The mission was plunged into mourning once more in November 1593. Having made substantial progress with Chinese in just two years and being already able to provide real support, Francesco de Petris fell seriously ill with malaria and died in the space of a few days. Ricci had become accustomed to the presence of his fellow countryman and to relying on his help, but he now found himself alone again. In sending the news to Superior General Acquaviva and Girolamo Costa, he spoke of losing a “dearly
beloved”1 brother, his “only companion and refuge in this wilderness.”2 Now aged forty-two, Ricci had been living in China for ten years and realized that time had passed quickly. On thinking back over past events, he felt only limited satisfaction with the results achieved. The “passions,” as he liked to put it, had alternated with consolations. While he considered himself fortunate to have escaped the illnesses that had befallen his brethren, he had also suffered hardship and loss and had to fight against hostility and prejudice. There were only a few dozen converts, not many by comparison with the expectations of early years. In a moment of fatigue, he had even wished for “a happy death” such as the martyrdom his companion Rodolfo Acquaviva had found in India.3
Echoes of the bitter reflections and moments of sadness to which the Jesuit gave way every so often are to be found in his letters, even though he seldom allowed his emotions to show in the reports of events he sent to his superiors and brethren. It was not customary for Jesuits to succumb to sentiment, revealing their human weaknesses and forgetting their higher mission. In any case, it can hardly have been easy to entrust one’s most private thoughts to letters written to family in the knowledge that it would take at least three years for them to reach their destination and as long to receive a reply. In the least favorable circumstances, the period of six or seven years between sending a message and receiving an answer could increase considerably, as in the exceptional case of a letter sent by Valignano from Japan in 1589 via Macao, which took seventeen years to arrive in Rome.4 As correspondence was also lost all too often in the frequent shipwrecks, the missionaries sought to increase the probability of their messages reaching their destination by sending at least two copies, one entrusted to the Portuguese carracks taking the western route from Macao via India and the other to the Spanish galleons taking the eastern route from Manila to Mexico, where it would be transported overland across the isthmus of Tehuantepec to another ship bound for Europe.
As the letters made their long journey, events and states of mind changed, and all immediacy was lost. In the saddest cases, the messages arrived when the intended recipient had already passed away. In a letter to Fabio de Fabii dated November 12, 1594, Ricci enjoined him to continue writing despite the precarious nature of their correspondence because it was such “a great consolation” to receive mail, and he confessed his own discouragement: “Many times, remembering how many long letters I have written to the dead over there, I lose the strength and will to write.” Ricci wrote to his father Giovanni Battista every year and to his brothers less frequently,5 but he seldom received a reply. In the second of the two surviving letters sent to his father from Shaozhou, he complained of having no news: “It would comfort me to know how they are and whether they are all alive.”6 This silence on the part of Ricci’s family suggests that Giovanni Battista still harbored a grudge for his son’s choice of career and his abrupt decision to leave for the missions without returning to Macerata for a last farewell. Ricci heard of the death of his grandmother Laria not from the family but from a fellow Jesuit, and spoke of this in a letter to his father,7 expressing sorrow at their separation, a distance for which he found consolation in the thought that earthly life was short and they would all soon meet again in heaven. The letter ended with this plea: “For pity’s sake, keep writing to me.”
Ricci did not fail to inform his father in his letters about the progress he had achieved in spreading the Gospel, but he also tried to introduce other subjects in the hope of interesting his father and perhaps making the remote, alien world in which his son was living feel a little closer. He told him, for example, about the Chinese products bound for Europe that he saw in transit along the river to the port of Canton. One of the most common of these products in Shaozhou, where it was collected in great amounts, was rhubarb, whose reddish bark was used in China above all to dye fabrics and whose root was in great demand in the West for the preparation of medicines, as Ricci’s father, being an apothecary, was well aware. Although the Chinese production was very abundant, the plant was considered rare and expensive on the European markets because most of the rhubarb sent from the East by land and sea was poorly preserved and deteriorated en route.
A very different subject was the Japanese invasion of Korea, China’s most faithful tributary kingdom. After the troops of the Rising Sun, led by the shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi, conquered Seoul and Pyongyang in the months of May and June 1592, the Chinese government was forced to mobilize the army and prepare for a war to expel the invaders. This obligatory decision was discussed with mounting concern because conflict would worsen the already precarious financial situation of the Chinese state, whose accounts were chronically in the red during the late Ming era.
The echoes of the fighting were, however, somewhat faint by the time they reached Shaozhou in the heart of the Guangdong province. Ricci continued his missionary work with a great deal of effort and little to show for it while awaiting the support of a new companion. This did not take long. About halfway through 1594, a few months after the death of De Petris, he was joined by a fellow Italian named Lazzaro Cattaneo from Sarzana, previously assigned to the Japan mission but then diverted to China by Valignano.
Minister Wang and the Reform of the Calendar
Cattaneo arrived with important news that was to mark a turning point for the mission. Ricci had always disliked being mistaken for a Buddhist monk, and his embarrassment only grew with the passage of time, as he informed Valignano repeatedly. His friend Qu Taisu had also made it clear to the missionaries that the robe of a bonze was not in keeping with the position they had established for themselves in Chinese society, and he suggested that they should dress in silk like the literati and introduce themselves with titles emphasizing their status as men of culture.
Cattaneo met Valignano in Macao before leaving for Shaozhou and discussed the problem with him at some length before obtaining the long awaited authorization. The missionaries were now permitted to grow their hair and beards, to wear silk garments similar to those of the shidafu on official occasions, and to present themselves as daoren, or “masters of the Way.”8
Ricci was greatly relieved. The missionaries immediately stopped shaving and cutting their hair and had new garments made with a view to adopting them in the future when a suitable opportunity arose. The decision to alter the image and title with which the missionaries presented themselves to the Chinese could not have been timelier. Now enjoying a reputation for wisdom and learning that clashed with his shabby monklike appearance, Ricci was called upon to receive ever greater numbers of visitors desiring to see his scientific instruments and demonstrations of his skill as a mathematician. Even a guan of high rank like Wang Zhongming, who had just resigned his post as minister of rites in Nanjing for reasons of health, stopped in Shaozhou on his way to his hometown on the island of Hainan in order to meet Xitai, Li Madou, of whom he had heard a great deal. Nanjing in the Jiangsu province was the second city in China after Beijing. Its name means “capital of the South,” and it had in fact been the capital of the empire for five dynasties and during the reign of the first two Ming emperors. The city enjoyed the privilege of retaining the same government structure as Beijing and hosted six ministries (of rites, punishments, finance, war, public works, and personnel) identical in name to those in the capital. The ministers were considered very important dignitaries, albeit of less political influence than their colleagues in Beijing.
Wang spent an entire day in conversation with the Jes
uit and was greatly impressed by his mathematical and astronomical knowledge. According to Ricci’s own account, the minister even suggested the possibility of his help being requested in the reform of the Chinese calendar,9 explaining that the system had been in need of radical correction for a long time but the decision to commence was constantly postponed because the imperial astronomers were not capable of performing the task. The Chinese calendar was of the lunisolar type, and the year was divided into twelve months each roughly corresponding to a lunation, the period of a complete revolution of the moon around the earth. There was also a further division of the year into twenty-four solar periods of approximately a fortnight, each of which was divided in turn into three periods of five or six days. The beginning of spring, for example, was spread over the three periods named “the wind melts the ice,” “the animals awaken from hibernation,” and “the fish swims beneath the ice,” short descriptions of the phenomena of nature in that part of the season.
As the period formed by the twelve lunar months did not coincide exactly with the solar year, it was necessary to include an entire intercalary thirteenth month every so often. The Chinese calendar still in use had been drawn up by the astronomer Guo Shoujing for the emperor Kublai Khan in 1281 during the Yuan era and had been adopted with the name of Datong but no substantial modification by the subsequent Ming dynasty. Albeit very advanced for the period in which it was conceived, it had become obsolete due to lack of revision and was now out of step with the seasons and was imprecise in the prediction of astronomical phenomena like eclipses.
When the time came to set off again, the minister had Ricci accompany him to his junk and kept him on board talking until late in the night, probably with further reference to the problem of the calendar. The Jesuit was aware of the difficulties to be encountered in devising a perpetual calendar system and remembered what he had learned at the Roman College from Christopher Clavius, one of the creators of the Gregorian calendar. Ricci unquestionably realized that the reform of the Chinese calendar could offer the Jesuits an extraordinary opportunity, and it was probably then that he began to make plans to have brethren sent to China who were more expert than he was in the complex astronomical calculations required to correct the system.10 He was in fact becoming convinced that success would confer immense prestige on the missionaries at the imperial court and would pave the way for the work of spreading the Gospel. Hope may have been kindled in Ricci’s breast that night, but he could scarcely have imagined how many years would have to pass and how many trials and tribulations the Jesuits would have to go through before one of their order was finally appointed with imperial approval to reform the Chinese calendar.11
Confucius, “Another Seneca”:
The Translation of the Confucian Classics
In accordance with Valignano’s recommendations, Ricci never ceased studying Mandarin and reading works of history and philosophy in an effort to understand the culture of the Confucian literati. Only if he succeeded in sharing the knowledge of the shidafu would he be able to converse with them on an equal footing, present the Christian doctrine with real authority, and find the best arguments to convince them of the validity of his religious message. Deeper study of Chinese philosophy was also prompted by plans to write a new catechism to replace the one published in Zhaoqing on the basis of Michele Ruggieri’s text, which Valignano found unsatisfactory because it had been prepared without an adequate understanding of Confucianism.
Ricci devoted himself from 1591, if not earlier, to the study of the most important canonical works that Chinese scholars were required to know perfectly in order to pass the imperial examinations. In addition to the Analects of Confucius, the Four Books of Confucianism traditionally comprised the Doctrine of the Mean and the Great Learning, works devoted to the rules governing the society in the master’s day, and the Mencius, an exposition of the thought of the philosopher of that name,12 who lived two centuries after Confucius and is considered his most important heir.13 They did not contain a systematic exposition of a developed body of doctrine but rather provided precepts for correct moral and social conduct and recommendations for sound government.
The Jesuit began to study them together with Almeida and continued with De Petris in the conviction that the knotty texts would be a good way for his companions to improve their knowledge of classical Chinese. After their deaths, he went on alone and decided in accordance with Valignano’s wishes to translate the four Chinese works into Latin in order to acquaint the brethren in Europe with the thinking of the Middle Kingdom’s greatest philosopher. Michele Ruggieri had embarked on a similar project but had been dissuaded from continuing by Valignano, who regarded his grasp of Chinese as inadequate for the task and preferred to wait for Ricci to carry it out.14
The assignment was most demanding, and Ricci thought the help of a “very learned” master indispensable. He accordingly resumed lessons in classical Chinese, becoming a pupil again at the age of over forty, as he wrote to Claudio Acquaviva on December 10, 1593 (“I am going to become a schoolboy in my old age”),15 confirming that he had been at work on the difficult translation for at least a year.
Ricci completed his task at the end of 1594 by producing the first Latin paraphrase of the Confucian works accompanied by numerous comments. During the years of the mission’s activity, the manuscript was used for study by Jesuits arriving in China and served as a text of reference for the compilation of the celebrated Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, the first complete presentation of the life and work of Confucius in the West, published in Paris in 1687 by a group of Jesuits under the supervision of Philippe Couplet from the Spanish Netherlands.16
The Four Books of Confucianism aroused the same interest in Ricci as the Greek and Latin works studied at the Roman College, and he found remarkable similarities between Confucian morality and the principles of Western ethics, as well as a particular affinity between the Chinese philosophy and Stoicism. He described them in a letter to Superior General Acquaviva as “sound moral documents”17 and Confucius as “another Seneca,” appreciating him as he had the great classical thinkers of the West: “In his sound way of living in harmony with nature, he is not inferior to our ancient philosophers and indeed superior to many.”18 Ricci was unquestionably struck by the fact that Confucianism identified man’s primary duty as the practice of two fundamental virtues, namely rectitude and benevolence or humanity, ren in Chinese, and encouraged citizens to cultivate solidarity, respect, courtesy, and trust. Moreover, the Chinese philosophy saw the family as the basis of society and the state as a great family, the emperor being described as the “mother and father” of his subjects. According to Confucius, the foundations of society were the five key relations between ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder and younger brother, and friends.
Another cornerstone of Confucian philosophy that Ricci could not fail to appreciate as a humanist was veneration for the past and the most ancient traditions. To quote one of the master’s best-known dicta, “Following the proper way, I do not forge new paths; with confidence I cherish the ancients.”19 In developing his studies, the Jesuit was pleasantly surprised to note that some of the Chinese master’s pithy utterances bore obvious similarities to sayings of Western classicism now part of the legacy of European culture. The Confucian view of the virtue of the just and constant mean as the supreme requirement20 recalled Aristotle’s view of virtue lying at the mean in the Nicomachean Ethics, just as the Chinese injunction not to impose on others what you do not wish for yourself21 is echoed in the well-known principle enunciated in the New Testament.
Ricci knew that the Confucian philosophy had been reworked over the centuries and was studied during the Ming era in the interpretation developed in the eleventh century by Zhu Xi, a member of the school known in the West in modern terms as Neo-Confucianism. Zhu Xi inserted the great master’s teaching into a more organic and complex philosophical system that took up elements of the Bud
dhist and Taoist doctrines in a highly demanding work of synthesis that has given rise to comparisons with Aquinas. His interpretation had become established dogma over the centuries, and no scholar failing to embrace Neo-Confucianism completely could ever pass the state examinations in the Ming era. Ricci did not accept Zhu Xi’s version, not least because of his discovery that ancient Confucianism spoke of Shangdi, the “Lord on High,” a sacral figure he regarded as possessing the same characteristics as the Christian god, whereas Zhu Xi referred rather to a supreme culmination or principle, taiji, the origin and foundation of all things, a concept far removed from the idea of a personal god. On reading the Confucian classics, Ricci formed the conviction that the catechism he had already begun to draft22 would be able to show Chinese scholars that Christian thinking and morality were perfectly compatible with ancient Confucianism before its Neo-Confucian reinterpretation. There would, however, be time for lengthy reflection on all these matters, as the Jesuit was determined that the writing of his religious text would take just as long as was necessary to ensure that it was an important and lasting work.
The study and translation of the Four Books enabled Ricci to take a further step toward integration into Chinese society. He now enjoyed the admiration of literati, as they had never known of a “barbarian” capable of quoting Confucius and discussing philosophy and ethics like a candidate for the imperial examinations. Li Madou, as his friends observed, was turning into a shidafu.
Despite the social and cultural successes, little progress was made in spreading the Gospel, and Ricci, for all his patience, began to feel some alarm. He had already expressed his concern to Acquaviva two years earlier—“so much time and so little fruit”23—and the situation had not improved, as shown by the total of just under forty converts in the space of nearly four years. It was now clear that the decision to remain in Shaozhou had proved unfruitful, not least because the persistent hostility of a section of the population toward the Jesuits, along with the widespread malaria, gave rise to constant concern. In his role from afar as supervisor of the China mission, Valignano suggested to Ricci that given this state of affairs, he and his companions should try to move to a less hostile province with a healthier climate as soon as possible. The opportunity to do so presented itself far sooner than expected.
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