In Greek life, however, poetry, the thinking imagination, is itself the essential Service of God. Viewed from one side, these powers split up ad infinitum, and, although they constitute an exclusive circle, just because they are particular powers they themselves come almost to have the infinitude of the qualities belonging to them when they are thought of as actually existing. What a number of particular relations are comprised in Pallas, for instance! Viewed from the other side, again, we see that it is the human, sensuous-spiritual form in which the ideal is to be represented, and as a consequence of all this, this representation is inexhaustible, and must ever continue to go on and renew itself, for the religious sense is itself this continuous transition from empirical existence to the ideal. There is here no fixed, spiritually definite doctrinal system, no doctrine; we have not truth as such in the form of thought; on the contrary, we see the divine in this immanent connection with reality, and hence always raising itself up anew and producing itself in and out of this reality. If this active production is brought to perfection by art, imagination has reached its ultimate fixed form, so that the ideal is set up, and then we find that there is a close connection between this and the decay of religious life.
So long, however, as the productive force which characterises this standpoint is fresh and active, the highest form of the assimilation of the divine consists in this, that the subject makes the god present through himself, and makes the god manifest in his own self. Because in this connection the recognised subjectivity of the god at the same time remains on one side as a “Beyond,” this representation of the divine is at the same time the acknowledgment and the adoration of his own substantial essentiality. Thus accordingly the divine is revered and acknowledged when it is represented in festivals, games, plays, songs—in art, in short. For any one is honoured in so far as a lofty idea is formed of him, and in so far
