If the only Jesuit you ever met was the subject of a biography in a library collection, what would this individual tell you about Jesuit life?
In this series, IgNation blogger Kevin Burns, who is not a Jesuit, takes a look at some of the works that come up in a large urban public library when he entered the search term “Jesuit” and filtered it through the genre of “Biography”. The books that popped up include some familiar names and some not so familiar but still very real Jesuits.
Thirty years ago, Jonathan D. Spence, the English-born and now History professor emeritus at Yale, presented his biography of a remarkable Italian Jesuit wrapped inside a rich cultural history of early western missionary encounters with Chinese culture. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci uses the story of a Jesuit missionary who arrived in China in 1583 to explore how he initiated an exchange of knowledge between Occidental and Oriental scholarship that still reverberates today. This item is not a literary review of Spence’s book but an exploration of Jesuit thought and experience using Matteo Ricci’s own words, all of which are contained in Spence’s fascinating book.
First, the biography in very broad strokes: Matteo Ricci was born into a wealthy family in Macerata, Italy, in 1552. He entered the Jesuits in 1571, studying in Florence and then at the Jesuit College in Rome. He was already a missionary when, in 1580, he was ordained in Cochin, India. From there he sailed to Macao, and then onwards to China, arriving there in 1583. This was a time of great challenge and hardship for missionaries. They arrived without a complete Chinese translation of the Bible, their journey from Rome took them six months across dangerous seas, and their letters home often took 3 to 7 years to arrive.
Ricci lived and worked in tiny Jesuit communities in Zhaoqing, Shaozou, Nanjing, and finally, in 1601, Peking where he remained until his death in 1610. He was a classically-trained Jesuit, a mathematician and linguist with a remarkable memory, what we would describe today as a photographic memory with phenomenally detailed recall. He wrote about methods to develop memory and in China he wrote about the “memory palace”– mental rather than physical constructs “to provide storage spaces for the myriad concepts that make up the sum of our human knowledge.”
Spence outlines Ricci’s ideas about memory and the calligraphy and drawings he used to explain his system. Always the missionary, his drawings and verbal imagery are based on the life of Christ and only slightly adapted to make them more comprehensible to the followers of other traditions: Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, primarily.
What makes Ricci’s story so vibrant today is to remember that he was a contemporary of Walter Raleigh (1552-1616), Shakespeare (1564-1616), and Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) and that he was writing from an often precarious situation, and in the early days of print. Spence mines his letters and books and most forcefully connects everything that Ricci does to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.
Now in Matteo Ricci’s own words:
The long outward boat journey from Rome was so bad that all he could do was “to sweat all the night through, stretched out on a plank with a tiny mattress, in a terrible stench and a host of lice and bedbugs.” (p. 76)
The Jesuits arriving in China knew that once there they would not be permitted to leave as this was the Chinese custom at the time. They were considered “to be foreigners and people who can bring harm to China. And anyone who has dealings with the place is seen as a mean person, suspected everywhere.” (p.191-2)
When a childhood friend writes that he is envious of Matteo’s exciting adventures he replies, “one needs no thrust of steel to be a martyr, nor need one embark on a long journey in order to be pilgrim.” (p.100)
In addition to his work about mathematics written in Chinese (especially Euclid and Christopher Clavius SJ) and memory, the Chinese nobles also expect works about alchemy, a skill they are certain this Jesuit possesses, even though “the more I assure them that I know nothing about these matters, the less they believe me.” (p. 188)
Spence the contemporary historian characterises missionary work as “the ambiguous world of cultural adaptation” (p. 114) but Ricci describes it in agricultural terms. “The time at which we now find ourselves in China is not yet that of the harvest, nor even of the sowing, but rather of opening up the wild woods and fighting with the wild beasts and poisonous snakes that lurk within.” (p. 196-7)
Amid the clearly ideological and physical dangers of missionary activity Ricci receives mystical reassurance in a dream which he outlines in a letter.
I must not forget to tell you one dream, which I had a few days after arriving in this place. I was standing, made melancholy by the sad outcome of my attempt, and by the travails of the journey, when it seemed to me that I met a man I did not recognize, who said to me: ‘So is it you who have just been traveling through this land, seeking to destroy its ancient laws and replace them with the law of God?’ and I, astonished that this person could penetrate so deep into my heart, asked in return: ‘Be you the devil or God?’ And he replied, ‘Not the devil but God.’ So I threw myself at his feet, weeping, and said, ‘If you, my Lord, know this, why up to now have you given me no help?’ And he answered me, ‘Go forward to that city’ – and here it seemed to me that he was showing me Peking – ‘and there I will help you.’ I entered the city filled with faith, passing through it without any difficulty. And this was my dream. (p. 81-2)
Because he must remain in China and getting books from Rome is so difficult, many of his Chinese publications are works that he adapts and translates from his memory of the original. Even so, Ricci cautions that memory often works in surprising ways.
It often happens that those who live at a later time are unable to grasp the point at which the great undertakings or actions of this world had their origin. And I, constantly seeking the reason for this phenomenon, could find no other answer than this, namely that all things (including those that come at last to triumph mightily) are at their beginnings so small and feint in outline that one cannot easily convince oneself that from them will grow matters of great moment. (p. 267)
As with so many Jesuits before and after him, he believes leaving some form of record is important: “the whole point of writing something down is that your voice will then carry for thousands of miles, whereas in direct conversation it fades at a hundred paces.” (p. 22)
In The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Jonathan D. Spence amplifies the voice of Matteo Ricci SJ loudly and clearly for our time.
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The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan D. Spence was first published by Viking Penguin US in 1984. The edition used for this piece is the 1985 Penguin Books paperback version, reprinted in 1986.
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* The accompanying illustrations, unless otherwise noted, are from the Boston College University Libraries whose digitized online books are in the public domain. Since no copyright permissions are needed, IgNation acknowledges Boston College University Libraries as the source for these images.
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Next in Keyword: Jesuit, Genre: Biography: Daniel Lord, SJ’s who, in 1930, wrote the "Code" that negotiated a future for the film business when Hollywood and "decency" were on a dangerous collision course..