[190] problems of being and its structure,^a problems of life---the gods are living, and they are subject to the ambiguities of life; or they are beyond them---the concept of spirit, of unity and diversity, of quantity and quality: all these concepts^b are present in the primitive vision of a divine being who comes to earth and does something there. There, being and causality, and time and space, and life and Spirit, and unity and diversity---all these concepts are present, but they are undeveloped; they are in the mother's womb of mythological ^cvision, but they have not reached the independence of rational structure. In the symbol ^dof creation^e---which is older than the Christian idea of creation, although the Christian idea has special characteristics---in this idea, concepts l^fike finitude (of course, being created, being creaturely, means being finite), or fundamental anthropological realities such as anxiety, are involved. And if one speaks of the creation of man, then the concept of freedom and reason are involved. For instance, in the symbol of the image of God, or the symbol of the fall of Adam, or of the distortion of the original world, in ALL myths^g, [there is] implied the concept of man's essential nature, and of his conflict within himself, his existential estrangement, ^hetc. In all mythsⁱ, conceptual elements are present, and philosophy has nothing to do but to draw them out, to DE-VELOP them out of their involvement, and that is what the philosophers do. This also is the reason why theology is possible. Only because every religious symbol^j has conceptual ^kpotentialities is THEO-LOGY possible; the -logos can be applied to these symbols. If these conceptual elements were not in the religious symbols, this would be impossible.