Daniel Canaris
The University of Sydney, School of Languages and Cultures, Faculty Member
- Daniel completed his Ph.D. at University of Sydney in 2016 with a dissertation on the reception of Confucianism in th... moreDaniel completed his Ph.D. at University of Sydney in 2016 with a dissertation on the reception of Confucianism in the thought of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). He is currently a DECRA Research Fellow at the University of Sydney where he is researching on Sino-Western intellectual exchange.edit
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In the 1580s, when the Jesuit missionaries Michele Ruggieri (15431607) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) established the first Jesuit mission in China, the terms “translatability” and “cultural incommensurability” were yet to enter the European... more
In the 1580s, when the Jesuit missionaries Michele Ruggieri (15431607) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) established the first Jesuit mission in China, the terms “translatability” and “cultural incommensurability” were yet to enter the European lexicon, but these questions were addressed implicitly through the translation choices employed in the mission field. For the early missionaries, translatability had immense ramifications for their missionary practice. One of the foremost challenges was how to communicate in Chinese the concept of “sanctity,” which was central to Christian soteriology. There was a range of terms in Chinese intellectual and religious traditions that the Jesuits drew upon to translate sanctus such as shengren 聖人 zhenren 真人 , and xian 仙 , but each of these terms implied a certain commensurability between Christian and indigenous Chinese conceptions of human excellence. This paper will present a microhistory of early Jesuit attempts to translate sanctus in Chinese, and reflect upon the significance of these translation choices for the development of the Jesuits’ missionary strategy.
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Lingyan lishao 靈言蠡勺 [LYLS] (Humble Attempt to Discuss the Soul, 1624) by the Calabrian Jesuit Francesco Sambiasi (1582–1649) and the Chinese mandarin Xu Guangqi 徐光啓 (1562–1633) was the first Chinese‑language treatise on the scholastic... more
Lingyan lishao 靈言蠡勺 [LYLS] (Humble Attempt to Discuss the Soul, 1624) by the Calabrian Jesuit Francesco Sambiasi (1582–1649) and the Chinese mandarin Xu Guangqi 徐光啓 (1562–1633) was the first Chinese‑language treatise on the scholastic Aristotelian soul and a pioneering work in Sino–Western intellectual exchanges. Until now, the dominant assumption has been that the first volume (juan) of this work is simply an adaptation of the Coimbra commentaries on De Anima [DA] and Parva Naturalia [PN]. This article demonstrates, however, that while most of the first juan is based on these Coimbra commentaries, its treatise on the substance of the soul was likely derived from another source, namely the Enchiridion, a 16th century confessional manual by the Spanish Augustinian Martín de Azpilcueta (1492–1586), or Doctor Navarrus. Through a close textual comparison, this article shows how LYLS adopts the same structure, content, and citations of the Enchiridion to construct an accessible and concise theological definition of the soul that was better suited for the Chinese missionary context than the dense philosophic definitions of the Coimbra commentaries.
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The Sicilian Jesuit Francesco Brancati SJ (1607–71) was known for his effective missionary work in Shanghai and its environs, as well as for his literary production in Chinese. Together with 24 other missionaries in China, in 1666 he was... more
The Sicilian Jesuit Francesco Brancati SJ (1607–71) was known for his effective missionary work in Shanghai and its environs, as well as for his literary production in Chinese. Together with 24 other missionaries in China, in 1666 he was exiled to Canton (Guangzhou). Here, tensions brewed not only between the Jesuits and mendicant friars, who disagreed with the Jesuits’ missionary policy, but also between the newly arrived Jesuits and those based in Guangzhou, who were not subject to the Vice-Province of China. To resolve some of these disputes, the missionaries held a conference from December 1667 to January 1668, but the acrimony became even more intense, and in the aftermath a flurry of letters was written by numerous missionaries in defence of their respective stances. Brancati’s letters are particularly illuminating, as they reveal the Jesuits’ personal and jurisdictional conflicts that are usually obscured in official publications. This article reproduces two of Brancati’s letters which are contextualized with an introduction and annotations.
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The twentieth-century rediscovery of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) by scholars such as Erich Auerbach and Isaiah Berlin was partly driven by the profound resonance of his hermeneutics for the valorisation of cultural alterity. Yet the... more
The twentieth-century rediscovery of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) by scholars such as Erich Auerbach and Isaiah Berlin was partly driven by the profound resonance of his hermeneutics for the valorisation of cultural alterity. Yet the actual content of his philological investigations is often difficult to square with this reading of his thought. The representation of China in his works is a case in point; despite the enthusiasm with which many of his contemporaries in Naples embraced China, Vico seems to view the intellectual and artistic achievements of Chinese civilisation with a certain disdain, characterising Confucianism as a “rough and ungainly” philosophy typical of the most primitive stage of civilisational development. Scholars who have maintained Vico’s contemporary relevance have tried to brush aside his apparent Eurocentrism in favour of his hermeneutics, whereas others have cited his treatment of China as symptomatic of the reactionary nature of his thought. The present study does not deny the importance of China to Vico’s polemic with libertinism but argues that his representation of China is best understood in view of its theological significance to contemporary Jesuit accommodations of Confucianism.
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A persistent feature in Jesuit reports about the late Ming and early Qing was the notion that an enduring peace and concord pervaded the Chinese political system. Although the Jesuits did not invent this association, which was rooted in... more
A persistent feature in Jesuit reports about the late Ming and early Qing was the notion that an enduring peace and concord pervaded the Chinese political system. Although the Jesuits did not invent this association, which was rooted in Greco-Roman historiography, the Jesuit encyclopaedist Antonio Possevino (1533–1611) was the first to link the ‘perpetual peace’ (perpetua pax) and ‘supreme concord’ (summa concordia) of the Chinese state to the Confucian intellectual tradition. As the Jesuits’ missionary strategy developed under the tutelage of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), ‘public peace’ (pax publica) and ‘the calm of the Republic’ (Republica quies) came to be perceived as the ultimate purpose of the Confucian precepts and one of the hinges on which the aims of Christianity, Confucianism and natural law can be reconciled. The supreme expression of the link between Confucianism and peace can be found in the Confucius Sinarum philosophus (1687), which presented for the first time an accessible translation of three of the four Confucian classics. Yet while retaining the view that pre-Qin Confucianism espoused peace as a central political aim, the Confucius Sinarum philosophus challenged the view that contemporary China could be regarded as a utopic actualization of Confucian peace. This paper will discuss this shift as an attempt to coopt the Chinese political experience as an argument against the pragmatic political philosophy known as ‘reason of state’, which was perceived by Jesuit thinkers as atheistic and immoral.
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The accommodation of Confucianism articulated by Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) reflected a Neoscholastic approach in which rational agreement was the primary hinge of in-terreligious engagement. Ricci's rationalism, however, was somewhat... more
The accommodation of Confucianism articulated by Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) reflected a Neoscholastic approach in which rational agreement was the primary hinge of in-terreligious engagement. Ricci's rationalism, however, was somewhat atypical among Jesuits of the late sixteenth century who often made overtures towards typology to explain the cultural and religious phenomena encountered in their missionary activities in East Asia and the New World. This article focuses on the writings of two Jesuits, the encyclopedist Antonio Possevino (1533-1611) and the China missionary Michele Ruggieri (1533-1611), who collaborated on the first European-language publication to include an extract of the Confucian corpus. It examines how Possevino adapts the manuscripts on China that Ruggieri provided him while in Rome in the early 1590s, and the tensions between the scholastic approach to evangelisation proposed in earlier chapters of the Bibliotheca selecta and the more extravagant typological strategies articulated in Ruggieri's original manuscripts.
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On 29 September 1584, the first Catholic catechism was printed in China under the title The True Record of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu Shilu 天主 實錄). Written primarily by the Jesuit missionary Michele Ruggieri (1543-1607) with the... more
On 29 September 1584, the first Catholic catechism was printed in China under the title The True Record of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu Shilu 天主 實錄). Written primarily by the Jesuit missionary Michele Ruggieri (1543-1607) with the assistance of at least two other Jesuits and Chinese interpreters, the catechism inaugurated the rich cultural exchange between China and Europe for which the Jesuit China mission would be renown. Despite the pioneering role of this catechism, it has been viewed for the most part by posterity as a pale forerunner of the later catechism by Ruggieri's confrère, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu Shiyi 天主實義). This article attempts to skirt the anachronistic comparison with Ricci's Tianzhu Shiyi by proposing the Tianzhu Shilu as an autonomous text expressive of a cogent strategy for tailoring Western scholasticism to the contingencies of the Chinese cultural context.
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The "Resposta breve" (Brief response, 1623-24) by Niccolò Longobardo was one of the most controversial documents ever penned in the Jesuit China mission. Longobardo criticized the use of indigenous Chinese vocabulary by Matteo Ricci to... more
The "Resposta breve" (Brief response, 1623-24) by Niccolò Longobardo was one of the most controversial documents ever penned in the Jesuit China mission. Longobardo criticized the use of indigenous Chinese vocabulary by Matteo Ricci to express Christian concepts as a perilous accommodation to diabolical monism. This article proposes a close reading of how Longobardo employed Scholastic, humanist, and Chinese sources to critique Ricci's disregard for the neo-Confucian interpreters in his reading of ancient Confucianism. It argues that Longobardo's polemic with Ricci was not theological in nature but reflected his distrust of philology in reconstructing the original meaning of ancient texts.
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Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu vol. lxxxvii, fasc. 173 (2018-I) Fasting has traditionally played an important role in Catholic practice and continues to be a part of Catholic religious life at prescribed times. However, historically,... more
Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu vol. lxxxvii, fasc. 173 (2018-I)
Fasting has traditionally played an important role in Catholic practice and continues to be a part of Catholic religious life at prescribed times. However, historically, the Church’s attitude towards vegetarianism was largely negative. The vegetarianism of the Gnostics and Manichaeans was condemned in the sixth century and that of the Cathars in the Middle Ages. Also, in the sixteenth century, those in Catholic regions who did not fast were suspected of being heretics because the Reformation greatly de-emphasised fasting. When missionaries came to Asia, they encountered a very different kind of fasting that was rooted in the teaching of Buddhism and had spread to all segments of society. This fasting consisted in abstinence from specific foods, such as meat, garlic, onion, leeks, as well as from wine. Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) argued for the superiority of the Catholic fast because the Buddhist prohibition of killing life was founded on the belief in reincarnation. In many writings, Jesuit missionaries and Chinese converts attacked Buddhist fasting respectively as superstitious and in opposition to the ancient Chinese practice of offering meat to ancestors. Buddhists in turn accused Catholics of being insensitive to the suffering caused by meat consumption. Yet, some Chinese were only willing to be baptized if they could keep their vegetarian diet. Without any set rule, missionaries dealt with this issue on a case by case basis, sometimes allowing those who were called fasters (jeiunantes) to be baptized.
Fasting has traditionally played an important role in Catholic practice and continues to be a part of Catholic religious life at prescribed times. However, historically, the Church’s attitude towards vegetarianism was largely negative. The vegetarianism of the Gnostics and Manichaeans was condemned in the sixth century and that of the Cathars in the Middle Ages. Also, in the sixteenth century, those in Catholic regions who did not fast were suspected of being heretics because the Reformation greatly de-emphasised fasting. When missionaries came to Asia, they encountered a very different kind of fasting that was rooted in the teaching of Buddhism and had spread to all segments of society. This fasting consisted in abstinence from specific foods, such as meat, garlic, onion, leeks, as well as from wine. Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) argued for the superiority of the Catholic fast because the Buddhist prohibition of killing life was founded on the belief in reincarnation. In many writings, Jesuit missionaries and Chinese converts attacked Buddhist fasting respectively as superstitious and in opposition to the ancient Chinese practice of offering meat to ancestors. Buddhists in turn accused Catholics of being insensitive to the suffering caused by meat consumption. Yet, some Chinese were only willing to be baptized if they could keep their vegetarian diet. Without any set rule, missionaries dealt with this issue on a case by case basis, sometimes allowing those who were called fasters (jeiunantes) to be baptized.
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The Jesuit translations of the Confucian canon not only provided one of the first European windows into Chinese culture but also changed the intellectual and cultural history of Europe. This paper introduces a new project, which examines... more
The Jesuit translations of the Confucian canon not only provided one of the first European windows into Chinese culture but also changed the intellectual and cultural history of Europe. This paper introduces a new project, which examines the rich history of these translations and their dissemination, and interrogates how Confucian ideas influenced the development of Enlightenment intellectual culture, analysing the personal and textual networks through which the first substantial literary and philosophical exchange was conducted between Europe and China.
在谈及近代早期全球化时代的“传教工作“时，我们一般想到的是知识的 单向流动，其中包括宗教教条，表达该宗教教条的语言及其形而上学、哲学和 科学背景。在美洲，这种单向特征的传教工作尤为突出。虽然当时的传教士 重视并学习过美洲文化和语言，但美洲作为西班牙和葡萄牙殖民计划内的地 区，当地的整体传教工作巳沦为殖民者的工具，其结果就是，天主教的传播往 往伴随砦对当地传统文化、民族认同和原住民语言的侵蚀。
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On 25 September 1710, Pope Clement XI finally promulgated the 1704 decree Cum Deus optimus, which condemned the toleration of certain Confucian rituals among Chinese Catholic converts and the use of the Chinese terms tian and Shangdi to... more
On 25 September 1710, Pope Clement XI finally promulgated the 1704 decree Cum Deus optimus, which condemned the toleration of certain Confucian rituals among Chinese Catholic converts and the use of the Chinese terms tian and Shangdi to refer to the Christian God. This papal decision antagonised the Kangxi Emperor and devastated the Jesuit China mission. Although the Jesuits were prohibited from publicly refuting the decree, the Flemish Jesuit François Noël sought to defend the Jesuit position by publishing his voluminous scholarship on the Chinese classics. Among other works, in 1711 Noël published two seminal contributions to the history of Sinology: the Sinensis imperii libri classici sex or Libri sex, and the Philosophia Sinica, a sophisticated treatment of Chinese metaphysics, ritual, and ethics. While the Libri sex achieved some degree of influence in the Enlightenment through the French translation of the French Jesuit historian Du Halde and the writings of the philosopher Christian Wolff, the Philosophia Sinica was actively suppressed by the Superior-General of the Jesuit order. Yet it is in this latter work where the full breadth of Noël’s originality and intellectual contribution can be found. Noël reinterprets the Jesuits’ position through the lens of Neo-Confucianism, integrating concepts such as li, taiji, yin, and yang in his reading of Chinese philosophy. With contributions from Sinologists and intellectual historians, this book offers the first systematic study of this pioneering work.
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The True Record of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu shilu, 1584) by the Jesuit missionary Michele Ruggieri was the first Chinese-language work ever published by a European. Despite being published only a few years after Ruggieri started... more
The True Record of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu shilu, 1584) by the Jesuit missionary Michele Ruggieri was the first Chinese-language work ever published by a European. Despite being published only a few years after Ruggieri started learning Chinese, it evinced sophisticated strategies to accommodate Christianity to the Chinese context and was a pioneering work in Sino-Western exchange. This book features a critical edition of the Chinese and Latin texts, which are both translated into English for the first time. An introduction, biography, and rich annotations are provided to situate this text in its cultural and intellectual context.
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While the resonance of Giambattista Vico's hermeneutics for postcolonialism has long been recognised, a rupture has been perceived between his intercultural sensibility and the actual content of his philological investigations, which have... more
While the resonance of Giambattista Vico's hermeneutics for postcolonialism has long been recognised, a rupture has been perceived between his intercultural sensibility and the actual content of his philological investigations, which have often been criticised as being Eurocentric and philologically spurious. China is a case in point. In his magnum opus New Science, Vico portrays China as backward and philosophically primitive compared to Europe.
In this first study dedicated to China in Vico's thought, Daniel Canaris shows that scholars have been beguiled by Vico's value judgements of China without considering the function of these value judgements in his theory of divine providence. This monograph illustrates that Vico's image of China is best appreciated within the contemporary theological controversies surrounding the Jesuit accommodation of Confucianism.
Through close examination of Vico's sources and intellectual context, Canaris argues that by refusing to consider Confucius as a "filosofo", Vico dismantles the rationalist premises of the theological accommodation proposed by the Jesuits and proposes a new functionalist valorisation of non-Christian religion that anticipates post-colonial critiques of the Enlightenment.
In this first study dedicated to China in Vico's thought, Daniel Canaris shows that scholars have been beguiled by Vico's value judgements of China without considering the function of these value judgements in his theory of divine providence. This monograph illustrates that Vico's image of China is best appreciated within the contemporary theological controversies surrounding the Jesuit accommodation of Confucianism.
Through close examination of Vico's sources and intellectual context, Canaris argues that by refusing to consider Confucius as a "filosofo", Vico dismantles the rationalist premises of the theological accommodation proposed by the Jesuits and proposes a new functionalist valorisation of non-Christian religion that anticipates post-colonial critiques of the Enlightenment.
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Gabriele Biondo (c. 1440s–1511), son of the illustrious humanist historian Flavio Biondo (1392–1463), was the secular parish priest of the church of Santo Stefano in Modigliana, a small town in Romagna then subject to Florence. A... more
Gabriele Biondo (c. 1440s–1511), son of the illustrious humanist historian Flavio Biondo (1392–1463), was the secular parish priest of the church of Santo Stefano in Modigliana, a small town in Romagna then subject to Florence. A charismatic spiritual director with a reputation for sanctity, Biondo cultivated a sizeable and disparate community of largely lay male and religious female followers in Modigliana, Florence, Bologna, and Venice. Biondo’s spirituality emphasized self-annihilation, the human dependence on grace, and the mystical abandonment of self to the divine will. Living on the eve of the Reformation, Biondo also disseminated in the treatises and letters addressed to his followers doctrinally controversial ideas, such as the irreparable corruption of the institutional church, the superfluity of sacerdotal mediation, and a critique of frequent communion, which had been influenced by the Franciscan Spirituals, especially Angelo da Clareno (1247–1337). While Biondo himself was never tried for heresy, in 1501thepatriarchof VeniceTommasoDonàimprisonedoneofhisfollowers,thedoctorGiovanni Maria Capucci, and Biondo’s Ricordo was examined for suspected heresy. This treatise was successfully defended by the Paduan Franciscan theologian Antonio Trombetta (d. 1514), who interpreted Biondo’s critique of the sacraments as a critique of superstitious sacramental practice and appealed to Biondo’s denunciation of Girolamo Savonarola as evidence of his orthodoxy.