"_--J.E.C.F.
VIII
FROM GOD TO GOD
To affirm that the religious sense is a sense of divinity and that it is
impossible without some abuse of the ordinary usages of human language
to speak of an atheistic religion, is not, I think, to do violence to
the truth; although it is clear that everything will depend upon the
concept that we form of God, a concept which in its turn depends upon
the concept of divinity.
Our proper procedure, in effect, will be to begin with this sense of
divinity, before prefixing to the concept of this quality the definite
article and the capital letter and so converting it into "the
Divinity"--that is, into God. For man has not deduced the divine from
God, but rather he has reached God through the divine.
In the course of these somewhat wandering but at the same time urgent
reflections upon the tragic sense of life, I have already alluded to the
_timor fecit deos_ of Statius with the object of limiting and correcting
it. It is not my intention to trace yet once again the historical
processes by which peoples have arrived at the consciousness and concept
of a personal God like the God of Christianity. And I say peoples and
not isolated individuals, for if there is any feeling or concept that is
truly collective and social it is the feeling and concept of God,
although the individual subsequently individualizes it. Philosophy may,
and in fact does, possess an individual origin; theology is necessarily
collective.
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