God’s Jigsaw of Human Rights
By Mark Tooley, Juicy Ecumenism.
(This talk was given at Christ Episcopal Church, Georgetown in Washington, DC on October 1.)
Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish bishop, argued in 1550 against enslaving Indians in the Spanish empire. His debating opponent claimed Spaniards were as superior to Indians as humans were to monkeys. But Bartolomé insisted: “All the peoples of the world are humans, and there is only one definition of all humans and of each one, that is that they are rational.” He said every person, regardless of tribe or religion, has from God “derechos humanos,” or “human rights,” in what was likely that term’s first use.
Interestingly, Bartolomé did not denounce all slavery. He thought slaves seized in just wars, which he at first thought true for Africans, were legitimate. But his underlying assumptions about human rights for all were important.
The development of ideas about human rights, chiefly and originally through Christianity, has been very slow. It can be likened to countless jigsaw pieces thrown to the floor, slowly pieced together across centuries, the final puzzle picture slowly emerging, but even now incomplete.
Part of that picture emerged in 587, when, at least according to Bede, the medieval chronicler, a monk in Rome who later became Pope Gregory the Great, encountered the sale of young boys in the marketplace. Bede recorded:
It is reported that some merchants, having just arrived at Rome on a certain day exposed many things for sale in the slave boys market place, and an abundance of people resorted thither to see slaves from England. Gregory himself went with the rest, and among other things some boys were set to sale, their bodies white, their countenances beautiful, and their hair very fine. Having viewed them he asked, as is said, from what country or nation they were brought, and was told, from the island of Britain, whose inhabitants were of such personal appearance.
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