This title is somewhat provocative: anyone who knows a little about Leibniz will also know that such a question is practically impossible to answer in a short article like this one.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born on 1 July 1646, in Leipzig, Germany. He is an inescapable character for anyone interested in the history of philosophy and mathematics in 17th- and 18th-century Europe. Possessing an insatiable intellect, he applied himself to philosophical topics ranging from metaphysics to logic, among many other areas of knowledge and thought.
In the field of mathematics, he became known for developing differential and integral calculus, a discovery he made around the same time as another unavoidable figure in the history of European thought, the Englishman Isaac Newton. For quite some time, controversy persisted between England and Germany as to the true paternity of the discovery, with some English commentators accusing Leibniz of having had access to Newton’s work through one of his followers.
Eventually, the controversy subsided, and nowadays, the consensus holds that the two mathematicians made the same discovery independently, although by different paths.
A relatively little-known facet of Leibniz’s intellectual activity was his deep interest in Chinese civilisation and culture, based on the earliest Chinese philosophical writings, which he accessed through Jesuit missionaries.
From the second half of the 16th century onwards, missionaries from the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) began to enter China in an organised manner, taking advantage of the newly established southern trading post of Macau, then under Portuguese rule.
This would not be the first time that Europeans had managed to enter and set up residence in China, even gaining access to the imperial court: they had already done so during the Yuan dynasty in the 13th and 14th centuries. This time, however, the context was radically different. The Society of Jesus, founded in 1540, was a Catholic order that was both very disciplined and very keen to make contact with different cultures and civilisations.
Using Macau as a stepping-stone, then, Jesuit missionaries began to enter China, targeting above all the capital, Beijing, and armed with a powerful intellectual arsenal: advanced European scientific and technological knowledge. With it, they brought a fierce determination to bridge the cultural gap between the two worlds. Their ultimate objective, though, was less innocent and much more ambitious: the conversion of the Chinese people to Christianity.
On arrival, the missionaries faced a very ancient and self-contained civilisation. The Chinese language, which they now had to learn, did not (and still does not) bear any similarity to European languages. The philosophical and religious concepts of Chinese culture, in which they also had to immerse themselves, were equally far removed.
We will talk more later about the details of this mission, in a text to be published on this website.
What is important for now is that despite never having visited China, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz maintained a steady correspondence with the Jesuit missionaries who had lived there and knew the country and its ancient culture. In 1689, Leibniz met in Rome with Claudio Grimaldi, who had just returned from a 17-year sojourn in China, and they began a correspondence that would last for several years.
Grimaldi was not the only member of the China Mission with whom Leibniz maintained regular correspondence. The philosopher also had access to partial translations of Chinese classics and works authored by Jesuit missionaries on Chinese culture and civilisation.
One such author, and a significant influence on Leibniz’s thinking, was the Italian missionary Matteo Ricci, the 16th-century founder of the China Mission. When Leibniz was born, Ricci had already been dead for 36 years, but the impact of his work endured.
Matteo Ricci not only spoke Chinese but also mastered the classical form of the language and was the author of a memorable work, written in Chinese, under the title The True Meaning of the Lord of the Heaven (Tianzhu Shiyi 天主实义).
At a certain point, a pressing question began to arise among Catholic missionaries: to what extent would Chinese cultural traditions, with their millennia-deep roots, prove compatible with Christianity? Or in other words, would conversion to Christianity force the Chinese people to renounce these traditions?
Most Jesuits of the China Mission accepted the position defended by Ricci, which became known as the ‘accommodationist’ approach. For Ricci, it was not a requisite that the Chinese must break with their philosophical and religious roots before converting to Christianity. His reasoning was that the oldest Chinese writings shared a common basis, and were thus compatible, with the principles of Christianity.
A minority of Jesuits, however, as well as other sectors of the Catholic Church, argued the opposite.
The debate, known as the Rites Controversy, lasted for 150 years, until in 1742, Pope Benedict XIV put an end to the disagreements, coming down in favour of those who opposed the accommodationist strategy.
Leibniz, on the other hand, supported Ricci’s ideas and argued in his own writings for the compatibility of the ancient philosophical principles of Chinese culture and the fundamental ideas of Christianity.
These arguments appear, developed and systematised, in the book that became known as Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese. Originally, this work was not a book but rather a letter-essay, written in response to a letter from the French Jesuit Nicholas Rémond, in which he asked Leibniz to comment on some texts by Jesuit missionaries on Chinese thought.
In this work, Leibniz justified his defence of Ricci’s strategy and the parallelism and compatibility between ancient Chinese thinking and Christianity. The expression ‘natural theology’ was initially used by Matteo Ricci.
A particular aspect of Chinese tradition that caught Leibniz’s attention was the classic I Ching (Yijing 易经), The Book of Changes. This work would become popular in the West in the second half of the 20th century, largely due to the publication of an English version – based on Richard Wilhelm’s German translation from the Chinese original – which featured a preface by the famous Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, Carl G. Jung.
It was one of Leibniz’s correspondents, Joachim Bouvet, who alerted him to the detailed hexagrams of the I Ching, each composed of six lines, based on a binary system, with each hexagram resulting from a combination of solid lines (––) and broken lines (– –), symbolising the principle of yin and yang. This represents something akin to the polarity of ‘1’ and ‘0’ in Leibniz’s binary arithmetic, which is the key to computer systems and, therefore, to our daily lives.
As Leibniz realised, the Chinese were ahead of him (and, of course, of us) by three millennia!
