The novel Don Quixote was written by the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The work recounts the incredible adventures of the character of the same name. Don Quixote is a wandering knight with sincere and honest intentions. However, on his way, the hero gets into ridiculous situations, from which he will try to find a way out. Like many works, Don Quixote gives readers a variety of topics to ponder, one of which is the aspect of Christian faith in the context of the time. It also allows analyzing how the problems of the past and people’s perceptions of them relate to the present time. This paper will examine aspects of truth, kindness, and other expressions of Christian faith and foundations in the work of Cervantes.
Don Quixote’s behavior is a symbol of nobleness and excellent spirit, the desire to benefit people, even in the name of unrealizable ideals, because it is in this aspiration that the growth of the soul lies. Appearance, financial situation, and status have no importance because Don Quixote is a multifaceted interesting person with pure thoughts. He combines kindness, inner strength, and naivety. Despite the absurdity of his exploits, the hero inspires admiration and tenderness. Don Quixote is the personification of nobility, generosity, and justice. He profoundly disagrees with the fact that people are put in chains.
The character tries with all his might to free those who have been led to hard labor. But the people he saves do not appreciate Don Quixote’s exploits. The criminals turned out to be ruthless and cynical. However, for the hero, it did not matter. He had a rule: freedom belongs to everyone, and no one can take it away. After such high demonstrations of Don Quixote’s character, it is hard not to agree that the direction of his thought is very noble. Don Quixote’s desire to revive chivalry is reckless, but it is respectful that he does not simply preach chivalrous values but begins with himself, with the example of his own life.
Many readers, myself included, notice that the image of Don Quixote, as the novel progresses, becomes increasingly close to that of Christ. That form of Christian representations, stories about Christianity, on the one hand, seems free, renewed, creative, playful, and carnivalesque. On the other hand, it is present because all these ideas about the inner Knight are pretty difficult to relate to these representations. The idea of the inner man who deeply and sincerely embraces Christianity is sidelined, and the whole novel is structured that way. In the first part, we see an aggressive madman who is not good and has bizarre thoughts; he preaches the Golden Age and is socially dangerous. In the second volume, the image grows, and we see a natural Christian sage, and at the end, the chivalrous fantasy is renounced.
The characters of Don Quixote are folk preachers and intense believers. Three forms of religiosity are distinguished in Don Quixote. Superficial religiosity is exceedingly abundantly represented in the text. These are all kinds of phrases and combinations that pierce our everyday speech, but they carry the image of God – “May God makes your worship a very fortunate knight, and grant you success in battle” (Cervantes 14). Then comes the kernel — whole series of judgments of principle that we need to pay attention to—for example, the role of the devil. The third idea characters talk about is reflexivity, the level of religiosity where problems are conceptualized.
In different times, there were such people in the church, so-called fools, people “not of this world,” who had a certain spark of God. They were often regarded as prophets or shunned. In his largely allegorical and autobiographical novel of Don Quixote, Cervantes writes about the world and what is expected and what will always be reprehensible. The book is imbued with high moral and Christian motives. The novel about the medieval fool, the prophet in the form of the Knight of the Sorrowful Image, above all teaches mercy and love. Putting on his armor and addressing the imaginary evil wizard Freston, Don Quixote speaks of the exploits of self-sacrificing knights that have passed from books to his heart (Cervantes 6). Quixote is driven forward by a thirst to do good, and this soul fire cannot be delayed. The Knight’s actions are imbued with Christian virtue, quiet gentleness, and love for his neighbors. Panza and Quixote walk side by side as two worlds — one earthly world that sees everything with its physical eyes and the spiritual world that sees with the eyes of the soul.
The Knight’s code of honor in medieval novels, taking Christian virtue as its basis, charged the Knight, among other things, with being faithful in various aspects of life. Hidalgo meets a lady who tempts him to betray his convictions, and the Knight’s refusal is a display of fidelity and purity in the face of the sin of seduction. Quixote and Panza’s further reflections on the strangeness of society’s attitude toward commitment are also noteworthy. In my opinion, this neglect of the institution of the family and the necessity of marriage is still highly acute.
Before his death, Dulcinea comes to Quixote as an image of perfect Beauty and Goodness in a dream or vision. And casting off the shackles of this world, Don Quixote sets out on a journey. This ending, in my opinion, is the truest because the image of Don Quixote is eternal; his appearance is still needed by people as another message from the Highest, that there is good in us humans, which is so distorted. That society needs a reminder that no matter what year or century it is, there are always those who need a protector, and evil must always be punished. People must wage war even within themselves with obscurantism, and this struggle is more complex and complicated. A man needs a constant reminder that he is a man.
The remarkable idea of this work in the Christianity context is in the idea that no matter how dark and troubled times are, there still appears a character, even fictional, who is trying to bring good into the world. A person or a character becomes a ray of hope, commonly even if he does not always have enough power to resist the imperfections of this world. It seemed to me that the original idea of Don Quixote was to show the lack of meaning in the old way of life. Still, in creating the text, the author significantly enriched the original idea, touching on the philosophical and religious aspects of human existence.
Work Cited
Cervantes, Miguel. Don Quixote. Translated by John Ormsby, Lector House, 2019.