Religion and Modernity in Spain: Religious Experience in the Novels of Ramón Pérez de Ayala.

While Ramón Pérez de Ayala is widely regarded as a leading liberal with strong anti-Catholic and indeed anti-religious views, a close examination of his novels reveals a more ambivalent attitude to religious experience. Indeed, his liberalism could be said to embrace religion in its spiritual, as distinct from its temporal, dimensions. This article examines a number of Pérez de Ayala's major novels and discusses his views on, among other things, his knowledge of biblical criticism, his views on transcendence, pantheism, education, Church and State, scholasticism, neo-Thomist aesthetics, sexuality, women and marriage. Perez de Ayala makes extensive use of the Bible and religious texts in his works and, in his advocacy of a return to the values of early Christianity, could be said to show affinities with religious or theological modernism, which is conventionally held not to have any impact within Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]