The Wise Man from the West: Matteo Ricci and His Mission to China

by Vincent Cronin

Overview

This is the amazing story of the famous Jesuit missionary priest to China, Fr. Matteo Ricci, revered as a "Wise Man" by the Chinese. He arrived in China in 1582 and died there twenty-eight years later, having developing a deep knowledge of and love for the country, the culture and the people.

Before Ricci's heroic mission, China was an unexplored land bordering on the vague, mysterious Cathay, and the West was no more than a rumor to the learned Mandarins, a distant unknown region lying beyond the bounds of geography. In the person of Father Ricci these two worlds met, and Vincent Cronin dramatically recreates the romance, the crossed purposes, the potential tragedy of that meeting. He shows us ancient China, the timeless state, with a civilization older than that wherein Christianity first found expression.

Because Ricci loved this civilization and honored it, he was able to teach his strange new Christian doctrine with tact and sympathy. He carried much of the technological and philosophical wisdom of the late Renaissance Europe, and thus found favor among the Mandarins, the men of learning who enjoyed high status at the Imperial Court. He learned Chinese to discuss with them the problems in science and technology, and also questions of religion and the hereafter. He lived as a great scholar among great scholars and left behind him a memory worthy of the Christian faith he served.

Well researched and written with an enchanting style, Cronin relied almost entirely on contemporary material only recently assembled, including Father Ricci's own letters and reports, and his account of China written in Peking before his death. The seed of Faith was sown and the crop, even after a century of atheistic communism, continues to grow in present- day China.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781621640042
Publisher:	Ignatius Press
Publication date:	10/12/2016
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	935,527
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Vincent Cronin (1924-2011), was a British historical, cultural, and biographical writer, well-known for his many historical biographies and for his two-volume history of the Renaissance. Acclaimed for his scholarly and  elegantly written works, he was as one of the finest popular historians of his generation, best known for his biographies of of Louis XIV, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, and Napoleon.

Table of Contents

Foreword 17

Prologue: The Sealed Empire 25

1 Call to the East 31

2 Breaking the Seal 53

3 Paradise Revealed 71

4 Gaining Ground 87

5 Bonze Into Graduate 103

6 Up the Imperial Canal 125

7 A Banquet in Nanking 135

8 Prisoners of the Eunuch 151

9 Within the Forbidden City 163

10 The Castle of the Barbarians 177

11 The Clash with the Buddhists 197

12 Adorers of the Cross 213

13 The Quest for Cathay 227

14 Unless the Grain Die 245

Epilogue: The End of the Mission 259

Note 273

Short Bibliography 275

Editorial Reviews

"Matteo Ricci was, by any standards, an extraordinary man. One concludes from reading this riveting book just how pertinent Ricci remains to both modern China and to the Church, ever ancient and ever new."
— James V. Schall, S.J., From the Foreword

"A book which does for once deserve the all too lightly used adjective 'outstanding.' "
— Honor Tracy, New Statesman

"A delightfully told story of a truly remarkable man."
— Rodney Gilbert, New York Herald Tribune

"The binoculars of history have brought his life into focus so that Chinese and Western Christians can appreciate both his wisdom and his sanctity are worthy of emulation. This book focuses us today on someone who may be canonized at last and teach us his brilliant ways to evangelize."
— Fr. Mitch Pacwa, SJ, Host, EWTN Live

"In this classic, Matteo Ricci and the other Christian missionaries to China truly come alive, reminding all of us that the heart of the New Evangelization still resides in going out of ourselves and boldly proclaiming the loving mercy of Christ, despite whatever cost."
— Fr. David Meconi, SJ, St. Louis University

"The story of Matteo Ricci's efforts to bring China to the Catholic Faith is an exciting tale, replete with historical, cultural, philosophical and theological material. The style is engaging and often reads like a spy novel. Father Ricci was a brilliant man, possessed of a vast body of knowledge that one would be hard pressed to find in a single individual today. The driving passion of his life, however, was the conversion of China."
— Fr. Peter Stravinskas, The Catholic Response

From the Publisher