Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 analyzes how the Jesuits developed a successful intercultural approach to spread the Gospel, introduce a Christian lifestyle in China, and build a variety of European-Chinese devotional lay communities.

Posted in MINNEAPOLIS 8:45 pm Jan 23, 2008 – LONDON 02:45 24 Jan
JO’BURG 04:45 24 Jan – MANILA 10:45 Jan 24 – SYDNEY 13:45 24 Jan

Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724, by Liam Matthew Brockey, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England, 2007. 477 pages.

“You will do well to send them on their way
in a manner worthy of God. It was for the sake of the Name
that they went out, receiving no help from the pagans.”
(3 John 1:6-7 NIV)

By Gloriscope staff

This very interesting and readable book of Catholic missionary history was obviously a labor of love. The author, Liam Matthew Brockey, writes in the Preface that he learned the Portuguese language in the house of his mother-in-law in Lisbon. He was going through the archives of Jesuit missionaries in Lisbon and the Society of Jesus in Rome (and other Italian archives), building the grand narrative of the Jesuit mission in China and digging for hundreds of first-hand details from missionary letters. Then he was writing this book keeping his focus on the subject for years, looking out from his mother’s-in-law patio over the rooftops of Lisbon.

The result of his considerable effort is a book that is well researched, systematic yet alive with all sorts of interesting detail from the life of Jesuit missionaries in China. The book is also beautifully printed with a very readable typeface on good paper.

The author has placed the history of the Jesuit mission in China in its wider context of the history of the Portuguese seaborne empire, the history of European-Chinese relations, and the history of Western missions in Asia. It was an ambitious research project, but the book is not too academic in its narrative style.

The explanation for the author’s success is that he adopted an internal perspective, that is, he looked at the history of Jesuits in China from their own perspective, as recorded in their dispatches back to Europe. And yet, the author has been able to weave the details into a larger, systematic picture of the Jesuit missionary strategy and practice.

In the first part of the book, the author’s central finding (he calls it “argument”) is that the nature of the Jesuit mission in China was in the Jesuit Society’s own image. This was reflected in the fact that the Jesuit Society exported its own organizational templates to build its mission church and lay activities in China.

The second part of the book analyzes various elements that combined to form the Jesuit mission and its communities of lay Chinese disciples. The author asks a very important question: How were the Jesuits able to imbue successive generations of their missionaries with the skills necessary for creating and sustaining a European-led mission church in a cultural context vastly different from Europe? He then describes the elements of Jesuit spirituality and pastoral techniques, a subject that has been analyzed by other historians as well.

But the author brings its most original intellectual effort to fruition in the last part of the book, in which he examines the interaction of Jesuit missionaries with their Chinese disciples. Of particular interest are his findings and conclusions about the intercultural transmission of early modern Catholic piety into the late imperial Chinese context.

He describes how Jesuits were actively proselytizing while moving about in urban and rural areas, using their rhetorical and theatrical skills to produce ritual gestures aimed to impress.

Yes, Chinese did respond to this educational technique that were able to build Christian communities and foster group cohesion, regular devotions and regular sacraments. In other words, the missionaries clothed the Gospel and the Christian lifestyle in the Chinese cultural semantics – and succeeded.

The result were mixed European-Chinese confraternities of various types. It was this organizational solution and the spiritual demands on the confraternity members that made Jesuit devotional communities different from their Chinese counterparts of Confucian and Buddhist spirituality. The description of a Marian community in Peking, instituted in 1609, clearly reveals its twin European-Chinese sources of inspiration.

The book reads as a fascinating string of Jesuit first-hand reports about the difficulties of travel to and in China, cultural adaptation, proselytizing, devotional training, and community building. For example, Jesuit Michele Ruggieri complained that the Chinese had no alphabet “but as many letters as there are words.” When he inquired how the Chinese themselves learned to read, he learned that, as he wrote, “even the natives spent fifteen years of their lives” in order to understand written texts.

The author also found some examples of dry Jesuit humor. For example, he quotes an Annual Letter home by the Jesuit missionary Andre Ferrao. Ferrao noted in his missionary letter that bodies of travelers on long sea voyages to East Asia were all dried out by the constant winds and salty waves. ” So undone and so worn down do we arrive,” wrote Ferrao, “that he speaks the truth who calls us relics, not only of the China mission, but of ourselves.” The book is full of such down-to-earth details.

At the end of his book, the author says that Jesuits were virtually the only Christian missionaries in China for almost a century and a half covered by this book. And after the Jesuits were forced to leave China, they left behind their churches, bones of Martino Martini and other Jesuit brothers who died in the mission field for Christ, and perhaps a spiritual legacy.

The Portuguese Jesuit Cathedral of St. Paul in Macau is now known as the Ruins of St. Paul (see photo here), marking the place in China where the long Jesuit mission in China began and ended.

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TO GOD BE ALL THE GLORY!

Published in the U.S.A. Copyright © 4T4C News Corp. 2008. All rights reserved.