Medieval Academy of America

Ubi Ecclesia? Perceptions of Medieval Europe in Spanish America

Author(s): Sabine MacCormack
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Speculum, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), pp. 74-100
Published by: Medieval Academy of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2864786 .
Accessed: 04/04/2012 17:50
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Medieval Academy of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Speculum.

http://www.jstor.org

Ubi Ecclesia? Perceptions of

Medieval Europe in Spanish America
By Sabine MacCormack
Where is the church? And what is it? In transposing to Spanish America a
question that arose in the bitter confrontations between Catholics and Donatists
in Augustine's North Africa,' I would like to explain some aspects of the impact
of Catholic Christianity, and thus of the Europe that had created it, overseas.
Specifically, I will tell the story of Peru, the outlines of which are paralleled,
not only throughout the Andes, but also in Brazil, Mexico,2 and Central America.
The works of Augustine, including his writings against the Donatists, were read
by Spanish missionaries in America, but it is not merely, nor even primarily,
the influence of Augustine that I am tracing here. Rather, what concerns me
is to reveal the functioning of a series of tensions and contradictions in the
impact of Europe on the world. It is fashionable, of course, to highlight the
oppressive and destructive nature of colonial regimes and to stop at that. But
this, however justified, along with reference to the all-pervasive power of a
dominant culture will not on its own help us understand the ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions that filled the minds of people at the time, and that
in one way or another motivated their actions.3
Augustine's debates with Donatists and pagans pinpoint a set of contradictions
I am very much indebted and grateful to David Ganz and Michael Moore for their many detailed
comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. I have tried hard to follow their advice.
Jocelyn Hillgarth also read that earlier draft and corrected some errors, as did Robert Markus, and
I thank them warmly. Most of all I thank Bruce Mannheim for his Quechua lessons, and for his
help with translating the passage cited at n. 109.
1 Augustine, Epistula ad Catholicosde secta Donatistarum2.2: "Quaestio certe inter nos versatur
ubi sit ecclesia, utrum apud nos an apud illos," ed. M. Petschenig, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 52 (Vienna, 1909), p. 232. W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church(Oxford, 1952),
remains important; see in particular the concluding chapter, pp. 315-36; also, Jean-Paul Brisson,
Autonomismeet Christianismedans I'Afriqueromainede SeptimeSeverea I'invasionvandale (Paris, 1958).
Robert Markus, "Christianity and Dissent in Roman North Africa," in his FromAugustine to Gregory
the Great:Historyand Christianityin Late Antiquity (London, 1983), reviews the debate and provides
a new perspective.
2 Two
major works on acculturation and conversion in Mexico have recently been published: Luis
Weckmann, The Medieval Heritage of Mexico (New York, 1992; original in Spanish, Mexico City,
1984); James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest:A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of
CentralMexico, SixteenththroughEighteenthCenturies(Stanford, 1992).
3 On the current state of research, see Steve
J. Stern, "Paradigms of Conquest: History, Historiography and Politics,"Journal of Latin AmericanStudies24 (1992), 1-34. On the impact of European
argiculture and industrial production in Peru and Mexico, see Carlos Sempat Assadourian, "The
Transfer of the European System of Production to New Spain and Peru," Journal of Latin American
Studies 24 (1992), 55-68, and in greater detail for Peru, his El sistemade la economiacolonial:Mercado
interno, regionesy espacioecon6mico(Lima, 1982); pp. 110-34 describe the "espacio peruano" which
was also the field of activity of the missionaries here discussed.
74

Speculum69 (1994)

Ubi Ecclesia?

75

that came to pervade Christianity and missionary Christianity for centuries.

Given that assent to Christian teaching should be voluntary, when was it appropriate, in the words of Jesus, to "compel them to enter"? Should idols, as
Augustine himself suggested, be removed from the altar of the human heart
before being removed from temples and shrines, or should they, as Augustine
also suggested, be destroyed outright?4 And the church, was it a supernatural
society not defined by interventions of the secular state, or in what sense was
the church a society here and now? And what role was the state then to play
in relation to it? When Pope Gregory the Great wrote to the missionary abbot
Mellitus in England, the forcible destruction of English idols was one of the
questions that occupied him.5 At this very period Columbanus and Gall on the
continent of Europe were confronting the same dilemma, resolving it sometimes
by force and sometimes by persuasion. Later, Boniface in Germany was once
more faced with the contradiction between persuasion and coercion, which two
generations later Charlemagne resolved in Saxony by firmly opting for coercion,
the shape of the church thus being determined by the intervention of the king.6
Missionaries in Peru, as we shall see, were to remember such episodes in the
evangelization of Europe when forming their own decisions as to how to pro4

Augustine, Sermo 62.11, ed. J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina (hereafter PL) 38:423, "Prius enim
agimus ut idola in eorum corde frangamus." In the same paragraph Augustine states that destroying
actual idols is a matter of awaiting the proper time. "Cum data vobis fuerit terra in potestatem,
... aras eorum, inquit, destruetis, lucos eorum comminuetis, et omnes titulos eorum confringetis.
(Deut. 7,1,5). Cum acceperitis potestatem, hoc facite." See further below, p. 86.
5
Gregory the Great, Epistolae 11.76, PL 77:1215-17. R. A. Markus, "Gregory the Great and a
Papal Missionary Strategy," Studies in ChurchHistory, 6: The Mission of the Churchand the Propagation
of the Faith, ed. G. J. Cuming (Cambridge, Eng., 1970), pp. 29-38, reprinted in his FromAugustine
to Gregorythe Great. For a different view of Gregory's intentions, see Georg Jenal, "Gregor der
Grosse und die Anfange der Angelsachsenmission (596-604)," Angli e Sassoni al di qua e al di la
del mare, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull'Alto Medioevo 32 (Spoleto, 1986),
pp. 793-857. See also, in the same volume, pp. 747-92, Arnold Angenendt, "The Conversion of
the Anglo-Saxons Considered against the Background of the Early Medieval Mission"; p. 749 f.,
the author distinguishes the individual conversions in early Christianity from the "collective or
corporative conversion" of entire societies in the early Middle Ages. In sixteenth-century Mexico
and Peru, conversion was, broadly speaking, of the "collective" kind.
6 R. A. Markus, "From Caesarius to Boniface:
Christianity and Paganism in Gaul," in Le septieme
siecle: Changementset continuites/The Seventh Century:Change and Continuity, ed. Jacques Fontaine
andJ. N. Hillgarth (London, 1992), pp. 154-72; Richard E. Sullivan, "The Carolingian Missionary
and the Pagan," Speculum28 (1953), 705-40, esp. pp. 722 ff., 729 f., 732 f., on the role of political
duress in evangelization; idem, "Carolingian Missionary Theories," Catholic Historical Review 42
(1956), 273-95; idem, "Early Medieval Missionary Activity: A Comparative Study of Eastern and
Western Methods," ChurchHistory23 (1954), 17-35. These essays are to be reprinted in the author's
ChristianMissionaryActivity in Early Medieval Europe (London, 1994). In a profoundly sad letter to
Bishop Daniel of Winchester, Boniface asked, as a "solace in my pilgrimage," for a copy of the
Prophets (see on the role of such books David Ganz, "The Luxeuil Prophets and Merovingian
Missionary Strategies," BeineckeStudies in Early Manuscripts,Yale University Library Gazette, Supplement 66 [New Haven, 1991], pp. 105-17) and wrote about the dilemma of needing secular
assistance to accomplish his missionary goals while at the same time finding his work compromised
by such assistance; see Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, ed. Michael Tangl, MGH EppSel
(Berlin, 1916), letter 63, p. 128. Letter 64, p. 132, is Bishop Daniel's reply, an Augustinian exhortation that "malos in ecclesia permixtos bonis usque ad finem seculi tempusque iudicii futuros"
(p. 135).

76

Ubi Ecclesia?

ceed, but in Peru, cultural difference on a scale unknown in Europe made the
contours of coercion much starker.
I will begin our search for where the church was, and what it was, in colonial
Peru with an apparent moment of equilibrium in the 1630s. A century after
the Spanish invasion of the Andes, a system of parishes for Spaniards, and
missionary parishes, doctrinas,for Indians, had been established. The archbishop
of Lima stood at the head of a farflung network of dioceses reaching from Chile
to what is now Colombia, and the religious orders had established houses in all
major cities and many minor ones. The Indians were Christians, by and large,
and their spiritual affairs were governed by the acts of five councils and a number
of synods and also by secular legislation. This was the time when an Augustinian
friar, Antonio de la Calancha, looked back on the work of his order in Peru,
producing a very large book about it, which was published in Barcelona in 1638.7
It was an unusual work, in which the history of the Augustinian order was woven
not only into the history of the Andes before and after the Spanish invasion
but also into the overall history of the Catholic church, and beyond that, into
the history of God's dealings with humankind.
While at this time the church could look back on a number of successes in
its growth and progress, the institutions of secular government in the viceroyalty
of Peru were not functioning as effectively as their framers had intended: tax
revenues were declining, and corruption at all levels of government was normal.8
Economy and political economy, however, interested Calancha very little. For
him, America, and in particular Peru, where he had been born, was still the
new heaven and the new earth that John had seen at the conclusion of the
Apocalypse,9 the locus where ancient prophecy was reaching its ultimate fulfillment. Calancha thus perceived his task as historian in terms of expounding the
process whereby prophetic vision was transformed into historical reality. At the
root of this view of the content of history lay Calancha's allegorical exegesis of
the Bible, which enabled him to apply biblical passages directly to events in
Peru. Calancha was a very learned man, having been raised in a society that
appreciated learning. He quoted Latin literature from memory; and Basil, Am7 Antonio de la
Calancha, Cr6nicamoralizadadel Ordende San Agustin en el Peru (Barcelona, 1638).
I will here cite the edition by I. Prado Pastor (Lima, 1974; hereafter Calancha). A second edition,
identical in most respects with the one of 1638, appeared in Barcelona in 1639, and in 1653 a
French translation was published. Four years later, Bernardo de Torres, Calancha's successor as
official historian of the Augustinian order in Peru, published his continuation of the story down to
the year 1654 and appended to it an abridgment of the earlier work; see P. A. Means, Bibliotheca
Andina (New Haven, 1928; repr. Detroit, 1973), pp. 326-34. A short biography of Calancha appears
in Bernardo de Torres, Cr6nicaagustina, ed. I. Prado Pastor (Lima, 1974), 3.4.24, pp. 826-28.
8 See the useful
survey by K. Andrien, "Spaniards, Andeans and the Early Colonial State in Peru,"
in K. Andrien and R. Adorno, eds., TransatlanticEncounters:Europeansand Andeans in the Sixteenth
Century(Berkeley, 1991), pp. 121-48.
9
Apocalypse 21.1; see Calancha, "Introducci6n," pp. 19-21, and 1.4, p. 75, where the verse is
cited. Note that Nicholas of Lyra, whom Calancha often consulted, interpreted this same passage
as referring to the last judgment, Quartapars Lyre (Nuremberg, 1497; cf. below, n. 11), fol. cccxlii
v. The application of prophetic texts to the Americas began with Christopher Columbus; see Pauline
Moffitt Watts, "Prophecy and Discovery: On the Spiritual Origins of Christopher Columbus's 'Enterprise of the Indies,' " AmericanHistorical Review 90 (1985), 73-102.

Ubi Ecclesia?

77

brose, Augustine, John Chrysostom, and Gregory the Great, and also the medieval exegetes of the Bible headed by Nicholas of Lyra, were his constant
companions. Such erudition, however, was not an end in itself. Rather, it was
a means of comprehending not merely the sacred text but also the contradictory
legacy of Christian Europe in the Andes: a legacy whereby the building of a
new church in Peru was inseparable from the destruction of the Andean world
as it had been before the Spanish invasion and the subjection of the Andean
people to an oppressive and exploitative government.
Greed and ambition were, as Calancha saw it, the dominant passions that had
inspired the Spanish invasion and conquest of Peru; they were, moreover, passions that characterized political life everywhere and at all times, and hence
continued to determine policy in his own day. But greed and ambition were not
the only forces at work. To show how this was so, how the operation of these
passions was periodically subverted by the hidden agency of a providence that
dwarfed human self-interest, Calancha explored the prophetic projection of
biblical texts and of events in sacred history onto the history of Peru, much as
in the fourteenth century Nicholas of Lyra had projected these same texts onto
the history of Europe.' For Calancha, as earlier for Lyra, the meaning of prophecy was alive and constantly expanding because current events revealed ever
new facets of what the biblical writers had set down. Where thus Nicholas of
Lyra found in the Apocalypse predictions of the manifold trials that had fallen
upon the church and Christendom from the time of John himself down to his
own day, Calancha extended the texts of the Bible to include event3 in the New
World.l1
By way of explaining his order's presence and mission in the Andes, for
example, Calancha cited a verse from the Book of Job in which Job responded
10See Henri de Lubac, Exegesemedievale:Les
quatresens de l'Ecriture,2/2 (Paris, 1964), pp. 344 ff.
Calancha also regularly cited the Glossa ordinaria (a version is in PL 113-14); see Beryl Smalley,
"Les commentaires bibliques de l'epoque romane: Glose ordinaire et gloses perimees," in her Studies
in Medieval Thoughtand Learningfrom Abelardto Wyclif (London, 1981), pp. 17-25; G. Lobrichon,
"Une nouveaute: Les gloses de la Bible," in Pierre Riche and Guy Lobrichon, eds., Le moyendge et
la Bible, Bible de Tous les Temps 4 (Paris, 1984), pp. 95-114.
1Late-medieval editions of Nicholas of
Lyra's commentary on the Bible were therefore augmented
by a variety of additiones which filled in the prophetic meanings that had become clear after his
time of writing in the mid-fourteenth century. See, for example, Quartapars Lyreby Anton Koberger
(Nuremberg, 1497; the colophon to the entire edition, on fol. cccxlv v., describes the content:
"Exactum est Nuremberge insigne hoc ac inusitatum opus biblie illustratum concordantiis utriusque
testamenti una cum postillis venerandi viri ordinis minorum fratris Nicolai de lyra cumque additionibus per venerabilem episcopum Paulum burgensem editis: ad replicis magistri Mathie dorinck
eiusdem ordinis minorum fratris et theologi optimi charactere vero impressum habes iucundissimo
impensisque Anthonii Kobergers prefate civitatis incole. Anno incarnate deitatis MCCCCXCVII die
vero sexta septembris"), fol. cccxxx v.-cccxxxvii v., on Islam and Christendom after Lyra's time.
On Lyra, C. Spicq, Esquissed'une histoire de l'exegese latine au moyendge (Paris, 1944), pp. 335-42;
also Wilhelm Kamlah, Apokalypseund Geschichtstheologie:
Die mittelalterlicheAuslegung der Apokalypse
vor Joachim von Fiore (Berlin, 1935), esp. pp. 119-29; on Paul, bishop of Burgos, also known as
Pablo de Santa Maria, see James Preus, From Shadow to Promise: Old TestamentInterpretationfrom
Augustineto the YoungLuther(Cambridge, Mass., 1969), pp. 86-101; Ottavio Di Camillo, El humanismo
castellanodel siglo XV (Valencia, 1976), pp. 152-54; K. Reinhardt, "Das Werk des Nicolaus von Lyra
im mittelalterlichen Spanien," Traditio43 (1987), 321-58.

78

Ubi Ecclesia?

to his friends' accusations: "There is an origin to veins of silver, and gold has
its place where it is melted down."'2 Perusal of classical, medieval, and contemporary geographical works suggested to Calancha that Job had prophetically
alluded to the silver mines of Potosi, discovered by the Spanish in 1545. Prophetic meanings, however, could be contradictory. For on the one hand, Potosi,
"the ultimate goal of [Spanish] greed" and "the most flavorful delicacy that the
kings of the world can taste," was a profound irritant to divine justice.13 But
on the other hand, Calancha cited Gregory the Great as having interpreted the
silver mentioned by Job as an image denoting the preachers of the Gospel.'4
These preachers, according to Calancha, were the missionary friars of his own
order, whose role in the evangelization of the Andes he regarded as decisive.'5
Even in Potosi, which elsewhere Calancha described as the mouth of hell, good
and ill thus held each other in tension, in an uneasy balance.
Calancha construed prophecy broadly: the text of Sacred Scripture was its
primary vehicle, but events also could be prophetic. Indeed, events exactly like
texts were capable of being compiled into exegetical traditions, chains of coherence because, speaking in general terms, all events originated in prophecy.
Take the Roman capture and siege of Jerusalem by the emperor Titus, about
which Calancha had read inJosephus. The fall ofJerusalem had been prophesied
by Jesus and had been interpreted by Christians from Eusebius onward'6 as
God's retribution to the Jews for the crucifixion. That retribution in turn was
a prophetic and prototypical occurrence which rendered subsequent history
intelligible. In 1571 Spanish forces invaded Vilcabamba, where for the last thirtysix years an Inca government in exile had maintained itself. Shortly before this
military exploit, the Augustinian friar Diego Ortiz, having destroyed Vilcabamba's principal shrine and the sacred rock that it housed, had died as a martyr.
In his narrative of these occurrences, Calancha compared Vilcabamba to Jerusalem, while the martyrdom of Diego Ortiz was a reflection of Christ's passion.
The Incas of Vilcabamba were thus punished just as the Jews had been, and
where in antiquity the instruments of divine vengeance had been the Romans,

12
Job 28.1. Calancha cited the Vulgate text, "Habet argentum venarum suarum principia, et auro
locus est in quo conflatur."
13Calancha 1.1,
p. 26: "ultimo fin de la codicia ... el dulce mas sabroso que gustan los Reyes
del mundo"; p. 27, "cerro por quien tanto se irrita su justicia."
14 Where Calancha
thought of preachers, members of his order, Gregory the Great had in mind
the eloquiumDei as being represented under the image of silver; see Moralia in lob (PL 75) 4.31.61,
16.18.23 (PL 76) 18.16.24, 18.26.39 (on "habet argentum . .."), 18.45.73, 28.7.17-18.
15 Calancha
1.1, pp. 29 ff. A further factor in Calancha's maze of quotations and references about
Potosi and his own order is a story according to which Augustine was the patron saint of Potosi,
his name having been drawn by lot.
16 Eusebius,
History of the Church 4.5-8; on the history of this theme in Spain, see Maria Rosa
Lida de Malkiel, Jerusalen: El tema literario de su cercoy destrucci6npor los romanos(Buenos Aires,
1973); David Hook, "The Legend of the Flavian Destruction of Jerusalem in Late Fifteenth-Century
Spain and Portugal," Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 65 (1988), 113-28. See also Jeremy Cohen, The
Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), pp. 144 f. (citing
Augustine's City of God), 238 f.

Ubi Ecclesia?

79

in Peru this role was taken up by the Spanish.'7 But here, just as in Roman
antiquity, good and ill held each other in tension, given that the Spanish were
at the same time instruments of divine vengeance and victims of their own
ambition and greed, the destroyers moreover of the Inca state, which Calancha,
like some earlier Spanish historians of the Andes, described in terms of profound
admiration.
Learned Augustinian friar that he was, Calancha had studied Augustine's City
of God with care. But he understood the book in the light of his own preoccupations, so that in his writing ideas derived from Augustine fused with ideas
that he and his contemporaries held about the visible accomplishment of divine
purpose within the Spanish empire. In the footsteps of Augustine, Calancha
accordingly paid tribute to secular political achievements and extolled the heroic
deeds of the Spanish during the age of discovery and conquest. Unlike Augustine, however, Calancha believed that sacred history and the history of the
church, with all the successes and reversals that it comprised, had been forecast
and therefore in a sense fixed in prophetic texts and events,'8 this being the
reason why God's purpose was in the last resort discernible to human beings.l9
Secular history, on the other hand, was governed by a different law and also
by different norms of conduct. From time immemorial, the law governing secular
history had been change and decline. In antiquity the empires of Assyria, Greece,
Carthage, and Rome had fallen and had been mourned by their subjects, just
'7 See Juan de Solorzano y Pereyra, Politica indiana, Biblioteca de Autores Espafioles 252, 1.10.
1-15. Unlike the lawyer and colonial administrator Solorzano, however, Calancha did not think in
primarilyjuridical terms; he regarded the Spanish as the instrument of providence in a more general,
nonspecific sense than did Solorzano: for Calancha, other nations would at other times serve as
God's instruments.
18 Calancha's interpretation of Augustine, however distant from Augustine's original meaning,
had medieval antecedents, the crucial issue being that Calancha, unlike Augustine, found in Scripture
precise pointers that aided in comprehending the present. See Amos Funkenstein, Heilsplan und
naturlicheEntwicklung:Gegenwartsbestimmung
im Geschichtsdenken
desMittelalters(Munich, 1965); more
recently, John van Engen, Rupertof Deutz (Berkeley, 1983), pp. 275-91; Hans-Werner Goetz, " 'Empirisch'-'metaphysisch'? Zum Verstandnis der Zweistaatenlehre Ottos von Freising im Hinblick auf
Augustin," Augustiniana 30 (1980), 29-42; on the contrast between Augustine and Aquinas, R. A.
Markus, Saeculum:Historyand Societyin the Theologyof St. Augustine (Cambridge, Eng., 1970), esp.
pp. 225 ff. Calancha was sufficiently imbued with Thomist reading to overlook the consequences
of Augustine's argument, City of God 19.15, that political society is not natural. The issue is linked
to Calancha's view of prophetic allegory; see above, n. 9. To suggest that an event in contemporary
history was in some way hinted at in Scripture, as Calancha did, for example, regarding the Spanish
capture of Vilcabamba and the evangelization of Peru, would have been unacceptable to Augustine;
see Markus, chap. 2. Theodor E. Mommsen, "St. Augustine and the Christian Idea of Progress:
The Background of the City of God," in his Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Eugene F. Rice
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1959), pp. 265-98, remains useful.
'9 Calancha 2.3 pp. 723-24, cites Pedro Ordofiez de Ceballos, Cuarentatriunfosde la Cruz (Madrid,
1614); triumphs 9 and 10 deal with Catholic missions in Asia and America that reveal God's plans;
similarly, Thomas Bozius, De signis ecclesiaeDei libri XXIIII (Rome, 1591), argues against the Reformers that the missionary successes of the Catholic church are a sign of divine support; in harmony
with this overall argument, Bozius attributed to missionaries the power of performing miracles,
which is precisely what the missionary Jose de Acosta, who worked in Peru, sadly noted they did
not have, below at n. 55. Bozius's argument was at the same time pitched against Machiavelli; see
his De ruinis gentium et regnorumadversus impiospoliticos libri octo (Rome, 1596), and below, n. 21.

80

Ubi Ecclesia?

as in Calancha's own day Andean people were still mourning the fall of the
Incas. Such were, as Calancha saw it, "the tragic outcomes of great and majestic
beginnings, the normal movements of fortune, and the legitimate offsprings of
time."20

Unlike his interpretations of sacred history, which were continuous with lateantique and medieval biblical exegesis and historical writing, these reflections
of Calancha's derived from his reading of the Tacitean historians, the jurists
and political theorists of his own time. Tacitus himself, along with his Spanish
imitator, the historian of the Indies Antonio de Herrera, accompanied Calancha
through his narrative of the civil wars among the Spanish invaders of Peru.21
A broader theoretical framework for these events came to Calancha from the
description of the world by Giovanni Botero, who familiarized readers throughout Europe and Spanish America with both the term and the concept of reason
of state.22 Finally, for his ideas on sovereignty, Calancha was indebted to Juan
de Solorzano, author of a juridical treatise in which the subjection of Indians
to Spaniards, which Calancha attributed at least in part to Spanish greed and
ambition, was legislated outright.23
Calancha 4.8, p. 1886.
On the influence of Tacitus on late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thought see
Kenneth C. Schellhase, Tacitusin RenaissancePolitical Thought (Chicago, 1976), chaps. 5-7. Arnaldo
Momigliano, "The First Political Commentary on Tacitus,"Journal of Roman Studies 37 (1947), 91101, reprinted in Contributoalla storia degli studi classici (Rome, 1955). On the edition of Tacitus
byJustus Lipsius and on that scholar's Tacitean writings, see also Mark Morford, "Tacitean Prudentia
and the Doctrines ofJustus Lipsius," in T. J. Luce and A. J. Woodman, eds., Tacitusand the Tacitean
Tradition(Princeton, 1993), pp. 129-51. See Calancha 1.6, p. 90, citingJustus Lipsius, Admiranda,
sive de magnitudineRomana, libri quattuor(Antwerp, 1599); Calancha 2.2, p. 715, citing Lipsius, De
Cruce libri tres ad sacramprofanamquehistoriamutiles (Antwerp, 1595)-both works were available in
several other editions. In Spain, the political study of Tacitus was important as a means of counteracting the doctrines of Machiavelli while at the same time learning from them. See Antonio
Maravall, "La corriente doctrinal del Tacitismo politico en Espafia," Cuadernoshispanoamericanos60
(1969), 645-67, discussing Spanish Taciteans whom Schellhase does not mention. See also Benito
Arias Montano, Aphorismossacados de la Historia de Publio Cornelio Tacito ... para la conservaci6ny
aumento de las Monarchias (Barcelona, 1614); Baltasar Alamos de Barrientos, Aforismosal Tacito
espafol, edited with an introductory study byJ. A. Fernandez de Santa Maria (Madrid, 1987); Manuel
Segura Ortega, La filosofia juridica y politica en las "Empresas"de Saavedra Fajardo(Murcia, 1984).
22 For reason of state, see Schellhase, Tacitus,
pp. 124-26; cf. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations
of Modern Political Thought, 1 (Cambridge, Eng., 1978), pp. 248-49. Calancha repeatedly cited
Giovanno Botero's Relationi universali, which was translated into Spanish as Relaciones universales
del mundo de Juan BoteroBenes: Primera y segunda parte traducidas ... por el Lizdo Diego de Aguiar
(Valladolid, 1609); see, for example, Calancha 1.4, pp. 67, 76; 1.7, pp. 100, 119; 2.4, p. 752; 2.40,
p. 1161. Calancha appears to have known, although he does not explicitly mention by title, Botero's
treatise on reason of state, which was translated into Spanish by Antonio Herrera, Diez librosde la
razon de estadocon tres librosde las causas de la grandeza,y magnificentiade las ciudadesdeJuan Botero
(Madrid, 1593). Note Calancha's opinion of reason of state, expressed as a judgment on the execution of the Inca Tupa Amaru in 1571, Cronica3.33, p. 1586, "O a quantos nobles a endurecido
el coracon la pestilencial razon de estado, veneno de las Monarquias, con engafios de comodidad,
i cuchillo de las conciencias en manos de la conservaci6n!"
23 On the status of
Indians, see Sol6rzano, Politica indiana (above, n. 17), book 2; also relevant
is book 3, on encomienda.See the important essay by Karen Spalding, "Quienes son los indios?" in
her De indio a campesino (Lima, 1974), pp. 147-93; and A. Pagden, Spanish Imperialismand the
Political Imagination (New Haven, 1990), chap. 1.
20

21

Ubi Ecclesia?

81

Calancha noted and regretted this subjection, but he did not think of it as a
condition that could be changed. This was because, for him, the church was the
mediator not of social justice but of divine grace, of beams of light that irradiated
an otherwise dark world. These beams of light, however, were perfectly visible:
they were, on the one hand, the relics of holy men, dead bodies sleeping in
their graves capable of "engendering living children" by performing miracles,24
and, on the other hand, the miracle-working images of Mary.
Ever since the twelfth century, the Virgin both in Spain and Europe at large
had protected her devotees by delivering the sinners among them from the
negative consequences of their actions, by healing the sick and righting social
wrongs. Spanish Virgins, moreover, performed miracles designed to convert
Jews and Muslims to Christianity.25In the Andes a generation after the invasion
it came to be believed that Mary had appeared to help the Spanish during the
siege of Cuzco,26 and by the end of the century a handful of shrines attracted
pilgrims from all parts of the continent and in due course even from Europe.
Calancha was especially devoted to Marian images housed in churches of his
own order, one of them being the Virgin of Guadalupe in northern Peru, an
image copied from its namesake in Spanish Extremadura, and another the Virgin
of Copacabana, whose image had been sculpted by the son of an Inca lord. It
was the interventions of Mary the "Divine Shepherdess"27 that modified the
harsh realities of colonial life, and it was Mary who spoke to her Andean worshippers in terms of endearment, affection, and tender care, thus making of
her shrines, as Calancha expressed it, a "holy land of promise" and a "celestial
Jerusalem" on earth.28
Like some of his Spanish and Peruvian contemporaries, Calancha described
the miraculous interventions of Mary with all the adornment of scriptural allegory and rhetorical elaboration that his mastery of patristic literature and
medieval exegesis put at his disposal. For him, as for her other Peruvian eulogists,
the Virgin gave access to a refuge, an enclosed garden where "running waters
Calancha, "Introducci6n," p. 15.
For the Virgin of Guadalupe, revered both in Spain and the Americas, see the manuscript
collection "Aqui comineca el prologo en la fundacion del monesterio de nra Senora sctama de
gua(dalup)e," Escorial, a IV 10, fifteenth century; the miracles are on fols. 146 ff. Fr. Gabriel de
Talavera, Historia de Nuestra Seworade Guadalupe (Toledo, 1597), contains 150 miracles taken from
the record at the site, going back to the foundation of the shrine. See also Historia y milagros de
Nuestra Senorade la Pena de Francia, con nueva correci6n,y con las indulgenciasconcedidasa los cofrades
y a las personasque visitan la dicha ymagen (Salamanca, 1567), Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, R 4555.
Another edition appeared in 1583, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, R 28175. This was the advocation
of the Virgin to which Guaman Poma de Ayala had an especial devotion; see his Nueva cronicay
buen gobierno,ed. J. V. Murra and R. Adorno (Madrid, 1987), pp. 402 f., 639 ff., 919 (mistakenly
numbered by Guaman Poma as 616), 932 f. William A. Christian, Apparitionsin Late Medieval and
RenaissanceSpain (Princeton, 1981), deals for the most part with apparitions of Mary.
26 Ruben
Vargas Ugarte, Historia del culto de Maria en Iberoamericay de sus imagenesy santuarios
mas celebrados,2 (Madrid, 1956), pp. 232-46; Sabine MacCormack, "From the Sun of the Incas to
the Virgin of Copacabana," Representations8 (1984), 30-60, at pp. 40, 48-49. For an early-medieval
antecedent of this militant Virgin Mary, see Suzanne Lewis, "A Byzantine 'Virgo Militans' at Charlemagne's Court," Viator 11 (1980), 71-93.
27 Calancha
3.4, p. 1259; for the "divina pastora" in art, see below n. 114.
28
Calancha 3.4, p. 1267; cf. 3.9, p. 1312; 3.5, p. 1273.
24

25

82

Ubi Ecclesia?

kiss the roots of flowers, distilling sweet scents,"29 a place of beauty and recollection. However much Calancha admired the heroic virtues of the founders
of his order in Peru, missionaries like Diego Ortiz, who had traveled the length
and breadth of the land on foot in order to "preach to all people,"30 he was
not a man of action. Rather, like many of his Peruvian contemporaries, he took
the established social and political order for granted, which is why the conflictive
legacy that the founders of the viceregal state had left behind speaks in his
pages only indirectly. That legacy, however, defined the policies of the Peruvian
church of his day, and in some respects continues to do so now.
Apart from the long history of religious contact and confrontation in the
peninsula,31 two factors determined the character of the missionary church in
Spanish America. Firstly, missionaries arrived in the wake of conquistadors and
soldiers, in a situation therefore in which coercion of some kind was inevitable,
given that potential converts were in the first instance opponents defeated in
war. Secondly, the cultures and languages of Mexico and Peru were unknown
to Europeans, so that the task of evangelization, of establishing a church, could
not be fully continuous with the evangelization of the late-antique Mediterranean and of early-medieval Europe, with those long drawn out conversations
and conflicts among people who were in the last resort neighbors.
Calancha described the arrival of the first Augustinian friars in Peru as an
advent of apostles, worthy successors of the original apostles and founders of
the church. There had been twelve friars,32 and after they had established a
simple monastery in Lima, most of them went out to evangelize the countryside,
29 Calancha

3.7, p. 1292 f.
28.19; Mark 16.15; cited in Calancha 1.3, pp. 53, 60; Calancha 3.43, p. 1732.
31 Missionaries in Peru
occasionally cited precedents of Visigothic ecclesiastical practice (see below
at n. 87) but very rarely referred to peninsular attempts to convert Jews and Muslims as in any
sense comparable to their own activities. One reason is that Indians were gentiles, which meant
that, in the eyes of a Spanish observer of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, different legal rules
and procedures applied to them. On Muslims, see most recently L. P. Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250
to 1500 (Chicago, 1990), chaps. 4-8 and 20, on Muslims (Mudejars) living under Christian institutions. On conversion and expulsion, see Antonio Dominguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent, Historia
de los moriscos:Vida y tragedia de una minoria (Madrid, 1978); Julio Caro Baroja, Los Moriscosdel
reino de Granada(Madrid, 1976); L. Cardaillac, Moriscosy cristianos:Un enfrentamientopolemico(14921640) (Madrid, 1979). On the Jews, from a rapidly growing literature I cite Salo Wittmayer Baron,
A Social and Religious Historyof theJews, 2nd ed., 10 (New York, 1965), chaps. 44-45; Yitzhak Baer,
A History of the Jews in ChristianSpain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1966); Cohen, The Friars and the Jews
(above, n. 16); Hispania Judaica: Studies on the History, Language and Literatureof the Jews in the
Hispanic World, ed. Joseph M. Sola-Sole, Samuel Armistead, and Joseph Silverman (vols. 2-4 of
Estudios [Barcelona, n.d., circa 1990]). See also Henry Kamen, "Clerical Violence in a Catholic
Society: The Hispanic World 1450-1720," in The Churchand War:Papers Read at the Twenty-First
Summer Meeting and the Twenty-SecondWinter Meeting of the EcclesiasticalHistory Society, ed. W. J.
Sheils (Oxford, 1983), pp. 201-16.
32 This choice of twelve
missionary friars, to match the number of Christ's apostles, echoes an
earlier European missionary tradition; see Sullivan, "The Carolingian Missionary" (above, n. 6), p.
706, n. 5. For the evangelization of Peru, see the still authoritative work of Pierre Duvibls, La lutte
contre les religions authochtonesdans le Perou colonial: L'extirpationde la idolatrie entre 1532 et 1660
(Lima, 1971); Nguyen Thai Hop, Julian Heras, and others, Evangelizaciony teologia en el Peru: Luces
y sombrasen el siglo XVI (Lima, 1991), is written from a more ecclesiastical, but nonetheless critical,
vantage point.
30 Matthew

Ubi Ecclesia?

83

building churches, preaching, caring for the poor. Diego Ortiz, the apostle of
Vilcabamba, had arrived, along with several other friars, in 1563,33 and more
friars came later. But this harmonious picture bears little resemblance to actual
circumstances in Peru during the mid-sixteenth century. In 1550, twenty-eight
years after the Spanish had arrived, Fray Domingo de Santo Tomas, a friend
and follower of Bartolome de Las Casas, wrote a letter to Charles V in which
he outlined the state of the land. The Andean population, he thought, had
halved, and so had their possessions. Warfare had only recently come to an end,
and Spanish demands for tribute payments and personal services were so excessive that the Indians had no time "for the things of God." "What is to be
deplored even more," Fray Domingo added, "is that they are masters neither
of their possessions because everything is taken from them, nor of their persons,
because [Spaniards] use them like animals."34Conditions such as these in Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere led Las Casas in 1552 to publish his famous
Accountof the Destructionof the Indies, which was translated into several European
languages and defined perceptions of the Spanish impact on the New World
for centuries.35
The outlines of an ecclesiastical order were, however, established in Peru
during these years, and its creators did look to the first apostles, the primitive
church, and early-medieval missionaries for guidance and precedent.36 The issues dealt with by the episcopal councils that met in Lima in 1551 and 1567
thus arose both from direct experience of the Andes and from Catholic tradition.
Andeans were sometimes ready and even eager to be baptized-at the same time,
however, they were likely to continue seeking out Andean priests and places of
worship.37 This occasioned the bishops to reflect about the content and for33 Calancha

2.20, p. 946 f.
from Fray Domingo de Santo Tomas to Charles V, dated 1 July 1550, Archivo de Indias,
Seville, Lima 313. In the same letter Fray Domingo stated that he had been in Peru for ten years,
which puts his arrival in 1540.
35 A recent edition of the
work, with introduction and bibliography, is by Andre Saint-Lu: Bartolome de Las Casas, Brevisimarelaci6n de la destrucci6nde las Indias (Madrid, 1987). The collection
edited by Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen, Bartolomede Las Casasin History:Towardan Understanding
of the Man and His Work(DeKalb, Ill., 1971), is a good introduction; also Andre Saint-Lu, Las Casas
indigeniste:Etudessur la vie et l'oeuvredu defenseurdes Indiens (Paris, 1982). Marcel Bataillon, Estudios
sobreBartolomede Las Casas (Barcelona, 1976). For an important newly discovered document, see
Helen Rand Parish, Las Casas as Bishop:A New InterpretationBased on His HolographPetition in the
Hans P Kraus Collectionof Hispanic AmericanManuscripts(Washington, D.C., 1980).
36 Pedro
Borges, Metodosmisionales en la cristianizaci6n de America (Madrid, 1960), and Robert
Ricard, The Spiritual Conquestof Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolateand the Evangelizing Methodsof
the MendicantOrdersin New Spain (Berkeley, 1966), remain useful as guides to the sources. Scholarly
approaches to the issues of Christianization in Spanish America have changed, however. See, for
example, Carmen Bernard and Serge Gruzinski, De l'idoldtrie:Une archeologiedes sciencesreligieuses
(Paris, 1988); Fernando Cervantes, "The Devils of Queretaro: Scepticism and Credulity in Late
Seventeenth Century Mexico," Past and Present 130 (1991), 51-69; Louise M. Burkhart, The Slippery
Earth:Nahua-ChristianMoral Dialogue in Sixteenth-CenturyMexico (Tucson, 1989).
37 For a similar situation in
late-antique Galicia, see Martin of Braga, De correctionerusticorum,ed.
C. W. Barlow, Papers and Monographs of the American Academy in Rome 12 (New Haven, 1950),
pp. 159-203. The treatise, providing instruction on basic doctrine and Christian observance, and
reproving pagan beliefs and rituals, is derived from Augustine's De catechizandisrudibus (see below,
34 Letter

84

Ubi Ecclesia?

mulation of missionary teaching. What kind of instruction should be given before

baptism, and how was it to be followed up subsequently? And, regarding Christian socialization, should marriages between converts and infidels be permitted,
and, if already contracted, should they be allowed to stand? To what extent
should the prohibited degrees of kinship in Christian marriage be enforced
among Andean converts? Regarding matters of ritual and worship, should Andean holy places and objects of worship be destroyed, or should the buildings
at least be converted to a Christian use? And finally, what were the appropriate
ways of dealing with apostasy?38
These issues were discussed in mid-sixteenth-century Lima and throughout
Peru in the light of European precedents. Missionaries read and quoted the
letters of Pope Gregory the Great to Augustine of Canterbury regarding Christian marriage and to Abbot Mellitus regarding idols and places of worship by
way of validating their own decisions.39Churches, shrines, and preaching crosses
were frequently raised on Inca and Andean cult sites, and in Cuzco the Dominican order simply moved into the Temple of the Sun, the central place of
worship of the Inca empire. Sacred objects were removed, but significant structural changes to the building were made only in the later seventeenth century.40
The shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in northern Peru displaced a huaca, an
Andean deity, and the pilgrimage to the Virgin of Copacabana supplanted an
earlier Inca pilgrimage.41 Not infrequently, however, missionaries in the Andes
despaired of communicating their message and reflected on the barbarous character of their listeners. The theme was not new. In 796, for example, the bishops

n. 52) and is addressed to the already baptized. Large parts of Martin's work are included in the
missionary treatise (attributed to Pirmin but perhaps not by him) entitled Scarapsus,edited by Gall
Jecker, Die Heimat des hi. Pirmin, des Apostels der Alamannen, Beitrage zur Geschichte des alten
Monchtums und des Benediktinerordens 13 (Munster, 1927), pp. 34-73; see also Arnold Angenendt,
MonachiPeregrini:Studienzu Pirmin und den monastischenVorstellungendesfruhen Mittelalters(Munich,
1972), esp. pp. 55-74.
38 The first three councils of Lima will be cited as Lima I, II, and III, from the edition
by Ruben
Vargas Ugarte, Concilios limenses (1551-1773), 3 vols. (Lima, 1951). Instruction of Indians: Lima
I, Constitucionesde los naturales 1, 4, 6, 13; Lima II, Naturales 2-3, 13, 25, 32, 34-35, 56, 86, 89,
92. Marriage and prohibited degrees: Lima I, Naturales 15-20, 24; Lima II, Naturales 37, 60-73.
Building of churches and destruction of Andean holy places: Lima I, Naturales2-3; Lima II, Naturales
98-99. Apostasy: Lima I, Naturales 27; Lima II, Naturales 95; see also on the continuance of nonChristian customs and rituals, Lima II, Naturales 99-110, 112-13, 119.
39
Jose de Acosta, De procurandaIndorumsalute, ed. and trans., into Spanish, L. Perefna,V. Baril,
and others, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1984; this excellent scholarly edition supplants the Spanish translation
without the Latin original in Jose de Acosta, Obras,ed. J. Mateos, Biblioteca de Autores Espafioles
73 [Madrid, 1954], which is still frequently consulted; the work will be cited hereafter as Acosta,
De procuranda),1.8, where Augustine's letter 22 to Bishop Aurelius (in Al. Goldbacher, ed., S. Aureli
Augustini HipponensisEpiscopiEpistolae, 5 vols. in the CSEL series [Vienna, 1895-1923], hereafter
Epistolae) about drunken celebrations on the tombs of the martyrs is also referred to; Acosta, De
procuranda3.24.
40 See
John H. Rowe, An Introductionto the Archaeologyof Cuzco, Papers of the Peabody Museum
of American Archaeology and Ethnology 27/2 (Cambridge, Mass., 1944), pp. 26-41, on the history
of the building.
41 On
Guadalupe de Pacasmayo, Calancha 3.1-5, pp. 1225-78; on Copacabana, MacCormack,
"Virgin of Copacabana" (above, n. 26).

Ubi Ecclesia?

85

assembled in the council on the banks of the river Danube described the Avars
in terms many Peruvian missionaries could readily have identified with: "These
are barbarous and irrational people, slow of mind and lacking letters, who learn
the sacred mysteries only tardily and with difficulty."42
What differentiated the situation in Peru from medieval European antecedents, however, were the ever-expanding presence of secular government and
its commitment to intervening in affairs of the church. Two concerns converged
here. On the one hand, as was well understood, evangelization could and did
serve as an instrument of social and political control, while on the other, the
missionaries in their own right were searching for means of enforcing their
message. As the bishops in the Second Council of Lima expressed it, echoing
Thomas Aquinas: "The law or precept would be in vain that does not possess
some coercive or compulsory force so as to compel the unwilling to perform
that which is ordered by the law or precept."43The council thus made attendance
at mass and catechism class compulsory, if need be by resorting to secular
jurisdiction, this being only one in a very long series of enactments formally to
appeal to the state for enforcement of ecclesiastical concerns.44The same council
also urged the secular government to "reduce" scattered Andean hamlets into
larger villages to facilitate Christian instruction.45 In some places such resettlement programs were already being organized, to be followed, in the 1570s, by
an Andean-wide restructuring of indigenous societies in Spanish-style villages,
each with its church, main square, governor's house, and other administrative
buildings.46 In such a context, late-antique ideas about religious coercion acquired a quite new relevance and efficacy.
These ideas were explored in some detail in the missionary treatise How to
Providefor the Salvation of the Indians, which the Jesuit Jose de Acosta completed
in 1576 and which served as a model for subsequent works of its kind.47 The
42
Conventusepiscoporumad ripas Danubii, 796 C.E. with Bishop Arno of Salzburg presiding, MGH
Conc 2/1:174: "Haec autem gens bruta et inrationabilis vel certe idiotae et sine litteris tardior atque
laboriosa ad cognoscenda sacra mysteria invenitur." On the context, see Sullivan, "Carolingian
Missionary Theories" (above, n. 6).
43 Lima II, Naturales
115, p. 217, with Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica,prima secundae q.96
a.5; also q.90 a.3 ad 2.
44 Lima II, Naturales 115,
p. 218: "Ordinamus ergo ... ut vicarii per dioecesanos ... instituendi,
vel visitatores compellant poenis si opus fuerit iuridice tamen, indos omnes ... ut illa observent
quae a suis in fide praeceptoribus iubentur ...." See also Lima II, Naturales 80, p. 196, where the
bishops ask secular authorities to resettle Andean people into larger villages, to facilitate instruction.
Lima I, Naturales 30, already ordered that Indian settlements founded to serve the inhabitants of
neighboring Spanish settlements be laid out with regular streets and houses, to facilitate Christian
instruction. A program of comprehensive resettlement was undertaken by the Viceroy Toledo; see
below, n. 46. Missionaries in early-medieval Europe had similar concerns to the ones expressed by
the bishops in Lima in 1567-68; see above, nn. 5-6.
45 Lima II, Naturales 80,
p. 196.
46 Sabine
MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Visionand Imaginationin Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, 1991), p. 140 f. and fig. 14, reproducing Juan de Matienzo's sketch of the center of a resettlement village in his Gobiernodel Peru, ed. G. Lohmann Villena (Lima, 1967).
47 Acosta, De
procuranda.Acosta's ideas on language were taken up by his fellowJesuit the linguist
Diego Gonzalez Holguin; see below, n. 81. Acosta's manual as a whole influenced the several times
reprinted manual by Alonso de la Peia Montenegro, Itinerariopara parochosde Indios, first published

86

Ubi Ecclesia?

majority of Andean people had by this time been baptized, so that preventing
apostasy and maintaining Christian lifestyles in Andean communities were now
the missionaries' primary concern. It was here that coercion came to the fore.
For while baptism, as Acosta agreed with the apologists of the early church,
must be voluntary, perseverance in the faith, compliance with a promise freely
made, must, he argued, be enforced. Where thus the bishops assembled in the
first two councils of Lima had hesitated as to when destruction of Andean objects
of worship was appropriate, Acosta urged that it was always appropriate because
the availability of these idols encouraged apostasy. The precedents he cited
began with Exodus and Deuteronomy: "You shall tear down their altars, break
their statues, and cut down their groves."48 Acosta also remembered the letter
of Ambrose against the Altar of Victory in the Roman curia, legislation from
the code ofJustinian49 and from late-antique and early-medieval church councils,
as well as Augustine's sermons and letters against pagans and Donatists. But
where Augustine, in a sermon cited by Acosta, had carefully pointed out that
idols not located on Christian property should for the time being be left intact,50
in Peru, as Acosta knew, property dedicated to non-Christian sacred uses was
subject to confiscation, and enforcement of this legislation was total. This endowed the old argument to "compel them to enter," which Acosta cited both
from Augustine and the Gospel,5' with unprecedented force.
Yet Acosta, his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors were not persecutors pure and simple, and in this respect also they perpetuated an ancient
Christian legacy. How were the people of the Andes going to hear the message
of salvation, Acosta asked, without a preacher? He formulated the question so
as to echo a passage from Paul that had moved Augustine deeply: "Everyone
who shall call on the Lord shall be saved. But how shall they call on him in
whom they do not believe, and how shall they believe in him of whom they have
not heard, and how shall they hear without a preacher?"52The opponents whom

in 1668. The treatise by Bartolome de Las Casas, De unico vocationis modo (edited in a bilingual
version by Paulino Castafeda Delgado and Antonio Garcia del Moral as vol. 2 [Madrid, 1990] of
the Obrascompletasof Las Casas) argues throughout that persuasion and example can be the only
instruments of conversion, without recourse to secular power at any point.
48 Acosta, De
procuranda 5.11, citing Exodus 34.13, repeated in Deuteronomy 7.5 with slightly
different wording. My translation is from the Vulgate text that Acosta was using. This is the same
passage as that cited by Augustine, Sermo62.11; see above, n. 4. That sermon in turn was cited by
Acosta, De procuranda5.10.
49Acosta, De
procuranda3.2, citing CodexJustinianus, ed. P. Krueger (repr. Dublin, 1967), 1.3.54
(56); Acosta, De procuranda 2.11, citing the Fourth Council of Toledo, ed. Jose Vives, Concilios
visigoticos e hispano-romanos(Barcelona, 1963), canon 55.
50
Augustine, Sermo62.12, PL 38:423. It is indicative of later-sixteenth-century missionary mentalities that Cesare Baronio in his Annales ecclesiastici,ad annum 399, section 71, referred to this
sermon as an example of Augustine's Christian mansuetudo.The edition of Baronio I consulted is
that by Augustinus Theiner, 27 vols. (Bar-le-Duc, 1864-74), the passage in question being in vol. 6.
51
Acosta, De procuranda1.7, with Augustine, Epistolae 185, to Boniface; but contrast De procuranda
1.13.
52 Romans
10.13-14, meditated upon by Augustine, Confessions1.1.1; also in Augustine, De catechizandisrudibus, ed. I. B. Bauer in Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 46 (Turnhout, 1969),
4.7.9. Acosta, De procuranda5.3, p. 547a; see also 4.6.

Ubi Ecclesia?

87

Acosta here had in mind were those who insisted that Christianity could be
taught to Andean people in Spanish, this being an undertaking for which he
had no patience at all. The Indians might indeed be slow of understanding, like
the rustici of Sardinia about whom Gregory the Great had written in his letters,
but this did not mean that there was no room for them in the ark of the church
or that they were not entitled to the love, devotion, and care of their teachers.53
But love had grown cold in the church of his day, Acosta noted sadly.54Where
was now the gift of languages that had enabled the apostles to speak in the
tongues of all nations? And where was the gift of performing miracles that had
endowed their words with power?55With repeated reflection on these recalcitrant problems, Acosta arrived at one firmly held conclusion: that the miracle
that would most of all further the cause of Christianity in the Andes, and that
would return the missionaries to the heady days of the primitive church, was
the virtuous living of the missionaries themselves. "A pure life is a powerful
means of corking the mouth of the devil himself," he added, quoting a sermon
by John Chrysostom.56
And the mouth of the devil needed corking, as Acosta understood only too
well. The conditions that twenty-five years earlier had tormented Domingo de
Santo Tomas had improved in one respect: the land was now essentially at peace.
However, peace had helped to institutionalize the rapaciousness of Spaniards
living in the viceroyalty, while at the same time central government was perfecting the official mechanisms for maximizing the surplus that was to be extracted from the Andean economy for the benefit of Europe.57 The process was
changing the character of the Andean people by turning many of them into
miserables,individuals whom their society protected not at all or only to a very
limited extent.58 The Indians might indeed be slow at understanding Christian
love, Acosta observed. The reason for this, however, was not what many Span-

53
On preaching in Spanish, see Acosta, De procuranda 1.6, 9; 3.13, citing Pope Gregory's letter
to Januarius, bishop of Sardinia, in Gregory, Epistolae4.26 in PL 77; see also Epistolae4.27, to the
nobles of Sardinia about the idolatrous practices of rustici. Richard Sullivan, "The Papacy and
Missionary Strategy in the Early Middle Ages," Mediaeval Studies 17 (1955), 46-106, at pp. 47-52
(to be reprinted in his ChristianMissionaryActivity, above, n. 6) on these and similar letters by Pope
Gregory.
54
Acosta, De procuranda1.6; see also 1.9 on the practice of the primitive church; further, 3.18.4,
p. 532 "... nescio utrum potius faciam, querarne nostrorum temporum calamitatem et charitatem
refrigescentem fidemque raro in quoquam inventam iuxta Domini verbum."
55 On the
gift of languages to the apostles, see Acosta, De procuranda 1.9. The same point, that
languages were given freely to the apostles, but in the present time have to be learned by hard
work, was made by Diego Gonzalez Holguin, Gramdticay arte nueva de la lengua general de todo el
Peri llamada lengua Qquichuao lengua del Inca (Lima, 1607; repr. 1842, n.p.; I cite from this latter
edition, hereafter Gramitica), p. v.
56Acosta, De procuranda 2.9,
p. 322; John Chrysostom, Homiliae XLIV in Epistolamprimam ad
Corinthios6.4, inJ. P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, 61:54.
57 See on this
issue, K. Spalding, "Exploitation as an Economic System: The State and the Extraction of Surplus in Colonial Peru," in G. A. Collier, R. Rosaldo, J. D. Wirth, eds., The Inca and
Aztec States, 1400-1800 (New York, 1982), pp. 321-42.
58 On miserablesas a
quasi-legal status, see Pefia Montenegro, Itinerario (above, n. 47) 2.1.1, pp.
178-79, citing Sol6rzano and the Third Council of Lima as well as colonial legislation.

88

Ubi Ecclesia?

iards liked to describe as their "short capacity," but the circumstances in which
they lived, the shape of the society that had come into existence in the Andes.59
By way of changing this society-and Acosta realized that the scope for change
was limited-he looked once again to the guidance of the Bible and to lateantique and medieval precedent. How could the rustici of Sardinia live as Christians, Gregory the Great had asked the empress Constantina, when the extortions
of the local nobility forced them to sell their children and to take refuge among
the pagan Lombards? Acosta redirected Gregory's question and his exhortation
toward the landholders of colonial Peru.60 But his principal interest was the
reform of the missionary clergy. Evangelization was by nature a slow, long, drawn
out process that required patience and learning. The conversion of the Irish,
the Galicians, the Germans and Saxons,61 and even of the Mediterranean world
had taken centuries, and had occurred only because missionaries beginning with
Paul had adjusted their message to their audience. In Peru, this meant that
missionaries had to understand Andean religious practices and beliefs; furthermore, they had to preach, teach, and hear confessions, not in Spanish, but
in Quechua.62
Acosta, rooted though he was in patristic and medieval theology, was nonetheless deeply aware of the particularity of the Peruvian church.63When in 1583
the bishops of Peru assembled for the Third Council of Lima, it was Acosta
who helped prepare a dossier of documents describing Andean religion. One
such document had already been produced for the Second Council of Lima,
and even in 1551 the bishops had noted some particularities of Andean religious
practice.64 Even so, what made Andean religion intelligible to the missionaries
was initially such aspects of it as they recognized from their reading about
idolatrous practices in the Hebrew Bible and in patristic and medieval author59Acosta, De procuranda1.8, p. 148: "Ac generaliter sane si quis contempletur, in humano ingenio
longe plus efficit educatio quam nativitas"; cf. 3.17.1-5, where Acosta tries to balance Indian corvee
labor as required by the viceregal state against the natural rights of the Andean people.
60
Acosta, De procuranda3.16, quoting Gregory the Great, Epistolae 5.41, PL 77:768-69.
61
Acosta, De procuranda 1.3-5 and 4.5 on missionary work in the apostolic, late-antique, and
early-medieval periods. Apart from Acosta, see also Jer6nimo Ore, Symbolocatolico indiano (Lima,
1598), 10, p. 45 f., on missions both in Europe, mentioning Martin of Tours, Remigius, Boniface,
Dominic, and in the New World, emphasizing the work of the Jesuits and of his own order, the
Franciscans.
62 Acosta, De
procuranda4.7-9.
63
Acosta, De procuranda4.11, on the inadequacy of instructions issued from Spain by theologians
ignorant of conditions in Peru.
64 The Third Council of Lima issued a short and a
long catechism, a manual for hearing confessions,
and a series of sermons on the principal points of Christian doctrine, all in Spanish, Quechua, and
Aymara. These works were published under the collective title Doctrina christiana y catecismopara
instrucci6nde los Indios (Lima, 1585; facsimile repr. Madrid, 1985); this was the first book to be
printed in Lima, preceded only by a short broadsheet about the new Gregorian calendar. Doctrina
christianaalso contains (p. 253 of the modern pagination) an Instrucci6ncontra las ceremonias,y ritos
que usan los Indios conformeal tiempo de su infidelidad and (p. 265 of the modern pagination) the
Erroresy supersticionesde los Indios sacadas del tratadoy averiguaci6n que hizo el licenciadoPolo. This
latter document was compiled for the Second Council of Lima by Polo de Ondegardo, who also
provided Acosta with much of his information. See also Lima I, Naturales 4, 25, containing some
short observations on Andean beliefs and rituals.

Ubi Ecclesia?

89

ities. Missionaries thus adduced, often quite deliberately, the experience of their
late-antique and medieval predecessors to interpret Andean religion, and it was
only after more prolonged contact that specifically Andean aspects of practice
and belief were understood.65 Similarly, the study of Quechua was initially modeled on European antecedents, on existing works of grammar and lexicography.
Only gradually did it become clear that the Quechua language could not really
be fitted into these preexisting molds.
Such had also been the experience of missionaries in early-medieval Europe,
who translated not only Christian but also Roman literary and philosophical
texts into German and Anglo-Saxon. Yet if we compare the linguistic work of
missionaries in the Andes with that of their early-medieval predecessors in Europe, the enduring political and cultural distance between Andean missionaries
and their charges springs into focus. Methods and phases in translating were
similar in Europe and the Andes, but the overall result was not. In Germany,
for example, translating began with baptismal formulas, prayers, blessings, and
vocabularies for the use of priests and missionaries. Longer texts followed: the
Rule of Benedict; Boethius's Consolation;Donatus's Grammar,Isidore's De fide
catholica, and much else besides.66 This happened because German was the language not only of the rustici who made up the majority of most missionaries'
public, but also of the elite, which included the very individuals who, like Notker
the German at St. Gall, produced the translations.67 In Peru, by contrast, then
as now, to be a native Quechua speaker identified a person as being excluded
from the elite.68 There are no known translations of Spanish classics into Que-

65
I describe this important and gradual shift in European perceptions in Religion in the Andes
(above, n. 46).
66 On the
monastery of St. Gall as a center of translation into Old High German, see Stefan
Sonderegger, "German Language and Literature in St. Gall," in James C. King and Werner Vogler,
eds., The Culture of the Abbeyof St. Gall: An Overview (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 161-84; see also Stefan
Sonderegger, Althochdeutschin St. Gallen: Ergebnisseund Problemeder althochdeutschenSprachuberlieferung in St. Gallen vom 8. bis zum 12. Jahrhundert (St. Gall, 1970). On Charlemagne's interest in
translation into German, see Werner Betz, "Karl der Grosse und die Lingua Theodisca," in Bernhard
Bischoff, ed., Karl der Grosse:Lebenswerkund Nachleben,2: Das geistige Leben(Diisseldorf, 1965), pp.
300-306. Francis Thomson, "SS. Cyril and Methodius and a Mythical Western Heresy: Trilinguism.
A Contribution to the Study of Patristic and Mediaeval Theories of Sacred Languages," Analecta
Bollandiana 110 (1992), 67-121. A useful collection of texts is by Elias von Steinmeyer, Die kleineren
althochdeutschenSprachdenkmaler(Berlin, 1963); see also Georg Baesecke, Kleinere Schriftenzur althochdeutschenSpracheund Literatur(Bern, 1966). On Isidore in Old High German, seeJ. N. Hillgarth,
"Isidorian Studies, 1976-1985," Studi medievali 31 (1990), 925-73 at pp. 936 and 967. Issues
arising in translating specifically Christian vocabulary are addressed by Stefan Sonderegger, "Die
Bedeutung des religiosen Wortschatzes fur die Entfaltung des Althochdeutschen: Von friiher Vielfalt
zu allmahlicher Vereinheitlichung," in Irland und Europa/Irelandand Europe:Die Kirche im Fruhmittelalter/The Early Church,ed. Pr6inseas Ni Chathain and Michael Richter (Stuttgart, 1984), pp. 24057.
67 Stefan
Sonderegger, "Notker der Deutsche und Cicero: Aspekte einer mittelalterlichen Rezeption," in Florilegium Sangallense: Festschriftfur Johannes Duft zum 65. Geburtstag,ed. Otto P. Clavadetscher and others (St. Gall and Sigmaringen, 1980), pp. 243-66. See also below, nn. 100-101.
68 Michael
J. Sallnow, Pilgrims of the Andes:Regional Cults in Cuzco (Washington, D.C., 1987), pp.
15, 86, 188, 196, 204, and passim; Catherine J. Allen, The Hold Life Has: Cocaand Cultural Identity
in an Andean Community(Washington, D.C., 1988), pp. 229-36.

90

Ubi Ecclesia?

chua, and there are only a handful into Nahuatl.69 As a result, Quechua has
become, to use Bruce Mannheim's graphic term, an oppressed language.70
This process, however, was not discernible to the early Quechua grammarians
and lexicographers, the missionaries who believed that Christianity must be
taught to the Indians both learnedly and eloquently.71 The first Quechua grammar and dictionary, the result of fifteen years of study, were published by Fray
Domingo de Santo Tomas in 1560. When countering arguments that Quechua
was an inadequate vehicle for Christian teaching, it was this work that Acosta
cited.72 Fray Domingo had written with a twofold purpose. On the one hand,
missionaries speaking Quechua were urgently needed in Peru. And on the other,
Fray Domingo wanted his readers to understand that Andean civilization was
in every sense equal to that of Europe, and that its exponents, the Indians of
Peru, were therefore as much entitled to be vassals of the Spanish crown as
were the people and nobles of Spain. Fray Domingo sought to impress this issue
on his readers by explaining carefully and repeatedly how, given that language
is the portrait of the culture that produces it, the Quechua language, apart
from containing many kinds of elegant and courteous forms of expression, was
ordered by parts of speech, each with its distinct properties, and by syntax, just
as Latin and Spanish were.73
In making this argument, Fray Domingo appealed to the most advanced Spanish research on language of his day, that is, the Latin and Spanish grammars
by the humanist Antonio de Nebrija. The Latin grammar was designed to improve Spaniards' mastery of classical, as distinct from medieval, Latin, which,
as a disciple of Italian humanists, Nebrija despised. The Spanish grammar, on
the other hand, demonstrated that the vernacular could, like Latin, be described
by reference to parts of speech, declensions, conjugations, and syntax and was
therefore as complete and sophisticated a vehicle for expression as Latin.74 In
extending these arguments to Quechua, Fray Domingo expanded and changed
their scope.
If Quechua was like Spanish and Latin, then there was no reason for at69
Jesus Bustamante informs me that he has found two manuscripts of plays by Calder6n translated
into Nahuatl. On the context for such plays, see Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest(above, n.
2), pp. 401-10.
70 See Bruce Mannheim, The
Language of the Inka since the EuropeanInvasion (Austin, Tex., 1991),
esp. pp. 61-79.
71 See on this
topic, Ore, Symbolo(above, n. 61), 10, p. 43 f.
72 Acosta, De
procuranda4.9.
73
Domingo de Santo Tomas, Gramdticao arte de la lengua general de los Indios de los reynosdel Peru
(Valladolid, 1560; repr. Lima, 1951), pp. 10, 16 (mentioning Antonio de Nebrija; modern pagination
cited here and below). The importance of teaching Christianity in Quechua was also stressed by
Pedro de Quiroga, Librointitulado Coloquiosde la verdad (Seville, 1922), written c. 1562. See Rodolfo
Cerr6n Palomino, "Un texto desconocido del Quechua costefio (s. XVI)," Revista andina 9/2 (1991),
393-413. On the Italian antecedents to these discussions see S. Stever Gravelle, "The Latin-Vernacular Question and Humanist Theory of Language and Culture," Journal of the History of Ideas
49 (1988), 367-86.
74 Antonio de
Nebrija, IntroductionesLatinae (Salamanca, 1530; repr. Salamanca, 1981), first published in 1481. The Spanish grammar was first published in 1492; see the edition, with introduction,
by Antonio Quilis, Gramdticade la lengua castellana (Madrid, 1980). Domingo de Santo Tomas,
Gramdtica,pp. 19-20, distinguishes the customary eight parts of speech in Quechua, referring to
Nebrija's Latin grammar (fol. 6v, unfoliated).

Ubi Ecclesia?

91

tempting to impose in the Andes a Spanish-speaking Christianity, this being a

point that Fray Domingo sought to demonstrate by including in his grammar a
Quechua sermon dealing with the origin and redemption of humankind, along
with translations of several short prayers.75Having made his case regarding the
equivalence of Quechua with Latin and Spanish grammar, Fray Domingo here
extended this case to vocabulary. At the same time, just as in Europe, where
the monks who translated Latin into Old High German had realized that simple
transposition from one language into the other was not enough,76 so in the
Andes. In some instances the vocabulary that missionaries needed was not available in Quechua, so that Spanish terms had to be used to describe "the mysteries
and sacraments of our holy Catholic faith."77 Elsewhere, Fray Domingo created
terms out of Quechua that described notions that had not existed in the Andes,
for example, "house of the devil," qupaypaguasin, for hell. Indeed, Quechua
had no term for the devil either, so that here Fray Domingo created the phrase
mana alli qupay,"spirit who is not good." Finally, Fray Domingo adapted existing
terms to Christian uses. Hananpacha, the visible sky and upper world, thus became heaven.78But the issue was complicated, because hanan described not just
an upper world, but also the upper moiety in each Andean settlement. Here
the term could refer both to the people and to their geographical location, as
in Hanancuzco, the upper part of the city, northeast of the Temple of the Sun,
which was inhabited by the upper Inca moiety.79
Fray Domingo was very much aware of these problems, not merely regarding
vocabulary, but also regarding grammar and syntax. Having thus set up his
explanation of Quechua grammar to follow the structure provided by Nebrija
75
Domingo de Santo Tomas, Gramdtica,pp. 188-207, the sermon and a prayer. The sermon in
part replicates the model sermon provided by the First Council of Lima; see Concilioslimenses,Lima
I, constitutions 38-39. Constitution 38 discusses the punishments of hell, pointing out that "all
their ancestors and lords, because they did not know or adore God but [adored] the sun and rocks
and other creatures, are now in that place with great pain." In accord with his generous assessment
of the theological value of Andean religion, Domingo de Santo Tomas omitted this statement from
his sermon. In the harsher ecclesiastical climate of the mid-seventeenth century, however, preachers
once more asserted that the pagan ancestors of Andeans were in hell; see Fernando de Avendafio,
Sermonesde los misteriosde nuestra santa fe catolica en lengua castellana y la general del Inca (Lima,
1648), sermon 4, fol. 44v. The sentiment about pagans was shared by Alcuin, Epistola 124, to Higbald,
bishop of Lindisfarne, MGH Epistolae Merowingici et Karolini aevi, 2:183.
76See Werner Betz,
DerEinfluss desLateinischenaufden althochdeutschen
Sprachschatz,1: DerAbrogans
(Heidelberg, 1936), p. 5, about Entlehnung, Analogiesetzung,Nachbildung.
77
Domingo de Santo Tomas, Gramdtica,p. 100, specifying gracia and charidad, as well as trees
and animals imported into Peru from Europe, as untranslatable.
78 Domingo de Santo Tomas, Lexicon o vocabulariode la lengua general del Peru (Valladolid, 1560;
repr. Lima, 1951), pp. 154, 279 (modern pagination) for "cupaypa guasin." The devil was especially
problematic; see ibid., p. 99, "demonio bueno o malo, cupay"; p. 279, "cupay, angel bueno o malo";
Gramdtica,pp. 200 and 201, "mana allicupay ... demonio." Vocabulario,p. 93, "cielo esto todo lo
que parece, hanacpacha"; cf. Gramdtica,p. 207, "hananpachaman ringuichic," "you will go to
heaven." See MacCormack, Religion in the Andes, pp. 254 ff.
79 Fray Domingo, a careful student of Andean culture and society, was aware of this meaning,
and thus did not use the term hurin, describing the lower moiety of society and its geographical
location, to refer to hell. On the very complex issue of the organization of Cuzco, see the distinct
approaches ofJ. H. Rowe, "La constitucion Inca del Cuzco," Historica9/1 (1985), 35-73, and R. T.
Zuidema, Inca Civilization in Cuzco, trans. Jean-Jacques Decoster (Austin, Tex., 1990).

92

Ubi Ecclesia?

in his IntroductionesLatinae, he was unable to dispense with a chapter entitled

"Regarding Some Ways of Speaking Particular (to Quechua) Involving the Verb
and Its Conjugation."80 Anyone learning Quechua is well advised to study this
chapter with care, because the "ways of speaking" it outlines are in effect fundamental to any real grasp of the language. These ways of speaking moved to
center stage in the next major Quechua grammar to be published, by the Jesuit
Diego Gonzalez Holguin, which appeared in Lima in 1607.81 Like Fray Domingo
and before him Nebrija, Gonzalez Holguin used the parts of speech as the basic
module of his discussion, but that is where the similarity between this and
grammars of European languages ends. Using some of the existing terminology
of European grammatical works, Gonzalez Holguin instead described the uses
in Quechua of a variety of structures alien to European languages, such as
nominalized verbs and the Quechua system of verbal and nominal suffixes.82It
was a book characteristic of its period, for Gonzalez Holguin recognized the
distinctiveness of Quechua grammar and syntax at the very time when other
missionaries were beginning to understand Andean religion in its own right, as
not being comparable with or reducible to whatever might be learned about
the religions of pre-Christian Europe, or even about the beliefs of contemporary
European country folk.
This recognition, however, did not come without a heavy cost. Those who,
like Fray Domingo, had argued for a basic similarity between Inca and Andean
culture, on the one hand, and the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and
of pre-Christian medieval Europe, on the other, did so out of a conviction that
cultures, however diverse, are endowed with a certain parity of stature. This
conviction formed part of the argument, so passionately defended by Bartolome
de Las Casas, about the brotherhood of all human beings. Although several of
the tenets defended by Las Casas entered Spanish legislation regarding Indians,
these tenets were so deeply at loggerheads with the logistics of colonial exploitation that the laws remained a dead letter.83Arguments about cultural parity
as a basis for political coexistence between Andeans and Europeans therefore
lost their former practical relevance, and the urgent tone of Las Casas and
Domingo de Santo Tomas gave way to more dispassionate, detached reflection
about Indian cultures. The Quechua grammar of Gonzalez Holguin was the
fruit of precisely this kind of reflection.
At this same time, in the early seventeenth century, a further set of forces
that once again leads us to look back to late-antique and medieval Europe came
80
Domingo de Santo Tomas, Gramdtica,p. 87, "de algunas maneras de hablar particulares que
hay por el verbo y conjugaci6n del." The text begins: "Es de notar cerca de la conjugaci6n de todos
los verbos en esta lengua que generalmente en ella ay ciertas y particulares maneras de hablar
allende y fuera de las generales conviene a saber por verbos y palabras incompletas, lo qual no se
halla en la lengua latina ni espainola o muy raramente." Quechua grammarians were not alone in
finding the framework provided by Latin inadequate for their task; see regarding Hebrew, A.J.
Klijnsmit, "Spinoza and Grammatical Tradition," MededelingenXLIXvanwegehet Spinozahuis(Leiden,
1986).
81 Gonzalez
Holguin, Gramdtica(above, n. 55).
82 Gonzalez
Holguin, Gramdtica,pp. 65-208.
83 Note Acosta's
gloomy discussion of these issues in De procuranda3.3-18.

Ubi Ecclesia?

93

into play in the Andes. The bishops and theologians, among them Acosta, who
assembled for the Third Council of Lima in 1583 were deeply aware that the
Christianity that had been taught to Andean people rarely made more than a
superficial impression. Rather, just as had happened in Europe during earlier
centuries, converts observed Christian rituals alongside the rituals of the old
religion without any sense that one ritual ought to exclude the other.84 It was
at this juncture that the Augustinian logic to "compel them to enter" acquired
its greatest force in the Andes, reinforced as this logic now was by the restatement and clarification of Catholic doctrine at the Council of Trent.85 Earlier
decrees against Andean religious observances were reiterated in 1583, alongside
new provisions for the enforcement of ecclesiastical precepts by the secular
state.86 Late-antique canons, especially those of the Visigothic councils of Toledo, were explicitly cited as precedent. These councils, moreover, provided the
Peruvian church with its vocabulary of coercion, or rather, as it was expressed
at the time, of extirpating idolatry.87
In or shortly before 1607, the missionary priest Francisco de Avila preached
a Quechua sermon against idolatry in his parish of San Damian de Huarochiri,
recounting in it some episodes from the lives of Christian martyrs.88This encouraged one of Avila's listeners to tell him of a local martyr, a man who had
recently been killed for refusing to take part in an Andean religious ritual.
See above, n. 37, on Martin of Braga and the Scarapsus.J. N. Hillgarth, "Popular Religion in
Visigothic Spain," in VisigothicSpain: New Approaches,ed. Edward James (Oxford, 1980) pp. 3-60,
reprinted in J. N. Hillgarth, VisigothicSpain, Byzantiumand the Irish (London, 1985), esp. pp. 47 ff.;
MacCormack, Religion in the Andes, esp. pp. 285-301. I do not know of any entirely satisfactory
account of the coexistence, whether peacable or not, of pagan and Christian beliefs and rituals in
any society. The difficulty is that it has been too easily assumed (by missionaries then and scholars
now) that either pagan or Christian practice, or both, are static, i.e., do not influence each other,
and that Christianity is somehow normative; see, for example, Alexander Murray, "Missionaries and
Magic in Dark Age Europe," Past and Present 136 (1992), 186-205.
85 On the
reception of the Council of Trent in Peru, see Valentin Trujillo Mena, La legislacion
eclesidsticaen el Virreynatodel Peru durante el siglo XVI (Lima, 1981), pp. 67 ff., and 335-54 for
papal corrections to the Third Council of Lima, esp. pp. 335 (Tridentine catechism) and 341 f.
(sacraments).
86 Lima III 4.7: "Si nulla potest Respublica sine metu supplicii in officio contineri, neque sufficiunt,
quantumvis bene ac sapienter constitutae leges ad cohibendos a criminibus homines, nisi poenae
pariter in rebelles decernatur...." Cf. above, at n. 31. Acosta, De procuranda 4.19, recommends
using the secular arm to administer physical punishments to Andeans for dereliction of Christian
obligations.
87 See Sixteenth Council of Toledo 16.2, ed. Vives, Concilios(above, n. 49),
pp. 499-500, for the
term "extirpation"; this canon was quoted by Jose de Arriaga, La extirpaci6nde la idolatria en el
Peri, in Horacio H. Urteaga, ed., Colecci6nde librosy documentospara la historia del Perz, 2nd ser.,
1 (Lima, 1920; hereafter Extirpaci6n),p. xxxii. Another aspect of missionary Christianity in earlycolonial Peru that has Visigothic antecedents is the idea-more often taken for granted in colonial
Peru than debated-that membership in civil society and membership in the church were coextensive
and that religious conformity and compliance with secular jurisdiction were inseparable. See the
Visigothic Liberiudiciorum4.2.17-18, MGL LL 1:184-85, for laws of Reccesvinth and Chindasvinth,
654, which decree that an inheritance cannot pass to the next of kin of a baby who has not been
baptized. The laws were repeated in the Fuero Juzgo; see Fuero Juzgo en Latin y Castellano ...
(Madrid, 1815), 4.2.18-19, pp. 71-72.
88 The
episode is recounted in Arriaga, Extirpaci6n 1, pp. 4-5.
84

94

Ubi Ecclesia?

Investigation of the incident led to the discovery of hundreds of Andean sacred

objects and mummified ancestral bodies which were continuing to receive offerings, conclusive proof that Christian teaching had made little impact. Avila's
prosecution of his investigation was ferocious and led to the launching of similar
investigations, described as visitas de idolatrias,throughout the huge archdiocese
of Lima during the following half century. This was a very different kind of
missionizing from that practiced earlier by Fray Domingo de Santo Tomas and
his contemporaries. Andean objects of worship had been destroyed from the
beginning, of course. However, the detail and intensity of the investigations
that Avila set afoot, and the harsh penalties that were imposed, were unheard
of.
Like Las Casas, and like Boniface in early-medieval Europe,89 Fray Domingo
had been confident that natural reason had endowed the peoples of the Americas
with an instinctive, spontaneous ability to comprehend the Christian revelation
and that therefore evangelization consisted of orchestrating a gradual transition
from Inca and Andean religion to Christianity. Acosta already considered such
confidence to be misplaced,90and Avila was convinced that a complete rupturethe extirpation of all Andean rituals and the systematic destruction of sacred
objects of every description-was a necessary precondition for evangelization.9l
Religious considerations went hand in hand with political ones. Eighty years
after the Inca empire had come to an end, the descendants of the invaders felt
at home in Peru and identified with the land, but they could not identify with
its people. Rather, coexistence with the Andean majority and a greater familiarity with Andean cultures and languages had produced a profound sense of
difference and polarization, a conviction that Andean culture was no foundation
for any kind of political order, just as Andean religion could not be turned into

Sixteenth-century missionaries discussed the question whether all human beings, and thus Amerindians, were endowed with natural reason principally in the light of Aristotle and Aquinas. But
this idea also had non-Aristotelian exponents. As Boniface wrote to King Aethelwald: "Cum ergo
gentiles, qui Deum nesciunt et legem non habent iuxta dictum apostoli, naturaliter ea quae legis
sunt faciunt et ostendunt opus legis scriptum in cordibus suis ... ," Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius
und Lullus (above, n. 6), letter 73, pp. 150 f. See further Ramon-Jesus Queralto Moreno, El pensamientofilosofico-politicode Bartolomede Las Casas (Seville, 1976), pp. 126-43.
90Throughout De procurandaAcosta reflected on the problems of superficial evangelization. See
1.14-15, where he describes parallel pagan and Christian cult and belief in the Andes, citing the
precedent of ancient Samaria (2 Kings 17.24-41) and describing Peru as "the Samaria of our times."
See also 4.5 and 5.9-11 on the limitations and extent of extirpation and coercion; 1.7 on "Compel
them to enter," citing also Augustine, Epistula 185, to Boniface regarding the Circumcellions.
9' To Andeanists, Avila is best known for the collection of myths from Huarochiri that were
recorded in Quechua under his patronage in order to facilitate extirpation and evangelization. The
myths were edited and translated by J. M. Arguedas, Dioses y hombresde Huarochiri (Lima, 1966);
this work includes, pp. 241-66, a collection of documents on the missionary history of the region.
The first scholarly edition of the text is by Gerald Taylor, Ritos y tradicionesde Huarochiri del siglo
XVII (Lima, 1987); the work includes a study on Francisco de Avila by Antonio Acosta. Now there
is also an English translation with the original text: Frank Salomon and George L. Urioste, The
HuarochiriManuscript:A Testamentof Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion (Austin, Tex., 1991). The
Quechua narrator of the myths periodically comments on the success of Avila's extirpation; see, in
the last-mentioned edition, 9.133, 20.246, 24.319, 25.347.
89

Ubi Ecclesia?

95

a grounding from which Christianity would grow.92A policy of extirpation, which

would deeply modify Andean society while destroying Andean religion, thus
made sense. In formulating this policy, men of the church, many of them formidably erudite, once again looked back to the authority and precedent of
biblical and Christian history. "The cult of idols is the root of all evil," the
author of the Book of Wisdom had written: Roman emperors and Visigothic
kings had legislated against it, and Tertullian, Lactantius, Ambrose, Augustine,
Chrysostom, Pope Leo, and Pope Gregory the Great had all urged the destruction of this veritable "seed of the devil."93
Francisco de Avila thus found a willing audience when in 1609 he reminded
the clergy of Lima in an elegant Latin oration of their priestly obligations.
"Behold in time of peace my bitterness has become most bitter to me," he
quoted from the song of Hezekiah, king of Judah, joining to the citation the
words which St. Bernard had used to exhort the bishops of his own day: "This
is not a time when the bride is adorned, but despoiled; she is not guarded but
lost; not defended but exposed; not raised up but prostituted. It is a time when
the flock is not pastured, but slain and devoured." "Your country lies desolate,"
Isaiah had written; "your cities are burned with fire; in your very presence aliens
devour your land."94 These words, Avila urged, could equally well be applied
to the missionary church of Peru. Conversion simply could not be the gentle
growing into Christianity that Fray Domingo de Santo Tomas had envisioned.
Rather, it had to be a break with the past, a radical cognitive disjuncture such
as Augustine had described in his Confessions.95
This disjuncture is what the visitas de idolatrias that Avila pioneered were
designed to achieve. The procedure began with mass, catechetical instruction,
and a sermon in which Andean beliefs about creation, human origins, and the
nature of deity were refuted as preliminary to explaining the greater cogency
of the biblical account. Next, village lords and elders were questioned individually with a view to discovering whether ancestral mummified bodies and other
objects of worship were being revered in secret. Finally, all other villagers,
grouped by sex, age, and occupation, were questioned for the same purpose.96
92 See the
pastoral letter of 1647 by the archbishop of Lima, Pedro de Villagomes, Cartapastoral
de exhortaci6n,e instrucci6ncontralas idolatriasde los indios del arzobispadode Lima. Arriaga's Extirpaci6n
was reproduced in this pastoral letter, which was reprinted by Horacio Urteaga, Exortacionese
instrucci6nacercade las idolatrias de los indios del arzobispadode Lima, Colecci6n de Libros y Documentos Referentes a la Historia del Peru 12 (Lima, 1919).
93See the aprobaci6nby Fray Miguel de Aguirre, O.S.A., for Francisco de Avila's sermons, in
Francisco Davila (sic), Tratadosde los evanglios que nuestra madre la iglesia proponeen todo el aio, 1
(Lima [1647]; hereafter Tratados),pp. 31-43 (pagination supplied here and below).
94 Avila, "Oratio ... ad dominum Bartholomaeum
Lupum Gerrerum," printed in Tratados,1:2223. The sermon of Bernard's that Avila had in mind claims to have been addressed to the bishops
assembled at the Council of Reims in 1148; it is now considered not to be by Bernard. For the text,
see PL 184:1079-86, Avila's quotation at 1083D. Avila and Pseudo-Bernard both cited the song of
Hezekiah, Isaiah 38.17, according to the Vulgate text, "Ecce in pace amaritudo mea amarissima"
and "Terra vestra deserta .. .," Isaiah 1.7.
95 Paula Fredriksen, "Paul and
Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, and the
Retrospective Self," Journal of TheologicalStudies 37/1 (1986), 3-35.
96 For a full
description of the procedure see Arriaga, Extirpaci6n 12-16.

96

Ubi Ecclesia?

Then such objects of worship as had been found as a result of questioning and
cross-examination were burned, and those who had attempted to conceal them
were publicly humiliated and punished. Not infrequently, Andeans subjected
to interrogation by a visitor of idolatries committed suicide.97 Others broke
down during or after questioning, either becoming demonically possessed, as a
missionary might view it, or making a spectacular gesture of conversion, abandoning family and home and living thenceforth as a humble servant or dependent of the church.98 Visitas were designed not only to destroy the established
structures of belief and ritual practice but also to distance a village from its
leaders, to supplant the authority and dignity of Andean priests and ritual specialists by those of Spanish counterparts. As one Andean priest, Hernando
Paucar, said to Avila, "The entire village respected me as now they respect you,
and much more."99
In early-medieval Europe, in Galicia, in Anglo-Saxon England, and in ninthcentury Bavaria and Switzerland, missionaries, priests, and monks came to identify with the people whom they were converting, or whom their predecessors
had converted. Here also, conversion was slow, but it was a two-way process.
As missionaries learned the languages and cultures of their prospective converts,
as those converts or their descendants in due course became priests, monks,
and nuns, late-antique ideals of holiness, formed in the sophisticated urban
environment of the later Roman Empire, were accommodated to ideals that
were practicable in the warlike, posttribal societies of early-medieval Europe.100
Simultaneously, the boundaries between the Latin and written culture of lateantique Christianity and the vernacular and oral cultures of those who hadjoined
the church began to interpenetrate each other. The epic Beowulf was written
down in and for a Christian society, and the Latin poem Waltharius,with its
vision of a heroic tribal past, likewise is the product of a Christian environment.101Colonial Peru, by contrast, produced no canonized saints of Andean
97
Arriaga, Extirpaci6n6, p. 61 f.
On demonic possession, see Avila, Tratados,1, preface. On becoming a dependent of the church,
see Pedro Cieza de Le6n, Cr6nica del Peru: Primera parte, ed. Franklin Pease, G.Y. (Lima, 1986),
117, p. 307.
99Avila, Tratados,1,
preface, p. 62.
100Patricia Cox, Biographyin Late Antiquity:A Questfor the Holy Man (Berkeley, 1983);
Jacques
Fontaine, "King Sisebut's Vita Desiderii and the Political Function of Visigothic Hagiography," in
VisigothicSpain, ed. James (above, n. 84), pp. 93-129; Karl Bosl, "Der 'Adelsheilige': Idealtypus
und Wirklichkeit, Gesellschaft und Kultur im merowingerzeitlichen Bayern des 7. und 8. Jahrhunderts," in Monchtumund Gesellschaftim Fruhmittelalter,ed. Friedrich Prinz (Darmstadt, 1976), pp.
354-86; Lellia Cracco Ruggini, "The Crisis of the Noble Saint: The 'Vita Arnulfi,' " in Le septieme
siecle (above, n. 6), pp. 116-53; Alexander Gieysztor, "Sanctus et gloriosissimus martyr Christi
Adalbertus: Un etat et une eglise missionaires aux alentours de l'an mille," in La conversioneal
cristianesimonell'Europadell'alto medioevo,Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull'Alto
Medioevo 14 (Spoleto, 1967), pp. 611-47.
101
John D. Niles, Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Teresa Paroli,
"La nascita della letteratura anglosassone," in Angli e Sassoni (above, n. 5), pp. 383-451; Rudolf
Schieffer, "Zu neuen Thesen iiber den 'Waltharius,' " DeutschesArchivfur Erforschungdes Mittelalters
36 (1980), 193-201; Edoardo D'Angelo, "Lucano nel 'Waltharius'?"Studi medievali32 (1991), 15990. See also above, n. 66. In historiographical terms, one may note the absorption of new materials
within existing genres of historical writing and the consequent expansion of those genres in early98

Ubi Ecclesia?

97

extraction; Andean men were not admitted to the priesthood or to monasteries,

and they could not teach in universities,102this being one reason why today the
corpus of Quechua literature is so very small. Hernando Paucar, whom Avila
prosecuted, ended his life in exile in Chile.l03
Avila, by contrast, spent his own long life preaching in Quechua every Sunday
and feast day, and he was a profoundly eloquent and learned preacher, able to
move his audience by reason and emotion and by the sheer power of his images.104Like Acosta, Avila read Augustine's treatise On Instructingthe Unlearned,
but characteristically he derived from it a very different message. Augustine had
written in response to a plea for help from the priest Deogratias of Carthage,
who was fearful of never truly being able to move and instruct the catechumens
in his charge, fearful also that his tongue could not express what his heart knew.
Acosta identified with this sense of isolation on the part of the preacher, with
the sheer loneliness of a missionary's life, and thus adjusted Augustine's counsels
for Deogratias to his own Andean experience.105
Avila, on the other hand, did not feel lonely. He was so successful an extirpator
because he had a quite uncanny ability to enter into the thoughts and values
of his Andean public, and this same characteristic is what also made him an
eloquent, powerful preacher. It was thus Augustine's reflections on language
and speech that found an Andean voice in his sermons. Speech happens in time
and has duration, Augustine had said; it is an external expression of the inner
and instantaneous perceptions of the intellect, a trace of those perceptions. The
duration of speech, its slowness when compared with the ictus intelligentiae, the
medieval Europe, as against a very different position in early-colonial Peru. Here, writing about the
Incas remained in a distinct and separate category, while Andeans of the time were scarcely represented either as autonomous historical agents or as historical writers. See Walter Goffart, The
Narratorsof BarbarianHistory:Jordanes, Gregoryof Tours,Bede and Paul the Deacon (Princeton, 1988).
A historiographical study of Peru remains to be written; see, meanwhile, Francisco Esteve Barba,
"Estudio preliminar," in his edition Cronicasperuanas de interes indigena, Biblioteca de Autores
Espafioles 209 (Madrid, 1968); Franklin Pease, G.Y., Del Tawantinsuyua la historiadel Peru, 2nd ed.
(Lima, 1989); Rolena Adorno, GuamanPoma: Writing and Resistancein Colonial Peru (Austin, Tex.,
1988).
102 Acosta, De
procuranda4.8, notes how useful mestizos can be to the enterprise of preaching in
Quechua but urges that they should not be ordained as priests. Recopilacionde las leyesde las Indias
mandadasimprimir... por ... Don CarlosII (Madrid, 1681; repr. 1973), 1.7.7, dated 1588, allowing
mestizos to become priests and mestizas to become nuns, remained for the most part a dead letter,
and Andean men were almost never ordained; see the excellent study by C. R. Boxer, The Church
Militant and Iberian Expansion, 1440-1770 (Baltimore, 1978), chap. 1. Luis Millones, "Los indios
de Santa Rosa: La poblaci6n aborigen a traves de los ojos de los bienaventurados," in 500 anos de
mestizajeen los Andes,ed. Hiroyasu Tomoeda and Luis Millones (Osaka, 1992), pp. 103-12, comments
on the biography of Saint Rose of Lima and the complete silence and effacement in that work of
her Andean servant and companion.
103
Avila, Tratados,1:68.
104 See Avila's own account of his
activities in the preface to his sermons, Tratados,1:53-88.
105
Acosta, De procuranda4.13-14, on the loneliness of missionaries and the resulting likelihood
of their falling into sin; 1.4 and 4.21, on the wearying nature of repeated preaching, this being an
issue treated by Augustine in De catechizandisrudibus (above, n. 52) 2.3.1-2, 7; 10.14.4-5; 10.15.9;
11.16.1. For an earlier reception of De catechizandisrudibus and the Enchiridion in the missionary
literature of Mexico, see A. Etchegaray Cruz, "Saint Augustin et le contenu de la catechese pretridentine en Amerique Latine," Revue des etudes augustiniennes 11 (1965), 277-90.

98

Ubi Ecclesia?

raylike thrust of the intelligence, is what induces weariness and discouragement

both in the speaker and in his public.106Avila put Augustine's counsels into
practice by articulating the thoughts, doubts, and reservations of his Andean
listeners, by preaching, as it were, a dialogue. Thinking of going to Cuzco and
saying it are two different things, Avila pointed out in a Christmas sermon: "Just
by yourselves you might be thinking, might be desiring, 'To go to Cuzco,' just
in your thought. But from that, talking, you might say, 'Yes, to Cuzco I want
to go.' This talk of yours, thinking of yours, might it not be two 'utterances'?107
Indeed, they could be two. Earlier, right, there was the word'08of your thought,
not yet your speaking. But by the time you speak, could not the word of your
word already have existed? It is definitely like that. This cannot be denied."'09
From here, Avila went on to explain from the text of the Gospel for the Nativity,
"In the beginning was the Word," how Christ the Word of God was first born
in the understanding-here he employed a term derived from the Quechua
word for wise man or shaman-of God the Father. Then Christ was born of the
Virgin Mary, and furthermore, he is also born in the understanding of human
beings.110In this way Avila redeployed Augustine's reflections on the nature of
language, also taking in a theme of Augustine's treatise On the Trinity,ll in order
to explain the Incarnation in terms both accessible to his Andean audience and
theologically profound.
A deep tension pervaded Avila's career: on the one hand, he combatted Andean religion with truly ferocious intensity, and on the other, his passionate
concern that his Andean public should really comprehend the Christian message
106
Augustine, De catechizandisrudibus 2.3.6: "Sed neque ita licet educere et quasi exporrigere in
sensum audientium per sonum vocis illa vestigia, quae imprimit intellectus memoriae, sicut apertus
et manifestus est vultus: illa enim sunt intus in animo, iste foris in corpore. Quapropter coniiciendum
est, quantum distet sonus oris nostri ab illo ictu intelligentiae, quando ne ipsi quidem impressioni
memoriae similis est."
107 1 translate "utterance" for Quechua "cimi" (also
spelled by Avila as "simi"; see below). Avila
uses the same term to translate and paraphrase the opening of John's Gospel, "In principio erat
verbum"; see Tratados, 1:56, "Naupaccmi cimi carccan, rimascca simi, ancha naupacc puni .. ."
See Diego Gonzalez Holguin, Vocabulariode la lengua general de todoel Peru llamada lengua Qquichua
o del Inca (Lima, 1608; repr. Lima, 1952) p. 326: "Simi. boca lenguage mandamiento ley bocado,
las nuevas, la palabra y la respuesta." Similarly Vocabularioy phrasis en la lengua general de los indios
del Peru, llamada Quichua . . . en los reyes,por Antonio Ricardo ano MDLXXXVI(repr. Lima, 1951),
p. 80: "Simi boca, lenguage, mandamiento, bocado." Bruce Mannheim has pointed out to me that
cimi is closer to the Greek logos than the Spanish verbo,or, for that matter, the Latin verbum.There
would thus be no basis in Quechua for the controversies that arose out of Erasmus's translation of
the opening of John as "In principio erat sermo"; see Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ:
New TestamentScholarshipin the Renaissance(Princeton, 1983), p. 170. "Sermo" also translates into
Quechua "simi." Avila was clearly aware of the theological implications of the range of meanings
of the term "cimi," and explores them in this sermon.
108 1 use "word" to translate "cimi" in the
original.
109Avila,Tratados,1:59.
10 Avila, Tratados,1:59-65.
"' Augustine, De Trinitate4.21; another counsel of Augustine's, to anticipate questions that the
listener might ask, De doctrina Christiana 4.20.39, was followed by Avila throughout his sermons.
See Carol Harrison, Beautyand Revelation in the Thoughtof Saint Augustine (Oxford, 1992), pp. 6970; and Hilary Dansey Smith, Preaching in the Spanish Golden Age: A Study of Some Preachersof the
Reign of Philip III (Oxford, 1978).

Ubi Ecclesia?

99

led him to translate it into a vocabulary and into concepts that were far from
alien to the earlier and non-Christian theology of the Andes. To "compel them
to enter" was as much an expression of Avila's pastoral concern as was his
preaching: one led into the other. But for that to be possible, the voices of
Avila's listeners had to and did remain alive in his preaching, just as earlier the
voices of Sallust and Terence, of Vergil, Cicero, and Varro had remained alive
in the sermons and writings of Augustine.112 Today, in the vast hinterland of
the Andes, in upper Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, the Christianity that Avila and
his followers preached has somehow taken root and has become an indigenous
Christianity, a religion recognizable to a student of Christian Europe-yet not.113
For as in Avila's sermons, it is the Andean soul with which Christian forms are
imbued that makes them live, and not the other way round.
Avila was a warrior of the church, and his contemporary Calancha, with whom
we began, was of a more contemplative, meditating inclination. Both men were
essentially forgotten during subsequent generations, and they remain forgotten
by all but scholars. Contemporary theologians in the Andes do not look back
to Calancha's piety and love for allegory that speak so eloquently not only in
his pages but also in the devotional art of the colonial church, in images of the
Virgin Immaculate, the Virgin Shepherdess of Souls, and of Christ the Man of
Sorrows."4 Nor do contemporary theologians look back to the long and tragic
history of extirpation. If there is any connection between the theological concerns of the colonial church and the church of the present, it is to be found
in the writings of Las Casas and Domingo de Santo Tomas, in their commitment
to recover the rights and human dignity of the dispossessed. It is the poor and
dispossessed who are at the forefront of contemporary Latin American theology
and pastoral care. The guiding principles of the theology of liberation, that
poverty and oppression are scandals to be combatted as a matter of fundamental
Christian obligation and, furthermore, that it is the faith, not of the privileged,
but of the poor that defines Christian identity, were pioneered in contemporary
Peru by Gustavo Gutierrez and arose out of his work with the poor of Lima.115
112

On Augustine's classical orientations, H. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique

(Paris, 1938), with Retractatio(Paris, 1949), remains fundamental. H. Hagendahl, Augustine and the
Latin Classics (Goteborg, 1967), is an authoritative guide to Augustine's classical quotations. See
also James O'Donnell, "Augustine's Classical Readings," Recherchesaugustiniennes 15 (1980), 14475.
113Sallnow,
Pilgrims of the Andes (above, n. 68), reveals the multifarious intersections of Andean
and European ideas in contemporary Andean Christianity;T. Platt, "The Andean Soldiers of Christ:
Confraternity Organization, the Mass of the Sun and Regenerative Warfare in Rural Potosi (18th20th Centuries)," Journal de la Societedes Americanistes73 (1987), 139-91.
114
Jose de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert, Historia de la pintura cuzquena,2 vols. (Lima, 1982), represents
the colonial repertory of themes very well. For the "divina pastora" by Marcos Zapata, in Cuzco
cathedral, see vol. 2, fig. 313. The Man of Sorrows, as Christ of the Earthquakes, is more frequently
invoked, and the Virgin Immaculate is almost ubiquitous in the Andes.
115 See Gustavo Gutierrez, La
teologia de la liberacion(Salamanca, 1972): the book begins with a
quotation from the novel Todaslas sangres, by Jose Maria Arguedas, in which the reader is invited
to consider the possibility that an Andean sacristan understands better where God might be than
does his parish priest; see also Gutierrez, p. 252, where the passage is discussed. I have not been
able to consult Gustavo Gutierrez, En busca de los pobresde Jesucristo:El pensamientode Bartolomede
Las Casas (Lima, 1992).

100

Ubi Ecclesia?

This identification with the poor precludes an involvement with the state such
as made religious coercion in the later Roman Empire and medieval Europe or
extirpation in colonial Peru a feasible course of action. Among the contemporary
heirs of the missionary church of Peru, therefore, the old question, where is
the church, and what is it, is being posed in an entirely new way, a way, however,
that is also deeply rooted in the late-antique and medieval past.

Sabine MacCormackis Professorof History and Classics at the Universityof Michigan, Ann
Arbor,MI 48109.