Shakespeare's view of the Caribbean native is bad enough, but a more extreme, but equally insidious view of the Other as deformed, heathen, non-Christian sinner is apparent in the paintings of Hieronomous Bosch. The most notable of these paintings are: " The Garden of Earthly Delights"; "The World Before and After the Flood"; "The Temptation of St. Anthony"; the "Last Judgment"; the "Hay Wain"; and "Paradise and Hell". These paintings provide a hierarchical vision of humanity as sinful and corrupt from the remotest ages. The diptych painting "Before and After the Flood". shows mankind as a sordid, hopeless race that is well worth destroying. It also pictures nature as slimy and genetically deformed due to an inherent 'sinfulness'.

This view of man's sinfulness appears to be a fundamental element in the construction of the European class system and thus in the construction of racism. The idea of "sin" is a social construction that serves a regime of knowledge/power. There are no sins, there are infringements of rights, murders, injustices and wrongs. The notion of sin operates relative to a system of knowledge, specifically the Judeo-Christian-Islamic system. The fiction of the idea of original sin illustrates this. The vision of history that is presented in Bosch is one of increasing corruption due to original sin, relieved only by the appearance of Christ and a few saints, who stand far above the corruption of ordinary humanity, whose only possible fate could be immortal torture in hell. Bosch's depiction's of tortures, like Dante's, are painted with an interest that almost glorifies them, as if his creativity were most excited by demonstrations of cruelty. Tortures, again, as in Dante, are almost endlessly multiplied with a genetic obsessiveness and mania for deformation that almost defies description; original sin genetically deforms all it touches. The excess of degradation expressed in Bosch and Dante is in direct proportion to the excess of sublimity expressed in their positive images of Christ and saints: transcendence creates horror and terror justifies ultimate knowledge.

These paintings are indicative of aspects of the mentality that managed to kill and exploit millions of people on at least two continents. Painted in the Low Countries of Brabant around 1495-1505, these paintings are roughly contemporaneous with the first atrocities of Columbus. Moreover, it is significant that they were bought by the Spanish Monarchs who had conquered and colonized Bosch's Netherlands. A few of these paintings were bought by Isabella (d.1504) and most of the others by Philip II (R.1556-98). The latter seems to have been especially fond of Bosch's cynical, satirical and corrosive view of humanity as little more than dwarfish and deformed beasts, lizards, snakes, demons and insects. To Philip, mankind was a composite of horrible attributes, well deserving of torture and god's wrath.

Philip had 33 of these paintings in his private collection in 1574.[1] According to contemporary accounts, Bosch's paintings were found everywhere in the Escorial Monastery, where Philip often lived. A certain Friar Jose de Sigienza wrote of them in 1605 that "these paintings are a satirical commentary on the shame and sinfulness of mankind".[2] No, actually, they are a commentary on the brutality of the ideals, 'truths' and 'purity' of the European and Christian mentalities of the 16th and 17th centuries. These paintings may also be, besides a few Mayan, Aztec or African accounts, about as close as one can come, at least in the hell and judgment pictures, to the actual terror and horror of the Conquest, the slave trade and the culture of terror and the murderous glory of the Intellect that made these atrocities possible.

In Bosch's Hell and Judgment paintings, Christ, like the beneficent Prospero, and representing the moral supremacy of the European, oversees the brutal and cruel punishment of millions of ordinary people. In the backgrounds of these paintings are factories of death, looming in the darkness: bodies are dismembered, torture and death are everywhere; plagues, genetic deformations and diseases dominate the earth. Though Bosch seems to have meant these as images of moral instruction, actually, 500 years later, they are much better seen as fairly accurate depictions of what the Europeans did to the Native Africans and Americans.

Philip reportedly wrote a book called the Order of Nature, which offers a primitive Christian form of the Linnaean system of classification of nature in hierarchies.[3] Carolus Linnaeus transformed a vestigial Christian notion of hierarchical classification into a theory of human and natural types. He wrote that every natural type should be "a product of number, of form, of proportion, of situation". [4] The human Intellect, or the scientist, hovered supreme over that which he classified. For instance, Linnaeus, in his essay "the Oeconomy of Nature" (1749), wrote that:

The Linnaean system thus lays part of the foundation of the science of biology and does so as part of a project of conquest. Should environmental disasters and extinctions that occur even up until the present be blamed on Linnaeus. No probably not.. The Linnaen system of classification, still largely in use today, enshrines the same will to power and exploitation expressed in the above quote. The Linnaean system anticipates the Darwinian system. There seems to be a development of current genetic conceptions of nature out of Christian and colonialist conceptions of nature and hierarchy. It is clear that such systems of classification ultimately had the discipline of power and exploitation as a complement to their explorative interest. It is also true that the Liinnean system is terribly important to the world’s preservation. There is no denying that many speceis are being saved now because of Linnaeus and the biological project of learning about and classifying species.
Concerning the history of science to the present, I see evidence that that the explorative drive, originating with the imperial ambitions of Kings and Conquistadors, can be separated from the exploitive drive. It is true that the divine right to know easily became the right to husband, own, conquer, exploit and kill. Philip's view that Europeans had the right to murder, steal land and wealth and eliminate other cultures is reflected in Darwin's belief that men compete like animals, but that "the more deadly struggle [is] which culture has the best fitted organization or instinct (i.e. the intellect of man) to win the day". The 'higher intellect' of the Europeans had the right, by the law of Natural Selection, to "win the day". Darwin believed, as I will discuss later, that the elimination of non-European cultures was historically inevitable. Darwin and Philip agree, despite the conflict between religion and science. [1] Yet there is in Darwin and more generous aunderstanding and wider appreciation fo the earth than one finds in Phillip. The similarity of Darwin's scientific rationalism to what could be called Philip's Intellectism indicates something of the development of rationalism out of Platonic and Christian ideologies of the supremacy of the intellect. In other words, both Philip and Darwin are participants in creating what will become the Empire of the Intellect, an empire that will be as much a geographical space as it is a psychological, historical and intellectual space. But there is unquestionably a progress out of the Christian mould into the Darwinian understanding of nature. If nature is to be saved, it is better kept in the hands of science than in the hands of business of religion.

A pre-Linnaean, pre-Darwinian system is implied in Bosch's paintings: the order of nature proceeds from Christ to the Saints, to religious men and women and then down the ladder to beasts, insects and demons, with endless grades of creatures in between. Bosch's images of demons and conglomerate creatures of horror and fancy also occur in Medieval breviaries, as well as imaginative depictions of people in the African or American continent where Native Americans are seen as creatures of hell, fable or fairy tale: 'wild men', demons, and savages. Similar distortions also appear on the margins of early maps and travel books. The European vision of the people outside Europe is closely bound up with images of hell and mythological demons. These images convey a vision of European superiority and help justify the atrocities committed against non European peoples. They also give some idea of the origins of classificatory systems like those that occur in Linnaeus and Darwin.

There is in Phillip no understanding of Darwin’s rejection of the ideology of the “Great Chain of Being”. Philip saw himself at the top of the "Great Chain of Being", since he was a Catholic King and ruled by divine right. He thought he was a supreme representative of Christ on earth. As Prospero exploits Caliban, Christ in Bosch's paintings terrorizes and punishes ordinary people. In a similar way with similar rationales, Philip exploited the Native Americans, the Africans, the Moors, and anyone who was poor or marginal in his own country. The system involved here is one of a murderous form of glory; a will to power that combines knowledge with terror, or exploits the terror that is an intrinsic aspect of system of knowledge. Philip's desire for sanctity as a Catholic cannot be separated from his genocidal and racist explorations, Inquisitions and expulsions. In the 16th and 17th centuries the Imperial mentality is inseparable from Christian religious mentalities, both Catholic and Protestant.

80 years since the Invasion of America, Philip II is contemplating the "truth" of Bosch's paintings while he continues the genocide begun by Columbus and steps up the slave trade to replace the Indians who have already been murdered or killed by disease. In the 17th century, slave exports are thought to be 1,341,000 people,[7] the increase being due to the dying out of natives and the development of sugar cane farming. But of course these are the usual causal reasons that economic historians tend to use. Behind such seemingly amoral, impersonal phrases, reflecting 'free market' ideology, as "the development of sugar cane farming" is both the greed and need of power, luxury and the deeper ideals, ideologies and beliefs of the Europeans. The presumption of amorality often hides an immorality. The Europeans glorified themselves with the products made literally with the blood of millions and this was done for god, the king and for early businessmen. It is in this light that the history of European art should be seen. Rueben's painting of glorified Kings and Queens, the pompous portraits of Louis the 14th, the glorified god-men of Michaelangelo: the endless paintings of Europeans masquerading as Greek and Roman Patricians and Ladies, in love with their wealth and high status as in Watteau, or the countless paintings honoring the heroic Christ, who represents them in heaven and who lords it over the sinning poor. Christ is the early modern image of the European as Conqueror and Supreme Intellect, lording over 'creation'. Mary is supposed to be the savioress of a very few whose cases warrant "Mercy'. But at the same time, she looks down with divine approval as her Son murders all in sight, casting them into eternal hells. The slim chance that Mary offered for salvation from the European horror made her an object of sympathy to the exploited indigenous people in Mexico and elsewhere.

I have dwelt on Philip II at some length because he built the Escorial Monastery and lived there, sleeping in a whitewashed room, with a window cut into the wall which overlooked the altar in the Church within, so that he could hear the prayers of the monks as he made all the decisions that cost the lives of countless people. Philip's drive for transcendence is fundamentally related to his active assistance in creating atrocities. His religious observations, his brooding prayers, his ecstatic spiritual longings are not separate from the blood spilling from the bodies of Africans and Indians. To Philip, the world was a dream, and corpses of Indians merely "shadows of a dream" to use Shelley's platonic phrase.. The picture of the puritanical, Spartan discipline of his life of prayer carries with it the perfume of atrocity. Indeed, the devotion to the abstract and symbolic realm of the shadows of gods that are dimly strained after in the life of prayer make of the real shadows and lights and beings of this life a stage of dreams, hardly real. There is no remorse for killing dreams. The Spanish-Christian notion found in Calderon and elsewhere that "life is a dream" is a convenient excuse for exploitation and murder, and one that was also used by Buddhist and Hindu states in the East. [8]

Philip lived a life of prayer, and his prayers reached up to the lights of glory and the sublime realm of heavenly truths and these truths helped him numb himself to the murders from which Spain profited. Apparently he had one of Bosch's paintings on the wall of his room to remind him of the vanity of all life and punishments that accompany straying from a fixed vision of the 'other world'. The 'other world' was the source of his power and the height of his knowledge and he did not mind that brutalized Indians and Africans paid the price of his holy piety with their deaths.

[1] Parker, Geoffrey. Philip II Boston: Little Brown. 1974 pg.46

[2] Guillard, Jacqueline, Maurice. Bosch New York. Clarkson N. Potter 1989 pg.22

[3]The question arises here of the origin of the classificatory systems of natural forms that have been created over the last few hundred years. Do such systems as that of Linnaeus and Darwin enshrine a tacit belief in European Imperial ideologies? Given Darwin's contention that natural selection implies the elimination of non-Europeans, a quote I will discuss later, the answer must be yes. Are the current efforts to redesign genetic structures latter day versions of Bosch's European supremacist notion of nature as an arena of corruption, good for nothing but conquest and exploitation? Is the effort to reduce nature to the exploitable atom, DNA strand and brain cell merely a new Creation story dictating Western man's supremacy over the environment and history? The answer to this appears to be yes also.

[4] Quoted in Said, Edward. Orientalism New York: Vintage Books. 1979 pg.119

[5] Quoted in Oelschlaeger, Max. The idea of Wilderness New Haven Yale University 1991 pg. 105

[6] The conflict between religion and science, like the conflict between traditionalism and modernism, appears to be a conflict between differing rationales of knowledge and power. Yet at the same time, science grows out of religious ideologies of knowledge/power. These evolutions and divergences are fairly complicated in each case and involve ideological as well as physical and practical components. Ideas act in actual, not merely mental, contexts and are affected by contexts in return. I have tried to deal with a number of these divergences and evolutions throughout this book, But it is impossible to deal with them exhaustively in one book.

There have been many attempts to explicitly conjoin science and religion in the last twenty years. One of the more well known of these is Fritjof Capra, who, in his Tao of Physics, imagine that Hinduism and Buddhism will somehow counteract the reductionism of science, and complement and mitigate the abuses that result from the scientific system of knowledge power with the 'holism' of the old theocratic systems. These writers-- Ken Wilber is another, do not realize that modern forms of power develop out of the theocratic and absolutist regimes of old. Nor do they realize that modern forms of knowledge/power do not differ from Traditional forms in their abrogation of human rights. The caste system justified by Hindu metaphysics is not less racist than the system of scientific research combined with corporate capitalism which justifies the racist exploitation of African or Brazilian resources.

In any case, I wish to indicate here is the complexity involved in comparing systems of knowledge power over long periods of time. Current efforts to find areas of overlap between traditional and modernist systems do not satisfy. More research and understanding is needed.

[7] Wolf, Eric Europe and the People Without History Berkeley, University of California 1982 pg. 195

[8] The notion of Samsara or Maya is the equivalent in the Eastern canon of knowledge. The notion of Atma is the rough equivalent of the European ideal of the intellect.