sacrifice as rather of the undeserved bliss of feeling independent and at unity with self in spite of all the self-surrender. The moving emotion is the sense of the dialectical contradiction of having sacrificed one’s personality and yet of being independent at the same time; this contradiction is ever present in love and ever resolved in it. So far as concerns the particular human individual personality in this depth of feeling, the unique love which affords bliss and an enjoyment of heaven rises above time and the particular individuality of that character which becomes a matter of indifference. in the pure ray of bliss which has just been described, particular individuality is superseded: in the sight of God all men are equal, or piety, rather, makes them all actually equal so that the only thing of importance is the expression of that concentration of love which needs neither happiness nor any particular single object. It is true that religious love too cannot exist without specific individuals who have some other sphere of existence apart from this feeling. But here the strictly ideal content is provided by the soulful depth of spiritual feeling which does not have its expression and actuality in the particular difference of a character with its talent, relationships, and fates, but is rather raised above these.

On the contrary the depth and profound feeling of the spirit presupposes that the soul has worked its way through its feelings and powers and the whole of its inner life, i.e. that it has overcome much, suffered grief, endured anguish and pain of soul, and yet in this disunion has preserved its integrity and withdrawn out of it into itself. In the myth of Hercules the Greeks have presented us with a hero who after many labours was placed amongst the gods and enjoyed blissful peace there. But what Hercules achieved was only something outside him, the bliss given him as a reward was only peaceful repose. The ancient prophecy that he would put an end to the reign of Zeus, he did not fulfill, supreme hero of the Greeks though he was. The end of that rule only began when man conquered not dragons outside him or Lernaean hydras, but the dragons and hydras of his own heart, the inner obstinacy and inflexibility of his own self. Only in this way does natural serenity become that higher serenity of the spirit which completely traverses the negative moment of disunion and by this labour has won infinite satisfaction. The, feeling of cheerfulness and happiness must be transfigured and purified into bliss. For good fortune and happiness still involve an accidental and natural correspondence between the individual and his external circumstances; but in bliss the good fortune still attendant on a man’s existence as he is in nature falls away and the whole thing is transferred into the inner life of the spirit. Bliss is an acquired satisfaction and justified only on that account; it is a serenity in victory, the soul’s feeling when it has expunged from itself everything sensuous and finite and therefore has cast aside the care that always lies in wait for us. The soul is blissful when, after experiencing conflict and agony, it has triumphed over its sufferings. (α) If we now ask what can be strictly ideal in this subject-matter, the answer is: the reconciliation of the individual heart with God who in his appearance as man has traversed this way of sorrows. The substance of spiritual depth of feeling is religion alone, the peace of the individual who has a sense of himself but who finds true satisfaction only when, self-collected, his mundane heart is broken so that he is raised above his mere natural existence and its finitude, and in this elevation has won a universal depth of feeling, a spiritual depth and oneness in and with God. The soul wills itself, but it wills itself in something other than what it is in its individuality and therefore it gives itself up in face of God in order to find and enjoy itself in him. This is characteristic of love, spiritual depth in its truth, that religious love without desire which gives to the human spirit reconciliation, peace, and bliss. It is not the pleasure and joy of actual love as we know it in ordinary life, but a love without passion, indeed without physical inclination but with only an inclination of soul. Looked at physically, this is a love which is death, a death to the world, so that there hovers there as something past the actual relationship of one person to another; as a real mundane bond and connection this relationship has not come essentially to its perfection; for, on the contrary, it bears in itself the deficiency of time and the finite, and therefore it leads on to that elevation into a beyond which remains a consciousness and enjoyment of love devoid of longing and desire.

As the most perfect subject for painting I have already specified inwardly satisfied [reconciled and peaceful] love, the object of which is not a purely spiritual ‘beyond’ but is present, so that we can see love itself before us in what is loved. The supreme and unique form of this love is Mary’s love for the Christ-child, the love of the one mother who has borne the Saviour of the world and carries him in her arms. This is the most beautiful subject to which Christian art in general, and especially painting in its religious sphere, has risen. The love of God, and in particular the love of Christ who sits at’ the right hand of God, is of a purely spiritual kind. The object of this love is visible only to the eye of the soul, so that here there is strictly no question of that duality which love implies, nor is any natural bond established between the lovers or any linking them together from the start. On the other hand, any other love is accidental in the inclination of one lover for another, or,’ alternatively, the lovers, e.g. brothers and sisters or a father in his love for his children, have outside this relation other conceI1l8 with an essential claim on them. Fathers or brothers have to apply themselves to the world, to the state, business, war, or, in short, to general purposes, while sisters become wives, mothers, and so forth. But in the case of maternal love it is generally true that a mother’s love for her child is neither something accidental just a single feature in her life, but, on the contrary, it is her supreme vocation on earth, and her natural character and most sacred calling directly coincide. But while other loving mothers see and feel in their child their husband and their inmost union with him, in Mary’s relation to her child this aspect is always absent. For her feeling has nothing in common with a wife’s love for her husband; on the contrary, her relation to Joseph is more like a sister’s to a brother, while on Joseph’s side there is a secret awe of the child who is God’s and Mary’s. Thus religious love in its fullest and most intimate human form we contemplate not in the suffering and risen Christ or in his lingering amongst his friends but in the person of Mary with her womanly feeling. Her whole heart and being is human love for the child that she calls her own, and at the same time adoration, worship, and love of God with whom she feels herself at one. She is humble in God’s sight and yet has an infinite sense of being the one woman who is blessed above all other virgins. She is not self-subsistent on her own account, but is perfect only in her child, in God, but in him she is satisfied and blessed, whether. at the manger or as the Queen of Heaven, without passion or longing, without any further need, without any aim other than to have and to hold what she has. In its religious subject-matter the portrayal of this love has a wide series of events, including, for example, the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Birth, the Flight into Egypt, etc. And then there are, added to this, other subjects from the later life of Christ, i.e. the Disciples and the women who follow him and in whom the love of God becomes more or less a personal relation of love for a living and present Saviour who walks amongst them as an actual man; there is also the love of the angels who hover over the birth of Christ and many other scenes in his life, in serious worship or innocent joy. In all these subjects it is painting especially which presents the peace and full satisfaction of love. But nevertheless this peace is followed by the deepest suffering. Mary sees Christ carry his cross, she sees him suffer and die on the cross, taken down from the cross and buried, and no grief of others is so profound as hers. Mary’s grief is of a totally different kind. She is emotional, she feels the thrust of the dagger into the centre of her soul, her heart breaks, but she does not turn into stone.

Next comes the Curse, as it is called, which God pronounced upon man. The prominent point in that curse turns chiefly on the contrast between man and nature. Man must work in the sweat of his brow: and woman bring forth in sorrow. As to work, if it is the result of the disunion, it is also the victory over it. The beasts have nothing more to do but to pick up the materials required to satisfy their wants: man on the contrary can only satisfy his wants by himself producing and transforming the necessary means. Thus even in these outside things man is dealing with himself. The story does not close with the expulsion from Paradise. We are further told, God said, ‘Behold Adam is become as one of us, to know good and evil.’ Knowledge is now spoken of as divine, and not, as before, as something wrong and forbidden. Such words contain a confutation of the idle talk that philosophy pertains only to the finitude of the mind. Philosophy is knowledge, and it is through knowledge that man first realises his original vocation, to be the image of God. When the record adds that God drove men out of the garden of Eden to prevent their eating of the tree of life, it only means that on his natural side certainly man is finite and mortal, but in knowledge infinite. We all know the theological dogma that man’s nature is evil, tainted with what is called Original Sin. Now while we accept the dogma, we must give up the setting of incident which represents original sin as consequent upon an accidental act of the first man. For the very notion of spirit is enough to show that man is evil by nature, and it is an error to imagine that he could ever be otherwise. To such extent as man is and acts like a creature of nature, his whole behaviour is what it ought not to be. For the spirit it is a duty to be free, and to realise itself by its own act. Nature is for man only the starting-point which he has to transform. The theological doctrine of original sin is a profound truth; but modem enlightenment prefers to believe that man is naturally good, and that he acts right so long as he continues true to nature. The hour when man leaves the path of mere natural being marks the difference between him, a self-conscious agent, and the natural world. But this schism, though it forms a necessary element in the very notion of spirit, is not the final goal of man. It is to this state of inward breach that the whole finite action of thought and will belongs. In that finite sphere man pursues ends of his own and draws from himself the material of his conduct. While he pursues these aims to the uttermost, while his knowledge and his will seek himself, his own narrow self apart from the universal, he is evil; and his evil is to be subjective. We seem at first to have a double evil here: but both are really the same. Man in so far as he is spirit is not the creature of nature: and when he behaves as such, and follows the cravings of appetite, he wills to be so. The natural wickedness of man is therefore unlike the natural life of animals. A mere natural life may be more exactly defined by saying that the natural man as such is an individual: for nature in every part is in the bonds of individualism. Thus when man wills to be a creature of nature, he wills in the same degree to be an individual simply. Yet against such impulsive and appetitive action, due to the individualism of nature, there also steps in the law or general principle. This law may either be an external force, or have the form of divine authority. So long as he continues in his natural state, man is in bondage to the law. It is true that among the instincts and affections of man, there are social or benevolent inclinations, love, sympathy, and others, reaching beyond his selfish isolation. But so long as these tendencies are instinctive, their virtual universality of scope and purport is vitiated by the subjective form which always allows free play to self-seeking and random action.

The Mosaic legend of the Fall of Man has preserved an ancient picture representing the origin and consequences of this disunion. The incidents of the legend form the basis of an essential article of the creed, the doctrine of original sin in man and his consequent need of succour. It may be well at the commencement of logic to examine the story which treats of the origin and the bearings of the very knowledge which logic has to discuss. For, though philosophy must not allow herself to be overawed by religion, or accept the position of existence on sufferance, she cannot afford to neglect these popular conceptions. The tales and allegories of religion, which have enjoyed for thousands of years the veneration of nations, are not to be set aside as antiquated even now. Upon a closer inspection of the story of the Fall we find, as was already said, that it exemplifies the universal bearings of knowledge upon the spiritual life. In its instinctive and natural stage, spiritual life wears the garb of innocence and confiding simplicity; but the very essence of spirit implies the absorption of this immediate condition in something higher. The spiritual is distinguished from the natural, and more especially from the animal, life, in the circumstance that it does not continue a mere stream of tendency, but sunders itself to self-realisation. But this position of severed life has in its turn to be suppressed, and the spirit has by its own act to win its way to concord again. The final concord then is spiritual; that is, the principle of restoration is found in thought, and thought only. The hand that inflicts the wound is also the hand which heals it. We are told in our story that Adam and Eve, the first human beings, the types of humanity, were placed in a garden, where grew a tree of life and a tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God, it is said, had forbidden them to eat of the fruit of this latter tree: of the tree of life for the present nothing further is said. These words evidently assume that man is not intended to seek knowledge, and ought to remain in the state of innocence. Other meditative races, it may be remarked, have held the same belief that the primitive state of mankind was one of innocence and harmony. Now all this is to a certain extent correct. The disunion that appears throughout humanity is not a condition to rest in. But it is a mistake to regard the natural and immediate harmony as the right state. The mind is not mere instinct: on the contrary, it essentially involves the tendency to reasoning and meditation. Childlike innocence no doubt has in it something fascinating and attractive: but only because it reminds us of what the spirit must win for itself. The harmoniousness of childhood is a gift from the hand of nature: the second harmony must spring from the labour and culture of the spirit. And so the words of Christ, ‘Except ye become as little children’, etc., are very far from telling us that we must always remain children. Again, we find in the narrative of Moses that the occasion which led man to leave his natural unity is attributed to solicitation from without. The serpent was the tempter. But the truth is, that the step into opposition, the awakening of consciousness, follows from the very nature of man; and the same history repeats itself in every son of Adam. The serpent represents likeness to God as consisting in the knowledge of good and evil: and it is just this knowledge in which man participates when he breaks with the unity of his instinctive being and eats of the forbidden fruit. The first reflection of awakened consciousness in men told them that they were naked. This is a naive and profound trait. For the sense of shame bears evidence to the separation of man from his natural and sensuous life. The beasts never get so far as this separation, and they feel no shame. And it is in the human feeling of shame that we are to seek the spiritual and moral origin origin of dress.

2. Abstract concepts. It is extremely difficult to explain how any set of purely physical actions and interactions could possibly invest consciousness with the immaterial—which is to say, purely abstract—concepts by which all experience is necessarily interpreted and known. It is almost impossible to say how a purely material system of stimulus and response could generate universal categories of understanding, especially if (and one hopes that most materialists would grant this much) those categories are not mere idiosyncratic personal inflections of experience, but real forms of knowledge about reality. In fact, they are the very substance of our knowledge of reality. As Hegel argued perhaps more persuasively than any other philosopher, simple sense-knowledge of particular things, in itself, would be utterly vacuous. My understanding of anything, even something as humbly particular as that insistently red rose in my garden, is composed not just of a collection of physical data but of the conceptual abstractions that my mind imposes upon them: I know the rose as a discrete object, as a flower, as a particular kind of flower, as a kind of vegetation, as a horticultural achievement, as a biological system, as a feature of an ecology, as an object of artistic interest, as a venerable and multi-faceted symbol, and so on; some of the concepts by which I know it are eidetic, some taxonomic, some aesthetic, some personal, and so on. All of these abstractions belong to various kinds of category and allow me, according to my interests and intentions, to situate the rose in a vast number of different sets: I can associate it eidetically not only with other flowers, but also with pictures of flowers; I can associate it biologically not only with other flowers, but also with non-floriferous sorts of vegetation; and so on. It is excruciatingly hard to see how any mechanical material system could create these categories, or how any purely physical system of interactions, however precisely coordinated, could produce an abstract concept. Surely no sequence of gradual or particulate steps, physiological or evolutionary, could by itself overcome the qualitative abyss between sense experience and mental abstractions.

American Republicans trumpet the value of negative liberty. The state is kept passive in relation to the people. Some people – the rich, powerful and well-connected – flourish, while the rest, the vast majority, live bland, banal lives or, in the case of a large underclass, lives of grim, grinding poverty and despair. The state extends no helping hand. American capitalist democracy is the creed of negative liberty. Many American citizens live in squalor, with minimal access to basic standards of health care. Tens of millions of Americans are poor, with no prospects. They are sustained by the illusion of the “American Dream”, which, in reality, is as rare as a lottery win. One in a million defies the odds and succeeds. For many of the rest, the dream is a nightmare.

This is classic slave behaviour: admiring the very people who oppress you. Many of the supporters of the right wing American Republican Party – the main party of the Old World Order – are members of the underclass. They are frequently fundamentalist Christians (a slave morality), and advocates of capitalism (even though they themselves have no capital) and have dead-end jobs or no jobs at all. When people vote for the masters who have made them slaves, they have lost all self-respect. They have been the victims of the perfect brainwashing regime. They have played the Perfect Game of the masters to the bitter

The thing that makes God the perfect spiritual object is precisely that he is abstract-as Hegel saw. He is not a concrete individuality, and so He does not limit our development by His own personal will and needs. When we look for the "perfect" human object we are looking for someone who allows us to express our will completely, without any frustration or false notes. We want an object that reflects a truly ideal image of ourselves. But no human object can do this; humans have wills and counterwills of their own, in a thousand ways they can move against us, their very appetites offend us. God's greatness and powers is something that we can nourish ourselves in, without its being compromised in any way by the happenings of the world. No human partner can offer this assurance because the partner is real. However much we may idealize and idolize him, he inevitably reflects earthly decay and imperfection. And as he is our ideal measure of value, this imperfection falls back upon us. If your partner is your "All" then any shortcoming in him becomes a major threat to you.

We are the new and improved Christians, those who actually understand Christianity. It has nothing to do with worshipping the Son of God, and everything to do with becoming God. Christianity is about making yourself Christ.

Our way of life is inherently based on masters and slaves. We bow to assorted Gods, like slaves bowing to masters. We bow to monarchs and presidents, to the rich, to celebrities. We never tire of bowing to others and getting on our knees. We are controlled at every turn. Isn’t it time to unshackle ourselves, to stand up straight for once? Isn’t it time to bring an end to the master-slave dialectic?

Hegel did not earn his reputation as a “difficult” philosopher for nothing. Yet no philosophy has ever been as magnificent, as ambitious, and as inspiring. Hegel showed how humanity and God are inextricably linked. He showed how it can truly be said that we can become God.

The Problem of Christianity. —Philosophy as the negation of a detached philosophy; religion as the death of God. —Death of God: Hegel's word, Marx's theory of ideologies, Kierkegaard's Pharisean Christianity, Nietzsche's word.—This does not mean (according to Heidegger): es gibt keinen Gott. God is dead, which means everything, except: there is no god. — It does mean: the absolute must be thought by a mortal (capable of dying)...The absolute requires all that in order to avoid being 'solitary' and 'lifeless' (Hegel). -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

It’s time to transform the world. Only positive liberty can produce the necessary alchemy. Why should humanity be content with being free from interference? Why doesn’t it want to become something wondrous? How do you become a god? By being left alone, left to your own devices? Or do you become a god when the State invests everything in you, and provides the framework, the machinery, for producing gods? The State can make you a god. You cannot make yourself a god. There are no gods on desert islands. It’s time to trust the State. It’s time to allow the State to engineer your metamorphosis. It’s time to become what you truly are … an authentic god.

The Greek gods, these beautiful figures, of more than human perfection, but still of human shape. This means that for the Greeks, only the perfected man is divine. Or, to use a Biblical expression, only the perfected man is in the image of God, not man as man. And this is decisive for the later development. In other words, what we would call the non-democratic character of the Greeks, even of Greek democracy, that is implied in that. Only men of a certain perfection are truly human beings, not man as such. And therefore, this leads to the fact, which Hegel points out, that the famous anthropomorphism of Greek religion is imperfect because it abstracts from the ugly, the imperfect, suffering, pain, death. And this is according to Hegel, the superiority of Christianity, because God has become a man, a suffering man, and died. [For the Greeks…] God appears in products of the human imagination and not in the flesh. That is the limitation of Greek anthropomorphism.

People believe in miracles, precisely because they don’t believe in miracles.

God is simply all souls together, while 'the Devil' is all souls apart (leading to conflict, hate and evil). Creation is what all souls together construct to explore their deepest nature and come to self-awareness. Souls start off united, and then create maximum disunity: the Big Bang. Then they dialectically work to come back into unity. They alienate themselves from themselves in order to understand themselves, to come to consciousness of themselves and their purpose and meaning, and then they return to themselves, but at a much higher level, a divine level. They have found themselves. They have come home. The broken mirror of God has reassembled and God can once again see its own reflection and know exactly what and why it is.

Agambenquotes from Hegel’s Aesthetics: “what is at issue […] is the right of the wide awake consciousness, the justification of what the man has self-consciously willed and knowingly done, as contrasted with what he was fated by the gods to do and actually did unconsciously,” and declares that “[n]othing is further from Auschwitz than this model” (2002: 96 & 97). Not only do innocence and guilt becomes unbridgeable, but their relation is based on a de facto inversion: the camp deportee “feels innocent precisely for that which the tragic hero feels guilty, and guilty exactly where the tragic hero feels innocent” (2002: 97). Agamben’s context is that of Primo Levi’s “grey zone,” and the rationale of Befehlnotstand, the principle of blind obedience, or the “‘state of compulsion to follow an order’” (2002: 97).

Hegel was an advocate of panlogism: reason is literally everywhere. Existence is made of reason, hence existence is entirely knowable. Reality is constituted by the mind and is its construction. Given that mind can know everything it made, there is no unknowable, noumenal world. If mind creates everything, there is nothing outside mind, no noumenal objects existing independently of mind.

Ronan was making me think, yes, and he was making me think about thinking (Hegel would be pleased), but my task as his myth writer was still to understand my son as a person and a being who was independent of me and yet dependent on my actions, my attention, and my love. I would not and will never do his the disservice of regarding him as an angel or telling myself that God had "other" plans for him, and for me. My plan was simple and yet impossible: to go with him as far as I could along this journey that we call life, to be with him as deeply as I could from moment to moment, and then to let him go.

Christianity is not these retrograde political positions that various self-proclaimed Christians take up. These positions are heresies, betrayals of the radicality of the Christian event, which is the moment at which the God of the beyond becomes a divided subject, when the infinite shows that it must appear as finite. It is this event that Hegel cannot abandon without destroying his entire system. When one removes Christianity, as Marx does, one ends up erecting a new substantial form of the divine with tragic consequences.

And no amount of “deconstruction” helps here: the ultimate formof idolatry is the deconstructive purifying of this Other, so that all thatremains of the Other is its place, the pure form of Otherness as theMessianic Promise. It is here that we encounter the limit of decon-struction: as Derrida himself has realized in the last two decades, themore radical a deconstruction is, the more it has to rely on its inher-ent undeconstructible condition of deconstruction, the messianicpromise of Justice.This promise is the true Derridean object of belief,and Derrida’s ultimate ethical axiom is that this belief is irreducible,“undeconstructible.” Thus Derrida can indulge in all kinds of para-doxes, claiming, among other things, that it is only atheists who trulypray—precisely by refusing to address God as a positive entity, theysilently address the pure Messianic Otherness. Here one should em-phasize the gap which separates Derrida from the Hegelian tradition:It would be too easy to show that, measured by the failure to establishliberal democracy, the gap between fact and ideal essence does notshow up only in . . . so-called primitive forms of government, theoc-racy and military dictatorship....But this failure and this gap alsocharacterize,a prioriand by definition,all democracies, including theoldest and most stable of so-called Western democracies. At stake hereis the very concept of democracy as concept of a promise that can onlyarise in such a diastema(failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjust-ment, being “out of joint”).That is why we always propose to speak ofa democracy to come,not of a futuredemocracy in the future present, noteven of a regulating idea, in the Kantian sense, or of a utopia—at leastto the extent that their inaccessibility would still retain the temporalform of a future present,of a future modality of the living present.15Here we have the difference between Hegel and Derrida at its purest:Derrida accepts Hegel’s fundamental lesson that one cannot assert theinnocent ideal against its distorted realization.This holds not only fordemocracy, but also for religion—the gap which separates the idealconcept from its actualization is already inherent to the concept itself:just as Derrida claims that “God already contradicts Himself,” that anypositive conceptual determination of the divine as a pure messianicpromise already betrays it, one should also say that “democracy already139 contradicts itself.” It is also against this background that Derrida elab-orates the mutual implication of religion and radical evil:16radical evil(politically: “totalitarianism”) emerges when religious faith or reason(or democracy itself) is posited in the mode of future present. Against Hegel, however, Derrida insists on the irreducible excess inthe ideal concept which cannot be reduced to the dialectic betweenthe ideal and its actualization: the messianic structure of “to come,”the excess of an abyss which can never be actualized in its determinatecontent. Hegel’s own position here is more intricate than it may ap-pear: his point is not that, through gradual dialectical progress, onecan master the gap between the concept and its actualization, andachieve the concept’s full self-transparency (“Absolute Knowing”).Rather, to put it in speculative terms, his point is to assert a “pure”contradiction which is no longer the contradiction between theundeconstructible pure Otherness and its failed actualizations/determinations, but the thoroughly immanent “contradiction” whichprecedes any Otherness.

It seems to me that in the theological appropriation of Hegel’s thought a certain Protestant enthusiasm reaches a febrile pitch, a rapt delight in divine sovereignty so total that it sees even the devil as only one of God’s innumerable masks.

But against proponents of identity politics and multiculturalism, Žižek argues that there is a kind of universality that is negative. The universal is not an ideal as some positive content that is always implicit to any “system” of thought. On the contrary the universal is a kind of traumatic antagonism around which ever-changing, thoroughly contingent, historical constellations of thought circle and revolve. Along these lines, according to Žižek’s reading of Hegel, the dialectic is a process without a subject, a process which revolves around a void or negativity. No agent (no God, humanity, or class as a collective subject) controls and directs the dialectical process.

that the ultimate meaning of death is the death of meaning itself. Hegel himself relies on this ambiguity when he says that the meaning attached to death is that through death the human element is stripped away and the divine glory comes into view once more—death is a stripping away of the human, the negative. But at the same time death itself is this negative, the furthest extreme to which humanity as natural existence is exposed; God himself is [involved in] this.9 How to read these last words? Through death, humanity in its natural existence (its decaying bodily reality, its finitude) is negated, so that the “divine glory” of the infinite and immortal Spirit can become visible without any finitude obfuscating the view. “But at the same time death itself is this negative”: God is not a perfect full supreme Being that appears when finitude is stripped away, it is itself the absolute force of negativity, of “stripping away” all positive existence—in “God,” the highest perfection coincides with the absolute power of destruction, so that, in the strongest sense possible, “God” is nothing but this negativity brought to the absolute, which means: to self-relation. And this means that God himself has to die;

Quien creen en la primacía de las personas y quien piensan que la Finalidad de todas las personas es trascender el tiempo y alcanzar aquello que es eterno e intemporal, son siempre, como es el caso de los hindúes, los budistas, los taoístas, los cristianos primitivos, abogados de la no violencia, la gentileza, la paz y la tolerancia. Quienes, al contrario, prefieren ser -profundos- a la manera de Hegel y Marx, quienes piensan que la -Historia- se ocupa de la Humanidad en la Masa y de la Humanidad en tanto sucesión de generaciones, y no del hombre y de la mujer de aquí y ahora, son indiferentes a la vida humana y a los valores personales, adorando a los Molochs que denominan Estado y Sociedad y están confiadamente preparados para sacrificar a las sucesivas generaciones de personas reales, de carne y hueso, cada una con su propio rostro, en aras de la felicidad enteramente hipotética que, sobre ninguna base discernible, piensa que será el destino de la humano en un futuro distante.

History is thorough and passes through many stages while bearing an ancient form to its grave. The last stage of a world-historical form is its comedy. The Greek gods, already died once of their wounds in Aeschylus's tragedy Prometheus Bound, were forced to die a second death - this time a comic one - in Lucian's dialogues.

But there can be no doubt that the worship of power is one of the worst kinds of human idolatries, a relic of the time of the cage, of human servitude. The worship of power is born of fear, an emotion which is rightly despised. A third reason why power politics has been made the core of history is that those in power wanted to be worshipped and could enforce their wishes. ...and our conscience can judge us and not our worldly success. The theory that god reveals himself and his judgement in history is indistinguishable from the theory that worldly success is the ultimate judge and justification of our actions; it comes to the same thing as the doctrine that history will judge , that is to say , that future might is right; it is the same as what I have called 'moral futurism' . To maintain that God reveals himself in what is usually called 'history' ,in the history of international crime and murder is indeed blasphemy; for what really happens within the realm of human lives is hardly ever touched upon by this cruel and at the same time childish affair

that we are dealing with our subjective processes and not with things themselves, for Kant insists that there cannot be contradictions in things.30 For Hegel, on the contrary, contradictions and antinomies are the innermost features of things themselves, even (and especially) of god as the highest “thing.

Accordingly, whereas Hegel views the Absolute-Spirit as something wherein God’s will participates as the culmination of conscious development, Jung treats God’s acts within psychic subjective personal judgment and understanding. It is then understood that, despite striking similarities with the Hegelian dialectics, Jung deviates significantly from Hegel in his construal of wholeness/Self as full of conflicts – which appears to be defined only within a psychological antithesis-Other and not as an Other beyond psychic boundaries. Contrary to Jung, and to some extent closer to Maximus – that introduces a final union of opposites within the Logos’s principles – logoi – Hegel follows a more consistent and progressive approach to wholeness/Absolute. It is precisely what Jung was reluctant to fully embrace, being thus trapped into the crucial limitations of his own ambiguous epistemology.

Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety seems to be that God’s grace might prove to be all too free on this side, that hell, instead of being populated with so many people, might some day prove to be empty!

The truth will set you free from falsehood. It will dissolve all shadows, giving you light and knowledge in God’s mercy. In this truth, you will be freed. — St. Catherine of Siena Hegel

We will appeal to the highest aspirations of people, not their basest instincts. We seek to make all people into Gods, no matter how retarded, deluded and dumb they may be at the moment. We will transform their consciousness. When we are finished, it won’t be Hegel and Nietzsche who are unknown amongst the masses, but the vacuous celebrities.

We need a road of trials, a succession of ordeals, to provide the resistance we must overcome in order to become moral (rational), which is to say intelligent. If we met no resistance, there would be no need for us to evolve. For a system to evolve into God, it needs the maximum possible resistance – it needs the Devil. The “world” is Satanic in order that we must become God to overcome it.

Marx believed that history had three stages or epochs (the ancient stage, the feudal stage, the capitalist stage). He thought he was witnessing the rise, and would see eventually of the fall, of the capitalist stage. He also advanced the idea of class consciousness. Each one of these societal epochs contained internal contradictions. These internal contradictions are what would lead to struggle and would eventually lead to the next phase. Then came his idea of historical determinism. Ultimately capitalism would fall. Capitalism had to fall. Why? Because his view of history was one of struggle. History was a series of struggles or conflicts. He was a disciple of Hegel. So this was his dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis). He envisioned the workers of the world would be uniting and revolting. His vision came to pass, but not everywhere. Toward the end of his life and during the life of his followers, they tried to understand and explain why capitalism didn’t fall. If capitalism is the exploitation of the masses, and if history is all about these conflicts, and if this conflict is going to come, and if the next thing that is going to come is a post-capitalist society, then why have we not seen it all come to pass?

The german word Geist meaning both mind and spirit. Must I also prove that I have a mind? I am God and I exist and anyone that says differently holds a delusional belief in modern psychology. Self-Actualization offers it's own proof. Translated from Hegel as: "being-in-and-for-itself" but is further complicated through the ideas of also being reflected upon itself as well as being outside of self. This is a very real feeling attained by the most successful people on the planet. This is a real higher power as defined in 1807. Eastern beliefs put the first achievement of this state into Gautama Buddha 500 BCE.

[Near at hand and difficult to grasp is God.]

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world...

It was by combining Spinoza with Kant’s epistemology that Fichte, Schelling and Hegel reached their varied pantheisms; it was from conatus sese preservandi, the effort to preserve one’s self, that Fichte’s Ich was born, and Schopenhauer’s “will to live,” and Nietzsche’s “will to power,” and Bergson’s élan vital. Hegel objected that Spinoza’s system was too lifeless and rigid; he was forgetting this dynamic element of it and remembering only that majestic conception of God as law which he appropriated for his “Absolute Reason.” But he was honest enough when he said, “To be a philosopher one must first be a Spinozist.

In order to give the reader an immediate glimpse of Hegel’s Platonizing worship of the state, I shall quote a few passages, even before I begin the analysis of his historicist philosophy. These passages show that Hegel’s radical collectivism depends as much on Plato as it depends on Frederick William III, king of Prussia in the critical period during and after the French Revolution. Their doctrine is that the state is everything, and the individual nothing; for he owes everything to the state, his physical as well as his spiritual existence. This is the message of Plato, of Frederick William’s Prussianism, and of Hegel. ‘The Universal is to be found in the State’, Hegel writes8. ‘The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth … We must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth, and consider that, if it is difficult to comprehend Nature, it is infinitely harder to grasp the Essence of the State … The State is the march of God through the world … The State must be comprehended as an organism … To the complete State belongs, essentially, consciousness and thought. The State knows what it wills … The State is real; and … true reality is necessary. What is real is eternally necessary … The State … exists for its own sake … The State is the actually existing, realized moral life.’ This selection of utterances may suffice to show Hegel’s Platonism and his insistence upon the absolute moral authority of the state, which overrules all personal morality, all conscience. It is, of course, a bombastic and hysterical Platonism, but this only makes more obvious the fact that it links Platonism with modern totalitarianism.