Columbus and the Culture War

Robert Royal, President of the Faith and Reason Institute and professor at Thomas More College discussed his recently published book, Columbus and the Crisis of the West for the Catholic Information Center on February 10. In it, he corrects revisionist history that depicts Christopher Columbus as a genocidal monster who advanced by a quantum leap the catastrophe that is Western Civilization. He shows that in fact Columbus acted from piety and concern for evangelism in light of the expectation of Christ’s second coming, but also for a desire for glory, which Royal appears to believe he earned.

Royal began from a “Catholic perspective,” that of the Dominican friar, Barthelome de las Casas, “the defender of the Indians.” His rhetoric spoke passionately against the exploitation of the Indians of the Western Hemisphere after the Spanish conquest. He said that the Indians were “rational beings,” that they were human beings made in the image of God, who possessed “rights and warranted respect on both secular and religious grounds.” Las Casas “knew Columbus personally and spoke of the sweetness and benignity of Columbus.” He defended Columbus from being the instigator of disorder that existed at the time of the Conquest and among his own subordinates. Las Casas said that although Columbus “sometimes had lapses of judgement, his intentions were good.”

In regard to the images of young, white people stomping on statues of Columbus last summer he said that “unlike Las Casas, the mobs knew little or nothing about the person against whom they raged.” The rioters, however, toppled statues of the American republic’s founders and even “black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass.” This showed that the real target was Western Civilization in its entirety, including even reformers. Western expansion from this perspective was irredeemably evil, annihilating and enslaving Native Americans and blacks.

Royal noted that once school children were familiar with a few basic facts about Columbus voyage. (This writer remembers the rhyme “Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492” universally known by American school children). What lies behind criticism of Columbus today is “anti-American … anti-western …  and even anti-Christian.” Other western countries experienced the same attacks on important historic figures, but notably not on statues of Karl Marx, whose movement killed 100 million people in the twentieth century.

Columbus’ critics ignore that he introduced our current (and permanent) global world. It is a world originally brought into existence by the “boldness and tenacity” of Columbus. Royal said that he defended Columbus in a book, Columbus on Trial, in 1992, on the five hundredth anniversary of his voyage. In the interim, scholarship has uncovered more evidence about Columbus which backs up a realistic assessment. However, there is now a “taboo” against saying anything positive. He noted the lecture that he gave at Princeton University in 1992 making many of the same positive points he does today was well received. But today, such a lecture in at many universities would be unthinkable. History is now commonly regarded as “a malleable background for the concerns of the present, and not as an independent source of wisdom or insight.”

“What is at stake,” Royal said, is the effort “to cancel our very culture.” All that is allowed in public spaces, at least as far as activists and rioters are concerned, is their own “perfection of moral vision.” Royal wondered what future generations will think of ours, “with tens of millions of abortions globally every year, our casual acceptance of pornography, our trivialization of sexuality, our materialism, our obsessions with safety, and our panic – our outright panic – at contrary ideas to what’s standard at the moment.”

Royal noted as well that “the radical critique of the West could not have happened without the very values that spring from the Western tradition itself.” These values include “equality, human dignity, liberty” etc. Slavery has existed from antiquity, and contrary to what is sometimes said, chattel slavery (slavery as ownership of another human being) is not an American invention. It too dates from antiquity (found in the Code of Hammurabi). He pointed out that “it was almost entirely the work of white Christians … that slavery was gradually eliminated in almost the entire world.” Slavery also existed with Native Americans, both in pre-Columbian and post-Columbian times.

Genocide was also present with Native Americans, Royal said. He referred to President Trump’s visit to Mount Rushmore during the statute-toppling period of the George Floyd protests and riots. It was observed that this land was taken from the Lakota, or Sioux, Indians. However, he pointed out that the Lakota conquered the Black Hills in 1776, wiping out the Cheyenne Indians, who had controlled that area. The Cheyenne, in turn, had taken the land from the Kiowa. Royal said it is only reasonable to assume that the Kiowa took the land from yet another tribe. These tribes “did the exact same thing that the United States did to drive the Lakota out.” He observed “how difficult it is to escape the network of human evils that have existed throughout history.” This, Royal said, is the problem of original sin. We must avoid the common fiction of “purely good non-Western cultures, and purely bad actors in the West.”

The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 “sent shock waves” throughout Europe, Royal said, and was an important reason for the age of discovery. He said that while revisionist history of Europe makes medieval and early modern Europe a history of power politics, power politics is in fact how the pre-Columbian history of the Western Hemisphere should be understood. He observed the empires and wars and human sacrifice involved in the Aztec, Olmec, Maya, and Inca civilizations. Idealization of native peoples are no complement to them, he said. Instead, these peoples are being set up for historical revisionism “when the truth about them is discovered.”

Royal said that “we’ve forgotten even more of what we once knew about human history in general, and Columbus in particular.” While Columbus can be criticized, he finds much in Columbus life “that deserves our praise, and even our gratitude for what it has brought us – all of us.” He finds much “bias” in the common contemporary hostile view of Columbus. He observed that school children today are taught that Columbus was a “genocidal maniac” (these exact words are used, Royal said, stemming from Howard Zinn’s revisionist history), and that he was “worse than Hitler” (as he said is claimed by the American Indian Movement).

To the contrary, Royal said, “no sound historian would believe that Columbus set out at any point to commit genocide.” By no means did he kill 40 million people, including 6 million Jews, as Hitler did. The current move to replace Columbus Day, commemorating a key figure in western civilization, with Indigenous People’s Day, based on vague notion of “indigenous people,” with no acknowledgment of who they are and what their history was is “pure bias.” It “is an attempt to cancel our own western civilization on the basis of nothing grounded in the truth or in history.” He said that we should be “alarmed” at this move. Columbus has become a “symbol” for everything people like or dislike about western civilization.

Trade free of the Muslim threat in the Middle East, and gold in the western hemisphere were indeed motives for Columbus. But he is exceptional as an explorer, deserving a holiday of his own. From what is known of the actual biographical details of Columbus’ life, “he was not by nature a greedy man any more than he was a violent man.” He was an explorer with many motivations. Many navigators attempted to explore sailing west into the Atlantic Ocean, and were never seen again. But Columbus was a gifted navigator “with very primitive instruments.” He knew that trade winds closer to the equator would carry him west, and the westerly winds in temperate latitudes would carry him back to Europe. He observed variations in his magnetic compass between the true north and the magnetic north, and the bulge of the shape of the earth near the coast of South America. Royal said that Columbus’ various discoveries are now taken for granted, but constitute a staggering achievement.

Columbus’ religious motivation was substantial. He believed, in line with Scripture, that the gospel must be preached to all nations before Christ’s return. He closely “studied books of prophecy, as well as books of navigation.” His personal correspondence also shows a deep personal piety, feeling called by God to sail to the Indies. He considered his voyages of discovery to be a fulfillment of the prophecies of Isaiah.

Various popes at the time said that Christianity should be spread by persuasion, not by force, Royal said. Also he noted the statement of Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, who was not especially well disposed to Christianity, that Columbus brought a “Copernican Revolution” to the people of Mexico. The Aztecs believed that the world has held in balance by human sacrifice. Fuentes said that “one can only imagine the astonishment of the hundreds and thousands of Indians who asked for baptism, as they came to realize that they were being asked to adore a God who sacrificed himself for men, instead of asking men to sacrifice themselves to gods, as the Aztec religion demanded.” This historical reality is “much missing from our conversation these days,” Royal said.

Royal then turned to the appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which followed the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Explorers in Africa and Asia brought Christianity to those areas, but the only continent wide conversion to Christianity resulting from the age of discovery happened in Central and South America. He related that in the appearance of the Virgin Mary to a Toltec Indian, she had the image of a four petalled flower above her pregnancy, which symbolized the inaccessible high deity recognized by the Toltec religion. Thus, to the indigenous peoples of Mexico, Mary bore the highest god, who would now live among them. Without Columbus, however, this evangelism of the Americas would not have been possible. The very self-criticism that revisionist history appeals to exists from the Christian morality introduced into Europe and America by the Christian faith. Repudiating Christianity, Royal said, will lead to “western suicide.”

At the close of his talk Royal responded to e-mailed questions. The first question asked about the claim that western civilization deserved to die because it is based on racism, sexism, environmental destruction, etc. Royal said that only a civilization with a Christian heritage would even care about such things, because our concern for human responsibility and sin opens us up to self-criticism. Looking to other civilizations with a view to this kind of criticism, one is going to be “very disappointed.” Another questioner asked about the papal bulls which sanctioned the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the New World (and which Spain alleged applied to Africa and Asia as well). Royal said that the papal documents follow the thinking of Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria, the Spanish natural law philosopher. They held that the Indians were rational beings, capable of directing their own lives in accordance with natural law. A formulator of just war doctrine, Vitoria maintained that the Indians were the owners of the land they lived on, and war could be waged against them only to end human sacrifice or ensure that Christian missionary activity was allowed.

Royal said we must not heed “the ideologues who want to destroy our civilization, who want to commit suicide in the name of they know not what.” Self-criticism is a possibility that arises from western civilization itself. But western civilization brought the gospel of Jesus Christ, and its doctrines of the dignity of all people and hope of eternal life, which no other civilization did.