Abstract
This chapter seeks to insert Longobardo’s report into its Renaissance intellectual context by considering how Longobardo’s polemic with Ricci’s accommodation of Confucianism reflects coeval European debates between humanism and scholasticism. Just as the European humanists attempted to discard the traditional commentaries of the Middle Ages and return to the original meaning of ancient texts, Ricci rejected the traditional commentaries of the Song dynasty and attempted to restore what he believed to be the authentic meaning of the Confucian classics by returning to the original texts of the Confucius. In contrast, just as the Renaissance scholastics interpreted ancient texts in continuity with medieval tradition, Longobardo interpreted the ancient texts of China in the light of those very Song-dynasty commentaries that Ricci had rejected.
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Notes
- 1.
The contours of the Humanist-Scholastic debate is expertly narrated in Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). For a collection of essays on the impact of this debate on Biblical criticism, see Erika Rummel, ed., Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2008). While the impact of Renaissance humanism on the Jesuit ratio studiorum has been given much attention, how tensions between scholastic and humanist methodology played out in the Jesuit order require further examination.
- 2.
Johannes van Oort, “Augustine and Hermes Trismegistus: An Inquiry into the Spirituality of Augustine’s ‘Hidden Years’,” Journal of Early Christian History 6, no. 2 (2016): 55–76.
- 3.
See Isabel Pina, “Joâo Rodrigues Tçuzu and the Controversy over Christian Terminology in China: The Perspective of a Jesuit from the Japanese Mission,” Bulletin of Portuguese/Japanese Studies 6 (2003): 47–71.
- 4.
“O numero destes Interpretes antigos he grande, porque soo no Suxu entram alguns 107, no comento do Yekim entram 136, no do Xukim 166, e assi das mais Kins, como se vee nos catalogos que andas impressos no prime[iro] das mesmas Kins. E he pera pasmar, ver como combinam e conspiram todos na intellig[enti]a das cousas fundamentaes e substansiaes das suas doutrinas, que he huma imagem dos nossos Santos Padres e doutores na exposição da sa[gr]ada scriptura. Por onde não sem rezão se faz na China tanto caso destes comentos, que não se admitemas composições que fazem os Letrados sobre o Texto, se não forem conformes ao sentido que lhe dão os Comentos.” APF, Manuscript SC Indie Orientiali e Cina, vol. 1, fol. 147r.
- 5.
APF, SC, Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 1, fol. 149v.
- 6.
APF, SC, Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 1, fol. 149v.
- 7.
Christopher S. Celenza, “Pythagoras in the Renaissance: The Case of Marsilio Ficino,” Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 3 (1999): 667–711.
- 8.
Pierio Valerianio Bolzani, Hieroglyphica sive de sacris aegyptiorum literis commentarii (Basel, 1556), title page.
- 9.
“Quanto a secunda parte, deve igualmente notarse, que por causa dos symbolos em todas as nações desde antigo ouve duas sortes de doutrina, huma verdadeira e secreta, outra falsa e aparente. A primeira hera a Philosophia e scientia das causas naturaes que sabiam somente os sabios, e tratavam secretamente entre si nas suas Classes. A secunda hera huma falsa apparentia da doutrina popular, que hera enigma da primeira e o povo evidava ser verdadeira na forma que soavam as palavras, havendo que na realidade hera totalmente falsa.” APF, SC, Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 1, fol. 149v.
- 10.
“Esta seita do Amida hé a que isteriormente se pregua e declara. E perguntando aos mais sabios que dem rezão de que maneira o Amida pode salvar as jentes, dizem por derradeiro que tudo hé fonbem. Esta palavra fonbem [hōben 方便] não a entendem os simples e os que não são letrados.” Juan Ruiz-de-Medina, ed., Documentos del Japon: 1547–1557 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1990), 662. For the authorship of this document, see Ruiz-de-Medina, 652–654. For the progeny of this concept in China, see Thierry Meynard, “Chinese Buddhism and the Threat of Atheism in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 31 (2011): 3–23. The Sumario is discussed extensively in App, The Cult of Emptiness, 33–50.
- 11.
Cooper, “Rodrigues in China,” 298–315. Rodrigues’ views about the Near Eastern origin of East Asian civilisation predate his intervention in the Terms Controversy. At the end of his famous Japanese grammar, or Arte da lingoa de Japam, Rodrigues traces the Chinese back to the ten tribes of Israel. Similar theories are propounded in his unfinished Historia da Igreja do Japâo, which was written between 1620 and 1621. See Rodrigues, Arte da lingoa de Iapam, 235r–235v; Cooper, João Rodrigues’s Account, 330–331; Cooper, Rodrigues the Interpreter, 269–294.
- 12.
Niccolò Longobardo, “Exemplum epistolae a P. Nicolao Longobardo, anno 1598, ex China conscriptae ad Reverendum P. Claudium Aquavivam Societatis Iesu Generalem,” in Recentissima de amplissimo regno Chinae (Mainz: Typis Ioannis Albini, 1601), 7.
- 13.
Cooper, João Rodrigues’s Account, 358–359.
- 14.
Philip J. Ivanhoe, “Whose Confucius? Which Analects?,” in Confucius and the Analects: New Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 119.
- 15.
APF, SC, Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 1, fol. 150v.
- 16.
Ivanhoe, “Whose Confucius? Which Analects?,” 124. Interestingly, however, the Qing dynasty philologist Zhang Xuecheng would adopt a reading similar to Longobardo’s in claiming, “Everything Confucius talked about concerned human nature and the Way of Heaven, but he never explicitly said what these were because he feared people would abandon the actual phenomena of the world in their search for the Way.” Ivanhoe, 127.
- 17.
APF, SC, Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 1, fol. 154r.
- 18.
APF, SC, Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 1, fol. 154r. Cfr. Commentarii collegii conimbricensis Societatis Iesu in octo libros physicorum Aristotelis stagiritae (Coimbra: Typis et expensis Antonii à Mariz Universitatis Typographi, 1592), 100–103 (liber I, c. 2, q. 2).
- 19.
“Os Philosophos deste tempo e outros depois de Aristoteles, pello conceito que tem daquelles primeiros Philosophos, não se persuadem que homens de tanto ingenio (posto que suas palavras são o que todas as cousas são huma Substantia continuada, e assi não differem entre si se não conforme a os sentidos exteriores os quaes se enganam) ouvessem de querer falar no sentido em que Aristoteles os refuta e reprende por onde os interpretam de varios modos. Mais dizem que Aristotels os reprende naquella forma, pera si ser as palavras, e não por cuidar que in se elles sentiam aquillo. Outros notam Aristoteles que lhes impos o que elles não quizeram dizer no sentido em que os refuta.” APF, SC, Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 1, fol. 154v.
- 20.
Michael Malone-Lee, “Cardinal Bessarion and the Introduction of Plato to the Latin West,” in Making and Rethinking the Renaissance: Between Greek and Latin in 15th–16th Century Europe, ed. Giancarlo Abbamonte and Stephen Harrison (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 118–119.
- 21.
Cesare Vasoli, “La critica di Francesco Patrizi ai ‘Principia’ aristotelici,” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 51, no. 4 (1996): 713–787.
- 22.
“Quarto finalmente, provase não ser isto cousa nova, que outros Autores mais antigos que os sobre nomeados não tivessam, pois a Seita dos Gymnosophistas Indianos o tem abertamente, e o professam os Bonzos da China que delles emanaram. O mesmo tem o Laoçu com os seus Tausus, e sobre tudo os professores do Jukiao desde maior ate o minor, assi antigos como modernos. Estas tres seitas são mais antigas que os Philosophos ditos acima, e todas tem origem de Zoroastre Mago e principe dos Chaldeos, que assi o ensinou e semeou pello mundo, pondo o Chaos eterno etc.” APF, SC, Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 1, fol. 154v.
- 23.
For a survey of these works, see Thierry Meynard, “Aristotelian Works in Seventeenth-Century China,” Monumenta Serica 65, no. 1 (2017): 61–85.
- 24.
APF, SC, Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 1, fol. 147v.
- 25.
“Nec est litteralis sensus ipsa figura, sed id quod est figuratum. Non enim cum Scriptura nominat Dei brachium, est litteralis sensus quod in Deo sit membrum huiusmodi corporale: sed id quod per hoc membrum significatur, scilicet virtus operativa.” Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Thomas Gornall (London: Blackfriars, 1964), I, q. 1, a. 10, ad 3.
- 26.
The identification of the Mandarin is by Song Liming. See his essay (Chapter 2, Sect. 2.1.2).
- 27.
APF, SC, Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 1, fol. 165r.
- 28.
APF, SC, Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 1, fol. 167v.
- 29.
Standaert, Yang Tingyun, 198.
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Canaris, D. (2021). Longobardo’s Scholastic Critique of Ricci’s Accommodation of Confucianism. In: Meynard, T., Canaris, D. (eds) A Brief Response on the Controversies over Shangdi, Tianshen and Linghun. Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0451-5_3
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