value and existence are one.

V

If art may be said to create values, religion has been said to conserve
them. But the values conserved are not those created: they are the
values postulated by philosophy as metaphysical reality. Whereas,
however, philosophy substitutes these values for the world of
experience, religion makes them continuous with the world of experience.
For religion value and existence are on the same level, but value is
more potent and environs existence, directing it for its own ends. The
unique content of religion, hence, is a specific imaginative extension
of the environment with value-forms: the visible world is extended at
either end by heaven and hell; the world of minds, by God, Satan,
angels, demons, saints, and so on. But where philosophy imaginatively
abolishes existence in behalf of value, where art realizes value in
existence, religion tends to control and to escape the environment which
exists by means of the environment which is postulated. The aim of
religion is salvation from sin. Salvation is the escape from experience
to heaven and the bosom of God; while hell is the compensatory
readjustment of inner quality to outer condition for the alien and the
enemy, without the knowledge of whose existence life in heaven could not
be complete.

In religion, hence, the conversion of the repressed array of interests
into ideal value-forms is less radical and abstract than in philosophy,
and less checked by fusion with existence than in art. Religion is,
therefore, at one and the same time more carnal and less reasonable than
philosophy and art. Its history and protagonists exhibit a closer
kinship to what is called insanity[93]--that being, in essence, the
substitution in actual life of the creatures of the imagination which
satisfy repressed needs for those of reality which repress them. It is
a somnambulism which intensifies rather than abolishes the contrast
between what is desired and what must be accepted. It offers itself
ultimately rather as a refuge from reality than a control of it, and its
development as an institution has turned on the creation and use of
devices to make this escape feasible. For religion, therefore, the
perception that the actual world, whatever its history, is now _not_
adapted to human nature, is the true point of departure. Thus religion
takes more account of experience than compensatory philosophy; it does
not de-realize existent evil. The outer conflict bet