Ultimate Religion

Literature is the only religion worth having.

Poetry is spilled religion.

The high priests of my religion are all poets.

Those who insist on reading the Qur'an like a Protestant (for surface meaning) are blasphemers; the Qur’an is "recitation" and the medium is the message; translating its music into prose is Luciferian hermeneutics.

Martin Heidegger has taught us that "poetic images are imaginings in a distinctive sense: not mere fancies and illusions but imaginings that are visible inclusions of the alien in the sight of the familiar." It is the dialectic of alien and familiar that makes "the poetic...the basic capacity for human dwelling." Mortals "must ever learn to dwell."

Religious traditions are vast archives of inherited prejudice; even so, they provide us with the idiom and the imaginary that are essential for poetic production.

What George Santayana called "ultimate religion" is a poetic relationship to the archive: one that sees in it (as Northrop Frye put it) myths to live by and metaphors to live in.

Which is to say, "ultimate religion" is poetic dwelling.