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Tragic Sense Of Life by Miguel de Unamuno

M >> Miguel de Unamuno >> Tragic Sense Of Life




Charity, then, is the impulse to liberate myself and all my fellows from
suffering, and to liberate God, who embraces us all.

Suffering is a spiritual thing. It is the most immediate revelation of
consciousness, and it may be that our body was given us simply in order
that suffering might be enabled to manifest itself. A man who had never
known suffering, either in greater or less degree, would scarcely
possess consciousness of himself. The child first cries at birth when
the air, entering into his lungs and limiting him, seems to say to him:
You have to breathe me in order that you may live!

We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us,
that the material or sensible world which the senses create for us
exists solely in order to embody and sustain that other spiritual or
imaginable world which the imagination creates for us. Consciousness
tends to be ever more and more consciousness, to intensify its
consciousness, to acquire full consciousness of its complete self, of
the whole of its content. We must needs believe with faith, whatever
counsels reason may give us, that in the depths of our own bodies, in
animals, in plants, in rocks, in everything that lives, in all the
Universe, there is a spirit that strives to know itself, to acquire
consciousness of itself, to be itself--for to be oneself is to know
oneself--to be pure spirit; and since it can only achieve this by means
of the body, by means of matter, it creates and makes use of matter at
the same time that it remains the prisoner of it. The face can only see
itself when portrayed in the mirror, but in order to see itself it must
remain the prisoner of the mirror in which it sees itself, and the image
which it sees therein is as the mirror distorts it; and if the mirror
breaks, the image is broken; and if the mirror is blurred, the image is
blurred.

Spirit finds itself limited by the matter in which it has to live and
acquire consciousness of itself, just as thought is limited by the word
in which as a social medium it is incarnated. Without matter there is no
spirit, but matter makes spirit suffer by limiting it. And suffering is
simply the obstacle which matter opposes to spirit; it is the clash of
the conscious with the unconscious.

Suffering is, in effect, the barrier which unconsciousness, matter, sets
up against consciousness, spirit; it is the resistance to will, the
limit which the visible universe imposes upon God; it is the wall that
consciousness runs up against when it seeks to extend itself at the
expense of unconsciousness; it is the resistance which unconsciousness
opposes to its penetration by consciousness.

Although in deference to authority we may believe, we do not in fact
know, that we possess heart, stomach, or lungs so long as they do not
cause us discomfort, suffering, or anguish. Physical suffering, or even
discomfort, is what reveals to us our own internal core. And the same is
true of spiritual suffering and anguish, for we do not take account of
the fact that we possess a soul until it hurts us.

Anguish is that which makes consciousness return upon itself. He who
knows no anguish knows what he does and what he thinks, but he does not
truly know that he does it and that he thinks it. He thinks, but he does
not think that he thinks, and his thoughts are as if they were not his.
Neither does he properly belong to himself. For it is only anguish, it
is only the passionate longing never to die, that makes a human spirit
master of itself.

Pain, which is a kind of dissolution, makes us discover our internal
core; and in the supreme dissolution, which is death, we shall, at last,
through the pain of annihilation, arrive at the core of our temporal
core--at God, whom in our spiritual anguish we breathe and learn to
love.

Even so must we believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give
us.

The origin of evil, as many discovered of old, is nothing other than
what is called by another name the inertia of matter, and, as applied to
the things of the spirit, sloth. And not without truth has it been said
that sloth is the mother of all vices, not forgetting that the supreme
sloth is that of not longing madly for immortality.

Consciousness, the craving for more, more, always more, hunger of
eternity and thirst of infinity, appetite for God--these are never
satisfied. Each consciousness seeks to be itself and to be all other
consciousnesses without ceasing to be itself: it seeks to be God. And
matter, unconsciousness, tends to be less and less, tends to be nothing,
its thirst being a thirst for repose. Spirit says: I wish to be! and
matter answers: I wish not to be!

And in the order of human life, the individual would tend, under the
sole instigation of the instinct of preservation, the creator of the
material world, to destruction, to annihilation, if it were not for
society, which, in implanting in him the instinct of perpetuation, the
creator of the spiritual world, lifts and impels him towards the All,
towards immortalization. And everything that man does as a mere
individual, opposed to society, for the sake of his own preservation,
and at the expense of society, if need be, is bad; and everything that
he does as a social person, for the sake of the society in which he
himself is included, for the sake of its perpetuation and of the
perpetuation of himself in it, is good. And many of those who seem to be
the greatest egoists, trampling everything under their feet in their
zeal to bring their work to a successful issue, are in reality men
whose souls are aflame and overflowing with charity, for they subject
and subordinate their petty personal I to the social I that has a
mission to accomplish.

He who would tie the working of love, of spiritualization, of
liberation, to transitory and individual forms, crucifies God in matter;
he crucifies God who makes the ideal subservient to his own temporal
interests or worldly glory. And such a one is a deicide.

The work of charity, of the love of God, is to endeavour to liberate God
from brute matter, to endeavour to give consciousness to everything, to
spiritualize or universalize everything; it is to dream that the very
rocks may find a voice and work in accordance with the spirit of this
dream; it is to dream that everything that exists may become conscious,
that the Word may become life.

We have but to look at the eucharistic symbol to see an instance of it.
The Word has been imprisoned in a piece of material bread, and it has
been imprisoned therein to the end that we may eat it, and in eating it
make it our own, part and parcel of our body in which the spirit dwells,
and that it may beat in our heart and think in our brain and be
consciousness. It has been imprisoned in this bread in order that, after
being buried in our body, it may come to life again in our spirit.

And we must spiritualize everything. And this we shall accomplish by
giving our spirit, which grows the more the more it is distributed, to
all men and to all things. And we give our spirit when we invade other
spirits and make ourselves the master of them.

All this is to be believed with faith, whatever counsels reason may give
us.

* * * * *

And now we are about to see what practical consequences all these more
or less fantastical doctrines may have in regard to logic, to esthetics,
and, above all, to ethics--their religious concretion, in a word. And
perhaps then they will gain more justification in the eyes of the
reader who, in spite of my warnings, has hitherto been looking for the
scientific or even philosophic development of an irrational system.

I think it may not be superfluous to recall to the reader once again
what I said at the conclusion of the sixth chapter, that entitled "In
the Depths of the Abyss"; but we now approach the practical or
pragmatical part of this treatise. First, however, we must see how the
religious sense may become concrete in the hopeful vision of another
life.

FOOTNOTES:

[44] Reinold Seeberg, _Christliche-protestantische Ethik_ in
_Systematische christliche Religion_, in _Die Kultur der Gegenwart_
series.

[45] _Cf._ St. Thomas Aquinas, _Summa_, secunda secundae, quaestio iv.,
art. 2.

[46] "_Que es Verdad?_" ("What is truth?"), published in _La Espana
Moderna_, March, 1906, vol. 207 (reprinted in the edition of collected
_Ensayos_, vol. vi., Madrid, 1918).




X

RELIGION, THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE BEYOND AND THE APOCATASTASIS

_Kai gar isos kai malista prepei mellonta echeise apodemein diaskopein te
kai muthologein peri tes apodemias tes echei, poian tina auten oiometha
einai._--PLATO: _Phaedo_.


Religion is founded upon faith, hope, and charity, which in their turn
are founded upon the feeling of divinity and of God. Of faith in God is
born our faith in men, of hope in God hope in men, and of charity or
piety towards God--for as Cicero said,[47] _est enim pietas iustitia
adversum deos_--charity towards men. In God is resumed not only
Humanity, but the whole Universe, and the Universe spiritualized and
penetrated with consciousness, for as the Christian Faith teaches, God
shall at last be all in all. St. Teresa said, and Miguel de Molinos
repeated with a harsher and more despairing inflection, that the soul
must realize that nothing exists but itself and God.

And this relation with God, this more or less intimate union with Him,
is what we call religion.

What is religion? In what does it differ from the religious sense and
how are the two related? Every man's definition of religion is based
upon his own inward experience of it rather than upon his observation of
it in others, nor indeed is it possible to define it without in some way
or another experiencing it. Tacitus said (_Hist._ v. 4), speaking of the
Jews, that they regarded as profane everything that the Romans held to
be sacred, and that what was sacred to them was to the Romans impure:
_profana illic omnia quae apud nos sacra, rursum conversa apud illos quae
nobis incesta_. Therefore he, the Roman, describes the Jews as a people
dominated by superstition and hostile to religion, _gens superstitioni
obnoxia, religionibus adversa_, while as regards Christianity, with
which he was very imperfectly acquainted, scarcely distinguishing it
from Judaism, he deemed it to be a pernicious superstition, _existialis
superstitio_, inspired by a hatred of mankind, _odium generis humani_
(_Ab excessu Aug._, xv., 44). And there have been many others who have
shared his opinion. But where does religion end and superstition begin,
or perhaps rather we should say at what point does superstition merge
into religion? What is the criterion by means of which we discriminate
between them?

It would be of little profit to recapitulate here, even summarily, the
principal definitions, each bearing the impress of the personal feeling
of its definer, which have been given of religion. Religion is better
described than defined and better felt than described. But if there is
any one definition that latterly has obtained acceptance, it is that of
Schleiermacher, to the effect that religion consists in the simple
feeling of a relationship of dependence upon something above us and a
desire to establish relations with this mysterious power. Nor is there
much amiss with the statement of W. Hermann[48] that the religious
longing of man is a desire for truth concerning his human existence. And
to cut short these extraneous citations, I will end with one from the
judicious and perspicacious Cournot: "Religious manifestations are the
necessary consequence of man's predisposition to believe in the
existence of an invisible, supernatural and miraculous world, a
predisposition which it has been possible to consider sometimes as a
reminiscence of an anterior state, sometimes as an intimation of a
future destiny" (_Traite de l'enchainement des idees fondamentales dans
les sciences et dans l'histoire_, Sec. 396). And it is this problem of
human destiny, of eternal life, or of the human finality of the Universe
or of God, that we have now reached. All the highways of religion lead
up to this, for it is the very essence of all religion.

Beginning with the savage's personalization of the whole Universe in his
fetich, religion has its roots in the vital necessity of giving human
finality to the Universe, to God, and this necessity obliges it,
therefore, to attribute to the Universe, to God, consciousness of self
and of purpose. And it may be said that religion is simply union with
God, each one interpreting God according to his own sense of Him. God
gives transcendent meaning and finality to life; but He gives it
relatively to each one of us who believe in Him. And thus God is for man
as much as man is for God, for God in becoming man, in becoming human,
has given Himself to man because of His love of him.

And this religious longing for union with God is a longing for a union
that cannot be consummated in science or in art, but only in life. "He
who possesses science and art, has religion; he who possesses neither
science nor art, let him get religion," said Goethe in one of his
frequent accesses of paganism. And yet in spite of what he said, he
himself, Goethe...?

And to wish that we may be united with God is not to wish that we may be
lost and submerged in Him, for this loss and submersion of self ends at
last in the complete dissolution of self in the dreamless sleep of
Nirvana; it is to wish to possess Him rather than to be possessed by
Him. When his disciples, amazed at his saying that it was impossible for
a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven, asked Jesus who then
could be saved, the Master replied that with men it was impossible but
not with God; and then said Peter, "Behold, we have forsaken all and
followed thee; what shall we have therefore?" And the reply of Jesus
was, not that they should be absorbed in the Father, but that they
should sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel
(Matt. xix. 23-26).

It was a Spaniard, and very emphatically a Spaniard, Miguel de Molinos,
who said in his _Guia Espiritual_[49] that "he who would attain to the
mystical science must abandon and be detached from five things: first,
from creatures; second, from temporal things; third, from the very gifts
of the Holy Spirit; fourth, from himself; and fifth, he must be detached
even from God." And he adds that "this last is the completest of all,
because that soul only that knows how to be so detached is that which
attains to being lost in God, and only the soul that attains to being so
lost succeeds in finding itself." Emphatically a true Spaniard, Molinos,
and truly Spanish is this paradoxical expression of quietism or rather
of nihilism--for he himself elsewhere speaks of annihilation--and not
less Spanish, nay, perhaps even more Spanish, were the Jesuits who
attacked him, upholding the prerogatives of the All against the claims
of Nothingness. For religion is not the longing for self-annihilation,
but for self-completion, it is the longing not for death but for life.
"The eternal religion of the inward essence of man ... the individual
dream of the heart, is the worship of his own being, the adoration of
life," as the tortured soul of Flaubert was intimately aware (_Par les
champs et par les greves_, vii.).

When at the beginning of the so-called modern age, at the Renaissance,
the pagan sense of religion came to life again, it took concrete form in
the knightly ideal with its codes of love and honour. But it was a
paganism Christianized, baptized. "Woman--_la donna_--was the divinity
enshrined within those savage breasts. Whosoever will investigate the
memorials of primitive times will find this ideal of woman in its full
force and purity; the Universe is woman. And so it was in Germany, in
France, in Provence, in Spain, in Italy, at the beginning of the modern
age. History was cast in this mould; Trojans and Romans were conceived
as knights-errant, and so too were Arabs, Saracens, Turks, the Sultan
and Saladin.... In this universal fraternity mingle angels, saints,
miracles and paradise, strangely blended with the fantasy and
voluptuousness of the Oriental world, and all baptized in the name of
Chivalry." Thus, in his _Storia della Letteratura italiana_, ii., writes
Francesco de Sanctis, and in an earlier passage he informs us that for
that breed of men "in paradise itself the lover's delight was to look
upon his lady--_Madonna_--and that he had no desire to go thither if he
might not go in his lady's company." What, in fact, was Chivalry--which
Cervantes, intending to kill it, afterwards purified and Christianized
in _Don Quixote_--but a real though distorted religion, a hybrid between
paganism and Christianity, whose gospel perhaps was the legend of
Tristan and Iseult? And did not even the Christianity of the
mystics--those knights-errant of the spirit--possibly reach its
culminating-point in the worship of the divine woman, the Virgin Mary?
What else was the Mariolatry of a St. Bonaventura, the troubadour of
Mary? And this sentiment found its inspiration in love of the fountain
of life, of that which saves us from death.

But as the Renaissance advanced men turned from the religion of woman to
the religion of science; desire, the foundation of which was curiosity,
ended in curiosity, in eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of
good and evil. Europe flocked to the University of Bologna in search of
learning. Chivalry was succeeded by Platonism. Men sought to discover
the mystery of the world and of life. But it was really in order to save
life, which they had also sought to save in the worship of woman. Human
consciousness sought to penetrate the Universal Consciousness, but its
real object, whether it was aware of it or not, was to save itself.

For the truth is that we feel and imagine the Universal
Consciousness--and in this feeling and imagination religious experience
consists--simply in order that thereby we may save our own individual
consciousnesses. And how?

Once again I must repeat that the longing for the immortality of the
soul, for the permanence, in some form or another, of our personal and
individual consciousness, is as much of the essence of religion as is
the longing that there may be a God. The one does not exist apart from
the other, the reason being that fundamentally they are one and the same
thing. But as soon as we attempt to give a concrete and rational form to
this longing for immortality and permanence, to define it to ourselves,
we encounter even more difficulties than we encountered in our attempt
to rationalize God.

The universal consent of mankind has again been invoked as a means of
justifying this immortal longing for immortality to our own feeble
reason. _Permanere animos arbitratur consensu nationum omnium_, said
Cicero, echoing the opinion of the ancients (_Tuscul. Quaest._, xvi.,
36). But this same recorder of his own feelings confessed that, although
when he read the arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul in
the _Phaedo_ of Plato he was compelled to assent to them, as soon as he
put the book aside and began to revolve the problem in his own mind, all
his previous assent melted away, _assentio omnis illa illabitur_ (cap.
xi., 25). And what happened to Cicero happens to us all, and it happened
likewise to Swedenborg, the most daring visionary of the other world.
Swedenborg admitted that he who discourses of life after death, putting
aside all erudite notions concerning the soul and its mode of union with
the body, believes that after death he shall live in a glorious joy and
vision, as a man among angels; but when he begins to reflect upon the
doctrine of the union of the soul with the body, or upon the
hypothetical opinion concerning the soul, doubts arise in him as to
whether the soul is thus or otherwise, and when these doubts arise, his
former idea is dissipated (_De caelo et inferno_, Sec. 183). Nevertheless,
as Cournot says, "it is the destiny that awaits me, _me_ or my _person_,
that moves, perturbs and consoles me, that makes me capable of
abnegation and sacrifice, whatever be the origin, the nature or the
essence of this inexplicable bond of union, in the absence of which the
philosophers are pleased to determine that my person must disappear"
(_Traite_, etc., Sec. 297).

Must we then embrace the pure and naked faith in an eternal life without
trying to represent it to ourselves? This is impossible; it is beyond
our power to bring ourselves or accustom ourselves to do so. And
nevertheless there are some who call themselves Christians and yet leave
almost altogether on one side this question of representation. Take any
work of theology informed by the most enlightened--that is, the most
rationalistic and liberal--Protestantism; take, for instance, the
_Dogmatik_ of Dr. Julius Kaftan, and of the 668 pages of which the sixth
edition, that of 1909, consists, you will find only one, the last, that
is devoted to this problem. And in this page, after affirming that
Christ is not only the beginning and middle but also the end and
consummation of History, and that those who are in Christ will attain to
fullness of life, the eternal life of those who are in Christ, not a
single word as to what that life may be. Half a dozen words at most
about eternal death, that is, hell, "for its existence is demanded by
the moral character of faith and of Christian hope." Its moral
character, eh? not its religious character, for I am not aware that the
latter knows any such exigency. And all this inspired by a prudent
agnostic parsimony.

Yes, the prudent, the rational, and, some will say, the pious,
attitude, is not to seek to penetrate into mysteries that are hidden
from our knowledge, not to insist upon shaping a plastic representation
of eternal glory, such as that of the _Divina Commedia_. True faith,
true Christian piety, we shall be told, consists in resting upon the
confidence that God, by the grace of Christ, will, in some way or
another, make us live in Him, in His Son; that, as our destiny is in His
almighty hands, we should surrender ourselves to Him, in the full
assurance that He will do with us what is best for the ultimate end of
life, of spirit and of the universe. Such is the teaching that has
traversed many centuries, and was notably prominent in the period
between Luther and Kant.

And nevertheless men have not ceased endeavouring to imagine to
themselves what this eternal life may be, nor will they cease their
endeavours so long as they are men and not merely thinking machines.
There are books of theology--or of what passes for theology--full of
disquisitions upon the conditions under which the blessed dead live in
paradise, upon their mode of enjoyment, upon the properties of the
glorious body, for without some form of body the soul cannot be
conceived.

And to this same necessity, the real necessity of forming to ourselves a
concrete representation of what this other life may be, must in great
part be referred the indestructible vitality of doctrines such as those
of spiritualism, metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from star
to star, and the like; doctrines which as often as they are pronounced
to be defeated and dead, are found to have come to life again, clothed
in some more or less new form. And it is merely supine to be content to
ignore them and not to seek to discover their permanent and living
essence. Man will never willingly abandon his attempt to form a concrete
representation of the other life.

But is an eternal and endless life after death indeed thinkable? How
can we conceive the life of a disembodied spirit? How can we conceive
such a spirit? How can we conceive a pure consciousness, without a
corporal organism? Descartes divided the world into thought and
extension, a dualism which was imposed upon him by the Christian dogma
of the immortality of the soul. But is extension, is matter, that which
thinks and is spiritualized, or is thought that which is extended and
materialized? The weightiest questions of metaphysics arise practically
out of our desire to arrive at an understanding of the possibility of
our immortality--from this fact they derive their value and cease to be
merely the idle discussions of fruitless curiosity. For the truth is
that metaphysics has no value save in so far as it attempts to explain
in what way our vital longing can or cannot be realized. And thus it is
that there is and always will be a rational metaphysic and a vital
metaphysic, in perennial conflict with one another, the one setting out
from the notion of cause, the other from the notion of substance.

And even if we were to succeed in imagining personal immortality, might
we not possibly feel it to be something no less terrible than its
negation? "Calypso was inconsolable at the departure of Ulysses; in her
sorrow she was dismayed at being immortal," said the gentle, the
mystical Fenelon at the beginning of his _Telemaque_. Was it not a kind
of doom that the ancient gods, no less than the demons, were subject
to--the deprivation of the power to commit suicide?

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