The Global Air

The Chinese literati's most obvious encounter with Renaissance culture begins with the arrival of the Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) in 1582. Over the following decades Jesuit missionaries collaborated with Chinese literati to translate books on Western astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, calendaring, medicine, and on geological and meteorological matters, in addition to religious subjects. ¹ An adaptation of Aristotle's Meteorologica was produced in 1633 by the Italian Jesuit missionary Alfonso Vagnoni (known in Chinese as Gao Yizhi 高一志, 1566–1640) and his Chinese informant Han Yun 韓云 (1596–1639), titled in Chinese “Kongji gezhi” 空際格致 (lit. “Investigating the Empty Space”), which I will here render as Investigating the Impalpable Spheres. ² Vagnoni and his thirteen Chinese collaborators also produced a version of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics with Renaissance commentaries in 1637–39. ³ These publications followed Ricci's 1584 Christianized adaptation of Aristotelian ideas of the four elements and a 1628 version of Aristotle's De Caelo et Mundo produced by the Portuguese missionary Francois Furtado (Fu Fanji 傅汎際, 1587–1653) and Li Zhizao 李之藻 (1565–1630). ⁴ Scholarship, however, has generally seen the reception of Aristotelianism in a dim light, owing to its supposed incompatibility with the mainstream Chinese philosophies at that time, in contrast with the positive reception of the Gregorian calendar reform. ⁵ By focusing on the matter of air, in this essay, I will show that Chinese literati's engagement with Aristotelianism, on “their own terms,” was more dynamic and productive than has been acknowledged. ⁶