Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

“For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.” At this word Christ our man’s thinking was arrested. He had arrived at what is called the religious problem and it presented itself to him in the form under which he had been contemplating it now for some time. In this problem—the problem, the religious problem—he saw the principal touchstone that distinguishes the intellectuals from the spiritual men.

In so far as the religious question is concerned, the intellectuals presented themselves to him, in effect, as divided into two large groups, usually called believers and unbelievers. Taking these terms in the concrete and in relation to his own country, they resolved themselves into intellectual Catholics and intellectual non-Catholics, who in practice were always anti-Catholics. These two factions contended one against another; but as a contest is only possible on a common basis, they contended on the same ground. No contest is possible between a fish which never emerges from the depths of the sea and a bird which never descends from the altitudes of the air. These two factions contended facing one another—that is to say, one looking in one direction and the other in another—but both standing on the same ground, both on the same plane of intellectuality. And woe to him who should address them either from above or from below, from another plane than theirs, from the plane of spirituality or from the plane of carnality. They will both unite in calling him either a madman or a brute.

These two factions contend together. For the one, religion is needful as the necessary basis of morality, social order being impossible without the fear of hell, of death and of the devil; religion is assured by external proofs, prophecies, miracles—or, rather, accounts of miracles—and before all and above all, by a tradition of centuries resting upon an authority. For the other, proofs of the truth of religion are wanting; social order can be established without hell or the fear of death and of the devil, and the tradition has neither been constant nor does it possess any convincing logical value. Both approach the question from the same side: the one sees in religion a social institution devoted to the interests of order, the other a social institution devoted to the interests of despotism; the one seeks for external logical proofs and the other rejects these proofs. Advocates, and merely advocates, both of them! For both of them it is a question of a social institution, something based upon external authorities and evidences or inevidences, upon something logical or illogical. It is what they call the conflict between reason and faith, although this faith is not faith but only belief. It was not possible for him, for our man, to feel it in that way, and the arguments of the one side interested him as little as those of the other. Disputes of intellectuals!...

He was now called to supper and he went away to attend to the wants of the body, giving it first food and then sleep.

THE MATERIALISM OF THE MASSES

In the course of my frequent peregrinations, when I go up and down the country preaching my lay sermons in the towns and cities of Spain, I have a way of taking my audiences as raw material for experiment. I carry out tests upon them, observing how they respond and react to my words. And I have observed that whenever they hear me say something which they think, however erroneously, implies a kind of negation of the immortality of the soul and of the existence of another life transcending this world, they break out into applause. And this applause saddens me and sometimes prompts me to attack.

If these outbursts of applause meant simply: “Hear, hear! Bravo! This man’s honest. He puts love of truth, however painful the truth may be, before love of consolation”—if the applause meant that, I would accept it, though with a certain sadness. But no, this applause means something different. It means: “Hear, hear! Excellent! We don’t want another life! This life is enough for us!” And this wounds me, for it is an explosion of the most debasing materialism.

Not believing that God exists or that the soul is immortal, or believing that God does not exist and that the soul is not immortal—and believing that the soul is not immortal is not the same as not believing that it is immortal—this is a belief that I can respect; but not wishing that God should exist or that the soul should be immortal is a thing profoundly repellent to me.

And it is precisely because I have this thorn in my heart of hearts, because I cannot resign myself to one day returning to unconsciousness, because I have a thirst for eternity, that this applause bruises my heart. That a man should not believe in another life, that I understand, for I myself find no proof of it; but that he should resign himself to this, and above all that he should not desire anything more than this life, that is a thing I do indeed not understand.

And then these gross calumniations of Christ and of Christianity, these stupidities that go contrary to nature and that have stunted the human spirit, and all this alluvion of vulgarity that so many unfortunate people swallow whole....