Behind the Book Cover

The Real Fight and Legacy of the Chinese Rites Controversy

Known as one “of the most fiercely fought and momentous religious debates in Christian history,”1 the Chinese rites controversy was long in the making and deadly and ironic in the end result. Matteo Ricci, the legendary founder of the Jesuit China mission, sowed the seeds of the many-sided saga in 1600 by endorsing Chinese sacred names for the European idea of deity and tolerating Chinese funerary and memorial rites as comparable or otherwise acceptable to Catholic practices. Soon after his death in 1610, disputes arose first internally among Jesuit missionaries and then externally with Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians after their arrival from the Philippines in the 1630s. The Vatican at first wavered between the two sides and then came down hard on the pro-Ricci Jesuits in a series of decisions beginning in 1704.2 After outlawing Ricci’s cultural accommodation and dooming it into what has been aptly called “one of history’s magnificent failures,”3 Rome finally reversed itself partially in 1939 by lifting the ritual prohibitions. Because of all the ironic twists and turns, the Chinese rites controversy is usually viewed in scholarship today as “a chapter in negative missiology.”4 In reality it is much more than that. Just as the fight is only superficially about “how . . . to translate into the Chinese language the concepts of the divinity . . . and how . . . to judge . . . the ceremonies performed by the Chinese,”5 so the enduring legacy of the protracted and multifaceted battle is not as clear or as negative as it may seem. To see all this and more, it is crucial to look closely again at how Chinese religious terms and rites came to figure prominently in Ricci’s proselytizing work, how his ideas were challenged both inside and outside the Jesuit China mission, how the Chinese reacted, and how the heated and often acrimonious wrangle inadvertently set in motion the intricate journey of a monistic idea from Chinese cosmology to English Romanticism.

The Different Meanings of Cultural Accommodation

In the form of instructions to his subordinates, Ricci made known in 1600 his decision to adopt the kind of cultural adaptation which was ever after associated with