歷史．虛構．文本性——明末耶穌會「世說」修辭學初探

History/Fiction/Textuality: A Preliminary Look at the Rhetorical Nature of the Chreiai in the Chinese Writings of the Late-Ming Jesuits

天主教耶穌會士在明末大舉入華，傳統上認為他們對中國文化的貢獻以科學為主。本文嘗試從文學的角度重探這個運動的文化本質，發現會士引介入華的西方文化實則包括中世紀大盛於歐洲民間的示範故事。尤具意義的是，歐洲修辭學傳統裏的軼事型示範故事「克雷亞」早經會士用中文重寫，借為証道之用。「克雷亞」敘寫西方上古的歷史人物，以簡潔明快為其形式特色，語帶諷刺幽默而發人深省，俱可視為《世說新語》某些故事的西洋對應版。有鑑於「世說」體筆記小說昌盛於明清之際，本文姑以名之。本文由歐洲古典修辭學出發，逐一檢視薈萃會士世說的《畸人十篇》（利瑪竇）、《七克》（龐迪我）與《達道紀言》（高一志）等書，以探討「歷史」這個主題在會士世說中文本化的情形，希望由此為史學撰述和虛構作品的模糊界線再作說明。耶穌會世說乃史上最早用中文寫成的希臘羅馬人物故事，本文未嘗明言的一個期待是：讀者在讀後可以把這些故事視同「中國文學」，從而為明末筆記小說再闢一研究領域。

Traditionally, the missionary work of the late-Ming Jesuits has been conceived as primarily a scientific movement, with great contributions on the level of material culture going from Europe to China. This paper, however, tries to re-examine the movement from a literary perspective, in the conviction that religious teaching is rhetorical, and hence literary, in nature. My investigation finds that what was brought to China by the Jesuits, along with their Christian faith, included European exemplum, a type of brief narrative generally employed to illustrate a religious point, which had enjoyed enormous popularity in the European pulpit. Of even greater significance is that among the Jesuit sermon exempla written in Chinese, a particular sub-genre of anecdote in the line of classical rhetoric stands out: chreia. A concise tale generally focusing on the witty, pointed, and gnomic sayings of a historical figure in Greco-Roman antiquity, chreia can be generically taken as the European counterpart to certain stories in the Shih-shuo hsin-yu. Given that shih-shuo, a generic term derived from the title of Liu I-ch'ing's masterpiece, had been well-received in the late Ming and the early Ch'ing, it is used in the present paper to render chreia. I approach the massive corpus of Jesuit chreia by the Aphtonian definition of the genre in order to fathom the borderline between history and fiction and conclude that rhetoric constitutes its textuality. The major texts under scrutiny in this paper encompass Matteo Ricci's Chi-jen shih-p'ien, Diego de Pantoja's Ch'i-k'e, and Alfonso Vagnoni's Ta-tao chi-yen. Since Jesuit chreiai were the earliest Chinese works about Western figures in the Greco-Roman world, I suggest in the lines of the present paper that they, a terra incognito whose study may enrich our understanding of Ming pi-chi anecdotes, should be taken as part of “Chinese literature.”