The Revealed Religion
787
But the community is not yet perfected in this its
self-consciousness; in general, its content exists for it in the form of
picture-thinking, and the duality in this thinking still attaches even to the
actual spirituality of the community, to its return out of its
picture-thinking; just as the element of pure thought itself was burdened with
it. The community also does not possess the consciousness of what it is; it is
spiritual self-consciousness which is not an object to itself as this self-consciousness,
or which does not unfold itself to a consciousness of itself; but rather, in so
far as it is consciousness, it has those picture-thoughts which we have
considered. We see self-consciousness at its last turning-point become inward
to itself and attain to a knowledge of its inwardness; we see it divest itself
of its natural existence and acquire pure negativity. But the positive meaning,
viz. that this negativity or pure inwardness of knowledge is just as much the
self-identical essence—or in other words, that substance has here succeeded in
becoming absolute self-consciousness—this is an ‘other’ for the devotional
consciousness. It grasps this aspect, viz. that the pure inwardization of
knowledge is in itself absolute simplicity or substance, as the picture-thought
of something which is so, not in virtue of its Notion, but as the deed of an
alien satisfaction. In other words, it does not grasp the fact that this depth
of the pure Self is the power by which the abstract divine Being is drawn down
from its abstraction and raised to a Self by the power of this pure devotion.
The action of the Self retains towards it this negative meaning because the
externalization, the kenosis of substance, is taken by the Self to be an action
implicit in the nature of substance; the Self does not grasp and truly comprehend
it, or does not find it in its own action as such. This unity of essence and
the Self having been implicitly achieved, consciousness, too, still has this
picture-thought of its reconciliation, but as a picture-thought. It obtains
satisfaction by externally attaching to its pure negativity the positive
meaning of the unity of itself with the essential Being; its satisfaction thus
itself remains burdened with the antithesis of a beyond. Its own reconciliation
therefore enters its consciousness as something distant, as something in the
distant future, just as the reconciliation which the other Self achieved
appears as something in the distant past. Just as the individual divine Man has
a father in principle and only an actual mother, so too the universal divine
Man, the community, has for its father its own doing and knowing, but for its
mother, eternal love which it only feels, but does not behold in its
consciousness as an actual, immediate object. Its reconciliation, therefore, is
in its heart, but its consciousness is still divided against itself and its
actual world is still disrupted. What enters its consciousness as the
in-itself, or the side of pure mediation, is a reconciliation that lies in the
beyond: but what enters it as present, as the side of immediacy and existence,
is the world which has still to await its transfiguration. The world is indeed
implicitly reconciled with the divine Being; and regarding the divine Being it
is known, of course, that it recognizes the object as no longer alienated from
it but as identical with it in its love. But for self-consciousness, this
immediate presence still has not the shape of Spirit. The Spirit of the
community is thus in its immediate consciousness divided from its religious
consciousness, which declares, it is true, that in themselves they are not
divided, but this merely implicit unity is not realized, or has not yet become
an equally absolute being-for-self.
