Authors: Michela Fontana
The hunt for the anonymous author did not spare the homes of the most influential monks, which were meticulously searched. A letter was found among Daguan’s papers in which he criticized the emperor for lack of religious conviction and for showing insufficient respect for his mother. Wanli gave orders that the bonze was to be punished, and the officials complied with undue zeal by having him beaten to death with bamboo canes. The monk Hanshan also had compromising documents; his punishment was perpetual exile in the Guangdong province.
The first to be suspected of writing the pamphlet was a captain of the Imperial Guard and nephew of Li Dai, who was stripped of his rank and exiled to his hometown even though the accusations proved to be groundless. The search continued, and suspicion fell on a merchant who composed poems in a style considered similar to that of the illegal publication. The man refused to confess even under torture but was nevertheless sentenced to
lingchisi
, or death by a thousand cuts, the most terrible of Chinese tortures, which involved binding the victim to a wooden frame in a public place and then slowly removing 1,600 slices of flesh, the victim’s head being left intact so as to witness his body’s torture for as long as possible.
Though perhaps disturbed by the cruelty of the punishments, which were in any case not dissimilar from those meted out in the West, the missionaries were glad that the anti-Buddhist movement and the persecutions of the alleged authors of the pamphlet had temporarily neutralized their more direct adversaries. Ricci interpreted these events as “divine retribution” visited upon his rivals.
10
Valignano’s Help to Strengthen the Mission
On establishing that the missionaries had succeeded in settling in the capital, the superiors in Macao were very pleased with the results obtained. Replaced by Valentim Carvalho as rector of the Jesuit College in Macao, Manuel Dias visited Beijing during the summer of 1602, followed by Nanchang and Nanjing, and sent a glowing report to Valignano. News of the success of the Jesuits’ endeavors also reached Rome. Superior General Acquaviva decided to send some more young missionaries to China, and the king of Spain pledged to provide the necessary funds. Meanwhile, in the wake of the achievements of the Society of Jesus, members of other religious orders, above all the Franciscans and Dominicans in the Philippines, made plans to found missions on Chinese soil.
Reassured by the encouraging news, the Visitor was intent on developing the China mission and reorganizing its hierarchical structure. He decided to make Ricci independent of Macao by allowing him to submit his decisions only to the Provincial and to dispense with the approval of the rector of the College in Macao. As Ricci commented in his history of the mission, “It was something very necessary and useful for the success of this work [because] the superiors of the College sometimes . . . have little experience in the matters of Christianity among unbelievers.”
11
In order to free Ricci from his other duties and enable him to concentrate exclusively on the mission in Beijing, Valignano placed Manuel Dias in charge of the three Jesuit residences in the south. More missionaries were assigned to China and began studying Mandarin in Macao, and three young Chinese men with Christian parents were admitted to the order. Valignano also obtained fresh funds and instructed the procurator of Japan and China to have the money delivered directly to China without obliging the missionaries to travel to Macao. His final act was to have various religious objects sent to the missions, including books and paintings to adorn the chapels and churches.
Ricci was reassured by this display of full support from his superior. As he wrote to Ludovico Maselli in February 1605,
12
“Valignano provides us with everything we need.” He added that he intended to arrange for his superior to visit China the following year so that he could see the results achieved for himself.
The Portuguese Jesuit Gaspar Ferreira, one of those assigned to the China mission, began his journey to Beijing along the Grand Canal in the summer of 1604. The vessel following him with the gifts for the mission was lost on the way due to the torrential rains that had swollen the rivers and caused catastrophic flooding, and many objects were stolen. The altar wine disappeared into the waves as well as the precious
Biblia Regia
sent as a gift by Cardinal Giulio Antonio Santori of Santa Severina, a polyglot bible in eight volumes printed in Antwerp in 1569, which contained versions of the holy scriptures in Latin, Greek, Jewish, and Syro-Chaldean.
The crate containing the precious work floated along the river and was salvaged by some boatmen, who hoped to find rich pickings. On discovering only a few books inside, they returned it to the owners in exchange for a small sum of money. The event was celebrated in the Beijing mission on the Feast of the Assumption with a solemn ceremony. In an effort to recover some more of the religious articles, including a painting sent to adorn the altar, the Jesuits sought the aid of Feng Yingjing, who made arrangements from prison for some friends to find the guilty parties. The boatmen suspected of the theft were soon captured and imprisoned, but the missionaries secured their release, well aware that confessions were extracted by means of torture in China, as they were in Europe. Most of Valignano’s gifts were thus lost forever.
The flood of July 1604 caused a great many deaths and was followed by a terrible famine. The emperor came to the people’s aid by allocating funds equivalent to two hundred thousand
scudi
, ordering the free distribution of food, and selling rice from the imperial granaries at low prices. Ricci was so impressed by the generosity of the Chinese state that he commented on the episode in a letter to his father Giovanni Battista: “I was astonished at so much charity among unbelievers.”
13
Ricci’s “Catechism,”
The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven
At the end of 1603, after three years in the capital, Ricci was ready to publish the apologetic work to which he attached the most importance, namely what he called his “catechism,” the fruit of at least ten years of study and reflection, and the spearhead of his method of evangelization based on cultural accommodation. In agreement with Valignano, he had decided to channel his greatest effort of persuasion into the medium of writing because he knew that the literati, being accustomed to study, would be more easily convinced of the validity of a doctrine by reading a text than by listening to a sermon. When he spoke about religion with scholars, they often asked him for a book on the subject so as to consider it with the necessary degree of concentration.
It was twenty years since the publication of the first catechism, drafted by Ruggieri and revised by Ricci in Zhaoqing. In that now distant period, the two Jesuits still dressed in Buddhist robes, had a limited grasp of the language, and knew nothing of the Confucian philosophy. While their first doctrinal work had nevertheless proved successful and been circulated also in Japan and Korea, Valignano found it unsatisfactory because terms of Buddhist origin were used to express religious concepts, and there was no reference to Confucianism. The Visitor therefore asked Ricci to write a new treatise more in line with the system of values espoused by the literati and ordered the destruction of the wood-block matrices of the Ruggieri catechism in 1596. Ricci set to work in Shaozhou between 1591 and 1594, in concomitance with his translation of the Confucian classics, and his superiors received the initial manuscript version in Latin in 1597.
The Visitor corrected the text with Duarte de Sande during the summer of 1598, but Ricci did not see the revised version until after his arrival in Beijing due to his unexpected departure from the south, the death of De Sande the following year, and various problems of transport. Ricci continued to improve the work in the meantime with the addition of new arguments against Buddhist doctrine drawn from discussions with the literati in Beijing. The Jesuits’ friends arranged for numerous handwritten copies to be produced and circulated among the scholars, whose comments then enabled Ricci to make further improvements. The only thing now needed for publication was the indispensable imprimatur from the inquisitors in Goa. While Ricci was still awaiting this ecclesiastical authorization, his friend Feng Yingjing asked for permission to have the work printed at his own expense and wrote a preface. The Jesuit asked him to wait, but according to Ricci’s account, the
shidafu
wrote back to say that China was “seriously ill” and the catechism was the only medicine that could cure it.
The Jesuit found this argument so cogent that he raised no further objections and allowed Feng Yingjing to have two hundred copies of the manuscript printed by his friends between October and December 1603 with the title
Tianzhu shiyi
, or
The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven
.
14
The substantial treatise was not at all a catechism in today’s sense of the term but a work conceived and constructed specifically for the literati of imperial China, “the first attempt by a Catholic scholar to use a Chinese way of thinking to introduce Christianity to Chinese intellectuals.”
15
The text is divided into eight chapters and is presented as a dialogue between two literati, one Western and the other Chinese. The former illustrates the Christian doctrine; the latter raises doubts, questions, and objections.
Since the boundary between religion and philosophy was very blurred in China, Ricci decided to present his arguments on the plane of speculation. In other words, he chose to illustrate only what could be demonstrated and understood through reasoning, not what was to be accepted as an act of faith. As he explained to Girolamo Costa, “It was a book about our religion, all according to natural reason.”
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In theological terms, he decided to speak only about what is called “natural revelation” and not about “positive revelation.”
In short, his aim was to demonstrate to the literati that Buddhism and Taoism—based respectively on the “void” and “nothingness” according to his interpretation of part of their philosophical foundations—were to be irrevocably rejected. He chose, however, to refrain from making direct accusations against his adversaries: “It is better to refute [the teachings of Buddhists and Taoists] than to hate [the men who hold these opinions].”
17
Ricci wanted to convince the Chinese that Christianity was not only compatible with the doctrine of Confucius but was also the only religion that fully reflected the teachings of ancient Confucianism before its contamination by Buddhist and Taoist ideas and Neo-Confucian interpretations. His was a bold undertaking, an ingenious effort to reconcile the irreconcilable, an attempt to bridge the abyss between Chinese and Western conceptions of the world, albeit so as to serve the ends of evangelization.
In order to achieve his goal, the Jesuit cited the classic texts of Confucianism and reinterpreted their numerous ambiguities to his own advantage. As he wrote in his history of the mission, “He endeavored to enlist Confucius, the leader of the sect of literati, on our side by interpreting in our favor some things left uncertain in his writings.”
18
At the same time, he deliberately presented his precepts in the Confucian style, emphasizing the importance of self-improvement in the knowledge that this was one of the most important virtues taught by Confucius, and seeking to show that this could come about through learning to worship the Lord of Heaven.
The first subject of discussion is the existence of one god, the creator of all things. Ricci refutes the beliefs developed by Buddhists and Taoists and rejects the idea of
taiji
, or “Supreme Ultimate,” the form of energy regarded by Neo-Confucianism as the origin of the universe, which is incompatible with the Christian idea of god. He then works back through the history of Chinese culture to rediscover the millennial roots of religious thought and claims that the idea of one personal god—called
Shangdi
, the Lord on High, or
Tian
, Heaven—is to be found in the Chinese classics of the third millennium
bc
. According to the missionary, both terms indicate the Eternal Father of Christianity—which he calls
Tianzhu
, the Lord of Heaven, in Chinese—and the recurrent expressions about respecting, fearing, and serving
Tian
are all references to God.
Ricci stresses the difference between human and divine nature and refutes the idea of mankind and the universe as forming a single organism, which is deeply rooted in Chinese culture. He then dedicates two chapters to the existence of the soul, which he describes as an entity of a spiritual nature separate from the body and the exclusive prerogative of humanity. The dualism of the spirit and the body was unknown to the Chinese, who believed that the various spirits attributed to people dissolved more or less quickly after death. They also believed that the human spirit was essentially the same as the animal, albeit of greater subtlety and agility. The catechism instead maintained that human beings and animals are different in nature because only the former have the ability to reason. One later chapter is entirely devoted to refuting the Buddhist doctrine of transmigration and another to presenting the Christian idea of heaven and hell, stress being laid on the capacity of human beings to choose between good and evil on the basis of reason.
The idea of otherworldly bliss juxtaposed with the possibility of being irrevocably condemned to eternal damnation was very difficult for the Chinese to accept. One of the recurrent criticisms made by the literati was that the catechism sought to attract the unwary by promising eternal happiness after death and terrifying them with tales of hellfire.
The last chapter speaks about the practice of celibacy and explains that Catholic priests are required to devote themselves entirely to their religious mission. Apart from a very brief mention of the Incarnation—“something is also said about the coming of Christ, our redeemer”—discussion of the mysteries of the faith was deliberately and prudently postponed to his subsequent work
Tianzhu jiaoyao
(“Christian Doctrine”), which was aimed at converts.