[326] functions of history, and these styles^a give you an answer to the question, "What about the ultimate concern of this period?" That was of course my task. My task was not a textbook knowledge---which I don't have, and if I had it I wouldn't communicate it because I think it is superfluous, and dangerous--- but I wanted to give an interpretation of the religious self-understanding of the different periods as expressed in the styles of these periods. And of course my personal realm was philosophy and theology, which also includes philosophy of religion^b---I didn't neglect it---but it was not the center of the interest; the center of the interest was the style and what this style does and did express. Now this brings me to two fundamentally different styles^c which we find in all realms of life and which are decisive for the relationship of religion and art. The first and rarest in history is the naturalistic style. I say "the rarest" because in the history of mankind, naturalism^d in art, and

in philosophy, is a rare event. NON-naturalistic expression is by far the predominant event in the history of art and in the history of all cultural expressions. But let us stick now to the history of art^e. If I speak of naturalism, I mean not the photographic reproduction of nature---this I would exclude from art, although modern photographers have ways of bringing artistic elements in the way in which they organize the photographic situation; but that's an applied art. The genuine art is never naturalistic in the sense of photographic. Nevertheless there is naturalistic art. This naturalistic art uses the immediately encountered world in a non-disrupted way in order to use it for artistic symbols^f. I would count under this form of naturalistic art not only what we usually call naturalistic in the narrower sense, but I would call also everything, every idealistic art, which is based