This is the confession of Velázquez, enacting Spain’s will to be Europe. This is a prophecy of Europe, whose life of mechanical perfection has turned the Christ and saints of its soul into such twisted creatures. _CHAPTER IX_ _THE WILL OF DON QUIXOTE_ _a. The Birth of the Hero_ _b. The Career of the Hero_ _c. The Book of the Hero_ _a. The Birth of the Hero_ Cervantes was born in a Europe more than three centuries beyond the noon of chivalry. Knighthood north of Spain begot great books. The _Chanson de Roland_ in the form which we possess is earlier than 1100. In the last years of the twelfth century Chrétien de Troies--first master in an unbroken line that perhaps closed with Anatole France--put into gracious and fleet form the Arthurian cycle. A bit later, a profounder German, Wolfram von Eschenbach, composed from French materials the transfiguring masterwork of chivalry, the Poem of Parzival. Joinville’s portrait of Saint Louis and of his two Crusades was written about 1290. Thereafter Europe, north of Spain, begins the great decline into the modern era. The last historic synthesis of western man lies in that Middle Age. It rose from the chaotic impact of the Roman Empire and the Teuton with Alexandria and Judah. Already ere the ancient world had fallen its architects were building. Origen, Tertullian, Jerome, Anthony, Gregory, Charlemagne--such were its foundation-makers. It reaches heights in Abélard, Aquinas, Francis, Dante: in the creators of the Gothic, in the great weavers of polyphonic music, in men of action--Godefroi de Bouillon and Saint Louis. And already, at this hey-day, from the disintegrant north come threats of dissolution in such figures as Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus who, positing the primacy of will over the intellect, declare Theology to be not science but revelation and foretell Luther and Kant--creators of the modern chaos. European thought, after the Cathedrals, Dante, and the great scholastics, is a story of destruction. Men of as high genius as Albertus Magnus or Saint Thomas proceed by vision and by dialectic to take stone from stone in the dismantlement of Christian Europe. Here and there in the vast liquidation a prophet throws up a scheme for a new Synthesis--such a one was Spinoza: the world cannot accept him, neither can it lose him, from cosmic prescience of a future need.