Anguish discovers God to us and makes us love Him.
To believe in God is to love Him, and to love Him is to feel Him
suffering, to pity Him.
It may perhaps appear blasphemous to say that God suffers, for suffering
implies limitation. Nevertheless, God, the Consciousness of the
Universe, is limited by the brute matter in which He lives, by the
unconscious, from which He seeks to liberate Himself and to liberate us.
And we, in our turn, must seek to liberate Him. God suffers in each and
all of us, in each and all of the consciousnesses imprisoned in
transitory matter, and we all suffer in Him. Religious anguish is but
the divine suffering, the feeling that God suffers in me and that I
suffer in Him.
The universal suffering is the anguish of all in seeking to be all else
but without power to achieve it, the anguish of each in being he that he
is, being at the same time all that he is not, and being so for ever.
The essence of a being is not only its endeavour to persist for ever, as
Spinoza taught us, but also its endeavour to universalize itself; it is
the hunger and thirst for eternity and infinity. Every created being
tends not only to preserve itself in itself, but to perpetuate itself,
and, moreover, to invade all other beings, to be others without ceasing
to be itself, to extend its limits to the infinite, but without breaking
them. It does not wish to throw down its walls and leave everything laid
flat, common and undefended, confounding and losing its own
individuality, but it wishes to carry its walls to the extreme limits of
creation and to embrace everything within them.
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