To affirm that the religious sense is a sense of divinity and that it is
impossible without some abuse of the ordinary usages of human language
to speak of an atheistic religion, is not, I think, to do violence to
the truth; although it is clear that everything will depend upon the
concept that we form of God, a concept which in its turn depends upon
the concept of divinity.
Our proper procedure, in effect, will be to begin with this sense of
divinity, before prefixing to the concept of this quality the definite
article and the capital letter and so converting it into "the
Divinity"--that is, into God. For man has not deduced the divine from
God, but rather he has reached God through the divine.
In the course of these somewhat wandering but at the same time urgent
reflections upon the tragic sense of life, I have already alluded to the
_timor fecit deos_ of Statius with the object of limiting and correcting
it. It is not my intention to trace yet once again the historical
processes by which peoples have arrived at the consciousness and concept
of a personal God like the God of Christianity. And I say peoples and
not isolated individuals, for if there is any feeling or concept that is
truly collective and social it is the feeling and concept of God,
although the individual subsequently individualizes it. Philosophy may,
and in fact does, possess an individual origin; theology is necessarily
collective.
Schleiermacher's theory, which attributes the origin, or rather the
essence, of the religious sense to the immediate and simple feeling of
dependency, appears to be the most profound and exact explanation.
Primitive man, living in society, feels himself to be dependent upon the
mysterious forces invisibly environing him; he feels himself to be in
social communion, not only with beings like himself, his fellow-men, but
with the whole of Nature, animate and inanimate, which simply means, in
other words, that he personalizes everything. Not only does he possess a
consciousness of the world, but he imagines that the world, like
himself, possesses consciousness also. Just as a child talks to his doll
or his dog as if it understood what he was saying, so the savage
believes that his fetich hears him when he speaks to it, and that the
angry storm-cloud is aware of him and deliberately pursues him. For the
newly born mind of the primitive natural man has not yet wholly severed
itself from the cords which still bind it to the womb of Nature, neither
has it clearly marked out the boundary that separates dreaming from
waking, imagination from reality.
The divine, therefore, was not originally something objective, but was
rather the subjectivity of consciousness projected exteriorly, the
personalization of the world. The concept of divinity arose out of the
feeling of divinity, and the feeling of divinity is simply the dim and
nascent feeling of personality vented upon the outside world. And
strictly speaking it is not possible to speak of outside and inside,
objective and subjective, when no such distinction was actually felt;
indeed it is precisely from this lack of distinction that the feeling
and concept of divinity proceed. The clearer our consciousness of the
distinction between the objective and the subjective, the more obscure
is the feeling of divinity in us.
It has been said, and very justly so it would appear, that Hellenic
paganism was not so much polytheistic as pantheistic. I do not know that
the belief in a multitude of gods, taking the concept of God in the
sense in which we understand it to-day, has ever really existed in any
human mind. And if by pantheism is understood the doctrine, not that
everything and each individual thing is God--a proposition which I find
unthinkable--but that everything is divine, then it may be said without
any great abuse of language that paganism was pantheistic. Its gods not
only mixed among men but intermixed with them; they begat gods upon
mortal women and upon goddesses mortal men begat demi-gods. And if
demi-gods, that is, demi-men, were believed to exist, it was because the
divine and the human were viewed as different aspects of the same
reality. The divinization of everything was simply its humanization. To
say that the sun was a god was equivalent to saying that it was a man, a
human consciousness, more or less, aggrandized and sublimated. And this
is true of all beliefs from fetichism to Hellenic paganism.
The real distinction between gods and men consisted in the fact that the
former were immortal. A god came to be identical with an immortal man
and a man was deified, reputed as a god, when it was deemed that at his
death he had not really died. Of certain heroes it was believed that
they were alive in the kingdom of the dead. And this is a point of great
importance in estimating the value of the concept of the divine.
In those republics of gods there was always some predominating god, some
real monarch. It was through the agency of this divine monarchy that
primitive peoples were led from monocultism to monotheism. Hence
monarchy and monotheism are twin brethren. Zeus, Jupiter, was in process
of being converted into an only god, just as Jahwé originally one god
among many others, came to be converted into an only god, first the god
of the people of Israel, then the god of humanity, and finally the god
of the whole universe.
Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial origin. "It is only on the march
and in time of war," says Robertson Smith in _The Prophets of
Israel_,[38] "that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central
authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national
organization, centring in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought
of mainly as the host of Jehovah. The very name of Israel is martial,
and means 'God (_El_) fighteth,' and Jehovah in the Old Testament is
Iahwè Çebäôth--the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the
battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly realized; but in
primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in
time of peace."
God, the only God, issued, therefore, from man's sense of divinity as a
warlike, monarchical and social God. He revealed himself to the people
as a whole, not to the individual. He was the God of a people and he
jealously exacted that worship should be rendered to him alone. The
transition from this monocultism to monotheism was effected largely by
the individual action, more philosophical perhaps than theological, of
the prophets. It was, in fact, the individual activity of the prophets
that individualized the divinity. And above all by making the divinity
ethical.
Subsequently reason--that is, philosophy--took possession of this God
who had arisen in the human consciousness as a consequence of the sense
of divinity in man, and tended to define him and convert him into an
idea. For to define a thing is to idealize it, a process which
necessitates the abstraction from it of its incommensurable or
irrational element, its vital essence. Thus the God of feeling, the
divinity felt as a unique person and consciousness external to us,
although at the same time enveloping and sustaining us, was converted
into the idea of God.
The logical, rational God, the _ens summum_, the _primum movens_, the
Supreme Being of theological philosophy, the God who is reached by the
three famous ways of negation, eminence and causality, _viæ negationis,
eminentiæ, causalitatis_, is nothing but an idea of God, a dead thing.
The traditional and much debated proofs of his existence are, at bottom,
merely a vain attempt to determine his essence; for as Vinet has very
well observed, existence is deduced from essence; and to say that God
exists, without saying what God is and how he is, is equivalent to
saying nothing at all.
And this God, arrived at by the methods of eminence and negation or
abstraction of finite qualities, ends by becoming an unthinkable God, a
pure idea, a God of whom, by the very fact of his ideal excellence, we
can say that he is nothing, as indeed he has been defined by Scotus
Erigena: _Deus propter excellentiam non inmerito nihil vocatur_. Or in
the words of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in his fifth Epistle,
"The divine darkness is the inaccessible light in which God is said to
dwell." The anthropomorphic God, the God who is felt, in being purified
of human, and as such finite, relative and temporal, attributes,
evaporates into the God of deism or of pantheism.
The traditional so-called proofs of the existence of God all refer to
this God-Idea, to this logical God, the God by abstraction, and hence
they really prove nothing, or rather, they prove nothing more than the
existence of this idea of God.
In my early youth, when first I began to be puzzled by these eternal
problems, I read in a book, the author of which I have no wish to
recall,[39] this sentence: "God is the great X placed over the ultimate
barrier of human knowledge; in the measure in which science advances,
the barrier recedes." And I wrote in the margin, "On this side of the
barrier, everything is explained without Him; on the further side,
nothing is explained, either with Him or without Him; God therefore is
superfluous." And so far as concerns the God-Idea, the God of the
proofs, I continue to be of the same opinion. Laplace is said to have
stated that he had not found the hypothesis of God necessary in order to
construct his scheme of the origin of the Universe, and it is very true.
In no way whatever does the idea of God help us to understand better the
existence, the essence and the finality of the Universe.
That there is a Supreme Being, infinite, absolute and eternal, whose
existence is unknown to us, and who has created the Universe, is not
more conceivable than that the material basis of the Universe itself,
its matter, is eternal and infinite and absolute. We do not understand
the existence of the world one whit the better by telling ourselves that
God created it. It is a begging of the question, or a merely verbal
solution, intended to cover up our ignorance. In strict truth, we deduce
the existence of the Creator from the fact that the thing created
exists, a process which does not justify rationally His existence. You
cannot deduce a necessity from a fact, or else everything were
necessary.
And if from the nature of the Universe we pass to what is called its
order, which is supposed to necessitate an Ordainer, we may say that
order is what there is, and we do not conceive of any other. This
deduction of God's existence from the order of the Universe implies a
transition from the ideal to the real order, an outward projection of
our mind, a supposition that the rational explanation of a thing
produces the thing itself. Human art, instructed by Nature, possesses a
conscious creative faculty, by means of which it apprehends the process
of creation, and we proceed to transfer this conscious and artistic
creative faculty to the consciousness of an artist-creator, but from
what nature he in his turn learnt his art we cannot tell.
The traditional analogy of the watch and the watchmaker is inapplicable
to a Being absolute, infinite and eternal. It is, moreover, only another
way of explaining nothing. For to say that the world is as it is and not
otherwise because God made it so, while at the same time we do not know
for what reason He made it so, is to say nothing. And if we knew for
what reason God made it so, then God is superfluous and the reason
itself suffices. If everything were mathematics, if there were no
irrational element, we should not have had recourse to this explanatory
theory of a Supreme Ordainer, who is nothing but the reason of the
irrational, and so merely another cloak for our ignorance. And let us
not discuss here that absurd proposition that, if all the type in a
printing-press were printed at random, the result could not possibly be
the composition of _Don Quixote_. Something would be composed which
would be as good as _Don Quixote_ for those who would have to be content
with it and would grow in it and would form part of it.
In effect, this traditional supposed proof of God's existence resolves
itself fundamentally into hypostatizing or substantivating the
explanation or reason of a phenomenon; it amounts to saying that
Mechanics is the cause of movement, Biology of life, Philology of
language, Chemistry of bodies, by simply adding the capital letter to
the science and converting it into a force distinct from the phenomena
from which we derive it and distinct from our mind which effects the
derivation. But the God who is the result of this process, a God who is
nothing but reason hypostatized and projected towards the infinite,
cannot possibly be felt as something living and real, nor yet be
conceived of save as a mere idea which will die with us.
The question arises, on the other hand, whether a thing the idea of
which has been conceived but which has no real existence, does not exist
because God wills that it should not exist, or whether God does not will
it to exist because, in fact, it does not exist; and, with regard to the
impossible, whether a thing is impossible because God wills it so, or
whether God wills it so because, in itself and by the very fact of its
own inherent absurdity, it is impossible. God has to submit to the
logical law of contradiction, and He cannot, according to the
theologians, cause two and two to make either more or less than four.
Either the law of necessity is above Him or He Himself is the law of
necessity. And in the moral order the question arises whether falsehood,
or homicide, or adultery, are wrong because He has so decreed it, or
whether He has so decreed it because they are wrong. If the former, then
God is a capricious and unreasonable God, who decrees one law when He
might equally well have decreed another, or, if the latter, He obeys an
intrinsic nature and essence which exists in things themselves
independently of Him--that is to say, independently of His sovereign
will; and if this is the case, if He obeys the innate reason of things,
this reason, if we could but know it, would suffice us without any
further need of God, and since we do not know it, God explains nothing.
This reason would be above God. Neither is it of any avail to say that
this reason is God Himself, the supreme reason of things. A reason of
this kind, a necessary reason, is not a personal something. It is will
that gives personality. And it is because of this problem of the
relations between God's reason, necessarily necessary, and His will,
necessarily free, that the logical and Aristotelian God will always be a
contradictory God.
The scholastic theologians never succeeded in disentangling themselves
from the difficulties in which they found themselves involved when they
attempted to reconcile human liberty with divine prescience and with the
knowledge that God possesses of the free and contingent future; and that
is strictly the reason why the rational God is wholly inapplicable to
the contingent, for the notion of contingency is fundamentally the same
as the notion of irrationality. The rational God is necessarily
necessary in His being and in His working; in every single case He
cannot do other than the best, and a number of different things cannot
all equally be the best, for among infinite possibilities there is only
one that is best accommodated to its end, just as among the infinite
number of lines that can be drawn from one point to another, there is
only one straight line. And the rational God, the God of reason, cannot
but follow in each case the straight line, the line that leads most
directly to the end proposed, a necessary end, just as the only straight
line that leads to it is a necessary line. And thus for the divinity of
God is substituted His necessity. And in the necessity of God, His free
will--that is to say, His conscious personality--perishes. The God of
our heart's desire, the God who shall save our soul from nothingness,
must needs be an arbitrary God.
Not because He thinks can God be God, but because He works, because He
creates; He is not a contemplative but an active God. A God-Reason, a
theoretical or contemplative God, such as is this God of theological
rationalism, is a God that is diluted in His own contemplation. With
this God corresponds, as we shall see, the beatific vision, understood
as the supreme expression of human felicity. A quietist God, in short,
as reason, by its very essence, is quietist.
There remains the other famous proof of God's existence, that of the
supposed unanimous consent in a belief in Him among all peoples. But
this proof is not strictly rational, neither is it an argument in favour
of the rational God who explains the Universe, but of the God of the
heart, who makes us live. We should be justified in calling it a
rational proof only on the supposition that we believed that reason was
identical with a more or less unanimous agreement among all peoples,
that it corresponded with the verdict of a universal suffrage, only on
the supposition that we held that _vox populi_, which is said to be _vox
Dei_, was actually the voice of reason.
Such was, indeed, the belief of Lamennais, that tragic and ardent
spirit, who affirmed that life and truth were essentially one and the
same thing--would that they were!--and that reason was one, universal,
everlasting and holy (_Essai sur l'indifférence_, partie iv., chap,
viii.). He invoked the _aut omnibus credendum est aut nemini_ of
Lactantius--we must believe all or none--and the saying of Heraclitus
that every individual opinion is fallible, and that of Aristotle that
the strongest proof consists in the general agreement of mankind, and
above all that of Pliny (_Paneg. Trajani_, lxii.), to the effect that
one man cannot deceive all men or be deceived by all--_nemo omnes,
neminem omnes fefellerunt_. Would that it were so! And so he concludes
with the dictum of Cicero (_De natura deorum_, lib. iii., cap. ii., 5
and 6), that we must believe the tradition of our ancestors even though
they fail to render us a reason--_maioribus autem nostris, etiam nulla
ratione reddita credere_.
Let us suppose that this belief of the ancients in the divine
interpenetration of the whole of Nature is universal and constant, and
that it is, as Aristotle calls it, an ancestral dogma (_patrios doxa_)
(_Metaphysica_, lib. vii., cap. vii.); this would prove only that there
is a motive impelling peoples and individuals--that is to say, all or
almost all or a majority of them--to believe in a God. But may it not be
that there are illusions and fallacies rooted in human nature itself? Do
not all peoples begin by believing that the sun turns round the earth?
And do we not all naturally incline to believe that which satisfies our
desires? Shall we say with Hermann[40] that, "if there is a God, He has
not left us without some indication of Himself, and if is His will that
we should find Him."
A pious desire, no doubt, but we cannot strictly call it a reason,
unless we apply to it the Augustinian sentence, but which again is not
a reason, "Since thou seekest Me, it must be that thou hast found Me,"
believing that God is the cause of our seeking Him.
This famous argument from the supposed unanimity of mankind's belief in
God, the argument which with a sure instinct was seized upon by the
ancients, is in its essence identical with the so-called moral proof
which Kant employed in his _Critique of Practical Reason_, transposing
its application from mankind collectively to the individual, the proof
which he derives from our conscience, or rather from our feeling of
divinity. It is not a proof strictly or specifically rational, but
vital; it cannot be applied to the logical God, the _ens summum_, the
essentially simple and abstract Being, the immobile and impassible prime
mover, the God-Reason, in a word, but to the biotic God, to the Being
essentially complex and concrete, to the suffering God who suffers and
desires in us and with us, to the Father of Christ who is only to be
approached through Man, through His Son (John xiv. 6), and whose
revelation is historical, or if you like, anecdotical, but not
philosophical or categorical.
The unanimous consent of mankind (let us suppose the unanimity) or, in
other words, this universal longing of all human souls who have arrived
at the consciousness of their humanity, which desires to be the end and
meaning of the Universe, this longing, which is nothing but that very
essence of the soul which consists in its effort to persist eternally
and without a break in the continuity of consciousness, leads us to the
human, anthropomorphic God, the projection of our consciousness to the
Consciousness of the Universe; it leads us to the God who confers human
meaning and finality upon the Universe and who is not the _ens summum_,
the _primum movens_, nor the Creator of the Universe, nor merely the
Idea-God. It leads us to the living, subjective God, for He is simply
subjectivity objectified or personality universalized--He is more than a
mere idea, and He is will rather than reason. God is Love--that is,
Will. Reason, the Word, derives from Him, but He, the Father, is, above
all, Will.
"There can be no doubt whatever," Ritschl says (_Rechtfertigung und
Versöhnung_, iii., chap. v.), "that a very imperfect view was taken of
God's spiritual personality in the older theology, when the functions of
knowing and willing alone were employed to illustrate it. Religious
thought plainly ascribes to God affections of feeling as well. The older
theology, however, laboured under the impression that feeling and
emotion were characteristic only of limited and created personality; it
transformed, _e.g._, the religious idea of the Divine blessedness into
eternal self-knowledge, and that of the Divine wrath into a fixed
purpose to punish sin." Yes, this logical God, arrived at by the _via
negationis_, was a God who, strictly speaking, neither loved nor hated,
because He neither enjoyed nor suffered, an inhuman God, and His justice
was a rational or mathematical justice--that is, an injustice.
The attributes of the living God, of the Father of Christ, must be
deduced from His historical revelation in the Gospel and in the
conscience of every Christian believer, and not from metaphysical
reasonings which lead only to the Nothing-God of Scotus Erigena, to the
rational or pantheistic God, to the atheist God--in short, to the
de-personalized Divinity.
Not by the way of reason, but only by the way of love and of suffering,
do we come to the living God, the human God. Reason rather separates us
from Him. We cannot first know Him in order that afterwards we may love
Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him, hungering after Him,
before knowing Him. The knowledge of God proceeds from the love of God,
and this knowledge has little or nothing of the rational in it. For God
is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to seek to confine Him within
the limits of our mind--that is to say, to kill Him. In so far as we
attempt to define Him, there rises up before us--Nothingness.
The idea of God, formulated by a theodicy that claims to be rational, is
simply an hypothesis, like the hypotheses of ether, for example.
Ether is, in effect, a merely hypothetical entity, valuable only in so
far as it explains that which by means of it we endeavour to
explain--light, electricity or universal gravitation--and only in so far
as these facts cannot be explained in any other way. In like manner the
idea of God is also an hypothesis, valuable only in so far as it enables
us to explain that which by means of if we endeavour to explain--the
essence and existence of the Universe--and only so long as these cannot
be explained in any other way. And since in reality we explain the
Universe neither better nor worse with this idea than without it, the
idea of God, the supreme _petitio principii_, is valueless.
But if ether is nothing but an hypothesis explanatory of light, air, on
the other hand, is a thing that is directly felt; and even though it did
not enable us to explain the phenomenon of sound, we should nevertheless
always be directly aware of it, and, above all, of the lack of it in
moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way God Himself,
not the idea of God, may become a reality that is immediately felt; and
even though the idea of Him does not enable us to explain either the
existence or the essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct
feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And this
feeling--mark it well, for all that is tragic in it and the whole tragic
sense of life is founded upon this--this feeling is a feeling of hunger
for God, of the lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first
instance, as we shall see, to wish that there may be a God, to be unable
to live without Him.
So long as I pilgrimaged through the fields of reason in search of God,
I could not find Him, for I was not deluded by the idea of God, neither
could I take an idea for God, and it was then, as I wandered among the
wastes of rationalism, that I told myself that we ought to seek no other
consolation than the truth, meaning thereby reason, and yet for all that
I was not comforted. But as I sank deeper and deeper into rational
scepticism on the one hand and into heart's despair on the other, the
hunger for God awoke within me, and the suffocation of spirit made me
feel the want of God, and with the want of Him, His reality. And I
wished that there might be a God, that God might exist. And God does not
exist, but rather super-exists, and He is sustaining our existence,
existing us _(existiéndonos)_.
God, who is Love, the Father of Love, is the son of love in us. There
are men of a facile and external habit of mind, slaves of reason, that
reason which externalizes us, who think it a shrewd comment to say that
so far from God having made man in His image and likeness, it is rather
man who has made his gods or his God in his own image and likeness,[41]
and so superficial are they that they do not pause to consider that if
the second of these propositions be true, as in fact it is, it is owing
to the fact that the first is not less true. God and man, in effect,
mutually create one another; God creates or reveals Himself in man and
man creates himself in God. God is His own maker, _Deus ipse se facit_,
said Lactantius (_Divinarum Institutionum_, ii., 8), and we may say that
He is making Himself continually both in man and by man. And if each of
us, impelled by his love, by his hunger for divinity, creates for
himself an image of God according to his own desire, and if according to
His desire God creates Himself for each of us, then there is a
collective, social, human God, the resultant of all the human
imaginations that imagine Him. For God is and reveals Himself in
collectivity. And God is the richest and most personal of human
conceptions.
The Master of divinity has bidden us be perfect as our Father who is in
heaven is perfect (Matt. v. 48), and in the sphere of thought and
feeling our perfection consists in the zeal with which we endeavour to
equate our imagination with the total imagination of the humanity of
which in God we form a part.
The logical theory of the opposition between the extension and the
comprehension of a concept, the one increasing in the ratio in which the
other diminishes, is well known. The concept that is most extensive and
at the same time least comprehensive is that of being or of thing, which
embraces everything that exists and possesses no other distinguishing
quality than that of being; while the concept that is most comprehensive
and least extensive is that of the Universe, which is only applicable to
itself and comprehends all existing qualities. And the logical or
rational God, the God obtained by way of negation, the absolute entity,
merges, like reality itself, into nothingness; for, as Hegel pointed
out, pure being and pure nothingness are identical. And the God of the
heart, the God who is felt, the God of living men, is the Universe
itself conceived as personality, is the consciousness of the Universe. A
God universal and personal, altogether different from the individual God
of a rigid metaphysical monotheism.
I must advert here once again to my view of the opposition that exists
between individuality and personality, notwithstanding the fact that the
one demands the other. Individuality is, if I may so express it, the
continent or thing which contains, personality the content or thing
contained, or I might say that my personality is in a certain sense my
comprehension, that which I comprehend or embrace within myself--which
is in a certain way the whole Universe--and that my individuality is my
extension; the one my infinite, the other my finite. A hundred jars of
hard earthenware are strongly individualized, but it is possible for
them to be all equally empty or all equally full of the same homogeneous
liquid, whereas two bladders of so delicate a membrane as to admit of
the action of osmosis and exosmosis may be strongly differentiated and
contain liquids of a very mixed composition. And thus a man, in so far
as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort
of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating
content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more
personality a man has and the greater his interior richness and the more
he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from
his fellows. In the same way the rigid God of deism, of Aristotelian
monotheism, the _ens summum_, is a being in whom individuality, or
rather simplicity, stifles personality. Definition kills him, for to
define is to impose boundaries, it is to limit, and it is impossible to
define the absolutely indefinable. This God lacks interior richness; he
is not a society in himself. And this the vital revelation obviated by
the belief in the Trinity, which makes God a society and even a family
in himself and no longer a pure individual. The God of faith is
personal; He is a person because He includes three persons, for
personality is not sensible of itself in isolation. An isolated person
ceases to be a person, for whom should he love? And if he does not love,
he is not a person. Nor can a simple being love himself without his love
expanding him into a compound being.
It was because God was felt as a Father that the belief in the Trinity
arose. For a God-Father cannot be a single, that is, a solitary, God. A
father is always the father of a family. And the fact that God was felt
as a father acted as a continual incentive to conceive Him not merely
anthropomorphically--that is to say, as a man, _anthropos_--but
andromorphically, as a male, _anêr_. In the popular Christian
imagination, in effect, God the Father is conceived of as a male. And
the reason is that man, _homo_, _anthropos_, as we know him, is
necessarily either a male, _vir_, _anêr_, or a female, _mulier_, _gynê_. And
to these may be added the child, who is neuter. And hence in order to
satisfy imaginatively this necessity of feeling God as a perfect
man--that is, as a family--arose the cult of the God-Mother, the Virgin
Mary, and the cult of the Child Jesus.
The cult of the Virgin, Mariolatry, which, by the gradual elevation of
the divine element in the Virgin has led almost to her deification,
answers merely to the demand of the feeling that God should be a perfect
man, that God should include in His nature the feminine element. The
progressive exaltation of the Virgin Mary, the work of Catholic piety,
having its beginning in the expression Mother of God, _theotokos_,
_deipara_, has culminated in attributing to her the status of
co-redeemer and in the dogmatic declaration of her conception without
the stain of original sin. Hence she now occupies a position between
Humanity and Divinity and nearer Divinity than Humanity. And it has been
surmised that in course of time she may perhaps even come to be regarded
as yet another personal manifestation of the Godhead.
And yet this might not necessarily involve the conversion of the Trinity
into a Quaternity. If _pneuma_, in Greek, spirit, instead of being neuter
had been feminine, who can say that the Virgin Mary might not already
have become an incarnation or humanization of the Holy Spirit? That
fervent piety which always knows how to mould theological speculation in
accordance with its own desires would have found sufficient warranty for
such a doctrine in the text of the Gospel, in Luke's narrative of the
Annunciation where the angel Gabriel hails Mary with the words, "The
Holy Spirit shall come upon thee," _pneuma agion epeleusetai epi se_ (Luke
i. 35). And thus a dogmatic evolution would have been effected parallel
to that of the divinization of Jesus, the Son, and his identification
with the Word.
In any case the cult of the Virgin, of the eternal feminine, or rather
of the divine feminine, of the divine maternity, helps to complete the
personalization of God by constituting Him a family.
In one of my books (_Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_, part ii., chap.
lxvii.) I have said that "God was and is, in our mind, masculine. In His
mode of judging and condemning men, He acts as a male, not as a human
person above the limitation of sex; He acts as a father. And to
counterbalance this, the Mother element was required, the Mother who
always forgives, the Mother whose arms are always open to the child when
he flies from the frowning brow or uplifted hand of the angry father;
the Mother in whose bosom we seek the dim, comforting memory of that
warmth and peace of our pre-natal unconsciousness, of that milky
sweetness that soothed our dreams of innocence; the Mother who knows no
justice but that of forgiveness, no law but that of love. Our weak and
imperfect conception of God as a God with a long beard and a voice of
thunder, of a God who promulgates laws and pronounces dooms, of a God
who is the Master of a household, a Roman Paterfamilias, required
counterpoise and complement, and since fundamentally we are unable to
conceive of the personal and living God as exalted above human and even
masculine characteristics, and still less as a neutral or hermaphrodite
God, we have recourse to providing Him with a feminine God, and by the
side of the God-Father we have placed the Goddess-Mother, she who always
forgives, because, since she sees with love-blind eyes, she sees always
the hidden cause of the fault and in that hidden cause the only justice
of forgiveness ..."
And to this I must now add that not only are we unable to conceive of
the full and living God as masculine simply, but we are unable to
conceive of Him as individual simply, as the projection of a solitary I,
an unsocial I, an I that is in reality an abstract I. 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.
For the masculine concrete god (_el_ dios) is nothing but the neuter
abstract divine quality (_lo_ divino). Now the transition from feeling
the divinity in all things to substantivating it and converting the
Divinity into God, cannot be achieved without feeling undergoing a
certain risk. And the Aristotelian God, the God of the logical proofs,
is nothing more than the Divinity, a concept and not a living person who
can be felt and with whom through love man can communicate. This God is
merely a substantivized adjective; He is a constitutional God who
reigns but does not govern, and Knowledge is His constitutional charter.
And even in Greco-Latin paganism itself the tendency towards a living
monotheism is apparent in the fact that Zeus was conceived of and felt
as a father, _Zeus patêr_, as Homer calls him, the _Ju-piter_ or
_Ju-pater_ of the Latins, and as a father of a whole widely extended
family of gods and goddesses who together with him constituted the
Divinity.
The conjunction of pagan polytheism with Judaic monotheism, which had
endeavoured by other means to save the personality of God, gave birth to
the feeling of the Catholic God, a God who is a society, as the pagan
God of whom I have spoken was a society, and who at the same time is
one, as the God of Israel finally became one. Such is the Christian
Trinity, whose deepest sense rationalistic deism has scarcely ever
succeeded in understanding, that deism, which though more or less
impregnated with Christianity, always remains Unitarian or Socinian.
And the truth is that we feel God less as a superhuman consciousness
than as the actual consciousness of the whole human race, past, present,
and future, as the collective consciousness of the whole race, and still
more, as the total and infinite consciousness which embraces and
sustains all consciousnesses, infra-human, human, and perhaps,
super-human. The divinity that there is in everything, from the
lowest--that is to say, from the least conscious--of living forms, to
the highest, including our own human consciousness, this divinity we
feel to be personalized, conscious of itself, in God. And this gradation
of consciousnesses, this sense of the gulf between the human and the
fully divine, the universal, consciousness, finds its counterpart in the
belief in angels with their different hierarchies, as intermediaries
between our human consciousness and that of God. And these gradations a
faith consistent with itself must believe to be infinite, for only by an
infinite number of degrees is it possible to pass from the finite to the
infinite.
Deistic rationalism conceives God as the Reason of the Universe, but its
logic compels it to conceive Him as an impersonal reason--that is to
say, as an idea--while deistic vitalism feels and imagines God as
Consciousness, and therefore as a person or rather as a society of
persons. The consciousness of each one of us, in effect, is a society of
persons; in me there are various I's and even the I's of those among
whom I live, live in me.
The God of deistic rationalism, in effect, the God of the logical proofs
of His existence, the _ens realissimum_ and the immobile prime mover, is
nothing more than a Supreme Reason, but in the same sense in which we
can call the law of universal gravitation the reason of the falling of
bodies, this law being merely the explanation of the phenomenon. But
will anyone say that that which we call the law of universal
gravitation, or any other law or mathematical principle, is a true and
independent reality, that it is an angel, that it is something which
possesses consciousness of itself and others, that it is a person? No,
it is nothing but an idea without any reality outside of the mind of him
who conceives it. And similarly this God-Reason either possesses
consciousness of himself or he possesses no reality outside the mind
that conceives him. And if he possesses consciousness of himself, he
becomes a personal reason, and then all the value of the traditional
proofs disappears, for these proofs only proved a reason, but not a
supreme consciousness. Mathematics prove an order, a constancy, a reason
in the series of mechanical phenomena, but they 'do not prove that this
reason is conscious of itself. This reason is a logical necessity, but
the logical necessity does not prove the teleological or finalist
necessity. And where there is no finality there is no personality, there
is no consciousness.
The rational God, therefore--that is to say, the God who is simply the
Reason of the Universe and nothing more--consummates his own
destruction, is destroyed in our mind in so far as he is such a God, and
is only born again in us when we feel him in our heart as a living
person, as Consciousness, and no longer merely as the impersonal and
objective Reason of the Universe. If we wish for a rational explanation
of the construction of a machine, all that we require to know is the
mechanical science of its constructor; but if we would have a reason for
the existence of such a machine, then, since it is the work not of
Nature but of man, we must suppose a conscious, constructive being. But
the second part of this reasoning is not applicable to God, even though
it be said that in Him the mechanical science and the mechanician, by
means of which the machine was constructed, are one and the same thing.
From the rational point of view this identification is merely a begging
of the question. And thus it is that reason destroys this Supreme
Reason, in so far as the latter is a person.
The human reason, in effect, is a reason that is based upon the
irrational, upon the total vital consciousness, upon will and feeling;
our human reason is not a reason that can prove to us the existence of a
Supreme Reason, which in its turn would have to be based upon the
Supreme Irrational, upon the Universal Consciousness. And the revelation
of this Supreme Consciousness in our feeling and imagination, by love,
by faith, by the process of personalization, is that which leads us to
believe in the living God.
And this God, the living God, your God, our God, is in me, is in you,
lives in us, and we live and move and have our being in Him. And He is
in us by virtue of the hunger, the longing, which we have for Him, He is
Himself creating the longing for Himself. And He is the God of the
humble, for in the words of the Apostle, God chose the foolish things of
the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to
confound the things which are mighty (i Cor. i. 27). And God is in each
one of us in the measure in which each one feels Him and loves Him. "If
of two men," says Kierkegaard, "one prays to the true God without
sincerity of heart, and the other prays to an idol with all the passion
of an infinite yearning, it is the first who really prays to an idol,
while the second really prays to God." It would be better to say that
the true God is He to whom man truly prays and whom man truly desires.
And there may even be a truer revelation in superstition itself than in
theology. The venerable Father of the long beard and white locks who
appears among the clouds carrying the globe of the world in his hand is
more living and more real than the _ens realissimum_ of theodicy.
Reason is an analytical, that is, a dissolving force, whenever it
transfers its activity from the form of intuitions, whether those of the
individual instinct of preservation or those of the social instinct of
perpetuation, and applies it to the essence and matter of them. Reason
orders the sensible perceptions which give us the material world; but
when its analysis is exercised upon the reality of the perceptions
themselves, it dissolves them and plunges us into a world of
appearances, a world of shadows without consistency, for outside the
domain of the formal, reason is nihilist and annihilating. And it
performs the same terrible office when we withdraw it from its proper
domain and apply it to the scrutiny of the imaginative intuitions which
give us the spiritual world. For reason annihilates and imagination
completes, integrates or totalizes; reason by itself alone kills, and it
is imagination that gives life. If it is true that imagination by itself
alone, in giving us life without limit, leads us to lose our identity in
the All and also kills us as individuals, it kills us by excess of life.
Reason, the head, speaks to us the word Nothing! imagination, the heart,
the word All! and between all and nothing, by the fusion of the all and
the nothing within us, we live in God, who is All, and God lives in us
who, without Him, are nothing. Reason reiterates, Vanity of vanities!
all is vanity! And imagination answers, Plenitude of plenitudes! all is
plenitude! And thus we live the vanity of plenitude or the plenitude of
vanity.
And so deeply rooted in the depths of man's being is this vital need of
living a world[42] illogical, irrational, personal or divine, that those
who do not believe in God, or believe that they do not believe in Him,
believe nevertheless in some little pocket god or even devil of their
own, or in an omen, or in a horseshoe picked up by chance on the
roadside and carried about with them to bring them good luck and defend
them from that very reason whose loyal and devoted henchmen they imagine
themselves to be.
The God whom we hunger after is the God to whom we pray, the God of the
_Pater Noster_, of the Lord's Prayer; the God whom we beseech, before
all and above all, and whether we are aware of it or not, to instil
faith into us, to make us believe in Him, to make Himself in us, the God
to whom we pray that His name may be hallowed and that His will may be
done--His will, not His reason--on earth as it is in heaven; but feeling
that His will cannot be other than the essence of our will, the desire
to persist eternally.
And such a God is the God of love--_how_ He is it profits us not to ask,
but rather let each consult his own heart and give his imagination leave
to picture Him in the remoteness of the Universe, gazing down upon him
with those myriad eyes of His that shine in the night-darkened heavens.
He in whom you believe, reader, He is your God, He who has lived with
you and within you, who was born with you, who was a child when you were
a child, who became a man according as you became a man, who will vanish
when you yourself vanish, and who is your principle of continuity in
the spiritual life, for He is the principle of solidarity among all men
and in each man and between men and the Universe, and He is, as you are,
a person. And if you believe in God, God believes in you, and believing
in you He creates you continually. For in your essence you are nothing
but the idea that God possesses of you--but a living idea, because the
idea of a God who is living and conscious of Himself, of a
God-Consciousness, and apart from what you are in the society of God you
are nothing.
How to define God? Yes, that is our longing. That was the longing of the
man Jacob, when, after wrestling all the night until the breaking of the
day with that divine visitant, he cried, "Tell me, I pray thee, thy
name!" (Gen. xxxii. 29). Listen to the words of that great Christian
preacher, Frederick William Robertson, in a sermon preached in Trinity
Chapel, Brighton, on the 10th of June, 1849: "And this is our
struggle--_the_ struggle. Let any true man go down into the deeps of his
own being, and answer us--what is the cry that comes from the most real
part of his nature? Is it the cry for daily bread? Jacob asked for that
in his _first_ communing with God--preservation, safety. Is it even
this--to be forgiven our sins? Jacob had a sin to be forgiven, and in
that most solemn moment of his existence he did not say a syllable about
it. Or is it this--'Hallowed be Thy name'? No, my brethren. Out of our
frail and yet sublime humanity, the demand that rises in the earthlier
hours of our religion may be this--'Save my soul'; but in the most
unearthly moments it is this--'Tell me thy name.' We move through a
world of mystery; and the deepest question is, What is the being that is
ever near, sometimes felt, never seen; that which has haunted us from
childhood with a dream of something surpassingly fair, which has never
yet been realized; that which sweeps through the soul at times as a
desolation, like the blast from the wings of the Angel of Death,
leaving us stricken and silent in our loneliness; that which has
touched us in our tenderest point, and the flesh has quivered with
agony, and our mortal affections have shrivelled up with pain; that
which comes to us in aspirations of nobleness and conceptions of
superhuman excellence? Shall we say It or He? What is It? Who is He?
Those anticipations of Immortality and God--what are they? Are they the
mere throbbings of my own heart, heard and mistaken for a living
something beside me? Are they the sound of my own wishes, echoing
through the vast void of Nothingness? or shall I call them God, Father,
Spirit, Love? A living Being within me or outside me? Tell me Thy name,
thou awful mystery of Loveliness! This is the struggle of all earnest
life."[43]
Thus Robertson. To which I must add this comment, that Tell me thy name
is essentially the same as Save my soul! We ask Him His name in order
that He may save our soul, that He may save the human soul, that He may
save the human finality of the Universe. And if they tell us that He is
called He, that He is the _ens realissimum_ or the Supreme Being or any
other metaphysical name, we are not contented, for we know that every
metaphysical name is an X, and we go on asking Him His name. And there
is only one name that satisfies our longing, and that is the name
Saviour, Jesus. God is the love that saves. As Browning said in his
_Christmas Eve and Easter Day_,
For the loving worm within its clod,
Were diviner than a loveless God
Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.
The essence of the divine is Love, Will that personalizes and
eternalizes, that feels the hunger for eternity and infinity.
It is ourselves, it is our eternity that we seek in God, it is our
divinization. It was Browning again who said, in _Saul_,
'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! my flesh that I seek
In the Godhead!
But this God who saves us, this personal God, the Consciousness of the
Universe who envelops and sustains our consciousnesses, this God who
gives human finality to the whole creation--does He exist? Have we
proofs of His existence?
This question leads in the first place to an enquiry into the cleaning
of this notion of existence. What is it to exist and in what sense do we
speak of things as not existing?
In its etymological signification to exist is to be outside of
ourselves, outside of our mind: _ex-sistere_. But is there anything
outside of our mind, outside of our consciousness which embraces the sum
of the known? Undoubtedly there is. The matter of knowledge comes to us
from without. And what is the mode of this matter? It is impossible for
us to know, for to know is to clothe matter with form, and hence we
cannot know the formless as formless. To do so would be tantamount to
investing chaos with order.
This problem of the existence of God, a problem that is rationally
insoluble, is really identical with the problem of consciousness, of the
_ex-sistentia_ and not of the _in-sistentia_ of consciousness, it is
none other than the problem of the substantial existence of the soul,
the problem of the perpetuity of the human soul, the problem of the
human finality of the Universe itself. To believe in a living and
personal God, in an eternal and universal consciousness that knows and
loves us, is to believe that the Universe exists _for_ man. For man, or
for a consciousness of the same order as the human consciousness, of the
same nature, although sublimated, a consciousness that is capable of
knowing us, in the depth of whose being our memory may live for ever.
Perhaps, as I have said before, by a supreme and desperate effort of
resignation we might succeed in making the sacrifice of our personality
provided that we knew that at our death it would go to enrich a Supreme
Personality; provided that we knew that the Universal Soul was nourished
by our souls and had need of them. We might perhaps meet death with a
desperate resignation or with a resigned despair, delivering up our soul
to the soul of humanity, bequeathing to it our work, the work that bears
the impress of our person, if it were certain that this humanity were
destined to bequeath its soul in its turn to another soul, when at long
last consciousness shall have become extinct upon this desire-tormented
Earth. But is it certain?
And if the soul of humanity is eternal, if the human collective
consciousness is eternal, if there is a Consciousness of the Universe,
and if this Consciousness is eternal, why must our own individual
consciousness--yours, reader, mine--be not eternal?
In the vast all of the Universe, must there be this unique anomaly--a
consciousness that knows itself, loves itself and feels itself, joined
to an organism which can only live within such and such degrees of heat,
a merely transitory phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity that
inspires the wish to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by
living organisms, by consciousnesses akin to our own, and a profound
longing enters into that dream that our souls shall pass from star to
star through the vast spaces of the heavens, in an infinite series of
transmigrations. The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe
that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or less
degree, extends through everything. We wish not only to save ourselves,
but to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is His
finality as we feel it.
What would a universe be without any consciousness capable of reflecting
it and knowing it? What would objectified reason be without will and
feeling? For us it would be equivalent to nothing--a thousand times more
dreadful than nothing.
If such a supposition is reality, our life is deprived of sense and
value.
It is not, therefore, rational necessity, but vital anguish that impels
us to believe in God. And to believe in God--I must reiterate it yet
again--is, before all and above all, to feel a hunger for God, a hunger
for divinity, to be sensible of His lack and absence, to wish that God
may exist. And it is to wish to save the human finality of the Universe.
For one might even come to resign oneself to being absorbed by God, if
it be that our consciousness is based upon a Consciousness, if
consciousness is the end of the Universe.
"The wicked man hath said in his heart, There is no God." And this is
truth. For in his head the righteous man may say to himself, God does
not exist! But only the wicked can say it in his heart. Not to believe
that there is a God or to believe that there is not a God, is one thing;
to resign oneself to there not being a God is another thing, and it is a
terrible and inhuman thing; but not to wish that there be a God exceeds
every other moral monstrosity; although, as a matter of fact, those who
deny God deny Him because of their despair at not finding Him.
And now reason once again confronts us with the Sphinx-like
question--the Sphinx, in effect, is reason--Does God exist? This eternal
and eternalizing person who gives meaning--and I will add, a human
meaning, for there is none other--to the Universe, is it a substantial
something, existing independently of our consciousness, independently of
our desire? Here we arrive at the insoluble, and it is best that it
should be so. Let it suffice for reason that it cannot prove the
impossibility of His existence.
To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to
act as if He existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the
inner spring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets
hope, hope begets faith, and faith and hope beget charity. Of this
divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of goodness.
Let us see how this may be.