empty vessels

In 1524, according to colonial accounts, an extraordinary face-off took place in one of the great buildings of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Triple Alliance – the Aztec empire, as it is better known – which Hernán Cortes had conquered three years before. Facing each other across the room two delegations of elite clerics battled over the nature of God. On one side were twelve eminent Franciscan monks, who had travelled from Europe in a mission authorized by Pope Hadrian VI. On the other were twelve high priests from the Triple Alliance, men who had wielded immense spiritual and political power until Cortes shuttered the grand temples and brought down the clerisy.

The Franciscans’ mission had begun with a request by Cortes. Cortes believed that the military conquest of the Alliance had to be accompanied and justified by an equivalent spiritual conquest. The Indians, he said, must be led to salvation.

Having expected childlike natives, empty vessels waiting to be filled by the Word, the Franciscans instead found themselves fencing with skilled rhetoricians, proud of their intellectual traditions. In the end the friars resorted to a crude but effective argument:  the Indians had to pledge fealty to the Christian god, because their own “gods were not powerful enough to liberate them from the hands of the Spaniards.” In a sober ceremony, the Mexica abjured their old religion and embraced Christianity.

For more than a decade, Sahagún and other religious authorities regarded the conversion a triumph. He initially began his reconstruction of the debate to commemorate it. But he never published the manuscript because he was slowly coming to believe that the Church’s efforts in New Spain had been a failure. Despite lip-service devotion to  the Gospel, the Mexica remained outside Christendom, as do some of their descendants to this day.

"1491",  Charles C. Mann