The Concept of the Soul During the Chinese Rites Controversy: the Example of Xia Dachang (original) (raw)
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The first treatise on the soul in China and its sources
In 1624, the Italian Jesuit Francesco Sambiasi and the Chinese scholar-officer Xu Guangqi produced the Lingyan lishao [Humble Attempt at Discussing Matters Pertaining to the soul]. My study serves as a supplement to the recent edition of the text by Isabelle Duceux, by showing how the Lingyan lishao takes its roots in the Coimbra De Anima commentary (1598). I show also that, in the process of transmitting the Western discourse of the soul to Chinese culture, the traditional boundaries between theology and philosophy were reshaped.
Religions, 2024
Lingyan lishao 靈言蠡勺 [LYLS] (Humble Attempt to Discuss the Soul, 1624) by the Calabrian Jesuit Francesco Sambiasi (1582–1649) and the Chinese mandarin Xu Guangqi 徐光啓 (1562–1633) was the first Chinese‑language treatise on the scholastic Aristotelian soul and a pioneering work in Sino–Western intellectual exchanges. Until now, the dominant assumption has been that the first volume (juan) of this work is simply an adaptation of the Coimbra commentaries on De Anima [DA] and Parva Naturalia [PN]. This article demonstrates, however, that while most of the first juan is based on these Coimbra commentaries, its treatise on the substance of the soul was likely derived from another source, namely the Enchiridion, a 16th century confessional manual by the Spanish Augustinian Martín de Azpilcueta (1492–1586), or Doctor Navarrus. Through a close textual comparison, this article shows how LYLS adopts the same structure, content, and citations of the Enchiridion to construct an accessible and concise theological definition of the soul that was better suited for the Chinese missionary context than the dense philosophic definitions of the Coimbra commentaries.
Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, 2024
The Jesuit China mission coincided with a sophisticated attempt to place Chinese and Western concepts of human nature in dialogue with Confucianism. The Jesuits believed that they could facilitate evangelization by drawing upon Confucian concepts to explain the soul. In so doing, they and their Chinese collaborators also pioneered a genre of hybrid philosophical texts, which used Aristotelian conceptions of the soul to critique and supplement autochthonous Chinese conceptions of human nature. These texts are not just of significance for Chinese Christian theology, but also anthropology, psychology, and even medicine, given the role played by the soul in both Chinese and Western conceptions of human physiology at the time. Until recently these texts have been little studied except by missiologists who were more interested in their relevance for mission history than for comparative philosophy. Scholarship has perhaps also been hampered by the immense linguistic demands of studying texts that sit between the Chinese and Western intellectual traditions. Recently, however, a number of Chinese scholars have turned their attention to these texts, intrigued by novel philosophical ideas contained therein and their complex relationship to both the Western and Chinese intellectual and religious traditions. Since many of these Chinese-language contributions are published in volumes which are not easily accessible outside of China, they have not enjoyed great visibility in Western-language scholarship. This article will review the major developments in Chinese scholarship and will conclude with suggestions for future research.
The Theological Background of the Chinese Rites Controversy
Catholicism's encounters with China: 17th to 20th century, 2018
While there is a very large number of titles on the “Chinese Rites Controversy”, one hardly finds a narrative that tells the history of the Controversy in its entirety and complexity. In fact, the history of the Controversy has yet to be told. It extended from the 17th to the 18th centuries, with an extemporaneous epilogue in the middle of the 20th century, and was a major turning point in the history of Chinese Catholicism. It involved the Ming and the Qing dynasties, the Holy See, major religious orders, and Chinese Christians. This essay is part of larger attempt by the author to summarize the events, figures, issues, and themes of this complex controversy. I submitted studies on the same subject for publication to other editorial projects. In this essay I pay attention to one aspect only of the general framework of the development of the Controversy: how theological differences influenced the missionary groups and persons involved. The Controversy is often viewed merely as a clash of political and religious powers. In fact there is a theological dimension that should not to be overlooked. Since its inception, theological differences mattered the most in the development of the dispute. 1. Accommodation 2. The Street Preaching of the Mendicant missionaries 3. Probalism against Probabiliorism 4. Accommodating the Doctrinal Language
Borrowing Legitimacy from the Dead: The Confucianization of Ancestor Worship
Early Chinese Religion, Part Two: The Period of Division (220-589), edited by John Lagerwey and Lü Pengzhi, 2010
In early medieval China, among its upper classes, no religious ceremonies were more frequently performed and had a greater impact on daily life than the ancestral rites. Sacrifi ces to the ancestors punctuated the calendar, sanctioned the institutions of marriage and concubinage, and periodically reminded the living of their lifelong debt to those who came before them. One could argue that it was the most fundamental and universal form of religious worship in China. Regardless of social class, no matter who one was, one esteemed and made off erings to his departed kin. 1 Furthermore, unhappy ancestors were not to be toyed with-they could have an adverse eff ect on the fortune and fate of oneself and one's family. For rulers, since their powerful ancestors helped secure their present fortune, how and which ancestors were to be honored was an important political issue-one that oft en occasioned vigorous court debate. Despite the obvious signifi cance of these rites, beyond the earliest period of Chinese history, Western scholars have written relatively little about them, especially about the form they took during the early medieval period. In other words, we only have a vague sense of how these rituals were performed and what their participants saw themselves as doing. We take it for granted that, at the very least, the upper classes had been performing these rituals for a long time and that the rites themselves changed little. We also assume that rulers undertook these rites because they legitimated their power, but it is not entirely clear how these rites did so. Th is chapter's purpose is to explore in what ways and to what extent the ancestral rites were practiced in early medieval China (AD 100-600), as well as how these ceremonies were connected to the conveyance of political legitimacy. 2 1 Although commoners probably only worshipped their own most recent deceased kin, such as their father and grandfather, they would have regarded this as being akin to the sacrifi ces that the upper classes dedicated to more remote ancestors.
Intellectual History Review, 2024
In the 1580s, when the Jesuit missionaries Michele Ruggieri (15431607) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) established the first Jesuit mission in China, the terms “translatability” and “cultural incommensurability” were yet to enter the European lexicon, but these questions were addressed implicitly through the translation choices employed in the mission field. For the early missionaries, translatability had immense ramifications for their missionary practice. One of the foremost challenges was how to communicate in Chinese the concept of “sanctity,” which was central to Christian soteriology. There was a range of terms in Chinese intellectual and religious traditions that the Jesuits drew upon to translate sanctus such as shengren 聖人 zhenren 真人 , and xian 仙 , but each of these terms implied a certain commensurability between Christian and indigenous Chinese conceptions of human excellence. This paper will present a microhistory of early Jesuit attempts to translate sanctus in Chinese, and reflect upon the significance of these translation choices for the development of the Jesuits’ missionary strategy.
Natural Theology and Ancient Theology in the Jesuit China Mission [POSTPRINT]
Intellectual History Review, [online 2019; print 2020], 2020
This article analyzes the proselytical use of ancient theology that developed in the environment of the Jesuit China Mission in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This period is roughly coeval with the European diffusion of deistic doctrines based on a secularized interpretation of natural theology. I argue that the threat posed by the spread of such doctrines produced a significant effect on the philosophy that Jesuits developed in order to relate to Confucianism. In particular, in the late seventeenth century, Jesuits belonging to the China Mission gradually abandoned Matteo Ricci’s natural theology and espoused an approach grounded in ancient theology. The situation changed, however, after the turn of the eighteenth century. Deism continued to spread and even ancient theology came to be perceived as dangerously close the libertinism. The increasing suspicion towards ancient theology was reflected, in the China Mission, by the reception of the doctrines advanced by the so-called Figurists, a group of French Jesuits who proposed an interpretation of certain characters of the Chinese Five Classics as figurae of the Bible.