Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/281

 here is a useless and aimless kind of giving up, a renunciation which is not practical and has not reference to the self; as, for example, the pouring out of a bowl of wine. The sacrifice is itself at the same time the enjoyment of the thing; the wine is drunk, the meat is eaten, and it is the power of Nature itself whose individual existence and external form are offered up and destroyed. Eating means sacrifice, and sacrifice just means eating.

Thus this higher sense of sacrifice and the enjoyment found in it attach themselves to all the actions of life; every occupation, every enjoyment of daily life is a sacrifice. Worship is not renunciation, not the offering up of a possession, of something belonging to oneself, but is rather idealised, theoretical and artistic enjoyment. Freedom and spirituality are spread over the entire daily and immediate life of man, and worship is in short a continuous poetry of life.

The worship of these gods is accordingly not to be called service in the proper sense of the word, as something having reference to a foreign independent will from whose chance decision is to be obtained what is desired. On the contrary, the act of adoration itself already implies a previous granting of something, or, in other words, it is itself enjoyment. It is, therefore, not a question of calling a power back to oneself from its place beyond what is here and now, nor of renouncing what, on the subjective side of self-consciousness, constitutes the separation, in order that man may be receptive of the power. It is thus not a question of deprivation or renunciation, or of the laying aside of something subjective belonging to the individual, nor does the idea of anguish, of self-tormenting, of self-torture come in here. The worship of Bacchus or of Ceres is the possession, the enjoyment of bread and wine, the consumption of these, and is therefore itself the immediate granting of these things. The Muse to which Homer appeals is in the same way his genius, and so on.