What Sahagún Thought He Was Doing: Sahagún's New World and the Claims of Tradition

Now a cornerstone of the colonial archive, Bernardino de Sahagún’s Historia universal de las cosas de la Nueva España was completed in the late 1570s with his Nahua co-authors.¹ Within a decade, the work disappeared into the Medici Court's then emerging collections, not to surface for centuries.² Today, it is studied by scholars who consistently marvel at its complexity and mine its riches as a treasury of the pre-Columbian past. Yet, before it passed over into our hands, this landmark manuscript was completed under adverse circumstances. As disease raged, evangelical optimism faded, funding withered, and censorship loomed, how did Sahagún understand his opus and its place in the world?

In this essay, I will seek to outline three ways of situating Sahagún within a longer history. Through attentive readings of the prologue that opens the work, I argue that his defense of his life’s work represents a sophisticated effort to render Mesoamerican antiquities as part of a shared tradition of theorizing the New World. I suggest that in justifying his enterprise as a diagnosis of the causes of idolatry in the res publica, he positions the text as participating in a broader economy of inquiries into the social arrangements then emerging in the Iberian Atlantic. I then argue that, in analogizing his text to a “dragnet of words”, he develops a New World textuality that joins the conception of tradition as the translation of intellectual property and the sharing of it among Christians with an emerging cosmopolitan imaginary grounded in neo-Scholastic understandings of friendship and charity. Finally, reconstructing the seams between Sahagún’s evangelical subjectivity and the worldly laboring behind the Codex and putting Sahagún’s conceptions of missionary work and humanistic endeavor into conversation, I demonstrate that his justifications rest on a fundamental inarticulacy, forced to disavow mere contemplation, that continue to shape our own practices of viewership and scholarship. Thus, I show that a careful study of his prologue invigorates our understanding of the contingencies that have shaped New World epistemic cultures and traditions of inquiry in his time and since.

“Los vicios de la Republica”: Diagnosing the Res Publicae

From the very first word of the prologue opening the Florentine Codex, Sahagún is keenly aware of the need to justify the documentation of idolatrous Aztec practices which are to be extirpated. He compares the missionary to a physician, arguing that medicine cannot be applied without knowing the causes of the sickness: “El medico no puede acatadamente aplicar las medicinas al enfermo sin que primero conozca: de que humor, o de que causa procede la enfermedad.”³ Scholars have noted that in this passage, Sahagún musters up the borrowed authority of Saint Augustine to defend his own enterprise by drawing on the first sentences of Book II of De civitate Dei.⁴

While this is surely the case, he is also drawing on a metaphor then enjoying great currency in political and economic discourse. A few sentences on, warning that the grave sins of idolatry are yet to be extirpated, Sahagún argues that there is “gran necessidad de Remedio.”⁵ As I will show, by invoking the anxieties in political and mercantile discourse that words like remedio and enfermedad would have conjured in this period, Sahagún charges the text with a broad semantic field, not so much indicting individual agents committing sins, as staking out an attempt to diagnose the complex ailments of emergent social worlds.⁶

We might consider that, in the growing genre of arbitrios, mercantile writers conceived of themselves as physicians prescribing cures for the declining health of the república.⁷ Just two sentences in, Sahagún writes that in order to apply doctrine (endereçar contra ellos su doctrina), the preacher must keep up to date with the “vicios de la Republica”.⁸ Why, we might ask, does he not say vicios desta gente or perhaps vicios destos naturales? He refers, of course, to the idolatry that persists among the Indians, but the appearance of the word república, by then well-established not only in political discourse, but also in mercantile writing as “the sphere of civil society defined by commerce and the private relations of all the estates of people”, is, I believe, far more multivalent.⁹ Vice, he seems to suggest, inheres in the emerging sociality and polity.

Consider the following 1569 passage, composed by a Dominican friar, reflecting on the difficulty of judging anything in the New World:

Todo es diferentísimo: el talento de la gente natural, la disposición de la república, el modo de gobernar y aun la capacidad de ser gobernados, a cuya causa siempre juzgué por imposible juzgar de oídas acertadamente las cosas de aquellas partes.¹⁰

The English translation renders “república”, anachronistically but perhaps more appropriately, as “society”, as the disposition of the social. Here as in Sahagún, the word república, from the Latin res publica, appearing without any modification, should be understood not as a reference to a demarcated, secular political entity (Sahagún’s translators render republica in English as “state”), but as an acknowledgement of the complex relations by which emerging social totalities are enacted.

Sahagún, I am suggesting, implicates with the metaphor of diagnosing the vicios of the Republica a broad array of relations created by the new mercantile economy, onto which he grafts the Indigenous social facts and idolatries that he documents in the Codex.¹¹ For an aging Sahagún, we might venture, the two are homologous, and the word república gives us a glimpse of how the Codex comes to serve as a vehicle to juxtapose these diverging conceptual worlds onto one nexus that he asks us to diagnose. The work that he has produced, he seems to claim, asks us to consider: what are the causes and manifestations of sin in our time? How can we apply the medicine without knowing the disease or the cause? In this light, we can read Sahagún’s invocation of Augustine’s City of God, a work that famously proclaimed the res publica Christiana and contrasted the Earthly City with the City of God, as an invitation to consider the ills implicated by the forms of social nexuses that these emerging arrangements of the res publicae represent. Indeed, the other time we see the word república in this prologue supports such a reading, in referring to Book VIII’s documentation of Indigenous governance, their “maneras de gouernar la Republica”.¹²

In reading Sahagún’s diagnostics of these res publicaee, we should see him as trafficking in a shifting semantic economy. Sahagún himself, I believe, saw the work he produced not only as an inventory of pre-Columbian Indigenous traditions, but also as an etiology and a topology of sin and idolatry amid diminishing evangelical optimism.¹³ The ecologies of sin that Sahagún diagnoses are inextricable from the emerging political and economic imaginaries and arrangements in the New World. Thus, we should see his work not only as an ethnographic or antiquarian exercise, but also as a contribution to a tradition of inquiry into the nature of polities after the conquest. In establishing the contents of the Codex as ultimately diagnostic in nature, as knowledge of an enfermedad, Sahagún implicitly joins the reflections on the modern res publicae that were emerging across the Iberian Atlantic.

“Nr̄os proximos, a quien somos obligados a amar”: Making New World Textuality

Sahagún’s text is long. Amounting to more than two thousand pages, its bulk is one of its most obvious features. Its later history in the Medici collections places it squarely at the center of the collecting culture of early modern Europe. But what exactly is he accumulating in all these pages?

In the prologue, he describes the work as a “red barredera” (“dragnet”) to bring to light all the words (vocablos) of the language and everything they speak of, literally and metaphorically: “Es esta obra como vna red barredera para sacar a luz todos los vocablos desta lengua con sus propias y methaphoricas significaçiones y todas sus maneras de hablar y las mas de sus antiguallas buenas y malas.”¹⁴ And in the section of the prologue labeled Al sincero lector, Sahagún notes that many have compared this work to a calepino, a now obsolete term for a dictionary, so named after Ambrosio Calepino’s Latin dictionary: “Quando esta obra se començo, començose a dezir, de los que lo supieron : que se hazia vn calepino : y aun hasta agora, no cesan muchos, de me preguntar, que en que terminos anda el calepino?”¹⁵ He, however, steers clear of claiming that the Historia universal itself is a full-fledged calepino, arguing that Calepino had consulted a variety of sources (such as Virgil and Cicero), not available to him in the context of New Spain. What I emphasize here is that even as Sahagún imposes a figurational, linguistic schema onto the exhaustive documentation of the Historia universal, he is also cognizant of the slippages that the inadequacy of classical authority in the New World creates.

Importantly, Sahagún’s work is certainly also modeled on natural histories, a genre itself under transformation in this period. The Historia universal exemplifies an uneasy relationship between philological work, whose revival by humanistic scholarship in the period allowed scholars to “compare words and things, secure in their knowledge that they had the right word in the right language,” and the facts of experience, “neither Latin nor Greek but a bewildering array of vernacular languages and dialects that identified objects within a local cosmology”.¹⁶ This takes on particular relevance in the Iberian Atlantic. As one scholar writes,

Encyclopedic histories of the New World became a primary vehicle of Spain’s translatio imperii and translatio studii. In metaphorical terms – though a metaphor with ontological pretensions – the Book of Nature was rewritten by transatlantic discovery and conquest. The encyclopedist’s task was now to rewrite this book, to produce new verbal copia, new tesoro (treasure), out of novel flora, fauna, peoples, customs, and beliefs.¹⁷

While Sahagún clings to the fiction of the homology of words and things, I will show that this is the result of his recourse to a Erasmian-inflected Christian notion of shared New World tradition, which allowed him to characterize the text of the opus as communal property, intellectual and material. By incorporating Indigeous peoples as hermanos and próximos and thereby assimilating them into a framework of Christian friendship, Sahagún builds a textuality that is fundamentally grounded in a shared point of articulation: the New World’s providential origins. In doing so, I would like to argue, Sahagún marries the notion of translatio imperii and translatio studii with a conception of shared tradition (as in traditio, that which is handed over) through friendship and caritas.¹⁸

Kathy Eden has traced this articulation of tradition, as accompanied by the accumulative enumeration of text and the adage that “friends hold all things in common”, in the work of Desiderius Erasmus and his Adages, a text Sahagún would have been familiar with:

Now imaginatively understood not as enemies but as joint-owners of a common inheritance, these same Christians, especially insofar as they read Erasmus’ Adages, also become owners not only of a double inheritance but also of a richer notion of tradition itself. Alongside the scriptural figure from Exodus of the classical tradition as private property handed over through subterfuge or fraud to an enemy, Erasmus adds another figure—this one from the very classical literature he longs to reclaim and more particularly from Pythagorean coffers: common property shared freely among friends. It is finally in friendship, then, that Erasmus professes not only to save but to reinvest so much of the classical literary tradition.¹⁹

This Christian conception of literary tradition born in Erasmus’s claims for the Adages, I argue, meets the contexts of the New World in Sahagún’s presentation of his work. Readers of the prologue gain a new appreciation for the workings of tradition in the New World, as embedded in the empire’s marshalling of divine providence as the pretext for its programs and the assimilation of Indigenous peoples as friends, neighbors, and likenesses, as co-descendants of Adam. In the place of the figure of the conquered Indigenous elite, Sahagún substitutes the friend, whose assimilation into the Christian community provides the justification of shared tradition. In positing a fundamental likeness between the Indigenous peoples and Europeans, Sahagún secures the text of the Florentine Codex as a shared tradition, as property held in common.

In explaining the origins of the Indigenous peoples, Sahagún writes:

Nr̄o señor dios pretendia, que la tierra despoblada se poblasse: para que algunos, de sus descendientes, fuessen a poblar, el parayso celestial : como agora lo vemos por esperiencia. Mas para que me detengo, en contar adeujnanças? Pues es certissimo, que estas gentes todas, son nr̄os hermanos : procedientes, del tronco de Adam, como nosotros : son nr̄os proximos, a quien somos obligados a amar, como a nosotros mjsmos. Qujdqujd sit, de lo que fueron los tiempos passados, vemos por esperiencia agora, que son abiles : para todas las artes mechanjcas, y las exercitan : son tanbien abiles, para deprender, todas las artes liberales, y la sancta theologia : como por esperiencia, se a visto : en aquellos, que an sido enseñados, en estas scientias. Porque de lo que son, en las cosas de guerra, esperientia se tiene dellos : ansi en la conqujsta desta tierra, como en otras particulares conquistas, que despues aca se an hecho…

The retrospective lessons of experience, as manifestations of divine providence, inaugurates textuality in the New World. In Sahagún’s prologue, the conditions of textuality are inextricable from the naturalization of the conquest, the transformation of enemy property into a tradition shared among friends. His conception of tradition, of the gift, is intimately tied to contextual economy of marvel and experience.²⁰ In interpreting the role of providence in populating the land and in making the Indigenous peoples, Sahagún emphasizes the role of experience (esperiencia) in the making of meaning.²¹ Likewise, he affirms the likeness between Indigenous peoples and the Europeans, emphasizing their purported shared lineage and their status as neighbors with responsibilities to love one another. This is the classical ideal of friendship par excellence, a spectral figure that has animated the conception of literary tradition since. As one scholar notes, it is in death that this ideal of friendship is most secure: “classical friendship inhabits the temporality of the “future anterior” in which death is the culmination of friendship insofar as it confirms purity of virtue on both the friend’s behalf and one’s own.”²² Sahagún’s work, of course, provides extensive documentation of the “times of idolatry” and of an Indigenous past to be extirpated. Anatomizing the friend who, under epistemic conditions of settlement and empire, can be represented only as dead or dying, Sahagún and his coauthors bequeath to the early modern transatlantic world a shared treasury of Indigenous tradition.²³

The likeness, rather than difference, between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples is thus central to Sahagún’s conception of tradition. An attentive reading of Sahagún prologue suggests that, rather than assimilating Sahagún into the pre-history of ethnography, we might instead take him on his word and see in his work a sophisticated attempt to make sense out of a dragnet (red barredera) of words (vocablos). In uncovering Nahuatl vocablos “con sus propias y methaphoricas signicaçiones y todas sus maneras de hablar y las mas de sus antigullas buenas y malas”, Sahagún performs the “social praxis” of what one might call friendship under conquest: a “discursive praxis” of accumulated wisdom that “forges a unity out of the experience of the many”.²⁴ We can thus see a New World textuality emerging in Sahagún, whose struggle for epistemological authority hinges on a notion of shared tradition contingent upon the legitimacy of the conquest and the relationalities it charters. Seen this way, we recover the Florentine Codex as a vibrant intellectual endeavor whose entanglements in the genealogies of modern epistemic cultures such as collecting culture, encyclopedism, and literature are yet to be fully uncovered.

“Redemir mill canas”: Officium and Otium in a Providential Empire

The Jesuit missionary José de Acosta once remarked that reading accounts of Amerindian customs would be “waste of time equivalent to that spent reading the libros de caballería.”²⁵ As Rolena Adorno points out, however, behind this sentiment also lurks the unspoken concern that these texts may be “all too fascinating.”²⁶ Anyone who reads Sahagún’s opus today will be struck by the difference between the work that Sahagún proposes it does in the prologue and the significance that scholars today have typically attributed to the manuscript. Whereas Sahagún writes that the work provides readers with knowledge of idolatry and sin that must be extirpated and cured, scholars and curators have typically emphasized the important role it plays in transmitting knowledge of Nahua culture.²⁷ Here, I would like to scrutinize how Sahagún represents the work that goes into his text. What does the unavailability to Sahagún of a more direct justification of the Historia universal’s grand project have to tell us about the conditions under which humanistic and intellectual endeavour is conceived and constrained in the New World?

Throughout the prologue, a description of the work that reading the text would facilitate is deferred in favor of a restatement of the evangelical purposes that it might serve, which serve in its stead. Take this strikingly apophatic passage, for instance:

Los predicadores, y confesores, medicos son de las animas para curar las enfermedades espirituales: conuiene tenga esperitia de las mediginas y de las enfermedades espirituales. El Predicador de los Vicios de la Republica para enderegar contra ellos su doctrina, y el confessor para sauer preguntar lo que conuiene y entender lo que dixeren tocante a su officio: conuje mucho que sepan lo necessario para exercitar sus officios.²⁸

What Sahagún exhaustively documents, the idolatries of the Indigenous population, is encapsulated within the unwieldy phrase “lo que conviene”, the verb convenir appearing no less than four times in as many sentences.²⁹ What is stated far more directly is that all of this knowledge is necessary for confessors to “exercitar sus officios”, to do their duty.

When he does describe the work that he has undertaken to produce the Historia universal, he uses the word “trabajo” (sometimes spelled “trauajo”):

En esto poco, que con gran trabajo se a rebuscado: parece mucho la ventaja: que hiziera, si todo se pudiera auer.³⁰

Es para Redemir mill canas porque con harto menos trauajo de lo que aqui me questa podran los que quisieren saber en poco tiempo muchas de sus antiguallas y todo el lenguaje desta gente mexicana.³¹

The semantic field of the term is illustrated by the one other use of the word in the prologue, which describes the Indigenous people: “Quan fuertes son, en sufrir trabajos, de hambre, y sed, frio, y sueño…”³² This bodily nature comes into view when Sahagún evinces an awareness of his old age. As in the example of “Redemir mill canas,” Sahagún’s most striking images of his work emphasize his mortality and old age. In the prologue to book two, he describes some of the conditions under which he worked (his Indigenous co-contributors often went unacknowledged). When his Franciscan superiors had judged it not to be a good use of church monies to record the writings that went into Codex, they ordered him, he says, to write in his own hand what he might wish. Emphasizing that his age and trembling hands, he writes: “como era maior de setenta años, y por temblor de la mano, no pude escreujr nada.”³³

The modern labor concept as we have it, freighted with the unacknowledged contingencies of race and empire in its historical articulations, is an inadequate vocabulary to draw Sahagún into our time. If, however, we take the monument that Sahagún provides us the trabajo of a man deviating from his officio, what might we find in its stead?

I would like to propose that Sahagún’s defense of his project struggles against the perception of what one might call New World otium. In Latin, officium (duty, from which officio is derived) is historically contrasted with otium (time of rest, from which ocio is derived).³⁴ Stefano Harney has proposed that otium, conceived, as the Greeks and Romans did, as a respite from public service and from war, may be a viable term to reclaim under conditions of permanent empire: “not an opposition to work, but an alternative to it”.³⁵ As Brian Vickers writes, “While Christian contemplation provided a legitimate way of life, it was always in danger of being scorned by the vita activa, and its defendants took care not to present the Christian as a being isolated from family or society - indeed, the whole concepts of charity and the reciprocal exercise of social and religious duties prevented any such isolation.”³⁶ This, I would like to suggest, is what strained Sahagún’s defense. The assumption of likeness that both holds together and strains Sahagún’s prologue and evangelical subjectivity requires a vocabulary of Christian neighborly caritas; with such an ethic, come responsibilities and entanglements in the imperial project and its vigilance and violence.³⁷ As Acosta’s claim analogizing an account like Sahagún’s to the libros de caballeria suggests, dismissing Sahagún’s documentary practices as otium, as idle contemplation, serves to mask the deep-seated anxiety that the empire’s justification for extirpation is fraying at its edges. If the claim of otium, as Harney proposes, is one of respite from the project of settler colonialism and empire, the unavailability of an unself-conscious otium to Sahagún testifies to the seams of an evangelical subjectivity that emerges in the imperial project of the New World. Clearly, the limits that this extirpation of difference places on the articulation of otium thus prove to be at the center of the immense disjuncture a modern reader experiences in encountering the justification available to Sahagún for his project.

Conclusion

How, then, to account for our own preconceptions of what Sahagún is interested in doing? What has conditioned us to see him as the great chronicler of Nahua culture? These questions, I would venture, stand at the heart of the legacy of early modern collecting and literary cultures. How are our conceptions of tradition mediated through providential textuality? How are our own practices of viewership and scholarship understood through premises contingent upon a similar inarticulacy of an aspirational otium amid permanent empire?³⁸ Sahagún’s understanding of his project is, I suggest, constitutive of the contingent knowledges that have developed out of the rationalities that have accompanied the conquest of the New World. When we sit with Sahagún’s manuscript today, in awe of its scope and complexity, we should recall that this work also discloses the contingency of the futures, realized and unrealized, of scholarship and viewership that make it such a unique and monumental object today. As influential scholars of our own archival and scholarly practices increasingly argue for theorizing “new digital worlds”, the complex legacy of early modern cultures of collection and collation both informs and shapes our changing relationship to artifacts and their study.³⁹ The reasons that make Sahagún’s monumental project an idle pursuit to his Franciscan superiors are the very same reasons that compel us to articulate Sahagún’s vitality in the contemporary world.

If the genre of the defense is, in the end, always inefficacious, its words inevitably betray the contours of a moment in which intellectual projects are conceived and emerge. In attending to Sahagún’s prologue, I have shown that Sahagún develops a sophisticated understanding of his project as an attempt to render Mesoamerican antiquities as part of a shared tradition of theorizing the New World. Writing against adverse circumstances, Sahagún understood his project as responding to the challenges changing conditions in the New World posed to the polity, to textuality, and to duty. In studying the project that Sahagún undertook, reconstructing what Sahagún thought he was doing reveals its tremendous resources for criticism as New Worlds continue to be invented, conquered, and studied. In his strained inarticulacy, Sahagún speaks to us with great urgency.