Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/188

 Spirit, it will be admitted that it derives its essential character from categories, and that the nature of this character is shown in logic to be the possession of the moment of mediation above indicated inseparably in itself. But we pause here to call attention to the absolutely universal fact, in whatever sense and with whatever meaning the facts may be understood. Without digressing into examples, we abide by the one object which here lies nearest to us.

God is activity, free activity relating itself to itself, and remaining with itself. The essential element in the notion or conception of God, or, for that matter, in every idea of God, is that He is Himself, the mediation of Himself with Himself. If God is defined merely as the Creator, His activity is taken only as going out of itself, as expanding itself out of itself, as sensible or material producing, without any return into itself. The product is something different from Him, it is the world; the introduction of the category of mediation would at once bring with it the idea that God must be through the medium of the world; one might, at all events, say with truth that He is Creator only by means of the world, or what He creates. Only this would be mere empty tautology; for the category, “that which is created,” is itself directly involved in the first category, that of the Creator. On the other hand, what is created remains, so far as the ordinary idea of it is concerned, as a world outside God, as an Other over against Him, so that He exists away beyond that world, apart from it, in-and-for-Himself. But in Christianity least of all is it true that we have to know God only as creation, activity, not as Spirit. The fact rather is that to this religion, the explicit consciousness that God is Spirit is peculiar, the consciousness that He, even as He is in-and-for-Himself, relates Himself, as it were, to the Other of Himself (called the Son), to Himself, that He is related to Himself in Himself as love, essentially as this love is mediation with itself. God is indeed the