Matteo Ricci and the Chinese Rites Controversy
Evolving Perspectives
In his General Audience this past Wednesday, Pope Francis praised the sixteenth-century Italian missionary Matteo Ricci, S.J. (1552-1610) for his love for the Chinese people and his commitment to his vocation as a follower of Jesus Christ. Ricci is well-known for his use of what today we would call inculturation, the adaptation of the Gospel to different cultures. Ricci adopted the clothing and style of a Buddhist monk, and later a Confucian scholar, attempted to present the Christian Gospel in the terms of Chinese, particularly Confucian, philosophy, and even encouraged Chinese converts to continue to practice certain traditional rituals, including the veneration of ancestors.
In the decades after Ricci’s death, however, some of these practices became highly disputed, in both China and Europe, in what became known as the Chinese rites controversy. The controversy focused on two issues in particular: 1) the Chinese names used by Christians to refer to “God,” the fear being a confusion of the Christian God with “pagan” deities; and 2) the veneration of ancestors, which critics interpreted as a “superstitious” religious ritual. In 1656, Pope Alexander VII issued his support to cultural accommodation in missionary efforts in China, but in 1704, Pope Clement XI decreed that traditional Chinese terms for the divine (Tiān, or “heaven,” and Shàngdì, or “supreme emperor”) were inadequate, and that a neologism developed by missionaries should be used instead (Tiānzhǔ, “Lord of Heaven”), and that Christians were forbidden to participate in rituals venerating ancestors or Confucius. In 1939, however, Pope Pius XII reversed the latter decision, allowing Christians to participate in the veneration of ancestors or Confucius.
Pope Francis’s discourse on Ricci (whom Francis declared “venerable” last December, the first step toward sainthood) inspired me to write on the Chinese rites controversy for two reasons. The first is that Ricci has long been a hero of mine. As an undergraduate, I wrote a short paper on Ricci and the Chinese rites controversy. On a humorous note, the experience of writing this paper taught me an important scholarly lesson. I ended the paper lamenting the Catholic Church’s shortsightedness in not recognizing the value of Ricci’s approach, not realizing that Pius XII had (however belatedly) reversed Clement XI’s decree in 1939. You see, my primary source for the paper was the Catholic Encyclopedia article on Ricci, which, although comprehensive, was published in 1912! That taught me, as a young scholar, to consult a variety of sources and to be aware of publication dates! I wrote a more sophisticated paper on Ricci in graduate school, recognizing that while in many ways he seems ahead of his time, he was likewise a man of his time; the paper explored Ricci in his Renaissance and Counter-Reformation context.
The second reason is that, while doing the research for last week’s post on the development of Catholic teaching on salvation outside the Church, I found that Ilaria Morali argues that the Chinese rites controversy was one of the factors that, for a few decades in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries anyway, turned Catholic theological opinion against the more generous response to that question developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by theologians like the Dominican Domingo Soto (1494-1560) and the Jesuits Francisco Suarez (1548-1617) and Juan de Lugo (1583-1660). I decided not to bring that up in the post, because it would have required even further research on my part and because it would have taken the post too far afield. Francis’s Audience created a good occasion to revisit the topic, though.
The Second Vatican Council document Gaudium et Spes’s (1965) superb chapter on culture, the second chapter of Part II of the document, made the theme of “inculturation” central to theology, although the document itself did not use the word. In that light, until relatively recently, studies of Ricci and the Chinese rites controversy have tended to portray Ricci and later Jesuits as heroes of inculturation, recognizing the value of non-Western cultures and the need to adapt the Gospel, while casting Ricci’s Jesuit opponents and later the Dominican and Franciscan opponents of the Chinese rites as benighted villains who dismissed non-Western practices as “superstition.”
More recently, however, scholars have provided a more nuanced account of the controversy, developing a more complex perspective on the issues involved and studying the period through a post-colonial lens. For example, although the Chinese rites controversy has previously been portrayed as a theological dispute amongst Europeans, scholars have come to recognize that the controversy hinged on disagreements over the proper interpretation of Chinese sacred texts and the relationships among those texts among the Chinese themselves, disagreements that European missionaries inserted themselves into but that could not be resolved by appeals to Christian theology. There is also a greater recognition that the issues at stake evolved as the controversy progressed.
So what was the Chinese rites controversy ultimately about? For the European missionaries, the controversy was primarily over whether certain rituals and language concerning God were “superstitious,” in the sense of fundamentally incompatible with Christian belief and practice. And yet, as I already suggested, the issue is not so simple that one could pit enlightened Jesuits against intolerant Dominicans and Franciscans. At least two factors make the controversy more complicated:
A key issue in the dispute was the relationship between the texts of Confucius (c. 551-c. 479 BCE) and the religious beliefs and practices of Taoism and Buddhism. Ricci and his Jesuit followers argued that Confucius’s teachings offered a monotheistic philosophy compatible with Christianity (analogous to the best of the Greek and Roman philosophers) that had been corrupted by the practices of Taoism and Buddhism during the Neo-Confucian revival in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Jesuits’ opponents, on the other hand, argued that the reality was more complex and that traditional, “superstitious” practices were woven into Confucianism. Interestingly, Ricci’s Dominican and Franciscan critics mirrored the majority of contemporaneous Chinese scholars, who argued that these traditional practices were integral to Confucianism, whereas Ricci’s views were similar to those of a small but influential group among the Confucian scholars of the day. I’m not going to explore this issue further, not least because I am not qualified to do so (!), but Daniel Canaris provides a good overview of this issue in the article cited at the end of this post.
Perhaps the key underlying theological issue in the debate was over what we might call God’s salvific activity amongst the Chinese, which is what links this controversy with the discussion in the earlier post on salvation outside the Church. As I noted there, the Spanish Jesuits eventually developed the notion of “implicit faith,” arguing that non-Christians who had not sufficiently been exposed to the Gospel might still experience God’s grace and ultimately salvation. As Morali notes, the Spanish theologians did not go so far as to consider whether implicit faith might come, in some way, through non-Christian religious practice, or even whether such practice might in some way be preparatory for the Gospel. That was precisely the question faced by the missionaries to China, however.
Among the European missionaries to China, there were three broad perspectives on the question of God’s salvific action amongst the Chinese, although undoubtedly there were variations within the three. The first was that of Ricci himself. Ricci took an essentially Thomist perspective and argued that through the natural light of reason, at least some Chinese had come to believe in monotheism and ethical principles consistent with the natural law. He believed that Confucius was the clearest, most consistent exponent of this natural monotheism, analogous to the way certain Greek and Roman philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, had achieved a certain natural knowledge of God.
It is not clear whether Ricci considered this natural light at all salvific—recall that some of the Spanish scholastics had concluded that the natural light of reason could be considered as implicit faith in the absence of the Gospel being proclaimed, while others argued God would provide the supernatural virtue of (implicit) faith to those who followed this natural light—but he clearly believed that it could serve as preparation for the Gospel, hence his use of Confucian texts and practices as evangelization tools. Ricci also believed, however, that this natural religion had been corrupted by the polytheism of traditional Chinese religion and the “atheism” of Buddhism. Ricci’s position was adopted by many Jesuits through most of the seventeenth century; they argued, for example, that the veneration of ancestors was a “civil” ceremony that did not involve “superstitious” elements.
The Jesuits’ Dominican and Franciscan opponents, however, argued that Chinese religious practice was hopelessly corrupted by superstition, and they rejected the distinction made by Ricci between natural or rational religion and superstitious practices. As we have seen, this argument was in part based on a different understanding of the relationship amongst Chinese classic texts (and, ironically, the Dominican and Franciscan perspective reflected the majority view among Chinese scholars on that relationship). The Dominicans and Franciscans accused the Jesuits of seeing what they wanted to see in Chinese religion. But their argument also reflected a more pessimistic, “Augustinian” anthropology that viewed human religious endeavors as corrupt without the light of Christian revelation.
By the latter part of the seventeenth century, when the rites controversy became a topic of dispute in Europe and not just among the missionaries in China, the Jesuit position had shifted significantly, evolving into a perspective known as figurism. Impressed by the detailed historical records that had been kept by the Chinese for thousands of years, the Jesuit missionaries came to interpret this history in light of the historical accounts in the Bible, associating archaic characters and events in the Bible with those in Chinese history. They concluded that Chinese culture had inherited a primitive monotheism from the days of Noah, that was likewise inherited in the Jewish, Greek, Zoroastrian, hermetic, and Arabic traditions. Figurism was therefore a variation of the Renaissance concordism of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), and Agostino Steuco (1497-1548), that claimed that a perennial philosophy had been passed on through these diverse traditions (not to be confused with attempts to claim Thomism as a “perennial philosophy”!)
The Jesuit figurists believed that Christian revelation could be found figuratively in the ancient religious texts of China, particularly the I Ching, much like earlier Christians had found Christ prefigured in the Hebrew Old Testament (the shift away from Confucian texts is also significant). They argued that this primitive revelation made possible an implicit faith among the Chinese (even arguing that Christians could learn something from Chinese religiosity!), but they nevertheless believed that Christian evangelization was necessary to make clear and explicit what was only understood confusedly and in figures.
With this more nuanced account of the controversy, it is easier to see both positive and negative aspects of the Jesuits’ approach. On the one hand, it remains true that they were pioneers in the process of inculturating the Gospel and pursuing the path of interreligious dialogue. They were open to the possibility of God’s salvific will operating outside the formal bounds of Christianity while maintaining that Christ is the sole mediator of salvation. On the other hand, their approach could nevertheless be accused of being “Orientalist,” although in a subtler way than the Dominican and Franciscans’ dismissal of Chinese practice as “superstitious.” The European Jesuits took it upon themselves to judge what was “authentic” Chinese religion and what was corrupted, and the later figurists adopted an uncritical approach to cultural and religious history that was already being criticized in their own day.
Maybe this is a stretch, but perhaps in the Dominican and Franciscan missionaries, despite their mostly negative assessment of Chinese religions, we can also see a faint historical echo of contemporary theologians like Augustine DiNoia and James L. Fredericks who have cautioned against theologies that view practitioners of other religions as implicitly Christian, and instead call for respecting the particularities of other religions.
That being said, both Ricci and the Jesuit figurists, like the Spanish Jesuits described in last week’s post, were wrestling with how to make sense of God’s universal salvific will, which is a good thing! For example, the notion of a primitive revelation prefiguring Christian revelation and inherited by all the world’s major civilizations is a creative, although ultimately flawed, theory of how God’s grace could be communicated to all people.
As Morali points out, when the Chinese rites controversy was taken up in Europe, the Jesuits there were already engaged in controversy with the Jansenists, which included a debate over whether Christ died for all or only for the elect. Rightly or wrongly, these two debates became entwined. Similarly, the Jesuit position on the Chinese rites came to be linked to the moral laxism attributed to the Jesuits by their opponents and subjected to withering criticism by Blaise Pascal in his Provincial Letters (1656-57). By the turn of the eighteenth century, the Jesuit position also came to be, unfairly, associated with the emerging phenomenon of Deism, which sought out universal truths among the diverse religions while eschewing revelation. The Jesuits, therefore, came under suspicion amid warnings against “indifferentism” in religion. It was not until the nineteenth century that the crucial theological questions that had been raised by the Jesuits would return to the fore.
Sources:
Canaris, Daniel. “Mediating Humanism and Scholasticism in Longobardo’s ‘Resposta breve’ and Ricci’s Reading of Confucianism.” In Renaissance Quarterly 74 (2021): 498-527.
Giovannetti-Singh, Gianmar. “Rethinking the Rites Controversy: Kilian Stumpf's Acta Pekinensia and the Historical Dimensions of a Religious Quarrel.” In Modern Intellectual History 19 (2022): 29-53.
Lackner, Michael. “Jesuit Figurism.” In China and Europe: Images and Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Thomas H. C. Lee, 129-48. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1991.
Morali, Ilaria. “The Travail of Ideas in the Tree Centuries Preceding Vatican II (1650-1964).” In Catholic Engagement with World Religions: A Critical Study, ed. Karl J. Becker and Ilaria Morali, 91-121. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010.
Wang, Niecai. “Revelation or Reason? Two Opposing Interpretations of the Confucian Classics during the Chinese Rites Controversy.” In Frontiers of Philosophy in China 14 (2019): 284-302.
Of Interest…
Continuing the conversation on artificial intelligence, the editors at Commonweal have called for a temporary moratorium on the deployment of artificial intelligence to give society a chance to prepare for the changes that AI will potentially bring about and to develop policies on what uses will be permitted or not. This comes in response to a call from a group of tech leaders for a six-month moratorium on the development of new AI technologies. A temporary moratorium certainly wouldn’t hurt but hardly provides time to resolve the relevant issues. Instead, we need a more forceful public conversation and attempts at regulation, as opposed to falling into the mindset that technological development follows an inevitable path. Likewise, calls for a moratorium seem to be in response to the deceptively human-like capacities of large language models like ChatGPT while ignoring the more pedestrian but more common AI algorithms used for financial services, risk management, advertising, etc.
That being said, buried deep in a report on the Royal Aeronautics Society Future Combat Air & Space Capabilities Summit is an alarming report on a US Air Force experiment using an autonomous drone with kill capability, but with a human operator “in the loop,” that is, making the final decision to kill or not. The researchers found that, because the drone had been trained to identify and kill threats, if the human operator told the drone “no” after identifying a threat, it would attempt to kill the operator so that it could then pursue the threat it had identified! For reasons like this, I have called for the prohibition of lethal autonomous weapons (for example, in an essay in the T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Ethics). Noreen Herzfeld has also written on lethal autonomous weapons from a Christian perspective in the Journal of Moral Theology’s special issue on artificial intelligence published last year.
In ecumenical news, Religious News Service has an interview with National Council of Churches President Vashti McKenzie. McKenzie was recently appointed president of the NCC after serving two years as interim president.
The United States government, via National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby, has condemned the Nicaraguan government’s ongoing targeting of the Catholic Church, according to the Catholic News Agency. This statement was part of a broader warning regarding the deterioration of democratic institutions and human rights in the country.
Coming Soon…
This week I interviewed Eleonora Rai, an assistant professor of history at the University of Turin (Italy) and a research associate at KU Leuven, on her work on the sixteenth-century Flemish theologian Leonard Lessius (1554-1623) and his theology of grace and salvation. Lessius was a contemporary of other Jesuits I have recently discussed, like Francisco Suarez and Matteo Ricci, and was deeply involved in the theological debates regarding the universality of God’s grace. I had a great discussion with Dr. Rai, and the interview should be published some time next week!
Last week’s post on salvation outside the Church was a bit of a surprise—it is now the most viewed post in Window Light’s (admittedly short) history! We also gained several new subscribers in response to the article. So welcome to new readers and subscribers, and thank you to long-time readers and subscribers, as well, for helping the newsletter become a success.