Loading...

Harmonious Disagreement

Matteo Ricci and His Closest Chinese Friends

by Yu Liu (Author)
©2015 Monographs VII, 246 Pages
Series: Asian Thought and Culture, Volume 73

Summary

The fascinating story of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) changing himself while trying to change the religious faith of the Chinese has been told many times. As a Jesuit, Ricci pushed Christian evangelism by claiming a theistic affinity with Confucianism and by presenting himself as a defender of Confucian orthodoxy from Buddhism. Already in his day, Ricci’s unusual cultural adaptation was controversial; not surprisingly, scholarly studies have hitherto focused almost exclusively on variations of this controversy. Reacting mostly to Ricci’s account of events, this line of research has provided insight, but much more can be learned about the early-modern cross-cultural encounter of Europe and China if the perspective is broadened to include his intricate and intriguing relationships with his Chinese friends. With his distinctively different religiosity, personal charisma, and knowledge of European science and mathematics, Ricci impressed the social and cultural elite of late Ming China, many of whom befriended him and some of whom became Christian converts. However, between him and his Chinese friends there were always disagreements, resulting sometimes from a lack of understanding or misunderstanding, and sometimes even when they apparently understood each other perfectly. Followed closely as the investigative thread of this book, the many kinds of disagreement cast an unusual light on an otherwise long familiar subject and are instructive for the at times tense and even hostile, but in reality always mutually energizing relationship of both competition and complement between China and the West in the early twenty-first century.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author(s)/editor(s)
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgements
  • Introduction: The Useful Instructions of Disagreement
  • Journey to the Far East
  • Michele Ruggieri
  • Matteo Ricci
  • Chapter Outline
  • Chapter 1. Preparing the Ground for Evangelism: Matteo Ricci’s Terms of Endearment in Jiaoyou Lun
  • The Politics of Affection
  • The Popular Reception
  • The Distinct Lack of Distinction
  • The Implications of Rhetoric
  • The Divergent Expectation and Fulfilment
  • Chapter 2. Reading Theism into Confucianism: Matteo Ricci’s Ambiguous Alliance in Tianzhu Shiyi
  • Ruggieri’s Catechism
  • Ricci’s Revision
  • Harmonious Disagreement
  • The Tactical Maneuver
  • The Ambivalent Appreciation
  • The Surprising Directions of Change and Legacy
  • Chapter 3. Arousing Antagonism out of Buddhism: Matteo Ricci’s Deliberate Provocation in Tianzhu Shiyi
  • The All-out War
  • The Erstwhile Peace
  • The Calculated Change
  • The Gain and Loss
  • Measures of Cultural Understanding
  • Chapter 4. Making Use of Stoicism: Matteo Ricci’s Surprising Breakthrough in Ershiwu Yan
  • The Incongruent Mutual Appreciation
  • Epictetus and Adaptation
  • The Unexpected Triumph
  • The Secret of the Appeal
  • Chapter 5. The Ambiguity of Intimacy and Distance: The Exemplary Friendship of Qu Taisu
  • An Unusual Acquaintance
  • A Relationship of Mutual Satisfaction
  • A Skeleton in the Closet
  • Intimacy and Distance
  • Signs of Ideological Disagreement
  • Chapter 6. The Intricacies of Motivation and Benefit: The Catholic Faith of Xu Guangqi
  • Life before Baptism
  • The Complex Motivation
  • The Delicate Intimacy
  • The Ambiguous Benefit
  • Chapter 7. The Attractions of Science and Spirituality: The Independent Journey of Li Zhizao into Catholicism
  • Family History and the Fateful Encounter
  • The Limitations of Attraction
  • The Subdued Voice of Reservation
  • The Conversion
  • Science and Faith
  • Chapter 8. The Many Kinds of Acceptance and Rejection: The Ideological Commitment of Yang Tingyun
  • The Mingled Doctrinal Influences
  • The Different Degrees of Spiritual Openness
  • The Conversion
  • The Acceptance and Rejection
  • The Question of Faith
  • Conclusion: The Enduring Lesson of History
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
  • Series index

| ix →

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks go first to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Niagara County Community College in upstate New York for a research fellowship and a sabbatical leave in the 2006–2007 academic year and then to the Fulbright program and Niagara County Community College for a lecturing-research fellowship at the City University of Hong Kong and a sabbatical leave in the 2012–2013 academic year. The Guggenheim fellowship and the associated sabbatical leave helped to get this research project off the ground in 2007 and the Fulbright fellowship in Hong Kong and the associated sabbatical leave made it possible for much of the involved Chinese language research to be completed.

In the process of reading and thinking about various strands of ideas and their intricate and intriguing relationships with each other for this book project, I also received the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Fellowship at the University of Hawaii, Manoa and East West Center in 2010 and the support of short-term research fellowships at Peabody Essex Museum’s Phillips Library in 2008, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., in 2012 and 2013 and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library of the University of California at Los Angeles in 2008 and 2014. For the crucial support of these short-term fellowships, I would like to acknowledge my heart-felt gratitude. ← ix | x →

Many ideas of this book project were initially explored as parts of journal articles and then extensively revised in response. For the instructive and invaluable feedback from all the involved peer reviewers, usually anonymous, and editors in the process, I would like to extend my appreciation to Journal of World History, Journal of Religious History, Journal of the History of Ideas, Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal, History of Religions, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, and The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms.

Many individuals have encouraged and supported this book project. I would like to express my gratitude to all of them, but in particular to Professor Carol Jacobs of Yale University, Professor Joan Copjec of Brown University, and Professor Roger T. Ames of the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

During the research for this book project, I have used libraries in many places. To all the involved librarians, I would like to express my appreciation, but in particular to Barbara Melcher of Niagara County Community College who, as the interlibrary loan librarian, always went over and above her call of duty to help me gain access to crucially important books and journal articles.

At Peter Lang, Dr. Michelle Salyga as the acquisitions editor most skillfully guided me through the manuscript review process. An anonymous external reader for the press and the series editor Dr. Sandra A. Wawrytko made constructive comments on the original text and provided useful suggestions for the subsequent revision. Many other individuals at the press, particularly Jackie Pavlovic of the Production Team, helped to prepare the text for the actual publication. To all of them, I would like to express my sincere gratitude.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the love and support of my family, especially my wife Yang Yang who have always encouraged my research and patiently served as a crucially important sounding board for many of my ideas.

Yu Liu
Niagara County Community College, USA
August 10, 2015

| 1 →

INTRODUCTION

The Useful Instructions of Disagreement

The fascinating story of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) changing himself while trying to change the religious faith of the Chinese has been told many times.1 As a Jesuit, Ricci pushed Christian evangelism by claiming a monotheistic affinity with Confucianism and by presenting himself as a defender of Confucian orthodoxy from Buddhism. Already in his day, Ricci’s unusual cultural adaptation was controversial; not surprisingly scholarly studies have hitherto focused almost exclusively on variations of this controversy.2 Reacting mostly to Ricci’s account of events, this line of research has given us insight, but much more can be learned about the early modern cross-cultural encounter of Europe and China if the perspective is broadened to his Chinese friends whose relationship with him was both intricate and intriguing. With his distinctively different religiosity, personal charisma, and knowledge of European science and mathematics, Ricci impressed the social and cultural elite of late Ming China many of whom befriended him and some of whom became Christian converts. However, between him and his Chinese friends there were always disagreements, resulting sometimes from a lack of understanding or misunderstanding, but coming about sometimes even when he and they apparently understood each other perfectly. Followed closely as the investigative thread of this book, the many kinds of disagreement will yield an unusual light on an ← 1 | 2 → otherwise long familiar subject and will be instructive for the at times tense and even hostile but in reality always mutually energizing relationship of both competition and complement between China and the West in the early twenty-first century.

Journey to the Far East

From Europe Ricci was brought to China by two colossal events which began long before his birth and ended well after his death: the Portuguese and Spanish maritime explorations of Africa, America, and Asia, and the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation. In the fifteenth century several factors including the enduring enchantment of Marco Polo (1254–1324)’s Il Milione about “the vast population, riches, arts, and orderly civilization of CATHAY”3 motivated Prince Henry of Portugal (1394–1460) to venture beyond the protective confines of the Iberian Peninsula.4 After the fall of Constantinople to Mehmed II (1432–1481) in 1453, the traditional overland trade route to Asia was cut off by the rising Islamic Ottoman Empire, forcing Europe to search seriously for a sea-based alternative. Under the sponsorship of King Ferdinand II (1450–1516) and Queen Isabella (1451–1504) of Spain, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) crossed the Atlantic and landed in Central America in 1492. Sailing down the Atlantic coastal line of West Africa, Vasco da Gama (1460 or 1469–1524) of Portugal rounded the southern tip of the African continent at the Cape of Good Hope and reached India in 1498. The subsequent triumph of Alfonso de Albuquerque (1453–1515) at Malacca in 1511 opened China to Europe by sea. By 1557, the Portuguese had firmly established themselves in Macao and for nearly a century afterwards they exchanged Chinese silk and gold for Japanese silver and copper in an enormously profitable triangular trade between Guangzhou, Macao, and Nagasaki.5

Just as the military threat of the Islamic Ottoman Empire compelled Europe to look for a new maritime trading route to Asia, so the movement of things in the same direction was accelerated inexorably by the internal division of Western Christianity which started in 1517 when Martin Luther (1483–1546) posted his impassioned Ninety-Five Theses against the papal sale of indulgences. The much shaken Catholic Church rejected the doctrinal challenge of the Protestant Reformation, but implicitly acknowledged the reality of past abuses. Both during and after the Council of Trent (1545–1563), successive popes initiated efforts to reform the administration, training, and ← 2 | 3 → discipline of the clergy and to promote the spirituality of the laity and the propagation of faith everywhere in the world. In both of these enterprises, a prominent role was played by the Society of Jesus which was founded in 1540. Led in the first sixteen years by Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) who had what Dauril Alden aptly categorizes as “[the] vision of a uniquely activist organization,”6 the Jesuits became famous not only for their highly centralized organizational structure and their special allegiance to the pope in the field of Christian evangelism but also for their extraordinary emphasis on secular as well as sacred learning and their ready and eclectic utilization of European humanism in the preparation of those assigned to missionary work. Across Europe at first but soon in the New World and elsewhere as well, they set up schools, colleges, and universities many of which have continued their operation to this day.7

At his hometown which is about 180 miles northeast of Rome and about 10 miles east of the Adriatic coast and was the administrative capital of the papal Marches region renowned for agricultural produce, Ricci received his first formal schooling from Nicolò Serangeli, a secular priest from Siena. Serangeli joined the Society of Jesus and left town when Ricci was only seven years old. Ricci never talked about the impact Serangeli made on him, but he reportedly asked about his childhood schoolmaster in Beijing in 1608 and referred to Serangeli in one of his letters in 1599, both facts giving tangible support to the suggestion of a recent scholar that “[Ricci’s] desire to enter the Society of Jesus was motivated by a wish to follow in the steps of his first teacher.”8 After Serangeli, Ricci had all his formal education with the Jesuits except the years of 1568 to 1571 when he was a student of law at La Sapienza University in Rome.9 Between 1561 and 1566, he was one of the first pupils at a Macerata boarding school founded by the Jesuits in 1561. After going against the expectations of his biological father for a career in law and joining the ranks of Jesuit fathers in 1571, he enrolled in the Jesuit Roman College which taught him not only literature, rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, geography, and cartography but also dedication to and enthusiasm and pedagogical tools for far away missionary work. At the end of 1576 when he had just finished the third year of philosophy, he put in a written request (one of those letters which later came to be known as Indipetae) to be sent to the missions in Asia, a request that landed him first in India and then in China.

Ricci’s arrival in Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province on September 10, 1583 started the Jesuit China mission, but it did not mark the first presence of Christianity in the country. From Iran or Syria, a member of the Nestorian ← 3 | 4 → faith is known to have arrived in 635 in Chang’an (Xi’an), the capital city of the powerful and newly established Tang dynasty (618–907), and to have been welcomed by the Taizong emperor (599–649, r. 626–649) who considered his teaching as “useful to things and helpful to man and appropriate for practice throughout the country” (jiwu liren, yixing tianxia).10 With the acceptance or tolerance of the imperial court, that single Nestorian priest founded a church which grew and prospered for more than two hundred years, but since followers came almost exclusively from the shifting community of foreign nationals then in the country for trade or other temporary purposes, the enterprise collapsed completely in the mid ninth century after being impacted collaterally in 845 by one of the periodically occurring and usually politically motivated religious persecutions which in this case targeted Buddhism. In the thirteenth century, Christianity again gained a well-recorded foothold in China after the Mongols overran the Song dynasty (960–1279) and took over the control of the nation. Surviving members of the Nestorian Church in and around the northwestern border areas of the country and Franciscan missionaries from Europe are known to have worked at the imperial court of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), but they mingled only with the Mongolian elite and their influence effectively ended when the Mongols were defeated and driven out in 1368.

Details

Pages
VII, 246
Year
2015
ISBN (PDF)
9781453917312
ISBN (ePUB)
9781454199243
ISBN (MOBI)
9781454199236
ISBN (Hardcover)
9781433132414
DOI
10.3726/978-1-4539-1731-2
Language
English
Publication date
2016 (April)
Keywords
cross-cultural eary modern Buddihsm Evangelism jesuit
Published
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien, 2015. VII, 246 pp.

Biographical notes

Yu Liu (Author)

Yu Liu received his PhD in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo and is currently Professor of English at Niagara County Community College in Sanborn, New York. Dr. Liu is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship (2006–2007) and a Fulbright lecturing-research fellowship at the City University of Hong Kong (2012–2013). He is also the author of Poetics and Politics: The Revolutions of Wordsworth (1999) and Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal (2008).

Previous

Title: Harmonious Disagreement
book preview page numper 1
book preview page numper 2
book preview page numper 3
book preview page numper 4
book preview page numper 5
book preview page numper 6
book preview page numper 7
book preview page numper 8
book preview page numper 9
book preview page numper 10
book preview page numper 11
book preview page numper 12
book preview page numper 13
book preview page numper 14
book preview page numper 15
book preview page numper 16
book preview page numper 17
book preview page numper 18
book preview page numper 19
book preview page numper 20
book preview page numper 21
book preview page numper 22
book preview page numper 23
book preview page numper 24
book preview page numper 25
book preview page numper 26
book preview page numper 27
book preview page numper 28
book preview page numper 29
book preview page numper 30
book preview page numper 31
book preview page numper 32
book preview page numper 33
book preview page numper 34
book preview page numper 35
book preview page numper 36
book preview page numper 37
book preview page numper 38
book preview page numper 39
book preview page numper 40
259 pages