The Jesuit Longobardo’s Interpretation of the Neo-Confucian Concepts of li and qi

Abstract

This article addresses the most important translation issue in the first philosophic and religious dialogue between Europe and China: is there a Chinese equivalent for the Christian concept of God? We approach the question from the perspective of comparative philosophy. We start by examining the historical and theoretical context in which the Jesuit Niccolò Longobardo developed his disagreement with Matteo Ricci regarding the question as to whether the Confucianism is an atheism. We then analyse the interpretation that equates li and qi, respectively, with the Aristotelian notions of accident and prime matter. After showing how Longobardo reduces neo-Confucianism to Presocratic atheism in an Aristotelian manner, we propose an alternative perspective that can reconcile Christianism and neo-Confucianism with regard to the concept of first cause.

1. Introduction

When Jesuits first arrived in China, the name of God was among the first words that needed to be translated into Chinese for evangelisation. This translation is not merely a question of semantic equivalence. It involves a comparison, if not a conflict, between two traditions of thought: the Aristotelianism and the neo-Confucianism. In this article, we focus on the philosophic aspect of the question investigated by the Jesuit Niccolò Longobardo: is the Chinese notion of the first cause material or spiritual?

2. Historical and Theoretical Context

The Jesuits were the first to conduct a comparative study of Sino-Western philosophy in the history of humanity. To introduce Christianity in China, it was first necessary to translate. The translation of Christian philosophical and theological concepts into Chinese was the very process of comparative philosophy and transcultural dialogue.

Matteo Ricci (1552–1610)’s strategy of cultural accommodation marked the first success of Christianity in China. Niccolò Longobardo (1565–1654), despite succeeding Ricci as Superior of the Jesuit China Mission, was one of the principal opponents of Ricci’s missionary strategy. His position is outlined in great detail in the text entitled A Brief Response to the Controversies over Shangdi 上帝 (God), tianshen 天神 (angel), and linghun 靈魂 (soul) (hereafter referred to as A Brief Response). This text played a decisive role in the Chinese Terms Controversy, and was later manipulated as part of the Chinese Rites Controversy, which brought about the end of the Jesuits’ first China mission (Meynard 2021, p. 83). If Ricci’s strategy represents a productive transcultural dialogue, which benefitted both China and Europe, the Chinese Rites Controversy is an example of a clash of civilisations. There is already an abundant literature on Ricci. As for the Controversies over Chinese Terms and Rites, there is copious research on the political and religious aspects of their historical events. However, the philosophic implications of Longobardo’s ideas, which raise some fundamental questions in comparative philosophy, both in terms of content and method, have not received sufficient attention in contemporary scholarship.

Ricci translated the name of God and related scholastic concepts by using terms coming from the Chinese classics. Some missionaries, including Longobardo, were opposed to this translation method because in their view these Chinese terms belong to a thought which is fundamentally materialist and atheist, and thus incompatible with the Christian faith.1 As Longobardo puts it, “nearly all the Chinese philosophers are deceived by their great arrogance and philosophy, and are led into the greatest of all evils, which is atheism, as will be seen more clearly in the following prelude where we will examine the fundamental principles of their natural and moral teaching.” One of the “fundamental principles of their natural teaching” is that “the Chinese did not recognise two distinct substances, spiritual and corporeal, but only one that is more or less material” (Longobardo 2021, pp. 119, 138).

The question as to whether there is a concept of spiritual substance in Chinese thought is crucial for Longobardo, since this concept serves as the philosophic basis for conversion. According to Thomistic theology, which was at the heart of the Jesuits’ intellectual formation, there are three types of spiritual substance: God, the angels and the rational soul, as clearly suggested by the title and the preface of A Brief Response. This treatise was a philological and philosophical study of mainly Confucian texts, and also incorporated interviews with Christian and non-Christian Chinese literati. The question of spiritual substance reflects a worldview, a conception of the existence of the world, and its causes. For Longobardo, the “Chinese philosophers” who “founded the Sect of the Literati”, i.e., Confucianism, also have a teaching on “the essence and being of universal causes and their causalities” (Longobardo 2021, pp. 93, 111).

While Ricci tends to find compatibility between Confucianism and Catholicism, Longobardo insists on their incompatibility. For the latter, to translate Deus with the vocabulary of ancient Confucianism is to “agree with pagan errors”:

More than twenty-five years have passed since I began to be troubled by that which the Chinese call {the Most High Lord or Emperor} Shangdi. After I read the Four Books {of Confucius} (Sishu 四書), as we are all accustomed to do the moment we arrive in China, I noticed that various interpreters explain the term Shangdi in a way that is most incompatible and repugnant to the divine nature.

(Longobardo 2021, p. 92)2

It is true that the consequence of such a translation is that the Chinese converts understand from a Confucian perspective:

The Christian literati often accommodate their interpretations of their jing 經, {that is, their teachings,} to something which they understand to be similar to our holy law while not realising how important it is for the truth of these controversies to come to light and for nothing false or fictitious to be said.

(Longobardo 2021, p. 94)

As we will show below, Longobardo determines whether the Chinese understanding of God is “similar to our holy law” by interpreting Confucian texts and notions from a scholastic point of view.

Between two cultures, as many similarities as differences can be found. It is difficult to imagine that Ricci is less aware of cultural difference than Longobardo. The difference between the two Jesuits is rather a difference in emphasis. In terms of outcomes, Ricci helped Christianity be accepted by the Chinese authorities, while Longobardo’s A Brief Response was used to influence the pope’s prohibition of the Chinese Rites, and consequently the Chinese emperor’s prohibition of evangelisation. Indeed, some Jesuits and missionaries from other orders (Dominicans, Franciscans, members of the Paris Foreign Missions Society) prohibited Chinese converts from participating in ceremonies in honour of Confucius and ancestors. Without mentioning all the aspects of the Chinese Terms and Rites Controversies, we will focus on their philosophic dimension: to ascertain whether these ceremonies are civil or religious, it is necessary to examine what the Chinese understand by God, angels and the soul. This brings us back to the question of translation and interpretation, because what is to be examined is the meaning of the Chinese terms used to translate God, angels, and the soul in the original context of the Confucian classics.3

To evangelise, one must speak the language of the locals. The Chinese of the 17th century were not yet interested in learning the languages of the missionaries, who set out to learn Chinese, hence the necessity to translate Christian concepts in Chinese. To translate is to establish equivalence. Now, it is precisely the equivalence established by Ricci that Longobardo challenges.

Ricci’s translation constructed less an equivalence than a comparability. To compare is to find similarities and differences at the same time. If we consider the concepts of God, angels, and the soul to be comparable aspects of Christianity and Confucianism, Ricci tends to find similarities, whereas Longobardo highlights the differences. In other words, Longobardo uncovers the fundamental differences behind the apparent similarities. But his comparative and interpretative approach is sometimes inconsistent insofar as he decontextualises Chinese concepts, interpreting them using the vocabulary of his own languages (including Latin) and examining them from the perspective of scholastic theology.4

3. Qi 氣 and Prime Matter

The objective of A Brief Response is to clarify the meaning of Chinese equivalents for three terms: God, angels and the soul. The study of these terms is “necessary so that we would not make mistakes when introducing terms and views in this Christian church” (Longobardo 2021, p. 95). As we have mentioned, for Longobardo, the problem of these Chinese terms consists in their materialism.

When Catholic missionaries entered in China in the late 16th century, Confucianism was still the official ideology of China. In both Confucianism and in Catholicism, canonical texts and their commentaries were authoritative. In translating Christian concepts with Confucian terms, the Jesuits inevitably were implicated in the problem of interpreting Confucianism, or rather the legitimacy of proposing an interpretation different from that of the Chinese commentators. Concerning the term of God, Ricci’s strategy is to “claim that the ancient Chinese knew God as Shangdi, but later commentators went astray from the original meaning of the canonical texts” (Canaris and Meynard 2021, p. 93, n. 5). Those “later commentators”, in Longobardo’s words, replace Shangdi, namely, “the Most High Lord or Emperor”, “who lives in the palace of heaven where he governs the world,” with li, “the universal nature,” “the cause and origin of all things,” which is “neither living nor intelligent” (Longobardo 2021, pp. 104, 121, 183). Both Ricci and Longobardo disagree with the philosophic doctrine in the Chinese commentators’ writings. The difference between them is that Ricci accepts Shangdi as an equivalent for God by interpreting ancient classics in his own way and sidelining the commentaries, whereas Longobardo underlines the authority of the commentaries such that he excludes the usage of the term Shangdi since the meaning of this term as understood by the commentators is incompatible with the Christian concept of God.

The disadvantage of Ricci’s translation is that once a Christian concept is translated into Chinese, it is understood by the Chinese according to the meaning of its Chinese equivalent within the original context of the Chinese classics. Longobardo describes the difficulties entailed by this understanding as follows:

To begin, they laugh at us when they hear us say that {the Most High} Shangdi is the creator of the whole world, as we are accustomed to declare. They know that according to Rujiao, {that is, the teaching of the literati,} their {eternal and Most High} Shangdi is heaven or its {preeminent} virtue. Thus, Shangdi by no means could exist before heaven but came into existence together with heaven or after there was already heaven. When we try to continue our proof that there must be a maker beforehand, and afterwards there was the house, etc., they do not let us speak any further. They say that since our God is {the Most High Lord called} Shangdi, we don’t need to explain it because they know it better than we do. Finally, […] we are considered rude and rash for wanting to teach the Chinese how to understand and interpret their authors.

(Longobardo 2021, p. 108. Italics ours)

The missionaries’ difficulties highlight the relationship between language and thought: their Chinese interlocutors do not know any foreign language and naturally think in Chinese. As for Longobardo, even if he speaks Chinese, he does not think in Chinese: he translates Chinese concepts in Latin to understand them within a scholastic framework. If the Chinese do not understand the possibility of thinking in a way different from that which was transmitted to them by their own tradition, Longobardo as a polyglot ignores it perhaps on purpose, because for him what is important is to ensure that Christian doctrines are strictly followed in the Chinese church. Hence both sides of the dialogue find themselves in the predicament of thinking in their own language and understanding the thought of the other through the conceptual framework related to their mother tongue.

The comparison between qi and prime matter unfolds through the framework of the Terms Controversy. The three terms, God, angels and the soul, are all related to the notion of spiritual substance in scholastic theology. For Longobardo, the Chinese equivalents of these terms denote things consisting of qi, which he identifies with prime matter. He concludes that Chinese thought is materialist. We can summarise his argument as follows: (1) God is a spiritual substance. This is the doctrine which he defends and the evidence which serves as the starting point of his critique of Chinese thought. (2) Since Longobardo interprets the concept qi and the Confucian axiom “all things are one” (萬物一體) through the prism of Aristotelian critique of Presocratic natural philosophy, he infers that the Chinese did not know any spiritual substance. (3) Since for the Chinese Shangdi is heaven (see the passage cited above), and heaven is nothing other than qi, Shangdi cannot be the equivalent of God.

Points 2 and 3 are based on two ideas: the Aristotelian–Thomistic idea of substance and the Confucian idea of the relationship between li 理 and qi. In interpreting the latter in light of the former, Ricci reduces li to accident in opposition to substance. This interpretation is implicitly integrated in Longobardo’s argumentation.

The reduction of qi to prime matter has two facets: the first, which is Longobardo’s principal concern, is religious and missiological, consisting in evaluating whether Confucianism is atheistic; the second is philosophic and theological, centred on the different ways of conceiving the first principle in the Confucian and Christian worldviews. It is the latter which interests us, because it allows us to deepen transcultural dialogue, whereas the first obstructs it.

Longobardo begins by affirming that Chinese thought has a concept of the first cause:

This first cause according to them is neither living nor cognizant, and it does not have any property or activity except being pure, still, subtle and diaphanous without body and shape, and can only be perceived with the intellect in the way in which we speak about spiritual things. Although it is not spiritual, it still does not possess these active and passive qualities of the elements.

(Longobardo 2021, p. 122)

The description of the first cause in the first sentence corresponds to the concept of li in neo-Confucianism. But Longobardo apparently contradicts himself: li “can only be perceived with the intellect in the way in which we speak about spiritual things”, but “it is not spiritual.” Moreover, a few lines after, he calls li chaos or prime matter. This hesitation on the nature of li reveals the profound difficulty in understanding the relationship between li and qi for someone steeped in scholastic thought. Indeed, Longobardo confuses li and qi in various places, and sometimes even replaces li with qi in his translation of the Chinese text (Canaris and Meynard 2021, p. 124, n. 101–2). Due to this confusion, he identifies both Chinese concepts with prime matter.

Beyond heaven they imagine an infinite prime matter out of which emanated taiji 太極, that is that primordial Air. They call this prime matter kong 空, xu 虛, li 理, dao 道, wu 無, wuji 無極.

(Longobardo 2021, p. 128, see also p. 129)

The concepts mentioned here—taiji, kong, xu, li, dao, wu, wuji—are different ways of conceiving the first cause in the three principal currents of thought in China: Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Li and qi—the latter identified by Longobardo with taiji and primordial Air—constitute a pair of central concepts in neo-Confucian cosmology, which is a kind of dualism.

In neo-Confucianism, in particular according to Zhu Xi (1130–1200), there is a li for each thing and a Li which is the principle and origin of the whole universe. In the case of an individual thing, li is conceived as its raison d’être; hence it “can only be perceived with the intellect,” as Longobardo says. Qi denotes the material and perceptible aspect of a thing. Li and qi are two different causes. The interaction between them explains the multiplicity of things and their change. Li is static and eternal; qi is dynamic and transient. The relation between the two is that they must neither be mixed up with each other nor separated from each other (Liu 2003, pp. 366–68).

Longobardo sometimes identifies li and qi, but sometimes separates them. The influence of scholastic teaching on substance is crucial for understanding his ambiguous position. For him, there are two sorts of substance: spiritual substance and corporeal substance. The Chinese only know the latter (Longobardo 2021, p. 138). Li is not a substance; therefore, it cannot be a spiritual substance. Thus, only qi remains as a candidate for substance. If the only substance is a material one, we are inevitably led to materialism.

The reason for which li is not a substance is explained by Ricci in The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven:

82. […] I shall now distinguish between various classes of things and place li in the right class. When I have done this, you will understand that the way the Supreme Ultimate 太極 is described precludes it from being the first cause of all things.

83. There are two classes of things: substance and accident. Things which do not depend on other things for their existence, such as heaven and earth, ghosts and spirits […] are all classed as substance. Things that cannot stand on their own and can only be established subject to other things […] are all classed as accident.

84. […] li also falls into the class of accidents. Since it is not substance how can it establish other things? When men of letters and learned men in China discuss principle, they only speak of it in two ways: they either say that li resides in the minds of men, or else they say it is to be found in things.

(Ricci 2016, pp. 83–85. Translation modified)

Li is not a substance, because it “depends on other things for its existence”. This dependence stems from Ricci’s understanding of neo-Confucianism: “they either say that principle resides in the minds of me, or else they say it is to be found in things”. The li “in the minds” can either refer to Lu Xiangshan:

Righteousness and Pattern are in the minds of human beings. As a matter of fact, these are what Heaven has endowed us with, and they can never be effaced or eliminated [from our minds].

(Lu 2014, p. 251)5

Or Wang Yangming:

[He] believed that all human beings are endowed with a complete repertoire of the Pattern, which enables them to understand how things are and should be in the world. The mind of human beings is Pattern in its knowing, conscious mode, and by bringing the Pattern of the mind into play we can understand the world around us as well as our proper place within it.

(Wang 2014, p. 261)

The li “in things” most likely refers to Zhu Xi:

Someone asked, “Did Pattern exist first or did qi exist first?” Master Zhu replied, “Pattern has never been separated from qi. However, the Pattern is ‘above with respect to form,’ while qi is ‘below with respect to form.’ If one discusses it in terms of being above or below with respect to form, how can there not be before and after?

(Zhu 2014, p. 182)

These quotations imply that li is either inseparable from minds or from things. But to conclude from this inseparability to dependence, as Ricci does, is simplistic and decontextualising. In order to understand his reasoning, let us turn back to the passage 83 in Ricci’s The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, quoted above: “Things which do not depend on other things for their existence […] are all classed as substance”. This explanation of substance corresponds exactly to Thomas Aquinas’ definition of the term: subsistere, quasi per se et non in alio existens (to subsist, as existing not in another but in itself) (Aquinas, De potentia, q. 9 a. 1).

For Aristotle, substance is separable from accident: it exists without accidents, while accidents do not exist separate from it. According to Pierre Aubenque, it is the separable nature of substance that slips towards “subsistence” in Aquinas (Aubenque 2009, p. 208). If separability characterises substance, then inseparability is the mode of being of the accident. It is exactly because of the inseparability that Ricci classifies li as accident. The neo-Confucians “either say that principle resides in the minds of me, or else they say it is to be found in things”: Ricci’s translation of these two fundamental theses of neo-Confucianism is faultless. But it is a forced interpretation to associate the notion of li with that of accident.

For Ricci, li is inseparable from qi in the same way that accident depends on substance. Thus, he departs from Zhu Xi in making the ontological status of li inferior to that of qi. The reason for doing so can be found in Ricci’s Latin summary of The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven. While the book is written in Chinese and intended to introduce Christianity, the Latin summary was sent to Rome for a Christian audience who were unfamiliar with the Chinese language and thought. The following is an extract from the summary:

We have judged it better in this book to refute it, rather than to twist what is said so as to make it agree with the idea of God; lest we should seem more to follow the Chinese teaching than to make and interpret Chinese authors in a way that they might follow our own doctrine. And since the learned men who govern China are especially hostile toward us because of our attack on this principle (li or taiji), we are more intent on refuting the explanation of this principle than the principle itself.6

This passage suggests that Ricci’s scholastic reading of the notion of li may not be simply a misunderstanding, but rather a deliberately chosen method of refutation. The aim is clear: there can be only one first principle, and this must be the Christian God. Li, which does not even subsist, is not at all comparable to God.

4. The Interpretation of Neo-Confucianism as an Atheism

Longobardo does not differ from Ricci in how he understands the relationship between li and qi: “both things, {namely itself [li] and Air [qi],} are always joined together and in turn cannot be separated, as we speak about prime matter and its coeval quantity” (Longobardo 2021, p. 140). Moreover, he strengthens this understanding by adding his own interpretation of a famous neo-Confucian axiom (萬物一體), which he translates into Latin as “omnia sunt unum” (all things are one).

Briefly put, wanwu yiti is a way of explaining the relationship between man and the universe. It concerns the neo-Confucian moral ideal rather than the first cause in physics and metaphysics. Without entering into the details of neo-Confucianism, let us focus on Longobardo’s interpretation. His method is to interpret the Latin translation of the neo-Confucian axiom by referring to the scholastic commentaries on Aristotle.

First of all, he cites the commentaries:

The Coimbra course and Fr Fonseca, and other commentators following the text of Aristotle say that those early ancient philosophers did not know any of the causes except the material cause, and not as it is in itself, but in a coarser way. For they thought and firmly believed that matter itself was the all-embracing essence of natural things and that all things were one and co-extensive with it while seeming many according to the external senses without any essential difference between them.

(Longobardo 2021, p. 132)

Furthermore, he explains qi through the prism of the material cause:

There is the air […] just like the elements among us, and out of this air things are joined together through generation and are dissolved into it during corruption. For this reason, this [air] is the essence, the being and the nature of all things.

(Longobardo 2021, p. 136)

“All things are one” is interpreted by Longobardo as an argument supporting the thesis that qi is the first cause of everything, despite the fact that in the Confucian context, “one” does not refer to qi.7 Thus, he concludes “that in the teaching of Rujiao 儒教 or the literati there is emphatically nothing more than one material substance” (Longobardo 2021, p. 140).

For Longobardo, Chinese religions, as well as Greek and Indian religions, can be traced back to Zoroaster. According to Canaris, Longobardo draws on the prisca theologia that saw the transmission of pagan knowledge as an act of diabolical deception. By subsuming Confucianism to paganism, he deviates from Ricci’s strategy of translating God with Confucian concepts (Canaris 2021, pp. 512–18).

It is interesting to compare Longobardo’s text with that of Aristotle to see the Aristotelian tone underlying the Jesuit’s discussion of qi. Let us begin with Longobardo:

The Chinese never knew of a creator who made everything out of pure nothing by His infinite power, nor understood true generation from matter and substantial form, but only the alteration and accidental change of shape and qualities on the presupposition that there is a common homogenous matter of all things. This is the eternal air, which is ungenerable and incorruptible in its substance but changeable through motion and rest, hot and cold, rarefication and density, etc., since only it is the essence of all things. This is just like what Aristotle says about those [Presocratic] philosophers, who philosophised in a similar way.

(Longobardo 2021, p. 138. Italics ours)

This is what Aristotle says in his Metaphysics:

Of the first philosophers, most thought the principles which were of the nature of matter were the only principles of all things; that of which all things that are consist, and from which they first come to be, and into which they are finally resolved (the substance remaining, but changing in its modifications), this they say is the element and the principle of things, and therefore they think nothing is either generated or destroyed, since this sort of entity is always conserved […]. From these facts one might think that the only cause is the so-called material cause.

(Aristotle 1984a, 983b6–18, 984a17. Italics ours)

The correspondence between the italicised parts is striking. Longobardo criticises Chinese thought through the framework of the opposition between creationism and materialism.8 The reference to Aristotle here shows that materialism is characteristic of all primitive thought. The primitive character of materialism is affirmed more explicitly in a gloss by Fonseca quoted by Longobardo:

The ancient philosophers almost only considered the material cause in their undeveloped and unclear philosophy, and not as it is, but in a certain primitive way they thought that the entire essence of natural things was matter itself.

(Longobardo 2021, p. 133)

Aristotle’s passage must be understood as a reflection on the first cause, which is the object of study of the Metaphysics. From this point of view, “the first philosophers” are credited with conceiving the notion of cause. Insofar as they were the first to undertake the search for causes, they were awarded the title of “the first philosophers” by Aristotle (Laks 2018, p. 20). Their fault, as it were, is to think only of a material cause. In other words, “first” means above all “innovator” and then “primitive”.

The reference to Aristotle allows us to take a step back from scholasticism and to reflect afresh on the comparability of Greek and Chinese worldviews. In the thought of the first philosophers, Aristotle distinguishes not only the notion of cause but also that of substance/substratum (hupokeimenon). Indeed, matter, cause and substance are concepts that are both distinct and linked for Aristotle. But he affirms that the first philosophers only know one cause, or one substance, which is matter. Matter constitutes the substrative aspect of substance, as Aristotle says in the citation above: “the substance remaining, but changing in its modifications.” It is precisely in this sense that Longobardo identifies qi with material substance: “the eternal air, which is ungenerable and incorruptible in its substance but changeable through motion and rest,” is “the essence of all things.” In short, for Aristotle, matter is one cause among others, whereas according to Longobardo, the only cause in Chinese thought is matter, and this is why Confucian China and Presocratic Greece are primitive in the same way.

If qi were the only cause, Longobardo would be right to conclude that Chinese thought is materialist. However, if we compare li with the Aristotelian concept of cause and substance, we reach a different conclusion.

As for cause, Aristotle distinguishes four: formal, material, efficient and final; that is, matter and form are two different causes. As for substance, matter and form are considered as two fundamental components of substance. To a certain extent, li is to qi as form is to matter in Aristotle. We have mentioned above that li and qi are two causes in neo-Confucian cosmology. Just as form and matter are inseparable in a perceptible and singular substance and separable only by the intellect (Aristotle 1984b, 190a15), so li, the raison d’être of a thing, “can only be perceived with the intellect in the way in which we speak about spiritual things,” as Longobardo also admits. But let us recall that Ricci interprets inseparability as dependence so as to reduce li to an accident.

Aristotle’s hylomorphism and the neo-Confucian doctrine of li and qi are two different ways of explaining existence of things and their changes. They are comparable but not identical: comparable because both posit the concept of cause (“cause” in the sense of the Greek terms archē and aition, as Aristotle explains in Book V of Metaphysics) and that of substrative matter; not identical because from a semantic point of view, li is not the Chinese equivalent of Aristotelian form. The etymological meaning of li is the vein of jade; its derivative and abstract meaning is “lines which guide the constitution of things”9. But insofar as li is the cause of movement in qi and this movement determines the generation and corruption of things, li is analogous to form and qi is analogous to matter. Moreover, as the raison d’être of a thing, li is comparable to form in the sense of the essence or definition of a thing.10

At the same time, however, by considering li as accident, Longobardo relinquishes the possibility of understanding li from the perspective of cause or form. Consequently, the points on which we have attempted to establish the comparability of Aristotelianism and Confucianism elude him. By reducing Confucianism to materialism and atheism, he provokes a cultural conflict rather than leads to cultural dialogue. This conflict, known as the Chinese Terms Controversy as mentioned above, highlights the difficulty of transcultural understanding. Longobardo’s analysis reveals in particular the difficulty of extricating oneself from one’s own habits of thought and of speaking in the translation and interpretation of philosophic texts belonging to other traditions.

Ricci and Longobardo have the same superficial reading of both the Aristotelian substance and the neo-Confucian li. For them, as li is not a substance, it cannot be the first cause. In our view, li is compatible not only with the Aristotelian concept of substance, but also with the scholastic concept of God. Enrico Berti points out that in Thomistic theology, only God is worthy of the title of substance in the sense of Being itself subsisting (Esse ipsum subsistens). God, Creator of the entire universe, is Being understood as substance; that is to say, he is a substance whose essence is beingness. And consequently, God is Being itself, which subsists as substance. As we have shown, it is precisely with the notion of what subsists per se as substance that Ricci and Longobardo attack the neo-Confucian doctrine that li is the origin of the universe. However, Berti also argues for a continuity between Aristotle’s notion of being and Saint Thomas’ notion of God. In Aristotle’s worldview, there is nothing irreconcilable with the Christian notion of creation, since creation, as Saint Thomas says, does not necessarily imply a beginning of the world in time, but only a total dependence of the world on God. This way of understanding the relationship between God and the world can also be admitted in Aristotle’s metaphysics, especially the doctrine of the first principle (Berti 2008, pp. 162–68, 193–95). From this perspective, in neo-Confucianism, there is also nothing irreconcilable with the Christian notion of creation, because the relationship between li and the world can also be regarded as a total dependence of the world on li. In the passage on “li in things” quoted above, to the question, “Did pattern exist first or did qi exist first?”, Zhu Xi’s answer clearly indicates that li, not qi, is the first principle.

In short, our comparison between Aristotelianism and neo-Confucianism shows that the translation of abstract concepts such as God, angels or the soul is not simply the search of an equivalent, or the substitution of linguistic signs, as in the case of words denoting things within the surrounding world, because the meaning of this type of concepts, which are abstracted from the world of sensation, cannot be abstracted from the system of thought which engenders these concepts. The same applies for the Chinese terms taken as their equivalent: Longobardo is right to assert that these Chinese terms belong to a way of thinking that is fundamentally different from Christian creationism, but he wrongly ends up with materialism because he interprets the relationship between li and qi from a scholastic point of view.

The Jesuit interpretation of neo-Confucianism shows that worldviews intersect even as they distinguish themselves. The positing of a first cause is one of the points where the two worldviews intersect, probably because we need a first cause to make the world explainable and intelligible. But there are different ways of conceiving the first cause and its relationship with the world.

5. Conclusions

The encounter between Christianity and Confucianism is a confrontation of two worldviews. The notion of first cause is part of the philosophical foundation of a worldview. The question as to whether the first cause is material for the Chinese is crucial for judging the compatibility of the two worldviews. Longobardo interprets a Chinese concept not in a Chinese but in a European context by translating the term from Chinese into Latin in order to determine whether it conforms to Christian teachings.

The question of the first cause is a point upon which worldviews intersect yet retain their distinctiveness. The notion of God (or of spiritual substance) and that of li are two ways of conceiving the first cause, comparable but not reducible to each other: Longobardo’s comparison between qi and prime matter depends on the understanding of the concept of spiritual substance (a kind of first cause) in Chinese thought.

Longobardo’s difficulty in understanding the concept of li and its relationship with qi stems from viewing these concepts through a Christian lens. It is understandable that a Jesuit would want his own worldview, which is explicated through Aristotelian–Thomistic theology, to be accepted by the Chinese instead of accepting the Chinese worldview. But his decontextualising interpretation of Chinese philosophy reinforced political and religious conflicts. As Geoffrey Lloyd puts it, “the crucial point is that they [the misunderstandings when Europeans, Jesuit missionaries in the van, first got to China] need not have arisen—if, that is, the Europeans had been prepared to examine indigenous Chinese beliefs more carefully” (Lloyd 2019, p. 38). In our view, misunderstandings are unavoidable in transcultural dialogue, since everyone is influenced by one’s own language and cultural tradition when understanding another culture. Although Longobardo’s interpretation of Neo-Confucianism has been superseded by more recent philological and philosophical research, its value lies in how it exposes the linguistic and cultural differences between Confucianism and Christianity. In doing so, it also illustrates both the difficulty and the necessity of transcultural dialogue in general.