It is perfectly true that the Christian religion contains, and may justly claim to accentuate, a certain phase of art; but in the due course of its development, at the time of the Aufklärung[199], it has also reached a point where we find that thought, or rather the Understanding[200], has driven into the background that element, which art pre-eminently requires, the actual human envisagement and revelation of God. For the human form and all that it expresses and declares, human events, actions, feeling, is the form under which art is forced to conceive and represent the content of Spirit. Inasmuch as the Understanding has converted God into a mere fact of thought, no longer crediting the appearance of His Spirit in concrete reality, and thus has alienated the God of Thought from all actual existence, this type of religious Illumination has necessarily accepted conceptions and requirements which are intolerable to Art. When, however, the Understanding is raised once more from the region of these abstractions into that of Reason, the need at once asserts itself for something more concrete, and withal for that kind of concreteness which Art itself unfolds. The period of the illuminating Understanding has, no doubt, possessed an art of its own, but only of very prosaic type, as we may even find it in Schiller, whose point of departure was precisely that of such a period of criticism; later on, however, owing to his realization how little reason, imagination, and passion were satisfied by the critical Understanding, he experienced a deep longing for art, in the fullest sense of the term, and primarily for the classical art of the Greeks and their gods, and general views of the world. It is from this kind of yearning, a reaction, in short, from the mere abstractions of the mind, that the poem referred to originated. According to the original draft of the poem, Schiller's attitude to Christianity is entirely polemical; afterwards he modified it considerably, no doubt realizing that its _animus_ was only directed against the critical aspect of the Illumination, which at a later time itself began to lose its importance. In the first instance he praises the Greek point of view as fortunate in that the whole of Nature was a thing of Life to it, and full of divinities. After that he reviews the Present and its prosaic conception of natural law, and the position man here takes relatively to God: /$ Diese traur'ge Stille Kündigt sie mir meinen Schöpfer an? Finster wie er selbst ist seine Hülle, Mein _Entsagen_, was ihn feiern kann[201]. $/