A detailed part of a map of the Province of Peking from Martino Martini’s Novus Atlas Sinensis (Amsterdam, 1665). Martini (1614-1661), a Tyrolese Jesuit, created this atlas, the first major geographical survey of that country published in Europe.
Jesuits are no strangers to controversy. At several reprises over the centuries, individual members and entire provinces of the Society of Jesus were embroiled in conflicts over matters theological, political, and financial. During the order’s first centuries, some of the more intense disputes arose from Jesuit positions on free will, regicide, and religious poverty. Yet their bitterest struggle in the pre-modern era—save for the events that led to the suppression of their order—was the Chinese rites controversy.
A detailed part of a map of the Province of Peking from Martino Martini’s Novus Atlas Sinensis (Amsterdam, 1665). Martini (1614-1661), a Tyrolese Jesuit, created this atlas, the first major geographical survey of that country published in Europe.
As the name suggests, this was both an exotic and esoteric affair. It originated in China among the first generations of missionaries in Asia in the modern era. At issue were questions of religious terminology and practice that had to be broached if Catholicism was to be successfully implanted in Chinese soil. The early protagonists were particularly concerned with the intersections between indigenous culture and Catholic theology, and they sought to reconcile the two. Within years, however, what began as a difference of opinions between missionaries spread to philosophical circles in Europe and became a cause célèbre that involved some of the leading thinkers of the pre-Enlightenment.
At its essence, the controversy was a debate over translation and interpretation. It began with the founder of the Jesuit mission to China, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), because of his attitude toward his apostolic endeavor.
Matteo Ricci, SJ, and Xu Guangqi from Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667). Ricci (1552–1610), one of the first Jesuits in China, was known as the founder of the China mission. Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), a very influential convert to Christianity, was a member of the Ming dynasty bureaucracy from Shanghai who rose to the rank of Imperial Grand Secretary.
Moreover, Ricci considered the Chinese people to be sufficiently endowed with reason to be able to understand and obey Christian precepts. In order to propagate Catholicism in China, he would seek to build on the elements of Chinese culture that he deemed inoffensive to Catholic orthodoxy.
Ricci’s successors tended to agree with his impressions, although with some reservations. While they had a positive appreciation of Chinese culture, they viewed some indigenous practices as dangerously close to idolatry. To be sure, many Chinese practices had already been transformed by centuries of Buddhist or Daoist influence. This was especially true of the rituals of the Chinese government and the cult of the dead. While both traditions had origins reaching back before the arrival of Buddhist teachings in China, their forms were clearly influenced by them. Nevertheless, later Jesuits in China concurred with Ricci’s opinion that Chinese Christians could be taught the difference between idolatry and true religion. And they trusted that their followers would abandon of their own accord any native practices with heterodox origins. For the Jesuits, Ricci’s stance was vindicated with every new mark on the mission’s baptismal tally.
Although some of the Jesuits were not satisfied with Ricci’s methods, their disagreement did not cause the rites controversy. That dispute began when Franciscan and Dominican missionaries from the Philippines arrived in southern China. When these friars took a close look at the practices and attitudes of the Jesuits’ Chinese Christians, they began to suspect that the men of the Society were permitting heterodoxy at best and abetting idolatry at worst. While their objections were rooted in theological opinions, one cannot deny that ongoing rivalries between the various religious orders contributed to the tenor of the discord among the missionaries. The two main sticking points raised by the mendicant missionaries had to do with common Chinese rituals practiced by the Jesuits’ Christians. The first involved the participation of Christian mandarins in the Confucian ceremonies required by the Chinese state. From the Jesuits’ point of view, a good Christian would seek to excuse himself but, if necessary, could attend these obligatory functions at “halls” to “revere” Confucius, just as one would do for a beloved schoolmaster. Yet from the friars’ perspective, these mandarins were going to “temples” to “sacrifice” to a pagan god. After all, anyone could see that Confucian shrines looked similar to Buddhist temples and that the offerings made in them were of incense and physical objects. But according to the Jesuits’ interpretation of the Confucian classics, the cult of the Sage was purely political. Whose interpretation of these ceremonies was correct?
Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata depicts a Chinese scholar drawing Chinese characters. Divergent European interpretations of Chinese symbols were among the main causes of the rites controversy.
The Jesuits in China were among the first Europeans in the modern era to study the Chinese language. Since their goal was to transmit a complex religious message into a sophisticated culture, they subjected themselves to years of study before attempting to evangelize. The first Jesuit to dedicate himself to studying Chinese was Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607), who acquired Mandarin laboriously by drawing pictures and having a Chinese tutor teach him the corresponding characters. His successor Matteo Ricci, however, was able to rely on texts printed for Chinese schoolboys. Later Jesuits would use similar methods, benefitting from the experiences of their confreres who developed the first Western language course for learning Chinese. This course included readings and writing classes with Chinese and European masters.
The other central issue in the rites controversy concerned the use of “ancestor tablets” by average Chinese Christians. In a culture where the cult of the dead figured so prominently, it would have been impossible for the Jesuits to uproot all manifestations of respect for the dead. These tablets, typically set up on a table, recorded the name of deceased ancestors and often bore an inscription proclaiming them as the “seat of the soul.” For the Jesuits, the presence of such objects in Christian homes was similar to having a tombstone. They insisted that all converts were disabused of the notion that the souls of the deceased lived near the tablets or required sacrifices, although they did not prohibit them. The friars were unwilling to compromise on this point. Far too many Christians, they claimed, were unclear about the nature of these pagan holdovers and could not be trusted to use them correctly.
In the early decades of the rites controversy, during the middle of the seventeenth century, the main protagonists were the Manila-based friars who started the debate and the Jesuits in China. In the 1640s, the friars sent representatives to Rome to seek papal condemnation of the Jesuits’ policies and succeeded in obtaining it in 1645. Naturally, the Jesuits sought vindication at Rome and gained it in 1656 by describing the same ceremonies and rituals using different terms. So with each side armed with papal declarations, the Jesuits continued to permit the Chinese rites among their Christians while the mendicants began to prohibit them. During the same period, the Jesuits’ flocks, which numbered over 100,000 Chinese Catholics, were spread across the breadth of the Qing empire, whereas the friars tended to their converts numbering in the thousands and confined to the southeastern Chinese coast. But the Jesuits were aware that their mission would suffer dramatically if the papacy prohibited them from tolerating the practice of the Chinese rites.
The Chinese rites controversy embroiled Europe in a war of pamphlets written by detractors and supporters of the various religious orders ministering in China. A papal bull in 1742 quashed the debate.
By airing their grievances at Rome, the Franciscan and Dominican friars and the Jesuits turned a Chinese affair into a European one. News of the disputes reached Europe at about the same time that Blaise Pascal was publishing his Provincial Letters, a work that lampooned the Jesuits, and this further proof of Jesuit misdoing was warmly received in many quarters. While the original dispute over the rites had involved men who had spent time in Asia and were familiar with Chinese realities, the debate in Europe was joined by men who had ulterior motives for either attacking or defending the Society of Jesus. The result was a drawn-out pamphlet war, with each side parsing the writings of the China missionaries in minute detail and adding their own judgments of the rites. While some participants issued opinions about the underlying questions of religious practice, many more seized the opportunity to attack the Society of Jesus in print. So the dispute over the controversy was gradually turned by the Jesuits’ most hostile critics into a public airing of the their purported wrongs.
Johann Adam Schall (1591–1666), a German Jesuit missionary to China, was an adviser to the emperor, taught mathematics, and helped reform the Chinese calendar. |
By the late seventeenth century, the level of rancor over the Chinese rites reached such a pitch that the papacy was spurred to resolve the problem. Siding with the opinions of the Sorbonne theology faculty, the cardinals of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, and the Roman Inquisition, Pope Clement XI issued a condemnation of the rites in 1704 and moved to make his decision known in China. The following year he sent a legate to the Kangxi emperor with the goal of bringing the Jesuits into line.
After that point, a further bone of contention was added to the mass of criticisms leveled against the Society of Jesus—insubordination. The Jesuits in China could not believe that the policies developed and tested by them over the span of a century should be called into question by men wholly unfamiliar with China. The missionaries therefore refused to obey the papal legate, pleading that their views on the rites had not been given sufficient consideration. Yet in the echo chamber of contemporary Paris and Rome, the Jesuits’ objections were seen as mere obstructionism and ignored. A series of subsequent condemnations of the rites culminated in a papal bull in 1742 that imposed silence on debates over the issue, a public rebuke to the Society that helped set the stage for the suppression of the order three decades later.
Seen from the vantage point of the early 21st century, it is surprising that the furor over the Chinese rites had so little to do with China itself and the fate of the Chinese Catholics. The papal condemnations, combined with the sensible refusal of the Chinese authorities to accept Rome’s interpretations of their culture, had the effect of stifling the spread of Christianity in China for more than a century. Perhaps fittingly, when the Vatican reopened the issue due to its concern for the welfare of Asian Catholics (prompted by the unenviable status of Japan’s Catholics in the increasingly ultranationalist atmosphere of that country in the 1930s), the papacy reversed its position on the Chinese rites. 
Liam Brockey, an assistant professor at Princeton, teaches European and Catholic history. He has written articles on the Jesuits in China as well as Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Harvard 2007). He is working on a study of sixteenth-century Lisbon.