Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/340

 become objective to itself. Here it is revealed what God is; He is no longer a Being above and beyond this world, an Unknown, for He has told men what He is, and this not merely in an outward way in history, but in consciousness. We have here, accordingly, the religion of the manifestation of God, since God knows Himself in the finite spirit. This simply means that God is revealed. Here this is the essential circumstance. What the transition was we discovered when we saw how this knowledge of God as free Spirit was, so far as its substance is concerned, still tinged with finitude and immediacy; this finitude had further to be discarded by the labour of Spirit; it is nothingness, and we saw how this nothingness was revealed to consciousness. The misery, the sorrow of the world, was the condition, the preparation on the subjective side for the consciousness of free Spirit, as the absolutely free and consequently infinite Spirit.

We shall confine ourselves, to begin with (A), to the general aspects of this sphere of thought.

The Absolute Religion is—1. The Revealed Religion. Religion is something revealed, it is manifested, only when the notion or conception of religion itself exists for itself; or, to put it differently, religion or the notion of religion has become objective to itself, not in the form of limited finite objectivity, but rather in such a way that it is objective to itself in accordance with its notion.

This can be expressed in a more definite way by saying that religion, according to its general conception or notion, is the consciousness of the absolute Essence. It is the nature, however, of consciousness to distinguish, and thus we have two things, consciousness and absolute Essence. These two at first are in a state of mutual exclusion, standing in a finite relation to each other. We have the empirical consciousness, and the Essence taken in the sense of something different.

They stand in a finite relation to each other, and so far they are themselves both finite, and thus consciousness