by John Lynch
Foundations of the Faith
Bolívar’s rejection of the liberal state was not simply a reaction to the attempt on his life but expressed a consistent policy that had always governed his attitude to religion. At the beginning of his final presidency he explained his principle of government to Páez as a return to tradition: ‘I plan to base my reforms on the solid foundation of religion and, as far as is compatible with our circumstances, to seek the simplest, the most secure and the most effective traditional laws.’69 His mindset was secularist and he was instinctively suspicious of the Church. But he was too political to allow his basic objectives to be jeopardized by gratuitous anti–clericalism, much less by overt freethinking. He conformed to the Catholic religion and went to church services. It would be unrealistic to expect absolute statements of belief or to conclude from their absence that he was irreligious. Other indications, mostly indirect, are better guides. He attended mass, for some periods frequently, he disapproved of casual behaviour in church, he was scornful of some priests, respectful of others, expecting serious standards from clergy and faithful. Whenever he rebuked the clergy it was for specific actions. The earthquake of 1812 was openly exploited by priests who preached against the republic, in Bolívar’s view ‘sacrilegiously abusing the sanctity of their office’ on behalf of the royalist cause.70
While royalist clergy angered him, he also had reason to be grateful for the support of many priests who rallied the faithful to the republican cause with words and deeds. Juan Fernández de Sotomayor, parish priest of Mompós and future bishop of Cartagena, in 1814 published the Catecismo o instrucción popular in which he denounced the Spanish colonial regime as unjust and the priests who supported it as enemies of religion; this was ‘a just and holy war’, which would liberate New Granada from slavery and lead to freedom and independence.71 Bolívar never acknowledged the contribution of clerical propagandists for independence, preachers who were able to reach an audience beyond his speeches and proclamations. He would have liked to disestablish the Church, but in a deeply Catholic society he had to move carefully. In his message to the constituent congress of Bolivia he explained that his Bolivian Constitution excluded religion from any public role, and he came close to saying that religion was a purely private concern, a matter of conscience, not of politics. He specifically declined to provide for an established Church or a state religion: ‘The sacred precepts and dogmas are useful, enlightening and metaphysical in their nature; we should profess them but this is a moral duty, not a political one.’72 The state should guarantee freedom of religion, without prescribing any particular religion. Bolívar thus defended a view of toleration familiar to modern religionists, in which faith exists on its own strength and merits without the support of legal sanctions. He never subscribed to Rousseau’s idea of a civil religion, designed for its social and political utility and intended to take the place of existing churches. Bolívar was a man of ideas but he was also a realist. This realism did not desert him during the presidential regime, and he sought to maintain a balance between the views of conservatives and liberals.
Bolívar had long admired Jeremy Bentham and regarded his republican system inspired by utility as appropriate for Americans. In 1822 he reassured Bentham that ‘the name of the preceptor of legislation is never pronounced, even in these savage regions of America, without veneration, nor without gratitude’. Utilitarianism offered Spanish America a new philosophical framework that would give republicanism a moral legitimacy after the collapse of royal government. Seeking an alternative authority to absolutism and religion, liberals seized upon utilitarianism as a modern philosophy capable of giving them the intellectual credibility they wanted. The doctrine of utility became Bolívar’s working philosophy.73 He acknowledged his enthusiasm for Bentham and expected the philosopher to adopt him ‘as one of his disciples, as, in consequence of being initiated in his doctrines, I have defended liberty, till it has been made the sovereign rule of Colombia’.74 For his part, Bentham had misgivings concerning the killing of prisoners by Bolívar, of which he claimed to have hearsay evidence in 1820. He seems to have decided not to raise the issue, which he could see was provocative, and there the matter rested.75 In 1823 Bentham wrote twice to Bolívar, advising him on government and, among other things, of the most appropriate way of appointing diplomatic envoys or, as he put it, an ‘Ambonational mode of Agency’. In August 1825 he sent Bolívar various copies of his books, including his Constitutional Code and Codification Proposal, and a long letter on his current life and labour. He advised him to avoid the English practice of rewarding government officials with excessive salaries, commending Bolívar’s own exemplary sacrifices in the public service, and he recommended the greatest happiness principle as the best antidote available to governments to avoid assassination projects, of which the Liberator had more than once been a target. He recalled their meeting in his garden in 1810, expressed his confidence in Bolívar and admiration for his achievements, and ended with the hope that he would soon be able to rest on his laurels and dedicate himself exclusively to the arts of peace.76 The books did not arrive but the letter impressed Bolívar who in reply voiced his enthusiasm for the thought of Bentham, which he described as ‘marvellously developed’ to dispel evil and ignorance.77
In republican Colombia the works of Bentham came under attack from the clergy and other conservatives, and the materialism, scepticism and anti–clericalism of the English philosopher were declared harmful to the Catholic religion. Bolívar was forced into painful decisions, not all of his own desiring and hardly justified in terms of the works’ contents. Convinced by now that the constitution and laws of Colombia were excessively liberal and that they threatened the dissolution of society and the state, and pressed by conservatives on the specific issue of Bentham, Bolívar had to take sides. In 1825 Santander had decreed that the universities should teach legislation according to the principles of Bentham.78 Now this policy was abandoned. A decree of March 1828 prohibited the teaching of Bentham’s Tratados de Legislación Civil y Penal in the universities of Colombia. The attempt to assassinate Bolívar in September 1828 and the involvement of university personnel in the conspiracy further convinced him that university students were being dangerously indoctrinated. To Archbishop Méndez of Caracas he wrote that ‘deviation from sound principles has produced the madness which agitates the country and needs to be corrected by the voice of pastors inculcating respect, obedience, and virtue’.79 His government issued a circular on public education (20 October 1828) denouncing the study of ‘principles of legislation by authors like Bentham and the others, whose works contain not only enlightening ideas but also many that are hostile to religion and morality and public order’. These courses should be replaced by, among others, the study of Latin, Roman and Canon Law, and the Roman Catholic religion and its history.80 The selection of Bentham as a pernicious influence is difficult to explain, for there was nothing in his works justifying assassination of a head of state, and other authors of the Enlightenment were available for those who wanted them. An English traveller in Bogotá noticed that young men ‘of good families and liberal education’ repudiated religion in favour of the works of Voltaire, Rousseau ‘and other freethinkers’.81 As it was, the episode left a cloud over the Liberator’s reputation.
During a visit to London in July 1830, Santander had dinner with Bentham, then aged eighty–two, and enjoyed what he described as an agreeable evening at his house, when Colombia, Bolívar and English politics were all discussed. In a subsequent letter Bentham asked Santander for the name of the author of ‘cette belle Constitution Bolivienne’, which had evidently impressed him. An innocent question and a tendentious reply. Santander could not resist the chance to besmirch Bolívar’s reputation and brand him as an enemy of liberal and republican institutions: ‘This monstrous constitution has been the real apple of discord dividing and ruining Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.’ As ‘the tyrant’ Bolívar fell from grace in the mind of Bentham, so the ‘disti
nguished’ Santander rose in his estimation. Santander did not allow the opportunity to pass: ‘Instead of giving us peace, tranquillity, and freedom he bequeaths hatreds, and resentments, and passions…. Alas, the same sword which overthrew Spanish domination, has destroyed the liberties of the Colombian people.’82 Bolívar knew the script.
Religious orders benefited from Bolívar’s rule, but only in the sense that they were allowed the right to exist. Liberal legislation by the congress of Cúcuta had suppressed conventos menores (small monasteries with fewer than eight members). Bolívar’s decree of July 1828 restored these religious houses in general, but did not apply to those now in use as schools or hospitals, neither did it restore their revenues. Another decree in the same month suspended the law of 1826 that made the age of twenty–five the minimum for taking religious vows, but again the renewed right was not absolute, for in future members of religous orders would have to give five years to pastoral service in Indian missions.83 Other measures were taken in defence of miscellaneous clerical practices, such as protecting censos, restoring the position of military chaplains and prohibiting attacks on the Catholic religion. These measures, even in conjunction, could not be regarded as any more extreme than the liberalism they replaced, or as evidence of Bolívar’s supposed conversion to clericalism. In any case, he was unrepentant. The Organic Decree explicitly listed protection of the Roman Catholic religion as a function of the national authorities: ‘The government will sustain and protect the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman religion as the religion of Colombians.’84 And as a postscript to his policy he later added: ‘Allow me in my last act to recommend to you [congress in January 1830] that you protect the holy religion that we profess, deep source of the blessings of heaven.’85 But these were formal and general statements without great policy impact. His colleagues and associates were not all clericalists. o’Leary recorded that many of Bolívar’s friends disapproved of his decree restoring the convents to the friars and he used to reply, ‘It is necessary to oppose religious fanaticism to the fanaticism of the demagogues.’86 Liberals may have opposed, but not the common people and from Popayán, admittedly a traditionally Catholic department, Tomás Mosquera reported that suspending the law suppressing convents had been well received by the gentes de pueblo.87
Clerical interests were not allowed to prevail over matters of political or economic importance. A decree of December 1828 exempted from payment of tithes any grain crops introduced in future on plantations of coffee, cacao and indigo, and landowners in highland Ecuador were allowed by decree of August 1829 to make interest payments to creditors (usually ecclesiastical) in kind. Bolívar was not likely to object to the provision of freedom of conscience and private worship allowed to non–Catholics in international treaties, such as that with Britain in 1826 and the Netherlands in 1829. He continued to insist that the republic would exercise the right of presentation to ecclesiastical benefices, as the Spanish and republican practice had always been, despite ultramontanist arguments that this required papal agreement. So episcopal appointments continued to be made by the state, though lesser appointments were left to the bishops. And Quito’s bishop was raised to archbishop without waiting for papal confirmation.
Meanwhile the policy of the Church towards republicanism had been changing, in America, if not in Rome.88 Disillusioned with the policies of Spain and impressed by the achievements of the revolution, royalist prelates opened their eyes to the republic and, from about 1820, one by one they converted to the cause of independence. Rafael Lasso de la Vega, bishop of Mérida, a creole born in Panama who had once excommunicated rebel leaders, now disavowed the divine right of kings, basing his republicanism on the right of the people to choose their government. A long interview with Bolívar convinced him that the Catholic religion was safer in the hands of the Liberator than in those of a liberal Spanish cortes. He began to work for the reconstruction of the Church in an independent Colombia, becoming one of the firmest allies of Bolívar and his first link with Rome. When he was appointed bishop of Quito in 1829, the Liberator told him of his great pleasure at his appointment ‘to care for the faithful who clamour to have a bishop worthy to be called prince of the Church and above all father of the poor’.89 During this time of crisis and division for religion, the Church in America received little help from Rome, where opposition to independence was reinforced by its experience of revolution in Europe and was expressed in a series of hostile encyclicals.90 Bolívar remained cool. A fighter for independence from Spain, he never sought independence from Rome. Like the bishops he could live with Roman intransigence and continue to seek collaboration. In Angostura in 1817 he committed himself ‘as head of a Christian people’ to preserve unity with the Roman Church.91 In 1822, in the turmoil of Pasto, he pleaded with the Spanish bishop of Popayán not to abandon Colombia in its hour of need, bereft as it was of priests and guidance:
As long as His Holiness does not recognize the political and religious existence of the Colombian nation, our Church has all the more need of its bishops to alleviate its orphan status. A violent separation of this hemisphere can only diminish the universality of the Roman Church, and responsibility for this terrible separation will fall especially on those who, in a position to maintain the unity of the Roman Church, have contributed by their negative conduct, to accelerate the ills that will ruin the Church and cause the eternal death of its souls.
Bolívar admired Bishop Jiménez de Enciso, a man with a sharp mind who listened carefully, spoke sensibly, was ‘already a good Colombian’ and could represent the republican cause with the same fervour with which he had served Ferdinand VII. He recommended him to Santander as a friend worth cultivating in Bogotá.92 And in the following year the bishop did in fact recommend the cause of independence to Pius VII.
Bolívar wanted to re–establish relations with the Holy See and eventually, in 1827, his representatives gained from Pope Leo XII recognition of bishops for Colombia and Bolivia. In welcoming the appointment of archbishops and bishops for the sees of Bogotá, Caracas, Santa Marta, Antioquia, Quito, Cuenca and Charcas, Bolívar gave a banquet in Bogotá in October 1827 at which he pronounced a toast to the new prelates and to the renewed unity with the Church of Rome, ‘the fount of heaven’. ‘The descendants of Saint Peter have always been our fathers, but war had left us orphans like a lamb bleating in vain for its lost mother. Now she has given us pastors worthy of the Church and of the Republic. [The new bishops] will be our guides, models of religion and of political virtues.’93 The Vatican continued to regard Bolívar with reserve, to give priority to Spain, and to concede nothing to American independence. Yet, in 1829 Bolívar assured Pius VIII of his ‘adhesion to the head of the Catholic Church, and respect and veneration for the sacred person of Your Holiness’.94 Bolívar could give Rome a lesson in Christian sentiments as well as in political judgement.
Bolívar’s government of 1828–30 was not a clerical reaction and he himself did not undergo a reconversion. He had not previously been excessively anticlerical and he had never been completely detached from religion. His mind and his policies were still pragmatic and secular, still consistent with his past. In 1828 he wrote to the priest Justiniano Gutiérrez, thanking him for his concern over his safety on the night of 25 September:
Let me recommend my friend, Dr Molano, who is going to Guaduas to see to his community, encouraged by the restoration of religion and the monastic orders. These contribute so much to the civilization of this country, and moreover work unceasingly to prevent the propagation of principles that are destroying us and which in the end not only succeed in destroying religion but also people’s lives. This happened in the French Revolution, when the most passionate philosophers had to repent of the very thing they had previously professed. So it was that Abbé Raynal died stricken by remorse, and many others like him, because without a sense of religion morality has no foundation.95
None of these sentiments amounted to religious absolutism and none were new to Bolívar’s thinki
ng.
The Limits of Revolution
Since May 1826 the Bolivarian revolution had faltered, apparently lost in a maze of complexities. In the Bolivian Constitution and accompanying message Bolívar reached the crest of his creativity. From then on it was defence all the way, verbal in reply to opposition, active in response to attack. What had gone wrong? We could, of course, accept his own explanation: blame the enemies who rejected his policies, criticize the friends who stood silent. ‘It will be the Colombians who will go down to posterity covered in ignominy, not me.’96 But the events of 1826–8 point to a deeper problem, beyond accusations, involving the whole strategy of independence.
From Angostura to Potosí, Bolívar directed the revolution: he conceived policy, decided strategy and controlled the way forward. He took the revolution so far ahead of its base that he put it beyond his own control and it became impossible to preserve the model of government he had designed: strong, central authority guaranteeing freedom within order and equality within reason. The Colombian army was there to impose a minimum of order, and he was supported too by the Bolivarians, a group of officers and administrators bound to him out of respect for his ideas and loyalty to his person. But the army could not be everywhere, and his Bolivarians, though posted to strategic positions, were not the equal of their leader and some, such as Urdaneta, were more Bolivarian than Bolívar himself. There was only one Bolivarian capable of ruling a state, and on the outer perimeter of the revolution even Sucre was vulnerable. In the Bolivarian scheme of things, Peru was essential to liberation because it shielded a Spanish army, but strategically it was a revolution too far; his political lines became stretched, his military power dispersed. Bolívar was aware of these dangers. World history had long recorded the trend: rulers who became overambitious, armies that marched too far, empires that outgrew their strength, conquests too expensive to defend. He knew that he would not be received with instant obedience everywhere, that equality for some meant disadvantage for others. He had planted the seeds of his ideas, but not all the ground was fertile and some of the growths were poisonous. None of this was news to him. Virtually every flaw in his world was seen, and often foreseen, by Bolívar himself. Was it humanly possible to do more?