Love, Despair, and Redemption in Miguel Mañara

Fr. Fabio Baroncini - A Reading of Miguel Mañarai during an evening at the CLU Retreat in Rimini, 1999.

Your reaction is naive because you don't know what awaits you tonight. I don't quite understand what has happened in the last two years, as I haven't had the good fortune to meet with you. What is this practice of beating the floor with the most expressive side of your personality?

Italian tradition expresses itself differently. I wouldn't want you to give too much away to our Viennese friends, who usually applaud with their feet. No offense to our Viennese friends here, to whom my culture owes a great deal, but according to the tradition of our movement, a gesture such as this, given the significance of the evening, is dedicated to an expression of beauty that is unique to human genius.

Occasionally, this expression may be a literary text rather than a piece of music or another form of testimony. This is not an addition to the discourse but a presentation for those who have made the effort to seriously engage with the proposal made to you yesterday. It is a documentation that, due to its significant expressiveness, may help restore and engage your human sensitivity to the same themes—or rather, to the same experience—to which you have been introduced.

This evening, as suggested by Don Pino and Dima, we will do a reading. It is a reading, and so, I hope not contradictorily, the beauty of the text will only be commented on here and there with some interpretative suggestions on my part. This means that you must be willing to listen to and read a work that has had, and continues to have, significant meaning in the history of the movement. I can personally testify to the value this text has had for me, having read some passages—obviously not all of them—by Oscar Milosz.

The play, Miguel Mañara, was written by a Lithuanian author of Polish origin, whose nephew, Czesław Miłosz, won the Nobel Prize some years ago. The author presents this play in the form of a "mystery," though I cannot dwell on the meaning of this theatrical form. The work is divided into six scenes. This information is also to help you know where we are in the reading so that your impatience does not suffer more than necessary.

Miguel Mañara is the protagonist. He is none other than the figure who, in the tradition of Enlightenment libertinism and its later revival by Romanticism, became Don Juan. He is based on a historical figure whom the Pope canonized a couple of years ago. Starting from this man’s life, the myth developed that would pass into music with Mozart and into philosophy and literature with Kierkegaard and others. In the author's intention, the myth of Don Juan represents modern man—that is, each one of us. It is with this concern, or rather with this intention, that it will be worthwhile for you to follow the reading. We are discussing the position that each of us has in life, according to the interpretative genius of our author.

We are in Seville in 1656. The first scene shows us a company of nobles, glorious in their past battles, but even more so, nobles who boast of their depravity, especially of a sexual nature. It is a banquet, and the more the list of conquests is recited, the more they drink. Miguel is credited with six duchesses and seven or eight marquises. There are sixty to one hundred women from the upper middle class, and even a few nuns because, as the text says, "they never hurt."

So, this is the atmosphere. Everyone adores Miguel Mañara. He is their leader, the human embodiment of their desires and tastes. Time after time, they toast and sing his praises. While this is happening, suddenly our character begins to speak. After a toast, he swears on his honor and on the head of the bishop of Rome. A voice cries out, "Gloria Mañara, Gloria Mañara in the depths of hell!" And he replies, "I swear on my honor, on the head of the bishop of Rome, that your hell does not exist and that it has never burned except in the head of a mad Messiah or a bad monk."

The radical nature of his judgment of reality is already apparent, but this judgment is steeped in distraction and forgetfulness. He excludes the existence of anything without a reason. "This hell of yours does not exist," he says, "but we know that they exist in the empty space of God." This man, who has touched the negative drama of existence with his own hands, destroying everything he touched, suddenly reveals a strange yearning. "We know that we exist in God's empty space, in worlds illuminated by a joy warmer than ours, in unexplored and beautiful lands far, far away from this one in which we live."

Just as he has experienced everything possible according to common criteria, he suddenly reveals an openness, a yearning for distant lands. "So please choose one of these distant and enchanting planets and send me there tonight through the voracious door of the tomb... If you give me the chance to live in such a world, in another world, I would go, even if it cost me my life. Because what there is here is not enough for me, because time is slow to pass, gentlemen, terribly slow, and I am strangely tired of this bitch of a life."

He should be satisfied, fulfilled, accomplished, praised by everyone. Yet, time passes slowly. It's as if nothing new ever happens. "I'm tired of this bitch of a life... Not reaching God is certainly a trifle, but losing Satan is great pain and immense boredom, in my opinion." Reality, when it is systematically exploited for a project, for a calculation, for an instinct, reveals itself to be corruptible, fragile, and vain. It has no substance, to the point that his heart opens. He knows nothing else, but he feels a tension towards something else.

"I dragged love into pleasure and mud and death. I was a traitor, a blasphemer, an executioner. I did everything a poor devil of a man can do. And look, I lost Satan." The very possibility of negation is no longer a source of pleasure. "I eat the bitter grass of the rock of life." This is like our rising in the morning when everything is focused on the affirmation of our ego, when it is not subject to a different attraction. When it is pure projection, every event and the time that passes always presents the bill: the bitter grass of the rock of life, which is boredom and alienation.

"I served Venus with anger, then with malice and disgust. Today I twisted her neck, yawning. And it is not vanity that speaks through my mouth; I do not pose as an insensitive executioner. I have suffered." Imagine this scene of celebration, with this man being hailed by everyone, yet he says this. "I have suffered," because reality is stubborn; it always presents the bill, eventually. "I have suffered greatly. Anguish beckoned me. Jealousy whispered in my ear. Pity took hold of my throat. Indeed, these were the least deceitful of my pleasures."

"So my confession surprises you? I hear laughter among you. Know, then, that I have never committed a truly despicable act... Who has not wept over his victim? Of course, in my youth I too sought, just like you, that miserable joy, that restless stranger who gives you her life and does not tell you her name." He speaks of a joy that appears fleetingly, without revealing its face, its consistency, its power—an attraction that cannot be deciphered.

"But in me," he continues, "soon the desire to pursue what you will never know—love—was born." He had sought this all his life, trying to identify it in the systematic use of his relationships with all the women he had had. But there is more. There is this desire that, when it touches reason, becomes a question, a cry, an expectation. "Love. Immense, dark, and sweet love. More than once, I thought I had grasped it." Because if one desires according to one's immediate human dynamics, one reaches out to affirm, to grasp, to possess. This is the greatness of Miguel Mañara. Strengthened by his desire, he always projected his strength onto reality to hold on to what existed for himself.

"More than once I thought I had grasped this love that corresponds to expectation, but it was nothing more than a ghost of a flame. I embraced it... and swore eternal tenderness." This love burned on his lips and covered his head with his own ashes. "And when I opened my eyes again, there was the horrible day of loneliness." Because no profound, original human need can find an answer within a mere fragment of reality, however fascinating it may be. "The horrible day of loneliness, the long, long day of loneliness, with a poor heart in my hands, a poor, sweet, and light heart like a sparrow in winter." What great compassion, what great humanity in looking at oneself.

"And one evening, lust, with its vile eye and low forehead, sat down on my bed. And lust contemplated me in silence... How do you look at the dead?" Is it a desire? A question? For what? "A new beauty, a new pain, a new good that one soon tires of in order to better savor a new evil, a new life, an infinity of new lives. That's what I need, gentlemen. Simply that and nothing more."

Everyone else believed that what he had already experienced was enough. No. His human dimension is rooted in a tension towards something other than all this, to the point of drawing on the possibility of a novelty that is in a new good or a new evil. "How can this abyss of life be filled? What can be done? Because desire is always there, stronger, crazier than ever... It is like a sea fire that bursts into flame in the depths of the universal black nothingness." I leave it to you to re-read and explore this in greater depth. It is a desire to embrace infinite possibilities. For less than that, it would not be a man. "Gentlemen, what are we doing here? What do we gain?"

At a certain point, a character who had been aloof, an old and soft-spoken man, leans over Miguel Mañara. "Don Fernando," he says, "If you see me here despite my white hair, Miguel, it is because I have been watching you for a long time. I was the best friend of your father, Don Tommaso de Leca. I knew your mother, Donna Girolama Frignano. Your mother was a saintly woman. Your father was a valiant gentleman, faithful to his God and his king. He died in my arms. Look at me, Miguel. See, I am not lowering my eyes, and I am no paler than before. Why am I telling you this? You are a coward and a traitor."

Don Miguel reacts, "Are you mad or drunk, Don Fernando? Or are you tired of living?"

Don Fernando replies, "You know that I have grown old in holy battles and that I never part with my sword, not even in death. I have had four horses killed under me, and I speak to the King face to face without uncovering my head. I could tear out your eyes and ears, you scoundrel! But I am content to repeat: You are a coward and a traitor! Anyone who makes women suffer and betrays them is a coward and a traitor. And anyone who desires another man's wife is a vile scoundrel. And anyone who tears the holy treasure of her virginity from the last girl in the village and then abandons her to shame and despair—anyone who does this is a dog and must die like a dog. You are no gentleman, Miguel. You are a dog. Your coat of arms belongs nailed above the door of a brothel."

"Listen to me, Miguel. You're young, you're thirty years old. You're rich, with a bad but powerful reason. Reason is powerful, Miguel... but your reason is evil. Why? Because it projects its own measure onto the infinity to which it is inexorably drawn. You are the one who determines what can answer you... Thirty years is like the smell of wheat fields, like the smile of the night at the window, where a face should appear, sweetly illuminated by the heart of a rose. Miguel, my son, my child. I am a crazy old man. I have spoken to you like an old fool. I have been unfair... I also liked girls when I was young. I did not seduce them. I did not make fun of them. I did not abandon them, but I liked them. Forgive this old, uncouth soldier."

"Listen to me, Miguel. In Seville, our good old city, there is a modest, very old house, not far from the Church of Charity. The house belongs to an elderly gentleman named Carillo de Mendoza. Your father knew him; I am his childhood friend. He is ill and has been a widower for four or five years. This Carrillo de Mendoza has only one daughter to console him in his long-suffering. The name of this girl is Girolama. It is your mother's name. She is a noble girl, sweet, good, and gorgeous. You are thirty years old. Miguel... you never go to church. Wicked man! You will go to Mass next Sunday. We will meet there. Come if you like, son. At the Church of Charity."

The party is over. Miguel remains alone, and a shadow, appearing suddenly, says, "Woe! Woe to the conscious man... who, blind to the beauty of God, prefers the emptiness of boredom to the torment of passion."

"Don Miguel, who are you?"

"I am the shadow of your past life."

In the second scene, three months have passed. We are now getting to the heart of the matter. This scene contains, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful love dialogues ever written. What happens to this man who is so detached from reality? He encounters Girolama, who introduces the great promise of fulfillment—an infinity of possibilities, a new life—not through the projection of instinct or the calculation of reason, but in the simple dynamics of a relationship.

Girolama speaks of her mother's death. "I wasn't twelve, Miguel, when she died. It will be four years around St. John's Day... It is so beautiful to die like that, with a pure heart, a clear mind, so beautiful that sometimes I reproach myself for having cried so much. But I was only a weak child." She is closely tied to the present, not to projections or desires for possession, but adhering to what is.

Miguel observes her quiet life. "How sad your life seems to me."

Girolama replies, "I have no friends my age, Don Miguel, and to tell the truth, I can easily do without their company. I don't like their way of laughing or their way of crying. Sometimes, they discuss men... and I don't like it... Yes, we lead a very secluded life. In winter, I never leave the house except to go to church. But in summer, we spend Sundays in the country... where we have a house with a large, large garden. And I love flowers very much."

Miguel says, "If you love flowers, you should have picked some to make yourself beautiful."

"And because I love them," Girolama responds, "I don't like people who pick them and possess them. I never put flowers in my hair; it's beautiful enough as it is, thank God. Flowers are beautiful living beings that should be left to live and breathe in the sun and air... It is perfectly possible to love in this world without feeling the urge to kill your beloved or imprison them."

A new dynamic is introduced, an unthinkable relationship to reality for Miguel. Girolama is not sad. "There is the house, there is the garden, and there are daily lessons. And the poor, Don Miguel... There are many, many poor people in Seville. I don't have time to get bored. And then there are books... lately we have been reading the adventures of the illustrious knight of La Mancha... How beautiful are books that make you laugh and cry at the same time."

Here we see reality in its fullness, carrying within itself the possibility of both laughter and tears. To find satisfaction, Miguel had to deny the possibility of tears to exalt laughter. But in doing so, he censored reality.

This reminds me of an episode with Don Giussani. We were in a tavern, and some of our group began to dance. To be happy with that dance, Giussani later said, you had to forget all the harsh realities of life. That gesture was not fully human. A gesture that holds all of the reality is human—"books that make you laugh and cry at the same time."

Girolama continues, "You seem a little surprised to see me so happy. Do not reproach me for my peace of mind and heart. I never neglect any of my duties,"—that is, her connection with reality. "I have it and I am happy." This is strange for Don Miguel.

"It was I, Girolama," he says, "who begged you to tell me the story of your dear life... May the beating of my heart tell you what I dare not entrust to my voice... I have changed a lot since the day we first met." In the moment of an encounter that introduces an attraction, you cannot calculate change. Change is seen; you are surprised by it. "I have changed, alas! Let there be no remedy for this sadness of the heart... What is done is done." This is the great objection that arises: incapacity. I cannot change. The weight of what I have done blocks me.

But Girolama does not see it that way. "I know you are a bad person, Don Miguel, that you have made many, many women cry, but all these women knew they were doing wrong by loving you... because none of them had received from you the oath, the great oath for eternity... They knew what they were doing."

Miguel is shaken. "Your voice frightens me. It's as if a ray of dawn suddenly penetrated a place protected by the wings of night." When the claim to possession of reality is challenged, one feels afraid. One can no longer measure, calculate, or project. One is lost.

Girolama senses his fear. "It is because I am small and weak, and I am sure you have great compassion for me, that you are afraid of breaking my wing or my paw... Something in my heart tells me that I am your sister. I do not fear your gaze upon me, Miguel... I know well that sometimes you look at me secretly, as one looks at a little animal that one would like to catch." She understands his possessive dynamic but is not afraid. "Women know what they're doing, and they don't let themselves be caught until God is no longer in their hearts, and then it's no longer worth catching them."

Miguel confesses the change in himself. "I can see better. Yet I wasn't blind. But it was the light that was missing... You have lit a lamp in my heart." He compares himself to a sick man who awakens from a fever dream into a beautiful room "immersed in the discreet music of light." He sees existence in a new way, as a harmony, a place of peace. "What a place of peace you have made of my heart, Girolama. Thank you!"

He asks her to be more than a sister. "My life is no longer my life... Girolama, give me your weak hand, your dearest hand, the hand of a sister, of a bride, of a saint."

"Be careful. Heaven is listening to you, Don Miguel."

He declares his love. "I am speaking to you, Girolama, the great one, so great that you frighten me, whom I have made my life, whom I have made my heart... My heart is no longer mine... and you entrust your great modesty and your holiness to me for time, for life, for eternity."

"And you love me?"

"I love you more."

"Love before men."

"Before men, before God." The second scene ends.

Just a hint of the third scene: three months have passed since the wedding, and Girolama dies. Imagine the scene: Don Miguel is there by the coffin. Spirits appear, tempting him with cynicism and skepticism. The attraction that had entered his life has been denied by death. So, a spirit tells him, don't waste your time on it. Replace it. "Get up. The mourning clothes are ready... We must live and live long, and say with all other men that it is a joy."

In the fourth scene, after some time, Don Miguel appears in a convent before the abbot. "Father, forgive me, I come to ask for asylum and protection."

"Against whom, my son?"

"Against myself." When he reveals he is Mañara, the abbot recoils. But Miguel insists, "It is the love of the Eternal One that consumes me, Father... I seek the punishment of the jealous God. The humility of the heart. The love of reality."

He has learned these things from Girolama. But what does he do? He continues in his old way, trying to possess this new experience of holiness through his own power, just as he tried to possess women. This is the temptation of self-made holiness. The abbot forces him to confess his sins, and Miguel speaks of Girolama. "This woman's love was a wonderful thing."

"Why are you here then?" the abbot asks.

"This woman," Don Miguel says in tears, "this sweet woman, who was all mine... Father, she is dead."

The abbot consoles him, but then rebukes him for trying to possess his own pain. "What do you know of your pain, my son?... You are here and everything is fine." It belongs, remaining within the experience that attracted you, that makes growth possible. The abbot warns him against inventing his own penance. "Love and haste do not go together... Love is measured by patience. An even and sure step... Life is long. Here, you will be careful not to invent prayers... From the last spark of your dementia, the first dawn will spring forth."

Miguel, alone, looks at the sky. He no longer projects his desires. He says, "I dare not say that you are... I have no right to be certain of one thing, of my love, of my love, of my blind love for you... Nothing is pure except my love for you... Nothing is real except my love for you. Nothing is immortal except my love for you... Love remains."

The fifth scene shows us an episode many years later. Don Miguel has become Friar Miguel, a preacher who converts the people of Seville and performs miracles. The beauty he encountered has transformed his humanity, making him a witness for everyone.

We come to the last scene. Don Miguel is now old and tired. It is just before dawn. He speaks to his own heart. "O heart, O my child, you have not slept... Here you are alone under the cold tears of a night lost forever." His companions are gone. "They are dead... Only one saw me grow old. The friar gardener... All the others are dead."

He prays one of the most beautiful prayers I know: "Lord, Lord, give us our daily hope. O Father and Son, give us our daily courage... Give me my daily ration of love. I am certain of nothing but my love for you... and measure it very generously because of others, so that I may go sated to those who do not love you and insult me."

A stranger approaches, the spirit of the earth, who claims him. "You know well that you are mine. Have you not given me the best of yourself? The poetry of your youth."

Don Miguel raises his hands to the sky and prays the psalms. "I am a stranger on earth... Do not stay away, for anguish is near. No one helps me... Deliver me from the place where I am confined." The Spirit of Heaven calls him, "Miguel, Miguel!" and he falls to the ground, dead.

The friar gardener finds him and makes the sign of the cross. "Now I am alone... like a bare branch whose dry sound frightens the evening wind. But my heart is joyful like the nest it remembers and like the earth that hopes beneath the snow because I know that everything is where it should be and goes where it should go, to the place assigned by wisdom that is not ours. Praise be to that wisdom."

Everything is where it should be, and everything goes where it should go, to a place assigned by a wisdom that is not ours.

Here is your brother, Magdalene. Here is your brother, Teresa.

Source: https://youtu.be/ltZZiEl5p1U?si=oiug4sSBm7pRkSQB