Unamuno’s Don Manuel: Faith, Doubt, and the Search for Truth
Don Manuel represents knowledge, the instrument to change reality. He stands on a high step because he can convince his people, fostering their belief. In the innermost secrets of his death, our priest is believed to have a lucid acceptance of human destiny. However, his profession and commitment to the Catholic Church force him to represent a truth he perceives as a hoax.
Don Manuel, due to his own knowledge, is in doubt, longing for something else, a truth that religious faith does not provide, but simply a lack of understanding, hence the angst. Intelligence, knowledge of humanity, opens a world of “prevented possibilities,” limited because it is impossible to encompass all knowledge. We cannot even decipher the existential, but our mind can ask why of things and even the reason why, obliging us to try to reassure our conscience and give some reassurance to our “thinking mind.”
Various religions, as a defense, would then be created by men to relieve the solvent power of intelligence. If you pretend to go beyond what we intellectually or spiritually conceived, the question we embrace and live eternally with Unamuno is a tragic sense of real life.
Don Manuel seemed like someone who preached a different truth, doubting the existence of God and immortal life. Do we believe we have already overcome the uneasy truth that Don Manuel faced? Because we still have a God, our new God of capitalist inclination, a painful truth for some and less so for others. The fact is that most criteria and values of yesteryear have been replaced by market criteria; it seems that everything is a great commodity to be bought and sold: ideologies, beliefs, feelings… but this, perhaps, at times, can produce a certain feeling of uneasiness. To alleviate our despair, there is an alleged web of events dedicated to assuaging our conscience. There is a Manuel from different fronts that we poured over his painful truth or lie (as look). It would be interesting to ask whether our Don Manuel also feels doubts about what posited as truth. The answer is obviously positive, and that doubt is one of the qualities inherent to human beings. All doubt, even of our own convictions, but we need to walk through a world of which we know little except what we need or think we know or conocer.
Questioning, doubting the system that is offered as single, true, guarded of our happiness and tranquility, uneasy to be, why certain ideologies succeed “kind and benevolent” to which we adhere in mass. We need a reason, a truth.
Returning to Unamuno’s Don Manuel, he does not attempt to give reasons or people who pose the existence of the afterlife; he prefers to live in ignorance because they do not understand the truth and that would make them suffer. He wants his beloved people to believe in what he cannot believe (dies without believing in eternal life).
Symbols in the Play
In the play, we find four basic symbols that sum up the thinking that is emerging from the work:
- The Lake: Symbolizes Manuel’s doubt and disbelief.
- The Mountain: Symbolizes faith, the proclamation of this, the voice of a united people, strong, immutable, infected by faith. These two symbols are united in the person of Don Manuel.
- The Village: Remote, located between the mountains and lake. This significant location of the village reveals that it lies between doubt and faith.
- The Snow: Refers to life itself. Falling snow on the mountain would be consolidated, giving a lasting appearance, but if it fell into a lake full of doubts, it would dissolve, leaving life without a trace. This would drown in a lake, is the mystery of life which fall under consolidated or dissolved, it is the mystery of faith.
You could say that the lake formed what we know, we know that would make us doubt, inquire, ask the mountains … our ignorance of “the truth of life” that we would highly permeable to certain “ideological impositions,” the village our inclination to a lake that may drown us in doubt or to a mountain to shelter us in a represented reality, snow, and the truth established semiaceptada by all. Just as our inclination will be more or less likely to fully integrate our current value system. If the snow fall on our lake would adapt to our form, submit it to our state and we hardly alter fluid, when you fall on the mountain and we cuajarÃa cover of a bucolic and radiant white layer.