INTRODUCTION
Historians of the Jesuit missions have largely assumed that the exegetical tools employed by the Jesuits in their reading of Confucianism represented an unproblematic symbiosis of humanist and Scholastic culture.Footnote 1 This view has been recently voiced by R. T. Pomplun, who claims that “the opposition between humanism and Scholasticism collapsed further with the broadening of the philological, grammatical, and historical knowledge of Asian languages in European universities.”Footnote 2 Pomplun demonstrates this point by examining how Jesuits used their study of Oriental languages, which he identifies as a humanist activity, to deliver Scholastic arguments for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. Pomplun finds support for this symbiosis in Kristeller's view of Renaissance humanism as an outgrowth of medieval Scholasticism.Footnote 3
All Jesuits were undeniably conversant with humanism and Scholastic philosophy thanks to the formation they received under the ratio studiorum, which covered both intellectual cultures; however, it does not follow that this marriage was always harmonious. This study seeks to explore tensions between humanist and Scholastic approaches to Chinese religion by examining the “Resposta breve sobre as controversias do Xám tý, tien xîn, lîm hoên” (Brief response on the controversies of Shangdi, tianshen, linghun, ca. 1623–24) by Niccolò Longobardo (1559–1654), who succeeded Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) as superior of the Jesuit China mission.Footnote 4 In this work, Longobardo delivered his scathing critique of Ricci's use of indigenous Chinese vocabulary to express the Christian concept of God (Shangdi 上帝), angels (tianshen 天神), and the soul (linghun 靈魂). Scholarship on Longobardo's treatise has expanded in recent years, but most researchers have been concerned with its illustrious afterlife. In fact, studies rarely refer to Longobardo's original Portuguese text, instead citing the translations in French, Spanish, and English that came later.Footnote 5 In addition to occasional slips in translation and the intrusion of the translators’ editorial voices, these versions redact Longobardo's patristic and Scholastic citations and do not include the original Chinese text discussed and paraphrased by Longobardo. Hence, they offer a limited view of the exegetical and methodological grounds upon which Longobardo came to reject Ricci's position.Footnote 6 Overall, as Kim notes, the intellectual context in which Longobardo came to oppose Ricci's accommodation of Confucianism remains poorly understood, especially in comparison to the wealth of studies on Ricci and the Rites Controversy at the turn of the eighteenth century.Footnote 7
This article proposes that the tensions between the missionary approaches of Longobardo and Ricci are due to contrasting approaches to textual criticism that can ultimately be traced to the humanist-Scholastic debate.Footnote 8 Ultimately, it reveals that the vision of the Renaissance that Ricci and Longobardo transmitted to China was far from homogenous or monolithic—indeed, it was fractious and contested. Although Longobardo utilized classic Scholastic arguments to challenge some of the humanist exegetical commitments advanced by Ricci, it is not the case that Ricci and Longobardo represent binaries, as both seamlessly embedded Scholastic and humanist propositions into their arguments. Rather, Longobardo's Scholastic critique of Ricci is best seen as a reflection of how a different emphasis on common assumptions can lead to drastically different strategies for interpreting Chinese culture.
BACKGROUND TO LONGOBARDO'S “RESPOSTA BREVE”
Ricci's passing, in 1610, was an ironic high-water mark for the early Jesuit missionaries in China. Having established social networks with the upper echelons of Chinese society, Ricci was afforded by the Wan Li 萬曆 Emperor the unprecedented privilege of receiving burial in China despite his foreign status. Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628), in his Latin edition of Ricci's diaries, which achieved great popularity in seventeenth-century Europe, triumphally compared Ricci's death to that of Samson, because “God granted him more power in death than he had exercised while living on earth.”Footnote 9
Yet soon after his death, the missionary methods with which he achieved such success would be challenged from within the Jesuit order. While the Chinese mission basked in the glow of apparent imperial sanction, the Japanese mission began to collapse under fierce persecution. Many of the missionaries working in Japan found refuge in Macau, and, at a loss for ways to exercise their apostolic zeal, they turned their attention to the mission in China. Both the Chinese and Japanese missions implemented the policy of cultural accommodation that had been elaborated by the Jesuit Visitor overseeing the Jesuit missions in the East, Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606). Ricci's methods in China not only made regular recourse to indigenous vocabulary, such as Shangdi for God, but also attempted to demonstrate the metaphysical compatibility of Christianity with Confucianism by presenting Christianity as the fulfillment of the original philosophy of Confucius, which had been lost and corrupted in Song-dynasty neo-Confucian commentaries.Footnote 10 The missionaries in Japan, however, had been scarred by Francis Xavier's (1506–52) unfortunate use of the Buddhist Sun deity Dainichi 大日 to translate God and were thus reluctant to employ indigenous analogues for expressing Christian theological concepts, such as God, angels, and the soul, instead preferring phonetic transliterations into Japanese.
According to Niccolò Longobardo, Ricci's successor as superior of the Jesuit China mission, the Visitor of Japan Francesco Pasio (1554–1612), who, together with Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607), had in fact preceded Ricci in obtaining permission to settle in Zhaoqing, in 1582,Footnote 11 initiated the polemics over Ricci's missionary strategy. On 24 September 1611, Pasio wrote to Longobardo expressing his concern about “some Chinese books written by our fathers over there [in China] [that] agree with the errors of the pagans” and implored Longobardo to conduct a thorough theological examination of these books.Footnote 12 Longobardo found that his confrere Sabatino de Ursis (1575–1620) shared his doubts about the equivalence between Shangdi and the Christian God. Xu Guangqi 徐光啓 (1562–1633), Yang Tingyun 楊廷荺 (1557?–1627), and Li Zhizao 李之藻 (1565–1630), collectively known as the Three Pillars of Chinese Catholicism, were called upon to give testimony, but De Ursis and Longobardo found unconvincing their entreaty to disregard the discrepancies between Confucian texts and commentaries and to focus on the texts that agree with Christian teaching.
The controversy intensified with the arrival of Fr. João Rodrigues (1561/62–1633/34), known as Tçuzu (The Interpreter), in recognition of his native-level fluency in the Japanese language.Footnote 13 Rodrigues expressed his misgivings on the matter in a letter to Fr. Valentim Carvalho (1559–1630), provincial of the Japanese and Chinese provinces from 1611 to 1617,Footnote 14 who ordered a “thorough examination of the term Shangdi.”Footnote 15 Francisco Viera, Visitor from 1613 to 1619,Footnote 16 renewed Carvalho's instruction. Having noted that there were dissenting views on the subject matter, Viera ordered the missionaries to examine methodically whether correspondences to the Christian concept of God, the angels, and the rational soul could be found in China's religious traditions. Frs. Diego Pantoja and Alfonso Vagnone wrote in favor of Ricci's methods, whereas Frs. Sabatino de Urbis and João Rodrigues wrote against them.Footnote 17 In 1617, Longobardo submitted his conclusions to Viera in the “Res Memorabiles pro Dirigenda Re Christiana” (Memorable things for directing the Christian mission), but in 1621 the Visitor Jerónimo Rodrigues (Visitor 1619–21 and 1622–26) decided in favor of Ricci at a conference in Macau.Footnote 18
The implacable Longobardo, however, did not let the matter settle, replying around 1623 with his “Resposta breve.” The “Resposta breve” draws extensively on Scholastic and patristic sources, humanist texts, the Confucian classics, the Ming-dynasty encyclopedia Xingli daquan 性理大全 (Summa of natural philosophy), and the testimony of Chinese literati to demonstrate the incoherence of Ricci's position. The appearance of the “Resposta breve” only added further fuel to the fire, provoking a number of counter-replies until the Visitor André Palmeiro (Visitor 1626–35) convoked a conference at Jiading, near Shanghai, from December 1627 to January 1628.Footnote 19 The conference followed Longobardo in forbidding the use of Shangdi in the Chinese mission, but Longobardo did not succeed in convincing his confreres to reject Confucianism as the main vehicle for expressing Christianity. Even after the conference, missionaries continued to argue for the Riccian position, which eventually became the semi-official position of the Jesuit order.
Longobardo's treatise was not intended for dissemination, but the French Jesuit Jean Valat (1614?–1696), who was sympathetic to Longobardo's position, found parts of the treatise in the Jesuit archives of Beijing and handed them to the Franciscan friar Antonio Caballero de Santa Maria (1602–69), one of the Jesuits’ fiercest adversaries in the Rites Controversy. In 1661, Caballero translated Longobardo's treatise into Latin as the “Responsio Brevis.”Footnote 20 During the Guangzhou conference, from 1667 to 1668, Antonio Caballero de Santa Maria gave a copy of Longobardo's treatise to the Dominican friar Domingo Fernandez Navarrete (1618–89). Navarrete absconded from Guangzhou on 9 December 1668 and translated the treatise into Spanish for inclusion in his Tratados históricos, politicos, ethicos, y religiosos de la monarchia de China (Historical, political, ethical, and religious treatises concerning the monarchy of China, 1676).Footnote 21 Through this work, which was widely disseminated despite Jesuit attempts to suppress it,Footnote 22 the European republic of letters was introduced to Longobardo's treatise. Subsequent translations into French and English at the beginning of eighteenth century, when the Rites and Terms Controversies reached their peak, provided powerful ammunition for the Jesuits’ opponents, as it became apparent that many of the reservations nursed by the Jansenists and friars had in fact been shared by none other than Ricci's hand-picked superior.Footnote 23 Longobardo's treatise continued to be influential well into the early eighteenth century, used as a source for information about neo-Confucianism by Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).Footnote 24
CHALLENGING TEXTUAL AUTHORITY: THE HUMANISM OF MATTEO RICCI
The chief contention of this article is that Longobardo's polemic against Ricci's accommodation should be viewed not merely in theological terms but also as a continuation and reapplication of contemporary European debates over humanist exegesis within a Chinese context. Whereas Ricci and Longobardo were undoubtedly in agreement on the evils of pagan idolatry and in their assessment of neo-Confucianism, they diverged on how to reconcile discrepancies between ancient sources and medieval commentaries and on how much weight to afford later interpreters as guides for interpreting the past. At the heart of this debate was the question of whether textual critics could arrogate to themselves the authority to override tradition and establish a direct relationship with the past. This debate has often been referred to as the humanist-Scholastic debate, which, inaugurated by Petrarch in the fourteenth century with De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia (On his own ignorance and that of many others, 1368), progressed unabated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as humanists such as Lorenzo Valla (1406–57) and Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536) applied their philological expertise to the criticism of the textus receptus of the Bible, enraging Scholastic theologians who appealed to the authority of tradition and the medieval commentators.Footnote 25
In a study entitled Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany, Overfield already cautioned against simplistic dualisms in juxtaposing humanists and Scholastics, considering the significant crossover between these two categories of intellectuals.Footnote 26 In the case of the Jesuits, a categoric dichotomy seems even more inappropriate. While the Jesuits followed the schools in extolling Saint Thomas Aquinas as their master in theology and Aristotle in philosophy, the Jesuit constitutions and the ratio studiorum also placed classical rhetoric at the foundation of curriculum.Footnote 27 Before studying philosophy and theology, Jesuits were expected to master Latin prose and verse by reading extensively in the classics and by emulating the best classical models. However, as Rummel playfully quips, “if humanist and Scholastic purists did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them for structural purposes.”Footnote 28 The debates of humanist philologists with Scholastic theologians were not a fancy of intellectual historians, but serious in their implications, even if the intellectual allegiances of the participants could not always be clearly defined.
Although Ricci's humanism is a commonplace in scholarship on the Jesuit China mission, Kim has argued strenuously that Ricci's Thomism was far more influential on his missionary background than his humanism. Kim's study acknowledges that humanism influenced Ricci's “benign attitudes” toward pagan culture, infused in works such as the Jiaoyou lun 交友論 (On friendship, 1595) and the Ershiwu yan 二十五言 (Twenty-five sayings, 1600), which wed Stoic models such as Cicero and Epictetus to Confucian ethics.Footnote 29 But Kim follows Kristeller and Grendler in stressing the intellectual continuities between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, claiming that there was nothing inherently humanist about the citation of pagan authors, because this was a common practice in medieval Scholasticism.Footnote 30 However, the distinction between humanist and Scholastic approaches to classical antiquity does not consist in the mere usage of pagan authors, whom Christian theologians had cited without interruption since patristic times, but in the opposing tools of textual criticism that were used by medieval and Renaissance authors to interpret such texts. In this respect, Ricci's exegetical presuppositions are profoundly humanist: he unpacks Confucianism with the same tools that Renaissance authors used to unpack antiquity. He has little respect for received tradition and has great confidence in his own interpretative ability to uncover the authentic meaning of the classics.
Kim also confusingly conflates the arguments that Ricci gives to prove the existence of God and to dispute neo-Confucian metaphysics in the Tianzhu shiyi 天主實義 (The true meaning of the Lord of Heaven, 1603) with Ricci's identification of God with Shangdi:Footnote 31 while the former are undoubtedly a translation into Chinese of Thomistic argumentation, the latter depends on philological principles that are largely alien to the spirit of medieval Scholasticism. Crucially, however, it must be considered that the mere translation of Scholastic arguments into Chinese is neither innovative nor controversial. The crux of the controversies over Ricci's missionary strategy revolved around the identification of God with Shangdi, which strongly suggests that at its roots the Terms Controversy was not theological but philological, and was thus deeply invested in continuing debates over humanist exegetical practices.
Ricci never systematically outlines his methodology for interpreting the Chinese classics, but its contours can be reconstructed from his copious writings. The first extant letter of Ricci's that discusses the Four Books is to Claudio Acquaviva, dated 10 December 1593, from Shaozhou, in which he compares the Four Books to “another Seneca or another of our authors who are most famous among the gentiles.”Footnote 32 Here, Ricci expresses his admiration for the moral contents of these works, by “four very good philosophers,” and informs the superior general that he had been tasked by Valignano to translate them into Latin “to assist with the preparation of a new catechism.”Footnote 33 While writing again to Acquaviva from Nanchang on 4 November 1595, he relates in passing his practice of citing passages from the ancient Chinese classics that “were favorable to the teachings of the Christian faith, such as the unity of God, the immortality of the soul, and the glory of the blessed.”Footnote 34
In his letter to Pasio dated 15 February 1609, Ricci moves beyond the view that the Chinese classics are merely amenable to a Christian reading, strongly affirming the superiority of the ancient Chinese in their worship and observance of the natural law in comparison to other pagan peoples. In light of their adherence to the dictates of natural reason, Ricci expressed his hope that the ancient Chinese could find salvation.Footnote 35 Echoes of this letter can be found in Ricci's memoirs, which were being composed around the same time but with an important difference that has been largely ignored by scholarship: whereas in his letter to Pasio he places the ancient Chinese worship of heaven and earth before the Lord of Heaven and implies that these are distinct divinities, in his memoirs he positions the Lord of Heaven as the primary object of ancient Chinese worship and suggests that Tian Di 天地 (Heaven and Earth) was but an alternative name for the Lord of Heaven. Ricci's grounds for this assimilation are explained in the Tianzhu shiyi, where Ricci cites a passage from Zhongyong 中庸 (Doctrine of the mean): “The ceremonies of sacrifices to heaven [jiao 郊] and earth [she 社] are meant for the service of the Sovereign on High [Shangdi 上帝].” In his commentary on the passage (Zhongyong zhangju 中庸章句), the Song-dynasty commentator Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) explains that “earth” is not repeated for the sake of “brevity” (shengwen 省文). Ricci corrects Zhu Xi by claiming that the failure to repeat “earth” was because Confucius actually believed these two entities were one, not two.Footnote 36 This eliminates the theologically problematic insinuation that the ancient Chinese worshipped heaven and earth but introduces additional questions, such as how a transcendent God could be identified with both heaven and earth. Hence, Ricci proposes that the ancient Chinese conception of God was pantheistic or animistic, in that heaven and earth served as the living body (corpo vivo) of the supreme divinity (suppremo nume):
Of all the pagan peoples that our Europe has come to know of, I do not know of any that had fewer errors in matters of religion than China in its earliest antiquity. For this reason, I find in their books that they always adored a supreme divinity, which they call King of Heaven [Shangdi], or Heaven and Earth [Tian Di], perhaps because they thought that heaven and earth were one animate thing, and that they made a living body together with the supreme divinity as its soul. They also venerated various tutelary spirits of the mountains, rivers, and the four parts of the world. In all their works, they always paid much attention to following the dictate of reason, which they said to have received from heaven; they never believed of the King of Heaven and all their other spirits and ministers such indecent things as our Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, and other foreign nations believed. Hence we can hope from the immense goodness of the Lord that many of these ancient [Chinese] were saved in the natural law, with that particular help that God is accustomed to extend to those who do everything they can to receive it.Footnote 37
The claims that Ricci makes about primitive Chinese theology might have suggested to his seventeenth-century reader echoes of the prisca theologia, or ancient theology, which had been popularized by Marsilio Ficino and which acquired a significant following in Counter-Reformation Catholicism under the guise of the philosophia perennis of Agostino Steuco. While later Jesuits, such as Martini, Couplet, and Bouvet, certainly made such a connection,Footnote 38 Ricci leaves the origin of Chinese monotheism perplexingly ambiguous. The prisca theologia is usually accompanied by a diffusionist account that traces the transmission of monotheistic doctrines among the gentiles back to conduits such as the Chaldeans or Egyptians, who were perceived as being the purest pagan recipients of ancient wisdom because of their temporal and spatial proximity to the Hebrews or antediluvian patriarchs.Footnote 39 However, Ricci's exaltation of primitive Chinese theology is a deprecation of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and is thus a striking contrast to the transmission theories of the prisca theologia. In the passage above, Ricci only attributes the origin of Chinese natural theology to “the dictate of natural reason” (“il dettame della ragione”), though he never explains what rational processes the Chinese underwent to arrive at such an understanding. Indeed, in another place, Ricci expresses a low view of Chinese dialectic, suggesting that ancient Chinese philosophy amounted to nothing more than confused moral maxims: “The science of which they had greater knowledge was moral. But since they did not know any dialectic, they say and write everything not in a scientific way but confusedly, by means of maxims and discourses, following everything that they could understand with the light of natural [reason]. The greatest philosopher among them is Confucius, who was born 550 years before the coming of the Lord into the world, and he lived a very good life for more than seventy years, teaching this nation with words, deeds, and writings.”Footnote 40
Conversely, Kim sees Ricci's belief in “the purity of the Chinese natural lights” as a Thomistic appeal to the purity of prelapsarian natural reason. According to Kim's reading, just as human reason was corrupted by the Fall, so Chinese natural reason had been “‘corrupted’ first by ‘atheistic’ Buddhism and ‘pantheistic’ Taoism, and later by Sung Neo-Confucianism, which syncretized the monotheistic purity with the religious corruption of Buddhism and Taoism.”Footnote 41 However, this reading is also unsatisfactory because Ricci makes no claim that primitive Chinese theology was representative of prelapsarian reason. In fact, as the above passage makes clear, the Chinese reasoning was highly imperfect, and their animistic concept of God diverged from the original revelation infused into Adam by God. Ricci's claim is merely that the ancient Chinese were purer than other gentile civilizations, not that they embodied purity per se.
Ricci was well aware that his interpretation of the Chinese classics could not be supported with reference to contemporary readings. In a letter of 13 October 1596, Ricci laments that China lacks any knowledge of God whatsoever, comparing the three sects of contemporary China to the three-headed Lernaean Hydra, each head spawning another three when cut off.Footnote 42 In his memoirs, he makes abundantly clear that the atheist literati of his day do not share his reading of the Confucian classics and that their most common view, which perceives everything as one substance, was introduced during the Song dynasty under the influence of the idolaters.Footnote 43 But here and elsewhere he conceals that the neo-Confucian interpretation was not just the most common but also the orthodoxy mandated by the government in the imperial examination system (keju 科舉). In fact, in one place he makes the remarkable claim that the “true literati” (“veri letterati”) do not speak about the creation of the world or its beginning, because “some of little authority take for granted extremely frivolous and ill-founded judgements, but they are given little attention.”Footnote 44
In his Western-language writings Ricci only occasionally mentions the Song-dynasty commentaries and hardly explains their status in relation to the Confucian classics.Footnote 45 Nevertheless, a hint of Ricci's disdain for the commentaries can be found in a letter of 9 September 1597 to Lelio Passionei, where he stresses that the Four Books were books of morals, composed during the time of Plato and Aristotle, consisting of aphorisms (sententie buone) that were not structured according to a scientific method (scientia). The books themselves, he confesses, are comparable in size to the letters of Cicero, “but the commentaries and glosses, and commentaries of commentaries and other expositions and discourses on them are already endless.”Footnote 46 Ricci does not reveal to Passionei that the commentaries conflict with his monotheistic reading of the classics, but his description of them as endless self-referential verbiage is far from flattering, inviting a comparison to critiques of Scholastic verbositas made by successive generations of humanists such as Petrarch and Valla. It is only in the Tianzhu shiyi that Ricci expressly articulates the philological premises of his rejection of neo-Confucianism:
The teaching handed down from the sages was geared to what people were capable of accepting; thus, there are many teachings, which, though handed down for generations, are incomplete. Then there are teachings that were given direct to students and were not recorded in books, or, if recorded, were subsequently lost. There is also the possibility that later, perverse historians removed parts of these records because they did not believe in their historical veracity. Moreover, written records are frequently subject to alteration, and one cannot say that because there is no written record certain things did not happen. Confucians today constantly misinterpret the writings of antiquity, and this is inexplicable. Since they put greater emphasis on style than on meaning, today's morality has declined despite the flourishing of today's scholarship.Footnote 47
The centerpiece of Ricci's philological identification of Shangdi with the Christian God is found in the second chapter of the Tianzhu shiyi, where Ricci rebuts the errors of the “three sects” of China—Buddhism, Taoism, and neo-Confucianism. At the beginning of the chapter, Ricci seemingly sides with the neo-Confucians, criticizing the void (kong 空) of Buddhism and nothingness (wu 無) of Daoism and arguing that the Confucian concept of existence (you 有) and their striving for self-cultivation on the basis of sincerity (cheng 誠) serve as more acceptable principles.Footnote 48 Ricci wields the Scholastic principle of “ex nihilo nihil fieri” (“nothing comes from nothing”) to demonstrate the absurdity of the metaphysical presuppositions held by Buddhism and Daoism.Footnote 49 But in the latter part of the chapter, Ricci reveals his fundamental opposition to the neo-Confucian concept of taiji 太極, or the Supreme Ultimate. There are two fundamental grounds to his opposition. First, the ancients revered Shangdi, the sovereign of heaven and earth, not the Supreme Ultimate.Footnote 50 Second, according to Ricci's Scholastic reasoning, the concept of taiji is logically absurd and no different from the wu and kong.
It is not this latter ground that establishes the concordance between the Christian God and Shangdi but, rather, the former, and Ricci's arguments are derived from the principles of humanist textual criticism. Ricci sifts through eleven citations of Shangdi in the Shijing 詩經 (Book of odes), Liji 禮記 (Book of rites), Shujing 書經 (Book of documents), and Zhongyong 中庸 (Doctrine of the mean) and demonstrates that the immanentist identification of Shangdi with the material heaven (tian 天) and principle (li 理) is an anachronistic imposition that betrays the internal logic of these ancient texts. For instance, since in the Yijing 易經 (Book of changes) it is stated that “the Sovereign [Lord] emerges from Zhen in the east,” it would be absurd to identify this “sovereign” with the material heaven because “the blue sky embraces the eight directions” and, thus, cannot come from one direction alone.Footnote 51 It is on these grounds that Ricci asserts that Tianzhu and Shangdi are one and the same except in name.Footnote 52
Ricci's philological reasoning was rather simplistic and was undoubtedly limited by his superficial understanding of neo-Confucianism. In fact, his understanding of the Four Books and Five Classics is quite limited, and he tends to isolate terms from their context. Although he rightly points to the ancient belief in Shangdi during the Zhou 周 dynasty, this element was seemingly marginal, or at least was not retained, during the Han 漢 dynasty. Hence, the centrality that Ricci gives to Shangdi is philologically questionable.
Nonetheless, Ricci betrays a strong historical consciousness, distinguishing between linguistic and conceptual forms that he attributes to later periods of Chinese philosophy from the teaching of the ancients. For Ricci, not only are terms such as taiji essentially absent from the writings of earliest antiquity, but the neo-Confucian identification of an immanentist taiji with Shangdi contradicts the plain reading of the texts. Such concerns were alien to most medieval Scholastics, who did not care much for philological accuracy or the historical context of ancient texts. As Grafton argues, while medieval Scholastics undoubtedly cited classical texts, “they did so in forms that their own creators would have found hard to recognize.”Footnote 53 Their primary concern was the utility of these ancient texts for exploring philosophic views. A similar lack of “historical grounding” can be observed in Song-dynasty classical exegesis, which employed a “philosophical hermeneutics” in its interpretation of the classics that assumed “a metaphysical order in which the text is embedded, and to which the interpreter possesses privileged access.”Footnote 54 While humanists differed in their understandings of the purpose and methods of classical scholarship, they had an acute awareness of the historical chasm separating the world of the ancients from their own day, and they privileged philology as a bridge.Footnote 55 Ricci's application of philological analysis to discredit the dominant Song dynasty cannot be divorced from his humanist leanings, even if these humanist textual practices mirrored late Ming critiques of Song symbolic and allegorical approaches to the classics that would later find fuller development in the kaozheng 考證 textual criticism of the Qing.Footnote 56
LONGOBARDO'S CRITIQUE OF RICCI'S INTERPRETATIVE PRACTICES
It must be reaffirmed that Ricci and Longobardo, despite their differences, share many conceptual and interpretative assumptions. Strikingly, the Greco-Roman echoes found in Ricci's writings are developed more explicitly and systematically in Longobardo's treatise. But whereas Ricci only vaguely articulates the relative purity of ancient Confucianism, Longobardo draws on an alternative tradition of the prisca theologia that saw the transmission of pagan knowledge as an act of diabolical deception. Such a view found sanction in Augustine's ambiguous treatment of figures such as Hermes Trismegistus, who, despite accurately foretelling the decline of idolatry, was said to have been inspired by a “fallacious spirit.”Footnote 57 Longobardo identifies Fuxi 伏羲, the legendary creator of humanity and first sovereign of China, with Zoroaster, who, after initiating the heretical sects in the West, came to China, where he established a new kingdom and the Confucian literati. Longobardo refers the reader to the abovementioned report of Rodrigues for a more extensive treatment of the topic.Footnote 58 Should Rodrigues's thesis that Confucianism had an ultimately diabolical origin be accepted, it would go without saying that the entire edifice of Ricci's accommodation would be compromised.
Longobardo's tracing back of Confucianism to diabolical deception drew upon Counter-Reformation trends. Although in the early sixteenth century Ficino's ideas had been popularized by Agostino Steuco in De Perenni Philosophia (On the perennial philosophy, 1540), by the end of the century there was a reaction against them among many Counter-Reformation theologians in Rome.Footnote 59 For instance, Ficino's blending of pagan and Christian sources was vociferously condemned by Giovan Battista Crispo in De Ethnicis Philosophis Caute Legendis (On the need for caution when reading pagan philosophers, 1594). Crispo claimed to have been supported in his caution against excessive accommodation to paganism by none other than Francisco de Toledo (1532–96), Roberto Bellarmino (1542–1621), Cesare Baronio (1538–1607), and Antonio Possevino (1533–1611), “the leading lights of this generation,” all of whom, with the exception of Baronio, were Jesuits. Indeed, Possevino reciprocated Crispo's gesture by citing De Ethnicis Philosophis Caute Legendis in the second edition of the Bibliotheca Selecta (Selected library, 1603).Footnote 60 Nevertheless, these works generally did not dispute the historical reality of Ficino's prisci theologi, which would not receive its first significant challenge until 1614, with Isaac Casaubon's redating of the Hermetic corpus.Footnote 61 Nor did they reject Ficino's transmission thesis, which accorded well with the commonly held view that all peoples descended from Noah, who undoubtedly was monotheistic.
The fact that there were mixed views about Zoroaster and the prisca theologia at the turn of the seventeenth century would have made Longobardo's claims about the diabolical origins of Confucianism a rather weak attack on ancient Chinese wisdom. Hence, while he refers to this theme on several occasions throughout his treatise, he deliberately announces that this will not be the focus of his critique, referring the reader instead to Rodrigues's elaboration of this theme. Yet Longobardo's assumptions about Fuxi's place in the prisca theologia still threads the substance of his attack on Ricci's interpretation of the ancient Chinese classics.
The focus of Longobardo's treatise was a sustained and cogent critique of Ricci's interpretative practices that emphasized the importance of commentaries and consensus for navigating the ambiguities of the past in both the Western and Chinese traditions. In the first prelude, Longobardo provides an overview of the range of texts employed in China and their respective authority there: of first rank were the five ancient jing 經 (Yijing, Shujing, Shijing, Liji, Chunqiu 春秋) and the Four Books (Sishu 四書); of second rank were the commentaries; of third rank were the summaries of Chinese natural and moral philosophy contained in the Xingli daquan; of fourth rank were works composed after the great burning of books by Qin Shihuang 秦始皇, in 212 BCE, an event frequently alluded to by the Jesuits as emblematic of the chasm between pre- and post-Qin intellectual culture. Of interest here is how Longobardo introduces the commentaries. Whereas Ricci saw the sheer quantity of seemingly endless and self-referential commentaries in the same way a humanist would scorn medieval verbositas, Longobardo is evidently very impressed not only by their number but also by their consistency, evoking a comparison with the church fathers as authoritative guides to sacred scripture:
There is a great number of ancient interpreters: for there are 107 interpreters of the Sishu or Four Books of Confucius; 136 interpreters commenting on the Yijing, 166 on the Shujing, and so on for the remaining jing or books of their teachings, as is seen in their catalogue printed at the beginning of them. It is wondrous to see how they combine everything in their understanding of the substantial points of their doctrine. It seems an image of our Holy Fathers in the interpretation of Sacred Scripture. Hence not without reason great attention is paid to these commentaries in China because the compositions that the literati write about the text cannot be admitted unless they agree with the interpretation of the commentaries.Footnote 62
Longobardo's argument is essentially that missionaries do not possess sufficient philological skills to reconstruct with confidence an interpretation of the classics that so blatantly contradicts the received tradition of the commentaries. At the heart of his concern is the sheer obscurity of the Chinese classics. In the third prelude, Longobardo asserts that obscurity is not restricted to Chinese antiquity but is an integral part of the prisca theologia tradition to which he subsumes his account of ancient Chinese wisdom. Citing the Coimbra commentary on Aristotle's De physica, a work that probably had arrived in China upon Trigault's return, in mid-1620, Longobardo argues that “all ancient pagan philosophers devised various symbols, enigmas, and figures so that the mysteries of their philosophy can be covered up and hidden.”Footnote 63 His signal example is naturally the abstruse Yijing, which he considers emblematic of the theoretical part of Chinese teaching: “The primary symbols are even and odd numbers, lines that are broken in the middle and whole, white and black dots, round and square figures, the six positions of places, and other words and metaphoric expressions.”Footnote 64 He claims that the mathematical mysteries of this book can only be understood by studying the eleventh and twelfth juan of the Xingli daquan, which include the cosmological and numerological theories of Shao Yong 邵雍 (1011–77). For Longobardo, the numerological content of this work suggests a comparison with Pythagorean numerology. This analogy is apt because, like the Yijing, Pythagoras's actual philosophic doctrines were shrouded in mystery, and scholars relied upon Aristotle's summaries and other commentaries of late antiquity for a basic knowledge of Pythagoreanism.Footnote 65 In other words, commentaries were necessary for interpreting not merely Chinese tradition but also the West. Further, the prisca theologia framework allows Longobardo to reverse the probative value of the Pythagorean analogy: since Pythagoras was heir to Zoroaster, whom Longobardo identified with Fuxi, the example of Pythagoras not only demonstrates the importance of commentaries but also suggests that Chinese commentaries can have a role in reconstructing knowledge of Western antiquity.
To bolster his claim about the necessity of commentaries for interpreting Chinese antiquity, Longobardo draws extensively on Western sources on pre-Socratic philosophy and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Some of his sources, such as Augustine's City of God, share Longobardo's skeptical or dismissive view of ancient wisdom, but others, such as the Hieroglyphica of Pierio Valeriano (1477–1558), do not reconcile easily with the tenor of Longobardo's analysis. After all, Valeriano was very much a product of the Egyptian enthusiasm that swept across Italy with the publication of Horapollo's Hieroglyphica. As Valeriano makes clear in his dedication to the reader, he saw his task to explain not only Egyptian antiquity but also the sacred letters in which Christ himself, the apostles, and the prophets were versed, as well as Pythagoras and Plato.Footnote 66
But Longobardo does not cite Valeriano because he wants to draw upon Valeriano's views about the compatibility between Egyptian wisdom and Christianity, but because he wants to apply Valeriano's conviction, common to most Renaissance humanists, that the Egyptian hieroglyphs are to be interpreted symbolically, as ideograms expressive of abstruse philosophic doctrines. Since these lofty doctrines would not have been comprehensible to the common man, Longobardo envisages, under the authority of Plutarch, Augustine, and the Coimbra commentaries, that there were two teachings common to all ancient peoples—a hidden “true” philosophy of natural causes, known only to a philosophic elite, and a “false external teaching,” couched in the more accessible language of idolatry that was used as a political expedience in controlling the people: “As for the second part, it must also be noted that by reason of the symbols there were two sorts of teaching in all nations since antiquity: one true and secret, the other false and apparent. The first was a philosophy and knowledge of natural causes, known only by the philosophers and discussed secretly among them in their classes. The second was a certain false external doctrine for the people, which was an enigma of the first teaching. But the people thought it true according to the sound of the words, despite being absolutely false.”Footnote 67
This division had a long history in the Jesuits’ exposition of Japanese Buddhism, appearing in the 1556 document “Sumário dos erros en que os gentios do Japão vivem e de algumas seitas gentílicas en que principalmente confiã” (Summary of the errors in which the peoples of Japan live and of some pagan sects in which they principally believe), attributed by Wicki to Balthasar Gago (1520–83) but largely a recompilation of information about Japanese religion stereotyped in 1551—only two years after Xavier's arrival in Japan.Footnote 68 Valignano gave this idea its clearest theoretical articulation, in his Catechismus Christianae Fidei (Catechism of the Christian faith, 1586). Rodrigues, however, would seem to be the first to explicitly apply it to the “three sects” of China, in his letter of 22 January 1616 from Macau to the superior general, and was most likely Longobardo's source.Footnote 69 Intriguingly, both Longobardo and Rodrigues compare the popular doctrine to Varro's “civil theology,” described in the sixth book of Augustine's City of God, and then cite the same passage of Seneca quoted by Augustine. Rodrigues's comparison between the monism of Melissus and Chinese philosophy is elaborated in Longobardo's explanation of the Chinese axiom wan wu yi ti 萬物一體 (all things are one). However, Longobardo may have already formulated this equivalence: in a letter dated 1598 to the superior general Acquaviva, Longobardo elliptically affirms that what Aristotle said about Melissus could be applied to Chinese natural philosophy—namely, that “they err in matter and form.”Footnote 70 Since Rodrigues's letter was composed before Trigault's return to China, in 1620, it understandably does not mention the Coimbra commentaries, but in his History of Japan, composed between 1620 and 1621, Rodrigues cites the Coimbra commentaries on De generatione et corruptione and De coelo to demonstrate the concordance of pre-Socratic cosmology with that of Sino-Japanese Buddhism.Footnote 71 It is thus certainly possible that even the Coimbra citations used in the “Resposta breve” had been suggested to Longobardo by Rodrigues.
For Longobardo, the division between esoteric and exoteric teachings is confirmed by the Chinese classics. He cites four passages of the Lunyu 論語 (Analects) and one passage mistakenly attributed to the Kongzi jiayu 孔子家語 (Sayings of Confucius) but actually from the Zhuangzi 莊子 (Zhuangzi) that purportedly prove that Confucius deliberately withheld from the common people information about the supernatural, just like Sakyamuni Buddha and the pre-Socratic philosophers. Longobardo's reading of these passages is tendentious, but he is correct in identifying esoteric/exoteric tendencies in the Chinese commentary tradition. For instance, Longobardo first cites the affirmation of Zigong 子貢 (520–456 BCE), in Lunyu 5.13, that “Confucius's discourses about man's nature and the Way of Heaven cannot be heard.”Footnote 72 This is a very significant passage in the Lunyu because, as Philip J. Ivanhoe remarks, “it is one of only two places in the text where the character human nature (xing 性) is mentioned (the other being 17.2) and it is the only passage that mentions the Way of Heaven (tiandao 天道).”Footnote 73 The commentator He Yan 何晏 (195–249), influenced by Daoism, saw the character yan 言 (to say) as indicative of the ineffability of metaphysical entities such as xing and tiandao compared to observable phenomena. Variations of this esoteric interpretation can be found in the Song 宋 interpreters Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033–1107), Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032–85), and Zhu Xi. But where Longobardo diverges from the commentary tradition is in his claim that Zigong “almost complained about his teacher, saying that in his whole life he never managed to have Confucius speak to him about human nature and the natural condition of heaven except toward the end.”Footnote 74 In fact, the commentators have contrasting recollections of the frequency with which Confucius opined on such matters. Cheng Yi understood the passage as meaning that “although the Master often discoursed on these topics, few could comprehend such complex and difficult teachings,” whereas Zhu Xi, perhaps recalling Lunyu 9.1, argued that Confucius “rarely spoke of these,” and, hence, “there were some students who had not heard about them.”Footnote 75 But at the end of the citation, Longobardo adds “except toward the end,” suggesting that when Confucius finally did discuss these matters, he cloaked them in obscurity, akin to how Buddha delivered at the end of this life his hidden atheist doctrines!
It becomes apparent that Longobardo's concern is to demonstrate not just the consistency between the Chinese commentary tradition, which Ricci regarded too lightly, and the Chinese classics, but also the consistency between the Chinese commentary tradition and the prisca theologia, which assumes a common origin for both Chinese and Western paganism. The fact that the testimony of Western classics about the beliefs of the pre-Socratics largely agrees with the premises of neo-Confucianism in Longobardo's mind proves that the neo-Confucian views were likely correct.
But in the seventh prelude, an interesting change of focus reveals that Longobardo's concerns are broader than the authority of the Chinese commentary tradition, striking at the heart of the humanist critique of Scholasticism. Here Longobardo relates how Aristotle and the commentary tradition that largely follows him attribute to the pre-Socratics knowledge of only the material cause, since matter is “the entire essence of natural things and that all things were only one continuous thing.”Footnote 76 The pre-Socratics differed in their accounts of what this material cause was, but they were apparently united in their view that the diversity of phenomena in the universe was not substantial but only accidental, resulting from factors such as rarefication and temperature. Following the Coimbra commentary, Longobardo writes, “In this sense Parmenides and Melissus asserted that all things are only one, and Aristotle cites and refutes them accordingly.”Footnote 77 As noted above, the attribution of such views to Confucius and the neo-Confucian tradition was integral to Longobardo's critique of Ricci's textual exegesis. Yet Longobardo is plainly aware that Aristotle's material reading of pre-Socratic metaphysics had been disputed:
Philosophers of this time and others after Aristotle, on account of their opinions of the first philosophers, could not be persuaded that men of such genius (even if their words are that all things are one continuous substance and not different among themselves except according to their external senses, which are fallible) wished to speak in that sense in which Aristotle refutes and reproaches them, and thus they interpret them in different ways. They say that Aristotle reprimanded them on account of their words, not because he believed that they truly thought such things. Others note that Aristotle imposed on them something that those philosophers themselves did not wish to say in the sense in which he refutes them.Footnote 78
While Longobardo does not identify the target of his criticism, it was a common belief among Renaissance thinkers that Aristotle had fundamentally misunderstood the pre-Socratics. Cardinal Bessarion (1403–72) argued in his work In Calumniatorem Platonis (Against the slanderer of Plato, 1469) that Aristotle knew that Parmenides and Melissus shared the Platonic view of the One, Being, and the Principle of Beings but dissimulated this knowledge in order not to mislead his readers into thinking that existence is single and immutable. The crux of the confusion is Bessarion's contention that Aristotle did not consider the underlying meaning of the words, which concern not the physical realm but divine things.Footnote 79 Nearer to Longobardo in time, Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (1529–97), whom Clement VIII appointed chair of Platonic philosophy at the Studium Urbis (La Sapienza), sought in his Dissertationes Peripateticae (Peripatetic dissertations, 1581) to counter Aristotle's distortion of pre-Socratic philosophy by proposing the pre-Socratics as continuous with the ancient philosophic tradition that culminated in Platonism and received fulfillment in Christianity. For Patrizi, Aristotle fundamentally misunderstood the metaphysical doctrines of the pre-Socratics and Plato because his vision was anchored to empiricism.Footnote 80
To prove the accuracy of Aristotle's reading of the pre-Socratics, Longobardo presents a series of arguments that are effectively adapted from his critique of Ricci's reading of ancient Confucianism. He appeals, first, to the plain meaning of their words cited in Aristotle; second, to the fact that these authors seem to lack knowledge of an efficient cause necessary for a concept of a transcendent creator; third, to the agreement of other classical sources, such as Galen and Cicero, with Aristotle; and, finally, to the fact that Chinese sources themselves present a metaphysics that concords with the Aristotelian reading of the pre-Socratics:
Fourth, it is finally proven that this is not at all new and that other authors, who are more ancient than the ones mentioned here, had held these notions. The sect of the Indian Gymnosophists held it openly and the Chinese Bonzes, who came from the gymnosophists, also profess it. The same is held by laozi together with his Daoist priests, and, above all, this view is held by the teachers of Rujiao, from the greatest to the least, from ancient to modern. Therefore, these three sects are more ancient than the philosophers mentioned above, and all these sects originated from the magus Zoroaster, prince of the Chaldeans, who taught and disseminated throughout the world notions such as chaos is eternal.Footnote 81
It is striking that in a treatise about Chinese philosophy Longobardo feels the need to devote an entire prelude to bolstering the authority of Aristotle's interpretation of the pre-Socratics. It bespeaks anxieties about the status of Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophy in the early seventeenth century, which had already suffered a sustained attack at the hands of humanism and was now suffering even greater challenges in Europe, with the profound epistemic shift taking place there during that time. Evidently, Ricci's philological criticism of the neo-Confucian commentaries was dangerous in Longobardo's eyes not only because it admitted possible heterodoxy in the Chinese Christian Church but also because his arguments were in fact derived from the very philological principles used by humanists to discredit the Scholastic tradition, which was at the heart of the Jesuit curriculum. Longobardo's sensitivity to this contradiction was no doubt heightened by the fact that since the early 1590s the Jesuits at Coimbra had been systematically commentating the entire Aristotelian corpus. At the time that Longobardo penned the “Resposta breve,” in 1623, the Jesuits had just begun translating these commentaries into Chinese, a project that would have been sanctioned by Longobardo as superior of the China mission. From 1623 to 1640, some nine works were published in China that broadly canvassed the three branches of the philosophy curriculum: logic, natural philosophy, and ethics.Footnote 82 It would have been very difficult for Longobardo to reconcile such a project with Ricci's professed disdain for commentaries.
Longobardo's anxiety about the humanist attack on the commentary tradition leads him to adopt at various points in his treatise an alternative argument that puts aside historical exactitude. Already in the second prelude, Longobardo acknowledges that, at least on the surface, discrepancies can be perceived between the texts of antiquity and the interpretations of the Song-dynasty commentators. For instance, whereas the ancients speak of Shangdi in terms that strikingly resemble the Christian God, “living in the palace of heaven, where he governs the world, bestowing reward on the good and inflicting punishment on the wicked,” the commentators identify this with a material heaven or an immanent principle of nature called li.Footnote 83 In the same vein, while the ancient texts admit the existence of spiritual beings called shen 神, gui 鬼, or guishen 鬼神, which govern particular places, the interpreters reduce these entities to natural phenomena or the “operative virtues” (“virtudes operativas”) working in things—a term used by Aquinas in explaining how an incorporeal God could be described in the Bible as having arms.Footnote 84
Even if it were to be accepted that the commentaries distorted the meaning of ancient Confucianism (a premise that Longobardo, of course, rejects), the missionaries could not escape the fact that these state-mandated commentaries were so embedded within the prevailing sensus communis that they were inseparable from contemporary Chinese usage. Whatever assertions a missionary made about the true meaning of Shangdi would be filtered by his Chinese interlocutor through the assumptions of the prevailing neo-Confucian orthodoxy. Longobardo illustrates this point in the seventeenth prelude with fascinating interviews between pagan and Christian mandarins that give insights into the limitations of intercultural dialogue. One notable episode involved a conversation with a non-Christian mandarin called Zhou Moqian 周慕 from Beijing.Footnote 85 After reading Ricci's Tianzhu shiyi, the mandarin asked Longobardo what the Jesuits meant by Tianzhu. Longobardo's explanation that Tianzhu was the same as Shangdi, an eternal, intelligent creator governing the cosmos, provoked laughter. His interlocutor found Longobardo's anthropomorphic explanation of Shangdi crude compared to the neo-Confucian view of Shangdi as a “virtue that governs in heaven, just as it lords and governs in all things, including our very selves.”Footnote 86 The very fact Longobardo had identified the Christian God with Shangdi prevented him from responding because his interlocutor already had a preconceived view of Shangdi.
Perhaps even more damning were Longobardo's charges against Yang Tingyun (whom Longobardo calls Doutor Miguel [Doctor Michael]), Ricci's illustrious convert. Longobardo alleges that in the Xixue shijie chujie 西學十誡初解 (Introduction to the Ten Commandments, 1624)—a text that is unfortunately not extant—Yang interpreted Christianity through neo-Confucian monism, suggesting that “all things are the one same substance as li, while there is no difference among things except in terms of their external figures and accidental qualities.”Footnote 87 Standaert demonstrated in his meticulous comparison between Longobardo's interview with Yang and Yang's Chinese writings that Longobardo, while mostly accurate in his citations, misrepresented Yang's true beliefs, because in other writings Yang clearly distinguished li from the Lord of Heaven.Footnote 88 Be that as it may, Longobardo's overall point remains coherent: exegesis cannot be conducted in a vacuum, divorced from the sociopolitical context. The missionaries cannot just reconstruct the original meaning of a text following the humanist appeal ad fontes; instead, they must consider the diversity of meanings assumed within a textual tradition and living community.
CONCLUSIONS
In contrasting the interpretative practices of Ricci and Longobardo, it must be emphasized that these figures do not represent antipodal binaries; rather, they depart from common assumptions, since they were formed in the same educational system that fused the studia humanitatis with neo-Scholasticism. Like Ricci, Longobardo draws extensively on humanist texts and concepts to construct his arguments. These commonalities, however, must not obscure the significant differences between their respective approaches. Ricci subliminally exploits humanist beliefs about the purity of ancient wisdom to make his reconstruction of ancient Confucian monotheism more plausible to the European reader, while Longobardo explicitly integrates ancient Chinese philosophy within a prisca theologia paradigm to demonstrate an equivalence between ancient Chinese philosophy and pre-Socratic monism, proving thereby the reliability of the neo-Confucian commentaries as guides to ancient wisdom.
As the above discussion has revealed, at the root of Longobardo's disagreement with Ricci were tensions between the humanist appeal ad fontes, which Ricci so enthusiastically embraced, and the authority afforded to the commentary tradition by the Jesuits in their interpretation of classical antiquity. Longobardo knew that the authority of commentaries had been undermined by humanist textual criticism. Hence, he saw his defense of Chinese commentaries not only as a critique of Ricci's missionary methods but also as a contribution to the rehabilitation of the commentary tradition in the West.
Longobardo's reduction of all Chinese philosophy to an offshoot of a diabolical conspiracy may be off-putting, and his readings may be too heavily filtered through his Scholastic worldview. Nevertheless, his treatise raises significant issues with the humanist mindset that inspired Ricci's confidence in reinterpreting the Confucian tradition against received tradition. While it may be somewhat farfetched to claim that Longobardo was the father of identity politics, his writings do betray an acute sensitivity to the dangers of cultural appropriation. He sees the missionaries as foreign guests in China, and any attempt on their part to contradict the Chinese, who knew their tradition far better than the missionaries, as an egregious impropriety. In this respect, Longobardo's attempt to distance Christianity from Chinese cultural forms was motivated, ironically, by a profound respect for the Chinese as the rightful guardians and best interpreters of their own culture.
