Faith and reason -- Christianity; Immortality -- Christianity; Tragic, The -- Religious aspects -- Christianity
And the truth is that we feel God less as a superhuman consciousness
than as the actual consciousness of the whole human race, past, present,
and future, as the collective consciousness of the whole race, and still
more, as the total and infinite consciousness which embraces and
sustains all consciousnesses, infra-human, human, and perhaps,
super-human. The divinity that there is in everything, from the
lowest--that is to say, from the least conscious--of living forms, to
the highest, including our own human consciousness, this divinity we
feel to be personalized, conscious of itself, in God. And this gradation
of consciousnesses, this sense of the gulf between the human and the
fully divine, the universal, consciousness, finds its counterpart in the
belief in angels with their different hierarchies, as intermediaries
between our human consciousness and that of God. And these gradations a
faith consistent with itself must believe to be infinite, for only by an
infinite number of degrees is it possible to pass from the finite to the
infinite.
Deistic rationalism conceives God as the Reason of the Universe, but its
logic compels it to conceive Him as an impersonal reason--that is to
say, as an idea--while deistic vitalism feels and imagines God as
Consciousness, and therefore as a person or rather as a society of
persons. The consciousness of each one of us, in effect, is a society of
persons; in me there are various I's and even the I's of those among
whom I live, live in me.
The God of deistic rationalism, in effect, the God of the logical proofs
of His existence, the _ens realissimum_ and the immobile prime mover, is
nothing more than a Supreme Reason, but in the same sense in which we
can call the law of universal gravitation the reason of the falling of
bodies, this law being merely the explanation of the phenomenon. But
will anyone say that that which we call the law of universal
gravitation, or any other law or mathematical principle, is a true and
independent reality, that it is an angel, that it is something which
possesses consciousness of itself and others, that it is a person? No,
it is nothing but an idea without any reality outside of the mind of him
who conceives it. And similarly this God-Reason either possesses
consciousness of himself or he possesses no reality outside the mind
that conceives him. And if he possesses consciousness of himself, he
becomes a personal reason, and then all the value of the traditional
proofs disappears, for these proofs only proved a reason, but not a
supreme consciousness. Mathematics prove an order, a constancy, a reason
in the series of mechanical phenomena, but they 'do not prove that this
reason is conscious of itself. This reason is a logical necessity, but
the logical necessity does not prove the teleological or finalist
necessity. And where there is no finality there is no personality, there
is no consciousness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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