Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/83

 God; and so, too, it does not detract from the divine character of the Other as it appears in human nature.

This otherness or Other-Being is Being which eternally annuls itself, which eternally posits itself and eternally annuls itself, and this self-positing and annulling of Other-Being is love or Spirit. Evil, as representing one side of Being, has been defined simply as the Other, the finite, the negative, and God has been placed on the other side as the Good, the True. But this Other, this negative, contains within itself affirmation as well, and in finite Being it must come to be consciously known that the principle of affirmation is contained in this Other, and that there lies in this principle of affirmation the principle of identity with the other side, just as God is not only the True, abstract self-identity, but has in the Other, in negation, in the self-positing of the Other, His peculiarly essential characteristic, which is indeed the peculiar characteristic of Spirit.

The possibility of reconciliation rests only on the conscious recognition of the implicit unity of divine and human nature; this is the necessary basis. Thus Man can know that he has been received into union with God in so far as God is not for him something foreign to his nature, in so far as he does not stand related to God as an external accident, but when he has been taken up into God in his essential character, in a way which is in accordance with his freedom and subjectivity; this, however, is possible only in so far as this subjectivity which belongs to human nature exists in God Himself.

Infinite sorrow must come to be conscious of this implicit Being as the implicit unity of divine and human nature, but only in its character as implicit Being or substantiality, and in such a way that this finitude, this weakness, this Other-Being, in no way impairs the substantial unity of the two.

The unity of divine and human nature, Man in his