ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the culmination of Hegel's Trinitarian speculation in his doctrine of spirit, where people meet the logic of holistic immanence. It explains that within the divine, there is a self-communication which includes relation to the other, and the spirit names the bond that holds the father and son into a unity. The chapter explores that in the relation between the divine and its temporal creation, spirit names that binding of plurality into an community of freedom, in which the life of the whole is at home with itself: God manifest in the community, communicating with itself through the members of the community as its own media, members through whom the spirit is communally mediated to itself. It reviews that while the human elevation to God is effected by religion, indeed accomplished by Christianity, its communication requires worldly communities of immanent, secular freedom. Hence religion as 'merely' a spiritual community requires its completion by the state, the earthly divinity.