UNDERSTANDING RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
UNDERSTANDING RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
The Prospects for Interreligious and Intercultural Understanding
The Jesuit Case and Its Theoretical Implications
CHARLES B. JONES
INTRODUCTION
For the past several years, I have been reading and translating anti-Jesuit polemical literature and Jesuit apologetic responses of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties (roughly 1600–1724). In the course of the research I have read through much literature by Western and Chinese scholars, and I have found in their writings not only their analyses of the historical facts, but also their judgments upon the Jesuit missionaries. These generally fall into three patterns in accordance with the authors’ particular horizons:
1. Jesuit and some American historians such as George Dunne and Liam Brockey tend to judge the Jesuits favorably. For them, the missions were successful both in making converts and in initiating a cultural exchange between East and West. In David Mungello’s reading, they are the forefathers of modern sinology.1
Chinese authors such as Yu Liu, Ping-yi Chu, and Qiong Zhang, render more negative judgments of the Jesuits as cultural interlopers.
1. See Dunne, Generation of Giants; Brockey, Journey to the East; Mungello, Curious Land.
Since missionaries assume a priori that other cultures need their gospel before they know anything about them, they cannot be anything but intruders. Some believe that the Jesuits’ friendly demeanor masked more sinister intentions. For example, Liu says,
Like . . . other Europeans, Ricci was animated by “a will to conquer and proselytize.” Unlike them, however, he recognized and accepted the limitations of European power in China. . . . When he refashioned himself in 1595 as a Confucian scholar-official, he revealed in addition his newly acquired sense of how accommodation could be best utilized for his evangelical purposes.2
2. The language of conquest recurs throughout Liu’s article, and in his conclusions, Liu avers that Ricci would have preferred the use of force to dominate China had it been possible, but chose dissimulation and accommodation as a fallback plan.3
3. European scholars such as Erik Zürcher and Jacques Gernet also looked unfavorably upon the Jesuits for similar reasons. In their judgment, the Jesuits were doomed to fail because the Chinese represented a superior culture which the Jesuits never understood.4
In this chapter I propose to leave the first category aside and examine possible reasons for the two negative judgments. In the next section, I will focus on two systematic arguments that hold that true intercultural communication is impossible in the nature of things regardless of the skill, sensitivity, and goodwill of the practitioners. Following that, I will list some practical arguments that specify only why in this case communication did not take place. Finally, I will argue that the Jesuit missions to China were a qualified though incomplete success and offer methodological suggestions for assessing other instances of interreligious encounter.
SYSTEMATIC CRITICISMS OF THE JESUITS
European and Chinese scholars generally hold that the Jesuits did not understand their host culture and its long history of philosophical-religious thought. Although rarely explicit, one may discern behind their opinions certain theories of intercultural exchange which deny the possibility of
2. Liu, “Intricacies of Accommodation,” 466.
3. Ibid., 480.
4. See Zürcher, “In the Beginning,” 163.
mutual understanding even under the best of circumstances. These are the theories of linguistic relativity and incommensurability.
The theory of linguistic relativity goes by many names, including “linguistic determinism,” “the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” or the “guidance and constraint hypothesis.” This theory has a long pedigree, and although it is frequently associated with the anthropologist Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and the linguist Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941), the basic idea goes back at least to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s (1768–1834) essay, “On the Different Methods of Translating” (“Methoden des Übersetzens,” 1813). Simply stated, this theory holds that language determines thought and worldview so that people coming from different language groups will construe the world in significantly different ways. A weak version of the hypothesis posits various discrete areas of mutual unintelligibility while allowing for overlaps in worldview that permit some level of communication. In stronger versions, the worldviews will be so incompatible with each other that no true understanding or interlinguistic communication is possible. If one accepts this, then it would follow that the Jesuits, whose minds were formed completely by European languages, would never be able to comprehend Chinese thought, couched as it is in an alien and unrelated language.
It cannot be our purpose to detail all the “strong” and “weak” versions of this theory or the attempts to test it experimentally, but that does not really matter, since most scholars who give appraisals of the Jesuits in China do not make a sophisticated use of it. Erik Zürcher, for example, simply says this: “The subject of this paper has been yet another dialogue of misunderstandings: a clash of beliefs that never developed into a real exchange of views, mainly because the basic concepts and assumptions were so far apart that they did not belong to the same universe of discourse.” The assertion that “universes of discourse” can be so different that a “real exchange of views” becomes impossible is a form of linguistic relativity, here expressed without elaboration. We thus must present some of the hypothesis’ salient points, and then proceed to an evaluation of its utility for analyzing the Jesuits in China.
Benjamin Whorf based his version of the theory on observations of deep differences in the ways that various languages allowed their speakers to relate to the world. He pointed to studies of Hopi language that purported to show that they had a very different conception of time than did speakers of European languages, and suggested this meant they lived in a thought-world where time had a different texture and feel to it. It was not punctuated into moments of past, present, and future, but rather confronted Hopi speakers with a world that stretched along a timeless continuum. In addition, he pointed out that the Inuit had far more words words for “snow” than Western languages to illustrate the way that a people’s environment can constrain their language.8 In the case of Chinese versus European worldviews, others have argued that Chinese (spoken and classical) has no way of expressing counterfactuals, with the result that Chinese people cannot articulate ideas in the subjunctive mode or raise hypothetical situations. Examples such as these are often given as supports for the strong version of the theory, which would imply the untranslatability of one language, and therefore one worldview, into another. If this is true, then one might suppose that the Jesuits were never going to understand the Chinese worldview and vice versa. How strong are this hypothesis’s warrants?
While some empirical studies do demonstrate differences in worldview that correlate well with the structure of language, the theory does not hold up in its strongest form that insists that languages (and cultures) are radically untranslatable. The data upon which Whorf based his hypothesis have been shown to be dubious. Geoffrey Pullum’s 1991 book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, among other works, demonstrated that native northern Alaskan languages have no more words for snow than any European language, especially if one takes into account phrases as well as words (e.g., English terms like “drifting snow” or “wet/dry snow”).9 In addition,
address, Dialoog der misverstanden. In it, he uses the term “misverstanden” in Dutch with the sense of two parties talking past one another with no real understanding or connection. I thank Wilhelmus Valkenberg for reading this piece with me and explaining the nuances of this term.
8. See Whorf, “Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language” for other examples.
9. Pullam, Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. See also Martin, “Eskimo Words for Snow.”
Ekkehart Malotki’s monograph Hopi Time provided translations from Hopi language such as the following epigraph to his book: “Then, indeed, the following day, quite early in the morning at the hour when people pray to the sun, around that time then he woke up the girl again.”10
As to the case of the supposedly missing Chinese counterfactuals, Robert Wardy points to Confucius’ Analects, 3:9. Here is the text with James Legge’s translation:
The Master said, “I could describe the ceremonies of the Xia dynasty, but Ji cannot sufficiently attest my words. I could describe the ceremonies of the Yin dynasty, but Song cannot sufficiently attest my words. (They cannot do so) because of the insufficiency of their records and wise men. If those were sufficient, I could adduce them in support of my words.”
If Chinese cannot articulate counterfactuals, then the last two statements would directly contradict one another: “They cannot do so because of the insufficiency of their records and wise men. They are sufficient, and thus I can adduce them in support of my words.” For the text to make sense, the latter sentence must be translated as a counterfactual.12 The principle of charity, as Donald Davidson reminds us, requires that when someone utters a sentence that they believe to be true, we must assume that it relates to a truth that we could also accept. Otherwise, we have to assume that anyone who says something that we cannot understand is mad.13 In order to grant that Confucius did not mean to contradict himself, we must assume he is using a counterfactual.
One sustained scholarly critique of the theory of linguistic relativity, happily enough, deals directly with the China Jesuits. In Aristotle in China, Robert Wardy presents extracts from the Mínglʕ tàn ৡ⧚, a 1631 Chinese translation of Aristotle’s Categories published by Francisco Furtado and Li Zhizao ᴢП㯏. He found that, no matter how abstruse or technical the philosophical arguments, and even when the argument was based on Greek and Latin word morphology without parallel in literary Chinese, the translators succeeded in conveying the meaning. In some cases, Wardy judged the Chinese even clearer than the original Greek!14 Thus, it appears that Chinese is not as inhospitable to European thought in translation as a hard version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis might hold.
10. Malotki, Hopi Time, n.p.; cited in Wardy, Aristotle in China, 14.
11. Legge, Chinese Classics, 1:22. Romanization modified.
12. Wardy, Aristotle in China, 29n102.
13. Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” 19.
14. Wardy, Aristotle in China, 120.
All this, I think, erodes the claim that the “universes of discourse” inhabited by European missionaries and Chinese intellectuals were so different as to preclude adequate mutual understanding. However, as Gadamer noted, translation is only the first step in understanding.15 After successful translation, further obstacles to understanding lie in wait, which we may group under the rubric “incommensurability.”
Incommensurability
The idea of incommensurability is similar to that of linguistic relativity, but covers a broader terrain with less precision.16 While I examined the theory of linguistic relativity above as a way of evaluating narrowly focused questions of translatability, here I will look at incommensurability to widen the inquiry beyond translation problems.
The concept of incommensurability was first enunciated in the early 1960s by philosophers of science Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. Borrowing the term from mathematics, in which it signifies the failure of one unit of measure to indicate the dimension of another unit without remainder (e.g., the incommensurability of the radius and circumference of a circle), they used it to indicate the inability to transfer information from one scientific paradigm to another. Both men received scholarly criticism for the term’s lack of precision, and Kuhn reformulated the idea several times.17 In a 1982 article, Kuhn proposed a “very modest form” of incommensurability, which he said applied not only to scientific communities and specializations, but to anthropology and other cross-cultural pursuits as well.
First, Kuhn distinguished between “translation” and “interpretation,” something he held philosophers such as Quine had mistakenly conflated. “Translation” always involves two languages and the transfer of text from one to another; “interpretation” need not involve another language, although it might.18 An anthropologist might hear a native word and employ one of a number of strategies to make it meaningful in his or her own language. First, there might be an exact equivalent for the word in English, such as “dog,” making the meaning very clear. Second, lacking such an exact equivalent, the anthropologist might describe the phenomenon in clear English. Neither of these two instances exemplifies incommensurability between the two languages or cultures. However, in a third instance the native manner
15. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 180.
16. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 79.
17. See Chen, “Thomas Kuhn’s Latest Notion of Incommensurability,” 257–58.
18. Kuhn, “Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability,” 672–73.
of conceptualizing the phenomenon might be embedded in such a different way of categorizing things that not even a description can convey the sense of the term; this would be an instance of incommensurability.19 This reduces the concept of incommensurability to another version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, since it posits linguistic or conceptual frames as the impediment to understanding, and hence is subject to the critique given above.
Other authors use the word differently. Paul Griffiths put forward an “incommensurability thesis” according to which a religious community’s insiders hold not only doctrines but also the criteria by which they judge doctrines to be sensible and useful or not. Members of competing communities cannot pass valid judgments on the sense and utility of one another’s doctrines, simply because they bring different criteria to bear. In short, no community’s beliefs may
legitimately be assessed by external critics.20 Garrett Green cites several authors who describe people as “imprisoned” within conceptual worlds in such a way that they cannot meaningfully communicate with people who inhabit other conceptual prisons.21 Green himself draws upon Clifford Geertz’s classic distinction between “world view” and “ethos” to point out that religions and cultures do not merely propound doctrines (the “world view”), but also inculcate distinctive moods, motivations, ethical systems, and aesthetic styles that contribute to mutual incomprehension as well.22 Richard Rorty put the matter thus: By “commensurable” I mean able to be brought under a set of rules which will tell us how rational agreement can be reached or what would settle the issue on every point where statements seem to conflict. These rules tell us how to construct an ideal situation, in which all residual disagreements will be seen to be “noncognitive” or merely verbal, or else merely temporary—capable of being resolved by doing something further.23
I will take the claim of incommensurability to mean that, not only are languages untranslatable, but that the concepts contained within two linguistic-cultural complexes are so disparate that they could not even be explained outside their own circles. In other words, not only could one not translate a text from another language into one’s own; one could not even explain its contents in one’s own words to others of one’s community. One may perhaps account for this by appeal to the concept of “orientation” put
19. Kuhn, “Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability,” 673.
20. Griffiths, Apology for Apologetics, 27–28.
21. Green, “Are Religions Incommensurable?,” 226.
22. Ibid., 224.
23. Quoted in Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 61.
forward by Nicholas Rescher. For him, an “orientation” is a fundamental way of seeing the world, a way that undergirds and provides a framework for the views we articulate, but of which we may not be conscious. If so, it would be s source of mutual incomprehension that would be very difficult even to detect, let alone overcome.24 It would render almost impossible the production of an annotated translation or a basic commentary.
Some Chinese authors have made such claims. Ping-yi Chu argues that the Aristotelian basis of Jesuit teachings made them incomprehensible to their Chinese readership. The story of Jesus’ birth to a virgin seemed heretical, and Confucian scholar-officials could never accept that Jesus deserved reverence after being condemned as a rebel by the competent political authorities.25 He concludes: “This was a vain attempt at a dialogue between two incommensurable world views.”26 Yuming Sun, after describing the depiction of Jesus as the incarnation of the Lord of Heaven (tianzhu Џ) in artwork that the Jesuits brought with them, declares that the Chinese would not have been able to make sense of such a depiction, since Heaven and the “Sovereign on High” (shangdi ϞᏱ) were incorporeal and suprasensible in their classical texts. He concludes, “Here is a classic example of cultural untranslatability.”27 In sum, the incommensurability thesis would hold that the Jesuits and their Chinese interlocutors never had a chance of understanding one another; their intellectual, historical, and cultural backgrounds were too different to have allowed that.
On such bases as these, some critics of the Jesuit missions hold that, in theory, any European-Chinese dialogue was doomed to failure because their modes of thought and expression inhabited irreconcilable universes of meaning. While, as Wolfgang Kubin says, such theories may be a useful tonic against the other extreme view, namely that accurate translation and adequate understanding occur easily and quickly,28 we must not let them
24. Rescher, “Philosophical Disagreement.”
25. Yang, Bùdéy ϡᕫᏆ [I cannot forebear], 450a, is a good example.
26. Chu, “Technical Knowledge,” 100.
27. Sun, “Cultural Translatability,” 468. Sun does not use the word “incommensurability,” but since he is not speaking of the translation of texts and modifies the word “translatability” with “cultural,” I believe he means something very like “incommensurability” here.
28. Kubin, “Importance of Misunderstanding,” 257.
pass without careful thought. I will raise four objections to these theoretical qualms. First, these theses put forward an unrealistic standard for communication, one that accepts only an ideal transfer of meaning, affect, and connotation into the target language. The evidence shows that attempts to meet such a standard rarely succeed, and indeed may not need to. For example, Wardy acknowledges that Li and Furtado took many liberties with the text of Aristotle’s Categories, but notes that they did so in order to ease the path to understanding. A strict translation with all the proper names of other philosophers, couched in syllogistic formalisms, and conveying Aristotle’s ironic tone, might not have been
accessible to a Chinese reader. The liberties and ellipses of the translation not only did not alter or diminish the ideas being communicated; they actually provided a better avenue to understanding.29 In some places, Wardy considers the Chinese rendering of particular philosophical points clearer than in the original text.30 Wardy gives many specific examples of philosophical points made in the Categories, such as the original text’s presentation of four different ways of thinking about substance, and judges that in each case, Furtado and Li found ways to transmit the ideas adequately and even elegantly into Chinese.31 Wardy concludes that the Mingli tan ৡ⧚ generally succeeded in rendering even Aristotle’s most technical distinctions into Chinese.
What about translation in the other direction, i.e., from the Chinese thought-world to the European? Even as they translated European scholastic thought into literary Chinese, the Jesuits were also translating the Chinese classics into Latin. One of the earliest results of their efforts was the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus of 1687, a publication that Thierry Maynard has examined in detail and rendered into English. In the introductory material, Maynard appraises the Jesuits’ grasp of the meaning of the texts of three of the canonical Four Books (si shu ಯ) of Confucianism: the Analects (Lunyu 䂪䁲), the Great Learning (Daxue ᅌ), and the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong Ёᒌ). While acknowledging that some modern scholars such as Jacques Gernet, David Hall, and Roger Ames, considered the Chinese and European systems of thought incommensurable, Maynard says, “The two traditions were so commensurate that a true dialogue occurred and a new meaning was created.”32 These two examples should be adequate to demonstrate that translation and interaction between cultures
29. Wardy, Aristotle in China, 83, 84.
30. Ibid., 120.
31. Ibid., 127–38.
32. Maynard, Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, 27.
can achieve real communication even when they do not attain the level of precision demanded by a strict theory of commensurability.
Second, as Paul Griffiths argues, the incommensurability thesis assumes that the doctrines and ideas of any culture or religion are held only for causes, never for reasons. That is to say, the cultural, historical, or intellectual matrix within which people hold to beliefs are the cause of those beliefs. A different set of matrices would cause adoption of a different set of beliefs. If that were true, then no dialogue would indeed be possible, as the causal matrices out of which the partners spoke would be incapable of rendering the others’ views intelligible. However, if people do in fact hold their beliefs and teachings for reasons, then there is a very good chance that, given enough time for continued dialogue, they will eventually come to understand one another’s reasons for believing as they do.33
Third, such theories show little regard for translation theory, in which genre matters. Straightforward technical instructions, such as those for assembling furniture, are extremely easy to translate with great accuracy. Poetry occupies the opposite end of the spectrum. Philosophical works are somewhere in between. Indeed, George Steiner commented that philosophical texts are the second-easiest type to translate successfully after technical manuals.34 Critics must take into account the genre of literature under consideration when assessing the success or failure of any given translation. Perhaps the poems in E. E. Cummings’ 73 Poems, so abstract and gnomic that they can hardly be considered English, would present insuperable difficulties of translation, but surely the “Life of Christ” books and the catechisms that the Jesuits published for popular consumption communicated their teachings in Chinese effectively. The refutations of these works that I have seen in Chinese polemical literature demonstrate that the critics had no trouble grasping European concepts.
Finally, Ping-yi Chu, one of the scholars who assert the incommensurability of Counter-Reformation European and Ming-Qing Chinese culture, makes the salient observation that one may make a claim of incommensurability as a means of establishing a boundary between cultures, a useful strategy when one culture feels another is encroaching on it.35 Mario Biagioli demonstrated that one side in a debate may even make an asymmetric declaration of incommensurability, as when Galileo claimed that his philosophical rivals, lacking his knowledge of mathematics, made arguments incommensurable to his, while he, being conversant with their
33. Griffiths, Apology for Apologetics, 28–29.
34. Steiner, After Babel, 326.
35. Chu, “Technical Knowledge,” 93n24.
philosophy, could absorb their views quite readily.36 Such claims may function to lay down markers to keep others out or to refute their claim to an insider’s understanding, but they are hardly rigorous theoretical statements.
Thus, we must reject any theory that asserts the a priori untranslatability or incommensurability of the Jesuit message into Chinese or of Chinese thought to Europeans as both theoretically unsound and empirically unproven.
Not all criticisms of the Jesuits are systematic in nature. Some are practical, and argue that this particular group of representatives from the West did not succeed in gaining a true understanding of late Ming-early Qing Chinese thought. The first such critique holds that missionaries in general cannot comprehend other cultures and religions because their very evangelical mandate precludes understanding. We will examine this broad claim and then its specific application to the Jesuits. The second critique eschews such broad assertions and focuses narrowly on the Jesuits as would-be cultural usurpers lacking legitimacy. Missionaries Cannot Understand Other Religions
One often encounters the assertion that dialogue and evangelization are incompatible; one can practice one or the other but not both, and individuals must therefore choose one or the other function when encountering other religions. This idea can even be found in official church pronouncements, such as the Vatican document Dialogue and Proclamation, in which the Catholic magisterium declared that the church ought to engage in both activities, but should prioritize evangelization over dialogue.37 According to this way of thinking, missionaries, as church representatives who follow the vocation of evangelization, cannot fruitfully participate in interreligious dialogue.
The broad assertion that evangelization is contrary to dialogue, which entails the conclusion that missionaries can never really understand their host culture, does not stand up to empirical testing. Galen Amstutz, in his book Interpreting Amida, asked why Westerners looking for religion in Japan were blind to the presence of the Pure Land schools of Jōdo Shū
36. Biagioli, “Anthropology of Incommensurability.”
37. Pontifical Council, Dialogue and Proclamation, §75–81.
ᅫ and Jōdo Shinshū ޜೳⳳᅫ in Japan, even though these were the largest, wealthiest, and most active religious organizations on the scene. To boil his complex analysis down to summary terms, he found that Pure Land did not suit the spiritual needs of Western seekers or the academic interests of scholars. Missionaries, however, did see the Pure Land schools for what they were, assessed their importance correctly, and described their beliefs and practices accurately.38 Having their own religious commitments already in place, missionaries seek to understand the competition as realistically as possible. In addition, they often remain on the scene for long years, learn the local language, and cultivate networks of educated informants. Thus they prove less likely to distort the data than the other two groups.
Other missionaries proved as attentive as the Jesuits to their religious surroundings. James Legge (1815–1897), a nineteenth-century Protestant missionary to south China, preached the Gospel to be sure, but he also produced critical translations of key Confucian texts of such high quality that they are still widely consulted. He also became Oxford’s first professor of Chinese. Ernst J. Eitel (1838–1908), an Evangelical Lutheran missionary to China produced the Handbook of Chinese Buddhism Being a Sanskrit, Chinese Dictionary (1888), one of the first reference tools on Chinese Buddhism ever published.39 Thus, we have no reason to think that the nature of their vocation prevents missionaries from understanding the religions of their host cultures.
What about the specific contention that the Jesuits themselves failed in both dialogue and understanding? On the face of it, it seems unlikely that some of Europe’s most intelligent and educated men, after living in China for decades, mastering its language, studying its literature, and having many conversations with highly educated friends and converts, would consistently miss the point of Chinese thought. Jacques Gernet himself, after articulating this view, provides clues that they actually understood their hosts quite well by quoting letters that Nicolò Longobardo sent to Rome which evince quite an adequate grasp of Confucian philosophy.
Erik Zürcher gives a somewhat more nuanced critique of the Jesuits in a lecture in which he compared their efforts to those of the Buddhists several centuries earlier. Buddhist monks, he says, infiltrated China slowly and as individuals. Having left their home countries behind, they did not communicate with any central authority back home (indeed no such authority existed), leaving them free to adapt their religion to local conditions.
38. Amstutz, Interpreting Amida, chaps. 4 and 5. 39. See Girardot, Victorian Translation of China.
40. Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, 207, 211.
Buddhism thus successfully penetrated China. The Jesuits, on the other hand, maintained contact with and loyalty to Rome, and the strict, doctrinaire religion of the Catholic Counter-reformation bound their hands and prevented them from achieving a successful adaptation.
It is difficult to credit these critiques. Gernet undercuts his own assertions by the evidence that he himself presents. Zürcher’s comparison of the Jesuits with the earlier Buddhist missionaries rests on inadequate foundations. He compares Buddhist missions from a period spanning five centuries with only the first century of the Jesuit missions. If one looked at only the first century of Buddhism’s presence in China, one would find a comparable difficulty of translation and a high degree of mutual misunderstanding. If one looked at Catholic missionary efforts in China for a period of five hundred years (taking it well into the twentieth century), one might find that Christianity’s adaptability to Chinese circumstances compares more favorably with that of Buddhism. In the end, then, I find the specific criticisms of the Jesuits’ abilities to understand the Chinese and adapt to China unconvincing.
The Jesuit Mission as Illegitimate Cultural Incursion
As noted in the introductory section, some scholars regard the Jesuits as uninvited cultural interlopers who, before ever coming to China, had decided that the Chinese needed their message. Aside from the quotation from Yu Liu given earlier, we also find this criticism in Qiong Zhang’s 1996 Harvard dissertation. Near the end, she appraises the Jesuits as men who believed that their Scholastic philosophy and theology was the pinnacle of human achievement, and who thus came to China already believing that it needed both Christianity and Western learning to “upgrade” it from its entanglement in idolatry and inferior philosophy.42 She further speculates that the encounter may have been more fruitful for both sides had the Jesuits been more receptive to the insights of China’s philosophical heritage.43 Certainly many of the anti-Jesuit writers of the late Ming and early Qing periods harbored their own suspicions about the Jesuits’ motives, connections with Western powers, and intentions. Ouyi Zhixu 㬙Ⲟᱎᯁ (1599–1655), for example, exclaimed in his Pixie ji 䮶䙾䲚 [Collected refutations of heterodoxy]:
41. Zürcher, Bouddhisme, christianisme et société chinoise, 29–37.
42. Zhang, Cultural Accommodation or Intellectual Colonization?, 290–92.
43. Ibid., 291.
Alas! Who knew that Wang Mang, so modest and respectable, would be a usurper of the Han court? Or that [Wang Anshi’s] “new learning” was actually a parasite of the [[[Northern]]] Song period. Your intentions are also very wicked!
However, one could take a softer view. Missionaries in other parts of the world, and even in China itself, came with a greater show of military power that enabled them to impose their presence upon a resisting population. One may recall the Dutch in Taiwan, for instance, who outlawed the practice of religions other than Christianity and flogged violators.45 The Protestant missionaries who arrived in the latter half of the nineteenth century were enabled to travel without let or hindrance throughout China because of the presence of Western gunboats and the “unequal treaties” whose memory still arouses resentment. The Jesuits, in contrast, had no such power base and could not impose their presence. They relied only upon their command of the language, their literary creations, their scientific and technological novelties, and their powers of persuasion.
This is more a question of legitimacy than of success in understanding Chinese thought. However, a few observations are appropriate here. As Nicholas Standaert has pointed out, such a polemical stance assumes a level of helplessness and passivity of the populations among which Western missionaries worked. In the academic environment of post-colonial studies, this may be a valid concern when missionaries depend upon a significant power imbalance to gain access and pursue their mission in other lands, but the Chinese were hardly helpless in this situation. In addition, scholars such as Standaert and Monika Übelhör have demonstrated that exchanges and conversations between the Chinese and the Jesuits were not infrequently initiated by the Chinese intelligentsia in pursuit of their own interests, and they certainly had an active hand in determining how the Jesuits’ teachings and publications were disseminated and received.46
In the final analysis, this critique stems from a value judgment rather than from questions of evidence. Perhaps we can boil the matter down to this: One may judge that anyone who enters foreign territory intending to effect changes in native culture, whether religious, ideological, or political, displays arrogance at the very least. More important for us, perhaps, is the observation that such an attitude does not lead to the praxis of dialogue as understood by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Richard Bernstein. Absent such
44. Ouyi Zhixu 㬙Ⲟᱎᯁ, Pixie ji 䮶䙾䲚, 19:11807. Translation mine.
45. Jones, Buddhism in Taiwan, 3, 4.
46. Standaert, “Study of the Classics by Late Ming Christian Converts,” 19; Standaert, Handbook of Christianity in China, 601.
praxis, the encounter of cultures and religions cannot bear the kind of fruit that a true exchange would produce. Others may judge differently, and assert that even missionaries, in spite of their intentions for the mission field, can still display good will and openness enough to understand their hosts well enough. The question remains open.
ANOTHER WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS
Most, if not all, of the views on the Jesuit encounter with Chinese religion canvassed above suffer from a grave methodological defect. They take a historical encounter between two highly evolved cultures that has lasted until the present day and try to boil it down into simple binary judgments such as success/failure or legitimate/illegitimate. Such an encounter, involving many actors and spanning several centuries, surely cannot be analyzed in any fruitful way by such crude metrics. As an alternative approach, I want to make the following methodological suggestions:
1. Distinguish between description and interpretation in appraising interreligious understanding. As Galen Amstutz points out, Jesuits in Japan understood Pure Land Buddhism quite well, even though they interpreted it through the lens of Christianity.47 Following his lead, I will suggest that we distinguish questions of factual understanding from questions regarding appropriate interpretation of local religious traditions, and evaluate the two separately. Using this measure, we could say that the Jesuits in early modern China understood the NeoConfucianism of their hosts quite well on the factual level. We may then consider the appropriateness of their overall Christian-Thomistic framework for interpreting this tradition and the missionary impulse that brought them into contact with it as a separate matter.
At this point one may cite Hans-Georg Gadamer’s dictum that mutual understanding equals agreement and conclude that any disagreement even about the interpretation of Chinese thought by the Jesuits entails misunderstanding.48 I do not believe such a criticism applies here. Throughout Truth and Method, Gadamer assumes that the interpreter is engaging with his or her own tradition. Whether or not one can understand another tradition and its literature is a question he does not address.
47. Amstutz, Interpreting Amida, 45–46.
48. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 180.
2. Use multigenerational, long-range time frames as the basis for evaluation rather than immediate understanding. The vast majority of the scholarship on Jesuit encounters with Neo-Confucian thought centers on the early generations of missionaries. Matteo Ricci gets the lion’s share of coverage; second-generation Jesuits such as Giulio Aleni get far less; late seventeenth-century figures such as Johann Adam Shall von Bell and Ferdinand Verbiest somewhat less. A very late missionary such as Alexandre de la Charme (1695–1767) gets almost none at all. As intelligent and diligent as the early Jesuits were, and as remarkable as their achievements in coming to grips with Chinese thought were, it is unreasonable to expect that they would get everything right in all details within one or two generations. It would be more realistic for us to acknowledge that the encounter between East and West and the drive toward mutual understanding is an ongoing process in which we are still very active. We continue to stand on the shoulders of all who have gone before us as we press ahead.
3. Understand that the cultures and religions that are trying to understand one another are not static entities, but are ever-developing systems whose courses will be altered by the encounter itself. As an example of this, one frequently hears that the concept “religion” did not exist in early China, and that the term used nowadays for this concept, zongjiao ᅫ ᬭ was a nineteenth-century Japanese neologism coined specifically to convey this Western idea. The concept is not native, but was thus grafted into East Asian thought and language.49 However, we must not fail to acknowledge that the word has long since been “naturalized,” and is part of East Asian discourse now. One may easily find literature on interreligious dialogue (zongjiao duihua ᅫᬭᇡ䁅), find departments of religion (zongjiao xi ᅫᬭ㋏) in Chinese universities, and engage in religious studies (zongjiao xue ᅫᬭᅌ). An appendix in Lydia H. Liu’s book Translingual Practice lists around 500 such vocabulary items that began as translations of Western terms but have since become part of Chinese language.50 Thus, intercultural and interreligious understanding is not a matter of one static entity studying another and trying to get it right; it is an enterprise the very engagement in which creates and then takes place within a trajectory of mutual transformation. The Japanese Protestant theologian Seiichi Yagi’s work bringing Buddhist
49. But see Campany, “On the Very Idea of Religions,” for an argument that a concept very like “religion” did exist in traditional China.
50. Liu, Translingual Practice, 284–98.
thought into Christian theology provides an example of this process carried out intentionally.51
4. See interreligious and intercultural encounter as an asymptotic process. Anyone who has studied a foreign language knows that one may get better and better at it the longer one sustains one’s efforts, but the likelihood of “going native” is remote. The same applies to habituation to a new culture; one may eventually become quite comfortable within another culture, but may still occasionally find oneself in difficult situations in which only the guidance of a native will do. Mastery of another language and culture is never either-or, and lauding the sojourner as either getting everything right or criticizing him for getting nothing right is a bootless endeavor.
5. Understand that all parties in the exchange, both host and guest, are involved in the process of creating representations. Edward Said, in his influential book Orientalism, was careful not to argue that European colonial powers created a false picture of the Middle East and its peoples; such an argument assumes an essentialized “Arab” (or, for us, “Chinese”) susceptible to misrepresentation. He acknowledged that both colonizers and colonized were involved in creating representations both of themselves and of the other. The real issue is that all systems of discourse constitute their subjects, no matter who is representing and who is represented.52 The task, then, is not to determine if this representation is right while that one is wrong, but to analyze the power relations that make one representation dominant while suppressing others. Mutual representation that takes form in a dialogical situation marked by unprejudiced curiosity and a balance of power may be the most desirable, but as we have seen from the examples raised by Amstutz, good representation can occur in competitive contexts as well.
6. Do not let the discourse of power relations between guest and host obscures the highly collaborative nature of interreligious encounter. Academics such as myself have grown accustomed to producing translations alone in our offices, surrounded by our reference books and online resources. We must remember that, in the past, much translation was done collaboratively, whether by the Kuchean monk Kumarajīva rendering Sanskrit texts into Chinese orally while Chinese scribes polished the final drafts, or Jesuits working with educated Chinese partners, as when Li and Furtado worked together to translate Aristotle’s
51. Swidler and Yagi, Bridge to Buddhist–Christian Understanding.
52. Said, Orientalism, 325–26.
Categories. The Jesuits applied this method consistently from the earliest collaborations of Matteo Ricci with Chinese literati.53 It is harder to criticize one side of the process of translation and interpretation when one realizes how much the other side cooperated in the venture.
CONCLUSIONS
So did the Jesuits understand the religion and philosophy of their literati hosts? We have seen that there is no a priori reason to think that they could not have done so. We have also seen that there was nothing about their missionary vocation or circumstances that would have precluded them from doing so. However, I want to be clear: While I do think one side in this centuries-old debate has a stronger case than the other, and believe that the Jesuits did a good job of engaging with Chinese thought, I do not wish to go so far as to say that they were entirely correct from the very beginning.
If we apply my six methodological suggestions, then I think we arrive at the more modest conclusion that they did as well as anyone could have. They arrived on an intellectual scene that was already buzzing with controversies and factions; native understandings abounded in great profusion. The Jesuits themselves could not agree on the most appropriate approach to take. Nevertheless, I think it fair to say that they got off to a good start, and helped to launch a period of East-West encounter whose fruits are still developing. Our two cultures and their native religious traditions are a pair of moving targets whose very proximity, beginning with European explorations and contact, has engendered continuous mutual change. Modern Western scholars are still busy studying and interpreting Chinese culture. The project will never be complete, but we can keep getting better and better the longer we stay engaged.
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