ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses man's self-knowledge; the worship of God; the transformation of the world by science; and the absolutization of man with the help of science, technology, and ideology. The general attractiveness of such "purely spiritual religion"—whether the cosmological or the mystic—resides in the uplift of the inner man to identification with God—or with the cosmos. The flaw in the new cosmology was located by a number of thinkers, among them the adepts of traditional wisdom, mystics and poets. The desacralization of the cosmos put a premium on pure rationality, while both Christian and Hebrew monotheisms tended toward institutionalization. The old cosmology received all along support from a certain type of Christian mysticism which also found official religion too dry and rational. The old cosmology, and the anthropology it shaped, had the advantage of offering to all things roots in the real.
