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| María Rosa Menocal [UCSC] |
that
stony landscape, fragrant with olive trees and sage brush, convulses
with unnarratable inventions, the peaks of mystical and Gnostic
subversions of each of
the three great institutions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. At
the same time — and again, remarkably, unaccountably, against each
of the three great classical cultures — the strange new gods of
vernacular poetries come to thumb their noses. It is not only that
the troubadours were the secular masterpiece of a culture sated with
the Heresy and eventually pillaged for it. It is also true that the
Cathars were far from alone. They shared time and space and politics
and basic beliefs with the Jewish kabbalists who created the great
Kabbalah there and then, and, no less on any count, with the greatest
of Muslim Sūfis,
including Ibn ‘Arabī.
None of them, in turn, were ever far from the many places where the
three old and revered paternal languages were being shamelessly
replaced or (perhaps worse still) made to dance to the rhythms of
another.
A
hint of the ultimately dizzying interweaving of all these strands can
be gleaned from the minuscule and Byzantine story of the woman who
became the wife of the young James II of Mallorca. The young James
was assigned the equally young Ramon Llull as a tutor — a Ramon
Llull whose first métier was as troubadour. Of course — lest stuck
in our national language corners we forget — Llull’s Catalan is
languedoc,
and in this part of “Spain” that is the language spoken and sung
— unless, like Llull, one became more than a poet and then, like
him, one learned Arabic. In any case, the young woman is a refugee
from the fierce war against the Albigensians, part of a diaspora that
sent dozens of troubadours to Italy and most of the Jewish kabbalists
to Spain, both with powerful historical repercussions. By all
accounts (including the triumphant official ones) the war was
unusually devastating and effectively razed that stony, fragrant
landscape. But she was not just any young woman; she was from
Montségur, the greatest of the houses of Perfects, the high and
secret nobility of Cathars. Montségur was that great Albigensian
stronghold whose bitterly sought fall in 1244 was “the last act of
the Albigensian tragedy,” to quote Frances Yates.
What
Yates also points out is that this charming connection is no doubt
the “missing link” between the ever-enigmatic Llull (whose
transition from troubadour to kabbalist-sounding mystic may now seem
less unusual in our context) and the De
divisione naturae
of John Scotus Erigena, the ninth century text that Yates is sure
provides a significant part of the basis of the most arcane of his
theories, those that smack most of kabbalist notions. The De
divisione naturae,
it turns out, was not only a favorite book among the Albigenses; it
had been banned by the Church precisely because it was assumed
heretical given the kind of readership it had. As Yates points out
(although her emphasis and intent is no doubt different from my own),
piecing together this puzzle in a sense resolves “the other old
problem” — which I left unbroached in the previous chapter — of
whether Llull was “influenced” by the Jewish Kaballah, since the
travels and fortunes of the text of the ninth-century, Greek-reading
Irishman, Scotus Erigena, highlights the extent to which what
flourished in languedoc,
and was then scattered in the maelstrom, was a whole stable of
“kabbalas.”
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