Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/67

, that is particular, is merely ideal, and has no true Being.

This substantiality is the fundamental determination of our knowledge of God too, but it is only the fundamental determination, the foundation not being yet the True. God is the absolute Power, we must say that; He alone is Power. Everything which pretends to say of itself that it is, that it has reality, is annulled, absorbed, is only a moment of the absolute God, the absolute Power. God alone is; God alone is the One true reality.

In our religion too this lies at the foundation of the idea of God. The omnipresence of God, if it is no empty word, directly expresses substantiality; the latter underlies it. But stupidity continues to prate of these profound religious expressions as a mere matter of memory, and is not at all in earnest about them. As soon as true Being is ascribed to the finite, as soon as things are independent, God is shut out from them; then God is not omnipresent at all, for if God is omnipresent, it will at once be said that He is real, and not the things.

He is therefore not beside the things, in the pores, like the God of Epicurus, but actually in the things: and in this case the things are not real, and this presence in them is the ideality of the things. For that feeble way of thinking, on the other hand, things are invincible; they are an impregnable reality. Omnipresence must have a true meaning for the spirit, heart, thought; Spirit must have a true interest in it. God is the subsistence of all things.

Pantheism is a bad expression, because it is possible to misunderstand it so that Πᾶν is taken in the sense of allness or totality, not as universality. The philosophy of Spinoza was a philosophy of substantiality, not of Pantheism.

God is in all higher religions, but especially in the Christian religion, the absolutely One Substance. He is,