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| As a young man |
Frieda had an
assignment in a class she’s taking to translate a poem of Miguel de Unamuno, so
we got into a conversation about him.
Perusing the bookcase I spotted a copy of his magnum opus: The Tragic Sense
of Life. It was one of those books
that I didn’t recall where I’d picked up but kept around thinking well, maybe
I’ll read that some day. Inside the
cover was the name “Tanya,” the sister of a girlfriend I had back in the early
80s.
Unamuno was a
Spanish writer who lived from 1864 to 1936.
In addition to poetry, he wrote plays and fiction, but The Tragic Sense of Life is his
philosophical testament. He was raised a
devout Catholic, but in college discovered science, and this set up a lifelong
conflict for him, because the knowledge of science lacked the promise of
personal immortality that had so comforted him as a boy. Unamuno really, really did not want to die, a
sentiment with which I have some empathy.
He considered the longing for immortality to be the essence of human
striving, as illustrated by our positing, across cultures, immortality as the
core of divinity, the basic quality of godhood.
He felt it was the primary secret that our thirst for knowledge
ultimately seeks. But, although he was dissatisfied
with science due to its failure to unearth this secret, he also knew he couldn’t
go back to the simple faith of his childhood, and this was the root of the
tragic sense referred to in the title.
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| Middle-aged |
His thoughts
document an early-20th century Spanish variation on a long phase of Western
intellectual development through which we are still passing, albeit in a later
stage, the struggle between reason and faith brought on by the Scientific
Revolution. Ever since the beginning of
the Scientific Revolution Western thought has concerned itself with the
collision of the new perspective with the old religious one. The new perspective, I would argue, really
goes back to the Greeks, their idea of the individual thinking for
himself. Toward the end of the Roman
Empire an alien, Levantine mysticism bled into Europe, an intoxicating ideological
drug known as Christianity that called, in exchange for the promise of
immortality, for submission to authority (all monotheistic religions are, by
nature, authoritarian and thus hostile to democracy), and the West fell into a
narcotic trance for a thousand years. In
the Renaissance Greek thinking, the individual, reawakened, and science grew
out of this uniquely European perspective.
Consequently this is really a struggle between our native inclinations as
Westerners, as the heirs of Greek civilization, and a foreign ideology that has
overlain them. But Unamuno didn’t look
that far back. For him, Catholicism felt
like his Spanish nature.
Part of Unamuno
realizes that there is no going back to childish beliefs, to superstition and
fairy tales; that religion is part of the childhood of our species, a childhood
we have outgrown. Yet his emotional
longing for immortality will not allow him to completely let go of it. At times his desperation is so great he seems
to imagine that immortality is something he can just conjure out of thin air,
as if wishing for it would make it so, rather than something that must be
clawed from nature bit by bit.
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| Old |
While longing
for immortality, he nevertheless recognized that the Christian vision of it is absurd. What would we do in Heaven: would there be TV
and sports teams, film and music, food and relationships—sexual
relationships? Would there be anything at
all of what we know and love about life?
Or would we just sit on a cloud strumming a harp for eternity? There is nothing plausible about the Christian
promise of immortality. Doctrinally,
virtually everything about Christianity is, by turns, outlandish, preposterous,
or ridiculous. It’s a relic of an
earlier age; ultimately, a con. Nevertheless,
like many today, he couldn’t shake it off.
He was caught between reason and faith, unable to commit to either. The book is a self-contradictory, rambling
record, rife with rhetorical questions, of his attempt to wrestle these incompatible
perspectives into some sort of reconciliation.
It was a
hopeless endeavor, of course. Despite
mighty efforts, he could not definitively shake off Catholicism because it was
such a deep part of his personal and national identity as a Spaniard, and he was
unable to rise above the latter to become a fully fledged European thinker. Ironically, had he been able to manage this
he would have secured a greater degree of literary immortality, because he
would have been seen by later generations as having been ahead of his
time, rather than of a piece with it. In
the end he fell back on one of the great resources of Spanish culture, the
figure of Don Quixote, as a symbol of his own impractical pursuit of an
unreachable goal.
What makes life
tragic for Unamuno as well as the rest of us is, of course, that we all must
die, and cannot go on learning and growing.
No one is going to be saved no matter who they submit to. Unamuno went through enormous mental
contortions to try to circumvent that conclusion, but they were to no
avail. A blood clot in his overworked
brain laid him low at the age of 72. Alas,
all we can do about this is to grant him a posthumous shadow of life by reading
him.
So, anyone want
a copy of The Tragic Sense of Life? Tanya?
