Jesuit Science through Korean Eyes

Jesuit Science through Korean Eyes DONALD L. BAKER Tour centuries ago Michael Ruggieri (1543-1607) and Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), two Italian priests from the Society of Jesus, arrived in southeastern China and began preaching the merits of European civilization and religion to a bemused Chinese audience. Within a couple of decades word of this Catholic missionary presence in China had traveled thousands of miles to Korea in the northeast. Though no Jesuit priest from China ever reached Korea, Jesuit publications did. As early as the first quarter of the seventeenth century, Koreans were reading and commenting in print on works on religion and natural science by European authors. Two and a half centuries before the Hermit Kingdom was forced to open its land to the Western world, the Korean response to the West had begun. Fr. Ruggieri soon returned to Europe to obtain more support for the mission. Ricci stayed and learned that he could make his Christian message more palatable to Chinese taste by packaging Christianity in Confucian colors and further strengthening its appeal through association with Western accomplishments in cartography, astronomy, and mathematics. The Riccian approach of cultural accommodation to Chinese Confucian mores was partially curtailed by papal decrees in the early eighteenth century.1 The other feature of Ricci's plan for bringing the Chinese to Christ, his borrowing of European advances in science and technology to promote Western religion, overcame initial 1. For a detailed account of the dispute over how to maintain the purity of the Christian message in a Chinese environment, see Antonio S. Rosso, Apostolic Legations to China of the Eighteenth Century (South Pasadena, Calif.: P.D. and lone Perkins, 1948). 207 208Journal ofKorean Studies opposition within the church and survived.2 By 1644 the GermanJesuit Adam Schall had been appointed director of the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy in Peking. Except for a brief hiatus in the 1660s, Jesuits continued to serve as China's official astronomers until Rome ordered the global suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773.s This Riccian presentation of Catholicism as compatible with Confucianism and cloaked in scientific and technological expertise is the version of Western learning that Koreans first encountered. Over the last few decades much has been written in the West on this early cross-cultural contact between Sino-Confucian culture and Western European civilization. The 190-year Jesuit mission is generally adjudged a failure, since China did not become Christian. The scholarly debate over the reasons behind that failure usually revolves around competing evaluations of the validity of adapting Catholicism to Confucian language and customs. Donald Treadgold, for example, argued that "The Jesuits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had an opportunity to convert the Chinese empire." If the authorities in Rome had not blundered by condemning the Jesuits' compromises with Confucian terminology and tradition, the Jesuits' proselytizing, enhanced by the popularity of Western science, might have generated a Chinese Christian civilization.4 George Dunne agreed that the Jesuits could have converted a substantial segment of the Chinese population if they had been allowed to preach a synthesis blending the "partial truths of Confucianism" with the "supernatural revelation of Christianity ," just as their predecessors in the early church had done with Greek philosophy.5 The papal rejection of Jesuit flexibility has had its defenders. Kenneth Scott Latourette, in his monumental History of Christians in China, suggested that whether or not the rites and terminology disputes had arisen it is unlikely the Society of Jesus would have won lasting acceptance for its alien religion in China. "No large body of Christian missionaries could have lived and worked in China at this time, no 2.George H. Dunne, Generation of Giants: The Story of the Jesuits in China in the Last Decades of the Ming Dynasty (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), p. 123. 3.For a concise summary of the Jesuit use of astronomy to gain acceptance in China, see Jonathan Spence, To Change China: Western Advisors in China, 1620-1960 (New York: Penguin Books, 1960), pp. 3-33. 4.Donald Treadgold, 7"Ae West in Russia and China (Cambridge: At the University Press), 2:31,33. 5.Dunne, Generation of...