"Today we are confused by two contrary views of man. On the one hand, man is a creature, bound to his environment in which he breathes.... The Greeks exulted in this view, worshipping Dionysus as the god of the Thracian countryside, the god of fertility and the energy of nature. Dionysian man exalts sentiment over mind, ecstasy over order, the senses and the unconscious over the reflective and the rational."
"On the other hand, man is creative. His immanence in the world is apparently contradicted by his transcendence over the world. The Greeks assumed that man's transcendence lay in his reason, his intellectual capacity to 'surge up' in the world, to build other worlds of culture beyond the natural, and, by his technologies, to subject the laws of nature to his own wishes. Is man therefore to be thought of more as a creator than as a creature? This is a crucial question for our age. The Greeks in their classical age of intellectual achievement envisaged Apollo as this god of achievement, who champions the autonomous life and the goal of self-achievement. He is the god of man the craftsman, and the Apollonian way is obvious today in our technological society. Technological and scientific man gains the power to distinguish, clarify and gain control by knowledge and reason.... Western civilization has oscillated in a zigzag course between these two models."
James Houston, I Believe in the Creator, Eerdmans (1980).