Unamuno the agony of Christianity

Now, after more than half a century, I realize and understand why Father Penagos, our rhetoric teacher in my time in Comilla, had taken a dislike to Don Miguel de Unamuno, whom he called a monkey; and it is that the great Basque writer surpasses Pio Baroja and Pérez de Ayala himself against the Jesuits in his indictments. He couldn't stand them. Nor was his countryman Iñigo de Loyola a saint of devotion. Basque among Basques, and consequently more Spanish than "Pupas" because of that "I understand myself and God understands me", Don Miguel wields his knowledge of Greek like a foil to put the Catholic religion on the bench. "The agony of Christianity" is a theological version of the "I accuse" of the Deyfruss affair. An allegation against the clergy, against King Alfonso XIII and the Heart of Jesus. The king had just consecrated the nation to this Jesuit devotion on the Cerro de los Ángeles. Holy Heart, you will reign. In this devastating book like no other of his, written in Paris, during his exile "paid for" by the dictator Primo de Ribera in 1924 because his professorial assets were not withdrawn, he reflects his doubts about the afterlife, the celibacy of the clerics, their doubts about the pontificate, a disastrous institution because for the professor at the University of Salamanca the guardian of the tomb of San Pedro happens to be a lackey of the antichrist (very strong, right?) He questions the fourth vow of the Jesuits. The obedience of the corpse and the two flags that are only one reality for the children of San Ignacio. And he dared to say about them what no one said they were fools, a bunch of jerks who practice corpse obedience. This article of their constitutions -explains don Miguel- is anti-Christian as anti-Christian is the papacy itself, a retrograde creation instituted by the Jesuits who, playing taba with millenarian terror, came up with a text like the totally apocryphal prophecies of Saint Malaquías . He questions all the social doctrine of the church, alleging that the ecclesiastical mission has nothing to do with politics, charity or the class struggle. They are very topical issues and I don't know if PP Francisco will have read Unamuno. This work was on the index for many years but raises truths and doubts at hand. That thing about Christian democracy sounded like blue chemistry to him... Christ had said that it is more difficult for a rich man to enter paradise than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, he showed that his good news has nothing to do with economic issues or social, with democracy, international demagogy or nationalism. Gospel in hand the great Don Miguel reads the primer to the priests, unmasking their Jesuit hypocrisy and his cynicism. Christianity is a building founded on great rhetoric, an assemblage of words since Saint Paul was its founder, Saint Augustine and other fathers of the desert were retor. I think that the Greek professor in his pride goes too far, although we will never discuss his brilliant definitions in this regard because in his analysis he remains in the shell and never reaches the soul of Christianity, that "quid divinum" that will pulse history to the very end. end of indestructible times when so many wanted to destroy it. Unamuno copies Tolstoy but despite his Hellenistic cognomentos he had not come to hear the monks of Athos sing a tropario or listen to the homily of a Russian Idumean. Eunuchs? Solicitors from the confessional? OK. That Jerusalem was a dirty city where ignorance, laziness and begging sprouted towards the beginning of the 20th century, well, too. Even so, in the word in principio erat Verbum the great factory of Revelation is founded. Christ cannot be understood if he is not described as the Great Eleuterio (liberator) and that was not understood by the great Greek professor. It focuses on the work of the "devil" (diabolos means accuser, provocateur) who walks at the pace of the Church in its transit through the earth through the centuries, in the midst of anxieties, calamities, great wars , human cruelties, felonies and conspiracies, excommunications, libelous bishops, eunuchs who castrated themselves to win the kingdom of heaven and show in their approach to religion an unmanly and feminine piety. This brilliant invective of Don Miguel de Unamuno, the great contreras, the "one cute" and "one milk" of Father Penagos, against the deposit of Truths reaffirms me in him; but the word is heard. "Paul - writes page 70 - when he was taken up to the seventh heaven, (possibly in an epileptic fit) he heard unspeakable sayings and wonderful music. The Samaritan woman heard the Christ and Sarah, already old, had a son by faith. Raab the whore, by faith he was saved." Certainly there is something in the gospel that flatters the ear and opens the doors of utopia for us. Writing was the bedside book of the great dreamers.