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Competing Virtues: the Right, the Wrong and the Possible in the Jesuit Missions of Canada

Delivered Nov. 15, 2010

Thank you very much.

Christianity began with the breaking of an old order. Time and time again the Jesus of

the Gospels is given these words to say: “You have heard it said… but I say unto you…” In the

Church’s view, this breaking point was not so much the destruction of what had gone before, as

its fulfillment. Yet this fulfillment always had to include breaking, both symbolic and concrete:

every priest broke Christ’s body in the sacrament of the Mass, and ardent missionaries of the

early Middle Ages such as St. Boniface smashed idols as they moved through the forests of

pagan Europe.

The baroque Jesuits both broke and built as they traveled around the world. On a

personal level, each Jesuit broke with the totality of secular existence upon entering the

Society, and continued to cultivate the breaking of his own bodily desires through acts of self-

mortification. Jesuits arriving among peoples whom they hoped to evangelize came armed

with the dichotomous vision of breaking and fulfilling, a two edged sword that they applied as

they reacted to circumstances influenced by both their ethnic, racial, and linguistic biases and

as they responded to the pressures applied by colonial power that supported their missions.

At the same time Jesuits were sustained by their awareness of being part of an indivisible unity,

the Society of Jesus, which claimed over 20,000 members by the middle of the eighteenth

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century. Among the concepts that held this large and widely dispersed Society together were

the notions of virtue, and its inverse, vice.

Jesuit culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was saturated with the

notion of virtue. Jesuit dramas extolled virtue, the Society’s visual arts stamped images of

virtuous action on the environment of school, church and residentia, and Jesuit polemical and

devotional writings provided examples of right action to the lay population. Virtues were also

represented symbolically in books of emblems produced by Jesuit presses. Contrasted with

Christian virtue was depraved or disordered action. Vicious acts, i. e., ones lacking or, more

often opposing virtue, as described in Jesuit historical documents, did not merely require

correction, but they provided a necessary narrative counterpoint to the right actions of the

Jesuits and those that accepted their doctrines. The Society’s self-composed narrative moved

forward through the unceasing rhetorical presentation of good and evil, virtue and vice,

elements which both sustained the reader’s interest and also provided guideposts to the

didactic message of the text.

In trying to assess what the Jesuits active in North America believed they were doing, it’s

most important to keep this self-conscious presentation of virtue and non (or anti-) virtue in

mind for two reasons. First, because this dichotomy is a salient feature of the Jesuit Relations,

a vast French language document that has long been a major source for scholars of

seventeenth century Canadian history. The Jesuit penchant for categorization is evident in the

descriptions of the players in the drama of the struggle for the souls of the aboriginal

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inhabitants of North America. The presence of “vicious” behaviors among those opposing the

Jesuits also led to the conclusion that the Devil was at work, attempting to thwart the Jesuits’

undertakings. And while this opposition of this kind might not seem like a good thing, the

efforts of the Evil One could be regarded as proof that the Jesuits were on the right track, or

else why would he bother? And the Relations, intended as they were for a lay audience,

become spicier with the inclusion of vice. The contrast between virtue and vice is also essential

to an understanding how the Jesuits created the categories within which they located all of

their experiences and with which they constructed their worldview, a worldview that would

guide the direction of their enterprises. The categories of virtue and vice intersected and

overlapped with those of barbarus and nobilis, creating a nexus of expectations that

contributed to the success or failure of the Society’s missions.

The identification and correction of vice were Jesuit preoccupations in part because

these endeavors took place on a material plane where so much of the Society’s work was

conducted. While famed as a religious order of intellectuals who delved into abstract matters,

the Jesuits had always paid attention to physical acts that signified breaks with the past and

that promised commitments to a redirection of one’s life in a more spiritual path. The

founding mythology of the Society and its later annals was replete with examples of this

redirection. St. Ignatius, the professional soldier who became the founder of the order, had

taken off his sword and hung it on an altar dedicated to the Virgin Mary as he had taken up a

new path as a “pilgrim”. St. Francis Borgia, one of the most powerful grandees of Spain,

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repudiated his wealth and titles to become a Jesuit and went on to serve as the Praepositus

generalis or head of the Society. Rejection of earthly pleasure and power was of course not a

Jesuit invention—St. Francis, and many others before him, had established the pattern of

turning away from worldly life to seek God’s will- but the Jesuits both wove this theme into

their institutional narrative and established it as a visible goal for both members of the Society

and also for the externi or students in their schools who would not become Jesuits. Thus a self-

conscious pursuit of virtue meant both engagement with and separation from elements of the

European culture from which the Society had sprung. The engagement came when Jesuits-in

training and their lay counterparts took up the study of classical authors such as Cicero or Virgil.

The Ratio made recommendations of authors to study based on the criteria of intellectual

challenge and practical application, asserting,

Scholarly learning should be employed moderately, so that now and then it stimulates

the mental powers and refreshes them without impeding the learning of the language.

These two themes, intellectual challenge and useful skill, would flavor both the Jesuit approach

to missionary work, and the techniques that Jesuits would use to cultivate virtue among the

peoples they met. And despite the expectation that a Jesuit be humble, being human beings,

some Jesuits must have felt a thrill of accomplishment and even a sense of superiority over

others because of the mastery of these skills.

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Yet, simultaneously, a separation from important aspects of secular European society

was evident at every step as Jesuit scholastics were conditioned to think of themselves as

members of an organization whose ties were not maintained be the restrictions of cloister walls

but through a culture bound by the invisible power of discipline and obedience. Tied up in this

complex relationship was a double notion of maleness that the word “virtue” implies. The

Latin root of this word is “vir” which gives us the English words “virile” and also “virtuoso.”

(Just as a side note, the word is also more distantly related to “werewolf” or man-wolf.) The

first of these words, “virile,” describes a man in terms of his physical masculinity; the latter,

“virtuoso,“ which comes to us through the Italian, suggests consummate mastery of an activity

that can be appreciated by others. Both notions are applicable to Baroque Jesuit culture.

Jesuits were celibate, but they were conspicuously and exclusively male; unlike the cloistered

contemplative, the Jesuit struggled openly in the world, testing himself physically, not only with

mortifications practiced in private but also by long dangerous journeys, exposure to harm on

the battlefield, physical temptations, extremes of climate, and exposure to the dreaded plague.

To these physical demands were added the tortures inflicted on Jesuits in every corner of the

globe and of course the martyrdoms glorified in the Society’s annals. Taken collectively these

masculine traits describe a “tough guy” such as might be found in many occupations of the day,

from mercenaries to slave traders, but complementing this toughness characteristic of the

“Christian athlete” were two other components that Jesuit teachers cultivated in their students:

skill in controlled rituals of competition and the ideal of practiced public performance. The

Ratio specified competitions between students and between teams of students for which prizes

were awarded. The competitions were verbal, not physical in nature but the symbolism

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employed suggested the ancient Greek pancration or the Roman arena. In these competitions

future Jesuits and externi alike were reminded of both the relationship among right behavior,

public performance and competition, and of the classical models that provided the examples of

virtue Jesuits were called upon to emulate. And these competitions, unlike the exertions of the

slaver or mercenary, were self-consciously undertaken for the ideal expressed in the Jesuit

motto: Omnia ad maiorem Gloriam Dei: All things for the greater glory of God.

In the act of public performance Jesuits drew upon the second element of male virtue,

that of demonstrated skill and understanding of a medium of communication. In fact virtuoso

originally had a broader meaning and included those who excelled in the humanities or

sciences, and was therefore construed in a manner close to the Greek aretē or excellence. The

Jesuit conception of virtuosity as including both great expressive skill demonstrated before an

audience and mastery of an intellectual discipline drew upon classical Pagan models at least as

much as on Christian ones. But it made very little allowance for understandings of

performance, knowledge or right action that had developed outside Greco-Roman or medieval

contexts, something that would place Jesuit missionaries at a disadvantage when they arrived

in North America.

It is not easy to generalize about the moral universe of all of the scores of individual

aboriginal peoples of North America. Different communities had evolved distinct perspectives

on the relationship, for instance, of the individual to the group, and on the connection between

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humans and what Europeans would later call “Nature” with a capital N. But generally it may be

fair to say that while solitary performance was important in many contexts within aboriginal

communities, relation was as least if not more so. For example, among the Huron people each

member of a community was in relation to others within that community, both through kinship

ties and through shared tasks, commonly held memories and proximal living conditions. When

for example, the celibate Recollects, another Catholic religious order working in seventeenth

century North America, rejected the offers of matrimonial alliances put forward by the Hurons,

the Europeans’ disgusted responses were seen as a grave insult to the community, who had

made the offer to demonstrate the Hurons’ acceptance of the Europeans and their desire to

enter into a real and lasting relationship with them. There is no exact equivalent for “virtue” in

this context, but what might be called “right action” in a Huron community always included

relation to others. The Jesuit notion of virtue, although it was tied to public performance,

which involved others also had a strand that emphasized isolation from others as well. The

priority the Jesuits and other Catholic clergy placed on daily devotional activities, which

absented them from the collectively undertaken tasks that kept a community going, created a

further gulf of understanding, one that linguistic barriers only heightened. Thus the Jesuit

performance of a “good” activity, as they understood it, might have been easily interpreted as

irresponsibility or arrogance. Stated another way, what was a demonstration of “virtue” for

European Catholics failed the test of “right action” in the context of an aboriginal community.

(I might add that in Europe, Jesuit priests were able to pursue such devotional activities in part

because of the support they received from Jesuit brothers who performed many of the practical

tasks of the community.)

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The part of the Jesuit ideal of “virtue” specifically demonstrated through public

performance was, on one level, not entirely alien to some aspects of aboriginal culture. The

special position occupied by the shaman within the Huron community derived in part from his

or her performances in a public setting, in which familiar formulae and behaviors were

repeated and collective memory was expressed through the actions of an individual. A rough

parallel might be drawn between such a performance and the celebration of mass by a priest.

But the shaman was always in kinship or other relationships to the people witnessing his

performance, while a Jesuit priest, even while working in Europe, often came from far away

and had disavowed the claims of kinship and historic connection to the community that a pre-

Tridentine parish priest might have possessed. Indeed, the priest could only serve in this role if

he had broken with the community in a serious and irreversible fashion.

(I would like to emphasize how different the formation of all clergy, not just that which

Jesuits underwent, became after the Council of Trent, which took place in the mid-sixteenth

century. For previous to this ecclesiastical council, many parish priests lived lives much more

similar to the laypersons they shepherded.)

And although the skills and performance of the shaman were derived from both a

remembered lore and perhaps from the shaman’s identification as a “vir” in a sense close to

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that employed by the Jesuits, the orality of the shaman’s performance was not derived from

the written word, nor could it be measured against it. This was not an omission or the result of

an insufficiently developed aesthetic sense. For the Hurons and for many other native

communities the application of absolute, externally existing standards to the execution of a

healing process simply would not have fit the expectations of those involved, nor would the

application of such standards have conveyed the understanding held by the community as to

the significance of the event and way it should be experienced. Unlike a Jesuit school drama,

whose script, it is true, might be modified from performance to performance but which as a

performance still had to be in strict relation to some written record, the performance of a

shaman’s dance was a totality in itself, and not dependent upon any external factors, such as a

documented record of how a similar dance had been executed a century earlier in some remote

location.

The difference in these two approaches to performance is directly related to the gap

between the Jesuit conception of good and evil and a differently perceived valuation of

experience as held by some aboriginal communities. The sequence of inquiry for a Jesuit was:

There is a performance: How does it measure up to long-established criteria for this mode of

expression? How does it compare with other more or less equivalent performances? And from

each of these questions, how is this performance situated within the institutional culture of the

Society whose goals the performance must always serve? For a seventeenth-century Huron

(and we must proceed carefully here when claiming knowledge of a social organization that

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disappeared long ago) the application of criteria to judge the “goodness” of a performance may

have been included such factors as the efficacy of the curative effort, the relation of the

performance to a dream or vision, or the collective experience of the witnesses, or the idea of

self-consciously evaluating such a performance may not have occurred to any of the

participants. Nor was a shaman’s performance calculated to teach a specific lesson or to

reinforce one of multiple competing versions of a historical narrative, as was a Jesuit school

drama performed amidst the inter-confessional conflict of Europe.

In contrast to performances occurring in aboriginal communities , the reference point of

every public display of oral virtuosity undertaken by the Jesuits was the written word, which

not coincidentally, was also the point of reference for moral evaluations. The texts that Jesuit

dramatists used were not subject—as far as scholarship has been able to determine—to

improvisation, and deviations from the written record would have been regarded as errors by

Jesuit teachers watching the performance. On a deeper level, the models for Jesuit oral

performance, whether they were the speeches or Cicero or the tragedies of Seneca, had existed

in written form and had been carefully recopied for centuries. Even newly composed Latin

texts destined for use in Jesuit performances (and here I include homilies and polemical

writings, as well as texts recited in processions) would be judged against the standard of the

classical Latin taught to every Jesuit in the Society’s schools. This emphasis on evaluation

extended to competitions among students in Jesuit schools, including each of the boys who

grew up to become the missionaries who journeyed to North America.

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The employment of an absolute standard in virtuoso performance paralleled the

absolute moral standards that were the starting point of Jesuit discernment and action

regarding the conduct of the people they met in North America. I say “starting point” because

in reality the experience of the Jesuits in this new environment was more than the application

of absolute standards to an unfamiliar setting. It was also an interface between a European-

based organization that during the seventeenth century had in fact been criticized for what was

seen as its excessive flexibility and pursuit of the possible. Specifically, Jesuit confessors were

faulted for telling penitents that they might look to a wide range of writers on morality to find

even just one that might justify the actions the penitent had taken. This approach to morality,

called probablism, caused immense scandal to many Catholics and partly inspired Blaise

Pascal’s attacks on the Jesuits in his Provincial Letters.

The controversy surrounding the Jesuit approach to ethics and morality is germane to

the missions to North America because it shows how despite its seemingly rule-bound nature

the Society had the potential to adapt to conditions on the ground—in this instance penitents

who the Jesuits believed would be more likely to come to conform if some sort of moral

justification might be found for their actions. How much adaptability and “inculturation,” as

practiced by seventeenth-century Jesuits from Nancy to Nagasaki is in evidence in these early

Jesuit encounters with aboriginal Native Americans? Records produced by the Jesuits

themselves contain little evidence of inculturation in this context, while the considerable

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number of Huron who converted might be interpreted as a consequence of Jesuit adaptability--

but also of possible coercion or mutual misunderstanding. It is safe to say that the Jesuits

working in the forests of Canada did not cut the aboriginals whom they met much slack,

perhaps because they were too busy reacting negatively to what they saw around them. Or

perhaps also because they were conscious of the criticism directed at their colleagues in France

and wished to appear more demanding in their apostolic work.

The roots of the often expressed Jesuit antipathy towards and even horror of Huron and

other aboriginal cultures are buried among a number of contradictory forces present in Jesuit

formation. It is easy for us to spot the Jesuits’ abhorrence of aboriginal sexual practices but

more than mere prudery is at work here. Because Jesuit formation placed such a priority on

demonstrations of self mastery, behavior of any kind that seemed to indulge the passions was

regarded with a genuine horror. From the perspective of a Baroque Catholic, man’s fallen state

was both the result of such self-indulgence (meaning Adam’s fall) and a place of peril (in Latin

“periculum”) in which further moral defeats might be suffered. The notion of danger in fact is

one of the most important elements of the Jesuit conception of virtue, and thus of the

construction of the Jesuit side of this story. Without danger, virtue is not so easily identified

and perhaps less important as well. Periculum, either explicitly physical, or of the more subtle

moral variety, is the test that proves the worth of the Christian, and is also an inescapable part

of the history of the Church, for of what use is salvation if there is not something from which

we must be saved?

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In the novel Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray, an Irish history teacher tells his students

But history, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the

truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn’t make

sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything

that doesn’t fit. And often that is quite a lot.

The inconvenient possibility of a messy truth also has to be part of our consideration of this

encounter. Here I am not talking about the problems of methodology, but rather about our

holding of the history after the methodology has already been employed and story has begun

to make sense to us. There are quite possibly parts of this story that aren’t going to fit, or will

fit only if one accepts a worldview that seems to us to be lacking integration. Some of these

things may be known to us through surviving records, and others not. Among the things that

seem to jar is found in the account of Isaac Jogues, one of the Jesuits killed by the Hurons in

1646. Describing the conditions of his and his fellow Jesuits’ earlier captivity among the

Mohawks, the priest writes “I saw our Egyptians sitting above pots of meat, which we could not

touch.”1 But what can Jogues mean? The answer is that this Jesuit likened the captivity of his

colleagues to the bondage experienced by the Children of Israel in Egypt. OK, just another

belabored Old Testament metaphor, you might say. But once this rock is flipped over, there are

a number of disconnected oddities on view. First, the Jesuits are comparing themselves to a

population (the Jews) that in day-to-day life they scorned as practitioners of a “superstition.”

1 Tanner, Societas, p. 521.

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(Devoted Jesuit brothers were sometimes referred to in their obituaries as “true Israelites”, a

term that really threw me the first time I saw it.) To do this the Jesuits had to segregate the

real flesh and blood Jews they might meet from the metaphorical Jews who were part of God’s

plan—a plan that included the Jesuits. This fact, and not the absence of real “Egyptians” in the

North American forest, is part of the messy truth. Reading this passage, and many others like

it, we are compelled to confront a Jesuit who divorced his living experience from his linguistic

knowledge, and in doing so we enter a terrain of messy truths that do not fit well together.

And among the additional truths that do not fit well together is also the disconnect between

the Biblical journey of the children of Israel and the urbane and polished political philosophy of

the Jesuits’ pagan idol Cicero. The former is a narrative dominated by fear, miracle, and

vengeance, and by the backsliding of a weak willed people. The latter expounded the ideal of

the politically engaged citizen of the Republic in terms largely devoid of theology.

Steeped in both literary traditions, Jesuits were stuck trying to balance these

incompatible visions. Yet just as the Israelites’ sojourn in Egypt provided the Jesuits with a way

of making sense of the torment they underwent in the North American wilderness their

understanding of Cicero gave them a guidepost in the ongoing articulation of their experience

in Baroque Latin. The interaction of these two elements makes for a complex brew, one that

may have confused the Jesuits themselves at times.

How can the apparently real concern the Jesuits held for the salvation of souls be

reconciled with the fathers’ capacity to disconnect cultural connections that seem so obvious to

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us today? We find the explanation, I believe, in the Jesuit understanding of virtue. Virtue, as

described by Cicero (and Cicero is never too far in the background in an investigation such as

this), consists of what were later called the Four Cardinal Virtues: justice, prudence, fortitude,

and temperance; the key here is the virtue that might seem the least familiar to us: fortitude.

Fortitude is both the quality that keeps the individual unmoved by the enticements of pleasures

and also the characteristic that removes emotional blocks to performing what reason requires.

Jesuit literature of the seventeenth century built upon this notion and extols a detachment

from the pains and pleasures of the world. But unlike a medieval hermit who fled from other

people in order to escape temptation and periculum, the Jesuit sought out the place where

people gathered and deliberately placed himself in situations where his fortitude would be

tested. Indeed, the most admired Jesuits were those who appeared supremely indifferent to

both pain and pleasure—and yet the story of their accomplishments was spread through

appeals to the senses; painting, sculptures and dramatic performance. Reconciling these two

facts is one of the biggest challenges to understanding the Jesuit mind of this period.

The raison d’etre of the Society of Jesus was (notice I do not say “is”!) the propagation of the

Faith. It is both motive for action and a rational program of that action. So, while it may be

difficult for us to grasp, the denial of a connection between what had been learned from books

and what was encountered in the material world aided the Jesuits in carrying out their mission.

For the Huron shaman, the idea of divorcing oneself from the evidences of the world

(which for him included knowledge gained from memories, dreams and visions) around one

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would have seemed bizarre and pointless—and impossible as well. Again, the notion of

relation and the absence of a written record are key features of how the shaman’s performance

relates to an ethical point of view. I’ll also venture to speculate that the force that propelled

the shaman’s actions also enlightened and animated experience for other members of his

community: a non-rational way of knowing that had kinesthetic and multisensory aspects as

well as affective ones. The Jesuits would have acknowledged the value of some of these

components of experience, but ultimately they depended upon the written word to express

and evaluate all such experiences. By connecting the act of writing to virtue, the Jesuits

gained the power to condense and codify their understanding, and to connect it symbolically to

the understandings of those who had lived long before. But they ran the risk of losing track of

those aspects of experience for which there are no concise Latin definitions. They also

inevitably if perhaps unintentionally devalued the experiences of others and thereby relegated

other ways of understanding right action to the periphery.

From the distance of almost four hundred years it is impossible to separate the religious

convictions of these Jesuits from whatever cultural prejudices they also brought with them to

North America. No doubt they would have been unable to make such a separation themselves.

And therein lies the most important lesson we can glean from an examination of this

encounter.

The Jesuits told their story in terms of and in the idiom of their religious convictions.

But religious convictions cannot be divorced from their cultural milieu that gave them birth. In

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the case of the meeting of aboriginal and Jesuit, the communities of each participant gave

support and validation to experience. As subjects of the King of France, Jesuits active in the

seventeenth-century missions to North America came from a world that even if it had

abandoned the political ideal of a united Christendom, nevertheless had elevated the image of

the individual European Christian as opposed to the “barbarian”’ or savage.” Racial categories

as they came to be known in the nineteenth century did not yet exist and Jesuit records

generally have little to say about the biologically derived features of the non-European they

met. By contrast, the nakedness of non-Europeans or their sexual or eating habits marked such

people as the Huron as “barbari.” (And if aboriginals had seemed to accept at least some of the

Jesuits’ teachings they might be called “nostri barbari” or “our barbarians,” but they were still

barbarians.) The lines dividing the civilized or “potentially virtuous” from the savage and

probably vicious had to do with the application of physicality, and its description in

propositional language, which brings me to my final point.

The Jesuits’ emphasis on the application of skills, and therefore on achievement, runs

through the entire culture of their order. Training in eloquence, fastidious recording of

conversion statistics, and the assembling of collections of technological wonders such as clocks

and prisms with which to dazzle courtiers of the Chinese Emperor were all expressions of the

Society’s willingness to apply skills and knowledge. Less visible to us surrounded as we are

with a culture that extols achievement is the Jesuit emphasis on externally visible

accomplishments, something that set them apart from many strands of the Christian tradition.

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Men of action, Jesuits forever noted the actions of others, and sought to transform the material

world. This tendency, coupled with the conviction that God regularly intervened in the natural

world meant that Jesuits framed questions of virtue and vice in terms of ordered versus

disordered action. The distinction is brought home in the artwork portraying Jesuit martyrs.

These are shown as calm, balanced and harmonious, even in the moment of their deaths, while

their tormentors reveal through their gestures their internal disorder.

In this dichotomy between order and disorder we find the key to the Jesuits’

understanding of the world in which they found themselves in North America, and thus to the

ways that they used to approach aboriginal peoples. This division also sheds light on the ways

in which they recorded the consequences of these encounters, using the rules of Latin grammar

and syntax. For the Huron, and many other aboriginal peoples, this separation of experience

into order and disorder, like so many other constructions proposed by the Jesuits, was largely

meaningless, since the concept of “order” and the self-conscious effort required to bring it into

existence was of little practical use in a world experienced and accepted in its totality and not

always in a linear fashion. At the same time, no aboriginal language was analyzed by its own

speakers in the way that future Jesuits analyzed Latin as they were learning to use it. Thus

while these future Jesuits were gaining mastery of the second language that would be a

building block of their institutional culture, they were also breaking it apart.

Dividing and breaking can be very similar—some might say almost identical—

activities. Breaking can transform the object of one’s attentions, and also make it more

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manageable, by decreasing its complexity. The general human tendency, possessed by

aboriginals as well as Jesuits, to group and categorize was expressed through incompatible

vocabularies, and driven, in each instance, by differing moral imperatives. We may look back

at the world of the seventeenth-century Jesuits and think that we see “olden times” when

things moved more slowly and life was less complicated, but for Europeans living then those

times were very fast paced and unsettling, both for practical reasons such as war and plague

and also because of the challenges pressed forward by thinkers such as Hobbes and Galileo. To

some this world seemed both unmanageable in its brokenness and in need of reduction that

would make it manageable again. So the Jesuits dreamed of a cosmos converted and a Church

universal, goals to be achieved through the dividing and mastering of the world they found. In

North America, they found cultures that they divided and ultimately helped to break, although

not in ways and not with the consequences they had hoped for. This sacrifice of a culture on

the altar of virtue is the greatest conundrum and the greatest tragedy in the story of the Jesuits’

first sojourn among the aboriginals of this land.

Thank you.