ladders of so delicate a membrane as to admit of
the action of osmosis and exosmosis may be strongly differentiated and
contain liquids of a very mixed composition. And thus a man, in so far
as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort
of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating
content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more
personality a man has and the greater his interior richness and the more
he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from
his fellows. In the same way the rigid God of deism, of Aristotelian
monotheism, the _ens summum_, is a being in whom individuality, or
rather simplicity, stifles personality. Definition kills him, for to
define is to impose boundaries, it is to limit, and it is impossible to
define the absolutely indefinable. This God lacks interior richness; he
is not a society in himself. And this the vital revelation obviated by
the belief in the Trinity, which makes God a society and even a family
in himself and no longer a pure individual. The God of faith is
personal; He is a person because He includes three persons, for
personality is not sensible of itself in isolation. An isolated person
ceases to be a person, for whom should he love? And if he does not love,
he is not a person. Nor can a simple being love himself without his love
expanding him into a compound being.

It was because God was felt as a Father that the belief in the Trinity
arose. For a God-Father cannot be a single, that is, a solitary, God. A
father is always the father of a family. And the fact that God was felt
as a father acted as a continual incentive to conceive Him not merely
anthropomorphically--that is to say, as a man, _anthropos_--but
andromorphically, as a male, _aner_. In the popular Christian
imagination, in effect, God the Father is conceived of as a male. And
the reason is that man, _homo_, _anthropos_, as we know him, is
necessarily either a male, _vir_, _aner_, or a female, _mulier_, _gyne_. And
to these may be added the child, who is neuter. And hence in order to
satisfy imaginatively this necessity of feeling God as a perfect
man--that is, as a family--arose the cult of the God-Mother, the Virgin
Mary, and the cult of the Child Jesus.

The cult of the Virgin, Mariolatry, which, by the gradual elevation of
the divine element in the Virgin has led almost to her deification,
answers merely to the demand of the feeling