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