The Imaginative Melancholy of Matteo Ricci

The imaginative melancholy of Matteo Ricci Gianni Criveller Matteo Ricci had the first chance to reach Beijing in early summer 1595 with an official delegation. Once in Nanjing, the minister who had included the missionary in his entourage, refused to take him to the Capital and, consequently, Ricci was expelled from the city of Nanjing. In that same ill-fated trip, Ricci lost his companion, who drowned in the waters of the river. Ricci himself nearly died in the same accident. Everything was going wrong and Matteo got into a state of melancholy. On June 25th or 26th, 1595 Matteo had a dream. He told the story to his friend Girolamo Costa just four months after the event: I do not want to omit telling you of a dream I had a few days before I arrived in this land [the city of Nanchang]. While I was melancholic for the sad failure of the attempt [of reaching Beijing] and for the hardships of the journey, it seemed to me that an unknown man came to me. He said: “Do you still want to go ahead in this land to destroy its old law, and plant God’s law?”. Wondering how he could have penetrated into my heart like that, I replied: “Oh, you must be the devil or God to know this.” And he said: “I am not the devil, but God.” Then I threw myself at his feet and weeping bitterly, I said: “Then, Lord, since you know this, why haven’t you helped me so far?” He said: “Go then into the city – and it seemed to me that he showed me Beijing –, and there I will help you.” This is the dream.1 The dream of a melancholic This is the only dream concerning himself that Ricci narrated. He warned his disciples, including Paul Xu Guangqi, against paying attention to dreams. This is also the only Jesuit dream that we know about in 200 years of mission in China. At the same time of his letter to Costa, Ricci wrote to his superior general and others as well, but without mentioning the dream. For Matteo it was, quite likely, an intimate detail to be shared with one of his best friends, Girolamo, who came from the same hometown, Macerata. 1 M. Ricci, Lettere, ed. F. D’Arelli (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2001), p. 290; my translation. 175 Gianni Criveller The missionary could in no way anticipate the prediction about reaching Beijing. As everything was going wrong, instead of getting closer to Beijing, Matteo was dramatically going farther from the Capital. The prediction was accomplished only six years later, on January 24, 1601. In no way could Matteo have anticipated that one day he would indeed enter the Capital of the empire. The dream is included in two other ancient sources: the autobiographical narration Della entrata della Compagnia di Giesù e Christianità nella Cina compiled by Ricci between 1608-1610, and Ricci’s biography written in Chinese by Giulio Aleni in 1630. The two texts are both “post-factum” (i.e. after the Ricci’s entrance to Beijing), and thus do not have the same interest of the letter to Girolamo Costa, dated October 28, 1595, six years before the successful arrival of Ricci in the Capital. Matteo’s melancholy Matteo Ricci confessed to suffering from melancholy in various instances. On 12th May 1605, he wrote a letter rather unusual and melancholic to his brother Orazio. Ricci went off in an unexpected outburst, complaining about the Chinese and the hardships of missionary life. Ricci was not incline to complain about China, the Chinese and the sacrifices the missionaries had to endure. The actual reason for his outburst might have been a feeling of frustration toward his family, from which Matteo expected more letters and attention. Matteo lived a rather cold relationship with his family, with the exception of his beloved grandmother Laria. In this instance, Matteo showed a soft, a “carnal” (more on this adjective) aspect of his personality. I remember writing on other letters to tell to my brothers to think often of us priest living in these lands as in a voluntary exile, far away not only from our loved ones, parents, brothers and sisters and relatives, but also from Christian folk and our countrymen. […] Here we are with long beards and hair down to our shoulders in houses even poorer of those of our workers; and many times we have to flee from enemies come to do us harm, as once happened to me, when I jumped out of a window and twisted my ankle, which still causes me pain. […] I cannot in truth look forward to many years more, and my hair is already all white. These Chinese wonder that I should be so old at no great age and do not know that they are the cause of my white hair.2 2 Ibid., p. 402. Translation borrowed from M. Fontana, A Jesuit in the Ming Court (Lanham; Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011), pp. 274-275. 176 The imaginative melancholy of Matteo Ricci The term “melancholy” appears in the writings of Ricci in few instances. In 1588 Wang Pan, the Guangdong-Guangxi Governor who had welcomed the missionaries Ricci and Michele Ruggieri in China (1583), was “very melancholic” for lack of advancement in his career. He suspected that his poor luck might have be caused by the support he had given to the foreign missionaries. As Ricci put it, the Lord took away this “false imagination”, and finally the much-coveted promotion came.3 Many years later, writing to the Superior General from Beijing, Ricci described the pain of the family of the physician attending to the missionaries in Nanchang. Their only son was dying, and the missionary pleaded with the doctor to baptize the child. He found the family filled with melancholy, and the room of the sick person full of superstitious things […]. The missionary eliminated those things, and erected an altar, where he placed the image of the Savior, and then baptized the doctor’s son.4 In both episodes, the terms “melancholy” and “image” or “imagination” are at a near distance. Their association, as we shall see soon, is greatly significant in the Aristotelian, Renaissance and Jesuitical thoughts. These terms and concepts associated also in the first lines of the letter that Matteo wrote to his classmate Ludovico Maselli on November 29, 1580, from Cochin (India). It is Ricci’s most eloquent melancholic text. It does not cause me such sadness, for thus I want to call it, to be far from my relations secundum carnem [of the flesh], although I am very carnal, so much as to be distant from Your Reverence whom I love more than my father. From which you can judge, Your Reverence, how welcome your letter was to me. I do not know what imaginings come to me sometimes, and I don’t know why a certain sort of melancholy comes over me – though I think that it is a good thing, and I would have scruple not having it – thinking that my fathers and brothers, whom I loved and love so much, of that college where I was born and brought up, have forgotten about me, while I hold all of them so fresh in the memory. To win over my misery I can’t but remember, with many prayers and with many tears, Your Reverence and the fathers and brothers of the college.5 In just a few lines Matteo put together an impressive series of words and verbs rather melancholic: sadness, be far, very carnal, be distant, I 3 M. Ricci, Della entrata della Compagnia di Giesù e Christianità nella Cina, ed. M. Del Gatto (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2000), p. 166. 4 Ricci, Lettere, pp. 438-439; my translation. 5 Ibid., p. 19. Translation partially borrowed from M. Laven, Mission to China. Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the East (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), pp. 120-121. 177 Gianni Criveller love, imagination, a certain sort of melancholy, scruple, thinking, I loved, I love so much, have forgotten, memory, misery, many tears, remember. The statement about “a certain sort of melancholy -a good thing- I would have scruple not having it”, is rather disconcerting as the traditional Catholic moral doctrine considers melancholy as associated with sloth (laziness/indolence), which is one of the seven deadly sins. A deadly sin, in Ricci times’ Catholic tradition, was considered a rather serious moral illness that could require, in the extreme cases, even the intervention by an exorcist. In the intense paragraph reported above, Ricci described himself as “very carnal”, a surprising and compromising expression that an ecclesiastic would hardly put on writing nowadays. There were various types of melancholy and Matteo was aware of the versatility of the word. Almost cautiously, he declared that he was suffering from a good type if melancholy, and indeed it is certainly good, as “he would have scruple not having it”. To what kind of melancholy was Matteo referring? The Greek invention of melancholy The term melancholy, which literally means black bile, was born in Greece. Hippocrates and the traditional medicine derived four fundamental personality types from four humors: sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic. The melancholic was the worst personality type in this singular ranking. The excess of black bile, derived from the spleen, caused melancholy, the malady of the weak and the sad. Aristotle was the first who wonders why many men of excellence are melancholic. In Problemata XXX 1, a text traditionally attributed to Aristotle,6 the author supported Platonic theory that great people are driven by extreme feelings. He asked, “Why the outstanding men in the field of philosophy, politics, poetry or art, are clearly melancholic?”7 The idea of the existence of a link between genius and melancholy lead to surprising results. By studying dreams, the Greek philosopher illustrated the importance of imagination in the process of producing dreams, as the dreams come from the incontinence of imagination. In Parva naturalia Aristotle associated melancholy to the ability to have “linear 6 Scholars agree that the content of this work is attributable to Aristotle. Aristotle, Problemata XXX, 1. See M. Prades Vilar, “Morbus animi e melanconia nelle Intercenali di Leon Battista Alberti,” Mnemosyne 5 (2007). 7 178 The imaginative melancholy of Matteo Ricci dreams”, dreams that establish a direct link, a straight line between what one dreams and subsequent events. According to Aristotle, while remaining rare and exceptional, they are the only dreams of which he admitted the veracity. The melancholic persons, endowed by acute inner perception and imaginative exuberance, derived from their mood, are more easily receptive of the tiny perceptual motions generated by events, and turn them into dreams. Following on such complex argument, Aristotle concluded: “there are melancholic persons whose dreams are true.”8 Melancholy enters European Middle age Greek medicine was transmitted into Middle Age Europe through Latin translation of Arabic textbooks - especially by the Monte Cassino monk Constantine the African-, and the medical School of Salerno. Christian Middle Age associated melancholy with sloth, i.e. the spiritual or emotional apathy and indolence. A malady particularly insidious for contemplatives, who might more easily fall into boredom and inertia. Melancholy afflicted those suffering from depression and on the verge of madness. The same Aristotle had expanded the platonic idea that God is present, to certain persons, through discontent, melancholy, excitement, delirium and fury. Melancholy made its debut in poetry as a feeling of extreme despair, in line with the Aristotelian thoughts illustrated above. One day Melancholy came to me is a famous sonnet in which the poet Dante foreshadows the death of Beatrice. A death announced by melancholy, an ominous carrier of death, grief and anger. One day Melancholy came to me / saying: “I wish to stay a while with you”, / and it seemed to me she’d with her too / Sorrow and Anger in her company / I said to her: “Off, away from here”. [Un dì si venne a me Malinconia / e disse: “Io voglio un poco stare teco”; / e parve a me ch’ella menasse seco / Dolore e Ira per sua compagnia/ e io le dissi: “partiti, va via”]. Dante places the slothful, next of kin of the melancholic (both are carriers of black bile), in Hell: 8 Aristotle, Etica Eudemia VII, 2, 1248a 30-1248b. See Prades Vilar, “Morbus animi e melanconia nelle Intercenali di Leon Battista Alberti”. 179 Gianni Criveller We were sullen / in the sweet air, that is gladdened by the sun, / bearing indolent smoke in our hearts: / now we lie here, sullen, in the black mire. [Tristi fummo / ne l’aere dolce che dal sol s’allegra, / portando dentro accidioso fummo: // or ci attristiam nella belletta negra].9 Significantly, one of the most remarkable pages in Francesco Petrarch’s Secretum (My Secret Book), an imaginary dialogue with Augustine written in Latin, is devoted to sloth, described as a “dreadful malady of the soul”. Petrarch describes sloth as a bitter taste for suffering, melancholy and sadness; an inclination for finding oneself embroiled in a troubled and unresolved psychology. While realizing its own negligence and guilt, the individual affected by such malady conveniently renounces changing his attitude. Sloth is therefore associated to boredom, melancholy and indifference. Augustine, at the end of the dialogue, reported in the second book of the Secretum, reproaches Francesco for such melancholy, indolence and lack of will. Augustine: “Tell me, what is the worst thing for you?” “All I see around, and what I hear and what I feel,” replies Francesco. “Wow! Do you really don’t like anything at all?” “Nothing, or rather only very few things” says Francis. “This is exactly what I call sloth: that you are afflicted by everything!” And then Augustine encourage him saying: “its’ about time you get rid of such melancholies once for all, and regain your peace!”10 Petrarch, the father of Humanism and one of the first modern souls, described such malady in philosophical and moral categories. Contemporary (to us) psychological analysis defines melancholy as depression. Petrarch, however, believed that such melancholy of consciousness; such inability to work and helplessness to look at life positively, is not only an evil and a disease, it is also a moral sin. In this regard, Petrarch followed traditional Catholic moral teaching. Renaissance and melancholy The fate of melancholy turns for the better with Humanism and Renaissance, the golden age of melancholy. Leon Battista Alberti rediscovers the Aristotelian theme of the relationship between genius and 9 Dante, Inferno 7, vv. 121-124. See F. Petrarca, Secretum, book 2 (Italian translation from Latin available online: petrarca.letteraturaoperaomnia.org/translate_italian/petrarca_secretum.html (15 April 2016). 10 180 The imaginative melancholy of Matteo Ricci melancholy, and imposes it on fifteenth-century literature. The literate, according to Alberti, suffers from the morbus animi, a psychological disorder next of kin to melancholy. The humanists, rediscovering the Aristotelian texts, give to melancholy an intellectual value hitherto unknown. Melancholy is set free from the moral condemnation and associated to the talent of the artists. At the same time, infatuated with Neo-Platonism and astrology, Renaissance thought associated melancholy with Saturn. The distant planet, considered responsible for depression and madness, is also seen as responsible for the qualities of the genius, combining genius and madness.11 Marsilio Ficino, leading intellectual at Lorenzo de’ Medici’s court, was the greatest proponent of Renaissance melancholy.12 Melancholy, according to Ficino, is the creative impulse of the intellect; the temperament of genius; the reflective capacity that induces clairvoyance. Ficino connected imagination with melancholy. While translating the Corpus ermeticus, the treaties of Egyptian and Greek origin behind many hermetic Renaissance and Neo-Platonic conceptions, Ficino acquires the notion that the perception of the world is the result of affections and passions. There is a connection between the senses (the activity of the soul), the cognitive process (the activity of the mind) and the image. By establishing a relationship among sensitive faculties, reason and imagination, Ficino affirms that imagination has the power to set human being free from the determinism of astrology and fate. Thus, the creative power of imagination discloses the exceptional dignity of human condition. The melancholic knows imagining more than anybody else does. The importance of imagination in the cognitive process and in the self-analysis uncovers the duality of the modern genius, who lives both the experience of a deep inner dualism between self-affirmation and self-doubt. The melancholic comes to senses and, from the depths of him/herself, dreams and looks up. His/her planet is Saturn, the farthest. The melancholic person is an involuntary wise, his/ her clairvoyance derives from his/her own distress: more than anybody else, he or she has the harbinger of the “elsewhere”. The philosopher Tommaso Campanella, the Dominican friar victim of the Inquisition, was a contemporary of Ricci, and linked dreams and melancholy. In his Il senso delle cose e la magia [On the Meaning of Things 11 See R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky and F. Saxl, Saturno e la melanconia (Torino: Einaudi, 1983). 12 See F. Rennis, “Ficino, la ‘renovatio’ della malinconia,” CON-fusioni, con-fusioni. jimdo.com/filosofia-e-scienze-umane/ficino-la-renovatio-della-melanconia/ (22 April 2014). 181 Gianni Criveller and on Magic], he describes melancholy as typically belonging to the sagacious spirits. As taught by Aristotle, Campanella affirms that in their dreams the melancholic are able to receive the most thin air motions. As a consequence, more than anybody else, “d’ogni cosa han sagace sogno”,13 i.e. in their dreams the melancholic foresee events. The imaginative melancholy In 1514, melancholy makes its iconographical debut with the engraving Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer, the greatest German Renaissance painter. Dürer’s angel of melancholy seems to gather his painful thoughts, an autobiographical expression of the limits in which the thinker feels wrapped, the awareness of the limit beyond which he cannot go. Surrounded by tools of scientific investigation, the angel, the main figure, is pervaded by a melancholic mood. It represented the sentiments of poets and artists. It was an autobiographical statement feeling as well, as Dürer wrote: “There is deceit in our knowledge, and the darkness is so firmly ingrained in us that even our groping search fails.”14 The melancholic knows the constitutive instability of the world and even of science. He prefers to keep them at a distance and imagines a different world. The melancholic despairs and imagines. His/her imaginative power allows him/her imagining other and better worlds. Melancholy reached its modern and even contemporary meaning: it is the aching perception of darkness and of the fragility of the human condition. Sensitive persons such as artists and poets are more acquainted with such a perception. The title Melencolia I derived from the De occulta philosophia, the alchemical treatise by Cornelius Agrippa. Agrippa follows on Ficino and Aristotle’s lessons, and in his sixteenth century’s occultist text, linked melancholy to three categories of genius: imaginative melancholia (the creativity of the artists); rational melancholia and mental melancholia. Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I could have been, therefore, entitled very well “imaginative melancholia”. 13 Tommaso Campanella, Il senso delle cose e la magia, as quoted by M. Cambi, Tommaso Campanella: epilessia, malinconia e profezia, Ovidius University of Constanza, litere. univ-ovidius.ro/Anale/09%20volumul%20XX%202009/02.Literary%20and%20Cultural%20 Encounters/11_Cambi.pdf (21 April 2014), p. 165. 14 Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturno e la melanconia, p. 341. 182 The imaginative melancholy of Matteo Ricci Hamlet and Don Quixote, melancholic heroes The indefinite and novel malaise described by Dürer as melancholy, becomes one of the most popular literary and psychological themes in late sixteenth century Europe. Mystical currents, magical practices and alchemists experiments multiplied and interweaved. Dürer had described the tragic unrest of human creation by the motto “even our groping search fails”. A feeling of spiritual catastrophe looms over the world. Life and death, the divine, the evil and the human suffering are questions without answers. Melancholy, caused by the vanity of things and the doubt about the capacity of reason, inspire the minds of thinkers and artists. In 1586 Timothy Bright published a Treatise of Melancholy, which significantly influenced William Shakespeare. The British dramatist employed the theme of melancholy to deepen the personality and the psychology of his characters. Hamlet (1603) is, par excellence, the melancholic Shakespeare’s hero, as Victor Hugo said: “he could have been named ‘Melancholia’, just as the image of Dürer.”15 The theme of melancholy deeply pervaded the “Spanish Golden Age” in the XVI and XVII century. Andrés Velásquez published the Libro de la melancolía (Seville, 1585). In 1605, shortly after the Hamlet by Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of his Don Quixote de la Mancha, the most important melancholic anti-hero in Spanish literature.16 In 1611, the dramatist Tirso Molina, who was also a religious and a missionary, published the play El melancólico, a scholarly discussion on the various meanings of melancholy. A theme present in many of his other comedies as well. The golden age of Spanish melancholy includes Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, two contemplatives who have gone through the “dark night of the soul” (the title of a poem by the latter, written in 1584-1585). As we have mentioned, the awkward link between melancholy and contemplative life was known since the Middle Ages. 15 G.B. Harrison, Elizabethan Melancholy, in University of California Santa Cruz, artsites.ucsc.edu/ faculty/bierman//elsinore/melancholy/melIntro.htm (15 March 2014). 16 Roger Bartra includes Don Quijote among the Spanish melancholic literature. See: R. Bartra: Cultura y melancolía. Las enfermedades del alma en la España del Siglo de Oro (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2001). 183 Gianni Criveller The Anatomy of Melancholy Matteo Ricci, who established a spontaneous bond between melancholy and imagination, was familiar with the works by Aristotle and Ficino and, in all likelihood, with Dürer’s image and the treatise by Cornelius Agrippa. After all, while in China, Ricci was mistaken for an alchemist. The library of the Roman College, where Matthew studied from 1573 to 1577, was one of the most provided in Europe and, thanks to special privileges, was provided with indicted books as well. In Rome Ricci studied almost exclusively liberal arts and sciences. His theological education was relegated to the few years he spent in Coimbra and in Goa (India). Humanist Ricci associated melancholy to imagining as iimagining is a fundamental trait of Jesuit training and spirituality, centered on the use of images for the contemplative exercise of “composition of place”. The latter is the technique of putting oneself within an imaginative space by the use of sacred images narrating the Gospel stories. The images have the power of conducting the person out of his own world, creating new mental images and, subsequently, a displacement of the self. This exit from the self creates a new space, and allows for contemplation, i.e. for an encounter with the divine. The adoption of sacred images and belief in their miraculous power; the printing and dissemination of images that represented the life of Jesus; and the confidence in their imaginative, evocative, persuasive and even healing power, were by far one of the most innovative features of Ricci and his Jesuit companions’ missionary activity of in China. There is one more material and remarkable tie between Matteo Ricci and European studies on melancholy. In 1621, Robert Burton published in London The Anatomy of Melancholy. The voluminous book of 900 pages summarizes decades of studies on melancholy and, at the same time, is pivotal in its introduction to modern culture. Burton cites Matteo Ricci, who had died in distant Beijing only 11 years earlier, at least 16 times. Ricci is not mentioned for his melancholy (as Burton had not access to his letters), but for his description of the life and customs of the Chinese. Even China, according to Burton, suffered by this ailment of the spirit. Burton source was Ricci’s own description of China, Della entrata della Compagnia di Giesù e Christianità nella Cina, written in 1608-1610 and largely available in Europe for a few years, thanks to its Latin translation and adaption by Nicolas Trigualt (De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas suscepta ab Societate Jesu, Augsburg, 1615). The book was hugely successful. The second edition was published the following year (1616). 184 The imaginative melancholy of Matteo Ricci Burton could had read the book in Latin or in one its translations in European languages: French (1616, 1617, 1618) and German (1617). De Christiana expeditione was translated also in Spanish, Italian and English (1621, 1622 and 1625 respectively), in time for the second edition of Anatomy of Melancholy (1638). Portrait of Melancholy In Portrait of Melancholy (1928) by German theologian Romano Guardini, I have found a thematic affinity with the figure of the melancholic missionary Matteo Ricci. He had passed through many borders, being himself a “living border”, as he wrote to his brother Orazio: “We live in these lands as in voluntary exile.” We described melancholy as a malady of the soul, the spirit of the genius and the state of those who imagine and dream a different world. According to Guardini, there is yet another brand of melancholy, the one suffered by those living through borders. The missionaries, such as Ricci, suffer by this sort of melancholy: Then there are those who experience, in a deep way, the mystery of “a life on the border”. They are never clearly here or there. They live in no man’s land. They experience the anxiety of the one who passes from one side to the other. […] Melancholy is the anxiety of the one who feels a proximity to infinity, which is, at the same time, bliss and threat. […] The meaning of human life is being a “living border”, and in taking upon him or herself this “life of the border”, and bring it to its end. By this he or she remains rooted in reality; he or she is free from the incantations of a false immediate unity with God. […] In this way, the genuine human attitude is described as an attitude influenced by the border, an attitude which is, at the same time, the only one adequate to reality.17 17 Originally in German (Vom Sinn der Schwermut, 1928), it was translated in Italian in 1952. I have read the text published by Morcelliana (R. Guardini, Ritratto della malinconia [Brescia: Morcelliana, 1993; fifth edition 1999]), pp. 69, 78-9 (my translation from Italian version). 185