Miguel de Unamuno's Quest for Faith

Book excerpt: Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) was a extraordinary Spanish thinker, a philosopher, linguist, poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, professor, university administrator, and Spanish public intellectual. He had great intellectual integrity and moral courage. Unamuno is not an easy philosopher to read. He loved paradoxes and even (at times) contradictions. Various interpreters have called him an atheist, a sceptic, a Protestant, a pantheist, a Catholic modernist, and a good Catholic. Passages can be found in his writings that can be taken to support all of these interpretations. In the present book, Jan E. Evans does an incisive and thorough job of sorting through the Unamuno corpus and arriving at a definitive interpretation of his views.One great asset of Evans' work is the insight she gains by comparing Unamuno's works with the philosophers whom he admired most and considered his fellow travellers in the tragic sense of life. These include Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), William James (1842-1910), and especially Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). This book examines the life and work of Unamuno through the lens of his faith. Those who are not familiar with Unamuno will find here a clear exposition of the most important themes in the thinker's work along with a framework through which one can profitably begin to read his primary texts.