Agony Of Christianity

Miguel de Unamuno - Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher.

In 1880-90, Unamuno was carried away by the socialist ideas of Bakunin, Lasalia, and Marx. He took an active part in the socialist weekly "Lucha de Classe" (Class Struggle). In 1898, after a religious crisis caused by the death of his three-year-old son from a meningitis infection, he abandoned socialism and began developing a philosophical concept. Unamuno was greatly influenced by the work and ideas of Augustine, studied the Spanish mystics of the Middle Ages, passionately read B. Pascal and S. Kierkegaard, for which he studied Danish in order to read the texts in the original.

Don Miguel perceived the death of his son as a world tragedy, which is the fact that a person wants to live forever, but cannot. Beginning in 1897 and throughout his career, his works reflect on faith and disbelief, death and immortality, and a tragic note permeates all his texts.

Unamuno develops the idea of God as the projection of the fundamental Being's thirst for the infinity of the universe and the guarantee of personal universality and personal immortality. The desire to maintain the belief in immortality and at the same time doubting religious truths determined Unamuno's aspiration to the so-called Towards "quixoticism", i.e. fighting in the name of a non-existent ideal, which the mind perceives as meaningless. The central problem of Unamuno's philosophy is the spiritual life of a person, which, in his opinion, is directed at the contradiction between the finite and the infinite: the desire for personal immortality is opposed by the rationalist certainty in the mortality of the essence, and the need for faith in the impossibility of faith for the modern mind.

Unamuno introduces the concept of "agony" as a particularly tragic perception of life, which is caused by the irreconcilable dualism of reason and faith. ("On the Tragic Sensation of People and Human Life 1913", "Agony of Christianity" 1924).

The book was first published in France in French in 1925, during the voluntary emigration of Miguel de Unamuno. As the author says in the preface to the Spanish edition, the book conveys a large part of what was formed in his "tragic feeling of life", but in a "too specific and improvised" form.

The translation is made from French.