Discussion: DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover

This text is being read in the section called Politics & The Body, along with The Communist Manifesto, Freud, Thoreau and Frankenstein.  Professor Thomas Grieve led the class this time, a specialist in literature from the modern period (1910-1930)

Grieve listed some of the themes in the book:

• Loss of pastoral world
• Class system
• War

He quoted from Wordsworth

"THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US; LATE AND SOON"

          The world is too much with us; late and soon,

          Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

          Little we see in Nature that is ours;

          We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

          The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

          The winds that will be howling at all hours,

          And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

          For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

          It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be

          A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

          So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

          Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

          Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

          Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Mellors represented the world that is being lost.  He is scornful of upper classes so he retreats to dialect, Lady Chatterly has to meet Mellors on his terms, in his world: in the woods (nature), having him speak in dialect to her though he can speak the same "King's English" that she speaks.  His virility is linked to nature and in many ways he is portrayed as the "Noble Savage".

We discussed why Connie chose or connected with Mellors.  It began with compassion, when Mellors saw her as vulnerable and as compassionate.  They each saw each other as distinct human beings - he saw the "woman" in her, not just the person.

Lady Chatterly's Lover is emphatically a post WWI war novel.  They had just experienced a horrendous war; one which made civilization realize that it had not advanced as far as they had been thinking.  This aspect of a damaged generation comes up several times.  At Mellors and Connie's 1st sex encounter, she is crying with all the anguish of her generation's forlornness pg 125
Going back to the 1st lines of the book, Lawrence begins with the "tragic age"

Ours is essentially a tragic age..We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

We discussed how Mellors is an early "angry young man", a manifestation we are not one with yet, though the youth are getting angrier and the abilities to demonstrate or act on their anger are much more global.  The situation in many European countries such as Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain, with 60-70% unemployment for men in their 20s, as well as the lack of possibilities for many immigrants in countries such as France, are leading to a build up of rage and despair.

Grieve provided us with some background to the writing of the novel.  How does this match DHL's life? He came from lower classes in mining town; ran off with married woman, an aristocrat; at the time he was writing LCL he was impotent because of his TB, his wife Frieda was sexually voracious and taking lovers, and making sure he knew it.  For Lawrence, depressed because of the state of the world, tender-hearted fucking is what will save us.  His hero, Mellors holds the power.  Lawrence has been accused of being misogynistic and we found this hard to assess just from one novel.  He writes ostensibly from a woman's point of view yet his writing is very much a man's perspective with its emphasis on the phallus.  It's the man who liberates the woman.  He educates her, guides her, he is the teacher, the wise experienced one, who frees and awakens her sexually.  For me it was quite paternalistic.  I don't know if I would call Lawrence misogynistic or whether he is just, unavoidably, male in outlook and focus.

Lawrence sees sex as a preventative or as protection against the decay of the world: against mechanization, industrialization, the weakening of men.  Some of his concerns are right on the money: the blight of industrialization, the lure and destruction of both Mammon and the bitch-goddess (much as I don't buy into the female characterization of this) of Success.

Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morality

Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Genealogy of Morality, Tr. Maudemarie Clark & Alan J Swensen, Hackett Publishing Co, Indianapolis, 1998

This book was first published in 1887.  My 1st instinct when reading the introduction to this book was resistance.  As I read that Nietzsche was going to be arguing against the validity or commonly held high valuation about "good" moral values such as "honesty, compassion, fairness" etc my defences went up and I wanted to immediately repudiate his 'immoralism'.  Recognizing this automatic reaction, I knew I had to keep an open mind about his premise and I was quite excited to read this text.

In his preamble, Nietzsche argues that if we just accept that these "good values" are universally of higher value, we risk accepting values that may hinder man's progress, that perhaps "the present were living at the expense of the future" and "that precisely morality would be to blame if a highest power and splendour of the human type - in itself possible - were never attained."

I found this concept very intriguing but when I started to read Nietzsche's words I was enormously irritated.  Diving into this book with no background in his previous work (which he says is necessary to understand this text) and with only a superficial knowledge of the evolution of Western thinking to the 19th century, I was really floundering trying to make sense of Nietzsche's arguments.  He keeps talking about the nobles at the beginning of this all, choosing the "good" moral values in order to self-glorify and to differentiate themselves from the "common herd".  But who were these nobles?  I don't see mankind as starting out with "nobles" nor do I see mankind as having held off from having values until some social stratification had occurred.  Nietzsche writes about (43.8-10)

the diseased softening and moralization by virtue of which the creature "man" finally learns to be ashamed of all his instincts 

I also have trouble with all Nietzsche's talk about Aryans, the blond beasts, about noble races, about Germanic peoples vs Teutons, Goths and Vandals.  I don't understand the context in which he would be discussing "blond beasts" and a "race of conquerors (58.13)  Where does this leave all the older civilizations: African, Asian, Middle Eastern - and their development of values?  I don't understand his discussion in his 1st section of "the Noble" and "the Jews" as being in opposition to the 'aristocratic value equation (16.31) and when he writes about Jesus as the "Redeemer bringing blessedness" and being "the seduction and detour to precisely those Jewish values and reshapings of the ideal" (17.31) I don't understand how this is going to the root of morals.  I'm pretty sure that many cultures pre-dating the years when Jesus lived among the Jews, Romans and the various tribes in the current Middle East, valued morals similar to ones ascribed to Christianity.

I can understand his suggestion that Christianity and/or Christian morals could have been a reaction, a push back against a ruling class, so that values such as humbleness, patience, obedience, forgiveness became elevated but I don't know that I would agree that honesty, fairness, generosity, compassion etc are not intrinsically 'high value' morals and ones which would have been universally considered estimable from mankind's earliest evolution.

Nietzsche considers that the basis for current morality, the estimation of "good values" was the slave revolt of the Jewish priestly class against the Roman noble class; and that the Reformation, Restoration, and even the French Revolution, were subsequent slave-revolts against the classical ideal, the noble class.

36.24-29

If[...] we place ourselves at the end of the enormous process, where the tree finally produces its fruit, where society and its morality of custom finally brings to light that to which  it was only the means: then we will find as the ripest fruit on its tree the sovereign individual, the individual resembling only himself, free again from the morality of custom, autonomous and supermoral (for "autonomous" and "moral" are mutually exclusive).

37.13-18

The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and fate, has sunk into his lowest depth and has become instinct, the dominant instinct - what will he call it, this dominant instinct, assuming that he feels the need to have a word for it? But there is no doubt: this sovereign human being calls it his conscience...

As I was reading Nietzsche's 2nd treatise: Guilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters, where he writes about the basic, primitive instinct for revenge, for punishment, for making the person who has caused injury suffer, and how this instinct in a powerful, secure community or society can be sublimated or satisfied by 'the law', and where crime becomes a crime against the state rather than between individuals.   I wondered about aboriginal healing circles and restorative justice processes where the perpetrator and the victim come together with the community to sort out retribution with a focus on how to heal the community, compensate the victim for injury and help the perpetrator heal and reintegrate back into the community.

In this section, Nietzsche writes about the true will of life:

50.11-22

One must even admit to oneself something still more problematic: that, from the highest biological standpoint, conditions of justice can never be anything but exceptional conditions, as partial restrictions of the true will of life - which is out after power - and subordinating themselves as individual means to its overall end: that is, as means for creating greater units of power.  A legal system conceived of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the battle of power complexes, but rather as means against all battle generally, say in accordance with Durhings's communist cliche that every will must accept every other will as equal, would be a principle hostile to life , a destroyer and dissolver of man, an attempt to kill the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret pathway to nothingness - 

Niezsche speaks about how with punishment, the criminal is held back from feeling the wrongness of his deed by the fact that 'justice' employed similar actions (lying, bribery, spying, entrapment - and, in the case of countries like China, Iran, the USA...even capital punishment, state-sanctioned killing). 55.4-5

all of these thus actions his judges in no way reject and condemn in themselves

57.10-14

Generally what can be achieved among humans and animals through punishment is an increase of fear, a sharpening of prudence, mastery of the appetites: punishment thus tames man, but it does not make him "better" - one might with greater justification maintain the opposite. 

His section on pg 51 stating that the usefulness of something (whether physiological or institutional) has nothing to do with what caused its genesis or 'coming into being' was interesting to read, especially as we'll be reading Darwin's Origin of Species in a few weeks and also considering the debate over "form follows function" vs "function follows form."

Nietzsche writes about "the suffering of man from man, from himself - as the consequence of a forceful separation from his animal past." 57.23-24
I'm not sure I'm convinced by Nietzsche of mankind's innate desire to cause pain, to receive pleasure from suffering, from causing or observing suffering, whether to others or to him/herself.  His description 63.36-37 of mankind's "will to erect an ideal - that of the "holy God" - in order, in the face of the same, to be tangibly certain of his absolute unworthiness" was an interesting observation.  He counts that as an example of mankind's will to self-punish, to self-torture, towards guilt and "bad conscience."

It is frustrating in all these male writers to have to read their gender-biased ideas and opinions.  Nietzsche, in his 3rd treatise "The Aesthetic Ideal" writes about what these mean to different groups.  What are his examples of different groups which might each have a common viewpoint, distinct from other groups?

• artists
• philosophers
• scholars
• priests
• saints
• women

So women are all lumped together by their sex, not by their interests, education, employment.  And what might 'women' mean by aesthetic ideals? 67.4-5 "at best, one more charming trait of seduction, a little morbidezza on beautiful flesh, the angelicalness of a pretty, fat animal"

We've read so few women writers and their voices over the centuries have been so constricted, so unrecorded - it's very disheartening.

Nietzsche, in his treatise on the ascetic ideal, writes that (80.11-15):

Hubris is our entire stance toward nature today, our violation of nature with the help of machines and the so thoughtless inventiveness of technicians and engineers; hubris is our stance toward God, that is to say toward some alleged spider of purpose and morality behind the great snare-web of causality...

He calls modern-day mankind "nutcrackers of souls" for our propensity to dissect ourselves. Nietzsche states that in mankind's early days what are currently considered vices were virtues (cruelty, dissimulation, revenge, denial of reason, madness was considered divinity) and what are now considered virtues were considered vices back then (well-being, desire for knowledge, peace, compassion, being pitied and work were considered disgraceful, change was immoral). pg 81
He writes about contemplation - initially viewed with fear and distrust as unwarriorlike.  He discusses the example of the Brahmins saying the ascetics had to use self-castigation to win power.  The early philosophers came from these contemplative people, beginning as priest, soothsayer, magician and often assumed an aloof stance from life, even hostile to life, de-sensualized.  Nietzsche says the early philosophers had to hide within these roles, hide within self-segregation from everyday life to survive and function, to think.  83.19-28

The idea we are fighting about here is the valuation of our life on the part of the ascetic priest. [...] The ascetic treats life as a wrong path that one must finally retrace back to the point where it begins; or as an error one refutes through deeds - should refute: for he demands that one go along with him...

 This speaks to me - I've always had a problem with the idea that our life on earth (and I don't know whether this is all there is - my inclination is to this view) is just a stepping point to a better life, that our entire focus and goal should be towards attaining some other existence, to the point of completely devaluing our lives on earth.  Nietzsche says this devaluation is one of the longest & broadest 'facts' there is in mankind's history.

While I can't agree that mankind takes pleasure, perhaps our only pleasure, in causing pain, I do agree that I don't understand why we don't pursue pleasure exclusively nor why we have impulses of self-denial, of self-punishment or self-sabotage - or altruism for that matter.  I'd always assumed, in myself, that these were culturally-learned behaviours (possibly even somewhat but not exclusively gender based) or psychological pathologies.  The presence of the 'ascetic priest' in every age, every race, every culture, suggests that this is a necessary quality, a necessary human tendency, according to Nietzsche.  H extends this ascetic tendency to self-injury to a denial or a derision of reason, excluding reason from the "realm of truth and being" (85.1)

The ascetic ideal [...] is exactly the opposite of what its venerators suppose - in it and through it life is wrestling with death and against death [...] That this ideal has been able to rule and achieve power over humans to the extent that history teaches us it has, in particular wherever the civilization and taming of man has been successfully carried out, expresses a great fact: the diseasedness of the previous type of human, at least of the human made tame, the physiological struggle of man with death (more precisely: with satiety with life, with tiredness, with the wish for the "end")  (86.9-18)

Nietzsche considers that this negating one  represents a deeply sick, diseased mankind, that "the ascetic ideal springs from the protective and healing instincts of a degenerating life that seeks with every means to hold its ground and is fighting for its existence."  86.4-6 .

"The diseased are man's greatest danger: not the evil, not the 'beasts of prey [...]  The weakest are the ones who most undermine life among humans, who most dangerously poison and call into question our confidence in life, in man, in ourselves." 87.26-29

The Dostoyevsky text that we read this week, Notes from the Underground, gave us a frightening, depressing example of just such a human, a self-loathing man who lived almost entirely in his own head.

All this makes sense when you think about the negative qualities of religion, of convention: the hypocrites, the intolerant pious people, the people resentful of the happy, the light-hearted, the joyful - we've seen these rigid, sour, destructive characters over and over in literature.  Nietzsche is very scathing about the "moral onanist and 'self-gratifier'" 88.29  He then goes on to once again rail against womenkind:

The sick woman in particular: no one excels her in refinements for ruling, oppressing, tyrannizing. Furthermore the sick woman does not spare anything living, anything dead; she digs the most buried of things up again (the Bogos say: 'woman is a hyena')"  88.32-35

These miserable diseased people are also a danger because they wish to shove "their own misery, all misery generally into the conscience of the happy: so that the happy would one day be ashamed of their happiness"  (89.15-17)

Not sure about the mention of "moral boom-boom"  pg 89.8  (Eugen Duhring) - something I'll have to read about.

The sick aesthetic priest wages war, a war of the spirit, of cunning, against the beasts of prey.  Their biggest internal danger (of the sick herd) is resentment/revenge, what Nietzsche calls "ressentiment".  The priest does this by changing the direction of the ressentiment.  According to Nietzsche the resentment is turned towards the self and leads to concepts such as "sin", "corruption", "damnation", "guilt".  III 15-16

 Nietzsche focuses somewhat on Christianity (as the prevalent European religion) but feels other religions are just as false.  Many of them include a desire for a state beyond the senses, for anaesthetizing, hypnotizing oneself.  The Vedanta says "good and evil he shakes from himself, as a wise man; his realm no longer suffers through any deed; over good and evil, over both he passed beyond."  This state is sought after in both the brahministic and buddhistic religions.  This state of redemption is not attainable through virtue.  Nietzsche considers this desire to isolate oneself form feelings and desires is a form of hibernation, of deep sleep and a denial of life.  He feels the Eastern valuation for nirvana is the same as the esteem of the Epicurean, "the hypnotic feeling of nothingess"pg 97.

Discussion: Anatole France "The Gods Will Have Blood"

Stephen started the discussion off by mentioning his experience during the 60s at SFU where the revolutionary/Berkeley spirit was strong and students believed they would overthrow the old guard and change the world.  A friend of his told him that come the revolution they would have to shoot Stephen because he wouldn't be able to go as far as the extremists.  Anatole France's book "The Gods Will Have Blood" and especially the character Brotteaux spoke to Stephen and this very thrilling time in his life.

Bruce led the discussion and disagreed with Davies' suggestion that Gamelin was a modern-day terrorist.  He felt that Gamelin was an idealist, a fanatic and extremist but not someone who just wants to destroy, rather someone who believes in a new order to the exclusion of any other considerations.

Anatole France was known as a left-wing writer and he was unusual in attacking the French Revolution from the left.  Bruce spoke a little about the Dreyfus affair and France's support of Dreyfus.  He circulated the famous 'J'accuse' article by Emile Zola - an article in L'Aurore newspaper.
The Zionist movement arose from Jewish feelings about the Dreyfus affair.

Gamelin's unfinished painting of Orestes and his sister Electra was an important theme in the book and this led to a discussion about the myth, about Orestes as a symbol of a person forced to commit a sin in order to obey another duty.

Brotteaux and Longuemare, as well as Athenais, were like a Greek chorus - the voice of consience.  They don't fit in with the world of the revolution and so they are all doomed. They had a love for humanity whereas Gamelin loved France and the ideal of the Revolution but he didn't have  a love for humanity.

The rational abstracted from the real world can be dangerous - if a person (especially one with power) focuses in on theory and a structure, on laws and regulations and ignores the humanity, real evil can result.

Anatole France referred often to Rousseau in the novel - Rousseau probably represented the brutal, raw nature.  We discussed the country interlude - which was an odd break in the novel.  This was likely a bit of  critique of Rousseau who wrote about the healing effects of Nature.  France felt that you can't just go into Nature and have it change anything.  The odd character of Tronche could represent the peasantry of France and how it is used and abused by the aristocrats/intellectuals etc.

I would like to read a bit more about this time period and try to get a better understanding of the various people and the events.  It was such a dramatic upheaval in centuries of class structure and led to important changes that we are still dealing with today.

Anouilh: ANTIGONE

Anouilh, Jean: Antigone; tr. Barbara Bray, Methuen, London,  1987

Jean Anouilh 1910-1987
Born in Bordeaux. His father was a tailor and his mother a violinist (at a nearby resort). The family moves to Paris when he is 8. Begins Law at the Sorbonne but quits to become a dramatist. He was quite influenced by the work of Pirandello, which surfaced in Paris in the 1920s.  Marries the actress Monelle Valentin when he is 22. Prisoner of war (briefly) in 1940. Antigone begins her 1st run (500 performances) in 1944, with Monelle Valentin in the lead role.  Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh perform in  Antigone at the London Old Vic in 1949. Lives near Lausanne for the last 30 years of his life. Anouilh increasingly disillusioned by French society, and has a particular antipathy to De Gaulle but also the far left militants.

Anouilh describes to Paul Vandromme what the theatre meant to him "Thanks to those spring evenings [at the theatre] in 1928 I was able to escape a little from the long night of my existence."

The Methuen edition describes some differences between Anouilh's Antigone and Sophocles'. Anouilh omits Tiresias, the blind seer.  In Anouilh's version, Creon (Antigone's uncle and now King of Thebes due to the deaths of both her brothers, Oedipus' sons) does not experience the growth and change we saw in Sophocles' version.  In the original, Creon has a conversation with both Tiresias and with his own son Haemon and both these men urge him not to carry out the death penalty Antigone received when she disobeyed Creon's edict and buried her brother Polyneices.  Creon spurns their advice initially, determined to be a strong impartial ruler but he eventually repents and realizes that by holding to his decision, he is dishonouring the gods.  In Anouilh's version, Creon is a more sympathetic man who has given up the life he enjoyed in order to become King of Thebes when both of Oedipus' sons kill each other.  His growth seems to have taken place prior to the events of the play.  Anouilh also omits much of the power and reason of Haemon's speeches.

It's interesting reading this Antigone after having read Elizabeth Smart's "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept." (I've been reading a bit out of sync over the break). Both are young passionate women who are very judgmental and intolerant (as is Werther) of age and its apparent compromises. All three are very idealistic and uncompromising.

It's not an original observation that passion and youth go together but the 3 books I've just read in the last week have really pummelled me with this dogmatic pairing.  All 3 texts, 2 fictional, one poetically autobiographical, have main characters that are young, subsumed by passion and intolerant of age, reason, compromise, survival.  All 3 see age or even maturity as, literally, a fate worth than death.  I'm still coming to grips with this uncompromising view of passion and with the prospect that passion, real passion, is - possibly, likely, sadly - only attainable in the young.  I'm not quite ready to give up on the possibility of passion but I also don't see life in such uncompromising, black and white, all-or-nothing, terms.

Laura was speaking the other day about having watched Baz Luhrman's "Romeo & Juliet" in another class.  She'd 1st seen the film as a teen or young adult and had found it very moving and enthralling, very powerful.  She said watching it in class made her realize the generational difference between herself and some younger classmates - who found the film dated and laughable.  I saw the film as an adult, probably in my 30s and I wasn't emotionally affected by it but thought it was a worthy update of the famous play.  It's interesting how age so affects perception.  I'm finding that about books I'm re-reading that I read as a teen or young adult.  I may get more context, more perspective, more substance out of them now but I don't know if they will affect me emotionally or chromatically the same way certain books did when I was young.

I enjoyed reading a different version of Antigone - for the same reason I enjoy (usually) seeing repeated versions of various of Shakespeare's plays - you get something different out each time.  I did very firmly have in my head, the whole time I was reading it, the fact that it was written in Paris during the 2nd world war.  Images from Casablanca and other WWII films and books would flit around in my head as I read through the play.

Barolome de Las Casas's A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

De Las Casas, Bartolome; A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies; Transl. Nigel Griffin; Penguin Classics, London, 2004

This is the text that I have to present to the class for discussion.  I was interested in this text partly because I'm very interested in Latin America and its history.  I also remember reading a biography of Mary I of England which also dealt with Prince Phillip (Felipe II) of Spain.  That period of time (in Spain and in England) has always stuck in my mind and De Las Casas' book was published, and the events he relates occurred, during that period.

Bartolome de las Casas was born in the late 15th c. and sailed as a young man in Columbus' 4th voyage to the Americas, to Hispaniola in 1502.  It was amazing to read a text written by someone who was present 10 years after Columbus first reached the Americas.  De Las Casas initially was there for commercial reasons, to make his fortune, accumulating land and slaves as a colonist.  In 1511 he heard a Dominican priest preach a sermon on the text "a voice crying in the wilderness", denouncing the Spanish treatment of the aboriginal peoples in the Americas.  De Las Casas was also present during Velasquez' brutal invasion of Cuba in 1513 - and he was horrified by what he saw.  His attitudes began to change and he started to protest the brutality used by the Spaniards as they invaded and took over the governance of the Americas, subjugating and tyrannizing the local inhabitants.  Initially De Las Casas objected to the brutality, greed and dishonesty but still thought that governing the local peoples was just if it were done more cooperatively and less brutally.  De Las Casas became ordained and travelled back and forth from Spain to the Americas speaking about what was going on in the Americas and preaching reform.  He received approval from Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor) to set up farming communities in what is now Venezuela where Spanish settlers would try to live in peace with the local people.  His vision was betrayed by the greed and non-cooperation of the settlers.  Their continued slave trade angered the indigenous peoples leading to violence and counter-violence and De Las Casas' project failed.

He was devastated by this failure and retreated to a Dominican monastery for many years.  He began to write and to read many philosophers.  It was this time period that led him to change his thinking about the rights of the indigenous peoples.  When he left the monastery in 1530, he became a very outspoken and dedicated proponent, not only of an end to the brutality and venality practiced by the Spaniards but of the rights of the indigenous people to their land and property.  He did not go so far as to think that Spain had no right to be there (Pope Constantine had granted sovereignty to Spain over all the "newly discovered" lands across the Atlantic Ocean, via the 'Donation of Constantine') but De Las Casas did feel that Spanish sovereignty provided citizenship rights to the indigenous people as well as their pre-existing rights to their property.  He also felt that natural laws, laws of humanity, required just treatment of the native people.

De Las Casas - important dates:

1484	Born in Seville to Pedro de Las Casas, a merchant who travelled to the Indies with Columbus
1502	Leaves Spain for Hispaniola
1511	Listens to a sermon by Dominican priest, Father Antonio de Montesinos, denouncing Spain's treatment of the AmerIndians.
1513	Present during the violent, bloody conquest of Cuba led by Diego Velazquez.
1515	Returns to Spain to plead the AmerIndian cause before King Ferdinand.
1516	Returns to America as a member of a commission sent to investigate the treatment of the Indians.
1519	Returns to Spain once more.
1520	Presents a defense of the AmerIndian to King Charles I (Emperor Charles V) The king supports his plan to build a colony in present-day Venezuela inhabited by both Spanish and free Indians.
1522	In January, after more than a year of continuous opposition of local encomenderos who incite AmerIndian attacks on the farmers, the experiment fails.
1523	Disappointed, Las Casas joins the Dominicans in Santo Domingo and focuses his energy on writing, begins both Apologetica historia de las Indias and Historia de Las Indies.
1530	Returned to Spain and obtained a royal decree prohibiting the enforcement of slavery in Peru which he delivered personally.
1537	Receives some support from the Pope in the form of Paul III's bull Sublimis Deus which declared the American AmerIndians as rational beings with souls and that their lives and property should be protected.
1542	Returns to Spain where he convinced Charles I to signs the "New Laws" which prohibited AmerIndian slavery and attempted to put an end to the encomienda system by limiting ownership of serfs to a single generation. Writes "A brief report on the Destruction of the Indians," which horrifies the court.
1544	To ensure enforcement of the laws he is named bishop of Chiapas in Guatemala - meets immediate opposition. He declares that any Spaniard who refuse to release his AmerIndians is to be denied absolution. A year later the inheritance limitation is rescinded by Charles V.
1547	Returns to Spain and gives up his episcopal dignity. Becomes an influential figure at court and at the Council of the Indies.
1550	Meets Sepulveda in the famous debate at the Council of Valladolid.
1552	Publishes The Destruction of the Indies. Spends the next fourteen years writing and appearing at court and councils in defense of the Indians.
1566	Dies in Madrid and buried in the convent chapel of Our Lady of Atocha.
1875	Historia de las Indias first published.

De Las Casas spent most of his adult life travelling through the Americas and back and forth to Spain, arguing for, preaching and educating about reform of Spanish rule in the Americas.  He initially advocated only for gentler treatment (the doctrine of peaceful conversion), he then progressed to supporting the legal rights of the indigenous peoples and was instrumental in several laws being passed by the Spanish monarchy to protect the indigenous people though these rights were not upheld by the Spanish conquistadors, settlers and some greedy clergy in the Americas.  Eventually De Las Casas became more radicalized and began to use his clerical office to try and compel change, by threatening excommunication or withholding absolution to those not adhering to the revised laws.

By the end of his lifetime he had seen 3 monarchies govern over the Americas (Ferdinand & Isabella, Charles I/V and Felipe II) with little improvement in the conditions for the local people.  He had argued his cause in many forums, had circulated his writings which not only shocked those in Spain but reached a wider audience in Europe.  Though he didn't see much improvement in his lifetime, conditions slowly began to change as the power of the initial conquistadors was curtailed and the encomiendero system was abolished.  

De Las Casas' text is difficult to read only because of its subject matter.  He goes through each country, roughly in the order in which they were "conquered" and the littany of brutal oppression, treachery, greed is very hard to read about.  He reports about one native leader who was about to be executed.  Asked to convert to Christianity/Catholicism so that he would have a chance at Heaven after he died, the local leader asked if the Spaniards around him were examples of Christians and would they be going to Heaven.  When he was told 'yes' he said that in this case he did not wish any chance of going to Heaven.
It's difficult to consider that human beings can do this to any living creature much less to other human beings.  I can't help but think of what it would have been like for the local people to have the Spaniards arrive and to then suffer such change, brutality and oppression.

When you try to explain it by saying those were brutal times you then run up against De Las Casas and the other clerics who spoke out against the brutality and were able to see and recognize the injustice.  Was it a matter of education?  Was it a matter of the type of person who would have been on those voyages of exploration (education, class, situation, greed, fitness for society?).

What was happening in Europe at the time?

15th century Spain:

• Uniting of five kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula: Castile, Aragón (which included Catalonia, Valencia, the kingdom of Naples, Sardinia and Sicily), Granada, Navarre and Portugal. By early in the 16th century they had been reduced to two: Castile/Aragón and Portugal.
• Castile and Aragón were united in the late 15th century through the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragón (tiny Navarre was swallowed by Aragón in 1513). 
•  The marriage between Isabel and Ferdinand in 1469  (she was 18 and he was 17) 
•  By January 1492, Granada was in Spanish hands.  Granada was the last Muslim kingdom of the once powerful al-Andalus and Isabella and Ferdinand saw its conquest as a necessary step for consolidating their political power and for religious uniformity in the peninsula. 
• The terms of surrender were generous and included freedom of religion. Religious conformity, however, was still the overall objective of the Christians. Already on March 31, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabel signed an edict giving Jews four months to accept baptism or go into exile; by 1501 the Muslims faced the same choice.
•  Christianity was now the common bond that held Spaniards together.  There was widespread suspicion that their conversion was not genuine.  This was not a new phenomenon; the 15th century had seen an explosion of Jews accepting baptism.  Many were sincere in their new faith, many others continued to practice their Judaic faith in secret. It was to investigate the suspicion of heresy amongst Conversos that the infamous Inquisition was introduced into Castile in 1478.
• Under the Mongol Empire's hegemony over Asia, Europeans had long enjoyed a safe land passage, the 'Silk Road', to China and India. After the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire (Turks) in 1453, the land route to Asia difficult and dangerous. A sea route to the Indies was needed.
• Portugal had made advances in navigation, allowing for more ambitious voyages & explorations.
•  Late 15^th c., the Catholic monarchs had just completed an expensive campaign in the Iberian Peninsula (la Reconquista), reconquering Granada, and were desperate for money. Columbus’ proposed search for a new route to the Indies promised access to these riches.  He 1^st sailed to Americas in August 1492

16^th Century  -  Golden Age for Spain

At the beginning of the 16th century, there was a general feeling of pride and self confidence in Spain. 

Further impetus to the general air of confidence was given by two far-reaching events:

• the “discovery” of America (Las Indias) by Christopher Columbus in 1492
• the accession in 1516 to the Spanish throne of the powerful Hapsburg family of central Europe.

With the discovery of Las Indias and the acquisition of vast new lands, Spain embarked on transatlantic imperial conquests.  With the accession of the Hapsburg Carlos I to the Spanish throne, Spain suddenly acquired large areas of central and northern Europe.

From the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand in 1469 there grew within about 55 years an imperial power whose possessions included large areas in Europe and America, and whose reach even stretched across the Pacific (the first voyage around the world was completed in 1522, led by the Portuguese explorer Magellan but under Spanish auspices).

The arranged marriage of Ferdinand and Isabel`s youngest daughter, Juana, to the son of the Hapsburg emperor, Maximilian I lead to the establishment of the Hapsburg dynasty in Spain by their son, Charles.

Charles I/V (1500-1558; ruled Spain 1516-56, Holy Roman Emperor 1519-58)

Charles I/V had large imperial ambitions, costly ambitions.  He requested money in pursuit of the office of Holy Roman Emperor (HRE) and did become HRE (as Charles V) in 1519.  His priorities extended beyond Spain, with high costs to the Spanish treasury. Of the 40 years that Charles ruled, he spent only 16 in Spain; in the last 13 years of his reign he didn’t set foot in Spain. His son, and successor, Felipe II, in contrast, was devoted to and spent most of his time in Spain.

Charles won Spaniards over by identifying them increasingly with the mission of defending Catholicism. His struggle with the threat of heretical Protestants in Northern Europe and with Ottoman (Turkish) activities in the Mediterranean recalled the crusading spirit of the Reconquista, which was still relatively fresh in the collective Spanish memory. 

The costs of defending imperial (HRE) and Catholic interests were enormous. The only recourse was to borrow money against the future gold and silver coming from the Americas. However, Spain had lost a large part of its own banking resources with the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, so the borrowed money came mainly from established bankers in Germany (Fuggers) and Genoa (Italy).  At one point parts of South America were granted by Spain to German banking interests.  I’ve always wondered a bit at the amount of German interests in South America as I didn’t think of Germany as having colonizing interests so far away.  It makes sense now.

SPAIN in the AMERICAS

Two rationalizations put forth for the Spanish Invasion of the Americas and their actions towards the indigenous peoples:

• 1.     There was the moral framework of the ‘just war’.
• 2.     Justification under Aristotelian concept of “natural slaves”

Thomas Aquinas had asked whether war was "always" sinful.  There was a general presumption against the shedding of blood.  The pacifists understood this prohibition to be absolute, while the ‘just war’ theorists maintained the prohibition could be overridden provided certain conditions were fulfilled.

The Thomistic tradition of just war identified three conditions for a war to be just:

1. ·      that it be commanded by a sovereign authority,
2. ·       that a just cause be present owing to some "fault" in the enemy, and
3. ·       that there exist a right intention to advance good or avoid evil.

• The supporters of Spanish conquest believed that rightful authority resided in the papal pronouncement of Alexander VI in 1493 that Spain had just title to the Indies for the purposes of conversion to Christianity. 
• The "fault" of the AmerIndians was usually noted to be refusal to accept the Christian faith.
• I haven’t seen as much discussion about the 'right intention' but it likely went along the lines of bringing Spanish knowledge, religion, advances (iron) to the AmerIndians.

The 2nd rationalization for the Spanish invasion of the Americas derived from classical philosophy rather than religious tradition: the Aristotelian notion that some persons are slaves by nature, born to serve masters. This was the argument used by de Sepulveda in 1550 at Valladolid. Fourteen distinguished judges were summoned by the emperor to assess whether war could be justly waged against the AmerIndians.  De Sepulveda cited the natural slavery argument and De Las Casas made the arguments contained in this text (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies) and in his massive “History of the Indies” and “Apologetic History of the Indies”.

Part of the just war rationalization relied on the dehumanization of the indigenous peoples and biblical arguments based on Battle of Jericho (Encisco in 1513).

In 1513, Martin Fernandez de Encisco argued before the crown's counselors that "the king might very justly send men to require these idolatrous AmerIndians to hand over their land to him, for it was given him by the pope. If the AmerIndians would not do this, he might justly wage war against them, kill them and enslave those captured in war, precisely as Joshua treated the inhabitants of Jericho."  The biblical record of the legendary battle of Jericho observes that the Israelites "utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass with the edge of the sword." (Joshua 6; 1 Sam. 15).

Encisco's biblical paradigm of conquest provided the theological grounds for the infamous Requirement (Requerimiento), issued under the authorization of King Ferdinand, in 1514.  This was a text carried by all conquistadors, to be read out to the indigenous people, warning them that if they did not convert and did not submit to Spain, they would be [rightfully] slaughtered.

De Las Casas discussed this requirement in this text, reporting that the Conquistador’s would obey the letter rather than the spirit of the law, reading the proclamation out loud, at night and at a distance from the sleeping villages where no one could hear the words (not that they would have understood them given that they were read out in Spanish and the meaning would not be obvious without extensive explanation and education).

De Las Casas' ideologies evolved to center on the right of the AmerIndians to their land, on the principle of self-determination, on the subordination of all Spanish interests, including those of the Crown, to AmerIndian interests, material and spiritual. Towards the end of his life, Las Casas ultimately advanced a program calling for

•  the suppression of the encomienda,
• liberation of the AmerIndians from all forms of servitude except a small voluntary tribute to the Crown, and
• the restoration of the ancient AmerIndian states and rulers, the rightful owners of those lands. Over these states the Spanish monarch would preside as "Emperor over many Kings" in order to fulfill his sacred mission of bringing the AmerIndians to the Catholic Faith and the Christian way of life. This was the only Spanish title to the Indies that Las Casas regarded as legitimate. The King's agents in the performance of this mission would be a small number of model religious who would cooperate with the native rulers, with the AmerIndians separated from the corrupting and oppressive presence of lay Spaniards.

He promoted practical political measures like the New Laws of 1542, and began to systematically use the powers of the Church: excommunication, interdict, and denial of absolution to secure compliance with these protective legislations.  Though he was successful in seeing several laws either revised or brought into being that were intended to offer some protection or justice to the inhabitants of the Americas, in practice De Las Casas' efforts were usually subverted by local Spanish resistance or by later being rescinded or weakened by the monarchs.

His writings in other texts show how his views and thinking were drastically advanced from the self-interest at play in Spain's "conquered lands" as well as the greed and appetite for power and for catholic dominance at play back in Spain.  As early as 1519, in a rebuttal to Juan de Quevedo, Bishop of Tierra Firme, who questioned the morals and capacities of the indigenous peoples, De Las Casas stated:

Our Christian religion adapts equally to all the nations of the world and receives all nations, and strips none of its liberty or dominion, nor does it reduce any people to servitude on the pretext that they are slaves "by nature."

For all the peoples of the world are men, and the definition of all men, collectively and severally, is one: that they are rational beings. All possess understanding and volition, being formed in the image and likeness of God; all have the five exterior senses and the four interior senses, and are moved by the objects of these; all have natural capacity or faculties to understand and master the knowledge that they do not have; and this is true not only of those that are inclined toward good but those that by reason of their depraved customs are bad; all take pleasure in goodness and in happy and pleasant things and all abhor evil and reject what offends or grieves them.... 

Thus all mankind is one, and all men are alike in what concerns their creation and all natural things, and no one is born enlightened. From this it follows that all of us must be guided and aided at first by those who were born before us.

In his last will and testament Las Casas wrote:

To act here at home on behalf of all those people 
out in what we call the Indies, 
the true possessors of those kingdoms, those territories.
  To act against the unimaginable, unspeakable violence
 and evil and harm they have suffered from our people,
 contrary to all reason, all justice,
so as to restore them to the original liberty
 they were lawlessly deprived of,
 and get them free of death by violence, death they still suffer.

He also commented on the probability of divine retribution, a factor that had always been uppermost in his mind throughout his time in the Americas:

I think that God shall have to pour out his fury and anger
 on Spain for these damnable, rotten, infamous deeds 
done so unjustly, so tyrannically, so barbarously 
to those people, against those people.
  For the whole of Spain has shared in the blood-soaked riches,
 some a little, some a lot, but all shared in goods 
that were ill-gotten, wickedly taken with violence and genocide-
and all must pay unless Spain does a mighty penance.

I'm looking forward to the discussion.