1993년 연세대 대학원에 제출한 박사학위논문 "마테오 리치의 中國觀補儒易佛論"이 책으로 나오지 못한 채 남아있습니다. 학술논문이지만 일반 독자들 읽기에도 어렵지 않고 동서문명 교섭사의 대표적 주제를 다룬 것이라 해서 조금 손을 봐서 교양서로 출간하자는 권유를 바로 받았지만, 당시 몇몇 학계 인사들과의 껄끄러운 사정으로 인해 놓아둔 것이 지금에 이르렀군요.

 

몇 달 전 한 출판사에서 책으로 내자는 고마운 제안이 들어와 출판 생각을 하게 되었는데, 막상 생각해 보니 꼭 그럴 필요가 있겠나 망설이는 마음이 들더군요. 읽어줄 독자들이 얼마간 계시리라고 생각은 되지만, 출판사의 편집자 노력까지 들여서 굳이 책으로 만들 필요까지 있겠는가, 나 자신도 교양서를 만들기 위한 보완 작업을 크게 벌이기보다 독자들이 읽기 쉽도록 좀 다듬기만 해서 블로그에 올려놓으면 꼭 읽고 싶은 분들은 책 살 필요 없이 여기서 읽을 수 있게 하는 편이 낫지 않겠나 하는 생각이 들었습니다.

 

그래서 틈날 때 조금씩 손봐서 여기 올리기로 했습니다. 우선 목차와 영문요약부터 올립니다. 이 논문으로 동서논문 교섭을 공부하면서 문명사 공부를 시작한 것이니, 내 문명사 관점에 관심 가진 분들이 여기서 그 출발점을 살펴봐 주기 바랍니다. 아마 봄이 오기 전에 다 올릴 수 있으리라 생각합니다.

 

 

緖論

 

1장 마테오 리치 중국관의 형성

 

1절 리치 이전 예수회의 중국 전교와 적응주의

2절 중국 진입과 정착

3西士신분의 확립

4절 황제, 관료 및 환관들과의 관계

 

2장 마테오 리치의 중국관

 

1절 중국 어문의 숙련도

2절 국가로서의 중국 인식

3절 중국의 문물과 사회에 대한 인식

4절 불교와 유가에 대한 인식

 

3장 보유역불론과 과학 활동

 

1절 리치의 역불론

2절 리치의 보유론

3절 전교 방법으로서의 과학 활동

4절 마테오 리치 전교 방법의 반향

 

結論

 

 

Matteo Ricci's Understanding of China and his Mission Principle

 

    Matteo Ricci(1552~1610) sailed to Goa in 1578 as a Jesuit missionary. He was summoned in 1582 to Macao for the China mission by Alessandro Valignano(1539~1606), the Jesuit Visitor to the East. One year later, he entered the country with Michaele Ruggieri(1543~1607) and opened the first Jesuit residence of the China mission in the city of Zhaoqing, the viceroyal seat of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces.

    Ruggieri left China after 4 years. But Rucci stayed on and lived 27 years in China until his death in 1610, with only one short break in 1593 for a visit to Macao. He was in Guangdong province for 12 years, and then in Nanchang for 3 years, then after a short visit to Beijing, in Nanjing for 1 year and half. After that, he made his second attempt for Beijing, and this time, succeeded in staying there. He had been in the royal city for a little short of ten years when he died, and then a piece of land was granted by the Emperor for the eternal stay of his body there.

    Of all the great achievements Ricci made, the most elementary one was his presence there. The Jesuits had begun their attempt to enter China at the time of St Francis Xavier(1506~1552), not many years after the formal foundation of the Order in 1540. They had had to wait more than 30 years until Ricci and Ruggieri went over to Zhaoqing. And then in less than 30 years' time, they were firmly established in the capital city of China, both on the ground and under it. They had secured both the support of some of the most select scholar-officials and the acknowledgement of the Emperor. And Ricci had been nearly single-handed in achieving this.

 

    For centuries that followed, church historians tended to be bent more on singing Ricci's praises than improving the practical understanding of his enterprise. They relied solely on Trigault's version of Della entrata della Compagnia di Giesu e Christianita nella Cina. The situation changed when Ricci's own draft was discovered in the early 20th century and published in 1942~9 as Fonti Ricciane with rich notes and verifications by Pasquale d'Elia.

    D'Elia's work enabled later scholars to track down Ricci's movement in the Chinese setting. The opening of China in the early 1970s not only facilitated the field-work, but also helped to increase Western scholars' interest in China, and remarkable works started to come out. The tri-ennial "Colloque de Sinologie" at Chantilly, initiated in 1974, has contributed greatly to the promotion of new studies on Jesuit activities in China.

    Two outstanding works appeared in the early 1980s: J Gernet's Chine et Christianism (1982) and J Spence's The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984). Gernet presented a fresh viewpoint for the scene; That Ricci may not have christianized China more than he was sinicized himself. That not all the Chinese converts became truer christians than Ricci became a Confucian.

    Gernet's view was a revealing one in many ways. It shows Ricci more as an infiltrator than as a conqueror. It suggests that the 'accommodation' did not take place in one direction only. It keeps the eminent Chinese converts such as Xu Guangqi and Li Zhizao in their places in the context of Chinese history. They did not depart from their Chinese tradition by accepting the Christian baptism or taking up European mathematics. They did not take as many steps to move out as Ricci took to move in.

    Spence followed suit, from another angle, to offer an explanation of Ricci's behavior in a new way. Through the study of Ricci's intellectual background and cultural inclinations, he presented Ricci as a "Renaissance Man". This view does not directly contradict Ricci's status as Christian missionary, but it supplies a number of new points from which to look at Ricci's movements. And it certainly helps to account for some of the hitherto puzzling aspects of Ricci's behavior.

 

    On beginning this study, I was primarily guided by Gernet and Spence's views. As Gernet suggested, I thought, Ricci's thoughts and works may have been heavily influenced by his experiences in China. And also, as Spence suggested, there may have been norms other than Christian to guide him. I took up Tianzhu shiyi and China in the Sixteenth Century (tr. of Della entrata... by Gallagher), Ricci's most important works in Chinese and Western languages, to see how far I could make sure about these suggestions.

    In the first chapter, I followed the development of Ricci's experiences in China, from the extreme sparsity of information he had before entering, to the difficulties he had in the early years for the survival of the mission, to the efforts he made to set himself up as a scholar, and to his choice of the scholar-officials over the eunuchs as his allies.

    Ricci was set against Buddhism right from the start, probably on the instruction of Valignano, which was in turn based on the Jesuit experiences in Japan. But there was a change around 1594, when Ricci decided to look down upon Buddhist monks rather than challenge them, as he had done before. This change was based on the development of his Confucian studies, and it saved him from the ceaseless conflicts with the populace which had afflicted him all through the years in Guangdong.

    While in Nanchang and Nanjing, Ricci's status as a scholar was firmly established. Moral austerity, mnemonic skill, and knowledge in science and mathematics combined to enhance his prestige among the Chinese scholars. He was well received into academic circles, and he found growing possibilities for strong allies in the members of the scholar-official class.

    A little time after arriving in Beijing in 1601, Ricci seems to have made his final decision to ally himself with the scholar-officials. It was at the cost of his relationship with the eunuchs. For the trip to Beijing and for the introduction to the imperial court, he had been relying on the latter. This decision may have also implied that he no longer counted on the Emperor's favour as the sole means to promote his design.

 

    In the second chapter, I examined how deep Ricci's perception reached the inside of the country. Telling from his transliteration of some Chinese proper names and other indications, I concluded that he may not have felt quite at home with the Chinese language. At least until he was stationed in Beijing, he may have had difficulty with reading, not to say with writing. In Beijing, with more stability and better company than before, he may have made fast development.

    His understanding of the location and size of country looks fairly accurate. One remarkable thing is, he accepted the traditional chronology, which goes back to beyond 2600 BC. It was a point that later conflicted with the biblical chronology, and forced later Jesuits to use the Septuagint Bible instead of the more widely accepted Vulgate Bible, because the former allowed them to set the date of Noah's Flood at before 3000 BC. The problem must have been foreseeable for Ricci, so this point testifies to Ricci's early commitment to the Chinese tradition.

    Ricci's appreciation of the Chinese culture is not very impressive. He paid attention to a number of novelties, but his overall vision seems to have been overwhelmed by his anxiousness to justify his position, firstly as a Christian missionary and secondly as a proponent of accommodationism. As can be expected, the most seriously hampered were his views of Buddhism and Confucianism. He showed little more understanding of Buddhism than that it was something to be attacked, and he centered, out of all proportions, his knowledge of Confucianism around the concept of Shang-di.

 

    In the third chapter, I had a look over major points of Ricci's mission principles. The first point is his hostility to Buddhism. The resemblance of Buddhism to Christianity in certain ways was certainly a problem for Ricci. To make the best of this problem, he argued that Buddhism learned from Christianity, supposing the origin of Buddhism was not much further back from its introduction to China. An intriguing point is found in his descriptions of the polemic Li Zhi. In three places in China in the Sixteenth Century, Ricci wrote favourably about Li, but in the fourth place where Li was found in league with Buddhist activists, Ricci deprecated him with unreserved harshness.

    Theology and ethics were the areas that Ricci elaborated the most to make the bondage between Christianity and Confucianism. Perhaps theology could be seen as the back line, beyond which he was not allowed to give way. The omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God was creator and controller. And that was that. But Ricci did not press on God as redemptor.

    On the other hand, ethics was the front line by which he tried to gain as much ground as he could. He tried to present Christian ethics to the Chinese scholars in a way as acceptable as possible, and in the course, he went as far as to utilize certain neo-Confucian concepts that he renounced in the theological context, such as xing and li. As was shown in Standaert's work on Yang Tingyun, there was a great thirst for moral power and ethical standards among Chinese intellectuals toward the fall of the Ming Dynasty.

    There was also a thirst for changes in science and technology. Ricci perceived this in the course of dealing with scholar-officials in Guangdong. He concentrated on geometry and astronomy, which would contribute to the Chinese calendrical science and thus provide the missionaries with jobs at the court. Xu Guangqi was an invaluable partner for this project. But they had different views. Ricci wanted to wait until the best technicians and materials were available, when the whole system could be replaced by the European system. Xu wanted to adopt what elements they had at hand, and corporate them into the existing system. As it turned out, their positions met halfway in the actual proceeding of the project, and while the European system replaced the traditional Chinese one, the European cosmology was largely dropped, resulting in the ultimate sinicization of the new system.

 

    In the last sections, I looked into the way Ricci's mission principles were received by fellow missionaries and Chinese collaborators. Telling from the frequent troubles with the Chinese populace at stations other than that in Beijing, missionaries in general do not seem to have shared much of Ricci's principles. Most of the troubles were settled with the help of officials who had been favorably disposed to the mission through Ricci's contacts, but missionaries at other stations were unable to generate such relationship for themselves.

    Aside from Pantoja and Ursis, who had worked with Ricci for years in Beijing, converts like Xu Guangqi and Li Zhizao were more reliable inheritors of Ricci's principles than most other missionaries. As was shown by Gernet, it was they that supported and maintained the principle of Christianity complementing Confucianism. They strongly influenced the important second generation missionaries like Giulio Aleni and Adam Schall von Bell, who arrived in the early 1620's.

    Soon after Ricci died, Pantoja started a move to appeal to the Emperor for the grant of a plot of land for Ricci's burial. He registered the help of a number of highly placed officials, and succeeded in taking over a good house just off the walls of Beijing from a denounced eunuch. In the course, he confronts one of the most powerful eunuchs and the minister of treasury in very determined manners, and had his way! It makes one wonder whether the patronizing officials (including Chancellor Ye Xianggao) were assisting the missionaries or controlling them. The outcome of the incident was the establishment of the presence of missionaries in Beijing on the ground of the Emperor's recognition, and it had been maneuvered by the hands of officials. It left the missionaries irrevocably confronted to the eunuchs and strongly allied with the scholar-officials.

 

 

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