In this chapter we will refer to both religious belief and practice: to questions of a theological and metaphysical nature, relating to Christianity and other religions; and to ways in which religious belief impinges on people's lives, as individuals and as members of societies. Such an approach accommodates Lorca's central conviction, shared with Nietzsche, that ‘God is dead’, and his exploration of the human consequences of that. Art may assuage where metaphysics fails to satisfy. Considered within a context of the history of ideas, Lorca's is not an unusual case, given central trends of Spanish liberal thought: many seriousminded people were repelled by the Catholic Church's doctrinal and political intransigence, but could not quell their anxiety over big questions that refuse to go away. One thinks here, for instance, of the lay ethos of the Residencia de Estudiantes that Lorca himself attended, or of the influence of a figure like Unamuno. The following survey cannot be exhaustive; it will aim, rather, to draw out a number of significant emphases within Lorca's writings.

The youthful writings

In 1986, Eutimio Martín's important study Federico García Lorca, heterodoxo y mártir made readers aware of the poet's early established interest in religious questions, closely linked to anxieties about matters of personal identity. The publication of three volumes of Lorcan juvenilia in 1994 subsequently filled out the picture. The main emphases within this sizeable corpus, having linkswith Impresiones y paisajes [Impressions and Landscapes] (1918) and Libro de poemas [Book of Poems] (1921), have been ably summarised by Ian Gibson and Christopher Maurer. Briefly recapitulated, for Lorca neither the self nor the cosmos can be satisfactorily understood. An awareness of death and fear of personal extinction, coupled with other forms of religious doubt, for instance about the place of evil, are at the root of human suffering (see for example Obras completas, IV, pp. 820–3), and this focuses the issue of whether God exists at all; if so, what is he really like? If he does, he must be an ‘artista fracasado’ [failed artist] (Obras completas, IV, p. 615), silent, absent, unperturbed by the sufferings of his own creation. The idea of Hell is a moral outrage. Jesus was a failure too.