“Reason is the first principle of all human acts”: Reason and Virtue according to St Thomas Aquinas and Matteo Ricci

Abstract

The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) was rightly called “the apostle of China.” Far from being moved by obscure impulses of intolerance and domination, as some of his modern detractors suggest, but reasonably convinced that only Jesus Christ is the Way leading to the supreme happiness of man, he found in the Thomistic relationship between reason and virtue the point of contact between the Chinese conception of wisdom and the Western conception of science. In Ricci’s Catechism, the Chinese interlocutor affirms: “I have heard that to act in accordance with reason is good, and is called virtue, and to offend against reason is evil, and is called vice;” during his mission in China, Matteo Ricci showed that right reason, “an imprint of the Lord of Heaven,” is the same which promotes both scientific research and the pursuit of moral perfection, and which leads man ‒ after having corrected what may appear unreasonable in religions ‒ to welcome the Revelation that comes from the Lord of Heaven.