A sign of great penitence : food, fasting and the dilemmas of evangelization in Early Modern Chinese and Japanese missions

Since their very first entry into the Ming empire (Jesuits 1580s, Franciscans 1630s),
Christian missionaries produced an extensive body of testimonies on this exotic and unknown
territory, in which they described Chinese history, philosophy, nature, culture, religions,
society, and people, including Chinese food, culinary practices, and habits. This extensive
corpus of missionary documents not only discussed “things Chinese” but also
interpreted this unknown country for their European readers in a process our current scholarship
has deemed as “transcultural translation”, during which the foreign culture is explained
using familiar European terms.
In my article, I focus on one particular aspect of food intake, or rather its voluntary absence:
the practices of ecclesiastical fasting. I analyse how the first Jesuit and Franciscan
missionaries understood fasting in the particular context of Chinese and Japanese culture
and, more importantly, what obstacles and dilemmas they had to face in establishing it in
their missionary work. I then relate these doubts and questions to contemporary missionary
casuistry and moral theology. Finally, I explore ecclesiastical fasting as a compelling symbol
of Christianity’s encounter with the alien spiritual and cultural idioms of China (and
Japan). I argue that it exemplifies the nature of the inter-cultural and inter-religious confrontation,
displaying the inevitable difficulties inherent in rendering the Christian message.
As far as the methodology is concerned, I explore some central assumptions of transculturality,
transcultural translation, and Otherness, though I also point out the potential flaws
and deficiencies of these perspectives when applied to this textual material. However, I do
not aim at establishing an unambiguous methodology for dealing with these sources; my
intention is rather to emphasize the absence of a reliable methodological approach for Early
Modern missionary documents.

Keywords: Early Modern missions in Northeast Asia; Franciscans; Jesuits; fasting; confessio
fidei; authenticity of faith