cute

Thank you Maria Jennifer for such a kind introduction. So as is

evident from the title of my lecture, my project at IKEA aims

at constructing an intellectual genealogy of an esoteric

movement in the Jesuit China mission known as figurism that

that emerged in the late 17th and early 18th centuries,

particularly amongst French missionaries.

Today, however, I do not intend to discuss figurism as such,

but its origins in early Jesuit writings in China.

As most of you are probably unaware of what figurism is

and how it is to be distinguished

from earlier Jesuit interpretations

of the Confucian classics, by way of introduction,

I thought I'd just give you some background information on the principal characteristics

of this movement before delving into the substance of my lecture.

So the undisputed pioneer of figurism was the missionary Jocquin Bouvier, who entered Ningbo

on the 23rd of July 1687 as an official scientific ambassador of Louis XIV to the Kangxi emperor,

along with four other French Jesuit missionaries.

Bouvier was highly valued by the Chinese for his knowledge of European mathematics and astronomy,

and after some intense training in the Manchu language, was appointed as tutor to Kangxi

and later the crown prince, Yinren.

Bouvier maintained a special bond with the Kangxi emperor, even as the relationship between

the Catholic Church and the Chinese court deteriorated with the Vatican's condemnation

of the Jesuits missionary methods, which the Kangxi emperor had personally sanctioned.

The approach of Bouvier and his followers towards the Chinese classics differed drastically

from that of their predecessors.

The most famous of the Jesuit missionaries, Meteoriici, proposed that the Chinese classics

exhibited a primitive monotheism that was compatible with Christianity.

Ritchie attempted to portray Christianity not as a novel doctrine for the Chinese, but

as a restoration of theological and moral principles which had been lost in China with

the arrival of Buddhism and the materialism of Song dynasty near Confucianism.

Ritchie was rationalist in his approach.

He did not explicitly maintain that the Chinese received any special prophetic revelation

or preserved in any special way the monotheistic doctrines that the Jews had inherited from

Noah.

Chinese monotheism was no more miraculous than Platonic or Aristotelian monotheism.

According to the thermistic principles by which Ritchie was formed, natural reason was

a sufficient explanation for the presence of monotheism in ancient China.

Bouvier, like most of the Jesuit missionaries in China, maintained allegiance to this position

which has become known as Ritchiean accommodationism.

But in the course of the latter half of the 17th century, Jesuit writings in China increasingly

speculated on non-rational causes for Confucian monotheism.

Jesuits such as Martino Martini and Philip Couplet drew tentative links between Noah

and the Chinese patriarchs and even on occasion suggested that Chinese monotheism was a result

of God's especial providential concern for the Chinese people.

But Bouvier was the first to propose a comprehensive esoteric interpretation of the Chinese classics.

In the most ancient of the Chinese classics, the Yijing, Bouvier saw veiled foreshadowings

of Christian revelation.

He scoured the hexagrams to show that their legendary creator Fuxi had knowledge of creation,

the coming of the Messiah and the end of the world.