This need was so intense that it inspired a literature and informed a religion. Æsthetic worlds were built upon this impulse and it infused the writings of mystics as well as the histories of rascals. Spain in her great Age—a pattern of sharp-limned individuals—was symphonized in the key of Honor.
b. The Mystic
The mystics of Catholic Spain who in act and word gave utterance to the will of Isabel rose from a high tradition in the land. They were indeed the fulfillment ... as was the Queen ... of a religious vision older than Spain herself. When Salamon B. Judah Ibn Gabírol was born in Málaga in 1021, there was not yet Spain. Gabírol looked about him at this land in which three continents and three religions were embroiled. And he said:
“Thy Glory is not diminished because of them that worship aught 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.