近世耶穌會士之儒化神學與中日破邪論

Abstract

This article mainly studies the Confucianized and sinicized theology of Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit leader with reference to his The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, and analyses the theories of Yu Chun-xi, Monk Zhu Hong, Hayashi Razan and Monk Sūden, the four pioneers of anti-Catholicism movement that were particularly against the localized theology of Ricci in Ming China and Japan during the 16th to 17th centuries in order to deepen our understanding of the localization trends of Catholicism and the nature of the anti-Catholicism movements, the Catholicism prohibition policies and persecutions in the early modern East Asia. A close examination of The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven shows that the Jesuits successfully formed a highly-localized monotheism theology through accommodation strategy particularly by using the pre-Song Confucianism. Ricci attempted to elaborate the theses of Catholicism with the Confucian concepts and the examples of the ancient Confucian sages, bright kings and sometimes even by using the concepts of Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi, other Song Confucians as well as Buddhism and Taoism to suit the tastes of the believers of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. Nevertheless, his monotheism theology inevitably offended polytheistic Buddhism and atheism of Neo-Confucian Rationalistic School which aroused the anti-Jesuit Catholicism movement. Yu Chun-xi defended Buddhism with the concepts of imperial authority and Confucianism, and discriminated against Ricci and criticized the anthropology and eschatology of his theology with the Confucian concepts such as the Sino-barbarian concept and Neo-Confucianism of Wang Yang-ming. Monk Zhu Hong, Chun-xi's teacher who believed that Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism were the same, criticized even more seriously Ricci's doctrines of God, cosmology and anthropology from the perspectives of Buddhism and Confucianism particularly Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi. Both Yu and Zhu tried hard to refute Ricci's criticism of the Buddhist precept of not killing. Different from their Confucian and Buddhist perspective of anti-Catholicism, Hayashi Razan and Monk Sūden widely criticized Catholicism, western knowledge and the political and economic threat of the Jesuits in Japan from the viewpoints of centralizing the power of Tokugawa Shogunate and defending the national religion which was a combination of Shinto, Buddhism and Confucianism. As the Jesuits did not widely affect the political, economic and social aspects of Ming China, the Confucians and Buddhists tended to incorporate Catholicism into the religious system of Buddhism. On the contrary, the Jesuits permeated through every aspect of Tokugawa Japan which substantially threatened both the Tokugawa government and the national religion. Therefore, the Confucian and Buddhist officials harshly criticized Catholicism and zealously helped the Tokugawa government to introduce and implement the prohibition policy to drive out all the Jesuits. The anti-Catholicism movement in Ming China was initiated from bottom-up which lacked support from the ruling class and therefore resulted in a small-scale missionary case or prosecution in Nanking. Contrarily, the movement in Tokugawa Japan was top-down in which Tokugawa Shogunate aimed to up-root by all means the Jesuits as a long-term diplomatic policy and finally suppressed them into an underground religion.