O Saint Confucius

The culmination of the Jesuit mission in China was works of philosophy reimagined and infused with contemporary Christian thought. These publications would chill Sino-European relations and serve as a "Confucius" enchiridion to a non-Chinese speaking world. I compare the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus against its pre-modern Chinese sources. I argue that the Jesuits' efforts were comparative philosophy: an attempt at the commensurability of Chinese and Western traditions within a Christian theology. In doing so, they altered the sense of 孔子, concealing the substitution; this interpretive violence reframed "Confucius" for the West for over three hundred years.