From sanctus to shengren: mediating Christian and Chinese concepts of human excellence in early modern China

ABSTRACT

In the 1580s, when the Jesuit missionaries Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) established the first Jesuit mission in China, the terms “translatability” and “cultural incommensurability” were yet to enter the European lexicon, but these questions were addressed implicitly through the translation choices employed in the mission field. For the early missionaries, translatability had immense ramifications for their missionary practice. One of the foremost challenges was how to communicate in Chinese the concept of “sanctity,” which was central to Christian soteriology. There was a range of terms in Chinese intellectual and religious traditions that the Jesuits drew upon to translate sanctus such as shengren 聖人 zhenren 真人, and xian 仙, but each of these terms implied a certain commensurability between Christian and indigenous Chinese conceptions of human excellence. This paper will present a microhistory of early Jesuit attempts to translate sanctus in Chinese, and reflect upon the significance of these translation choices for the development of the Jesuits’ missionary strategy.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese rites controversy
• Confucianism
• Daoism
• justification
• saints

1. Introduction

When meeting the intellectual traditions of another culture, we are inevitably confronted with the conundrum of how to interpret and translate its concepts meaningfully. Since intellectual concepts are formed within discursive contexts, once they are extricated from their context and transposed into another, they enter what Homi Bhabha calls “hybrid” or “liminal” semantic spaces, assuming new and often extraneous meanings. In the 1580s, when the Jesuit missionaries Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) established the first Jesuit mission in China, the terms “translatability” and “cultural incommensurability” were yet to enter the European lexicon, but similar questions ante litteram emerged in their attempts to render Christian concepts meaningfully into Chinese. At first, these questions were addressed implicitly by the translation choices employed in the mission field, but over time, as disagreements emerged on the appropriateness of translation strategies, the missionaries were compelled to justify and reflect upon their interpretative decisions. For these missionaries, translatability was not merely an academic exercise, but had theological, political, and practical ramifications for their missionary work.

One of the foremost challenges for the first Jesuit missionaries was how to communicate the Christian concept of “sanctity” in Chinese. Catholicism is characterized by a strong soteriological message, namely that conversion to Christianity through baptism bestows upon believers the possibility of salvation from the horrors of Hell after death and the enjoyment of eternal life in Heaven. In Latin Christianity, a person who achieves this salvific state is designated sanctus (saints), which translates the Greek ἅγιος. The translation of this restrictive theological meaning of sanctus was further complicated by the polyvalence of the term. Sanctus had a pagan prehistory, and its usage within Christian communities underwent significant evolution, from a term of address for fellow Christians in apostolic times to a formal title bestowed through a formal process of canonization upon deceased Christians renowned for heroic virtue.¹ Sanctus could also indicate something sacred set aside for religious use or an honorific for individuals with specific religious functions, such as the Holy Father being the term of address for the Pope. Yet, in using this term, we do not imply that the Pope is one of the elect.

In Chinese, there were a number of terms available to missionaries for translating sanctus. Within the Confucian tradition, the term shengren 聖人 (sage) first appears in numerous passages of the Yijing 易經 (Book of Changes) and the Shijing 詩經 (Book of Odes) to indicate virtuous and wise rulers, and in the Shujing 書經 (Book of Documents) emerges the figure of legendary sage-kings (shengwang 聖王) who led communities and bestowed order upon them with their moral integrity and wisdom.² Conversely, in the Lunyu 論語 (Analects) and especially the Mengzi 孟子 (Mencius), the semantic range of shengren is broadened to encapsulate any person who fulfills the innate potential of human nature by cultivating the ideals of humaneness (ren 仁) and wisdom (zhi 智).³ Yet the political and elitist vision of sageliness persists in retaining the sage-kings as the paradigms of virtuous conduct: “All people can become the sage-kings Yao and Shun” (人皆可以為堯舜, Mencius 6B:22). The Daoist tradition also employs the term shengren, but it de-emphasizes the term’s moral and political connotations. Rather, it understands sageliness transcendentally as the realization of union with nature and focusses on the superhuman powers possessed by the shengren.⁴ Other terms employed with similar meaning in the Daoist tradition include xian 仙 (immortal) and zhenren 真人 (Realized Person). Since each of these terms were embedded within millennial traditions, the choice of term had significant implications for how the Jesuit missionaries sought to present Christianity to their Chinese interlocutors and implied a certain commensurability between Christian and indigenous Chinese conceptions of sagehood. Over time, the Jesuits opted for shengren 聖人, which persists today as the standard Chinese term for saint.

In recent years, scholars have considered the comparability of Christian and Confucian conceptions of moral excellence to evaluate the appropriateness of applying European typologies of religion to Confucianism. For Huang Chin-Shing 黃進興, the institutional process used for enshrining Confucian sages and correlates and the ritual practices surrounding their cult resemble Catholic canonization and the devotion towards the saints. Hence, the comparability of these respective traditions suggests that Confucianism has a fundamentally religious character.⁵ In contrast, Anh Q. Tran follows the more common reading of Confucianism as a moral philosophy, viewing the shengren as a moral and anthropological ideal. Accordingly, Tran downplays the devotions towards shengren in Confucianism and argues that, unlike Christianity, the Confucian sage was concerned with human fulfillment in the present life.⁶

While these comparative approaches can finetune our understanding of ideas and traditions of thought, the privileging of Confucianism in Christian dialogue with Chinese thought is historically conditioned by the Jesuits’ accommodation strategy and overshadows other, potentially more intuitive, points of contact. Matteo Ricci came to seek an exclusive accommodation between Confucianism and Christianity only after fifteen years in China. With this Confucian orientation, it is only natural that Ricci would translate the Christian sanctus as shengren. Yet, in the first years of the mission, the Jesuits and their Chinese collaborators used Daoist vocabulary to express Christian notions of sanctity and missionary identity. That the missionaries or their Chinese interpreters would initially employ Daoist concepts to explain Christian sanctity might suggest that a broader frame of reference is necessary for comparative analysis.

As propaedeutic to this aspiration, this article constructs a microhistory of the Jesuits’ first attempts to convey the concept of Christian holiness in Chinese, the concomitant questions over missionary identity, and the theological debates surrounding these translation choices. Historians of the China mission have not devoted much attention to this issue, in part because the translatability of shengren was not a central focus of the Chinese Rites Controversy. However, the question of how to mediate Christian and Chinese conceptions of human excellence was subliminally present from the beginning of the mission and informed on a philological level the development of the Chinese Rites Controversy. A close examination of the early missionaries’ attempts to articulate Christian conception of holiness in the hybrid and liminal space of the mission field reveals that their translation choices for sanctus not only tracked and corroborated the intellectual frame through which Christian theology was made meaningful to the Chinese, but also, especially at the beginning of the mission, serve to forge missionary’s personal identity in their social interactions.

The first part of the microhistory constructed below reveals how the missionaries transitioned from an eclectic engagement with Buddhism, Daoist, and Confucianism to an exclusivist accommodation with Confucianism. As these decisions were made on the mission field far from the oversight of Roman authorities which lacked the linguistic and cultural expertise to understand them, they reveal a degree of elasticity and experimental creativity that breaks the narrative of a monolithic and homogenizing Tridentine Catholicism. The imperfection of their translation choices and the confusion of their Chinese interlocutors exemplify the difficulties inherent to intercultural communication.

The second part considers the theological ramifications of the Jesuits’ lexical choices for expressing Christian sanctity. In using shengren in his Chinese writings, Ricci implied a degree of commensurability between a Christian saint and Confucian sage, especially Confucius, who was shengren per antonomasia. While Ricci draws upon theological discussions extending salvation to virtuous pagans, he consciously employs the technical vocabulary and distinctions of Christian sainthood to legitimize the rituals practiced in Confucius’s honor. After the arrival of the mendicant friars in the 1630s, the disputes over the religious connotations of the term shengren and Confucius’s salvation served an important philological role in the debates over the permissibility of the Confucian rites.

2. The Jesuit missionaries: Buddhist monks or Daoist sages?

From the moment the Jesuits entered China, they set out to learn about and engage with China’s intellectual traditions as part of the policy of accommodation established by the Visitor Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606). The first Jesuit missionary to obtain permission to reside on mainland China was Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607). Confucian elements can be found in his Chinese catechism, the Tianzhu shilu 天主實錄 (True Record of the Lord of Heaven, 1584), but the engagement with Confucianism in this work, which was the first book-length publication in Chinese by a European, was primarily limited to moral precepts, including comparisons between Christian and Confucian filial piety (xiao 孝). At this stage, Ruggieri did not envisage a systematic and exclusive accommodation with Confucianism. Instead, he drew eclectically upon China’s diverse intellectual and religious traditions to describe the Christian faith. Despite attacking Buddhism, Ruggieri presented himself as a Buddhist monk (seng 僧), and intermingled Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian vocabulary throughout the Tianzhu shilu to explain the Christian faith. Arguably, Ruggieri’s approach reflects syncretist discourse about “the unity of the three teachings” (sanjiao heyi 三教合一) which had entered into particular prominence during the Ming dynasty, especially among the followers of Wang Yangming 王阳明 (1472–1529).⁷ While for proponents of sanjiao heyi, the three teachings generally remained distinct, the teachings of one tradition can be used to elucidate the meanings of others.⁸

Within this hybrid space, Ruggieri opts for predominantly Daoist vocabulary to express the concept of Christian sanctity. For saints in heaven, Ruggieri employs dedao shenxian 淂道神仙 (literally “immortals who have obtained the Way”) and dedao zhi zhenren淂道之真人 (literally “true man who has attained the Way”). While dedao had been used in the Mencius (2B:10), it had acquired a specialized meaning in Daoism of “realizing the Dao,” indicating the final stage of the Zuowang 坐忘 meditative practice where the adept is liberated with full of knowledge of the Dao and has transcended the limitations of the world.⁹ Shenxian (divine immortal), which is related to xian 仙 (immortal) denotes transcendent beings who have attained longevity or immortality and other extraordinary powers, such as bilocation, invincibility, and therapeutic abilities. Zhenren is roughly synonymous to xian, though in some Daoist texts it indicates a higher degree of perfection than xian.¹⁰ In the Zhuangzi 莊子, the zhenren, having achieved a state of supreme indifference, is impervious to all human vicissitudes, seeing success and failure as human constructions that are foreign to the Dao.

In the Tianzhu shilu, Ruggieri also uses Daoist terms to indicate the prophets and the Virgin Mary. For instance, Moses is referred to as dedao zhi shi/ren 得道之士/人 (a scholar or man who has attained the Way) and even daoshi 道士, the technical term for an ordained Daoist priest. Similarly, Mary is called daonü 道女, namely a female ordained Daoist priest. In contrast, St Augustine is anonymously indicated as xianshi 賢士, a term which literally translates as a “talented scholar” and gives little indication of his saintly status in the Christian tradition. In the Tianzhu shilu, the character sheng 聖 is never used with personal names, but only as a qualifier with jiao 教 (teaching) to refer to Christianity (shengjiao 聖教) and with shui 水 to indicate Holy Water (shengshui 聖水).¹¹

The use of Daoist terminology to translate the concept of Christian sanctity can also be found in other texts of the period, including those co-authored by Ricci. In the Portuguese–Chinese dictionary compiled by Ricci and Ruggieri, the term santo translated as using xian 仙.¹² This term also appears in Ruggieri’s translation of angelic salutation, where Mary is addressed at the beginning of the prayer as Xian Maliya 仙媽利呀.¹³ The use of xian here is somewhat superfluous or incongruous since the prayer does not commence with an invocation of Our Lady as “Holy Mary” but with “Hail Mary.” In the second half of the prayer, “Holy Mother” is rendered as shengmu niangniang 聖母娘娘. Shengmu also appears in Ruggieri’s poem as Shengtu sanxiang shuo guanzhe zhi 聖圖三像說觀者知 (An Explanation of the Three Persons in the Holy Picture).¹⁴ Similarly, on Ricci’s world map (Kunyu wanguo quantu 坤輿萬國全圖, 1602), toponyms named in honor of Christian saints are rendered with xian, such as San Lorenzo (Xian Laolengzu dao 仙勞冷祖島, i.e. Madagascar), São Tomé (Xian Duomo dao 仙多默島), and Capo de Santa Maria (Xian Maliya Feng 仙瑪利亞峰), whereas the Holy Land is rendered as Shengtu 聖土.¹⁵

Following the above examples, we can infer the rough translation guidelines that the missionaries used for translating sanctus in the early stage of the mission. As an honorific adjective used in conjunction with a personal name to indicate a canonized saint, sanctus was rendered as xian; as a marker for distinguishing a special concept, place, or personage from a common noun such as water, land, or mother, sanctus was to be translated as sheng; as a noun indicating a saint in heaven, prophet/holyman, or holy woman, it was translated as zhenren, xianshi, daoshi, or daonü.

Despite these overtures to Daoism, it is unlikely that Ruggieri and Ricci deliberately sought an equivalence between Christian and Daoist conceptions of moral excellence in these passages. First, in the Latin text corresponding to the Chinese text of the Tianzhu shilu, Ruggieri merely uses the sanctus according to its conventional Christian meanings.¹⁶ Second, other than the Daoist language employed here, the exposition of Christian dogma in the Tianzhu shilu is highly schematic and conventional. At no point does Ruggieri attempt to develop a Daoist Christian theology. Third, although Ricci had vaguely identified Daoism as one of three “three sects” in a letter of 1584,¹⁷ the Jesuits at the time did not seem to have a deep understanding of Daoist doctrines, and both the Tianzhu shilu and its corresponding Latin text do not betray any awareness of Daoism as a religious or philosophic sect. Hence, these translation choices were most likely suggested to Ruggieri by the Chinese interpreters upon whom he relied to communicate with local officials and to draft the Tianzhu shilu.¹⁸

Even if one cannot infer from these choices a deliberate Jesuit strategy of accommodation with Daoism, that their Chinese collaborators may have made such dynamic equivalences because they believed Christian sanctity had more in common with Daoism than with Confucianism. After all, the Confucian shengren focused on human fulfillment through moral cultivation in the present life without any regard for reward after death, whereas Daoist practitioners aimed at transcending the human condition and attaining immortality, notions which arguably seem closer to the eternal life promised to Christian saints. Furthermore, we cannot ignore the confusion that these Daoist terms would have likely had on the Chinese reader, for whom this catechism was their first window into Christianity. For instance, Ruggieri’s Chinese interlocutor at one points criticizes Amitabha and Sakyamuni as “not having obtained the Way” (非得道之人), and this forms part of Ruggieri’s critique of Buddhism as demoniac sect.¹⁹ For a lay Chinese reader, this barb could in fact be interpreted as a Daoist attack on Buddhism.

The Daoist lexical choices for Christian sanctity in the Tianzhu shilu laid the foundation for a more conscious exploration of a Daoist missionary identity. In some respects, this was facilitated by rumors that the Jesuits practiced alchemy, a discipline which, in China, was associated with Daoism.²⁰ On one occasion, this reputation brought Ruggieri into grave scandal involving a fraudster called Cai Yilong 蔡一龍, who falsely claimed to be privy to Ruggieri’s alchemical secrets. Even after Ruggieri’s departure from the mission in 1589, Ricci continued to be approached on numerous occasions by local people desirous of learning the secrets of alchemy.²¹ Notably, as Hsia recounts, Qu Rukui 瞿汝夔 (1549–1612; literary name Taisu 太素), who was one of Ricci’s early and most important collaborators in the transmission of Western scientific knowledge into China, was most likely drawn to Ricci because of Ricci’s reputation for alchemical expertise.²² Ricci was well aware of the Daoist associations of alchemy in China as well of the rich corpus of alchemical texts in the Daoist canon (Daozang 道藏). In his history of the mission, Ricci relates how Daoist “saints” (santi) in antiquity had established the practices of outer alchemy (waidan 外丹) aimed at the transmutation of cinnabar (dan 丹) into silver and of inner alchemy (neidan 內丹) aimed at the acquisition of immortality.²³

Even if Ricci continually sought to disabuse his interlocutors of his alchemical abilities, he was possibly complicit in encouraging them by presenting himself as a Daoist sage. He signed the earliest extant draft of his first published Chinese writing, the Jiaoyou lun 交友論 (Treatise on Friendship), as a shanren 山人 (mountain person),²⁴ a term originally denoting a Daoist sage or intellectual who has secluded himself from worldly affairs by living in the mountains.²⁵ By the Ming dynasty, shanren came to indicate a social class of freethinking scholars who did not hold office but sought patronage from wealthy or powerful individuals. As Timothy Billings writes, “to be a shanren was more an attitude than a style of living in seclusion or in poverty—an attitude of intellectual and aesthetic refinement, and of critical detachment, often against the Confucian norm.”²⁶ Nevertheless, the eremitic seclusion connoted by the word retained Daoist insinuations, and in the Yuan dynasty it had even been used as a title for Daoist alchemists.²⁷

Ricci consciously builds upon the Daoist insinuations of shanren in his proem to the Jiaoyou lun. After describing his wanderings from the Far West to Nanjing (Jinling 金陵), he then sails to Nanpu, where he beholds the Western Mountain (xishan 西山). This mountain, upon which was located the Daoist temple Wanshou Gong 萬壽宮, he lauds as the “abode of the sages” (zhiren yuansou至人淵藪). The term zhiren 至人 also had steep Daoist connotations, insofar as it was used in the Zhuangzi (Tianxia 天下) to indicate the “perfect man who does not separate from truth” (不離於真, 謂之至人). Feeling compelled to remain by the aura of the place, he takes up residence and was invited by the prince Jian’an Wang 建安王 to relate his ideas on friendship. Withdrawing (tui 退) from the world to complete the commission, Ricci implies that the composition of the Jiaoyou lun was somehow inspired by the reclusive lifestyle of the monks on the Western Mountain.²⁸ As Haun Saussy points out, Ricci’s Daoist self-presentation was noticed by his Chinese contemporaries.²⁹ In the poetry of Li Zhi (1527–1602), a heterodox Ming philosopher who met Ricci on three occasions in Nanjing in 1599, Ricci’s wanderings evoke the “carefree meanderings” (xiaoyao you 逍遙遊) of the first chapter of the Zhuangzi.³⁰

Ricci’s hybrid experimentation with Confucian learning, Buddhist demeanor, Daoist vocabulary, and his own foreign origins eventually yielded to a decision to assume the identity of a Confucian literatus and to privilege the Confucian classics as the exclusive point of contact between Chinese thought and Christianity. Ricci understood that Confucianism was the ideology of the state and the elites, and even if there were strong syncretic tendencies in late Ming society, explicit identification as a Confucian intellectual could afford Ricci greater access to the upper echelons of power. This shift to Confucianism had already commenced in 1594 when Ricci was in Shaozhou 韶州 and before the first drafts of the Jiaoyou lun were written, but it took some time for this decision to filter through all the complexities of Ricci’s hybrid identity and lexical choices. In the standard 1601 text of the Jiaoyou lun, Ricci replaces shanren with xiushi 修士, a term connoting moral cultivation and thus of more Confucian flavor. Yet the Daoist insinuations of the proem remain in this published text, and, as Timothy Billings points out, Ricci’s reputation as a shanren persisted. For example, in preface to Jiaoyou lun, published by Zhu Tingce 朱廷策 (fl. 1610) in 1615, Ricci is referred to as Li Shanren 利山人.³¹

Ricci’s new Confucian orientation is clearly seen in his attempt to assume a new identity as a Confucian shengren. In two letters to the Superior General, Ricci’s future successor as Superior of the Jesuit China mission, Niccolò Longobardo (1559–1654), stressed the role of Ricci’s intellectual activities and literary production in diffusing Ricci’s reputation of sageliness. According to Longobardo’s first letter, dated 10 October 1598, the above-mentioned Qu Taisu 瞿太素 sent to Ricci from Suzhou 苏州 a letter dated 18 May 1596 relating how, after writing a book on what Ricci taught him during their three years together (1589–1592), Ricci had come to be universally regarded as a sage or shengren 聖人, which Longobardo translates as “the saint of this time” (il santo di questo tempo). What is interesting about Longobardo’s letter is that he then proceeds to elucidate the meaning of shengren in the Chinese context and boastfully introduces a comparison between Ricci and Confucius:

Shengren is the greatest title that can be given to a man in China because it denotes a man who was born holy (santo) and wise (savio) to the highest degree, in such a way that he can be a teacher of all, as was their Confucius. According to their books, a shengren is born every 500 years, and now they give this title to Fr Matteo Ricci, as Taisu says here.³²

In a follow up letter of 20 September 1599, Longobardo repeats the assertion, but instead links directly Ricci’s reputation for sageliness to the publication of the Jiaoyou lun.³³ Ricci himself relates in a letter sent a month earlier to Girolamo Costa that the missionaries in China were “regarded as the greatest saints (i maggiori santi) that have ever been in China.”³⁴ Ricci does not specify here the corresponding Chinese word for the Italian santi, but, given the proximity in time and the thematic commonalities between Ricci and Longobardo’s letters, it is quite likely Ricci reformulated out of modesty the same anecdote of Qu Taisu as praise for all missionaries. Chinese sources would seem to confirm Ricci and Longobardo’s claims. In the Aomen jilüe 澳門記略 (A Short History of Macau, 1751), the first systematic Chinese-language history of Macau, the Qing dynasty provincial officials Yin Guangren 印光任 (1691–1758) and Zhang Rulin 張汝霖 (1709–1769) include several interspersed references to Ricci’s career in China. Despite their hostility to the presence of Christianity and foreigners in China, the authors seem relatively sympathetic to Ricci, whom they describe as courteous and affable, and grandiloquently record that “the scholars and magistrates honoured him as the Sage from the Far West” (學士大夫至尊為極西聖人).³⁵

One may wonder whether Ricci and Longobardo misinterpreted or misrepresented the significance of being described as a shengren in the late Ming. With the diffusion of the School of Mind (lixue 理學), the view that sagehood was the preserve of a select few yielded to an egalitarian view of sagehood as latently potential in all people through the exercise of one’s innate moral knowledge (liangzhi 良知). Famously, Wang Yangming was said to have found unremarkable (changshi 常事) the claim made by one of his students that “all the people on the street are sages” (滿街人都是聖人).³⁶ Yet Ricci more conventionally understands sagehood as an exceptional and extraordinary ideal realized more in remote antiquity than in the degenerate present. In the Tianzhu shiyi 天主實義 (True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, 1603), the catechism that Ricci composed in part to supplant Ruggieri’s Tianzhu shilu, Ricci’s Chinese interlocutors comment that “For a long time now, no sage has arisen” (今久非見聖人), and the lack of sages among the present day is used to discredit the integrity of contemporary Confucian teaching, namely neo-Confucianism.³⁷ The implied comparison between the Jesuits’ sagehood and Confucius would be developed in the aura surrounding Giulio Aleni (1582–1649), who, among his followers in Fujian, was described not only as “Confucius of the West” (Xilai Kongzi 西來孔子) but also as a sage (shengren 聖人) surpassing Confucius.³⁸

The supreme testament of Ricci’s Confucian credentials is the Tianzhu shiyi. In this work, Ricci takes an unambiguously critical stance of Daoism and Buddhism, which he refutes as founded upon illogical principles. While he criticizes neo-Confucian doctrines such as taiji along similar lines, he portrays ancient Confucianism as compatible with Christianity, and implies that his Christian message is in fact a restoration of this ancient Confucianism that had been lost over time. In support of this Confucian orientation, a marked change in lexical choices for expressing the concept of Christian sanctity can be observed. Whereas in the Tianzhu shilu, Ruggieri obliquely refers to Augustine as xianshi, in the Tianzhu shiyi, Ricci identifies him by name (Aowusitinuo 㠗梧斯悌諾) and with title Xishi shengren 西士聖人, thus emphasizing his status as a Western scholar and moral exemplar.³⁹ The usage of shengren in the Tianzhu shiyi is explicitly within the Confucian intellectual and textual tradition: “Confucians regard the sages as authoritative examples, and the sages used the canonical writings and their authoritative commentaries as media of instruction” (儒者以聖人為宗, 聖人以經傳示教).⁴⁰ On one occasion, Ricci even uses shengren in reference to Confucius: “My view, however, is that the words you have quoted [i.e. on the need to produce offspring to fulfill the requirements of filial piety] were not handed down from the Sage, but were uttered by Mencius” (予曰此非聖人之傳語, 乃孟氏也).⁴¹ The deliberate use of the same term within the same text to indicate Augustine and Confucius would suggest to the Chinese reader an equivalence between Christian and Confucian ideals of human excellence.

Nonetheless, there are still some inconsistencies in Ricci’s vocabulary for Christian sanctity. For instance, Ricci uses shengshen 聖神 to indicate St Francis, the Biblical prophets, and the saints in heaven more generally, but he also uses this term in a non-Christian context on one occasion.⁴² This term was apparently used to describe the qualities of Emperor Yao in the Book of Documents, but it would also be later used to indicate the Holy Spirit. Hence, in later editions of the Tianzhu shiyi, the characters in shengshen were reversed as shensheng 神聖 or changed to shengren.⁴³ Another term employed in the Tianzhu shiyi is shenren 神人, which appears in one passage for saints in heaven and in another as a general term for a person of moral excellence.⁴⁴ Over time, however, shengren would emerge as the default term used by the Jesuit missionaries to denote a Christian saint. For instance, in the revised version of the Tianzhu shilu, published around 1640, the diverse Daoist vocabulary for Christian sanctity found in the 1584 edition is systematically changed to shengren.⁴⁵

3. The salvation of Confucius and the Chinese Rites Controversy

The implied equivalence between Confucius the shengren and the Christian saint raises the complex and ultimately irresolvable question of Confucius’s eternal fate. The missionaries’ discussions of this topic were steeped in centuries of reflection on the salvation of virtuous pagans, or what John Marenbon has aptly termed “the problem of paganism.”⁴⁶ For Augustine, following St Paul, justification is contingent upon faith, namely the recognition and acceptance of the incarnate Christ as their mediator. Augustine wavered between two positions: the first offered a narrow possibility of salvation to those living before the Incarnation with faith oriented towards the future coming of the Messiah, but this was applicable primarily to Jews and only a few gentiles, such as Job; the second more radically rejected the possibility of pagan salvation due to the faulty object of pagan virtue (namely personal glory). In the sixteenth century, Augustine’s views were revived by Calvinists and then in the seventeenth century by Jansenists, who stressed the depravity of fallen human nature and thus the impossibility of salvation without divine grace.⁴⁷

Augustine’s grim views, however, were not universally accepted, and the discovery of vast numbers of peoples in the New World and Asia during the early modern period undermined the medieval conviction that the Gospel had been universally promulgated. In Ricci’s time it was not unusual to contend that salvation was possible for virtuous pagans. Theologians in the School of Salamanca, such as Domingo De Soto (1494–1560), extended the possibility of salvation to pagans prior to contact with Christian Europe through “implicit” faith, whereas Jesuit theologians, such as Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) and Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), who taught at the Roman College while Ricci studied there, held that God provided sufficient means for all to attain salvation even without explicit acceptance of the Gospel.⁴⁸

Yet salvation of non-Catholics remained doctrinally undefined up until the Second Vatican Council, and even today the Church is reluctant to speculate upon the salvation of a non-Christian individual. Hence Ricci does not explicitly address these topics in his Chinese-language works, leaving it to the reader to infer that the shengren Confucius enjoys the same afterlife as the shengren Augustine. But in his history of the early China mission, which he compiled towards the end of his life, Ricci expresses an optimistic view that the ancient Chinese were saved due to their monotheism and virtuous conduct:

Hence it can be hoped from the immense Bounty of the Lord that many of these ancients were saved in the natural law, with that particular help that God is accustomed to grant to those who do their utmost to receive it.⁴⁹

Ricci’s formulation was in the same spirit as contemporary Jesuit theologians, but also in continuity with the medieval axiom: “To those who do what is in their power God does not deny grace” (Facienti quod in se est Deus non denegat gratiam).⁵⁰ In the same work, Ricci relates Confucius’s reputation for sanctity:

The greatest philosopher among them is Confucius, who was born 551 years before the coming of the Lord to the world, and he lived a good life for more than 70 years, teaching this nation with words, deeds and writings. Consequently, he is regarded and venerated by all as the holiest (il più santo) man that had ever been in the word. In truth, in that which he said and in his good way of living according to nature, he is not inferior to our ancient philosophers, and superior to many.⁵¹

Ricci is rather cautious in his language: he does not quite say that Confucius was a saint, but that he was regarded (tenuto) and venerated (venerato) by the Chinese as such. Yet he accepts as a fact (nel vero) that Confucius lived a life of extreme virtue in accordance with nature, thus fulfilling the criterion specified above for salvation. Veneratio was of course the technical term used in Catholic theology to indicate the honor that Christians owe to saints as opposed to the adoration owed to God alone.

Ricci’s description of the rituals offered in the Confucian temples in honor of Confucius and the correlates (peixiang 配享) was also punctiliously couched in the theology of Christian sainthood. Ricci relates that magistrates reverence Confucius twice a month, lighting candles and placing incense before the altar, while, on special occasions such as Confucius’s birthday, “they offer him dead animals and other things to eat with much solemnity, to thank him for the good teaching that he left them in his books.”⁵² Despite this elaborate ceremony, Ricci stresses that the participants do not pray to Confucius or seek anything, since the benefits they received came not from Confucius but rather the application of his teachings.⁵³ The distinctions that Ricci draws here reflect Tridentine Catholic views on the veneration of saints whereby the prayers addressed to saints are in fact intercessory, in that the saint is not petitioned to grant a good with his or her own power, but is merely entreated to pray on the suppliant’s behalf to God.⁵⁴

In a passage that was crossed out and not reproduced in the official Latin translation of the text by Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628), Ricci describes the same rituals using the term “sacrifice” (sacrificio). In Catholic theology, it is generally understood that the person or thing to which a sacrificial offering is made is divine, and such an insinuation would contravene the Catholic theology of sainthood. Yet this lapsus calami in fact reinforces the associations between these rites and the veneration of Catholic saints. Realizing the perils of labeling the rituals a “sacrifice,” Ricci quickly qualifies that the Chinese “do not recognise in [Confucius] any divinity or ask anything from him” and adds in a marginal annotation “and thus it cannot be called a true sacrifice (vero sacrificio).”⁵⁵

Ricci’s views on the salvation of the ancient Chinese sages were not shared by all Jesuit missionaries, and the refusal of these missionaries to affirm unambiguously the salvation of the ancient sages caused considerable unease among the Chinese intellectuals. One of the Jesuits’ early detractors, Xu Dashou 許大受, was scandalized by reports that the Europeans in Macau considered Confucius “a devil” (mogui 魔鬼), and that Confucius, along with the other sages of antiquity such as Fuxi, Yao and Shun, were in Hell. In his Shengchao zuopi 聖朝佐闢 (Assistance to the Holy [i.e. Ming] Dynasty for the Refutation [of Catholicism], 1623), Xu relates that he was informed by Giulio Aleni and Niccolò Longobardo that Confucius was not in fact in a place of suffering, but in “a Hell for purification, where there is no suffering; all those who have followed this teaching but who have not attained its perfection will enter this Hell, which is like a paradise” (此一種鍊清地獄, 無甚苦事, 凢從彼敎而未造其極者, 亦入此獄, 葢天堂之流亞云).⁵⁶ Even though, according to this account, Confucius was spared all suffering in the afterlife, Xu was shocked by the thought that Confucius, who, according to the Mencius (2A2), was the “most excellent man who ever existed” (自有生民以來, 未有盛於孔子), had been placed in such a lowly position by the Christian God.⁵⁷

Xu captures the diverging and shifting views on Confucius and Confucianism held by Jesuit missionaries in the decades after Ricci’s death in 1610. Due to the collapse of the Jesuit mission in Japan, Macau was host to missionaries exiled from Japan, many of whom opposed Ricci’s engagement with Confucianism. Under their influence, Longobardo would develop an atheistic reading of the entire Confucian intellectual tradition, which would disqualify all the ancient Chinese sages from salvation.⁵⁸ Given that Longobardo was superior of the China mission when Aleni was interviewed by Xu, Aleni may have felt pressured to express himself with greater circumspection about Confucius’s eternal fate. But even after Longobardo’s influence over missionary policy waned, Aleni never positively affirmed that Confucius and the other ancient sages were saved. Xu’s account would seem to be corroborated by other Chinese accounts of encounters with Aleni. According to the Buddhist monk Huang Zhen 黃真, when Aleni visited Zhangzhou 漳州 in Fujian province in 1633, the Jesuit reluctantly admitted to the monk that Wen Wang, who was esteemed by Confucius as a model ruler, was in Hell because of his polygamy and concubinage.⁵⁹

Nevertheless, Xu’s critique contains much theological confusion and possibly misrepresents Aleni’s position. First, Xu conflates Purgatory, where the souls of the baptized who died in the state of grace but with venial sin are purified, and the Limbo of the Patriarchs, which is not a place of “purification” (lianqing 鍊清) but a temporary abode for the righteous before the Incarnation. This conflation is not made in Aleni’s Chinese-language works, which implicitly afford Confucius and the other ancient Chinese sages a possibility of salvation in heaven. For instance, in the Wanwu zhenyuan 萬物真原 (True Origin of all Things, 1628), Aleni distinguishes between four layers of Hell, the second lowest being Purgatory (lianzuiyu 煉罪獄) for the purification of the virtuous (shanren 善人) with transgressions (guoqian 過愆) and outermost being the Limbo of the Patriarchs, which is defined as a “temporary waiting Hell” (zanhouyu 暫候獄). Here the souls of the virtuous (youdezhe 有德者) who died before the Incarnation awaited the coming of Jesus “without suffering and in bliss” (無苦惱而有安樂), but this Hell is now empty.⁶⁰ On the basis of this passage, if Confucius were to be counted as among the virtuous, he would in fact be now in Heaven, not Hell. This possibility is countenanced in Aleni’s response to a question posed on 12 September 1632 by his disciple Li Jiugong 李九功 (died 1681), whose conversations with Aleni would be recorded in the Kouduo richao 口鐸日抄 (Diary of Oral Admonitions, 1630–1640):

On the eighth [Li] Qixu (=Li Jiugong) asked: ‘Only fifty years have passed since the Heavenly Studies have entered our country. Of course, it is fair that sinners who lived before that time have to suffer in hell. But also those who have controlled their bodies and cultivated virtue, like the persons who in our country are called sages and saints (xian sheng zhe賢聖者), have not fully conformed to the Ten Commandments: how has the Lord of Heaven dealt with them?’

The master said: ‘The Lord of Heaven’s Ten Commandments have been engraved in the human mind; their general content has always been known in the whole world. If those persons indeed respectfully observed them on the basis of what they knew, there are extenuating circumstances, even though the canonical Scriptures had not been transmitted to them. in his mercy the Lord of Heaven surely has helped them, either by silently inspiring their minds, or by letting [some] persons transmit the Doctrine to them in order to make their virtue complete. He certainly has not disregarded their sincere observance. If China’s sages indeed have been capable of this, I am sure that the Lord of Heaven has given them a safe place to rest. However, those people of the past still could plead ignorance. Now since several tens of years there are persons here explaining the Doctrine, and at present the Way is as accessible as a main road. how can those be excused who clearly know about it and yet turn their backs on it?’⁶¹

On the surface, Aleni seems to be restating Ricci’s position, but, taken in the context of Li’s question, Aleni’s response is much more tentative and pessimistic. Whereas, for Ricci, salvation before the Incarnation is contingent upon adherence to a vaguely defined natural law, for Aleni, salvation of the ancient sages depends upon whether they observed the Ten Commandments, which specifically prohibited polygamy and concubinage, practices common throughout Chinese history. For Aleni, even though the ancient Chinese may not have had knowledge of the canonical scriptures, they must have had at least subconscious knowledge of the Ten Commandments because they “are engraved in people’s hearts and whose content is known throughout the whole world” (天主十誡, 刻在人心, 天下皆已知其概). However, the premise of Li’s question is that these Chinese sages did not fully live in accordance with them (於十誡尚未盡符), signaling perhaps their polyamorous practices. Aleni’s phrasing suggests that ignorance cannot be pleaded as an excuse for disobeying the Ten Commandments but merely for their failure to follow Scripture, of which they had no knowledge. In contrast, for contemporary Chinese, it is no longer enough to follow the Ten Commandments because the Gospel has already been proclaimed in China. Hence Aleni’s response to Li here is, in fact, compatible with his response to Huang Zhen, and remains highly ambiguous about whether the ancient sages were saved. This ambiguity was understandably confusing and distressing for literati like Xu Dashou.

Ricci’s framework for explaining Confucius’s eternal fate and his saintly status in China would be radically challenged with the arrival of the Dominican and Franciscan missionaries in the 1630s. These mendicant friars formed the view that the rituals offered in honor of Confucius and ancestors were in fact sacrifices and not permissible for Chinese Catholic converts, thus instigating a century-long debate now known as the Chinese Rites Controversy. The leading opponents of the Rites in the initial stage of the controversy were the Dominican friar Juan Bautista Morales (1597–1664) and the Franciscan friar Antonio de Santa María Caballero (1602–1669). In 1635, they jointly witnessed ancestral rituals in Muyang 穆陽 in Fujian province and questioned local Christians who participated in the Rites about their meaning. Alarmed by the similarities between the rituals and the Mass, the friars suspected that they were sacrificial in nature and conducted inquiries both with local Christians and the Jesuits to ascertain the true meaning of these ancestral rituals, as well as of the rituals in honor of Confucius, which the friars believed functionally analogous.⁶² An important respondent was the Jesuit vice-provincial Francisco Furtado (1589–1653), who sent a summary of the friars’ objections to the Jesuit Superior General, Muzio Vitelleschi (1563–1645), dated 10 November 1636,⁶³ and penned a detailed response dated 8 February 1640 to twelve questions posed by Morales.⁶⁴ As there is much cross-over between these two documents, the following analysis will focus on the latter document, which is much more substantial.

The lens through which the friars critique the ancestral and Confucian rituals reflected Protestant attacks on the cult of the saints in Europe. During the Reformation, the veneration of saints was widely denounced as superstitious and idolatrous, symbolizing the degeneration of the Roman Church into quasi-paganism.⁶⁵ Similarly, Furtado’s justification of the Confucian rituals mirrored the distinctions made in Catholic theological defenses of saint cults. In the sixth question, Morales asks whether Christian mandarins and literati are permitted to participate in the Confucian rituals. Furtado’s response closely follows Ricci’s description of the rituals, stressing that the honors paid to Confucius emerged after his death as recognition of Confucius’s virtues and as a means of thanksgiving for the benefits received from Confucius’s teaching. To explain how these rituals could be legitimately practiced by Christians, Furtado expands Ricci’s distinction between true sacrifice and the “improper” sacrifice using a parallel with Christian saints: the act of sacrifice is an acknowledgement of divinity in the object of the sacrifice; in the Christian context, such a sacrifice is made to God since no divinity or power is attributed to the saints themselves, but in common parlance (populariter loquendo), sacrifices are said to be offered to saints so that, through their intercession, our sacrifice may become more pleasing to God.⁶⁶ Likewise, though the Chinese word for sacrifice is used to denote the rituals in honor of Confucius, the Chinese do not recognize any divinity in Confucius or believe that they obtain anything through Confucius’s merits; therefore, the honors made to Confucius cannot be considered sacrifices. Hence, for Furtado, the nature of rituals and cults is not defined by their appearance, but rather the intention with which they are performed.

The friars at this stage of the controversy did not openly question Ricci’s monotheist reading of the ancient Chinese classics, but they assumed an antagonistic position towards Confucius, whom they openly proclaimed to the Chinese as being in Hell as a pagan idolater. Furtado was fearful that such language would antagonize the Chinese and imperil the mission. Even though Confucianism encourages us to pursue virtue for its own sake and lacks precise vocabulary for Heaven and Hell, Furtado argues that the Chinese classics teach “implicitly” (subobscure) that good actions are rewarded and bad actions are punished after death. He cites as examples of souls understood by the Chinese to be in Heaven the sage kings Yao and Shun, as well as Confucius; as examples of souls in Hell he mentions the Kings Jie 桀 of the Xia dynasty and Zhou 紂 of the Shang dynasty, who were both synonymous with tyranny in Chinese historiography. Only those souls which are not especially good or evil are dissipated after death in the air like smoke.⁶⁷ Furtado alleges that, as a of result of the friars’ recklessness, a memorial was submitted to the emperor accusing the Jesuits of seeking to destroy Confucianism, and only after the examination of the Jesuits’ writings were these charges dropped.⁶⁸

The question of Confucius’s eternal fate was so sensitive that the Chinese had even found offensive the insinuation that Confucius was in the Limbo of the Patriarchs, which in the Creed is identified as “Hell” and had been translated by the Jesuits literally into Chinese as diyu 地狱. Furtado mentions that a misunderstanding about the relationship between the Bosom of the Patriarchs and Hell prompted a scholar – presumably Xu Dashou – to publish a systematic rebuttal of the Catholic faith (i.e. the Shengchao zuopi). The Chinese were outraged that a figure of Confucius’s stature could have been found in such an inferior place after death and had to be rescued by Christ. Hence, after this experience, Furtado maintains, the Jesuits decided to employ a semantic translation for the Limbo of the Patriarchs. For instance, in the revised edition of the Tianzhu shilu, published when Furtado was vice-provincial, this place is identified as “dwelling place of the sages of antiquity” (gusheng jisuo 古聖寄所), thus removing the negative connotations of Hell.⁶⁹

Confucius’s salvation is discussed more specifically in Furtado’s response to Morales’s eleventh question. Morales complained about the equivocal responses (aequivocationes) that Jesuits gave the Chinese. Furtado, like Ricci and Aleni before him, was well aware that it was theologically problematic (parum tutum est) to proclaim positively that Confucius was saved, but it was politically problematic for him to state otherwise. Hence, Furtado advises that missionaries explain this problem not with a direct response but with a syllogism containing a certain major premise and an uncertain minor premise:

All those who know God and love him above all things, and depart from this life with this knowledge and love are saved [major premise]; if Confucius knew God and loved Him above all things, and passed away with this knowledge and love [minor premise], then he is undoubtedly saved.⁷⁰

Furtado leaves it open to the Chinese literati to determine whether Confucius fulfilled this condition by investigating their own books.⁷¹ Naturally, given that Furtado, following Ricci, believed that the ancient Chinese (which presumably included Confucius) did have knowledge of God and accepted uncritically Confucius’s reputation for virtue, Furtado was indeed leading his interlocutors to the conclusion that Confucius was saved without definitively proclaiming such. Furtado concedes that this response is somewhat equivocal, but he believes that it was necessary for the Gospel to take root in China. In this respect, he was following the example of St Paul, who “became all things to all people” (1 Cor. 9:22), and even, he claims, Christ the Lord, who frequently moderated his responses “so that they could be useful (utilitati), and not scandalous (scandalo).”⁷²

Unconvinced by the Jesuits’ responses, Morales travelled to Rome to present seventeen queries concerning the Jesuits’ missionary practice in China, especially their toleration of Confucian and ancestral rituals. The fourteenth of Morales’s questions concerned the usage of the word sheng as a qualifier for the Trinity, Christ, the Virgin Mary, and other saints in apologetic literature where the character was also used to indicate Confucius and the sage kings, whom Morales describes as being “infidels and idolaters” despite their reputation for sanctity in China. Evidently, Morales rejected Furtado’s minor premise, and was concerned that the equivalence drawn between Chinese sages and Christian saints might imply an equivalence between them. Morales only vaguely alludes to “books of Christian doctrine published by missionaries,” but it is possible he is referring to the Daiyi pian 代疑篇 (1621) or the Daiyi xupian 代疑續篇 (1635) by the Christian convert Yang Tingyun 楊廷筠, the latter work being published in Fujian around the time the mendicant friars made their initial inquiries about the Chinese Rites and mentioned in their first reports.⁷³

The 1645 decree of Propaganda Fide accepted Morales’s description of the Confucian and ancestral rites as idolatrous, and prohibited Chinese Catholics from participating in them, yet curiously it refused to pronounce definitively on the usage of sheng on the grounds that the cardinals in Rome did not have the linguistic expertise to adjudicate the true meaning of this word. Instead, they revealed a degree of flexibility: “If this word in the Kingdom of China has a wide [semantic] range (habet latitudinem), ministers can use it; however if it is restricted to mean true and perfect sanctity (veram et perfectam Sanctitatem), then it cannot be used.”⁷⁴ This reluctance to intervene is even more remarkable given that, according to Morales’s testimony, Confucius and the sage kings were “idolaters.” For Propaganda Fide, therefore, to describe both Confucius and Augustine as a shengren does not necessary imply that they were both of the same soteriological status. Context and philological research were key for deciphering the precise meaning of terms and for determining their acceptability in Christian apologetics.

Propaganda Fide’s response on the usage of sheng with Confucius allowed for a greater diversity of views on the status of Confucius and the Confucian tradition, even among the mendicant friars who were opposed to the Chinese Rites. Notably, Caballero embraced the leeway of this article to develop a positive perspective on Confucius in his writings prior to his exile to Guangzhou in 1666, after which he became hardened in his opposition to Confucianism as an intellectual tradition. Let us first consider the “Sworn Declaration” (“Declaratio sub iuramento,” 1661), in which Caballero expressed his opposition to the papal decree of 1656 that the Jesuit Martino Martini (1614–1661) had secured in favor of the Chinese Rites. Caballero paraphrases Propaganda Fide’s 1645 response to Morales’s query and accepts it as fact even though Propaganda Fide phrases it only in conditional terms: “The word and character sheng 聖 has a broad meaning, for it means either true sanctity or the excellence of someone before others.”⁷⁵ According to the logic of the 1645 decree, Caballero implies here that he did not oppose its usage with both Chinese sages and Christian saints in Christian publications. In the same “Sworn Declaration,” Caballero also embraces Ricci’s view that Confucius was monotheist and of exemplary virtue, thus contradicting Morales’s testimony that Confucius was an idolater. He builds upon these premises in the “Relation on the Sects of China” (“Relatio Sinae Sectarum”), which he finished by 18 November 1662, to affirm that Confucius is saved as a virtuous pagan:

After having completed 73 years of his life, he died 659 years before St Thomas the Apostle preached the Gospel to China. Concerning similar pagan men who did not have higher light than that of the law of nature, but if they were to have had it, they would have followed it, and did as much as they could do by themselves, and lived according to the rectitude of natural reason, Christ the Lord revealed to Saint Bridget in her Revelations (book 1, chapter 41) that they will not be judged with the wicked.⁷⁶

In contrast, Morales sought not only to combat the 1656 decree but also to overturn the flexibility that Propaganda Fide conceded over the usage of sheng. On 30 May 1661, Morales concluded a petition to Propaganda Fide (“Relatio et libellus supplex”), which was signed by his Dominican confrères, with the intention of demonstrating the factual errors in Martini’s description of the Chinese Rites. At one point of the text, Morales discusses the significance of the title sheng, attributed to Confucius. To support his analysis, Morales consults the influential Chinese dictionary Zihui 字彙 (Collection of Characters, 1615) by Mei Yingzuo 梅膺祚. Morales translates the entry on sheng as follows:

Sheng, that is fully and perfectly all good, either the virtues or gifts of the intellect which are found in man, and the culmination or summit in those virtues, above which a person cannot pass; or the supreme height of all virtues to which a person can reach, and cannot go further; and because in all things nothing can be found which it does not penetrate and it knows even future things.⁷⁷

Morales’s rendering of this definition seems to be aimed directly at resolving the question of sheng’s semantic rage posed by Propaganda Fide: far from possessing latitudo, sheng denotes in a restricted way moral and intellectual perfection and is even suggestive of prophetic ability. As Morales elaborates, this honor is bestowed on Confucius because his teaching is considered infallible, like Sacred Scripture in Christian Europe. Hence the Jesuits, in order to ease the introduction of Christianity in China, present Christianity as “in agreement with the teaching of Confucius.” Morales adduces as evidence the Tianzhu shiyi, which states unambiguously that the Christian God (Tianzhu) is the same as Shangdi in the Chinese classics. Curiously, Morales does not dispute Ricci’s equivalence between Shangdi and Tianzhu (et hoc non vanum & sine fundamento dicitur), but cautions against inferring from this equivalence that Christianity and Confucianism are compatible: literati who convert to Christianity on this basis leave the faith as they come to realize the chasm between the two teachings.⁷⁸

Morales’s and Caballero’s petitions to Propaganda Fide had little effect, and the status quo continued up until 1693, when Charles Maigrot (1652–1730), the apostolic vicar of the mission in Fujian province, issued an edict or “Mandatum” prohibiting the practice of the Chinese Rites in Fujian. In the edict, Maigrot did not stake a position on the usage of sheng in relation to Confucius, but the debates over the translation of sheng emerged in the ensuing discussions in Rome over whether the Chinese rituals in honor of Confucius were civil or religious. In 1694, Maigrot dispatched to Rome Nicolas Charmot M.E.P. (1645–1714) to submit the “Mandatum” for deliberation. In 1697, four theologians in Rome examined Maigrot’s claims with the assistance of the Vicar Apostolic of Hunan and Guangdong 湖廣, Giovanni Francesco Nicolai a Leonessa (1656–1737), who drew up a report and provided translations and equivalents to help the Roman theologians understand the Chinese terminology and concepts.

For Nicolai, the question of whether Christians are allowed to minister or be present at the offerings to Confucius hinges firstly on whether sheng denotes merely an individual of great moral or intellectual worth in a secular sense, or whether it necessarily has religious overtones. As numerous Jesuit publications attest, Confucius is honored not merely as a teacher, but as a sanctus. An important source for Nicolai was the Da Ming huidian 大明會典 (1597), the collection of official statues of the Ming dynasty, which had been consulted extensively by other missionaries, such as Domingo Navarrete (1610–1689) and Francesco Brancati (1607–1671).⁷⁹ According to Nicolai, Confucius is portrayed in this work not merely an ordinary sheng but a sheng par excellence: Confucius’s virtue is compared to Heaven and Earth and his spirit has surpassed all other sheng of the past. For Nicolai, the fundamental meaning of sheng is holiness (sanctitas), which can also simultaneously denote wisdom (sapientia). Nicolai acknowledges that among “Chinese atheists” sheng denotes “the most perfect and most wise man,” namely the highest grade of perfection to which people with the assistance of Heaven or nature are able to reach.⁸⁰ However, he appeals to the Chinese classics to assert that sheng who ascended into heaven after death and from heaven grant favors to people, and have been venerated from antiquity to the present day as saints. Nicolai is probably drawing upon the Tianzhu shiyi, which includes various citations from the Shujing and Shijing to show how the souls of the ancient sage kings survived death and continued to intercede on behalf of humanity.⁸¹ Hence, the supernatural powers attributed to the shengren undermined Martini’s thesis that the rituals in honor of Confucius were merely “civil and political.” Nicolai’s redefinition of shengren in religious terms thus provided a pivotal contribution to the decree Cum Deus optimus issued by Pope Clement XI (1649–1721) in 1704 to prohibit Christian participation in the Chinese Rites.

4. Conclusion

This article has sought to show how far-reaching and complex were the questions surrounding the translation of the Christian concept of holiness into Chinese. The lexical choices that the missionaries used for expressing sanctus had implications not only for how Christianity as a religion was understood but also for the missionaries’ own identities in their social interactions. Just as Ruggieri employed Daoist vocabulary to convey Christian sanctity in the Tianzhu shilu and Buddhist vocabulary elsewhere, so emerged a hybrid identity of the missionaries as Buddhist monks and Daoist alchemists, which Ricci would later more explicitly embrace in marketing himself as a Daoist sage or shanren. Yet we should be wary of attributing to the Jesuits disproportionate agency in the process. Especially in the 1580s, when Ruggieri and Ricci were first learning the ropes, they lacked the linguistic and cultural knowledge to understand the significance of the translations, and they relied upon native Chinese as their interpreters who employed dynamic equivalences to make sense of this new religion. It could be argued, therefore, that the experimentalism seen in this early missionary period was not properly speaking an accommodation insofar as accommodation denotes a conscious decision on the part of subject expert to adapt to the needs of a target audience. Rather, it bears more the marks of an indigenous Chinese reading of Christianity and spontaneous response to the presence of these mysterious missionary figures. Naturally, over time, as the missionaries became better versed in Chinese language and culture, they assumed greater agency in their lexical choices, but their Chinese collaborators still played a key role in prompting and guiding the missionaries in the decision-making process. Given the eclectic or even syncretic frame in which Christianity was first received and interpreted by the Chinese, does it make sense to privilege Confucianism in our comparative studies of Chinese and Christian thought? Reflecting on these spontaneous and indigenous Chinese readings of Christianity may help us develop a richer comparative analysis of Chinese and Christian conceptions of human excellence and reflect better on how Christianity can integrate within an Asian context.

This experimental stage yielded to a more rigid and systematic Confucian orientation which then in turn was deconstructed with European theological categories during the Chinese Rites Controversy. During this debate the agency of the missionaries’ Chinese collaborators was diminished as the questions were decided primarily in Europe by theologians with minimal understanding of Chinese culture and language. Yet, as we see with the meaning of sheng, the theologians of Propaganda Fide professed their linguistic ignorance, inviting the missionaries to reflect further on the polyvalence of words and to avoid assuming simplistic equivalences. The interpretative frames developed by the rival camps in Chinese Rites Controversy still inform debates over Confucianism and Chinese religion today. If Tran’s interpretation is heir to the Jesuit reading of the Chinese Rites as civil and political, Huang’s focus on the religious dimension of Confucianism resembles the position of Dominican and Franciscan friars who criticized these same rituals as superstitious and idolatrous. While the Eurocentric doctrinal focus of the Chinese Rites Controversy may seem obtuse to Sinologists and comparative philosophers today, the questions that they posed continue to inform debates today.

Even though the Chinese Rites Controversy concluded with a condemnation of inculturation and a more restrictive understanding of the Catholic Church’s relationship with non-Christian religion, the debates that unfolded during the Chinese Rites Controversy also prompted missionaries to confront unresolved questions about how non-Christian forms of human excellence should be valorized and described within the Church. In their writings and interactions, the Jesuits applied, in practical terms, recent theological developments by refusing to condemn ancient Chinese sages and expressing hope that they had found salvation through their cultivation of virtue. By valorizing Chinese conceptions of sagehood, the Jesuits made an important contribution to broadening the Catholic Church’s understanding of moral excellence, which would be only fully realized in the Second Vatican Council.

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This work was supported by Australian Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Daniel Canaris

Daniel Canaris is an intellectual historian specializing in Sino-Western cultural exchange, as well as the Italian Enlightenment and Renaissance. He completed his Ph.D. in Italian Studies at the University of Sydney in 2017 and has been awarded fellowships by the University Erlangen-Nuremberg, the Warburg Institute (University of London), the Sun Yat-sen University, the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History (University of San Francisco), and Villa I Tatti (Harvard; declined), and is currently an A.R.C. Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (D.E.C.R.A.) fellow. His first monograph, Vico and China, was published in 2020 as part of the Voltaire Foundation’s Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, and co-edited with Thierry Meynard a critical edition and translation of Longobardo’s Resposta breve (Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History). His critical edition and translation of Michele Ruggieri’s Tianzhu shilu 天主实录 was published by Brill in 2023.

Notes

1 Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity.

2 Pan, “The Sage and the Saint”.

3 Tran, “Becoming a Shengren”.

4 Littlejohn, Historical Dictionary of Daoism, 171.

5 Chin-shing 黃進興, “Sages and Saints”.

6 Tran, “Becoming a Shengren”.

7 Gentz, “Rational Choice”.

8 Brook objects to the use of “syncretism” as a label for sanjiao heyi, likening the sanjiao to a “condominium” of teachings. See Brook, “Rethinking Syncretism”.

9 Kohn, Sitting in Oblivion.

10 “Perfected Person, Real Person, Authentic Person, ZHENREN 真人” (Littlejohn, Historical Dictionary of Daoism).

11 Sophie Ling-chia Wei mistakenly suggests that Ruggieri translates sanctus as shengren 聖人. However, Wei was referring to the revised edition of the Tianzhu shilu that was published around 1640 and not Ruggieri’s original text. See Wei, “Sheng Ren in the Figurists’ Reinterpretation of the Yijing”.

12 A.R.S.I., Jap.Sin. I, 198, fol. 142^v. For facsimile edition, see Ruggieri and Ricci, Dicionário Português-Chinês.

13 A.R.S.I., Jap.Sin. I, 189, fol. 44^v.

14 Chan, “Michele Ruggieri”.

15 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana [BAV], Barberini Orientale, 150.1–6.

16 For a transcription and translation of this Latin text, see Canaris, Michele Ruggieri’s Tianzhu Shilu.

17 See Ricci’s letter to Giambattista Román of 13 September 1584:

Están divididos en tres setas, sin la de los Moros, que, no sé cómo, se sembró entre ellos: la una se llama heguia y la otra cilitan y la otra es de los letrados y esta es la más celebrada.

Ricci, Lettere (1580–1609), 84–5.

18 For Ruggieri’s Chinese collaborators, see D’Elia, “Quadro storico-sinologico del primo libro di dottrina cristiana in cinese”.

19 Canaris, Michele Ruggieri’s Tianzhu, 106–7.

20 Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, 104.

21 Letter of 9 September 1589, p. 139; 28 October 1595, p. 281; 28 October 1595, p. 292; 4 November 1595, p. 317; 13 October 1596, p. 335; 15 February 1609, p. 514.

22 Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, 120–1.

23 D’Elia, Fonti Ricciane, 1:104.

24 British Library Add. Ms. 8803. See Ricci, On Friendship, 16.

25 Yifeng 赵轶峰, “Shanren yu wan Ming shehui 山人与晚明社会”.

26 Ricci, On Friendship, 16.

27 For shanren in the Ming, see Wang, The Ming Prince and Daoism, 139–54. For the alchemical associations of the term, see He, “Text and Teacher in the Transmission of Alchemical Knowledge”.

28 Ricci, On Friendship, 17–18.

29 Saussy, “Matteo Ricci the Daoist”.

30 For Ricci’s meeting with Li Zhi, see Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, 191–4.

31 Ricci, On Friendship, 17.

32 “Questo titolo di xingino è nella Cina il maggiore che si possa dare ad un huomo, perchè significa un huomo che nacque santo et savio in sommo grado, di maniera che possa esser maestro di tutti, come fu il loro Confutio. Tengono ne’ suoi libri che ogni 500 anni ha di nascere un xingino. et adesso dànno questo titolo al P. Matteo Ricci, come dice qui il Thaiso.” D’Elia, Fonti Ricciane, 1:118–19, n.7.

33 “Il P. Matteo Ricci tradusse in lingua cinese alcune sentenze d’Amicizia et perciò lo tengono in tanta stima che lo chiaman xingino, ch'è il maggior titolo che si dia.” D’Elia, Fonti Ricciane, 1:118-19, n.7.

34 Ricci, Lettere, 362.

35 See Lundbaek, “Matteo Ricci in the Aomen Jilüe”; D’Elia, Fonti Ricciane, 1:118–19, n.7.

36 Li, “On the Claim ‘All the People on the Street Are Sages’”.

37 Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, 296.

38 Pan, “The Sage and the Saint”, 454–5.

39 Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, 64.

40 ibid., 266–7.

41 Ibid., 348–9.

42 Ibid., 76–7, 256–7, 278–9, 362–3.

43 Ibid., 77, n.100.

44 Ibid., 282–3; 348–9.

45 Canaris, Michele Ruggieri’s Tianzhu Shilu.

46 For discussion, see Marenbon, Pagans and Philosophers.

47 Jansen, Augustinus, seu doctrina Sancti Augustini de humanae naturae sanitate, aegritudine, medicina adversus Pelagianos et Massilanses.

48 Sullivan, Salvation Outside the Church?.

49 “Di dove si può sperare dalla immensa bontà del Signore, che molti di quegli antichi si salvassero nella legge naturale, con quello agiuto particolare che suole Iddio porgere, a quegli che di sua parte fanno quanto possono per riceverlo.” D’Elia, Fonti Ricciane, 1:109.

50 McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 135–45.

51 “Il magiore filosofo che ha tra loro è il Confutio, che nacque cinquecento e cinquanta uno anni inanzi alla venuta del Signore al mondo, e visse più di settenta anni assai buona vita, insegnando con parole, opre, e scritti, questa natione. Laonde da tutti è tenuto e venerato per il più santo huomo che mai fusse nel mondo. E nel vero, in quello che disse e nel suo buon modo di vivere conforme alla natura, non è inferiore ai nostri antichi filosofi, excedendo a molti.” D’Elia, Fonti Ricciane, 1:39.

52 “gli offriscono animali morti et altre cose da mangiare con molta solennità, pe raggradirgli la buona doctrina che gli lasciò ne’ suoi libri.” D’Elia, Fonti Ricciane, 1:119.

53 Ibid. 1:119.

54 McHugh and Callan, Catechism of the Council of Trent for Parish Priests, 492–93.

55 D’Elia, Fonti Ricciane, 1:40.

56 Xu 許大受, Aide à la réfutation de la Sainte Dynastie contre la doctrine du Seigneur du Ciel, 33.

57 Ibid.

58 Canaris, “Mediating Humanism and Scholasticism”.

59 Gernet, Chine et christianisme, 240–1.

60 München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, L. Sin. C, 391, 20a-20b.

61 Li Jiubiao 李九標, Kouduo Richao: Li Jiubiao’s Diary of Oral Admonitions, 1:376-7.

62 Margiotti, “L’atteggiamento dei francescani spagnoli nella questione dei riti cinesi”.

63 Furtado to Vitelleschi, 10 November 1636, A.R.S.I., Jap. Sin 161 II, fols. 164–165. The Latin version is published as Furtado, “Epistola patris Francisci Furtado vice provincialis Sinensis die 10 Novemberis, anno 1636”.

64 Furtado, “Responsio patris Francisci Furtado vice-provincialis Sinensis Societatis Jesu ad duodecim questiones a P. F. Joanne Baptista de Morales Ordinis S. Dominici Manilensis, propositas Patribus Societatis Jesu laborantibus in praedicatione Sancti Evangelii in Imperio Sinarum anno 1640”.

65 Heming, Protestants and the Cult of the Saints.

66 Furtado, “Responsio patris Francisci Furtado”, 15.

67 Ibid., 30–1.

68 Ibid., 19.

69 Canaris, Michele Ruggieri’s Tianzhu Shilu, 288.

70 Furtado, “Responsio patris Francisci Furtado”, 37.

71 Ibid., 37.

72 Ibid., 38.

73 Margiotti, “L’atteggiamento dei francescani spagnoli nella questione dei riti cinesi”, 131.

74 Navarrete, Tratados históricos, políticos, éticos y religiosos de la monarchia de China, 457. See Hsia, “Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata (1667)”, 388.

75 A.P.F., SC Indie Orientali e Cina 1, 1623–1674, fol. 202r.

76 “Septuagintaque tribus suae vitae annis sic completis cursui eius finem dedit, sexcentis quinquaginta novem annis antequam S. Thomas Apostolus Sanctum Evangelium Sinis praedicaret. De similibus viris etiamsi infidelibus, qui alteriorem lucem quam legis naturae non habuierunt, porro si habuissent, prosecuti fuissent et quantum fuit in se fecerunt, et vixerunt iuxta rationis naturalis rectitudinem, Christus Dominus revelavit Sanctae Birgitae lib. I, cp. 41, suarum Revelationum quod cum pravis minime iudicabuntur.” Archivo de la Provincia de la Inmaculada-España, fondo AFIO (Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental), 43–8, fol. 7^r.

77 “Xing, idest plene, et perfecte omne bonum, sive virtutes sint, sive intellectus dona, quae reperiuntur in homine, et summitas, vel altitudo in illis virtutibus, supra quam homo transgredi non potest, vel altitudo summa omnium virtutum, ad quam homo potest pervenire, et ulterius non transgredi,et quod in omnibus nihil inveniatur, quod non penetret, et sciat etiam futura.” Alexandre, Documenta controversiam missionariorum, 58.

78 Ibid., 59.

79 Meynard, “Conflicting Interpretations on the Collected Statutes of the Ming Dynasty”.

80 Ripoll, Bullarium Ordinis FF. Praedicatorum sub auspiciis SS. D. N. D. Clementis XII, pontificis maximi, 454.

81 Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, 142–5.