Reason is uncomfortable. Unamuno, Life 5.16

Some would use reason to defend or approach a kind of comfort with death, with our mortality, that Unamuno finds very cold. 

No, para la razón, la verdad es lo que se puede demostrar que es, que existe, consuélenos o no. Y la razón no es ciertamente una facultad consoladora. Aquel terrible poeta latino Lucrecio, bajo cuya aparente serenidad y ataraxia epicúrea tanta desesperación se cela, decía que la piedad consiste en poder contemplarlo todo con alma serena, pacata posse mente omnia tueri. Y fué este Lucrecio el mismo que escribió que la religión puede inducirnos a tantos males: tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. Y es que la religión, y sobre todo la cristiana más tarde, fué, como dice el Apóstol, un escándalo para los judíos y una locura para los intelectuales. Tácito llamó a la religión cristiana, a la de la inmortalidad del alma, perniciosa superstición, exitialis superstitio, afirmando que envolvía un odio al género humano, odium generis humani.

Hablando de la época de estos hombres, de la época más genuinamente racionalista, escribía Flaubert a madame Roger des Genettes estas preñadas palabras: «Tiene usted razón; hay que hablar con respeto de Lucrecio; no le veo comparable sino a Byron, y Byron no tiene ni su gravedad ni la sinceridad de su tristeza. La melancolía antigua me parece más profunda que la de los modernos, que sobrentienden todos más o menos la inmortalidad de más allá del agujero negro. Pero para los antiguos este agujero negro era el infinito mismo; sus ensueños se dibujan y pasan sobre un fondo de ébano inmutable. No existiendo ya los dioses, y no existiendo todavía Cristo, hubo, desde Cicerón a Marco Aurelio, un momento único en que el hombre estuvo solo. En ninguna parte encuentro esta grandeza; pero lo que hace a Lucrecio intolerable es su física, que da como positiva. Si es débil, es por no haber dudado bastante, ha querido explicar, ¡concluir!».

Sí, Lucrecio quiso concluir, solucionar y, lo que es peor, quiso hallar en la razón consuelo. Porque hay también una abogacía anti-teológica y un odium anti-theologicum.

Muchos, muchísimos hombres de ciencia, la mayoría de los que se llaman a sí mismos racionalistas, lo padecen.

But reason is different. For her, truth is that which can be demonstrated, whether it consoles us or not. And reason is certainly not a consolatory faculty. The terrible Latin poet Lucretius, beneath whose facade of serenity and Epicurean calm lies such desperation, said that piety consists in the ability to contemplate all things with a soul at peace: “to be able to regard the world with mind untroubled” (†). This was the same Lucretius who wrote that religion can drive us to crime: “such awful sins can she inspire!” (‡). Religion was truly a scandal for the Jews and lunacy unto the intellectuals, as the apostle says (*). Tacitus called the Christian religion, and the doctrine of the soul's immortality that it professed, a destructive superstition, affirming that it expressed hatred for humanity (⁑).

Speaking of the time of these ancients, the era of our history most genuinely rational, Flaubert wrote to Lady Roger des Genettes (⁂) these pregnant words: “You are right. We must speak respectfully of Lucretius. I do not see him comparable to anyone of our day except Byron, and Byron lacks both his gravity and his grief, which is utterly and uniquely sincere. The ancient melancholy seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, who all presuppose some kind of immortality in whatever lies beyond the black hole that punctuates our mortality. But the ancients saw that hole as the void of infinity itself. Their illusions are drawn and pass away over an immutable dark abyss. When the gods were banished and Christ did not yet exist, there was between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius a unique moment in which man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find such grandeur. But what makes Lucretius unbearable is his physics, which he presents as something positive. If he is weak, it is for not having doubted enough: he gave in to the temptation to explain, to reach a definitive conclusion.”

Yes, Lucretius wanted to reach a conclusion, and what is worse, he wanted to find comfort in reason. It is possible to employ casuistry against theology, to hate theology as pedantic theologians hate heresy.

Many folk—a great many men of science, and the majority of those who call themselves rationalists—are afflicted with such hatred.

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(†) De rerum natura 5.1203. Titus Lucretius Carus composed this epic poem 'on the nature of things' in the first century BCE, in honor of his patron Gaius Memmius and the philosopher Epicurus. Here is the entire passage from which our line comes (5.1194-1203), with a free translation:

O genus infelix humanum, talia divis

cum tribuit facta atque iras adiunxit acerbas!

quantos tum gemitus ipsi sibi, quantaque nobis

volnera, quas lacrimas peperere minoribus nostris!

nec pietas ullast velatum saepe videri

vertier ad lapidem atque omnis accedere ad aras

nec procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas

ante deum delubra nec aras sanguine multo

spargere quadrupedum nec votis nectere vota,

sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri.

Unhappy race of human fools

Trusting gods made from their tools

How many groans, how many wounds

How many tears their worship doomed!

On us descends our parents' fate:

We bow to stones, and veil the face

To the altars we ascend

Before the lord our hands extend

In the dirt we're tumbled prone

Scattering blood on holy stones

Vow to vow we make a chain

But piety we cannot gain.

The only righteousness we find:

To see the world with peaceful mind.

(‡) This line comes earlier in Lucretius' poem (1.101), after a depiction of Iphigenia's sacrifice at the hands of her father Agamemnon, who killed her to placate the goddess Artemis so that his fleet of warships might reach Troy. If you explained the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to Lucretius, he would understand it to be about the gods' wicked thirst for human blood, a thirst whose origins he would trace to humanity's superstitious fear of death.

(*) 1 Corinthians 1.23. As usual with Unamuno, the apostle here is Paul.

(⁑) Annals 15.44. The acerbic Latin phrases Unamuno cites derive from Tacitus' discussion of the trial of Christians accused by the emperor Nero of setting fire to Rome, in July of the year 64 CE. While the historian finds the Christians innocent of the crime, he convicts them of being impious and vicious.

(⁂) Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) left Normandy, the place of his birth, for Paris, where he took up and abandoned the study of law en route to becoming a famous writer. Part of that unusual career involved maintaining a large correspondence, which included many notable figures of the day—among them Edma Roger des Gennettes, who ran a salon. Unamuno cites the third series (1854-1869) of Flaubert's Correspondance (pub. 1910, in Paris) for this passage. George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron, is the poet to whom Flaubert alludes as approaching the stature of Lucretius.