The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 1650-1785 (review)

In The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 1650-1785, David Mungello has written a concise yet informative history of the missionary work undertaken by Catholics in Shandong during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As in his earlier work, The Forgotten Christians of Hangzhou (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994), Mungello has sought to enlighten readers about Catholic missionary efforts in China. His impressive use of primary documents including archives in the Vatican, Europe, and China is evident in both these works. Included in the present slender volume are maps from these archives as well as contemporary photographs taken by Mungello during a visit to Shandong in the late 1990s. They provide a context that cannot be conveyed by words alone. Accounts of the failures of Christianity in late dynastic China are legion, and yet there is an involvement by Catholic missionaries in the countryside that has previously been known only in a cursory way; this involvement is carefully detailed in Mungello's work.

There is a metaphysical pathos underlying the activities of the Catholic missionaries in China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Mungello shows his respect for the passion that they brought to their calling. Proselytizing in China was not an endeavor for the weak. It required an unusual level of spiritual dedication, physical strength, and intellectual resolve. There is an inherent tension among these qualities that Mungello makes plain in this volume. On the one hand missionaries sought to bring the spirit of an idealized sacred world to the Chinese, while on the other they were constantly confronted with the desires of the profane world of the flesh. How Mungello sorts out the two makes for unusual reading in the field of missiology.

In The Forgotten Christians of Hangzhou, Mungello discussed the efforts of the Jesuits in Zhejiang Province; in The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, he concentrates on the work of mendicant orders around Jinan. While both groups envisioned a Christian China effected through the process of conversion, the focus of their efforts differed. Among the Jesuits were Europe's best and brightest—well educated and fervently devout Catholics (Forgotten Christians, p. 111). Jesuits concentrated on converting members of the elite, who would then exert their power and privilege on the rest of China in a traditional top-down, hierarchical fashion. Less educated than their Jesuit counterparts, the mendicant missionaries in the provinces tended to focus more on conversions of the common people, who, in turn, would create a groundswell of support for Christianity that could foster an indigenized Chinese Catholic Church. As mendicant orders, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians were especially vulnerable to a chronic lack of funds and resources. As a consequence, out of necessity, these men frequently wore local dress and ate local cuisine in order to survive, as was the case with the Franciscan Fr. Antonio de Santa Maria Caballero, who "wore Manchu clothes and spoke Chinese with such fluency that ... when he visited a Dominican and spoke Chinese, the other priest did not recognize him until he spoke Spanish" (The Sprit and the Flesh, p. 25). This adaptation made it possible to survive the hardships of living in Shandong with its "many physical discomforts, including extreme cold and heat, poor food, uncomfortable housing, and a life of poverty" (p. 26).

The tale of Catholicism in Shandong begins with the endeavors of Fr. Caballero, who, after an abortive attempt in 1633, was successful in his second attempt in 1649 to establish a mission in Jinan. For nearly twenty years thereafter, Fr. Caballero worked tirelessly to bring the word of God to the Chinese. He is unusual for the fact that he wrote three works and collaborated with a member of the literati class, Shang Huqing. It is worth noting that Mungello, in both of his books, deals with local literati, who attempted...