The process of art is the endowment of a particular experience with the full measure of life. The work of art is a fragment of word or substance informed with the wholeness of spiritual vision. The mystics of Spain were fated to make art, or to make deeds. For here theology was heir to centuries of universal vision. The mystic remains a Catholic and a churchman. The Inquisition narrows his forms of speculation. He is a part of Spain. But all Spain’s cosmic will is in him. This will is in the great work of Luis de León: _Los Nombres de Cristo_. Three Augustinian monks set forth from their convent across the river from Salamanca. One of them has found a shaded grove on the río Tormes: here, shielded from the fever of the sun, they rest and exchange discourse on the names of Christ. The subject is rigidly dogmatic: the treatment of the virtue of names has the Pythagorian and Kabbalistic note which Plato and Aquinas equally would have rejected. Yet in this stifled frame, an artist quickens a magnificent world. The monks with their conventional background, the old town in flame of summer, the river panting through its fringe of trees, the athletic freedom of the mind in search, the passionate reality of God--all Spain is in this antiquated book. Her extremes of waste and verdure, her turmoil of race, her traffic and speculation, her panoply of vision--Jew, Christian, warrior, priest--converge into the substance of prose. The delirious delights of logic scaling the battlements of God, the southern arabesque whereby the abstract thought becomes design make it glamorous and moving. León’s career was action. He was a teacher, and his words were on the quick of deed. This is why the Inquisition took note of him and subjected him to five years of imprisonment and torture. The Inquisition, for all its folly and corruption, was the coefficient of Spain’s unity. In any organism, thought and act are joined. This was true of medieval Europe: it was true of Spain alone in Europe after the modern dawn.