Wise Man Of The West (Harvill Press Editions)

by Vincent Cronin

  The Secretary approached the Governor of the Castle and when Ts’ai retorted with the old charges became furious. “Ma T’ang and his mob are murdering travellers by the hundred in open daylight: what could a foreigner do? It is perfectly clear that he abhors the eunuchs and is in complete sympathy with us.”

  Because Ricci’s friend held the higher office and could have the Governor dismissed (in fact, Ts’ai had obtained his appointment through the Secretary’s influence), resistance was out of the question. Happily a face-saving solution lay to hand. Ricci was unwell, suffering from confinement and the nervous strain of the last few months. The Governor advised him to send a note to the Ministry, saying that he lay ill and wished to leave the Castle for medical treatment.

  At the end of May Ricci received written permission to reside in the city. Ts’ai, determined to exercise authority even outside the Castle walls, laid down that every five days the Castle servants should take provisions of rice, meat, salt, vegetables and wine, together with fuel for cooking, sufficient for five persons, to the missionaries’ lodging. Ricci was not displeased with this arrangement, for it would make them less dependent on Macao.

  After three months’ virtual imprisonment and fruitless attempts to communicate with the Emperor, Ricci and Pantoja walked out of the Castle gates. It was a relief to return to China from this ark of tributary peoples, to wander where they wished, unobserved by vigilant groom-guards. Back at their old lodgings, Ricci’s first action, since mandarins and eunuchs baulked each other at every turn, was to appeal directly to the Emperor. With the help of friends he composed a new memorial which the official in charge of transmitting letters, whose friendship he had made a point of winning, promised to deliver. In it Ricci recalled that he had offered clocks and other curios: instead of an appointment or a return of presents he asked for a place to live. This, too, was treated like a prayer from the damned. At first Ricci presumed that according to protocol the letter had been forwarded to the Ministry of Rites, which was so opposed to his remaining. However, he was later informed by eunuchs in touch with the Emperor that he and his party could safely remain in the capital, provided they never spoke of leaving, for that would be considered an insult to the Son of Heaven. With this Ricci had to be content. If he had not been granted official permission to stay, at least his presence was tolerated. Presumably neither Ma T’ang nor officials at the Castle would be able to secure his expulsion. What proved no less important in a country where appearances were paramount, his friends considered he had gained a victory on all fronts. Soon he was receiving calls from the curious and contemptuous, as well as from a few seekers after truth.

  Among the first visitors to their lodging was the highest-ranking mandarin of Peking, at that time the only Chancellor of the Empire. Ricci and he exchanged those presents without which no friendship could burgeon, the Chancellor esteeming most an ebony sundial. Ricci was then invited to his home, where they began to discuss Christianity. From experience Ricci had learned to postpone questions of doctrine to a later meeting, for the Chinese were accustomed to retort, “Yes, doubdess that is true, but our beliefs are true also. Religions are many, but reason is one.” Instead he excited admiration by enumerating good works practised by Christians: hospitals for the sick and incurable, homes for foundlings and orphans, confraternities for helping the poor, widows, and prisoners; the censorship of books, which prevented the circulation of useless and harmful works; and above all the law forbidding kings, princes, the highest lords and poorest peasants to marry more than one wife, who could never be divorced, even though she never bore a son. When he heard this, the Chancellor turned to other guests. “That in itself is sufficient to prove the Far Westerner’s kingdom noble and well governed.” But although they praised monogamy, Ricci found it quite another matter to make them practise it. After grave conversations about virtue and the good life, whether at the Chancellor’s home or elsewhere, in Peking or in Nanking, the guests departed to that other, seldom-mentioned world which Ricci never entered, to their wives and concubines and softened boys, to Plum Blossom, Orchid, Perfume and Lady of the Vase, to Hibiscus, Chrysanthemum, Moon Lady and Tower of Jade. Innumerable as the flowers whose names they bore, behind every painted screen their high-pitched voices could be heard, raised in song or laughter. Powerful and invisible as the Emperor, they were Ricci’s real rivals, undoing with a kiss an evening’s arguments. He had summed up the situation in a letter to the General in Rome: “It is exceedingly difficult for a man of authority and self-respect to send one of his wives back to her family, for that implies giving her to another husband. They continually beg us to grant a dispensation in this matter, and indeed we feel pity for them. But in other countries God makes possible a solution to even greater difficulties and we hope that He will do the same in China.” Nine years had passed since he had written those words and still no solution had been found.

  Soon after their release from the Castle, Ricci received a visit from the four eunuchs of the mathematical college. Something had gone wrong with the Emperor’s clock; if they brought it to his lodgings, would he repair it? Ricci agreed, delighted at establishing a new link, however indirect. During the three days it remained in the house his friends crowded in to admire the wonderful object which had pleased the Emperor more than his prettiest blue and white porcelain. When it was repaired and carried back, the Emperor, learning that it had been seen by people outside the palace, trembled with jealousy. “If the clocks stop again,” he cried, “summon Li Ma-tou to carry out repairs in the palace.” This again was interpreted as a mark of imperial benevolence. Arrangements were made for Ricci and Pantoja to regulate the two clocks four times a year. In fact, the eunuchs allowed them to enter whenever they liked and even to take their friends. Soon Peking, and indeed the whole country, believed the false rumour which Ricci longed to make true—that the graduate preachers often spoke face to face with the Son of Heaven.

  During the last six months of 1601 they were invited to more houses than in the whole of Ricci’s previous stay in China, often attending two or three banquets in a single evening. It was necessary to accept all dinner invitations, not merely from courtesy but because serious matters such as religion were seldom discussed except in the convivial atmosphere fostered by food and drink. On fast days Ricci, instead of taking a full mid-day meal, was obliged to go hungry until the banquet began at dusk. He knew it was far from being a heroic ordeal, but he had to struggle nonetheless. “If you suffer a little,” he exhorted himself, “be patient! It will soon be over.”

  One of the most intimate of Ricci’s new friends was Li Chih-tsao. Born in 1565 of a military family, he took the degree of doctorate at the age of thirty-three, winning eighth place in a list of two hundred and ninety-two. He held an important post in the Ministry of Public Works in Peking, and had come to know Ricci soon after the missionary’s arrival. They became close friends, Ricci esteeming the doctor’s brilliant intelligence and skill as a geographer, Li the sciences Ricci knew and taught, especially his maps, for he himself as a young man had published an excellent atlas of the world, which showed nothing more than the fifteen provinces of China. At Li’s request Ricci prepared a third edition of his map. Over five feet high, in six parts, it was in fact an absolutely new sinusoidal projection which took a year to complete. In the second edition there had been only thirty place-names: in the third there were over a thousand. As well as much astronomical information, he added curious details about each country: “From Labrador to Florida the people are fishermen, wear skins and treat strangers well. Those who live inland, in the mountains, wage perpetual war, eating only snakes, ants, spiders and the like.” The balsam and silver of Peru were mentioned, and Ruscelli’s legend about Ireland applied to England: “The island has no native snakes or other poisonous reptiles, and when imported such animals became harmless.” Li wrote a flattering preface; so did three of Li’s friends, all praising the author’s virtue and intelligence. The printers pirated it while in the
press, so that two impressions were issued, but even so, a few months after publication copies had become unobtainable.

  This beautiful and scholarly work was widely acclaimed. Some cities, however, were perturbed. How could Li Ma-tou, being a foreigner, possess such vast knowledge? Ricci was highly amused when, to salve their pride, they concluded that as he had lived some twenty years in China he could not really be considered a foreigner.

  Under Ricci’s direction, Li learned how to make every kind of sundial and an astrolabe complete with laminae. He translated in an abridged form the works of Clavius called Gnomonica, Astrolabe and Practical Arithmetic, revealing for the first time in Chinese the method of extracting square and cubic roots from whole numbers and fractions. By translating Clavius’s commentary on John Holywood’s Sphere, he introduced the first Englishman to China. Holywood, born at the end of the twelfth century in Halifax, Yorkshire, studied at Oxford and later settled in Paris. His fame rested entirely on the Tractatus de Sphaera, a little work in four chapters treating of the terrestrial globe, of circles great and small, of the rising and setting of the stars, and of the orbits and movements of the planets. It added little to Ptolemy and his Arabic commentators, but enjoyed a great renown during the Middle Ages and, although the discoveries of Copernicus had rendered much of it out of date, remained a standard text-book. Ricci supplemented it by composing a poem in four hundred and twenty verses entitled Treatise of the Constellations, giving to each of the twenty-eight Chinese constellations its name, position and degree of luminosity in a form easy to learn by heart. This work too Li translated into Chinese.

  The year 1601 convinced Ricci that he had at last won an influential position where his gifts could be used to greatest advantage and which, for the moment, he could not abandon. Yet, as superior of the whole China mission, he must somehow direct and solve the problems of the other houses which had grown up in the wake of his journeys. So far he had governed by letter, but, feeling the need of a more personal report, in the autumn of that year he wrote to Macao, suggesting that one of the Fathers be sent to the three other houses, travel to Peking, then return to discuss any outstanding problems with Valignano when he should next arrive in the enclave. In August 1602 Manoel Dias, a somewhat austere but enterprising Portuguese, travelled to Peking and gave Ricci the full report for which he had asked, an account which stirred the memories of twenty years.

  Of the three houses Ricci had founded Shiuchow flourished best, under the direction of a young Sicilian, Nicolò Longobardo, personally selected by the Visitor for his indomitable character and boundless energy. At Nanchang, on the other hand, little progress was made, for the single missionary there had been stricken with consumption. At the southern capital Ricci’s friendships had been strengthened, and some fifty new converts were being made every year. In that city an influential Christian mandarin, baptised by Ricci, had recently died. He had asked for Christian burial but most of his family wished to call in the bonzes for the traditional colourful rites, supreme outward proof of filial piety. The missionary in charge had referred the problem to Ricci.

  No Chinese ceremony was so elaborate or important. An immensely long cortège would first be formed, led by two men bearing large lanterns recording the family name, age and title of the deceased, followed by sixteen musicians sounding drums and gongs, pipes and trumpets. Next would walk the sons, the eldest, supported in his grief by retainers, carrying in one hand a wooden staff entwined with white paper, in the other, at the end of a bamboo pole, a white streamer called the soul cloth, supposed to summon the errant soul to accompany the body. Then would come the bier, followed by relatives and friends.

  At the grave each person would be given a piece of betel nut wrapped in a leaf and a piece of silver in cream-coloured paper. After a masked figure had dispelled evil spirits by striking each corner with a spear, the coffin would be lowered, paper images of servants, elephants, tigers and lions burned and a pot containing rice lowered into the grave as food for the soul. Not until the geomancer had assured himself that it lay straight would the coffin be covered over. When earth had been cast in, the Buddhist bonze in charge would lift a crowing cock high in the air, then bend his body three times to the grave. All the mourners having copied his action, the soul cloth would finally be committed to sacred flames.

  The question put to Ricci was: could superstitious elements in these rites be suppressed, while the outward form was adapted to Christianity? Scandal would be caused if a Christian were forbidden to pay his father supreme honours, and the policy of the missionaries had been to tolerate outward forms wherever possible. But in this case Ricci decided that the constituent ceremonies were based on a conception of death alien to the new religion and that, however offensive to Chinese susceptibilities, a complete break must be made. The Nankinese family were ordered to bury the dead man with Christian prayers and the simple ritual of tears.

  Dias remained in Peking two months. Ricci was able to take the majority of decisions himself but several requests and difficulties he asked Dias to refer to Valignano. First, if converts were to be made on the scale of Japan—and some of Ricci’s European correspondents did not hesitate to criticise what they considered to be his slow progress—more priests were needed, strong men apt at learning a new language. It was asking too much that missionaries, one of them seriously ill, should remain alone for years on end in so alien a country. Valignano, on his arrival in Macao at the beginning of 1603, consolidated Ricci’s success, which indeed surpassed his best hopes, by promising to send Dias himself to Nanchang, and to divert other priests destined for Japan to China. A scheme for generous financial help had to be curtailed later in the year when two carracks and a brigantine sailing for Japan in July were captured off Macao by Dutch pirates: symptom of a new and growing threat not only to Portuguese power but to her Catholic mission. The loss to the enclave amounted to 400,000 ducats, and to the Vice-province alone 15,000 ducats, the sum annually invested in trade by the Society.

  The second question related to government of the four houses. Ricci, fully occupied at Peking, suggested that Dias, for whose zeal and love of the Chinese he had the highest regard, should succeed him as superior of the mission. Valignano, however, believing that even by letter Ricci could govern more effectively than anyone else in person, declined to relieve his compatriot. Instead, he appointed Dias superior of the three southern houses, subject to Ricci, who in turn was directly answerable to the Vice-Provincial of Japan and China. Thirdly, in response to Ricci’s request, Valignano gave permission for three more young Chinese, born of Christian parents at Macao, to be received into the Society.

  Finally, the Visitor decided a number of very difficult theological questions. At certain times of the year gifts of meat, fruit, pieces of silk—paper, if the family were very poor—and incense were offered before the ancestral tablets which stood in every house. The tablet consisted of a plain, oblong piece of hard wood, split nearly the whole way up and stuck into a small transverse block. On one of the inner surfaces and on the front outer surface were written the name and age of the dead ancestor with other particulars. For the interpretation of these offerings Ricci took his stand on a capital text of the Doctrine of the Mean, in which King Wu and the Duke of Chou were said to have “served the dead as they would have served them had they been living, which is the summit of filial piety.” In Ricci’s opinion, the dead were not believed to eat the offerings, or even to have need of them: the action was simply an outward expression of love and gratitude, instituted for the comfort of the living, not the dead, and to teach sons to honour their parents while alive, seeing that respect was everywhere paid to them even after their death. A careful study of the history of the practices—far older than Buddhism—had convinced Ricci that the veneration paid to parents and the similar honours to Confucius were not idolatrous but purely civil and should be tolerated. Longobardo had recently challenged this opinion, and Ricci now asked for an authoritative ruling.

  T
he issue raised questions of supreme importance. In the savage countries of South America, Indonesia and Africa, Christianity had posed not only as a religion but as a great civilising force. It had spread as a result of physical conquest, and imposed on the people a Western way of life, considered a norm. No distinction was made between the essentials of Christianity and Western trappings, so that everything from the hymns sung in church to the moulding of an altar reredos followed European patterns.

  In China, however, as Ricci and Valignano were aware, Christianity was for the first time in history confronted with a civilisation older and at least as great as the Graeco-Roman, with a population far more numerous than that of Europe. Christianity could not conquer here merely by force of arms, numbers or superior intelligence. Abandoning an age-old exclusive provincialism, she must recognise and tolerate all that was best in the older civilisation, and introduce only her essential message: her revelation and theology. If she attempted to impose unessentials—philosophic, literary, artistic or ritual—or to cut Chinese civilisation to Western patterns, she would remain an exotic tied to Occidental methodology and customs which would make her message unacceptable to the Chinese mind. The Church, in fact, in order to show herself truly universal, in order to sail the China sea, must jettison all local and national prejudice, even her age-old habits of mind, and take on a cargo of Eastern wisdom compatible with her message, without deviating one point from her essential course.