Matteo Ricci’s Emotional Communities: On Friendship between Christianity and (Neo)Confucianism

This paper analyses the emotional landscape in which operated the first Jesuit mission to China, headed by Matteo Ricci. As mentioned by the latter’s correspondence, fear was a common emotion in and around the Jesuit enterprise of China in general, due to its fragile legal recognition in the country. To resolve this issue, Ricci set out to persuade his Chinese audience of the virtuousness of love for one’s neighbour: a friendship that he postulated as marked by a set of specific practices and actions, with strong political and spiritual dimensions, rather than just a static, inactive feeling. He presented this principles to his Chinese audience through a collection of sentences taken from European Classical culture, titled On Friendship (Jiaoyou lun, 1596). This paper contextualizes them within the ideals of Jesuit friendship, which understood Roman and Greek sayings through the lens of centuries of Christian tradition, highlighting at the same time how the contingencies of the Chinese mission affected them.