Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled by Dominic Sachsenmaier

Author:Dominic Sachsenmaier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

THE LIMITS OF INTEGRATION

Despite all the efforts to underline the compatibilities between Christianity and Confucianism, many aspects of the Jesuits’ life and work remained radically at variance with Chinese codes. For instance, the European fathers’ vow of chastity was in breach of the Confucian duty to produce offspring. And most saliently, the Jesuits were part of organizations—whether the global Catholic Church in general or the Society of Jesus in particular—that had their centers outside the Ming or Qing state. This institutional membership distinguished the European fathers from the broad spectrum of figures in China who in other regards were comparable to them. For example, the group of Muslim scientists employed by the court in Beijing, who in the course of the seventeenth century were increasingly replaced by Jesuit experts, maintained only loose ties with the outside world of Islam.87 Likewise, the Buddhist scholars who stressed connections with Confucianism were usually rooted only in the Chinese cultural context, without significant connections to Southeast Asia or any other region in which Buddhism was highly influential.

In his depiction of the Jesuits, Zhu Zongyuan does not deal with Catholic institutions like the priesthood, even though some of his writings suggest that he must have been familiar with them. The same is the case with Catholic symbolism, liturgy, music, and architecture—all these facets of ecclesiastical life were known to Zhu, but he does not take them up when introducing the Jesuits to his readers. He also does not elaborate on the organizational setup of the Catholic Church, whether outside or inside China. Explaining more of the institutional cultures of the ecclesia would likely have only added to the waves of distrust Zhu Zongyuan was trying to combat. It would have shown the limits to which the European fathers could—and wanted to—present themselves in a Confucian manner. Not only theological concerns but also many aspects of Catholicism as an organized religion stood in the way of its complete localization in China, and Zhu must have been aware of them.

In fact, under close observation, the organizational structure of the Learning of Heaven looked nothing like an adaptation to Confucian paths and patterns. Although there were some basic similarities between Christian organizations and the world of late Ming academies, the Christians, unlike the latter, maintained a profound division between clergy and common parishioners. What is more, this division ran along ethnic lines, since Chinese individuals were long barred from the sacrament of becoming a priest. During Zhu Zongyuan’s lifetime, the Society of Jesus admitted Chinese individuals only at the level of coadjutor brothers, and even this was limited by strict policies. Until the early seventeenth century, only Chinese males who had been born in Macao and educated by the Jesuits were eligible to become coadjutor brothers; after 1627 some mestizos were also allowed to join their ranks, but all of them were from Macao.88 Only in the 1670s did the Society of Jesus begin to ease this policy.

While the admission of Chinese coadjutor brothers into the Society of

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