In the spring of 1738, Fr. Bernardino Bevilacqua was hustled out of Shandong to quiet the uproar over his sexual seduction of young Chinese converts. Fr. Alessio Randanini followed him to Macau in 1741. The story of this scandal has remained largely untold for nearly three centuries. Among Christians in Shandong and southern Zhili provinces during the years 1650-1785, the spirit and the flesh lived in constant tension as the aspirations of the spirit (faith, hope, love, devotion, mercy, and piety) contended with the passions of the flesh (hatred, jealousy, lust, and pride). The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong tells the deeply human story of the introduction of Christianity to a provincial region in China where European missionaries shared the poverty and isolation of their Chinese flocks. Their close personal relationships led to intellectual and pastoral collaboration, suppression, an underground church, imprisonment, apostasy and martyrdom as well as peasant secret society affiliations, self-flagellation, and sexual seduction. In the remote villages of this region, the missionaries and their converts lived out their pious aspirations and eternal damnations under a darkening sky of growing anti-Christian policies from the capital.
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The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 1650-1785
In the spring of 1738, Fr. Bernardino Bevilacqua was hustled out of Shandong to quiet the uproar over his sexual seduction of young Chinese converts. Fr. Alessio Randanini followed him to Macau in 1741. The story of this scandal has remained largely untold for nearly three centuries. Among Christians in Shandong and southern Zhili provinces during the years 1650-1785, the spirit and the flesh lived in constant tension as the aspirations of the spirit (faith, hope, love, devotion, mercy, and piety) contended with the passions of the flesh (hatred, jealousy, lust, and pride). The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong tells the deeply human story of the introduction of Christianity to a provincial region in China where European missionaries shared the poverty and isolation of their Chinese flocks. Their close personal relationships led to intellectual and pastoral collaboration, suppression, an underground church, imprisonment, apostasy and martyrdom as well as peasant secret society affiliations, self-flagellation, and sexual seduction. In the remote villages of this region, the missionaries and their converts lived out their pious aspirations and eternal damnations under a darkening sky of growing anti-Christian policies from the capital.
In the spring of 1738, Fr. Bernardino Bevilacqua was hustled out of Shandong to quiet the uproar over his sexual seduction of young Chinese converts. Fr. Alessio Randanini followed him to Macau in 1741. The story of this scandal has remained largely untold for nearly three centuries. Among Christians in Shandong and southern Zhili provinces during the years 1650-1785, the spirit and the flesh lived in constant tension as the aspirations of the spirit (faith, hope, love, devotion, mercy, and piety) contended with the passions of the flesh (hatred, jealousy, lust, and pride). The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong tells the deeply human story of the introduction of Christianity to a provincial region in China where European missionaries shared the poverty and isolation of their Chinese flocks. Their close personal relationships led to intellectual and pastoral collaboration, suppression, an underground church, imprisonment, apostasy and martyrdom as well as peasant secret society affiliations, self-flagellation, and sexual seduction. In the remote villages of this region, the missionaries and their converts lived out their pious aspirations and eternal damnations under a darkening sky of growing anti-Christian policies from the capital.
D. E. Mungello is professor of history emeritus at Baylor University. His books include The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800, Drowning Girls in China: Female Infanticide since 1650, Western Queers in China: The Fight to the Land of Oz, and The Catholic Invasion of China.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Introduction Chapter 3 Prelude: Wondrous Signs Chapter 4 The Trials and Endeavors of Father Antonio Chapter 5 The Attempt to Blend Confucianism and Christianity Chapter 6 The Return to Shandong after the Anti-Christian Persecution of 1664-1669 Chapter 7 To Kiss the Image of the Crucified Jesus and to Feel the Whip Upon One's Flesh Chapter 8 Christianity and Chinese Heterodox Sects, 1701-34 Chapter 9 Shepards, Wolves, and Martyrs in the Underground Church Chapter 10 Postlude: Requiscat in pace Chapter 11 Chinese-Character Glossary
What People are Saying About This
Eugenio Menegon
"In The Spirit and the Flesh, Mungello directs his attention to the daily life of the Franciscan Christian communities in the northern Chinese province of Shandong between 1650 and 1785. He chronicles through the biographical experiences of Spanish and Italian Franciscans, belonging both to the Spanish Province of San Gregorio Magno and to Propaganda Fide, the difficult beginnings, the hard-won developments, and the eventual demise of the Shandong misison.
Daniel H. Bays
Mungello objectively captures the triumphs and tragedy of Franciscan priests and Chinese converts on the plains of Shandong. . . . Meticulously researched, engagingly written, and full of insights into the nature of early modern Chinese Catholicism.
Joanna Waley-Cohen
In this meticulous and fascinating account, David Mungello brings vividly to life the human experience of missionaries working across the provinces of Qing China—the sense of isolation, the poverty, the interdenominational friendships and disputes, and the worldly temptations. Illuminating the dependence of European missionaries on their Chinese converts, he shows the extent to which Christianity became assimilated into Chinese culture prior to the growth of European imperialism and, tantalizingly, suggests that often, the locales in which Christianity has resurfaced in China today correspond to the centers of clandestine mission activity two centuries ago.
Lionel M. Jensen
If, as Aby Warburg once wrote, 'God is in the details,' then D. E. Mungello's masterful reconstruction of the indigenization of Christianity in seventeenth and eighteenth century Shandong is divine. With his signature mastery of sources and ethnographic sensitivity to the scattered records of European missionaries and Chinese Christians, he vividly retraces the movements of body and spirit within a discrete interval of the Sino-western encounter to disclose the perilous but productive convergence of cultures presaging our global present. Most importantly, Mungello draws from these irreducible, faithful dead a tale of poignancy and power that in its eloquence binds readers of today (students and scholars alike) with a courageous creative minority whose ingenious embrace of Christianity was responsible for its assimilation into Chinese culture.