Religion

VII. Religion (§672-758)

Hegel's goal in this section is to run through the manifestations of religion, as the process relates to the process of the Spirit realizing itself in the individual. Like the individual consciousness, the process is a unity, with each religion/religious type represents one coil in the spring. Hegel sees history as bearing out this growth, as well as (more vaguely) the journey of the individual Spirit in religious investigation.

"Religion" as Hegel uses it is perhaps not what we mean by the term today. I would say we understand it today to mean an organized institution composed of believers, as opposed to spirituality (personal belief and experiences with the divine). Hegel seems to use it to mean something different than an institution or spirituality. His meaning is closer to understanding, that is, how the Spirit (individual) understands the Spirit (the Absolute and itself -- it is the 'and itself' that distinguishes this "Religion" from the religious impulses discussed in previous sections).

Hegel runs through historical examples of each of the coils of the spring: understanding the Absolute as energy, vegetable, animal, and man-made object; as man-made beauty, artists and participatory art (e.g. hymns), sacraments and traditions, and as language and drama. Like our experience of developing self-consciousness, history's experience of developing religion grows from a dimly perceived vague generalization to a entirely concrete (and controlled) object, and then from that to an increasingly dynamic and also increasingly self-oriented object. Religion begins pass "from the form of substance into that of Subject" (§748).

As the understanding of Religion becomes more self-oriented (the Spirit seeing itself in the Absolute), there is a temptation to reject the divine Absolute "and [bestow] on the spiritless self, on the individual person, complete existence on its own account" (the Roman Empire) (§750). The inherent emptiness of the self cuts short this temptation. Spirit despairs in its temptation.