From the loss of itself and of its world grows an infinite grief. The people of Israel stood ready for this grief.

What happens then?

Spirit falls back wholly into itself. At this outermost point it finds something infinitely positive within. The principle of the unity of divine and human nature. Reconciliation. Truth and freedom now appear in one’s own consciousness.

Who is to make this real?

This task falls to the Germanic peoples of the North.

Summary: Spirit grieves over the loss of the old world. Out of this grief it finds the reconciliation of the divine and the human. The Germanic peoples have the task of making it real.

§ 452. The spiritual substance, which frees its content, as well as its individual actuality or its self-consciousness, from its limitedness in the fear of death, has raised this to infinity, and therein is an object to itself as universal spirit, which self-consciousness knows as its substance, thereby likewise freed from fear, and which is the actuality corresponding to its concept.