Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/347

 belonging to the Notion of God. But God as Spirit is essentially this very self-revelation; He does not create the world once for all, but He is the eternal Creator, this eternal self-revelation, this actus. This is His Notion, His essential characteristic.

Religion, the revealed religion, Spirit as for Spirit, is as such the Religion of Spirit. It is not something which does not open itself out for an Other, which is an Other merely momentarily. God posits or lays down the Other, and takes it up again into His eternal movement. Spirit just is what appears to itself or manifests itself; this constitutes its act, or form of action, and its life; this is its only act, and it is itself only its act. What does God reveal, in fact, but just that He is this revelation of Himself? What He reveals is the infinite form. Absolute subjectivity is determination, and this is the positing or bringing into actual existence of distinctions or difference. The positing of the content, what He thus reveals, is that He is the one Power who can make these distinctions in Himself. It is His Being to make these distinctions eternally, to take them back and at the same time to remain with Himself, not to go out of Himself. What is revealed, is, that He is for an Other. This is the essential character, the definition, of revelation.

2. This religion, which is manifest or revealed to itself, is not only the revealed religion, but the religion which is actually known as a religion which has been revealed; and by this is understood, on the one hand, that it has been revealed by God, that God has actually communicated the knowledge of Himself to men; and, on the other hand, that being a revealed religion, it is a positive religion in the sense that it has come to men, and has been given to them from the outside.

In view of this peculiarity which attaches to the idea of what is positive, it becomes interesting to see what the Positive is.