Angelus News | October 2-9, 2020 | Vol. 5 No. 25

Columin
the
1492.
EVERETT COLLECTION/SHUTTERSTOCK
everything would be better if Europeans
had not arrived in the New World.
This idea is even embraced by some
ecclesiastics, who propose that the
evangelization that took place was not
justified since the means by which
it was conducted were not always
upright.
I remember standing on a Mayan
pyramid in Tikal with some Spaniards
who sighed with guilt because their
ancestors had “destroyed” the civilization
whose ruins lay before us. Tikal
was destroyed before the conquistadors
arrived, of course, but that did not matter
to the romantic hankerings of these
modern, post-Franco Spaniards (who
enjoy all the perks and luxuries of the
culture they profess to hate).
“You don’t think that the Spanish
were not at least better than the people
who built this place for human sacrifice?”
I asked. “Didn’t you hear the
guide say they rolled the victims’ heads
down these steep steps?” They rolled
their eyes at my reply.
How do such ideas gain currency and
why are they being passed down to the
next generation?
Several books about Columbus have
been very instructive in teaching me
how people choose to think of him.
One is the 1996 science-fiction novel
“Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher
Columbus” (Tor Books, $8.99),
by Orson Scott Card.
The author imagines an alternative
history in which Columbus is stranded
in America with people from the
future. The planet has been catastrophically
depopulated and ecologically
damaged.
Columbus is given credit in the novel
for his sincere Christianity. But an
African woman named Diko comes
from the future to marry him and
change the course of human history,
supposedly to save the human race
from extinction. In my opinion, Diko’s
purpose is to power-wash Columbus
with political correctness.
Alternative-history fiction involves
reimagining the past to reshape it.
“Pastwatch” is an attempt in fiction to
do what cultural commentators are
trying to achieve by history writing:
change our understanding of the past
by adapting it to the prejudices of the
present. Ambiguity, thy name is alternative
history.
Card may have written a historical
novel that veered off into fantasy, but
he did teach me something important.
I knew that Christopher Columbus
wanted to find a trade route to the
Orient of Cathay and Cipango, as he
called China and Japan.
I assumed that he was motivated by
what a German book about him captured
in a title, “Um Gott und Gold,”
or “About God and Gold.” I learned
that the gold the discoverer wanted was
supposed to pay for the liberation of
Constantinople and the reconquest of
Jerusalem.
I also read a book about Columbus’
laborious study of the Fathers and the
Bible to defend his route to the East by
way of the West, as well as his prediction
of the end of the world if his plan
was achieved. It is called “Christopher
Columbus’s Book of Prophecies,” and
shows how much Columbus worked
out of a medieval theological mindset.
In other words, Columbus was a
brilliant sailor, a kind of entrepreneur
of discovery, and a Christian mystic.
He was concerned about conquest
but as a means of evangelization. This
seems on the face of it to be a contradiction,
but he lived in the shadow of
the Islam’s conquest of almost half of
the world the Europeans knew and its
ambition to conquer the other half.
He saw himself marching toward the
apocalypse, premised on the preaching
of Christ to all the nations as predicted
by Scripture.
Much of the rejection of Columbus
has to do with the imposition of
European values and the exploitation
of indigenous peoples that happened
long after the explorer died. Still others
argue that it would have been better
for the Incas and the Aztecs to keep
their violent empires and gold (until
the French or the Portuguese or the
English got to them) than to discover
Jesus. That is a philosophical position
that really is a decision about faith.
The intellectuals who reject Columbus
must rely on a hypothetical,
alternative history in which Columbus
did not discover America. But the real
choice is between seeing the value of
the past, with its light and shadows, or
deciding to completely erase it.
Pulling down the statues of Columbus
doesn’t help people see reality in
its complicated ambiguity — it makes
people ignore the past, and thus fail to
learn from it. Calling Columbus a “bad
man” because of ideas that are antithetical
or politically incorrect to some
now, doesn’t make you more aware of
history, but less so.
History should give us a more complicated
and nuanced view of human
affairs, not a narrower one.
Protesters topple a statue of Christopher Columbus in front of the Minnesota State Capitol in St.
Paul, Minnesota, on June 10.
SHUTTERSTOCK
Msgr. Richard Antall is pastor of Holy
Name Church in Cleveland, Ohio, and
author of “The Wedding” (Lambing
Press, $16.95). He spent 20 years as a
missionary in El Salvador.
October 2-9, 2020 • ANGELUS • 25