Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/233

 characterisation which is thus reached seems, in accordance with what has been stated, to consist simply in this, that the creatures are no longer merely in a state of service, but rather find their freedom in the very act of rendering service. This moment of the freedom of subjects or persons for whom God is, and which is wanting in the standpoint of the Religion of Sublimity which we have been considering, we have already seen in a lower stage of thought, in the sphere of the Religion of Nature, in the Syrian religion, namely.

In the higher stage, to which we now pass, what in the lower was represented in a natural immediate way is transferred to the pure region of Spirit, and is ascribed to its inner mediation. In the religion of sorrow or pain we saw that God loses Himself, that He dies, and exists only by means of the negation of Himself. This act of mediation is the moment which is again to be taken up here. God dies, and from this death He rises again. That is the negation of Himself which we, on the one hand, conceive of as the “Other” of Himself, as the world; and He Himself dies, which means that in this death He comes to Himself. In this way, however, the “Other” is represented as freely existing for itself, and accordingly the mediation and rising again belong to the other side, the side of what has been created.

Considered thus, it seems as if the conception of God Himself underwent no change, but that the change is only in the aspect in which the “Other” is regarded. That it is just here where freedom comes in, and that it is this side, namely, that of the “Other,” which is free, is to be explained from the fact that in the finite, this otherness of God dies away, and so the Divine appears again in the finite in an actual way, or for itself. Thus what is of the world is known as something which has the Divine in it, and the Being-other or otherness which at first is characterised only as negation, is again negated, and is the negation of negation within itself.