Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/105

 represented by Evil; this humanity, which is itself a moment in the divine life, is now characterised as something foreign to God, as something which does not belong to His nature; this finitude, however, in its condition of Being-for-self, or as existing independently in relation to God, is evil, something foreign to God’s nature; He has, however, taken our finite nature in order to slay it by His death. His shameful death, as representing the marvellous union of these absolute extremes, is at the same time infinite love.

It is a proof of infinite love that God identified Himself with what was foreign to His nature in order to slay it. This is the signification of the death of Christ. Christ has borne the sins of the world, He has reconciled God to us, as it is said.

This death is thus at once finitude in its most extreme form, and at the same time the abolition and absorption of natural finitude, of immediate existence and estrangement, the cancelling of limits. This abolition and absorption of the natural is to be conceived of in a spiritual sense as essentially meaning that the movement of Spirit consists in comprehending itself in itself, in dying to the natural, that it is therefore abstraction from immediate volition and immediate consciousness, an act of sinking into itself, and then an act whereby it itself draws out of this depth into which it has plunged what is merely its own specific character, its true essence, and its absolute universality. What has for it worth, and all that constitutes its value, it finds only in this abolition of its natural Being and will. The suffering and the sorrow connected with this death which contains this element of the reconciliation of Spirit with itself and with what it potentially is, this negative moment which belongs to Spirit only as Spirit, is inner conversion and change. Here, however, death is not brought before us with this concrete meaning, but is represented as natural death, for in the Divine Idea that negation cannot be exhibited