Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830

by John H. Elliott

  CHAPTER 7

  America as Sacred Space

  God's providential design

  For Protestants and Catholics alike, America held a special place in God's providential design. `The overruling Providence of the great God', wrote Cotton Mather, the Puritan divine, in 1702, `is to be acknowledged, as well in the concealing of America for so long a time, as in the discovering of it, when the fulness of time was come for the discovery . . .' For Mather the coincidence of the discovery with the `Reformation of Religion' in Europe was part of God's providential plan. With America now revealed, `the Church of God must no longer be wrapped up in Strabo's cloak; Geography must now find work for a Christiano-graphy in regions far enough beyond the bounds wherein the Church of God had, through all former ages, been circumscribed ...'i

  That same `Reformation of Religion', which was central to the Protestant story of the redemption of the human race, also helped Catholics to locate the conquest and colonization of America within their own alternative story of the unfolding of God's design. Giovanni Botero, in his highly influential Relazioni universali of 1595, declared that it was divine providence which brought about the rejection of Columbus's proposals by the kings of France and England, whose countries would subsequently fall prey to the supreme heresy of Calvinism. Instead, God placed America in the safe hands of the Castilians and the Portuguese and their pious monarchs.' Franciscans engaged in the evangelization of the Indies made an even closer association between the conversion of the New World and religious upheaval in the Old. Luther and Cortes, asserted Fray Geronimo de Mendieta, had been born in the same year. No matter that his dates were wrong. Hernan Cortes was the new Moses who had opened the way to the promised land, and the losses suffered by the church to heresy in Europe had been offset by the winning of innumerable souls in the new lands he had conquered for the faith.'

  Mendieta, who stood in much the same temporal and psychological relationship to the first evangelists of New Spain as Mather to the first settlers of New England,' represented a late flowering of a spiritual Franciscan tradition which located America, as the Puritans would seek to locate America, in both time and space. The twelve Franciscan `apostles' who, at the request of Hernan Cortes, embarked on the enormous task of winning the peoples of Mexico to the faith, were the heirs to an apocalyptic tradition permeated by the eschatological ideas of the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot, Joachim of Fiore. In Joachimite prophecy, the first two ages, those of the Father and the Son, would be followed by a third age, the age of the Holy Ghost. This third age, as the Franciscans saw it, was about to dawn. The New Jerusalem would be established on earth, and the conversion of the world would be the prelude to its end.'

  In this scheme of things, as interpreted by the Franciscan apostle, Fray Toribio de Benavente - known as Motolinia, `the poor one', by his Nahua flock - America was to be the theatre in which the great drama of salvation was played out. According to Motolinia, the twelve apostles, as the sons of the `true Israelite, St. Francis', came to Mexico `as to another Egypt, not hungering for bread but for souls, which are to be found in abundance'. The Indians, to whom they were bringing the Christian evangel, had been struck down for their sins by plagues more cruel even than those that once afflicted Egypt - by the diseases that accompanied the conquest, and by the heavy labour and tributes imposed by the conquerors. But the evangelists had come to lead them on their exodus out of the land in which their souls had been held in pharaonic captivity by the devil.6 As these redeemed people embraced the true faith with simple fervour, it would become possible - and indeed was already becoming possible - to restore the church of the apostles in its pure and primitive form. In this Franciscan `Christiano-graphy', to borrow Cotton Mather's term, America thus became a supremely sacred space, with the conversion of the Indians presaging the imminent coming of the age of the Holy Ghost.

  This millennial vision of the first Franciscans was by no means universally shared, even among members of the Franciscan Order itself. Not only was there scepticism about the sincerity of the mass Indian conversions, but there were those like the Dominican Las Casas who held firmly to the Augustinian doctrine that salvation was not for the masses but was reserved for the elect.7 Spanish America, however, was large enough to provide the setting for a variety of holy experiments. In the 1530s, in a bellicose region of Guatemala that was to be rechristened Verapaz, Las Casas launched his own ultimately abortive experiment for the peaceable winning of the Indians to the faith, placing them directly under royal rule and keeping the encomenderos at arm's length.' It was in this decade, too, that Vasco de Quiroga, the Bishop of Michoacan, set up his famous `pueblohospitals' of Santa Fe, on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro. An important source of inspiration for these Indian communities, in which religious indoctrination was combined with six hours a day of labour for the common weal, was Thomas More's Utopia, which Quiroga had read with admiration. But alongside this humanist vision, Quiroga also shared the Franciscan ideal of the restoration in the New World of the primitive Christian church.'

  As the sixteenth century drew to a close, millenarian expectations among the friars were on the wane, and just as Mather was to lament the `declension' of New England from the high ideals of its pioneering generation, so Mendieta looked back in bitterness on the fall of the Mexican New Jerusalem, corrupted and destroyed by the vices of the conquerors.1° But in fact the most ambitious of all holy experiments in Spanish America was yet to come, undertaken by the Jesuit Order among the unsubdued Guarani Indians in the remote jungle borderlands between Brazil and Paraguay. Here, from 1609, the Jesuits began to establish their famous mission settlements, after obtaining from the royal authorities a prohibition against the entry of Spanish colonists into the region, like that secured by Las Casas for his Verapaz experiment."

  In their aspiration to control both the spiritual and the temporal activities of the Indians who inhabited them, these Jesuit mission settlements resembled the reducciones - the village communities created by Viceroy Toledo's forcible relocation of the Peruvian Indians in the later sixteenth century. But, unlike the reducciones, these communities were unconnected with encomiendas, and Indians paid their tribute through the Company of Jesus directly to the king. The exclusion of encomenderos and other Europeans, which owed at least as much to the remoteness of the region as to any royal prohibition, allowed the Jesuits to conduct their holy experiment on their own terms. In their period of maximum prosperity, in the opening decades of the eighteenth century, the thirty communities, covering some 100,000 square kilometres, had a population of perhaps 150,000 Guarani Indians who had been persuaded to abandon their previous semi-nomadic existence and to live tightly disciplined lives regulated by the liturgical calendar and strictly supervised by the Jesuits.12 Economically self-supporting, and organized to defend themselves against raids by the bandeirantes from neighbouring Brazil, these proved themselves to be viable communities over a period of a century and a half, yielding the Jesuits both a healthy income and a rich harvest of souls. But, as transformed by a European imagination nourished by Jesuit newsletters, they were to be much more than this. The Jesuits, it seemed, had created nothing less than a Utopia in the forests of America.

  The Jesuit `state' of Paraguay, as interpreted by the Europe of the Enlightenment, represented the secularization of a spiritual ideal. But, as with the other holy experiments conducted on American soil, the spiritual and the secular were closely intertwined. Spiritual communities withdrawn from the world were, by their nature, exemplary communities holding out an alternative vision of how the world might be if it would only change its ways. It was the peculiarity of these exemplary communities of Hispanic America, beginning with the millennial kingdom of the Franciscans in New Spain and culminating in the Jesuit `state' of Paraguay, that they all revolved around the conversion of the Indians, in fulfilment of what were seen as the spiritual obligations inherent in God's choice of Spain to conquer and settle these pagan lands. By contrast, the Indians were marginal
to the greatest holy experiment in British America, the creation of Puritan New England as a `city upon a hill'.

  It was of course true that the conversion of the Indians had figured on the agenda of the English since the beginnings of settlement - although it was to be conversion, argued Robert Johnson in his Nova Britannia of 1609, not in the Spanish manner `with rapier's point and musket shot ... but by fair and loving means, suiting to our English natures ...'13 This was the animating spirit behind Eliot's `praying villages', the Protestant answer to the Jesuit missions, and the most visible reminder of a continuing if erratically pursued commitment to the propagation of the gospel on American soil.14 There was no doubt that the spiritual and moral well-being of the Indians formed part of God's providential design for the English settlement of America, as Cotton Mather noted in relation to the report of the healing of a Christianized Indian in Martha's Vineyard, whose withered arm was restored through prayer. Quoting with approbation the words of a fellow minister, `who can or dare deny but that the calling of those Americans to the knowledge of the truth, may seem a weighty occasion to expect from God the gift of miracles?', he added his own triumphant conclusion: `Behold, reader, the expectation remarkably accommodated!"5

  One of the ironies inherent in Mather's comment is that the friars in Spain's American dominions had agonized over the absence of miracles to support and validate their efforts. Not all were convinced by Mendieta's argument that `Miracles according to St. Paul are for the infidels and unbelievers, and since the Indians of this land received the Faith with such readiness and desire, miracles were not necessary in order to convert them.'16 Mather and his colleagues were untroubled by any such doubts. Theirs was a world not of miracles but of 'especial providences of God', in which an event like the healing of an Indian's withered arm constituted but one small fragment of the providential order of a God-centred universe.17

  According to the Protestant apocalyptic tradition as it developed in Tudor and early Stuart England, all the territories in America settled and to be settled by the English had their predestined place in God's grand design, since the English themselves were an elect nation chosen by the Lord. For John Rolfe, as for others who pioneered the settlement of Virginia, their migration across the Atlantic was the going forth of `a peculiar people, marked and chosen by the finger of God, to possess it, for undoubtedly he is with us'.18 As one of the sermons preached before the Virginia Company at the time of the founding of Jamestown declared, England possessed a divine warrant to establish a `new Britain in another world'.19 America thereby assumed its position as a new battleground in the unrelenting struggle between the forces of light, represented by the Protestant Reformation, and the satanic forces of darkness, which had their seat in Rome.

  Yet if, in accordance with this cosmic vision, all British America acquired the character of sacred space, one part of it, at least in the eyes of its committed inhabitants, was sacred above all others: `that English settlement', as Cotton Mather put it, `which may, upon a thousand accounts, pretend unto more of true English than all the rest, and which alone therefore has been called New-England ...' Here, looking back over the course of the seventeenth century, he could proudly record `some feeble attempts made in the American hemisphere to anticipate the state of the New Jerusalem, as far as the unavoidable vanity of human affairs and influence of Satan upon them would allow of it ... '20

  Not everyone was willing to accept Mather's version of the story, even in New England itself. The maverick Roger Williams, for one, rejected the notion that New England, or for that matter old England or any other nation, qualified as elect because of a covenant with God.21 Others, more secularly minded, would have no truck with the idea that they had come to America to build an approximation of the New Jerusalem. When a minister attempted to persuade a group of listeners in northern New England to mend their ways because `otherwise they would contradict the main end of planting this wilderness', one of them cried out: `Sir, you are mistaken: you think you are preaching to the people at the Bay; our main end was to catch fish.'22 But if the image of New England as new Canaan held little appeal for those who had gone there merely to catch fish, many saw the unfolding of God's plan in the story of its settlement.

  The story, as told by Mather, began with the providential landfall in 1620 of the Pilgrim Fathers at Cape Cod, which `was not the port upon which they intended', and not the `land for which they had provided. There was indeed a most wonderful providence of God, over a pious and a praying people, in this disappointment! The most crooked way that ever was gone, even that of Israel's peregrination through the wilderness, may be called a right way, such was the way of this little Israel, now going into the wilderness ...'23 The children of Israel had set forth on the tortuous journey that would lead them to the promised land.

  John Winthrop's crossing in the Arbella in 1630 added to the already potent image of an exodus into the wilderness24 another, and eventually even more potent image, that of a `city upon a hill'.25 `The eyes of the world are upon us', as he told his companions in his address on board ship. The covenant among the participants in the Great Migration to build their city on a hill in New England rather than old England was an explicit recognition of the failure of the Puritans to conform the Anglican church to their wishes and to create in their home country the godly society for which they had yearned and striven for so long. God's wrath was about to descend on England for its sins. `I am verily persuaded,' wrote John Winthrop, `God will bring some heavy Affliction upon this land and that speedily.' America thus became a place of refuge for those whom God `means to save out of this generall callamitie'.26

  The providentialist vision therefore transcended the Protestant- Catholic divide, giving America, in the eyes of Franciscans and Puritans alike, its assigned place in the great drama of judgment and salvation. But where the Franciscans made the conversion of the Indians the centrepiece of this drama, the Puritan version of it was exclusive, not inclusive, and was framed in terms of the salvation of the elect. The church to be established in Massachusetts Bay was to be a gathered church of visible saints, those who had experienced the transforming touch of God's grace. Whether Indians would be numbered among the saints was in the disposition of God, not of man. For this reason, the mission to the Indians came a poor second to ministering to the elect.

  Yet it was possible that the Indians had special claims to the attention of the New England ministers, for reasons that were both historical and providentialist - or so the `Apostle' John Eliot came to believe. Ever since the conquest of Mexico there had been suggestions that its inhabitants might be descended from the lost tribes of Israel. How else explain what seemed to a number of friars, like the Dominican Fray Diego Duran, the remarkable parallels between some of the rites and experiences of the Israelites as related in the Bible, and those of the Aztecs, a people whose history was also that of an exodus to a promised land?27 In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, possible affinities between the Jews and the indigenous peoples of America again became the subject of excited debate, this time among the Protestants, duly impressed in the prevailing climate of millennial expectation by Manasseh ben Israel's identification of the Indians with the ten lost tribes in his Spes Israelis.21

  Just as the identification had lent credibility in the sixteenth century to the notion that the Indians were capable of conversion, and had thus given a providentialist context to the activities of the friars, so, a century later, similar doctrines gave a new impetus to Eliot's missionary endeavours. In two series of public lectures on biblical prophecy the Boston preacher John Cotton had expounded in the 1640s a millenarian doctrine which can be traced back, like that of the Franciscans of New Spain, to the teachings of Joachim of Fiore. The New England saints were to stand ready for a period of great convulsions, in which the destruction of the Church of Rome would be followed by the conversion of the Jews, the dawn of the millennium and the redemption of the gentiles, among whom he numbered the American Indians. Eliot
was one of those deeply influenced by Cotton's millenarian beliefs, although they offered no hope for anything more than a few scattered conversions of the New England Indians until there had first been a mass conversion of the Jews. But if, as Eliot began to believe at the end of the decade, the peoples of America were not after all of gentile but of Jewish origin, then - if the millennium was indeed imminent - the mass conversion of the Indians must be much nearer than was thought. While the execution of Charles I indicated that England was to provide the setting for the inauguration of the new millennial order in the west, New England now became, in Eliot's eyes, the setting for its inauguration in the `east'.29

  In 1651, at Natick, on the Charles River, he established his first Indian community. Like Vasco de Quiroga's `pueblo-hospitals' on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro, the settlement was a civil and religious polity, and Eliot planned its governance by means of rulers of one hundred, as prescribed by his understanding of the millennial order.30 Yet although the missionary work itself made great strides in the following years, and thirteen more praying towns were eventually to be founded, the founder himself gradually retreated from some of his more extreme positions. The Restoration of the monarchy in England cast doubt on the anticipated time-scale for the coming of the millennium, and further study made the Hebrew origin of the Indians less certain than it had seemed at the peak of Eliot's millenarian zeal in the early 1650s. Others never shared his millenarian views, and had always harboured doubts about the spiritual aptitude of the Indians. Especially afer the trauma of King Philip's War of 1675-6, New England ministers were inclined to agree with the conclusion to William Hubbard's General History of New England (1680): `here are no footsteps of any religion before the English came, but merely diabolical."' The same conclusion had long ago been reached by friars and clerics in Spanish America, who castigated Indian `idolatry' as active devil worship, and had become convinced that any resemblances between indigenous ceremonial practices and those of Judaism were deceptions by the devil rather than the acting out of vague ancestral memories of distant Hebrew rites.