Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

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Don Quixote, as he emerges unscathed from the mind of his author, is a man possessed: not a madman. He is a man possessed as were the Hebrew prophets, or Jesus, or Vardhamana, or Boehme or Plotinus, or any poet.... The difference is subtle but is clear beyond the logical distinctions of man’s reason. No atheist would call Amos mad, but a man possessed. To Jesus saying: “When ye have lifted up the Son of God, then shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself, but as my Father hath taught me” no Jew would ascribe madness, but possession. Quixote is possessed of an Ideal. And since this ideal was mothered of the world struggling toward light, and since now it mothers him entire, becoming his truth and his world, Don Quixote takes his place among the broken and triumphant prophets. Even the alienist durst not call him mad, for in the drama which he enacts he knows his part: and the more fully senses what he calls the truth, knowing its bodily difference from the facts about him.

Reality for the medieval soul was neo-platonic. The conceptual was real: all else was merely fact. The bitter apartness of Jew and Arab from medieval Europe was due to the failure of the Semite, despite Philo and Al Gazali, to assimilate neo-platonism deeply. Plotinus, Porphyry, Augustine, Iamblicus created the psychology of a thousand years of Europe. The real is not this world. We are snared and mired in a viscous web of seeming. All congeries of sense is this. And knowledge tends, not to a translating of this factual film into the real but to the piercing it, the abandoning it altogether. This attitude is far from the naturalistic mysticism of the Hebrew, from the intellectual mysticism of Plato; from the profound nihilism of the Hindu who recognized the unity of the ideal and the factual, interpreting one always in terms of the other. Medievalism is a child—and a childish offshoot—of all these. It declares: There is a real world, and it is not this one. Man can reach the real world, by various means. He must crucify the fact, he must worship the saints, he must lose his body in order to save his soul.

Don Quixote moves through a world neo-platonically real. He is as aware as Sancho of sheep, windmills, inns, country wenches. He chooses to disregard these lies of fact. He erects a systematic symbol whereby his senses vault the phenomena about him, and deliver him the truth. Thereby, the windmill serves him as a giant; the sheep as enchanted armies; the empty cave of Montesino as the scene of Glory, and Maritornes the whore as the virgin lady languishing in love. He has elected to do Justice upon earth. These giants, armies and disasters serve him as means to that end.

By a similar process, the medieval mind made all history into parable and symbol. The medieval mind is subjectivism carried to the intense conclusion made possible by the barbarous Germanic will. Philo’s allegories of the Scripture, the Book of Zohar, the way of Egypt and India with all written words, treating them as intricate and recondite symbols, obsessed the mind of medieval Europe. No act is simple, no name is simply a name. The world becomes a dramatic Mystery, with every scene bearing upon the central Plot: the soul’s salvation. For a thousand years, literature and art, to be serious, had to be allegory.

The mood of medieval symbolism, while it was fathered by Plato and the Jews, is neither Greek nor Jewish. With these two adult peoples, symbolism held its place: it remained a relative and ancillary life within the mastering testimony of the world. Already in Plotinus and Saint Augustine, the balance is lost. When we are deep in the Middle Ages, we are deep in an allegoric jungle: the paths of fact are gone; there comes no daylight of reason in this tangle of monster foliage and whelming branches.

Don Quixote’s world is medievally real. It is a hypertrophy of such births as Chivalry, Romance and Sainthood. In its character of wholeness, of deliberate disregard for fact, it springs from the fountainhead of neo-platonic thought.

But if this transfiguring of the world to his own will is a medieval act, Don Quixote’s impulse is not medieval, is not even Christian. The medieval will, myriad in its flowerings, was childishly simple in its seed: the soul’s salvation. Nothing else counted: or rather, everything had its sole significance, indeed its reality, as it bore on this monomaniac problem of each soul: to be saved. That a man’s soul might be saved, all acts since Adam had been apportioned. For this, the Hebrews lived, the Prophets preached, Christ died: for this, Peter builded his Church and the Jews remained outside in perpetual testimony of damnation. For this, men went on Crusades, conquered heathens, gave birth to children in holy wedlock. For this there was love and justice: for this there was life and death. But Don Quixote is no more centrally concerned with his soul’s salvation than if he had been a Jew. He believes in his soul; he hopes it shall be saved. But his acts are motived by a will far less personal: the enacting of Justice.

Don Quixote looks upon himself as the instrument of Justice. He is the embodied and moving will of Justice. The neo-platonic Christian lived justly, that he might pierce better the Phenomenal Lie and win salvation. The Arab warrior spread justice with his sword because the Prophet was just, and he must serve the Prophet to be saved. The knight of the Round Table of King Arthur performed deeds of justice—rescuing the virgin, slaying the bad giant—because it was good sport and because it was a way to his salvation. But Don Quixote wills Justice upon earth, because he hungers after Justice, because there is naught else true save Justice. If, by the sheer testimony of his words and deeds, we analyze this passion of Don Quixote, we learn that for him instinctively Justice meant Unity. The world must become One: and the means thereto is Justice.

The symbols with which he works are medieval Christian; his mental mechanism is neo-platonic: his knightly attitude is more Moorish than Teutonic (as contrasted with the Germanic tenor of the freebooting Cid). But this heart of his will is Hebrew. The parabolic line of its enactment in his life links Don Quixote with the Prophets.