The conquest of humanity

Sepúlveda’s Democrates Secundus is a work of great erudition that avails itself of the Catholic Church’s doctrinal tradition to legitimize the subjugation of the

Indios. And it is Saint Augustine in particular that Sepúlveda looks to in seeking to justify Western domination over non-Western peoples, regarded as sinners. As Augustine reflects in his letter to Marcellinus, “it is quite useful to conquer one who has been stripped of the freedom to sin, while nothing is more unhappy than the happiness of sinners.”

So therein lies the work of Christian charity: in lifting sinners from their condition of sin, in bringing their nature into line with the laws of nature, that is, with the laws of God, by which is meant the God of Christianity. Christian charity thus becomes the means through which to conquer humanity and make it true: once the Indios are made into “worshippers of the true God,” they will “change from barbarians into humans, or almost so, that is, into human and civil people according to their capacities” (Sepúlveda [1544/45] 2009, 97; my translation).

The design is thus complete: if those barbarians should refuse “the command of Christians,” they could “by rights” be put down, on the ground of the despicable offences they commit and of their acts of inhumanity, and they could therefore achieve the highest good if they pay obedience to good men—ones who are “human and practice the true religion”—in such a way that they can be restored to “integrity, humanity, and piety” (ibid., 89). In virtue of Christian charity, sinners who act contrary to the laws of nature can be brought “under our power,” so that they can be snatched up before they fall “over the cliff, even against their will” (ibid.).

What barbarism? Cannibalism and the force of customs; reason and common sense

A little more than three decades after Sepúlveda wrote his Democrates Secundus, Michel de Montaigne upended the question of the legitimacy of the conquest of the New World by introducing a different, and completely new, way of looking at the matter. He did so in his well-known essay “Of Cannibals,” written in 1579-80, the year of the first edition of the Essays', it is here that Montaigne relativizes the concept of barbarianism (cf. Montaleone 2011, 138).

While in the eyes of Sepúlveda barbarianism consisted in violating a law of nature dogmatically taken as true in virtue of its belonging to the tradition of Catholic Christian natural law, according to which the law of nature is the law of God, Montaigne took a sceptical view of the world that sees it as “always

¹

Augustine, Letter 138 (AD 412), chap. 2, § 14. Quoted in the introduction to Democrates Secundus in Sepúlveda (1544/45) 2009 at p. 97; my translation. Here is the passage as translated in Cunningham 1886 at p. 485: “For the person from whom is taken away the freedom which he abuses in doing wrong is vanquished with benefit to himself; since nothing is more truly a misfortune than that good fortune of offenders, by which pernicious impunity is maintained, and the evil disposition, like an enemy within the man, is strengthened.”

Deconstructing the concepts 43 multiplex and ambiguous” (ibid., 150; my translation), which in turn led him to instead look for what common ground there may be beneath the differences that give the appearance of irreconcilability (ibid., 147).

The essay “Of Cannibals” opens with a quotation that Montaigne attributes to King Pyrrhus of Epirus, the words he uttered on beholding the formation of the army that Rome had sent out against him: “‘I know not,’ said he, ‘what kind of barbarians’ (for so the Greeks called all other nations) ‘these may be; but the disposition of this army that I see has nothing of barbarism in it.’”^[1] Montaigne invites us to take away from this remark the lesson that “we are to judge by the eye of reason, and not from common report” (Montaigne 1842, 87).

And in that opposition—between reason and received opinion—lies the central theme that runs all through the short essay: in opposition to common sense, which structures our convictions and transforms them into habits, reason needs to be able to make its own independent judgments by a constant effort not to accept opinions, doctrines, and theories without first having assessed their foundation.

In this way the essay anticipates the conclusion that will famously be arrived at through the principles that will underpin the new discipline of cultural anthropology, namely, “that there is nothing barbarous and savage in [the New World], excepting that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country” (ibid., 89). Conversely, “we have no other level of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the perfect government, there the most exact and accomplished usage of all things” (ibid.). Exemplified in this reflection is an extraordinary appreciation for the relativism we have come to recognize in our understanding of cultures, and it prompts Montaigne to consider how unfortunate the “barbarous horror” is by which we are seized as we judge the cruel actions of others, “seeing so clearly into their faults” while remaining “so blind to our own” (ibid., 91).

• [1] Montaigne, Essays, bk. I, chap. XXX, in Montaigne 1842, 87, citing Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus, c. 8. 2 I understand discourse here in the Foucauldian sense of the term.