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Augustine and the Amerindian in Seventeenth-Century New France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Peter A. Goddard
Peter A. Goddard
Affiliation:
Peter A. Goddard is assistant professor of history at the University of Guelph.
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Extract

It may appear absurd to link a thinker of Christian antiquity with the peoples of early modern North America. The Bishop of Hippo (354–430) was not particularly interested in evangelization beyond the Mediterranean world. While he encouraged the proselytization of the tribes of North Africa, Augustine rejected the possibility of “New Worlds” as “on no grounds credible” for lack of scriptural warrant. His achievement, some thousand years before Columbus, was to provide the authoritative account of religious conversion as well as the intellectual foundations for Christian spirituality. This legacy was not well suited, however, to deal with problems raised by contact with “new” peoples of the Americas. It had little to say about the “nature” of these “savage” peoples as well as the prospects for their conversion. Augustinian theology emphasizes relations between God and self, in contrast to the approach identified with Thomas Aquinas, which asserts the possibility of finding God in the world and propels inquiry in that direction. Augustine's sense of the corruption of fallen humankind and the powerlessness of nature without God would appear to discourage any but the most morbid interest in New World peoples.

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Articles
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Church History , Volume 67 , Issue 4 , December 1998 , pp. 662 - 681
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1998

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References

Early versions of this article were presented to the Early Modern Europe Seminar at Oxford University, and the “work in progress” seminar at the University of British Columbia. The author would like to thank David Murray, John O'Malley, Dermot Quinn, and Michael Ruse as well as the anonymous reviewers for Church History for their helpful comments.

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38. Lallemant's mystical asceticism was hostile to the activism central to the Jesuit “way of proceeding.” Mutius Vitelleschi, general 1615–1645, confined it to advanced teaching. See Dudon, P., “Les Leçons d'oraison du P. Lallement, ont-elles étés blamées par ses supérieurs?” Revue d'ascétique et de mystique 11 (1930): 396–406.Google Scholar

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45. Le Jeune's writings are available in Monumenta Novae Franciae [cited as MNF], vols. 2–5, and in the bilingual edition, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents [henceforward cited as JR], ed. Thwaites, Reuben Gold, 73 vols. (1896–1901; reprint, New York: Pageant, 1959).Google ScholarThe 1634 Relation is annotated in Le Missionnaire, I'apostat et le sorcier, ed. Laflèche, Guy (Montreal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1972).Google Scholar

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47. “Lettre circulaire sur la mort de Paul Lejeune,” MNF 2: 377.

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57. Lafitau, , Moeurs de sauvages amériquains, 1:5.Google Scholar

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