Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/296

 mind, the initiated is purified in the very process of passing through the experience of seeing these pictorial forms and having these emotions.

These mystical perceptions or pictorial forms accordingly correspond to those pictorial forms of the divine life, the process of which is set forth in tragedy and comedy. The fear, the sympathy, the grief represented in tragedy, all those conditions in which self-consciousness is carried away, and in which it shares, are just what forms that process of purification which accomplishes all that should be accomplished. In the same way the pictorial representations of comedy, and the giving up by Spirit of its dignity, of its value, of its opinion of itself, and even of its fundamental powers, this entire surrender of all that belongs to self, is just this worship in which the spirit, through this surrender of all that is finite, enjoys and retains the indestructible certainty of itself.

In public worship even the main interest is not so much the paying of honour to the gods as the enjoyment of the divine. Since, however, in this worship of mysteries, the soul is on its own account elevated into an end and is regarded in this condition of contrast as abstract, independent, and, as it were, sundered from the divine, the idea of the immortality of the soul necessarily makes its appearance here. The completed purification raises it above the temporal, fleeting, present existence, and inasmuch as it is made permanently free, the idea of the passing over of the individual as one dead on his natural side, into an eternal life, is closely associated with this form of worship. The individual is made a citizen of the essential, ideal kingdom of the under world, in which temporal reality is reduced to the condition of a phantom world.

Since then the mysteries represent the return of the Greek spirit to its first beginnings, the form of what constitutes these is essentially symbolical, i.e., the signification is something other than the outward