God should be irrational. Unamuno, Life 8.7

For Unamuno, reason and will are at odds. One is about setting mortal limits; the other transgresses these limits. The character of God is conceived historically as comprehending both traits, somehow, in a universal form that is at once uniformly rational and personally willing. But that perfect union is not actually conceivable, in rational terms as humans know them. To posit it seriously is ultimately to choose one or the other: to opt either for a Stoic universe in which gods are rationally fated, or for a more primitively Christian or pagan universe in which personal deity wills things in ways that trangress, transcend, or traduce reason (as we know it).

Pregúntase, por otra parte, si una cosa cualquiera imaginada pero no existente, no existe porque Dios no lo quiere, o no lo quiere Dios porque no existe, y respecto a lo imposible, si es que no puede ser porque Dios así lo quiere, o no lo quiere Dios porque ello en sí y por su absurdo mismo no puede ser. Dios tiene que someterse a la ley lógica de contradicción, y no puede hacer, según los teólogos, que dos más dos hagan más o menos que cuatro. La ley de la necesidad está sobre Él o es Él mismo. Y en el orden moral se pregunta si la mentira, o el homicidio, o el adulterio, son malos porque así lo estableció o si lo estableció así porque ello es malo. Si lo primero, Dios o es un Dios caprichoso y absurdo que establece una ley pudiendo haber establecido otra, u obedece a una naturaleza y esencia intrínseca de las cosas mismas independiente de él, es decir, de su voluntad soberana; y si es así, si obedece a una razón de ser de las cosas, esta razón, si la conociésemos, nos bastaría sin necesidad alguna de más Dios, y no conociéndola, ni Dios tampoco nos aclara nada. Esa razón estaría sobre Dios. Ni vale decir que esa razón es Dios mismo, razón suprema de las cosas. Una razón así, necesaria, no es algo personal. La personalidad la da la voluntad. Y es este problema de las relaciones entre la razón, necesariamente necesaria, de Dios y su voluntad, necesariamente libre, lo que hará siempre del Dios lógico o aristotélico un Dios contradictorio.

Los teólogos escolásticos no han sabido nunca desenredarse de las dificultades en que se veían metidos al tratar de conciliar la libertad humana con la presciencia divina y el conocimiento que Dios tiene de lo futuro contingente y libre; y es porque, en rigor, el Dios racional es completamente inaplicable a lo contingente, pues que la noción de contingencia no es en el fondo sino la noción de irracionalidad. El Dios racional es forzosamente necesario en su ser y en su obrar, no puede hacer en cada caso sino lo mejor, y no cabe que haya varias cosas igualmente mejores, pues entre infinitas posibilidades sólo hay una que sea la más acomodada a su fin, como entre las infinitas líneas que pueden trazarse de un punto a otro sólo hay una recta. Y el Dios racional, el Dios de la razón, no puede menos sino seguir en cada caso la línea recta, la más conducente al fin que se propone, fin necesario como es necesaria la única recta dirección que a él conduce. Y así la divinidad de Dios es sustituída por su necesidad. Y en la necesidad de Dios perece su voluntad libre, es decir, su personalidad consciente. El Dios que anhelamos, el Dios que ha de salvar nuestra alma de la nada, el Dios inmortalizador, tiene que ser un Dios arbitrario.

Y es que Dios no puede ser Dios porque piensa, sino porque obra, porque crea; no es un Dios contemplativo, sino activo. Un Dios Razón, un Dios teórico o contemplativo, como es el Dios éste del racionalismo teológico, es un Dios que se diluye en su propia contemplación. A este Dios corresponde, como veremos, la visión beatífica como expresión suprema de la felicidad eterna. Un Dios quietista, en fin, como es quietista por su esencia misma la razón.

Ask yourself now the following question about anything you like that is imaginary, but not actual: does this thing fail to exist because God does not want it, or does God fail to want it because it doesn't exist? Consider something impossible. Is it impossible because God wants it to be, or does God fail to desire its possibility because it is absurd on its own terms, prior to his wish? God must submit to the logical law of contradiction, according to theologians, and so he cannot cause that two and two together make more or less than four. The law of necessity is over him, or is essentially himself. In the realm of moral order: is lying, killing, or adultery evil because thus did God ordain, or does his ordinance arise because these things are evil on their own? If we choose the first answer, then God is capricious and absurd, making one law when he could have made another. If we choose the second, then he obeys a nature or essential order intrinsic to things without him, independent of his sovereign will. If this latter is the case—if he obeys a rational order inherent in the existence of things—then this order or reason, if we knew it, would be enough for us without God, and knowing God without it would not clarify anything for us. The reason would be God, really. But it is not right to say that the reason is God himself, as the ultimate rational cause for all things. A logical reason like this one, necessary or requisite, is nothing personal. Personality is what gives something will. Our inability here to determine the relationship between divine reason, which as reason must be necessary, and divine will, necessarily free, will always cause problems for any kind of logical God in the tradition of Aristotle, since the God thus conceived is always self-contradictory.

The scholastic theologians were never able to conceive how to untangle themselves from the difficulties that trapped them as they tried to reconcile human liberty with divine foreknowledge, the knowledge that God possesses of future contingency, freed from temporal constraint. The reason for their failure, if we apply ourselves rigorously to understand it, is that a rational God is utterly without relation to contingency, as the very notion of contingency, in its most basic form, is nothing else but the notion of irrationality. The rational God of scholasticism is perforce a necessary being, in all that he is and does. He cannot act in any instance except for the improvement of all things, universally, and there is no possibility for the existence of various things equally susceptible of mutually exclusive improvement. There exists for him but one possibility to make actual among the infinite possibilities that present themselves, just as among the infinity of lines possible between two mathematical points, there is just one of them that is straight. So the rational God, the God of reason, has no choice but to follow in every case the straight line that leads most to the rational end that his existence posits, an end that is just as necessary as the rigid trajectory that approaches it. In this manner the divinity of God is supplanted by his necessity. And in that divine necessity, the free will of God—his conscious personality—perishes. The God that we long for, the God that shall save our souls from nothingness, the God that grants immortality, must be an arbitrary God.

God cannot be God because he thinks, merely; he is God because he works, because he makes. He is not a contemplative God, but an active one. In contrast to him, a deifed Reason, a theoretical or contemplative God such as the rational theologian worships, is a God who dissolves in his own contemplation. To this latter God belongs, as we shall see, the beatific vision as the ultimate expression of eternal happiness. This quietist God is ultimately quiet, inactive & dispassionate, by virtue of reason being the essence of his character.