Whence divinity? Unamuno, Life 8.2
Unamuno
describes his understanding of our historical conception of divinity.
On his reading, we (or our ancestors) feel dependent on the
environment for important things that we cannot perfectly control.
These things come to us mediated by foreign power or agency (notably
the weather) that we cannot bind or separate cleanly from ourselves
(cf. circadian rhythms, menstrual cycles, digestion, mortality).
Feeling our inner and outer lives bound in the expression of this
power, we attribute personality like ours to it, and so in time it
becomes a traditional divinity: human personality attached to cosmic
events larger & subtler than any human can drive, with impact at
once objective (sunlight) and subjective (my feeling as I stand in
the sun, which I might love or hate, bless or curse).
La
doctrina de Schleiermacher que pone el origen, o más bien la esencia
del sentimiento religioso, en el inmediato y sencillo sentimiento de
dependencia, parece ser la explicación más profunda y exacta. El
hombre primitivo, viviendo en sociedad, se siente depender de
misteriosas potencias que invisiblemente le rodean, se siente en
comunión social, no sólo con sus semejantes, los demás hombres,
sino con la Naturaleza toda animada e inanimada, lo que no quiere
decir otra cosa sino que lo personaliza todo. No sólo tiene él
conciencia del mundo, sino que se imagina que el mundo tiene también
conciencia como él. Lo mismo que un niño habla a su perro o a su
muñeco, cual si le entendiesen, cree el salvaje que le oye su
fetiche o que la nube tormentosa se acuerda de él y le persigue. Y
es que el espíritu del hombre natural, primitivo, no se ha
desplacentado todavía de la Naturaleza, ni ha marcado el lindero
entre el sueño y la vigilia, entre la realidad y la imaginación.
No
fué, pues, lo divino, algo objetivo, sino la subjetividad de la
conciencia proyectada hacia fuera, la personalización del mundo. El
concepto de divinidad surgió del sentimiento de ella, y el
sentimiento de divinidad no es sino el mismo oscuro y naciente
sentimiento de personalidad vertido a lo de fuera. Ni cabe en rigor
decir fuera y dentro, objetivo y subjetivo, cuando tal distinción no
era sentida, y siendo como es, de esa indistinción de donde el
sentimiento y el concepto de divinidad proceden. Cuanto más clara la
conciencia de la distinción entre lo objetivo y lo subjetivo, tanto
más oscuro el sentimiento de divinidad en nosotros.
Hase
dicho, y al parecer con entera razón, que el paganismo helénico es,
más bien que politeísta, panteísta. La creencia en muchos dioses,
tomando el concepto de Dios como hoy le tomamos, no sé que haya
existido en cabeza humana. Y si por panteísmo se entiende la
doctrina no de que todo y cada cosa es Dios —proposición para mí
impensable—, sino de que todo es divino, sin gran violencia cabe
decir que el paganismo era politeísta. Los dioses, no sólo se
mezclaban entre los hombres, sino que se mezclaban con ellos;
engendraban los dioses en las mujeres mortales, y los hombres
mortales engendraban en las diosas a semi-dioses. Y si hay
semi-dioses, esto es, semi-hombres, es tan sólo porque lo divino y
lo humano eran caras de una misma realidad. La divinización de todo
no era sino su humanización. Y decir que el Sol era un dios,
equivalía a decir que era un hombre, una conciencia humana más o
menos agrandada y sublimada. Y esto vale desde el fetichismo hasta el
paganismo helénico.
Schleiermacher's
doctrine (†) places the origin of religious feeling, or rather its
essence, in our immediate and simple awareness of dependence: this
appears to be the most profound and precisely correct explanation we
have for religion. Primitive man, living in society, feels himself to
depend on powerful mysteries that surround him invisibly. He exists
in social communion not merely with his fellow humans, but with all
Nature, animate and inanimate. In other words, he renders everything
into persons, with whom he must deal. More than just aware of the
world's consciousness, he imagines that it holds that consciousness
the way he holds his own. Even as a child speaks to his dog or his
doll, taking it for granted that they understand him, so the man
without civilization believes that his sacred fetish hears him, or
that a storm-cloud marks and remembers him, as it chases him down.
This happens because the spirit of every natural, primitive man has
not yet been entirely removed from Nature, has not marked the
boundary between dreams and waking, reality and imagination.
The
divine, then, was not initially an objective thing. Instead, it was
the subjectivity of our consciousness projected outwards: a
personification and personalization of the world. The concept of
divinity arose from our sense that it was there, and this sense or
awareness was a feeling, obscure and embryonic, that personality
exists beyond us. We cannot distinguish rigorously here between what
lies outside us and within, between objective and subjective
phenomena, as such a distinction was not clearly or cleanly felt: our
lack of ability to separate these things is precisely whence our
feeling and conception of divinity derive. The clearer our awareness
of the division between objective and subjective things, the dimmer
our sense of the divinity within us.
It
has been said, and the saying appears correct, that Greek paganism is
pantheist rather than polytheist. What does this mean? Believing in
many gods, taking cognizance of each one as we do of God today: I do
not know that such a thing ever entered into the human mind. What is
pantheism, then? It might mean that each and every thing is God, a
doctrine that is to me unthinkable. If we omit that, and pantheism
means instead that everything is divine, then it seems possible to
say, without doing violence to the truth, that pantheist paganism was
polytheist, too. The gods, on this reading, not only mixed with men;
they also participated in our species, becoming joined to us. Gods
fathered divine children with mortal women, and mortal men bedded
goddesses who gave birth to demi-gods. If there are demi-gods, or in
other words demi-humans, it is only because the divine and the human
are both faces of the same reality. The divinization of everything
was also its humanization. Saying that the sun was a god was
functionally the same as saying that he was a man, a human
personality or conscience more grandiose and sublime than ours, in
some way. This account of divinity holds true from the appearance of
primitive fetishism to the flowering of Greek paganism.
---
(†)
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was a German
theologian, scholar, and preacher who went from studying to tutoring
to pastoring (at a Reformed church in Stolp) to a professorship (at
the University of Halle, and then Berlin, which he helped to found).
He was heavily influenced by Spinoza and Plato, and is sometimes
regarded as the father of modern liberal theology (against which Karl
Barth rebelled in the twentieth century). His most famous theological
writing, alluded to here by Unamuno, was published in two major
editions: Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der
evangelischen Kirche (pub.
1820-21, 1830-31).