In line with the principles of Romantic criticism discussed above, mourning-plays contain their own distinct form and should be criticised according to their own immanently discovered standards. The “content [Gehalt]” and “ true object” of the baroque mourning-play is not, as it is in tragedy, myth but rather historical life (OGT, 46). As with Goethe’s borrowing of the novella form, this content is in part derived from other aesthetic structures, principally the eschatological focus of mediaeval Christian literature: the Passion-Plays, Mystery-Plays and chronicles whose historiography portrayed “the whole of the course of history, world history as salvation history” (OGT, 65). But the Lutheran renunciation of the Catholic emphasis upon good works, and the secularizing tendency implicit in the naturalistic legal and political philosophies of the 16th and 17th century (discussed in relation to Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty) resulted in the stripping bare of human value and significance from such history. This tense, antinomical combination of transcendence and immanence produces an uneasy hybrid, in which history—as a narrative of the human march towards redemption on the Day of Judgement—loses the eschatological certainty of its redemptive conclusion, and becomes secularized into a mere natural setting for the profane struggle over political power. 