The Jesuit Heresiological Discourse as an Enlightenment Project in Early Modern China

Refutations of Buddhism, Daoism, and various Chinese popular cults formed a vital balance to the gestures of cultural accommodation attempted by the Jesuits in late-Ming and early-Qing China. Yet this heresiological discourse remains largely invisible in the prevailing historiography, which prominently features the accommodating Jesuit bent on forging synthesis between the East and West. This article seeks to address such neglect by centrally engaging this discourse and arguing that the Jesuits and their Chinese converts, in their consistent stress on reason and (Aristotelian) science as a basis of their criticisms of Chinese religion, articulated a hybrid notion of heterodoxy that anticipated in significant ways post-Enlightenment conceptions of superstition. Thus the article offers a case study in support of the emerging revisionist scholarship that interprets the European Enlightenment as a multi-stage historical process originating at least partially outside Europe in the sites of cross-cultural encounters during the Age of Discovery.