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(In »Everything is religion«)

So in fact, this seemingly simple question must be nuanced and made more specific, at least somewhat, in order for us to be able to discuss it in a meaningful way. What the answer will be – and what the question actually means – depends, of course, partly on what we mean by “God”, and partly on what we mean by “exist”. Let us start with the latter, which might perhaps be the most convenient place to start. A beautiful poem, untitled, one of the very last authored by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa – the manuscript is dated as November 19, 1935 – reads as follows:

There are sicknesses worse than any sickness;
There are pains that don’t ache, not even in the soul,
And yet they’re more painful than those that do.
There are anxieties from dreams that are more real
Than the ones life brings; there are sensations
Felt only by imagining them
That are more ours than our very own life.
There are countless things that exist
Without existing, that lastingly exist
And lastingly are ours, they’re us...
Over the muddy green of the wide river
The white circumflexes of the seagulls...
Over my soul the useless flutter
Of what never was nor could be, and it’s everything.
Give me more wine, because life is nothing.
(Translation: Richard Zenith. From Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, Penguin Books 2006.)

In the poem several assertions are made; assertions about the texture of existence. The poem states that things are this way and that way. There are sicknesses that are worse than any sickness and therefore are also something other than sickness (although they are, nonetheless, sicknesses), and the anxieties from dreams are more real than those that afflict us in what we call life or reality (which means that the concepts “dream” and “reality” must be challenged), and so on. Sicknesses, anxieties, a hint of elusive hopes and a significant measure of resignation. If we were to attempt to identify some sort of all-encompassing feature of Pessoa’s poem, we might perhaps agree that it encapsulates a frame of mind, even an acquired outlook on life. And that this frame of mind and this outlook are coloured by an increasingly lucid sadness.