 Whereas earlier rationalists had conceived of God as being entirely distinct from nature and possessing perfect knowledge untainted by materiality, and had furthermore “placed the effort and labor of abstraction and of self-liberation from the sensuous only in themselves”, Feuerbach notes that Hegel was the first to transform “this subjective activity into the self-activity of the divine being”, so that, like the heroes of pagan antiquity, God (or the Idea) must “fight through virtue for his divinity”, and only comes to be for himself (or itself) at the end of a long and laborious process (GPZ 296/32). This process, as it is described by Hegel at the end of the Science of Logic, involves the logical Idea 