The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate. Hegel 1798
It is of the greatest interest to see how and with what teaching Jesus directly confronts (a) the principle of subjection and (b) the infinite Sovereign Lord of the Jews. Here, at the center of their spirit, the battle must have been in its most stubborn phase, since to attack one thing here was to attack their all. The attack on single offshoots of the Jewish spirit affects its underlying principle too, although there is as yet no consciousness that this principle is attacked. There is no embitterment until there is a growing feeling that at the roots of a struggle about a single point there lies a conflict of principles. Jesus was opposed to the Jews on the question of their Most High; and this opposition was soon put into words on both sides.
To the Jewish idea of God as their Lord and Governor, Jesus opposes a relationship of God to men like that of a father to his children.
Morality cancels domination within the sphere of consciousness;[1] love cancels the barriers in the sphere of morality; but love itself is still incomplete in nature.[2] In the moments of happy love there is no room for objectivity; yet every reflection annuls love, restores objectivity again, and with objectivity we are once more on the territory of restrictions. What is religious, then, is the πληρ αρμα [fulfillment] of love; it is reflection and love united, bound together in thought. Love’s intuition seems to fulfill the demand for completeness; but there is a contradiction. Intuition, representative thinking, is something restrictive, something receptive only of something restricted; but here the object intuited [God] would be something infinite. The infinite cannot be carried in this vessel.
To conceive of pure life[3] means trying to abstract from every deed, from everything which the man was or will be. Character is an abstraction from activity alone; it means the universal behind specific actions. Consciousness of pure life would be consciousness of what the man is, and in it there is no differentiation and no developed or actualized multiplicity. This simplicity is not a negative simplicity, a unity produced by abstraction (since in such a unity either we have simply the positing of one determinate thing in abstraction from all others determinacies, or else its pure unity is only the negatively indeterminate, i.e., the posited demand for abstraction from everything determinate. Pure life is being).[4] Plurality is nothing absolute. This pure life is the source of all separate lives, impulses, and deeds. But if it comes into consciousness as a belief in life, it is then living in the believer and yet is to some extent posited outside him. Since, in thus becoming conscious of it, he is restricted, his consciousness and the infinite cannot be completely in one. Man can believe in a God only by being able to abstract from every deed, from everything determinate, while at the same time simply clinging fast to the soul of every deed and everything determinate. In anything soulless and spiritless there can be nothing divine. If a man always feels himself determined, always doing of suffering this or that, acting in this way or that, then what has thus been abstracted and delimited has not been cut off from the spirit; on the contrary, what remains permanent for him behind these passing details is only the opposite of life, namely, the dominant universal.[5] The whole field of determinacy falls away, and beyond this consciousness of determinacies there is only the empty unity of the totality of objects as the essence dominating determinacies. To this infinite field of lordship and bondage there can be opposed only the pure sensing of life which has in itself its justification and its authority. But by appearing as an opposite, it appears as something determinate in a determinate man [Jesus] who cannot give an intuition of purity to profane eyes bound to mundane realities. In this determinate situation in which he appears, the man can appeal only to his origin, to the source from which every shape of restricted life flows to him; he cannot appeal to the whole, which he now is, as to an absolute. He must call on something higher, on the Father who lives immutable in all mutability.
Since the divine is pure life, anything and everything said of it must be free from any [implication of] opposition. And all reflection’s expressions about the relations of the objective being or about that being’s activity in objective action must be avoided, since the activity of the divine is only a unification of spirits. Only spirit grasps and comprehends spirit. Expressions such as “command, teach, learn, see, recognize, make, will, come into the Kingdom of Heaven, go,” express the relations of an objective being to us only if spirit is receiving something objective to it.[6] Hence it is only in inspired terms that the divine can [properly] be spoken of. Jewish culture reveals a consciousness of only one group of living relationships, and even these in the form of concepts rather than of virtues and qualities of character. This is all the more natural in that the Jews had to express, in the main, only relations between strangers, beings different in essence, e.g., compassion, bounty, etc. John is the Evangelist who has the most to say about God and the bond between God and Jesus. But the Jewish culture, which was so poor in spiritual relationships, forced him to avail himself of objective ties and matter-of-fact phraseology for expression the higher spiritual realities, and this language thus often sounds harsher than when feelings are supposed to be expressed in the parallelistic style.[7] “The Kingdom of Heaven; entry into the Kingdom; I am the door; I am the true bread, who eats my flesh,” etc. – into such matter-of-fact and everyday ties is the spiritual forced.
The state of Jewish culture cannot be called[8] the state of childhood, nor can its phraseology be called an undeveloped, childlike phraseology. There are a few deep, childlike, tones retained in it, or rather reintroduced into it, but the remainder, with its forced and difficult mode of expression, is rather a consequence of the supreme miseducation of the people. A purer being has to fight against this mode of speaking, and he suffers under it when he has to reveal himself in forms of that kind; and he cannot dispense with them, since he himself belongs to this people.
The beginning of John’s Gospel contains a series of propositional sentences which speak of God and the divine in more appropriate phraseology. It is to use the simplest form of reflective phraseology to say: “In the beginning was the Logos; the Logos was with God, and God was the Logos; in him was life.” But these sentences have only the deceptive semblance of judgments, for the predicates are not concepts, not universals like those necessarily contained in judgments expression reflection. On the contrary, the predicates are themselves once more something being and living. Even this simple form of reflection is not adapted to the spiritual expression of spirit. Nowhere more than in the communication of the divine is it necessary for the recipient to grasp the communication with the depths of his own spirit. Nowhere is it less possible to learn, to assimilate passively, because everything expressed by the divine in the language of reflection is eo ipso contradictory; and the passive spiritless assimilation of such an expression not only leaves the deeper spirit empty but also distracts the intellect which assimilates it and for which it is a contradiction. This always objective language hence attains sense and weight only in the spirit of the reader and to an extent which differs with the degree to which the relationships of life and the opposition of life and death have come into his consciousness.
Of the two extreme methods of interpreting John’s exordium, the most objective is to take the Logos as something actual , an individual; the most subjective is to take it as reason; in the former case as a particular, in the latter as universality; in the former, as the most single and exclusive reality, in the latter as a mere ens rationis.[9] God and the Logos become distinct because Being must be taken from a double point of view [by reflection], since reflection supposes that that to which it gives a reflected form is at the same time not reflected; i.e., it takes Being (I) to be the single in which there is no partition or opposition, and (ii) at the same time to be the single which is potentially separable and infinitely divisible into parts.[10] God and the Logos are only different in that God is matter in the form of the Logos: the Logos itself is with God; both are one. The multiplicity, the infinity, of the real is the infinite divisibility realized: by the Logos all things are made; the world is not an emanation of the Deity, or otherwise the real would be through and through divine. Yet, as real, it is an emanation, a part of the infinite partitioning, though in the part (ἐν αὐτῷ is better taken with the immediately preceding οὐδέ ἓν ὃ γέγουευ), or in the one who partitions ad infinitum (if ἐν αὐτῷ is taken as referring to λόγος), there is life. The single entity, the restriced entity, as something opposed [to life], something dead, is yet a branch of the infinite tree of life. Each part, to which the whole is external, is yet a whole, a life. And this life, once again as something reflected upon, as divided by reflection into the relation of subject and predicate, is life (ζωή) and life understood (φῶς[light], truth). These finite entities have opposites; the opposite of light is darkness.
John the Baptist was not the light; he oly bore witness of it; he had a sense of the one whole, but it came home to his consciousness not in its purity but only in a restricted way, in specific relations. He beileved in it, but his consciousness was not equivalent to life. Only a consciousness which is equivalent to life is φῶς, and in it consciousness and life differ only in that the latter is being, while the former is being as reflected upon. Though John was not himself the φῶς, yet it was in every man who comes into the world of men (κόσμος means the whole of human relationships and human life, i.e., something more restricted than πάυτα and ὂ γέγονεν, verse 3). It is not simply a case of man’s being ϕωτιζὀμευος [lighted] by his entry into the world; the φῶς is also in the world itself. The world itself and all its relationships and events are entirely the work of the ἄνθρωπος [man] who is φῶς, of the man who is self-developing; but the world in which these relations are alive did not recognize that the whole of nature was coming into self-consciousness in him. Nature now coming to self-consciousness was in the world but it did not enter the consciousness of the world.[11] The world of men is his very own (ἴδιον), is most akin to him, and men do not receive him but treat him as a stranger. But those who do recognize themselves in him acquire power thereby; “power” means not a living principle [acquired for the first time] or a new force, but only a degree of life, a similarity or dissimilarity of life. They do not become other than they were, but they know God and recognize themselves as children of God, as weaker than he, yet of a like nature in so far as they have become conscious of that spiritual relation suggested by his name (ὂυομα)[12] as the ἂνθρωπος who is ϕωτιζόμευος ϕώτι άληθίνω [lighted by the true light]. They find their essence in no stranger, but in God.
Up to this point we have heard only of the truth itself and of man in general terms. In verse 14 the Logos[13] appears modified as an individual, in which form also he has revealed himself to us (ἄνθρωπος έρχόμνος είς τόν κόσμον – there is nothing else for the αύτόν of vss. 10 ff to refer to).[14] John bore witness, not of the φῶς alone (verse 7), but also of the individual (verse 15).
However sublime the idea of God may be made here, there yet always remains the Jewish principle of opposing thought to reality, reason to sense; this principle involves the rending of life and a lifeless connection between God and the world, though the tie between these must be taken to be a living connection; and, where such a connection is in question, ties between the related terms can be expressed only in mystical phraseology.
The most commonly cited and the most striking expression of Jesus’ relation to God is his calling himself the “son of God” and contrasting himself as son of God with himself as the “son of man.” The designation of this relation is one of the few natural expressions left by accident in the Jewish speech of that time, and therefore it is to be counted among their happy expressions. The relation of a son to his father is not a conceptual unity (as, for instance, unity or harmony of disposition, similarity of principles, etc.), a unity which is only a unity in thought and is abstracted from life. On the contrary, it is a living relation of living beings, a likeness of life. Father and son are simply modifications of the same life, not opposite essences, not a plurality of absolute substantialities. Thus the son of God is the same essence as the father, and yet for every act of reflective thinking, though only for such thinking, he is a separate essence. Even in the expression “A son of the stem of Koresh,” for example, which the Arabs use to denote the individual, a single member of the clan, there is the implication that this individual is not simply a part of the whole; the whole does not lie outside him; he himself is just he whole which the entire clan is. This is clear too from the sequel to the manner of waging war peculiar to such a natural, undivided, people: every single individual is put to the sword in the most cruel fashion. In modern Europe, on the other hand, where each individual does not carry the whole state in himself, but where the bond is only the conceptual one of the same rights for all, war is waged not against the individual, but against the whole which lies outside him. As with any genuinely free people, so among the Arabs, the individual is a part and at the same time the whole. It is true only of objects, of things lifeless, that the whole is other than the parts; in the living thing, on the other hand, the part of the whole is one and the same as the whole. If particular objects, as substances, are linked together while each of them yet retains its character as an individual (as numerically one),[15] then their common characteristic, their unity, is only a concept, not an essence, not something being. Living things, however, are essences, even if they are separate, and their unity is still a unity of essence. What is a contradiction in the realm of the dead is not one in the realm of life.
A tree which has three branches makes up with them one tree; but every “son” of the tree, every branch (and also its other “children,” leaves and blossoms) is itself a tree. The fibers bringing sap to the branch from the stem are of the same nature as the roots. If a [cutting from certain types of] tree is set in the ground upside down it will put forth leaves out of the roots in the air, and the boughs will root themselves in the ground. And it is just as true to say that there is only one tree here as to say that there are three.
The unity of essence between father and son in the Godhead was discovered even by the Jews in the relation to God which Jesus ascribed to himself (John v. 18): “He makes himself equal with God in that he calls God his father.” To the Jewish principle of God’s domination Jesus could oppose the needs of man (just as he had set the need to satisfy hunger over against the festival of the Sabbath), but even this he could do only in general terms. The deeper development of this contrast, e.g., [the discovery of] a primacy of the practical reason, was absent from the culture of those times. In his opposition [to Judaism] he stood before their eyes only as an individual. In order to remove the thought of this individuality, Jesus continually appealed, especially in John, to his oneness with God, who has granted to the son to have life in himself, just as the father has life in himself. He and the father are one; he is bread come down from heaven, and so forth. These are hard words (σκληροί λόγι), and they are not softened by being interpreted as imagery or misinterpreted as the uniting of concepts instead of being taken spiritually as life. Of course, as soon as intellectual concepts are opposed to imagery and taken as dominant, every image must be set aside as only play, as a by-product of the imagination and without truth; and, instead of the life of the image, nothing remains but objects.
But Jesus calls himself not only son of God but also son of man. If “son of God” expressed a modification of the divine, so “son of man” would be a modification of man. But man is not one nature, one essence, like the Godhead; it is a concept, an ens rationis. And “son of man” means here “something subsumed under the concept of man.” “Jesus is man” is a judgment proper; the predicate is not a living essence but a universal (ἂνθρωπος, man; νίός ἂνθρωπον [son of man], a man). The son of God is also son of man; the divine in a particular shape appears as a man. The connection of infinite and finite is of course a “holy mystery,"[16] because this connection is life itself. Reflective thinking, which partitions life, can distinguish it into infinite and finite, and then it is only the restriction, the finite regarded by itself, which affords the concept of man as opposed to the divine. But outside reflective thinking, and in truth, there is no such restriction. This meaning of the “son of man” comes out most clearly when the “son of man” is set over against the “son of God,” e.g., (John v. 26-27), “For as the father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the son to have life in himself, and hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the son of man.” Again (v. 22), “The father judgeth no man, he hath committed all judgment unto the son.” On the other hand, we read (John iii. 17; Matthew xviii, 11), “god sent not his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.” Judgment is not an act of the divine, for the law, which is in the judge, is the universal opposed to the man who is to be judged, and judgment (in law) is a judgment (in logic), an assertion of likeness or unlikeness, the recognition of a conceptual unity or an irreconcilable opposition. The son of God does not judge, sunder, or divine, does not hold to an opposite in its opposition. An utterance, or the stirring, of the divine is no lawgiving or legislation, no upholding of the mastery of the law. On the contrary, the world is to be saved by the divine, and even “save” is a word improperly used of the spirit, for it denotes the absolute impotence, in face of danger, of the man on its brink, and to that extent salvation is the action of a stranger to a stranger. And the operation of the divine may be called “salvation” only in so far as the man saved was a stranger, not to his essence, but only to his previous plight.
The father judges not, nor does the son (who has life in himself) in so far as he is one with the father; but at the same time he has received authority, and the power to pass judgment, because he is the son of man. The reason for this is that the modification is, as a modification, something restricted, and this restriction makes possible an opposition [between the law and the man to be judged], makes possible a separation between universal and particular. Materially, there can be a comparison between him and others in respect of force and so of authority, while in the formal side (I) the activity of comparing, (ii) the concept, i.e., the law, and (iii) the cleavage between the law and the individual or its connection with him, hold course and pass judgment. Yet at the same time the man could not judge if he were not divine; for only if he were can the criterion of judgment be in him, can the cleavage be possible. His power to bind and to loose is grounded in the divine.[17]
Judgment itself may be of two kinds, the domination of the nondivine either in idea alone or else in reality. Jesus says (John iii. 18-19): “He that believeth on the son of God is not condemned, but he that believeth not is condemned already” because he has not recognized this relation of the man [Jesus] to God, has not recognized his divinity. And “this is the condemnation, that men loved darkness rather than light.” In their unbelief, then, lay their very condemnation. The divine man does not approach evil as a power dominating and subduing it, since the divine son of man has received authority but not power [in this field]. It is not in the field of reality [as opposed to ideas] that he deals with the world and fights it. He does not bring its condemnation to it in the shape of consciousness of a punishment. What cannot live with him, what cannot enjoy with him, what has sundered itself and stands separated from him, has set up limits for itself which he recognizes as sundering restrictions, even if they be the world’s higher pride and are not felt by the world as restrictions, even if the world’s suffering has not for it the form of suffering, or at least not the form of the retroactive suffering inflicted by a law. But it is the world’s unbelief which degrades it to a lower sphere and is its own condemnation, even if it flatter itself in its unconsciousness of the divine, in its degradation.
The relation of Jesus to God, as the relation of a son to his father, could be apprehended as a piece of knowledge or alternatively by faith, according as man puts the divine wholly outside himself or not. Knowledge posits, for its way of taking this relation, two natures of different kinds, a human nature and a divine one, a human essence and a divine one, each with personality and substantiality, and, whatever their relation, both remaining two because they are posited as absolutely different. Those who posit this absolute difference and yet still require us to think of these absolute as on in their inmost relationship do not dismiss the intellect the ground that they are asserting a truth outside its scope. On the contrary, it is the intellect which they expect to grasp absolutely different substances which at the same time are an absolute unity. Thus they destroy the intellect in positing it. Those who (I) accept the given different of the substantialities but (ii) deny their unity are more logical. They are justified in (I), since it is required to think God and man, and therefore in (ii), since to cancel the cleavage between God and man would be contrary to the first admission they were required to make. In this way they save the intellect; but when they refuse to move beyond this absolute difference of essences, then they elevate the intellect, absolute division, destruction of life, to the pinnacle of spirit. IT was from this intellectualistic point of view that the Jews took what Jesus said.
When Jesus said, “The father is in me and I in the father; who has seen me has seen the father; who knows the father knows that what I say is true; I and the father are one,” the Jews accused him of blasphemy because though born a man he made himself God. How were they to recognize divinity in a man, poor things that they were, possessing only a consciousness of their misery, of the depth of their servitude, of their opposition to the divine, of an impassable gulf between the being of God and the being of men? Spirit alone recognizes spirit. They saw in Jesus only the man, the Nazarene, the carpenter’s son whose brothers and kinsfolk lived among them; so much he was, and more he could not be, for he was only one like themselves, and they felt themselves to be nothing. The Jewish multitude was bound to wreck his attempt to give them the consciousness of something divine, for faith in something divine, something great, cannot make its home in a dunghill. The lion has no room in a nest, the infinite spirit none in the prison of a Jewish soul, the whole of life none in a withering leaf. The hill and the eye which sees it are object and subject, but between man and God, between spirit and spirit, there is no such cleft of objectivity and subjectivity; one is to the other an other only in that one recognizes the other; both are one.
One element in taking the relation of son to father objectively [instead of spiritually], or rather the consequence which this interpretation has for the will, is (a) the discovery of a connection between ourselves and God in the connection between the separate human and divine natures thus conceived and reverenced in Jesus, and (b) the hope for a love between two total dissimilars, a love of God for man which might at best be a form of sympathy. Jesus’ relation to God, as the relation of son to father, is a child’s relation, since in essence, in spirit, the son feels himself one with the father who lives in him. This has no resemblance to that child’s relation in which a man might put himself with the rich overlord of the world whose life he feels wholly alien to him and with whom he connects himself only through presents showered on him, only through the crumbs falling from the rich man’s table.
The essence of Jesus; i.e., his relationship to God as son to father, can be truly grasped only by faith; and faith in himself is what Jesus demanded of his people. This faith is characterized by its object [Gegenstand], the divine. Faith in a mundane reality is an acquaintance with some kind of object [Objekt], of something restricted. And just as an object [Objekt] is other than God, so this acquaintance is different from faith in the divine.[18] “God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” How could anything but a spirit know a spirit? The relation of spirit to spirit is a feeling of harmony, is their unification; how could heterogeneity be unified? Faith in the divine is only possible if in the believer himself there is a divine element which rediscovers itself, its own nature, in that on which it believes, even if it be unconscious that what it has found is its own nature. In every man there is light and life; he is the property of the light. He is not illumined by a light in the way in which a dark body is when it borrows a brightness not its own; on the contrary, his own inflammability takes fire and he burns with a flame that is his own. The middle state between darkness (remoteness from the divine, imprisonment in the mundane) and a wholly divine life of one’s own, a trust in one’s self, is faith in the divine. It is the inkling, the knowledge, of the divine, the longing for union with God, the desire for a divine life. But it lacks the strength of [that state of mind which results when] divinity has pervaded all the threads of one’s consciousness, directed all one’s relations with the world, and now breathes throughout one’s being. Hence faith in the divine grows out of the divinity of the believer’s own nature; only a modification of the Godhead can know the Godhead.
When Jesus asked his disciples [Matthew xvi. 13]: “Whom do men say that I, the son of man, am?” his friends recounted the opinions of the Jews who even in transfiguring him, setting him beyond the reality of the human world, still could not go beyond that reality, still saw in him only an individual, though the individuality they gave him as ascribed to him in a nonnatural way. But when Peter had expressed his faith in the son of man, his recognition of the son of God in the son of man, Jesus called him blessed: “Blessed art thou Simon; for other men thou art the son of Jona, but thou art the son of ma, since the father in Heaven hath revealed this unto thee.” No revelation is required for the mere apprehension of the divine nature; a great part of Christendom learns to apprehend this. Children are taught to infer from miracles, etc., that Jesus is God. Learning like this, the [intellectual] reception of this faith, cannot be called a divine revelation; command and the cane will produce it. “My father in Heaven hath revealed this to thee,” i.e., the divine in thee hath recognized my divinity; thou hast understood my essence; it has re-echoed in thine. The man who passed among men as Simon, son of Jona, Jesus made Peter, the rock on which his community was to be founded. He gave him his own power of binding and loosing, a power which can be granted only to a nature which carries in itself the divine in its purity, for it is a power of recognizing any departure from the divine. There is now no judgment in Heaven differing from thine; what thou seest as bound or free on earth is likewise so in the eyes of Heaven. Now for the first time Jesus ventures to speak of his disciples of his impending fate; but Peter’s consciousness of the divinity of his teacher at once assumes the character of faith only; the faith which senses the divine but is not yet a filling of his whole being with the divine, not yet a reception of the Holy Spirit.
There frequently recurs the idea of ascribing to God’ agency the faith which Jesus’ friends have in him. Jesus often, particularly in John xvii, calls them those “given him by God.” Cf. John vi. 29, where belief in him is called a “work of God,” something effected by the divine. The effective working of the divine is totally different from learning and being instructed. See also John vi. 65: “No man can come unto me except it were given unto him of my father.”
This faith, however, is only the first stage in the relationship with Jesus. In its culmination this relationship is conceived so intimately that his friends are on with him. See John xii. 36: “Until ye have light, believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light.” Between those who only have faith in the light and those who are the children of light, there is a difference similar to that between John the Baptist, who only bore witness of the light, and Jesus, the light individualized in a man. Just as Jesus has eternal life in himself, so too those who believe in him shall attain everlasting life (John vi. 40). The living association with Jesus is most clearly expounded in John’s account of his final discourse: They in him and he in them; they together one; he the vine, they the branches; in the parts the same nature, a life like the life in the whole. It is this culminating relationship which Jesus prays his father to grant to his friends and which he promises them when he shall be removed from them. So long as he lived among them, they remained believers only, for they were not self-dependent. Jesus was their teacher and master, and individual center on which they depended. They had not yet attained an independent life of their own. The spirit of Jesus ruled them, but after his removal even this objectivity,[19] this partition between them and God, fell away, and the spirit of God could then animate their whole being. When Jesus says (John vii. 38-39): “He that believeth on me, out of his belly shall flow rivers of life,” John remarks that this was spoken of the thorough animation by the Holy Ghost which was still to come; they had not yet received the spirit because Jesus was not yet glorified.
All thought of a difference in essence between Jesus and those in whom faith in him has become life, in whom the divine is present, must be eliminated. When Jesus speaks of himself so often as of a pre-eminent nature, this is to contrast himself with the Jews. From them he separates himself and thereby his divinity also acquires an individual form [a uniqueness peculiar to himself]. “I am the truth and the life; he who believes on me” – this uniform and constant emphasis on the “I” in John’s Gospel is a separation of his personality from the Jewish character, but however vigorously he makes himself an individual in contrast with the Jewish spirit, he equally vigorously annuls all divine personality, divine individuality, in talking to his friends; with them he will simply be one, and they in him are to be one.[20] John says (ii. 25) of Jesus that he knew what was in man; and the truest mirror of his beautiful faith in nature is his discourse at the sight of uncorrupted beings (Matthew xviii. 1 ff.): If ye do not become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. He who is the most childlike is the greatest in heaven. Whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. Whoever is capable of sensing in the child the child’s pure life, of recognizing the holiness of the child’s nature, has sensed my essence. Whoso shall sully this holy purity, it were better for him that a millstone were hung round his neck and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea. Oh! The grievous necessity of such violations of the holy! The deepest, holiest, sorrow of a beautiful soul, its most incomprehensible riddle, is that its nature has to be disrupted, its holiness sullied. Just as for the intellect the most incomprehensible thing is the divine and unity with God, so for the noble heart is alienation from God. Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones, for I say unto you that in heaven their angels do always behold the fact of my father in heaven.
By the “angels” of the children we are not to understand “objective beings,” since (to give an argumentum ad hominem) the angels of the rest of mankind would then also have to be thuoght of as living in the sight of God. In “the angels’ sight of God” much is very happily unified: Unconsciousness, undeveloped unity [with God], being and life in God, are here severed from God because they are supposed to be represented, as modifications of divinity, in existing children;[21] yet the being and doing of the angels is an eternal sight of God. In order to exhibit spirit, the divine, outside its restriction, and the community of the restricted with the living one, Plato separates the entity which is pure life from the restricted entity by a difference of time. He allows pure spirits to have lived wholly in the sight of the divine and to be the same in their later life on earth, except that there they have only a darkened consciousness of that heavenly vision.[22] In a different way Jesus here separates the nature, the divinity, of spirit from the restriction and unites them. As an angel, the childlike spirit is represented not simply as in God without all reality, without existence of its own, but as at the same time a son of God, a particular. The opposition of seer and seen, i.e., of subject and object, disappears in the seeing itself. Their difference is only a possibility of separation. A man wholly immersed in seeing the sun would be only a feeling of light, would be light-feeling become an entity. A man who lived entirely in beholding another would be this other entirely, would be merely possessed of the possibility of becoming different from him. But what is lost, what has severed itself, is re-won through the return to unity, to becoming as children. But what repudiates this reunification and sets itself firmly against it has cut itself off; let him be to you a stranger with whom you have nothing in common. If you break off companionship with him, then what you declare to be binding on him in his isolation shall be binding also in heaven. But what you loose, declare to be free and therefore unified, is free in heaven too, is one there, does not merely behold the Godhead.
Jesus explains this unity in another way (Matthew xviii. 19): “If two or three of you shall agree as touching anything that ye shall ask, it shall be done for you of my father.” The expressions “ask” and “vouchsafe” are relative strictly to a unification in respect of objects (πράγματα [things]); it was only for a unification of this kind that the matter-of-fact language of the Jews had words. But here the object in question can be nothing but the reflected unity (the σνμϕωνία τὠν δνοἰν ὴ τριὠν [agreement of two or three]); regarded as an object, this is a beautiful relationship, but subjectively it is unification; spirits cannot be on in objects proper. The beautiful relationship, a unity of two or three of you, is repeated in the harmony of the whole, is a sound, a concord with the same harmony and is produced thereby. It is because it is in the harmony, because it is something divine. In this association with the divine, those who are at one are also in association with Jesus. Where two or three are united in my spirit (είς τό ὂνομα μοΰ [into my name], cf. Matthew x. 41), in that respect in which being and eternal life fall into my lot, in which I am, then I am in the midst of them, and so is my spirit.
Thus specifically does Jesus declare himself against personality, against the view that his essence possessed an individuality opposed to that of those who had attained the culmination of friendship with him (against the thought of a personal God),[23] for the ground of such an individuality would be an absolute particularity of his being in opposition to theirs. A remark about the unity of lovers is also relevant here (Matthew xix. 5-6): Man and wife, these twain, become one, so that they are no longer two. What therefore God hath joined, let no man put asunder. If this “joining” were supposed to have reference solely to the original designation of the man and the woman for one another, this reason would not suffice against divorce, since divorce would not cancel that designation, that conceptual unification; it would remain even if a living link were disrupted. It is a living link that is said to be something divine, effected by God’s agency.
Since Jesus gave battle to the entire genius of his people and had altogether broken with his world, the completion of his fate could be nothing save suppression by the hostile genius of his people. The glorification of the son of man in this downfall is not negative (does not consist in a renunciation of all his relations with the world) but positive (his nature has forgone the unnatural world, has preferred to save it in battle and defeat rather than consciously submit to its corruption or else unconsciously and increasingly succumb to corruption’s stealthy advance). Jesus was conscious that it was necessary to his individual self to perish, and he tried to convince his disciples also of this necessity. But they could not separate his essence from his person; they were still only believers. When Peter recognized the divine in the son of man, Jesus expected his friends to be able to realize and bear the thought of their parting from him. Hence he speaks of it to them immediately after he had heard Peter utter his faith. But Peter’s terror of it shows how far his faith was from the culmination of faith. Only after the departure of Jesus’ individual self could their dependence on him cease; only then could a spirit of their own or the divine spirit subsist in them. “It is expedient for you that I go away.” Jesus says (John xvi. 7), “for if I got not away, the Comforter will not come unto you” – the Comforter (John xiv. 16 ff.), “the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it knoweth him not; I will not leave you behind as orphans; I come to you and ye shall see me, because I love and ye shall live also.” When ye cease merely to see the divine in me and outside yourselves, when ye have life in yourselves, then will the divine come to consciousness in you also (John xv. 27), because ye have been with me from the beginning, because our natures are one in love and in God. “The spirit will guide you into all truth” (John xvi. 13), and will put you in mind of all things that I have said unto you. He is a Comforter. To give comfort means to give the expectation of a good like the one lost or greater than the one lost; so shall ye not be left behind as orphans, since as much as ye think to lose in losing me, so much shall ye receive in yourselves.
Jesus also contrasts individuality with the spirit of the whole. Whoever (Matthew xii. 31 ff.) blasphemes a man (blasphemes me as the son of man), this sin shall be forgiven him. But whoso blasphemes the spirit itself, the divine, his sin shall not be forgiven either in this time or in the time to come. Out of the abundance of the heart (verse 34) the mouth speaketh; out of the treasure of a good spirit the good man bringeth forth good things, out of the evil spirit the evil man bringeth forth evil. He who blasphemes the individual (i.e., blasphemes me as an individual self) shuts himself out only from me, not from love; but he who sunders himself from God blasphemes nature itself, blasphemes the spirit in nature; his spirit has destroyed its own holiness, and he is therefore incapable of annulling his separation and reuniting himself with love, with holiness. By a sign ye could be shaken, but that would not restore in you the nature ye have lost. The Eumenides of your being could be terrified, but the void left in you by the Daemons thus chased away would not be filled by love. It will only draw your furies back again, and, now strengthened by your very consciousness that they are furies of hell, they complete your destruction.
The culmination of faith, the return to the Godhead whence man is born, closes the circle of man’s development. Everything lives in the Godhead, every living thing is its child, but the child carries the unity, the connection, the concord with the entire harmony, undisturbed though undeveloped, in itself. It begins with faith in gods outside itself, with fear, until through its actions it has [isolated and] separated itself more and more; but then it returns through associations to the original unity which now is developed, self-produced, and sensed as a unity. The child now knows God, i.e., the spirit of God is present in the child, issues from its restrictions, annuls the modification, and restores the whole. God, the Son, the Holy Spirit!
“Teach all nations” (the last words of the glorified Jesus – Matthew xxviii. 19) “baptizing them into these relationships of the divine, into the connection of[24] the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” From the very context of the words, it is clear that by “baptizing into” we are not to understand a dipping in water, a so-called “Christening” in which there has to be an utterance of certain words like a magic formula. The word μρθητεύειυ [teach] is likewise deprived of the notion of teaching proper by the clause which follows it. God cannot be taught or learned, since he is life and can be apprehended only with life. “Fill them with the spiritual relation” (ὂυομα [name]; cf. Matthew x. 41: “whoso receiveth a prophet εις ὂυομα προϕήτου [in the name of a prophet], i.e., in so far as he is a prophet)[25] “which connects the One, the modification (separation), and the developed reunification of life and spirit (i.e., not in conceptual thinking alone).” In Matthew xxi. 25 Jesus asks: Whence was the baptism (βάπτισμα) of John? From heaven or of men? βάπτισμα means the entire consecration of spirit and character; in connection with it we may also think of the immersion in water, but only as an incidental. But in mark I. 4 the thought that John used this form for reception into his spiritual community totally disappears. “John,” we read, “preached the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” In verse 8 John says: “I have baptized you with water, but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost” and (as Luke iii. 16 adds) “with fire” (έυ πνεύματι άγίώ καί πυρί Cf. Matthew xii. 28: έν πνεύματι θεοΰ έκββάλλωτά δαιμόυια, in the spirit of God, i.e., as one with God). He will press upon you with fire and the holy spirit and will fill you with these because when he who is himself filled with the spirit consecrates others έν πυεύματι [in spirit] (Mark I. 8), he consecrates them also είς πνεΰμα, είς ὂνομα [into spirit, into the “name"] (Matthew xxviii. 19). What they receive, what comes into them, is nothing other than what is in him.
John’s habit (nothing similar is known to have been done by Jesus) of baptizing by immersion in water those drawn to his spirit is an important and symbolical one. No feeling is so homogeneous with the desire of the infinite, the longing to merge into the infinite, as the desire to immerse one’s self in the sea. To plunge into it is to be confronted by an alien element which at once flows round us on every side and which is felt at every point of the body. We are taken away from the world and the world from us. We are nothing but felt water which touches us where we are, and we are only where we feel it. In the sea there is no gap, no restriction, no multiplicity, nothing specific. The feeling of it is the simplest, the least broken up. After immersion a man comes up into the air again, separates himself from the water, is at once free from it and yet it still drips from him everywhere. So soon as the water leaves him, the world around him takes on specific characteristics again, and he comes back strengthened to the consciousness of multiplicity. When we look out into a cloudless sky and into the simple, shapeless, plain of an eastern horizon, we have no sense of the surrounding air, and the play of our thoughts is something different from mere gazing. In immersion there is only one feeling, there is only forgetfulness of the world, a solitude which has repelled everything, withdrawn itself from everything. The baptism of Jesus appears in Marks’ account (I. 9 ff.) as such a withdrawal from the entire past, as an inspiring consecration into a new world in which reality floats before the new spirit in a form in which there is no distinction between reality and dream: “He was baptized of John in Jordan, and straightway coming up out of the water he saw the heavens opened and the spirit like a dove descending upon him. And there came a voice from heaven, Thou art my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. And immediately the spirit drove him into the wilderness, and he was there forty days, tempted of Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and angels ministered unto him.” In coming out of the water he is filled with the highest inspiration, and this prevents him from remaining int eh world and drives him into the wilderness. At that point the working of his spirit had not yet detached itself from the consciousness of everyday affairs. To this detachment he was fully awakened only after forty days, and thereafter he enters the world with confidence but in firm opposition to it.
The expression μαθητεύσατε βαπτίζουτες ["teach all nations, baptizing them” (Matthew xxviii, 19)] is therefore of deep significance. “All power is given unto me in heaven and upon earth” (cf. John xiii. 31, where Jesus speaks of his glorification at the moment when Judas has left the company to betray him to the Jews, at that juncture when he awaited his return to his Father who is greater than he; so here in Matthew he speaks of his power] at the time when he is represented as already withdrawn from everything which the world could demand of him, from every part of his life in which the world could share). “All power is given unto me in heaven and upon earth. Go ye therefore into all nations and make them your disciples so that ye consecrate them into connection with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, so that that united spirit may flow round them and be felt round them just as the water touches every part of the body of those immersed in it, and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” At this moment when Jesus is represented as freed from all worldliness and personality, there can less than ever be any though that his essence is an individuality, a personality. He is among those whose essence is permeated by the Holy Spirit, who are initiated into the divine, whose essence lives in the divine which is now consummated and living in Jesus.
This baptism into connection with Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is expressed much more weakly by Luke (xxiv. 47) as preaching repentance and remission of sins in the name of Christ, a preaching which was to begin at Jerusalem. “Ye are witnesses of these things. I send the promise of my Father upon you.” They are not to begin their work outside Jerusalem until they are “endued with power from on high.” A doctrine pure and simple can be preached, and supported by the testimony of events, without being itself possessed by the Holy Spirit. But teaching of that kind is no consecration, not a baptism of the spirit. In Mark (even if the last chapter be not wholly genuine, still its tone is characteristic) this leave-taking of Jesus is expressed much more objectively. Spirituality appears here rather as a customary formula; the expressions are words chilled and conventionalized by the custom of a church. “Preach the Gospel” (without and further addition, so that “Gospel” is a sort of technical term); “the baptized believer shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be condemned.” The “believer” and the man who has been “baptized” are expressions already having the appearance of specific words serving to mark off a sect or communion, word without soul whose whole meanings are presupposed.[26] Instead of using the spirit-laden “I am with you alway” to express how believers are filled with the spirit of God and the glorified Jesus, Mark speaks in dry terms, uninspired and without spiritual animation, of wonderful dominations over this world, of the expulsion of devils, and of similar actions which will be within the power of believers. The words are as objective as only those words can be in which actions are described without any hint of their soul.
What Jesus calls the “Kingdom of God” is the living harmony of men, their fellowship in God; it is the development of the divine among men, the relationship with God which they enter through being filled with the Holy Spirit, i.e., that of becoming his sons and living in the harmony of their developed many-sidedness and their entire being and character. In this harmony their many-sided consciousness chimes in with one spirit and their many different lives with one life, but, more than this, by its means the partitions against other godlike beings are abolished, and the same living spirit animates the different beings, who therefore are no longer merely similar but one; they make up not a collection but a communion, since they are unified not in a universal, a concept (e.g., as believers), but through life and through love.
The Jewish language gave Jesus the word “Kingdom,” which imports something heterogeneous into the expression of the divine unification of me, for it means only a union through domination, through the power of a stranger over a stranger, a union to be totally distinguished from the beauty of the divine life of a pure human fellowship, because such a life is of all things the freest possible. This idea of a Kingdom of God completes and comprises the whole of the [Christian] religion as Jesus founded it, and we have still to consider whether it completely satisfied nature or whether his disciples were impelled by any need to something beyond, and, if so, what that need was.
In the Kingdom of God what is common to all is life in God. This is not the common character which a concept expresses, but is love, a living bond which unites the believers; it is this feeling of unity of life, a feeling in which all oppositions, as pure enmities, and also rights, as unifications of still subsisting oppositions, are annulled. “A new command give I unto you,” says Jesus [John xiii. 34], “that ye love one another; thereby shall men know that ye are my disciples.” This friendship of soul, described in the language of reflection as an essence, as spirit, is the divine spirit, is God who rules the communion. Is there an idea more beautiful than that of a nation of men related to one another by love? Is there one more uplifting than that of belonging to a whole which as a whole, as one, is the spirit of God whose sons the individual members are? Was there still to be an incompleteness in this idea, as incompleteness which would give a fate power over it? Or would this fate be the nemesis raging against a too beautiful endeavor, against an overleaping of nature?
In love man has found himself again in another. Since love is a unification of life, it presupposes division, a development of life, a developed many-sidedness of life. The more variegated the manifold in which life is alive, the more the places in which it can be reunified; the more the places in which it can sense itself, the deeper does love become. The more extended the multiplicity of the relations and feelings of the lovers and the more deeply love is concentrated, the more exclusive it is and the more indifferent to the life of other persons. Its joy communes with every other life and recognizes it [as life], yet it recoils if it senses an [exclusive] individuality in the other. The more isolated men stand in respect of their culture and interest, in their relation to the world, and the more idiosyncrasies they have, the more does their love become restricted to itself [i.e., to their own group, instead of spreading throughout the world]. If it is to be conscious of its happiness, if it is to give happiness to itself as it is fond of doing, it must isolate itself, must even create enmities for itself. Therefore the love which a large group of people can feel for one another[27] admits of only a certain degree of strength or depth and demands both a similarity in mind, in interest, in numerous relationships of life, and also a diminution of individualities. But since this community of life, this similarity of mind, is not love, it can be brought home to consciousness only through its definite and strongly marked expressions. There is no question of a correspondence in knowledge, in similar opinions; the linking of many persons depends on similarity of need, and it reveals itself in objects which can be common, in relationships arising from such objects, and then in a common striving for them and a common activity and enterprise. It can attach itself to a thousand objects of common use and enjoyment, objects belonging to a similar culture, and can know itself in them. A group of similar aims, the whole range of physical need, may be an object of united enterprise, and in such enterprise a like spirit reveals itself; and then this common spirit delights to make itself recognized in the peace [of the group], to be gay in unifying the group, since it enjoys itself in gladness and play.
The friends of Jesus kept together after his death; they ate and drank in common. Some of their brotherhoods wholly abolished property rights against one another; other did so partly by their profuse almsgiving and contributions to the common stock. They conversed about their departed friend and master, prayed together, strengthened one another in faith and courage. Their enemies accused some of their societies of even having wives in common, an accusation which they lacked purity and courage enough to deserve, or of which they had no need to feel shame.[28] In common many withdrew to make other people sharers in their faith and their hopes; and because this is the sole activity of the Christian community, proselytizing is that community’s essential property. Beyond this common pleasure, enjoying, praying, eating, believing and hoping, beyond the single activity of spreading the faith, of enlarging the community of worship, there still lies a prodigious field of objectivity which claims activity of many kinds and sets up a fate whose scope extends in all directions and whose power is mighty. In love’s task the community scorns any unification save the deepest, any spirit save the highest. The grand idea of a universal philanthropy, a shallow idea and an unnatural one, I pass over, since it was not this which was the aspiration of the community. But the community cannot go beyond love itself. Apart from the relationship of the common faith and the revelations of this common possession in the appropriate religious actions, every other tie in other objective activities is alien to the community, whether the purpose of such a tie be the achievement of some end or the development of another side of life or a common activity. Equally alien is every spirit of co-operation for something other than the dissemination of the faith, every spirit which reveals and enjoys itself in play in other modes and restricted forms of life. In such a spirit the community would not recognize itself; to have done so would have been to renounce love, its own spirit, and be untrue to its God. Not only would it have forsaken love, it would have destroyed it, since its members would have put themselves in jeopardy of clashing against one another’s individuality, and must have done this all the more as their education was different; and they would thereby have surrendered themselves to the province of their difference characters, to the power of their different fates. For the sake of a petty interest, a difference of character in some detail, love would have been changed into hatred, and a severance from God would have followed. This danger is warded off only by an inactive and undeveloped love, i.e., by a love which, though love is the highest life, remains unliving. Hence the contranatural expansion of love’s scope becomes entangled in a contradiction, in a false effort which was bound to become the father of the most appalling fanaticism, whether of an active or a passive life.[29] This restriction of love to itself, its flight from all determinate modes of living even if its spirit breathed in them, or even if they sprang from its spirit, this removal of itself from all fate, is just its greatest fate; and here is the point where Jesus is linked with fate, linked indeed in the most sublime way, but where he suffers under it.
1. i.e., Kantian morality substitutes reverence of a moral law within man’s consciousness for fear of a dominant overlord outside him, though reason’s law cramps part of man’s nature instead of fulfilling it.
2. Hegel added here, but afterward deleted, the words: “Love may be happy or unhappy.”
3. “... of pure self-consciousness,” as Hegel first wrote and then deleted.
4. i.e., is positive, not negative; is reality, not a demand; is not a determinate thing, but is positively indeterminate.
5. The meaning of this obscure passage seems to be as follows: Morality is a spirit uniting determinate moral actions into a living whole. The man who is conscious only of specific actions and limited obligations has not severed these from their abiding spirit, because he is not conscious of that spirit. What he has done is to distinguish particular passing duties from the permanent universal law or overlord which compels his obedience. In other words, he is not on the plane of spiritual morality or religion at all; he is still at the level of bondage to an overlord.
6. i.e., only if God is conceived objectively, and if his commands, for example, are treated as simply objective and positive.
7. Wechsel-Stil. The meaning is doubtful.
8. As it is by Lessing in his Education of the Human Race, §§ 16, 20, 48.
9. Hegel is arguing that the living relationship between God, Jesus, and men can be apprehended in spirit, but this creates difficulties for the intellect, because by analysis, the essential activity of the intellect, the living bond between the related forms is destroyed. If the exordium of John’s Gospel is taken quite literally, or in an intellectualistic way, then insoluble contradictions arise, because the Logos is something described as an individual and sometimes as universal reason. Hence two opposed intellectualistic interpretations of the passage become possible. Hegel accepts neither. He takes John’s statements, expressed as they are in the simplest language of which reflective thought is capable, and tires to interpret their spirit. His exegesis is based throughout on the Greek text and is not intelligible without a study of that text. It gives rise to several textual and exegetical questions, but these cannot be discussed here.
10. The essentially analytic character of reflective thinking forces it to look on Being or reality from two points of view. For example, it distinguishes between an object in its immediacy and the same object as reflected, or mediated by reflection. Hence arises the application to the object of opposed categories such as one and many, whole and parts, form and matter. Thus, for reflection, God and the Logos, which really are one life, become different as different aspects of one whole; and men, God’s creatures, who once again really share in the life of God, are taken to be parts in the whole. Now since, for reflection, a whole, though from one point of view a single unity, is from another potentially infinitely divisible, the process of creation is described in reflective phraseology as the actualization of this potential divisibility. This process is the work of the Logos and is thus describable as the self-partitioning of the Logos, or as its self-differentiation. The one life of the Logos and God is partitioned or differentiated ad infinitum into the individuals who share that life in the same sort of way in which the tree partitions itself by putting forth branches which share in its life.
11. i.e., the world of men did not recognize that Jesus was “Nature becoming conscious of itself,” i.e., was the Logos.
12. “Those who believe in his name.” Hegel interprets this as meaning that the man who believes in the true light is conscious of himself as lighted thereby, and of his essence as thus sharing in the light which is the life of God or the truth.
13. “The word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”
14. In vs. 10 (“the world knew him not”) the Greek word translated “him” is masculine, while the Greek word for “Light” is neuter. Hegel assumes that the “him” of vs. 10 must refer to the “man coming into the world” of vs. 9. “The Light” has become personalized, however, in vss. 7-9, and this is probably now made explicit by the use of “him,” which must refer to the Light.
15. This seems to be a reference to the Doctrine of the Trinity and a suggestion of its inadequacy.
16. As Nohl indicates in a footnote, Hegel is quoting and criticizing Kant. See the “General Remark” appended to Part III of his Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone.
17. Perhaps the meaning of this perplexing passage is as follows: The judge is the mouthpiece of the law. His judgment is a comparison between this law, a universal or a concept, and the man to be judged, the particular. In the judgment the particular is brought under the universal and is judged to accord or to be at variance with it. Here there are two oppositions: the first is between the judge and the man; the second is between the man and the law. The judge is a man like the other, but his authority and power as judge place him above the other as well as in opposition to him; and this fact Hegel expresses by using the distinction between form and matter: materially, the judge is a man (though his power makes a cleavage between him and the other), but his formal or universal aspect is the law whose mouthpiece he is.
18. God is the object (Gegenstand) of faith, i.e., he it is in whom we believe. But he is not an object (Objekt) as distinct from a subject, because he is spirit or a living consciousness.
19. i.e., the objectivity implied in the relation of ruler and ruled.
20. Hegel is arguing that when Jesus seemed to claim to be an individual with special characteristics of his own, not shared by other individuals, he was contrasting himself with the Jews, from whom he did claim to be distinct in spirit. So too the divinity which Jesus claimed was not peculiar to himself, a unique individuality of his own; all the children of God could be animated by the Holy Spirit and share in the divine life.
21. i.e., in angels who are often pictorially represented as children.
22. Hegel is probably thinking of the myth at the end of the Republic, or of the myth in the Phaedrus.
23. I.e, a God who is a person exclusive of others persons and set over against them.
24. The A. V. reads “baptizing them in the name of the Father,” etc., but the Greek means “baptizing them into the name,” etc. The expression “into the name of someone” is common in Hellenistic Greek with a financial reference; e.g., it is used of money paid into someone’s name and so into his possession. The meaning here is parallel to this, i.e., “baptizing them so that they are entered as the possession of the Father, etc.” The expression “baptizing into” is used in the Epistles to describe the act whereby a mystical union is produced (e.g., Romans vi, 3), and it is this meaning which Hegel sees in this passage.
25. In this passage the Greek words translated “in the name” again mean “into the name.” Here they seem to be equivalent to a usage in rabbinical Hebrew and to mean “for the sake” or, in this context, “receive a prophet without an ulterior motive and for his own sake, simply because he is a prophet.” Hegel’s attempt to relate the exegesis of this passage to that of the other is dubious and perplexing. He seems to take ὂυομα, name, to mean “spirit” or “spiritual relation” and to hold that the relation in question is that which unites the three Persons as interpreted here.
26. i.e., the words presuppose ecclesiastical doctrines expressed in technical language instead of in the living words of direct spiritual experience.
27. See G. Keate, The Pellew Islands, German translation by G. Forster (Hamburg, 1789), p. xxxiv. Hegel referred to this book in a marginal note. Nohl supplies the exact reference.
28. Perhaps the meaning is that if the accusation was deserved, then no shame need have been felt, because the sort of community in question would have been compatible with purity. In Heaven there is no giving in marriage.
29. Cf. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, § 5.