晚明首批来华耶稣会士诠释的基督

Jesus Christ Interpreted by the Jesuits to China in the Late Ming Dynasty

柯毅霖(Gianni Criveller) ； 张思敏

《基督教文化學刊》 3期 (2000/05) Pp. 199-218

並列摘要

From the first half of the 17th century, Matteo Ricci and his fellow Jesuits were accused of casting aside Christ and concealing the event of the Crucifixion in their preaching in order not to hurt Chinese sensibilities. Such accusations played some part in the outcome of the Chinese Rites Controversy and in the suppression of the Society of Jesus itself (1773). In recent years the same accusations have been resurrected by authors like J. Cummins and J. Gernet. When the first two Jesuits entered China (1582), they dressed as Buddhist monks, a clear sign that they intended their mission to be a religious one. They openly spoke and wrote about Jesus, as evidenced in the first decade of their proselytization, but they did not adopt the street preaching method. Michele Ruggieri seemed to be satisfied with the progress of the mission, but Ricci was not. Ricci intuited that the right to stay in China should be pursued through winning the respect of those who were the leaders of the country, the Confucian scholars. From the beginning of the 1590s, Ricci adopted a two-fold approach: by indirect and direct preaching. The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, written by Ricci in 1604, is an example of indirect preaching, targeting the literati interested in general religious questions. In the same year, Ricci published a booklet entitled The Christian Doctrine. This illustrates his second apprach: direct Christian teaching presented to catechumens and converts. Other missionaries basically followed the same methods. In 1619, Da Rocha published The Method of the Rosary, with 15 illustrations of the life of Jesus. The book is the first major example of the adaptation of Christian art to China. The illustrations successfully adopted the style of Dong Jichang, who conceived painting as the expression of man's inner being. In 1637, Giulio Aleni published The Illustrated Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which contains 56 illustrations of the life of Jesus. It may be considered the masterpiece of Aleni's missionary endeavor. The message that Aleni wanted to communicate with the illustrations is that the Chinese people have become part of the Church, and should enjoy the same dignity as other members of the Universal Church.