A modern State with a medieval God. In France and England, the medieval God has already vaporized away. England breaks literally with Rome. France dissolves her bonds into mere gesture. _The modern State must have no God but itself._ It must create its own pragmatic, its ethic, its metaphysic, finally its religion upon the unitary plan of its own health and progress. France knows this: henceforth the State of France will act unhindered by any ideal external to its future. And England knows this. Two mighty States move forward with a unity of program and of control born of the need of the State. But in Spain, the State is not cause and effect, not ideal and goal, not master and dispenser. In Spain, the State shall be the tool of a Vision hostile to the State’s essential nature. The State must be materialistic, possessive, selfish. Spain’s ideal is visionary, creative, altruistic. The State must steal and hold. Spain’s ideal spends. The State murders to enhance itself. Spain’s ideal murders to enhance Christ. The State is anti-individual. Spain’s ideal makes and controls by law the yearning of each soul. Isabel is an artist: she has the logic and the integrity of the artist. But in the form of her work live elements that disrupt and that belie each other. She makes of Spain a modern State: she sends this monster, lustful, treacherous and dull, upon a Christian errand.... _CHAPTER VIII_ _THE WILL OF SAINT AND SINNER_ _a._ _Irony and Honor_ _b._ _The Mystic_ _c._ _The Jesuit_ _d._ _The Jurist_ _e._ _The Rogue_ _f._ _Velazquez_ _a._ _Irony and Honor_ The Catholic Kings have builded ruthlessly: absolutism, the grace of Christ, intolerance, universal justice, arms and prayer were to make Spain one. Now each of these qualities takes form and grows personified in Spain. Each is imbued with Spain’s imperious will to be whole and one: each grows great with this spirit: each wars upon them all. Spain was chaotic and diverse. Her will to be one serries her into antitheses. Her will to union breaks her into extremes. Irony works on Isabel’s fair fabric. Perhaps the land itself is symbol of the process. Spain is desert--and garden; flat plain--and mountain; great heat--and winter. Spain is Europe--and Africa. In her events, she reveals this first ironic state of fusion--the splitting up into opposites of action. Columbus, mystic captain who charted his voyage in the Prophets, becomes enchained in the lust of avarice. His men, sent to Christianize the Indies, enslave the courteous American and sack his cities. Spain’s past transforms! The Cid, that playful knight, becomes crusader. Saints turn knight-errant. Moderate Stoics (like Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius whose father was a Spaniard) inspire the ascetic fury of the hermits. And the humane Arcipreste de Hita, Castile’s first poet, is turned into an apologist for license.