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Reviewed by:
  • The Christian Mission in China in the Verbiest Era: Some Aspects of the Missionary Approach, and: François de Rougemont, S.J., Missionary in Ch'ang-shu (Chiang-nan): A Study of the Account Book (1674-1676) and the Elogium
  • Eugenio Menegon (bio)
Noël Golvers , editor. The Christian Mission in China in the Verbiest Era: Some Aspects of the Missionary Approach. Louvain Chinese Studies, vol. 4. Leuven: Leuven University Press / Ferdinand Verbiest Foundation, 1999. 114 pp. Paperback BEF 595, ISBN90-6186-996-x.
Noël Golvers . François de Rougemont, S.J., Missionary in Ch'ang-shu (Chiang-nan): A Study of the Account Book (1674-1676) and the Elogium. Louvain Chinese Studies, vol. 7. Leuven: Leuven University Press / Ferdinand Verbiest Foundation, 1999. 794 pp. Paperback BEF 2,995, ISBN90-5867-001-5.

The historiography of the Roman Catholic China mission has traditionally revolved around the impact of Christianity and "Western knowledge" upon literati and court circles in late imperial China. In the last two decades, however, this research paradigm has been to a great extent both refined and broadened. On the one hand, following a long-standing tradition that gave almost exclusive attention to Western sources and the deeds of foreign missionaries, new scholarship has endeavored to elucidate the scientific and artistic accomplishments of the Jesuits in China by increasingly studying works written in Chinese by missionaries, converts, and opponents, as well as the social context of scientific interactions at the center and the periphery of the empire. On the other hand—and this is a more recent development—scholars have focused their attention on the life of the Christian communities, where the vast majority of converts were located at any given time. The two volumes under review here exemplify both of these historiographical shifts, which I will group under the headings "scholarly interaction" and "Christian life."

The Christian Mission in China in the Verbiest Era: Some Aspects of the Missionary Approach is a collection of six essays by different authors who adopt both the "scholarly interaction" and the "Christian life" approaches. Although the volume lacks an overarching editorial integration, the main focus of the collection is the scholarly interaction between the Jesuits and the court elite circles during the early Qing. Not surprisingly in a volume with Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. (1623-1688) as its pivotal figure, the most prominent topic is the Qiongli xue (The learning of the fathoming principle). This work, edited by Verbiest in the late 1670s, represented an important part of the philosophical foundations needed to transmit Christianity and its Weltanschauung to China in an organic way. The project, in Verbiest's own words, should consist of "a Chinese version of our [Western] Dialectics and Philosophy, more specifically under the cover of giving a deeper insight into our Astronomy, but in reality to give a better foundation to [End Page 118] our Christian Teaching."1 Obviously for this purpose the Jesuits had to be in a position to offer to the Chinese translations of crucial texts of the Aristotelian tradition, which, together with Thomistic theology, was one of the main pillars of Catholic learning. By including in one collection a number of such texts, the Qiongli xue capped the piecemeal yet persistent translation efforts by the Jesuits and a number of prominent converts—especially Li Zhizao (d. 1630)—over a period of almost a century. Since the philosophical curriculum per se included many branches of knowledge other than metaphysics, the Jesuits also integrated in their presentation of Western learning such disciplines as logic, physics, natural philosophy, and natural theology.

In his essay "Verbiest's introduction of Aristoteles Latinus (Coimbra) in China: New Western Evidence" (pp. 33-55), Noël Golvers, using Western sources, describes the history and significance of the Qiongli xue. To him, this compilation represents the ultimate effort of the Jesuit missionaries "to open up to the Chinese the Western theological and philosophical tradition in which . . . [the Jesuits'] catechetical system was embedded" (p. 33). For similar "catechetical" reasons, the Jesuits also felt compelled to translate the mathematical basis of their astronomical knowledge, which they considered organic to evangelization. By illustrating empirically the nature of astronomical phenomena, they hoped "to...

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