the earliest example of the transfer of religious terminology to a secular application

"There are in particular two major features of Germany's developing literature in the period of Goethe' youth -- say,  until 1770 -- which are interesting precisely because of the extent to which, for all their importance (usually ignored by the official accounts), they do not determine the original direction of Goethe's unique talent. The first is the earliest example of the transfer of religious terminology to a secular application: the growth of German aesthetic theory (the ex-theology of an ex-clerisy), the establishment of the concepts 'literature', 'art' in general, 'artistic genius', and, the religious term in which thirty years of philosophizing are eventually focused, 'artistic creativity'."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 26.