Thursday, January 26, 2012

Las Casas, Sepulveda and the Great Debate

Las Casas, Sepulveda
and the Great Debate

by Ronald A. Barnett
Part Two
In 1550-1551 a public debate was held in Valladolid, Spain, between Las Casas, chief spokesman for the Indians of New Spain, and his opponent, Sepulveda, who regarded the Indians as subhuman and therefore subject to the superior races–slaves; Indians committed crimes against nature, namely idolatry, sodomy, and cannibalism; Indians sacrificed innocent people in sacrificial rites; finally, Indians were infidels who could be converted to Christianity only by force.
Las Casas countered first with a four-part definition of barbarism. Then he argued that the Indians of New Spain did not fall under Sepulveda’s definition of barbarism and were therefore, not inferior to civilized peoples nor were they necessarily subject to the superior races. Moreover, Aristotle’s Theory of Natural Slavery, invoked by Sepulveda did not apply to the Indians of New Spain because the Indians lived in harmonious and organized communities and had a form or written language, although as pagans, they needed help from the Spaniards to save their souls.
Las Casas’ main defense of the Indians and the most difficult part of his argument involved idolatry, human sacrifice, and the use of Biblical scriptures in the Great Debate. Las Casa began by declaring that the Indians, while admittedly pagan, could not be classified as heretics who had dissented against the Roman Catholic faith. Consequently, Indians did not fall under the jurisdiction of Pope Paul III or King Charles V and so could not be punished for crimes against nature, including idolatry or human sacrifice. This counter-argument was particularly important because the early Conquistadores and Spanish missionaries were so horrified at the worship of what they regarded as “idols” and the Aztec practice of human sacrifice that they felt perfectly justified in dealing with the Indians in any way they saw fit.
The cultural gap between the Spaniards and Indians was so wide that the Spaniards could not possibly understand, much less accept, the Aztec concept of human sacrifice as a means of preserving the universe. Furthermore, Spanish missionaries were greatly perplexed by the similarities between many Aztec practices and the rites of the Catholic church. For example, the Eucharist of the Catholic church and the Aztec concept of ixiptlatl had much in common, for they both involved a form of personification. In the former, the bread and wine were not simply symbols of the body of Christ, but the actual flesh and blood of Jesus (transubstantiation), at least for devout Catholics, in the latter the priest who danced in the skin of the flayed human sacrifice personified the deity he was representing (ixiptlatl) at least in the minds of the believers. The Spaniards regarded the Aztec practice as sinful idolatry. The only difference was that the Spaniards had the weapons to convince the Aztecs they were wrong and that the Spaniards were right.
Las Casas’ response was crucial to his whole defense of the Indians, for it involved acknowledging, if not justifying, idolatry and human sacrifice as it was practiced by the Aztecs. Granted that human sacrifice is wrong, so the argument went, it can nevertheless, perhaps be explained by the circumstances in which the Indians found themselves during the 16th century. In any case, the Indians were pagans, not heretics and were therefore to be converted to Christianity by peaceful means and not violently punished for their lack of faith in the Catholic church. Here Las Casas made perhaps his greatest concession as a Dominican priest, for he acknowledged that idolatry and human sacrifice were lesser evils than war, which should be avoided at all cost. The Indians were evolving and therefore needed to be converted, not killed, thus overturning Sepulveda’s previous argument that war was necessary to convince the Indians because in the Bible Jesus is said to have forced guests to attend the wedding feast. Las Casas replied that while the Bible could indeed be interpreted in different ways one should not completely distort the meaning of the scriptures.
The Great Debate ended in 1551. The terms of the discussion were highly academic and theoretical and did not deal with native culture in its own context. Moreover, the Indians were never included in the debate. Sepulveda continued as a spokesman for the encomienda system of slavery in New Spain, while Las Casas became known as the defender of Indians. However, as D. Castro points out in Another Face of Empire, Las Casas did indeed come to the defense of the Indians against the torture and murder of natives by the Spaniards but in fact he was simply substituting another form of paternalistic, ecclesiastical imperialism in place of military, economic and political domination.
Sepulveda never visited the Americas but his arguments in the debate with Las Casas reflected actual practices in the Spanish conquest of the Americas. His work was suppressed from an early time because he told the truth about the racial intolerance and dirty practices of the Conquest. InDemocrates Segundo Sepulveda expressed the general attitude of the Spaniards toward the Indians: “(The Indians are)…naturally lazy and vicious, melancholic, cowardly, and in general a lying, shiftless people. Their marriages are not a sacrament but a sacrilege. They are idolatrous, libidinous and commit sodomy. Their chief desire is to eat, drink, worship heathen idols and commit bestial obscenities. What could one expect from a people whose skulls are so thick and hard that the Spaniards had to take care in fighting not to strike on the head lest the swords be blunted.”
One way or another, the natives of the Americas were destined to be subject to the will and whims of the ruling Europeans. The Spaniards who followed Sepulveda continued with their aggressive policies. Only a few actually adopted more peaceful methods of conversion but as far as the Indians were concerned no real change resulted.

Bartolomeo de Las Casas, Father to the Indians

Product photo

Bartolomeo de Las Casas, Father to the Indians

Dan Graves, MSL

The Indians had a name for Bartolomé de las Casas: "Father to the Indians." It had not always been so. When he first traveled to Spanish America he was twenty-four years old and no priest. To the contrary, he was following in conquistador footsteps. Like many Spanish youth he settled on a plantation where he enjoyed the forced labor of native conscripts.
One day in 1509, a Dominican monk, Father Montesinos spoke from the pulpit, berating Spanish colonists for their cruel treatment of the natives. How could men call themselves Christians and perpetrate the barbarities these butchers daily unleashed against their helpless charges? he asked.
Bartolomé was cut to the quick. While others screamed threats and abuse at the preacher, he went out and freed his slaves. Then he returned to Montesinos for advice as to what he should do next. Montesinos trained him to be a priest. He was the first Spaniard ordained in the new world.
Thereafter, Bartolomé labored for the Indians as few men have before or after. His whole life was devoted to that single cause. He wrote books documenting the cruelty done to the natives. He pleaded with those who ruled the colonies. Five times he crossed the ocean to plead with the king of Spain. The pope had granted Spain its possessions in the New World on the ground that Spain evangelize the Indians, Bartolomé reminded the king. The king agreed. Laws were passed ordering better treatment of the Indians. In the New World these benevolent rules were ignored by men who knew the king was powerless to enforce them. But the Indians knew Bartolomé as their benefactor and revered his name.
As a last resort, Bartolomé prevailed upon church authorities to refuse confession to men who continued their barbarities and did not return stolen loot and free their slaves. Priests who courageously carried out this directive were threatened and had to flee, while wicked priests continued to offer absolution to the brutal men under their charge.
When Bartolomé was old the king offered him the richest ecclesiastical see in gold--wealthy Peru. Bartolomé refused it. Send him to the poorest, he begged, some place where many natives remained unconverted so he would have much work to do for the Lord. He was given a place in impoverished Mexico.
He worked there for three years and then was forced to return to Spain to answer charges his enemies had trumped up against him. He came home fighting. Once again he proved that it was cruelty which had led to the revolts which the colonists tried to blame on his teaching. All the same, he was not allowed to return to his beloved Indians. On this day, July 31, 1566 he died. When the news reached the people he had done so much to help, they lamented in their villages and lighted bonfires in honor of his passing.

Bartolomé de las Casas


Bartolomé de las Casas O.P. (c. 1484 – 18 July 1566) was a 16th-century Spanish historian, social reformer and Dominican friar. He became the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed "Protector of the Indians". His extensive writings, the most famous "A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies" and "Historia de Las Indias", chronicle the first decades of colonization of theWest Indies and focus particularly on the atrocities committed by the colonizers against the Indigenous peoples.
Arriving as one of the first settlers in the New World he participated in, and was eventually compelled to oppose, the atrocities committed against the Native Americans by the Spanish colonists. In 1515 he reformed his views, giving up his Indian slaves and encomienda, instead advocating before King Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor on behalf of rights for the natives. In 1522 he attempted to launch a new kind of peaceful colonialism on the coast of Venezuela, but this venture failed causing Las Casas to enter the Dominican Order and become a monk, leaving the public scene for a decade. He then traveled to Central America undertaking peaceful evangelization among the Maya ofGuatemala and participated in debates among the Mexican churchmen about how best to bring the natives to the Christian faith. Traveling back to Spain to recruit more missionaries, he continued lobbying for the abolition of the encomiendado , gaining an important victory by the passing of the New Laws in 1542. He was appointed Bishop of Chiapas, but served only for a short time before he was forced to return to Spain because of resistance to the New Laws by the encomenderos, and conflicts with Spanish settlers because of his pro-Indian policies and activist religious stances. The remainder of his life was spent at the Spanish court where he held great influence over Indies-related issues. In 1550 he participated in the Valladolid debate; he argued against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda that the Indians were fully human and that forcefully subjugating them was unjustifiable. Sepúlveda countered that they were less than human and required Spanish masters in order to become civilized.
Bartolomé de las Casas spent 50 years of his life actively fighting slavery and the violent colonial abuse of indigenous peoples, especially by trying to convince the Spanish court to adopt a more humane policy of colonization. And although he failed to save the indigenous peoples of the Western Indies, his efforts resulted in several improvements in the legal status of the natives, and in an increased colonial focus on the ethics of colonialism. Las Casas is often seen as one of the first advocates for universal Human Rights.