The expression “problem of God” is ambiguous. It can mean the problems of every sort that the divinity poses to man. But it can also mean something prior and more radical: is there a problem of God for philosophy? I shall deal with the latter; therefore, not with God in Himself, but with the philosophical possibility of the problem of God.
The question is exceedingly old. Philosophy, indeed, at every important moment of its history, has had to grapple with the proofs of the existence of God: the ontological argument, the five celebrated ways of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus’s argument a simultaneo, etc.[1] Over against these attempts to prove rationally the necessity of the existence of God, there have never been lacking in philosophy those who have held such rational proofs to be insufficient, whether because they did not consider the proofs actually adduced to be conclusive, or because they rejected a priori the possibility of any rational demonstration concerning the divinity. And then, either an atheistic attitude has been adopted, or it has been held that man possesses a feeling of the divine, ranging from a beautiful religiosity to the so-called vital exigencies, which would lead him to believe in God despite the rational incapacity to know Him.
But this question of the possibility of rationally proving the existence of God does not formally coincide with what I have called the problem of God. The problem arises, rather, when the presupposition of every “demonstration” is brought to light, as likewise of every “negation,” or even of every “feeling” of the existence of God.
At this point, the situation bears an intimate analogy with the one that arose concerning the celebrated question of the existence of an “external” world. Idealism has denied the existence of real things, that is, of things external to the subject and independent of it. Man would be an entity enclosed within himself, having no need whatever of an external reality: were the latter to exist, it would be unknowable. Realism, on the contrary, admits the existence of the external world, but by virtue of a reasoning grounded upon an evident “fact”: the interiority of the subject itself, and one or several rational principles, likewise evident: such, for example, as the principle of causality or some similar one. There are those who consider that this “critical” realism is not only insufficient, but rather useless, since it finds no sufficient motive for doubting “external” perception, which would manifest to us with immediate evidence the “fact” that there is something “external” to man. This is the so-called “naïve” realism.
Now then: these three attitudes involve a fundamental presupposition common to them: the existence or nonexistence of the external world is a “fact,” whether demonstrated, or immediate, or undemonstrated, or indemonstrable. Whatever the definitive attitude adopted may be, it is always a matter of a “fact,” of a factum. Idealism and critical realism have, moreover, another presupposition: the existence of an “external” world is something “added” to the existence of the subject: “in addition” to the subject, things exist. The subject is what it is, in and for itself, and then—such is the opinion of critical realism—it needs to have recourse to an external world in order to be able to explain to itself its own inner vicissitudes. Thus, then, it is supposed:
1. That the existence of the external world is a “fact.”
2. That it is a fact “added” to the facts of consciousness.
These two presuppositions are more than debatable. Is it true that the existence of the external world is something “added”? Is it true that it is a mere fact—as incontrovertible as one likes, but a fact after all? This carries the question back to a further plane: to the analysis of the very subjectivity of the subject. And it has been seen that the being of the subject consists formally, in one of its dimensions, in being “open” to things. Then, it is not that the subject exists and, “in addition,” there are things, but rather that to be a subject “consists” in being open to things. The exteriority of the world is not a mere factum, but the formal ontological structure of the human subject. By virtue of it, there could be things without men, but not men without things—and this, not by a kind of necessity founded on the principle of causality, nor even by a kind of logical contradiction implied in the very concept of man, but by something more: because it would be a kind of counter-being or counter-existence of man. The existence of an external world is not something that comes to man from without; on the contrary: it comes to him from himself. Idealism had said something similar; but, in speaking of “himself,” it meant that external things are a positing of the subject. It is not a matter of this; the “himself” is not a being “enclosed” in itself, but a being “open” to things; what the subject “posits” with this its “openness” is precisely the openness and, therefore, the exteriority, by which it is possible that there be things “external” to the subject and that they “enter” (sit venia verbo) into it. This position is the very being of man. Without things, then, man would be nothing. In this his constitutive ontological nihility the reality of things is implicit. Only then does it make sense to ask in individuo whether each thing is or is not real.
Present-day philosophy has managed, at least, to pose the problem of the reality of things in these terms. They are neither “facts” nor “additions,” but a constitutivum formale and, therefore, a necessarium of the human being as such.
Well then: as regards God, the situation does not appear to have improved notably. One starts from the presupposition that man and things are, to begin with, subsistent and substantive; so that, if there is a God, He will be there “in addition” to these subsistent things. Some appeal to a rational demonstration; others, to a blind feeling. There are also those who hold the matter to be useless and claim that it is an evident “fact,” like all facts (such is the ontologism of Rosmini and Hegelian idealism); and since this fact, which would be God, cannot be “juxtaposed” to anything, this attitude leads, ultimately, to pantheism. All these attitudes suppose:
1. That the substantivity of things demands that it be demonstrated that “in addition” to them there exists a God.
2. That this existence is a factum (for non-atheists), at least, quoad nos, from our human point of view.
I said quoad nos. The demonstrations of the existence of God carefully distinguish, indeed, His existence quoad se, that is, as it concerns God Himself, and quoad nos. The limitation of human reason brings as a consequence this necessary distinction, by virtue of which all knowledge of God is necessarily “indirect.” But in what this limitation consists and, above all, how this limitation (which, being such, is something negative) takes on a positive sense so as to make possible and necessary the very knowledge of God, is something that has almost never been elucidated with sufficient precision. Those who do not admit this knowledge see in this limitation the door thrown open to feeling, to the irrational. It then seems as if the prior question were what may be the primary organon for reaching God: knowledge or feeling.
And this is precisely what, just as in the case of the reality of the external world, gives rise to the suspicion whether those two presuppositions are sufficiently exact: Is the existence of God quoad nos only a factum? Is access to it something merely and necessarily consequent upon the mode of being of human reason? Might it not, perhaps, be quoad nos something constitutive of it? Are knowledge, or feeling, or any other “faculty,” the organon for entering into “relation” with God? Might it not be that it is not a matter of any organon at all, because the very being of man is constitutively a being in God? What then will this “in” signify? What sense, in such a case, does a demonstration of the existence of God have? Has such a demonstration become idle or, on the contrary, will precisely then have been shown, in a rigorous manner, the conditions of the possibility and of the character of this demonstration?
The question about God is thus carried back to a question about man. And the philosophical possibility of the problem of God will consist in discovering the human dimension within which that question must be posed—or rather, is already posed.
Human existence, we are told today, is a reality that consists in finding itself among things and making itself, caring for them and being dragged along by them. In this its self-making, human existence acquires its selfhood and its being; that is, in this its self-making it is what it is and as it is. Human existence is thrown among things, and in this being-thrown it takes on the daring of existing. The constitutive indigence of man, that his being nothing without, with, and through things, is a consequence of being thrown, of this his radical ontological nihility.
But with this we have only begun: What is the relation of man to the totality of his existence? What is the character of this his being thrown among things? Is it nothing but a “finding oneself” existing? Is it only a “mere” finding oneself, or is it something more? Might not his constitutive ontological nihility be still deeper and more radical?
I should like to observe, before continuing, the nature of these explanations. Both the phenomenon of “being thrown” and the others to which I shall refer cannot be acquired except in the very analysis of existence. The whole sense of what is to follow consists in trying to make it clear that human existence is not described with sufficient precision if one says only that man finds himself existing. And throughout all this let one keep constantly before one’s eyes the example (nothing more than an example) of the reality of the external world to which I alluded before.
For the present, I should prefer to say that man finds himself, in some manner, implanted in existence. And if we wish to avoid all complication, superfluous for the moment, let us say that man finds himself implanted in being. For the word existence is, in fact, quite equivocal. What is meant by it? The manner in which man is? Then existence means as much as the mode in which man ex-sists, sistit extra causas, stands outside the causes, which here are things. In this sense, there would be no great difficulty in saying that to exist is to transcend and, consequently, to live. Very well. But is man his existence? Here another possible sense of existing intersects, which may perhaps render this question ambiguous. For existing can, moreover, designate the being that man has conquered by transcending and living. Then it would have to be said that man is not his life, but that he lives in order to be. But he, his being, is, in some manner, beyond his existence in the sense of “life.” The Scholastic theologians already said that “nature” and “supposit” are not the same, and especially nature and person, even understanding by nature the singular nature. Boethius defined the supposit: naturae completae individua substantia; the person would be the rational supposit. And the Scholastics added that both moments stand to each other in the relation of “that by which it is” (natura ut quo) and “that which is” (suppossitum ut quod). Thus said Saint Augustine: “Verum haec quando in una sunt persona, sicut est horno, potest nobis quispiam dicere: tría ista, memoria, intellectus et amor, mea sunt, mon sua; nec sibi sed mihi agunt quod agunt, immo ego per illa. Ego enim memini per memoriam, intelligo per intelligentiam, amo per amorem… Ego per omnia illa tria memini, ego intelligo, ego diligo, qui nec memoria sum, nec intelligentia, nec dilectio sed haec habeo.” (De Trin., lib. XV, c. 22). Personality is the very being of man: actiones sunt suppositorum, because the supposit is that which properly “is.” This question, though transcendental, was regarded as a Byzantinism. And philosophy, from Descartes to Kant, laboriously and erroneously retraced the lost path. Man appears, in Descartes, as a substance: res (without, for the rest, entering into the classic question of the purely analogical unity of the category of substance); in the “Critique of Pure Reason” this res is distinguished, as subject, from the pure ego, from the I; in the “Critique of Practical Reason” there is discovered, beyond the I, the person; for the Cartesian division between thinking things and extended things Kant substituted the disjunction between persons and things. The history of modern philosophy has thus successively traversed these three stages: subject, I, person.[2] But what person may be is something that Kant left rather obscure. Certainly, it is not only consciousness of identity, as for Locke. It is something more. For the present, to be sui juris, and this “being sui juris” is, for Kant, being a categorical imperative. But neither did this arrive at the radical question concerning the person. One must go back again to the strictly ontological dimension in which Scholasticism moved for the last time, by virtue of fruitful theological necessities, unhappily sterilized in pure polemic. But this would carry us too far. In what follows, the context will indicate the sense in which I employ the word “existence.”
It suffices us, for the moment, to say that the person is the being of man. The person finds itself implanted in being “in order to realize itself.” That radical and incommunicable unity which is the person realizes itself by means of the complexity of living. And to live is to live with things, with others, and with ourselves, insofar as we are living beings. This “with” is not a mere juxtaposition of person and life: the “with” is one of the formal ontological characters of the human person as such, and, by virtue of it, the life of every human being is, constitutively, “personal.” Every life, being the life of a person, is, constitutively, a life: either “impersonal,” or “more or less personal,” or “depersonalized”; that is, that with which man realizes himself as a person can and, to a certain extent, must conceal his personal being.
This being supposed, it would perhaps be too little to say that man finds himself implanted in being. So as not to lose myself in excessively prolix developments, the reader will permit me to make a concise enumeration of some propositions that I deem fundamental. Let nothing be seen in their terseness but conciseness.
1. Man already exists as a person, in the sense of being an entity whose entity consists in having to realize himself as a person, having to elaborate his personality in life.
2. Man finds himself sent into existence, or, better, existence is sent to him. This missive character, if I may be permitted the expression, is not only interior to life. Life, supposing it to be lived, evidently has a mission and a destiny. But this is not the question: the question concerns the presupposition itself. It is not that life has a mission, but that it is mission. Life, in its totality, is not a mere factum; the presumed facticity of existence is only a provisional denomination. Nor is existence a splendid possibility either. It is something more. Man receives existence as something imposed upon him. Man is bound to life. But, as we shall see later, bound to life does not mean bound by life.
3. This which existence imposes upon him is what impels him to live. Man has, indeed, to make himself among and with things, but he does not receive from them the impulse for life: he receives, at most, stimuli and possibilities for living.
4. This which impels him to live does not mean the natural tendency or attachment to life. It is something prior. It is something upon which man leans in order to exist, in order to make himself. Man not only has to make his being with things, but, in order to do so, he finds himself supported a tergo upon something, whence life itself comes to him.
5. This support is not a mere physical point of support. It is support in the sense that it is what supports us in existence; it is what makes us be. Man not only is nothing without things, but, by himself, he does not “be.” It is not enough for him to be able and to have to make himself. He needs the force of being in the process of making himself. He needs to be made to make himself. His ontological nihility is radical; not only is he nothing without things and without doing something with them, but, by himself alone, he has not the force to be making himself, to come to be.
6. It cannot be said that this force is we ourselves. Bound to life, it is not, however, life that binds us. Being what is most our own, since it makes us be, it is in a certain way what is most other, since it makes us be.
7. That is to say, man, in existing, not only finds himself with things that “there are” and with which he has to make himself, but he finds that one “has” to make oneself and “has” to be making himself. In addition to things, “there is” also that which makes there be.
8. This making-there-be of existence is not made manifest to us in a mere obligation to be. The presumed obligation is a consequence of something more radical: we are obliged to exist because previously we are religated to that which makes us exist. This ontological bond of the human being is “religation.” In obligation we are simply subjected to something that either is imposed on us extrinsically, or inclines us intrinsically, as a constitutive tendency of what we are. In religation we are more than subjected; for we find ourselves bound to something that is not extrinsic, but that, previously, makes us be. Hence, in obligation, we go toward something that either is added to us in its fulfillment, or, at least, is completed or perfected in it. In religation, on the contrary, we do not “go toward,” but, previously, we “come from.” It is, if you will, a “going,” but a going that consists, not in a “fulfilling,” but rather in an acquiescing to that from which we come, in “being who one already is.” We “go” insofar as we recognize that we “have come.” In religation, more than the obligation to do or the respect for being (in the sense of dependence), there is the bowing of recognition before that which “makes there be.”
9. By virtue of it, religation makes patent and actual to us what, summing up all the foregoing, we might call the fundamentality of human existence. Foundation is, primarily, that which is at once root and support. Fundamentality, then, does not here have an exclusively or primarily conceptual sense, but is something more radical. Nor is it simply the mere cause of our being in one way or another, but of our being-in-existence (if the expression be forgiven me).
10. Now then: to exist is to exist “with”—with things, with others, with ourselves—. This “with” belongs to the very being of man: it is not an addition to him. In existence everything else is wrapped up in this peculiar form of the “with.” That which religates existence therefore religates, along with it, the whole world. Religation is not something that affects man exclusively, differently and separately from other things, but affects him together with all of them. For this reason it affects everything. Only in man is religation formally actualized; but in that formal actuality of human existence which is religation there appears everything, even the material universe, as a field illumined by the light of the religating fundamentality. Let it be well understood that it is a matter only of this field appearing “illumined.” It is a matter only of things appearing set within the perspective of their ultimate fundamentality. In no way is it meant by this that anything has been achieved other than to contemplate the world in the light of this “problem.”
Human existence, then, is not only thrown among things, but religated at its root. Religation—religatum esse, religio, religion, in the primary sense [3]—is a formally constitutive dimension of existence. Therefore religation or religion is not something that one simply has or does not have. Man does not have religion, but rather, velis nolis, consists in religation or religion. For this reason he can have, or even not have, a religion, positive religions. And, from the Christian point of view, it is evident that only man is capable of Revelation, because only he consists in religation: religation is the ontological presupposition of all revelation. The Scholastics already spoke of a certain religio naturalis; but they left the matter in great vagueness by not laying greater stress on the sense of this its naturalness. Natural does not here mean natural inclination, but a formal dimension of the very being of man. Something constitutive of him and not simply consequent. Religation is not a dimension pertaining to the nature of man, but to his person, if you will to his personalized nature. Pure nature, with the mere mechanism of its psychic and psychophysical faculties, is not the formal subject of religation. The formal subject of religation is personalized nature. We are religated primarily, not insofar as we are naturally endowed with certain properties, but insofar as we personally subsist. For this reason, rather than of natural religion, we would speak of personal religion. The nature of our personality formally involves religation. Saint Bonaventure already made every person, even the finite person, consist in a relation, and characterized that relation as a principium originale. The person involves within itself a relation of origin, for Saint Bonaventure. Religation is not the principium originale, but it is the primary phenomenon in which it is actualized in our existence. Religion is not a property nor a necessity; it is something distinct and superior: a formal dimension of the human personal being. Religion, as such, is neither a mere feeling, nor a bare knowledge, nor an act of obedience, nor an incitement to action, but the actualization of the religated being of man. In religion we do not previously feel a help for acting, but a foundation for being. For this reason, its “ultimation” or supreme expression is “worship,” in the widest and most integral sense of the word, not as a set of rites, but as the actualization of that “recognizing” or acquiescence to which I alluded before.
11. And just as being open to things discovers to us, in this its being open, that “there are” things, so too being religated discovers to us that “there is” that which religates, that which constitutes the fundamental root of existence. Without further commitment, it is, for the present, what we all designate by the word God, that to which we are religated in our entire being. God is not patent to us, but rather the deity. Deity is the title of a domain that reason will have to make precise precisely because it does not know by mere intuition what it is, nor whether it has effective existence as an entity. By his religation, man finds himself compelled to bring his reason into play in order to make precise and to justify the nature of God as reality. But reason would not do so if previously the ontological structure of his person, religation, did not install the intelligence, by the mere fact of existing personally and religatedly, in the domain of deity. We shall return to this. Sight as such does not guarantee the reality of a determinate object. But it opens before man the domain of the visible. Religation does not place us before the precise reality of a God, but opens before us the domain of deity, and installs us constitutively in it. Deity shows itself to us as the mere correlate of religation; in religation we are “founded,” and deity is “that which founds” as such. Even the attempt to deny all reality to that which founds (atheism) is metaphysically impossible without the domain of deity: atheism is a negative position with respect to deity.
Rather than infinite, necessary, perfect, etc.—ontological attributes still excessively complex—I believe I may venture to call God, such as He is patent to man in his constitutive religation, ens fundamentale or fundamentating [fundamentante] (reserving the right to explain myself presently on this word “ens”). That which religates us, religates us under that special form which consists in supporting us by making us be. Hence our existence has foundation, in all the senses the word possesses in Spanish. The primary attribute, quoad nos, of the divinity is fundamentality. Whatever we may say of God, even His own negation (in atheism), presupposes having first discovered Him in our religated dimension.
In a certain manner, then, just as the exteriority of things belongs to the very being of man, in the sense indicated above—that is, without things thereby forming part of him—so too the fundamentality of God “belongs” to the being of man, not because God fundamentally forms part of our being, but because it constitutes a formal part of it, the “being founded,” the being religated. God is nothing subjective, just as neither are external things. To exist is, in one of its dimensions, to be already having discovered God in our religation.
Note, however, that exteriority and religation are, in a certain manner, of opposite sign. Man is open to things; he finds himself among them and with them. Therefore he goes toward them, sketching out a world of possibilities of doing something with those things. But man does not thus find himself with God. God is not a thing in this sense. In being religated, man is not with God, but rather in God. Nor does he go toward God sketching out something to do with Him, but rather he is coming from God, “having to” do and to make himself. For this reason, all further going toward God is a being carried by Him. In the openness before things, man finds himself with things and sets himself before them. In the openness that is religation, man is set in existence, implanted in being, as I said at the beginning, and set in it as coming “from.” As an ontological dimension, religation makes patent the condition of an entity, man, who neither is nor can be understood in his selfhood, except from outside himself.
“We move, live, and are in Him.” And this “in” means: 1st, To be religated. 2nd, To be so constitutively. As a problem, the problem of God is the problem of religation.
This is not a demonstration nor anything of the sort, but the attempt to indicate the ontological analysis of one of our dimensions. The problem of God is not a question that man poses to himself as a scientific or vital problem might be posed—that is, as something that, in the last analysis, might or might not be posed, according to the urgencies of life or the acuteness of the understanding—but is a problem already posed in man, by the mere fact of finding himself implanted in existence. Inasmuch as it is nothing but the question of this mode of implantation.
Since God is, then, something that affects the very being of man, all discussion about the “faculties” that primarily lead us to Him becomes obsolete. God is patent in the very being of man.[4] Man does not need to reach God. Man consists in coming from God, and, therefore, in being in Him. The aspirations of the heart are of themselves a romantic vagueness that would be of no use to us. Those raptures or transports toward the infinite, that religioid sentimentality, are, at most, an indication and effect of something deeper: of the being of man in God.
To avoid all equivocation, it will not be amiss to add that the point of view I here maintain has nothing to do with what was called, in its day, the “philosophy of action.” Action is something practical. Now then: here it is a question neither of theory, nor of practice, nor of thought, nor of life, but of the being of man. That splendid and formidable book which is Blondel’s L’Action will not attain all its marvelous intellectual efficacy save by carrying the problem onto the clear terrain of an ontology. And I am inclined to believe that God is not primarily an “increment” necessary for action, but rather the “foundation” of existence, discovered as a problem in our very being, in its constitutive religation.
Nor does pure knowledge as such prove more favorable. For there are in knowledge two distinct dimensions: the one, what is effectively known in knowledge; the other, what leads us to know. Man is led to know by his own being. And precisely because his being is open and religated, his existence is necessarily an attempt at knowledge of things and of God. This requires some special consideration.
But, first, an observation. Neither is it a question of an experience of God. In reality, there is no experience of God, for deeper reasons, for those by which neither can one properly speak of an experience of reality. There is experience of real things; but reality itself is not the object of one or of many experiences. It is something more: reality, in a certain manner, one is; one is it, in the measure in which to be is to be open to things. Neither is there, properly, experience of God, as if He were a thing, a fact, or something similar. It is something more. Human existence is a religated and founded existence. The possession of existence is not experience in any sense, and, therefore, neither is God.[5]
The presumed controversy between a so-called method of immanence and a method of transcendence has no sense, because what has no sense is to need a method in order to reach God. God is not something that is in man as a part of him, nor is He a thing added to him from without, nor is He a state of consciousness, nor an object. Whatever of God there may be in man is only religation in which we are open to Him, and in this religation God is made patent to us. For this reason one cannot, strictly speaking, speak of a relation with God. Or, if you will, all relation with God presupposes previously that man consists in making things patent and making God patent, although both patencies are of a different sense. There is, as I have indicated before and as we shall see presently, an intellectual problem concerning God; but this does not mean either that the primary mode of making God patent is an act of knowledge or of any other faculty, nor that knowledge is a subsequent reflection upon a chimerical religious experience; it is not a question of any act, but of the being of man.
Man, indeed, has, among others, a capacity to know. The understanding knows whether something is or is not; whether it is in one way or in another; why it is as it is, and not otherwise. The understanding always moves within the “is.” This has been able to make one think that the “is” is the primary form in which man enters into contact with things. But this is excessive. In knowing, man understands what there is, and knows it as being. Things then become entities. But being always presupposes the there-is [el haber]. It is possible that they afterward coincide; thus, for example, for Parmenides, there is only what is. But one cannot, as Parmenides himself does, convert this coincidence into an identity between being and there-is, as if thing and entity were synonyms.
And, indeed, already Plato, following Democritus, surmised that “there is” something that “is not,” in the sense of the entity, that is, of the “thing that is” which Parmenides disclosed to us. And Aristotle strives to show us something that “there is” and that is affected by the “is not,” whether because it supervenes upon that which properly “is,” or because it “is not yet,” etc. Had the Greek language not possessed a single verb, the verb to be, to express the two ideas of being and there-is (the same occurs in Latin), the great paradoxes of its ontology would have been notably simplified and clarified. The necessity of making use only of the “is” thus obliged Plato to affirm that that which “is not” also “is.” Perhaps one might express, with fair success, one of the great discoveries of post-Eleatic philosophy by saying that it attempts to grasp, from the point of view of being, something that, indisputably, there is, but that is “of that which is not.”
Man understands, then, what there is, and understands it as being. Being is always the being of what there is. And this there-is is constituted in the radical openness in which man is open to things and finds himself with them. Since this finding-oneself belongs to his being, there also belongs to him the intellection of things, that is, to understand that they “are.”
Already within the orbit of being and, therefore, of understanding, in its widest sense, we say that things are or are not. But we employ the term being in many acceptations: this is a man; this is red; it is true that two and two are four, etc. Since Aristotle it has been said, for this reason, that it is problematic whether all these kinds of knowledge concerning the being of things constitute a single science, a single knowledge. And since Aristotle it has also been answered affirmatively, saying that all these senses of the term “being” have an analogical unity, which lies in the diverse manner in which they all imply one same fundamental sense: being, in the sense of subsistent thing. The thing is, then, that which properly “is,” the entity properly such. There is, then: 1st, the entity simpliciter, the thing or substance. 2nd, all the rest that, in its diversity, also offers a diverse ratio entis, according as it stands, in one measure or another, with respect to substance. By virtue of this, the kinds of knowledge concerning the being of things are a single science: the science of the entity as such, first philosophy or metaphysics. Philosophy is not, for Aristotle, a science of being, because he, probably, has not arrived at a concept of being.[6] Philosophy is only the science of entities in their entity: it ascertains in what measure they possess ratio entis.
Since man is open “toward” things, the “being” that the understanding primarily understands is the being of things. Aristotle limited himself to noting it. Philosophy must, however, interpret this “fact.”
From ancient times it has been said that the first adequate object of knowledge is external things. And it is necessary to add that this adequation is founded on the fact that human existence “consists,” in one of its dimensions, in being open, and, therefore, constitutively directed toward them. For this reason, all knowledge of oneself is constitutively a return from things toward oneself. The greatest difficulty of this knowledge lies in the necessary inadequacy of that “is” of things, applied to what is not a thing, to human existing. Then, the “oneself” does not enter into that “is.”
This makes one realize that the ontological dialectic is not a mere application of “a” concept already made, the concept of being, to new objects. It is not evident that there is a pure and abstract “is” that is “one.” Hence the dialectic of being is not a simple application nor an extension of an idea of being to diverse regions of entities, but a progressive constitution of the very domain of being, made possible, in turn, by the progressive discovery of new objects or regions, which oblige one to remake ab initio the very sense of being, conserving it, but absorbing it into a superior unity.
If the idea of analogy is maintained, it will have to be said that analogy is not a mere formal correlation, but involves a determinate direction: one sets out from the “is” of things in order to march in casu toward the “is” of human existence, passing through the “is” of life, etc. Since this “is” cannot be simply transferred to human existence from the material universe, the ontology of the former proves, for the present, absolutely problematic. Let us suppose the problem already solved. For this it will have been necessary to return to the “is” of things in order to modify it, avoiding its circumscription to the physical world. It is essential to the ontological dialectic not only the direction toward the new goal, but also this reversion to its first origin. In reverting upon the latter, we find ourselves forced to operate anew upon the “is” of things. That is to say, a third moment; there is a moment of radicalization. The analogy is maintained in what was understood at the point of departure in order to modify it. In what does this modification consist? It is not a question simply of adding or removing notes, but of giving to the “is” a new sense and a new amplitude of horizons that permit lodging within it the new object. But then one will not have managed only to discover a new entity in its entity, but a new ratio entis.[7] And this while remaining in the previous entity, but looking at it from the new one. So that this latter entity, which was what at the beginning presented itself to us as problematic, has now converted the first one into a problem. The solution of the problem has consisted in conserving the content of the concept, subsuming it under a new and broader ratio. I believe this distinction between concept and ratio entis essential. Enlarging Aristotle’s phrase, one would have to affirm not only that being, in the sense of concept, is said in many ways, but that, above all, the very reason of entity is said in many ways. And this in a manner so radical that it would encompass forms of the “is” no less true than that of the entity as such: mythology, technics, etc., also operate with objects that present, within those operations, their own ratio entis. The ontological dialectic is, above all, the dialectic of these rationes.
In our case, seeing things from the point of view of human existence, we find that the latter forces us to conserve the “is” of things, eliminating, however, what is peculiar to “thinghood” as such.
Well then: the understanding finds not only that “there are” things, but also that other thing that “there is,” which religates and founds existence: God. But it is a “there is” in which its content is a problem. By religation, then, it is possible and necessary at once to pose the intellectual problem of God. Our analysis has not only not eliminated the intellection of God, not only not made it superfluous, but leads inexorably to it, with all its radical problematicity: it carries us, without remission, to having to pose to ourselves the problem of God.
For if, indeed, the return that led us from things to understanding ourselves was radical, still more radical is that return in which, without stopping at ourselves, we are led to understand, not what “there is,” but what “makes there be.” All possibility of understanding God depends, then, on the possibility of lodging Him (if I may be permitted the expression) in the “is.” It is not simply a question of enlarging the “is” in order to lodge God in it. The difficulty is deeper. We do not know, for the present, whether this lodging is possible. And this, in a far more radical form than in the case of human existence. For the “is” is always read in what “there is.” And with all its peculiarities, human existence is of “what there is.” God, on the contrary, is not, for a finite mind, “what there is,” but that which “makes there be something.” That is to say, it is not that, on the one hand, there is human existence, and on the other, God, and that “afterward” the bridge is extended by which it “turns out” to be God who makes there be existence. No: the primary mode in which, for man, “there is” (if one wishes to employ the expression) God, is the very founding; better still: from the human point of view, the being-founding is the deity. Hence the possibility of finding some sense of the “is” for God is a grave problem. That God has something to do with being results already from the fact that the things that there are, are. But the problem lies precisely in ascertaining in what this having-to-do consists. The being of metaphysics is in no way identified with God. In God the there-being infinitely exceeds being. God is beyond being. Prima rerum creatorum est esse, the medieval Platonizers already said. Esse formaliter non est in Deo…nihil quod est in Deo habet rationem entis, repeated Master Eckhart and, with him, all Christian mysticism.[8] When it has been said of God that He is the ipsum esse subsistens, there has been said of Him, perhaps, the most that we can say understanding what we say; but we have not touched God in His divine ultimacy. I do not intend to suggest any vague mysticoid sense, but something perfectly graspable and concrete: God is knowable in the measure in which He can be lodged in being; He is unknowable, and is beyond being, in the measure in which He cannot be lodged in it. The possible analogy or ontological unity between God and things has a radically distinct sense from the unity of being within extra-divine ontology. At most one could speak of a supra-analogy.[9] We do not know, for the present, whether God is an entity, and if He is, we do not know in what measure. Or better: we know that there is God, but we do not know Him: such is the theological problem.
But it does not mean, I repeat, that it is a matter of a mere application or simple enlargement of the concept of being. It is a matter of something more: of discovering a new ratio entis, which renders everything problematic: things themselves, men, and one’s own person. Hence the problem that God poses does not refer only to Him, as if He were an entity juxtaposed and added to the others, but refers also to everything else, for in His light everything acquires a distinct sense, without thereby ceasing to be what it was before.
Let us give an example. For Aristotle substance is the being sufficient to exist separately. It is opposed, for this reason, to accident. What Aristotle understands by that sufficiency and that separation, if one wishes to give these words a positive content, is something that can only be understood when we contemplate how things come to be, one from another, how they are subject to movement. The separation and sufficiency in question are integrally manifested when, in the generation of things, these come to suffice unto themselves, independently of their progenitors. Then we say that things properly begin to exist, have their own consistency, are substances. Saint Thomas Aquinas, on the contrary, sees things issuing from God. He thus defines creation: emanatio totius esse a Deo. Things are here opposed, above all, to nothingness, and there will then be called substances those that can receive existence directly from God without need of God’s producing them or concreating them in a prior subject. The Aristotelian idea of “sufficiency,” even conserved in all its integrity, acquires a distinct sense in the light of the new ratio entis: it is a sufficiency in order to inhesion, but purely aptitudinal. (The confusion of these two points of view is manifested in the ontology of Spinoza, and leads him to pantheism.) The “is” of the physical world then radically changes its sense. For Aristotle it took on precise sense from becoming; for Saint Thomas Aquinas, from creation ex nihilo, that is, from his God. Let us leave aside in this the special idea of God, proper to Christianity, and consider it only as an illustration of what we have been saying: seen from God, the whole world takes on a new ratio entis, a new sense of the “is.” God being a problem, so too, at once, is the world.
Religated existence is a “vision” of God in the world and of the world in God. Not, certainly, an intuitive vision, as ontologism claimed, but the simple making-patent that occurs in religating fundamentality. It illumines everything with a new ratio entis. When we try to raise it to a concept and to give it ontological justification, then, and only then—that is, this vision being presupposed, religation being presupposed—is when we find ourselves forced to attempt a discursive demonstration of the existence and of the entitative and operative attributes of God. Such a demonstration would never be the “primary” discovery of God. It would mean that, once discovered, God keeps the world bound to Himself “by reason of being.” The “making there be” will have been poured and emptied into a concept of divine causality. But this will always be an ontological explanation, achieved within a prior vision of things: the vision that that primary binding confers upon us, by which everything shows itself to us religated to God. Our analysis has not only not made useless the march of the understanding toward God, but has necessarily required it. Reciprocally, the fact that the human understanding possesses the bare faculty of demonstrating the existence of God would never mean that discourse is the first way of arriving intellectually at it.[10]
We do not thereby prejudge what may be the result of this inexorable attempt to know God; we do not prejudge who God may be, where He is found, and what He does. That is, it remains as a problem of the proper nature of the divinity. For I did not propose to treat of God, but to clarify the dimension in which His problem is found and is already posed: the constitutive religation of human existence. From the moment that to understand is always to understand what there is, it will result that all existence has a theological problem, and that, therefore, a theology is essential to all religion. Theology is not identified with religion, but neither is it a reflexive appendix, fortuitously and eventually added to it: every religion constitutively involves a theology. I claimed no more than this.
We must now examine the significance possessed by atheism. But first it is fitting to complete what has been said concerning religation with some considerations relating to freedom. Religation seems to be opposed to freedom. But freedom can be understood in many senses.
Freedom can signify, in the first place, the use of freedom in life; we speak thus of a free or unfree act.
But it can signify something deeper. Man can use or not use his freedom, he can even find himself partially or totally deprived of it, whether by external forces or by internal forces. But it would make no sense to say the same of a stone. Man is not distinguished from a stone in that he executes free actions of which the stone is dispossessed, but the difference is more radical: human existence itself is freedom; to exist is to free oneself from things, and thanks to this liberation we can be turned back toward them and understand or modify them. Freedom then signifies liberation, liberated existence.
In religation, man does not have freedom in either of these two senses. From this point of view, religation is a limitation. But both the use of freedom and liberation emerge from the radical constitution of an entity whose being is freedom. Man is implanted in being. And this implantation which constitutes him in being constitutes him in being free. Man is being free, he is effectively being so. Religation, by which man exists, confers on him his freedom. Reciprocally, man acquires his freedom, is constituted in being free, by religation. Religation then takes on a positive sense. As the use of freedom, freedom is something interior to life; as liberation, it is the radical event of life, it is the principle of existence, in the sense of transcendence and of life; as free constitution, freedom is the implantation of man in being as person, and is constituted there where the person is constituted, in religation. Freedom is only possible as freedom “for,” not only as freedom “from,” and, in this sense, is only possible as religation. Freedom does not exist save in an entity implanted in the maximal fundamentality of its being. There is no “freedom” without “foundation.” The ens fundamentale, God, is not an extrinsic limit to freedom, but rather this fundamentality confers on man his being free: first, as regards the effective use of his freedom; second, as regards liberation; third, because it constitutes man in being founded: man exists, and his existence consists in making us be freely. This is an essential structure into which one would have to delve anew. Without religation and without that which religates, freedom would be, for man, his maximal impotence and his radical despair. With religation and with God, his freedom is his maximal power; so much so, that with it his own person is constituted, his own being, intimate and interior to him, over against everything, even over against his own life.
Actions, indeed, belong to supposits and, in our case, to persons. For this reason, man is not his existence, but rather existence is his. What man is does not consist in the effective course of his life, but in this “being his own.” In the case of the human supposit, this “being his own” is something toto coelo distinct from the manner in which an attribute is a property of substance. The “being his own” of man is something that, in a certain manner, is in his hands, he disposes of it. Man is present at the passing of everything, even of his own life, and his person “is” beyond the passing and the remaining. By virtue of this, man can modify the “being his own” of life. He can, for example, “repent” and thus rectify his being, going so far as to “convert” it into another. He also has the possibility of “forgiving” his neighbor. None of these “phenomena” refers to life as such, but to the person. While life runs its course and passes, man “is” what remains of his “own” after all that has to happen to him has happened to him.
Thanks to this transcendence of the being of man with respect to his own life, the human person can turn against life and against himself. That which makes us be free, makes us be free, effectively so, and, therefore, able to act effectively against oneself. To the being of man, counter-being is essential. But counter-being is rather a being-against; it presupposes, then, religation. Man turns against himself in the measure in which he already exists. By being religated, man, as a person, is, in a certain manner, an absolute subject, loosed from his own life, from things, from others. Absolute in a certain manner, also over against God, for although he is implanted in existence religatedly, he is so as something whose being-there is a being-in-the-process-of-making-himself, and, therefore, as something constitutively his own. In his primary religation, man takes on his freedom, his “relative absolute being.” Absolute, because it is “his own”; relative, because it is “taken on.”
If this is so, if man is constitutively religated, one must then ask what atheism is and how it is possible.
It is fitting to set down, of course, that a true atheism is an exceedingly difficult and subtle thing. What is usually called atheism usually consists, most of the time, in purely practical attitudes, and almost always in negations of a certain idea of God: for example, the one contained in the Christian creed. But non-belief in Christianity and, in general, the non-acceptance of a certain determinate idea of God, is not, strictly, atheism simpliciter.
What must be clarified is what it is that makes a true atheism possible. Atheism is thus, for the present, a problem, and not the primary situation of man. If man is constitutively religated, the problem will lie not in discovering God, but in the possibility of concealing Him.
For this it must be recalled that man is a person, in a merely radical sense; he is one already, but he cannot be one save by realizing a personality. This realization is carried out by living. Hence, in being a person there is given the ontological possibility of “forgetting” religation and, thereby, of apparently losing the fundamentality of existence. Apparently, because this loss is only the way in which he who has lost himself in the complexity of his life feels personality. Personality is, as such, the maximal simplicity, but a simplicity that is conquered through the complication of life. The tragedy of personality lies in this: that, without living, it is impossible to be a person; one is a person in the measure in which one lives. But the more one lives, the more difficult it is to be a person. Man must oppose himself to the complication of his life in order to absorb it energetically into the superior simplicity of the person. In the measure in which one is incapable of accomplishing this, one is also incapable of existing as a realized person. And in the measure in which one is dissolved in the complication of life, one is close to feeling oneself unbound and to identifying one’s being with one’s life. The existence that feels itself unbound is an atheistic existence, an existence that has not reached the bottom of itself. The possibility of atheism is the possibility of feeling oneself unbound. And what makes it possible to feel oneself unbound is the “sufficiency” of the person to make himself, arising from the success of his forces for living. The success of life is the great creator of atheism. Radical confidence, the surrender to one’s own forces for being, and the unbinding from everything, are one and the same phenomenon. Only a superior spirit can keep itself religated in the midst of the complicated success of its forces for being.
Thus unbound, the person implants itself in itself in its life, and life acquires an absolutely absolute character. It is what Saint John called, in a splendid phrase, the pride of life. Through it man founds himself upon himself. Christian theology has always seen in pride the capital sin among the capital sins, and the capital form of pride is atheism.
The possibility closest to the person, as such, is pride. In it the success of life conceals its own foundation, and man unbinds himself from everything, implanting himself in himself. Parodying Heraclitus, one might say that God loves to hide. And Sacred Scripture already reminds us that God resists the proud.
From this it results that the fundamental form of atheism is the rebellion of life. Can this be called a true atheism? It is one, in a certain manner, in the sense I have just indicated. But, at bottom, perhaps it is not. It is rather the divinization or the deification of life. In reality, more than denying God, the proud man affirms that he is God, that he totally suffices unto himself. But, then, it is not properly a question of denying God, but of coming to an agreement about who it is that is God. It is possible that one may say that there is he who renounces God in such a way that he admits not even the deification of life. But whence does this attitude receive its force and its possibility save from that all-embracing power of denying, behind which is concealed the very omnipotence of the denier and of the denial? To deny, in atheism, the deification of life is to expel life outside oneself and to remain alone, without one’s own life. Life has not been deified, but the person has. The atheist, in one form or another, makes of himself a God. Atheism is not possible without a God. Atheism is only possible in the domain of deity opened by religation. The human person, in implanting himself in himself, does so by the force he has, and which he believes to be his being; he inscribes his own being within the area of deity; a testimony all the more eloquent of that which religatedly makes him be. In his being unbound, man is made possible by God, he is in Him, under that paradoxical form which consists in letting us be without making an issue of Him, or, as we say in Spanish, “to be left by the hand of God.” Man cannot feel himself otherwise than religated, or else unbound. Therefore, man is radically religated. His feeling himself unbound is already to be religated.
For this reason there is no other way of realizing the vanity, or unfoundedness, of pride than the failure of an existence that relegates itself to its pure factum. I do not refer to the failures that man may suffer within his life, but to that failure which, even while knowing no “failures,” is “failure”: the radical failure of a life and of a person that have attempted to substantivate themselves. In its hour, the life founded upon itself appears internally unfounded, and, therefore, referred to a foundation of which it sees itself deprived.
It is not cosmic anguish that is the deepest way of encountering nothingness and awakening to being. There is another event (let us call it so) more radical still: that which invades us when, before the sudden death of a loved one, we say: “we are nothing.” On the contrary, we feel reality, the foundation of life, in those cases in which he who dies does so making death itself his own, accepting it, as the just crowning of his being, with the force that comes to him from that to which he is religated.
For this reason true atheism can only cease to be such by letting it be true, but obliging it to be so to its ultimate consequences. Without more ado, atheism will discover itself to be atheistic in and with God. The failure that constitutively lies in wait for us always assures the possibility of a rediscovery of God.
This pride of life has assumed diverse forms. Man possesses a life; and there is in human life, as such, the possibility of complacently delighting exhaustively in itself. In one form or another, this would lead us to an atheism arising from a peccatum originale.[11] But man, besides having life, is a person, and has, for this reason, the maximal possibility of implanting himself in himself. This would lead us to a personal atheism, to a peccatum personale. But man has, moreover, history, an objective spirit, as Hegel called it. Alongside original sin and personal sin, one would have to introduce thematically, in theology, the sin of the times, historical sin.[12] It is the “power of sin,” as a theological factor of history, and I believe it essential to suggest that this power receives concrete, historical forms, according to the times. The world is, in each epoch, endowed with peculiar graces and sins. It is not necessary that a person bear upon himself the sin of the times, nor, if he bears it, is it licit that it be imputed to him, on that account, personally. Well then: I sincerely believe that there is an atheism of history. The present time is a time of atheism, it is an epoch proud of its own success. Atheism affects today, primo et per se, our time and our world. Those of us who are not atheists are what we are, in spite of our time, as the atheists of other epochs were so in spite of theirs.[13] Our epoch is rich in that type of lives, exemplary in every respect, but before which there always arises a final objection: “Well, and so what?…”; magnificent existences of splendid figure, unbound from everything, wandering and errant… As an epoch, our epoch is an epoch of unbinding and of unfoundedness. For this reason, the religious problem of today is not a problem of confessions, but the problem of religion-irreligion. And, naturally, we cannot forget that it is also the epoch of the crisis of intimacy.
Since this cannot be an ultimate position, man has been having recourse to all sorts of supports. Today it seems to him that philosophy’s turn has come. For more than two centuries the philosophy of the atheist has been converted into the religion of his life. And we are today half convincing ourselves that philosophy is this. I have not yet managed to share this opinion. It is possible that man may have recourse to philosophy in order to be able to live; it is possible that philosophy may be even a héxis of the intelligence; but it is a very different thing to believe that philosophy consists in being a mode of life. At the bottom of a great part of present-day philosophy there lies a surreptitious deification of existence.[14]
Probably, it is necessary to press experience still further. The hour will surely come in which man, in his intimate and radical failure, will awaken as from a dream, finding himself in God and realizing that in his atheism he has done nothing but be in God. Then he will find himself religated to Him, not precisely in order to flee from the world, from others, and from himself, but on the contrary, in order to be able to endure and to sustain himself in being. God does not manifest Himself primarily as negation, but as foundation, as that which makes it possible to exist. Religation is the making-possible of existence as such.
I wish to conclude this brief note
In it I have not given a rational demonstration of the existence of God. I have not even given a concept of God. I have done nothing but try to discover the point at which the problem arises and the dimension in which it is already posed: the constitutive and ontological religation of existence. Now the questions would begin to arise in floods. If that were so, it would demonstrate the usefulness of this little note.
Is this a problem for philosophy? Evidently. But with this it is not said in what sense it may be one, nor that everything said up to here about God belongs equally to philosophy. The problem of God could, in the last instance, exceed pure philosophy. This could only be elucidated with an adequate concept of philosophy. But this is a task much more complex than the one I here proposed to myself.
[Official bibliography #43, Naturaleza, Historia, Dios, pp. 361-397 (pagination of the 5th edition);
Official bibliography #21, Revista de Occidente 149 (1935) 129-159.]
Notes
[1] The present study obtained the Nihil obstat of the ecclesiastical censorship on October 4, 1943. It was published in Spanish in 1935 in the Revista de Occidente. In 1936 my authorization was requested for a French version of it in Recherches Philosophiques. For this I introduced some modifications of detail, especially in IV, which was the object of a new and more extensive redaction. The French translation was simply monstrous. It was not submitted to me before its publication, and the translator, misunderstanding our language, put absurd phrases into my pen. Let my total disapproval, then, be placed on record. The Spanish text that served as basis is the one I offer in these pages. I also take the opportunity to disassociate myself very formally from the use and even the abuse that has been made of my modest pages. Let it not be forgotten that in them I treat only of the problem of God, not of God Himself. It would be absurd to think that I claim to give a demonstration of the existence of God or to disqualify those that have been given. It is only a question of fixing the line on which both the “demonstration” and the mediate and rational “apprehension” of God can be produced; the line on which atheism, too, negatively moves.^
[2] In reality, one has not gone beyond distinguishing these three terms as if they were three human strata; it would be necessary to pose the problem of their radical unity. I cannot enter here into this question. ^
[3] From very ancient times the etymology of this word has been disputed. Cicero, Lactantius, and Saint Augustine oscillate between the verb religare and relegere, to be scrupulous in one’s dealings with God. Modern linguistics has not managed to resolve the doubt. For a moment it seemed to incline in favor of the second explanation. But, definitively, it has been possible to see that it proves much more probable to derive religio from religare. One may see, on this point, Meillet, Ernout, and Bienveniste. In any case, no etymology resolves theological problems. And it is sufficient that the thing be scientifically probable for it to be possible, without precipitation or frivolity, to appeal to it, aiming at objectives that are not linguistic, but theological.^
[4] It is clear, of course, that He is not patent “as He is in Himself” (this would be a singular ontologism), but as “founding.” The mode of His patency is “being founding.”^
[5] Naturally, let it not be forgotten that I speak, not of the “reality” itself of God, but of His “patency” in man.^
[6] I am interested in emphasizing that this affirmation that Aristotle does not arrive at a concept of being is dated 1935.^
[7] I understand here by ratio something prior to the concept: it is what gives occasion to form the concept in question. In a certain manner it could, for the moment, be taken as equivalent to “sense.” I should prefer, however, to call it idea, provided that the concept be distinguished from it. The concept is the notion that we elaborate in considering the thing within a certain ratio, sense, or idea.^
[8] I refer, naturally, only to speculative mysticism, and only in the generic sense of declaring God to be beyond being, leaving aside the very words of Eckhart. Although Eckhart’s affirmation aroused a violent reaction on the part of some Franciscan theologians, no doubt because of its drastic form, it is certain that it has old roots in the history of theology. Thus, Marius Victorinus, in the fourth century: “God is not “being” (ón), but rather “ante-being” (proón).” (P. L. VIII, col. 2, 29 D) e The disputed and uncertain John Scotus Eriugena said: “In knowing that God is incomprehensible, not without reason is He called nothingness par excellence.” (P. L. CXXII, col. 680 D). It is true that Eriugena has pantheistic tendencies, but it is not necessary to interpret those phrases in a pejorative sense. Saint Thomas Aquinas himself, speaking of Dionysius the Areopagite, tells us, indeed: “Since God is the cause of all existing things, He turns out to be a “nothing” (nihil) of existing things, not because He lacks being, but because He is supereminently “segregated from all things.”” (Comm. de Divin. Norn. I, L. 3) e The quoted portions are from the text itself, referring to the Areopagite. See, moreover, the text of Cajetan, which is in the following note. It is not my intention to enter into this question, but only to make it seen that these ideas manifest with all clarity the problem to which I allude: the difficulty of applying to God the concept of being, save by modifying it radically; and in this difficulty lies precisely the whole problem of speculative theology. That is all. Whatever else may be inferred from this remains the reader’s responsibility. It is no affair of mine.^
[9] Thus, Cajetan tells us: “Res divina prior est ente et omnibus differentiis ejus: est enim super ens et super unum, etc.” (Q.39, a. 1, VII). “The divine reality is prior to the entity and to all its differences; for it is above the entity and above the one, etc.” The emphasis is Cajetan’s.^
[10] Some Thomist theologian, such as Lepidi, has gone so far as to affirm: “The movement of our intelligence, whenever it understands and reasons, begins with an implicit knowledge of God and ends in an explicit knowledge of God.” Saint Thomas Aquinas himself touches at times upon this dimension of the problem. “Secundum quod intelligere nihil aliud dicit quam intuitum, qui nihil aliud est quam praesentia intelligibilis ad intellectum quocum que modo, sic anima semper intelligit se et Deum, et consequitur quidam amor indeterminatus.” (The emphasis is mine.) In the amor indeterminatus and in the understanding, as simple intuition, man finds himself turned toward God quocumque modo.^
[11] Today I would be inclined to treat in another way the problem of the “natural” consequences of original sin. Distinguishing, as I do in another work, the natural potencies of man and the possibilities with which he counts at each instant, it becomes clear that, if the former remained intact, the latter changed fundamentally with original sin. Saint Paul himself, who insists that man can naturally always know God, did not hesitate to teach in the Athenian Areopagus that, in consequence of original sin, man was left in the situation of having to seek God gropingly, by gropings. This is not all, but it is essential. Let the theme remain for another occasion. ^
[12] I do not wish now to make an issue of what there may or may not be, in atheism, and, in general, in human acts, of sin sensu stricto. What matters to me is the triple qualification of personal, historical, and original. ^
[13] This idea of historical sin has been suggested to me by Ortega, who frequently insists that the vices of one’s epoch and of society are not necessarily imputable to the individual. ^
[14] I am not suspect of a lack of enthusiasm for present-day philosophy. These very lines are the most eloquent testimony of it; some of the presuppositions they imply belong formally to it: whoever knows the philosophy of our time will be able to identify them at first sight. But I sincerely believe that in present-day philosophy a lamentable and highly symptomatic oversight has been committed: the passing over of this religation.
