명말(明末) 예수회 선교사 마테오 리치에 대한 새로운 평가

Rethinking matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit Missionary to Late Ming China

The celebrated Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci has been recognized as a pathfinder of contextualization theology as he audaciously attributed traditional Confucianism as a missionary point of contact between Christianity and China during the last decades of the Ming Dynasty, China. His book T'ien-chu shih-i illustrates Ricci's innovative strategies of accommodating Confucian religiosity and philosophy into the basic doctrine of Christianity, especially on the concept of God, He tried to introduce the Western religion to the late Ming Chinese intellectuals avoiding their cultural reactions against encroaching foreign religion. His last book Chi-jen shih-p'ien, written in Chinese in 1608 just two years before his death at Peking, however, contains a very different religious and missiologial argument. Matteo Ricci articulated the traditional religious theme of Memento morifollowing the ways in which traditional European folk religion had been sustained and multiplied throughout the history of Medieval Europe, Matteo Ricci's last book, Chi-jen shih-p'ien, clearly shows that he was following the footsteps of numerous Counter-Reformation Jesuit preachers and missionaries who used the subject of Memento mori the scare tactics to convert non-believers and pagans in Europe and elsewhere. The Chinese intellectuals, however, did not hear Matteo Ricci's scary stories about death and hell without their own process of conceptualization. Their Neo-Confucian frameworks of the early seventeenth-century Ming China allowed them to accommodate and comprehend the teaching of Western Christianity from their own Neo-Confucian perspectives.