Eros and Empire: Politics and Christianity in Don Quixote (review)

Higuera’s ambitious hybrid of political theory, theology and literary criticism offers Anglophone scholars of Counter-Reformation political theory the unique vantage point of Cervantes’ masterpiece from which to examine Spanish contributions to scholastic theories of natural law and community, as well as Counter-Reformation resistance to Machiavellian statecraft. To this end, Higuera reads Don Ouixote as an analog of the political and theological debates that put these theories to the practical test of an empire whose prosperity or survival often required violent coercion. Underlying his project are two assumptions likely to engender skepticism in Hispanists. First, Higuera anchors his text with the premise that there is a relationship of macrocosm and microcosm between the teleology of an imperial Spain and that of the Alonso Quijano who sets out to revive knight errantry. Second, he implies a seamless thread from Spanish imperialism of the era of Charles V to that of the 1605 and 1615 publications of Don Ouixote.

Skepticism notwithstanding, Higuera’s study offers specialists readings of key episodes in Parts I and II that promote the study of the political and theological debates of early-modern Spain as a means to better understand the period’s extraordinarily rich and complex fiction. Higuera outlines a four-part, eleven-chapter structure that is quite expansive for a monograph of just under 200 pages. The first section, comprised of two chapters, examines Don Quixote’s love for Dulcinea, which for Higuera is an emblem of the love of humans for the divine. Herein lies the Eros that Higuera finds common to Spanish expansion in the name of Catholicism and Don Ouixote’s quest for glory in the name of Dulcinea. The second section, incorporating chapters three through five, examines the political implications of this love. A third section—two chapters—studies the inevitable contradictions when love and imperial expansion intersect. Finally, a fourth, two-chapter section studies the romances of chivalry as representatives of the vexing interrelationship between the imagination and historical truth.

To make the fundamental link between Cervantes’ novel and Counter-Reformation theology, the first sections draw an arc from Plato’s Symposium to the debate on love Cervantes includes in Book IV of La Galatea. Higuera then traces the desires and disenchantments of a quest for conquest in Cervantes’ fiction as an illustration of how theories of the just war outlined in Thomist theory collided with the realities of the humans who would practice empire. This point is further illustrated in a chapter, “Emperors and Robbers,” which thoughtfully interweaves analyses of Don Quixote’s project with Roque Guinart and the renegade Christian, Uchalín, whom the Captive mentions in his tale. To illustrate how Don Ouixote responds to the moralists of empire, Higuera pairs these episodes with philosophies of Francisco de Vitoria (1480?–1546), Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573), and the Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1527–1611), without discussing how they would have been filtered to Cervantes. Such a question would be particularly relevant with Vitoria whose fame came through lectures delivered in the 1530s. Exploring the challenges to these theories that Don Quixote presents in his practices of empire, Higuera moves on to discuss the ultimate, insurmountable obstacle to imperial glory in “The Lowly Aldonza.” He reads the unsightly or mendicant Dulcinea/Aldonza whom Don Quixote finds in Book II—first in his visit to the village and then in the Cave of Montesinos—as an emblem of the dilemma of the Christian who would conquer. Higuera finds that both the Spanish imperial longings for a New Rome, as articulated in a letter he cites from Diego Hurtado de Mendoza to Charles V, and its fictional echoes in Don Quixote’s Golden Age Speech, crumble before a moral world more receptive to Erasmian fools than conquerors.

While Higuera reaches this point through some engaging and thought-provoking interpretation of episodes—particularly Marcela’s speech of self-defense, Don Quixote’s speech on the Golden Age, and the Captive’s Tale...