And so we come to the second level, religion. This is the domain of Vorstellung, which is a more inward form of consciousness. It is in a sense an internalization of what is bodied forth in sensuous form in the arts. For Vorstellen makes use of images, of the sensuous and the pictorial.

But it makes use of them for a further purpose, that of portraying or characterizing the absolute. Religious thought is a representative mode of consciousness. It uses sensuous images, but not just to contemplate their sensuous referents, rather as symbols which strain to render a higher content. This description of a higher domain in images drawn from a lower one is typical of religious thought. For instance, the necessary self-diremption of the Idea or universal is rendered in theology by the image of begetting: God begat his Son before all ages. Of course everybody understands that this is not to be understood in the normal sensuous way, but rather that it is being used to refer beyond to something supersensible.

Vorstellung is thus a mode of consciousness which is freeing itself, as it were, from the merely sensible in order to reach the universal. But it has not yet fully succeeded, it is still caught in the sensible, and must use sensible images. Of course, religion also makes use of conceptual thought. We sometimes find fully worked out philosophies within a theological context, as for instance with the Church fathers or the scholastics (GPhil, 169).