 The unfinished character of Yorck's manuscript is apparent especially in these passages, for there is no further exploration or exposition of the Jewish world (let alone anything like a justification for the juxtaposition of the Jewish world with the Roman period). Yorck's comments concerning the Roman world are likewise very sketchy at best. Although Yorck positions the Romans as a world-historical people of the will, he does not do much more than to refer to the popular notion of the “imperialist drive of the Romans” (ST, p. 30). Once, in a letter to Dilthey, Yorck emphasizes that the Roman pursuit of power locks life into pure immanence, without temporality and transcendence: “Might is everything,” he writes (CR, p. 120). Yorck continues by contending that the proverbial epithet of Rome as the “Eternal City” is by no means a mere saying. Rather, for Yorck, it captures something of the ostentatious display of Rome's imperial power—its splendid oblivion of time. Yorck writes: “Rome does not, just as no Roman ever does, comprehend—death” (CR, p. 120). By way of historical contraposition, Yorck then describes, in the same letter, the “mute, simple crosses” scratched into the walls of the underground Carcere Mamertino by imprisoned early Christians. Yorck characterizes these crosses as “light-points on the underground sky [of the prison], signs of the transcendence of consciousness” (CR, p. 120). The immanence of a life lived for power and might is contrasted with the interiority of a conscious feeling of transcendence. 