We live by despair. Unamuno, Life 6.16

Unamuno does not want to discuss doubt and hope in political or even ethical terms. What he is most interested in is our existential feeling: how do we handle not knowing the outcome of our life?

¿Y qué sino la incertidumbre, la duda, la voz de la razón era el abismo, el gouffre terrible ante el que temblaba Pascal? Y ello fué lo que le llevó a formular su terrible sentencia: il faut s’abêtir, ¡hay que entontecerse!

Todo el jansenismo, adaptación católica del calvinismo, lleva este mismo sello. Aquel Port Royal que se debía a un vasco, el abate de Saint-Cyran, vasco como Íñigo de Loyola, y como el que estas líneas traza, lleva siempre en su fondo un sedimento de desesperación religiosa, de suicidio de la razón. También Íñigo la mató en la obediencia.

Por desesperación se afirma, por desesperación se niega, y por ella se abstiene uno de afirmar y de negar. Observad a los más de nuestros ateos, y veréis que lo son por rabia, por rabia de no poder creer que haya Dios. Son enemigos personales de Dios. Han sustantivado y personalizado la Nada, y su no Dios es un Anti-Dios.

Y nada hemos de decir de aquella frase abyecta e innoble de «si no hubiera Dios habría que inventarlo». Esta es la expresión del inmundo escepticismo de los conservadores, de los que estiman que la religión es un resorte de gobierno, y cuyo interés es que haya en la otra vida infierno para los que aquí se oponen a sus intereses mundanos. Esa repugnante frase de saduceo es digna del incrédulo adulador de poderosos a quien se atribuye.

No, no es ese el hondo sentido vital. No se trata de una policía trascendente, no de asegurar el orden —¡vaya un orden!— en la tierra con amenazas de castigos y halagos de premios eternos después de la muerte. Todo esto es muy bajo, es decir, no más que política, o si se quiere ética. Se trata de vivir.

What was the abyss of Pascal, the terrible gulf before which he trembled, if not uncertainty, doubt, and the voice of reason? The sight of these things caused him to utter his awful judgment: “We must become fools!” (†).

All Jansenism carries this same seal, betraying the Calvinist bent of its Catholicism. Port Royal owes its reputation to a Basque, the abbot of Saint-Cyran (‡), who resembles another Basque, Ignatius of Loyola (*), in that his profession of faith carries in its lees a sediment of religious despair, of reason destroying itself. Ignatius also killed his reason with obedience.

Despair is the source of our affirmations and denials, and it is by despair also that we refrain from affirming or denying. Observe most of our atheists, and you will see that they are atheist because they are angry: furious that they cannot contrive to believe that God exists. They are personal enemies of God. They have substantiated and personified Nothing, and this not-God is their anti-God.

There is nothing to say here about that vile and ignoble dictum, that if God did not exist, we would have to invent him (⁑). This expression rises from the unclean skepticism of traditionalists, conservatives for whom religion is a tool of government. They want hell to exist in another life for those who oppose their mundane interests here. This disgusting phrase, reeking of the Sadducees, is worthy of the unbeliever to whom it is credited, a man known for worshipping those in power.

No! All this misses the deep and vital meaning here. We are not discussing transcendental politics, securing order on earth—and what an order it is!—with threats of eternal punishment and promises of similar reward, after death. All this is very low, nothing more than politics, or ethics, if you prefer. We are talking about life.

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(†) I haven't discovered this particular phrase in Pascal's oeuvre, but it does echo a passage in the Thoughts wherein the reader is told that learning faith from the faithful will render him foolish (Pensées 2.233).

(‡) Jean du Vergier de Hauranne (1581-1643) befriended Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638) early in their clerical careers: they shared a mystical approach to Catholic faith, and a deep interest in the church fathers, notably Augustine (who provided the inspiration for Jansen's magnum opus, Augustinus). Their church work took them from Paris to Bayonne, Vergier's birthplace. When they left Bayonne (Jansen in 1616, Vergier in 1617), Jansen went to teach theology at the college of Saint Pulcheria in Leuven, and Vergier departed for the abbey of Saint-Cyran, as abbot. He later became the director and confessor of the nuns at the abbey of Port-Royal des Champs, which became a headquarters for the teaching and practice of an Augustinian theology that its arch-enemies, the Jesuits, called Jansenism (after Cornelius Jansen). Pope Innocent X issued an apostolic constitution condemning Jansenism in 1653.

(*) Íñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola (1491-1556) was born in the Loyola castle in Gipuzkoa, one of thirteen children in a family of minor Basque nobles. His military career ended dramatically at the Battle of Pamplona (20 May 1521), when an army of French and Navarrese stormed the castle he held for Castile, and a musket-ball shattered his leg. He healed lame, and became very devout, going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, seeing visions, and eventually securing the approval of Pope Paul III for the foundation of a new religious order: the Society of Jesus, known commonly as the Jesuits. To them he bequeathed a discipline comprising many different spiritual exercises or rituals for cultivating devotion. Unamuno's comparing him to the abbot of Saint-Cyran is not without irony, as the Jesuits and the Jansenists were resolutely opposed to one another.

(⁑) Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer. This line comes from a poem by Voltaire: Epître à l'auteur du livre des Trois imposteurs, published in 1768. Unamuno compares him to the Jewish Sadducees, who controlled the temple of Jerusalem in the wake of the Maccabean revolt and denied the resurrection of the soul.