ABSTRACT
Most of us are polytheists, inconsistently and confusingly worshipping ourselves, our country, ‘freedom’, sex or money. There is no class of objects known as ‘gods’. Worshipping is a relationship: gods are what the peoples worship. In German culture, things went rather differently, the Germans being less interested in machinery than in deep thought. German metaphysics, from Kant to Heidegger, became an immensely impressive exercise in substituting philosophy for theology, pure thought for prayerful reflection. ‘Credere Deum’ is a matter of believing god to be god, both in the sense of acknowledging that god exists and in the sense of acknowledging that the one the peoples mention when they speak of ‘god’ is, as it were, the only real god.
