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T H E S P I R I T O F C H R I S T I A N I T Y and both were one-sided, because worship was incomplete, since something divine was promised and it melted away in the mouth. (302) It is of the greatest interest to see how and with what teaching Jesus directly confronts (a) the principle of subjection and (b) the infinite Sovereign Lord of the Jews. Here, at the center of their spirit, the battle must have been in its most stubborn phase, since to attack one thing here was to attack their all. The attack on single offshoots of the Jewish spirit affects its underlying principle too, although there is as yet no consciousness that this principle is attacked. There is no embitterment until there is a growing feeling that at the roots of a struggle about a single point there lies a conflict of principles. Jesus was opposed to the Jews on the question of their Most High; and this opposition was soon put into words on both sides. To the Jewish idea of God as their Lord and Governor, Jesus opposes a relationship of God to men like that of a father to his children. Morality cancelsdominationwithin the sphereofconsciousness; 70 love cancels the barriers in the sphere of morality; but love itself is still incomplete in nature.71In the moments of happy love there is no room for objectivity; yet every reflection annuls love, restores objectivity again, and with objectivity we are once more on the territory of restrictions. What is religious, then, is the aX$pwpa ["fulfilment"] of love; it is reflection and love united, bound together in thought. Love's intuition seems to fulfil the demand for completeness; but there is a contradiction. Intuition, representative thinking, is something restrictive, something receptive only of something restricted; but here the object intuited [God] would be something infinite. The infinite cannot be carried in this vessel. 70. [I.e., Kantian moraliey substitutes reverence of a moral law within man's consciousness for fear of a dominant overlord outside him, though reason's law cramps part of man's nature instead of fulfilling it.] 7 1. [Hegel added here, but afterward deleted, the words : "Love may be happy or unhappy."] [253 I E A R L Y T H E O L O G I C A L W R I T I N G S To conceive of pure life72means trying to abstract from every deed, from everything which the man was or will be. Charactcr is an abstraction from activity alone; it means thc universal behind specific actions. Consciousness of pure life would be conscio~lsness of what the man is, and in it there is no differentiation and no developed or actualized multiplicity. This simplicity is not a negative simplicity, a unity (303) produced by abstraction (since in such a unity either we have simply the positing of one determinate thing in abstraction from all other determinacies, 0:- else its pure unity is only the negatively indeterminate, i.e., the posited demand for abstraction from everything determinate. Pure life is being).7VPlurality is nothing absolute. This pure life is the source of all separate lives, impulses, and deeds. Rut if it comes into consciousness as a belief in life, it is then living in the bcliever and yet is to some extent posited outside him. Since, in thus becoming conscious of it, he is restricted, his consciousness and the infinite cannot be completely in one. Man can believe in a God only by being able to abstract from every deed, from everything determinate, while at the same time simply clinging fast to the soul of every deed and everything determinate . In anything soulless and spiritless there can be nothing divine . If a man always feels himself determined, always doing or suffering this or that, acting in this way or that, then what has thus been abstracted and delimited has not been cut off from the spirit; on the contrary, what remains permanent for him behind these passing details is only the opposite of life, namely, the dominant universal.74 7 2 . [". . . . or pure self-consciousness," as I-legel first wrote and then dcleted .] 73. [I.e., is positive, not ncgarivc; is reality, not a demand, is not a determinate thing, but is positively indeterminate.] 74. [The meaning of this obscure passage seerns to be as follows : Morality is a spirit uniting deterininate moral actions into a living...

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