was most despised, and fundamentally perverted feeling, so that in man’s inner life there no longer remained anything to set against the new religion, which in its turn raised what had been most despised to the place of what was highest, and made it a banner. Everything established, everything moral, everything considered by ordinary opinion as of value and possessed of authority, was destroyed, and all that was left to the existing order of things, towards which the new religion took up a position of antagonism, was the purely external, cold power, namely, death, which life, ennobled by feeling that in its inner nature it was infinite now, no longer in any way dreaded.
Now, however, a further determination comes into play—God has died, God is dead,—this is the most frightful of all thoughts, that all that is eternal, all that is true is not, that negation itself is found in God; the deepest sorrow, the feeling of something completely irretrievable, the renunciation of everything of a higher kind, are connected with this. The course of thought does not, however, stop short here; on the contrary, thought begins to retrace its steps: God, that is to say, maintains Himself in this process, and the latter is only the death of death. God comes to life again, and thus things are reversed.[1] The Resurrection is something which thus
- ↑ This is the meaning of the resurrection and the ascension of Christ. Like all that goes before, this elevation of Christ to heaven outwardly appears for the immediate or natural consciousness in the mode of reality. “Thou wilt not leave Thy righteous one in the grave; Thou wilt not suffer Thine Holy One to see corruption.” This is the form, too, in which this death of death, the overcoming of the grave, the triumph over the negative, and this elevation to heaven appear to sense-perception. This triumphing over the negative is not, however, a putting off of human nature, but, on the contrary, is its most complete preservation in death itself and in the highest love. Spirit is Spirit only in so far as it is this negative of the negative which thus contains the negative in itself. When, accordingly, the Son of Man sits on the right hand of the Father, we see that in this exaltation of human nature its glory consists, and its identity with the divine nature appears to the spiritual eye in the highest possible way.—(From the sheets in Hegel’s own handwriting belonging to the year 1821.)
