Adapting Catholicism to Confucianism: Matteo Ricci’s Tianzhu Shiyi

Abstract

Tianzhu Shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven) is the single most important proselytizing work of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), the legendary founder of the early modern Jesuit China mission. Controversial since the early seventeenth century, it has been both praised and condemned for Ricci’s claim of a monotheistic affinity between Catholicism and Confucianism. Ricci’s gesture of friendship to Confucianism won him many Chinese friends and posthumously made him famous or notorious in Europe, but as this essay contends, it was never more than a tactical cover for him during his lifetime. Since the real purpose of his cultural adaptation was his unobtrusive engagement with the ancient Chinese philosophical idea of tianren heyi (humanity’s unity with heaven), what is ultimately so instructive about Tianzhu Shiyi is the light cast on Ricci’s intricate relationship with his Chinese friends and on the ironic twists and turns of his complex legacy.

Acknowledgement

In addition to a 2006–2007 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship and a 2012–2013 Fulbright lecturing-research fellowship at the City University of Hong Kong which helped respectively to start and complete the research for this essay, the author would like to acknowledge the crucial support of short-term research fellowships received in 2008 at the Clark Library of UCLA and at the Phillips Library of Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts and in 2012 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, and of a 2010 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute fellowship at the University of Hawaii, Manoa and the East West Center. The author would also like to thank the editors of the journal and the anonymous readers for all the careful and constructive comments on earlier versions of this essay.

Notes

1. After being circulated in manuscript and continuously revised both stylistically and otherwise with the help of many Chinese friends in Nanchang, Nanjing, and Beijing, Tianzhu Shiyi was finally published for the first time in 1603 by a non-Christian Chinese friend of Ricci named Feng Yingjing (1555–1606).

2. Sun Shangyang and Nicolas Standaert, Yibasiling nianqian de Zhongguo Jidujiao (Chinese Christianity before 1840) (Beijing: Xueyuan Chubanshe, 2004), 127.

3. For Ruggieri’s proselytizing text in Chinese, see Michele Ruggieri, Tianzhu Shilu (The True Record about the Master of Heaven), in Yesuhui Luoma Dang’anguan Ming Qing Tianzhujiao Wenxian (Chinese Christian texts from the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus), 12 vols. (Taipei: Taipei Ricci Institute, 2002), ed. Nicolas Standaert and Adrian Dudink, 1.1–85.

4. Peter D. Hershock, Chan Buddhism: Dimensions of Asian Spirituality (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 50.

5. Confucian Analects, The Great Learning & The Doctrine of the Mean, trans. James Legge (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971), XV.xxiii.

6. Michele Ruggieri, “Chinese Poem No. 3.2,” in Albert Chan, S.J., “Michele Ruggieri, S.J. (1543–1607) and his Chinese Poems,” Monumenta Serica 41 (1993): 159.

7. J. S. Cummins, “Two Missionary Methods in China: Mendicants and Jesuits,” in Jesuit and Friar in the Spanish Expansion to the East (London: Variorum Reprints, 1986), 43.

8. John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 255.

9. Andrew C. Ross, “Alessandro Valignano: The Jesuits and Culture in the East,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, S.J., et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 346.

10. Haun Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 36.

11. Matteo Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (T’ien-chu Shih-i), trans. Douglas Lancashire and Peter Hu Kuo-chen, S.J. (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1985), 121; hereafter cited in the text.

12. “Wen Wang” (King Wen), in Shijing (The Book of Odes), compiled and annotated by Cheng Junying (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 2004), 406.

13. Niccolò Longobardo, A Short Answer Concerning the Controversies about Xang Ti, Tien Xin, and Ling Hoen and other Chinese Names and Terms (1623–24), included as Book 5 of Fernadez Navarette’s An Account of the Empire of China, Historical, Political, Moral and Religion which is part of the first volume of A Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1704), 1.183.

14. Ibid.

15. David E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner Verlag, 1985), 18.

16. Jacques Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 71.

17. Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, 15.

18. For the Catholic Church in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Ricci’s claim of monotheistic affinity with Confucianism posed two different but equally difficult problems: if the ancient Chinese were indeed monotheistic as Ricci and his supporters contended, then Christianity would lose its unique claim of access to divinity and the related theological truth; if neither the ancient nor the modern Chinese were monotheistic but nevertheless had a social and moral code which even Ricci’s critics conceded as admirable, then it would be unclear why Christian faith and revelation were needed at all.

19. Erik Zurcher, “Jesuit Accommodation and the Chinese Cultural Imperative,” in The Chinese Rites Controversy, ed. D. E. Mungello (Nettetal: Steyler Verlad, 1994), 32.

20. Zhang Xiaolin, Tianzhushiyi yu Zhongguoxuetong: Wenhua Hudong yu Quanshi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven and the Chinese Doctrinal Tradition: Cultural Interaction and Interpretation) (Shanghai: Xuelin Chubanshe, 2005), 354.

21. Matteo Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci: 1583–1610, trans. Louis J. Gallagher, S.J. (New York: Random House, 1953), 93.

22. Tacchi Venturi, Opere Storiche del P. Matteo Ricci, S.J. (Macerata: F. Giorgetti, 1911–13), 2.385.

23. Paulos Huang, Confronting Confucian Understandings of the Christian Doctrine of Salvation: A Systematic Theological Analysis of the Basic Problems in the Confucian-Christian Dialogue (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 45.

24. Li Shuzeng et al., The Chinese Philosophy of the Ming Dynasty (Zhongguo Mingdai Zhexue) (Zhengzhou: The People’s Press of the Henan Province, 2002), 1790.

25. Huang Zhen, “ZunRu JiJing” (Reflections on Respecting Confucianism), in Mingmo Qingchu Yesuhui Sixiang Wenxian Huibian (An Expository Collection of the Christian and the Anti-Christian Philosophical Manuscripts and Prints in Ming-Qing China), ed. Zheng Ande (Beijing: The Religion Research Institute of Beijing University, 2003), 5.97.

26. Longobardo, A Short Answer Concerning the Controversies (1623–24), in A Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1704), 1.221.

27. Longobardo, A Short Answer Concerning the Controversies, 1.222.

28. Ibid. For more discussion about the complex relationship of Xu Guangqi with Ricci and other Jesuits, see Statecraft and Intellectual Renewal in Late Ming China: The Cross-Cultural Synthesis of Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), ed. Catherine Jami, Peter Engelfriet, and Gregory Blue (Brill: Leiden, 2001).

29. Ibid., 1.220. For more discussion about Yang Tingyun’s complex responses to Ricci’s theistic reading of Confucianism, see Yu Liu, “The Religiosity of a Former Confucian-Buddhist: The Catholic Faith of Yang Tingyun,” Journal of the History of Ideas 73 (2012): 25–46.

30. Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century, 95.

31. Paul A. Rule, K’ung-tzu or Confucius?: The Jesuit Interpretation of Confucianism (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 5.

32. Huang, Confronting Confucian Understandings of the Christian Doctrine of Salvation, 250.

33. Yuen-ting Lai, “The Linking of Spinoza to Chinese Thought by Bayle and Malebranche,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 23 (1985): 154.

34. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), vi.

35. Pierre Bayle, The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Pierre Bayle, 2nd ed. (1734–38), (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1997), 5.218.

36. Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 3.

37. Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 3.

38. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E. Latham (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 64. It is not clear whether Ricci ever read Lucretius, whose poetic exposition of Epicureanism was accidentally rediscovered in a German monastery in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini, an unemployed papal secretary, as Stephen Greenblatt records in The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011). However, it is well-known that the educational program of the Jesuits at the Collegio Romano was heavily influenced by Renaissance humanism and included many ancient Greco and Roman writers who later apparently helped Ricci and his Jesuit confreres to understand and appreciate Confucianism.

39. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 21.

40. Julia Ching, The Religious Thought of Chu Hsi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6.

41. Frederick W. Mote, Intellectual Foundations of China (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 20.

42. Qian Mu, Shijie Jushi yu Zhongguo Wenhua (The World Situation and Chinese Culture) (Taibei: Lantai Chubanshe, 2001), 376.

43. R. Po-Chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 224.

44. Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century, 430.

45. Xu Guangqi, “Ke ‘Tong Wen Suan Zhi’ Xu” (Preface to Arithmetic Rules Common to Cultures), in Mingmo Tianzhujiao Sanzhushi Wenjianzhu (Catholic Documents of Xu Guangqi, Li Zhizao, Yang Tingyun: An Exposition of Three Great Late Ming Thinkers in China), ed. Li Tiangang (Hong Kong: Daofeng Shushe, 2007), 93.

46. Fang Yizhi, “Wuli Xiaoshi: Zixu” (Self-preface for The Introduction to Physics), in Siku Quanshu (Complete Collection of the Four Treasuries), vol. 867 (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 1987), 742; immediately after this, Fang added that upon closer examination even Western measurement was not as good as it was thought to be.

47. Li Zhizao, “Yi ‘Huanyou Quan’ Xu” (Preface to the translation of Aristotle’s De coelo), in Mingmo Tianzhujiao Sanzhushi Wenjianzhu, 169.

48. Nicolas Standaert, Yang Tingyun, Confucian and Christian in Late Ming China (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 218.

49. Yang Tingyun, Shengshui Jiyan (Recorded Words of the Holy Water), in Mingmo Tianzhujiao Sanzhushi Wenjianzhu, 205.

50. Matteo Ricci, “1604 Letter to the General of the Jesuits,” preserved in the Casanatense Library in Rome, ms. no. 2136; quoted in Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, 27.

51. Zhang Xiaolin, Tianzhushiyi yu Zhongguoxuetong, 250.

52. R. Po-Chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, 231.

53. The Book of Job 23:13, in The New King James Version (New York: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1982).

54. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 2.498.

55. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck, 3rd ed. (New Jersey, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), 169. For more on the possible history of ideas leading from the Chinese notion of tianren heyi (unity of heaven and humanity) to the revolution of Kant’s ethical philosophy, see Yu Liu, “A New Way of Seeing Old Things: Organicism and the Far Eastern Input of Western Modernity,” International Studies in Philosophy 38 (2006): 97–119.