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Jonathan D. Spence occupies a peculiar position of celebrity among historians. He probably may be considered to be one of the greatest Western scholars of China. More over, his historical writings are the most reliable amongst those of these days.
His prose is usually described with the help of such words as graceful and impeccable. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci is one of his masterpieces. One of the first Christian missionaries Matteo Ricci went to China in the late sixteenth century. Spence depicts his life in China from a number of different perspectives. Most of them are connected to the circumstances of Ricci's childhood that he had spent in Italy, the birthplace of counter-reformation. The author portrays startling picture of how did foreigners live in China under the rule of the Ming dynasty.
It also characterizes ways the Roman Catholic missionaries used for evangelism to take roots. Evidently, they considered it too hard for Chinese to comprehend the whole Gospel message. That is why they attempted to bring it partially. Though Ricci had spent the rest of his life in China that constituted thirty-two years, still after his death, such notions as crucifixion, resurrection, and incarnation had not been explained properly to Chinese. Matteo Ricci was an Italian Jesuit. He went to China to disseminate Catholicism into the mostly Confucian country.
He had to find a convincing reason to make educated Chinese deny their original faith in favor of the one Ricci brought. One way to do it was to demonstrate the superiority of Western traditions and way of life. He found out that to tempt the Confucians to lend their ears to him, he should teach them some academic hints to improve their memory abilities. As the country accounted numerous rituals, traditions, and laws, it was rather useful capability to learn them all. With the help of this method Ricci drawn in a lot of students, who were interested in doing well on their exams. He received readily disposed listeners and became one of the first Western missionaries to learn their language well enough to understand the country he chose as his home.
One more thing that is of great importance, is that Ricci also managed to gain a sympathetic comprehension of China, which he brought to Rome, and subsequently to Europe. In 1596, Ricci wrote A Treatise on Mnemonics. It was a work in Chinese destined for the governor of Jiangxi Province. In it he depicted the medieval European concept of a memory palace a premise built in the mind and furnished with memorable things. Remembering is a process of entering the rooms and tying information to their essence. That essence should be perceptible as well as dramatic.
Matteo Ricci explained the Chinese how to create that memory palace. He taught them that the dimensions of this palace would lies upon how much they would like to remember: the most arrogant design would be made up of several hundred buildings of diverse forms and sizes; "the more there are the better it will be, " Ricci claims. One could establish modest place, or one could create less striking buildings such as a temple mixture, a clump of government premises, a public hall, or a merchants' waiting room. If one desired to start with a still smaller range, then he could construct a unpretentious reception hall, or a pavilion. And if one wished to create a private space he could utilize just the corner of that pavilion, or an altar in a temple, or even such a homely thing as a wardrobe or a sofa. In summing up this memory scheme, he taught that these palaces were intellectual systems to be held in one's head, not huge objects to be competently designed out of "real" matter.
Ricci supposed that there were three main opportunities for such memory placement. First, it could be take it out of reality - that is, from structures that one had seen himself and remembered in his mind. Second, it could be totally fabricated, provision of the imagination evoked by it in any form or size. Or third, it could be half real and half fabricated, as in the event of a constructing a thing one was well acquainted with and by which he fractured nonexistent door as a way to new frontiers.
The true aim of all these intellectual systems was to give storage place for the myriad notions that sum up to our human intelligence. Ricci wrote, that to all things we want to remember, we should connect an image; and to each of these images we should set a posture to which it reposes calmly until we are eager to demand the return of it by an act of recollection. Since this whole memory scheme can function only if the objects stay in the directed positions and if we can immediately remember where we put them, evidently it seems to be less difficult to rely on real positions that we know perfectly enough to never forget them. But Ricci thought that it would be wrong. For it is by enlarging the amount of positions and the appropriate number of reflections that can be kept in them, that we enlarge and reinforce our memory.
So the Chinese should fight with the hard mission of setting up unreal places, or combining the unreal with the real, establishing them constantly in their minds by permanent practice and revising in order that at last the unreal places become "as if real, and can never be erased. " The point was that the Chinese should be interested in how on earth had such a system developed. And Ricci would anticipate their questions by summing up the ancient traditions of the West, which attributes the concept of memory with the help of careful lodging to the Greek poet Simonides... As Ricci explained (providing the closest approximation he could in Chinese for the poet's name): Mnemonic method is a common skill for remembering the sequence of objects that had been worked out into a system through the following centuries. Since Ricci himself was a Catholic monk, he expected that once the Chinese recognized the importance of mnemonic powers they would be forced to enquire him about the religion that implemented such miracles into reality. Some consider that Ricci was fetching contemporary innovations to the Catholic Church, but he also took the Chinese back to the fundamentals of the medieval church, world where the reason was intended to function with minimal guidance from outside pressures. By now, Ricci's garish hints of remembering were dropped out from favor.
Europe censured them as sorcery and witch crafting. However, this was China. Ricci left his imprint on China. For sure, he did not execute prevalent talks. But his legation did abstained from the first sound intellectual connection between European and Chinese cultures.
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Research essay sample on Life In China One Of The First Ricci
