[15] The religious, the original mode in which man becomes objective to himself, is (as is clearly enough, explained in this work) to be distinguished from the mode in which this occurs in reflection and speculation; the latter is voluntary, the former involuntary, necessary—as necessary as art, as speech. With the progress of time, it is true; theology coincides with religion. [↑]
[16] [Deut. xxiii. 12, 13]. [↑]
[17] See, for example, [Gen. xxxv. 2]; [Levit. xi. 44]; [xx. 26]; and the Commentary of Le Clerc on these passages. [↑]
PART I.
THE TRUE OR ANTHROPOLOGICAL ESSENCE OF RELIGION.
CHAPTER II.
GOD AS A BEING OF THE UNDERSTANDING.
Religion is the disuniting of man from himself; he sets God before him as the antithesis of himself. God is not what man is—man is not what God is. God is the infinite, man the finite being; God is perfect, man imperfect; God eternal, man temporal; God almighty, man weak; God holy, man sinful. God and man are extremes: God is the absolutely positive, the sum of all realities; man the absolutely negative, comprehending all negations.
But in religion man contemplates his own latent nature. Hence it must be shown that this antithesis, this differencing of God and man, with which religion begins, is a differencing of man with his own nature.