Figurism, a Missionary Theory of the Chinese Classics

Bouvet arrived in Beijing in the party of French Jesuits sent by Louis XIV, taught the Kangxi emperor mathematics, and developed a reading of the Chinese classics that he believed would open China to Christianity without asking anyone to abandon their own antiquity. The premise was that God gave a revelation to all humanity at the beginning, that fragments of it survive scattered through the oldest books of every people, and that the Chinese classics preserve an unusually pure portion. On that reading the Book of Changes is not a divination manual at all but a coded remnant of the primitive truth, and the sages of Chinese antiquity are witnesses to it.

The attraction of this to a missionary is obvious. It makes conversion a recovery rather than a replacement, and it makes the Chinese tradition an ally instead of a rival. The difficulty was that it convinced almost nobody. His own order was uneasy, Rome was hostile, and the wider dispute over whether Chinese converts might continue to honour their ancestors was moving against the Jesuit position at the same time. Figurism was effectively disowned, and Bouvet did not publish the bulk of what he wrote on it.

There was also a question of who was being persuaded. Figurism addressed two audiences at once. Chinese scholars were being told that their own canon pointed toward Christianity, and European readers were being told that Chinese antiquity was not a rival revelation but a damaged copy of their own. Both messages were flattering, and neither was entirely candid about what the other audience was hearing, which is a recurring difficulty in missionary theology rather than a fault peculiar to this case.