Year: 2002
Type: article
Abstract: The Company of Jesus was the first religious order established on a permanent basis in China in the Modern Era. In part, this was due to accommodation. This process implies, on the one hand, an acculturation process (the study of the Chinese language and costumes). On the other hand, a sinization (a process by which the Jesuits practically became Chinese). The politics of accommodation, formulated by Alexandro Valignano, were embodied by the Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610). One of the main points in Ricci’s accommodation was his interpretation of Confucianism. When he arrived to China, the Jesuits made an effort to get close to Buddhism, even dressing themselves like bonzes, in order to get close to the people. However, Ricci changed his habits and began to wear robes similar to those of Confucian scholars. It was at that time that Ricci set himself totally apart from Buddhism (he attributed profoundly conceptual errors to that theory) and got closer to Confucianism. There were also controversies among the different Confucianist strains. Ricci took advantage of this fact to elaborate his own interpretation, based on old texts and putting distance from neo-Confucianism. To him, Confucius’s original texts had some resemblance to Christian doctrine, but neo-Confucianist philosophers had developed Confucianism in the wrong direction, fundamentally because of the pernicious influence of Buddhism. Ricci proposed that his interpretation of Confucianism (which included, as a matter of course, Christian ideas) was the correct way of construing primitive Confucianism. Ricci’s interpretation was responsible for the Controversy of the Chinese Rites, that lead to the failure of the Chinese mission in the eighteen century.
Source: Estudios de Asia y África
Author: José Antonio Cervera Jiménez
Institution: El Colegio de México
Language: Spanish
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4383505765