Two Skies over Salamanca, Part 1 of an Essay by Ricardo Nirenberg

      In memory of Yves Bonnefoy, lover of the Baroque, poet of the ephemeral.

1.

The first decade of the seventeenth century saw Galileo refuting, with his inclined plane experiment of 1604, the Aristotelian tenet that bodies fall with constant velocity, and concluding that, instead, they fall with constant acceleration, a conclusion that led to the new physics and the mathematical toolkit of the calculus, invented later in the century.  Four years later, in 1608, Galileo’s telescope brought the skies a bit closer.  And let us not forget that Johannes Kepler in his Astronomia nova of 1609 established the laws of planetary motion.  As if such prodigious production called for an equally prodigious devastation, the Thirty Years’ War started in 1618.

A less known achievement, yet no less important for our picture of the universe and our liberation from Aristotelian tenets, preceded those I mentioned above by a quarter century: we may think of it as a prelude to the scientific and artistic revolution.  A star never seen before and extremely bright was visible in Europe between 1572 and 1574.  The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) discovered it in November 1572 in the constellation Cassiopeia, and so did the Spanish astronomer, Jerónimo Muñoz (c.1520-October 1591).  A joint Danish and Hispanic production therefore.  It was not to be the last.

A prominent and highly respected figure in Spanish mathematics and astronomy, Muñoz gained fame throughout Europe for his 1573 publication, Libro del nuevo cometa, his account of Super Nova 1572, as it is called now.  With accurate measuring, he calculated its parallax was too small for a sublunar object.Therefore, it had to be beyond the moon, proving that Aristotle was wrong to maintain that the translunar heavens are immutable, not subject to change.

Another, not minor point of Aristotelian doctrine that Muñoz dispelled, in an earlier manuscript dating from the 1560s, titled in Latin Questio de orbibus, edited and translated in 2022 by Professor Miguel Á. Granada of the University of Barcelona, is the existence of celestial solid spheres or “orbs” that would transport planets and comets in their orbits.  Since at that time, remember, natura abhorrebat vacuum, Muñoz postulated a heaven filled with air where celestial objects moved “like fishes in the water.”  The possibility of an airless space would be revised later, in the middle of the following century, by Pascal, Torricelli, et al., and the spectacular 1654 Magdeburg experiment.

Muñoz is not only a distinguished figure in the history of astronomy but an interesting personality in other respects.  Born in Valencia, Muñoz studied at the local university, graduating as a Bachelor of Arts on 6 June 1537.  Following his graduation, he continued his studies travelling across Europe.  He stayed in Paris, as a disciple of the Collège Royal professor of mathematics Oronce Fine, until roughly 1540.  In 1531, Fine had been appointed to the chair of mathematics at the Collège Royal (the present Collège de France), founded by King Francis I, where he taught until his death.  Muñoz then left Paris and went to Leuven, in the Low Countries, to study under Gemma Frisius, professor of medicine at the University of Leuven.  At that time, the university lacked a mathematics professor, so Muñoz attended private lessons in astronomy and geometry taught by Frisius in his own home.  Then Muñoz travelled to Ancona, on the Adriatic, where he taught Hebrew at the city’s university in the late 1540s.  His mastery of Hebrew fed rumors that Muñoz was secretly a Jew himself, rumors on whose veracity I have no opinion.  All I can say is that Muñoz was fortunate in having begun his European trek when he did, in 1537: twenty-two years later, on November 20, 1559, the new king, Phillip II, issued a pragmática (a decree) that forbade his subjects from studying abroad.  Protestantism, apparently, was considered contagious, especially among university students.  The decree marks the apogee of the Counter Reformation and, according to modern scholars such as Pedro Henríquez Ureña, the beginning of Spanish decadence.

Like Odysseus the versatile, Muñoz saw the cities of many men and met many kinds of minds, before returning to his native place, Valencia where he began giving private classes of mathematics at some point before 1556. In 1563, he returned to the University of Valencia as a professor of Hebrew; two years later, he also became a mathematics professor at the same university.  As a professor of both subjects, he was both well paid and well respected; those who selected Muñoz for the mathematics chair called him “distinguished and eminent in all of the sciences.”  A Renaissance man both literally, by birthdate and birthplace, and metaphorically, by being a polymath.  A century later, the prodigious mathematician and thinker Blaise Pascal devised the motto of the polymath: « Il vaut mieux savoir un peu de tout que tout sur très peu. »  In addition to teaching, Muñoz also worked as a cartographer, a surveyor, and as a builder, overseeing municipal construction projects.  Un peu de tout, c’est bien cela.

2.

Muñoz became a professor at the University of Valencia in the 1563, and in 1578 he moved to Salamanca, where he taught astronomy, mathematics, and Hebrew until his death in October 1591.  It would be surprising if a graduate from the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires in the 1950s could refrain, at this point, from remembering that Fray Luis de León, the learned Renaissance poet, also taught at Salamanca about the same time.  I graduated from the Colegio and am not an exception to the rule, so I asked myself whether they, Fray Luis and Muñoz, both Hebrew scholars, had been in contact.  Both shared in the complications and perils of being suspected of being judaizante, marrano, or crypto Jew, and Fray Luis was imprisoned by the Inquisition at Valladolid from 27 March 1572 until December 1576, for translating the Song of Songs into the vulgar tongue.  He died on August 23, 1591.  Fray Luis and Muñoz, therefore, were colleagues at Salamanca for twelve or thirteen years and they died only two months apart.

The year when the super nova appeared in the sky, 1572, coincided with the time Fray Luis composed one of his best-known poems, “Noche serena” (Calm Night), dedicated to his friend Loarte (perhaps the painter Jerónimo de Loarte), which begins:

Cuando contemplo el cielo,
         de innumerables luces adornado...
(When I contemplate the sky, / adorned by countless lights...)

When I think of those two sky gazers, colegas salmantinos, Fray Luis and Muñoz, I can’t avoid asking myself: did they contemplate the sky from the same tower, or from separate ones?  Did they see above the same vastness, or different kinds?  To find an answer, it is enough to keep on reading “Calm Night” for a few more verses:

y miro hacia el suelo,
de noche rodeado,
en sueño y en olvido sepultado,

el amor y la pena
despiertan en mi pecho un ansia ardiente;
despiden larga vena
los ojos hechos fuente;
Loarte y digo al fin con voz doliente:

“Morada de grandeza,
templo de claridad y hermosura,
el alma, que a tu alteza
nació, ¿qué desventura
la tiene en esta cárcel baja, escura?

(...and I look down to the ground, / in night immersed, / in slumber and in oblivion buried, // love and sorrow / waken a burning anxiety in my heart; / tears fall / from the fountain of my eyes, / Loarte, and I say with voice despondent: // Abode of greatness / temple of clarity and beauty, / the soul that to your height / was born, what misfortune / holds her in this low, obscure jail?)

Let us stay a while on those three stanzas above, on Fray Luis’ religious, fervorous preference for the sky, his sky, over our earth.  His sky coincides with or contains the Christian heaven, but our earth is for him a low and obscure jail.  Why?  “Low,” I think, because by the basic meaning of the word and from our own point of view, the heavens are high, and our ground is low: Jerónimo Muñoz would not have incurred in such vicious pleonasm.  And “obscure” because the sun has set: if it hadn’t, the Augustine friar wouldn’t have been able to contemplate the sky, ornate as he says it was with innumerable lights.  And “jail”?  Why on earth does Fray Luis call it a jail?  Perhaps because he was jailed by the Inquisition in Valladolid at the time of its composition?  That time is not known precisely, so we cannot tell.  In any case, almost three centuries later, another poet, the great Emily Dickinson, masterfully responded with four lines to the psychological gist of those three stanzas by Fray Luis:

Who has not found the Heaven – below –
Will fail of it above –
For Angels rent the House next ours,
Wherever we remove –
(Poem #1543).

Whether Dickinson had read the poem of Luis de León or had heard about it I have no inkling.  Thus I return, tail between my legs, to the differences between the inner skies of the two Salamanca professors, who lived so shortly before the invention of the telescope, in the middle of the cruel disputes between heliocentrists and geocentrists; on the way from the immutable heavens of Aristotle and Aquinas to the threshold of Galilean and Cartesian science.  Muñoz’ sky was vibrant with change and motion, reticulated and triangulated, diagrammatic — Fray Luis’ was dramatic and emblematic — bears, bulls, eagles, serpents, crabs appeared each at their turn, unchangeable, to play their eternal roles and exert their absolute influences.  At the risk of oversimplifying, one could conclude that Muñoz’ sky was mathematical, and Fray Luis’ was mythical and poetical.

Saying which does not comport any judgment of worth, neither against modern science nor against the art of poetry: logos and mythos are — or rather originally were but unfortunately this has been almost forgotten — sides of the same coin.

3.

If we go back to the Eleatics of the 5th century BC, whose basic tenet was that we humans cannot think nor say “it is not” but only “it is,” we already find in Parmenides a mix of logos and myth that, via Plato, became extremely influential on Western thought.  The logos or logic element in the mix is manifest, since it pretends to be a rule governing both thought and speech; the mythical part is a tad hidden: it is a categorical refusal to admit that we die for good, i.e. that soon we, all of us, will be not.  As a consequence of Parmenides’ basic tenet, the reality of motion was denied, notably by Zeno and his paradoxes.  Fray Luis de León’s poem “Night Serene” and countless others are byproducts of Elea: eulogies of a Platonic heaven of unchangeable ideas, and condemnations or scorn for this base world of change, deceit, and decay.

As a result of the split — the eternal heavens versus the ephemeral world — early pictured in the characteristic Renaissance painting by Raphael (c. 1500), “The School of Athens,” with Plato and Aristotle discussing at the center, the human spirit eventually split itself into a part that dealt in abstract, i.e. eternal, thoughts, which Pascal dubbed l’esprit de géométrie, and another part dealing with the ephemeral, the poetical, l’esprit de finesse.  It was the middle of the 17th century: the new sciences of motion progressed with assured steps and conquering faith (in 1604 Galileo showed that bodies fall with constant acceleration; in 1628 William Harvey published his momentous 72‐page book, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals).  Meanwhile the arts were dominated, obsessed, by an acute consciousness of our ephemerality, pictured in those two paintings characteristic of the Baroque, titled “Et in Arcadia Ego,” one by Guercino and another by Nicolas Poussin — death proclaiming its presence even in peaceful, wooded Arcadia — and expressed in another phrase of Blaise Pascal:

“L’homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature ; mais c’est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l’univers entier s’arme pour l’écraser : une vapeur, une goutte d’eau suffit pour le tuer.”
(Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature; but it is a thinking reed.  The universe need not complot to shatter him; a vapor, a drop of water is enough to kill him).

Back in Spain, in 1629, Pedro Calderón de la Barca wrote a sonnet that is among the most popular poetic expressions of the Baroque ephemeral, “A las flores” (To the flowers):

Éstas que fueron pompa y alegría,
despertando al albor de la mañana,
a la tarde serán lástima vana,
durmiendo en brazos de la noche fría.

Este matiz, que al cielo desafía,
iris listado de oro, nieve y grana,
será escarmiento de la vida humana:
¡tanto se emprende en término de un día!

A florecer las rosas madrugaron
y para envejecerse florecieron:
cuna y sepulcro en un botón hallaron.

Tales los hombres sus fortunas vieron:
en un día nacieron y expiraron;
que pasados los siglos horas fueron.

(These, having been pomp and joy / waking at the light of dawn, / in the afternoon shall be vain plight / sleeping in the cold arms of the night. // This fury that defies the sky, / iris lined with snow, scarlet, and gold, will be a lesson for the human life: so much we learn in one day span! // The roses early rose to flower, / and to get old they flowered: / cradle and grave in a calyx they found. // Thus men their fortune saw: / in one day they grew and died: / since all centuries past were but hours.)

Another sonnet, as popular but more dramatic from the Spanish Baroque (the date is uncertain, but must be not long before 1645), is titled “Amor constante, más allá de la muerte,” (Constant love, beyond death) by Francisco de Quevedo:

Cerrar podrá mis ojos la postrera
sombra que me llevare el blanco día,
y podrá desatar esta alma mía
hora a su afán ansioso lisonjera;

mas no, de esotra parte, en la ribera,
dejará la memoria, en donde ardía:
nadar sabe mi llama la agua fría,
y perder el respeto a ley severa.

Alma a quien todo un dios prisión ha sido,
venas que humor a tanto fuego han dado,
medulas que han gloriosamente ardido,

su cuerpo dejarán, no su cuidado;
serán ceniza, mas tendrá sentido;
polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado.

(The final shadow the bright day / will carry away might close my eyes, / and to my eager anxiousness benign, that time / might untie this soul of mine; // but not on this side, on this shore, / will memory disappear where it burned: / my flame knows to swim in the cold water / and to contradict the law of mortality. // Soul who was prisoner of a god, / veins that have fed so much fire, / marrows that have gloriously burnt, // their body will be abandoned, not their care; / they will be sensitive ashes, / dust they will be, but dust in love).

Ephemerality, here, is the presence of the poet’s final hour; but notice the remarkable fact: ephemerality is linked to constancy.  This is not exceptional in Baroque art, it rather seems to be a rule.  You may say, but where’s constancy in the previous example of the flowers?  I respond that Calderón’s sonnet is recited in his play El príncipe constante by don Fernando, a Portuguese prince who surrenders his life out of loyalty to the Catholic faith.  The rule that links ephemerality to constancy in the poetry of the Baroque may be attributed to an artistic necessity: when a noble literary character is buffeted by the ephemerality of things and life, care must be taken not to dishonor said character, not to extend the ephemerality to his or her will, resoluteness, and loyalty.

Those two Baroque poems, by Calderón and by Quevedo, I was assigned to learn by heart in high school, in the Colegio Nacional.  Finally, I include here another poem, not from the Baroque era, and not to be compared in poetic quality with those two Spanish sonnets I commented on, but only because here the poet foolishly pretends to be a champion who conquers the ephemeral.  I encountered it early, one of those things I was told to learn by heart during my first years in grammar school: “La abuelita” (Granny) by the Mexican Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (1850 - 1895):

Tres años hace murió Abuelita;
cuando la fueron a sepultar,
deudos y amigos, en honda cuita
se congregaron para llorar.

Cuando la negra caja cerraron,
curioso y grave me aproximé,
y, al verme cerca, me regañaron
porque sin llanto la contemplé.

Dolor vehemente, rápido pasa;
tres años hace que muerta está;
llovieron penas, y nadie en casa
de mi Abuelita se acuerda ya.

Yo sólo tengo luto y tristeza,
y su recuerdo fuerza cobró,
como del árbol en la corteza,
se ahonda el nombre que se escribió.

(Three years ago Granny died; / when they took her to her grave, / relatives and friends in deep mourning / gathered together to weep. // When they closed the dark box, / curious and serious I approached, / and seeing me close to it, they scolded me / because no tears fell down my cheeks. // Fervent pain fast disappears; / for three years she has been dead; / sorrows rained, nobody at home / gives Granny a thought. // I’m the only one who’s sad and mourns, / and my memory of her grows stronger, / as it sinks deeper in the tree bark, / the name that’s writ on it.)

When I was eight or nine, my reaction to those sixteen lines was revulsion at those  relatives and friends: how awfully they all behaved, what a bunch of devils, to scold a poor boy for not crying in the presence of a dead Granny!  With the years, my feelings turned to aversion to the poet, the hypocrite, Baudelaire’s younger brother, the narcissist, pretending his sadness and mourning were immune to oblivion and grew stronger by the day, while none of the other relatives and friends gave Granny a thought.  Nobody, not one thought!  How did he know?  Because don Manuel’s brain was made of tree bark, cabeza de alcornoque, the bark of a cork oak, and because he lived during an age of boredom, the so-called Belle Époque.

 

The Second Part of this essay, to be published in March, will touch on Valéry and Rilke, and the poetic revival from an era of boredom.