Miguel de Unamuno in his novel, San Manuel Bueno, mártir, reveals his central character as a figure torn by existential angst while simultaneously driven by a compassion to serve others. The development of these two characteristics within a single character gives rise in the novel to a consideration of religious faith. The central figure, Don Manuel, at the novel's opening is being processed for beatification in the Catholic Church, thus establishing a backdrop which speaks to the issue of religion. Despite his compassion and good works which will earn him this consideration for canonization, an agonizing sadness fills Don Manuel because of his fear of death which he sees as the annihilation of self, not believing in the Catholic teaching of immortality. That as a priest he must maintain silence regarding his disbelief in immortality establishes the central tension within the work. Thus Don Manuel labors tirelessly to serve and comfort his rural parish while he himself suffers the agonies of his own doubt. Don Manuel's skepticism regarding immortality is explored in the novel by means of a series of extended dialogues with his young protege, Angela. My proposal is to examine these dialogues within a frame which mediates the questions of faith and doubt as they are explored in the text.

Vicente Reynal suggests that the Unamunian novel should be read in the light of the significance of its characters, that what happens to them, what they do, and who they are can become the means for interpreting the work (336). In San Manuel [San Manuel Bueno, mártir] it is through the extensive dialogues in the text that we glimpse the inner workings of its characters, and thus approach the ideas which they represent. The dialogue between Don Manuel and Angela focuses on their doubt and on their faith in regards to the question of the immortality of the soul. If we read Angela as representing faith and Don Manuel as representing skepticism, clearly Angela has control of the discourse, and it is she who interprets Don Manuel. This leads to an attempted exoneration of Don Manuel's doubt in light of Angela's faith (Jurkevich 135). This view is corroborated in the novel's epilogue by a fictive Unamuno who conjures up the image of his namesake, Saint Michael the Archangel, for the purpose of defending Moses (Don Manuel having identified himself earlier as a type of Moses) against the Devil who claims him because of his disbelief. This reading lends to the novel an internal coherence and resolution. I wish to expand upon this reading by focusing on the Angela-Don Manuel dialogues as the means for examining the context in which Unamuno tenders questions of religious faith ; I wish to see how Angela's final rationalizations fail in their attempt at exonerating Don Manuel (Valdés 31).

There are semantic difficulties involved in a discussion of faith in this novel. Although the term has a fundamental importance for an understanding of the novel, its meaning seems extraordinarily ambiguous. Although its usage remains common in the twentieth century, its classical Christian meanings have been largely jettisoned. The writings of Paul of Tarsus and Martin Luther, for example, have tremendous implications for its meaning, at the same time that faith as a human experience in the twentieth century has been largely subsumed under the categories of psychology. This may be seen as inevitable in that faith in its classical Christian sense, remains largely in conflict with fundamental premises of twentieth century culture and academic discourse (Ilie 184). If we think of the literature of St. John of the Cross, for example, we are reminded that faith is an experience which leads the believer to a mystical, non-rational understanding of life. However, for Don Manuel and Angela faith consists of one's ability to concur with Catholic dogmas, specifically regarding the immortality of the soul. Faith in this sense is like an allegiance or loyalty in which one rationally acknowledges avowed truths concerning an immaterial reality. Faith is not considered as an integrated insight or personal experience. Don Manuel is seen to have lost faith, once and for all, because he disbelieves the Catholic dogma of the immortal soul. Angela who is often seen to represent faith, primarily wrestles with religious concepts and language (Morón Arroyo 153).

As we read Angela's account of her life, it becomes clear that at the center of her experience is her relationship with Don Manuel. From this we may assume that Don Manuel has strongly influenced her life and faith. As the novel opens Angela narrates her experience as a small girl in awe of the parish priest. Even while away at boarding school she is made to understand that he is a great man (98). When she comes home to her village and confronts Don Manuel in the confession booth, she is distraught due to the exaggerated esteem in which she holds the man. Don Manuel comforts her, and she leaves the church with a feeling of consolation (112). At the same time she senses within herself a deep compassion for him, and returns on occasion to confess with Don Manuel primarily as a means for offering consolation to him. It is during these visits that she recognizes something of a concealed confession in his hushed voice. She raises her doubts with him, only to be rebuffed by his impatience with questions regarding spiritual beings, and she intuits in this way, piece by piece, the unorthodox nature of Don Manuel's faith (113). These insights distress her deeply, and at one point she hides herself in her room to cry (113). She cannot contain her doubts and confronts him directly regarding the existence of Hell. He evades her questions as best he can and, when he cannot, he concedes that one must follow the teachings of the Church (114). Having cornered the priest in this way Angela comments only on the deep sadness in his eyes.

Thus with lingering doubts concerning Don Manuel's belief, and a growing awareness of his pain, we see within Angela, a growing awareness of something which threatens her allegiance-like faith to the Church. As Reynal has suggested, we focus on Unamuno's personalities if we are to grasp the ideas that are presented in his novels. In these early dialogues between the village priest and the young lay person we are made aware that Don Manuel's unorthodoxy is communicating itself to Angela. An uneasiness creeps into her life which raises doubts within her. These doubts are neither met with convincing encouragement nor with an open exploration as to their significance. Rather an element of duplicity is both present and perceived. The innocent faith of Angela comes into contact with Don Manuel's despairing skepticism. How these two affect each other forms one of the key elements in the dramatic representation of Unamuno's tragic sense of life (Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico 35). Despite a growing awareness of his disbeliefs and his anquished emotional state, Angela records that during this period Don Manuel's influence in her life grew (114). The direction which the dialogue between these two takes is thus seen to be determined by the priest. Angela comes to him in the role of a daughter expecting to be taught in the way of Catholic salvation, but rather something more akin to a dialogue opens up in which Angela is forced to take a more equal position in order to defend her faith, which seems to be ironically threatened by her confessor. What Angela has begun to suspect about Don Manuel's disbelief is made explicit by her brother Lázaro. Manuel's disbelief in the survival of the soul after death is thus brought into the open for Angela, and she confronts this awful reality. What we witness in the text is the preeminence of Don Manuel and the preeminence of his dialogue with Angela as the means for exploring the question of faith and doubt. The discourse itself defines the limits of the discussion. Faith is bound by doubt, and Angela is left to find a way to rationalize this difficulty.

Angela is faced with a formidable dilemma: how is it possible to maintain her loyalty to Church dogma, while submitting to her spiritual mentor's skepticism. We will see in the end that she attempts a resolution to this problem. The dialogues between Angela and Don Manuel which follow the revelation by Lázaro reveal something of the process by which Angela will come to her final statement of faith. At the first encounter after the revelation by Lázaro, Don Manuel intuits what it is that she has found out about him, and they cry together (125). The open ambiguity of their relationship is now described in legal terms, the question becomes who is the judge and who the prisoner. Angela, in the role of judge puts the essential question to the prisoner: Do you believe in the next life? (125) ; Don Manuel manages to avoid giving a clear answer. Rather he responds that Angela ought to distract herself from religious considerations by getting married. Here we witness a side of Don Manuel difficult to reconcile. The repeated advice to distract oneself from serious examination of one's faith is difficult to understand in a character who takes his own reflections very seriously. This is an important point in the agony that Don Manuel suffers. He cannot resolve the question of what to do with his doubt. Doubt plagues his thoughts and comes into conflict with his faith. Manuel cannot relieve himself of his doubts and thus remains unable to give his allegiance-like faith to the dogma concerning immortality.

We see another example of this on the occasion when Manuel advises Angela against the teachings of Santa Teresa, recommending that she seek distraction in Bertoldo (112). It is hard to see, at first, why Don Manuel would not recommend reading Santa Teresa, since she represents, as he does, a vocation of tireless service to one's community. But we remember that Manuel understands very differently the meaning of the interior life. Teresa of Avila, in Las Moradas, describes her profound spiritual experience, as an inward journey of solitude and faith. For Manuel these descriptions of inward places in the soul must have seemed terrifying. As his dialogues make clear, he has become terrified of the experience of solitude because that is when the specter of death most haunts him. Unlike Teresa who balances life with her integration of tireless work and inspired devotion, Manuel's life is one of exhaustion in which the obsession with mortality dominates all. He works to avoid solitude, and when work ends, he can only seek distraction. His sole consolation being that he might help others avoid the same anguish that grips him.

The dialogue between Angela and Don Manuel takes on an absurd twist when Don Manuel gives Angela the wafer of Christ's body, a ritual which asserts a faith in the transcendental nature of the historical Jesus. For he asks that she pray for Jesus. Angela rises like a zombie from the altar at hearing this, devastated by the implications of the priest's request (134). She undergoes a spiritual crises over this matter and as a result, confronts her own understanding of the nature and reality of sin. The absurdity of praying for a god at the moment in which one is acknowledging dependence on the god, gives insight into the disorienting influence that Don Manuel exerts on the faith of Angela. When she returns to him the next day, he seems changed, he appears solemn as if in decline. She raises the question of his request to pray for the soul of Jesus Christ, but he stops her, not wanting to hear his own words spoken aloud. She then proceeds to the thought that haunts her, the one regarding the existence and realities of sin, and by implication whether one needs to give allegiance to the Catholic dogma of salvation. Don Manuel responds with an enigma, and then reopens the absurdist line by asking that she pray for him, and his sins ; despite his denying the need for prayers or the existence of sin (136). This conversation brings to a close the second group of dialogues between Don Manuel and Angela, having taken place after Lázaro's revelation of Manuel's disbelief.

In Angela's final statement, after Don Manuel's death, we recognize the unusual lengths to which she must go in order to rationalize her faith. She records in her journal that her conviction for the dogmas of the Church have been severely undermined. She has been converted to a position of skepticism even while she formulates statements that maintain the illusion of belief. The contradictions she formulates signal the kind of lessons which she has learned from Don Manuel. She begins her final statement with an essential assertion of Don Manuel's life: We must live! The implication of this slogan being that we must live, oblivious to more ultimate realities. Moreover she is old and surprised by life's brief moment. She has successfully lost herself, and forgotten about her interior life, as Manuel taught (145). If not busy with her work among the people, she feels a terrible loneliness, tortured by the presence of unknown people (146). Angela by this description of herself confirms what she has said earlier about Don Manuel's influence over her. In the end, she has become like him.

What confirms most strongly the change in Angela may be what we do not read in her closing statement. There is nothing of religious devotion, there are no prayers, no biblical texts cited, only a Manuel-like litany of questions which go unanswered. Questions which indicate uncertainty and doubt, disorientation even. Amidst these final revelations of Angela's doubt, we find her last direct references to Don Manuel. They are curious, indeed, for here at the last, she attempts to resolve for Don Manuel what she cannot resolve for herself. She proclaims that he, although not thinking himself to have believed in immortality, did believe. And then that God, for some inscrutable reason, made Don Manuel and Lázaro believe that they were nonbelievers (146). These are statements which create tremendous problems for an understanding of Christianity, and human psychology. For if individuals have faith without knowing it, then faith is subconscious, and primarily symbolic, something that leaves no trace of itself in the individual's consciousness. A faith thus defined would be taking on characteristics extremely unlike those attributed to faith in the Christian tradition. There follows these assertions a litany of questions such as: Do I believe? Do I know anything? Do I believe anything? What does believing mean? (147). Statements which lend a hollow ring to her pronouncements that Don Manuel in the end was a believer. Angela has attempted to maintain her belief, even while she questions what it means to believe. She is immersed in a troublesome doubt at the same time that she longs for the assurances of her own salvation. She struggles with faith as though it were a math problem.

Angela's faith in this novel is a rational one, modest in scope, and prescriptive, like opium, in its alleviation of human suffering. She concerns herself in the novel with questions that pertain to the individual's inability to give allegiance to religious dogmas, at the same time that she addresses questions of faith and the longing for religious certainty. I have suggested a reading of the novel which would see Don Manuel's tragedy contextualized within his relationship to Angela, and conclude that his doubt regarding Catholic dogma in the end degrades the faith of his disciple, Angela. I see Angela's attempts at reconciling Manuel's disbelief with the Church's dogmas of immortal life as transparently unstable. Angela has submitted the intangible experience of faith to the rationalizing processes of the intellect and arrived at conclusions which remain unconvincing for the reader.

Works Cited

Ilie, Paul. Unamuno: An Existential View of Self and Society. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1967.

Jurkevich, Gayana. The Elusive Self. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1991.

Morón Arroyo, Ciriaco. “Unamuno y Hegel” Antonio Sánchez Barbudo (ed.), Miguel de Unamuno. Madrid: Taurus, 1974, 151-179.

Reynal, Vicente. “Del sentimiento trágico de San Manuel Bueno, mártir.” La Torre 70-71 (1970): 331-45.

Unamuno, Miguel de. Del sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1971.

———. San Manuel Bueno, mártir. México: Letras Hispánicas, 1994.

Valdés, Mario. Introduction. San Manuel Bueno, mártir. By Miguel de Unamuno. México: Letras Hispánicas, 1994.