40 ~ ONE HUMAN FAMILY
of people who had both ‘inborn rudeness’ and ‘inhuman and barbarous customs’. Civilized people, he claimed, were the ‘natural lords’ of such savages. It was therefore justified to use force against any of them who refused this ‘overlordship’. The official Spanish crown doctrine towards the natives remained one of ‘peaceful persuasion’, but Sepulveda’s arguments helped create an atmosphere in which that doctrine was often half-heartedly and ineffectually applied.20
The European Renaissance (14th to 17th centuries) that followed
Aquinas’s time, far from removing the fog of classical philosophy obscuring the biblical framework, greatly enhanced it. Greek thinkers, including their belief in ‘natural inferiority’, were more popular than ever. Fredrickson ’s words are again pertinent; he writes that “the Renaissance was a time of intellectual ferment in which many traditional and orthodox ideas were being questioned—and among these was the doctrine of the unity of mankind.”21
He had previously
stated that despite the attempts to justify beliefs in the natural inferiority of ‘barbarian peoples’ (such as Sepulveda’s appeal to Aristotle, and the theological attempts at invoking a non-existent curse on Ham):
Bust of Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who taught that some people were
slaves by nature. Public domain
20. Fredrickson, G.M., Ref. 14. 21. Ref. 14, p. 10.
“such views could rarely be followed to their logical outcome in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because of the strong countervailing force of Christian belief in the essential unity of mankind [emphasis added].”14
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