To Heaven or Hell: Bartolomé de Las Casas's Confesionario by David Thomas Orique (review)

David Orique has done a great service by providing a very readable and useful translation of Bartolomé de Las Casas's 1546 Confesionario. The basis for his translation of this remarkable document, surprisingly the first ever into English, is the 1552 version published from Seville. Orique adds annotations in footnotes to help readers along and prefaces the document with three short chapters. The first places the Confesionario within the larger context of the Spanish Atlantic world and provides an account of Las Casas's early life and transformation into a defender of Native Americans in the New World. The second chapter explores the specific context within which Las Casas, as Bishop of Chiapas, wrote the confessionary and the dramatic responses that ensued from his opponents (including charges of high treason and inquisitorial scrutiny). The third chapter provides a helpful interpretive overview of the document and contextualizes it within the medieval canon law and summa confessorum tradition (although, unfortunately, not the broader early modern context of confessional manuals nor the substantial historiography that they have engendered).

The Confesionario itself is an astonishing and brave document written to provide guidance for confessors in Las Casas's diocese. As Orique indicates, it follows the pattern established in Las Casas's earlier labors to tie together restitution, justice, and salvation (p.17). In particular, the Confesionario ordered confessors of conquistadors, encomenderos, slave owners, and, indeed, all Spaniards in the Indies (since he claims there were none who "acted in good faith" [p. 77]) to make restitution for the various ways in which they had robbed, oppressed, mistreated, or perpetrated violence of any kind upon the native inhabitants of the land. This might even entail handing over their entire estates. Failure to comply was to be met with exclusion from the Eucharist, a meaningful threat in a society that was organized around the annual Easter Duty and that saw sacramental grace as essential for salvation. By obeying these rules, the bishop asserted, "the conscience of the penitent will be assured, the aggrieved and the deprived will attain justice, and the confessor will fulfill his duty…" (p. 99).

As that last phrase suggests, much of the burden for carrying out this program fell squarely on the confessors themselves, who were charged with implementing the bishop's plan. He bound them to comply, lest by granting absolution they become "companion[s] and participant[s] in the crime and sin of the one who robs and destroys his neighbors" (p. 105). This gestures at the way in which Las Casas was attempting to establish a tightly regulated system of confessional oversight that would allow him to refashion social, economic, and ethical relations within his diocese.

Frustratingly, the book does not effectively describe the consequences of that plan. Orique notes that Dominicans in New Spain supported it from 1546 and that, from 1560, mendicants in Peru also came on board (p. 69). But what does this mean? To what extent were conquistadors and encomenderos successfully pressured (if ever) to actually make restitution? One longs for a more explicit answer to this question.

Professors will find this short text valuable for a variety of undergraduate courses. I expect that Las Casas's activist bent will intrigue many students. It might be effectively paired with Anthony Pagden's edition of Francisco de Vitoria Political Writings or, indeed, with a number of the "Latin American Originals" published by Pennsylvania State University Press, the series within which this book appeared.