SOURCE: “Doubles in Hell: El Burlador de Sevilla Y Convidado de Piedra,” in Hispanic Review, Vol. 58, No. 3, Summer, 1990, pp. 361-77.

[In the following essay, Arias examines why both Don Juan and the Commander perish in de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla, concluding that the violence committed by the Commander in the name of God is no more than Don Juan's violence committed in vain.]

Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (c. 1630) is a play with a deceptively simple happy ending. After sinning against society and against God throughout the four adventures that compose the dramatic action, Don Juan finally meets with his just fate in the flames of hell. In the closing scene, the King heralds the return to social order by ordaining the marriage of Don Juan's victims; the source of the community's problems, he proclaims, has been dealt his just punishment from Heaven:

¡Justo castigo del cielo!
Y agora es bien que se casen
todos, pues la causa es muerta,
vida de tantos desastres. (3.1057-60)

Here we see what critics commonly confirm: that the force of divine justice impels the play's particularly prominent movement from “order disturbed to order restored,” a movement which Arnold Reichenberger identifies as typical of the comedia in general (307).

One problem, however, obscures our understanding of this divine justice. Since the premiere of El burlador nearly 360 years ago, commentators have virtually ignored the question of why the Commander, a messenger of God, perishes in the flames together with Don Juan. In fact, critics for the most part continue to weave their interpretations of the dramatic events as though this apparent philosophical inconsistency did not exist. The present study endeavors to shed light on this problem, first by exploring the reasons why we persist in minimizing the double damnation and then by illustrating why the incident is central to a more profound understanding of the play's underlying organization and significance. I shall show that the resolution of El burlador perpetuates a mythological lie at the same time that it allows a glimpse of the heretofore unrecognized ethnological truth which this lie encumbers. René Girard's theory concerning the violent origins of religion and the victimary mechanism upon which society is based suggests the way of finally unveiling this truth.

It is curious that our critical understanding of the play's resolution mirrors the King's own perception of the happy ending. Similarly, our disregard for the significance of the Commander's fate duplicates the reaction of the single dramatic witness to the catastrophe, Catalinón. A close look at the text reveals that the King's knowledge of Don Juan's death is based upon Catalinón's secondhand account of the incident. After escaping the flames in the chapel that devour both the Commander and Don Juan, Catalinón scurries to the palace to relate the strange tale of his master's fate. Don Juan's victims, his father, and the King listen in wonder as the servant tells how he saw the vivified statue take Don Juan by the hand and squeeze the very life out of him, saying he was acting in accordance with God's will. Catalinón then seals his version of the story by repeating the Commander's own words: “Dios / me manda que así te mate, / castigando tus delitos. / Quien tal hace que tal pague” (3.1047-50). Like all representation, Catalinón's account of the catastrophe entails a degree of distortion: he says nothing of the fire within the statue nor of the Commander's and Don Juan's dual descent into those flames. He ignores these details; their meaning does not penetrate. Instead, by repeating the statue's words, the servant prompts his listeners to believe that the Commander was indeed a messenger sent from heaven to kill the guilty sinner in punishment for his crimes, the instrument of divine justice responsible for the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Future audiences of El burlador, like Catalinón's own audience, unquestioningly perpetuate this mistaken belief.

Reichenberger lends authority to the conventional perception when he says that the Spanish playwright of the comedia “may be and often is a priest, … but not a prophet or seer (vates) who sees farther than his public and points towards new goals but dimly perceived by his audience” (306). Just prior to Reichenberger's comments in the late 1950s, however, critics were beginning to identify elements in Tirso's play that intimate a heretofore unperceived complexity of meaning. In The Approach to the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age, Alexander A. Parker notes that each of Don Juan's adventures entails the progressive breaking down of the institutions and beliefs that unite the community; his behavior, Parker suggests, is not the merely capricious exercise in sexual revelry it appears to be (13; see also Rodríguez). And in “El Burlador de Sevilla: A Tragedy of Errors,” Bruce Wardropper argues that if Don Juan's conduct threatens the social order, it is only because the community is already corrupt (64; see also Aubrun; Ruiz Ramón; Lundelius). Parker's and Wardropper's germinal observations corroborate the suggestion that the playwright's vision and that of his public are not one and the same, that in fact Tirso gives dramatic form to a truth that Catalinón and the society of El burlador, as well as the play's commentators and audiences, sorely wish to ignore. The breadth of this truth exceeds what commentators are prone to judge as the limited terrain of the comedia in general; it concerns the universal and timeless problem of human violence.

Traditionally, interpretations of El burlador focus on questions which involve either contemporary religious orthodoxy or the problem of the origins of the supernatural episode. On the one hand, commentators view the play as an exemplary drama belonging to the tradition of the propaedeutic literature of the times, the Catholic Reformation started in 1563 by the edicts of the Council of Trent. In its historical context, the meaning of the drama hinges on the theological controversy over the doctrines of predestination and free will. Américo Castro sums up the traditional view that the play's underlying problem concerns whether man can live sure of divine grace since destiny rules over his ultimate fate, or whether he must work toward salvation through the practice of good deeds and virtue (14).¹ On the other hand, the episode of the vivified statue has been a focal point of interest ever since Arturo Farinelli, Víctor Said Armesto, and Georges Gendarme de Bévotte began the chauvinistic search for its origins in Spanish and European folklore. Without detracting from the value of these two dominant critical perspectives, it must be noted that commentators have lost sight of the play's overall mythological organization. They have not explored its sacrificial theme and, in particular, the implications of its sacrificial resolution.

Nevertheless El burlador is clearly a sacrificial drama. As René Girard would see it, the generative and organizing force behind the themes and motifs of the play is the scapegoat mechanism which culminates in sacrifice. In Violence and the Sacred Girard explains his thesis that the process of scapegoating, or unanimous victimization, is at the heart of religious beliefs and prohibitions and, ultimately, of all human institutions. It is, he believes, the generating source, or structuring device, of all world mythologies. According to the Girardian theory, scapegoating provided the means for ensuring the peaceful continuity of societies in the earliest stages of development. Primitive communities discharged the aggressiveness and wrongdoings of individual members of a social group onto a single victim, thereby diverting the threat of escalating violence within the group onto a random substitute. The expulsion or murder of the scapegoat served to bring the potentially destructive situation under control, to eliminate the contagion of internal violence, and to restore social order. The victim, who was initially charged as the cause of social disintegration, became in retrospect the cure for the same ills with which he was charged. Unaware that its own collective transfer occasioned the solution for internal dissension and violence, the primitive community endowed its victim with the power to cure those ills; it sanctified the victim, thus giving birth to what would become the notion of god. Eventually, ritual sacrifices emerged as a form of imitating or recreating the scapegoat process, which the community remembered as its source of peace. The memory of collective violence and expulsion of the surrogate victim, as Girard summarily says, “is preserved, but concealed under the veils of ritual sacrifice which falsifies the nature of the crisis and moralizes the scapegoat mechanism. At later stages in culture,” he adds, “the function of the ritual is taken over by literature” (Violence 201).

There appears to be an explicit parallel between the scapegoat process as Girard describes it, and the dramatic action of El burlador. The trend in recent studies of the play has in fact begun to expose the similarities by challenging the Manichaean notion of good and evil as these two forces appear in opposition throughout the play. Don Juan continues to emerge as the unchristian sinner who is guilty of crimes against both God and the community. But critics now agree that Don Juan's victims, far from being innocent as once assumed, actually form part of a corrupt society in which pride, arrogance, lust, envy, greed, dishonesty, favoritism, and hypocrisy prevail as norms of behavior. As Francisco Ruiz Ramón shows in “Don Juan y la sociedad del Burlador,” corruption pervades all levels of the society from the countryfolk of the provinces to the nobles in the royal palace; gender is not a discriminating factor nor is the King himself exempt. At the end of the play, nevertheless, the members of this society are unanimous in their charge that Don Juan is the sole cause of their problems. His “miraculous” death at the hands of the “messenger of God” not only appeases their demand for just retribution but achieves the cathartic effect of cleansing the community of its own sins and guilt and of reaffirming the members' own mistaken sense of righteousness—a catharsis which sympathetic audiences and readers of the play also experience. At the same time, Don Juan's death provides the occasion for the marriage of victims and rivals, which amounts to a reconfirmation of faith in the institutions that define the community. His immolation, like that of the sacrificial victim in primitive societies, sets the stage for the restoration of social order. The happy ending thus marks the beginning of a period of renewed social harmony while Don Juan emerges not only as the source but also the cure of the community's problems. His at once pernicious and beneficent nature is perpetuated to this day by artists and critics who either romanticize Don Juan's heroic proportions or censure the violence that he incarnates. The essential ambiguity of the figure, characteristic of any scapegoat, has become proverbial.

Further evidence of the parallel between the scapegoat mechanism and the dramatic action of El burlador arises in the crisis which leads to the sacrificial solution, and which Don Juan's actions provoke. Although much commentary centers on Don Juan's sexual behavior, his sexuality serves not only to divert our attention away from the less obvious motivating force that impels his actions (the subject of a forthcoming study) but also to veil the less obvious characteristic that defines the real essence of his being. Don Juan's own words in the opening scene of the play point to this characteristic: as he makes his debut into the world of literary fiction, he boldly proclaims, “¿Quién soy? Un hombre sin nombre” (1.15). His later behavior confirms that Don Juan's refusal here to identify himself cannot be explained in psychological terms alone as a renunciation of the “law of the Name-of-the-Father,” as Jacques Lacan argues (qtd. in Sullivan 94) but can be better understood in terms of a rejection of the system of nomenclature in general. In saying that he is a man without a name, Don Juan denies the process that makes possible the separation of subject and object and thus provides the basis for the system of differentiation upon which human knowledge resides. His iconoclasm persists throughout the play, from his first to his final adventure, as he makes a mockery not only of the father / son relation, but also of the relation between subject and king, man and woman, and man and God. He further disregards class distinctions, rules of hospitality, bonds of friendship, the institution of marriage, and respect for the dead. At the same time that Don Juan ravages social customs, laws, and institutions, he refuses to acknowledge humanity's most fundamental categories of thought: past and future, sin and virtue, sacred and profane. In a word, Don Juan progressively destroys the system of biological, cultural, and ontological distinctions that defines the human community and provides for its peaceful coexistence and development. He incarnates the very spirit of social violence.

The ex-abrupto opening of El burlador, the repetition of fleeting sexual adventures and flight, the incessant switching of matrimonial partners, the disregard for the unities of time and space, and the abrupt changes in tone from dramatic to lyric to comic all reflect Don Juan's own Dionysian behavior. His extreme iconoclasm, which structure and theme reinforce, sets into motion the social crisis which precipitates the play's victimary resolution. As Girard would see it, the events preceding this resolution constitute the dramatic reenactment of a “sacrificial crisis,” a crisis in which forms of social violence tend to eliminate all differences within a cultural unit and thereby threaten its very existence:

The sacrificial crisis can be defined … as a crisis of distinctions—that is, a crisis affecting the cultural order. This cultural order is nothing more than a regulated system of distinctions in which the differences among individuals are used to establish their identity and their mutual relationships. … Order, peace, and fecundity depend on cultural distinctions; it is not these distinctions but the loss of them that gives birth to fierce rivalries and sets members of the same family or social group at one another's throats. (Violence 49)

Girard calls this leveling of cultural differences “undifferentiation,” a theme which emerges from multiple levels of El burlador. Tirso captures the spirit of the crisis of distinctions in the closing scenes of the play. On the one hand, categorical distinctions disappear: the vivified statue is evidence of a disregard for the distinction between life and death, the demonic meal in the chapel betrays a rupture in the boundary between infernal and divine, and the vengeful, deceitful, and violent behavior of the “messenger of God” challenges the Christian understanding of what constitutes good and evil. On the other hand, the gathering of nobles and countryfolk at the palace of Seville signals the collapse of cultural distinctions: father turns against son (3.1023-27), subjects ignore the conventions of decorum in the presence of their king (3.759-60), a fisherwoman befriends a Duchess (3.1106), a country maiden appears as a courtesan on the arm of a Duke (3.827-30). The indiscriminate crowd is unanimous, moreover, in its rejection of Don Juan; everyone speaks of his or her desire for revenge and retribution. The feeling is that if the situation is not quickly resolved, the pandemonium will lead to all out violence. At the same time, the shifting of scenes between the palace, and the inn and church where Don Juan's encounters with the vivified statue occur, suggests that a supernatural solution is at hand.

Tirso in fact suggests the probability of such a solution at intervals throughout the play, each time Don Juan's father, servant, and victims warn him that he must eventually come to terms with divine justice. In addition, the textual portrayal of an ineffectual king precludes the possibility of a judicial solution to the crisis. The judicial system, after all, as Girard says, “can only exist in conjunction with a firmly established political power” (Violence 23). And the King of Castille, as Ruiz Ramón says, plays the role of nothing more than a vulgar matchmaker (89). It is thus not surprising that when the King finally orders that Don Juan be seized and killed (3.1022), the sacrificial solution is already set into motion by the intervention of the Commander's vivified statue. The demonic inversion of the imagery of sacrifice surrounding the last communal meal as well as Don Juan's immolation in the chapel (altar) only serve to further highlight the sacrificial theme.

On this basis, the play appears to be a thinly-veiled Christianized dramatization of a sacrificial rite. But if El burlador were merely a Christian representation of sacrifice cast in the theological mold and concurring with the understanding of its time, then Charles V. Aubrun would be correct in judging the supernatural denouement as a badly integrated afterthought. Tirso's play is not such a drama, however, precisely because of the supernatural episode. As the remainder of this study endeavors to show, the intervention and eventual fate of the stone statue in fact exposes the psychology of the mechanism of sacrifice, thus planting the seeds for its very demystification.

In a sacrificial context as Girard describes it, the alternation of roles between sacrificer and victim serves to reveal their fundamental lack of difference (see “To double business”). With this in mind, it is interesting to note that Tirso insists on the themes of role reversal and alternation to the extent that his insistence can hardly be fortuitous. The reciprocal invitation to dinner, in which Don Juan and the Commander respectively double as both host and guest, is one obvious case in point. Another striking example occurs in the scene in which the statue lures Don Juan to his death: here the Commander imitates the same deceitful behavior, gestures, and language the burlador previously employed in his own adventures throughout the play (see Allain). The underlying identity of the Commander and Don Juan, which a Girardian view of the role reversals suggests, is confirmed in the climactic moment of the play when the antagonists perish together as doubles in the flames of hell. The dual title of the play highlights the structural and thematic coherence of the work by intimating this eventual doubling. Nevertheless, in spite of the textual insistence on alternation, role reversal, and reciprocity, Charles Aubrun suggests the duplicity of the dinner scenes is superfluous; Archimede Marni dismisses the duplicity of the Commander's behavior on the grounds of the religious concept of justice as counterpassion; and critics in general ignore the episode of the double damnation.

The themes of role reversal, alternation, reciprocity, and doubling all highlight the essential absence of difference between Don Gonzalo and Don Juan, divine messenger and sinner, sacrificer and victim. These themes also reinforce the predominate theme of undifferentiation, or the leveling of distinctions which provokes the social crisis that culminates in sacrifice. In addition, the supporting themes emphasize the infernal circularity of the process of revenge in which the Commander engages, as will be explained. And finally, in a still more general sense, role reversal, alternation, reciprocity, and doubling all underscore the notion of substitution as the basis for the practice of sacrifice. In other words, the themes reflect the process of sacrificial substitution whereby the society seeks to deflect its own violence upon the victim. As we see then, these intertwining themes constitute a remarkable thematic cluster whose unity is founded in sacrificial victimization.

Perhaps the principal difficulty with the resolution of Tirso's play does not arise from the text after all, but from interpretations that fail to distinguish between the mythological and the Christian elements which converge in the text.² The most disturbing paradox of the resolution is the forthright association between the sacred and violence—an association which belongs distinctively to mythological consciousness. The Commander's role as a messenger of God openly links the issue of divine justice with revenge, deceit, and murder: the statue tricks Don Juan into taking his hand, ignores his plea for divine absolution and the chance for a final confession, kills the unsuspecting victim, and imputes his murderous act to divine injunction. His behavior points to the essential characteristic of the mythological quality of the sacred, which “is its dual nature,” as Girard explains. “[I]t is both harmful and beneficial. It leaves the impression of a double transcendence, a paradoxical conjunction, because we understand [the duality] from a Christian perspective considered by us to be the norm, whereas in fact it is unique” (Scapegoat 199).

Our failure until now to come to terms with the Commander's fate appears to be the result of viewing his behavior from a Christian perspective rather than as evidence of the persistence of ancient beliefs. Most commentators do injustice to the text by ignoring the Commander's fate altogether. Some resort to the slanted rationalization of Daniel Rogers, for example, who says “there is no indication that Don Gonzalo, having delivered his charge into hell, will himself be obliged to stay there” (144). Others, like Archimede Marni, dispense with the problem while explaining the Commander's unchristian conduct on the grounds of what they call the Aristotelian-Thomistic concept of counterpassion, a sophisticated rendering of the “eye for an eye” code of justice. They show that Don Juan's punishment is made to fit his crimes but no one extends this observation to the Commander's own fate. Each of these commentators misses the point. They fall victim to the divine messenger's own game of taking his violence seriously and thus they entrap themselves within the same sacrificial system that the play and its participants represent. Such responses not only obscure the perspective necessary to understand the problem at hand, the critics' reliance on religious orthodoxy to explain the Commander's violent behavior also provides a revealing example of how religion shelters us from confronting the truth of violence, just as the Girardian theory maintains.

Although it is true that Tirso shows the primitive “eye for an eye” principle controls retaliation, he is unambiguous in condemning the Commander's own use of violence to deter violence. In the end, Tirso leaves no room to justify or to dismiss this conduct, for the play's self-professed instrument of divine justice perishes with the guilty sinner in the flames. We must finally recognize, then, that the text means precisely what it says: the Commander suffers the same punishment as Don Juan; he burns in hell. Consequently, if the Commander is an instrument of divine justice, he is also a victim of that justice. If he is a messenger of God sent to ensure the triumph of good over evil, he is also a part of the evil over which the good eventually triumphs.

The textual association statue/vengeance/God sheds light on this problem. The obvious nature of the vivified statue's evil is vengeance and this becomes apparent in the second act of the play. As he lies dying, Don Gonzalo's sole concern is his desire for revenge; with his last breath he threatens Don Juan that his fury will follow him (2.542). At the end of the play, the vivified statue fulfills this threat. The fire raging within the statue is metaphorically a desire for vengeance so terrible and omnipotent that it survives death itself. The statue's fire is also real to the extent that it eventually destroys his antagonist. It seems clear, then, that the Commander's statue embodies the spirit of vengeance. He represents the unchristian desire for revenge which consumes each of Don Juan's victims as they gather at the palace and which is, moreover, deeply ingrained not only in seventeenth-century Spanish society but in the human community of all times and places. This view suggests that our understanding of the statue's origins must be tied not only to the medieval legends and ballads in which he appears but to a far earlier time in the history of the human race. Perhaps he is linked in the memory of society with the notion of the graven images of stone that man placed between himself and God, or perhaps even with the notion of death by stoning whereby no one person is responsible for the crime.

We must, accordingly, question the notion that the statue is a messenger of God, as he claims, and suspect instead that he represents the community and is a product of its own illusions. As he appears in El burlador, the avenging statue is in fact a typical product of mythical thought, which conceives of the sacred and violence and of life and death as a single essence (see Cassirer). He is a consequence of the thinking that hypostatizes forces and activities as its means of engendering mythical explanations of the world and, in this particular instance, as its means of avoiding the burden of its own guilt. Just as Venus is love and beauty, and Vulcan is the forming principle at work in the universe, the vivified statue, as Tirso presents him, is vengeance.

On this basis, one might assume that the supernatural intervention of the Commander is not linked primarily with miracle, as traditional commentaries maintain. The statue does not belong to the Christian realm of the miraculous, which ordinarily involves the element of faith and the intervention of God, but to the world of mythological monsters where anything can turn into anything else, where the boundary between life and death is nonexistent, and where the direct intervention of ambivalent gods is a common occurrence. If we wish, nevertheless, to follow through with the interpretation of the statue's intervention along the lines of miracle, we can argue that the miraculous occurs not with the appearance of the statue but with his disappearance into the flames. His damnation is tantamount to God's denial of the self-appointed messenger and to His rejection of the responsibility for the vengeance and violence that the statue attributes to Him. In leaving the Commander to burn with the unchristian sinner, God reveals their essential similarity at the same time that He returns the burden of vengeance/violence back to man and woman, who are its true originators and perpetrators. He leaves humankind to its own devices.

If we slightly adjust the focus of Wardropper's thesis of “El tema central de El burlador de Sevilla,” that the theme of the drama concerns the miraculous intervention of God because human justice does not work, we reveal an essential insight. God does not intervene through the mediation of the avenging statue because the King and the judicial system are inadequate to deal with the problem at hand. After all, the King does not seriously try to deal with Don Juan until the end of the play, when he finally orders that the burlador be seized and killed. Instead, God intervenes to destroy the statue which embodies the self-righteous illusion that the society has created out of its own desire for vengeance. Vengeance is the system of human justice which necessitates the intervention of God to ensure its destruction.

All this explains why the Commander's damnation serves to demystify his own rationale. The incident reveals the means by which humanity conceals from itself the human origin of its own violence (Violence 161). The projection of vengeance/violence onto the supernatural statue and the statue's subsequent projection of vengeance/violence onto God merely duplicate the process by which the human community avoids responsibility for this burden and seeks to justify this evil. The solution is infallible, for violence is first imputed to a supernatural monster and then to God Himself, always to an element outside the realm of human jurisdiction and control. Thus we can begin to understand Girard's thesis that “violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred” (Violence 31). The statue's own violent conduct carried out in the name of God, as well as our dismissal of it on the basis of religious dogma, in essence, demonstrates this truth.

The text, moreover, speaks for itself in revealing the Commander's, and our own, mistaken perception of the workings of divine justice in El burlador. It shows that the “eye for an eye” dictum understood as a principle for action ignores the fact that the retaliatory code serves also as an a posteriori statement on the fate of those who adopt it. In other words, the text shows that the violence which revenge perpetuates inevitably ends in the destruction of both parties. The Commander's own words testify to the fact that he becomes a victim of the same divine law he self-righteously espouses. When the statue is about to kill Don Juan, he says, “Ésta es justicia de Dios: / quien tal hace que tal pague” (3.956-57). When he later descends into the flames with Don Juan, the Commander repeats the same words: “Ésta es justicia de Dios: / quien tal hace que tal pague” (3.973-74). In the first instance, we understand the aphorism to mean that the burlador himself is finally deceived, tricked into paying with his life the price for his sinful ways. In the second instance, however, the meaning changes as the words paradoxically become a commentary on the Commander's own fate. The statue is consumed by his own fire; he alone is responsible for his own death. As Girard says, “[t]he very weapons used to combat violence are turned against their users. Violence is like a raging fire that feeds on the very objects intended to smother its flames” (Violence 31). At this point in the drama, we must either dismiss the episode as nonsense, or finally recognize the universal law that violence inevitably will return to the perpetrator. The other option, Catalinón's, of ignoring the Commander's fate, is no longer open to us.

Textual indications of the statue's association with hell, which precede and foreshadow the catastrophe, confirm that the Commander's damnation is neither incidental nor an oversight on the part of the dramatist. Prior to leaving the inn where the first dinner scene takes place, the statue asks for Don Juan's hand and assures him there is nothing to fear. “¿Eso dices? ¿Yo temor?” answers Don Juan extending his hand; “Si fueras el mismo infierno / la mano te diera yo” (3.645-47). Immediately afterwards, he ponders the infernal nature of his antagonist but quickly dismisses his premonition as a figment of his imagination:

Cuando me tomó la mano,
de suerte me la apretó,
que un infierno parecía
jamás vide tal calor.
Un aliento respiraba,
organizando la voz,
tan frío, que parecía
infernal respiración.
Pero todas son ideas
que da la imaginación: (3.668-77)

When Don Juan returns to the chapel to comply with the reciprocal invitation to dinner, his “imaginary” fears prove to be prophetic. At the Commander's request, he raises a tombstone to discover their meal of scorpion, vipers, and fingernails, items which folklorist Dorothy Mackay equates with the popular conception of hell's horrors. It is hardly fortuitous that the Commander refers to these items as “nuestros manjares” (3.921; emphasis added). Don Juan unwittingly alludes once again to demonic imagery, saying to his host: “Comeré / si me dieses áspid a áspid / cuantos el infierno tiene” (3.2725-27). After the meal in the chapel, which by now has undeniable associations as an anteroom of hell rather than a house of God, the statue once again asks for Don Juan's hand and deceptively reassures him there is nothing to fear. “¿Eso dices? ¿Yo temor?” repeats Don Juan, echoing his response of their previous encounter. This time his reply ends not with the same fatuous boast but with the terrified realization that the statue's fire is burning him: “¡Que me abrasas! ¡No me abrases con tu fuego!” (3.946-50). Moments later, chapel, avenger, and victim are engulfed in the flames.

All in all, the textual evidence linking the avenging statue with hell is irrefutable. The Commander's attribution onto God of his own violence and vengeance is a self-righteous delusion which his own damnation serves to expose. The monologue in which Don Juan describes the statue's infernal presence, the parallel dialogue of the two dinner scenes depicting him as a diabolic figure, the fiendish food and setting over which he presides, and the fact that the fire which eventually destroys both antagonists arises from within the statue all leave little room to question his identity not as a messenger of God but as hell itself. Our commentary finally allows us to understand his disappearance into the flames as an extraordinary event to the extent that it manifests, in ever so brief an instant, the convergence of mythology with Christianity: it reveals that vengeance, the life force of the sacrificial system upon which mythology rests, is hell.

In conclusion, my study has shown that the play's movement from the disturbance of order to the restoration of order is a reenactment of the scapegoat mechanism triggered in primitive societies by a social crisis of distinctions. As violence increasingly threatens the well-being and structure of the community, the resentment and desire for revenge among its members come to rest on a single individual and dissipate with his death, thus providing for the return to order. Tirso's drama presents a prime example of Girard's thesis that ritual sacrifice takes over the function of the scapegoat mechanism and that literature eventually takes on the function of this ritual. In the process, these rites moralize the workings of the mechanism, a process which El burlador decisively reflects but only ostensibly endorses.

What is truly remarkable about this play is that it is a sacrificial drama in which Tirso establishes the guilt of the victim at the same time that he denounces the innocence of the avenger and of the community he represents. It is a drama that begins to expose the sacrificial mechanism. The incident of the statue's damnation lifts the play's mechanism of concealment briefly to reveal the truth that Catalinón does not see and that the commentators' rationalizations of the Commander's unchristian behavior further veil. This truth, as I have shown, concerns the process of the sacralization of violence and the illusory nature of the process of revenge which seems to generate this violence. It concerns our inability to comprehend human violence, an inability to come to terms with it, a refusal to assume responsibility for it. Tirso quickly conceals these truths with the play's sacrificial ending, however, for in the final solution he reverts to the very mechanism that the Commander's damnation begins to dismantle. But in so doing, he points to still another truth, which is the ethnological reality that social order depends upon victimization.

The ending of Tirso's drama thus appears to contradict the notion implicit in the concept of counterpassion that violence is of a dual essence: that the sinner Don Juan exhibits a bad violence which must be punished while the Commander's good violence is to be condoned on the grounds that it reflects the will of God. Actually both bearers of violence are condemned to the flames. This means that the difference between their behavior is arbitrary; it suggests that the “divine” justice that entails deceit, vengeance, and murder is our own creation. In other words, the belief that imputes revenge and sacrifice to divine injunction is but another of the many ways we have of rationalizing human violence. It is an illusion, as Girard's theory explains, shared by members of a persecuting crowd whose vengeful gods are born of a desire to justify the crowd's own violence.³

Notes

1. I address this aspect of the play in my current study, “The Theological Language of Tirso in El burlador and El condenado.”

2. One of the most challenging aspects of Girard's theory is his thesis that Christianity is not merely one myth among the world mythologies. On the subject of revelation and the Gospels, see The Scapegoat 100-11; Things Hidden 180-262. See also Schwager's study of the gradual revelation throughout the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures of God's rejection of violence, vengeance, and sacrifice.

3. A part of this study was originally presented at the Colloquium on Vengeance organized by the Program of Interdisciplinary Research, Stanford University, 27-29 Oct. 1988. I wish to thank Professor Cesáreo Bandera for his generosity in discussing the ideas of this work with me, and Professors Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce and René Girard for their own generous support, suggestions, and criticism concerning my current research and writing.

Works Cited

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Aubrun, Charles V. “Le Don Juan de Tirso de Molina: essai d’interprétation.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 49 (1957): 26-61.

Cassirer, Ernst, Mythical Thought. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale UP, 1955. Vol. 2 of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. 3 vols. 1955-1957.

Castro, Américo. Introduction. Cinco Ensayos sobre Don Juan. Ed. Américo Castro. Santiago: Cultura, 1937.

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