J.S. Cummins
Ashgate Variorum
Hardback
368
1993
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 (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.
Ashgate Variorum
Hardback
368
1993
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 (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.