Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/156

 God has no content, is not concrete. Thus the manifestation of God in the flesh, the exaltation of Christ to the position of Son of the God, the transfiguration of the finitude of the world and of self-consciousness until they appear as the infinite self-determination of God, have no place here. Christianity is held to be a system of teaching or set of doctrines, and Christ an ambassador from God, a divine teacher, and so a teacher like Socrates, only a still more distinguished teacher, since he was without sin. This, however, is to go only half way, it is a compromise. Christ was either merely a man, or he was the “Son of Man.” There would thus be nothing left of the divine history, and Christ would be spoken of as he is in the Koran. The difference between this standpoint and Mohammedanism consists merely in the fact that the latter, the conceptions of which are bathed in the ether of illimitableness, and which represents this infinite independence, directly gives up all particular interests, enjoyment, position, individual knowledge, all “vanity” in short. On the other hand, rationalistic Enlightenment gives Man an abstract standing on his own account, since for it God is beyond this world and has no affirmative relation to the subject, so that Man recognises the affirmative Universal only in so far as it is in him, and yet has it in him in a merely abstract way, and accordingly what gives it body or substance is taken only from what is accidental and arbitrary.

Still we must recognise the presence of reconciliation in this last form too, and thus this final manifestation is also a realisation of Faith. Since, in fact, all content, all truth perishes in this particular subjectivity which knows itself infinitely in itself, the principle of subjective freedom has as a consequence come to be consciously known. What is called in the Spiritual Community the inner life, is now developed in itself; it is not only something inward, conscience, but it is subjectivity which differentiates itself makes distinctions within itself, is concrete;