§ 555. The subjective consciousness of the absolute spirit is essentially and intrinsically a process, the immediate and substantial unity of which is the _Belief_ in the witness of the spirit as the _certainty_ of objective truth. Belief, at once this immediate unity and containing it as a reciprocal dependence of these different terms, has in _devotion_—the implicit or more explicit act of worship (_cultus_)—passed over into the process of superseding the contrast till it becomes spiritual liberation, the process of authenticating that first certainty by this intermediation, and of gaining its concrete determination, viz. reconciliation, the actuality of the spirit. Sub-Section A. Art. § 556. As this consciousness of the Absolute first takes shape, its immediacy produces the factor of finitude in Art. On one hand that is, it breaks up into a work of external common existence, into the subject which produces that work, and the subject which contemplates and worships it. But, on the other hand, it is the concrete _contemplation_ and mental picture of implicitly absolute spirit as the _Ideal_. In this ideal, or the concrete shape born of the subjective spirit, its natural immediacy, which is only a _sign_ of the Idea, is so transfigured by the informing spirit in order to express the Idea, that the figure shows it and it alone:—the shape or form of _Beauty_. § 557. The sensuous externality attaching to the beautiful,—the _form of immediacy_ as such,—at the same time _qualifies_ what it _embodies_: and the God (of art) has with his spirituality at the same time the stamp upon him of a natural medium or natural phase of existence—He contains the so-called _unity_ of nature and spirit—i.e. the immediate unity in sensuously intuitional form—hence not the spiritual unity, in which the natural would be put only as “ideal,” as superseded in spirit, and the spiritual content would be only in self-relation. It is not the absolute spirit which enters this consciousness. On the subjective side the community has of course an ethical life, aware, as it is, of the spirituality of its essence: and its self-consciousness and actuality are in it elevated to substantial liberty. But with the stigma of immediacy upon it, the subject’s liberty is only a _manner of life_, without the infinite self-reflection and the subjective inwardness of _conscience_. These considerations govern in their further developments the devotion and the worship in the religion of fine art. § 558. For the objects of contemplation it has to produce, Art requires not only an external given material—(under which are also included subjective images and ideas), but—for the expression of spiritual truth—must use the given forms of nature with a significance which art must divine and possess (cf. § 411). Of all such forms the human is the highest and the true, because only in it can the spirit have its corporeity and thus its visible expression.