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.