Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/33

 incomprehensible. The nature of God is equally something incomprehensible. This Incomprehensible is really nothing but the Notion itself, which involves the power of differentiation, and the Understanding does not get beyond the fact of the existence of the difference.

Thus it says: this cannot be comprehended; for the principle of the Understanding is abstract self-identity, and not concrete identity, according to which these differences exist in something which is one. For the Understanding God is the One, the Essence of Essences. This empty identity without difference is the false representation of God given by the Understanding and by modern theology. God is Spirit, what gives itself an objective form and knows itself in that. This is concrete identity, and thus the Idea is also an essential moment. According to the idea of abstract identity, on the other hand, the One and the Other exist independently, each for itself, and are at the same time related to each other, and therefore we get a contradiction.

This, then, is what is called the incomprehensible. The cancelling or resolution of the contradiction is the Notion; the Understanding does not get the length of the cancelling of the contradiction, because it starts with the presupposition of its existence; for it the two sides which form the contradiction are and remain in a state of mutual independence.

One reason why it is said that the Divine Idea is incomprehensible is that, since religion, the truth, exists for all men, the content of the Idea appears in a sensuous form, or in the form of something which can be grasped by the Understanding. It appears, we repeat, in a sensuous form, and so we have the expressions Father and Son descriptive of a relation which exists in the sphere of life, a designation which has been adopted from what is seen in the sense-life.

In religion the truth is revealed in accordance with the content; but it is something different for it to appear