God creates man to create himself. Unamuno, Life 8.11
Unamuno
thinks that God is not primarily an idea, nor any kind of
explanation. Instead, God is an image of perfect humanity that each
of us projects instinctively, as we notice what is best in our own
character and look to nurture this. When we share these images in
community, the images become one, a whole greater than any sum of its
parts that makes us as much as we make it.
Mientras
peregriné por los campos de la razón a busca de Dios, no pude
encontrarle porque la idea de Dios no me engañaba, ni pude tomar por
Dios a una idea, y fué entonces, cuando erraba por los páramos del
racionalismo, cuando me dije que no debemos buscar más consuelo que
la verdad, llamando así a la razón, sin que por eso me consolara.
Pero al ir hundiéndome en el escepticismo racional de una parte y en
la desesperación sentimental de otra, se me encendió el hambre de
Dios, y el ahogo de espíritu me hizo sentir con su falta, su
realidad. Y quise que haya Dios, que exista Dios. Y Dios no existe,
sino que más bien sobre-existe, y está sustentando nuestra
existencia, existiéndonos.
Dios,
que es el Amor, el Padre del Amor, es hijo del amor en nosotros. Hay
hombres ligeros y exteriores, esclavos de la razón que nos
exterioriza, que creen haber dicho algo con decir que lejos de haber
hecho Dios al hombre a su imagen y semejanza, es el hombre el que a
su imagen y semejanza se hace sus dioses o su Dios, sin reparar, los
muy livianos, que si esto segundo es, como realmente es, así, se
debe a que no es menos verdad lo primero. Dios y el hombre se hacen
mutuamente, en efecto; Dios se hace o se revela en el hombre, y el
hombre se hace en Dios, Dios se hizo a sí mismo, Deus
ipse se fecit,
dijo Lactancio (Divinarum
institutionum,
II, 8), y podemos decir que se está haciendo, y en el hombre y por
el hombre. Y si cada cual de nosotros, en el empuje de su amor, en su
hambre de divinidad, se imagina a Dios a su medida, y a su medida se
hace Dios para él, hay un Dios colectivo, social, humano, resultante
de las imaginaciones todas humanas que le imaginan. Porque Dios es y
se revela en la colectividad. Y es Dios la más rica y más personal
concepción humana.
While
I wandered through reason's fields in quest of God, I could not find
him, for the idea of God did not beguile me. I was not capable
of taking God for an idea, and it was then, in my pilgrimage through
the wilderness of rationalism, that I told myself we ought never to
seek better comfort than the truth—my
name then for reason. This
did nothing to comfort me, but as I kept drowning my mind in rational
skepticism and my heart in the anguish of despair, a hunger for God
was kindled in me, and the suffocation of my spirit made me feel the
reality of God, by his very lack. I wanted God to exist, to be
present. In fact, God does not exist: he superexists, sustaining our
existence, causing us to
stand forth from the void.
God
is Love, the Father of Love, born from the love within us. There are
men out there, clever wags in thrall to superficiality and to the
reason that makes all things superficial, who believe that they have
said something when they remark that far from God making mankind in
his image, it is rather man who forms gods, or God, in our own image
and likeness (†). Fools! They cannot see how the truth of the second
observation must redound to the credit of the first. God and man make
one another mutually, in effect. God makes or reveals himself in man,
and man shapes himself in God. “God created himself,” as
Lactantius says (Divine Institutes 2.8), and we can say that
he is still doing this, making himself in man and by means of man.
And if each of us imagines God in his own human likeness—in the
impulse of his own love, in his own hunger for divinity—and
fashions God for himself to this measure, then the result is a
collective God, a social and human God risen from all the human
imaginations that depict him. For God exists and reveals himself in
community, while being also the richest and most intimately personal
conception of which we are capable, as humans.
---
(†) The
most famous articulation of this argument belongs to Xenophanes of
Colophon (c. 570-478 BC).
Clement of Alexandria
provides two fragments of his verse that deliver it (Stromata
5.14.109):
ἀλλ’
οἱ βροτοὶ δοκοῦσι γεννᾶσθαι θεούς,
τὴν
σφετέρην δὲ ἐσθῆτα ἔχειν φωνήν τε
δέμας τε.
Mortals
made the gods, it seems
With
mortal voice, and flesh, and things.
ἀλλ’
εἴ τοι χεῖρας γ’ εἶχον βόες ἠὲ λέοντες,
ὡς
γράψαι χείρεσσι καὶ ἔργα τελεῖν ἅπερ
ἄνδρες,
ἵπποι
μέν θ’ ἵπποισι, βόες δέ τε βουσὶν ὁμοίας
καί
κε θεῶν ἰδέας ἔγραφον καὶ σώματ’
ἐποίουν
τοιαῦθ’
οἷόν περ καὶ αὐτοὶ δέμας εἶχον ὁμοῖον.
Lions
and oxen, had they hands
To
draw and finish works like man,
Horse
and cow, if they were skilled
To
make a mark and then to build,
Each
would give his god a grace
Like
the one in his own face.