In May 1577 Ricci studied for a short time at the University of Coimbra.
Career
Gallery of Matteo Ricci
1610
A Chinese portrait of Ricci.
Gallery of Matteo Ricci
1667
Matteo Ricci (Li Madou) and Xu Guangqi. From: Athanasius Kircher: China Illustrata.
Gallery of Matteo Ricci
Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), Jesuit missionary to China.
Gallery of Matteo Ricci
An early 17th-century depiction of Ricci in Chinese robes.
Gallery of Matteo Ricci
A Chinese portrait of Ricci.
Gallery of Matteo Ricci
Jesuit missionaries, like Fr. Matteo Ricci, and Adam Schaal von Bell (above) recognized that the coherence between the teachings of Christianity and those of Confucius made Chinese civilization receptive to Western Science.
Gallery of Matteo Ricci
Matteo Ricci and Xu Guangqi, two saints the Chinese Church deserves to venerate together.
Gallery of Matteo Ricci
Matteo Ricci
Gallery of Matteo Ricci
Adam Schall and Matteo Ricci holding a map of China
Gallery of Matteo Ricci
Portrait of a missionary Matteo Ricci
Achievements
The statue of Ricci in downtown Macao, unveiled on 7 August 2010, the anniversary of his arrival on the island.
Jesuit missionaries, like Fr. Matteo Ricci, and Adam Schaal von Bell (above) recognized that the coherence between the teachings of Christianity and those of Confucius made Chinese civilization receptive to Western Science.
Matteo Ricci was an Italian Jesuit Priest and also astronomer, geographer, and mathematician. He was one of the pioneer Jesuits in China and became the Superior General of the Mission in 1592. He is known for respecting and adapting to the Chinese culture in the 16th century, learning the language and finding a successful way to explain Catholic faith to the Chinese people by connecting it to Confucianism.
Background
Ethnicity:
Ricci was from a noble family in Macerata, in central Italy.
Matteo Ricci was born on October 6, 1552, in Macerata, Marche, Italy, which is today a part of Italy but in the 16th century was a town in the Papal States. His father, Giovanni Battista Ricci, a pharmacist by profession, dedicated most of his time to public affairs and for a time served as governor of the city. His mother, Giovanna Angiolelli, was known for her simple piety.
Education
After receiving home-based education, Ricci entered Jesuit School in 1561 and moved out of Macerata in 1568 to go to Rome to study law. He continued his education by studying astronomy, mathematics, and cosmology under the direction of Christopher Clavius, a Jesuit priest.
At the time, Jesuits were known to be the leaders in scientific research, and their members often went on travels to spread Christianity to the new worlds. Inspired to help in this area, Ricci applied for an expedition to East Asia. In 1572 he was enrolled at the Collegio Romano, where he studied until 1577. During a couple of months spent in Portugal, he studied at the University of Coimbra.
Ricci began his missionary journey in Lisbon, where he embarked on a ship in 1578. It took him to Goa, a Portuguese outpost in India. He spent a couple of years there and was ordained at Cochin in 1580. Two years later, he received an invitation to come to Macau and prepare for his mission in China.
When Ricci arrived at Macau in 1582, activity of Christian missionaries was limited to that Portuguese trading post and spreading the mission onto Mainland China was yet to happen. Ricci realized that getting to know Chinese culture and language could be of great help so he started studying them. With a fellow Italian priest Michele Ruggieri, he traveled to Zhaoqing and Canton, looking for a place where a permanent Jesuit mission can be established.
In 1583, after they were officially called by the province governor, who heard of Ricci’s skills as a cartographer and mathematician, they settled in Zhaoqing. One year later, Ricci made the first map of the world in European-style but in the Chinese language. This map would turn to be crucial in extending knowledge that Chinese had about the world. Two missionaries also comprised the first ever Portuguese-Chinese dictionary, creating a system to transcribe Chinese words into the Latin alphabet. Ricci was expelled from Zhaoqing by the new province governor in 1589.
He moved on to travel to Shaoguan and reached Nanjing in 1595 and Nanchang in 1597. Meanwhile, his superior Alessandro Valignano made him Major Superior of the Christian missionary activity in China. Ricci worked at this post from 1592 until his death.
In 1598 he moved to Tongzhou, which enabled him to reach the capital of China, Beijing, later that year. He waited for two months to reach the Imperial Palace but that was not able due to the Korean/Japanese war that was occurring at the time. He then decided to return to Nanjing and then go to Suzhou.
Ricci also compiled an improved version of a Chinese-Portuguese dictionary in 1598, with the help of a fellow Jesuit Lazzaro Cattaneo. In 1601, the Wanli Emperor (Ming dynasty) called Ricci to become an adviser to the imperial court. Ricci thus became the first ever Westerner that received an invitation to enter the Forbidden City (Imperial Palace). Wanli Emperor heard of Ricci’s correct predictions of solar eclipses and believed he deserved a place at the imperial court.
Despite the sympathies, Ricci and the Emperor had never met, although Ricci was granted generous funds for the completion of the first ever China’s global atlas, called the Zhidang waiji. He also established the first Catholic church in Beijing in 1605 – the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Establishing the position in society enabled him to meet the Chinese elite and offer them to convert to Christianity. Perhaps one of the most significant conversions was when the war veteran Li Yingshi turned to Christianity.
Ricci was the first European that found out that a small Jewish community exists in China. They were called the Kaifeng Jews because they were from Kaifeng in the province of Henan. Although Ricci never personally visited them, he sent one of his junior missionaries there in 1608.
Ricci died in Beijing in 1610. The customs of the time dictated that foreigners should be buried in Macau but special permission was gained from the Emperor for him to be buried in Beijing. Nicolas Trigault, another Jesuit, translated Ricci’s remained papers and published them in 1615 under the name “De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas”.
(A complete map of the world, first ever to be done in the...)
Religion
Ricci was a member of a male religious congregation of the Catholic Church known as the Society of Jesus. While in college, he was attracted to the Society of Jesus whose member he became in 1571. He spent most of his life in China spreading Christianity.
In China Ricci befriended and debated a number of Buddhist and Daoist scholars, while consistently arguing against the acceptance of the syncretic “Three Religions” dogma. He concluded that, if the Chinese would reject Buddhism and Daoism, and also reject polygamy and a few other relatively minor rites, they “could certainly become Christians, since the essence of their doctrine contains nothing contrary to the essence of the Catholic faith, nor would the Catholic faith hinder them in any way, but would indeed aid in that attainment of the quiet and peace of the republic which their books claim as their goal.”
Views
Ricci believed that his knowledge of Renaissance science was inseparable from his knowledge of the Christian faith. He insisted that the leap in scientific progress in Renaissance Europe was not a “secret” of the West, but was the patrimony of all mankind. The same was true of the emerging Classical tradition of music in Europe - Ricci presented the court with a harpsichord and wrote contrapuntal songs which he taught court officials to play and sing.
Just as Ricci found the Chinese of a moral disposition to embrace Christianity, so were they willing and anxious to enhance their own rich scientific and cultural heritage with the scientific ideas and methods which Ricci and some of the later Jesuits had mastered. Ricci understood that the central issue was the power of cognition as the basis for knowing things rather than just learning things. He wrote to the Chinese: “Investigation using reason can lead to scientific knowledge, while someone else’s opinions lead only to my own new opinion. Scientific knowledge is an absence of doubt; opinion is always accompanied by doubt.”
Ricci realized that the success of his mission lies on his respect for Chinese culture, which is why he made sure to speak, read and write classical Chinese, which was used by officials and scholars in Beijing. Despite the huge appreciation of Chinese culture, Ricci noticed that prostitution was widespread in China at the time and felt that he had to condemn this.
His approach to explaining Christianity to Chinese people proved to be very successful. Instead of presenting the Catholicism as something new, he would say that the Chinese people always believed in God and that Christianity just presented the completion of that faith. Ricci studied Confucian Classics and used various terms, such as “Lord of Heaven” instead of “God”, and he made sure to respect Chinese traditions. The Vatican even outlawed his approach after pressured by Franciscan and Dominican missionaries.
Quotations:
"The Chinese place absolutely no trust in any foreign country, and thus they allow no one at all to enter and reside here unless they undertake never again to return home, as is the case with us."
“The whole point of writing something down is that your voice will then carry for thousands of miles, whereas in direct conversation it fades at a hundred paces.”
"The commonest opinion held here among those who Consider themselves the most wise, is to say that all three sects come together as one, and that you can hold them all at once. In this they deceive themselves and others, and lead to great disorder by its appearing to them that as far as religion is concerned, the more ways of talking about religion there are, all the more benefit will that bring to the kingdom."
"The fathers gave such clear and lucid explanations on all these matters which were so new to the Chinese, that many were unable to deny the truth of all that he said; and, for this reason, the information on this matter quickly spread among all the scholars of China. From this one can understand how much esteem was given to the Jesuits as well as to our land which thenceforth they did not dare to describe as barbarian, a word they were accustomed to use in describing countries other than China."
Membership
Ricci entered the Society of Jesus in 1571, qhile he was in college, and remained a devoted member of the congregation until his death.
Personality
Ricci was a smart and modest man, an intellectual who appreaciated and befriended people regardless of their race and religion.
Physical Characteristics:
He is portrayed as a man with fairly long beard that wears clerical clothing.
Quotes from others about the person
“For all [Matteo] Ricci’s academic and personal talent, his pre-eminent, enduring gift was a capacity to delight in the company of others. He was able to accomplish so much - translate geometrical principles into Chinese, engage pastorally in theological debates with some of the brightest Buddhists of his day, and joyfully welcome thousands of inquisitive scholars to his home - because of the mutual support and companionship of his friends. A few of these were his Jesuit brothers… But the vast majority of his friends were Chinese: the scholars, officials and local people he talked with on his travels and in the marketplace. To recall Ricci’s exploits, it is necessary to remember his company of friends.” - Jeremy Clarke on Italian-born Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci in “East Meets West: Matteo Ricci’s Cross-Cultural Mission to China".
Interests
reading
Philosophers & Thinkers
Alessandro Valignano
Politicians
The Wanli Emperor
Writers
Michele Ruggieri
Artists
Li Yingshi
Connections
Ricci was a servant of God and he never married or had any children.