Sojourners in a Strange Land

Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China

Florence C. Hsia

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780226355610
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Though Jesuits assumed a variety of roles as missionaries in late imperial China, their most memorable guise was that of scientific expert, whose maps, clocks, astrolabes, and armillaries reportedly astonished the Chinese. But the icon of the missionary-scientist is itself a complex myth. Masterfully correcting the standard story of China Jesuits as simple conduits for Western science, Florence C. Hsia shows how these missionary-scientists remade themselves as they negotiated the place of the profane sciences in a religious enterprise.

Sojourners in a Strange Land develops a genealogy of Jesuit conceptions of scientific life within the Chinese mission field from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Analyzing the printed record of their endeavors in natural philosophy and mathematics, Hsia identifies three models of the missionary man of science by their genres of writing: mission history, travelogue, and academic collection. Drawing on the history of early modern Europe's scientific, religious, and print culture, she uses the elaboration and reception of these scientific personae to construct the first collective biography of the Jesuit missionary-scientist's many incarnations in late imperial China. 

CHAPTER ONE

Who Was That Masked Man?

It was Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, whom Ignatius of Loyola invoked in 1553 when his companions in the Society of Jesus demurred over the position of royal confessor to João III of Portugal, worried that the honor would put their own souls at risk. Speaking with the authority due him as the Society’s founder and first superior general, Ignatius assured them that so long as their intent was pure and their interests not their own but God’s, they need not fear: “We should become all things to all, so that we may gain all for Christ.”¹ The sons of Ignatius took the directive to heart, assuming such guises as circumstances demanded in order to bring an eternal and immutable truth to all of humankind. When the French Jesuit Louis Lecomte pronounced the Pauline dictum again a century and a half later, he did so with a specificity born of both his own time on the China mission and his order’s long evangelical experience: “It is necessary to be barbarous with the barbarians, polite with peoples of intelligence, of the most ordinary life in Europe, austere to excess among the penitents of the Indies, decently dressed in China and half-nude in the forests of Madurai.”²

The ideal Jesuit was thus a shape-shifter, putting on different clothes and different roles, speaking in as many tongues and modulating his message in as many forms of diction as his audiences required. Those who first made the arduous journey by land or sea to the mission fields of late imperial China had only survived the initial stage of metamorphosis. The new arrivals slowly compiled lexicons for regional dialects, the guanhua spoken by men of learning, and the laconic idioms of classical Chinese; they learned the etiquette of calling on officials, and what rhetorical techniques were most likely to convince the uneducated. They tried shaving their heads and faces like Buddhist monks and growing their hair and beards long like the Chinese learned elite. They exchanged their cassocks for Buddhist-style garb, only to shrug it off for the silken robes of the literati—all the better to tend their newfound flocks as priests, preachers, confessors, and catechists.³ Jesuits lived a wide variety of lives within the China mission. Most of them are recognizable as local versions of roles their brethren enacted throughout early modern Catholic Europe, the British Isles, New France, and the Iberian Indies. But the most enduring guise they assumed in the Middle Kingdom is arguably the most peculiar: that of the missionary as a man of scientific expertise, whose maps, clocks, astrolabes, and armillaries apparently astonished the Chinese as much as the suggestion that water could freeze hard enough to bear an elephant shocked John Locke’s Siamese king.⁴

Certainly the figure of the missionary as man of science has proved the most long-lived in both popular and scholarly representations of the Jesuit presence in late imperial China. Life magazine’s list of “The 100 people who made the millennium” paid tribute to his historic introduction of Western science to the Chinese, and the same accomplishment won him a place in Nature magazine’s commemorations of scientific anniversaries, penned by two distinguished historians of science and medicine.⁵ Recent centenary celebrations have made him the stuff of newspaper and magazine articles, exhibitions, plays, comic strips, philatelic commemoratives, masses, papal blessings, and endless academic symposia.⁶ Whether tracing routes to the Middle Kingdom on world maps based on European models, struggling to translate Euclidean geometry into Chinese and Manchu, or teaching provincial scholars and members of the imperial family how to shoot the sun, the Jesuit missionary stands at the frontlines of cross-cultural scientific and technological exchange in the early modern era. But what of the missionary himself? As a middleman brokering cultural goods across the great divides that cleave religion from science and East from West, the China Jesuit is often an object of fascination but rarely one of explicit analysis. The persistence of the term “missionary-scientist” across a broad disciplinary spectrum is telling, for even in its less anachronistic variants the neologism is largely a term of convenience, a compound that capitalizes on the immediacy of such polarities for modern sensibilities while offering little purchase on how members of the Society of Jesus went about inhabiting the variety of social roles the term suggests.⁷ The historical emergence and fortunes of this puzzling figure are the subjects of this book.

The Jesuit missionary as a man of science was a complex character indeed, one whose various manifestations reflected both the desires of and the demands upon Catholic religious living in an uncertain age. Though the spiritual renewal of the sixteenth century produced the Society of Jesus, which received papal approval in 1540 and quickly expanded to become the most visible of the religious communities founded in the post-medieval Catholic world, it also sowed suspicion among Catholics and Protestants alike for the Society’s perceived innovations, especially in the mission fields. In the pages of the satirical Jesuite unmasqued (1689), for instance, three real Jesuits—Edward Petre, François de La Chaise, and the missionary Guy Tachard, of whom we shall hear more—conducted a fictional debate over which strategy was best suited to bring “English Hereticks” to the true faith, Petre being in a position to influence matters as confessor to the recently seated and Catholic James II of England. They discussed the merits of poison, armed rebellion, and bribery, all methods supposedly deployed in the failed Popish Plot to speed James’ accession by assassinating his brother Charles; they considered the possibility of Jesuit members of Parliament (an unlikely prospect, they agreed); and they praised the policy of forced conversion that La Chaise, confessor to Louis XIV, was widely thought to have urged on his royal penitent, who revoked the Edict of Nantes and loosed the dragonnades upon the Huguenot population of France. All this was bad enough, but the greatest threat was that masked man, the Jesuit who was willing to “personate” characters other than his own: Episcoparians, Presbyterians, and Huguenots, Turks and Siamese “Idolators,” and even “good Roman Catholicks,” if need be. From the fictional Tachard’s mouth came the pronouncement that Jesuits “must outwardly profess Judaism, be Atheists among Atheists, Impious with the Impious, and Blasphemers with those that are of that perswasion, provided they can thereby accomplish their designs, or obtain the mark they aim at.”⁸ In its very partisanship, Tachard’s supposed improvement on a Jesuit commonplace reveals the depth of early modern anxieties over the identity of what Étienne Pasquier—that staunch defender of the University of Paris against Jesuit intrusion—called a “Hermophroditicall Order.”⁹

No less settled were the contours of Jesuit shape-shifting within the world of learning. If the foundations for the Society’s approach to its adopted educational apostolate were more or less laid by the sixteenth century’s close, the articulation of Jesuit knowledge remained an open question throughout the early modern period. As audiences for Jesuit ministry evolved, so too did Jesuit pedagogy.¹⁰ To “be all things to all,” members of the Society of Jesus found themselves teaching subjects barely adumbrated in the order’s Ratio Studiorum—such as hydrography, military architecture, and experimental philosophy—in a variety of classrooms, whether in some seven hundred colleges, universities, and seminaries under the Society’s direction by the late eighteenth century, or in the form of Jesuit tuition given privatim to the pages of Philip IV’s court, fellow passengers in the “floating colleges” aboard ships bound for the East, and the early Manchu emperors of China.¹¹ And, like their lay counterparts, Jesuit scholars negotiated an increasingly complicated landscape of courts, societies, academies, observatories, mathematical museums, cabinets of curiosities, and the shifting marketplace of print, which ranged from sumptuous folios published under the aegis of noble patronage or by subscription, to the regularly issued loose quarto sheets of savant periodicals and the occasional thesis broadside.

The China Jesuit wandered through these contested terrains for nearly two hundred years, from the moment in 1584 when Matteo Ricci took a European mappamondo down from the wall of the Jesuit residence in Zhaoqing to make it “speak Chinese,” to the day in 1774 when news of the Society’s suppression finally reached Augustin von Hallerstein, the last Jesuit director of the imperial Astronomical Bureau in Beijing, and Michel Benoist, who had debated the heliocentric system of the world with the Qianlong emperor.¹² However geographically strange the lands through which he sojourned, they were not different in kind from those in which his European confreres worked: the “Indies” in which early modern Jesuits labored for the salvation of souls stretched from the mysterious Nicobar Islands to the Breton and Neapolitan countrysides, while Jesuit displays of erudition emanated from Bahia and Beijing as well as Coimbra, Rome, Paris, and Prague. In this sense, the China Jesuit’s peregrinations are but part of a larger story about the place of scholarship within the order’s ministries, of its members within the Republic of Letters, and of the Society of Jesus as a whole in the era of Enlightenment.¹³

Interests, Institutions, and Networks

Jesuit willingness to “become all things to all” tells us something about the preconditions for the various masks that early modern members of the Society of Jesus wore in the course of their journeys through so many mission fields and worlds of profane learning. It tells us little, however, about how and why certain “personations” became part of the Society’s repertoire. Flexibility with regard to “places, times, and persons,” recommended as a desirable quality of character for the Society’s members and as a principle in the Society’s ministries, may have encouraged mathematical, astronomical, and natural philosophical investigations in a general sense. But engagement with such matters was the exception for Jesuits on the China mission, not the rule.¹⁴ Much the same can be said for the Society of Jesus as a whole. Prosopographical analyses suggest that an exceedingly small proportion of individuals was responsible for the Society’s collective legacy in both script and print for the history of early modern science, a textual corpus that itself represents perhaps a tenth of the order’s literary efforts prior to its suppression.¹⁵ As for the more than four hundred individuals who bore the burden of the old Society’s evangelical efforts in the Middle Kingdom, but a fraction (averaging five or six out of at most forty or so in any given year during the mission’s first century) devoted themselves to constructing mechanical devices, casting astronomical instruments, surveying landscapes, or rendering texts in natural philosophy, pure and mixed mathematics, and medicine; only a bare handful—perhaps fifteen in all—ever held positions in the imperial Astronomical Bureau, the institutional locus of Jesuit scientific efforts in China from the time of Ricci.¹⁶ The life of an “ordinary” Jesuit on the China mission had little to do with such activities.¹⁷

How, then, to account for the persistent reenactment of such exceptional lives? As a first step, we may look to the exigencies of the mission field, a perspective that has gained historiographic recognition in recent years with exploration of the Asian-language materials authored by missionaries and their auditors.¹⁸ Jesuits sought audiences among provincial literati, an institutional niche within the imperial bureaucracy, and the occasional attention of an emperor. Scholarly scrutiny has shown how these various locales within the China mission field elicited distinct forms of evangelical action, each with its own particular echoes and legacy in the broader cultural history of late imperial Chinese science. Translations of Euclidean geometry during the late Ming, for instance, reflected traditional master-disciple relationships in which Jesuit “scholars from the West” transmitted their teachings orally to native literati, and while missionary tutelage of the Kangxi emperor was entirely effaced in the Shuli jingyun (“Essential Principles of Mathematics,” 1723), the imperially sponsored mathematical compendium was based almost entirely on Jesuit lecture notes.¹⁹ Such successes and failures in the pursuit of evangelical interests surely shaped missionary behavior; had Chinese auditors been more interested in the niceties of French or Italian cuisine than in Aristotelian cosmology or Tychonic instrumentation, the present book might well be a history of Jesuit chefs in the Celestial Empire.

The explanatory weight we accord functionalist claims about science’s role in sustaining the Society’s apostolic enterprise in late imperial China depends, in turn, on how we conceive of the institution served by such activity. But appeals to institutional policies, communal values, and organizational infrastructure can take us only so far in thinking about how and why members of even the most robust collectivities consistently pursue certain kinds of activities under a corporate cloak.²⁰ Despite repeated complaints from missionaries on the ground, Jesuit superiors did not always see the need for natural philosophical texts, astronomical instruments, or mathematical skills in the China mission. Even where initiatives in favor of a “science strategy” in the Middle Kingdom can be confirmed at the highest level—witness the letters and decrees issued by the Society’s superiors general towards the end of the seventeenth century to improve the quality of mathematical instruction in its Portuguese province, deemed a pressing desideratum in light of Portugal’s responsibility for the China mission and Lisbon’s importance as a departure point for China-bound Jesuits—their practical consequences are another matter.²¹ However famously (or notoriously) concerned with obedience and philosophical uniformity, the Society of Jesus as a whole can hardly be said to have approached any issue in lockstep formation, while recent examinations of its censorial practices have revealed the porosity of such mechanisms as well as the extent to which Jesuit revisers took it upon themselves to evaluate a work’s literary merits, novelty, and other qualities at least theoretically distinct from content.²² Though institutions—in both the social and formal senses—certainly possess considerable power over those who belong to them, their continued heuristic value depends on scholarly sensitivity to processes that bridge prescription and practice, link collectivities and individuals, and, finally, define and sustain institutions themselves.²³

In addressing the issue of how centers of power exercise control over agents at a distance, recent work in the sociology of science has offered an alternative “vocabulary for describing institutionalization” that draws much of its theoretical purchase from case studies of science and technology in the context of European imperialism.²⁴ Actor-network theory proposes a model on which a network of elements—textual and non-textual inscriptions (tables of solar declination, maps), devices (the mariner’s astrolabe), and people (trained navigators)—constitutes a set of faithful envoys that can safely traverse considerable geographical, political, and cultural spaces, “exert influence without in turn being influenced” en route, and eventually “return, again unscathed, in order to report to centre.” The reiteration of such cycles, in turn, constitutes the stabilized patterns of “science in action” at work in spatially and chronologically extended ventures.²⁵ The broad applicability of this vocabulary has been borne out in studies of how natural knowledge has been made and circulated within communities constituted through various forms of social cohesion: correspondence, acquaintance, patronage, and/or membership in formal organizations, including the Society of Jesus.²⁶ Yet this literature has also pressed beyond the explanatory limitations of network analysis. Agents that make up such networks are hardly agents at all, as the model assumes both their passive participation and their static nature; network theory itself has yet to integrate “a mechanism for how group identity and loyalty might be maintained” into its picture of reliable agents in the field.²⁷

Personae and Print Culture

This study tells the various scientific lives of the China Jesuits from a different perspective: their own. It explores how these historical actors conceived of their scientific labors within the China mission, and how they tried to convince both themselves and those with whom the future of such endeavors rested—their supporters and potential successors back home—that such activities constituted a live option for a missionary life. In examining what members of the Society themselves had to say about their scientific work in the Chinese mission fields, we meet with all the usual interpretive diffic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Conventions
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Who Was That Masked Man?
• 2. Writing Missions
• 3. Telling Missionary Lives
• 4. Making Jesuit Science Travel
• 5. Reading Jesuit Voyages
• 6. Jesuit Academicians
• 7. Observational Fortunes
• 8. Familiar Letters and Familiar Faces
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back