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 that God should be a perfect
man, that God should include in His nature the feminine element. The
progressive exaltation of the Virgin Mary, the work of Catholic piety,
having its beginning in the expression Mother of God, _theotokos_,
_deipara_, has culminated in attributing to her the status of
co-redeemer and in the dogmatic declaration of her conception without
the stain of original sin.
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