God must be something, not nothing. Unamuno, Life 8.12
Unamuno
addresses the tradition of rational theology that renders God as pure
being, a negation of all humanly perceptible attributes that can
only be expressed as unlimited existence. He rejects this
portrait of God, preferring one that sees deity as containing &
incorporating every limit: a sum of particulars that does not omit
anything concrete in the world. Though we cannot achieve a breadth of
representative mind sufficient to comprehend the limitations of this
God, limitation means that he is personal, and at least potentially
mortal: endlessly remote from the total abstraction of pure being.
Nos
dijo el Maestro de divinidad que seamos perfectos como es perfecto
nuestro Padre que está en los cielos (Mat. V, 48), y en el orden del
sentir y el pensar nuestra perfección consiste en ahincarnos porque
nuestra imaginación llegue a la total imaginación de la humanidad
de que formamos, en Dios, parte.
Conocida
es la doctrina lógica de la contraposición entre la extensión y la
comprensión de un concepto, y como a medida que la una crece, la
otra mengua. El concepto más extenso y a la par menos comprensivo,
es el de ente o cosa que abarca todo lo existente y no tiene más
nota que la de ser, y el concepto más comprensivo y el menos extenso
es el del universo, que sólo a sí mismo se aplica y comprende todas
las notas existentes. Y el Dios lógico o racional, el Dios obtenido
por vía de negación, el ente sumo, se sume, como realidad, en la
nada, pues el ser puro y la pura nada, según enseñaba Hegel, se
identifican. Y el Dios cordial o sentido, el Dios de los vivos, es el
Universo mismo personalizado, es la conciencia del Universo.
Un
Dios universal y personal, muy otro que el Dios individual del rígido
monoteísmo metafísico.
The
Master of divinity told us to become perfect, as our Father in the
heavens is perfect (Matthew 5.48), and our perfection in the
regulation of thought and feeling consists in hastening the arrival
of that moment wherein our imagination attains the universal
imagination of all humanity, of which we form a part, in God.
We
are familiar already with the logical doctrine that opposes the
extension of a concept to its comprehension, such that as the one
grows, the other must shrink. The most extensive, and so least
comprehensive, concept is that of a being or thing that includes all
existence, but that carries no significant attribute in itself beyond
the fact that it persists. The most comprehensive concept, in
contrast, and the least extensive, is that of the universe, which applies only to itself and includes every significant
attribute extant or possible. The logical or rational God, the God
obtained by way of negation: this supreme being can only appear in
reality as nothing, for pure being is the same as nothingness,
as Hegel taught. The God of the heart, meanwhile, the God that we who
live can feel, is the Universe itself, in personal form: the
consciousness of the Universe.
A
universal & personal God, very different from the individual God
of rigid, metaphysical monotheism.