Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/111

 has nothing to do with Substance, it is not posited in the Self, in the subject as such. The negation is not an actual inner moment, an immanent determination of Substance, and the latter has not the pain of death within itself.

Here, for the first time, we have the death of the god as something within himself, implying that the negation is immanent in his essential nature, in his very self, and it is precisely owing to this that this god is essentially characterised as Subject. The nature of a subject is to give itself this otherness within itself, and through negation of itself to return to itself, to produce itself.

This death appears at first as something undignified; we have the idea that it is the lot of the finite to pass away, and in accordance with this idea death, in so far as it is spoken of in connection with God, is only transferred to Him as a determination out of the sphere of that finite which is inadequate to Him. God does not in this way get to be truly known, but rather is debased by the determination of negation. Over against that assertion of the presence of death in the divine stands the demand that God should be conceived of as a supreme Being, only identical with himself, and this conception is reckoned as the highest and most honourable, so that it is only at the end that Spirit reaches it. If God be thus conceived as the Supreme Being, He is without content, and this is the poorest possible idea of Him, and quite an antiquated one. The first step of the objective attitude is the step to this abstraction, to Brahma, in whom no negativity is contained. Good, light, is likewise this abstraction, which has the negative only outside of itself as darkness. From this abstraction an advance is already made here to the concrete idea of God, and in this way the moment of negation enters, at first in this peculiar or special mode as death, inasmuch as God is now beheld in human form. And thus the moment of death is to be ranked high, as an essential