Iberia (103 page)

 

It was now time to leave Barcelona and I did so with reluctance,
for the city had been a revelation to me, and my wife was pleased
that I shared the enthusiasm she had developed years earlier.
When speaking of Andalucía, I said that if I were a young
workman stuck away in some bleak pueblo I would emigrate to
Barcelona, and the more I saw of the city the more surprised I
was that the influx from the south had not been greater; but it is
necessary to complete the analysis. If I were a young Catalan with
intellectual promise I think I would leave Barcelona and emigrate
to Madrid, and I would do so for two reasons. I am inherently
suspicious of separatist movements, whether active or sentimental,
political or artistic, and I fear that Catalan nationalism would in
the long run weaken me. Also, I would want to be in Madrid
because for the next forty or fifty years it is there that the decisions
will be made, and as a Catalan intellectual I might play an
important role in helping make them. The figure of speech with
which I opened this chapter was more relevant than I had
supposed: Barcelona has the heady and dangerous quality of
champagne and should be taken in moderation.

 

One of the pleasant aspects of the city is that it serves as the sea
terminus for the Baleares, which, with Palma as their capital, have
long provided a romantic holiday land for vacationers from
northern Europe. Here George Sand and Frédéric Chopin came
when there were no hotels on Mallorca; today there is a heavier
concentration of tourist facilities than elsewhere in Spain: sixteen
hundred hotels, five thousand bars, ten thousand tourist shops
and two and a half million visitors a year. Impossible as it seems,
in the winter season one can leave Sweden by plane, spend three
months in Palma in a top-class hotel with all meals and fly back
to Sweden for a total cost of $248. At one hotel the manager told
me, ‘And because we happen to be outside of town, if you stay
with us, we allow you the use of a car at no extra cost.’

 

My wife and I took a night boat to Palma, and asked the steward
to call us an hour before dawn so that we could go on deck to
watch the islands rising from the sea. How beautiful Mallorca
was! First the mountains showed like a dark mass, sufficiently
high to assure us that they would contain valleys, which are among
the chief pleasures of the place. Then as dawn brightened, much
of the darkness changed to green forests, so that Mallorca was
going to be a verdant island. Next we saw lines of white cliffs
dropping down to the water’s edge and these I had not heard
about, so I asked a sailor, ‘Does Mallorca have so many cliffs?’ He
peered into the uncertain light and said, ‘Hotels. They’re all
hotels.’

 

Now, as the sun approached the horizon, I saw for the first
time the fortress on the hill that guards Palma, and before long
its round gray towers caught the first direct rays of sunlight. I
could imagine how impressive those battlements must have
seemed to pirates moving in to sack the place, which happened
frequently, or to armies obliged to lay siege to Palma. One part
of the Baleares had had a chameleon-like existence; it had been
occupied by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans,
Visigoths, Muslims, and in the age of stability, when it was
presumed to be Spanish, by a whole parade of European powers.

 

As I was reviewing this turbulent history, full sunlight burst
over Palma and I saw, standing beside the sea, the great cathedral
which since its inception has been the conspicuous symbol of
Mallorca. It was a magnificent sight, this poem of stone rising
from the waves, and if one complains that in cities like Toledo,
Sevilla and Barcelona one can barely see the cathedrals because
of encroaching houses and shops, the deficiency is repaired here,
where the cathedral stands as free as a lighthouse on a
promontory. The full sun was now reflected from the white hotel
faces, so that more than ever they resembled cliffs and my wife
said. ‘There ought to be sea gulls flying out of them.’

 

I had made the trip to Mallorca not to see one of Europe’s
major playgrounds but rather to pay my respects to the greatest
Catalan of history, a man of cloudy reputation but grandeur of
spirit, a bit of a charlatan but a leader of the Church and one of
the most congenial figures in Spanish history, whose fame has
always been relished by a few and whose general quality must one
day be recognized by the many. In the uncomplicated days of the
medieval period when to be Christian was to be Catholic and
when, even though heresy might crop out here or there to be
speedily exterminated, there was not yet open schism, the five
major nations of Europe produced five scholastic philosophers.
In the order of appearance the first four were Abélard of France
(1079-1142), Albertus Magnus of Germany (1193-1280), Thomas
Aquinas of Italy (1225-1274) and Duns Scotus of England
(1265-1308). In Spain the comparable figure was the Catalan
from Mallorca known throughout Europe as the Doctor
Illuminatus, Ramón Llull (1235-1315). In English he is known
as Raymond Lull (or sometimes Lully) and in Latin as Raymundo
Lulio, but each of these names is deceptive as far as pronunciation
is concerned, for it is Yool.

 

The date of his birth to a noble family of Mallorca is significant,
in that Christians recaptured the island in 1232, only three years
before Llull was born, so that in effect he was a child of
Muslim--Christian inheritance. For the first thirty years of his
life he proved to be an ordinary fellow with certain extraordinary
habits. He was a roisterer, married early to Blanca Picany, who
seems to have been a stable woman of deep sensibility by whom
he had children, including a son to whom he wrote a delightful
book about growing up. The first unusual thing about Llull was
that he wrote poetry, and very good poetry too, of a high lyrical
pitch but not much spiritual content. Mallorca legend says that
his life would have gone forward in customary routine, focusing
on his good wife and his beloved children, except that one day
he conceived a passion for a young unmarried woman of the city.
He was driven to confusion by her pale beauty and one day rode
his horse into the center of the church during worship so as to
impress her with his love. She rebuffed him in various ways and
there was talk of calling in her male kinsmen to chastise him, but
at this point she chose a more dramatic gesture. She had her
duenna arrange an assignation, and when she was alone with Llull
she confessed that she was smitten with him but that one thing
had deterred her from confessing her love, and having said this,
she undressed to the waist and allowed him to see her breast eaten
away by cancer and she only weeks from death.

 

The impact upon Llull was so staggering that he became more
or less unhinged. The girl died on schedule, and he began that
withdrawal from life which became so pronounced that his wife
had to sue the court for the appointment of a custodian for his
possessions, and this was done. Henceforth Llull was in effect a
penniless friar. After a pilgrimage on foot to Santiago de
Compostela, he joined the Franciscan Order; and after a sustained
mystical experience in which he beheld Christ five times, he
conceived the idea that he had been chosen to convert Islam to
Christianity. Later he realized that to accomplish this he must
know Arabic; finding that faithful Muslims would not teach him
the language when his avowed purpose was to subvert
Muhammad, he escaped their boycott by borrowing enough
money from his wife to purchase an Arab slave whose only job
was to teach him Arabic. When the task was done and Llull could
speak the language--he never learned Latin--he tested his powers
by conducting a theological disputation with his slave, but the
latter must have been a courageous man, for either he bested Llull
in the argument, proving that Muhammad was superior to Christ,
or he blasphemed Christianity; whatever the case, Llull flew into
a rage and killed his slave. His remorse was so great that from this
time he lived by only one rule, ‘He who loves not, lives not.’

 

It would be a pleasure to recite the accomplishments of this
brilliant man, but recently I came upon a passage from Havelock
Ellis’ tribute to Llull, written in 1902 when Ellis was among the
first writers in English to bring the Catalan philosopher to the
attention of Europe, and this sums up the matter:

The multiplicity of Llull’s acquirements remains astonishing. He
wrote, as a matter of course, of metaphysics, logic, rhetoric,
grammar, dogmatics, ethics; these were within the province of
every schoolman. But beyond these, he dealt with geometry,
astronomy, physics, chemistry, anthropology, as well as law and
statecraft, navigation and warfare and horsemanship. He foresaw
the problem of thermo-dynamics, the question of the expenditure
of heat in the initiation of movement; he discussed the essential
properties of the elements; he was acquainted with the property
of iron when touched by the magnet to turn to the north; he
endeavored to explain the causes of wind, and rain, and ice; he
concerned himself with the problems of generation. He foresaw
the Tartar invasion before the coming of the Ottomans, and he
firmly believed in the existence of a great continent on the other
side of the world centuries before Columbus sailed out into the
west. He was not a great scientific discoverer or investigator, he
had not the exclusively scientific temperament of another great
Franciscan of that day, Roger Bacon; but his keen and penetrating
intelligence placed him at the head and even in front of the best
available knowledge of his time, and we can but wonder that a
man who began life as the gay singer of a remote centre of chivalry,
and ended it as a martyr to faith, should have possessed so much
cold, intellectual acumen, so much quiet energy, to devote to the
interpretation of the visible world.

Ellis’ imposing catalogue fails to touch the two facets of Llull’s
career that attracted me to him. I do not mean his perfection of
the astrolabe, whereby travelers were able to ascertain where they
were on the ocean, nor his writing of two hundred and
twenty-eight treatises on almost every important topic of his age,
but rather the fact that it was Ramón Llull who intellectually
initiated the cult of the Virgin; his philosophical expositions paved
the way for the doctrines of Immaculate Conception, Intercession
and Assumption. (The theological underpinning was provided
by Duns Scotus.) Therefore, since the cult of the Virgin has
become the central fact of Spanish theology and perhaps of
Spanish thought in general, Llull must be recognized as one of
Spain’s prime movers.

The second reason why I regarded him so highly had to do
with other matters. Years before, when I was studying Muslim
and Jewish thought in the eastern Mediterranean, I came upon
an essay whose title and author I have forgotten, because at the
time I was not concerned with the problem it discussed; it was
called something like ‘Raymundo Lulio and the Last Crusade’
and was by a Jewish author who took a rather dim view of Llull,
because the Franciscan had conceived a scatterbrained idea of
converting all Jews and Muslims to Catholicism by means of his
rational persuasion alone. It was a brilliant essay, and long after
I had read it and apparently forgotten it, the picture of Ramón
Llull returned to stand with me at unexpected places. In Cyprus
I recalled that Llull had journeyed there in hopes of converting
the Tartars, whom he mistakenly believed to have overrun the
Holy Land. When I wandered among the barren rocks of Carthage,
Llull appeared, and at Tunis he was very much present, for he
had gone there to argue with the sultan and to prove deductively
the superiority of Christ. In Paris there was Llull; in Rome, where
he went so often to plead with the popes for a crusade of the
intellect and not of the sword; and in a half dozen other cities of
the Mediterranean where he had engaged in disputation with
Jews and Muslims, trying to convert them by his logic.

‘I see many knights going to the Holy Land beyond the seas,’
he reasoned with the Pope, ‘and thinking that they can acquire it
by force of arms; but in the end all are destroyed before they attain
that which they think to have. Whence it seems to me that the
conquest of the Holy Land ought not to be attempted except in
the way in which Jesus Christ and his apostles acquired it in the
first place, namely, by love and prayers and the pouring out of
treasure and blood.’ He ended all his exhortations with the
reminder ‘He who loves not, lives not.’

It was with these recollections of a man who had become a
brother to me that I watched our ship dock at Palma, where Llull
had galloped his legendary horse into church to seek an
assignation with his reluctant lady. As soon as the gangplank was
lowered I set off for the Basílica de San Francisco, whose
three-tiered cloister marked by palm trees is one of the choice
sights of Mallorca. There I had the good luck to meet the young
Franciscan who directed the monastery attached to the basilica,
Father Antonio Riutford, who seemed scarcely old enough for
such a job. He was a scholar and well versed in the life of Ramón
Llull, of whom he said, ‘Fine philosopher. Poor theologian.’ To
confirm this judgment he led me to the stained-glass window
which showed St. Francis and St. Dominic watching with approval
as Ramón Llull in purple robes and Duns Scotus in blue announce
their doctrine of the Virgin. ‘Llull for ideas. Scotus for sanctity,’
Father Riutford said. He then took me to a second window
overlooking the nave of the church, and here Llull appeared in
the brown robes of a Franciscan, preaching to Muslims with more
success than he enjoyed in real life; the window is striking in that
the unbelievers are not struck dumb by Llull’s eloquence. They
listen with dignity to the Doctor Illuminatus and some of them
have voluntarily moved into the ranks of his converts.