Salamanca is its University. Here in the first splendor of the Reconquista, Christian kings foregathered wise men of Israel and Islam and joined to them the aspirant scholars in Christ. The school was founded by a king of León and chartered by a saint, San Fernando of Castile. For two centuries, learning here was universalistic. Here, in spirit, Ibn Gabírol the Jew became Avicebron, and his book Makor Hayim the Latin Fons Vitæ which nourished Saint Thomas of Aquinas. Here the teaching of Averroës the Moslem was absorbed for Rome. The Mussulman Avempace and Tofaíl—Platonists—here went down before the Stagyrite phalanx which included Ibn Ezra, Ben Maimun and Gersonides. Here was prepared food that later fed Albertus Magnus; here were married east and west as a thousand years before in Alexandria. For the body of Catholic Europe was bone of Greek logic, flesh of Jewish faith and eye of Arab science.
Here, ages later, when the medieval unity of Rome drooped and split, when Protestant heresy was annexed by the new State wills of the north, the Church of Rome was saved. From Salamanca came the theocratic polity of the Catholic kings which fused the modern will of the State to the old idea of the Church. From Salamanca spread the religious energy which won all South America and part of North America to Roman Doctrine.[12] For here above all, were nurtured the Spanish mystics who made possible that last great conversion: Cristobal Colón, Pedro de Alcántara, Juan de Avila, Luis de León, Luis de Granada, Juan de la Cruz, Teresa de Jesús, Iñigo de Loyola—that various athletic group who by book or preachment, by crusade or compass revived Rome. In Salamanca, at least in spirit, the Medieval Synthesis was reborn: and in spirit has subsisted to our day.
The earlier, more liberal Salamanca which had so immediate a share in the real splendor of that Synthesis is not this town still glowing by the River Tormes. The Salamanca of today is that of Isabel and Ferdinand, of the sixteenth century—of the Jesuits and the fanatical revivers.
Unlike most of the great cities of Castile, it rises gently from the meseta. And heroisms of the mind, rather than of blood, speak in the smolder of its ancient body. The River Tormes is urbane, almost European. It passes waving willows and lush fruit trees; washes the shaded soto where the monks met to platonize with Luis de León upon the Names of Christ. A Roman bridge leads low to the city. Here once stood a granite bull by means of which the wily beggar knocked wisdom into the head of Lazarillo. And the streets climb up through the mud. Walls crumble with the hillside under the town. An ancient church stands on the bank surrounded by the mire; and houses, foul with age, their carved seals moldered, limp like proud beggars up the sharp incline. The Cathedral is a soft gold crest in the sun: at its feet are waves of convents, consistories, churches, schools. The central streets are paved with cobble stones. The houses are low and the glass of their windows is out of place, so new it gleams within the soft senility of walls. Dogs, children, refuse clutter up the streets. Everywhere one feels the elemental base—a hill—on which this young culture of Christian Spain has builded. In the churches, five centuries are confused. The Old Cathedral is Romanesque; with its chaste columns and its nave a petrified forest, it stands beside the scintillance of the plateresque New Cathedral. Nearby is a Dominican convent in which a queer mariner named Columbus found refuge and support in a scheme rejected by most of the Crowns of Europe. The seventeenth century baroque of the Churrigueras flaunts its high monstrosities beneath ornate ceilings. Much of the gold arrogance of this convent is a result of that mad scheme of Columbus. But the man himself is closer to the streets; for here one still encounters at least in spirit the pícaro, the monk half-saint, half-satyr, the immortal Celestina. A Jesuit convent rears its chill harsh walls in the town’s heart: a symbol of the ruthless might of the Company of Jesus, of its enormous logic. And everywhere, the alleys limping up, limping down, between the homes of the Church.
This Salamanca, fixed in the eras of Isabel, Carlos, Felipe II, has aged; has not changed. The dirty streets are the same; the low blind precincts of the poor (Cervantes lived here once) and the dominant recurrent periods of church and tower. Life’s anarchy is here controlled by learning. Every crooked street is righted by a convent; every lurch of alley is stopped by a square. And the whole town is mastered by the Plaza Mayor—a square as correct as a schoolman’s syllogism. Its sides are unvariant four-storied walls; it is colonnaded equally and equally façaded; it is the noble, proper heart of a town which has argued unity in Christ through seven rank chaotic hundred years....
The buildings of the university are the least of it. In the Library you may find manuscripts by Alfonso the Wise, glosses by thirteenth century Jews, Arabic illuminations of Gazali. You may sit in the same chill lecture halls where once great masters taught humanities and where but yesterday Miguel de Unamuno “explained” Greek after the universal measure. But Salamanca is an ancient seer whose word has gone forth to the world, while the body shriveled and the blood grew bleak.
More of the university is the tropical gold work of the Dominican altars; is the stupendous grace of the two Cathedrals; is the immense glower of the Jesuit on the hill. More, the sedulous symmetry of the Plaza within the coil of gutters. More, the glow of the yellow mellow stone within the desert fastness of Castile.
c. The Water Bridge
The æsthetic sense of Spain is social, instinctive, unconscious. Her master works of art rise like isolate acts from the trammels of her life. Her cities are among them: and none more perfect than the ancient towns bristling upon rocks within the Castilian desert.
Choose your day well for visiting these communal works of Spain. Salamanca needs sun: its warm gold stones speak graciously within an azure sky. The Escorial is best in rain: its chill stones shrink from the blue-gold of the Spanish day, but under the drift of breaking clouds it glows like fossil fire. Segovia sings most clearly in a wind. Great clouds like armies plunge from the Sierras and invest the Castle. The sun makes sudden sallies on the Cathedral. Then gloom once more on the town, like repentance after violence.