Religion Of Quixotism
by Miguel de Unamuno

I become more and more convinced that our philosophy, the Spanish philosophy, is liquescent and diffused in our literature, in our life, in our action, above all in our mysticism, and not in philosophical systems. It is concrete. (And is there not perhaps as much philosophy or more in Goethe, for example, as in Hegel?) The poetry of Jorge Manrique, the Romancero, Don Quijote, La Vida es Sueno, La Subida al Monte Carmelo, imply an intuition of the world and a concept of life - Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht. This philosophy of ours could with difficulty formulate itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that was a-philosophical, positivist, technicist, given up to pure history and the natural sciences, a period essentially materialist and pessimistic.

We shall find the hero of Spanish thought, perhaps, not in any philosopher who lived in flesh and bone, but in an entity of fiction and of action, more real than all the philosophers - in Don Quixote. For there is doubtless a philosophic Quixotism, but there is also a Quixotic philosophy. Was not perhaps the philosophy of the Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and, above all, the philosophy latent in the abstract but passionate thought of our mystics, in its essence none other than this? What was the mysticism of St. John of the Cross but a knight-errantry of the heart in the divine warfare?

And the feeling that animated Don Quixote cannot strictly be called idealism; he did not fight for ideas. It was spiritualism; he fought for the spirit.

Speculative or meditative Quixotism is, like practical Quixotism, foolishness, a daughter-foolishness to the foolishness of the cross. And therefore it is contemned by reason. Philosophy at bottom abhors Christianity, and well did the gentle Marcus Aurelius prove it.

The tragedy of Christ, the divine tragedy, is the tragedy of the Cross. Pilate, the sceptic, the man of culture, sought by means of ridicule to turn it into comedy and conceived the farce of the king with the reed sceptre and crown of thorns, saying: "Behold the man!" But the people, more human than he, the people that thirsts for tragedy, cried: "Crucify him! crucify him!" And the other tragedy, the human, the intra-human tragedy, is that of Don Quixote with his face lathered for the ducal servants to laugh at, and for the dukes, as much slaves as their servants, to laugh at too. "Behold the fool!" - so they would say. And the comic, the irrational tragedy is suffering beneath ridicule and contempt.

For an individual, as for a people, the highest heroism is being willing to face ridicule - still more, being willing to make oneself ridiculous and not flinching at the ridicule.

Antero de Quental, the tragic Portuguese who committed suicide, wrote as follows, smarting under the ultimatum which England delivered to his country in 1890: "An English statesman of the last century, also certainly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace Walpole, said that life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think. Very well then, if we have to end tragically, we Portuguese, we who feel, we much prefer this terrible, but noble, destiny to that which is reserved, and perhaps at no very remote future date, for England, the country that thinks and calculates, whose destiny is to end miserably and comically." We may leave on one side the assertion that England thinks and calculates, implying that she does not feel, the injustice of which is explained by the circumstance that provoked it, and also the assertion that the Portuguese feel, implying that they scarcely ever think or calculate - for we sister peoples of the Atlantic have always been distinguished by a certain sentimental pedantry; but there remains the terrible underlying idea, namely, that some, those who put thought above feeling - I should say reason above faith - die comically, and those die tragically who put faith above reason. For it is the ridiculers who die comically, and God laughs at their comic ending, while the portion, the noble portion, of those who are ridiculed is tragedy.

And what we must look out for in the record of Don Quixote is ridicule.

The philosophy in the soul of my people presents itself to me as the expression of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don Quixote, as the expression of a conflict between the world as the reason of science exhibits it to us and the world as we wish it to be, as our religious faith tells us that it is. And in this philosophy is to be found the secret of what is usually said about us, that we are fundamentally irreducible to Kultur, that is to say, that we do not resign ourselves to it. No, Don Quixote resigns himself neither to the world nor to its truth, neither to science nor to logic, neither to art nor aesthetics, neither to morality nor to ethics.

"In any case the result of all this," so I have been told more than once and by more than one person, "will simply be to urge people on to the maddest kind of Catholicism." And they have accused me of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. So be it! And what then?

Yes, I know, I know that it is folly to seek to turn the waters of the river back to their source, and that it is the crowd that seeks the medicine for its ills in the past; but I know too that everyone who fights for any ideal whatsoever, even though it may seem to belong to the past, is urging the world on to the future, and that the only reactionaries are those who find themselves at ease in the present. Every pretended restoration of the past is a creation of the future, and if the past is dream, something not properly known, so much the better. As always, the march is towards the future; he who marches, marches thither, even though he march backwards way - and who knows if that is not the better way?

I feel that I have a mediaeval soul and I believe that the soul of my country is mediaeval - that it has been forced to traverse the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Revolution, learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual heritage of those ages that are called dark. And Quixotism is nothing but the most desperate phase of the struggle of the Middle Ages against their offspring, the Renaissance.

And if some accuse me of furthering the cause of Catholic reaction, perhaps the others, the official Catholics, accuse me of.... But these, in Spain trouble themselves little about anything and are only interested in their own quarrels and dissensions. And besides, poor folk, they are somewhat dull of understanding.

But the fact is that my work - I was going to say my mission - is to shatter the faith of both these and those and of others besides, faith in affirmation, faith in negation and faith in abstention, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who resign themselves, whether to Catholicism or to rationalism or to agnosticism; it is to make them all live lives of inquietude and passionate desire.

Will this work be efficacious? But did Don Quixote believe in the immediate and visible efficacy of his work? It is greatly to be doubted, and at any rate he did not risk putting the visor he had made to the test by giving it a second blow. And many passages in his history indicate that he did not believe much in the immediate success of his design to restore knight-errantry. And what did it matter so long as he himself thus lived and immortalized himself? And he must have surmised, and did in fact surmise, that his achievement would have another and a higher efficacy - namely, that it would go on working in the minds of all those who in the spirit of devotion read of his exploits.

Don Quixote made himself ridiculous, but did he perchance know the most tragic ridicule of all, the ridicule that is reflected in the eyes of a man's own soul, the ridicule with which a man sees his own self? Transfer Don Quixote's battlefield to his own soul; conceive him to be fighting in his soul to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, not to lose the treasure of his infancy; turn him into an inward Don Quixote - with his Sancho, a Sancho equally inward and equally heroical at his side - and then talk to me of the comic tragedy.

And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer that he has left himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all theories and all philosophies. Other peoples have left principally institutions, books - we have left souls. St. Teresa is worth any institution, any "Critique of Pure Reason."

Don Quixote was converted? Yes, but only to die. But the other, the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives among us, breathing his spirit into us, this Don Quixote was never converted, this Don Quixote goes on inciting us to make ourselves ridiculous, this Don Quixote must never die. And the conversion of the other Don Quixote - he who was converted only to die - was possible because he was mad, and it was his madness, not his death or his conversion, that immortalized him and earned for him the forgiveness of the crime of having been born. Felix culpa! Neither was his madness cured but only transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure - in dying he stormed heaven, which suffereth violence.

This Don Quixote died and descended into hell, and he entered it lance on rest and freed all the condemned, as he freed the galley-slaves, and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down from them the scroll that Dante saw there, and replaced it by one on which was written "Long live hope!" and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing at him, he went to heaven. And God laughed at him paternally and this divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness.

And the other Don Quixote remained here amongst us, fighting with desperation. Is not despair the mainspring of his fighting? How is it that among the words that English has borrowed from our tongue - siesta, camarilla, guerilla and the like - there occurs this word desperado? This inward Don Quixote that I spoke of, conscious of his own comicness, is he not a man of despair - desesperado? A desperado, yes, like Pizarro and like Loyola. But "despair is the master of impossibilities," as Salazar y Torres tells us, and it is despair and despair alone from whence springs heroic hope, absurd hope, mad hope. Spero quia absurdum, it ought to be said, rather than credo.

And Don Quixote, who lived solitary, sought more solitude still, sought the solitudes of the Pena Pobre in order that there, alone, without witnesses, he might plunge into yet wilder extravagances to the easing of his soul. Yet he was not quite solitary, for Sancho accompanied him, Sancho the good, Sancho the believing, Sancho the simple. If, as some say, in Spain Don Quixote is dead and Sancho lives, then we are saved, for Sancho, his master dead, will become a knight-errant himself. At any rate he is waiting for some other mad knight to follow yet again.

And there is also a tragedy of Sancho. The other Sancho, the Sancho who journeyed with the mortal Don Quixote - it does not appear certain that he died, although some say that he died hopelessly mad, calling for his lance, and believing that all those things which on his death-bed his converted master abominated as lies had been really true. But neither does it appear certain that the bachelor Sanson Carrasco, or the curate, or the barber, or the dukes and canons are dead, and it is with these that the heroic Sancho has to fight.

Don Quixote journeyed alone, alone with Sancho, alone with his solitude. And shall we not also journey alone, we his lovers creating for ourselves a quixotesque Spain which exists only in our imagination?

And again we shall be asked: What has Don Quixote bequeathed to Kultur? I answer: Quixotism, and that is no little thing. It is a whole method, a whole epistemology, a whole aesthetic, a whole logic, a whole ethic, above all a whole religion, that is to say, a whole economy of things human and divine, a whole hope in the rationally absurd.

For what did Don Quixote fight? For Dulcinea, for glory, for life, for survival. Not for Iseult, who is the eternal flesh; not for Beatrice, who is theology; not for Margaret, who is the people; not for Helen, who is culture. He fought for Dulcinea, and he won her, for he lives.

And what is greatest in him is his having been ridiculed and overcome, for it is in being overcome that he overcame; he overcame the world by making it laugh at him.

And to-day? To-day he feels his own comicness and the vanity of his efforts so far as temporal issues are concerned; he sees himself from without - culture has taught him to objectify himself, that is to say, to alienate himself from himself instead of to enter into himself, and in seeing himself from without he laughs at himself, but with a bitter laughter. Perhaps the most tragic character would be an inward Margutte, who, like the Margutte of Pulci, should die bursting with laughter, but with laughter at himself. E ridera in eterno, he will laugh for all eternity, said the Angel Gabriel of Margutte. Do you not hear the laughter of God?

The mortal Don Quixote, in dying, understood his own comicness and wept for his sins; but the immortal Don Quixote understands and rises above his comicness and triumphs over it without renouncing it.

But now Don Quixote hears his own laughter, he hears the divine laughter, and since he is not a pessimist, since he believes in eternal life, he has to fight, attacking the modern scientific inquisitorial orthodoxy by adducing a new and impossible Middle Age, dualistic, contradictory, passionate. Like a new Savonarola - an Italian Quixote of the end of the fifteenth century - he fights against this Modern Age which began with Machiavelli and which will end comically. He fights against the rationalism inherited from the eighteenth century. Peace of consciousness, reconciliation between reason and faith, are now, thanks to the providence of God, impossible. The world must be as Don Quixote wishes it to be, and inns must be castles, and he will fight against it and will, to all appearances, be overcome, but he will triumph by making himself ridiculous. He will triumph by laughing at himself and making himself laughed at.

"Reason speaks and feeling bites," said Petrarch; but reason also bites and bites in the heart of hearts. And more light does not make more warmth. "Light, light, more light!" they tell us that the dying Goethe cried. No, warmth, warmth, more warmth, for we die of cold and not of darkness. It is not the night but the frost that kills.

The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration, in its essence mystical, mediaeval, quixotesque, has been called demi-mondaine philosophy. Leave out the demi; call it mondaine, mundane. Mundane - yes, for the world and not for philosophers, just as chemistry ought not to be for chemists alone. The world wishes to be deceived - mundus vult decipi - either with the illusion antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or with the illusion subsequent to reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever wishes to deceive will always find someone who will let himself be deceived. And blessed are those who are made fools of. A Frenchman, Jules de Gaultier, has said that it was the privilege of his countrymen n'etre pas dupe - not to be taken in. A sorry privilege!

Science does not give Don Quixote what he demands of it. "Then let him not demand it," it will be said, "let him resign himself, let him accept life and truth as they are." But he does not accept them as they are, and he asks for signs, urged thereto by Sancho who stands by his side. And it is not that Don Quixote does not understand what those understand who talk thus to him, those who are able to resign themselves and to accept rational life and rational truth. No, it is that the needs of his heart are greater. Pedantry? Who knows?

And in this critical century Don Quixote, who has contaminated himself with criticism also, has to attack his own self, the victim of intellectualism and sentimentalism, and it is when he wishes to be most spontaneous that he appears most affected. And the poor fellow wishes to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he sinks into the inner despair of the critical century whose two greatest victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. And through despair he attains the heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke - that Don Quixote of the mind who escaped from the cloister - and he becomes an awakener of sleeping souls (dormitantium animorum excubitor), as the ex-Dominican said of himself. "Heroic love," Bruno wrote, "is the property of those superior natures called insane [insano] - not because they do not know [non sanno], but because they over-know [soprasanno]."

But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines - at any rate they have stated on the inscription at the foot of his statue in the Campo dei Fiori, opposite the Vatican, that it is dedicated to him by the age which he foretold (il secole da lui divinato). But our Don Quixote, the Don Quixote who has risen from the dead, the inward Don Quixote, the Don Quixote who is conscious of his own comicness, does not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they are not of it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire to the mountain, fleeing from the king-making and king-killing crowds, as Christ retired alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim Him king. He left the title of king to be written upon the cross.

What, then, is the new mission of Don Quixote in the world of to-day? To cry aloud, to cry aloud in the wilderness. But the wilderness hears, though men do not hear, and one day it will be transformed into a sounding forest, and this solitary voice that falls upon the wilderness like seed, will yield a gigantic cedar, which with its hundred thousand tongues will sing an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life and of death.

End of Religion Of Quixotism by Miguel de Unamuno