Reading the Book of Genesis in the New World: José de Acosta and Bernabé Cobo on the Origins of the American Population

READING THE BOOK OF GENESIS IN THE NEW WORLD: JOSÉ DE ACOSTA AND BERNABÉ COBO ON THE ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN POPULATION by Andrés I. Prieto University of Colorado at Boulder UPON his return to Spain from Peru, the Jesuit missionary José de Acosta published his acclaimed Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590). The book, a reworking and expansion of a previous Latin work he had written in Peru, De Natura Novis Orbis (1588), quickly became one of the most influential sources of information regarding the nature and cultures of the New World, being translated into all major European languages and, ironically, back into Latin (O’Gorman 245-47). In his book, Acosta took up one of the most vexing problems posed by the American continent, namely, the origins of its native inhabitants. Since the early sixteenth century, Spanish and European intellectuals alike had proposed a number of different theories for the presence of human beings on a continent unknown to the Ancients and, more disturbingly , not referred to in the Bible. Peoples as disparate as the lost tribes of Israel, the ancient inhabitants of Atlantis, or even pre-Roman Iberians had been proposed as the original settlers of the New World.1 Despite their variety, all these hypotheses shared a common concern to include the American peoples within the master narrative of European, and especially Biblical, chronology (Browne 10-12). Acosta’s solution to this conundrum was not based on interpretations of Ancient texts, or on far-fetched etymologies such as those linking the Biblical kingdom of Ophir to Peru. Instead, Acosta proposed a reasonable , if highly speculative, hypothesis: that the peopling of America must have been the result of a migration from Asia, through either a land bridge or 1 001-19 Prieto, A.I. copia 13/9/10 11:08 Página 1 by a short navigation. Although influential, Acosta’s theory did not go unchallenged in the seventeenth century, as Hugo Grotius’s attack on the land-bridge theory, or Isaac La Peyrère’s pre-Adamite hypothesis, confirm.2 Acosta’s speculations faced some skepticism even among some of his own confreres, such as the Chilean Jesuit Diego de Rosales, who was more partial to Oviedo’s hypothesis of an early Iberian population of the continent (1: 12-17). But while Rosales merely selected an alternative explanation, the Spanish Jesuit working in Peru, Bernabé Cobo carefully examined Acosta’s theory and line of reasoning in his Historia del Nuevo Mundo (ca. 1653), only to find it wanting. According to Cobo, although Acosta’s hypothesis gave a plausible explanation for the presence of America’s native inhabitants, it did not provide a satisfactory account for the equally problematic presence of an American fauna so different from that of the Old World (2: 37). Instead, as we shall see, Cobo adapted for his own hypothesis an idea that was the object of mockery and derision for Acosta. Cobo’s criticism of Acosta’s theory is revealing of one of the most remarkable aspects of Jesuit natural histories written during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: its diversity of methods, topics, and underlying assumptions. This variety has led some scholars to describe Jesuit natural history “as a game to be played or to be watched and admired, but the outcome of which is irrelevant” (Ashworth 156). Such a judgment is possible only if we consider science as an end in itself, and its history as the history of a progressive accumulation of knowledge about the world. However, a different conclusion may be reached if we consider the Jesuit approach to natural history not as an end, but as means for different purposes, in particular for spiritual purposes. As Ignatius Loyola himself had noted, the study of philosophy and the research of the natural world were not only useful to help students better understand theology ; if the study of philosophy and the natural sciences was done piously and “to the greater glory of God,” then it could be considered equivalent to prayer and Divine contemplation (361).3 Keeping this spiritual goal in mind, Cobo’s theoretical differences with Acosta can provide an illustrative example of some of...