Matteo Ricci, who carried Euclid to Beijing and Confucius to Rome: 6 October
Matteo Ricci was born in Macerata on 6 October 1552. The Jesuit who entered China dressed as a Buddhist monk and died in Beijing as a Confucian scholar translated Euclid into Chinese, argued for the Christian God in the vocabulary of the classics, and began a dispute about rites that Rome settled only in 1939. Le Corbusier shares the birthday.
Matteo Ricci was born on 6 October 1552 in Macerata, a hill town in the Papal States, and died on 11 May 1610 in Beijing, where the emperor gave special permission for a European to be buried inside the Imperial City for the first time. Between those two dates lies the most consequential experiment in cross-cultural philosophy that the early modern world produced. Ricci went to China to convert it. He ended by translating it, in both directions at once, and the questions his translation raised have not closed.
The experiment is worth a philosopher's attention for a reason that has little to do with religion. Ricci was the first European to argue, in Chinese, to Chinese readers, inside the Chinese classics, that a concept from one tradition could be identified with a concept from another. He was also the first to discover what that identification costs. Four centuries later, when scholars quarrel over whether 'philosophy' is a Western word that can be applied to Confucius at all, they are quarrelling on ground Ricci cleared.
He was studying law in Rome when he joined the Jesuits in 1571, and at the Collegio Romano he learned his mathematics and astronomy from Christopher Clavius, the man who built the Gregorian calendar. That training turned out to be his passport. Ricci reached Macau in 1582, settled the next year at Zhaoqing in Guangdong, and began learning Chinese, a language no European had yet mastered for scholarly purposes. He also began producing things the local mandarins wanted to see: clocks, prisms, and a map of the world which, for the first time, showed China to a Chinese audience with the rest of the earth around it. The Great Map of Ten Thousand Countries was first made at Zhaoqing and redrawn several times over the following decades.
His first costume was a Buddhist monk's robe, on the reasonable assumption that a foreign holy man should look like a native one. It was the wrong assumption. Buddhist monks had little standing with the officials who ran the country, and in 1589, at Shaozhou, a scholar named Qu Taisu advised him to dress as one of the literati instead. Ricci grew his beard, put on silk, took the name Li Madou, and began describing himself as a 'Western Confucian'. The decision looks like public relations. It was in fact the whole of his method. From then on his mission would be addressed to the educated elite in the idiom of their own tradition, and would treat that tradition as a partner rather than an obstacle. His colleague Michele Ruggieri took the other road, to ordinary people; Ricci's was the one the Jesuits followed for a century.
Beijing refused him in 1595. He lived in Nanjing from 1599 and in 1601 was at last permitted to settle in the capital, where he stayed, within reach of the court but never received by the Wanli emperor in person, until his death.
Samuel Clarke, Newton's advocate against Leibniz, was born on 11 October 1675; Hans Kelsen, author of the Pure Theory of Law, on 11 October 1881. Tschirnhaus died on the date in 1708, Zwingli in battle in 1531, and in 1939 Alexander Sachs carried Einstein's letter into the Oval Office. The thread is where reason's reach ends and responsibility begins.
Charles Taylor, Scott J. Shapiro, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Robert Alexy
Ricci's standing in the history of ideas rests on a two-way traffic. Westward, more below. Eastward, the great cargo was Euclid. In 1607, with the scholar-official Xu Guangqi, he published The First Six Books of Euclid in Chinese, working from Clavius's Latin edition of the Elements. Xu was one of the three converts, with Li Zhizao and Yang Tingyun, whom the Chinese church later called its three pillars, and he was also a serious mathematician; the collaboration was not dictation. The translation had to invent a vocabulary, and much of it stuck. The Chinese word for geometry, jihe, is Ricci and Xu's coinage.
What travelled with Euclid was more than a set of theorems. It was a model of what knowledge looks like when it proceeds from definitions and axioms by demonstration, a model that the Chinese tradition, rich in algorithmic mathematics, had not organised in that form. Ricci also wrote a Chinese treatise on the art of memory, teaching his hosts the Renaissance technique of the memory palace, the subject of Jonathan Spence's 1984 book; and he was famous among the literati for memory feats of his own. These were the attractions. Religion came after, and was presented, when it came, as the completion of what the classics had already glimpsed.
The book in which he made that case is the Tianzhu shiyi, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven. He began it in 1595 and it was finally printed in 1603. Its form is the oldest in philosophy: a dialogue between a Western scholar and a Chinese scholar, which Ricci's modern editors describe as an ordered digest of his many actual conversations with the literati. The argument runs through the existence of God, the immortality of the soul and the natural law, using scholastic arguments adapted to a readership that had never heard of Aristotle. Its central move is the one that made it famous and dangerous. The Lord of Heaven, Ricci proposed, was already present in the earliest Chinese classics under the names Shangdi, the Lord on High, and Tian, Heaven. The ancient Confucians had known God; it was the later Neo-Confucian metaphysics of li and qi, and still more Buddhism, that had obscured him. The book's anti-Buddhist tone made it the most controversial thing he wrote.
The philosophical interest lies in what Ricci had to assume. He assumed that Shangdi and Deus could be the same concept wearing different names, and that the difference was a matter of later corruption rather than of two traditions having asked different questions. Some Chinese scholars accepted the identification and were baptised. Others wrote against him, arguing that he had Christianised Confucius rather than found Christ in him, and the objection has never gone away. It is the same objection, mirror-reversed, that modern readers raise against European histories which treat Confucius as a moralist without a metaphysics, and that Tu Weiming has spent a career answering from the other side. Ricci's accommodation is the first full statement of a problem that has no clean solution: to make a tradition intelligible in another's terms is already to change it.
The other direction of the traffic is easier to miss, because Ricci's own Latin version of the Four Books, begun in the early 1590s, does not survive. What survives is its effect. The Jesuit presentation of Confucianism as a rational moral philosophy, compatible with natural religion and lacking only revelation, passed through Ricci's letters and journals into the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus that later Jesuits printed in Paris in 1687, and from there into the European imagination. Leibniz, who corresponded eagerly with the China Jesuits, published his Novissima Sinica in 1697 and argued that Europe should receive Chinese missionaries in practical ethics in exchange for the geometers it was sending out. The Enlightenment's China, the empire governed by philosopher-officials selected by examination, is a Jesuit construction, and Ricci laid its first stone. That the construction was in part a projection does not make it inert; it shaped how Europe argued about merit, religion and the state for a hundred years.
Ricci's strategy had a second element which outlived him and nearly destroyed his mission. He judged that the rites Chinese Christians performed to their ancestors and to Confucius were civil ceremonies, expressions of respect and gratitude, and not acts of worship, and he allowed converts to keep them. The Jesuits in China and Korea followed what became known as the directives of Matteo Ricci. The Dominicans and Franciscans who arrived after his death did not. The quarrel that followed, the Chinese Rites controversy, is one of the longest in the Church's history. In 1704 Clement XI banned the rites and forbade further discussion; his bull Ex illa die of 19 March 1715 condemned them formally. The Kangxi emperor, who in 1706 had required missionaries to swear to follow Ricci's rules as a condition of staying, read the decree and in 1721 banned Christian missions in China altogether. Benedict XIV reaffirmed the ban in 1742 and bound missionaries by oath never to raise the question again. It was not until 8 December 1939 that Pius XII's decree Plane compertum est allowed Chinese Catholics to honour their ancestors and attend ceremonies for Confucius, on exactly the grounds Ricci had given three and a quarter centuries earlier: that these were civil rites, not religious ones.
That is the cost. Ricci's accommodation depended on a distinction, civil against religious, which his own church could not accept for 230 years and which the Chinese state did not recognise at all, since in China the ritual and the political were not two things. The dispute is usually told as a story about Catholic intransigence. It is better read as a demonstration of how a translation, once it enters two systems at once, is at the mercy of both.
Readers following this autumn's gatherings in East Asia will find the same questions, with different vocabulary, in our diary of philosophy events in Korea and China. Ricci's tomb is still in Beijing. His successors in the mission were buried around it.
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who would become Le Corbusier, was born on 6 October 1887 at La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Swiss Jura. His sentence from Vers une architecture (1923), that a house is a machine to live in, is the most quoted and least understood claim in the philosophy of the built environment: not a demand that homes be mechanical, but an argument that dwelling has functions, as a ship or an aircraft does, and that a form which ignores them is a lie about how people live. The Unité d'habitation at Marseille (1947 to 1952) and the government buildings at Chandigarh were the proof he offered. The counter-argument, that a dwelling is not a function but a way of being in the world, was Heidegger's, and the two positions have been arguing in every planning office since. He died swimming at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on 27 August 1965.
Ricci and Le Corbusier would seem to have nothing in common beyond a birthday. Both, though, bet their lives on the proposition that a form made in one place could be set down in another and still work. One of them is buried in Beijing. The previous entry in this series, on Diderot, Jonathan Edwards and Václav Havel, takes up where the calendar left off; the month's conferences are in the October conference diary.
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was born in Berlin on 10 October 1873. He made the history of ideas a discipline, traced one idea from Plato to the Romantics in The Great Chain of Being, and helped write the rules of academic freedom he later qualified. The same date, in four Catholic countries, did not exist in 1582.
Jacques Derrida died in Paris on 9 October 2004; Nicolai Hartmann died in Göttingen on 9 October 1950. One spent a career showing that presence never quite arrives, the other rebuilt an ontology of levels in which being does not depend on anyone's knowing it. The date puts the two reflexes of twentieth-century philosophy side by side.
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