"What is emitted from the divine, though it be only like the reflection from the fire, still has the divine reality in itself, and one might almost ask what were the fire without glow, the sun without light, or the Creator without the creature?"
About this Quote
Muller is doing something sly here: he turns a misty metaphysical claim into a concrete sensory argument, then uses that argument to quietly revise what "divine" even means. The line starts by conceding distance and dilution - "only like the reflection from the fire" - but immediately insists that even the reflected trace still carries "divine reality". The move is strategic. It protects transcendence (God is not reduced to the world) while refusing a hard separation (the world is not mere dead matter). He wants both the hierarchy and the intimacy.
The subtext is relational theology disguised as an image lesson. Fire is not fire-as-experience without glow; a sun with no light is conceptually intact but practically meaningless. By analogy, a Creator without a creature becomes a sterile abstraction: a title without a theater in which it can be legible. Muller isn't exactly denying God's independence; he's implying that divinity, as humans can speak of it, requires expression. "Emission" and "reflection" let him argue that the world is not an accidental byproduct but the very medium in which the divine becomes perceivable.
Context matters: as a 19th-century educator and philologist steeped in comparative religion, Muller is trying to make room for the sacred within modern intellectual life. He threads a needle between orthodox doctrine and the era's hunger for immanent meaning, suggesting that studying the world - languages, myths, cultures, "creatures" - is not a detour from God but a way the glow gives itself away.
The subtext is relational theology disguised as an image lesson. Fire is not fire-as-experience without glow; a sun with no light is conceptually intact but practically meaningless. By analogy, a Creator without a creature becomes a sterile abstraction: a title without a theater in which it can be legible. Muller isn't exactly denying God's independence; he's implying that divinity, as humans can speak of it, requires expression. "Emission" and "reflection" let him argue that the world is not an accidental byproduct but the very medium in which the divine becomes perceivable.
Context matters: as a 19th-century educator and philologist steeped in comparative religion, Muller is trying to make room for the sacred within modern intellectual life. He threads a needle between orthodox doctrine and the era's hunger for immanent meaning, suggesting that studying the world - languages, myths, cultures, "creatures" - is not a detour from God but a way the glow gives itself away.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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