living, human God--that is, of a God
who suffers--it is only the dead, the inhuman, that does not suffer--a
God who loves and thirsts for love, for pity, a God who is a person.
Whosoever knows not the Son will never know the Father, and the Father
is only known through the Son; whosoever knows not the Son of Man--he
who suffers bloody anguish and the pangs of a breaking heart, whose soul
is heavy within him even unto death, who suffers the pain that kills and
brings to life again--will never know the Father, and can know nothing
of the suffering God.

He who does not suffer, and who does not suffer because he does not
live, is that logical and frozen _ens realissimum_, the _primum movens_,
that impassive entity, which because of its impassivity is nothing but a
pure idea. The category does not suffer, but neither does it live or
exist as a person. And how is the world to derive its origin and life
from an impassive idea? Such a world would be but the idea of the world.
But the world suffers, and suffering is the sense of the flesh of
reality; it is the spirit's sense of its mass and substance; it is the
self's sense of its own tangibility; it is immediate reality.

Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it
is only suffering that makes us persons. And suffering is universal,
suffering is that which unites all us living beings together; it is the
universal or divine blood that flows through us all. That which we call
will, what is it but suffering?

And suffering has its degrees, according to the depth of its
penetration, from the suffering that floats upon the sea of appearances
to the eternal anguish, the source of the tragic sense of life, which
seeks a habitation in the depths of the eternal and there awakens
consolation; from the physical suffering that contorts our bodies to the
religious anguish that flings us upon the bosom of God, there to be
watered by the divine tears.

Anguish is something far deeper, more intimate, and more spiritual than
suffering. We are wont to feel the touch of anguish even in the midst of
that which we call happiness, and even because of this happiness itself,
to which we cannot resign ourselves and before which we tremble. The
happy who resign themselves to their apparent happiness, to a transitory
happiness, seem to be as men without substance, or, at any rate, men who
have not discovered this substance in themselves, who have not touched
it. Such men a