False Prophets of Liberation: Salamanca, Marx, and the Battle for the Hispanic Soul
By Johannes Schmidt

As global power shifts accelerate and the Western world faces an internal crisis of identity, it becomes urgent to recover the deeper roots of our civilization. Too often, the economic and political systems that underpin freedom are treated as merely secular achievements, detached from any theological or philosophical tradition. But in truth, the political foundations of human rights, free markets, and liberty in the West owe far more to the Catholic tradition—particularly to the School of Salamanca—than our historiographies might lead us to believe.

The Hispanic world, far from being a passive recipient of Western ideas, was an early and vital architect of them. Through the work of the Schoolmen, Spanish thought laid down a vision of human rights, natural law, and economic freedom that now stands as a vital counterweight to the ideological assaults of our age—from Marxist revolutionism to deterministic theories of history that deny human freedom.

Today, as Latin America once again stands at a crossroads, facing the twin temptations of populist authoritarianism and left-wing, authoritarian resurgence, the question is no longer merely academic. The fate of nations—and the integrity of the Western project—may well depend on whether we can recover and renew the tradition of liberty born in the chapels and classrooms of Salamanca.

It would be a mistake to conclude that the economic contributions of the School of Salamanca, deeply rooted in scripture, were anything but of great theological importance. Matters of price and value, after all, appear all over Scripture—one need not look further than Leviticus 19:35-36 or Deuteronomy 25:13-16 to see this. The Schoolmen understood that to give to Caesar what is of Caesar, one must understand what exactly is owed. And so, the fact that the fathers of modern free-market economics consider the School of Salamanca, a deeply Spanish and Catholic tradition, to be the forerunner of the economic system which the Church defends today is of theological note—although it is important to note that Pope Paul VI made some important clarifications in Populorum Progressio. Max Weber’s assertion that Capitalism was born of the Protestant reformation is thus here challenged.

And so today, although the liberal world order still endures, the illusion of a final, uncontested victory has collapsed. Our willfull misreading of the “end of history” has been challenged by the renewed rise of authoritarianism, populism, and the emergence of advesarial “new leviathans,” to echo John Gray.

When contemplating if, with the failure of communism, capitalism should be the goal for the third world, John Paul II wrote: 

If by capitalism is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative… But if by capitalism is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.[1]

Catholic Theologian Andrew Swafford clarifies this point by writing that we must look for a system that:

recognizes the transcendence of the human person and the eternal destiny to which we are called. This is why the alternatives cannot be either Marxism or consumerism. Yes, the market economy is more befitting to human dignity and human freedom. But economic freedom must be subordinated to the full truth of the human person—that is, freedom must be grounded in truth.[2]

This, it would seem, could only be constructed in a system that respects individual freedom and allows individuals to make choices freely. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the Catholic Bishops have asserted that “the Church’s teaching opposes collectivist and statist economic approaches.”

And yet economic issues, which are indeed deeply biblical, were not the only concerns of the Spanish Schoolmen. However, for the sake of this essay, two more fundamental contributions to the modern Western project will be explored: 1) the Spanish Indies debate and early modern human rights 2) the Salamancan opposition to Lutheran “heresies.”

On the Sunday before Christmas of 1511, from the wilderness of the New World, a voice would cry out in defense of the indigenous peoples who were being killed and enslaved by the Spanish Conquistadors. In a fiery sermon (given with the permission of the Order of Preachers,) Antonio Montesinos asked his countrymen, “tell me, by what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged a detestable war against these people, who dwelt quietly and peacefully on their own land?”[3] These questions sparked a debate on the rights of the Spanish in the Indies and consequently would turn into the first human rights debate in recorded history. This debate inspired the revival of the Thomist version of Natural law, connected to the second part of the Summa Theologiae. As Thomas Izbicki notes:

Among the most influential elements in the works from the School of Salamanca are those connected to what was called the ius gentium until the late eighteenth century but is nowadays referred to as international law. Firstly, they separated the ius gentium from natural law, with which it had more or less been identified with since the formulation of Roman Law; secondly, they developed a martial law on the basis of quaestio 40 in the Secunda Secundae of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae; and thirdly, they treated the alleged right to enslave non-European human beings.[4]

Yet although Montesinos and Las Casas certainly played an instrumental role in starting the debate, the most important work can certainly be credited to the work of Salamancans such as, Luis de Molina and Francisco Suárez, and Francisco Vitoria. Throughout their exploration of the Summa Theologiae, these Schoolmen concluded that law should be treated as something created by reason and revelation and not simply as a construct of the will. Natural law, therefore, was binding on all humanity and “its principles applied to mutable situations and different peoples” as God was indirectly the author of all human laws.

The most notable example of this work applied to the politics of the New World was Vitoria’s 1539 De Indis where he showed that the natives were veri domini of their property, even if they were unbelievers. There, Vitoria showed Salamanca’s characteristic willingness to challenge convention by refuting Aristotle’s understanding of the property rights of barbarians by dismissing the Conquistador’s traditional “argument from sin” on the ground that sin did not cancel an individual’s natural right to property.

In De Iure Belli, Vitoria challenged the theological grounds by which the King or the Pope could wage war against the natives. Izbicki explains:

The second lecture lists seven “unjust titles” for the war against the Amerindians. Vitoria rejected the idea that either the emperor or the pope is master of the world. He denied that Emperor Charles V could take away the domains of others. He cited Juan de Torquemada’s Summa de ecclesia to prove that the pope’s supremacy was spiritual, not temporal; and he maintained that the pope could not force unbelievers to convert. According to Vitoria, discovery was not a justification for conquest.[6]

The work of Stafford Poole reminds us that these debates were not limited to Peninsular Schoolmen and the importance of the contributions of meetings such as the 1585 Third Mexican Council should not be understated.

In the midst of these debates, King Ferdinand II convened a commission that would ultimately pass the Laws of Burgos, a code of ordinances meant to protect the indigenous people and protect them from enslavement. Similarly inspired, Pope Paul III issued a bull titled Sublimis Deus in which he declared that the natives were fully human, had souls, and had a natural right to property.

A similarly notable area of influence is the Schoolmen’s “resistance of Lutheran heresies,” as described by Quentin Skinner in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought.[7] While the Schoolmen’s interaction with “heresies” could simply be recalled as a matter between Protestants and Catholics, the fruit of the debate would ultimately be born of the Post Council of Trent feud between the Dominicans and the Augustinians and Jesuits on the problem of grace and free-will. As Antonio Astrain explains:

Vast as was the subject of that controversy, its principal question, and the one that gave its name to the whole dispute, concerned the help (auxilia) afforded by grace; while the crucial point was the reconciliation of the efficacy of grace with human freedom. We know on the one hand that the efficacious grace given for the performance of an action obtains, infallibly, man's consent and that action takes place. On the other hand it is certain that in so acting, man is free. Hence the question: How can these two things--the infallible result and liberty--be harmonized?[8]

This question was brought to the public sphere in 1582 when Luis de Leon, alongside Prudencio Montemayor, spoke publically in support of individual free-will and against the notion of individual predestination. This brought about accusations of Pelagianism and Calvinism and culminated in their arrest by the Inquisition and the loss of their teaching posts at Salamanca. Later, in 1588, Luis de Molina published his Concordia in which he attempted to reconcile individual free-will with divine omniscience. In a word, Molina sought to combat the theory of predetermination, which he regarded as incompatible with human freedom. Ultimately, Pope Clement VIII would establish a commission to settle the controversy, but no conclusion was reached. The notion that humans are inherently free, however, would resonate for centuries to come.

Today, the fruit of the Schoolmen’s labor in terms of human rights and individual freedom can be seen everywhere that liberal democracies put individual rights before rhose of the state. A prime example of this can be seen in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. From the philosophical principles born from Montesinos’ outcry, human rights have become rights capable of being claimed against states and even against the Church.

Nevertheless, the Hispanic traditions of liberty, free-will, free-markets and cooperation have, in recent decades, faced homegrown theological challengers. A new breed of Latin American theologian was born in the 1950s that rejected the most basic tenants of the School of Salamanca: individual rights, economic liberty, and free-will. These Liberation Theologians instead tried to reconcile their theology with a deterministic vision of human history and a Marxist economic platform which did not shy away from violent revolution.

To be clear, it is important to recognize that when liberation theologians remained faithful to Catholic social teaching—upholding the dignity of the poor, the sanctity of life, and the call for nonviolent justice—they carried forward a profoundly Catholic mission of love to the peripheries. But where they severed these roots, embracing Marxist materialism and revolutionary violence, they marked not a development, but a rupture in the Hispanic moral inheritance.

To understand this new theology, and seeming enemy of the legacy of Salamanca, one must first turn to Gustavo Gutierrez and his 1971 A Theology of Liberation. This book was written at a time of great upheaval throughout Latin America. Born of frustrations over the failure of many nations in Latin America to achieve a socially equitable level of economic, political and social development, Gutierrez’s work represents a radical religious response, analysis and critique of the existing conditions in the “Third World.” His theology is one which borrows from Marx and Hegel’s understanding of an ever-unfolding history—understood by him perhaps as a new eschatology-- and ties it to what he refers to as God’s “preferential option for the poor.”[9]

Similarly, it seems that he borrows from Kant’s view of war in history as a necessary evil for the creation of just societies. As William Duncan notes, Liberation Theology is “aimed at empowering the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed” and “the movement challenged many of the traditional ideas concerning the relationship between the church and society, the church and politics, and the church and revolutionary movements.”[10]

Liberation theologians consider liberation to be more than simply a spiritual matter. According to Gutierrez, liberation can be from sin, psychological, or political.[11] The last of these liberations is perhaps what he is best known for and seeks to eradicate unjust societal structures and the immediate causes of poverty and injustice. To accomplish this, Gutierrez recognizes that the poor must play in active role in their own liberation and must therefore be empowered to bring about active change. As he notes, they must be freed from “those things that limit the capacity to develop themselves freely and in dignity.”[12] This empowerment must be looked at critically, however, as it might often be misinterpreted as an invitation to violence and revolutionary trends.

It is my belief that this militancy is tied not only to the revolutionary doctrine of Marx, but on an even more fundamental level to the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. As was previously alluded to, Liberation Theology borrows from Hegel’s understanding of history as a comprehensible process moving towards a necessary end. In his own words, “the question at issue is therefore the ultimate end of mankind, the end which the spirit sets itself in the world.”[13]

Hegel thus believes that various moments in history thus become necessary stages moving towards humanity’s ultimate end. But this idea is certainly not unique to Hegel. In his “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” Kant attempts to demonstrate how reason and morality will ultimately prevail over individualism and how, from this, the end of history might culminate in the emergence of a world composed of peacefully coexisting nations. As he notes, “in man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.”

These nations, however, will, according to Kant, be in a perpetual state of war as it is the only means by which nature can “establish a condition of quiet and security” (IUH, 7).  The constant state of war acts as a political process which runs as a distortion of the notion of Schumpeterian creative destruction by which “new relations among states” and “new political bodies” are created until finally “through the best possible civic constitution and common agreement and legislation in external affairs, a state is created which, like a civic commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically” (IUH, 7). This view of war as a necessary tool of eschatology is put into context when Gutierrez claims that “the theology of liberation is rooted in a revolutionary militancy.”[14] It is important, too, to note the move away from the indigenous, Hispanic view of individual rights and free-will by both Kant and Gutierrez.

Kant’s understanding of history shares in the dangers of Hegel’s which treats history as a social science which can be forecasted and used to predict the general course of history. This fails because of a fundamental knowledge problem, but is also dangerous as this view of history can, and has, led to “utopian social engineering” which “aims at remodeling the ‘whole of society’ in accordance with a definite plan or blueprint.”[15] The danger here is magnified by the fact that Kant was indeed no pacifist (understood by Max Weber through Matthew 5:39) but rather believed war to play a necessary role in history and to be “part of man’s nature.”[16][17]

One must wonder how such a project might be used to justify wars and thus violence that could bring about “the civic union of the human race” and “contributing to this end of Nature” (IUH, 9). As Kant cannot promise that his vision will hold through the future, as it is “to be expected that ideas and ideals will change,” we must remember Karl Popper’s warning that “utopian engineers must therefore lead, in the absence of rational methods, to the use of power instead of reason, i.e. to violence.”[18] Following this particular “road to serfdom,” one can expect to find little more than authoritarianism and wrongly justified war.

With this in mind, it is important to note that Gutierrez seems to tie his vision of injustice directly to capitalism and in his book writes of the weakness of the present development models as tools of capitalist exploitation and domination. As he notes, “It is becoming ever more evident that the Latin American people will not be freed of their present situation except through a deep transformation, a social revolution that radically and qualitative change the conditions in which they presently live.”[19]

Being Peruvian and having witnessed the horrors brought about by popular “revolutionaries,” he should have been acutely aware that ideas have consequences.

This, of course, cannot be read without remembering his invocations of Dom Helder Camara, Mariátegui, Marx, and perhaps most poignantly Ernesto “Che” Guevara. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued guidelines in 1984 and 1986 regarding Liberation Theology’s “insufficiently critical” use of Marxist (and thus Hegelian) notions of history and social analysis, and the manner in which its emphasis on “institutional evils seemed to obviate a serious consideration of individual sin.”[20]

It is, therefore, of no surprise that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith warns that “There is a tendency to identify the kingdom of God and its growth with the human liberation movement, and to make history itself the subject of its own development, as a process of the self-redemption of man by means of the class struggle. This identification is in opposition to the faith of the Church as it has been reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council.”[21]

As Michael Novak notes, liberation theology was not fundamentally designed to coexist with private property, markets, or individual liberties. This is true because of seven fundamentally Marxists elements found in liberation theology, namely: 1) the effort of liberation theology seeks to create a new man and a new earth; 2) the espousal of a utopian sensibility; 3) the benign view of the state; 4) the failure to say anything about how wealth is created; 5) the advocacy of the abolition of private property; 6) the treatment of class struggle as a fact; and 7) the denouncement of capitalism.[22]

As Carroll Rios de Rodriguez notes, “this worldview was not only theologically and morally wrong, but it would result in Latin America paying a high economic and political price that would hurt the poor.”[23]

Ultimately, the Hispanic world has given far more to the philosophical and theological foundations of the West than is often recognized. The first lights of renewal in the Dark Ages burned in the monasteries of the Iberian Pyrenees, and later blazed from the golden altars of the new world universities during the Hispanic Golden Age. Ángel Ganivet’s warning—that the Hispanic spirit overflowed its boundaries and risked exhaustion—seems prophetic in light of the ideological betrayals that followed. Yet the deeper current remains: the vision of Vasconcelos and Martí reminds us that the inheritance of de León, Montesinos, Mariana, and Vitoria is not merely historical. It is a living tradition, one capable of reawakening across Hispanic America.

[1] John Paul II. Centesimus Annus: On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum. 1991.

[2] Madigan, Patrick. "Nature and Grace: A New Approach to Thomistic Ressourcement. By Andrew Dean Swafford. Pp. Xiv, 205, Cambridge, James Clarke, 2015." The Heythrop Journal, no. 6 (2015): 1089-090.

[3] Fafián, Manuel Maceiras, and Luis Méndez Francisco. Los Derechos Humanos En Su Origen: La República Dominicana Y Fray Antón Montesinos. Salamanca: San Esteban, 2011.

[4] Izbicki, Thomas. "The School of Salamanca." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer (2019).

[5] Hanke, Lewis, and Bartolomé De Las Casas. All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation between Bartolomé De Las Casas and Juan Ginés De Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994.

[6] Izbicki, Thomas. "The School of Salamanca." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer (2019).

[7] Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000.

[8] Astrain, Antonio. Historia De La Compañía De Jesús En La Asistencia De España. Madrid: Administación De Razón Y Fe, 1916.

[9] Gutierrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1988.

[10] Duncan, William. "The Political Philosophy of Gustavo Gutierrez." May 1995.

[11] Gutierrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1988.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Little, Daniel. "Philosophy of History." Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences (n.d.)

[14] Gutierrez, Gustavo. The Power of the Poor in History. Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2004.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Duichin, M. (2014). Philosophy and War: Hegel versus Kant or Kant towards Hegel? Hegel-Jahrbuch, 2014(1).

[17] Kant, I., Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, & Rheinland-Westfalen, K. L. (1902). Kant's gesammelte Schriften: Vorkritische Schriften I, 1747-1756.

[18] Popper, K. R. (2002). The Open Society and Its Enemies. London, England: Psychology Press.

[19] Gutierrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1988.

[20] Garvey, Michael. "The Godfather of Liberation Theology." Notre Dame Magazine, Winter 2008.

[21] Instruction on Certain Aspects of the "Theology of Liberation. 1984.

[22] Novak, Michael. Will it Liberate ?: Questions About Liberation Theology. Madison Books, 1991.

[23] Rios de Rodriguez, Carroll. "The Economics of Liberation Theology." Acton Institute.