A Brief Response on the Controversies over Shangdi, Tianshen and Linghun

Book excerpt: This book represents the first critical edition and scholarly annotated translation of a pioneering report on the predicament of cross-cultural understanding at the dawn of globalization, titled “A Brief Response on the Controversies over Shangdi, Tianshen and Linghun” (“Resposta breve sobre as Controversias do Xámtý, Tien Xîn, Lîm hoên”), which was written in China by the Sicilian Jesuit missionary Niccolò Longobardo (1565–1654) in the 1620s and profoundly influenced Enlightenment understandings of Asian philosophy. The book restores the focus on Longobardo’s own intellectual concerns, while also reproducing and analyzing all the Chinese-language annotations on the previously unpublished Portuguese and Latin manuscripts. Moreover, it meticulously modernizes all romanizations with standard Hanyu pinyin and identifies, on the basis of archival research, most of Longobardo’s Chinese interlocutors, thus providing new insights into how the Jesuits networked with Chinese scholars in the late Ming. In this way, it opens up this seminal text to Sinologists and global historians exploring Europe’s first intellectual exchanges with China. In addition, the book presents four introductory essays, written by the editors and two prominent scholars on the Jesuit China mission. These essays comprehensively reconstruct the historical and intellectual context of Longobardo’s report, stressing that it cannot be viewed purely as a product of Sino-European cultural exchange, but also as an outgrowth of both exegetic debates within Europe and of European experiences across Asia, especially in Japan. Hence this critical edition will greatly contribute to a more globalized view of the Jesuit China mission.