This is nothing other than the performance of tragedy within the ethical, which the Absolute eternally plays with itself: that it eternally gives birth to itself into objectivity, thereby surrendering itself, in this its figure, to suffering and to death, and raising itself up out of its ashes into glory. The divine, in its figure and objectivity, has immediately a doubled nature, and its life is the absolute oneness of these natures; but the movement of the absolute conflict of these two natures presents itself, in the divine [nature] that has comprehended itself therein, as courage – with which it frees itself from the death of the other, conflicting nature, yet through this liberation surrenders its own life, for this life exists only in being bound together with that other; but it likewise rises again out of it absolutely, for in this death, as the sacrifice of the second nature, death is itself conquered; – appearing, however, in the other nature, the divine movement presents itself such that the pure abstraction of this nature, which would be a merely subterranean, purely negative power, is sublated through its living union with the divine, in that the latter shines into it and, through this ideal oneness in spirit, makes it into its own reconciled living body – which, as body, at once remains in difference and in transience, and, through spirit, beholds the divine as something alien to itself.

The image of this tragedy, more closely determined for the ethical, is the outcome of that trial of the Eumenides – as the powers of right that subsists in difference – and of Apollo, the god of indifferent light, over Orestes, before the ethical organization, the people of Athens; which, in human fashion, as the Areopagus of Athens, casts equal votes for both powers into the urn, acknowledges the coexistence of both, yet thereby neither settles the strife nor determines any relation or connection between them; but, in divine fashion, as the Athena of Athens, gives back wholly to himself the one entangled, by the god himself, in this difference, and, together with the separation of the powers that both had a part in the criminal, also brings about a reconciliation such that the Eumenides would be honored by this people as divine powers and would henceforth have their seat in the city, so that their wild nature might enjoy the sight, from their altar erected below in the city, of Athena enthroned on high upon the citadel opposite, and would thereby be pacified.

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