The Spanish Christ
He was a foreigner, a South American, and he came from Paris. “But these Christs!—Good God!” he said to me, as we stood before one of the bloodiest of those that are to be found in our cathedrals, “this thing repels, revolts——”
“It revolts him who knows nothing of the cult of suffering,” I said. And he replied: “But suffering is not blood. There is bloodless suffering, serene suffering.”...
And we began to talk about it.
I confessed to him that I have the soul of my people, and that I like these livid Christs, emaciated, purple, bloody, these Christs that someone has called ferocious. Lacking in art? Barbarous? I don’t know. And I like these harsh Marias Dolorosas, rigid with grief.
The Spanish Christ—so Guerra Junqueiro has often said to me—was born in Tangiers. Perhaps. Perhaps He is an African Christ. Would He be more Christ if He were an Attic or a Parisian or an English Christ? For the other Christ, the Galilean, the historical, we must bid farewell to. And as for history as applied to Christianity.... This history is the history of the last twenty centuries, and here, in Spain, history is Spanish. He was born then, perhaps, in Tangiers. Not very far from Tangiers was born St. Augustine.
Bloodless, serene, purified suffering.... Yes, yes, “stylistic”—or shall we say, artistic?—suffering. The cry of suffering breathed into a flute and become a dirge. Very good. All that the Laocoön inspired in Lessing was just that.
Very good. But it is the same with this kind of suffering as with irony. Usually ironists are people who are never angry. He who is angry is insulting. The ironist forgives everything and says that it is because he understands everything. And what if it is because he understands nothing? I don’t know.
This harsh, raw manner of ours—I said to my friend, the South American—not everyone can bear it. It has been said that hate is rife in Spain. Perhaps. Perhaps we begin by hating ourselves. You will find many here, a great many, who dislike themselves. We follow the precept of “love thy neighbour as thyself,” and since, in spite of inevitable egoism, we do not love ourselves, so neither do we love our neighbours. The ascetic and the egoist are made in the same way. Not that the ascetic is not an egoist; egoistic he may indeed be, and with a vengeance. But even when an egoist, he does not know how to love himself.
When you see a bull-fight, I continued, you will understand these Christs. The poor bull is also a kind of irrational Christ, a propitiatory victim, whose blood cleanses us from not a few of the sins of barbarism. And leads us, nevertheless, to others. But is it not true that forgiveness leads us—unhappy humans!—to sin again?
My friend saw a bull-fight in Madrid and wrote to me as follows;
“You are right. The Spanish people likes violent spectacles, which beget the emotion of tragedy, or rather of ferocity. I had no difficulty in understanding this at the bull-fight last Sunday. I understood it also when I conversed with various people, and in particular with literary people, who tear one another to pieces with unparalleled ferocity. Poor Christ, pierced and bathed with blood! There is no hope that His wounds will ever heal in these Spanish cathedrals or that the grimace of His frenzied pain will ever relax—for here there is no knowledge of the return of Jesus to heaven, after His martyrdom.”
Perhaps—who knows?—our heaven is martyrdom itself.
Not a few foreigners who have learnt to know us have been struck with this ferocity with which, here in Spain, men of letters destroy one another. Yes, here all men, but particularly artists and writers, destroy one another with the ferocity of bull-fighters—or it may be with the Christian ferocity of our Tangerine Christianity.
And I, who do not like bull-fights and never go to see them, I, who do not like flaying my fellow writers (for the office of executioner dirties the hands), I like these Tangerine Christs, purple, livid, blood-stained and blood-drained. Yes, I like these bleeding and exsanguious Christs.
And the smell of tragedy! Above all, the smell of tragedy!
You should read the great Sarmiento’s comparison between bull-fights and tragedy, in his account of his journey in Spain about the middle of the last century. In the bull-fight there is none of the insupportable unities of the pseudo-classical tragedy, and there is, moreover, real dying. Real dying, and, above all, real killing. The bull is killed just as an infidel dog was killed by a good Spanish Christian in the good old days—really killed.
For many people, perhaps for my friend the American, all this creates an atmosphere difficult to breathe, an acrid atmosphere. But if you take away the taste, other atmospheres too become insipid. It is like the austere beauty of our bleak upland deserts. He who tempers his soul, or distempers it—I know not which—in the contemplation of these blood-stained and blood-drained Christs, never accustoms himself afterwards to others.
And this hate, this same hate that circulates everywhere here, like a subterranean stream of lava, this same hate...
It has its source in what is deepest in ourselves; we hate ourselves and not one another only, but each one his own self.
“But you people have no real love of life, although you are tenacious of it,” another foreigner said to me once, a Frenchman, as one who makes a discovery. And I replied: “Perhaps!” He exclaimed again: “But this is a veritable cult of death!” And I answered: “Of death, no—of immortality!” The fear that if we die, we die utterly and altogether, makes us cling to life, and the hope of living another life makes us hate this one.
La joie de vivre. It has been translated la alegría de vivir. But it is only a translation. This alegría de vivir—let them say what they like—is a gallicism. It is not an authentic Spanish phrase. I do not remember to have met with it in any of our classics. For man’s greatest crime is that of having been born.1 Indeed it is!
And this same literary ferocity with which our men of letters bite and tear and flay and quarter one another is not without its sharp voluptuousness for the spectator. And it is in this strife that our masterminds are tempered. Many of their ripest have been produced in the atmosphere of defamatory coteries. And they carry with them, naturally enough, the acrid flavour of their origin. They smell of hate. And the public, scenting hate, becomes excited and applauds. Applauds as it does at the bull-fight when it smells blood. Blood of the body or blood of the soul, what is there else?
Is this cultured? is this civilized? is this European? I don’t know. But it is Spanish.
Ought we to be ashamed of it? Why? Better to probe into it, scrutinize it, stir up the depths of it, make ourselves fully conscious of this hatred of our own selves. The evil lies in our being unconscious of it, for once it is revealed to us for what it is, a hatred and abhorrence of our own selves, it is already in the way of becoming ennobling and strengthening and redeeming. Do you not remember that terrible paradox of the Gospels about having to hate father and mother and wife and children in order to take up the cross, the blood-stained cross, and follow the Redeemer? Hatred of ourselves, when it is unconscious, obscure, purely instinctive, almost animal, engenders egoism; but when it becomes conscious, clear, rational, it is able to engender heroism. And there is a rational hatred, yes, there is.
Yes, there is a triumphant, heavenly, glorious Christ, He of the Transfiguration, He of the Ascension, He who sits at the right hand of the Father; but He is for when we shall have triumphed, for when we shall have been transfigured, for when we shall have ascended. But for here and now, in this bull-ring of the world, in this life which is nothing but tragic bull-fighting, the other Christ, the livid, the purple, the bleeding and exsanguious.