THE JESUIT MISSION IN CHINA:
THE IMPACT OF THE WEST ON CHINA
AND CHINA’S
IMPACT ON THE WEST
Final Project
ISCL 742
The History of Christianity
in Missiological Perspective
Presented to
Dr. Donald E. Douglas,
Ph.D.
School of Intercultural Studies
Biola
University
by Timothy P. Grove
20
December 2005
There
has been direct, though sporadic, contact between Europe and China since very
early times. The Greeks and Romans
came to realize that another great empire existed far to the east, and referred
to the Chinese as Seres (from this
was derived the word serica, meaning
silk garments). There were several
Roman embassies to China during the first and second centuries A.D. These expeditions proceeded by way of
the Red Sea to the eastern coast of India, and then passed overland through
Burma into Yunnan and thence to China.
These embassies yielded little—apparently the Chinese viewed the Roman
ambassadors as merely the representatives of one more petty western kingdom,
failing to recognize the existence of a powerful western empire, or to realize
the potential importance of cultivating ties with the West. Meanwhile, the Silk Road developed as
an important trade route between China and the Near East, and there is an
account of an attempt by some Chinese silk-weavers to introduce silk
cultivation in the Eastern Empire during the reign of Justinian (Leibniz). Cosmas Indicopleustes, in his Topographia Christiana (c547) gave China
the more correct name Tzin—clear
evidence of some degree of actual communication with that distant empire
(Leibniz). Nothing further came of
this, however, and there was no further direct contact between China and Europe
until the 13th century, although Chinese goods continued to pass
westward over the Silk Road.
Meanwhile, in 635 A.D., Nestorian
missionaries led by A-lo-pen, a Syrian, established themselves in China. This important mission had considerable
success, as commemorated by the Nestorian Monument of 781 A.D. The downfall of the Nestorian mission
came swiftly, however, when in 845 the Taoist Emperor Wu Tsung proscribed
Buddhism and Christianity as well, noting that there were then “3000 monks from
Ta-ch’in [Syria] and Mu-hu-po” [Mesopotamia?] (Neill 1990: 96). Christianity had virtually disappeared
by the end of the 10th century, though some Nestorian Christians
remained here and there, especially along the Silk Road.
The Mongol Conquest of China
brought Christianity again into prominence, since a number of the Mongol tribes
and several important Mongol generals were Nestorian Christians. Hearing of this, the Catholic church
made its first attempts to extend its influence to China. John of Monte Corvino, a Franciscan,
arrived in Beijing in 1294 and served as Archbishop of Beijing from1308 until
his death in 1328. He had papal
permission to celebrate mass and other sacraments in the Mongol language. He claimed to have baptized 6,400
converts by 1305, though the progress of his work was slowed by conflict with
the Nestorians (Camps 1995). A
number of friars from Europe visited Mongolia and China in those days,
including William de Rubruquis and Odoric of Pordenone, both of whom left
written accounts of their travels.
John of Monte Corvino died without an immediate
successor. Eventually, in response
to an embassy of Chinese Christians, at least two later archbishops were
appointed: Nicholas (1338) and
William of Prato (1370). Very
little is known of these men, though Matteo Ricci found evidence that they had
actually arrived in China. With
the overthrow of the Yuan dynasty (1368), the Ming rulers sought to eliminate
all foreign influences, including Christianity. A few Christians remained, but Christianity virtually
disappeared, for the second time, from Chinese consciousness (Camps 1995). Ricci came across a few Nestorian
families in Nanjing and elsewhere in central China. However, “the only traces of Christianity among most of them
were that they seemed to have some knowledge of the psalter and they ate pork,
over which they made the sign of the cross” (Spence 1984: 119).
Travel
between China and Europe was extremely difficult, dangerous, and expensive—the
trip took two years, and may be compared to traveling to the Moon in our own
day. Because of the immense
geographical separation between China and Europe, the two cultures developed in
complete isolation from each other.
When contact between East and West became more frequent, the reports of
travelers to China occasioned great excitement in Europe: these were accounts of a highly
developed yet completely alien civilization, amounting almost to news from
another world.
These
contacts eventually had a number of important influences on European thought,
including Christian theology, philosophy, linguistics, history, and political
science. Because of China’s
cultural isolationism, the influence of Europe on China was less noticeable,
though the importance of European technological advances was widely recognized
in China before 1700. By far the
most important factor in the early cultural exchanges between China and the
West was the Jesuit presence in China, beginning in 1554 and continuing until
the suppression of the Order in 1773.
In 1567, the Jesuit Juan Bautista
Ribeira had tried unsuccessfully to convert the Chinese in the region of Macao,
and concluded that “there is no hope of converting them, unless one has
recourse to force and unless they give way before the soldiers.” Another
unsuccessful Jesuit missionary, Melchior Nunes Barreto, wrote a letter urging
Christian rulers to “force the sovereign of China to grant to the missionaries
the right to preach and to the natives the right to hear the truth.” According to the Franciscan
missionary Alfaro, “With or without soldiers, to wish to enter China is to
attempt to reach the moon” (Dunne 1962: 16-17).
Alessandro Valignano, who arrived
in Macao in 1577 as superior of all the Jesuit missions in the Far East,
favored an entirely different approach:
“The only possible way to penetration will be utterly different from
that which has been adopted up to now in all the other missions in these
countries” (Dunne 1962: 17). The
new approach which Valignano advocated has generally been called accommodation,
and this approach characterized the Jesuit mission in China for more than a
century, until papal intervention put an end to it. The Jesuit Michele Ruggeri expressed the Order’s willingness
to adapt in a famous sentence:
“Siamo fatti Cini ut Christo Sinas
lucrifaciamus” (“Let us become Chinese so that we may win the Chinese to
Christ”) (Criveller 1997: 36). The
long-term results of this policy of cultural accommodation, and the degree to
which the Jesuits might have succeeded in converting China to Christianity had
they been allowed to pursue their policy without interference, will never be
known. Nevertheless, their work in
China remains one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of Christian
missions.
Ricci, Schall, and Verbiest
The
most famous of the Jesuit missionaries to China were Matteo Ricci (1552-1610),
Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1591-1666), and Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688).
Ricci, known in Chinese as Li Ma-tou, was a native of
Macerata in the Papal States. He
arrived in Macao in 1582 and quickly set about mastering the Chinese
language. Ricci was a student of
the Renaissance ars memorativa, the
training of the memory through the use of mnemonic systems. On one occasion in 1595, he
demonstrated his ability by reading over a list of over 400 random Chinese characters,
then repeating the list in reverse.
In this way, he succeeded in mastering the Chinese writing system and
committing the Confucian Classics to memory. Spence notes that Francesco Panigarola, who may have tutored
Ricci in these methods, was able to remember 100,000 specific items of
information (Spence 1984).
“After his entry into China, Ricci
became a Chinese with the Chinese.
He adopted Chinese manners, diet, sleep patterns, and clothing, down to
cuffs, belt, sash, hat, and colors.
He gave up grape wine for rice wine, no small matter for an Italian”
(Sebes 1988: 42). The purpose of
this quiet infiltration of Chinese society was to convert the ruling class, and
ultimately the Chinese emperor.
Ricci felt that if this could be accomplished, the conversion of the
entire Chinese nation was assured.
The open proclamation of the Gospel might jeopardize this plan. "I do not think that we shall
establish a church," Ricci wrote in 1596, "but instead a room for
discussion and we will say Mass privately . . . because one proceeds more
effectively and with greater fruit here through conversations than through
formal sermons” (Dunne 1962: 46).
Again in 1598 he wrote, "The hour had not yet arrived to begin preaching
here the holy Gospel” (Dunne 1962: 55).
In 1601, Ricci was finally
successful in obtaining permission to live in Peking. He presented two chiming clocks to the Chinese emperor, and
was requested to adjust and maintain them in the future. He was well received
because of his mastery of the Chinese language in both its spoken and written
forms, so remarkable in a foreigner.
Ricci also impressed the Chinese with his knowledge of mathematics and
astronomy, and by displaying an accurate world-map, drawn with China in the
center. He succeeded in making
several influential Chinese converts, including Xu Ganggi, the most powerful
official at the Chinese court. The
Ming History states: "Those who
came from the West were intelligent and were men of great capacity. Their only purpose was to preach
religion, with no desire for government honors or for material gain. For this reason those who were given to
novelties were greatly attracted to them” (Chan 1988: 160).
Ricci soon had to confront the
problem of how to deal with the Confucianism which pervaded Chinese society
from top to bottom. Unlike
Buddhism, which was early identified as fundamentally opposed to Christianity,
Confucianism's specifically religious teachings were only implicit. This made Confucianism less readily
identifiable as a pagan religion, and suggested to Ricci and others that some
kind of compromise might be workable.
Ricci believed that Christianity
and Confucianism (in its "original", not its Neo-Confucian form)
could be reconciled to stand against Buddhism and Taoism. He obtained a good grasp of
Neo-Confucian metaphysics so that he could argue for an interpretation of
Confucianism which could be reconciled with Christianity. Thus, he used passages in the Confucian
classics to demonstrate the immortality of the soul and the existence of
hell.
In his approach to ethics, Ricci
tried to show the parallels between Confucianism and Christianity. For example, he related the concept of hsiao (filial piety) to the Ten
Commandments, and noted the similarity between Confucius' version of the Golden
Rule and Jesus' teaching in Matthew 7:12.
He also sought to show how the Confucian values of pao (reciprocity) and te
(personal virtues) could be incorporated into Christianity. Ricci
believed there was no essential contradiction between the two systems of
thought, but that the ethical teachings of Confucianism could be supplemented
and perfected by those of Christianity.
Thus, while Confucius taught that the expression of love should be
differentiated in accordance with its object, Christianity taught universal
love for all men.
Ricci's understanding of and
respect for Confucian ethical teachings won him many admirers among the
educated Chinese. At the same
time, he did not hesitate to attack Chinese practices which could not be reconciled
with Christian ethics. He was
outspoken in his condemnation of homosexuality (widely practiced among the
educated elite in Ming times), and he insisted that converts dismiss their
concubines before he would consent to baptize them.
Ricci
believed that he had found evidence in the Confucian classics that the ancient
Chinese had once known and venerated the God of the Bible, to whom the classics
referred as Shang-ti ("The Lord
on High") or T'ien
("Heaven"). He claimed
that the Chinese were a branch of the people of Judaea who had migrated to the
East in ancient times. Ricci
assured the Chinese that all of their ancient sages had been believers in the
One God and hence were in Heaven, but that subsequent generations had forgotten
God's existence.
Ricci wrote numerous books in
Chinese, including Ki ho yuen pen
(“Principles of Geometry”), which was a translation of Euclid’s Elements, and Si kouo ki fa (“Art of Artificial Memory”), in which he presented
his ars memorativa to the Chinese
(Pfister).
Ricci was a real Renaissance Man. His treatise De
Amicitia (Chiao yu lun, 1601), which was modeled on a similar work of
Cicero, proved extremely popular among the Chinese. Ricci’s T’ien tchou
che i (De Deo vera ratio), a treatise on metaphysics, and Ki jen che p’ien (“The ten paradoxes”),
a set of dialogues, were widely read by the educated Chinese of his day (Pfister).
Still, according to Jacques Gernet,
Ricci’s philosophical assumptions ultimately worked against the success of the
Jesuit mission, since his cosmology was “pre-Copernican and mediaeval,” and his
Aristotelian and Ptolemaic view of the universe as closed and finite was at
odds with Chinese cosmology (Mungello 1989: 66). The form of learning which the Jesuits brought to China was
thoroughly Aristotelian in its emphasis on systematization and logic and its
dependence on authority and neglect of empirical investigation (Mungello 1989).
Ricci’s account of China, De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas,
was published in Europe in 1615.
This work was enormously influential, and had been translated into six
European languages by 1625 (Mungello 1989).
Ricci and other Jesuits entered
China with the intention of spending the rest of their lives there. In many cases, they were profoundly
changed by “the power of Chinese culture to sinify foreigners” (Mungello 1989:
49). Ricci, for example, came to
praise Chinese as more concise and elegant than Latin, and also developed great
respect for Confucius. “Indeed,”
he wrote, “if we critically examine [Confucius’] actions and sayings as they
are recorded in history, we shall be forced to admit that he was the equal of
the pagan philosophers and superior to most of them” (Mungello 1989: 57). In later years, the Confucian classics
were routinely used by the Jesuits as a means of language acquisition.
So
great was Ricci's admiration for Confucianism that he came to believe that the
teachings of Confucius should be incorporated into Christian ethics. "Ricci's Chinese writings suggest
he had become a convert to Confucianism in the process of teaching
Christianity" (Young 1980: 43).
The Jesuits adopted a policy of
accommodation to the state cult of Confucianism, but of opposition to Buddhism,
which was seen as incompatible with Christianity. The Chinese phrase buru
yifo (“supplement Confucianism, replace Buddhism”) was repeatedly used to
summarize this strategy (Wills 1994).
In their learned discussions with Confucian intellectuals, Ricci and his
successors proposed an approach to metaphysical inquiry through gewu (“investigation of things”—this was
the mathematical, astronomical, geographical and engineering science which so
impressed the Chinese), qiongli (“fathoming
principles”), and finally zhitian
(“knowing God”). Thus, the success
of the Jesuits in scientific pursuits would result in greater openness to the
claims of Christianity (Standaert 1994).
By 1640, the Jesuits had converted fifty palace women, forty eunuchs,
and over one hundred other members of the imperial court (Spence 1969).
Adam Schall (T’ang Jo-wang), a native of Cologne, arrived in Beijing in 1622,
and soon distinguished himself by accurately predicting an eclipse of the moon
on October 8, 1623 (Attwater 1963).
Schall and his assistants were placed in charge of a reform of the
Chinese calendar. They presented a
telescope and an armillary sphere to the emperor, and were permitted to set
these up in the Forbidden City.
They also impressed the emperor by their accurate prediction of eclipses
of both the sun and moon in January 1638.
The
Manchu invasion and the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644 could have jeopardized
the success of the Jesuit mission, but Schall made a formal petition to the
emperor, demonstrating the western method of calculating an eclipse of the sun
for September 1st of that year (Spence 1969). The details of Schall’s calculations
were confirmed precisely when the eclipse occurred, and in the end Adam Schall
became a close confidante of the new emperor, Shun-chih, who called him Ma-fa (“honorable father” in Manchu),
granted him unlimited access to his presence, and allowed him to dispense with
the k’ou-t’ou (Väth 1933). It is
interesting to note that from this time on, the Jesuits faced the challenge of
learning Manchu as well as Chinese!
In 1645, the emperor appointed
Schall director of the Bureau of Astronomy. Schall accepted this position with some reluctance, since
the Bureau of Astronomy was a division of the Bureau of Rites and existed for
the purpose of forecasting auspicious and inauspicious days and times. In addition, its responsibilities
included the publication not only of the official Calendar, but also the
so-called “Yellow Calendar” (from the color of its covers) which purveyed
information pertinent to Chinese astrology and superstitious beliefs,
apportioning the days and months of the year to twenty good or evil spirits,
and associating ten other spirits with their habitation of rooms in houses and
parts of the body (Väth 1933). The Yellow Calendar was published with the
signature of the director of the Bureau of Astronomy, and there was some
question as to whether Schall ought to ascribe his name to such a document, in
which superstition played so large a part. In addition, Schall’s duties included astrological weather
forecasting (in the tradition of the Farmer’s
Almanac), and the practice of geomancy. This ancient Chinese practice involved divining the hidden
location of such things as “white tigers” and “green dragons” within the earth,
with a view to choosing the best locations for buildings and tombs, as well as
selecting the proper days to begin their construction (Väth 1933).
Since Schall himself was not
directly involved in any of these practices, he determined that scruples about
them were of little weight when compared to the importance of his position for
the continued success of the Jesuit mission in China. However,
in 1649 two of his assistants, Gabriel de Magalhães
and Luigi Buglio, denounced him to his Jesuit superiors for his involvement in
promoting superstitious practices.
Schall defended himself in a letter to the general of the Society
(1652), in which he denied the charge that the Bureau of Astronomy was in
effect practicing divination, although he admitted that “we do attribute to the
stars a certain influence on human actions; we seek to expound celestial
phenomena; we mention the names of spirits in the calendar, but in all this we
pay every regard to God” (Attwater 1963: 137-138). In his defense, Schall noted the example of the Magi who
followed a star to find the infant Jesus and the eclipse which occurred when He
was crucified; Schall also argued that the western use of Mercury, Venus, Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn to designate planets was just as much an “invocation of
spirits” as the examples found in the Yellow Calendar. After much deliberation,
the Society finally decided in Schall’s favor in 1664.
Like most educated people of his
time, including Galileo, Kepler, Melancthon, and Leibniz, Schall was a believer
in astrology. This belief was
strongly supported by Aquinas himself, who wrote that “The stars influence the
bodies of men and thus their temperaments, which are affected by their bodily
constitution. … At the time of birth this influence is especially strong, which
is why a largely accurate horoscope may then be cast of the course of this or that
human life” (Attwater 1963: 138).
Schall was also a believer in mundane astrology, which seeks to
associate signs in the heavens with political events. He believed that the comets he had observed in Goa in 1618,
on his way to China, had portended disaster for the German, Chinese, and Mogul
empires, as well as the death of Gustavus Adolphus (Väth 1933).
Schall is frequently depicted in Chinese dress, with
the emblem of a crane embroidered across the front of his tunic. One of his most interesting innovations
was to change the measurement of the ecliptic circle from 365 and a quarter
degrees (the Chinese practice, corresponding to the length of the year) to 360
degrees (Väth 1933).
Ferdinand Verbiest (Nan Huai-ren), was born at Pitthem, a
village near Courtrai. He arrived at Macao in 1659 at the age of 35. Verbiest
was educated at the University of Louvain, where his course of study included
astronomy and mathematics. He
arrived in Beijing in 1660 and soon became Schall’s assistant. In competition with Chinese
astronomers, he repeatedly demonstrated the superiority of western methods in
predicting the time of eclipses.
The success of Schall and Verbiest in astronomy and
in rectifying the calendar led to invidious attacks on him from other
officials. In 1664, in a report to
the Board of Rites, one Yang Guangxian made serious charges against him: “Adam Schall dodged and hid in the
court for the purpose of stealing secret information under the cover of
compiling the calendar. The
missionaries ganged up and were hatching a sinister plot. That is why they are building churches
in the capital and other important cities and promulgate their doctrines to
tempt people. Their activities
have violated our law and must be condemned” (Xi Zezong 1994: 187). “The Westerner Adam Schall was a
posthumous follower of Jesus, who had been the ringleader of the treacherous
bandits of the Kingdom of Judea.
In the Ming dynasty he came to Peking secretly, and posed as a calendar-maker
in order to carry on the propagation of heresy. He engaged in spying out the secrets of our court. … During
the last twenty years [the Westerners] have won over one million disciples who
have spread throughout the Empire. … If we do not eradicate them soon, then we
ourselves rear a tiger that will lead us to future disaster” (Spence 1969:
21).
Schall, Verbiest, and their Jesuit
associates were imprisoned and placed on trial in 1665. During one phase of the trial, Verbiest
was ordered to predict the exact time of a coming eclipse, and Chinese and
Muslim astronomers were ordered to do the same. Verbiest, with help from Schall, was nearly precise in his
prediction, while the others were off by thirty minutes or more (Spence 1969). Although the official list of charges
was patently ridiculous, including the failure of Schall’s Bureau of Astronomy
to choose the correct day for a ceremony honoring the emperor’s youngest son,
Schall and twelve Chinese officials of the Bureau of Astronomy were sentenced
to death by dismemberment. It was
also decreed that all Christian missionaries should be deported from China and
the Christian religion proscribed.
However, on the following day, a meeting of the regents to ratify this
sentence was interrupted by a strong earthquake, and shortly thereafter a comet
appeared in the sky. The Chinese,
perhaps correctly, interpreted this as a sign of divine displeasure, and
although five of the Chinese officials were executed, Schall and the other
missionaries were released.
Schall, already seriously ill, died in 1666. His gravestone, still extant in 1900 but destroyed during
the Boxer Rebellion, was inscribed in both Chinese and Manchu (Väth 1933).
Schall’s accuser, Yang Guangxian,
was made head of the Bureau of Astronomy, but his incompetence soon became
clear, and in 1669 the emperor released Ferdinand Verbiest from house arrest
and placed him in charge (Xi Zezong 1994)
Verbiest was appointed a mandarin (scholar-official) in 1674.
Verbiest personally tutored the
emperor in western mathematics and astronomy for two years, and saw him make
great progress. Verbiest and the
emperor became great friends, and he accompanied the emperor on two visits to
Tartary (Mongolia and Manchuria) in 1682 and 1683 (Orléans
1854). Verbiest also taught the
emperor painting and music.
During one of the expeditions to
Tartary, Verbiest gave the emperor an astronomy lesson: “As the night was fair, and the Heavens
very clear, he willed me to name in the Chinese and European languages, all the
constellations that then appeared above the horizon, and he himself first named
all those he already knew” (Lach 1993: 1709). The two had many conversations about Christianity, in which
the emperor often asked difficult questions, such as why God had not simply
forgiven the sins of the world, rather than having His Son die; or how the
flood of Noah could have been universally destructive, when the Chinese account
of the flood said that those on the plains drowned, while those who escaped to
the mountains survived (Lin Jinshui 1994).
Verbiest distinguished himself
above all as a mechanical engineer.
By 1673 he had completed six bronze astronomical instruments, which were
installed in the Beijing observatory.
These included a celestial globe locating the positions of 1,888
individual stars, which was accompanied by a printed star catalogue, two
armillary spheres (one ecliptic and one equatorial), a horizon circle, a
quadrant, and a sextant (previously unknown in China) (Xi Zezong 1994). He also prepared a Chinese version of a
recent European map of the world, modified so as to place China in the middle
(Foss1988).
In 1674, when the Sanfan Rebellion
broke out, Verbiest was ordered to make cannons for the army. He supervised the casting of nearly 500
of these, and held a public demonstration of their effectiveness. When each gun was finished, it was
engraved with the name of a Christian saint, and Verbiest would sprinkle it
with holy water and pray for the success of the emperor’s army (Lin Jinshui
1994). These cannons were later
used against the Russian fortress of Albazin on the Amur (1685-86).
Perhaps most remarkable was
Verbiest’s construction in 1665 of a steamboat and of a wooden “automotive
machine” powered by a steam turbine.
He drove this machine around in circles inside the large rooms of the
palace. Although these experiments
led to no widespread practical applications, they antedate the first European
devices of their kind by more than 100 years! (Scheel 1994).
Verbiest also acted as a diplomat
and interpreter in negotiations with the Russian embassy to Beijing in
1676. Later generations of Chinese
historians have portrayed him as a spy or double agent because of the
information about China which he communicated to the Russian ambassador, N.G.M.
Spathary. Apparently Verbiest’s
helpfulness to the Russians was motivated by his desire to secure an overland
route through Russia for future Jesuit missionaries (Heyndrickx 1994). Leibniz also dreamed of the opening of
a land route to China, leading to more regular communication between learned men
in China and Europe. After the
Sino-Russian treaty of Nerchinsk (1689), he had high hopes that this might
actually occur, and in his Novissima
Sinica (1697) Leibniz urged Protestants to dispatch missionaries to China
(Wiener 1973).
In gratitude to Verbiest and at his
request, Kangxi made a proclamation in 1687 guaranteeing the free exercise of
the Christian religion throughout his empire, with priests being permitted to
travel freely under Verbiest’s seal.
Verbiest died the following year, but after some negotiation the Jesuits
were able to obtain a new edict of toleration (1692) (Lin Jinshui 1994).
The
details of Verbiest’s work in China were made known to Europeans through the
publication of his Astronomia europaea
sub imperatore tartaro-sinico Cam Hy apellato (1687).
“It was a star that long ago
led the Three Kings to adore the True God,” Verbiest wrote, “In the same way
the science of the stars will lead the rulers of the Orient, little by little,
to know and to adore their Lord” (Spence 1969: 33).
Beginning with Ricci, the
Jesuits had recognized the value of astronomy as a means of gaining the respect
of the Chinese. Rulings by the
Church in 1616 and 1633 condemned heliocentrism as erroneous, despite the fact
that the heliocentric view was becoming increasingly necessary to make sense of
astronomical phenomena. Thus, the
Jesuits were forbidden by the Church to teach heliocentrism in China; as a
compromise, they introduced the theory of Tycho Brahe, by which the sun is
described as revolving around the earth, while the remaining planets are in
orbit around the sun.
The Copernican (heliocentric)
view was finally introduced to China by the Jesuit Michel Benoist (Chiang Yu-jen) in 1760, three years
after Copernicus’ De revolutionibus
was removed from the Index (Mungello 1989).
The Polish Jesuit Michael Boym
devoted himself to botany and materia medica. His botanical expeditions to various parts of China and
Southeast Asia were reported in two important and influential works: Flora
sinensis (1656) and Specimen
medicinae sinicae (1682). One
of his more interesting discoveries was that certain plants brought from the
Americas during the 16th century had acclimated themselves to
southern China and were flourishing there in his day (Lach 1993: 1681).
The Jesuits were guilty of a
certain amount of deliberate misrepresentation, or propagandizing, in their
presentation of the Christian West to the Chinese. In their descriptions of Europe, they maintained that an
ideal society had existed there since the beginning of the Christian era. Giulio Aleni claimed that “All European
states, large or small, from their kings to the common people, adhere to
Catholicism, no heterodox doctrine being allowed in their midst” (Chen Minsun
1994: 131), and Ricci would have the Chinese believe that “there had been no
war and no strife among the thirty states of Europe for one thousand six
hundred years” (Chen Minsun 1994: 130).
Another example of this is the story Ricci told the Chinese in an effort
to discredit Buddhism: “When we
examine Chinese history we find that Emperor Ming of the Han dynasty had heard
of these events [the ministry and miracles of Christ] and sent ambassadors on a
mission to the West to search for canonical writings. Midway these ambassadors mistakenly took India to be their
goal, and returned to China with Buddhist scriptures which were then circulated
throughout the nation. From then
until now the people of your esteemed country have been deceived and misled”
[!] (Criveller 1997: 111).
Aleni’s
Tianzhu Jiangsheng Yanxing Jilüe (the Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ) was
published in 1635, with an accompanying volume of pictures published two years
later. This work contains numerous
interesting adaptations of the Gospel for a Chinese audience. For example, when Jesus went out to
pray, he was said to “practice the exercise of meditation” (Criveller 1997:
207). In the account of the six
brothers who married the same woman (Matthew 22), Aleni omits the fact that the
men were brothers. When Jesus is
sent to Herod, Aleni says that the soldiers dressed Him in “a long white
cloak,” white being the color of mourning in China (Criveller 1997: 208). In Luke 9, in the case of the man who
wanted to bury his father and the man who wanted to say goodbye to his parents,
Aleni has “let me first go to bury my dead relative” and “let me first go home
and finish my work” (Criveller 1997: 219). This is a recognition of the importance of the concept
of filial piety, which required a three-year period of mourning for one’s father,
including retirement from all public activity. On the same theme, Aleni gives an account of Jesus’
childhood: “Afterwards for18
years, He lived in Nazareth. He
respected the Holy Mother and Joseph, establishing an example of filial piety
for humankind” (Criveller 1997: 220).
Aleni also includes some Catholic legends: a pagan temple in Rome is reported to have collapsed on the
occasion of Jesus’ birth, and Calvary is identified as the same place where
Abraham offered to sacrifice Isaac, as well as being the site of Adam’s tomb
(Criveller 1997).
The Chinese Rites Controversy
The Chinese Rites controversy began
in 1643, when the Dominican Juan Bautista Morales brought formal charges
against the Jesuits, and concluded in 1742, when Benedict XIV issued the bull Ex quo singulari, prohibiting Christians
from observing the Confucian rites, imposing an oath of observance on all
missionaries in China, and forbidding all future discussion of the matter.
At issue was whether Confucianism
was a pagan religion, a theistic moral philosophy compatible with Christianity,
or an atheistic philosophy incompatible with Christianity (Lach 1993). The first view was held by the
Dominicans and Franciscans; the Jesuits held the second view of Confucianism as
they supposed it to have existed in its original form, while admitting that the
Neo-Confucian beliefs of the Chinese intelligentsia in later times were
essentially atheistic.
The
conflict between the Jesuits and the Mendicant Orders (Franciscans and
Dominicans) had its basis in the orders’ conflicting approaches to ethical
decisions, which had their origin in the casuistic approach to morality and the
manuals of moal theology which arose during the 17th century. The Jesuits espoused probabilism, “the
doctrine that in matters of conscience where authorities differ, the opinion
favoring greater liberty may be followed, provided it is solidly probable”
(Criveller 1997: 18). The
Dominicans, on the other hand, espoused probabiliorism, which meant that in
making ethical decisions it was best to err on the side of caution. They accused the Jesuits of having
created “a set of rules for evading the rules, and rejected anything which was
founded on a probabilist basis, including the accommodationist approach of the
Jesuit mission in China (Criveller 1997).
Another
important difference between the Jesuits and the Mendicant orders was that the
Jesuits believed the best approach to the conversion of China would be
conversion from the top. Thus, it
was always their goal to recommend themselves to the educated classes. Adam Schall “endeavored to live like a
Confucian official. He worked hard
at the Chinese language, studied the Confucian Classics, wore the long robes of
the Chinese scholar, and lived in considerable style” (Spence 1969: 14). The Franciscans and Dominicans, by
contrast, directed their efforts toward the poor, in the belief that they were
following the example of Christ in doing so.
A
very important issue which arose in China was the question of the salvation or
damnation of the ancient Chinese, including Confucius. The Jesuits espoused the axiom of St.
Thomas Aquinas that “to one who does what lies in his power, God does not deny
grace” (Criveller 1997: 26). The
Franciscans, of course, did not hesitate to proclaim that Confucius and all
others who had died without knowledge of Christianity were in hell.
Among
the specific charges made against the Jesuits were that they refused to say
that Confucius was in hell, that they hid the Crucifix from public view, and
that they refrained from mentioning the Passion and death of Christ. They were also criticized for their
adoption of Chinese dress, permitting themselves to be carried about in
sedan-chairs, making loans for interest, and engaging in scientific work
(Criveller 1997).
Francesco Furtado, Vice Superior of
the Jesuits in China, “admitted that the Jesuits did not give wide public
display to the Crucifixion. They
wanted to avoid the danger of exposing the Christian doctrine of Crucifixion to
ridicule, or letting the Cross be assimilated to a Taoist charm” (Criveller
1997: 82). To this, Friar Domingo
Navarrete responded that “we do not say that they do not preach the Crucified
Christ, but that they reveal him very late” (Criveller 1997: 83). This has to do with the Jesuit policy
of arcana, by which various
doctrines, sacraments, and other practices which might potentially give offense
to the Chinese were deliberately concealed from the public and only gradually
revealed to catechumens. The Franciscans,
by contrast, believed that all the doctrines of Christianity should be preached
openly, without dissembling. One
friar customarily held up the crucifix during the preaching of the Gospel.
Origen (185-254) had taught that “each nation should
call God by the name designated to its highest and most esteemed being”
(Collani 1994: 461). What this
designation should be in Chinese was hotly debated among the Jesuits, beginning
at a conference at Macao in 1621 (Attwater 1963). Perhaps the most tragic aspect of the Chinese Rites
Controversy was that the needless dispute over names for God ultimately
resulted in the loss of imperial favor.
The emperor Kangxi had presented the Jesuits with
tablets inscribed with the Chinese characters jing tian (“worship heaven”), and these were displayed in their
church in Beijing. However,
despite the testimony of numerous Chinese scholars that jing tian and jing tianzhu
(“worship the Lord of heaven”) were synonymous terms, Charles Maigrot, the
Vicar Apostolicus of Fujian, believed that the emperor’s phrase referred to the
material heavens and hence was an exhortation to idolatry. Maigrot proceeded to remove the
tablets, which had amounted to an edict of imperial toleration of Christianity,
from their place in the church, causing “a great tumult among the Christians”
(Collani 1994: 468).
On August 2, 1706, the Emperor met personally with
Maigrot, and asked him, “What are your objections to the characters jing tian?” Maigrot replied, “Tian
does not mean the Lord of Heaven.”
“I am very surprised at you,” said the emperor, “Did I not already state
that tian is a much better expression
for the Lord of Heaven than tianzhu?” He went on to argue that “the true
meaning of Chinese words does not always coincide with their literal meaning”
(Collani 1994: 467).
At one point, the emperor, disgusted by Maigrot's
poor spoken Chinese, asked him to interpret four Chinese characters written on
a scroll hanging behind the throne.
Maigrot was able to read only one of them; moreover, he was unable to recognize
Matteo Ricci's Chinese name in written form, and admitted that he was
unfamiliar with Ricci's T'ien-chu shih-i (which
all educated Chinese had read).
The emperor warned Maigrot against any interference with the Chinese
rites and dismissed him from court, expressing his astonishment "that such
dunces should claim to decide the meaning of texts and ceremonies of several
thousand years' antiquity" (Cronin 1955: 282).
The emperor subsequently interviewed one of
Maigrot’s teachers of Chinese, the Christian Jiang Weibiao (Xaverius), who
stated, “I have been with Maigrot for two years and have explained Chinese
books to him. But he stubbornly
stuck to a different European interpretation” (Collani 1994: 468).
This stubbornness had its final consequence on March
19, 1715, when the papal bull Ex illa die
forbade the practice of the Confucian rites by Christians, and specifically
forbade the use of the phrase jing tian. This effectively ended the successful
Jesuit mission in China (Collani 1994).
Tianzhu, by the way, is still
the designation for God used by Chinese Catholics.
It should be noted that not all Chinese shared the
emperor’s views on the interchangeability of these terms. As one Chinese official wrote in 1620,
[The missionaries] “take the Chinese ‘Heaven’ and misleadingly compare it with
their ‘Lord of Heaven,’ who mysteriously dwelt in this world as an immortal and
has published a sacred book, so wild is their imagining” (Criveller 1997: 376).
One
consequence of the Church’s position on these matters was that the Jesuits were
no longer permitted to accept the title of mandarin (scholar-official), as
Schall, Verbiest, and several others had done. By forbidding this, the Church dealt a very serious blow to
the Jesuit strategy to convert the Chinese educated classes.
Five French Jesuits, Joachim
Bouvet, Jean de Fontaney, Jean-Francois Gerbillon, Guy Tachard, and Claude de
Visdelou, arrived in Beijing just ten days after Verbiest’s death (1688). Since
they were trained in astronomy, they were able to continue his work (Witek
1994:18). Bouvet later
corresponded with Leibniz, providing him with much useful first-hand
information.
In
1709, in response to the emperor’s request to provide and accurate and detailed
atlas of the Chinese empire, the Jesuits changed their emphasis from astronomy
to cartography. They began by
surveying Manchuria, and the emperor was so impressed with the results that he
employed three separate groups of Jesuit surveyors on the project. Every province of China had been mapped
by the end of 1715, and the completed atlas was presented to the emperor in
1718. There were about 120 Jesuits
working in China at that time, and an estimated 300,000 Chinese Catholics (Foss
1988).
Jesuits continued to hold the
position of director of the Bureau of Astronomy until the suppression of the
order in 1773 (Pfister).
The Influence of China on European Thought
The Chinese Rites controversy was
an important factor in contributing to European consciousness of China, having
“given rise in the minds of everyone to a desire to know China” (Etienne de
Silhouette, Idée générale du gouvernement
… des Chinois, 1729, quoted in Wiener 1973: 358). The controversy, which lasted for a century, quickly spread
from China to Europe, where the Chinese Rites were hotly debated in religious
circles between the supporters of the Jesuits and the supporters of the
Dominicans and Franciscans. The
controversy soon spread to the Sorbonne, and many European intellectuals became
involved in it. Nicolas Malebranche, in his Entretien
d'un philosophe chrétien et d'un philosophe chinois, sur l'existence et la
nature de Dieu (1708), written with the support of Jesuits in China, argued
that the Confucianism of the Chinese learned class amounted to atheism.
Leibniz also wrote in support of
the Jesuit cause: “… even if
[Confucianism] is regarded equivocally, it is advisable to give it the most
favorable meaning—as the Apostle Paul is said to have done in taking the altar
erected to an unknown god as having been instituted by the Athenians for rites
which they ought to have celebrated rather than for those which they usually
practiced” (Leibniz 1994: 63). In
all, Leibniz wrote four treatises on China—the Novissima Sinica, De Cultu
Confucii civili (1700/01), Remarks on
Chinese Rites and Religion (1708), and Discourse
on the Natural Theology of the Chinese (1716). In all of these works, Leibniz took the side of the Jesuits
in the Chinese Rites controversy.
The
occasional arrival of Jesuits from China, sometimes even with visiting Chinese
converts, also aroused a great deal of interest. During his visit to Europe from 1682-92, the Jesuit Philippe
Couplet was received by Pope Alexander VII in Rome and Louis XIV at Versailles. “With his Chinese companion, clothing,
and accouterments, Couplet appears to have launched a rage for chinoiserie in France” (Mungello 1988:
262). Couplet also supervised the
publication in Paris of Confucius Sinarum
philosophus (1687), a Latin translation of the Confucian classics which was
to have a significant influence on European thought. Over one-hundred Jesuits had contributed to the translation
(Mungello 1988).
The materials on China published by
the Jesuits had profound and far-reaching implications. Ricci and others praised the Chinese
system of government by scholar-officials as “government by philosophers,” and
this parallel to Plato’s Republic did much to idealize China in the eyes of
European thinkers, especially during the Enlightenment (Mungello 1989). The Jesuit Athanasias Kircher, in his China illustrata (1667), portrayed China
as a sort of utopia—a happy land characterized by industry and good social
order, under the rule of a “philosopher king.”
One of the earliest European
philosophers to propagate the Jesuit view of the Chinese was Christian Wolff,
who delivered an important lecture at Marburg in 1730, praising China as “the
outstanding working example of an enlightened government” (Wiener 1973:
361). This idea became a
commonplace among 18th century writers and was repeated in various
forms by Rousseau, Goldsmith (Chinese
Letters, 1760-62), the Marquis d’Argens (Lettres chinoises, 1755), and many others. Montesquieu, however, in his L’esprit des lois (1748) was more
realistic in that he balanced the accounts of the Jesuits with those of
European merchants, who unanimously condemned the Chinese for their “treachery,
deceit, and dishonesty” (Wiener 1973: 361).
The eighteenth century reading
public “wanted a culture idol and China presented itself as a likely candidate”
(Mungello 1989: 125n). For this
reason, J-B Du Halde, in his editions of the massively influential Jesuit Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (34
volumes, 1702-1776) purposely omitted any material which appeared unsympathetic
to the Chinese. The Lettres were “particularly famous and
highly appreciated reading-matter in the cultural salons of XVIII century
France” (Criveller 1997:12).
With the appearance in 18th
century Europe of Chinese porcelain and other examples of Chinese visual arts, chinoiserie (pseudo-Chinese art,
fashion, and décor) became all the rage.
The pastel colors and dreamy sensuality of Chinese porcelain offered
relief from the monumentalism and geometric precision of baroque and
neoclassical design. This was
expressed in wallpaper with Chinese designs, lacquer paneling, Chinese
cabinets, screens, fans, and tapestries.
Imitation Chinese pagodas were erected on landed estates and in public
gardens, and sedan chairs became the height of fashion. China was popularly seen as “the home
of an imaginary, happy people who came to life in the paintings on
porcelain” (Wiener 1973: 354). It
is ironic that many of the motifs which appeared in wares imported from China
were not authentically Chinese, but were mass-produced for the European
market. Thus, to appeal to
European tastes, Europeans’ preconceptions about China were mirrored back to
them!
China became a popular subject of
European writers. Voltaire, for example, wrote at least three works of this
kind. Voltaire’s Entretiens chinoises (1768) present an imaginary
dialogue between a Jesuit and a Chinese mandarin who has visited Europe, on the
subject of Natural Theology. His
play L’Orphelin de la Chine (1755)
used as its basis an authentic Chinese drama which had been published by Du
Halde. De la gloire, ou entretien avec un Chinois (1738) records the
imaginary conversation between a Chinese merchant and other patrons in a
bookshop in Holland. It soon
appears that the visitor is completely unacquainted with the most important
assumptions of European civilization, while the Europeans demonstrate their
complete ignorance of China. At
the end, Voltaire exclaims, “Since Caesar and Jupiter are names unknown to the
finest, most ancient, most extensive, most populous, and most civilized kingdom
in the universe, it becomes ye well, O ye rulers of petty states! Ye pulpit orators of a narrow parish,
or a little town! Ye doctors of
Salamanca, or of Bourges! Ye
trifling authors, and ye heavy commentators!—it becomes you well, indeed, to
aspire to fame and immortality” (Voltaire 1940: 274).
In his attacks on the Catholic
church, Voltaire “cleverly used the information about China provided by the
Catholics … If the Chinese really were so moral, intelligent, ethical, and well
governed and if this was largely attributable to the influence of Confucius, it
followed that since Confucius had not been a Christian it was obviously
possible for a country to get along admirably without the presence of Catholic
clerical power” (Spence 1999: ¶3).
Voltaire’s Essai sur les Moeurs et
l’esprit des nations began with a long section on China, which he portrayed
as an ideal political system where government had fostered and protected the
development of civilization. In
that work, Voltaire stated that “the great misunderstanding over Chinese rites
sprang from our judging their practices in light of ours: we carry the prejudices that spring
from our contentious nature to the ends of the world” (Spence 1999: ¶4).
As an expression of the very high
esteem in which Confucius was held, Leibniz’ statement in the Novissima Sinica (1697) is
remarkable: “We need missionaries
from the Chinese who might teach us the use and practice of natural religion,
just as we have sent them teachers of revealed theology” (Wiener 1973: 361).
Another important issue which arose
was the chronology of ancient history.
The latest possible date accepted by Chinese scholars for the foundation
of China was 2357 B.C. (others placed it as far back as 2952 B.C.). The Vulgate dating of the Flood to 2349
B.C. would thus have been unacceptable to the Chinese, amounting to a flat
contradiction of Chinese historical traditions. For this reason, the Jesuits received permission in 1637 to
teach the Septuagint chronology in China, which placed the Flood in 2957 B.C.
(Mungello 1989).
The problem of reconciling Biblical
and Chinese chronology was of great significance from the European side as
well. If the Chinese records (as
transmitted to European readers in Martino Martini’s Sinicae Historiae decas prima, 1658) were correct, then continued
acceptance of the Vulgate chronology became problematical. The Vulgate flood date of 2349 B.C.
corresponded very closely with the Chinese account of a great flood during the
reign of the emperor Yao (2357-2257 B.C.); yet this would imply that the
destruction of mankind by the Flood was not universal and that the Chinese, at
least, were not descendants of Noah (Mungello 1989). It thus became a matter of necessity to adopt the Septuagint
chronology in Europe as well. The third edition of Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle was
revised to incorporate the Septuagint chronology (in place of the Hebrew Old
Testament chronology), which entailed less conflict with the received history
of ancient China (Mungello 1989).
Even more revolutionary was the suggestion of Isaac
Vossius that since China’s history clearly antedated the Flood, since the
history of China was continuous, and since no universal deluge is mentioned in
the Chinese annals, the Flood was therefore not universal but “simply an event
in the history of the Jews” Thus
Vossius, “on the basis of his faith in the Chinese annals, … reduced the Bible
to a book of local history” (Wiener 1973: 359)—a significant challenge to the
doctrine of the inerrancy of the scriptures.
A subject to which information from
China proved very important was the search by European scholars for a
“universal language”. Some
scholars assumed that the archetype of all languages which had existed before
the confusion of human speech at Babel must still exist, and the great
antiquity of the Chinese language led some to investigate the possibility that
Chinese was the original form of human speech, unchanged since the time of
Noah. This argument was proposed
by John Webb in An historical essay
endeavoring a probability that the language of the empire of China is the
primitive language (1669).
Kircher believed that the Chinese
writing system was originally pictographic, and sought to relate it to the
Egyptian hieroglyphic writing (still undeciphered at that time). Kircher concluded that the Chinese had
migrated from Egypt, and that their writing system was invented 300 years after
the Flood by Fu His, whom he identified as a counselor of the biblical Nimrod,
thus making the Chinese of Hamitic descent (Mungello 1989).
According to Alvaro Semedo (Imperio de la China, 1642), Chinese was
one of the 71 languages created at Babel.
He emphasized the monosyllabic nature of the Chinese language and its
lack of inflectional features, and claimed (quite accurately, it now appears)
that the written form of the language dates to around 2000 B.C. Semedo explained how the 214 radicals
were used to form more complex characters. He demonstrated how the Chinese character meaning “precious
stone” (yü) was related to simpler characters
meaning “king” and “earth,” and how yü
in turn formed part of more complex characters designating various types of
precious stones. He correctly stated that the total number of Chinese
characters exceeded 60,000 (Mungello 1989).
Others, including Descartes,
Leibniz, and Bishop John Wilkins, approached the problem from a different
direction. They sought to create a
purely logical language of numbers or symbols, by which the meaning of any
expression could be derived with mathematical precision. Numerous schemes and proposals of this
type appeared between 1650 and 1725.
Newly available information about
the Chinese language and writing system was examined by Leibniz and others with
these ideas in mind. Leibniz
“hoped to use elements from Chinese in developing a philosophical language that
would replace Latin and help to make direct communication possible among the
intellectuals of the world” (Wiener 1973: 358). “If we had some exact language (like the one called Adamitic
by some) or at least a kind of truly philosophic writing, in which the ideas
were reduced to a kind of alphabet of human thought, then all that follows
rationally from what is given could be found by a kind of calculus, just as
arithmetical or geometrical problems are solved” (Mungello 1989: 192).
The
representational system Leibniz had in mind is known as a Universal
Characteristic, its elements as Real Characters. He believed that there had been one or more primitive
languages which had “perfectly captured the relationship between the thought
and the thing,” but that “such languages had long since deteriorated” (Mungello
1989: 194). However, Jacob Gohl (Jacobus Golius), a Dutch scholar, believed
that Chinese had been “invented all at once,” in other words, that it had been
devised as a logical system.
The
Jesuit Le Comte constructed a table of the 326 possible monosyllables which
could occur in Mandarin; multiplying these by five tones, he concluded that
only 1,665 spoken words were possible (Lach 1993).
Another
argument for the universal logical and nature of the Chinese writing system was
the fact that Chinese writing was used and understood in Japan, Korea, Taiwan,
Vietnam, and Thailand, although Chinese was not spoken in those countries.
Two German scholars at Berlin,
Andreas Müller (1630?-1694) and Christian Mentzel (1622-1701), each claimed to
have developed a Clavis Sinica—an
algorithm by which the meaning of Chinese writing could be readily
derived. “This key was essentially
a logical rather than a linguistic device and it emphasized
classification” (Mungello 1989:
36).
Leibniz became extremely interested
in this project, and wrote to Müller, addressing fourteen questions to him,
such as “after practicing this Key, can I understand everything written in
Chinese script, no matter what the subject may be?” and “if I had this Key,
could I write something in Chinese script, and would it be comprehensible by a
literate Chinese?” (Mungello 1989: 199).
However, Müller refused to reveal anything about his secret unless he
received a substantial payment.
Unable to profit from his “discovery,” Müller burned his Clavis Sinica shortly before his death.
Müller did produce a typographia, still extant at the Deutsche
Staatsbibliothek, comprising 3,284 small wooden printing blocks, each engraved
with a Chinese character (Mungello 1989)
Mentzel’s Clavis Sinica, ad Chinensium Scripturam et Pronunciationem Mandarinicam
was supposed to have contained 124 “tables of writing” which disclosed the
evolving form of complex Chinese characters from simpler ones. Mentzel made reference to the 214
radicals, divided into 17 categories according to the number of strokes their
writing required. “It is clear
from the manner in which Mentzel treated the 17 categories that he regarded
them as more than an artificial arrangement of the characters for the purpose
of lexical efficiency” (Mungello 1989: 202).
Mentzel’s claim that his Key could
explain the Mandarin pronunciation and meaning of the characters is more
mysterious; unfortunately his Clavis
Sinica was never published, and no copy of it is known to exist. When Leibniz wrote to him in 1698,
Mentzel was too ill to reply, and died not long after. It appears that Mentzel failed to
publish his work because he was unaware of the Chinese typographia which Müller
had already made and presented to the Elector’s library.
A closely related subject, which greatly
fascinated Leibniz, was the 64 hexagrams of the I ching. The Jesuit
missionary Joachim Bouvet (1656-1730) served as tutor of the Kang Xi emperor’s
children. He was in China from
1688-97, and met Leibniz during a visit to Europe. They continued to correspond after Bouvet’s return to China
in 1698. Bouvet believed
that Fu Hsi, the legendary writer of the I
ching, was none other than the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, and that by
producing the eight basic trigrams of the I
ching, Fu Hsi had provided “a notation for experiment and observation in
all of the sciences” (Leibniz 1994: 16).
Bouvet also claimed that the I
ching contained prophetic anticipations of the Christian mysteries
(Mungello).
Leibniz
saw a remarkable correspondence between the hexagrams of the I ching and his own discovery of binary
arithmetic. In a letter to Bouvet
(1703), Leibniz linked the eight basic trigrams to the numbers 0 to 7, so that
(in binary notation), the 8th would be represented as 111, “the most
perfect and the Sabbath, for in it everything has been made and fulfilled”
(Leibniz 1994: 17). “I think the substance of the ancient theology of the
Chinese is intact and, purged of additional errors, can be harnessed to the
great truths of the Christian religion.
Fohi, the most ancient prince and philosopher of the Chinese, had
understood the origin of things from unity and nothing, i.e., his mysterious
figures reveal something of an analogy to Creation, containing the binary
arithmetic (and yet hinting at greater things) that I rediscovered after so
many thousands of years, where all numbers are written by only two notations, 0
and 1” (Leibniz 1994: 73).
If
the logical, binary system of the I ching
was the actual basis of the Chinese writing system, then that system might
actually prove to be the Universal Characteristic which Leibniz sought. “If we Europeans were well enough
informed concerning Chinese Literature, then, with the aid of logic, critical
thinking, mathematics and our manner of expressing thought—more exacting than
theirs—we could uncover in the Chinese writings of the remotest antiquity many
things unknown to modern Chinese and even to other commentators thought to be
classical.… Actually, the 64 figures [in the I ching] represent a Binary Arithmetic which apparently this great
legislator possessed, and which I have rediscovered some thousands of years
later. … This Arithmetic furnishes the simplest way of making changes, since
there are only two components” (Leibniz 1994: 133). Leibniz believed that the wholesale conversion of the
Chinese would result once it was explained to them that later generations had
simply lost the true meaning of the I
ching (Leibniz 1994).
Much
of this speculation sounds like nonsense to us today; of course, in the 17th
century when the Chinese language and writing system were an entirely novel
discovery, all of these suggestions were exciting possibilities. Some of them would have to be discarded
in the light of subsequent investigation, while others might still yield
something if pursued further.
Leibniz was one of the most creative minds of his day, and even today
very little that he said can be readily discounted.
The
Jesuit accounts of China had some impact on Protestant Christian thought, as
may be seen in several quotations from the writings of Jonathan Edwards:
“We see, that those who live at the greatest distance from
revelation, are far the most brutish. The Heathens in America, and in
some of the utmost parts of Asia and Africa, are far more barbarous than those
who formerly lived in Rome, Greece, Egypt, Syria, and Chaldea.
Their traditions are more worn out, and they are more distant from places
enlightened with revelation. The Chinese, descended probably from the
subjects of Noah, that holy man, have held more by tradition from him, than
other nations, and so have been a more civilized people” (Edwards 1817: ¶17).
“The [Native] Americans, the
Africans, the Tartars, and the ingenious Chinese, have had time enough, one
would think, to find out the true and right idea of God; and yet, after above
five thousand years' improvements, and the full exercise of reason, they have,
at this day, got no farther in their progress towards the true religion, than
to the worship of stocks and stones and devils. How many thousand years
must be allowed to these nations, to reason themselves into the true
religion? What the light of nature and reason could do to investigate the
knowledge of God, is best seen by what they have already done. (Edwards
1817: ¶35)
Such
statements stand in sharp contrast to the Enlightenment’s idealization of
Confucius and the Chinese “natural theology.”
It
was Hegel who gave currency to the idea that Chinese civilization was static
and unprogressive. Thus, in marked
contrast to what earlier philosophers had written, he placed China at the
bottom of his linear scheme of historical development, a stagnant antithesis to
the “self-realization” which characterized Europe (Wiener 1973: 366). As Nicolas Boulanger had written,
somewhat prophetically, in 1763: “All the remains of her ancient institutions,
which China now possesses, will necessarily be lost; they will disappear in the
future revolutions; as what she hath already lost of them vanished in former
ones; and finally, as she acquires nothing new, she will always be on the
losing side” (Spence 1999: ¶6).
The Influence of Europe on Chinese Thought
While most learned Chinese remained
skeptical of the Jesuits’ accounts of the West, there were a few who recognized
the significance of this cultural interchange. Xu Erjue, in a preface written for one of Verbiest’s works
(1676) wrote that “The Chinese remain in a corner, just like the frogs living
in the bottom of a well, without knowing the immensity of the great rivers. …
They know only the domain of China, the capital, and the provinces, but nothing
special outside China” (Lin Tongyang 1994: 159).
During the early stages of contact
with the Jesuits, many educated Chinese responded with great interest to the
Jesuit program of gewu qiongli zhitian (“investigation of things, fathoming principles, knowing
God”).
In terms of the investigation of
things, in the judgment of the Chinese scholar Liang Qichao (1872-1927), the
Jesuit introduction of European astronomy and mathematics entailed a Chinese
accommodation of foreign ideas comparable in magnitude and importance to the
introduction of Buddhism to China (Xi Zezong 1994). The numerous technical innovations of Verbiest and others
had a great impact on Chinese thought. However, by the end of the 17th
century, “Chinese scholars who continued to be interested in the westerners’
investigation of things were no longer interested in their way of fathoming
principles” (Standaert 1994: 419).
Some of the Chinese scholars
reacted to Christian ideas with great hostility, as expressed by the official
Xu Ruke in 1620: “They do not give
due reverence to Shang-di but say that he was born of a barbarian woman and
according to a picture of him they have brought, he really looked like a doll.
… They take our incomparable China and oppose it to their Great Western Land,
as if there were two countries in the world” (Criveller 1997: 376). Clearly it was seen by the Chinese as
insulting to be asked to adopt a foreign religion.
Chinese objections to the deity
of Christ demonstrate the great gulf which separated eastern and western
thinking: “He is just a barbarian
of the Western seas. They also say
that he died nailed, by evil administrators, to a structure in the form of a
character that denotes ‘ten.’ So
he is just a barbarian convict condemned to death. How could an executed barbarian convict be called the Lord
of Heaven?” (Criveller 1997: 376).
“Was the Heaven empty during the thirty-three years of Incarnation? Or are there two Gods? Why did he come personally to save
humankind, why did he not create a good person to do this for Him, since the history
of China has plenty of good sages adapted for the purpose?” (Criveller 1997:
387). “Although he is said to have
redeemed all crimes, the fact that there are still people who are cast into
hell proves that the Redemption was incomplete” [!] (Criveller 1997: 392).
Even those who were attracted to
Christianity were dismayed by the apparent exclusion of China from the plan of
salvation. The discovery in 1625
of the Nestorian Monument was of great help to the Jesuits in answering these
questions, since it demonstrated the ancient presence of Christianity in China
(Criveller 1997). Back in Europe,
however, many (including Voltaire) believed that the Nestorian Monument was a
Jesuit fabrication intended to reinforce their position of power and influence
in China (Mungello 1989).
The
fact remains that after the first wave of influential converts to Christianity
under Ricci’s influence, there was a gradual turning away and loss of interest
in the Christian message by the emperor and the ruling class. It seems likely that Rome’s
inflexibility and cultural insensitivity helped bring this about. At the same time, it may be that Matteo
Ricci was unique and irreplaceable—that none of the later Jesuits, however
talented, could have hoped to match his success in understanding and being
understood by the Chinese.
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