Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/294

 Thus it is said that the serpent beguiled man with its lies. The pride of freedom is here the attitude which ought not to be.

The other side, namely, that that severance or division is to exist, in so far as it contains the well-spring of his healing, is expressed in the words of God: “Behold! Adam is become as one of us.” It is thus not only no lie of the serpent’s, but, as a matter of fact, God Himself corroborates it. This, however, is usually overlooked, and not mentioned at all.

We may therefore say that it is the everlasting history of the freedom of man that he should come out of this state of dulness or torpor in which he is in his earliest years; that he should come, in fact, to the light of consciousness; or, to put it more precisely, that both good and evil should exist for him.

If we draw out what is actually implied in this representation, we find it to be the very same as what is contained in the Idea, namely, that man, Spirit, reaches the state of reconciliation, or, to put it superficially, that he becomes good, fulfils his destiny. For the attainment of this reconciliation, this standpoint of consciousness, of reflection, of division or dualism, is just as necessary as the abandonment of it.

That in this state man has had the highest knowledge of nature and of God, has occupied the highest standpoint of philosophical knowledge, is an absurd idea, which, moreover, proves itself historically to be wholly unfounded.

It is imagined that this natural unity is the true attitude of man in religion. Yet he must have already been struck by the circumstance that this Paradise, this age of Saturn, is represented as something that is lost. This alone is sufficient to indicate that such an idea does not contain the Truth, for in divine history there is no past, and no contingency. If the existing Paradise has been lost, in whatever way this may have happened, it is