The issue of Chinese atheism surfaced early in the Chinese rites controversy: in the discussions and conflicts about the translation of the name of God, and over the value or significance to be assigned to the veneration of ancestors and of Confucius. The atheism of Confucian scholars-whether enabling or hampering the conversion of China-was used to establish the inner intent of the Chinese rites.1 Were they social and political, corresponding to the atheistic nature of the Chinese government, or were they religious, and therefore idolatrous and superstitious? And how could they be idolatrous and superstitious when they were practiced by atheists? The question was how to draw the line, in China's case, between fides and mores.2 A lengthy debate officially took place at a theological or polemical level, with pamphlets, brochures, treatises and accusations exchanged between the Jesuits and the other religious orders that moved into China. At the same time, the debate permeated the cultural foundations of modern Europe and helped shape the Enlightenment concept of atheism.3 1 Pierre-Antoine Fabre, "Pour une histoire spirituelle des savoirs dans l'espace du monde moderne. Esquisse d'un point de vue," in Missions d'évangélisation et circulation des savoirs. XVIe-XVIIIe siècle, ed. Ch. de Castelnau-L'Estoile, M.L. Copete, A. Maldavsky and Ines G. Županov (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2011), 445-458, 455. 2 On the Society of Jesus' role in defining this relationship, see Paul Nelles, "Du savant au missionnaire: la doctrine, les moeurs et l'écriture de l'histoire chez les jésuites,"
It was not difficult for a foreigner in China to get killed. China was the country that resembled Ancient Pagan Europe most closely and thus it was the perfect place for martyrs. Nevertheless, among the many Jesuits who suffered persecution, tribulation, imprisonment and torture, few of them suffered death for hatred of their religion. Such an absence became a matter for disputation among the religious orders over the Chinese Rites. If bloodshed was a requisite for the spread of Christianity, the lack of martyrs of the Society of Jesus was proof that the type of Christianity they preached in China was not the true faith, but an adapted and compromised version. Among the first observers of this peculiar absence of Jesuit martyrs in China was Bishop Juan de Palafox y Mendoza (1600-1659), one of the main opponents of the Jesuit method adopted in China. In his writings, the absence of Jesuit martyrs became the confirmation that the adaptation practised by the Jesuits had denied the Christian message its most subversive power and witness to the faith.
THE COUNCIL, OTHER POWERS, OTHER CULTURESedited by michela catto adriano prosperi 4TRENT AND BEYOND THE COUNCIL, OTHER POWERS, OTHER CULTURES edited by m. catto, a. prosperi F or centuries, the Council of Trent has been studied as a fundamental episode in European history wherein doctrinal and institutional unity was lost. Although the Council decrees nowhere refer to the contexts of the peoples met by Christopher Columbus, nor to the Cathay regions rediscovered by missionaries, nor to their religions, their superstitions or their political systems, the Council was nonetheless a global event. The Roman Church, which lost doctrinal control of the considerable part of Europe captured by different forms of Protestantism, imposed itself upon its followers through the application of conciliar decrees. Freed of its exclusively European perspective it opened up to cultures of the rest of the world. The customs and traditions thus encountered, the relationships with political authorities, possibilities for the construction of a new Christianity offered by New Worlds, disclosing spaces and contexts to the Tridentine Church, with accommodations and cross-fertilizations, with a return to origins and tradition, obliged that it begin to think of itself, perhaps for the first time, as a universal Church.The Council and Beyond suggests not only reconsideration of Europe through the prism of the Tridentine decrees and the long processes of their dissemination, but also through an intercontinental consideration, a spatial perspective that would become universal to the Church and to the normative texts that had been elaborated at Trent.
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