Christopher Columbus, Mystic

Christopher Columbus wielded a strong mystical side, believing that he was acting as the right hand of Providence.

So, some public statues are still coming down, but nowhere nearly as violently or as frequently as they were toppled last year. Indeed, 2020 was one of the most violent years I can remember, comparable to the events of 1968. It would be hard for 2021 to have been even more violent, and, thank the Good Lord, it’s been far better.

Still, watching the statues of Christopher Columbus come down last year—without a single serious defender—still irks me, especially when one takes into account that one of the largest fraternal orders in the world is named in his honor. For whatever reason, this Catholic fraternal order remained silent in the face of violent rapacity.

To be sure, Christopher Columbus possessed faults. He was, after all, a fallen man, and as capable of sin and temptation as any of us. But, he also accomplished some of the most extraordinary things the world has ever seen. It is false to represent Columbus—even if merely as a symbol—as “somehow worse than Hitler,” as one prominent commentator said of him nearly thirty years ago.  The more I know about Columbus, the more fascinated I am by him.

When Columbus made his first voyage in 1492, sailing for the Catholic Spanish monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand, Spain had—after nearly 800 years—finally removed the Islamic threat to Iberia. Muslims had conquered nearly all of Iberia around 711, and the Spanish had waged a war of reconquest. In other words, from a providential standpoint, God appeared to be telling the Spanish to turn from Islam to the West, to seek a passage to India and China, that is, to carry on the Reconquest, but in the worlds to be discovered.

Columbus himself wielded a strong mystical side, believing that he was acting as the right hand of Providence.

As Columbus wrote in his journal, just prior to his first voyage to the West:

…and I saw the Moorish king come out of the gates of the city and kiss the royal hands of Your Highnesses…and Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians…took thought to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said parts of India, to see those princes and peoples and lands…and the manner which should be used to bring about their conversion to our holy faith, and ordained that I should not go by land to the eastward, by which way it was the custom to go, but by way of the west, by which down to this day we do not know certainly that anyone has passed; therefore, having driven out all the Jews from your realms and lordships in the same month of January, Your Highnesses commanded me that, with a sufficient fleet, I should go to the said parts of India, and for this accorded me great rewards and ennobled me so that from that time henceforth I might style myself “Don” and be high admiral of the Ocean Sea and viceroy and perpetual Governor of the islands and continent which I should discover…and that my eldest son should succeed to the same position, and so on from generation to generation forever.

Even the name Christopher Columbus, crazily enough, means “Christ-bearer” and “Dove.”

Again, the importance of 1492 cannot be stressed enough. On January 2, 1492, the Spanish concluded their final victory against the Moors, and on March 30, 1492, the Spanish monarchs issued an edict demanding the conversion or expulsion of the Jews, an edict to be enforced on July 31, 1492.

As the average Spaniard would later understand it (the Old World did not figure out it was a New World and not Asia until roughly 1506), these events proved that the battle against the Muslims/Heathens should move to the Americas.

The Order of St. Francis, the Franciscans, especially believed the end of the world was close to realization. The end would witness Jerusalem becoming Christian; a Christian monarch converting the world from Islam and Judaism; and, then, according to God’s will, the coming of the New Jerusalem. As a whole, the order was very taken with the millenialist ideals of the Franciscan Joachim of Fiore—believing that we had finally entered the final, or the third age of man, that is, the Age of the Holy Spirit.  Joachim even seemed to indicate that the liberators of Jerusalem “would sail from Spain.”

These millenialist visions mixed well with monarchical ambitions, as King Ferdinand especially wanted to be “King of Jerusalem” and be seen as a Christian Crusader and the grand liberator of the Holy Land.

Many Spaniards at the time even believed the Emperor in Cathay (China)—known as the “Great Khan of the Golden Horde”—was interested in Christianity. Columbus carried a special letter to him, direct from the monarchs of Spain.

As Columbus viewed it:

During this time, I searched out and studied all kinds of texts: geographies, histories, chronologies, philosoph[ies], and other subjects. With a hand that could be felt, the Lord opened my mind to the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies, and He opened my will to desire to accomplish this project. This was the fire that burned within me when I came to visit your Highnesses.

And, “For the execution of the journey to the Indies, I was not aided by intelligence, by mathematics, or by maps. It was simply the fulfillment of what Isaiah had prophesied.”

And, again, in 1500: “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth, of which He spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John, after having spoken of it by the mouth of Isaiah; and He showed me the spot where to find it.”

Columbus even wrote a book called the “Book of Prophecies,” and he thought the world would end within 155 years of his voyages.

In 1503, Columbus wrote:

David, in his will, left three thousand quintals of gold of the Indies to Solomon to aid in building the Temple, and, according to Josephus, it was from these same lands. Jerusalem and Mount Sion are to be rebuilt by the hand of a Christian; who this is to be, God declares by the mouth of his prophet in the fourteenth Psalm. Abbot Joachin said that he was to come from Spain. St. Jerome showed the way to it to the holy lady. The emperor of Catayo, some time since, sent for wise men to instruct him in the faith of Christ. Who will offer himself for this work? If our Lord bring me back to Spain, I pledge myself, in the name of God, to bring him there in safety.

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Sources:

For this post, I am deeply indebted to several sources, but most importantly:

Sweet, Leonard I., “Christopher Columbus and the Millennial Vision of the New World,” Catholic Historical Review (July 1986), 369-382.

And,

Steck, Francis Borgia, “Christopher Columbus and the Franciscans,” The Americas 3 (January 1947), 319-341.

The featured image is “Christopher Columbus with his son Diego at La Rábida Friary” (1834) by Giustiniano Degli Avancini, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.