Niccolò Longobardo and the Early Modern Encounter of Europe with China

Abstract

Known today as one "of the most fiercely fought and momentous religious debates in Christian history," that largely internecine fight of the Catholic Church has always been perceived by Longobardo's critics as responsible for turning the once thriving Jesuit evangelical cause in China into what Ray R. Noll calls "a chapter in negative missiology"" or what John S. Gregory terms "one of history's magnificent failures."s In the face of all this longstanding resentment, however, it is important to note the oftenoverlooked fact that, in addition to being one of the earliest Jesuit missionaries in China, Longobardo was nominated by Ricci to succeed him as the leader of the Jesuit China mission, and he held that position for twelve long years after Ricci's death. [...]in addition to being similar in the setting and general atmosphere of their places of worship, Buddhism and Christianity resembled one another in the teaching of contempt for sensual pleasure and in the use of rewards and punishments in the next world as an enticement for interest in individual salvation in this world. Only after being in China for several years and after learning the Chinese language and customs well did Ricci gradually realize that Buddhist monks had a very low social standing in Chinese society, and any association with them in the public perception made it more difficult for him to gain Christianity the kind of respect that he needed for his proselytizing work. [...]after maneuvering out of China in 1588 his senior colleague Ruggieri, who still favored a superficially cordial relationship with Buddhism, Ricci decided in 1595 to discard his Buddhist clothes, grow back his beard and hair, and present himself in the garb and guise of a Confucian scholar as Valignano had originally instructed and as his Chinese friends had encouraged him.

Writing in 1962 about the founding fathers of the early modern Jesuit China mission, Jesuit historian George H. Dunne famously called them the generation of giants "who, breaking with the dominant spirit of their times and recalling a distant past, restored the concept of cultural adaptation to a central position in the world mission of Christianity."!

About one of the earliest missionaries, however, Dunne had reservations because he characterized him as an incalcitrant troublemaker who stubbornly challenged the terminological adaptation of Christianity to Confucianism, which had been instituted by Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), the widely venerated founder of the Jesuit China mission.

Dunne was not the first Jesuit scholar to hold this strikingly negative view. As early as 1676, Dominican missionary to China Domingo Fernändez Navarrete (1610-1689) already wrote about witnessing confreres of that early Jesuit missionary as trying actively to "lessen his reputation, by saying, he was no great Divine." As reported recently by Claudia von Collani, he is considered even today as "an opponent of and traitor to his brethren in the Society of Jesus."

Having been consistently belittled and condemned for the past three hundred and fifty or so years, this giant of the early modern Jesuit China mission was Niccold Longobardo (1559-1654).

To his critics, both the belittlement and the condemnation represent a posthumous retribution for his allegedly nefarious link with the Chinese terms and rites controversy, which discredited and destroyed the cultural accommodation policy of Ricci."

Known today as one "of the most fiercely fought and momentous religious debates in Christian history," that largely internecine fight of the Catholic Church has always been perceived by Longobardo's critics as responsible for turning the once thriving Jesuit evangelical cause in China into what Ray R. Noll calls "a chapter in negative missiology"" or what John S. Gregory terms "one of history's magnificent failures."s

In the face of all this longstanding resentment, however, it is important to note the oftenoverlooked fact that, in addition to being one of the earliest Jesuit missionaries in China, Longobardo was nominated by Ricci to succeed him as the leader of the Jesuit China mission, and he held that position for twelve long years after Ricci's death. If, as claimed by his critics, he was weak in theology and was opposed to cultural accommodation, could Ricci have shown so much approval for his work and put so much institutional trust in him? Could his Jesuit superiors have allowed him to retain that leadership role for so long?

Longobardo and Ricci apparently did not agree on everything, and that divergence of views turned out to be decisive in the eventual fate of the Jesuit China mission, but what was their precise disagreement and what was the exact chain of events leading to the drastic unraveling of the Jesuit evangelical enterprise in China? To understand the rich complexities of the early modern cross-cultural encounter between Europe and China, it is crucial to take a close look at Longobardo's attitude toward cultural adaptation, his disagreement with Ricci, his involvement in the Chinese terms and rites controversy, and his consequential impact beyond the win or loss of Christian evangelism.

The Question of Cultural Adaptation

The Jesuit endeavor to spread the Catholic faith to the Middle Kingdom began with Francis Xavier (1506-1552), a Spanish compatriot of Ignatius of Loyola and a member of the original Gang of Seven who founded the Society of Jesus in 1540. Soon after launching the Jesuit Japan mission in 1549, Xavier saw the need to evangelize China because the Japanese constantly peppered him with the question: "If yours is the true faith, why have not the Chinese, from whom comes all wisdom, heard of 1t?"°

Just as his Jesuit confreres later hoped to achieve their missionary triumph in Japan or India by converting the leaders of the Japanese shogunate or the great Mughal ruler Akbar (1542-1605), so Xavier placed all his bets in 1552 for a quick Constantine-style victory in China on a Portuguese embassy to the Chinese imperial court. Arranged by him but financed by a Portuguese merchant whom he designated as the ambassador, that diplomatic mission did not pan out due to some unanticipated opposition from a local Portuguese commandant, and Xavier died of sickness on December 3, 1552, on a small Chinese island called Shangchuan, less than ten miles from the southern coast of mainland China.

Xavier's dream of approaching the Chinese emperor directly for permission to propagate the Christian faith would live on and become, in time, the holy grail for Ricci and his successors in the Jesuit China mission - including Longobardo, but that dream had little to do with cultural adaptation.

After Xavier's death, the Jesuits tried several more times in the 1550s, 60s, and 70s to penetrate China, but none of those attempts worked. Faced with all these failures, Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606), as a visitor to all Jesuit missions in Asia, decided on a radically different approach during his first visit and extended stay in Macao between 1578 and 1579. Laying the groundwork for the evolution of an apostolic strategy that consciously responded to what has been fittingly depicted as the "cultural imperative [of China]"'° or "the imperative of Confucianism,"'" he arranged for Michele Ruggieri (1543-1607) to come in 1579 from India to Macao for Chinese language studies and he left specific instructions for the acquisition of Mandarin or the language of the Confucian scholar-officials who served the imperial court rather than the Cantonese dialect used by the people in Macao and Guangdong Province.

As Ruggieri prepared to make the historic trip to Zhaoqing, the administrative capital of Guangdong Province, in early September 1583 with Ricci, who, at his request, had come to Macao from India in 1582, Valignano instructed them "to introduce themselves in China as men of letters (homes letrados) ... [and dress themselves] in the Chinese fashion, in capes with long sleeves and four-cornered hats, in the same way as some of their literati (letrados)."?

Just before setting out, however, Ruggieri and Ricci took the suggestion of a local Chinese official by cutting off their beards, shaving off their hair, and putting on the robes of Buddhist monks.

At the time, this endorsement of a Buddhist affiliation seemed both prudent and providential. After all, in addition to being similar in the setting and general atmosphere of their places of worship, Buddhism and Christianity resembled one another in the teaching of contempt for sensual pleasure and in the use of rewards and punishments in the next world as an enticement for interest in individual salvation in this world.

Only after being in China for several years and after learning the Chinese language and customs well did Ricci gradually realize that Buddhist monks had a very low social standing in Chinese society, and any association with them in the public perception made it more difficult for him to gain Christianity the kind of respect that he needed for his proselytizing work.

Finally, after maneuvering out of China in 1588 his senior colleague Ruggieri, who still favored a superficially cordial relationship with Buddhism, Ricci decided in 1595 to discard his Buddhist clothes, grow back his beard and hair, and present himself in the garb and guise of a Confucian scholar as Valignano had originally instructed and as his Chinese friends had encouraged him.

Rightly recognized in scholarship today as first conceived by Valignano and then put into creative practice by Ricci, the proselytizing strategy of the Jesuit China mission, which Ricci unfolded in 1595, is usually described as "[p]ropagation and evangelism "from the top down" so that the adaptation of language, dress, hairstyle, and personal appearance, the focus on the literate elite, the use of European science and technology as bait, and the openness to Chinese values, particularly Confucianism, were all geared toward getting close to the emperor and his court.

That hope of a Constantine-style victory was a constant aspiration in the Jesuit China mission and an enduring legacy left behind by Xavier, but by itself, it had little to do with cultural adaptation, and in practice, it was never more than a tantalizing illusion. In contrast, what really made Ricci and his small band of Jesuit missionaries respected and spectacularly successful in being accepted or at least tolerated in China was his conscious decision in the early 1590s to become culturally Chinese via a tactical alliance with Confucianism.

For Ricci, however, blending into Chinese society was only one aspect of his proselytizing strategy, and it was never more than a means to an end. For the achievement of that end, which was "to uproot the ancient religion of this kingdom and to replace it with a new one" (spegnere l'antica religione di questo regno e porse in esso un'altra nova),' there was another aspect of his proselytizing strategy which turned cultural adaptation into an instrument of Christian evangelism.

In the name of "buRu yiFo" (supplementing Confucianism and repudiating Buddhism), Which his most famous Chinese convert Xu Guanggi (1562-1633) phrased for him after his death," in particular, he pushed his evangelizing cause from inside Chinese culture by "rejecting Buddhism as a false religion, distinguishing ancient from modern Confucianism, and allying himself with the literati of ancient Confucianism."!6

By the time Longobardo entered China in 1597, Ricci's idea of merging Christianity seamlessly into Chinese culture was already the official mantra of the Jesuit China mission. Before long, it became an integral part of who Longobardo was as a missionary. His first assignment in China was in Shaozhou, Guangdong Province, where Ricci had stayed from 1589 to 1595 before leaving for Nanchang, Nanjing, and eventually, Beijing.

In that nondescript provincial town, Longobardo collaborated effectively with the local gentry, low-level Confucian scholars, and illiterate villagers between 1597 and 1610. After moving from Shaozhou to Beijing in 1611 to lead the Jesuit China mission as Ricci's hand-picked successor, he became familiar with Xu Guanggi, Li Zhizao (15651630), and Yang Tingyun (1557-1627).

Even though all these three were not only the most high-profile members of the early Chinese church but also high-ranking officials in the Ming government, Longobardo was never ill at ease with them, contradicting the often repeated contrast of him with Ricci, which subtly denigrates him by portraying him as an abnormal Jesuit who "preferred the direct apostolate amongst the lower classes to the long-term and indirect work amongst the literati!" or who was "a religious worker, more in the mode of the popular preachers of repentance in the rural areas of early modern Catholic Europe."

Just as he was known in Shaozhou as "active in evangelistic work among both common folk and the scholar class,"'· so he worked well with what he got wherever he was in China throughout his long missionary career as a supporter and practitioner of Ricci's cultural adaptation policy.

Before his death, Ricci had famously attracted Confucian scholar-officials to him with his knowledge of European cartography, geometry, and various sciences. Prepared similarly by his Jesuit education, Longobardo made his comparable contribution to the Jesuit intellectual apostolate.

Well-known for his knowledge of European firearms, he helped Xu Guanggi, Li Zhizao, and others in the early 1620s to obtain Portuguese cannon and cannoneers from Macao. With another Jesuit missionary, he was once known to have fashioned a terrestrial globe. In 1624, he also published a treatise on earthquakes called Dizhen Jie. When Xu Guanggi and Li Zhizao attempted a correction of the Chinese calendar in the late 1620s with the help of European mathematics, they asked him to serve as their assistant. Even though he begged off on account of his old age, their very request to him indicated their recognition of both his expertise in European secular knowledge and his reputation in China for having that expertise.

Longobardo's support for Ricci's policy of cultural adaptation was even more conspicuous during his tenure as superior of the Jesuit China mission. On his own initiative, he sent Nicolas Trigault (1577-1628) to Europe in 1613 to obtain support of many different kinds. To continue the use of European science and technology as baits for Confucian scholar-officials, for instance, he asked repeatedly for mathematicians and astronomers.

At his urging, Trigault brought back eminent recruits with mathematical knowledge, such as the Bohemian Wenceslas Pantaleon Kirwitzer (1586-1626), the Italian Giacomo Rho (1593-1638), the Swiss Johann Terrenz (1576-1630), and the German Johan Adam Schall von Bell (1591-1666).

To advance the intellectual apostolate started by Ricci, Longobardo also asked for European books. He wanted every Jesuit residence in China to have a library, and he desired the principal one in Beijing to vie with the very best in Europe. Acting on his order, Trigault was known to have acquired five hundred and thirty-four works in four hundred and fifty-seven volumes from the pontifical library in Rome and two hundred and twenty-three works in one hundred and seventy-two volumes from other sources.

In addition to books, recruits, funds, and independent status of the Jesuit China mission from the Jesuit Japan mission, Longobardo asked Trigault to seek permission from the pope and the superior general of the Jesuit organization about two things which, as the Jesuit historian George H. Dunne pointed out in 1962, were "radical in nature and of farreaching importance."

One had to do with the headwear of a priest while performing Christian rituals such as mass and confession, and the other was about the choice of liturgical language. Both in Europe and in China, head ornaments were instruments of communication about social and political status, but the way they were used in the two cultures was diametrically different. Whereas the uncovered head of a priest enacting his ritualistic duty in the church, like that of a subordinate in the presence of a superior, meant respect and subordination in Europe, just the opposite was signified in China. To accommodate Christianity to Chinese cultural practice, Longobardo sought papal permission to allow priests in China to keep their heads covered while celebrating mass.

In 1606, the highest Jesuit authorities in Rome sent word about not accepting Chinese candidates into the Jesuit organization as priests because they were too new in the faith. Longobardo disagreed with this interdiction, believing that the Chinese were already as fit for ordination as either the Japanese or the Europeans. To prepare for the eventual elevation of Chinese candidates to the priesthood without a knowledge of Latin, he asked Trigault to request papal permission to translate the Bible into literary Chinese and to allow Chinese priests to celebrate mass and recite the canonical hours in literary Chinese.

Trigault arrived in Rome from China in October 1614. Claudio Aquaviva (1543-1615), superior general of the Jesuit order, quickly relayed Longobardo's requests from Trigault to theologians at the Jesuit Roman College, who gave a favorable response in a report on January 6, 1615. Trigault then formally submitted Longobardo's requests to Pope Paul V (1550-1621; papacy, 1605-1621), whose office approved them in a meeting held on January 15, 1615, and in the presence of Pope Paul V.

The permission for priests to have their heads covered with an ornament, known as jijin, during church ceremonies was soon acted upon. Even though the papal permission to adopt Chinese as the liturgical language was not implemented, the very stand Longobardo took on it, as on the issue of headwear, is indelible evidence of his strong and steadfast support for the general policy of Ricci to become culturally Chinese. In this connection, it is important to note that not only Longobardo but also the Jesuit superior general, the Jesuit theologians in Rome, Pope Paul V, and the papal office at the Vatican were all on board in support of cultural accommodation.

The Disagreement with Ricci

Despite his clear and documentable support for cultural adaption, Longobardo disagreed with Ricci about the disguise of Jesuit missionaries as what Lionel Jensen calls "a Chinese fundamentalist sect that preached a theology of Christian/Confucian syncretism."!

Inextricably linked with this disagreement was his objection to Ricci's terminological and ceremonial accommodation of Christianity to the dominant Chinese cultural tradition. In the form of instructions to his subordinates, Ricci made officially known his adaptation of terms and rites in 1600.

Approved in 1603 by the Jesuit Visitor Valignano and referred to in 1706 by the reigning Chinese emperor Kangxi (1654-1722; r. 1661-1722) as the directives of Matteo Ricci (Li Madou de guiju), the specific document containing Ricci's order has not survived, but in a list drawn up in 1680 by the Jesuit Vice-provincial Giandomenico Gabiani (1623-1694) from original documents in the Jesuit Peking (Beijing) Archives, the guidelines issued by Ricci back in 1600 are known to be, among other things, "about tolerating prudently social rituals and civil cults according to the practice of the nation; and especially about rites for dead parents, grateful veneration of Master Confucius within the limits of common courtesy; [and] about the licit use of Chinese sacred names as well as European." Even though Ricci announced his fateful decision in 1600, he himself had, in fact, been enacting its contents since 1593.

From the beginning of his time in China, Longobardo disagreed with Ricci about his terminological enculturation of Christianity in Chinese society. In scholarship, the specific details have been often obscured, and the disagreement has consequently been dismissed or trivialized persistently as a mere technical fight. In 1962, George H. Dunne described Longobardo's challenge to Ricci as "[t]he problem of finding Chinese words with which to express Christian ideas." In 1985, Dunne's Jesuit conferee George Minamiki followed suit by characterizing the terminological issue Longobardo had with Ricci as "how . . . to translate into the Chinese language the concepts of the divinity."

Carrying this consistently Jesuit interpretation into the twenty-first century, Nicolas Standaert also in 2000, presented Longobardo's opposition to Ricci and the related Chinese terms controversy as "about whether to choose, like in Japan, a Latin transliteration or a Chinese term."?

Since Longobardo not only objected to Ricci's practice but also persisted in his opposition, he has been made to appear in scholarship as among "a group of doctrinal purists" who "tried to assert the impossibility of translation, contending that the Catholic theology could be communicated to the Chinese only in a language free of Chinese associations, which is to say without being translated."

Though widely influential, this view of Longobardo as a doctrinal purist who did not believe in the possibility of translation and the related trivialization of his disagreement with Ricci as a mere technical fight is highly problematic. When Longobardo sent Trigault to Europe in 1613, one of the most important tasks he entrusted to Trigault was to seek papal permission to translate the Christian Bible into literary Chinese. Within the Jesuit order, questions about Ricci's endorsement of Chinese terminological conventions first arose in Japan, where his proselytizing works in Chinese had been circulated.

In 1612 the Jesuit Visitor to the Far East, Francesco Pasio (1554-1612), relayed the concerns of the Jesuits in Japan to Longobardo. As superior of the Jesuit China mission, Longobardo immediately launched an internal debate. If he was indeed opposed to the communication of Christian theology in Chinese, why did he still ask Trigault in 1613 to seek papal permission for the use of literary Chinese as the liturgical language of the young Chinese church?

Longobardo's not being against the translation of Christian concepts into Chinese can also be seen in his attitude toward the Chinese expression of the Christian deity, which was then and is still used today in the Chinese Catholic community. Known as Tianzhu (Master of Heaven), it was first used by Ruggieri in 1584 in his Christian catechism in Chinese, Tianzhu Shilu (The True Record of the Master of Heaven).

Taking it from a local Chinese convert who could have confused Christianity with Buddhism since the Jesuit missionaries were then dressed like Buddhist monks and identified themselves as religious workers from India, Ruggieri did not know that it had long been used as a reference to a Buddhist deity.

Ricci subsequently adopted the same Chinese expression for the Christian God in his Tianzhu Shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven), which he began to revise from Ruggieri's catechistic text in 1593 and which he completed in 1595 and first published in 1603.

During the Jesuit internal debate, Jodo Rodrigues (1561-1633), the most well-known critic of Ricci in the Jesuit Japan mission, pointed to the etymological association of Tianzhu with Buddhism as his reason for rejecting it. Longobardo was aware of this situation, but even though the anti-Ricci view of Rodrigues is known today as "[the] greatest influence on" him," he continued his support for the term for a long time.

Longobardo's stand on the term 7ianzhu contrasts sharply with his position on Ricci's use of other Chinese expressions for the Christian God, particularly 7ian (Heaven) and Shangdi (Lord on High). Since Ricci endorsed these other terms while Longobardo rejected them, the disagreement between them could come across as a technical issue of translation.

In reality, the situation is complex, and specific details are again crucial because, in addition to adopting the Chinese Tian (Heaven) and Shangdi (Lord on High) in his translation of the related Christian concept, Ricci also concurrently made the audacious claim about the Chinese sacred names in their original Chinese context as revealing a monotheistic equivalence between ancient Confucianism and Catholicism.

"He who is called the Lord of Heaven in my humble country," as Ricci said in his major proselytizing work in Chinese, Tianzhu Shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven), "is He who is called Shangdi in Chinese."·· After enumerating appearances of Shangdi in such Chinese classics as Shijing (The Book of Odes), Yijing (The Book of Changes), Liji (The Book of Rites), and Shangshu (The Book of Documents), he quickly and confidently concluded that "the Sovereign on High and the Lord of Heaven are different only in name."

To back up his related claim that ancient Chinese already understood the immortality of the human soul, Ricci also pressed traditional Chinese mortuary and memorial rites into his service.

"According to the ancient rites of China," as he noted in Tianzhu Shiyi, "filial sons and worthy grandsons must keep the ancestral temples in good repair throughout the year and present clothes and food appropriate to the time of the year in order to win the approval of parents already departed from this world."·· "If the flesh and spirits of these parents have all been destroyed and they, therefore, cannot listen to our importunities and see our heads striking the ground in worship," he quickly went on to point out while citing a famous saying from Liji, "then the acts of "serving the dead as if they were living and serving those who have perished as if they still existed" would be mere games of children rather than important rituals practiced by all from the sovereign of the nation down to the common man."

The monotheistic equivalence between ancient Confucianism and Catholicism, which Ricci so boldly and strikingly proclaimed as evidenced and proved by the Chinese Tian (Heaven) and Shangdi (Lord on High) in his translation of the related Christian concept is what Longobardo strongly and steadfastly opposed.

"It is above twenty-five years," as he wrote in his well-known anti-Ricci treatise, which was first composed in 1623-24 and which unmistakably marks his disagreement with Ricci as starting just one or two years after his arrival in China, "since the Chinese Xang Ti (that is, the King of the upper Region) began to be an eye-sore to me, and to go to my heart."

"For after having heard Confucius and his four Books, as we all used to do at our first coming hither," as he explained, "I observed by degrees, that the Definition and Account of several Expositions of Xang Ti, was very opposite and repugnant to the Divine Nature."

As indicated by his close attention to the definition and account of the Chinese term, he opposed Ricci's endorsement of the Chinese Tian or Shangdi because he did not believe that the Chinese expressions in their original Chinese context meant the same as the Christian deity. In addition to seeing Ricci's Christian misreading of ancient Confucianism as nothing more than make-believe, Longobardo found it to be an ineffective instrument of Christian evangelism.

In the early 1590s, the single most important Chinese scholar who helped Ricci understand Confucianism and even think of assaulting it in the guise of defending it from the corruptive influence of Buddhism was Qu Taisu (1549-1612). He was born and brought up in a well-known Chinese scholar-official family but early rebelled against the usual career in government through civil service exams, and he decided on an independent path of life strongly associated with Buddhism and Daoism.

In the chronicle of the Jesuit China mission, Ricci paid unstinted tribute to Qu as the person to whom "[all] the Fathers and the cause of Christianity in China were greatly indebted."· Writing about Qu in 1623-24, however, Longobardo presented him as a star witness against Ricci, who "with his own hand writ a Pamphlet, in which he collected those things that ought to be said of the three Sects, because the Father [i.e., Ricci] was out as to them in his Book."

Like Qu Taisu, those who were attracted to Ricci were mostly Confucian scholars. Being well inculcated in Confucian classics and related commentary traditions, they were able to recognize fundamental differences between Confucianism and Christianity as soon as they learned about the basic elements of the European religion. Like Qu Taisu, those who responded positively to Ricci's enculturation of Christianity were also mostly unconventional Confucian scholars, or what the noted twentieth-century Chinese historian Zhu Weizheng calls "disciples of Wang Yang Ming's teaching" (Wangxue xintu).> Convinced about the possibility of "the same heart and the same reason" (tongxin tongli) " across different belief systems and practices, they welcomed European religious ideas just as they had previously opened themselves to Buddhism and Daoism.

They never agreed with Ricci's Christian misreading of ancient Confucianism, but they took it in their stride, as exposed by Longobardo, using it to defend their continued belief in Chinese theistic ideas while not directly challenging Ricci.

In a pro-Christian publication that touched on the relationship of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism with his new Christian affiliation, as Longobardo pointed out, Yang Tingyun "endeavors ... to speak well of them all, showing that all of them have the same End and Design, which is to assign a Principle to the Universe; and that therefore they border upon our Holy Faith, and come to be the same thing with it in Essentials."

In the seventeenth century, Yang Tingyun was enshrined along with Xu Guanggi and Li Zhizao as one of the "firm and stable pillars, very proper to sustain that infant Church." Since he was attracted to Ricci not because of European mathematics and sciences as in the case of Xu Guanggi and Li Zhizao, he has been celebrated in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as "a religious man, a seeker after truth,"· "a[n] anima naturaliter christiana,"· "an ideal Catholic," and "the most devout Christian convert."·

However, if he merely echoed Ricci's equation of European and Chinese theistic terms and used it to justify his old belief in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, was he really converted?

The Involvement in the Chinese Rites Controversy

As a result of Longobardo's vigorous and persistent challenge to Ricci or his legacy, the debate of the Jesuit China mission about the latter's adaptation of terms and ceremonies started in 1612 behind closed doors and continued until the early 1630s. When the Chinese rites controversy officially got underway, it was at first a technical dispute about traditional Chinese mortuary and memorial customs, which were seen respectively by the newly arrived Dominicans and Franciscans from the Philippines as religious and by the Jesuits as civic.

After Longobardo's disagreement with Ricci became known to the Dominicans and Franciscans in the early 1660s, the internecine fight within the Catholic Church quickly morphed into a referendum on Ricci's Christian misreading of Chinese terminological and ceremonial conventions, particularly his monotheistic equation of ancient Confucianism with Catholicism.

In 1704 Pope Clement XI (1649-1721; papacy, 1700-1721) sided decisively with Ricci's opponents, and that decision was subsequently reaffirmed authoritatively not only in 1707 by the Nanjing decree of the papal legate Maillard de Tournon (16681710) but also in 1715 by Pope Clement XI's Ex Ша die decree. In 1742, Pope Benedict XIV (1675-1758; papacy, 1740-1758) went further with his Ex-quo singulari decree, banning the involved Chinese terms and rituals and forbidding all further debates.

Due at least partly to the Chinese rites controversy, Pope Clement XIV (1705-1774; papacy, 1769-1774) ordered the worldwide suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773 with his papal brief, Dominus ac Redemptor.

Despite being indisputably impactful and consequential, Longobardo's involvement in the Chinese rites controversy was inadvertent. In the internal debate of the Jesuit China mission, Longobardo fought hard against Ricci's terminological adaption, but his side eventually lost. To prevent any further flare-up of the dispute, Francisco Furtado (15891653), the Jesuit Vice Provincial of South China, ordered the destruction of Longobardo's anti-Ricci treatise in 1645 or 46. That order was carried out by Gaspar Ferreira (1571-1649) in Jinan, the capital city of Shandong Province, where Longobardo had long been working as a missionary, but no one knew at the time that he had saved a copy for himself.

After Longobardo died in Beijing in 1654 at the age of ninety-five, French Jesuit Jean Valat (1614-1696) came upon the saved copy of his anti-Ricci treatise in 1656 while cleaning his room in Beijing. In 1661, Valat passed Longobardo's text to the Franciscan friar Antonio de Santa Maria Caballero (1602-1669), who quickly made several copies and distributed them to Dominicans in China, Manila, New Spain, and Europe.

The far and wide dissemination of Longobardo's disagreement with Ricci in time turned the tide against the Jesuits in the Chinese rites controversy, but that momentous sequence of events was not what he had intended. Longobardo knew Caballero, and the two met at least twice in Beijing in the early 1650s. During one of those two meetings, Caballero is known to have talked with Longobardo for several days. If Longobardo really wanted to publicize the divergence of views between him and Ricci beyond the Jesuit organization, why didn't he disclose it to Caballero in the early 1650s, since the latter was already well-known in the early 1630s as a staunch opponent of Ricci's ceremonial adaptation?

Not only was Longobardo's involvement in the Chinese rites controversy inadvertent, but his truly outsized role in it was also possible only because of the intriguing leadership arrangement made by Ricci before his death in 1610. As the founder of the Jesuit China mission, Ricci already praised Longobardo's theological learning to the Jesuit superior general in 1606 and recommended him then as a suitable future leader."

On his deathbed in 1610, he appointed Longobardo to that position. At the same time, he nominated Sabatino de Ursis (1575-1620) as superior of the Jesuit missionary station in Beijing, even though the latter arrived in China only in 1607.

Both of these personnel decisions were highly unusual, not only because Longobardo and de Ursis proved before long to be the most vocal and redoubtable opponents of Ricci's terminological adaptation but also because neither of them had then taken the famous fourth vow (vow of special obedience to the pope) which was beyond the usual three vows of perpetual poverty, chastity, and obedience and was the marker of core membership inside the Jesuit organization."

Without that status, they deserved much less to be promoted than Alfonso Vagnoni (1566-1640) and Diego de Pantoja (1571-1618), who had by then already professed the fourth vow for several years · and who would be Ricci's most eloquent and indefatigable defenders.

Highly unusual, the personnel decisions of Ricci in 1610 cannot but compel attention once again to the complexity of Longobardo's disagreement with him. As already pointed out, Longobardo's disagreement with Ricci began shortly after his arrival in China. As superior of the Jesuit China mission, Ricci could not be unaware of how the small band of Jesuit missionaries under him read canonical works of Confucianism and how they were similar to or different from him in viewing Confucianism as amenable to Catholicism.

The anti-Ricci view of de Ursis has not been preserved, but since he agreed with Longobardo, the latter's anti-Ricci treatise shows by implication how he also did not see any theological affinity of ancient Confucianism with Catholicism as claimed by Ricci. The pro-Ricci views of Vagnoni and de Pantoja have been lost as well, but Longobardo reported them in his anti-Ricci treatise as "alleging, that the Chinese had some knowledge of God, of Angels, and of our Soul, calling them by the Names, Xang Ti, Tien Xin, and Ling Hoen."·

Given the sharp contrast of views, what is so interesting to note retrospectively is how Ricci may have agreed with his future opponents rather than with his future defenders. If this is only implied by his highly irregular personnel decision in 1610, it can hardly be missed in his prior description to his Jesuit superior and European audience about his understanding of Confucianism and his proselytizing strategy.

"The doctrine most commonly held among the Literati at present," as Ricci wrote in the chronicle of the Jesuit China mission, which he composed in his native Italian tongue just a few years before his death and which his Jesuit confrere Nicolas Trigault translated into Latin and published in Europe for him posthumously in 1615, "seems to me to have been taken from the sect of idols, as promulgated about five centuries ago."

"This doctrine," as he noted, "asserts that the entire universe is composed of a common substance; that the creator of the universe is one in a continuous body, a corpus continuum as it were, together with heaven and earth, men and beasts, trees and plants, and the four elements, and that each individual thing is a member of this body."s! "From this unity of substance," he quickly pointed out, "they reason to the love that should unite the individual constituents, and also that man can become like unto God because he is created one with God."

In his anti-Ricci treatise, Longobardo described the fundamental belief of Confucianism over and over again as a monistic understanding of life or that "all things are one and the same Substance.">> When writing about the Chinese notion of the creator being united with humanity and everything else in a common substance (una sola sustantia) or a continuous body (un corpo continuo), Ricci showed that he understood the cosmological conviction of Confucianism in the same way.

The only difference between them is that Ricci deliberately chose to characterize or mischaracterize it as a modern Buddhist corruption so that he could fight it while pretending to defend Confucianism from Buddhism. "This philosophy," as he said in the chronicle of the Jesuit China mission, "we endeavor to refute, not only from reason but also from the testimony of their own ancient philosophers to whom they are indebted for all the philosophy they have."

"Accordingly, we have judged it preferable in this book," as he said similarly in 1604 about the rhetorical orientation of his main proselytizing work in a confidential letter to Acquaviva, the Jesuit Superior General in Rome, "rather than attack what they say, to turn it in such a way that it is in accordance with the idea of God so that we appear not so much to be following Chinese ideas as interpreting Chinese authors in such a way that they follow our ideas."

Longobardo could not have been unaware of the ulterior motive behind Ricci's deliberate misreading of ancient Confucianism, but, as shown in his anti-Ricci treatise, he saw it as mere make-believe and found it in practice as an ineffective instrument of Christian evangelism.

Beyond the Win or Loss of Christian Evangelism

Because of Longobardo's persistent challenge to Ricci or his legacy, the evangelical cause of the Jesuit China mission collapsed in the early eighteenth century. However, the early modern cross-cultural encounter of Europe with China was much more than the win or loss of Christian evangelism. The wide publicity about Longobardo's disagreement with Ricci in the late seventeenth century did doom Ricci's adaptation of terms and rites in China, but it also brought the cosmological conviction of Chinese culture into the philosophical and religious consciousness of Europe.

Known then as now in China as tianren heyi or humanity's unity with heaven, the Chinese monistic idea has been characterized by the prominent twentieth-century Chinese philosopher Qian Mu as "the ultimate foundational source of Chinese cultural thought" (Zhongguo wenhua sixiang de zonggenyuan)· and aptly glossed by the noted Chinese American philosopher Wing-Tsit Chan as the uniquely Chinese expression of humanism, "not the humanism that denies or slights a Supreme Power, but one that professes the unity of man and Heaven."

In his anti-Ricci treatise, Longobardo cited the earliest Confucian classics, such as Yijing (The Book of Changes), to prove that the tianren heyi belief existed in Chinese culture long before the entry of Buddhism into the country from India. Following Yijing, he carefully explained the Chinese monistic idea, particularly its implied vision of life as a self-impelled and self-adjusted organismic process inherent in the ever-shifting variation, contrast, and equilibrium of the yin-yang material energy.

Since Chinese philosophers, both early and late, never thought about the ultimate metaphysical issue in terms of the Aristotelian efficient cause or what Frederick W. Mote describes as "conceptions of creation ex nihilo by the hand of God, or through the will of God, and all other such mechanistic, teleological, and theistic cosmologies,"· he, as much as Ricci, condemned Confucian cosmology as atheism.

However, since Chinese philosophers, both early and late, were always as concerned with "knowing what is first and what is last" (zhi suo xianhou)> as their European counterparts and since they never supported the materialistic view of life as "an infinite number of atoms moving randomly through space" or as "the spontaneous and casual collision and the multifarious, accidental, random and purposeless congregation and coalescence of atoms," he, as much as Ricci, apparently sensed the inadequacy of the usual European term atheism for Confucian cosmology.

"They call it the Natural Condition and Rule of Heaven," as he said about the Chinese Tian, "for as much as it causes all things to be guided and governed in due method or order; yet not by any intellectual Sense or rational Choice, but only by a natural Order and Propension.""6

Whether or not the Chinese idea of divinity in the Confucian belief about tianren heyi is what Julia Ching calls "the 'personal God" of panentheistic theology," what is so interesting about the involved Chinese religious thinking is how it resembles neither European theism nor European atheism and somehow seems to be both the one and the other at the same time.

Epitomizing what Frederick С. Beiser terms "a middle path," " the Confucian cosmological conviction is what Chad Hansen depicts as a kind of "non-contrastively rational [thinking],"" or what Brook Ziporyn characterizes as a distinctive ability to think "without the notions of mutually exclusive sameness and difference."

In Tianzhu Shiyi, which was written in the form of a dialogue between him and a Chinese scholar, Ricci categorized the tianren heyi idea as "the most difficult subject of all" while having his Chinese interlocutor point out the fact that it was in Chinese culture long before the entry of Buddhism from India.

As a missionary working in a country where he could not simply impose his faith by force, Ricci knew that he needed to accept and reject Confucianism at the same time so as to advance his apostolic agenda and avoid alienating his Chinese friends, who were mostly Confucian scholar-officials. In the contradictory needs of the situation, what he felt he could admire and must reject about the Chinese monistic worldview became a crucial and expedient part of his proselytizing strategy.

Ricci did not achieve his purpose of using a dubious equation of Chinese and European theistic terms and ceremonies to convert the fundamental meaning of Chinese philosophy and religion, and before his death, his appointment of Longobardo as his hand-picked successor made inevitable the outcome of the Chinese terms and rites controversy. However, by nominating Longobardo as the leader of the Jesuit China mission, he made it possible not only for the latter to challenge his adaptation of terms and rites and his closely related monotheistic equation of ancient Confucianism with Catholicism but also for the Chinese monistic idea to be first debated inside the Jesuit China mission and then much more widely promulgated throughout Europe.

The first person known today to have publicized Longobardo's disagreement with Ricci in Europe is the Spanish Dominican missionary, Domingo Fernández Navarrete. After getting his copy of Longobardo's anti-Ricci treatise from the Franciscan friar Antonio de Santa Maria Caballero, he took it to Europe and had it published in a Spanish translation in his memoir in 1676.

In 1704, it was translated from Spanish into English and published as part of Navarrete's autobiography, A Collection of Voyages and Travels. Three years before that, Louis Champion Cicé (1648-1727), a former missionary to China from Missions Etrangéres de Paris (Paris Foreign Mission Society), also translated Longobardo's treatise into French from Longobardo's original Portuguese text and Caballero's Latin translation and had them published in France.

Not as well-known but no less important is Longobardo's own involvement in the transmission of Confucian cosmology to Europe. Even though he is mostly known today in relation to his anti-Ricci treatise of 1623-24, that text is only one of many he wrote on that subject.

All those texts were well circulated inside the Jesuit organization because he wrote them not just for the participants of the internal debate in the Jesuit China mission and his superiors in Macao and Rome but also, as he put it, for "other Fathers who are out of China."

One of those who could very well have read them was Van den Enden (1602-1674). He was an active member of the Society of Jesus between 1619 and 1633, and in the late 1640s, he was the Latin teacher of Spinoza (1632-1677). Via Van den Enden, then, Spinoza's very possible access to the Chinese tianren heyi idea could provide muchneeded light on the otherwise mystifying fact that his revolutionary theory of monism differed from everything in European philosophy and religion but was recognized at the turn of the eighteenth century by Pierre Bayle and others as resembling the cosmological conviction of Confucianism."

Conclusion

As a result of the Chinese rites controversy, the once promising and seemingly spectacularly successful Jesuit enterprise of Christian evangelism in China crashed to the ground in the early eighteenth century.

Given the indisputable impact of Longobardo in the related chain of events, it is understandable that he has been belittled and condemned by his Jesuit critics and others for the past three hundred and fifty or so years, but this longstanding resentment against him should now be tempered by the consideration of the sobering fact that in addition to being one of the earliest Jesuit missionaries in China, he was chosen in 1610 by Ricci as his successor to lead the Jesuit China mission and he held that position for twelve long years after Ricci's death.

If, as alleged by his critics long after his death, he was weak in theology, against cultural accommodation, and abnormal as a Jesuit for preferring to evangelize the illiterate, Ricci could not have shown so much approval for his work and put so much institutional trust in him, and his Jesuit superiors also could not have allowed him to retain that leadership role for so long.

Longobardo was never against the Jesuit top-down orientation in Christian evangelism or the enculturation of Christianity in Chinese society.

He only disagreed with Ricci's adaptation of terms and rites because he saw Ricci's implied monotheistic equation of ancient Confucianism with Catholicism as a blatant misrepresentation of both Chinese and European cultural traditions, and he found it in practice as an ineffective instrument of Christian evangelism. He never intended to publicize his disagreement with Ricci outside the Jesuit organization.

Even though his inadvertent involvement in the Chinese rites controversy changed the fortune of the Jesuit evangelical cause in China, in the same process it also introduced to Europe the monistic conviction of Chinese culture about tianren heyi, or humanity's unity with heaven. This helped to catapult a major conceptual revolution, enabling European philosophical thinking to overcome what Joseph Needham in the midtwentieth century called "the dichotomy of either theological vitalist idealism or mechanical materialism."

To understand the rich complexities of the early modern cross-cultural encounter between Europe and China, it is crucially important to view Longobardo differently and to appreciate the many intricacies of his diversely consequential disagreement with Ricci.

Footnote

1 George H. Dunne, S.J., Generation of Giants: The Story of the Jesuits in China in the Last Decades of the Ming Dynasty (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962), 14.

2 Domingo Fernandez Navarrete, An Account of the Empire of China, in Awnsham and John Churchill, A Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1704), I. 223.

3 Claudia von Collani, "The Genesis, Editions and Translations of Longobardo's Treatise," in А Brief Response on the Controversies over Shangdi, Tianshen and Linghun, ed. T. Meynard and D. Canaris (Singapore: Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, 2021), 8.

4 The dates given here follow those as recorded on his tombstone in Beijing. For a recent discussion about this detail as well as the spelling of Longobardo's name, see Claudia von Collani, "The Genesis, Editions and Translations of Longobardo's Treatise."

5 There is controversy about Ricci's terminological and ceremonial adaptation and the related Chinese terms and rites issues.

6 Paul Rule and Claudia von Collani, "Introduction," in The Acta Pekinensia or Historical Records of the Maillard de Tournon Legation, ed. Paul Rule and Claudia von Collani (Macau: Macau Ricci Institute, 2015), xiii

7 Ray Е. Noll, "Introduction," in 700 Roman Documents concerning the Chinese Rites Controversy (1645-1941), trans. Donald F. St. Sure, S. J. and ed. Ray R. Noll (San Francisco: The Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, 1992), vi

8 John S. Gregory, The West and China since 1500 (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 38.

9 Cited in А.Н. Rowbotham, Missionary and Mandarin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942), 46

10 Nicolas Standaert, S.J., "Jesuit Corporate Culture as Shaped by the Chinese," in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540-1773, ed. John W. O'Malley, S.J., Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, S.J. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 352-363, 356.

11 Erik Zürcher, "Jesuit Accommodation and the Chinese Cultural Imperative," in The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning, ed. D.E. Mungello (Nettetal, 1994), 31-64, 41.

12 Alessandro Valignano, "Letter to the Bishop of Evora, Dom Theotonio de Braganca, from Goa, 23 December 1585," quoted in Paul A. Rule, K ung-tzu or Confucius? The Jesuit Interpretation of Confucianism (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 3

13 Claudia von Collani, "Jesuits under the Portuguese Padroado," in Handbook of Christianity in China, Volume One: 635-1800, ed. Nicolas Standaert, S.J. (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 309-313, 310.

14 Ricci, Fonti Ricciane: Documenti Originali Concernenti Matteo Ricci e la storia delle prime relazioni tra Г'Еигора e la Cina (1579-1615), ed. Pasquale M. D'Elia, 3 vols. (Roma: La Libreria dello Stato, 1942-1949), 1. 355, п. 463.

15 Xu Guanggi, "<<Taixi Shuifa>> Xu" (Preface to Western Irrigation), in Mingmo Tianzhujiao Sanzhushi Wenjianzhu (Catholic Documents of Xu Guanggi, Li Zhizao, Yang Tingyun: An Exposition of Three Great Late Ming Thinkers in China), ed. Li Tiangang (Hong Kong: Daofeng Shushe, 2007) 88 16 Christopher A. Spalatin, S. J. Matteo Ricci's Use of Epictetus (Waegwan, Korea: Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana Facultas Theologiae, 1975), 85.

17 Paul A. Rule, Kúng-tzu or Confucius? The Jesuit Interpretation of Confucianism (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 78.

18 R. Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552-1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 247-248

19 L. Carrington Goodrich, "Longobardi," Dictionary of Ming Biography 1368-1644, ed. L. Carrington Goodrich (New York and London: Columbia University Press), 985-989, 985.

20 Dunne, Generation of Giants, 160

21 Lionel Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism (Durham, Duke University Press, 1997), 34.

22 Cited in Paul Rule and Claudia von Collani, "Introduction to 7he Acta Pekinensia or Historical Records of the Maillard de Tournon Legation," xxv.

23 Dunne, Generation of Giants, 282.

24 George Minamiki, S.J. The Chinese Rites Controversy from its Beginning to Modern Times (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985), ix.

25 Nicolas Standaert, "Rites controversy," in Handbook of Christianity in China, Volume One: 6351800, 680-688, 682.

26 Haun Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 37.

27 Claudia von Collani, "The Treatise on Chinese Religions (1623) of N. Longobardi, S.J.," SinoWestern Cultural Relations Journal, 17 (1995): 29-37, 31-32.

28 Matteo Ricci, Tianzhu Shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven), trans. Douglas Lancashire and Peter Hu Kuo-chen, S.J. (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1985), 121

29 Ricci, Tianzhu Shiyi, 125

30 Ricci, Tianzhu Shiyi, 161.

3! Ibid.

32 Niccolo Longobardo, А Short Answer Concerning the Controversies about Xang Ti, Tien Xin, and Ling Hoen and other Chinese Names and Terms (1623-24), included as Book V of Fernandez Navarette's An Account of the Empire of China, Historical, Political, Moral and Religion in A Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1704), I. 183.

33 Ibid.

34 Matteo Ricci, Fonti Ricciane, 11. 341, No. 753, and China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci, 1583-1610, trans. Louis J. Gallagher (New York: Random House, 1953), 467.

35 Longobardo, A Short Answer Concerning the Controversies, 1. 189.

36 Zhu Weizheng, Zouchu Zhongshiji (Walking Out of the Middle Ages) (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Chubanshe, 1987), 160.

37 Lu Jiuyuan (1139-1192), Lu Xiangshan Quanji (The Complete Works of Lu Xiangshan) (Beijing: Zhongguo Shudian, 1992), 173.

38 About the subtle disagreement between Ricci and his Chinese friends including those who were supposedly converted, see Yinong Huang, Liang Tou She: Mingmo Qingchu de Diyidai Tianzhu Jiaotu (The Two-Headed Snake: The First Generation of Catholics in the Late Ming and Early Qing) (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 2006) and Yu Liu, Harmonious Disagreement: Matteo Ricci and His Closest Chinese Friends (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2015).

39 Longobardo, A Short Answer Concerning the Controversies, 1. 222.

40 Alvarus de Semedo, The History of that Great and Renowned Monarchy of China (London, 1655), 204.

41 Paul A. Rule, K'ung-tzu or Confucius: The Jesuit Interpretation of Confucianism, 66.

42 Nicolas Standaert, Yang Tingyun, Confucian and Christian in Late Ming China (Brill: Leiden, 1988), 56.

43 Sun Shangyang, Jidujiao yu Mingmo Ruxue (Christianity and Late Ming Confucianism) (Beijing: Dongfang Chubanshe, 1994), 205.

44 Jia Qingjun, "Lun Yang Tingyun Sixiang zhi Maodunxing" (On the Contradiction of Yang Tinyun's Thinking), The Northern Forum, 214 (2009), 74-77, 74.

45 About the complexity of Yang Tingyun's conversion, see Yu Liu, "The Religiosity of a Former Confucian-Buddhist: The Catholic Faith of Yang Tingyun," Journal of the History of Ideas, 73 (2012): 25-46.

46 Opere Storiche del P. Matteo Ricci S.J., ed. Pietro Tacchi-Venturi, S.J. (Macerata: Giorgetti, 19111913), П. 302-303.

47 Longobardo took the fourth vow in 1617 while de Ursis was accorded that status in 1618.21.

48 De Pantoja took the fourth vow in 1604 at the order of the Jesuit visitor Valignano while Vagnoni was given permission for the fourth vow in 1606 at the recommendation of Ricci.

49 Longobardo, A Short Answer Concerning the Controversies, I. 185.

50 Ricci, Fonti Ricciane, 1. 116, N. 176, and China in the Sixteenth Century, 95.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid

53 Longobardo, 4 Short Answer Concerning the Controversies, 1. 202.23.

54 Ibid.

55 Matteo Ricci, "1604 Letter to the General of the Jesuits," preserved in the Casanatense Library in Rome, ms. No. 2136; quoted in Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 27.

56 Qian Mu, The World Situation and Chinese Culture (Shijie jushi yu zhongguo wenhua) (Taipei: Lantai Chubanshe, 2001), 383.

57 Wing-Tsit Chan, 4 Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, translated and compiled by Wing-Tsit Chan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 3.

58 Frederick W. Mote, Intellectual Foundations of China (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 20.

59 The Great Learning, in Confucian Analects, The Great Learning & The Doctrine of the Mean, trans. James Legge (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971), 357.

60 Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 5.

61 Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. В.Е. Latham (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 64.

62 Niccolo Longobardo, A Short Answer Concerning the Controversies (1623-24), 1. 214.

63 Julia Ching, The Religious Thought of Chu Hsi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 252.

64 Frederick С. Beiser, "Kant's intellectual development: 1746-1781," in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 30.

65 Chad Hansen, "Should the Ancient Masters Value Reason?" in Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts: Essays dedicated to Angus C. Graham, ed. Henry Rosemont, Jr (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991), 179-207, 205.

66 Brook Ziporyn, Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 9.

67 Ricci, Tianzhu Shiyi, 237.

68 Longobardo, A Short Answer Concerning the Controversies, 1.185.

69About Spinoza's possible Chinese connection, see Lewis A. Maverick, "A Possible Chinese Source of Spinoza's Doctrine," Revue de Littérature comparée 19 (1939): 417-28; Yuen-ting Lai, "The Linking of Spinoza to Chinese Thought by Bayle and Malebranche," Journal of the History of Philosophy 23 (1985): 151-78; and Yu Liu, "Deus sive Natura: The Monistic Link of Spinoza with China," 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 25 (2020): 64-85.

70 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), II. 498