Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

Between these and the carnal or sarcinal men he always established a difference. For him the carnal men were the brutish, the absolutely uncultured, those who scarcely think of anything but eating, drinking and sleeping, those who are wholly and completely immerged in animal life. The psychical man, no; the psychical man is interested in questions of science and culture; the psychical Spaniard preaches national regeneration, is enthusiastic about the telephone, the gramophone and the cinematograph, reads Flammarion, Haeckel, Ribot, buys popular works on philosophy, and if he is in the neighbourhood of a railway stands in ecstatic contemplation of the majestic progress of the locomotive. If the psychical man is an orthodox Catholic, he admires the genius of St. Thomas Aquinas, although he has never read him, he knows that modern geology squares with the Mosaic account of the Creation, and that it is legitimate to admit a part of Darwinism, and that the Church possesses a remedy for all the social ills that afflict our age. The psychical man is an intellectual, his intellect may be small or great, but fundamentally he is an intellectual.

And lastly come the spiritual men, the dreamers, those whom the intellectuals contemptuously call mystics, those who tolerate the tyranny neither of science nor of logic, those who believe that there is another world within our world and mysterious dormant forces in the depths of our spirit, those who speak the language of the heart and many who prefer not to speak at all. Most of the great poets have been spiritual men, not intellectuals. Of one of them, of the sweet singer Wordsworth, it has been said that he was a genius without talent, that is to say a great spirit without sufficient intelligence.

How many times had he not read and re-read the end of the second and the beginning of the third chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians! “For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth [not with didactical arguments, which is the term employed in the text], but which the Holy Spirit teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man [psychical, or as our man translated it, intellectual] receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual [pneumatical] judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal [sarcinal], even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat; for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able. For ye are yet carnal....”

He turned again to the epistles of Paul of Tarsus and re-read the verses that he had so often read before. “The things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.” And he said to himself: Useless to seek to know the things of God by the method of didactical argument, of theology, of logic; a theology is a contradiction in terms, for the theos is at war with the logia; arguments do not help us to reach God. And he remembered Kant and his shattering of the supposed logical proofs of the existence of God, and how in his own spirit all that scaffolding of a metalogical belief, spiritual and not intellectual, psychical and not pneumatical, had collapsed. The ontological proof, the cosmological proof, the metaphysical proof, the ethical proof, all had come tumbling down in his mind at the same time, and with them the so-called God of reason. All that theological rationalism had come to earth in his spirit with a crash, though the noise of it was heard only by himself, destroying not a few delicate flowers in its fall and covering the ground with rubbish. Upheavals of the heart, earthquakes of the spirit, had cleared the ground of the debris, and in a new way, a way the intellectuals do not know, there sprung up within him a faith which came from the Spirit of God. For the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.

“Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.”—Mystic! This word, spat out with contempt, like an insult or a reproach, seemed to be spoken into his ear, and so near, so clear, so distinct it was, that he involuntarily turned his head. And there at his side, not in the body, visible and tangible, but present in the spirit, was the prototype of the intellectual, with all his most exclusively intellectual attributes—there was the psychical man, the natural man par excellence. There he was repeating his physiological creed parrot-wise, while in his heart he rebelled against his poetic and creative impotence, against his unconfessed unspirituality.—He shrugged his shoulders, smiled and turned again to look at the slowly darkening sky. The sunset clouds now appeared like mountains of ashes, the remains of the solar conflagration. He turned on the electric switch and the wire thread glowed in the bulb—there was light, light of man’s making, light of applied science.

“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness into him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” Foolishness ... madness ... he repeated to himself, while his eyes wandered over those familiar objects which the electric light had called forth out of the dark shadows. Madness ... and what is madness? There are alienists, phreno-pathologists, psychiatrists, and who knows by how many other names they are called?... But what is sanity? For perhaps one ought to begin with that.

Health is that condition in which a man is free from every kind of disease; but what is disease? Health, others say, is “that condition in which the organism exercises all its faculties normally.”[5] Normally ... normally ... and what is the normal? He stretched out his hand for a book which he was just then reading, a book stored with a mass of data relating to the mysterious life of the spirit, the work of that noble mind that had been the soul of the Society for Psychical Research, and he read:

“The word normal in common speech is used almost indifferently to imply either of two things, which may be very different from each other—conformity to a standard and position as an average between extremes. Often, indeed, the average constitutes the standard—as when a gas is of average density; or is practically equivalent to the standard—as when a sovereign is of normal weight. But when we come to living organisms a new factor is introduced. Life is change; each living organism changes; each generation differs from its predecessor. To assign a fixed norm to a changing species is to shoot point-blank at a flying bird. The actual average at any given moment is no ideal standard; rather, the furthest evolutionary stage now reached is tending, given stability in the environment, to become the average of the future.”[6]

He shut the book and said to himself again: Normal ... madness ... sanity ... disease ... health.... The madness of to-day will be the sanity of to-morrow, just as the sanity of to-day will appear madness to-morrow. Intellectuals call that madness which they are unable to understand, for it can only be discerned spiritually. And an intellectual, what is he, in the last instance, but a normal man, a man of the via media, equally far removed from the carnal and from the spiritual man? The intellectual is the man of the via media, at an equal distance from the enormous mass of carnality and from the very limited quantity of conscious spirituality—for the other kind of spirituality, the unconscious and potential, is dormant in all men and is perhaps more alive in the carnal men themselves than in the intellectuals. For it is easier for the flesh than for the intellect to receive the spirit; between intellect and spirit the logic of the schools interposes. The intellectual is the man of average sense, which he calls common sense, and which is as far from the universal, cosmic or instinctive sense in which carnal men live, as it is from that private sense which fortifies the spirit of spiritual men.

“But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.” By what right do those whose own spirit is buried beneath their intellect judge the things of the spirit?