a. Irony and Honor
b. The Mystic
c. The Jesuit
d. The Jurist
e. The Rogue
f. Velazquez
a. Irony and Honor
The Catholic Kings have builded ruthlessly: absolutism, the grace of Christ, intolerance, universal justice, arms and prayer were to make Spain one. Now each of these qualities takes form and grows personified in Spain. Each is imbued with Spain’s imperious will to be whole and one: each grows great with this spirit: each wars upon them all. Spain was chaotic and diverse. Her will to be one serries her into antitheses. Her will to union breaks her into extremes. Irony works on Isabel’s fair fabric.
Perhaps the land itself is symbol of the process. Spain is desert—and garden; flat plain—and mountain; great heat—and winter. Spain is Europe—and Africa. In her events, she reveals this first ironic state of fusion—the splitting up into opposites of action. Columbus, mystic captain who charted his voyage in the Prophets, becomes enchained in the lust of avarice. His men, sent to Christianize the Indies, enslave the courteous American and sack his cities. Spain’s past transforms! The Cid, that playful knight, becomes crusader. Saints turn knight-errant. Moderate Stoics (like Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius whose father was a Spaniard) inspire the ascetic fury of the hermits. And the humane Arcipreste de Hita, Castile’s first poet, is turned into an apologist for license.
In her pageant of extremes, Spain’s Middle Class is crowded out. The land has warriors—and beggars; nobles and rascals: saints and scoundrels. Charity is practiced with the sword and the mystic walks with the thief. Santa Teresa answers La Celestina. Don Quixote sallies forth with Sancho Panza.
One spirit moves them all. They have each the same whole pride in Spain, the same faith in her destiny, the same mind that Spain is their inheritance. The Spanish mystic is no aloof and transcendental man: he works for Spain. The Spanish rascal is no shallow rascal: he has the almost metaphysical conviction that Spain must feed him. And every Spaniard, from prostitute to saint, from king to beggar, moves within a sense which reveals this terrible will to social unity: the sense of Honor.
. . . . . .
The Spanish sense of Honor is the need of Spain to resist the social chaos of her land. The member of an integrated world completes it with self-approval. Self-approval the Spaniard does not need. He was a person, long before he had a nation. The Spaniard knew what was right, what was true. His need was to make others know as he did: for in this social conformity, he would feel himself at last the member of a group. The pundonor was the point of contact whereby he graphed, not his place in Heaven, but his place in the world. The stress was upon others. And this was the trait of a land in which individual unity was achieved; in which rights of personality needed no insistence; but in which social unity was lacking and was longed for.[17]