Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno, Volume 5: The Agony of Christianity and Essays on Faith: The Agony of Christianity and Essays on Faith PDF
Preview Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno, Volume 5: The Agony of Christianity and Essays on Faith: The Agony of Christianity and Essays on Faith
BOLLINGEN SERIES LXXXV Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno Volume 5 Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno Edited and Annotated by Anthony Kerrigan and Martin Noziek 1. Peace in War 2. The Private World 3. Our Lord Don Quixote 4. The Tragic Sense of Life 5. The Agony of Christianity 6. Novela/Nivola 7. Ficciones Miguel de Unamuno The Agony of Christianity and Essays on Faith Translated by Anthony Kerrigan Annotated by Martin Nozick and Anthony Kerrigan BoIlingen Series LXXXV · 5 Princeton University Press Copyright © 1974 by Princeton University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Catalogue card no. 67-22341 ISBN 0-691-09933-2 THIS IS VOLUME FIVE OF THE SELECTED WORKS OF MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO CONSTITUTING NUMBER LXXXV IN BOLLINGEN SERIES SPONSORED BY BOLLINGEN FOUNDATION. IT IS THE THIRD VOLUME OF THE SELECTED WORKS TO APPEAR Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press Princeton, N.J. Table of Contents TRANSLATOR'S NOTE I The Agony of Christianity I. Introduction 3 Π. Agony 9 ΙΠ. What is Christianity? 14 IV. The Word and the Letter 23 V. Abishag the Shunammite 32 VI. The Virihty of Faith 43 VII. So-Called Social Christianity 55 VIII. Absolute Individualism 66 IX. The Faith of Pascal 73 X. Pere Hyacinthe 88 XI. Conclusion 102 II Essays on Faith Nicodemus the Pharisee 113 Faith 148 ν Contents What is Truth? 165 The Secret of Life 185 The Portico of the Temple 202 My Religion 209 The Vertical of Le Dantec 218 Rebekah 230 Spin from your Entrails! 235 NOTES 243 INDEX 287 vi Translator's Note BY AGONY, UNAMUNO means death throes, in deed, but the death throes of any dubious, any doubt ful, any doubting man all his life. By Christianity, he means the West, properly so-called, the area where the corrida of Christianity, the running of the black bulls of Christianity, is—or has been—celebrated, played out (in both senses). The Decline of the West? Unamuno speaks of this phenomenon in Chap ter VII, where he suggests that what the Romantics (Napoleon chief among them) did not foresee was that the Cossacks would turn "Democratic" and the democratic Left would turn Cossack, that the Church would turn Revolutionary and the Revolution would turn Ultramontane (over the mountains to Moscow or Mao everything seems better). The Romantics did not dream of Bolshevism/Fascism/Maoism. Nor did they foresee "the chaotic disorder which the agonic Oswald Spengler attempts to render by the architec tonic music of his Der Untergang des Abendlandes, which is simply the agony of Christianity." And there we have a Baroque—but concise—definition of our book's title. And, what of the "desert Muslimism'1 of which Unamimo speaks in this book? In its peace—and in its warfare—"it becomes Christianized . . . which is to say it becomes agonic, it agonizes in the throes of proselytism." The dogmatic Libyan Chief of State of fered, in 1972, the Catholic Irish Republican Army the arms it needed—if it would turn Muslim! And in Translator's Note 1973, in Uganda, Amin Dada, another military dic tator, was forcibly turning a country only 10% Mos lem into an all-Islamic state, and doing so by naked terror, beginning with the "enforced mass conversions to Islam among the troops." ("Behind Uganda's Or deal," C. Munnion, London.) What is to be done? We agonize. We agonize in any case. We might as well do it on purpose (like the rich young farmer who could afford to farm "on pur pose" in Kingsley Amis's softly Gnostic Green Man, a ghostly book which includes a parody of the fruity "with-it" cleric of the ephemeral English moment). A procreative man, Unamuno fought death, fought it alongside Christianity, whose message may be love—procreative love rather than some other watered variety—but whose "buena nueva," "glad tidings," good news is, or was, war on death. Unamuno glosses the battle, the permanent revo lution against death. He glosses, he adverbializes, Western man's "agony," which is Greek for struggle: that of agonist, protagonist, antagonist—with, in, and against his individual life-role, whatever it may be, and whether or not it be all three. When Unamuno put together this gloss on his reading against death, in exile, in Paris, he did not see his Parisian exile in a romantic light. He viewed it, felt it, much as an Athenian viewed proscription, when Athens was integral. He took it as a terrible sentence against himself—even if it was self-imposed. He lived to view it (in retrospect) as having been a wrong-headed move by himself, and even contra-indi- cated as any kind of medicine for his country's ill. The Paris of the senses, of the bittersweet joie de vivre and its consequent hangover cafard, did not exist for him, though he was as sensually farfetched, Translator's Note as deeply sexual, even as perverse, as James Joyce in the same city, whatever the obvious and different ap pearances of their public characters: that of the re bellious Irish-pagan Catholic Celt and that of the heterodoxical Castilian-Catholic Basque who said he believed in a Christ from Tangiers. For Unamuno, the Christian God was a "working hypothesis" (as Martin Nozick writes in his book on Unamuno), but he doubted the conclusions. Such was his Agony as well as his Tragic Sense of Life, which were not only books by Unamuno but novels of his life. Agony, struggle, la moral de batalla, mean life, while peace means, as it did for Don Quixote, the end, death. And Christ had come—whatever His other, contradictory messages—to bring "not peace but a sword." And Agony itself, in short, is a death agony against final death, against total death. (As, coition, the struggle and little death, is the only means to keep humanity eternal.) And now when Christianity and the West are under sentence of the final penalty (even as "the race of the monks of the West," as foretold in this book), and the death-rattle is electronically am plified the better to be heard, the agony is all the more painfully agonizing. Now that Europe, the West, seems doomed, all that is left to us is resistance. The Resistance itself is based on contradiction: "Whoever affirms his faith upon a basis of uncer tainty does not and cannot lie," Unamuno wrote in his Tragic Sense of Life. He did not seek a synthesis of thesis and antithesis any more than did Pascal or Proudhon, as he announces here, but abided by con tradiction, even by strife. "Men seek peace, they say, but do they . . . ?" he asks in Chapter HI of The Agony.
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