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.
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