Columbus Day

Since it was this week, thought I'd write about the man and his times.

The world we know began in the fifteenth century. Not the world in the sense of human history or human cultures, which had already existed for millennia, but the world as a concrete reality in which all parts of the globe have come into contact with one another and begun to recognize themselves as part of a single human family which had been scattered -- a process still underway. The roundness of our world -- the globe -- had been known by serious thinkers since the classical world. Yet it was only because of a small expedition by a few men driven by a mishmash of personal ambition, desire for profit, and religious motives that an old mathematical calculation was turned into a new human fact.

The Columbus discoveries and the European intellectual and religious climate which birthed them are at best taken for granted, and at worst viewed as the beginning of a sinister Western hegemony over man and nature. The last five hundred years have seen the usual human narrative of pain and grace.
But we cannot simply identify the voyages of discovery -- much less the fifteenth-century culture from which they sprang -- with the good or the bad in that story. History is more complex than that.

In the fifteenth century, Europe was recovering from the Black Death of the previous century and also being squeezed by outside forces. Turkish troops had already been fighting as far into the Balkans as Belgrade by mid-century. Otranto, in the heel of Italy, fell to them in 1480 for a time.
Had Islam continued its advance, much of Europe might have come to resemble the cultures we now associate with the Middle East. The Americas might have become largely Muslim countries as opposed to largely Christian ones. Islam was more advanced than Europe in 1492, but in the paradoxical ways of culture, its superiority is what led to its being surpassed. Muslims do not seem to have taken much interest in Western technical developments in navigation, and even well-placed countries like Morocco never sought to brave the high seas in search of new lands. European technological innovation and military advance seems to have been born of necessity, given the superiority of outside cultures and the conflicts and rivalries among European nations.

Speaking of which, the "Eurocentric" forces, of which we hear so much criticism these days, were something quite different in the fifteenth century. What we today call "Europeans" thought of themselves as part of Christendom, and a Christendom that desperately needed to return to some of its founding truths. Similarly, they did not regard themselves as the bearers of the highest culture. Ancient Greece and Rome, they knew, had lived at a higher level, hence the need to recover and imitate classical models for the cultural renaissance. The fabled wealth of the distant Orient and the clearly superior civilization of nearby Islam did not allow Christendom to think itself culturally advanced or, more significantly, to turn in on itself, as self-satisfied empires of the time such as China did. Contemporary European maps -- the ones all the early mariners used in the Age of Discovery -- bear witness to their central belief: Jerusalem, not Europe, was the center of the world.

This sense of inferiority and threat, combined with the unsettling social diversity in Europe at the time, gave Europeans a rich and dynamic, perhaps even providential, restlessness. This restlessness gave birth to a spirit of renewal, of renaissance. There were many renaissances taking place in Europe -- religious, cultural, scientific, artistic -- going back at least to the twelfth century. And all of these played into the motivations of Columbus.

It was an age when for various (and sometimes nefarious) reasons people had the faith to attempt things beyond what was previously thought possible. These reasons are worth looking into. Some have claimed that the Christian dimension of Columbus's personality was just a cover for greed and ambition. These alleged traits are then read as a metaphor for a hypocritical European expansion under the cover of religion. Hypocrites certainly existed in the fifteenth century, as they do today. But real history -- as opposed to anachronistic morality tales -- is always more complex than the simple motives we project back on to figures quite different from ourselves. Columbus combined his faith with new knowledge and interests. He sought the Renaissance ideal of glory; in this case, of an unprecedented voyage. He drove hard bargains with Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to secure the financial benefits of his discoveries to himself and his children.

Yet when all the mundane reasons have been listed, the spiritual dimension of this man's undertaking remains in ways that are quite unexpected.

To Be Continued...