Miguel de Unamuno "A Reasonable Faith" is a Contradiction in Terms Joanna Dales considers Miguel de Unamuno’s approach to religion “Religion is for lovers”. So begins John D. Caputo’s On Religion. Caputo goes on to write of the fateful separation between religious emotion and rationality in the Enlightenment, the failure of the project to establish the existence of God on a firmly rational basis and the triumph of godlessness among western intellectuals in the era we call Modern. However, now that we are all postmodern, now that meanings and certainties have been dissolved into relativities, now that Derrida has opened up to us new ways of thinking about "truth" and "reality", he suggests that we may be able to recapture something of what Augustine or Anselm were after when they placed the love of God before knowledge of him, faith before understanding. Astonishingly, Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864-1936), Professor of Greek, Rector at the University of Salamanca, novelist, playwright, poet, scourge of Catholic orthodoxy on the one hand and of "progressivist" atheism on the other, denouncer of the Dictator Primo de Valera and political exile; he comes close to Caputo in the core part of his thinking. Unamuno is normally categorized as an early existentialist or with the "Generation of ’98", the forgers of a new Spanish consciousness after the loss of the last Spanish colonies in 1898; but reading him anew in 2002 we may equally well see him as a forerunner of postmodernism.
Consider his attitude to language. A philologist by early training, he knew as well as Don Cupitt that the world comes The question we should be asking of the universe is not "Why?" (porqué?) but "What for?" (para qué?) Language alienates us from the world, creates a barrier to straightforward perception such as a dog might experience, but at the same time it gives us the opportunity to create our own world. The niebla, or mist, of the title can be seen as representing the world of existence, or be-ing, if we follow Don Cupitt: invisible and formless until it is as it were embodied in some particular thing and given shape in language. "The world is a kaleidoscope. Man imposes logic on it." (Niebla, p.84) We create our world with words, but then we have very little control over what we make. In his essay Intellectualidad y Espiritualidad, Unamuno complains of the way his thoughts cease to be his once they are "incarnated in words" and become public, but are subject to diminution, even falsification. (Essays and Soliloquies, p.173.) Augusto Perez, the hero of Niebla, tries to "write" his own life according to his wishes, but it keeps going wrong.
At last he finds that he is himself only a creation of language, and that his creator, Unamuno, is determined to kill him! He goes to plead with Unamuno in his office, but his pleas are rejected.
Unamuno is playing games, but he means us to wonder whether we are we not all in the same boat as his fictional personage. "Things in books", Augusto remarks to his bemused servant, "and what isn’t something in a book? Could it be that before there were books in some form or other, before there were stories, before there were words, before there was thought, there was anything? And when thought comes to an end will there be anything left?" (p.249).
Unamuno himself is only something in a book, and Augusto will have his revenge for he will die too! "God will stop dreaming you" (Prologue to Niebla, p.61).
This may seem like a counsel of despair, and indeed Unamuno is never far from despair in the face of finitude and death. But it is to us through the medium of language. Not that he presents us with a theory of language, but belief in the power of the Word to create its own reality is fundamental to his thinking. Thought depends on language: ‘Reason is nothing but internal language’ (Del Sentimiento Trdgico de la Vida, p.306). We can see this primacy of language in a comic, or tragi-comic, light. The epilogue to his novel Niebla is ‘spoken’ by a dog, which muses on this strange human characteristic of speech (the essential human characteristic):
He [man] barks in his own way, he speaks, and that makes him invent what isn’t there and not notice what is there. Once he’s put a name to something, he doesn’t see this something; he only hears the name which he’s given it, or sees it written. Language makes him tell lies, invent what isn’t there, and get confused. (Niebla, p.256.) through wrestling with despair that we gain hope and life. We do not sit down meekly in the thought that our lives are "written" for us by forces beyond our control.
Language is creativity, and so we each have the responsibility for writing the "novel", or story, of our own life:
And so when | tell them [my readers] how to write a novel, or rather, how I’m writing the novel of my life, my history, I’m helping them to write their own novel, the novel which is the life of each one of us... And if your life, reader, is not a novel, then leave this book alone, don’t go on reading me. Don’t go on reading me because you will get indigestion and you will have to vomit me out, without any advantage to yourself or to me. (Como se hace una Novela, p.120.) Unamuno explains that when he writes about Alfonso XIII or Primo de Valera, presenting them as they appear to him, Sof 57 January 2003 — at they become "his", characters in his novel, and therefore he loves them as his creatures, his children, even though he hates them (Ibid. p.157). If Augusto Perez exemplifies the hazards of trying to write the novel of one’s own life another "fictional" character provides the heroic pattern of how this should be done. (Unamuno refused to accept a hard distinction between fiction and fact.) This person is Don Quixote. Unamuno’s La Vida de Don Quixote y Sancho takes episodes as related by Cervantes and aims to draw out from them their exemplary, life-giving, qualities. "Nuestro sefior Don Quixote" is the exemplar of the religious life. He is the type of Christ. He dazzlingly exemplifies that "experience of the impossible" which Caputo sees as the defining characteristic of religion, inside or outside the bounds of the avowedly religious sphere (On Religion, p-109). His is a "religion without religion" such as Caputo finds in some contemporary popular-culture. Don Quixote is of course a Christian — what else could he be? — but what drives him is not Christianity, but his absurd vision of knight-errantry and the love of Dulcinea, his spur to glory, however unfortunately now "enchanted" so as to bear the form of a common country servant-girl. Nevertheless he is, Unamuno tells us, spiritual brother to the mystics of his native Castile. Among them St.
Teresa seems to bear pride of place, that "lady errant who, departing from a love so deeply human, ended by leaving the human realm altogether" (Vida, p.170). Unamuno also takes a mischievous pleasure in drawing analogies between Don Quixote’s adventures and the life of St. Ignatius of Loyola (the Jesuits were among those who felt the lash of Unamuno’s scorn). Like such venerated figures Don Quixote would not allow the knocks and rubs of hard factuality, the world of science and reason, to come between him and his vision of justice and right-doing or deter him in his mission to impose that vision by force of deeds on a resisting world. As Caputo also stresses, it is necessary to "do the truth." Unamuno goes further in contending that action makes, creates truth (Vida, p-255). Action, that is, in the service of faith. There is a chapter in Don Quixote where the hero is overthrown by a prankster masquerading as another knight and is thereby compelled by the rules governing knight-errantry to give up his claim that Dulcinea is the most beautiful woman in the world or surrender his life. Don Quixote prefers to lose his life rather than deny the truth that he has created through his faith and defended by force of arms.
He had made [Dulcinea’s surpassing beauty], certainly, he had made it in pure faith, he had created it with the fire of his passion; but once created it had a life of its own, and he received his life from it. And so | forge my truth, by my faith and against all the world; but once my faith is forged, my truth will prevail and maintain itself against all the world and | shall live from it. (Vida, p.272.) "Truth is what makes us live, not what makes us think." So concludes a passage where Unamuno writes of something very like the "negative" experience of the mystic, when all the sensible world, all the world of ideas, all one’s beliefs and hopes, seem overwhelmed in a sense of annulment. It is a moment of anguish:
And in this anguish, in this supreme distress of spiritual drowning, when your ideas are slipping away from you, they will lift you up in an agonizing flight so that you may recover them in substantial knowledge. And you will see that the world is your creation, not your representation, as the German said. By force of this supreme labour of pain you will conquer the truth, which is not, is not, the reflection of the Universe in your mind but your assent to it in your heart. The anguish of the spirit is the gate of substantial truth.The spirit suffers that you may believe, and believing live. In the face of all the negations of the "logical", which rules the apparent relations of things, rises the affirmation of the "cardiac", which rules the substantial effects of them.Although your head may say that your consciousness must dissolve one day, your heart, awakened and illuminated by the infinite anguish, will teach you that there is a world where reason is not the guide. Truth is what makes us live, not what makes us think. (Vida, p.253.) sof 57 January 2003 For Unamuno, as for Caputo, religion is "an affair of the heart" (Essays and Soliloquies, p.158).
Unamuno fits well with Don Cupitt’s idea of the mystic as subversive, the one who uses language, sometimes playfully, to build an alternative world to that delivered by the orthodoxy of his or her time (in Mysticism After Modernity). But Unamuno had two competing orthodoxies to contend with: that of the Church with its inhibiting dogma, its stubborn adherence to an obsolete world-view on the one hand, and, on the other, a no less stubborn and obtuse (in Unamuno’s view at least) selfabasement before the idols of science and logic. In his 1904 essay, Intellectualidad y Espiritualidad, he maintains that he is not attacking either position as wrong in itself but rather a type of the mind that he characterizes as "psychical" or "intellectual" and finds guilty of poverty of spirit:
The psychical man is interested in questions of science and culture; the psychical Spaniard preaches national regeneration, is enthusiastic about the telephone, the gramophone and the cinematograph... If the psychical man is an orthodox Catholic he admires the genius of St. Thomas Aquinas, although he has never read him, he knows that modern geology squares with the Mosaic account of the Creation, and that it is legitimate to admit a part of Darwinism, and that the Church possesses a remedy for all the social ills that afflict our age. (Essays and Soliloquies, p.182) Opposed to the "psychical" man we have, on the one hand, the "carnal" man who doesn’t want to think at all, and on the other the "spiritual men, the dreamers" (Unamuno draws his categories loosely from St Paul) The "spiritual men" are "those whom the intellectuals contemptuously call mystics, those who tolerate the tyranny neither of science or of logic, those who believe that there is another world within our world and mysterious dormant voices in the depths of our spirit, those who speak the language of the heart and many who prefer not to speak at all." Well, Unamuno did not prefer to be silent. In 1913, after dominating countless conversational gatherings in cafés and producing a great many other writings of various genres, he gave the world his major philosophical treatise, Del Sentimiento Trdgico de la Vida, or The Tragic Sense of Life. In this the despised "mystic" or spiritual man takes on the intellectuals in the guise of the major representatives of western philosophy through the ages to assert his own anti-rationalist approach to life and to religion. Anti-rationalist but not irrational. Unamuno’s religion is no fideistic piety: on the contrary, he seeks to stir up doubt, conflict, to shatter all complacent certainties. Vital faith is born of doubt, wrestling with the Angel. He reminds us that he has already commended the faith of Sancho Panza, far from wholly persuaded of what his master tells him about enchantment and the rest, but prepared to entertain the possibility that his master is to be trusted and that he will get to govern an island, as he has been promised. He believes against his better reason, as it were, and this faith is sufficient to save Sancho even though his motivation is greed. By contrast Unamuno has no use for the Enlightenment approach to God, for the attempt to establish by reason the existence of some Unmoved Mover: even if the arguments were convincing — and his contempt for the socalled "proofs" of God’s existence is equalled only by his scorn for the "proofs" of atheism — the God thus proved is dead, useless for the purposes of religion. We long to know whether death is final, but we can never be sure, therefore we are continually in a state of internal strife. Life and knowledge are continually at odds:
Because living is one thing and knowing is another, and ... perhaps there is such an opposition between them that we can say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and everything rational is anti-vital.
And this is the base of the tragic sense of life (p.75).
We cannot simply abandon ourselves to the anti-rational.
Our vital longings crave satisfaction, reason can neither overcome nor appease them, but yet we must resort to reason ee -””™ — to support us in our faith. Hence the whole history of Christian thinking, the unstable union between the life-giving "madness of the cross" and death-dealing Hellenistic philosophy (p.142).
Theology, Unamuno says elsewhere, is a contradiction in terms, “for the theos is at war with the logia" (Essays and Soliloquies, p.184).
Yet faith needs reason to give it order and substance, make it possible to grasp, and reason needs faith to give it some assurance that it is good for (para) something. The question we should be asking of the universe is not "Why?" (porqué?) but "What for?" (para qué?) What is the use of our longing for God and immortality? What is the use of philosophy and theology?
How can we make them work together for life?
Toward the end of his life Unamuno wrote a little book, a novella, called San Manuel Bueno, Martir. It illustrates, like the Quixote book but in a completely different way, how we can live by vital faith in the face of deadly reason, though it may mean that our whole life is a martyrdom. Don Manuel is a village priest who does not believe either in God or in the life everlasting. He will not disturb the simple faith of his parishioners, which he sees as their birthright, their vital bond with their history. His agony of soul is only hinted at during his celebration of the mass by the thrilling earnestness with which he pronounces the words "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Such is their effect that the village idiot catches them, and turns up at odd moments echoing them. His morality is centred on human need, on what will make for life, not on cold "truth." A village girl is seduced and runs away, then returns to the village with a baby. Don Manuel persuades her former fiancé to marry her, and in his adoptive father’s old age the child becomes his stay and comfort. He will not use his position to extract a confession from a man suspected of an atrocity: "I don’t extract from anybody a truth which will perhaps lead to his death" (p.17). There comes a time when a man called Lazaro returns to the village from America. Lazaro has become imbued with progressivist ideas and learned to despise his village and its culture as "feudal" and "medieval". It does not take long for Don Manuel to win him over to his way of thinking, so that he becomes not only a practising Catholic but also the priest’s constant companion and assistant. He serves to bring out features of Don Manuel’s philosophy, as when he wants to try to disabuse the villagers of some of their superstition. Don Manuel will not have it, believing that it is better to believe too much than to believe nothing, neither will he allow Lazaro to set up a union for the village workers, believing that this will too much disturb the tranquillity of their traditional way of life. Lazaro shapes himself more and more to the pattern of the master, and the two conceal their disbelief from all but Lazaro’s sister, Angela, to their dying day.
Angela, who tells the story, concludes that they were both believers without knowing it: | believe that Don Manuel Bueno, that my Saint Manuel and my brother Lazaro died believing they did not believe that which most concerns us, but believing without believing, believing in an active and resigned desolation (p.76).
Unamuno often makes use of the closeness in Spanish between the word for believing (creer) and the word for creating (crear).
Creer es crear — to believe is to create. In the end it makes no sense to ask whether God exists "objectively." Such an "objective" God, accessible to reason, would be lifeless, useless. Don Manuel and Lazaro’s God is the product of will and imagination. For them as for Unamuno, religion and belief in God spring in the first place from our desire for immortality, from our defiant refusal to accept annihilation. Imagination delivers to us the means, although again it cannot do without reason at its side:
For reason annihilates and imagination makes entire, integrates or totalizes; reason on its own kills and imagination is what gives life. Yet it is certain that imagination on its own, through giving us life without limit, brings us to confound ourselves with the totality, and, as individuals, also kills us, kills us through excess of life. Reason, the head, tells us "Nothing!"; imagination, the heart, tells us "Everything!", and between nothing and everything, the all and the nothing melting together in us, we live in God, who is everything, and God lives in us, who without him are nothing.
Reason repeats, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!" And imagination replies, "Plenitude of plenitudes, all is plenitude! And thus we live the vanity of plenitude or the plenitude of vanity (Del Sentimiento Trdgico, p.199).
Can we make present use of this craggy, eccentric, disturbing figure? (Para qué Unamuno?) One element of Unamuno’s thought, which is likely to grate on the middle-ofroad Sea-of-Faith member, is his preoccupation with life after death. Many of us, I imagine, have settled quite comfortably to the idea of impermanence, and may even have learnt with Don Cupitt to take pleasure in it, to be "easy, going." Yet we still thrill to Dylan Thomas’s injunction to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." And even without the prospect of dying there is enough to rage against to make us wonder whether our ultimate goal should be to seek "religious happiness" in an acceptance of flux, contingency, secondariness. (Mysticism after Modernity) Perhaps we can borrow Unamuno’s passion, his sense that we are called on to impose a life-giving vision on intractable material, to deal with such fears as arise from a consideration of our closeness to animal nature, the suggestion that we are the victims of our genetic make-up, incurably selfish and destructive; fears aggravated by a contemplation of history and world affairs. Perhaps we should go forthwith to seek our rusty armour, our disused and cobwebby religious faith, using a barber’s basin as a helmet if we can find no better, and go forth to battle, animated by love of the impossible, against the windmills and the scoffers of our age.
Note. Quotations are my translations from Spanish editions of Unamuno’s works published by Alianza Editorial: San Manuel Bueno and Como se hace una Novela (1966); Niebla (1939); Del Sentimiento Trdgico de la Vida (1976) and Vida de Don Quixote y Sancho (1987); with the exception of Unamuno’s short pieces translated as Essays and Soliloquies, (Harrap, 1924). Among secondary works I am particularly indebted to Allen Lacy’s Miguel de Unamuno: The Rhetoric of Existence, Mouton, 1967.