Note 52 — Chapter III · (continued 8)

The statement of the general contrast is no doubt true enough. It may be doubted, however, whether Hegel's own interpretation of the reconciliation of Œdipus as one consummated in death can be wholly brought under the ancient conception. It would seem truer to admit that in the spirit at least of the "Œdipus Coloneus" we have, at least in so far as that reconciliation is objective, and not merely a reconciling influence on our minds, the spectators, as in the case of the deaths of King Lear or Cornelia, in the sense that "death makes all things sweet," a mysterious approach to problems which Christianity first attempted seriously to solve, and which are usually regarded as insoluble without the assumption of a future state, or at least a divine absorption. Even admitting that Œdipus in his death became a real constituent of the harmonious unity of the civic life that received him, we cannot with truth say that such a reconciliation was one in which he shared personally, and whereof he was conscious, except in so far as he was aware of this by prevision; and to that extent the reconciliation was not in his death, but rather, as in the Christian view, a condition of the soul, a conviction that by his death he would live again,—almost identical in fact with some modern interpretations of immortality.