Sobreamor: Ausiàs March, Ibn Zaydûn, Ibn `Arabî, Ramon Llull by Jad Hatem (review)

It is not everyday that you find Ahmad ibn Zaydun (Sevilla/Córdoba 1003-1071), Muhammad ibn Arabi (Murcia, 1165-1240), Ramon Llull (Mallorca, 1232-1315), and Ausiàs March (Valencia, 1397-1459) together in one room talking about love. Yet this is just what Jad Hatem has achieved in this lovely book, published originally in French as Suramour (Paris: Cygnet, 2010) and now translated into Catalan by Elena de la Cruz Vergari as Sobreamor.

Hatem has been professor of Literature, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at the St. Joseph University, Beirut since 1976 and has written widely and prolifically on topics literary, philosophical, religious (and various combinations of the three) ranging from classical Arabic poetry and theology to contemporary Catalan poetry. Here he brings his interpretive talents to bear on some very worthy yet under-studied texts from medieval Iberia that all deal with the topic of spiritual love, sometimes divine, sometimes human, and occasionally both.

The book is divided into an introduction and four chapters, one on the poet Ausiàs March, one on the poet Ibn Zaydun and mystic Ibn Arabi, and two on the polymath Ramon Llull. This constellation of subject matter makes Hatem one of the very few scholars to tackle the Catalan/Arabic nexus and perhaps the only scholar ever to juxtapose these particular authors in a single study.

In the introduction Hatem makes it clear that he does not intend to demonstrate the influence of the Andalusi authors on Llull and March, an orientation which distinguishes this study from Alvaro Galmés de Fuentes’s Ramon Llull y la tradición árabe (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1999). Rather, his object is to demonstrate how medieval Iberian authors manifested two contradictory impulses in their amorous discourse, namely that one leads to “l’absolut i la follia” and the other to “l’amor pur” (19). Hatem cautions us that to focus on the one or the other is to miss the point, and as a result come away with a narrower understanding of how medieval authors understood love.

The first chapter, “Ausiàs March, poeta de l’amor pur” (29-38), is an analysis of March’s theory of love in his Cants de mort. Hatem here expounds March’s philosophy of love as a process of emotional reduction by which the dross burns away, leaving a pure love. In the second chapter, “De l’amor com a religió a la religió de l’amor: Ibn Zaydun i Ibn Arabi” (39-58) Hatem explains how Ibn Zaydun and Ibn Arabi employ the twin discourses of human love and religious devotion, often one in the service of the other. Readers of Castilian cancionero poetry and mystics such as Teresa de Ávila and San Juan de la Cruz, not to mention Hebrew Andalusi poets such as Moses ibn Ezra and Judah Halevi, will be familiar both with the “heresy of courtly love” by which the poet exalts his beloved in divine terms, as well as with the mystics’ tendency to write of their love for God in terms of human romantic desire.

In chapter three, “El desig de sobreamor en un poema de Ramon Llull” (59-82), Hatem demonstrates how Llull, in Cent noms de Déu, inverts the chivalric code of service to the beloved, substituting the Virgin for the beloved. According to Hatem’s reading, Llull argues that women are an obstacle to divine love, not a conduit for it. In fact, earthly sexual and/or romantic desire’s function is to serve as a temptation to be overcome in order to attain spiritual perfection.

The fourth and final chapter, “Sobreamor i cristocentrisme en Ramon Llull” (85-97) centers on Llull’s idea (expressed in Cent noms de Déu, Félix o Llibre de meravelles, and elsewhere), that the world was created expressly...