Encounters with the Remote and Strange: Protestant Missionaries in China as Translators of the Dao De Jing (original) (raw)
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Religions, 2021
Over the last one hundred years, the Chinese Union Version of the Bible (CUV)—translated by Western Protestant missionaries—has enjoyed an unparalleled status as the Chinese Bible or the “Authorized Version” of the Chinese Bible. However, despite such towering significance, no scholarly works to date have systematically examined the influences of Protestant missionary theology on the translation of the CUV and, in turn, on Chinese Christianity. As an introductory attempt to explore this question, this paper first highlights this gap in current scholarship and the importance of filling this gap. Then, it presents four factors and two limitations in examining the theology of the CUV and conducts a case study on the theological topic of dichotomy versus trichotomy in the translation of the CUV along with four other Chinese Bible translations. After examining how the translators’ theology might have influenced these translations, it suggests how such influence through the translation of the CUV might have shaped Chinese Christianity both past and present, thereby demonstrating how the understanding of Chinese Christianity can be deepened by examining the relationships between missionaries’ theology, their Bible translations, and the development of Chinese Christianity.
Routledge, 2019
This book presents the Jesuit Figurists’ encounter with the Yijing in their mission in China. The author analyzes how Jesuit Figurists incorporated their intralingual translation of the Yijing, the classical and vernacular use of Chinese language and the imitation of Chinese literati’s format, and the divinization of Yijing numbers into their typological exegesis. By presenting the different ways in which Jesuit Figurists’ Christianized the Yijing and grafted a Chinese version of Jesus and Christian stories onto the Chinese classics, this book reveals the value of Jesuit missionary-translators. The Chinese manuscripts the Figurists left behind themselves became treasures which have been excavated and displayed in this book. These treasures reveal the other side of the story, the side not much shown in past scholarship on the Figurists. These handwritten manuscripts on the Christianized Yijing are a legacy which continues to impact the European understanding of Chinese history and civilization in later centuries. A first analysis of these manuscripts in Chinese, this book uncovers the Jesuits mystic theological interpretation in their trans-textual dialogue in the intra-lingual translation of the Book of Changes. The book will be of interest to scholars working on the history of Christianity in China and East Asian Religion and Philosophy.
Compilation and Translation Review, 2020
Long viewed as a divinatory, religious, historical and philosophical work with roots in ancient Chinese culture, the Yijing has secured an idiosyncratic position in the Western academic sinology. This paper looks at the motives, strategies and ideologies with which the early Jesuit missionaries introduced the Yijing to the West, particularly with reference to the biblical exegesis tradition and how its derivative "Figurism" had influenced their interpretation and translation of this work. The present study purports to investigate how the Jesuit missionaries had appropriated the Yijing at multiple levels to facilitate the Confucian-Christian synthesis (following Matteo Ricci's Accommodation approach), in order to proselytize the Chinese gentry by mitigating the conspicuous discrepancies between Christianity and Ruism. With the acquiescence of the Roman Church and the patronage of the Kangxi Emperor, the Jesuit missionaries studied, interpreted and rendered the Yijing. Driven by an emic perspective based on Figuristic ideologies, a certain group of Jesuit missionary scholars penetrated and rewrote the Yijing to reduce the degree of passive resistance once this enigmatic Chinese canonical text encountered Christian civilization. What they did to a certain extent led to the reciprocal inter-culturation of China and the West. However, the Figurists' overly accommodating approach and their deliberate emphasis on the esoteric revelation of the "biblical truth" encrypted in the Yijing simultaneously prevented this text from being accepted by the reason-oriented European literati. Nontheless, the Figurists' translation and dissemination of the Yijing, did grant traditional Chinese cosmology, then in a peripheral position, access to the European literary polysystem as a challenge to the central Christian doctrines. Undoubtedly their efforts made a crucial contribution to the cultural communication between China and the West from 17th to mid-18th centuries.
The World of the Orient, 2024
This paper examines the life and work of the Spanish missionary Antonio de Santa Maria Caballero (1602-1669), who played a significant role in re-establishing the Franciscan presence in the Catholic missions of China during the 17th century. Caballero began his active missionary work in 1633 and became proficient in the Chinese language and culture, mainly focusing on understanding the works of Confucius and other classics. His dedication allowed him to pass the rigorous imperial exams in Lipu, northeast of Guangxi, in 1653. Caballero's work, published in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Chinese, includes books, treatises, comments, and letters that identify his missionary theory and practice. He strongly opposed the accommodation model promoted by the Jesuits, which allowed Chinese converts to Christianity to continue practicing ancestor rituals and worshiping Confucius. Caballero criticized any blending of traditional Chinese beliefs with Christian doctrine. In 1666, together with 24 other Catholic missionaries in China, Caballero was arrested and exiled to Canton, where he died three years later. During exile, the surviving missionaries, 20 Jesuits, three Dominicans, and Caballero, held from December 18, 1667, to January 26, 1668, a series of meetings that, later known as “Canton Conferences,” intended to develop a consensual text on the missionary strategy. Dominated by the Jesuit accommodationist model, all the missionaries present signed the final document known in Latin as Acta Cantoniensia authentica, except Caballero, who immediately worked on a document justifying his critical position. The result was a long letter written originally in Spanish addressed in 1668 to the Portuguese Jesuit Luís da Gama (1610-1672), then provincial of China and Japan, entitled “Tratado que se remitió al muy R. P. Luís de Gama de la Compañia de Jesús sobre algunos puntos de esta misión de la Gran China” (Treatise sent to the very R. P. Luís de Gama of the Society of Jesus on some points of this mission in Great China). Mobilizing the main Confucian and neo-Confucian classics that Caballero shared in-depth, the text criticized in detail the cults of ancestors and Confucius as pagan, also denying any possibility of finding even remote forms of natural theology and an approach to the Christian God among the ancient school traditions that underpinned traditional cults. At the same time, seeking to substantiate his critical positions with works produced by some Jesuits, Caballero translated into Latin during this period of exile a treatise initially written in Portuguese by the Italian Jesuit Nicolò Longobardo, the successor of Matteo Ricci, critic of the accommodationist model and, in particular, of the proposed Chinese translations of the name of God. The two texts, Caballero's letter and Longobardo's treatise were translated into French and published in Paris in 1701 by the Society of Foreign Missions of Paris, a congregation extremely hostile to the Jesuit missionary model in China. Entitled “Anciens Traitez de divers auteurs sur les ceremonies de la Chine” (Ancient Treatises of various authors on the ceremonies of China), the work would be offered in 1715 to the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz at the end of 1715 by his French correspondent Nicolas-François Rémond de Montfort. The critical reading of Leibniz produced his unfinished reflections, written in 1716, on the ethical compatibility between Chinese classical moral thought and Christian doctrine written in French as “Lettre sur la philosophie chinoise à Monsieur de Rémond” (Letter on the Chinese Philosophy to M. Remond). Republished since 1977 as “Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese,” Leibniz's text is a defense of the Jesuit missionary accommodation system, stressing its contribution to his personal ongoing research on the possibilities of an autonomous, universal moral philosophy grounded in transcultural foundations.
Christian Missionaries and Modernization in China: The Evolution of meanings and Functions
2021
This article analyses the role of Christian missionaries in the Modernization of China. The paper will examine the historical developments of Christianity's arrival in China, and the function of Jesuit and Protestant missionary groups. Furthermore, it will indicate that although the primary purpose of all missionaries was to evangelize the Chinese heathen, this developed gradually as historical and cultural conditions in China and the West changed. How did the conditions for this development come about? In sum, there were three categories of factors influencing this development including the demands of the "Treaty system", and the new relations of the weakened Qing government with the Western powers; the Protestant theological-social disputes in the West over the impossibility of Evangelization of other people in the world; China's particular climate and catastrophic natural events such as drought, floods and the like. In contrast to Jesuits, Protestant missionarie...