And in the same way God Himself,
not the idea of God, may become a reality that is immediately felt; and
even though the idea of Him does not enable us to explain either the
existence or the essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct
feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And this
feeling--mark it well, for all that is tragic in it and the whole tragic
sense of life is founded upon this--this feeling is a feeling of hunger
for God, of the lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first
instance, as we shall see, to wish that there may be a God, to be unable
to live without Him.
So long as I pilgrimaged through the fields of reason in search of God,
I could not find Him, for I was not deluded by the idea of God, neither
could I take an idea for God, and it was then, as I wandered among the
wastes of rationalism, that I told myself that we ought to seek no other
consolation than the truth, meaning thereby reason, and yet for all that
I was not comforted. But as I sank deeper and deeper into rational
scepticism on the one hand and into heart's despair on the other, the
hunger for God awoke within me, and the suffocation of spirit made me
feel the want of God, and with the want of Him, His reality. And I
wished that there might be a God, that God might exist. And God does not
exist, but rather super-exists, and He is sustaining our existence,
existing us _(existiendonos)_.
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