The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 1650-1785 (review)

Abstract

Chinese The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 1650-1785. By David E. Mungello. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. 2001. Pp. xiv, 210. $70.00 clothbound; $26.95 paperback.) Catholicism first reached China in the Mongol period, when Franciscan missionaries traveled through Central Asia to the court of the Khans. The early Catholic communities established by friars, however, had all but disappeared by the mid-Ming period (late fourteenth century). It was only in the late sixteenth century, with the arrival of the Jesuits in Macao, that missionary work resumed in earnest. The story of Matteo Ricci, S.J., and his confreres in the following generations has been told many times, and research on the encounter of Christianity and European knowledge as brought to China by the Jesuits, particularly within the upper echelons of Chinese society (literati and the imperial court), continues in full swing. It is only in recent years, however, that scholars in the English-speaking world have started to pay increasing attention to the diffusion of Christianity in rural and popular contexts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing more on devotion and ritual than on science and fine arts, and examining also the work of orders and congregations other than the Jesuits, such as the Franciscans, Dominicans, Propaganda Fide, and the Missions Etrangeres de Paris (on these missions, we already have a rich, although mostly dated, literature in European languages other than English). David Mungello's latest monograph is a pioneering effort in this direction. Through a number of books and articles published over the years, Mungello has explored the transmission of Chinese thought and culture to Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as the inculturation of Christianity in China. In these earlier works, he has shown predilection for intellectual history, such as in his book on the native converted literatus Zhang Xingyao (1994), where he dissected Zhang's writings to prove how the new Christian creed was interpreted within prevailing Confucian intellectual context. Conversely, in The Spirit and the Flesh, Mungello directs his attention to the daily life of the Franciscan Christian communities in the northern Chinese province of Shandong between 1650 and 1785. He chronicles through the biographical experiences of Spanish and Italian Franciscans, belonging both to the Spanish Province of San Gregorio Magno and to Propaganda Fide, the difficult beginnings, the hard-won developments, and the eventual demise of the Shandong mission. …