Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno, Volume 4: The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations by Miguel de Unamuno

Author:Miguel de Unamuno [Unamuno, Miguel de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691225746
Publisher: Princeton UP
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

sings our poet Antonio Machado in his Campos de Castilla. Is the sadness of the land in the land itself, or in those of us who look upon it? Do they not, truly, suffer? And yet, what can an individual soul in a world of matter actually be? Is a rock or a mountain individual? Is a tree?

Nevertheless the fact remains that spirit and matter are in constant strife. The poet Espronceda expressed the thought:

To live a life of peace on earth,

either soul or matter is of extra worth.

And is there not in the history of thought, or of human imagination, if you prefer, something that corresponds to this process of the reduction of matter, in the sense of a reduction of everything to consciousness?

Yes, there is, and the author of this idea is the first Christian mystic, St. Paul of Ephesus, the Apostle to the Gentiles, who, because he had never with the carnal eye of his face looked upon the face of the carnal, mortal Christ, the ethical Christ, created within himself an immortal and religious Christ, and who was caught up into the third heaven and there heard secret and unspeakable words (2 Cor. 12). And this first Christian mystic dreamed also of a final triumph of spirit, of consciousness, and it is this which in theology is technically called the apocatastasis or restitution.

In verses 26 through 28 of chapter 15 of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul tells us: “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 subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all” That is, in the end, God, Consciousness, will become the all in all.

This doctrine is completed by Paul’s teaching, in his Epistle to the Ephesians, concerning the end of the whole history of the world. In this epistle, as we all know, he represents Christ—by whom “were all things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible” (Col. 1:16)—as the head over all things (Eph. 1:22), and in him, in this head, we shall all be raised up that we may live in the communion of saints and that we “may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge” (Eph. 3:18-19). And this gathering together of us in Christ, who is the head and, as it were, the compendium of Humanity, is what the Apostle calls the gathering or collecting together or recapitulating of all things in Christ: And this recapitulation anacephalaeosis—the end of the world’s history and of the human race, is merely another aspect of the apocatastasis.

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