ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that commentators grant that religion plays a major role in shaping the distinctive character of Hegel's mature philosophy. Hegel's concept of God is unintelligible apart from his concept of thought, of which philosophy gives the absolute form. The chapter explores this conceptual doubling seems an intimate embrace, but what of an agon, perhaps even a disguised antagonism in it all, if the embrace repulses divine transcendence as other? It begins with remarks on Hegel's unhappy consciousness his name for the form of alienated consciousness. The chapter reviews cultus or worship as representing something of the religious ethos within which Hegel's idea of philosophizing was shaped. It turns to the reconciliation as surpassing those asymmetries said to alienate people. These, coupled with philosophy's surpassing of religious representation in absolute knowing, direct us to Hegel's speculative idea of God. For Hegel, reconciliation and forgiveness are inseparable, and discusses the Phenomenology, where the unhappy consciousness returns in the transition to religion.
