Abstract

An examination of the rhetoric of death and damnation in Tirso's Burlador reveals that the play can be read as a dramatized homily about the natural and supernatural realms of God's justice, reflected in the work's natural and supernatural realms of action. Concerning the rhetoric of damnation, much traditional criticism about the Burlador has centered on whether Tirso adopts either a "Thomist" or "Molinist" position concerning the De auxiliis controversy; and on why, or even whether, Don Juan is consigned to hell. Such hermeneutic disputes can be resolved by recognizing that the protagonist is damned for presumption, which all orthodox theology of the period considered to be, like despair, a sin against the theological virtue of hope and, hence, an "unpardonable" sin against the Holy Spirit. As spelled out most systematically in Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, the theology of presumption acts as a referential code for the mechanism of Don Juan's damnation, and thus for Tirso's rendering of the supernatural (eternal) realm of God's justice.

In the natural (temporal) realm of God's justice, the matching of "punishment" and "crime" holds equally for the protagonist and his victims. After discussing the crime and punishment of each victim in turn, this study examines how both realms of divine justice converge in the character of the protagonist. His sentence of death for his crimes against other human beings, together with his sentence of damnation for his sin against hope and the Holy Spirit, jointly dramatize the the play's central, "anagogical" theme: that a God who is at once just and merciful exacts from any infraction of either the temporal or eternal order a terrible, fitting price. Lastly, the theological position put forth in Tirso's homiletic play is shown to stand outside the academic debate between "Thomists" and "Molinists" about grace and free will.

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