First, we have the redemption-history of Christ; the phasal moments of absolute Spirit presented in the person of God Himself, in so far as He becomes man, and takes to Himself an actual existence in the world of finitude and its concrete conditions, and in this to start with isolated existence gives visible shape to the Absolute itself.
Secondly, we shall consider love in its positive presentment as the feeling of reconciliation between the human and the Divine; in other words the Holy Family, the maternal love of Mary, the love of Christ and that of his disciples.
Thirdly, we have the community before us. Here it is the Spirit of God as present by virtue of the conversion of soul and the mortification of the natural and finite sense, in short, the return of man to God, a return in which penances and pains mediate in the first instance this union of God and man.
1. THE REDEMPTION-HISTORY OF CHRIST
The reconciliation of God with His own substance, history in its absolute significance, or, in one word, the process of realization, is made visible to our senses and assured to our minds by the revelation of God in the world. The content of this reconcilement as expressed in the most direct way is the coalescence in unity of the absolute essence of reality with the individual subject of human consciousness. An individual man is God and God is an individual man. In this truth is implied the fact that the human spirit intrinsically, that is, relatively to its notion and essence, is Spirit in truth; and every particular individual in virtue of the humanity he connotes possesses the infinite vocation no less than the infinite significance of being an object of God and in union with God. But along with this and of a like importance the obligation is imposed on man to realize this notion, which, in the first instance, he merely possesses under the implication of his nature. In other words, he has to place before himself and attain to this union with God as the seal of his existence. Only when he has thus consummated his proper destiny does he become essentially free and infinite Spirit. This he can only do in so far as that unity is itself the origination, the eternal ground-root of the human and Divine nature. The goal is here the explicit beginning of the process, namely, the presupposition for the religious consciousness exhibited in romantic art, that God is Himself man and flesh, that He has become this particular human individual, in whom the reconciliation consequently no longer remains as only implicit, so that it is merely to be inferred from its notional existence, but asserts itself in objective existence also before the perception of human sense as this particular and actually existing man. The importance of this aspect of particularity consists in this that it enables all other individuals to find in the same the picture of his own reconcilement with God; it is now no longer a mere possibility, but a fact which has on this very account appeared as really accomplished in this one person. Inasmuch, however, as this unity, conceived as the ideal reconciliation of opposed factors of one process, is no immediately unified mode of being, it is inevitable, in the second place, that the process of Spirit as exemplified in this one individual—the process, that is, by means of which consciousness is for the first time Spirit in Truth—should receive the form of its existence in the history of this very person. This history of Spirit attaining its consummation in one personal life consists simply in all that we have already adverted to; that is to say, the particular man casts on one side his singularity both in its bodily and spiritual presence, in other words he suffers and dies, but furthermore through the agony of death rises again out of death and ascends as glorified God, very and real Spirit, who now, it is true, has entered actual existence as this particular person, yet is with equal truth only very God as Spirit in His community.
(a) This history furnishes the fundamental material for the romantic art of the religious consciousness, in its attitude to which, however, art, taken simply as Art, is to some extent a superfluity. For the main thing here is spiritual conviction, the feeling and conception of this eternal truth, and the faith which is essential evidence to itself of the truth, and becomes in consequence a vital possession of the ideality of that conception. In other words, faith in its developed condition consists in the immediate conviction that it has confronting soul, in the organic movement of this history, the truth itself. If, however, the consciousness of truth is the main point of importance it follows that the beauty of the artistic reflection and presentation is of incidental value to which we may be comparatively indifferent, for the truth is present to mind quite independently of art.
(b) From another point of view, however, the religious content comprises at the same time within its compass a certain aspect of this process, by virtue of which it not merely admits of artistic treatment, but, in a specific relation, admits of it as necessary. In the religious conception of romantic art, as we have more than once explained it, it is an inseparable concomitant of the content that it carries anthropomorphism to the verge of an extreme; and this is so because it is precisely this content which possesses for its main centrum the complete coalescence of the Absolute and Divine with the human consciousness as a visible part of sensuous reality, in other words, as envisaged in the external bodily frame of man, and further, is compelled to represent the Divine in the form of individuality such as is associated with the deficiencies of Nature and the mode of finite phenomena. In this respect Art supplies to the consciousness which seeks to envisage the Divine manifestation, the definite presence of an individual and real human figure, a concrete image, moreover, of the exterior traits of events, in which the birth, life, sufferings, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ are more widely circulated to the glory of God; so that it is exclusively by Art that the real and visible presence of the Divine is for ever renewed over again in a permanent form.
(c) In so far as, in this Divine manifestation, an emphasis is laid on this, namely, that God is essentially a particular individual to the exclusion of others, and does not merely present to us the union of Divine and human consciousness in its universal significance, but rather as that of this particular man, to that extent, the very nature of the content makes it inevitable that all the features of contingency and particularity incidental to finite existence assert themselves, from which the beauty which characterized the consummation of the classic Ideal had purified itself. That which the free notion of beauty had removed from itself as unfitting, in other words, the non-ideal, is in the present case accepted as a necessary aspect, which actually originates in the movement of the content itself and is consequently made explicit.
(α) And it follows from this that when the person of Christ is selected for the object of art, as so frequently occurs, artists, no matter when or where, have taken the very worst course of all who create in their presentment of Christ an Ideal in the meaning and mode of the classical Ideal. Such heads or figures of Christ may no doubt display earnestness, repose, and ethical worth: but the true Christ presentment should rather possess on the one hand soul-intensity and pre-eminently spirituality in its widest comprehension, on the other, intimate personality and individual distinction. Both these contrasted aspects are inconsistent with that blissful repose in the sensuous environment of our humanity. To combine these two termini of artistic reproduction, expression and form, as above defined, is a matter of the greatest difficulty, and painters especially have almost always got themselves into difficulties when they diverged from the traditional type[225].