VII - The Road to Manifest Religion

Summary

With religion we enter a new point of view from which the development of Geist can be read, along with those we have seen earlier: consciousness, self-consciousness, reason and (objective) spirit. But this point of view is not simply on a par with the others. On the contrary, religion is the standpoint of Geist's or the absolute's consciousness of itself.

We have seen that for Hegel the ultimate reality which must come to fruition and full self-revelation through history is God or the cosmic Geist whose embodiment is the universe, with which he is therefore identical and yet not identical. The fullness of this self-revelation will come in speculative philosophy. But like other aspects of the ultimate fruition of Geist, this self-consciousness of the absolute exists and is to be found through history in more rudimentary obscure form.

This form is religion. This self-consciousness of the absolute must, like its ultimate fulfilment in speculative philosophy, be embodied in human consciousness. But Hegel is suggesting that we should see the evolution of religion in human society as more than just the evolution of human consciousness. This of course it is as well, and we have noted various stages of this human religious consciousness in our survey of self-consciousness and Geist – e.g. the unhappy consciousness, or the supra-sensible world. But we must also see this evolution as the development of a larger-than-human consciousness. The justification for this comes, of course, with the validation of the ontological reality of the Hegelian notion of Geist.