Unamuno's faith and Kierkegaard's religiousness a: making sense of the struggle.

Evans, Jan E.

There has been a substantial amount written on the faith of Miguel de Unamuno. Some critics have attempted to situate the Spanish philosopher within various recognized religious perspectives: Unamuno is a Catholic, a modern Erasmus, a Lutheran, a Protestant Liberal, a Krausist and a panentheist. Chief among the defenders of Unamuno as a Catholic is Julian Marias who sees in Unamuno's life a constant working out of the New Testament which Unamuno knows intimately (144-145). Felipe Lapuente says that Unamuno was called a modern Erasmus by the Ayuntamiento in Salamanca after the fateful day, October 12, 1936, in which he dared to oppose General Millan Astray in the Paraninfo of the University (29). In an early article Nemesio Gonzalez Caminero lays the blame for Unamuno's loss of his Catholic faith and his "initiation" into the Lutheran faith at the feet of Kant (227). Nelson Orringer has ably demonstrated the influence of Protestant liberal theologians like Ritschl and Harnack on Unamuno's thought, which Michael Gomez further illuminates in his study of Religious Modernism in Unamuno and Nietzsche. Armand Baker has a detailed exploration of Unamuno as a Krausist and panentheist in "The God of Unamuno." In my view, Unamuno would have rejected all of those religious labels.

Some critics have called Unamuno an atheist. The most strident of those is Antonio Sanchez Barbudo. In Estudios sobre Unamuno y Machado he says: Unamuno era en verdad un ateo, pero tan anheloso de Dios, de eternidad, por un lado, y tan farsante y ansioso de fama, por otro; tan desespe rado a veces y tan retorico otras muchas; y sobre todo, tan avisado, tan cuidadoso de ocultar su verdadero problema, esto es, su verdadera falta de fe, que encubriendo esta en un mar de palabras, y con toda su confusion, estuvo a punto de volver loco a medio mundo. (281)

Other commentators like Carlos Blanco Aguinaga in El Unamuno contemplativo (290) find Sanchez Barbudo's judgments harsh and inaccurate because they do not take into consideration the whole of Unamuno's work.

In January of 1957 the Catholic Church made its judgment official when it included two of Unamuno's works, Del sentimiento tragico de la vida and La agonia de cristianismo, on its then extant Index of Forbidden Books. But already in 1903 Unamuno was condemned by the bishop of Salamanca, Fray Tomas de la Camara, early in his career at the University of Salamaca (Lapuente 28), and the same ecclesial office prohibited the reading of his Del sentimiento tragico de la vida in 1942 (Nozick 18).

The heterodox nature of the Unamuno corpus gives rise to all of these theories. Much as one can give proof texts from the Bible to substantiate contradictory claims, some critics have gone to the works of Unamuno and have found passages to further their own agendas. Unamuno himself gives plenty of fodder for such critics because of his own penchant for contradiction; he does not want to be confined or limited by any school of thought. The purpose of this study is not to try out one more religious label on Unamuno but rather to relate Unamuno's faith to S0ren Kierkegaard's depiction of "Religiousness A" in Concluding Unscientific Postscript so that we may better understand the richness, complexity and depth of Unamuno's faith. In looking to Kierkegaard to help us understand Unamuno we can see a connection between Unamuno's philosophy and his religious beliefs. In the first chapter of Del sentimiento tragico de la vida Unamuno names Kierkegaard as one of the men who possesses the tragic sense of life. Kierkegaard is a man "cargado de sabiduria mas bien que de ciencia," one who understands that if philosophy is to matter, it has to be lived (7:120). For Unamuno the tragic sense of life is bound up with the heart's desire for immortality and the objective truth of our death. How we live our lives in face of that paradox gives rise to Unamuno's faith.

For the purposes of this article I will speak about Unamuno's faith rather than Unamuno's religion. Whenever Unamuno takes up the topic of religion he gets combative, as in his famous essay, "Mi religion." There he accuses those who would want to know what his religion is of wanting only to be able to categorize him or dismiss him. Those who demand to know what his religion is seem unaffected by the deep, eternal concerns of the heart, as he says, "se apartan de las grandes y eternas inquietudes del corazon" (3:261). By contrast, Unamuno's essay, "La fe," is a treatise that is full of passion and life rather than ridicule and defensiveness. There he says that faith is sincerity, tolerance and mercy (1:970). That essay begins with a quote from Ibsen, "Liv ogtro skal smelte sammen," "Life and faith must meld together into one" (1:962).

The quote from Ibsen leads us to Kierkegaard and the sequence of events that led to Unamuno's reading Kierkegaard. In a letter to Clarin, Unamuno reveals that he is immersing himself in reading the Danish theologian Kierkegaard whom he learned about through Brandes, who claimed that Ibsen aspired to be Kierkegaard's poetical voice (Menendez y Pelayo 82). To begin his essay on faith Unamuno uses Ibsen, who gives voice to Kierkegaard. The clear Kierkegaardian theme that runs through this early essay on faith is that assent to a set of propositions cannot be called faith. Rather, to have faith is to live in hope and to work for an ideal, an ideal that is always in the future and will be for eternity. There is much more that can be gleaned from Kierkegaard that can illuminate Unamuno's life of faith which is essentially a life of struggle and suffering. (1)

There is no doubt that Unamuno read nearly all of the fourteen volumes of the Samlede Vcerker, Kierkegaard's collected works which were published in Denmark between 1901 and 1906. Those volumes still exist in the Casa Museo Unamuno in Salamanca and clearly show Unamuno's interaction with the text in glosses on Danish words in the margins and multiple underlined passages. However, the text that has the most underlined passages and the text that is most quoted by Unamuno is Concluding Unscientific Postscript. (2) The existence spheres of the aesthetic and the ethical are artfully set forth in Either/Or, but it is in Postscript that the first two stages are compared with religiousness, the last of Kierkegaard's three stages of existence. It is important to understand the trajectory of all of the stages before explicating the stage of religiousness more fully. It is in Kierkegaard's understanding of the stage of religiousness that we can situate the faith of Unamuno and through that understanding appreciate its intricacy and intensity.

For Kierkegaard these three stages, the esthetic, the ethical and the religious, mark the progress of a person who is striving to live authentically. All of us begin in the esthetic stage where one lives for one's appetites and desires to be immediately satisfied. It is a stage in which one seeks to avoid boredom at all cost, and so the novel and the original are held in highest regard. The epitome of the esthete is the seducer whose diary is recorded at the end of Either/Or. The next stage begins when the esthete realizes that his or her life is just a succession of vacuous moments that do not really amount to happiness; then the person is poised to move on to the ethical stage. In Either/Or II Judge William seeks to convince "A," the writer of Either/Or I, that it is only when one begins to make commitments, exemplified by the commitment of marriage, that life acquires meaning. It is in this stage, the ethical stage, that one takes stock of one's passions and fulfills duties based on those passions. However, for Judge Williams, ethical passions are defined within the limits of societal expectations. The third stage is that of the religious, in which one realizes that the ethical life is unattainable in one's own strength. The religious life is divided into two more types, Religiousness A and Religiousness B. Religiousness A is a natural religion of immanence; Religious B is the transcendent religion of Christianity.

My purpose here is to illuminate Unamuno's faith with the content of Religiousness A. The fact that I am using Religiousness A and not Religiousness B is telling. Jesus-Antonio Collado in his book, Kierkegaard y Unamuno: La existencia religiosa, has done a careful and detailed study to show how Kierkegaard's view of faith is not shared by Unamuno. The view of faith that Collado attributes to Kierkegaard is authentic Christianity. By arguing that Unamuno's faith is not Kierkegaard's Collado has convincingly demonstrated that Unamuno's faith is not Christian. However, Collado seems dismissive of any substantive content in Unamuno's faith when he says that it is "una concepcion incoherente y falta de madurez en que el nervio de las ideas resulta en el fondo desde el principio hasta el fin pobre y deleznable" (410). I believe that Unamuno's faith does have significant meaning and that the Kierkegaardian category of Religiousness A, which Collado does not consider, can help to reveal its depth. But before we delve into Religiousness A, it is necessary to return to the existence stages and to further explicate what Kierkegaard means by the ethical stage. If we were to only use Either/Or as the basis of what Kierkegaard believes the ethical to be we would be very mistaken.

In Either/Or and also in Fear and Trembling the practical, ethical life is seen as what one is expected to do as a reasonable, decent human being within the context of a particular societal group. (3) However, in Postscript the ethical has a much richer content, one that goes beyond the ethics of Judge William. Here the ethical is still the second stage on the path to authentic existence, but we see that authentic existence may be in conflict with the societal expectations of citizenly duties. Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Postscript, says, "Ethics focuses upon the individual, and ethically understood it is every individual's task to become a complete human being, just as it is the presupposition of ethics that everyone is born in the condition of being able to become that" (CUP 346). For Climacus, the origin of the ethical mandate is God; it is God who calls the individual to be the person that he or she was created to be. However, it is entirely possible to feel the weight of the ethical task without knowing that it is God who has given the call. C. Stephen Evans says, "If God is the source of the ethical "ought," then anyone who is aware of the moral task already has an implicit awareness of God's reality, even if the individual does not recognize that is it God who is addressing him" (115).

In Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits Kierkegaard explains the ethical in terms of its goal--to be the person that one is supposed to be. In order for the person to be what one should be, one must be single minded, one must will to do the "Good". (4) The "Good" is what God wants of me. Kierkegaard says, "At every person's birth there comes into existence an eternal purpose for that person, for that person in particular. Faithfulness to oneself in relation to this is the highest thing a person can do" (UDVS 129). Climacus sets forth this principle first in Postscript and clearly sees the beginning of the religious life in the ethical because the source of the ethical task is God. He says, "It is really the God-relationship that makes a human being a human being" (CUP 244). Since this is so, it is important to situate Unamuno first in the ethical sphere.

In his Danish copy of another of the Upbuilding Discourses, Unamuno writes as a summary, "Y es el fin de la vida hacerse un alma," "the end of life is to become a soul." The context is a discourse on the virtue of patience in the process of gaining one's soul. The theme resonated with Unamuno. In Del sentimiento tragico de la vida he writes, "Me dicen que he venido a realizar no se que final social; pero yo siento que yo, lo mismo que cada uno de mis hermanos, he venido a realizarme, a vivir," (7: 116). There is a clear sense that the obligation is to become what one is supposed to be as an individual, and not merely to serve some socially recognizable end. Unamuno's view here seems very close to that of Kierkegaard, who stresses the idea that a genuine ethical individual has a quality that he calls "primitivity," something that a person who lives only by conforming to social roles does not have (SUD 33). As early as Concluding Unscientific Postscript Kierkegaard had satirized the person who lacks individuality as similar to a child who does not know the rules of etiquette, and must first observe what others do at a dinner party before eating anything (CUP 244).

A person in the ethical stage is ready to pass on to the religious stage when one recognizes that one falls short of fulfilling one's commitments and when one recognizes the difficulty of the process of becoming a self, of gaining a soul. Religiousness A, in turn, has three "moments" that are also incremental steps in the deepening of the religious stage. They are resignation, suffering and guilt. Climacus calls them respectively, the "initial," "the essential," and the "decisive" moments of the religious stage called Religiousness A (CUP ix). Each of these will be explored individually, and I will outline their reflection in Unamuno's writings. We will see that Unamuno's thought most certainly embodies the first two of these steps while the last remains open to question.

The initial step is resignation which has to do with the person's relationship to "the absolute". If authentic existence is to be won by becoming the person one is intended to be, it is to be accomplished by willing the "highest good." Only then, according to Climacus, will a person have "an absolute relation to the absolute" and a "relative relation to the relative," (CUP 387.) For Climacus the absolute is equated with "eternal happiness," and it is contrasted with such relative goods as "a good job, a beautiful wife, health..." (CUP 391). Those relative things are to be resigned if they come into conflict with "eternal happiness." What this means is that the person recognizes what is absolute, and sees what is most important in relationship to which all other things become dispensable. Climacus says, "If it does not absolutely transform his existence for him, then he is not relating himself to an eternal happiness; if there is something he is not willing to give up for its sake, then he is not relating himself to an eternal happiness" (CUP 393).

While Climacus designates the absolute as an "eternal happiness," Unamuno equates the absolute with immortality, essentially the same thing with the same demand on the person's existence. All other desires for Unamuno are subordinate to the desire for immortality. He says in the chapter entitled "El hambre de la inmortalidad" of Del sentimiento tragico de la vida, "El hambre de Dios, la sed de eternidad, de sobrevivir, nos ahogara siempre este pobre goce de la vida que pasa y no queda" (7: 135). The problem of immortality is the central problem around which Unamuno's entire work is woven. He puts it simply when he says, "Si muero, ya nada tiene sentido" (7: 129). For Unamuno there is no meaning in this life if there is not another life in which the self he currently is remains. He says further, "No quiero morirme, no; no quiero, ni quiero quererlo; quiero vivir siempre, siempre, siempre y vivir yo, este pobre yo que me soy y me siento ser ahora y aqui y por esto me tortura el problema de la duracion de mi alma, de la mia propia" (7: 136).

There is no doubt but that Unamuno was willing to give up everything to face the problem of immortality squarely and to get others to face it as well. He dismisses facile answers to the problem of immortality. As a scholar formed in the nineteenth century Unamuno rejects the notion that all intellectual endeavors contribute in some way to "progress" and thus we never die (8:835). Unamuno also discards pantheism in his discussion of individual conscience in Del sentimiento tragico de la vida. He says that being part of some unnamable mass of being before we were born and returning to it when we die annihilates any since of individuality and therefore any sense of meaningful immortality (7: 161). What about living on in our children or in our publications? In the Diario intimo Unamuno calls these attempts at immortality "sad comfort." We might hope that our memory stays alive in the minds of kin and readers, but it is unreasonable to think our memory endures because each generation forgets much of what and who have gone before, just as we have forgotten our forbearers. " Triste consuelo el de que seguira el mundo y viviran nuestros hijos y nuestras obras muertos nosotros! Triste consuelo si al morir morimos del todo volviendo a la nada! No, consuelo, sino desconsuelo y desesperacion"^: 848). Progress, pantheism, living on in our children or our work are all inadequate to satisfy the desire we have to live after death. (5)

The image that Unamuno invokes in Del sentimiento tragico de la vida is that of staring down the Sphinx. "El remedio es considerarlo cara a cara, fija la mirada en la mirada de la Esfinge, que es asi como se deshace el maleficio de su aojamiento. Si del todo morimos todos, para que todo? ... Es el para que de la Esfinge" (134). In Vida de don Quijote y Sancho Unamuno speaks about awaking his readers to the longing for immortality, "Hay que inquietar los espiritus y enfusar en ellos [los projimos] fuertes anhelos, aun a sabiendas de que no han de alcanzar nunca lo anhelado" (3:155). With Don Quijote, Unamuno is not afraid of appearing absurd or ridiculous. He says, "Solo el que ensaya lo absurdo es capaz de conquistar lo imposible... Y sobre todo, no hay mas que un modo de triunfar de veras: arrostrar el ridiculo" (3:141). The Church rejected his writings and encouraged the faithful not to read him, but Unamuno maintained his focus on immortality as the absolute through which all of our being must be defined. For Unamuno all other considerations are relative to that absolute, showing his own embrace of the first movement of Religiousness A.

The second aspect of Religiousness A that is outlined by Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript is that of suffering. When a person gives up the relative for the absolute the result is suffering. Climacus calls this kind of suffering "dying to immediacy," and it is different from the suffering that one would experience as a result of illness or catastrophe in one's life (CUP 499). Climacus says, "Fortune, misfortune, fate, immediate enthusiasm, despair these are what the esthetic life-view has at its disposal" (CUP 434); these are what he calls esthetic suffering. One can think of a perfect example of esthetic suffering from Unamuno's protagonists--Joaquin of Abel Sanchez. Joaquin is consumed by envy and hate that are the source of his constant suffering, but his is not religious suffering, it is esthetic suffering.

For Climacus, even the hurt that is felt in, say, the loss of a spouse, might or might not be religious suffering. If the loss points the individual ever more to the absolute, then this common suffering can become religious suffering. Fundamentally, religious suffering is about recognizing one's limits and one's dependence on God. Joaquin's suffering does the opposite. Rather than recognizing the need for God's help in his pain, Joaquin revels in his pain and sees himself as some sort of tragic hero. The religious suffering of which Climacus writes also cannot be equated with masochism or self-inflicted pain, as in self-flagellation, as though the point were just to make life miserable. The reason this is so is that people who torment themselves still see themselves as capable of accomplishing something important on their own; they have not learned that they must depend on God (CUP 463).

The pain of religious suffering is ongoing because the relinquishing of the relative to the absolute is never finished. So Climacus characterizes all of the religious life as one of suffering. "Just as the faith of immediacy is in fortune, so the faith of the religious is in this, that life lies precisely in suffering" (CUP 436). Unamuno read the page on which this quote is found very carefully, and he underlined the following at the end of the same paragraph, "Viewed religiously, the fortunate person, whom the whole world favors, is just as much a suffering person, if he is religious, as the person to whom misfortune comes from the outside" (CUP 436).

The heart of Unamuno's life of struggle is suffering. For him, the desire for immortality can never be fulfilled. All that is vital points to life after death but all that is rational denies that possibility. Faith wants to believe what reason rejects, and life must be lived in the tension between the two. The result is suffering. "El dolor nos dice que existimos ... y el dolor nos dice que existe y que sufre Dios; pero es el dolor de la congoja, de la congoja de sobrevivir y ser eternos. La congoja nos descubre a Dios y nos hace quererle" (7:232). For Unamuno the pain of suffering is necessary and can bring us to hope. "Acongojados al sentir que todo pasa, que pasamos nosotros, que pasa lo nuestro, que pasa cuanto nos rodea, la congoja misma nos revela el consuelo de lo que no pasa, de lo eterno, de lo hermoso" (7:229). Without facing our finitude and the suffering that results from that, we would not know the eternal.

According to Climacus, a key to the life of suffering in Religiousness A is the recognition of our dependence on God to fulfill the demands of the ethical. Does Unamuno's faith include such dependence? Though Unamuno is accused of being arrogant, proud and defiant, he unequivocally points to our need for God when he says, "Y necesitamos a Dios para salvar la conciencia; no para pensar la existencia, sino para vivirla; no para saber por que y como es, sino para sentir para que es. El amor es un contrasentido si no hay Dios" (7:201).

Unamuno realizes that in order to have immortality there needs to be a God. Immortality is dependent upon God, but rationally proving God is beyond human reason. "Las supuestas pruebas clasicas de la existencia de Dios refierense todas a este Dios-Idea, a este Dios logico, al Dios por remocion y de aqui que en rigor no prueben nada" (7:204). Since our thirst to know God rationally will never be assuaged and the desire for immortality should always motivate our minds and our hearts, the suffering and struggle will never and should never end. "Mira lector, aunque no te conozco, te quiero tanto que si pudiese tenerte en mis manos, te abriria el pecho y en el cogollo del corazon te rasgaria una llaga y te pondria alli vinagre y sal para que no pudieses descansar nunca y vivieras en perpetua zozobra y en anhelo inacabable" (3:241). Unamuno's view certainly seems to conform to Climacus' view that the religious life is one of continual suffering.

The last step in the existence sphere of Religiousness A, according to Climacus, is that of the personal recognition of guilt. He takes some care to explain what he means by guilt. The guilt of which he speaks is acknowledgement of one's failure to become what God has intended and the recognition that only God can provide the means to assuage that guilt. He outlines different views of guilt which do not reach the level of religious guilt. First, guilt could be viewed as personal failures that do not require God for their solution. Second, guilt could be viewed as crimes for which civil punishment is appropriate. Finally, guilt could be understood as lapses in moral behavior for which one might do penance. In all these cases, the person would not require God for absolution. In religious guilt the person must recognize that there is ultimately nothing that one can do humanly to make up for or "solve" the ongoing failing to live up to what God wants him or her to be. The individual must recognize his utter dependence on God to remake the broken relationship between them.

It is at this step that there is some difficulty in wholly squaring Unamuno's faith with Kierkegaard's Religiousness A. There is evidence of Unamuno's having read the part of Concluding Unscientific Postscript in which Climacus outlines the requirements of this decisive step in Religiousness A. In a section in which Climacus deals with the fact that guilt "belongs essentially in the religious sphere," Unamuno underlined,

The religious address deals essentially with the totality-category. It can use a crime, it can use a weakness, it can use a negligence, in short, any particular whatever; but what sets the religious address apart as such is that it moves from this particular to the totality-category by joining this particular together with a relation to an eternal happiness. (CUP 538)

The paragraph which starts with that quote ends with another underlined section that reads, "the religious address deals with inwardness, in which the totality-category seizes a person" (583). It would seem that Unamuno's attention was caught by the idea of the religious being faith that is wholly lived, that is related to "an eternal happiness." These are points of resonance between Unamuno and Kierkegaard.

But the idea of personal guilt and the need for God to restore a broken relationship between the human individual and himself seems not to be part of Unamuno's makeup. One thinks of a telling scene from San Manuel Bueno, martir that is indicative of Unamuno's attitude toward personal culpability. Angela comes to Don Manuel with a question that has come to her as she was praying to Mary, "Santa Maria, madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte," after a holy week communion during which Don Manuel had asked her to pray for him. Upon praying the prayer she asked herself, " nosotros pecadores? y cual es nuestro pecado, cual?" and not being able to answer, she goes to Don Manuel. His response echoes Calderon de la Barca's La vida es sueno as he says, "el delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido." Just in case she missed his meaning Don Manuel repeats, "Ese es, hija, nuestro pecado: el haber nacido" (2: 1147). Our problem is our finitude, our very existence.

Interestingly, Kierkegaard anticipated such a response to guilt. In Postscript Climacus explains that since guilt is a universal phenomenon that is grounded in the gap between the eternal and our temporal actuality, it is tempting to "shove the guilt onto the one who placed him in existence or onto existence itself" (CUP 528). In this case, guilt is made to be an ontological problem rather than a moral or a personal failure. Kierkegaard says that the most decisive expression of Religiousness A is a person who refuses to use this excuse and who thus sees himself or herself as truly guilty. Unamuno, however, seems to see the gap between ideal and achievement as inherent in existence rather than something one should take responsibility for. Our sin is that of having been born. Climacus says that on this view, "the guilt-consciousness is only a new expression for suffering in existence," and so the person holding this view has only come to the second step of Religiousness A and not to the third (CUP 528).

My intent here has been to show the richness and the depth of Unamuno's faith through the lens of Kierkegaard's Religiousness A. Through the progressive steps of resignation, suffering and guilt a person's relationship to "an eternal happiness" is defined and Religiousness A is attained. Miguel de Unamuno advocates for the kind of resignation that Kierkegaard calls for when he passionately desires immortality and relates all else to that absolute. Unamuno sees that there is no meaning in this life if it ends in death. He recognizes that desiring to live on through one's children or one's work are false goals that make a mockery of immortality. At the end of Del sentimiento tragico de la vida he says: Hay que creer en la otra vida, en la vida eterna de mas alla de la tumba, y en una vida individual y personal, en una vida en que cada uno de nosotros sienta su conciencia y la sienta unirse, sin confundirse, con las demas conciencias todas en la Conciencia Suprema, en Dios; hay que creer en esa otra vida para poder vivir esta y soportarla y darle sentido y finalidad. Y hay que creer acaso en esa otra vida para merecerla, para conseguirla, o tal vez ni la merece ni la consigue el que no la anhela sobre la razon, y si fuere menester, hasta contra ella. (7:261)

The proof of his profound desire to live eternally will be seen in his own conduct as he seeks to live as though he merited eternal life (7:264).

Suffering, the second of Kierkegaard's steps in Religiousness A, is a central part of Unamuno's faith. He thoroughly understands the suffering that is caused when the longing for the eternal life that gives this life meaning must be embraced in the face of rationality. Reason and the passions of the heart will always be in tension and will always result in suffering. Unamuno understands that the attainment of immortality is necessarily dependent on God, though the proof of such a God is impossible. He chooses to live as though God exists, accepting the suffering that the struggle to know produces and the fact that the question is never resolved. He declares that wanting to believe is enough. "Creer en Dios es anhelar que le haya y es, ademas, conducirse como si le hubiera; es vivir de ese anhelo y hacer de el nuestro intimo resorte de accion" (7:219).

Though Unamuno does not seem to fulfill the third step of Religiousness A, to accept the need for God to provide the solution for personal guilt, I believe that his full understanding of the first two steps situates him firmly in Religiousness A. Climacus has a deep appreciation for this stage of existence. He says, "Religiousness A ... is so strenuous for a human being that there is always a sufficient task in it" (CUP 557) and later adds, "A person existing religiously can express his relation to an eternal happiness (immortality, eternal life) outside Christianity, and it certainly has also been done, since it must be said of Religiousness A that even if it had not been present in paganism it could have been" (CUP 559). Unamuno's faith functions outside the paradigm of orthodox Christianity, but its central requirements are consonant with Religoiusness A and as such are religiously profound and demanding.

We can now understand better how it is that none of the kinds of Christianity, whether Catholic or Lutheran or Liberal Protestant, mentioned in the religious labels at the beginning of this article captures the thought of Miguel de Unamuno; we can also see that the critics who call Unamuno an atheist are far off the mark. If we understand Unamuno's faith as the faith found in Religiousness A, we see that his faith is one that includes the ethical sphere of existence that recognizes commitments that are required by a force beyond oneself. It is a faith that requires "an absolute relation to the absolute" as Unamuno resigns all to embrace the problem of immortality. It is a faith that is willing to suffer, to make of life a struggle for the truth, even though one may never know the truth about what happens after death. Unamuno's faith is his lived philosophy, and in Kierkegaardian terms is it "strenuous" and provides Unamuno with a "sufficient task" for a lifetime.

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--. Abel Sanchez. 1917. Obras completas, 1967. 2: 683-759.

--. La agonia del cristianismo. 1926. Obras completas, 1967. 8: 307-64.

--. Del sentimiento tragico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos. 1913. Obras completas, 1967. 7: 106-302.

--. Diario intimo. 1897-1902. Obras completas, 1966. 8: 773-880.

--. "Ibsen y Kierkegaard." 1907. Obras completas, 1968. 3: 289-93.

--. "Mi religion." 1907. Obras completas, 1968. 3: 259-63.

--. San Manuel Bueno, martir. 1930. Obras completas, 1967. 2: 1113-54.

--. Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho. 1904. Obras completas, 1968. 3:49-254.

Jan E. Evans

Baylor University

NOTES

(1) Michael Gomez attributes Unamuno's need for holding contradictory views in tension to the modernism that grips both Unamuno and Nietzsche. I don't disagree completely with that point, but his explanation of the source of the philosophical struggle does not help to make sense of the struggle existentially, which is the focus of this study.

(2) Strictly speaking, Concluding Unscientific Postscript should be attributed to Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus rather than to Kierkegaard himself, following Kierkegaard's request in the "First and Last Declaration" attached to Postscript. However, it is fairly clear that Unamuno himself did not draw a distinction between Climacus and Kierkegaard as his copy of Postcript indicates that he did not read "The First and Last Declaration." In any case, the relation between Climacus and Kierkegaard is a close one, as indicated by the fact that Kierkegaard placed his own name on the title page of Postscript as "Editor." Kierkegaard himself tells us in The Point of View for my Work as an Author that placing his own name on the title page was a "hint, at least for someone who is concerned with or has a sense for such things." (31-32). Since Climacus does not claim to be a Christian, he cannot simply be identified with Kierkegaard. However, in The Point of View Kierkegaard appropriates much of what Climacus has done by claiming that Postscript is the turning point of his whole authorship and expresses the crucial issue of the whole authorship: "becoming a Christian" (PV 55).

(3) These distinctions are made by C. Stephen Evans in Kierkegaard: An Introduction. I am indebted to his explication of the ethical and the religious found in Chapter 6, "Religious existence: Religiousness A," (110-138).

(4) A section of this book is translated into English separately as Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing.

(5) I have also dealt with this theme of less than adequate answers to the question of immortality in "Unamuno's Passion for Immortality: Narcissism or Foundation for Religious Belief?" (28-31).