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The Inca Garcilaso De La Vega Humanist Interpreter of the Inca Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Pierre Duviols
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If the Royal Commentaries of the Incas, published in 1609, for a long time enjoyed an authority and exceptional prestige, if this work created the image in the French 18th century of an ideally ordered, just and virtuous society, it was no doubt due more to the admirable skill with which Garcilaso presented an especially brilliant and fascinating picture of the civilization of his maternal ancestors, the lords of Peru, than to the title of Inca, in which he could take pride—as the son of a Peruvian princess and a noble Spanish conqueror—or to the fact that he witnessed the aftermath of the conquest and the fall of the empire. It was perhaps a too attractive picture, and toward the middle of the 19th century it raised some doubt and scepticism. The Commentaries were then considered to be a romanticized history of the Inca civilization, even a utopia pure and simple. Modern criticism has reversed this view. It has pointed out that many facts in the book were valid, and that some were indisputable. Recent works tend to revindicate in their conclusions the historical importance and the sincerity of Garcilaso, without denying in the process the stylization, idealization and prejudices of the book. The viewpoint of the erudite Peruvian scholar Porras Barrenechea is in this respect significant: “The image of the Inca Empire that Garcilaso projects,” he writes, “is neither false nor deceptive. It is only one-sided. He gathered and related essentially favorable facts, those which exalted the memory of the lost empire and not which would have justified its disappearance…”

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 12 , Issue 47 , September 1964 , pp. 36 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © 1964 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 A. Miro Quesada, El Inca Garcilaso, Lima, 1945; Porras Barrenechea, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Lima, 1946; Luis E. Valcarcel, "Garcilaso y la etnografia del Peru" in Nuevos Estudios sobre el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Lima, 1955; J. Durand, "Garcilaso between the World of the Incas and that of Renaissance Concepts," in Diogenes, No. 43, Fall 1963.

2 Porras Barrenechea, op. cit. p. 15.

3 A. Métraux, Les Incas, Le Seuil, 1961, p. 115.

4 The religious historiography of Peru, prior to the Commentaries, is sometimes a tributary itself of European humanism, in varying degrees. One thinks of Las Casas (Apologetic History) and of Acosta (Natural and Moral History of the Indies).

5 On the sacrifices to the Sun, see II, VIII. On the other festivals of the Sun, see VII, V and VII, VI.

6 Jacques Perret, "Vue d'ensemble sur les livres VI-XI" in vol. II of La Cité de Dieu, Paris, Garnier, 1960. We refer always to the Garnier edition.

7 The apologetic of Luis of Granada makes use of and develops the arguments (from cause to effect, pragmatic, aesthetic) of Stoic theology represented by the De Natura Deorum, of Cicero, in which it can be seen that the idea of god in the mind of men derives essentially from "the regularity of motion, the revolution of the heavens, the distinction between the sun, moon and all the stars, their utility, their beauty, their order; the sight of similar objects in itself shows sufficiently that they are not due to chance…" (translated from II, V, in Les Stoiciens, Bibl. de la Pléiade, p. 414).

8 We obviously do not claim that Saint Augustine and Luis of Granada were Garcilaso's only European sources. The Inca could just as well have first had recourse to the lessons of Plato, whose ideal republic hardly left any place for irrational myths or indecent cults. For Plato, the quarrels and passions of the gods were incompatible with the order and harmony that reign in the just State. We should point out that the Commentaries try precisely to give the image of a just and harmonious state from which base and ignorant cults would be excluded. We should also point out that, for Plato, the philosopher constructing the ideal city would substitute the imperfect gods conceived in the image of man by the idea of Good, represented by the Sun in a visible world. The Incas Tupac Yupanqui and Huayna Capac undertook a revision, analogous to an imperfect, poetic and civil theology, according to Garcilaso, by according—just as Plato did—the greatest importance to the idea of first cause.

Garcilaso, on the other hand, takes from the utopian thought of the Renaissance, also nourished by Plato and Saint Augustine. In this respect, we should not ignore the influence that could have been exerted on the Inca by Thomas More's Utopia (1510), which abolished private property and conceived—in the last chaptet—of a religion not dissimilar to that of the Commentaries. At least Garcilaso's idea of the two ages of idolatry, which foresaw the advent of the third age, that of Christ, may be found in it. The first age would correspond to the enlightened idolatry of the Incas: "Some worship the Sun, others deify the Moon or some other planet. Some venerate as a supreme god a man whose glory and virtue once had a particularly strong impact," More wrote; he too followed the current of Platonist thought. The second age would correspond to the natural religion established by the amautas and the Inca sovereigns, with the belief, according to More, in "a sole God, eternal, immense, unknown, inexplicable, beyond the perceptions of the human mind, filling the whole world with his omnipotence and not with his corporeal size." The sage Utopus plays the role of a religious reformer comparable to that of Manco Capac, with this difference—certainly important—that he decreed religious freedom and proscribed all proselytism. Utopus thus envisaged that the third age—the advent of faith— would be realized, not by following an "authoritarian evangelization but by the moral prestige of the story of Christ's life."

This comparison is all the more interesting since More made of his Raphael Hitlody, the inventor of Utopia, a former friend of Americo Vespucci on his first voyages. Thus More's Utopia, inspired by the first American discoveries, would find its historical confirmation in the Commentaries. We could from here conclude, with L. A. Arocena, that: "Garcilaso found, or believed he found, in the traditions of the Inca empire all the most audacious constructions that Renaissance humanism invented. Thus…he was able to show the conquerors that in overthrowing the secular throne of the sons of the Sun, they had in a way destroyed their own dream." (A. Arocena, El Inca Garcilaso y el humanismo renacentista, Buenos Aires, 1949).

9 Las Casas, who contested the rights of Spain over Peru, went so far as to demand that the Crown restitute the country to the legitimate descendants of the Inca Huayna Capac. (Treatise on the Twelve Peruvian Questions, 1564).

10 Cf. last chapter of Commentaries.