"The individual who knows and says nothing more about me than that I am an atheist, knows and says nothing about me." This remark by Ludwig Feuerbach applies with equal force to his twentieth-century intellectual descendant, Ernst Bloch. Like Feuerback, Bloch is primarily concerned, not with the negation of religious belief, but with the attainment of a positive position by means of the criticism of religion. Yet, unlike Feuerbach, Bloch stands imbedded in the twentieth-century Marxist tradition, from which most vestiges of religion have been erased. His analysis of religion, therefore, first involves a constructive and creative reappropriation of the kernel of religious experience itself. This is especially true because Bloch is convinced that his radical Marxist philosophy of Hope, as elaborated in his monumental work Das Prinzip Hoffnung,l has reopened the door to a variety of human cultural expressions and creations. The past, which had been a repository of so many sealed and finished entities to former philosophies, becomes for Bloch an undiscovered continent filled with the dormant