Apollo rejects whatever is too near-entanglement in things, the melting gaze, and, equally, soulful merging, mystical inebriation and its ecstatic vision. He desires not soul but spirit. And this means freedom from the heaviness, coarseness, and constriction of what is near, stately objectivity, a ranging glance. Apollo's ideal of distance not only puts him in opposition to Dionysiac exuber-ance: for us it is even more significant that it involves a flat con-tradiction of values which Christianity later rated high. Just as Apollo himself never emphasizes his personality and never, by his Delphian oracles, claims praise and honor for him-self beyond all others, so he is oblivious to the eternal worth of the human individual and the single soul. The sense of his manifesta-tion is that it directs a man's attention not to the worth of his ego and the profound inwardness of his individual soul, but rather to what transcends the personal, to the unchangeable, to the eternal forms.
— Walter F. Otto
Apollo is the first great pneumatic move in Western religion — and Otto, writing before that word carried its clinical weight, names the anatomy precisely. Distance, stately objectivity, the ranging glance: these are not temperament, they are a program. The soul's nearness, its entanglement, its heaviness — Apollo refuses them as a doctor refuses infection. What he offers instead is transcendence of the personal, the eternal forms, the unchangeable. If you feel the pull of that offer, you are already inside the ratio: *if I ascend far enough from the particular, from the coarse and near, I will not have to suffer what nearness costs.*
Otto's aside about Christianity is the sharper cut. The soul, the individual's inward worth, the eternal significance of the single person — these were *not* Apollonian values. Christianity invented them, or at least rated them high. But the bypasses ran in parallel: Apollo's route (ascent to the universal) and Christianity's route (the soul's infinite worth before God) both move away from what Homer's polypronal interior was — a field of voices, none of them sovereign, each arriving from outside. The eternal forms and the eternal soul are both escapes from that field. They are different vehicles carrying the same destination: somewhere that does not bleed.
Walter F. Otto·The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion·1929