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Introduction Catholic Global Missions and the Expansion of Europe

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Introduction Catholic Global Missions and the Expansion of Europe Introduction Catholic Global Missions and the Expansion of Europe In 1562, the discovery of alleged human sacrifices practiced by nominally converted Christians unleashed a violent outburst from Friar Diego de Lan- da (1524–79). The Franciscan friar organized an inquisition, burned scores of Mayan codices and hundreds of images; over 4,500 Mayans were interrogated, many under torture, ending in 169 deaths and suicides. Repatriated to Spain to stand trial for conducting an illegal Inquisition, de Landa was acquitted; in 1571 he was appointed Bishop of Yucatán. De Landa was not a particularly brutal conquistador. He had dedicated himself to learning Mayan in order to evangelize the people of the Yucatán. After his arrival there in 1549, De Landa trekked all over the scattered vil- lages preaching the Gospels to the Mayans, who had only recently submitted to Spanish conquest. Having zealously learned the language and culture of the Mayans, the Franciscan eventually composed a book, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, which, although it has only survived in part, was the first ethnography of the Mayan people. And yet, this friar-ethnographer, to whom we owe the only document of Mayan culture in the initial years of the encounter, wrought great destruction to the culture of the peoples who were his flock. Scandalized and angered by the many religious images of the Mayans, and appalled by their alleged human sacrifice to the gods, De Landa developed a deep hostility to indigenous culture that fueled his paranoia about a network of underground apostates, which explains the brutality of the 1562 repression.1 One generation later, across the Pacific and on another continent, an Italian Jesuit had become a master of the Chinese language and Confucian texts in the Empire of the Great Ming. Departing for India in 1579, the year of de Landa’s death, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) worked for three years in Portuguese Goa and Cochin before he was summoned to Macau, the Portuguese enclave on the south China coast. Immediately, the young Jesuit was impressed by elite Chinese culture. The mandarins in China, Ricci wrote, reminded him of the ec- clesiastic dignitaries of the Catholic Church. In both cases, it was intelligence, scholarship, and virtue that were rewarded, not noble birth. As for the achieve- ments of Chinese civilization, Ricci rated them even higher than Ancient Greece and Rome. In so many things the Chinese were superior to Europeans, 1 See Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquest: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. p. 76. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004355286_002 2 Introduction Ricci conceded, except in the knowledge of the true faith. Ricci had spent more than a decade of studies and frustration mastering Chinese culture. Unlike de Landa, his knowledge of “native” culture led to admiration, not abhorrence. To- ward the end of his life Ricci composed a memoir of which a Latin translation was published in 1615. While not the first work composed by a westerner on China (that honor belongs to his countryman Marco Polo), The Christian Expe- dition in China represented the first scholarly account of the politics, economy, language, and religions of Chinese civilization. In sharp contrast to Diego de Landa’s encounter with the Mayans, Ricci found much in Chinese civilization he admired, foremost, the moral philosophy of Confucianism, which he com- pared to that of Plato and the Stoics. On that note of cultural harmony, Ricci developed a program of evangelization in which selected leitmotifs of Confu- cianism were declared harmonious with Christianity. A celebrity during his lifetime, Ricci became the model for future generations of missionaries to Chi- na. Despite critics, his method would endure until the beginning of the 18th century, when the papal condemnation of Chinese rituals honoring ancestors, Confucius, and certain classical terms introduced a jarring note into Christian evangelization in Late Imperial China.2 Two men, two methods: what do the different careers of de Landa and Ricci illustrate? This is the central question that animates this collection of essays. The global history of Catholic mission revolves around one question: was Cath- olic evangelization a part of European colonial and imperial expansion or was it carried through on a different institutional impetus with different goals from conquest, subjugation, and incorporation? The tragedy in the Yucatán seems to support the first answer. Nor did it stand alone. Diego de Landa might have been particularly harsh in his treatment of the Mayans, but even ‘gentler’ Fran- ciscans, such as Bernardino de Sahagún, the compiler of Nahuatl and ethnog- rapher of the post-conquest Aztecs, were active in the ‘spiritual conquest of Mexico’, to use Robert Ricard’s disputed and outdated formulation.3 Does the difference between de Landa and Ricci come down to empire? De Landa op- erated as an agent of empire, as Christianization constituted a central aim of Spanish imperialism. However, he was not representative of all missionaries. Ricci, a subject of the pope and not the Spanish king, had a different agen- da. This is obvious when we compare him to fellow Portuguese Jesuits, who 2 See my A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 3 Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evange- lizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). The original French was published in 1933..
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