Adapting Catholicism to Confucianism: Matteo Ricci’s Tianzhu Shiyi

Abstract

Tianzhu Shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven) is the single most important proselytizing work of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), the legendary founder of the early modern Jesuit China mission. Controversial since the early seventeenth century, it has been both praised and condemned for Ricci’s claim of a monotheistic affinity between Catholicism and Confucianism. Ricci’s gesture of friendship to Confucianism won him many Chinese friends and posthumously made him famous or notorious in Europe, but as this essay contends, it was never more than a tactical cover for him during his lifetime. Since the real purpose of his cultural adaptation was his unobtrusive engagement with the ancient Chinese philosophical idea of tianren heyi (humanity’s unity with heaven), what is ultimately so instructive about Tianzhu Shiyi is the light cast on Ricci’s intricate relationship with his Chinese friends and on the ironic twists and turns of his complex legacy.