Architecture is predominantly symbolic; sculpture permits the purest expression of the classical ideal; painting, music, and poetry bear a romantic character.  This does not exclude the recurrence of these three stages within each art—­in architecture, for example, as monumental (the obelisk), useful (house and temple), and Gothic (the cathedral) architecture.  As the plastic arts reached their culmination among the Hellenes, so the romantic arts culminate among the Christian nations.  In poetry, as the most perfect and universal (or the totality of) art, uniting in itself the two contraries, the symbolic and the classical, the lyric is a repetition of the architectonic-musical, the epic, of the plastic-pictorial, the drama, the union of the lyric and the epic.

(2) Philosophy of Religion.—­The withdrawal from outer sensibility into the inner spirit, begun in romantic art, especially in poetry, is completed in religion.  In religion the nations have recorded the way in which they represent the substance of the world; in it the unity of the infinite and the finite is felt, and represented through imagination.  Religion is not merely a feeling of piety, but a thought of the absolute, only not in the form of thinking.  Religion and philosophy are materially the same, both have God or the truth for their object, they differ only in form—­religion contains in an empirical, symbolic form the same speculative content which philosophy presents in the adequate form of the concept.  Religion is developing knowledge as it gradually conquers imperfection.  It appears first as definite religion in two stadia, natural religion and the religion of spiritual individuality, and finally attains the complete realization of its concept in the absolute religion of Christianity.

Natural religion, in its lowest stage magic, develops in three forms—­as the religion of measure (Chinese), of phantasy (Indian or Brahmanical), and of being in self (Buddhistic).  In the Persian (Zoroastrian) religion of light, the Syrian religion of pain, and the Egyptian religion of enigma, is prepared the way for the transformation into the religion of freedom.  The Greek solves the riddle of the Sphinx by apprehending himself as subject, as man.

The religion of spiritual individuality or free subjectivity passes through three stadia:  the Jewish religion of sublimity (unity), the Greek religion of beauty (necessity), the Roman religion of purposiveness (of the understanding).  In contrast to the Jewish religion of slavish obedience, which by miracle makes known the power of the one God and the nullity of nature, which has been “created” by his will, and the prosaic severity of the Roman, which, in Jupiter and Fortuna, worships only the world-dominion of the Roman people, the more cheerful art-religion of the Hellenes reverences in the beautiful forms of the gods, the powers which man is aware of in himself—­wisdom, bravery, and beauty.