Another absent interlocutor in Valladolid was the Dominican and professor of theology and philosophy at Salamanca, Francisco de Vitoria (1486–1546). Like Palacios Rubios, Vitoria had never been to America. He did not have the benefit or the authority of the ocular observer. He worked from reports and from his rich library. In 1534, he, like many others, was shocked to hear of the unlawful execution (regicide) in Cajamarca of the Inca Atahualpa and he wrote on the problem of Spain and the Amerindians without being solicited by the crown to do so (Pagden, 1982: 64–80). Vitoria was one of the leaders of the Thomist revival in Spain. He followed Thomas Aquinas’s reasoning regarding the difference between pagans and Christians. The theory of natural law was the discursive frame within which the theologians at Salamanca analyzed the critical question that Amerindians posed for European epistemology.
In 1537 Vitoria wrote Relectio de Indis (1557), a work that circulated widely in manuscript form and had a lasting imprint in all future discussion concerning the Indies. In de Indis, the theologian tries to find an answer to the unthinkable question: What if there is no just title to the conquest of America? As Anthony Pagden points out, with this question Vitoria takes the problem of “just title” out of the strict realm of the law and places it in the space of theology for the problem involved, settling the chief question regarding the nature of the Indian qua man (66–7). It was clear to Vitoria from the report received on Mexico and Peru that the Indians were not simple irrational beings, and thus any common–sense discussion could demonstrate that the Indians were not monkeys, but human beings. Relying on Aristotle, Vitoria reasoned that the Indians clearly had the use of reason, in their own way. They had order in their affairs, they had properly organized cities, recognizable forms of marriage, magistrates, rulers, laws, industry, and commerce. They also had religion. For Vitoria, as it had been for Aristotle, the city stood for the most perfect unit of society, the “only place where the practice of virtue and the pursuit of happiness” are at all possible. Man, for both Plato and Aristotle, can only realize himself as a citizen. Christianity transforms the secular, Greek city into a spiritual community (Pagden, 1982: 69). Indeed, St. Augustine could only conceive of the world, both celestial and earthly, as urban. People who built cities and lived in them could simply not be thought of as barbarians or natural slaves. By definition they were civilized. Vitoria found that the Indian societies also exhibited two other traits of civilization: they engaged in trade and hospitality and they had visibly organized religions.
However, in the second part of de Indis, the part that deals with just title to conquest, Vitoria starts to back–pedal and begins to offer the contra argument required in scholastic argument (Pagden, 1982: 80). There he speaks not of what Indian societies practiced but of what they did not, or rather how they did not resemble Europe, whose assumed normative character had underlined the entire discussion on natural and divine law. Vitoria argued that Indian law was insufficiently wise and unsatisfactory. He abandoned the urban model argument and focused instead on the reports of cannibalism, sodomy, and bestiality which he thought violated the natural order. The Indians’ dietary and sexual practices showed that they were not only irrational but even mentally defective and thus incapable of governing themselves (Pagden, 1982: 85–7).
Vitoria’s arguments exposed the insurmountable contradictions driving the discourses of the conquest–cum–evangelization. The contradictions embedded in the theory of natural law itself were brought to their critical limits, for they were being used to account for the simultaneous, but unthinkable, perception of sameness and difference that the European cognitive complex obtained from contact with the Amerindians. This conundrum, this limitation in European epistemology, has shadowed the history of Amerindian peoples to the present, for “if the natural slave is incapable of participating in a state of happiness, then he must also be incapable of achieving his proper end (telos) as a man. If nature never creates anything which is, of itself, incapable of accomplishing its ends – for such a thing would be useless – then the natural slave is not a man” (Pagden, 1982: 94).
Vitoria managed to cover over this blind spot in his discourse by appealing to the idea that God created man and that the essential characteristic of man is his rational mind. Thus the Indians’ faults and deficiencies could eventually be rubbed out with proper education and discipline, a solution that was not that far away from Las Casas’s idea of peaceful and slow conversion. Paradoxically this idea translated into the very harsh laws and bodily punishment that Toledo (1515–82) put in place in the Andes, in part supported by the denigrating ideas that Acosta put forth in the Third Council of Lima in (1579) and in the earlier De Procuranda (1557). From the clay that Vitoria’s hands molded, the Indian came out not a slave, but a child. In this scheme the king of Spain was the tutor of the Indians. When the Indians no longer required tutoring, they would be left to enjoy their proper liberty. Vitoria managed to dismantle Palacios’s argument on the universal authority of the pope and he even ended up reasoning that idolatry was not grounds for dispossession of the Indians. Upon hearing of this scandalous position, Charles V ordered Vitoria to stop interfering in the question of the Indies (Pagden, 1982: 106, Brading, 1991: 84).
Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda was partly educated in Bologna and Rome. He had been a tutor to Philip II, and by 1536 he was appointed imperial chronicler. He published a tract against Erasmus’s pacifism in order to defend the European warrior code and social structure (Brading, 1991: 86). In 1544 he wrote a dialogue, Democrates Secundus, in order to defend the Spanish conquest and empire in the world. He drew his information and arguments in part from Oviedo and Gómora. For him the Indians were slaves by nature for they lacked prudence, intelligence, virtue, and even humanity, all the attributes that the Renaissance thought citizens ought to have. He also defined the Indians by what they were not, especially when it came to lacking “writing.” From there he surmised that Indians also lacked history and laws, had no sense of self–consciousness, had no notion of private property and were, in general, ruled by tyrants. Sepúlveda’s challenge caused Las Casas to rethink his materials in order to demonstrate that the Indians were not different and that they could be both savage and as civilized as the Europeans (Brading, 1991: 88–9). The Dominican had to begin moving toward a comparative ethnography with the ancient world, a move not lost on Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca. In the Valladolid debate, Las Casas’s job was to prove that the Indians were neither natural slaves, nor “homunculus,” as Sepulveda would have it, but rather normal human beings created by God, even if the Bible did not mention them. By and large he accomplished this task.
The arguments that Las Casas brandished in this fight were garnished from his Historia de las Indias (1542) and his later Apologetica historia sumaria (1551). Probably the best study to date of Las Casas’s thought on the matter can be found in David Brading’s The First America (1991). In order to frame a sense of cultural evolution Las Casas turned to Cicero and his idea of stages in the natural history of humanity. For Cicero, all men in all nations are essentially the same in their nature. For Las Casas, it was not hard to show that the Aztecs and the Incas resembled the Greeks and the Romans. For instance, of Aristotle’s six requirements or marks of civilized life, all could be found in the Amerindian societies: agriculture, artisans and artists, a warrior class, rich men, organized religion, lawful government, and city life. Once again he deployed St. Augustine’s argument on natural enlightenment and the desire of all men to seek and serve God (Brading, 1991: 90). Las Casas’s approach to Amerindian religions required that he really stretch the comparative frame, and while the Greek and the Aztec pantheon could be safely compared, some of the rituals and practices of Amerindian religions simply had to be attributed to the Devil’s ability to gain hold of pagans. He