[In the following essay, Conlon makes use of Freudian theory about the connection between a person's conception of God and the relationship with one's father to examine the character of the bandit Enrico in El condenado por desconfiado. Conlon argues that “Enrico, like the rest of humanity, simply has no choice but to use his father as a model for the divine, and, therefore, to assume that his divine Father will be as tolerant as his human one.”]

A pesar del hecho de que el carácter psicológico de El condenado por desconfiado es generalmente reconocido, la obra tiene una dimensión freudiana que los estudios críticos no han tomado en cuenta hasta el presente. Este aspecto psicoanalítico radica en el personaje de Enrico. La influencia subconsciente que su padre Anareto tiene sobre las actitudes y acciones del bandido que se salva hace destacar ciertas ideas freudianas basadas sobre la relación entre padre e hijo y el modo en que ésta llega a ser identificada con el concepto de la relación con Dios.

Enrico no puede cambiar su concepción de Dios, el padre supremo, hasta cambiar su visión de Anareto, su padre humano. Por ser su condición espiritual consecuencia de una asociación subconsciente, Enrico es, en cierto sentido, dotado de un carácter predeterminado. Sin embargo, ya que revela una capacidad de liberarse de su condición espiritual y psicológicamente predeterminada, logra trascender la esclavitud de la condición humana para demostrar, por otra parte, su libertad moral y emocional.

Most studies of El condenado por desconfiado concentrate on the tortured Paulo, in particular, upon his spiritual condition, and the theological implications of his damnation. With significant exceptions,¹ scholars tend to be less curious about the figure in the play who is saved, Enrico, often treating him as a foil for Paulo: a dramatic contrivance whose raison d'être is to be the agent of Paulo's dilemma.

A study of Enrico's speeches and actions from a psychoanalytic point of view reveals, however, that his spiritual make-up and development possess independent complexity and interest.² His story in many ways dramatically prefigures the Freudian insight linking the individual's vision of God to his perception of his father. In fact, all of Enrico's feelings, attitudes, and expectations regarding the divine are unconsciously modeled on his relationship with his parent, Anareto.³

To begin our study of the tie between Enrico's relationship with his father and his conception of God, we must isolate and analyze the elements and properties of Enrico's love for Anareto. First, it is a singular one: Enrico reveals no emotion even resembling love toward anyone else. (His attachment to Celia is a combination of lust, “yo estoy / preso por los ojos bellos / de Celia …,”⁴ and greed—what he can take, steal and beat from her.) Not only is Anareto the one person whom Enrico loves, he is also the only one he respects, and his respect entails nearly absolute obedience:

          Que esta virtud solamente
en mi vida distraída
conservo piadosamente,
que es deuda al padre debida
el serle el hijo obediente.
          En mi vida le ofendí,
ni pesadumbre le di;
en todo cuanto mandó,
obediente me halló
desde el día que nací;

(1069-1078)

His affection is a compassionate one:

          Cinco años ha que le tengo
en una cama tullido,
y tanto a estimarle vengo,
que con andar tan perdido
a mi costa le mantengo.

(1054-1058)

In addition to compassion and obedience, Enrico's love for his father contains another element—a susceptibility to the old man's moral influence. Even without any conscious or deliberate attempt to influence his son's actions, Anareto's proximity affects Enrico's ability to sin. This murderer and rapist is powerless to commit evil if he is near his father. In his father's house, when he is reminded that he must fulfill his agreement to murder an old man named Albano, he says:

          No me atrevo, aunque mi nombre
tiene su altivo renombre
en las memorias escrito,
intentar tan gran delito
donde está durmiendo este hombre.

(1216-1220)

Anareto's visage is so burned into the conscience of his son that, even when no longer in his presence, Enrico refuses to kill Albano simply because he reminds the brigand of his father:

          pero en llegando a mirar
las canas que supe honrar
porque en mi padre las vi,
todo el furor reprimí
y las procuré estimar.

(1280-1284)

To kill this man, Enrico reasons, would make him “ingrato” to his father.⁵

Enrico's love for his father contains a lofty, even celestial quality:

No el sol por celajes rojos
          saliendo a dar resplandor
a la tiniebla mayor
que espera tan alto bien,
parece al día tan bien,
como vos a mí, señor.
          Que vos para mí sois sol,
y los rayos que arrojáis
dese divino arrebol,
son las canas con que honráis
este reino

(2155-65)

These imagistic connections of heaven and light with Anareto—along with his moral authority, forgiving nature and suffering condition—seem to associate him with God, but in such a vague and undefined way as to make it difficult to assign the old man a particular divine “identity.”⁶ Enrico's connection of his parent and his Creator, despite being unconscious, by contrast, is clear. For him, the deity is a cosmic father, one just like his earthly one, forgiving and magnanimous.⁷ Enrico manufactures a parallel between the acceptance which, despite his crimes, he receives from Anareto, and the forgiveness and salvation which, despite his sins, he expects from the Supreme Being.⁸ Enrico's transparent imposition of his father's character onto his conception of the divine, particularly as it relates to God's forgiving nature, dramatizes one of Freud's most important findings concerning the connection between psychology and religion: “The psychoanalysis of individual human beings … teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.”⁹ Enrico's particular view of God as a benevolent, forgiving father figure who, though His ways are incomprehensible, will save him, illustrates Freud's notion of the kind of god that man seeks and wants: a “benevolent Providence which is only seemingly stern … which in the end, though its ways and byways are difficult to follow, orders everything for the best—that is to make it enjoyable for us.”¹⁰

If we keep Freud's words in mind concerning the way the individual models his conception of God on his own father, and how man longs for a forgiving and only “seemingly stern” Providence, Enrico's unorthodox vision of the mechanics of salvation becomes quite understandable. He believes, for example, that God will forgive him, will save him, regardless of his actions. How God is to do this, what his “ways and byways” will be, Enrico does not have the slightest idea, but he is confident that, in Freud's words, God will make all “for the best … make it enjoyable” eternally for him:

mas siempre tengo esperanza
en que tengo de salvarme,
puesto que no va fundada
mi esperanza en obras mías,
sino en saber que se humana
Dios con el más pecador,
y con su piedad se salva.(11)

(1993-1999)

Besides not provoking fear of eternal punishment in Enrico, his crimes do not seem to cause him any psychic pain, guilt or shame (except, paradoxically, where they directly conflict with his love for his father). To the contrary, his recounting of his crimes—rapes, murders, arsons—is boastful and ebullient. To understand why Enrico lacks a moral sense, it is useful to read Freud's description of how the individual develops this quality:

Young children are amoral and possess no internal inhibitions against their impulses striving for pleasure. The part which is later taken on by the super-ego is played to begin with by an external power, by parental authority. Parental influence governs the child by offering proofs of love and by threatening punishments which are signs to the child of loss of love and are bound to be feared on their own account. This realistic anxiety is the precursor of the later moral anxiety. [The latter replaces the former when] the external restraint is internalized and the super-ego takes the place of the parental agency and observes, directs and threatens the ego in exactly the same way as earlier the parents did with the child.¹²

In Freudian terms, Enrico's condition is one of moral fixation; he is a child, “amoral and possess[ing] no internal inhibitions.” The lack of these internal restraints is the consequence of paternal lenity. Enrico never had to fear punishment, “the sign of the loss of love,” and without this “realistic anxiety” “moral anxiety” never developed. Since there have never been any “external restraints” from the parent, none could be internalized and no super-ego or conscience could develop. According to Freud, our adult moral condition is a matter of “prolonging the father”¹³—and the father Enrico “prolongs” is one who offered no censure, expected no remorse.

The two legacies of his father's indulgence—the bandit's confidence in his salvation and his absence of guilt—explain his refusals to confess on the two occasions he believes he will be executed. He cannot repent before his mock execution despite wishing to (“que quisiera arrepentirme, / y cuando quiero, no puedo,” 1775-1776) because without a moral center his crimes seem to him only abstractly wrong. His impulse to confess contains no felt need for purification, only a sense of the appropriateness of the sacrament at such a time. Behind his refusal to confess is also of course his certainty that God will forgive him in the next life regardless of his sins—just as his father has in this one: “que se humana / Dios con el más pecador, / y con su piedad se salva,” (1997-1999).

This unconscious association of paternal forgiveness and divine compassion holds him back from repenting the second time that he awaits execution. The absurd character of his reasons for refusing confession on this occasion points to this. He will not confess, he tells himself, because he cannot remember all his sins (“Quién podrá ahora acordarse / de tantos pecados viejos?,” 2382-2383), and thus “más vale / no tratar de aquestas cosas” (2386-2387). The lameness of his excuse hints at the existence of some unstated motive for not confessing. His subsequent expression of confidence in the all-forgiving character of God (“su misericordia alabo; / con ella podré salvarme,” 2389-2390) identifies it: his paternally inspired vision of the divine.

The role of this unconscious equation between parental kindness and divine forgiveness in Enrico's obduracy is made unequivocally clear by his reaction to Anareto's ultimatum. Given the choice by his father of “coni[esar] a Dios tus pecados” (2483) or “ni te has de llamar mi hijo, / ni yo te he de conocer” (2489-2490), Enrico immediately repents.¹⁴ The threat alters the relationship between him and his father from one of apparently unqualified acceptance to one of contingent acceptance. Because Enrico has always unconsciously identified paternal and divine forgiveness, he is now aware of the possibility of divine rejection and he confesses. Enrico repents, it must be emphasized, not just because his tie to his father is now a contingent one, but, to repeat the words of Freud, because “his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation.” Now his relation to God is also one of contingency. Realizing that paternal rejection is possible, Enrico can finally accept the possibility of divine rejection. Didactically, the volte-face in the bandit's attitude illustrates the traditional Golden Age dramatic theme of el desengaño. Like Don Juan, Enrico has followed the infernal path of basing his vision of perfect divine justice on imperfect human justice. Unlike the Burlador de Sevilla, however, he is disabused of this damning “engaño” in time to save his soul.

As anyone who has studied this play knows, a theological debate surrounds it regarding its position on free will and the role of the individual's own efforts to bring about his salvation. It dates back to a 16th-century dispute between the Dominicans and the Jesuits. The Jesuits held that God granted all men sufficient grace to save themselves but allowed them to make their own moral choices, in effect, to decide their own eternal fates. Such a view of salvation obviously denied pre-destination and emphasized free will. It stressed free will so much, in fact, that the Dominicans claimed that it heretically slighted the role of God in a miraculous process.¹⁵ They themselves believed that God much more directly influenced men's good deeds—that those deeds were emanations of the Divine and expressions of Its will—a view denounced by the Jesuits as a denial of man's moral freedom.¹⁶ For a hundred and fifty years scholars have interpreted El condenado in terms of this debate, seeing it as affirming the Jesuit, the Dominican or some other contemporary position on free will.

El condenado por desconfiado is clearly about free will, but in a broader way than this dispute encompasses. The figure of Enrico raises the question of how much a man determines his own eternal destiny if the forces driving him to make the decisions which determine that destiny are unknown to him. His vision of Christianity, God, and the mechanics of salvation are shaped by unconscious forces. As we have seen, the bandit's certainty of his salvation is the product of a parallel shaped in his unconscious mind between God and his father. Since the analog of God on earth, his revered human creator, Anareto, has accepted him uncritically and ignored his many crimes in this life, so, the logic of his unconscious thinking goes, must God accept him in the next one. Given Enrico's unconscious association of Anareto with God, expressed in the bandit's paternally inspired compassion, chastened behavior and religious language, his confidence in God's mercy is understandable. From a Freudian perspective his presumption is more than understandable, it is inevitable. Enrico, like the rest of humanity, simply has no choice but to use his father as a model for the divine, and, therefore, to assume that his divine Father will be as tolerant as his human one.

Given the fact that his presumptuous certainty is more or less a condition of his birth and that his crimes are the product of that presumption, Enrico's life of sin has a morally passive character. In contrast to Paulo, who deliberately and consciously decides to reject God's law, Enrico merely follows the path that has been cleared for him by an inescapable psychological process. Enrico's story is a paradoxical one, however, because it illustrates not only the power of unconscious forces over man but man's capacity to overcome those forces. Like many individuals bound to patterns of behavior based on unconscious assumptions formed in childhood, Enrico can only be free once he realizes that those assumptions are false. His father's ultimatum drives Enrico to eschew his life-long expectation of paternal lenity and with it the notion of infinite divine mercy to which it is subconsciously linked. His new-found virtue, an act of will expressed in repentance, is then also an act of self-knowledge, manifested in his humility. His confession, an actual and symbolic rejection of his whole past life, represents both a psychological and a spiritual maturing, a throwing off of sinful chains forged in early life by the nature of his relationship with his father.

In the end Enrico is an interesting character and represents an extraordinary achievement because of his contradictory nature—both free and un-free, psychologically and morally determined, yet able to overcome that determination. His story, in turn, is so unusual because, as we have seen, it dramatizes powerfully and credibly a process of psychological emancipation while illustrating orthodox Catholic morality on the role of humility and repentance in achieving salvation.

Notes

1. Some studies which grant Enrico importance include the following: David H. Darst, “The Thematic Design of El condenado por desconfiado,” KRQ, 21 (1974), 483-94; I.L. McClelland, Tirso de Molina: Studies in Dramatic Realism (Liverpool, 1948), 129-164; T.E. May, “El condenado por desconfiado: 1. The Enigmas, 2. Anareto,” BHS, 35 (1958), 138-156; Alexander A. Parker, “Santos y bandoleros en el teatro español del Siglo de Oro,” Arbor, 13 (1949), 395-416; Carlos A. Pérez, “Verosimilitud psicológica de El condenado por desconfiado,” Hispanófila, 27 (1966), 1-21.

   A not insignificant fact which is often overlooked in evaluating Enrico's importance is that he appears in thirty-one scenes and Paulo in only nineteen, according to the count of W. Silva Tapia. “Cercanía de Tirso de Molina en El condenado por desconfiado,” Atenea, 89 (1948), 410.

2. Because Paulo's spiritual evolution also reveals the link between religion and personal psychology, the notion of Enrico as merely a foil for Paulo is doubly unfortunate because it represents not only an inaccurate delimitation of the bandit's role, but also a misreading of the relationship between the two figures. The saved bandit, rather than being a foil for the damned monk, is more like a mirror image of him, with the slight but crucial reversals and distortions that simile implies. As Angel Valbuena Prat has observed, “el paralelismo de Paulo y Enrico, no es casual, y mero engaño del demonio,” El teatro español en su Siglo de Oro (Barcelona, 1969), 202. For discussions of the psychological-religious connection in Paulo, see the essays by Darst and Pérez.

3. Some critics see the connection between father and son in symbolic terms, such that Anareto is almost a manifestation of Enrico's spirit. Henry Sullivan, for example, sees Anareto as the “concrete expression of his [Enrico's] persevering devotion and faith in the heavenly father,” in Tirso de Molina and the Drama of the Counter Reformation (Amsterdam, 1976), 37. William M. Whitby and Robert Roland Anderson view Anareto as “represent[ing] the son's conscience,” in their “Introduction” to Lope de Vega's La fianza satisfecha (Cambridge, 1971), 46.

4. Tirso de Molina, El condenado por desconfiado in Spanish Drama of the Golden Age, ed. Raymond MacCurdy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), p. 167. All future quotations from El condenado will be from this edition and indicated by line numbers within the text.

5. Pérez' interpretation of this scene as a “horror al parricidio” provoked by the thought of “causar la muerte de su padre si mata a su imagen” lacks a convincing psychological basis. The fact that Enrico has squandered the old man's wealth does not mean that “ha matado ya figuradamente a su padre” (16) and would not likely incline him to translate mentally scenes such as this one into visions of parricide.

6. Daniel Rogers seems to be suggesting that the mise en scène of the play lends support to the notion that Anareto is some sort of God figure when he observes, “There are repeated associations in this play between stage curtains and the veil which separates this world from eternity. These associations may lead us to draw analogies and contrasts between Enrico's loving and suffering father and Paulo's angry God,” “Introduction” to El condenado por desconfiado by Tirso de Molina (Oxford, 1974), 10.

   A critical debate exists concerning the sort of God Anareto suggests. May asserts that the old man's kindness and forbearance in the face of his son's prodigal behavior likens him to the crucified Christ: “Anareto represents man as sharing in the sacrificial folly of Christ” (156). Rogers, despite his contrast between the old man and the ogreish God of Paulo's dream, denies May's identification of Anareto with Christ: “There appear to me to be more, and closer, analogies between Anareto and God the Father than between Anareto and God the Son” (33).

   If we limit the question of Anareto's divine identity to the mind of his son, the debate disappears. Obviously for most of the play Anareto symbolizes the mercy of Jesus; at the end of the work, however, Enrico also associates him with the wrath of Jaweh.

7. Mine is just the reverse of Darst's view which holds that Anareto “is in many ways an objectification of Enrico's conception of God the Father” (489).

8. To accept this parallel, since it is unconscious, one does not also have to accept May's speculation that Anareto only feigns ignorance of Enrico's misdeeds but accepts him anyway (149). To imagine, however, that the actor playing Anareto somehow communicated an awareness of Enrico's misdeeds strengthens the case for a paternal source of Enrico's confidence in the divine.

9. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, (1913-1914), Vol. 13 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, general editor and translator, James Strachey (London, 1955), 147.

10. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, (1927-1931), Vol. 21 of Standard Edition … (1961).

11. This speech seems to contradict I.L. McClelland's thesis that Enrico does not possess a consistent faith in God but only a “spark of spiritual instinct,” which, from the friction of the bandit's sufferings and disillusionments, gradually ignites into the flame of true belief. Thus she claims that this moving expression may contain “as much perverseness as conviction” (151). Miss McClelland cannot explain, however, why, after undergoing the terrifying experience of a mock execution, Enrico should suddenly become “perverse” (whimsical?) on the subject of eternal salvation. Her interpretation of this speech (and thus her rejection of the consistency of Enrico's faith) seems even more improbable when we consider that such a trivializing of Enrico's feelings here undercuts the thematic importance and dramatic impact of a climactic scene, where, for the first and only time, the lives and destinies of Enrico and Paulo directly intersect and their contrasting views on salvation are articulated to each other.

12. Freud, New Introductory Lectures, Standard Edition, Vol. 22 (1964), p. 62.

13. Freud, Moses and Monothesism, Standard Edition, Vol. 23 (1965), p. 120. In the same work he emphasizes in particular the role of the father in the child's development: “The authority of the child's parents [is] essentially that of the autocratic father” (119).

14. Some earlier discussions of this final interview between father and son have emphasized the purely emotional—as opposed to the psychological—character of the scene, and its impact on Enrico. Parker states simply: Enrico “pensaba que su rebeldía era valor, pero es un valor que ahora pierde al ver las lágrimas de su padre” (414). May understands Enrico's confession as a manifestation of gratitude to the old man: “Having accepted every sacrifice his father has to offer, he [Enrico] is able to do something in return; and this is to accept the sacrifice made for him by Christ” (155-156). Darst traces a direct path between Enrico's contrition here for his sins to his earthly father and his submission to his heavenly one “Overwhelmed with remorse for the manner in which he has offended his earthly father, the youth … supplicates the ‘Señor piadoso y eterno’ (III, 471) for remission of his sins” (492).

    The analyses of this scene by Rogers and Pérez are significant because of their stress on the impact of Anareto's threat on Enrico's repentance. Rogers quite correctly asserts, “Anareto finally brings about Enrico's conversion not by forbearance but by an ultimatum” (33), but does not explain why the ultimatum is necessary or which psychological pressure points in Enrico such a threat touches.

    Pérez' discussion of this encounter between Enrico and Anareto is especially useful because it links the ultimatum with Anareto's association with the divine. “El pobre viejo no le reprocha sino el que no se confiese y le amenaza con lo que Enrico más ha temido: ser rechazado por su padre. Ahora su padre y el Dios a quien insistentemente consultaba en el juego se le presentan como una sola entidad” (18). Despite the essential correctness of his observations, Pérez is not accurate when he insists that Enrico has feared his father's rejection “desde su infancia;” before this scene Anareto had never given him the slightest reason to believe such a thing could happen. The linking of God and Anareto, however, has been a constant in Enrico's mind, and not, as Pérez seems to imply, something new here.

    Professor McClelland's approach to this scene is unusual in that it denies Anareto a major role in Enrico's change of heart. “Anareto does not convert Enrico. The villain was converted even before he was seized” (161). This interpretation rests on her belief that Enrico's willingness to confess “had been in an advanced state of development long before Anareto left his bed” (162). This proposition is easily refuted by the fact that Enrico twice before (once moments earlier) in the same situation, facing execution, denied confession. Her explanation of these refusals as, respectively, “a mood of defiance” and an “attack of nerves,” like her interpretation of Enrico's profession of faith already discussed, are not only improbable, but tend to trivialize the play.

    Her interpretation of this scene also has a self-contradictory quality. She claims that Anareto's threat, or, in her words, his “troubled reproof,” serves to “help him [Enrico] over this last phase … the acceptance of Enrico of his Christian obligations and his avowal of repentance” (161). Since Enrico would never have been “roused … to relieve his father's distress … [and thus] to live up to his best instincts” (161), had his father not “left his bed,” the logic of McClelland's argument refutes her hypothesis.

15. Rogers, “Introduction,” 20.

16. H. Tracy Sturcken, “El condenado por desconfiado: A Literary Debate in Retrospect,” Symposium, 12 (1958), 189; Rogers, p. 20. For discussions of the background of this debate, literary and theological, see also Otis H. Green, Spain and the Western Tradition, II (Madison, Wis., 1968), 212-278; and Henry W. Sullivan's book already cited, 28-40.