The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (61 page)

Having said these words, Busqueros went next door with the trusted servant of Señora Moro. They conferred for a long time, after which Busqueros came back by himself, carrying a sort of map of the Calle de los Agustinos in his hand.

‘Here's the end of the street which leads towards the Dominicans' house,' he said. ‘There you will find the man you have already seen, with two others he will answer for. As for me, I shall be at the
opposite end with the pick of my friends, who are also yours, Don Lope. No, no, I am wrong. There will be a couple there, and the pick of them will be by this back door to keep the Duke of Santa Maura's people at bay.'

I thought that all these explanations gave me the right to say a few words and to ask what I would be doing while all this was going on. But Busqueros interrupted me imperiously and said, ‘Not one question, Señor Don Lope, not one word! That was the condition and if you have forgotten already, I haven't.'

For the rest of the day Busqueros did nothing but come and go. It was the same in the evening. Sometimes the house next door was too well lit; at others there were suspicious characters in the street; or again the agreed signals had not been seen. Sometimes Busqueros came himself; sometimes he sent reports by one of his henchmen. Eventually he came to get me, and I dutifully followed him. My heart was thumping, as you may well imagine. The thought that I was disobeying my father added to my worries; but love conquered all other feelings.

On entering the Calle de los Agustinos, Busqueros showed me where his trusted friends were posted and gave them the password. If someone came by, he told me, my friends would seem to pick a quarrel with him and the passer-by would quickly take another route. ‘Now we're here,' he continued, ‘here's the ladder you must climb up. As you can see, it is securely propped up against a pile of building-stones. I will look out for the signal and when I clap, you must climb up.'

Who would believe that after all these plans and arrangements Busqueros picked the wrong window? But that's what he did. And you will see what became of it.

I had my right arm in a sling but when he gave me the signal I climbed up nimbly with the help of only one arm. When I reached the top of the ladder I could not find the half-open shutter I had been promised. I risked knocking with my remaining arm, supporting myself only on my legs. At that moment a man opened the shutter violently, pushing it against me. I lost my balance and fell from the top of the ladder on to the building-stone below. I broke my already injured arm in two places. A leg which was trapped in the rungs was
also broken and the other one dislocated; and I was lacerated from my neck to my hips. The man who had opened the shutter, and who apparently wanted me to die, shouted to me, ‘Are you dead?'

Fearing that he would come to finish me off, I replied that I was dead.

Then the same man shouted, ‘Is there a purgatory?'

As I was suffering appalling pain I replied that there was certainly a purgatory and that I was there already. Then I think I fainted.

‘There had certainly been thunder and lightning,' he replied. ‘Perhaps it was that which made Busqueros mistake the house.'

‘Ah,' I cried, ‘there can't be any doubt. You are a soul from purgatory. You are poor Aguilar.'

I immediately ran out into the street and as dawn was just breaking I hired mules and went quickly to the Camaldolese monastery. There I found the Knight of Toledo prostrated in front of an image. I prostrated myself beside the knight and, as one is not allowed to speak aloud in the Camaldolese monastery, I put my lips to his ear and told him Soarez's story. At first this had no effect on him but then Toledo turned to me and mouthed in my ear, ‘My dear Avarito, do you think that the wife of the
oidor
Uscariz still loves me and has remained faithful to me?'

‘Bravo!' I replied. ‘Shhh! Let's not shock these good hermits. Say your prayers as usual, and I'll let it be known that we have completed our period of retreat.'

When the superior learned that it was our intention to return to the world he was no less fulsome for all that about the knight's piety.

As soon as we had left the monastery the knight recovered all his jollity. I told him about Busqueros. He told me that he knew him, that he was a gentleman in the household of the Duke of Arcos and that he was looked on as unbearable throughout Madrid.

Rebecca had long wanted to know what the duke thought about religion, for she had a decided aversion for Christianity and she was involved in the plot to encourage us to embrace the Muslim faith. So she addressed the duke in a tone half-way between the serious and the playful and asked him if there were no awkward equations in his religion.

Velásquez had become very solemn once religion had been mentioned. But when he realized that the question was a sort of joke he looked angry. He thought for a few moments and then replied as follows:

I can therefore indicate the infinite, but I cannot comprehend it. Now, if it is the case that I cannot comprehend, cannot express but
can only indicate the infinitely great and the infinitely small, how can I express what is simultaneously infinitely great, infinitely intelligent, infinitely good and the creator of all infinities? Here the Church comes to the aid of my geometry. She gives me the expression of three contained in one without breaking it down. What can I object to that, which is beyond my powers of conception? All I can do is offer my submission.

It is not science which leads to unbelief but rather ignorance. The ignorant man thinks he understands something provided that he sees it every day. The natural philosopher walks amid enigmas, always striving to understand and always half-understanding. He learns to believe what he does not understand, and that is a step on the road to faith. Don Newton and Don Leibniz were true Christians, and even theologians, and both acknowledged the mystery of numbers which they could not comprehend.

If they had been born into our Church they would also have confessed another no less inconceivable mystery, which consists in the possibility of an intimate union between man and his creator. In problem form this possibility does not afford any direct data because it gives us only unknowns. But it affords us some grasp of it in that it indicates to us that man is completely separated from other material intelligences. For if man really is alone in his species in this world, if we are firmly convinced of his isolation in the whole animal kingdom, then we can accept with less difficulty that he can achieve union with his God. After these preliminaries, let us now turn for a moment to the intelligence of animals.

An animal wills, remembers, combines, weighs up alternatives and decides. It thinks but it doesn't think about its thinking, which is the force of the intellect raised to the power of two. An animal does not say, ‘I am a thinking being.' This abstraction is so far from its nature that one never sees an animal endowed with the idea of number, although this is the simplest of abstractions.

The magpie does not leave its nest as long as it suspects a man to be hiding nearby. It was decided to test the extent of its intelligence. Five hunters went into a hide and the magpie only left its nest after seeing the fifth emerge from it. When six or seven hunters came, the magpie lost count, so that it always left the nest after the fifth. Some have
deduced from this that the magpie can count up to five. They are wrong. The magpie had retained the image of all five men but it had not counted them. To count is to abstract the number from the material circumstance.

We see charlatans put ponies on show which tap with their hooves the number of spades or clubs on a card. But it is a sign from their master which makes them tap or stop tapping. They have no idea of numeration and this abstraction, which is the simplest of all abstractions, may be considered to mark the limit of animal intelligence.

Doubtless the intelligence of animals often comes close to our own. The dog soon recognizes the master of the house and his friends and those who are neither friends nor enemies. It is fond of the former and tolerates the latter. It hates evil-looking people. It gets upset and gets excited. It hopes and fears. It is ashamed if it is found doing what it has been told not to do. Pliny says that elephants have been taught to dance, and that once they were found rehearsing in the moonlight.

The intelligence of animals surprises us when it is applied to particular circumstances. They do what they are told, they avoid doing what they are told not to do and what would be harmful to them in other ways. But they do not distinguish the general idea of the good from the particular idea associated with one action or another. So they cannot classify their actions. They cannot divide them into good and bad actions. This abstraction is more difficult than numeration. They are not capable of the easier form so they will not be of the more difficult.

Conscience is partly man's own creation, since what is bad in one country is good in another. But in general, conscience warns of what abstraction has placed under the one or the other sign, that is, good or evil. Animals are incapable of such abstraction. They therefore have no conscience and cannot be guided by it. So they are therefore not susceptible of reward or punishment other than that which we inflict on them for our convenience and not for theirs.

So man is alone in his species in a world where we find nothing which does not fit into a general scheme. Man alone knows his thought and alone can abstract and generalize qualities. He alone is susceptible to merit or demerit, since abstraction, generalization and division into good and evil have shaped his conscience.

But why should man have qualities which distinguish him from all the other animals? Here analogy leads us to say that everything in this world has a well-specified goal. Conscience must have been given to man for a purpose. And thus we are brought by reasoning to natural religion. And where does that lead us? Nowhere other than to the same goal as revealed religion, that is, to future rewards. For where the products are the same, the factors cannot be very different.

But the reasoning on which natural religion is based is a dangerous instrument which can easily harm the person using it. What virtue has not been attacked by reason? What crime have people not tried to justify by it? Could eternal providence have exposed the fate of ethics to the mercy of sophistry? Certainly not. Faith, supported by the habits of childhood, filial love, and the needs of the human heart, offers man a surer mainstay than reason. Conscience itself, which distinguishes us from brute beasts, has been doubted, and sceptics have made it their plaything. They have insinuated that man is not different from the countless other material intelligences which inhabit this world. But in spite of them man senses that he has a conscience, and the priest uttering the words of consecration says to him, ‘a God comes down to this altar and unites Himself with you.' Then man understands clearly that he does not belong to brute nature. He withdraws inside himself and there he guards his conscience.

But you will say that it isn't a question of proving to me that natural religion tends to the same end as revealed religion. If you are a Christian, you must believe in revealed religion and in the miracles which have established it. But wait a moment. Let us first be clear about the difference between revealed and natural religion.

According to theologians, God is the author of the Christian religion. He is this also according to philosophers, since nothing happens, according to them, without divine permission. But the theologians base their arguments on miracles, which are exceptions to the general laws of nature and with which philosophers have some difficulty. In so far as they study nature, the latter tend to believe that God, the author of our holy religion, decided to establish it only by human means and without setting aside the general laws which govern the natural and spiritual world.

Here the difference is slight, but natural philosophers attempt to
make a yet more delicate distinction. They say to theologians, ‘Those who have seen miracles have no difficulty in believing in them. The merit of faith is yours, since you have come eighteen centuries later. And if faith is a merit, yours is also tested, whether miracles really occurred or whether a sacred tradition transmitted knowledge of them to you. If the test is the same, then the merit is also the same.'

At this point theologians abandon the defensive and say to natural philosophers, ‘But who has revealed to you the laws of nature? How do you know whether miracles, instead of being exceptions, are not rather manifestations of phenomena unknown to you? For you do not know the laws of nature with which you dare to challenge the decrees of religion. How do the rays of light, which you have postulated in the laws of optics, pass through each other in all directions without colliding with each other? Whereas, if they strike a mirror, they bounce off it as though they were elastic bodies? Sounds pass through each other in the same way and they are sent back in the form of echoes. They obey more or less the same laws as rays of light, yet they seem only to be a way of being whereas rays of light seem substantial. You don't understand it for at bottom you don't understand anything.'

Natural philosophers are forced to admit that they know nothing. But they can say, ‘If we are not able to define a miracle, and are very far from being able to deny it, you theologians don't have the right to reject the declarations of the Church fathers, who admitted that our dogmas and mysteries existed already in earlier religions. Now as these were not given to ancient religions by revelation, you must incline to our opinion and concede that the same dogmas could have been established without the help of miracles.' Finally, these natural philosophers add, ‘If you want us clearly to state our opinion on the origins of Christianity, here it is.

‘The temples of the ancients were slaughterhouses and their gods shameless adulterers, but some congregations of religious men had purer principles and less repellent sacrifices. Philosophers called the divinity
theos
, without specifying Jupiter or Saturn. Rome, then, was subduing the world by its arms and subjugating it to its vices. A divine master appeared in Palestine. He preached love of one's fellow
man, contempt for riches, forgiveness of trespasses, resignation to the will of a Father who is in heaven.

‘Simple men had followed him during his lifetime. They came together after his death. Other more enlightened men chose from among pagan rituals that which was best adapted to the new cult. Finally, Church fathers made heard from the pulpit a more persuasive eloquence than that which up till then had been heard in public. And thus by apparently human means Christianity was formed from the purest elements of pagan and Jewish religions. But that is also how the will of heaven is accomplished. Doubtless, the creator of the universe could have written His holy law in letters of fire across the starry night sky, but He did not do so. He hid the rites of a more perfect religion in ancient mysteries, just as in the acorn He hid the forest which one day is going to give shade to our descendants. Unknown to us, we live in the midst of causes whose effects will surprise posterity. Therefore we give to God the name providence. We would call him only power if He acted otherwise.'

Such is the idea that natural philosophers have formed of the origins of Christianity. It is far from pleasing to the theologians, but they have not got the courage to contest it, since they see in the opinions of their antagonists true and great ideas which make them indulgent towards forgivable errors.

Thus, rather like the lines we call asymptotes, the opinions of philosophers and theologians can converge, without ever meeting, to within a distance which is smaller than any given distance. That is to say, that difference becomes less than any given distance or perceptible quantity. Now does a difference which I cannot perceive give me the right to set my convictions up in opposition to my brothers and to my Church? Does it give me the right to sow my doubts in the faith that they possess and which they have made the basis of their ethics? Certainly not. I haven't got that right. So I submit heart and soul. Don Newton and Don Leibniz were Christians and even theologians; the latter even strove for the reunion of the churches. As for me, who am not worthy to be named after such great men, I study theology in the works of creation and find in it new reasons for adoring the creator.