A Restless Nature

Abstract

During the Spanish Renaissance, curiosity was the catalyst for change and creativity. Earlier philosophical stories regarding the perils and pitfalls of curiosity, written by Plotinus and Hermes Trismegistus, were adapted to a quite positive end: human creativity in letters.

1. Introduction

In the third century AD, Plotinus added a metaphysical twist to existing notions of curiosity. Positing hubristic inquisitiveness as the motivating force for the creation of time, the Greek philosopher describes “a restlessly active nature which wanted to control itself and be on its own” (Plotinus 1967, 3.7.11). This restless nature “moved, and time moved with it” such that soul “put itself into time… then handed over that which came into being as a slave to time” (Plotinus 1967, 3.7.11). Seeking autonomy, knowledge and creative clout, the curious nature generated difference, ergo time, in the cosmos. Curiosity begat the chaos of change.

A supposed contemporary of Plotinus, the apocryphal author Hermes Trismegistus, describes a similar process in terms of a Narcissus myth: the first son of Mens, he who brings the cosmos into being through intellectual ideation of it, sees himself reflected in Nature’s waters. Unable to resist the beauty of his reflected self in the landscape fashioned by his father, he descends to become one with nature because he too wishes to create, that is, to do something more than he was meant to do.1 Curiosity, here tinged with narcissism, begat creativity.

My focus in what follows will be on two Spanish adaptations of those curiosity stories, for what they tell us about early modern human empowerment in the arts. Mystic poet San Juan de la Cruz (1542–1591) attempts to invert the Hermetic descent so as to find, then join with, the divinity embedded in nature, while Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658) transforms Plotinus’s chronological chaos into a new, aesthetic type of genesis story. Both authors use curiosity’s descent into nature as the spark for their own creative muse.

2. Origins

Curiosity has always had a chameleonic quality, and the early Greeks used two different words to convey its divergent characteristics. The term periergia signified interested intellectual exploration, which itself had two different manifestations: if focused, it was positive but if a bit scattershot, negative. Overly intrusive nosiness or meddling, on the other hand, was roundly denigrated as polupragmon.2 Those general differences in meaning are not always crystal clear in usage: Theophrastus condemned as well-meaning but intemperate the mistakes “of the perierges, the curious one”, and Plutarch decried “as a grievous vice” the negative polypragmosyne (Assmann 2005, p. 38). Writing midway between those two authors, Polybius contrarily used the putatively negative polypragmosyne to cast a positive light on intellectual endeavor (Leigh 2013, p. 1). Leigh adds to the mix yet a third related word, philopragmon, explaining this last as “an essential disposition, a positive relish for different forms of engagement” (Leigh 2013, p. 5).

Throughout the Middle Ages the Latin curiositas, which incorporated the full range of meanings for all three Greek terms, similarly vacillated in signaling traits from enviable to regrettable.3 In the first century BCE, Cicero coined the Latin noun form to describe a happy state of intellectual stimulation: “I’m ravenous with curiosity” (Cicero 1999, 30 (2.12), p. 167).4 Two centuries later, Apuleius criticized Psyche for falling prey to her curiosity.5 From the third century CE we have the two creative curiosity stories referenced above by Hermes Trismegistus and Plotinus. For St. Augustine in the fourth century the quality was, simply, a pejorative, a vice, a sin.6 The saint specifically relates both Plotinus’ restlessly active fallen nature, and the Hermetic first man’s descent, to curiositas as a moral transgression (Torchia 2013, p. 21), while similarly identifying man’s wish to reverse that fall through the exercise of his own intellectual drive as yet another sin, that of wanting to know too much.

Moving forward, intellectual inquisitiveness was considered acceptable only if directed to an approved end, of which there were precious few. Excessive curiosity could be a simple lack of focus or a distracted restlessness, but when willful, it was criticized as intellect run amok without the control of reason. Writing mid-fifth c., Macrobius suggests “hidden causes (arcanas causas), which a few men, by careful inquiry (curiositas) are able to grasp” (Macrobius 2011, p. 133).7 For most philosophers and theologians during this time frame, the post-descent yet still connected-to-its-origins, ergo restless, soul trapped in body should remain focused on divinely oriented intellectual matters (the good curiosity) so as to not get distracted by worldly interests or passions (the bad curiosity).

3. Early Modern Adaptations

Early modern humanists inherited that long-term moral baggage through Augustine and others, but they also gained access to the original Greek texts, some of which presented curiosity as an intellectual drive directed toward ultimate self-realization. Italian philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) translated into Latin for the first time all the works of Plato and the Neoplatonists, as well as Hermetic author Hermes Trismegistus. Reading those authors in concert with Christian writings, Ficino identified a pia philosophia that he considered the primordial juncture between philosophy and religious belief. For the Italian philosopher, restoring that original confluence was key to resolving man’s perennial questions on essence and existence, that is, it was the means with which to satisfy his intellectual curiosity. There are a number of texts in which Ficino speaks to the negative side of the trait, but he also insists that for a true philosopher, it is vital. In his Three Books on Life (De vita), the Italian philosopher attacks the detractors who accuse him of heresy as “intellectual busybodies (curiosis ingeniis)”, while defending the inherent worth of his own intellectual curiosity (Ficino 2002, I.55). In Ficino’s commentary to Plato’s Republic we read that “just as the people are eager and curious to perceive these lower objects of the senses, so the mind of the philosopher is equally inclined and keen to discover the ideal principles of all these things and [he] is a shrewd hunter of truth itself” (Ficino 2009, p. 24).8 In this place, Ficino is glossing Republic Book V, where Plato says that the philosopher “is a lover of truth” who diligently seeks it. This is the appropriate curiosity of Macrobius, seeking “arcanas causas”, or in Ficino’s words, “ideales rationes”. There are caveats, and the Italian philosopher questions: “will curiosity [alone] make a philosopher?” only to answer that those who simply gorge themselves on every sight and sound are merely “an imitation” (Ficino 2009, p. 24). In sum, we can appreciate in Ficino’s own words, as well as in his readings of Plato and the Neoplatonists, the persistence of curiosity’s dual aspects. Still risky or dispreciable in some instances, it is nonetheless an acceptable quality for the true philosopher. A lover of wisdom will direct his or her soul to hunt for its own “arcane causes” and “ideal reasonings” that is, its original, ideal principle. The message, as heard and amplified by later 16th c. thinkers, was that curiosity was fine if focused.

Early modern Spaniards welcomed with open arms the messages conveyed in these newly translated ancient and classical texts.9 Specifically on the sources of the two curiosity stories referenced above, we know that the Hermetic writings underpin the 16th c.’s celebrated Spanish mysticism,10 and Spain’s writers also speak of Plotinus in glowing terms. Dominican theologian Fray Luis de Granada praises the “great philosopher named Plotinus” who achieved union with God by separating himself from all earthly concerns (Granada [1554] 1994, p. 137).11 Poet and literary critic Fernando de Herrera makes use of the Greek philosopher’s authority on the geometry of self-fashioning and control: “as Plotinus says, as soon as we concentrate our thought on one thing, it is expected that all the other senses will move into common sense, in which thought is formed, just as radii move from circumference to center” (Herrera 1966, p. 313).12 Augustinian Pedro Malón de Chaide uses Plotinus to explicate Plato: “The ideas, says Plotinus, the infinite and ineffable forces of divine Wisdom, immense and fertile sources, first forms, concur in the divinity, that is, they are one thing with God” (Malón de Chaide 1959, 3.89). Lexicographer Sebastián de Covarrubias defines ‘Manes’ or men’s souls that have left their bodies by, in part, noting what Augustine says in reference to what Plotinus had said: “that the souls of men are called daemones, and if they are good they are converted into Lares but if bad, into Lemurs or Larvae” (Covarrubias Orozco 1994, “Manes”). Certain echoes of Plotinian thought in Spanish letters have been highlighted: per Elias Rivers, Francisco de Aldana’s “Otavas en toscano” mirror the silent, motionless communion between God and the angels that is a concept of fundamental importance in the Plotinian scale of hypostases (Rivers 1953, p. 168), and Hugues Didier studied the impact of the Greek philosopher’s thought on the writings of Jesuit polymath Juan Nieremberg. Aurora Egido points to Plotinus as one important factor among many influential in the writings of Baltasar Gracián. Given that both Nieremberg and Gracián were members of the Jesuit Order, it is noteworthy that deluxe editions of Ficino’s translation of Plotinus were housed in more than one Jesuit College or professed house, that is, places of retreat and learning.13

In short, the Plotinian and Hermetic texts were readily available to and popular with early modern Spanish thinkers, whose artistic environment encouraged creative experimentation with those concepts, forms and meanings. Spanish authors challenged and altered in surprising ways the earlier Neoplatonic aesthetic, pushing it in a direction that would lead to later 18th c. modern aesthetics.14 This changed artistic impetus included new praise for intellectual curiosity, and dictionaries from 1490 (Palencia 1967) through 1611 (Sebastián de Covarrubias) defined the word in positive terms.15 In Spanish writings throughout the sixteenth century, curiosity is frequently used in a positive light: Arce de Otálora praises Quintilian for his curiosity; Cabrera de Córdoba offers the adjective to denote something attractive to the eyes without any Augustinian condemnation; Antonio de Guevara praises curious historians who saved ancient histories; and Bartolomé de las Casas offers an interesting dichotomy between the “curious philosopher and the devout Christian”, each of whom might travel to the Indies for a different reason: the philosopher to enjoy its beauty and marvels, and the Christian to attribute that beauty to God’s design for the world (Casas 1992, I.323).

Within that modernizing trajectory, the metaphysical curiosity stories referenced above were reworked in creative verse by San Juan de la Cruz, and in prose by Baltasar Gracián. I’ll begin with the former.

4. Restless Nature I: Hermes Trismegistus and San Juan de la Cruz

San Juan de la Cruz’s Cántico espiritual consists of two hundred verses composed in the stanza form known as’lyre’. Following Garcilaso de la Vega’s early 16th c. first use in the Spanish language of this Horatian-derived mix of hendecasyllable and septisyllable lines, the form became a favorite for Spanish poets. In the Cántico, it is used to describe a searching journey through nature, with the mix of shorter (seven-syllable) and longer (eleven-syllable) verses adding a dramatic, rhythmic unevenness to complement the passionate search that structures the poem. The poetic voice is stylized as a female, logically read to indicate that the speaker represents the poet’s soul,16 which narrates its own restless journey through nature seeking hidden signs of its lover’s self and beauty. This is the acceptable curiosity, soul searching for its origin, a goal clearly invoked in the first verses: “Where have you hidden yourself,/Lover, and left me weeping?” (Juan de la Cruz 2000, ll.1–2). Seeking traces left in flowers, fields and waters, the poet races through the natural world demanding relief for his own restless curiosity, to be satisfied only when that Lover reveals himself for a euphoric if threatening end: “Reveal yourself/and let the sight and beauty of you kill me” (ll.51–52). Certain places in the natural world resonate with imagery of the Hermetic curiosity story as they offer hope of rediscovery: “Oh crystalline waters/if you would only, in your silvery semblances/suddenly form/the desired eyes/drawn and borne inside myself” (ll.56–60). In inverse fashion, those verses echo the descent by the son of Mens in the Hermetic text: he saw himself reflected in earth’s waters, and so descended to merge with her. The poet searches out that fallen son of God, who he quite obviously believes is literally inhabiting the surrounding nature: “My Lover the mountains,/the solitary, sylvan hills,/the strange regions,/the singing rivers,/the whistle of the loving winds” (ll.66–70). The poet’s soul conjures with “sweet lyre/and siren song” those elements of nature, then finally enters into the garden in which it will find refuge, to rest there in the “sweet arms” of its loved one (ll.101–2; 110).

San Juan de la Cruz tells us that Mother Nature was wounded by the descent of a Lover who can now be released by the poetic voice. Nature will provide solace by giving its breast to the wandering, desperate soul in order to teach it “a most scrumptious science” (Juan de la Cruz 2000, l.132). When it does so, and just as it had when descending to merge with nature’s waters, the Lover leaves the poet’s wandering soul covered in “grace and beauty” (l.165). San Juan’s verses describe an attempt to invert the son of Mens’ descent in the Hermetic text, and the overriding message of the poem is clear: the Lover is nature. This rather obvious deduction has presented a raft of difficulties for Christian readers, who may allow that their God graces nature with his beauty in an ephemeral sense, but cannot accept that he is nature. This suggestion is especially fraught in Spanish, a language in which this last supposition crosses the line into heretical pantheistic thought. God may be temporarily in, but he may not be, nature. An English reader does not differentiate lexically between being as essence and existence, using the same verb ‘to be’ for both. A Spanish speaker, however, chooses between two verbs, ser and estar, with the former indicating essence and the latter, existence, a temporary status. For Christians, God may be (estar) in nature, but he is not (ser) nature.

On that same theologically thorny basis, alongside the risky suggestion of pantheistic pitfall regarding divine essence, one very small detail in the poem has pestered scholars for centuries. In the last verse of the fifth stanza, we read “he left them dressed in his beauty” (Juan de la Cruz 2000, l.25). The Lover sought by the wandering poetic soul left the parts of nature (woods, streams, mountains, etc.) dressed as himself. He descended to merge with nature, ergo his beauty now is the natural world. Struggling mightily to explain the possessive adjective ‘his’, editors, for the most part, avoid the issue by deleting it. Calling the adjective a probable scribal insertion, the issue is reduced to a simple syllable-counting concern: if one deletes the possessive and aspirates the ‘h’ of the word beauty (hermosura), all is resolved. Some unidentified silly scribe must have failed to notice that, and so resolved a putative metrical irregularity by inserting the possessive. That series of conjectures and deductions is unnecessary, however, as San Juan de la Cruz fairly obviously included the adjective because that is just how the Hermetic curiosity story reads: the Lover, son of the divinity, joined with nature, thusly clothing it in his beauty. A determination to erase the evidence of that story obscures one very obvious truth: early modern Christianity was different from that practiced in later centuries. An ideology riddled with Neoplatonic and Hermetic thought, the pia philosophia envisaged by Ficino was celebrated by Christian thinkers in the following 16th c., during which San Juan wrote his Cántico. Further, that story of curiosity leading to the descent of the son of Mens is very similar, albeit with one key difference to the one told by Christians for their own son of God, who likewise descended to become one with human nature. In the Biblical version, God sent his son to earth to save mankind. In the Hermetic text, that son’s own curiosity and creativity were the driving forces behind his descent. San Juan de la Cruz chose that latter version, activating those same qualities in himself so as to reverse the process and reunite with the divinity embedded in nature. Curiosity served as a stimulus for his art.

5. Restless Nature II: Plotinus and Baltasar Gracián

A more radical take on the old curiosity stories is that proposed by the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián in his highly regarded philosophical novel titled Criticón, published in three parts in 1651, 1653 and 1657. By the time of that publication, the Spanish Jesuit was already a cause célèbre for his 1642 Sharp Wit and the Art of Ingeniousness, a book in which he codifies the underlying principles of metaphor and brilliant conceptual expression. Gracián’s Sharp Wit… has been read as a theory of language, a neo-rhetorical treatise and a style manual, either praised as a “code book to poetic intellectualism” (Díaz Plaja 1949–1958, 3.710),17 or insulted as a “code book to bad literary taste” (Pérez Lasheras 2001, p. 72).18 For my purposes here, it is noteworthy that the Spanish author’s basic proposals regarding the underlying structures of man’s creative language in Sharp Wit… parallel what Stephen Gersh calls the analogical deep structures of Plotinus and Ficino on ratio, proportion, concord in discord and harmonics as the foundation of reality and its creation (Gersh 2017, pp. xxi–xxviii). A few quotations exemplify those same factors in Gracián’s text: “If perception of wit is credited to the eagle, producing such wit is engaging with the angels: the job of cherubins and the elevation of men who take being to the original hierarchy” (Gracián 1993, p. 316).19 That is, man can become like the angels and transcend this world; language is his weapon and wit, its most exalted expression. Like Plotinus, Gracián details consonant actions for sight, sound and intellect: “proportion among parts of the visible is beauty, among sounds, consonance and for intellect, it is concept/conceit” (p. 316), and he elaborates on how those factors come together: “The conceptual artifice consists of a skillful concordance, in a harmonic correlation between extreme knowables, expressed through an act of intellect” (p. 320). The perfection of such subtle concord is complex: “There is pure wit, which only offers one species of conceit, whether this be through fainting and parrying, or via proportion; and there is mixed wit, the monster of conceptual thought, because it combines two or three species of subtleties, with their perfections mixed and their essences speaking to one other” (p. 325).

Words, for Gracián, are alive and powerful as manifestations of human intellectual prowess in the creation of structural linguistic harmonics. The Spanish Jesuit uses the terminology of Ficino and Plotinus, but where they employed ratio, proportion and harmony to interpret how God creates reality, Gracián shifts attention to the mechanics of the human brain as it creates in language. That change in focus, purpose and power center underscores a new confidence in human agency. Through language, man can uncover “the secret relations hidden in the Universe of things” (Soto Rivera 2006, p. 71). The ancient image of the poet as an interpreter of the divine mind has been fortified but redirected in a secular fashion: the wordsmith’s powers now proceed from human rather than divine source.20 Further, this human writer creating in words not only understands but also directs the metaphysical universe he inhabits.

In the first part of his novel Criticón, published nine years after Sharp Wit, Gracián fashions just such a world in letters as an exploration of the four ages or seasons of man. He focuses specifically on knowledge: what it is, what it means to have it, and the rights and responsibilities associated with its possession. In his Prologue “To a Reader (A quien leyere)”, the author tells us that human life can be divided into three component stages: nature, art and moral lesson. Given that the first few chapters (crisis) of the novel will be my focus in what follows, I am looking at the author’s exploration of man’s nature, prior to any art with which he might perfect or ruin that nature.21 The focus of these sections is what man is in the first instance, his essence, his intellect and his entry into the world.22 It is here, as well, that Gracián rewrites the Plotinian curiosity story.

El Criticón opens with an old man, shipwrecked and drowning as he tries to reach the shores of an island called Santa Elena. He is described by the narrative voice as “midway between life and death (equívoco entre la muerte y la vida)”. That phrasing and imagery echo Plotinus, who describes the nature of the soul as “amphibious, compelled to live by turns the life there [above], and the life here [below]” (Plotinus 1967, 4.8.4, pp. 34–35). For Spaniards of the time, the named place (Santa Elena), in which Gracián’s story is set, was also an amphibious, mid-way point between old and new worlds. Discovered in 1502 by Portuguese sailor João da Nova, the island served as a cargo port for over a century, remaining uninhabited until 1657, that is, six years after the publication of the first part of Criticón. In the novel, the drowning man Critilo is rescued by Andrenio, who is described as an angel in both looks and deeds. Andrenio has had no prior contact whatsoever with human beings; he is untainted by experience. Critilo tries to thank his savior, only to realize that Andrenio speaks no language. So, the rescued man takes it upon himself to teach his rescuer to speak, after which they share histories and a journey in search of immortality.23 Throughout the novel, Critilo guides Andrenio through two phases of intellectual development: the discursive or dianoetic, and the interior or noetic. Critilo teaches Andrenio how to survive in the world of men, challenging him to see beyond worldly deceit and to find its hidden truths. Finally, the two characters arrive at the Island of Immortality with its, again with a Plotinian echo, Mansion of Eternity.

Andrenio learns Critilo’s language quickly due to, as the narrator tells us, his “curiosity to know truths” (Gracián 2009, p. 69). Once equipped to narrate his origins, Andrenio tells Critilo that he was raised by wolves, in a cave, high up on a cliff.24 His young brother wolves learned to navigate the cliffside, but he physically could not. He was intellect in human body, trapped in the environment of beasts. Andrenio employs multiple Platonic images in his first discourse, including a reference to the “accursed cave” (p. 71) in which he was raised with wolf pups and in which he had neither exterior nor interior light.25 One day he felt an urge to know, a “thirst for knowledge” that he describes as “such a great blow of light and awareness that, thinking about myself I began to recognize myself and to pursue all sorts of reflection on my own being” (p. 71).26 Here, Andrenio in the Platonic cave begins to practice Plotinian self-reflection. First, his curiosity causes him to distinguish between himself and the wolves. Then, his “observation and curiosity” (p. 72) lead him to listen to the world and to “imagine” the parts he could not see from the cave.27 His efforts include the very Plotinian act of splitting himself in two: “I argued with myself at times to see if, pushed, I could exceed myself; I duplicated myself… to see if, divorced from my ignorance I might attain the realization of my desires” (p. 70, my emphasis).28 This self-reflection and self-duplication is just what Plotinus advises. In Ennead 5.3, we read that the man who knows himself is double, one knowing the nature of the reasoning, which belongs to the soul, and one up above this man, who knows himself according to Intellect because he has become that Intellect; and by that Intellect he thinks himself again, not any longer as man, but having become altogether other and snatching himself up into the higher world, drawing up only the better part of soul, which alone is able to be winged for intellection (Plotinus 1967, 5.3.4, p. 83).

For Plotinus, the initial illumination “turns the soul back on itself” so that intellect “will duplicate itself” (Plotinus 1967); Gracián describes the exact same process for Andrenio: a “great blow of light and awareness”, then self-reflection and self-duplication (Gracián 2009, p. 71). Apart from Gracián, no other Spanish author references this act or even uses the word duplicarse in a related fashion. The Spanish author’s most obvious source is plainly Plotinus, recognized as the first philosopher “to have clearly distinguished the concepts of soul… and ego” (E.R. Dodds, cited in O’Daly 1973, p. 4). In order to follow the Delphic commandment “know thyself”, Plotinus split himself in two: “the knower must objectify the self, and in so doing, duplicate the self in the very act of knowing it” (Torchia 2013, p. 41). For the Greek philosopher, as for Andrenio in Gracián’s novel, that self-knowledge was “the necessary prelude to philosophy” (O’Daly 1973, p. 19).

For Plotinus, soul in body is “in a state of alienation” from itself and there are two ways for it to investigate its power and nature, its divinity (Plotinus 1967, 5.1.1–2). The first is to duplicate itself so as to grasp itself “as the expressed thought of Intellect” (5.1.3), precisely as Andrenio did in the cave. The second route to knowledge is through rational thought in a historical process, i.e., philosophy in time (O’Daly 1973, p. 18). In Gracián’s novel, Andrenio splits himself in two for his first realizations, prior to his rescue of Critilo. Post-rescue, amphibious soul Critilo leads Andrenio through an enactment of the second model for intellectual self-fulfillment. In short, Gracián personifies Plotinus’ restless nature in Andrenio. The character self-duplicates so as to self-reflect: restless and miserable in the cave, he found refuge in dreams of what might lay outside that darkness. One night his world [the cave] was jolted by an earthquake. In that moment Andrenio felt himself being pulled apart, he was lost to himself, and the experience, he says, was “an eclipse of his soul” and a “deadly ecstasy or rapture (deliquio)” at the same time (Gracián 2009, p. 76). His “painful jail” was broken open and he was “born again” (p. 76). This restless nature descended and was thrust into human time. Andrenio relates that he was stunned, between “curiosity and happiness”, at the sight of “this great theater of earth and sky” and specifically at the sun, a “monarch of light” that he instinctively adored (p. 78). As Plato says of Socrates, Andrenio stood still for a full day, admiring and watching the sun, innately aware that contemplation of this visible, corporeal sun might lead to knowledge of divine, incorporeal intellect. All of this preceded Andrenio’s rescue of the drowning, amphibious Critilo.

Criticón is most commonly read for its moral lessons, with old man Critilo teaching youth Andrenio how to “become a person (hacerse persona)” by rejecting the risky pitfalls of human existence. In this view, wisdom and experience act as a guide for the innocent. For example, on realizing that Andrenio knows no language, Critilo highlights the need for it as a means to elevate thought. This argument, although inconsistent with Plotinian belief regarding language as only necessary for our terrestrial life (Robertson 2008, p. 65),29 is nonetheless clearly reflected in the specific details of Andrenio’s story. The character did not need language to begin his self-reflection; pre-language, in the cave, he duplicated himself so as to know himself. In this sense, an alternative reading of Gracián’s novel might see Critilo as evidence of the corrupt influence that life on earth, life in time, with language, has for a fallen angel, that restless nature descended into the chaos of chronological existence. He is, after all, himself, amphibious, drowning and in need of rescue. The younger man, Andrenio, is an angel who will only need speech because he is in the company of the older, earthly man. In the cave, he had already been born again, without language, through intellect. Taking Plotinus’s recommendations, those earlier steps prepared the character Andrenio for philosophy as a way of life. With language, Critilo leads him through the next steps.

Thus, we can read Andrenio as an intuitive intellect, duplicating himself to know himself prior to the fall. Only after that does he meet Critilo, who will lead him through the Plotinian possibilities for dialectic and then noetic self-knowledge through ratiocination, through the philosophy of and by an embodied soul. For Plotinus, the Soul bears Intellect, an idea matched here in Gracián’s novel with Critilo-Soul bearing Andrenio-Intellect through multiple life lessons until they arrive at the Mansion of Eternity. Taking the imagery one step further, rather than see the two characters as separate co-protagonists, Gracián may have been playing with a recreation of the Neoplatonic–Hermetic androgyne. If so, the Spanish Jesuit did so through curiosity that first creates and then serves as a means to reverse humankind’s fall. In other words, precisely what St. Augustine condemned. Gracián personifies in Andrenio the fall of the soul from a mountaintop cave to earth, along with the cyclical result of that temporalization: man’s need to learn everything, over and over and over again. In short, curiosity is humankind’s curse but also its salvation. Whereas San Juan de la Cruz sought to release the Hermetic first son, the divinity in nature, Gracián seeks to reverse the Plotinian fall that created our chronological chaos. Without that rescue, man is doomed to discord:

(Critilo to Andrenio): “this universe is composed of contraries and makes concord out of discord… There is no thing that does not have its opposite, with which it fights, sometimes winning, sometimes giving up… But more than this, within the same man, within the doors of his own physical body, this discord is even more pitched [in battle]”.

(Andrenio): “What are you saying, man against himself?”

(Critilo): “Yes, given that what he has as a world, even if it be a small one [the recognized trope of man as microcosm], he is fully composed of discord” (Gracián 2009, pp. 91–92).

The dual and dueling aspects of curiosity are, in Criticón, embodied in man. A creature of time, he both creates it and fights against it.

6. Literary Dramatization as Philosophy

Gracián’s works have been studied for their reflection of philosophical trends popular in the Spanish 16th c.: Neostoicism (Aurora Egido), Scholasticism (Alban Forcione), and the resonance of Nicholas de Cusa (Alexander Parker). The connection to Plotinus, although recognized in general, has not yet been highlighted for its multiple specific details. One principal difficulty is that, in Criticón, Gracián, like other Spanish authors of his time, dramatizes his concerns rather than presenting analytical thought in essay or dialogue form. He explores the Plotinian ideas on curiosity and time in a new genre, the one we now call the novel, a form that was not so identified in his day. For Gracián and his contemporaries, long-form creative writings in prose mixed philosophy and invention. They were called “poetry in prose” or “poetic prose”, phrasings that signify an as-yet unnamed and amorphous mix of history and poetry, fact and fiction. These works are a place of experimentation in creative letters, avenues for Spaniards to dramatize their philosophy on life, letters and art. From the last third of the 16th c. and moving forward, Spanish writers would realize in literary works what earlier thinkers had posited in analytical terms. Dialogues were incorporated into expanded settings that make the conversations a part of everyday existence. Prose was exploratory, inevitably poetic and philosophical.

This poetic (in prose) attitude toward self, cosmos and nature was driven by a Ficinian, Plotinian, Neoplatonic type of intellectual curiosity, the positive curiositas earlier thinkers described as that of the true philosopher. Spanish authors use those same questions as a springboard for creative poetics. San Juan de la Cruz modernized the Hermetic curiosity story in a paradoxical fashion by Biblicizing it, offering an enigmatic echo of the Song of Songs as the means to recover the primordial lover of hermetic myth. Gracián, a Jesuit whose religious order warned against curiosity as a means to inquire into the doings of others, nonetheless explored in prose the metaphysical foundations of man’s nature as curious, creative intellect. In Criticón we have a novelesque recreation of the underlying structural metaphysics of Ennead 3.7, On Eternity and Time. Speculative curiositas underlies many 16th c. Spanish literary creations, in verse as well as in prose. In this sense, curiosity begat modernity.