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Updated: June 10, 2025
Another pitfall, however, opens here. These contrasted doctrines may change rôles. So long as by redemption we understand, in the mystic way, exaltation above finitude and existence, because all particularity is sin, to be redeemed is to abandon the Life of Reason; but redemption might mean extrication from untoward accidents, so that a rational life might be led under right conditions.
The common representations of immortality, with their hope of future compensation, are far from pious. The true immortality of religion is this amid finitude to become one with the infinite, and in one moment to be eternal. Schleiermacher's optimism well harmonizes with this view of the relation between God and the world.
We may; and the preference is one which we should all more clearly feel, were it not for an illusion, proper to the romantic temperament, which lends a mysterious charm to things which are indefinite and indefinable. It is the suggestion of infinite perfection. In reality, perfection is a synonym of finitude.
That very restlessness and dissatisfaction is the witness to the dignity of our nature, the grandeur of our destiny. We were made for God, for the attainment of eternal life through union with Him. No being who was merely finite, could be conscious of its finitude. Spite of yourselves ye witness this, Who blindly self or sense adore.
And what of the great artists and poets who have conquered the chains of mortal finitude and breathed of higher worlds? Every one of them is a convincing testimony of the possibility of mankind transcending the material, and taking unto itself of the resources of a deeper world.
There was in it some dim feeling that though God was separated from them by all the distance between finitude and infinitude, yet they were nearer to Him than to any one else; that the nearest living relation whom these poor persecuted Jews had was the Lord of Hosts, beneath whose wings they might come to trust.
The creation was the self-diremption of the infinite into finite expression, the fall was the self-discovery of this finitude, the incarnation was the awakening of the finite to its essential infinity; and here, a sufficient number of pages having been engrossed, the matter generally hastened to a conclusion; for the redemption with its means of application, once the central point in Christianity, was less pliable to the new pantheistic interpretation.
And this for Hegel is genuine evolution. That evolution demands a union of opposites seems at first paradoxical enough. To say that Christianity is a religion of both infinity and finitude means nothing less than that it contains a contradiction.
To accept everything, however, is not an easy nor a tolerable thing, unless you are naturally well pleased with what falls to your share. It will be his finitude, his inordinate claims, his enormous effrontery in having any will or any preference in particular, that will seem to him the source of all evil and the single blot on the infinite lucidity of things.
But we do cross the infinite at every step, and meet the eternal in every second. Therefore some of our philosophers say there is no such thing as finitude; it is but a maya, an illusion. The real is the infinite, and it is only maya, the unreality, which causes the appearance of the finite. But the word maya is a mere name, it is no explanation.
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