Latin American Scholasticism
1539 – 1700
Friars used medieval natural law to argue that the conquest was illegal, in universities funded by the crown conducting it.
- Active
- 1539 – 1700
- Where
- Salamanca, Mexico City, Lima
- Status
- extinct
- Tradition
- Latin American
The claim
Dominion rests on natural law and belongs to all rational beings. Unbelief does not forfeit it, discovery confers no title to inhabited land, and a war fought without just cause remains unjust however it is described.
What it held
Vitoria's lectures at Salamanca in 1539 examined whether Spain had any lawful title to the Americas and went through the available justifications one at a time. Papal donation: the pope has no temporal authority over non-Christians. Discovery: valid for unoccupied land, and these lands were occupied. Refusal to convert: unbelief is not a crime and cannot justify war. Barbarism: the indigenous peoples have cities, laws, marriage and property, and are plainly rational.
He concluded that most of the claimed titles failed. Charles V, whose empire it was and whose university it was, ordered him to stop lecturing on it.
Las Casas took the argument into open confrontation. At Valladolid in 1550 he debated Sepúlveda, who had argued from Aristotle that some peoples are natural slaves, and Las Casas answered that the category cannot apply to peoples with functioning polities. No formal verdict was issued and the encomienda continued, but the debate happened, in public, before a royal panel.
What came out of it is the beginning of international law. Vitoria's argument that there is a law of nations binding on all peoples, Christian or not, is where Grotius starts.
How it argued
Scholastic disputation applied to a live political question, with natural law as the standard and the crown's own commissions as the occasion.
What it was arguing against
The papal donation, the requerimiento, and Sepúlveda's Aristotelian argument for natural slavery.
Where it disagreed with itself
How much practical effect any of it had — the New Laws of 1542 were largely unenforced. Whether Las Casas' early proposal to import African slaves instead, which he later repudiated in writing, compromises the rest.
Common misconceptions
That the Spanish empire proceeded without moral argument. It was contested from within by its own theologians, in its own universities, in public — which is unusual among empires rather than typical.
How it began
The conquest itself, and a Dominican order with both a presence in the Americas and chairs at Salamanca.
What became of it
Faded as the crown lost interest in the question and as scholasticism generally declined.
Lasting influence
International law through Grotius, who cites Vitoria. The modern idea of rights held by all people regardless of religion. Human rights discourse traces one of its lines here.
Why it still matters
It is the founding argument that conquest requires justification and that indigenous peoples hold rights independently of the conqueror's religion.
Put another way
A university lawyer telling his patron the deeds do not hold.
Where to start
On the American Indians. It is a lecture, it is orderly, and the conclusions are startling for the date.
The surprising bit
Vitoria's lectures were never published by him — they survive as students' notes — and the emperor's instruction to stop discussing the matter is preserved in the archives.
In their own words
The Indians in question were true masters, both publicly and privately, before the arrival of the Spaniards.
All the peoples of the world are human.
Connections
- Answers
- Thomism, Natural Law
- Opposed by
- Peripatetic school (Aristotelianism)
- Influenced
- Philosophy of Liberation
The verdict
The empire's own theologians arguing that it had no right to what it had taken, and being told to be quiet.