Page:Psychology of the Unconscious (1916).djvu/258

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standpoint, however, gives to the human being an individual tendency separating him from the mass, which, in the course of centuries, led to the development of personality, hand in hand with which developed the hero cult, and has led to the modern individualistic cult of personages. The attempts of rationalistic theology to keep hold of the personal Jesus as the last and most precious remnant of the divinity which has vanished beyond the power of the imagination corresponds to this tendency. In this respect the Roman Catholic Church was more practical, because she met the general need of the visible, or at least historically believed hero, through the fact that she placed upon the throne of worship a small but clearly perceptible god of the world, namely, the Roman Pope, the Pater patrum, and at the same time the Pontifex Maximus of the invisible upper or inner God. The sensuous demonstrability of God naturally supports the religious process of introversion, because the human figure essentially facilitates the transference, for it is not easy to imagine something lovable or venerable in a spiritual being. This tendency, everywhere present, has been secretly preserved in the rationalistic theology with its Jesus historically insisted upon. This does not mean that men loved the visible God; they love him, not as he is, for he is merely a man, and when the pious wished to love humanity they could go to their neighbors and their enemies to love them. Mankind wishes to love in God only their ideas, that is to say, the ideas which they project into God. By that they wish to love their unconscious, that is, that remnant of ancient humanity and the cen-