Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) was a Dominican friar and theologian who is remembered today for his eloquent protests over the treatment of the aboriginal populations in what the Spanish conquerers called the New World. A prolific writer, his best-known of many works on the subject is
Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias [
Very Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies] of 1552 (written in 1539), the Indies in this case referring to the Caribbean Islands who were the first in the New World to received the decidedly mixed blessings of European Christianity.
The fact that Las Casas and other Dominicans denounced Spanish practices like making unjust war on the aboriginal peoples, forced conversion to Christianity, and the
encomienda system, which was the main instrument in Las Casas' time by which the Spanish colonizers subjugated the native peoples into political submission and forced labor, is a powerful reminder that there were Europeans from the start of the settlement of the New World who criticized the practices of the colonizers. And, in the case of Las Casas, made such criticisms over decades and in increasingly sharp terms. So it was possible by the standards of European Christianity in the early-modern decades ("modern" is conventionally dated from 1492) to object to those practices in Spain. And the Spanish version of those standards weren't known for their extreme tolerance, to put it mildly. Las Casas lived during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition, the height of Spanish imperial power and expansion, and the Counter-Reformation.
The works of Las Casas are of particular historical interest because of his presence in the New World during much of the first century of European colonization and because of his sympathetic view of the native inhabitants. He first went to the Caribbean in 1502-1507, returned as a chaplain to the Spanish forces that conquered Cuba in 1512 remaining until 1515, made a brief return to the Caribbean in 1517, and then was present in 1522-1540, returned again to the New World where he was selected as Bishop of Chiapas, returned to Spain in 1547 where he participated in a famous coloquium of theologians in which his views on the New World were criticized by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490-1573), and died in Spain in 1566. During his time in the New World, he lived in what is now México, Central America and Peru. Adriano de Utrecht, who became Pope Adrian VI, described Las Casas as "protector universal de todos los indios de las Indias" (universal protector of the Indians of the Indies).
Though the
Brevísima relación is his most famous work, he wrote much longer works elaborating the theological and practical bases of his positions on the treatment of the Indians and his opposition to slavery, including
Historia de las Indias,
Del único modo de atraer a todos los pueblos a la verdadera religión,
Dieciseis remedios,
Historia de las Indias, and
Apologética historia sumaria. The December 1974 edition of the Spanish philosophical-literary journal
Revista de Occidente was devoted to various essays on the philosophical and theological assumption of the defender of the peoples of the New World.
The essay by André Saint-Lu, "Significación de la denuncia lascasiana", addresses the polemical style of his famous criticisms of Spanish policy in the New World. Defensive historians of Spain have accused Las Casas of gross exageration, but Saint-Lu argues that even though some of the figures he used for populations and geography were too high, that his basic claims were correct and that Las Casas was not deliberately falsifying his data. After all, there was scarcely anything like a comprehensive pre-Columbus census of the native people of the Americas. And there are parts of the continents that remained uncharted well into the 20th century. The criticisms from Las Casas were scarcely embraced by the Spanish monarchs. But they also were neither entirely unwelcome nor completely ineffective. The Spanish military leaders in the New World were a potential source of opposition to the Spanish kings, having as they did access to immense wealth in the conquered territories. His criticisms were influential in the promulgation of the Leyes Nuevas (New Laws) of 1542 which aimed at abolishing slavery and forced labor by the Indians in the Spanish domains.
John Phelan in "El imperio cristiano de Las Casas, el imperio espanol de Sepúlveda y el imperio milennario de Mendieta" focuses on an aspect that other writers in the
Revista agree was central to Las Casas' thought. Las Casas believed that the mission to convert the native people of the Americas to Christianity was the main task of the Spanish and the chief blessing of the discovery of the New World. Although Las Casas specifically opposed the
forced conversion of the Indians and argued against the prevailing consensus that Christian nations were justified in conquering pagan nations on the basis of the superiority of the Christian religion. This central focus of the views of Las Casas points once again to the tragic aspects of the European conquest of America, alongside those that were rightly regarded by critics like Las Casas as sinful, wrong and criminal. If views like those of Las Casas had prevailed on Spanish policy after 1492, it would presumably have meant that they would have established colonies in the New World with the aim of trading with the Indian peoples, of which the Incas were the most highly developed in European terms.
But the European diseases to which the native people had no immunity and for which they had no effective medicines would still have likely taken a tremendous toll. Those were the main source of the dying out of much of the native populations in the Americas. That alone would have provoked military clashes between the natives and the colonizers. On top of that, there were the European notions of property and sovereignty, eventual competition by other expansionist European kingdoms, and just plain greed. Add to that the strongly-felt imperative by many Spaniards - including Las Casas and other clerical critics of the Spanish methods - to Christianize the natives.
Las Casas seemed to be persuaded by the notion that many of the Indian peoples were quite receptive to Christianity, and even had knowledge of some primitive version of the True Faith. In this, he was probably deceived as many other Europeans were by the syncretism of so much of native religion, in which accepting Christian baptism or attending Christian services was by no means considered inconsistent with practicing their traditional "pagan" religions. Francis Parkman, one of the few American historians of the 19th century who actually knew a great deal about Indian religions, customs and social structures, has described this huge gap in understanding between the Europeans and the natives of North America in his books like
The Jesuits in North America. Las Casas' principled opposition to forced conversion could have given the Spanish conquerers and the Church a way to live more peacefully with the pagan civilizations of the Indians. But these alternative scenarios are so far from what actually happened that a "lascasian" alternative seems downright utopian.
And in philosophical terms, his thought
was utopian, as the
Revista essays make very clear. Utopian thinking was heavily influential among European Christians at the time. Thomas Moore's
De optimo reipublicae statu de que nova insula Utopia was first published in 1516. José Antonio Maravall notes in "Utopía y primitivism en Las Casas" that Las Casas never cites Moore's work, but he also argues that the ideas of Las Casas were closer to those of Moore than perhaps any other thinker. Whether it was by direct influence, indirect influence, common sources of understanding or just the ideas being "in the air" is hard to say. Maravall observes that the inspiration for both came from the very early experience of Spanish colonization in America. Moore objected to the kind of exploitation he saw developing in the New World in the emerging capitalist order, though it wasn't called that until later. Las Casas proposed alternatives to the colonial practices which he considered capable of adoption, based on what Maravall calls the "quasi-natural" mode of agriculture practiced by poor farmers in Spain. He describes Las Casas' vision for New World societies "basadas en la agricultura y sin más que los elementos minimamente necessarios para mantenerlas" (based on agriculture and without more than the minimally necessary elements to maintain them).
This was not a realistic vision. And it was also a vision based on creating societies of (voluntarily) Christianized natives in the Americas organized along a brand of European model, although one less brutal and avaricious than the
encomiendo system. The great positive contribution of utopian thinking has been to critique existing or emerging social and political realities in the light of a model that rejects that worst aspects. But since the 16th century, we've had quite a number of examples of utopian thinking degenerating into dystopias of violence and oppression. It doesn't mean that utopian thinking is inherently bad. To borrow a well-known phrase, utopias don't create dystopias, dystopians do. It's just that utopian thinking needs to be handled with the care a loaded gun deserves.
Utopian thinking in Las Casas' time was closely related to eschatologial (End Times) thinking, which was very widespread and influential at the time. Apocalyptic thinking influenced the actions of people and rulers, and influenced the interpretations they put on events. And western Christian Europe had some shattering events in the 1500s, such as the Protestant Reformation, the subsequent Wars of Religion, and the Peasant War in Germany. The discovery and colonization of America was also interpreted as a hopeful sign of the Last Days and the associated Last Judgment. Of course, that didn't stop the Christian monarchs of Europe from lusting after the long-term advantages of colonies in the New World. But such terrestrial considerations could and did coexist with apocalyptic understandings of current history.
Maravall draws on the later concept of Martin Buber to distinguish between eschatology and utopian thinking. The concept of the end of the world in the Jewish and Christian traditions views the approaching end of the world as a consummation brought about by God which produces an exit from history as we know it. (The notion of the "end of history" played an unfortunate role in American foreign policy in recent years, but that's several centuries after Las Casas' time.) Utopian thought envisions a just and peaceful society within the context of human history, where human possibilities produce a society free of the evils of an existing one. Maravall observes that utopian criticisms that are founded in backward-looking ideas from a departing or departed past time can nevertheless produce useful and forward-looking criticisms. And he suggests that the work of Las Casas falls into that category. A more recent example of this phenomenon would be the Christian philosopher Ivan Illich (1926-2002).
Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552)John Phelan's essay shows some of the ways that worked with Las Casas. Describing the famous debate in Valladolid in 1550-1551 between Las Casas and Sepúlveda, Phelan argues that Las Casas defended a medieval outlook in his late-modern-sounding plea for the fundamental equality of all and his opposition to forced conversion. Those were ideas based in the Aristotelian thinking of Thomas Aquinas. Sepúlveda also based his ideas on Thomist thought, but came to very different conclusion. Sepúlveda, Phelan argues, was actually more modern in his argument in that context, because he defended a notion of the Spanish mission that reflected an emerging Spanish nationalism. (The modern system of nation-states is commonly dated from the Treat of Westfalia in 1848.) Another leading contemporary Spanish theologian, Gerónimo de Mendieta (1525-1604), offered a very different vision. His notion was based on a mystical version of Christianity. But his mysticism led him to argue for the forced conversion of the American natives on the grounds that their conversion would initiate the apocalyse. By contrast, Las Casas used eschatological notions to warn the Spaniards that their misconduct toward the Indians would bring divine judgment onto their heads.
Whether one wishes to regard Sir Francis Drake and Elizabeth I of England as the hammers of God in delivering that judgment is a different matter that I won't attempt to explore here. But that prophetic aspect of the work of Las Casas is the focus of Marcel Bataillon in "Las Casas, ¿un profeta?". Bataillon argues that, at least in his later phase dating from the Vallodolid disputation, Las Casas viewed himself in more political than in religious terms, Phelan argues, though he viewed his role in petitioning the Spanish crown for changes in New World policies toward the Indians as being in the tradition of the religious prophets of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew warned their rulers of the consequences of their injustices in the real world of policy toward the poor and weak in their kingdoms, in particular.
A third important element of the lascasian outlook was the notion of the natives of the Americas as examples of the "bien salvaje", the good savage or the good primitive. "Noble savage" is probably a better English translation because that's the form in which the concept is more familiar in the Anglo-Saxon world. The concept didn't begin with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). It actually goes back to classical Greco-Roman philosophy. Las Casas viewed the Indians of the Americas as noble savages. He drew humane conclusions from that idealization of the native peoples. But the concept also probably inevitably carries an element of paternalistic condescension in thought. And when a group of people are viewed as some utopian idea and then they turn out to be just as ignoble and "savage" as the civilized peoples are, idealization can easily transform into demonization instead. But this concept of the Americas as an unspoiled land populated by noble savages was a very widespread and influential one in Europe, and heavily influenced Las Cosas.
The essay by Jose Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, Las Casas y Carranza: fe y utopía" compares the thinking of Las Casas and one of his contemporary partisans, Bartolomé Carranza (1503-1576), who endured a long heresy trial over his
Comentarios sobre el catecismo cristiano (1558), which focused on issues of Church governance and practice. Carranza was eventually acquitted, but was required to renounce portions of that work. Carranza's experience is yet another example of the limits of dissent, even for prominent Churchmen in that time. Las Casas passionately defended his friend Carranza to the Inquisition. Tellechea Idígoras makes a comment that is reflective of the prophetic nature of Las Cazas' life's work: "Su voz es incómoda, entonces y ahora" (His voice is uncomfortable, then and now). Comforting the comfortable was definitely not the mission to which Bartolomé de las Casas devoted his life.
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