Is God Happy?

In a remarkable essay written toward the end of his life, Kolakowski wondered whether God could be happy. Because humans can experience the sacred and the profane, he dared to judge God in human terms. To be human is to participate in the pain and joy of others, to “feel compassion.” Only those ignorant of suffering, such as small children with “no experience of great pain or death among those close to them,” can therefore know true happiness, if only for a time. The same must apply to God: “If He is not indifferent, but subject to emotion like us, He must live in a constant state of sorrow when He witnesses human suffering.” Jesus Christ—for Christians, the son of God—“was not happy in any recognizable sense. He was embodied and suffered pain, he shared the suffering of his fellow men, and he died on the cross.”...

To the extent that we are fully human, our sense of fortune is always partial, compromised, unsatisfying—everything true happiness, however fleeting, is not supposed to be. Thus he wonders: If God is at all like us (we are created in His image), can He be happy? Kolakowski’s answer, again perhaps impiously, is yes—but only if the universe is one in which everybody is saved, and hell and purgatory do not exist, and there is bliss for all. We can imagine such a situation, but “it has never been seen. It has never been seen.”