Matteo Ricci (2 page)

The syllabuses followed the indications of the founder of the order, who envisioned a broad range of disciplines, albeit in line with the dictates of orthodoxy. “As regards letters . . . he wants everyone to be well-versed in grammar and the humanities, especially if aided in this by age and inclination. Then he rejects no kind of accepted culture, neither poetry and rhetoric nor logic and natural and moral philosophy, neither metaphysics nor mathematics . . . because the order must be endowed with every possible means of edification.”
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The method of teaching followed the instructions formulated by the founders of the order and subsequently laid down in the
Ratio studiorum
, promulgated in its definitive form in 1599 by Claudio Acquaviva, the heir to a noble Neapolitan family, who became the Superior General in 1581 and was to hold that position for over thirty years, covering the entire span of Ricci’s life in China.

The Jesuits’ allegiance in philosophy was to Aristotle and in theology to Saint Thomas Aquinas, the doctor of the Church who had succeeded in combining the Stagirite’s teaching with Catholic doctrine in a rational system of thought. As we read in the
Ratio studiorum
, “Our brethren follow the doctrine of Saint Thomas absolutely and do everything possible to ensure that the students cherish it in their hearts.”
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The most important Jesuit university, regarded as a model for all the others, was the Roman College, today the Pontifical Gregorian University. Organized on the same lines as the University of Paris, it received papal recognition as a center of higher education in 1556. According to a letter written by Loyola on the plans for the college in March 1553,
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“most learned and assiduous” professors were to teach “intelligent and virtuous students of good background and education” and seek to turn out “eminent Jesuits.” The order’s teachers included experts in specialized disciplines like mathematics and astronomy.

Matteo Ricci was admitted to the Roman College on September 17, 1572, after a short period at its Florentine counterpart,
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where he had been sent on taking his initial vows. Ugo Boncompagni, a convinced supporter of the Jesuit schools and missionary work, became Pope Gregory XIII in the same year.

The home of the Roman College, the fourth since its foundation and the last before its definitive move to the premises built by the order of Pope Gregory, was a solemn Renaissance palazzo built with funds donated by the Marquise of Tolfa, the widow of Paul IV’s nephew Camillo Orsini. The complex consisted of two separate buildings “harmoniously laid out around two large arcaded quadrangles,”
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one for the students and classrooms, the other for the religious community, beside which the church of the Annunziata stood. The Roman College taught over a thousand young people from all over Europe free of charge in that period.

The 130 of these who belonged to the order,
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like Ricci, were offered an overall education but only on condition that they lived in the college and that their contacts with parents and relatives were kept to the bare minimum. For nearly five years, from the moment Ricci crossed the threshold of the building, his real family was to be the group made up of his fellow students and the teaching body. The Jesuit would always remember them with affection and nostalgia, as is clearly revealed on reading his letters from the East. In one of the first, written shortly after his departure for the missions and sent from Cochin, India, in November 1580 to Ludovico Maselli, rector of the Roman College in the years when Ricci attended it, we read as follows:

I do not feel so much sadness . . . at being far away from my family
secundum carnem
, even though I am very attached to the flesh, as at being away from Your Reverence, whom I love more than my own father.
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The young Ricci set about the course of studies laid down for those belonging to the order: two years of rhetoric, three of philosophy, and three of theology. He studied Latin, the language in which the lessons were taught, as well as Greek and Hebrew in the first two years. The decision of the teachers at the college to present pagan authors of antiquity as models of style was influenced by humanism, the intellectual movement that had led to the rediscovery and reappraisal of Greek and Latin classical culture in the previous century. The texts studied were, however, vetted in advance by the ecclesiastical authorities, who took care to cut anything deemed inappropriate. Ricci’s reading included the Latin authors Martial, Horace, Ovid, Virgil, and Quintilian, as well as Homer, Hesiod, Thucydides, and Demosthenes among the Greeks. The paradigm to be followed for Latin was Cicero, considered an unsurpassable example of Roman rhetoric. While rigid control was maintained over the content of the courses, the teachers’ choices revealed a significant degree of independence with respect to the ecclesiastical authorities, as shown by the fact that Erasmus of Rotterdam was also read in the Jesuit colleges even though his works had been placed on the
Index
. Having completed the first two years, Ricci embarked on the three years of philosophy with in-depth study of Aristotelian logic, ethics, and metaphysics, as well as the ethics of the Stoics Epictetus and Seneca. In order to hone his dialectic skills, he took part in the customary monthly debates, during which students presented philosophical theses and defended them before an audience of teachers and students in accordance with previously established procedures.

Even though the philosophical exercises were carried out according to the rules of Aristotelian logic and in the name of reason, the end was theological. The Jesuits saw knowledge as a sword to be carefully honed and used to defend the Church. In no case was study to distract the novices from their religious mission, and still less to lead them onto paths incompatible with the strictest observance of doctrine.

Ricci attended the courses of rhetoric and philosophy, subjecting himself to what a Jesuit historian describes as “unflagging mental activity, constant practice and exercise, a sort of never-ending gymnastics of the mind.”
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He is also reported to have taken part in the “academies” or study groups made up of students particularly distinguished for learning, diligence, and piety. During the last year of philosophy, he attended the new course on controversies inaugurated by the young teacher of theology Roberto Bellarmino, a future cardinal and saint destined to become one of the most influential figures in the Society of Jesus.
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Christopher Clavius, Mathematics, and Astronomy

An integral part of the philosophical training imparted in the Jesuit colleges was the study of natural philosophy, understood as the sciences and especially mathematics, which at the time also included astronomy, music, geography, and applied disciplines like mechanics and architecture.

The second half of the sixteenth century saw mathematics taking on a significant and all-pervasive role in technology and the study of nature. Advanced arithmetical procedures were required in the then developing fields of trade and banking as well as in architecture, the manufacture of cannons, the study of the trajectory of projectiles, and numerous other technical and artisanal activities that called for precise measurement and calculation. Geometric skills were also indispensable in art in order to capture three-dimensional
reality on canvas by means of perspective, a technique perfected in the previous century and based on principles that heralded the development of projective geometry. Mathematics was to take on a still more significant role in the following century, becoming the primary tool of the investigation of the physical world for Galileo. As the Pisan scientist wrote in a celebrated passage of his work
The Assayer
,

Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes—I mean the universe—but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written. This book is written in the mathematical language.
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Mathematical knowledge was considered important also for theological purposes. According to the Church and its reworking of the Greek conception of nature, God designed and created the world in accordance with mathematical laws that man was capable of discovering and understanding by means of reason. The search for the laws governing the universe was therefore considered a religious quest, and the discovery of the mathematical relations underlying natural phenomena became a way to celebrate the greatness and glory of God’s work. This philosophical vision was shared by scientists and found expression in the words of one of the great astronomers of the seventeenth century, namely Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), the discoverer of the laws governing the movements of the planets:

The chief aim of all the investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He has revealed to us in the language of mathematics.
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Mathematics was held in great consideration at the Roman College, where the leading role in persuading colleagues to include arithmetic, algebra, and geometry in the syllabus was played by the German Christoph Klau (1537–1612), known by the humanistic name of Christophorus Clavius and in English as Christopher Clavius. An illustrious astronomer and mathematician, he taught at the Roman College from 1563 on and was one of the professors that most influenced Ricci’s early development. Clavius was regarded as the Euclid of the sixteenth century, a reputation earned through the publication in 1574 of his annotated translation from the Greek of Euclid’s
Elements
—the famous work on arithmetic and geometry written in the third century
bc
—considered one of the most complete versions produced during the Renaissance.
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The German professor was also the author of treatises on astronomy, his best-loved subject, and education. The extent of the esteem he enjoyed among scholars can be gauged from his correspondence with some of the greatest scientists of the time, and above all his friendship with the young Galileo, who turned to him for advice on more than one occasion.

“I attach more importance to the opinion of Your Reverence than to any other.”
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It was in these terms that Galileo, then little over twenty, wrote to Clavius, who was twice his age, for advice on a problem of physics.

Clavius knew that most of the young novices showed little interest in science and that many professors thought it pointless to teach mathematics to future priests and missionaries. As he wrote,

Professors of philosophy must have a knowledge of mathematics and . . . urge their students to devote themselves to the study of these sciences instead of neglecting them, as in the past. Students must understand that philosophy and mathematics are connected.
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Clavius undertook an authentic campaign to persuade his colleagues, maintaining not only that the decision to teach mathematics would enhance the prestige of the Society of Jesus, but also that the discipline of Pythagoras was a fundamental prerequisite for learning the other sciences and applied disciplines. Ricci shared his master’s views and is reported to have derived great benefit from his teaching.

If mathematics was the foundation of science, then astronomy was its pinnacle. Father Clavius regularly observed the heavens from the terrace of the Roman College and witnessed in 1572 the appearance of a “new star,” which remained visible for eighteen months in the constellation of Cassiopeia before disappearing into nothingness. Also observed by Chinese astronomers, it was actually a supernova, a star of great mass that explodes to shine very brightly for a certain period of time before burning out forever. A celestial phenomenon well known to science today, it was not understood at the time and was regarded rather as an odd meteorological event, it being inconceivable that anything new could appear in the perfect, incorruptible, immutable heavens.

Known halfway through the sixteenth century as “astrology,” astronomy was divided into “meteorological astrology,” the study of celestial bodies on the basis of observations and calculations, and “judicial astrology,” the study of the influence of the stars on human life in order to draw up horoscopes, which is simply called astrology today. The latter was also taught in universities and was practiced even by great scientists like Kepler, who continued to take advantage of his reputation as an astrologer even in the seventeenth century in order to swell his income with commissions for horoscopes. Even though the belief that the celestial bodies influenced human life was commonly accepted, judicial astrology was banned in the Jesuit colleges because believing that the future was written in the stars was incompatible with the Christian idea of free will.

The description of the cosmos that Ricci studied at the Roman College and was later to teach to the Chinese dated back to Aristotle and had been presented in mathematical form by the astronomer and geographer Ptolemy (c.
ad
138–180) in the
Almagest
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and was later reworked in the light of Christian doctrine by Aquinas. According to this model, the universe is finite and the earth immobile at its center. Rotating around it are eight spheres or “heavens” of the purest incorruptible crystalline material on which the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are set. Then come the fixed stars, so called in order to distinguish them from planets, which change their position in the sky. After the stars is the tenth and last sphere, called the
Primum Mobile
, beyond which Catholic doctrine located the empyrean, the dwelling place of God, the only unmoving sphere capable of setting all the others in motion.

Reinterpreted in the light of religion, the Ptolemaic system had been unchallenged for centuries as established fact and fully corresponded to the vision of a perfect universe created by God with the earth and man in the center, as described by Dante in the
Divine Comedy
. Scientists accepted it because it made possible fairly precise predictions of astronomical phenomena like solar and lunar eclipses and because it described the movement of planets by means of a mathematical system that, though complex,
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proved sufficiently in line with observation.