Bartolomé de las Casas · Politics
Las Casas’s theory of missions in <em>The Only Way</em> (De unico modo): that there is one and only legitimate method of drawing people to the true faith - gentle persuasion of the understanding and the will - and that conversion by force is a contradiction in terms.
Before Las Casas was famous as the scourge of the conquistadors, he worked out the positive doctrine that underlies all his protest: a theory of how the Christian faith may and may not be spread. He set it down in a Latin treatise, De unico vocationis modo omnium gentium ad veram religionem - The Only Way of Drawing All Peoples to the True Religion, written in the 1530s. Its thesis is announced in its title. There is not a range of acceptable missionary methods, gentle ones preferable and harsh ones tolerable in a pinch. There is one way, single and universal, appointed by God for every people, in every place, at every time: to teach the understanding by reasons and to move the will gently, by persuasion and invitation. Preaching, example, and love are not just the nicest means of evangelization; they are the only legitimate ones. War, conquest, terror, and forced baptism are not a rougher road to the same destination. They are a road that does not arrive at all.
The doctrine of The Only Way is not a soft-hearted preference; it is a strict deduction from Las Casas’s view of human nature - the same view we met in his defence of native rights. If all human beings are rational, then all human beings come to belief in the way rational creatures come to belief: through understanding and free assent. There is no back door. The way you must approach a rational mind, whether Greek or Roman or Aztec, is by addressing its reason and appealing to its will, because that is simply what a mind is. Hence the method is universal - ‘common to all the world’ - precisely because rationality is universal. This is why the theory of missions and the defence of the Indians are one argument, not two. To hold that the native peoples are rational is already to hold that they must be evangelized by persuasion, since that is the only thing that works on a rational being. Sepúlveda’s conquest-then-conversion and Las Casas’s persuasion-only are downstream of their opposed views of who the Indians are.
Las Casas anchored his doctrine in the example of Christ and the apostles. How, he asked, did the faith spread in the first place? Not by imperial armies conquering the ancient world and then baptizing the survivors at sword-point, but by preachers - poor, unarmed, often persecuted men - who went out, taught, argued, suffered, and won hearts by the truth of their message and the holiness of their lives. Christ sent his disciples as sheep among wolves, not as wolves among sheep; he told them to teach and to preach, not to conquer. The whole apostolic model is one of persuasion, patience, and voluntary acceptance, and Las Casas argued that this model is not a historical accident but the divinely appointed pattern for all time. The conquistadors had inverted it exactly: they came as wolves, made war first and preached after, and called the result Christianity. For Las Casas this was not zealous evangelization gone slightly wrong; it was the precise opposite of the Gospel it claimed to serve - the method of the persecutors dressed up as the method of the apostles.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that in The Only Way Las Casas argued there is a single legitimate method of evangelization - peaceful persuasion of reason and will, common to all peoples and all times - and that force is not merely a worse method but no method at all, because compelled belief is not belief. Explain why his theory of mis…
Leads to John Locke.
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