Ethics or eschatology? Unamuno, Life 4.13
Is the purpose of religion to optimize human moral expression, or to achieve the goal of immortality? Unamuno says that Catholicism aims at both of these ends, but primarily the latter. Thus there is really just one sin that matters: thinking without the church, whose ethics are imparted as tools for immortalizing us, not instruments for assuaging our conscience of guilt (rational or otherwise). Unamuno appears to agree with Tertullian, that Christianity is essentially irrational. This does not mean that it has no use for reason at all, only that its foundation is not to be justified by reason. A rational man, Unamuno suggests, would never seek immortality, and thus would have no use for Catholicism—and perhaps no use for the arts and sciences whose historical expression incorporates elements of personality cult. Is life rational? Unamuno thinks not. We live by desire, hope, and fear, and not simply by reason, who is a servant to these primary drivers rather than a master.
¡Y
no es que el catolicismo abandone lo ético, no! No hay religión
moderna que pueda soslayarlo. Pero esta nuestra es en su fondo y en
gran parte, aunque sus doctores protesten contra esto, un compromiso
entre la escatología y la moral, aquélla puesta al servicio de
ésta. ¿Qué otra cosa es si no ese horror de las penas eternas del
infierno que tan mal se compadece con la apocatástasis pauliniana?
Atengámonos a aquello que la Theologia
deutsch, el manual místico que Lutero leía, hace
decir a Dios y es: «Si he de recompensar tu maldad, tengo que
hacerlo con bien, pues ni soy ni tengo otra cosa». Y el Cristo dijo:
«Padre, perdónalos, pues no saben lo que se hacen», y no hay
hombre que sepa lo que se hace. Pero ha sido menester convertir a la
religión, a beneficio del orden social, en policía, y de ahí el
infierno. El cristianismo oriental o griego es predominantemente
escatológico, predominantemente ético el protestantismo y el
catolicismo un compromiso entre ambas cosas, aunque con predominancia
de lo primero. La más genuina moral católica, la ascética
monástica, es moral de escatología enderezada a la salvación del
alma individual más que al mantenimiento de la sociedad. Y en el
culto a la virginidad ¿no habrá acaso una cierta oscura idea de que
el perpetuarse en otros estorba la propia perpetuación? La moral
ascética es una moral negativa. Y, en rigor, lo importante es no
morirse, péquese o no. Ni hay que tomar muy a la letra, sino como
una efusión lírica y más bien retórica, aquello de nuestro
célebre soneto
No
me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte
el
cielo que me tienes prometido,
y
lo que sigue.
El
verdadero pecado, acaso el pecado contra el Espíritu Santo que no
tiene remisión, es el pecado de herejía, el de pensar por cuenta
propia. Ya se ha oído aquí, en nuestra España, que ser liberal,
esto es, hereje, es peor que ser asesino, ladrón o adúltero. El
pecado más grave es no obedecer a la Iglesia, cuya infalibilidad nos
defiende de la razón.
¿Y
por qué ha de escandalizar la infalibilidad de un hombre, del Papa?
¿Qué más da que sea infalible
un
libro: la Biblia, una sociedad de hombres: la Iglesia, o un hombre
solo? ¿Cambia por eso la dificultad racional de esencia? Y pues no
siendo más racional la infalibilidad de un libro o la de una
sociedad que la de un hombre solo, había que asentar este supremo
escándalo para el racionalismo.
Catholicism
does not abandon the realm of ethics, certainly! No modern religion
can avoid it. But our faith is largely and fundamentally a compromise
between eschatology and morality, with the latter offering service to
the former, though our learned divines may protest. Whence else the
horror we feel when contemplating the eternal punishments of hell, a
horror that agrees so ill with the restoration preached by Paul (†)?
Let us take a moment to attend the words put into God's mouth in the
Theologia Deutsch, a
mystic manual
that even
Luther used
read (‡):
"If I am to provide recompense for your evil, I must do so with
goodness, for I am and have nothing apart from this." And
of course Christ himself
says, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do"
(Luke 23.34). There
really is no man who knows what he does,
but nevertheless it has been necessary, for the benefit of social
order, to turn religion into policy, and that
is the actual
origin of hell. Greek and oriental Christianity is predominantly
eschatological; Protestantism is predominantly ethical; and
Catholicism exists as a compromise between the two, though it gives
priority to eschatology. The most genuinely Catholic morality is
monastic asceticism: an ethics of eschatology adapted for the
individual soul rather than the maintenance of society. Is there not
in the cult of virginity a certain dark intuition that perpetuating
oneself in others upsets or
derails one's
own efforts
to achieve eternity? Ascetic
morality is a morality of negation. In rigorous terms, what matters
for it is the denial of death, whether we sin or not.
Nor should we take the
famous little poem
(*) very literally, when it sings or declaims, in specious
words:
All
my love for thee, o God
I
give it free, for no reward
Heaven
and ensuing bliss:
I
shall not love thee more for this.
The
only real sin, the sin against the Holy Spirit that has no remission,
is the sin of heresy—of
thinking independently. In our own Spain, we have been told that
being liberal—in
other words, a heretic—is worse than being an assassin, a thief, or
an adulterer. The worst sin is failing to obey the church, whose
infallibility defends us from reason.
Why
make such a fuss about the Pope's infallibility here, as it though it
were something unique? Once we discover the need for infallibility as
a tool against reason, does it make any real difference whether we
assign it to a book (the Bible), or a society of persons (the
church), or just one man? Does the essential, rational difficulty
change at all? No. And so this absurdity—an
affront to reason—had to
be adopted somehow, someway, into the fabric of our religion.
---
(†)
The ancient Christian doctrine of restoration (ἀποκατάστασις,
restitutio in pristinum statum) held that God would
ultimately redeem every single thing (and person) in the universe,
restoring it to an original and essential perfection. It was preached
unequivocally in the fourth century CE by Gregory of Nyssa (cf.
Patrologiae Graecae 46.100-105), who found it implicit in the
first epistle of Paul to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 15.28: ἵνα ᾖ ὁ
θεὸς πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν, ut sit Deus omnia in
omnibus). Earlier doctors of the church anticipated Gregory, but
were not quite as bold: Origen equivocates on the redemption of
devils, and Clement of Alexandria diplomatically avers that the
punishment of God is always corrective rather than vengeful. The
theological problem for Unamuno here: How does it make sense to fear
eternal punishment in hell, if all punishment ends eventually, when
the punished is restored? Catholic fear of eternity in hell is real,
but so is Catholic faith in the promise of restoration.
(‡)
The Theologia Deutsch, also known as the Theologia
Germanica or Der Franckforter, is an anonymous religious
treatise from the fourteenth century CE. Written in German, it claims
to be the work of a Catholic priest from the Teutonic Order, living
in Frankfurt. Luther finds its doctrine (and use of the vernacular
rather than Latin) very congenial; Calvin rejects it as dangerous to
the church.
(*)
Unamuno quotes the first two lines of a sixteenth-century Spanish
sonnet whose authorship is unknown (though various attempts have been
made to assign it to Juan de Ávila, Miguel de Guevara, Teresa de
Ávila,
and even Lope de Vega). It is justly famous, worth quoting in full.
No me mueve, mi Dios, para
quererte
el Cielo que me tienes
prometido
ni me mueve el Infierno tan
temido
para dejar por eso de
ofenderte.
A
gift like thine, a love that's free.