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Downloaded From Modern Intellectual History (2020), 1–25 doi:10.1017/S1479244320000426 ARTICLE Rethinking the Rites Controversy: Kilian Stumpf’s Acta Pekinensia and the Historical Dimensions of a Religious Quarrel Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh* Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge *Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected] The Chinese rites controversy (c.1582–1742) is typically characterized as a religious quarrel between different Catholic orders over whether it was permissible for Chinese converts to observe traditional rites and use the terms tian and shangdi to refer to the Christian God. As such, it is often argued that the conflict was shaped predominantly by the divergent theological attitudes between the rites-supporting Jesuits and their anti-rites opponents towards “accommodation.” By examining the Jesuit missionary Kilian Stumpf’s Acta Pekinensia—a detailed chronicle of the papal legate Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon’s 1705–6 investigation into the controversy in Beijing—this article proposes that ostensibly religious disputes between Catholic orders consisted primarily of disagreements over ancient Chinese history. Stumpf’s text shows that missionaries’ understandings of antiquity were constructed through their interpretations of ancient Chinese books and their interactions with the Kangxi Emperor. The article suggests that the historiographical characterization of the controversy as “religious” has its roots in the Vatican suppression of the rites, which served to erase the historical nature of the conflict exposed in the Acta Pekinensia. On 4 December 1705, the Vatican’s legatus a latere Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon (1668–1710) reached Beijing, having been sent by Pope Clement XI (b. 1649, r. 1700–21) to investigate the developing conflict between different Catholic orders over the so-called Chinese rites controversy. Tournon, a Savoyard aristocrat-cum-cardinal, who was neither a Jesuit nor a member of any monastic order, was tasked with concluding on behalf of the Holy See whether or not it was appropriate for Chinese Christians to observe traditional rites honoring deceased ancestors and use the terms tian and shangdi to refer to the Christian God.1 The complex negotiations and discussions between missionaries of different orders, Tournon, Qing officials, and the Kangxi Emperor (b. 1654, r. 1661–1722) were recorded in meticulous detail by the Würzburg-born Jesuit astronomer, his- toriographer, and papal notary Kilian Stumpf (1655–1720) in the Acta 1Paul Rule and Claudia von Collani, “Introduction,” in The Acta Pekinensia, Or, Historical Records of the Maillard de Tournon Legation, ed. Paul Rule and Claudia von Collani, vol. 1 (Rome, 2015), xiii–lxxxviii, at xxii. © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 80.43.95.79, on 09 Nov 2020 at 10:10:07, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244320000426 2 Gianamar Giovannetti‐Singh Pekinensia. This mammoth manuscript, consisting of 1,467 folios written in a hotchpotch of Latin, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanized Chinese, was only recently published in English in 2015 by Paul Rule and Claudia von Collani and offers valuable new information about the topics over which different actors in the quarrel disagreed. The rites controversy, described by Collani as one of “the longest and the most acrimonious conflicts in the history of the Catholic Church in the early modern period,” began as early as the China mission itself, in the late sixteenth century.2 Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), one of the founders of the mission in the early 1580s, permitted his Chinese neophytes to observe traditional rites, and designated tian (Heaven), shangdi (Supreme Emperor), and the neologism tianzhu (Lord of Heaven) as appropriate terms to refer to the Christian God.3 Moreover, although Ricci considered the contemporary Chinese to be “atheists,” he noted “that in the beginning they worship[ed] a supreme divine being.”4 Thus, Ricci argued, con- temporary “atheistic” Confucianism had degenerated from an ancient primitive monotheism. As historian Wu Huiyi puts it, “the strategy of ‘accommodation’ advocated by Ricci [was] based on wishful thinking that the Confucian tradition derive[d] from the same source as the Christian religion.”5 Michael Lackner explains that, attuned to the Renaissance preoccupation that contemporary repro- ductions of ancient texts may have been corrupted through mistranslation, Ricci and his successors attempted “to minimize the influence of [Song Dynasty (960– 1279 CE)] Neo-Confucian thought [in their exegeses of the Confucian canon] which they regarded as a late and degenerate distortion of the original meaning of the classics.”6 Indeed, as Jacques Gernet argues, at the time that Ricci was work- ing in China, “the idea that the Neo-Confucianism of the eleventh and twelfth cen- turies was not the true Confucianism of Antiquity … was in the air.”7 Ricci’s hermeneutics kindled a centuries-long historical endeavor by Jesuits to examine the connections between what they believed to be primitive Chinese monotheism and biblical narratives of the early history of humanity. By translating elements of what they perceived to be Chinese religious doctrines for European readers, mis- sionaries were required to both position and characterize the position of the mater- ial they were representing within both the European and the Chinese canons; by virtue of this, every translator—or missionary—had to be a historian. The Jesuits’ conception of ancient Chinese history, despite varying in minor details from missionary to missionary, generally held that the Chinese had known 2Claudia von Collani, “The Jesuit Rites Controversy,” in Ines G. Županov, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits (Oxford, 2019), 891–917, at 893. 3Tianzhu was coined in 1583 by Cin Nicò, a Chinese convert who labored as a caretaker in a mission house in Zhaoqing. It was first appropriated by a European in Michele Ruggieri’s (1543–1607) Chinese translation of the Ten Commandments. See Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham, NC, 1997), 73. 4Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault, Entrata nella Cina de’ Padri della Compagnia del Gesu (Naples, 1622), 82 5Wu Huiyi, Traduire la Chine au XVIIIe siècle: Les jésuites traducteurs de textes chinois et le renouvelle- ment des connaissances européennes sur la Chine (1687–ca. 1740) (Paris, 2017), 208. 6Michael Lackner, “Jesuit Figurism,” in Thomas H. C. Lee, ed., China and Europe: Images and Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Hong Kong, 1991), 129–49, at 134. 7Jacques Gernet, Chine et christianisme: La première confrontation (Paris, 2009; first published 1982), 37. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 80.43.95.79, on 09 Nov 2020 at 10:10:07, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244320000426 Modern Intellectual History 3 and worshipped the Christian God at least since the time of the biblical Flood and that the traces of their primitive monotheism could be detected through the exegesis of Chinese texts. These historical positions were closely related to elements of the rites controversy—particularly to the conflict over Chinese names for God. For example, the missionary Martino Martini (1614–61) wrote in 1658 that the Chinese … use the word XANGTI [shangdi] to refer to the Supreme Lord of Heaven … They say similar things about the sky [tian], and since these cannot be attributed to the visible and material sky, it is very probable that with this name the Chinese wish to indicate the Supreme ruler and Lord of Heaven and I would say in fact that they were the first to have notions of God, already from the times of Noah or not much later.8 In 1703, the French Jesuit missionary Joachim Bouvet (1656–1732) finished writing the Tianxue benyi (The True Meaning of the Study of Heaven), which “made just one assertion: that both in the ancient and in contemporary Chinese texts the one true God is known by the words Tian and Shangdi.”9 As soon as Tournon’s legation reached Beijing in 1705, the legate “prohibit[ed] Father Bouvet’s book.”10 Stumpf wrote in the Acta Pekinensia that Tournon “rendered the book useless, forbidding it so strongly that the superiors of the author were obliged by their Ordinary to … swear an oath that no further copies or woodblocks were extant.”11 This article sug- gests that Tournon’s (and many other non-Jesuit Catholics’) hostility towards the Jesuits’ accommodation of Chinese rites and terms for God can be framed in terms of historical disagreements over whether the ancient Chinese had known the Christian God. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this lengthy and multifaceted conflict has presented sig- nificant challenges for historians of Christianity in China. Describing the contro- versy as a “historiographical curse,” Gianni Criveller points out that almost every work “omit[s] fundamental aspects or episodes” of the diatribe.12 Although David Mungello’s edited volume The Chinese Rites Controversy (1994) offers a wide-ranging overview of the quarrel through several episodes and different inter- pretations of their meanings, one of the collection’s contributions, by the sinologist Erik Zürcher, identifies a crucial historiographical issue that characterizes the majority of twentieth-century works on the controversy and, I contend, has yet to be fully corrected in contemporary studies.13 Zürcher explains that an unwar- ranted focus on the theological aspects of the conflict, which necessarily entailed the Eurocentric assumption that the outcome would be settled in the Vatican by 8Martino Martini, Sinicae historiae decas prima (Munich, 1658), 2.
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