A Question of Rites: Friar Domingo Navarrete and the Jesuits in China

The 'Question of Rites' - or the Chinese Rites controversy - created a scandal in the 17th and 18th centuries that shook the Catholic Church, horrifying Pascal and the Jansenists, delighting Voltaire and the free thinkers, and contributing, in the end, to the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773. The affair arose with the attempt to convert China to Christianity and revolved around the question of accommodation to a different culture (still a live issue today). Specifically, what attitude should the missionaries adopt to the ancestor veneration that was so integral a part of Chinese culture? The Jesuits, who came first, saw it as 'merely civic and social custom, tinged perhaps with superstition, but separable from it'; the friars as 'certainly superstitious and perhaps even idolatrous'. The struggle for the prize - the conversion of China - fuelled old Jesuit-Dominican antagonisms. There were wide repercussions: politics, national and ecclesiastical, even the history of science were involved.
Professor Cummins retells the story from a deliberately 'dissident' viewpoint. Till now the account has been largely that of the Jesuits; his focus is the Spanish Dominican, Domingo Navarrete (1618-86), who emerged as the spokesman for the friars' cause. Not a scholar or scientist of the calibre of Matteo Ricci or other Jesuit 'geometers' in Peking, Navarrete nonetheless fully merits attention as a perceptive and frank observer of a passionate and complex scene. His major work, the Tratados, was widely read, admired by the likes of Quesnay and Locke, and served as a key source of European knowledge about China.
The first chapters of the present book set out the background: the rise of the Dominicans and the Jesuits, their differing philosophies, and their conflicts in Europe and America. After tracing the origins of the China mission, Professor Cummins then follows Navarrete's career, his 22 years in Asia, involvement in the politics of Rome and Madrid, his writings, down to his death as a would-be reforming archbishop of Hispaniola. At the same time he conveys with a rare sympathy all the dreams and passion of these missionaries, while remaining alive to the ironies and contradictions of the positions they adopted.