Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/267

 manifested content. It is only when separation in God advances to its ultimate limit and appears as man, as a particular empirical self-consciousness, that this sensuousness, this externality, is, so to speak, set free as sensuousness, that is to say, the conditionateness of externality and its want of suitability to express the Notion actually come to light in the god. Here matter, the sensuous, has not yet this form. On the contrary, it keeps true to its content. As the god, though spiritual, universal power, issues out of Nature, he must have the natural as the element of his embodiment, and it must be made plain that it is just the natural which is the mode of the expression of the divine. The god thus appears in stone, and the material is still held to be adequate to the expression of the god as god. It is only when the god appears and reveals himself as a definite individual that Spirit, the subjective knowledge of Spirit as Spirit, is seen to be the true manifestation of God, and it is not till then that sensuousness is set free, that is to say, it is no longer blended with the god, but shows itself to be inadequate as his form; the sensuousness, the immediate individuality, is nailed to the cross. In this process of inversion, it is also shown, however, that this self-alienation, or self-emptying of God in the human form, is only one side of the divine life, for this self-emptying, this manifestation, is taken back again in the One who then for the first time becomes Spirit for thought and for the Church. This single, existing, actual man is done away with and taken up into something higher, and appears as a moment, as one of the persons of God in God. Thus only is man as a definite individual man truly in God, and thus the manifestation of the divine is absolute, and its element is Spirit itself. The Jewish idea that God essentially exists for thought alone, and the sensuousness of the Greek form of beauty, are equally contained in this form of the divine, and as being taken up into something higher, are freed from the limitation attaching to them.