A patron saint of globalization

By Tim Muldoon
Boston College and Patheos.com

May 10 marked the 400th anniversary of the death of Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit who was the first Westerner to enter the Forbidden City in China. His legacy is the subject of celebration in both East and West, from the year-long tribute in the Diocese of Shanghai to the exhibit of his world map in the Library of Congress. His life and writings--in mathematics, philosophy, cartography, mnemonics, and astronomy, as well as Christian doctrine--represent a model for our current thinking about the future of Christianity amid globalization. Ricci's method was humble and conversational, not imperialistic, offering Christian faith not as a hammer over pagans, but as a wisdom tradition that might enhance what was already good in an existing culture.

His life and work unfolded during the first wave of globalization, when European powers sought to extend their markets through colonization. Catholic missionaries took advantage of the trade routes this process opened up, still naïve about the relationship between religion, culture, economics, and power. Over time, though, some began to understand that the Church's mission of spreading the gospel had to be disentagled from its Eurocentric bias. Ricci's Jesuit predecessor Francis Xavier, for example, learned over time that the Church's presence in Asia was marred by its frequent complicity with European imperialism. The Church's mission of evangelization was compromised by its perception as a Western religion, an import that was unlikely to find a home in Asian soil.

Ricci was not the first Westerner, or the first priest, in China--in fact the Franciscans had been there centuries earlier, and there had been a small group of Nestorian Christians there in the eighth century. Yet these early communities were small. In the years before Ricci arrived the Catholic presence in China was little more than a chaplaincy to the Portuguese traders there.

All that changed in the years of Ricci's presence. Not only was he discontent with the "chaplaincy" model of Catholic presence in China; he was dissatisfied with the inadequate theology that lay underneath it. What Ricci brought to China was an altogether new model of living Christian faith and of evangelizing, a model which in our age of pluralism and a new globalization is both thought provoking and, in a word, hopeful.

What did Ricci propose? That sharing the gospel of Jesus is rooted in friendship. Not the "let's get along for a while before I start the hard sell about conversion" variety, but rather a model of seeing God already present in the other, and seeking to learn what God is doing in the good I see in the other. Ricci paid attention: he learned to speak Chinese, he learned Chinese customs, he admired the classics of Confucius. He discerned the presence of God in the wonders of Chinese history, culture, writing, and manners. His was a distinctively Ignatian humanism, learned at the feet of great thinkers of Renaissance Europe. Indeed, the Jesuits of the 16th century championed the Roman playwright Terence's famous dictum "nothing human is foreign to me" as a motto for their schools. Ricci saw God very active in China; he did not need to introduce the Chinese people to God. Rather, he saw his (modest) task as cultivating friendship, a task evinced by the publication of his first book in Chinese, On Friendship (Jiaoyou lun, 1595)--modeled after Cicero's book De Amicitia.

In time, Ricci drew many friends and confidants to his inner circle, including Paul Xu Guangxi, with whom he translated Chinese classics into Latin, in order that there might be a kind of "conversational" evangelization working both ways (the Church to China and China to the Church). Xu eventually became Catholic, no doubt in part because he came to understand the spirituality that motivated Ricci in the first place. For at the heart of Ricci's Jesuit mission of friendship was an abiding Christian faith, the central theme of which he saw as God reaching out in friendship to human beings through Jesus. For him, life as a Christian meant imitating that basic dynamic.

Tim Muldoon is a Catholic theologian and author of several books including A Saint for All Reasons. He teaches in the Honors Program at Boston College and blogs at Patheos.com.

By David Charles  |  May 27, 2010; 5:58 PM ET
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