Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

The tragedy of Christ, the divine tragedy, is the tragedy of the Cross. Pilate, the sceptic, the man of culture, sought by means of ridicule to turn it into comedy and conceived the farce of the king with the reed sceptre and crown of thorns, saying: “Behold the man!” But the people, more human than he, the people that thirsts for tragedy, cried: “Crucify him! crucify him!” And the other tragedy, the human, the intra-human tragedy, is that of Don Quixote with his face lathered for the ducal servants to laugh at, and for the dukes, as much slaves as their servants, to laugh at too. “Behold the fool!”—so they would say. And the comic, the irrational tragedy is suffering beneath ridicule and contempt.

For an individual, as for a people, the highest heroism is being willing to face ridicule—still more, being willing to make oneself ridiculous and not flinching at the ridicule.

Antero de Quental, the tragic Portuguese who committed suicide, wrote as follows, smarting under the ultimatum which England delivered to his country in 1890: “An English statesman of the last century, also certainly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace Walpole, said that life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think. Very well then, if we have to end tragically, we Portuguese, we who feel, we much prefer this terrible, but noble, destiny to that which is reserved, and perhaps at no very remote future date, for England, the country that thinks and calculates, whose destiny is to end miserably and comically.” We may leave on one side the assertion that England thinks and calculates, implying that she does not feel, the injustice of which is explained by the circumstance that provoked it, and also the assertion that the Portuguese feel, implying that they scarcely ever think or calculate—for we sister peoples of the Atlantic have always been distinguished by a certain sentimental pedantry; but there remains the terrible underlying idea, namely, that some, those who put thought above feeling—I should say reason above faith—die comically, and those die tragically who put faith above reason. For it is the ridiculers who die comically, and God laughs at their comic ending, while the portion, the noble portion, of those who are ridiculed is tragedy.

And what we must look out for in the record of Don Quixote is ridicule.

The philosophy in the soul of my people presents itself to me as the expression of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don Quixote, as the expression of a conflict between the world as the reason of science exhibits it to us and the world as we wish it to be, as our religious faith tells us that it is. And in this philosophy is to be found the secret of what is usually said about us, that we are fundamentally irreducible to Kultur, that is to say, that we do not resign ourselves to it. No, Don Quixote resigns himself neither to the world nor to its truth, neither to science nor to logic, neither to art nor aesthetics, neither to morality nor to ethics.

“In any case the result of all this,” so I have been told more than once and by more than one person, “will simply be to urge people on to the maddest kind of Catholicism.” And they have accused me of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. So be it! And what then?

Yes, I know, I know that it is folly to seek to turn the waters of the river back to their source, and that it is the crowd that seeks the medicine for its ills in the past; but I know too that everyone who fights for any ideal whatsoever, even though it may seem to belong to the past, is urging the world on to the future, and that the only reactionaries are those who find themselves at ease in the present. Every pretended restoration of the past is a creation of the future, and if the past is dream, something not properly known, so much the better. As always, the march is towards the future; he who marches, marches thither, even though he march backwards way—and who knows if that is not the better way?

I feel that I have a mediæval soul and I believe that the soul of my country is mediæval—that it has been forced to traverse the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Revolution, learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual heritage of those ages that are called dark. And Quixotism is nothing but the most desperate phase of the struggle of the Middle Ages against their offspring, the Renaissance.

And if some accuse me of furthering the cause of Catholic reaction, perhaps the others, the official Catholics, accuse me of.... But these, in Spain trouble themselves little about anything and are only interested in their own quarrels and dissensions. And besides, poor folk, they are somewhat dull of understanding.

But the fact is that my work—I was going to say my mission—is to shatter the faith of both these and those and of others besides, faith in affirmation, faith in negation and faith in abstention, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who resign themselves, whether to Catholicism or to rationalism or to agnosticism; it is to make them all live lives of inquietude and passionate desire.