Celebrating Aquinas in China
Over the past year and a half there have been commemorations of the 800th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Aquinas, including lectures, conferences, and publications exploring his philosophical and theological insights and the enduring value of his thought. Surprising to many were the commemorations, indeed celebrations, that have taken place in China.
In June 2024, the School of Philosophy of Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan was the site of a two-day conference commemorating the birth of Thomas Aquinas. The conference was co-sponsored with the Chinese National Forum of Medieval Philosophy, an organization of Chinese academics that was established in 2019. The announcement noted that Thomas Aquinas “occupies an important historical position in the history of Western philosophy; he is the greatest teacher of all philosophies” worthy to be celebrated “in a spirit of reverence.”
The conference had seventy participants from thirty Chinese universities. Along with talks on a wide variety of subjects concerning Aquinas was a celebration of a new Chinese translation of the Summa Theologiae. There were talks on the epistemology, anthropology, metaphysics, and theology of Aquinas. Several emphasized the importance of Aquinas’s thought for contemporary intellectual and cultural themes.
On 15 January 2025, a famous newspaper in Shanghai, the Wenhui Daily, published an essay by Qi Zhao, Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, with the title: “‘He is for all ages’—Commemorating the eight hundredth anniversary of the birth of Thomas Aquinas.” She noted that Aquinas’s
academic achievements can be called a miracle in the history of human thought. He integrated almost all the available intellectual (si xiang) achievements in Western Europe in the 13th century, including the essence of ancient Greek, Medieval, Islamic, and Jewish philosophy. … Although inevitably marked by the medieval era, Aquinas’s thought has unique contemporary value. A philosopher [Etienne Gilson] once profoundly pointed out that “knowing Aquinas is equivalent to knowing the best, most capable, and most modern mind of the Middle Ages, because Aquinas is both timeless (chao shi) and timely (he shi), and he is suitable for people of all times.”
Among Aquinas’s many contributions, “two are the most notable. One is that he integrated Aristotle’s classical philosophy with the medieval belief tradition, and the other is that he provided the intellectual foundation for the transition of Western civilization from the Middle Ages to the modern world, [a transition that served as] the intellectual bridge of Western civilization.”
Quoting Pope St. John Paul II, who in 1999 gave Aquinas the title Doctor Humanitatis (this in addition to two other titles Aquinas had: Angelic Doctor and Common Doctor) (Inter Munera Academiarum, no. 4 [1999]), she noted that Aquinas was “always willing to accept the values of various cultures.” She concludes that although Aquinas never directly encountered Chinese civilization, his “respect for human nature and nature provides a broad space for contemporary Chinese scholars to study and learn from his thoughts.”
Qi’s essay is indicative of a new current of interest in Thomism, particularly in various academic circles in China. There is a historical dimension to this interest: the encounter between Jesuit missionaries and Chinese intellectuals, primarily in the seventeenth century. As part of their missionary project, the Jesuits brought with them sophisticated knowledge, especially, but not only, in mathematics and astronomy. They came to play important roles in the communication of astronomical observations and theories central to the development of the Chinese calendar. In particular, their scientific expertise gave them unprecedented access to Chinese intellectual circles and provided them with the opportunity to advance their missionary objectives of converting important Chinese scholars, and perhaps even the emperor, to Christianity.
The Jesuits did not bring their message to China into a vacuum, however. The China they entered possessed a literary-philosophical heritage that spanned millennia. Philosophical analysis was important since the Jesuits encountered sophisticated reflections in Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist thought. The Jesuit missionaries sought to expand on this foundation by explaining fundamental doctrines and practices of Christianity. They emphasized two doctrines in particular: creation and the immortality of the soul. As they sought to explain what they believed, especially about creation, they employed Chinese expressions, expressions that themselves had long interpretive histories.
Since the Jesuits translated commentaries in Aristotelian natural philosophy and metaphysics and embraced a Thomistic philosophy and theology in their own writings, scholars today who seek to understand the encounters in this period in Chinese history necessarily must reflect on the thought of both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. This interest in Aristotle and Aquinas as necessary for a historical understanding of a crucial period in Chinese history contributes to a deepening attempt to understand Thomas Aquinas.
Of the many examples in current scholarship, the most notable is French Jesuit priest Thierry Meynard, professor of philosophy at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. He has written extensively on how Jesuit missionaries came to understand Confucian and Daoist texts, and has published a French translation, with extensive notes, of Matteo Ricci’s famous work, True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven [Tianzhu shiyi], written as a dialogue between a Chinese Scholar and his Christian interlocutor.
Josef Pieper, the great twentieth-century German scholar, noted that the doctrine of creation is the key to Aquinas’s entire intellectual project. It is not surprising that the Jesuits, schooled as they were in Aquinas’s philosophy and theology, were particularly attentive to setting forth that God is the creator of all that is. Matteo Ricci argues that Neo-Confucian cosmology is inadequate to account for the existence of things; yet he thinks he finds in ancient Confucian thought expressions that can be employed in explaining what creation means. He also argues, in line with Aquinas’s fifth way to God, that the order and design evident in nature require an ultimate intelligible source.
With respect to creation proper, Ricci notes that nothing can create itself. Everything is propagated by something that precedes, and there must be a first cause (literally a “first ancestor” or chuzong). When the Chinese scholar asks from whom the Lord of Heaven was born, Ricci argues that God is the first cause because He is eternal:
The Lord of Heaven is referred to as the source of all things. If there were another who produces Him, the Lord of Heaven would cease to be the Lord of Heaven. … The Lord of Heaven has no beginning and no end and is therefore the beginning of all things and the root of all things. If there were no Lord of Heaven there would be nothing else. All things were produced by the Lord of Heaven, but the Lord of Heaven was not produced by anything else.
The work of another Jesuit, Giulio Aleni, is the subject of considerable interest today. In The True Source of the Myriad of Things (Wanwu Zhenyuan) Aleni was assisted by Zhang Geng. They sought to show that Neo-Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism offer inadequate accounts of the origin of the world and processes in it. They were especially interested in rejecting the view they attributed to Neo-Confucian scholars, that the world undergoes a kind of spontaneous series of self-generated changes that do not require any external source.
In 2024, Biyun Dai of Nankai University and Paul Hosle of Fudan University published the first complete English translation of Wanwu Zhenyuan. Significantly, the title of Dai’s and Hosle’s book is Scholastic Metaphysics in Late Ming China, and it also provides the original Chinese text. Their introduction contains an excellent account of the content of the work, the intellectual context in which it appeared, its relationship to the work of Matteo Ricci, and descriptions of other works by Aleni. In setting forth the distinctive character of God as the source of all that is, Aleni and Zhang note that
the Lord of Heaven’s accomplishment in creating heaven and earth is not the same as humans’ accomplishments in creating things. … He absolutely did not rely on instruments but only issued from His own omnipotence, and whatever He wished to be generated was generated. … He absolutely did not need to wait for time, but in a flash heaven and earth were established.
At the end of the dialogue, we find the response to the frequent question as to who generated the Lord of Heaven:
Alas! The Lord of Heaven is the source-less source of the myriad existents. Why do you inquire from where He is generated? If the Lord of Heaven had something from which He is generated, then He would not be the Lord of Heaven, because things with a beginning necessarily come from what has no beginning. … What I call the Lord of Heaven and the Creator can be compared to nothing in the world. … And so the Lord of Heaven naturally transcends the myriad of things, naturally precedes the myriad existents, has nothing from which he is generated, and is truly self-existent, and is the source of the myriad of things. … Think it over, think it over.
Indicative of the increased interest in the work of Aleni is the analysis of Professor Song Gang of Hong Kong University, who recently published an extensive analysis of Aleni’s Kouduo richao (The Diary of Oral Admonitions). Song notes that the text “records throughout its eight volumes the conversations between Giulio Aleni, three of his fellow Jesuits, and more than seventy Chinese figures, most of them being local converts in Fujian.”
As we have seen with the Wanwu Zhenyuan, the preparation for these texts involved the assistance of Chinese converts whose understanding of Chinese sources and the arguments of the Jesuits was crucial. For example, the 1628 work on cosmology, the Huanyou quan (Explanation of the Great Being), was a result of the collaboration of the Portuguese Jesuit, Francisco Furtado (1589–1653) and the Chinese Christian scholar, Li Zhizao (1571–1630). Beginning with an exposition of the doctrine of creation, the Huanyou quan starts with the notion of efficient cause (zuosuoyiran) and argues that to avoid infinite regress the chain of efficient causes in the natural world requires a first cause; this first cause has no other cause than itself, and this is God. This is not first in a chronological sequence but reflects a simultaneous dependence of all things on a first cause. As Furtado and Li write: “A first agent is needed as being common to the myriad of things.”
These texts are a very small part of a vast literature of the Jesuits and their Chinese Christian converts. In the seventeenth century, at least 590 Chinese Christian texts were produced, with a little more than one hundred in the form of dialogues. Aleni and his collaborators, for example, produced twenty-three works, ten of which were dialogues.
But the Jesuit encounter with Chinese philosophy did not end in the seventeenth century. Jesuits missionaries returned to China in the nineteenth century (after their suppression in 1741 and reestablishment in 1814). A recent book by Antonio De Caro, examining the contributions of the Jesuit missionary Angelo Zottoli (1826–1902), details the continuation of the themes established by the earlier Jesuits.
In citing these various texts by Jesuit missionaries, my point is that this interest in their encounter with Chinese culture now serves as a stimulus for increased reflection in China on the thought of Thomas Aquinas since, as we have seen, Aquinas’s work served as the foundation of the analyses the Jesuits set forth. The current interest in Aquinas’s thought in China is connected to the complementarity Aquinas saw between faith and reason, theology and philosophy and, notably, the role of reason in disclosing what Aquinas called “preambles” to faith: conclusions, based on reason alone, that allow one, for example, to come to know that God exists. For Aquinas, Christian faith perfects what reason comes to know about God and human being. Qi Zhao, in the essay cited above, claims that this is especially the case in ethics.
Aquinas’s discussion of creation is an excellent example of his broader understanding of the relationship between faith and reason. This allows him to engage with those who do not share his faith. Creation is a particularly good venue for such dialogue since reflection about the origin of things is a constant concern for human cultures, even though, as Aquinas recognized, not all reflections on origins result in what for him is an adequate grasp of creation.
There are intellectual hurdles to overcome in considering creation: the rejection of the idea of a transcendent cause, the denial of metaphysics and of the claim that existence is a brute fact that needs no cause, and the insistence that creation must mean a temporal beginning. These hurdles, however, are not limited to Chinese intellectual traditions. Aquinas always distinguished between a philosophical understanding of creation, set forth in the discipline of metaphysics, and a theological understanding based on revelation. The philosophical sense recognized that all that is, in whatever way or ways it is, is caused to be by God, and prescinded from any sense of temporality. Hence, were the universe to be eternal it still would be a created universe. The theological sense incorporates what philosophy discloses: not only that universe is temporally finite, but that it is the providential act of a Trinitarian God. Since for Aquinas philosophy alone shows us that the universe is created, his analysis is available for those who do not share his faith, in China, but not only in China. As Giulio Aleni noted in his discussion of creation in Wanwu Zhenyuan:
Reason is the common teacher of humanity. The people of the Eastern ocean and those of the Western ocean dwell in different lands but under the same heaven, possess different cultural and literary traditions but the same reason, and no one can escape from the teaching of this common teacher.
Thomas Aquinas can be celebrated by the peoples of both oceans.
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