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Amado Nervo: His Mysticism and Franciscan Influence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Roderick A. Molina
Roderick A. Molina*
Affiliation:
The Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C.
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Extract

Amado nervo’s affection for religious themes is projected so frequently and so intimately in all his work that literary critics have constantly classified him among the number of the mystical poets—those privileged beings who aspired to union with God through love, and who expressed their sublime thoughts in poetic form.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , October 1949 , pp. 173 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1950

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References

* In Amado Nervo. Sus Mejores Poemas. Selección de Eduardo Barrios and Roberto Maza Fuentes. (Santiago de Chile, Editorial Nascimiento, 1933), p. 9.

1 Amado Nervo was born at Tepic, a small city on the Pacific shores of the Mexican state of Nayarit, on August 27, 1870. He died at Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, May 24, 1919. “My family name,” said Nervo, “is Ruiz Nervo; my father modified it, by shortening it. He called himself Amado Nervo and he gave me his name. I became, then, Amado Nervo, and this name, which seemed to be a pseudonym—as many in America believed it to be—and which in any case was a rare name, was probably of no little aid in my literary success. Who knows what my luck would have been with my ancestral name, Ruiz de Nervo, or if I had been named Pérez y Pérez!” Obras Completas de Amado Nervo, Vol. XXX: La mañana del poeta (Mexico, Ediciones Botas, 1938, edited by Alfonso Méndez Planearte), pp. 17–20. In this study the citations will be taken from Obras Completas de Amado Nervo (Madrid, 1920–1922), edited by Alfonso Reyes, which will be henceforth cited simply as Obras Completas.

2 It may be useful to clarify, at this point, the matter of Nervo’s vocation to the priesthood. He received his primary education at Tepic and his secondary training at Jacona (Michoacán). From 1886 to 1891, Nervo studied at the Colegio-Seminario at Zamora. When he completed his courses in literature, science and philosophy in 1888, instead of beginning the theological course in preparation for the priesthood—as did his fellow-students—Nervo began the study of law. It was only at the end of 1890, during a spiritual retreat, that he decided to study for the priesthood. However, his theological studies must have lasted less than a year, for on December 30, 1891, he writes from Tepic to the Méndez Padilla family informing them that he had left the Colegio-Seminario of Zamora, that he was seeking employment, and earnestly requesting their prayers that the Faith of his fathers may guide and protect him as he goes forth into the battle of life. See the introduction to Mañana del poeta, Obras Completas de Amado Nervo (Mexico, Ediciones Botas, 1938), pp. 63–64.

3 Wellman, Esther Turner, in her excellent study, Amado Nervo, Mexico’s Religious Poet (Instituto de las Españas, New York, 1936), p. 246 Google Scholar, recalls the curious fact that “…today Nervo’s statue in the Secretaría Pública (of Mexico City) wears the Franciscan habit.”

4 Estrada, Genaro: Bibliografía de Amado Nervo (Mexico, Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 1925)Google Scholar. This bibliography contains nearly all Nervo’s works that had been published up to that date. Since then, two other works of Nervo have been found and published by the noted Mexican writer, Planearte, Alfonso Méndez: La mañana del poeta (as Vol. XXX of the Obras Completas, Mexico, 1938) and La Ultima Luna (in Abside, Vol. VII [Mexico, 1943], pp. 175–200).Google Scholar

5 Compare the poem of Nervo, entitled: “De Paul Verlaine” (published in El Nacional of Mexico City, November 28, 1896), with Paul Verlaine’s poem “Femme et Chatte”, in his Poémes saturniens. (Cited in Wellman, op. cit., p. 30.)

Paul Verlaine:

Elle jouait avec sa chatte;

Et c’etait merveille de voir

La main blanche et la blanche patte

S’abattre dans l’ombre du soir.

Amado Nervo:

Se divirtía junto a su gata

y era un hermoso prodigio de ver

la mano blanca, la blanca pata

que se agitaban entre la grata

sombra del pálido atardecer.

6 Darío, Rubén: Autobiografía (Madrid, 1922), p. 178.Google Scholar

7 Goldberg, Isaac: Studies in Spanish-American Literature (New York, Brentano’s, 1920), pp. 11–16.Google Scholar

8 This description of Nervo by Rubén Darío is found in the introduction to Las Ideas de Tello Téllez. Como el Cristal, Obras Completas, Vol. XIX, pp. 11–12.

9 Nervo, Amado: Lengua y Literatura, 1a parte, Obras Completas, Vol. XXII, pp. 42–43.Google Scholar When Rubén Darío died in 1917, Nervo wrote those tender verses:

Ha muerto Rubén Darío,
!el de las piedras preciosas!
Cuántos años intensos junto al Sena vivimos
engarzando en el oro de un común ideal
los versos juveniles que, a veces, brotar vimos
como brotan dos rosas a un tiempo de un rosal!

Nervo: Las voces, Obras Completas, Vol. III, pp. 102–103.

In the Retiro Park of Madrid, there is a marble monument with the face of Rubén Darío on one side and that of Amado Nervo on the other. It was evidently the sculptor’s aim to thus symbolize the fact that the two poets sprang from the same social trunk and that, although they followed different paths, they complemented each other. Rubén sought to infuse a high, almost mythical sense of values in the new generation of writers in the Spanish language—Nervo sought refuge and contemplation. The two Latin American poets succeeded in infusing optimism and new life into the Spanish language.

10 Lengua y Literatura, 1a parte, Obras Completas, Vol. XXII, pp. 42–43.

11 In Negras, Perlas. Místicas, Obras Completas, Vol. I, pp. 209–211.Google Scholar

12 Lengua y Literatura, 1a parte, Obras Completas, Vol. XXII, pp. 36–38.

13 Poemas, Obras Completas, Vol. II, pp. 211–224.

14 Interiores, Jardines. En voz baja, Obras Completas, Vol. VII, pp. 63–64.Google Scholar

15 In Interiores, Jardines. En voz baja, Obras Completas, Vol. VII, pp. 31–32.Google Scholar

16 Ureña, Pedro Henríquez: Literary Currents in Hispanic America (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1945), p. 160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Nervo, : El Arquero Divino, Obras Completas, Vol. XXVII, p. 161.Google Scholar

18 Nervo, : Las Ideas de Tello Téllez. Como el Cristal, Obras Completas, Vol. XIX, p. 13.Google Scholar

19 de Unamuno, Miguel: Introduction to Jardines Interiores. En voz baja, Obras Completas, Vol. VII, pp. 18–19.Google Scholar

20 In El Nuevo Mundo of Mexico City, February 23, 1917.

21 Oyuela, Calixto: “El misticismo de Amado Nervo”, a lecture delivered in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires, June 27, 1919 Google Scholar. This lecture was first published in Nosotros, Vol. XXXII, No. 122 (Buenos Aires, June-July, 1919), and later was republished as an introduction to Vol. XV of Obras Completas de Amado Nervo (Madrid, 1920). See also: Wellman, Esther Turner: Amado Nervo, Mexico’s Religious Poet, pp. 125 ff.Google Scholar, which is the most complete study of Nervo yet to appear; Meléndez, Concha: Amado Nervo (New York, Instituto de las Espanas, 1926), pp. 63–80 Google Scholar; Alfonso Méndez Plancarte’s introduction to Vol. XXX of Obras Completas de Amado Nervo (Mexico, Ediciones Botas, 1938); Junco, Alfonso: “Sobre el misticismo de Nervo”, in Fisonomías (Buenos Aires, 1927), pp. 115 ff.Google Scholar, cited in Alfonso Méndez Planearte, op. cit.

22 The statement made in the article entitled “Amado Nervo” in the Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada Europeo-Americana, Vol. 38 (Barcelona, Espasa-Calpe, n. d.), p. 279, that Nervo had studied at the universities of Mexico and Paris has no historical basis. See Alfonso Méndez Plancarte’s introduction to Vol. XXX, Obras Completas (ed. cit.).

23 Wellman, op. cit., p. 279.

24 Ideas de Tello Téllez. Como el Cristal, Obras Completas, Vol. XXIX, p. 91.

25 Discursos. Conferencias. Miscelánea, Obras Completas, Vol. XXVII, p. 69.

26 EN Torno a la Guerra, Obras Completas, Vol. XXIV, pp. 79–80.

27 Ensayos, Obras Completas, Vol. XXVI, pp. 73, 270–275.

28 Ibid., pp. 74, 150. Also, Perlas Negras. Místicas, Obras Completas, Vol. I, pp. 57–58.

29 Perlas Negras. Místicas, Obras Completas, Vol. I, p. 199.

30 Franco, Pedro B.: La Vida Espiritual de Amado Nervo (Buenos Aires, 1919), p. 27.Google Scholar This author makes the mistake of applying this phase of Nervo’s life to the whole course of the poet’s life, deducting therefrom that Nervo was a theosophist and that he had found peace in theosophism. But Nervo expresses himself very clearly on this point: “Do not laugh at this. This comes from theosophist teachings. … I tell you these things without intending you to believe them, simply because they are beautiful.” Ideas de Tello Téllez. Como el Cristal, Obras Completas, Vol. XXIX, p. 125.

31 Perlas Negras. Místicas, Obras Completas, Vol. I, pp. 199–200.

32 Wellman (op. cit., pp. 150 ff.) attempts to prove that the change undergone in the poet’s development was due to the influence exercised upon him by the “Generation of ’98” and by Don Miguel Unamuno, in whose spirit he found “… what was already in himself—the disquiet of a mind forever pondering over the meaning of existence.” Referring to Nervo’s En voz baja, Unamuno said: “What shall I tell you of this ‘I’, I who live impelled by thirst and hunger for God, ‘calling upon the infinite’, ‘seeking to produce an ideal’, as the poet here sings? And like the poet, I am assailed by the torturing ‘quién sabe’. Many times I have said, and I now repeat with him:

De todas suertes, me escuda
mi sed de investigación,
mi ansia de Dios, honda y muda
y hay más amor en mi duda
que en tu tibia afirmación.

Doubting is perhaps the most human and most intimate way of believing (I refer you to my Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho).” In the Introduction to Jardines Interiores.

En voz baja, Obras Completas, Vol. VII, p. 19. The reader should note this similarity of ideas which Unamuno himself admits, although we disapprove of the rhetorical fallacy of the famous professor of Salamanca. Perfecto Méndez Padilla points out the influence of the Positivists on the mind of Nervo at the time when he went to Mexico City in 1894. See his “Amado Nervo: La evolución de sus ideas y su retorno a la fé,” in La Ultima Vanidad, Obras Completas, Vol. XXIX, p. 148.

33 Nervo, Amado: “The Story of my Life”, Inter America, Vol. VI (New York, 1923), pp. 96–98.Google Scholar In this article, Nervo laments that his economic situation had not permitted him to publish fewer of his compositions—but only his best ones. However, he needed the means to live in a country where the market for books was very limited.

34 La Amada Inmóvil was found in manuscript form at the poet’s death. It corresponds to Vol. XII of Obras Completas.

35 Wellman, op. cit., pp. 20–21.

36 La Amada Inmóvil, Obras Completas, Vol. XIL p. 62.

37 Perlas Negras. Místicas, Obras Completas, Vol. I, p. 492.

38 Dorothy Kress has made a free translation of this poem:

Offertory

My God, I offer you my grief:
For it is all that I can offer now!
You gave me love, a love that made belief
In love a cult!
Death took her off and how
Was I to have anything but grief?
Accept it, Lord,
For it is all that I can offer now!

In Confessions of a Modern Poet (Boston, Bruce & Humphries, Inc., 1935), p. 50.

39 This work has been translated into German by Graebel, Carl: Erfüllung (Buenos Aires, 1936)Google Scholar, and into English by Rice, W. F.: Plenitude (Los Angeles, J. R. Muller, 1928).Google Scholar

40 Don Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, with his great mastery of this subject, has given a clear and concise definition of what constitutes mystical poetry. According to him, mystical poetry must not be confused with merely Christian poetry, although in its pure form it can only be found in Christianity. To possess true mystical inspiration, it is not enough to have profound knowledge of theology nor to have religious devotion nor even to have reached the very heights of sanctity. The mystic poet must have “a special psychological state, an overflowing of the will and the mind, a fixed and deep contemplation of things divine, a basic metaphysics and philosophy, which follow a different, but not contrary path than that of dogmatic theology.” Estudios y Discursos de Crítica Histórica y Literaria (Madrid, Edición Nacional, 1941), Vol. II, pp. 71–72. Mystical poetry, says Dr. David Rubio, O.S.A., is “…no more than the interpretation, in the form of art, of all these theologies and philosophies animated by the personal and intense feeling of the poet who sings of his love.” The Mystic Soul of Spain (New York, Cosmopolitan Science & Axt Service Co., 1946), pp. 13.

41 Elevación, Obras Completas, Vol. XV, p. 158.

42 Ibid., “De tí podrá decirse…’”

43 Serenidad, Obras Completas, Vol. XI, p. 213.

44 Ibid., pp. 187–188.

45 Elevación, Obras Completas, Vol. XV, p. 90.

46 Calixto Oyuela, op. cit.

47 Alfonso Junco, op. cit., pp. 105 ff.

48 El Estanque de los lotos, Obras Completas, Vol. XVIII, p. 211.

49 “Diálogo Interior”, Estanque de los lotos, Obras Completas, Vol. XVIII, pp. 21–24.

50 Perfecto Méndez Padilla, op. cit., pp. 139–184. Rosas, Hernán, in his Amado Nervo, La Peralta y Rosas (Mexico, 1926), pp. 66–67 Google Scholar, presents the death of the poet in a manner contrary to the historical fact. Our version is based on an interview given by José María Zorrilla San Martín to a reporter of the Chilean newspaper, El Mercurio (Santiago, March 14, 1926), which may also be found in the introduction to La Mañana del Poeta, Obras Completas de Amado Nervo (Mexico, Ediciones Botas, 1938), p. 286. See also, Reyes, Alfonso: Tránsito de Amado Nervo (Santiago, Chile, Ediciones Ercilla, 1937)Google Scholar. Professor Reyes is an authority on the life and works of Amado,Nervo. He has penetrated more deeply than any other writer into the psychology of the poet. It was he who edited the Obras Completas de Amado Nervo (Madrid, 1920–1922), which we have used for our study.

51 Wellman, op. cit., pp. 233–234.

52 For a summary of the Franciscan influence in Mexico, see Benitez, José R., Historia Gráflca de la Nueva España (Mexico, 1929), especially pp. 65–71.Google Scholar Cf, also Engelhardt, Zephyrin O.F.M.: Missions and Missionaries of California, Vol, I (Santa Barbara, Cal., 1929), p. 329.Google Scholar The Guatemalan Jesuit, Padre Rafael Landivar, sang the praises of the City of Tepic and its famous Cross in his Rusticatio Mexicana (Mexico, 1924, a translation into Spanish from the second edition published at Bologna in 1782), pp. 306–311.

53 Gemelli, Agostino O.F.M.: El Francisccmismo (Spanish translation, Barcelona, Luis Gili, 1940), pp. 263–299.Google Scholar

54 Ibid., p. 267.

55 Ibid., p. 272.

56 Ibid., p. 282.

57 Las Ideas de Tello Téllez. Como el Cristal, Obras Completas, Vol. XIX, pp. 58–59.

58 Pascual Aguilera. El Domador de Almas, Obras Completas, Vol. VI, p. 37.

59 El Diamante de la Inquietud. El Diablo Desinteresado. Una Mentira, Obras Completas, Vol. XIV, p. 114.

60 Plenitud, Obras Completas, Vol. XVII, p. 38.

61 Ensayos, Obras Completas, Vol. XXVI, p. 68.

62 En torno a la Guerrá, Obras Completas, Vol. XXIV, pp. 69–80, 150. Also Ensayos, Obras Completas, Vol. XXVI, pp. 192, 224, and Las Ideas de Tello Téllez. Como el Cristal, Obras Completas, Vol. XIX, p. 63.

63 La Lengua y la Literatura, 1a parte, Obras Completas, Vol. XXII, pp. 64–65.

64 Poemas, Obras Completas, Vol. II, pp. 209–224.

65 de Legísima, Juan R. O.F.M. and Cañedo, Lino G. O.F.M., editors: Escritos completos de San Francisco de Asís (Madrid, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1945), p. 70.Google Scholar See also Marasso, Arturo Rocca: Estudios Literarios (Buenos Aires, 1920), pp. 125 ff.Google Scholar

66 Poemas, Obras Completas, Vol. II, pp. 219–220.

67 La Lengua y la Literatura, 1a parte, Obras Completas, Vol. XXII, pp. 64–65.

68 Plenitud, Obras Completas, Vol. XVII, pp. 137–138.

69 Elevación, Obras Completas, Vol. XV, p. 57.

70 Plenitud, Obras Completas, Vol. XVII, p. 159.

71 El Estanque de los lotos, Obras Completas, Vol. XVIII, p. 223.

72 Elevación, Obras Completas, Vol. XV, p. 148.

73 Plenitud, Obras Completas, Vol. XVII, p. 133.

74 La Lengua y la Literatura, 2» parte, Obras Completas, Vol. XXIII, pp. 164, 169.

75 Ibid., p. 170.

76 D’Alençon, Ubald O.F.M. Cap.: Leçons d’histoire franciscaine (Paris, Librairie Saint-François, 1918), pp. 8–36.Google Scholar

77 “Credo,” Serenidad, Obras Completas, Vol. XI, p. 117.

78 La Amado Inmóvil, Obras Completas, Vol. XII, p. 51.

79 In the last days of his life Nervo regretted having written some of the poems of his youth. Calixto Oyuela (op. cit., p. 20), declared that Nervo had written to him saying that he wished he had never written the poem “A Kempis”, found in Perlas Negras. Místicas, Obras Completas, Vol. I, p. 187.

80 Nervo complains that when he reached “one of the most difficult and most elevated points of poetic alpinism; to the high plateau of simplicity” (as Rubén Darío had said), those who had formerly praised his malarmeismos, “who did not understand even the Sursum Corda” (i. e., nothing), now began to call him chabacano (unrefined). Juana de Asbaje, Obras Completas, Vol. VIII, pp. 114–115.

81 Ensayos, Obras Completas, Vol. XXVI, p. 105.