De-constructing the name(s) of God: Matteo Ricci's translational apostolate

Abstract

The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, Matteo Ricci's Chinese catechism, first published in 1603, embodies a very particular context: that of a Jesuit missionary and his intellectual engagement with Neo-Confucian scholars in China during the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century. Ricci transformed and translated a Western idea of God into this Other context. His immersion in this context allowed him to negotiate between the tradition he came from and anOther in China. By looking at Ricci's translational journey through the prism of deconstruction we can uncover the importance of context for translation as he supplements the original Confucian Shangdi [The Sovereign on High] with a Christian interpretation-cum-translation, Tianzhu [the Lord of Heaven]. Deconstruction can be used as a methodology that helps us to understand, in this context, how Ricci de-constructed “God” through Other names with new (im)possibilities.

Keywords:

• Matteo Ricci
• Chinese
• religion
• deconstruction
• Neo-Confucianism
• Tianzhu Shangdi

Notes

1. Catechismo was the term Ricci used throughout his writings to refer to Tianzhu shiyi and its predecessor Tianzhu shengjiao shilu.

2. All translations in this article are by the author, unless indicated otherwise.

3. In Chinese the two characters that make up the name China 中國 (C. Zhong guo) mean “the Middle Kingdom”.

4. Originally the Classic of Music (樂經; C. Yue jing) was included among the “original” Classics, but as it was lost by the Han 漢朝 dynasty we now usually refer to the Five Classics.

5. Ironically, the diagram was based on the “Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate that Antedates Heaven” (太極先天之圖; C. Taiji xiantian-zhitu) from a Daoist priest, Chen Tuan 陳摶 (c. 906–89), despite the fact that Zhu was highly critical of Daoism (Fung 1983, vol. 2, 439).

6. Oddly, Kim Sangkeun (2001, 166–183), in Strange Names of God, discusses “The Western Missionaries’ Responses to the Riccian Term Shangti”. This was not Ricci's term: Ricci emphasized the use of Tianzhu, while, as mentioned above, never settling definitively on a single word, adapting to a different (cultural and linguistic) context, allowing for other possibilities beyond the boundaries of a Roman Latin tradition, highlighting the problematics inherent in language and naming, which he clearly understood.

7. Derrida (2004) discusses the idea of “living on” in detail in his essay of the same title.

8. Kenneth Scott Latourette (1966, 131–152), in A History of Christian Missions in China, describes the “Rites Controversy” that ensued after Ricci's death and which is beyond the scope of this paper.

9. Caputo (2006) deconstructs the name of God in his text The Weakness of God and, rather than considering it as something powerful and omnipotent, reads it as a weak force which hopes to change the heart; this is what he considers as the “goal” of Jesus’ mission.

10. Matteo Ricci did not know about the Nestorian mission or Alopen's own translational apostolate, as the famous Nestorian Stele which recounts the mission, carved onto stone in Chinese and Syriac, was only rediscovered in 1625, after Ricci's death. Moreover, “the lost sutras of Jesus”, which were Alopen's attempt to engage with Buddhism and Daoism, were unearthed only at the turn of the twentieth century (Riegert and Moore 2009).