Dr. Louis Painchaud is Associate Professor at the Faculté de théologie et de sciences religieuses and the Institut d'études anciennes at Laval University

1. Tell us a little about the path your career has followed. What attracted you to your area of study? Who inspired you? Where did you study?

I began my studies in Theology at Laval University in 1969. Progressively, over the course of my bachelor's degree, I became more and more interested in Religious Studies, which didn't exist at that time as a field of study distinct from Theology. However, the bachelor's degree in Theology included a certain number of credits in Sociology and Psychology of Religion.
I was equally attracted to Church History and Patristics, which was taught by Hervé Gagné, as well as to Exegesis. After I finished my B.A., I enrolled in a Master's programme. My thesis incorporated a contemporary, sociological approach; it was a sociological analysis of parish Bingo and Bingo halls in Quebec City. I loved working on that study! It was directed by professor Raymond Lemieux, who was at the time a part of Laval's Centre de recherche en sociologie religieuse, which no longer exists, but which had been very important here in the 1960s and 70s, and which was at the origins of the development of Religious Studies at our university.
Occasionally, during the course of my Master's degree, I had the opportunity to do coursework with Professor Jacques Ménard in Gnosticism. A Montrealer by birth, and a professor of the History of Religions at the Faculté de théologie catholique de l'Université de Strasbourg, Ménard was a recognized specialist in Gnosticism and the Coptic Nag Hammadi texts.
I became passionate about this new field of study, and in 1973 I began to learn Coptic with Professor Michel Roberge. In 1976, I was accepted as a doctoral student; my thesis project was to prepare the critical edition, translation and commentary of the Second Treatise of the Great Seth from Codex VII of the Nag Hammadi library.
During the same era, professors Gagné, Ménard et Roberge launched an ambitious project to create critical editions and French translations of the entire Coptic Nag Hammadi library. Three years later, in 1979, I defended my doctoral dissertation before a committee which included professor Bentley Layton of Yale University. Since then, I 've never left this field.
During the course of my formative years, I had the privilege of meeting true masters of their fields, scholars who left a profound impression on me. It was these scholars who, without a doubt, instilled in me this same passion.

2. You've worked in a number of different contexts: as researcher, professor in a Cégep, and most recently, as a professor at Laval. Could you comment a bit on this?

I began teaching part-time in different colleges around Quebec while I was working on my Master's and Ph.D. From this, I obtained a post at the Cégep de Sainte-Foy where I taught, during the course of 22 years, a variety of courses including the religions of Asia, Western religions, and Religion in Quebec, as well as thematic courses such as "Religion and Magic" and "Life, Death and the Afterlife." I really loved teaching at the pre-university level, since it allowed me to touch on a wide variety of subjects with generally very receptive students. But at the same time, it was sometimes difficult to reconcile the exigencies of this broad teaching repertoire with that of a very specialized research interest. In addition, research is not part of the mission of cégeps, to the extent that in order to be released from a portion of my teaching responsibilities so as to conduct research, I had to find outside funding which would permit my replacement.
During the course of the 1980s, very generous grants and subsidies were available to us, particularly the Programme d'aide aux chercheurs de colleges from the funding agency FCAR (Fonds quebecois pour la formation de chercheurs et l'aide a la recherche) which played a tremendously important role for me. In addition, the proximity of the Cégep de Sainte-Foy to Laval, as well as the understanding of my Cégep colleagues in the face of my unavailability for certain administrative tasks, greatly helped things.
That much having been said, in order to follow a regular research programme when one is teaching at a cégep, it's really necessary to be completely committed, because research is simply not recognized as part of your career within the college. At the same time, a professor at a cégep is always perceived as a bit of an outsider within the university millieu -- which is understandable, but sometimes very frustrating. This situation became more and more difficult during the course of the '90s, in the wake of budgetary cuts in the educational domain. I was forced, therefore, to stop my research activities at the close of the decade. Happily, Laval could offer me a post on a limited contract in 1999, then a regular post in 2000.

3. Tell us about how you found financing for the French editions and translations of the Coptic Nag Hammadi library. It's a great story.

First, it's important to say that our enterprise -- to create critical editions and French translations of the Coptic Nag Hammadi writings -- had been funded since its inception by the Canada Arts Council, then by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), and by FCAR, as well as by the Université Laval itself through its research professor post, and finally, to a lesser degree, by smaller foundations such as the Fonds Gérard-Dion.
However, as the university was forced to reduce expenses during the course of the '90s, it was forced to eliminate the post of research professor, at the very same time that SSHRCC and FCAR withdrew their funding, especially in the light of certain contributors' chronic failure to meet publishing deadlines. The situation was serious, and we were at risk of having to put an end to our work and to be unable to achieve our goals. We urgently needed to find a new source of funding, for it appeared clear that, unless we redressed the situation, the major public funding agencies and the University would no longer be able to support our work. Thus it was necessary to seek funding from the private sector. It was then that I contacted the Fondation Joseph-Armand Bombardier, where my request received a very positive reception. Those responsible for the Foundation invited me to submit a formal grant proposal, which the Board of Executives read and then agreed to offer their support.
Because of this, a tighter control of our budget, and a new partnership with la Fondation Joseph-Armand Bombardier, we were able to recover some funding from SSHRCC and FCAR. Today, my colleagues and I remain confident that we can complete the critical editions and translations of the BCNH, as well as publish the concordances of the Nag Hammadi codices here by 2005-2006. And we're also envisaging new projects.
What's more, we've created a research group for the study of ancient Christianity (GRECA), which welcomes young graduate students interested in working on ancient Christianity, Gnosticism, and Manichaeism. For the current academic year, this group has included a dozen students at the Master's, Doctoral, and Post-Doctoral levels, from Laval as well as from English-speaking Canada, France, Finland, Denmark and Romania. They're enrolled in graduate programmes in the Ancient World, Theology, and Religious Studies. Their courses are in French, but often in the seminary context, there are exchanges in both English and French, and the students are invited to compose their written work in English. The number and the diversity of these students create a very rich and extremely stimulating environment for everybody.

4. What do you see as the particular difficulties which confront francophone scholars in Religious Studies, both in Canada and internationally?

I think that the difficulties we have are no different from those which confront our colleagues whose principal language is other than English, which is really the principal language of communication in the academic domain. One has to be bilingual. That is not, however, a hardship, for we can't entertain the illusion that a sole language is sufficient in the Academy!
As North-American Francophones, we have the advantage of participating in two cultures. French culture permits us to cultivate special ties with colleagues in French research environments, particularly in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. But we have, equally, the advantage of being close to the North American research scene -- in both English Canada and America -- in which we are able to easily integrate ourselves because we share equally in a culture which extends beyond linguistic differences.

That having been said, a certain gap always exists between the francophone and anglophone milieux in Canada, and we've got to work to close that gap. Our corporation and its web site could play an important role in that sense. I think, however, that the real difficulties are to be found elsewhere and are shared by both francophones and anglophones. These problems are born from the ageing of the professorial corps and and the reduction of universities' strength in the field of Religious Studies, along with the extra work load that accompanies both. The position of Religious Studies continues to be threatened within institutions. At the same time, religion remains a major aspect of culture, and it will continue to remain so. Universities must continue to take notice of this; they must continue to develop and dispense critical knowledge of this subject. This is the great crisis that confronts all of us, beyond linguistic differences.

5. Do you have any advice for junior scholars just beginning their university career?

I'm tempted to say no! Young people starting their careers today do so in a context very different from that which prevailed in the 1970s. The instabilities in the universities threatens the survival of our discipline. It's necessary to fight against that. If, then, I had to give a piece of advice, it would be this: Prepare yourselves for the battle. You must be better equipped than we were, more competent, more inventive, too...innovators.

But above all, you must be passionate! If what you're doing doesn't make you feel passionate about it, you should do something else!
At the recent congrés de l'Association canadienne-française pour l'avancement de la science (ACFAS) at the University of Sherbrooke, I met some graduate students who had organized an extremely interesting interdisciplinary colloquium entitled "Technoritualités : la religiosité rave." Now here's a group of graduate students interested in a contemporary cultural phenomenon which has been, up to this point, pretty much ignored in the university context, but which has a manifestly religious dimension. I was struck by the enthusiasm, the seriousness and the originality of these students, and I say to them: Bravo!
Religion remains a central phenomenon in our "secular" Western societies. It often assumes new faces which it's necessary to recognize, describe and analyze, and ultimately to situate among the multiple historical and contemporary manifestations of religion.

This is not to say that we need to abandon the more "classical" studies of religion. Of those that are the most familiar to me, the great manuscript discoveries of the twentieth century -- particularly those from Qumran and Nag Hammadi, or again, the discovery of new Manichaean manuscripts -- open for us extraordinary opportunities for research and will completely revise our ideas about the Ancient World, whether we work in Biblical Studies, Early Christianity, or the History of Religion in general. A great deal of work still remains to be done in our field, as well as in plenty of others.