Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/49

 It is to be observed that this is no expiation for crime; nothing is made good by means of it. This renunciation has not the consciousness of sin as a presupposition. These are, on the contrary, austerities undertaken with a view to attaining the state of Brahma. It is not penance entered upon for the purpose of atoning to the gods for any kind of crime, transgression, or offence. Penance of the latter kind presupposes the existence of a relation between the work of man, his concrete existence, his actions, and the One God—an idea which is full of content, in which man has the standard and the law of his character and behaviour, and to which he is to conform himself in his will and life. But the relation to Brahma contains as yet nothing concrete, because he himself is merely the abstraction of the substantial soul; all further determination and content lies outside of him. Thus a worship, as a substantial relation which effectually influences and directs the concrete man, has no place in the relation to Brahma. If such a relation were present here at all, it would have to be sought in the adoration of the other gods. But just as Brahma is conceived as the solitary self-enclosed Being, so, too, the exaltation of the individual self-consciousness which strives, by means of the austerities just spoken of, to render its own abstraction something perennial for itself, is rather a flight out of the concrete reality of feeling and living activity. In the consciousness which says, “I am Brahma,” all virtues and vices, all gods, and finally the Trimurti itself, vanish. The concrete consciousness of one’s self and of objective content, which, in the Christian idea of the repentance and conversion of the universal sensuous life, is relinquished, is not characterised here as anything sinful or negative, as it is in the penitential life of Christians and Christian monks, and in the idea of conversion. On the contrary, it comprehends on the one hand, as has just been indicated, the very content, otherwise esteemed as holy; and, on the other hand, we see that the