Reason separates us from God, Unamuno held, but we come to God by way of love and suffering. The knowledge of God, which is not rational, proceeds from the love of God.

Unamuno claims that truth must be lived and his truth, his faith is querer creer (to want to believe).

“To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to act as if He existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action.

Truth only becomes truth as it is acted on in passion and becomes embodied in a person’s life.

These two authors offer an important counter-discourse for our twenty-first century aversion of suffering, but the ultimate purposes of that suffering are very different in Unamuno and Kierkegaard, and those goals should be clear to anyone who would take up the possibility of seeing positive ends for suffering.

Second, I agree that doubt is an important component of a mature faith.

It is important to record the actions taken by this Spanish philosopher that affected the trajectory of Spanish history, actions that sprang from his faith and his longing for God to exist.

First, his insistence that philosophy must be relevant to real life is one that I resonate with.

I do not see reason as the enemy of faith;