Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/266

 is the subject, that which manifests itself in its predicate, in external existence.

If in this process the manifestation belongs to the subjective side, so that God appears as something made by man, still that is merely one moment. For this positing of God, the making of His existence dependent on man, is, on the other hand, mediated by the abrogation of the individual self, and thus it was possible for the Greeks to see their god in the Zeus of Phidias. The artist did not give them in an abstract way something which was his own work, but presented to them the appropriate and peculiar manifestation of the essential, the outward form of actually existing necessity.

The form given to the god is thus the ideal form. Previous to the time of the Greeks there was no true ideality, nor was it possible for it to appear at any subsequent time. The art of the Christian religion is indeed beautiful, but ideality is not its ultimate principle. We cannot get at the element of defect in the Greek gods by saying that they are anthropopathic, a category of finitude under which we may put the immoral element, as, for example, the stories of the amours of Zeus, which may have their origin in older myths based on what is as yet the natural way of looking at things. The main defect is not that there is too much of the anthropopathic in these gods, but that there is too little. The manifestation and the aspect of the definite existence of the divine do not yet advance so far as immediate actuality, in the form of a definite individual, that is, as this definite man. The truest, most proper form is necessarily this, that the absolute Spirit which exists for itself should advance to the point at which it shows itself as individual empirical self-consciousness. This characteristic, consisting thus in advance to the sensuous definite individual, is not yet present here. The form made by man in which the divinity appears has, it is true, a material side, but this has still such pliability that it can be perfectly adapted to the