In much the same way the gods appear to us in their aspect of lofty freedom and spiritual repose to be exalted over their bodily presence, so that they seem to feel their form, their limbs, despite all the beauty that is there, as at the same time a superfluous appanage. And yet withal the entire presentment is suffused with vitality, identical with their spiritual being, inseparable, without the disunion of what is essentially subsistent, and those parts which are more loosely put together, the spirit in short neither escaping nor coming forth from the body, but both firmly moulded together into a whole, out of which, and in no other way, the self-absorption of Spirit looks forth in silence in its amazing and secure self-possession.
(_γγ_) For the reason, then, that the contention we have indicated is present, without appearing, however, as a difference or separation of the ideal spirituality from its external form, the negative which is therein contained, is for this very reason immanent in this inseparable totality and is thereby expressed. This is within the sphere of this spiritual loftiness the breath and atmosphere of melancholy, which men of genius have felt in the godlike figures of antique art even where the beauty of the external presentment is consummate. The repose of divine blessedness[191] is unable to split itself up into the passions of joy, pleasure, and satisfaction, and the _peace_ of immortality stands aloof from the smile of self-satisfaction and genial contentedness. Contentment is the emotion of the agreement of our singular subjectivity with the condition of that environment which is defined for or given to us or brought about through our own agency. Napoleon, for example, never expressed more thorough contentment than when he happened to obtain some success at the cost of making all the world discontented. For contentment is only the approval of my own being, action, and engagements, and the extreme of it is readily recognizable in that state of feeling of the Philistine to which every man of practical ability necessarily extends it. This feeling and its expression is, however, no expression appropriate to the prefigured immortal gods. Free and perfected beauty is not satisfied with joining the concordant temper of a particular finite existence; rather its individuality, in its aspect as Spirit no less than in that of form, albeit it is self-defined with characterization, only finds itself fully in union with its true nature when it is at the same time free universality and spirituality in repose upon itself. This universality is just that which people are wont to point to as the frigidity of the Greek gods. They are only cold, however, to our modern intimacy with the temporal. Independently regarded they possess warmth and life; that peaceful blessedness, which is reflected in their external presentment, is essentially an abstraction from particularity, a mode of being indifferent to the Past, a surrender of that which is external, a giving up which, albeit neither full of trouble nor pain, is for all that a giving up of what is earthly and evanescent, just as their cheerfulness of spirit looks far away and over death, the grave, loss and temporality, and for the very reason that it is profound inherently contains this negative we are discussing. And the more this earnestness and spiritual freedom is prominent in the vision of these godlike figures the more we feel the contrast between this loftiness and the determinate corporality in which they are enclosed. The blessed gods mourn quite as much over their blessedness as their bodily environment. In the letters of their form we read the destiny which lies before them, and whose development, as actual manifestation of that contradiction between this very loftiness and that particularity, spirituality, and sensuous existence classical art itself sets face to face with its final overthrow.