Luis de León

• 1. Introduction

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  Luis de León, a Spanish friar, poet and professor, is said to have returned to his Salamanca classroom on the 29th of January 1577. He began with a Latin line, Dicebamus hesterna die, meaning "As we were saying yesterday." The words skip lightly over a long absence. He had spent that time in an Inquisition prison, accused of heresy by fellow churchmen.

  Nothing in his background suggested a rebel. He was a priest, a scholar and a devout believer in the Catholic faith. Yet his enemies insisted he was something else entirely.

  Why would a loyal friar end up before the Inquisition? What did a professor of the Bible write, both inside a cell and out of it? And why do readers still return to his poetry?

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• 2. From Belmonte to the Cloister

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  Belmonte, in the Province of Cuenca, is where Luis de León was born in 1527 or 1528, since the sources cannot agree on the year. His parents, Lope de León and Inés de Varela, raised five children. Lope worked as a lawyer, and his career carried the family to Madrid in 1534 and later to Valladolid. The boy grew into a gifted linguist, at home in Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and he devoted himself to interpreting and translating religious texts.

  In 1541, at the age of fourteen, he entered the University of Salamanca to study Canon Law. His uncle Francisco looked after him there. The plan did not last. Thompson places the change of heart only five or six months after Luis arrived, while other authors say 1543. Either way, he abandoned law and joined the Order of the Hermits of St. Augustine. After a novitiate of uncertain length, he entered the Priory of San Pedro on the 29th of January 1544.

  The matriculation book at Salamanca for 1546-7 holds the first record of him as a student of theology. In 1552 he earned a bachelor's degree in theology at the University of Toledo. He then studied Hebrew and Biblical interpretation at the University of Alcalá de Henares. That Hebrew training would later become one of the most dangerous items in his record.

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• 3. Elections and Chairs

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  Salamanca was unusual because every university chair was filled by election, and Fray Luis kept winning them. He returned to the city in 1559. On the 7th of May 1560 he graduated as a licentiate, and on the 30th of June he became a Master of Theology. In the following year he won the Chair of St Thomas, a minor post with a four-year tenure.

  In 1565 he took the Chair of St Durandus, and the electors renewed his hold on it in 1569. Administrative duties arrived alongside the teaching. In 1566 he became administrator of the Augustinian College of San Guillermo in Salamanca. A year later he was vice rector of the whole University.

  In 1571 he added the Chair of Sacred Letters. Alongside his lectures, he translated classical and biblical literature and wrote on religious themes, and his works earned him wide fame. That same year of 1571, two Dominican professors began building a case against him.

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• 4. A Risky Translation

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  A nun in Salamanca named Isabel Osorio, the cousin of Fray Luis, could not read Latin. In 1561 he began translating the Song of Songs into Spanish for her and wrote a commentary to go with it. This was his first major translation of a biblical text. It was probably inspired by a commentary that his contemporary Arias Montano lent him while passing through Salamanca that year.

  The Council of Trent had banned translating biblical texts into Spanish, so the project carried real risk. Still, the manuscript was popular among his friends. They copied it and passed it around privately. Because the text was so controversial, it did not reach print until 1798, more than two centuries after he began.

  His Latin writing on the same book came later. The commentary In Cantica Canticorum Salomonis explanatio was published in 1580, building on an earlier Spanish commentary, and he revised and enlarged it in 1589. That year he also published a volume of Latin commentaries on Obadiah, 2 Thessalonians, Galatians and the Song of Songs. This volume represents the summit of his achievement as a Biblical scholar.

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• 5. Trial by Inquisition

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  Seventeen propositions reached the Inquisition in 1571, submitted by the Dominican professors Bartolomé de Medina and Castro. They claimed to document heretical opinions held by Fray Luis. His Spanish translation and commentary on the Song of Solomon was the biggest piece of evidence against him. Another charge said he had criticised the text of the Vulgate.

  The deeper quarrel concerned ancestry. Although he was a devout and believing priest, his family descended from Spanish Jewish Conversos. He also spoke out loudly for teaching Hebrew in Catholic universities and seminaries. The Dominicans responded with false accusations that he was both a Marrano and a Judaiser.

  He was held at Valladolid from the 27th of March 1572 until December 1576. Accounts disagree about the severity. One stresses his isolation and poor conditions, and says he fell ill and stayed in bad health throughout. Another notes that the conditions were never harsh and that he had complete access to books. Either way, he kept writing and studying. The elections of 1573 took place while he was in prison, so he lost the Chair of St Durandus.

  On the 11th of December 1576, the tables turned. He was cleared of all charges and released, with an admonishment to be more careful and reserved in his publications and speech. He returned to Salamanca on the 30th of December in triumph. Before the year ended, the university gave him a special chair. In 1578 he obtained the chair of Moral Philosophy for life. In 1579 he was elected to the most significant chair in the university, the Chair of Holy Scripture, sometimes called the Bible Chair.

  The admonishment to be careful, however, was a lesson he did not take to heart.

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• 6. Scripture for Ordinary Readers

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  La Perfecta Casada, or The Perfect Wife, appeared in 1583 and became the most popular of his prose works. Fray Luis based it on the Proverbs of Solomon and wrote it as a moral exposition for his newly married young niece. It advises young women on the proper behaviour and duties of a wife, toward her husband and her children. It became a favourite wedding gift, almost an instruction manual for marriage. It has been described as a revolutionary defence of women's roles in society at the time. Six editions had appeared by 1632.

  De los Nombres de Cristo, or The Names of Christ, is a guide for lay readers to the essential principles of the church. It takes the form of a dialogue among three friends at a country estate. Over two days they discuss fourteen of the names given to Christ in Scripture. Each book ends with a lyrical meditation in the form of a poem. The central theme is the centrality and universality of Christ. Fray Luis wrote it in prison, and it was published between 1583 and 1585.

  The work grew in stages. The first edition of 1583 had two books and considered nine names. The edition of 1585 added a third book, covering four names, and put the name "shepherd" into the first book. The posthumous edition of 1595 added "lamb." The structure of that third edition underlies the 1984 English translation. In Spain, seven editions had been printed by 1605.

  Exposición del Libro de Job, his commentary on the Book of Job, was another effort to open Scripture to people who could not read Latin. Job's story of patience and suffering also serves as a corrective guide to behaviour. Fray Luis wrote it in verse and dialogue so that it would be both enjoyable and informative. He began it in prison and had finished thirty-five chapters by the end of 1580. Ten years later he resumed the work, and he completed it in 1591, a few months before his death. He dedicated it to Mother Ana de Jesús, the person to whom John of the Cross had dedicated his Spiritual Canticle. It reached print in 1779, almost two centuries after he finished it.

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• 7. Poems Among Friends

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  Most of his poems were probably composed between 1559 and 1584, yet Fray Luis never published them. He circulated them among his friends. They first appeared in print in 1631, when Francisco de Quevedo printed them. Hispanists have fixed the canon of his poetry at twenty-nine poems. Two of them stand out.

  In The Life Removed, Fray Luis follows the beatus ille theme introduced by Horace and reflects on choice and its consequences. People who chase power and wealth, and who are guided by the talk and opinion of others, will not find the peace, happiness and liberty promised to those who walk the hidden path. The poem then turns to a ship in a storm. Its sailors are driven only by greed and ambition, and they will not meet the harmonious end of those on the hidden path.

  Francisco de Salinas was an organist and composer, and Fray Luis wrote the Ode to Salinas for him. The two friends often talked about art and poetry and listened to music together. They shared a belief that music can make a person more religious and can inspire the contemplation of spiritual matters. The ode is full of positive images of music as a way to contemplate the divine and to overcome ignorance and foolishness.

  Edith Grossman has summed up his place in Spanish literature. "Fray Luis is generally considered the leading poet in the far-reaching Christianization of the Renaissance in Spain during the sixteenth-century." In her account, the Counter-Reformation and the rulings of the Council of Trent changed how poets used the secular Italianate forms and themes that Garcilaso brought into Spain. Writers began to use them to explore moral, spiritual and religious subjects. The poets and humanists who followed Fray Luis formed the influential School of Salamanca.

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• 8. Last Years and Legacy

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  Three disputations on the merits of Christ and on human predestination led to another Inquisition run-in for Fray Luis in 1582. This time he was not imprisoned, and he was absolved two years later, in 1584. His first published Spanish and Latin works had emerged in 1580, some of them begun in prison, and most of his works were printed during that decade.

  In 1588 he published the first collected edition of the writings of Teresa of Ávila. To produce it, he collated her manuscripts, checked references and notes, and prepared a definitive text. Both were in Salamanca in late 1570, but they are not believed ever to have met. The work brought him into contact with Mother Ana de Jesús. He also defended the privileges of the Discalced Carmelite nuns against proposed changes to the Teresian constitution. He also earned a Master of the Arts degree from the University of Sahagún.

  He died at the age of 64 on the 23rd of August 1591, in Madrigal de las Altas Torres. He is buried in Salamanca, in the Priory of San Agustín. Ten days before his death, his order had elected him Vicar General of the Augustinians.

  In the centuries after his death, Spain especially praised him as a poet. In the eighteenth century he became a source of inspiration for various Neoclassical poets.

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