Saint Manuel, Martyr explores deep religious and philosophical paradoxes that question the meaning of life and death. In sum, the novel portrays a simple man without faith, who in his solitude, loneliness, and suffering sees that faith is merely an illusion, a dream that the common man dreams to fend off the terrible truth that only the brotherhood and nature in this world counts-that there's no otherworldly eternity. His life, then, is a deliberate fraud to console his parishioners.