Don Quixote and Catholicism

Rereading Cervantine Spirituality

Michael McGrath

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781442616011
• eBook ISBN: 9781557539007
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Four hundred years since its publication, Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote continues to inspire and to challenge its readers. The universal and timeless appeal of the novel, however, has distanced its hero from its author and its author from his own life and the time in which he lived. The discussion of the novel's Catholic identity, therefore, is based on a reading that returns Cervantes's hero to Cervantes's text and Cervantes to the events that most shaped his life. The authors and texts McGrath cites, as well as his arguments and interpretations, are mediated by his religious sensibility. Consequently, he proposes that his study represents one way of interpreting Don Quixote and acts as a complement to other approaches. It is McGrath's assertion that the religiosity and spirituality of Cervantes's masterpiece illustrate that Don Quixote is inseparable from the teachings of Catholic orthodoxy. Furthermore, he argues that Cervantes's spirituality is as diverse as early modern Catholicism. McGrath does not believe that the novel is primarily a religious or even a serious text, and he considers his arguments through the lens of Cervantine irony, satire, and multiperspectivism. As a Roman Catholic who is a Hispanist, McGrath proposes to reclaim Cervantes's Catholicity from the interpretive tradition that ascribes a predominantly Erasmian reading of the novel. When the totality of biographical and sociohistorical events and influences that shaped Cervantes's religiosity are considered, the result is a new appreciation of the novel's moral didactic and spiritual orientation.

Chapter One

Miguel de Cervantes and Early Modern Catholicism

Miguel de Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares, a university town about twenty miles from Madrid, in 1547. While his exact date of birth is unknown, it is believed that he was born on September 29, which is the Feast of Saint Michael, and baptized on October 9 in the Iglesia de Santa María la Mayor:

Domingo, nueve días del mes de octubre, año del Señor de mill e quinientos e quarenta e siete años, fue baptizado Miguel, hijo de Rodrigo Cervantes e su mujer doña Leonor. Baptizóle el reverendo señor Bartolomé Serrano, cura de Nuestra Señora. Testigos, Baltasar Vázquez, Sacristán, e yo, que le bapticé e firme de mi nombre. Bachiller Serrano.¹ (Fernández Álvarez 24–25)

The decision of Cervantes’s parents to have him baptized under the patronage of St. Michael, the archangel whose first responsibility is to combat Satan, provides insight into his family’s religiosity.² Cervantes’s sister Luisa (1546–1620) was prioress of the Carmelite Convent of the Imagen in Alcalá de Henares on three different occasions. In addition to Luisa, Cervantes’s sisters Andrea (1544–1609) and Magdalena (1553–1611), as well as his wife Catalina de Salazar (1565–1626), were members of the Third Order of St. Francis.³ In 1609, Cervantes joined the Brotherhood of the Slaves of the Most Holy Sacrament, a confraternity whose members included Lope de Vega (1562–1635) and Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645). Cervantes biographer and noted Hispanist Jean Canavaggio postulates that Cervantes was a faithful and obedient member who followed the Order’s strict rules “to the letter” (Canavaggio 236).⁴

Cervantes’s paternal grandfather, Juan de Cervantes (ca. 1477–1556), who was an esteemed scholar and lawyer in Spain, worked in Alcalá de Henares from 1509–12, and the author’s father, Rodrigo, was born there in 1509 (d. 1585). The powerful religious reformer Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436–1517) founded the University of Alcalá de Henares in the same year, and soon thereafter the city became one of the most prominent cities of learning in Renaissance Europe. In addition to its world-famous university, Alcalá de Henares was also the home to more than twenty convents, two major seminaries, five monasteries, and three parish churches. In his book Spanish Cities, Richard Kagan comments on Anton van den Wyngaerde’s (1525–71) drawings of Alcalá de Henares from 1565: “By minimizing his references to secular life, Wyngaerde seems to be suggesting that the city of Alcalá de Henares was dedicated to the study of theology and to the service of the Catholic Church, two of the university’s avowed goals” (Canavaggio 236). The young Cervantes did not live many years in Alcalá de Henares before his father Rodrigo’s itinerant lifestyle, a result of his economic and legal difficulties, moved the Cervantes family to Córdoba, where Juan de Cervantes still lived, in 1553. In this same year, the city of Córdoba opened its first Jesuit school, Santa Catalina.

The influence of Juan de Cervantes, who served Córdoba as its mayor and chief magistrate, made it possible for his grandson to attend Santa Catalina, whose students belonged to aristocratic families. Jesuit schools during Cervantes’s day focused heavily on grammar and rhetoric. Cervantes and his family lived in Córdoba for only three years. The death of Juan de Cervantes motivated Cervantes’s father to seek the security offered by another family member, Andrés (1518–93), who was Rodrigo’s brother and the mayor of Cabra, a village forty miles from Córdoba. The Cervantes family remained in Cabra, although information about their stay there is scant, until 1564, the year in which Rodrigo’s name appears on a real estate document in Seville.

In 1563, Cervantes continued his Jesuit education at the Colegio San Hermenegildo (Seville). One of his teachers was Father Pedro Pablo Acevedo (1522–73), who had been Cervantes’s teacher at the Colegio de Santa Catalina in Córdoba. Father Acevedo was a playwright who established the norms, including staging and music, of Jesuit school drama. He incorporated drama into his classes as a teaching aid, and this manner of instruction must have sparked the young Cervantes’s passion for drama, a genre in which he would not earn the recognition he aspired to achieve.⁵ Years later, Cervantes would write about his time as a Jesuit school student in El coloquio de los perros:

No sé qué tiene la virtud, que, con alcanzárseme a mí tan poco, o nada della, luego recibí gusto de ver el amor, el término, la solicitud y la industria con que aquellos benditos padres y maestros enseñaban a aquellos niños, enderezando las tiernas varas de su juventud, por que no torciesen ni tomasen mal siniestro en el camino de la virtud, que justamente con las letras les mostraban. Consideraba cómo los reñían con suavidad, los castigaban con misericordia, los animaban con ejemplos, los incitaban con premios y los sobrellevaban con cordura, y, finalmente, como les pintaban la fealdad y horror de los vicios y les dibujaban la hermosura de las virtudes, para que, aborrecidos ellos y amadas ellas, consiguiesen el fin para que fueron criados. (Cervantes, Novelas 316)

Rodrigo de Cervantes moved his family to Madrid in 1566. During this time, Cervantes was a disciple of the Catholic priest Juan López de Hoyos (1511–83), who was an admirer of the Christian humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) and the director of the Estudio Público de Humanidades de la Villa de Madrid, where Cervantes studied for several months.⁶

Cervantes’s literary accomplishments during the time he was a student of the Estudio Público de Humanidades de la Villa de Madrid included a sonnet that he dedicated to Queen Isabel de Valois (1545–68), who was the wife of King Philip II (1556–98), as well as four poems in honor of the Queen upon her death a year later. López de Hoyos published the poems Cervantes wrote shortly after the Queen’s death. Cervantes’s lack of critical acclaim as a poet, however, did not discourage him from writing poetry. In fact, Cervantes’s masterpiece Don Quixote contains forty-five poems that appear in a variety of formats.

In his biography of Cervantes, No Ordinary Man: The Life and Times of Miguel de Cervantes, Donald McCrory relates that a royal warrant dated September 15, 1569 authorized the arrest of Cervantes for wounding another man in a duel. The victim was Antonio de Sigura, and the punishment, as dictated by a panel of judges that consisted of four jurists (Salazar, Ortiz, Hernán Velázquez and Álvaro García de Toledo), called for Cervantes’s right hand to be cut off (Fernández Álvarez 57). Aware of the punishment he was facing, Cervantes fled Madrid for Seville, where he remained a short time before he moved to Rome to work in the household of Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva (1546–74).⁷ Cervantes’s tenure in the household of Cardinal Acquaviva provided him with an insightful education in Catholicism and its traditions and rituals:

Not yet twenty-three, Cervantes’s time in an ambitious prelate’s household in Rome, the centre of the universal Church, would have shown him the power of a culture where ceremony ruled supreme; a world of patronage, faction, and worship. It was also his entry into the world of a Christian prince being educated for high office. This granted, his sojourn in Rome would have been much more valuable than generally credited. He would have seen aspects of courtly and ecclesiastical life as well as the functioning of the diplomatic process; no prince of the Church was free from the machinery of statecraft and political intrigue. The history of alliances, truces, secret affinities and clandestine negotiations which involved the Papal States and other states at the time prove this. Aware of these or not, while working for Acquaviva he was soon to hear rumours of the growing conflict between Venice and Turkey; it was the talk of the town. (McCrory 51)

In addition, the brief time he spent in Italy afforded Cervantes the opportunity to learn about Italian literature, references to which appear frequently throughout Don Quixote. The novella of El curioso impertinente, as well as other interpolated stories in Don Quixote, are based upon Italian models.⁸

Cervantes enlisted in the army in 1570 as a harquebusier and supported the Holy League, which consisted of soldiers from Spain, Italy, and Malta, in its battles against the Turkish Muslims. Cervantes fought valiantly in the Battle of Lepanto (Greece, 1571), the naval campaign during which he lost use of his left hand as a result of a serious wound. In spite of a serious illness that afflicted him, Cervantes refused to abandon the Battle of Lepanto. Cervantes biographer Manuel Fernández Álvarez describes the author’s military service and the pride with which Cervantes would remember this time in his life:

Una batalla en la que Cervantes participa heroicamente—y aquí el término heroico adquiere toda su grandeza—, hasta el punto de que le faltaría poco para perecer en la contienda … pero de la que guardaría un recuerdo emocionado, como algo grandioso de lo que estaría profundamente orgulloso toda su vida. (Fernández Álvarez 88)

The Christian fleet consisted of more than 200 galleys and Cervantes, as well as his brother Rodrigo, served on La Marquesa. The Holy League’s victory did not come without a price. In all, it suffered nearly 13,000 casualties and lost 50 galleys. The number of Ottoman casualties and prisoners, however, numbered over 28,000, and the Ottomans lost 210 ships, 130 of which the Holy League captured.

Cervantes’s participation in the Battle of Lepanto was, arguably, the defining moment of his life. In the prologue to Part II of Don Quixote (1615), he praises Spain’s participation in the Battle of Lepanto and writes proudly about the crippling injury he received to his left hand:

Lo que no he podido dejar de sentir es que me note de viejo y de manco, como si hubiera sido en mi mano haber detenido el tiempo, que no pasase por mí, o si mi manquedad hubiera nacido en alguna taberna, sino en la más alta ocasión que vieron los siglos pasados, los presentes, ni esperan ver los venideros. Si mis heridas no resplandecen en los ojos de quien las miras, son estimadas, a lo menos, en la estimación de los que saben dónde se cobraron; que el soldado más bien parece muerto en la batalla que libre en la fuga; y es esto en mí de manera, que si ahora me propusieran y facilitaran un imposible, quisiera antes haberme hallado en aquella facción prodigiosa que sano ahora de mis heridas sin haberme hallado en ella. Las que el soldado muestra en el rostro y en los pechos, estrellas son que guían a los demás al cielo de la honra, y al de desear la justa alabanza.⁹ (25–26)

Cervantes’s dedicated service to the Holy League is even more admirable, considering that the years in which he served were difficult ones. In addition to the crippling injury to Cervantes’s left hand, Barbary pirates, under the leadership of Arnaut Mamí (d. 1600) and his lieutenant Dalí Mamí, captured El Sol, the ship on which Cervantes and his brother were returning to Spain in 1575.¹⁰ The pirates took Cervantes to Algiers, where he remained for five years as a prisoner. His captivity, as María Antonia Garcés notes, was by no means an anomaly for sixteenth-century Spaniards: “From the massive campaigns led by the ransomer monks to raise funds for the rescue of captives, to the processions held when these ransomed men and women returned home, to the chains and shackles hung in churches and public buildings to signify liberation, the cruel reality of captivity in Barbary was ever present for the Spaniards” (Cervantes in Algiers 172).¹¹ When Dalí Mamí saw that Cervantes had letters of commendation from Don Juan de Austria (1547–78), who was King Philip II’s halfbrother, and Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba (1520–78), who was the third Duke of Sessa (Italy), for his military service, he increased the price of the ransom, believing that Cervantes was an important soldier. Cervantes describes his experience as a prisoner in El capitán cautivo, another one of the interpolated stories that appears in Don Quixote.

Cervantes’s captivity in Algiers must have been transformational with respect to his spirituality. When he arrived there, he discovered a multicultural and multilingual city that attracted a heterogeneous population of people: Turks, Arabs, Berbers, Christian captives, Jews, exiled moriscos, and converts to Islam from different parts of the world (Garcés, An Early Modern Dialogue with Islam 2).¹² His captivity would later inform his literature. In the biographical drama El trato de Argel, which Cervantes wrote shortly after he returned to Spain, for example, the captive Saavedra tries to persuade another prisoner not to convert to Islam:

Si tú supieses, Pedro, a dó se extiende

la perfección de nuestra ley cristiana,

verías cómo en ella se nos manda

que un pecado mortal no se cometa,

aunque se interesase en cometerle

la universal salud del mundo.

Pues ¿cómo quieres tú, por verte libre

de libertad del cuerpo, echar mil hierro[s]

al alma miserable, desdichada,

cometiendo un pecado tan inorme

como es negar a Cristo y a su Iglesia? (Teatro completo 905–06)

Islam continued to be anathema to Cervantes after he returned to Spain, and he expressed his anti-Muslim sentiment, at times disdainful and confrontational, numerous times in his literature.¹³ Cervantes’s years of captivity, however, also provided him with a new perspective on Muslim-Catholic relations and of his own faith: “Placed in that context, Cervantes’s dealings with Moors and renegades, his stirring defense of the Catholic faith, are illuminated with a new light, one that makes him more accessible, more human, and—in a word—more real” (Canavaggio 91).

Evidence of Cervantes’s enlightened attitude toward Muslim-Catholic relations is El capitán cautivo, whose protagonists are Zoraida, a Muslim who is a convert to Catholicism, and Captain Ruy Pérez de Viedma, a Christian who is a prisoner in Algiers. Zoraida, who adopts the name María because of her devotion to the Virgin Mary, arranges for Ruy Pérez to escape but on the condition that he take her to Spain, where she hopes to be baptized a Catholic and to marry the captive captain. Their prospective marriage, more than an act of love, fulfills the religious beliefs of Catholicism and assumes a mystical dimension because Zoraida, or María, and Ruy Pérez also desire to grow closer to God.

Before they can marry, however, Zoraida must be baptized a Catholic, and only then is she able marry in the Catholic Church.¹⁴ The sincerity of Zoraida’s intentions is open to debate. Francisco Márquez Villanueva postulates that Zoraida’s desire to convert to Catholicism and to marry Ruy Pérez is pure chicanery, motivated by a longing to be free. Franco Meregalli affirms that Zoraida genuinely loves Ruy Pérez but that she wishes to convert to Catholicism because it is the religion of the man she loves. Ciriaco Morón Arroyo, however, disputes Villanueva’s and Meregalli’s interpretations completely. Morón Arroyo reads the episode through a strictly theological lens, informed by a Thomistic explanation of the characters’ words and actions. He believes the theological underpinnings of the episode are apparent from its beginning when Luscinda asks if Zoraida is baptized. Morón Arroyo notes that Cervantes would have chosen different words if the meaning of the episode were not intended to be interpreted within...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Miguel de Cervantes and Early Modern Catholicism
• Chapter Two: The Hermeneutics of Cervantine Spirituality
• Chapter Three: Don Quixote and Moral Theology: What a Knight and His Squire Can Teach Us About Cervantes’s Catholicism
• Chapter Four: Tilting at the Truth: Don Quixote’s Spiritual Journey as a Contemplative in Action
• Chapter Five: The Anthropological Vision of Don Quixote
• Chapter Six: From La Mancha to Manresa: Sancho Panza’s Incarnational Spirituality
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Book
• About the Author