A Question of Rites: Friar Domingo Navarrete and the Jesuits in China (review)

Reviews 437 women, women as heads ofhouseholds, and the effect ofmarriage on the household economy. Chapters 8 and 9 might well be thought of as companion pieces juxtaposing the position ofsons and daughters in the households and the ideology ofChina. Issues ofgender equity and the endless permutations of the one-child-per-family policy are also introduced. The treatment given this extremely important topic is somewhat surprising, and not as satisfying as the rest of the volume. It is unfortunate that the opportunity for a most creative application of Croll's own "Heaven to Earth" conceptualization is not taken with this topic. The potential for the chapter to integrate her concept of a transformed ideology with issues of gender in China's villages is passed over for a much more generalized discussion ofissues , often at the national and provincial levels. From Heaven to Earth is an important book that not only serves as an introduction to some ofthe seminal issues related to China's reforms but also poses a considerable challenge to the research community actively working in rural areas. We must move beyond the mere accounting ofsocioeconomic changes in rural China, and seek to understand the cultural, ideological, and psychological changes that are as much emblems ofreform policies as the new television next door or the factory down the road. Gregory Veeck Louisiana State University mm J. S. Cummins. A Question ofRites: Friar Domingo Navarrete and theJesuits in China. Aldershot, Hampshire: Scolar Press; Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1993. xv, 349 pp. Hardcover $76.95. A Question ofRites is the culmination ofa life's work by the author, Emeritus Professor ofHispanic Studies at the University ofLondon, on the Dominican Friars in China, and especially Friar Domingo Navarrete (1618-1686). His 1962 translation for the Hakluyt Society of The Travels and Controversies ofFriar Domingo Navarrete remains indispensable for the study not only ofthe seventeenth -century Christian missions in China, but ofearly Qing China itself. And© 1995 by University' . ?tt ·<¦ p Cummins' articles, collected as Jesuit and Friar in the Spanish Expansion to the of Hawai ? Pressr r East (Variorum Reprints, 1986), are a thoroughly researched as well as spirited defense of the friars, Dominican and Franciscan, against their Jesuit critics. 438 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 Now, in this closely packed work, Cummins both rehearses the old arguments and provides a life and times ofhis hero, Navarrete. Unfortunately, the polemic seems to have overcome the historical and biographical project. Even the reader predisposed to his views would probably find the relentless anthology of anti-Jesuit quotations, out ofcontext and uncritically presented , more irritating than enlightening. And the focus on things Spanish, understandable given Cummins' academic roots, is not necessarily helpful for the sinologist. The "Madrid Entr'acte" (chapter 8), for example, is barely relevant to the main theme, too short to be a satisfactory account of Spain in the 1670s and 1680s and not focused on Navarrete himself. Even the Jesuits are presented in the opening chapter exclusively as Spanish. Leaving aside the thorny question whether the Basque founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius ofLoyola, and his Basque companion and pioneer of the China mission, Francis Xavier, should be regarded as Spanish, the Society was founded in Paris, established in Rome, and, so far as the Asian missions were concerned, always more Portuguese than Spanish in personnel and outlook. Joseph Dehergne's Repertoire des Jésuites de Chine de 1522 à 1800 lists only five Spaniards among the 921 Jesuits of the mission. It is a serious distortion to see the Jesuit/ Friar encounter in China, whatever its roots, as one between Spanish (Dominican ) "Hounds and [Jesuit] Foxes." It is salutary to be reminded by Cummins that the Friars as well as the Jesuits had scientific inclinations, practiced medicine, and were innovative and accommodating in the Americas. But that makes it all the more difficult to understand their hostility toward such activities in China. On the other hand, Cummins perpetuates some long-exploded historical myths about the status of the Jesuits in China: that they were predominantly "mandarins" (chapter 2), that they entered China under patronage "usually as imperial mathematicians or bureaucrats" (p. 91). A statistical survey, even for the second halfof the seventeenth century, will effectively demolish this stereotype. AU except a handful ofJesuits, like the friars, entered China semi-clandestinely, worked well away from the court, and had no official position (Dehergne, Appendix 7, lists only twenty-three "Jesuit mandarins"). The difficulty in writing on the Rites issue, as so many have found, is that it involves not only sources in many European languages, as well as in Chinese, but a deep knowledge of theology and religious history. It is not surprising, then, nor does it greatly detract from the value ofthe work, if Cummins sometimes errs in his presentation ofissues. Examples are his confusion of God's foreknowledge with predestination (p. 34), the misappropriation of the modern term "catechism" for Ricci's Tianzhu shiyi (p. 54), and the statement (which appears to be the author's but may be Navarrete's—in any case without comment) that "the Christian God" demands the stoning to death ofidolaters (p. 59). A more serious theological problem is the unexamined assumption (one certainly held by Navarrete Reviews 439 but contested by the Chinese Jesuits) that Catholic orthodoxy equated with a conformity to European "rules" (p. 100). There are many curious misapprehensions in A Question ofRites about late Ming/early Qing China. While the Jesuit Martini may briefly have been a mandarin ofthe loyalist Southern Ming, he certainlywas not "a Mandarin ofthe First Degree" nor could he have worn robes embroidered with a "golden dragon" (p. 100). IfMartini on his return from Rome in 1659 had been gorgeous in "silk dragon robes" (p. 115), his head would not have remained on his shoulders long. The Yang Guangxian case is presented (chapter 5) without the politics of the regency period so much discussed in recent Qing historiography, leaving the impression that itwas simply yet another case ofJesuit hubris receiving its just reward. Again on the key issues at stake in the Rites Controversy, there is little attempt to use recent works on Chinese religion as a criterion. Cummins cites Léon Wieger (inaccurately) on Zhu Xi's atheism and denial of the immortality ofthe soul, but there is nothing on the rehabilitation of Confucian religiosity by Tu Wei-ming, Rodney Taylor, Julia Ching, and others. Sinologists will be surprised to hear that Mencius is "verbose, fluent and satirical" (p. 200) and had an encounter with "his emperor" (p. 201). Cummins seems to have taken his China, like his Jesuits , whole from Navarrete. We are twice told that Giovanni Lubelli, S.J., knew little Chinese, yet he wrote ten works in Chinese, most ofwhich, according to Poster's bibliography, were reprinted frequently well into modern times. The central concern of the book is Navarrete's view on the Chinese Rites, but Cummins fails to distinguish the various key issues: Chinese "atheism," the use of Chinese terms for God, ancestor rituals, and Confucian rituals. He recounts Navarrete's triumphant discovery of Longobardi's suppressed treatise, but nowhere indicates that Longobardi was entirely concerned with the "terms" question and totally accepted the standard Jesuit view on rituals. He notes the irony of the Jesuits in China appealing to "fact" against "law" in China while denying such a distinction to the Jansenists in Europe, but adopts the curious position on Kang Xi's declaration on the civic nature ofthe rites that his views were definitive but presumptuous, necessarily pro-Chinese, and hence concealed their "religious content " (pp. 234-235). There are some very well told tales in A Question ofRites. The long chapter 6, "A Dominican joins the Jesuits," describing the house arrest in Canton ofmissionaries ofvarious orders from 1666 to 1669 is psychologically convincing, and a judicious appraisal ofsome very complex, largely archival sources. But some welldocumented aspects ofNavarrete's career get very little attention. His comparatively summary treatment by the Roman Inquisition and the suppression ofhis second book are attributed to Jesuit machination, but a close examination ofboth the published Tratados and the partlyprinted but unpublished Controversias might suggest other explanations. For example, Navarrete asked the Inquisition 440 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 for endorsement ofhis view that the Manchus were usurpers and that Chinese Christians had a duty to denounce them and to refuse all offices under them, even that of schoolteacher. The Jesuits, he told the Inquisition, should be condemned as seeking to govern the world, and the Confucians, he wrote, were simultaneously atheists and idolaters. It is readily understandable why a work so abounding in quotations should use the method ofcitation by lumping references to a paragraph or section in one note. However, the annotation is not consistent, and in several places I was unable to locate a quotation or find the source for a comment that appeared to need substantiating in the forest of citations in the reference section at the end ofthe book. And some ofthe bibliographical details were inaccurate; to take but one amusing example, Basil Guy's ironic "Ad majorem Societatis gloriam: Jesuit perspectives on Chinese mores in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries" is listed as a conventional "AMDG." One test ofthe importance of a book is the challenge it offers to accepted ideas. By this criterion, Cummins' A Question ofRites is a major work. It is far from being a definitive history of the Rites question, even for the third half of the seventeenth century. But it presents with verve, wit, and, at times, well-deserved acerbity, one side ofthe question. It will, I hope, provoke much further work on this important episode not only in Sino-Western relations, but in the general history ofideas. Paul Rule La Trobe University mm Lincoln H. Day and Ma Xia, editors. Migration and Urbanization in China. Studies in Chinese Environment and Development. An East Gate Book. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. 272 pp. Hardcover $55.00. Most ofthe papers collected in this book are based on a large-scale migration survey conducted by the Academy ofSocial Science of China in 1986, a survey which offers a wealth ofinformation on population migration and related socioeco- ^i noe L rr · ·* nomîc details. In addition to its richness of information, the book also provides a© 1995 by Universityr ofHawai'i Pressgood view ofChina's population migration from different angles, including historical changes in the patterns ofmigration, migration motivation, permanent and temporary migration differentials, interregional migration, economic adjustment ofmigrants in urban areas, and the basic characteristics ofmigrants. ...