The truth of Zeus. Unamuno, Life 8.19

Unamuno accepts Hume's position: that reason is servant to the passions, which become its foundation, the source from which it flows, & the background against which it must make sense. This sense, rational sense, is necessarily lesser than the irrational sense that births it. We perceive more potentially significant information than we can ever reduce to any perfectly rational account. So our most vivid accounts of the world we inhabit are always more than rational, incorporating description of more than we are able perfectly or comprehensively to define. God appears here as a personal character, not a rational entity, and his native habitat is passionate mythology, not rational theology or theodicy.

No es la razón humana, en efecto, razón que a su vez tampoco se sustenta sino sobre lo irracional, sobre la conciencia vital toda, sobre la voluntad y el sentimiento; no es esa nuestra razón la que puede probarnos la existencia de una Razón Suprema, que tendría a su vez que sustentarse sobre lo Supremo Irracional, sobre la Conciencia Universal. Y la revelación sentimental e imaginativa, por amor, por fe, por obra de personalización, de esa Conciencia Suprema, es la que nos lleva a creer en el Dios vivo.

Y este Dios, el Dios vivo, tu Dios, nuestro Dios, está en mí, está en ti, vive en nosotros, y nosotros vivimos, nos movemos y somos en Él. Y está en nosotros por el hambre que de Él tenemos, por el anhelo, haciéndose apetecer. Y es el Dios de los humildes, porque Dios escogió lo necio del mundo para avergonzar a los sabios, y lo flaco para avergonzar a lo fuerte, según el Apóstol. (I Cor., I, 27.) Y es Dios en cada uno según cada uno lo siente y según le ama. «Si de dos hombres —dice Kierkegaard— reza el uno al verdadero Dios con insinceridad personal, y el otro con la pasión toda de la infinitud reza a un ídolo, es el primero el que en realidad ora a un ídolo, mientras que el segundo ora en verdad a Dios». Mejor es decir que es Dios verdadero Aquel a quien se reza y se anhela de verdad. Y hasta la superstición misma puede ser más reveladora que la teología. El viejo Padre de luengas barbas y melenas blancas, que aparece entre nubes llevando la bola del mundo en la mano, es más vivo y más verdadero que el ens realissimum de la teodicea.

Human reason is effectively incapable of standing upon any foundation except the irrational one offered by the total vital awareness that is our will and feeling. It is not going to be able to prove for us the existence of any supreme Reason beyond it, which in turn would have to rest upon a supreme Irrationality, a Universal Awareness or Consciousness. Instead it is by revelation—the sentimental and imaginative revelation of love and faith, forming the personality of this supreme Conscience for us—that we come to believe in the living God.

This God, the living God that is yours and ours, abides in you and also in me: he lives in us, and we live, and move, and have our being in him. He abides in us because of our hunger for him, the desire that makes us long for him. He is the God of the humble, since from the world he has chosen the fool to shame the wise, and the weak to embarrass the strong, as the Apostle says (1 Corinthians 1.27). He is God in each of us, according to the individual feeling and love that we hold for him. “If any man pray to the true God without sincerity,” Kierkegaard says, “while another prays to an idol with all the passion of infinity, it is in fact the first man who prays to an idol, and the second who truly prays to God.” Better to say that the true God is the one to whom all real prayer and desire are directed. Superstition reveals more here than theology. The ancient Father who appears midst the clouds with long beard and white mane, carrying the world's thunderbolt in his hand, is more alive, and more true, than the realest essence of rational theologians.