Divinity without deity

AI-assisted translation from the Greek. Greek original

There is a question that anyone who has seen the structure of suffering in the world is eventually compelled to ask. Why the world is like this. Why life feeds on life. Why animals tear other animals apart. Why an infant can suffer for no reason. Why there are camps, orphanages, fenced-in slaughterhouses where cows stand in line while machines draw their milk.

Traditional theology answers these questions with frameworks that do not withstand careful scrutiny. That suffering is the price of human freedom. That suffering teaches us. That suffering is a mystery beyond our understanding. None of these answers explains suffering where human freedom is not involved — in the animal kingdom, in infants who die before becoming conscious, in the very structure of evolution, which operates through the death of the defeated.

I would be ashamed of a god who chose to create such a world. This shame is not atheism. It is the right moral response to an image of god that theology itself has fashioned and no one has corrected. If god is omnipotent and chose this world, then the judgment against him is justified. If the answer is “we do not understand his reasons,” then that answer abandons the very position it is defending.

There is, however, another possibility, one that has not been stated clearly enough.

God may not be what we expected. Not because he does not exist. Because he is not a saviour in the sense imagined by humanity’s childlike imagination. His refusal to act as a saviour is neither abandonment nor weakness nor malice. It is an act of trust. He leaves us room. He does not intervene to force us to become what we ourselves must become. His withdrawal is the condition of our coming of age.

From this perspective, what we would expect of him is not removed from the world — it is transferred to us. Love, justice, care, consolation — everything we would want god to do for us and for others — becomes our own work. Not because god is absent. Because divine nature itself manifests as a gradual transfer of possibility to the human being.

A distinction is needed here that is usually not made. Between deity and divinity. Deity is a status — I am a god, I control, I decide. When human beings thought they could possess deity, the result was Auschwitz, the camps, every form of exterminatory ideology. Deity seized as a possession leads to abuse.

Divinity is something else. It is not a status you acquire. It is a way of being you take on. You act divinely not because you are a god, but because you recognize that your very existence carries a possibility that exceeds your mere biological functioning. Divinity is not taken away from god — it passes to you as a possibility for action.

How do we know what a divine act is. We do not need revelation to know it. Each of us knows what hurts us. We therefore also know what does not hurt us. And this knowledge gives us direct access to what hurts and does not hurt another. Our pain is the criterion. You do not need a theory to recognize that an ant being crushed suffers — you know it because you know what it means to be crushed.

The divine act undertaken by a human being is not a triumph. It does not fill the person performing it with a sense of victory or moral superiority. It contains a melancholy that does not go away. This melancholy is not personal fatigue. It is the recognition that the world has been made in such a way that someone needs to act divinely, and this need is itself a burden. You act divinely because the ecosystem is not divine. If it were, you would not need to do it yourself. Your act presupposes a lack in the world. And the act does not make good that lack — it reduces it, but does not change the structure that produced it.

Melancholy is the memory of “there should be no need” within “I act.” What I am doing is right, but the world that forced me to do it is not right. This duality — a right act, a wrong condition — keeps melancholy alive even at the moment of action.

And perhaps this very melancholy is what god would feel if he became explicitly aware of his own position. For he too acts — or allows things to be done — within a world whose very nature includes suffering. His unease before himself is no different from the human being’s unease before the need to act divinely in a world where divineness is not guaranteed by its structure.

This shared melancholy is the point at which the relationship between human being and god ceases to be hierarchical. It is no longer god above and the human being below. Both are in the same difficulty, on different scales. God in his own abstract position before himself. The human being in their own concrete position before the world. Yet the movement is shared. They share a burden that neither chose but that both must bear.

What traditional discourse would call salvation takes another form here. You are not saved because someone comes to save you. You become the one who could save, on the small scale that falls to you. You do not believe in an omnipotent god who will set things right. You become a fellow traveller with a god who also bears the unbearable burden of being or becoming — we do not know which — god.

Faith here is measured not by a declaration but by the act of taking responsibility. Whoever takes on the good they would hope for from god puts divine nature into practice, regardless of what they believe about his existence. Whoever invokes god without taking responsibility betrays what they invoke.

The freedom born here is neither severance nor revolt. It is travelling together. A relationship with something that you do not know exists in the form you once imagined, but movement towards it makes you what you had hoped it would be. The journey itself becomes the place where god and the human being meet — not as master and slave, but as two beings sharing the same unbearable burden.