Writes Lonergan, “Man affirms the divine, and obscurely he knows what he means. As best he can, he expresses his meaning, but his resources for expression are unequal to the task. He can give God a name, but there are many tongues, and so there are many names. He can indicate divine attributes by analogy, but he cannot disassociate the analogies he employs from their imperfections. To make God a cause is to relegate him to the past; to make him an end is to postpone him to the future; to insist upon his immediacy and relevance to the world and to human living is to involve him in the hearth and the family, in the emphases of patriarchal and matriarchal arrangements, in the concerns of hunters and fishers, of agriculturalists, craftsman, and nomads, in the interests of property and the state, in occupations of peace and war. The fourfold bias of the dramatic and practical subject of common sense reappears in the conception of the divine, and by this reinforcement and sanction it heads, first, to an ever fuller expansion but, ultimately, to its own reversal. So the empires of the Mediterranean basin gathered the gods of their people into pantheons; syncretists reduced their numbers; allergists gave new meanings to their exploits; and philosophers discovered and preached the primacy of the Intelligible and the One.”