ABSTRACT
In short, although Las Casas, as befitted a good Dominican, strained to locate arguments in Aristotle and Aquinas to buttress his case, he was profoundly Augustinian both in natural temper and in his moral and political philosophy. It should be remembered that he entered the Dominican Order at the age of 40, and until then had more studied canon law than theology. The works by which he is remembered comprise a narrative history, an original exercise in comparative ethnography and several polemical tracts, all written in Spanish and far removed from the calm scholastic style of Vitoria or de Soto. Moreover, if in his defence of the Indians Las Casas relied on Thomist principles of natural law, in his attack on the conquerors, an attack which he maintained for half a century, he questioned the very legitimacy of Spanish dominion in the New World. True, he accepted the Papal Donation as the foundation of Spain's sovereignty, but in his insistence on royal authority, on the government of a viceroy backed by a military garrison, he displayed an absolutist bias common to much Augustinian political theory in the sixteenth century. Whereas the conquerors aspired to create a feudal society in the New World, based on a contractual relation with the Crown, Las Casas denied their claims any justice and looked to the Crown to install a protectorate, with Viceroys governing the Indian community through the mediation of the mendicant orders. If, throughout his career, he obtained a hearing at court, it was surely because he always exalted royal power, investing its authority with a providential aura. In regard to the colonists, the defender of the Indians was thus an architect of Habsburg absolutism.30
