OF THE TRIBULATION P RIBADENEIRA 1557- 1611

 

TREATISE OF THE TRIBULATION OF Fr. RIVADENEIRA

 

The hunting birds have already left, the first frosts are falling and the trees are stripped of their greenery. When the leaf falls, the death of the terminally ill is predicted.

On this cold afternoon I read the “De Tribulatione” of the great Jesuit ascetic P. Ribadeneira about whose life we know little. Except that he had a bad time at the Sorbonne for not being chosen to be part of the first promotion at the Company's Foundation.

Even so, he wrote the biography of Saint Ignatius, a prodigy of Castilian prose. In his considerations of the tribulation he comes, if not to correct Sto. Thomas in his interpretation of pain ─God does not create evil, he allows it─; He, however, maintains that pain is a catharsis and serves as a purification to the Christian life of the sinner.

  So how do you explain the killing of Palestinian children, they are innocent?

Good. The wise Jesuit maintains that God has nothing to do with this genocide. It is the work of sin, ambition, arrogance, cruelty, impiety, follies.

How then does he not punish the tyrant? Well, here we enter the theology of free will advocated by the council fathers in Trent, especially Arias Montano.

  In contradiction to the Protestants who preached salvation by faith without works. The just never sins. So the tyrant has free rein to act as he pleases?

Another response from Ribadeneira: God created free man and respects his will. The Book of Job and the Consolation of Philosophy are the axial axes on which the wheel of this magnificent work turns.

We are flesh of pain (Job). Beings for death (Zaratrusta). Life is full of thistles, thistles, thorns ─tibula, in Latin─. In the face of pain, Buddhists consider obliteration. For the orientals you do not exist.

The Roman Stoics advised endurance. This is how Senequism is born. Much of the attitude in Spanish literature and philosophy agrees with this theory.

From Garcilaso to Unamuno passing through Cervantes, Góngora and Quevedo and all picaresque literature is Senequista but it sublimates all the contradictions to catharsis.

  Writing becomes a purification. It's quite a mystique. This Jesuit must not have been liked by his own coreligionists - the same thing happened to Gracián - and he was on the verge of leaving the Company.

They preached the way to heaven through the narrow path, the denial of self, never responding to affront.

  She was of convert origin, the same as St. Teresa, who said that this life is a night in a bad inn and that she only asked God to suffer and suffer. Values that are not very valid today either.

  Now as then comfort and delight are preferred. And even less do you want to know anything about death.

It reviews the afflictions and dangers, disappointments, failures, disappointments that threaten human beings in their journey through existence: the evil of war, brawls of all kinds, the loss of property or homeland.

  For Ribadeneira, tribulations are a threshing in which the grain is separated from the chaff. "It enlightens and perfects the good and in them it produces fruits of patience, humility and trust, just as in the bad it causes opposite effects of despair and impatience because from the same wood that fire purifies and refines the gold to the wood that supports it." burns it." For the author, moral pain is much worse than physical pain. Especially in matters of honor that were so important to the Spaniards of the 16th century, an attitude that could be carried over to our days. He speaks of the torture of the unmarried:

"There is no greater tribulation when bitterness, infidelity, and bitterness arise between marriages. There can be no greater evil than to find war where there should be great peace and harmony and only rivalries and discord grow. Honey turns to gall and the cough to medicine. Kisses turn into tears. Voices, screams, threats are heard, which lead to murders."

  On the contrary, he extols the sacramental virtue of marriage. The couple must be united like a “black wildebeest” until death separates them, following the Pauline recommendations.

Let the man guard the woman as the apple of her eye, and let the woman be subject to her husband. In these times where in Spain many married men and women are on their third or fourth marriage and divorce seems widespread, Saint Paul's commandment sounds like heavenly music in our deranged and de-Christianized times.

In short, let us offer the Lord such sorrows and tribulations for our sins because the one from Loyola already said that in times of tribulation not to change.

  It is what it is. You just have to hold on. Father Ribadeneira, the poor man, knew many things about God but he was lacking in knowledge of the human condition.

The men and women of here and now seem to be made of a different material than those of yesteryear,