Abstract
In 2006, my wife and I had the privilege of visiting the Zhalan cemetery and viewing the gravesites of Matteo Ricci and his Jesuit colleagues, Johann Adam Schall and Ferdinand Verbiest. These sites, located outside the old city gate in Beijing, were restored after the Cultural Revolution and commemorated in 1983, on the 400th anniversary of Ricci’s arrival in China. The memory of the Jesuit mission to China is now carefully preserved, for it was the Jesuits who were largely responsible for opening up China to Europe in the modern period. This early encounter between East and West endures in significance.1
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Notes
The Zhalan cemetery is in a lovely park on the grounds of the Beijing Party School. Our host in 2006 was the bureau head of the Office for Letters and Visits from the Masses for the Beijing municipality. For a history of the cemetery, see Edward J. Malatesta, SJ, and Gao Zhiyu, Departed, Yet Present: Zhalan, The Oldest Christian Cemetery in Beijing (San Francisco: Ricci Institute, University of San Francisco, 1995).
Jonathan D. Spence, To Change China: Western Advisers in China (New York: Penguin Books, 1980 [1969]), Introduction (unpaginated).
William P. Alford, “Exporting ‘The Pursuit of Happiness,’” Harvard Law Review 113:7 (2000), p. 1678.
Sources for this section include John W. O’Malley, SJ, The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993);
R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal: 1540–1770 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
and Andrew Pettigree, Europe in the Sixteenth Century (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publisher, 2002).
Michela Fontana, Matteo Ricci: A Jesuit in the Ming Court (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), p. 9.
On the history of this period, see especially F. W. Mote, Imperial China: 900–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999);
and Patricia Buckley Ebrey, China: The Cambridge Illustrated History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 167–186.
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
The paragraphs on scholar-officials draw on my essay “Advisors to Rulers: Serving the State and the Way,” Prospects for the Professions in China, ed. William P. Alford, Kenneth Winston, and William C. Kirby (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 225–253.
On the principal features of a profession, see Philip Selznick, Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 120–123.
Charles Hucker, “Confucianism and the Chinese Censorial System,” Confucianism and Chinese Civilization, ed. Arthur F. Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964), p. 57.
John W. Dardess, Confucianism and Autocracy: Professional Ethics in the Founding of the Ming Dynasty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 164.
Pei-Yi Wu, The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. ix–xii and 235.
See also Pei-Yi Wu, “Self-Examination and Confessions of Sins in Traditional China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 39 (1979), pp. 5–38.
For an engaging account of the declining years of the Ming, including the failures and general incompetence of various scholar-officials, see Ray Huang, 1587: A Year of No Significance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981).
Gilbert Rozman, “Comparisons of Modern Confucian Values in China and Japan,” The East Asia Region: Confucian Heritage and Its Modern Adaptation, ed. Gilbert Rozman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 162.
In addition to sources cited above, see R. Po-Chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010);
Charles E. Ronan, SJ, and Bonnie B. C. Oh, eds., East Meets West: The Jesuits in China, 1582–1773 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1988);
and Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984).
D. E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 13.
Willard J. Peterson, “What to Wear? Observation and Participation by Jesuit Missionaries in Late Ming Society,” Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 410.
Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), pp. 57, 70.
Spence, To Change China, p. 8. As late as 1609, a year before his death in Beijing, Ricci wrote: “If we can teach them our sciences … it will be easy to persuade them to our holy law.” Quoted by Mary Laven, Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the East (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), p. 95.
Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 133–144.
For a general discussion of ancient Chinese “religion,” including ancestral spirits, nature divinities, and the “high god” Shangdi, see Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), Chapters 1 and 2.
From a 1604 letter to Claudio Acquaviva, Ricci’s superior in Rome, quoted by Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 97. Along the same lines, in a 1609 letter to Fr Francesco Pasio, the vice-provincial of Japan, Ricci wrote: “I have avoided criticizing [basic Confucian doctrine] but have sought to interpret it where it appears to conflict with our holy faith.”
Quoted by D. E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and The Origins of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), p. 63.
Elman, On Their Own Terms, pp. 114, 120. Paul Rule observes that the ancient Confucian texts that Ricci favored present a limiting case, since “the religious or sacred elements are elusive.” Paul A. Rule, K’ung-tzu or Confucius? The Jesuit Interpretation of Confucianism (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), p. xiii.
Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr., The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (New York: Random House, 1998), pp. 46–47.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Writings on China, trans. Daniel J. Cook and Henry Rosemont, Jr. (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), pp. 46, 47, and 51. Leibniz’s enthusiasm for Confucian ethics was shared by Voltaire, but the seeds of disillusion began to appear in a number of eighteenth-century European writers as they learned more about Chinese society through firsthand reports.
Michael Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 4.
See Willard J. Peterson, “Fang I-chih: Western Learning and the ‘Investigation of Things,’” The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, ed. William T. de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), especially pp. 385–388.
Tu Wei-Ming, Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Confucian Religiousness (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1989), p. 48.
There is a large literature on what is known as “the Chinese rites controversy.” See, for example, Paul Rule’s article, cited above. In 1939, Pope Pius XII rescinded the decrees of Clement XI, and in 2001, during ceremonies marking the 400th anniversary of Ricci’s arrival in Beijing, John Paul II apologized directly to the Chinese for wrongs committed by members of the Church, saying: “I regret that in many people these failings may have given the impression of a lack of respect and esteem for the Chinese people.” Quoted by Thomas C. Fox, Pentecost in Asia: A New Way of Being Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), p. 196.
Huang Zongxi, Waiting for the Dawn: A Plan for the Prince, trans. William T. de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 3.
On the question about numbers of converts, see Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission To China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). Brockey’s aim is to shift the story of the mission from the relationship between Jesuits and mandarins to a focus on commoners. His claim is that Ricci was sufficiently successful in establishing good relations with scholar-officials to provide official protection to subsequent missionaries to engage in ordinary evangelizing.
John T. Noonan, Jr., “Development in Moral Doctrine,” Theological Studies 54 (1993), p. 667, referring to Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q11, a3. Compare Henry’s remark, in chapter 1, that since women who have an abortion are answerable to God, the state can have a liberal abortion law.
“Dignitatis Humanae,” December 7, 1965, Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents, ed. Austin Flannery, OP (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing, 1996), pp. 551–568.
This phrase from the Modern Library edition of Machiavelli’s political writings is an unfortunate mistranslation. See Kenneth Winston, “Moral Opportunism: A Case Study,” Integrity and Conscience, ed. Ian Shapiro and Robert M. Adams (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 184 n. 37.
Niccolò Machiavelli, Selected Political Writings, trans. by David Wootton (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994), p. 117.
See, for example, Peter C. Pham, In Our Own Tongues: Perspectives from Asia on Mission and Inculturation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003),
and Michael Amaladoss, The Asian Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006).
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© 2015 Kenneth Winston
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Winston, K. (2015). Missionaries in China: The Ethics of Exporting Ethics. In: Ethics in Public Life. Asia Today. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137492050_4
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