Perhaps you are under the impression that when the Friars came to the to-them New World, their mode of evangelization involved little more than manipulation into a superficial level of adherence. Well, you’d be wrong, wouldn’t you? Those who came to bring Christ to the peoples of the Americas certainly had their flaws – as we all do – but superficial they were not. I’m fascinated by the varied and creative methods that the friars – and later Jesuits – brought and developed, the rich spiritual life they encouraged and their creativity in conveying complex notions to people to whom these were truly foreign and novel ideas.
I suppose I am interested in it partly because it’s what I’ve been doing for years, both in the classroom and through my writing – especially that last part. What, I always wonder – is enough? Enough to convey the truth of the faith, enough to engage the hearer with God in an authentic way, especially given all of the limits in the situation: the limits of the hearer, cultural limitations and then, bottom line, the limits of human expression of divine truth, period.
Last night, I skimmed a book on one such method: pictographic catechisms developed in Colonial Mexico. I skimmed it because it’s a scholarly work, with much of the material being quite technical. But you know how to get something out of a book like that if you’re a non-specialist, right? Start with the summary paragraphs at the end of each chapter and work backwards if you’re interested in more. Academics are nothing if not unfailingly obedient to the accepted structures of essay and informational writing – they always summarize for you.
It’s called Painted Words: Nahua Catholicism, Politics, and Memory in the Atzaqualco Pictorial Catechism and the entire book is available via JSTOR – you have to have an account to read the whole thing, but it’s free to make an account, so why not?
From the book’s description:
Painted Words presents a facsimile, decipherment, and analysis of a seventeenth-century pictographic catechism from colonial Mexico, preserved as Fonds Mexicain 399 at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Works in this genre present the Catholic catechism in pictures that were read sign by sign as aids to memorization and oral performance. They have long been understood as a product of the experimental techniques of early evangelization, but this study shows that they are better understood as indigenous expressions of devotional knowledge.
In addition to inventive pictography to recount the catechism, this manuscript features Nahuatl texts that focus on don Pedro Moteuczoma, son of the Mexica ruler Moteuczoma the Younger, and his home, San Sebastián Atzaqualco. Other glosses identify figures drawn within the manuscript as Nahua and Spanish historical personages, as if the catechism had been repurposed as a dynastic record. The end of the document displays a series of Nahua and Spanish heraldic devices.
These combined pictorial and alphabetic expressions form a spectacular example of how colonial pictographers created innovative text genres, through which they reimagined pre-Columbian writing and early evangelization―and ultimately articulated newly emerging assertions of indigenous identity and memorialized native history.
It’s very, very interesting – and, as the description indicates, thorough. If you really wanted to, you could engage in some close study because a deep translation is offered.
The chapters put the pictographic catechism in context – both in a European context and the context of other methods of evangelization including – I found this interesting – the use of a cloth called a lienzo by the friars. Because of the material, I don’t believe any survive, but we know of their use from the friars’ writings as well as their depiction in other works (books, murals) – it would be a cloth painted with Biblical scenes or symbols to aid in catechizing. It makes so much sense – a cloth being easy to transport and large enough to use when addressing a group. Original Power Point, right?
Anyway, below, I’ve reproduced some pages from this particular pictographic catechism illustrating some of the Works of Mercy. Here, first, is the list of the contents:
I apologize if these aren’t in the correct order, but they’re numbered, so you can figure it out. At least get a sense. The whole thing is available here, in the text of the book, which, as I said, is available for just the cost of registering at JSTOR.
Isn’t it interesting?
And while in one sense, it is “obscure” – in another sense, it’s not at all. We’re all evangelizers and missionaries in a hostile culture to which the Good News is foreign, strange and even threatening. Yes, the conditions are certainly wildly different, but there’s still much to learn from this, I think.
As much as we hear doctrine denigrated these days, even as the content of evangelization, note the friars – who sacrificed much to go out to the ends of the earth to accompany the marginalized on the peripheries – made communicating these basic teachings and practices the core of their efforts. They understood that everything else flows from that – from understanding the universe and the world correctly, understanding one’s place in it and the role each person plays in sharing the love poured out to us through Christ.
You might also find it interesting to note that really, you could take the core of this catechism and teach it today, couldn’t you? For all the talk about things developing and changing – maybe they don’t, really? And maybe that’s the point?
My favorite symbol, I think, is the one for sin. It really does say it all:
Charlotte was Both 