Making sense of God. Unamuno, Life 8.16
Unamuno
continues to differentiate carefully between the Catholic Trinity and
other ways of conceiving divinity, including pagan and Jewish
antecedents to the Trinity as well as Protestant and heretical
alternatives to it. The Catholic Trinity is irrational, unlike the
Aristotelian or Deist God, and contradictory (containing society and
unity together, as our life does).
El
sentimiento pagano de divinidad viva obvió a esto con el politeísmo.
Es el conjunto de sus dioses, la república de éstos, lo que
constituye realmente su Divinidad. El verdadero Dios del paganismo
helénico es más bien que Zeus Padre (Jupiter),
la sociedad toda de los dioses y semi-dioses. Y de aquí la
solemnidad de la invocación de Demóstenes cuando invocaba a los
dioses todos, y a todas las diosas:
τοῖς
θεοῖς εὔχομαι πᾶσι καὶ πάσαις.
Y cuando los
razonadores sustantivaron el término dios, θεός,
que es propiamente un adjetivo, una cualidad predicada de cada uno de
los dioses, y le añadieron un artículo, forjaron
el
dios
—ὁ
θεός—
abstracto o muerto del
racionalismo filosófico, una cualidad sustantivada y falta de
personalidad por lo tanto. Porque
el
dios no es más
que lo
divino.
Y es que de sentir la
divinidad en todo no puede pasarse, sin riesgo para el sentimiento, a
sustantivarla y hacer de la Divinidad Dios. Y el Dios aristotélico,
el de las pruebas lógicas, no es más que la Divinidad, un concepto
y no una persona viva a que se pueda sentir y con la que pueda por el
amor comunicarse el hombre. Ese Dios que no es sino un
adjetivo
sustantivado, es un dios constitucional que reina, pero no gobierna;
la Ciencia es su carta constitucional.
Y
en el propio paganismo greco-latino, la tendencia al monoteísmo vivo
se ve en concebir y sentir a Zeus como padre, Ζεὺς
πατήρ que le
llama Homero, Iu-piter
o sea Iu-pater entre
los latinos, y padre de toda una dilatada familia de dioses y diosas
que con él constituyen la Divinidad.
De
la conjunción del politeísmo pagano con el monoteísmo judaico, que
había tratado por otros medios de salvar la personalidad de Dios,
resultó el sentimiento del Dios católico, que es sociedad, como era
sociedad ese Dios pagano de que dije, y es uno como el Dios de Israel
acabó siéndolo. Y tal es la Trinidad cuyo más hondo sentido rara
vez ha logrado comprender el deísmo racionalista, más o menos
impregnado de cristianismo, pero siempre unitariano o sociniano.
Pagan sensibility responded to this multiplicity evident in living
divinity by professing polytheism. Pagan divinity, writ large,
is ultimately the association of all the gods, a divine republic of
many persons. The true God of Hellenic paganism is really the society
of all the gods and demi-gods, not just Father Zeus (Jupiter, for
Romans). Hence the solemnity evident in Demosthenes' prayer: “Gods
and goddesses, I beseech you all!” (De corona 1).
Rationalizing pagans encountered the term theos (Greek
for god) as
an adjective, a quality or predicate attached to each and every one
of the gods, individually. When they rendered this adjective as a
noun, they added an article to it, forging the god
(ho theos in Greek) as
an abstract and empty form, a dead artifact of rational philosophy
that naturally lacked personality, given its existence as a
substantivized quality. The god
in Greek philosophy is nothing more than divinity—impersonal
and abstract, with no particular cult or myth attached. There is a
great gulf between feeling the divinity of all things generally, and
making that feeling substantial, rendering our sense of the divine
particularly
as God. The Aristotelian God,
the god of logical proofs, is no more than divinity,
a concept rather than a living person, incapable of engaging our
feelings or communicating with us by love. This god is just a
substantivized adjective, a constitutional god who rules but cannot
reign. Science is his mandate.
Among
the Greeks and Latins, even paganism tended toward a more vivid and
personal monotheism than the philosophers'. Homer calls Zeus father,
and the Latin Jupiter has
the word father (pater)
inside it, indicating the
supreme god's presiding role in the sprawling family of gods and
goddesses that together make up all divinity.
The
Catholic sense of God arose from a conjunction between pagan
polytheism and Jewish monotheism, which tried to save the personality
of God by special means of its own. For Catholics, God is both a
society, like the Olympian family I just mentioned, and one
individual, also, as the God of Israel ended up being. Such is
the Trinity, whose deepest sense lies generally outside the grasp of
rationalizing Deism, an artifact of the Enlightenment whose tincture
of Christianity is always Unitarian or Socinian (†).
---
(†)
Deism makes God the cause of all otherwise uncaused events that
render our world (cf. Aristotle's formulation of deity as prime
mover, and the body
of writings that appeared in the wake of Lord Herbert of Cherbury's
De Veritate,
especially Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the
Creation). Unitarians and
Socinians emerged in the 16th
century CE as non-trinitarian Christians.