Sinful Worlds, Divine Purposes, and Justifications of Slavery in Alonso de Sandoval’s De instauranda Aethiopum salute

Abstract To twenty-first-century eyes, the question of how Jesuits could minister to enslaved people, while simultaneously enslaving them, can seem hard to resolve. This article examines the work of the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval (1576–1652), De instauranda Aethiopum salute , as a window into the worldview of a Jesuit who was also an enslaver. The apparent tension between the two Jesuit activities of ministry and slaveholding has often led to distorted representations of Sandoval as a humanitarian or proto-abolitionist. This article seeks to resolve the apparent tension by examining Sandoval as a religious thinker who articulated justifications of transatlantic slavery. It argues that in De instauranda a view of the temporal world as inherently sinful, and a faith in God’s ultimate plan for the salvation of the fallen world, combined to justify and celebrate transatlantic slavery as an instrument of salvation. Sandoval’s faith in divinely ordained hierarchies meant that he saw no contradiction between Christian charity and colonial slavery. This worldview deserves further attention from scholars who wish to understand the mentalité of the seventeenth-century Society of Jesus on its own terms.