Harsh Words on Christian Influence
If we begin by examining Gauguin’s words, we see that the written word played an important role during his life in Tahiti. Gauguin did a significant amount of writing during this time spent in Tahiti – from letters to his wife, friends, and colleagues to a book entitled Noa Noa. (In fact, for his first few months in Tahiti, Gauguin’s only communication was by words, as he did not paint until he had been in Tahiti for several months.) Interspersed throughout these works we find a scathing commentary on the Christian missionary presence on the island of Tahiti. From the beginning of his time on the island, Gauguin lamented the destruction of Tahiti by the local French missionaries. It seems that if Gauguin was to have decided the fate of the Tahitian people, French missionaries would never have landed on the island. But the influence of the French missionaries in Tahiti was undeniable, and – for Gauguin – unacceptable. In a letter Gauguin wrote to his wife shortly after his arrival in Tahiti, Gauguin censures the Protestant missionaries in particular, stating that they “have already introduced a new element of Protestant hypocrisy and are destroying the sense of poetry” (qtd. Denvir 63). Gauguin left Europe for Tahiti to seek this “sense of poetry” and when he arrived he discovered that the Tahiti he sought had been blemished by the influence of the Christian missionaries. Indeed, his words for the Catholic Church were no kinder, saying in a letter to Charles Morice written in November of 1897 that “now the Church never forgives” (Gauguin Letters 211), a harsh commentary on a religion that includes the sacrament of reconciliation.
In his published works, written for a wider audience, Gauguin was perhaps more subtle in his criticism of the Christian missionary influence in Tahiti, but in the end was no less harsh in his commentary, presented most overtly in Noa Noa. If Gauguin was shouting out his distaste in his private letters, then his more public commentary in Noa Noa can be equated with a stage whisper – much quieter with a hint of subtlety, yet still intended for a very wide audience. For example, in Noa Noa, Gauguin describes the wedding of a half-white schoolmistress and her “genuine Maori” husband that he attended as an externally 
celebratory affair whose Tahitian ritual had been ruined by Christian tradition. His criticism of the Christian missionaries’ hypocrisy continues in this account, but more subtle than in other descriptions. He says that Protestant bishop who presided over the marriage “had taken an interest” in the bride and “had personally interceded to bring about this wedding which many regarded as a little hurried” (Gauguin Noa Noa 87-88). Gauguin declares that “out here, the will of the missionary is the will of God” and later insinuates that the bride was pregnant, not with her husbands’ but with the bishop’s child at the time of the wedding (Gauguin Noa Noa 88, 91). This commentary on the Christianized marriage of the two young Tahitians highlights Gauguin’s disgust at what he perceived as Christian hypocrisy. If Gauguin wrote things as he saw them, he saw a Tahiti that was being gradually destroyed by this Christian influence. According to Gauguin’s writings, Tahiti when left untouched by Christian missionaries was a paradise that served as Gauguin’s own personal Eden, an Eden destroyed by the hypocrisy of the French Christian missionaries.
Cover from Noa Noa, illustrated by Gauguin