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.

And even in Greco-Latin paganism itself the tendency towards a living
monotheism is apparent in the fact that Zeus was conceived of and felt
as a father, _Zeus pater_, as Homer calls him, the _Ju-piter_ or
_Ju-pater_ of the Latins, and as a father of a whole widely extended
family of gods and goddesses who together with him constituted the
Divinity.

The conjunction of pagan polytheism with Judaic monotheism, which had
endeavoured by other means to save the personality of God, gave birth to
the feeling of the Catholic God, a God who is a society, as the pagan
God of whom I have spoken was a society, and who at the same time is
one, as the God of Israel finally became one. Such is the Christian
Trinity, whose deepest sense rationalistic deism has scarcely ever
succeeded in understanding, that deism, which though more or less
impregnated with Christianity, always remains Unitarian or Socinian.

And the truth is that we feel God less as a superhuman consciousness
than as the actual consciousness of the whole human race, past, present,
and future, as the collective consciousness of the whole race, and still
more, as the total and infinite consciousness which embraces and
sustains all consciousnesses, infra-human, human, and perhaps,
super-human. The divinity that there is in everything, from the
lowest--that is to say, from the least conscious--of living forms, to
the highest, including our own human consciousness, this divinity we
feel to be personalized, conscious of itself, in God. And this gradation
of consciousnesses, this sense of the gulf between the human and the
fully divine, the universal, consciousness, finds its counterpart in the
belief in angels with their different hierarchies, as intermediaries
between our human consciousness and that of God. And these gradations a
faith consistent with itself must believe to be infinite, for only by an
infinite number of degrees is it possible to pass from the fi