Iberia (28 page)
Authors: James Michener
Life is like a school of gladiators, where men live and fight with
each other.
He who has committed a fault is to be corrected both by advice
and by force, kindly and harshly, and to be made better for himself
as well as for another, not without chastisement, but without
passion.
stones did not rest on another; in this way it is sustained.
the world as one house.
In view of the fact that Spain was to become the champion of
religion and today considers herself the nation most deeply
committed to the defense of Catholicism, it was appropriate that
her premier philosopher should have concerned himself with this
matter. Spaniards are proud of the fact that certain of Seneca’s
writings are sufficiently ambiguous to permit him to be called the
first important classical figure to have embraced Christianity, but
whether he did so remains a subject of controversy. The following
quotations echo with curious overtones:
heard you.
God is nigh to you, he is with you, he is in you: I tell you, Lucilius,
a holy spirit resides within us, an observer and guardian of our
good and our bad doings, who, as he has been dealt with by us,
so he deals with us; no man is good without God.
original.
God is not to be worshiped with sacrifices and blood: for what
pleasure can He have in the slaughter of the innocent? But with
a pure mind, a good and honest purpose. Temples are not to be
built for Him with stones piled on high: God is to be consecrated
in the breast of each.
The same being whom we call Jupiter, the wisest men regard as
the keeper and protector of the universe, a spirit and a mind, the
Lord and Maker of this lower world, to whom all names are
suitable. Will you call him Destiny? You will not err. On him
depend all things, and all the causes of causes are from him. Will
you call him Providence? You will say well. For it is his wisdom
that provides for this world that it be without confusion and
proceed on its course without change. Will you call him Nature?
You will not commit a mistake. For all things have had their
beginning from him, in whom we live and move and have our
being. Will you call him the World? You will not be deceived. For
he is all that you see wholly infused into his parts and sustaining
himself by his own power.
As in many Spanish cities the central plaza, serving as a kind
of huge open-air bus terminal, is named after José Antonio, and
not far away is the statue of my second favorite Córdoban, Bishop
Hosius (in Spanish Osio, c. 255-c. 358), whom I first met in Nicaea
in Asia Minor when I was studying the Church council at which
the Nicene Creed was promulgated as the normative theological
guide for all Christians. Hosius was a man of enormous conviction
who battled to establish the trinitarian definition of God under
which Christianity would prosper; his archenemy was Arius of
Constantinople, father of the Arian heresy subscribed to by the
German tribes, including the Visigoths who ruled Spain, which
taught that Jesus could not logically be coexistent with God but
must be of lesser nature. Even before I knew that Hosius was a
Spaniard, I was much attracted to him; he was a furious man, a
terrible warrior for his interpretation of God and a fearsome
enemy of those who did not agree with him. He ranged from
Cordoba to Rome to Asia Minor to Constantinople, and wherever
he went he brought reason and devotion. Repeatedly he was
anathematized, abused, arrested and persecuted, but he continued
to wage his war against Arianism, even offering his life to prove
the rightness of his beliefs. He was a very human prelate, for when
nearly a century old he lost his old fire and succumbed to
pressures, publicly turning his back on all he had previously
believed, accepting Arianism and paving the way for a conciliation
that helped make Spain temporarily Arian. At a hundred and two
the old renegade died—and I find something quite Spanish in his
behavior, both his stern advocacy of an idea and his ultimate
betrayal of it when conditions changed. Hosius is a complex and
fascinating figure, one of the greatest churchmen and probably
Spain’s principal contribution to Church history.
Today in the quiet square facing the church of the Capuchins
in Córdoba the old bishop stands tall and baldheaded in marble
toga and sandals. In his left hand he carries a staff ending in a
gilded bronze eagle perched on a cross which rises from a globe.
Not even in death is he serene, for he seems eager to leap forward
to the next brawl. At the base appear three good bas-reliefs
showing the old man bared to the waist being flogged by Roman
soldiers; defending the Trinity before one of the Holy Roman
emperors; supported by three other churchmen wearing crosses
as he expels a figure who must be Arius, author of the heresy. On
the back stands the plaque: ‘To Hosius, Bishop Confessor of Christ
in Torment. Counselor of Constantine the Great. On the sixteenth
centennial of the Council of Nicaea over which he presided, the
citizens of Córdoba dedicated this monument, under the initiative
of their prelate. December 31, 1925.’
In a corner of the Jewish section, opposite to the one where
Seneca presides, appears one of the gentlest and most attractive
statues in Europe. The courtyard which it dominates is paved in
small pebbles set in cement; the walls are whitewashed and plain;
brick archways form beautiful short vistas, and flowers bloom
about the base of the statue and in the nearby windowboxes. The
base consists of a series of random-sized brown rocks fitted into
an attractive cube on which rests a plain marble bench containing
the sitting figure of a man wearing the robes and twisted turban
of the desert. In his lap he holds a book kept open by his right
thumb; his face and bearing are those of a philosopher who is
resting here in the quiet prior to meeting with his students.
It is Córdoba’s memorial to a brilliant man whom the city
treated shabbily, the Jew Moses Maimonides (in Spanish Moisés
de Maimón, 1135-1204), a worthy partner to Seneca and Hosius.
I suppose that intellectually he is the most brilliant man that Spain
produced, a medical doctor of wide reputation who wrote basic
treatises on such subjects as asthma, living healthily without
medicine, and the principles of sexual intercourse. In fact, his
medical knowledge was so comprehensive and his skill so highly
regarded that he spent the last years of his life as personal doctor
to Saladin in Cairo.
His chief fame, however, was as a religious philosopher, in
which capacity he helped establish the norms of Judaism. He
wrote brilliantly, argued persuasively, and laid down a body of
principles which had much effect on non-Jews like Thomas
Aquinas, Herbert Spencer and Gottfried von Leibniz. If one wants
to savor medieval thought at its best, I recommend Maimonides’
, in which he takes a bewildered applicant
step by step through the religious process, providing rational
explanations for the existence of God and for lesser theological
problems. It is a beautifully composed work and explains why
Jews consider him the foremost Jewish intelligence since the time
of Moses: ‘Between Moses and Moses, there was no one like unto
Moses.’
Maimonides was born in Córdoba and lived not far from where
his statue now stands, but shortly after his bar mitzvah the
Muslims controlling the city launched a series of persecutions
from which he fled. It was while wandering from one inhospitable
city along the Mediterranean littoral to another that he became
a notable scholar. We catch glimpses of him in Algeria, in Tunis,
in Turkey perhaps, in Palestine definitely and finally in Egypt,
where his medical proficiency earned him a livelihood. He was a
prodigious worker, and one of the most attractive letters surviving
from this age was written by him, explaining how he spent his
days; he found time in his schedule for medical duties,
contemplation, meeting with Jews seeking religious opinion,
leadership of the synagogue and service as advisor to the sultan.
His hours fitted together like the pieces of a mosaic and he
reported that he had no time for even one additional obligation.
His collected works, which are voluminous, are currently being
edited and published uniformly by Yale University, which is
appropriate, for he is one of the fathers of modern intelligence.
It was surprising for me to learn that Córdoba, so long the
center of Islamic culture in Spain, contained no statue of the
principal adornment of that culture, the philosopher Averroës
(1126-1198), who played a major role in codifying Islamic thought
and in bringing Aristotle to the attention of the west. It is quite
possible that he knew Maimonides, whose life his own parallels,
for he too was a medical doctor of note, and he too was expelled
from Córdoba by the reactionary fanaticism of Moors, who
despised books. He too ended his life as doctor-in-residence to a
ruler in North Africa, in this case Morocco, and he was, in his
field, at least as brilliant as Seneca, Hosius and Maimonides in
theirs. It is extraordinary that Córdoba contains no memorial to
so famous a son, but if there was one I failed to find it. It would
be pleasant, in my next trip, to discover that the city had
remembered Averroës, for then I could make an intellectual
pilgrimage to the four statues and thus pay homage in turn to the
finest pagan of Spanish history, the finest churchman, the
outstanding Jew and the most brilliant Muslim. No one can
explain why it was Córdoba that produced these four excellent
men from four different religions.
Today the city betrays few signs that it was for so long the center
of Islamic rule in Spain. The Moors crossed over form Africa on
April 27, 711, and before the end of that year had captured
Córdoba, where they remained till June 29, 1236. They thus
occupied the city for half a millennium, making it their
resplendent capital, but except for the Great Mosque and a fortress
called the Alcázar, it is easier to find Roman ruins than Islamic,
and this is true throughout Spain; Moors were in the peninsula
from 711 to 1492, but in city after city, like Toledo and Salamanca,
one finds little to remind him that these centers were once Islamic;
and when a building has been preserved, it has usually been so
well masked by later architects that it goes undetected.
A word as to nomenclature. The warrior tribes that invaded
Spain from North Africa were united in only one thing: they were
followers of Muhammad and his religion Islam. Insofar as their
beliefs were concerned, it is proper to describe these men as
Islamic. Unfortunately, the adjective derived from Islam has never
come into popular use for identifying an individual follower; we
rarely say, ‘He is an Islamite.’ Instead we use the word Muslim,
philologically derived from the same root as Islam (one who
submits), so that the adjective Muslim is identical with Islamic.
The noun Muslim identifies a follower of Islam, and it is proper
to describe the invaders as Muslims. Tribally, they were composed
from such varied sources as Berbers of the Atlas Mountains, who
comprised the vast majority of the early invaders, and men from
former Roman colonies reaching from Morocco to Egypt. They
were a mixed lot. The designation Moor is an imprecise word of
no scientific meaning; its derivation is not religious, nor
geographic, nor ethnic. Some experts claim that it comes from
the Greek word for black or dark; others say it is derived from
some African word meaning black, but few of the original Moors
were Negroes. Historically it has come to mean ‘any member of
the North African groups who invaded Spain, including the
Arabs.’ I shall be using the word in that sense.
Who were the Arabs? Technically they were members of that
incandescent and superior group which spread out from the
Arabian desert and with matchless speed overran surrounding
cultures. Muhammad’s Hegira took place in 622; he died in 632;
the flood tide of the faithful did not reach Spain till 711, a delay
of nearly eighty years. In that time the Arab leadership had been
thinly dispersed, and it is unlikely that many pure Arabs crossed
over into Spain, although it has always been popular to assume
that they did. Spaniards prefer to speak of this experience as ‘the
Arab occupation,’ as if the Muslims who surged across the Straits
of Gibraltar had been mainly Arabs, but we know that in the first
foraging party, which captured most of southern Spain within a
few weeks and got all the way to Toledo, there were no Arabs at
all. There were, however, small Arab cadres in most of the
succeeding armies and Arab leadership in the government, but
to extend this to ‘the triumph of Arab culture’ is meaningless, for
there were few Arabs and less culture; the salient innovations in
architecture, art, literature and philosophy were imported mainly
from long-established cultural centers to the north of Arabia. It
is, however, accurate to speak of an Islamic culture and to speak
of it with a certain amount of awe, for at its heyday in Spain it
must have been impressive. It reached Spain in later waves, after
the Berbers and the other mountain folk had conquered the
peninsula.
Finally, we know that when the fanatical fundamentalists of
Islam, the Almoravids, conquered southern Spain in 1086, only
to be supplanted in 1146 by the even more fanatical Almohads,
there were no Arabs whatever in their ranks. Both groups were
composed principally of mountain wild men recently converted
to Islam and of the opinion that Arab leadership, what there was
of it, had gone soft and was ignoring the true teaching of
Muhammad. Of any thousand Islamic invaders chosen at random
through the centuries, I suppose not more than three or four
could have been Arabs, but Spanish writers have felt that in
surrendering to Arab superiority there was honor, but in losing
to Berber inferiority there was ignominy.