Ancestral Offering Rites, Catholicism, and Paradigmatic Mediation: Chinese Catholic and Confucian Intellectual Xia Da-chang's Treatises on the Chinese Rites Controversy

This paper analyzes the thought of Xia Dachang (Christian name: Madiya), a Confucian scholar and Catholic from Jiangxi who wrote several treatises on the issue of ancestral offerings during the Catholic Church’s Chinese Rites Controversy in the late-seventeenth century. Xia, as one of the first Chinese Christians to engage Western missionaries on this issue, refuted the notion that ancestral offering rituals—and their meanings within a Chinese context—were incompatible with Catholic theology. Xia used a scholar’s traditional research methodology toward the Confucian classics to explicate the meanings of ancestral offerings and to assert their commensurability with Catholicism. Specifically, he utilized the concept of xiao, or filiality, to mediate between the Catholic imperative to honor one’s father and mother and the social, moral, and intellectual norms of Confucian society, arguing that ancestral rites connect and fulfill the obligation of both traditions and that this practice would strengthen the Catholic identities of converts. Xia’s imaginative re-interpretation of the meaning of ancestral offering rituals, based on his study of Confucian classics, produced novel ideas in relation to both Catholic theology and contemporary Confucian classical scholarship. By studying Xia’s translation between intellectual and theological paradigms, this paper speaks to the processes through which Chinese thinkers during the Qing innovatively engaged novel philosophical-religious paradigms using their own methodologies and conceptual apparatuses. It concludes with a discussion of how studying Xia’s writings through a translation approach illuminates the problematics within contemporary scholarship on the histories of both ancestral offering rituals and the Chinese Rites Controversy.