Truth about Creation: Dominican Conviction about Inherent Goodness and Human Dignity

On the island of Hispaniola, in the year 1511, a Dominican friar delivered a sermon that left his congregation fuming. The Spanish colonisers who had gathered for Mass probably did not expect to be so directly challenged on all that was dear to them – their conquest of the New World, their use of native slaves for the mining of gold, their commercial successes. The words Antonio Montesinos delivered were forthright and unambiguous. He accused his congregation of being in a state of mortal sin, in which they would live and die because of their cruelty to the natives. He demanded of them:

“Tell me, by what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery? By what right do you wage such detestable wars on these people who lived mildly and peacefully in their own lands, where you have consumed infinite numbers of them with unheard of murders and desolations?”

In the course of the political commotion that followed, Fr Antonio’s prior told the Governor that Fr Antonio had merely delivered the sermon, but the whole Dominican community had known and approved of it in advance. This sermon, then, was not that of a lone priest sharing his solitary thoughts. This was a sermon from the Dominicans, handing on long-held Dominican thought.

The basis of human dignity

Fr Antonio was preaching 300 years after Dominic’s own preaching, on a continent that Dominic had not even known existed. Yet motivating the sermon were the same fundamental Christian truths that Dominic had preached: that God, who is all good, created the world and everything in it; that all creation, therefore, is good; that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, and by virtue of this possess an inherent dignity that no one anywhere and at any time can take away from them; that God further dignified human life by living a human life in the flesh just as we did.

There is nothing peculiarly Dominican about all this – it is simply orthodox Catholic theology which should be firmly assented to and witnessed to by all Catholics. But Dominic was led to found his Order because of his encounters with the Cathar heretics of France. There he had seen that without preachers dedicated to bringing people to the truth it was possible for people to reject these Christian truths and to embrace exactly the opposite: all creation is evil; human life has no dignity; and to reject creation is the aim of Christian life. Even more dangerous can be the in-between position, which holds that this group of people has an inherent dignity but not that group of people. This was the error that Fr Antonio tried to bring his congregation to see, with further questions that he put to them: “Are they not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves?”

The fruits of their labours

The Dominicans of Hispaniola were not immediately successful in converting their congregation to this Christian ethic. Fr Antonio had likened the sermon to “a voice crying in the wilderness”. They knew that this truth would hurt. Over the following decades, though, their preaching gradually bore fruit. Their most famous success was with Bartolomeo de las Casas, a secular priest who was also a slave-owner. Las Casas was one of those angered by the sermon, but in time he was converted to their position and became a Dominican. For the remaining 50 years of his life he pursued a campaign in both the New World and Spain, seeking justice and restitution for the Indians, and spreading awareness in Spain of the mistreatment of the Indians. In his writings he was such a powerful in defence of the Indian cause that he became widely known as the ‘Protector of the Indians’.

At the same time as las Casas was preaching in his writings and in the missions, a fellow Dominican was doing his bit from the podium. Fr Francisco de Vitoria, of the University of Salamanca, was prompted by the Hispaniola controversy to consider the theological and legal implications of the Spanish conquest of the New World. Following the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas concerning natural rights, he argued that the Indians were the owners of their land by the same natural rights as the Spaniards were the owners of their land in Spain. In doing so he made a lasting impact on the development of modern international law. The arguments of Las Casas, Vitoria and their Dominican brethren were central to the change of Spanish policy in the New World.

A great tradition

It was not just Spanish Dominicans who preached heroically about the inherent dignity of every human being. In every century of the Order’s history, we have examples of Dominicans fighting for human dignity, in the pulpit, at their desks, in the lecture halls and the mission territories. Over the last century, Dominicans have been active in opposing apartheid, in seeking fairer economic and labour conditions for all, and in arguing for uses of biotechnology that preserve and protect human life. But these are only some areas of preaching. Whenever a Dominican preaches the Gospel, he is telling the truth about creation and implicitly recognises in his listeners their dignity as children of God. No Dominican knows for certain how and to whom he will be preaching next, but as long as he tells the truth about God and humanity he can be sure that he is preaching in the Dominican tradition.