Unamuno

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.  

Middle-aged

His thoughts document an early-20^th 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. 

 

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?