Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/268

 At this stage, in which the divine still requires the sensuous for its essential representation, it appears as a multiplicity of gods. In this multiplicity, it is true, necessity presents itself as simple reflection into self, but this simplicity is only form, for the matter in which it exhibits itself is still immediacy, the element of Nature, not the absolute matter, namely, Spirit. It is thus not Spirit as Spirit that is here represented; the truth rather being that the spiritual existence goes ahead of the consciousness of the content, for this latter is not yet itself Spirit.

C.

WORSHIP OR CULTUS.

This is here a very big subject. Worship essentially means that the empirical consciousness elevates itself, and that man gives himself the consciousness and feeling of the indwelling of the divine within him, and of his unity with the divine. If the work of art is the self-revelation of God and the revelation of the productivity of man as the positing of this revelation by the abrogation of his particular knowledge and will, on the other hand, the work of art equally involves the fact that God and man are no longer beings alien to one another, but have been taken up into a higher unity. The positing or bringing out of what is implicit in the work of art is here accordingly worship, and this latter is hence the relationship whereby the external objectivity of God is, relatively to subjective knowledge, abrogated, and the identity of the two set forth. In this way the external divine existence, as something divorced from existence within the subjective spirit, is abrogated, and thus God is, as it were, called to mind within the sphere of subjectivity. The general character of this worship consists in this, that the subject has an essentially affirmative relationship to his god.