De Las Casas on Barbarianism

De las Casas postulates that the Indians are 'barbarians' only by their lack of access to a desirable language, and most importantly, their lack of faith in Jesus. Would that make them 'barbarians' in Aristotle's terms?

In answering this question, I think it’s important to layout Bartolomé de Las Casas’ explanation of the different kinds of barbarianism. Beginning in Chapter 264, he argues that barbarianism can be defined in four ways. The first definition assumes barbarians are people who exude “strangeness, ferocity, disorder, exorbitance, degeneration of reason, of justice and of good customs and human benignity…” (4). The second definition states that barbarians are those who “lack a written language” or whose “manner of speech is strange compared to another” (4). De Las Casas then defines barbarians in the third group as people who “are not governed by reason” (5). Here, de Las Casas actually references Aristotle, stating that such barbarians are referenced in Politics, where Aristotle writes that “they are slaves by nature and worthy of always serving and being the subjects of others, because among them there is no natural dynasty, for they have no ordered government, nobility or subjects” (5). Lastly, Bartolomé explains that the last definition of barbarianism defines barbarians as nonbelievers, and thus that any nation—no matter how organized—that does not worship God is inherently barbarian. He explains that such nonbelievers do not sin because they do not have faith in Christ, but instead that they “are not condemned except for other sins they commit, those which cannot be pardoned without faith” (6). De Las Casas thus argues that societies of people who do not believe in Christ are not condemned or strange (read: barbaric) because of their lack of faith, but that because they cannot be saved and their lives cannot be reformed through God because His words have not touched them, they are inherently barbaric. At the end of the piece, de Las Casas writes that the Indios can only be considered barbaric by the second and fourth definitions because they do not have a written language and they do not have faith in God; their societies are too complex and structured, and the people too rational and mannered, to be barbaric by the first and third definitions. I think that de Las Casas was spot on in linking Aristotle’s definition of natural slavery with the third definition of barbarianism he provided. De Las Casas argues that people of all societies can fulfill the first and second definition of barbarianism, and by his fourth definition Aristotle himself would be considered barbaric. In this case, I think that Aristotle would not consider people who fit into the first, second, or fourth categories as barbaric, but only those who seem to have been born “bereft of everything essential to the state of man, such as human reason” (5). Thus, I do not believe that the Indios as described by Bartolomé de las Casas would have been thought of as barbaric in Aristotle’s terms. I still personally disagree that anyone, however, is born without reason.