[109] the whole Christian symbol^a was discovered as symbolism. Its literal understanding had become impossible because the structure of reality had been discovered, and the force [?] of thought, in the pre-scientific stage, and still partly in the scientific stage, were taken out of possibility. The Bible^b speaks of "above" and "below." The primitive man sees God^c in Heaven "above," and the demons in Hell "below," and the earth "between," as the place where the divine and the demonic powers fighting with each other, where the Christ^d appears, conquers the demonic^e world, will judge the universe and renew it. All these ideas were tremendously endangered for popular feeling in the moment in which the earth had lost its central character. And I can betray you the fact that even today, theology^f has not found the real answer to the questions involved in the possibility of other worlds, with conscious spiritual beings, in relation to the history of salvation^g as described in biblical literature. This was a tremendous shock. It was a shock against the remnants of the mythological^h worldview, in the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic scientific interpretation of it. It was not the scientific interpretation AS SUCH, but it was the shock produced by the consequences of this scientific interpretation for the mythological worldview, giving a central position to the earth. In this world, which then was finally formulated by Descartsⁱ [sic.] and Newton^j as the great machine in which all the stars are moving according to eternal mechanical laws, man and his affairs were lost to such a degree that man was driven by that anxiety of which Pascal^k speaks, and