The Madness Of San Miguel

Unamuno, old friend, I will never understand why I return to you again and again. If anyone took seriously the Emersonian adage that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," it was Unamuno. He is a source, therefore, of perpetual frustration but also of delight. He belongs among the mad Friends of God, if only he knew...

To believe in God is to long for his existence, and, furthermore, to act as if God did exist; it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner wellspring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets hope; hope begets faith, and faith and hope together beget charity. Out of this longing is born our sense of beauty, finality, goodness.

~ The Tragic Sense of Life, Kerrigan trans., 202-203.

The mad Friends of God (al-majdhub) were honored in classical Islamic society. Some even founded "schools" of divine madness for those whose longing for the divine rendered them unfit for polite society.

Unamuno found no such place in the Spanish Catholicism that he defended with so much vigor in his writings. The title of Margaret Thomas Rudd's 1963 biography of Unamuno, The Lone Heretic, says it all.

Sic transit gloria mundi.