Homage To Unamuno

The Spanish poet, novelist and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno Y Jugo,1864-1936, was born in Bilbao into a Basque family. He was educated in Bilbao and at the University of Madrid. As a professor of Greek and Classics he taught at the University of Salamanca, where, from 1920, he served twice as rector of the university. An existentialist, Unamuno was tormented by the mystery and anguish of life, the conflict between faith and reason. In his 1913 Del sentimiento tragico de la vita he explored the absurdities, the tensions, the incomprehensible fences of nothingness: birth and death, man's yearning for eternal life, the perennial desire for immortality, the pervasiveness of hopelessness and despair, the human experience that nourishes the development of the brotherhood of man. A Catholic, Unamuno held that religion is needed for authentic human existence. For pragmatic reasons, we need religion, a courageous leap of faith is necessary for our well-being and we must live as if God does in fact exist. Unfortunately skepticism intrudes, shadows of despair threaten the logic of the heart, the darkness of the logic of the head overwhelms faith. Sorrow has no resolution and evil has no redemption. We can weep, of course, and we should, but it avails us nothing. Unamuno believed in the eternity of the soul. In death the soul merges with the universe, man has total union with space, time, cosmos and being. The idea of the nondestruction of the soul follows from the a priori impossibility of the destruction of the soul, as we cannot even conceive the nonexistence of consciousness. The Bible says that man was created in the image of God. Unamuno believed that to be a man meant to seek to become God. And unless man is God he is not even man. He died in turbulent political times, during the Spanish Civil War.