Therefore, we can say with Saint Leo that it happened by divine plan that [the Tartars] seized the Chinese Imperium doubtlessly in order that “common preaching might more rapidly have passageways [to the people], which the government of one state holds together.”Footnote 1
So wrote Martino Martini in 1654, midway during his decade-long sojourn across Europe to rally support for the Jesuit cause in China. The Manchu conquest, the “first big Chinese event reported in the Western world” (Van Kley Reference Van Kley1973: 561), marked the first time, in European accounts, that China became contemporaneous with European politics and coeval with Judeo-Christian history. Take as an example Martini's incorporation of Pope St. Leo I (“the Great”)’s famous claimFootnote 2 about divine providence and the Roman Empire, which stresses the practical union of (one) church and (one) government. It also recalls the formal division, in 1555, of the Holy Roman Empire into either Catholic or Lutheran territories, and transcendentalizes a unitary order of power such that a radically dissimilar Other could be included within and brought under the shared history of Christendom. Like the Roman Empire, the extension of which was divinely ordained, the Ming-Qing transition was, as Martini would have it, part of the same divine plan.
By revisiting the optic of “accommodation,” a term broadly used in scholarship on the China Jesuits, I show that the ideological stakes of missionization, apart but not separate from the salvation of souls, were mediated by a textual-textile politics linking the this-worldly project of geopolitical calibration to the salvific redemption of all mankind. The modus (“mode,” “measure,” “meter,” “manner”) embedded within (ac)commodare quite literally defines the very project of missionization as a metrical project of adjustment and adaptation. By what tangible, measurable—and thus exchangeable and commercial—signs could a “religion” be mediated?
This article's return to the problem of accommodation may look like a step backward in view of the justly desirable turn toward understanding the Chinese cultural context on its own terms and the retirement of paeans to Matteo Ricci and the “so-called accommodation of China” (Goodman and Grafton Reference Goodman and Grafton1990: 98). And yet, the social history of accommodation, a history well within the purview of the project of provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty2000), has been largely overlooked. How did it frame the practices of translation and conversion that so occupied the Jesuits and their hagiographers? The semantic, semiotic, and ethical labor achieved by this term is worth a retrospective examination. Thus, this article has, confessedly, a Eurocentric slant, one that is itself a consequence of the perduring politics of the very term “accommodation.” Seldom without the company of either praise or censure, whether it be respect for how the Jesuits adopted the customs of local literati or cynicism over the cross-cultural sharing of science and philosophy (Gernet Reference Gernet and Lloyd1985), accommodation has always been entangled with Eurocentrism as a practice. And it is concerning the literary affordances of this practice and its bustling commercial undercurrents that accommodation has much to reveal.
Missionaries like Martini were immersed in what would become a century-long debate (the “rites controversy”) with their own superiors and rival orders over two classic anthropological categories, ritualFootnote 3—the practice of what they claimed were “civil and political,”Footnote 4 not “religious” rituals (i.e., the Confucian rites performed for one's ancestors), and language—the appropriate Chinese translations of the European concepts of God, soul, and heaven (see Mungello Reference Mungello1985; Standaert Reference Standaert2001). This encounter with the referential indeterminacy of translated terms and alien materiality complicated and contributed to the redefining of both categories, a project of purification (Latour Reference Latour and Porter1993) begun during the Protestant Reformation. One solution was the deployment of a semiotic ideology that enabled the cross-cultural translation of cosmically anchoring concepts (e.g., God) on condition that the target culture/language be canalized into a Christian genealogy. Thus, China could be seen not so much as “not Christian” as “not yet Christian.” Later Jesuit Figurists were to stretch this genealogy back to the sons of Noah, further rendering the Chinese as “not yet Christian again.” Radical exterior differences notwithstanding, the Jesuits appealed to a scalability that could, to paraphrase Anna Tsing (Reference Tsing2012: 506), extend the project of Christianity to China without transforming its interior content.
Even so, exterior contradictions, such as those seen in the earlier debate over whether colorful silks were appropriate garments for the Jesuits in Japan or were instead the Devil's work (D'Ortia Reference D'Ortia and Maryks2016), remained persistent obstacles. The textual traces of silk went below the surface. I examine the semiotics of accommodation by turning to the Brevis relatio de numero et qualitate Christianorum apud Sinas, “A brief report on the number and qualityFootnote 5 of Christians in China,” a booklet written by the Jesuit Father Martino Martini (1614–1661) early in the rites controversy. In short order, it integrates the genres of official letter, statistical survey, inventory, and conversion narrative. This concise summary of the China mission demonstrates how the biblical metaphors of fertility and fruitfulness used by early modern European missionaries indexed, or presupposed and entailed (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2004; Reference Silverstein2005), classical musings on sericulture in order to mediate, through measurable, accountable phenomena, the qualitative properties of divine politics.
In marked contrast to many of their earlier counterparts in the “New World,” the China Jesuits did not aim to import an undiluted European Catholicism; the perceived cultural sophistication of China as well as anxieties over missionary access motivated a different program of evangelization (Mungello Reference Mungello2009: 85ff.; Dunne Reference Dunne1962: 10ff.). Whereas the “discoverers” of America aspired to transform the “New” into a “likeness of the Old” (Pagden Reference Pagden1993: 10), the brand of Jesuit accommodation initiated and exemplified by Alessandro Valignano and Matteo Ricci (and sometimes dubbed the “Ricci method”) refers to the task of translating Christian theology into Chinese terms and categories. Yet the practice of accommodation was hardly novel; it had a medieval precedent in the late sixth-century Gregorian mission to England, widely known through Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (ca. 731). In response to Augustine of Canterbury's inquiry about the apparent inconsistency of one faith with “different customs” (diversae consuetudines), Pope Gregory I advised:
If you have discovered in the Roman, Gallican, or any other church something better able to please God Almighty, carefully select [it]; and that which you have been able to gather from many churches, administer with especial instruction in the church of the English, which is thus far new to the faith. For things must not be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things. Therefore, from each church select those things that are pious, religious, and correct, and entrust to custom these things, as though collected in a small bundle, in the minds of the English.Footnote 6
“Accommodation” is a modern term for any strategy of evangelizing that encourages some degree of syncretization with local customs; the related terms “adaptation” and “inculturation” are sometimes used interchangeably.Footnote 7 Although popularized by the work of historians such as Donald F. Lach and David E. Mungello, for whom accommodation “applies to the setting in China where Jesuit missionaries accommodated Western learning to the Chinese cultural scene and attempted to achieve the acceptance of Chinese literati through the Confucian-Christian synthesis” (Mungello Reference Mungello1985: 15), as a missiologic concept it was already in wide circulation by the early Middle Ages.
The debate over Jesuit accommodation in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries centered on the Chinese rites controversy and the related Malabar rites debate in south India. In a 1619 defense of accommodation,Footnote 8 Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656), a Jesuit in Madurai, explicitly cites Gregory I's instructions to Mellitus, a colleague of Augustine of Canterbury, to “[l]et these temples which were made for the demons, now serve to honour the true God” (Nobili Reference Nobili and Rajamanickam1971 [1619]: 69).Footnote 9 Bede's text, “necesse est, ut a cultu daemonum in obsequio ueri Dei debeant commutari” (Historia 1.30), appears as follows in De Nobili's citation: “necesse enim est, ut a cultu daemonum in obsequium veri Dei debeant commodari; for it is necessary that from the worship of demons [these temples] must be accommodated to the service of the true God.”
Something interesting has happened: Bede had used commutari (“to be changed entirely”), not commodari (“to be adjusted according to a measure”). Whether this was a manuscript error or instead a sly lapsus plumae on the part of de Nobili, commodari grants a much more generous, and degenerate, rendition of the tradition of interpretatio christiana that Christianized so many pagan sites of the ancient Mediterranean world. There was nothing specifically Jesuit about commodare—it was not associated with the Society of Jesus in the way that “accommodation” later was—nor were the Jesuits of one mind on this matter. What de Nobili's (and later, Martini's) use of commodare can do is help move scholarship on accommodation and the rites controversy beyond the impasse between the dream of cross-cultural synthesis and the revisionary criticism it later attracted for neglecting the interpretative failure of the Jesuits to “[perceive] those others as they were” (Goodman and Grafton Reference Goodman and Grafton1990: 147). Both of these stances, entangled with the term “accommodation,” have come to characterize scholarship on the Jesuits in China (Standaert Reference Standaert2001). This is, importantly, an impasse that speaks specifically to Western anxieties over the legacy of missionization and colonialism. The China mission emerged as a charming but short-lived exception in the annals of racism and exploitation: here were Europeans who, recognizing and respecting the antiquity and sophistication of another culture, reverentially remade themselves in its image. As Zhang Longxi has observed, Chinese scholars tend to be especially appreciative of Jesuit accommodationFootnote 10 (1998: 103–4), very likely more so than are their Western counterparts.
It is tempting to read into the difference between commutari and commodari the exceptionalism of the China mission. But the modus inside commodare (and, by extension, accommodation) ought to remind both optimist and pessimist that what cultural synthesis and interpretation have in common is an always already encultured anchor of reference, and that while this anchor may skew all efforts to “[perceive] those others as they were,” nevertheless it is the condition of possibility for any attempt at interpretation. What must be remembered is that the goal of the Jesuits, as missionaries, was the conversion of “those others,” not accommodation (Brockey Reference Brockey2014: 285). For de Nobili, pagan temples can be re-anchored to the Christian God. This potentiality complicates the relationship between sign and referent: far from a permanent association, it is a re-routable channel—but only if, on the same map, it was first mis-routed. So too did the Jesuits “invent” Confucius and present themselves as his truest exegetes (Jensen Reference Jensen1993), as once Origen invented Jewish literalism in order to “reveal” the Christian allegories already present in the Old Testament (Zhang Reference Longxi1998: 84ff.). De Nobili's act of “misreading” not only the temples (“they serve demons, but…”) but also the ultimatum of Gregory I (or Bede), of precisely not “perceiving those others as they were,” is critical to accommodation. If Bede was the more uncompromising reader of temples, de Nobili was, in fact, the more parsimonious: a single anchor of reference does not merely suffice, but rather demands, to re-map and re-measure all sign-referent routes.
But when referring to cultural customs, de Nobili uses a different term: “From this source—that is, the removal (translatione) of these men [the Brahmins] from their own customs—does that enormous difficulty [of converting them] chiefly arise.”Footnote 11 Here, translatio opposes the sense of commodare. Whereas even a temple dedicated to the “worship of demons” can be adapted or re-routed (in theory, at least) to the Christian rite, the Madurai Brahmins cannot be trans-lated or “carried across” (without) their own customs if they are to be converted. How then are language and ritual, the companions of custom, to be accommodated? Wrapping conflicts like these within the long-brewing revolution of European space-time and the stirrings of nationalism, the development of comparative history and the invention of modernity, Benedict Anderson sketches the following summary:
In the course of the sixteenth century, Europe's “discovery” of grandiose civilizations hitherto only dimly rumoured—in China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent—or completely unknown—Aztec Mexico and Incan Peru—suggested an irremediable human pluralism. Most of these civilizations had developed quite separate from the known history of Europe, Christendom, Antiquity, indeed man: their genealogies lay outside of and were unassimilable to Eden. (Only homogeneous, empty time would offer them accommodation.) (Reference Anderson2006: 69).
But this was not quite—or at least not yet—the case. Both missionaries and sinologists strove to accommodate Chinese history and language within a Euro-Christian timeline and geography. Their genealogizing was not only far removed from a notion of “homogeneous, empty” time and space, but also heartily assimilable to Eden. In particular, it was not language but rather silk, that fluid and well-traveled fabric of infidels, that was more commodious and elastic than what the “profound shrinkage of the European world in time and space” (ibid.: 68) might have later made it out to be.
MARTINO MARTINI AND THE FABRIC OF CONTROVERSY
“For what would the people think,” he said, “seeing a Mandarin, one who ought to be dignified, leave his chair to talk to a man dressed like a tramp?”Footnote 12
These were the words attributed to Martino Martini, a “Mandarin of the First Order,” twenty years after his death. Attired in a silk robe with a dragon ostentatiously emblazoned across his chest (Cambout de Pontchâteau Reference Cambout de Pontchâteau1682: 390ff.), Martini refused to alight from his litter to greet a Franciscan friar (the “tramp”) for fear of losing face in the eyes of the Chinese elite. The Jesuits, after all, had adopted the trappings of scholar-officials for the sake of legitimizing their missionary endeavors, converting aristocrats, and thus obtaining for themselves and their efforts official protection.
Rival religious orders had long sought to undermine Jesuit influence in Asia. In 1645, the Propaganda Fide passed its first judgment on the rites question—laying before the eyes of Europe what had until then been a local “Oriental” issue (Minamiki Reference Minamiki1985: 28)—in response to charges of laxity submitted by the Dominican missionary Juan Baptista Morales against the Jesuits. But complaints against them had been simmering for a century prior to this official rebuke. Although Rome, cognizant of the costs of the Japan mission, had granted the Jesuits the dispensation to participate in the silk trade between Japan and Portugal, they attracted no little condemnation, especially from the Franciscans, for dirtying their hands. The earliest mention of Jesuit involvement dates to 1556 (Cooper Reference Cooper1974: 224), during the early years of the Japan mission; by the end of that century, the Macau-Japan trade had become the primary bedrock of Jesuit revenue (Villiers Reference Villiers1980). Added to this was the traditional enmity between the Spanish and the Portuguese, replicated in the tensions between the Spanish Dominicans and Franciscans and the Portuguese-sponsored Jesuits. The fraught silk trade between Manila and Macau likewise reflected and reproduced this rivalry (Boxer Reference Boxer1946). The glut of Chinese silks entering the Spanish market meant that much of the silver mined in the Americas found its way into the possession of the Portuguese and the Chinese. Spain assiduously endeavored to develop silk production in Mexico (Castelló and Martinez del Río Reference Castelló [Yturbide] and Martinez del Río [de Redo]1971: 89), and indeed, the cultivation of Mexican silk was encouraged by the Dominicans there. But, however fine the product, it simply could not compete with the sheer quantity of Chinese silks coming from Manila by way of Macau.
Toward Martini's waning years, roughly a decade after he, flaunting the silken effects of a “Mandarin of the First Order,” imperiously snubbed a mendicant friar, the French, too, had entered the fray. Together with the Propaganda Fide, the newly founded Paris Foreign Missions Society (1658) sought to bypass the Portuguese Patroado and offset Jesuit influence in the region. Two years later, the Compagnie de Chine (1660), modeled after the Dutch East India Company and later incorporated into the French East India Company (1664), patriotically sprang up to finance French missionaries bound for Asia (Lach and Van Kley Reference Lach and Van Kley1993a: 231–32). The question of the Chinese rites, which members of the Paris Foreign Missions Society accused Martini of misrepresenting, thus coincided with the jockeying for commercial power in the matter of the uses and abuses of silk.
Martino Martini was one of the most prolific writers of the generation of Jesuit missionaries immediately following Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). He was born in 1614 in Trent, home to the inaugurating event of the so-called Counter-ReformationFootnote 13 or Catholic Reformation, the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Molded by the educational reforms of Renaissance humanists and galvanized by Luther's Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, the new “activist” spirituality (Olin Reference Olin1990: 11–12) of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries called for vigorous religious exercise (see Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, ca. 1541) and the unprecedented institutionalization, of a piece with the industrial growth of long-distance seafaring and ongoing Spanish and Portuguese imperial ambitions, of missionary activity. Chief among the new religious orders established during this period, the Society of Jesus, formally recognized in 1540, had from its very beginning positioned itself as an itinerant defender of the faith. Indeed, the former caballero Ignatius Loyola had founded the Jesuits to travel; neither monastic nor diocesan, the order was a mobile, international corporation structured for overseas evangelization (Harris Reference Harris and O'Malley1999: 217).
Martini entered the Society of Jesus at the age of seventeen. Nine years later, in 1640, he left for China by way of Lisbon and in 1643 arrived in Macau, where he continued his study of Chinese. While in Rome, he had studied under Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680), the Jesuit polymath and proto-sinologist (whose interest in Chinese characters related chiefly to their alleged derivability from Egyptian hieroglyphs). In response to the growing anxieties sparked by the rites controversies in China and India, Martini's Brevis relatio enthusiastically eulogizes the success of the Jesuit mission. Appointed Procurator of the Vice-Province of China in 1650, he was sent to Rome to lobby against Pope Innocent X's 1645 decree against the Chinese rites (which the Jesuits had disobeyed). His ancillary but no less crucial tasks were to fundraise and recruit for the China mission and to advertise its achievements.
It would be nearly ten years before he returned to China. After an extended stopover in the Philippines in late 1650 or early 1651, imprisonment in Jakarta, and a long voyage at sea, he reached Bergen, Norway, in the summer of 1653. His journey to Rome through Hamburg, Amsterdam, Leiden, Antwerp, and Brussels amounted to a publicity tour. Indeed, prior to the publication of the Brevis relatio in Rome in December 1654, an even briefer Zeitung aus der neuen Welt oder chinesishen Königreichen, anonymously compiled from what were likely interviews given by Martini (Bertuccioli Reference Bertuccioli1998: 149), had been printed in Augsburg. Martini finally arrived in Rome in the fall of 1654. The Thirty Years’ War, the last large-scale religious war waged on the European continent, had ended six years before. Queen Christina of Sweden, possibly the most prominent Catholic convert of the decade, had just abdicated the throne, and her subsequent arrival and residency in Rome would coincide with Martini's visit. (Her status and notoriety may have partially motivated his decision to devote nearly an entire chapter of the Brevis relatio to the conversion of women of the imperial court.) All of Martini's major works were published in Europe between 1654 and 1658.Footnote 14
Martini's defense secured the only papal ruling in favor of the Jesuits during the rites controversy. Pope Alexander VII's decree of 1656 permitted Christian converts to participate in Confucian rites on the basis of their purely civil function. Early that year, Martini left Rome for Lisbon; he returned to Hangzhou in 1659, where he spent his last two years supervising the building of a churchFootnote 15 and publishing several works in Chinese. He died in 1661.Footnote 16
At first glance, Martini's Brevis relatio fits squarely into a category of Jesuit correspondence (and later, general histories) regularized and institutionalized by Loyola's own directive to the order's missionaries to write back to him. These carefully composed, and often heavily edited letters were used to instruct the Society of Jesus and to publicize its efforts. They relayed information about a region's geography, people, customs, and beliefs. Many of these were compiled and published as “letterbooks,”Footnote 17 translated from Portuguese or Spanish into Italian, Latin, and other languages, and advertised as “very profitable and entertaining reading” (quoted in Lach Reference Lach1965: 319). In Italy they were sold cheaply or distributed for free. Martini's Brevis relatio, however, is neither an eyewitness account nor a field report. At times theatric, his re-reporting of the “number and quality” of Christians in China has nowadays been considered “an exaggerated balance sheet of the Vice-Province's triumphs” (Brockey Reference Brockey2007: 153). Composed during his travels and in consultation with other Jesuit materials (e.g. the Annual Letters), the Brevis relatio partakes of the well-established institution of missionary correspondence. True to its name, the text consists of thirty-six pages divided into seven chapters.Footnote 18
ACCOMMODATION REVISITED
In its original place-based sense, accommodation both corresponds and contrasts with the Spanish Franciscan project of reducción in the Yucatán: “To be reducido was above all to live in a stable place, in which things were done in their proper settings and people behaved in ways appropriate to those settings” (Hanks Reference Hanks2010: 25). Spanish missionaries in the Philippines conceived of the dual project of translation and conversion as a way of “reducing” the local language and its errant speaker “back” to their proper order (Rafael Reference Rafael1993). In colonial Peru, where reducción was likewise the forced restructuring of indigenous villages into square-gridded pueblos de indios (Durston Reference Durston2007: 77ff.), the spatial centrality of the church-and-plaza complex facilitated the public, processional catechetical performances that were the specialty of local Jesuit missionaries. There, too, it was the Jesuits who reproduced indigenous hierarchical distinctions via the differential assignment of performance roles to different status groups (ibid.: 289–90). Commodare is “to adjust according to a measure; to make fit, put in order”; reducido means “convinced and put in better order” (Covarrubias Reference Covarrubias and Maldonado1995 [1611] quoted in Hanks Reference Hanks2010: 2).
Evidently, China was far from the only mission field “accommodated” by a Christian order, and missionaries everywhere were usually sensitive to the weight of social hierarchy. Yet the China mission was unparalleled, prior to the expansion of Sanskrit studies in the eighteenth century, in generating linguistic interest among European observers. The Enlightenment-era hunt for the primordial, pre-Babellic language went hand in hand with the development of the new academic discipline of Sinology, which was inaugurated in large part by the Jesuits. Until the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773, they were the chief purveyors of knowledge about China (Mungello Reference Mungello2009: 130). Martini's teacher Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) had traced Chinese characters back to Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese lineage back to Ham, son of Noah (Mungello Reference Mungello1985: 143–44).Footnote 19 He admired the iconicity of Chinese characters, which supposedly accounted for the less mediated and purer quality of the Chinese language (Eco Reference Eco1997: 158–62). Kircher's interlocutor Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), who sided with the Jesuits in the rites controversy, also viewed Chinese as an almost-computational code; he believed that it bore a naïve resemblance to his Universal Character,Footnote 20 his own solution to the vagaries of referential language. Cryptography, kabbalism, hieroglyphics, and Chinese characters, all of which were considered more “immediate” media than alphabetic writing, influenced seventeenth-century attempts at constructed languages. Francis Bacon termed Chinese writing the “real character” because it “really” represented concepts rather than words or sounds (Okrent Reference Okrent2009: 46) and was moreover translationally ascendant because it rendered different tongues (Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Vietnamese) horizontally translatable.
In short, Chinese was both a measure for other languages and, more crucially, measurable—the characters looked like their meanings in a demonstrably iconic fashion. According to Ricci, “All the countries which use this kind of writing can understand each other's correspondence and books even though the languages are different, something which is not at all the case with our letters” (quoted in Spence Reference Spence1984: 137). Ricci's account (De christiana expeditione apud Sinas ab Societate Iesu suscepta, 1615) instigated the subsequent search for a “real character” (Eco Reference Eco1997: 158). Yet what is critical here is not that Chinese-qua-Other served as a measure by which Latin or Greek was defined, but that it could instead be measured by the same metric of biblical antiquity. For all his fascination with Chinese, Kircher never sought a perfect language by which to reunite all peoples but took for granted the universality of Latin (Eco Reference Eco1997: 165).
At the same time, Martini's confrere Prospero Intorcetta also pointed to measurement—this time, the mismeasurement of the formal aspects of Christian sacra—to advocate for the vernacularization of the Mass. The lingual incompetence of the Chinese twisted the monosyllabic plebs into the quadrisyllabic pelepusu—an incommensurable increase of syllables—and was responsible for the following monstrosity:
Hoc est enim corpus meum
This is for [conj] body my
“For this is my body” (from the words of consecration uttered by the priest during the eucharistic rite)
ho-cu ye-su-tu ye-nim co-lo-pu-su me-um
Worse yet, the Chinese characters selected as phonetic aids for the words of consecration (which, because they transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, are to be accurately intonedFootnote 21) formed “a conglomerate of meanings and unrelated and ridiculous senses”:Footnote 22 halitus, antiquus, dominus, officium, regula, pulchrum, quies, quisque, iter, fugere, res, meditari, viridantia, prata (breath, ancient, lord, duty, rule, beautiful, quiet, each, journey, flee, thing, reflect, green, meadows). Not only did this carry the obvious dangers of “committing many substantial errors and of changing the same words of the Consecration through the violent and crooked pronunciation of Latin,” he wrote in 1672, but it also ran the risk of “moving the bystanders to laughter.”Footnote 23 Another priest complained, “Not only do they speak like parrots without understanding anything, but they cannot even pronounce words that parrots can pronounce” (Buglio 1678Footnote 24 quoted in Waquet Reference Waquet2001: 54). Intorcetta lays out an alternative, this time with the Latin gloss below:
nai cu xi ngo xin
enim hoc est meum corpus
For this is my body
“The placement of these five hieroglyphics corresponds to the placement of our five words,” writes Intorcetta, “…and it settles it so that the same hieroglyphs do not mean anything other than that which our same Latin form literally means.”Footnote 25 As in the case of reducción (here, the number of syllables is literally “reduced”), the determination of placement, order, and number renders the suspect quality of non-European Christianity measurable and legible to the European gaze.
By rejecting the removal of Chinese characters from their grammatical usage, Intorcetta agrees with de Nobili that conversion is nearly impossible without the aid of “custom.” Tellingly, de Nobili had named as the source of difficulty not the translation or carrying across of custom, but rather the carrying across of the Brahmins he hoped to convert. Language (understood as a grammar and a lexicon) can be, and is to be, cautiously translated. Although the missionaries were justly concerned that their terms for God and the Holy Spirit bore the taint of paganism, the grammar of another language could, in theory, be skillfully manipulated to be commensurate with the grammar of Latin. But diverse peoples, so presumably short of any given civilizational equivalence, could at best only be accommodated to a unitary cosmological origin. Although clothed in the mantle of tolerance, accommodation in fact presupposes a mis-fit—the aforementioned “misreading”—between source and target such that the thing accommodated can be restored to its proper source and/or redirected to its proper target.
Although accommodation was not a specifically Jesuit term, it appears serviceably in the Jesuit translation of the Analects completed in 1684. To give just one example, the translation embellishes the pithy 我則異於是，無可無不可 (18.8, “I am different from all these [reclusive retirees]. I have no course for which I am predetermined, and no course against which I am predetermined” [translation in Legge Reference Legge1893]) with the following addition, invented out of whole cloth: “I adapt [accommodo] myself to all, so that, as much as possible, I can do service to all”Footnote 26 (translation in Meynard Reference Meynard2015). As Thierry Meynard (Reference Meynard2015: 543) has observed, this Jesuit Confucius appears to be echoing the words of St. Paul: “For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more” (1 Corinthians 9:19).Footnote 27 Accommodare was, while not a prescribed term for the Pauline tactic indexed through the wisdom of “Confucius,” by this point a useful signal to the critical observer that interpretive gymnastics were about to dazzle by showing, with no spectacle spared, that all that glitters—those surface-level differences in garb and grammar—is really just the same, already revealed historical tableau.
The content of “pre-” and early Enlightenment history consisted of self-reproducing narratives, anecdotes and exempla included, founded on set patterns that enabled the mirroring of the past and future (Li and Meynard Reference Li and Meynard2014: 90–92). An exemplum was a chronotope (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Emerson and Holquist1981) that could be summoned with the force of a “baptismal” moment (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003; Reference Silverstein2004) to contain and categorize unconnected events such that the ancient Mediterranean and the contemporary Far East could mirror one another and even appear coeval. Thus could Confucius be “perfected” by Jesus in such a way that conversion to Christianity was tantamount to becoming a born-again Confucian (Xiao Reference Qinghe2016), and thus could the Figurists, decades after Ricci and Martini, see in Hermes, Zoroaster, and Fu Xi the same figure of Enoch, the universal lawgiver (Mungello Reference Mungello1985: 321). The “discovery” of ancient iterative patterns could place the new within the framework of the old (i.e., a form of type-sourced interdiscursivity [Silverstein Reference Silverstein2005]) and establish an anchor of reference under which accommodation (and later, Figurist speculationFootnote 28) could be a simultaneously parsimonious and proliferative method of interpretation.
To recapitulate, accommodation in its earlier place-based sense involved the reordering of time and space. Missionary translation met the challenge of establishing new sign-referent routes by re-measuring (and, in the case of the Confucius translation, freely adding) what they understood to be a “language”—the concrete vehicle of thought that, once thoroughly investigated, would drive its inspectors back to the pre-Babellic inheritance of all mankind—in order that the “same” knowledge of the divine be revealed. Under this language ideology, the grammatica sinica was just another warped inheritance that, while responsible for the “conglomerate of meanings and unrelated and ridiculous senses,” nevertheless made possible the missionary enterprise of universal communication. Pertinent to this goal was Ricci's 1595 treatise On Friendship (交友論), his Twenty-Five Sayings (二十五言), and Martini's 1647 sequel, the less popular Pamphlet on Gathering Friends (逑友篇). For all the literary wit of these works, was the selective deployment of Epictetus and Cicero indicative of Ricci, and Martini as well, as more “a translator than an author” (Goodman and Grafton Reference Goodman and Grafton1990: 100)? Here too, Chinese and non-Chinese scholars diverge, with the latter preferring to view the likes of Ricci as mere translators and the former content with examining the potential Confucian overtones of these “translations” (Billings Reference Billings, Ricci and Billings2009: 19–20). Even if accommodative hermeneutics could be folded into the humanist toolkit (Goodman and Grafton Reference Goodman and Grafton1990), the results of such interpretive tinkering often exceeded permissible limits on both sides. The proliferation of designations for “China” (e.g., Cataium, Sina, Sinae, Tai-c'ing, Ciumhoa) partially reflecting the diversity of the “equivalent” Chinese terms (e.g., Da Ming, Da Qing, Zhonghua) came into being, often collaboratively, in the service of these overtures to friendship. Yet when writing to their European audience, the Jesuits recalibrated the emic, cosmically centered concepts of tianxia (“all under heaven”) and Zhongguo (the court, capital, and/or country at the center of the universe) into “China,” a (proto-)nation-state after the European model, decentered and contemporaneous with Europe (Chen Reference Bo2016). While this might seem to be a surrender to “homogenous, empty time,” it indexed, rather, the dream of mankind's unitary origin, a theo-political attempt to shrink the expanding world. Standaert (Reference Standaert2016) has argued that Chen (Reference Bo2016) himself anachronistically attributes a nineteenth-century notion of the nation-state to the Jesuit invention of “China,” a critique that might well apply to Anderson's sketch of the birth of “homogenous, empty” time.
TEXT AND TEXTILE
Mediated by Christian Latinity, the project of translating a world was anchored to a metric of biblical antiquity that cited and recited itself throughout human history. The task of the missionary was to recognize these citations and strategize accordingly. But as the failure of the Figurists to convince either their own confreres or the Chinese would later show, the basic gap between reader and writer could not be bridged by exempla alone. In his Brevis relatio, Martini anticipates readerly incredulity while still citing the same biblical metric in a way that acknowledges the indefinite purity of the imitation without drawing the damning conclusion of its impurity. At first glance, the rhetoric appears to be quite simple. Martini compares the passion and natural disposition of Chinese converts to those of the “primitive Church,” the earliest authentic Christians, as follows: “Assemblies are convened through the mode of Fellowship [Sodalitas] … some men are allotted to the duty and care of [the needs of Christians], the fervor of the primitive Church having been reborn here in a certain measure [renato hic quodammodo fervore primitivae Ecclesiae].”Footnote 29
The participle renato, “reborn,” in the tag-like ablative absolute renato hic quodammodo fervore primitivae Ecclesiae, together with the cautious hedge quodammodo, “in a certain measure,” presupposes a source type—early, authentic Christianity—and entails, albeit incompletely, the cosmogonic period of the Church. The effect of proximity between past and present achieved in this structure of likeness (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2005: 8) accommodates these idolatrous Others by recruiting them to the role of pious and primeval subjects; it becomes possible, via the reflexive hedge quodammodo, to commensurate the pure past and reborn present. Ironically, it is the unassuming indefiniteness of quodammodo that transforms strict impurity into degrees of purity.
The exterior rectitude Martini so stresses is the reflection of interior purity, the seed whose fertility (foecundo … semini) is externally proven by the spread of its “fruit.” The metric against which Chinese behavior can be measured is known only to the missionary, who then spares little when conveying to what degree these converts approximate the perfect Christians:
But although [the Chinese Christians] are very precise in these corporal matters, they are nevertheless much more outstanding in spiritual works of mercy. Hence with the greatest zeal they share with others as soon as possible the scarcely discovered treasure of the light of the Gospel; indeed, so that anyone can become equal to [aequiparari] the fertile seed that endlessly produces fruit among parents, familiars, and friends. You would believe that they have been made and arranged by nature toward piety: they are led by so great a reverence and veneration of sacred things. Many among them have leisure for mental prayer and meditation of sacred things, chiefly of the Passion of the Lord, and this [they do] with unparalleled disposition of the mind, with the most tender tears constantly bursting forth from the pious affect of the spirit, the fruit which overflows into exterior acts.Footnote 30
Measured against the endlessly productive “fertile seed,” the convert must duplicate its projected yield. Paradoxically, spiritual even-parity (aequi-par) can only be proven by external proliferation, resulting in an evangelical mathematics that is ever greater in quantity the ever more equal it is in quality. As for this innate quality, Martini exhibits the converts as “made and arranged by nature toward piety,” rendering nature and culture (in its original agri-cultural sense of cult-ivation) likewise iconic of one another: interior faith transparently “overflows into exterior acts,” and fruits beget fruits. Or so “you would believe”; reflexively exploiting the distance between reader and narrative, Martini suggests a hypothetical cause, complete with exaggerated effects, that maximizes the gap between reader and narrative even as it presents an ostensibly familiar picture of piety. It is as though readerly distance were compensated by the physical contiguity between unseen cause and reported effect: spiritual virtuosity is merely the extension of natural predisposition. But so what? What gives this blunt claim its bite is the covert scaffolding upon which it rests. After all, the relationship of physical contiguity between sign (e.g., the displays of piety) and object (e.g., the cause “you would believe”)—or indexicality—is just as concerned with manipulating social networks, temporal structures, and truth/evidence correspondences as it is with spatial relations (Gal Reference Gal2005: 29).
Beginning with relations of truth/evidence, one might recall that the locus classicus of “knowing a tree by its fruit” is Jesus’ warning in Matthew 7:15–20: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? So, every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears evil fruit. A sound tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits.” Martini's deployment of arboreal metaphors accomplishes two things: it uses familiar terms to ground an unverifiable truth/evidence correspondence and, more ingeniously, it indexes classical European notions of the Chinese, rhetorically prefiguring a cultivated inclination toward a very Christian semiotic ideology. Long ago marked by its distinctive “fruit”—that is, silk—China was at least fertile even if not (yet) Christian. Isidore of Seville (d. 636)’s encyclopedic Etymologies or Origins, whose lasting popularity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance can be gauged by the great number of surviving manuscript copies (almost a thousand!) (Barney et al. Reference Barney, Lewis, Beach and Berghof2006: 24), states the following about the Seres, or the Chinese, in Book IX, “On Languages, Races, Kingships, the Military, Citizens, and Kindred” (De linguis, gentibus, regnis, militia, civibus, affinitatibus): “And if all things were considered, yet more labels of races would appear shifted than settled, to whom [some manner of] reason[ing] has afterwards given diverse names. For in fact Indians are [thus] called from the river Indus, which encloses them on the western side. The Seres, a people situated to the East, among whom is woven [a kind of] wool from trees, received their name from their own town. About them there is this [unidentified citation]: The Seres, unknown by face but known by fleece” (9.2.39–40, my italics).Footnote 31
Nor was this information new. The name Seres may have arisen via metonymy from the Greek word for silk, σήρFootnote 32 (Yule Reference Yule1998 [1916]: 20). Already in Book II of Vergil's Georgics (29 BCE) is the same claim—“one of the commonest myths about silk production” (Lach Reference Lach1965: 15)—circulated about silk from trees:
Nor indeed can all lands bear all things. Willows by rivers and alders by thick marshes spring forth, as do barren ash trees on rocky mountains. Shores are lush with myrtle-groves, and finally, Bacchus [i.e., the vine] loves open hills, but yew trees the north wind and the chills. Look too at the earth tamed by faraway tillers, both the eastern homes of the Arabians and the tattooed Gelonians [a people of Scythia], countries distinguished by their trees. India alone bears the black ebony, the bough of frankincense alone belongs to the Sabaeans [a people of southern Arabia]. Why should I tell you about both the balsam trickling from its fragrant wood and the berries of the evergreen acanthus? Why [speak of] the groves of the Ethiopians white with wool [i.e., cotton], and how the Seres comb out delicate fleeces from leaves? Or the thickets which India bears, nearer the Ocean, a bay at the end of the earth, where no hurling arrows have been able to conquer the airy summit of any tree? And indeed, when using their quivers, that race is not slow. Media bears the bitter sap and the lingering taste of the abundant citron… (2.109–27, my emphasis).Footnote 33
“[P]oet after poet echoes the story down to Claudian,” writes Henry Yule; “Pliny knows no better, nor does Ammianus, three centuries later than Pliny” (Reference Yule1998 [1916]: 21).Footnote 34 In Vergil's cosmology, each race, nation, or land is known by its flora; exterior difference betrays interior difference, and this difference is absolute. Isidore's unidentified citation stating that the Chinese are “unknown by face but known by fleece” correspondingly defines them by their product, silk. The axes of interiority/exteriority and nature/culture that Martini draws upon works within, and are perhaps even prefigured by, this arboreal metaphor. Recall the afore-quoted admonition of Gregory I to Augustine of Canterbury: “For things must not be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things.” The logic of the medieval use of gardens as mnemonic placeholders for events in the lives of Jesus and Mary (Fulton Reference Fulton2004: 8) works similarly. Mary, for example, is not to be loved for the sake of the lily, but the lily for the sake of Mary. It is the flower's physical qualities that verify (and not only index) Mary's inhabitance of their corresponding qualities. Likewise, it is the specificity of the tree's unique qualities that verifies the corresponding difference of the earth from which it had sprung. Even though indigenous European silk manufacturing was well-established by the seventeenth century, wool cloth was, unquestionably, the European textile (Schneider Reference Schneider1978: 423). To claim that silk is not to be loved for the sake of China, but China for the sake of silk may seem mercenary, but it is the very prestige and cultivability of silk that indexes the quality and fertility of the Chinese mission field.
One of the key virtues of fruiting trees is that, like flowers, they are eminently cultivable. That is, they respond well to human “self-expression” (Fulton Reference Fulton2004: 10). Although Martini surely knew that silk did not grow on trees,Footnote 35 the fertility that he is trying to prove is semiotically rooted in the covert identification of a classically attested nature “known by fleece” to the metric of a fertility “known by fruit” in the New Testament. It is this irreducible “difference of the soil”Footnote 36 that Martini is invoking when he claims that “the fervor of the primitive church [has] been reborn here” and that the Chinese “were made and arranged by nature toward piety”—a nature amenable to cultivation and therefore proliferation. Such proliferation involved more than spiritual goods: by the time of Ricci's arrival in Macau in 1582, the Jesuits were already heavily engaged in the lucrative Portuguese silk trade, the ethical qualms concerning which they placated by stressing the basic need to fund the Japan and China missions (Cooper Reference Cooper1974: 246; Spence Reference Spence1984: 174ff.; Brockey Reference Brockey2014: 229). Martini's juxtaposition of the early mission churches—both that of the rites controversy and that of the earliest Christians—responds to the doctrinarian condemnation of the impurities of accommodation by using a familiar horticultural metaphor to claim a familiarizable harvest: the two-fold conversion of silk into ducats and of silk into souls.
CONCLUSION: SILKY SIGNS
In 1646, Martino Martini passed through the southern region of Mindong on his way to Zhejiang. Clad in silk and carried in a litter, he, as recounted earlier, reportedly refused to acknowledge a shabbily dressed friar, Franciscan or Dominican (depending on the accountFootnote 37), who had come to meet him. He did not want to be mistaken for associating with a beggar. While this episode became emblematic of the excesses of Jesuit conduct overseasFootnote 38 (Hsia Reference Hsia2009: 41ff.; Menegon Reference Menegon2009: 95), it capaciously illustrates the accommodationist rationalization for elite conversions. As Martini explains: “Thus advises the Seraphic Doctor St. Bonaventure: to work more to convert the wealthy and powerful than the poor and mean, because ‘greater utility arises out of the correction of one rich man than out of many poor men, for the salvation of the poor benefits [the poor] themselves, but a rich man, [when] corrected, benefits many … as the Leader of the city, so those who live in it; the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to the faith benefitted the Church more than that of many others.’”Footnote 39 Negotiated through the politics of fabric, St. Bonaventure's advice begins to take on a silky cast: the “fruit” that multiplies, in terms of wealth and in terms of men, is none other than silk. And it is, as well, the fabric of the sovereign. The abbreviated quote from Ecclesiasticus 10:2 (“as the Leader of the city, so those who live in it” [qualis Rector civitatis, Footnote 40 tales habitantes in ea]) indexes the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (“whose region, his religion”), established by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and expanded by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Attuned to the contemporary politics of church-state coordination, Martini's defense of elite conversions matter-of-factly maintains that entire states can and should thus be more economically converted via the “correction” of their ruler(s)—a thoroughly political maneuver which had an important precedent in the trade-minded Jesuit strategy in Japan (Tremml-Werner Reference Tremml-Werner2015: 80).
Accommodation thus involved the geopolitical recalibration of the cosmically anchored Zhongguo or tianxia into “China,” a political organization contemporaneous with Europe (Chen Reference Bo2016). Commensuration, or the “transformation of different qualities into a common metric” (Espeland and Stevens Reference Espeland and Stevens1998: 314), was the first necessary step. The Chinese mission field first had to be incorporated under a Euro-Christian cosmological framework. If Martini could say, after Pope St. Leo, that “it happened by divine plan that [the Tartars] seized the Chinese Imperium doubtlessly in order that ‘common preaching might more rapidly have passageways [to the people], which the government of one state holds together,’” then he saw in dynastic revolution not only the hand of God but also a very European conceptualization of the political community (civitas). As I have shown, the case of China is remarkable in that its spiritual fertility was prefigured by pre-Christian notions of its sericultural fertility. At this time, such “foreshadowing” was understood to be a divine language and not merely, according to a more Protestant perspective, a literary device (Yelle Reference Yelle2013: 97).
Like the securely governed state, St. Bonaventure's qualis Rector civitatis, tales habitantes in ea stresses that certain political conditions must manifest before evangelical fitness can obtain. What these conditions were, was a matter of contestation: some political trappings, among them silk, could be and ought to be borrowed. The art of discerning the political required nothing less than a scientia—a “Sinology”—upon which a militant (“counter-”)reformation of the faith could manifest: “May the Reader understand clearer than daylight that the Fathers of the Society ought to have an extraordinary understanding (non vulgarem … scientiam) of the customs, laws, teachings, and conventions of the Chinese, whence they [the Fathers] are able to easily distinguish those things that are merely political (quae politica solum) and those that are superstitious (quae superstitiosa), so that they can more easily separate good from evil.”Footnote 41
This scientia implicitly included, as well, the “convention” of silk, the ubiquitous but unspecified fabric seen in the portraits of Ricci and Martini, which had aroused scandal and controversy within the Jesuit order since the Japan mission. For all the accommodative bent of the humanist toolkit, the constitutions governing the order had explicitly forbade the use of silk (Brockey Reference Brockey2016: 184). It took decades of entreaties from within the Society—André Palmeiro's concessions despite his own misgivings about the spiritual contagion posed by the collecting and habitual wearing of silk robes (Brockey Reference Brockey2014: 302–6) and Alessandro Valignano's explanations that silk apparel conferred the authority to speak to authority—to overcome the “deceit and falsity of believing that silks made Christians” (Cabral quoted in Brockey Reference Brockey2016: 193).
In other words, silk was a matter of political science,Footnote 42 both as merchandise and as a channel of communication. After Ricci realized, in the 1580s, that the Buddhist garb he had initially adopted to signal his “religious” status was scorned by the elite, he quickly swapped it for the silk robe of the scholar. However, Jesuit accounts of Ricci's triumphs excluded the words seta and sericum (Brockey Reference Brockey2016: 207–8). Martini was not alone in carefully writing around silk: the word serico[que] is used just once,Footnote 43 when describing an ornate cloth covering a copy of the Gospel, a gift for the ill-fated Chongzhen Emperor, and also, furtively, a self-referential nod to the silk-robed Gospel-bearers themselves. Silk, especially explicit indications of donning silk, remained taboo. Here, too, Martini has an accommodative strategy.Footnote 44 Consider how the eunuch Van (baptized Joseph), “accommodated (commodabat) his own home as often as needed to celebrate the sacred rites, in which women were admitted, for whom under their ancestral custom it is not permitted to enter the temples together with men.”Footnote 45
It is no accident that here, in the “richly adorned prison of the Court,”Footnote 46 is the question of gender addressed. The Fathers cannot enter; the reader learns that eunuchs serve in place of priests. Martini has little good to say about “this kind of men” (hominum genus). But even here, among the most characteristically covetous, one finds “a lily among thorns, among the other Eunuchs very much devoid of these virtues [i.e., modesty, etc.]; Divine grace abundantly supplied what was lacking in Nature.”Footnote 47
Here the eunuch Van, despite being out of season once and for all, not only produces fruit, but forbidden fruit: the women of the palace inaccessible to outsiders. Celibate (like Joseph) and virginal (like Mary, symbolized by the lily to which Van has been compared), the eunuch can become, like the priest, generative in spirit. Van's structural accommodation of both body and home metaphorically reproduces the political accommodation of dynastic disseverment on the scale of a single individual. In both cases, fertility is the strange fruit of severance and sacrifice.Footnote 48 Once again, silk-fruit is not far from the surface of the text. St. Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) recounts a far more accurate tale of silk production (V.2.2) in The Interior Castle (1588), musing that “once this silkworm is grown … it begins to spin the silk and build the house wherein it will die. I would like to point out here that this house is Christ” (V.2.4). Upon the death of the silkworm, a white butterfly representing the soul emerges from the cocoon. Like the silkworm's silken house (or tomb), the eunuch's inaccessible interior castle is woven to accommodate metamorphosis. Together with his house-turned-chapel, the eunuch Van is the silk-clad means, as much accommodated as reduced, through which change—here, the numeric growth of the faithful—can be transmitted from the interior to the exterior. There is no doubt that the China Jesuits were familiar with Teresa of Avila's works, a collection of “Spiritual Admonitions” attributed to her is included in the index of Chinese-language Christian publications in the last chapter of the Brevis relatio.
However greatly inflated, the numbers of Chinese converts provided by Martini (thirteen thousand in 1627; forty thousand in 1636; over sixty or seventy thousand in 1640; 150,000 minimum in 1651) were modest in comparison to missionary claims elsewhere in the non-European world. Even so, it was the covert politics of silk that made it possible for the Jesuits, following their conviction that mass conversions of non-European heathens could compensate for numeric losses at home to the Reformation (Lach Reference Lach1965: 319), to labor away at these numbers. There was, first, the practical fact that no silk meant no elite converts, and second, the semiotic gymnastics required to say as much to those who could not stomach the sight of missionaries parading around in silk. For it was silk that served as the seen but unspoken medium of conversion between qualitatively different, and otherwise non-exchangeable quantities: “The missionaries’ ‘capital’ was calculated in number of converts, confessions, and communions as much as in Spanish pesos or silver taels” (Menegon Reference Menegon2017: 28). By dint of trafficking in silk, these diverse units could be collectively counted as “capital.”
The skillfulness of Martini's text lies in its present absences: fertile eunuchs, the horticultural metaphors that conjure silk without having to speak of silk, and the quiet redirection from ritual and spiritual impurity to degrees of purity. Jesuit Sinology was constrained by the currents of Counter-Reformation discourse on the categories and boundaries, then still in flux, of “ritual,” “religion,” and “true Christianity.” The transference of these provincial disputes to “new” worlds scaled up Christian disunity and provided interested data for partisans back home (Nongbri Reference Nongbri2013: 85). While such a focus confines the broader problem of accommodating Christianity to the narrow and one-sided European squabble over the superstitious and the political (Gernet Reference Gernet and Lloyd1985), inasmuch as the majority of Martini's texts were written for a European audience, he was concerned less with turning European qualities Chinese than with deploying Chinese exemplarity, silk included, to index the civilizational origo of early modern Christian Europe. He may not have translated a world so much as re-inscribed his own, but that which he did translate he was only able to encounter while clad in silk.
