It is true that sculpture in its complete plastic perfection accepts the gods as substantive potencies, and endows them with a form in whose beauty they in the first instance repose in security, for the reason that the accidental character, of their external envisagement is to the least extent emphasized. Their multiplicity and distinction does in fact, however, constitute this element of contingency, and thought annuls this in the determinate conception of one divinity, through whose inevitable power they are mutually at war with and to the detriment of each other. For however universal the power of every particular god is conceived as specific individuality, such is of a restricted range. Add to this the fact that the gods do not continue in their eternal repose; they are self-determined relatively to particular aims in actual movement through their being drawn hither and thither by the pre-existing conditions and collisions of concrete reality, in order at one time to afford assistance and at another to obstruct or destroy. These isolated relations in which the gods as active individuals participate contain within them an element of contingency, which impairs the substantive nature of the divine, however much the same may persist as the predominant substratum, and involves the gods in the contradictions and conflicts of a limited finitude. By reason of this finiteness immanent in the gods themselves they fall into contradiction with the loftiness, worth, and beauty of their existence, through which, too, they are eventually brought down to the level of mere caprice and chance. The genuine Ideal evades the complete appearance of this contradiction simply and in so far as—this is preeminently the case in true sculpture and its particular creations as we find them in temples—the divine personalities are represented as explicitly alone in the repose of blessedness, yet retain, as we have already above indicated, a certain aspect of lifelessness, somewhat aloof from all emotion, and withal that quiet characteristic of pathetic lament. It is just this mournfulness which exposes their fate by demonstrating that something of higher import stands above them, and the passage from the particularities of form to their comprehending unity is a necessary one. If, however, we fix our attention on the type and configuration of this loftier unity we shall find that it is, as contrasted with the individuality and relative determination of the gods, the essentially abstract and formless—the necessity, the fate, which under this mode of abstraction the higher can only in general terms be, and which constrains both gods and men, while remaining in itself incomprehensible and inconceivable. Fate is not as yet absolute and self-subsistent end, and thereby at the same time subjective, personal, divine purpose, but merely the one and universal Power which transcends the particularity of the different gods, and consequently is unable to be presented itself as individual entity; because otherwise it would simply appear as one among many individuals, and would stand above them. For this reason it remains without form and individuality, and is in this abstraction merely necessity and nothing more; with which gods no less than men, when they differentiate themselves as separate from one another, contend. And thus they give effect to their individual power condemned though it be to limitations, and would fain exalt themselves over the bounds and warrant of Fate, though they are, in fact, its subjects, and are forced to hearken to all that unalterably befalls them.
2. THE DISSOLUTION OF THE GODS THROUGH THEIR ANTHROPOMORPHISM
For the reason, then, that the principle of self-determinate Necessity[197] does not appertain to the particular gods, does not supply in other words the content of their self-determination, and only floats over them as an undefined abstraction, the aspect of their insularity as individuals has consequently free play and is unable to escape from Destiny, is moreover at liberty to branch out into the external fabric of the human condition, into the finite consistency of anthropomorphism, possibilities which convert the gods into the reverse of that condition which truly constitutes the notion of what they are essentially and in virtue of their divine nature. The overthrow of these gods of beauty is consequently quite inevitably brought about for art through their own nature. The human consciousness is at last quite unable to find repose in them, and is fain compelled to take leave of them. And, moreover, if we look more closely we shall find that the mode and type of Greek anthropomorphism supplies us with a general example of how the gods vanish away from the faiths of religion no less than those of poetry.
(a) Spiritual individuality here makes its appearance in the human form, it is true, as Ideal; but for all that it is in the immediately visible, that is, the bodily presence, not within humanity in all its essential explication, under the mode in which it is conscious of itself in its own self-conscious world as distinct from God, while in the same breath it annuls the distinction, and is, by its own act, as one with God, essentially infinite and absolute self-consciousness.
(α) For this reason the plastic Ideal is unable to present itself as infinite self-conscious spirituality. These plastic shapes of beauty are not merely stone and bronze, but also the infinite form of subjective life vanishes from them in their content and expression. We may become as enthusiastic as we please over their beauty and art, but for all that our enthusiasm is and remains something native to our own souls; it is not really at home in the objects which it thus contemplates, that is in the gods themselves. To complete the true totality a real reciprocity is required on this side also of the subjective, self-knowing unity and infinity; it is this, and only this, that unfolds our conception of a living God of knowledge, and of men who thus apprehend Him. If this totality is not also essentially and with adequacy conformable to the content and nature of the Absolute, then the Absolute will itself appear not as truly a subject of spiritual being, and its presentment will confront us merely in its objective form without the possession of self-conscious Spirit. It is quite true, no doubt, that the individuality of the gods retains the content of subjectivity, but merely under modes that are contingent, and in a process of development,' which moves independently outside that substantive repose and blessedness of the gods.
(β) On the other hand, the subjectivity which is opposed to the gods of plastic art is also not the form of conscious life which is essentially eternal and true. In other words, this latter is—as we shall see for ourselves more clearly in our consideration of the third type of art, the romantic—that which has before it the objectivity to which it is conformable under the mode of an essentially infinite and self-knowing God. Inasmuch, however, as the knowing subject, at the stage we are now discussing, does not consciously conceive itself as present in the perfections of these godlike figures, nor even in its contemplation of such objects is aware of itself as circumstantially objective, it is still wholly distinct and separate from its absolute object, and is consequently a purely contingent and finite subjectivity.
(γ) We might possibly suppose that the passage into a higher sphere of reality would have been emphasized by the imagination and art as a further war among the gods, in a way analogous, in fact, to the first transition from the symbolism of the gods of Nature to the spiritual Ideals of classical art. This is by no means the case. On the contrary, this translation is carried forward in a wholly different field, as a conflict brought home to consciousness between absolute reality and the present world. For this reason art, in its relation to the higher content, which it has to seize under new modes, occupies an entirely altered position. This new configuration does not assert its importance as revelation by means of Art, but is made manifest independently without it, and appears on the prosaic ground of controversial and rational discussion, and from thence is within the soul and its religious emotions, mainly by means of miracle, martyrdoms, and so on, carried into the world of subjective knowledge, together with a consciousness of the contradiction between all that is finite and the Absolute, which unfolds itself in actual history as the process of events toward a Present which is not merely imagined, but is the fact we have before us. The Divine, God Himself, becomes flesh, is born, lives, suffers, dies, and rises from the dead. This is a content which heart did not discover, but which, quite apart from it, was a present fact, and which consequently it has not borrowed from its own domain, but merely supplies a form to it. That old transition and war of the gods, on the contrary, discovered its origins in the artistic or imaginative view of the world simply, which created its wisdom and plastic shapes from its inner life, and gave to astonished mankind his new gods. For this reason the classic gods also have only received their existence through the fiat of the imagination, and merely exist as such in stone and bronze, or in the world open to the senses, not, however, in flesh and blood, or in very and actual Spirit. The anthropomorphism of the Greek gods is therefore without real human existence, that of body no less than that of Spirit. It is Christianity which first introduces us to this reality in flesh and blood as the determinate existence, life, and activity of God Himself. Consequently this bodily form, this flesh, however much also the purely natural and sensuous is recognized as a negation therein, receives its due and honour, and that which partakes of anthropomorphism here is sanctified. Even as man originally was made in the image of God, God is an image of man; whoso beholdeth the Son beholdeth the Father, and whoso loveth the Son loveth the Father. In a word, God is acknowledged as present in the actual world. This new content, then, is not brought home to consciousness by means of the conceptions of art, but is presented from an exterior source as an actual occurrence, as the history of the God who became flesh. A transition such as this could not take its point of departure from Art; the contrast between the old and the new would have been too disparate. The God of revealed religion, in respect to content and form, is very God in truth, in contrast with whom all rivals would become mere creations of the imagination, whom it would be quite impossible to compare with Him on equal terms. The old and new gods of classical art, on the contrary, originate in both cases independently from the ground of the imagination. They have only such reality from the finite Spirit as enables them to be conceived and represented as potencies of Nature and Spirit; the contradiction and conflict they declare, is taken seriously. If, however, the transition from the Greek gods to the God of Christendom were portrayed in the first instance by Art, the representation of such a war of gods could not in this direct form be enforced in all seriousness.
(b) Consequently this strife and transition becomes also, in more recent times, primarily an accidental, isolated subject-matter of art, which can claim to create no true epoch, and has been able in this form to embody no fundamental phase in the line of the entire development of art. We will recall here in this connection, if incidentally, a few of the more famous examples of this nature. We frequently hear in more recent times the lament over the submergence of Greek art, and a yearning towards Greek gods and heroes is not infrequently the theme of our poets[198]. This lamentation is expressed emphatically as in direct opposition to Christendom; and though it is, no doubt, generally granted that it contains the higher truth, the qualification is added that, so far as art is concerned, the transition is only to be regretted. This is the theme of Schiller's "Gods of Greece"; and it is worth our while, even in the present inquiry, to consider this poem, not merely as poetry in the beauty of its exposition, its musical rhythm, its vivid pictures, or in the charm of its regretful mood, which was the motive force in its creation, but also in order to examine the content. Schiller's pathos is always true, no less than poignant, and the result of profound reflection.
It is perfectly true that the Christian religion contains, and may justly claim to accentuate, a certain phase of art; but in the due course of its development, at the time of the Aufklärung[199], it has also reached a point where we find that thought, or rather the Understanding[200], has driven into the background that element, which art pre-eminently requires, the actual human envisagement and revelation of God. For the human form and all that it expresses and declares, human events, actions, feeling, is the form under which art is forced to conceive and represent the content of Spirit. Inasmuch as the Understanding has converted God into a mere fact of thought, no longer crediting the appearance of His Spirit in concrete reality, and thus has alienated the God of Thought from all actual existence, this type of religious Illumination has necessarily accepted conceptions and requirements which are intolerable to Art. When, however, the Understanding is raised once more from the region of these abstractions into that of Reason, the need at once asserts itself for something more concrete, and withal for that kind of concreteness which Art itself unfolds. The period of the illuminating Understanding has, no doubt, possessed an art of its own, but only of very prosaic type, as we may even find it in Schiller, whose point of departure was precisely that of such a period of criticism; later on, however, owing to his realization how little reason, imagination, and passion were satisfied by the critical Understanding, he experienced a deep longing for art, in the fullest sense of the term, and primarily for the classical art of the Greeks and their gods, and general views of the world. It is from this kind of yearning, a reaction, in short, from the mere abstractions of the mind, that the poem referred to originated. According to the original draft of the poem, Schiller's attitude to Christianity is entirely polemical; afterwards he modified it considerably, no doubt realizing that its animus was only directed against the critical aspect of the Illumination, which at a later time itself began to lose its importance. In the first instance he praises the Greek point of view as fortunate in that the whole of Nature was a thing of Life to it, and full of divinities. After that he reviews the Present and its prosaic conception of natural law, and the position man here takes relatively to God: