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Passion and Faith: A Study of Unamuno

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Jeffrey G. Sobosan
Affiliation:
Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California

Extract

Miquel de Unamuno, a thinker perhaps too large and passionate to yield to easy labelling, has been characterised in different ways by many of his most brilliant compatriots. Julian Marias spoke of him as a man obsessed by the proud thirst to know, a passionate man who in spite of a ‘problematic intellectual adherence’ was nonetheless able to live and think within a vital Catholic tradition. Ortega y Gasset wrote that all of Unamuno's work was dominated by one theme, that of death; it was one monumental meditatio mortis. It was Madariaga, not an original philosopher but undoubtedly as penetrating a critic as either Marias or Ortega, however, who most faithfully portrayed the often convoluted but always profound man Unamuno was. In most if not all of the main characters of his novels and short stories, he rightly observes, ‘we can trace the dominant passion which is their whole being to a mere variety of the one and only passion which obsesses Unamuno, the hunger for life, a full life, here and after’. This passion, assailed as it was by the constant probings of his critical intellect ought to have made his existence precarious at best.

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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