The ethical [aspect] of marriage consists in the consciousness of this unity as a substantial purpose, and thus in love, trust, and the sharing of the whole of individual existence — a disposition and actuality in which the natural drive is reduced to the modality of a natural moment, one destined to be extinguished precisely in its satisfaction, while the spiritual bond stands forth in its right as the substantial [element] — and thus as that which is elevated above the contingency of the passions and of temporary particular liking, as, in itself, indissoluble.

That marriage is not the relationship of a contract concerning its essential basis has been remarked above (§ 75), for it is precisely this: to proceed from the standpoint of contract, of the personality that is self-subsistent in its singularity, in order to supersede it. The identification of the personalities, through which the family is one person and its members are its accidents (though substance is essentially the relation of accidents to itself; see Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, § 98), is the ethical spirit which, for itself — stripped of the manifold externality it has in its existence as in these individuals, and in the interests of appearance determined in time and in various ways — has been lifted out as a shape for representation, and has been worshipped as the Penates and the like, and constitutes in general that in which the religious character of marriage and family, piety, consists. It is a further abstraction when the divine, the substantial, is separated from its existence, and when, in this way, the feeling and consciousness of spiritual unity is also fixed as what is falsely called Platonic love; this separation is connected with the monastic view, through which the moment of natural vitality is determined as simply the negative, and is given, precisely through this separation, an infinite importance for itself.