Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.

Consciousness knows something; this something is the essence or is per se. This object, however, is also the per se, the inherent reality, for consciousness. Hence comes ambiguity of this truth. Consciousness, as we see, has now two objects: one is the first per se, the second is the existence for consciousness of this per se. The last object appears at first sight to be merely the reflection of consciousness into itself, i.e. an idea not of an object, but solely of its knowledge of that first object. But, as was already indicated, by that very process the first object is altered; it ceases to be what is per se, and becomes consciously something which is per se only for consciousness. Consequently, then, what this real per se is for consciousness is truth: which, however, means that this is the essential reality, or the object which consciousness has. This new object contains the nothingness of the first; the new object is the experience concerning that first object.

The subject behaves in general as a thinking subject; yet the subject is also concrete conscoiusness. Therefore, the idea, absolute truth, must be present for this subject as concrete self-consciousness, as an actual subject. The idea posesses certainty for the subject only insofar as it is a perceptible idea, insofar as it exists for the subject. This is immediate knowledge, is certainty. It is also necessary that what is true is also what is certain for me. This is the further process of mediation and is no longer something immediately apprehended, so this mediation is the transition into the universal. For the universal absolute idea is the end here as well as the beginning. The certainty of Jesus’ unity with God penetrated the actuality of the hearts of the believers. This certainty revealed the certainty of an infinite relationship with God was the highest qualitative mode of satisfaction. This infinite relationship exists in certainty in the determination of one’s feeling as consciousness that God is love. This content must remain immediately certain in the mode of sensible appearance, this content is called the outpouring and revelation of the nature of God in the Holy Spirit. The intuition of the nature of God’s spirit satisfying human needs sensibly as Jesus leads to positing glorification of God through revelation of his mediating death and resurrection. This revelation expressed that the negative moments of finitude and weakness are moments contained within the “death of God,” by which the external and negative becomes sublated into the internal. This history reveals humanity is implicitly both dead and God through mediation, through what subsists in-itself returning to itself and eternally becoming spirit. This certainty, intuition, and consciousness of the unity of God and man constitutes the truth upon which develops the consciousness that God is triune. That Christ has died is an eternal act, in the nature of God himself.