Science, Mathematics, and Reason: The Missionary Methods of the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes in Seventeenth-Century Vietnam

Scholars, and the general public as well, have shown continuing interest in the intensive missionary efforts of the seventeenth-century Jesuits in China. ¹ Few in the West, however, are familiar with the remarkable efforts undertaken nearly contemporaneously by Alexandre de Rhodes among the people of China's southern neighbor, Vietnam. De Rhodes, a Jesuit from Avignon, France, understood well the power of ideas; and, as an individual who was intellectually ahead of his times, he skillfully used an array of new ideas in persuading the Vietnamese people to accept the religious message that he brought them.

It would be difficult to do justice in a short study to all of de Rhodes's amazing accomplishments. One would need to discuss his contributions in several specific areas: to the Vietnamese people, particularly in respect to religion and linguistics; to the Roman Catholic Church, in his successful broadening of its mission effort in Asia; and to Europeans, for whom he provided, through his engaging narratives of travel, not only a wealth of new knowledge about Southeast Asia, but also his views on the values he saw in Asian culture: the prominence in his travel narratives of the theme of cosmopolitanism--the willingness to acknowledge the values of others and even to consider the adaptation to one's own culture of foreign cultural elements, one of the key concepts in the coming century of Enlightenment--provides a striking illustration of the advanced nature of de Rhodes's ideas and his absorption with them.

But to understand and appreciate de Rhodes, it may be more useful to focus on one particular aspect of his work than to engage in a brief analysis of each of his many successes. By examining carefully an individual theme from his own writings, one can gain meaningful insights into both his intellectual outlook and his method of influencing the Vietnamese: de Rhodes's insistent presentation of new European scientific knowledge as well as contemporary European applications of the concept of reason represents one of the most dynamic of these themes. While the use of these ideas constitutes only a small part of de Rhodes's missionary approach, which was in the main theological, ² it is significant in demonstrating his ties with the intellectual era in which he lived and the succeeding one as well.

The use of science, mathematics, and reason was indeed the method that had already proven successful for the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, one of the best known of the early exponents of Christianity in China. As Ricci explained in his journal: "Whoever may think that ethics, physics and mathematics are not important in the work of the Church, is unacquainted with the taste of the Chinese, who are slow to take a salutary spiritual potion, unless it be seasoned with an intellectual flavoring." ³ Alexandre de Rhodes, beginning his missionary work in Vietnam in late 1624 or early 1625, about fourteen years after Ricci's death, took to heart his predecessor's gustatory dictum, adapting to the taste of his own listeners in Vietnam the most advanced European thinking of his day.

That de Rhodes is less well known today than he should be is a result, in part at least, of the inaccessibility of the books he wrote about Vietnam, of which no less than eight were published in France and Italy at the midpoint of the seventeenth century. ⁴ Those specialists who do know of de Rhodes's work are enthusiastic in their praise of his achievements. The scholar and historian of the Jesuits, William V. Bangert, calls de Rhodes "one of the most effective Jesuit missionaries of all time." ⁵ And the French scholar Claude Larre and his Vietnamese colleague Pham Dinh Khiem, who together edited the 1961 Vietnamese republication of de Rhodes's Catechism, state...