Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/108

 Himself. This death is love itself, expressed as a moment of God, and it is this death which brings about reconciliation. In it we have a picture of absolute love. It is the identity of the Divine and the human, it implies that in the finite God is at home with Himself, and this finite as seen in death is itself a determination belonging to God. God has through death reconciled the world, and reconciled it eternally with Himself. This comingback from the state of estrangement is His return to Himself, and it is because of it that He is Spirit, and the third point accordingly is that Christ has risen. Negation is consequently surmounted, and the negation of the negation is thus a moment of the Divine nature.

Suffering and dying taken in this sense are ideas opposed to the doctrine of moral imputation according to which each individual has to stand for himself only, and each is the doer of his own deeds. The fate of Christ seems to contradict this imputation; this imputation, however, has a place only in the sphere of finitude, where the subject is regarded as a single person, and not in the sphere of free Spirit. The characteristic idea in the region of finitude is that each remains what he is; if he has done evil, he is evil; evil is in him as representing his quality. But already in the sphere of morality, and still more in that of religion, Spirit is known to be free, to be affirmative in itself, so that the element of limit in it which gets the length of evil is a nullity for the infinitude of Spirit; Spirit can make what has happened as if it had not happened; the action certainly remains in the memory, but Spirit puts it away. Imputation, therefore, does not reach to this sphere. For the true consciousness of Spirit the finitude of Man is slain in the death of Christ. This death of the natural gets in this way a universal signification, the finite, evil, in fact, is destroyed. The world is thus reconciled, and through this death the world is implicitly freed from its evil. It is in connection with a true understanding of the death of