Whenever doubt assails me, I turn to The Tragic Sense of Life and my faith is quickly restored. Faith and reason. The man of flesh and bone. Immortality. These are the themes Unamuno discusses with the ardent --fanatical I'd say--hunger for God.

After such shoddy fiction as the DaVinci Code, and fake TV Documentaries (The Tomb of Jesus), I find solace, wisdom, respect for God, and much joy as I read pages upon pages of this beloved book--The Tragic Sense of Life.

Heavy thinkers such as Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, and Descartes, Unamuno dismissess with stern righteousness. Little value does he place in knowledge--gnosis, rationality--attacking Descartes' arrogance as well as Spinoza's atheism.

Wither knowledge? Unamuno asks: "The end of man is to create science, to catalogue the Universe, so that it may be handed back to God in order...." he answers himself by quoting a thought from one of his novels. Yet, no praise is too lavish for passion and suffering--emblems of existentialism.

Dostoesvsky's irrational, irreverent, disdainful Underground Man says, "After all suffering is the sole cause of consciousness." Unamuno, like Dostoesvky and other Christian existentialists see the transitoriness of this real world--exalting passion and suffering over reason, truth, and beauty--as prelude to the ideal world of eternity where one returns to God:

What I enjoy about Unamuno's writings is his undaunted challenge of dogmas, to include the Pauline writings, which he considers all but wild dreams. Take this speculation from St. Paul:

"the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death, for he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him. And when all things shall be subdue unto him, then shall be the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all." (Cor I, xv, 26-28).

For Unamuno, the Pauline wild dream that eternal life is where we are absorbed into God--"that God may be all in all"--is but an absurdity.

Unamuno's view is simple and humble: Let's live this life (here and now) so that we can deserve the other life--and once there we shall be alive and with our own consciousness.

It is this longing for immortality what sustains us and makes us human.

There are some fine translations of this book, but I prefer J. E. Crawford Flitch’s who has taken the trouble to add his own Endnotes. Believers as well as unbelievers could well profit from Unamuno’s book.