Let’s return to the genuine Columbus of the Italian immigrants and not to the fictional Columbus of the French revolutionaries and their flat Earth myth.
D onald Trump says that he wants to “bring Columbus Day back from the ashes.” But the question is, “Which Columbus?”
There have been two very different Christopher Columbus heroes in the American pantheon over the 250 years of our national history. Before the destruction of Columbus at the hands of the Marxists that began in the 1960s, there was already significant tension over the place of Columbus as an iconic American founder.
It has been hard to keep pace with the assault on Columbus over the past half century. Starting in the Sixties, leftist academics excoriated him for destroying the environment; for bringing nothing but germs, guns, and steel; and for introducing slavery, genocide, and capitalism into a state of natural “paradise.” When I first started teaching in the year 2000, protesters sprayed statues of Columbus with red spray paint. That was the legacy of the 1992 protests around the 500th anniversary of his famous voyage and landfall. In the past ten years, woke rioters beheaded Columbus statues in 2016 and the ire of Antifa toppled them in 2020. And while the idea of replacing his holiday with Indigenous Peoples’ Day has been around since the 1970s and a few states made the change by 1992, it wasn’t until 2021 that President Joe Biden issued the first presidential proclamation of the change.
When Daniel J. Boorstin returned pride of place to Columbus with his popular 1983 book The Discoverers, he was already “bringing back Columbus.” But Boorstin brought back the wrong Columbus. Will we get it right this time?
The first Christopher Columbus monument in North America — and, indeed, the world — was erected by the new French revolutionary regime’s ambassador to the equally new American republic in 1792. This first Columbus monument was a modest obelisk on the French ambassador’s private Baltimore estate. The French Enlightenment philosophers’ version of Columbus was a man fashioned after their own image: a Man of the Age of Reason, or a Man of the Age of Baconian Science, devoted to the empirical method, who had to fight off the heavy hand of the tradition of biblical obfuscation, superstition, and religion of the Dark Ages.
While many had mocked the medievals for scientific backwardness before, it was probably Voltaire who first actually used the word “flat” to describe ancient Hebrew and medieval Christian views of the Earth and heavens. Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason, invented the idea that Christians would be burned at the stake in the Middle Ages if they didn’t accept that the Earth was “flat as a trencher.” But, neither of them mentioned Columbus.
It was left to America’s own Washington Irving — author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow — to invent the fully fledged “flat Earth myth.” As Jeffry Russell, a professor of intellectual history at Harvard, Notre Dame, and the University of California, pointed out in his delightful little book Inventing the Flat Earth (1991), it is pure myth that there ever was a widespread belief in a flat Earth or that Columbus’s voyage was a heroic feat of empirical science to prove — by experiment! — that the Earth was round. Irving published the first English-language biography of Christopher Columbus in 1828. It was very influential. He decorated his highly colored prose with footnotes to Spanish archival materials, the paraphernalia of social scientific objectivity, giving the illusion of the certainty of a research historian.
Irving’s Columbus was a sublime, romantic natural genius holding forth on his scientific hypothesis against the benighted Spanish Dominican monks. Never mind that the actual issue that they debated was the circumference of the Earth rather than its shape. And, of course, on the issue of the circumference, the Dominican monks were far more scientifically accurate than Columbus, who insisted that it was a mere 2,000 miles from the Canary Islands to Japan and that he could make the trip in a couple of months. The Spanish monks knew what everyone had known since Ptolemy: The Earth was far bigger than that. In the end, Divine Providence had more of a hand than science in Columbus’s achievement.
But Washington Irving’s Columbus was gleefully taken up and popularized in a million textbooks, cartoons, children’s literature, and films. First, Irving’s Columbus provided a useful caricature of Catholics for the “Nativist” anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic movement in America. Later, Irving’s Columbus became a stock character in the efforts of academics such as John Draper and Andrew Dickson White to create a narrative of the perpetual “warfare” between science and religion in the midst of the Darwin controversy in the 1870s. They portrayed all Christians — Catholics and Protestant alike — as biblical literalists who had persecuted all natural scientists down through the ages. This narrative enabled them to deconstruct America’s religious liberal arts colleges with their colonial-era classical curricula and reconstruct them on the lines of German research universities, funded by grants from corporations and big government.
That’s why it is most unfortunate that Boorstin, writing in the 1980s, should have “brought back” this fictional Columbus. In two chapters titled “The Prison of Christian Dogma” and “A Flat Earth Returns,” Boorstin regurgitated the entire myth that Christians view the world as a “hodgepodge of fantasy and dogma” and that Columbus had to rely on sailors who feared “falling off the edge of the earth.”
By Boorstin’s time this was egregious. It was not merely the repetition of simplistic anti-Catholic and anti-Christian tropes; it flew in the face of the work of intellectual historians who had proven beyond any reasonable doubt that figures like the Latin author Lactantius or Greek author Cosmas Indicopleustes, both writing in the very early centuries of Christianity, were in no way representative of medieval, Christian cosmology writ large. You didn’t need to be a Latin scholar to understand the phrases orbis terrarum and terra est rotunda or to recognize that the infant Christ Child seated in the medieval Virgin’s lap was holding the whole world in his hands — and that it was a globe.
The second interpretation of Christopher Columbus emerged in 1892, on the 400th anniversary of his voyage. By that time, the Italian Risorgimento was displacing large numbers of Italian peasants and workers, many of whom flooded American shores in the years after the American Civil War. These Italian immigrants were overjoyed that, despite the prejudice that they faced, there was already an Italian in the pantheon of American heroes.
Italian-American immigrants embraced the Genoese sailor as their own and refashioned him in their own image. Instead of Columbus statues holding aloft the globe of the Earth, or the sextant, or the charter of trade — icons of science, technology, and commerce — they gleefully went about putting up statues of Christopher Columbus in every Little Italy of every American city, sculpted in imported Carrera marble, donated by the Knights of Columbus, and holding aloft the crucifix — the icon of his greatest achievement: the evangelization of the Americas for Christianity.
Pope Leo XIII wrote an encyclical letter in 1892 celebrating Columbus as heir to the medieval synthesis of faith and reason, a man in the mold of Saint Thomas Aquinas (an Italian Dominican monk who had mentioned the roundness of the Earth in the opening pages of his Summa Theologiae in the 1200s). For Leo, as for the Italian immigrants, Columbus’s primary goal and primary achievement was the spread of Christian faith, not the rejection of Christian faith in the name of science and reason.
Truth to tell, the poor, uneducated Italian immigrants’ version of Columbus was a lot closer to the historical reality than the highly educated French revolutionary philosophes’ version. Christopher Columbus was indeed fervently religious. He was a Third Order Franciscan, who espoused the apocalyptic hopes with which his era was rife. But the hoped for end of the world could not come about without the preaching of the Gospel to all nations. In his writings, Columbus expressed his concern that the vast population of China languished in paganism (as it languishes still 500 years later!) without Christian missionaries — or worse, that the Muslim forces might reach the Chinese first.
Columbus set sail in the context of a climax of the crusading spirit in the Spanish reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim forces at the Battle of Granada in 1492 and the loss of Constantinople to Muslim Ottomans in 1453 (becoming Istanbul; the then-largest Christian church in the world, the Hagia Sophia, becoming a mosque). Apocalyptic hopes and apocalyptic fears for Christendom were the common cultural coin of the day. Gold and spices from China and the Indies were not luxury goods but war material in the great struggle between Christianity and Islam for control of the Mediterranean world. If Christians could have gotten to China by Marco Polo’s old route they would have, but the Ottoman Turks blocked the path. Suleiman the Magnificent vowed that he would make the Mediterranean a sea on which no Christian ship could sail. The great Christian naval victory at Lepanto was a hundred years in the future (1571), while the first Turkish siege of Vienna (1529) was just around the corner.
It was indeed in the context and spirit of the ages of faith and crusade that Columbus set sail, and not in the context and spirit of the Baconian age of empirical science.
Columbus “brought” the Old World to the New World rather than leaving behind the Old World with its benighted traditions in search of the New. Slavery, racism, and genocide were nothing new to the Americas when Columbus arrived. But the idea that “all mankind is one,” that all races are descended from a single parent and are made in the image and likeness of God, and have human rights under natural law — that was a new idea. The very language of natural law and human rights with which Bartolomé de las Casas condemned the Spanish conquistadors for their treatment of the native peoples was an inheritance of the Christian Middle Ages. It is truer to say that Columbus brought Christianity to the Americas than to say that he proved to anyone that the Earth was round. After all, the Americas have now produced not just one but two popes, as well as countless Christian missionaries.
President Trump did — fortunately — indicate in his brief “I’m bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes” tweet that he would be reinstating the American hero for “the Italians that love him so much.” Let’s hope that we can in fact return to the genuine Columbus of the Italian immigrants and not to the fictional Columbus of the French revolutionaries and their flat Earth myth.