Western Learning and Christianity in China: The Contribution and Impact of Johann Adam Schall von Bell, S.J. (1592-1666) (review)

This two-volume work contains the proceedings of an international conference held in Sankt Augustin, Germany, in 1992 to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the German-born Jesuit missionary to China, Johann Adam Schall von Bell. Each of the fifty-one articles is printed in its original language—English, Chinese, German, or French—and is supplemented by a summary in English and Chinese. Each volume contains a bibliography of Chinese and Japanese works cited, and volume 2 contains a general index with glossary. The contributions are grouped under eight headings. Volume 1 contains essays on Schall as a person and on his context, his relations with Chinese contemporaries, and his work on astrology, astronomy, and the calendar. In volume 2 there are essays on Schall's contribution to "Western Learning" in China, on his religious writings and activities, on Schall as a literary and iconographic figure, on the reception and impact of his work, and on other examples of the encounter between Europe and China. In the brief scope of a review it is clearly impossible to comment on the details of such a wealth of material.

Instead it might be worth considering briefly the reasons for publishing two such large volumes on a seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary to China. The person whose name is most generally associated with this mission is its founder, Matteo Ricci. Schall succeeded Ricci, and, as the contributors to these volumes underscore, the mission would not have survived the transition from the Ming dynasty to the Qing without someone with his combination of political acumen and abilities as an astronomer. Thus, the focus on Schall's remarkable career is in fact a way to understand much about the Jesuit mission and about the Chinese context in which it struggled for survival. However, it should be noted that although biographical details do emerge in the various essays, these volumes are not directly concerned with providing a comprehensive biography for Schall.¹ As the title indicates, the focus is on Schall's role in bringing Christianity and "Western learning" to China and on the impact on China of his endeavors. They thus help to fill out our understanding of the cultural interaction between China and Europe that took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Although Europeans have been supplied with information about the Jesuit mission to China, and this mission has periodically been a topic of intense debate ever since the seventeenth century, for the most part this has been a European debate based in large measure on information about China supplied by missionaries. This particular cultural contact has been a focus of controversy because it was, in the early period, almost exclusively mediated by Jesuits and was thus inevitably embroiled in debates concerning Jesuits, their position in the Catholic Church, their missionary policies, and the struggle between Protestants and Catholics. Matters have been further complicated by the uses that early enlightenment figures such as Voltaire, Bayle, and Leibniz made of Jesuit interpretations of Chinese philosophy and culture, and by the violent reactions of others, such as Arnauld. Thus there has always been much at stake for Europeans in their interpretations of this mission to China and of what it says about Jesuits, about European culture in relation to Chinese culture, and about the Chinese through their reaction to Europeans, Christianity, and "Western Learning." For just this reason it has also been difficult to achieve a rounded picture; particularly lacking has been information from the Chinese perspective. These two volumes go a considerable way toward indicating just what gaps there are and sketching in at least some of the details. Just over half...