Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

In one of those series of popular publications which flatter and seduce the coarsest instincts of the unlettered multitudes, there is a book—translated from the Italian, I believe—entitled “Jesus Christ Has Never Existed.” It is one of the most deplorable, shallow, and worthless books imaginable, inspired not by a love of truth but by the most blatant sectarianism. I was talking about it one day to a man who had read it and who had been delighted with it, and I said: “It is not the thesis that shocks me. The thesis that Jesus had no historical existence, that He is a myth, has many times been put forward, and with apparently very plausible arguments, at any rate with erudition—recently by Karthoff—but it is a thesis that has been demolished by the most judicious investigators, no matter what their personal creed may have been.” He replied: “Then I’m sorry, for He ought not to have existed.” And naturally I did not know what to say to that.

This lack of ideality, this aridity and poverty of inward life, which is implied by not longing for another and transcendental life, all this practical materialism, is dismaying to the mind of whosoever meditates a little upon the worth of human life. For my own part, I have very little hope of peoples who fall into this materialistic attitude.

Understand me clearly: I am not assuring you, nor can I assure you, that there is another life; I myself am not convinced that there is; but I cannot conceive that a man, a true man, should not merely resign himself to the enjoyment of this life only, but that he should renounce and even spurn another life. And as for this idea that we shall continue to live in our works, in our children, in the memory of other generations, and that everything renews and transforms itself, and that we shall help to build up a more perfect society—all this appears to me to be the most miserable subterfuge for escaping the depths of despair.

This is the reason why the radicalism of certain sections of the masses dismays me and why I cannot hope that anything fruitful will come of it. The radicalism of the masses in Spain, and perhaps in other so-called Latin, or, more strictly speaking, Catholic, countries, is lacking in the spirit and substance of religion. The weak point in our socialism is its confused notion of the supreme end of the individual life.

Let us better the economic condition of man—good! Let us put an end to the division between rich and poor—exactly! Let us realize a state in which a moderate amount of work will be sufficient to satisfy all our wants—very good! And then? We have now created a society such as Bebel or Kropotkin dreamed of, and what is to happen to each one of us in this society? What is to be the end of this society? What shall we live for?

“Get rich!” said Guizon, the Calvinist, to the Catholic bourgeoisie of France; “get rich!” Very good. And then, when we have got rich?...

A country in which the people think only of getting rich is a country ... well, I would rather not inquire what kind of a country it is. Suffice it to say that I at any rate should die in it of cold, of shame, of disgust.

And if a country which is solely preoccupied with getting rich is abhorrent to me, still more abhorrent is the country in which the dominant preoccupation is that of enjoyment, of diversion. In other words, of self-stupefaction.

A collective patriotic enthusiasm, an imperialistic instinct, a passionate desire to influence other peoples and to impress your own stamp upon them—this, after all, is something. But this enthusiasm, this instinct, this desire, lives and burns in those peoples which preserve the inward spring of religion, an underlying inextinguishable thirst for eternity.

The people that is satisfied with this life lives, strictly speaking, on the defensive, and the people that lives on the defensive ends by being absorbed and dominated by those in whom the aggressive and dominating instinct is uppermost. The so-called struggle for life is efficacious only when the struggle is for predominance, not for preservation. The essence of being, as Spinoza showed, consists not so much in the effort to persist in mere being as in the effort to become more, to become everything. It is the appetite for infinity and eternity.