We all have a tendency to judge the past, to judge, according to our values, people from the past who are not here anymore to defend themselves. In the case of “The Controversy of Valladolid,” I suppose – I hope – that today we’re all on Bartolome de Las Casas’s side. We believe that other human beings, whose habits and beliefs are different, are as human as we are. They are our “brothers Indians,” as Las Casas put it. Even if our social and political conditions are far from being similar to others, we believe that we have the same rights and consequently the same duties.

Sepulveda, a famous philosopher who was the first to translate Aristotle into Spanish, thought differently. Aristotle had written about people being “slave-born” and other people being born to rule over them. So, under the supreme authority of Aristotle, Sepulveda thought and claimed that the American natives were destined by God to be subjugated and enslaved by the Spanish conquerors. This, in his view, was the reason why God had given to a small number of Spaniards the power to conquer a huge empire of barbaric pagans.

When writing “The Controversy of Valladolid,” I felt I should consider Sepulveda – whatever my own feelings – as a sincere man and give him the best possible reasons. If not, I would have treated him the same way he was treating the natives. I would have made him the “bad guy.”

First, I realized that, in the middle of the 16th century, the idea of the “human species” which is common today, did not exist yet. In the books of the most famous doctors and physicians, like the French Ambroise Pare, surgeon of the king, we find examples of women giving birth to toads or snakes. Pare repeats the same legends that the Greek Herodotus was writing 20 centuries earlier, when he was told about Egyptian prostitutes getting pregnant from crocodiles by the Nile.

It’s not a question of stupidity but of ignorance. The time of science had not begun yet. It would take another 250 years before a Swedish botantist, Linnaeus, started to classify living creatures – beginning with plants – according to what we call today their “species.”

Calling Sepulveda a racist would be pointless. He wouldn’t understand what we’re talking about. The concept of “species” was still very vague, the earth was covered with myths and legends (Columbus was convinced he had seen mermaids).The word “race” had no scientific meaning.

Indeed, scientifically speaking, we still really don’t know what “race” is. We speak about the “white race” or the “Caucasian race.” We could also very well speak about the “race of the misers,” “the race of the actors.” It’s a word without precise content, an empty word.

There’s another reason to explain – if not to justify – Sepulveda’s attitude. In his time, in the 16th century, everybody believed in God, which is not the case today. Not only did they believe in God; they believed in the “true God,” meaning the God of the Christians. And not only did they believe in the Christian God; they believed he ruled the world. He had allowed Spain, after having chased the Moors out of its peninsula, to conquer a new world.

That conquest was the work of God, and Sepulveda went so far as to maintain that smallpox, which killed a great number of Indians, was a gift from God to the Spaniards. If it was not God’s work – as Sepulveda put it – how could we understand that if Jesus had come to earth to redeem all men, as written in the Gospels, his name had never reached the new lands? Could God have ignored the existence of these natives?

That was unthinkable, since God knows everything. The only possible conclusion, for a mind shaped like Sepulveda’s, was that God, the true God, didn’t want these natives to be part of the new kingdom. And why didn’t he want it? Because they were not real human beings, with a soul worth being saved.

I have a great admiration for Las Casas, who was one of the very first, at the beginning of the modern ages, to talk about “human rights” and to fight against slavery. Two centuries and a half later, when slavery was first abolished for the first time by the French Revolution, the man who proposed the law was also a priest, Abbe Gregoire. And Abbe Gregoire wrote a book in praise of Las Casas, who he had not forgotten.

Las Casas was a real pioneer of thought, and we feel very close to him. It’s not so easy to put ourselves in Sepulveda’s heart and mind. But we must make this effort, as often as possible. If we succeed, we can go deep into our own roots, we can sense where we are coming from. Because we have all been Sepulveda, one day or another, and it would be a mistake to forget about it.