The Christian knight’s idea of death can be condensed into his perception and attitude towards life. Because one of the things that best defines men is their relationship with death. The animal differs essentially from man in that he knows nothing of death. Now then; the conceptions that man has formed of death can be reduced to two types: those for which death is the end or the end and those for which death is the beginning or the beginning. There are men who consider death as the termination of life. For these men, life is this life that they now live and of which they have an immediate, full and unequivocal intuition. Death is, then, nothing but the negation of this immediate reality. What is there beyond death? Ah! They neither know nor want to know; there is probably nothing, according to them, and above all, it is not worth pondering what there is, since it is impossible to find out.
The other group of men, on the other hand, see in death a beginning, the initiation of a more truly living life, eternal life. For them, death does not close, but opens. It is not negation, but affirmation, and the moment when all hopes begin to be fulfilled. The Christian knight, because he is a Christian and because he is a knight, is resolutely part of this second group, that of men who conceive of death as dawn and not as dusk. But what consequences follow from this conception of death? First of all, a corresponding and equal conception of life. For it is clear that for those who see death as the end and the end of life, life must be something supremely positive, the most positive thing in existence and the highest value of all real values. On the other hand, the man who sees in death the beginning of eternal life, of true life, must consider this earthly human life—the life that death suppresses—as a mere transit or passage or ephemeral preparation for the other, decisive and eternal life. This life will therefore have a subordinate, conditioned, inferior value. And so, the former will be prepared to make their stay in life as pleasant, enjoyable and perfect as possible, while the latter will be mainly governed by the idea of making everything in life converge towards the other life, towards eternal life.
For the Christian knight, life is nothing but the preparation for death, the narrow corridor that leads to eternal life, a simple transit, the shorter the better, towards the gate that opens onto infinity and eternity. The “I die because I do not die” of Saint Teresa perfectly expresses this feeling of imperfect life. On the other hand, there are human communities that have tended and tend rather to form a positive idea of earthly life. They see life as something stable, lasting – although not enduring – that deserves all our attention and all our care. These people, who know how to savor the douceur de vivre, take good care to season and enhance the various forms of our earthly life; they apply their spirit and their effort to cultivating life; they transform, for example, food into an art, human commerce into a system of refined delights, and the holy depth of love into a complicated network of delicate subtleties. They are people who love life for itself and give it a value in itself, and they dress it, comb it, perfume it, adorn it, wrap it in music and rhetoric, sublimate it; in short, they pay it the supreme worship that is paid to a supreme value.
But the Christian knight feels in the depths of his soul disgust and disdain for all this worship of life. The Christian knight offers his life to something far superior, to something that begins just when life ends and when death opens the golden doors of infinity and eternity. The life of the Christian knight is not worth the trouble of being dressed, dressed, and perfumed. It is worth nothing, or it is worth it only insofar as it is put at the service of eternal value. It is fatigue, and labor, and hard fighting, and patient suffering, and longing hope. The knight wants all the work in this life for himself, precisely because this life is not a place to stay, but a passage to eternity.
And so, the conception of death as access to eternal life disqualifies or devalues, for the Christian knight, this earthly life, and reduces it to a mere step or transit, too long, alas!, for our yearnings for eternity. And this way of considering death and life ultimately explains the reason for the particularities that we have already enumerated in the character of the Spanish knight. In effect, a transit or step is not worth it in itself, but only for that to which it gives access. Thus, the knight's life is not worth anything in itself, but rather in the service of the ideal goal in which the knight has placed his paladin's arm. Thus, the knight will despise as petty any attachment to things and will cultivate in himself greatness, that is, the consciousness of his dedication to a great work. Thus, the knight will be brave and bold; far from fearing death, he will accept it with joy, because he sees in it the entrance into eternal life. The knight will not be servile; and in life, nothing but his eternal ideal will seem worthy of appreciation. The knight will live supported by his faith rather than by the calculations of reason and experience in this life. He will affirm his ideal personality, which is to live in the eternal, hiding modestly and with shame the real individuality, stained by sin, which it would be dishonorable to exhibit. In short, the Christian knight draws the entire series of his virtues - and defects - from his conception of death and life. Because he subordinates all life to what begins after death.
“IDEA OF HISPANICITY”
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