(αα) Consequently we observe in the concrete individuality of the gods—when we have before us the genuine classic Ideal, on equal terms with all else—this nobility and loftiness of Spirit, in which, despite the entire absorption within the bodily and sensuous presence, we are made conscious of the absolute removal of all the indigence of what is wholly finite. Pure self-absorption[188] and the abstract liberation from every kind of determinacy is the highway to the Ideal of the Sublime. The classical Ideal, on the contrary, is made visible in an existence which entirely is its own, that is, the specific manifestation of Spirit itself; yet for all that we shall find that here, too, the Sublimity of the same is blended with the beauty, and that the one aspect passes over immediately into the other. And this it is which constitutes the expression of loftiness in these figures of the gods, making inevitable the Sublime of classical beauty. An immortal seriousness[189] makes its throne on the forehead of these gods, and is poured forth over their entire presentment.
(ββ) In their beauty these gods appear, therefore, as exalted over their individual bodily shape; we have consequently a kind contradiction or contention between their lofty blessedness, which is, in fact, their spiritual self-exclusiveness and their beauty, which pertains to their external bodily presence. Spirit appears wholly lost in its external form, and yet for all that appears quite as much absorbed in itself from out that form. It is precisely as though we had the moving to and fro of an immortal god among mortal men.
In this relation the Greek gods make on us an impression which, despite all difference, resembles that which the bust of Goethe by Rauch made upon me when I first saw it. Many will have doubtless seen it, the high brow, the powerful, commanding nose, the free eye, the round chin, the affable, finely-cut lips, the pose of the head, so suggestive of genius, with its glance a bit on one side and uplifted: add to this the entire fulness and breadth of an emotional and genial humanity, and further, those carefully articulated muscles of the forehead, of the entire countenance, of all that gives evidence of passion and emotion; and in all this house of Life, the repose, stillness, and loftiness of advanced age; and we may add withal the fading ebb of the lips, which retreat back into the teethless mouth, the slackness of the neck and cheeks, whereby the bridge of the nose appears yet more dominant, and the reach of the forehead yet more towering. The force of this firmly set figure, which to an extraordinary degree brings before us the notion of immutability, appears all the more so in the loose environment which surrounds it[190], just as the sublime head and form of the Oriental in his wide turban, but flapping over-garment and trailing slippers. It is the secure, powerful, timeless spirit, which, in the mask of encircling mortality, is just ready to let this husk fall away, and yet suffers it to linger around it freely and without restraint.
In much the same way the gods appear to us in their aspect of lofty freedom and spiritual repose to be exalted over their bodily presence, so that they seem to feel their form, their limbs, despite all the beauty that is there, as at the same time a superfluous appanage. And yet withal the entire presentment is suffused with vitality, identical with their spiritual being, inseparable, without the disunion of what is essentially subsistent, and those parts which are more loosely put together, the spirit in short neither escaping nor coming forth from the body, but both firmly moulded together into a whole, out of which, and in no other way, the self-absorption of Spirit looks forth in silence in its amazing and secure self-possession.
(γγ) For the reason, then, that the contention we have indicated is present, without appearing, however, as a difference or separation of the ideal spirituality from its external form, the negative which is therein contained, is for this very reason immanent in this inseparable totality and is thereby expressed. This is within the sphere of this spiritual loftiness the breath and atmosphere of melancholy, which men of genius have felt in the godlike figures of antique art even where the beauty of the external presentment is consummate. The repose of divine blessedness[191] is unable to split itself up into the passions of joy, pleasure, and satisfaction, and the peace of immortality stands aloof from the smile of self-satisfaction and genial contentedness. Contentment is the emotion of the agreement of our singular subjectivity with the condition of that environment which is defined for or given to us or brought about through our own agency. Napoleon, for example, never expressed more thorough contentment than when he happened to obtain some success at the cost of making all the world discontented. For contentment is only the approval of my own being, action, and engagements, and the extreme of it is readily recognizable in that state of feeling of the Philistine to which every man of practical ability necessarily extends it. This feeling and its expression is, however, no expression appropriate to the prefigured immortal gods. Free and perfected beauty is not satisfied with joining the concordant temper of a particular finite existence; rather its individuality, in its aspect as Spirit no less than in that of form, albeit it is self-defined with characterization, only finds itself fully in union with its true nature when it is at the same time free universality and spirituality in repose upon itself. This universality is just that which people are wont to point to as the frigidity of the Greek gods. They are only cold, however, to our modern intimacy with the temporal. Independently regarded they possess warmth and life; that peaceful blessedness, which is reflected in their external presentment, is essentially an abstraction from particularity, a mode of being indifferent to the Past, a surrender of that which is external, a giving up which, albeit neither full of trouble nor pain, is for all that a giving up of what is earthly and evanescent, just as their cheerfulness of spirit looks far away and over death, the grave, loss and temporality, and for the very reason that it is profound inherently contains this negative we are discussing. And the more this earnestness and spiritual freedom is prominent in the vision of these godlike figures the more we feel the contrast between this loftiness and the determinate corporality in which they are enclosed. The blessed gods mourn quite as much over their blessedness as their bodily environment. In the letters of their form we read the destiny which lies before them, and whose development, as actual manifestation of that contradiction between this very loftiness and that particularity, spirituality, and sensuous existence classical art itself sets face to face with its final overthrow.
(c) If we ask ourselves, then, thirdly, what is the nature of the external representation, which is adequate to this notion of the classic Ideal we have just indicated, we shall find in this connection, too, that the essential points of view have already in our general consideration of the Ideal been furnished us with considerable detail. We have consequently here only further to remark, that in the genuine classic Ideal the spiritual individuality of the gods is not conceived in their relation to something else, or brought about by virtue of their particularity in conflict, and battle, but rather is made visible in their eternal self-tranquillity, in this painfulness of the godlike peace itself. The determinate character is not, therefore, made active in the way that it stimulated the gods to the sense of particular emotions and passions, or compelled them to adopt specific aims of conduct. On the contrary, it is precisely out of that collision and development, nay, out of that very relation to the finite and all that is essentially discordant that they are brought back to that condition of pure self-absorption. This repose in its most austere severity, not inflexible, cold, or dead, but sensitive and immutable, is the highest and most adequate form of representation for the classic gods. When they make their appearance consequently in specific situations, it is not necessary that there should be conditions or actions which give rise to conflicts, but rather such which, as themselves harmless, so, too, leave the gods in a like condition. It is, therefore, sculpture which among the arts is above all adapted to portray the classic Ideal in its simple self-possession, in which what is rather the universal divinity receives more obvious emphasis than the particular character. Chiefly it is the more ancient and more austere type of sculpture which maintains its firm hold of this aspect of the Ideal, and only in the later forms we find a movement towards increased dramatic vividness of situations and characterization. Poetry, on the contrary, ranges the gods in vigorous action, that is, in an attitude of negation to a definite mode of life, and brings them thereby into conflict and strife. The repose of plastic art, where it remains in the sphere which is uniquely its own, can only express the aforesaid negative phase of spirit face to face with particular facts in that serious strain of melancholy, which we have already attempted to define more nearly.
2. THE SPHERE OF THE PARTICULAR GODS
As individuality in visible form, represented under the mode of immediate existence, and withal both definite and particular, godhead necessarily is divided into a number of figures. In other words, Polytheism is unquestionably essential as the principle of classical art, and it would be the undertaking of a fool to think of embodying the one God of the Sublime and of Pantheism or the absolute religion, which comprehends God purely as Spirit and essential personality, in the plastic type of beauty, or to entertain the idea that the classical forms could have arisen among the Jews, Mohammedans, or Christians, as adapted to the content of their religious beliefs, from their own original views of the world, as they did in the case of the Greeks.
(a) In this multiplicity the divine universe[192] at this stage is broken up into a sphere of particular gods, of which each individual stands by himself alone in contrast to all the others. These individualities are not, however, of the kind that they can be taken merely as allegorical presentations of universal qualities, as if Apollo, for example, were the god of wisdom, Zeus of dominion. Zeus is also quite as much wisdom, and in the "Eumenides" Apollo, as we have seen, protects Orestes, the son and the royal son to boot, whom he himself has stimulated to an act of vengeance. The sphere of the Greek gods is a multiplicity of individuals, of which every particular god, albeit also in the specific character of a particular person, is at the same time a self-exclusive totality, which itself possesses essentially also the quality of another god. For every such presentment, viewed as divine, is always, too, a whole. It is only by this means that the divine personalities of Greek religion include an abundance of traits; and although their blessedness consists in their universal and spiritual self-repose no less than in their abstraction from the direct movement which Time is for ever defeating in the sphere of the disintegrating manifold of natural fact and condition, yet for all that they possess the power in a like degree to assert themselves as energetic and active in many of its aspects. They are neither the abstract particular nor the abstract universal, but the universal which is the source of particularity.
(b) On account of this type of individuality, however, Greek polytheism is unable to make up an essentially systematic and self-integrated totality. At the first glance, it is true, it appears imperative to require of the Olympus of the gods, that the numerous gods that are there assembled, should, as thus collected together, and if their separable unities have real truth in them, and their content is to be classic in the true sense, also express essentially the totality of the Idea, should exhaust the entire sphere of the necessary forces of Nature and Spirit, and give to themselves therefore constructive completeness, in other words, manifest themselves as subject to a principle of necessity. This demand, however, would be liable from the first to the qualification that those forces present in the emotions and, generally speaking, assertive in the sphere of spiritual life in the absolute significance[193] which becomes operative first in the later and higher religion, must remain excluded from the sphere of the classic gods, so that the range of content, the particular aspects of which succeed in making an appearance in Greek mythology, would be already thereby curtailed. Moreover, apart from this, we have also on the one hand, necessarily introduced by virtue of the essentially varied character of this individuality, the accidental incidents of a definition, which avoids the rigorous articulation of the differences inherent in the notion, and does not suffer these divinities to maintain the abstraction of merely one mode of determination. And, on the other hand, the universality, in the elemental medium of which the divine personalities secure their blessed state, abolishes any hard and fast particularity, and the loftiness of the eternal powers exalts itself jubilant over the cold seriousness of finite fact, wherein, if this inconsequence did not prevail, the divine presences would be evolved through the medium of their limitations.