Luis de Leon Ode to Francisco Salinas Introduction & Notes by Michael Smith

Fray Luis de León (1527-1591) was born at Belmonte de Cuenca in La Mancha. At the age of fourteen he entered the University of Salamanca, and in 1544 he joined the Augustinian Order in the city. Here in Salamanca Fray Luis stayed, becoming in time its greatest scriptural and theological scholar and teacher. In the theologically contentious atmosphere of Counter-Reformation Spain, Salamanca was a centre of controversy, and Fray Luis spent his life in the thick of it. His translation of the Canticle into Spanish from the Hebrew instead of the Latin of the Vulgate, which he criticised, entangled him in the Inquisition by which he was imprisoned in Vallodolid in March 1572; and he was not released until December 1576 despite that fact that his guilt was never established. The canon of Fray Luis's poetry, as fixed by hispanists, consists of twenty nine poems. Apart from these, he wrote mainly prose, most notably, Los nombres de Cristo and La perfecta casada. He also translated Horace's Odes into Spanish.

The images of Fray Luis as a poet of serenity is not, as Azorín has demonstrated, altogether true. As one sees from his life in Salamanca, he was a man with a capacity for fiery polemics: this side of his nature is most evident in his prose writings. In his poetry, on the other hand, he expresses a concomitant longing for a peace, a tranquillity. It does not seem to me fortuitous that Quevedo, that most contentious of Spanish writers, should have been drawn to the poetry of Fray Luis, and to have been the first to publish it. For Quevedo himself had a deep longing, in his case tragically never to be gratified either in life or in letters, for a plane of rest which it seems he found in the poetry of Fray Luis.

Fray Luis was a genuinely scholarly man. Philosophical and theological concepts could be said to be constituent of his consciousness, not simply the data of book-learning. In constructing the architectonics of his poetry, ideas are essential to what the poems become. A romantic poet will use imagery drawn from the world of nature: Fray Luis draws his imagery from the world of philosophical concepts, a procedure no less valid so long as the result is poetry and not a philosophical discourse in verse.

Fray Luis disclaimed for himself the ultimate mystical experience such as one finds it in Juan de la Cruz or Teresa of Ávila. The scholarly mind can only go so far. But what it can do, and does in the case of Fray Luis, is construct, from the intellect, worlds of visionary ideas that are transcendent at least in the order of aesthetics. The mind and the imagination reach out to the cosmos in civilised confabulation. For a man of faith like Fray Luis, the cosmos will be amenable to such confabulation.

The central philosophical concept employed by Fray Luis in his Ode to his friend Salinas, is the Pythagorean concept of the harmony of the spheres. According to the Pythagoreans, the heavenly bodies, which revolve around the Middle Fire (the centre of the universe), are separated from one another at purposeful intervals corresponding with the relative lengths of strings, and are so arranged as to produce harmonious tones. The revolving speed of the heavenly bodies around the centre of the universe will be proportioned to their distance from one another; and as every vibrating string emits a note, it follows that the heavenly bodies revolving simultaneously will produce a harmony of notes. The fixed stars will produce the deepest note, the sphere of the moon the highest, and the spheres between them, intermediate notes. The human sense of hearing cannot perceive this music of the spheres. Above the universe is the One, the Divine Spirit or God, who is the ruler or guide of all things and who upholds universal order.

The following rough outline may be of assistance to the reader of the Ode: the music of his friend, Salinas, creates an order in the soul of Fray Luis that enables it to rise out of its corporal bondage, in which it had forgotten ('sunk in oblivion') its former state of pure spirituality. As the soul, by the agency of Salinas' music, discovers its true nature – its state of pure spirituality – it discards or unlearns all worldly desires. Then it moves out through the spheres to the highest music, and it comes at length to God, the great master, the great musician who creates and upholds the whole harmony of the universe. Since the music of the universe is composed of concordant notes (Pythagorean numbers), it emits a consonant response to Salinas' music. Thus transported, the soul transcends the corporal life of sensation, which is alien to it. It longs to continue in its state of spiritual ecstasy and never return to the sensual life of the body. Fray Luis invites his friends to share in his spiritual rapture.

The poem's vision of spiritual harmony is not static; rather, it is animated, striving, and, regrettably, of temporary duration. It is a vision achieved by the effort of imaginative meditation through the instrumentality of art, specifically music. The pleasure behind the vision comes from a world of avarice and ignorance known only too well to Fray Luis. Art offers an escape from that world, a means of transcending it. But this is not the transcendence of the solitary soul that one finds in Juan de la Cruz, in all its spiritual severity. The intellectual, rather than the mystical rapture of Fray Luis embraces a companionship of kindred souls, his friends. In this, Fray Luis's transcendent vision is, in the end, human. And perhaps herein lies, as Oreste Macri suggests, an unavowed nostalgia for the possession of that ultimate mystical experience.

 

* * *

Francisco Salinas was born in Burgos in 1513 and died in Salamanca in 1590. He was blind from the age of ten. He accompanied Cardinal Sarmiento to Rome in 1538 and was organist at the Spanish court in Naples from 1558 to 1561. He was organist in León in 1563 and in Salamanca in 1567, where he also taught at the university. A distinguished theorist, he wrote De musica libri septem (Salamanca, 1577).