It is the consciousness of love by which man reconciles himself with God. The consciousness of the divine love, or, the contemplation of God as human, is the mystery of the incarnation.
The incarnation is nothing else than the practical, material manifestation of the human nature of God. He did not become man for his own sake; the want of man which still exists in the religious sentiment – was the cause of the incarnation.
He was a human God
God became man out of mercy: thus he was in himself already a human God before he became an actual man; for human misery went to his heart. The incarnation was a tear of the divine compassion, and hence it was only the visible advent of a being having human feelings, and, therefore, essentially human.
The truth of the Incarnation does not belong to any religion alone, for it belongs, implicity at least, more or less to every religion as such. For every religion which has any claim to such a name presupposes that God is not indifferent to beings who worship him; that therefore what is human is not alien to him; that, as an object of human veneration, He is a human God.
Every Prayer Is, In Fact, The Incarnation Of Distress
Every prayer discloses the secret of the Incarnation; every prayer is, in fact, an incarnation of distress, I make him a participator in my sorrows and wants. God is not deaf to my complaints, he has compassion on me; he becomes human with human. He loves us all and suffers with us too. An essential condition of the incarnate, or, the human God, is the passion.
Love attests itself by suffering. God as God is the sum of all human perfection; God as man is the sum of all human misery.
The heathen philosophers celebrated activity, especially the spontaneous activity of the intelligence, as the highest, the divine; religion consecrated passivity, even placing it in God. Religion is so little super–human that it even sanctions human weakness.
To suffer is the highest command of religion.
The history of religion is the history of the passion of humanity. While among the heathen the shout of sensual pleasure mingled itself in the worship of the gods, among the early worshippers, God is served with sighs and tears. Thus tears are the light–reflecting drops which mirror the nature of those who worship God.
Source I The World’s Great Books
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