From Overcoming Self to Overcoming Nature: Teaching on Human Nature in Ricci, Pantoja, and Aleni

“what heaven imparts to man is called human nature. To follow our nature is called the Way. Cultivating the Way is called education.”1 Thus say the opening sentences of The Doctrine of the Mean, a Confucian classic traditionally attributed to Confucius’s grandson Zisi. Neo-Confucianism, which was predominant in the Chinese intellectual world from the middle of the ninth to the seventeenth century, anchored the way of moral cultivation in following the heavenly-ordained human nature. As we can see in Matteo Ricci’s record of his 1599 debate on the good of human nature, the Jesuit missionary quickly realized upon his arrival in China how popular the issue of human nature was among the Chinese literati.2 In Chapter 7 of The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (1604), Ricci discussed at length the good of human nature. He insisted that our originally good nature is infected with disease3 and that overcoming self is a way to be rid of evil,4 but he did not give an explicit opinion on the Confucian teaching of following human nature found in The Doctrine of the Mean. That silence was to be broken very soon.
In 1610, Ricci’s confrere and collaborator Diego de Pantoja coined [End Page 76] the phrasing “to overcome nature” as a way of presenting a Catholic response to the Confucian axiom “to follow nature is the Way.” Because the Jesuits started to establish Catholic missionary work in China at the end of the sixteenth century, Pantoja’s teaching was the first Catholic response to the Confucian axiom on human nature. Two decades later, the Jesuit Giulio Aleni gave this Catholic response a final form and proposed that “overcoming human nature is called the Way.”5 This article will investigate the transition from overcoming self to overcoming human nature in the work of early Jesuit missionaries in China and explore how Pantoja and Aleni taught “overcoming human nature” to further the uncontroversial issue of “overcoming self.” The exploration will consider both the Western and Chinese intellectual sources and backgrounds that shaped their teachings to illustrate the interaction of the two traditions in the early seventeenth century.