Between the Lord of Heaven and ancestors: hybridization of Catholic and Confucian rituals in Late Imperial China

Abstract

China during the 17th and 18th centuries not only witnessed a drastic political transition from the Great Ming empire to the alien Manchu regime, but it was also involved in dynamic exchanges with Western religion and culture brought by the Catholic missionaries. In this historic encounter, the introduction of key Catholic rituals, including baptism, confession, and the Mass, created both curiosity and confusion among Chinese people, who were used to the longstanding Confucian tradition of ancestor worship and a rich body of Buddhist and Daoist ritual traditions. To obtain easy acceptance of Christianity by the mainstream ideology, the Jesuits endeavored to compromise to and appropriate established Confucian rituals. This accommodation strategy was often carried out at the expense of deviations from orthodox liturgical procedures and spiritual undertones attached to them. While proud of their achievements in fostering a Christian-Confucian ritual synthesis, the Jesuits during the Chinese rites controversy had to face challenges from other missionary societies in China and from conservative authorities in Rome. On the Chinese side, however, most local converts did not passively accept whatever the missionaries performed before their eyes. They instead empowered themselves by reinterpreting (or misinterpreting) Catholic worship to the Lord of Heaven (i.e. God) and Confucian worship to ancestors, thus creating a noticeable hybrid religious identity and life style. In the paper, reflections of the paradoxical self-other relation among the Jesuits and Chinese will be discussed, on the basis of which I would bring forward my theory of “dialogic hybridization” to contribute to recent studies on the late imperial Sino-Western encounter.