Meeting of worlds
A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552-1610 R. Po-chia Hsia
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the Jesuit encounter with the East Mary Laven
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hough vast differences remain between East and West, 24-hour news, internet
access and films ensure familiarity with places and people from afar. The same was not true in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci went to China in the sixteenth century, he found not only that China was alien to him, but that he was an object of fear and distrust in a land where Westerners were rarely, if ever, seen. A Jesuit in the Forbidden City is a riveting read and highly detailed, yet is an accessible retelling of Matteo Ricci’s mission to China, recapturing both the exhilaration and the dangerous exoticism of his life. Born in Macerata, Italy, in 1552, Ricci would end his life in 1610 as the first foreigner in China to be given an imperial burial. Educated by the then recently
OUR REVIEWERS
Hilmar Pabel is professor of history at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada.
James Kelly is research assistant at Queen Mary, University of London. Fergus Kerr is the editor of New Blackfriars.
John Cornwell is director of the Jesus College, Cambridge, Science and Human Dimension Project.
Matthew Wardis researching twelfth-century plainchant at Cambridge University.
Scott Applebyis director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and professor of history at Notre Dame University, Indiana, USA.
Rima Devereauxis a writer, editor and translator.
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22 | THE TABLET | 1 October 2011
A statue of Jesuit Fr Matteo Ricci stands outside the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Beijing. Photo: CNS
Christendom. It is a simple reminder that the Church has never been a narrow venture. In contrast to Po-chia Hsia’s
linear and chronological biography, Mary Laven’s Mission to China opts for a thematic, cultural history in which Ricci acts as a focal point rather than as subject. Her work is about “the understandings and misunderstandings, conversations and confusions, descriptions and distortions that arose from the meeting of two worlds”.
Shunning a traditional
character-based study, Laven uses Ricci’s literary output to analyse key moments of this encounter. For example, a
formed Society of Jesus, Ricci was set to become a lawyer but, against his father’s wishes, he entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1571 before being sent on the Indian mission. Under another Jesuit, Michele Ruggieri, Ricci had his first taste of missionary activity in China but, as happened repeatedly, the fledgling Jesuit effort fell prey to mandarin politics and intense xenophobia. According to Po-chia Hsia, Ricci learnt from his elder’s mistakes. Though Ruggieri had the Westerners dress as Chinese Buddhist monks in order to merge with the culture, hostility continued towards the missionaries and Ricci realised a change in tactic was necessary. In the strictly hierarchical Chinese system, Ricci recognised the need to reach the literati and mandarin class, who could also offer patronage. He thus adopted the garments of the more respected Confucian scholars and mingled Christianity with the Eastern tradition’s ideas. To correct the impression that Christianity was just the latest trend in Buddhist thinking, he also launched blistering attacks on Buddhist ideas. Success was immediate. Po-chia Hsia continues the story of Ricci in great depth, always scholarly but never staid. His great advantage is his fluency in Chinese, allowing him to use many largely neglected sources from the Chinese side to fill the gaps in our understanding of the situation. Occasionally this leads to sidetracking details about Chinese figures but it nevertheless gives a fascinatingly contextualised overview of the sorts of people with whom Ricci was mixing. Equally, when Ricci eventually reaches
the Forbidden City and the Emperor, Po-chia Hsia stresses another aspect of Ricci’s approach: the Chinese were enthralled by the sophistication of the mathematics, science and social ethics of
chapter on presents for the Emperor explores the Jesuit mission’s “shopping list” of desired objects requested from Europe in an attempt to impress materialistic Chinese culture. A chapter about Ricci’s approach to friendship draws on his work On Friendship, a round-up of Western philosophers’ and churchmen’s views he was able to recall from memory. What Laven lacks in detail, compared to
Po-chia Hsia’s approach, she makes up for in neat readability. She depicts a Jesuit mission where Ricci sought to make legitimate his religion by legitimising himself among the Chinese: he always rode in sedan chairs, for instance, since that was what important people did. She frequently returns to the exchange of ideas and the hybrid intellectual community that grew up around Ricci. Particularly interesting are her remarks on the Jesuit being impressed by the Chinese system of government, where scholarship and intellectual agility carried far more weight than inherited wealth or privilege. Perhaps most intriguing are the very
different conclusions each writer reaches. For example, Po-chia Hsia finds Ricci very close to several of his Chinese friends; Laven portrays him as much closer to his friends in the West. The former reads in Ricci’s letters a sadness at the separation from his family; Laven finds instead a note of estrangement. Most markedly, for Laven, Ricci’s mission was not a success in the manner that is usually claimed. She argues that the Jesuits enjoyed better results when they appealed to poorer Chinese people through the use of images, rather than through Ricci’s intellectual works of the written word, as Po-chia Hsia suggests. But read together, the two books – one a biography, the other a cultural overview – represent both the enigma and the genius of Ricci. James Kelly
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