, no Philip II., our great Philip?
A negative achievement, it will be said. But what is that? What is
negative? what is positive? At what point in time--a line always
continuing in the same direction, from the past to the future--does the
zero occur which denotes the boundary between the positive and the
negative? Spain, which is said to be the land of knights and rogues--and
all of them rogues--has been the country most slandered by history
precisely because it championed the Counter-Reformation. And because
its arrogance has prevented it from stepping down into the public
forum, into the world's vanity fair, and publishing its own
justification.
Let us leave on one side Spain's eight centuries of warfare against the
Moors, during which she defended Europe from Mohammedanism, her work of
internal unification, her discovery of America and the Indies--for this
was the achievement of Spain and Portugal, and not of Columbus and Vasco
da Gama--let us leave all this, and more than this, on one side, and it
is not a little thing. Is it not a cultural achievement to have created
a score of nations, reserving nothing for herself, and to have begotten,
as the Conquistadores did, free men on poor Indian slaves? Apart from
all this, does our mysticism count for nothing in the world of thought?
Perhaps the peoples whose souls Helen will ravish away with her kisses
may some day have to return to this mysticism to find their souls again.
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