Deny it they did. Better than to summarize their attitudes is to let them speak for themselves. Saint Paul famously said that it was “better to marry than burn.” Marriage, in this view, is an inferior state for a man, since the practices of sexual love distract him from service to God. And so from the beginning, the body is distinct from the soul and is a source of weakness and dissolution. Gregory of Nisa thought marriage a “dismal tragedy,” and Jerome wrote, “The truth is that, in view of the purity of the body of Christ, all sexual intercourse is unclean.” Tertullian, for his part, saw no intrinsic difference between fornication and sex within marriage, since intercourse was essentially shameful. Combined with the ascetic and ferocious solitude of the desert fathers, these early thinkers set down a foundation of ideas: that virginity is superior to marriage, that celibacy is required for service of God, and that sex is contaminated with sin. The Christian preacher and philosopher Origen, in the early third century, thought that sexual love stilled the spirit and that the embraces of the beloved were a pathetic substitute for the only embrace that counted, the embrace of the soul by Jesus. Origen himself, rather than suffer such temptations, went to be castrated. In the late fourth century, Ambrose, not to be outdone, wrote that marriage made women filthy and that a wife was like a prostitute of one man. If a married couple yielded to sexual desire, then it was of the utmost importance that their coupling be so strict and mechanical that it held no pleasure whatsoever.
All this leads to Augustine, the most influential of thinkers in this field. The ideas of Augustine about love and sex have been the subject of countless books and commentaries, and rightly so, since upon the foundation given him he constructed a house of ideas. The house has stood and weathered a thousand assaults through the centuries, and in orthodox Christianity at least it still is a formidable presence.
Augustine associated sexuality directly with original sin. The shame of sexual love, by his reasoning, derives from the fateful disobedience in Genesis, after which Adam and Eve had the first sexual desire (there having been none, according to Augustine, in Eden). Sexual desire, after the Fall, was no longer a matter of will; it was spontaneous and uncontrollable. All this being the case, every child is conceived in sin and is in some way marked at conception, since every man carries the contaminated seed of Adam. We should recall that this corruption, expressed in the flesh of every one of us simply by our being born, has an easily identifiable cause: the yielding of Eve to the temptations of the Devil in the Garden of Eden.
We can see from this very brief sketch of Christian teaching how such ideas led naturally to the beliefs and practices we would expect: the requirement of celibacy for priests; the insistence upon the shame, if not depravity, of sex within marriage; the counsel against sexual pleasure, which alienates us from God; the natural inferiority of women; and the exaltation of virginity.
I trouble to sketch these ideas, since they would have been fully in play in the early seventeenth-century Spain, in which there lived a young man—we do not know his name—who attended Catholic church, but, as well, practiced in secret the rites and offered the prayers of Islam in company with other Muslims. And this, in Inquisitorial Spain. These men learned Arabic and parts of the Koran. They lived in constant threat of arrest, torture, and execution.
This young man read the literature of the day—Cervantes, Garcilaso, Góngora, Fernando de Rojas, and first, and most, Lope de Vega. He loved the work of Lope and memorized a host of his sonnets, as well as passages in Spanish of most of the other writers he held dear. In 1609, when Philip II expelled by proclamation the remaining Moriscos in Spain, he was among the miserable and despised exiles. Eventually he would find his way to Tunis, and there settle. And come to write, in Spanish, a treatise on marriage and sexual love that stands as the most astonishing and beautiful in the history of the language of the times. Though it is written in Tunis, it is, like its author, so casually mystical that it draws directly from the work of Sufis who had written on sexuality; and it is so incorrigibly Spanish that it is laced with sonnets from … Lope de Vega!
However remarkable its content, it is a patient exercise in explication. The writer reviews the characteristics of a man who should marry. He should be someone concerned about virtue, secure enough in his work to be able to support and care for a wife, and he should be amorously inclined. This last qualification alerts us immediately that we are not reading a lecture from, say, Thomas Aquinas. Our Spaniard goes on to review the qualities such a man should seek in a wife, such as physical and moral beauty, piety, modesty in public, and capacity to bear children. He even has explicit recommendations for the marriage celebration, which, poignantly, follow in many details what we know of such ceremonies in the Morisco communities of Al-Andalus. And then, to the obligations of marriage, in which the evocative and passionate ideas of our author begin to take shape: for he offers his arguments on behalf of the sexual rights of a woman, her rightful claim on the amorous energies of her husband, and her presumptive liberty to explore with him the whole combustible range of her pleasures. There is even a passage of advice for a woman whose husband is neglectful, because he is too often consumed in prayer and contemplation. She has a right to the physical love of her husband, and her right is founded not merely in the fact of marriage; rather, his amorous devotions are a spiritual necessity, a gentle directive from heaven, a duty to God.
We are taking leave, we sense, of Augustine. Our Spaniard has not the least hesitation to head off into erotic detail. His theme is consistent. A husband must recognize that a wife has the same sexual rights and privileges in the nuptial bed as he does himself. His counsel is clear: a husband must in his erotic offerings show a considerate, knowledgeable attention to his wife, so that trust and pleasure can live together. Imaginative adoption of a host of sexual positions is recommended, though a husband must never ask his wife to take up a position uncomfortable to her. He must in his loving of her bring her to full, intense, transformative satisfactions, and he must make sure that her climax occurs at the same time as his, or if not, that her climax always precedes his. Wholehearted exploration in bed, the slow, attentive use of hands and mouth, all the fine variety of embraces, the transports of playfulness, the most candent and conscious devotion: all this is, by the good lights of our Spaniard, natural to marriage. It is celebratory, tender, reverential treatment of sexual love, and as we come to know the book, what grows in us is a wonder it exists at all. And as if all these surprising and delicious offerings were not enough, our Andalusian has yet more suggestive counsel to offer.
The first sentence in Professor Luce Lopez-Baralt’s five-hundred-page study of the Kama Sutra Español says it best: “Nunca lo habíamos oído en literatura española: el sexo nos lleva a Dios”: we have never heard it before in Spanish literature: sex bears us to God. Our Spaniard, writing in Tunis, makes just such a claim. When a couple gives themselves to their mutual delectations, when their envelopment in the pleasures of one another is unreserved and trusting, what they feel is far more than pleasure. Their devotion does more than burnish the body. It awakens the soul. The sensual, with such radiance and unity in bed, is more than sensual: it is transcendental. The experience is a special dispensation of God, and it means that sexual love might be understood as an ecstatic and initiatory prayer. It gives us directly and unmistakably a foretaste of paradise. We move outside of time, in a benediction of flesh that is natural to human life. Alone among the human appetites, erotic love, rightly practiced, can bring us spiritual refinement, and our shared pleasures are both joyful and sacramental.
It is one vision of life, of marriage, of sex, written by a Spaniard in exile in Tunis early in the seventeenth century. It is a vision of unusual gentleness, sustained beauty, and devotional heat. It brings together desire and knowledge, sense and spirit, sex and soul; and instead of shame, we have his song in favor of erotic life that is a flourishing and deliverance.
The Alhambra at twilight, with the famous Torre de Comares in the
foreground and the Sierra Nevada along the horizon. © ROBERT BLESSE
The Alhambra aglow, as seen each night from the Albayzín. © STEVEN NIGHTINGALE
A closeup of the whirling, sidereal muqarnas of the ceiling of the Sala de las Dos Hermanas in the Alhambra. Titus Burckhardt calls them “a honeycomb whose honey consisted of light itself.” © JOSE VAL BAL
The Albayzín as seen from the Sabika Hill, high in the Darro Canyon, east of the Alhambra. © ROBERT BLESSE
A closeup of the center of the Albayzín, with its complexity of terraces, balconies, windows, and flowers. © JOSE VAL BAL
The hill of the Sacromonte above the Albayzín, where the famous lead tablets were found bearing the Seal of Solomon. © STEVEN NIGHTINGALE
The church of San Pedro at the base of the Albayzín, with the Alhambra soaring above. © JOSE VAL BAL
The Albayzín at night, with its illuminated windows and mystery. © JOSE VAL BAL
The Church of Saint John, in the lower Albayzín, with its fine Almohad tower. The church has been recently restored. © JOSE VAL BAL
The thriving Calderería Nueva in the Albayzín, where Arab merchants from north Africa sell goods from around the world. © JOSE VAL BAL
A street near our carmen in the Albayzín, with its vines, cobblestones, and come-hither narrow passageway. © STEVEN NIGHTINGALE
A beautiful terrace in the Albayzín. It has the traditional offerings: grapevine, flowers, railing, woodwork and open sitting area. © STEVEN NIGHTINGALE
The entrance to a typical carmen, with fountain, alberca, flowers, lanterns, brickwork, grapevine, and dappled light. The Alcazar of the Alhambra rises in the distance. © STEVEN NIGHTINGALE
A watercolor of a beautiful and historic carmen in the Albayzín, recently restored. © RICARDO BELLIDO CEBALLOS
A watercolor of the Darro canyon at the base of the Albayzín, showing early fall colors and one of the low bridges. © RICARDO BELLIDO CEBALLOS
A classic torreón of a lovely carmen, with sitting area, flowers, and irresistible hammock. © STEVEN NIGHTINGALE
Tile work over the entranceway to a house in the center of the Albayzín. We came to think of our neighborhood as a barrio of stars. © STEVEN NIGHTINGALE
A street in the Albayzín engulfed by bougainvillea. © STEVEN NIGHTINGALE
In a small garden in the Albayzín, a young fig tree growing aside a flourishing mock orange. © STEVEN NIGHTINGALE
In the Albayzín, wherever there is support, roses will climb and bloom and, given the chance, grow over the roof and onto the street. © STEVEN NIGHTINGALE
Windows of colored glass found now and again in the Albayzín. The morning meant green and blue streaming light in the room. © STEVEN NIGHTINGALE
Lemons and oranges growing over a wall in the afternoon light of the Albayzín. © JOSE VAL BAL
An olambrilla—an example of the small painted tiles often inset into terra cotta floors in the Albayzín—this one of a pomegranate. © STEVEN NIGHTINGALE
The legendary double arches of the Mezquita in Cordoba. Standing among them for any length of time can give rise to a feeling of weightlessness.
The poster advertising the Concurso de Cante Jondo—Contest of Deep Song—organized by García Lorca and Manuel Falla in 1922. It was planned for the Placeta de San Nicolás in the Albayzin, but the big crowds obliged a move to the terrace of the Alhambra.
A wall of tiles in the Torre de Comares. The whole pattern here, in relation to its history and design, is discussed in depth in the chapter entitled “A Few Notions of Geometry and Revelation.” The tile work is meant to offer us the chance to understand patterns of conception and creation, refine our perceptions, and develop new capacities of mind. © STEVEN NIGHTINGALE
Al-Andalus and 1492: the Plate Tectonics of History
WE HAVE BEEN in swift passage through the work of Al-Andalus, so surprising in its variety and accomplishment. The more time spent with the texts and the historians of the period, the more we come to admire the uncommon energies, exploratory zeal, and systematic rigor of the men and women of the time. Hardly a worthy human endeavor was left aside: we have visited their music and poetry, philosophy and mathematics, medicine and astronomy, agriculture, governance, gardening, and the arts of love.
Our look into such work has not allowed us to linger as we might. If we had such time together, we might look into the work of the eleventh-century Córdoban Ibn Hazm. When the caliphate disintegrated, he was forced into exile and occasional imprisonment. But he was a man of his times: highly educated, a sometime vizier, a religious scholar, student of law, and poet. He had the privilege of being, until the age of 14, raised in the harem, where his studies seemed to have enlivened him considerably. The women taught him poetry, composition, and the Koran. And so, later on in life, he thought himself the right man to write a book called The Dove’s Neck Ring. It is an essay on love, which takes as its starting point the idea that those in love reunite parts of a soul divided at creation, so that love is a concord of life in this world that recreates a sublime and original unity. It is a notion that speaks to the power and fatefulness of love, and its unpredictability. Ibn Hazm wants to give us love as it is, in men and women he has known. He writes openly that women’s desires are equal to those of men, and even that women may have prophetic abilities. He wants to show how our lives play out in love, in our gestures and longings, work and concealment, signs and language; in our dreams, by our secrets, with song, in bed. The book even has a chapter charmingly entitled “On Falling in Love While Asleep,” which goes to show that none of us is ever safe.
We should, before we take our leave of Al-Andalus, touch on the transformative current of mysticism that ran through the centuries of the period. Mysticism, in a sentence, is the principle that a man or woman with the right initiative may in this life come into unity with the divine. In Judaism, this principle took form in the Kabbalah, a study that came into prominence in Al-Andalus in the work of Moses de Leon, another far-rambling scholar who finally settled in Ávila. He is the author of the Zohar, the rich book which established the Kabbalah, a method by which the inner reality of the Torah may be studied. The student, using the framework offered in the Zohar, may work his way through levels of meaning in the scripture, each level more sacred than the next, so as to reach an enveloping reality from which all life is derived. The resulting knowledge allows the student to be of secret help on earth and a force for harmony everywhere. Of course, the search for such knowledge requires such inner capacity that it is not recommended that the study begin before age 40. Be that as it may, Moses de Leon’s Zohar (that he wrote, or he conjured, or had revealed to him) is of course supposed to be based on much more ancient texts of the second century and be reflective of secret practices of antiquity. But some scholars think that the wily Moses de Leon dreamed up the whole art in Al-Andalus. This is a period when dreams were given life and released into the world. Whatever the case, it is in Al-Andalus that the Kabbalah was given definitively to the world.
And we cannot touch upon mysticism in Al-Andalus without bringing to center stage the work of the Sufis, an influential and extraordinary group. Poets, scholars, paupers, scientists, doctors, beggars, historians, jokesters, hidden and public men and women, this group created in Al-Andalus and throughout the Middle East one of the most distinguished records of accomplishment in the world. The Sufis hold that in this life, we may seek to purify the heart, perfect the mind, and learn the purpose of all life. Such work can only be undertaken because of love, by means of love, for the purposes of love. If a student makes real inner progress, then the honor of her conduct and her fidelity to learning leads inevitably to a luminescent, uncommon understanding; from such understanding, she has her practical chance to serve life, in love, with rare prescience. The distinguished historian L.P. Harvey has suggested that Granada itself owes its origin to the Sufis, and the Albayzín and the wider city have been the site of many Sufi schools. We shall have in this writing further occasion to lea
rn of the work of the Sufis, after we visit the walls of tiles that are among the most uncanny beauties of all Granada.
We should note that the Christian mystics who rose to prominence in Spain—two examples are Saint Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, both of the sixteenth century—drew upon the mystical work of Al-Andalus in their search to say what they understood of their own spiritual experience. Take, for example, the famous seven mansions of Saint Teresa of Ávila, which we encounter in her mystical essay The Interior Castle. In that book, she describes the soul as made of crystal (or diamond) and having seven rooms that we may visit as we search for God. The conception seems to derive from two directly related Sufi texts, the Maqamat of Abu’l Hasan al-Nuri, which has the same journey through the same seven dwellings, also concentric, and the mystical seven valleys of Faridudin Attar’s famous Parliament of the Birds, so magnetic a text that even Chaucer took a crack at writing a book of the same title and theme. It all bespeaks the cross-pollination of religious writing and experience, and Saint Teresa, one of the most famous Christian mystics of Spain, was of Jewish ancestry. It is as if, in the mysticism of Al-Andalus, we witness a convivencia of souls.
Saint John of the Cross, a monk, poet, and mystic, was a close associate of Saint Teresa. He, also, was from a Jewish family who had converted to Christianity. In a life of wandering, in which he was persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured by his fellow Christians, he managed to write some of the most compelling mystical poetry in Spanish. His poetry draws on Sufi imagery and on the Hebrew Song of Songs—more spiritual convivencia. It is intensely erotic and addresses the chance that we may (as the Sufis also held) die consciously in this life and move by love into unity with the beloved. The ecstasy of two devoted lovers, in his powerful verse, is at once a resurgence of soul—a departure from oneself into another and a better world.
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