NRO Weekend, October 7-8, 2000
Hero of History
Christopher Columbus as a genuine, historical titan.

By Jeffrey Hart, NR senior editor. Excerpted from NR October 15, 1990

hristopher Columbus was a genuine titan, a hero of history and of the human spirit. Samuel Eliot Morison has written well about him; we have his famous letters and an elegant re-issue of his journal, The Log of Christopher Columbus: His Own Account of the Voyage That Changed the World International Maine Publishing Company, Camden, Maine, 1987). But if you wish to read superlatively incisive commentary, try pages 6 to 25 of William Spengemann's The Adventurous Muse (Yale, 1967).

Columbus not only sailed the Ocean Sea, he sailed between the medieval and the modern consciousness. In place of a globe, the Middle Ages had a flat map, depicting a world-island consisting of Europe, Africa, and Asia. It was complete and static. Ocean was supposed to cover everything else.

In discovering a new part of the world, Columbus destroyed such finite certainties. He upset theologies. He found not only a new geographical place, but a new unfolding world of mind and experience. "The farther one goes," he wrote, "the more one learns."

Columbus was not a philosopher, but he provided the materials of philosophy. His aims were multiple and confused: 1) to cross the Ocean Sea and prove his theories of navigation (a scientific and modem project; though he thought the world was pearshaped); 2) to find a nautical way to the riches of Asia (Spain, as usual, was hard up; the Turk controlled the land routes); 3) to convert the pagan nations; 4) to find the Earthly Paradise (Eden), as foreseen in the Book of Revelation (a medieval and doctrinal goal; he thought he had found the Earthly Paradise when he met the fresh waters at the mouth of the Orinoco River). He even developed a theory of spiritual growth as seeking.

This was a man both of the medieval world and of the dawning world of the Renaissance, a hero of human consciousness indeed. (The great American poet Hart Crane grasped this with spectacular intensity.)

In retrospect, Columbus helped inaugurate an enormous westward European expansion, surely the greatest demographic movement in history. Driven by complex causes, it reached the Atlantic coast of the New World, then pushed ever westward, toward Cahfornia, the Klondike. And though it had begun as a colonial movement itself, it eventually came full circle, beating back the old empires of England, France, and Spain. It reached its geographical high tide in 1945, when General MacArthur signed the surrender document aboard the battleship Missouri. But its spiritual heritage now begins to encircle the entire globe. The ideals of representative government and liberty under law have leaped continents and cultures and are the sole forms of modem legitimacy, whether triumphant in Managua, Budapest, and Moscow or threatening in Peking. Westward ho, says the world.

To those who would denigrate Columbus and the other pioneers one can apply Nietzsche's term garbage-can philosophers," or Thomas Carlyle's term Teufelsdreck, devil's turd) — that is, nihilists, the sour enemies of human aspiration. To denigrate Columbus is to denigrate what is worthy in human history and in us all.