The attributes of the living God, of the Father of Christ, must be deduced from His historical revelation in the Gospel and in the conscience of every Christian believer, and not from metaphysical reasonings which lead only to the Nothing-God of Scotus Erigena, to the rational or pantheistic God, to the atheist God—­in short, to the de-personalized Divinity.

Not by the way of reason, but only by the way of love and of suffering, do we come to the living God, the human God.  Reason rather separates us from Him.  We cannot first know Him in order that afterwards we may love Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him, hungering after Him, before knowing Him.  The knowledge of God proceeds from the love of God, and this knowledge has little or nothing of the rational in it.  For God is indefinable.  To seek to define Him is to seek to confine Him within the limits of our mind—­that is to say, to kill Him.  In so far as we attempt to define Him, there rises up before us—­Nothingness.

The idea of God, formulated by a theodicy that claims to be rational, is simply an hypothesis, like the hypotheses of ether, for example.

Ether is, in effect, a merely hypothetical entity, valuable only in so far as it explains that which by means of it we endeavour to explain—­light, electricity or universal gravitation—­and only in so far as these facts cannot be explained in any other way.  In like manner the idea of God is also an hypothesis, valuable only in so far as it enables us to explain that which by means of if we endeavour to explain—­the essence and existence of the Universe—­and only so long as these cannot be explained in any other way.  And since in reality we explain the Universe neither better nor worse with this idea than without it, the idea of God, the supreme petitio principii, is valueless.

But if ether is nothing but an hypothesis explanatory of light, air, on the other hand, is a thing that is directly felt; and even though it did not enable us to explain the phenomenon of sound, we should nevertheless always be directly aware of it, and, above all, of the lack of it in moments of suffocation or air-hunger.  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.