Life: social tragedy or individual dilemma? Unamuno, Life 4.11
Unamuno
sees Catholicism maintaining an ancient commitment to communion
and community that Protestants lose, in part because they focus too
much on rational ethics, which belong properly to individuals (rather
than groups) and to this world (rather than any other). He finds
minimal room for heroic self-sacrifice in forms of religion which
allow themselves to become simply ethical (a matter of finding the
right, sensible thing and doing it, with no fuss or tragedy). His
Catholics are religious because they must confront the tragedy of
life being inherently unsolved and insoluble, and they rise to that
challenge sacramentally, ritually—in the context of a living
tradition that never achieves a perfectly rational ethic like Kant's
categorical imperative. Communion with Christ, on Unamuno's reading,
requires a social unity or integrity that defies the ability of any
individual among us to capture with reason, or express with any singular ethic separated from all others by shared reason. Justification of the
individual, a core tenet of Protestantism (on Unamuno's reading), is
not that important for Catholics, who read life as a social tragedy
rather than an individual moral dilemma.
No
ha sido la preocupación del pecado nunca tan angustiosa entre los
católicos, o por lo menos, con tanta aparencialidad de angustia. El
sacramento de la confesión ayuda a ello. Y tal vez es que persiste
aquí más que entre ellos el fondo de la concepción primitiva
judaica y pagana del pecado como de algo material e infeccioso y
hereditario, que se cura con el bautismo y la
absolución. En Adán pecó toda su descendencia, casi materialmente,
y se trasmitió su pecado como una enfermedad material se trasmite.
Tenía, pues, razón Renán, cuya educación era
católica, al revolverse contra el protestante Amiel, que le acusó
de no dar la debida importancia al pecado. Y, en cambio, el
protestantismo, absorto en eso de la justificación, tomada en un
sentido más ético que otra cosa, aunque con apariencias religiosas,
acaba por neutralizar y casi borrar lo escatológico, abandona la
simbólica nicena, cae en la anarquía confesional, en puro
individualismo religioso y en vaga religiosidad estética, ética o
cultural. La que podríamos llamar «allendidad», Jenseitigkeit,
se borra poco a poco detrás de la «aquendidad»,
Diesseitigkeit. Y esto, a pesar del
mismo Kant, que quiso salvarla, pero arruinándola.
La
vocación terrenal y la confianza pasiva en Dios dan su ramplonería
religiosa al luteranismo, que estuvo a punto de naufragar en la edad
de la ilustración, de la
Aufklärung,
y que apenas si el pietismo, imbuyéndole alguna savia religiosa
católica, logró galvanizar un poco. Y así resulta muy exacto lo
que Oliveira Martins decía en su espléndida
Historia
da civilasação iberica,
lib.
4.º, cap. III; y es que «el catolicismo dió héroes y el
protestantismo sociedades sensatas, felices, ricas, libres, en lo que
respecta a las instituciones y a la economía externa, pero incapaces
de ninguna acción grandiosa, porque la religión comenzaba por
despedazar en el corazón del hombre aquello que le hace susceptible
de las audacias y de los nobles sacrificios». Coged
una Dogmática cualquiera de las producidas por la última disolución
protestante, la del ritschleniano Kaftan, por ejemplo, y ved a lo que
allí queda reducida la escatología. Y su maestro mismo, Albrecht
Ritschl, nos dice: «El problema de la necesidad de la justificación
o remisión de los pecados sólo puede derivarse del concepto de la
vida eterna como directa relación de fin de aquella acción divina.
Pero si se ha de aplicar ese concepto no más que al estado de la
vida de ultratumba, queda su contenido fuera de toda experiencia, y
no puede fundar conocimiento alguno que tenga carácter científico.
No son, por lo tanto, más claras las esperanzas y los anhelos de la
más fuerte certeza subjetiva, y no contienen en sí garantía alguna
de la integridad de lo que se espera y anhela. Claridad e integridad
de la representación ideal son, sin embargo, las condiciones para la
comprensión, esto es, para el conocimiento de la conexión necesaria
de la cosa en sí y con sus dados presupuestos. Así es que la
confesión evangélica de que la justificación por la fe fundamental
lleva consigo la certeza de la vida eterna, es inaplicable
teológicamente, mientras no se muestre en la experiencia presente
posible esa relación de fin» (Rechtfertigung
und Versöhnung,
III, cap.
VII, 52). Todo esto es muy racional, pero
...
Preoccupation
with sin has never been as anxious among Catholics as Protestants, at
least as far as outward appearances go. The sacrament of confession
helps this. Perhaps the Catholics retain a closer hold on the
primitive foundation laid by Jews and pagans, who conceived sin as
something material, infectious, and hereditary, to be cured with
baptism and absolution. In Adam occurred the sin of all his
descendants—materially, as it were—and his sin passed down to us
as a material, physical illness would. And so Renan, educated by
Catholics, was right to revolt against the Protestant Amiel (†),
who accused him of failing to give sin its due. And Protestantism,
for its part, becoming absorbed in the idea of justification—which
it takes in a sense more ethical than religious, though it retains
the outward forms of religion—ends up neutering and almost
destroying eschatology. Abandoning the shared symbolic discourse of
Nicea, it falls into confessional anarchy, reducing religion to a
purely individual matter and leaving the community nothing but a
vaguely religious affect, ethical or cultural. What we might call the
world beyond, the Otherworld of the religious, is erased little by
little behind the rising profile of this world, the province of
secular moralists. This happens in spite of Kant, who wanted to save
the Otherworld, but instead managed only to proclaim its final ruin.
Lutheranism
takes its religious vulgarity from being thoroughly devoted to
worldly affairs, and from an apathetic confidence in God, soon to be
shipwrecked in the age of Enlightenment, the Dawn of Reason whose
blistering attack on the tree of religion was scarcely healed by
whatever sap the Pietists (‡) managed to scrounge from Catholicism.
And so the judgment expressed by Oliveira Martins (*) in his
excellent History of Iberian Civilization
(book 4, chapter 3) is utterly correct: "Catholicism created
heroes, but the product of Protestantism was societies: sensible,
happy, wealthy, free in terms of their institutions and external
economy, but incapable of any heroic action, for Protestant religion
begins by destroying the capacity of the human heart to conceive
great deeds and noble sacrifices." Take any of the
professions of faith produced by the latest Protestant rebellion,
that of Albrecht Ritschl's student Kaftan for example, and see there
the pitiful remains of what used to be eschatology. Ritschl himself
(⁑), the master of this pupil, addresses us thus: "The need
for justification, or remission of sins, can only arise as a problem
from the conception of eternal life as a direct experience, an end of
the divine action that begins with creation. If the concept of
eternal life applies only to the state of life that exists beyond the
grave, however, then its content remains outside all our mortal
experience, and it cannot serve as a basis for any knowledge of a
scientific character. The hopes and desires of the strongest
subjective certainty are thus no clearer or brighter than any others,
and in themselves they carry no assurance of the integrity of that
which they represent to us. Still, comprehension requires us to meet
the conditions of clarity and integrity as we represent any ideal to
our minds: we must recognize how the thing represented is a necessary
expression, proceeding inevitably from grounds we allow a priori.
So the evangelical confession
that justification by faith brings with itself a certainty of eternal
life finds no place in theology, since our present experience
provides no information validating the
conception of its end present
in this confession"
(Justification and Atonement 3.7.52).
This is all very rational, but ...
---
(†)
Joseph Ernest Renan (1823-1892) and Henri-Frédéric Amiel
(1821-1881) were contemporaries who read and criticized each other's
work. Unamuno refers here to an essay of Renan's translated by Isabel
Hapgood (Recollections and Letters of Ernest Renan,
published 1892, pp. 262-295), in which he discusses Amiel's
posthumously published Journal.
(‡)
A Lutheran revivalist movement that began with the ministry of
Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705), who wanted to foster traditions of
personal and communal devotion (notably the study of scripture and
public preaching) among Protestants. Kant (1724-1804) was raised as a
Pietist, and the movement had a strong influence on the founders of
Methodism, including John Wesley (1703-1791).
(*)
Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins (1845-1894) was a Portuguese
businessman and historian, remembered for his conception of history
as narrative rather than science.
(⁑)
Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1899) was a professor of theology at Bonn and
then Göttingen. He wrote several books, including the one Unamuno
quotes here (arguing that faith is irrational, or perhaps better,
beyond rational, since it cannot derive from simple facts). Julius
Wilhem Martin Kaftan (1848-1926) accepted and continued his
tradition, maintaining that effective faith is a personal, individual
reconciliation with God, who does not need or seek to redeem humanity
writ large.