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darkness' sake. The "mysticist" does not want to see what he could
see, but instead merely to "divine"; it affects the soul more agreeably,
and perhaps we may also say: it implies less of an obligation. In
reality the removal of the glass was an act of an "enlightenment"
which leads deeper into the mystery: for now the form- and color–
intoxicated visitor to this incomparable church far more directly
confronts the mystery which gives it profundity: the incomprehensi–
ble suffering of the Son of God. Previously, there was only a shadow,
something dark, which, in its contrast with the light-created nave of
the church, "somehow" aroused emotion: now one
is
struck by the
mystery itself, and it is because a veil has been removed, something
that deceived, something that concealed-because light has been let
in, because there has been enlightenment.
.
It is precisely Christian faith, and Christian faith alone, which
from the beginning contains an element of enlightenment: for it is
finally based upon the report of an event, a fact, a historical oc–
currence. The religions are human interpretations of the incom–
prehensible world and incomprehensible life, they grope toward
truth, they divine it, they seek to serve it, they play with it, they
have their justification in the hiddenness of God. Christianity is the
announcement that God emerged from his hiddenness, under Pontius
Pilate in the Roman province of Judaea: that he was born a man
in Bethlehem, that he was crucified and rose again. Christian "doc–
trine" is an enlightenment concerning this enlightenment-state of
God, which made the religions of the world meaningless.
This
en–
lightenment does away with the taboos, the myths, the power of the
magical spheres.
Inasmuch as God in Christ, through his words and his life,
enlightens man concerning the true God, he also enlightens
him
concerning man: he frees him to himself. This too can be under–
stood as the beginning of Christian enlightenment.
This side of Christianity has not always preponderated. Faith
had at once to disillusion and comfort the confused and troubled
man of late antiquity through its truth; and it did so, but in that
climate of late antique superstition Christianity itself often became
phantasmal. But in certain passages of its history the enlightenment
side of the Christian faith is obvious and palpable. It is so, for
example, in contrast to the same vulgar superstition of late antiquity,
