God is a Family. Unamuno, Life 8.15
Unamuno
continues explaining his understanding of the Virgin Mary and the
Trinity. The Virgin, for him, is our Divine Mother, and the Trinity
is fundamentally a vessel for holding our impression that God must be
human & personal. Each human, it turns out, is properly a
society: here Unamuno agrees with Walt Whitman, as well as cellular
biologists. So a personal, human God must be society, as well.
En
uno de mis libros (Vida
de Don Quijote y Sancho,
segunda parte, cap. LXVII) he dicho que «Dios era y es en nuestras
mentes masculino. Su modo de juzgar y condenar a los hombres, modo de
varón, no de persona humana por encima de sexo; modo de Padre. Y
para compensarlo hacía falta la Madre, la Madre que perdona siempre,
la Madre que abre siempre los brazos al hijo cuando huye éste de la
mano levantada o del ceño fruncido del irritado padre; la madre en
cuyo regazo se busca como consuelo una oscura remembranza de aquella
tibia paz de la inconsciencia que dentro de él fué el alba que
precedió a nuestro nacimiento y un dejo de aquella dulce leche que
embalsamó nuestros sueños de inocencia;
la madre que no conoce
más justicia que el perdón ni más ley que el amor.
Nuestra pobre e
imperfecta concepción de un Dios con largas barbas y voz de trueno,
de un Dios que impone preceptos y pronuncia sentencias, de un Dios
amo
de casa, pater
familias a la
romana, necesitaba compensarse y completarse; y como en el fondo no
podemos concebir al Dios personal y vivo, no ya por encima de rasgos
humanos, mas ni aun por encima de rasgos varoniles, y menos un Dios
neutro o hermafrodita, acudimos a darle un Dios femenino y junto al
Dios Padre hemos puesto a la Diosa Madre, a la que perdona siempre,
porque como mira con amor ciego, ve siempre el fondo de la culpa y en
ese fondo la justicia única del perdón...»
A
lo que debo ahora añadir que no sólo no podemos concebir al Dios
vivo y entero como solamente varón, sino que no le podemos concebir
como solamente individuo, como proyección de un yo solitario, fuera
de sociedad, de un yo en realidad abstracto. Mi yo vivo es un yo que
es en realidad un nosotros; mi yo vivo, personal, no vive sino en los
demás, de los demás y por los demás yos; procedo de una
muchedumbre de abuelos y en mí los llevo en extracto, y llevo a la
vez en mí en potencia una muchedumbre de nietos, y Dios, proyección
de mi yo al infinito—o más bien yo proyección de Dios a lo
finito—, es también muchedumbre. Y de aquí, para salvar la
personalidad de Dios, es decir, para salvar al Dios vivo, la
necesidad de fe—esto es sentimental e imaginativa—de concebirle y
sentirle con una cierta multiplicidad interna.
In
one of my books, I put it thus: “In our minds, God was, and is
still, masculine. His manner of judging and condemning people is that
of a man, not a human personage that has transcended sex. He acts as
a father. To balance him, there was need of a mother—the
Mother, in fact, who always forgives, whose arms are ever open to the
child fleeing the hand or face of the angry Father. The Mother in
whose embrace we seek some dark remembrance of that warm peace of
unconsciousness, the lack of awareness that came before the dawn of
our active mind. The Mother whose milk soaked the dreams of our
innocence. The Mother who knows no justice apart from forgiveness, no
law but love. Our poor and imperfect conception of God as a man with
huge beard and thundering voice—a god who imposes precepts and
pronounces sentences, a master of the house like the Roman
paterfamilias—demands
something to balance it and round it out. We were quite incapable of
conceiving a personal and living god beyond human traits, beyond the
realm where masculinity appears, and neuter or hermaphroditic
divinity made even less sense to us, so we hastened to give our God
his feminine counterpart, to place the Mother Goddess beside the
Father God, where she extends
her eternal forgiveness: for as she looks out with love that is
blind, she sees always the depths of our every fault, and in those
depths she witnesses the solitary justice of forgiveness ...”
(The Life of Don Quixote & Sancho, 2.67).
To
these reflections I must now add that just as we cannot conceive God
living and whole as merely a man,
so it is impossible for us to imagine him as merely or simply an
individual, the projection of a
solitary ego without any
society, an ego really and truly abstract. My own ego, the
I that I am, is in reality a we.
My living and personal self does not actually live except as part of
my society, and each self in that society is similarly bonded to its
fellows. I proceed from an abundance of grandparents, whose being I
carry extracted within my own, and right there with it I find in
myself the potential being of myriad grandchildren. Whether we make
God a projection of my own being into infinity, or more faithfully
render myself as his projection into mortal finitude, he
must also be a multitude, as I am. And so, to keep personality as a
divine attribute—to
keep God as a living being, in other words—our
faith must necessarily feel and imagine him as possessing some kind
of internal multitude or multiplicity.