(_γ_) We might possibly suppose that the passage into a higher sphere of reality would have been emphasized by the imagination and art as a further war among the gods, in a way analogous, in fact, to the first transition from the symbolism of the gods of Nature to the spiritual Ideals of classical art. This is by no means the case. On the contrary, this translation is carried forward in a wholly different field, as a conflict brought home to consciousness between absolute reality and the present world. For this reason art, in its relation to the higher content, which it has to seize under new modes, occupies an entirely altered position. This new configuration does not assert its importance as revelation by means of Art, but is made manifest independently without it, and appears on the prosaic ground of controversial and rational discussion, and from thence is within the soul and its religious emotions, mainly by means of miracle, martyrdoms, and so on, carried into the world of subjective knowledge, together with a consciousness of the contradiction between all that is finite and the Absolute, which unfolds itself in actual history as the process of events toward a Present which is not merely imagined, but is the _fact_ we have before us. The Divine, God Himself, becomes flesh, is born, lives, suffers, dies, and rises from the dead. This is a content which heart did not discover, but which, quite apart from it, was a present fact, and which consequently it has not borrowed from its own domain, but merely supplies a form to it. That old transition and war of the gods, on the contrary, discovered its origins in the artistic or imaginative view of the world simply, which created its wisdom and plastic shapes from its inner life, and gave to astonished mankind his new gods. For this reason the classic gods also have only received their existence through the fiat of the imagination, and merely exist as such in stone and bronze, or in the world open to the senses, not, however, in flesh and blood, or in very and actual Spirit. The anthropomorphism of the Greek gods is therefore without real human existence, that of body no less than that of Spirit. It is Christianity which first introduces us to this reality in flesh and blood as the determinate existence, life, and activity of God Himself. Consequently this bodily form, this flesh, however much also the purely natural and sensuous is recognized as a negation therein, receives its due and honour, and that which partakes of anthropomorphism here is sanctified. Even as man originally was made in the image of God, God is an image of man; whoso beholdeth the Son beholdeth the Father, and whoso loveth the Son loveth the Father. In a word, God is acknowledged as present in the actual world. This new content, then, is not brought home to consciousness by means of the conceptions of art, but is presented from an exterior source as an actual occurrence, as the history of the God who became flesh.