David Hackett Fischer, Champlain's Dream

A book review of David Hackett Fischer, Champlain's Dream (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).

At once a biography of Samuel Champlain (1574-1635) and a history of the founding of colonial New France, Fischer's Champlain's Dream is also in part at least a work in Christian ethics, which points to the difference the application of Christian values can make in the real world.  Champlain's Dream is  a well written, carefully researched, and timely work devoted to an important and fascinating slice of the past, all of the things we expect of Fisher.

As Fischer portrays him, Champlain was a man who was born into violent times and was a soldier, but he became something much more than just a warrior.  He was born into a France that was rent with religious divisions between Catholics and Protestant and himself converted from Protestantism to Catholicism but learned to transcend these divisions.  He lived in a time when politics was as complicated and brutal as ever, and he played the political game when necessary but only in pursuit of his dream for a French colony in North America.  Finally, what Champlain found in the great St. Lawrence River valley was a large set of Indian tribes engaged in constant warfare with each other and weary of that warfare; and he managed to bring a certain degree of peace to the warring tribes for a period of time in pursuit of his dream of a peaceful, prosperous New France

A self-portrait of Champlain

All of this, according to Fischer, grew out of Champlain's Christian faith.  Fischer is careful to keep Champlain in his own time so that he doesn't end up being a seventeenth century version of a modern-day progressive Christian.  Champlain believed in monarchy.  He accepted a hierarchical society as perfectly natural.  He was a patriotic Frenchman.  Still, he wanted Protestants to have a place in New France along side of Catholics.  Perhaps even more remarkably Champlain respected the Indians he worked with, valued much of their cultures, and sought to live with them in a fair and peaceable union that did not lead eventually to their near extermination.  And all of this was because of the way Chaplain interpreted and applied his Christian faith.

It is clear that none of this came easily for Champlain.  He made powerful political enemies and always had to contend with conflicting financial interests that sought to exploit French North America at the expense of his vision.  In New France, he had to contend with the Iroquois, who never made peace with the French, and he was forced to attack them in order to deter their attacks on the colony and on its allied tribes.  On the home front, he had a complicated relationship with his wife, Helene, that never produced any children and ended up with her entering a convent.  At one time, New France was seized by Scottish merchants based in England and Champlain was made a prisoner until he was finally returned to France.  Through it all, however, he persevered in his pursuit of his vision of a peaceful and prosperous New France grounded on Christian principles.  He, for example, promoted exchanges of young people between the French and the Indians so that both sides gained a better appreciation for the cultures of the other.  Many of the French young men because interpreters for the French, not just of Indian languages but also of their ways of life.

In his concluding chapter, Fischer writes,

Many stories have been told about first encounters between American Indians and Europeans.  Few of them are about harmony and peace.  The more one reads of these accounts, the more one learns that something extraordinary happened in New France during the early seventeenth century—something different from what took place in new Spain, New England, and New Netherlands.  Scholars of many nations agree that the founders of New France were able to maintain good relations with American Indians more effectively than any other colonizing power. (p. 527)

Fischer credits those good relations primarily to Samuel Champlain who he characterizes as a man of deep religious faith as well as a member of a group of French humanists who originally formed around King Henri IV.  Champlain himself was close to the king.

One could well argue that New England was just as much a product of the application of Christian beliefs and values as New France, but with an outcome that was very different.  The Indians were pushed into open war, treated with disdain, and eventually the "Indian problem" was solved by their near extermination.  While Fischer points out that there were compassionate English settlers and insensitive settlers among the French, one of his key points is that the differences between the practice of Christianity in New France under Champlain and the practice of the faith in other colonies such as New England led to very different outcomes.  The outcome in New France was more Christ-like.  It was less dualistic and less brutal.  It was less ideological and less destructive.  It was more dialogical and more just and peaceable.

Fischer did not write Champlain's Dream as a work of theological reflection, but much of what he wrote provokes, almost demands that reflection.  But whether or not it is viewed theologically, Fischer's Champlain's Dream is a well-crafted historiographical work. It is a comprehensive study that includes a lengthy literature survey, a set of sixteen appendices on a range of issues and subjects related to Champlain's life and times, and an extensive bibliography.  The book is richly illustrated and contains a good set of maps.  All-in-all, this is an excellent book generally and one that is well worth consideration by students of Christian theology and ethics.

Sigurd Olson, Reflections from the North Country

A book review of Sigurd F. Olson, Reflections from the North Country (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998; originally published by Alfred A. Knopf,1976).

He disguised the fact well, but in truth Sigurd Olson (1899-1982) was an academic, however much he was best known in his day as a man of the wilderness, especially the northern wilderness of the "boundary waters" of northern Minnesota and western Ontario—the Quetico-Superior country.  He was also an author who wrote a series of popular books on his life experience with the wilderness.  Reflections from the North Country, published in 1976, is one of his last works, and in it readers begin to see more clearly the widely-read academic who over the years had worked out a personal theology wrapped around the idea of an "emergent God," which is a symbol of what humanity aspires for—that which is beyond knowing and definition.

In these reflections, Olson assesses his experience with northern wildernesses, how those experiences shaped him, and what they mean for him and for the whole human race.  It is clear throughout Reflections from the North Country that for Olson life in the wilderness is essentially a spiritual experience.  In the silence and beauty of the wild, Olson discovered a form of meditation that is natural and simple, one that doesn't rely on spiritualistic techniques or the technologies of elaborate forms of meditation.  If Olson had a religion, it was the woods and waters of the North.

The antagonist of Reflections from the North Country is urban, technological, consumer-istic, noisy, self-indulgent, pollution-ridden, and irreverent modern technological society.  Often in theology one describes God by exploring what  God is not, and technological consumer society fulfills that spiritual function for Olson.  What particularly concerns him is the way people live in modern society.  They hurry, pay no attention, are tense and troubled, chase after superficial priorities, and live at a distance from nature and who they really are.  Modern society and its anti-spiritual values are destroying the natural world that we depend upon for everything.

Nature, however, remains a powerful spiritual force that is able to transform the lives of those who are willing to submit themselves to the disciplines of wilderness living, if even only for a few days.  Olson reports how men (never women) who travelled with him on canoe trips invariably began to relax, smile, slow down, and come quietly and happily alive in the course of their time in the wilderness.  The interplay between wilderness as protagonist and modern society as antagonist thus lies at the heart of Reflections from the North Country.  There is little good to be said for society, although it does provide us with the insights into the nature of the wilderness provided by science—and thereby places wilderness in its vast evolutionary setting.  By the same token, there is little that is wrong with the wilderness.  In it is found wisdom, silence, serenity, the discipline of fishing, and good eating.  It is a place of unparalleled beauty; it is where we find meaning in life.  In sum, "Wilderness can be appreciated only by contrast, and solitude understood only when we have been without it." (page 35).

Listening Point, Olson's cabin in the North Woods

Olson expresses a deep appreciation for aboriginal peoples, Eskimos and American Indians.  He admires the way in which they are connected to the wilderness in a subliminal way, which in fact is our common heritage.  The rest of us, however, have lost touch with that deep, hidden place in us that connects us to the wild.  Olson thus poses the central question of his reflections, "...how can [modern man] nurture these desiccated nerve ends of his ancient knowing and make them flower again into a fuller life, with more appreciation of beauty and awareness and the potentialities of our relationships to others?"  His immediate answer: "...by placing ourselves in the proper situation and mood, and willfully recognizing there is something we possess that is normally hidden and lost to the modern mind." (page 24).  In a word, we have to expose ourselves to the wilderness, which for Olson is the Eden we are willfully losing and the Kingdom of God (to mix metaphors) to which we must return.  We have to escape the rat race and attain a "Godlike leisure," which can be done only in the wild places of the Earth (page 31).

Everything that matters is at stake in the interplay of wilderness and the modern, technology-driven world.  If we lose the wild, Olson was convinced, we lose our souls.  The very future of the human race is put at risk.

Being in the wilderness was for Olson a spiritual experience, a mystical encounter.  Quiet time spent watching a sunset, feeding squirrels, caring for the forest's trees and flowers, or just gazing intently at an ants' nest brings us peace.  This was his form of meditation.  He refers in Reflections from the North Country to the "great silence" that he experienced in the wild and to a sense of oneness that at times accompanied it.  Once one has felt these things then, "...comes the search for the ultimate, which only knowledge of the earth, the universe, and man's relationship to it can bring." (page 56).  Olson concludes Reflections from the North Country with a quick dip in the cold, clear waters of theological reflection.  He speaks of listening to the wilderness with our inner senses of seeing and hearing, by which we discover our oneness with God's creation and may even experience communion with God.  We need to understand that Olson's God is not the traditional one preached from church pulpits.  He refers to the "emergent God," a shadowy divine reality that is as much symbol tied to the human spirit and revealed in our contemplative experiences with the wilderness as anything else.  God is our goal and, somehow, also embedded in our human evolution.  Olson believes that one day all of humanity will be united in its knowledge of this God that stands "beyond absurdity."

Twenty-first century readers will find some things about Olson's Reflections from the North Country "quaint" or irritating, depending on the reader.  Writing in the 1970s, Olson does not avoid the use of sexist English.  It is clear at various points, moreover, that his imagined readers were men, and his tone in a few places is even a bit "manful," for want of a better term.  In more recent decades, furthermore, we are striving to think beyond simplistic dualisms, and to a degree Olson's contrast of wilderness and technological society is a rather simplistic dualism.  Urban activists and those who thrive on city living are likely to find his attitudes objectionable and even arrogant.  Olson also has a disdain for religious forms of meditation other than his own quiet contemplation of nature.

That being said, the core of this book is solid.  It calls its readers to value creation and to see themselves as connected to the rapidly disappearing wilderness places of our planet.  Reflections from the North Country is also simply written and without pretension.  For those who love the wild this book is an excellent companion to their wilderness experience, giving that experience deeper meaning by placing it in a cosmic, evolutionary context.  For this audience, Reflections from the North Country is as timely and even as inspiring today as it was for readers forty years ago.  If you love the wild, I highly recommend this book to you.

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For further insights into Olson's spiritual approach to the wilderness, see David Backes, "The Land Beyond the Rim: Sigurd Olson's Wilderness Theology."