Public and virtuous? Public or virtuous? A cross-cultural comparison of the phenomenon of friendship in the French court and in late Ming China

ANA CAROLINA HOSNE; CHRISTIAN KÜHNER

Plymouth

Conferencia; Plymouth State University’s Medieval and Renaissance Forum; 2011

Plymouth State University

In the early modern West, authors like La Bruyère, La Rochefoucald and Gracián wrote maxims and aphorisms on friendship. The vision of friendship these texts convey is a cynical one, where “dissimulation” becomes a key word; friendship is a precarious alliance, for it is likely that one will break up soon. The early modern age does not yet know the sharp division between the public and the private sphere. There are public persons, not a public sphere in which people have a public role separated from their private life. The friendships of those public persons (the king, the high nobility, the high clergy) are thus public friendships; and there is no separation between friendship and politics. Consequently, “friendship” becomes a term that is used for short-lived political alliances, especially in court society; telling true from false friends was an obsession of elite members who became often cynical about friendship. However, early modern authors insist that there is also true and virtuous friendship in the world; but it is rare, and few people ever encounter it. Thus, a cynical vision of public-political friendship became predominant in Western philosophical and literary thought, which thus moved away from the medieval idea of caritas, in which friendship between true Christians is seen as virtuous, because it is embedded in the overarching love of God. In contrast to the courtly European thinkers, a man from the West in late Ming China, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, made circulate a different vision in the public sphere, that of virtuous friendship. In late Ming China (1368-1644), the second half of the Ming dynasty saw an explosion of friendship discourses as well as the rise of a cult of friendship among many educated males. In orthodox Confucianism, friendship was a relationship unsanctioned by the core Confucian values prioritizing state and family, and as such it was viewed with suspicion and often considered a potential threat. This is probably why among the so-called “five cardinal human relationships” or wulun (the relation of husband and wife; with the parents; between elder and younger brother; between ruler and subject; between friends) friendship was traditionally deemed the least essential. But here we focus on the fact that everybody was talking about friendship at the end of the sixteenth century, especially in southern China, where the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) was living. His Jiaoyou lun (1595) or De amicitia was his first work written in Chinese that circulated widely among the jianghui (assemblies of philosophical debate), popular among a different sector of the large literati community. This work aims to analyze the phenomenon of friendship through a cross-cultural comparison between the West – the French court specifically – on the one hand and late Ming China on the other, as such an approach will allow us to judge to what extent the early modern West was different from other cultures of the same time, or whether it had perhaps a lot of similarities with them. We observe that in both societies friendship is a concept and a theme circulating in the public sphere. But, whereas in Western philosophic and literary discourse friendship seems to become increasingly dissociated from virtue during the early modern period, in late Ming China, Matteo Ricci – a man from the West – carries to China the belief of virtuous friendship and makes it circulate in the public sphere through the maxims comprised in his treatise.