Page:The Theme of the Joseph Novels.djvu/21

 telling, that everything was there for the first time, than one foundation took place after the other, the foundation love, of envy, of hatred, of murder, and of much else. But this dominant originality is, at the same time, repetition, reflection, image; the result of rotation of the spheres which brings the upper, the starlike into the lower regions, carries, in turn, the worldly into the realm of the divine, so that gods become men, men in turn become gods. The worldly finds itself pre-created in the realm of the stars, and the individual character seeks its dignity by tracing itself back to the timeless, mythical pattern, giving it presence.

I dwelled on the birth of the Ego out of the mythical collective, the Abrahamitic Ego which is pretentious enough to assume that man should serve only the Highest, from which assumption the discovery of God followed. The claim of the human ego to central importance is the premise for the discovery of God, and from the very first the pathos for the dignity of the Ego is connected with that for the dignity of humanity.

At the same time, these humans remain confined in the mythical, the collective, to a large extent of their being. What they call spirit and culture, is just the conviction that their lives are the embodiment of the myth, and their ego detaches itself from the collective in much the same way as certain figures of Rodin wrest themselves out of the stone and awaken from it. Jaacob, weighty with stories, is also such a half-detached figure: his solemness is still mythical and already individual; the cult which he devotes to his feelings, and for which he is punished by the jealousy of the Highest is the bland but proud assertion of an ego which loftily feels itself the subject and hero of its stories. It is still a patriarchal and respectable form of human [17]