The unqualified welcome extended to Chinese thought and practices during the eighteenth century was not, however, endorsed by the theologians of Europe. While the missionaries at the court of K’ang Hsi were exerting greater influence than ever before, while the number of Chinese converts reached a total of 300,000, a further aspect of Ricci’s programme had aroused bitter controversy.
Ricci had seen that Christianity could never succeed in China as an exotic; it must adapt itself to Oriental ways of thought, graft itself to all that was best in a civilisation older than those within which Christianity had first found expression. All his life he had respected Chinese susceptibilities, believing that to do otherwise was unpardonable egoism. He had used tact and gentleness, realising, with profound sympathy, the difficulties which faced a Chinese confronted with a strange religion. He had laid down that the mysteries of faith must be gradually unfolded, otherwise irreparable shock and damage would be done to Chinese sensibility and natural pride. Afterwards, when grace had worked its miracle, the heights and depths of faith could be revealed. Moreover, after life-long study of Chinese practices he had decided that just as slavery had been tolerated in early Christian centuries until the time should be ripe for its abolition, converts might fulfil their two traditional duties, the veneration of Confucius and the dead members of their family.
As the China mission grew, Franciscans and Dominicans entered the country. Their method of evangelising was direct, uncompromising and took little account of the different psychology of the people to whom it was addressed. The Mendicants walked through the streets holding up crucifixes and, when a crowd gathered, preached in public, very often through interpreters. The Spaniards among them did not hesitate to proclaim that all the long line of Chinese Emperors were burning in hell. When they discovered that converts made by the Jesuits were allowed to honour Confucius and the tablets of the dead, they protested that a tainted form of Christianity had been introduced to China. The Mendicants forbade their converts such concessions and complained to Rome, branding Jesuit methods of adaptation as protective mimicry. Theologians of the Society rallied to the support of their missionaries. For seventy years the controversy raged while Rome, seeing in the problem one of the most difficult and far-reaching that had ever faced the Church, delayed her decision. Both parties accumulated evidence. The Jesuits obtained from K’ang Hsi a written document which they believed would prove decisive. In it the Emperor stated “Honours are paid to Confucius not as a petition for favours, intelligence or high office but as to a Master, because of the magnificent moral teaching which he has left to posterity. As for the ceremony in honour of dead ancestors, it originates in the desire to show filial piety. According to the customs observed by Confucians, this ceremony contains no request for help; it is practised only to show filial respect to the dead. Souls of ancestors are not held to reside in the tablets; these are only symbols which serve to express gratitude and keep the dead in memory, as though they were actually present.”
The Jesuits were not scandalised at the phrase “genuflection before the dead,” for they had seen sons pay just such respect to their living parents. If food was offered to the dead, that was because the Chinese knew no better way of showing affection and gratitude; as well reprimand Europeans when they laid flowers at a grave because the dead possess no sense of smell. These customs were older far than the Church herself and were part of an inflexible moral system which would never be brought to heel; concessions of less importance had once been granted the less intractable Roman Empire; could the Papacy not afford to be generous? Was not Rome the eternal city, transcending the merely human limitations of thought imposed by race and culture, and therefore bound to embrace both West and East, bound even, because of her physical position, to show special sympathy towards the peoples of Asia?
On their side, the Mendicants maintained that, despite all appeals to authority and tradition, in actual fact such honours, as practised by the majority of Chinese, were tainted with superstition. Confucius, they protested, was venerated not merely as a teacher, but as the highest of the saints, a superhuman being, while most Chinese held that the souls of their ancestors were actually present in the tablets and feasted on the food offered to them.
Nine Cardinals appointed to decide between the conflicting views held their fateful sitting on November 13th, 1704. All were Italian; they assembled in Rome; the documents they studied were written in Latin; their categories were Aristotelian; none had ever visited the East. Yet the dilemma they faced was the same which Ricci’s life had so triumphantly solved; how love the totally other without losing identity? A week later the Cardinals issued their decree, confirmed by Pope Clement XI.
They had chosen to be rigorously inflexible. Their guiding principle had been that integrity must precede charity: the missions must be free not only from formal superstition, but from the very suspicion of such a thing. The veneration of Confucius and dead ancestors was almost without qualification declared superstitious and Christians forbidden to practise such ceremonies. Even the forms of homage paid to Confucius after graduation, as well as any semblance of sacrifices or offerings on the graves of the dead, were prohibited. Ricci’s policy of tolerance and adaptation was revoked.
A young Frenchman, Charles de Tournon, who combined religious zeal with overbearing self-assertion and tactlessness, was sent to Peking to enforce the decree. Ignorant of Chinese and distrustful of the Jesuits, he chose as his interpreter a French bishop named Maigrot who had lived twenty years in China, the most outspoken antagonist of Chinese rites. Maigrot was invited by the Emperor, at an interview which took place in the summer of 1706, to discuss those aspects of Confucianism which were held to be incompatible with Christianity. Surprised at Maigrot’s faltering Chinese, K’ang Hsi invited the bishop to expound four characters on a scroll which hung behind the dragon throne. Maigrot was able to interpret only one of them correctly. Later he failed to recognise the name Li Ma-tou and confessed that he had never even opened his Christian Doctrine, though it was well known to every member of the court. Indeed, several of Ricci’s books were now numbered among the greatest works of Chinese literature. At the close of the interview the Emperor, a highly intelligent man with a long record of benevolent rule, expressed astonishment that dunces such as Maigrot and Tournon should claim to decide on the meaning of texts and ceremonies of several thousand years’ antiquity. Despite pleas from all sides Tournon refused to admit he had made a mistake in selecting the bishop as his representative. The Emperor, who had already suffered several insults at the hands of Tournon, ordered the legate to return to Canton. On his arrival at Nanking Tournon made public the most important sections of the decree against Chinese rites.
The imperial power was thus directly confronted with the pontifical will, the Son of Heaven with the Holy Father. Christianity appeared to the outraged Tartar no longer a universal religion adaptable to all peoples but a swashbuckling, narrow, prejudiced local cult. He laid down that all missionaries, if they wished to remain in China, must obtain an imperial permit, which would be issued only to those who agreed to abide by the practices of Ricci.
Once the sympathy of the Emperor and high mandarins was lost—as Ricci had foreseen—the authority attaching to Christianity declined. Eleven years after Tournon’s visit, the foreign religion was formally prohibited in China and although loyalty to the French Jesuits prevented the execution of this decree during the lifetime of K’ang Hsi, under his successors Christianity suffered oppression. Missionaries nevertheless remained at court, no longer as trusted advisers but as painters, landscape gardeners, fabricators of fountains and mechanical toys, still receiving their annual present of venison, pheasants and frozen fish.
In 1773, after almost two centuries of work in China, during which four hundred and seventy-two of its members, Chinese and European, built up the Church on Ricci’s foundations, the Society of Jesus was suppressed. The last remaining bulwark at Peking against outright persecution was broken
, the lightning conductor removed. Ebbing religious zeal in France, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars—these, too, had an adverse effect on the mission: the flow of money and priests dwindled; Christianity steadily waned; in a few years the last converts would have died and the final wooden cross been consumed in fire before the statue of Buddha.
The decline was dramatically arrested by the rise of new forces. Peace in Europe promoted the rapid expansion of mercantile interests in the East. The English, in particular, made substantial profits from the importation of opium to China against tea, silk and porcelain, but their ships and merchants were subjected to the usual cramping conditions and kept at arm’s length on the coastal fringe. In 1840 the imperial commissioner of Canton attempted to suppress the opium traffic by seizing and destroying 20,000 cases of the drug. Britain, by Western standards badly treated, declared and won an easy war; treaties were signed between China, on the one hand, and Britain, France and America, opening certain Chinese ports, granting more favourable terms of trade and providing, among other concessions, for the entrance of Christian missionaries. Money and men once more began to flow into China; churches were re-established; many converts made; the old threads, so it seemed, taken up. In 1842 the Jesuits returned, establishing their house in the ancestral village of Paul Hsü. Superficial continuity hid a profound change. The privilege formerly won for Christianity by the virtue and wisdom of its missionaries had now been obtained by superior rifles and long-range guns.
While the West considered China a dodo state which had failed to evolve suitable methods of self-defence, China’s first reaction to the invaders was one of resentment and scornful superiority. Much as Rome viewed the Goths and Vandals, she admitted the superiority of the West in the art of killing but viewed its ideals and way of life with contempt. Agriculture, moral philosophy, the mandarin class, hostility to the strange and new—by these she had attained harmony with her surroundings, and she did not intend to jeopardise the delicate balance by trying to improve her material well-being along Western lines. She still believed all change would be change for the worse.
But as the century drew on, China’s humiliation became more complete. Adverse terms of trade drained off her silver; the opium traffic debilitated her people; the Western powers exacted one concession after another. In 1895, as had happened three centuries earlier, Korea was invaded by Japan, her power greatly increased by the adoption of Western weapons, and China suffered a crushing defeat. The lesson was inescapable: she must practise the despised modern techniques of Europe and America as the only means to survival. Industrialisation, however, could not be grafted on to the existing régime. Efficiency would entail new social and political institutions, the surrender of privileges and cherished values. Machines, despite their masters’ mind, must bring a machine-age.
After several vain attempts the revolution was achieved, the Son of Heaven replaced by a doctor of medicine, graduate of a Western university. The early decades of the twentieth century brought changes more sweeping than any in the past two thousand years. The system of examinations based on Confucianism was abolished; books were written no longer in mandarin but in the Peking dialect; women tripped out of their homes; a modern army was created; the year, significantly, reckoned by the sun instead of the moon. Just as eighteenth-century Europe had enthusiastically accepted many superficial aspects of Chinese thought and life, while remaining ignorant of their spirit, so now China welcomed Western technical achievements—railways, guns, power-houses, machinery—but to Christianity, which fired that civilisation, she remained largely indifferent. Science and democracy became the twin gods: faithful reflection of the contemporary Western attitude. Chinese students at European and American universities found belief in progress, religious agnosticism and a scarcely veiled contempt for Christianity. Returning to their own country, crowded with zealous missionaries, they asked, “Do you propose to convert China and then wait for the Chinese to reconvert the West?” Yen Fu, shortly after the first World War, expressed his people’s growing disillusionment with the new experiment. “Western progress,” he said, “has culminated in four achievements: to be selfish, to kill others, to feel little integrity and less shame.” China, strengthened and modernised, expressed revolt and preference for her traditional way of life in extreme nationalism.
Profiting from the toleration accorded by trade treaties, Christianity meanwhile was making progress, sometimes filling the vacuum, though seldom among the leading intellectuals, as cultural forms were broken up. The Catholic missions in particular received impetus from an important papal decision. In 1939, after the Chinese Government had several times explicitly affirmed the civil character of honours paid to Confucius and the dead, Rome issued a decree tolerating these practices. Ricci, whose reputation had lain under a cloud for two centuries, was finally and completely justified. At a time when the West was branding China’s traditional values as backward, inferior and an obstacle to progress, the Church reaffirmed Ricci’s belief that Christianity must welcome the best elements in Eastern thought. But Rome’s decree had less importance than it would have had in 1704, for mass education and the breaking-up of families by modern methods of communication had weakened Confucianism.
The revolution, at first welcomed by the West, soon showed that nationalism could prove a greater threat to the Church than immutability. China counted 2,500 native clergy and three million Catholics, but the second figure represented considerably less than one per cent of the population. Mass was still celebrated in Latin, although as early as 1615, at Longobardo’s request, the use of Chinese had been approved in principle by the Pope. Most damaging of all, at every turn the ideals of Christianity were refuted by Western treatment of China. As in Ricci’s day, the businessmen and politicians without largely undid the work of the missionaries within. The Church was dismissed as simply another instrument of Western imperialism.
Throughout a generation of war and anarchy China sought an answer to foreign economic control and political aggression as well as her own national humiliation. While the first World War had increased repugnance for the West, she saw in the Russian revolution the overthrow by a single qppressed class of what she herself was suffering on a national scale. Russia’s relations with China were governed by fear of Japan. While unobtrusively obtaining control over China’s outer dominions, Manchuria and Mongolia, as bulwarks against Japanese aggression, in other respects she sought to win the goodwill of Peking, with the result that China did not disdain to adopt the revolutionaries’ principles as a solution to her own problems. Russia, her partially Asiatic civilisation giving her an instinctive understanding of the ideals to which Chinese Communists would respond, helped the young party to forge out of the chaos of civil war an authoritarian closed society with an equal distribution of land, its economy managed by the state, professing a rigidly orthodox fraternal creed aimed at realising heaven on earth. The forms of the People’s Republic were the age-old forms of the Middle Kingdom, mandarins replaced by commissars, the doctrine of Confucius by that of Marx and Lenin. China had at last opened heart and mind to the outside world and, under the guise of a vital spiritual creed—the only one in the world, it seemed, which commanded enthusiasm—embraced the most extreme form of Western materialism. Ricci’s clock had been welcomed, his books dashed to the ground.
Cut off from her source, Christianity suffers persecution in a country whose Government holds that religion is the opium of the people. Missionaries are again forbidden to sail up the Western River to Canton. The history of the “Adorers of the Cross” is being repeated. China has once again become an almost inaccessible Cathay. Though the mutual understanding he built up has been scattered and his ideals betrayed, Ricci’s life remains. Defeat now can never be total. At the capital city, part of the brown soil, lies the dust which was his body, given freely, a still unbroken link between the West and furthest Asia.
Note
The chief sources of this biography are Ricci’s own history
of the Chinese mission, his letters and those of his companions, reports made by his superiors and a short life by his contemporary, Sabatino De Ursis. The history has been edited, with a multitude of identifications and copious extracts from contemporary Chinese documents, by Pasquale D’Elia, S.J., as part of a work bearing the general title Fonti Ricciane. Perusal of his volumes will reveal the extent to which the present book is dependent upon Father D’Elia’s scholarship and research. To this great sinologue and pioneer of Ricci studies I am very deeply indebted. I am no less grateful to Mr. Herbert Agar for invaluable advice regarding the form of the biography. I also wish to thank the founders and trustees of the Richard Hillary Trust, Father Basil FitzGibbon, who first mentioned Ricci’s name to me, Mr. H. McAleavy of the School of Oriental Studies, Father Philip Caraman, Doctor Werner Eichhorn and the Very Rev. Columba Cary-Elwes, who has written a history of the Catholic Church in the Middle Kingdom, shortly to be published under the title China and the Cross.
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