Book Review, 03 May 2007
Reviewed by Simon Scott Plummer

China’s diplomatic evangelists

Journey to the East: the Jesuit mission to China, 1579-1724
Liam Matthew Brockey
The Belknap Press of Harvard, £22.95
Tablet bookshop price £20.70 Tel 01420 592974

This is an admirable piece of scholarly research into one of the most challenging missionary endeavours ever undertaken. The title is the mirror image of the journey to the West made in the seventh century by the monk Xuanzang and later immortalised in the novel Monkey. Xuanzang went to India in search of Buddhist scriptures. The goal of the Jesuits, inspired by St Francis Xavier, was no less than the conversion of China, then the world's greatest empire, to Christianity.

The task was daunting in more ways than one. First, there was the voyage from Lisbon to Macau on board the Portuguese carracks, a passage both protracted and perilous; one scholar has estimated that only about half the missionaries survived this ordeal and that many of those who did died shortly after reaching China. Then there was the language, with its thousands of ideographs and its confusing terms, at least to Christian ears, for concepts such as God, angels and soul; the latter led to serious differences within the Society, even pushing one member to commit suicide.

Having survived the voyage and mastered the language, the Jesuits were faced, in a vast mission field, with a shortage of financial resources and personnel. It says much for their organisational skills that a handful of foreign priests were able to maintain a Christian community which at the beginning of the eighteenth century is estimated to have numbered 200,000, more than half of them in Shanghai and the surrounding coastal region, and that this community continued to function during periods when the priests had to lie low.

Such success attracted other proselytisers to China's shores: first the Mendicant Franciscan and Dominican friars, then the Vicars Apostolic of the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris, a reflection of the shift of temporal power in Europe from the Portuguese monarchy to France under Louis XIV. The Sun King even appointed five Jesuits as "Mathématiciens du Roy" and charged them with establishing an academic outpost in Peking.

The use of science and technology was one of the chief means by which the Portuguese-backed Jesuits hoped to gain favour at court and secure political protection for their fledgling Christian communities. The instruments used by the Fleming Ferdinand Verbiest to calculate the imperial calendar can be seen on the old walls of the capital today. If astronomy was the area where the Society achieved its greatest prominence under the Ming and Qing dynasties, it also sought the favour of the mandarinate through philosophy, mathematics, diplomacy, music and painting.

Treating with the throne may have been the only way into the Middle Kingdom. But it left its practitioners vulnerable to shifts in political fortune. The Society first experienced this in 1616, when it was denounced by Shen Que, a vice-minister, for subversion, and its members were expelled from the two imperial capitals, Peking and Nanjing. A further blow came in 1664, when Yang Guangxian, an acquaintance of Muslim astronomers whose dismissal had been obtained by the German Jesuit Johann Adam Schall, accused the missionaries of treason and secured an order of expulsion; fortunately for them, it was not carried out.

Ironically, the final blow to the Jesuits in China came via the institution to whose cause their order was dedicated- the papacy. Rome wanted to break the Portuguese monopoly over Asian Catholicism. Clement XI's instrument for asserting his authority was the Torinese Carlo Tomasso Maillard de Tournon. In his first audience with the Emperor Kangxi, he refused to accept his host's wish that a national missionary administrator be appointed from among the Jesuits. In the second, the two men fell out over the Chinese Rites, or doctrinal terms, which the emperor had approved. In 1706, Kangxi decreed that all missionaries must obtain a licence for their activities and accept the Chinese Rites, facing the Jesuits with the moral dilemma of whether to obey Emperor or Pope. A year after Kangxi died in 1723, his successor, Yongzheng, included the Tianzhu jiao, or Teachings of the Lord of Heaven, among "perverse sects and sinister doctrines". The Jesuits were expelled and their buildings seized. They maintained a minimal presence in China for another 50 years but the days of great missionary enterprise were over.

These are the highlights of a story many of whose features will be familiar to readers. But an equally fascinating part of this book are the chapters devoted to the Jesuits' evangelising methods. Historical fascination with the relationship between the imperial court and such figures as Matteo Ricci has obscured the fact that most converts were ordinary folk living in the provinces. An assistant professor of history at Princeton University, Liam Brockey has drawn on archives in the Biblioteca da Ajuda in Lisbon and the Archivum Romanum Societatis Jesu in Rome to paint an extraordinarily detailed picture of a mission which started in 1579 with the summoning of Michele Ruggieri to China, and was dealt a mortal blow by the proscription of Christianity 145 years later.

The Jesuits' reluctance to ordain Chinese priests stemmed, Brockey believes, from a wish to maintain their group identity and a fear that indigenous clergy might infringe the discipline of the order. This made them rely on groups of lay men and women to form the building-blocks of the mission Church. The Society brought its organisational methods from Europe and grafted them on to a culture where hui, or associations, both religious and secular, were already common. Thus Marian sodalities, charitable confraternities and penitential brotherhoods were formed. In their evangelising efforts, the Jesuits found that children, with their quick memorising of prayers and ritual gestures, played an important role in bringing others in their families to Christ.

In this masterly survey, Brockey strips the China mission of any pious fancy. We are shown the political manoeuvring between priests and the imperial court, between different nationalities within the Society itself and between the Society and Rome. There are those who will argue that these seemingly worldly pre-occupations inevitably led to the proscription of 1724. Yet the scale of the challenge and the ingenuity shown by a handful of men in meeting it reinforces one's admiration for the Society of Jesus. This is no hagiography but an elegantly clear exposition of a tremendous missionary undertaking.

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