"Reflections on the Coincidences of Christopher Columbus's 'Libro
de Las Profecias' and the American Dream"
 
by Delno C. West and August Kling
 
in "Encounters" (Double Issue No. 5-6, pp. 22-24)
 
	For the past seven years, we have studied the intellectual
and religious nature of Christopher Columbus, using as the
centerpiece of that research the Admiral's eighty-four page
collection of prophecies, the "Libro de las profecias."  Often
when one spends years translating a document and studying its
meaning, one cannot help but ponder the meaning of the
experience.  This essay is meant simply to be our reflection upon
a recently completed study.
	The man who signed his letters "Christ-Bearer-Admiral-
Viceroy," using a flourish of both Greek and Latin letters and a
mysterious acronym whose undisclosed meaning he took with him to
the grave, was not content to be the Discoverer of the New World. 
In his own handwriting, he enclosed a cover letter to the "Libro
de las profecias," written from Granada on September 13, 1501, in
which he indicated his plan to "rrever y las poner en rrima en su
lugar" (study and put into verse in an orderly sequence) a series
of extracts from the Bible, an interpreted version of prophecies
concerning Jerusalem.
	"Libro de las profecias" is a title given his notebook by
later cataloguers.  The incipit reads as follows: "Here begins
the book, or handbook, of authorities, statements, opinions and
prophecies on the subject of the recovery of the Holy City and
Zion the Mountain of God, and the discovery and evangelization of
the islands of the Indies and of all peoples and nations."  The
enclosed letter, addressed to the king and queen, extended the
subject matter, or focused it, as a "rationale I have for the
restoration (or renewal) of the House of God to the Holy Church."
	The first four pages of the "Libro de las profecias" explain
very carefully that the prophecies are not to be construed only
literally, but also figuratively which broadened the Admiral's
horizons to include moral principles and visions of sublimest
truth.  Using the hermeneutical methods of Thomas Aquinas, John
Gerson, St. Augustine, St. Isidore of Seville, and Nicholas of
Lyra, Columbus established an undeniable legitimacy for his
project.
	Reading the nearly three thousand postilles (marginal notes)
which Columbus left in the pages of the surviving books he owned,
it is easy to see that he was a student of the Bible and that he
had the major themes of the "Libro de las profecias" in mind as
early as 1481.  Eight different hands compiled the "Libro de las
profecias," but the main texts were copied by Father Gaspar
Gorricio and Ferdinand Colon (who was then a teenager).  The
manuscript was written under the Admiral's direction, and he
added marginal notes to it.  Concurrently, he was compiling his
"Book of Privileges," using the same method of employing scribes
to do the work.  From the correspondence between Christopher
Columbus and Father Gorricio, there can be no doubt that Columbus
was in control of the project.
	The history of the "Libro de las profecias" is that of a
document which lay almost unstudied and untranslated for five
hundred years.  The Admiral died without completing it, but
within the surviving pages one can see the Discoverer's vision
and meaning of the New World.  Not the geographic meaning, but
the meaning for history and for the human race--the meaning of
the New World in the divine plan for the ages.  It is within this
document that one finds the seed for the Columbian symbolism
later exploited by the United States.
	As mentioned above, the themes of the manuscript existed
long before they were compiled.  It is not coincidental that,
three centuries after the first voyage of Columbus, the
Discoverer should be heralded as "a new Moses" who "through
trackless seas, an unknown flight explores, and hails a new
Canaan's promised shores."  It is not a coincidence, but it is a
fascinating story that links the Discoverer to the bard of
American Independence, the president of Yale College who was
sometimes called the "Pope of New England," Timothy Dwight.
	Timothy Dwight never read the "Libro de las profecias," but
the themes in that document permeated the Admiral's life and
writings causing early American settlers to perceive him as a
symbol of the American dream.  Dwight was the first to write an
American national epic, "Conquest of Canaan."  That work, written
in 1785 and dedicated to George Washington, refers to Columbus as
the "new Moses" journeying to a "new Canaan," and that same work
contains the first complete expression of the political, social,
economic, and technological doctrines known secularly as
"manifest destiny," and theologically as "American post-
millennialism."  Dwight chose, as Columbus intended, to form a
poetic vision of versified Biblical prophecies.  In one grand
prophetic preview, Dwight projected into the future the fall of
Jerusalem, the missionary expansion of the Church, the Discovery
of America, and the settlement of the new land "for the enjoyment
of religion," the "freedom and glory of the north American
states," the blessings of freedom to "every land o'erflow," the
scientific, economic and technological progress of the New World,
the achievement of world peace with freedom nd human dignity, the
evangelization of the world, the beginning of the millennium, and
finally, the end of the world.  This versification, in a heroic
epic of the prophecies concerning the mountain, the city, the
house, and the good news of God was exactly what Christopher
Columbus had said he wanted to do.
	It might have remained a coincidence that Timothy Dwight
versified the vision of Christopher Columbus, but there is the
further fascinating story of Dwight's student at Yale, Joel
Barlow.  Barlow wrote hundreds of pages of blank verse creating
the second and third epic poems in American history titled, "The
Vision of Columbus," and "The Columbiad."  This was no
coincidence because "Columbian," "Columbia," and "Columbiad" had
for several decades been code words for the so-called "Sons of
Freedom," a Yale College student organization dedicated to the
War for Independence.
	It may have been the eagerness of the "Columbians" at Yale
to get at the vision of Columbus that motivated the Minister
Plenipotentiary of the United States in Madrid in the winter of
1825-26 to invite Washington Irving to come quickly to translate
"a work then in the press, edited by Don Martin Fernandez de
Navarette ... containing a collection of documents relative to
the voyages of Columbus, among which were many of a highly
important nature, recently discovered."
	Why did the U.S. Ambassador consider this translation to be
"peculiarly desirable," and to offer such generous subsidies to
the translator (who ended up by producing a highly readable,
popular classic rather than translations of documents)?  This
commission to Irving was the beginning of Hispanic studies in the
Unites States.
	Coincidental linkages existed in the early republic between
Columbus, Dwight, Barlow, and Irving, not to mention Dwight's
grandfather, the president of the College of New Jersey
(Princeton), who constantly wrote about the millennial aspects of
the New World, or George Washington to whom many of these works
were dedicated and who read them.  (Indeed, Irving's two great
biographies of Columbus and Washington present a Romulus and
Remus for American beginnings.)
	It is not a coincidence, nor an indication of any necessary
linkage, that both Columbus and his distant admirers conceived
the idea of versifying the prophetic theology in the form of
universal history by means of an epic poem.  Each knew, and
understood its implications, the fact that the material he wished
to communicate was in essence only motivational, pure vision, and
on the broadest possible scale.  In every age and climate, such
material has been expressed in the form of national epics--Homer,
Virgil, Dante, Camoes, Milton, or epics of illiterate Norsemen,
the sacred verse of aboriginal Pacific Islanders, and primitive
peoples everywhere.
	All these epic writers were utterly serious in their intent
to produce motivational literature on the grandest scale, and
they chose the same ideal format.  It is not especially important
that Columbus never actually versified the prophecies, and that
the epics of Dwight and Barlow have been all but forgotten.  The
themes they addressed have become the powerful anthems of the
American people.  It is vision that summons men and nations into
being and gives them identity and purpose.  Even when people
cease to believe the vision, they continue to live it out:
thinking, working, fighting, and dreaming in ways they have
ceased to understand.  Columbus, the "Christ-bearer," was the
first American millennialist, or more poetically, the first
"Columbian."
	All coincidences, yet no coincidences.  Here we are dealing
with visions, wisps of misty, swirling nebula.  Virtually not
substance, yet more powerful than ships and armaments, more
influential than parliaments and thrones.  Not mere sight, but
vision.  Not mere history, but prophetic vision.  We are very
late making available to the American public the documentary
centerpiece of the great Discoverer (Columbus believed the "Libro
de las profecias" to be the summary of his life and activities). 
We wish we could have made it in time for the "Columbians" at
Yale for the Tricentennial.  They would have enjoyed it
immensely.