To distinguish between ‘deity’ and ‘divinity’ may seem an abstract exercise for some, but Hazrat Inayat Khan shows it to be an important consideration.
When distinguishing between these two concepts I should say that deity is God idealized and divinity is God personified. Deity has never been manifest on the physical plane except in the heart of man, but divinity has manifested in the physical form. Thus the secret of deity can be sought in the heart of divinity. Divinity is reduced God and enlarged man. The whole difficulty that has occurred in all periods of the world’s history has been the difficulty of understanding divinity or apprehending the mystery of divinity. Man cannot think of man being God nor can man think of God being man. Therefore the claimant of divinity has sometimes been called God, but then he was kept remote and aloof from human beings. At other times the claimant of divinity has been brought to earth and called no better than man.
In reality divinity is the expansion of the human soul; divinity is human nature in God. That is why God is one, the only Being; but there are as many deities as there are human beings, for the deity is the enshrined God whom man has conceived by his thoughts and ideas. God is enshrined in his heart, and in that way the ideas about deity came to differ. Some say God is the Judge and some say God is the Father; some say God is the Creator while to others He is the Sustainer. Some say that God has three aspects, and that a Trinity makes God; some say Gods are many. The Hindus have conceived thirty-three score Devata, which means divinities. The Chinese conceived numberless Gods. The believers in one God have ridiculed them, but in fact it is one and the same conception looked at from different points of view. Somebody can be praised by one and hated by another, and ten people may all have a different idea of the same person, because each understands him according to his state of evolution.
Each sees that person according to his own point of view, each looks at him through his own eyes, and therefore the same person is different to each being. In the mind of one the person is a sinner, in the mind of another he is a saint. The same person who is considered gentle and good by one is considered the opposite by another. If this can be so in connection with a living being, it is equally possible that various ideas of the deity should be formed in each heart, and that each soul should mold his own deity according to his own evolution and according to his way of idealizing and understanding. Therefore the deity of every heart is different and is as that person has imagined; but the God of every soul is one and the same, whatever people imagine. It is the same God that they all imagine, but their imaginations are different and it is the lack of understanding of this that has caused the differences in religion.
We read in the books of the past that there used to be blood feuds, family feuds, because one family believed in one God and another family had another. They called Him a family God and these families used to fight with one another because of their separate Gods and they gave their lives for their God. It is not very different even now when nations fight against nations; for the time being the God of each becomes different, or at least the people think the hostile country is not doing the will of their own God. Man is very much the same down the ages; he only shows his evolution by degrees.
To be continued…