In Natural and Moral History of the Indies,
José de Acosta presents a philosophical and theological composition
of the New World . Throughout the seven books,
the author depicts natural and ethical landscapes which he arranges in a
conceptual (rather than a chronological) way as an artist would. One can
perceive that the writer’s deep knowledge of the Greek classical thinking and
the Bible allows him to approach his object of study from a pre-meditated way
of seeing, a XVI-Century equivalent to what Roland Barthes called “a readerly
perspective” in the XX Century. The readerly
induces us to acknowledge all possible meanings of texts. The text becomes, as
Barthes thought, a galaxy of signifiers. In this sense, we may say that Acosta’s
book also offers itself as a galaxy of signifiers to the contemporary reader.
In the
introduction, Walter D. Mignolo refers to the life and work of Acosta. Acosta
was part of the Jesuit order, which was created by Ignatius of Loyola in 1534
and approved by the Catholic Church in 1540 (xvii). Natural and Moral History of the Indies responded not only to the
“good news” from the New World but to the tensions and conflicts of the “Old World,”
for it was written at the intersection of the Renaissance revival of the
Greco-Latin tradition and the emergence of a “heretofore unknown but impressive
mass of land” and an intriguing variety of people (xvii). Acosta’s concept of
the moral and natural elements of history symbolized the meeting point of
philosophy and theology; the first discipline was concerned with the
understanding of nature (minerals, plants, animals), the order of the universe,
and the chain of being –an expression of God’s creation- while theology
proposed a way in which the understanding of nature was practiced to reverence
God (xviii). Acosta benefited from the experiences of scholars like Juan de
Tovar in Mexico and Juan Polo
de Ondegardo in Peru
Here are the
subjects studied in the books that form Acosta’s volume. Cosmology, geography
and history are part of the first book. These disciplines combined were used by
the writer in order to elucidate the existence of a continent that had been unknown to the Europeans until then and the origins of its inhabitants (Mignolo
xxiii). The second book is dedicated to give an explanation about the natural
conditions of the tropical zone, and the Equator. The third book refers to the
configuration of the Indies in its multiple
elements such as the winds, the waters, the properties of the land and the volcanic
heat (Mignolo xxiv). The fourth book presents an account of the order of things
inscribed in God’s creation of the universe. The next two volumes explore “man”
as a rational being in relation to topics like education, writing systems, religion,
politics, and economy. In his seventh book, Acosta depicts a series of events
narrating the means by which the Indies came
into acknowledging the Spaniards’ beliefs. In an opportune commentary at the
end of Acosta’s book, Mignolo again underlines the importance of Acosta’s
vision blending together the natural and the moral which became “an
unprecedented intellectual exercise to accommodate new realities into old
patterns of thinking” (454).
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