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.