Animals, Sages and Saints: Alfonso Vagnone’s Rhetorical Strategy in Chinese Context

Around 1632, while stationed in Shanxi Province (China), the Italian Jesuit Alfonso Vagnone published a pedagogical treatise entitled On the Education of Children (Tongyou jiaoyu) on which he had worked for several years. The book achieves a carefully crafted synthesis between Confucian educational principles, European Humanism, and Jesuit pedagogy. This is achieved through various rhetorical devices, one of them being the extensive use of animal simile, which prepares considerations about behavioral models to be found in (Pagan) Sages and (Christian) saints. This study focuses on the rhetorical and narrative methods through which Vagnone grounds a gradation and continuum between Nature and Grace, inserting his pedagogical considerations into a carefully crafted apologetics. Vagnone’s work is also remarkable by its implicit openness to various Confucian schools, while Matteo Ricci was drawing a sharp distinction between original Confucianism and the School of the Principle. In more than one way, Vagnone’s work is “ecumenical”. It makes the love for one’s offspring, found in all living species and in all nations, the ground of moral reform, itself conducive to greater openness toward revealed truths.