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| Non-fiction and essays |
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| University essays |
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| History Dissertation |
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| ENCOUNTER IN THE NEW WORLD: SPANISH ATTITUDES AND ACTIONS TOWARDS INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, LATE 15TH TO EARLY 16TH CENTURY |
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| Chapter Five: Conversion to Christianity The Spanish held firmly to the belief that conversion of the Indians in the New World was a Christian duty. Spreading the faith was a key factor in all discussions of the nature of the Indians; even the Las Casas announced that he had ‘witnessed Spanish concern that the true Faith should take root, grow and blossom’ among the natives.# A concerted effort to bring the Christian faith to the Indians began in 1510 with the arrival of four Dominicans to the Americas, and thereafter small numbers of missionaries began to move among the vast Indian populations, spreading the gospel.# These early missionaries were confronted with many difficulties, not the least of which was the language barrier. When the friars realised that there were numerous indigenous languages, and that to learn even a few words was a laborious process, they sometimes resorted to preaching to the Indians in Latin or Spanish, hoping that their ‘Christian fervour would make up for linguistic deficiencies.’# The missionary nature of the Christian faith meant that preachers conducted their activities with a religious zeal that sometimes aroused native hostility. Justification for converting the natives came primarily from historical precedent. As the early Europeans themselves had received Christianity and spread it throughout the continent, so it fell to the Spaniards of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to spread the gospel throughout the newly discovered lands across the ocean. Some Spaniards maintained that as the pagan tribes of Western Europe had been ‘susceptible to conversion by the gentle and patient teachings of Christianity and hence were capable of cultural development without recourse to coercion or decimation, then so must be the peoples of the Americas.’# Others, however, were willing to use whatever means necessary to bring the Indians into the Christian fold, even if they tried to resist. This followed Sepúlveda’s doctrine of a ‘just war,’ and in many areas, the task of converting the natives did not occur until the local population had been pacified either by force, or by disease- related deaths. Most Spaniards, however, accepted the idea that the natives had to be Christianised before they could lead moral lives and achieve salvation. It was only by ‘becoming obedient subjects of their Christian masters and jettisoning their most important traditions’ could they hope to ‘overcome their crude inheritance.’# The Spanish drive to convert the Indians to Christianity had several implications. Firstly, on some level Spaniards regarded the Indians as equal, or at least almost equal with the Europeans. By accepting the idea that the natives could accept the Christian faith, the Spaniards granted that they possessed sufficient reason to follow that faith. Yet despite such an acceptance of the Indians’ capabilities, the fact that the natives needed to follow a ‘European’ religion to reach this ‘universal’ state of equality diminished their worth. If native religions were so awful for the Spaniards that violence was permissible in their removal, then clearly the conquistadores were incapable of fully accepting Indian equality. Las Casas saw the conversion of natives in itself as a good thing, but was dismayed at the concurrent exploitation of natives. He declared that ‘neither pagan idolatry nor sins justified Christians in usurping [the Indians’] lands or seizing their goods.’# Some Spaniards clearly felt that by converting the Indians to Christianity, they would become easier to rule, and that taxes and other economic benefits could be derived from them. Christianisation was just one aspect of the concerted attempt to bring the Indians closer to the people the Spaniards thought they could be, i.e. more like themselves. From the replacement of native names with Spanish ones to the translation of Christian works into native tongues, Spanish culture slowly began to usurp the native culture. Native religion was just one of many aspects of Indian society that had to be replaced before the Indians could be considered the equals of the Spanish. Las Casas determined that the natives were capable of receiving the gospel, thus achievement of fully equal status with the Spanish was held back only by the fact that the Indians were not Christians. Las Casas acknowledged that while the more fortunate Christians had a duty to lend ‘spiritual assistance’ to the natives, they had to ‘respect the political sovereignties and the property rights that the Indians enjoyed by virtue of their membership in the world community of peoples.’# Initially, the importance of peaceful religious conversion was not always the main aspect of Las Casas’s argument. Wagner has suggested that initially it was the encomienda system that provoked his anger.# As a friar and bishop, there is little doubt that conversion held much greater importance to Las Casas in the following decades. Indeed, in a response in 1519 to Juan Quevedo, the bishop of Darien who favoured Indian slavery, Las Casas declared that ‘Our Christian religion is suitable for all and may be adapted to all the nations of the world, and all alike may receive it; and no one may be deprived of his liberty, nor may he be enslaved on the excuse that he is a natural slave, as it would appear that the revered bishop advocates.’# Gradually, the main thrust of Las Casas’s writings on the subject of the Indians became the idea that as the Indians were rational beings, they could be converted to Christianity. Moreover he held that ‘this conversion should take place as a result of peaceful preaching by the Spaniards, which should inculcate a real understanding of Christian doctrine and not simply lead to superficial baptism of the uninstructed.’# Some religious leaders argued that the Indians had to be baptised whether they understood Christian doctrine or not, whether they resisted or not. It was a commonly held belief that it was better for an Indian to die a Christian than to live as a heathen, a belief that conflicted with Las Casas’s views. For Spaniards who wrote about Indians and the conquest, the native religions were deemed pagan and antithetical to the Indians’ well-being. Cortés and his companions, as seen above, felt it was their Christian duty to remove the barbaric native religions and begin the process of converting the Indians. Indeed, Díaz wrote that Cortés told the Indians that ‘our great Emperor’s purpose in sending us to their lands was to abolish human sacrifices and the other evil rites they practised, and to see that they did not rob one another and that they ceased to worship their accursed idols.’# Modern writers might suggest that this process involved the removal of native customs to facilitate their replacement with Spanish civilisation. Díaz’s account continually stresses that the Spanish purpose in the New World was to eradicate vestiges of idolatrous practices and other barbaric activities amongst the natives, to ‘save them from their false beliefs,’ lest the Indians ‘be taken to hell, where they would burn forever in living flames.’# Spaniards who would read Díaz’s account could see in such a potent image that justification for conquest was legitimate for religious reasons alone. The solution to the barbarities of Mexican religion was simple for men like Cortés and Díaz: conversion to Christianity. This conversion had a good chance of success with the relatively more advanced peoples of the Aztec domain. As Cortés wrote to the King: We believe that had we interpreters and other people to explain to [the Indians] the error of their ways and the nature of the True Faith, many of them, and perhaps even all, would soon renounce their false beliefs and come to the true knowledge of God; for they live in a more civilised and reasonable manner than any other people we have seen in these parts up to the present.# In fact Cortés would later suggest to the Spanish king that if he would ‘send to these parts many religious persons,’ then the conversion could proceed apace.# All that was required was a sufficiently zealous clergy to spread the word, and the pacification of the natives to facilitate this process. The classification of the Indians as ‘barbarians’ often stemmed from the fact that they were not Christians. Even Las Casas, in his Apologetic History, defined the Indians as being barbarians because of their lack of acceptance of the gospel, even though he was swift to point out that this was because they had never before had an opportunity to become Christians: ‘all these peoples are barbarians in the broad sense…This is only through their lack of our holy faith, which means a purely negative faithlessness, caused by mere ignorance, and is not a sin, as has been declared.’# For men like Las Casas and Vitoria, the Indians’ lack of Christianity was not a just cause for the seizure of Indian lands or goods, nor exclusion from protection of the law. The predominant viewpoint, however, was that the Indians’ lack of Christianity and barbarous nature was a state that could only be alleviated by subjugation under the Spanish. It was apparent that the Indians, being ‘idle, vicious and without charity’, ‘exist only incompletely until mastered.’ For many their freedom was ‘a violation of the natural order’ and ‘harmful to them.’# Propagation of the Christian faith as seen above was an underlying principle of Sepúlveda’s doctrine of just war. For Sepúlveda, the conquest of the Indies was a ‘great work of charity’, and he asked ‘what greater benefit can one give a man than to communicate to him the faith of Christ?’# Even Las Casas would agree with Sepúlveda that Christianity was beneficial to the Indians, who would be immeasurably improved by conversion to the Christian religion. Sepúlveda, however, asserted that until the Indians were transformed into something approaching European (i.e. civilised) men, they needed to be subjugated to the superior Spanish. To allow the natives to continue under their false beliefs would be to neglect the Spanish duty of converting and civilising. Sepúlveda suggested that priests needed to preach the gospel to the Indians, and by his logic, ‘how can they preach to these barbarians if they are not sent to them, as St. Paul says, and how are they to be sent if these barbarians are not conquered first?’# Christianisation of the Indians was a professed goal of Las Casas and Sepúlveda, but for the latter if achieving that goal meant the forceful subjugation of the Indians by the Spaniards, that was completely justified. |
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