GOD, IMMORTALITY, AND LIVED EXPERIENCE IN UNAMUNO

Unamuno develops what at least on the surface seems to be a simple view of the concept of God out of his reflections on the complexities of human existence - of concrete, lived experience. As high-lighted previously, for the Spanish philosopher, the depths, range, and complexities of experience are such that reason by itself is insufficient to grapple with them, to do justice to them. Or, in the words of Bernard E. Meland, "We live more deeply than we can think".11 Thus, there is a fundamental rift between faith and reason; faith not as assent to in-tellectual propositions or "a blind leap into the dark," but as an act of the whole person involving "flesh and blood," the intellect, the will, and, most especially, feelings. It is such faith, such radical trust that enables us, in spite of its vicissitudes, to experience life's fullness and to search for its meaning. The most shattering, the most profound of these experiences is death, including our awareness and anticipation of it. Unamuno's poignant analysis of death and our awareness of it leads to the human quest for immortality. And the search for immor-tality is full of its own paradoxes: the more you hang on to what you prize in life, the more likely you are to lose it; and often the more one loves life, the more one seeks its fulfillment in death. Whatever the paradoxes, the quest for immortality and the search for meaning are inseparable: human existence is meaningful if it has an abiding and ultimate significance. While there can be no empirical or rational grounds for the absolute certainty of such abiding and ultimate sig-nificance, for eternal life, we need to live life "in spite of the lack of absolute certainty. The proof that is sufficient unto itself is in the lives such faith helps to produce.

Unamuno finds the solution to the insolubly linked problems of immortality and the meaning of life in an image and concept of God that is quite suggestive of panentheism. The Spanish philosopher begins his handling of this issue with a discussion of the significance of reaching out towards others as a result of some sense of the bonds of our common humanity (integral to his understanding of the word "pity"), in part motivated by the unceasing reaching beyond ourselves toward immortality.12 Thus, Unamuno writes that "consciousness [conscientid] is participated knowledge, is co-feeling, and co-feeling is compassion"; hence, "love personalizes all that it loves."13 he elaborates:

And when love is so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves everything, then it personalizes everything and that the total All, that the Universe, is also a Person possessing a Consciousness, a Consciousness which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves and therefore is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe, which love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call God. And thus the soul pities God and feels itself pitied by Him; loves Him and feels itself loved by Him, sheltering its misery in the bosom of the eternal and infinite misery, which, in eternalizing and infmitizing itself, is the supreme happiness itself14