G. W. F. Hegel

“ But in Christianity least of all is it true that we have to know God only as creation, activity, not as Spirit. The fact rather is that to this religion, the explicit consciousness that God is Spirit is peculiar, the consciousness that He, even as He is in-and-for-Himself, relates Himself, as it were, to the Other of Himself (called the Son) , to Himself, that He is related to Himself in Himself as love, essentially as this love is mediation with itself. God is indeed the Creator of the world, and is so sufficiently defined. ”

“ Faith, in so far as it is defined to be immediate knowledge, as distinguished from what is mediate, reduces itself to the abstract formalism above mentioned. This abstraction makes it possible not only to rank as faith the sensuous certainty which I have that I possess a body, and that there are things outside me, but to deduce or prove from it what the nature of faith is. But we should do gross injustice to what in the sphere of religion is termed faith if we were to see in it only this abstraction. Faith must rather be full of substance; it must be a content, and this is to be a true content ”

“ It has already been remarked that the assertion of faith, of which we have to speak, is found outside of genuine simple faith. This latter, in so far as it has advanced to conscious knowledge, and has consequently acquired a consciousness of knowledge, accedes to knowledge with full confidence in it, because it is pre-eminently full of confidence in itself, is sure of itself, and firmly established in itself. We are rather concerned with faith in so far as it takes up a polemical attitude towards rational knowledge, and expresses itself in a polemical fashion even against knowledge in general. ”

“ God is activity, free activity relating itself to itself, and remaining with itself. The essential element in the notion or conception of God, or, for that matter, in every idea of God, is that He is Himself, the mediation of Himself with Himself. If God is defined merely as the Creator, His activity is taken only as going out of itself, as expanding itself out of itself, as sensible or material producing, without any return into itself. ”

“ If it were otherwise, the overthrow and defence of the truth of religion would not be carried out with external weapons, which are just as foreign to faith and religion as to knowledge. The faith which rejects knowledge as such, is just because of this devoid of content, and is, to begin with, to be taken abstractly as faith in general, as it opposes itself to concrete knowledge, to rational knowledge, without reference to content. As thus abstract, it is removed back into the simplicity of self-consciousness. ”

“ Faith, then, inasmuch as it has God as the object of its consciousness, has this mediation for its object; just as faith, as existing in the individual, only exists through teaching and training, the teaching and training of men, but still more through the teaching and training of the Spirit of God, and exists only through this process of mediation. ”

“ But faith, like consciousness in general, this relation of the subject to an object, is quite abstract, whether God is its object, or whatever thing or content may be the object, and so faith or knowledge only exists through the medium of an object. Otherwise we have empty identity, a faith in or knowledge of nothing. ”

“ On the other hand, what is created remains, so far as the ordinary idea of it is concerned, as a world outside God, as an Other over against Him, so that He exists away beyond that world, apart from it, in-and-for-Himself. ”

“ If it is even only subjective, as faith or knowledge is, at all events it is, the predicate of Being belongs to it, just as such Being appertains to the object which exists only in faith or knowledge. ”

“ But faith is now called immediate knowledge, and is accordingly to be distinguished radically from mediate and mediating knowledge. Since at this stage we leave on one side the speculative examination of these conceptions, in order to keep within the proper sphere of this kind of assertion, we will oppose to this separation, which is asserted to be absolute, the fact that there is no act of knowledge, any more than there is any act of sensation, conception, or volition, no activity, property, or condition pertaining to Spirit, which is not mediated and mediating ”

“ And what is more, the Egyptians believed, and knew it for certain, that Apis was a great or the greatest god; while the Greeks thought the same regarding Jupiter; just as the Hindus still know for certain that the cow, and other inhabitants of India, the Mongols and many races, that a man, the Dalai-Lama, is God. That this certainty is expressed and asserted is admitted. A man may quite well say, I know something for certain, I believe it, it is true. ”

“ The product is something different from Him, it is the world; the introduction of the category of mediation would at once bring with it the idea that God must be through the medium of the world; one might, at all events, say with truth that He is Creator only by means of the world, or what He creates. ”

“ It is thus as a universal fact that logical philosophy presents it—we might add, along with the exhibition of its necessity, to which we need not here appeal—in the completed circle of the forms of thought. As regards the matter of sense, whether it belongs to outer or inner perception, it is admitted that it is finite, that is, that it exists only as mediated through what is other than sense. ”