Prefaced by Benjamin Keen’s excellent introduction which both acquaints the reader with the various approaches to Las Casas from the sixteenth century to the present and skillfully sets the tone for the remaining essays, Bartolomé de las Casas in History is divided into four major sections tracing the life, ideology, presence in America, and heritage of the great Dominican. Totalling ten studies—especially no-table being those by Friede and Bataillon—in praise of the Defender of the Indians, the book is a remarkable mosaic of scholarly appraisals “honoring the memory of Las Casas after the fourth centenary of his death.”
The first section opens with a biographical sketch by Las Casas’s biographer, the late Manuel Giménez Fernández. Unqualifiedly favorable to the Dominican—his opponents are often dismissed as moral weaklings or outright scoundrels—the essay clearly discloses how deeply the author was affected by events of the last generation in Spain, and his search (in the life and ideology of Las Casas) for the guiding principles of modern liberal Catholicism. “His life is a magnificent lesson and example of the conduct (the honesty, study, and valor) that should guide the actions of the Christian intellectual confronting a hostile political environment,” writes Professor Giménez Fernández, “and around his doctrine, properly applied to present-day conditions, can rally all who are disillusioned with anarchistic individualism, with totalitarianism, which degrades the human personality, and with the servile legalism that grovels before Caesar” (117-118).
Juan Friede’s masterful “Las Casas and Indigenism in the Sixteenth Century” closes the first cycle of essays. Rejecting what he sees as the excessive and unilateral emphasis placed by some scholars on the “juridical-theological discussions provoked by the entrance of the Indians into the Hispanic world” (129), Professor Friede insists that the destiny of the Indians was “molded not by laws and discussions but by the struggle of social forces both in America and in Spain” (131), and maintains that the “American reality was the guiding star” of Lascasian thought, “the ultimate argument in all his polemics” (162). The subject of this study, therefore, is Las Casas as “the head of a political movement and the organizer of an activist party” (132). Similarly, Marcel Bataillon’s superb monograph subjecting Las Casas’s plans for reform to methodical analysis argues “the unity of pragmatic thought that inspired the series of memorials drafted” by Las Casas between 1515 and 1520. Professor Bataillon, however, does not fail to stress the significance of Las Casas’s “conversion” and subsequent retreat in 1522 which changed him “from a good colonist-reformer into a theologian-jurist. Indefatigably, he sought the doctrinal justification for his activity in favor of the Indians” (414). And Valeri Afanasiev concedes Las Casas’s “determination to revive and apply the ideals of an abstract Christian humanism that he believed derived from the Scriptural texts” (554).
Although admirable in principle, then, Professor Friede’s position is in practice fraught with danger; sins of omission which not even his remarkable scholarship can surmount. To argue that “the ideological struggle in behalf of the Indians . . . belongs to the intellectual history of Spain” (footnote 4) or that “the ideological side of the Indianist movement does not, properly speaking, belong to Latin American history but rather to the history of Spanish juridical-theological ideas of the sixteenth century” (128), suggests a demarcation between Spain and America unrealistic in the context of the early sixteenth century. Moreover, therein lies also an implicit separation of intellectual and social history, an inevitable division of labor, to be sure, but fallow ground for confusion if carried too far. For example, while Professor Friede remarks—a trifle optimistically, I think—that Charles V “and his advisers had grown up in an atmosphere of Renaissance humanism, a ‘modernism’ of broad European vision in which the encomienda, with its medieval features of lordship and paternalism, must have seemed strange if not repugnant” (142), he also characterizes Sepúlveda—Renaissance humanist to his fingertips—as the retrograde defender of the encomienda. Examples of this nature bear witness to the need, not for separation, but for the further integration of early American developments into the contemporary Hispano-European intellectual milieu.
The ideology of Las Casas is scrutinized in three essays by Venancio D. Carro, Ángel Losada, and Manuel M. Martínez. Carro, contending that not enough attention has been paid to the Spanish theological-juridical renaissance of the sixteenth century, proposes to examine its influence on Las Casas. An excessively apologetic and eulogistic tone, unfortunately, considerably curtails the effectiveness of Father Carro’s erudition. Losada studies the Las Casas-Sepúlveda controversy at Valladolid, and is alone among the contributors in giving Sepúlveda—whom Afanasiev, for instance, sees as the “ideologist of the slaveowners”—a fair hearing. The implied suggestion is clear: Sepúlveda should be judged in terms of his own writings, and not through the eyes of Las Casas as has hitherto been generally done. Father Martínez undertakes to show Las Casas’s knowledge of and competence to judge events in America, and his courage in denouncing abuses.
In addition to Bataillon’s contribution mentioned earlier, Las Casas’s presence in America is explored by the late Benno M. Biermann. Father Biermann gives us a detailed account of the Verapaz episode. The last major division of the book, “The Heritage of Las Casas,” is made up of studies by Juan Comas on the detractors of Las Casas, Raymond Marcus on the figure of Las Casas in literature, and Valeri Afanasiev. Following a Marxist viewpoint, Professor Afanasiev interprets the Dutch and English editions of Las Casas’s partial writings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as, initially, a symbol for “revolutionary and patriotic sentiments” struggling (in the United Provinces and England) against the “feudal reaction” led by Spain; later, they were used to justify the colonial ambitions of the triumphant bourgeoisie in both countries. It is doubtful, however, that Las Casas sought, as the author maintains, to expose “Spain’s colonial policy before all mankind” (568).