This, to Hegel, is the truth. This collective consciousness, this Absolute Spirit at the heart of his grand metaphysical theory of reality, is made manifest in the historical advent of Christianity, which is why the religion is so important to Hegel’s philosophy. Of course, this takes a historical process to be realized. If Spirit is reality and reality is Spirit then what is History? It is “Spirit emptied out into Time,” a “process” undertaken by Spirit itself which ends in Spirit “perfectly knowing what it is.”8 Hegel’s dialectic, the logic of thought and reality itself, weaves its way in between every paragraph and chapter of The Phenomenology just as it weaves its way through History itself, guiding Spirit’s journey of maturation. The word maturation here is important: Hegel’s Phenomenology has been characterized as a Bildungsroman, a literary genre dealing with a young, naive protagonist progressively growing wiser as he formally matures. If this really is the model of Hegel’s project than we must posit none other than Spirit as our fateful protagonist, whom we see, over the course of Hegel’s book, gradually grow wiser, more mature, and more aware if its true nature, as history marches forward to the tune of dialectic. Spirit, the collective consciousness that composes the real itself, must undergo dialectical development in order to realize what it is. The specifics of dialectical logic, as well as each individual stage of Spirit’s historical development as charted by Hegel, are less important here than what this process culminates in: the historical emergence of Christianity, as an expression of Spirit finally coming to know itself.
Christianity makes this a possibility through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. In Christ, God becomes man, and man becomes God. The infinite consciousness whose mind constitutes the intelligible order of the real itself—God—is given the form of an individual flesh and blood man, a finite consciousness. We see then the gap between “pure thinking and particular individuality” bridged in the figure of Christ.9 That we knew ourselves to be the finite consciousness of the man Jesus Christ—that is, the individual human person that exists as a physical body—was obvious enough to us. The fact, too, that there existed something else, something we call Being itself, something which is an intelligible reality, was also already largely presupposed. But now, in Christ, we no longer see these two things as distinctly separate: we no longer posit a reality independent of us because we are that reality. Crucially, the God of the Christian Bible is not just the totality of reality itself—he is the ultimate mind behind reality, the absolute consciousness that stretches across infinity and from which the wellspring of Being flows. This sort of higher mind, this sort of consciousness from which all reality springs, is precisely what Spirit is; Christ, through the Incarnation of God in flesh, helps us realize that this is us. Christ is the central figure in Hegel’s philosophy because he represents the truth of Spirit: that all of us is Spirit, and that Spirit is Being. Hegel approves of Christianity’s content so enthusiastically precisely because “Absolute Spirit is the content.”10