in a hylomorphic model, form has priority because experience, like matter, exists only insofar as it is informed. In the idealist model, in contrast, experience of a certain kind (i.e., “Spirit” or Geist) has a prior reality that necessarily expresses and fulfills itself in objective cultural and religious forms. In both models the culture-forming power of religious experience can be acknowledged, although in one case the experience is derivative, in the other primordial. In thus inverting the relation