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“The Chinese Rites Controversy NUMBER 32 ReportFEBRUARY • 2004 CENTER for the PACIFIC RIM THE CENTER FOR THE PACIFIC RIM PROMOTES “The Chinese Rites Controversy: understanding, communica- tion, and cooperation A Long Lasting Controversy in Sino-Western among the cultures and economies of the Pacific Cultural History” Rim and provides leader- ship in strengthening the position of the San Francisco Bay Area as a pre-eminent American The Ricci Institute at the University of San Dr. Claudia von Collani gateway to the Pacific. It Francisco has for many years been involved in the is a missiologist from fulfills its mission through interdisciplinary academic study of the Chinese Rites Controversy. This Würzberg in Germany who programs, research, print commitment dates back to the early 1980s when has done research on the and online publications, Fr. Edward Malatesta, S.J., founding director of study of the China mission scholarly exchanges, the Ricci Institute, had returned from his initiation (1580–1780) and the Chinese conferences, and other outreach activities. to Chinese studies in Taiwan to his old mentor, Rites Controversy. Fr. Francis Rouleau, S.J.. Dr. Eugenio Menegon A former China-missionary and historian of the is a long-time research THE RICCI INSTITUTE IS Jesuit mission in China, Fr. Rouleau projected a associate of the Ricci part of the Center for the Pacific Rim. It is a leading scholarly study of the Chinese Rites issue in con- Institute and currently a interdisciplinary research junction with the Ricci Institute. Now, over the researcher in sinology at the center that promotes, in the last four years and at the invitation of the Ricci Catholic University of spirit of Matteo Ricci, the Institute, a team of scholars has been involved in Leuven in Belgium. encounter of Chinese culture and Christian faith our renewed effort to continue this task. The Chinese Rites Controversy project draws by conducting research Dr. Paul Rule is an upon the Rouleau collection of copies of docu- projects, organizing confer- Australian sinologist and ments from European archives and the resources ences and producing schol- arly publications. With its Honorary Associate in the of Fr. Albert Chan’s Chinese Library at the Ricci 80,000-volume Chinese History Department at La Institute as well as the library and electronic Library and The Ricci 21st Trobe University in resources of the University of San Francisco. We Century Roundtable, the Melbourne, Australia and have also found enormously helpful the digests Institute offers premier resources in the study of Distinguished Fellow of the and drafts by Rouleau and Malatesta in the Ricci Christianity in China. EDS-Stewart Chair at the Ricci Institute. Institute’s Rouleau Collection. This issue of Pacific Rim Report is the first report on our work N N N WE GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE the EDS-Stewart Chair for in progress. Chinese-Western Cultural History at the USF Ricci Institute and The Henry Luce Foundation for funding this issue of Pacific Rim Report. “The Chinese Rites Controversy: A Long Lasting Controversy in Sino-Western Cultural History” Paul A. Rule Ricci Institute, University of San Francisco, USA t is hard for us in the twenty-first century to view, with anything but repugnance and Iincomprehension, the vehemence and bitter- ness of seventeenth-eighteenth-century religious controversy. The Chinese Rites Controversy was perhaps the most bitter and long-lasting of all. The grand old man of China mission history, Henri Bernard-Maître S.J., even argued that it was possi- bly in terms of the number and caliber of the par- “It was not just ticipants, its length and ferocity, the greatest inter- nal struggle in the long history of the Catholic a matter for church- Church notwithstanding the early Councils.1 men, the battle- Furthermore, it was not just a matter for ground of theolo- churchmen, the battleground of theologians, and Fanciful depiction of a Jesuit church in Beijing ecclesiastical politicians. It engaged philosophers with people bowing, burning incense, and offering gians, and ecclesias- food before the high alter. (A. Thomas, Histoire de and intellectuals generally, including some of the la mission de Pékin, Paris, 1923, p. 145) tical politicians. It best minds of the time. It raged intermittently new form. Through their strong Biblicism the engaged philosophers from the 1630s, flared at the end of the century and continued well into the eighteenth century. Protestant missionaries, apart from a horror of and intellectuals And it had consequences and echoes up to the ‘idolatry’, were faced with the dilemma of translat- generally, including present day. ing the biblical Yahweh/Theos into Chinese. So as well as having to negotiate the dangerous rapids some of the best The specific questions at issue may seem obscure and irrelevant: whether a handful of of Chinese ancestor and other rituals, like their minds of the time.” Chinese Christian converts might or might not Catholic predecessors they had to engage with the continue to perform rituals in honor of their Chinese ‘terms’ issue. Tian (Heaven, ), they ancestors, and some related problems such as tended to equate with imperial idol worship. In how to render the name of God in Chinese (the their anxiety to stress their difference from the ‘terms’ question); whether Christian mandarins Catholics, they eschewed the Catholic compro- might perform rituals to Confucius and other offi- mise Tianzhu (Lord of Heaven, ). So the cial rituals such as those to the guardian spirits of argument came down to a choice between their city; and more general issues still of accom- Shangdi (the traditional ‘Lord on High’, ) modation of Western Christian liturgy and church and shen (a generic term for gods or spirits, ). law and practices to Chinese conditions. However, Two versions of the Chinese bible were thus creat- the controversy was also exacerbated by tensions ed: a Shangdi and a Shen version. But this, in and jealousies between missionaries of differing turn, influenced judgments about ancestor rituals. religious orders and national origins. In this When David Crocket Graham, a Protestant mis- respect it was a microcosm of a large number of sionary in Southwest China and excellent ethnog- theological, cultural, and political differences. rapher, found that the common people regarded their ancestors as shen, he abandoned his earlier With the coming of Protestant missionaries in toleration of ancestor rituals because he thought the nineteenth century the problem recurred in a abbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbc 2 N The Ricci Institute at the USF Center for the Pacific Rim this prima facie evidence of idolatry—they equat- about the possibilities of salvation outside the ed their ancestors with his God.2 Catholic Church. Added to this potent mixture The problem of interpreting key terms is not were old jealousies and rivalries among religious just one concerning Chinese terminology. Some orders and between ‘regular’ and ‘secular’ clergy, three centuries later we frequently are struck by and especially between colonizing powers. what appear to be paradoxes and contradictions Even more, however, the Chinese Rites con- in the European labels being flung around so troversy raises in an acute and illustrative form, freely by the protagonists. How could the Chinese many theoretical and practical issues that are be simultaneously ‘atheists’ and ‘idolaters’, ‘mate- very much alive today. When post-modernist and rialists’ and ‘superstitious’? What was the emo- post-structuralist theory and relativist philoso- tional freight of such terms? And did their com- phies challenge the very possibility of cross-cul- monly used equivalents in the various European tural understanding, a close study of a classic languages have the same implications in each? case of this may prove enlightening. Similarly it Many, on closer inspection, appear to be code may illuminate the debates about the relativity of words, revealing theological partisanship and language.3 Galileo’s alleged remark eppur se institutional allegiance. muove, ‘and yet it does move’, remains the best The forces allied against the ‘permissive’ poli- rebuttal of too much skeptical and paralyzing cies of the missionaries of the Society of Jesus theory. were in some ways a strange coalition: Roman On the other hand, the endless and ultimately curial centralizers, Gallican supporters of national stultifying arguments about words—Chinese “The Chinese Rites autonomy in religion, Europeanizers who wished words for ‘God’, whether ancestor rituals were controversy raises in to impose Western styles of Christianity every- ‘sacrifices’ and the buildings they were held in an acute and where, and those who, for want of a better term, ‘halls’ or ‘temples’—remind us that words divide we may call ‘Augustinians’, with a deep pessimism and obfuscate as well as communicate. Actions, illustrative form, experience, personal interaction may overcome many theoretical and apparently insuperable obstacles to communica- tion. One in our time who knew this better than practical issues that most, the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, are very much alive protested: today.” There has been endless definition, endless verbal- izing, and words have become gods. There are so many words that one cannot get to God as long as He is thought to be on the side of the words. But when he is placed firmly beyond the other side of words, the words multiply like flies and there is a great buzzing religion, very profitable, very holy, very spurious.4 Much of the tragedy of the Chinese Rites lies in the inability of old China hands to verbalize and defend their intuitions and perceptions. Their theology could not keep up with their experience. In a time when Christianity, in numbers and expression, is, for the first time since its begin- nings, unequivocally non-Western, issues of Photostat of an early Qing Christian ancestral enculturation, its preconditions and limits, are tablet. (George H. Dunne, S.J., Generation of urgent for the Christian churches and amount to Giants.
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