Passions In Sixteenth-Century Spain

Bartolomé de las Casas defended the rights of natives and condemned cruelties committed by the Spanish by producing the radical argument that the Native Americans were human. During his time, early modern thinkers largely interpreted their world through the understanding of the Great Chain of Being, but contested the place of natives within that hierarchy. For Las Casas, the ability to reason defined humanity. To fully understand rationality in sixteenth-century Spain, contemporary historians examine the complexities of early modern emotional theories, deciphering how virtues, sins, passions, and logic all connected. Rationality and the passions linked inextricably together, simultaneously codependent yet each vying for control of the other. Peter Harrison suggested that during the biblical Fall, “reason had lost its control of the passions,” upsetting the careful balance between the two and creating strife for humankind. Similarly, sixteenth-century Catholics cursed because their anger cause …show more content…
According to Barbara Rosenwein’s interpretation of Thomas Aquinas, the passions themselves were neutral. The process of reason acting upon the passions created virtue, but did not eliminate the passions in and of themselves. Rather, virtue moderated them. The process of creating virtue from emotions involved “harmonizing the passions” – regulating them through prayer, dietary changes, or even listening to music in order to encourage positive and discourage negative effects. Deschrijver defined the emotion of despair “in its theological sense – as giving up hope for salvation.” With the understanding of faith or hope as evidence of virtue and the lack thereof, despair, as evidence of sin, early modern Christians who possessed reason should, then regulate their passions in order to encourage faith and discourage despair. This would become one of the ways in which Las Casas criticized the