Macao, Manila, Mexico, and Madrid: Jesuit controversies over strategies for the Christianization of China (1580--1600)

From Macao to Manila, Mexico, and Madrid, there were a number of contenders for missionary strategies to open the doors of the closed kingdoms of China. The strategies implicit to “accommodation,” historically attributed to Matteo Ricci (1554–1610), were among them. Yet, temporally coinciding with the formative years of the Jesuit mission to China were various Hispanic projects for the conquest of China. As the introduction of Christianity into the Americas and (more recently) the Philippine Islands, required prior pacification, and the establishment of a civil protectorate for missionaries and their fledgling converts, many argued that such would prove the case in China. A proposal for the conquest of China on those grounds came to be defended primarily by Alonso Sánchez (1545–1605), a Jesuit missionary in the Philippines, and chiefly disputed by José de Acosta (1540–1600), of missionary experience in Peru.; The proposal launched a storm of controversy, and the arguments that followed attempted to articulate in various ways the problematic relationship of Christianization to the use of coercive civil, military, and religious authority—of “evangelism” to “ imperium.” What follows is an extended analysis of the central terms of that controversy: the arguments employed, the ways in which they were expressed, and the traditions of thought implied. It is argued that the controversy represented a historical moment in which events and circumstances provided the occasion for complex and long-standing controversies to coalesce. From St. Augustine's De civitate Dei, through the more recent wars of conquest in the Americas, the deeply problematic relationship of evangelism to empire proved a constant tension within Christian thought. The analysis undertaken here contextualizes the proposed conquest of China within the intellectual and theological milieu of the 1580's, complete with the tensions, contradictions, and uncertainties that marked Christian thought between the Renaissance and the 17th century. Attempts are made to weigh and balance historiographical patterns of interpretation, and to draw from the moral and theological deliberations implied in the controversy critical insight into a chapter of the religious, moral and political thought of 16th century Europe in its expanding global context.