Matteo Ricci

Matteo Ricci

Matteo Ricci

A Jesuit in the Ming Court

Michela Fontana

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, inc.

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Copyright © 2011 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

English translation by Paul Metcalfe for Scriptum, Rome

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fontana, Michela, 1950-

[Matteo Ricci. English]

Matteo Ricci : A Jesuit in the Ming Court / Michela Fontana.

pages cm

Translation of: Matteo Ricci / Michela Fontana. — Milano : Mondadori, c2005. — 347 pages ; 23 cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4422-0586-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-0588-8 (electronic)

1. Ricci, Matteo, 1552–1610. 2. Jesuits—China—Biography. 3. China—History—Ming dynasty, 1368-1644. I. Title.

BV3427.R46F6613 2011

266'.2092—dc22

[B]

2010050586

™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For my husband

In memory of my father

and for my mother

v

Zhaoqing, China, September 10, 1583

Japan looks onto an immense empire that enjoys great peace and is considered superior to all the Christian states as regards the workings of justice by the Portuguese merchants. . . . The Chinese I have seen . . . are bright and eager to learn. . . . Nothing leads me to imagine the presence of any Christians there.

—Francis Xavier

The Audience

The prefect
1
Wang Pan wore a loose robe of red silk and a mandarin square elaborately embroidered with two wild geese. The sleeves of the garment were so long and wide as to conceal his hands. Ornaments of silver, wood, and ivory hung from the richly decorated belt. His boots and hat were both black, the latter a rigid skullcap with a rounded brim on either side pointing down toward the shoulders.

Everything in the dress and bearing of the middle-aged official responsible for governing a region in the south of China the size of a small Italian state denoted prestige. The choice of ornaments was not left to chance, personal taste, or any wish to flaunt opulence, but was dictated by a precise protocol codified at the imperial court in Beijing. The details of the apparel, first of all the type of embroidered bird used as a badge of office, indicated that the “mandarin”—a term derived by the Portuguese from their verb
mandar
, meaning to command, and used by them to designate important Chinese dignitaries—held the fourth-highest rank of the nine in the imperial bureaucracy. Even though he was not at the very top of the administrative ladder, his power was sufficient to intimidate anyone admitted to his presence.

He sat on a chair with high armrests and an imposingly tall back at a table of dark wood bearing a number of books bound in damask fabric. Calligraphic brushes of different sizes in wood and bamboo were arrayed on a small and elegant vertical rack of wood and polychromatic china with a painted dragon motif, beside which was the customary slab of black stone for ink and a special bird-shaped water jug of white jade. Vases of blue and white porcelain and jade sculptures embellished with minute inlay were displayed behind him on top of a bookcase with asymmetrical shelves.

Kneeling before the prefect together with a number of Chinese citizens were two young missionaries with European features. Their heads were shaven, and they wore modest robes of grey cotton similar to those of Buddhist monks.

The priests had as yet a very limited knowledge of the difficult language and the history, culture, and customs of that remote empire in the farthest East, so different from the world they knew. The China with which they were now coming into apprehensive contact was a mysterious and hostile land that refused entry to foreigners, who were regarded as illiterate barbarians and dangerous enemies.

Helped by an interpreter and obeying the rules of a complex and alien procedure, the two Italian Jesuits, Matteo Ricci and Michele Ruggieri, asked the mandarin for permission to reside in his country. They wanted to purchase a site where they could build a house and a church and worship their god, the Lord of Heaven and Earth, in peace and in accordance with the laws of the land.

It was a fateful moment, and the date, September 10, 1583, was to remain imprinted in the Jesuits’ memory forever. After at least thirty years of fruitless attempts by Western priests to establish a foothold on imperial territory, the first Jesuit mission in the China of the Ming dynasty was becoming a reality, and one that would mark the beginning of one of the most significant periods in the history of cultural exchange between East and West. For Matteo Ricci, then thirty years of age, it was the start of a human, intellectual, and spiritual adventure that was to continue for the rest of his life.

Thirty years earlier . . .

Note

1. The term used by Ricci in his writings is
governatore
, which corresponds in the Ming bureaucratic nomenclature to
zhifu
, meaning an official in charge of a prefecture (
fu
). This is translated here as “prefect” in line with current terminology.

v

From Macerata to Rome, 1552–1576

Whatever the present or other Roman pontiffs order that concerns the saving of souls and the spread of the faith, and to whatever provinces he shall wish to send us, this let us strive to accomplish as far as in us lies, without any turning back or excuse.

—Ignatius Loyola, Constitution of the Society of Jesus (1540)

Geometry is one and eternal shining in the mind of God. That share in it accorded to humans is one of the reasons that humanity is the image of God.

—Johannes Kepler,
Harmonices Mundi
(1618)
1

The Choice

Matteo Ricci was born in Macerata, a town of the Papal States with a population of just under thirteen thousand, perched on a hill between the parallel valleys of the Potenza and Chienti rivers, on October 6, 1552.
2
In addition to various other municipal councils, his father, Giovanni Battista Ricci, an apothecary by profession, is thought to have served on the
Consiglio di Credenza
, membership of which was an exclusive prerogative of the city’s dignitaries, in 1596.
3
The Ricci family had belonged to the lesser nobility of Macerata for centuries, their coat of arms being a blue hedgehog (
riccio
in Italian) on a vermilion field, and were to be granted the marquisate of Castel Vecchio at the end of the seventeenth century. His mother, Giovanna Angiolelli, was also born into a noble family.

Matteo, the firstborn of a numerous family, had four sisters and eight brothers, including Antonio Maria, who was to become the canon of Macerata, and Orazio, who was to hold important positions in the government of the city.
4
Entrusted to the care of his grandmother, Laria, he studied under the guidance of Father Niccolò Bencivegni from Siena until the age of seven, when the priest left his post as tutor to enter the Society of Jesus, one of the most important orders founded in connection with the Counter-Reformation.

Matteo continued his studies at the new Jesuit college opened in the city in 1561, where he distinguished himself as one of the best pupils and manifested a religious vocation at a very early age, according to Sabatino de Ursis, his first biographer.
5
His father is reported to have had other plans for him, however, and he was sent to Rome immediately on completion of his basic education in order to study jurisprudence at the university, probably with a view to a career in the papal administration.

He arrived in Rome in 1568. The capital then had a population of nearly one hundred thousand and was one of the world’s greatest cities of art. Work was still underway on Saint Peter’s, the symbol of the Church’s greatness, whose creation had involved some of the greatest artists of the Renaissance. Its construction, which did not come to an end until the following century after 176 years of activity and the succession of twenty-eight popes to the throne of Saint Peter, was regarded by Romans as a never-ending process. Ricci was not to witness the erection of Michelangelo’s renowned dome, as it was not completed until 1588, four years after the death of its designer and ten after his own departure from the capital.

The atmosphere in Rome was steeped in the spirit of the Counter-Refor
mation. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) had ended just a few years earlier with an overall doctrinal and disciplinary reorganization of the Catholic Church after the rift in the Christian world caused by the Protestant Reformation. The pope’s authority was being constantly strengthened, and his claims to supremacy over the temporal powers were being asserted with ever-greater determination. The creation of the Congregation of the Holy Office, or Inquisition, in Rome by Paul III in 1542 and the publication of the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
by the order of Paul IV in 1559, with the ensuing repressive measures against nonorthodox authors and printers, made it possible to exercise rigid control over culture, thus stifling the lively growth of ideas that had characterized the previous century. The papal throne had been occupied for two years by Pius V, formerly the Dominican friar Antonio Michele Ghislieri, an inquisitor and future saint unswerving in the persecution of heresy and dissent, who excommunicated Elizabeth I of England in 1570.

At the time when Ricci entered the capital, Italy was a patchwork of states mostly subject to Spain, among which only Venice and, within certain limits, the Papal State retained any real independence from Madrid. Bitter religious disputes were interwoven in Europe with the struggle for supremacy among the nations. In the Near East, Suleiman the Magnificent had died two years earlier after bringing the Turkish Ottoman Empire to the peak of its power and threatening the eastern borders of Austria. Vying for supremacy over the world’s oceans were the two Catholic maritime powers of Spain and Portugal, whose navigators were responsible for the most important exploits of the previous century, from the discovery of the New World to the first landings in India and the circumnavigation of the globe.
6
The image of our planet had changed, and expeditions in previously unknown seas and lands led to the redrawing of maps and the growth of trade, giving birth to a market that now embraced different continents. Missionaries traveled the routes opened up by explorers and merchants, Jesuits together with Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians, eager to convert “the infidels” in every corner of the world and to regain in distant lands part of the power lost by the Catholic Church in Europe due to the Protestant Reformation.

In the previous century, while the boundaries of the known world widened, the Old World had undergone deep cultural change. Princes, military leaders, cardinals, courtiers, adventurers, merchants, and bankers, as well as artists, architects, writers, philosophers, astronomers, mathematicians, physicians, and magicians, all played their parts in a drama destined to transform the world. Now, however, halfway through the sixteenth century, the drive for innovation that had characterized the Renaissance period was forced to come to terms with the rigorous control over orthodoxy imposed by the religious authorities in Catholic countries like Italy and Spain. Despite the savage wars of religion that soaked Europe in blood and the intolerance that impeded the free expression of culture, evolution toward modernity did continue in knowledge and art as well as the gradual creation of nation-states. New ideas intermingled with old conceptions and philosophies on a complex and contradictory social and cultural scene. Age-old superstitions accompanied the first steps of modern science. Greater depth and specialization were achieved in every field of knowledge, and natural philosophy began to give way to the scientific disciplines fully established in the centuries to come. Mathematics took on a central role as an essential tool for the investigation and understanding of natural phenomena, and technology gained increasing power and importance.

We cannot know the dreams and aspirations of Matteo Ricci as he embarked on life in the Rome of the late Renaissance. The hagiographic accounts of Jesuit biographers
7
are rife with premonitory signs sent by divine providence to herald his destiny as a missionary and show no trace of the doubts, hesitations, and uncertainties he probably experienced, like most young people seeking their way in life. It can only be assumed on the basis of subsequent events that Matteo Ricci was soon convinced that a secular career was not for him. He began to attend the Marian congregation attached to the Roman College, the Jesuit university in Rome, in 1569 and made the decision to abandon law and enter the Jesuit order even before completing three years of university studies. He presented himself to the novitiate of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale on August 15, 1571, and was admitted to the Society of Jesus by Jeronimo Nadal, then vicar general. His spiritual guide in the house of probation was Alessandro Valignano, thirteen years his senior but admitted to the Jesuit order only four years earlier, a temporary replacement for the titular master of novices Fabio de Fabii. The register of the Society of Jesus, which still survives, includes a document drawn up by Valignano certifying the admittance of “Mattheo Ricci” from Macerata and attesting that the young person had signed the customary declaration of self-renunciation and complete obedience to the constitution of the order,
8
that he accepted “the way of life of the Society and was perfectly content to be admitted to whatever rank and office the Society might see fit to grant him and to perform obediently whatever he might be ordered.”
9

While it is possible that Alessandro Valignano sensed Ricci’s qualities of character on their first meeting, he certainly had no way of knowing that the young man from Macerata would become one of his greatest allies in the missionary work in China and one of the wisest practitioners of the method he himself devised of spreading the faith. Valignano was appointed Visitor in the Indies shortly afterward, with the task of supervising the work of the missions in the Far East. He left Rome for Lisbon in September 1573 and set sail for the Indies from there the following year, together with forty young brethren.

The news of the radical decision taken by Matteo, now a novice in the Society of Jesus, was evidently a blow to his father, who immediately set off in a bid to persuade him to change his mind. Shortly after his departure, according to the Jesuit biographers, Giovanni Battista was struck down by a severe bout of fever and was forced to stop in Tolentino, about eleven miles southeast of Macerata. Perhaps seeing this as a sign from God, or simply having come to realize that his efforts would prove useless, he resigned himself to turning back and wrote to tell his son that he would respect his decision and make no attempt to stop him.

After his brief encounter with Valignano, Ricci’s figure of reference was Fabio de Fabii, a Roman nobleman who had joined the order, like him, against the wishes of his family. In May 1572, shortly before his twentieth birthday, he took the simple vows that constituted the first step toward becoming a member of the Jesuit order.

The Society of Jesus and the
Roman College:
Ad maiorem Dei gloriam

Joining the Society of Jesus, or Societas Jesu, meant belonging to a religious elite culturally in the avant-garde. Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), the founder of the order and a scion of a noble Basque family, had abandoned a military career after being seriously wounded and had channeled his warrior’s ardor into the religious struggle. It was while studying at the University of Paris that he created the Society of Jesus in 1534, together with six fellow students, including his compatriot Francis Xavier.
10
He conceived it as a rigidly hierarchical organization, a select militia at the service of the pope and the Counter-Reformation, with the task of defending the Church against heretics. Absolute obedience to the decisions of superiors was mandatory for Jesuits, as we read in the Constitution:

Let holy obedience, in execution, in the will, and in the intellect, be always utterly perfect in us; let us obey with great promptness, spiritual joy, and perseverance whatever may be commanded of us.

Approved by Pope Paul III in 1540, six years after its foundation, the order had obtained a considerable degree of independence from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and its members recognized the authority of no superior from outside the order other than the pope. In addition to the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, the members who completed the requisite series of studies and were judged spiritually fit also undertook to perform unhesitatingly whatever mission the pope might assign them by taking the specific vow
circa missiones
. The supreme head was the
Praepositus Generalis
, or Superior General, subject only to the regulations of the order and the pontiff. The long training before taking the vows and the techniques of self-control and asceticism developed by Loyola in the
Spiritual Exercises
, published in 1548, strengthened the gifts of discipline, energy, tenacity, and abnegation that made the order’s members ideal instruments for the defense and propagation of the Catholic faith.
11

Immediately after the creation of the Society of Jesus, Jesuit missionaries traveled the routes opened up by explorers to spread the Gospel among “infidels” in every corner of the world, making converts in Africa, South America, India, Malacca, Japan, and the Moluccas. The most difficult country to penetrate was China, whose coasts had been reached for the first time by the Portuguese in 1515 but where no priest had yet been able to settle.
12
The first missionary to seek entry into the Chinese empire during the Ming dynasty, after founding Jesuit missions in India, the Moluccas, and Japan, was Francis Xavier, who considered it necessary to focus the utmost attention on China due to the evident cultural influence exercised by the empire over the rest of Asia. Xavier was convinced that the missionary work in other Eastern countries, including Japan, would be much easier if China became Christian. Having left Japan and arrived at Goa in India at the beginning of 1552, the Jesuit took up residence a few months later on the small island of Shang-
chuan, ten kilometers off the Chinese coast, and waited in vain for permission to enter the country. After a sudden illness, he died in December 1552, two months after Ricci’s birth.

In Europe, the members of the Society of Jesus devoted themselves above all to education, considered the most effective form of missionary activity. Their cultural background was immensely rich, even though naturally bent to their religious ends, and many were confessors and advisers to princes and sovereigns. Their teaching took place in colleges, which included schools of every level and universities founded in many European countries and some where missions were operating. Renowned for their educational rigor and attended by members of the order and by the sons of the ruling class, the Jesuit colleges and houses scattered through the whole of Europe numbered over five hundred by the end of the sixteenth century.