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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.
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