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SHOOTING FOR THE STARS: THE JESUITS AT THE QING COURT Eugenio Menegon
First of all, who are the Jesuits? They were established as a religious order of the Catholic Church in the mid-16th century, and you may know that a number of universities in the world today are run by Jesuits (the University of San Francisco, for example). Education has always been an important part of the Jesuits' mission. But besides education, one of their main aims was to conduct missionary work in the newly discovered lands of America, and in Africa and Asia. That is why we find them in China not long after their foundation. The Jesuits arrived in China in the 1580s, at a special juncture in Chinese history. The latter part of the Ming dynasty was a period of great economic prosperity and unprecedented intellectual diversity and openness, but also a time of strong social polarization, of government disarray, of bitter struggles between political factions, and of devastating ecological disasters. As a consequence, Chinese literati were in search of a way to understand their fragmented world and reform the empire. Among the many options available for moral and political reform, a selected number of learned men in government circles found attractive the ideas offered by this new, so-called "Celestial Teachings" (Tianxue) brought by the Jesuits. What attracted these literati to the Celestial Teachings of the Jesuits was the organic nature of their teachings. Let me explain what I mean by organic. In medieval and early modern times, knowledge was organized differently than today. We perceive history, theology, philosophy, physics, chemistry and so on, as separate disciplines. Moreover, humanities are rarely seen in conversation with the so-called “exact sciences.” However, this was not the case in the past. Before the Enlightenment, knowledge in Europe was constructed into a single hierarchy of disciplines. While some disciplines were more important than others, they were all seen as part of a unitary body of knowledge. In the hierarchy of the early modern period, theology was at the top, followed by philosophy, and then by what we call hard or exact sciences, and they broadly called “natural philosophy.” That is what I mean by organic: all branches of knowledge were interrelated, and the exact sciences measuring and describing the physical world pointed to the superior order of the metaphysical reality described by philosophers and theologians. In China, the situation was similar in many respects. In spite of differences in the classification of knowledge and in the way the world was conceived, Chinese thinkers also placed “metaphysics” high on the hierarchy. The Chinese did not separate the physical from the metaphysical as starkly as Westerners did. Nevertheless, they similarly believed that all forms of knowledge, including exact sciences, were meant to reveal and explain the hidden, ideal pattern of the universe. Like their European counterparts, they also pursued a project of organic knowledge. It is precisely this common belief in the organic nature of knowledge, both in the West and China, that accounts for the initial interest towards the religious and scientific aspects of the Jesuit mission to China. The Jesuits, as most people of their time, Galileo and Newton included, believed that there was a unified hierarchy of knowledge. They thought that knowledge of metaphysical realities had to be premised on the knowledge of physical reality. At the core of their hierarchy, however, remained a moral system centered on a supreme, ordering principle of the universe, the Christian “Lord of Heaven.” Some Ming scholars, in their almost obsessive search for a way to reform their decaying society through what they called “practical learning,” found this moral, religious and scientific system quite attractive. But here lay also the difficulty in China: the anthropomorphic god of the Christians is not a philosophical principle, except in some rarefied theological models. The Christian God is a fatherly figure, who begot a son conceived by a mortal woman. This was too much to swallow for many Chinese scholars in search of principles of universal order. They had been trained, through the subtleties of Buddhist thought and of Neo-Confucian cosmology, to think of the supreme principle as a cosmic force, difficult to define, immanent in things, but certainly not having human forms. How could they accept the embodied divinity of Christianity? However, a small number of Chinese did accept the idea. They could do so by creatively defining the Christian god in Chinese ways, emphasizing his fatherly role, and the idea of a god-king, of a “Lord of Heaven”, of an “Emperor on High.” However, by the 1630s, in the final years of the Ming dynasty, holders of the highest academic degrees stopped converting to the foreign creed. Disenchanted with their failed schemes for political and moral reform, they lived in a country threatened by peasant rebellions and barbarian attacks, and became less and less interested in experimenting with what they increasingly perceived as an alien import. Instead the community of Christian converts mainly comprised commoners from then on. And then came the conquest of the Ming empire by the Manchus in 1644. The conquest was followed by internal strife between southern Chinese regimes loyal to the fallen Ming, and the armies of the newly established Qing dynasty. The Jesuits, who were scattered in different parts of the empire, sided with different parties. In Beijing, the German Jesuit astronomer Adam Schall chose to side with the Manchus, and was awarded honors and the power to reform the Chinese calendar. With the victory of the Manchus, the Jesuits suceeded in getting into the bureaucratic machinery of the new Qing dynasty, and tried to continue their plan to spread their “Celestial Studies” in China, this time from the strong position of advisers to the imperial government. However, Chinese intellectual elites, while interested in the physical sciences of the Jesuits, started rejecting their metaphysical overarching frame. In short, they acknowledged the usefulness of Western sciences, but wanted to use them to understand the hidden principles of the universe on their own terms. And the Jesuits ended up being trapped in the Qing Court, attempting still to use that special place to further what I have called their “organic project,” but less and less effectively. Many scholars and officials in fact began to oppose the Celestial Teachings of the Jesuits. The first large offensive occurred in the 1660s: Chinese and Muslim astronomers attacked the work of the Jesuits on the Imperial Calendar, precisely criticizing the Christian cosmology and the religious component of the Jesuits’ teachings. That crisis was overcome, but somehow it foreshadowed the nature of the Jesuits’ relationship with the emperor: only the personal favor of the throne could protect them from the attacks of Chinese officials and scholars. But while patronage brought favor, it was also easy to fall from favor. The Jesuits had good luck: the man who got them out of trouble during the Calendar controversy of the 1660s was the Kangxi Emperor, a voraciously curious man, a shrewd ruler and a surprisingly open-minded monarch. Conscious of his role as the builder of a still weak empire, and of the multi-ethnic nature of that empire, Kangxi was able with great success for a number of years to negotiate the different cultural and religious traditions of the vast Qing domain. Even Westerners and their religion, thus, were welcome. But the Jesuits had to earn their patron’s favor the hard way: working for him day and night. At this point let us pause for a moment, and try to imagine how the daily life of these Jesuits was back then. We can take the final years of the Kangxi reign in the early 18th century as our point in time. At that time, a group of French Jesuits, trained in a number of sciences, had built with imperial money a beautiful church in the imperial city, that is, the part of Beijing near the palace that was usually reserved to members of the aristocracy and government bodies. That was a great privilege. Sent by the King of France over twenty years earlier, the French Jesuits had become very close to the emperor, teaching him mathematics, and doing cartographic surveys and all kinds of artistic and technical jobs for him. Their daily life tells us about the tension of religion and science in their work. Some of the fathers in Beijing were busy running around the city to take care of their congregations, but beside their religious work, they had to be alwas ready to run to the palace at the emperor’s command. But we should not be surprised that the Jesuits were so busy. In fact, the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors were truly “work-aholics,” and also expected from their subjects the same degree of diligence. Kangxi, for example, woke up before dawn, around 4 a.m., attended some lectures on the Classics, then spent the rest of the morning –starting at times as early as 5 a.m.– in audiences with his officials, discussing with them administrative decisions. Finally, he closed the morning with members of the imperial household, to discuss matters of palace administration. After lunch in the afternoon, the emperor did his own studies, writing poems, practicing calligraphy, until the sun set. When the candles were lit at 8 p.m., after dinner, he read the secret memorials pouring in from the provincial officials, and wrote himself in red ink comments in response. He often worked until midnight. This schedule made life difficult for many officials. Just imagine them getting all dressed in court robes, then mounting their horses and leaving their houses some miles away, to be at the palace at 5 a.m. in the dead of winter! In spite of numerous pleas by officials to have audiences only every other day, or once a week, the Kangxi emperor never balked at this daily routine of duties until his death! Fortunately for them, the Jesuits did not have to go to audiences that often. But they had to report to their offices on a daily basis. In certain periods, they indeed had to meet with the emperor himself every day. For example, in the 1690s, two of the French Fathers would go to the palace daily, two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening, to teach the eager Kangxi Western mathematics and geometry. Kangxi usually had them step on his platform, and had them sit near him to show him the geometrical figures and explain the subject to him more easily. Even during his summer vacations at the Palace of Eternal Spring a few miles from Beijing, he did not interrupt his lessons. The Fathers were then obliged to go to the summer palace early every day. They left Beijing at 4 a.m., and returned to their residence in the city only at the beginning of the night. Soon after they were back, they had to start working again, often spending part of the night in composing and preparing the lesson for the following day. The continuous traveling and those sleepless nights terribly tired them, and sometimes they felt overwhelmed. After they retired from the imperial presence, the emperor continued his work: he repeated by himself what he had been taught; he re-read the demonstrations; he called some of his princes and explained the lessons to them. According to Jesuit reports, the emperor continued for 4 or 5 years these studies with the same assiduity, without diminishing his effort in running state affairs, and without missing one day of his audiences with the important officials of his house and of the ministries. We know why the Jesuits endured all this: for the greater glory of God, ad maiorem Dei gloriam, as their motto goes. But why did the Chinese, and in particular the Qing emperors, let the Jesuits into China? We have seen that Kangxi rescued the Jesuits from their controversy with Chinese astronomers in the 1660s. Then he employed them in numerous state-building projects, like the mapping of the empire. And last, but not least, he retained them as his personal teachers of western sciences. The Qing state was getting much needed know-how from them. But that is not the whole story. In 1691 the emperor got a malaric fever. No remedy was found that could cure him. Finally, a Jesuit offered him some quinine, a new drug imported by Westerners from Macao. The imperial fever disappeared. And the gratitude of the emperor for his foreign servants increased. The French Jesuit mission obtained a large piece of land near the palace to build its church and residence. Thus, many factors were at play in Kangxi’s “letting the door open”: state-building was one; the introduction of Western knowledge for the reform of the calendar was another one; court politics, yet another one. But what seems to have mattered quite a bit was his personal relationship with the Fathers, a relationship that was almost like that of a father to his sons. This in fact was the metaphor often used by emperors when referring to their subjects. When two Jesuits were ordered to learn Manchu to explain mathematics to the emperor in his own language, Kangxi, like a good Confucian father who worried for the scholastic progress of his own sons, assigned to the two priests Manchu teachers, and personally tested the Jesuits, reading their compositions. Thus, if the desire of Western expertise was the first factor in letting the door open, the exceptional favor enjoyed by the Jesuits during the long reign of Kangxi – 61 years! – can only be explained by this personal relationship. Even when in the early 18th century, towards the end of Kangxi’s reign, things got rougher for the Jesuits, Kangxi still continued to treat them favourably. The Jesuits became embroiled in doctrinal discussions with envoys of the pope, and the emperor sided with them. But those were the final years of the policy of toleration. When the son of Kangxi, the Yongzheng emperor ascended the throne, things started to change. The personal relationship was gone. First, the new emperor was a devout Buddhist. This certainly did not bode well for the Christian priests. More important, though, is the fact that he had vied with his brothers for the throne in the waning years of his fathers reign. And one of the Portuguese Jesuits happened to choose the wrong side, becoming an unwilling participant in the factional struggles that ruined the very last years of Kangxi’s life. Even worse, a whole branch of the imperial clan opposed to the Yongzheng emperor converted to Catholicism. Soon after his enthronement, Yongzheng forbade the preaching of Christianity and had his relatives in the Catholic camp arrested. The Portuguese Jesuit was ordered to committ suicide. Since he could not kill himself – as well know, that is a sin for Christians – he had finally to be strangled by a guard. Most of the converts in the imperial clan ended up in prison, and languished there for years. The intersection of religion and scientific knowledge of the Jesuit mission could not be openly tolerated any more. Yongzheng, in fact, clearly understood the nature of the Jesuit work in China. In a meeting he had with some of the court Jesuits in 1724, he bluntly observed: During the reign of my father you built churches in all provinces, and you have rapidly expanded. I saw it, but I did not dare to say anything. But if you have been able to cheat my father, do not hope to do the same with me. You want all the Chinese to become Christians. I know well that this is something required by your religion. But if that happens, what will we become? The subjects of your king? Your Christians only recognize you, and in time of trouble they will listen only to your voice. I know well that there is nothing to fear now. But when the boats will come more numerous from your countries, then there could be disorders. [1]In the light of the history of China in the 19th century, when Western boats arrived numerous, and with them many gunships, these words sound prophetic. Nevertheless, the emperor decided to keep the Jesuits at court. Clearly their contribution to the construction of the Qing state, the glory of the imperial house, and the private pleasures of the emperor and his court were still deemed too important to be discarded. This attitude persisted under Yongzheng and his son Qianlong: Christianity was forbidden, but the Jesuits were allowed to continue their work in the capital. In fact, especially Qianlong, continued to eagerly seek their services. Father Amiot, one of the last Jesuits in Beijing at the end of the 18th century, observed that To be in China and be there for the glory of God, one must come prepared to do anything demanded. Those of our able artists in Europe who have their whims, who wish to work only in this manner and at that time as it pleases themselves, should come and spend some time here. They would soon be radically cured of all their whims after a few months of a noviciate at the court of Beijing. Since the missionaries were established here no Emperor has profited more by their services than the present occupant of the throne, [Qianlong]. And there is no one who has more harshly treated them or who has fulminated more crushing decrees against the holy religion they profess. […] The tastes of this prince vary, so to speak, like the seasons. He has been all for music and for fountains, today he is all for machines and constructions. There is scarcely anything for which his inclination has not changed except for painting. The same whims can come back to him, and we must be ever on our guard not to be taken at a disadvantage. [2]In this grim description of the new relationship of the Jesuits with the Chinese emperor, we find no trace of the organic project fusing religion and science of the earlier years. No doubt, this was due both to changes in China and in Europe. The 18th century missionaries, especially those coming from France, had been educated in a different world, a world that had started separating disciplines more starkly. European academicians eagerly awaited the installments published in Paris of the famous collection from the Jesuit missions entitled “Edifying and Curious Letters.” However, most of these scholars were little interested in the edifying aspect of the letters, and were instead eager to learn about the technicalities of porcelain making or the geography of Asia. The missionaries themselves had probably stopped believing in the possibility to further their organic project in China, as we see from the pessimistic remarks in their correspondence. By the final years of the Kangxi reign, Chinese literati, and the court, had become almost impossible targets for that fusion of religious and scientific elements. Chinese intellectuals and their Manchu lords accepted now only the technical knowledge of the West, while rejecting its spiritual dimension. They also started arguing that Western principles were just a derivation of the ancient ideas contained in the Chinese classics, in what has been termed the theory of the “Chinese Origin of Western Learning.” Western sciences and arts, then, for all purposes became totally detached from their theological and philosophical foundations in the eyes of the Chinese. At this point, realizing that they were merely used by the court, Jesuit artists and technicians consciously remained at court to use their arts to protect the core of their organic project: the propagation of Christianity in China. Thus in 1736, in 1737, and again in 1746, while the Qianlong emperor was visiting his studio, Brother Giuseppe Castiglione, the author of the famous portrait of the emperor riding his horse shown in the exhibit, tearfully felt to his knees, to the surprise of the monarch, and asked for tolerance towards Christians in the empire. Each time the emperor was taken aback, and his eunuchs were enraged by this breach of ceremony. Nobody was supposed to talk to the emperor, unless specifically interrogated by him. Whether Castiglione’s acts of defiance were useful we do not know. In 1736, the pressure on the mission decreased. However, in 1746 Castiglione’s intervention could not avoid the execution of five missionaries discovered in southern China. We could well ask, at this point, who was using whom? As nicely put by a Jesuit scholar of the China mission, Nicolas Standaert, the philosophy of the founder of the Jesuits Ignatius of Loyola had been turned on his head by the Chinese: Jesuit accommodation is often described by a sentence attributed to Ignatius of Loyola: “enter through the door of the other so as to make them leave through our door.” But the Chinese said to the Jesuits: “You should enter through our door. Moreover you should remain inside, and you cannot leave without permission. Anyway, we have no intention to leave through your door.” [3]This might sound as a defeat of the Jesuit utopian project, which was truly “shooting for the stars.” The Jesuits had been literally “shooting” their gazes towards the starry sky over Beijing as imperial astronomers. But they had gone all the way to China to convert the Chinese and the Chinese emperor to Christianity, not to make scientific observations. In the end, the enourmous investment in manpower, financial funds, and intellectual resources that the Jesuits and their political patrons, the kings and princes of Europe and the Popes, spent over two centuries to advance their Chinese mission, turned out to be a shot too long even for these brilliant Catholic priests. Scholars have often debated on the significance of the Jesuit religious and cultural mission to China. Some have praised its successes, others have regretted its failures. Still others have decried its tanglement with Christianity, or with Western powers, or the fact that Jesuit science was extremely conservative and delayed the introduction of some important discoveries of Galileo and other European scientists into China. I am not here to discuss the merits of the mission. That is not the work of the historian. I wish only to point to the extraordinary human dimension of this most fascinating story. Numerous Jesuits sat at the side of Kangxi, teaching him mathematics or astronomy, and at the same time learning Chinese, Manchu, or the mysteries of the Book of Changes, to serve him and Christianity, better. Kangxi understood their mission, often disagreed, but always recognized the dedication of these men, who promised never to leave China once they entered its borders. The story was a different one with Yongzheng and Qianlong. But even if Qianlong was a very demanding boss, as we have seen, the emperor never failed to praise the abilities of his Western artists and technicians. As to the Jesuits themselves, in spite of their complaints, it seems that they remained proud of their work. In writing to Europe, they still seemed secretly pleased to let people know that they had been in all the rooms of the palace, to paint a portrait or to repair a Western clock. The Jesuits continued until the end of their mission to write long scientific reports to Europe, singing the praises of Chinese porcelain, describing with marvel the long history of China, speculating on the nature of its language. They kept shooting for the stars until the end. And that is the stuff that often keeps us going: a sense of wonder for the world we inhabit, and a consuming passion to uncover the meaning of it all. ENDNOTES 1. Aimé-Martin, M.L., ed. Lettres édifiantes et curieuses concernant l'Asie, l'Afrique et l'Amérique, avec quelques relations nouvelles des missions, et des notes géographiques et historiques . Paris: Paul Daffis Libraire-Éditeur, 1875-77, vol. 3, p. 364. [Return to Text] 2. Letter of Father Amiot written at Peking in 1754 to a Jesuit in France, Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, 1877 edition, vol. IV, as translated into English in W. Devine, The Four Churches of Peking, London - Tientsin: Burns, Oates & Washbourne Ltd., 1930, pp. 17-19. [Return to Text] 3. Nicolas Standaert, “Jesuit Corporate Culture As Shaped by the Chinese,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, edited by J. W. O'Malley et al. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. [Return to Text] FOR FURTHER READING Peterson, Willard. “Learning from Heaven: the Introduction of Christianity and other Western Ideas into Late Ming China.” In The Cambridge History of China, edited by Denis Twittchett and Frederick W. Mote, 789-839. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Standaert, Nicolas. “The Classification of Sciences and the Jesuit Mission in Late Ming China.” In Linked Faiths: Essays on Chinese Religions and Traditional Culture in Honour of Kristofer Schipper, edited by Jan M. De Meyer and Peter M. Engelfriet, 287-317. Leiden: Brill, 1999. Standaert, Nicolas, ed. Handbook of Christianity in China. Volume One: 635-1800. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Waley-Cohen, Joanna. “China and Catholicism in the Sixteenth through the 18th Centuries.” In Waley-Cohen, Joanna. The Sextants of Beijing. Global Currents in Chinese History, 55-91. New York - London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999. Waley-Cohen, Joanna. “China and Western Technology in the Late Eighteenth Century.” American Historical Review 98, no. 5 (1993): 1525-1544. Wu, Silas H.L. “Emperors at Work: The daily schedule of the K'ang-hsi and Yung-cheng Emperors, 1661-1735.” Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies 8, no. 1-2 (1970): 210-227. |
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