[In the excerpt below, Marty discusses the experience of the modern reader encountering Las Casas 's writings.]

Half a millennium after the event, historians and the general public have learned to say not that Columbus discovered America but that with his voyages he encountered a world that was new to Europeans. It also should long ago have been noticed that Columbus never really did "discover" the Native Americans whom he called Indians. The adventurer brought stereotypes into which these people had to fit: we Europeans, he deduced, might both "save" them and "enslave" them.

Bartolome de Las Casas, a Dominican priest, might more properly have been described all along as the one who discovered these Americans. Now we might also change that to say he encountered them. Las Casas smashed his own stereotypes and came to know these as the "others" who were not simply objects for salvation, certainly not subjects for slavery, nor mere pagans or heathen, enemies or permanent strangers. They were full fellow human beings, possessing valid traditions, dignity, and rights.

Not every one in his day thought so. For decades Las Casas, officially named to be the protector of the Indians, pleaded their case in two hemispheres. He did so at risk to reputation and even life, but he never tired. The priest denounced slaveholders in America and defended their slaves in Spain. Las Casas created trouble for conquistadores while he spoke up for their conquered victims—most of whom were dying as a result of imported European diseases against which they had no immunity, the Europeans' cruel disregard for Native American life, or formal and constant warfare against them.

The slaveholders and killers had their defenders in high places, especially among those who profited from slavery, whether in America or Spain. The most notable advocate was Juan Gines de Sepulveda, a Cordoban theologian, who … argued on Aristotelian grounds that war against the Native Americans was just. Why? Because they were inferior to the Spaniards, just as children were to adults, women to men, and even as apes were to humans. Almost sixty years after Columbus's first encounters and fifty after Las Casas first sailed to America, Sepulveda and Las Casas squared off in the face of distinguished theologians at the Council of Valladolid….

[The] genre of the Defense can be offputting, unless and until one lets the book's character work its effects on the modern consciousness. The vehemence of his ad hominem argument and the emotional language used seem more appropriate for stagy television programs rather than a literary and legal search for truth. The reader must understand that, for Las Casas, profound and vital truths were at stake in his debates. (And he was right.) Stating these truths demanded acts of passion, and they were forthcoming…. Las Casas circles around and then spirals back to revisit Sepulvedan arguments he has already successfully demolished. The empathic reader sees that at once. When I read Las Casas's explosive and repetitive passages, however, I learned not to be put off but to be enthralled: they have a kind of ritual, incantatory power that does not take away from the argument but reinforces it. Indeed, thinking of the paragraphs as musical themes a composer keeps developing is an appropriate way to be drawn into the still compelling case of the old Dominican.

Along with the overwhelming argument, the over-defense of the Indians, and the overkill of Sepulveda (who may not have felt a thing!), there are other alienating features. Not only is the world of Las Casas past and thus foreign; it issues from a world view few will share today. I would like to think that not a single reader would approve his defense of the natives on the grounds that they were not Catholic heretics, against whom war would be just. Also, one hopes that even the most ardent Catholic missionaries have a hard time endorsing the thought world of Las Casas and his kind. These late medieval figures pictured the struggle for Indian souls to be desperate: policies that cut short the life of the unredeemed or that drove the Indian into hostility against Spain and Christianity threatened to send precious souls to eternal fires of hell. Sepulveda seemed not to care; the Indians were pagan, savage, apelike, worthy of death and hell. Las Casas, in return, fairly shrieks: the natives are citizens, capable of nobility, often to be admired and never to be killed or enslaved. Failure to understand the cosmic backdrop of the issues will mean keeping Las Casas only at a distance, when he belongs up close in a world where "rights" remain at stake even where "mission" often fades.

Third, get ready not only for a world that is distant because it is past and because it exposes a cosmic backdrop that is hard to recover today, but also for a world that sets before us a very imperfect human being. Don't get me wrong. While not eligible to be a Lascasista, whether on linguistic, cultural, or religious grounds, I am in the company of those who regard him as heroic and in a way saintly.

To certify credentials: eight years before the Columbus quincentennial that brought Las Casas to the fore once again, I began my own history, titled Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America, not with Virginians and Puritans of 1607 and 1620/1630, as historians of my kind used to do, but with a chapter on "The Conqueror Versus the Missionary." In it is a picture of Las Casas that we captioned as if it were a Who's Who entry: "Known as the Protector of the Indians, Bartolome de Las Casas (1474–1566) never set foot on what is today the United States. Paradoxically, he is remembered widely as the first great figure to speak up for the rights of minorities in the New World, even though he played a brief part in legitimizing black slavery. His portrayals of Spanish cruelties in the Americas gave rise to a 'Black Legend' about Spaniards, which the English happily exploited to show themselves in a more favorable light."

Such a portrait caption was a protection against contemporaries who expect our ancestors to be as virtuous, indeed as perfect as we—we of the generations of genocides and Holocaust, prejudices and racisms and two World Wars. It was also an anticipation of a Lascasian reference I must reenter into the record:

Las Casas did the Indians no favor when he over-advertised their virtues; it would be unwise to misrepresent him here. A man of his own day, a day that took human slavery for granted, he made a tragic proposal back in 1516—one that had enormous consequences. While outlining his communal system [he was also the hemisphere's pioneer European Utopian experimenter] for the New World he added a fatal line: "If necessary white and black slaves can be brought from Castile." Two years later he shortened this proposal simply to "Negro slaves." Like other early protectors of the Indians, Las Casas thought them superior to black Africans, but because he was already the voice of conscience to thoughtful people in church and court, his word meant more than the word of others. In 1518 Charles V first authorized the purchase of slaves for use in the Indies. Years later Las Casas vehemently reversed his stand. In his Historia he, almost alone in his time, said that "the same law applies equally to the Negro as to the Indians," but by then it was too late to do much good.

Reprinting that paragraph serves as a reminder that even the most ardent Lascasista has to qualify claims for his heroism or sainthood. At our house whenever, yes whenever—for the occasions are frequent—one reads an honest biography, there comes a moment when that reader gasps or gulps or sighs. His or her mate then is trained to ask, by now by instinct, "What was his [or her] cosmic flaw?" Las Casas had a cosmic flaw, or at least offered a cosmically flawed proposal in 1518, and the reader of this Defense centuries later has to reckon with it in any effort to create a balance sheet on the author.

Balance is the last and least thing Las Casas sought. He was for justice, truth, and the rights of the Indians, and would stay around as long as it took to make his point. He would shout as loud as he thought necessary. He would cry not in sentimentality but in rage and sympathy as often as the tears would naturally well up, and he would plead even at the expense of his own dignity. And while writing at white heat, he could also keep cool enough to cite classic theologians and philosophers who were as vivid to his hearers at Valladolid and his readers everywhere as most of them are obscure … to most of us in our time….

Las Casas, as I mentioned above, "came back" during the Columbus quincentennial of 1992. This time, much of the public who are of European descent, eager to repent for the sins of foreparents five centuries ago, sometimes ready to make some redress, and willing to make Columbus and the Spaniards their own verbal victims mindlessly wrote off all Europeans of five centuries ago as dehumanizers who plotted genocide and were almost apelike exploiters. Those of our contemporaries who stayed around long enough to do their own examining found that matters were then, as they always are, more complicated than stereotypers let them be. There were countervoices among the explorers, among them some missionaries, all of whose assumptions none of us share but some of whose expressions all of us might share.

Among them, as the stock of Columbus has turned bearish, that of Las Casas has gone bullish. He strikes many as worthy of investment: investment of time and energy, of a second look for some, and a first look for many. If In Defense of the Indians is the text that serves as that first look, its readers have chosen well. By letting us move around firsthand in an alien world, those who make it available have also exposed to view a profound and impassioned soul who helps make some issues of the 500-year-old events seem current, still demanding, still urgent.