I am asked, then: “What is your religion?” And I will reply: My
religion is to seek truth in life and life in truth, even though
knowing full well that I shall never find them so long as I live; my
religion is to wrestle unceasingly and unwearyingly with mystery; my
religion is to wrestle with God from nightfall until the breaking
of the day, as Jacob is said to have wrestled with Him. I cannot
accommodate myself to the doctrine of the Unknowable or to that of
“thus far and no farther.” I reject the everlasting _Ignorabimus_. And
at all hazards I seek to scale the unattainable.
“Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” Christ said to us,
and such an ideal of perfection is, without doubt, unattainable. But He
put the unattainable before us as the goal and term of our endeavours.
And He attained to it, say the theologians, by grace. And I wish to
fight my fight careless of victory. Are there not armies and even
peoples who march to certain defeat? Do we not praise those who die
fighting rather than surrender? This, then, is my religion.
Those who put this question to me want me to give them a dogma, a
solution which they can accept without disturbing their mental inertia.
Or rather it is not this that they want, so much as to be able to
label me and put me into one of the divisions in which they classify
minds, so that they can say of me: He is a Lutheran, a Calvanist, a
Catholic, an atheist, a rationalist, a mystic, or any other of those
nicknames whose exact meaning they do not understand but which dispense
them from further thinking. And I do not wish to have myself labelled,
for I, Miguel de Unamuno, like every other man who aspires to full
consciousness, am a unique species. “There are no diseases, but only
persons who are diseased,” some doctors say, and I say that there are
no opinions, but only opining persons.
In religion there is but little that is capable of rational resolution,
and as I do not possess that little I cannot communicate it logically,
for only the rational is logical and transmissible. I have, it is true,
so far as my affections, my heart and my feelings are concerned, a
strong bent towards Christianity, but without adhering to the special
dogmas of this or that Christian confession. I count every man a
Christian who invokes the name of Christ with respect and love, and I
am repelled by the orthodox, whether Catholic or Protestant--the latter
being usually as intransigent as the former--who deny the Christianity
of those who interpret the Gospel differently from themselves. I know a
Protestant Christian who denies that Unitarians are Christians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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