This is an English translation of the original 1804 edition of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's Philosophie und Religion. The small volume was written in response to his friend Carl Eschenmayer's critique that Schelling's philosophy failed to properly account for the question of how the Absolute can come out of itself and become difference. Schelling responded by proposing a new theory that: "There is no continuous transition from the Absolute to the actual; the origin of the phenomenal world is conceivable only as a complete falling-away from absoluteness by means of a leap." Thus Creation itself becomes the original sin, i.e., the fall of the finite world from the Absolute, and God can only be revealed in history as a whole, "and then only a progressively evolving revelation." Distributed in the US by Continuum. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)