(b) More closely regarded this content as love has the form of self-concentrated emotion, which, instead of making its content more explicit, that is to say, presenting it to consciousness in its definite terms and universality, rather converges the infinite breadth of the same directly to one focus in the clear profundity of the soul, without further unfolding in other directions for the imagination the wealth which it essentially includes. By this means a content of equal significance, which would be inconformable to artistic presentation, is fresh from the mint of its pure and ideal universality, is none the less capable of being the subject-matter of art in this individual existence of subjective emotion; for while under a mode such as this it is not on the one hand compelled to accept an articulation of perfect clarity by reason of its still undisclosed depth, which is the obvious characteristic of soul-life, yet on the other hand it receives under this mode a medium that it is possible for art to make use of. For soul-life, heart, feeling, however self-contained and spiritual they may remain, have none the less a bond of affiliation with the sensuous and material, so that they are able also on the outside show of things through the bodily members themselves, through a look, the facial expression, or in a still more spiritual way through the voice tones or a word to disclose the inmost life and existence of Spirit. But this exterior medium is in such a case only acceptable in so far as it strictly expresses this most intimate life of soul in ways that reflect the inward nature of the soul itself.
(c) We defined the notion of the Ideal to be the reconciliation of the inward life with its reality; we may now in like manner point to the emotion of love as the Ideal of romantic art in the sphere of the religious consciousness. It is spiritual beauty in its pure emanation. The classic Ideal also exhibited the mediation and reconcilement of Spirit with its Other. But here the opposing factor of Spirit was the exterior medium suffused with that Spirit, it was its bodily organism. In love, on the contrary, the opposing presence of that which is spiritual is not the phenomenon of Nature, but a spiritual consciousness itself, another subject of such; and the realization of Spirit is consequently effected by Spirit itself in its own kingdom, in that medium which is uniquely its own. It follows from this that love in this its positive self-fruition and essentially tranquillized and blessed realization is ideal, but before everything else spiritual beauty, which can only be expressed for the sake of the ideal virtue it possesses and further only in and as a part of the inmost shrine of the soul. For that Spirit, which is present in spirit to itself and is immediately aware of its own, which withal possesses what is spiritual for the substance and bottom of its very existence, abides in intimacy with itself, and, best definition of all, is the inward being of Love.
(α) God is Love; and consequently it is this most profound essence which, in this form native to artistic presentation, is thus apprehended and presented in the person of Christ. Christ is, however, Divine love in the sense that from one aspect of it declares God Himself as its object, that is, God in the mode of His invisible essence, and from another it as truly reveals humanity under the seal of its redemption; and for this reason it is not so much in Him[229] that the passage of one individual into another particular individual is made manifest in His love, as the fact that we have here the idea of Love itself in its universality, in other words, the Absolute, the spirit of Truth in the medium and mode of emotion. With the universality of its object the expression of Love is also universalized in pursuance of which the purely individual concentration of heart and soul is not made the important point, just as among the Greeks in the ancient Titan Eros and Venus Urania we find, though, of course, in an entirely different connection, that it is the universal idea rather than the individual side of personal form and feeling which is the factor emphasized. Only when Christ is, in the presentation of romantic art, rather conceived as at the same time the isolate self-absorbed personality himself, is the expression of love clothed in the form of individual inwardness, and even then it is, of course, always exalted and uplifted by the universality of the content.
(β) The kind of love, however, which in this sphere of art is most within its reach and is generally the most successful object of the romantic and religious imagination, is the love of Mary, the mother's love. It stands closest to Nature's reality, is very human, and yet entirely spiritual, without either the interest or the egotism of sensual desire, not sensuous and yet present inward bliss in its absolute condition of fruition. It is a love that has no longing in it, not friendship, for friendship, albeit also so rich in soul quality, requires a substantive content, an essential material as the associating object. A mother's love, on the contrary, possesses without any mutuality[230] of aim or interests an immediate basis in the natural maternal bond. But in this particular case the mother's love is just as little restricted to the purely natural affiliation. Mary possesses in the child which she has carried under her heart and borne with travail the perfected knowledge and feeling of her very self, and this selfsame child, the blood of her blood, is also in equal degree exalted above her, and yet for all that she is conscious that this higher belongs to herself, and is precisely that she gains in her act of self-oblivion and possession. The natural intimacy of the mother's love is absolutely spiritualized, it receives for its very embodiment the Divine; but this spiritual coherence remains lowly and unaware, permeated in a wonderful manner with the unity of Nature and the emotion of womanhood. It is the blessed mother's love, and pertains only to the one mother, who first was recipient of its joy[231]. It is quite true that even this love is not without its pain, but the pain is merely the grief of loss, the lament over the suffering, dying, and dead son, and, as we shall find it at a later stage[232], has nothing to do with the injustice and torture suffered from a force without, or with the infinite conflict with sin, still less with agonies and pangs that arise in the soul. The inwardness of soul such as we have analysed is the beauty of Spirit, the Ideal, the human identification of man with God, with Spirit, with Truth; oblivion in its pure selflessness, the surrender of the ego, which, however, in this surrender, is from beginning to end at unity with that in which it is absorbed, and it is in this coalescence that the feeling of blessedness is consummated.
Under such a fair aspect we have maternal love embodied in romantic art, and it is at the same time a picture of Spirit itself, because Spirit is only apprehensible by art in the form of feeling; and the feeling of that union of the individual with God in its most original, most real, and most vivid form is only present in the mother's love of the Madonna. It must inevitably form the subject-matter of art, if in the representation of this, the sphere of the religious imagination, the Ideal, the affirmative reconciliation in its joy is not to fall short of its aim. There has consequently been a time when the maternal love of the Blessed Virgin has been placed as the highest and holiest of Earth's possessions, and as such has been revered and presented to mankind. When, however, Spirit is brought before the human consciousness in its own native element, separated, that is, from all underlying emotion, the free mediation of Spirit that is built up on such a foundation can alone be regarded as the free road to Truth; and consequently we find that in Protestantism, as contrasted to this worship of Mary whether in art or belief, it is the Holy Spirit, and the inmost mediation of Spirit which has become the loftier truth.
(γ) Thirdly, and in conclusion, the positive reconciliation of spiritual life is embodied in the feelings of Christ's own disciples, the women and friends who follow him. Such are for the most part characters who have personally taken on themselves the severity of the idea of Christianity, hand iii hand with their Divine friend, by virtue of the friendship, teaching, and sermons of Christ, without passing through the external and inward pangs of spiritual conversion, who have carried it forward, made themselves masters both of it and themselves, and in the depth of their hearts remain strong in the same. From such, no doubt, the immediate unity and intimacy of that mother's love in a measure vanishes; but they still possess as the bond which unites them the presence of Christ, the common service to a great life which they share, and the direct impulse of Spirit[233].
3. THE SPIRIT OF THE COMMUNITY
In making our passage over to a concluding stage of the subject under discussion we can hardly do better than associate it with that which we have already touched upon in connection with the history of Christ. The immediate existence of Christ, as this particular man, who is God, is assumed to be wiped out, in other words, the truth itself asserts itself that in the manifestation of God as man, the true reality of God thus envisaged is not immediate sensuous existence but Spirit. The reality of the Absolute regarded as infinite subjectivity[234] is simply Spirit itself; God is in knowledge, in the element of the inner life, and only there. This absolute existence of God, as absolutely ideal to the same extent as it is subjective[235] universality, does not therefore admit of the limitations of this particular individual, who has in the story of his life made manifest the reconciliation between the Divine and human self-consciousness, but on the contrary is enlarged to the full measure of the human consciousness which is reconciled to God, that is, in general terms to our humanity, which exists as an aggregate of many individuals. In his independence, however, taken, that is, as a specific personality, man is not under any immediate mode the Divine, but on the contrary finite and human, which only in so far as it really propounds itself as a negation, which it essentially is, and thereby annuls itself in this negative aspect, can attain to the reconcilement with God. It is only by virtue of this deliverance from the frailty of finitude that our humanity declares itself as the vehicle of the existence of the absolute Spirit, as the spirit of the community, in which the union of the human and Divine Spirit within the bounds of human reality itself, in the sense of its realized mediation, carries into fulfilment what essentially, if we look at it in the light of the notion of Spirit, it is from the first in that very union.
The principal modes which are of importance in respect to this new content of romantic art may be distinguished as follows: