Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/37

 love I give up my abstract personality, and in this way win it back as concrete personality.

It is just this winning back of personality by the act of absorption, by the being absorbed into the other, which constitutes the true nature of personality. Such forms of the Understanding directly prove themselves in experience to be of those which annul themselves.

In love, in friendship, it is the person or individual who maintains himself, and by means of love gets the subjectivity which is his personality. If here, in connection with religion, the idea of personality is clung to in an abstract way, then we get three Gods, and the infinite form, absolute negativity is forgotten, or if personality is regarded as not cancelled, then we have evil, for personality which does not yield itself up to the absolute Idea is evil. In the divine unity personality is held to be cancelled, and it is only in appearance that the negativity of personality is distinguished from that whereby it is done away with.

The Trinity has been reduced to a relation of Father, Son, and Spirit, and this is a childlike relation, a childlike natural form. The Understanding has no category, no relation which in point of suitability for expressing the truth can be compared with this. At the same time it must be understood that it is merely pictorial, and that Spirit does not actually enter into a relation of this kind. Love would be a still more suitable expression, but Spirit is the really true one.

The abstract God, the Father, is the Universal, the eternal, all-embracing, total particularity. We have reached the stage of Spirit; here the Universal includes everything within itself; the Other, the Son, is infinite particularity, manifestation; the third, the Spirit, is individuality as such. The Universal, however, as totality is itself Spirit; all three are Spirit. In the third, God is Spirit, we say, but He is presupposed to be this as well, and the third is also the first. This is a truth which