In the Footsteps of Dialogue: China and the Legacy of Matteo Ricci
It is a bit daunting to imagine saying anything new about Matteo Ricci, SJ, (利瑪竇, 1552-1610)—it is a bit like being tasked to provide a talk on Galileo (1564-1642), Louis XIV of France (1638-1715), Peter Canisius (1521-1597), and John Henry Newman (1801-1890). The enterprise of writing and publishing books about Ricci is prodigious. In fact, it is dizzying as scholars seem to trip over their pens, hoping to offer their own unique contribution to the now popular Ricci industry.
My aim here is to center my musings on Ricci’s legacy in more modern history, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but like most historians I shall dawdle awhile in getting there. So, if you can be just a little patient with me, I will peripatetically land my meanderings on our own time after first drifting into areas that will be useful to our understanding of the present. Historians are afflicted with what I call “Brideshead syndrome,” a habitual mental framework that echoes Julia Flyte’s assertion: “Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.” I shall do my best to connect the tripartite concerns of Ricci’s life, method of dialogue, and legacy in the present.
As many of us know, Matteo Ricci was a Jesuit who, along with Michele Ruggieri, SJ, (羅明堅, 1543-1607) and Alessandro Valignano, SJ, (范禮安, 1539-1606) is known largely for his gifts as a polyglot, cartographer, scientist, and committed evangelist, and who is particularly connected with the missionary strategies of dialogue and accommodation. He studied under the noted mathematician and astronomer, Christopher Clavius, SJ (1538-1612) and was raised by a father who was a science-minded pharmacist. When one reads about Ricci in Chinese sources, unsurprisingly one encounters protracted descriptions of his genius, and especially about how irresistibly charming he was in social settings. This character trait of “charming,” is so much emphasized in Chinese accounts that the French sinologist, Jacques Gernet (1921-2018), described the early Jesuit mission to China as “an enterprise of seduction.” Platitudes in praise of Ricci are deserved, but there is much more to say about Father Ricci than what is proffered in the embroidered narratives of the ecclesial and secular hagiographies commonly read.
Most books and talks about Matteo Ricci suggest that he unequivocally, and without exception, venerated Chinese culture and Chinese people. After Ricci died at Beijing in 1610, a manuscript written by him in Italian was discovered among the papers he left behind. His confrere, Nicolas Trigault, SJ, (金尼閣, 1577-1628) brought these papers to Rome with him in 1614 and published Ricci’s narrative account of the mission in China in 1615 under the title, De Christiana Expeditione Apud Sinas, or “On the Christian Mission to China.” Written by Ricci shortly before his death, he was keen to reveal his inner judgments about the empire he had lived in since 1582. While he does praise China for its “innate genius,” he also provides a protracted criticism of Chinese culture, which he admits in his essay, “Concerning Certain Rites, Superstitions and Otherwise,” are faults, as he asserts were caused by “being obscured in pagan darkness for some thousands of years.” Among those cultural practices Ricci condemns are: Chinese astrology and almanacs; numerology and fortunetelling; the “consultation of demons and family spirits”; Fengshui 風水 geomancy; selling one’s children into slavery; the practice of concubinage; female infanticide; public suicide; male castration; systemic political corruption and the indignities of the tribute system; and the alchemical cults of immortality and longevity. And several scholars such as Jonathan Spence, Timothy Brook, and David Mungello, described what was Matteo Ricci’s most adamant reproach against Chinese culture, the prevalent custom of pederasty. In either 1609 or early 1610, Ricci wrote:
That which most displays the misery of these people is they practice natural lusts and unnatural ones that reverse the order of things. And this is neither forbidden by law nor thought to be shameful or illicit. It is publicly discussed, practiced everywhere, and tolerated by all . . . Boys dressed like prostitutes fill public streets, . . . gallantly dressed and wearing rouge like women they are initiated into this dreadful vice.
In fact, Ricci’s litany of condemned cultural practices in China causes one to wonder what remains, in his mind, for Christianity to accommodate to. Even so, the Ricci that is most frequently depicted in books is the man who indeed frequently referred to the Chinese as “this noble race” or “this estimable people,” and interlards much of his writing with effusive accolades for the Ming empire. In a letter to the Jesuit Father General in 1583, he asserted that, “China is grand in many ways; it certainly has the greatest king in the world.” Ricci’s assessment of China was above all a human one, round rather than flat, sober rather than sightless.
And the preponderance of books and talks about Ricci also suggest that China’s population venerated Ricci with the same effusion that he purportedly venerated China. This is another inaccuracy that begs nuance. The esteemed Ming Neo-Confucian philosopher and historian, Li Zhi (李贄, 1527-1602), was among the intellectual pundits who knew Ricci and left behind a record of his impressions of the Jesuit from the West. After one of his numerous encounters with Matteo Ricci in Nanjing, Li wrote of the Jesuit missionary:
[Ricci] has travelled over 10,000 li to reach China . . . There is not a single one of our books that he has not read . . . Now he is perfectly capable of speaking our language, writing our characters and conforming to our conventions of good behavio . . . Among all the people I have ever seen, there is not his equal. [The fact is that] people err through an excess of either inflexibility or compliancy—either they make a show of their intelligence or their minds are limited. They are all inferior to him. But I do not really know what he has come to do here . . . I think it would be much too stupid for him to want to substitute his teaching for that of the Duke of Zhou or Confucius.
Despite the weight of Father Ricci’s charm and intellect, Li Zhi could not comprehend why Ricci had ever come to China in the first place. Some Chinese intellectuals were even more critical of Matteo Ricci. A Buddhist layperson named Huang Zhen was quite direct in his complaints against Ricci: “The fact that Ricci and his gang have come successfully to China is nothing but a plan by their whole country to subvert the Chinese with barbarian ways.” Huang and many others viewed Ricci as a duplicitous Westerner committed to misrepresenting Confucianism in order to undermine Buddhism and subvert Chinese culture. So, we can say that neither Ricci nor his Chinese counterparts were monolithically enamored with everything on the other side of the cultural table. Dialogue was not always agreeable, and conflict sometimes overshadowed convergence.
Despite the difficulties, within the long sweep of Ricci’s influence on China’s Catholic history, the concept of dialogue has remained an unremitting thread of emphasis. For those of us who spend our time researching China’s ecclesial past and present, the term “dialogue” has grown encrusted with a patina of somewhat hackneyed academic jargon. But I insist that the model of religious, cultural, and political dialogue was and still is central to apprehending Matteo Ricci’s legacy in the Middle Kingdom. Ricci’s studies at the Roman College after he entered the Order in 1571 exposed him to the dialectical Scholasticism of the Angelic Doctor, Thomas Aquinas, OP (1225-1274), the formalized debate structures of Medieval disputatio, and by the time he had mastered the dialectical texts of China’s Confucian canon, he was well inculcated by the then (little “c”) catholic commitment to dialogue as a method of inching toward truth and resolutions.
By October 1596, Matteo Ricci had completed the first draft of his monumental catechism, the Tianzhu Shiyi 天主實義, or “True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven,” a work that includes a dialogue between a Xishi 西士, or “Scholar from the West,” and a Zhongshi 中士, or “Scholar from China.” In this imagined dialectic between China and the West, Ricci suggests that much of Confucianism is attuned to Catholic Christianity, though the Chinese scholar finally concedes to the Christian position in the work’s conclusion. Ricci’s dialogue here is largely metaphysical and cosmogonical, but his dialectical propensities did lead him into controversies, especially with Buddhist intellectuals, who wrote scathing rebuttals against Ricci’s assertions. I have already mentioned one Buddhist response to Ricci’s propositions; here is another.
In 1608, a Buddhist Ming official, Yu Qunxi, wrote an open letter in response to Ricci’s pejorative assessments of Buddhism. Yu’s letter was in response to Matteo Ricci’s book, Jiren shipian 畸人十篇, or “Ten Discourses of the Man of Paradox,” a record of interlocutions between Ricci and Chinese intellectuals in which he is critical of Buddhism. Yu writes of Ricci’s argument that Buddhism is unworthy of consideration: “While the Confucian classics and the history books are indeed worthy of citation, there are also many places in the Buddhist sutras that are harmonious with your [Christian] teachings. Yet without [even] a casual reading, you attack them.” In this actual religious disputation, which was not a theoretical dialogue in one of Ricci’s published works, the nature and outcome of the dialogue is more one of conflict than confluence. In the end of his letter, Yu criticizes Ricci for bringing to China matters only meaningful to himself, and nothing special in the views of Chinese thinkers. Yu complains: “What you are offering, Sir, are merely pigs and celeries.” It suffices to say that Ricci’s personal history of dialogue in China resulted in both victories and failures. The great French Renaissance philosopher, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), wrote: “Speech belongs half to the speaker, and half to the listener.” In other words, for Matteo Ricci dialogue was only sometimes successful; speech, as Montaigne suggests, is a hermeneutic dance between speaker and listener that often results in sore toes.
Our question here, then, is how did Ricci’s legacy of dialogue carry into our own era? I will begin with two twentieth-century literary examples of Jesuit dialogue with China, both occupying the realm of political rather than religious discourse. Catholic dialogue with China has never been picky; topics of discourse have ranged from mapmaking, anatomy, astronomy, architecture, metaphysics, painting, to religion. Perhaps no time was dialogue more acutely necessary than immediately after the fierce clashes of the Boxer Uprising in 1900. Isaac Newton (1643-1727) once suggested that dialogue is “the knack of making a point without making an enemy.” The problem with dialogue between the Church and China’s authorities in the early twentieth century was that they were already, in large part, enemies. Making a point with an enemy is far more difficult than making one while still friends. By this time the Jesuits were obliged to apply Ricci’s methods of dialogue in adapted forms, but, fortunately, Ricci had had much to say about adaptation, even when adaptation was to be applied to adaptation. What Jesuits did in the wake of the Boxer Uprising was produce dramatic plays that included dialogue between Christian and non-Christian Chinese; in other words, non-Chinese Jesuits relocated the dialogue they wished to have with Chinese into the realm of fictive disputation between two Chinese, thus transforming Sino-Western dialogue into Sino-Sino dialogue.
There are many examples of this strategy to fictionalize dialogue so that all participants are Chinese. One example is the work of James P. Kearney, SJ (1896-1967), an American Jesuit from San Francisco who served as a missionary in Singapore. He wrote a play in the mid twentieth century about the Boxer Uprising massacre at the Jesuit mission of Zhujiahe. Kearney’s script, “Chinese Martyrs of 1900 – Boxer Persecution,” was written in three acts, and the final act features a melodramatic setting of the siege against Zhujiahe village. In the prologue to the play, Kearney sets a dialogue between two Chinese intellectuals, each representing one of the two predominant currents of opinion among Chinese who confronted how to restore China after 1900, progressive and pro-Western versus traditional and anti-Western. This debate was, for obvious reasons, of great concern to the Catholic missionaries hoping to rebuild China’s shattered Christian community. And rather than pit a Western missionary against a Chinese traditionalist, which would have underscored the already tense negotiations underway between Western and Chinese officials, Kearney removes any non-Chinese interlocutor from the dialogue. He provides two alternate prologues to select from, and for the first option he describes how the stage is to be set as the curtain first opens.
Peking: home of the wealthy mandarin, Kang Wei Li. Time: September, 1898. Kang is a calm, dignified, bearded man of about 60. With him is his cousin, Yo Wen Hao, a sprightly young, short-bearded mandarin of 35. They are drinking tea and fanning themselves.
The younger, “sprightly,” mandarin, opens with the remark that, “the question seems to be a conflict to the death between progress and tradition,” to which the older Kang Wei Li responds, “Is China to remain the China that our ancestors knew and loved, or is it to fall into the hands of radicals who would destroy it by making it foreign?” The dialogue continues to develop with Kang insisting that to accept foreigners, and their religion, is to “wreck the very foundations of our country,” while Yo asserts that the reformers who recommend the acceptance of the Westerners and Christianity “seek to save, not destroy” China. Concluding their protracted discussion about whether the progressive ideals of the emperor or the conservative ideals of the empress dowager are most appropriate for saving China, Kang tersely quips, “I am for tradition,” and Yo insists, “And I am for reform.” No Catholic missionary participates in this debate; it is a dialogue of two Chinese intellectuals fictionally couched within a play, but the discussion is one that Kearney is keen to locate within the earshot of Chinese who would otherwise be disgusted by the same dialogue if it included a Westerner. When Matteo Ricci wrote his famous Tianzhushiyi, or “True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven,” he was free to set a Chinese against a Western interlocutor. Once that ability was no longer tenable, a new layer of adaptation was required to highlight another dialogue in a new historical context. Ricci’s legacy of dialogue continued, only the footprints revealed a different pair of shoes.
Another example serves to illustrate how Jesuit missionaries in China during the twentieth century constructed fictional discussions in plays to underscore the dialogue that they felt should be heard in China in the Post-Boxer era. In the wake of the Boxer conflicts of 1900 Jesuits began to collect witness testimonies about what had occurred, and the French Jesuit, Pierre-Xavier Mertens, SJ (談天道, 1881-1964), spent much of his life in China recasting these accounts into histories and plays. With the assistance of Chinese seminarians, Mertens wrote dramas that he staged for large Chinese audiences, and his most popular drama was the play commemorating the massive massacre of Chinese Christians and two French Jesuits at the Catholic village, Zhujiahe, entitled Zhujiahe zhiming ju, or “Drama of the Martyrs of Zhujiahe.” First performed in 1930 with the help of Chinese priests and school students, this three-act play represents the Zhujiahe incident from mostly the point of view of the Chinese protagonists, dealing less with the two Jesuits who perished there during the violence, Paul Denn, SJ (湯愛玲, 1847-1900) and Léon-Ignace Mangin, SJ (任德芬, 1857-1900). Embedded in the play’s opening act is a dialogue much in the vein of the one that James P. Kearney later wrote.
Two Chinese gentry are introduced in Mertens’ play, Gentry Lu 路紳士 and Gentry Ma 馬紳士. These two Chinese nobles are seen in the opening act conducting an animated dialogue. Mertens describes Gentry Ma in his script as “a friend of Catholics,” and Gentry Ma as “a hater of Catholics.” Their dialogue serves to represent a debate between two Chinese literati; one is pro-West and the other is anti-West. The debate is heated. Gentry Ma argues that Catholics and Westerners are “law-abiding and good citizens, sincere and tolerant, harmonious with their fellow villagers, and constantly offer supplications on behalf of the emperor.” Lu, however, argues against toleration, simply asserting: “In my view, all the Catholic believers [, Chinese and Western,] should be annihilated.” This dialogue includes two sides of what was then an impassioned disagreement in China, whether foreigners and Christianity were salutary or destructive. What Mertens argues through the voice of Ma, is that both Westerners and Catholics are in fact innocent of all the accusations commonly made against them. They are exemplary citizens who show exemplary loyalty to China. Again, since the Sino-Western tensions immediately after the Boxer Uprising were too passionate for missionaries to engage in affable dialogue with Chinese officials, Jesuits moved the dialogue they wished they could have had in person onto the stages of Chinese plays, with all Chinese actors. If direct dialogue was impracticable, then circuitous dialogue had to do.
To briefly recapitulate what I have suggested so far: first, Matteo Ricci was unequivocally one of the most significant progenitors of Sino-Christian dialogue and missionary accommodation; second, Ricci was not at all the monolithic Sinophile that he has been portrayed to be, nor was he monolithically liked by the Chinese who knew him; third, Ricci’s method of dialogue presupposes a form of disputation, or dialectic, that involves two persons in a discussion intended to resolve a dispute over two opposing positions; fourth, Ricci’s pattern of dialogue allowed for constant adaptations to his pattern of dialogue; and fifth, more recent Jesuits who followed in Ricci’s footsteps inherited both his commitment to interlocution and his example of adaptation to changing circumstances. I will bring us now into our own era and consider how Ricci’s legacy of dialogue remains active in Sino-Western and Sino-Christian exchange.
I was recently invited to speak at the Gregorian in Rome for a conference entitled, “Matteo Ricci: A Legacy of Friendship, Dialogue, and Peace,” which was attended by several ecclesial luminaries—Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, Cardinal Stephen Chow, and the General of the Jesuits, Fr. Arturo Sosa. The gathering was orchestrated in anticipation of Matteo Ricci’s beatification. The Holy See press office connected the conference unambiguously to Ricci’s relevance to Catholicism in China in the twenty-first century: “The role of China in today’s world, the vitality and problems of the Chinese Catholic Church and the relations between the Holy See and the government in Beijing give extraordinary relevance to the figure of Father Matteo Ricci and his fruitful encounter with the Chinese reality.” The press release continues:
The recent declaration by Pope Francis of his heroic virtues, an important step in the cause for his beatification, encourage renewed study of the figure of Matteo Ricci in his entirety, as an exemplary witness of the Christian approach to the variety of cultures and the complexity of human realities, as an inspiration for the mission of the Church and of the Society of Jesus, and for relations of dialogue and peace between peoples.
If we read this report carefully, we see that the Holy See has adopted the usual prose of hagiography to emphasize Ricci more as a stereotype than the nuanced historical figure he was while living in the Ming empire. And the official webpage of the Society of Jesus posted a report following the gathering that asserted: “Ricci’s in-depth knowledge of the Chinese language and culture and his sincere friendship with the Confucian scholars of his time made him a lasting point of reference for the inculturation of the proclamation of the Gospel and for the construction of bridges between Chinese and European cultures.” Again, emphasis is placed upon Ricci’s “in-depth knowledge of the Chinese language,” his “sincere friendship with the Confucian scholars,” and his image as a “bridge between Chinese and European cultures.” I am not suggesting that Matteo Ricci was not all of these things, but while he was a friend to Confucians, he was also an antagonist to Buddhists and Daoists. And, I doubt that Li Zhi and many of his Neo-Confucian colleagues would have described him as a “bridge between West and the East.” The effusive tributes assembled in these recent reports are lovely—I, too, am an admirer of Father Ricci—but reducing Ricci to a litany of accolades does not get at the fact that Ricci’s authentic legacy of dialogue has more to do with attempts at cultural understanding, attempts at dialectical resolution, and most of all, honesty when these attempts are unsuccessful. Adaptation and accommodation, as Matteo Ricci practiced these methods in dialogue, had as much to do with readjustment when dialogue appears to fail, as it has to do with wearing Chinese regalia, speaking Chinese, and knowing how properly to behave at social gatherings.
The Matteo Ricci we read about in contemporary texts, the ones we engage in archives, disclose three realities that defined Ricci as a cultural and religious interlocutor. One, he sometimes got things wrong, and his Chinese disputants were hasty to point those errors out. Two, he was a participant in several heated and controversial conflicts with Chinese intellectuals, who at the end of the day may have been more enemies than friends. And three, Ricci was not above the human impulse to launch occasional invective against elements of Chinese culture he viewed as “inferior to the West.” I only bring these points up to underscore that Ricci’s so-called method of dialogue expected disagreements and blunders, as well as agreements and successes. Viewing the Ricci of history rather than the Ricci of hagiography allows us to see that one of his “secrets of success” was that Ricci’s method of dialogue was one of process more than pressure. Dialogue is patient; it convinces rather than compels.
So, how has Ricci’s legacy reached our own era? The Jesuit Archbishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Stephen Chow, recently visited the Beijing cathedral and prayed vespers with the faithful. Also in attendance were Hong Kong auxiliary Bishop, Joseph Ha Chi-shing 夏志誠, and the Bishop of Beijing, Li Shan 李山. Not only was this gathering largely unprecedented since 1949, but Matteo Ricci’s iconic image was prominently displayed as these three prelates gathered in Beijing. Ricci remains a potent symbol of Sino-Western, Sino-Christian, and Sino-Vatican dialogue, and he is becoming even more symbolically prominent as China’s Catholics navigate through post-1949 realities. Between 1949 and the election of Pope Francis, China’s Catholics have confronted several colossal historical events that have required a great deal of adaptation and suppleness in the realm of Sino-Catholic dialogue. The new reality now faced by Western scholars, Western governments, and the West-based Holy See is that China’s Catholic population is presently governed by all-Chinese bishops and all-Chinese clergy. Missionaries are now illegal in China, and, for the most part, so is explicit Vatican control over China’s Church. I am inclined to suggest that the “New China” predicted by Mao has arrived, and this new landscape has required new forms of dialogue.
To return to Jesuits in China—the most famous Jesuit to have lived through the Maoist era, and someone who became one of China’s most influential bishops during its Communist era, was Jin Luxian, SJ (金魯賢, 1916-2013). Jin was, in my opinion, the best-informed living person in China regarding Catholic affairs when he died in Shanghai after ninety-six years of life, and seventy-four years as a Jesuit. Jin, whatever one thinks of his controversial relationship with China’s Communist party, adhered faithfully to Matteo Ricci’s methods of dialogue: he was consistently present at all opportunities for discussion, he adapted to historical context, and he understood the language of his interlocutors. Some have suggested that he went too far in each of these areas; he was caustically critical of Chinese clergy who fled China after 1949, at times he appears to have facilitated party demands that were contrary to Church teaching, and he often spoke in terms more amenable to party officials than his fellow Catholics. All that said, ask any Catholic in China what their opinion of Jin Luxian is and the most common answer will be, “I admire him. Where would the Church be today without his form of dialogue?” I knew Jin Luxian, and he was among the most charming people I have ever met. Sound familiar? During our protracted chats about the Church in China I felt like the Ming philosopher, Li Zhi, at a banquet discoursing with Father Ricci.
He is perfectly capable of speaking our language [Jin spoke several languages], . . . conforming to our conventions of good behavior . . . Among all the people I have ever seen, there is not his equal. [The fact is that] people err through an excess of either inflexibility or compliancy—either they make a show of their intelligence or their minds are limited. They are all inferior to him. But I do not really know what he is trying to argue . . .
One of the first things he said to me was cautionary: “I am a slippery fish.” And that he was. But, indeed, where would the Chinese Church be today without his long history of successful dialogue with China’s officials?
I will conclude here with a few final remarks. A very large number of Jesuit missionaries followed in the footsteps of Matteo Ricci, inspired by stories of his life in China told and retold in Jesuit houses throughout the world. Among the remarkable materials held in the Society of Jesus Archive in Rome is a collection of letters written by Jesuits, called Litterae Indepetae, to the father generals asking to be sent abroad to mission territories. In one part of the archive, there are twenty-nine boxes containing 14,067 letters by 6,167 Jesuits, and perhaps as many as 2,000 additional letters are held in other parts of the archive. These letters were written before the suppression of the Society in 1773, and a very large portion of these requests asked to be sent to China to continue the work of the great dialectician, Matteo Ricci. Countless Chinese encountered the faith and became Christians under the influence of Jesuit missionaries who went to China because of the witness and legacy of Father Ricci. And it is important to bear in mind that it was Ricci himself who admitted the first two Chinese men into the Society of Jesus on 1 January 1591, Zhong Mingren (鐘鳴仁, 1562-1621) and Huang Mingsha, SJ (黃明沙, 1569 1606). It is accurate to say that the Society in China was born under Ricci’s influence, and that the Jesuit mission after his death was encouraged by his example. So powerful was the Jesuit desire to go to China that, as Father Edward Malatesta, SJ (1932-1998) has pointed out, droves of young Jesuits set out for China, despite the fact that, “only one third . . . reached their destination” due to sickness and disaster.
Over the course of my many years in China I have witnessed the effusive admiration that Chinese Catholics have for this Jesuit from Macerata. Both members of the Communist Party and worshippers in China’s churches agree that his legacy is one of cultural friendship and dialogue, but especially from the point of view of China’s Catholic faithful, Matteo Ricci represents the possibility of a Catholicism in China that is authentically Chinese. So far, I have only provided examples of fictionalized dialogue produced by twentieth-century Jesuits engaging China in circuitous exchange. The eighteenth-century Chinese author, Ji Yun (紀昀/紀曉嵐, 1724-1805), also set a fictional dialogue to express his musings on the presence of Catholics in his native China. This dialogue, however, is set between two fox spirits on the city wall of Beijing looking at the nearby Catholic church at Xuanwumen 宣武門. One fox spirit posits: “Now this Western Catholic church stands there. Those Westerners truly cannot be matched for their know-how in calculating the movements of heavenly bodies and their ingenuity in manufacturing machines, but their religion is no more than a variation of the Buddhist scriptures dressed up with some Confucian principles.” The other fox spirit responds, “Even so, in the footsteps of Matteo Ricci, Westerners have come here in an unending stream, and will never stop until they convince us. Isn’t that a madcap idea?” From the Chinese side of the long dialogue between China and the Jesuit missionaries, suspicion and doubt always lurked in the background. But for Ricci and his successors, neither suspicion nor doubt afflicted their side of the dialogue.
I will conclude here by giving Matteo Ricci my last sentence. Reflecting on his entire reason for travelling to China, Ricci wrote: “We have been living here in China for nearly thirty years, . . . and have lived in friendly dialogue with the nobles, magistrates, and most distinguished men of letters in the empire. And who can doubt that this whole expedition of which I am now writing was divinely devoted to bringing to light of our faith to souls?”
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article was originally presented as a lecture at the McGrath Institute for Church Life on 6 March 2025.
