Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/72

 In order that the need of universal reconciliation, and as a part of this divine reconciliation, absolute reconciliation in Man, should arise, it is necessary that the opposition should get this infinite character, and that it should be seen that this universality comprises Man’s most inward nature, that there is nothing which is outside of this opposition, that the opposition is not of a particular kind. This is the deepest depth.

(a.) We have first to consider the relation in which the disunion stands to one of the extremes, namely, to God. Man is inwardly conscious that in the depths of his being he is a contradiction, and thus there arises an infinite feeling of sorrow in reference to himself. Sorrow is present only where there is opposition to what ought to be, to an affirmative. What is no longer in itself an affirmative has no contradiction, no sorrow in it either; sorrow is just negativity in the Affirmative, it means that the Affirmative is something self-contradictory, that it is wounded by its own act.

This sorrow is the one element of evil. Evil existing simply by itself is an abstraction, it exists only in opposition to good; and since it is present in the unity of the subject, the feeling of opposition in reference to this disunion constitutes infinite sorrow. If the consciousness of good did not thus exist in the subject itself, and if the infinite demand made by good was not present in the inmost being of the subject, then there would be no sorrow there, evil itself would be an empty nothing; it is present only in this antithesis or opposition.

Both evil and this sorrow can be infinite only when good, God, is known as one God, as a pure spiritual God, and it is only when good is this pure unity, when we have belief in one God, and only in connection with such a belief, that the negative can and must advance to this determination of evil, and that the negation also can advance to this condition of universality.