Jesuit Reflections on Their Overseas Missions, from China to Paraguay

ANA CAROLINA HOSNE

Harvard Review of Latin America

David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies

Lugar: Cambridge, Mass ; Año: 2015 vol. XIV p. 56 - 57

1541?1443

This article examines how two distant Jesuit missions, in China and Paraguay, were assessed through the lens of Plato´s Republic. In the case of the Paraguay mission, Jesuit José Peramás (1732-1793) wrote a work in Latin, De administratione guaranica comparate ad Rempublicam Platonis commentaris (1793) in which he draws an analogy between the organization of the Guarani reductions and Plato´s Republic. In his view, Plato´s utopia, embodied in the reductions, had become possible thanks to the wisdom of the Catholic Church and the Spanish monarchy. Like Peramás in Paraguay, the Jesuits in China would also resort to Plato´s Republic to assess their mission in the Ming Empire. Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610)?s humanistic education at the Roman College provided him with useful tools to access the literati circles in China, which were to a great extent composed of scholar-officials, i.e. those who held posts in the Ming Empire. Over time, Ricci gained knowledge about the painstaking examination system to obtain these posts and become part of the imperial bureaucracy. This insight into the Chinese political system led Ricci to claim that China had accomplished what all the other nations could not; that is, the ideal of Plato?s Republic and its philosopher-kings, embodied in the Confucian literati.