Matteo Ricci (15 page)

Notes

1. Roger Bacon,
Opus Majus
(1266–1268), part IV, distinction I, chapter I, trans. R. B. Burke,
The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928), vol. 1, p. 116.

2. Little now survives of this great monastery. An enormous kitchen utensil called the “frying pan of a thousand monks” was found in its ruins in 1934. See FR, book III, ch. I, pp. 280–81.

3. Letter to Alessandro Valignano, September 9, 1589; OS II, p. 78.

4. Ricci writes that the city’s name was Qujiang, but it was called Shaozhou, meaning prefecture, because the prefect had his residence there.

5. Called a
suanpan
in Chinese and still used for arithmetical calculations in China. For further information about numbering and systems of calculation, see Georges Ifrah,
Histoire universelle des chiffres
(Paris: Seghers, 1981) [trad. it.
Storia universale dei numeri
, Milano, Mondadori, 1989, p. 120, 383, 431].

6. Boards divided into parallel rows and columns on which pebbles and other objects could be used as counters to represent numbers and perform arithmetical operations. See Georges Ifrah, op. cit. pp. 120.

7. This decimal positional system uses the ten digits from zero to nine to write all numbers, the value of each digit in the number being multiplied by ten in relation to its position starting from the right.

8. See Georges Ifrah, op. cit., p. 131.

9. See Carl B. Boyer,
A History of Mathematics
(1968), [trad. it.
Storia della matematica
, Milano: Mondadori, p. 233].

10. Joseph Needham,
Science and Civilisation in China
, vol. 3,
Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and Earth
[trad. it.
Scienza e civiltà in Cina
, vol. 3,
Matematica e Astronomia
, Torino: Einaudi, 1985, p. 21].

11. FR, book III, ch. III, p. 297.

12. A. Benjamin Elman,
A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 466.

13. Peter M. Engelfriet,
Euclid in China
(Leiden: Brill, 1998), p. 101.

14. Peter M. Engelfriet,
Siu Man-Keung, Xu Guangqi’s Attempts to Integrate Western and Chinese Mathematics in Statecraft and Intellectual Renewal in Late Ming China
(Leiden: Brill, 2001), p. 290.

15. Jean-Claude Martzloff,
A History of Chinese Mathematics
(New York: Springer-Verlag, 1987), p. 19. This view is not shared by all historians of science and is the subject of lively debate. See for example Roger Hart, “Quantifying Ritual: Political Cosmology, Courtly Music and Precision Mathematics in Seventeenth-Century China,” and other articles by the same author: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rhart.

16. Even though most European mathematicians were also nonprofessionals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (François Viète was a lawyer and Gerolamo Cardano a physician, for example), they did form a fairly homogeneous community. For mathematics in the Ming era, see P. M. Engelfriet,
Euclid in China
, cit., pp. 98 ff.

17. Engelfriet,
Euclid in China
, cit., p. 99.

18. See chapter 8 (“Astronomy and the Emperor”) and chapter 10 (“The Forgotten Astronomical Observatory”).

19. C. B. Boyer, op. cit., p. 233, and G. Ifrah, op. cit., p. 135. The latter devotes parts of chapters 8, 26, and 28 to China.

20. C. B. Boyer, op. cit., p. 233.

21. J. Needham, op. cit., p. 191.

22. For the characteristics of Chinese mathematics, see J.-C. Martzloff, op. cit., pp. 69 ff.

23. J.-C. Martzloff, op. cit., p. 273.

24. For further discussion of the use of logical deduction in ancient Chinese thinking, see Angus Graham,
Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science
(Hong Kong: Chinese University, 1978).

25. J.-C. Martzloff, op. cit., p. 297.

26. P. M. Engelfriet,
Euclid in China
, cit., p. 136.

27. FR, book III, ch. III, p. 298.

28. Valery M. Garret,
Chinese Clothing
(Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 15.

29. P. M. Engelfriet,
Euclid in China
, cit., p. 61.

30. OS II, p. 106.

v

From Shaozhou to Nanchang, 1593–1595

The Master said, “Having studied, to then repeatedly apply what you have learned—is this not a source of pleasure? To have friends come from distant quarters—is this not a source of enjoyment? To go unacknowledged by others without harboring frustration—is this not the mark of an exemplary person?”

—Confucius,
Analects
(1, 1)

The Master was always gracious yet serious, commanding yet not severe, deferential yet at ease.

—Confucius,
Analects
(7, 38)

Do not impose on others what you yourself do not want.

—Confucius,
Analects
(15, 24)

Distance and Nostalgia

The mission was plunged into mourning once more in November 1593. Having made substantial progress with Chinese in just two years and being already able to provide real support, Francesco de Petris fell seriously ill with malaria and died in the space of a few days. Ricci had become accustomed to the presence of his fellow countryman and to relying on his help, but he now found himself alone again. In sending the news to Superior General Acquaviva and Girolamo Costa, he spoke of losing a “dearly
beloved”
1
brother, his “only companion and refuge in this wilderness.”
2
Now aged forty-two, Ricci had been living in China for ten years and realized that time had passed quickly. On thinking back over past events, he felt only limited satisfaction with the results achieved. The “passions,” as he liked to put it, had alternated with consolations. While he considered himself fortunate to have escaped the illnesses that had befallen his brethren, he had also suffered hardship and loss and had to fight against hostility and prejudice. There were only a few dozen converts, not many by comparison with the expectations of early years. In a moment of fatigue, he had even wished for “a happy death” such as the martyrdom his companion Rodolfo Acquaviva had found in India.
3

Echoes of the bitter reflections and moments of sadness to which the Jesuit gave way every so often are to be found in his letters, even though he seldom allowed his emotions to show in the reports of events he sent to his superiors and brethren. It was not customary for Jesuits to succumb to sentiment, revealing their human weaknesses and forgetting their higher mission. In any case, it can hardly have been easy to entrust one’s most private thoughts to letters written to family in the knowledge that it would take at least three years for them to reach their destination and as long to receive a reply. In the least favorable circumstances, the period of six or seven years between sending a message and receiving an answer could increase considerably, as in the exceptional case of a letter sent by Valignano from Japan in 1589 via Macao, which took seventeen years to arrive in Rome.
4
As correspondence was also lost all too often in the frequent shipwrecks, the missionaries sought to increase the probability of their messages reaching their destination by sending at least two copies, one entrusted to the Portuguese carracks taking the western route from Macao via India and the other to the Spanish galleons taking the eastern route from Manila to Mexico, where it would be transported overland across the isthmus of Tehuantepec to another ship bound for Europe.

As the letters made their long journey, events and states of mind changed, and all immediacy was lost. In the saddest cases, the messages arrived when the intended recipient had already passed away. In a letter to Fabio de Fabii dated November 12, 1594, Ricci enjoined him to continue writing despite the precarious nature of their correspondence because it was such “a great consolation” to receive mail, and he confessed his own discouragement: “Many times, remembering how many long letters I have written to the dead over there, I lose the strength and will to write.” Ricci wrote to his father Giovanni Battista every year and to his brothers less frequently,
5
but he seldom received a reply. In the second of the two surviving letters sent to his father from Shaozhou, he complained of having no news: “It would comfort me to know how they are and whether they are all alive.”
6
This silence on the part of Ricci’s family suggests that Giovanni Battista still harbored a grudge for his son’s choice of career and his abrupt decision to leave for the missions without returning to Macerata for a last farewell. Ricci heard of the death of his grandmother Laria not from the family but from a fellow Jesuit, and spoke of this in a letter to his father,
7
expressing sorrow at their separation, a distance for which he found consolation in the thought that earthly life was short and they would all soon meet again in heaven. The letter ended with this plea: “For pity’s sake, keep writing to me.”

Ricci did not fail to inform his father in his letters about the progress he had achieved in spreading the Gospel, but he also tried to introduce other subjects in the hope of interesting his father and perhaps making the remote, alien world in which his son was living feel a little closer. He told him, for example, about the Chinese products bound for Europe that he saw in transit along the river to the port of Canton. One of the most common of these products in Shaozhou, where it was collected in great amounts, was rhubarb, whose reddish bark was used in China above all to dye fabrics and whose root was in great demand in the West for the preparation of medicines, as Ricci’s father, being an apothecary, was well aware. Although the Chinese production was very abundant, the plant was considered rare and expensive on the European markets because most of the rhubarb sent from the East by land and sea was poorly preserved and deteriorated en route.

A very different subject was the Japanese invasion of Korea, China’s most faithful tributary kingdom. After the troops of the Rising Sun, led by the shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi, conquered Seoul and Pyongyang in the months of May and June 1592, the Chinese government was forced to mobilize the army and prepare for a war to expel the invaders. This obligatory decision was discussed with mounting concern because conflict would worsen the already precarious financial situation of the Chinese state, whose accounts were chronically in the red during the late Ming era.

The echoes of the fighting were, however, somewhat faint by the time they reached Shaozhou in the heart of the Guangdong province. Ricci continued his missionary work with a great deal of effort and little to show for it while awaiting the support of a new companion. This did not take long. About halfway through 1594, a few months after the death of De Petris, he was joined by a fellow Italian named Lazzaro Cattaneo from Sarzana, previously assigned to the Japan mission but then diverted to China by Valignano.

Minister Wang and the Reform of the Calendar

Cattaneo arrived with important news that was to mark a turning point for the mission. Ricci had always disliked being mistaken for a Buddhist monk, and his embarrassment only grew with the passage of time, as he informed Valignano repeatedly. His friend Qu Taisu had also made it clear to the missionaries that the robe of a bonze was not in keeping with the position they had established for themselves in Chinese society, and he suggested that they should dress in silk like the literati and introduce themselves with titles emphasizing their status as men of culture.

Cattaneo met Valignano in Macao before leaving for Shaozhou and discussed the problem with him at some length before obtaining the long awaited authorization. The missionaries were now permitted to grow their hair and beards, to wear silk garments similar to those of the
shidafu
on official occasions, and to present themselves as
daoren
, or “masters of the Way.”
8

Ricci was greatly relieved. The missionaries immediately stopped shaving and cutting their hair and had new garments made with a view to adopting them in the future when a suitable opportunity arose. The decision to alter the image and title with which the missionaries presented themselves to the Chinese could not have been timelier. Now enjoying a reputation for wisdom and learning that clashed with his shabby monklike appearance, Ricci was called upon to receive ever greater numbers of visitors desiring to see his scientific instruments and demonstrations of his skill as a mathematician. Even a
guan
of high rank like Wang Zhongming, who had just resigned his post as minister of rites in Nanjing for reasons of health, stopped in Shaozhou on his way to his hometown on the island of Hainan in order to meet Xitai, Li Madou, of whom he had heard a great deal. Nanjing in the Jiangsu province was the second city in China after Beijing. Its name means “capital of the South,” and it had in fact been the capital of the empire for five dynasties and during the reign of the first two Ming emperors. The city enjoyed the privilege of retaining the same government structure as Beijing and hosted six ministries (of rites, punishments, finance, war, public works, and personnel) identical in name to those in the capital. The ministers were considered very important dignitaries, albeit of less political influence than their colleagues in Beijing.

Wang spent an entire day in conversation with the Jesuit and was greatly impressed by his mathematical and astronomical knowledge. According to Ricci’s own account, the minister even suggested the possibility of his help being requested in the reform of the Chinese calendar,
9
explaining that the system had been in need of radical correction for a long time but the decision to commence was constantly postponed because the imperial astronomers were not capable of performing the task. The Chinese calendar was of the lunisolar type, and the year was divided into twelve months each roughly corresponding to a lunation, the period of a complete revolution of the moon around the earth. There was also a further division of the year into twenty-four solar periods of approximately a fortnight, each of which was divided in turn into three periods of five or six days. The beginning of spring, for example, was spread over the three periods named “the wind melts the ice,” “the animals awaken from hibernation,” and “the fish swims beneath the ice,” short descriptions of the phenomena of nature in that part of the season.

As the period formed by the twelve lunar months did not coincide exactly with the solar year, it was necessary to include an entire intercalary thirteenth month every so often. The Chinese calendar still in use had been drawn up by the astronomer Guo Shoujing for the emperor Kublai Khan in 1281 during the Yuan era and had been adopted with the name of
Datong
but no substantial modification by the subsequent Ming dynasty. Albeit very advanced for the period in which it was conceived, it had become obsolete due to lack of revision and was now out of step with the seasons and was imprecise in the prediction of astronomical phenomena like eclipses.

When the time came to set off again, the minister had Ricci accompany him to his junk and kept him on board talking until late in the night, probably with further reference to the problem of the calendar. The Jesuit was aware of the difficulties to be encountered in devising a perpetual calendar system and remembered what he had learned at the Roman College from Christopher Clavius, one of the creators of the Gregorian calendar. Ricci unquestionably realized that the reform of the Chinese calendar could offer the Jesuits an extraordinary opportunity, and it was probably then that he began to make plans to have brethren sent to China who were more expert than he was in the complex astronomical calculations required to correct the system.
10
He was in fact becoming convinced that success would confer immense prestige on the missionaries at the imperial court and would pave the way for the work of spreading the Gospel. Hope may have been kindled in Ricci’s breast that night, but he could scarcely have imagined how many years would have to pass and how many trials and tribulations the Jesuits would have to go through before one of their order was finally appointed with imperial approval to reform the Chinese calendar.
11

Confucius, “Another Seneca”:
The Translation of the Confucian Classics

In accordance with Valignano’s recommendations, Ricci never ceased studying Mandarin and reading works of history and philosophy in an effort to understand the culture of the Confucian literati. Only if he succeeded in sharing the knowledge of the
shidafu
would he be able to converse with them on an equal footing, present the Christian doctrine with real authority, and find the best arguments to convince them of the validity of his religious message. Deeper study of Chinese philosophy was also prompted by plans to write a new catechism to replace the one published in Zhaoqing on the basis of Michele Ruggieri’s text, which Valignano found unsatisfactory because it had been prepared without an adequate understanding of Confucianism.

Ricci devoted himself from 1591, if not earlier, to the study of the most important canonical works that Chinese scholars were required to know perfectly in order to pass the imperial examinations. In addition to the
Analects
of Confucius, the Four Books of Confucianism traditionally comprised the
Doctrine of the Mean
and the
Great Learning
, works devoted to the rules governing the society in the master’s day, and the
Mencius
, an exposition of the thought of the philosopher of that name,
12
who lived two centuries after Confucius and is considered his most important heir.
13
They did not contain a systematic exposition of a developed body of doctrine but rather provided precepts for correct moral and social conduct and recommendations for sound government.

The Jesuit began to study them together with Almeida and continued with De Petris in the conviction that the knotty texts would be a good way for his companions to improve their knowledge of classical Chinese. After their deaths, he went on alone and decided in accordance with Valignano’s wishes to translate the four Chinese works into Latin in order to acquaint the brethren in Europe with the thinking of the Middle Kingdom’s greatest philosopher. Michele Ruggieri had embarked on a similar project but had been dissuaded from continuing by Valignano, who regarded his grasp of Chinese as inadequate for the task and preferred to wait for Ricci to carry it out.
14