Humanism and the slavery of sin
Three events mark a new era that has come to be known as humanism. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 (which caused the migration of Byzantine intellectuals to Western Europe), the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1450, and the surprising growth of the bourgeoisie in cities such as Florence, Venice, and Milan.
Humanism, in comparison with medieval thought, defended a new type of realism in which the world is a cognitive fact of human perception, emphasizing rational ideals and seeking to recover the objectivity of experience. Although the goal of humanism was social, not epistemological, criticism, the Renaissance brought with it a new examination of many issues that had once been taken for granted.
Modern social sciences owe much to humanism, not as a discipline, but as an instrument of social research. There is a nagging concern for detail in this trend. Its best exponent is the interpretation of the mathematical sciences captured in pictorial language through the art of correct perspective. It so happened that the instrument of this criticism placed man, and therefore his reason, at a center from which the universe could begin to be pondered as an intelligible order.
During this historical and philosophical renaissance, it became clear that history is the best way to understand the present (Machiavelli proclaimed that there is no politics without history). Religious dogma and traditional wisdom took a back seat. A new willingness to reexamine human nature emerged. Hence testimonies such as Petrarch’s De sua ignorancia, Erasmus’s Adagia, or Moro’s own Utopia.
The humanist philosopher, unlike his medieval colleague, is not someone withdrawn into a cloister, far from the people. He is an activist. In the humanist ideology, private action without sufficient reason is inept. Humanitas is the middle ground between action and contemplation. Hence the idea of balance in politics in the broad sense of the term. If we compare humanism with stoicism, we find in the former a more realistic social critique, an effort directed toward changing things in their utopian sense. Humanism proposes a reinterpretation of the past while making a bold call for the reconstruction of the future.
Perhaps in an still evangelical context, humanism makes humanitas a conception of an individual and at the same time collective nature. From now on, reality is clear. It is not imbued with the dualism that forced the Middle Ages into a constant ambiguity between the secular and the religious. Keep in mind that slavery is very different for Christianity than it was for Roman Stoicism. The former sympathized with the exploited classes of the Roman Empire because Christianity was, within the empire, an exploited class. Here the order of factors changes. With the advent of Christianity, the slavery of sin is worse than the sin of slavery.
The idea of Christian sin
Christian sin is not a mere transgression, but the deterioration of the fundamental will of the person toward God. Its antidote is faith (seen in man’s ability to respond to temptations in a way that reflects his commitment to Christ). The Christian idea of equality has to do with divine creation, which takes as its foundation a concept of man made in the image and likeness of God. If the idea of person has value, it is because God is, in a sense, a person, albeit immeasurably more important. Man, in his original condition, is a slave to the flesh. Christian liberation is not a liberation from the flesh, but of the spirit in Christ’s redemption. If the world offers a life in chains, true freedom means eternal life in the spirit provided by divine grace and power.
Utopia by Thomas More
In contrast, the humanist man coexists in an earthly and physical world. His best archetype is the earthly, and everything that accompanies it is worthwhile. Fame and riches are no longer a stigma, as long as a balance between mind and body is cultivated. The goal is not to reform humanity, but rather its social order. An outstanding work of this period is Utopia, by Thomas More, written during a period when its author was closely associated with Erasmus, another giant of humanism. More, the statesman, is convinced that humanism is the best vehicle for social change. Thus, while Erasmus, in his Praise of Morality (dedicated to More), focuses on the government of unreason, More replaces his companion’s negative criticism with a positive and balanced conception in which the government of reflection reigns supreme.
In Utopia, More does not devote much space to the subject of slavery, but what he says about it is important. The inhabitants of Utopia have no slaves, except those captured as prisoners of war. The humanist defends the idea of forced labor as punishment for criminals. For him, slavery can have a utilitarian and preventive function. While serving as a lesson to others, criminals are useful to society. Note the difference: in Rome, a Roman could not be sold as a slave; however, a citizen of Utopia could become one if he were a criminal. Is this a decline in citizenship or an increase in social morality? Neither. The citizens of Utopia live according to a strict moral code, which includes honesty, integrity, and mutual respect. Citizens are expected to live in harmony with one another and contribute to maintaining the moral fabric of society. The fundamental responsibility of the citizen is to seek the common good. Virtue and respect for laws and customs sustain the harmonious functioning of society.
The idea of free will makes every man deserving of the same. By embracing a vile course, the criminal abandons his dignity and therefore forfeits his right to freedom. Slavery of the body can be a purifying agent for slavery of the soul. Although it may not seem so, by making slavery a punishment for both foreigners and citizens, Moro strips slavery of the onerous illegitimacy it enjoyed during Roman times. If slavery is retribution for crime, the institution becomes, for the first time, a stigma worthy of criminal behavior. If being a criminal is equivalent to being a slave, no human being can be considered a potential slave simply because they are not Christian. In other words, one is a slave because of a transgression of free will that excludes race and creed. From now on, the sin of slavery begins to win out over the slavery of sin.
The “De las Casas” case
The figure of Bartolomé de las Casas stands out in history as one of those rare men whose life is not limited to living in time, but questions and redeems it. In him, the drama of the European conscience when confronted with the New World is manifested with particular clarity. For twelve years he participated in the American enterprise, yes; but unlike so many others, his soul was not numbed by custom. From the beginning, the wound of injustice afflicted him. His true conversion—that inner moment that divides a life into before and after—took place in 1514, when he renounced not only his commission but also the usual way of life in America. Back in Europe, he did not take refuge in nostalgia but devoted himself, with the rigor of a jurist and the fervor of a prophet, to the study of the status of the Indian.
For De Las Casas, the problem was not simply political or economic, but essentially spiritual: what place should the indigenous man occupy in the new historical community that was taking shape? In 1519, his voice resounded in the Spanish Parliament as an early echo of a consciousness that was just emerging. And the emperor embraced his vision: to found free peoples, where Indians and Spaniards would not repeat the old world, but would forge a new and higher one. De las Casas’s real utopia: America not as an extension of Europe, but as a possibility for its transcendence.
With this idea, somewhat crazy for its time, De las Casas and a group of peasants set out in 1520 for a concession near what is now Venezuela. The project ended in disaster when it encountered the natural resistance of the Indians, the stubborn opposition of the encomenderos of Santo Domingo, and the apathy of the other colonizers. This was too much for De las Casas, who returned to Santo Domingo, disillusioned by his failures. Around 1523, he took the Dominican vows and four years later, De las Casas began writing his “Apologetic History,” which would serve as an introduction to his masterpiece: The History of the Indies.
After 1542, De las Casas entered his most fruitful period when he became one of the most important figures in the Council of the Indies. In 1551, he entered into a dispute with the theologian Juan Inés de Sepúlveda, an influential figure in the Spanish court. Due to the importance of this divergence for the problem of slavery in America, it is worth examining what happened.
The so-called dispute was highly paradoxical. To understand it, one must understand that humanism took hold a little late in Spain. During the conquest, Spanish humanists realized that the only way to survive in the closed and ultra-conservative climate that prevailed in Spain was to align themselves, at least ideologically, with the crown. A sad incident of the time was the forced exile of the then young humanist Juan Luis Vives, simply because he was Jewish. Any humanist advance in Spain was always overshadowed by scholasticism, which enjoyed greater influence and prestige in the universities. When the Spanish Inquisition began in 1530, along with the autos-da-fé, this weak Spanish humanism was dealt a fatal blow.
Cover image: Saint Mark Freeing the Slave (1547/48), by Tintoretto.
