Bread of Immortality. Unamuno, Life 4.9
Unamuno believes the Eucharist is the axis of Catholicism, and its religious purpose is to make humanity whole, uniting each particular individual with every other individual in the communion that is Christ's body. This communion, for him, must be a dialogue of particular persons: it cannot be resumed into something abstract, remote from personal intimacy.
Quid ad aeternitatem? He aquí la pregunta capital. Y acaba el Credo con aquello de resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi, la resurrección de los muertos y la vida venidera. En el cementerio, hoy amortizado, de Mallona, en mi pueblo natal, Bilbao, hay grabada una cuarteta que dice:
Quid ad aeternitatem? He aquí la pregunta capital. Y acaba el Credo con aquello de resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi, la resurrección de los muertos y la vida venidera. En el cementerio, hoy amortizado, de Mallona, en mi pueblo natal, Bilbao, hay grabada una cuarteta que dice:
Aunque
estamos en polvo convertidos,
en ti, Señor, nuestra
esperanza fía,
que tornaremos a vivir
vestidos
con la carne y la piel que
nos cubría;
o
como el Catecismo dice: con los mismos cuerpos y almas que tuvieron.
A punto tal, que es doctrina católica ortodoxa la de que la dicha de
los bienaventurados no es del todo perfecta hasta que recobran sus
cuerpos. Quéjanse en el cielo, y «aquel quejido les nace —dice
nuestro Fray Pedro Malón de Chaide, de la Orden de San Agustín,
español y vasco— de que no están enteros en el cielo, pues sólo
está allá el alma, y aunque no pueden tener pena porque ven a Dios,
en quien inefablemente se gozan, con todo eso parece que no están
del todo contentos. Estarlo han cuando se vistieren de sus propios
cuerpos».
Y
a este dogma central de la resurrección en Cristo y por Cristo
corresponde un sacramento central también, el eje de la piedad
popular católica, y es el sacramento de la Eucaristía. En él se
administra el cuerpo de Cristo, que es pan de inmortalidad.
What
endures into eternity? That is the real question. The Creed ends
invoking the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to
come (†). In the cemetery of Mallona, which is closed today, in my
ancestral city of Bilbao, there is a plaque with this quartet
engraved:
Though
our bodies be but dust
In
thee, o Lord, we've put our trust
That
we anon shall don life's robes
Resume
the flesh that was our clothes.
Or
again, in the words of the
Catechism: they shall rise with the same bodies and souls that they
once possessed. The orthodox Catholic doctrine is that the glory of
the blessed is not made perfect until they recover their bodies. They
mourn in heaven, and as our Brother
Pedro Malón de Chaide, a Spanish Basque of the Order of Saint
Augustine (‡),
reminds us: "That
mourning arises
from the fact that they are not whole in heaven, for only the soul is
there, and though they cannot suffer, for they see God and rejoice in
his presence beyond our ability to express, still it appears that
they are not utterly content. They shall be so when they don again
their own bodies."
To
this central dogma of resurrection in and through Christ there
belongs also a central sacrament, the axis of popular Catholic piety,
and that is the sacrament of the Eucharist. In it, believers receive
their portion of the body of Christ, which is the bread of
immortality.
---
(†)
After being adopted by the council of Nicaea in 325 CE and amended by
the second ecumenical council of Constantinople in 381, the Creed was
initially recited by believers at baptism. Clergy in Spain and the
Roman East introduced it into the liturgy as early as the sixth
century, and their practice eventually spread to the northern
churches, as well. The church of Rome made it an official part of the
mass in 1014. Unamuno quotes the Latin mass.
(‡)
Pedro Malón de Chaide (c. 1530-1589 CE) studied letters at the
university of Salamanca, where he became a pupil of Brother
Luis de León and joined the Order of the Brethren of Saint
Augustine, which had been founded in 1244 to incorporate under one
discipline various monastic communities using the rule that Augustine
created in the fourth century. When his master and others (notably
Alonso Gudiel) were taken by the Inquisition on charges of heresy,
he decided to refrain from publishing, and released just one book to
print (though he seems to have written others by hand): The
Conversion of the Magdalene, a
vernacular account of the saint. Unamuno quotes from this.