‘Figurism' as the capture of others' religion for one's own.
In the modern era, specifically in the seventeenth century, one finds in a number of scholarly texts a general hermeneutic aim to plunder non Christian peoples of their profound wisdom. Notably, the very learned bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet[1] in his Demonstratio evangelica of 1679 searched for and found the ‘figuras' of Moses in the pagan religions of ancient Egypt and India. But this kind of hermeneutics seemed to have blossomed remarkably amongst Jesuit missionaries looking to find a niche, in the first place, in China, and also in the Americas.
Around about 1730, as European scholars reflected upon the wisdom of distant lands (foreign to Christianity), one begins to speak of ‘figurists' in the broad sense. Not that this is a clearly identifiable school of exegesis, but it relates to a number of Jesuits who had for some time been researching traces of biblical elements in the classical texts of distant cultures, and especially in China, in the I-Ching[2] . In a letter sent to the Abbé Bignon in 1704, Father Bouvet[3] wrote: “There is no mystery in the Christian religion, no dogma in our theology, no maxim in the sanctity of our moral code which is not expressed in these books (the Chinese canon), with a surprising clarity, and in infinite ways which are equally as ingenious and sublime, and which generally relate to the same figuras and symbols as in divine scripture.” Father Joseph-Henri de Prémare[4] appears to be he most important ‘figurist'; he picked out, amongst others, traces of the following elements of the Bible in Chinese classics: the story of the fall of the angels, the fall of man, redemption, the idea of Heaven, redemption through a Saviour, and even the immaculate conception, of which he said; “In the ancient Chinese books there is nothing more frequently referred to as a woman who is a virgin and mother at the same time, a virgin-mother honoured by the Chinese until today.”
The Jesuits would therefore have the advantage of the Confucian scholars in that they understood the true meaning of the wonders on which those scholars were nourished. This claim, furthermore, is reasserted by Matteo Ricci , who already knew better than the Chinese the real meaning of the Heaven to which they addressed their sacrifices. The Jesuits were able to translate Heaven (Chinese Tianciù in Ricci's transcription), as God. This Heaven to which the Emperor sacrificed becomes a providential buttress for the justifying exegesis and Ricci devoted a whole book to it in Chinese: The real meaning of the Lord of Heaven. The Chinese were predestined to receive the Christian religion.
The grievous consequences of this universal postulation is, for religion, evidence of a mechanism analogous to Roland Barthe's ‘flight of Language'. The religion of others, fundamentally, may be captured for one's own. There is no place, other than to outrage, for difference.
