1.  Religion as consciousness of absolute essence, of the absolute being, as such was one of the patterns in our series, grouped under the general headings of consciousness, self-consciousness, reason and spirit/mind, but it was only considered from the standpoint of consciousness aware of the absolute essence.  The absolute being in and for itself, the self-consciousness of spirit, however, did not appear in those forms.

2.  As understanding consciousness is already aware of what is extrasensory or inside objective existence [III. Force and understanding etc. §13 M].  ²Now, the extrasensory, eternal, or whatever one wants to call it, is selfless.  It is only initially the universal and is still a long way from being the spirit that knows itself to be spirit.

– ³The next thing that happened was that the self-consciousness that found its completion in the pattern of unhappy consciousness turned out to be just the pain of spirit that was still only caught up in dragging itself back out into objectivity without actually reaching it.  ⁴So the unity of the single self-consciousness and its invariant essence arrived at by this self-consciousness remains its beyond [IV.B. Freedom of self-consciousness etc. §§33, 34 M].

– ⁵ The immediate existence of reason, which emerged for us out of that pain, and reason's peculiar patterns have no religion because their self-consciousness either knows or seeks itself in the immediate present.

3.  In contrast, in the customary ethical world we saw a religion, but the religion of the underworld.  This religion is the belief in the terrible and unknown night of fate and in the Eumenides of the departed spirit [VI.A.b. Customary ethical action etc. §§6-9 and 11 M].  The former is pure negativity in the form of universality and the latter is the same thing in the form of singularity.  ²Absolute essence, the absolute being, in the latter form is thus certainly the self and indeed, just like the self, present ; but the single self is this single shadow, whose universality is a fate separate from itself.  ³It is shadow, this overcome, and hence universal self; but that negative significance has not yet switched to this positive meaning and for that reason the self overcome also means still immediately this particular shadow bereft of essence.

– ⁴Without the self, however, fate remains the unconscious night that does not make it to differentiation within itself nor to the clarity of self-knowledge.

4.  This belief in the nothingness of necessity and in the underworld turns into belief in heaven, because the departed self must unite itself with its own universality and break apart what it contains within that universality in order to become clear about itself.  ²We saw this realm of thought unfold its content without the concept only in the element of thinking and for this reason its suffered its downfall in its destiny, namely in the religion of the Enlightenment [VI.B.b. Faith and pure insight M].  ³That extrasensory beyond of the understanding reasserts itself in this religion of the Enlightenment, where self-consciousness is, however, satisfied in the here and now and the extrasensory, empty beyond, which can be neither known nor feared, indeed knows itself neither as self nor as power [III. Force and understanding §13 ff. and VI.B.II.a. Enlightenment's struggle with superstition §33.1-5 M].

5.  The religion of morality finally reasserts the knowledge that the absolute being does have a positive content, which, however, remains united with the negativity of the Enlightenment.  ²That content is a being that likewise has been taken back into the self and is locked up there; it is a differentiated content whose parts are immediately negated in being set up.  ³Now, the fate into which this contradictory motion sinks is its own as the self conscious of what is essential and actually real [VI.C.b. Duplicity §§11-16 M].

6.  In religion, self-knowing spirit is immediately its own pure self-consciousness.  ²The patterns of spirit we studied in the last chapter – true, self-alienated and self-certain – together constitute spirit in its consciousness confronting its world, which does not recognize itself in that world.  ³In conscience, however, it subjugates itself along with its objective world, its images and its determinate concepts, becoming a self-consciousness at home in its own self.  ⁴Here spirit has for itself, considered as an object, the meaning of being universal spirit containing all essence and all reality in itself.  That still doesn't give it the form of free actual reality or of an independent, appearing nature.  ⁵It certainly has pattern, embodied form, the form of being, simply as an object of its own consciousness; but since this in religion is established in essential terms as self-consciousness, this pattern is completely transparent to itself and the reality it contains is enclosed within it, overcome in it as when we say all actual reality; it is thought universal reality.

7.  Thus in religion the character of genuine consciousness of spirit does not have the form of free otherness, so its existence is something other than its self-consciousness and its genuine reality falls outside of religion.  What we have here is one spirit of both, but its consciousness certainly does not encompass both; religion appears to be a part of that existence and action whose other part is life in its own real world.  ²We know now that spirit in its world and the spirit aware of itself as spirit, i.e. in religion, are one and the same, which means that the completion of religion lies in both becoming equal: not only that its actual reality is grasped by religion, but also the reverse, that spirit itself, self-conscious of itself, becomes actual and an object of its own consciousness.

– ³Spirit in religion imagines itself and to that extent it is certainly consciousness and the actual reality locked up in religion is the pattern and the clothing of its image.  ⁴Actual reality, however, does not receive its full rights in this image, i.e. of not being merely clothing, but also independent, free existence.  Conversely, since that reality inherently lacks perfection, it is a specific, determinate pattern that does not do justice to what it is supposed to represent, namely self-conscious spirit.  ⁵For its pattern to express spirit, the pattern must be nothing other than spirit, which itself has to appear, or actually be, what it is in its essence.  ⁶Only in this way is it possible to arrive at a condition, which may seem like the exact opposite demand, namely that the object of its consciousness also has the form of free actual reality.  In fact, only the spirit that is object to itself as absolute spirit can both be a free reality to itself and remain fully conscious of itself therein.

8.  Distinguishing self-consciousness and consciousness proper, religion and spirit in its world, the existence of spirit, right from the start makes it clear that the latter consists in the whole of spirit when its moments emerge in separation and each for itself.  ²Those moments are consciousness, self-consciousness, reason and spirit ; spirit here as immediate spirit, not yet consciousness of spirit.  ³Their combined totality constitutes spirit in its secular, worldly existence; spirit as such contains the previous patterns in the general terms, the moments we just listed.  ⁴Religion presupposes the entire course of those patterns and is their simple totality, their absolute self.

– ⁵Their course in relation to religion should not, however, be thought of in chronological terms.  ⁶Only the whole spirit is in time and the patterns, which are patterns of the whole spirit as such, make up a sequence; for only the whole has genuine reality and hence the form of pure freedom from others that is expressed as time.  ⁷But those moments of spirit – consciousness, self-consciousness, reason and spirit – precisely because they are moments, have no existence distinct from each other.

– ⁸Just as spirit is distinguished from its moments, so a third difference can be drawn, namely their isolating, specific definition, distinct from the moments themselves.  ⁹We saw each of those moments differentiate itself within itself in its own course, each structuring itself differently; as, for example, in consciousness, sense certainty and perception were differentiated.  ¹⁰These patterns separate in time belonging to a particular whole.

– ¹¹For spirit descends from its universality through definition, determination, down to singularity.  ¹²The definition or midpoint is consciousness, self-consciousness, etc.  ¹³Singularity, however, constitutes the patterns of these moments.  ¹⁴They thus present spirit in its singularities, its actual realities, differentiating themselves within time in such a way, moreover, that each successive term contains those preceding it.

9.  Religion is thus the completion of spirit, into which its single moments of consciousness, self-consciousness, reason and spirit return and, indeed, have already returned, as into their ground, and it is in this sense that they constitute the given actual reality of the whole spirit, which only exists as the differentiating and cyclical return motion of these moments.  ²The becoming, the emergence and development of religion as such is contained in the motion of the general moments.  ³Each of these attributes is represented not only as it defines itself in general, but as it is in and for itself, i.e. as it runs its course as a whole within itself, so what has emerged here is not only the becoming of religion as such, but also the complete courses of the single moments contain the specific terms of religion itself.  ⁴The whole spirit, the spirit of religion, is, once again, the motion striving out of its immediacy to arrive at knowledge of what spirit is in itself or immediately and, moreover, to achieve a complete correspondence between the pattern in which spirit appears to its own consciousness and its own essence, so that spirit then sees itself just as it is.

– ⁵In its becoming spirit thus exists in specific patterns, which constitute the differences of this motion; at the same time this gives determinate religion also a determinate, real spirit.  ⁶Now, if consciousness, self-consciousness, reason and spirit all belong to self-knowing spirit, then the specific forms that developed separately within each of them all belong to specific patterns of self-knowing spirit.  ⁷Any given specific pattern of religion takes for its actual spirit those that correspond to it from among the patterns of each of its moments.  ⁸The one determinateness of religion penetrates through all sides of its actual existence, stamping them all with this common imprint.

10.  This is the new ordering principle for the previous patterns and the result is quite distinct from their own sequence.  A few things have to be said about this here.

– ²In the series as we studied it each moment developed itself, deepening itself within itself, into a whole from its own characteristic principle.  Knowing, the process of knowledge, was the depth, the spirit, in which they, which have no persistence for themselves, found their substance.  ³What has happened here is that this substance has moved outside all that.  It is now the depth of self-certain spirit that does not allow the single principle to isolate itself and to make itself into the whole; but instead, gathering all these moments together within itself and holding them there, it strides forward in this whole wealth of its actual spirit, while all of its particular moments take and receive together the same definition, the same determinateness, of the whole.

– ⁴This self-certain spirit and its motion is their true actual reality and the being in and for itself that belongs to each of them.

– ⁵If then the previous one sequence designated the backward steps in its progress as knots, pressing on forward from out of them into one long row, it's now as if in these knots, the general moments, the sequence is interrupted, broken into many lines that also symmetrically unite when combined into one bunch, so that common differences found in the structuring of the particular patterns come together.

– ⁶It is spontaneously clear from the whole demonstration how the coordination of the general directions represented here is to be understood.  It would be superfluous to remark that these differences are essentially only to be grasped as moments of becoming, not as parts.  In the actual spirit they are attributes of its substance, while in religion they are merely predicates of the subject.

– ⁷Similarly, in itself or for us all forms as such are certainly contained in spirit and in each; but what's important on the question of the actual reality of spirit is which determinate term is for it in spirit's consciousness, i.e. what term is the form in which spirit knows its self to be expressed, the pattern in which it knows its essence?

11.  The distinction drawn between actual spirit and that which knows itself to be spirit, or between it as consciousness and as self-consciousness, is overcome in the spirit that knows itself according to its truth.  Its consciousness and its self-consciousness are equalized, balanced.  ²Religion here is immediate, so this difference has not yet returned back into spirit.  ³All we have here is just the concept of religion and in this the essence is the self-consciousness that is all truth to itself encompassing all reality in this truth.  ⁴This self-consciousness has, as consciousness, itself for its object.  The spirit that initially knows itself immediately is thus to itself spirit in the form of immediacy and the definition, the definiteness of the pattern in which it appears to itself is that of being.  ⁵This being is not filled with feeling or diverse material or any other one-sided moments, goals, and terms, but with spirit and is known by itself to be all truth and reality.  ⁶As such, the filling does not correspond to their pattern just as spirit as essence does not correspond to its consciousness.  ⁷Spirit here is only actual as absolute spirit, just as when it has self-certainty it also has its truth, i.e. the extremes into which spirit divides itself as consciousness are in the pattern of spirit for each other.  ⁸The patterning that spirit takes on as object of its consciousness remains filled with the certainty of spirit as with substance and this content ensures that the object cannot sink back into pure objectivity, into the form of negativity against self-consciousness.  ⁹The immediate unity of spirit with itself is the foundation, the pure consciousness, within which consciousness separates itself.  ¹⁰Enclosed in this way in its pure self-consciousness, spirit exists in religion not as the creator of a nature as such; what it generates in this motion are its patterns as spirits, which together comprise its complete appearance.  This motion is the becoming, the emergence and development, of its complete actual reality through the single individual sides of that reality, its incomplete realities.

12.  Its first reality is the concept of religion itself; immediate, i.e. natural religion.  In natural religion spirit knows itself as its object in natural, immediate form.  ²The second, however, is necessarily that of knowing itself in the pattern of naturalness overcome, i.e that of the self.  ³This is artificial religion, for the pattern elevates itself to the form of the self by generating consciousness and that's how consciousness sees its action or its self in its object.  ⁴The third finally overcomes the one-sidedness of the first two; the self is just as much something immediate as immediacy is self.  ⁵If in the first spirit as such is in the form of consciousness and in the second it is in the form of self-consciousness, then in the third spirit takes the form of the unity of the two; it has the pattern of being in and for itself and imagined as it is in and for itself, this is revealed religion.  ⁶Although spirit has attained its own true pattern in revealed religion, the pattern itself and the image constitute the side that has not yet been overcome.  Spirit must pass out of this over into the concept in order to dissolve the form of objectivity completely in the concept, in the concept which also encompasses this its opposite within it.  ⁷With this spirit grasps its own concept as we had only an initial grasp of it and its pattern or the element of spirit's existence, since the pattern is now the concept, is spirit itself.