Thank You Very Much for That Introduction

―They did not know‖: An Introduction to the Encounter between Jesuits and Native Peoples in Nouvelle France

Delivered Sept. 23, 2010

Thank you very much for that introduction.

The title of my talk may have led you to expect that I am going to offer myself as an authority on the cultures of the First Peoples or at least on the initial encounters between the First Nations and Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries. In fact, I make no such claim, and my intention today is to accomplish something more modest, if still perhaps very important.

It has been said that the two most compelling things about history are that it shows how much people long ago were like us, and also, how they were not like us. I’d like to make this profound truth a point of departure for a reflection on the encounter between the French Jesuits and various First Nations in the first half of the seventeenth century. In doing so, my intention is not to start by taking sides in a controversy that is very understandably heated, considering the far-reaching and even cataclysmic consequences of that encounter. This is not to say that I think responsibility and blame cannot be assigned to those involved, but rather that however we judge those who lived long ago, we ought first to understand, as best we can, what they thought and even more how they thought.

Let me begin this afternoon with the Jesuits, since the record of their hopes and intentions is particularly copious, if not always easy to comprehend. The Jesuit Fathers who journeyed into the middle of the North American continent were products, both of another continent, and

1 of a spiritual, moral and educational system born in that continent a century earlier. Let us first consider the continent of Europe. In the twentieth century we look back on earlier European history through the prism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This means that we see Europe as a place that rose to preeminent political and material power, only to see much of this power squandered in two world wars, while its claims to moral superiority over other world cultures were dashed by the unmasking of its colonial abuses and its own genocidal treatment of fellow Europeans. Moreover, we see the earlier history of the continent knowing what is coming next, and inevitably influenced in our perceptions by that knowledge.

Seventeenth century Europeans of course did not know what was coming next. What they did know was that their life was difficult and frequently horrifying. The difficult and horrifying aspects of the seventeenth century are well known, but are worth reviewing for a moment. The Thirty Years War set the standard for atrocity, horror and death that was only surpassed in the world wars of the last century. The overt and deliberate brutality of marauding armies in this conflict and in other contemporaneous one (The conduct of Cromwell’s army at the Siege of Droghega is only one such example) was complemented by the spread of disease, the disruption of agriculture and commerce, and the destruction of cultural institutions. This was also the time of the last great wave of bubonic plague to pass over Western Europe. The latter day notion of progress was not held by most people, while millennial and apocalyptic predictions abounded and had many believers. A false Messiah excited and then bitterly disappointed the Jews of Europe and thousands of innocents were burned as witches in Germany, while nuns rolled on the floors of French convents as exorcists sought to free them from their tormenters. In short, while there are hard and awful things in any period of human history, in the seventeenth century misfortunes

2 and fearful events of particularly dramatic proportions crowded close upon the lives of many, if not most people.

It is from this continent and this milieu that the Jesuits who would labor in Nouvelle France set forth. But these men were also the products of a very specific program of intellectual, spiritual and social formation that gave then the tools with which they sought to understand and to cope with this difficult world. This formation had some unique characteristics. First, it is worth recalling that in the early 17th century world of Catholicism the Jesuits were very much the new kids on the block. On the day in 1540 that the pope granted to the Society of Jesus (the official title of the Jesuit order) the right to organize with the Church’s blessing, the Benedictines were already 1000 years old, the Dominicans and Franciscans each more than 300 years old. Late arrivals on the missionary and educational scene, the Jesuits made up for lost time and soon became the most glamourous (to use an anachronistic word that I think nevertheless is appropriate here) of Catholic orders. Their more charitable critics said the Jesuits were pushy. Other critics referred to them in terms I can’t use in a public lecture! The very fact that the Jesuits took their name, not after their founder, as did so many other Catholic orders, but after Jesus himself, seemed an arrogant affront to many.

The Jesuits were very successful in establishing schools that even their enemies had to admit offered a solid education. Their missionaries went to remote lands many Europeans did not even know existed. Jesuits became the confessors of the mightiest political figures in Europe. Their scientists sparred with Galileo and strove to decipher hieroglyphics. Soon the Jesuits were building some of the most spectacular churches ever seen. Each success (or near success) encouraged the Jesuits to advertise their accomplishments with what

3 seemed to many people an immodest pride, while their enemies (many of them Catholics, a few of them even popes) spread the word that Jesuits were behind political assassinations and moral degradation and were the fomenters of a shadowy plot to seize even more power. Like them or not, the Jesuits were the center of a great deal of attention. They were also purveyors of a free education attuned to the needs of the times, and while, like everyone else in that day, they had fixed ideas about class and status, they offered an upward path for talented poor boys.

In short, the Society of Jesus offered, among many other things, career possibilities, affiliation with a famous (if sometimes notorious) worldwide organization that has been called the ―world’s first multinational corporation‖, a chance to see the world, and all of this on top of a religious mission in an age of passionately held religious beliefs. It is of course impossible to know the complex motivations of the thousands of individual men who joined the Society. Yet the question of motivations is important in any investigation of the actions of the Jesuits who came to Canada. To round off this very quick look at the context out of which these men emerged, let me touch on a few additional points. The Jesuits were and are an all male order (to be more exact, they are an all male order that early on admitted one woman under an alias, but have never repeated this risky move). The all male nature of the Society has prompted some to call the Jesuits ―macho,‖ a designation that is not really accurate. But it is true that the organization of the Society of Jesus even today is male in its psychology and activist in its philosophy. The Jesuits are not collectivist in their decision making or consensus builders in the construction of their communities. Obedience is a key element of Jesuit life. Yet at the same time Jesuits have traditionally counted among their number risk takers and men willing to ―push the envelope.‖ Jesuits have never lived in cloistered quarters, and have not even always agreed on a uniform habit, something that their critics have

4 said was a sign of their laxness and lack of focus. Committed to spreading the message of universal salvation, the Jesuits have all the same turned away many applicants and dismissed many more Jesuits in training, earning them the charge that they were ―elitists.‖ Embracing the beauties of this world in their art, music, and poetry to a degree that sometimes scandalized others (boys dancing ballet in Jesuit school productions generated especially outraged reactions), Jesuits have at the same time cultivated veneration for their brethren who were martyred. For a Jesuit of the Baroque period, martyrdom was not a tragedy, or the consequence of a failed undertaking. Martyrdom, both theoretically and practically, demonstrated success, a point worth recalling as we approach the encounter between Jesuits and First Peoples. A martyr gave all to the cause, and his life left behind a narrative that might inspire others. He might also leave behind relics that could become objects of veneration to laypersons and future Jesuit alike. Jesuits in training or ―novices‖ were constantly confronted with images of various kinds of martyrdom, some of them horrifyingly graphic. The smaller martyrdoms of hair shirts, private and public flagellations, and rigorous fasts were likewise defining features of the Baroque Society.

While it is probably going too far to assert that many Jesuits joined the Society specifically hoping to be killed, the culture of martyrdom and the glorification of suffering were very real parts of the Jesuit experience and must be factored into any speculations as to why Jesuits came as missionaries to a particular land and what they hoped to accomplish there.

There is one last element that must be included in this hasty sketch of the culture of the Jesuits of the seventeenth century: this is the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the founder of the order. Armchair readers of this short document are likely to be disappointed; it is not an

5 exciting page-turner. But as a process extended over many days, the Exercises, which every Jesuit must undertake each year, have had a profound impact on the lives of many laypersons as well as Jesuits. One passage in particular has attracted the attention of scholars of Jesuit contacts with non-Europeans. In it the person undertaking the exercises is invited to visualize how God sees the entire world:

To see the various persons: and first those on the surface of the earth, in such variety in dress as in actions: some white and others black; some in peace and others in war; some weeping and others laughing; some well, and others ill; some being born and others dying…

To a modern reader this passage seems to reinforce the idea of the equality of all humans and need to regard each with dignity. And certainly Ignatius and his followers believed that every human being was capable of attaining salvation, a position that put them at odds with many of their contemporaries, who were reluctant, to say the least, to regard a Jew, a Guraní or a Black man as a fully human entity with a soul. But—and this is a very big but— this did not mean that Jesuits who had undertaken the Exercises had magically shed their ethnic and racial prejudices. In the Society of Jesus sincerely held belief in universal salvation existed alongside of national rivalries among Jesuits and negative attitudes toward non-Europeans held by almost all Europeans of the day. In this connection I might point out that well into the 20th century Jesuits were officially expected to prove that they had no Jewish or African blood—although the reality was that there were many Jesuits who did have such ancestry.

So, in some respects the Jesuits of the 17th century shared many of the characteristics of other Europeans of the Age of Exploration,

6 dreaming of the conquest (in this case a spiritual one) of new lands, and filled with preconceptions about the these lands. But unlike a Pizzaro or Champlain the ideal Jesuit saw what we would consider failure in this life (expulsion, death etc.) as still a mark of success and envisioned communities they could creates held together as much by faith as by coercion. And Jesuits, despite their prejudices, were constantly seeking equivalencies between their home cultures and the cultures they encountered. In other words, in the customs, literatures, and especially in the religious practices of non-Europeans Jesuit looked for parallels with European, Christian practices. In doing so they often deceived themselves and drew the ire of other Catholics who saw the Jesuits as bending all kinds of rules in order to win conversions and gain influence. Other times they scored remarkable successes: the Japanese mission counted hundreds of thousands of converts before its brutal suppression. The search for equivalences was characteristic of the order as a whole, but was often carried out by an individual Jesuit. The business of deciding whether a statue, a ritual or a custom could be fit into an existing Eurocentric framework or whether it had to be cast out as the work of Satan, fell within the Jesuit practice of ―discernment.‖ This process very often had to be conducted by a solitary Jesuit without recourse to consultation with his superiors, who might be many days’ or even months’ journey away. Despite the emphasis within the order on obedience ad hoc decisions were key characteristics of the Jesuit enterprise. This turned out to be one of the order’s greatest strengths as it allowed for great practical flexibility. But it also led to some of the Jesuits’ biggest failures.

The Jesuits who penetrated the middle of North America were French. To be more exact, they were subjects of the King of France. But once again we find ourselves looking backwards through a set of anachronistic definitions when we use these words. France is usually

7 credited with being one of, if not the first true European nation state. But even over 100 years after our ―French Jesuits‖ appeared on the scene, only a fraction of the subjects of the king of France spoke a dialect intelligible in Paris. The central administration of the Bourbons, for most French peasants and burghers was distant, intruding on the life of the poor mostly to collect hated taxes and to round up young men for its armies. Even Jesuits, who were far better traveled than most people, might never have been close to the capital city or have a clear sense of the political configurations that dictated affairs of state. Patriotism, in the sense the word has been used for the past two centuries, played little influence in their lives, although suspicion of other national and linguistic groups, and loyalty to their department or region could be very important. But many important European institutions existed without a strongly national identity. It is worth recalling that one of the most powerful figures in 17th century Europe, the Holy Roman Emperor, derived his authority from traditions that were supranational and reigned in a court that was multilingual.

In an insecure world lacking many symbols and instruments of national identity, a connection with a supranational organization assumed immense importance. The supranational curriculum of the Society of Jesus outlined in the Ratio Studiorum of 1599, reinforced the tendency of Jesuits to think of themselves as part of a special organization that embraced the world and beyond (one of the mottos of the early Jesuits was ―Unus non sufficit orbis‖ -- One world is not enough). The universal application of this curriculum complemented the vision of the Universal Church drawing all of humanity to its bosom, aided by the universal Catholic order, the Jesuits. As the middle of the seventeenth century approached and what historians have called a ―time of crisis‖ for Europe approached, the Jesuits reached the pinnacle of their influence and power.

And so the Jesuits came to North America. The specifics of these various expeditions will have to wait for another afternoon, but I’d like to approach this topic today by starting with the claim that the Jesuits did not know where they were. I’ll repeat this, since this is the thesis of my talk today. The Jesuits did not know where they were. By this I do not mean that their maps had failed them and that they were lost, or that they did not understand the general geographical relationship of the continent they were on to the one from which the had just come. Rather I am building on the comment of the Jesuit historian Campeau who after many years of examining the correspondence of the Jesuits of Nouvelle France with their colleagues in Europe concluded that both groups of men misjudged the difficulty of converting vast numbers of individuals in alien environment. They did not appreciate the scale of the territory in which the Jesuit missionaries were working, nor did they grasp the complexities of relations between the nations who inhabited this vast space. What is more, some of these men, turning to the pivotal event of the conversion of the Roman world in late classical antiquity, perhaps naively, perhaps deliberately understood this historical event as a continual progression, one marked by frequent martyrdoms to be sure, but steady and fairly rapid. In fact the triumph of Christianity in the Mediterranean world and the struggles over which strain of Christianity would be supreme took half a millennium. And even then the transformation was far from total.

But even if the conversion of the Roman Empire had taken far longer and cost far more blood, it still was no model for North America. The Jesuits had trouble seeing this, I think, for two interrelated reasons. First, their educational and religious formation (which were completely intertwined) attended to grammatical details and built careful rhetorical connections in their use of language, but fostered an anticipation for

9 Divine intervention in the lives of men (my use of the male pronoun here is deliberate) that encouraged Jesuits to expect the miraculous. One of the consequences of this attitude was a fearless, heroic approach to seemingly impossible situations that excites our admiration today even as it leaves some of us wondering what these men thought they were doing. Whether the task was pastoral, polemical, or scholarly, Baroque Jesuits attacked it with great amounts of energy, talent and faith. But another consequence of their formation was that Jesuits were often wildly unrealistic in their expectations of how practical processes would unfold. None of the great empires of the east that the Jesuits penetrated underwent the hoped-for mass, top-down conversion. The Jesuits were kicked out of Ethiopia, burned at the stake in Elizabethan England, imprisoned in Sweden, thrown out of windows in Transylvania and ultimately saw their greatest material achievement, the ―reductions‖ in Paraguay, destroyed by the Spanish and Portuguese. Yet as I have already suggested, these seeming defeats only heightened the ardor of men who saw their Society suffering so that its ultimate triumph would be that much greater (an analogy they drew explicitly with the life of Christ). These setbacks likewise did not decrease the frequency with which Jesuits reported seeing crosses in the sky or described the expulsion of demons from crystals. I am certain many Jesuits believed that North America was a likely venue for stunning Divine interventions that would further their cause. The very lack of concrete information about where they were headed would have made it all the easier for them to envision a place where the ―laws of probability‖ as we might put it today, would be overcome by the miraculous. That the human societies into which they were about to enter might possess aspects as subtle or rules as non-negotiable as did the papal court in Rome does not seem to have been part of their thinking. Cultural and racial prejudice undoubtedly contributed to this blind spot, but do not explain all of it. The Jesuits’ understanding of themselves, their belief in the foundation

10 myth of their order, and their view of history often did not allow for a realistic assessment of the obstacles they would face. Moreover it may be that the Jesuits’ desire to travel to exotic places and face danger has been exaggerated. Recent research suggests that at least some Jesuits were motivated as much by the desire to surrender to the Will of God to as save their own souls as they were by a specific drive to ―care for the souls‖ of others. If true, such a passivity, while perhaps admirable from a theological point of view, would not have provided much incentive to try to understand what Canada—or any other destination—held in store for them.

Turing to the other factor that blinded Jesuits to the realistic prospects for establishing Christianity in Nouvelle France, I must climb out a way on a limb of speculation for a better view. While it’s not possible to know all the motivations of the men who joined the Jesuits we can be certain that those who sought admission had some inkling of what they were in for. The Council of Trent, meeting in the years immediately after the creation of the Society, had made it clear that the former laxity of clerical life was to be stopped. Open cohabitation of priests with concubines, a careless approach to the Sacraments and a generally secular lifestyle were banned. As the so-called ―shock troops of the Counter-Reformation‖ Jesuits would be especially visible and were expected to be above reproach on these matters. That the enemies of the Jesuits dredged up scandals involving the fathers and women only made the necessity to illustrate the break between life as a Jesuit and life on the outside even greater. Jesuits knew that the joys of family life and of the tavern that so many diocesan priests had previously known would not be theirs. But more importantly, this separation from a preindustrial, overwhelmingly rural world where ties of family and kin were paramount meant that Jesuit novices entered an environment which was not only celibate, but which glorified those who turned away

11 from family allegiances and privileges. A new hierarchy and a radically different process of locating the individual within the group confronted the Jesuit in training. In the place of human relations defined by position within a family, trade or profession, and by geographical roots, young Jesuits learned to sleep ―with one foot on the ground‖ ready to travel anywhere at the command of the pope; they were of course not to have special friendships, their work assignments might change drastically depending on the needs of the order, and while required to give their all as Jesuits, they were not to pursue worldly—or even ecclesiastical--- honors. Their lives were both divorced from the publicly visible, communal patterns that characterized much of early modern Europe while they themselves were held up as moral examples to all. The ties between master and apprentice, older and younger family member, husband and wife, and among guild members were replaced— ideally—with a loyalty to the Society of Jesus and to the Catholic Church. In such an environment, comparisons were made, not with one’s neighbors but with the great ―Christian athletes‖ whose deeds were celebrated constantly in the Jesuit community. And since the accomplishments of Xavier, Kostka and others were embellished continually, any Jesuit aspiring to reach such heights faced a very steep climb. Jesuits headed to a destination such as Nouvelle France thus were doubly isolated- both from the earthy secular culture of the soldiers and settlers who came from the same continent as they did, as well as from the unknown Native cultures they were about to encounter. This double isolation made it even harder for the Jesuits to understand where they were.

These isolated men set forth, like any other band of travelers, with a specific set of strengths and weaknesses. While skill and accuracy in language and rigor in reasoning were promoted in Jesuit formation, the emotional climate in which this formation took place was sometimes

12 overwrought and the objectives sought were grandiose. Probing deeper, we see a population of young men emerging from a disturbed and dangerous landscape, seeking both security and a chance to excel, desirous of putting their religious passions to the test, and in some cases uncertain about or even frightened of their own sexuality. Jesuit formation provided answers to many of these quandaries. A life as a Jesuit also meant that one might know with confidence who the ―other‖ was. Thus the Baroque love of chiaroscuro was satisfied in Jesuit narratives that had clearly identified villains: the cruel Pagan despot, the brutal peasant, and the violent ―savage.‖ There were other, less threatening ―others‖ as well: the vulnerable woman, the promising lad, and the powerful leader won over to the true faith. Jesuit dramatists and chroniclers described each of these archetypes while Jesuit missionaries went abroad expecting to meet them in the flesh.

At the beginning of this talk I suggested that people long ago were both similar to us and at the same time not like us. The Jesuits, with their awareness of a world swarming with invisible legions of demons, their belief that God acts in specifically retaliatory—if not overtly vengeful-- ways against His enemies, and their conviction that they had been called upon to save souls, may not sound like many of us. But they were also like us in many ways, which is one – but not the only—reason they are worth studying. By this I do not merely mean that the Jesuits who arrived in Nouvelle France were convinced of their own virtue and were prepared to go to great lengths to show others the ―right way,‖ although that is certainly true. Rather I am thinking—and here I’m speaking specifically as a U. S. citizen—of the ―broken places,‖ both geographically and spiritually, from which these men were coming, of the deep insecurities and desires to identify with something larger than themselves that they brought with them and with the combination of single-minded will and hopefulness and naïvité and blindness that

13 colored their view of the world. The belief that Jesuit formation—a good part of which was an academically rigorous, hierarchically organized competitive education – led to a life worth living sounds very familiar to this academic. I am also thinking of the process of self-selection that drew men to this religious order, of the institutional culture which continued the process of selection, and which was eventually itself shaped by the personalities of the men it had drawn to itself. And I am thinking of how this pattern continues today in many institutions.

An examination of the Jesuits as they were when they arrived in North America compels us to ask questions about some of our own enterprises that stretch across cultures (and in saying ―our,‖ I speak as a rationalist heir of European culture). Among these questions are, How does cultural isolation affect perception? What things might someone see more clearly- or not at all—if she or she is thrust into a profoundly unfamiliar environment? And, What are the ways by which we come to know where we are? We may also ask what can be learned from the Jesuits that will aid us in answering these questions. In attempting to answer the questions we are inevitably restricted both by the limits on our ability to analyze ourselves, and also by the difficulties of interpreting the records the Jesuits left. Yet the story of the Jesuits in North America does present some clues on how to look at contact between cultures, especially when that contact is triggered by the penetration of a small band of individuals from one culture into deep within the geographical confines of the other culture.

The greatest lesson to be gained from looking at the Jesuit side of the Jesuit-Native peoples encounter is how narratives of the past shape understanding of the present. The Jesuits were intimately familiar with two narratives when they arrived in North America. The first, and most basic was the story of the early Christian Church and its heroes, a story

14 that not coincidentally their Belgian colleagues the Bollandists at that very moment were expounding upon. This narrative, starting in the Acts of the Apostles is a story of the triumph of the true faith. The story of the Society of Jesus was already richly developed by the mid-seventeenth century, despite the relative youth of the order. This narrative reads like variations on a theme. The individual careers of Jesuits are smoothed into archetypal patterns and Jesuits live and die in what one historian has called ―Jesuit time,‖ in which coming events are prefigured and God’s will is played out. Later Jesuits appear to emulate, not only the superstar saints Ignatius and especially Xavier, but also earlier nameless Jesuits.

The power of these narratives within an organization that put such a premium on the written word was immense. And as the older narrative shaped the younger, the combined force of the combined narrative influenced how Jesuits wrote about their own and about their colleagues’ experiences. And even more importantly, the story lines, the vocabulary used and the characters described in these narratives shaped how Jesuits understood their own experiences. Armed with sharpened but narrow analytical and linguistic tools, Jesuit missionaries understood all that lay ahead of them in terms of what had gone before. And, I would argue, that often when we advance into the unknown we do the same. Utterly isolated, trained to go forward, not to retreat, and ringed by known and unknown dangers, the Jesuits increasingly experienced North America under the weight of a script they could not rewrite. Virtually every aspect of the tragedy that soon unfolded was shaped by this fact.

Today the Jesuits play a smaller role in world affairs. And indeed the impact they have had recently is often on or beyond the very edges of the Euro-centric culture that gave them birth. At the same time we –

15 and again I mean the heirs of European culture—have paradoxically become more like the Jesuits. Instead of swarms of demons we believe in bacteria and viruses we have never seen. We – some of us at least— still believe in miraculous interventions in the usual order of things, only we look to human endeavor to bring about the miracle. We are simultaneously rule followers and risk takers, and we stumble forward towards spiritual unknowns as dark and terrifying as the forests of Nouvelle France were nearly four centuries ago. We too come from broken places, emulate superhuman accomplishment and try to solve problems by giving names to unfamiliar phenomena. We are often estranged individuals, isolated from extended families and peer groups. And we collide with cultures about which we often do not know even the right questions to ask.

The case of the Jesuits and the Natives peoples of Nouvelle France draws our attention then for two reasons: for the general lessons about cross-cultural collisions which I have attempted to outline here, and because we need to understand the specifics of this particular encounter which changed so many things. As we proceed in this investigation, watch to see where the actors in this drama seem like us—and when they do not resemble us. As we find points of congruence and gaps of incomprehension between these men and ourselves, and as we inevitably are moved to pass judgment on their actions, we may want to reflect on our own understanding of the world, on our own responses, and our own responsibility. In this way, the Jesuits who came to Nouvelle France so long ago can serve, whatever we may think of them as men, as our teachers, a role that despite the differences between themselves and us, they would have understood very well.

Thank you.