his account of Latin literature. Wolf, the creator of the Altertumswissenschaft or Science of Antiquity, completed the process of rupture between the “modern” and the “ancient”, and established epistemological and theoretical guidelines for tracing the histories of Latin and Greek Literatures, many of which are still applied today. Thus with the ancient world marked off as an enclosed and separate reality, the European literatures ceased to be seen as a continuation of the classical; instead, the Middle Ages was taken as the starting point for the new literary histories. In the course of just a few decades, the perception of continuity disappeared and gave way to the concept of “national literatures”: both the modern “European” ones that emerged from the limbo of the High Middle Ages, and the “ancient”, such as the Greek and Latin literatures, which scholars began to analyse through the philosophical prism of nationalism.
Juan Andrés’s work is little known today: not even within the history of Spanish literature has it received the recognition it deserves. Andrés was a Spanish Jesuit priest who took a profound interest in literary history. When King Charles III ordered the expulsion of the Company of Jesus in 1767, he went into exile in Italy where he developed his ideas on historiography, which were closely related to those of Friedrich Schlegel and Herder. His main works were written in Italian, but his brother translated many of them into Spanish. He thus became well known in Spain in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth. Andrés’ principal work, Dell’Origine, progressi e stato attuale d’ogni letteratura, offers the best example of the new epistemological model for comparative history. It not merely juxtaposes the different literatures and establishes parallels between them, but transcends these juxtapositions to form a larger organic whole – one that was founded on the model of the Enlightement histories, but developed it a great deal further. As he himself wrote in the prologue to his work:
Tenemos infinitas historias literarias, unas de naciones, provincias y ciudades; otras de Ciencias y Artes particulares; todas en verdad utilísimas … pero aún no ha salido a la luz una obra filosófica que tome por objeto toda la literatura. (Andrés 16)
(We have infinite literary histories, some of nations, provinces and cities; others of particular Sciences and Arts; all of them truly are extremely helpful … but we have not yet had a philosophical work that takes as its object the whole of literature.)
Abbé Andrés was therefore working with a concept of literature as Studia Humanitatis rather than Belles Letres – a concept that he would use to encompass all mankind’s accumulated knowledge, in all the cultures of the world that were known in his day. Thus Andrés aimed to take into account not only the poetry, drama or novels of different nations but their contributions to the sciences as well. This led him, among other things, to acknowledge the importance of the Islamic world. Such acknowledgement was highly controversial at the time, and may explain why the Jesuit’s work was ignored and forgotten. Dell’Origine, progressi e stato attuale d’ogni letteratura is written in a profoundly comparative spirit, with every national literature and author, every element of knowledge seen as a cog that sets other cogs in motion within a great machine of history that must be understood as a whole.
As far as his conception of Greek and Latin literatures is concerned, Andrés came closer to the ideas of Herder and Romanticism, according first place to Greek rather than to Latin literature because of its originality and liveliness. Nevertheless, Andrés did not allow himself to be swept away by the idea of the Greeks’ unique genius. True to the spirit of the Enlightenment, he considered the birth of Greek literature from the point of view of progress, and in doing so broke away from the prevailing Eurocentrism of the time. Thus Andrés recognised the contributions that various, especially Asian, peoples had made to Greece, as we can see in the following two fragments from the first and third volumes:
La Grecia, provincia en otro tiempo de las más incultas el mundo, debe su ilustración y cultura a todas las partes de la tierra conocida hasta entonces; las otras naciones habían sembrado, por decirlo así, la semilla de las ciencias; pero sólo a la Grecia tocaba la suerte de coger todo el fruto. (Andrés I, 36-37)
(Greece, which in the past was one of the most undeveloped provinces of the world, owes its culture and enlightment to all of the known places of the time; the other nations had cultivated, so to speak, the seed of the sciences; but only in Greece did they come to reap the grain.)
el ver que de las colonias establecidas en Asia nacen sus primeros poetas e historiadores, y el observar en Homero y otros Griegos algunos pasages muy semejantes a los libros sagrados … da algún motivo para creer que los Griegos hayan recibido de los Asiáticas las primeras luces e las buenas letras. (Andrés III, 7-8)
(the fact that its first poets and historians appear in the colonies established in Asia, and that we see in Homer and other Greeks passages very similar to the Holy Scripture … gives us reason to believe that the Greeks had received from the Asians the first lights and fine letters.)
With his universalising ideal of human knowledge, Andrés was thus determined to acknowledge certain facts that most classical literary historiography ignored, since they represented a threat to the established, strictly Eurocentric model of Greek spiritual identity.
In addition to its originality, one of the greatest virtues of Greek literature, according to Juan Andrés, lies in the way that it fuses reason and imagination through the conjunction of scientific knowledge and belles lettres. Andrés’ emphasis on this virtue directly relates to the universal model of literature underlying his work.
Andrés, as indicated above, tended to consider Latin literature inferior to Greek, and even denied it a separate identity, considering it a mere continuation of the Greek. In thus rejecting servile imitation and according greater value to creative genius, Andrés adopted a stance that had more in common with the theoretical paradigms of the future than with those of the past. Nevertheless, he reiterates that “knowing” (as opposed to “imitating”) the classics is a prerequisite for the correct evolution of human reason and thought. Andrés proposes a dialogic relationship between modernity and antiquity, in which the former would benefit in its evolution from the teachings of the latter, but he never suggests that this relationship should be viewed as rigidly normative, according value only to the old.
In his historiographical approach to the classical and national literatures Andrés shows an appreciation of all their separate contributions, but sees them always in relation to the whole. Although he considers Greek literature inherently superior to Latin, he recognises in Virgil the apex of all classical poetry, and analyses in detail the reasons for the decline of both literatures. Andrés’ emphasis on the impact of each element of “world literature” on the others, his depiction of literary hierarchies as an organic whole and the rationalist analysis he develops, constitute a new basis (and a very advanced one for its time) from which to look at different literatures from a comparative perspective.
It was precisely this effort to evaluate the different constitutents of world literature in order to understand and appreciate the evolution of the whole that led Andrés to one of his most controversial theses: the importance of Arabian literature for the development of European literature. On this point he found himself in opposition to both the neoclassic and the romantic ideals. Andrés defended the argument that Romance poetry had developed primarily under the influence of Arabic rather than Latin poetry, with Spain playing a key role as the bridge between Europe and North Africa. This thesis was based on elements of prosody and, above all, rhyme scheme (an element that is non-existent in Latin but absolutely fundamental to Arabic poetry) and on the great flowering of poetry in the Hispanic kingdoms of the twelfth century, which Andrés ascribes to their constant commerce with the Arabs. In addition, Andrés gave full credit to the contribution of those whom he considered the true transmitters of science of the Greeks, and who therefore constituted a fundamental element in the development of European science in Europe, as we see in the following passage:
Toda Europa había dejado en un completo abandono las Ciencias …, los árabes entre tanto acogiendo las Ciencias desterradas de nuestras provincias, iban en busca de los maestros griegos que les habían enseñado, estudiaban sus libros, que son las fuentes de la sabiduría, los traducían en su idioma y hacían