The agony of christianity

Productinformatie

DON MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO was born at Bilbao in 1864, but the best creative years of his life were passed at Salamanca, where he became Rector of the University, having previously and afterwards held the chair of Greek at that famous seat of learning. In all probability he would still be there had he not found it impossible to refrain from criticizing the military dictatorship of His Excellency General Primo de Rivera who, in the autumn of 1923, had him arrested and deported to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. From there Don Miguel escaped to France, where he continued, in the strange company of Blasco Ibanez, to continue his protest against the regime of "the Royal Goose." In France also he wrote the present work, which was first published in French.

At that time little was known in this country or in England of a writer and teacher whose position in Spain was analogous to that of Croce in Italy, Bergson in France, or Tolstoy in Russia.

Hispanists like J. B. Trend had drawn attention to him, Havelock Ellis admired him, and in Rosinante to the Road Again John Dos Passos explained his peculiar position in contemporary Spanish literature. His chief work, The Tragic Sense of Life, had appeared in English but enjoyed no perceptible measure of recognition. The Europeans who associated their names in a manifesto against his deportation were all Continental writers. Subsequently a selected volume of his essays was translated, and his famous Life of Don Quixote and Sancho is announced. Thus L'Agonie du Christianisme is the fourth of his works to be offered to the English-reading public.

Miguel de Unamuno, as I have suggested elsewhere in an essay on him, presents a Spanish variety of Charles Kingsley's "muscular Christianity," the typical English Protestant and the untypical Spanish Catholic being alike in their religious individualism. Don Miguel has always been an ardent individualist and the least orthodox of men. If he sided with the Church and the authorities at the time of the Ferrer case, he was not by any means a conventional loyal citizen, as his articles in El Liberal used to demonstrate, as well as the opposition which his appointments at the University of Salamanca encountered. Nor was he a very orthodox professor or Rector, for his pupils remember him as talking of everything under the sun rather than of the Greek authors. His administration of the University was even the subject of parliamentary debate before the War.

This ex-Rector of the University of Salamanca is a Hellenist and a Christian philosopher, the former by profession, the latter by vocation. At a Welsh Eisteddfod Salvador de Madariaga, an interesting and bi-lingual interpreter of English and Spanish literature, discovered a resemblance between the Welsh clergy present and the Basque Unamuno. "A tall, broad-shouldered, bony man, with high cheeks, a beak-like nose, pointed gray beard, and a complexion the colour of the red haematites on which Bilbao, his native town, is built, and which Bilbao ruthlessly plucks from its very body to exchange for gold in the markets of England—and in the deep sockets under the high'aggressive forehead prolonged by short iron-gray hair, two eyes like gimlets eagerly watching the world through spectacles which seem to be purposely pointed at the object like microscopes; a fighting expression, but of noble fighting, above the prizes of the passing world, the contempt for which is shown in a peculiar attire whose blackness invades even that little triangle of white which worldly men leave on their breast for the necktie of frivolity and the decorations of vanity, and, blinding it, leaves but the thinnest rim of white collar to emphasize, rather than relieve, the priestly effect of the whole. Such is Don Miguel de Unamuno."

In his religious meditations is heard the note of intellectual struggle in a mind torn between the emotional will to believe and the impulse of the logical faculties with their insistence upon reason. He sees the histories of religion and philosophy as inseparable because "the tragic history of human thought" is concerned only with one subject: the rationalization of life. If reason did not (fortunately, in Unamuno's view) engender skepticism, he could not attain "the holy, sweet, redeeming uncertainty," which is "our supreme consolation." In the present volume, as in its predecessors, one may witness the search of his keen mind amidst the uncertainties which constitute the drama of religious thought. It is a mind more akin to the English Protestant than to the Spanish Catholic type. Here is an un-Mediterranean earnestness, that "alkaloid" in the Spaniard which Unamuno himself defined the Basque to be.

Don Miguel is not only the writer which this and his other translated works would reveal him. He has written travel sketches (limited to the Iberian peninsula, it is true, for the world came to him in Salamanca), poetry, and five novels of characteristically eccentric originality. One, entitled Fog, which was published just after the War broke out, has the advantage of anticipating Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. Two young couples, after many misunderstandings and proposed changes of partners, finally agree: Mauricio shall marry Rosario and Augusto shall take Eugenia, who once loved Mauricio. At the eleventh hour she changes her mind, and these two run off together. No further combinations are possible. But no end has been made of the story. What becomes of Augusto? Does he kill himself, or them? He comes to Salamanca to find his author, and tells him that he has decided to commit suicide. Unamuno points out that he cannot do this, since he does not exist, now that his author has finished with him. Augusto must live in the imagination of his creator, but he dies of overeating. Then, the doctors are unable to determine the cause of his death. Like everything else, death escapes from definition and defies the human reason.

Cast mainly in the form of dialogues and soliloquies, Unamuno's novels have little conventional appeal, interesting though they must always be to those who care for the man and his work, of which they are an integral part. All superfluous details are rigorously suppressed, even the name of the town in Fog; there is little or no descriptive writing; the scene is as bare as an Elizabethan stage, stripped, as it were, for the inter-action of passions and ideas. The absence of physical details, the schematization of the characters, do not deprive such works as Fog and Abel Sanchez of a profound humanity and vitality. If, as some critics charge, his people are all incarnations of himself, filled with his own preoccupations, then they are another proof of the essential reality of his thinking, of his famous definition of the "man of flesh and bones" in The Tragic Sense of Life.

Salvador de Madariaga summed up his brilliant essay on the author by declaring him "the greatest literary figure" of his country, although not the equal in specific respects of Pio Baroja, Perez de Ayala, Ramon del Valle Inclan, or even Blasco Ibanez. "Unamuno is head and shoulders above them all in the highness of his purpose and in the earnestness and loyalty with which, Quixote-like, he has served his unattainable Dulcinea. Then there is another and most important reason which explains his position . . . and it is that Unamuno, by the cross which he has chosen to bear, incarnates the spirit of modern Spain. His eternal conflict between faith and reason, between life and thought, between spirit and intellect, between heaven and civilization, is the conflict of Spain herself. A border country, like Russia, in which East and West mix their spiritual waters, Spain wavers between two life-philosophies and cannot rest."

These words were written before Don Miguel's peace had been destroyed and his livelihood taken from him by exile, before L'Agonie du Christianisme was conceived and born in that exile. Señor Madariaga would have little to add to them, for subsequent events and this volume give them an enhanced value. Perhaps they may serve, better than any words of mine, to bring more American readers to Miguel de Unamuno.

Ernest Boyd