Lydia Jackson

ENG 3346

Dr. Davidson

5/8/2015

My Religion by Miguel de Unamuno

A friend from Chile wrote me and told me that he had met there with some people who

mentioned my writings and they asked him: “Okay, in short, what is the religion of this Mr.

Unamuno?” A similar question has led me here several times. And I'm going to try, not to

answer it, something which I don’t intend to do, but to see if I can raise a better sense of the

meaning of that question.

Both individuals and peoples of lazy spirit­­and spiritual sloth fits with fruitful activities

of economic orders and similar orders­­tend towards dogmatism, whether they know it or not,

like it or not, intentionally or unintentionally. The attitude of spiritual laziness flees the critical or

skeptical position.

I say skeptical, taking the skeptical voice in its etymological and philosophical sense,

because skeptic does not mean doubter, but one who investigates or gleans, as opposed to

affirming and believing whatever they have found. It’s the difference between one who searches

out a problem, and one who gives us a formula, rightly or not, as the solution.

In the order of pure philosophical speculation, there is a precipitation of asking for

definitive solutions, provided it’s always made to advance the approach to a problem. When you

mess up a long calculation, erasing what’s done and starting again means no little progress.

When a house is threatened by ruin or is completely uninhabitable, the next step is to demolish,

not to order another one to be built over it. Fittingly, yes, the new one could be built with

materials from the old, but that is destroying it before it is created. In the meantime, the

occupants could shelter in a barracks, if they have no other home, or sleep in a shallow field.

And it’s necessary not to lose sight of practicing this in our own life, seldom do we ever

receive definitive scientific solutions. Men have lived, and currently live on dubious hypotheses

and explanations, and even without them all together. When punishing a criminal, society does

not argue about whether he had free will or not, just as when sneezing one does not reflect on the

damage that the small obstacle could do that caused him to sneeze in the first place.

To the men who argue that not believing in eternal punishment of hell would be bad, with

all due respect to them, I say they are wrong. If people were to stop believing in punishment in

life after death, they wouldn’t be worse, but society would then seek another justification for

ideal behavior. The person who is good while believing in some sort of transcendental order, is

not good because he believes in it; he believes because he is good. A proposition which will

appear obscure and convoluted, I’m sure, to those spiritually lazy inquisitors.

And so, if I am asked, “What is your religion?” I will respond: my religion is to seek the

truth in life and the life in truth, even while knowing that I will not find them while alive. My

religion is fighting incessantly and untiringly with the unknown; my religion is to wrestle with

God from the break of dawn until nightfall, as they say He wrestled with Jacob. I cannot

compromise with the concept of that which is Unrecognizable­­or Unknowable, as the pedants

write­­ nor with the idea of “here you shall go, but no further”. I reject the eternal ignorabimus.

And in every case I want to reach the inaccessible.

“Be perfect as your Father who is in heaven is perfect”, the Christ said to us, and such an

ideal of perfection is undoubtedly unavailable. But he gave us the unattainable as a goal for our

efforts. And it happened, as the theologians say, by grace. And I want to fight my fight without

caring about the victory. Are there not armies and even peoples that go to a sure defeat? Do we

not praise those who allow themselves to be killed fighting before ever giving up? This, then, is

my religion.

Those who direct this question to me, they want me to give them a dogma, a solution in

which they can rest in their spiritual laziness. And even this they don’t really want, but they only

seek be able to pigeonhole me and put me into one of their slots into which they categorize

spiritualities, saying of me: “Oh, he’s a Lutheran, he’s a Calvinist, he’s a Catholic, he’s an

atheist, he’s a rationalist, he’s a mysticist;” or any other of these terms whose exact sense is

actually unclear to them, but exempts them from thinking more. And I refuse to let myself be

pigeonholed, because I, Miguel de Unamuno, like any other man who aspires to full

consciousness, am a unique species. “There are no illnesses, but only those who are ill,” some

doctors say, and I say there are no opinions, but only opinionated people.

As far as religion is concerned, there is hardly anything that I have rationally resolved,

and as I don’t have it, I can’t communicate it logically, because it is only logically and rationally

transmissible. It’s true that I have, with affection, with heart, with feeling, a strong tendency

towards Christianity, without sticking to special dogmas of this or that Christian denomination. I

consider anyone a Christian who invokes the name of Christ with love and respect, and I loathe

the Orthodox, be they Catholic or Protestant­­ the latter are usually just as uncompromising as

the former­­who deny those Christians that don’t interpret the Gospel as they do. For instance, I

know Protestant Christians who deny that Unitarians are Christians.

I confess sincerely that the supposed rational evidence­­ontological, cosmological,

ethical, et cetera­­ of the existence of God doesn’t show me anything; so many of the reasons

they want to give me of the existence of God seem to me to be based in fallacies and petitions of

principle. In this I am with Kant. It’s unfortunate, but I feel that when I speak of this, I can’t

speak with the shoe cobbler in cobbler’s terms.

No one has succeeded to convince me rationally of the existence of God, but neither of

His non­existence; the reasonings of the atheists seem to me to be of a superficiality and futility

even greater than their opponents. And if I believe in God, or at least, I want to believe in Him, it

is, before anything, because I want God to exist, and then, because it has been revealed to me,

through friendship, in the Gospel and through Christ and from his story. It is a matter of heart.

That is to say, I am not as convinced of it as I am of the fact that two and two makes four.

If it was a matter of something that didn’t affect my peace of mind and my consolation

having been born, perhaps I would not care about the problem; but as it is in every aspect of my

inner life and the spring of my every action, I can not resign myself to say: neither do I know nor

can I know. I do not know, it is true; maybe one can never know, but I "want" to know. I want it,

and that’s enough.

I will pass through life fighting with mystery, even without hoping to penetrate it,

because that fight is my nourishment and my consolation. Yes, my consolation. I have been

accustomed to finding hope in desperation itself. And, you fools and fakes, don’t shout

“Paradox!”

I can’t conceive a cultivated person without this preoccupation, and I expect very little in

the order of culture­­ and being cultured is not the same as being civilized ­­of those who go

through life disinterested in the metaphysical aspect of this religious problem and only study it in

its social and political aspect. I expect very little in the way of enrichment of the spiritual

treasure of humanity from those men or people that, because of mental laziness, or

superficiality, or scientism, or whatever reason, turn away from the great and eternal concerns of

the heart. I have no hope for those who say: “Don’t think about that!”; If possible I have even

less hope, however, for those who believe in a heaven and a hell like we believed as children,

and still less from those who claim with the seriousness of a fool: “All these are but fables and

myths; when we die we are buried, and that’s it.” I only hope in those that are ignorant, but are

not resigned to ignorance; in those that fight without rest for the truth and put their life into the

fight itself rather than the victory.

And most of my work has been always to concern my neighbors, to remove the sediment

from their hearts, to distress them, if I can. What I said in my Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, is

the most extensive confession of mine in this respect. Let them seek, as I seek; let them fight, as I

fight, and hopefully, between all of us, we can glean some secret knowledge from God, and, at

least this struggle will make us better people, people of more spirit.

For this work­­religious work­­I found it necessary in these countries such as this country

of Castilian tongue, where the people are rotted away with laziness and superficiality of spirit,

dormant in the routine of Catholic dogmatism, or freethinking or scientific dogmatism, I’ve

sometimes had to seem shameless and indecorous, or other times hard and aggressive, more than

a few times convoluted and paradoxical. In our diminished literature rarely can anyone be heard

shouting from the bottom of their heart, broken down, crying. This kind of cry was almost

unheard of. Writers were afraid to be ridiculed. It happened to them and it still happens to them

as it happens to many who put up with an affront in public for fear of being ridiculed for being

seen with their hat on the ground or being arrested by a policeman. Not me; when I have felt the

need to cry out, I cried out. Decorum has never stopped me. This is one of the things least

excused of me by my fellow writers, my partners of the pen, so restrained, so correct, so

disciplined even when preach impropriety and rebellion. The literary anarchists care, more than

anything, for style and syntax. And when they are out of tune they do it carefully in tune, they

pull their discordant notes chaotically into harmony.

When I have felt pain, I have cried out, and even in public. The psalms featured in my

volume of Poems are nothing more than the cries of my heart, with which I have sought to

vibrate the heartstrings of others. If they have no heartstrings, or if they do but the strings are too

rigid to pluck, then my cries will not resonate within them, and they will declare “this is not

poetry”, and will put it to an acoustical examination. One can also acoustically examine the cry

that pierces a man when he sees his child suddenly fall down dead, and for he that has neither

heart nor children,that’s all it is.

These psalms of my Poems, with other various compositions that are there, are my

religion, my religion sung from my heart, not expressed logically and reasonably. And I sing it,

for better or for worse, with the voice and the ear that God gave me, because I can’t rationalize it.

And he that sees the reasoning and the logic, and the method and exegesis, more than the life in

these my verses because they don’t contain fauns, dryads, satyrs, water lilies, absinthes (or

wormwood), glaucous eyes, or other more or less modernist ornaments of bad taste, those can

stay there with him, I won’t touch his heart, not with a violin bow nor with a hammer.

To reiterate, what I avoid like the plague are those who would classify me, and I want to

die hearing the spirit idlers who sometimes stop to listen to me ask: “And this man, what is he?”

Liberal and progressive fools will call me a reactionary or perhaps a mystic, without knowing, of

course, what either of those mean, and conservative and reactionary fools will call me a unique

species of spiritual anarchist, and both of them will think I am a poor eager gentlemen who is

trying desperately to pass for original but whose head is actually a madhouse. But nobody should

care for what they think of him, the progressives or the conservatives, the liberals or the

reactionaries.

And as man is stubborn and does not usually want to learn and become accustomed even

after he has been preached to for four hours he usually returns back to his old ways, the

persistent questioners, if they read this, will turn the question right back to me again with:

“Great; but what solutions do you bring?” And I, to conclude, will tell them, that if they want a

solution, go to the store across the street, because I do not sell such an item. My endeavor has

been, is, and will be, that those who read me will think and ponder on fundamental things, it has

never been to give them ready­made answers. I have sought to always stir, and, at most, suggest,

rather than to instruct. If I sell bread, it’s not bread, but yeast or leaven.

There are friends, and good friends, who advise me to leave this work and devote myself

to what they call an objective work, something that is, they say, definitive, building something,

something lasting. They mean something dogmatic. I declare myself incapable and reclaim my

freedom, my holy freedom, even to contradict myself, if it comes to that. I do not know if

something of what I’ve done or something I do henceforth will endure through the years or

through the centuries after I die; but I know that if you strike the boundless sea, waves will go

round endlessly, although they’ll eventually become weaker and weaker. To agitate is

something. If, thanks to this agitation, another comes after me that does something that is lasting,

my work will last through it.

It is the work of supreme mercy to awaken the sleeping and shake the dead, and it is the

work of supreme religious piety to seek the truth in all things and uncover fraud, folly, and

ineptitude, wherever they may be.

Now then, my good friend the Chilean knows how to answer those that ask him about my

religion. However; if they are one of the fools who believe that I hold a grudge against a people

of a country when I have sung the truth to its thoughtless children, the best thing that can be done

is not to answer them.