"It has been rightly said that society, in its essence, is a memory. It may be added that, through most of human history, this memory has been a religious one."[1] Hegel could not agree with this more. The evolution, the history, of Geist depicted in the Phenomenology is primarily a religious phenomenon. At one point Hegel even equates God and Geist.[2] But, if one persists in taking Geist as a stationary concept rather than a living, breathing, evolving concept it is easy to misunderstand the relationship between God and Geist. In doing this, it is all too easy to think Hegel does more with God than he actually does. It would be a mistake to think that God is the concept which unites the collective and the individual. To do so would lead one to believe Hegel describes God as the foundation of reality, the good and truthful God of Descartes. For Hegel, God does not exist apart from man's conception of him. But neither is God only an idea.
Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche concluded that God is only a "fantastic idea." Hegel claims "God is only God insofar as he knows himself; his knowing himself is, furthermore, a self-consciousness in man and man's knowledge of God that goes on to man's knowing himself in God."[3] Etienne Gilson says that this does not mean what Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche concluded about God. Instead, Gilson feels it was Hegel's necessary response to the question "Does the object have any reality in itself, independent of the subject?" while still affirming that "all experience is our representation." For Gilson, "Hegel wanted to describe the Absolute correctly, not to suppress it as a concept somehow unworthy of modern times!"[4] This is not a denial of the "supernatural" by Hegel, but it is not an affirmation of it either. Hegel is saying that God has an independent existence of each and every man but not from all men. The power and existence of collective Geist is greater than each and every individual Geist. Berger describes the socially constructed reality as fact for the individual, and so is collective Geist a fact for a man. God found Himself bit by bit as man knew more and more of Him. As God comes to know Himself, He exists and His existence is His existence in Geist. And certainly man comes to know himself in God once he comes to hold this view. It is there, in that view, that Geist becomes Absolute and Absolute Geist is God.
God is not always equated with Geist. This is, instead, a goal for Geist, one which Geist evolves toward. It is this movement of Geist toward its completion as God that the Phenomenology traces. The concept of God is thus closely connected with the concept of Geist though they are not identical. Exactly, what connection is there between God and Geist?
The question described by Gilson, "Does the object have any reality in itself, independent of the subject?" is certainly answered in the positive by Hegel. That objects are real objects was accepted both by Kant and Hegel.[5] Also, Hegel, like Kant, accepts the position that "all experience is our representation." But Geist is, for Hegel, the cause of the shared experience. Geist, by means of living men, is a living substance itself.
The living substance, further, is that being which is truly subject, or,
what is the same thing, is truly realized and actual (wirklich)
solely in the process of positing itself, or in mediating with its own self
its transitions from one state or position to the opposite.[6]
It is this living substance that is Geist both collective and individual. It is God, but, it is man as well. It is the "whole" and "the truth is the whole."[7] Geist is the whole answer to the question described by Gilson, The question, "Exactly what connection is there for Hegel between God and Geist?" becomes "What aspect of Geist is God?"
Per se the divine life is no doubt undisturbed identity and oneness
with itself, which finds no serious obstacle in otherness and
estrangement. But this "per se" is abstract generality, where we
abstract from its real nature, which consists in its being objective to
itself, conscious of itself on its own account (fur sich zu sein); and
where consequently we neglect altogether the self-movement
which is the formal character of its activity.[8]
So, the life of God and divine intelligence becomes a fact just as Geist does, with self-consciousness. But, that there is self-consciousness doesn't entail that there is God.
Just as the Phenomenology is a study of growing, changing Geist it studies the growing, changing nature of God and the two are integrally connected. For the concept of God is first developed when man becomes self conscious of the unity of his community. The concept of God here in the beginning:
...is essentially not the abstract being that lies beyond the believing
consciousness; it is the spirit of the religious communion,
it is the unity of that abstract being and self-consciousness.[9]
As Geist advances to the stage of Morality, the concept of God, too, advances because Morality "postulates that there is another consciousness which renders sacred...those duties...which only exist in a moral consciousness."[10]
This consciousness is, consequently, such that in it the universal
and the particular are, through and through one; its essential
principle is thus the same, as that of the harmony of
morality and happiness.[11]
In this stage, the concept of God
...becomes now a master and ruler of the world, who brings
about the harmony of morality and happiness and at the
same time sanctifies duties in their multiplicity.[12]
In each of these two stages, the Ethical (Sittlichkeit) and the Moral (Moralitat), man conceives of God as a principle of unity. In Sittlichkeit, God is conceived of as the unity of the community's Geist, the abstract collective being, with the individual Geist. In Moralitat, God is conceived of as the object of thought in which the universal and particular are unified. Neither Sittlichkeit nor Moralitat are considered better than the other. Both have positive and negative aspects. In Sittlichkeit, the individual's freedom is overly restricted to the point where, as with Antigone, the individual comes into mortal conflict with society for personal moral reasons. In Moralitat, the individual has his freedom but is faced with near anomic separation from his community. It is when:
...as we now know that spirit in its own world and spirit
conscious of itself as spirit, i.e. spirit in the sphere of
religion, are the same, the completion of religion consists
in the two forms becoming identical with one another.[13]
It is when Sittlichkeit and Moralitat are united that religion is "completed." That is when the individuals view of what is moral is identical with his community's view of what is ethical.
But Sittlichkeit and Moralitat both are primarily ways of interpreting man's consciousness of the divine and not God's knowledge of Himself. God's knowledge of Himself is reflected primarily in the different types of religions. These types also develop in stages. Each stage is determined by "the particular unity of consciousness and self-consciousness."[14] These stages Hegel describes as Natural Religion, Religion in the form of Art, and Revealed Religion. These stages are not all to be understood as identifiable historical religions, though some may be more easily associated with one stage than another. But each stage:
...just as much sets forth again merely the different aspects
of a single religion, and the imagery, the conscious
ideas, which seem to mark off one concrete religion
from another make their appearance in each.[15]
The first stage is that of Natural Religion and is in effect Hegel’s description of God’s development at the level of Consciousness. It includes the level of Sense-certainty when God is worshipped as Light.
When the first and immediate cleavage is made within self-knowing
Absolute Spirit (Geist), its shape assumes that character which
belongs to immediate consciousness or to sense-certainty.[16]
God then advances to the stage of Perception when plants and animals are objects of religion, and to the stage of Understanding as the artificer.[17]
God in religion in the form of art reaches Self-consciousness. In art and especially in language God becomes self-conscious.
The religious cult constitutes the process of the two sides –
a process in which the divine embodiment in motion within
the pure feeling-element of self-consciousness, and its
embodiment at rest in the element of thing hood, reciprocally
abandon the different character each possesses, and the
unity, which is the underlying principle of their being,
becomes an existing fact.[18]
In this, God virtually experiences the independence and dependence of Self-consciousness as in Lordship and Bondage. God then, experiences the freedom of Self-consciousness in the living work of art and the spiritual work of art in which God becomes first anthropomorphic and then “combines the meaning of natural and ethical essentiality.”[19] For, as a spiritual work of art:
Rational thinking removes contingency of form and shape from
the divine Being: and, in opposition to the uncritical wisdom
of the chorus - a wisdom, giving utterance to all sorts of ethical
maxims and stamping with the validity and authority a multitude
of laws and specific conceptions of duty and of right - rational
thought lifts these into the simple Ideas of the Beautiful and the
Good.[20]
But in all these stages:
All divine reality goes back into (the unhappy consciousness);
it means, in other words, the complete relinquishment and
emptying of substance. It is consciousness of the loss of
everything of significance in this certainty of itself, and of the
loss even of this knowledge or certainty of self - the loss of
substance as well as of self; it is the bitter pain which finds
expression in the cruel words, "God is dead."[21]
But for Hegel, God has taken another step to the level of Reason and Geist. This is evident only in Christianity; for in Christianity, God:
...is neither set up as something thought, or imaginatively represented,
nor as something produced, as is the case with the immediate
self in natural religion, or again in religion as art. Rather, this
concrete God is beheld sensuously and immediately as a self, as
a real individual human being; only so is it a self-consciousness.[22]
It is in Jesus Christ that God is revealed as Absolute Geist. He is Geist because:
...actual reality, or self-consciousness, and implicit being in the
sense of substance are (Geist's) two moments; and by the
reciprocity of their kenosis, each relinquishing or "emptying"
itself of itself and becoming the other, spirit (Geist) thus
comes into existence as their unity.[23]
As a result of God becoming man as Jesus Christ, the "Word" is made flesh.[24] Thus:
The immediate inherent nature of (Geist), which takes on the form
of self-consciousness, means nothing else than that the concrete
actual World-spirit (Weltgeist) has reached this knowledge of itself.[25]
Further, it is Absolute Geist when:
...this appears now as the belief of the world, the belief that spirit
exists in fact as a definite self-consciousness, i.e. as an actual
human being; that spirit is an object for immediate experience;
that the believing mind sees, feels and hears this divinity.[26]
It is as Geist that God will be with us "even unto the end of the world" since "He has now arisen in Spirit, as He formerly rose before consciousness as an object existing in the sphere of sense."[27]
God is thus integrally connected with Geist as an individual and also through collective Geist, but it is only as Absolute Geist that they are equated, for then, God as we know Him to be is equivalent to God as He knows Himself to be.
The question "What aspect of Geist is God?" is answered. God is an individual that must also go through the stages collective Geist has gone through. The history of religion is thus, not only a history of collective Geist as individual men living and working, but is also the history of the becoming of the Spirit of God.
This course thus followed by religion is the true theodicy; it exhibits
all products of spirit, every form of its self-knowledge, as
necessary, because spirit is something living, working, and its impulse
is to press on through the series of its manifestations towards the
consciousness of itself as embracing all truth.[28]
But this does not mean Hegel affirms the Supernatural. God can be considered as an individual though His existence is solely in the collective consciousness of man because the concept of God acts on each individual's consciousness. It is in His act where Hegel places the individual's reality. So we can understand "the true being" of God as His act. "Individuality is real in the deed, and a deed it is which cancels both the aspects of what is 'meant' or 'presumed' to be."[29]
And for Hegel, God's act is essential to man.
Speaking generally, it is through thought, concrete thought, or,
to put it more definitely, it is by reason of his being spirit that
man is man. And from man as spirit proceed all the many
developments of the sciences and arts, the interests of
political life, and all those conditions which have reference
to man's freedom and will. But all these manifold forms of human
relations, activities, and pleasures, and all the ways in which
these are intertwined, all that has worth and dignity for man, all
wherein he seeks his happiness, his glory, and his pride, finds
its ultimate centre in religion, in the thought, the consciousness,
and the feeling of God. Thus God is the beginning of all
things and the end of all things.[30]
But the relationship between God's existence for man, that is, God as collective Geist, and God's existence for Himself, that is, God as individual Geist is not adequately discussed by Hegel. The nature of the relationship between the two is not explained. The distinction was apparently considered unproblematic for Hegel, as was the distinction between collective and individual Geist. But for contemporary theology the distinction between collective Geist and individual Geist is problematic and it arises primarily in the problem of God's relationship to man.
[1] Berger. The Sacred Canopy p. 41
[2] Kaufmann. Op. cit. p. 274
[3] G.W.F. Hegel. Encyclopedia #564 quoted in Kaufmann pp. 272-273 and quoted in Etienne Gilson and Thomas Langan and Armand A. Naurer. Recent Philosophy, Hegel to the Present (New York, 1962) p. 39
[4] Gilson. Op. cit. pp. 37 and 39
[5] See Chapter 4 note 8.
[6] Hegel. Phen. P. 80
[7] Ibid. p. 81
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid. p. 568
[10] Ibid. p. 621
[11] Ibid. p. 622
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid. p.688
[14] Ibid. p.697
[15] Ibid. p.696
[16] Ibid. p.699
[17] Ibid. pp. 702-708
[18] Ibid. p. 720
[19] Ibid. p. 746
[20] Ibid. p. 747
[21] Ibid. p. 752 - 753
[22] Ibid. p. 758
[23] Ibid. p. 756
[24] Ibid. p. 767
[25] Ibid. p. 757
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid. p. 763
[28] G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Religion, Erster Band. Trans E.B. Speirs and J. Burden Sanderson Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (London, 1895) re-edited by J. Glenn Gray for Harper Torchbooks (New York, 1970) p. 206
[29] Hegel. Phen. P. 349
[30] Hegel. Philosophie der Religion pp. 128 - 129