Las Casas and the Primacy of Truth

This article is part of a series of responses to Episode 2.6 of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast.

In the Genealogies of Modernity podcast episode “A Medieval Anti-Racist,” producer Terence Sweeney explores how Bartolomé de las Casas was presented with what, for him, was a distinctively modern problem: how to bring an end to the evils inherent in the Spanish colonial project. In order to address it, at least on the intellectual side, he relied on some old-fashioned tools. But we might ask why looking backwards helped Las Casas. Why is it that when he recognized that something was wrong, he had to look to older thinking to articulate how and why?

It’s partly, I suspect, the times in which he was living: colonial expansion was new. To be forward thinking was to try to arrange all of the new information about how the world worked in a new way—information like the apparent civilizational superiority of the Europeans. But there is also an element of intellectual change, incipient in the sixteenth century, but which gathered pace over the years, in which the relationship between experience, truth, and action began to fall apart.

To speak broadly, the older scholastic tradition tended to see experience as necessary for attaining truth, but insufficient without a further act of intellectual contemplation—an act revealing the universal dimension of reality latent in every particular. This universal truth was then the appropriate context and criterion for action. Experience leads to—but does not exhaust—truth, and contemplation precedes practice. A distinctly “modern” alternative, only on the cusp of being worked out in the sixteenth century, would connect these differently. To begin with, doubts about universal truth lead to an excessive emphasis on experience and a refusal to move from particular to universal truth: the experience of the individual or the group is paramount, and brooks neither challenge nor expansion. Equally it is experience, rather than truth, which leads to action. If truth comes back into the picture, it is often the result rather than the context and condition of action. We find ourselves in the world defined, perhaps rather like that of the encomenderos, by “facts on the ground.”

Seen in this way, there is something of enduring significance in the fact that Las Casas’s protest was rooted in his return to the scholastic tradition of Christian reason, and particularly in the work of Thomas Aquinas. His story as a defender of the colonized is also his story as a churchman, and so in his strategy for defending the native inhabitants of the Americas, the question of truth is central. Experience—the experience of cruelty and massacre—must lead to recognition of a greater truth, of the unity of the human race, in order for it to properly drive action. Keeping these links in the right order is, I suggest, what Las Casas’s allegiance to older forms of thinking helped him to do.

Now, it’s too simple to say that this was just a result of looking backwards to a better intellectual climate. The concept of “natural slaves” and human hierarchy was elaborated from Aristotle, the great source for medieval scholastic thinking, and the famous debate at Valladolid was conducted in scholastic and canonical terms on both sides. Looking backwards wasn’t pure—there was more than one way to do it. Las Casas’s own life, too, was hardly pure in the sense of being able to reject callousness, cruelty, and the lure of false righteousness completely.

And so there is something “modern” in Las Casas too—a recognition of the moral significance of experience, and a break with his own past. The modern high regard for experience can lead to the rejection of supposedly settled Aristotelian “truths.” That Las Casas’s conversion involved the experience of colonial wickedness firsthand is surely no accident. Sepulveda could make his arguments in great confidence, but he never visited the Americas. This gives us an insight into one side of Las Casas’s strategy: it is his experience which his histories rhetorically make present for the moral benefit of those who have not come by it firsthand. We too can access the truth which experience allows us to reach.

Nevertheless, while experience is vital, the religious aspect of Las Casas’s story points to the way in which even the immediacy of experience points to the primacy of truth. In their own way, Las Casas’s errors point this out. His acceptance for a time of African slavery is conceivable only if the suffering of the Indios remained merely an experienced wickedness, rather than something pointing to a deeper truth about human nature. And pushing on to this deeper truth requires moving beyond thinking about how the world works to thinking about what human beings are. Experience calls for something more like contemplation, the attempt to see things as they are in their broadest and most fundamental context—for Las Casas, to see all human beings in the light of their creation by God.

Bartolomé de las Casas, Disputa o controversia con Ginés de Sepúlveda (1552)

After all, without pushing on to this final context, one could interpret the experiences precisely in terms of Spanish superiority. Was the power of the conquerors not in itself evidence of the superiority of their civilization, reason, and social order as well as a sign of divine favor? Las Casas’s return to the thought of Thomas Aquinas was a move from considering the world in terms of how it works—the apparent hierarchy of control and dominance in which the Spaniards appeared at the apex—to an attempt to see it in terms of being. Thinking about human beings in terms of what we are, of human nature, led to a claim of fundamental truth: the claim that “all humanity is one,” and that this unity is to be seen in the light of God’s eternity. The experience is necessary, but the truth is primary. With this truth in the central place, it can become a motive and guide for action. Hence the strikingly religious form which Las Casas’s campaign takes: rhetoric and intellectual argument, but also the power of the confessional, thus setting the question for others in eternal terms, too.

This is different, very clearly, from the technical rationality of contemporary governance, the claim to be working purely from the facts of the matter—a distinctively modern way of understanding and ordering human life, cutting off from the realm of thinking what can’t be reduced to calculation. But it is also different from another modern model of action and thought about the world—one in which the practical demand precedes and floats free of questions regarding truth. Our claims and stories are then arranged at will to support whatever practical action requires. Or what is perhaps more common and more sympathetic—a model in which experience, precisely because it is so egregious, is itself a sufficient starting point for action, with reaching out to universal truth an impossible search for a context beyond the competing claims of power and dominance.

Certainly, Las Casas depended on his recognizing the falsehood of a brutal rationality of extraction. But looking back to the Thomist tradition, and to the ultimate priority of eternal truth, let him see that moral action depends on a sense that there is—corrupted, twisted, and mutilated though it may be—a good order of things which calls out to be upheld. In our own troubles, some such contemplative moment may help in guiding our action not by the immediacy of experience or the empty rationality of technical control, but by true attention to the human good. Perhaps Las Casas can be seen not so much as a complex forerunner whose achievements are controversial, but as an example. If in the end he saw the need to set himself against his time, if he was in some sense a man beyond his time, then it is not because he was ahead of his time—nor even because he was looking backward—but because he related both experience and action to a truth whose ultimate source and context lay outside time altogether.

Euan Grant is the Gifford Fellow in Natural Theology at the University of St Andrews. He works on the theology of human nature in conversation with Thomas Aquinas and other mediaeval and modern theological sources.