Juan Ruiz and the Heterodox Naturalism of Spain

Abstract

1. Introduction In 1960, Maria Rosa Lida Malkiel wrote about Juan Ruiz: His devotion is entirely orthodox, very respectful of the Church's organization and indulgent toward the moral weaknesses of ecclesiastics (21). On the next page, she alludes to an assured and familiar religiosity on the part of the author of The Book of Good Love that allowed him--perhaps paradoxically--to complacently enact his parody of texts of devotion. Those familiar with the first judgments of Ruiz's work, beginning in the nineteenth century, might find this vision of an orthodox Juan Ruiz a bit surprising. For example, the Count of Puibusque considered Juan Ruiz a licentious author, capable of painting des folies toute espece (81). (1) Menendez Pelayo provides the mildest evaluation of his time, as it is not entirely critical but rather considers the text espejo fidelisimo la sociedad dei siglo XIV, con todos sus vicios y prevaricaciones (a faithful mirror of fifteenth-century society, with all of its vices and prevarications) that reflected de cien modos el extravio las creencias (in a hundred ways how beliefs could stray; 425). Scholars have investigated these judgments most in recent decades, dragging our anonymous author by his hair, if necessary, into themes and areas of inquiry that were--and may still be--enjoying their hours of glory in certain academic institutions. Emphasizing marginality and exclusion validates Americo Castro's old idea about the mudejarismo of Juan Ruiz. The conception of Juan Ruiz as unconventional, of the dark side, or as an alias for Aben Roic, a marginalized Semite, seems to have become a sort of commonplace that, I believe, must be further explored, especially with regard to the complex field of heterodoxy. One of the themes that best allows entry into this subject is the peculiar use the author of The Book of Good Love makes of Aristotle's authority in order to justify the venereal inclinations of the poetic I, a topic discussed by Rico in a fundamental article published in El Crotalon in 1985. The famous stanzas seventy-one to seventy-six are mere examples of the many instances of the malicious parading of authorities observed in the Book, and would seem practically anodyne or simply rhetorical if the ideas formulated there did not evoke a past, both far and immediate, charged with tumultuous heterodoxies and even heresies, in Hispanic as well as foreign contexts. That is why, in my view, we should examine anew the possible heterodoxies of our author precisely in terms of this unofficial Aristotelianism, thus invoking another especially significant figure for heresiology, Averroes, the philosopher from Cordova. Exploring the influence of Averroes on Ruiz appears to me the best way to approach that heterodox dimension of the Book that Lida Malkiel seemed to want to ignore, despite her defense of the Semitic nature of a work that she characterizes without vacillation as mudejar art as if speaking of a cathedral (19). 2. Heterodox Antecedents of Ruizian Naturalism: From Radical Aristotelianism to Heresy 2.1 The First Heterodox Aristotelianism: The Leonese Heresy (1216-1236) De altera vita fideisque controversias, by the famous chronicler Lucas of Tuy, is practically the only contemporary testimony we have of the Leonese heresy, a movement that was declared heretical and bred an atmosphere of uncertainty in the city of Leon during the first third of the thirteenth century. The ideological battles involved were so precocious that concepts that would have been easily identified some years later, such as Aristotelianism, natural philosophy, and, above all, Averroism, were totally unknown by anyone capable of shining some light on what was happening in Leon around that time. This is why the Leonese heresy tended to be associated with what signified heresy in Rome: the Albigensian heresy. (2) If we add to this that the head of the movement was a French philosopher called Arnaldo--a name with a long history in Occitan-Catalan lands--it seems understandable that this movement was explained as an expansion of Catharism beyond the Pyrenees. …