Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/49

 nature that it should be, but only in an ideal sense; it is not something implicitly eternal, but, on the contrary, it is something created, its Being is something which has been merely posited, or is dependent on something else.

The Being of the world means that it has a moment of Being, but that it annuls this separation and estrangement from God, and that it is its true nature to return to its source, to get into a relationship of Spirit or Love.

We thus get the Process of the world which implies a passing from the state of revolt and separation to that of reconciliation. What first appears in the Idea is merely the relation of Father and Son; but the Other also comes to have the characteristic of Other-Being or otherness, of something which is.

It is in the Son, in the determination or specifying of the difference, that an advance is made to further specification in the form of more differences, and that difference gets its rights, the right of being different. Jacob Böhme described this transition in the stage represented by the Son as follows: The first and Only-begotten was Lucifer, the light-bearer, clearness, brightness, but he imaged himself in himself, i.e., posited an independent existence for himself, advanced to a condition of Being, and so to a state of revolt, and that then the eternal and Only-begotten was immediately put in his place.

Regarded from the first of the two standpoints, the relation is that God exists in His eternal truth, and this is thought of as the state of things which existed before time was, as the state in which God was when the blessed spirits and the morning stars, the angels, His children, sang His praises. The relation thus existing is described as a state, but it is an eternal relation of thought to its object. Later on a revolt occurred, as it is expressed, and this is the positing of the second standpoint, the one side of the truth represented by the analysis of the Son, the keeping apart of the two