Band 4, Heft 2 - Special Issue: Early Modern Theologies of Race in the Age of European Expansion

The first global debate about racial admixture originated in the exegesis of papal privileges designed to aid Catholic converts in Spanish and Portuguese Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Later Scholastics contributed to the ontology of race by aligning religious status with origins, or blood, in ways that departed from raging controversies around Jewish and Muslim converts to Catholicism. Through recourse to seventeenth-century probabilism, these moral theologians and canonists debated the meaning of the term mestizos , a Spanish term that appeared alongside the Latin mixtim progeniti (“mixed offspring”) in marriage privileges granted to neophytes in colonial contexts. Were persons with 25% of non-European blood mestizos , or, instead, Europeans? Were mulattos, as mixtim progeniti, mestizos also? The mestizo conundrum, and the opinions and papal bulls that it generated, shaped legal constructions of whitening (Spanish blanqueamiento , Portuguese branqueamento ) in colonial Latin America, and anticipated the moral and legal dilemmas of Brazil’s present-day affirmative-action program.

The 1627 beatification of the twenty-six martyrs of Japan was a major milestone in the history of the Church and especially for the missionary orders. These martyrs were the first officially recognized saints from the newly “discovered” lands. However, while the majority of the twenty-six were in fact Japanese, surviving paintings depict them as white-skinned missionaries and without any physical features that would have been considered “typically Asian” at the time. This paper analyzes this iconographic tradition and shows how it can be understood as a consequence of a process of assimilation of Christian Japan into the Catholic world view. Associating particular skin color with true faith and civilization was part of discourses that blended the physical “otherness” of these martyrs. This paper demonstrates how these discourses point to the first seeds of a racial perception of East Asians, which would later become the notion of “yellow.”

Tolerance is often considered a modern social development. However, a robust, if distinctly unmodern, concept of tolerance can be found in the work of Thomas Aquinas. The object of tolerance is a perceived evil which is endured for the sake of averting a greater evil. The paper explores how the concept of tolerance which Bartolomé de las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria inherited from Thomas Aquinas was deployed and stretched in response to the Amerindian cult of human sacrifice. Both Spanish Dominicans concur in regarding human sacrifice as an evil act, but they base their judgment on different principles. Las Casas interprets human sacrifice as a question of religion. Vitoria considers it a question of temperance. The result is that Las Casas counsels toleration of the practice, whereas Vitoria justifies military intervention on behalf of the innocent.

Gregorio López was a Chinese Christian who, after becoming a Dominican friar and priest, was appointed bishop and apostolic vicar of Nanjing. Previous biographies did not touch on the difficulties of admitting a Chinese Christian as a friar, and explanations of his late and problematic consecration remain insufficient. The documentary sources presented in this article contribute to a better understanding of these issues. Obstacles in his consecration are explained in the context of institutional and national conflicts. It is shown how Gregorio was proposed as bishop by French vicars seeking more effective control of the mission in China. A Dominican friar was supposed to become his theological adviser to settle the Chinese Rites Controversy. However, this plan failed. New documents reveal in detail how the Chinese bishop was engaged by Jesuits and Augustinians to support their position against the French vicars and to defend their opinions on Chinese rites.

Bernardino de Ávila’s Relación del Reyno del Nippon is the only secular Spanish account of the martyrdoms of Nagasaki that took place between 1614 and 1619. Opening as a depiction of Japanese history and society, Ávila’s portrait of Japanese women develops from the admiration of physical beauty and marital qualities to the praise of female courage during the persecution of Christians. Whether narrating events he witnessed or copying and reinterpreting European missionaries’ texts or Japanese Christians’ reports, Ávila creates the idea of heroic wives and virgins who endure torture and martyrdom without apostatizing. As a layman, his interpretation of the events lacks the deep knowledge of learned churchmen, yet his narrative adds the point of view of a commoner who struggled to live and understand the failure of Christendom in kingdoms not ruled by Spain. The article analyzes the development of the representation of Japanese women in Ávila’s work and the influence of religious writing in his narrative.