beside Thee. For the intention of them all is to attain Thee. But
they are as the blind: they set their faces toward the way of the
King; and they wander out of the way.”
Gabírol the Jew wrote hymns which were included in the Sephardic ritual.
But the book which sets forth his vision of God and life reveals no
specific creed: it was too universalistic for the Jews who neglected his
philosophy and soon lost even the Arabic manuscript of his work. Two
centuries later, the _Makor Hayim_ reappears in the Latin version _Fons
Vitæ_: Aquinas combats its intuitionalism, Duns Scotus leans on it. The
Arabs Ibn Sina and Ibn Roshd were naturalized in Europe as Avicenna and
Averroës: now Ibn Gabírol, stripped of his race and sect, becomes
Avicebron: one of the sources of platonic faith in modern thought. But
it is an error to confound Gabírol with the followers of Plotinus who
supplied the principal attack upon those fossils of modern rationalism,
Maimonides and Aquinas. There is an element in Gabírol which the true
neo-platonist lacks: an element both Semitic and of Spain. It is the
element of Will, immanent and purposeful, in his conception of
divinity. Life to Gabírol is no mere fated emanation of the Godhead as
to the true North African and Hindu mystic: nor is it an unreal envelope
about truth, as to the followers of Plato. Life is the form of God in
matter: the willful imprint of divinity on earth. This concept gives to
the rapt activity of the mystics who embrace it an earthward, a
practical direction. If the world is pattern of God’s will, the highest
human spirit cannot in the highest vision transcend the earth or grow
detached from it: he must work in earth and through earthly deed enact
God’s revelation.
Gabírol, first of Spain’s literary mystics, founds this tradition which
at the end is to produce in Spain a lineage of mystics who are men of
action: a lineage far removed indeed from the commoner progeny of
mystics who, as they approach God, leave the terrestrial life. The early
Moslem thinkers outdid even their Jewish partners in the great Courts of
Córdoba and other Andalusian towns, by this tendency of their doctrines.
But their universalism became materialistic. Stressing the monism of
nature, they lost sight of God as the _informer_: the Prophet Mohammed
shrank to a sort of intellectual agent of the will, what the Spaniards
called _intendimiento agente_, a power more physical than of the spirit.
There were exceptions. Avempace, the Moslem platonist, for instance, who
was born in Guadix a little later than Gabírol. And his disciple,
Tofaíl, whose novel _Hai-ben-Jochdam_ is a spiritual _Robinson Crusoe_,
an extraordinary proof of the immanence of God. Hai, an infant, is
abandoned on a desert island. A doe nurses him. The bare demands of
material survival sharpen his reason: and from the purity of
intellectual understanding he achieves religious revelation. His body
has evoked reason, and reason evokes God. Now, at the end of his days,
an aged saint comes to the island. He has reached by simple faith the
same religious certitude as Hai by the exercise of mind. The circle is
rounded. God is the end of all ways, and is the way of all thoughts.
But the rational monism of the Moslems was not protected, like that of
the Jews from a sheer materialism which made many thinkers at the Court
of Abd-er-Rahman contemporaries at once of Democritus and Haeckel. The
immediate plateau from which arose in Spain the Catholic mystic heights
was Jewish.
For many ages, the Spanish Catholics[18] contribute little to the
medieval Scripture whose prophets were men like Abelard, Albertus and
Aquinas. The long line of Spanish Jewish worthies droops: while in the
north the subtly variant seed of Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus flowers at
last into the twin rebellion of Protestantism and of rationalism. It is
with the age of Calvin, of Francis Bacon, of Erasmus, that Catholic
Spain finds voice at last: and in a way which is an act. By means of
this late flowering in the south, modern Europe is a natural issue from
the womb of the medieval Church. Rome is saved until the seed of Rome’s
successorship is planted: international law is founded: America is
discovered and is peopled.
The tradition of such men as Gabírol and Tofaíl seemed dead, when it
spoke suddenly afresh in the work of a Spanish Jew. And of this man’s
influence, Menendez y Pelayo says in his classic work on the Ideas of
Spain: “All the Catholic mystics, from the Dominican Fray Luis de
Granada to the Jesuit Nieremberg accepted the æsthetic of Leon Hebreo
integrally, knowingly.”
His true name was Judah Leo Abravanel and with his father, a statesman
and a thinker, he left Spain in the exodus of 1492. He was a young man
when he settled in Italy, and it is very possible that his _Dialogues of
Love_ were originally written in Italian.[19] The oldest text of this
epoch-making work is an Italian prose full of Castilian uses.
The originality of the work of Leon Hebreo rests chiefly in the fact
that here for the first time ancient and medieval thought achieves a
modern form. The stuffs of the _Dialogues_ come up from Plato, Plotinus,
Crescas and the Kabbala: but the grace of the Renaissance, the humanism
of Venice and of Florence are within them. Here is the doctrine of the
Eternal Recurrence which Nietszche strove to incorporate in European
thought. Here in germ is Spinoza’s explanation of the union of the
individual with God and of the unity of substance. The _Dialogues_ are
so universalistic that they do not refute the legend of their author’s
conversion to the Christian faith: and they are so poetic that they
constitute indeed a lyrical threshold to the Pantheism which Spinoza was
to architect for Europe. To Crescas and Leon Hebreo comes Descartes to
produce Spinoza: comes the spiritual body of the Spanish will to produce
the Spanish mystics. Castilian grows to be the literal and literary word
of a nation resolved to win the earth in order to establish God upon it.
Perhaps the most powerful writer among these mystics[20] was the
Augustinian monk, Luis de León, whose lecture hall with its narrow
wooden benches honeycombed with the knife-marks of his students, one may
still see in Salamanca. The prose of Abravanel is luminous, pigmented,
mobile. His dialogues remain a string of separate gems, variously
valued, inorganic. The prose of Luis de León--far superior to his
verse--is integral and substantial as the will of Spain. Abravanel was
an uprooted speculator. León was a Spanish Catholic immersed in the
business of his age. He is indeed a mystic only by reflection: a
classicist at heart. His work is less parabolic, has fewer flashes than
the _Dialogues_; it is indeed less open to the sun and stars. But it is
far more plastic. Spain herself moves in his sentences and knits them
whole. The author is a passionate believer: so is his land, so is his
Monarch: so becomes his people. There is no separation between the
dreams of the close of Salamanca and the sea-bridging policy of the
Castilian State. Luis de León, preaching to his students in a narrow
hall within a narrow city, is linked with Italy and with America.
The process of art is the endowment of a particular experience with the
full measure of life. The work of art is a fragment of word or substance
informed with the wholeness of spiritual vision. The mystics of Spain
were fated to make art, or to make deeds. For here theology was heir to
centuries of universal vision. The mystic remains a Catholic and a
churchman. The Inquisition narrows his forms of speculation. He is a
part of Spain. But all Spain’s cosmic will is in him.
This will is in the great work of Luis de León: _Los Nombres de Cristo_.
Three Augustinian monks set forth from their convent across the river
from Salamanca. One of them has found a shaded grove on the río Tormes:
here, shielded from the fever of the sun, they rest and exchange
discourse on the names of Christ. The subject is rigidly dogmatic: the
treatment of the virtue of names has the Pythagorian and Kabbalistic
note which Plato and Aquinas equally would have rejected. Yet in this
stifled frame, an artist quickens a magnificent world. The monks with
their conventional background, the old town in flame of summer, the
river panting through its fringe of trees, the athletic freedom of the
mind in search, the passionate reality of God--all Spain is in this
antiquated book. Her extremes of waste and verdure, her turmoil of race,
her traffic and speculation, her panoply of vision--Jew, Christian,
warrior, priest--converge into the substance of prose. The delirious
delights of logic scaling the battlements of God, the southern arabesque
whereby the abstract thought becomes design make it glamorous and
moving.
León’s career was action. He was a teacher, and his words were on the
quick of deed. This is why the Inquisition took note of him and
subjected him to five years of imprisonment and torture. The
Inquisition, for all its folly and corruption, was the coefficient of
Spain’s unity. In any organism, thought and act are joined. This was
true of medieval Europe: it was true of Spain alone in Europe after the
modern dawn.
A younger man than Luis was Juan de Yepes whom Rome later canonized as
San Juan de la Cruz. Like Luis de León, like Teresa and Loyola, Juan met
with persecution not because he was a mystic and a poet; but a man of
action. Haggard, fanatical, almost disembodied, this spirit had body
enough to pass like a scourge of flame through the dark cities of
Castile, cleansing monastic evil; and like a breath of sweetness,
comforting the sick. He, too, is incarnate, in his particular phase, of
Spain’s whole will. He is a saint: rapt and ascetic. His voice is the
voice of spiritual vision. Yet it, as his life, is marvelously fleshed:
a sort of slender fire. The peculiar plasticity of Spain is clear in
Juan if one contrast his life with that of Saint Francis of Assisi, or
his work with that of Porphyry and Plotinus. Grace here has a hard edge,
is the handle of action. This reforming flesh fuses the sweetness of
Saint Francis with the acumen of Savonarola. Juan is very close to
Christ. For he is ruthless and practical. His charity like Christ’s is
sharper than a sword.
John of the Cross shares the _graphic_ quality which Spain
through her unitary will breathed into her various parts. He is
abstract--plastically; he is Idea--incarnate. In no wise is he
transcendent. Chained down to rot in some hostile convent cell, he is
still concerned with persons and with convents. A titanic
pressure--Spain--seems to have columned all the world into this lean,
bright figure.
His song is like him. The simple words hold an immensity like the deep
nights of Spain. Love of conquest, of gold, of glory and of power--the
turbulence of Spain is not within them. Yet the essence of will and
power, making this intricate turmoil, lives in his poems like a
resolution of many chords in silence.
Juan’s preceptress and ally in their task of purifying convents was
Teresa de Ahumada, known to religion and to letters as Santa Teresa de
Jesús. Teresa’s town, Avila, stands for her: stands for the woman of
Spain. The unbroken walls, the elliptical towers, the crenellated
parapets and gateways, symbolize her virtue. Within, Avila is mellow and
is fecund. Her walls shut her safe from the thrusting mountains of
Castile. Avila is ordered, within chaos.
Santa Teresa is the mystic, as organizer: she is yet another part of the
will of Isabel and Spain. The religious houses of the land are dissolute
and weak. Against the hostility which her sex aroused, against the
distrust of the Inquisition, Teresa moves through Spain, cleansing and
creating hearths for the luminous life. The world, to her, is a
household. The Master is Christ and he requires service. Her imaginative
powers ... in which the Arab glamour is not wanting ... make so vivid
the delights of service that the convents of Spain become as magnets,
sapping the humbler households of the land. To Teresa, the soul also is
a home; and her book _Las Moradas_ is a picture of its chambers. “As
above, so below.” Christ, the bridegroom, enters the household of the
soul: and at once, the humble household becomes Heaven. Teresa’s
convents are literal heavens upon earth: they are the dwelling of a Lord
whose passion fails not. Spain’s will pours a sea of energy into this
fragment of her deed. Teresa’s work is homely; and so is the rough
plastic language of her books. _Las Moradas, El Libro de su Vida_
articulate the sense of the common Spanish matron who makes of her
bridal bed an altar, and of her religion a marriage.
* * * * *
Teresa is no merely powerful reformer: she is a creator. In her hand,
the broom and the account-book become mystic weapons: even as in the
hands of Torquemada the wrack; and in the hands of Columbus the rudder
and the compass.
He was born in Italy; and the question of his descent, Italian or
Spanish or Jew, is unsolved and has no bearing. Christopher Columbus in
his historic rôle belongs with the Spanish mystics. We have lost his
book of _Prophecias_. But we can reconstruct the trend of the argument
which, having failed to convince the “practical” Courts of England,
Portugal and France, won over the clerics of Spain and at Córdoba moved
the Queen to send him westward.
Like the platonic Jews, Columbus idealized his route and made a symbol
of his navigating passion. Like Philo, he mapped out his scheme in
Scripture. Yet another phase of Spain’s organic will was served by this
devout seafarer: and through Spain, yet another need of Europe.
Medieval Christendom is in dissolution. Much energy is released; and
needs an outlet, and cannot find it until this mystic mariner, Christian
and medieval, finds America. Down to earth pours the energy of Europe:
the Vision and Body of a Gothic Christ no longer hold it. Down it
clamors, seeking earthly forms--seeking an America, indeed! But Columbus
is a Catholic. And Isabel, the Catholic Queen, smiles on his adventure,
aiming to spread the Church to India. And what they do--this mystic
seafarer, this rapt good monarch--is to give to Europe an escape for its
too-long stored Catholic might: to give to it a land in which the blood
of the medieval Christ may be sluiced, may be lost forever!
Irony marries with heroic Spain.
_c._ _The Jesuit_
In 1491, there was born to a family of noble Basques in the Guipúzcoan
castle of Loyola another mystic instrument of the Spanish will. Iñigo
Lopez de Recalde had the crude upbringing of the gentlemen of his race.
He learned to write Castilian; he served in the Court of the Catholic
Kings; and he became a soldier. He was a good soldier and the eyes of
his superiors were on him. At the age of thirty he took part in the
defense against the French of Pampeluna, capital of Navarre. A cannon
ball shattered his leg. During the long convalescence, grace came to the
Basque captain. He renounced worldly arms and took the staff and habit
of a religious beggar. He pilgrimaged to Rome and to Jerusalem. At
thirty-three, he began to study Latin. His austerity and that of a few
comrades whom he had attracted and whom he held for life brought him the
usual displeasure of the Holy Office who discouraged any swerving, even
in the path of piety, from the common norm. Loyola met distrust in the
University of Alcalá: on his arrival at Salamanca, he was jailed on
general suspicion of being either too holy or a fraud. Thence, still
seeking theology, he went to Paris and to London. Everywhere he was
coldly received, and forbidden to speak on religious topics. He was
forty: he had abandoned a career of arms: he was not even a priest. But
he had friends: they formed a band of seven including another Basque,
Francisco Xavier, a Frenchman and a Portuguese. In 1534, they took a
private vow of chastity, poverty and devotion. Three years later, Loyola
was ordained a priest. Since his conversion at the age of thirty,
eighteen years had passed, and they had been for him a constant wrack of
suspicion and of impediment to his purpose. He waited eighteen more
months ere he judged himself worthy to say Mass. And not until then did
he put forth his plan of a Company of Jesus--a cohort of religious
soldiers--to defend Christ in the world and to spread Him. Pope Paul III
recognized the Order in 1540. Loyola against his will was elected
General in 1541.
Like its name, the _Compañía de Jesús_ was military in form and method.
One year before Loyola’s conversion at Pampeluna, Martin Luther had
burned the Papal bull of excommunication. Europe made this simultaneous
gesture of antithesis. The north lurched from the medieval Body: and
Spain took its fate unto herself, girded her loins to save and spread
the Church. Born to war, converted in an experience of war, surrounded
by the strife of faction, Loyola never ceased to be a soldier. He
conceived Christianity in martial terms. The Church needed defense and
aggrandizement. The nature of the man’s career and the will of his
nation shaped the Company of Jesus.
At its head was a General, with power as absolute as that of a
commander-in-chief in war. The Church was at war. Monastery and convent
were Christ’s infantry. They did not suffice. They were even losing
ground. The new Compañía would be the cavalry: an arm best fitted for
skirmish and attack.
“Let us think all in the same manner; let us speak all in the same
manner,” said Loyola. His Spiritual Exercises were the drill of his
cohorts. So the militant ideal of Spain, serving in her armies the will
of Isabel, found this new and compact body. The sword had become a
mystic instrument. Now a body of spiritual fathers turned themselves
into a sword: took on the traits and ethic of the sword. Like Spain’s,
the forces of Loyola spread at once to Africa, America and Asia. And at
the end, the Society of Jesus, like Spain once more, locked in too
perfect oneness: its strength hardened and grew brittle: its heroic
faith became a stifling armor.
* * * * *
About a hundred years after the founding of the Society of Jesus, a
young Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, wrote a series of Letters which have
focused all the distrust and misconception aroused by the aggressive
Body, and from whose subtle blows it never has recovered. _Les Lettres
d’un Provincial_ is a great literary work. A man of genius, spokesman of
his race, exposes the presence in his land of an organism monstrously
alien to the spirit and rhythm of France. His intuitions are
metaphysically deeper than his logic. Pascal does not know that the
Society of Jesus is a formulation of the will of Spain: his points often
are departures from false premises as in his invidious handling of the
Jesuit doctrine of _probabilism_ or of the famous Jesuit sentence: “The
end justifies the means.” Small matter: Pascal wrote a brilliant
laughing prose whose beauty has not faded; and more, almost unwittingly
he defended France against the invasion of an alien will. Although his
arguments were often false, although his irony was unscrupulous, Pascal
from his vantage-point was right.
The will of France has been adverse to that of Spain: France has worked
from a social sense to the creation of a personal conscience. She has
moved from the group-mystical to the personal-rational; from the Gothic
church to the modern realistic; from social vision to the individual;
from Substance to Essence; from France herself to man. Blaise Pascal is
an exemplar of this pattern of his people’s progress. He and the
Jansenists reveal the effort of the conservative French to transform the
old Catholicism into an individualistic faith that shall be consonant
with France’s future. Pascal’s sense of Grace as a determined individual
gift of personality places his conflict with the Jesuits on its fairest
ground: it is the will of social France for personal autonomy, at odds
with this invasion of personalized Spain whose will is to create a
social spirit.[21] Pascal, Racine, Descartes are the last great minds
of France to believe in the persistence of their nation’s progress
_within_ the Church. Calvin, greatest of the Protestant thinkers and a
true Frenchman, marks the break. France accepts a destiny outside of
Rome which, in this logical people, swiftly leads to a destiny outside
the whole structure of Christian revelation. Pascal and Racine within
the Church, Calvin in a church of his own, Montaigne the skeptic, begin
not by accepting man--but by the desire to create him. The social body
exists: the individual soul does not. All French classic literature
converges in this effort to establish it ... converges, indeed, upon
Romanticism (Diderot, Rousseau, Stendhal). In Germany, the same trend
passes from Luther to Goethe, Schopenhauer, Novalis, Nietzsche. The
French problem of creating the personal conscience above the accepted
group marries with the will of northern Europe to break up the social
synthesis of medieval Rome by the creating of individual souls that
shall be _atomic_, _anarchic_, but once more creative. The antistrophe
is the tragic will of Spain, and the heroic Jesuit effort, to revive a
Body that was doomed.
In the domain of education, the Society of Jesus does not swerve far
from Spain. And the will of Spain accepts man as he is found. Isabel
creates her empire by use of her countrymen’s frailties and lusts. The
Jesuit proceeds in the same spirit. He will work, not from the departure
of an ideal concept of what man should be: he will work with man, with
this miserable, forkèd, naked son of sin--and build from him the City of
his God. Man in his weakness, man in his vice and blindness, will be a
note in the cosmic Song: his muddy heart will be strong as marble. There
is a magic to enact this. Its name is Faith. There is a philosophy to
enact this. It is the traditional sense, in Spanish thought, of God’s
immanence and of earth as the immediate pattern of God’s will. The
Jesuits are not pantheists: but their tolerance and their practical
acceptance of _the fact_ are the unconscious fruits of five centuries of
pantheistic feeling. The Jesuits are not Evangelists. But in their
attitude toward Faith as a universal magic, they are close to the
Apostles. They take the Christian mystery as a present truth. The age of
miracle is eternal. God is here and everywhere: the assertion of a magic
Word--as in the Kabbala--transfigures immanence to revelation. The
doctrine of Grace, as an inborn personal trait to be achieved (if at
all) only by spiritual acts, is too hierarchic. It is the doctrine of
peoples tending toward individualism. (In the East, it becomes the
doctrine of Caste.) Moreover, in accepting man as he is, the Jesuit
cannot place the magic virtue in any of his inherent traits. The divine
virtue must be at once impersonal and social. Man is frail and corrupt:
his will is frail and corrupt. His life is only in God, even as God’s
life through Christ is eternally in man. There is no work to be done,
beside the assertion that the work _is_ done. If grace depended upon
man’s efforts, we should all be damned. If reason or will or any
personal trait had been sufficient, why was Christ crucified? No: the
commonest human stone is holy, when it becomes a stone of the House of
God. Likewise, man’s corruptions, however vile, can be architected by
faith into the Church where they are sanctified and transfigured.
The philosophy of the Jesuits explains their methods. Does the builder
of a house consult the stones? What can the stone do but put itself into
the hands of the builder? The builder must be aggressive, dominant,
ruthless. But the Jesuit is more than an architect: he is a soldier.
When he sets aside the sword for the word, the cause is strategy. His
tactics remain warlike. War is pragmatic. Subtlety, surprise, mobility,
deceit are warlike arms.
The world stands at a crisis. The grandiose structure of medieval
Rome--the highest spiritual Form ever achieved by Europe--crumbles and
sags. Spain strips to save it.
_d._ _The Jurist_