The Chinese rites controversy is typically characterized as a religious quarrel between different Catholic orders over whether it was permissible for Chinese converts to observe traditional rites and use the terms tian and shangdi to refer to the Christian God. As such, it is often argued that the conflict was shaped predominantly by the divergent theological attitudes between the rites-supporting Jesuits and their anti-rites opponents towards “accommodation.” By examining the Jesuit missionary Kilian Stumpf's Acta Pekinensia—a detailed chronicle of the papal (...) legate Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon's 1705–6 investigation into the controversy in Beijing—this article proposes that ostensibly religious disputes between Catholic orders consisted primarily of disagreements over ancient Chinese history. Stumpf's text shows that missionaries’ understandings of antiquity were constructed through their interpretations of ancient Chinese books and their interactions with the Kangxi Emperor. The article suggests that the historiographical characterization of the controversy as “religious” has its roots in the Vatican suppression of the rites, which served to erase the historical nature of the conflict exposed in the Acta Pekinensia. (shrink)

L'article exhume une supercherie littéraire empruntant au goût chinois publiée à Paris en 1788 et tente d'en décortiquer les implications intellectuelles. Le faux porte sur le détournement du titre de l'ouvrage—référence au pamphlet de Morelly, alors communément attribué à Diderot—, de l'auteur—Confucius, philosophe contemporain de Socrate qui n'a laissé aucun ouvrage de sa main—, du travail de traduction—qui par définition n'a jamais pu exister—et de commentaire—attribué à un jésuite de la mission française en Chine. Le véritable aute ur du faux, (...) Louis Lavicomterie, Montagnard et régicide, l'a revendiqué pendant la Révolution. La reconstitution des circonstances et des arrière-plans historiques du texte tente de circonscrire la charge émotive et pamphlétaire de ce message chinois falsifié pour véhiculer un plaidoyer en faveur de l'abolition de la peine de mort et une satire de la justice et du clergé. Derrière Confucius, Lavicomterie a inscrit Voltaire en filigrane. On peut y lire autant de miroirs des attentes à la veille de la Révolution: la recherche d'une morale laïque permettant de dépasser les discordes religieuses et le rejet du droit divin, fondement de l'Ancien Régime. (shrink)

In the seventeenth century, missionaries in China translated a vast array of Chinese works, including classics, official histories, and legal documents. Their translations have been analysed through several perspectives, yet their use of Chinese dictionaries has been largely overlooked. In the context of the Rites Controversy, between the Jesuits on one side and the Dominican and Franciscan friars on the other, precise references to authoritative Chinese dictionaries were made to corroborate their interpretation of Chinese rituals as either religious or secular. (...) This article first describes why and how missionaries started from the early beginning of the mission in the 1580s to write their own bilingual dictionaries based on existing Western and Chinese dictionaries. Then, it considers how the same dictionaries became an important reference when the Rites Controversy erupted in the 1630s. Based on manuscript and printed documents written until 1670, three Chinese characters which became the focus of competing interpretations are discussed: miao as temple versus hall, ji as sacrifice versus offering, and sheng as prophet versus wise man. Besides the problem of biased translations on both sides, we shall show that there was a more fundamental reason which prevented the missionaries from settling their controversy using dictionaries. (shrink)

1. Translation is as much a movement between languages as it is between bodies of thought. Prior to any engagement with Malebranche’s Entretien d'un philosophe chrétien, et d'un philosophe chinois...