MDMD: Jesuits in China and North America

[Doug Millison]

from the first M&D reading on Pynchon-L. The Lingua Franca article I
referenced appears to remain available online.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9712&msg=21963&sort=date

Date:	Sun, 7 Dec 1997 14:46:53 -0800
To:	pynchon-l@[omitted]
From:	millison@[omitted] (Doug Millison)
Subject: MDMD: Jesuits in China and North America


Interesting article in Lingua Franca (on the web at
http://www.linguafranca.com/9712/ip.html). In a new book, Manufacturing
Confucianism: Chinese Traditions & Universal Civilization, author Lionel M.
Jensen, a historian at the University of Colorado in Denver, argues that
16th century Jesuit missionaries in China more or less created the
character we know in the West as Confucious, building on a tradition of a
learned teacher, Kong Zi (referred to only once as Kong Fuzi,
reinterpreting the teachings to make him  "the avatar of a proto-Christian
natural theology" and thus laying the groundwork to make their doctines
more palatable to potential converts, as they "began to interpret ru
doctrine as a kind of revealed theology, a divine light that prefigured the
eventual embrace of Christianity by the Chinese. 'Ricci and his fellow
missionaries began to sermonize a Christianized ru advocating the
resurrection of the true teaching of Kongzi,' Jensen writes."

Following on my last post comparing  Jesuits and English missionaries in
North America, it also appears that the Jesuits did a similar kind of
re-interpreation of the native American spiritual traditions they
encountered, telling their Christian story in ways the native would find
familiar. It's also true that many of those they "converted" did so only in
the most ambiguous terms, often for purely economic gains. The Indian
tribes appear to have engaged in a fairly subtle realpolitik of playing the
French against the English to their own advantage, a strategy that
succeeded but unfortunately only up to a point.