Friendship And Hospitality The Jesuit Confucian Encounter In Late Ming China PDF Download

This dissertation discusses the China-West encounter in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, an encounter initiated by the Jesuit priests who took their apostolic missions from the Post-Reformation Europe to the Middle Kingdom. Of the issues raised and contended during this encounter, which cover virtually all concerns that the human race has ever had such as culture, religion, ethics, moral philosophy, arts, literature, science, technology and many more, the dissertation chooses for examination some topics related directly and closely to the concepts and practices of friendship and hospitality. Divided into two parts, with the first devoted to the friendship presented and promoted by the Jesuits in China and the second, to the Confucian hospitality displayed or denied to the missionaries, the dissertation contains seven main chapters, each approaching from its own perspective an issue related to the subjects of friendship and hospitality. Chapter One investigates the thinking of friendship in the Society of Jesus, discussing what friendship as determined by and elaborated in the Ignatian spirituality means to the Jesuits. Chapter Two continues the discussion on the Jesuit view of friendship by focusing on one specific example of work, A Treatise on Friendship, written in classical Chinese by Matteo Ricci (1552--1610), an early Jesuit missionary to China. Treating friendship as a concept concerning alterity, the discussion looks to dismantle the effort of assimilation in Ricci's friendship. Indeed, Ricci elaborated vigorously on friendship, hoping to establish some cultural analogy between, and eventually a Christian assimilation of, the West and China. His rhetoric and his very act of speaking to the Chinese audience, however, not only show that the difference could not be erased, but also prove that alterity is the absolute condition of possibility under which friendship--friendship between two individuals or a friendly relation between two cultures--happens. Chapter Three argues that Ricci's effort and practice in translating the term or concept of Deus or God into Chinese enacts both the impossibility and necessity of translation. Convinced by his theology that the name of God, the most proper of all proper names, had been from the beginning innate in all cultures and languages, Ricci argued that, a ready phrase Shangdi or Lord-on-High that he found from the Confucian classics, was the indication that the ancient Chinese had faith in God. The discussion will argue that Ricci's intention to use his translation, that is, his "rediscovery" of God in ancient China, to assimilate China under the Christian God as a universal and absolute reference could not succeed for the simple reason that he could not keep the same signified while adorning it with other signifiers. With Chapter Four, an introductory chapter on the Derridean and Levinasian theories of hospitality and the Chinese traditional Rite of Hospitality, the dissertation moves into Part II, the part tackling Ming China's Sino-centrism through examining from different angles the Confucian response to the Jesuits. Chapters Five and Six deal with a related problem: the impact on the Confucians and their ideologies left by modern science and technology such as cartography and astronomy of the West introduced by the Jesuits. With the world map showing the Chinese that the earth was a globe and the missionaries' calculation through modern mathematics being more accurate in the prediction of eclipse, the Confucians were forced to rethink and restructure their worldview and their dichotomy of the self and other. Chapter Seven takes this rethinking and restructuring further by looking at the Confucian effort to restore or return to the primitive Confucianism, a form of Confucianism supposedly free from and immune to foreign influences. But this attempt of restoration, an effort to separate the self from the other, the discussion will show, is already an assured sign that the other is nowhere else but in the self.