What kind of person says it is fortunate to undergo misfortunes? Right after that, consider this question: What is said about such people these days?
If the response to the first question is “saints”, then the response to the second question would likely be “masochists.” Or if the response would be more careful, circumspect, and academically precise, perhaps “self-haters.”
Strangely enough, one of the best-loved characters of the past 500 years, by common man and professor alike, is this very kind of person. Early in what we know of his life, he was humiliated in a fall from his horse and then drubbed by an angry mule-driver he had threatened. Listen to his response, lying on the ground, unable to get up not only for his bruises but also for the excessive weight of his armor: “Yet nonetheless he considered himself fortunate, for as he saw it, misfortunes such as this were common to knights-errant.”
The man is none other than Don Quixote, the Knight of La Mancha, of whom the novelist Vladimir Nabokov said “stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant.”
Ironically, few have read the entire book about Quixote’s exploits that Miguel de Cervantes wrote in the early 1600s; perhaps none, as a friend of mine joked recently, referring to its heft (it weighs in at more than 1,000 pages).
However, Don Quixote not only haunts the roads of Spain on his lean nag, as Chesterton says, but he rides at large in the imagination of Western culture. The 1,000-page book is easy to summarize: a middle-aged man reads so much fantasy literature about knights that he decides to become one himself and sets out for a misadventure at every mile, seeing princesses in prostitutes and giants in windmills.
The thing that produces his enormous energy for repeated misunderstandings is the same thing that makes him cheerful through humiliations and beatings: his ideals that hold that wrongs must be righted, that courage is not only more colorful but also means more than cynicism, and that everything should be undergone for love.
The uncomfortable fact about Don Quixote is that in all this he acts very much like a saint. For example, consider the opinions of St. Francis as recorded in the medieval writings known as The Little Flowers of St. Francis. Trudging to a far-off friary through bitter cold, Francis begins explaining to his companion all the things that are not perfect joy: giving a holy example, miracles, perfect natural and supernatural knowledge. It is worth hearing St. Francis explain this in detail:
“Friar Leo, albeit the minor friars [ie, Franciscans] in every land set a great example of holiness and of good edification, nevertheless, write and note diligently that therein is not perfect joy.” And when St. Francis had gone farther, he called unto him the second time: “O, Friar Leo, although the minor friar should give sight to the blind, make straight the crooked, cast out devils, make the deaf to hear, the lame to walk, and the dumb to speak, and, what is a greater thing, should raise those who have been dead four days; write that therein is not perfect joy.”
Going a little farther, he shouted loudly: “O, Friar Leo, if the minor friar knew all tongues, and all sciences, and all the Scriptures, so that he was able to prophesy and to reveal not only things to come but also the secrets of consciences and souls; write that therein is not perfect joy.” Going a little farther, St. Francis yet again shouted loudly: “O, Friar Leo, little sheep of God, albeit the minor friar should speak with the tongue of angels, and knew the courses of the stars and the virtues of herbs, and albeit all the treasures of the earth were revealed to him and he knew the virtues of birds and of fishes and of all animals and of men, of trees, of stones and of roots and of waters; write that therein is not perfect joy.”
And going yet farther a certain space, St. Francis shouted loudly: “O, Friar Leo, although the minor friar should know to preach so well that he should convert all the infidels to the faith of Christ; write that therein is not perfect joy.”
Like us, his companion Brother Leo finally asks, “So what then is perfect joy?” Francis answers in what seems to be a pile of absurdities: being misunderstood, held in contempt, and finally, harsh beatings. So far, so pointless!
But wait, there is more. What is the reason that enduring such obvious indignities would be perfect joy?
If we shall bear all these things patiently and with cheerfulness, thinking on the sufferings of Christ the blessed, which we ought to bear patiently for his love. [Here Francis breaks out into an emphatic ecstasy as wild and as chivalrous as anything from Don Quixote.] O, Friar Leo, write that here and in this is perfect joy; and therefore hear the conclusion, Friar Leo; above all the graces and gifts of the Holy Spirit, which Christ grants to his friends, is that of self-conquest and of willingly bearing sufferings, injuries and reproaches and discomforts for the love of Christ; because in all the other gifts of God we cannot glory, inasmuch as they are not ours, but of God; whence the apostle saith: what hast thou that thou didst not receive from God! and if thou didst receive it from him, wherefore dost thou glory therein as if thou hadst it of thyself! But in the cross of tribulation and of affliction we may glory, because this is our own; and therefore the apostle saith: I would not glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Answered like the godfather of Don Quixote!
Embracing indignity
Following that turn of phrase around the corner, we can look at a more recent example of this same attitude in a godson of Don Quixote, St. Louis Martin. This warrior in the guise of a watchmaker had an astonishing thing to say in the presence of his daughters shortly after his youngest, St. Thérèse, had been welcomed into a Carmelite convent of Lisieux. Having already offered to God a full and pious life, with all of his daughters in religious vocations, and his beloved wife gone, he exclaimed: “My God, I am too happy. . . . I want to suffer something for you. . . . And I offered myself.”
But what was left of himself for this old man to offer? How could anyone look more like a madman, to boast of his happiness after having seemingly lost everything, and then set this happiness aside? The answer was ironic and as literal as possible: it was the loss of self known as mental illness.
St. Thérèse later referred to the ensuing period as the “three years of her father’s martyrdom.” After several humiliating incidents, he was committed to an asylum. In the asylum he alternated between two states: insanity and periods of lucidity where, fully aware of the mortifying depths he had been brought to, he renewed his offering to God, telling his daughters not to pray for him to be cured “but only that God’s will be done.”
There are some who praise Don Quixote’s gallantry and at the same time are quick to describe that of St. Francis and St. Louis as masochism. These are secular, cultured men, “the wise men . . . [who] trim sad lamps [and] touch sad strings,” as Chesterton refers to them in his great poem, Ballad of the White Horse. We “ignorant and brave” Christians might object that masochism is pleasure in being hurt for the sake of pain itself, whereas the saints endure pain for God.
Greater love has no man
But the secular-cultured men respond that it’s the same thing, since there is no God, and everyone knows it. “God does not exist, and even if someone is an idiot, he will eventually realize that,” claims French novelist Michel Houllebecq. Religion, in the end, is sadism.
I point this out not to address the philosophical mushiness of such thinking but because it is a temptation that even devout Catholics encounter. Mortification is a suspicious thing to us; we have been infected by the concerns of the culture. We are a little offput ourselves by the examples that secular-cultured people mock, such as the example of St. Dominic Loricatus scourging himself 3,000 times to take off a year of purgatory.
I remember a friend of mine looking askance when “mortification” was the stated intention for a decade of the rosary. “It’s not a virtue,” he protested. “It’s an exercise, it’s like calling bench-pressing a virtue instead of strength itself.”
Sure, he has a point. But just as it is the faculty of the lover to sing, what he often sings of is pain, the trials he undergoes or will undergo or is willing to undergo to win the beloved. And Don Quixote is the perfect character to connect what we know, deep down, about suffering for love with the love of the cross for Christ’s sake.
Not only nobility but joy
Mortification, a spiritual practice that makes even devout Catholics these days is uncomfortable, is a point for mockery for “educated” people. But what these same worldly men ridicule in Catholicism is the same thing that even they praise in the Knight of La Mancha, Don Quixote.
To welcome suffering for the sake of something higher is exactly the kind of chivalry to which Don Quixote challenges us. By appreciating his exploits, we can learn to better appreciate men such as St. Francis and St. Louis Martin. While their attitudes toward suffering might seem perverse and even masochistic from the wrong point of view, comparison with Don Quixote reveals that they faced humiliations and physical pain with the same excitement of knights facing great dangers.
Finally, reading Don Quixote can tell us something not only about the nobility of the saints but also about their joy.
What Don Quixote proposes to himself and to us his readers is not essentially more scandalous than Christ’s proposition: “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
Die for one’s friends? Not live? What can look unhealthier in an age that is obsessed with health and has no idea what love is?
We admire Don Quixote not in spite of but because of his absurd-looking chivalry. Somehow, the fact that it seems to be removed from reason makes it safe for our cultural gatekeepers such as Nabokov and Houllebecq in a way that the saints are not. If there is no love of eternal and transcendent value behind the love of a particular woman, it will not threaten worldly absolutes such as the state and progress.
Sentimental gallantry? Sure. Rational ridiculousness? No! But the key here is to remove the gloss from our eyes. Don Quixote does not act from lack of reason. Misunderstanding, yes. But is a woman’s love and reputation worth dying for, because any woman is worth dying for? Is righting wrongs worth suffering mockery? If an ideal is true, should one pursue it regardless of how attainable it is? Of course. Don Quixote is eminently reasonable. And so are the saints.
Not only can Don Quixote help us appreciate the nobility and venturesomeness of mortification but also its lightness. Indeed, “laughing with” and “laughing at” are carefully distinguished in an unredeemed life. But not so with Don Quixote, and not so with the saints. It is as if God wanted us to chuckle at these good friends because they are so amusing—and then to join them because they are so admirable. The only thing greater than the funniness of a saint is his nobility.
St. Augustine once said that the New Testament is in the Old concealed, and that the Old Testament is in the New revealed. In similar way, literature can help us understand truths hidden in hagiography. So discover the gallantry of the saints revealed in Don Quixote, and don’t be surprised to find Don Quixote, among his fellow knights, the saints.