(_c_) We defined the notion of the Ideal to be the reconciliation of the inward life with its reality; we may now in like manner point to the emotion of love as _the Ideal_ of romantic art in the sphere of the religious consciousness. It is _spiritual_ beauty in its pure emanation. The classic Ideal also exhibited the mediation and reconcilement of Spirit with its Other. But here the opposing factor of Spirit was the exterior medium suffused with that Spirit, it was its bodily organism. In love, on the contrary, the opposing presence of that which is spiritual is not the phenomenon of Nature, but a spiritual consciousness itself, another subject of such; and the realization of Spirit is consequently effected by Spirit itself in its own kingdom, in that medium which is uniquely its own. It follows from this that love in this its positive self-fruition and essentially tranquillized and blessed realization is ideal, but before everything else _spiritual_ beauty, which can only be expressed for the sake of the ideal virtue it possesses and further only in and as a part of the inmost shrine of the soul. For that Spirit, which is present in _spirit_ to itself and is immediately aware of its own, which withal possesses what is spiritual for the substance and bottom of its very existence, abides in intimacy with itself, and, best definition of all, is the inward being of Love. (_α_) God is Love; and consequently it is this most profound essence which, in this form native to artistic presentation, is thus apprehended and presented in the person of Christ. Christ is, however, _Divine love_ in the sense that from one aspect of it declares God Himself as its object, that is, God in the mode of His invisible essence, and from another it as truly reveals humanity under the seal of its redemption; and for this reason it is not so much in Him[229] that the passage of one individual into another particular individual is made manifest in His love, as the fact that we have here the _idea_ of Love itself in its universality, in other words, the Absolute, the spirit of Truth in the medium and mode of emotion. With the universality of its object the expression of Love is also universalized in pursuance of which the purely individual concentration of heart and soul is not made the important point, just as among the Greeks in the ancient Titan Eros and Venus Urania we find, though, of course, in an entirely different connection, that it is the universal idea rather than the individual side of personal form and feeling which is the factor emphasized. Only when Christ is, in the presentation of romantic art, rather conceived as at the same time the isolate self-absorbed personality himself, is the expression of love clothed in the form of individual inwardness, and even then it is, of course, always exalted and uplifted by the universality of the content.