From God to God (1)

The so-called logical God was a God who neither loved nor hated, because He did not experience either pleasure or suffering. He was an inhuman God, whose truth was rational or mathematical truth, which means injustice. The attributes of the living God must be inferred from the historical revelation found in the Gospel, not from metaphysical speculations.

One can only reach the living God through love and suffering; reason, on the other hand, separates us from Him. It is not possible to first come to know Him and then love Him; first, one must love Him, hunger for Him, and only then can one come to know Him. The knowledge of God arises from the love of God, and there is nothing rational about this.

God Himself can become a directly sensed reality, especially in moments of spiritual drowning. This feeling, this hunger for God, is the sense of God's absence. First, we believe in God when we want there to be a God, and we are incapable of living without Him. God, who is Love, the Father of Love, is also the Son of Love within us. God and man mutually create each other; God creates or reveals Himself in man, and man comes into being in God.

If each of us creates God in our own way, and if God creates Himself in His own way for each of us, then there already exists a communal, social, human God. God exists in community, and He reveals Himself in community. Man has sensed God as the Father, and this led to the belief in the Holy Trinity. Because the Father God cannot be a lonely God. The father is always a family father. Man felt God as a father, and this suggested to him that he would conceive of God anthropomorphically, as a man, rather than anthropomorphically, that is, as a human being. In the Christian imagination, the Father God is male. The perfect God-man, or the Divine Family, was fulfilled by the imagination's emotional need: thus the cult of God the Mother, the Virgin Mary, and the Child Jesus was formed. The cult of Mary, through which the Virgin nearly became God, arises from the emotional need that God must be a perfect human, from the need that femininity must also be present in God. Catholic devotion increasingly exalted Mary, declared her the co-redeemer, and made the dogma of her immaculate conception free from original sin, which placed her between humanity and divinity, closer to the latter. However, this does not make the Holy Trinity into the Holy Quadrinity. The cult of the Virgin, of divine femininity, of divine motherhood, contributes to the full personification of God by surrounding Him with a family. We cannot imagine the personal and living God as a gender-neutral or hermaphroditic God, and so we had to complement Him with a female God, placing the Mother God alongside the Father God.

Miguel de Unamuno "A tragikus életérzés", Európa könyvkiadó, 1989