by Dr. Michael Dominic Taylor, Visiting Fellow
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra lived a dark and troubled life—marked by disability, captivity, slavery, poverty, imprisonment, and professional frustrations—but it was not without its glories as well. The first of these was his participation in that miraculous defeat of the Ottoman Empire at Lepanto at the age of twenty-four. The second, decades later, was authoring the two-part masterpiece, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, by all accounts the first of its kind and the best-selling novel of all time.[1] The third was dying in the grace of God in April 1616, just three weeks after taking the habit of the Third Order of Saint Francis.[2] He is buried in Madrid, in the Convent of the Discalced Trinitarians, to whom Cervantes credited his rescue in 1580—physically, from his five year captivity in Algeria, and, no doubt, spiritually, from a life of despair outside the Sacraments. History, always with its particular sense of irony, has situated the Convent at 18 Lope de Vega Street, named for Cervantes’ more wealthy, more productive, and more acclaimed literary rival of the Spanish Golden Age.
Cervantes’ other great literary contemporary was none other than William Shakespeare, whom the vagaries of history unite in the shared death day of April 23, 1616, the Feast of St. George, the paradigmatic Christian Knight.[3] When speaking of great literature, it is hardly possible to mention Cervantes and Shakespeare without giving deference to Dante, as the three are unanimously lauded as the maximum representatives of literary achievement in their respective tongues. What these three also had in common was their Catholicism and the obsession they garner from modern literary critics regarding the nature of their genius. In one way or another, every authentically modern account of these authors defends the thesis that their genius was in no way related to what they see as the mere trappings of Catholicism, taken up as the occasion to demonstrate their personal prowess, or better yet, as a veiled disenchantment with or rejection of the Faith. These critics cannot deny the genius of these authors, so they seek to “spin” it, to reinterpret it in a dualistic mode wherein form is only accidently related to content, the latter being best understood by the readers themselves in whatever way is most meaningful to them.
The Catholic reader feels at home in these works, not only when the faith of their authors is explicit but perhaps even more so when it is not, as is the case in much of Shakespeare’s work. His lament at “bare ruin’d choirs” (Sonnet 73), his desire that “the truth should live from age to age, As ’twere retailed to all posterity” (Richard III), his opposition to divorce, rejection of love of the state, criticism of usury, and opposition to puritanical moralism, to name a few examples, bares the heart of a man living amidst a hostile regime. However, they also reveal how the shackles placed on the expression of truth become the occasion for its glorious originality. It could be argued that Dante’s genius is revealed, in part, by limits imposed not by an authoritarian government but by the ineffability of the spiritual realm and the sheer magnitude of his undertaking.
Recent scholarship has revealed that though Cervantes’ Catholicism was approved of, not all of his dearest sources and inspirations were, specifically St. John of the Cross.[4] The notorious State-operated Inquisition kept a tight reign on theological innovators in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, counting numerous future saints among those investigated, including Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross. Cervantes had a deep regard for the Spanish mystics, starting with Fray Luis de Leon, whom he honored in the following lines spoken by Calliope in Book VI of Galatea, his first significant work: “Fray Luis de León it is I sing, Whom I love and adore, to whom I cling.” On the occasion of the beatification of Teresa of Ávila in 1614, Cervantes composed an ode in her honor, and the “Descent into the Cave of Montesinos” in Book II, Chapters XXII–IV, seems to have been influenced by her Interior Castle.
However, John of the Cross (1542–1591) and his works were under threat of censure during the life of Cervantes, and only circulated privately among the monasteries and convents of the Discalced Carmelites. Providentially, Cervantes’ older sister was a member of just such a convent in their hometown of Alcalá de Henares, where John of the Cross would have visited frequently in the years following Cervantes’ liberation. Even the first edition of John’s writings, published in 1618, omits the Spiritual Canticle and shows other alterations in order to avoid censure. There is good reason to believe that the writings of the diminutive mystic, as well as news of his life and works, would have been sought after and found by Cervantes.
It is what occurred after John of the Cross’s death, however, that will be most significant for this brief commentary. John of the Cross died in 1591 at the Discalced Carmelite Monastery in Úbeda, when he was unable to overcome a pestilential fever. Before his death a noble widow by the name of Doña Ana de Peñalosa, who was under his spiritual direction, had arranged with the Vicar General of the Reform that, no matter where John of the Cross died, his body would be returned to Segovia, his native city, and be laid to rest in the monastery that he had founded there. However, the Monastery in Úbeda was reluctant to give up the body of the saint by popular acclaim, and the incorrupt state and sweet fragrance of his relics only heightened his fame, drawing pilgrims from all around. It is known that Cervantes himself was in Úbeda during the wheat harvest of 1592, perhaps only to visit the saint. The transfer of the body finally took place in secrecy in mid-1593. Travelling by night and avoiding main roads, Don Juan de Medina Ceballos oversaw the more than 300-mile journey. Despite these efforts, the local citizens caught wind of their movements and confronted the group more than once. Nevertheless, they did arrive in Segovia eventually, where St. John of the Cross is venerated to this day in the Convent the bears his name.[5] We will come back to this story shortly, when we discuss Book I, Chapter XIX, but we must start from the beginning.
Evidence for this influence of John of the Cross on Cervantes is hinted at from the outset of Don Quixote. Let us recall that “The Dark Night” begins thus:
En una noche oscura,
con ansias, en amores inflamada,
¡oh dichosa ventura!,
salí sin ser notada
estando ya mi casa sosegada.In a dark night
with desires, in love enflamed,
oh, blessed quest!,
unnoticed I left
my house now all in calm.[6]
The spiritual significance of the lines is given by the author himself, so as not to be misinterpreted. It sings of the joyous trust, enflamed by love, that dispels any hesitance of the Christian soul from setting out, once the desires of the body have been calmed, onto the spiritual path of self negation, where understanding does not reach. Don Quixote’s very first sally in Chapter II begins thus:
And one morning before dawn on a hot day in July, without informing a single person of his intentions, and without anyone seeing him, he armed himself with all his armor and mounted Rocinante, wearing his poorly constructed helmet, and he grasped his shield and took up his lance and through the side door of a corral he rode out into the countryside with great joy and delight at seeing how easily he had given a beginning to his virtuous desire.[7]
The parallels are clear, but the similarities end immediately, as Don Quixote’s joy turns to doubt. The next line continues:
But as soon as he found himself in the countryside he was assailed by a thought so terrible it almost made him abandon the enterprise he had barely begun; he recalled that he had not been dubbed a knight…
The drama of Don Quixote’s burning desire—and absolute incapacity—to be a true knight are the driving force of the entire work, the constant occasion for absurdity and humor, and the endearing quality that make him loveable despite his outrageous madness.
The cause of that madness, of course, was the obsessive, private reading of books of chivalry within a hermeneutic of literalism, and, it must be noted, a lack of sleep. Living in the decades following the Council of Trent, in the midst of the Catholic Reformation, Cervantes was well aware of the dangers of private interpretation and the deformities that it could spawn. In the very next chapter, Chapter III, Don Quixote has himself dubbed a knight in a ludicrous ceremony that maintains only the faintest resemblance to the authentic original. Arriving at an inn, which he believes to be a castle, he convinces the innkeeper to perform the ceremony and dub him a knight the following morning. As with many of the normal people Don Quixote interacts with, the innkeeper goes along with his madness if only to have a good laugh. However, nothing is as it should be. There is no chapel because it has been torn down in order to build a new one, so the liturgy must be held in the corral. There is no Bible so the innkeeper’s ledger is used instead. The only witnesses are two prostitutes and a boy with a candle. The words of the innkeeper during the dubbing are nothing but a mock prayer, mumbled in something resembling Latin. All in all, the effect of the entire scene is a tragic hilarity, as Don Quixote’s errors are carried by Cervantes’ superbly witty writing ad absurdum.
However, Don Quixote’s sins will not go unpunished and the state of his soul will be revealed in the light of the true knighthood of St. John of the Cross. Still at the beginning of the novel, in Chapter XIX, we hear of “the adventure with a dead body” in which Don Quixote attacks a group of priests, whom he thinks are otherworldly demons, as they transport a dead body through the night. The chapter opens with the conjecture of Sancho that their misfortunes up until that point have been a punishment for Don Quixote’s infidelity to the order of chivalry for not keeping a vow he made. Don Quixote counters by explaining that, “in the order of chivalry there are means to grant dispensations for everything…” However, this abased theology will soon be met with the firmest form of corrective the Church can offer its lost children.
On a very dark night, as the narrator notes, Sancho and his master witness a procession of twenty mounted men bearing torches followed by a coffin and six more men mounted on mules, dressed in mourning. To Don Quixote, the body was no doubt that of a dead knight whom he alone could revenge. The entire situation cannot but conjure the memory of the solemn translation of the body of St. John of the Cross, and Don Quixote’s identification of the body as that of a knight is an assumption that is fitting for the particular brand of his madness but also deeply telling of Cervantes’ own notion of spiritual chivalry that haunts the entire novel.
Don Quixote confronts the torchbearers and, when his inquiry into the nature of the situation is not met with the desired response, he proceeds to attack, injure, and disperse the party, who “all thought he was not a man but a devil from hell.” In the madness, a seminarian named Alonso López has been thrown from his mule and broken his leg. Alonso explains that they are bringing the dead body from Baeza (a town conspicuously close to Úbeda), where the man “was originally interred,” to Segovia, his native city. Upon hearing that he had died by a pestilential fever, Don Quixote abandons his desire for vengeance, helps Alonso back onto his mule, and sends him to the rest of his group “to beg their pardon for the offense against them, which it had not been in his power to avoid committing.” As he is leaving, it is Sancho who adds that it is Don Quixote of La Mancha who begs their pardon, also know as “el Caballero de la Triste Figura” [“The Knight of the Sorrowful Face”].
When Don Quixote asks for an explanation for this title, Sancho says that, in the light of the seminarian’s torch, he saw on his master “the sorriest-looking face I’ve seen recently.” Don Quixote responds by conjecturing that “the wise man whose task it will be to write the history of my deeds must have thought it would be a good idea if I took some appellative title as did the knights of the past.” Shortly thereafter Alonso López returns with the following announcement:
I forgot to say that your grace should be advised that you have been excommunicated for having laid violent hands on something sacred, juxta illud: Si quis suadente diabolo, etc.
López is quoting from the Council of Trent, to which Don Quixote responds like a true modernist: with casuistry, self-justification, and yet, the insistence that he is a good and faithful Catholic:
I do not understand those Latin words but I do know very well that I did not use my hands but this lance; furthermore, I did not think I was attacking priests or things of the Church, which I respect and adore as the Catholic and faithful Christian I am, but phantoms and apparitions of the next world.
Despite the fact that the reader believes the truth of his words, Don Quixote’s own countenance has already betrayed his defense, as if the light of dead knight’s torchbearer, in the midst of that the dark night, revealed the truth of his tortured soul. One cannot but see a flicker of what must have been Cervantes’ own sorrow in Don Quixote, that same sorrow that French novelist Leon Bloy described in La Femme Pauvre: “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.”
We are given further insight into this existential drama that cuts through the uproarious chronicles of Don Quixote towards the start of Book II, which Cervantes wrote a decade later, after imitators had tried to usurp his fame. In Book II, Chapter VII, in a discussion about the honor and glory Don Quixote sought through his knight errantry, Sancho suggests: “We should begin to be saints, and then we’ll win the fame we want in a much shorter time…” After citing the case of “two discalced friars” that had been “canonized or beatified” and the veneration they received, Sancho concludes: “It’s better to be a humble friar, in any order at all, than a valiant knight errant…” To which Don Quixote replies, “All of that is true but we cannot all be friars, and God brings His children to heaven by many paths: chivalry is a religion, and there are sainted knights in Glory.” The discussion ends with Sancho’s observation that, “There are many who are errant,” and Don Quixote’s response: “Many, but few who deserve to be called knights.”
Modern interpreters see these discussions as compulsory nods to the dominant ideology of the day, choosing to imagine that Cervantes is some kind of subversive in disguise. They tilt at these windmills at their own peril, more like Don Quixote himself than his creator. However, through the mock revival of knight errantry by Don Quixote, Cervantes seems to be encouraging the revival of a true spiritual chivalry in the line of Bernard of Clairvaux and the Spanish Mystics.
The appellation “The Knight of the Sorrowful Face” will mark Don Quixote until Book II, Chapter XVII, in which Don Quixote insists on fighting two lions that are released from their cage but that do not attack him, laying back down instead. Don Quixote is declared victorious and Sancho retitles his master “The Knight of the Lions.” To what should be attributed the calming of the lions? Is there a deeper significance in this new name? St. John of the Cross in his commentary on the twentieth stanza of the “Spiritual Canticle” says, “the Bridegroom, in adjuring the lions, restrains the violence and controls the fury of rage.”[8] Perhaps we cannot know what Cervantes intended, but immediately afterward we are informed, in no uncertain terms, that Don Quixote has been set on an upward path—perhaps because he has now confronted a danger present in reality rather than his own imagination, perhaps due to the miraculous adjuring of the lions. Regardless, he is now working his way back to health: “In all this time Don Diego de Miranda had not said a word but was careful to observe and note the actions and words of Don Quixote, who seemed to him a sane man gone mad and a madman edging toward sanity.”
However, Don Quixote would have to bear his excommunication from the time of the encounter with the relics of St. John of the Cross in Book I, Chapter XIX, until the very end of the saga, when he finally comes to his senses, gives his confession, receives the sacraments, and dies in grace. The story of “the adventure with the dead body” bears too many resemblances to that of the transfer of the body of St. John of the Cross to be ignored, a resemblance first suggested in 1819, and yet one that has taken some time to reach literary commentary in the English language.[9] In the closing lines of the chapter, Don Quixote expresses his desire to look at the body in the coffin to see if it is “actually bones or not.” Sancho convinces him not to and we get a sense that Don Quixote was not yet prepared for what he might find: the incorrupt and sweet smelling body of St. John of the Cross. Modern critics and Catholic readers alike would do well to look in and discover what this light reveals.
[1] This accomplishment would have a secondary effect that Cervantes should also be credited for: the complete destruction of the genre of banal “books of chivalry” that infected Don Quixote’s imagination. Not a single work of this type, which had been the most popular by far, was produced after the publication of Don Quixote.
[2] Cervantes’ death day was recorded in his local parish as April 23rd, though many historians insist that this be amended given the evidence that he had died the day before.
[3] However, it seems that the coincidence was not temporal but symbolic, due to Protestant England’s stubborn (170 year long) resistance to the more accurate Gregorian Calendar, adopted by Catholic and more scientific nations starting in 1582, which omitted ten calendar days and moved the start of a new year to January 1st.
[4] See Luce López-Baralt, “Don Quixote and Saint John of the Cross’s Spiritual Chivalry,” Religions 12 (2021) 616.
[5] Though Pope Clement VIII ordered the body be returned to Úbeda, the convent of St. John of the Cross’s last days would eventually receive only a hand and a tibia.
[6] My translation.
[7] All translations taken from Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, translated by E. Grossman, New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
[8] St. John of the Cross, A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ, https://ccel.org/ccel/john_cross/canticle/canticle.xxvi.html
[9] Martin Fernández Navarrete, Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1819.
Dr. Michael Dominic Taylor is a Visiting Fellow at Thomas More College for the 2021-2022 academic year. He is the author of The Foundations of Nature: Metaphysics of Gift for an Integral Ecological Ethic (Cascade, 2020).
This article was first published in the St. Austin Review 22.2 (March/April 2022) 25–28.
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