What is God? Unamuno, Life 7.10
It
has been said that God is love. But what would this mean, really?
Unamuno has one answer.
El
amor personaliza cuanto ama. Sólo cabe enamorarse de una idea
personalizándola. Y cuando el amor es tan grande y tan vivo, y tan
fuerte y desbordante que lo ama todo, entonces lo personaliza todo y
descubre que el total Todo, que el Universo es Persona también, que
tiene una Conciencia, Conciencia que a su vez sufre, compadece y ama,
es decir, es conciencia. Y a esta Conciencia del Universo, que el
amor descubre personalizando cuanto ama, es a lo que llamamos Dios. Y
así el alma compadece a Dios y se siente por Él compadecida, le ama
y se siente por Él amada, abrigando su miseria en el seno de la
miseria eterna e infinita, que es al eternizarse e infinitarse la
felicidad suprema misma.
Dios
es, pues, la personalización del Todo, es la Conciencia eterna e
infinita del Universo, Conciencia presa de la materia, y luchando por
libertarse de ella. Personalizamos al Todo para salvarnos de la nada,
y el único misterio verdaderamente misterioso es el misterio del
dolor.
Love
invariably renders the beloved as another person. The only way to
fall in love with an ideal is to make it a person. And when love is
so great and alive, so strong and overflowing, that it loves
everything and each thing all together at once, it personifies this
whole and discovers the All that is our universe. The universe is a
person, too, with consciousness that suffers, shares suffering, and
loves: these are the activities that consciousness entails. This
universal consciousness, which love discovers by personifying what it
loves, is what we call God. And so, our soul suffers with God,
feeling with and for him as it senses his feeling with and for it. It
loves him, and feels loved by him in return, wrapping its own little
misery in the bosom of eternal and infinite misery, which by being
infinite and eternal becomes the greatest happiness there is.
As
the personification of the All, God is the eternal and unbounded
Awareness of the Universe—an awareness captured by matter, fighting
to liberate itself from material limitation. We personify the All to
save ourselves from the void that is the Nothing, and the only true
mystery we know, the only one actually mysterious, is the mystery of
pain.