Notes
Notes
The first Spanish edition of this work, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos, was published in Madrid in 1913 (320 pp. with a one-page index), by Renacimiento. (The first chapter had appeared in the magazine La España Moderna, beginning in December 1911, the second chapter in the January 1912 issue, in monthly installments, skipping the November issue, until the end.) It was followed by many other editions, by different publishers, the most important being in a two-volume edition of Ensayos, edited by B. G. de Candamo (Madrid, 1942), Tomo II, published by Aguilar. Then followed the first series of Obras Completas (OC1 in our Notes) (Madrid, 1950), Tomo IV, published by Afrodisio Aguado; and then a second Obras Completas (OC2 in our Notes), in sixteen volumes (Madrid, 1958), Tomo XVI, published by Vergara: all three editions have been used in our translation. In a third edition of Obras Completas, planned for ten volumes by Escelicer, Madrid, there appeared in their Vol. 7 (late 1969), the same text, only in clearer type. The book has been translated, in chronological order, into Italian, in two volumes (Milano, 1914, and Firenze, 1924), and into a one-volume edition (Firenze, 1937); into three French editions (Paris, 1917), translated “most of it in the trenches,” by a medical doctor, and issued by the Nouvelle Revue Française, an edition in 1937 by Gallimard, and again in 1957; into English (London, 1921), into German (München, 1925, and Leipzig, 1933); into Czechoslovak (Praha, 1927); into Danish (Köbenhavn, 1925); into Latvian (Riga, 1936); and into Japanese (Tokyo, 1971).
I. THE MAN OF FLESH AND BLOOD
3. “Homo sum”: Terence (c. 195–159 B.C.), Heauton Timoroumenos, 25, “I am a man; nothing human do I deem alien to me.”
the real brother: It is this insistence on the total individual rather than the abstract man which aligns Unamuno with the existentialists, long before the term came into fashion.
featherless biped: Cf. Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, tr. R. D. Hicks (Loeb Classical Library, 1925), II, 43.
Aristotle: Politics, Book I, Ch. 2; the Greek, 
“political animal.”
a no-man: Cf. Unamuno’s Homo insipidus, “who does not belong either here or there, is neither of the present nor the past, and is not of any time or place,” in his The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, Part II, Ch. 46 (Vol. 3, p. 234, in this edition).
5. Kierkegaard: Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55). It was in a book by Georg Brandes on Ibsen, whom Unamuno much admired (especially Brand), that Unamuno first came across the name of Kierkegaard (“Ibsen y Kierkegaard,” OC, iv; this edition, Vol. 5), and since he already knew German and some Norwegian, it was not difficult for him to learn Danish. The discovery of Kierkegaard was one of the capital events in Unamuno’s intellectual life, for in the Dane he found a soul-brother, one who had already expressed himself against implicit faith, religious “officialdom” and conformity, and those who set themselves up as purveyors of religious interpretations; Kierkegaard had already insisted on religion as subjective and passionate, and therefore recalcitrant to all definition, a via crucis rather than a reason for selfsatisfaction. Unamuno’s adoption of Kierkegaard as one of his favorite or “cardiac” writers makes of him the first Spaniard to study the Dane, and also one of the first, outside of Denmark, to understand his importance for modern thought. The Unamuno library boasts of the fourteen volumes of Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Vaerker, udgivne af B. A. Drachmann. J. L. Heiberg og H. O. Lange (Kjøvenhavn, 1901-06), many of which are profusely marked in Unamuno’s hand, especially the volumes containing Enten/Eller (Either/Or), Stadier Paa Livets Vei (Stages on Life's Way), and the book he so often quotes in The Tragic Sense of Life, the Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift or Concluding Unscientific Postscript,
The “leap” referred to here is one of Kierkegaard’s central concepts, the leap from reason into faith.
6. immortal leap: salto inmortal, “There is a play here upon the term salto mortal, used to denote the dangerous aerial somersault of the acrobat, which cannot be rendered into English.”—J. E. Crawford Flitch, in his translation ( 1921) of The Tragic Sense of Life.
Unamuno is playing with the famous “salto mortale” (Italian) of Kierkegaard: the leap from reason into faith, through will rather than logic. Quite independently of Kierkegaard, William James had also understood the meaning of such a leap.
7. William James: The influence of William James (especially in The Will to Believe, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and Pragmatism) weaves its way through this and other works of Unamuno. In James, the Spaniard found substantiation of many of his own thoughts and feelings, e.g., that the temperament and affective needs of the thinking man contribute to molding his thought; the limitations of “objective certitude”; the creative power of faith; the notion of the “leap in the dark” from the empirical to the spiritual mode. Cf. Pelayo H. Fernández, Miguel de Unamuno y William James, un paralelo pragmático (Salamanca, 1961).
Consciousness or Conscience: Consciencia. “The same word is used in Spanish to denote both consciousness and conscience. If the latter is specifically intended the qualifying adjective ‘moral' or ‘religiosa' is commonly added.”—J.E.C. Flitch.
8. Hegel. . . framer of definitions: This contempt for Hegel, in whose Logic Unamuno tells us he first began reading German during his university days in Madrid (1880-84), echoes Kierkegaard’s own scorn for that systematic thinker. Already in En torno al casticismo (written as separate essays in 1895, five years before his discovery of the Danish writer), Unamuno refutes Hegel’s idea that man defines himself in history.
Joseph Butler: (1692–1752), author of the Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736). Unamuno has in his library the Everyman edition (London and New York, 1906). Of the several passages marked off by Unamuno, the one on p. 189 is of special interest: “. . . doubting necessarily implies some degree of evidence for that of which we doubt.” Newman’s judgment on Butler is given in the Introduction to the book in Unamuno’s library.
11. Fichte: Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), disciple of Kant, author (1800) of Die Bestimmung des Menschen (The Vocation of Man). Fichte attempted to rescue the “I” from eighteenth-century determinism, i.e., what we know of external things is what we know of our own mental processes.
12. one of our ascetics: Although J. E. Crawford Flitch attributes the notion to San Juan de los Angeles (1536-1609 ), and Giberto Beccari, the Italian translator of The Tragic Sense, attributes it to P. Alonso Rodríguez (1538–1616), it comes from The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Subida del Monte Carmelo, 1583), by St. John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz, 1542-91).
14. Obermann: A novel by Étienne Pivert de Sénancour (1770-1846), French Romantic; though in effect an émigré living in Switzerland at the time of his main work, he totally ignored the French Revolution and wrote as if it had not existed. Obermann (Oberman, in the first two-volume edition of 1804) was edited by Sainte-Beuve in 1833 and by George Sand in 1852; it was written in the Jura region, as a series of letters, and influenced later Romantic literature. This melancholy romantic novel was one of Unamuno’s favorite books, endlessly quoted by him throughout his work. The words “And along with Obermann . . . everything,” are, in the original French, from Letter XLV of Sénancour’s Obermann: “Les lois générales sont fort belles, et je leur sacrifierais volontiers un an, deux, dix ans même de ma vie; mais tout mon être, c’est trop: ce n’est rien dans la nature, c’est tout pour moi.” As he often does, Unamuno here alters the original to suit his immediate purpose. For Unamuno and Sénancour, see Émile Martel, “Lecturas francesas de Unamuno: Sénancour,” Cuadernos de la cátedra de Miguel de Unamuno, xiv-xv (Salamanca, 1964-65), 85-96.
16. “shall lose it”: Matt. 10:39.
17. “help thou mine unbelief”: Mark 9:24.
18. “Para pensar cual tú, . . .”:
To think like you, all I need
merely is to possess intelligence.
20. unknowable: The allusion here is to Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and his school which relegated the religious to the area of the “unknowable.” Unamuno fell under the spell of Spencer in the 1880s but eventually rejected his influence. Although he translated many of Spencer’s essays, he considered his rejection of the Englishman one of the greatest victories of his life.
22. men weighed down . . . : It is noteworthy that the René of Chateaubriand and the Obermann of Sénancour, fictional characters, are considered as real as the long list of actual literary figures named here. These are Unamuno’s “cardiac” writers, men whose hearts were as involved in their creation as their minds.
Spanish [proverb]: The Spanish proverb is “Piensa el ladrón que todos son de su condición” (“The thief thinks all men are thieves”).
II. THE POINT OF DEPARTURE
23. the serpent—a model of prudence for Christ: Cf. “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up,” John 3:14. And “John did not hesitate to compare Christ with the Serpent because Christ had assumed the whole economy of the exodus,” Thierry Maertens, Bible Themes (Brussels, 1962), I, 211; “Christ gave it his full meaning by assimilating Himself to the serpent,” ibid., 176. In Mark 16:18, and Luke 10: 19, “it is one of the signs of the mission of the disciples of Jesus that they have power over serpents,” J. L. McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible (London-Dublin, 1965), p. 791. In the Old Testament, “the brazen serpent was one of the objects of worship in the Temple—not a genuine idol, but a representation of God.” Cf. 4 Kings 18:4 and “the sign of the serpent, representing obedience to the Law”; cf. Wisdom 16:1-7, Bible Themes, loc. cit. Cf., too, the double serpents of Mercury’s caduceus, where the tame serpent is a counterpoise to the wild one. Jung, in his Psychology and Alchemy, tr. R.F.C. Hull (Bollingen Series XX: 12, 2nd edn., Princeton, 1968), pp. 292-95, points out that this double image suggests the concept of homeopathy, cure by the cause, so that the serpent is a source for curing the ill caused by the serpent. It was thus a symbol of St. John the Evangelist and appears next to a chalice. See Juan-Eduardo Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, tr. Jack Sage (London, 1962), p. 276. Cf. Simone Weil, speaking of Christianity in Waiting on God (London, 1952), p. 27: “The bronze serpent must be lifted up again so that whoever raises his eyes to it may be saved.”
woman . . . life: It was Unamuno’s conviction that any system of education of women must take into account the fact that women gestate, give birth, and nurse their children, and are structured toward these three ends. Cf. “La educación: prólogo a la obra de Bunge, del mismo título,” OC, III, 517.
31. Mr. Balfour: The Foundations of Belief, being Notes Introductory to the Study of Theology, by the Right Hon. Arthur James Balfour, London, 1895: “So it is with those persons who claim to show by their example that naturalism is practically consistent with the maintenance of ethical ideals with which naturalism has no natural affinity. Their spiritual life is parasitic: it is sheltered by convictions which belong, not to them, but to the society of which they form a part; it is nourished by processes in which they take no share. And when those convictions decay, and those processes come to an end, the alien life which they have maintained can scarce be expected to outlast them” (Ch. iv). A Conservative member of Parliament, Balfour became Foreign Secretary and prepared the Balfour Declaration, keystone to the legal creation of the state of Israel.
32. it is not so much . . . Him: There is an unmistakable echo here of the Kantian idea that the categorical imperative of morality leads to a belief in God.
33. Max Stirner: pseudonym of Johann Kaspar Schmidt (1806–56), author of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1845), translated as The Ego and His Own (1907). Stirner’s work is a reaction against Hegel, an attack upon systematic philosophy. The only thing of which we have certain knowledge, Stirner held, is the individual who is unique and who must cultivate that uniqueness against all general beliefs and philosophies. Stirner was a forerunner of Nietzsche.
34. “Act in such wise . . .”: Kant, in Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785). The translation by Thomas K. Abbott from Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (Indianapolis, New York, 1949, p. 47) is: “There is therefore but one categorical imperative, namely, this: Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
Xenophon: Memorabilia and Oeconomicus, with an English translation by E. C. Marchant (Loeb Classical Library, 1959), Memorabilia, III, xi.
Hodgson: Shadworth Holloway Hodgson (1832–1912), Time and Space, a metaphysical essay (London, 1865), p. 13.
36. Spinoza: 1632-77. Spinoza was not himself an exile; he was born in Amsterdam of a Jewish family that had come to Holland in the sixteenth century. The Ethics was published after his death. The translation by R.H.M. Elwes in The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza: The Ethics (New York, 1951), II, 232, is: “A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.”
“blessedness is not”: op. cit., p. 270.
37. Cicero's definition: De Officiis, tr. Walter Miller (Loeb Classical Library, 1951), II, 2, p. 172: “Sapientia autem est, ut a veteribus philosophis definitum est, rerum divinarum et humanarum causarumque, quibus eae res continentur, scientia; . . .” “Wisdom, moreover, as the word has been defined by the philosophers of old, is ‘the knowledge of things human and divine and of the causes by which those things are controlled.' ”
Clement of Alexandria: the edition in the Unamuno library is Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte, Clemens Alexandrinus (Leipzig, J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 3 vols., 1905, 1906, 1909). The English translation is from The Miscellanies, ed. Rev. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Christian Fathers, Vol. XII, Clement of Alexandria, Vol. II (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1869), Book iv, Ch. XXII, pp. 202–03.
40. poêle: actually the poêle was a room heated by a stove. Cf. beginning of Part II of the Discourse.
cogito ergo sum, which St. Augustine . . . anticipated: In his copy of Adolf von Harnack’s Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (Freiburg i. B. und Leipzig; Akademische Verlagsbuchhandlung von J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]), Vol. 3 (1890), p. 299, alongside of note 2 which reads “Confess. VII, 16 ‘Audivi (verba Ego sum qui sum) sicut auditur in corde, et non drat prorsus unde dubitarem; faciliusque dubitarem vivere me, quam non esse veritatem.’ VI, 5” Unamuno penciled “Cf. cogito, ergo sum.”
According to Ètienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, tr. L.E.M. Lynch (New York: 1960), pp. 41-43, Augustine anticipates Descartes in several works, but especially in De Libero Arbitrio, in De Trinitate, and in De Civitate Dei. See the notes corresponding to the pages indicated.
III. THE HUNGER FOR IMMORTALITY
43. legends on the theme: In the Phaedo, Socrates is making his final observations before taking the hemlock, and has just given an account of the nature of the world and of the underworld, and of “they who are released . . . from confinement in . . . the earth, and passing upward to their pure abode, make their dwelling upon the earth’s surface. And . . . such as have purified themselves sufficiently by philosophy live thereafter altogether without bodies, and reach habitations even more beautiful, which it is not easy to portray—nor is there time to do so now.” And he concludes: “Of course, no reasonable man ought to insist that the facts are exactly as I have described them.” But “We should use such accounts to inspire ourselves with confidence, and that is why I have already drawn out my tale so long.” Phaedo, tr. Hugh Tredennick, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series LXXI (Princeton, 1969), pp. 94-95.
44. “He wants nothing of a god but eternity”: “and a heaven to throne in,” Coriolanus, V. iv. (25). The sense is that Marcius lacks only eternity to make him a god, as Unamuno points out in the Spanish.
Pindar: Pythia, VIII, Epod 5, line 95.
45. “If in this life . . . miserable”: This is the epigraph Unamuno chose for his culminating work, the novelette San Manuel Bueno, mártir, OC, XVI, in another volume of this edition.
The tragic Portuguese Jew . . . death: See herein, note to p. 36.
46. “in a matter . . . monster”: No. 194 of Pascal’s Thoughts. Actually Pascal considers the “indifference” to be “monstrous.”
47. Amidst the delirium . . . immortality of the soul: “He [Robespierre] is President of the Convention; he has made the Convention decree, so they name it, décréter the ‘Existence of the Supreme Being,’ and likewise ‘ce principe consolateur of the Immortality of the Soul.’ ” Cf. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution (Leipzig, 1851), Vol. III, Book XI, Ch. iv, p. 335, which Unamuno owned, read, and finally translated entire. Throughout the book, Carlyle refers to Robespierre as the Incorruptible, sometimes as the Seagreen Incorruptible, which in his translation, La revolución francesa, published in Madrid, 1902, Unamuno renders as “cetrino incorruptible" (as: “ ‘A Republic?’ said the Seagreen, . . . 'What is that?’ . . . O seagreen Incorruptible, thou shalt see!” [Vol. 2, Bk. 4, Ch. 4], translated by Unamuno as: “¿República?—dijo el cetrino . . . — ¿qué es eso? ¡Ya lo has de ver, cetrino incorruptible!”)
“e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle”: last line of the Inferno: “And thence we issued forth to see again the stars,” tr. Charles S. Singleton, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Bollingen Series LXXX (Princeton, 1970), I, 369.
48. “Every time”:
Cada vez que considero
Que me tengo de morir
Tiendo la capa en el suelo
Y no me harto de dormir.
“Strofa popolare andalusa,” says the Italian translator G. Beccari, in a note at this point of his translation Del sentimento tragico della vita negli uomini e nei popoli, Prima parte (Milano, 1914), p. 46. Cf. Our Lord Don Quixote, Vol. 3 of this edition, p. xix.
49. “Hell might afford my miseries a shelter”: From “Lines Written Under the Influence of Delirium,” marked in Unamuno’s own copy of The Poetical Works of William Cowper (London, 1889), p. 23.
Obermann: for the French, see herein, p. 282; on Sénancour, see the note to p. 14. We take the English from the version of J. Anthony Barnes (London and New York, 1915), II, 252, where the full quote begins: “‘Man is perishable,’ is the response.”
“Abandon all Hope!”: “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate!” Inferno, Canto III, line 9.
50. “Perì l'inganno estremo . . From “A se stesso” (Canti, Firenze, 1831):
Or poserai per sempre,
Stanco mio cor. Perì l’inganno estremo,
Ch’eterno io mi credei.
Cf. The Penguin Book of Italian Verse (Harmondsworth, 1958), which gives a prose translation: “Now you will rest for ever, tired heart of mine. The last deception has perished which I believed eternal.” Unamuno’s version is totally different, and is surely what Leopardi had in mind.
The last line of this same poem is
E l'infinita vanità del tutto.
“the close kinship . . . die”'. Cf. Leopardi’s poem “Amor e morte.”
Fratelli a un tempo stesso, Amor e Morte
Ingenerò la sorte.
Quando novellamente
Nasce nel cor profondo
Un amoroso affetto,
Languido e stanco insiem con esso in petto
Un desiderio de morir si sente. . . .
Fate in one hour created Love and Death,
Brothers to each other.
When freshly in the deepest heart
A loving feeling springs,
With it together in the breast is felt,
Languid and weary a desire for death. . . .
The translation is from Leopardi’s Canti, translated into English verse, with parallel text and an introduction, by John Humphreys Whitfield (Napoli, 1962), pp. 194 ff.
Unamuno’s admiration for Leopardi’s work never diminished throughout his lifetime; the author of the Canti was one of the Spaniard’s “cardiac” writers, and when exiled to the island of Fuerteventura in 1924, Unamuno carried with him only three books: The New Testament in Greek, a copy of the Divine Comedy, and a volume of Leopardi’s poetry. He had also translated Leopardi’s “La ginestra” in 1899; cf. OC, XIII, 479-88.
“Beautiful risk!”: Unamuno uses the Spanish “hermoso” (beautiful or handsome) to translate the Greek adjective, which is usually also rendered as “beautiful” in English. (“Risk” he changes to “chance”—“suerte” —for the substantive on the second invocation of the modifier.) “Glorious risk” might perhaps ring more roundly in English, however, and Hugh Tredennick, in his translation of the Phaedo (see herein, note to p. 43), translates the adjective as “noble,” rendering the pertinent passage (which occurs after Socrates has described the good fortune after death of those who “have lived a life of surpassing holiness”) as follows: “Of course no reasonable man ought to insist that the facts are exactly as I have described them. But that either this or something very like it is a true account of our souls and their future habitations—since we have clear evidence that the soul is immortal —this, I think, is both a reasonable contention and a belief worth risking, for the risk is a noble one.”
51. Pascals famous argument of the wager: Thought No. 233. The argument holds that since one is “embarked” in life there is no choice but to wager on whether God exists or not. It is wiser to wager affirmatively, since if He exists, then one wins all; if not, nothing has been lost.
“My I! They are stealing my I!” In his unpublished doctoral thesis Libros y lecturas franceses de Miguel de Unamuno (Salamanca, 1964), Emile Martel says that Michelet is represented in Unamuno’s work mainly by this quotation which neither Martel nor the present editors have been able to trace. Unamuno uses this quotation quite often in his work but the verb varies from “arrebatan” (used in the present quotation) to “arrancan” to “devuelvan,” that is, from “they are stealing” (or “snatching away”) to “they are tearing away.” On p. 212 of his thesis, Martel says “After some early and partial contact with Michelet in 1887, Don Miguel seems to have become slowly more familiar with his work. It is probable that he read some of Michelet’s books in 1900 and certainly read L'Histoire de la France au Moyen Age in 1921.” There is no book by Michelet in the Unamuno library in Salamanca.
53. “stinking pride”: is from Leopardi’s “La ginestra,” translated by Unamuno himself as “La retama” (OC, xiii, 482, line 106). The Italian context reads:
Magnanimo animale
Non credo io già, ma stolto,
Quel che nato a perir, nutrito in pene,
Dice, a goder son fatto,
E di fetido orgoglio
Empie le carte, . . .
Unamuno translated these lines as:
Nunca creí magnánimo
animal, sino necio
el que a morir viniendo a nuestro mundo,
y entre penas criado, aún exclama:
“¡para el goce estoy hecho!”
y de fétido orgullo
páginas llena, . . .
And along with Obermann . . . : See herein, note to p. 14.
55. the gods weave and accomplish the destruction of mortals: In his Diario íntimo Unamuno notes: “For a long time I kept in my room two portrait sketches, one of Spencer, the other of Homer, drawn by me; at the bottom of the latter I had copied out the lines from the Odyssey which go ‘The gods weave and accomplish the destruction of mortals in order that their posterity may have something to narrate’—the quintessence of the shallow spirit of paganism, a sterile aestheticism which kills all spiritual substance and beauty.” (Madrid, 1970), Cuaderno I, p. 16; and also Cuaderno III, p. 154, where the Homeric observation is followed by the notation: “Aestheticism is horrible, a kind of death.”
57. There you have that “thief of energies” . . . courage: Here Unamuno has Nietzsche in mind, but mistakenly if understandably attributes to the German writer part of a verse from the last stanza of Arthur Rimbaud’s “Les premières communions”: “Christ! ô Christ, éternel voleur des énergies!” There are many passages in Nietzsche where Christ and Christianity are condemned, and Unamuno confesses that he knew Nietzsche only fragmentarily and through references to and quotations from the German’s work. He had read Henri Lichtenberger’s La philosophie de Nietzsche and Jules de Gaultier’s De Kant à Nietzsche, and if he considered Nietzsche a great poet, he condemned him as an extremely weak thinker. Cf. the essays “¿Para qué escribir?” and “Algo sobre Nietzsche” in OC, VIII, and also the sonnet “A Nietzsche” in Rosario de sonetos líricos, OC, XIII, 611.
In his exhaustive book, Nietzsche en España (Madrid, 1967), Professor Gonzalo Sobejano proves that Nietzsche’s influence on Unamuno is more in “mannet” than ideas, that Unamuno had probably read the Zarathustra by 1900 either in German, French, or in Spanish translation, and that numerous analogies between Unamuno and Nietzsche would disprove Unamuno’s denial of any first-hand knowledge of the German writer.
“eternal recurrence": See Index to Complete Works of Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (London, 1913).
58. Boccaccio . . . virtue: Cf. Vita di Dante, in Charles Allen Dinsmore, Aids to the Study of Dante (Boston and New York, 1903), p. 99.
Legenda trium sociorum: The Three Companions, a life of St. Francis of Assisi (middle of thirteenth century), written by Thomas of Celano, Italian friar of the thirteenth century, presumably the author of the Dies Irae hymn. An early follower of St. Francis, Celano was the author of two Lives of the saint (1229, 1247), the second of which is cited here (English translation by A. G. Ferrers, 1908).
59. his life for his purse: play on the robber’s cry of “¡Manos arriba! La bolsa o la vida!” “Hands up! Your purse [money] or your life!”
60. Emile: Book iv, the section titled “The Creed of a Savoyard Priest,” p. 231 of the translation by Barbara Foxley (London, 1963). It was this section outlining Rousseau’s religious attitude that caused Emile to be banned and burned.
61. a Stylite who erects himself into an image: In his The Penguin Dictionary of Saints (1965), Donald Attwater points out how Simeon the Stylite’s pillar became increasingly higher, so that over the years it grew to a height of sixty feet, and that while the purpose was ostensibly to remove Simeon from the press of the multitude, the opposite happened: as the column grew higher the crowds became greater. And cf. Tennyson’s poem “St. Simeon Stylites”: “The silly people take me for a saint,” but also “Who may be made a saint, if I fail here?” and “I will not cease to grasp the hope I hold / Of saintdom” (lines 127, 48, and 5-6).
The latest edition (Escelicer) of the Obras Completes reads “estilista”: stylist.
Mr. X: Unamuno calls him “Fernandez” which is a very common Spanish name and may be translated as “Mr. Smith,” “Mr. X,” or “John Doe.”
62. Abel . . . Cain: The Cain-Abel theme is a recurrent one in Unamuno, and was fictionalized by him in the novel Abel Sánchez and the play El Otro. Cf. Carlos Claveria, “Sobre el tema de Caín en la obra de Unamuno,” in Temas de Unamuno (Madrid, 1953).
“Death to me! Long live my fame!”: “¡Muera yo, viva mi fama!” Among the last words of Rodrigo Arias, son of Arias Gongalo, in the third act of the Second Part (“Comedia Segunda”) of the drama by Guillén de Castro (1569-1631). Rodrigo Arias wins the contest at arms against Don Diego Ordóñez de Lara (though he dies, like his two brothers immediately before him) by driving Don Diego out of bounds on the field of honor, so that, as Don Diego says, “killing him I did not vanquish / and he in dying vanquished me!” But later a formal sentence by the judges has the effect of declaring them both victors.
Girolamo Olgiati: In his essay “Olgiati” of 1900 (in OC, viii, 666-69), Unamuno translates a long passage from Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (Leipzig, 1899), i, 61-62. Olgiati’s exclamation comes at the end of that passage. Our translation comes from The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London and New York, 1944), p. 38.
63. “avidus malae famae”: The Annals of Tacitus (Loeb Classical Library, 1962), II, 28, pp. 424, 425: “Celebre inter acusatores Trionis ingenium erat avidumque famae malae.” “Trio’s genius, which was famous among the professional informers, hungered after notoriety.”
Erostratism: or Herostratism. “Do you know who Herostratus was?” one character asks another toward the end of Unamuno’s Amor y Pedagogía. “He was a man who burned down the temple of Ephesus to make his name imperishable. In the same way we burn down our felicity to bequeath our name, a vain sound, to posterity.” Unamuno seems to have invented the word. Cf. “Dos cartas inéditas de Unamuno,” by Dámaso Alonso, in Spanish Thought and Letters in the Twentieth Century (Nashville, 1966), pp. 4-5, where Alonso sums up the word’s meaning as: “to do something, set fire to a temple, or create a great literary work, so as not to die, not to die altogether.”
“Posterity . . . minorities”: Cf. Charles Gounod, Autobiographical Reminiscences with Family Letters and Notes on Music, tr. The Hon. W. Hely Hutchinson (London, 1896), p. 197: “The only true and definite sentence, that of posterity, is but the accumulated judgment of successive minorities.”
IV. THE ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM
65. Second Coming of Christ: Cf. 1 Thess. 4:16-17: “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”
66. Harnack: Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), eminent German Protestant theologian and church historian, best known for his Dogmengeschichte (English tr., 1894-99) which, along with other books and essays by German liberal Protestant theologians, Unamuno read avidly in the last years of the nineteenth century. The edition of Harnack’s work used by Unamuno is the Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte von Dr. Adolf Harnack, dritte verbesserte und vermehrte Auflage (Freiburg i. B. und Leipzig, Akademische Verlagsbuchhandlung von J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]). Of the three volumes making up the total work, the first two are dated 1894, while the third (containing the index to the three volumes) is 1890, and therefore does not belong to the third definitive edition.
These books are among the most annotated in the Unamuno library. They are a monument of erudition, and recount how early Christian faith hardened into dogma as it encompassed Greek philosophy and Roman law. Even the Reformation eventually became involved with “ordinance, doctrine, and ceremony,” and Harnack advocated a cleansing of all “non-essential” matter and a return to faith as “the beginning, middle, and end of all religious fervor.” The impact of Harnack’s research and concepts is patent throughout The Tragic Sense of Life and many other essays, especially the important “La fe” (“Faith”) of 1900.
It is of interest that Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45) was a member of Harnack’s last seminar and spoke at his teacher’s memorial service on June 15, 1930, in Berlin.
Nemesius: (fl. c. A.D. 390), Christian philosopher, Bishop of Emesius, and author of the treatise On Man's Nature.
Lactantius: Lucius Caelius Firmianus Lactantius, 240?—320?, a native of Africa, has been called the Christian Cicero; he wrote treatises on the “handiwork” and the “wrath” of God, and a history tracing the effects of Divine Judgment on contemporary events.
67. Hosea 11:1: “When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt.”
68. Rohde: Erwin Rohde, Psyche, Seelencult und Unsterblichkeit der Griechen (Tübingen, 1907), Erster Band, p. 181. The translation is from Psyche, The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, tr. W. B. Hillis (New York, 1966), i, 131. In a footnote concerning Rohde’s book, Unamuno says “Up to the present this is the leading work dealing with the belief of the Greeks in the immortality of the soul.”
Both the Titanic . . . jail: Rohde, op. cit., Zweiter Band, p. 121; tr. Hillis, II, 341-42: “The distinction between the Titanic and Dionysiac elements in man is an allegorical expression of the popular distinction between body and soul; it also corresponds to a profoundly felt estimate of the relative value of these two sides of man’s being. According to Orphic doctrine man’s duty is to free himself from the chains of the body in which the soul lies fast bound like the prisoner in his cell.”
“an immortality . . . populace.” Rohde, op. cit., Zweiter Band, p. 378; tr. Hillis, II, 538.
Pfleiderer; Otto Pfleiderer (1839-1908), German Protestant theologian. The quotation is from the third edition of Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtliche Grundlage (Berlin, 1896), p. 539.
69. Weizsäcker: Karl Heinrich von Weizsäcker (1822–99), German theologian and editor (1856-78) of Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie. The quotation is from Das apostolische Zeitalter der christlichen Kirche (Freiburg i. B., 1892), p. 102. The translation made from the second and revised edition by James Millar, The Apostolic Age of the Christian Church (London and New York, 1897), i, 123, runs: “This we are entitled to call the earliest Christian theology. In Paul’s case, it was a necessity; it supplied to some extent the want of personal acquaintance with Jesus. . .
70. Justin Martyr: born about A.D. 100 and beheaded about 165. Christian philosopher and apologist who opened the first Christian school in Rome. Cf. Apologies, ed. A.W.F. Blunt (Cambridge Patristic Texts, 1911), Apologia I, xlvi.
71. Malebranche: Nicolas de Malebranche (1638-1715). Malebranche emphasizes the notion referred to here in many other works of his: Entretiens sur la métaphysique et la religion, Conversations chrétiennes, Recherches de la vérité. For example, see Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce, édité par Ginette Dreyfus, Œuvres de Malebranche, Tome V (Paris, 1958), p. 43: “. . . there was no way of making men worthy of the glory they would possess one day comparable to that of allowing them all to be developed in sin, so that they might all receive mercy in Jesus Christ.”
Council of Nicaea: The first Council of Nicaea. By order of Constantine, the council of all bishops of the Roman world met in June of A.D. 325 and condemned the heresy of Arius.
Athanasius'. St. Athanasius (c. A.D. 296–373). As deacon he accompanied Bishop Alexander of Alexandria to the first council of Nicaea in 325; three years later he became the bishop of the see of Alexandria over which he presided for forty-six years with periods of exile for his opposition to Arianism, which was supported by some of the emperors, especially Constantius. Unamuno uses Harnack’s work as the basis for his discussion of Athanasius.
Socinian Protestantism: a forerunner of modern Unitarianism, originating with the Italians Laelius Socinus (1525–62) and his nephew Faustus Socinus (1539–1604). It spread from Poland to the Netherlands to England, and in the eighteenth century to New England. The Socinians denied the doctrine of the Trinity and accepted Jesus solely as a man, but chosen by God.
(Drat. I. 39): Cf. Harnack, op. cit., II, 203-04.
the Logos: Unamuno’s note is “On this head, see, among others, Harnack, II Teil, I Buch, VII cap., I.” That is, Vol. II, Book I, Ch. VII, I.
72. Of this Christ . . . eschatology: also This same Harnack . . . faith; also “The complete contradiction . . . contra-rational." Cf. Harnack, op. cit., II, 220 ff.
73. Fray Pedro Malón de Chaide: (1530-1589), author of Libro de la conversión de la Magdalena, a work on asceticism written in a popular and picturesque style; the Prologue contains a graceful eulogy of the Spanish language. The footnote by Unamuno reproduced in OC, XVI, 193, erroneously ascribes the quotation in question to Part IV, Ch. IX, rather than to the correct Part IV, Ch. LVI. Cf. La conversión de la Magdalena, ed. P. Félix García, Clásicos castellanos (Madrid, 1947), III, 126-27.
74. ex opere operato: “By virtue of the thing done.” In theology, a concept which substantiates the intrinsic merit of the sacraments irrespective of the virtue or merit of the priest.
Little wonder then: From St. Teresa’s Libro de las Relaciones Espirituales, translated as Spiritual Relations, Complete Works of St. Theresa, tr. and ed. E. Allison Peers (London and New York, 1957), fifth impression, I, 351-52.
75. Amiel, the Protestant: Amiel writes, in Fragments d'un Journal Intime (Unamuno’s library contains a marked copy of the Dixième Édition, Genève, 1908), Tome II, pp. 122-23: “15 août 1871.—Relu une deuxième fois La vie de Jésus, de Renan, seizième édition populaire. Ce qui est caractéristique dans cette analyse du christianisme, c’est que le péché n’y joue pas de rôle. Or si quelque chose explique le succès de la Bonne Nouvelle parmi les hommes, c’est qu’elle apportait la délivrance du péché, en un seul mot le salut. Il conviendrait pourtant d’expliquer religieusement une religion, et de ne pas esquiver le centre de son sujet. . . . Il y a dans Renan un reste de ruse séminariste. . . .”
The entire passage, translated by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Amiel's Journal (New York, 1928), p. 252, runs in English: “Re-read, for the second time, Renan’s ‘Vie de Jésus,’ in the sixteenth popular edition. The most characteristic feature of this analysis of Christianity is that sin plays no part at all in it. Now, if anything explains the success of the Gospel among men, it is that it brought them deliverance from sin —in a word, salvation. A man, however, is bound to explain a religion seriously, and not to shirk the very center of his subject. In Renan there are still some remains of a priestly ruse. . .
Renan’s answers to Amiel are contained in his two articles on “Henri-Frédéric Amiel,” written on September 30 and October 7, 1884, for the Journal des Débats and included in his Œuvres Complètes, ed. Henriette Psichari (Paris, 1948), Tome ii, pp. 1140-61. Renan is harsh toward Amiel who, he says, in the face of the infinite number of tasks still to be accomplished in the world, fell back upon “devouring himself” and “doubting about life.” In the second article, Renan argues: “It is not of sin, atonement and redemption that one must henceforth speak . . . it is of kindness, good cheer, indulgence, good humor and resignation. As hope in the other life disappears, we must accustom mortal beings to look upon life as tolerable, otherwise they will rebel. . . . Pessimism and nihilism are caused by the boredom of a life which, because of a defective social organization, is not worth living.”
76. Oliveira Martins: Joaquim Pedro Oliveira Martins (1845–94), outstanding Portuguese historian, author of many works, among which the História da Civilizaçâo Ibérica was Unamuno’s favorite, quoted by him many times. The translation is from  History of Iberian Civilization by Aubrey F. G. Bell (Oxford, 1930), p. 200.
Kaftan: Julius Kaftan (1848–1926), professor of religion at Berlin and representative of the Ritschlian “liberal” theology. His books Dogmatik (Tübingen, 1909) and Die Wahrheit der christlichen Religion (Basel, 1888) are both in Unamuno’s library at Salamanca.
Ritschl: Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89), German Protestant theologian. In his most influential work, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung (1870–74), he demonstrates his pivotal belief that Christianity is more a guide to life than a system of dogma; mysticism he held in low esteem. The quotation is from Dritter Band (Bonn, 1874), p. 436, while the translation is by H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (New York, 1900), pp. 499-500. The translation is of the third volume only of Ritschl’s work.
77. Melanchthon's Loci Communes: Cf. Wilhelm Herrmann’s “Christlich-protestantische Dogmatik” in Systematische Christliche Religion von Ernst Troeltsch, Joseph Pohle, Joseph Mausbach, Cornelius Krieg, Wilh. Herrmann, Rein. Seeberg, Wilhelm Faber, Heinrich Julius Holtzmann; Die Kultur Der Gegenwart (ed. Paul Hinneberg), Teil I, Abteilung iv, 2, zweiter verbesserte Auflage (Berlin und Leipzig, 1909), p. 130.
Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott: the edition in Unamuno’s library is the third (dritte Auflage, Stuttgart, 1896). There exists a translation “from the second thoroughly revised edition with annotations by the author” done by J. Sandys Stanyon (London, 1895) called The Communion of the Christian with God.
“the effective knowledge”: The reference is to Herrmann’s essay “Christlich-protestantische Dogmatik,” op. cit., p. 130.
78. “The desire to save one's soul . . . salvation”: ibid., pp. 130-31.
Ernst Troeltsch: (1865-1923), important Church historian who viewed Christianity within the context of history, not from without. Unamuno is referring to the following statement by Troeltsch: “Den grossartigsten Schmuck schliesslich empfing der Kultus durch das geistliche Konzert, das, von Schülerchören getragen, die lutherischen Kantoren zu einem Bestandteil der Kirche machte. Das Schönste, ja fast das Einzige, was die Kunst in diesem kirchlichen Zeitalter vollbracht hat, ist hier geschaffen worden. In Bach hat das Luthertum die tiefste Darstellung gefunden, die ihm überhaupt zuteil geworden ist.” It is from the long essay “Protestantisches Christentum und Kirche in der Neuzeit,” in Die Kultur der Gegenwart (ed. Paul Hinneberg), Teil i, Abteilung iv, 1: Geschichte der Christlichen Religion, zweite stark vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage (Berlin, 1909), p. 534.
The translation would be: “Religious worship received, finally, its most brilliant adornment in the sacred music which, executed by school choirs, made of Lutheran choirmasters an element of the Church. The finest, indeed the only, artistic accomplishment during this period of the Church was made in that area. It is in Bach that Lutheranism found the most profound representation it has ever achieved.”
celestial music!: “The common use of the expression música celestial to denote ‘nonsense, something not worth listening to,’ lends it a satirical byplay which disappears in the English rendering” (J. E. Crawford Flitch, in his translation of The Tragic Sense of Life). Unamuno’s tone-deafness was well known. Walter Starkie tells of how in Madrid “I also discovered that Unamuno was a-musical; to him sweet sound was but música celestial—the Spanish synonym for nonsense” (Introduction to Our Lord Don Quixote, this edition, Vol. 3, p. xviii).
Christ: For selections from The Christ of Velázquez, cf. Poetry, February, 1963.
Theologia Germanica: or Theologia deutsch, probably written in Frankfort about 1350 to explain the mystical experience to ordinary men. The author is supposed to have been a member of the association of the Friends of God that included Meister Eckhart, John Tauler, and the Blessed Henry Suso. The book was greatly admired by Luther, who published an incomplete edition of it in 1518. The translation used here is from Theologia Germanica, ed. Thomas S. Kepler (Cleveland and New York, 1952), p. 119.
79. I am not moved, my Lord:
No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte,
el cielo que me tienes prometido,
sonnet formerly attributed to a variety of authors, from St. Ignatius Loyola to St. Teresa, but now proved to be the work of Miguel de Guevara (c. 1585-c. 1646), a Mexican friar.
80. Pius IX: reigned 1846–78.
Loisy: Abbé Alfred Firmin Loisy (1857–1940), Bible critic and author (1902) of L'Évangile et l'Église (a polemical refutation of Adolf von Harnack’s What is Christianity?), a book which became the pivot of the Catholic Modernist movement, and which led to his eventual excommunication (1908). The quotation is from the second edition of Autour d'un petit Livre (Paris, 1903, pp. 211-13) in the same volume with L'Évangile et L'Église, third edition, 1904, 211-12.
81. Vatican Council: First Vatican Council (1869-70), defined “the traditional Catholic belief in the value of reason, and of its rights in the field of religion . . .” and the infallibility of the pope; cf. Philip Hughes, A Popular History of the Catholic Church (New York, 1954), p. 243.
The recent struggle . . . Modernism: In 1907 Pius X issued his decree Lamentabili sane exitu and his encyclical Pascendi, condemning Modernists who argued against the “objective supernatural character [of Catholicism] . . . reducing it to a matter of individual religious psychology” (Hughes, op. cit., pp. 268-69).
Dogme et Critique: by Édouard Le Roy (1870-1954), French philosopher, successor to Bergson as professor of philosophy at the Collège de France. The book referred to was published in Paris, 1906, and Ch. v concerns itself with the problem of Christ’s resurrection. Le Roy holds that the resurrection could not have been a real, material phenomenon in the ordinary sense: the resurrection—transcendental in meaning—cannot be linked to any physical or biological conditions, for it corresponds to another type of reality, psychological and spiritual in essence. Jesus’ lasting effect is proof in itself of the resurrection for He is eternally resurrected in His Church and in the Eucharist.
Unamuno read the fourth edition (Paris, 1907).
82. motiva credibilitatis . . . rationale obsequium: Reason is the springboard from which one goes to faith which is beyond but not against reason. Therefore faith is reasonable, but not solely an act of reason.
fides praecedit rationem . . . per fidem ad intellectum . . . credo ut intelligam: Cf. Étienne Gibson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, tr. L.E.M. Lynch (New York, 1960), for first quotation, p. 260, note 14; for second, p. 259, note 7; for third quotation, which is a transposition of Augustine’s frequent crede ut intelligas, both those places and p. 261, note 17.
. . . certum est, quia impossibile est: Tertullian, De Carne Christi, 5.
Pascal's il faut s’abêtir: Thought 233. Unamuno used the edition Blaise Pascal, Pensées, d’après l’édition de M. Brunschvicg (London, Paris, n.d.).
Donoso Cortés: Juan Donoso Cortés (1809–53); during a short life he was a vigorous writer, speaker, and political figure; a conservative, his most important work, much cited by “libertarian anti-liberals” in the twentieth century, is his Ensayo sobre el catolicismo, el liberalismo y el socialismo (1851). He held up Catholicism as antithetical to “progressive” modernity. The quotation is from the 1851 Barcelona edition of this work, Book I, Ch. v, pp. 66–67: “Por el contrario, entre la razón humana y lo absurdo hay una afinidad secreta, un parentesco estrechísimo. El pecado los ha unido con el vínculo de un indisoluble matrimonio. Lo absurdo triunfa del hombre cabalmente, porque está desnudo de todo derecho anterior y superior a la razón humana.”
Joseph de Maistre: 1754-1821, French diplomat and philosopher; in his Du Pape (On the Pope), 1819, he upheld the primacy of the Pontiff and examined schismatic groups; other works were De l'Église Gallicane (On the Gallican Church), 1820, and Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg (St. Petersburg Nights), 1821.
Quod apud . . . traditum: quoted in Harnack’s Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (Freiburg i. B., 1888), i, 329. The translation of the entire quotation (“Nullus inter multos eventus unus est . . . quod apud multos unum invenitur, non est erratum sed traditum”) by Neil Buchanan (History of Dogma, New York, 1958, II, 67-68) is “One event among many is as good as none; but when one and the same feature is found among many, it is not an aberration but a tradition.”
Lamennais: Hugues Félicité Robert de Lamennais (1772-1854), French ecclesiastic and philosopher; his early works were a defense of ultramontanism, but he grew ever more unorthodox and died refusing the sacraments; his Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion (1817–23) is an attack on the rationalistic thought following on the skepticism of Voltaire and Rousseau; in this book Lamennais held that all beliefs, especially religious, affect society and that therefore indifference is not acceptable; he supported the cumulative opinion and belief of society against the individual’s power of rationality; the first part of this work was published in London (1895) as Essay on Indifference in Matters of Religion, translated by Lord Stanley of Alderley. Lamennais’s poetical Paroles d'un croyant (1834) was condemned in an encyclical in the year of publication. His final position favored “the Christianity of the human race” over that of the Vatican; no one man should stand in his beliefs against the traditional ones held by mankind. Unamuno cites him with frequency.
The entire quotation, of which Unamuno extracts a part, is “La certitude, principe de vie de l’intelligence, résulte du concours des moyens et de la similitude des rapports; elle est, si cette expression m’est permise, une production sociale. . . .” and comes from Tome Deuxième of Essai sur L'indifférence en matière de religion, nouvelle édition (Paris, n.d.), p. 104. Note Unamuno’s mistranslation of the first part of the sentence. The English translation in the text, nonetheless, follows Unamuno’s wording.
“I . . . true”: Joseph de Maistre, Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, Xe entretien, from Œuvres Choisies (Paris, 1909), II, 163.
83. its supreme goodness or utility: The concept reflects the influence of William James’s pragmatism on Unamuno.
“Since . . . none”: Lactantius, Divin. Inst., lib. II, cap. iv; quoted by Lamennais, op. cit., quatrième partie, tome troisième, p. 161.
Henry Suso: the Blessed Henry Suso (1295?-1366), German mystical thinker and writer. The reference is to Deutsche Schriften des seligen Heinrich Seuse, Literarisches Institut von Dr. Max Suttler, München, 1876, Zweites Buch, neuntes Kapitel, p. 355, a book in Unamuno’s library. Translation: Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, translated with an Introduction and Notes by James M. Clark (London, 1953), p. 79:
THE SERVANT: Lord, everything is all that the heart could wish for, except one thing: Truly, Lord, when a soul is faint with longing for Thee, and for the sweet, loving converse of Thy presence, Lord, then Thou art silent, and speakest not a single word that one can hear. Alas, my Lord, is it not painful when Thou, gentle Lord, art the only chosen love of their heart, and yet dost behave like a stranger, and keep silence so completely?
Reply of ETERNAL WISDOM: Do not all creatures proclaim that it is I? [Footnote explains “That I exist.”]
THE SERVANT: Ah, Lord, this is not enough for a longing heart.
Leo XIII: elected Pope in 1878, reigned until 1903. In his Aeterni Patris (1879) he restored St. Thomas Aquinas to his supreme place in Catholic philosophy and theology.
84. faith of the charcoal burner: “la fe del carbonero,” proverbial expression to denote unblinking acceptance of religious dogma.
“Do not ask me . . . answer you”: Part of the catechism of Gaspar Astete, S.J. (1537–1601), widely used in Spain; according to Unamuno it fostered passive acceptance of dogma and narrowness of thought.
“reservoir instead of river”: Phillips Brooks (1835–93), American Episcopal bishop, orator, and writer. The quotation comes from “The Sufficient Grace of God,” in Sermons Preached in English Churches (New York, 1883), p. 129.
“The victory of the Nicene Creed”: Harnack, op. cit., II, 1 Kap., VII, 3, p. 274. Translated from the third German edition of Adolf Harnack, History of Dogma by Neil Buchanan (New York, 1958), vol. 4, p. 106.
85. Pohle: Joseph Pohle (1852-1922), professor of theology and philosophy. The quotation is from the essay “Christlich-katholische Dogmatik” from the collection Systematische Christliche Religion, in the series Die Kultur der Gegenwart, Teil I, Abteilung IV, 2.
Gnosticism: A many-faceted religious movement, tangential to primitive Christianity. A religion in its own right, its sources include the pagan Corpus Hermeticum and the oldest fonts of Jewish mysticism. In general it depreciates the cosmos and spurns atonement. “The sink of ancient spirituality . . . Gnosticism, that deathbed whereon all the myths of oriental and occidental antiquity crowded together for a last convulsion,” Paul Elmer More, The Greek Tradition, Christ the Word ,Vol. IV (Princeton, 1927), p. 70. In its Christian form, it developed into Manichaeism, a Gnostic world religion. Evil came to be represented as a break within the Godhead; eventually there was a division between the Creator and the highest God: the world, an evil, cannot be the work of a good God; the pleroma or realm of light is beyond this world; Valentinus and Basilides negated the humanity of Christ, and also rejected the Old Testament. (Cf. A Vindication of the Counterfeit Basilides, by Jorge Luis Borges, Englished by A. Kerrigan in Transatlantic Review, 27, London and New York, 1967–68. Borges judges the Prophetic Books of William Blake to be a rediscovery of the insights of Gnosticism.) Thomas Molnar, in his “Gnosticism: the Perennial Heresy,” Triumph, July 1968, points out that for Gnostics, the Creator, or Demiurgos, was sometimes an anti-God, or the principle of materiality, and he goes so far as to label all materialist doctrines descendants of this heresy, categorizing Hegel and Marx as “neo-Gnostics,” who recharacterized the Demiurgos as “reaction”; he also notes that God remains “powerless” in the struggle of the soul towards spirituality and that mankind alone can save itself: this is a partly Unamunian view (“Charity is the impulse . . . to liberate God.”), but Unamuno’s stand is not properly either meliorative or Gnostic.
Cf. Harnack, op. cit., on Gnosticism.
86. as Herrmann says: Wilhelm Herrmann, in his essay “Christlich-protestantische Dogmatik,” op. cit., p. 161.
Channing pointed out: From “Objections to Unitarian Christianity Considered,” 1819, in The Complete Works of William Ellery Channing (London, 1884), p. 303.
V. THE RATIONAL DISSOLUTION
88. “immortality to light”: The Philosophical Works of David Hume Including All the Essays, etc., in four volumes (Boston and Edinburgh, 1854), vol. 4, p. 547.
89. Aristotle . . . substance: De Anima, II, 1, 2.
90. devoted to pragmatism: “Pragmatism, a New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” Popular Lectures on Philosophy by William James (London and New York, 1907), pp. 87-88.
94. Cartesian dualism: To Descartes, the mind was divorced from the external world of extended objects. Cf., for example, the Principles of Philosophy, Part i, Principle LXIII: “How we may have distinct conceptions of thought and extension, inasmuch as the one constitutes the nature of mind, and the other that of body,” in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, rendered into English by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Gross (Cambridge, 1967), vol. i.
Curso de filosofía elemental: the quotation is from Tomo ii of the Obras Completas (Barcelona, 1925), section titled “Psicología,” Capítulo II (“Simplicidad del Alma”).
Jaime Luciano Balmes (1810–48) was one of the first philosophers Unamuno read in his father’s library as a very young man. In his El protestantismo comparado con el catolicismo (tr. as European Civilization, Baltimore, 1918), Balmes refuted Guizot’s History, and held that Catholicism and progress were one; in politics, he advocated a union of Carlists and Liberals in Spain.
95. feeling something: Treatise of Human Nature, Book i, Part iv, Section vi, “Of Personal Identity,” 1854 edn., i, 312: “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.”
96. esse est percipi: From George Berkeley (1685–1753), in Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in A New Theory of Vision and other Select Philosophical Writings (London and New York, n.d.), p. 114: “For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence, out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.”
97. Bishop Joseph Butler: See herein, note to p. 8.
paragraph 140: “In a large sense indeed, we may be said to have an idea, or rather a notion of spirit, that is, (1) we understand the meaning of the word, otherwise we could not affirm or deny anything of it. Moreover, (2) as we conceive the ideas that are in the minds of other spirits by means of our own, which we suppose to be resemblances of them: so we know other spirits by means of our own soul, which in that sense is the image or idea of them, it having a like respect to other spirits, that blueness of heat by me perceived has to those ideas perceived by another.” From Berkeley, op. cit., p. 186, in Unamuno’s library, marked and slightly indexed for his own use by Unamuno.
of the soul: “The natural immortality of the soul is a necessary consequence of the foregoing doctrine.” Berkeley, op. cit., paragraph 141.
98. Alexander of Aphrodisias: or Alexandri Aphrodisei, Greek commentator on Aristotle, whom the humanists studied at the end of the fifteenth century. His De intellectu was printed in the 1480s in Venice.
Pietro Pomponazzi: (1462–1524), Aristotelian philosopher, humanist, and teacher. His De immortalitate animae was published in Bologna in 1516. Pomponazzi argues that the immortality of the soul cannot be affirmed or denied by natural reason. The soul, however, operates and exists within the body, although in no special place; its essential operation is knowing and since it can grasp universals, it participates, in a way, in immortality.
two thick volumes: London and New York, 1903.
99. Spencer-. Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). Cf. herein, note to p. 20. All of Part I of the First Principles is entitled “The Unknowable” which, in Spencer’s words, means “that the reality underlying appearances is totally and for ever inconceivable by us; . . . .”
100. Schleiermacher: Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher ( 1768-1834), German theologian and philosopher who held that since man is conscious and knows he cannot exist for himself, he consequently feels himself absolutely dependent; this feeling, he believed, is the source of all religion; all religion is positive because religious feeling is experienced through sense consciousness; the religion of reason, on the other hand, is a pure abstraction. His principal work is Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche (2 vols., 1821–22). In English: The Christian Faith, tr. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh, 1948; New York, 1963).
It seeks to arrest the flow.: an echo of Bergson’s “durée.”
In order to analyze . . . destroy it.: reminiscent of Wordsworth’s “we murder to dissect” from “The Tables Turned.” In Unamuno’s copy of Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of Wordsworth (a reprint of the 1827 edition, London and New York, n.d.), practically all the poems are marked (“The Tables Turned” has nine check-marks, corresponding, probably, to nine readings).
101. appear and do not appear to be: The last speech by the “venerable and awful” (as Socrates called him) Parmenides, in the Parmenides, is: “To this we may add the conclusion. It seems that, whether there is or is not a one, both that one and the others alike are and are not, and appear and do not appear to be, all manner of things in all manner of ways, with respect to themselves and to one another.” To which Socrates says: “Most true,” and the dialogue comes to an end. (From Plato and Parmenides, tr. F. M. Cornford, London, 1939, reprinted in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns [Princeton, 1969], pp. 920, 956.)
102. Dean Stanley: Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815-81), English theologian, professor of ecclesiastical history at Oxford, dean of Westminster. The quotation is from the first lecture in Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church (London, 1861), p. 27.
104. Vinet: Alexandre Rodolphe Vinet (1797-1847), Swiss theologian and critic, several of whose books were early translated into English: as, Vital Christianity (1846), Outlines of Philosophy and Literature (1865). The book here referred to by Unamuno was issued in English, translated by Thomas Smith, as Studies On Pascal, Edinburgh, 1859; his Englishing of the quoted passage reads (p. 80): “Of the two wants with which human nature is continually distressed, that of happiness is not only the more universally felt, and the more constantly experienced, it is also the more imperious. And this want is not purely sensual; it is intellectual. It is not only for the soul, it is also for the mind, that happiness is a necessity. Happiness makes part of the truth.”
105. pacata posse mente omnia tueri: De Rerum Natura, v. 1203. The entire passage runs: “O unhappy race of mankind, to ascribe such doings to the gods and to add thereto bitter wrath! What groans did they then create for themselves, what wounds for us, what tears for generations to come! It is no piety to show oneself often with covered head, turning towards a stone and approaching every altar, none to fall prostrate upon the ground and to spread open the palms before shrines of the gods, none to sprinkle altars with the blood of beasts in showers and to link vow to vow, but rather to be able to survey all things with mind at peace.” From the Loeb Classical Library edition, p. 425.
1 Cor. 1:23: Unamuno gives, as Spanish for the Bible, “un escándalo para los judíos y una locura para los intelectuales.”
odium generis humani: From The Annals (Loeb Classical Library, 1962), Tacitus IV, Book xv, 44, p. 282, where Christianity is called exitiabilis superstitio or “pernicious superstition.” “Odio humani generis” appears on p. 285.
“. . . to come to conclusions”'. Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, troisième série, 1854–69 (Paris, 1919), p. 220.
The translation is from Gustave Flaubert, Letters, selected, with an Introduction, by Richard Rumbold, tr. J. M. Cohen (New York, 1951), p. 136. Between the word “ebony” and the sentence starting with “The gods . . .” there is a sentence which Unamuno omitted: “Pas de cris, pas de convulsions, rien que la fixité d’un visage pensif.” “No cries, no struggles, only the fixity of the pensive gaze.”
The letter to Madame Roger des Genettes was probably written in 1861.
106. “This people who knoweth not the law are cursed”: John 7:49.
Soloviev . . . hypocrisy: Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev (1853–1900), Russian religious philosopher and poet; a friend of Dostoevski (he may have been the “original” of Aloysha in The Brothers Karamazov); a believer in the eventual deification of mankind, he influenced Nikolai Berdyaev and Aleksander Blok. The editors have been unable to trace present quotation.
Vogt: Karl Vogt (1817–95), German naturalist and materialist.
Haeckel: Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834–1919), German biologist and evolutionist; from “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” he developed a philosophy of materialistic monism.
Büchner: Friedrich K.C.L. Büchner (1824-99), German physician; his Kraft und Stoff (Energy and Matter), 1855, was a materialistic view of the cosmos.
Virchow: Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), German anatomist, originator of the doctrine of germinal continuity.
108. “Live for the day”: Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero, Odes, i, xi, 8, usually Englished as “Seize the day, and put as little trust as you can in the morrow.”
Proposition XXI: The English given here is from The Ethics (Ethica Or dine Geometrico Demonstrata), tr. R.H.M. Elwes, The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (New York, 1951), vol. n. All the Spinoza citations in English in this chapter are taken from this same source.
111. “What good . . . feel it?”: The Imitation of Christ, Part i, Ch. i. The Modern Library edition (carrying the generic title The Consolation of Philosophy) gives on p. 130 the following translation: “I desire rather to know compunction than its definition.”
Diderot: “Lettre au sujet des observations du Chevalier de Chastellux sur le Traité du mélodrame,” Œuvres complètes de Diderot (Paris, 1875), VIII, 509. The story is not precisely as Unamuno recounts it: the eunuch did not wish lessons in aesthetics, but simply advice on which girl to choose.
“the eternal recurrence”: cf. Index to the Complete Works of Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (London, 1913).
112. a parte ante . . . a parte post: An interesting parallelism of thought is to be found in a later-day poet:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton,” lines 1-5.
the laughing lion: Thus Spake Zarathustra, iv, LXXI, “The Greeting.” Unamuno refers to the same “laughing lion” in his sonnet to Nietzsche, Rosario de sonetos líricos (OC, XIII, 611).
113. Carducci: Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907), Italian critic and poet, much admired by Unamuno, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1906. (See Unamuno’s essay “A propósito de Josué Carducci” in OC, iv, 890, in another volume of this edition.) “Idillio maremmano” can be found in The Oxford Book of Italian Verse, No. 344 (where it is spelled “Idillio Maremanno”); the poem is from Rime nuove, his fourth book (first edition 1887); the verse was written in September, 1872. A translation of this piece by G. L. Bickersteth, Carducci (London, 1913), p. 169, renders these lines as follows:
Better by work to have forgot, than sought
To solve, vast riddles that no man solved yet!
“Su Monte Mario,” written in January of 1882, is from Odi Barbare, a collection of fifty-seven poems written between 1873 and 1889. Unamuno’s Spanish translation of the poem, entitled “Sobre el monte Mario,” is to be found in Poesías (1907), OC, XIII, 477-78.
114. we know nothing: the italics given here are found in the quoted lines from Cain: A Mystery, in The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, ed. E. H. Coleridge (London, 1905), pp. 628, 633, 639. Cf. herein, note to p. 146.
115. “philosophy the illusion”: Poems of Wordsworth, chosen and edited by Matthew Arnold (London and New York, 1907), p. xix.
Brunetière . . . bankruptcy of science.: Ferdinand Brunetière (1849-1906), French critic. The expression comes from the article “Après une visite au Vatican” which appeared on January 1, 1895, in the Revue des Deux Mondes and was incorporated into the book Questions actuelles (Paris, 1907), pp. 3-47. Partly in refutation of the scientific claims made by Renan in L'Avenir de la Science, published in 1890, Brunetiere speaks of “banqueroutes” and “faillites” of science, its inability to enlighten us about man’s destiny.
116. the phenomenalism of Hume . . . Mill: David Hume (1711–76) says in his Treatise of Human Nature (London, 1911), i, 5: “And, as the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences, so the only solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation.”
In his System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive (London, New York and Toronto, 1941, Book III, Ch. xxi, Sec. 4, p. 376) John Stuart Mill (1806–73) writes: “The uniformity in the succession of events, otherwise called the law of causation, must be received not as a law of the universe, but of that portion of it only which is within range of our means as sure observation, with a reasonable degree of extension to adjacent cases. To extend it further is to make a supposition without evidence, and to which, in the absence of any ground from experience for estimating its degree of possibility, it would be idle to attempt to assign any.” The edition of the System of Logic in Unamuno’s library is the 1872 edition published in London by Longmans, Green.
VI. IN THE DEPTHS OF THE ABYSS
118. Parce . . . orbis: “Spare the only hope of all the universe.” The quotation from Tertullian is in Harnack, op. cit., i, 552.
Marcion: born about A.D. 85, raised a Christian, year of death unknown. To him, the mystery of Christ was so tremendous that it aroused a sense of absolute estrangement: God is all love, man is helpless and wretched, and the Creator of the world cannot be identified with God. Thus Marcion rejected the Old Testament with its merciless creator. Christianity, he felt, was already falsifying the truth, and he attempted a critical sifting of the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul, and founded the Marcionite Church which spread widely.
119. Doubt . . . function of method: In his Discours de la Méthode (1637) Descartes rejected as false all opinions in any way open to doubt in order to arrive at something indubitable. And while he considered all things false, he arrived at the certainty that such doubt involved thought: I think, therefore I am.
hothouse doubt: Unamuno is again referring to the poêle, the room heated by a stove where Descartes elaborated his method. See Part II of the Discours.
120. a provisional ethic: Descartes’s words are “une morale par provision.”
121. brother Kierkegaard: from Concluding Unscientific Postscript: translated from the Danish by David F. Swenson, completed after his death and provided with Introduction and Notes by Walter Lowrie (Princeton, 1941), Book Two, Part Two, Ch. III, pp. 267-68. The last sentence is in a footnote.
The Holberg mentioned in the passage is the Danish playwright Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), while the play in question is referred to in French as La Ruelle de l'accouchée and in English as The Lying-in Chamber. There is no English translation of the play.
122. Hegel . . . rationalist-. G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) was as impersonal a thinker as Kierkegaard was subjective. Man, for Hegel, achieves concreteness only as a “moment” in the Absolute. Religion he considered a form of philosophy and Kierkegaard charged him with being essentially an atheist. In addition, the Dane inveighed against Hegel for absorbing the concrete individual into an abstract Absolute, for his concept of the individual only in terms of larger institutions such as State and Church; in short, for turning man away from the significance of his own existence.
123. official State-philosopher: for Hegel the State and its institutions embodied objective reason and rational freedom, and he glorified the Prussian state. He was called by that state to occupy the first chair of philosophy at Berlin (1818).
125. “destructive barbarism”: V. Troeltsch, Systematische christliche Religion, in Die Kultur der Gegenwart series. Unamuno himself supplies this information in a footnote to the text. The essay from which the quotation is taken is called “Wesen der Religion und der Religionswissenschaft,” op. cit. (see herein, note to p. 78), p. 10.
Robert Browning: from “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.” Unamuno read and penciled (principally with the Spanish equivalents of the more difficult English words) practically every poem in the two large volumes of the Poetical Works of Robert Browning (London, 1905); the sections Unamuno used in his own work are generally indicated by a red line; the verses quoted here are to be found on page 531.
Vinet: See herein, note to p. 104. Vinet’s laconic description of the “book” mentioned by Unamuno is a cutting minimization: “The author has only added an eloquent preface to the report which he made last year to the French Academy, on the autograph manuscript of the Thoughts” (Smith translation, p. 249). The title of the section—X—of Vinet’s book dealing with Cousin is entitled (in Smith’s English): “Literary Critique on M. Victor Cousin’s Essay on the Thoughts of Pascal” (p. 248). Smith’s wording of the passage we have quoted in Unamuno’s text is: “Even the knowledge of the mind, as such, has need of the heart. Without the desire to see, we do not see. When the life and the thought are greatly materialized, we do not believe in spiritual things.” Studies in Pascal, by Alexander Vinet, tr. Thomas Smith (Edinburgh, 1859), p. 274. Unamuno used Études sur Blaise Pascal, par A. Vinet, quatrième édition (Paris, 1904).
126. Ritschl: see herein, note to p. 76. The full title of the work quoted is Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung (3 vols., 1870–74). We cite the passage from the English translation of this work, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, Vol. in, translated by various hands (Ch. iv was rendered by H. R. Mackintosh), and edited by H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay (Edinburgh, 1900), pp. 209-10. (This edition of Vol. in was published independently of the rest of the work.)
127. The system of antithesis: Kant held that when pure reason cannot handle categories beyond experiential phenomena, it comes up against contradictions that cannot be resolved. Hegel postulates that such contradictions or dialectical opposites (thesis and antithesis) are true in the more comprehensive synthesis.
The Analysis of Sensations: (Die Analyse der Empfindigungen und Physischen zum Psychischen, 1886, i, Section 12, n.), translated from the first German edition by C. M. Williams, revised and supplemented from the fifth German edition by Sydney Waterlow (Chicago and London, 1914), p. 23, n.: “The scientist and scholar have also the battle of existence to fight, that the ways even of science still lead to the mouth, and that the pure impulse towards knowledge is still an ideal in our present social conditions.”
Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Austrian physicist and philosopher, is perhaps best remembered in the field of ballistics, where he elaborated the properties of shock waves, so that the Mach reflection, Mach effect, and Mach stem are concepts used in studying the effects of atomic explosion.
128. Kierkegaard', in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. Swenson and Lowrie, Part Two, Ch. III, p. 273. Unamuno’s own footnote to this quotation reads: “I leave almost untranslated his original expression Existents-Consequents. It means existential or practical consequence, and not the consequence of pure reason or logic.”
129: Loyson: Hyacinthe Loyson (1827–1912). Ordained a Dominican in 1851, entered the Carmelite Order in 1863, named to pulpit of Notre Dame in 1865. He opposed Vatican I, married a former Protestant woman in 1872, then left Carmel and finally the Church. Founded the Liberal Catholic Church in Geneva in 1873-74, then the Gallican Church in Paris in 1879.
For a full discussion of Loyson by Unamuno, see The Agony of Christianity in another volume of this edition.
Truth is whatever I feel to be truth: There are unmistakable echoes here of Kierkegaard’s concept of truth as subjectivity.
130. “What! . . . that he existed at all.” From Lamennais’s Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion. Tome deuxième, Troisième Partie, Ch. 1, p. 83. All the Spanish editions give chapter 67, which is wrong. Cf. note on Lamennais herein, p. 82.
133. Life of Don Quixote and Sancho: see Vol. 3 of this edition.
134. Francke: August Hermann Francke (1663-1727), German pietist, Bible scholar, and educator, who founded the so-called “ragged school” of orphans and pauper students; his influence turned Halle into a center of pietism.
if . . . He actually existed: Albrecht Ritschl: Geschichte des Pietismus, II, Abt. 1 (Bonn, 1884), p. 251. Cf. herein, note to p. 76.
I should certainly exist too:
Sufro yo a tu costa,
Dios no existente, pues si tú existieras
existiría yo también de veras.
Cf. “La oración del ateo,” Rosario de sonetos líricos (1911), OC, XIII, 546; in another volume of this edition.
servum arbitrium: bondage of the will. In his book The Bondage of the Will, an answer to Erasmus’s The Freedom of the Will, Luther argues that man is incapable by himself of willing himself into a proper relationship with God.
The difference between the “tragic sense” of Calvinism and the Catholic “temper” or “talante” is expertly handled by José Luis L. Aranguren in Catolicismo y protestantismo como formas de existencia (Madrid, 1952, 1957, 1963); see especially “Sobre el talante religioso de Miguel de Unamuno,” pp. 193-211. Unamuno, says the author (pp. 198-99), “begins to err when, alongside of this ‘Protestant desperation,’ he affirms the existence of a ‘Catholic desperation.’ We know that there cannot be any ‘Catholic desperation,’ because the Catholic is the opposite of the ‘despairing man.’ What Unamuno calls [Catholic desperation] is either the temptation to despair, or the secularization of Protestant desperation, following the line of decreasing faith Luther-Pascal-Kierkegaard-Unamuno.”
faith . . . charcoal burner: this is Unamuno’s frequent way of referring to unblinking acceptance of dogma.
And what was that abyss, that terrible gouffre . . . il faut s’abêtir: All the prominent passages in Pascal have abîme; however, Baudelaire says “Pascal avait son gouffre. . . .” in his poem “Le Gouffre.” For “il faut s’abêtir,” see Pascal’s Thought No. 233.
135. Jansenism: an ascetic religious movement based on the Augustinus (1640) of Bishop Jansenius (1585–1638), Dutch theologian and Bishop of Ypres. Its center was Port-Royal which under Angélique Arnaud became a retreat that received Pascal and other learned men. It was closed by Louis XIV in 1705 and destroyed in 1710.
Abbé de Saint-Cyran: Jean du Verger de Hauranne (1581–1643), friend to Jansenius, spiritual director at Port-Royal, born in Bayonne, and therefore of the French Basque country; consequently, according to Unamuno, “of the same race” as Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Society of Jesus, born at the estate of Loyola in Guipúzcoa. Unamuno was, of course, also a Basque, born in Bilbao.
incredulous adulator: Voltaire. The line is from his “Épitre á l’auteur du livre des Trois Imposteurs."
136. immortality is no less so: Cf. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. Swenson and Lowrie, pp. 152-58. For example (p. 154): “. . . the question of immortality is essentially not a learned question, rather it is a question of inwardness, which the subject by becoming subjective must put to himself. Objectively the question cannot be answered, because objectively it cannot be put, since immortality precisely is the potentiation and highest development of the developed subjectivity.”
137. “The time will come . . “Cantico del gallo silvestre” from Operette Morali. The translation is by J. H. Whitfield in Leopardi: Poems and Prose, ed. Angel Flores (Bloomington, 1966), pp. 225-26.
Spencer: Taking direction from Darwin and the embryologist K. E. von Baer, Spencer conceived of the evolution of all forms, organic and non-organic, from indeterminate homogeneity to more determinate heterogeneity, with an offsetting tendency toward integration into larger wholes or closer associations of men.
139. Walt Whitman: Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was sent to Unamuno on April 30, 1906, by Prof. Everett Ward Olmsted of Cornell University. On August 6 of that same year, Unamuno published his story “El canto adámico” (included in the collection El espejo de la muerte, published in 1913 and included in OC, ii; in another volume of this edition) in which the author translates some of Whitman’s verses to a friend. This, as Manuel Garcia Blanco points out, gives Unamuno first place among Spanish writers who concerned themselves with the American poet. For a full discussion of Unamuno and Whitman, consult the chapter “Walt Whitman” in García Blanco’s América y Unamuno (Madrid, 1964), pp. 368-405.
143. “life is a dream”: The reference is to Calderon’s drama La vida es sueño, which Unamuno uses as a point of reference throughout his works.
145. progressives . . . European thought: Unamuno, who had been an europeizante in his earlier period, a partisan of bringing Spain up to the level of France, England, and Germany, became, by the turn of the century, the enemy of such attitudes, and proposed that Spain “hispanize” Europe. One need only compare his “En torno al casticismo” (written in the form of five articles in 1895 and published in book form in 1902, OC, in, 157-303, another volume in this edition) with the article “Sobre la europeización” (OC, III, included in another volume of this edition) and especially his Life of Don Quixote and Sancho (Vol. 3 of this edition).
cardiacal truth: “Cardiacal” is an adjective Unamuno also frequently applies to certain of his favorite writers—-who composed as much with their hearts as with their minds—such as Sénancour, Kierkegaard, Pascal.
VII. LOVE, PAIN, COMPASSION, AND PERSONALITY
146. Byron: The Cain and Abel theme is central to Unamuno’s thought and work. Cf. the novel Abel Sánchez and the play El Otro (other volumes of this edition).
as Leopardi sang:
Fratelli a un tempo stesso, Amor e Morte
Ingenerò la sorte.
from Amor e morte. See herein, note to p. 50.
148. The love of money . . . evil: 1 Tim. 6:10.
And some people . . . flesh: Cf. La tía Tula (OC, ix; another volume in this edition).
149. this child . . . falls sick and dies: It is of significance to point out here that a few months after his birth in October 1896 Unamuno’s third child, Raimundo Jenaro, suffered an attack of meningitis and developed hydrocephalia. Grief over his child’s misfortune aggravated Unamuno’s feelings of guilt at having lost his faith and brought on the famous “crisis of 1897” of which he writes in many letters and which is best reflected in his Diario íntimo, started about the time of the child’s illness.
The crisis erupted one night in March of 1897; when Unamuno’s wife, Concha, saw the grief and suffering of her husband, she cried out “¡Hijo mío!” (“My son!” or “My child!”), a scene which appears in several novels and plays by Don Miguel, and accounts for the statement (page 150) “And in woman all love is maternal.”
151. Isabel . . . Lorenzo: From Keats’s “Isabella or The Pot of Basil,” in The Poetical Works of John Keats (London, 1899), p. 183 (a book much marked by Unamuno, in his library).
152. That distant star . . . existing: Cf. the poem “Aldebarán” (Rimas de dentro, 1923, OC, XIII, 882-86).
155. Dante: The lines quoted are from the Inferno of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Canto V, verses 121-23, here in the translation of Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, 1970):
“There is no greater sorrow than to recall, in wretchedness, the happy time; . . .”
Herodotus: The English here is from The Histories of Herodotus, tr. George Rawlinson, ed. E. H. Blakeney (London and New York, 1964), p. 281.
156. Giambattista Vico: (1668–1744), Italian cultural historian, who postulated a cyclical development of history and retraced the evolution of the earliest myths. His “new science” is a milestone in the philosophy of history, the theoretical history of science and the history of ideas. The quotations from his work are from Della metafisica poetica, Book II, of Scienza nuova; the English given here is from the translation by Thomas G. Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, in their The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated from the third edition, 1744 (Ithaca, 1958), pp. 104, 105, 106.
157. Tacitus: the quotation here is from Annals, v, 10.
It was useless . . . positivism: Auguste Comte (1798-1857), father of Positivism, divided the history of man into three stages: theological, metaphysical, and positivistic.
158. Memorabilia: in Memorabilia and Oeconomicus (Loeb Classical Library, 1923), pp. 5-7 (Memorabilia, i, i, 6-9, as mentioned by Unamuno); the Anaxagoras reference is in IV, VII, 6, pp. 349-55.
Aristotle . . . necessity: Physics, II, VIII. Aristotle does not mention Zeus, but see note on Aristophanes, below.
159. Bergson: Henri Bergson (1859-1941), French philosopher and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. The foreign philosopher most widely read by such members of the generation of 1898 as Azorin, Machado, Unamuno. The reference here is to Bergson’s Évolution créatrice (1907) which, along with other works, represents a reaction against the positivism, determinism, and evolutionism of the late nineteenth century, in favor of intuitionism.
Richard Avenarius: Richard H. L. Avenarius (1843-1896), German philosopher and professor of philosophy at Zurich, originator of a positivist system known as “empiriocriticism (attacked by Lenin in his tract Materialism and Empirio Criticism, 1909). The quotation comes from Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (Leipzig, 1888), p. xix.
160. The Clouds: lines 367-89. Cf. the translation by William Arrowsmith (Ann Arbor, 1962), pp. 34-35; “Strepsiades: Then who makes it rain? . . . Sokrates: Why, the Clouds, of course. . . . Strep.: But who makes them move before they collide? Isn’t that Zeus? Sokr.: Not Zeus, idiot. The convection-principle! Strep.: Convection? That’s a new one. Just think. So Zeus is out and convection-principle’s in. Tch. Tch. But wait: you haven’t told me who makes it thunder. . . .”
161. Berkeley: Cf. herein note to p. 96.
Hartmann: Karl Robert Eduard Von Hartmann (1842–1906), German philosopher, author of Die Philosophie des Unbewussten (1869), English translation, The Philosophy of the Unconscious (1884). In his view, will and existence are sin, and a collective reason must eventually lead to a collective effort to will non-existence; civilization involves the annulment of the will to live and the freeing of the unconscious from its suffering.
162. Lamarck: Jean Baptiste de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829), French naturalist who believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics and formulated a theory of evolution from imperfect to perfect beings, stemming from the perfecting power of nature and responding to the changes in environment. Darwin recognized that Lamarck had drawn attention to the probability that organic change was the result of law and not miracle.
platter Empirismus: Schopenhauer-Briefe, ed. Ludwig Schemann (Leipzig, 1893), p. 325.
163. the inner, essential force: Unamuno is here echoing Bergson’s élan vital.
166. material things . . . hunger: Unamuno wrote a prologue (in OC, VII, 384-93) to the book of the Catalan biologist Ramón Turró, Orígenes del conocimiento (el hambre) , first published in French ( 1914; this French edition was sent to Unamuno by the author with a dedication, and is profusely marked by Unamuno), and later in German, and finally in Spanish (Madrid, 1921) in which he says “When I read this book in its French edition (since it was published in German and French before it was in Spanish, the language in which it was written), I was struck by how certain of its outstanding psychological ideas coincided with ideas which I have long held and expounded in some of my books. The principal idea is the one which is expressed in a synthetic phrase—therefore lending itself to misinterpretation—-to the effect that the external world of the senses is revealed to us by hunger; as knowledge, it is the handiwork of hunger. Of hunger, which is individual, and of love, which is the hunger of the species. . . .”
167. “And what is truth?”:. Cf. “¿Qué es verdad?” in OC, III; in another volume of this edition.
169. Emanuel Swedenborg: (1688–1772), the Swedish scientist and theologian, postulated a system of “correspondence” in which everything on the material plane corresponds to its aspect among the spiritual realities; the reality, thus, is spiritual, and the material aspect but a reflection or correspondence. Swedenborg, then, is the inverse of the classical “spiritualist.” The English given here is taken from Heaven and its Wonders and Hell: from Things Heard and Seen, the Everyman edition of 1911, p. 22, in Unamuno’s library at Salamanca, used and marked by Unamuno. No translator is given on the title page, but the Introduction states: “The translation of the present volume has been revised by Mr. F. Bayley, M.A., on the basis of the F cap. 8vo. edition issued by the Swedenborg Society. . . An earlier edition, also consulted, is the version of Samuel Noble, 2nd edn. (London, 1851), p. 20, where the wording is roughly similar.
“God . . . eternal”: Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 296.
Mazzini: Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), political writer born in Genoa, champion of Italian unity and independence, spent most of his life in exile. The quotation from the essay “Ai giovani d’Italia” (“Dio e grande, perche pensa operando”) is from Scritti Scelti, a cura di J. White Mario, nuova presentazione di Cesare Federico Goffis (Firenze, 1964), p. 258. Unamuno has in his library the original edition (Firenze, 1901) with the same pagination.
170. Scripture . . . made: Cf. John 1:1-4.
For to believe in God is . . . to create Him, even though He creates us beforehand.: “Porque creer en Dios es . . . crearle, aunque El nos cree antes.” This rhetorical device, paronomasia, is a play on the verbs creer, to believe, and crear, to create; apart from the sound play, or sound-similarity play, there is also the double-edged ambiguity of the last verb, cree, which could be either the present indicative of creer or the present subjunctive of crear (which is the sense in which we have taken it).
VIII. FROM GOD TO GOD
172. timor fecit deos: Statius, Vol. i (Loeb Classical Library, 1928), Thebaid, III, line 661: “primus in orbe deos fecit timor!” translated as “Fear first created gods in the world!” pp. 500, 501. (Cf. “ Twas only fear first in the world made gods,” Ben Jonson, Fall of Sejanus, Act II.)
Schleiermacher's theory: Cf. herein, note to p. 100, also The Christian Faith, English translation from the 2nd German edition, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh, 1948), p. 12: “The common element in all howsoever diverse expressions of piety, by which these are conjointly distinguished from all other feelings, or, in other words, the self-identical essence of piety, is this: the consciousness of being absolutely dependent, or, which is the same thing, of being in relation with God.”
175. Robertson Smith: The Prophets of Israel (London, 1895), Lecture I, p. 36.
176. Vinet: From Smith translation (Edinburgh, 1859), p. 184: “To know that a thing is, without knowing what it is, is very often to know nothing. Separated from its mode, existence is but a word.” Unamuno owned the fourth edition of the original French (Paris, 1904). Cf. herein, note to p. 104.
Scotus Erigena: (c. 810-877), Irish philosopher and theologian, a luminary of the Carolingian Middle Ages (tautologically named: Scotus from Scotia, Erigena from Erin, the Irish being then called Scots); he translated the Pseudo-Dionysius; his own thought postulated theophanies, manifestations of the Godhead: man himself is a theophany, and, like God, shares His unknowability. The quotation is “Dum ergo incomprehensibilis intelligitur, per excellentiam nihilum non immerito vocitatur.” From De Divisione Naturae, in Joannis Scoti, Opera, ed. H. J. Floss, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, J.-P. Migne, 1853, Vol. 122, p. 681A.
Dionysius the Areopagite: The actual person described by this name, a supposed disciple of St. Paul at Athens, acquired a posthumous reputation as author of ten short letters and four treatises, probably forgeries; a central theme is the ascent of the soul by the negative way, in which the senses are obliterated, as are thoughts and reasonings, until the soul achieves “the darkness of unknowing,” wherein it is enlightened by “the ray of divine darkness.” The quotation Unamuno refers to is “Divina caligo est inaccessibile lumen, in quo habitare Deus dicitur. . . .” From Sancti Dionysii Areopagitae, Epistolae Diversae, Joannis Scoti, Opera, ed. H. J. Floss, Migne, op.cit., p. 1178C.
do not care to recall: a paraphrastic echo of the opening sentence of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
177. Laplace: Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749–1827), French astronomer and mathematician who attempted to explain away all the anomalies of Newtonian physics, especially the notion of divine intervention. The “phrase” is his celebrated reply to Napoleon’s query about the absence of God from his theory.
178. the watch and the watchmaker: The argument that as the watch presupposes an intelligent being who produced it, the existence of the universe requires the existence of a Maker, is from William Paley (1743-1805), English theologian and philosopher whose most important work is Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802).
181. Lamennais: Cf. herein, note to p. 82. The citation is from Essai sur l'indifférence, quatrième partie, chapitre VIII, tome troisième, p. 177, in the four volume edition (n.d.) in the Unamuno library at Salamanca: “. . . la raison humaine est comme la Religion, une, universelle, perpétuelle, sainte.” Lactantius is mentioned on p. 196, p. 235; Heraclitus on p. 162; Aristotle on p. 163; Pliny on p. 164 (from Paneg. Trajani, LXII); Cicero (De natura deorum, Book III, Ch. ii, 5 and 6) on p. 241.
182. an ancestral dogma: Metaphysics, Lib. VII, Cap. VII.
Herrmann: Cf. herein, note to p. 77. The quotation is from the essay “Christlich-protestantische Dogmatik” in Systematische Christliche Religion, in the series Die Kultur der Gegenwart, i, iv, 2 (Berlin und Leipzig, 1909), p. 166.
Augustinian sentence: The quotation here, which is indeed redolent of Augustine, is from Pascal’s Le Mystère de Jésus, Thought 553: “Console-toi, tu ne me chercherais pas, si tu ne m’avais trouvé.” It is also the first line of Sonnet iv, from Andanzas y visiones españolas, in OC, XIII, 808.
183. Ritschl writes: Cf. herein, notes to pp. 76 and 126. The quotation is from Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, III, Ch. iv. The translation is from The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, English translation ed. H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay (New York, 1900), p. 322.
184. the Nothing-God of Scotus Erigena: See herein, note to p. 176 on Scotus Erigena.
the hypothesis of ether: Cf. “The Vertical of Le Dantec” in another volume of this edition.
186. image and likeness: Crawford Flitch, in a footnote to his translation, pertinently quotes Voltaire’s statement “Si Dieu a fait l’homme à son image, l’homme le lui a bien rendu”; he might have added the well known “Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer,” which bears on the same point of the relation between the inventor and the invented, the Maker and the Made, and on the question of which is which.
Lactantius: See herein, note to p. 66; the citation here is from Divinarum Institutionum, II, 8. Cf. The Divine Institutes, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. VII (Grand Rapids, 1951), Book I, Ch. VII, p. 17: “But because that which exists must of necessity have had a beginning, it follows that since there was nothing before Him, He was produced from Himself before all things. . . . God of His own power made of Himself.”
and we may say . . . being created by man: The idea is beautifully put by Rainer Maria Rilke in one of the poems from his Das Stundenbuch (The Book of Hours):
Was wirst du tun, Gott, wenn ich sterbe?
Ich bin dein Krug (wenn ich zerscherbe?)
Ich bin dein Trank (wenn ich verderbe?)
Bin dein Gewand und dein Gewerbe,
mit mir verlierst du deinen Sinn.
187. The logical theory . . . concept: See herein, note to p. 94, for Descartes’s distinction.
Hegel. . . identical: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik, Werke, Dritter Band (Berlin, 1841), Erstes Buch, Die Lehre vom Seyn, p. 72: “Seyn, reines Seyn,—ohne weitere Bestimmung. In seiner unbestimmten Unmittelbarkeit ist es nur sich selbst gleich, und auch nicht ungleich gegen Anderes. . . .” The edition is in Unamuno’s library.
188. the absolutely indefinable: an echo of the Kierkegaardian concept of God as the “absolutely different.” Cf. Philosophical Fragments, tr. David Swenson, revised by Howard V. Hong, second edition (Princeton, 1962), p. 55.
191. Demosthenes . . . goddesses: On the Crown.
192. “that which is divine”: “Porque el dios no es más que lo divino.” Flitch translates the sentence: “For the masculine concrete god [el dios] is nothing but the neuter abstract divine quality [lo divino].” This version has an obvious merit of its own, although less literal than the version chosen in the present translation.
Socinian: See herein, note to p. 71.
195. “If of two men . . . to God”: Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 179-80: “If one who lives in the midst of Christendom goes up to the house of God, the house of the true God, with the true conception of God in his knowledge, and prays, but prays in a false spirit; and one who lives in an idolatrous community prays with the entire passion of the infinite, although his eyes rest upon the image of an idol: where is there most truth? The one who prays in truth to God though he worships an idol; the other prays falsely to the true God, and hence worships in fact an idol.”
198. Frederick William Robertson: (1816–53). Anglican preacher noted for his independent views and his non-scientific theology. The citation is from his Sermons. Unamuno possessed and marked the Tauchnitz (Leipzig) edition, in 4 volumes, Volume i, Sermon III (June 10, 1849), “Jacob’s Wrestling,” pp. 46-47.
199. Browning: the verses quoted here are in “Christmas Eve and Easter Day.”
Saul: from the Dramatic Lyrics, Vol. I of The Poetical Works, XVIII, p. 280.
202. “The wicked man . . . God.”: “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” Psalms 14:1, also 53:1.
IX. FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY
204. Tacitus; the epigraph from Tacitus reads, in the English of William Peterson, The Dialogues of Publius Cornelius Tacitus (Loeb Classical Library, 1914): “[It is] more religious and more reverent to believe in the works of Deity than to comprehend them.” And cf., in Tacitus, Germania, ed. J.G.C. Anderson (Oxford, 1938), p. 167, where, in a note, the opening phrase is given as “. . . more in accordance with piety and reverence.”
“. . . create what we do not see!”: The play on words of the Spanish locution is lost in translation, the original reading: “Creer lo que no vimos, ¡no!, sino crear lo que no vemos.” The essay written “a dozen years ago,” is “La fe,” 1900 (OC, xvi, 99; another volume of this edition). (In the quotation from the essay given in OC2, xvi, 313, crear is mistakenly printed as creer, thus making creer appear twice in the sentence and changing the meaning. OC1, iv, 609, 1950, gives the correct wording.)
205. “faith in faith itself”: From the same essay referred to in the previous note, “La fe” in which he used some passages of an earlier essay “¡Pistis y no gnosis!” dated January 1897 (OC, iv, 1019-25).
206. Seeberg: Reinold Seeberg; the citation is from Christliche-protestantische Ethik in Systematic sche Christliche Religion, published in the series Die Kultur der Gegenwart, p. 202. See herein, notes to pp. 77, 78, 85 for information on this series.
208. Phillips Brooks: (1835-93), American Episcopal clergyman and preacher (Unamuno calls him a Unitarian, perhaps mindful of the fact that he was a Broad Churchman, more concerned with humanity as a whole than with the Church as God’s instrument), Bishop of Massachusetts, and author of several collections of sermons. Unamuno owned the London edition of The Mystery of Iniquity and Other Sermons (1900). The passage cited is from Sermon xvi (not xii, as all editions of Unamuno in Spanish have it), pp. 278-79.
210. makes us live it.: Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa, secunda secundae, quaestio iv, art. 2. [Note by Unamuno.]
Cournot: Antoine Augustin Cournot (1801–77), French mathematician and economist. From Traité de l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans l'histoire (written in 1861, the edition in the Unamuno library is Paris, 1911), p. 373.
211. So that St. Augustine could say: The English given here is from Confessions, Book i, 1, in the translation of R. S. Pine-Coffin, in the Penguin edition, 1968. Unamuno omitted the phrase “because we have had preachers to tell us about you.”
212. Vanni Fucci . . . insulting God with obscene gestures: Inferno, xxv, 1-3:
At the end of his words, the thief raised up his hands with both the figs, crying, “Take them, God, for I aim them at you!”
Vanni Fucci was a violent partisan of the Neri Guelfs of Pistoia. According to one account, Fucci, with two accomplices (both of whom were similarly named Vanni), broke into and plundered the treasury of San Jacopo in the church of San Zeno at Pistoia in 1293. (See Singleton, Inferno, translation and commentary.) The “figs” are an obscene and insulting gesture made by thrusting the thumb between the first and second fingers.
213. “Go ye therefore and teach all nations!”: In a letter to his friend Pedro Jiménez Ilundain, dated May 25, 1898, Unamuno recalls: “Many years ago, when I was still a child, at a period when I was most imbued with the religious spirit, I came home from taking communion, and I got the idea of opening the gospel at random and placing my finger on some passage. And it was this one: ‘Go ye therefore and teach all nations [Matt.: 28:19].’ This made a very deep impression on me; I took it to be a command to become a priest.
“But since I was already about fifteen or sixteen at the time, and was already betrothed to the girl who is now my wife, I decided to try again for clarification. When I again took communion, I went home, opened the Gospel once more, and came upon verse 27 of Chapter ix of Saint John: ‘He answered them, I have told you already and ye did not hear: wherefore would ye hear it again?’ I cannot tell you the effect this had on me.” From Hernán Benítez, El drama religioso de Unamuno (Buenos Aires, 1949), pp. 267-68. Unamuno recalls these incidents in other writings of his.
216. In a previous essay: Cf. “What is Truth?”, OC, III, 992 (in English in this edition); first published in La España Moderna, March 1906, Vol. 207.
portico . . . temple: Cf. the essay “El portico del templo,” of July 1906, in OC, iv; in English in this edition.
217. “Poesy is the illusion . . .”: from Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. Swenson and Lowrie, pp. 408-09.
“desperate way out”: Kierkegaard, op. cit., p. 96.
all eternity . . . point: With regard to Kierkegaard’s treatment of the Instant or Moment, cf. The Concept of Dread (Princeton, 1957), pp. 74 ff., and Philosophical Fragments (Princeton, 1962), pp. 72 ff.
224. Will . . . suffering: Whether consciously or otherwise, Unamuno is using here for his own purposes Schopenhauer’s concept that irrational will underlies all aspects of life, especially the need for self-perpetuation, and at the same time that it is the source of frustration and suffering.
226. “Be nought, and thou shalt be more than aught that is”: This quotation comes from Diálogos de la conquista del espiritual y secreto Reino de Dios (Madrid, 1912), and is from the Third Dialogue (8), p. 69. Cf. herein, Ch. I and see note to p. 310.
“Do I exist at all?”: cf. Unamuno’s own experience, e.g., in the inception of the famous religious crisis of March 1897 as related in the Diario intimo, in its second entry: he had started this diary on Wednesday of Holy Week, and on the next day, Holy Thursday, he wrote: “My terror has been annihilation, nullification, the nothingness beyond the tomb.” Quoted by Emilio Salcedo in his Vida de Don Miguel (Salamanca, 1964), p. 86; in the same book, pp. 84-85, Salcedo relates the details of Unamuno’s cardiac crisis of a few days before. And cf. the interpretation placed on the event by Charles Moeller, in “Quelques aspects de l’itinéraire spirituel d’Unamuno,” in Unamuno a los cien años (Salamanca, 1967), p. 81, where he calls the experience, a “séisme intérieur,” and says the religious crisis as Unamuno felt himself seized “in the claws of the angel of nothingness” was “provoquée par un spasme cardiaque,” thus affirming the well-known James-Lange theory of affect, in which a high state of emotion generally follows from awareness of a physiological alteration. In his Retrato de Unamuno (Madrid, 1957), Luis S. Granjel writes (p. 156) that the crisis set Unamuno definitely upon his course of finding out who he really was.
227. as Spinoza taught us: See herein, notes to pp. 36, 108.
228. “The Soul of the Universe . . The translation of Plotinus here is from The Enneads, tr. Stephen McKenna, New York and London, 1962.
230. “sweet-tasting dolor”: for Unamuno’s “dolor sabroso” which is his paraphrase of St. Teresa’s “esta pena tan sabrosa” from the Life, Ch. xxix, “this pain so sweet.”
235. an irrational system: OC2 has “sistema racional” but OC1 and the Candamo (Aguilar) edition of Tragic Sense of Life (Vol. II, p. 922), both have “irracional,” which makes more sense.
X. RELIGION, MYTHOLOGY OF THE BEYOND, AND APOCATASTASIS
236. Phaedo: See The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, p. 44.
Cicero: De natura deorum, lib. I, cap. XLI. The English translation is that of H. Rackham (Loeb Classical Library, 1933).
Miguel de Molinos: (1628–96), Spanish priest who developed his extreme Quietist outlook and practice in Rome and died there in an Inquisition prison; his impulse to suppress the will to the point where God took over and worked His own way led him to accept any sexual temptation or aberration as the work of the Devil upon a passive, and therefore sinless, believer, who was thereby intensified in his quiet repose in God; at his trial he admitted to his antinomianism, as revealed in his correspondence, and, as was natural in a Quietist, in the end proffered no defense.
Through its influence on Madame Guyon, Quietism came into France and deeply affected Fénelon (1651–1715). The heresy was denounced by Bossuet, and Fénelon was condemned by the Pope in 1699. See herein, note to p. 245.
237. Tacitus: Hist. lib. v, cap. iv. “The Jews regard as profane all that we hold sacred; on the other hand, they permit all that we abhor”; in the English of Clifford H. Moore: Tacitus, The Histories (Loeb Classical Library, 1931), Bk. v, Ch. iv, p. 179. The next phrase is from Bk. v, Ch. XIII, where the English is given (p. 197) as: “a people which, though prone to superstition, is opposed to all propitiatory rites.” (OC2, but not OC1 and Candamo, give “conversa” for “concessa”.) Unamuno gives the source for the two final Latin quotations in his paragraph as Ab. excessu Aug. (i.e., The Annals, which Tacitus first called Ab. excessu divi Augusti, though he also spoke of them as Annales), Bk. xv, 44, where the Latin passage is given (in Tacite, Annales, Traduit par Henri Goelzer, Paris, 1957, p. 491) as “multitude ingens haud proinde in crimine incendii quam odio humani generis conuicti sunt”; the English for which (in Tacitus, The Annals and The Histories, tr. A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb, Chalfont St. Giles, 1966, p. 257) is given as: “an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.” The previous Latin phrase, Unamuno’s “existialis superstitio” (in all Spanish editions) is given by all authorities (cf. edition by H. Furneaux, Oxford, 1907, p. 375) as “exitiabilis superstitio.”
Schleiermacher: Cf. herein, note to p. 172.
Herrmann's statement: from the essay “Christlichprotestantische Dogmatik” in Systematische Christliche Religion, in the series Die Kultur der Gegenwart, i, iv, 2, p. 140. See herein, note to p. 77.
Cournot: see herein, note to p. 210; the citation is from Traité de l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans l'histoire, §396. In the Paris (Hachette) edition of 1911, p. 450, the orginal reads: “Les manifestations religieuses sont la suite nécessaire du penchant de l’homme à croire à l’existence d’un monde invisible, surnaturel et merveilleux: penchant que l’on a pu regarder, tantôt comme la réminiscence d’un état antérieur, tantôt comme le pressentiment d’une destinée future.”
238. “Whoever . . . religion”: from Goethe’s Zahme Xenien aus dem Nachlass:
Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt,
Hat auch Religion;
Wer jene beiden nicht besitzt,
Der habe Religion.
239. Guía espiritual: Unamuno furnishes the full title of the work and the source for the quote in a footnote: Guía espiritual que desembaraza al alma y la conduce por el interior camino para alcanzar la perfecta contemplación y el rico tesoro de la paz interior. The source is given as “Libro III, cap. XVIII, párrafo 175.” Flitch gives the paragraph as 185, whereas the paragraph in question is neither the one nor the other, but 176 in Molinos. The translation given here is made from the Madrid, 1935, edition of the book (Imprenta de Galo Sáez, Espasa-Calpe in the series Biblioteca de filósofos españoles), together with some borrowing from Flitch. In his library Unamuno has the following edition of the book: Guida spirituale del dottore Michele di Molinos (Napoli, 1908). The Guía was originally written in Italian.
Flaubert: The quotation is from Par les Champs et par les Grèves, Pyrenees, Corse (Paris, 1910), p. 153.
240. Francesco de Sanctis: (1817–83), leading Italian literary critic of his century; together with Benedetto Croce, his editor, and the much earlier Giambattista Vico, he was one of a line of unorthodox Neapolitan philosophers of history; his Storia della letteratura italiana was first issued in 1870. English translation by Joan Redfern, 1931; the English given here is from The History of Italian Literature (New York, n.d.), I, 28-29.
St. Bonaventura: (1221–74); a doctor of the Church. His theology was basically mystical, and he did not scorn playing the divine fool, which would naturally imply certain affinities with Unamuno. His life of St. Francis was rendered into English in 1904, and his The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ in 1926. See also The Philosophy of St. Bonaventura, by Étienne Gilson (1938).
241. Cicero: “(Tuscul. Quaest. xvi., 36)” in Unamuno’s text. In the Loeb edition (1927) of the Tusculan Disputations (Tusculanarum Disputationum), Bk. I, XVI, 36, in the English of J. E. King, the passage reads: “resting upon the agreement of all races of mankind we think that souls have an abiding life. . . .” The second citation, in the next sentence, is from Bk. I, XI, 25. But the Loeb edition cited here (p. 30) reads in Latin: “Adensio ilia omnis elabitur,” rather than the Latin of the three principal editions of Unamuno in Spanish; the English for the passage (p. 31) reads: “. . . somehow I am sorry to find that I agree while reading, yet when I have laid the book aside and begin to reflect in my own mind upon the immortality of souls, all my previous sense of agreement slips away.”
242. Swedenborg: Unamuno possessed and marked the Everyman edition of Heaven and Hell (London and New York, 1911), in the translation first issued by the Swedenborg Society and revised by F. Bayley, where, on pp. 80-81, we read: “The same is true of a belief in the life of man after death. He who speaks about it without any learned cogitations respecting the soul or the doctrine of its reunion with the body, believes that after death he is to live as a man and among angels if he has lived well; and that then he will see magnificent things and experience great joy: but as soon as he reverts to the doctrine of re-union with the body, or to the common hypothesis about the soul, and doubt arises whether the soul is of such a nature, and thus the question is raised, whether it is so, his former idea is dissipated.”
Cournot: Traité, §297, p. 343, in the edition cited above.
Julius Kaftan: Dogmatik, von D. Julius Kaftan (Tübingen, 1909). The quotation is: “Das verlangt der sittliche Charakter des christlichen Glaubens und Hoffens.” OC2 has “688” pages, which is incorrect.
245. Fénelon: François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon (1651-1715), Archbishop of Cambrai, a synthesis! of Christian mysticism; a mystic himself (eventually), he assigned priority for achieving the mystic experience to renunciation of self until a passive state, which was love, was attained (Quietism). His Télémaque (1699) embodied his innate abomination of despotism; an account of the adventures of Telemachus in search of his father Ulysses, the book constitutes a political novel interspersed with passages of prose poetry. In an incisive entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1967 edition) by François Varillon, the commentator writes that Fénelon remains for us the man who wrote, “Everything about us is vain, except the death of self, which is brought about by Grace.” Unamuno’s textual quotation is from Télémaque, and constitutes the beginning of the first sentence of the book; the English here given is from The Adventures of Telemachus, The Son of Ulysses, tr. from the French by John Hawkesworth (Dublin, 1791), fourth edition, p. 1. Cf. herein, the note to p. 236 on Molinos.
246. Swedenborg observed: In the Everyman edition of Heaven and Hell in Unamuno’s library at Salamanca (paragraphs 158 and 160) §158: “I have been informed from heaven why there are such changes of state. The angels said that there are many reasons. The first is that the delight of a heavenly life due to the Lord’s gifts of love and wisdom, would gradually lose its value if they were always in its full enjoyment: this indeed is actually the case with those who are in the enjoyment of unvarying delights and pleasures. Another reason is, that angels have a selfhood as well as men; this consists in loving themselves, and all who are in heaven are withheld from their selfhood and enjoy love and wisdom so far as they are withheld from it by the Lord. Now in proportion as they are not so withheld they are drawn to the love of self, and since every one loves his selfhood and is attracted by it, therefore they experience these successive alternations of state. A third reason is that in this way they are perfected, for they thus become accustomed to be maintained in love to the Lord and to be withheld from the love of self; and the perception and sense of what is good is rendered more exquisite by such alternations of delight and sadness. . . .” §160: “When the angels are in the last of these states, that is, when the influence of their selfhood is felt, they begin to grow sad. I have conversed with them when they were in this state and have noticed their sadness; but they said that they hoped soon to return to their former state, and thus, as it were again to heaven; for it is heaven to them to be withheld from their selfhood.”
Bossuet: Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), French Catholic theologian and polemicist; chiefly known for his funeral orations and sermons; he engaged in polemical activity against Quietism as represented principally by Fénelon (see herein, notes to pp. 236 and 245); like Unamuno, he was acutely conscious of the paradox between the grandiose and the ephemeral in the human condition; his rhetoric and style have been much admired by the French, including such writers as Paul Valéry. A. J. Krailsheimer (in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York and London, 1967, p. 354) concludes that “Bossuet earns his place in history above all else as a public figure, ‘the eagle of Meaux.’ In the grand siècle Bossuet was the church just as Louis was the state.”
The present citation is attributed by Unamuno to Du culte qui est dû à Dieu, without further indication. It is not, however, in the sermon “Sur le culte dû à Dieu” nor in the section called “De Dieu et du culte qui lui est dû” from Pensées chrétiennes et morales sur différents sujets.
247. Judges: The English of Judges 13:22 (in the King James version) reads: “And Manoah said unto his wife, We shall surely die, because we have seen God.”
St. Teresa: Chapter 20 of The Life. Cf. the English of David Lewis, in his translation of The Life of St. Teresa of Avila (London, 1962), Ch. 20, where the context can be found in English, and further, in Ch. 38; the entire work is well indexed. And cf. The Life, in The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, tr. and ed. E. Allison Peers (London, 1946), where even the “Principal Figures of Speech Used by the Saint,” as well as her “Scriptural Quotations,” are indexed. For Unamuno’s quotation farther down, from the Moradas sétimas, see Peers, Vol. II, Seventh Mansion, Ch. II, p. 335, for his English of the saint’s subtle figures of speech concerning the wax tapers, the rain and the river, and the two windows, where the translator is less literal, but the meaning perhaps made clearer.
248. Jakob Böhme: (1575–1642), German mystic who strove to reconcile the divided world *of Good and Evil, of Yes and No, and show how it would be made one, just as the three-fold God had sprung from one source; a shoemaker by trade, and with little schooling, he produced twenty-nine, titles, which attracted later thinkers from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Berdyaev and Tillich, and influenced such contemporary irregulars as Henry Miller.
Moradas sétimas: see herein, note on St. Teresa, above.
249. the silence of thought: Unamuno’s paraphrase is synoptical. Paragraph 129 of Ch. XVII of Book One of the Guía espiritual (Madrid, 1935), reads: “Tres maneras hay de silencio. El primero es de palabras, el segundo de deseos y el tercero de pensamientos. En el primero, de palabras, se alcanza la virtud; en el segundo, de deseos, se consigue la quietud; en el tercero, de pensamientos, en interior recogimiento. No hablando, no deseando, no pensando se llega al verdadero y perfecto silencio místico, en el cual habla Dios con el ánima, se comunica y la enseña en su más íntimo fondo la más perfecta y alta sabiduría.” The second sentence of Unamuno’s paraphrastic restatement of Molinos is taken from Paragraph 187 of Ch. xx of Book Three (OC1 and OC2 wrongly print the citation as from “cap. xx, párr. 186,” which paragraph is, in fact, in the preceding chapter) : “El camino para llegar a aquel alto estado del ánimo reformado, por donde inmediatamente se llega al sumo bien, a nuestro primer origen y suma paz, es la nada. . . .”
Journal intime: Unamuno used the Fragments d'un Journal Intime, précédés d’une étude par Edmond Scherer, dixième édition (Genève, 1908), 2 vols. Nada is used both times in Vol. II, pp. 4 and 194 respectively: “Tu avais besoin de te donner à quelque grand amour, à quelque noble but; tu aurais voulu vivre et mourir pour l’idéal, c’est-à-dire pour une sainte cause. Une fois cette impossibilité démontrée, tu n’as repris coeur sérieusement à rien et tu n’as plus fait que badiner avec une destinée dont tu n’étais plus dupe, Nada!” And; “Est-ce que toutes mes paperasses réunies, ma correspondance, ces milliers de pages intimes, mes cours, mes articles, mes rimes, mes notes diverses sont autre chose que des feuilles sèches? A qui et à quoi aurai-je été utile; est-ce que mon nom durera un jour de plus que moi et signifiera-t-il quelque chose pour quelqu’un?—Vie nulle. Beaucoup d’allées et de venues et de griffonnages pour rien. Le résumé: Nada!"
249-50. acquiring differentiated knowledge: At this point Unamuno says: “Hence Lessing’s famous saying, already cited.” The quotation Unamuno is referring to is indeed from Lessing, although never previously cited, and comes from Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 97. The quotation in German reads: “Wenn Gott in seiner Rechten alle Wahrheit, und in seiner Linken den einzigen immer regen Trieb nach Wahrheit, obschon mit dem Zusatze mich immer und ewig zu irren, verschlossen hielte, und spräche zu mir: wähle! Ich fiele ihm mit Demuth in seine Linke und sagte: Vater, gieb! die reine Wahrheit ist ja doch für dich allein!”
251. Plotinus: Enneads, II, 9. See McKenna translation, p. 139.
Bossuet: Traité de la Concupiscence, Œuvres Complètes de Bossuet, ed. F. Lachat (Paris, 1862), Vol. vu, Ch. xi, p. 438: “L’homme donc étant devenu pécheur en se cherchant soi-même, il est devenu malheureux en se trouvant. . . .”
Carlyle: Past and Present (Chicago and New York, n.d.), p. 276. This is the edition in Unamuno’s library.
252. Seneca: Cf. Moral Essays II, “To Marcia On Consolation,” xxvi, 6, in the English of John W. Basore (Loeb Classical Library, 1932), where the related passage (p. 97) reads: “Then also the souls of the blest . . . when it shall seem best to God to work once more this ruin—we, too, amid the falling universe—shall be changed again into our former elements.”
Unamuno, like so many others, considers Seneca a Spaniard because he was born in Cordoba around 4 B.C.
Job: 19:25-7: “For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me.”
253. Ulysses: Homer’s Odyssey, Book x, 488-92; in the English of E. V. Rieu (Harmondsworth, 1967) the passage reads: “. . . ‘to consult the soul of Teiresias, the blind Theban prophet, whose understanding even death has not impaired. For dead though he is, Persephone has left to him, and him alone, a mind to reason with. The rest are mere shadows flitting to and fro.’ ”
Aristotle: Ethics, X, B, 7.
St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica, I-IIae, iv, 1, New York and London, 1966.
254. Dante: Cf. the poetic and finished English of the standard verse translation by Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds of Paradise (Harmondsworth, 1967), Canto XXXIII, 58-63 (pp. 344-45):
As from a dream one may awake to find
Its passion yet imprinted on the heart,
Although all else is cancelled from the mind.
So of my vision now but little part
Remains, yet in my inmost soul I know
The sweet instilling which it did impart.
and for the next sentence of the Italian
So the sun melts the imprint on the snow, . . . .
255. Ethics: Propositions xxxv and xxxvi and finally Proposition XLII Five of The Ethics, the English given here is that of R.H.M. Elwes, translated from the Latin; in The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, Vol. 11 (New York, 1951), pp. 264-65, and 270.
the heart also has its reasons: “Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point” “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows ought.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Thought No. 277.
256. Bernard Brunhes: La Dégradation de l'Énergie (Paris, 1912), IVe Partie, Ch. XVIII, 2, pp. 261-62.
Gratry: Auguste Joseph Alphonse Gratry (1805–72), French priest and professor at the Sorbonne; opponent of idealist pantheism and rationalism.
257. Cauchy: Augustin Louis, Baron Cauchy (1789-1857), French mathematician, who made important contributions in numerous fields, ranging from astronomy to optics; his collected works, Œuvres completes d'Augustin Cauchy, have been published in twenty-seven volumes.
258. Brunhes calls: op. cit., Ch. xxvi, par. 2, p. 381: “les théologiens du monisme.”
258-59. “The world built to last. . . without Him”: Brunhes, op. cit., Ch. xxvi, par. 2, p. 380.
259. the comments of Ritschl . . . cited before: see herein, note to p. 126. And also cf. pp. 76-77, above, and notes.
as Papini called him: In Il Crepuscolo dei filosofi, Società Editrice Lombarda (Milano, 1906), p. 186 (in his chapter on Spencer), Papini calls Spencer “L’ingegnere licenziato diveniva filosofo.” And a little later on (p. 188), Papini adds: “la filosofia spenceriana si presenta a noi, innegabilmente, come l’opera paziente e faticosa di un meccanico disoccupato.” It may be recalled that Spencer was a railway engineer from 1837 until 1841.
Ardigò: Roberto Ardigò (1828–1920), principal Italian positivist; he received an “anti-revelation” while staring at the red color of a rose, and left the priesthood convinced that knowledge originated in sensation; Ardigò’s differences with Spencer hinged on his substituting an indistinct-distinct relationship in the formation of all reality for Spencer’s homogeneous-heterogeneous relation, and in assuming an infinity for the indistinct, or, as Unamuno puts it, assuming that the heterogeneous is eternal.
In a letter to his friend Pedro de Múgica, dated November 23, 1891, shortly after beginning his career as professor of Greek at Salamanca, Unamuno announced he was reading the Opere Filosofiche of Roberto Ardigo whom he considers comparable to the best philosophers of his day, worthy of standing alongside of Spencer, Taine, and Wundt. Cf. Cartas inéditas de Miguel de Unamuno, ed. Sergio Fernández Larrain (Santiago de Chile, 1965), p. 155.
261. Leopardi . . . “La Ginestra”: Leopardi’s original (lines 124 and 125 of “La Ginestra”) reads:
che de’ mortali
É madre in parto ed in voler matrigna.
which Unamuno translates (lines 127 and 128 of La Retama, OC, XIII, 482) as:
de los mortales
madre en el parto, en el querer madrastra.
Cf. The Penguin Book of Italian Verse, edited by George Kay (Harmondsworth, 1958), where the full Italian title is translated as
The Broom
or
The Flower of the Desert,
and the lines in question are translated by Kay (p. 296), in prose at the foot of the Italian original, as ". . . the mother of humankind in bearing them, and their stepmother in feelings.”
Antero de Quental: (1842–91), one of the most important Portuguese poets of the nineteenth century. Like Unamuno, he was brought up in an orthodox Catholic household, came in contact with modern European ideological currents—political, philosophical, religious, literary—during his years at Coimbra, and was tormented for the rest of his life by enthusiasms and disillusionments, along with deplorable health which led him to suicide. His most important collections of poetry are the Odes Modernas (1865) and especially his Sonetos (1861, 1881, 1886), philosophical, abstract, un-musical but moving in their intense sincerity.
Unamuno’s enthusiasm for Antero de Quental was such that he grouped him with his other "cardiac” writers: Sénancour, Leopardi, and Kierkegaard (cf. "La literatura portuguesa contemporánea” in Por tierras de Portugal y de España, OC, I, 362). For a comprehensive discussion of Unamuno-Antero de Quental, see Ch. IX, "El sentimiento trágico de Antero de Quental,” in Julio García Morejón, Unamuno y Portugal (Madrid, 1964).
The "two superb sonnets” translated by Unamuno (OC, XIV, 929-30) are:
“Redención”
(Dos sonetos de Antero de Quental, “traducidos a la letra y no en verso”.)
Voces del mar, de los árboles, del viento
cuando a veces en sueño doloroso
me cuna vuestro canto poderoso
juzgo igual al mío vuestro tormento.
Verbo crepuscular e íntimo aliento
de las cosas mudas, salmo misterioso,
¿no serás tú, quejumbre vaporosa,
el suspiro del mundo y su lamento?
Un espíritu habita la inmensidad;
un ansia cruel de libertad
agita y mueve las formas fugitivas;
y yo comprendo vuestra lengua extraña,
voces del mar, de la selva, de la montaña,
almas hermanas de la mía, almas cautivas.
* * *
¡No lloréis, vientos, árboles y mares,
coro antiguo de voces rumorosas,
de voces primitivas, dolorosas,
como un llanto de larvas tumulares!
Rompiendo un día surgiréis radiosas
de ese sueño y esas ansias afrentosas
que expresan vuestras quejas singulares.
Almas en el limbo aún de la existencia,
despertaréis un día en la conciencia,
y cerniéndoos, ya puro pensamiento,
veréis las formas, hijas de la ilusión,
caer deshechas como un sueño vano
y acabará por fin vuestro tormento!
262. Antonio Machado: (1875–1939), chief poet of the Generation of 1898. The lines are from his long somber ballad “La tierra de Alvargonzález” (p. 167 of Antonio Machado, Obras, Poesía y Prosa, ed. Aurora de Albornoz y Guillermo de Torre, Buenos Aires, 1964):
¡Oh tierras de Alvargonzález
en el corazón de España,
tierras pobres, tierras tristes,
tan tristes, que tienen alma!
Though closely reasoned, Machado’s verses are a species of “objets trouvés,” a finding, perhaps, as above, of the quintessence of Castile, more by fortuitous paradoxical juxtaposition than by development of poetic logic, which latter was the manner of Unamuno in his verse. Machado’s simple selectivity, while eschewing the abstractions of categories, abstracted the psychic character of objects and places in more concrete terms than others of his time. Often he coincides with Unamuno and other members of the Generation of 1898 in finding, say, death, to be the genius of Castile (“Castilla de la muerte”). And, like Unamuno, he sensed the dream-meaning of life: from memory the only worthwhile re-creation was that of its dreams (“De toda la memoria sólo vale / el don preclaro de evocar los sueños”). He also shared with Unamuno a sense of ironical paradox, as in the lines quoted in the text here by Unamuno, where sorrow creates soul, the soul of the hard landscape; finally, like Unamuno, he could be called a “visceral” poet.
One of the greatest poetical tributes paid to Unamuno is Machado’s poem “A don Miguel de Unamuno” (op. cit., p. 228). Cf. also “Las cartas de Antonio Machado” plus appendices in Manuel Garcia Blanco, En torno a Unamuno (Madrid, 1965), pp. 215-91. For a complete discussion of the relations between the two writers, see Aurora de Albornoz, La presencia de Miguel de Unamuno en Antonio Machado (Madrid, 1968).
Espronceda: José de Espronceda (1808-42), Spanish poet in the Byronic manner and one of the most curious lyric talents. The original of the lines given are:
Aquí, para vivir en santa calma,
o sobra la materia o sobra el alma.
It is from El diablo mundo, Canto I; cf. the edition by Jaime Gil de Biedma (Madrid, 1966), p. 159.
264. Plotinus: Ennead II, 9:7.
266. In the end . . . apocatastasis: Cf. Harnack, op. cit., i, 631.
267. anything but law, The original Spanish reads: “eso que llaman derecho penal, y que es todo menos derecho.” The word derecho means not only “law” but “right” and “straight,” so that Unamuno is using a double-barreled word.
Lamennais: Œuvres de F. de Lamennais, Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion, nouvelle édition, tome troisième, quatrième partie, ch. vu, p. 111: “Dieu est juste et nous sommes punis, voilà tout ce qu’il est indispensable que nous sachions; le reste n’est pour nous que de pure curiosité” (Lamennais’s italics). Cf. herein, notes to pp. 82, 130, 181.
269. St. Augustine: Confessions, Book VII. For full discussion on this head see Étienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, tr. L.E.M. Lynch (New York, 1960), p. 144 and corresponding notes.
Franklin: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (London, 1903), p. 2: “This good fortune, when I reflect on it (which is frequently the case), has induced me sometimes to say, that, if it were left to my choice, I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end; requesting only the advantage authors have of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first. So would I also wish to change some incidents of it for others more favourable. Notwithstanding, if this condition was denied, I should still accept the offer of recommencing the same life.”
Leopardi: To Leopardi this world was a valley of tears, without a God, full of suffering and tedium, and it was better not to have been born, while death was a favor (“Grazia il morir,” line 84 of “Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale”). Cf. herein, notes to pp. 50, 53.
271. Browning: This citation is from “Easter Day,” Vol. I, VII, p. 498, of the collected edition in Unamuno’s library (see herein, note to p. 125).
Inferno: The appropriate lines, covering the entombment of the Epicureans, are in Canto X, lines 10-15:
“All shall be closed when from Jehoshaphat they return here with the bodies which they have left above. In this part Epicurus with all his followers, who make the soul die with the body, have their burial-place.”
The Divine Comedy: Singleton translation, i, 99. Unamuno interpreted the passage liberally, combining the two stanzas in his own way, though the Canto does begin in the area where the Epicureans are buried. “Sepolcreto degli Epicurei” (in the commentary and according to the Canto headings by Siro Chimenz, Turin, 1962).
Aeneid: Book vi, 426-29. In his prose translation, W. F. Jackson Knight (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 160, gives the passage as follows: “Immediately cries were heard. These were the loud wailing of infant souls weeping at the very entranceway; never had they had their share of life’s sweetness, for the dark day had stolen them from their mothers’ breasts and plunged them to a death before their time.”
272. Charles Bonnefon: Dialogue sur la vie et sur la mort, 3e édition (Paris, 1911), passim. Although Bonnefon has disappeared without apparent trace in the histories of thought and encyclopedias, there is a very moving letter from him in the Unamuno files, dated 10 janvier 1915(?) from Nîmes, in which he signs himself “ancien correspondant du Figaro à Berlin, auteur du Dialogue sur la Vie et la Mort; soldat.”
274-75. two pietists of Protestant origin: Johann Jakob Moser (1701-85) and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702-82). Both quotations that follow are from Albrecht Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus in der lutherischen Kirche des 17, und 18, Jahrhunderts, 3 vols. (Bonn, 1880, 1884, 1886).
275. Spener: OC1 and OC2 both have “Spencer”; the Candamo edition (Madrid, 1958) has “Spener.” Unamuno obviously meant Spener, as Flitch has it, as also do the Italian translator G. Beccari, and the French translator Marcel Faure-Beaulieu. Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705) was a leading German pietist; his Pia desideria (1675) was published in an English edition in 1964. In order to revitalize the Church, he organized collegia pietatis, or associations of piety, through which, very much in the spirit of the evangelical movements which also swept England and America in the eighteenth century, he hoped to revive the spirit of Christ in the lives of men, to leaven formal theology by true faith. Pietism exercised an influence on the Moravian Church and on such men as Kant and Schleiermacher. Ritschl discusses Spener in the work cited above.
276. Browning: The couplet quoted is from Section xv, of “The Flight of the Duchess,” p. 420 of the edition in Unamuno’s library (see herein, note to p. 125).
277. He is among them: Matt. 18:20: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
278. speranza: Dante’s Inferno, Canto III, line 9: Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate: usually translated as: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” In her version of the Inferno (Harmondsworth, 1949), Dorothy L. Sayers translates the tercet (terzain), in the style of Dante’s terza rima, as follows:
NOTHING ERE I WAS MADE WAS MADE TO BE
SAVE THINGS ETERNE, AND I ETERNE ABIDE;
LAY DOWN ALL HOPE, YOU THAT GO IN BY ME.
279. doubt: “incertidumbre”: OC2 reads “muchedumbre” a howling typographical error.
felicity: Unamuno is, of course, inverting Dante’s well-known tercet: “There is no greater grief than to recall past happiness in an unhappy time” (Nessun maggior dolore / Che ricordarsi del tempo felice / Nella miseria; Inferno, v, 121).
280. desperate way out: Although OC says Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift (Concluding Unscientific Postscript), II, I, Ch. I, it is actually in II, I, Ch. II, 3 (p. 97 in the Princeton edition cited previously).
No wonder . . . madness of the Cross: 1 Cor. 1:23. Cf. herein, note to p. 105.
Holmes . . . “asylums”: Actually Holmes is quoting himself at this point, not “one of the characters in his . . . conversations.” See The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, in the edition by Eleanor M. Tilton (New York, 1961), p. 47. Unamuno used the Everyman Edition (London, 1906, 1908), p. 41.
281. Obermann: Cf. the epigraph to Chapter Eleven and its translation from the French on p. 286 of the text. The full translation, from Obermann, by Étienne Pivert de Sénancour, tr. J. Anthony Barnes (2 vols., London and New York, 1910, 1915), Vol. II, Letter xc, p. 252 reads: “ ‘Man is perishable,’ is the response. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if annihilation must be our portion, let us not make it a just one.”
unique problem: Unamuno uses único, which may be translated as unique or sole, in either case it means, as Unamuno repeated again and again, that the problem of personal immortality is the only real problem that confronts us.
XI. THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM
282. Obermann: see the translation from the French herein, p. 286; see also the note to p. 281 on Obermann.
Jeremiah: 15:10: “Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth!” Unamuno has “Job” in all editions; French and Italian editions preserve “Job.”
283. Fouillée . . . idea forces: Alfred Fouillée (1838–1912), French philosopher and sociologist who wished to reconcile traditional metaphysical thought with natural science through his concept of the idée-force, i.e., that thought or mind is always behind action. His central work is Psychologie des idées-forces (Paris, 1893), 2 vols. Unamuno has in his library Fouillée’s Critique des Systèmes de Morale Contemporains (Paris, 1883), of which livre premier, ch. ii is called “L’évolution des idées et des sentiments moraux selon la philosophie idéaliste des idées-forces. Complément psychologique du naturalisme.”
285. Pascal: Thought No. 233.
Johann Jakob Moser: Cf. herein, note to p. 274.
286. Obermann: The English given here is that of J. Anthony Barnes in his version of the book. See herein, note to p. 281 on Obermann for full source. For Sénancour, see herein, note to p. 14 on Obermann, It is interesting that Albert Camus used the same quotation as epigraph to the fourth letter of his Lettres à un ami allemand.
“Whatever . . . destroyed”: Faust I, lines 1339-40.
287. The Nation: (London), Vol. xi, No. 14, July 6, 1912, p. 504.
288. H. G. Wells: (1866-1946), the English novelist (The Time Machine, 1895; The War of the Worlds, 1898) and popular historian (The Outline of History, 1920, rev. 1931), had a period of belief in the supernatural (God: the Invisible King, 1917). Unamuno used and marked the Tauchnitz edition of Anticipations (Leipzig, 1902), p. 285.
290. Windelband: Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915), German historian of philosophy and philosopher. The reference is to Präludien: Aufsätze und Reden zur Einführung in die Philosophie, published in 1884 in 2 volumes. Unamuno’s copy of the work is Tübingen, 1911, and the chapter referred to is “Über Friedrich Hölderlin und sein Geschick,” I, 239-59.
Life is a Dream: La vida es sueño, Acto III, escena 4a:
Que estoy soñando y que quiero
obrar bien, pues no se pierde
el hacer bien aun en sueños.
and Acto III, escena 10a
acudamos a lo eterno
que es la fama vividora,
donde ni duermen las dichas
ni las grandezas reposan.
Some Spanish texts omit the division into scenes, as in Candamo (OC2 gives an erroneous act in the first instance) and in Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Tragedias (I), edición de Francisco Ruiz Ramón (Madrid, 1967), pp. 128 and 148.
293. Epistle to the Ephesians: The fourth chapter in its entirety is addressed more or less to those in the “vocation wherewith you are called.”
“I am a Roman citizen!”: Acts 16:37-38; Acts 22:25-29; Acts 25:11. Anyone who possessed citizenship rights in the Roman Empire could, if he uttered the words “I am a Roman citizen,” demand to appeal to the emperor.
296. my own official bureaucratic capacity: Unamuno was rector of the University of Salamanca for the first time from 1900 to 1914.
297. “dies on them”: “ ‘se les muera,’ y no sólo 'se muera’ ”: the Spanish phrase is by natural usage more vivid: it conveys the intimate colloquial sense of personal loss.
ethical sense . . . religious one: An echo of Kierkegaard’s three stages on life’s way: aesthetic, ethical, and, the loftiest, religious.
298. anonymous societies: Unamuno speaks merely of the “. . . sociedades y empresas industriales anónimas” which are the Spanish equivalent of the American “Inc.” (incorporated societies) and the British “Ltd.” (limited companies): we take the liberty of adding the equivalents in the two languages.
299. “in the sweat of thy face”: Gen. 3:19.
301. Fourier: François Marie Charles Fourier ( 1772-1837), French philosopher who proposed life in socialist units called Phalansteries where there would be division of labor and sharing of profits.
305. Be ye . . . is perfect: Matt. 5:48.
306. “. . . help Thou my impotence!”: An echo and paraphrase of “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24).
Fray Thomé de Jesus: Portuguese friar and mystical writer who accompanied his king, D. Sebastião, to Africa and was captured; while in prison, where he died in 1582, he wrote his Trabalhos de Jesus, or The Sufferings of Jesus, published posthumously, the first part in 1602, the second in 1609. The quotations are from the First Part (Lisboa, 1865), pp. 3 and 82.
307. morality of slaves: Nietzsche’s Sklavenmoral. Cf. Genealogy of Morals, also Will to Power.
308. Milton: The English text used here, from “On His Blindness,” is taken from the Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford, 1957), p. 352.
309. an egotistical poet of an avaricious people: the poet was Alfred de Musset (1810-57) and the people, the French. The line is from La coupe et les lèvres, Premières Poésies: “Mon verre est petit, mais je bois dans mon verre.”
“Be ye . . .is perfect”: Cf. above, note to p. 305.
John 17:21: “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us.”
Romans 12:5: “So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.”
310. Fray Juan de los Angeles: See herein, note to p. 226. The citation given here is from his Diálogos de la conquista del espiritual y secreto Reino de Dios, Obras místicas de Fr. Juan de los Angeles (Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1912), p. 69: “No seas, y podrás más que todo lo que es.”
311. Concluding Unscientific Postscript: We translate here directly from Unamuno’s Spanish, instead of quoting from the Swenson-Lowrie translation hitherto cited, where the English is a violation of the textual sense. Cf. op. cit., Book Two, Part Two, Ch. iv, Sect. II. A, 3, p. 479.
Windelband: op. cit., “Das Heilige,” II, 297.
312. Goethe: Gespräche mit Eckermann, 4. Februar 1829. The translation is from Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann, tr. John Oxenford, ed. J. K. Moorhead (London, 1946), p. 287.
the Thebaid: the desert region around Thebes to which the earliest Christian hermits retired. Unamuno is referring to the monastic ethic.
313. Domingo de Guzmán: St. Dominic ( 1170?–1221).
the Piarists: founded by St. Joseph of Calasanz (c. 1557-1648), a Spaniard from Aragón, who established his first primary school in Rome; forerunners of the Christian Brothers, or de La Salle Order, the Piarists were therefore among the first priests to teach in schools.
314. . . . exclaimed St. Teresa: Although Unamuno attributes this quotation to the Life (Vida) of St. Teresa, it is actually from the Camino de perfección. The translation is from the Book Called Way of Perfection, Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, translated and edited by E. Allison Peers from the critical edition of P. Silverio de Santa Teresa, C.D. (London and New York, 1957), II, 79.
Fray Luis de León: (1527–91), Augustinian friar, religious poet and humanist, professor at the University of Salamanca. His prose work De los nombres de Cristo (On the Names of Christ), published in 1583, expounds meanings of the names given to Christ in the New Testament. Unamuno passed by his statue every day and was one of his great admirers. The reference in the text is to the above work, in the edition in Unamuno’s library (Biblioteca Salvatella, Barcelona, 1885), Libro i, p. 61.
315. Annie Besant: (1847–1933); British social reformer, sometime Fabian socialist, theosophist, and Indian independence leader. The quotation is from Annie Besant. An Autobiography (London, 1908), p. 335.
316. Plato . . . knowledge: Meno, 87.
318. Descartes . . . described: The reference here is to the clash between Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset in 1909. When Azorin wrote his article “Colección de farsantes” for the newspaper ABC of September 12, 1909, to defend his country against foreign detractors, Unamuno wrote him a private letter of congratulations which found its way into the same newspaper. Unamuno referred to the “simpletons” (papanatas) fascinated by Europeans. “It is time,” he said, “to declare that we are their equals and perhaps even better in quite a number of things.” And he added: “If it were impossible for one nation to produce both a Descartes and Saint John of the Cross, I would opt for the latter.” In answer, Ortega wrote his article “Unamuno y Europa, Fábula” in which he refers to St. John of the Cross as a “handsome little monk with an incandescent heart who wove lacework of ecstatic rhetoric in his cell,” and calls Unamuno a “wild man” (energúmeno) who cannot see that without Descartes “we would remain in darkness and see nothing, certainly not the dark robe [pardo sayal] of Juan de Yepes [St. John of the Cross].” The article is in the Obras completas of José Ortega y Gasset (Madrid, 1957), Vol. I.
319. Krausism: The ideas of the German philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832), as propagated by Julián Sanz del Rio (1814–69), had enormous influence in Spain. Sanz del Rio studied in Heidelberg with disciples of Krause, and when he assumed his chair of philosophy at the Central University of Madrid, he attracted many enthusiasts to his Krausist system. Briefly, he held that it was the duty of Humanity, through rational effort, to carry out on earth God’s harmonious design and to resolve all differences. The Krausists’ view of God had nothing to do with dogma or revelation, or indeed even Christianity, but imbued many men with a sense of mission: e.g., Francisco Giner de los Ríos founded the independent secular Institución Libre de Enseñanza, a landmark in Spanish “idealist” educational reform. The definitive history of Krausism is to be found in Vol. I of La Institución Libre de Enseñanza by Vicente Cacho Viu (Madrid, 1962). (And cf. review in English of this book in “The University Bookman,” Winter, 1964.) Menéndez Pelayo judged that “In Spain we have been Krausist by chance, thanks to the intellectual gloom and slovenliness of Sanz del Rio.” And: the Krausists “more than a school, were a lodge, a mutual benefit society . . . something tenebrous and repugnant to all independent souls. . . . Whenever they were in command they divided up the professorships like seized booty; they all spoke alike and dressed alike. . . . They were all sullen, lowering, somber; they all reacted according to formula, even in the pettiness of practical daily life. . . .” Heterodoxos (Buenos Aires, 1951) Vol. VII, p. 363. “Underlying nebulous Krausist philosophizing was a paradisiacal millenarianism, a vague and abstracted sentimentalism,” wrote Azorin in the ABC (May 15, 1908). And the poet Ramón de Campoamor defined the doctrinal content of the school as: “in philosophy, an all-nothing, pantheism gone to seed; in morality, calculated indifference; in politics, communism: in the arts, indeterminism; and in literature, sheer chaos.” In sum: “Artists, poets, and writers may come from all known philosophical systems except Krausism.” Obras completas (Madrid, 1901) in, pp. 17 and 154.
XII. DON QUIXOTE IN THE CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN TRAGICOMEDY
322. Böhme . . . Aurora: Aurora oder die Morgenröthe von Jacob Böhme (Amsterdam, 1620), Ch. xi, paragraph 75, p. 113, and paragraph 83, p. 114. See herein, note on Böhme, p. 248.
323. which Carlyle called a Fortress of Ignorance: “fortaleza de la ignorancia, . . .” Unamuno was probably recalling (and paraphrasing) from Sartor Resartus, where Carlyle puts the matter rather differently, speaking of Salamanca as a type of “Castle of Indolence”: “And yet, in such winter-seasons of Denial, it is for the nobler-minded perhaps a comparative misery to have been born, and to be awake, and work; and for the duller a felicity, if like hibernating animals, safe-lodged in some Salamanca University, or Sybaris City, or other superstitious or voluptuous Castle of Indolence, they can slumber through, in stupid dreams, and only awaken when the loud-roaring hailstorms have all done their work, and to our prayers and martyrdoms the new Spring has been vouchsafed.” From “Pedagogy,” Sartor Resartus, Heroes and Hero-Worship, and Past and Present (London, 1888), p. 82, a book in Unamuno’s library.
Frenchman of letters . . . university: Unamuno is referring to the critic Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915), whom he mentions by name in his speech “Lo que ha de ser un rector en España” (“Conferencia leída en el Ateneo de Madrid el 25 de noviembre de 1914,” OC, vu, 870). Unamuno was especially outraged by the preface Remy de Gourmont wrote for a book of poetry by the Argentinian Leopoldo Díaz (Las Sombras de Hellas, Les Ombres d'Hellas, avec la traduction en vers français par F. Raisin, préface de Remy de Gourmont, Genève, Paris, 1902) which Unamuno reviewed for the Madrid paper La Lectura (“Los sonetos de un diplomático argentino” in OC, VIII, 236-41). In his preface, Gourmont says that the Spanish language is flourishing not in Spain, but in South American literature, which owes nothing to Spain but its language, since its ideas are European and its intellectual capital is Paris. Leopoldo Diaz, adds the French critic, sings in the purest “langue néo-espagnole” which is “plus souple que le rude castillan classique, . . . aussi plus claire; . . .” Unamuno has red marks alongside of “Sa capitale intellectuelle est Paris” and “Cette langue, plus souple que le rude castillan classique, . . .”
Archer M. Huntington: “Mister Archer M. Huntington, poeta—”; Huntington (1870-1955) was not widely known as a poet, although he did translate the verse of El Cantar de Mío Cid. He was an art collector, philanthropist, and ardent Hispanist, founder of the Hispanic Society of America (1904). The Italian translator (Beccari) puts the matter which we have placed in parentheses into a footnote in the Italian edition. The sentence quoted here is from a letter to “My dear Unamuno” written on the stationery of the Hotel du Palais, Biarritz, undated (but probably 1911), in the Unamuno archives in Salamanca.
324. in 1604: The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus was entered on the Stationer’s Books in 1600-01, probably written before 1590; Unamuno’s copy of the play (in the Everyman’s Library) was “From the Quarto of 1604,” the earliest known edition.
325. Marlowe's Faust: In The Plays of Christopher Marlowe with an Introduction (dated 1909) by Edward Thomas (London and New York, n.d.); the verse quotation given here is on p. 154.
326. Simon Magus: this Simon appears for the first time in Acts 8:9-24 as the Samarian sorcerer converted to Christianity by the evangelist Philip, and who then offered Peter and John money for the powers of those to whom the Holy Ghost was given. Then Peter upbraided him and urged him to repent. In ecclesiastical tradition, Simon (who gave his name to “simony”) developed into a magician and heretic, and Justin Martyr speaks of him as a native of Gitta in Samaria who was considered God by his fellow countrymen and was accompanied by a woman named Helen, formerly a prostitute, and whom he called “the first intelligence” proceeding from him. This tradition was taken up by Irenaeus, Tertullian, and others, Helen becoming assimilated to Helen of Troy.
schibolet: in his essay “Faith,” in another volume of this edition, Unamuno plays upon variants of the word, speaking of “chiboletes” “schibolet” “sibolet,” and the sectarian and geographical significance of the differences between the pronunciation of the word. Cf. Judges 12:5-6:
. . . If he said Nay, then they said to him, Say now Shibboleth, and he said Sibboleth, for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him and slew him. . . .
The Italian translator, Beccari, adds: “Tres Ensayos, Madrid, 1900 pagg. 58 e ss. L’A. si riferisce a un episodio poco noto della Bibbia, della lotta di Jefte contro gli Efraimiti (Giudici, xII, 6) e divenuto poi materia di proverbio.”
327. When Galileo . . . : From the letter “A Leopoldo d’Austria in Innsbruck,” in Galileo Galilei, Frammenti e Lettere, con introduzione e note di Giovanni Gentile (Firenze, n.d.), seconda edizione, pp. 262-63. The letter was written “23 maggio 1618.”
“Eppur si muove!”: “Yet it does move!” This phrase, attributed to Galileo, was supposed to have been said after he was forced to recant his doctrine that the earth moves around the sun.
329. Every time . . . :
Cada vez que considero
Que me tengo de morir
Tiendo la capa en el suelo
Y no me harto de dormir.
Cf. herein, note to p. 48, and Vol. 3 of this edition, pp. xix and 218.
Pérez de Ayala: Ramón, Spanish novelist (1880–1962), identified with Unamuno on many issues in Spanish culture; a master stylist, he reflected the preoccupations of the Generation of 1898 (the contradiction between dream and reality, among others, and he was dubious about the value of pure thought). La pata de la raposa is a semi-autobiographical novel. The quotation here is taken from the Spanish text of the Buenos Aires (Austral) edition of 1966, p. 174. Unamuno wrote a review of the book for La Nación of Buenos Aires, August 13, 1912. We give the complete passage from the novel; Unamuno excerpted it.
330. Calderón: The quotation is from the dramatist’s Gustos y disgustos no son más que imaginación, Act. I, esc. iv:
No es consuelo de desdichas,
es otra desdicha aparte,
querer a quien las padece
persuadir que no son tales.
Fray Diego de Estella: (1524–78), celebrated orator and confessor to Cardinal Granvelle. The quotation is from his Tratado de la Vanidad del Mundo (1574), Ch. XXI.
330-31. In his admirable letters: Joseph de Maistre wrote Cinq lettres sur l'Education Publique en Russie à M. Le Comte Rasoumowsky, Ministre de l'Instruction Publique, to be found in Considérations sur la France, Mélanges (Paris, 1909), IV, 182-92. Here Unamuno refers to “Lettre 1,” where de Maistre expatiates on the lack of science in Russia and the apparent incapacity of that country to absorb science at that point in history. Cf. herein, note to p. 82.
331. pasteboard visor: in Don Quixote, Part I, Ch. I.
332. Cournot wrote: in his Traité de l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans Phistoire, etc. (Paris, 1911) par. 510.
Tacitus: in Germania, 19. The translation by Sir William Peterson in the Loeb Classical Library, 1920, p. 291, is: “No one laughs at vice there; no one calls seduction, suffered or wrought, the spirit of the age.”
“. . . grandiosità spagnola”: from Carducci’s Del rinnovamento letterario in Italia. Unamuno used and marked Prose di Giosuè Carducci, MDCCCLIXMCMIII (Bologna, 1905), where Mosche cocchiere appears on p. 1353 through p. 1372. Unamuno has, in a handwritten index of his own at the back of the book, noted “Cervantes . . . 1364”; on that page the Italian is to be found: “. . . anche la Spagna, che non ebbe egemonia mai di pensiero, ha il suo Cervantes.” Cf. herein, note to p. 113.
333. Charles I: the Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire.
334. Amor y pedagogía: Unamuno’s satire of sociological pedagogy and “scientism” in general, published 1902; in OC, II.
335. regenerationist literature: in the wake of Spain’s defeat by the United States in 1898 and the loss of its last important colonies, came many articles and books analyzing the causes of Spanish decline and proposing concrete remedies for national regeneration.
Joaquín Costa: (1846–1911), scholar, writer, and reformer (“regenerationist”) who denounced the corruption and stagnation that kept Spain from catching up with the rest of Europe through political, industrial, agricultural, and educational reform. For him, the figure of the Cid, hero of the great Spanish epic dating from c. 1140, could teach Spain many lessons, if correctly interpreted, and Costa interpreted the Cid’s actions and words as pointing to constitutional monarchy, separation of Church and State, social justice, in short, meliorist change in keeping with basic traditions and the genius of the Spanish nation. Only when the Cid was used as a symbol for intransigent statist absolutism did Costa ask, on several occasions, that a “double lock” be put on his tomb. However, as Unamuno himself put it, “that man always thought about keeping North Africa for Spain, and perhaps even more, about conquering it totally.” (“Discurso en el homenaje a Joaquín Costa, en el Ateneo de Madrid, el 8 de febrero de 1932,” OC, VII, 1031.) Cf. also “Sobre la tumba de Costa,” OC, III, 1127-45.
acting the Cid: “poniéndose a cidear”; the French translation (by Marcel Faure-Beaulieu) gives “se mit à ‘faire le Cid’ while the Italian translator (Beccari), after giving “si mise a cidear,” adds a clarifying note: “Da Cid, verbo creato dall’A.: significa ‘fare el Cid,’ cioè il bravo.” Flitch, in his English translation, avoids the complication of Unamuno’s play on words by apparently avoiding Unamuno’s phrase; in any case, it is omitted.
“Down with Don Quixote!”: On June 25, 1898, Unamuno published in the Vida Nueva his article “¡Muera Don Quijote!” (OC, v, 712) in which he advocated the elimination of the madness of quixotic undertakings in favor of solid, continuous work; Spain was enslaved to its spectacular history and should shake off that hypnosis, forget its overseas ambitions and concentrate on its workaday tasks.
Life of Don Quixote and Sancho: in Vol. 3 of this edition.
336. “Elegy” of Jorge Manrique: the “Coplas por la muerte de su padre don Rodrigo” (1476), the great elegy written for his father by Jorge Manrique (1440-79), splendidly translated into English by Longfellow.
Romancero: medieval Spanish ballads, among the most beautiful in the world.
La vida es sueño: Life is a Dream, the best-known drama of Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-81).
Subida del Monte Carmelo: the great work (1578–83) of St. John of the Cross (1542-91), consisting of eight stanzas accompanied by prose commentaries.
337. pre-judices: “pre-juicios.”
Bacon was right . . . : In his Novum Organum (Book I), “Aphorisms Concerning the Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of Man,” Francis Bacon says “There are four classes of idols which beset men’s minds” and proceeds to call them Idols of the Tribe, Idols of the Cave, Idols of the Market-place, and Idols of the Theater (XXXIX). The Idols of the Market-place (or “idola fori”) are those formed “by the intercourse and association of men with each other,” and the author says that “the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding. Nor do the definitions or explanations wherewith in some things learned men are wont to guard and defend themselves, by any means set the matter right. But words plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into numberless empty controversies and idle fancies” (XLIII).
Avenarius: see herein, note to p. 159.
337-38. as is reason itself: OC2 gives “como la raza misma”; but the early edition in the Unamuno library (Madrid, 1938) gives “como la razón misma” (as do OC1 and the Candamo edition).
338. Oliver Wendell Holmes: The exact words of the “Yankee,” given here, are from The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (Everyman’s Library, London and New York, 1906), p. 38; his copy much marked by Unamuno and with numberless pencilled marginal translations into Spanish of the more esoteric “Yankee” words.
Stendhal: The English given here is in the translation from the French by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff of The Charterhouse of Parma (New York, 1962), pp. 142-43. The passage is marked in Unamuno’s own copy of La Chartreuse de Parme (Paris, n.d.), p. 130-31.
339. Aben Tofail: also spelled Ibn Tufail and Ibn Tofayl (cf. index and note to p. 370 in Vol. 3, this edition). He was a twelfth-century writer, born in Guadix (Granada province); the solitary thinker is the hero of a romance written on the theme of a child brought up in isolation from the world. Unamuno was taken with this theme, which finds a slightly different, but equally theoretical—and absurd—development, in his Amor y pedagogía, where the child is brought up in accordance with “scientific” formulae, independent of reality.
Unamuno had in his library the book El filósofo autodidacto de Abentofail, novela psicológica traducida directamente del árabe por D. Francisco Pons Boigues, con un prólogo de Menéndez y Pelayo (Zaragoza, 1900).
Martin A. S. Hume: The Spanish People, their Origin, Growth and Influence (London, 1901). Unamuno says that Hume refers to the “individualidad introspectiva” of the Spaniard in his Preface. This is a mistake, since in his essay “El individualismo español,” OC, III, 617, he says that the phrase “the introspective individuality of the Spaniards” occurs in Ch. x, p. 375, which is the right place.
Suárez: Francisco Suárez (1548-1617), Jesuit, commonly considered the most important systematic philosopher produced by Spain before the twentieth century, although he wrote all of his many works in Latin. Of special significance and influence is his Disputationes metaphysicae (1597)..
metanthropics: “metantrópica” in OC1 and Candamo, but OC2 has, erroneously, “misantrópica.”
Menéndez y Pelayo: Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (1856–1912), considered the father of modern Spanish historical research and criticism. He studied at the University of Barcelona with Manuel Milá y Fontanals (1818-84) who more than anyone else was responsible for Menéndez y Pelayo’s formation in scientific research. An indefatigable worker, he became Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Madrid in 1878; in 1881 he was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy; and in 1898 he left his teaching post to become Director of the National Library. An impassioned genius of great culture, at home with the major European languages, he was deeply religious and a traditionalist, and although he modified his views somewhat in his later years, he felt that Spanish greatness coincided with its orthodoxy. The author of many highly significant works, his Historia de las ideas estéticas en España (History of Aesthetic Ideas in Spain) was published in 1883–91.
as Benedetto Croce truly said of him: in Croce’s Filosofía dello spirito, I, Estetica come scienza dell' espressione e linguistica generale, terza edizione riveduta (Bari, 1909), pp. 558-59. For a detailed analysis of the literary relations between Unamuno and Croce (1866-1952) see Manuel García Blanco, “Benedetto Croce (Historia de una amistad),” in En torno a Unamuno (Madrid, 1965), pp. 425-67. The correspondence between both writers started in 1911 when Unamuno sent the Italian his prologue to the Spanish translation of the Estetica (“Prólogo a la version castellana de la Estética de B. Croce,” OC, vii, 242-64) which he had read in Italian. The correspondence continued very sporadically until 1921. In one of his letters dated 16-X-12, Unamuno states that it was through Croce that he came to De Sanctis and Windelband.
340. Luis Vives: Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540), Spanish humanist and philosopher, friend of Sir Thomas More and Erasmus. Born in Valencia, he died in Bruges, having spent a good deal of his life outside of Spain, in England, France, and the Low Countries. The author of many works in Latin on diverse subjects, he fought the errors of Aristotelianism and advocated observation of nature. José Ferrater Mora (Diccionario de filosofía, Buenos Aires, 1965, 5th edition, II, 916) says: “As Menéndez y Pelayo has pointed out, the philosophy of Vives is a critical philosophy, but also an eclectic philosophy: anti-Aristotelianism in dialectic, Aristotelianism in metaphysics, Stoicism and Platonism in ethics, naturalism in physics, experimentalism and rationalism in the science of the soul, all presided over by the sincerest Christian belief. . . .”
Scottish school: the Scottish philosophy of common sense, originated by Thomas Reid (1710–95), whose An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764) defended common sense against philosophical paradoxes and skepticism. Others associated with this school were Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), whose books were read widely in France and America, and Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856), who proclaimed the sovereignty of common sense as the test of truth.
Balmes: see herein, note to p. 94.
Angel Ganivet: (1865-98), Spanish essayist and novelist, known mainly for his seminal Idearium español in which he develops the idea that Spanish philosophy “was that of Seneca,” along with other theories in an attempt to analyze the Spanish temper and Spanish history. He and Unamuno met in Madrid in the spring of 1891 while both were waiting to take the oral examinations for teaching posts. After about two months of close friendship, they never saw each other again. Some five years later, Unamuno read Ganivet’s articles in El defensor de Granada, and they corresponded from 1896 to 1898, when Ganivet took his own life. They exchanged public letters published in the same newspaper, dealing with the purpose and future of Spain, which Unamuno republished in 1912 under the title of El parvenir de España (OC, iv, 953-1015). Cf. “Ganivet, Philosopher” in Vol. 3 of this edition, pp. 368-73.
Tertullian: See herein, note (Credo quia absurdum) to p. 352, below.
341. the high altar of their village church: In Ch. 58 of the Second Part of Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the same chapter in Unamuno’s The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho (Vol. 3, p. 247, of this edition).
Mount Carmel: see herein, previous note to p. 336, for Subida del Monte Carmelo. The poem commented on in that work is commonly known as the Dark Night of the Soul.
Athena's owl: It is interesting that one of the symbols José Ortega y Gasset uses in advocating clarity and precision is that of the owl. See herein, note to p. 318 (Descartes . . . described) on the relations between Unamuno and Ortega.
Unamuno himself was caricatured as an owl.
342. ultimatum of 1890: The ultimatum referred to was issued by England in 1890 threatening a severance in relations with Portugal should certain disputed African territories not be evacuated by Portugal. Portugal was forced to accede.
he wrote: Unamuno supplied a bibliographical footnote to the text: “In an article which was to have been published on the occasion of the ultimatum, and of which the original is in the possession of the Conde do Ameal. This fragment appeared in the Portuguese review A Aguia (No. 3), March, 1912.” It was published in Porto, vol. l-2a serie, p. 68. For Quental, see herein, note to p. 261.
343. “the history of the word ‘philosophy'. . From Präludien by Wilhelm Windelband (Tübingen, 1911), I, 20.
344. “By philosophy in the systematic sense . . .”: See Präludien, p. 29.
“Whoever places upon philosophy the burden . . .”: Windelband, p. 39.
345. “the abomination of desolation”: Matt. 24: 15.
Benedetto Croce: Unamuno is here referring to the three parts of Croce’s Filosofia dello spirito: 1. Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale 2. Logica come scienza del concetto puro 3. Filosofia della pratica economica ed etica. All three (Bari, 1909) are in Unamuno’s library along with the later fourth part, Teoria e storia della storiografia (Bari, 1917). Cf. earlier note on Croce, herein, p. 339.
virtù, practical efficiency: Unamuno’s definition of the Italian word is somewhat original.
350. slicing his pasteboard visor in two: In Part i, Ch. 1, Don Quixote constructed a pasteboard visor, because he was lacking a real one, and then, to test its strength, “unsheathed his sword and delivered two blows, and with the first one, and at one point, undid the work of a week.” He then reconstructed it with iron cross-strips, but desisted from putting it to the test again: “. . . unwilling to experiment with it further, he commissioned it and held it to be a most excellent fitted visor.”
351. the crime of having been born: the reference is to Calderon’s play La vida es sueño: “. . . for a man’s greatest crime is to have been born” (“pues el delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido”), Jornada primera, Escena II.
Felix culpal: Latin: “Happy sin,” in reference to the Fall of Man, which made possible his redemption.
which suffers violence: a reference to Matt. 11:12; “And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.” Cf. Vol. 3 of this edition, pp. 29 and 247, with their corresponding notes. Cervantes also echoed the Biblical sentence.
as he had freed the galley slaves: in Don Quixote, Part I, Ch. 22.
352. Agustín de Salazar y Torres: (1642–75), Spanish poet; in his Elegir al enemigo, acto 1, he writes “es la desesperación dueña de los imposibles.”
Credo quia absurdum: a phrase by Tertullian (c. 155-c. 222), earliest of the ancient Church writers in the West. Some texts give “Credo quia impossibile,” “I believe because it is impossible,” which in itself is an adaptation of “Certum est quia impossibile est,” “It is certain because it is impossible” (De Carne Christi, V). Unamuno paraphrases yet again, changing the main verb: “I hope because it is absurd.”
the solitude of Peña Pobre: In Part I, Ch. 25, Don Quixote goes through his own form of penance in the Sierra Morena, in imitation of his hero Amadís de Gaula, who had withdrawn to the Peña Pobre for the same purpose.
the curate . . . the barber . . . the canons: the well-known figures in Don Quixote, who, for Unamuno, represent all that Don Quixote is not: common sense, sanity, moderation. The Duke and Duchess may be said to represent the undynamic lack of tension (to use Ortegan terms) of the powers-that-be in Spain.
Kultur: Unamuno often used this spelling to underline his contempt for German science, scholarship, and militarism.
353. for he lives in her: “pues que vive.” The French translator (Faure-Beaulieu) gives: “puisqu’elle vit,” that is, Dulcinea lives. But Unamuno has just said that Dulcinea is the life-principle, so it is more likely he means that Don Quixote lives because he fought for her, and won life. We give a combination of the two possible meanings, a rendering which in any case does not violate the Unamunian idea.
Margutte: a half-giant who dies, in his turn, of laughing overmuch when Morgante dies from the bite of a mere crab; the giant Morgante is the squire of Orlando (Roland), a knight in the service of Charlemagne; all these characters appear in a burlesque heroic poem, Morgante Maggiore, by Luigi Pulci (1432-87), a mordant Florentine poet.
354. modernist: Unamuno is here referring to the modernista movement in Hispano-American and Spanish literature, which received its main impetus from the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916), and was strongly influenced by the French Parnassians and Symbolists. Although their style was often over-refined and artificial, the modernists effected a revolution in literary style and theme. Unamuno never failed to show his disapproval of the school and of Rubén Darío, for he believed them too far removed from the central spiritual questions, too interested in form rather than matter, too aesthetic and “Frenchified.”
Old-Christian Spanish: “cristiano viejo español.” This is a play on the mania for “pureza de sangre,” for blood free from Jewish or Moorish strain, thus pure Old-Christian stock (ironically, therefore, of stock closest in point of time to the Hebrew original of the newer religion), as opposed to that of the New Christians, mainly converted former Jews. There is no Old-Christian Spanish, of course, since the language of the oldest Christians is impregnated with pagan-Latin, Muslim-Arabic, and other roots. The translation “good old-fashioned Spanish,” is probably a sensible working rendering, except that Unamuno liked to hear the echoes of irony in his writing.
Clavileño: The wooden horse upon which Don Quixote imagined that he and Sancho were carried through the air in order to aid some “ladies in distress.” (Don Quixote, Part II, Chs. 40 and 41.)
355. and inns perforce will have to be castles: On several occasions Don Quixote held that certain inns were castles.
Master Peter's puppet show: in Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 26, the puppets depict the freeing of the legendary Melisendra, captive of the Moors, until Don Quixote breaks up the show by unsheathing his sword and setting about among the puppet-Moors, finally destroying the stage and the actors.
Kierkegaard: the reference is to Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Book II, Part II, Ch. iv, Section II, B. The translation by Swenson and Lowrie in the edition we have been using (Princeton, 1941, p. 503) is: “The ‘awakened’ religionists are often enough busied about the ungodly world which derides them—though from another point of view this is after all just what they themselves would wish, for the sake of being well assured that they are the ‘awakened’ . . . seeing that they are derided, and then again for the sake of having the advantage of being able to complain of the world’s ungodliness.”
the forces . . . pedantry: the allusion here is to the movement headed by Charles Maurras (1868-1952) who fought individualism, liberalism, and romanticism, and espoused the causes of monarchy, Roman Catholicism, and classical reason as forces of discipline. Along with Léon Daudet (1868–1942), Maurras founded L'Action française, which Unamuno particularly detested.
356. Byron's Lara: In Unamuno’s copy of the 1905 (London) edition of the one-volume Poetical Works of Lord Byron, “Dedicated by Gracious Permission to his Majesty the King of the Hellenes,” “Lara: A Tale” is marked marginally, as is the rest of the volume. A footnote to the poem in this edition clarifies the Spanish reference: “The reader is appraised that the name of Lara being Spanish . . . the word ‘Serf,’ which could not be correctly applied to the lower classes in Spain, who were never vassals of the soil, has nevertheless been employed to designate the followers of our fictitious chieftain. [Byron, writing to Murray, July 14, 1814, says, ‘The name only is Spanish; the country is not Spain, but the Moon.’—Letters, 1899, iii, 110].”
Machiavelli . . . deceived: The Prince, Ch. XVIII.
Jules de Gaultier: (1858–1942). Unamuno read Gaultier’s De Kant à Nietzsche in the Mercure de France of 1899-1900. The “n’être pas dupe” undoubtedly is a paraphrase of a section concerning the superiority of France as regards their religious and spiritual maturity, which Unamuno marked in the margin. The general trend of the passage is found in the following: “C’est un grand bonheur pour un peuple posséder une religion qui a passé le temps de sa fermentation. Par la bienfaisance de ce privilège, la race française est actuellement la mieux préparée à voir éclore les modalités les plus intellectuelles de la Vie....” Mercure de France, octobre, 1899, No. 118, Tome xxxii, 142-47. De Kant à Nietzsche was published in book form in 1900.
357. Giordano Bruno: (1548–1600), born in Nola; in 1565, at the age of seventeen, he entered the Dominican friary of San Domenico in Naples, where he troubled the authorities. He fled, shed his habit, and started his long years of wandering and creativity. Burned in Rome as a heretic.
And Bruno also wrote: In the third dialogue of his De Gli Eroici Furori, Bruno describes heroic love as having divinity as its object: a certain divine beauty, which is reflected in the soul, whence it extends to the body. (“Tutti gli amori (se sono eroici, e non son puri animali, che chiamano naturali e cattivi alla generazione, come instrumenti de la natura in certo modo) hanno per oggetto la divinità, tendeno alla divina bellezza, la quale prima si comunica all’anime e risplende in quelle; e da quelle poi, o per dir meglio, per quelle poi si comunica alli corpi. . . .”); p. 336 of Unamuno’s copy of Dialoghi Morali, con note di Giovanni Gentile in the series Classici della filosofia moderna a cura di Benedetto Croce e Giovanni Gentile, vol. II (Bari, 1908 ). In the fourth dialogue there is a discussion of the intellect and how it achieves divine beauty. In the same fourth dialogue there is a discussion of anima and it is then we have the talk of insano and soprasape. When the anima becomes too intense, there results an insano condition, because, according to the subsequent conversation, the anima knows too much (soprasape), p. 354. Obviously, Unamuno has compressed and paraphrased the third and fourth dialogues to combine both the qualities and nature of heroic love and anima. Since Bruno himself extends heroic love to anima, Unamuno apparently does not feel compelled to take one step at a time, but leaps grandly from one stage to the other.
il secolo da lui divinato: the inscription on the plinth of the large dark statue to Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori reads: A BRUNO IL SECOLO DA LUI DIVINATO QUI OVE IL ROGO ARSE MDCCCLXXXIX (To Bruno, the century he foresaw, here where his pyre burned, 1889).