{334} (cont’d)

3

Individual, social, historical dimensions
of the experience of God

In the three dimensions of man, individual, social, and historical, man has an experience of God. Leaving aside the individual dimension, which is the one that has appeared mostly in the previous consideration, there is a historic experience of God, and a social experience of God.

In the first place, man has a social experience of God. And he has it even when living in a society which has no God or does not wish to have one, because this not-wishing and this not-having constitute a precise form of experience of God, as we shall immediately explain.

This experience of God is not the result of a kind of syllogism: God is present in man and man experiences God as absolute in everything; but {335} he lives in a society, and therefore, experiences God in society. But we are not concerned with this; we are trying to see in what the social dimension of the experience of God consists. The social experience of God, precisely because it is social, is multiform and varied, just as diverse as the manners of living the absolute in the freedom of each one. Each person creates in his own way the experience of the absolute. But in addition man has a social experience of God as multiform as the individual one, a social experience with all the concretions, vicissitudes and limits of the societies to which men can belong. In reality, the experience is not an attribute of man, but of men in its concrete form.

For example, in the people of Israel, a Semitic people is the experience of the true God as fidelity, as fidelity not only offered by God in a berith, in a covenant —as I explained above—, but as an experience which man makes of the divine fidelity. Here “truth” means fidelity. Although the term used is “truth”, the word “truth” is in this case something more than intentional conformity. The word “truth” is the fidelity of God. Thus, man will ask mercy from God, will ask that God have mercy on him, precisely so that God Himself should be faithful to the fidelity He has offered.

The examples can be multiplied. Among others, there is the episode of Elijah in his struggle with the prophets of Baal. Baalism is a historic form, an historic experience of God; the intellection of divinity as Baal was the product of an evolution within Phoenician thought, which originally had “El”, supreme God, at the head of the Ugaritic pantheon. Only afterwards {336} did Baal acquire a certain supremacy leaving “El” relegated to a subordinate divinity. The reason for this stems from the fact that the early Phoenicians were nomads, and a nomad is accompanied throughout his migrations in the desert by the divinity understood as “El” until his establishment in the country where they are going to become sedentary. But once becoming sedentary, what is essential is not that God accompany them through the desert, but that there be sufficient rain for the crops. It is then that Baalism appears. Elijah argues with the priests of the Canaanite God, but at that time this Canaanite God is now Baal. And the dispute occurs also in the form of a social experience, appealing to the fidelity of Yahweh with the trial of fire.

The people of Israel had had other forms of this experience of God before; for example, the experience of God in the desert, an experience which was en enrichment of the experience of God. The determination is maintained that Yahweh is the same God as the God of the fathers, and the fact that God is the God of the fathers is a form of social experience. The fathers are the ancestors of the family: this is the God of the family. It would be chimerical to impose on the mind of Abraham and the patriarchs the idea of only one God that Israel itself has in the last years of its pre-Christian existence. He is still the God of the fathers. The well-known text of the contracts signed between the gods of the others and the gods of the Hittite fathers clearly shows that the God of the fathers continues living in the Israelite society.

With Moses, however, there is a point of inflection. The God of the fathers changes into something more radical, into a jealous God, which is a social form of living the absoluteness of God. It would be an exaggeration to pretend that Moses was a monotheist {337} in the sense that he did not admit any other divine reality, but the one of Yahweh. But the Yahweh of Moses did not admit any other divine reality next to Him; not only was He jealous, but He was solitary, even though this solitude may have only consisted in the solitude and real truth of Yahweh. It will require prophetic preaching to have a different social form, which is the authentic and rigorous monotheism where the other gods are nothingness, the elohim have now turned into ililim.

There are, then, different social forms of the experience of God. I have mentioned a few as examples. They are social forms of the experience of the absolute. The Israelite did not feel himself to be an Israelite, or being what he had to be absolutely, like something constituting a dialectic of the exception; but leaving aside his sins, the Israelite felt himself truly Israelite when he was a faithful servant of Yahweh, a fidelity which had very different aspects in the different social eras of Israel.

In addition there is, nonetheless, an historical experience of God which is not identical to the social experience, to wit, a true historical experience of God.

It has become customary to consider history as a kind of chronological museum of human and social forms. But, Is history a museum of social forms, even if they are chronologically connected? This seems to me radically insufficient. History, primarily and fundamentally —even though not universal, and has not been such until the beginning of this century, because what went before is not a universality, but a synchrony of different individual histories— history, within the limits of its historicity, is properly and rigorously speaking an experience. And as experience it is physical proof of {338} reality. Man has not only been taking on different forms over the course of history, but in fact has been experimenting. Our era, for example, is physically testing many things which for Aristotle were just a catalog of empty forms, and for us are experiences. History is constitutively experience. But, Experience of what? Precisely, experience of reality. Yet, history is not, contrary to what may be thought at present, the last word on human reality, because history is constitutively penultimate; ultimateness only belongs to the person insofar as person of each man.

However, history has implied an experience of God. And in turn the experience of God has configured history. As such monotheism is one of the factors which have led to the universality of history. Whether seeking it or not, monotheism has had a great deal to do in the universal constitution of history. Regardless of the people adopting it: in Israel, in Islam, in the Christian peoples, etc., we can detect how in the course of history the polytheisms vanish in front of monotheism. Man has been building a fabulous experience throughout history, the monotheist experience. It is a strict and rigorous experience, and not simply a theologic and metaphysical argument.

And this mode of experience is proper to the history of Israel. We have pointed to this before as social experience, but now we should return to see it as historical experience. When the God of Israel appears, Yahweh, who according to the earliest writers was invoked by the ancient fathers, God appears as the God of the fathers. This God of the fathers appears in a concrete form: not simply {339} offering His fidelity, which was the constitution of the covenant for Moses, but in a concrete form of historical experience. That form is the one of being now with them. This historical experience has different forms. From the most elemental form, His accompanying them across the desert to the borders of Canaan, until the constitution of that which has been called the “amphictyony” of the tribes of Israel. Regardless of how this may have come about historically —that is not our point— God appears then in another form: He is the God of the pact of the tribes. Later, in connection with the monarchy which was imposing itself, there appears another historical form of the experience of God: Yahweh as king. And in a still more particular form: the God of the armies, Yahweh Sabaoth. This is the historical experience of God as chief of a State, in this case theocratic.

Further yet, one can appreciate a true theology of history in the inspired preaching itself of the Old Testament, which is the supreme expression of this historical experience of God: God offers His fidelity under the condition that the Israelites be faithful. This is followed by the defection of Israel, then the punishment of God arrives, and finally the repentance with the return to God. This theology of history in four acts is precisely the theology of the historical experience of God. It is an experience lived by the people of Israel in different historical phases, the historical experience of God as fidelity, a fidelity that is the real truth of God, and never canceled regardless of any infidelities by men.

When reading the Old Testament it may seem that a unitary line is being offered. God creates man in His own image and likeness; man commits the original sin, corrupts himself, then came the deluge, etc. The Red Sea is crossed ... and {340} the lineal narration of a history continues. But the Israelites did not live it that way. They lived each of these episodes in and by themselves. Israel did not have from the beginning the idea of being a chosen people. How could they have had it, since they had started by not being a people? Israel has gone through all these historical vicissitudes and only when a theologian, the priestly writer, reflected with inspiration from the theological and theologic perspectives about these experiences of Israel, was he able to see along these diverse experiences the links of a unitary chain, which is the experience of God, unitary in different phases of manifestation, of that which is precisely to be the chosen people of God.

The being of the chosen people is the structure of their theology of history, in a unity which goes back to the earliest times of Israelite humanity, and which continues up to the time of Christ. As the chosen people of God, the people of Israel have lived the experience of God as something absolute and something which, in a way, has made them feel absolute in the face of all other peoples, because those peoples pass on, and in the end, only Israel remains. However, this happens in such an obscure way that not even Job dared to answer the question which that experience poses. Such, then, is the historical form of the experience of God.

And this is not extraneous to the New Testament. Christ did not found Christianity by organizing some institutions and saying “this is how one has to live”. He did some of that. But Christ founded Christianity in a much more radical and intimate way. Christ founded Christianity by making Christians, i.e., setting in motion the movement of Christianity in the course of history. Christ wished to be experienced by His followers so that {341} they, associated in Him, could be in Him the historical experience of God. The historical experience of His divine filiation is continued precisely in the very expansion of Christianity. It is the real subsistent truth of Christ which runs through the river beds of a history.

This is not exclusive to Christianity, nor is it primarily exclusive to Christianity. In Christianity there is all of this, because it rests upon a universal augural truth, the historical experience of the absolutely absolute Being from the side of man, insofar as he is an I which advances by founding himself as absolute upon the One Who is absolutely absolute. I am founding myself as absolute upon the One Who is absolutely absolute. And only because of this are there all of those structures I have just recalled. If one wishes to employ the usual classical terminology, we could say that this structure of the experience of the absolute, the historical experience of the absolute, is the dynamic and obediential base, thanks to which it has been possible to have structures like the Israelite and the Christian in history. History is an experience, and a dimensional experience of the absolute.

Contrary to what Kant and Hegel said, history is not the unfolding of reason, of a logos, but it is really the unfolding of an experience of God. Hegel, who did not see in reality anything but a decanting of reason, did not find a different way of conceptualizing history except as the form of objective spirit, of objectivized reason, above persons, who, as Hegel says, disappear into the objective spirit which, in its turn, is the ultimate march towards absolute spirit. This is absurd. Hegel thought about how men could be God; Christianity taught them to think how God could become {342} man, and then precisely learn to be God. This is the anti-Hegelian or para-Hegelian vision of history, a history which is, indeed, an historic experience of God.


4

Other attitudes facing the experience of God

There are other attitudes towards the problem we are discussing. In the first place, there is the attitude of the agnostic and the person who is indifferent. The frustration of the agnostic and the unconcernedness —if not, it would not be indifference— of the indifferent person are in reality modes of the experience of God. Without this the agnostic would not be an agnostic, and the indifferent person would not be indifferent. Each would be something else.

A more serious problem arises, on the other hand, regarding atheism: the problem of one who faces the theological question of the ultimateness of the real, and yet does not reach the existence of God. But this problem has to be approached clearly by saying that atheism does not enjoy the conditio possidentis. It might be thought that man is without God, and then he who claims that God exists is the one who has to prove it. This is not true. The truth is that each man is religated to the power of the real in all of us. He who proceeds towards God admits the existence of God reasonably. And he who does not so proceed has to prove why he does not. He has to give reasons. What is primary is not to be without God; what is primary is to be religated to the power of the real. Atheism just as much as theism is the conclusion of an intellective and vital process within that aforementioned religation when one confronts the ultimateness of the real.

{343} Then we must ask, In what does the attitude of the atheist consist with respect to this line of thinking? I already indicated this before: it consists precisely in that the atheist, who undoubtedly would admit that in some way we are relatively absolute persons, has an attitude based on the pure facticity of the absolute, and he remains in that facticity. He would admit that, but would not admit that we can proceed beyond it. Now, the intent of formulating it this way is to provide a more careful exposition of atheism: the ultimate essence of atheism consists in this and in nothing else. When confronting this attitude, the reply does not consist in “proving” through an intellective process that God exists. No. Here we have to confront atheism directly. And then, from the reality of God, one thing is clear: if man discovers the fundamental reality in an intellective and volitional process, from will to truth, and the atheist does not, it is because the atheist, in contradistinction to the theist who has discovered God, finds himself with his own pure facticity concealing God: this is the “covering up” of God confronting His “dis-covering”. It is not a lack of experience of God. It is an experience in a certain way “covered up”.

The experience of God may have various tonalities. One of them is to discover it and another one to keep it under cover. This is not a dialectical metaphor to avoid the issue, because the atheist who is so sincerely, and finds himself resting upon his atheism just as we believers find ourselves resting upon our faith without great theological arguments that may have brought us to it, this atheist, I say, just as the believer, is the terminus not only of the good will of God, but of His supernatural graces, at least from the Christian point of view. At best, in this case, man is in God.

{344} In 1936 while in Rome, I wrote the following: “It is probably necessary to activate experience even more. The time will surely arrive in which man, in his intimate and radical failure, will awaken as if from a dream, finding himself in God and becoming aware that in his atheism he has done nothing but been in God. Then he will find himself religated to Him, not in order to flee from the world, from others, and himself, but just the opposite, to be able to withstand and support himself in being, because God does not manifest Himself primarily as negation, but as fundamentation, as that which makes existence possible”. The experience of God, consequently, a parte Dei, is God giving Himself as absolute to human experience; a parte hominis, it is to incorporate the experience of the absolute in the constitution of my person. Man does not encounter God primarily in the dialectic of necessities and indigencies. Man encounters God precisely in the plenitude of his being and his life. Anything else is to have a sad concept of God. Of course —all of us are victims of inelegancies— we appeal to God when it thunders. Indeed, no one is exempt. But this is not the primary form in which man proceeds towards God, and “is now” actually in God. He does not proceed by the way of indigence, but of plenitude, the plenitude of his being, in the plenitude of his life and his death. Man does not advance towards God in the individual, social, and historical experience of his indigence; this intervenes secondarily. He proceeds towards God and must proceed above all through what is most plenary, in the plenitude itself of life, i.e., in making himself a person. In the personal being, in the relatively absolute being of the person, is where he finds God, giving Himself to man in his experience. This donation of God is precisely the reality of the person. And this {345} human experience of the absolute is experience of this donation of God.

But, What is the unity of these two moments? Is it enough to appeal to the concept of experience as physical proof of reality in order that this experience of God —God giving Himself to man in experience— and this experience of man, experimenting and searching individually, socially, and historically with his freedom, for what is the relatively absolute of his being; is it enough with this convergence in the concept of experience to resolve the problem? Not in the least. We must then ask: In what does the intrinsic and formal unity of the human person “and” God consist, in this experience of God, now bilaterally considered? That is the issue of the next chapter.