The
following is my summary of “A Loving Ambivalence,” an article by Helen Andrews, in 小白加速器破解会员, October 8 (Columbus Day), 2018. The title refers to the final lines:
“Since we have failed to come up with a better solution, even after forty years
of postmodern sensitivity to indigenous rights along the philosophical lines
suggested by Las Casas, maybe we should take a lead from Motolinía instead. It
could be that in a saga as complex and wrenching as the meeting of the Old
World and the New, loving ambivalence is the best we could hope for.” “Loving
Ambivalence” seems to mean Las Casas is wrong, so we should kind of shrug our
shoulders about historic atrocities against the Indians. The author does not
explain what makes that proposal “loving,” or if it has any relation to
Christian love; she does not refer to Christian principles at all, except to
mock Las Casas for talking about “love and gentleness and kindness.”
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Ms.
Andrews devotes one paragraph (two if we are generous) to the actual arguments
(148, or generously 273, words of a 3790-word essay). My main reason for
addressing her article is to point out again that what I did in my post yesterday
was to outline the actual arguments of Las Casas and Sepúlveda.
Sepúlveda’s
argument, she says, is that “Spaniards also have human rights”—which is kind of
a strange way to talk about the people who are invading someone else’s home, enslaving
and slaughtering them by the millions, and dominating their whole continent.
“To create
the conditions of peace and order that would make peaceful propagation of the
gospel possible, such peoples would simply have to be ruled, as the Roman
empire had ruled Hispania.” That, as we saw yesterday, is the real argument. It
has both a general principle (a major, or “wider,” premise) and a specific
application (a minor, or “narrower,” premise). The general principle is that
the effective way, and the only way, to preach the Gospel is first to conquer.
In yesterday’s post we saw how Las Casas contradicted the idea that conquering
with the sword is in general either the only way or effective—but you don’t
need Las Casas to make that argument for you.
Ms.
Andrews seems ambivalent about Indian culture. In this same paragraph, she
says, “With an advanced civilization like the Aztecs, one might negotiate a
treaty concerning the rights of misssionaries,” and in the next, “The Aztecs
had developed an advanced tribute system” (which somehow legitimates the
Spanish enslaving the Indians), but a few paragraphs before she commends Cortes
for his “undisputed mastery of the Aztec empire.” To me that sounds like a
contradiction. Should the Aztecs be conquered, and “become more civilized,” or
respected as a civilization?
She
contrasts the Aztecs with “pre-literate tribes in a place like Guatemala,” a
strange choice of example. Guatemala is the Mayans. Their period of great
building ended around 950, but the city of Mayapan still had a population of
10-15,000 people a hundred years before the Spanish came. (Madrid was about
4,000—though London, for example, was more like 50,000.) Every historian of
civilization I know agrees that the Mayas were one of the most advanced
civilizations in history. They were certainly literate. Google the “Popol Vuh,”
and you’ll find they had a highly developed religion and mythology; the Mayan
“Madrid Codex,” “Dresden Codex,” and “Paris Codex” are three famous examples of
Mayan writing from the time, though the conquistadors destroyed what they
could. I don’t know what Ms. Andrews is talking about, or whether she knows
what she’s talking about, when she uses Guatemala as an example of illiterate
people who need to become Spaniards before they can become Christians.
In the
next paragraph, Ms. Andrews gets to her, and Sepúlveda’s, real argument, which
is that it was more economically advantageous to Spain to enslave the Indians
and steal their stuff. That might be true, but it is beside the point:
Christians do not believe that economic advantage is a good reason to do immoral
things. That’s really the debate, between materialists and Christians.
Ad
hominem
Apart from
these two paragraphs, the article is a string of unsubstantiated personal
attacks. Ironically, she accuses Las Casas of what her article does: “Rather
than answer Sepúlveda’s arguments, Las Casas preferred ad hominem attacks”
(that is, putting down the person). But we have seen his arguments, which make
no appearance in her article. Ironically, accusing him of ad hominem attacks is
itself an ad hominem attack.
This is
going to be long. You should probably skip it, but it’s worth documenting.
He only
pretended to defend the Indians because it “brought him worldly success and the
favor of the establishment.” His “worldly success” included being named
“Protector of the Indians” and given the opportunity, in “a lavish charter” (quickly
retracted), to form a colony in Venezuela. (In fact, many of his Dominican
brothers were slaughtered by the Indians in response to a slave raid they
opposed and he was chased out of town by the slave raiders; when he was made a
bishop in Mexico, he was chased out at gunpoint; and when he returned to Spain
he was accused of treason.)
“Las Casas
swore he would find thousands” to populate this colony, but the word “swore” suggests
he was untrue to his word; his “worldly success” was somehow compatible with no
one joining him.
“Rather
than stay and put his pacific principles into practice, he ran off to
Hispaniola to file bureaucratic complaints against the local traders and
soldiers whom he blamed for the rising tensions. The men he left behind at
Cumaná were killed.” Bad person!
“Las Casas
absolved himself of responsibility for the deaths of his men at Cumaná. It was
the fault of those traders and soldiers who had refused to recognize his
authority.” Andrews never explains why it is unreasonable to claim that armed
men breaking laws would cause problems. But she sure thinks Las Casas was
irresponsible for trying to stop them.
“That was
the way his guilt worked.” This is an odd line, common in today’s conservative
discourse. Somehow anyone who has a sense of guilt is morally compromised. I do
not know how to square that claim with Christianity. Christians are supposed to
feel guilt. Moral relativism is not Christianity.
After “his
moral crisis in 1514” (again, having a crisis over one’s immorality is something
to mock), he “turned to a life of activism” (Christian action is also obviously
wrong). He is “the original humanitarian personality,” a strange claim, except
when she claims he begins a “shift from pre-modern to modern ideas of moral
heroism, from Christian saints to human rights activists.” She does not support
the claim that Christian saints do not care about human rights; her argument
seems to be guilty by association with modern “activists” (whom, I guess,
readers of First Things dislike).
He “so
easily shrugged off the deaths for which he really was individually responsible”:
so despite being bad for having had a moral crisis, he is also bad for not
realizing that he was “individually responsible” whenever other people violated
his principles.
“Las Casas
did not know a calpixqui from a coatimundi.” Snap! “He knew little about
pre-conquest cultures. There is no evidence he spoke any Indian language. At
Valladolid, he spoke generically of ‘the Indians,’ making no distinctions
between the Aztecs, whose capital was larger than any European city at the time
save Constantinople, and the Tainos, whose idea of advanced technology was a
spear with a fish tooth on the end.” I confess that I have not read Las Casas’s
five-volume History of the Indies, or his Apologetic History of the
Peoples of these Indies, or his separate book on Peru, but I do find
Andrews’ claim improbable; she does not substantiate the accusation that these
books are vague and unsubstantiated.
“Avoiding
specifics, Las Casas merely offered the judges his repeated assertion.” “Las
Casas frequently referred to his firsthand experience of the New World as the
basis for his authority, but this experience was far less extensive than he led
people to believe.” “The Hieronymites’ open-mindedness galled Las Casas to no
end. For the crime of not taking his word for everything, he accused them of
being in the pay of the encomenderos.” “There was hardly an intellectual low to
which Las Casas would not stoop.” “For someone who knew so little, Las Casas
was astonishingly resistant to correction. A central point of conflict between
him and the Hieronymite monks of the Hispaniola commission was that they
insisted on actually talking to the colonists about their experiences.” “Las
Casas’s constant misrepresentations. . . . ‘Everything which he attributes to
me is false, as is well known by those who have read my book, and he knows
better than anybody.’” “Las Casas spent most of his time on his drive-by visits
to the missionary field collecting atrocity stories and very little time
administering sacraments or preaching the Word.” (Was that a Rush Limbaugh
reference?) “At a time when the use of Indians as carriers was widely condemned
(the practice was periodically banned, though enforcement was difficult), Las
Casas traveled with twenty or thirty, ‘and the greatest part of what they were
carrying was accusations against the Spaniards and other rubbish.’” If you’ve
ever been unclear on what “ad hominem attack” means, there you go.
She even
claims, “Las Casas revenged himself on his former mentor by forging a deathbed
retraction on his behalf,” substantiating the claim by saying that everyone
present said the deathbed retraction was true, but she doubts it. This is an
example of a circular argument: when people agree with Las Casas he must have
manipulated them because no one would agree with Las Casas.
Finally: “he
simply reiterated his categorical belief that pacifism would meet all
eventualities.” This appears to be her summary of his appealing, not to
pacificism—as I have said, and will document, if I get a chance, his allies
defended him precisely on the grounds of just war—but to the Gospel at all. Of
that, he is guilty. But he does more than just “reiterate his categorical
beliefs”: as we have seen, he responds with arguments to arguments.
Las
Casas’s friends get the same treatment. “Charles V’s priority was limiting the
power of American landowners in order to prevent the emergence of an
aristocracy that would threaten his power. That, and not humanitarianism, was
the reason for his hostility to the feudal encomienda system of compulsory
labor.” Couldn’t be that he was convinced by Christian arguments.
“Among Las
Casas’s many enemies were other men who had better claim to moral authority,”
among them, “a more decisive man—Hernán Cortés.” I don’t know what “decisive”
means here: Cortés did kill a lot of people, but she seems annoyed at how much
Las Casas fights for what he thinks is right.
“The most
saintly of Las Casas’s opponents was the Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente
. . . This holy friar hated Las Casas with a passion.” Torobio was also known
as Motolinía. One way Andrews knows he was right is that “Motolinía’s memoir .
. . is livelier and less repetitive than Las Casas’s.” What does that mean?
The
greatest hero, however, is Sepúlveda, Las Casas’ opponent in the debate at
Valladolid that we detailed yesterday. Andrews says almost nothing about
Sepúlveda’s arguments, which we reviewed in a previous post. But she says a lot
about what a great guy he was.
He is
introduced as the “underdog at Valladolid.” Poor guy. “To the university
professors on the judges’ panel at Valladolid, Sepúlveda was a man out of his
depth. They were scholastics of the old school, trained in the methods of
Aquinas, to whom Sepúlveda was an upstart rhetorician who had the nerve to
opine on moral questions without the proper theological grounding.”
But she’s
a little confusing on this. He isn’t a scholastic. He is a rhetorician. But she
also claims, “No man in Europe knew Aristotle better. Sepúlveda’s Latin
translation of the Politics was the standard throughout the continent.” The
second sentence seems to be her evidence for the first. But no one who studies
texts thinks that the translators are the philosophical experts. I think
scholars would agree there were quite a few great students of Aristotle,
including the Spanish Dominicans who took Las Casas’ side and who were those
evil “scholastics.” And none of Andrews’ arguments, nor any of the arguments we
saw in actually detailing the Valladolid debate, come from Aristotle: they come
from the Bible, from claims about evangelization and culture, and from claims
about the Indians, all totally foreign to Aristotle. This claim that he is the
greatest Aristotelian, apart from being probably false, is also irrelevant.
It’s just another ad hominem argument.
But poor
Sepúlveda, his “book in defense of the conquistadors was never published in
Spain during his lifetime, thanks to lobbying by Las Casas to have it censored
by the royal licensing office.” Somehow people not publishing your book is
proof that you’re right.
But “Sepúlveda’s
goal was to come up with a long-term solution” . . . as opposed to Las Casas? “Sepúlveda
thought the answer was to create a fully functioning New World aristocracy.”
What’s
the point?
I do not
know Ms. Andrews, and I will not conjecture on why First Things was
eager to take down Las Casas’s call for moral treatment of the Indians. My main
point here, not really worth anyone’s time, is to show that her long article
does little but make ad hominem attacks. That doesn’t prove that there are no
substantive attacks on Las Casas. But it does show that some of the attacks, at
least, lack substance. You can’t contradict an argument simply by vigorously
asserting that you think he was a bad guy and his opponents are good guys.
But she
begins and ends with a point much more easily made. She begins, “The so-called ‘Black
Legend’—the idea that Spanish imperialism was categorically more brutal than
any other country’s—derives in large part from the Brief Relation, which was
immediately translated into every European language and enthusiastically
embraced by Spain’s Protestant rivals.” She ends, “For all our Anglophone
sneering about the Black Legend, there are 1.7 million Nahuatl speakers on this
continent today and only 150,000 speakers of Navajo. Our empire exterminated
its indigenous peoples far more thoroughly than the Spanish ever did.”
As I said
in a previous point, if the Black Legend is meant to say that Spain is the only
sinful nation on earth, it is indeed a bad thing. The English were worse! But
if “the Black Legend” is that nations in general are sinful, it is no legend at
all, it is the Gospel truth. One good reason to learn about Las Casas, and our
fallen history in general, is not to make us feel smug for being English, not
Spanish, but to teach us to rely on Christ, his Church, and his saints, not on any
nationalism, English, Spanish, Indian, or American. Our hope is in Jesus
Christ, and him alone.
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We have
been considering the great sixteenth-century Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas,
and his defense of the Indians of the Caribbean against the Spanish
conquistadors. Today, we get to the heart of the debate: the actual arguments
on either side.
In
1551-52, Las Casas, by now a bishop in Mexico, came back to Spain to debate the
Franciscan Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (emphasis on the syllable with the accent
mark).
The
Dominicans had been denouncing the enslavement of the Indians since 1510.
A papal bull
of 1537, Sublimis Deus, declared that the Indians were fully human, just
as capable as anyone else of becoming Christians, and therefore, “are by no
means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even
though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should,
freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their
property; nor should they be in any way enslaved.”
In 1542,
Spanish Emperor Charles V passed the so-called “New Laws,” written in part by
Las Casas and his Dominican confrere Francisco de Vitoria, required just
treatment of the Indians. But by 1545, the conquistadors had gotten those laws
repealed.
So in 1550
the Emperor called for a debate by theologians on what to do. The Franciscan
Sepúlveda had written that the actions of the conquistadors were just and that
the king should allow the Spanish to enslave the Indians. The Dominican Las
Casas opposed him, arguing “in favor of the liberty of the Indians.” It is
fascinating to read their actual arguments.
***
Sepúlveda
argued four points:
The
Indians were violating natural law, especially by idolatry, and therefore
deserved to be conquered.
The
Indians were savages and therefore needed to be enslaved to a more civilized
nation, such as the Spanish, in order to be trained in civilization.
This
kind of enslavement was the only way, and an effective way, to teach the
Indians about Christianity.
That
the Indians must be stopped from their evil ways, which included human
sacrifice and canibalism.
Fascinating!
These are real arguments that Christians were making at the time, the leading
arguments for how the Spanish treated the Indians. These are not just
reconstructions by later anti-religious people: these were the arguments by the
leading theologian explaining what the Spanish were doing in America.
He
supported these arguments with examples from Scripture, trying to explain how
the invasion of the Americas was like the invasion of the Israelites into the
land of Canaan.
***
Las Casas
responded by contradicting the example from the Old Testament. He argued that
the Catholic tradition does not read the Old Testament in this way. Augustine,
Thomas Aquinas, and John Chrysostom, for example, specifically argue that
idolatry, and non-Christian religion in general, is not a valid cause for just
war. Notice here an important turn: to the question of just war. . . .
To
Sepúlveda’s first claim, that idolatry deserves war, Las Casas argues first
that the Tradition and the New Testament itself oppose such an argument, and
then explains that where Christians have justly battled non-Christians, it is
in defense of Christians: where non-Christians have conquered Christian
territory and then defiled churches or attacked Christian peoples. There is a
right of self-defense, but not a righ to attack non-Christians on principle.
To
Sepúlveda’s second claim, that the Indians are savages and need slavery to
become civilized people, Las Casas opposes not the general claim that
Christians ought to bring civilization but the specific claim that the Indians
lack it. Las Casas had documented at length (especially in his Apologetic
History of the People of these Indies) that, far from savages, the Indians
built houses, baked bread, farmed, had government and religion, etc. They were
not just like the Spanish, but nor were they savages. (I have been reading a
lot of Indian history recently: the stories we learned in grade school about
naked savages really aren’t true.)
To
Sepúlveda’s third claim, that slavery is the best and only way to convert
Indians to Christianity, Las Casas responds at length, and with multiple
arguments. The Gospel has to be received, if it is to be received in truth, as
good news. At the point of the sword, it can only be seen as a tool of
oppression. The preacher needs to show love and elicit love; enslavement
produces hatred, a terrible obstacle to seeing the truth of the Gospel. Las
Casas (repeating a point St. Thomas Aquinas makes, for example, in the sixth
chapter of Summa Contra Gentiles) says converting people with the sword
is the way of Islam, not of Christianity. Christianity teaches that our sins
are forgiven, especially by baptism; enslavement holds our sins against us. Las
Casas argues, too, for the importance of first impressions of Christianity:
however violence works in a culture that already knows the Gospel—and however
we judge whether a culture does already understand the Gospel—in the case of
the Indians, we need to be sure they know that Christianity is not just a form
of Spanish domination. Finally, Las Casas argues that Jesus came in peace, not
with the sword.
Finally,
to Sepúlveda’s fourth claim, that war is necessary because of the crimes of the
Indians, such as human sacrifice and canibalism, Las Casas argues that war is
an ironic way to stop killing. War unleashes, on both sides, all kinds of sins;
certainly Las Casas has seen the sins of the Spanish conquistador, which the
Spanish king should be at least as eager to stop as the sins of the Indians. Las
Casas adds a strange but thought-provoking argument: that human sacrifice,
though wrong, is done with a good intention. Abraham himself was willing to
sacrifice his son to recognize God. The Indians are wrong, but one mustn’t
thing of them as completely depraved. Instead, the Dominican calls for Spain to
preach the Gospel to them.
Las Casas
ends by proposing that instead of war, the Spanish take a twofold approach,
sending peaceful bands of missionaries into the interior, and establishing
peaceful trade on the exterior, as ways of gently pulling the Indians around to
alliances and to Christianity. He did not win this debate.
***
I think
it’s pretty exciting to read the actual arguments these sixteenth-century
friars were making about race and colonialism. Too often we read this history
through the lenses of people who hate Christianity and Christians who just feel
defensive. Instead, it is good to read what real Christians argued. And it is
good to see that the heroes of this story, mostly Dominicans, were calling for
a more peaceful way.
The key is
the Gospel. My non- (and anti-) Christian colleagues in the university seem to
fear that Christianity is an imperialistic religion. Spain wanted to take over
the world; Christianity says go out to all the world; therefore Christianity is
about conquering. I think Christians themselves too often seem to think in the
same confused way.
To the
contrary, Las Casas uses the universality of the Gospel against the
over-particularity of Spanish imperialism. The Spanish are not God’s chosen
people. (Nor are the English, or the Americans, or the Indians.) Jesus Christ
came to save everyone. In recognizing that the Indians are human beings, living
human lives (including their own forms of civilization and even religion) and
waiting for the truth of the Gospel, Las Casas makes the argument for why they
should not just be slaves to another country.
So too in
making the argument for preaching, for a religion that is based on good news,
received through the word, not the sword, understood as a spiritual good and
not just as a way to avoid the physical pains of war and slavery, Las Casas
shows that the nature of Christianity is peaceful. Lose that sense of Good
News, and you lose the Gospel—and fall into imperialism.
Thank God
for the great Spanish Dominicans of the sixteenth century, who teach us a
better way to look at race and imperialism.
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Last week I tried to explain the encomienda system, which the Spanish brought with them to the Americas. The upshot is: when Bartolomé de las Casas came to Hispaniola in 1502, at the age of eighteen, in the year of Columbus’s fourth voyage, the plan was to force the Indians to find gold and silver. Not very noble.
In 1510,
some reports say Las Casas was ordained a priest. I don’t know how that fits
into the story.
But in 1510, too, Dominican friars came to Hispaniola. I said last week that history is mostly a story of sin—including the encomienda of the Indians, in which Las Casas was participating—but that there were also saints. These Dominicans were among the saints. And I’ll admit at the beginning: I love the Dominican tradition, both spiritual and intellectual, and the Dominicans are going to be the heroes of this story. I’m telling a story of sin, but also a story of heroic Dominicans.
The Dominicans who arrived in 1510 denounced the enslavement of the Indians. In fact, they refused to grant absolution to anyone still involved in enslaving the Indians—which was everyone, including Las Casas. Today we talk about denying communion to politicians who support abortion. That is a weak echo of these Dominicans. Here, we’re not just talking about people who support an idea, but people who are participating in it. And the Dominicans were in a dangerous place, in a Wild West where they were confronting violent men with weapons, who had no one to stop them from slaughtering the Dominicans. (Note, too, the location of the denial: in the confessional, not at the altar rail.)
***
The
Dominicans were founded around the year 1200 to preach the Gospel in places
where destructive ideas were being preached. One way to put it is that they
were fighting heresy. But another way to put it is how they were fighting
heresy: with the word.
They came
to a situation in the South of France where knights were killing heretics with
swords, and where priests went around in fancy carriages. The Dominicans,
instead, were poor preachers. Their poverty, their willingness to forsake
everything but Christ, showed the authenticity of their preaching, just as
their risk of danger in Hispaniola and their opposition to the rich showed that
they were not in it for money or comfort, but for Christ.
The
Dominicans were later put in charge of the Inquisition. That’s a complicated
thing, but I think the great twentieth-century Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper
makes an important point when he says putting the Dominicans in charge—the poor
preachers—said a lot about the goal of the Inquisition. There were inquisitions
by the sword, crusades to kill heretics. The Dominican Inquisition said that
the real question is preaching the truth of the Gospel. The Inquisition, yes,
wanted to contradict people who were preaching false Gospels. But the concern
was with preaching, and the response was with preaching. The Dominican
Inquisition meant confronting word with word, falsehood with truth—not
conquering heretics with the sword.
Of course,
the Inquisition was a temptation, and I fear there are times the Dominicans
became more inquisitorial than Dominican. In every generation there is this
temptation, to abandon the word of the Gospel and instead choose the way of
power. But that was not the Dominican way.
The good
news is that, just as the Dominicans in Spain were getting caught up in the
evil of the Spanish Inquisition, a renewal movement was happening, represented
by those Dominicans in Hispaniola. One group was using the sword to support
nationalism. The other group was using the word to fight those who used the
sword to support nationalism. One preached the Gospel, the other preached a
false Gospel of Spanish nationalism.
Las Casas’s transformation was a long journey. At first, he defended encomienda against the Dominicans, and was part of the group of conquistador-colonists who, led by Christopher Columbus’s son Diego, managed to get the Dominicans kicked out of Hispaniola.
The words,
he believed, applied to him as conquistador. The Dominicans were right.
In 1515 he
went home to Spain, to try to convince the King to stop the atrocities against
the Indians. He wrote his first of several accounts of what was happening, Memorial
de Remedios para las Indias. He proposed several concrete solutions: a
complete pause on using Indians for labor; self-governing Indian communities; a
grant to the conquistadors, as payment for their work, not of Indian slaves,
but of a certain number of man-hours, from the Indian communities; Spanish
towns built for the Indians, including hospitals. Still imperialism, but with
more respect for the natives.
He succeeded in getting some priests, from the old Order of St. Jerome, placed in positions of oversight over the Spanish treatment of the Indians. But these priests accommodated the conquistadors, arguing that Indians were incapable of taking care of themselves without Spanish oversight. (That claim would be funny if it weren’t evil: the Indians had been taking care of themselves for thousands of years. Notice too a resonance with modern priests, always tempted to take the side of the rich and say the poor are not capable of the Gospel.) Las Casas became such a thorn in the side of the conquistadors and their pet priests that he had to take refuge—in the Dominican monasteries.
Next, he tried to set up a refuge for the Indians in Venezuela, where he would manage things in a more respectful way. After about seven years of being harassed by Spanish colonists and conquistadors, he gave up—and joined the Dominicans.
After
that, he gave his whole career, from 1522 to his death in 1561, to defending
the Indians. He traveled the Caribbean, and even tried to go to Peru, to
document what was happening. His Short Account of the Destruction of the
Indies documented what the Spanish were doing. His Apologetic Summary of
the People of these Indies documented the civilizations of the Indians, to
contradict the idea that they were primitives and somehow less than human or
desperate for Spanish government. A much longer History of the Indies tells
the story at greater length. He saved Christopher Columbus’s diaries, so that
we could hear what Columbus himself described of the civilization of the
Indians and of Spanish atrocities. De thesauris in Peru (the treasures
in Peru) defended the Incas and opposed the Spanish mission to take their gold
and silver.
And in 1550-51, he participated in debates back in Spain about the treatment of the Indians. In our next installment, we will consider the substance of those debates. . . .
Today, the back story of Bartolomé de las Casas. Soon, more of his story.
Las Casas was one of the early Spanish Conquistadores in the Americas. He came with his father to Hispaniola (“Little Spain”), Columbus’s main island, and now the location of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in 1502, the year of Columbus’s fourth voyage. He seems to have been about eighteen. We know about Las Casas primarily through his own extensive reports.
The Spanish
colonists imported a system they called encomienda. Understanding it
needs a brief history of pre-Columbian Spain. 1492, the year Columbus sailed,
was also the end of the Reconquista, the re-conquering of Spain from the
Muslims. The verbal similarity between the Re-conquista of Spain and the Conquistadores
in the Americas points to the deeper legal and cultural similarities: Spain
brought to America the ideas they had developed fighting Muslims in Spain.
***
Muhammed died in 609. For whatever reasons (beyond the scope of this post) conquering bands picked up his new religion and spread quickly. In 710-711 these Muslims invaded and conquered almost all of the Iberian Peninsula. 732 was their first major defeat, by Charles Martel (martel means “the hammer”), all the way at Tours, about three-quarters of the way through France to Paris (which is in the far north). The French nation was born of beating back the Muslims into Iberia, which they had mostly done by 759. After that, France moved on to other things.
But Spain
had another seven hundred years to fight. They gradually got a foothold in the
north, then expanded slightly south, century by century, until in 1492, among
other things, the Spanish drove the Muslims out of their last redoubt, Granada,
in the very south.
I don’t
want to prolong this discussion. What I do want to point out is that most of
Spain’s history was forged in these wars. In fact, if you think about the dates
720 (the foundation of Asturia), 1492 (both Columbus and the final conquest of
southern Spain), and 2020 (today), Spain spent 772 years fighting the Muslims,
and it’s only been 528 years since they stopped. Spain is the Reconquista.
And it certainly was at the time of Columbus: the only thing they had ever
known was this war of (re) conquest.
So when
they got to the Americas, that’s what they did. A standard method of the Reconquista
was this system of encomienda.
***
In all of Feudal Europe, society was organized around knights: guys who could devote their whole life to learning to fight on horseback. Fighting on horseback takes a lot of skill, so it’s something you need to devote your whole life to, but before guns (and long bows), it was also incredibly effective, so everything military revolved around it. It was also expensive, so you had to be rich.
Beneath
the knights, you had serfs who supported them. The knight wasn’t working the
land, so he had other people work the land for him. Was it slavery? Kind of,
kind of not, but that’s not our point here. The point is, knights needed people
to work the land for them, so that they could ride horses.
Above the
knights, kings could only be effective if they kept the knights happy.
Everything revolved around these warriors on horseback. (Interesting sidenote:
the same was true of the Mongols, though there they didn’t even bother with
farming: similar and different.)
In Spain,
where war was the entire way of life, the way a king got knights to fight for
him was by offering him serfs. Encomienda means something “commendation,”
“handing over.” The basic idea was: if a knight conquered an area for his king,
he got control of the land—and of the people who would farm it for him. That
was the way Spanish kings encouraged the knights, the re-conquistadores, and
that was the way they paid them.
***
So,
naturally, conquest and 安卓加速器 was the idea the Spanish brought to
the Americas. It had no roots in anything especially Christian (or
anti-Christian). It was just the way of life of the Conquistadores.
With two differences. First, where in Spain they were pushing up against their Muslim neighbors, who had previously conquered them and who, at least sometimes, could arguably be seen as agressors, in the New World the Conquistadors were completely invading someone else’s country. Though the Spanish came up with other arguments—which we shall consider later—none of the arguments for the re-conquest of Spain applied to the conquest of America.
Second,
where in Spain they used encomienda for farming, in America what they wanted
was gold. This has to do with Spanish materialism, which is shocking. But it also
has to do with the distance from home. In Spain, they wanted to make a home. In
America, the Spanish wanted to get rich and then go home. It is an interesting
difference between Spanish America and English America that the English were
coming here to settle (which had its own problems). The Spanish were coming
here to extract gold and silver and head home.
***
So when
Las Casas came to America, he came looking for gold. But the encomienda system
was adjusted in some strange ways. In Spain, you had to prove yourself a
conqueror before you got the slaves: that is how the kings urged the knights to
fight. In America, you just had to take the boat ride over: that was awful enough
that the king needed to offer recompensation—and the compensation was slaves.
And in
Spain, the people you were conquering were people an awful lot like you, people
you had fought with on equal footing for hundreds of years, and people whose
technology and way of life were pretty darned similar. In America, the Indians
were really different.
A key part
of this difference was weapons. The Spanish had guns. They had steel armor.
And, of course, they had germs. I have been reading the recent popular
histories 1493 and Guns, Germs, Steel. There are some fascinating
reasons, having nothing to do with cultural superiority, that gave the Spanish
huge advantages. For example, the East-West orientation of Eurasia meant that
germs could travel over huge areas and encounter similar climates. It also
allowed the spread of farming technologies (because farming in East Asia works
about the same as farming in Western France) that supported the growth of
cities. Whereas the north-south orientation of the Americas meant that a germ or
farming technique that thrived in Argentina would not make it north to Mexico,
etc. The upshot is, Eurasia had developed much more virulent diseases, as well
as immunities, than had the Americas, and it was a pretty unfair advantage. Eurasian
germs laid the Indians waste. Indian germs had no effect on Europe. (Whether
advances in weaponry and the willingness to use it made early-modern Europe culturally
superior or inferior to the Indians is a question I will leave open.)
So settlers
like Las Casas came to Hispaniola and then spent the bulk of their energy
enslaving Indians and demanding that they find gold and silver. And they called
it encomienda, the Spanish way.
***
I’ll end
this post with a thought about (cue spooky music) “The Black Legend.” Anti-Spanish
northern-Eurpean Protestant historians like to talk about how horrible Spain
is. The Inquisition and the treatment of the Indians are exhibits one and two
in anti-Spanish history.
In
response, Catholics whine about “the black legend”: black because it’s bad,
legend because it’s false.
Certainly not England. I got into this reading about the Indians reading about Anglo America’s history. I knew it was bad. When I read it carefully, it’s way worse than I thought. The United States was built on the destruction of the Indians, whose country we invaded, and whom we largely defeated not on the field of battle but by burning villages and killing women and children. (There’s a word for that . . . .) The English have nothing to brag about when they talk to Spain. And I think everyone should read Evelyn Waugh’s life of Edmund Campion, not least so that we can see that the Spanish Inquisition has some pretty stiff competition from England when it comes to horrific religious persecution.
In other
words, my point isn’t to take sides with one nation against another. My point
is, first, to get the history right—but even more, to think about the world
like a Christian. A Christian does not look around the world and think things
are fine and history is a long story of wonderful people being nice to one
another. Human history is a parade of horribles. My salvation is in Jesus
Christ (and his body, the Church), not in the awesomeness of Spain, England,
the United States—or the Indians, for that matter.
“Black
Legend”? It’s no legend that human history is black. It’s the truth. The lie is
that we are fine without Jesus. A parallel lie is that whole nations are saintly:
the Church rightly treats saints as the exception in human behavior, not the
norm. There were saints in Spain and in the Americas, and I’m going to write
about them. But encomienda and the Conquistadores? It’s no legend to say that
they were not saints, they were fallen men, and their behavior was very dark, ugly,
and un-Christian. I think we’d all do a lot better if we stopped treating any
nation as holy, and find our identity and salvation in the Church, and in Jesus
Christ.
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I’ve been
silent for too long. This blog has been silent, for a variety of reasons I’ve
mentioned over the past six months—including that our now-six-month old seventh
child, though awfully sweet, remains a pain in the neck at bedtime.
But I’ve
also been too silent about issues of race. Now is a good time to break that
silence.
***
Race has
been an important issue for me and my wife. We both grew up in very white
places, but have spent our adulthood in poor, urban neighborhoods. We spent the
first several years of our marriage in poor, black neighborhoods of white cities,
and have spent the last eleven years in a white, working-class, immigrant
neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, a predominantly black city. Race has been
an issue we’ve had to think about, and we have grown more passionate about it
over the years.
But it’s
also an issue that is hard for American Catholics, as some recent events have
shown. I won’t get into those events, but I will say: I’ve been afraid to speak
up as much as I’ve known I should, and it’s time to break the silence.
***
My main
way of thinking about this issue is in terms of the Good Samaritan. A man is
bleeding on the side of the road. In the story Jesus tells, it is irrelevant
whose fault the man’s plight is.
He
concludes, “Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the
man who fell among robbers?” The lawyer answers correctly, “The one who showed
him mercy.” Jesus says, “You go and do likewise.”
***
There’s an
important point here about tribalism. The Jews, like all of us—especially Americans
today—believed they should love their own countrymen, but hate their opponents.
(The Old Law’s command to love your neighbor and hate your enemies was not a
command to hate your enemies, it was a command to love at least your neighbor;
the lawyer correctly quotes it not as “hate your enemies” but as “love your
neighbor.” It was a mitigation of our tendency to hate even the people in our
own community. Jesus does not contradict that command, but doubles down on it.)
And
second, Samaritans don’t worship right. Jesus is slapping us in the face for
our tendency to self-referential religion, religion more worried about how nice
our vestments are than whether we love God or neighbor. (Look, I care about
liturgy—but good liturgy, even Pope Benedict will tell you, is liturgy built on
love, not self-righteousness.)
***
I like to
read Luke as a kind of commentary on Matthew. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus’s
teaching culminates in chapter 25, his very last word of his fifth and last sermon,
before going to his death: “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked
and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me. . . . I
say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do
it to me. And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the
righteous into eternal life.”
It is a
sin that, of its nature, endures, by the brilliant combination of DNA and a
visible distinction. Every time a cop pulls over a black man, that man bears in
his skin color the mark of centuries of oppression. He is held suspect of every
failure of a people born with a knee on their neck. He is held responsible for
every time a black kid has responded to that violence with anger.
The coronavirus
has killed vastly disproportionate numbers of black people, and the coronavirus
economy has had a vastly disproporionate effect on them. There are long books
to read and write about the legacy of racism in our country, but we need to
look no further than the coronavirus to know that somehow—save the explanation
for later, first acknolwedge the fact!—everyone who is born black in this country
is bleeding on the side of the road.
***
Our Lord tells
us, in the parable of the Good Samaritan and in Matthew 25, that the path to
eternal life (“what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”) is through the man
bleeding on the side of the road, because love of God is inseparable from love
of neighbor. He tells us that those who ignore that suffering “will go away
into eternal punishment” because they have refused the Lord himself (“when did
we see you?”)
The Good
Samaritan is a good way to understand two very different meanings of the word “racism.”
White people tend to use that word to mean personal animosity, or even direct
action, against black people. If I haven’t kicked any black people today, they
say, then there is no racism, and I bear no responsibility. I can walk past like
the priest and the Levite.
Black
people tend to use the word “racism” not to refer to personal animosity but to
a Situation, the situation in which, among so many other things, black people are
disproprortionately hurt by the coronavirus and its economy. However we explain
the mechanisms of it, the fact is that black people are lying bleeding on the
side of the road. It is because of “race”, and one of the meanings of the suffix
“-ism”, says the Dictionary,
is a “state, condition, or property.” There is an -ism, a condition, a status
quo, about race, and it’s a problem: racism.
To say it’s
not my problem is to fail to love. Jesus condemns that attitude, because eternity
without love is hell.
***
Loving
requires opening our eyes. It is easy, especially in our suburbanized and polarized
country, to cross to the other side of the road and avoid ever seeing the wounded
man. Jesus calls us to get out on the road and see people. Read some books. Read
some web pages. Come to our cities—get over the horrific lie that places with
black people are dangerous—and see what is really going on. Open your eyes and
learn to love.
I haven’t
been writing for awhile, a halfway intentional decision, in part because I’ve
been working on some longer writing projects (a virtuous reason), in part
because I’ve been overwhelmed by a colicky newborn, and a transition from a
very busy early semester to a global health crisis in mid-semester (the force
of events)—and mostly because I’m just disorganized and give up too easily.
But a
thought on the present crisis gives me a chance to begin again.
***
A couple
of my Catholics friends whom I most respect have suggested we see this crisis
in sort of apocalyptic terms. There is
obvious truth to that proposal. We are
experiencing a cataclysm. Beyond the
death toll, which may be shocking, the health crisis is demanding an economic and
social crisis. None of us will forget
being unable to go to work or Mass. Many
may face long periods of unemployment. Loneliness
and other social pathologies are sure to be horrible. We already had rising rates of suicide and
other “deaths of despair,” such as opiate overdose.
And we must receive these things as coming from the hand of God. (God does not, of course, dictate how we handle the crisis. But with numbers of infections and deaths doubling multiple times per week, along with 20% of those with known infections needing to be hospitalized because they can’t breathe, I’ll accept the unanimous opinion of public-health officials that we do need to take drastic measures.)
Apocalyptic
literature talks about an “illumination of consciences.” Somehow what’s supposed to happen is that,
alongside horrible signs, people recognize their sins, and many, somehow,
convert. It’s not hard to imagine how
the fear of death, the shattering of our sense of control, and even our isolation,
with or without family, could create a perfect context for such an
illumination.
***
But I resist
ultra-supernaturalism. Perhaps it is
partly a matter of personality. But it
is also a matter of theological conviction.
Let me approach this topic again, but from a more humdrum angle.
I’m stuck
at home. I’m teaching online, but I
already had a light schedule this semester, and now most of my meetings are
cancelled, I have no commute, and my time is freed of the million things that take
up my time at work.
I daydream about productivity. Now I should have time to teach my children music, and math, and theology, and literature; to take long walks and do other exercise; to read; to get enough sleep; to write! What an opportunity!
But in
fact, though the circumstances around me have changed, it’s still the same
me. The me who reads too much on the
internet during ordinary times does the same thing during extraordinary
times. The me who spends too much time
daydreaming and not enough time working: that’s still me. I am still too irritable with the people I
should love. I am still distracted when
I should be praying. I still get caught
in negative internal monologues.
Over the
years I’ve had the opportunity for many hermitage retreats. Mystical!
Spiritual! Hermitage is
wonderful. But it’s still the same
me. I’m no more insightful on hermitage
than I am at home. I pray more, but I
get distracted just as much. On more
than one hermitage, I’ve managed to waste hours and hours, and undermine my big
plans, just playing with the fire. Take
away the internet, and I still get just as distracted. (Sure, playing with the fire is pretty “contemplative.” But it’s also a pretty good way to
procrastinate, even on hermitage.)
I’ll tie
this all back to the coronavirus apocalypse two ways.
First,
sure, this is a crisis given to us by God, an apocalyptical moment of some kind
(though anyone who tells you they know the day or the hour of Christ’s final
coming needs to spend more time reading his words and less time with private
revelation). This is an illumination of
conscience, absolutely.
But I don’t
think anything magical will come of it. Like
hermitage, all that an illumination of conscience can do is throw us back to
where we were in the first place: to show us our selfishness, and to see if we
are humble enough to cast ourselves on his Mercy. What the Apocalyptic reveals is the Ordinary. And what it demands is the Ordinary: to live
our lives the way we ought to live them everyday.
That’s how
this apocalyptic crisis affects ourselves.
The same is true of how it affects our relationship with our
neighbor. It’s tempting, when we think
about apocalypses, to hope that suddenly God will step in and handle evangelization
for us. Suddenly, this grand moment will
come, and God will magically convert everyone, and all that ordinary boring Gospel
stuff will disappear, and we won’t have to love our neighbor, or speak the
Gospel to him, or be good witnesses.
But here,
too, all the apocalypse does is throw us back to the Ordinary. In this crisis, and in the final crisis—both the
personal final crisis we’ll each face on our deathbeds, and the ultimate final
crisis at the end of history, whenever that may come—nothing changes. What the apocalypse reveals is what was
always true. We still need to love our
neighbor, preach the Gospel, be good witnesses of Christ’s love. There is no other way.
How do
think about the Apocalypse? How do you
think about the moment we’re in?
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I’ve been enjoying the novels of Dostoevsky the last few years (I’ve read and reread Brothers Karamazov, then The Idiot and Demons), as well as American Southern authors, from Flannery O’Connor to Faulkner, who evoke something of his sense of hopeless poverty, and Russian spiritual authors, from the Vladimir Lossky to Catherine Doughtery to the Philokalia, who I feel have . . . something important to say to us in the West. I also find something hopeful in the bleak hopelessness of English Catholic novelists like Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. But no one speaks to me of both that bleak poverty and that special Russian sense for the Gospel like Dostoevsky. I’ve been trying to figure out why.
I’ve had a
sense that somehow this fits into the Russian debate, at Dostoevsky’s time,
between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles.
Dostoevsky was one of the Russians who thought that they shouldn’t be
imitating us in the West. On the one
hand, Slavophilia (whatever it means) makes me nervous. I believe in Catholicism, which means rising above
our national biases into the universal perspective of Christ; I hate
nationalist Christianities, and Russian Orthodoxy is one of the most
nationalist. I don’t want to follow Russians
deeper into their self-regarding parochialism.
On the
other hand, that might be what makes the Russians useful for us: they can shake
us out of our Western biases, help us see beyond the narrowness of our own sort
of nationalism, and so recover a Christianity that is bigger than America and the
modern West.
***
I recently
began another read through Crime and Punishment, and found this wonderful line,
already in the second chapter:
“A follower of the latest ideas was explaining to me just the other day that
in our era compassion has even been prohibited by science and that this is already being done in England, where they’ve developed political economy.”
From the
pen of the Slavophile Dostoevsky, the line is obviously ironic. It identifies the problem of the West as a
kind of know-it-all pseudo-scientific outlook that thinks it rises above basic
human relationships. Dostoevsky’s word “compassion”
nicely ties together a central part of the supernatural Gospel with the most
natural parts of human existence. “England”—that’s
us—thinks it’s too sophisticated for either Jesus or basic human decency.
***
I happened to read these lines in a bright white Urgent Care, with one of those home improvement shows playing on the television in front of me. On tv, they’ve just knocked open a wall and discovered some new opportunity. I wasn’t following exactly, but the contractor says to the couple, “Do you want to switch over to a tankless water heater?” They say, “Is that within our budget?” He says, “Oh, it will only be fifteen hundred dollars.” And she says, “Yes, I think we should do it: for our future, and for the environment!”
The impression is that “normal” people have thousands of dollars to throw around on spur-of-the-moment ideas; that we should be “investing” in “our future”; and that the most meaningful things in life are how fancy your latest renovation is. There is no interior life, no need for compassion, no relationships, just lots of expensive stuff.
Meanwhile,
I read about Dostoevsky’s characters, horrifically poor, living in a hallway,
dying of consumption and drunken despair, physically beaten by their bosses,
hiring their daughters out for prostitution because they have no other hope of
feeding their starving children.
Within the first thirty pages, a main character is on his kness, arms stretched out like a cross, proclaiming his wretchedness to his wife. The same character has proclaimed of himself, “There’s no reason to feel sorry for me! I should be crucified, nailed to a cross, not pitied.”
But he
says of the Crucified: “He who has pitied all men and who has understood
everyone and everything, He will take pity on us; He and no one else; He is the
judge. He will come on that day and He
will ask: ‘Where is thy daughter who sacrificed herself for her wicked and
consumptive stepmother and for a stranger’s little children? Where is thy daughter who pitied her earthly
father, a useless drunkard, , and who was not dismayed by his beastliness?’ And he will say: ‘Come forth, I have already
forgiven thee!’ . . . Then He will summon us, too: ‘Come forth, He will say, “even
ye! Come forth, ye drunkards, come
forth, ye weaklings, come forth, ye shameless ones! . . . And He will say, ‘I
receive them, oh, ye wise men, I receive them, oh ye learned men, because not
one of them hath ever considered himself worthy. . . . ‘And He will stretch forth
His arms to us, and we will kiss His hands . . . and we will weep . . . and we
will understand all things.”
***
In our world
of HGTV, we pretend that compassion—compassion for one another, compassion for
the poor, the compassion of Christ, our own desperate need for compassion—is a
thing of the past, solved by economic “progress.”
Of course,
that’s not true. Though we might not
live in the wretched physical poverty of Dostoevsky’s characters, we real human
beings still feel the terror of all sorts of emotional and relational and
spiritual poverty. We still anaesthetize
our pain, just like Dostoevsky’s drunks.
But we pretend that economic growth replaces compassion. And we lose the immediacy of the Cross,
Dostoevsky’s sense that our whole lives revolve around the pity and suffering
of Jesus Christ.
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It might explain, too, why our South American pope sounds so strange to the ears of rich white Americans . . . .
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Our readings this Sunday begin with a controversial idea: “Share your bread with the hungry.”
Modern politics
seems to be split between those who think the hungry probably don’t deserve my
bread, and need the stimulus of their hunger to teach them a better work ethic;
and those who think the government should take care of them so I don’t have
to.
And modern
Christianity seems split between those who substitute the so-called “spiritual
works of mercy” (counsel the doubtful, etc.) for the Gospel’s somehow inferior “corporal”
works of mercy (“I was hungry, and you did not feed me . . . Depart from me,
you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels”; and
those who prefer to ignore all the business about God and Jesus and Truth and
Virtue in favor of an entirely material social program.
Oddly
enough, the solution to this tangled controversy is in what the old Greek
theologians call theosis: divinization.
“God became man so that men could become God.”
***
One place
to find the key is in our Gospel. “You
are the salt of the earth . . . . You
are the light of the world,” says a familiar Gospel. (These are the lines immediately following
the Beatitudes, but it happened that this year the Presentation replaced that
Gospel, something that only happens on average every twenty-one years.)
No matter
where you are on whatever ideological spectrum, these lines are attractive: We
all think we should make the world a better place.
But our
Gospel ends on an odd note: “Your light must shine before others, that they may
see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.” What is the connection between my good deeds
and “glorifying” God in heaven? The
first part focuses on me—but the second on God.
The first part is very this-worldly—the second part is about worship and
heaven.
The Tradition
sees it this way: our good deeds are a product of God’s good work in us. The saints are his masterwork. This is parallel to Creation: the world is
good because God made it. The things of
this world are less good than God, but they really do have a share in his
goodness, because he made them, and therefore they are reason to give thanks to
God, to “glorify your heavenly Father.”
But whereas the world is only his Creation, the saints are his children,
really sharing in his life; only a human being can love as God loves.
***
The flipside
is the other odd part of this Gospel: whereasas the second part, about the
light of the world, ends with glorifying your heavenly Father, the first part,
about the salt of the earth, ends with a threat. “If salt loses its taste . . . It is no
longer good for anything but to be throw out and trampled underfoot.”
The Tradition notes an interesting double layer in the various calls to serve the poor. “Share your bread with the hungry, shelter the oppressed and the homeless . . . . Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer, you shall cry for help, and he will say: Here I am!”
Our Psalm
says, “Lavishly he gives to the poor.”
Who is he? God? Or us?
In fact, it’s both. We give, because
he gives, and when we give to them, he gives to us. The whole mystery of Christianity is in this
chain of giving: “Lavishly he gives to the poor.”
***
Our
reading from First Corinthians adds the key middle ground: Jesus.
He is both
the poor man and the generous man, and he teaches us to be both.
“I came to you in weakness and fear and much trembling,” says Paul, and so he renounces all claim to glory and riches and power. In Christ the poor man, we find that our true riches are not in what we hoard for ourselves, but in our total reliance on the mercy of God, who raises the dead.
And in our
love of Christ, we long to poor ourselves out as he did. The corporal works of mercy give flesh to
that call to imitate Christ. Yes, of
course we should preach the Gospel. But
if we turn the corporal demands of the Gospel into merely “spiritual works,” we
empty the Gospel of its power, and deny the flesh of Christ.
[Incidentally,
my apologies for my absences. Our
seventh was born in early December.
Relying to much on my own strength, I have often been finding how weak
that strength is!]
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This
Sunday’s Gospel gives us the one act of Jesus’s ministry before he begins his
preaching, with the Sermon on the Mount: Matthew has given us two chapters on the
infancy of Jesus, one chapter about John the Baptist and the Baptism of Jesus,
and half a chapter about the temptation of the wilderness. Then, “When Jesus heard that John had been
arrested, he withdrew to Galilee.”
Follow me!
Here we
have a great play on words. In English, he
tells the “fishermen,” “I will make you fishers of men.” That’s nice, and I don’t want to take it away
from you.
But in the
Greek original, the word play is different.
The word for fisherman says nothing about fish or about men. The word is “salty”: a fisherman is a man of
the sea. He is calling them to go out to
the seas of the world.
(The
Hebrew word for fishermen is about fish, not seas. But it’s a rare word in Hebrew, because
Hebrews aren’t fishermen.)
***
There’s
quite a lot in our readings about seas.
Our prophecy from Isaiah, from which our Gospel will quote, says, “he has
glorified the seaward road,” adding another water theme, “the land west of the Jordan.” Our Gospel begins, “When Jesus heard that John
had been arrested,” whom he had met in the waters of the Jordan,” he . . . went
to live in Capernaum by the sea.” Then
it quotes Isaiah. Then we find Peter and
Andrew, “casting a net into the sea; they were” fishermen? Men of the sea, salties. “I will make you salties of men.” James and John were in a boat.
Strangest,
though, is that business about Zebulun and Naphtali. Why on earth begin Jesus’s public ministry with
a double reference to this part of Isaiah?
“The people who sit in darkness have seen a great light” is obviously good
stuff. But Matthew starts by quoting Isaiah
on “Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way to the sea.”
***
It helps to understand a little geography. Here’s a map.
The
Mediterranean Sea is to the left. Israel
is the bottom two thirds of the yellow part, by the sea. Babylon is the green part to the right. But when the Old Testament prophets talk
about the invaders who would take them away to the Babylonian Exile, they speak
not of “the East” but of “the North.” You
can see the reason on the map. To the
east of Israel is an empty desert. The
roads to Babylon are through the rivers and populated lands to the north, in a
great “crescent” path.
For the Israelites, the literal sea, the Mediterranean, was a scary place. They mostly left it to the Phoenecians: physically, boat-going people; culturally, cosmpolitan people, who mixed with the world. Israelites kept away from boats, and away from the nations. The salt sea is everything scary to Israel. The Greek word “sea,” like the word for “fisherman,” also means “salty”; it’s ironic to call the “sea” of Galilee “salty,” because it was known for its sweet fresh waters. But it is physically a place of boats—and culturally, a place of foreigners. Galilee of the Gentiles is the place where the cultural “seas” of the world crash onto the beaches of Israel, and threaten to stream down like the Jordan.
Israelites
stayed away from the beach. Jesus went
there to begin his ministry. That’s the
real word play in “fishers of men”: not that they would catch men instead of
fish (though that’s a nice idea, too), but that they would go forth, not just
on the physical seas of Lake Galilee, but onto the cultural seas of the world,
beginning from Galilee of the Gentiles: “salties of men,” Phoenicians rather
than homebodies.
“Jesus
began to preach and say, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’” It’s that message of repentance, and of the
kingdom of Jesus, that is the heart of the Jesus, the “meaning,” as St. Paul
say, of “the cross of Christ.” Let us
not empty it of its meaning by falling to lesser things. Let us see the light of Christ, and set sail
on the seas of the world.
Can you think of a relationship where the Gospel of Jesus Christ could help you transcend petty differences?
Baptism of the Lord – Jesus: The Way (and the Truth, and the Life) of Justice and Peace
1 Comment
This Sunday, the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, began the new Church year by proclaiming the person of Jesus Christ.
The
Baptism of the Lord is the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, an appropriate
place to begin the Church year. This
Year of Matthew, we also get the opening of Isaiah’s proclamation of the
Messiah.
Isaiah is a long, difficult book. The first 41 chapters proclaim woe to various nations of the earth. But then in chapter 42, it takes a new direction. Modern scholars call this Second Isaiah, as if it’s another author; even an old-fashioned reader like Thomas Aquinas recognizes that the book takes a dramatic turn. It begins to proclaim the Suffering Servant, who will come to save his people from these woes. What we read this Sunday is the very beginning of that prophecy.
***
“Thus says
the Lord: Here is my servant,” it begins.
But if this is the beginning, we should pay attention to how it
describes him. “Upon whom I have put my
spirit,” it says, and then “He shall bring forth justice to the nations. . .
. He establishes justice on the earth .
. . . I, the Lord, have called you for the victory of justice.” Justice.
The Messiah brings Justice.
But justice doesn’t mean what we think that it means. The first indication is that Isaiah immediately adds, “Not crying out, not shouting.” We think of protest, from Left or Right. But Jesus’s way is calm.
He will
“bring out prisoners from confinement, and from the dungeon, those who live in
darkness.” In Isaiah, those “dungeons”
(an odd translation: anyway, prison buildings) are real: Israel is in captivity
in Assyria, on the way to Babylon. The
prisons from which Jesus frees us today are no less real, though metaphorical.
But the
way to freedom is through “a light for the nations, to open the eyes of the
blind.” A new kind of justice, real
justice, from a new way of seeing.
Ironically,
where Isaiah said the Messiah will not shout, the Psalm says, “The God of glory
thunders,” “The voice of the Lord is over the waters . . . the voice of the
Lord is mighty.” Justice does not mean
protest and crushing enemies, but nor does peace mean silence. The voice of the Lord, which the same Psalm
29 says, “breaks the cedars of Lebanon . . . makes Lebanon to skip like a calf
. . . flashes forth flames of fire,” breaks in and transforms us. The Messiah brings peace and justice by the
power of his word, which converts us.
***
In our
reading from Acts, Peter is discovering that the Gospel welcomes in the
Gentiles, and not only those who were of Israel by the flesh: “God shows no
partiality.” That crushing of walls is a
huge, and underrated, theme of the New Testament. He breaks down the walls of division. He creates peace from those who were at war.
But
how? “You know the word that he sent to
the Israelites as he proclaimed peace through Jesus Christ.” Through the word of Jesus Christ. He is our peace.
***
And by the Holy Spirit. The New Testament has a way of speaking that seems odd to us. “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power,” it says. It sounds like Jesus was an ordinary man, who then received power from on high.
That’s not
true: Jesus was the Word become flesh, God from God, Light from Light, from the
very beginning. And yet Scripture shows
that the same Spirit who comes on us is the Spirit that anointed Jesus. We receive the anointing of Jesus. We receive the Holy Spirit and power. And it is only that power from on high that
can make justice and peace in this world.
Jesus, who
was anointed with the Holy Spirit from eternity, brings that Spirit into the
waters of Baptism so that we may receive the same Spirit when we enter into
those waters. And as the Spirit is the
Spirit of sonship, we become children of God, “sons in the Son,” sharing in his
nature.
Jesus is our justice and our peace, because only he can give to us that true justice and peace that is the truth and harmony of the Holy Trinity, the eternal right relationship of perfect love and joy.
Through
the sacraments we enter into Jesus, and begin—slowly—to be transformed into the
love and truth of the Trinity. On the
one hand, the only true justice and peace is in Jesus, who heals our sinful
hearts, so full of selfish division, and lifts us up into divine harmony. On the other hand, anything that does not
result in peace and justice is not true union with Jesus.
Where
do you see the tragedy of false efforts for peace and justice—on the Left and
the Right?
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