The supreme turning-point of this life of God is the putting aside of individual existence as the life of a _particular_ man simply--the story of the Passion, the suffering on the Cross, the Calvary of Spirit, the agony of death. In so far as the content here comprises the fact that the external and bodily form--immediate existence in its personal mode--is, in the pain of its inherent contradiction, propounded in this aspect of negation in order that Spirit may secure its truth and its blessedness by the sacrifice of the sensuous and its individual singularity, to that extent we reach the extreme line of division between it as an artistic creation and the classic or plastic Ideal. From one point of view no doubt the earthly body and the frailty of human Nature is expressly exalted and honoured in the fact that it is God Himself who is made manifest within it. On the other hand, however, it is just this human and bodily side which is posited as negative, and declares itself in its pain. In the classic Ideal the undisturbed harmony in no way vanishes before the co-essential Spirit. The main incidents of that Passion, the mocking of Christ, the crowning with thorns, the carrying of the cross, the final death on the same in the agony of a torturing and tedious death, are wholly incompatible with the presentment of the Greek type of beauty. The lofty aspect in such situations as these is the essential holiness implied in them, the depth of the Spirit's inmost, the eternal significance of the agony in its relation to the spiritual process, the endurance and Divine repose. The personal environment of this sublime figure is in part composed of friends and in part of enemies. The friends are throughout no ideal creations, but relatively to the notion[227], particular individualities typical of ordinary men, which the impulse of Spirit attaches to Christ: the enemies, on the other hand, by virtue of the fact that they place themselves in hostility to God, judge, mock, put to torture, and crucify Him, are presented to us as spiritually evil, and this conception of their wickedness of heart and enmity to God brings in its train on its exterior side ugliness, grossness, barbarity, the rage and distortion of Spirit. In all these respects, in contrast with the classical beauty we have before us in such representations the non-beautiful as an inevitable concomitant.