Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

“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.