God is beyond proof. Unamuno, Life 8.4

Unamuno does not believe that we can prove the existence of God. What we prove are rational ideas, and these are never sufficient to contain divinity.

Y de este Dios surgido así en la conciencia humana a partir del sentimiento de divinidad, apoderóse luego la razón, esto es, la filosofía, y tendió a definirlo, a convertirlo en idea. Porque definir algo es idealizarlo, para lo cual hay que prescindir de su elemento inconmensurable o irracional, de su fondo vital. Y el Dios sentido, la divinidad sentida como persona y conciencia única fuera de nosotros, aunque envolviéndonos y sosteniéndonos, se convirtió en la idea de Dios.

El Dios lógico, racional, el ens summum, el primum movens, el Ser Supremo de la filosofía teológica, aquel a que se llega por los tres famosos caminos de negación, eminencia y causalidad, viae negationis, eminentiae, causalitatis, no es más que una idea de Dios, algo muerto. Las tradicionales y tantas veces debatidas pruebas de su existencia no son, en el fondo, sino un intento vano de determinar su esencia; porque, como hacía muy bien notar Vinet, la existencia se saca de la esencia; y decir que Dios existe, sin decir qué es Dios y cómo es, equivale a no decir nada.

Y este Dios, por eminencia y negación o remoción de cualidades finitas, acaba por ser un Dios impensable, una pura idea, un Dios de quien, a causa de su excelencia misma ideal, podemos decir que no es nada, como ya definió Escoto Eriúgena: Deus propter excellentiam non inmerito nihil vocatur. O con frase del falso Dionisio Areopagita, en su epístola 5: «La divina tiniebla es la luz inaccesible en la que se dice habita Dios». El Dios antropomórfico y sentido, al ir purificándose de atributos humanos, y como tales finitos y relativos y temporales, se evapora en el Dios del deísmo o del panteísmo.

Las supuestas pruebas clásicas de la existencia de Dios refiérense todas a este Dios-Idea, a este Dios lógico, al Dios por remoción, y de aquí que en rigor no prueben nada, es decir, no prueban más que la existencia de esa idea de Dios.

Once this God was risen thus in our human consciousness, where he emerged from our sense of divinity, reason then took hold of him. In other words, philosophy took him in her grasp and sought to define him, to turn him into an idea. For to define a thing is to make it ideal, a process that demands the removal of every irrational or unmeasurable element, so that whatever we are defining loses its vital foundations. And thus the God we felt, the divinity we sensed as a person and awareness outside our own selves, though he embraced and sustained us, was made into the idea of God.

The logical, rational God—ultimate entity, prime mover, Supreme Being of theological philosophy, an inevitable conclusion arising from the three famous pathways of negation, exaltation, and causality (†)—is no more than an idea, a dead image of God. The traditional and much debated proofs of divine existence are at root nothing more than a vain attempt to determine or limit God's essence. For as Vinet noted very astutely, existence is derived from essence. Saying that God exists without saying what or how he is: this is the same as saying nothing at all.

This God, whether we attain him by the exaltation of finite qualities, or their negation and removal, ends up as something unthinkable: a pure idea, a God whose conceptual excellence means that we can properly call him nothing. In the words of the Irish Scotus, “Because of his excellence, it is not wrong to call God nothing” (‡). The false Dionysius anticipates this judgment in his fifth epistle: “The divine darkness is an inaccessible light in which God is said to dwell” (*). As he cleanses himself of human attributes, removing everything finite and relative and temporal from his character, the human-shaped God we feel evaporates into the remote God of deism, or pantheism.

All the classic proofs of God's existence refer properly to this ideal God, this logical God, the God attained by loss of humanity. Thus, what they prove in rigorous terms is precisely nothing; they cannot prove more than the existence of this idea of God.

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(†) These three ways familiar to Christian theologians originate with Plato, it seems, but are published explicitly in works attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite (1^st century CE), though scholars find the language in them easier to situate in later times (~ 5^th century CE). The way of negation affirms that God exists beyond any of his attributes, whose denial thus produces a negative image of God as that which exists without attribution. The way of exaltation argues that God must contain all extremes of goodness, fully developed. So God appears as an image of all that is perfect, perfectly joined together. The way of causality affirms that all phenomena must have cause from which they arise; the world in its totality would then have cause, and this cause is God.

(‡) Johannes Scotus Eriugena (c. 800-877 CE) was a famous Irish scholar who inherited Alcuin's position over the Palace School in the time of Charles the Bald, grandson of Charlemagne & king over the western Carolingian lands (West Francia from 840, Italy and the empire generally from 875). He translated the body of texts attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite from Greek, which he read, into Latin, and composed a magnum opus articulating his own understanding of this tradition (De divisione naturae, vel Periphyseon).

(*) Among the texts attributed to Dionysius are several epistles. The fifth, addressed to a deacon or minister named Dorotheus, opens with the following sentence, whose first period is translated by Unamuno: 

Ὁ θεῖος γνόφος ἐστὶ τὸ «ἀπρόσιτον φῶς », ἐν ᾧ κατοικεῖν ὁ θεὸς λέγεται, καὶ ἀοράτῳ γε ὄντι διὰ τὴν ὑπερέχουσαν φανότητα καὶ ἀπροσίτῳ τῷ αὐτῷ δι’ ὑπερβολὴν ὑπερουσίου φωτοχυσίας (Epistulae 5.1, ed. Heil & Ritter).

“The divine darkness is a light unapproachable, in which God is said to dwell. It is unseen, being too much and mighty for our vision, and inaccessible, because of the excessive light that pours from it.”