Saint Manuel Bueno, Absurd Man by Ryan Wasser

Ryan Wasser

Composing syllabi for the academic milieu always feels like a daunting task. As a professor, deciding what material to cover, and how to supplement that material with evocative readings is challenging . If one has any sense, one strikes a balance between typically acknowledged “great works,” and lesser-known works that are no less profound despite their relatively subjacent position in the canon. This year was no different: unsure of myself in my inaugural role as “adjunct professor,” I decided to rely on the strength of my experience with philosophical texts by including Miguel de Unamuno’s “Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr” as a key reading for the upcoming semester . Often overlooked in favor of philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre, Unamuno’s work is notable for its integration of asystematic existential elements into an otherwise easily digestible, prosaic form .

In that regard, “Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr” is a unique literary feature on the landscape of existential philosophy. One is tempted, upon first, second, and subsequent readings to believe that Unamuno’s story of a priest intimately at odds with his own faith and his effect on the surrounding village of Valverde de Lucina is about the interrelatedness of comportment and faith—in other words, the understanding that what we do is more telling of what we believe than what we say we believe. This perspective is all but codified in the closing ruminations of one Angela Carballino—the eyes through which the story is told—ergo I have no intention on debating its viability, chiefly because, speaking personally, I hold “it” to be a fact of the human condition . Having said that, equally as pressing are the connections between Unamuno’s story and other existential thinkers such as Camus, especially if the more intuitive moments of the story are taken at face value. One begins to wonder whether Don Manuel is the incidental man of God Angela makes him out to be, or if he was an absurd man akin to albeit wildly different from the characters analyzed in Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus . A more pressing concern might be

For readers unfamiliar with Unamuno’s work, a brief summarization is in order . As noted, the story of Don Manuel is given to us by Angela, a woman who, after returning to her village after attending a covenant school for girls, becomes close to the priest, first after a number of confessional encounters where she articulates various concerns to the man, and later, after her brother, Lazaro, returns from the United States, complete with modern, atheistic sensibilities in tow. While various smaller events constitute the bulk of the story, it is the paradoxical relationship between Lazaro and Don Manuel that forms the crux of Angela’s reminiscence. The relationship is paradoxical because it is clear that Lazaro is not keen about the priestly order especially as they relate to the feudalistic “idiocy” of the Spanish countryside (Unamuno, “Saint Manuel Bueno” 271) . But for Lazaro, Don Manuel “is not like the rest of them,” not the manipulative womanizer Lazaro perceives other priests to be, but “is, in fact, a saint” (272), and it is this growing respect for the priest that leads Lazaro to embark on a faux-conversion to Christianity for the sake of the town’s spiritual welfare.

The most compelling aspect of Lazaro’s conversion from atheist to undercover apostate is that it speaks directly to the situation the Don Manuel has known all his life, that Manuel himself does not believe in Heaven or God; that his role as “poor country priest,” while necessary for the prosperity of his parish, is ultimately founded on what he perceives as justifiably benevolent deception. The extent of his disbelief comes to us in pieces: first, through discrete indicators in his manner of speech while discussing the existence of Hell with Angela, next through his revelation to Lazaro about his lifelong, seemingly hereditary struggle with suicidal thoughts, then in his scathing remarks about the syndication of the Church, and finally when he confesses as much in no uncertain terms to Lazaro communion of the last Easter week communion prior to his death (Unamuno, “Saint Manuel Bueno” 283) .

The interactions between Angela, Lazaro, and Don Manuel establish important ethical questions—more so than other points, the futility of obsessing over the “Social Question” and the questionability of religious “syndication” stand out (283)—that are critical, not just to the characters, but to readers alike . The questions raised solely by Don Manuel, however, are far more impressive, if not illuminating, as they pertain to the human condition, namely, “what is the nature of belief,” and “how should we act in the face of unbearable truths?” The answers to these questions can be found immediately in the actions of priest himself: belief, something attributed in the story to belief and tradition, is the opiate of the masses, and something Don Manuel insists on continuing to be the source of in spite of his own stated lack of belief so that the people of Valverde de Lucina might “live as happily as possible in the illusion that all this has a purpose” (282) . As to the issue of unbearable truths, Don Manuel advocates, both for himself and Lazaro, a kind of continual suicide by passion, working despite the weariness-inducing impermanence of life so that their people— people less cosmopolitan than those of contemporary society—might “be allowed to live with their illusion,” to continue dreaming their lives so to speak (288) .

But should Don Manuel’s actions be considered those of an absurd man? In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus describes the absurd as “that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints life, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together” (50)— it is the inescapable realization of the world’s incommensurability with our expectations of it, and the limits such a realization places on our ability to know or understand the world-as-such in anything that might be considered unitary in fashion . An absurd man, therefore, is a person who lives without appeal (53), who fully accepts the limits of his or her particular fate, and carries on in spite of the absurd as opposed to reconciling the absurd through redemptive nostalgia or suicide . In the company of absurd men is Don Juan as well as all great actors, and great conquerors—”[they are,] as much through [their] passions as through [their] torture,” and it is precisely this dualistic persistence in the behavior and reflections of Don Manuel that would seem to justify our characterizing him as

“absurd” (Camus 120) . But is this characterization fair? Does it do Don Manuel justice?

As self-evident as the answer might appear to be from such a perspective, in the opinion of this author, one cannot be so sure . Don Manuel checks all the appropriate boxes for Camus’ description of an absurd man, but even with all of that, our efforts fail to characterize the priest of Valverde de Lucina as absurd because “the absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to, “ which is to say that the absurd is a matter of particularity, a matter of faith (Camus 31). If we assume faith to be the paradox “that the single individual as the particular stands in absolute relation to the Absolute” (Kierkegaard 54)—a reasonable assumption given Unamuno’s bespoke reverence for what he calls Kierkegaard’s contra-rational position toward religiosity (The Tragic Sense of Life 198)—then one might further argue that the absurd and God, despite being syzygistic opposites, are technically one in the same, that God both is and isn’t simultaneously, as is our relationship with it. The human experience proves to be paradoxical at every turn, least of all in its relation to the metaphysical or transcendent .

With that we return to our overarching question: what separates a man of faith from an absurd man? As it turns out, very little; a semantic line drawn in the sand that we moderns utilize to assuage our own discomfort with the paradox of human existence. Not only do questions like these make it so that we cannot see metaphorical the forest for the trees, they give us a convenient excuse for failing to do so. Maybe it doesn’t matter if there is a difference between a person who lives without appeal, and a person whose appeal is so foreign to “the universal” that it transcends comprehensibility . Perhaps, in certain instances such as these, fine details and idiosyncrasies ought to play second fiddle to the larger principles embedded in the actions of those we observe. Perhaps there are moments when we should leave the suspicions we have become so accustomed to entertaining unrequited . There is no better evidence of this than the “conversion” of Lazaro—each of us has the capacity to act as though we are better people than we actually are, and in doing so becoming the better person we have feigned being in the interest of promoting a greater, more harmonious existence for all. And as for our saint, I find Angela’s final rumination to be most profound, if only slightly incorrect, “that Don Manuel the Good . . . died thinking [he] did not believe, but that, without believing in [his] belief, [he] actually believed, in active, resigned desolation” (Unamuno, “Saint Manuel Bueno” 291) . Desolation, I fear, is too strong a word: the good saint may have been resigned, but only to the paradox of human being, the reality that heaven and hell, whatever those words mean to you, are places we make in this existence. B

Works Cited Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O’Brien, Vintage Books, 1983. De Unamuno, Miguel. “Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr.” Basic Writings of Existentialism. Edited by Gordon Marino, The Modern Library, 2004, pp. 257-294. ---. The Tragic Sense of Life. Translated by J.E. Crawford Flitch. E-book, Dover Books, 1954. Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling. Edited by C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh, translated by Sylvia Walsh. Cambridge UP, 2006.

1It is important here to acknowledge a good friend of mine and talented philosopher in his own right, Shane Warren of West Chester University, who first introduced me to the work of Unamuno. 2Emphasis added.