Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

Cervantes was born in a Europe more than three centuries beyond the noon of chivalry. Knighthood north of Spain begot great books. The Chanson de Roland in the form which we possess is earlier than 1100. In the last years of the twelfth century Chrétien de Troies—first master in an unbroken line that perhaps closed with Anatole France—put into gracious and fleet form the Arthurian cycle. A bit later, a profounder German, Wolfram von Eschenbach, composed from French materials the transfiguring masterwork of chivalry, the Poem of Parzival. Joinville’s portrait of Saint Louis and of his two Crusades was written about 1290. Thereafter Europe, north of Spain, begins the great decline into the modern era.

The last historic synthesis of western man lies in that Middle Age. It rose from the chaotic impact of the Roman Empire and the Teuton with Alexandria and Judah. Already ere the ancient world had fallen its architects were building. Origen, Tertullian, Jerome, Anthony, Gregory, Charlemagne—such were its foundation-makers. It reaches heights in Abélard, Aquinas, Francis, Dante: in the creators of the Gothic, in the great weavers of polyphonic music, in men of action—Godefroi de Bouillon and Saint Louis. And already, at this hey-day, from the disintegrant north come threats of dissolution in such figures as Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus who, positing the primacy of will over the intellect, declare Theology to be not science but revelation and foretell Luther and Kant—creators of the modern chaos.

European thought, after the Cathedrals, Dante, and the great scholastics, is a story of destruction. Men of as high genius as Albertus Magnus or Saint Thomas proceed by vision and by dialectic to take stone from stone in the dismantlement of Christian Europe. Here and there in the vast liquidation a prophet throws up a scheme for a new Synthesis—such a one was Spinoza: the world cannot accept him, neither can it lose him, from cosmic prescience of a future need.

The towers of this great House in which dwelt the soul of Europe touch the year 1300. Dante has devised his vision; Chartres lives upon the Ile-de-France; Saint Bernard in Clairvaux and Saint Francis in Assisi have filled the world with brothers; chivalry has brought war and love into the sacred symphony of Europe; the German foray is Crusade; lust of the flesh bears the Mystery of Tristan and Isolt, of Abélard and Héloïse. Now, the divine Structure nobly curves back to earth. By 1400, Europe dwells once more in the bowels of discord. By 1500, European man is a congeries of atomic wills: the unity of Christ has scattered into exploration, industry and science.

But in this destructive act, Europe is as creative as when the Fathers builded, out of the Prophets, Plato, Paul, the puissant Organism of medieval Europe. To tear down such a body is as divine an act as to build it. Systole and diastole are equal. Schopenhauer and Kant are brothers before God with Aquinas. The long ages of deliquescence from that peak of Rome rightly seem rich to our enlisted eyes since they are as full of saints and heroes consecrate to our work, as were the anchorites of the Thebaid to theirs.

For this is the mysterious law of history: that the divine is present in death even as in life, in the Nay equally with the Yea. God does not build His revelation upon earth and then turn away His face while man tears down. He is there, too, in the destruction. He was there when the Prophets created the Jew: He was there also when the Pharisees and the Essenic Christ destroyed the Jew. He was there when the saints and Fathers builded Catholic Rome. He was there when Luther, Calvin, Goethe, Blake burned Rome away.

We see Him in the despair of Dostoievski no less than in the joy of Saint Francis. It was while the Jewish world drooped and retched, that the gospels of Jesus flowered. From that nadir was prepared the Dantean zenith. Once more an ebb of the Tide. Spain has become a befuddled chaos. Home from her mad anachronistic dream of establishing on earth what Europe has given up for centuries, she is already rotting. And now, from the bitterness of her awareness rises a new Word. It, too, is entextured of contemporary failure, and is implicit of revelation.

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Spain did not conform with the Middle Ages of the north. Roman Iberia received its dominant invasion from the south, whereas in Italy, Gaul and Britain the coefficient of transformation from Rome to Holy Rome was the same Teuton element which held the eastern marches beyond Roman rule. León, Aragon and Castile were medieval in so far as the Visigoth was strong in them. But even here, contact was as great with the Moslem foe of the south as with the brother northward.

Medievalism is an idealism forced upon the world of Appearance. It is a mystical conclusion by the Teuton will, drawn from the logical element of Latin, and the naturalistic element of Semitic, cultures. It is most powerful in the lands where the Teuton is strongest: Germany and England. In France, where the blend was fairest between Frank and Gallo-Roman, it is most balanced and most perfect. In Italy, medievalism is never great. And in a land whose conclusive elements are Semitic or harmonize with the Semitic, it is impossible. Such a land was Spain. The ethnic Iberian base of Spain is more African in nature than European; more aboriginally close to Semite than to German. Arab culture was always naturalistic. Judaism and Mohammedanism are pragmatic systems on different levels, yet both based upon empirical experience and natural law. In medieval Catholicism, the natural laws and the experience of the world are deformed by a mystic idealizing will. In Semitism, the ideal sense is made to converge with natural law: the mystic will is regarded as possessing its true form in the activity of nature.