The Story of a Conversion: the Extraordinary Encounter of Manuel García Morente

I love conversion stories, and this one makes my own look tame. I had nothing to lose by becoming a Catholic; Don Manuel had a lot to lose.

From One Peter Five

By Robert Lazu Kmita, PhD

How could a distinguished modern university professor of philosophy believe in God, the Virgin Mary, angels, and saints?

Before his conversion, to such a rhetorical question, the Spanish thinker Manuel García Morente (1886–1942) would always respond with the silence of a superior smile. All these Christian teachings and beliefs were, gently, labeled by him as “childishness.” Born into a family in which only the women practiced the Faith, while the men were carried away by the revolutionary and anti-clerical ideas of Voltaire and other such “enlightened” minds, Morente was shaped by a restrained atheism—hard as a granite wall. The greatest problem of such spirits—alas, so numerous in the modern world—is pride.

If Saint John Chrysostom once told his listeners in Antioch that “the greatness of thy knowledge should puff thee up with pride,”[1] then Morente stands as proof that such (secular) knowledge is often accompanied by pride in equal measure. That is why the conversion of the “enlightened” has, in general, been a very rare phenomenon. Constantly fed with ideas of secularism and agnosticism, or with those of revolutionary reforms and libertinism turned into dogma, all these spirits not only refuse to believe, but are held captive within an environment that seeks by every means to make faith impossible—of course, not without the participation and consent of the “prisoners.”

Though Spanish, Manuel García Morente was educated in France, where he completed his studies at the famous Sorbonne University, then in Germany, defending his doctoral thesis La estética de Kant (Kant’s Aesthetics) in 1912 at the University of Madrid. When Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) had announced as early as 1906 in Il crepuscolo dei filosofi (The Twilight of the Philosophers) that Kant was then the most celebrated of philosophers, Morente did nothing but confirm that belief. Unlike Papini, who exposed the contradictions and absurdities in Kantian philosophy, Morente not only wrote studies and books dedicated to Saint Anselm’s adversary but also translated Kant’s most important works into the language of Cervantes.

Recognized for his merits, he was appointed Undersecretary of Public Education in Spain in 1930. In 1931, he became Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Madrid. A brilliant career, wasn’t it? Standing on the heights of success, nothing could have led such a “superstar” of rationalist-atheist-agnostic intelligentsia to embrace faith. And yet, this is precisely what happened—proving that indeed, “the ways of the Lord are mysterious.”

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 abruptly ended Manuel García Morente’s brilliant career. Not only did he lose all his positions and privileges, but in an environment where communism sought tyrannically to impose its own ideology, his passion for “idealist” German philosophy and “bourgeois” thinkers like Henri Bergson made him a target of the Red power.

A widower, left with two daughters in his care, he trembled as he watched from behind the curtains the trucks and soldiers who came to make arrests and lead the unfortunate prisoners to their executions. Everything turned truly dramatic when, on August 28, 1936, his son-in-law, only 29 years old, was assassinated. His daughter, Morente’s own child, found herself alone with two children. The family’s anguish grew exponentially. Yet, paradoxically, the faith and prayers of the women in the professor’s house grew ever stronger. The description of those days deserves to be read in full:

One day, the militiamen came to arrest the eldest son of our neighbors across the hall. The poor boy was imprisoned and later executed at Paracuellos. Another time, I burned in the furnace of the central heating all the documents and correspondence I had kept from the year when I was Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Public Instruction under General Berenger’s government. The next day—a providential fact!—they came to search my house.

After that, we spent our days hidden behind closed shutters, watching the cars that stopped in front of the gate. With our hearts pounding, we counted the steps the assassins climbed, and when they passed our floor, we breathed with relief. Death was going to another house! My daughters, my sister-in-law, an aunt, and the servant who had been with us for twenty-six years would all huddle in a corner of the house and stay there praying for hours and hours on end. At that time, I myself couldn’t pray, nor did I even know how. But some inner impulse made me approve, with gratitude, the gentle and humble faith of those wonderful women.[2]

The tension of those turbulent times needs no commentary. Fear and terror—the favorite weapons of communist dictatorships—were dominant. But above all, a sense of helplessness, of the inability to act, paralyzed Morente. Things did not stop there. One day, a trusted friend with certain connections warned him that the “Reds” had planned his arrest and execution. Horrified, Morente left his family behind and fled to Paris. Then began the inferno of remorse.

Torn by guilt for having abandoned his daughters and grandchildren, yet consoling himself that he had no choice, he lived in fear of receiving news that his family had been killed. Days passed, and living off the charity of an old friend who sheltered him, he lacked even the most basic means of subsistence. Yet a kind woman offered him a hot meal each day. Later he would understand that even this was a small sign of Providence.

What drove him to the brink of despair, however, was his total inability to act. He, the great intellectual of Spain, a friend of the famous philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), was utterly powerless. However hard he tried to find a way to bring his family to Paris, nothing worked. And when at last he managed to speak with someone from the new government who promised help, he learned definitively that he was persona non grata and that his family was trapped in Spain.

From that moment, a new understanding slowly began to dawn upon him—an intellectual revelation showing him a different meaning of freedom, by no means the hubristic one of the modern world. It was a freedom bounded by a framework we do not control. It was as if, trapped in a labyrinth, we could only escape if we accepted that the labyrinth itself must move around us while we walked without knowing where we were going. Our task was simply to walk—and the labyrinth would turn and shift until, not by our own initiative but through its motion, we would arrive at the right path, toward the exit. We need only to move forward, accepting that we do not control the route:

Around me—or rather, above me and independent of me—my entire life was being woven, without the slightest intervention on my part (…) I remained completely passive, knowing nothing of what was happening to me. As if an unknown power, absolute master of human destiny, were putting in order, without me, all that was mine.

The proud and haughty Spanish thinker was thus reduced to a state of humility in which he was forced to accept his limits. Torn by contradictory thoughts, he rebelled yet recognized his helplessness. At first, he refused to accept it. At times, the thought of suicide visited him. Like his Basque predecessor, Ignatius of Loyola, he feared he might lose his mind. The endless, powerless waiting would ultimately lead him to accept the teaching of Divine Providence, toward which the one Saint Augustine called “the inner teacher”—the Holy Spirit—was gently guiding him. It became impossible for him to deny that something or Someone, other than himself, was “weaving” and “shaping” his life.

The first decisive moment came on the evening of April 29, 1937. After weeks and months of torment and anguish, he became convinced of the existence of Divine Providence. Yet one major problem remained: this Providence seemed to him distant and arbitrary, belonging to that deistic God who does not intervene in the world or in human lives. An unbearable inner dryness consumed him. Long afflicted with chronic insomnia, he tried to rest, seeking peace by listening to classical music on the radio. A piece of genius electrified him—it was a section from L’Enfance du Christ (The Childhood of Christ), by Hector Berlioz (1803–1869).

The sublime music unleashed a flood of images—all drawn from the liturgical memories of his childhood, when, taken to church by his pious mother, he gazed reverently at the holy images and listened to the Gospel readings. Scene after scene, he relived the life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, culminating in the scene of the Crucifixion:

Little by little, within my soul there began to form the vision of Christ—Christ the man—crucified on the summit of a mountain overlooking an immense landscape, a vast plain teeming with human beings—women, children—over whom stretched the arms of our crucified Lord. And the arms of Christ grew and grew, seeming to embrace all that suffering multitude and cover it with His infinite love.

Overwhelmed by this new movement of the heart, he knelt and tried to pray. He could not. He could no longer remember a single prayer from the days—over forty years earlier—when he had attended Sunday school. Distressed, he struggled for hours to recall them. With great effort, he managed to write in a notebook everything he remembered of the Pater Noster and Ave Maria. He could not recover anything from the Credo or Salve Regina. But it was something. He repeated these improvised prayers with joy, staying up until midnight, comforted by the waves of grace he felt. Decided, he told himself that the next day he would buy a Bible and a prayer book. For the first time in months—after so many insomniac nights—he fell asleep.

When he suddenly awoke around 2 a.m., with an inexplicable feeling in his soul, the event occurred that he would later call—perhaps inspired by Karl Jaspers—“the extraordinary fact:”

I turned my face toward the inside of the room and was struck motionless. He was there. I did not see Him, I did not hear Him, I did not touch Him, but He was there. The room was dimly lit by a small electric lamp—no brighter than one or two candles—placed in a corner. I saw nothing, heard nothing, touched nothing. I had no sensation at all. But He was there.

The lines above are best understood in silence. His later confessor, Don José María García Lahiguera (1903–1989), published them exactly as you have read them, after the author’s death. They mark the culmination of a life that would end at the foot of the Cross. That encounter with Our Lord Jesus Christ—without any sensory experience—on that night in Paris between April 29 and 30, 1937, was the crucial moment, the kairós (καιρός), as the ancient Greeks called it, when the life of Manuel García Morente took a new path.

The joy of his daughters cannot be described. Without a doubt, their prayers and those of his wife in heaven had obtained such a grace of conversion—one that would lead him to embrace the most demanding and meritorious mission imaginable: in 1940, he became a priest. Despite his early death in 1942, the experience of that “extraordinary fact,” which he left us as an immortal testimony, remains one of the signs of hope in our dark times.

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[1] Saint John Chrysostom, The Homilies on the Statuesor to the People of Antioch, Oxford, 1842, p. 207.

[2] All the quotes are translated from the Romanian version made by the remarkable poet and classicist Cristian Bădiliță: Manuel García Morente, Faptul extraordinar. Experiența mistică a unui filosof contemporan (The Extraordinary Fact. The Mystical Experience of a Contemporary Philosopher), Bucharest: Vremea Publishing House, 2019. The original Spanish texts are found in Manuel García Morente, El „hecho extraordinario” y otros escritos, Madrid: Ediciones Rialp, 1986.

Pictured: Don Manuel García Morente, a Priest of the Royal, Celestial and Military Order of Our Lady of Mercy and the Redemption of the Captives.