Mystery

Use in the book

The tiny equation of mysteries with religious secrets remains open-ended. The extended account of Trinity and Incarnation instead asks how one mystery joined to another can produce practical consequences. Finally Joubert points to theologians who announce that everything in faith is mystery while claiming everything in their detailed systems is demonstrated. The last contrast criticizes the movement between those levels; it does not resolve their relation in a new theory supplied by the reader.

Places to read

1. I, p. 191, entry begun p. 190, no. 13, ¶2An unfinished gloss relates mysteries to religious secrets.
2. II, p. 669, entry 7, ¶1Joining mysteries gives them practical consequences.
3. II, p. 802–803, entry 2, ¶10General mystery and detailed demonstration are juxtaposed critically.

Translation in this edition

The English translation preserves “religious secrets,” the speculative/practical distinction and both occurrences of “everything” in the criticism of theologians. Speculative means contemplative or theoretical here. The damaged words in the last witness are marked as contextual English completions.

Use in the book

The opening programme is to unfold a mystery in plain terms: the reader is heir of the world and called to communion in divine glory. Traherne’s surprising truths are not valued because they remain inaccessible. Their concealment has prevented enjoyment, and friendship now undertakes to make their interior beauty known.

Redemption is inseparable from this disclosed end. The mystery includes Christ’s love in saving, but also the communion for which salvation occurs. Elsewhere it is mysterious that the same world can be paradise to one person and prison to another. Mystery thus often signals a relation hidden within familiar experience, requiring an altered apprehension rather than an exotic object.

Places to read

1. I.3The work promises a plain unfolding of the reader’s concealed inheritance.
2. I.5The mystery includes the end of redemption in communion with divine glory.
3. I.36Opposite experiences of one world reveal a mystery of apprehension and enjoyment.

In this edition

Mystery does not automatically mean an unintelligible proposition. In the opening meditations it is precisely what the writer undertakes to unfold.

Use in the book

Fusées II condenses violet into restrained, mysterious, veiled love and the colour of a canoness. No single person or religious order is identified. The colour draws emotional and institutional associations together without unfolding them into an allegory. Its withheld quality is part of the note's usefulness as a future poetic resource.

Fusées XVI expressly leaves room for conjecture and counts mystery and regret among the qualities of the Beautiful. The male head receives mystery too, so the word crosses the passage's gendered division between erotic suggestion and frustrated power. But the bewitched-mirror parenthesis also warns that suggestiveness can become projection. To value mystery is not to certify every secret the observer imagines.

Fusées XXII begins by explaining the ship's infinite and mysterious charm through symmetry and moving lines. An explanation of the operation does not abolish the resulting sense of depth. Mon cœur mis à nu LII, by contrast, accuses Voltaire of hating mystery because he is lazy. That polemical judgment reverses the familiar idea that only explanation requires intellectual effort: here reduction may be the shortcut, while sustaining difficult relations between body, creation and spirit asks more of thought. The insult remains Baudelaire's evaluation, not an impartial portrait of Voltaire.

Places to read

1. Fusées IIamour contenu, mystérieux, voilé — The violet colour gathers associations without resolving them.
2. Fusées XVILe mystère, le regret sont aussi des caractères du Beau. — Mystery becomes a positive aesthetic quality.
3. Fusées XXIIle charme infini et mystérieux — The ship retains mystery even while the notebook analyzes its effects.
4. Mon cœur mis à nu LIIVoltaire, comme tous les paresseux, haïssait le mystère. — The polemic treats reduction of mystery as an intellectual failure.

Translation in this edition

The edition retains ‘mystery’ rather than repeatedly substituting enigma, which would overpromise a solution. ‘Leaving room for conjecture’ gives laisser carrière its sense of freedom for interpretive movement. ‘Canoness’, explained in translator's note 2, preserves a specific religious title; replacing it with ‘nun’ would narrow the associations of the violet fragment. The edition's ‘veiled’ likewise keeps concealment material as well as figurative.