Missionary Encounters Review

7/30/2019 Missionary Encounters Review

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/missionary-encounters-review 1/17

Missionary Encounters in China and Tibet: From Matteo Ricci to Ippolito DesideriA Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552–1610 by Ronnie Po-chia Hsia; Jesuit onthe Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri’s Mission to 18th-Century Tibet by Trent PomplunReview by: Joan-Pau RubiésHistory of Religions, Vol. 52, No. 3 (February 2013), pp. 267-282Published by: The University of Chicago Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668661 .

Accessed: 14/05/2013 15:26

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History

of Religions.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 46.5.0.108 on Tue, 14 May 2013 15:26:43 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668661?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp





http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668661?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress



R E V I E W A R T I C L E

MISSIONARY ENCOUNTERS IN CH IN A A ND TIBET: FROM MATTEO RI CC I T O

IPPOLITO DESIDERI

A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552–1610. By RONNIE PO-CHIA HSIA.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 386. Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri’s Mission to 18th-Century Tibet .

By TRENT POMPLUN. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 320.

In the past three decades the study of early modern Christian missions has been

deeply transformed. A new paradigm is emerging that seeks to interpret the missions as

a global phenomenon and, in particular, as a privileged field for cross-cultural encoun-

ters. It questions the quasi-hagiographic emphasis of those accounts that all too often

perpetuated the assumptions of traditional Christian apologists and sought to identify

the missions with the expansion of European science and civilization; it also questions

the simplicity of some postcolonial critiques that interpreted the phenomenon simply

as an adjunct to Western imperialism. This new historiography is often more concerned

with cultural and political interactions than with just Western dominance or native

resistance to European cultural penetration. Therefore, it questions the Eurocentric bias

all too often imposed by the prevalence of the sources generated by the missionaries,

mobilizing when possible alternative native sources. Above all, it seeks a sophisticated

rhetorical analysis of missionary sources and pays attention to the production and circu-

lation of ethnographic and scientific “knowledge” in its various contexts, from the mis-

sion field to Europe, dealing with, for example, the role of missionaries as cultural me-

diators, the importance of interpreters and native converts, the very nature of religious

conversions, or the possibilities and limitations of intercultural dialogues.

One theme that has emerged from recent scholarship on the Catholic missions is the

global nature of the enterprise. Although the European scene of the Counter-Reformation

Ó 2013by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.0018-2710/2013/5203-0004$10.00







has not been forgotten (and a number of historians study the internal missions to the still

partially “pagan” countryside, or among Spanish Moriscos), it is perhaps inevitable that,

as the current interest in the modern process of globalization gathered pace at the turn of

the third millennium, its early modern roots would be reexamined and, in particular, thatthe Jesuit missions, which, remarkably, spanned from New France (modern Canada) to

Brazil and Paraguay, and from China, Japan, and the Philippines to Ethiopia, India,

Siam, or the Spice Islands, would be subject to a new analysis from this “global” per-

spective. Luke Clossey’s recent Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Mis-

sions, which considers the order’s wide-ranging networks from a variety of spiritual and

material perspectives, declares this topicality with its very title.1 The centralized and

strongly hierarchical organization of the Jesuit order, its system of information via regu-

lar letter writing, its efforts at propaganda through many historical works and other pub-

lications, and its investment in “modern” forms of education that embraced the rhetori-

cal training and scientific concerns of humanistic culture have all contributed to theidea that the Jesuits were the early modern global order par excellence. As a matter of

fact, other mendicant orders with a missionary spirit, such as the discalced Franciscans,

were also pioneers in many distant lands, from New Spain to India, Sri Lanka, or China,

and in certain areas, such as the Philippine Islands or Persia, the presence of Augustin-

ians, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Capuchins was of the greatest importance. Never-

theless, in modern scholarship there is a strong bias toward the Jesuits, and the implicit

assumption in many cases is that they were the most efficient, creative, and often deci-

sive missionary order. A recent and important volume dedicated to the early modern

missions and the circulation of “knowledge,” Missions d’evangelisation et circulation

des savoirs, XVIe–XVIIIe siecle can serve to illustrate this.2

Of twenty contributions,more than half are primarily concerned with Jesuits, three with Franciscans, two with

Capuchins, one with Augustinian materials, and finally another with a Jeronymite

brother (the remainder are comparative or study the Propaganda Fide). I do not believe

this is simply a reflection of the relative importance of the Jesuits in the mission fields;

we must also take account of the availability of Jesuit materials both in archives and in

print, the members of the Society having remained very successful publicists in a mod-

ern academic environment through works of great empirical scholarship.3 In a number

1 Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2008). It would be fair to note that although Dauril Alden’s massiveThe Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996) did not display the word “global” and onlyconcerned itself with the Portuguese Province, in effect it outlined a similar perspective whendealing with problems of organization and finance.

2Charlotte de Castelnau-l’Estoile, Marie-Lucie Copete, Aliocha Maldavsky, and Ines G.

Zupanov, eds., Missions d’evangelisation et circulation des savoirs, XVIe–XVIIIe siecle(Madrid: Casa de Velazquez, 2011). Although the book title is in French, many essays appear inCastilian and English. Unlike other multilingual collections based on a conference, however,this is a properly edited volume, with a clear focus, uniformly high standards of scholarship, andan important introduction.

3

This modern fascination with the Jesuits goes beyond the availability of sources and is argu-ably connected to a Black Legend, with roots in Protestant anti-Catholic polemics, but also criti-cisms and suspicion within the Catholic Church itself.

268 Missionary Encounters in China and Tibet







of ways the Jesuits were less unique than the shape of modern historiography of mission

might lead many to assume. This is not to deny their distinctive contribution or its global

significance but, rather, to emphasize the need for more research on the other missionary

orders and more thought, through systematic comparisons, on where exactly the differ-ences were.

For example, beyond the obvious institutional and organizational aspects, it is

worth raising the issue whether spiritual and intellectual training had anything to do

with Jesuit missionary success. The Society’s willingness to embrace a modern edu-

cation in the humanities, which involved rhetorical skills in history writing and uses

of the dialogue form, but also sciences such as astronomy, cosmography, and mathe-

matics, has often been noted.4 The extent of their participation in the Republic of Let-

ters, with many publications that (among other things) strengthened the propaganda

for their missions, also clearly distinguishes the Jesuits throughout the period from

the late Renaissance to the height of the Enlightenment. More difficult to determineperhaps is the extent to which their psychological training through the spiritual exer-

cises made a difference to their missionary accomplishments. The combination of

worldliness with inner mysticism, the “contemplation in action” defined by John

O’Malley in his important book The First Jesuits, which disentangled the connections

between the charismatic spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola and its practical transmuta-

tion by the likes of fathers Jeronimo Nadal and Juan Alfonso de Polanco, might have

helped the Jesuits operate in small units in culturally (as well as geographically) dis-

tant lands.5 I am, however, skeptical as to whether the close connection between

laboring for the salvation of others and being concerned with the salvation of one’s

own self, suggested by Luke Clossey as characteristic of the Jesuits, would have beenvery different in the case of Franciscans, Dominicans, or Augustinians in exotic mis-

sion fields.6

From the perspective of cross-cultural encounters, the obvious point to consider in

this respect is the development of methods of cultural accommodation and, in particu-

lar, learning native languages, the cultivation of non-European literatures, and the

acceptance of local civil customs (e.g., dress and diet), when they were perceived as

not contrary to natural law. Here again, we must begin by noting that the Jesuits were

not alone in these attempts of accommodation. For example, the Carmelite Juan Tadeo,

in the Persia of Shah Abbas, or the priest of the Missions etrangeres, Louis Laneau, in

seventeenth-century Siam, advocated nonconfrontational missionary strategies involv-

ing deep engagement with non-European cultural traditions. Nor were the Jesuits

unique in their ethnographic efforts, as any student of the work of the Franciscans

in New Spain knows. Even the transfer of cutting-edge European mathematics and

astronomy to China could have been accomplished by the Augustinian Martın de

Rada, who was learning mandarin Chinese and studying their scientific literature

4Another important field of research involves their use of the arts. For all these various

aspects, see John O’Malley SJ, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Ken-nedy SJ, eds., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1999–

2004).5John O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

6Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 119–25.

269 History of Religions







before Ricci had set foot in the Middle Kingdom.7 The Jesuits nevertheless embraced

all of these forms of cultural interaction more systematically and comprehensively

than any other order, and it was the more notorious and extreme of their experiments in

India and China that opened a rift within the church between those who supportedthose methods as theologically valid as well as politically convenient, and those who

denounced them as compromising the integrity of Christian teaching, especially in

relation to idolatry. In this respect, it is worth noting that Francis Xavier and Cosme de

Torres in Japan developed their own version of accommodation without reaching the

degree of contention met by the specific proposals developed by Matteo Ricci in China

and Roberto Nobili in India. The issue, therefore, was not the principle of accommoda-

tion but its legitimate range of application. The comparison between the strategies

adopted by Jesuit missionaries in different mission fields, such as Japan, China, India,

and Tibet, alongside the methods employed by rival orders (Dominicans, discalced

Franciscans, and Capuchins, especially, but also Carmelites and Theatines) shouldhelp elucidate the distinctiveness of the Jesuit order in relation to each missionary con-

text and the impact of individual contributions to extending the boundaries of accom-

modation. Even though accommodation was clearly developed further in those oriental

missions where there was not a colonial context of coercion that might facilitate con-

versions, especially in those areas widely considered to be more rational and civil

(clearly the case in Japan and China), even comparisons with missions in the New

World are worthwhile.8

A number of recent books on Matteo Ricci and Ippolito Desideri, two Jesuit mis-

sionaries whose careers helped open up China and Tibet to the European Republic of

Letters, offer an opportunity to reflect upon this new historiography on the overseasmissions of the Counter-Reformation, with its increased focus on cross-cultural ex-

changes. It is evident that individual pioneers working in conditions of relative isola-

tion continue to attract attention, in part because they soon became saintly heroes

(often self-promoted in their own letters and historical writings) of the most ambi-

tious missionary endeavors, but also because their often unprecedented exposure to

the deep cultural roots of gentile civilizations generated some of the most dramatic

and better-documented examples of cultural creativity and adaptation in the early

modern period. One may question, of course, whether the repeated emphasis on

studying well-known elite figures like Matteo Ricci may distort our interpretation of

the missionary movement. In this respect, books such as Liam Brockey’s Journey to

the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724, which considers the mission

throughout the seventeenth century from the perspective of a large corpus of sources

and deals with the Portuguese perspective in particular detail, remain salutary.9 If

anything, by emphasizing the organization of everyday religious activities in multiple

7The Augustinian mission was frustrated by the diplomatic breakdown between the Castilian

governor in the Philippines and the authorities in Fujian in 1576, followed by Rada’s death in1578, although he had already started work on a Chinese grammar and vocabulary, now lost.

8See in this respect Takao Abe, The Jesuit Mission in New France: A New Interpretation in

the Light of the Earlier Jesuit Experience in Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2011).9Liam Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).








provincial residences, Brockey helps establish that Ricci’s dialogues with Confucian

mandarins, or Johann Adam Schall’s work at the imperial astronomical bureau, were

only partial aspects of the mission, and not necessarily the most important for the

Jesuits themselves, or for the majority of their converts. In particular, he notes thatwhile Ricci’s strategy had helped create support from the mandarin elites and the

court, from the 1620s the position of the missionaries was more secure, and the focus

of the mission shifted toward the popular classes, facilitating the eventual growth of

conversions. The mission led by Giulio Aleni in the province of Fujian, which has

been the object of increasing attention, is especially noteworthy in this respect,

because, as Erik Z€urcher has argued, Aleni had the most impact among the lower

strata of the literati class.10 Aleni was both a continuator of Ricci in the fundamentals

of his accommodation of Chinese customs, such as the rites offered to ancestors, and

a developer of his message in an explicit evangelical direction, offering, for example,

a more direct presentation of specifically Christian visual imagery than Ricci hadbeen able to afford.11 We could perhaps say that while individual case studies do not

provide the perspective for answering some of the larger historical questions (such as

assessing the success or failure of the missions), they can illuminate the subtler

aspects of cross-cultural dynamics. As the books by Hsia and Laven show for Ricci,

even the most familiar figures repay a fresh analysis.

Hsia’s A Jesuit in the Forbidden City offers what is probably the most thorough

and systematic biography in English of the missionary who managed to penetrate the

cultural and political maze of Ming China at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Through a detailed and balanced chronological exposition that combines use of the

documents generated by the Jesuits, and especially Ricci’s own letters and books,with a vast array of Chinese sources, many of which have been made available in

recent publications in China itself, Hsia offers what may come to be seen as a defini-

tive work of synthesis and, if nothing else, a reliable work of reference that is often

evocative and always written to the point. The Chinese reaction to the Jesuits can

only be evaluated by reference to sources that often challenge the sometimes self-

serving presentation of the missionaries, but, in addition, Ricci and his companions

produced important texts in Chinese that cast a great deal of light on how they devel-

oped their apologetic strategy (something quite different from how they justified that

strategy in Europe). While some of these texts, in particular, the fundamental True

Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu shiyi) (Beijing, 1604), but also theologically

less significant books, such as his treatise on friendship, have long been used by

10Erik Z€urcher, “Aleni: The Medium and the Message,” in “Scholar from the West”: Giulio

Aleni S. J. (1582–1649) and the Dialogue between Christianity and China, ed. Tiziana Lippielloand Roman Malek (Sankt Augustin: Monumenta Serica Institute, 1997).

11Especially revealing of Aleni’s impact and the wide-ranging nature of his message are the

notes on his teachings collected by the Chinese Christian Li Jiubao and other converts in the1630s. See Kouduo Richao: Li Jiubao’s “Diary of Oral Admonitions”; A Late Ming Christian

Journal, translated with an introduction and notes by Erik Z€urcher (Sankt Augustin: Monumenta

Serica Institute, 2007). On the extent to which specific Christian themes such as the Crucifixionwere made increasingly explicit, see also Gianni Criveller, Preaching Christ in Late MingChina: The Jesuits’ Presentation of Christ from Matteo Ricci to Giulio Aleni (Taipei, 1997).








scholars, other works have received less attention.12 Notably, we still await an

English translation of another of Ricci’s masterworks in Chinese, his Ten Discourses

of a Man of Paradox (Jiren shipian) (Beijing, 1607), which offers support to Hsia for

some of his chapters on how Ricci engaged his Chinese opponents (by contrast,scholars in Italy have been more active, and recently Wang Suna and Filippo Mignini

produced a parallel text with Italian translation).13 Of course, Hsia is not the first

scholar to consider the Chinese response: Jonathan Spence displayed his expertise as

a sinologist in his inspirational and now classic Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci,

while Buddhist anti-Christian polemics were at the heart of Jacques Gernet’s near

contemporary monograph, China and the Christian Impact .14 All these works, how-

ever, have their limitations: as has often been noted, Spence’s reliance on the Renais-

sance art of memory to organize his account was, however attractive, somehow artifi-

cial (Hsia notes, for example, that his treatise on memory might have been one of

Ricci’s less successful works in Chinese, since spatial mnemonics to learn Chinesecharacters were useless for native speakers who knew them phonetically), and Ger-

net’s emphasis on the radical incommensurability of European and Chinese concepts

has been questioned by many, including myself, on the grounds that expert foreign

language acquisition and, most important, cultural decoding are possible, however

gradual or selective the process of “cultural learning” involved.15

12Of great importance for the wider dissemination of the Tianzhu Shiyi has been the English

translation with parallel Chinese text (apparently with some errors) edited by Edward Malatesta

SJ, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (T’ien-chu Shih-i) , translated by Douglas Lanca-shire and Peter Zhu Guozhen (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1985). Of Ricci’s other works, possibly the treatise on friendship has attracted the most attention, including the editionsby Filippo Mignini, De l’amicicia (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2005), which includes Ricci’s own Ital-ian text as well as the Chinese; and, in English, Timothy Billings, On Friendship (New York:Columbia University Press, 2009).

13Matteo Ricci, Dieci Capitoli di un Uomo Strano, trans. and ed. Wang Suna and Filippo

Mignini (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2010).14

Jonathan Spence, Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York, 1984); Jacques Gernet,China and the Christian Impact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The work hadfirst appeared in French as Chine et christianisme: Action et r eaction (Paris, 1982). The secondedition of 1992 contained another subtitle, La premiere confrontation, and a new preface.

15Hsia, A Jesuit , 151. The criticism dates back from Hugh Trevor-Roper’s long and impor-

tant review in the New York Times Review of Books (June 13, 1985), later reprinted as “A Spiri-tual Conquest? Matteo Ricci in China,” in From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution(London: Secker & Warburg, 1992), 1–14. As Trevor-Roper noted, the use of four ideographs toreconstruct Ricci’s own memories suggested interesting connections between Counter-Refor-mation Italy and Ming China, and offered vivid glimpses of Ricci’s world, but failed to presentthe information on his mission in an accessible fashion. To the extent that this is a problem, bothHsia and Laven have opted for a more pedagogical kind of narrative order. On the problem withJacques Gernet’s use of incommensurability, see Joan-Pau Rubies, “The Concept of CulturalDialogue and the Jesuit Method of Accommodation: Between Idolatry and Civilization,” Archi-vum Historicum Societates Iesu 74 (2005): 237–80, esp. 240–41. A similar line of criticism wasdeveloped by Paul Rule in his review of Gernet’s book in Asian Studies Review 13 (1990): 152.See also the reflections by Nicolas Standaert, “Methodology in View of Contact between Cul-

tures: The China Case in the 17th Century,” Centre for the Study of Religion and Chinese Soci-ety Occasional Paper no. 11 (Hong Kong, 2002), which assesses Gernet’s work as belonging to aparadigm of “reception” that is analytically more limited than one based on “interaction.”








In this context, Hsia’s key contribution is not simply to seek to introduce a Chinese

counterpoint to the traditional paraphrase of the letters and narratives produced by

the Jesuits, which have long been available in scholarly editions, but also to offer a

more thorough examination of Ricci’s career from this perspective. He has profited inthis respect not only from the annotation of Pasquale d’Elia’s still indispensable edi-

tion of Ricci’s works, Fonti Ricciane: Storia dell’introduzione del cristianismo in

Cina, but also from more recent discoveries.16 For example, Hsia dwells at some

length on the career of Qu Rukui, Ricci’s first Chinese follower, whose heterodox

condition as an errant literatus had a lot to do with a sexual scandal involving his half-

brother’s wife in his youth).17 The career of Ricci emerges not so much as his physi-

cal and cultural penetration of China through a number of stages defined by obstacles

to be overcome (Shaozhou, 1594–95; Nanchang, 1595–98; Nanjing, 1598–1600; Bei-

jing, 1600–1610), a largely individual process with the support of the great visitor

Alessandro Valignano and some help from a few companions, and much more like aseries of two-sided encounters where the motivations of Chinese patrons, friends, and

opponents become crucial. Hsia’s narrative fully integrates the roles of many of these

figures: early patrons like Wang Pan, who thought they were welcoming yet another

sect of Buddhist monks coming from “India,” even sponsoring the printing of the first

Christian catechism produced by Ruggieri with the help of his first converts; orthodox

Confucian mandarin allies, such as Zhang Huang or Feng Yinjing, whose hostility to

Buddhism and to eunuchs Ricci found congenial, or, at the opposite end, neo-Confu-

cian scholars such as Jiao Hong or the iconoclastic Buddhist monk Li Zhi, whose fall

from grace and suicide Ricci did not lament, despite having socialized with him with

perfect civility, because of his religious allegiance to “idolatry”; also officials withscientific interests, such as Li Zhizao, who with Ricci translated several European

works of cosmography, mathematics, and astronomy into Chinese, but for many

years was reluctant to become a Christian because he did not want to give up his con-

cubines, and Xu Guangqi (baptized as Paul), the most prominent early convert and

also a scientific collaborator, who was attracted to Ricci’s powerful intellect and to

the idealized image of Europe offered by the Jesuits, but also to the Christian doctrine

of justice in the afterlife. In some cases these figures are known through detailed

English-language scholarship (such being the case of Jiao Hong and Xu Guangqi), but

16Pasquale d’Elia, ed., Fonti Ricciane: Storia dell’introduzione del cristianismo in Cina, 3

vols. (Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1942–49).17

Hsia, A Jesuit , 122–23. This is just one example of how access to recent Chinese scholar-ship, in this case Huang Yilong’s book of 2005, has allowed Hsia to go beyond the existing histo-riography on Ricci, which often exaggerates Qu Rukui’s social standing on account of the statusof his father as a successful civil servant: in fact, the young man had been expelled from the Qulineage on account of the sexual scandal. By contrast, it is surprising to find that some of themanuscripts in European languages that Hsia has used are quoted through online editions whosetranscription might not be perfect, when the documents remain available in the archives. Thisrelates in particular to the Castilian perspective from the Philippines, all too often neglected byhistorians of the Jesuit mission to China, who simply offer derivative and often distorted echoes

of the expeditions by Miguel de Loarca and Martın de Rada, or Juan Bautista Roman and AlonsoSanchez. Hsia, at least, shows awareness of some of the recent scholarship by Manel Olle andothers, but the task of integrating the two Iberian imperial perspectives remains to be done.








on many occasions it is only access to Chinese scholarship that makes it possible to

obtain a more rounded image. Hsia clarifies, for example, how Ricci’s years in the

south, and especially in Nanjing, far from a simple long wait to reach the imperial cen-

ter, were in fact essential to his eventual success, as they gave him the opportunity tobuild a network of contacts with a generation of young mandarins ahead of their even-

tual promotion to Beijing.

Hsia’s work contains some important further insights, from his characterization

of the True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven as a war declaration against Buddhism

(rather than simply as a brilliant attempt at accommodation of Confucianism) to a

fresh analysis of the contribution of Michele Ruggieri, who preceded Ricci in found-

ing the mission in Zhaoqing and learning mandarin Chinese (interestingly, Mary

Laven’s very recent book on Ricci also pays renewed attention to Ruggieri).18 How-

ever, Hsia’s choices also have some costs. The orderly account of the various stages

of Ricci’s progress from Italy to Beijing makes narrative sense for a biography but isentirely conventional and tends to reproduce some of the tropes of Ricci’s own self-

presentation. It also contributes to the feeling that the book does not do too much to

challenge previous interpretations, however distant we may now feel from the naive

Eurocentrism of Vincent Cronin’s The Wise Man from the West .19 As Hsia’s prologue

declares, the book portrays how a man of intelligence, charm, and endurance repre-

senting a renewed and confident Catholicism gained access to the inner realm of Chi-

nese civilization. At points the critical edge is so muted that the propaganda element

in some of the sources takes center stage. For example, the account of Ricci’s years in

Rome follows closely the protohagiographic account of Ricci’s early years added by

Nicolas Trigault at the end of the Storia, on the basis of a letter written by Ricci’scompanion Sabatino de Ursis upon his death in 1610, without further analysis.20 Per-

18Compare Hsia, A Jesuit , 78–115, to Mary Laven’s Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the

Jesuit Encounter with the East (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), chaps. 1 and 2. Both use Rug-gieri’s still-unpublished journal notes, or “Relaciones” ( Archivum Romanum Societates Iesu,Jap-Sin 101, I). It would be great to have this important material transcribed and published. AsHsia notes, despite the traditional focus on Ricci as the real genius, there is already some Jesuitbibliography on Ruggieri, especially the works by Joseph Shih and Albert Chan. In a third recentintervention, again written with complete independence from the other two, Yu Liu, in the pagesof this very journal (“The True Pioneer of the Jesuit China Mission: Michele Ruggieri,” History

of Religions 50 [2011]: 362–83), has insisted on Ruggieri’s importance most radically, claimingthat, in fact, he had pioneered Ricci’s accommodation in its fundamentals and might have suc-ceeded better in the long run because he limited the identification of Christianity with Confu-cianism and did not seek to tone down those explicit Christian themes that Ricci held backas culturally too sensitive. This seems exaggerated and downplays the Jesuit need to distanceChristianity from Buddhism. We also need more evidence for the contention that Ricci’s criti-cisms of Ruggieri’s limited vigor and lack of ability with spoken Chinese were behind Valigna-no’s decision to send him to Rome (all the documents, including Ricci’s Storia, report this asValignano’s judgment. The possibility of Ricci’s intervention is accepted by Hsia but dismissedby Laven).

19Vincent Cronin, The Wise Man from the West (New York, 1955).

20I follow the convention of referring to Ricci’s work briefly as Storia, according to Pasquale

d’Elia’s edition. The actual manuscript is titled Della entrata della compagnia di Giesu e Chris-tianita nella Cina. Trigault published it in Latin in 1615 as De Christiana expeditione qpud Sinas.








haps more problematic is the way Hsia uses Ricci’s account of his own conversations

with Buddhist monks and other Chinese interlocutors in the dialogues he published as

the Ten Discourses of a Man of Paradox. Given the conventions of the humanist dia-

logue form, which the Jesuits so successfully exploited for its pedagogic value, butalso, above all, the apologetic aims of this work, it is inevitable that Ricci fictional-

ized the conversations, yet Hsia presents the material as a largely factual account,

with no serious attempt to scrutinize each episode as a rhetorical construct.21 This

occasional lack of critical tone is compounded by the decision to place all the histo-

riographical discussion at the end of the book, as an epilogue. This may have been

designed to make the book more accessible for a large audience (which is certainly

one of the logics driving many of the recent books on Ricci, including Laven’s), but it

also enhances the impression that this is primarily an account of the missionary’s tri-

umphal progress, from the self-denying powers of Jesuit spirituality (on departing

from Italy Ricci turned down the offer to say good-bye to his family in Macerata) tothe epic finale at the heart of imperial China. Hsia’s account is certainly judicious as

well as meticulous and informed, but it stops short of a systematic exploration of the

many issues of interpretation that Ricci’s remarkable cross-cultural efforts may

elicit.22

Mary Laven’s Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the

East provides a lighter alternative to Hsia’s biography, and one that in some ways is

closer to the creative spirit that about three decades ago inspired Jonathan Spence to

analyze his subject around a set of images and analogies. Very engagingly written,

the main strength of the book is the thematic exploration of distinctive aspects of the

interactions between Ricci and his hosts from the perspective of a cultural historian,dealing with issues such as the significance of gift giving, the meanings of friendship,

or the troubled sexual identities underlying the clash between Jesuit missionaries and

palace eunuchs. Laven’s expertise in early modern cultural history is rooted in Euro-

pean scholarship, and she makes no pretense of offering new insights based on Chi-

nese sources. However, she has taken seriously the rich English-language scholarship

on the cultural history of Ming China and its literati by historians such as Craig Clu-

nas, Benjamin Elman, Joseph McDermott, Kai-Wing Chow, Shih-Shan Henry Tsai,

or Timothy Brook, and this allows her to make many interesting points on how cul-

tural differences were negotiated. By contrast, Laven openly eschews the intellectual

21Hsia rightly notes, however, that Ricci, in True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, painted an

idealized picture of the West and offered an exaggerated account of his “victory” over Buddhistmonks: any real exchanges would have been more inconclusive, for the sake of politeness, if nothing else.

22Hsia, however, has dealt with some of these issues elsewhere. In particular, on the produc-

tion of Christian literature in Chinese by the Jesuits, see Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, “The CatholicMission and Translations in China 1583–1700,” in Cultural Translation in Early-Modern

Europe, ed. Peter Burke and Ronnie Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2007), 39–51; on Jesuit linguistic skills compared to those of Franciscan and Dominican mis-sionaries, see “Language Acquisition and Missionary Strategies in China, 1580–1760,” in de

Castelnau-l’Estoile et al., Missions d’evang

elisation, 211–29; and on dreams, “Dreams and Con-

versions: A Comparative Analysis of Catholic and Buddhist Dreams in Ming and Qing China,” Journal of Religious History 29 (2006): 233–40.








aspects of the encounter emphasized by historians such as David Mungello, obvi-

ously not because scientific exchanges and religious disputations were unimportant

to the mission, but rather because (she argues) mental worlds need to be conceived

more broadly, encompassing emotions and human relationships, rituals, and objects.Certainly, and perhaps inevitably, there is one chapter titled “The True Meaning of

the Lord of Heaven,” which considers Ricci’s key text presenting Christianity to his

Chinese audience as a work of careful artifice, deftly attuned to Ming values and con-

cerns (although to continue to characterize the dialogue as a catechism, as Ricci

did, rather than a work of rational apologetics, may be misleading).23 Curiously, an

identically titled chapter is offered by Hsia, although his exposition tends toward

paraphrasing Ricci’s dialogue, without much further analysis. In any case, Laven’s

concern to broaden the intercultural exchange beyond the world of ideas is a legiti-

mate one and allows her to explore new paths (for a similar approach one might con-

sider the excellent study by Nicolas Standaert of Jesuit funerary rituals in China, The Interweaving of Rituals, a model in the genre).24 There is nevertheless some risk that,

in following the new emphasis, we could lose sight of the fact that what made Ricci’s

missionary strategy truly original in comparison to so many other Jesuits practicing

accommodation in India, Japan, or Tibet, was his idea that Confucianism was, if

properly understood as a rational civil philosophy, entirely compatible with Chris-

tianity, in a way analogous to ancient Stoicism. The accommodation of dress, diet,

and customs, as well songs and poetry, and, of course, politics and sociability, was

practiced in various fields of mission, but the consideration of a whole intellectual tra-

dition that was entirely non-Christian as profoundly valid (once purified of subsequent

Buddhist influences) was, in an early modern context, both new and radical. It wouldalso create some long-term difficulties for the Jesuits within their own Roman Church,

and, eventually, cast a long shadow in the European Enlightenment.

Ricci has always attracted a great deal of attention. Less well known, but in some

ways no less revealing, is the case of another Italian, Ippolito Desideri, whose ill-

fated mission to Tibet at the start of the eighteenth century has recently been the focus

of new research, much of it deftly summarized in Trent Pomplun’s Jesuit on the Roof

of the World . Some hundred and thirty years separated Desideri’s experience from

Ricci’s, but while the latter ended his career on a high note, respected in China and

23Ricci called the work a catechism in his Storia and some of his letters, reflecting contempo-

rary usage. The word doctrina was used for a fuller exposition of the faith, quite often in the formof a series of questions and answers, that is, what is currently understood as a catechism (I amgrateful to Nicolas Standaert for his observations on this point). The important issue is that, prob-ably inspired by Valignano’s Cathechismus Christianae Fidei, in China Ricci had chosen a moregradual approach. Unlike Ruggieri’s Tianzhu Shilu, or “Veritable record of the Lord of heaven,”which might be conceived as a catechism in the form of a dialogue, Ricci’s Tianzhu Shiyi, writ-ten to replace it, was only concerned with putting forward rational arguments about the “Truemeaning of the Lord of Heaven,” and excluded many of the mysteries of the faith (Ricci haddescribed it accurately in 1594 as a “libro delle cose della nostra fede tutto di ragione naturale”).It was, therefore, a “preparation for the gospel” rather than a systematic exposition of Christian

doctrine for converts.24Nicolas Standaert, The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange

between China and Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).








about to become famous in Europe, Desideri’s vast efforts were cut short abruptly

and virtually came to nothing. His apologetic work in Tibetan might be comparable

to Ricci’s Chinese dialogues but never had the same kind of impact among its

intended audiences. Similarly, his detailed account of his mission and of Tibetan his-tory, customs, and religion, written in Italian, might be compared to Ricci’s Storia

dell’introduzione del cristianismo in Cina, but while Nicolas Trigault’s Latin version

of the latter ensured its immense influence in seventeenth-century Europe, Desideri’s

Notizie Istoriche del Thibet was seen as part of a polemic against the Capuchins and

therefore suppressed, only to be rediscovered in the twentieth century. Although

Luciano Petech produced a critical edition of the Italian manuscripts and other related

documents which remains indispensable, I missionari italiani nel Tibet e nel Nepal, it

is a happy coincidence that English readers will be able to enjoy as an ideal comple-

ment to Pomplun’s monograph the new scholarly translation of this text by Michael

J. Sweet and edited by Leonard Zwilling, Mission to Tibet .25

Desideri’s fate was profoundly marked by the crisis experienced by the Society of

Jesus, and here again assessing the question of cultural accommodation is crucial.

The troubles of the society originally had a great deal to do with the negative reaction

provoked by the experiments inaugurated by Ricci in China, and a few years later by

Roberto Nobili in India. In all these cases, it is worth noting the prevalence of a

minority of well-educated, sophisticated Italian missionaries working in cutting-edge

missions in the loose context of the Portuguese padroado, and the resentment created

by this national and educational imbalance certainly contributed to the suspicion with

which the more radical uses of accommodation were often assessed. But if national

jealousies help explain the origins of the conflict in the mission field at the turn of theseventeenth century, one hundred years later the issue had become about hatred and

suspicion of the Jesuits more generally, and the Roman authorities were increasingly

unable to manage the conflict. As I have argued elsewhere in relation to the interpre-

tation of the evolution of the rites controversy, for a full assessment of the missions as

a form of cultural encounter it is often crucial to distinguish two different logics, one

that belonged to each particular mission field, and another that concerned its Euro-

pean context of reception, propaganda, and conflict.26 Often what worked best in

China created the most problems at home. The conflicts about rites in China and India

were coming to a head precisely at the time when the clash about the jurisdiction of

the Tibetan missions emerged. In fact, Tibet became like a secondary stage in a kind

of vast chess game pitting the Jesuit order against a vast array of adversaries in

Europe and overseas that included Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jansenists (as well

as, of course, many enemies outside the Catholic Church). And yet, it is worth empha-

sizing that Desideri’s missionary methods, let alone his Christian apologetic strate-

gies in relation to Buddhism, were largely uncontroversial. In Tibet, Desideri clashed

25Luciano Petech, ed., I missionari italiani nel Tibet e nel Nepal, 7 vols. (Rome: Libreria dello

Stato, 1952–57); Michael J. Sweet, Mission to Tibet: The Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Account by Father Ippolito Desideri S.J., ed. Leonard Zwilling (Boston: Wisdom, 2010). There

was a previous English translation by Filippo de Filippi in 1932, but this new version offers asuperior text, a thorough introduction, and excellent annotation.26

Rubies, “The Concept of Cultural Dialogue.”








with fellow Italians with whom he got on quite well personally and alongside whom

he had studied Buddhism in order to attack it. The contentious issue was simply about

priority rights and the unwillingness of different orders to cooperate in the same fields

of mission. Hence, we must resist the conclusion that the rites controversy was alonethe key to the various conflicts experienced by the Society of Jesus. Rather, what is

most symptomatic of the new epoch of Jesuit decline concerns the ecclesiastical con-

text by which, decade after decade, the order created by Ignatius had been increas-

ingly put on the defensive in Rome, despite its earlier missionary success, symbolized

by the saintly status of Francis Xavier. In other words, beyond the issue of rites, there

was a wider context of entrenched rivalry between orders and a widespread political

suspicion of the Jesuits, which fed a fatally negative interaction within the Catholic

Church.

The case of Desideri’s mission to Tibet exemplifies this very clearly, because on

this occasion the Propaganda Fide clearly upheld the right of the Capuchins toexclude a Jesuit presence, notwithstanding the fact that there were also various seven-

teenth-century precedents of Jesuit missions in that region, a presence that had been

recently publicized by Athanasius Kircher in his China Illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667).

Recent scholarship has made clear the extent to which Desideri’s mission was per-

ceived as a provocative move, and might indeed have been initiated in direct response

to the Propaganda’s awarding of Tibet to the Capuchins. In this reading, Desideri was

a pawn that the General of the Society, Michelangelo Tamburini, sent to Tibet in order

to contest the Capuchin move, perhaps hoping that they would retreat, or maybe in

order to facilitate other negotiations in the contested fields of India and China. It is

interesting in this respect that Desideri was not allowed to stay in Ladakh by his imme-diate superior Freyre but instead was told to continue toward the “third Tibet,” namely,

Lhasa. While Pomplun offers the traditional view expressed by Desideri in his writ-

ings that Freyre simply failed in his missionary vocation in the face of the difficult cli-

mate and living conditions (he was used to the heat of North India and was hoping to

get back), Michael Sweet has suggested that Freyre had secret instructions from his

superiors in the Province to find the place where the Capuchins operated. In this

account, it was this plan that dragged Desideri to Lhasa, only to be left there all alone

by Freyre, to fight the ground against the rival order. Desideri, in fact, was quite

accommodating toward the Capuchins, suggesting that they could complement each

other. The open issue of scholarly contention is whether Desideri’s Tibetan vocation

was largely his own initiative, something decided by the Provincial in India or, rather,

from the very beginning an idea instilled by the General of the order.27 If it was indeed

the latter’s plan to use Desideri in order to contest the ground directly, his move back-

fired, because the pope yielded yet again to the Propaganda, whose decision had been

to send the Capuchins to Tibet. To make things worse, however, at the point of his

forced retreat Desideri was imbued with such a powerful sense of his personal voca-

27In this division of opinion, Sweet and Zwilling seem to stand in the tradition of Henri Hos-

ten and Petech in believing that Desideri received the instruction from Rome, as he eventually

claimed. Pomplun, by contrast, seems to be the heir of Cornelius Wessels in his view that we donot really know whether he intended to open (or perhaps reopen) the Tibetan mission when heleft Rome.








tion in Tibet (not surprisingly perhaps, considering the huge efforts he undertook) that

he refused to give up quietly and took the conflict directly to Rome. The battle that

ensued became bitter, but the pawn was nevertheless sacrificed. When he worked on

the final drafts of his Notizie, Desideri’s cause was no longer a cause that could further the interests of the Society he had devoted his life to.

It is one of the many virtues of Pomplun’s book that it seeks to penetrate the spiri-

tual roots of Desideri’s obstinacy. His personal calling to Tibet was in his mind noth-

ing less than obeying what he understood to be the will of God, in effect reproducing

one of the key psychological mechanisms of the Jesuit spiritual exercises. Finding

one’s vocation was a process of self-denial, but it was difficult to be told that the prov-

idential plan that had taken a young man from Pistoia to fight the Devil in Tibet at the

cost of many risks and sacrifices was no longer what the superiors had previously

thought. Pomplun’s Desideri is an idealist in a particular mold, able to master written

Tibetan in record time precisely because he felt the urgency of his mission againstformidable odds. The paradox was that, in the end, it became impossible to disentan-

gle personal desires from selfless dedication to a divine cause.

Beyond offering a view on the politics of the mission and Desideri’s own ideas

about them, Pomplun’s book is thematically wide ranging, considering in some detail

both the political context of the mission from a Tibetan perspective, and the nature of

the theological encounter with Buddhism, here taking account of seventeenth-century

European concerns with the history of idolatry, the role of the Devil, and the possible

salvation of virtuous gentiles. Indeed, where Hsia is historiographically austere, Pomp-

lun is eager to situate his study at the heart of a number of controversies. Methodo-

logically, he embraces the importance of images as part of the Jesuit training, in away openly reminiscent of Jonathan Spence. He also subjects Desideri’s historical

writings to a searching rhetorical analysis. In relation to existing controversies, he

seeks to situate his study as a contribution to the analysis of cross-cultural dialogues,

not only in relation to the meaning of accommodation but also concerning the extent

to which Tibet became a myth in the Western imagination, very much in the wake of

the work of Donald Lopez, whose thesis Pomplun seeks to vindicate.28 In particular,

against the grain of an idealized Tibetan Buddhism, Pomplun’s analysis highlights

the competition of various monastic orders, with emphasis on the way the Geluk

monks used the occasion of the Z€unghar (Western Mongol) invasion and the fall of

the Khosud (also Western Mongol) kinglet Lhazang Khan in 1717–18 to target rival

groups such as the Nyingma, in fact following a wider historical pattern by which

intense factionalism in Tibet facilitated foreign military intervention from Mongolia

and China. Nonspecialists will welcome Pomplun’s elucidation of the historical

background to the Catholic missions, from the centralizing success of the fifth Dalai

Lama, Ngawang Yeshe Gyatso, in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, to

the eventual consolidation of the Qing as imperial overlords after 1720. Desideri, of

course, was sympathetic to Lhazang Khan, his protector, and during the Z€unghar

invasion he sought refuge in Dakpo and enjoyed good relations with some Nyingma

28Donald S. Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, 1998).








monks, all of which colors his account. Pomplun has a tendency to share these

Nyingma sympathies, and even ventures that Desideri’s friend the “Lungar Lama”

was, in fact, the known figure Ch€oje Lingpa, a treasure-finder famous for his “discov-

ery” of new prophecies of Padmasambhava, a semimythical figure in Tibetan Bud-dhism, and one that also fascinated Desideri for its Christian analogies.29

In the same way that English language historians working on Ricci have repeat-

edly been able to benefit from the great editing efforts of Italian scholars working on

his letters and his retrospective historical narrative, with key contributions ranging

from Pietro Tacchi Venturi and Pasquale d’Elia in the first half of the twentieth cen-

tury to the more recent editions by Francesco d’Arelli, Filippo Mignini, and others,

recent scholarship on Desideri has been made largely possible by the great edition of

his Italian works prepared by Luciano Petech in the 1950s, with more recent contribu-

tions by Enzo Barghiacchi. What is perhaps most novel of the more recent scholar-

ship by Michael Sweet and Trent Pomplun (also building on the work of GiuseppeToscano) is the increasing attention paid to Desideri’s Tibetan works of Christian

apologetics. It is a pity that this aspect is not discussed in the monograph, on the

grounds that it belongs to a subsequent research project.30 Instead, Jesuit on the Roof

of the World emphasizes the biographical aspect and is strongest in its depiction of

the missionary’s psychological complexity, carefully eschewing the genre’s tendency

to overly sympathize with the subject’s point of view. Particularly valuable is the

effort to subject Desideri’s writings to critical scrutiny as ego documents. By contrast,

Pomplun’s treatment of his analysis of Tibetan Buddhism in a chapter titled “Tibetan

Religion in Theological Perspective” remains somewhat preliminary, and the reader

is left wanting to know more about, for example, what Desideri might have read aboutBuddhism before reaching Tibet, or how his analysis differed from the views con-

cerning “Buddhist atheism” developed by Nobili and other Jesuits in South India,

let alone a comparison with the Jesuit analysis of Japanese and Chinese Buddhism.

Some conclusions are nevertheless clear, for example, that Desideri appreciated Bud-

dhist ethics and dialectics, instead targeting nontheistic metaphysics and the doctrine

of transmigration of the souls (which, of course, was perfectly familiar as a “Pythago-

rean” doctrine to all Europeans with a classical education). It is also apparent that

Desideri mainly learned about Madhyamaka philosophy, a tradition within Buddhism

that (by contrast with some Chinese and Japanese schools) is particularly skeptical

concerning the existence of intrinsic natures, and was rather dominant within the

Geluk monasteries where he studied.31 Pomplun notes, in particular, that Desideri

read the works of Nagarjuna, Bhaviveka and Aryadeva. His discussion of the Italian’s

29Padmasambhava, or “Urygen” in Desideri’s writings, introduced Tantric Buddhism into

Tibet from India in the eighth century, but his cult (particularly strong in the Nyingma school)transformed him into a prophet whose teachings were hidden and could be freshly revealed.

30See, however, the important subsequent article by Trent Pomplun, “Natural Reason and

Buddhist Philosophy: The Tibetan Studies of Ippolito Desideri,” History of Religions 50, no. 4(2011): 384–419.

31

This is the more orthodox rang tong doctrine of emptiness. By contrast, the Nyingma weremore sympathetic to the zhen tong doctrine of an ultimate pure reality, inspired by the notion of Tathagatagarbha.








theological outlook from a European perspective also makes clear the sophistication

of his theology of grace, and suggests a man more attuned to combining Aquinas’s

positive valuation of natural reason with Augustinian positions than, let us say, Fran-

cis Xavier or Matteo Ricci. This probably reflects Desideri’s awareness of the contro-versies concerning grace and free will of the previous decades, and reinforces the

impression that he was determined to stand clear of the kinds of accommodation that

the Jesuits had developed in China. But, of course, he had no need to. While Confu-

cianism might be interpreted (however controversially) as a civil moral philosophy,

no compromise with Buddhism was possible, as it was perceived as both idolatrous

and atheistic, hence inadmissible to Christians on two counts. The obvious analogies

with Christianity in other matters were therefore not a bridge to build upon but, rather,

a potential trap to be rejected.

At some points Pomplun’s synthesis feels a little premature. In particular, his dis-

cussion of Desideri’s cultural and intellectual background in relation to Hermeticismand the seventeenth-century debates about the history of gentilism is less sure than his

theological analysis. One must be careful for example, not to treat Athanasius Kircher

as a normative figure within his order (in this respect his views can be fruitfully con-

trasted to those by Pierre-Daniel Huet, with whom father Jean Bouchet, whom Desi-

deri knew in South India, had corresponded). Some of Pomplun’s arguments could

also have been presented with more clarity, both in terms of narrative (in the chapters

on the politics of Tibet, for example) and of distribution of materials (much of the sub-

ject matter concerning Desideri’s views of Tibetan religion as similar to Pythagorean-

ism in reality follows directly from his analysis of Tibetan religion, but Pomplun’s

discussion is fragmented and appears as sections of two separate chapters, one on Desi-deri’s theology and another on his rhetoric). Finally, Pomplun’s analysis of accommo-

dation could be refined. He very rightly notes that other orders practiced some forms of

accommodation and (following J. S. Cummins and other critics) rejects the identifica-

tion of the Jesuits as some sort of progressive rationalists battling against obscurantist

friars. However, he fails to elucidate that the issue was never accommodation, per se,

but rather which degree of accommodation was appropriate in each particular mission-

ary context, taking account not only of the analysis of idolatry but also of the degrees

of civilization perceived in different lands. The issue with Ricci’s method was not

whether he could use reason in religious disputes, or acquire social prestige through

his knowledge of mathematics, but rather whether one could interpret Confucian rites

as nonreligious, adopt Chinese terms to refer to God, or present Christianity without

reference to its central mysteries. Desideri’s silence about the rites controversy that

raged at the time of his mission is not the great problem that Pomplun perceives

because, as we have seen, in Tibet there was no room for compromise with Buddhist

idolatry, and his conflict with the Capuchins was entirely about jurisdiction. And yet,

Desideri’s emphasis on the need to take seriously the natural intelligence of Tibetans,

not assuming that Europeans were in any way superior, and hence on the need to

appeal to their natural reason rather than divine intervention (grace working through

human means), was distinctive of many in his order. In his particular circumstances,

this belief in the importance of rational means also helped bolster his claim in Rome

that the Jesuits were needed in Tibet. Of course, the Capuchins could not fail to beoffended by Desideri’s apology of the Jesuit presence in Lhasa through the idea that








while the Capuchins were perfectly suited to works of charity, they needed him to mas-

ter gentile religious literature and demolish Buddhism with rational arguments, as if the

Jesuit father alone could face the formidable challenge presented by the subtle debating

skills of Buddhist monks. Alas, we do not have the translations of the Capuchin Oraziodella Penna, who learned Tibetan alongside Desideri, to assess their relative merits in

interpreting Tibetan Buddhism—yet another triumph of the Jesuit archive.

The comparison of Ricci and Desideri is illuminating. Desideri appears in Pom-

plun’s book as a more passionate, less balanced man than the Stoic genius of Confu-

cian sociability and scientific conversation that was Matteo Ricci, and his theology

seems slightly more Augustinian. However, their idealism has similar roots in the

same kind of vocational spirituality. Two key differences separated them: one, the

Confucian element in Chinese culture, which could be interpreted as very different

from Buddhism, because it was possibly not religious. And yet, if we consider Ricci’s

disputes with Buddhist monks, we encounter a similar rhetoric to Desideri’s, althoughmore comparisons will be needed to fully explore this parallel. More decisive per-

haps, Desideri lived at a different time. By the time he reached Tibet, the Jesuit order

was about to be forced into full retreat, and the Catholic Church was losing the confi-

dence (once bolstered by the Council of Trent) that, through the perfect agreement of

reason and faith, it would be able to shape the destiny of Europe and, possibly, the

whole world. But although the times were changing, and their missionary contexts

were different, it was perhaps in his belief that reason and faith could not fail to rein-

force each other that Desideri would have felt closest to Ricci.

JOAN-PAU RUBI

ES ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona


Date post:	14-Apr-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	u2go4him
View:	216 times
Download:	0 times

Missionary Encounters Review

Documents