In The Monk, Matthew Lewis takes his stand against hubristic righteousness. In a Madrid monastery, the arrogant monk Ambrosio falls to temptation and begins a campaign of, in the words of The British Critic, “lust, murder, incest, and every atrocity that can disgrace human nature.” He’s dead and damned not long after. So, when I write that, in search of the “gothic obscurity” Lewis describes, I abandoned my ideals and travelled instead to a Toledo monastery… Well, the reader would do well to withhold judgement.
At San Juan de los Reyes Monastery in Toledo, Franciscan monks once lived by their vow of seclusion under the royal crest of Isabella I and Ferdinand II. They may neither have known nor cared that they weren’t in Madrid, so neither do I. Principle to them, as to the monk Ambrosio, was their devotion to virtue.
Walking the corridors of the lower cloister, it’s hard to imagine the seclusion of San Juan de los Reyes driving anyone to such deeds. Indeed, critics of Lewis’s time had difficulty accepting it. In The Critical Review, Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the novel, “voluptuous, corrupting, obscene and complacent.” One reader known only as Aurelius claimed that the “wanton and immodest nature” of The Monk and other early gothic literature drove him insane.
But as Emma McEvoy writes in her introduction, “other papers avoid the issue of moral purity altogether and treat the novel merely as a good read.”
In the same way, San Juan de los Reyes is a good monastery. The flamboyant gothic architecture creates plenty of moments worth lingering over. The courtyard garden, even in late winter, breathes life into the silence. And the locked doors, for all I know, hide unthinkable depths of sin.
It makes me think of John Ruskin’s reflections in The Nature of Gothic:
Artists, considered as searchers after truth, are … divided into three great classes. … Those on the right perceive and pursue the good and leave the evil. Those on the left perceive and pursue the evil and leave the good. Those in the centre, the greatest, perceive and pursue the good and evil together.
Maybe you shouldn’t be all good or all bad all the time. Maybe you can’t always find the monastery you pictured in the exact place where it was set. But between the images seared into my mind by The Monk and the tranquil morning I passed in San Juan de los Reyes Monastery, one can find “gothic obscurity” somewhere in the centre.
If you’re in the area, Toledo’s Brujeria Museum similarly explores the good and evil as it exists in the image of the witch. And if you’re in the mood, Saint-Maclou Church in Rouen is considered one of the finest examples of the flamboyant gothic style shared by San Juan de los Reyes.