In the beginning, hope. Unamuno, Life 9.1
According
to Unamuno, the first step toward belief in God is hope. We hope that
divinity exists before we have any sort of conviction that he must
be, or must have any form (if indeed he should exist). Faith is built
on this hope, and (for Unamuno) involves a certain amount of
creation. We create our own faith from the hope that we nurture. If
we decide not to nurture hope, there is no faith, and no amount of
rational argument can directly address this.
A
este Dios cordial o vivo se llega, y se vuelve a Él cuando por el
Dios lógico o muerto se le ha dejado, por camino de fe y no de
convicción racional o matemática.
¿Y
qué cosa es fe?
Así
pregunta el catecismo de la doctrina cristiana que se nos enseñó en
la escuela, y contesta así: creer lo que no vimos.
A
lo que hace ya una docena de años corregí en un ensayo diciendo:
«¡creer lo que no vimos, no!, sino crear lo que no vemos». Y antes
os he dicho que creer en Dios es, en primera instancia al menos,
querer que le haya, anhelar la existencia de Dios.
La
virtud teologal de la fe es, según el Apóstol Pablo, cuya
definición sirve de base a las tradicionales disquisiciones
cristianas sobre ella, «la sustancia de las cosas que se espera, la
demostración de lo que no se ve»: ἐλπιζομένων
ὑπόστασις, πραγμάτων ἔλεγχος οὐ
βλεπομένων (Hebreos XI, 1). La sustancia, o más
bien el sustento o base de la esperanza, la garantía de ella. Lo
cual conexiona, y más que conexiona subordina, la fe a la esperanza.
Y de hecho no es que esperamos porque creemos, sino más bien que
creemos porque esperamos. Es la esperanza en Dios, esto es, el
ardiente anhelo de que haya un Dios que garantice la eternidad de la
conciencia lo que nos lleva a creer en Él.
We
meet this living God of the heart, meet him and return to see him
again, when the dead God of logic has abandoned us. Our encounter
with the living God takes place on the road of faith, not the way of
any rational or mathematical conviction.
What
is faith, then?
This
is the question in the Christian catechism that we learned in school,
and here is the answer: believing that which we have not seen.
I
corrected this answer some twelve years ago in an essay: “Believing
what we haven't seen? No! Rather, faith is creating what we do
not see in this moment.” I have already told you here that
believing in God is, at least in the first instance, wanting him to
exist—desiring his existence.
According
to the apostle Paul, whose definition serves as a foundation for
traditional Christian discussions on this subject, the theological
virtue of faith is “the substance of things hoped for, the
manifestation of things unseen” (Hebrews 11.1). The substance—or
perhaps better, subsistence—of
hope: the basis on
which hope stands; its guarantee (†).
Faith is connected to hope, and is subordinate or dependent in that
connection. In point of fact, we do not hope because we believe;
rather, we believe because we have hope. It is our hope in God, our
burning desire that God should exist, that guarantees the eternity of
the awareness that leads us to believe in Him.
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(†)
Sustancia, sustento, base, garantía (substance,
subsistence, basis, guarantee):
different translations for the Greek hypostasis in
the language of the apostle.