Why is Miró's Bishop a Leper?

Ian R. Macdonald

Towards the end of 1912 Gabriel Miró wrote to his friend Enrique Puigcerver: «Trabajo por conseguir una 2.ª edición de Del Vivir y La novela de mi amigo. Daré este invierno El Obispo leproso y la loca, y acaso otras dos obras que no tienen título»¹. Miró's publishing plans were often fragile creatures. In 1916 he wrote to José Guardiola Ortiz, his first biographer: «Al Obispo leproso lo tengo abandonado por Jesús; y seguirá en barbecho en tanto que escribo Figuras de Bethleem, obra que me ilusiona grandemente»². On 30 May 1917 the Diario de Alicante told its readers: «En breve aparecerá "El obispo leproso", obra cumbre de Gabriel Miró». And so on. Nuestro padre San Daniel, the first part of the novel, appeared in 1921, while El obispo leproso itself was finally published late in 1926. Through all this time one thing remained constant: the theme of the leper bishop. From a relatively early stage in his writing career Miró had retained this kernel of the Oleza novels. A scrap of paper in the Miró family archives headed «Para El obispo leproso» speaks of characters called Samuel, Cándida, and Víctor, none of whom appear in the final version. This, together with the disappearance of «la loca» from the title, the division into two books, and the length of time from conception to publication are the few traces we have of what must have been a long, complex process of development and maturation³. But the image of the bishop who contracts leprosy is the centre around which the novels are deployed. Why is the bishop a leper?

The problem can best be introduced by a glance at the often rather tentative or tangential suggestions made by other readers. A difficulty arises at once, that of disentangling the prelate from his affliction. Everyone is agreed that he represents values for which the novel demands our admiration. He may at times be indifferent or impatient, but he is, to put it crudely, on the side of virtue. Hence some readers claim him as a symbol of goodness: «Si fuésemos dados a los símbolos, cosa que tal vez no pasó por las mientes del novelista, diríamos que el obispo leproso simboliza el bien, la tolerancia, el amor, la máxima bondad»⁴. Paciencia Ontañón writes: «El nuevo obispo representa el progreso»⁵. While such remarks are reasonable in themselves, they beg the question as to why this good and progressive leader should be singled out by Miró for a disfiguring, painful, and fatal disease.

Other writers emphasise the leprosy. José-Carlos Mainer, in an interesting argument for Miró as a reformist social observer, speaks of the «desasosegante imagen del obispo leproso (otra víctima de su impotencia) que preside desde el Palacio episcopal la congestionada vida de una ciudad prisionera de sí misma»⁶. A similarly negative analysis had been presented in 1934 by Juan Chabas who saw the bishop as a symbol of «la caducidad enfermiza del poder espiritual de la Iglesia, vencido, esclavizado por el dominio político y económico de la Compañía de Jesús»⁷.

A more hopeful view is taken by a third group of readers, those who see in su ilustrísima a redemptive or propitiatory figure. The idea that the bishop is a redeemer is proposed within the novel itself, but as the view not of the narrator but of some people in Oleza⁸. Gloria Videla shares their idea: «[El obispo] va a asumir la frustración y el encierro de los seres auténticos y buenos, sufriendo su progresiva lepra redentoramente, encerrándose en el palacio episcopal y muriendo. Pero su acción y su sacrificio van a transformar la ciudad»⁹. More cautiously Ricardo Gullón, in an article that first appeared in 1952, insisted on the mysteriousness of the bishop's rôle in the novels but concluded: «El misterio tiene así una parte en claro: la conducta del Obispo es la propia de un alma cristiana. Quedan zonas de penumbra en cuanto a la significación de la enfermedad; tal vez deba atribuírsele valor de símbolo; acaso el prelado es la víctima propiciatoria, el "elegido para salvar a Oleza"»¹⁰. The concepts of propitiation and redemption are difficult enough in themselves; an unqualified application of them to Miró's bishop raises even more questions. Who is propitiated? Who is redeemed? What does this salvation consist of? A railway? In a recent article Gullón restates his position in a much subtler way that seems to avoid these difficulties: «En El obispo leproso, la relación espacio-personaje es llevada a un paralelismo en que las llagas del Obispo y las lacras de la ciudad son, en distintos niveles, metáfora de una condición incurable. Con esta radical diferencia, el personaje es el Cordero, la víctima inocente que gráficamente padece las pústulas que el pueblo, Oleza, no siente»¹¹. Here propitiation and redemption have disappeared and of the Christian vision only the suffering lamb remains. The inevitability of death seems to counterbalance the dignity of the suffering bishop.

Christian themes are handled with equal care by Gerald Brown who comments that «the symbol of the Bishop's leprosy... like all good myths» is «mysterious, and open to different interpretations». The bishop's death wins for Oleza wisdom rather than victory, and by his enduring of the disease he plays his part in bringing a civilized maturity to the town¹². Elsewhere Brown associated the bishop with the New Testament, seeing Pablo as related to St. Paul. The bishop has led the wise to understand that Olezans must no longer look to a father-figure for authority. This is «perhaps, the point of having him suffer from a disease characterized by a progressive epidermal insensitivity which is the paradoxical outward symptom of a critical nervous condition under the flesh»¹³.

If there are so many different, and in some ways contradictory, views of the obispo leproso's illness «dont le symbolisme est très clair» according to L. J. Woodward¹⁴, it is worth once more examining the question and the answers, including even the pervading assumption that the leprosy is symbolic.

Miró's interest in leprosy is first revealed to us in Del vivir (1904). He had recently visited the area of northern Alicante which was one of the major centres of leprosy in Spain. It was an increasing, or at least an increasingly identified, problem. In 1878 Alicante counted 68 cases, in 1909 117¹⁵. The question of how to treat the lepers was a live issue. Del vivir touches on proposals to create a sanatorium for lepers, proposals that within a few years were carried out. Fontilles, about six miles from Parcent, became the first modern leprosy sanatorium in Spain. Del vivir is, among other things, a plea for such modern treatment and a plea for leprosy sufferers to be more humanely and charitably treated. Miró is of course especially good at revealing the hypocrisy and self-interest in the argument: for shunning the lepers. That his presentation of commercial fears was not a fiction is revealed in his letter to Andrés González-Blanco: «He sabido que algunos lugareños de Parcent se han quejado. Temían que Del Vivir menguase la renta de la cosecha regional de pasa. Estas pobrecillas almas ignoran que de quinientos ejemplares (cifra máxima de la edición única) tan sólo he vendido cuarenta»¹⁶. Miró's experience of leprosy was personal and practical, not simply as a rhetorical figure or a Biblical theme. It is notable that, though Biblical references to leprosy are important in Del vivir, the church is shown in a poor light, its messages of consolation commonly being used in practice as empty formulae or, worse, hypocritically to help non-sufferers wash their hands of the problem.

If the first impulse in the choice of the leper bishop was the shocking experience of a live human problem, another was probably the story, which Miró would surely have heard at school in Orihuela, of Fernando Loaces, bishop of Lérida, native of Orihuela, who died in 1568. He contracted leprosy while bishop, was abandoned by all, but received by the Dominicans at Orihuela where he was miraculously cured. His promise to erect a building for the Dominicans for a college and university made him one of the founders of the college which Miró attended in Orihuela¹⁷. This possible origin for the leper bishop theme was first presented by Luis Astrana Marín in his violent attack on El obispo leproso in 1927. Astrana takes it for granted that Loaces is Miró's model but complains that in Miró's version there is no cure: «El novelista ha desperdiciado lo mejor de la leyenda para componer un argumento seco cual un esparto»¹⁸. For Astrana the point of the story is that it is of a piece with orthodox piety. For Miró faith is problematic: the good bishop dies.

Astrana's articles introduce us to the complex ambiguities of traditional attitudes to leprosy. Astrana had a weekly column in El Imparcial and for five weeks early in 1927 he had attacked Góngora. Now he turned on Miró's «estilo leproso, tan hediondo e irremediable como la enfermedad a que alude». «Es, pues», he continued, «el estilo leproso, a semejanza de la lepra, una enfermedad contagiosa y terrible, aunque cutánea -por cuanto su mal se nota en la superficie- con sus correspondientes pústulas, que se va extendiendo por todo el cuerpo del lenguaje y termina en una fiebre lenta». A fortnight later he goes further, linking the style he attacks with homosexuality, «esta otra lepra literaria»¹⁹. For good measure the attack is also anti-semitic and anti-feminist.

Many of the traditional qualities of the leper as a rhetorical figure appear here. He is disgusting to see, a danger to others, and immoral, especially sexually²⁰. This stereotype can be simply a figure of speech or it can represent a belief about the real world. It can be accompanied by sympathy for particular sufferers or it can extend into practical consequences the prejudices it embodies. Pardo Bazán's La prueba, quite possibly known to Miró, displays the range of the stereotype in late nineteenth-century Spain, from the mother who regards leprosy as divine punishment and a hereditary curse, to the son who consciously adopts a «modern» attitude but in practice is terrified, to the wife whose conjugal devotion is expressed by her strict control over her fear and revulsion towards her leper husband.

The attitude represented by the stereotype is that held by the healthy, by respectable society, and is largely dependent on belief rather than experience. Miró's view of the leper picks up an alternative tradition and sees him from outside respectable society: the leper as the lonely outcast. Characteristically this is the view of a fellow-outsider in Miró's world, the artist. And one should also associate with these two the Jew, «ese judío que las gentes aborrecen tanto porque le han ofendido mucho», as Miró puts it in El humo dormido (OC, 701). The connection has already appeared in Astrana; historically Jews and lepers were at times persecuted together; and the mother in La prueba puts it thus: «¿No te parece vergüenza ser de familia de judíos y de lazarados?» Miró's sympathetic view is deeply critical of all this. Many readers have noted that figures of speech drawn from leprosy appear in El obispo leproso. It should be added that they appear in the words or point of view of those Olezans whom Miró so clearly dislikes.

If Miró, then, is attacking the stereotype as a result of his own experience, perhaps the first conclusion is that the bishop's leprosy, drawn from that experience and from Bishop Loaces, is to start with not symbolic at all. He is a man suffering from Hansen's disease, a leprosy patient, an individual who suffers pain and dies, and who suffers more intensely because of popular attitudes to his sickness. His suffering and death are both unique and commonplace, the felt suffering of one individual, the suffering and death that all face as individuals. Miró takes the shocking but rather common theme of the leper who is a member of the establishment and presents it through his own experience. That the bishop is a noble man singled out by leprosy simply points to the cruel unpredictability of pain on the one hand -Hansen's bacillus is not choosy on grounds of virtue or class- and, on the other, to the fact that leprosy is simply one form of death. I emphasise these seemingly obvious points because they are so often jumped in the scurry to hunt the symbol. In effect Miró presents us with a piece of ironizing at the expense of literature and of the figure of speech: here is a leper who is actually a leper who is actually a leper. To be a leper is not to be someone else's literary symbol or someone else's figure of speech; on the contrary it is made more painful by the existence of the stereotypes.

I have started with circumstantial evidence and shall introduce more but my intention is simply to clarify what is surely in the text of Miró's novels. Perhaps, for instance, the fact that the bishop occupies the title of the novel, but appears rarely, has reinforced the presumption of a purely symbolic function, but the bishop's few appearances surely in fact build up a delicate and sensitive portrayal of the man. His empathy towards the young boy Pablo in his study, his friendship with Magín built on trust and respect, his nervousness under medical examination: episodes like these produce, if not a fully-rounded character, a recognisable and sympathetic individual. He himself protests that the skin-specialist «objetivaba demasiado el mal» (OC, 949). His illness is part of himself, not something separate under the doctor's power.

Any reading that tries to go beyond this reality of the bishop's character and illness must start from it. For Miró, after all, destinations, like symbolic meanings, should never be decided in advance. In his lecture on the Figuras de la Pasión del Señor he remarked: «Pero es que el símbolo [del Calvario] ¿no vendrá después de morir Jesús, no simbólicamente, sino en carne viva y desnuda?»²¹. This applies precisely to the bishop. But if we do wish to go beyond this suffering and dying individual, to establish what he may suggest within the novel, there is an obviously appropriate source of guidance: the Bible and Christian tradition. The bishop himself points to the chapters in Leviticus where leprosy is treated. He also acknowledges that Biblical leprosy is not necessarily modern leprosy, for after all he appreciates modern Biblical scholarship: «Y el obispo mentó los eczemas, los herpes, el impétigo, la psoriasis y más denominaciones y estudios de la nosología de la piel» (OC, 926). The break between traditional and modern understandings of leprosy is as clearly marked as the break between traditional and modern Bible criticism, even though Miró at once humorously qualifies the bishop's modernity by seeing a touch of rationalisation in it: «Semejaba muy persuasivo en las enfermedades leves». But we have to go back into the tradition that made little distinction between Biblical and contemporary leprosy.

In Leviticus no specifically moral valuation is attached to leprosy: it is simply a question of ritual purity. But even within the Old Testament itself moral connotations soon appear. In Numbers 12, Miriam is punished by God with leprosy for speaking against Moses. In II Chronicles 26, King Uzziah is struck with leprosy by God, and dies a leper. His offence was pride that led him to try to usurp the functions of the priests. A parallel tale appears in II Kings 15. And earlier in II Kings is the story of Naaman in which his servant Gehazi is punished with Naaman's leprosy for his attempted fraud. These Old Testament punishments naturally came to form the strongest element in the long tradition of seeing lepers as symbols of various sins, and indeed as direct victims of punishment for their own sins. The cures of lepers carried out by Jesus were obviously read as the saving of sinners. The Church Fathers developed the detailed interpretation of these themes: heresy, pride, deceit, and avarice were sins commonly held to be signified by leprosy. (Covarrubias can say confidently: «La lepra sinifica la dotrina falsa».) And it was inevitable that the long-standing medical and popular belief in the sexual depravity of lepers should also be incorporated. Saul Brody quotes from, among others, Tertullian and Prudentius (both of whom are mentioned in the Oleza novels) examples of leprosy symbolically linked with sexual sinfulness²². Thus while on the one hand some members and orders of the church developed and put into practice the idea that lepers needed especial care from Christians, on the other the church reinforced and developed the idea of leprosy as a symbol of sin.

Calderón's auto La lepra de Constantino is a good example of the standard uses of the theme. Constantine, having been aided in battle by the Christian God, gives orders to praise Jupiter. At once struck with leprosy, he is persuaded by «la gentilidad» that it is a punishment from Jupiter for first supposing that the help was Christian. «La gentilidad» uses the Old Testament accounts to argue that leprosy is «la Culpa», especially appropriate to pride and lack of faith. The cure for Constantine is a pre-Christian one: «La lepra con sangre humana se cura». Sacrifices of Christian children to Jupiter are called for. But a Massacre of the Innocents is avoided. Faith, St. Peter, and St. Paul show Constantine the Christian meaning of his leprosy, «esa pegajosa peste (que símbolo del pecado mancha el cuerpo, el alma ofende)». The New Testament replaces the Old:

PEDRO:       Con que verá el mundo claramente que la Lepra del Pecado, pues la del cuerpo se entiende ser hoy la Culpa del alma, aunque con sangre inocente se curó una vez, con agua se cura ya.

Calderón is at the end of a long theological and literary tradition. Saul Brody has summed up that tradition during the Middle Ages as follows:

In Frauendienst, the Tristan legend, Jaufré, and The Testament of Cresseid, the leprosy is linked with physical lust; in The Testament of Cresseid and Der Arme Heinrich it punishes the sin of pride; and in the Amis and Amiloun story as in Dante, it is the consequence of falsification. In short, the association of leprosy with spiritual defilement is pervasive in the literature of the Middle Ages, and not arbitrarily so, but because common beliefs -as seen in medical, homiletic, and social attitudes- made the same connection.

(p.189)

If the first layer of Miró's irony, then, is that his leper is first of all an individual rather than a symbol, the second layer is that the bishop's significance is the reverse of the dominant meaning developed by centuries of literary and religious tradition. He is only a sinner in the sense that all men are sinners, while the particular sins linked to leprosy suggest a joke on Miró's part, for from the point of view of the novel the bishop is the least heretical, least deceitful and avaricious, most chaste character in Oleza. From the point of view of his opponents, however, these are precisely the bishop's sins. He is proud, he interferes with, traditional priestly ritual like King Uzziah, his religious attitudes are regarded as near-heretical, and he is seen as condoning sexual laxity. Is this why it is never stated outright that he has leprosy? It is attributed to him by his enemies in Oleza, just as they attribute to him the sins traditionally symbolized by leprosy. In a sense Oleza makes a leper and a sinner of a good man.

There are other ways also in which the expectations raised by the symbol of a leper are unfulfilled. Calderón's blood-sacrifice is but one aspect of the widespread notion that leprosy is cured by the blood of the innocent, animal, child, or virgin. While Miró gives us an innocent virgin in María Fulgencia, the only blood shed is that of one of her pigeons, a death that leads not to the bishop's cure but to the disgrace of his enemies by a ridiculous chain of events²³. And while Miró brings into prominence the Old Testament /New Testament contrast, he eschews, as Astrana pointed out, the cure by water that Bishop Loaces and Constantine underwent, and which in the Old Testament was prefigured by the cleansing of Naaman in the Jordan.

If the leper as sinner can only be regarded as an ironical idea, perhaps readers who have suggested that the bishop is a redeemer appear to be nearer the truth. Perhaps the leprosy represents sin or a punishment for sin, but not the bishop's sin. As a Christ-figure he can be seen as suffering the sins of others, the sins of those who see him as a sinner. The ordinary Olezans, those who are not his especial enemies, wonder if this is the case. But why leprosy? Again tradition offers possible explanations. The church, using leprosy as a symbol of sin, but needing to offer real lepers consolation, stressed that the disease was a gift from God, a sacred malady, and that if he was patient a leper would be saved. The complexities of the whole situation are often sharply revealed by the words of the medieval rituals of separation. That of Vienne is a good example. The leper who is being separated from mankind for the good of the healthy and who is experiencing a ritual that draws on the funeral rites and treats him as in some senses dead, hears these words: «My friend, it pleases our Lord that you should be infected with this disease, and our Lord gives you a great gift when he wishes to punish you for the evil you have done in this world»²⁴. Lazarus provided the best example in the Bible of the leper who received his reward in heaven. Job, too (a figure much quoted by Miró), offered the picture of a sufferer from a dreadful skin disease who is later restored to moral prosperity.

Another theme that gave the leper more dignity was the kind of story in which a pious Christian cares for a leper and is rewarded by finding that the leper is Christ²⁵. This widespread theme is related to the older idea of the Messiah appearing as a leper. This was a Jewish tradition²⁶, but crucially for our purpose it can be found in the Vulgate and therefore in Scío de San Miguel's translation of it that Miró used as one of his principal versions of the Bible. Isaiah 53.4 reads: «En verdad tomó sobre sí nuestras enfermedades, y él cargó con nuestros dolores; y nosotros le reputamos como leproso, y herido de Dios, y humillado». The context is the passage that in Christian tradition is seen as prophetic of Jesus the Messiah, the Suffering Servant. Regardless of modern views as to the identity of the suffering servant or as to the propriety of the Vulgate and Scío's use of the terms «leprosus» and «leproso», there are ample grounds here for seeing this passage as crucially influential in the shaping of the leper bishop's image. Once the suffering servant is seen as a leper the whole of Isaiah 53 reveals close links with Miró's bishop. The servant's appearance is unpleasant: «No hay buen parecer en él, ni hermosura; y le vimos, y no era de mirar». This is connected with illness: he is a «varón de dolores». As a result he is reputed (as in Oleza) to be a leper, and regarded as punished by God. Miró not only knew the passage well but uses a personal adaptation of it in his essay «La conciencia mesiánica en Jesús» and in his lecture at Gijón: «Despreciado y el postrero de todos; se incorporará los trabajos y dolores; y en sus llagas se sanarán las heridas de los hombres» (OC, 1230). Miró chooses the word «llagas» here («livore» in the Vulgate, «cardenales» in Scío), because it fits perfectly the vocabulary both of Christ's wounds and of the sores of leprosy. One should also add that if Miró knew anything of scholarly debate over the suffering servant, and one would expect him to, he would know of the work of Duhm who in 1892 had proposed that the servant was a rabbi who died of leprosy. The whole pattern of servant-leprosy-Christ-crucifixion hung together for Miró.

It appears then, that the view put forward in the novel, the view that the bishop dies for the sins of Oleza and is in some sense a redeemer, may be the right one. But who is redeemed? Paulina is left with an «olor de felicidad no realizada» (OC, 1054). Pablo is left gazing out at the railway that offers him the option of a new world at the cost of losing his home world. We are given no clue as to what he will choose and though he has been linked with St. Paul by some readers²⁷, one does not feel much confidence that he will in any way repeat the achievements of his namesake. The suggestions of new life, conversion, a passion overcome, are balanced by the sense that the cycle of frustrated and frustrating human choice is about to begin again. Pablo's first love, María Fulgencia, is also left unsatisfied, sacrificed to the rôle imposed on women by her society. It is hard to find any character who can be said to have been redeemed by the bishop's suffering and death. As for Oleza as a whole, it has been somewhat modernized and opened up. The bishop's railway has largely achieved this, but there seems little to link his leprosy and the railway in any pattern that parallels the death and saving resurrection of Jesus. The railway is not a result of the bishop's suffering, nor is it an unambiguous good, as atonement is. The bishop, after all, is not cured. If we take the railway as pure progress and modern salvation then we are into a world -unfamiliar to Miró- of parody.

Miró's world, however, is ironical, not parodical, and this is true of his introduction of this theme of sacrifice and redemption that now needs more careful analysis. The idea first appears in the mouth of the nervous mother superior as a piece of the conventional wisdom of Oleza; «¿Y es lepra, lepra de verdad la que aflige a su ilustrísima?; ¡Y dicen que por los pecados de la diócesis!» (OC, 1018). It reappears in the last section of the novel in a paragraph that from a narrative point of view is heavily ambiguous, that invites the reader to tease out, sentence by sentence, whose view he is experiencing:

Paulina le habló del obispo. Y Pablo volvió sus ojos, ocultándose de sus remordimientos. En todas las iglesias de la diócesis se rezaba por el llagado. El Señor le había elegido para salvar a Oleza. Y Oleza ya se cansaba de decirlo y oírlo. Oleza recordaba que el anterior prelado, de una mundana actividad de agente de negocios espirituales, no necesitó sufrir para obtener los bienes de su apostolado. Pues el otro pobre obispo de Alepo siquiera padecía por su perfección de santidad y no por redimir a nadie. ¿Ni redimir a estas horas de qué? Los hombres rubios pecadores, los extranjeros del ferrocarril, ya no estaban; y para los pecados del lugar no era menester una víctima propiciatoria.

(OC, 1043)

However the problems of point-of-view are resolved, it cannot be claimed that there is here any warrant for authorial endorsement of the idea of the bishop as redeemer. There is even a suggestion of the idea of the leper as punished by God, for the railway navvies from whom salvation might have been sought were brought by the bishop. What is clear is that once again an interpretation of the bishop is seen to emerge from the world of conventional opinion inside the novel.

Before trying to assess the overall view that the novel presents, two pieces of external evidence are appropriate. On a scrap of paper kept in the family archives Miró has written:

Que alguien tenga la culpa del mal. Descansamos ya. Podemos aborrecerle siquiera. ¿Y si tuviéramos nosotros la culpa? Nos aborreceremos aborreciendo a los que tienen la culpa de que la tengamos. Y así llegaremos hasta el sacrificio del carnero, a quien incorporamos los pecados del mundo.

Too much should not be made of such a scrap, but it is suggestive, and Miró's notes of this kind were always either his own words or quotations with which he agreed in one way or another. In this case the flavour is very much his. Either way, it suggests that the idea of the propitiatory or redeeming sacrifice is a morally dangerous one. Certainly if the rôle of redeemer is an attributed one then it is an evasion. It can only make moral sense where the rôle is given from above or accepted from within.

The same doubt is expressed with delicious humour in one of the drafts of the manuscript «Sigüenza y el mirador azul» where Miró writes of a cholera epidemic in the Alicante of his childhood -the mid-eighties:

La otra epidemia, la del 54, -Alicante tenía sus epónimos siniestros- terminó con el sacrificio del Gobernador Quijano. Camila y Nuño el viejo lo comentaban elogiando aquellos tiempos. Quijano se había ofrecido como víctima de propiciación. Y se aceptó su ofrecimiento. Ahora, nadie. Pero alguien había de ser el último. Después de él, las campanas, el Te Deum, el gozo de las calles, la fruta y el agua sin hervir. ¡El último, solo en la tartana! ¿Cuándo se moriría el último? ¡Qué ansiedad porque se muriera ése, que aún estaba vivo, que podía ser uno de nosotros!

The concept of one dying for all is lovingly relegated to the category of folklore. The offering and the acceptance of the sacrifice are interpretations of a reality that otherwise would reveal chance and cruelty. The roots of the interpretation in the needs of human psychology are delicately revealed. Popular attitudes here (including the «good old days» syndrome) are very much akin to those in Oleza.

But if the Oleza novels and Miró himself undermine the concept of redemption, why is the bishop so insistently likened to Christ, to the suffering servant? Understanding must surely lie in Miró's third major irony, this time a tragic irony. If the first irony is that the bishop's leprosy is real before it is symbolic, and the second that the bishop is the opposite of the traditional sinning leper, then Miró's final irony is that he is a redeemer who does not redeem, at least not certainly or absolutely. He is a Christ for the new century.

But before we hastily pigeon-hole Miró as another heroic twentieth-century doubter, it is important to specify much more closely his own understanding of Jesus. Without this it is impossible to grasp the unique weaving together of traditional and modern elements in Miró's mature work. As is well known, Miró was brought up in an orthodox Catholic family, apparently a secure and loving background in which his mother, as he tells us at the start of the Figuras de la Pasión del Señor, made the New Testament story an essential part of his upbringing, inseparable from the warmth of his home. Orthodoxy, without the warmth, was reinforced by attendance at the Jesuit boarding-school in Orihuela. At some stage Miró lost his faith while retaining the deep emotional bond with the New Testament and gaining a loathing for the cruel and inhuman side of his Jesuit education. It is tempting to speculate that part of Miró's admiration for Pepita Jiménez -he wrote as a young man the words «¡Bendito seas!» on the frontispiece portrait of Valera- was that it helped liberate him without guilt from elements of his childhood faith that had become unacceptable. However that may be, it is important to be clear that the adult Gabriel Miró was not a practising or orthodox Catholic. It is surely obvious from his work that this is so but the testimony of his friends also supports it²⁸. Edmund King summarizes the situation thus: «To the writings of Ernest Renan, who mingled religious skepticism with sympathy for Christian ideals, Miró felt a strong attraction... We may suppose that Miró's spiritual development roughly paralleled Renan's, and that he felt about religion and his past much the same as Renan did»²⁹. Miró loved much of the liturgical expression of the church and attended the great services, but he attended them neither as a believer nor as an aesthete. He spoke of the «liturgia magna y triste» of Holy Week³⁰. It was for him a supreme expression of humanity's troubles, and especially of the consciousness of death and transience.

Yet Miró was perhaps less sentimental about his past than Renan, seeing it as something to be understood and accepted rather than lamented. For that reason the liberal protestant writers of his time obviously appealed to Miró also. For instance, in his article «La conciencia mesiánica de Jesús» he gives as one of his sources Adolf Harnack, the German scholar whose celebrated published lectures Das Wesen des Christentums (1900) Miró possessed in a well-used French edition. Harnack's book is organized in a significant manner. The first part tackles Jesus' «message», the next part that message in relation to modern problems, and only then does Harnack proceed to the death and resurrection, treating them as part of the historical development of Christianity, as belonging to what the church has made of Jesus since his ministry. For Harnack the core of Christianity lies in Jesus' sayings and he sees these as essentially ethical. Miró's own approach, set out in «La conciencia mesiánica de Jesús», is closely parallel. He sees Jesus as developing first a sense of the Fatherhood of God as opposed to the concept of «Jehová terrible». Then comes the idea of the neighbour and the linked idea emphasised by Miró, as by Harnack, that it is the intention behind a deed, rather than the deed itself, that matters morally. Then Jesus takes the idea of the Messiah and turns it inside out by relating it to Isaiah 53, to the idea of the suffering Messiah: «Y [Jesús] arranca de su reino los signos de fausto, las esperanzas políticas; y las promesas del Cristo le palpitan en su sangre con palabras de Isaías: "Despreciado y el postrero de todos; se incorporará los trabajos y dolores; y en sus llagas se sanarán las heridas de los hombres"» (OC, 1230). In all this Miró's point of view is very like Harnack's. He treats Jesus as a man evolving a uniquely new moral teaching within the context of his own religion and traditions. Divinity is not denied but neither is it in any direct sense the author of Jesus' work. Jesus is seen creating the Gospel message rather than presenting an absolute truth.

Jesus' death completes the story in «La conciencia mesiánica». His death is seen as fulfilling the concept of the suffering Messiah. For Miró apostolic and patristic ideas of redemption are meanings developed by the early Christians out of the Passion. The redemption that he best understands is that embodied not in future theology but in the words of Isaiah, «en sus llagas se sanarán las heridas de los hombres». Putting the life and death of Jesus in the context of Jewish history and prophesy makes a more purely human story than starting with the death and resurrection as a divine entrance into history.

The central features of the Jesus that Miró admires are, then, that he is perfectly human, and that he embodies in his teaching and his life and death the perfection of the moral insight of the suffering servant. The paradoxes of the Sermon on the Mount flow from this central conception of the pure man who is disfigured, abased, rejected. This profound and paradoxical morality is inseparable from the ideas of love for others that Miró prized so highly. «With his stripes we are healed... he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter»: the servant is a redeemer and is compared to a propitiatory offering, yet because Miró insists on understanding the overall meaning of the Passion as he does he makes it clear that the emphasis of the Catholic idea of redemption means little to him. Redemption is not; to put it very crudely, a technical religious matter. It is not a vast cancelling of debts. It is not the overcoming of death. It is not something done for man. The whole theology of grace is inappropriate here for Miró's version of redemption is human, is ethical. Miró speaks of «el Mesías sufrido, la divinidad florecida en Jesús» (OC, 1230).

Harnack's view here expresses well, I believe, something close or at least related to Miró's point:

Qui peut s'empêcher de voir que le dogme d'une «rédemption objective» n'est devenu, dans le développement de l'histoire de l'Église, une pesante tentation qui a amoindri, pendant des générations, la gravité de la religion? Une conception de la «Rédemption» qui ne peut pas avec précision être emboîtée dans la prédication de Jésus est un piège. Certainement le christianisme est la religion de la Rédemption; mais cette conception est délicate et ne peut être enlevée à la sphère de l'expérience personnelle et de la conversion intérieure31.

Miró takes this point of view and pushes it perhaps a little further. For him men cannot be saved by others but only by themselves, by acts of faith and love and by acceptance of themselves, of their past, and of suffering³².

It is in this way that Miró's leper bishop has finally to be understood. He has not the power to save absolutely, either from sin or death, either as an officer of Christ's church, or through his own Passion. But he does offer possibilities. The railway represents these in one way: there is now a choice for Olezans. His purity, acceptance of suffering and death, and practical goodness represent possibilities for others in another way. Again Harnack puts it well: «Partout où souffre le juste il y a une expiation qui purifie»³³. Is this not exactly the emotion lying behind the ironies of the moment when Paulina, Álvaro, and Pablo set off «camino de la felicidad» as the bells toll for the bishop's death?

Just before the bishop dies Miró writes: «Del obispo leproso no se tenía más que su ausencia, su ausencia sin moverse ya de lo profundo de la ciudad» (OC, 1043). An absence that is a presence. By the irony Miró has stripped away layer after layer of possible meanings for the bishop's leprosy. Those absences finally leave this quiet invisible presence, this still centre in a novel where so much is expressed in terms of space, this image of stoical acceptance in a world of change and transience. It is the very delicacy and fragility of this vision that has given the novel its shape, with the fullness of Oleza life in the foreground, the bishop of the title, the central figure, elusively withdrawn.

The bishop accepts the suffering imposed on him, but again careful distinctions are needed if we are not to see Miró as simply putting forward Christian resignation. Don Magín's unsentimental theology clarifies matters here. In his dialogue with Doña Corazón in Nuestro padre San Daniel he tells her: «Solemos decir que un alma goza de un estado de gracia cuando vive de beneficios del cielo, en una dulce quietud. Eso no es un estado de gracia: es vivir gratis, vivir a costa de Dios; y se ha de vivir a costa de sí mismo» (OC, 866). Orthodox enough, but behind Don Magín we can see Miró's stress on salvation coming from oneself or from nowhere. The whole dialogue develops these ideas, with a careful distinction between «acomodarse» and «resignarse».

At the end of El obispo leproso Magín again considers acceptance and sacrifice. This time he has grown older, the bishop has died, he has grown less sure that he can express precisely what sacrifice is, just as the novel reveals Miró's difficulties in expressing his vision of the nature of the bishop's sacrifice. In the end Magín offers a very Mironian unpeeling of layers of meaning leaving a core almost as tenuous as a shrug of the shoulders: «Y si los sacrificios no fueren soluciones, que sean siquiera un sufrimiento, y serán algo, aunque no sean afirmativamente nada» (OC, 1060). No sacrifice is of itself redeeming. All that is left is individual, inner meaning. In the Miró family archives is a sheet of paper headed «Para El obispo leproso/Su pensamiento capital o tesis según dicen». It reads: «El obispo dice: "Tanto la virtud como el pecado deben de tener una convicción, una decisión que es de la naturaleza propia, íntima de la criatura virtuosa o pecadora. Yo, por ejemplo, he ofrecido la virginidad a Dios después de imponérmela a mí mismo, y la he ofrecido a Dios cuando ya estaba en mí como una objetividad y no como una aspiración"». There could hardly be a clearer example of the idea that redemption comes from within rather than from following rules or accepting an offer from outside.

The characters in the novel are of course a part of this world. They cannot be saved by the bishop, but only be shamed and purified by his goodness and suffering. In the central cases of Paulina, Pablo, Álvaro, and María Fulgencia each has to seek salvation from him or herself. Paulina has to return home to find a possibility of happiness after finding that the bishop cannot help. Álvaro fails to accept himself. Pablo is left to choose whether to use the railway or not. María Fulgencia turns what seems an imprisonment into a willed acceptance of what has happened to her. But beyond these characters stand Purita and Magín. Both of them embody the stoicism of the bishop. Magín at the end is seen as subject to the leprosy of time. Purita suffers constant frustration of her sexuality. Yet their parting is a moment of joy, of flowers, as well as of sadness. The reader's indignation at the way Purita is treated in Oleza is continually played against her own invincible joy, not a matter of putting up with things cheerfully, but of shaping her own life out of herself and out of what is given or not given her.

Ricardo Gullón writes, we have seen, that «las llagas del Obispo y las lacras de la ciudad son, en distintos niveles, metáfora de una condición incurable»³⁴. That «condición incurable» is for Miró the basic given of his own life. His Oleza novels are his attempt at shaping his own life within and out of what is given him³⁵.