Afterword

Unamuno and the Contest with Death

TO RE-READ UNAMUNO—especially when one is reading to find where one stands at last with him—is itself to be in a contest. One emerges a little shaken and winded, for here is an author that insists upon coming at you head on. Yet the man himself is so simple, direct, beguiling—a true friend, but a troubling friend. He troubles us above all when we try to follow too straight a line in trying to pin him down. What I shall have to offer the reader here, I am afraid, will be my perplexities and questions—hesitations before the ultimate challenge he throws down to us.

Let us begin by remembering that Unamuno was for a long time professor of Greek at the University of Salamanca. This is a fact about his thought which we must not forget. True, there are other and deeper ways to characterize him as a man: a Basque who was Spanish to the core, “a Spanish consciousness, made in Spain”; or, as one genial interpreter put it, a man of “a Protestant mind and a Catholic heart”; or, as he liked to see himself, the knight of La Mancha on his own passionate quest through the modern wasteland ready to do battle with our latter-day ogres. All of these aspects dramatize the man and his mission; the quieter fact for his intellectual development was the experience of the Greek language and the Greeks—as decisive an exposure for him as, in a different way, for another significant modern thinker, Martin Heidegger.

Now, in Greek the word agonia means a contest, struggle. In English this root meaning has largely faded from the word. An agony is taken to mean merely physical or emotional pain. Yet if we reflect for a moment we shall find that this root meaning still lurks beneath the surface: when the blows of suffering fall, we must still be able to struggle and resist, or else we cease to be human altogether and collapse into a clinical lump. For Unamuno, life was unceasing conflict, out of the tension of which each human soul has to create its own fate and meaning. In this sense he would agree with the saying of the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “War [conflict] is the father of all things.”

Consequently, when Unamuno speaks, as he does in many places, of “the agony of Christianity,” we must understand that he can use this phrase only because for him Christianity is still something profoundly alive. What is in agony still lives, and lives powerfully. Christianity had this vitality for him largely because he had such a deep grasp of the material side of its symbols and images. Before Sir James Frazer and other anthropologists had made known the resemblances of Christian rites and symbols to those of primitive peoples, Unamuno perceived and savored this tie of Christianity with all that is earthbound and archaic in our nature. The symbols (through which this archaic nature speaks) live when taken as concrete and material, die when they become merely abstract signs.

In the history of Catholic theology, the definitions of dogma are called symbola, symbols. Unamuno was passionately interested in the history of dogma, and from the twists and turns in its evolution he finds proof for his belief that the vital current of life is not merely non-rational but anti-rational in nature. Perhaps he would have been more accurate to say anti-rationalistic. In any case, the point is central to his thought, and his argument deserves more objective appraisal than has been given to it. Unamuno advances it with the passion of a believer, but the lyricism of his writing should not mislead us, as it has often done many readers, about the sophistication of his thinking. The same argument can be stated coolly by the non-believer and in the objective terms of the behaviorial sciences. Despite all the research in these sciences we still have no coherent picture of human nature as a whole. It would seem, accordingly, to be sound procedure not to limit our samples of human behavior to man as a performing mechanism but to draw on all fields of human activity where our human nature may be revealing itself.

Now, over the millennia of its history, at each crucial stage where it was in difficulty and some easier and more rationalistic formula presented itself, the Church renewed itself by rejecting such formulae and choosing a doctrine more concrete and more paradoxical to reason. That is the evidence on which Unamuno bases his contention that the thrust of life must always carry us beyond reason. Consider three such occasions.

The conflict about Arianism in the fourth century turned on the question of the Incarnation. Jesus was true man and true God; but as man-God was he really one (consubstantial) with the Father? One would have thought Christianity already had enough stumbling blocks to put before the skeptical pagan intelligence without adding the doctrine, scandalous to reason, that God, the infinite, could become flesh as man, the finite. Arius arrived on the scene with a rationalistic simplification that would in effect have left Christianity a more or less straightforward theism, and therefore more acceptable to the philosophers. But Athanasius, his opponent, speaking for the people who were the body of the Church, triumphed; and the Incarnation became dogma. Here was a doctrine more concrete, physical, sensuous, even if altogether perplexing and enigmatic to the rational mind. At certain times the human need for the concreteness and the materiality of the symbol can be a craving as strong as physical hunger.

Later, in the ninth century, a controversy arose over the question of Transubstantiation. Was the wafer consecrated in the communion service actually transformed into the real body and blood of Jesus Christ? At the last supper, Jesus had simply said, "Whenever you do this [that is, break bread], do it in remembrance of me.” The communion rite, accordingly, could be taken as a commemoration by the faithful of that last supper that Jesus shared with his disciples. Why not leave matters on this relatively simple and straightforward level? Why pile up more difficulties for the reason of the believer, particularly with a doctrine that links Christianity with those primitive rites of totemism in which the sacred animal is physically devoured? But here again, the craving for the sheer materiality of the symbol asserted itself against rationalism. A certain monk, Radbertus, advanced the doctrine that the wafer and wine used in communion are really transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Scotus Erigena, the greatest philosopher of the age, opposed this doctrine on rational grounds. But the craving for the concreteness of the symbol won out, and Erigena’s fellow monks, according to historic legend, rose up and killed him.

Our third instance occurred in 1950, fourteen years after Unamuno’s death, yet it was a faith he already held prophetically: the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin. This symbolon tells us that the body of Mary has been taken up into heaven to reside with God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. (That the body of woman should be so exalted, raised to the spiritual heights, and made to complete the male Trinity, led Jung to call the enactment of this dogma the most important event in Christendom since the Protestant Reformation. On the psychology of the matter Jung is undoubtedly right, but historically it remains to be seen whether the dogma did not arrive too late within Christianity.) To rationalists, of course, this dogma is worse than ridiculous.

But can we really take such incidents from the restricted sphere of ecclesiastical history as evidence of what our human nature and its needs are? The behavioral scientist, with his sampling techniques, will ask how fair a sample of human behavior this history represents. The answer is that it does in fact embrace a pretty large segment of homo sapiens of the West acting within that central area of his existence that is called religion. Of course, the fact that these instances are taken from the religious area of experience will make them immediately suspect to some minds. Does not such behavior merely belong to a superstitious past which mankind is now discarding? The assumption behind this attitude is that man in his modern secular and rationalistic form is to be taken as the measure of all things. But does not this assumption imply that our human nature and its needs have been altogether transformed within recent history? That is the question that Unamuno is constantly raising as he does battle with the positivism and rationalism of the nineteenth century.

Here the evidence from anthropology supplements the history of religion. All history rests on the immensely longer past of pre-history, which it would be folly to neglect in any speculation about human nature. The anthropological findings have accumulated enormously since 1912, when Unamuno wrote The Tragic Sense of Life; and were he alive, there is no doubt but that he would be passionately immersed in this material. The overwhelming testimony from the ethnographers is that the primitive is the same human animal as us. Time and again, the fieldworker who at first encounter felt the ways of a tribe so foreign and strange will end with the statement, “They are so like us, after all.” No doubt, between the cultures of these primitives and ours there is a great gulf, and their modes of being human may therefore be different from ours; but the human creature in both cases seems to be fundamentally the same. Now the savage mind, we are told, grasps its world as concrete, sacral, and totally meaningful (there are no loose ends or dangling facts that are not tied into a concrete matrix of meanings). Moreover, for the, primitive there is a constant transaction, a process of give and take, between the dead and the living. (On another level, this same attitude is expressed in the Catholic doctrine of the Communion of All the Living and the Dead.) How far do these primitive attitudes express needs of our human nature that are still with us today? Has modern man succeeded in discarding these needs altogether? Or has modern culture merely suppressed them?

The time factor has some relevance here. Current paleontology tells us that man, homo sapiens, has been on this earth close to a million years. If we take the French Revolution as a conveniently arbitrary date when a public and deliberate program of secularization was unleashed on the Western world, then we may take the span of man’s secular and rationalistic existence to be about two hundred years. Two hundred against a million! That is about one five-thousandth of man’s existence on earth. If you imagine a clock running through the dial’s cycle of twelve hours, then this span of man’s programmed rationalization would amount to less than ten seconds.

How far do these last ticking seconds give us the measure of what our human nature is? Can we really believe that in these last ten seconds man has completely transformed himself and thrown off the weight of pre-history?

The weight of the sampling would seem to tilt the balance toward the immense stretch of anthropological and paleontological time. Moreover, the derangements and malaise in our contemporary life suggest that our rationalized technological civilization has come into conflict with our basic human nature. The discoveries of depth psychology in our century also warn us that the archaic and mythologizing animal—the creature that hungers for symbols—still lurks below the modern veneer.

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It is this same hunger for the concrete and physical that explains Unamuno’s longing for immortality. What he craves is not just the survival after death as pure consciousness or disembodied spirit, but survival in this flesh, these bones, this body. And so he hungers after a faith (which reason cannot supply) in the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body.

The reader, according to his own faith, will or will not follow Unamuno that far. The question of faith aside, we can, however, ask some philosophical questions about the meaning of death and the attitudes human beings take toward it. All philosophy, Socrates said, is a meditation upon death; yet the subject had received scant attention from his contemporary philosophers before Unamuno wrote The Tragic Sense of Life. Since that time, the movement of Existentialism arose and is still flourishing; and in its light (or darkness) Unamuno’s own reputation as a man of vision has been considerably enhanced. Existentialism seems to mean many different things to different people; but at least one thing about it is clear: it has tried, and sometimes succeeded, in bringing questions of life and death back into philosophy. It is interesting to compare with Unamuno two thinkers within this movement, Heidegger and Camus, in whom the reflection upon death also plays a central role.

Time occupies the crucial position in Heidegger’s philosophy. Man is the animal for whom Being spontaneously opens forward toward the future and backward toward the past. His Being is thus literally compounded of non-Being—the Not-yet of the future, the No-longer of the past. Only as he holds these two together in presence is he able to stand meaningfully within time; and only then can he go on to make chronometers and for practical purposes count off the hours, minutes, seconds. This clock time runs on; ticking away, it may even run away with our lives, even while we are trying to run away from it. In the end, time becomes real for each man only as the possibility of his own death looms before him. Then we know that man is truly finite, truly a Being-towarddeath. From the moment he was born he has been delivered over to the possibility of death, and not just death in general, but his own, most individual, death.

How is the individual to bear such anxiety? Only, says Heidegger, if he lets this possibility of death—his own individual Being-toward-death—become disclosed to him in all its fullness can he acquire a certain resoluteness and freedom toward death that will liberate him from the servitude to petty cares, the daily fuss and fret, clock-time worries. As for immortality, that question lies altogether outside the scope of Heidegger’s thought. Man has simply to learn to live with Non-being.

The pages in which Heidegger deals with time and mortality are written with a plodding power unrivaled in contemporary philosophy. Yet when we come later to the resolute and liberated Dasein (Man) I find the picture somehow unsatisfying. This creature is too solitary before his own death, too stiffly encased in the armor of his own resoluteness. To be sure, each of us must learn for himself that he (and not merely the others whose obituaries he reads in the papers) is mortal. But what about the death of another person? Is it always an external and neutral event happening out there in the world? Does not a man sometimes discover death, real death, in the agonizing thought that the woman he loves will someday die? Heidegger’s view narrows the contest with death to a single player in unshatterable solitude. But there is another contest that involves the interplay of surrender and resoluteness; a contest in which we might want to trade a death for a death, our own for a beloved child or mate. In short, a contest of love and death.

Unamuno too might be taxed with this charge of egotism. He persistently speaks, especially in the earlier chapters, of his own personal and private longing for his own immortality, almost as if he were denying that the mortality of others might at some moments be a matter of greater anguish. The whole spirit and tone of the book speak against such egotism, however. The man is clearly so radiant with charity and compassion, so passionate to pour himself out to quicken the lives of others. (See, particularly, the chapter “Faith, Hope, and Charity.”)

The early Camus (of the Myth of Sisyphus) had read some Heidegger and he sounds some of the same notes. Here is the same sense of our finite, time-bound, and mortal existence, and the same solitary existential ego confronting these facts in its own self-absorbed questioning. Time and death present themselves to Camus as threats to all human values. What are our highest cultural values—the works of a Shakespeare or a Goethe, for example—worth, if in ten thousand years they will not even be understood? Or if mankind no longer exists to read them? This vista of eventual Nothingness drove Unamuno into a frenzy; the young Camus, on the other hand, professes to confront it with an ironic and mock-Cartesian lucidity.

Camus could not remain in this aesthetic stance. The absurd man, confronting his own death with lucid courage, may strike an admirable posture; but he has nothing to say to the vast body of humanity that faces death day to day in the daily round of things. Camus had to pass from saying “I” in the face of death to saying “We.” That is the progress from The Stranger to The Plague. Both novels deal with human mortality. But while the first presents the solitary man, stranger to his human brothers, who is pushed against the blank wall of death, the second shows us how some human beings can be drawn together under the threat of death. In the town that has been afflicted by a plague everybody stands under the sentence of death. The plague is thus but an image of the human condition, in which we all stand similarly condemned. Yet in that situation men learn for the first time that mortality makes them brothers, and that in the presence, of death they can labor together to save life. The contest with death may be unequal, but it is worth waging.

Neither Heidegger nor Camus makes the leap toward immortality. They seem able to accept the fact of death, albeit with much anguish, without appealing to a life beyond. Unamuno could not rest with such stoicism, however much more rationally justifiable than his own attitude, simply because for him the acquiescence in death denies one part of our human nature: our absurd but unquenchable longing for everlasting life. Thrust this longing out the front door, he tells us, and it will return in some form through the back door. It could be argued that Camus virtually introduced a surrogate form of immortality in The Plague in the guise of the coherent community that persists beyond the death of its individual members. The individual can bear his own little light’s flickering out in the great void if there will be others remaining for whom the light still shines.

Why is there death? Why did God introduce death into His creation? Theologians have asked these questions for centuries, and wearied themselves to death in answering. From the point of view of modern biology these questions do not appear quite so futile as once thought, and the biologists’ answers, oddly enough, run parallel to the theologians’. Biologists have been able to fix in the long line of evolution the point at which death emerges for living beings. Below that point, among the simplest organisms, death does not occur: these very elementary creatures may be destroyed by a chemical or physical cause, but they do not die in the natural course of things as higher beings do. Now, at the point at which death enters the evolutionary scale, the differentiation of sex also occurs. Sex and death together! From the evolutionist’s point of view, the biological use of these two phenomena is easily seen: sexual differentiation permits a wider capacity for variation in the offspring, while death’s replacing one individual by another makes it possible for the offspring to surpass the parent. Here are two most efficacious devices on nature’s part for enriching the evolutionary process.

But from the poet’s or the philosopher’s point of view, this evolutionary linking will suggest more intimate consequences in the life of man. Eros, which binds us most closely to one another, emerges in the scale of life coordinate with Death, which sunders us from all others. But are these two opposites to be separated so categorically from each other? In the life of man do they not play into one another inextricably? Does not the awareness of death bind humans closer in their love for each other? Since we are all brothers-in-death should we not love one another?

Tolstoi’s story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” has by this time become almost the classical reference on the subject of death, and yet its whole message is not usually grasped. (Heidegger, for example, bases his analysis of death on the first part, which deals with Ivan’s breakdown, but he does not draw upon the reconciliation toward the end of the story.) Ivan Ilyich, an average bourgeois, has an accident and learns later that he is going to die. All his defenses are shattered; for the first time in his life he is thrown nakedly back upon himself. He, Ivan Ilyich, and not some other, is going to die. He is suddenly cut off from all the people he knew, and even from his own immediate family; he sees them all as alien and at an infinite distance. This is the imminence of death experienced as absolute solitude. Yet, toward the end of the story, he passes beyond that solitude to find love for another human being—in the person of the young peasant who comes to his bedside to keep him company. The near presence of death has enabled him to surrender to a larger life beyond his solitary ego. We die as individuals in order to join the possibly immortal life of mankind.

Unamuno, of course, wants more immortality than that. At this point perhaps the philosopher can only cheerfully part company with the man of faith. I do think, though, that Unamuno in the singleminded intensity of his passion does oversimplify the possible attitudes toward death. The natural craving (to live on and on) may take different forms and intensities in different people. At certain moments one does wish to live as oneself forever; at other moments, and without succumbing to nihilism or despair, one would be content to resign one’s place. Besides, personal immortality offers some serious ambiguities of its own: it can be a terrifying rather than a comforting thought. So at least felt Kierkegaard, who in his Sickness Unto Death analyzes ultimate despair as the recoil from this possibility of having to be oneself, of not being able to escape oneself, through all eternity. Only an equally extreme faith, he argues, can enable the believing Christian to welcome such a future. Unamuno, a more robust man, seems never to have felt the same dismay.

The Tragic Sense of Life is to be read as a great philosophical lyric. It expresses how one man—and an exemplary man—felt about death and immortality at a certain stage in his life. Those feelings, Unamuno repeatedly insists, cannot be justified logically; but neither can logic, and least of all logic, dismiss them. The reader will respond to Unamuno’s passion with his own capacity for passion. But one thing that seems to me inarguable about this book is that it is also a noble lyric, the voice of a man, an hombre, speaking to his fellow men in the midst of our disheartened century. Nobody can come away from it without being quickened once again for that ceaseless contest with death—and particularly death of the spirit—that goes on day by day, and sometimes even hour by hour, in the lives of all of us.

WILLIAM BARRETT