The Golgotha of the AbsoluteIn these days of secularism, an atheist is simply a person who no longer believes in the existence of the God. One may be an atheist and still practice the religion of his parents out of habit. However, the word ‘atheist’ connotes a faint stigma that dates back to an older age- the medieval- where a radical infidel who was either brave or foolish enough to oppose the canons of the establishment of the time, the Church, was speedily condemned with charges of heresy and subsequently punished with excommunication or worse, execution. Once the Age of Reason or Enlightenment emerged in the 17th and the 18th century, as well as the challenge of the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church gradually began to slacken its iron grip on the publishing press. In the 19th century, the orthodoxy remained very much in power and strongly influenced the works of scholars with the expectation that whatever was written should be readily compatible with the prevailing dogmas. This was very much the case for the philosopher Hegel. As far as Hegel was concerned, Zeus could fill in for YHVH in his writings, but due to the culture of the times Hegel had the German guardians of the Christian orthodoxy breathing heavily down his neck, so this ought be taken in account whenever encountering Christian overtones in his work. In Hegel's systematic philosophy, the Absolute originally manifests itself in the form of immediacy, or objects of sense. This manifestation is apprehended as ‘beauty,’ which is the “sensuous semblance [Scheinen] of the Idea.” The aesthetic consciousness apperceives the Absolute through the veil of senses as the Ideal. However, aesthetic intuition is not philosophy. Only thought itself can adequately apprehend the Absolute as Spirit, Reason, or self-thinking Thought. Instead of making the jump from art to philosophy, Hegel introduces religion as an intermediate mode of apprehending the Absolute. Religion presents the self-manifestation
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of the Absolute in the form of Vorstellung, or ‘pictorial representation.’ Where the aesthetic consciousness employs the veil of senses in its apprehension of the Absolute, the religious consciousness 'thinks' the Absolute, though not in the pure conceptual manner of philosophy. Vorstellung is a signpost, a type of imagery that represents the concept of the Absolute, what Frederick Copleston calls a “marriage between imagination and thought.” For example, when the religious consciousness apprehends the logical Idea, or Logos, as being objectified in nature as a ‘pictorial representation,’ it conceives of God's creation of the universe. As for the divine entity ...

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