Wonder and Exile in the New World. Alex Nava
possession—represented the victory of the “City of Man” over the “City of God.” For the reform-minded Dominicans of the age of Conquest, this victory was almost total and absolute in the New World, so much, in fact, that the “City of Man” had achieved totalitarian authority. Those homesick pilgrims that belonged to the “City of God” were, by contrast, few and far between, like revolutionaries on the verge of defeat, disunited and routed. The Dominicans, however, would try to rally them.
Las Casas would never forget one mendicant preacher in particular, the Dominican friar Antonio Montesinos. Las Casas sat calmly in the church pews as Montesinos mounted the pulpit and began his tirade. In opening his mouth, a dam broke and a flood of accusations and denunciations accosted the congregation like volcanic lava burning up everything in its path. The biblical text for the sermon was the passage relating the ministry of John the Baptist, the voice crying out in the desert. Montesinos went on to describe himself as a “voice of Christ in the desert of this island”:
You are all in mortal sin! You live in it and you die in it! Why? Because of the cruelty and tyranny you use with these innocent people. Tell me, with what right, with what justice, do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such detestable wars on these people? . . . Are they not human beings? Have they no rational souls? Are you not obligated to love them as you love yourselves? Do you not understand this? Do you not grasp this? How is it that you sleep so soundly, so lethargically? (LC, HI, 141)
Montesinos’s thunderous words rained on the audience with fury. On that day, Montesinos channeled the best of the Hebrew prophets.
Needless to say, Montesinos caused an uproar. His congregation wanted sweet and sentimental sermons, not this fury that thickened like the dark clouds of a hurricane. Montesinos’s superior in Hispaniola, Pedro de Cordoba, supported his sermon, and himself turns to the king to tell him what is happening in the New World. The colonists are “depopulating” rather than populating the lands. The Indians have the appearance of “painted corpses” rather than living human beings. The cruelties and servitude in the New World are worse than those committed by the Pharaoh and the Egyptians.35
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