Missionary Strategies in the New World, 1610-1690

An Intellectual History

Catherine Ballériaux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317271499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Early Modern History

The study is an intellectual and comparative history of French, Spanish, and English missions to the native peoples of America in the seventeenth century, c. 1610–1690. It shows that missions are ideal case studies to properly understand the relationship between religion and politics in early modern Catholic and Calvinist thought.

The book aims to analyse the intellectual roots of fundamental ideas in Catholic and Calvinist missionary writings—among others idolatry, conversion, civility, and police—by examining the classical, Augustinian, neo-thomist, reformed Protestant, and contemporary European influences on their writings. Missionaries' insistence on the necessity of reform, emphasising an experiential, practical vision of Christianity, led them to elaborate conversion strategies that encompassed not only religious, but also political and social changes. It was at the margins of empire that the essentials of Calvinist and Catholic soteriologies and political thought could be enacted and crystallised. By a careful analysis of these missiologies, the study thus argues that missionaries' common strategies—habituation, segregation, social and political regulations—stem from a shared intellectual heritage, classical, humanist, and above all concerned with the Erasmian ideal of a reformation of manners.

1
Custom as Ethos and Habituation

Native Paganism and Idolatry

Missionaries who came to the New World in the seventeenth century encountered an incredibly varied array of cults and rituals, which they did not perceive as religion but as superstitions. Despite this variety, and despite doctrinal discrepancies, Calvinist and Catholic missionaries offered strikingly similar interpretations of the origins and causes of native idolatry. Their analysis of the mechanisms, both psychological and social, that underpinned not only the origins of pagan cults but also the channels through which pagans could be led to the Christian faith relied on a similar analysis of custom and education. This reminds us that Roman Catholics and Protestants were not, as they perceived themselves, opposites but rather historically recent variants of a long-established, common religious tradition.

Idolatry was, understandably, a major issue for religious proselytisers. Those native practices could not be understood as religion in the proper sense of the term: they were superstitions, irrational beliefs stemming from a long tradition of ignorance and reinforced by the tyrannical authority of religious and political leaders.¹ Rarely or only loosely defined, idolatry implied confusion about the object of worship and/or as to its expression through specific cults.²

Missionaries analysed the mental processes underlying conversion according to their specific understandings of the relationship between human activity and God’s will. Catholics relied on a heavily Aristotelian and Thomist framework, while Puritans borrowed their understanding of human agency from both Aristotelian and Thomist psychology and the continental and English Reformed Protestant traditions. Both also borrowed from the Augustinian tradition. Catholic thinkers insisted on the ability of the will to freely follow the good being the object of reason, while Protestants believed that man after the Fall was unable to understand God’s will and to live a moral life without regeneration. Yet, I argue that in practice, both traditions implemented their conversion strategies through similar processes of habituation, which ironically, were not completely different from the ways in which, according to these authors, idolatry had taken root in native societies.

The Nature of Idolatry

Native religious practices were invariably depicted, whether in New Spain, Peru, New France, or New England, as superstitions that had alienated native populations from what missionaries considered to be commonly accepted customs. In missionaries’ eyes, those superstitions had become a second nature deeply ingrained in the natives’ character and had been transmitted from their forefathers.

The natives’ radically different habits made the New World, according to the Jesuit Alonso Pantoja, ‘another world’, in which missionaries were confronted with ‘moral cases’ which were radically different from anything they could encounter in Europe. The Jesuit Bernabé Cobo argued in 1639 that the natives lived in darkness because of the ‘perversity of their customs’.³ In 1637, the French Jesuit Paul Le Jeune, when told by a Huron that the missionaries were ‘wrong to criticise their customs’, lamented about all those ‘impostures… to which these Barbarians are attached by a habit very difficult to uproot’.⁴ John Eliot, active as a missionary in New England from 1647 to his death in 1690, repeatedly noticed how difficult it was for the natives to abandon ‘the old customes of the ancient Heathen’ to take up the ‘wayes of God’.⁵

In Calvinist writings, Christianity was presented as an ancient knowledge among the natives, a knowledge that had disappeared because the natives’ forefathers had been, according to Puritans, ‘a stubborne and rebellious children’. Thus God had forsaken them, left them ‘alone in sinne and ignorance’. The natives were ‘inheritors of a grievous and fearefull curse… in nearest alliance to the wild beasts that perish… so are curses entailed and come by naturall descent unto others’.⁶ All humans were in bondage to sin. But the natives were particularly disadvantaged because their forefathers had forgotten Revelation, and they themselves had no access to the Scriptures.

This understanding of idolatry as a set of ancestral customs embedded in the native’s hearts was also a common trope in French and Spanish writings. In 1668, Alonso de la Peña Montenegro, Bishop of Quito from 1653 to his death in 1687, commented on the natives’ idolatries:

This bad seed made so many deep roots in them, that it is as if it became their own blood and flesh… and thus, although they are born with free-will, vice comes through the blood, it feeds through the milk, and brings with it an internal empire, which tyrannises the whole republic of man.⁷

Similarly, in 1634, Le Jeune emphasised the difficulty of extirpating idolatry: ‘a disease of the mind so great as is a superstition deeply-rooted for so many centuries, & suckled in with the nurse’s milk, is not cured in a moment’.⁸

The idea of customs or habits had been widely discussed since Aristotle. To understand these depictions of idolatry as a deeply-rooted custom, we need to trace the use of the term back to Aristotle’s definition of ‘ethos’. In Aristotle’s nomenclature, ethos was part of the non-rational soul; it referred to the habits that humans internalised and which became a second nature. This was the term also used to describe the habits of animals, children, and barbarians.⁹ Ethos, if part of the non-rational soul, was nevertheless fundamental, especially in education, because it was how, by practice, some behaviours could be internalised so as to become indistinguishable from our original nature. Habituation would help students internalise the right moral behaviours and was the foundation of moral virtues. Habits were thus fundamental in education but also problematic because of their very persistence. For Aristotle, a society with bad customs and laws would make it very difficult for one to acquire the right moral habits. Augustine also frequently discussed these ‘bad habits’ (consuetudines), which easily became a second nature.¹⁰ Missionaries insisted on the ancestral dimension of native customs and recognised how difficult it would be for the natives to give up their idolatries to take up the demanding moral standards of Christianity.¹¹ Alonso de la Peña Montenegro thought that ‘one should not be surprised that the customs of their parents and ancestors have become natural, as they are transmitted to their sons as if an inheritance; which is the main reason why the Indians are so inclined to idolatry …’¹² The French Jesuit Pierre Biard explained in 1616 that custom was so deeply rooted in the natives’ minds that

all your arguments, and you can bring a thousand if you wish, are crossed out by this single stroke which they always have at hand, Aoti Chabaya, (they say), this is the Savages’ way of doing things. You use yours, we use ours; every one values his own wares…¹³

Indeed, the natives themselves frequently reaffirmed their attachment to their customs. In Maryland, a Wicomesse ambassador reminded a surprised governor that ‘… since that you are heere strangers, and come into our Countrey, you should rather conforme your selves to the Customes of our Countrey, then impose yours upon us’.¹⁴

Many missionaries feared that the pervasiveness of religious practices in the natives’ lives would make them difficult to uproot. The French Jesuit Jérôme Lalemant explained in 1644 that superstition pervaded the daily activities of the natives so much that to become Christian,

one must deprive oneself not only of the pastimes that are completely innocent elsewhere, & of the sweetest pleasures of life; but also of the most necessary things, & in a word, to die to the world at the moment that one wants to assume the life of a Christian.¹⁵

In New England, a converted native explained to the governor in 1652 that to enter the ‘Church of Christ’, he and his compatriots had ‘to part with all their old Customes, and to part with their friends and lands, or any thing which hindereth them from coming to that place, where they may gather a Church’.¹⁶ In his fictive Indian Dialogues, John Eliot had the character of an unconverted sachem, Penoowot, express his anxiety about the demands of conversion: ‘I know that old customes of sin are very hardly left, and I have been so long accustomed to sin, that I am afraid of my self’.¹⁷

Despite idolatry’s persistence, missionaries perceived it as a historical, contextual issue, a question of accidents rather than essence. Those ancestral customs could of course be explained by the Fall but also in great part by lack of education. Godly Protestants systematically linked idolatrous behaviours with, as Richard Mather called it, ‘Pagan Blindness and Ignorance’.¹⁸

In the eyes of Catholic missionaries, a great problem amongst the natives was that they favoured visible things over spiritual ones. According to Le Jeune, ‘They have no words to express the purely spiritual ideas’.¹⁹ The Jesuit Pablo José Arriaga thought that the natives adored their idols because they only cared about temporal and visible happiness and had no appreciation or hope for spiritual and eternal felicity.²⁰ Spanish Jesuit Francisco de Figueroa claimed that the Maynas (a tribe of the Jivaroan peoples) ‘confess[ed] that there is another life for men… where no one dies. But they evaluate it only in relation to material things, ascribing it only pleasures related to their bodies and stomachs’. Augustine had linked bad habits to sole interest in temporal and worldly pleasures.²¹ Thus the natives used their idols—mistakenly taking the visible object for the invisible God—to obtain temporal favours, never for the good of their souls. Because of this obsession with visible reality, the natives ignored the true, invisible God. The numerous comments about the natives’ regard for only sensory experiences emphasized the missionaries’ belief that, before the arrival of Europeans, they had been uninterested in intellectual and spiritual matters, which conditioned access to the knowledge of God, an idea which was, as we will see, related to the hardship of their lives.²² The major issue at stake, thus, was the natives’ alleged ignorance. Paul Le Jeune captured this sense of native ignorance in 1634, when he insisted that ‘all words related to piety, devotion, virtue… the language of Theologians, Philosophers, Mathematicians, and Physicians… all these things are not found either in the thoughts or upon the lips of the Savages’. Bernabé Cobo likewise claimed in 1639 that the minds of the natives of both New Spain and Peru were impaired only because they had ‘no literature, sciences, or fine arts’.²³

Numerous writers believed that the natives’ degenerate customs were a consequence of their origin and history. By the late 1640s, Eliot was convinced that the natives were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, which made their conversion instrumental in his millenarian scheme, a topic that will be addressed in a subsequent chapter. As a result of their dispersion, the natives had forgotten Revelation, which was the cause of ‘their misery while they are lo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Comparative History of Religious Processes
• 1 Custom as Ethos and Habituation: Native Paganism and Idolatry
• 2 Conversion: Will, Grace, and Good Works
• 3 Native Nomadic Lifestyles: Civility, Law, and Godly Government
• 4 Assimilation versus Segregation: Two Competing Missiologies
• 5 Community Building: Commonwealth and Christian Missions
• 6 Conflict: Rejection of European Political and Religious Authority
• Conclusion: Reformation of Manners
• Abbreviations
• Primary Sources
• Secondary Sources
• Index