FROM JUSTINIAN TO LUTHER

XII

THE THREE RELIGIONS IN SPAIN

 

IN the eleventh century the alternate despotism and disintegration which marked Muslim rule in Spain gave the Christians their opportunity. The epoch of Christian chivalry and adventure begins with Ferdinand I, who was roughly contemporary with the glorified freebooter who was called in Arabic “Cid” (Lord), and in Spanish 'Campeador' (Champion). Ferdinand, unlike the Cid, was a pious Christian as well as a brave warrior. He inherited Castile, he took possession of Leon, his wife's inheritance, and he began to press back the Muslims. He died in 1065. Twenty years later his son Alfonso VI overran Muslim Spain and captured the strong city of Toledo, the fall of which resounded throughout Islam. He favored the Mozarabes, the Christians who had adopted the language of the Arabs, with the strange result that the name Mozarabic became applied to their old Latin service books, which differed widely from the Roman rite. From the date of its conquest in 1085 Toledo has kept the two different Latin rites. There are still families in the city who proudly regard the Mozarabic liturgy as their own, trace their descent from the time before the conquest, and only intermarry with the adherents of the Roman rite under minute regulations which the Church has sanctioned.

Alarmed by the fall of Toledo, the Muslim princes of Spain invited the help of Yusef I, the head of a Berber horde of North Africa, the Almoravides, and founder of the fourth Muslim dynasty in Morocco and Spain. After a century of varying fortunes the Christians made a supreme effort and met their foes heroically in 1212 on the plains of Las Navas de Tolosa. They won the day, and until 1257 their progress was rapid and unbroken. The Christian leader was Ferdinand III, 'San Fernando' (1199-1252). Cordova was taken in 1236, and the fortress of Jaen in 1246, when Ferdinand made a profitable treaty with the King of Granada. Seville itself, with its huge mosque and magnificent 'Giralda' tower, was occupied in 1248. Ferdinand's Muslim and Jewish subjects together were probably equal in number to his Christians, and he dealt well with all.

Just as there had been Mozarabes under a fairly tolerant Muslim rule, so there were now under Christian rule a vast number of Mudejares, Muslim 'tributaries'. And by the close of the thirteenth century there were hardly any independent Muslims left in Spain outside the comparatively small kingdom of Granada with its cities Granada and Malaga. Here Muslim culture showed an almost magical power of revival, a revival of which the Alhambra remains as a lovely memorial.

It was the usual custom for the Christian conquerors to leave the Mudejares undisturbed in the practice of their religion and their customs. They had their own mosques and schools, their own shambles for the slaughter of animals. They abounded in Valencia and various districts of southern Spain: in Valencia mosques were said to be as numerous as churches. The people were industrious, skilful, and thrifty. They excelled in works of agriculture and irrigation. Their pottery was beautiful, their fabrics of silk and cotton were exquisite, they were good masons, and many buildings in the Mudejar style testify to their artistic feeling. It is probable that with continued kindly treatment they would have become assimilated to the Christians. Many spoke Spanish even when they wrote it in Arabic letters. In fact as early as 1300 they were beginning to forget Arabic, and the extinction of Arabic would almost certainly have brought with it the disappearance of the Qur'an and its religion.

 

The Jews of Spain in the thirteenth century enjoyed a freedom which has few parallels in the Middle Ages. They showed great ability in finance and furnished one king after another with the money necessary for his enterprises. Each community had its rabbis under a Rabb mayor like a Christian bishop. They were under their own laws and their own judges. Their sabbaths were undisturbed and they were even allowed to practice polygamy. After Jaime I of Aragon conquered Minorca, in 1232, he took all Jews who settled there under his protection. When San Fernando conquered Seville, in 1248, he allotted the Jews four mosques to be converted into synagogues. Alfonso X patronized Jewish men of learning, he built for them an observatory at Seville, and at Toledo permitted them to erect the fine synagogue in a Judaeo-Moorish style now known as Santa Maria la Blanca. Open controversy did not necessarily occasion violence, for in 1263 the Dominican Fray Pablo Christia, a converted Jew, challenged a great rabbi to a disputation which was presided over by Jaime I in his palace at Barcelona. Each champion claimed the victory; and the king gave the rabbi a generous gift, while he issued a decree ordering his faithful Jews to listen reverently to Fray Pablo.

In the thirteenth century certain popes endeavored to stir up Spanish fanaticism against the Jews and the Moors, but with very indifferent success. The Spanish Church took no notice, but in 1312 the Spanish bishops who went to France to take part in the Council of Vienne returned with an entirely new zeal against the Jews. At the Council of Zamora, in 1313, canons were passed to limit the intercourse between Jews and Christians. That there was some ground for alarm is suggested by the fact that the Council of Valladolid, in 1322, refers to the scandals caused by the Moors and Jews coming to Christian services, and the employment of Moors and Jews to sing and play musical instruments in church. The Council of Tarragona, in 1329, throws more light upon the prevailing intercourse between the adherents of the three different religions of Spain by deploring the attendance of Christians at the marriages and circumcisions of Jews and Moors, and actually acting as godparents of non-Christians. In 1388 the Council of Valencia enforced the sus­pension of labor on Sundays, a requirement necessitated by the mixed households in which a Jew or a Muslim had Christian servants.

In the meantime popular hatred of the Jews was steadily increasing. As money-lenders they charged exorbitant rates of interest, not resting satisfied with the legal rate of 20 per cent. or even 33. As farmers of taxes they turned taxation into a form of merciless speculation and exaction, and their ostentatious display of wealth exasperated every class of gentile. This exasperation came to a head in 1391. The rabble of Seville, inflamed by the preaching of a sincere but fanatical archdeacon, Ferran Martinez, attacked the wealthy Jewish quarter of the city, looted the houses, and slew some four thousand of the inhabitants. The flame of persecution spread from one city of Castile to another, and in Valencia, in spite of the precautions taken by King Juan I of Aragon, the scenes of massacre were repeated. Up to this date the conversions from Judaism to Christianity had been rare. But the terror created by the massacres of 1391 was so great that multitudes of Jews demanded baptism, and we find henceforth in Spain a large community known as “Conversos” or “Maranos” (Accursed), some of whom became the deadliest enemies of Judaism.

It is a startling fact that the thirteenth century, which witnessed a rapid decline of Muslim material power in Spain, witnessed a widespread growth of Muslim influence on Christian philosophy. The Arab is not by nature philosophic. But the establishment of Muslim dynasties in Damascus and Baghdad brought Islam into close contact with the Christianity of cultivated Greeks and Syrians, and Greek and Syriac books on medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy were eagerly translated into Arabic. In the meantime, points of divergence arose among the Muslims themselves, and discussions as to the unity of God, predestination and freewill, reason and tradition, led them to make use of the weapons of Greek philosophy. The Greek word 'philosopher' was adopted, and was applied to thinkers who professed Islam but based their teaching on Greek philosophy, whereas the theologians might borrow philosophic arguments from the Greeks, but based their teaching directly upon the Qur'an.

For these Muslim philosophers Aristotle was an authority without a rival; their God is the God of Aristotle, seen, however, through a glass tinted with Neo-Platonism and Persian thought. They were Muslim Peripatetics. Al-Kindi in the ninth century, Al-Farabi in the tenth, expounded Aristotle, interpreting their great master in their own way and therefore with their own personal contributions to his system. A generation later than Al-Farabi there was born in the East of Persia the greatest of Muslim philosophers and one of the greatest thinkers of the eleventh century, Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, poet, mathematician, physician, and, above all, philosopher. His exoteric teaching is essentially Aristotelian, while he classifies the sciences and presents his theories with greater clearness than Aristotle himself. Two points with which the Arab philosophers especially concerned themselves are prominent in his works, the nature of the eternity of the world and its creation, and the nature of the active Intellect which proceeds from God, works in all rational souls, and is the source of prophetic inspiration. He held that the world is eternal; but he also held that it is contingent and not necessary, because it might have been other than it actually is. Therefore it has a cause, eternal and necessary, God himself. In this way he attempted to safeguard the doctrine of the creation of the world by God.

In his esoteric teaching Ibn Sina mixes Aristotelianism with the mysticism of the Persian Sufis, who taught that by asceticism and meditation the soul can free itself from the trammels of sense and become absorbed into the divine Mind, and thus attain to supreme felicity. It is a doctrine which, in its more moderate form, does not repudiate reason, but insists that above knowledge and reason there is a clearer method of perception, an adequate intuition of absolute truth. Such was the belief of Ibn Sina and also of Al-Ghazali, another great Persian (d. 1111). After studying all philosophies and sects, Al-Ghazali came to the conclusion that all were false, and then spent eleven years in retreat until he attained a condition of ecstasy and peace. He was the most skeptical of Muslim philosophers, and directed the sharpest criticism against the principle of causation and the idea of natural law. He built his theology on a basis of philosophic doubt; and he employed the weapons of both skepticism and mysticism so effectively that Muslim philosophy was suspected in the East and migrated to Spain.

Ibn Badja (Avempace), who was born in Saragossa, and died in 1138, was the first important Peripatetic philosopher of Spain. In reaction against the skepticism and mysticism of Al-Ghazali he defended the rights of reason, and inaugurated in the West a movement which was represented by men greater than himself.

Ibn Roshd (Averroes), who was born at Cordova in 1120, closes the list of these Muslim philosophers. He devotes little attention to ethics. He busies himself with philosophical speculations and develops everything that his predecessors had taught in that subject. He almost worships Aristotle, and he blames Avicenna for departing from the position of the master. There are four points at which Averroes decisively influenced future philosophy. First, the world is eternal, produced by God by way of emanation, not by creation from nothing. Secondly, matter is eternal, it is a kind of receptacle in which all forms exist potentially without being as yet developed. It is the work of the first intelligence that issued from God to extract from matter the forms which it contains. This extraction is the immediate cause of the universe which we see. All that exists potentially must at some time become actual, and therefore is actual and necessary for him who stands in the midst of eternity. Thirdly, there is only one active Intellect for and in the human race, and we think by virtue of its action in us. Fourthly, this Intellect is immortal, but there is no personal immortality: Plato and Aristotle are dead, the speculative spirit that was in them survives. Averroes endeavored to define the relation between philosophy and religion by teaching that all mankind is divided into three classes; the philosophers who require demonstration; the men of dialectic, such as theologians, who are content with probable arguments; and the men of exhortation, for whom appeals to the imagination and rhetorical arguments are enough. The Qur'an is a miracle which contains something to convince all three classes, and Averroes maintains that it is most mischievous to give philosophic teaching to men who are not capable of receiving it.

Averroes was regarded with suspicion by his own people, and he may not unfairly be said to have represented those elements in Peripatetic philosophy which were most alien from Christianity. But he initiated the later Schoolmen into that enlarged knowledge of Aristotle which was destined to influence the whole future of theology, and he was certainly one of the greatest thinkers of his time.

 

The toleration and the prosperity enjoyed by the Jews of Spain enabled them to reach a degree of culture in no way inferior to that of their Muslim rulers. Among their most brilliant representatives was Salomon Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron), who was born in Malaga in 1020. His teaching tends in the direction of Pantheism. Its peculiar feature is to be found in the place assigned to the Will of God. It is interposed between God and the world. The universal Intelligence and the universal Soul issue from this Will, which is the cause of the being of all things, and through which God is immanent in the world. In addition to his celebrated treatise Fons Vitae, he wrote hymns which are greatly esteemed in the worship of the synagogue. His Crown of Royalty eloquently extols the unity of God and wisdom, God's 'fostered child', but Ibn Gabirol is far nearer to Neo-Platonism than to the Pentateuch. Everything inferior to God is mixed with a certain amount of matter, which is potentiality as opposed to actuality, and it passes into lower and yet lower stages of existence down to the coarse matter of the human body. This theory, which was accepted by some early Franciscan philosophers, was opposed by St. Thomas Aquinas.

After Ibn Gabirol there were Jewish writers who elaborated philosophic proofs of the existence of God, and there were others who, neglecting philosophy as worthless, laid stress upon revelation and tradition.

This theological reaction reached its height in Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides), born at Cordova in 1135. His most celebrated work is the Guide of the Perplexed, addressed to scholars who are already acquainted with philosophy but do not know how to reconcile it with a literal interpretation of Scripture. He holds that a contradiction between philosophy and the Bible is impossible, and that recourse must be had to allegory whenever they appear to disagree. With regard to the eternity and the creation of the world, he maintains that as philosophy gives us no clear proof in favor of one or the other alternative, we can accept the biblical account of a creation in time. He proves the existence of God by the necessity for granting that there must be a first mover to account for movement, a necessary being, and a first cause. Thus the existence of God is established whether the world be created or eternal.

But Maimonides refuses to ascribe to God any attributes except negative attributes. He is intent upon eliminating anything that in the smallest degree might seem to imperil the unity of God, and the Jewish doctrine of God's unity is brought into line with Greek philosophy.

Maimonides shows the influence of Neo-Platonism in his doctrine of the intelligences. He believes that there are nine heavenly spheres, moved by nine immaterial intelligences, the first of which is a direct emanation from the primal Cause, the rest emanating one from another. The tenth and lowest sphere is that of the moon attached to the tenth intelligence. This intelligence is the active Intellect which causes the transition of man's intellect from a state of potentiality to that of actuality.

The life of Maimonides is full of real human interest. Compelled to leave Cordova after its capture by the fanatical Almohades, he pursued his literary work in Fez, then became the venerated leader of Judaism in Cairo, and lastly the body physician of Saladin. It is said that he became so much attached to Saladin that he declined the offer of a similar post at the English court, made to him by Richard I. In him Jewish medieval learning culminates. He influenced scholasticism, he contributed to the philosophy of the great Jewish philosopher of a future age, Spinoza, and his brief creed has remained a pillar of orthodox Judaism, a creed nearer to Christianity than to the liberal Judaism which has discarded belief in a personal Messiah and in the resurrection of the body.

The Jews of Spain carried to Languedoc and Provence the writings of Averroes, as well as those of Maimonides, and before 125o the leaven of Arabian philosophy was working in Christian minds.

Mysticism no less than philosophy received a powerful impulse from the Jewries of Spain.

The Zohar or Book of Splendour is a treatise which exercised, and in the East still exercises, a profound influence on Judaism, and affected the attitude of Christians towards Jews in the sixteenth century. Written in Hebrew and Aramaic, and containing an explanation of Spanish words, it purports to be the work of Rabbi Simeon ben Yochai, a famous teacher of the second century. It probably owes its composition to two different authors. Of these one was Moses de Leon (d. 1305) and the other Abraham Abulafia, a Jewish ascetic who held that he was the Messiah and went to Rome to convert the Pope. Ostensibly the Zohar is a commentary on the Pentateuch. It teaches, however, that God, the Infinite, En Sof, is unknowable. Like the Gnostics, the authors of the Zohar were confronted with the question, How does the Infinite come into contact with the universe? The Zohar gives essentially the same answer as the Gnostics. The Infinite makes a bridge between himself and the world by a series of Sefiroth or emanations. The first of these is an effulgence of His light, the Divine Will, named in mystic language the Crown. The tenth and last Sefirah is the material universe, the visible kingdom of God. These emanations or potencies form an absolute unity with En Sof, as the colours of the flame and the flame itself are latent in burning coal.

But the ten Sefiroth are not only the potencies through which creation is possible. They form in their totality Adam Kadmon, Original Man or Heavenly Man. He may be described as the immanent divine activity in the universe and he created earthly man as a copy of himself. All human souls already exist before they come to earth. A man's immortality depends upon his piety and purity. The spiritual consummation of the world cannot take place until the last new soul, that of the Messiah, enters upon an earthly life. Sin and hell will then disappear and Satan become a good angel, for there is nothing eternal that is not good.

The Zohar is one of the most important parts of the Jewish Kabbala or traditional theosophy, and there exist clear echoes of it in the Jewish Prayer Book. At the same time it contains distinct approximations to the Christian doctrines of the Trinity, the Second Adam, and the Atonement. The result was that several eminent Spanish Kabbalists embraced Christianity, and during the period of the Renaissance great scholars like Mirandola and Reuchlin championed the Kabbala as an auxiliary of the faith.

 

To the Franciscans and Dominicans belongs the credit of attempting to convert the Muslim world. The early Franciscans had some success in Morocco, from whence the Christians in 1260 sent a subscription towards building the church at Assisi. The Dominican Raymond de Peñaforte devoted himself with great zeal to the conversion of the Muslims, and founded in Murcia and Tunis institutions where the brethren of his order could study Hebrew and Arabic. But the most original and systematic missionary effort, an effort of the boldest enthusiasm, was made by the Catalan, Raymond Lull.

Raymond Lull was born at Palma in the isle of Majorca about 1235. The island had only lately come under Christian rule, and Christians and Muslims lived side by side, not always in peace and concord. Lull was of noble birth, and at the age of thirty was seneschal of King Jaime of Majorca, son of Jaime I of Aragon. He was a married libertine and skilled in the arts of the troubadour, devoting his talents to the composition of sensuous poetry. He was converted by visions of Christ crucified, and was so convinced of the reality of these visions that he resolved to give his life to the conversion of the Muslims, and prayed that he might win the crown of martyrdom. He learnt Arabic from a Saracen slave, who discovered the object of his master's studies and sought to take his life. He became as familiar with Latin and Arabic as with his own melodious Catalan, and for ten years taught in a monastery which he persuaded the king to build at Miramar. In spite of constant rebuffs, he urged his cause in Naples, Genoa, Rome, and Paris, where he contended against the doctrines of Averroes. The untiring efforts that he made to induce Christians to study Oriental languages were not in vain. Before he died the Council of Vienne directed that chairs of Hebrew and Arabic should be founded at Rome, Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca.

He wrote many books and discovered, he believed by inspiration, a method of proving the truths of religion which he called Ars Magna. By it he represented fundamental ideas and their relations to the objects of thought by letters and figures, giving all possible questions and tabulating all possible predications. Strange as this method may seem to us, it impressed many of his Muslim contemporaries, and he made numerous converts in Majorca, Spain, and North Africa. He had a firm belief in the value and sanctity of the human intellect, and was convinced that a Christian ought to be able to give a reason for his faith. With regard to Islam Lull showed remarkable fore­sight. The Tatars were sweeping across Asia, burning and killing within the borders of Eastern Christianity, and he saw what a mighty force Islam would become if it absorbed these Mongol Tatars. He implored the scholars of Paris to head a movement which would win the Mongols for Christ. His contemporary John of Monte Corvino met with extraordinary success in Pekin, and other Franciscans did much for the conversion of the Eastern world. But the disaster which Lull feared came at the end of the fourteenth century, when Tamerlane founded a new empire under the banner of the Crescent.

Lull had his heart's desire, for after converting many Muslims at Bugia in Africa he was stoned and died on June the 29th, 1315. He was one of the heroes of his age, and among his memorable words are those which record his conviction that the conquest of the Holy Land should be attempted in no other way than that of Christ and His apostles, 'by love, by prayer, by tears, and the offering up of our own lives'.

 

The early years of the fifteenth century were marked by the impassioned missionary preaching of St. Vincent Ferrer, who went to Toledo in 1411 and made thousands of Hebrew converts in Castile and Aragon. His work was followed by more repressive legislation against Jews and Moors and by a remarkable public disputation held near Tortosa in 1414. The Christian protagonist was Geronimo de Santafe, a learned convert who confronted the leading Jewish rabbis in discussions which lasted several months and ended in a partial victory for the Christians. It is certain that the number of professing Jews greatly diminished, although both in Castile and Aragon they enjoyed occasional years of respite from persecution. In the meantime the Hebrew Christians were moving towards their inevitable doom, a doom which threatened both them and their unbelieving kindred. The gentile nobles were angry and jealous when they found that the Maranos formed a close corporation of their own and secured for themselves some of the highest offices in Church and State. And the less sincere converts, thinking that they were safe, often threw discretion to the winds by telling their servants to eat meat in Lent, or by reviving the practice of circumcision and visiting the synagogues. Some avoided holy communion as much as possible, and they told such lies in the confessional that a sarcastic priest, after hearing a Marano's confession, said, “Since you have never sinned, I want a piece of your clothes as a relic to cure the sick”.

 

At Cordova there was a serious outbreak and massacre of the Jews in 1473, and seven years later Ferdinand and Isabella, 'the Catholic sovereigns', took the decisive step of establishing the Spanish Inquisition. The old papal Inquisition of the thirteenth century never obtained a firm foothold in Spain, the Church of Castile was too proud of her ancient independence to accept it with good will. But now the necessary bull was obtained from Pope Sixtus IV, and an Inquisition was created which was under royal control as much as possible. The first auto de fe was celebrated at Seville, February the 6th, 1481, and the work went on vigorously under the ruthless Torquemada, the confessor of the king and queen. It is a strange fact that the king's grand­mother was a Jewess, Torquemada belonged to a Jewish family, so did Hernando de Talavera, Archbishop of Granada. In 1492 the final blow descended: the Jews were given the choice between baptism and expulsion. Some 50,000 were baptized; but a far larger number were driven from the country with every circumstance of cruelty. Many went to Italy, and many made their way to the dominions of the Sultan of Turkey, where their descendants still retain the Castilian dialect of their ancestors. Others went to Portugal and in time their descendants reached Holland, England, and the West Indies. In Spain little care was taken to instruct the numerous converts in their new faith, and for a time relapses were not infrequent. Unceasingly spied upon by their neighbors and their servants, the people of Jewish descent were prosecuted even for such crimes as refusing to eat pork or wearing clean linen on a Saturday. The result of these prosecutions roughly verified the saying that it requires three generations to change the religion of a people. In 1595 it was said that they had almost all become good Christians.

 

A somewhat different state of things prevailed in Portugal. When the Spanish conversos flocked to Portugal, King Manoel, in 1497, issued a law for the protection of these 'New Christians'. They grew rich and intermarried with the noblest families; many became priests. The Jews were persecuted, but the Jewish Christians were left in peace until the introduction of the Inquisition into Portugal in 1531, and its full establishment, in 1540 and 1548, exposed them to the same interference as their brethren in Spain. Christians of Hebrew origin are still very numerous in the northern provinces of Portugal. But the non-Christian Jews were relentlessly persecuted until the eighteenth century, when it was believed that Judaism was extinct throughout the Peninsula. This opinion has been recently disproved. Early in the present century it was discovered that a number of the inhabitants of the small towns in the mining region of the Sierra da Estrella in Portugal are Crypto-Jews. They knew no Hebrew and they had abandoned circumcision, but they observed the Sabbath, the Passover, and the Day of Atonement, and were conscious that they were children of Abraham, regarding their enfeebled religion as the only orthodox Judaism. Mostly of humble rank, they are nevertheless kinsmen of the rich Jews who founded the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in London, where the father of Lord Beaconsfield was once a worshipper.

Against the conscientious bigotry and the cruel hypocrisy of the age of Ferdinand and Isabella stands the noble figure of Hernando de Talavera. He learnt Arabic, required others of the clergy to follow his example, and provided the Moors of Granada with translations of parts of the Gospels and services in their own language. He set an example of the highest Christian charity, self-denial, and energy, and began to win converts by solely Christian methods. Cardinal Ximenes, on the contrary, was in favor of hastening the process of conversion, and the result was that the Moors, like the Jews, had to submit to either expulsion or baptism. Such obstacles were placed in the way of their departure that they were practically forced to become Christians. Talavera himself, venerated by all good men, nearly fell a victim to the calumnies and intrigues of the fiendish inquisitor Lucero, who inaugurated a reign of terror for his own personal aggrandizement. The archbishop whom he harried, having nothing, yet possessing all things, died after taking part in a procession bareheaded and barefooted through the streets of Granada on Ascension Day 1507.

The Moors, Crypto-Muslim and Christian alike, were finally expelled from Spain in 1609. They appear to have numbered about 600,000 souls. One fact might have touched the hearts of their persecutors, had they only known it, and suggested more discrimination and more charity. Some of these Moriscos who were driven from Spain to Africa made their way to Tetuan. They were Christians, and, having firmly refused to worship in the mosque, they were stoned to death by the Muslims, and thus, though Spain knew them not, they deserved to be numbered among the saints.