Introduction : Christian Missions and the History of ReligionsAuthor(s): Trent PomplunReviewed work(s):Source: History of Religions, Vol. 50, No. 4, Jesuit Missionaries in China and Tibet (May2011), pp. 325-328Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/658126 .Accessed: 19/06/2012 10:50

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Trent Pomplun

I N T RODUC TIO N : C H R I S TIA N M I S S IO NS A N D TH E H I S TORY O F R E L I GIO NS

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2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.0018-2710/2011/5004-0001$10.00

The

Sanscrit

language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderfulstructure; more perfect than the

Greek

, more copious than the

Latin

,and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both ofthem a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms ofgrammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; sostrong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three,without believing them to have sprung from some common source,which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, thoughnot quite so forcible, for supposing that both the

Gothic

and the

Celtic

, though blended with a very different idiom, had the sameorigin with the

Sanscrit

; and the old

Persian

might be added to thesame family.

What student of Sanskrit has not been thrilled by this well-worn quota-tion from Sir William “Oriental” Jones’s third discourse before the RoyalAsiatic Society? I have deployed this very quotation, which was deliveredin 1786 and published two years later, to great effect on philosophers,theologians, and classicists myself. For many, it is the font out of whichthe history of religions leapt. The only problem with its frequent quotationis that Sir William Jones was not the first European to practice compara-tive linguistics, or even the first to note the similarity of Indian and Euro-pean languages. The first honor should rightly belong to Gaston-Laurent

Introduction

326

Coeurdoux (1711–99), a Jesuit who lived in Pondicherry (now Pudu-cherry), during the generation before Jones. Coeurdoux corresponded withAbbé Bathélemy (1716–95), the head of the Académie des Inscriptions etdes Belles Lettres, and the more famous Orientalist Abraham HyacintheAnquetil-Duperron (1731–1805), but his letters were not published in the

Mémoires

of the Académie until 1808, and so the Jesuit missionary waslargely bypassed for the eminently quotable Jones. For the record, ThomasStephens (1549–1619), a Jesuit who lived in Goa, noted the similarity ofGreek, Latin, and the Konkan

i

language in a letter to his brother in 1583.I quoted Jones for years before I learned about the contribution of

sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors to the history of religions.Old standbys in the history of ideas, such as Frank E. Manuel’s

TheEighteenth Century Confronts the Gods

or Burton Feldman and RobertD. Richardson’s classic anthology

The Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680–1860

, largely exclude Catholic missionaries from their discussions. Theseauthors seem to imply that “Catholicism” and “modernity” are mutuallyexclusive categories, even as the erstwhile representatives of both regu-larly exchanged letters, shared accommodations, or debated the finer pointsof comparative linguistics. Of course, we are now all-too-aware that mo-dernity had its fair share of prejudice, too. If we bemoan the colonialistaspirations of many of the first Orientalists—and still more their racism—we might pause before celebrating their work of emancipating the historyof religions from the theologians and missionaries who were its first prac-titioners. At the very least, we should acknowledge these missionaries’contributions to our knowledge of non-Western languages, cultures, andreligions.

The voyages of discovery provide the “backstory” to the better-knownauthors, such as Fontenelle, Bayle, Toland, Newton, Hume, Hamann, orHerder, whom we usually associate with the birth of the history of reli-gions. When we return to the missionaries that often accompanied thevoyages, we discover a rich trove of writings that represent the first“modern” contact between Europeans and the inhabitants of Asia and theNew World. The last hundred years of scholarship has slowly unearthedmanuscripts that moldered in archives for centuries. The most famous mis-sionaries, such as St. Francis Xavier (1506–52), Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), and Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656), are no longer the preserve ofhistorians from their respective religious orders, and have now been treatedto extensive scholarly studies, many of the most dramatic being written bynative speakers of the languages the missionaries struggled so heroically tolearn. Studies of the missions have also benefitted enormously by advancesin the historiography of early modern Europe. Just as the most recentstudies of the Society of Jesus emphasize its material culture, social ini-tiatives, and collaboration with laypeople, scholars such as Gauvin Bailey

History of Religions

327

have begun to explore printing and the production of art in the missions;Liam Brockey has emphasized the role of lay catechists and other indig-enous religious authorities in China; Qiong Zhang and Hui-neng Chenare now showing us just how much Jesuits depended on Confucianiconography.

The three articles that follow represent the most recent trends in missionshistory. Junhyoung Michael Shin’s “The Supernatural in the Jesuit Adapta-tion to Confucianism: Giulio Aleni’s

Tianzhu Jiangsheng Chuxiang Jingjie�������� (Fuzhou, 1637)” dramatically expands our knowl-edge of the Chinese sources Jesuits used in their mission and deepens ourunderstanding of the encounter between two cultures by showing how asingle work combines competing notions of visual narrative, meditation,and print culture itself. As Shin demonstrates, the Jesuits were more thanhappy to adopt supernatural elements from popular Confucian books tobolster the claims found in their own theological literature. If Aleni (1582–1649) sought to adapt Jesuit methods of meditation, especially the “com-position of place” (

compositio loci

) in the

Spiritual Exercises

, to indige-nous Chinese methods of visual narrative, he still did so within a largerConfucian suspicion of images. Shin’s account of how Aleni negotiatedthis tension gives us some sense of the difficulties missionaries faced, butalso of how they overcame them. Yu Liu’s “The True Pioneer of the JesuitChina Mission: Michele Ruggieri” argues to the same end, but by differentmeans. At first glance, Yu Liu’s article is a welcome contribution to whatwe once would have considered the “second tier” of missionaries whohave been eclipsed in the secondary literature by the triad of Matteo Ricci,Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1591–1666), and Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–88). Yu Liu reminds us, however, that Ruggieri (1543–1607) was Ricci’ssenior in the mission; he establishes Ruggieri’s seminal role in the com-position of the Portuguese-Chinese Dictionary usually attributed to Ricciand argues that Ruggieri’s

Tianzhu shilu

is the true “experimental blue-print” of the mission’s plan of studies (

ratio studiorum

) commonly attrib-uted to Manuel Dias the Elder (1549–1639). What is more important, YuLiu shows how Ruggieri’s accomplishments were downplayed not onlyby modern scholars but by Matteo Ricci himself, largely because Rug-gieri’s ideas about how to best accommodate Christianity to Chinese re-ligion and culture did not accord with the party line later established bythe more famous missionary. My own article, “Natural Reason and Bud-dhist Philosophy: The Tibetan Studies of Ippolito Desideri, SJ (1684–1733),” attempts to place the Tibetan writings of the Jesuit missionary inthe larger context of Jesuit Thomism. I have attempted to demonstratethat the common view that Ippolito Desideri turned from “folk religion”to “philosophy” as he gained a sophisticated knowledge of TibetanBuddhism assumes categories that were not germane to a missionary of

Introduction

328

the early eighteenth century. On the one hand, Desideri remained consistentin his treatment of Tibetan religion, and so neither argued nor assumedthat Tibetan religion was somehow secondary to the allegedly “rationalist”concerns of Tibetan Madhyamaka. On the other hand, Desideri was re-freshingly free of what Gregory Schopen would later call “Protestant pre-suppositions” in Buddhist Studies. He did not distinguish, for example,between canonical writings and authoritative commentaries such as Tsong-khapa’s

Great Stages of the Path

(Lam rim chen mo) from “apocryphal”

religious writings such as The Testimonial Record of Padmasa m bhava (Padma bka’i thang yig). In other words, Desideri, indebted to theThomism of the Society of Jesus, did not interpret Tibetan religion interms of the nineteenth- or twentieth-century ideas of “great tradition”versus “little tradition.” It is ironic that the very things that make Desideri’sthought look so decidedly premodern allowed him to recognize thatTibetans possessed a truly philosophical consciousness—a gift that laterEuropeans were often loath to acknowledge in any Asian culture.

It would be foolish, of course, to argue that Giulio Aleni, MicheleRuggieri, and Ippolito Desideri did not have assumptions of their own.They were missionaries, after all, and their most fervent hope was theconversion of the peoples they evangelized. If their religious views seemodd or premodern, we might imagine how they themselves felt among themandarins of the Ming court or the

geshés

of the great Tibetan monasteries.We run the risk of distorting their contributions to the history of religionsif we ignore their own religious convictions, but we run the further riskof failing to attend to the importance of religion in general, whether Asian,European, or a curious blend of both.

Loyola University Maryland