Cultural accommodation or intellectual colonization? A reinterpretation of the Jesuit approach to Confucianism during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries

This dissertation takes issue with the "cultural accommodation" thesis prevalent in the previous scholarship on the Jesuit missionary strategy in China, particularly on the Jesuit approach to classical and Neo-Confucianism, venturing a counterargument that the spirit and essence of the Jesuit strategy should be characterized as "intellectual colonialism." This argument is presented through an interpretation of the role of Western Scholastic learning in the Jesuit missionary agenda. The dissertation situates the Jesuit mission to the late Ming China within the context of cultural confrontation, highlighting the profound impact of Western intellectual traditions and attainments, particularly Platonic metaphysics and Aristotelian-Scholastic natural philosophy, logic, and models of argumentation, on the development of the doctrines and theoretical framework of Catholic theology on the one hand, and the fundamental embeddedness of Confucian spirituality, both classical and modern, in Chinese moral, metaphysical, cosmological, and medical discourses on the other.; Tracing the evolution of the Jesuit approach to Confucianism during the first six decades of the mission, particularly the crucial period from the emergence of the "Ricci Method" to the reassessment, rediscovery, and elaboration of it by Matteo Ricci's successors through their controversy on the "question of terms," the dissertation demonstrates how the Jesuits' deepening awareness of the cultural dimension of the Catholic-Confucian confrontation informed their increasingly methodical uses of Western Scholastic learning in their "intellectual dialogues" with the Confucian-minded audience. It takes Matteo Ricci's metaphorical description of his foundational project--"clearing the soil," "sowing the seeds," and awaiting the season of "harvest"--as a point of departure, and reconstructs that project by examining the representative Chinese works of Matteo Ricci, Nicolaus Longobardo, and Julius Aleni, showing how they employed Western Scholastic learning, in the name of extolling universal reason and truth, to Christianize Confucian classics, which they seemingly appropriated, and to refute the teachings of Neo-Confucianism and other Chinese religious traditions. This study thus concludes that the transmission of Scholastic learning, both in apologetic context and in the form of systematic translations and adaptations, constituted the centerpiece of the Jesuit missionary endeavor in China, the goal of which was to effect a foundational and paradigmatic transformation in Chinese culture in hope of a total religious conversion.