The Jesuit Missions to China and Peru, 1580-1610. Beyond Faith and Reason

HOSNE, ANA CAROLINA

Routledge

Lugar: Oxon; Año: 2012 p. 256

It had to be an expansionistic religious Order such as the Society of Jesus that could dream of both its universalism and that of Christianity. Its flexibility, as an inclination and forma mentis, became crucial for exporting Christianitas and expressing it in the mission setting. This book proposes a historical analysis of two Jesuit catechisms: the Third Lima Council catechetical corpus entitled Doctrina Christiana y catecismo para instrucción de indios (1584-1585) with José de Acosta as the main author of the Spanish text – it was also translated into Quechua and Aymara – and Matteo Ricci´s Tianzhu shiyi or True Doctrine of the Lord of Heaven (1603) in Chinese. José de Acosta (1540-1600) and Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) played key roles in settling the missions in Colonial Peru and late Ming China respectively. Both of them savants, they also devoted themselves to composing catechisms, adapted to the features and needs of those spaces while exhibiting – supposedly – an uncontested orthodox doctrine, as Christianity was not inclined to share its domain with any local beliefs. The lens I have chosen to approach these spaces is that of doctrine and, specifically, the doctrine that both Jesuits, Acosta and Ricci, shaped in their catechisms composed in the mission spaces. From a European perspective, this book is about the way Catholicism expanded in the early modern period, craving universalism. Both Jesuits shaped doctrine and conceived it as hegemonic, ecumenical and orthodox. But, as I aim to show in this book, it was a fictional orthodoxy: wherever Christianitas was promoted, it would inevitably share and mingle with local religions, accommodating itself to the specific. In this book I focus on this process and choose to do so by analyzing how Acosta and Ricci succeeded in adapting the ‘universal’ to the ‘specific’, reflecting it in their respective catechisms. For this purpose I adopt a three-dimensional space: colonial Peru, late Ming China and early modern Europe, always present and reflected in the missions. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415529822/