500 years ago this Sunday, the Dominicans friars of the Spanish colony of Hispaniola called the Spanish colonists to repentance for their gross mistreatment of the native population. The stirring words of Antonio de Montesinos’ homily for Fourth Advent—which shocked the unsuspecting congregation—still echo:
And what care do you take over who teaches them the faith, that they know their God and creator? Are baptized? Hear mass? Keep festival days and Sundays? These [Indians], are they not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obligated to love them as you love yourselves? Do you not understand this? Do you not feel this? How is it that you are in such a deep, lethargic sleep? You can be sure that in your state you are no more able to be saved than the Moors or Turks, who lack and don’t even want the faith of Jesus Christ.
Many today remember de Montesinos as a precursor to secular human rights, but this is misguided. His greatest charge against the Spanish was not that they had neglected the bodies of the natives, but that they had ignored the fate of their souls. It was their human dignity—the care of their souls as well as the care of their bodies—that concerned the Dominican friars.
It was no accident that early champions of what we today would call human rights cared more for men’s souls than their bodies. It was the bold, some would say foolhardy, belief in a transcendent order that gave the friars ground to stand against the depredations of a fallen world.
This fact, and what it means for human rights today, is discussed by Andrew Wilson in our December issue, in an article available only to subscribers. If you haven’t yet subscribed, you can do so here.
December 16th, 2011 | 10:03 pm
It remains unclear that the material and spiritual are unequal priorities in providing for another. That is NOT Catholic teaching and is not supported in the Gospel. The writer fails to prove it.
December 17th, 2011 | 10:57 am
Dan C. writes:
“It remains unclear that the material and spiritual are unequal priorities in providing for another. That is NOT Catholic teaching and is not supported in the Gospel. The writer fails to prove it.”
You raise a good point.
The Dominican Order, whose founding is inextricably connected with the Albigensian Crusade, was commisioned as inquisitors as early as 1231. Which is to say that for centuries they were involved in a system which used tools such as imprisonment, torture and, when a condemned heretic was “released to the secular arm,” execution.
Question: since for the medieval and early modern Dominicans the “saving of souls” involved a fight against heresy that resulted in the “imprisonment of bodies,” the “torture of bodies,” and, occasionally, the execution/exhumation and “burning of bodies,” in what sense can the order be called the “early champions of what we today would call human rights”? Heretics are still humans, aren’t they?
December 17th, 2011 | 11:33 am
Dan C. – Thank you for your comment. I was writing in a kind of shorthand, but I’ve updated the post to avoid any confusion.
December 18th, 2011 | 10:40 am
As the author of the article referred, I am disturbed by the sharp distinction between bodies and souls here displayed, and the assumption that there’s no line between Montesino and what he represented and current discussions of human rights.
First of all, the Dominicans were brought to action by descriptions of gross neglect, nigh torture, inflicted on innocent Indians by Spanish hidalgos. These were clearly crimes. That they had no concern for the Indians’ souls, moreover, was a clear indication that the settlers were in no meaningful sense Christian, not some deepening of spiritual over bodily crimes.
And secondly, I think there is indeed a line between the Thomist/Aristotelian notion of “rights” and what are now held as such, at least by some. “Human Rights” is now a large, diffuse concept, however, and a certain strain of whiggish thought sees them somehow replacing an antiquated theism. It is this disjunction, in fact, that I would like to draw attention to as untrue and problematic.
As we continue to negotiate a pluralist world, we will have to admit as well the roots of much rights practice in a Christian culture, and figure out how the erosion of deep forms of “discipline” can be understood when this background is no longer normative.
December 21st, 2011 | 1:16 pm
Andrew Wilson writes:
And secondly, I think there is indeed a line between the Thomist/Aristotelian notion of “rights” and what are now held as such, at least by some. “Human Rights” is now a large, diffuse concept, however, and a certain strain of whiggish thought sees them somehow replacing an antiquated theism. It is this disjunction, in fact, that I would like to draw attention to as untrue and problematic.
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As someone who believes and practices a species of Christian theism, and who holds no brief for any variety of “whiggish thought,” I find your application of Ramist logic here unjustified and unhelpful in my attempt to understand this seeming paradox: how could a group of Christians like the Dominicans both defend the human dignity of the New World Indians while simultaneously trample upon that same human dignity in regard to those suspected (or convicted) of supporting heresy or heretics in both the Old and New Worlds? I’d argue that how one addresses this paradox of persecutorial violence – or if, on the contrary, one chooses to pass over it in silence – largely determines how seriously their “line-drawing” should be taken in their genealogy of the notion of human rights.
Andrew Wilson concludes:
As we continue to negotiate a pluralist world, we will have to admit as well the roots of much rights practice in a Christian culture, and figure out how the erosion of deep forms of “discipline” can be understood when this background is no longer normative.
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If we can say that one deep form (??? are you sure you don’t mean “deep structure”?) of discipline in the history of Christianity has been “persecution” – here as expressed in the crusades and the several national and local inquisitions, but as you know there were Protestant expressions, too – then let us thank God that this Christian “deep form” has been thoroughly eroded in most parts of the world. And let us pray that, in our “pluralist” present and future, no Christian group falls or will fall into the fatal error made by the early modern Spanish: their adoption of a national inquisition (or some other instrument of persecution) as part of a mistaken and un-Christian pursuit of an imperative toward religious and ethnic uniformity.
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