CHAPTER 1: 1492: The Seven Deadly Sins Tumble out of Europe

New World Mirror and Old World Bible

THEIR BEHAVIOR WHILE CONQUERING THE AMERICAS OUGHT TO HAVE convinced Europeans that they needed to be converted to Christianity. Instead, what caught their attention after 1492 were surprising aspects of indigenous cultures. Some European writers now saw their culture as deficient in light of indigenous cultures. Rather than seeing Europeans' rebellion against God as the cause, these writers blamed European ideas about property and the state.

In New Worlds for Old, William Brandon portrays "attitude toward property" as "the greatest dividing difference" between European and indigenous societies. Europeans were quick to notice it. In the Americas there was no "mine and thine." A stay-at-home compiler, Peter Martyr, summarized explorers' accounts in 1504 (here translated in Tudor English). Land was held communally, "in open gardens, not intrenched with dykes, dyvyded with hedges, or defended with waules. They deal trewely one with another, without lawes, without bookes, and without Judges." Europeans' stress on "mine and thine," Brandon argues, created a stratified society of haves and have-nots, and a powerful state was needed to protect property rights. By contrast, many indigenous societies stressed group ownership of land and generosity with food and goods. This produced an egalitarian "masterlessness" by comparison. Europeans thought the natives amazingly free.

The root problem was Europeans' lack of obedience to the God who instituted property rights and government, not those institutions themselves. In a state of rebellion that rendered their religion unable to integrate their society, Europeans made property and power ends in themselves. European writers did not focus on the root problem but on its surface manifestations. Without realizing the revolutionary implications of their argument, they favorably contrasted indigenous propertylessness and "masterlessness" with European avarice, tyranny and bondage. They used the myth of human goodness in a New World state of nature to liberate themselves from the Christian belief in innate human depravity.

In reality, there were inequality and some private property and some rulers in the Americas.⁴⁰ European thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Michel de Montaigne ignored that fact and used indigenous societies as models whose libertarian nature Europeans might copy. Here were human-centered societies they could imitate in order to create a more human-centered Europe free of the old medieval argument between God and man. The New World mirror showed them their defects in light of their relationships to each other, not in light of their relationship to God.

So the Columbian encounter did not change their minds about their argument with God or even show them they were arguing with him. It did not cause the Protestant Reformation, for initially seafaring and settling had secularizing effects. Also, as Cameron argues, lay dissatisfaction with some church abuses did not logically lead to the Reformation. The laypeople were generally satisfied with "the predictable cycle of sin and forgiveness, the breathtaking shrines and sparkling festivals, the sensuous, tangible piety" they had created.⁴¹ The Reformation was not anthropocentric but theocentric. It used the mirror of Scripture, not of exploration or experience.

Martin Luther's emphasis on justification by faith alone powerfully undercut human means to salvation: indulgences, good deeds, masses and prayers for the dead. Thus it undercut the mining of the church's spiritual functions. It powerfully restored God's preeminent role in human salvation:

The saving of fallen souls was not a process of little lapses and little rituals to correct those lapses. Rather, it was a question of real sin, of a massive, all-corrupting inability to do right, which only God, by utterly gratuitous, self-sacrificing mercy, first covered with his grace, and then gradually . . . replaced with his own goodness in the Christian, in a process completed only in death.⁴²

Reformers told Europeans that God was "a being infinitely vaster and more mysterious than the God of current anthropomorphism."⁴³ They powerfully restated God's side in his argument with Europeans.

Instead of reintegrating Europe, this restatement further divided it into bitter factions. Far from motivating exploration and colonization, the Protestant Reformation delayed them in countries such as England, where people were preoccupied for generations with religious strife. Later, the Reformation supplied a religious motive for emigration, but that was not its immediate effect. The engine driving European overseas expansion was not religious zeal but capitalism, so we must examine the roots of European capitalism to understand expansion. Those roots are intertwined with the fact that, given Europeans' rebellion against God, the Christian religion did not fully integrate European societies.

We must recognize the paradox that the Reformation tended to strengthen, not weaken, the capitalist spirit unshackled in Renaissance Italy. First, it further destroyed any ability the Catholic Church and Catholic monarchs had to restrain merchants' behavior by secular or religious authority. Second, by reconnecting some Europeans to the transcendent God, the Reformation created the ascetic, intensely striving, calculating, saving Calvinist, whom Max Weber and others have seen as the personality type in capitalism's origins and growth. Protestants dignified all labor--not just the priest's or monk's labor--as service to God, to be done diligently and well, thus "producing a zeal for work unlike anything the world had yet seen." Calvinists seemed like Italian merchants--motives varied, but, as Stephen Innes notes, outwardly "the diligent saint (working for God's glory only) was indistinguishable from the diligent worldling (working for himself or herself only)."⁴⁴

Innes describes Puritan Massachusetts Bay, but his words apply to all of Calvinist Europe: "The settlers' providentialism--the belief that they were participating in the working out of God's purposes--made all labor and enterprise `godly business,' to be pursued aggressively and judged by the most exacting of stan-dards." This Protestant providentialism was outwardly similar to yet inwardly opposite from Renaissance individualism: it stressed individuals (their consciences, not their desires); it was innovative; it was limitless in a way (God asked total obedience, but to well-marked rules); it did not condemn the accumulation of capital (the Bible had little to say on wealth creation but much on its distribution). Thus in economics two opposite movements worked to the same end.⁴⁵