EQUIPO DE PROTECCIÓN PERSONAL

Aquinas, in opposition to the Augustinian view of the proper relations

among the peoples of the world, denied the pope temporal jurisdiction over infidels. Mere infidelity was no justification for depriving the non-believer of his natural rights, which were derived from natural law

21

and the law of nations. The Council of Trent, in its condemnation of the Protestant view that man was by nature entirely given over to sin and utterly dependent on grace in its decrees on Original Sin (17 June, 1546) and Justification (13 January 1547), confirmed the Thomist view that

Phelan, Millennial Kingdom, 5; 65ff.

J.A. Weisheipl, ’Thomism’, New Catholic Encyclopedia, XIV, 127-28.

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man possessed natural virtues and could freely choose to cooperate with prevenient grace. The heathen, by his natural inclination towards good, was predisposed to seek and accept the faith even if he could not,

alone, without the salvation offered through Christ reach a state of

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grace and adoption as one of the children of God. Thus, even when ignorant of the gospel he was not 'wholly depraved' or totally lost to Original Sin. The implications of the authoritative statement on the nature of peoples outside the church were important for the debate in Spain on the rights and nature of the Indian in so far as the church gave its full support theologically to those Spanish religious like Las Casas and Mendieta who denounced racialist and 'natural slavery' theories of the Indian character.

The Franciscan friar, Geronimo de Mendieta, represented another tradition within the Spanish Church, that which John Leddy Phelan has

identified as a mystical and apocalyptic strain in Spanish Catholic thoughty

presenting the conversion of the Indians as the completion of God's plan for human history in preparation for the Last Judgement. Mendieta, if on different grounds, supported the Dominican opponents of the 'natural slavery' thesis. God had revealed to him directly^rather than through legal and theological arguments^that 'no race or generation of people were more disposed to save their souls or more capable of doing so than the natives of New Spain'. He stressed the Indians' meekness, gentleness, simplicity of heart, humility, obedience, patience and contentment with poverty, arguing that they instinctively practised those virtues enjoined in the Sermon on the Mount. They possessed natural reason and were capable

22

of receiving grace but, being simpler and less corrupted than Europeans^ they needed the special protection of the religious orders against

exploitation. Their childlike innocence made them soft wax, vulnerable to the imprint of good or evil influences. Rather than requiring the elaborate legal and social institutions of Spain and its sophisticated civilisation, the Indians needed to remain in a simple, protective social system where the priest guarded and instructed them as a father guarded his children. Mendieta, like Las Casas, rejected the Aristot­ elian thesis that some men were born natural slaves and with him denied the extension of that thesis to condemn the Indians as a race to natural

23

inferiority and subservience to the Spaniards. In the terms of St. Paul's doctrine that Greek and Jew (and Spaniard and Indian) were equal in the sight of God, Mendieta argued that Aristotle's classifiction of human beings into masters and slaves had been superseded by Christian

24 universalism.

Influenced by the arguments of their leading theologians and supported by church teaching, the religious orders generally assumed a benevolent and protective position in their attitude to the peoples of

the new empire, but it would be a dangerous simplification to assume that even within the orders there was a uniform consensus based on principles of Christian humanitarianism favorable to the rights and dignity of the Indians. The sixteenth century debate was not a clear confrontation between colonists eager to conquer and exploit the natives and friars anxious to protect and respect them. There were alternative opinions

o q

Phelan, Millennial Kingdom, 59-65. 24

within the Franciscan and Dominican orders in Spain, for instance, which

found even greater support in the colonies. In 1549 a Dominican,

Domingo de Betanzos, confessed that during his years in the Americas

he had thought and written of the Indians as bestlas [beasts] and

although he repudiated it on his deathbed, there were undoubtedly others 25

who shared that view in his order. The Dominicans were fortunate to

include a number of preeminent defenders of the Indians but the other

orders were more ambivalent in their attitude. More typical of

Franciscan thought than Mendieta's vision of the Indians as noble savages

was the opinion of Pedro de Azuaga that they were timid, opportunistic and hypocritical, kept in order only by Spanish military power and ready

2 6

to accept the faith out of fear rather than positive conviction. It is also true that even the most benevolent defenders of the

Indians displayed serious prejudices in their arguments which had negative consequences for the place assigned to the new converts in the colonial

churches. In a colonial situation, benevolent paternalism could hardly

escape becoming discriminatory authoritarianism. Mendieta himself argued

that the Indians were made ’to be pupils, not teachers, parishioners, not 27

priests', a view which colonial experience inevitably encouraged given

the reality of exploitation and conflict of interest in the New World.

Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, 23.

Phelan, Millennial. Kingdom, 60. There were Spanish bishops also

willing to use Aristotelian ideas of natural slavery against the Indians such as Juan Quevedo, Bishop of Darien, who advanced this argument in a debate with Las Casas in 1519 before the Emperor

Charles V at Barcelona; Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, 16.

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The daily exercise of direct power over deferential Indians encouraged

some religious in the habit of domination rather than service. Despite

their knowledge of Indian languages and their direct experience of Indian cultures, the friars were also limited by assumptions and values which

they brought with them to the New World. For the Spaniards, religious

and laymen alike, the 'Indian* whether Mexican or Peruvian or Filipino, agriculturalist, fisherman, or hunter, existed as an abstraction, an archetypical figure possessing a precise list of either good or bad

qualities. The various schools of thought regarding the peoples of

the empire shared in common this disposition to generalise about the 2 8

Indians as if they all belonged to one race. It is for this reason

that an understanding of friar attitudes towards the peoples of the Philippine Islands in the late sixteenth century requires some knowledge

of the debate on the Indians of the Americas. Three centuries later,

Spanish bishops and friars were still speaking of the indio as if he 29 were a single type made up of specific, fixed racial qualities.

Sixteenth century Spanish theories of colonial peoples were thus

implicitly racialist even when benign and the same theologians who defend­ ed the Indians were prepared to accept the enslavement and exploitation

30

of Negroes. Inevitably, too, the most sublime theories became

embroiled with self-interest once the missionaries had established churches, estates, parishes and missions and all the institutions of the colonial

Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, 10.

See the examples given later in this chapter. Tine religious who gave

testimony before the Taft Commission distinguished between Visayans, Ilocanos and Tagalogs (as did Chirino in 1604) and between mestizos

and pure indios but in little else; see 'Lands Held for Ecclesiastical

or Religious Uses, etc.', 97; 98-100; 113; etc.

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churches. It has been argued that there were other than altruistic reasons behind the benevolent policy and that the crown was inclined to Thomistic appeals to the sanctity of natural law and the law of nations as a 'smokescreen' behind which it could restrict the economic power of the colonists and maintain central control of the empire. Similarly, it has been argued that Mendieta's conception of an indio Eden protected by the religious orders, provided the Franciscans with a justification for establishing and jealously retaining a Franciscan

31 'empire' secure against royal and colonial interference.

As the church settled into the routine of colonial rule and became part of the colonial establishment racialist assumptions which had been

32

condemned in the formal debates in Spain tended to reappear. The key concept of the Indians in the thinking of the Spanish regulars was as children, either as the innocent children of God or as wards needing pro-

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tection (in distinction to servants or slaves to be exploited); But there was another sense in which the Indian was regarded as a child and eventually this came to predominate so that, in the Philippines by the nineteenth century, the previous two senses were overlaid by the third.

In this third sense, the Indians, as children, were irresponsible, feckless and emotionally, mentally and morally undeveloped.

The most influential support for this view of the Indian as an

Phelan, 'Conflicting Spanish Imperial Ideologies', 63.

Charles Gibson, 'Spanish Exploitation of Indians in Central Mexico', extract from The Aztecs under Spanish Rule (1964) in Hanke, Latin American Civilization, I , 176.

S. Poole, 'Latin America, Church and the Indian in', New Catholic Encyclopedia, VIII, 448; and see Phelan, Millennial Kingdom, 66-67.

infant inferior to civilised adults came from Las Casas’ opponent in the Valladolid debates of 1550-1551, the Aristotelian humanist scholar, Juan Gines de Sepulveda (1490-1573). Applying Aristotle's doctrine of natural slavery to peoples, Sepulveda based his case for a just war against the Indians on his thesis that they were innately inferior to the Spaniards:

The man rules over the woman, the adult over the child, the father over his children. That is to say, the most powerful and most perfect rule over the weakest and more imperfect. This same relationship exists among men, there being some who are by nature masters, and others who by nature are slaves... It will always be just and in accordance with natural law that such people submit to the rule of the more cultured and humane princes and nations .... And if the latter reject such rule, it can be imposed upon them by force of arms. Such a war will be just according to natural law.... War against these barbarians can be justified not only on the basis of their

paganism but even more so because of their abominable licentious­ ness, their prodigious sacrifice of human victims, the extreme harm that they inflicted on innocent persons, their horrible banquets of human flesh, and the impious cult of their idols. ^‘4 Sepulveda, although his works were removed from circulation or banned in the decades after the Valladolid debate, appealed to nationalist and imperialist sentiments which suited the material goals of those Spaniards

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