“How does thinking return to God?” This is Hegel’s simplest description of the connotation of the Enlightenment and its problems in the mature period of his thought. Hegel thought that the question of the Enlightenment lay in how to sublate subjective finiteness and return to objectivity. In the Tübingen period and the Bernian period, Hegel understood the religion from a moral point of view. This essentially based religion on selfconsciousness, indicating that he had not yet exceeded the Enlightenment’s understanding of religion. It was not until the Frankfurt period that Hegel went beyond the idea of defining religion in terms of moral, and understood religion from the perspective of the unity of subject and object. But because he still relied on the subjective emotion like love to achieve this unity, the result was the split between religion and state. This paper argues that Hegel’s early attempt to educate the people by religion fails, forcing him to understand and reflect on the Enlightenment more deeply, and to rethink the relationship between individual, world and god.

German philosophy; Hegel; Enlightenment; religion; morality; principle of individuality