Page 35 - Eclipse of God

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RELIGION AND REALITY

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The relationship between religion and reality prevailing in a
given epoch is the most accurate index of its true character.
In some periods, that which men “believe in” as something
absolutely independent of themselves is a reality with which
they are in a living relation, although they well know that they
can form only a most inadequate representation of it. In other
periods, on the contrary, this reality is replaced by a varying
representation that men “have” and therefore can handle, or
by only a residue of the representation, a concept which bears
only faint traces of the original image.
Men who are still “religious” in such times usually fail to re-
alize that the relation conceived of as religious no longer exists
between them and a reality independent of them, but has ex-
istence only within the mind— a mind which at the same time
contains hypostatized images, hypostatized “ideas.”
Concomitantly there appears, more or less clearly, a certain
type of person, who thinks that this is as it should be: in the
opinion of this person, religion has never been anything but
an intra- psychic process whose products are “projected” on

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