Aleni (Giulio)

(at times spelt Giulio Alenio) (1582-1649)
1.	Giulio Aleni was born in Brescia (Italy) in 1582 and died at Fuzhou (China)on the 10th of June 1649. He was an Italian Jesuit missionary. After entering the Society of Jesus, Aleni was sent for a brief mission to Peru. After that, he was finally sent to China. He landed in Macao in 1610 (the year Matteo Ricci died in Peking). He spent his first three years teaching mathematics while waiting for a favourable opportunity to penetrate into China. Following the example of Matteo Rici, Aleni began a serious study of Chinese language and culture and he saw his knowledge of mathematics as a very useful tool of starting a dialogue with Chinese scholars. As Matteo Ricci had done before (keeping a constant correspondence with his professor Christopher Clavius), Aleni kept constant epistolar correspondence with the Italian astronomer A. G. Magini, who updated the far away missionary on the most recent scientific development in Europe. He was known to the Chinese as Ai Ru-lue艾儒略 and was called "Confucius from the West".
2.	Aleni was a man of letters, a cartographer, an astronomer, a mathematician, above all he was a missionary. He was the first Christian missionary in Kiangsi, and built several churches in Fujian.   His 39 years of work in China was marked by unceasing zeal and considerable success. He adopted the dress and manners of the country. He wrote 25 books in Chinese (some religious, some scientific).         In 1620, Aleni reprinted Matteo Ricci’s world map (il mappamondo). Aleni's name is in the left-most column of Chinese on the upper half, above the Jesuit seal.                                                                           Around 1620, Aleni supervised the wood-block printing of a book entitled “K`un-yü t`u-shuo”, which literally means “An Illustrated Explanation of Geography”. In it Aleni presents the Western world to the Chinese.   In 1623 Aleni wrote a cosmography “Iche fang wai ki Hang-chow” in six volumes, which was translated into Manchu under the title “The True Origin of 10,000 Things”, a copy of which was sent from Peking to Paris in 1789.
3.	Aleni brought western iconography to China, where it was used as the Chinese themselves had used illustrations, especially in Buddho-Taoist teaching. He wrote “T`ien-chu chiang-sheng ch`u-hsiang ching-chieh”, an illustrated life of Jesus in 8 volumes, published in Peking in 1635-1637. Religious illustrations made the reading more attractive even for non-Christians. It was republished several times. In 1887 it was edited in three volumes. It was appreciated by many. Even protestant missionaries adopted it.                                  We must admit that Aleni’s wood block engraving does not represent the best of Chinese wood-block engraving of the the time, but appears to be a cheap printing (there is no publishing information given). It was probably sponsored by one of the churches that Aleni fostered in Fukien, where low-cost and quick printing abounded.
4.	Aleni, following “Matteo Ricci’s rules of inculturation of the Gospel into Chinese society, had to face the same problem: how to judge what is acceptable and what can not be accepted into Christianity. Besides the three main religious bodies of “Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism, “folk beliefs” had flourished immensely in the Ming and Qing dynasties.   When Matteo Ricci and later Aleni arrived in China at the end of the 16th century, they were immediately impressed by the prosperity of “folk beliefs”:  the number of idols throughout the kingdom of China was simply incredible. Not only there were idols by the thousands to be found in a single temple, there were in nearly every private dwelling.   How did the Jesuit missionaries respond to this challenge? Instead of out rightly refuting all Chinese customs as “idolatrous”, the missionaries, after studying well Chinese culture and asking opinions from Chinese scholars, concluded that some customs were not superstitious and were compatible with Christian doctrine (such as ancestral sacrifices which were just an expression of the later generation’s filial piety in accordance to Confucius). However, Matteo Ricci and Giulio Aleni opposed those ancestral rites which were tinged with superstition such as burning paper money to the dead. The missionaries were against forms of “divination by casting lots”, ”selection of lucky and unlucky days”, ”fortune -telling” and other superstitious practices.   One interesting fact is that the Jesuits tried to seek support for their arguments from the Confucian Classics. Jesuits like Giulio Aleni and others wanted to explain that their judgment of “heresy” on some folk beliefs, were due not only to the latter's fundamental conflict with Catholic doctrine, but also to the fact that they had diverged widely from the teaching of orthodox Confucianism. For example even Confucians prohibited people burning paper money to the dead. From 16th to 17th century, a group of orthodox Confucian scholars in China were promoting cultural reform with the aim of rebuilding a new social order based on pure Confucian rituals and doctrines. People would logically conclude that Catholicism was an “orthodox” religion, since it was compatible with some standards of Confucianism. In other words, Jesuits tried to "ally" Catholicism with Confucianism, and make it widely accepted by Ming-Qing Chinese society.Actually, this was a very good demonstration of the strategy of so called “cultural accommodation” by the Jesuits in late Ming and early Qing China because they knew very well this was the only way to root Catholicism in this “central kingdom”, according to the famous “Matteo Ricci’s rules”.