The Missionary Work of Fray Antonio de Santa Maria Caballero in 17th-century China and Leibniz’s “Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese”

This paper examines the life and work of the Spanish missionary Antonio de Santa Maria Caballero (1602–1669), who played a significant role in re-establishing the Franciscan presence in the Catholic missions of China during the 17th century. Caballero began his active missionary work in 1633 and became proficient in the Chinese language and culture, mainly focusing on understanding the works of Confucius and other classics. His dedication allowed him to pass the rigorous imperial exams in Lipu, northeast of Guangxi, in 1653. Caballero’s work, published in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Chinese, includes books, treatises, comments, and letters that identify his missionary theory and practice. He strongly opposed the accommodation model promoted by the Jesuits, which allowed Chinese converts to Christianity to continue practicing ancestor rituals and worshiping Confucius. Caballero criticized any blending of traditional Chinese beliefs with Christian doctrine. In 1666, together with 24 other Catholic missionaries in China, Caballero was arrested and exiled to Canton, where he died three years later. During exile, the surviving missionaries, 20 Jesuits, three Dominicans, and Caballero, held from December 18, 1667, to January 26, 1668, a series of meetings that, later known as “Canton Conferences”, intended to develop a consensual text on the missionary strategy. Dominated by the Jesuit accommodationist model, all the missionaries present signed the final document known in Latin as Acta Cantoniensia authentica, except Caballero, who immediately worked on a document justifying his critical position. The result was a long letter written originally in Spanish addressed in 1668 to the Portuguese Jesuit Luís da Gama (1610–1672), then provincial of China and Japan, entitled “Tratado que se remitió al muy R. P. Luís de Gama de la Compañia de Jesús sobre algunos puntos de esta misión de la Gran China” (Treatise sent to the very R. P. Luís de Gama of the Society of Jesus on some points of this mission in Great China). Mobilizing the main Confucian and neo-Confucian classics that Caballero shared in-depth, the text criticized in detail the cults of ancestors and Confucius as pagan, also denying any possibility of finding even remote forms of natural theology and an approach to the Christian God among the ancient school traditions that underpinned traditional cults. At the same time, seeking to substantiate his critical positions with works produced by some Jesuits, Caballero translated into Latin during this period of exile a treatise initially written in Portuguese by the Italian Jesuit Nicolò Longobardo, the successor of Matteo Ricci, critic of the accommodationist model and, in particular, of the proposed Chinese translations of the name of God. The two texts, Caballero’s letter and Longobardo’s treatise were translated into French and published in Paris in 1701 by the Society of Foreign Missions of Paris, a congregation extremely hostile to the Jesuit missionary model in China. Entitled “Anciens Traitez de divers auteurs sur les ceremonies de la Chine” (Ancient Treatises of various authors on the ceremonies of China), the work would be offered in 1715 to the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz at the end of 1715 by his French correspondent Nicolas-François Rémond de Montfort. The critical reading of Leibniz produced his unfinished reflections, written in 1716, on the ethical compatibility between Chinese classical moral thought and Christian doctrine written in French as “Lettre sur la philosophie chinoise à Monsieur de Rémond” (Letter on the Chinese Philosophy to M. Remond). Republished since 1977 as “Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese,” Leibniz’s text is a defense of the Jesuit missionary accommodation system, stressing its contribution to his personal ongoing research on the possibilities of an autonomous, universal moral philosophy grounded in transcultural foundations.