Page 26 - Mounted Oriental Porcelain, The Getty Museum

information with a good deal of religious propaganda Translations of Confucius appeared under Jesuit
intended to bolster their somewhat unstable position sponsorship quite early on and exercised a surprising in-
as the religious order charged with the conversion of fluence on European thought. The English version of
the Middle Kingdom to Christianity. Of the journal of Confucius's works was, for example, the first thing that
Matteo Ricci (covering the period 1583-1610), the first James Duke of York, later King James n, asked to be
and probably the most successful of the Jesuit mission- shown when he visited the Bodleian Library at Oxford in
51
aries to go to China, it has been said: "it probably had i683. A year earlier than this the German philosopher
more effect on the literary and scientific, the philosoph- Leibnitz had written that he was deeply "immersed in
ical and religious phases of life in Europe than any other the works of Confucius." A few years later he published
historical volume of the period." 50 Ricci wrote of the his Novissima Sinica, in which he expressed the view
government of the Middle Kingdom by the mandarin that, owing to the general corruption of European mor-
class under the Wanli emperor: als, "Chinese missionaries should be sent to teach us the
aim and practice of natural theology," a curious conse-
the entire kingdom is administered by the order of the
Learned, commonly known as the Philosophers. The quence of the missionary zeal of the Society of Jesus. The
responsibility for orderly management of the entire general impact of these writings on European intellectu-
realm is wholly and completely committed to their als was to foster a belief that Confucianism was to some
charge. degree a purified form of the Christian religion—almost
indeed that the Confucian Analects could be equated
The appeal of such ideas to men of the Enlightenment, with the Beatitudes as a guide to conduct. 52 The main
particularly in France, is all too clear. The philosophes consequence of this sentimental idealizing of Chinese life
in the century preceding the French Revolution certainly was to produce what has been described as "a cultural
thought of themselves, and were increasingly thought misunderstanding on a wide scale . . . almost unique in
of by others, as just the sort of elite to play the role of the history of Western thought and institutions."
such mandarins. It is of course easy to understand the attraction of
It was the same with religion. Of Confucian beliefs this explanation of Confucianism to an age in which
Ricci remarked: many thinkers, in France and elsewhere, were seeking to

of all the pagan sects known to Europe, I know of no replace Christian theology with some form of rationalis-
people who fell into fewer errors . . . From the very tic Deism. To Voltaire it provided a particularly useful
beginnings of their history it is recorded in their stick with which to further his crusade against the French
writings that they recognized and worshipped one church (Vinfame as he called it). Confucius, he found,
supreme being whom they called the King of "appealed only to virtue; there is nothing [in his works]
Heaven . . . One can confidently hope that many of religious allegory." Voltaire's most successful play,
of the ancient Chinese found salvation in the nat- UOrphelin de la Chine, had as its subtitle Les Morales
ural law.
de Confucius en Cinq Actes. He declared that the Far
The appeal of such an interpretation of Confucian- East was "the cradle of all arts to which the West owed
ism to an age becoming increasingly sceptical of Chris- everything." His Essai sur les Moeurs was designed as a
tian revelation, an age in which many thinkers in France reply to Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois and its unfavor-
and elsewhere were seeking to replace theology with able attitude toward the Orient. It opens with a chapter
some form of natural religion, is evident. on China, and Voltaire's conclusion is that "the organi-
No doubt the mandarin class, in the highest eche- zation of their Empire is, in truth, the best in the world."
lons of which Ricci moved at the court of the Wanli In a sweeping condemnation of Western princes and peo-
emperor, liked to present its empire as a monolithic Con- ples, this secular pope thundered out from Les Delices
fucian state. The Jesuits likewise lapped up such ideas an anathema that, faced by the exemplary virtues of
and were encouraged in their missionary task to think Chinese civilization, Europeans could do nothing but
that Confucians were almost natural Christians without "admire, blush and, above all, imitate." 53
knowing it. But one has only to read the letters of con- Such deliberate imitation did indeed occur in par-
temporary merchants trying to trade with China to re- ticularly extraordinary fashion in 1756. At the spring
alize the almost unbridgeable gap between the Jesuit sowing of that year, the physiocrat, Francois Quesnay
dream and the Chinese reality; the merchants had hardly (sometimes described as le Confucius Europeen], sup-
any direct contact with the mandarin class except to ported by his patron Madame de Pompadour, carried
corrupt them with bribes when they put obstacles in the his sinophile theories of agriculture so far as to persuade
way of trade. Louis xv to plow the first furrow in imitation of the age-

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