Sepúlveda versus De las Casas
The paradox lies in the person of Sepúlveda himself (confessor to the emperor and considered one of the most lucid minds of the time). Juan Inés was a respected humanist, even by Erasmus, whom he later betrayed. Long before the trials against the Spanish Hellenists, Sepúlveda decided to defend the lucrative causes of the time: the Inquisition and the conquest. Hence his attack on the Lutheran Reformation and, later, purely by coincidence, his dispute with the indigenist arguments of the friar De las Casas. Sepúlveda’s book Demócrates segundo, o de las justas causas de la guerra contra indios (Democrates II, or the Just Causes of the War Against the Indians) had been submitted to royal censorship for publication in 1547.
Written in a humanistic style, the work displays the rhetorical dialogue of the time, in which a certain Demócrates (Sepúlveda’s alter ego) delivers his best arguments against Leopoldo, the typical Lutheran villain. Here an interesting fact about the controversy arises. Although Sepúlveda enjoyed the favor of the court, the context in which the dispute took place tended to favor the type of ecclesiastical argument defended by De las Casas. In that late Renaissance Spain, the dispute over policy toward the new subjects in the New World was such that Charles V himself had to intercede with the council of Valladolid. The issue to be addressed was whether the war against the Indians was just. Presiding over the council were theologians of the stature of Cano, Soto, Miranda, and Arévalo. Sepúlveda presented Demócrates, and De las Casas presented Apología, dedicated to Philip, son of Charles V, which contains a summary of his indigenist principles.
Is the conflagration against the Indians legitimate? De las Casas’ ruling is that war constitutes a violation of natural law. In any conflict, even if it is just, the innocent must be protected from the disasters of war. For example, considering the inhabitants of a besieged city as enemies is simply unjust. In every war, a distinction must always be made between the innocent and the guilty. For De las Casas, the Indian is innocent, as he is exempt from all responsibility under the laws created in the Old World (it should be noted that this argument belongs to Francisco de Vitoria, a theologian and jurist of the School of Salamanca, considered one of the fathers of modern international law).
Bartolomé argues that, from a doctrinal point of view, there are no infidel Indians, since they have not denied a God whom they have yet to know. From a legal point of view, Indian property does not conflict with any property of the crown, since they have been conquered. For these reasons, war is not justified. War could be justified in the case of the infidel or against the heretic; although even in those cases, it is a last resort, concludes De las Casas.
On the opposite side, Sepúlveda offers his view of just war, drawing heavily on the doctrines of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. To do so, he relies on the famous Aristotelian argument of the barbarian incapable of governing himself. Demócrates defends a just cause, “defended by the greatest philosophers” (referring to Aristotle). He asserts that it is just under the principles of Natural and Divine Law to use force to subjugate those who should obey others “but refuse to be governed by the empire.”
Sepúlveda echoes the Macedonian philosopher:
For Aristotle, a natural slave is only capable of apprehending, not of having a rational principle. Not only is it necessary to govern them, but it is also in their best interest to be enslaved by a ruler.
Power is justified, by nature, in those who prevail “over their inferiors.” Barbarians (in this case, the Indians) are inferior to the Spaniards… “as children are to adults, women to men, the cruel to the meek, the intemperate to the continent, and monkeys to men.” Democrates clarifies that Natural Law requires “the perfect to dominate the imperfect and the strong to dominate the weak,” so that virtue may rise above vice.
De las Casas’s reply is suggestively modern. His conception of the problem does not dictate what the barbarian deserves or does not deserve a priori and de facto because of his condition, an argument that De las Casas dismisses as dogmatic. Instead, the friar suggests achieving the same end with the most just action in the light of the Gospel: peacefully converting the barbarians to the teachings of Christ.
This idea is more pragmatic, forward-looking, and scientific in its coherence. On the one hand, De las Casas considers the Indian as another human being, that is, inserted within a legislative system already existing in the scholastic legal canon. On the other hand, he avoids the chaos and disaster of war in terms of human losses and the cost of reparations.
Of course, the tangled web of Sepúlveda’s thesis cannot be understood without realizing that his most powerful argument has to do with the aboriginal practices of cannibalism and the sacrifice of innocents. For Sepúlveda and the classical school of international law headed by Francisco Vitoria, such practices constituted a mortal offense against the civilized principles of the church and were sufficient to justify war.
What is at stake is what is legitimate and illegitimate in the context of a new ethical and political reality. What separates a civilized society from a barbaric one. De las Casas admits cases of cannibalism and sacrifice among the Indians, but declares that these are exceptions to the rule.
First, there must be a distinction between pagans and Indians (the latter have never heard of the teachings of the Church and are therefore innocent). De las Casas accepts that the Indians do wrong, but that the evil they commit is unknown to them (in a way, he points to the future idea of Weltanschauung of the 19th century).
In his defense, De las Casas compares Indians to children, appealing to innocence: those who do not know do what they believe to be good, even if they are wrong. De las Casas separates apparent evil from intentional evil. While condemning the practice, he absolves it. If the Indians cannot be accused of intentional evil (although they can be accused of the former), the punishment cannot be the same for both. The correct course of action involves peaceful conversion. Lacanian reasoning takes a critical, albeit tolerant, perspective. This argument must have impressed those present at the dispute, where its novelty was its economy. The point of the Indian’s innocence is necessary for their lives to be understood in their proper social context. Perhaps unwittingly, the Dominican friar defined novel boundaries between the individual’s intentionality and his relationship to sin. In other words, responsibility requires freedom, and freedom requires reason. Without the ability to choose between good and evil, there is no transgression.
In a modern way, De las Casas points out that human sacrifice is not new in history (he mentions Abraham as an example). The practice has been common in many religions around the world, including the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. To judge the present, it is necessary to understand the practices of the past, for those same practices that we condemn today are in a sense part of our heritage. De las Casas does not ask us to absolve the present, but to understand it in its proper perspective. The present must allow the future what it is capable of granting the past: magnanimity. This Lacanian concept is very important in my examination. The solution to the Indian problem lies in a nonviolent conversion to Christianity. This point is connected to another important argument that is very close to the spirit of the coming Enlightenment. It is better to embrace faith voluntarily. Brute force only produces resentment and hypocrisy. It is worthwhile to convince through persuasion.
According to De las Casas, forcing religion is counterproductive, as it means making a fundamental decision for any human being. Comparing this moment with the late Roman Empire, we perceive a change in the conception of human rights. The problem of slavery returns to the forefront, now from a different perspective. The rights that Indians deserve help us understand what kind of rights we are talking about. We can better understand why the Spanish crown allowed De las Casas to explore the issue of slavery within Spanish high society.
The enslavement of Indians had been condemned by the crown itself. There was a legitimate interest in preserving the safety of the indigenous population from the beginning of the conquest, even though much of this motivation was utilitarian. Examples include: the instructions given to Columbus on his second voyage, the will of Isabella the Catholic, the dispatch of the Hieronymite friars to investigate the distribution of slaves after De las Casas’ complaints, and the pro-Indian policy of Charles V. This same Charles had been educated in a liberal humanist environment, surrounded by Flemish advisors, for whom the encomienda must have seemed extravagant, even repulsive. This was precisely the moment of De las Casas’ rise in the Spanish court. It is worth asking whether European slavery could have disappeared immediately after the discovery. Whether or not it was possible for Las Casas’ ideas to break the stubbornness of those others that would soon take hold, with the introduction of the slave trade. Indigenous slavery could be abolished, at least in theory.
In 1529, the royal council meeting in Barcelona declared that the Indians should be freed and exempted from forced labor. The edict insisted that no Indian could be sold into servitude. Then, in December of that year, the council decided to abolish servitude. Historical irony? Everything would change on November 18, 1533, when the first shipments of gold from the newly discovered Peru arrived on the shores of Spain. From that moment on, the crown changed its policy.
Clearly, the prolongation of slavery in America had more to do with economic reasons than with any moral considerations. Slavery survived in a clot of ideas that still justified it. There are ideological currents that appear not to exist, although they subsist, hidden in the subtleties of paragraphs or in ideological foundations, prey to sinister interests.
After the Council of Trent, in a counter-reformist climate, these retrograde ideas became attached to Realpolitik. None other than De las Casas is the most striking example. This was the moment when the Dominican friar was faced with the dilemma of choosing between the slavery of Indians or blacks.
In Historia de las Indias, De las Casas comments on the slave trade in a tone of remorse. When the idea of bringing black slaves to alleviate the shortage of Indian labor, which was already disappearing, was proposed, the colonizers presented De las Casas with the alternative of reducing or ending the suffering of the Indians on condition that black labor be used. De las Casas accepted.
That warning that permission should be given to bring slaves to these lands was first given by the clergyman Casas, who did not warn of the injustice done to those whom the Portuguese took and made slaves; which, after he realized it, he would not give up for anything in the world, because he always considered it unjust and tyrannical to make them slaves, because they had the same rights as the Indians.
Could someone so experienced in the ways of the colonizers be unaware that black slaves faced as much or more suffering than the Indians? Someone who was never comfortable with colonial morality interceded on behalf of the latter in 1531.
De las Casas admits that at one point he thought the captivity of black people was just.
Not later, when he observes “how the Portuguese make them slaves.” Can he possibly understand that (by making distinctions between Indians and blacks) he contradicts the spirit of his own defense of the Indians against Sepúlveda? Did he perhaps think that these black slaves were prisoners of a just war, or perhaps slaves of other slaves?
Note that at the time, the following distinction was supported (clearly expressed by Diego de Covarrubias):
There is a great difference between a captive and a slave, because a captive is an enemy of any condition, eager in a good war; a slave is the same, being unfaithful, a prisoner who is Catholic and can be ransomed.
We know that such a distinction is not sufficient. Neither blacks nor Indians are unfaithful. They are, according to De las Casas, “innocent” (Bartolomé does not use the word slave, but “captive”).
From our present perspective, it seems unusual that the same voices that defend the Indians do not protest the approaching slave trade (many of these voices come from the clergy). What is going on? Perhaps it is the idea of the animal strength of black slaves, or the fact that the slave trade was already a reality among the Tangosmaos before the conquest, or that other perception that black people are rebellious and ungovernable. There is no 16th-century theologian, including Molina (or Vitoria), who disputed the moral legitimacy of the slavery of blacks captured in just wars.
Fray Bernardo de Santo Domingo suggests that Spaniards be given license to bring blacks. Friar Francisco de la Cruz associates the color of blacks with a curse on their ancestors. Are blacks as human as Indians?
When De las Casas admits his responsibility, his acceptance, albeit belated, is symptomatic of that tense ambiguity of betraying principles and justifying his circumstances. Let us be clear that the slave trade does not depend exclusively on De las Casas’ verdict. Of course, the slave trade goes beyond what any individual could think or do. Rather, let us see the friar’s inconsistency as a sign pointing to the weight of the worldview on man. He was undoubtedly an advanced spirit, although trapped in the contradictions of his time. When, much later, referring to blacks, he says, “because the same reason is theirs as the Indians,” he ends up equating blacks with Indians. Both deserve the same emancipatory destiny. The speaker now is the chronicler near death, asking God for forgiveness for his grave sin.
Yesterday is a misread paradox
The slow course of these ideas would contribute, at the end of the 18th century, to the development of anti-slavery consciousness, now from a Protestant paradigm based on Christian values of equality and compassion. Thomas Clarkson’s well-known text, An Essay on the Slavery and the Trade of the Human Kind (1786), would draw on the ideas defended by Montesquieu and Rousseau as well as humanist thought. The argument was succinct and powerful: if all human beings share the same nature, slavery is irrational and contrary to justice. Was this not the seed of the ancient Senecan ideal?
Yes, history appears to us, at first glance, as a tragic, even grotesque grimace. But is this impression not rather a reflection of our own confusion? Our thinking, anchored in its own time, seeks to judge the past with present eyes—and in doing so, it commits a subtle form of injustice. There is a rule, an inner law of history that we should not forget: just as we leaf through the pages of the past with severity, so too will we be scrutinized one day from the future. The apparent contradiction of yesterday is nothing more than a misread paradox. From the height of the Stoic ideology—which is not resignation, but lucidity—we understand that everything that has happened has a sufficient reason at its core. The real is, therefore, not only the necessary, but the optimal within its invisible context. Instead of looking for culprits in the past, it would be better to learn its logic: to accept that each era acts with the clarity that its horizon allows. And that we, children of our time, cannot see beyond our own shadows.
In light of these stories that I have connected a little hastily, it seems that slavery was always an evil that could not be clearly seen. More time was needed. It is like this with the weight of an era that we can hardly escape from the practices of the present. Are we now, in 2025, observing what will be despised in the future of 2125? Reason can speculate about evils, but the present and the future are separated by eras, and their ways of seeing the world cannot be anticipated in the fog of time. It is history that weaves its way along the path. The history of slavery is one thing, and the slavery of history is another.
Epilogue: I am Lucterius, the stoic slave
I am Lucterius (although that is not my name among free men). My owner calls me “Gaipor,” a common nickname among slaves. My body belongs to my master, like the table or the fire that warms his triclinium. There is not a day that goes by without some pain; I realized long ago that pain does not define me. I have learned to observe it and not fear it.
I have no property, no real wife, no children of my own. But I have my spirit. My master cannot enter there. That is what he cannot take from me. The Stoics say that virtue is the only good, and that it depends solely on me. That it does not matter whether I was born free or captured in war; if I act with reason and self-control, I can be better than the senator I serve.
What do I gain by resisting my fate with anger? Fortune turns like the wheel of a mill. Today I am a slave, tomorrow perhaps dead, and in death there is no slavery. But while I breathe, I can practice virtue: do my work with care, not let fear or desire rule me, and find dignity in what depends on me: my judgment, my response, my attitude.
I have seen free men who live like beasts, slaves to their passions. And I have seen slaves who live more peacefully than their masters, because they have tamed their souls like a good charioteer tames his horses.
Thus I survive. Not because I expect freedom—that is not for me to decide—but because I have understood that true freedom is not written on a tablet of manumission, but in the heart of those who are invulnerable to resentment.
Cover image: The Slave Ship (J. M. W. Turner, 1840). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
