He is the essential, since it is only through that positing that He even is at all; and this unessential, this semblance or show of existence, is not a manifestation of Him. This is the Religion of Sublimity.
2. The Natural and the Spiritual are united, still they are not in immediate union, but in a unity which implies that the Spiritual is what determines, and is so united with the bodily element that this last does not stand over against it, but is merely an organ, is its expression, in which it outwardly presents itself. This is the religion of divine outward manifestation, of divine corporeality, materiality, naturalness, and this is of such a kind that it is the appearing of subjectivity, or else the self-manifestation of subjectivity is present in it, not appearing for others only, but appearing to itself. Thus this spiritual individuality is not the limitless individuality of pure thought; it has a spiritual character only. Thus on the one hand the Natural is, as it were, the body of the Spiritual, and owing to the fact that the Spiritual thus makes use of a body, the subject is on the other hand determined as finite. This is the Religion of Beauty.
In the religion of sublimity the one God is the Lord, and individuals stand related to Him as servants. In the religion of beauty, too, the subject has purified itself from its mere immediate knowing and willing, but it has also retained its will and knows itself as free, and knows itself thus because it has completed the negation of its natural will, and as moral has a free affirmative relation to God. But the subject has not as yet passed through the consciousness, and through the opposition of good and evil, and so is still affected with naturalness. If, therefore, the religion of beauty forms the stage of reconciliation as contrasted with the sphere of sublimity, this reconciliation is still immediate reconciliation, because it is not yet mediated through consciousness of the opposition.
3. The religion in which the notion, the independent,
