, chap. i.). The power
of creating God in our own image and likeness, of personalizing the
Universe, simply means that we carry God within us, as the substance of
what we hope for, and that God is continually creating us in His own
image and likeness.
And we create God--that is to say, God creates Himself in us--by
compassion, by love. To believe in God is to love Him, and in our love
to fear Him; and we begin by loving Him even before knowing Him, and by
loving Him we come at last to see and discover Him in all things.
Those who say that they believe in God and yet neither love nor fear
Him, do not in fact believe in Him but in those who have taught them
that God exists, and these in their turn often enough do not believe in
Him either. Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any
passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty,
without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation,
believe only in the God-Idea, not in God Himself. And just as belief in
God is born of love, so also it may be born of fear, and even of hate,
and of such kind was the belief of Vanni Fucci, the thief, whom Dante
depicts insulting God with obscene gestures in Hell (_Inf._, xxv., 1-3).
For the devils also believe in God, and not a few atheists.
Is it not perhaps a mode of believing in God, this fury with which those
deny and even insult Him, who, because they cannot bring themselves to
believe in Him, wish that He may not exist? Like those who believe,
they, too, wish that God may exist; but being men of a weak and passive
or of an evil disposition, in whom reason is stronger than will, they
feel themselves caught in the grip of reason and haled along in their
own despite, and they fall into despair, and because of their despair
they deny, and in their denial they affirm and create the thing that
they deny, and God reveals Himself in them, affirming Himself by their
very denial of Him.
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