I am a little more than halfway through Miguel De Unamuno's theological work on the nature of Christianity, and so far I am loving it. It is a theological application of the Christian Philosophy laid down in his most famous work, THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE, which has been one of my favorite books for a long time.
One thing you must know about Unamuno's work is that his writing is broadly linear, but can be hard to follow. He kind of writes down a bundle of ideas, and from that bundle a genuine picture emerges. Then he uses that picture to work out a new bundle of ideas. In this way, there is an overall logical progression, even if particular chapters are a little more scattered. I find this way of writing amenable to my way of thinking, so I find him readable, but many others may not.
Unamuno begins his book by working out the philosophical concept of AGONY. For him, agony is a very rich concept, much like angst is for Camus or despair was for Kierkegaard. Agony, for Unamuno, comes from facing a need to rationalize what cannot be rationalized, and the pain that flows from this cognitive dissonance. Not any internal contradiction will do, it must be a paradox that pains the one who perceives it. One feels God's presence and comes to love God, but to love something is to desire to know it. But to know God, to truly know God is impossible. One cannot get one's reason around it. Indeed, the very idea may be anathema to reason. The desire for a love relationship and the inability to truly know what one loves is the source of immeasurable pain, at least at first. This is the AGONY that Unamuno speaks of.
But one should not think of Unamuno's work as one of despair of depression. Indeed, Unamuno thinks that despair and depression can be good things, and are indeed necessary stages on the road to genuine faith, but the ultimate end of Unamuno's work is love and hope. Unamuno says that the greatest hope is the hope born of hopelessness, and the greatest joy the joy of the depressed. No, for Unamuno this AGONY is not something to be avoided. Rather, one must enter fully into it if one is to discover God. For the AGONY we experience by our need to know and our inability to know is roughly the same AGONY God feels when He is forced to love that which seems all but incapable of loving Him. In that sense, the AGONY we feel is the very pain of God (Kazon Kitamori would've liked Unamuno's reasoning here, I think), and by embracing that pain we share in God's life, and that is the only way we can truly love God in this world.
Unamuno then goes on to argue that all true Christianity is mysticism. That to be Christian is to embrace a mystical attitude towards life. This is roughly connected to his perspective on AGONY, for indeed AGONY is a pathway to find unity or oneness with God. Indeed all true AGONY can be a pathway to God. Unamuno thinks that the honest atheist has more faith than the dishonest Christian, for the honest atheist has opened himself up to the possibility of feeling genuine AGONY. Unamuno makes a distinction between knowing God and knowing about God, and between the Word of God the letter of God. For Unamuno, Christianity has erred by putting to much faith in the letter and lacking the living Word of God. Mysticism is left behind for understanding, but any understanding Christians pretend to can be nothing but pretense. What is understood is not really God, and so one never faces genuine AGONY, and never finds the genuine, mystic union with God that brings real life. So you wind up with a false Christianity, and a false church.
Unamuno goes on to illustrate what he is talking about with the image of David's last wife, who remained a virgin to the day he died. She cared for him as a mother, David was unable to 'lie with her' at this point, but her love for him was intense. Unamuno sees in this a foreshadowing of Christ. We desire to 'know' God in the way the woman desired to 'be with' her husband. But being unable to know God, we instead seek to love God as a mother, and thereby we come to experience God directly. For Unamuno God is the sufferer we pick up off the ground and comfort, and by this act we know God's genuine love for us, we become One with God, and find the peace and happiness we seek. Faith that seeks to 'see God' in the world or seeks to get something from God is bound to be frustrated, in the same way David's last wife was frustrated. Only by becoming mother to God do we find God and fin our place in the universe. This vision of Unamuno's appeals to me greatly. It is roughly my own view, better stated. He made this particular Bible story come alive, I now share his view that within it is a cosmic significance. Christ is God made the suffering David, and faith is born not of being subject to Christ's power but of wanting to use our own power to comfort and console Christ. This is an unabashedly Christocentric vision of God, and one that I fully embrace. Unamuno has given form and function to what I have felt for quite a while. Wow, this stuff is amazing.
Unamuno argues for a kind of political neutrality for Christianity, based on the apocalyptic nature of Jesus' and Paul's teachings. This is the one big flaw for me. I cannot separate morality and religion has he does. I agree with Unamuno that Jesus and Paul's teachings cannot be the foundation for a political philosophy as we receive them in the text, but they can be adapted into political philosophies and grounds for action in this world. We cannot use them as absolute guides, but the can inspire us to think about political issues in a certain way. We cannot responsibly live as people for whom the world is about to end. We can live, and find a way to live responsibly, as people for whom the world might be about to end. There can be such a thing as Christian ethics, despite Unamuno's denial of such a thing. In fact, Unamuno himself, through his focus on the Cross and our relationship with God, has shown us a ground for moral action in the world. A religious idea that is morally neutral is dead. And I do not believe Christ to be dead.
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