The year 2010 was marked by many cultural and religious initiatives commemorating the four-hundredth anniversary of Matteo Ricci's death in Beijing on May 11, 1610. Symposia and seminars, exhibitions, concerts, movies, and theater performances offered a multifaceted representation of the complex heritage left by this Jesuit humanist missionary who introduced Catholicism and Western sciences into Ming China. The diocese of Macerata (Italy), the town where Ricci was born on October 6, 1552, announced the reopening of the canonical process for his beatification. The past two years have seen a tremendous expansion of historical scholarship on Ricci: dozens of books, special journal issues, and scholarly articles have been published all over the world. This expansion of interest in Ricci is by no means new, but it gained momentum after an initial round of celebrations in his honor held in 1982, to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of his arrival in China (Macau) on August 7, 1582. In 1982 as well, Jacques Gernet's Chine et christianisme, action et réaction (Paris: Gallimard) pronounced a negative judgment on the Jesuit enterprise in China, opening an intense debate about the meaning, strategies, and results of Ricci's mission. The most influential books on Ricci subsequently published in the 1980s included Jonathan Spence's The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (London: Penguin Books, 1984) and the English translation of Ricci's The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu shiyi, Beijing 1603) edited by Edward Malatesta (Taipei, Paris, and Hong Kong: Institut Ricci, 1985). In 2001, the four-hundredth anniversary of Ricci's entrance into Beijing on January 24, 1601, inspired another wave of historical studies. Furthermore, over the past three decades, several of Ricci's Italian and Chinese writings have been published with translations, comments, and annotations. These joined Pasquale D'Elia's meticulously annotated three-volume work, Fonti Ricciane (Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1942–49), a masterpiece of erudition that remains the unsurpassed account of Ricci's own chronicle of his time in China, titled Della entrata della Compagnia di Giesù e Christianità nella China (written in Beijing in 1609–10). This present review discusses but a small portion of the vast body of scholarship on Ricci, namely three books published in 2010 and 2011 in English.
Matteo Ricci: A Jesuit in the Ming Court, is the English translation (by Paul Metcalfe) of Michela Fontana's Matteo Ricci, originally published in Italian in 2005 (Milano: Mondadori). Fontana is a historian of science from Italy, and the book has significantly profited from the author's background and expertise. She follows a conventional biographical format, but always pays special attention to the scientific dimension of Ricci's enterprise. Scientific excellence was an integral part of the Jesuit worldview and education, and the curriculum of the young Matteo at the Roman College, regulated by the first drafts of the Ratio studiorum, is described in great detail. During Ricci's formative years in Rome, the Galilean controversy had not yet arisen, and freedom of research was guaranteed to some of the best scientists in Europe. Later, when Ricci was in China, the publication of scientific works and the manufacture of scientific instruments would play a prominent part in his enterprise.
Fontana's captivating narrative describes at length numerous aspects of early modern Chinese culture, science, and ways of life, comparing and contrasting them to their contemporary Western analogues: the printing of books, the examination system for government positions, geographical and astronomical instruments, and many other aspects of the “material culture” of everyday life (such as dress, transportation, cuisine, furniture, seals, and reading material). Every new place or person is described with a wealth of information taken from a variety of modern sources. Episodes from Ricci's life are reconstructed in great detail on the basis of Ricci's own account (Della entrata) and his letters. In sum, Fontana's biography offers an excellent overview, accessible to a wide audience, of Ricci's mission and of cultural and scientific relations between China and Europe.
Ronnie Hsia's book, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, is arguably the most comprehensive and informative biography of Matteo Ricci to date. This historian of early modern Europe, raised in Hong Kong and now a professor at Pennsylvania State University (USA), also follows a chronological biographical format. What makes the book unique is Hsia's facility with both the European and Chinese sides of the story, thanks to his ability to read the original primary sources, no matter the language in which they are written. Hsia crafts his narrative from in-depth research into a huge body of documentation and sources. His remarkable familiarity with original Jesuit sources, mostly in Portuguese, allows him to fill his narrative with an impressive amount of information, so very necessary for scrutinizing Ricci's enterprise. Hsia's dissection of Chinese reactions to Ricci's activities looks well beyond anti-Christian writings (thus rectifying Gernet's most serious methodological deficiency). His analysis of the records of Ricci that appear in Chinese historical accounts is more extensive than D'Elia's earlier work, and Hsia's scholarly contribution also includes a significant amount of new information on relevant late Ming sources. Hsia offers substantial accounts of Ricci's works and provides the first long translations or summaries in a Western language of some of Ricci's Chinese writings. The narrative is also enriched by original character sketches, such as that of the mysterious “Shi Lou,” the high official who accepted Ricci as a member of his entourage on the way to Beijing in 1595 (an ill-fated journey in which Ricci was left in Nanjing, from where he was later expelled). D'Elia had tentatively proposed that Shi Lou might be Shi Xing (Fonti Ricciane, I, pp. 338–39), but Hsia identifies him as Sun Kuang, the vice-minister of war, with whom Ricci's predecessor Michele Ruggieri had come into contact in 1586 in Shaoxing (pp. 101, 138–39). Also quite intriguing is Hsia's additional information about Qu Rukui, certainly the most long-standing and faithful among Ricci's friends: the wandering and destitute Qu was expelled from his high-profile family and his name stricken from its genealogy for having seduced his sister-in-law.
Hsia is eminently a historian, and he describes with great accuracy the early modern historical contexts of Italy, Europe, and China. Particularly praiseworthy is his extensive coverage of Ricci's confreres and companions, and their roles in the Jesuit enterprise in China. Michele Ruggieri, who preceded Ricci in his earlier, brief attempts to settle in China, is often overlooked or belittled, even by his contemporaries. However, Hsia (and similarly Mary Laven) provides a fair and appropriately full account of Ruggieri, with the entirety of chapter 5 devoted to this man whom Hsia calls “the founder of the Jesuit Mission in China” (p. 97).
Mission to China is the most recent account of Ricci's enterprise, written by Mary Laven, a British, Cambridge-based historian of early modern Europe. Laven eschews a conventional biography in favor of an original narrative that attempts to enter and even intimately understand Ricci's mind. She structures her narrative around key themes, including the Jesuit policy of cultural accommodation, gift policy, friendship (which includes perceptive observations about Matteo's somewhat cold relationship with his family), science and culture as instruments of evangelization, the doctrinal message, and controversial relationships with political power (Ricci has often been criticized for seeking connections with the powerful; however, his supporters were often unconventional intellectuals or marginalized officials). These topics are interwoven with a chronological narrative of Ricci's life that begins with a fascinating introduction to his attempt to map the world (happily, Laven avoids the common error of claiming that Ricci placed China at the center of his map, discussed again below). Other fascinating episodes include her descriptions of the “shopping list” of Alessandro Valignano, the Jesuit Superior in Asia (a list that included Venetian prisms, whose “power” was compared with that of Chinese alchemy); the journey of Ruggieri (included also in Hsia's account); and a vivid description of the surgery used to create eunuchs.
The most original feature of this book, which makes it a worthwhile read, is Laven's emphasis on Ricci's psychological history. She examines Ricci's fifty-four extant letters not so much as a chronicle of his life, but as a mine from which to extract hints that allow a reconstruction of his mental, emotional, and spiritual state. One example, among others, is the description of Ricci's capacity for “emotional intensity” when writing to his friends, something that eloquently appears in a letter to Ludovico Maselli (pp. 120–21). Laven describes Ricci as a man occasionally stricken by emotional maladies such as sadness and melancholy, and remarkably unapologetic in his readiness to admit such sentiments. In a few pages devoted to gender (chapter 5), Laven ventures into the realm of Ricci's and the Jesuits' sexuality and manhood, proceeding with a sensitivity and restraint commensurate with the restrained nature of her available evidence. Laven is well-equipped to analyze the religious anthropology and phenomenology of the late Renaissance and early Catholic reformation, and she offers insightful observations on the power of the extraordinary in Ricci's missionary endeavor (see the miraculous tale narrated on p. 195). For Ricci, the reasoned logic found in books was better than spoken words; but images were more powerful yet than books, being imbued with the ability to emotionally persuade people to accept the Christian message. Clearly, not all of the multifaceted aspects of Ricci's mission to China were the products of an articulated strategy or were based on the use of science as a tool of evangelization. Laven does not idealize Ricci as a faultless scientific, cultural, and religious communicator, but rather portrays him as the son of an apothecary (from whom Matteo retained a great interest in herbs and drugs) and a child of his time, as a “carnal” man (pp. 120–21) belonging to the Society of Jesus, and as a missionary who devoted his entire life and all his energies to a religious cause.
Reading any one of these reviewed volumes would be sufficient to acquire a general, comprehensive, and fair understanding of Ricci. Reading all of them provides a far more fully articulated and sophisticated picture of the many complexities and intricacies of Ricci's enterprise. Based on solid scholarship, the reviewed books do not contain any major errors. I would, however, object to Fontana's opinion that Leo Li Zhizao converted to Christianity out of gratitude to Ricci (p. 271). Leo Li's major intellectual, political, and economical commitment in support of the early Catholic community would suggest a deeper motivation. In addition, Fontana seems to keep Ricci at a certain distance: the reader comes to know what happens around him, but not much of his inner world, nor of what motivated him to keep going despite the constant fatigue and suffering that would have discouraged anybody else. Hsia's “Epilogue” is a commendable attempt to summarize four hundred years of Catholic missions in China and historical studies of Ricci. However, complex historical issues end up being oversimplified, and his bibliographical survey includes titles without academic value and omits valuable biographies such as Fernando Bortone's P. Matteo Ricci S.I., il “saggio d'occidente” (Rome: Desclée & C., 1965). As for Laven, her insistence on comparing Ricci's mapping of China to the twentieth-century mapping of Great Britain by agents from the Soviet Union quickly becomes overdone and misleading. Her reference to Gernet's work should have been more critical, as Gernet's polemical interpretation of Jesuit missions has been rejected by noted sinologists such as Nicolas Standaert, Erik Zürcher, Paul Rule, Julia Ching, and Claudia Von Collani. Laven's excellent account of Ricci's psychology also calls for further reading on the theme of melancholy, an emotional malady that Ricci mentioned in his letters and from which he suffered.
Very few inaccuracies appear in Fontana's and Hsia's narratives, which are packed with information. I mention here only the commonplace error, repeated in various venues and publications, that Ricci put China at the center of his world map. In fact, the central meridian of the map is situated just east of Japan, leaving Europe, Africa, and Asia to the viewer's left, and the Americas to the right. As Ricci reported in Della entrata, some Chinese literati were even disappointed to see that China was not located in the center and looked somehow small. In Fonti Ricciane (I, p. 211) D'Elia traced the origins of this myth of the China-centered map back to Jesuit writer Giovanni Battista Riccioli who, in 1651, misinterpreted Trigault's Latin translation of Ricci's Della entrata. The late-seventeenth-century Jesuit historian Daniello Bartoli appeared to confirm the myth, but in fact he only stated that Ricci, differently from European mapmakers, moved China toward the center of the map. “But this legend,” D'Elia concluded, “is tenacious, and I do hope that, after these honest explanations, it will be finally and definitively abandoned” (Fonti Ricciane I, p. 211). The historian of world cartography Angelo Cattaneo made a similar appeal, during a symposium organized by the Macau Ricci Institute in November 2009, to reject this myth once and for all.
Future studies on Ricci should, in my opinion, pay specific attention to theological issues, which are often overlooked. Ricci was, after all, a missionary trained in scholastic theology, and the rationale of his missionary method has to be interpreted in the context of its theological significance. For example, accommodation was a hermeneutical device rooted in Thomist thought and in the works of Erasmus of Rotterdam. In addition, Ricci's own writings explain that he articulated his evangelical message in two distinct literary genres: the catechism and the Christian doctrine. The catechism presented only matters that, according to scholastic theology, belonged to natural revelation, i.e., were comprehensible by the light of reason. Ricci discussed them with Confucian visitors and Buddhist opponents, employing the authority of the Chinese classics to bolster his explanations. By contrast, the Christian doctrine contains matters of faith, derived from positive revelation, that are necessary for receiving baptism and for living a Christian life. These teachings (which included the narration of the Crucifixion) were presented only to catechumens and neophytes. Finally, Ricci's aim was to sow the field for others to reap. While he did not baptize many people, he created Christian communities located in important urban centers on the way from Macau to Beijing (similar to the apostle Paul, who baptized only a few people and founded communities on the way from Jerusalem to Rome, his final destination). Ricci needed to obtain freedom and security for Christian preaching, something that only the emperor could grant, and this is why Ricci wanted to go to the capital. I would not describe Ricci's plan as an “obsession” (Hsia, p. 165), but rather as a well thought-out decision that he considered to be approved from on high. Ricci's dream of June 1595, in which Jesus indicated Beijing as the ultimate goal is, in my opinion, the most dramatic turning point in Ricci's self-understanding. The episode is certainly authentic, as Ricci narrated it to his friend Gerolamo Costa only a few months afterwards, when Ricci, oppressed by repeated failures, could not possibly have anticipated that the dream's prediction would ever be fulfilled. From then on, however, Ricci regained self-confidence and made the “ascent to Beijing” the vital purpose of his mission.
