milky sweetness that soothed our dreams of innocence; the Mother who knows no justice but that of forgiveness, no law but that of love.  Our weak and imperfect conception of God as a God with a long beard and a voice of thunder, of a God who promulgates laws and pronounces dooms, of a God who is the Master of a household, a Roman Paterfamilias, required counterpoise and complement, and since fundamentally we are unable to conceive of the personal and living God as exalted above human and even masculine characteristics, and still less as a neutral or hermaphrodite God, we have recourse to providing Him with a feminine God, and by the side of the God-Father we have placed the Goddess-Mother, she who always forgives, because, since she sees with love-blind eyes, she sees always the hidden cause of the fault and in that hidden cause the only justice of forgiveness ...”

And to this I must now add that not only are we unable to conceive of the full and living God as masculine simply, but we are unable to conceive of Him as individual simply, as the projection of a solitary I, an unsocial I, an I that is in reality an abstract I. My living I is an I that is really a We; my living personal I lives only in other, of other, and by other I’s; I am sprung, from a multitude of ancestors, I carry them within me in extract, and at the same time I carry within me, potentially, a multitude of descendants, and God, the projection of my I to the infinite—­or rather I, the projection of God to the finite—­must also be multitude.  Hence, in order to save the personality of God—­that is to say, in order to save the living God—­faith’s need—­the need of the feeling and the imagination—­of conceiving Him and; feeling Him as possessed of a certain internal multiplicity.

This need the pagan feeling of a living divinity obviated by polytheism.  It is the agglomeration of its gods, the republic of them, that really constitutes its Divinity.  The real God of Hellenic paganism is not so much Father Zeus (Jupiter) as the whole society of gods and demi-gods.  Hence the solemnity of the invocation of Demosthenes when he invoked all the gods and all the goddesses:  tois theohis euchomai pasi kahi pasais.  And when the rationalizers converted the term god, theos, which is properly an adjective, a quality predicated of each one of the gods, into a substantive, and added the definite article to it, they produced the god, o theos, the dead and abstract god of philosophical rationalism, a substantivized quality and therefore void of personality.  For the masculine concrete god (el dios) is nothing but the neuter abstract divine quality (lo divino).  Now the transition from feeling the divinity in all things to substantivating it and converting the Divinity into God, cannot be achieved without feeling undergoing a certain risk.  And the Aristotelian God, the God of the logical proofs, is nothing more than the Divinity, a concept and not a living person who can be felt and with whom through love man can communicate.  This God is merely a substantivized adjective; He is a constitutional God who reigns but does not govern, and Knowledge is His constitutional charter.