City of God and the difference in the social orders created by the love of God as against the love of self, continued to question the entire legitimacy of the Spanish empire (Brading, 1991: 78). Derived from Augustine’s On the Predestination and the Gift of Perseverance, the idea of the providential discovery of America provides Las Casas with an explanation for the failure of the Spanish to establish the city of God in America. Carried away by the self–love that rules in the earthly city, the Spanish acted as if inspired by the devil (Brading, 1991: 76). The paramount role that providence plays in the polemics and policies of conquest and relations with other civilizations is only comparable to the extended functions invested in the Devil (Cervantes, 1994: 5–75) as the chief presider over the construction of Amerindian “otherness,” or colonial difference.
In response to the barrage of questions brought about by the vociferous interventions of Las Casas, Charles V called for a “junta” or meeting of jurists and theologians. The chief questions to be put to rest in Valladolid in 1550–1 were the human status of the Indians and the problematic behavior of the conquerors, never Spain’s right to dominion over the earth. The jury was composed of Dominican theologians and the two debaters were to be Las Casas, the friar, and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573), the lawyer, known as a defender of the imperial rights of the Spanish crown. The chief debaters never saw each other over the long year in which the debate took place. When Las Casas’s turn came he took five days to read his Apologetica historia to the judges
In the debate at Valladolid Las Casas had to contend not only with Sepúlveda, but also with another, absent adversary. Juan López de Palacios Rubios (1450–1524) had been one of the first Spanish jurists to come to the defense of Spanish lawful right to empire. He based his arguments on scholastic theology and medieval canon law rather than civil law. As far as he could reason and, basing himself on Aristotle, the Indians were “slaves by nature” in need of tutelage and correction before they could be fit for self–rule. This argument, like several of Las Casas’s arguments, would also reverberate through the centuries and can even be found today when “modern” democracies demand to be regarded and adopted as the universal model.
Palacios Rubios also worked very cleverly in finding an imperial genealogy for the pope’s political authority over the world. He argued that the world had seen four previous, universal “monarchies” – Assyrians, Medes, Greeks, and Romans – before Christ had inaugurated the fifth and last monarchy of the world. Thus the pope, as the vicar of Christ, exercised both spiritual and temporal power over the entire world and could indeed, delegate such authority on Spain (Brading, 1991: 80–1). So Palacios Rubios devised the Requerimiento (Seed, 1995), a document to be read to the Indians upon their first encounter with the Spaniards that would inform them of the hegemony of the pope and the king over the entire world. It followed that any Indian who did not accept the authority of the pope was subject to legitimate acts of war and conquest. The Requerimiento was used for the first time in the conquest of El Darien in 1517, a campaign in which Oviedo participated. This document made Oviedo’s taking and branding of slaves and the atrocities denounced by Las Casas “legal.” The stakes in the Valladolid debate could not have been higher.
Another absent interlocutor in Valladolid was the Dominican and professor of theology and philosophy at Salamanca, Francisco de Vitoria (1486–1546). Like Palacios Rubios, Vitoria had never been to America. He did not have the benefit or the authority of the ocular observer. He worked from reports and from his rich library. In 1534, he, like many others, was shocked to hear of the unlawful execution (regicide) in Cajamarca of the Inca Atahualpa and he wrote on the problem of Spain and the Amerindians without being solicited by the crown to do so (Pagden, 1982: 64–80). Vitoria was one of the leaders of the Thomist revival in Spain. He followed Thomas Aquinas’s reasoning regarding the difference between pagans and Christians. The theory of natural law was the discursive frame within which the theologians at Salamanca analyzed the critical question that Amerindians posed for European epistemology.
In 1537 Vitoria wrote Relectio de Indis (1557), a work that circulated widely in manuscript form and had a lasting imprint in all future discussion concerning the Indies. In de Indis, the theologian tries to find an answer to the unthinkable question: What if there is no just title to the conquest of America? As Anthony Pagden points out, with this question Vitoria takes the problem of “just title” out of the strict realm of the law and places it in the space of theology for the problem involved, settling the chief question regarding the nature of the Indian qua man (66–7). It was clear to Vitoria from the report received on Mexico and Peru that the Indians were not simple irrational beings, and thus any common–sense discussion could demonstrate that the Indians were not monkeys, but human beings. Relying on Aristotle, Vitoria reasoned that the Indians clearly had the use of reason, in their own way. They had order in their affairs, they had properly organized cities, recognizable forms of marriage, magistrates, rulers, laws, industry, and commerce. They also had religion. For Vitoria, as it had been for Aristotle, the city stood for the most perfect unit of society, the “only place where the practice of virtue and the pursuit of happiness” are at all possible. Man, for both Plato and Aristotle, can only realize himself as a citizen. Christianity transforms the secular, Greek city into a spiritual community (Pagden, 1982: 69). Indeed, St. Augustine could only conceive of the world, both celestial and earthly, as urban. People who built cities and lived in them could simply not be thought of as barbarians or natural slaves. By definition they were civilized. Vitoria found that the Indian societies also exhibited two other traits of civilization: they engaged in trade and hospitality and they had visibly organized religions.
However, in the second part of de Indis, the part that deals with just title to conquest, Vitoria starts to back–pedal and begins to offer the contra argument required in scholastic argument (Pagden, 1982: 80). There he speaks not of what Indian societies practiced but of what they did not, or rather how they did not resemble Europe, whose assumed normative character had underlined the entire discussion on natural and divine law. Vitoria argued that Indian law was insufficiently wise and unsatisfactory. He abandoned the urban model argument and focused instead on the reports of cannibalism, sodomy, and bestiality which he thought violated the natural order. The Indians’ dietary and sexual practices showed that they were not only irrational but even mentally defective and thus incapable of governing themselves (Pagden, 1982: 85–7).
Vitoria’s arguments exposed the insurmountable contradictions driving the discourses of the conquest–cum–evangelization. The contradictions embedded in the theory of natural law itself were brought to their critical limits, for they were being used to account for the simultaneous, but unthinkable, perception of sameness and difference that the European cognitive complex obtained from contact with the Amerindians. This conundrum, this limitation in European epistemology, has shadowed the history of Amerindian peoples to the present, for “if the natural slave is incapable of participating in a state of happiness, then he must also be incapable of achieving his proper end (telos) as a man. If nature never creates anything which is, of itself, incapable of accomplishing its ends – for such a thing would be useless – then the natural slave is not a man” (Pagden, 1982: 94).
Vitoria managed to cover over this blind spot in his discourse by appealing to the idea that God created man and that the essential characteristic of man is his rational mind. Thus the Indians’ faults and deficiencies could eventually be rubbed out with proper education and discipline, a solution that was not that far away from Las Casas’s idea of peaceful and slow conversion. Paradoxically this idea translated into the very harsh laws and bodily punishment that Toledo (1515–82) put in place in the Andes, in part supported by the denigrating ideas that Acosta put forth in the Third Council of Lima in (1579) and in the earlier De Procuranda (1557). From the clay that Vitoria’s hands molded, the Indian came out not a slave, but a child. In this scheme the king of Spain was the tutor of the Indians. When the Indians no longer required tutoring, they would be left to enjoy their proper liberty. Vitoria managed to dismantle Palacios’s argument on the universal authority of the pope and he even ended up reasoning that idolatry was not grounds for dispossession of the Indians. Upon hearing of this scandalous
