Ricci owed his success, apart from his personality and learning, largely to his "accommodation method"—an attempt to harmonize the Christian doctrine with the Chinese tradition, which laid the foundation of the subsequent success of the Roman Catholic Church in China. Though the unhappy rites controversy ca.
Ricci's China journal was translated by Louis J. Gallagher as China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matteo Ricci, , which unfortunately contains a number of errors. Recommended for general historical background are G. Hudson, Europe and China , and George H. Dunne, Generation of Giants He also worked at acquiring understanding of Chinese culture.
While there Ricci produced the first edition of his map of the world Great Map of Ten Thousand Countries which is a remarkable achievement showing China's geographical position in the world.
In Ricci moved to Shao-chou and began to teach Chinese scholars the mathematical ideas that he had learnt from his teacher Clavius.
This is perhaps the first time that European mathematics and Chinese mathematics had interacted and it must be seen as an important event. Ricci attempted to visit Peking in but found the city closed to foreigners. He went instead to Nanking where he lived from , working on mathematics, astronomy and geography. Ricci was well received in Nanking and this encouraged him to try again to visit Peking which he did in This time he was allowed to live in the city and he made this his home from that time until his death nine years later.
There was at that time a problem with the European's understanding of whether the country which Marco Polo had visited by an overland route, and called Cathay, was the same country as China which had been visited by sea. I no longer recognized myself in the mirror. I am a year-old woman, and I am completely bald. Cancer treatment does that.
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About Contact More. Matteo Ricci, SJ Gretchen Crowder. While there he also received training in music, mathematics, cartography, cosmology, and astronomy. One of his teachers was none other than the renowned Jesuit father Christopher Clavius, a friend of Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei.
At that time Western missionaries believed in the superiority of European culture and brought along their own cultural patterns, which they imposed on people they considered uncivilized. This attitude, unfortunately, endured among many until the middle of the twentieth century. In Japan and China also, some experienced a real conversion of the mind. Impressed by the achievements they observed in Japanese and Chinese literature, politics, and philosophy, they decided to make this culture the foundation of their missionary project.
Valignano was the one who masterminded this new approach, which was based on the concept of a multipolar world whose center was no longer Europe. From his experience as novice-master, he knew that most young Italians trained in the Roman College of the Society of Jesus were free from this infection, were imbued with the ideas of the Italian Renaissance, and were intellectually well prepared. Christianity should shed its Western garb and be clothed, equally well, in Chinese style.
Valignano required all Jesuits assigned to China to know the language before he would let them enter the country. A year later, Ricci and his fellow Jesuit Michele Ruggieri Luo Mingjian , at the invitation of Wang Pan, the magistrate of Zhaoqing, then the administrative capital of the province of Guangdong, took residence in that city.
Thus began the amazing story of Matteo Ricci in China until his death in Beijing in While Valignano was the one who taught his young Jesuits to think outside the box of European culture and to envision a new missionary model, Ricci clearly became the one who applied it to the Chinese context.
He successfully lived out a completely fresh approach for the West in its engagement with China. In the pursuit of this goal, Ricci had at his disposal not only his training as a Jesuit but also an impressive array of physical and intellectual attributes.
He was impressive in physical appearance, with blue eyes and a voice like a bell; he was endowed with a facility in foreign languages and a photographic memory; and he was keen in his ability to grasp the essentials of Chinese culture and to discern the means of entry into a sophisticated culture like that of China. While in China he displayed a profound respect for the diversity of cultures, promoted mutual understanding, and was a master of dialogue on an equal footing.
This way of life accounts in great part for the fascination with his achievements, which extends well beyond church circles. He became thoroughly familiar with the long history of this rich culture, its classics, and its philosophy. In he translated extensive parts of the Four Books into Latin and developed the first system for Romanizing Chinese.
He tested the effectiveness of his work as teaching material on newly arrived European Jesuits. For this accomplishment of allowing two different cultures to communicate with each other on the basis of the Confucian classics, Ricci should be considered the founder of Western sinology. Ricci also set aside standard traditional European mapmaking when, in a map he prepared in , he placed China instead of Europe near the center of the world.
This work is one of his many accomplishments that show his thoughtfulness and great admiration for the empire that called itself the Middle Kingdom.
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