EVOLUTION OF THE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.
(From Hegel lectures on Aesthetics)

 

SYMBOLISM
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The primitive religion of the symbol appears and essentially belongs to the East. The idea of god seeks its expression in symbols without finding it. Because the idea is abstract and indefinite, it can not find the symbol in its true essence. It will eventually produce an expression of vague and poorly defined concepts.
This symbol of religion has developed, over time, into a multitude of transitions and transformations, reaching its climax with the Egyptian religion.

The idea, according to its true nature, can not remain in the abstraction and indeterminacy. Now this idea is vague and indeterminate, it is incapable of a free development and measure; it can not find something in the symbol which matches it perfectly.

There is in the symbol 1. its meaning, which is a conception of the mind and 2. its expression, which is a sensual image that addresses the senses.
The symbol with multiple meanings, is ambiguous. This ambiguity ceases only when the two terms (meaning and expression) are designed separately and combined.

The "Eastern" conception of symbol, has given rise to monuments and emblems obscure and equivocal, whose character is the weird, the grandiose and the fantastic.
These productions of primitive religious ideas have nothing serious. They are the domain of children's stories, a simple play of the imagination which revels in particular and accidental associations. Within this poverty and rudeness of constructs, the fantastic and grotesque is dominant.

The symbol fades gradually within the primitive religion, as subjective freedom gradually emerges. This subjectivity takes the place of the vague and indeterminate conceptions. The spirit is liberated from his alienation from the object of his worship, from the ill-defined relationship between the idea and the corresponding physical element.

What characterizes the "symbolic" religion is his quest to find pure concepts and an appropriate way of representation. It is a conflict between spirit and symbol, both imperfect and heterogeneous; a continuing conflict between the two sterile components.

 Symbolism has evolved over time.
The first symbol was an unconscious and unthought symbol. Then came the reflected symbol; that of comparison.
Some examples:
In the Persian Zend-Avesta, the unit is that of god and nature. Then, with the Zoroastrians, the light is God himself.
In both cases, the design remains unclear. The imagination invents no profound idea. The unity of the visible and the invisible principle is its essence.

To achieve symbolism, strictly speaking, it is necessary to show a distinction, a separation between the two. This trend appears in the Hindu religion, an advanced form and a higher degree of religious concept. The intellect then form abstract conceptions and seeks physical elements to convey them. Imagination, strictly speaking, is born and grows in its greatest depths. In the attempt of the mind to separate the elements and combine them again, the thoughts are still vague and confused. The principle of things is not conceived in its spiritual nature. Ideas about God are empty abstractions. The representation of physical elements is through the sensual and material world. Having, neither measure, nor rules, it wear itself off trying to penetrate the universal significance of the world through a grand, bizarre imagination, without depth; passing, aimlessely from one extreme to another.
The universal can only escape its contradictionsthrough the extension of its physical dimension by gigantic creations and the absence of any measure; losing itself in the vague and the arbitrary.

While recognizing the fruitfulness, the brilliance and grandeur of these conceptions, it is noted the abscence of reason and a clear sense of things and people. The ideas traveling in the wildest dreams and boundless; deifying the objects of nature and the animals. The union of man and god is reduced to the level of a simple fact.

If India's wild imagination and amazed by the fantastic can not control the excesses of his thought is in Egypt that we discover the "true" symbol, strictly speaking.

After noticing that at the beginning, the symbolism was characterized by the coarse separation of mind and the physical element; distinction reflected through a rudimentary relation, forming a very poorly defined totality, we see a new separation an opposition between the two elements where imagination attempts to recombine them in vain.
For the the spirit to free itself, it is necessary that it frees itself from the material form; so that it reaches the consciousness of himself and of his spirituality.

With the Egyptians, the fermentation of the imagination that produces the fantastic appeases itself. The physical element is subordinate to the mind. The representation of religious conceptions, although enigmatic, becomes somewhat higher. The idea is more confident. The symbol is a more accurate representation, in which the spiritual principle is clearer and disengages from physical nature, although it is not always in all its clarity.
Symbolic human forms show the divine principle through a real analogy. Phenomena and laws of nature (phase of the sun, seasons, germination, etc..) are analogies of life (birth, life, death, etc..). It is an imagination that is controlled and regulated, which shows more calm and reason.
Found in this religion is the need to shape the physical elements that can express their religious ideas and that can be subordinated to them.

But the problem remains unsolved. The spirit still has not found its proper representation. It remains unclear to speak his own language, clear and intelligible.

For example, in human figures, the physical element reveals a mysterious, spiritual force, but the principle is also not a real personality. The impetus of this internal principle comes from the outside like the statue of Memnon which comes alive only when hit by sunlight, by the influence of nature.

Egyptian religion aspired to spiritualize, but the complexity of symbolic elements, mixing and reflecting each other, if it reveals a great freedom of spirit, revealed a lack of clarity and measurement.
The symbols contain a multitude of deep meanings, but remains a testament to the vain effort of the mind to understand itself.



MYTHOLOGY
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In mythology, an idea emerges which manifests itself released its own accord. The spirit takes hold as his own physical element, which presents itself as an object of contemplation. Man has a clear and measured idea of his spirit in his mind. This is manifested by an external identical shape. His awareness of himself is revealed clearly in the object of his worship.
Unlike the symbolism, who, wishing to give expression to the spirit, only creates obscure puzzles, mythology reveals an idea that has within its own, its outward manifestation. Compare to the abscence of freedom and lack of individualism of symbolism, mythology develops a reflective consciousness of the mind that is identical in its physical form.

The spirit is free and has his own conscience. He owns and has in his mind nothing vague or obscure. Yet this is not the spirit in its infinite form, the thought that thinks itself, the absolute that reveals itself to itself.
This spirit always manifest itself in its immediate existence, in the natural and sensual. A spirit that can not be taken back to itself. In addition, we find, among the gods, an unalterable serenity, but it remains cold and lifeless and the legendary calm disappears gradually increasing in the passions of anthropomorphism.


Mythology is a reaction against the East and symbolism is, first, by a systematic degradation of the animal world. The sacrifices, the sacred hunts, etc., denote a state of mind very different from that of the Egyptians, for example. Nature, instead of being revered, is degraded. Assume an animal form becomes the punishment for a heinous crime or something bad and wrong. Following this reduction of nature, an order appears spiritually superior.

 Mythology is the opposite of the annihilation of the personality that was found in the symbolic religions. These symbolic, primitive religions, sometimes profound, in which the spirit was lost in attempting to represent ideas foreign to its own nature, while their imagination, in the absence of rules and action, unable to channelize itself, wandered amid designs that had neither the nature of freedom, nor the spirit unified with itself.

Yet the gods of mythology can not pretend to be anything other than natural forces. They can not be represented as absolute and free spirits. While notions of right and justice appear, they are exclusive rights, absolutist, restricted and unintelligent form of implacable vengeance, or as in the old nemesis, a power which lowers everything that rises.

The soul no longer recognizes, in this growing anthropomorphism the infinite spirituality.


MONOTHEISM
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Judaism
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Abraham, the progenitor of the Jewish people saw the real world as its opposite. Nothing of nature was to him a manifestation of God, God fully mastered his life. This ideal gave him the power to submit the world, offering him both the necessary and the security.
 The mysteries were strange to him. It was impossible to be initiated. While the revelations were the lot of all, the very fact of talking about them where desecratiing it. Only were allowed discussions about the purpose of these revelations, namely the Law.

 Judaism is the first religion to put the Spirit in the domain of pure thought. The natural mode of representation disappears.

God is One; He is Absolute power.  All that is set out as particularity is negative, inadequate to express Him, unworthy of Him. He is Essence, formless, and His natural mode exists only for thought and spirit.
The world is something posed by the Spirit, begotten of his nothingness by an act of judgment, of separation. What is natural is the non-existent.
 God Himself is the Other in His own intention. And because he is One, He exists outside of Himself in a negative movement. He is the positing of His own power. This power is conceived as an absolute negativity.
The creation of the world is  the negative relationship of the Power with Himself.
What is created has the mark of something that has no independence. It is not independent, but is not necessarily identical. There is a particularization of God in His determination in His intent. The world is apprehended, both as dependent and as a separate being. The manifestation of nothingness, the ideality of this finite existence, the fact that this Being has no independence; this manifestation as power, is righteousness. This justice is the moment of negation. It makes manifest the emptiness of things.

 God also assessed for the first time His own aim, His end. God is His own end. He is wisdom and that wisdom is equal to His Power. This determination is receiving a real form, a concrete universality, which appears in man's self-consciousness. That purpose is essentially  human. It results in the family and the nation. This is the purpose of the Wisdom of God in its practical application. Just as in politics, the universal laws that govern men really exist as they apply to particular cases, the universality of God who is One can not exist in practice than in the particularity of one nation, even though other nations are invited to attend.

 

 

 

Islam
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Unlike Judaism where God appears, for the first time, as the real objective Spirit, invisible, inaccessible and in opposition to nature, Islam objectifies the spirit in a return to pantheism; a neo-pantheism wher god is not everyting like in the old pantheism, but where the divine is manifested in all things . The Muslim abandons his personality and feel the divine in the depths of his soul, in a joyful intoxication, absorbed in the eternal.)



Christendom
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Faced with the purely objectives commandments of the Mosaic or Mohammedan Law, Christianity, through the teaching of Jesus, brought a new Law and a subjective Spirit. An indeterminate subjectivity which has nothing in common with the picky monitoring of the objective commandments.
 From a religious and civil law, a Law which managed the conflicts between individuals, a new Law evolves into an internal law, where man manages the opposition within his own being. Moral commandments in which opposites are no longer strangers (as between two individuals) and who are no longer subject to dogma and authority.

With Christ, the command appears to have its source in the autonomy of human will.

The Spirit of Jesus is a spirit that stands above morality; giving right to the one who fulfills the Law, but cancels the Law as authoritarian and dogmatic.
This is a new "righteousness", more complete, because it supplement the deficiencies of the objective law.
An eye for an eye implies an equivalence of right in the Law; a right to a reparation against a wrong. Christ asks men to cast away this right to rise above the sphere of justice and injustice and enter the realm of Spirit.
Similarly, virtue is something restricted and limited, the Spirit can not find an understanding of itself in something finite, since it is, in essence, infinite.
Only through the Spirit subjectivized, unified with itself, liberated by having transcended its contradictions, that man can claim to reach the divine Absolute.
It is the Spirit of reconciliation.