Don Quixote: The Dream, the Priest and Perdition

One’s final resting place of either heaven or hell depended on ridding their world of the propensity for indulging in the written word. But Quixote’s priest saved lives rescuing compositions. Each book had to be examined for permission to live. “You’re right, said the priest, so its life is spared for the time being”.  proved too much for the ordinary Spaniard who bowed to the will of a religious order intent on control through fear. By using his mantle of spirituality, the priest used his authority to put every book on trial. The Inquisition of the written word. The ritual of throwing books out of the window to the everlasting flames of perdition exemplifies how the priest contrived at a superficial ritual of cleansing. Souls were saved through the books so they too would not burn in hell, but go to a heavenly reward.  Books contained the ideas of men who presented new ideas and new ways of thinking that might release the iron hold of the Church on the populace.  

Fear of hell was uppermost in the minds of the people that it was they, not the Church, who perpetuated the Inquisition. The niece willing gave library keys the “room where the books, the authors of the mischief were kept, and she was happy to hand them over” . But the priest looked for reasons to save souls, the dreams within pages not yet read, posterity must not be robbed of their beauty. But for the lesser educated, the niece, the housekeeper, and the barber, burning words was analagous to searing the devil’s fumes from one’s soul. Foreign ideas of chivalry, poetry, or literature that might stain the teachings propounded by the Church.  Inquisitional fear gripped the minds of those subject to the Church’s rule. Quixote’s people urged the priest to cleanse the evil that might emanate from the pages.  But the priest would not let all be burned and sent to perdition. Some poets had to be redeemed.  

The satirical adventures of the protagonist revealed the value of sincerity regardless of life’s quest, as long as it was carried out with personal honesty. Quixote’s mission was searching for love, just as Voltaire’s Candide, in the face of derision. Scorn for religious control provided the format for Quixote to abate all responsibilities living life to create the impossible from the improbable. Rewriting this paper, I would add more statements from the barber as he represented the middle working class as opposed to the housekeeper’s trust in the severest tenets of the Church and the niece’s desire to return to normalcy and prosperity. Test case 1 sets the conflict between seeking life’s dreams in face of Inquisitional terrors, and the priest’s affection for the poets contravenes the idea that all members of the clergy insisted on Inquisitional torture for breaking the strictures of ecclesiastical control. Another perspective might be to analyze Quixote through the eyes of Sancho Panza, a man whose loyalty gave balance to Quixote’s dreams of reaching the impossible goal of purity and love. Inquisitional fear of a dream that circumvented the Church in all its dogma burned through the psyche of sixteenth century Christians as the books flamed up in sacrificial emulation.

 Endnotes

Miguel De Cervantes de Saavedra, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), Pt 1, Ch, VI, p. 1.

  Ibid, p. 3.

  Ibid, p. 4.

  Ibid, p. 4.

  Ibid, p. 4.

  Ibid, p. 2.

  Ibid, p. 1.

  Ibid, p. 1.

  Ibid, p. 3.

  Ibid, pp. 4-5.