The Soul of Spain

Abstract

Few Americans had any insight into the critical part that Spain had played and still continues to play in the development of the modern world, through the fact that Spain endeavored to transpose the dying medieval culture into a modern key; witness Loyola’s Society of Jesus. Spain gave to her colonies in the New World her language, religion, civic institutions, her system of education, her social customs, her chivalric sense of honor and her mystic fervor. Spain gave her body and soul to the New World. It is, therefore, in my humble opinion, of paramount importance to know the soul of Spain in order to comprehend and understand the Spanish American people. To that purpose—to better understand the spiritual and cultural background of Spanish America by studying the “Soul” of Spain—this work is dedicated.—THE AUTHOR . At the close of the eighteenth century Nicholas Masson de Morvilliers raised a hubbub in Europe by asking these two questions in the Encyclopédie Méthodique: “Mais que doit-on a I’Espagne? Et depuis deux siecles, depuis quatre, depuis six, qu’a-t-elle fait pour l’Europe?” At the end of a century of positivistic philosophy and at the beginning of the industrial era this was a very logical question. It is true that Spain did not invent the locomotive, the telegraph, the telephone nor the modern frigidaire; but in the realm of human and eternal values could a more idiotic question have been asked? The metaphysics of Suarez, the international law of Victoria, the great theologians of the Council of Trent, Cano and Soto, had no value whatsoever for this Positivistic century; nor did the fact that Spain had produced one of the most human and original theatres with Lope de Vega, Calderón, Tirso de Molina and Alarcón; the greatest novel in the modern sense of the word, Don Quijote;the most profound satirist of all Europe, Quevedo; the outstanding moralist of the seventeenth century, Lorenzo Gracian; and above all these a school of mystics in Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint John of the Cross, Fray Luis de León and Juan de los Angeles, which has never been equaled. Even if Mr. Masson de Morvilliers could not see the importance of these contributions it is difficult to comprehend how he could ignore the transcendental fact that Spain had broken the columns of Hercules and had spread Mediterranean culture through the countries lying on the other side of the Atlantic and on the remotest shores of the Pacific.