Auto Da Alma by Gil Vicente

The Soul's Journey

Gil Vicente’s Auto da Alma (The Soul’s Journey) is a short allegorical play written in 1508 where a human soul travels through life accompanied by a guardian angel and hounded by the devil. Along the way it wavers between vanity, wealth, and despair before finally finding refuge at the “inn” of the Church. Funny enough, I found out about the story while overhearing Gil Vicente’s name while touring a church in Lisbon.

Reading it, I recognized a pattern I knew well. I have lived this cycle before. Temptation does not arrive once and vanish. It circles back again and again. Ambition, pleasure, burnout, retreat discipline, ambition, repeat. For years I barely noticed it happening. I heard the whisper (“do it just this once, you are young, it will not matter”) and I obeyed. I became a prisoner to my own devices.

What stunned me in Auto da Alma was the Devil not as seducer but as director. He doesn’t only tempt with pleasures but also stages them. “Put your arm here. Fold your arms proudly. Now strut.” He choreographs the Soul into spectacle. And the point is not joy. The point is visibility.

That image struck me because I had lived under a similar direction myself. At Penn, I observed the unspoken grammar of being seen: a gait of confidence, offhand nods that signaled belonging, and to a lesser extent, the things you wore and had. The “scene” was rarely about enjoying itself. It was about looking like you belonged to it. That is the trick we fall prey to: confusing visibility for fulfillment. If I am seen, I must belong. If I am seen, I must matter. I can count the times I truly enjoyed the scene on one hand. But I remember wanting to be seen in it.

That is when I saw how the Viente’s Devil changes masks. Sometimes he appeals to appetite. When that fails, he appeals to ego. He flatters: “You are too noble for rules, too important to bow. Be free.” He reframes freedom as refusal of obedience and refusal of discipline. It feels intoxicating.

And when ego fades, another mask appears in the form of respectability. It’s no longer a wild temptation but a sober one. It’s harder to detect because it wears the costume of common sense and stability. I have long chased the point of no return, where compounding wealth frees me from constraint: no thought to dinner prices, freedom to travel anywhere, the slightly nicer house on the block in the already nice neighborhood. On its face that is prudence. Yet somewhere along the way prudence crosses into fixation. And New York tempts you to keep moving that line forward until the fixation becomes invisible. It’s respectable, even praised. But it’s also dangerously binding. A personal fixation is built from a collective one… respectability is invisible because culture turns it into the norm.

Culture and leadership really does matter (so much). It defines what is celebrated, what is mocked, what is forbidden. The culture we choose to live in, abide by, and build for… it, by our own free will ends up coercing us. We quickly chase the very things that draw us away from our authenticity, from our real curiosities, from the slow work of quiet discipline. Often when I have chased the stage, I have neglected the seeds that needed watering. And then, by my own choice, I have had to step back to replant them.

If spectacle enslaves, hardship frees. Chase things that make me struggle at a deep mental or physical level because they feel like the Angel’s language. Yet even hardship can become a performance if I let the gaze of others into the room. The line is thin. The same gritty run that centers me can become a badge and the same meditative discipline that allows for silence in me can become a distorted brand. Time has a way of collapsing illusions. Uniforms that once seemed like badges of privilege can calcify into burial costumes.

So what do I actually seek? Not wealth as spectacle and not freedom as defiance, but slack: space to do meaningful work without panic. That pursuit can be clean fuel if it is tied to discipline and inputs. It becomes dangerous when it hardens into fixation. Even good concerns can become snares if they drain away from the practices that restore.

The test I return to is simple. Does this send me back to the Inn—discipline, community, solitude, curiosity? Or does it send me back to the stage?

There is a moment in the play when the Soul flips. It admits complicity: “I gave you too many of my years.” Then it demands release: “persecute me no more.” That order here crucially matters. Owning it and then asking for release is how suffering becomes insight instead of despair. Even in suffering, though, there can be triumph, because suffering can teach you to tell the voices apart.

Borrowing from Vicente: close the body’s eyes to vanity, bind the appetite for ease, and take one faithful step.

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Other thoughts:

While the parts where Devil and Angel played tug of war with the Soul was filled with self reflection, I didn’t love the ending because it didn’t feel like it investigated real inner conflict. The last stretch of the play is all the saints and doctors of the Church describing Christ’s sacrifice in layered imagery.

I used GPT 5 as a teacher through this. I would paste a stanza, try my own paraphrase, and get feedback on where I missed a word, tone, or structure. Over time, I asked less for summaries and more for guidance on how to spot interjections, contrasts, or archaic phrasing myself. I’m still far from an expert (Prof Egan’s class taught me that there’s nothing like taking a full course) but this gave me confidence to approach other works I’ve always wanted to read (e.g. Dante).

Some notes from reading more medieval work:

• Syntax – medieval english flips word order. Spotting “if… yet” or “though… still” clauses

• Spotting tone – “Ah” or “O” signals lament; Contrast structures mark grief, etc.

• Decoding symbols – “tree” as cross, “inn” as the Church, “banquet” as false pleasure

• Mapping the Devil’s masks: sometimes a flatterer, sometimes a pragmatist, sometimes a mocker, sometimes a whisperer of despair