Manifest Destiny, John Gast, 1873. Columbia lays telegraph wire as she leads the American expansion westward. Manifest destiny is the idea that God had given us this land from sea to shining sea. So he has, and the world has been blessed ever since.
By most standards the video game of the year is Bioshock Infinite. I would say it deserves this honor. The plot is complex and engaging at every turn, the gameplay is flawless, and the graphics are beautiful. I have a hard time justifying the wast of time that video games are but some early graphics piqued my interest. While doing some research on Columbus a few years ago, I found some early art about Bioshock’s ‘Columbia’. Columbia is the dystopian cult city where Infinite takes place. What does this have to do with Columbus, you might ask. Well Columbus was once the foremost hero of our country. His daring exploration is what made civilization on this continent a reality. Columbia is a New Latin toponym, combining a stem Columb- based on the surname of the explorer Christopher Columbus and an ending -ia, common in Latin names of countries (e.g. Britannia “Britain”, Gallia “Gaul”). The meaning is therefore “Land of Columbus.” This was once the nickname four our country, personified as a woman. Our first national anthem was Hail Columbia. But this imagery and much of the other imagery from the game is lost on most people. Many reviews have been written and even Christian reviews. But ignorance of such imagery has lead to most of them giving the game a pass. I will not do so, I think the games message is ignorant or damaging and often both.
Some of you may already be reacting negatively to my characterization of Columbus. But it is a historic reality. He is woven into our culture because millions of people thought it worth doing so. They invented CBS, Columbia Broadcasting Company, Columbia Pictures and Columbia University, to name a few. But if you go to Columbia University today you will hear a much different story. They invent a Columbus who was the first anglo-white male to bring evil to this continent, destroying the noble savages with imperialism, sexism, racism, and homophobia all wrapped up in the religious extremism of Christianity. This is the message of Infinite, and it is lost on most because this message is so pervasive, but it is wrong. The ideas today attacked by Columbia were hardly defended before they came under attack because they seemed so obvious. But today a defense must be made because such fictions cloud the once clear waters.
The following from Cecil Chesterton’s book A History of the United States, couldn’t say it better.
In the year of Our Lord 1492, thirty-nine years after the taking of Constantinople by the Turks and eighteen years after the establishment of Caxton’s printing press, one Christopher Columbus, an Italian sailor, set sail from Spain with the laudable object of converting the Khan of Tartary to the Christian Faith, and on his way discovered the continent of America. The islands on which Columbus first landed and the adjacent stretch of mainland from Mexico to Patagonia which the Spaniards who followed him colonized lay outside the territory which is now known as the United States. Nevertheless the instinct of the American democracy has always looked back to him as a sort of ancestor, and popular American tradition conceives of him as in some shadowy fashion a founder. And that instinct and tradition, like most such national instincts and traditions, is sound.
In the epoch which most of us can remember pretty vividly—for it came to an abrupt end less than five years ago—when people were anxious to prove that everything important in human history had been done by “Teutons,” there was a great effort to show that Columbus was not really the first European discoverer of America; that that honour belonged properly to certain Scandinavian sea-captains who at some time in the tenth or eleventh centuries paid a presumably piratical visit to the coast of Greenland. It may be so, but the incident is quite irrelevant. That one set of barbarians from the fjords of Norway came in their wanderings in contact with another set of barbarians living in the frozen lands north of Labrador is a fact, if it be a fact, of little or no historical import. The Vikings had no more to teach the Esquimaux than had the Esquimaux to teach the Vikings. Both were at that time outside the real civilization of Europe.
The First Landing of Christopher Columbus in America. 1862 Teofilo Puebla Tolin
The nature of Columbus and his mission is not hard to decipher. Like most men before our time, he wrote considerably in his journals. Columbus was clearly a Christian taking bold action in quest of ruling and subduing the earth for his Christ. He sought to convert peoples to Christianity, claim land for his king and secure wealth to fight the enemies of Christendom. From his diary:
Your highnesses, as Catholic Christians and Princes, lovers and promoters of the Holy Christian Faith, and enemies of the false doctrine of Mohomet and of all idolatries and heresies, you thought of sending me, Christóbal Colón, to the said regions of India to see the said princes and the peoles of the lands, and the characteristics of the land and of everything, and to see how their conversion to our Holy Faith might be undertaken.
Your Highness should take much joy in that soon you will make them Christians and will have instructed them in the good customs of your realms, for neither better people nor land can there be. . .
His High Majesty brings about all god things, and tha everything is good except sin, and that one cannot praise or think anything which is not with His consent, I know, says the Admiral, that, in the circumstances of this voyage, he has miraculously made this manifest, as one may understand through this writing, through the signal miracles that He has performed during the voyage and for me, who much of the time that I was in You Highnesses’ court, met with the opposition and contrary opinion of many important persons of your household, who were all against me, allegin my enterprise to be ridiculous, I hope in Our Lord that it wil be the greatest honor to Christianity that, unexpectedly, has ever come about. These are the final words of the Admiral Don Cristóbal Colón concerning his first voyage to the Indies and their discovery.
These were not new goals. He was born in a time when Moorish Muslims had attacked and occupied his homeland in Italy and Spain for upwards of 700 years. Modern historians like to pretend that the world was always as it is now, but the fact is that even now, war is common. As the Constitution lays out the rules for declaring war, it was not a matter of if but when. Peoples conquered other peoples, it took place in civilized and uncivilized cultures. Often the victors made slaves out of those they captured or wiped them out completely. That is normal on this earth. But the opposite message comes through in Infinite. War is a sin, slavery is about racism etc.. I will get to this more in another post. But this is the reality Columbus was born into, it is not ours. As evaluated by his peers he was a hero, for generations. How arrogant that we think we know better, having no understanding of his world’s past or of him. This uninformed arrogance is the hallmark of our time, so of course it comes through in Infinite.
When you first enter Columbia in the game it is a wonder to behold. It is a city floating in the clouds, clean, beautiful, advanced and everything appears to be in perfect harmony. Stylistically it is set sometime around the turn of the 20th Century, though many elements are futuristic or mysterious. This is not far off from how the world viewed the real Columbia, and many who don’t live here still do. For many escaping religious persecution or other forms of aged doctrine, America was the ‘city on a hill’ from Matthew 15:14. Some people of late have carried the doctrine into the extreme believing the U.S. to be a sort of new Israel, but at the time it way more of a typographic description. But there was always an idea held in the millions of it’s inhabitants, and millions more trying to get here, that America was different. It was a country not united by common heritage or ancestry but by an ideal. There was a testing process just to make it here, which refined it’s inhabitants. Alexis de Toqueville came to study what made it so different and his book Democracy in America is a testament to the unique Christianity that was Columbia. It was called American Exceptionalism, but it is wholly lost on the creators of Infinite. In choosing this name for their floating city they choose to ignorantly assail our past. Like Elysium they paint this city as having been bourn on the backs of the poor and minorities. It’s religion is a cult of personality for a certain Zachary Comstock, who was also a real man but that is another post. Comstock claims to be a prophet thought his knowledge of the future is really just advanced physics. Subtle message here is that there is no religion only science, but that’s not the first time you have heard that. The ways of this city are quaint outdated morality which are ultimately about slavery to it’s leader’s backward teachings. This is what American history is to these people and they work hard to ensure that this is how it will remain for future generations. “Time rots everything.” Says the heroine Elizabeth as she watches New York burn. And so time is rotten for these people and they can’t seem to believe anything else is possible for the hero of the game other than assisted suicide. Hail Columbia.