Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/525

 ABSOLUTE SPIRIT. 503 tasy (Indian or Brahmanical), and of being in self (Buddhis- tic). In the Persian (Zoroastrian) reh'gion of light, the Syrian religion of pain, and the Egyptian religion of enigma, is prepared the way for the transformation into the religion of freedom. The Greek solves the riddle of the Sphinx by apprehending himself as subject, as man. The religion of spiritual individuality or free subjectivity passes through three stadia: the Jewish religion of sub- limity (unity), the Greek religion of beauty (necessity), the Roman religion of purposiveness (of the understanding). In contrast to the Jewish religion of slavish obedience, which by miracle makes known the power of the one God and the nullity of nature, which has been "created " by his will, and the prosaic severity of the Roman, which, in Jupiter and Fortuna, worships only the world-dominion of the Roman people, the more cheerful art-religion of the Hellenes reverences in the beautiful forms of the gods, the powers which man is aware of in himself — wisdom, bravery, and beauty. The Christian or revealed religion is the religion of truth, of freedom, of spirit. Its content is the unity of the divine nature and the human, God as knowing himself in being known of man ; the knowledge of God is God's self-knowl- edge. Its fundamental truths are the Trinity (signifying that God differentiates and sublates the difference in love), the incarnation (as a figure of the essential unity of the infinite and finite spirit), the fall, and Christ's atoning death (this signifies that the realization of the unity between man and God presupposes the overcoming of naturality and selfishness). (3) Philosophy. — Finally the task remains of clothing the absolute content given in religion in the form adequate to it, in the form of the concept. In philosophy absolute spirit attains the highest stage, its perfect self-knowledge. It is.:;^, the self-thinking Idea. Here we must not look for further detailed explanations: philosophy is just the course which has been traversed. Its systematic exposition is encyclopaedia ; the considera- tion of its own actualization, the history of philosophy, which, as a " philosophical " discipline, has to show the