The most eminent poet of the Salamancan school is Luis Ponce de León (1529-91), a native of Belmonte de Cuenca, who joined the Augustinian order in his eighteenth year, and became professor of theology at the University of Salamanca in 1561. He soon found himself in the midst of a theological squabble as to the comparative merits of the Septuagint and the Hebrew MSS. Rivals spread the legend—fatal in Spain—that he was of Jewish descent, and that he conspired with the Hebrew professors, Martínez de Cantalapiedra and Grajal, in interpreting Scripture according to Jewish traditions. His chief opponent was León de Castro, who held the Greek chair. Public discussions were the fashion, and debates waxed acrimonious, after the custom of professors at large. On one occasion Luis de León went so far as to threaten Castro with the public burning of the latter's treatise on Isaiah. Castro was not the man to flinch, and anticipated his enemy by denouncing Fray Luis to the Inquisition. The matter would doubtless have ended here, had it not been discovered that Fray Luis had translated the Song of Solomon into Castilian: a grave offence in the eyes of the Holy Office, which, rejecting the Lutheran formula of "every man his own pope," forbade the circulation of Bibles in the vernacular. In March 1572 Luis de León was arrested, and was kept a prisoner by the local authorities for four and a half years, during which he was baited with questions calculated to convict him of heresy and to involve his friend Benito Arias Montano. Notwithstanding the efforts of Bartolomé Medina and his brother-Dominicans, Fray Luis was acquitted on December 7, 1576. Judged by modern standards, he was harshly treated; but toleration is a modern birth, begotten by indifference and fear. In the sixteenth century men believed what they professed, and acted on their beliefs—the Spaniards by imprisoning their own countryman, Luis de León; Calvin by burning Harvey's forerunner, the Spaniard Miguel Servet. Fray Luis was the last of men to whine and whimper: he was judged by the tribunal of his own choosing, the tribunal with which he had menaced Castro: and the result vindicated his choice.[10] Ex forti dulcedo. The indomitable nobility of his character is visible in the first words he uttered on his return to the chair which Salamanca had kept for him:—"Gentlemen, as we were saying the other day." In 1591 he was elected Vicar-General of Castile, was chosen Provincial of his order, and was then commanded, against his will, to publish all his writings. He died ten days later.
In prison Fray Luis wrote his celebrated treatise, the greatest of Spanish mystic books, Los Nombres de Cristo, a series of dissertations, in Plato's manner, on the symbolic value of such names of Christ as the Mount, the Shepherd, the Arm of God, the Prince of Peace, the Bridegroom. Published in 1583, the exposition is cast in the form of a dialogue, in which Marcelo, Sabino, and Julián examine the theological mysteries implied by the subject. With Fray Luis's theology we have no concern; nor with his learning, save in so far as it is curious to see the Hellenic-Alexandrine leaven working through in his imitation of St. Clement's Epistle to the Corinthians. But his concise eloquence and his classic purity of expression rank him among the best masters of Castilian prose. The like great qualities are shown in his Exposición del libro de Job, drawn up by request of Santa Teresa's friend, Sor Ana de Jesús, and in his rendering of and commentary on the Song of Solomon, which he holds for an emblematic eclogue to be interpreted as a poetic foreshadowing of the Divine Espousal of the Church with Christ. A book still held in great esteem is his Perfecta Casada (The Perfect Wife), suggested, it may be, by Luis Vives' Christian Woman, and composed (1583) for the benefit of María Varela Osorio. It is not, indeed,
"That hymn for which the whole world longs,
A worthy hymn in woman's praise."
It is rather a singularly brilliant paraphrase of the thirty-first chapter of the Book of Proverbs, a code of practical conduct for the ideal spouse, which may be read with delight even by those who think the friar's doctrine reactionary.
Great in prose, Luis de León is no less great in verse. With San Juan de la Cruz he heads the list of Spain's lyrico-mystical poets. Yet he set no value on his poems, which he regarded as mere toys of childhood: so that their preservation is due to the accident of his collecting them late in life to amuse the leisure of the Bishop of Córdoba. We owe their publication to Quevedo, who issued them in 1631 as a counterblast to culteranismo. Of the three books into which they are divided, two consist of translations—from Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Euripides, and Pindar; and from the Psalms, the Book of Job, and St. Thomas of Aquin's Pange lingua. "I have tried," says Fray Luis of his sacred renderings, "to imitate so far as I might their simple origin and antique flavour, full of sweetness and majesty, as it seems to me;" and he succeeds as greatly in the primitive unction of the one kind as in the faultless form of the other. Still these are but inspired imitations, and the original poet is to be sought for in the first book. Some idea of his ode entitled Noche Serena may be gathered from Mr. Henry Phillips' version of the opening stanzas:—
"When to the heavenly dome my thoughts take flight,
With shimmering stars bedecked, ablaze with light,
Then sink my eyes down to the ground,
In slumber wrapped, oblivion bound,