Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
Readers of this newsletter are well aware that the abandonment of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation in favor of the diabolical myth of molecules-to-man evolution has allowed an anti-culture of death to engulf the whole world. From time to time, however, it is important to reflect on some of the ways that the failure to uphold the traditional reading of the sacred history of Genesis had negative effects within Christendom long before the widespread acceptance of evolutionary mythology.
Philosophy: “The Handmaid of Theology”
While Theology is indubitably the “Queen of the Sciences,” Philosophy is rightly esteemed her “handmaid,” and Aristotle is rightly revered as one of the greatest thinkers in the history of philosophy. In the Middle Ages St. Thomas Aquinas and the great Scholastic Theologians even referred to him simply as “the Philosopher.” As long as philosophy remains the handmaid of Theology, the thought of Aristotle provides Catholic theologians with a magnificent tool for defining the truths of the Faith and for investigating and understanding the natural world. Unfortunately, if any philosophy, including the philosophy of Aristotle, takes precedence over Divine Revelation, as understood in God’s Church from the beginning, the consequences will be disastrous.
In this newsletter I would like to acknowledge the way that Bishop Bartholomew Las Casas drew from the traditional Catholic interpretation of the sacred history of Genesis to refute the Aristotelian concept of “natural slavery” which was widely used to justify the enslavement of Africans and Amerindian peoples. In doing so, I do not mean to exaggerate the virtues of Bishop Las Casas whose missionary labors do not compare in terms of active charity and service to the Amerindian people with the labors of missionaries like Fray Toribio of Benavente (1482–1565), known as “Motolinia,” who personally baptized 400,000 indigenous people in Mexico and who was so well loved by them that Hernando Cortes was able to entrust the peace of the Mexico City area to “Motolinia” in his absence after his conquest of the Aztec Kingdom. However, I will try to demonstrate that the ability of Las Casas to successfully defend the fundamental human rights of the Amerindian peoples and to gain the support of the Spanish Primate, Cardinal Cisneros, and the Spanish crown flowed from his appeal to fundamental truths enshrined in the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation, at a time when the philosophy of Aristotle was being widely used to justify the enslavement of the indigenous people of the New World.
Bishop Bartholomew Las Casas
Before explaining how the traditional Catholic reading of Genesis played a critical role in securing humane treatment for the indigenous peoples of the New World, it will be helpful to give a brief sketch of the controversial Bishop Las Casas’ tumultuous life as set forth in the Old Catholic Encyclopedia:
Born at Seville, probably in 1474; d. at Madrid, 1566. His family was from France and settled at Seville. He called himself Casaus during his youth, and changed the name to Casas later on. Francisco Casaus, or Casas, the father of Bartolomé, had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage and brought back an Indian boy whom he left to his son as a servant. Bartolomé studied law at Salamanca, took his degree of Licentiate, and enjoyed a fair reputation as a lawyer. He possessed the confidence of the Spanish Governors of the Antilles after the departure of Columbus, and the first of these, Ovando, took him to the Island of Hispañola in 1502. Both Ovando and his successor, Velasquez, relied, in more ways than one, on the advice of Las Casas, who did not, however, remain much longer a layman, for in 1510 we find him a secular priest.
The condition of the Indians, especially those of the Greater Antilles, was not a satisfactory one. The earliest Spanish colonists in America were not the choicest examples of their race, neither were they numerous enough to improve the country and its resources as fast as they wished. Hence it was that the Indians were pressed into service; but those of the Antilles were not fitted for labour. With them the women, not the men, formed the labouring class. This the Spaniards did not know and, as Europeans, could not understand. Nor could they comprehend how the Indian was physically unfit for manual labour, owing to the lack of training. Hence the aborigines were overworked, and in many cases harshly treated, while epidemics were imported from the Old World, and a rapid decrease of the indigenous population set in. Las Casas saw all this, and sought to prevent it by every means at his disposal. He received, in the first years of his activity, full support from the clergy in America, and still more in Spain, where Cardinal Cisneros was counted among his most unfailing supporters.
In becoming a priest Las Casas gained two important points: almost complete freedom of speech and material independence. As an ecclesiastic he could penetrate nearly everywhere, and express himself as he liked. The rapid disappearance of the Indians in the Antilles caused much concern in Spain. Fears were entertained that it would ruin the colonies. Las Casas proposed a remedy. He suggested and, with characteristic vehemence, insisted that the natives should be placed under the control of the Church, and separated from contact with any portion of the laity. This measure could not replace the many aborigines who had already perished, and it gave but little relief to the remnant. Yet the Crown, always anxious to assist the Indians, and most favourably impressed by the philanthropic endeavours of Las Casas, was willing and eager that he should make a trial. The north-eastern coast of South America (Venezuela) was selected, and Las Casas was sent there in 1519 with ample means for the experiment. It must be stated, however, that when Las Casas was in Spain the second time, in 1517, he had made great efforts to secure farmers as emigrants for the Antilles, but failed. About the same time another measure of relief was proposed: the importation of negroes. Las Casas was one of its advocates. When he went to Venezuela he took with him seven negroes as his own personal slaves, and it is certain that he recommended the distribution of negroes through the Antilles, allowing five or six hundred to each island.
The charge often made against Las Casas, that he introduced negro slavery into the New World, is unjust. As early as 1505 negroes were sent to the Antilles to work in mines. After that they were repeatedly imported, but without his co-operation. Besides, slavery was at that time sanctioned by Spanish custom and law. But the fact that he tolerated slavery in the case of negroes, while condemning Indian servitude, appears to us a logical inconsistency. It did not occur to him that the personal liberty of negroes and Indians alike was sacred, and that in point of civilization there was little difference between the two races. At a later period he recognized his error, but the cause of the Indians had so completely absorbed his sympathies that he did nothing for the black race.
The first attempt of Las Casas to carry out his plan of educating the Indian apart from the white man resulted in disastrous failure, caused by the Indians themselves. After establishing a post at Cumaná, Las Casas returned to give an account of what he had done. In the meantime the aborigines, seeing a large building of frail material, filled with commodities ultimately destined for distribution among them as time went on, forcibly appropriated the supplies, set fire to the buildings, and, after killing as many of the Europeans as could not escape, withdrew to the interior with their booty. It was a sore blow to the priest, but, instead of drawing the true lesson from it, he laid the blame on his countrymen, accusing them of having instigated the catastrophe out of ill will towards himself and his projects. Thereafter the colonization of the New World became in his eyes a grave offence, even a sin. Embittered in spirit, he joined the Dominican Order and began a fierce crusade for what he considered the rights and interests of the Indians.
1484 – 1566
In his active sympathy for the American aborigines Las Casas had not stood alone. He had on his side, in principle, the sovereigns and the most influential men and women of Spain. He was sincerely admired for his absolute devotion to the cause of humanity, his untiring activity and zeal. He stood out among the men of his day as an exceptionally noble personality. But the more perspicacious among his admirers saw, also, that he was eminently unpractical, and, while they supported within reason, they could not approve the extremes which he peremptorily demanded. His very popularity spoiled his character. Among the clergy, the Hieronymites, who had been entrusted with the conversion and training of the Antillean natives, were his first active supporters. After his entry into the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans naturally stood by him. The conquest of Mexico brought the Spaniards into intimate contact with the most numerous and most cultured groups of Indians in America. The degree of culture and the civil polity of these groups were overrated, and the character of the people misunderstood, as well as their social organization. They were represented as highly civilized, and the coercion accompanying the conquest, even if indispensable for the changes which alone could set the aborigines upon the path of progress, appeared to many to be wanton cruelty. Las Casas was prompt to raise the cry of condemnation.
It was in 1522 that, after the failure of his plan at Cumaná, Las Casas retired to a Dominican convent on the Island of Santo Domingo, where he soon after began to write his voluminous “Historia de las Indias”. His picture of the earliest times of Spanish colonization is gruesome. He exaggerated the number of aborigines on the island at the time of discovery, and magnified into a deed of revolting cruelty every act which savoured of injustice. Sober common sense demands the revision and correction of his indictments. The life which Las Casas would have desired to lead could not, in the face of his disappointments, be led by a man of his temperament. At the same time the authorities favoured further investigations into the condition of the Indians, chiefly in the regions last occupied. He therefore went to Nicaragua in 1527. Everywhere he found abuses, and everywhere painted them in the blackest colours, making no allowances for local conditions or for the dark side of the Indian character. That the natives, owing to centuries of isolation, were unable to understand European civilization did not enter his mind. He saw in them only victims of unjustifiable aggression. It is greatly to the credit of the Spanish Government’s goodwill to have not only tolerated but encouraged the visionary designs of Las Casas, who became more and more aggressive. Some of his biographers have unjustifiably extended the scope of his travels at that time. He is credited with having made a journey to Peru in the execution of his philanthropic mission; the truth is that Las Casas never touched South America, except on its northern coast. Nevertheless, he addressed to the king a memorial, couched in violent terms, on Peruvian affairs, of which he had not the least personal knowledge.
The critical question was that of Indian labour. Slavery had repeatedly been abolished, except in the case of prisoners of war and as a punishment for rebellion. The most rational solution appeared to be to let the Indian pass to enfranchisement through progressive stages of training under the supervision of the whites, such as might have the effect of initiating him little by little in the ways of European civilization. This plan demanded a feudal condition of things, and the Repartimientos and Encomiendas, while abolishing personal servitude, substituted for it agrarian serfdom. While not eliminating the possibility of individual and official abuses, however, it checked them in many ways. Las Casas was not satisfied with the improvement; it was not radical enough for him. He continued to agitate, and, though he does not appear as the framer of the “New Laws” for the Indies (promulgated in 1542), it is certain that those enactments were due to his influence with the Government, with the clergy, and with persons who, guided more by humanitarian theories than by practical knowledge of the New World, would not have stopped short of complete emancipation, regardless of its consequences to European settlement. The strong support which Las Casas found in Spain discredits the accusations of tyranny brought against the Spaniards by Las Casas himself and by his partisans. His violent denunciations were not only unjust, but extremely ungrateful. Throughout his career he never lacked either the means for support or for carrying out his schemes. But his vehemence and sweeping injustice estranged more and more those who, fully desirous of aiding the Indians, had to acknowledge that gradual reform, and not sudden revolution, was the true policy.
Granting that Bishop Las Casas did not always conduct his defense of the natural rights of the indigenous peoples of the Americas with the truth and charity required of a successor of the Apostles, it will still be beneficial for us today to see how the traditional doctrine of creation provided the basis for his refutation of the popular Aristotelian notion of “natural slavery.” In the Politics Aristotle sets forth his concept of Natural Slavery asserting that some individuals are slaves by nature while others are masters by nature. Aristotle argued that this hierarchy is natural and just, benefiting both parties through a symbiotic relationship where the master provides rational guidance and the slave provides physical labor. Bishop Las Casas was able to show how the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation derived from the sacred history of Genesis argued against the Aristotelian idea of “natural slavery.” As political scientist Thomas Francis Xavier Varacalli explains in his excellent master’s thesis on the political philosophy of Bishop Las Casas:
In the Summa, Thomas tackles the question of whether God is just. Following Aristotle, he divides justice into two separate types: commutative and distributive. God does not participate in commutative justice, which is concerned with intercourse and exchange, because he is self-sufficient. He does partake, however, in distributive justice by providing what is due to his creation. Thomas writes, “It is also due to a created thing that it should possess what is ordered to it; thus it is due to man to have hands, and that other animals should serve him.” God creates always in accordance with the good. In God, there is a perfect harmony between the intellect and the will, for “it is impossible for God to will anything but what His wisdom approves.” Consequently, God gives what is necessary for the betterment of human beings. He gives to his creation not only out of love, but because the sheer grandeur of his distributive justice befits his own nature. Since God is truly perfect, he does not neglect what he has created. God’s justice is accompanied by the exercise of his mercy, which provides human beings with even more than what is simply just. Thomas writes that it is characteristic of God to “bestow upon creatures what is due to them more bountifully than is proportionate to their deserts.”
No earthly creature receives more from God than do human beings. God perpetuates this distributive justice to all human beings and at all times because God governs the world. Thomas identifies two ways to demonstrate that God governs the world: through the observation of nature itself and from a consideration of God’s goodness. First, Thomas argues that God’s governance is shown through the observation of nature. Thomas writes, “For we observe that in nature things happen always or nearly always for the best; which would not be the case unless some sort of providence directed nature toward good as an end; which is to govern.” Careful observation of nature shows that it is ordered and that it has an end. Thomas’ argument is teleological. God created nature in such a way that human beings can interpret moral claims from nature. Human beings after the Fall, even without the benefit of Christian revelation, have the ability to understand the basic truths of the world. Revelation, though it illuminates the study of nature, does not contradict it. The second way in which it is evident that God governs the world is through a consideration of God’s goodness. Thomas writes:
It is not fitting that the supreme goodness of God should produce things without giving them their perfection. Now a thing’s ultimate perfection consists in the attainment of its end. Therefore, it belongs to the Divine goodness…to lead them to their end; and this is to govern.
God’s justice, which is furthered by his mercy, provides human beings with what is necessary for their end (such as the aforementioned hands and dominion over animals). By providing human beings with what is necessary for their end, God’s design allows every creature to seek its own perfection. Human beings, through the exercise of the reason, aim to have God as their end by perfecting themselves through acts of goodness. As Thomas’ discussion on God’s governance of the world asserts, good governance consists is bringing one’s subjects to fulfill their end. Human government mimics God’s governance to the extent that it leads its citizens to fulfill their temporal end: happiness. The exercise of human happiness includes the practice of moral virtue, especially justice. As justice always concerns itself with relations of at least two people, human beings need to live in political and social community in order to imitate God’s justice to the extent that they are able. It is part of God’s distributive justice that human beings are not autonomous individuals who live by themselves. Rather, political and social life is an intricate part of God’s justice because human beings, by nature, must live with each other for a variety of reasons, ranging from basic survival to the exercise of virtue. The political and social life of human beings is so natural that it would have existed even before the Fall.
Las Casas viewed Aristotelian natural slavery as incompatible with the justice, mercy, orderliness, and governance of God’s creation. Las Casas sums up his position nicely:
If we believe that such a huge part of mankind is barbaric, it would follow that God’s design has for the most part been ineffective with so many thousands of men deprived of the natural light that is common to all people.
To state that a whole race or nation is mentally deformed and lacking in the ability to govern is a sin against the beauty of God’s creation. Las Casas believes that the claim of widespread natural slavery is contrary to Thomas’ position that God provides all human beings with what is necessary to attain their end (i.e. reason) because it is contrary to God’s nature to make many things imperfect. Las Casas writes:
Hence it necessarily follows that a rational nature, receiving its power from the Creator alone, should include men who, as a rule, are endowed with the best gifts of their nature and are rarely slow witted or barbarous.”
Las Casas, like Thomas, admits that there are a few men who are slow-witted and barbarous, but Las Casas takes Thomas’ caveat to mean that those few slow-witted or barbarous men would be interspersed thinly throughout various nations. In this way, God’s distributive justice would not be impeded because, since human beings are political and social animals by nature, the slow-witted would be taken care of by their fellow men in a political community. Such an opportunity allows the citizenry to grow in virtue. Las Casas did not believe that Thomas’ caveat for the existence of the slow witted translated into the possibility that an entire continent could be populated by such deficient human beings.
Did God Abandon the Amerindian Peoples?
In his book on the life and thought of Bishop Las Casas, historian Thomas Francis Xavier Varacalli quoted above notes that in addition to natural slavery:
Las Casas had to address another argument that threatened the plausibility of his Thomistic understanding of God’s relationship with the world. Some Spanish contemporaries believed that, since the Gospel had not been revealed to the Amerindians for fifteen hundred years, the natives of the New World were not favored by God.
In reality, there is overwhelming evidence that St. Thomas the Apostle did evangelize the New World, as explained in the excellent sermon recorded at this link: Nevertheless:
some Europeans believed that the Amerindians were somehow different from and inferior to other human beings. In the beginning of his History, Las Casas poses the question that many sixteenth-century Europeans had asked about the discovery of the New World: how could God allow an entire continent to be unknown to the Christian world for fifteen hundred years?
Las Casas responds to the question with a theological answer rooted in teleology:
As for the mass of people, original sin has caused it to suffer cruelly and to experience misery by devious ways in order to merit goodness…It is unreasonable, then, to ask questions like Why now and not before? Or Why so late? It must not be thought that, because a nation is discovered later than another, its Maker denied it His support, for He ordained things as He pleased. If a nation is unknown, it is to help some and edify everyone that they are to blame if it is not in a state of grace, and that they should not attribute it to themselves if that nation basks in divine grace, but must attribute it instead to the benevolence of the Lord.
Although Las Casas does not specifically quote Thomas in this passage, his argument is rooted in the Angelic Doctor’s understanding of why there are differences among human beings. The imperfect, the unbaptized, the disbelievers, and the widespread existence of sin exist to show how wondrous and magnificent perfection, baptism, belief, and goodness are. It provides the Christian with an opportunity to be “an aroma of Christ” to God’s creation. It allows the Christian to honor God in a very special way. In this case, the discovery of the Amerindians provides Christians with the opportunity not only to convert the Amerindians but to reevaluate the blessings God has given them. Christians are not supposed to use the discovery of the New World into order to pervert it or, worse, attribute to it false understandings of human nature, such as Aristotelian natural slavery. Rather, Las Casas frames the question again in the context of God’s distributive justice: the existence of unbelievers allows Christians to be, as the Bible teaches, fishers of men.
In order to defend the Amerindians against the detractors of their rationality and sovereignty, Las Casas drew upon the traditional Christian doctrine of imago Dei and a Thomistic philosophical anthropology rooted in natural law. The Christian doctrine of imago Dei is rooted in the Genesis narrative, where it is stated: “God created mankind in his image: in the image of God he created them: male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:28). Genesis provides no exception to the verse: all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. Las Casas made the imago Dei a foundational aspect of his political thought. He took it as evidence for the universality of human nature. Since the imago Dei was a widely accepted belief in Christianity, many adamant proponents of the Conquest did not deny that the Amerindians were made in God’s image. They simply believed that the doctrine alone provided neither evidence for Amerindian rationality nor legitimacy for the natives’ right to self-governance and self-determination. The doctrine of the imago Dei did not in-and-of-itself present a clear solution to the Amerindian problem. Theology and philosophy had to accompany and to support the doctrine in order to draw out its significance for the Amerindian question.
In order to use the imago Dei to buttress the merits of his argument, Las Casas reflected upon the nature of God. As the previous section indicated, Las Casas’ understanding of the justice, mercy, and governance of God was influenced strongly by Thomas. In Thomistic fashion, Las Casas emphasizes the rationality of God and gives God the title of Supreme Intellect. Las Casas’ argument is simple: if God is the Supreme Intellect and if the human being is made in God’s image, then the human being is an image of the Supreme Intellect. The human being, therefore, can interpret the world, is capable of abstract thought, and can understand the distinction between good and evil. A human being’s capacity to do these things does not make him or her equal to God’s perfection. A human being, after all, cannot possess complete knowledge of the eternal law of God, due to humanity’s natural limitations and the subsequent consequences of the Fall. Yet, by being made imago Dei, human beings have the capacity to know God to the extent of which the human soul is capable. Las Casas stresses that being made in the imago Dei is a fundamental characteristic in defining human beings as a species. He claims that “both the Scriptures and our experience tell us [that] all men were created in God’s image, although the Fall of our first fathers caused men to have to battle with their natural surroundings, as can be seen by the ferocity, rebellion, and distress from which we sometimes suffer.”
While most Christians certainly believe that the doctrine of the imago Dei is contained within Scripture, Las Casas insists that it can also be learned through experience. This argument is thoroughly Thomistic: for if the imago Dei illuminates human reason, then it is present through the good use of one’s intellect. Even without revelation, human beings can come to know the tangible effects of being made in God’s image, such as their ability to understand the precepts of the natural law that was discussed in the second chapter. His belief in the universality of human nature also leads him to dismiss arguments about any perceived natural deficiency of the Amerindians. The dysfunctional qualities he mentions – ferocity, rebellion, and distress – are a result of the Fall. They are not unique to the Amerindians. Cannibalism and human sacrifice are also a result of the Fall insofar as the arguments that legitimized those customs derived from a misapprehension of natural law precepts known through practical reason. In order to make his case, Las Casas turns to the ancient historian Strabo, who recorded instances of the pre-Roman inhabitants of Spain participating in human sacrifice. Las Casas’ argument is clever: if the Amerindians are natural slaves for participating in this crime, then so were the ancestors of the Spanish. Las Casas uses Strabo’s account in order to demonstrate that participation in sacrifice is a result of the misapprehension of the natural law instead of a rational deficiency. Despite its utmost seriousness, the Fall neither destroyed the imago Dei nor the intellect of the human being.
Conclusion
From this discussion of the thought of Bishop Las Casas, we can see that God’s Genesis Revelation regarding the “first perfection of the universe” and the perfection of St. Adam and St. Eve before the Fall allowed Las Casas to argue successfully that the depraved condition of certain groups of Indians could not obviate the fundamental goodness of human nature as it had been created by God at the foundation of the world and thus ought not to be used as a pretext for arguing that African and Amerindian peoples were “natural slaves.” Aristotle was a profound observer of nature, but, without God’s Genesis Revelation in regard to the first perfection of the universe and the perfection of our first parents, he could not see the necessity of drawing conclusions about humanity in relation to God’s original design for mankind. He judged human nature according to what he observed in this fallen world. For all his faults, Bishop Las Casas deserves credit for refusing to allow the human nature of the Amerindian and African natives to be understood apart from Divine Revelation about the original nature of man and his original holiness. By continually hearkening back to the first perfection of the universe when it came forth from God in the beginning, Las Casas helped to keep civil and ecclesiastical leaders from judging the humanity of the indigenous people according to the behavior of a few morally degraded communities.
Most of the political leaders of the Western (once-Christian) world take it for granted that they are morally superior to the Catholics who subjugated the Amerindian peoples. But the writings of Las Casas show how deluded they are. Las Casas argues consistently that the imago dei conferred on every human being since the creation of St. Adam and St. Eve endows him or her with certain inalienable rights, and, to that extent, he seems to be in agreement with John Locke and the Enlightenment philosophers. But as the children of the Enlightenment separated themselves from the influence of the Catholic Church, they progressively exalted the rights of individuals in ways that allowed them to trample on the rights to life, liberty and property of huge numbers of other human beings with a clear conscience. In our own day, the secular humanist elite exalts the freedom of the individual to deny the existence of the natural law and to violate it at will, even when this entails the wanton destruction of billions of unborn children through surgical abortion and abortifacient contraception.
Through the prayers of Our Lady of Guadalupe, St. Joseph, Terror of Demons, and all the Holy Angels and Saints, may the Holy Ghost deliver us from all evil and error and lead us into all the Truth!
In Domino,
Hugh Owen
P.S. Videos of the presentations from the Kolbe Center’s 2026 leadership retreat are now available for viewing in this playlist on the Kolbe Center’s Youtube channel.
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