Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/295

 only not by all. Here, however, there is something known by all, which is merely treated as secret, i.e., secret only to this extent, that it is not made the talk of everyday life, just as we see in the case of Jews, who do not name the name Jehovah, or, to take an opposite case, just as in daily life there are things known to all but of which no one speaks. But these pictures of the divine were not mystical in the sense in which the public doctrines of Christendom have been called mysteries. For in the case of the latter the mystical element is the inward and speculative element. What had been seen by the initiated had to remain secret, mainly because the Greeks would not have been able to speak of it otherwise than in myths, that is to say, not without altering what was old. But even in this worship, although it starts from a definite opposition, joyousness or serenity still continues to constitute the basis. The path of purification is traversed indeed, but that does not represent the infinite pain and doubt in which the abstract self-consciousness isolates itself from itself in its abstract knowledge, and because of this moves and pulsates merely within itself when in this empty abstract form, is merely a kind of inward trembling, and in this abstract certainty of itself cannot absolutely reach fixed truth and objectivity, nor come to have the feeling of these. On the contrary, it is always on the basis of that unity that this traversing of the path exists and has value as the actually completed purification of the soul, as absolution, and having this original unconscious basis remains rather an external process of the soul, since the latter does not go down into the innermost depths of negativity as is the case where subjectivity is completely developed and attains to infinitude. If terrors, frightful images, forms inspiring dread, and such like, are already employed here, and if, on the other hand, and in contrast to this dark side, bright and brilliant representations, significant pictures full of splendour are made use of to produce a deeper effect on the