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"There are," says Goethe in an aphorism, "only two true religions: the one, that which recognizes and worships the holy that dwells in and around us without giving it any form whatever; the other, that which gives it the fairest form: whatever lies between is idolatry."¹ In antiquity these two religions existed independently of each other as the Jewish and the Greek. They had in common that they saw nature not as primary or independent but as that through which infinite purpose was realized. Human life had its meaning as participation in that purpose. The two religions differed in that, for the one, there was in truth only the actuality of the infinite purpose; in the other, artistic imagination presented the unity of nature and thought as a number of gods, inconsistently both absolute and special. The one detracted nothing from the divine; the other elevated the human as it limited the divine. Against both, another religion proved itself dominant in the world, which divinized the human and put finite purposes in place of the one infinite purpose.²

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-2434-1_15

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