José de Acosta

Spanish Jesuit missionary and writer

• Born: 1540
• Birthplace: Medina del Campo, Spain
• Died: February 15, 1600
• Place of death: Salamanca, Spain

José de Acosta is best known for his magisterial work The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, a pioneering study of the indigenous cultures of the Americas and American geography, climate, flora, and fauna. He also favored the humane treatment of American Indians.

Early Life

José de Acosta (hoh-SAY day ah-KOH-stah) was born the same year that the Jesuit order (the Society of Jesus), founded by fellow Spaniard Ignatius Loyola, won official approval in Rome. The Jesuits would come to play a pivotal role in the colonization and Christianization of Spanish America, and Acosta’s life work would make an important contribution to that effort.

José was one of nine children born to the well-to-do Acosta family in Medina del Campo, a key trading town located between Valladolid and Madrid on the central plateau of Spain. Some scholars have speculated that the Acostas were of Portuguese-Jewish ancestry. The paterfamilias, Don Antonio de Acosta, was a successful merchant who patronized the Jesuit order in Medina del Campo. Five of his six sons, including José, would join the Society of Jesus.

Few details are known about José’s earliest education, except that he studied some Latin grammar prior to beginning his novitiate in 1552. That year, at the age of twelve, he ran away from home to join the Jesuits in Salamanca; despite their strong support for the society, José’s parents were opposed to his joining the order at such a young age.

Acosta devoted the next fifteen years of his life to his studies. He received an excellent Jesuit education, which included rigorous training not only in theology but also in classical Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, and rhetoric. A gifted writer with a special flair for Latin, Acosta won a reputation for his religious dramas and sermons. Acosta spent eight years at the renowned university of Alcalá de Henares (1559-1567), where he studied philosophy and theology and trained for the ministry.

After completing his studies, Acosta taught and preached in provincial Spain; but what the young Jesuit truly desired was, in his own words, “to go to the Indies, but also to work among the Africans, and to work out of love of the Lord unto death.”

Life’s Work

In 1569, Acosta petitioned Francis Borja, the general of the Society of Jesus in Spain, for a transfer to the Americas. It was not until 1571 that Acosta finally heard word that he was to set sail for Peru.

Acosta and two fellow Jesuits arrived in Lima on April 27, 1572, the third party of Jesuits to arrive in Peru (the first five Jesuits had arrived in 1568, the second group in the following year). The Kingdom of Peru (which included almost all of South America, except for Brazil) was a jewel in the Spanish crown, with its rich silver mines at Potosí (now in Bolivia). Acosta would make it his home for almost fifteen years.

Acosta had been in Lima for just more than a year, teaching theology at the Jesuit College of San Pablo, when he was sent to visit the region to reform extant missions and to assess the potential for founding new ones. During his sixteen months of traveling in what is now southern Peru and Bolivia, Acosta encountered many new lands and indigenous cultures and began to gather the ethnographic and scientific data that would ultimately form his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590; The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 1604). He most likely acquired some skills (though not fluency) in South American Indian languages during these travels.

In 1574, Acosta returned to Lima, where he was appointed professor of theology at the University of San Marcos. Shortly thereafter, he became the provincial of Peru, a three-year appointment to govern a Jesuit province, which was a post he held from 1576 to 1581. During his provincialate, the number of Jesuits in Peru increased from 77 to 113. Acosta opened several Jesuit colleges and residences and established a new reducción, or reduction, a South American Indian village at Juli (on Lake Titicaca), which would become a model ministry for the founding of later communities. Acosta stressed the importance of preaching to the indigenous in their own tongue, and his tenure saw an increased effort to train priests in local languages.

Acosta wrote the first of his three important works on the Americas, the De procuranda Indorum salute (wr. 1576, pb. 1588; English translation, 1996). The first book written by a Jesuit in the region, De procuranda Indorum salute made the case for evangelizing the indigenous of the New World and provided practical guidance for accomplishing that daunting task. Acosta wrote this work in Latin for an audience of fellow clergy. The book reflects Acosta’s realistic optimism: He was confident in the ability of the Church to convert the South American Indians, but experience had taught him that this would come neither quickly nor easily.

Following the completion of his term as provincial, Acosta spent another six years in Peru, serving as theological consultant to the reformist Third Provincial Council of Lima, convoked by Archbishop Toribio de Mogrovejo. On behalf of the council, Acosta authored a trilingual book of catechisms and sermons for the indigenous of Peru in Spanish and the local languages Aymara and Quechua. Acosta’s Doctrina Christiana, y catecismo para instrucción de los Indios (pb. c. 1584; Christian doctrine and catechism for the instruction of the Indians) was the first full-length book printed in Peru. In 1587, Acosta began his return journey to Spain, stopping first in Mexico. He spent almost a year there, where he visited his brother at the Jesuit college of Oaxaca and gathered materials on Aztec culture for his forthcoming The Natural and Moral History of the Indies.

Finally back in Spain, Acosta completed this massive work. It comprises seven books. The first four concern natural history, from general considerations about the shape and size of the earth and the place of the New World, to detailed descriptions of the unique minerals, plants, and animals found in the Americas. Books five through seven comprise Acosta’s moral history, that is, the history of human beings, in which Acosta relates the history, culture, and religion of the Incas and Aztecs. Part of The Natural and Moral History of the Indies was published in Latin in 1589 with the De procuranda Indorum salute under the title De natura novi orbis libri duo et promulgatione evangelii. After the complete Spanish-language edition was published at Seville in 1590, Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias was quickly translated and printed in many other European languages.

Meanwhile, Acosta found himself much in demand at the court of King Philip II as an expert on the American possessions that the king would never see for himself. Acosta spent two years from 1592 to 1594 in Rome as Philip II’s representative to the Fifth General Congregation, an international gathering of the Society of Jesus, where elected representatives were to debate issues of fundamental importance to the order.

Acosta returned to Spain in the spring of 1594, where he served as rector at Valladolid and then at the Jesuit college of Salamanca. Acosta remained in Salamanca, preaching, writing, and ministering to the poor, until his death in 1600.

Significance

Acosta has been called the Pliny of the New World for The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, which provided a compendium of knowledge on the geography, climate, flora, fauna, history, language, and religion of the Aztecs and Incas. The Jesuit scholar attempted to reconcile his classical learning with the staggering newness of what he had encountered firsthand in the New World.

Acosta was also a strong proponent of the humane treatment of the American Indian, denouncing Spanish brutality. Determined to evangelize the Indians of the New World through peaceful means, Acosta argued against the use of force and coercion and stressed the need for flexibility and adaptability, in recognition of the diversity of native cultures.

Bibliography

Acosta, José de. Natural and Moral History of the Indies. Translated by Frances López-Morillas and edited by Jane E. Mangan. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. Modern English translation of Acosta’s seminal work with explanatory notes. Brief introduction places Acosta’s history in its intellectual context.

Burgaleta, Claudio M. José de Acosta, S.J. (1540-1600): His Life and Thought. Chicago: Loyola Press, 1999. Part 1 gives a chronological biography of Acosta. Part 2 analyzes Acosta’s theology, writing style, and intellectual method. Includes appendices with brief excerpts of Acosta’s writing.

Ford, Thayne R. “Stranger in a Foreign Land: José de Acosta’s Scientific Realizations in Sixteenth-Century Peru.” Sixteenth Century Journal 29, no. 1 (Spring, 1998): 19-33. Explores the importance of Acosta’s scientific contributions.

O’Malley, John W., et al., eds. The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Thirty-two essays on various aspects of Jesuit contributions to the arts and sciences, with an introductory essay on the historiography of the Society of Jesus.