Creative Faith
When as a boy I began to be disquieted by the eternal problems, I read in a book, the author of which I have no wish to recall, this sentence: “God is the great x placed over the barrier of human knowledge—as science advances, the barrier recedes.” And I wrote in the margin: “On this side of the barrier, everything is explained without Him; on the further side, nothing is explained, either with Him or without Him. God, therefore, is superfluous.” And so as far as concerns the God-Idea, the God whose existence is supposed to be logically proved, I continue to be of the same opinion. Laplace is said to have stated that he had not found the hypothesis of God necessary in the construction of his system of the origin of the Universe, and it very certainly is so. The idea of God does not in any way help us to understand any better the existence, the essence and the finality of the Universe.
The living God, the human God, is reached not by the way of reason but by the way of love and of suffering. Reason rather separates us from Him. It is not possible to know Him in order that afterwards we may love Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him, hungering for Him, before knowing Him. The knowledge of God proceeds from the love of God, and it is a knowledge that has little or nothing of the rational in it. For God is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to claim to limit Him in our mind—that is to say, to kill Him. In so far as we attempt to define Him, we are confronted by Nothingness.
The idea of God which the would-be rational theodicy presents us with is merely an hypothesis, like the hypothesis of the ether, for example.
The ether is, in effect, merely a hypothetical entity, which is of value only in so far as it explains that which by means of it we seek to explain—light, or electricity, or universal gravitation—and only so far as these facts cannot be explained in any other way. Similarly the idea of God is also an hypothesis which is of value only in so far as we explain by means of it that which we seek to explain—the essence and existence of the Universe—and only so long as these cannot be explained better in some other way. And since in reality we explain the Universe neither better nor worse with this idea than without it, the idea of God, the supreme petitio principii, fails of its purpose.
But if the ether is nothing but an hypothesis intended to explain light, air on the other hand is a thing that is directly felt; and even though it did not enable us to explain sound, we should have a direct sensation of it, and, above all, of the lack of it in moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way, God Himself, not the idea of God, may become a directly felt reality; and although the idea of Him may not enable us to explain either the existence or the essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And this feeling—mark it well, for herein lies its tragicness and the whole tragic sense of life—is a feeling of hunger for God, of lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first instance, to wish that there may be a God, not to be able to live without Him.
So long as I pilgrimaged through the fields of reason in search of God, I could not find Him, for I was not taken in by the idea of God, neither could I take an idea for God; and it was then, as I wandered among the wastes of rationalism, that I told myself that we ought to seek no other consolation than the truth, meaning thereby reason, and yet for all that I was not comforted. But as I sank deeper and deeper into rational scepticism on the one hand and into heart’s despair on the other, the hunger for God awoke within me, and the suffocation of spirit made me feel the want of God, and with the want of Him, His reality. And I wished that there might be a God, that God might exist.
The problem of the existence of God, a problem that is rationally insoluble, is in its essence none other than the problem of consciousness, the very problem of the substantial existence of the soul, the very problem of the perpetuity of the human soul, the very problem of the human finality of the Universe. To believe in a living and personal God, in an eternal and universal consciousness that knows us and loves us, is to believe that the Universe exists for man. For man, or for a consciousness of the same order as the human consciousness, of the same nature, although sublimated, a consciousness that is cognizant of us, in whose depths our memory lives for ever.
Perhaps by a supreme and desperate effort of resignation we might succeed in making the sacrifice of our personality if we knew that in dying it would go to enrich a Supreme Personality, a Supreme Consciousness, if we knew that the Universal Soul was nourished by our souls and had need of them. Perhaps we might meet death with a desperate resignation or with a resigned desperation, delivering up our soul to the soul of humanity, bequeathing to it our work, the work that bears the stamp of our personality, if this humanity were in its turn to bequeath its soul to another soul after the ultimate extinction of consciousness upon this earth with its burden of longings. But if it be otherwise?
And if the soul of humanity is eternal, if the human collective consciousness is eternal, if there is a Consciousness of the Universe and if this Consciousness is eternal, why should not our own individual consciousness, yours, reader, and mine, not be eternal?
In the whole of the vast universe must there needs be such a thing as a consciousness that knows itself, loves itself and feels itself, an exception united to a organism that can only live between such and such degrees of heat, a transitory phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity to wish to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by living organisms, by consciousness akin to our own, and there is an element of profound longing in the dream of the transmigration of our souls through the stars that people the vast remotenesses of the heavens. The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or lesser degree, extends through all things. We wish not only to save ourselves but to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is His felt finality.
What would a universe be without any consciousness to reflect it and to know it? What would the objectified reason be, without will and without feeling? For us it would be the same as nothing—a thousand times more dreadful than nothing.
If such a supposed universe is reality, then our life lacks value and meaning.
It is not, therefore, rational necessity but vital anguish that leads us to believe in God. And to believe in God—I must repeat it again—is, before all and above all, to feel hunger for God, hunger for divinity, to feel the lack and absence of God, to wish that God may exist. And it is to wish to save the human finality of the Universe. For we might even succeed in resigning ourselves to being absorbed by God if our consciousness rests upon a Consciousness, if consciousness is the end of the Universe.
“The wicked man has said in his heart: There is no God.” And there is truth in this. For it is possible for a righteous man to say in his head: God does not exist. But only the wicked can say it in his heart. Not to believe that there is a God or to believe that there is not a God, is one thing; to resign oneself to there not being a God is another thing, though an inhuman and horrible thing; but not to wish that there is a God exceeds every other moral aberration. Although in fact those who deny God do so because of their despair at not finding Him.
And now once again there comes the rational question, the question of the Sphinx—the Sphinx, in effect, is reason—does God exist? This eternal and eternalizing Person who gives meaning—I do not add “human,” for there is no other meaning—to the universe, is He a substantial something external to our consciousness, external to our desire? Here you have something that is insoluble, and it is better that it should be insoluble. Let it suffice for reason that the impossibility of His existence cannot be proved.
To believe in God is to long for His existence, and, furthermore, it is to act as if He existed. It is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action.
To believe is to place confidence in someone, and it has reference to a person. I say that I know that there is an animal called the horse, and that it has such and such characteristics, because I have seen it; and I say that I believe in the existence of the giraffe or the ornithorhyncus, and that it has such and such qualities, because I believe those who assure me that they have seen it. And hence the element of uncertainty that attaches to faith, for a person may be deceived or he may deceive us.
But, on the other hand, this personal element in belief gives it an affective character, it connects it with love, and above all, in religious faith, it carries with it a reference to what is hoped for. Perhaps there is nobody who would sacrifice his life for the sake of maintaining that the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles, for such a truth does not require the sacrifice of our life; but on the other hand there are many who have lost their lives for the sake of maintaining their religious faith, and it is martyrs that make faith rather than faith that makes martyrs. For faith is not the mere adherence of the intellect to an abstract principle; it is not the recognition of a theoretical truth in which the will does nothing save move us to understand; faith is a matter of the will, it is a movement of the mind towards a practical truth, towards a person, towards something that makes us live and not merely understand life.
But although we said that faith is a matter of the will, it would perhaps be better to say that it is the will itself, the will not to die, or rather some other psychic force distinct from intelligence, will and feeling. We should then have feeling, knowing, willing, and believing or creating. For neither feeling nor intelligence nor will creates; they operate upon a material already given, upon a material given by faith. Faith is the creating power of man. But since it has a more intimate relation with the will than with any other of his faculties, we present it under the form of volition.
Faith is, then, if not creative power, the fruit of the will, and its function is to create. Faith, in a certain sense, creates its object. And faith in God consists in creating God, and since it is God that gives us faith in Him, it is God who is continually creating Himself in us. Hence St. Augustine said: “I will seek Thee, Lord, by calling upon Thee, and I will call upon Thee by believing in Thee. My faith calls upon Thee, Lord, the faith which Thou hast given me, with which Thou hast inspired me through the Humanity of Thy Son, through the ministry of the Preacher” (“Confessions,” Book I, chap. I). The power of creating God in our own image and likeness, of personalizing the Universe, simply means that we carry God within us, as the substance of what we hope for, and that God is continually creating us in His image and likeness.
But after all this I shall be told that to show that faith creates its own object is to show that this object is an object for faith alone, that it has no objective reality external to faith itself—just as, on the other hand, to maintain that faith is necessary in order to restrain or to console people is to declare that the object of faith is illusory. What is certain is that for thinking believers to-day, faith is, before all and above all, wishing that God may exist.
Wishing that God may exist, and acting and feeling as if He did exist. And it is in this way, wishing for God’s existence and acting conformably with this desire, that we create God in ourselves, that is, that God creates Himself in us, manifests Himself to us, opens and reveals Himself to us. For God goes out to meet him who seeks Him with love and by love and withdraws Himself from him who seeks Him with the cold and loveless reason. God wills that the heart should have rest but not the head, while in the physical life the head sometimes rests and sleeps and the heart wakes and works unrestingly. And thus knowledge without love removes us from God; and love, even without knowledge, and perhaps better without it, leads us to God, and through God to wisdom. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Faith is our longing for the eternal, for God; and hope is God’s longing, the longing of the eternal, of the divine in us, which advances to meet our faith and raises us up. Man aspires to God by faith and cries to Him: “I believe—give me, Lord, wherein to believe.” And God, the divinity in man, sends him hope in another life in order that he may believe in it. Hope is the reward of faith. Only he who believes truly hopes, and only he who truly hopes believes. We believe only what we hope, and we hope only what we believe.