[150] otherwise they would not be historians^a at all. They have explanations, which is a difficult job, open to many errors. Beyond this they understand, they participate in, the reality of Greek thinking and living, and out of their participation^b, into which they bring their own whole reality, they give us a picture of this historical phenomenon which we call Greek culture. And this picture has truth, it has the truth of creative understanding, which is a very definite form of truth. There are three levels in it: the factual understanding, which is empirical and has analogy to physical knowledge and for which experimental methods can be used in the sense of documentation. It has the hypothetical element of hypothetical derivation of one fact from the other. And here hypotheses have less probability than any physical hypothesis has, but they have SOME probability, and can be corrected all the time. Then there is the understanding, which makes the historian^c great, and gives us, through his eyes, a new picture of the past which is always also our own existence, because we belong not only to our present and our future, but also to our past. So I can say: from SCIENTIFIC knowledge, the explanation and understanding is distinguished in history by participation, but this doesn’t make history, poetry or epics. Early history was told by the epic poets, by those who told the epic story, like the Homeric stories, on the marketplace to all people. Now history^d does not have this character. It has the detached factual inquiry. It is not mythological or legendary truth, nor is it epical or poetic truth. But it is the truth of its own right and in its own character. Now we come from here to the great problem of the relation of religion to historical truth. If our definition is justified, that religion^e is the state of being ultimately concerned, if faith is ultimate concern, then we would say that faith cannot guarantee the factual element or the explanatory element, and that faith lives in the element of meaning. But to the cultural meaning of a reality of the past, it adds the dimension of ultimate concern. And it can do this to