Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/325

 substantial, and valid standing. It is within these extremes and within the contradiction involved in them that Roman life moves restlessly about.

Roman virtue, virtus, consists of that kind of cold patriotism according to which the individual gives himself wholly up to advance anything that is a matter of state or of sovereignty. The Romans too gave a visible representation of this disappearance of the individual in the universal, of this negativity, and it constitutes an essential feature of their religious games.

In a religion which has no doctrine it is by means specially of the representations given in festivals and dramas that the truth concerning the god is brought before the eyes of men. In such a religion dramas have for this reason a wholly different importance from what they have with us. In ancient times their essential object is to bring before the imagination the process of the substantial powers, the divine life in its movement and action. The adoration of the images of the gods, and the worship paid to them are connected with this divine life in its state of repose or Being, and the movement of the divine life is contained in the narratives connected with the gods, in the myth, though it is thought of as existing only for the inner subjective mental representation of the truth. And just as the idea formed of the god in his state of repose comes to find expression in some work of art, in the manner characteristic of immediate imaginative perception, so, too, the idea formed of divine action comes to be represented externally in the drama. Such a way of representing the god was not indigenous to the Romans; it was not something which sprang up on Roman soil and Roman ground; and thus in adopting what was for them originally foreign, they turned it into something empty, ghastly, horrible—as we can see in the case of Seneca—without making the moral divine Idea of it their own. So, too, it was really only the later Greek comedy which they took to do with, and they gave