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LIAM Matthew Brockey is a junior scholar, assistant professor at Princeton University’s history department. He does not claim to present the history of the Catholic Church in China as such, but his study belongs to the genre of the history of the Church’s mission, focusing on the missionary enterprise of the Jesuits, from 1579 on, first under the Vice-province of Japan, and from 1619 on, under the Vice-province of China. The study ends with the proscription of Christianity by Emperor Yongzheng in 1724, resulting with the expulsion of almost all the missionaries. The book title is a literary reference to the Journey to the West (Xiyouji), because Brockey sees a parallel between the trip of Xuanzang to India and the adventurous progress of the Jesuits in China.
In the Introduction, Brockey frames the Jesuit mission into the larger context of European modern history, seeing the Jesuit mission in China as a mirror of modern Europe. The same as religious life in Europe, the China mission will be caught between two opposite forces in modern Europe. On one hand, the missionaries, shaped by devotional practices at home, attempted to adapt them into China and were ready for new experiments. But on the other hand, the Church hierarchy attempted to keep things more and more under their control, enforcing theological orthodoxy and controlling the regular clergy. As Brockey states, “this is in the main a European story, even if the Jesuits’ efforts in China have traditionally been set down as part of a Chinese tale” (p. 12). Truly, Brockey makes a point here. However, from the outset, we can highlight here the flaw in the argument of a harmonious encounter at the local level, being crushed from the outside by the central power of the Church. This explanation seems quite unilateral: What about the rigidities of the Chinese state? What about the local forces within Chinese society opposed to the Jesuit mission?
Brockey focuses on previously neglected materials, especially the documents written in Portuguese or Latin, and pertaining to the collections of the Biblioteca da Ajuda in Lisbon and of the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu in Rome. Instead of relying on already polished accounts of the mission, Brockey is to be praised for delving into primary documents, consisting of annual letters, internal rules and reports of the Vice-province of China, as well as individual letters of China Jesuits. Thus, he is able to show the hesitations of the Jesuits, their internal divisions, their conflicts, more than one has ever done. He has a very realistic grasp of the Jesuit mission as a work in progress, and in this sense his account differs from the story of the heroic achievements of the Jesuits. However, in Brockey’s study, the main actors are still the missionaries. Almost all the documents come from them and, if we hear about Chinese Catholics or opponents, it is only indirectly. They do not have their own voices. Brockey very seldom refers to primary sources in the Chinese language and he says nothing about the current research undertaken by Chinese scholars in mainland China and Taiwan. In terms of historical method, this is indeed a great limitation of this study.
Chapter I, “An Easy Foothold”, retraces the beginning of the China mission from the coming of Michele Ruggieri to China in 1579 to Ricci’s death in 1610. Brockey emphasizes Ruggieri’s landmark achievements, like the granting of the residence permit within the Ming Empire and the use of local dress. Brockey recognizes also an important feature of Ricci’s missionary method: seeking political patronage and appealing to the moral sensibilities of the mandarins (p. 42). Brockey attempts to correct the traditional historiography that has tended to emphasize the dealings of the Jesuits with the mandarins over their missionary work among the masses. In the whole book, Brockey strives to show the limitation of Ricci’s strategy: “For despite the high profile of the Peking house and the crucial role it played in securing the safety of the other mission stations, its locus at the heart of the Chinese state removed Ricci and his court Jesuits from contributing fully to the religious goals of their collective effort—the conversion of the Chinese to Christianity.” In other words, Ricci’s method of seeking political protection became inefficient. Also, Ricci’s method became a double-edged sword, since by relying more and more on the will of the Emperor, they became also more vulnerable if the Emperor changed this attitude.
While the first chapter is quite conventional, the second chapter, “In the Shadow of Greatness”, is well worth reading. It tells the story of the mission from around the time of Ricci’s death to the period of maturity of the mission in the 1630s. It describes how Ricci and the following generation of Jesuits relied on powerful patrons, such as Xu Guangqi, Yang Tingyun, Li Zhizao and Wang Zheng. These patrons could not completely avert local proscriptions, such as the one launched by Shen Que in Nanjing in 1616 and provoking the closing of five Jesuit houses. Yet the patrons pleaded for Christianity and avoided the expulsion of the Jesuits. In the early 1630s, after half a century of missionary work, such patrons were not needed anymore since the standing of the court Jesuits was enough to protect the mission. In this chapter, Brockey brings a wealth of materials, rarely used before, related to the inner life of the Society, like the establishment of the Vice-province of China in 1619, the Regulations of the Visitor Gabriel de Matos in 1621, the conference at Jiading in 1627 and the Regulations of the Visitor André Palmeiro in 1629, especially deciding for the use of tianzhu for God, at the exclusion of shangdi.
Chapter 3, “Witness to Armagedon”, describes the progress of the mission from the 1630s up to 1663. While China experienced a decade of chaos with the collapse of the Ming, the Jesuits enjoyed more freedom and could extend their field activities to rural areas. Also, this epoch of uncertainty made people more receptive to the Christian message. Brockey describes the new methods being implemented, quite different from the methods used in urban areas. The Jesuits did not shy away from playing with the belief in the supernatural among Chinese rustics: signs of the cross, medals, paintings, prayers, holy water and rosary beads were held to have special powers for healing. “Eventually, the association between Christian rituals, devotional objects, and doctrine implanted in the minds of peasants merged to form a recognizable popular Chinese Christian identity, an alternative to the literati image of Tianxue” (p. 98). Also, some Jesuits changed the dates of some Catholic festivals to have them coincide with Chinese festivals. There is a brief account of the conflict between Jesuits and friars on the Chinese rites, presented as a clash between the gradualist method of the Jesuits and the imposition of uniform Catholic practice supported by the friars. By 1663, though there were only 24 European priests, the mission seemed to be running on a fast track, with twenty residences and 105,000 Christians.
Chapter 4, “The Problem with Success”, encapsulates the predicament of the Jesuit mission. While the Jesuits felt the need to propagate their success and discoveries with “triumphalist texts” in order to obtain more support from Europe, they attracted more and more jealousy from opponents and competitors in the mission field, especially with the Roman decision in 1673 to open China to societies of secular priests. Similarly, the more the Jesuits relied on the political support of the Emperor, and the more the mission became subject to the fluctuations of court politics, especially when the Jesuit presence became felt by the Chinese as a meaningful power, which therefore attracted supporters, but also opponents. In showing the forces at play, Brockey seems to suggest that the Jesuits were not cautious enough in their desire to secure for themselves political protection. The ambivalence of success is rightly illustrated by Brockey with the rise of Adam Schall and his fall in 1664, resulting in the arrest of almost all the missionaries working in China and the subsequent “Canton exile”, from 1666 to 1671. Brockey describes the consequence of the “Canton exile” for the adherents of what he calls Tianzhu jiao...
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