I turn to the saint, not because the saint is dependent on God, but because God is dependent on the saint, because God is determined and ruled by the prayers, i.e., by the wish or heart of the saint. The distinctions which the Catholic theologians made between latreia, doulia, and hyperdoulia, are absurd, groundless sophisms. Exinanivit , says St. Bernard, majestate et potentia, non bonitate et misercordia . God above the Mediator is nothing else than the cold understanding above the heart, like Fate above the Olympic gods. Man, as an emotional and sensuous being is governed and made happy only by images, by sensible representations.
Mind presenting itself as at once type-creating, emotional, and sensuous, is the imagination.
The second Person in God, who is in truth the first person in religion, is the nature of the imagination made objective. The Son is the satisfaction of the need for mental images, the nature of the imaginative activity in man made objective as an absolute, divine activity. Man makes to himself an image of God, i.e., he converts the abstract being of the reason, the being of the thinking power, into an object of sense or imagination. The adoration of the saint in his image is the adoration of the image as the saint. Wherever the image is the essential expression, the organ of religion, there also it is the essence of religion.