Missionary Imposition
How one misguided man blew up an imperial mandate for tolerance. Part III of The Universal Commerce of Light
Kangxi Emperor: “Do you understand the Chinese books?’
Charles Maigrot: “Very little.”
Emperor: “Tuornon declares that you were versed in our books, therefore I have called you to come here. Did you read the Confucian Four Books?’
Maigrot: “Yes I did.”
Emperor: “Do you remember what you have read?”
Maigrot: “No, I do not.”
In the year 1692, the Kangxi Emperor, pleased with the assistance lent by Jesuit missionaries in the conclusion of an important treaty with Russia, issued an Edict of Toleration that recognized the right of Christians to worship as they pleased in China.
We decide therefore that all temples dedicated to the Lord of Heaven, in whatever place they may be found, ought to be preserved, and that it may be permitted to all who wish to worship this God to enter these temples, offer him incense, and perform the ceremonies practiced according to ancient custom by the Christians. Therefore let no one henceforth offer them any opposition.
In 1692 Kangxi was 38 years old, fully in the prime of his enormous abilities and in total control of the richest and most populous country in the world. Insatiable for knowledge of all kinds, Kangxi welcomed Jesuits into his court, employed them in important positions in the Bureau of Astronomy and trusted them as tutors for himself and his children. Of particular interest: one Jesuit, the multitalented Ferdinand Verbiest, supervised the design and casting of hundreds of cannons deployed by Kangxi’s armies with huge success.
Here, at the close of the 17th century, we are witness to a rare moment of mutually respectful cultural and technological exchange between Europe and China. And we might wonder, what could have been?
It was not to last. Barely a year later, Charles Maigrot, a Catholic missionary in the southeastern province of Fujian, issued his own proclamation, the Mandatum seu Edictum. Maigrot’s tract was effectively an Edict of Intoleration. He listed seven stipulations ordering missionaries not to allow Chinese Christians to engage in various “superstitious” activities, the most important of which was participation in traditional rites honoring their ancestors and Confucius.
The missionaries are never and not for any reason to allow Christians to perform, to take part in or attend the solemn sacrifices or oblations which are offered two times a year to Confucius and the ancestors. We declare that these sacrifices are tarnished with superstition.
Maigrot took pains to forbid that anyone should even make the argument that traditional Chinese cultural practices were compatible with Christianity:
We point out that nothing is to be published in spoken or written form, which could mislead uncautious persons to error and could open the way for superstition, such as:
-- that the philosophy taught by the Chinese contains nothing in contradiction to Christianity if it is understood in the right way;
-- that the book the Chinese call (Yijing) is the sum of the best physical and moral teachings.
We strictly forbid the dissemination of this and other [teachings] in Our Vicariate in written or oral form, as it is wrong, unwise and scandalous.
Maigrot’s edict was a broadside against the Jesuit policy of “accommodation” discussed in Part II. Even to suggest that there were similarities between Confucianism (or the Yijing) and Christianity was deemed unacceptable.
To be fair, to compare the relevant potency of these two edicts would seem, on the face of it, a bit dubious. The power dynamic separating the Kangxi Emperor and Charles Maigrot was vast. Kangxi was an absolute ruler whose every utterance laid down the law of the land. Maigrot, despite holding the impressive title of “Apostolic Vicar” and serving as a direct emissary of the Pope, had limited power to enforce his edict on the community of Christian converts in Fujian. It is likely that most of them ignored him, and continued to honor their ancestors and Confucius as they always had. It was far from unusual in this era for a Chinese person to incorporate a blend of Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist practices into their daily lives; adding some Jesus worship into the mix did not necessarily mean negating everything else.
But while Jesuits were open to nuance, the 17th century Catholic Church as an institution, still reeling from the challenge of the Protestant Reformation, was not known for its openness to ambiguity and difference. Maigrot’s edict may have been largely ignored in China, but he had friends back at the Vatican who made sure the Pope was paying attention. The wheels of Rome moved slowly, but in 1704 Pope Clement X finally took action, and issued a Papal Bull “against Christian adherence to Confucian beliefs and rites.” The Pope also sent a papal legate, Charles Thomas Maillard de Tournon, to investigate the situation on the ground in China.
De Tuornon met with Kangxi, who professed himself confused at the notion that Confucian rites were incompatible with Christianity. Because if that was true, and Chinese Christians could no longer take part in rituals that were core parts of Chinese culture, then those Christians would no longer be part of Chinese society. This is not at all what Kangxi had in mind when he issued his Edict of Toleration. According to the scholar Claudia Collani, Kangxi told de Tuornon that Christianity had to be compatible with Confucianism, or Europeans would no longer be allowed to reside in China. De Tuornon, who was not well-versed in the subtleties of Chinese culture or Jesuit accommodationism, recommended that Kangxi meet with Charles Maigrot. Maigrot, de Tuornon assured Kangxi, was an “a noted scholar of Chinese studies” who could explain the problem to Kangxi’s satisfaction.
Maigrot was summoned for an imperial audience. It did not go well.
According to one account, Maigrot “fanatically despised China’s culture, its literati, and the Jesuits,” attributes that make him unlikely to have gotten along well with the Emperor. Even worse, however, was the embarrassing reality that, in stark contrast to the Jesuits Kangxi was accustomed to dealing with, Maigrot, despite having lived in China for more than a decade, could barely speak Mandarin.
The imperial cross-examination was a disaster for European-Chinese relations. Kangxi quickly determined, to his great displeasure, that Maigrot’s mastery of spoken Chinese was not to up the task of person-to-person communication. An interpreter was required. But Maigrot’s humiliation had only begun. He also proved unable to read Chinese and unable to discourse upon the Confucian classics. Kangxi was offended and angry. This was the “expert” who dared make proclamations about what Chinese could or could not do with respect to Confucian ritual?
A few days after the audience, Kangxi issued a decree directly to Maigrot.
From Collani’s “Charles Maigrot’s Role in the Chinese Rites Controversy”:
Tuornon had declared that you understand perfectly Chinese books and that you can interpret their meaning. Thereupon I, the emperor, have called you to come here from the capital to learn it myself. You were not able to recite one single article from the Four Books and said that learning books by heart is not practiced in Europe. When asked, you could not give the meaning of the inscription with four characters … you did not understand and could not interpret their meaning: out of four characters, you knew only two. When I ordered you to explain to me your own writings, you could not do it. Moreover you have issued a law in Fujian and when I asked you how many people follow this (Christian) law, you answer five thousand. But these five thousand people, if they believe in you and observe your regulations that… the worship of Confucius, the reverence of the tablets and the performance of sacrifices which take place at the grave of the ancestors are bad, then they surely are not my subjects.
The short-term outcome was decisive. Maigrot was expelled from China. All other missionaries were required to apply for residence permits. The Jesuit position at the Manchu court was terminally undermined. The era of toleration was over.
Collani:
“Maigrot’s influence was devastating in China. Until his time, the Rites Controversy had been a matter only between missionaries in China or some theologians in Rome. But with de Tournon’s and Maigrot’s appearance at the Chinese court, the Kangxi emperor changed his favorable attitude towards the missionaries and became suspicious about the authorities in Rome. He received the impression that the pope wanted to alienate his subjects from his rule. His eldest son was afraid that the missionaries were simply spies for the Spanish or Portuguese who were preparing an invasion of China. Thus Maigrot played an important negative role for the development of the relationship between China and Europe, and mutual understanding still suffers from the activities that Maigrot had initiated.
"For better or worse, the die is now cast, the world is one. The citizen of the world has to live with his fellow-citizens, at the ever-narrowing range of the aerofoil and the radio-wave. He can only give them the understanding and appreciation which they deserve if he knows the achievements of the sages and precursors of their culture as well as of his own. We are living in the dawn of a new universalism, which, if humanity survives the dangers attendant on control by irresponsible men of sources of power hitherto unimaginable, will unite the working peoples of all races in a community both catholic and cooperative. The mortar of this edifice is mutual comprehension..."
Joseph Needham, Introduction to Science and Civilization in China
My detour into the Rites Controversy was an offshoot of the provocative suggestion made by the historian Joseph Needham that the binary-encoded hexagrams of the Yijing and the structure of the Chinese writing system influenced Leibniz’ intellectual journey and thus helped lay the groundwork for the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, with special emphasis on the invention of computing technology. I considered this a potentially extraordinary example of cultural cross-pollination and I wanted to know more. This ended up with me learning a great deal about the nexus of that cross-pollination – the Jesuits who were the first to transmit detailed knowledge of Chinese civilization to the West.
I have since come to the conclusion that, notwithstanding Leibniz’s undoubted fascination with Chinese civilization, Needham’s proposition doesn’t quite hold up. The most one can say is that Leibniz found correlations between his ideas and Chinese philosophy, which was exciting for him, but hardly determinative of the course of the Enlightenment.
But there’s a thread I can’t let go of. As I argued in the first installment of this series, perhaps the best realization of Leibniz’s dream of a “universal language” has been the emergence of digital technology based on Leibniz’s invention of binary arithmetic. We are all of us, everywhere, connected in a digital web, and increasingly, the steady improvement of translation software means that, technically speaking, there are no real obstacles to mutual comprehension.
And yet… some three and a half centuries after the invention of binary arithmetic, the single most technologically important conflict dividing the U.S. and China is control over the tech that makes the semiconductor chips that that are the foundational infrastructure of our networked computer age. The U.S. currently bans the export of the most advanced such technology to China. But the world’s most successful semiconductor manufacturing company also happens to be headquartered in Taiwan. We are in the middle of a ongoing global power showdown over who owns the state-of-the-art tech to build our universal language.
From a Chinese perspective, still smarting from Western colonial and imperial predation dating back to the 19th century, it’s hard to see the semiconductor technology ban as anything but Great Power realpolitik, a contemporary manifestation of the “gunboat diplomacy” enforced on China by superior British technology. The ghost of Kangxi is offended and angry.
From a U.S. perspective, mindful of China’s ongoing military buildup, vociferous threats targeted at Taiwanese independence, and relentless crackdowns on human rights in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet, the interdiction seems only prudent.
Whichever side you pick, mutual comprehension is not in abundance, a tangled knot whose initial complications trace all the way back to the first meaningful intellectual intercourse between China and Europe in the 17th century. Or more precisely, to the end of that meaningful intercourse.
I blame Maigrot.
Perhaps it is unfair to pick on one man. Perhaps the real target of my ire should be missionary arrogance, or the Counter-Reformation rigidity that made the Vatican so deadset against anything with a whiff of pagan or Protestant odor, or the institutionalized white supremacy that blossomed from European imperialism.
But people matter. And Maigrot, an intolerant fanatic who spoke terrible Chinese, distilled in his person the absolute essence of those who in every age think they know best but in their ignorance wreak nothing but havoc and chaos. Maigrot achieved the rarest of opportunities, a personal audience with the emperor. And he pissed Kangxi off so much that the world changed. A path in which China participated as an equal partner in the Enlightenment disappeared.
Remember Ferdinand Verbiest, the Jesuit who oversaw the forging and design of state-of-the-art cannonry for Kangxi? He saw sharing information as a way to build connection. What if we could imagine a world in which technological and cultural exchange continued between Europe and China throughout the eighteenth century, a world in which mutual comprehension flourished and as a result East Asia proved robust enough to resist colonial incursions? A world in which the imposition of religious dogma by whichever power has the biggest cannons was eschewed in favor of cooperation and respect for difference? A world in which we all operated on the basis of our own personal edicts of toleration?
It seems like a lot to ask. But right now, in a country where the incoming presidential regime literally and vindictively campaigned on a platform of intolerance targeted at racial and sexual difference while pretending to preach the Gospel, it is only by submerging myself in dreams of different paths taken that I can make it through the night.
End of Part III
Absolutely fascinating and so sad.