Iberia (74 page)
Authors: James Michener
the walled city of Avila, judged by most people to be the finest
medieval remnant in Spain. From any approach it is a handsome
sight, perched on a hill with a river nearby and massive walls
enclosing it. The gates of Avila look as if horsemen might clatter
out through the portcullis, and I was fortunate on my first visit
to enter the city along with a wedding party that had engaged a
band. It was lunchtime and we were headed for the same
restaurant near the walls of the city. It was very old, with
low-ceilinged rooms and open rafters, and the food was heavy.
The wedding party sang, and by the time everyone was half-drunk
I could not tell what century this group belonged to. In 1300 they
would have looked much the same, and in 1500, too. They were
the perennial farmers of Spain come to town for a celebration,
and it was a noisy, delightful day. I was invited to toast the bride
in a harsh red wine that went well with the roast pig we were
eating, and when I left I was given a boisterous farewell. Down
in the streets of Avila the noise of the celebration followed me
and I could imagine a watchman of some previous age clomping
along and crying to the inn, ‘Ho, there! Silence! Honest men want
to sleep.’ It was going to be some time before there was silence.
remarkable woman whose piety made the city famous; almost
none come to seek out the musician whose genius I had discovered
by accident and who now meant so much to me. The woman was
Santa Teresa de Avila (1515-1582), foremost of the Spanish
mystics and a writer of distinction. She was born of a good family
and at the age of eighteen unexpectedly announced her intention
of joining a convent, where she led a prosaic life marked mainly
by a lively social life which she maintained with the leading
families in the area, but at the age of forty she chanced to see a
statue of Christ that had been left accidentally in her path and in
a moment of divine inspiration she saw through to the reality of
God. From that time on she became increasingly concerned with
the mystical path to religious insight, retaining, however, the hard
practicality of her upbringing. She sought Papal permission to
reform the lax order of which she was a member and launched
the Discalced (Shoeless; that is, they wore sandals) Carmelites as
opposed to the traditional Calced Carmelites, who wore shoes.
Her practical mind made her an excellent administrator, and
before long she established branches of her reformed order in
different parts of Spain, including two monasteries for men, but
at the same time her spiritual life intensified, enabling her to write
a series of books which constitute the classic statement of
mysticism.
priest with whom her spiritual life would henceforth be linked,
and their relationship forms one of the gentlest episodes of
Spanish history. Juan de Yepis y Alvarez (1542-1591),
twenty-seven years younger than Teresa, was the son of very poor
parents. His father died early and his widowed mother took her
brood to Arévalo and then to Medina, where Juan served as male
nurse in a paupers’ hospital. His close contact with misery bred
two results: he took vows as a Carmelite and he entertained those
first mystical visions which were to characterize his life. Like other
great Spaniards he attended the University of Salamanca, where
at the age of twenty-five he was ordained a priest. After brief
service he met for the first time Teresa de Avila, whose fame filled
the countryside. Judging from externals, no one could have
predicted that this fashionable, witty nun from a fine family would
find in Juan de Yepis, a retiring young priest from an
under-privileged family, a bond of identity, but that is what
happened. The English religious expert, F. Trueman Dicken, calls
their friendship ‘one of the most fecund of all Christian
relationships since the time of the Apostles.’ In Teresa’s fight to
defend her Discalced Carmelites, Juan became a bold champion,
and as a result spent a long confinement in Toledo jail, where his
exceptional gift for poetry manifested itself. When he left the
prison he was a major poet, a lyricist of the darker moods of the
spirit; the title of one of his outcries has become almost a theme
song of modern confusion, ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’:
On a dark night,
In the dark night Juan found the beginning of his mystical
understanding, which drew him even closer to Teresa. During
one five-year period he served as confessor to the convent in Avila,
headed by Teresa, and for three of those years she was in residence,
so that the two mystics were able to conduct long discussions
which deepened the spiritual life of each. It was this period of
shared ideas that led to the richest literary results; of her
experience with Juan’s sharp mind Teresa said, ‘He is my little
Seneca.’
Teresa lived to be sixty-seven; Juan died at forty-nine, as if he
felt it unprofitable to continue without the presence of his mentor.
Together they bore the moves made against them by the Church
and the persecutions initiated by monasteries and convents that
did not want to be reformed. Each suffered severe discipline and
even the threat of investigation by the Inquisition, but when they
were dead, persons who knew them began to realize that in Teresa
of Avila and Juan de Yepis, now known as Juan de la Cruz, this
wall-girt town had produced two saints whose miracles stemmed
from their close acquaintanceship with God. Teresa attained
sainthood first in 1622, Juan in 1726, and they live today as the
twin glories of Avila. In the fall of 1967 Pope Paul VI announced
that henceforth Santa Teresa would be considered as one of the
doctors of the Church. Prior to this, there had been no woman
so honored.
To Spain mysticism is as natural as the olive tree, but here it
avoids both the mysterious excess and the delirious rapture of
eastern mysticism. It is a practical, one might almost say realistic,
method for attaining a realization of God. It requires no trauma,
is far removed from catatonic trance and avoids special
vocabularies and recondite ritual; it is a very special brand of
mysticism and the principal theological gift of Spain to the world
at large. No better exemplars could be found than this curiously
assorted pair of Avila; they were hard-headed realists when it
came to the management of religious societies and self-disciplined
intellects when it came to rationalizing and reporting their
religious experiences. They insisted, however, upon the reality of
their approach to God and defended it in pure and simple prose,
none better than these sentences from the opening of Teresa’s
:
Few tasks which I have been ordered to undertake have been
so difficult as this present one of writing about prayer because I
do not feel that the Lord has given me the spirituality for it, and
because for the last three months I have been suffering from such
noises in the head that I find it difficult to write even about
ordinary things…. But I began to think of the soul as a castle made
of diamond or very clear crystal in which there are many rooms,
just as in heaven there are many mansions….For if we consider
the matter, the soul of the righteous is but a paradise in which, as
God tells us, He takes delight….Let us then consider the many
mansions of this castle, some up high, others lower down, still
others along the sides, and in the very center of all the principal
one, where takes place the most secret intercourse between God
and the soul.
illuminated Avila and all Spain.
It is obvious that to an organized Church the mysticism
expressed in the above quotation from Teresa poses a threat, for
it runs the risk of degenerating into the Quaker heresy of ‘each
man his own priest,’ because if by the mystical process one can
attain direct contact with God, the intercession of Church and
prelate is no longer essential, although it may for social reasons
continue to be convenient. It was this potentiality in the preaching
of Teresa and Juan that kept them hovering between sainthood
and heresy, and much of the opposition they encountered during
their working lives originated in an honest fear on the part of the
Church that they were encouraging in others, if not practicing
themselves, a separatism which must end in apostasy.
After their deaths that is what happened. The Illuminati, those
who found God for themselves through the mystical illumination
of their own souls, became quite a plague to the Church in Spain;
they were considered no better than Protestants and had to be
eliminated. The Inquisition was especially harsh in dealing with
them, and those who were not burned were exiled, so that one
sees in Avila not only the glory of Teresa and Juan but also the
degeneration of their ideas in the practices of the Illuminati.
I had not come to Avila, which I remember as a uniformly
evocative town, to recall Santa Teresa; I came to pay homage to
one of the finest artists Spain has produced, the equal in his field
to Cervantes in the novel or Valázquez in painting. I had found
him for myself in one of the tardiest discoveries on record. When
I was a student the music of Palestrina struck me with force; it
was exactly what I had been looking for and I have never since
tired of listening to
, which must be
one of the finest pieces of choral music. But once in Germany
when I bought a Polydor record of some Palestrina music, I found
that the second side had been filled out with a short composition
by another Italian composer, Tommaso Lodovico da Vittoria, of
whom I had not heard. It was an ‘Ave Maria’ of such exquisite
construction that I found myself playing it eight times for every
once that I played Palestrina. Of all the musical settings for this
prayer, and I am not forgetting Bach and Schubert, I found
Vittoria’s the finest, and when I looked about for other
compositions by this minor Italian, I found other pieces which
seemed to me about as good as choral music could be, and I began
to wonder why Palestrina was so well known and his countryman
so little.
I am ashamed to say that ten or fifteen years passed before I
discovered that my Tommaso Lodovico da Vittoria was not an
Italian at all but a Spaniard from Avila named Tomás Luis de
Victoria (1548-1611), who customarily added Abulensis (of Avila)
to his name, and that he had written a dozen great works which
stand with the best of his age, or of any age for that matter. In
time I acquired recordings of his
(Mass
for the Dead, 1603), which critics usually select as his masterpiece,
his motets and especially his
Responsories for Tenebrae
(1585),
those deeply moving evening prayers. The
Officium Defunctorum
has additional interest for anyone who has visited Avila; Victoria
wrote it for the funeral of the Empress María, daughter of Carlos
V and sister of Felipe II, and its first performance occurred in the
convent where Victoria served as chaplain, that of the Descalzas
Reales, first of the Teresan convents in Madrid.
As Victoria becomes better known, the grandeur of his
production is increasingly recognized. He was the equal of
Palestrina in all except homophony, and this he seems to have
avoided consciously. The richness of his construction and the
dramatic manner in which he interweaves as many as six threads
of sound, uniting them occasionally in majestic chords, form one
of the joys of sixteenth-century music and I would suppose that
for many who know music generally, the discovery of Victoria
will be one of the few remaining delights. There could be no better
approach than a recording of his majestic Christmas responsory
‘O Magnum Mysterium’ (O Great Mystery, 1572), which is
divided into three contrasting parts: the animals observe Christ
lying in their manger; people voice their astonishment at a virgin
birth; and all explode into one of the finest hallelujahs ever
written. Because of its variety and power, the ‘Mysterium’ is a
favorite of professional singers and numerous good recordings
exist.
As I walked through the narrow streets of Avila, listening to
the voices of Victoria’s choirs as they sang the music I had come
to know so well, I reflected on the curious fate that had overtaken
Spanish music. Victoria died in 1611, on August 27, a day held
in reverence by mystics throughout the world as the anniversary
of Santa Teresa’s vision of being struck in the heart by a lance of
fire held by an angel. He left Spanish music the equal of any being
composed in Europe; each basic building block required for future
construction had been fashioned and there was no structural
reason why Spanish music should not have matured as did Italian
and German and every reason why it should have surpassed
French and English, but in the decades that followed, it retreated
slowly, step by step, from its capable beginnings until it foundered
in trivia. Even its failures lacked reach; the inheritors of Victoria
produced no great masses, no soaring affirmations of belief, no
operas, no symphonies, no string quartets, so that one can only
ask, ‘What happened?’
I spent three nights in Avila wrestling with this problem, for
although the focus of my question was music, it applied equally
to drama, painting, poetry and to a lesser extent the novel, and if
I could find a reasonable answer to the problem of music, I might
discover what had happened to the other arts. After such favorable
starts, why had there come decline?
I liked Spanish music. I had studied most of the work done by
Falla, Albéniz, Granados (1867-1916) and Turina (1882-1949)
and had an understanding of at least the first and last of that Big
Four. I judged Falla’s work to be as inspired thematically as any
then produced in Europe;
