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objectively at these foreign peoples and recognize their common
humanity was no small accomplishment, particularly when meas-
ured against the parochialism that has so often colored one
people s conception of another.
Such impartiality could not have been expected to develop out
of American Indian cultures. The Indians of the same region or
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150 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
language group did not even have a common name for them-
selves, explains Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison. Each
tribe called itself something like We, the People, and referred to
its neighbors by a word that meant the Barbarians, Sons of She-
35
Dog, or something equally insulting. That a counterexample
like the Iroquois Confederation comes so readily to mind is an
indication of its exceptional character. The conception of an
international order of states large and small, of varying levels of
civilization and refinement, operating on a principle of equality,
could not have found fertile soil amid such narrow chauvinism.
The Catholic conception of the fundamental unity of the human
race, on the other hand, informed the deliberations of the great
sixteenth-century Spanish theologians who insisted on universal
principles that must govern the interaction of states. If we criti-
cize Spanish excesses in the New World, therefore, it is thanks to
the moral tools provided by the Catholic theologians of Spain
itself that we are able to do so.
Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa put European interac-
tion with the natives of the New World into similar perspective:
Father Las Casas was the most active, although not the only
one, of those nonconformists who rebelled against abuses
inflicted upon the Indians. They fought against their fellow
men and against the policies of their own country in the name
of the moral principle that to them was higher than any princi-
ple of nation or state. This self-determination could not have
been possible among the Incas or any of the other pre-Hispanic
cultures. In these cultures, as in the other great civilizations of
history foreign to the West, the individual could not morally
question the social organism of which he was a part, because he
existed only as an integral atom of that organism and because
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THE ORIGINS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 151
for him the dictates of the state could not be separated from
morality. The first culture to interrogate and question itself,
the first to break up the masses into individual beings who with
time gradually gained the right to think and act for themselves,
was to become, thanks to that unknown exercise, freedom, the
most powerful civilization of our world.36
That injustices were committed in the conquest of the New
World no serious person will deny, and priests at the time chron-
icled and condemned them. But it is natural that we should wish
to find some silver lining, some mitigating factor, amid the demo-
graphic tragedy that struck the peoples of the New World during
the Age of Discovery. And that silver lining was that the encoun-
ters between these peoples provided an especially opportune
moment for moralists to discuss and develop the fundamental
principles that must govern their interaction. In this task they
were aided enormously by the painstaking moral analysis of
37
Catholic theologians teaching in Spanish universities. As Hanke
rightly concludes, The ideals which some Spaniards sought to
put into practice as they opened up the New World will never lose
their shining brightness as long as men believe that other peoples
have a right to live, that just methods may be found for the con-
duct of relations between peoples, and that essentially all the peo-
38
ples of the world are men. These are ideas with which the West
has identified for centuries, and they come to us directly from the
best of Catholic thought. Thus do we have another pillar of West-
ern civilization constructed by the Catholic Church.
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Chapter Eight
The Church and Economics
he standard story of the history of economic thought
essentially begins with Adam Smith and other eigh-
Tteenth-century thinkers. Catholics themselves, particu-
larly those hostile to the market economy, have also tended to
identify modern economic principles and insights more or less
with thinkers of the Enlightenment. To the contrary, however,
medieval and late Scholastic commentators understood and the-
orized about the free economy in ways that would prove pro-
foundly fruitful for the development of sound economic thinking
in the West. Modern economics, therefore, constitutes another
important area in which Catholic influence has, until recently, all
too often been obscured or overlooked. In fact, Catholics are now
being called its founders.
Joseph Schumpeter, one of the great economists of the twenti-
eth century, paid tribute to the overlooked contributions of the
late Scholastics in History of Economic Analysis (1954). [I]t is
they, he wrote, who come nearer than does any other group to
1
having been the founders of scientific economics. In devoting
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154 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
scholarly attention to this unfortunately neglected chapter in the
history of economic thought, Schumpeter would be joined by
other accomplished scholars over the course of the twentieth cen-
tury, including Raymond de Roover, Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson,
2
and Alejandro Chafuen.
Another great twentieth-century economist, Murray N. Roth-
bard, devoted a lengthy section of his critically acclaimed history
of economic thought to the insights of the late Scholastics, whom
he described as brilliant social thinkers and economic analysts.
He made a compelling case that the insights of these men reached
their culmination in the Austrian School of economics, an impor-
tant school of economic thought that developed in the late nine- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
