Page 1 of 4

Could there be a topic more wondrous than an international group of Catholic priests working as technicians, artists and scientists for the Chinese imperial court in the pre-modern age? After three centuries, we still marvel at the enterprise of this group of Europeans, who tried hard to understand China and spent most of their lives there. They learnt from the Chinese, and taught them what they knew of European sciences and arts, and what they intimately believed about the ultimate meaning of life and the universe. We should not overlook that this was their central aim: to bring their religion, Christianity, to China. In the process, the Jesuits brought many other Western things to China and the Qing court: European notions of astronomy, geography, mathematics, and geometry; perspective and naturalistic painting; rococo architecture and French gardening; clocks and red wine, and so on. Our understanding of the Jesuits' role in Chinese history can thus enrich our knowledge of the court culture of the Qing period, and of the workings of East-West cultural relations, areas which are so prominently illustrated in this Oakland exhibit.

First of all, who are the Jesuits? They were established as a religious order of the Catholic Church in the mid-16th century, and you may know that a number of universities in the world today are run by Jesuits (the University of San Francisco, for example). Education has always been an important part of the Jesuits' mission. But besides education, one of their main aims was to conduct missionary work in the newly discovered lands of America, and in Arica and Asia. That is why we find them in China not long after their foundation.

The Jesuits arrived in China in the 1580s, at a special juncture in Chinese history. The latter part of the Ming dynasty was a period of great economic prosperity and unprecedented intellectual diversity and openness, but also a time of strong social polarization, of government disarray, of bitter struggles between political factions, and of devastating ecological disasters. As a consequence, Chinese literati were in search of a way to understand their fragmented world and reform the empire. Among the many options available for moral and political reform, a selected number of learned men in government circles found attractive the ideas offered by this new, so-called "Celestial Teachings" (Tianxue) brought by the Jesuits.

What attracted these literati to the Celestial Teachings of the Jesuits was the organic nature of their teachings. Let me explain what I mean by organic. In medieval and early modern times, knowledge was organized differently than today. We perceive history, theology, philosophy, physics, chemistry and so on, as separate disciplines. Moreover, humanities are rarely seen in conversation with the so-called “exact sciences.” However, this was not the case in the past. Before the Enlightenment, knowledge in Europe was constructed into a single hierarchy of disciplines. While some disciplines were more important than others, they were all seen as part of a unitary body of knowledge. In the hierarchy of the early modern period, theology was at the top, followed by philosophy, and then by what we call hard or exact sciences, and they broadly called “natural philosophy.” That is what I mean by organic: all branches of knowledge were interrelated, and the exact sciences measuring and describing the physical world pointed to the superior order of the metaphysical reality described by philosophers and theologians.

In China, the situation was similar in many respects. In spite of differences in the classification of knowledge and in the way the world was conceived, Chinese thinkers also placed “metaphysics” high on the hierarchy. The Chinese did not separate the physical from the metaphysical as starkly as Westerners did. Nevertheless, they similarly believed that all forms of knowledge, including exact sciences, were meant to reveal and explain the hidden, ideal pattern of the universe. Like their European counterparts, they also pursued a project of organic knowledge.

It is precisely this common belief in the organic nature of knowledge, both in the West and China, that accounts for the initial interest towards the religious and scientific aspects of the Jesuit mission to China. The Jesuits, as most people of their time, Galileo and Newton included, believed that there was a unified hierarchy of knowledge. They thought that knowledge of metaphysical realities had to be premised on the knowledge of physical reality. At the core of their hierarchy, however, remained a moral system centered on a supreme, ordering principle of the universe, the Christian “Lord of Heaven.” Some Ming scholars, in their almost obsessive search for a way to reform their decaying society through what they called “practical learning,” found this moral, religious and scientific system quite attractive.

But here lay also the difficulty in China: the anthropomorphic god of the Christians is not a philosophical principle, except in some rarefied theological models. The Christian God is a fatherly figure, who begot a son conceived by a mortal woman. This was too much to swallow for many Chinese scholars in search of principles of universal order. They had been trained, through the subtleties of Buddhist thought and of Neo-Confucian cosmology, to think of the supreme principle as a cosmic force, difficult to define, immanent in things, but certainly not having human forms. How could they accept the embodied divinity of Christianity?