More on the history of the esoteric-exoteric distinction

The Swiss scholar Urs App, in his The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), gives an early instance of the esoteric-exoteric distinction that I missed in my book Western Sufism. The esoteric-exoteric distinction is, of course, central to René Guénon's Traditionalism.

In Western Sufism, I identified the analysis of Chinese religion of the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) as an early example of universalism (WS, pp. 92-93), but failed to note that some of Ricci’s colleagues were adding an esoteric-exoteric framework to their understanding of Japanese religion. At abut the same time, another Jesuit, Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606), interpreted the Buddhist doctrine of the “two truths” into something approaching the esoteric and the exoteric, starting a tradition of interpretation of Japanese religion that leads us to Leibniz and then perhaps to John Toland (1670-1722), whose definition of esoteric and exoteric in Clidophorus (1720) I emphasize in Western Sufism.

According to App, Valignano first made a distinction between the gonkyō (権教, Sanskrit saṁvṛti-satya, provisional or mundane, approximately exoteric) and the jikkyō (実況, Sanskrit paramārtha-satya, ultimate, approximately esoteric) in his Sumario de los errores del Japon (Summary of the Errors of Japan) of 1556.  He made the same distinction again in his Catechismus christianae fidei, in quo veritas nostrae religionis ostenditur, et sectae Iaponenses confutantur (Catechism of the Christian Faith, in which the truth of our religion is shown, and the Japanese sects are refuted) of 1586, which then became standard reading in a 1593 re-edition. 

Ricci did not make Valignano’s distinction, but João Rodrigues (1561-1633) did, and in this was followed by Niccolò Longobardi (1559-1654) in his Trattato su alcuni punti della religione dei cinesi (Treatise on Some Points of the Religion of the Chinese). Longobardi was cited by Leibniz in his Discours sur la théologie naturelle des Chinois (Discourse on the natural theology of the Chinese, 1716) as writing that the Chinese 

have two kinds of doctrine: a secret one that they regard as true and that only the learned understand and teach encoded in figures [symbols]; and the vulgar one which is a figure of the first and is regarded by the learned as false in the natural meaning of the words (cited in App, p. 144). 

Longobardi, then, may have been a source for Leibniz’s one-time friend Toland.

One further update. In Western Sufism, I identify the French Protestant scholar Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) as the first person to identify Sufism, along with Buddhism, as a form of Spinozism in 1702 (WS, p. 103). App notes that an opponent of Bayle’s, the Swiss protestant theologian Jean Le Clerc (1657-1736 ), in fact made the same connection in the case of Buddhism, though not of Sufism, rather earlier, in 1688 (App 150-151).

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