The Christ of Velázquez and the Christ of Unamuno

* I acknowledge with thanks the helpful comments made by Professor C. A. Longhurst on earlier drafts of this article.

Abstract

Unamuno was unable to assent intellectually to Catholic doctrines, but the figure of the crucified Christ was, throughout his life, the object of sustained fascination, particularly in the long poetic sequence El Cristo de Velázquez. Yet Unamuno's Christology is characteristically sui generis. For him, Christ is primarily the symbolic representative of humanity and of human suffering, rather than someone entrusted by God with a special mission of salvation. Though Unamuno's Christ is not that of orthodox Christianity, his portayal in this poem restores the human to the centre of religious experience and re-instates a proper appreciation of the place of doubt, feeling, desire and suffering in the discussion of faith.

Key words:

• Christ
• Christology
• symbolic
• orthodox
• human
• religious experience
• doubt
• faith

Notes

* I acknowledge with thanks the helpful comments made by Professor C. A. Longhurst on earlier drafts of this article.

1 Colette & Jean-Claude Rabaté, Miguel de Unamuno: biografía (Madrid: Taurus, 2009), 302.

2 Antonio Sánchez Barbudo, Estudios sobre Unamuno y Machado, Colección Guadarrama de Crítica y Ensayo 19 (Madrid: Guadarrama, 1959), 106; Nemesio González Caminero, S.J., Unamuno (Comillas: Univ. Pontificia, 1948), 283; José Antonio Maravall, La Nación (Buenos Aires), 12 March 1948; Jacinto Grau, Unamuno: su tiempo y su España (Buenos Aires: Editorial Alda, 1946), 28.

3 Sánchez Barbudo, Estudios sobre Unamuno y Machado, 112.

4 Sánchez Barbudo, Estudios sobre Unamuno y Machado, 46. This view of Unamuno has remained influential. In comparable vein, John Butt, in his study of San Manuel Bueno, mártir, has written more recently that ‘Unamuno is implying that Jesus was no more (or less) than a human hero who suffered death in order to create and reinforce human illusion’ (John Butt, Miguel de Unamuno: ‘San Manuel Bueno, mártir’, Critical Guides to Spanish Texts 31 [London: Grant & Cutler in association with Tamesis, 1981], 62).

5 Miguel de Unamuno, Obras completas, ed. & prólogo Ricardo Senabre, Biblioteca Castro, 10 vols (Madrid: Turner, 1995–2009), VIII, 335. Further references are to this edition and are given in the text in the form volume number followed by page-reference.

6 Writing in the Guardian on 4 January 2011, A. N. Wilson declared: ‘ “In Memoriam” has been my companion for all my grownup life. I have found it a good “self-help” book in bereavement. And of all the 19th-century books about faith and loss of faith […] I have found it “answered”, both the condition of despair and doubt, which must invade any sensitive soul contemplating an apparently pitiless universe and the raw pain of bereavement; and, yet, which acknowledges the reality of religious experience. The intuitive sense that there is something “behind the veil, behind the veil” is equally honestly confronted. Though “something sealed” the lips of the evangelist when it came to explaining or proving Christ's divinity, it is not purely contemptible to believe where “we cannot prove” ’ (<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jan/04/tennyson-in-memoriam-religious-certainty> [accessed 11 May 2012]).

7 ‘Unamuno would also acknowledge that reason and faith are the functions of two different (and antagonistic) faculties, but could not rid himself of the obsessive need to apply the former in the realm of the latter’ (Sonya A. Ingwersen, ‘Unamuno and Schleiermacher: The “Agonic Style” and Protestant Hermeneutics’, Anglican Theological Review, 67 [1985], 260–72 [p. 268]).

8 José Luis Abellán, Miguel de Unamuno a la luz de la psicología: una interpretación de Unamuno desde la psicología individual (Madrid: Tecnos, 1964), 129.

9 Quoted in Abellán, Miguel de Unamuno a la luz de la psicología, 129.

10 ‘[…] the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. […] Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block [skandalon] to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength’ (1 Cor. 1:18–25).

11 Unamuno expressed a similar idea in the short story ‘Una visita al viejo poeta’, incorporated in El espejo de la muerte: ‘[…] a la sombra de esa higuera […] leo el Evangelio, y en él se me muestra el Hijo del Hombre, el hombre mismo, palpable, concreto, vivo, y por Cristo, con quien hablo, subo a su Padre, sin argumentos de lógica, por escala cordial’ (Unamuno, Obras completas, ed. Senabre, II, 131).

12 Miguel de Unamuno, Antología poética, ed. Roberto Paoli (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1992), 161.

13 Unamuno himself emphasized the contrast between the atmosphere of serenity in the longer poem and that of the earlier composition: ‘fue cierto remordimiento de haber hecho aquel feroz poema […] lo que me hizo emprender la obra más humana de mi poema “El Cristo de Velázquez” ’ (Obras completas, ed. Senabre, VI, 567–68).

14 Miguel de Unamuno, El Cristo de Velázquez (Madrid: Calpe, 1920).

15 ‘El Cristo de Unamuno’, in Antonio Gallego Morell, Diez ensayos sobre literatura española, Colección Selecta 47 (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1973), 79–96 (p. 81).

16 Gallego Morell, ‘El Cristo de Unamuno’, 92.

17 See, for example, Juan Guillermo Renart, ‘El Cristo de Velázquez’ de Unamuno: estructura, estilo, sentido (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1984); Calvin Cannon, ‘The Mythic Cosmology of Unamuno's El Cristo de Velázquez’, Hispanic Review, 28:1 (1960), 28–39 and ‘The Miltonic Rhythm of Unamuno's El Cristo de Velázquez’, Hispania (USA), 44:1 (1961), 95–98; Pilar de Cuadra, Unamuno y su poema ‘El Cristo de Velázquez’ (San Sebastián: Caja de Ahorros Provincial de Guipúzcoa, 1987).

18 The use of the capitalized Hombre in this part of the poem does not imply any whole-hearted adoption of the biblical concept of ‘The Son of Man’, itself the subject of much debate. It is rather that in these instances Unamuno presents Christ as the ideal representative of humanity.

19 Ingwersen, ‘Unamuno and Schleiermacher’, 265.

20 Abellán, Miguel de Unamuno a la luz de la psicología, 129; Gallego Morell, ‘El Cristo de Unamuno’, 88. A myth, of course, can powerfully transmit truth value, but only if it has some basis, however tenuous, in historical reality. Gallego Morell seems to be using ‘mito’ in the sense of ‘pure invention’ when he endorses Marrero's comment: ‘[Unamuno] parece a veces inventarse o fabricarse un Dios para uso personal’ (93).

21 According to N. T. Wright, resurrection, in the Pauline writings, ‘always means transformation, going through the process of death and out into a new kind of life beyond, rather than simply returning to exactly the same sort of life’ (N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 3 [London: SPCK, 2003], 273).

22 ‘La agonía del cristianismo’, in Obras completas, ed. Senabre, X, 554.

23 C. A. Longhurst, ‘Unamuno on Identity: Personal and National’, Hispanic Research Journal, 12:1 (2011), 48–62 (p. 58), <http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/174582011X1286967331418> (accessed 11 May 2012).

24 Agustín Escalans overstates his case when he claims that ‘Miguel de Unamuno, hombre de fe por encima de la razón, creyente perfecto, […] íntimamente ignaciano por quijotismo filosófico, ama al Cristo sangrante del madero expiatorio con toda su fe en la futura resurrección’ (Agustín Escalans, Miguel de Unamuno [Buenos Aires: Editorial Juventud Argentina, 1947], 163).

25 Hugo H. Culpepper, ‘Immortality and Modern Thought: A Study of Miguel de Unamuno’, Review & Expositor, 58:3 (1961), 279–95 (p. 286).

26 As well as having a thorough acquaintance with the writings of Scheiermacher and Kierkegaard, Unamuno, in Del sentimiento trágico, quoted extensively from Karl Heinrich von Weizsäcker, Das Apostolische Zeitalter Der Christlichen Kirche (Freiburg i. B: Mohr, 1890), Albrecht Ritschl, Die Christliche Lehre Von Der Rechtfertigung Und Versöhnung (Bonn: A. Marcus, 1870) and Otto Pfleiderer, Religionsphilosophie Auf Geschichtlicher Grundlage (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1878). See Nelson R. Orringer, Unamuno y los protestantes liberales (1912): sobre las fuentes de ‘Del sentimiento trágico de la vida’, Biblioteca Hispánica de Filosofía 98 (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1985). Pilar de Cuadra has noted that among the copies of the Bible in Unamuno's personal library were Luther's translation (in which Unamuno made marginal notes), and Spanish translations by the Protestant reformers Cipriano Valera and Casiodoro de Reina (Unamuno y su poema ‘El Cristo de Velázquez’, 124–25).

27 Quoted in Abellán, Miguel de Unamuno a la luz de la psicología, 131.

28 Rabaté, Miguel de Unamuno: biografía, 287.

29 Culpepper, ‘Immortality and Modern Thought’, 283.

30 Walter Glannon, ‘Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, mártir: Ethics through Fiction’, Modern Language Notes, 102:2 (1987), 316–33.