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A Friend Who Does Me No Good: Aphorism In Matteo Ricci’S On Friendship, Maximilian Chan Weiher
A Friend Who Does Me No Good: Aphorism In Matteo Ricci’S On Friendship, Maximilian Chan Weiher
Asian Languages and Cultures Honors Projects
This paper argues that Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) designed his aphoristic compilation, Jiaoyou Lun 交友論–On Friendship (1595)–to serve the Jesuit mission of converting the Chinese to Catholicism and express the conflict he may have felt exploiting friends to forward the Jesuit mission. Utilizing friendships to allow for greater social influence was central to the Jesuit proselytization strategy in China. However, Ricci’s moral education from youth taught him to judge utilitarian friendships as immoral. The extant scholarship regarding Ricci’s On Friendship fails to acknowledge the significance of the aphoristic form to this work. To illuminate the value of aphorism …