Don Quixote and Catholicism: Rereading Cervantine Spirituality by Michael J. McGrath

Abstract

Reviewed by: Don Quixote and Catholicism: Rereading Cervantine Spirituality by Michael J. McGrath James Nemiroff McGrath, Michael J. Don Quixote and Catholicism: Rereading Cervantine Spirituality. Purdue UP, 2020. Pp. 189. ISBN 978-1-55753-899-4. During the past century, Don Quixote has been analyzed from a variety of critical approaches, whether it be from the perspective of theories of the novel, how the novel dialogues with other disciplines, such as visual art or political philosophy, or, more basically, whether Cervantes’s novel exaggerates Catholicism or is informed by it. In Don Quixote and Catholicism: Rereading Cervantine Spirituality, Michael J. McGrath tackles this third question and argues that Don Quixote is a novel inherently informed by the teachings of Catholic orthodoxy (5). McGrath’s goal in his study is “to reclaim Cervantes’[s] Catholicity from the interpretative tradition that ascribes a predominantly Erasmian reading of the novel” (5). McGrath’s study is divided into six chapters. Chapters 1–2 provide historical and critical context for the literary analyses he will pursue in chapters 3–6. Chapter 1 focuses on how Cervantes’s life experiences and intellectual upbringing informed not only his spirituality but also his literary works. For example, McGrath mentions how his allegiance to the Holy League, his fighting in the Battle of Lepanto and subsequent imprisonment in Algiers exposed Cervantes to a variety of cultures and religious traditions that helped inform his early dramatic works (namely El trato de Argel). Moreover, McGrath discusses how his formal education in the works of St. Ignatius of Loyola and Santa Teresa de Avila can help critics understand both Don Quixote’s journey, insofar as the knight imitates the life of St. Ignatius, but also his literary references. Beyond simply being a satire of various genres popular during the Early Modern Period, McGrath [End Page 145] contends that Don Quixote’s readings are indeed acts of contemplative prayer, which evoke mental images or mental symbols (27). Using the conceptual vocabulary of St. Ignatius, McGrath contends that Don Quixote can be read as a manual of Cervantine spirituality that privileges Ignatian spiritual practices over Erasmian Christian Humanism. However, before exploring the different spiritual elements in Cervantes’s novel, McGrath contextualizes his study further in chapter 2 by discussing Erasmus’s impact on Jesuit spirituality, and in so doing responds to the classic Erasmian readings of Don Quixote offered by Américo Castro and Marcel Bataillon. In chapters 3–6, McGrath analyzes both parts of Don Quixote from this Catholic lens attempting to see to what degree Don Quixote mirrors Cervantes’s Catholic upbringing. In chapter 3, McGrath analyzes the novel from the perspective of moral theology, a discipline that became increasingly important in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries due to Spain’s conquest of the New World. McGrath takes as his point of departure Don Quixote’s confession at the end of Part II to probe about the nature of Don Quixote’s morality throughout both parts. The author claims that the morality of the knight’s actions can be evaluated based on the degree in which he perceives the objective and subjective morality of his actions defined as “the relationship between what a person does and the moral order, or the difference between whether an action is good or evil and whether the human being believes it to be so” (66). In order to prove the degree to which morality drives Don Quixote’s actions, McGrath considers the knight’s encounters with Andrés, his first encounter with Ginés de Pasamonte and his meeting with the galley slaves. While the first criterion focuses more on Don Quixote’s justifications for actions, McGrath concludes the chapter exploring the degree Don Quixote is moral, taking into account the consequences of his actions on other characters. In order to assess this consequence, McGrath introduces the concept of the double effect, a concept derived from Neo-Thomist philosophy popular in the period. After considering how Don Quixote’s actions are driven and determined by a Catholic morality, chapters 4–6 consider how the knight errant and his squire Sancho Panza imitate tenets of Jesuit spirituality in a variety of ways. Chapter 4 focuses on episodes...