Page:Novalis Schriften - Volume 2.djvu/138

★ 128 ★ tendency, a religious hope, a belief in a future religion which in a miraculous way transformed them from the ground up, and with the most remarkable endurance preserved them down to our times.

On closer examination, however, true religion appears again to be divided antinomically into pantheism and monotheism. I am using a license here in that I do not take pantheism in the ordinary sense, but understand it as the idea that everything can be an agent of divinity, can be a mediator, by my elevation of it: just as monotheism, on the contrary, indicates a belief that there is only one such agent bestowed for us in the world, one alone that is appropriate to the idea of ​​a mediator, and through which God alone lets himself be heard, which I am compelled to choose for myself: for without which monotheism would not be true religion.

As incompatible as the two seem to be, their union can be brought about if the monotheistic mediator is made the mediator of the mediating world of pantheism, and the latter is, as it were, centered through former, so that both make each other necessary in different ways.

The prayer, or the religious thought, therefore consists of a three-fold ascending, indivisible abstraction or positing. Every object can be a temple to the religious person in the sense of the augurs. The spirit of this temple is the omnipresent high priest, the monotheistic mediator, who alone stands in direct relationship with the divinity.

75. The basis of all eternal connection is an absolute tendency in all directions. The power of the hierarchy, the true freemasonry, and the invisible