[p. 361]
|361| Monarchy is the presentation of the absolute reality of ethical life in one individual; aristocracy in several; it differs from the absolute constitution through heredity, still more through possessions; and because it has the form of the absolute constitution, and not its essence, it is the worst. – Democracy is the presentation in all, thus mixing of possession with it, and no separation of the absolute estate. For the absolute constitution the form of aristocracy or monarchy is indifferent; it is also democracy in the estates.
In monarchy a religion must stand beside the monarch; he is the identity of the whole, but in empirical shape; and the more empirical he is, the more barbarous the people, the more power religion has and the more independently it constitutes itself; the more the people becomes one with itself, with nature and ethical life, the more it takes the divine into itself, and loses in this religion which resists it; and then passes through, by way of the reconciliation with the world and with itself, by way of the unimaginativeness of irreligion, and of the understanding.
In aristocracy this is likewise so, but for the sake of its fatherliness, of the universal porridge, there is little imagination and religion.
In democracy absolute religion indeed, but unconsolidated, or rather natural religion, the ethical is bound up with the natural, and the connection of objective nature makes it accessible to the understanding; for the positing of nature as something objective, – Epicurean philosophy; – religion must be purely ethical; so the imagination of absolute religion, so the art which produced a Jupiter, Apollo, Venus; not the Homeric, where Jupiter Juno is the air, Neptune the water; – this separation must be complete; the ethical movement of God absolute, not crimes and weaknesses but absolute crime, death.
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