Dissertation Fellow 2000-01
Patrick Provost-Smith (History)
Johns Hopkins University
Between the Gospel of Peace and
the Sword of War:
The Missionary Strategies of José de Acosta (1540-1600)
and Matteo Ricci (1552-1610)
As part of a larger project of studying comparatively European
intellectual discourses concerning the non-European world, and particularly
their impact on the history of political and moral thought, my dissertation
explores the tensions and conflicts produced by the intellectual
development of missionary strategies in the 16th c. and the problematic
nature of the expansion of Christianity under the auspices of the
Spanish and Portuguese empires.
Both Jose de Acosta and Matteo Ricci were of the same intellectual
generation, were both rhetoricians and classicists, and were recognized
during their lifetimes as missionary strategists of repute. Both
were known for having developed complex strategies of cultural accommodation.
Yet, such strategies were not isolated from, as Acosta put it, the
contradiction between "annuntiatio evangelicae pacis et intentatio
bellici gladii." The context for their work was one of controversy
over the legitimacy of imperial expansion and imperial violence,
in itself as well as in missionary strategies, and over the applicability
of “just war” criteria to the complex realities of that
expansion. Both Acosta and Ricci turned to classical, apostolic,
and patristic exempla for understanding the onversion of the Hellenistic
world to Christianity in late antiquity as the historical analogy
for the conversion of the Americas and Asia to Christianity in the
16th century, and to those same sources for understanding the problematic
relationship of evangelism to empire. It was the nature of the Roman
Empire, of the judgments implicit in the “just war,”
the problems of licit or illicit coercion, and similar Augustinian
topics that supplied the subtext for Acosta and Ricci’s engagements
with similar problems. As both the form and content of their arguments
were grounded in the discourses of "sacred history" and
of classical rhetoric, their work also provides an avenue for exploring
the Renaissance humanistic orientation of their thought, in their
classical and Christian patristic contexts.
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