Free Will, the Picaresque, and the Exemplarity of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares

Although my subject is the Christian doctrine of free will and its importance in the revision of the picaresque at the hands of Miguel de Cervantes and others of his generation, rather than the theme of freedom more generally, I would begin by noting that freedom was a multifaceted and often polemical concern in early modern Europe. In this, it differed from today, when, under the enduring influence of liberalism and its validation of individual rights, individual achievements, and individual liberties, we are wont to cast freedom in a uniquely positive light, akin to that in which Don Quixote portrays the world stretching out before him when, "libre y desembarazado," he departs the castle of the Duke and Duchess in part two of Cervantes's novel. "La libertad," he informs Sancho, "es uno de los más preciosos dones que a los hombres dieron los cielos; con ella no pueden igualarse los tesoros que encierra la tierra ni el mar encubre. . . . ¡Venturoso aquel a quien el cielo dio un pedazo de pan sin que le quede obligación de agradecerlo a otro que al mismo cielo!" (2.58, 1195).¹

For Don Quixote, freedom is a compound ideal consisting, on one hand, of the license to make one's own way in the world and, on the other, of the absence of social (worldly) duties and conventions. Quite otherwise were the understandings of the missionaries Gerónimo de Mendieta and José de Acosta. Writing to Philip II in 1562 to acclaim the labors of his fellow Franciscans in bringing Christianity to the natives of New Spain, Mendieta also construes freedom as a twofold phenomenon. Nevertheless, he complains that the laws enacted to ensure the civil liberties of the crown's new subjects have impeded the higher goal of religious conversion, because, in its haste to release the Indians from the clutches of their native lords, Spain abandoned them to their own equally bad devices. "En tiempo de la infidelidad," Mendieta explains, "nadie hacia su voluntad, sino lo que le era mandado, y ahora la mucha libertad nos hace mal, porque no estamos forzados á tener á nadie temor ni respeto" (2: 518). In the same vein, Acosta argues in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590) that the oppression to which the Amerindians and others conquered by Spain in recent years have unjustly been subject has, in fact, been beneficial to their salvation, for "Dios sacó bien de ese mal, e hizo que la sujeción de los indios les fuese su entero remedio, y salud." He, too, explains:

Véase todo lo que en nuestros siglos se ha de nuevo allegado a la cristiandad en Oriente y Poniente, y véase cuán poca seguridad y firmeza ha habido en la fe y religión cristiana dondequiera que los nuevamente convertidos han tenido entera libertad para disponer de sí a su albedrío. En los indios sujetos, la cristiandad va sin duda creciendo y mejorando, y dando de cada día más fruto, y en otros de otra suerte de principios más dichosos, va descayendo y amenazando ruina.

(7.1, 376-77)

These contradictory understandings of freedom are typical of the crisis that arose in early modern Europe from the expansion of geographic, intellectual, scientific, and religious horizons, on one hand, and from the breakdown of traditional certainties and authority (auctoritas), on the other. They also inform the definitions of libre and libertad given by Sebastián de Covarrubias in his Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española (1611). Starting with the premise that libre "Tiene por opuesto siervo. Y dízese liber qualquiera que es sui iuris," and that libertad is the natural (or immanent) power to do whatever one likes, unless it is prohibited by the force of arms or by law (Libertas est naturalis facultas, eius, quod cuique facere libet, nisi quod vi, aut iure prohibetur), Covarrubias adduces first the positive, and then the negative, aspects of freedom. Of the positive, he states: "Llamamos libre al soltero que no es casado. Libre, el que est...