The Apologetic History of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas

This commemorative edition of Bartolomé de las Casas’ Apologética historia sumaria, published four hundred years after his death, is an event of signal importance for Las Casian studies. Edited by Edmundo O’Gorman with the assistance of several students in his seminar, the complete text is in fact the third edition of Las Casas’ immense treatise.¹ The care and precision taken in the preparation of this text amply justify a third edition. The O’Gorman version is based not only on the Serrano Sanz edition, but also on the original manuscript in the Real Academia de Historia. Though O’Gorman has followed the punctuation and the spelling of Serrano Sanz, and the paragraphing is identical with the Pérez de Tudela edition, he has made significant innovations.

In accordance with his interpretation of the work, O’Gorman has divided the treatise into three distinct books and an epilogue, while preserving the original chapter numbers. Inasmuch as Las Casas did not entitle his chapters, Pérez de Tudela followed the practice of Serrano Sanz, who attached chapter headings in presumed sixteenth-century terms without indicating explicitly what he was doing. O’Gorman has modernized the chapter headings, but he has put them in parentheses. He has included and clarified those references which Las Casas failed to complete and also the erasures which the previous editors had omitted. Not the least valuable features of the present text are analytical indices and six appendices.

While the new edition is in itself a major contribution, more important still is the editor’s brilliant introductory essay. O’Gorman has brooded and written about Las Casas’ thought for over two decades, and he clashes with many interpretations of another illustrious Las Casian, Lewis Hanke. For example, O’Gorman rejects Hanke’s view of the origin and purpose of the Apologética historia. According to Hanke, this work, begun on Española around 1527, was finished twenty years later in time to be used as one of the author’s principal weapons in the Valladolid debate with Sepúlveda (1550-1551). The late Manuel Giménez Fernández and Pérez de Tudela share Hanke’s interpretation. Marcel Bataillon does not.

O’Gorman argues that the bulk of the Apologética historia was written after Valladolid, and that it is not a polemical work. He points out that it contains no references either to Sepúlveda or to his other opponents, in sharp contrast to the polemical character of the Historia de las Indias. Its spirit and tone are theoretical, for its central purpose was to incorporate the Indian into the Aristotelian-Christian scheme of human nature on the highest level of philosophical abstraction. This theoretical approach of the Apologética historia, says O ’Gorman, was Las Casas’ reaction to his polemical failure at Valladolid.

Until 1552 Las Casas did not clearly perceive that the Historia and the Apologética historia were two different works, the former a polemical chronicle of Spanish activity in the Indies and the latter an abstract treatise on the human nature of the Indians. In contrast to Hanke, O’Gorman feels that the Apologética historia, which Las Casas originally conceived as a part of the Historia, was begun in Valladolid as a separate work between 1555 and 1556, when Las Casas was eighty-one, and finished between 1556 and 1559. This challenging hypothesis is only a probability and not a certainty. O’Gorman’s evidence is indirect and based on an interpretation of fragmentary textual evidence. Certainly, however, O’Gorman has constructed a hypothesis sufficiently plausible and cogently reasoned to deserve serious consideration.

O’Gorman divides the Apologética historia into four sections: 1) the preamble or the Argument; 2) a two-part demonstration of the Indians’ rationality; and 3) an epilogue dealing with definitions of barbarism. After considering the physical environment of the New World (Chapters 1-22), Las Casas develops his a priori argument in Chapters 23-29. This section contains two parts—a discussion of the physical or natural conditions which must exist in order for human beings to enjoy full intellectual capacity and a demonstration that the Indians possess these physical qualities.

Las Casas’ post a priori argument (chapters 40-263) was a comparative historical approach in which he analyzes the preconquest cultures and compares them with each other and with the pre-Christian civilizations of the Old World. In so doing Las Casas may have been the first Westerner to write world history. He derived his philosophical framework from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom identified rationality with prudence. Prudence was divided into three kinds: 1) monastic or rational control of one’s self; 2) domestic or the family regime; and 3) political or social organization. Las Casas went to great pains to demonstrate that Indian societies possessed the six classes that Aristotle identified as being necessary for a rational political life—farmers, artisans, warriors, rich men, priests, and magistrates.

Aristotle argued that some degree of urbanization was necessary in order for men to lead the good life. Hence Las Casas had to explain the existence of very isolated groups in the Indies. In so doing he formulated his definition of man, which in O’Gorman’s opinion is the fundamental premise upon which the Apologética historic rests. Las Casas’ ontology went back to Greco-Roman antiquity and in particular to Cicero: “All the peoples of the world are men, and there is only one definition for all men and for each man, and that is that they are rational.” Not only is rationality the essence of humanness, characterizing the whole human species, but also it is fully actualized and exemplified by the same inalterable traits in each member of the human race. A corollary to the ontological unity of the human species is that there are no races of monstrously deformed men; for at the most only a few isolated individuals fall into this category.

In stressing the inalterable and uniform character of human nature through all time, Las Casas was minimizing historical and cultural differences, however much attention he paid to these matters. His extensive historical comparisons rested on the supposition that, in the last analysis, the historical life of New World Indians was of the same quality as the historical existence of the peoples in the Old World. Whatever cultural difference might exist among peoples, he implied, was simply a greater degree of perfection of the human mind. The essence of man’s being, however, was unchangeable. History was accidental to man in that history could not change the central core of his being, which is his rationality.

Las Casas’ universalism rested on two traditions—a Greco-Roman ontological definition of man and the medieval ideal of Christian equality. Whatever differences there may be in the historical destinies of various peoples, there is a supranatural equality of all men deriving from a common origin and a common end. All men are each others’ neighbors and brothers. Hence each people in the world should be left alone to exercise their own sovereignty. More fortunate peoples, who possess the Christian gospel, may lend spiritual assistance to less fortunate pagans by sending out missionaries. But the Spaniards must respect the political sovereignties and the property rights that the Indians enjoyed by virtue of their membership in the world community of peoples. Las Casas envisaged the sovereignty that the Spanish kings might exercise in the New World as supranatural in character, deriving exclusively from missionary enterprise. This supranatural jurisdiction complemented but did not erase the political sovereignties of the Indian nations founded in natural law and in the law of nations.²

Las Casas pleaded that no matter how isolated the Indians might have been for centuries without any knowledge of the Christian faith, and no matter how barbarous some of their customs might appear to the Spaniards, the Spaniard face to face with the Indian was in the presence of his neighbor, his fellow man. Thus Las Casas sought to incorporate the Indians on a conceptual basis of equality into the universal framework of the Christian community.

According to a long-standing argument of O’Gorman, none of Las Casas’ opponents asserted that the Indians were brutes and not human beings—least of all Sepúlveda, who regarded the Indians as grossly inferior human beings, but never denied that they possessed some rationality. Instead Sepúlveda seemed to be implying that there were gradations in human rationality. Las Casas himself never confronted the question as to whether there were such gradations. He did not even suspect that this was the implicit view of his adversary. Indeed, by defining the essence of human being as an unchangeable and uniform rationality, he excluded gradations. Las Casas’ logic was impeccable, but it is difficult for us to accept his view that history is exclusively a logical process.

Sepúlveda’s task was more complicated than that of Las Casas. Though he shared with Las Casas the view about the unity of mankind, he was an ardent Spanish nationalist who regarded the physical and human nature of the New World as something strange and forbidding—“rareza,” to use O’Gorman’s term—because it seemed to be different from that of Europe. Sepúlveda had to defend both the new nationalist doctrine that Christian and pagan peoples were unequal and at the same time salvage the antique-medieval universalism and egalitarianism. Although he preserved the fraternal notion of a Christian community, he stressed Aristotle’s doctrine that the more perfect should rule the less perfect. All men are ontologically equal. Yes, but some men (the Christians) are more equal than other groups (the pagans).

Only the “virtuous, prudent, and learned” (the Christians) can fully understand the meaning of natural law. Sepúlveda’s novelty was his assertion that all peoples do not possess the sovereign right to pursue the common destiny of man on their account. Some groups lack the fullness of rational capacity to discern the norms by which this common destiny can be reached. The histories of these “inferior” peoples lack meaning and, indeed, they can be said to enter history only when a “superior” people impose themselves on them. Hence Sepulveda argues that civilized peoples have the right and the obligation not only to render spiritual assistance to barbarian peoples, but also to impose their own superior culture upon them by force. Las Casas agreed with the first proposition but not with the second.

O’Gorman argues that Las Casas has been misinterpreted by his posterity, who have made him into a “kind of Woodrow Wilson in a Dominican habit.” He should not be regarded as a precursor of democratic liberal pacifism and modern egalitarianism. He should be viewed for what he was, a late medieval theologian who had no understanding of or sympathy for the rising current of nationalism.

At the Valladolid debate Las Casas and Sepúlveda were mutually incomprehensible—Las Casas a Scholastic philosopher working for the universal interests of the Christian commonwealth and Sepúlveda a Renaissance Aristotelian serving the political interests of Spanish nationalism. Both men shared the Aristotelian view that the more perfect should rule the less perfect. To Las Casas this proposition meant spiritual assistance to pagan peoples by converting them rationally and peacefully to Christianity. To Sepúlveda this Aristotelian principle meant the abrogation of pagan peoples’ sovereignty and their conquest by force. Las Casas expressed the ancient-medieval ideal of the brotherhood of man linked together by a common supranatural destiny. Sepúlveda spoke for the more modern ideal of the fraternity of all men belonging to one nation that was destined to include all humanity. Only in this context can one understand how Las Casas might accuse his opponents of being unchristian, and they in turn denounce him for being unpatriotic.

The Apologética historia is indeed a major work in the corpus of Las Casas’ thought. The central premise of all his voluminous writings is that the missionary enterprise is the only justification for Spanish activity in the Indies. In Del único modo de atraer a todos los pueblos a la verdadera religión Las Casas formulated his missionary method, conversion by means of persuasion and reason. In the Seville treatises he defined the supranatural character of Spanish sovereignty in the New World. In the Apologética historia he developed his ontology of man. The Historia de las Indias was a historical demonstration of how the Spaniards had violated the abstract principles enunciated in the previously mentioned works. And, of course, the Brevísima relación was a propaganda broadside taken from the Historia.

In the on-going debate about the thought of Bartolomé de las Casas Edmundo O’Gorman has indeed made a notable contribution. For some time to come we shall be discussing the questions he has posed in this edition of the Apologética historia.

Author notes