~ Unamuno conceives faith as a process whereby we imagine the world as a divine person. This is only possible, really, because the world acts in us to make such a revelation desirable, before we are consciously or deliberately aware of it. Seeing God in the world is only possible because he operates within us to make such a vision possible, compelling, desirable. Why do we see anything? For Unamuno, the answer is that God wants to reveal himself to us. When we see him there, outside, we recognize him here, within ourselves. Not as something we control or define, with perfect clarity, but as someone we can love, and make, and believe in. ~
Mas, aunque decimos que la fe es cosa de la voluntad, mejor sería acaso decir que es la voluntad misma, la voluntad de no morir, o más bien otra potencia anímica distinta de la inteligencia, de la voluntad y del sentimiento. Tendríamos, pues, el sentir, el conocer, el querer y el creer, o sea crear. Porque ni el sentimiento, ni la inteligencia, ni la voluntad crean, sino que se ejercen sobre materia dada ya, sobre materia dada por la fe. La fe es el poder creador del hombre. Pero como tiene más íntima relación con la voluntad que con cualquiera otra de las potencias, la presentamos en forma volitiva. Adviértase, sin embargo, como querer creer, es decir, querer crear, no es precisamente creer o crear, aunque sí comienzo de ello.
La fe es, pues, si no potencia creativa, flor de la voluntad, y su oficio crear. La fe crea, en cierto modo, su objeto. Y la fe en Dios consiste en crear a Dios, y como es Dios el que nos da la fe en Él, es Dios el que se está creando a sí mismo de continuo en nosotros. Por la que dijo San Agustín: «Te buscaré, Señor, invocándote, y te invocaré creyendo en Ti. Te invoca, Señor, mi fe, la fe que me diste, que me inspiraste con la humanidad de tu Hijo, por el ministerio de tu predicador.» (Confesiones, lib. I, capítulo I). El poder de crear un Dios a nuestra imagen y semejanza, de personalizar el Universo, no significa otra cosa sino que llevamos a Dios dentro, como sustancia de lo que esperamos, y que Dios nos está de continuo creando a su imagen y semejanza.
Y se crea a Dios, es decir, se crea Dios a sí mismo en nosotros por la compasión, por el amor. Creer en Dios es amarle y temerle con amor, y se empieza por amarle aun antes de conocerle, y amándole es como se acaba por verle y descubrirle en todo.
Still, though we say that faith is a matter of will, it would perhaps be better to say that faith is will itself—the will to escape death—or even to affirm that it is some other expression of the soul distinct from intelligence, will, or emotional sensibility. We would then have it as the process of feeling, knowing, loving, & believing, or in other words, creating. For it is not our emotional affect that creates, nor our intelligence, nor our will: these things operate with material given to them from elsewhere, from faith. Faith is the creative power of man. Because it has a more intimate relationship with will than any other power of ours, we present it in the guise of will. Notice, however, that wanting to believe (or to create, which amounts to the same thing) is not precisely the same as believing or creating, per se, though every process of belief or creation that I engage does begin with it.
So, faith is either our creative faculty, or at the very least a flower of the will, with creating as its active expression. Faith creates its own object, in some sense. Faith in God consists in the fact that we create him, and as it is God himself who gives us faith in him, so he is the one constantly creating himself in us. This explains the prayer of Saint Augustine: “I shall seek thee, Lord, calling upon thy name, & I shall call thee by believing in thee. My faith invokes thee, Lord—the faith that thou didst give me, inspiring me with the humanity of thy Son, by the ministry of thy preacher” (†). The power to create a God in our own image and likeness, to render the Universe as a person, means only one thing: we carry God inside us, as the substance of that which we hope for, and in the inner recesses of our soul, God is always creating us in his own image and likeness.
God is created—or in other words, God creates himself—in us by means of compassion, by means of love. Believing in God is loving him, and fearing him too withal, though we must keep the love. Our belief begins by loving him before we know him: it is by means of loving him that we end up seeing him, discovering all that he is.
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(†)
quaeram te, domine, invocans te et invocem te credens in te: praedicatus enim es nobis. invocat te, domine, fides mea, quam dedisti mihi, quam inspirasti mihi per humanitatem filii tui, per ministerium praedicatoris tui (Confessions 1.1).