From God to God

Religious feeling is the feeling of divinity; only by violating everyday human language can one speak of a godless religion. Everything depends on the concept we form of God. This, in turn, depends on the concept of divinity. It is through divinity that man has reached God, rather than deriving divinity from God.

Peoples collectively arrived at the concept and feeling of a personal God, which the individual immediately personalizes. The origin and essence of religious feeling lies in the direct and simple sense of dependence. A person living in society feels that they are dependent on mysterious forces that surround them invisibly, and not only does the individual feel a social connection with other people, but also with the entire nature. They not only know the world, but imagine that the world also has consciousness, just as they do. The divine is not something objective, but the subjectivity of consciousness projected outward, the personification of the world. The concept of divinity emerged from the sense of divinity, which is nothing other than the vague and emerging sense of personality, namely the sense of personality related to that which lies outside of oneself.

Hellenistic paganism was more pantheistic than polytheistic, in the sense that everything is divine. The gods not only mingled with humans but also intermingled with them, and some gods were born of mortals. If there are demigods, it is only because the divine and the human are two sides of the same reality. The deification of everything is nothing other than the humanization of everything. The gods actually only differed from humans in that they were immortal. A god was an immortal human; to consider a human as a god was to believe that they did not truly die, but continued to live in the realm of the dead.

In the republic of the gods, there was always a supreme god, a true ruler. Divine monarchy was what led peoples to monotheism. Monarchy and monotheism are twin siblings. Zeus, Jupiter, on the path to becoming the one God, was first the god of the people of Israel, then of all humanity, and finally of the entire universe. He became Jehovah, the same Jehovah who, at the beginning, was just one god among many. When Israel became a nation, there was a need for a central authority, and Israel believed itself to be the army of Jehovah. The belief in one God, the Monotheistic God, emerged from the human sense of divinity as a warlike, monarchic, and societal god. It was the god of a people, and it demanded jealously that only it be worshipped. From this monoculture, monotheism emerged, largely through the individual actions of the prophets. They personalized Divinity by making it ethical.

Reason immediately took hold of this God, trying to define and turn it into an idea. The felt God, the divinity perceived as a person, transformed into the idea of God. The logical, rational God, the Supreme Being of theological philosophy, is a rather lifeless conception of God. The classical proofs for God's existence pertain to this Idea-God, this logical God, and therefore prove nothing except the existence of this concept of God. Scholastic theologians could not reconcile human freedom with divine foreknowledge because the rational God is entirely unsuitable for contingent events, as contingency is essentially irrational. The rational God follows a straight line to reach the set goal, but in this necessity, God's free will and conscious personality fade away. God is not God because He thinks, but because He acts, because He creates.

Miguel de Unamuno "A tragikus életérzés", Európa könyvkiadó, 1989