Christianity and Confucianism: Culture, Faith and Politics 9780567657640, 9780567696403, 9780567657688

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
ABBREVIATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
Introduction: Images, Issues and Impressionism
CHALLENGES
CHALLENGES
POSSIBILITIES
PLANS
PART I
CHAPTER ONE Confucius, ‘The Master’ and Cultural Decay
PICTURE RESTORATION AND ‘CULTURAL ARCHETYPES’
AESTHETICS, PAIN AND NOSTALGIA
LIFE, LEARNING AND LEGACY
Character and Context
Sources and Celebrity
Confucius: Life, Legacy and Literature
CHAPTER TWO Jesus, ‘The Christ’ and Spiritual Renewal
THE MANY COMINGS OF CHRISTIANITY
JESUS: DYNAMICS OF PRAISE AND BLAME
THE ‘FACE’ OF JESUS: IMAGE, FAITH AND POLITICS
IMAGE AND ‘CULTURAL ARCHETYPES’
JESUS, THE CHURCH AND THE NEW TESTAMENT EVIDENCE
THE CHRIST OF CHRISTIAN TRADITION
PART II
CHAPTER THREE Heaven, Earth and ‘Harmony’
RICCI, CHINA AND NEW 17TH-CENTURY HORIZONS
CONFUCIUS SINARUM PHILOSOPHUS AND THE BIRTH OF EUROPEAN SINOLOGY
‘HEAVEN’ AND ‘EARTH’ IN THE ANALECTS AND GOSPELS
The Analects
The Gospels
CHAPTER FOUR Humanity, Society and the Search for Worth
PORCELAIN AND THE PROBLEM OF PERFECTION
CHINA AND THE ROOTS OF EUROPEAN ANTHROPOLOGY
CHINA IN EUROPE: DESCARTES, SPINOZA, LEIBNIZ AND THE BIRTH OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
VOLTAIRE, DIDEROT AND THE CULTURE OF ENCYCLOPEDIAS
BRITAIN AND THE BIRTH OF ANTHROPOLOGY, 1650–1750
Milton, Addison, Pope, Berkeley, Locke and Chinoiserie
Hume, Adam Smith and New Questions about China
HUMAN IDENTITY, LIFE AND SOCIETY IN THE ANALECTS AND GOSPELS
The Analects
The Gospels
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER FIVE Character, Purpose and Morality: China and Enlightenment Habits and Values
TEA, TASTE AND TRADITION IN CHINA AND THE WEST
KANT, CHARACTER AND CHINA: c. 1750–1820
CHINA, ROMANTICISM AND REVOLUTION
China, Britain and Changing Cultural Horizons
CHINA AND THE WEST IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTIONARIES
Reid, Burke and Paine
Rousseau, Herder, Hegel and Schleiermacher
CHARACTER, PURPOSE AND MORALITY IN THE ANALECTS AND GOSPELS
The Analects
The Gospels
CONCLUSION
PART III
CHAPTER SIX Truth and Truthfulness: The 19th-Century Crisis in China and the West
STORY, TRUTH, SHAKESPEARE AND LIN ZEXU 􁷇􀡷􁗀
GEORGE ELIOT, CHARLES DICKENS AND ‘TRUTH’ IN STORY FORM
LEGGE, WAGNER AND THE DRAMA OF XIQU 􁡢􁴢 THEATRE
TRUTH, MEANING AND POWER: THE COMING OF A 19TH-CENTURY CRISIS
Eliot, Strauss and 19th-Century ‘Lives of Jesus’
Schopenhauer, China and ‘Oriental’ Religions
Feuerbach, China and the ‘Hermeneutics of Suspicion’
Kierkegaard, Truth and the Origins of 20th-Century Existentialism
Nietzsche, Marx, Truth and Lies
‘TRUTH’ AND ‘TRUTHFULNESS’ IN THE ANALECTS AND GOSPELS
The Analects
The Gospels
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER SEVEN Memory, Rite and Tradition: The Chinese Origin of a Western Movement
MODERNISM AND THE MODERN WORLD
CULTURE, MEMORY AND HERMENEUTICS: THE EARLY 20TH-CENTURY DILEMMA
Husserl and His Heirs
Igor Stravinsky and Le Sacre du Printemps
Marcel Proust and À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu
Niels Bohr, ‘Quantum Theory’ and ‘Complementarity’
Ezra Pound, Imagism and ‘The Orient’
MEMORY, RITE AND TRADITION IN THE ANALECTS AND GOSPELS
The Judeo-Christian Anamnetic Tradition
The Analects and Confucian Classics
Points of Comparison and Contrast
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER EIGHT Sickness, Death and the Afterlife: On Making Sense of Everything and Nothing
DEATH IN THE 20TH CENTURY: CRISIS, MEANING AND MANAGEMENT
THE ORIGINS OF MID-20TH- CENTURY EXISTENTIALISM
SHAPING THE DEBATE: HUSSERL, UNAMUNO, BUBER, MARCEL, JASPERS AND CHINA
LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH: FOUR THEMES SHAPING CHINA AND THE WEST
Sartre, Camus and Franco-Chinese Existentialism
‘Protest Atheism’ and ‘Theology after Auschwitz’
‘Christian Existentialism’ and Modern Hermeneutics
Life, Death and Meaning: From Wittgenstein to Habermas
SICKNESS, DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE IN THE ANALECTS AND GOSPELS
The Analects
The Gospels
CONCLUSION
Conclusion
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

CHRISTIANITY AND CONFUCIANISM

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CHRISTIANITY AND CONFUCIANISM CULTURE, FAITH AND POLITICS Christopher Hancock

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T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 This edition published 2022 Copyright © Christopher Hancock, 2021 Christopher Hancock has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi–xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image: Imaginechina Limited / Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hancock, Christopher, author. Title: Christianity and Confucianism : culture, faith and politics / Christopher Hancock. Description: London ; New York : T&T Clark, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Christianity and Confucianism: Culture, Faith and Politics, sets comparative textual analysis against the backcloth of 2000 years of cultural, political, and religious interaction between China and the West. As the world responds to China’s rise and China positions herself for global engagement, this major new study reawakens and revises an ancient conversation. As a generous introduction to biblical Christianity and the Confucian Classics, Christianity and Confucianism tells a remarkable story of mutual formation and cultural indebtedness. East and West are shown to have shaped the mind, heart, culture, philosophy and politics of the other – and far more, perhaps, than either knows or would want to admit. Christopher Hancock has provided a rich and stimulating resource for scholars and students, diplomats and social scientists, devotees of culture and those who pursue wisdom and peace today”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020034883 (print) | LCCN 2020034884 (ebook) | ISBN 9780567657640 (hardback) | ISBN 9780567696991 (paperback) | ISBN 9780567657688 (pdf) | ISBN 9780567657695 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Christianity and other religions--Confucianism. | Confucianism—Relations—Christianity. Classification: LCC BR128.C43 H423 2020 (print) | LCC BR128.C43 (ebook) | DDC 261.2/9512—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034883 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034884 ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePUB:

978-0-5676-5764-0 978-0-5676-9699-1 978-0-5676-5768-8 978-0-5676-5769-5

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CONTENTS

L IST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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L IST OF A BBREVIATIONS

ix

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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P REFACE Introduction: Images, Issues and Impressionism

xiii 1

PART I

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1 Confucius, ‘The Master’ and Cultural Decay Picture Restoration and ‘Cultural Archetypes’ Aesthetics, Pain and Nostalgia Life, Learning and Legacy Character and Context Sources and Celebrity Confucius: Life, Legacy and Literature

17 20 22 26 26 35 40

2 Jesus, ‘The Christ’ and Spiritual Renewal The Many Comings of Christianity Jesus: Dynamics of Praise and Blame The ‘Face’ of Jesus: Image, Faith and Politics Image and ‘Cultural Archetypes’ Jesus, the Church and the New Testament Evidence The Christ of Christian Tradition

47 48 54 61 64 70 82

PART II

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3 Heaven, Earth and ‘Harmony’ Ricci, China and New 17th-Century Horizons Confucius Sinarum Philosophus and the Birth of European Sinology Britain, China and the Quest for ‘Harmony’ ‘Heaven’ and ‘Earth’ in the Analects and Gospels The Analects The Gospels

89 90 101 104 118 119 123 v

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CONTENTS

4 Humanity, Society and the Search for Worth Porcelain and the Problem of Perfection China and the Roots of European Anthropology China in Europe: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and the Birth of the Enlightenment Voltaire, Diderot and the Culture of Encyclopedias Britain and the Birth of Anthropology, 1650–1750 Milton, Addison, Pope, Berkeley, Locke and Chinoiserie Hume, Adam Smith and New Questions about China Human Identity, Life and Society in the Analects and Gospels The Analects The Gospels Conclusion

129 130 135 140 149 155 155 169 172 173 179 182

5 Character, Purpose and Morality: China and Enlightenment Habits and Values Tea, Taste and Tradition in China and the West Kant, Character and China: c. 1750–1820 China, Romanticism and Revolution China, Britain and Changing Cultural Horizons China and the West in an Age of Revolutionaries Reid, Burke and Paine Rousseau, Herder, Hegel and Schleiermacher Character, Purpose and Morality in the Analects and Gospels The Analects The Gospels Conclusion

183 185 190 196 198 213 214 221 243 245 252 259

PART III

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6 Truth and Truthfulness: The 19th-Century Crisis in China and the West Story, Truth, Shakespeare and Lin Zexu ᷇ࡷᗀ George Eliot, Charles Dickens and ‘Truth’ in Story Form Legge, Wagner and the Drama of Xiqu ᡢᴢ Theatre Truth, Meaning and Power: The Coming of a 19th-Century Crisis Eliot, Strauss and 19th-Century ‘Lives of Jesus’ Schopenhauer, China and ‘Oriental’ Religions Feuerbach, China and the ‘Hermeneutics of Suspicion’ Kierkegaard, Truth and the Origins of 20th-Century Existentialism Nietzsche, Marx, Truth and Lies ‘Truth’ and ‘Truthfulness’ in the Analects and Gospels The Analects The Gospels Conclusion

263 266 273 289 302 302 304 306 311 315 331 331 338 343

CONTENTS

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7 Memory, Rite and Tradition: The Chinese Origin of a Western Movement Modernism and the Modern World Culture, Memory and Hermeneutics: The Early 20th-Century Dilemma Husserl and His Heirs Igor Stravinsky and Le Sacre du Printemps Marcel Proust and À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu Niels Bohr, ‘Quantum Theory’ and ‘Complementarity’ Ezra Pound, Imagism and ‘The Orient’ Memory, Rite and Tradition in the Analects and Gospels The Judeo-Christian Anamnetic Tradition The Analects and Confucian Classics Points of Comparison and Contrast Conclusion

345 346 353 354 365 373 377 383 395 397 402 407 408

8 Sickness, Death and the Afterlife: On Making Sense of Everything and Nothing Death in the 20th Century: Crisis, Meaning and Management The Origins of Mid-20th-Century Existentialism Shaping the Debate: Husserl, Unamuno, Buber, Marcel, Jaspers and China Life in the Shadow of Death: Four Themes Shaping China and the West Sartre, Camus and Franco-Chinese Existentialism ‘Protest Atheism’ and ‘Theology after Auschwitz’ ‘Christian Existentialism’ and Modern Hermeneutics Life, Death and Meaning: From Wittgenstein to Habermas Sickness, Death and the Afterlife in the Analects and Gospels The Analects The Gospels Conclusion

411 412 415 421 426 426 443 456 468 482 482 490 496

Conclusion

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B IBLIOGRAPHY

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I NDEX

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Confucius the scholar (551–449 BCE) The Analects of Confucius [Jesus with] Martha and Mary by Bai Huiqun ⲭភ㗔 (contemp.) Barbara Hepworth, ‘Mother and Child’ (1927) Michelangelo (6 March 1475–18 February 1564) – The Pietà (1498–9) Matteo Ricci, SJ (6 October 1552–11 May 1610) Michael Shen Fuzong/Fu-Tsung ⊸⾿ᇇ (1657–92) by Sir Godrey Kneller (1687) The Gagnières-Fonthill vase by Barthélemy Rémy (1713) Wedgwood abolitionist medallion, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ (1786) Mary Anne Evans (aka George Eliot) (22 November 1819–22 December 1880) Lin Shu ᷇㍃ (8 November 1852–9 October 1924) Richard Wagner (22 May 1813–13 February 1883) Lu Xun 冟䗵 [the pen name of Zhou Shuren ઘ⁩Ӫ] (25 September 1881–19 October 1936) 14 Socialist Realism (from the Museum of Socialist Art, Sofia, Bulgaria) 15 ‘Bloody Saturday’: a child crying outside the South Railway Station, Shanghai (1937)

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40 45 57 67 69 91 100 132 135 275 284 295 325 382 455

ABBREVIATIONS

A ACPA AUP BMGN CCP CHCCS CPS CRVP CUP CUV DNB

The Confucian Analects The Association of Chinese Philosophers in America Associated University Presses Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Niederlanden Chinese Communist Party Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change Series Chinese Philosophical Studies The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy Cambridge University Press Chinese Union Version Dictionary of National Biography, ed. L. Stephens, 63 vols, Oxford: OUP (1885– 1900). EDBT Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology EIC East India Company ELH English Literary History HK Hong Kong IR International Relations KRSRR Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception, Resources LMS London Missionary Society LXX Septuagint MS Manuscript MSMS Monumenta Serica Monograph Series NCPF Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers NIDNTT New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology NIGTC The New International Greek Testament Commentary NIV The New International Version of the Bible, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1979. NT New Testament NYU New York University OT Old Testament OUP Oxford University Press PRC Peoples’ Republic of China RC Roman Catholic (church and tradition) SBL Society of Biblical Literature SJ The Society of Jesus (or the Jesuits) SKQS Siku Quanshu SLS Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa ix

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SUNY TDNTT TDOT TTR WW

ABBREVIATIONS

State University of New York Theological Dictionary of New Testament Theology Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction World War

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My sincere thanks to Anna Turton, Sarah Blake, Juliet Gardner, and all the Bloomsbury team for their patience, good nature and encouragement. This has been a journey of discovery for writer and publisher alike! Many friends and colleagues have happily read all, or part, of the manuscript in draft. In particular, my thanks to Anthony E. Clarke, Wright Doyle, Stephen Green, Graham Hutchings, Richard Madsen, John Milbank, Stephen Whitefield, Yang Huilin, Yao Xinzhong, Jing (Cathy) Zhang and her Chinese assistants at Renmin University, Beijing. Without their help, counsel, and scholarly inspiration the work would not have seen the light of day. My thanks are also due to the acute Classical eye of my brother Jonathan, who saved me from infelicitous prose, and to my beloved wife, Suzie, who bore the demands of this lengthy project and checked the text with her meticulous precision. The mistakes that remain are, of course, mine. If perchance some eagle-eyed Western sinologist finds questionable characters in Chinese citations or quotations, I plead the guidance and current disagreements about such things among scholarly Chinese. Fashions change, complexities abound: the wisdom I hope you will find fairly exegeted here, endures. I am also grateful for use of, and permission to quote from, the following copyright material: Analecta Husserliana for multiple citations from Edmund Husserl’s work. The Camus Estate (the Wylie Agency) for quotations from The Stranger and Essays Lyrical & Critical (1968). Faber & Faber for use of ‘Redress of Poetry’ by Seamus Heaney (P190627/239) and T. S. Eliot’s Murder in a Cathedral (1935). Excerpts from NIGHT by Elie Wiesel, translated by Marion Wiesel. Translation copyright @ 2006 Marion Wiesel. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Florian Noetzel Verlag (Heirichshofen Books) for use of a quotation from ‘Music of the Billion’ (9783795904746). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., for multiple quotations from Edward Slingerland’s fine translation and edition of Confucius Analects (2003). Harper & Row and Penguin Random House for quotations from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archepelago 2 (1973). The Barbara Hepworth Estate for reproduction of ‘Mother and Child’ (1927). Hodder & Stoughton for multiple quotations from the New International Version (1980 edition). Houghton, Miflin Harcourt for quotations from T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935). New Directions Publishing: ‘Fragment (1966)’ by Ezra Pound, from the Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1968 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. xi

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Routledge (Taylor & Francis) for permission to quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), trans. F. P. Ramsey & C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 2014), §6.4321. Thames & Hudson for use of quotations from Vincent Van Gogh – The Letters, edited by Leo Janson, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker, copyright © 2009 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Huygens Institute, The Hague, Mercatorfonds, Brussels, and Thames & Hudson Ltd, London. Reprinted by kind permission of Thames & Hudson.

PREFACE

Where morning dawns and evening fades you call forth songs of praise. —Ps. 65.8 This is a story more than a study. It tells the story of a long and difficult conversation. At times the two parties have ignored one another; rather more often – too often – they cussed, accused and fought. Both are to blame for the state of their disunion. Like warring siblings, or a divorcing couple, they profess innocence and indict the other. The book is the story of this stormy relationship. It also tells the story of where it all began, in the hope that memory will heal. Time will tell. The story begins by introducing the two main characters, the founding fathers of great dynasties. It proceeds to relate six instances in history when their successors met, conversed and clashed. Some of the story is well-known. Much is little known, with disastrous effects. Like casualties of inherited abuse or multiple forms of dependency, inheritors of this fraught history are innocent victims of others’ culpability. It is only if, or when, we join up the dots of history we understand the complexity of this legacy. History, like memory, can also heal. Denial is a great enemy of therapy. It takes many forms. Behind ‘I am not to blame’, lies the lie, ‘I am never to blame, and see things as they truly are.’ There’s a denial of guilt, and a denial of intention, or failure to grasp motivation. International Relations is now alert to this deep, ‘affective’, dimension. We study the mind of the suicide-bomber. We examine denial of wrongdoing. We try to explain the abuse of power, or corruption of position. Our story is full of denial, and the acute complexities that brings. History relates, and perpetuates, dishonesty. No amount of therapy can help the fundamentally deceitful and self-deceived. I am speaking, of course, of the long, tortuous history of Sino-Western relations. I am also talking of the source and legacy of the moral and intellectual frameworks – those mighty cultural dynasties – which formed China and Christendom, Confucianism and Christianity. In Chapters 1 and 2, we return to the founding fathers of these two dynastic traditions, Jesus and Confucius. Chapters 3 to 8 visit select instances – historical snapshots, if you like – when the dialogue between China and the West, and thence Christianity and Confucianism, intensified. My argument is that both China and the West have been indelibly affected by this exchange; indeed, affected to a degree that we do not, perhaps cannot, maybe even will not, appreciate. Coming to terms with history and memory can be intensely painful. Denial, evasion, anger, blame, distortion, threat and corruption, are tempting. Therapists expect this. Truth must be made attractive. I hope it is here with the allure of fascination, discovery and veracity; perhaps even the offer of ‘truth’ or scent of ‘peace’, rather than well-worn deception or denial of the possibility of change and reconciliation. The thematic chapters in Parts II and III will hold gems of historical wisdom for some, costly choices for others. When I studied Modern History in Oxford in the early 1970s, China had no place in the curriculum. Global historians, and historians of ideas in the West, are playing catch-up on China’s xiii

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PREFACE

impact on Western culture. There is much work to be done. Chinese academics have in recent decades been filling in the blanks on China’s engagement with, and debt to, the West – especially to Christianity and Christian mission. But Western theology hasn’t begun to reckon with the extent to which the terms in which the Bible is read are the result of Sino-Western interaction; while China’s new regressive leadership is in sad denial of the degree to which Chinese culture was, and is, the result of its exposure to worlds beyond its borders. In keeping with a new genre of ‘One World’ literature, this volume tells the story of East-West cultural exchange through comparative analysis of Christianity and Confucianism. It offers a multidisciplinary read on historic East-West relations with a view to recalibrating contemporary culture studies and diplomacy. Recognition of the extent to which China and the West ‘read’ life through similar cultural lenses offers a way to reduce misunderstanding and increase mutual appreciation. I remember a distinguished Chinese colleague dismissing the suggestion Christianity didn’t belong in China with the words, ‘But we wouldn’t be the country we are without Christianity.’ Similar humility would be good in the West: for, it is also true, ‘We wouldn’t be the culture/s we are without China and Confucianism.’ At least, that is what history and inter-cultural exchange teach in six historical snapshots that follow. Before beginning, I want to say three other things. First, this book is written from the West; although I hope I have been as sensitive and attentive to Chinese sources as possible. I am immensely grateful to the thousands of Chinese colleagues with whom I have engaged on Chinese, Christian, Confucian, and countless other topics over the last couple of decades or so. These are my friends. As a Westerner, I respect their diligence, courage, knowledge and joy in life. They will always know their history, Academy and culture better than an outsider. I hope they will see cultural humility in this exercise in historical hermeneutics and will point out ways in which this ‘One World’ perspective might have been enriched. Second, though there are good reasons to focus on Sino-Western relations, a strong case could also made for application of this cross-cultural model to, say, Indo-Western or Persian sources. Recognition that we are product of multiple cultures, and heirs of global interaction, opens a way to see ourselves and others in a new light. My roots and recent work in south India suggest that might be a next project; but, as with China, there is a mass of post-colonial baggage here to overcome in me and in others. For there, too, the story is of a long, difficult dialogue and the inherited damage extensive. Therapy teaches us to face, and not evade, history, memory, culpability and immaturity. The good news is, therein lies a much-needed pathway to peace. Third, I have structured the book as a dialogue between the text and the notes. I have left some of my working in the margins to encourage others to take reading, research and the discussion forward. Citations are at times abbreviated: the full bibliography carries the rest. Since completing this work, the deaths have been reported of Professor Dan Bays and Dr. Gary Tiedemann. Both were wonderful scholars, good friends and generous hosts to this Johnny-come-lately to the party of Sino-Christian Studies. May these fine Christian men rest in the peace and joy of their Lord. To them, and all my readers, I will always owe an incomparable debt of gratitude. Christopher Hancock Tirana, Albania 9 December 2019

Introduction: Images, Issues and Impressionism The beginning is perhaps more difficult than anything else, but keep heart, it will turn out all right. —van Gogh 1927: 31 Our story begins in a seedy studio in Paris. Not the first place, we might imagine, to host a conversation about philosophy and religion, but probably not the last place either. Art is the handmaid of culture, as it is of faith and human creativity. Images evoke in ways data and percentage, logic and argument, never can. They speak when the world is silent and leave lasting impressions. They make a point, sell a product, keep us awake at night. Images in stories add power to narrative. They are like parables in a nutshell. It’s right we begin here, to remind ourselves of the power of images; such that, to some they become forbidden idols, to others favoured gods. If we are not careful, they leave false or distorted impressions. Not every image is true, nor all perception accurate. We misread maps, mistake meanings, forget a face. Our story here questions the image we have of Confucianism and the impression left on us by Christianity. In a seedy studio we risk finding truth and owning up to our mistakes. In one of many letters by the post-Impressionist Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) to his brother Theo (1857–91), he wrote this: ‘What is always urgent is the drawing, and whether you do it straight off with the brush or with something else, say a pen, you never get enough done. I am trying now to exaggerate the essential, and purposely leave the obvious things vague’ (van Gogh 1958: 572).2 Van Gogh’s radical style demonstrates this, with his striking colours, bold lines and rough textures, especially after he, and his co-resident in the ‘Yellow House’ in Arles, Paul Gaugin (1848–93), started to use loose-woven jute canvasses. Artistic skills, like oils, were to be crisply, keenly, deliberately deployed. Echoing Swedish philosopher-scientist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688– 1772), Van Gogh – and, even more so, Gaugin – posited an inherent harmony and beauty in nature that artists seek to capture by simplification, exaggeration and, if needed, ‘distortion’ (Grant 2014: 148f.). Hence, his ‘Prisoners Exercising’ (February 1890) – a stark copy of Gustave Doré’s (1833– 83) gloomy engraving ‘Newgale: The Exercise Yard’ – conveys the sense of imprisonment he felt in the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum at Saint Rémy, where he died from self-inflicted (?) gunshot wounds (five months later). Less is more in such an image. With a few brushstrokes he lays bare his tortured spirit; his life, as depicted elsewhere, an ugly blemish on an exalted canvas. Art and faith alone gave it meaning (Maurer 1998: 35). From this dark ‘Symbolist’ world light still shines; the artist’s studio a shrine to Van Gogh, his admirers, and seekers after truth.

1 2

Letter to Theo van Gogh (The Hague, January 1873). Letter to Theo, 26 May 1888. Van Gogh wrote more than 650 letters to his brother. 1

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Careful selection and skilful exaggeration apply to all forms of art. These principles match our comparative study of Christianity and classical Confucianism. To claim more for it than an impressionist’s introduction would be wrong. Not to attend carefully, as we splash paint on vast subjects, would be foolish. Skill is needed. Focus is essential. Much must be still left vague. Getting to grips with originals is key. Second-hand copies will not do. It is third-hand impressions of Confucianism and Christianity that have made dialogue between them so stormy and strained. Listening to what is really being said helps restore relationship. As we set out, Van Gogh is a good companion. His life’s journey and work are well-known in China and the West. Théodore Duret’s (1838–1927) biography3 was translated and adapted for Japanese readers by Kuroda Jûtarô (1887–1970) in 1921. The work was sinicized by the philosopher, artist, essayist, and social commentator Feng Zikai 䊀ᆀᝧ (1898–1975) as ụ儉⭏⍫ (Van Gogh’s Life). Feng was a Buddhist Neo-Confucian, with a passion for Western art, philosophy, childlike simplicity and artistic sympathy. Van Gogh’s madness is for him ‘similar to the ideal archetype of the Oriental hermit-like artist’ (Inaga 2000: 93).4 Van Gogh and Feng both address pain and sadness in life. Their interests and method are apposite here: they aim to portray the truth about life faithfully, creatively and poignantly. Van Gogh inspires confidence to move on from what we see and know of him to what we do not know of Christianity and Confucianism. He speaks for every scholar, ‘[Y]ou never get enough done’! And adds: ‘It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning’ (Jansen 2009: 4.281).5 Lofty ideas, like existential realities, warrant attention to grasp meaning. Mind, body and soul are scrutinized. Centuries of ignorance and interpretative grime dull the colours of ancient texts and traditions. Like the picture restorer, our task is to strip away accretions to understand, appreciate, and then compare originals. For Van Gogh, this is the heart of art and essence of faith and wisdom: this, to him, is how to see, and so live, life. In Van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ (1889) – a view from his room in Saint Rémy – and four versions of ‘Sunflowers’ (1888) he painted for Gaugin’s room when luring him to Arles, we find an analogue of the breadth and depth needed to study Christianity and Confucianism. Cosmic mysteries and daily realities confront us. Just as Van Gogh’s provocative aesthetic sought the soul of the immaterial cosmos in the body of the material world, Christianity and Confucianism construe form as translucent, an opaque window on an unseen, larger world. In the spirit of the Impressionists, we examine the critical, creative genius of Confucius and Jesus, to glean from the few historical brushstrokes we have of their life and thought the key to their wisdom and impact on our world. We read of the impression they left through art. Van Gogh may seem an unexpected intermediary to foster cross-cultural dialogue between Christianity and Confucianism. Far from it: the artist’s early embrace of oriental styles and culture

Cf. Duret, T. (1916), Vincent van Gogh. On van Gogh’s reception in Asia, Inaga, S. (2000), ‘The Myth of Vincent van Gogh’; —(1998), ‘Théodore Duret, Kuroda Jûtarô et Feng Zikai’; Laurence, P. (2003), Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes, 369. 5 Letter 686, to Theo, 23 or 24 September 1888. Unlike some Impressionists, van Gogh was respectful of Christianity. In his early years he aspired to be a pastor and was active as a village evangelist in Belgium. His theological awareness is illustrated by a letter to Theo, prompted by something he’s read by the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1920): ‘From what I gather from that article, in it he’s searching for what will remain eternally true in the religion of Christ, and what all religions have in common . . . I believe that his religion cannot be cruel and increase our sufferings, but on the contrary, it must be very consoling and must inspire serenity, and energy, and the courage to live, and a whole lot of things’ (ibid.). 3 4

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is well-known. He and Theo were fascinated by Japanese woodcuts (or ukiyo-e prints), which they collected and marketed in Paris. With this came a sense that the Orient could, and did, illuminate the West. As Van Gogh wrote in July 1888: ‘All my work is based to some extent on Japanese art’ (Jansen 2009: 4.175).6 He accorded it neo-religious status:7 as here, images can easily – to some, dangerously – acquire an iconic aura. Impressionism took its name from Oscar-Claude Monet’s (1840–1926) painting of a sun rise over the harbour at Le Havre, Impression, soleil levant (1874). The mystique of the Orient – particularly China – had fascinated and inspired the intellectual and artistic élite of Europe since the early 17th century. Over time – for social, economic, or political reasons – estimations of China and Chinese culture fluctuated. With the US-Japanese Convention of Kanagawa (1854), which ended Holland’s trade monopoly, Japan opened up. Japonisme flooded Europe, as chinoiserie had a century earlier. To Monet, Van Gogh, and others at the time, the ‘rising sun’ of oriental culture was the harbinger of a new European renaissance. In its use of light, vivid colour, texture, acute angles, lack of perspective, and alluring ‘off-stage’ figures, traditional Japanese art offered Impressionists new ideas and techniques. Its vibrant, sceptical, anarchic heir, Post-Impressionism, trailed behind circumspectly. Here imitation and creativity combine. The effect is more muted: reception must be, we sense now, mutual. Van Gogh’s cautious oriental optimism, social realism and generous naturalism, provide a helpful paradigm for cultural dialogue between Christianity and Confucianism. Neither uncritical ‘Orientalism’ nor unthinking ‘Occidentalism’ is appropriate. Mutuality and respect are essential. As Van Gogh wrote again to Theo: I cannot help thinking that the best way of knowing God is to love many things. Love this friend, this person, this thing, whatever you like, and you will be on the right road to understanding Him better, that is what I keep telling myself. But you must love with a sublime, genuine, profound sympathy, with devotion, with intelligence, and you must try all the time to understand Him more, better and yet more. That will lead to God, that will lead to an unshakeable faith. —Jansen: 1.2478 Van Gogh studied life generously and comprehensively, in all its raw beauty and reality: herein lay the key to life’s mystery and God’s reality. As French-American literary critic George Steiner (b. 1929) points out, Van Gogh’s artistic genius turns a tough old pair of peasant shoes, on a rough textured canvas, into the existential truth of a long homeward journey after a hard day’s work in the fields of life (Steiner 1991: 42). The same is true of his depiction of eyes, so full of existential longing and an eagerness to learn. Attentiveness, honesty and generosity of spirit, are marks of a good conversation. They are also sine qua nons of cross-cultural exchange. Bombast, overconfidence, disinterest and mockery make for an unpleasant meal, eaten or shared. Van Gogh

Letter 640. On van Gogh’s interest in Japanese art, Grant, Letters, 150f. Ibid. On the Orient and van Gogh’s self-perception, see his letter to Theo on the exchange of self-portraits with Gaugin: ‘[I]f I might be allowed to stress my own personality in a portrait, I had done so in trying to convey in my portrait not only myself but an impressionist in general, and had conceived it as the portrait of a bonze (sic), a simple worshiper of the eternal Buddha’ (Letter 697, 7 October 1888; Jansen, 4.308). 8 Letter 155, 22 to 24 June 1880 (from Cuesmes). Van Gogh’s faith and art became more complex and inclusive in later life. 6 7

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suggests another kitchen, where life is tasted through another’s experience. In this, he offers a wholesome intercultural diet. The essentialism which guides van Gogh’s aesthetic priorities and technique – and the prolific output that so irked the ponderous Paul Cézanne (1839–1906)! – is useful in other respects. It raises the epistemological issue of ‘essentialism’ per se: that is, the definition of phenomena by traits or platonic ‘ideals’ by temporal ‘forms’. It works for van Gogh, but can it work here? Is an ‘essentialist’ approach to Confucianism and Christianity possible, or even desirable? Can these vast, ancient, evolving traditions be read through their dominant traits? Isn’t more subtlety needed? Or, again, can the ideas and ideals at their heart, be captured in simple, coherent prose? And the billiondollar question: Is what Confucius and Jesus were about ever mastered? Van Gogh’s essentialism alerts us to a fundamental issue for study of Confucianism and Christianity: in form and content these ancient expressions of humanity’s spiritual and ethical response to mystery and drama in life, are profoundly complex. When overlaid by millennia of intentional and unintentional interpretative grime, we struggle to see the originals. We might conclude none existed, that they are merely ancient myths. Better, perhaps, to be open to the idea that in their mystery lies majesty, in tattered rags royal robes. The image we have may be an old, inaccurate impression: it shouldn’t mislead us to assume the original isn’t worthy of attention. It is fools who claim to see and know. These traditions defy such easy confidence. They are allusive in style, depicting wisdom like an Impressionist painting. Van Gogh’s global appeal today is heartening. He reminds us that ‘exaggerating the essential’ can work. In the chapters following we heed his advice; mindful that in the end much will remain ‘vague’, unclear, unexplained, or inexplicable. An image is just an image after all, an invitation in parabolic form inviting us to think further, look deeper and be ready to be surprised. I sincerely hope this will be the beginning of a satisfying new journey. There is more for us in van Gogh’s legacy. The term ‘Impressionism’ became a cudgel wielded by the smug art critic, engraver, and playwright Louis Leroy (1812–85). As he wrote of Monet’s ‘Impression, soleil levant’: ‘Impression – I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it – and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape.’9 Leroy was not alone. The fifty-five artists in the ‘Exposition des Impressionnistes’ (Impressionists’ Exhibition) that the flamboyant Parisian photographer Nadar10 showed at his salon in April 1874, were widely ridiculed. Édouard Manet’s (1832–83) sister-in-law, Berthe Morisot (1841–95), reports one critic dismissing them as ‘a bunch of lunatics and a woman’. Form and content were both lambasted. Traditionalists couldn’t see intention in blurred images. But Impressionist style and technique drew almost as much from new science as old oriental art. The physics of light, form, shape and colour were analysed en route to feather-light brushstrokes and vivid tones that evoke a glimpse, a face, emotion, a group, an outdoor scene. The Parisian cognoscenti were hostile. These bold new images did anything but impress. The irascible art critic Albert Wolff (1835–91) wrote in Le Figaro: Try to make Monsieur Pissarro understand that trees are not violet; that the sky is not the color of fresh butter . . . that no sensible human being could countenance such aberrations . . . [T]ry Leroy’s review – in the form of a dialogue between two acidic attendees – appeared in Le Charivari (25 April 1874). Nadar was Gaspard-Félix Tournachon’s (1820–1910) pseudonym. An exotic enigma, Nadar was a caricaturist, novelist, journalist and balloonist!

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to explain to Monsieur Renoir that a woman’s torso is not a mass of decomposing flesh with those purplish-green stains. —q. Shikes 1980: 13211 Perceptions change. Preference and prejudice come and go. Impressionism is now accredited, with van Gogh its legitimate heir and its self-conscious, bastard child. While Monet painted flowers, van Gogh portrayed pain. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism have changed the way we see art and read the world. The impact of both on China and the West has been huge. They have changed perception. In what follows, we track other cultural realities that have defined and united China and the West and have shaped how Christianity and Confucianism have been interpreted. For art and science, like music, nature, books and sport, define culture and unite cultures. Van Gogh exemplifies a vital hermeneutic principle: we read the world through global ‘cultural archetypes’. We do not approach life tabula rasa, but with preconfigured paradigms. To see originals clearly these schematizing ‘archetypes’ must be named, their impact registered, restricted even, if needed. A cross-cultural reading of the Confucian Classics and Christian New Testament requires we face factors affecting our reading. We must ‘read backwards carefully’.12 Comparative analysis risks becoming mere intellectual ‘wallpaper’. We must use all sorts of cultural, literary, historical, philosophical, linguistic and social scientific resources to recover a fresh sense of the original craftsmen and their craft, and thereby glean a clearer idea of what they said and why they still matter. The history of Impressionism alerts us to prejudice and distortion. The movement’s love of detail and light touch demand attention. Depth is subtle, image evanescent, prejudice blind.

CHALLENGES Though our aims are limited, the task is immense. Neither Confucianism nor Christianity can be easily pigeon-holed. They are seminal, pluriform, realities with a long, dynamic – often conflicted – interpretative history. To scholars, they offer the best and worst of disciplines: broad avenues for research, immense scope for ‘impacts’! For millennia Confucianism and Christianity have catalysed human imagination and critiqued culture(s). The canon of the Confucian Classics and Christian scriptures have been thesauri for life and morality. Here are world-defining words, ideas, texts and practices to set beside Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Marxism, as proto-types of our spiritual, philosophical, and ethical endeavour. Both traditions have also been subject to social, political and intellectual pressure. Long-time Columbia University sinologist Theodore de Bary (1919–2017) observes in The Trouble with Confucianism (1991): ‘[D]espite the new, more considered attention given to Confucius, his place is still unsettled and his status unclear’ (ix). Whatever we conclude of the character and merits of Christianity and Confucianism, these are not artsy flummery but ‘Old Masters’, priceless even when ‘out of fashion’. They judge us, not the reverse. Perspective is crucial. Before considering the history and complexity of cross-cultural (or comparative) philosophical dialogue between Confucianism and Christianity, we should consider the challenges ahead. Here On Impressionism and the 1874 exhibition, Guntern, G. (2010), The Spirit of Creativity, 303–5. On the concept and need to ‘read backwards carefully’, Salter, A. (2017), ‘Reading time backwards?’; Hays, R. (2014), Reading Backwards. Also, below p. 472, n. 386 and passim. 11 12

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are two vast glacial movements that have cut a swathe through the rock of human personality, society and history. We may not warm to their principles: we cannot deny their prescience and legacy, their intellectual weight and moral urgency. When we engage them, we find ourselves prodded and squeezed. As Jesus challenged his disciples: ‘But what about you? Who do you say I am?’ (Mk 8.29). The interrogative character of Christianity and Confucianism is integral to both traditions. Here texts and themes subvert and disconcert. This is ancient ‘wisdom literature’ with a deep, allusive, alluring authority. Much is questioned and questionable here, though. In both traditions, philosophical, theological, and commentarial work, is constantly re-evaluating primary sources. Ancient texts are subject to modern criticism, moral directives to the postmodern mirage of ‘choice’, textual integrity tested by ‘relevance’. If we are not careful, confidence in the possibility of interpretative clarity is shot, with Christianity an ‘essentially contested concept’ (Sykes 1984: 251f.) and Confucianism relegated to exotica. Legitimate questions remain. We must ask with others if Confucianism is a ‘religion’,13 or Christianity ever less than such. We must reckon with various – very different – ‘schools of thought’. Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Pentecostal become Classical, Neo-, New, or Bostonian Confucianism. Like other ‘Old Masters’ we must be ready to be humbled. If we presume to scrutinize them, we find the reverse to be true. Here are ancient traditions with extraordinary modern power. The challenges facing us can be gathered under three heads. First, the complexity of reading and interpreting ancient ‘Classics’. Both Christianity and Confucianism are textual. Their origin, appeal, focus, character and subsequent history, are inseparable from the Four and Five Books of the Confucian Classics and the four New Testament Gospels. And all are rightly read in their broader canonical context. Here lies, in van Gogh’s sense, their ‘kernel’. Though some may, out of ignorance, indifference or ideology, despise or dismiss these texts, no comparative study of Christianity and Confucianism can. The faces of Jesus, Confucius, and their disciples are etched on these rough canvasses as nowhere else: we read here what was first written about them. As is often said, the twenty chapters of the Analects, or Lunyu 䄆䃎 (collected sayings), of Confucius and the New Testament’s Gospels are the most natural point of textual comparison and thematic dialogue. In our search for the ‘essential’, this is the place to start. In what follows, the Analects and Gospels provide a window to frame and focus our discussion. This restriction helps to protect the narrative line and reduces relevant material. But texts are still notoriously tricky. Reading words may be easy, but understanding and interpreting them is not. In this instance, reading is complexified by Chinese and Greek originals. Understanding is clouded by culture, exposition mangled by syntax. The risk of distortion, misconception, prejudice and presumption, is immense. As indicated, our work is like picture restoration: cleaning texts so their original meaning and present value shines. To ‘read backwards carefully’ requires we reckon with shared ‘cultural archetypes’ that shape the way the Analects and Gospels are interpreted in China and the West. That is my thesis and my aim. These are developed here in thematic chapters set into a progressive timeframe of East-West relations. The process enables us to read, mark, learn and evaluate Jesus and Confucius without prejudice, and so study their image and ideas with openness, understanding and integrity. But it will not be easy: false assumptions run deep in all of us.

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N.B. among other discussions, Taylor, R. (2010), Religious Dimensions of Confucianism.

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Our second challenge is the breadth and depth of the ideas and issues that Jesus and Confucius raise, let alone those who have chewed their bones or continued their work. Here are two characters bracketed by some with Gautama Buddha (c. 563 BCE/480 BCE–c. 483 BCE/400 BCE) and the Prophet Muhammad (c. 570 CE—632 CE), Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) and Mother Teresa (1910–97), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–68) and Nelson Mandela (1918–2013), as ‘paradigms’ of vision, courage, faith and transformative power. Figures who have changed our world, and how we see it. Like these, we meet Confucius and Jesus more with awe than confidence. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on Confucius and Jesus. We will discover them there to be remarkable as much for who and what they were and are, as for what they said or did. Their appeal is holistic. They address everyday issues and higher things. They critique character and commend compassion. They touch small and great, friend and enemy. They turn words into action, and lead by example. Here is practical wisdom, philosophy of a moral, relational, spiritual, eternal kind. There is an imperative, pedagogical power in what they say and do. ‘This matters’; or, as Jesus said, ‘Whoever has ears, let them hear’ (Mt. 11.15, Mk 4.9). It is no surprise these paradoxically conservative, yet iconoclastic, lives were wracked by obloquy and controversy. Their disruptive energy still shakes the foundation of life as we know or make it. Post-World War II scepticism, hegemonic scientism, materialist apathy, relativistic postmodernism, and angular ‘New Atheism’, may have conspired to choke Christianity, and Confucianism may have been savaged by mid-20th-century Maoism and the myopia of the ‘lost ten years’ of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), but their power to subvert persists. CCP academic activist Yang Rongguo ὺ῞഻ (1907–78) may have (rather oddly) criticized Confucius as the ‘sage of the reactionary classes’ (q. Ching, J., 1976: 49), for his ideological elitism (with ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ of an intuited Way) and his philosophical idealism (with precision and an ‘objectification of names’), but ‘the Master’ returned as a giant in Reform Era China,14 with his comprehensive claims still as invasive as in Christian orthodoxy where mind, body and spirit are appealed to at every level. We treat these tigers as kittens at our peril. As Confucius, like the 4th-century Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE), warned: ‘Working from the wrong starting-point will lead to nothing but harm’ (A. 2.16).15 Van Gogh would not dispute this. We must begin at the beginning and aim to keep things clear, concise and imitatively compelling. This kind of methodological exaggeration makes sense. It helps us identify significant wood in a forest of intellectual and moral trees. The third challenge we face is perspectival: changing the analogy, where should we, or, as importantly, can we stand to study these two soaring historic peaks? If we’re too close we risk drowning in the effluent of minutiae, if too distant, we’ll overlook the gems in rocky outcrops. The problem of perspective can be put another way. Claimed objectivity threatens the subjective character of Christianity and Confucianism, like a musicologist who mistakes black notes on a page for serene music. If we adopt an ‘invested’ attitude, however, and approach Christianity and Confucianism as ‘committed’ observers, we risk being seen to be (or actually be!) a ‘know-all’ bigot. Interculturalism appreciates such problems of context and perspective, with cultural ‘disengagement’ deemed as difficult as inter-cultural rapport. We must tread with care. Neither Christianity nor Confucianism was formed or fuelled in a cultural vacuum. Both are product, producer and prophetic 14 On this, Gregor, A. and M. Chang (1979), ‘Anti-Confucianism’, 1073–92; MacFarquhar, R. and M. Schoenhals (2006), Mao’s Last Revolution; Teoh, V. (1985), ‘The Reassessment of Confucius’. On Confucian ‘rectification of names’, p. 250, n. 382. 15 N.B. unless indicated, quotations are from Slingerland, E. (2003a), Confucius Analects.

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critics of their historical context. We simply can’t side-step discussions of context and enculturation. However, Christianity and Confucianism have for millennia inhabited ‘One World’. They belong to intersecting cultural ‘horizons’ where mutual enculturation was, and is, inevitable. Viewed thus, the dialogue of Christianity and Confucianism isn’t the strident squabbling of unknown ‘aliens’ and ‘foreigners’, but that of all-too-familiar acquaintances and global, cultural neighbours. This is important to register. We must beware, though, to never underestimate the challenge of monitoring harsh exchanges between East and West or between Confucianism and Christianity. Our story is full of bitter disputes, violent exchanges, tough words and cold, calculating disinterest. The literature is vast, specialist knowledge imperialistic, linguistic nuance often decisive and thematic similarity dangerously seductive. Cultivated in different environments, grown on distant continents, voiced in other tongues, expressed by distinctive rituals: it is not hard to present the case for difference between Christianity and Confucianism. The more so when we admit their different intellectual orbits: one humanistic, the other theistic; one bound to history, the other by eternity. But even a casual observer can see similarity in Jesus’s ‘Love command’ (‘Do to others what you would have them do to you’, Mt. 7.12) and Confucius’s ‘Golden rule’ (‘Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you’, A. 15.24). If your image of these traditions is that they speak of fundamentally different things, please think again: they do not. That’s the problem; or, better, a problem many have tried to avoid.

POSSIBILITIES Despite the challenges, there has been a long, sophisticated history of careful comparative analysis of Christianity and Confucianism. The present volume depends on the work of others, past and present. It is not hard to see the potential value and persisting allure of Christian-Confucian dialogue. Here are two culture-shaping traditions that have defined life and death for millions. Like it or not, they have made – and still make – our world. Though cultural ‘wallpaper’ for some16 – particularly those deaf to history or dead to the soul – here are two sophisticated, ancient socioethical systems that (at least) inculcate values, engender ideals, foster relationships and help to stabilize society. More than this, Confucian-Christian dialogue offers stimuli for self-discovery, social cohesion and harmony in a war-torn world. Here are old, bold, effective antidotes to fissiparous individualism, aggressive materialism and a corrosive globalized culture. We may not welcome the questions they ask or answers they give, but we can neither deny their right to tender them nor ignore them out of hand. If we drill down further, we find Confucian-Christian dialogue speaks to pressing issues of identity and individuality, and thence into debates on genetic engineering and ecology, euthanasia, education and Human Rights.17 The connection both traditions forge between anthropology and cosmology challenges a mechanistic bifurcation of humanity and the natural world at a time this

N.B. on spirituality in secularity, Smith, G. (2008), History of Secularism. N.B. on New Confucianism and ecology, Tu, W. (1998), ‘Beyond the Enlightenment Mentality’; —(1976) Neo-Confucian Thought; —(1989) Centrality and Commonality. For Christian responses, Gottlieb R. S. ed. (2004), This Sacred Earth; Bakken, P., et al. (1995), Ecology, Justice and Christian Faith; Hessel, D. T. ed. (1996), Theology for Earth Community; — (2000), Christianity and Ecology; Nash, J. A. (1996), ‘Toward the Ecological Reformation of Christianity’. 16 17

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relationship is under close, postmodern scrutiny. As such, both traditions now resist abuse of the natural world and offer a prophetic critique of amoral ecology and biological experimentation. Here, in short, is a concerted appeal to depth in life and a rejection of selfish superficiality. Love, goodness, truth, discipline, sacrifice, patience, study, effort, wisdom and loyalty, are all commended here; while pride and deceit, treachery, cant, poverty, pain, death and despair, are effectively confronted. If we doubt how relevant Confucianism and Christianity are to life today, we should read (again) their ‘Classic’ texts, in which our shared existential condition is laid bare with disconcerting perspicacity. This comparative study of Christianity and Confucianism has been enhanced by, and aims to contribute to, three specific areas of scholarship. First, comparative ‘Culture Studies’ and intercultural philosophy; in other words, academic disciplines that address the specific character and complexity of what has been called the ‘Dialogue between Civilizations’. Talk of ‘culture wars’18 and the ‘clash of civilizations’19 has generated heat, if not light. ‘Culture Studies’ reinforce the notion of Confucianism and Christianity as micro-cultures that exist in a symbiotic relation with macro-cultures that spawn, nurture, critique and disseminate them. We cannot, and do not know cultural realities apart from this process of cultural conditioning. Historical inter-cultural studies confirm of-late that cultural interaction has existed for longer, and in more potent and nuanced ways, than previously imagined.20 Like grains of wheat in a trader’s bag, ideas, rituals and cultural habits have been transported and planted elsewhere.21 We can no longer say confidently and unambiguously that ‘East is East, and West is West’. Modern ‘globalization’ narratives too often forget the fact and impact of ‘Silk Roads’.22 We are, and have been aware for centuries of being, part of one interconnected world. In light of this, later chapters consider Confucianism and Christianity as micro-cultures; that is, through their symbols, rituals, myths and mores. Prior to that, we examine the technical, intellectual exchange that has existed for centuries between Christianity and Confucianism. But even more than this, we look for macro-cultural situations, which spawned, nurtured, critiqued, and disseminated oriental Confucianism in occidental Christianity, and the reverse. Neither Christianity nor Confucianism have existed in a vacuum, and neither remained unaffected by international stimuli. Like images in a camera, each is rightly seen as superimposed on and through the other for millennia. How could it be otherwise? Recognizing this is crucial here. Inter-cultural philosophy, as a subset of ‘Culture Studies’, is an important matrix for ConfucianChristian dialogue.23 If Christianity is more than a philosophy, it is never less: it applies logic, uses 18 N.B. the roots of ‘culture war’ discourse in 1980s America, and of Samuel Huntington (1927–2008) and Edward Said’s (1935–2003) popularizing of an East-West ‘clash of civilizations’, in Prussian PM Otto von Bismarck’s (1815–98) Kulturkampf (culture struggle, 1871–8), that sought to restrict the influence of the RC minority. In the 1920s, the Marxist social theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) re-energized the idea of a ‘culture struggle’. Cf. also, Hunter, J. D. (1991), Culture Wars. For positive and inclusive views of E-W exchange, Forman, R. G. (2014), China and the Victorian Imagination; Song, G. ed. (2016), Reshaping the Boundaries: The Christian Intersection of China and the West in the Modern Era. 19 Cf. Huntington, S. (1996), The Clash of Civilizations; Said, E. (1978), Orientalism. For a Chinese view, He, G. (2008), ‘Clash of Civilizations’. On Said, p. 184, n. 3, 268, n. 17, 294, n. 145, 384, n. 213. 20 On China and world religions, Chan, W-T. (1969), ‘The Historic Chinese Contribution’. 21 Cf. Clossey, L. (2006), ‘Merchants, Migrants, Missionaries’; Gunn, G. C. (2003), First Globalization.; also, Feuchter, J. et al. (2011), Cultural Transfers in Dispute. 22 On the cultural impact of old ‘Silk Road/s’, Frankopan, P. (2015), The Silk Roads. 23 On E-W philosophical interaction since the late–1980s, Bunnin, N. and J. Yu, eds (2004), Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy; also, on religion and globalization in China from 1800, Jansen, T., T. Klein and C. Meyer, eds (2014), Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China.

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reason, and engages, or is engaged by, secular thought and ideology in its public exposition of faith. Confucianism is, as we will see, controversially a ‘religion’ or even ‘religious’.24 Inter-cultural philosophy – more than inter-religious dialogue, or even comparative religion – captures the spirit of this book in two key respects. First, it advocates an inclusive approach in which no school of philosophy is privileged, no part of their history, methodology, or content, proscribed. This seems to me entirely appropriate. The pitch is to be level, even if the game is tight. Neither Confucianism nor Christianity can be permitted to set the agenda. Christianity cannot demand Confucianism address, for example, sin, nor Confucianism prescribe its expression(s) of filial piety for all. Intercultural philosophy is methodologically and intellectually generous. It does not project categories nor promote its preferred criteria. It pursues mature systems ready and able to communicate respectfully. Second, as David Hall and Roger Ames argue in their ‘deconstructive’ reading of the Analects, Thinking through Confucius (1987), inter-cultural philosophy can help point up the inadequacy of Western categories to express Chinese culture. As Robert Neville says in the Preface: ‘Increasing sophistication has revealed the subtle but pervasive otherness between these cultures that distorts the effectiveness of even the best translations’ (viii).25 In other words, key categories like humanity, heaven, time, love or truth, are susceptible to distorted or projected meanings. I would go further: if we are not aware of ‘cultural archetypes’ that shape how we see life, we cannot read accurately nor ‘read backwards carefully’. If we fail to take cognizance of the way China and the West have been (and indeed are) conditioned by ‘cultural archetypes’, we cannot read the Analects and Gospels with intelligent integrity, let alone interpret them wisely as guides to life and images of truth. Equally, however, when global ‘cultural archetypes’ are identified and deployed, we have the basis for a new type of Confucian-Christian dialogue and East-West socio-political, linguistic and cultural exchange. The second area of scholarship to which this work relates, and seeks to contribute, is the cultural and intellectual history of East-West relations. This is the obvious location for study of the dialogue between Christianity and Confucianism.26 Indeed, the centrality of the 17th-century Jesuit mission to European engagement with China places Confucian-Christian dialogue at the historical and intellectual heart of East-West relations. We will look at the content of that dialogue in detail later: it is the backcloth of much that follows.27 For now, three features of this cross-cultural history deserve attention. First, as Frankopan and others have shown, from 13th-century Mongol invasions to trade in silk, tea, porcelain and spices, European interaction with China was broad and deep. Military campaigns suppressed and displaced people. Old cultural boundaries became blurred.28 Musicology tracks tunes from China to Persia. Evidence reveals Nestorian (viz. Persian) Christians in China in 578 CE, but they were there as traders and not missionaries. Socio-geographic mobility, and this cultural, intellectual fluidity, are not new. Confucian-Christian dialogue – when interpreted

Cf. p. 33, n. 76, 34, n. 77, 35, 117, n. 144, 121f., 151, 182, n. 292, 257, 293. Hall and Ames show how inter-cultural studies can expose the inadequacy of domestic terms and categories. 26 N.B. recently, Keevak, M. (2017), Embassies to China. 27 For a recent study of the Jesuit contribution, N. Golvers, N. (2017), ‘The Jesuit mission in China (17th-18th cent.) as the framework for the circulation of knowledge between Europe and China’. 28 On knowledge exchange without travel, Sachsenmaier, D. (2018), Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled; and, when early missionaries lost their way, Vermote, F. (2018), ‘Travelers Lost and Redirected’. 24 25

INTRODUCTION

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as a subtle spectrum of casual, verbal, ritual, and formal academic, encounters – existed for centuries in unself-conscious, broadband, cultural interaction. In so far as Christianity was noticed in the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), it was linked to Syria and the Roman Empire as just Bosi-jiao ⌒ᯟᮉ (Persian teaching) or Daqin jingjiao བྷ〖Ჟᮉ (Enlightened religion of the Daqin).29 The history of East-West cultural and intellectual relations cannot compartmentalize religion and everyday life, nor bifurcate occidental Christianity and oriental Confucianism. Such hard edges do not fit the evidence, nor the subtle science of cultural interaction. What’s more, as introduced above, this interpenetration involves shared ‘cultural archetypes’ that intrude on, and inspire, ConfucianChristian dialogue. There is one caveat to this: after more than two millennia the mystique (if not terror) of the ‘Orient’ in occidental eyes is as strong as ever.30 The cultural and intellectual history of East-West relations also reveals, secondly, the interaction was two-way. If post-colonial studies ensure European violations of Asia are not hidden, contemporary scholarship admits other countervailing forces. The social, scientific, philosophical, political, and literary impact on 17th- and 18th-century Europe of the quest to copy ‘hard paste’ porcelain, say, or to integrate Chinese thought in European philosophy and correlate Confucianism with Christian orthodoxy, are increasingly acknowledged today.31 Likewise, Western missionaries as intermediaries of culture. As Harvard historian John K. Fairbank (1907–91) wrote: ‘In China’s nineteenth-century relations with the West, Protestant missionaries are still the least studied but most significant actors in the scene’ (Barnett and Fairbank 1985: 2).32 If we accept the criticism in academic International Relations of a late ‘Eurocentric big bang theory of world politics’, in which western ‘civilization’ spontaneously combusted, expanded, and spread out to make a world in its image, Europe’s encounters with China were still at best deferential, at worst, doctrinaire, dangerous, disastrous.33 But there were countless sources in China, and key receptors in the West, that helped to catalyse the dynamic trans-cultural matrix in which independently constructed texts and traditions (like the Analects and Gospels) have been – and still are – consciously or unconsciously read. In the international, cultural cartography that follows, we see significant topographic features on the uncharted, unprocessed, and at times unwelcomed, landscape of cultural reciprocity that has shaped, and still shapes, the world today.34 The legacy of van Gogh and his ilk live on in China and the West.35 Capturing and presenting this is essential here – and for the future. As we have begun to recognize, in the history of East-West cultural and intellectual interaction, Christian mission, and the literature associated with it, are increasingly respected. When something, 29 Daqin was the name for the Eastern Roman Empire. On this, Nicolini-Zani, M. (2013), ‘Christian Approaches to Religious Diversity’. 30 On the mystique of the Orient, p. 101, 103f., 145, 173. 31 Cf. Couto, D. and F. Lachaud, eds (2017), Empires en marche; Brandt, B. and D. L. Purdy, eds (2016), China in the German Enlightenment; Jäger, H. (2012), ‘Konfuzianismusrezeption als Wegbereitung der deutschen Aufklärung’. Cf. also, below p. 102f., 110, 115, 118, 184. 32 Cf. Fairbank, J. K. (1974a), The Missionary Enterprise. 33 For an IR perspective on intimidation Jesuits (and others) felt when they first encountered Chinese politics, culture and philosophy, Zhang, Y. (2014), ‘Curious and exotic encounters’; Mungello, D. (2005), The Great Encounter, 81f. 34 On unexpected Sino-Western philosophical contact, Gopnik, A. (2009), ‘Could David Hume Have Known about Buddhism?’ 35 N.B. Van Gogh’s impact on artists trained in the West, like Xu Beihong ᗀᛢ卫 (1895–1953), President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and Chairman of the China Artists Association (1949), and Sanyu or Chang Yu ᑨ⦹ (1901–66), who settled in Paris. Such is art’s capacity to speak globally and unite socio-politically. On this, cf. Choi, K. I. (2015), ‘Portraits of Virtue: Henri-Léonard Bertin, Joseph Amiot and the “Great Man” of China’.

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or someone, noticeably Christian first arrived in China is a mystery.36 The stele37 discovered by workman in Xi’an 㾯ᆹᐲ (mod.), or Chang’an 䮧ᆹ (China’s historic capital), in 1625, is dated 781. It honours the arrival of the shadowy Bishop Alopen in 635.38 This is a significant event in the primitive history of Chinese Christianity,39 despite the fact James Legge (1815–97), the Scottish missionary-scholar and first Professor of Chinese at Oxford University (fr. 1876), dismissed Alopen and his successors’ legacy as a ‘certain degenerate nominal Christianity . . . swamped by Confucian, Taoist & Buddhist ideas’ ([1888], Foster 1939: 112)! Perhaps unsurprisingly, before the appearance of the gifted and charismatic Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and his Jesuit brethren in the early 17th century, the history of Christianity in China is shrouded in mystery and plagued by controversy (not that things improve much later!).40 As casual encounters give way to missionary endeavour, the fortunes of Christianity in China wax and wane. Waves of missionaries come from Europe bringing their different theologies, practices and cultural hand-luggage. Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans, and various manifestations of Protestant endeavour, all engage Chinese culture and its ancient Confucian heritage.41 We review this story in Chapter 3. For now, as recent scholarship (on an almost industrial scale) reveals, the RC ‘China mission’ of the 17th and 18th centuries played a pivotal role in importing (largely unsuccessfully at first) European culture into China and exporting (at times effectively and oppressively) Chinese skills, ideas, products, artefacts and personnel into Western Europe. In this atmosphere Confucian-Christian cultural dialogue was hazardous. It had to weather intense military and political storms, economic and imperial ambition, religious and nationalist bigotry, and the idiocy or unpredictability of specific individuals and diverse communities.42 Along the way, Europe learned much from China and China from Europe. The result is the appearance today of two once unimaginable realities: China a global super-power and home to the largest Christian community, the West re-invaded by wealthy Chinese visitors and hundreds of thousands of Chinese scholars and students, many seeking faith and/or a new homeland. The third area of scholarship which this book has been enhanced by, and aims to contribute to, is comparative Sino- and/or Confucian-Christian studies. Scholarship in this area can be subdivided. Some evidence suggests the late 1st-century Thomas mission went on from India to China. The stele was a 279 cm high limestone column with an account of Christian communities and their faith inscribed in Chinese and Syriac script. Cf. p. 92f., 96, n. 28. 38 Cf. Moffett, S. H. (1998b), Art. ‘Alopen’, in G. Anderson (ed.), Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, 14f. 39 On the stele, Wang, D. (2006), ‘Remnants of Christianity’, in R. Malek and P. Hofrichter (eds), Jingjiao, 149–62; also, Saeki, P. Y. (1951), Nestorian Documents; Wylie, A. (1855–6), ‘On the Nestorian Tablet’. On the history and archaeology of Christianity in Central Asia and China during the Tang (618–907) and Yuan (1271–1368) dynasties, Barrett, T. H. (2002), ‘Buddhism, Taoism and the eighth-century Chinese term for Christianity’; Baumer, C. (2006), Church of the East, 160–223; Godwin, T. (2017), Persian Christians at the Chinese Court; Halbertsma, T. (2008), Early Christian Remains; Malek, R. ed. (2002), Chinese Face of Jesus Christ, 159–79, 180–218, 259–83; Mikkelsen, G. (2007), [Review] ‘Li Tang’s Study of the History of Nestorian Christianity’. 40 On Christianity in China to 1500, Latourette, K. S. (1929), History of Christian Missions in China; Moffett, S. H. (1998a), History of Christianity in Asia; Moule, A. C. (1930), Christians in China; Gilman, I. and H-J. Klimkeit (1999), Christians in Asia Before 1500; Riboud, P. (2001), Art. ‘Tang’, in N. Standaert (ed.), Handbook of Christianity in China, I. 1–43; Lin, W. (2003), Tangdai jingjiao zai yanjiu; Tubach, J. (1999), ‘Die nestorianische Kirche in China’; Forte, A. ed. (1996), L’inscription nestorienne de Si-Ngan-Fou. 41 On Christianity in China generally, Bays, D. (2012a), A New History of Christianity in China; Doyle, G. W. ed. (2015), Builders of the Chinese Church; Fontana, M. (2011), Matteo Ricci; Liu, W. (2004), Christianity in China; Lutz, J. G. (2008), Opening China; Menegon, E. (2009), Ancestors, Virgins, & Friars; Tiedemann, R. G. ed. (2010), Handbook of Christianity in China, Volume 2; Wang, X. (1998), Christianity and Imperial Culture. 42 On ‘failures’ in Western engagement with the Orient, Hertel, R. and M. Keevak, eds (2017), Early Encounters. 36 37

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First, there are integrative studies like Ralph Covell’s, Confucius, The Buddha, and Christ (1986) and David Mungello’s Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (1989) that interweave historical data with intellectual debate, and correlate philosophical and theological issues with emerging Sino-Christian relations.43 Second, there is the work of Chinese scholars such as He Guanghu (b. 1950), Liu Xiaofeng (b. 1956), Ma Min (b. 1955), Tao Feiya (b. 1954), Yang Huilin (b. 1954), Zhao Dunhua (b. 1949) and Zhuo Xinping (b. 1955), who have developed expertise in Western theology and philosophy, church history, ethics, biblical studies and comparative literature, and provided important critical reflection on, and thought-leadership to, Chinese theology and its white-collar ‘Cultural Christians’.44 Third, some new Sino- and ConfucianChristian literature has a thematic, or ‘systematic’, theological character. This perpetuates early Catholic or Protestant intentions: notably, the scholastic strategy of Alessandro Valignano, SJ (1539–1606), Matteo Ricci, SJ, and their Jesuit brothers in Beijing, Johann Adam Schaal von Bell, SJ (1592–1666) and Ferdinand Verbiest, SJ (1623–88); the early translations, sinology and crosscultural work of pioneer Protestant missionaries like Robert Morrison (1782–1836), William Milne (1785–1822), Walter Medhurst (1796–1857) and the Chinese convert Liang [A] Fa ằⲬ (1789– 1855);45 the educational and medical work of early American missionaries Elijah Coleman Bridgman (1801–61), Edwin Stevens (1802–37), and Peter Parker (1804–88); and a second generation of scholar-missionaries, like John Stronach (1810–88), W. A. P. Martin (1827–1916), Timothy Richard (1845–1919), James Legge and his Cambridge counterpart Herbert Giles (1845–1935).46 As Yang Huilin and Daniel Yeung’s work on Sino-Christian theology has shown, early and mid-20th-century Chinese scholars (i.e. Xie Fuya, Zhou Yifu, Zhou Lianhua, Xu Baoqian, Fan Zimei, Liu Tingfang, Feng Shangli, Cheng Jingyi, Chang Lit-sen, Zhao Zichen [T. C. Chao], Wu Yaozong [Y. T. Wu], Wu Leichuan) developed doctrinal, thematic studies and nurtured distinct traditions of indigenous Chinese theology.47 More recently, Julia Ching, He Guanghu, Paulos Huang, Sangkeun Kim, Miikka Ruokanen, Paul A. Rule, Paul K. T. Sih, Tu Weiming, Yang Huilin, Yao Xinzhong and K. K. Yeo (and myself) have studied sundry theological, contextual and exegetical issues in Sino-Western and Confucian-Christian dialogue.48 Spirituality, humanity, forgiveness, salvation, love, memory, ritual and wisdom have all been studied, and biblical, Confucian, Daoist, Neo-Confucian, and Buddhist texts comparatively exegeted. The present work engages this body of material, and the questions it asks about the cultural distinctives of China and Christianity. But I also want to ask some different questions in new ways. 43 Cf. Lo, H. L. (1996), Nestorianism; Riegert, R. and T. Moore, eds (2006), The Lost Sutras of Jesus; Starr, C. (2016), Chinese Theology; Young, J. D. (1980), East-West Synthesis. 44 On their work, Fällman, F. (2008), Salvation and Modernity; He, G. (2000s), ‘Religious Studies in China 1978–1999’. On cultural re-accreditation of Western mission, Yang, H. (2014), China, Christianity, and the Question of Culture. 45 Cf. McNeur, G. H. (2013), Liang A-Fa: China’s First Preacher; Hancock, C. (2008), Robert Morrison, ad loc. 46 Cf. Covell, passim, on these individuals; also, below p. 214f. 47 On Sino-Christian studies, He, G. (2006), ‘The Basis and Significance of Sino-Christian Theology’, in H. Yang and D. H. N. Yeung (eds), Sino-Christian Studies in China, 120–33; Starr, C. (2014), ‘Sino-Christian Theology’, in Jansen, Klein and Meyer (eds), 379–410; Madsen, R. (2017), ‘Epilogue: Multiple Sinicizations of Multiple Christianities’. 48 Cf. Ching, J. (1976), Christianity and Confucianism; He, G. (2000b), ‘Being vs. nothingness’; —(2013) ‘Human Dignity in Christianity and Confucianism’, in Zhuo, X. (ed.), Christianity, 107–33; Hancock, C. (2006), ‘Wisdom as Folly’; — (2013), ‘Memory, rite and tradition’; —(2014), ‘The seven-fold wisdom of love’; Huang, P. (2009), Confronting Confucian Understandings; Rule, P. A. (1986), K’ung-tzu or Confucius?; Ruokanen, M. and P. Huang, eds (2010), Christianity and Chinese Culture; Sih, P. K. T. (1952), From Confucius to Christ; Yang, H. (2006), Sino-Christian Studies in China; Yao, X. (1997), Confucianism and Christianity; Yeo, K. K. (2008), Musing with Confucius and Paul.

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PLANS As indicated, my aim here is to develop three perspectives in Confucian-Christian dialogue: First, the hermeneutic perspective, to re-examine the Analects and Gospels in light of modern hermeneutics: in particular, by using the motif of ‘reading backwards carefully’, to ensure what is read is what was meant. Though a platform of existential commonality exists between modern readers and these ancient texts, that enables us to engage and be engaged by them, in many other respects we are culturally distant, and bring conscious and unconscious presuppositions to bear on interpretation. To repeat the artistic analogy, our aim is picture restoration, to enable the originals to shine. In the final section of each chapter, we look at the text of the Analects and Gospels to read what they say again in light of historical events and developments. If discouraged or confused at any stage, I suggest you might start here. Second, the cultural perspective in Confucian-Christian dialogue: that is, to re-state the nature of the historic encounter of the Confucian Orient and Christendom. This involves charting shared exposure to, and often willing embrace of, trans-national ‘cultural archetypes’. In Chapters 3 to 8, major thematic comparisons of Confucianism and Christianity (if you like, the ‘essentials’ we exaggerate here) are set against the background of six historic ‘cultural archetypes’ that shaped, and in many respects still shape, the way East and West engage(d) the world and view(ed) life. Personally, I cannot divest myself of an occidental orientation. I hope nevertheless a compelling story of cultural, existential commonality emerges; or, at least enough for Chinese scholars and readers to amplify or adjust my narrative at some later stage. To my mind, that would be a good, right and entirely appropriate complementary study. Third, I aim to develop a critical perspective on Confucian-Christian dialogue: that is, to permit cultural commonalities and hermeneutic resources to challenge the narrow, myopic textualism of those who interpret the Analects and Gospels as if they did not belong to, or could not speak about, the life we live and world we share. Confucianism and Christianity are good for one another – and, I believe, good for the cultures from which they hail. This is not as widely recognized as it could be. Rather than encouraging cultural chauvinism, with China and/or the West growing in satisfied isolationism, I hope this book opens new paths into a ripe orchard of inter-cultural fruit. We begin, though, with the two individuals whose names and lives we associate with the traditions they inspired.

PART I In Part I we meet two men. They travel with us down the centuries covered by this book. At times we will sense their presence, their words and deeds directly affecting our journey. At other times, we will not be aware they are there. Perhaps we have ignored or forgotten them. Perhaps they – or we – have drifted away. This can be disconcerting, discouraging even. But we shouldn’t be worried. These are good men, who understand, really understand people, us. That is part of their genius. They understand fellow travellers as no mountain guide ever can. They anticipate questions, and answer needs, as no tour guide ever could. They set a pace that is both comfortable and challenging. They keep quiet, give us space, test our resolve, leave room for reflection. They add new information to keep our senses alert. Most importantly of all, they don’t just say, ‘Admire that view’, or ‘This is the time meals are served’: they share the view, they serve the meal. They are part of the journey – no, they are the journey, both making it and making it worthwhile. Little wonder we associate them both with ‘the Way’. There is something else we should be prepared for. These guides expose us to risk. They challenge us to attempt that pitch, to scale that wall, to go ‘off piste’ and face up to our fears. In the process, we see a striking integrity in their theory and practice. They don’t say, ‘Go and do, while I do nothing.’ They say, ‘Come and see’, and – perhaps most strikingly of all – ‘Come and see what I do.’ They claim to be examples and guides. They set the bar high and call their travelling companions, their disciples, to do the same. Unlike a doctor who claims to keep the Hippocratic Oath while ignoring suffering, or the musicologist who says notes on a page are great music, or the priest who preaches godliness while practising infidelity, these great guides ‘walk their talk’. Their ideal becomes a reality, their ethics are embodied, in them ‘words’ become ‘flesh’.

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CHAPTER ONE

Confucius, ‘The Master’ and Cultural Decay Virtue is never solitary; it always has neighbours. —A. 4.25 The next two chapters form a pair: better, perhaps, they examine two big figures on one dark old canvas. Like Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452–1519) masterful Mona Lisa (c. 1503–6), their eyes look deeply, follow carefully, interrogate, laugh, and perhaps even love us. It is hard to share a room, a gaze, or a lot of time with them, without being disturbed and consoled in equal measure. We may be more familiar with one face than the other, or unused to seeing them together. The canvas we are looking at needs cleaning. The light could be brighter, our mind and memories could be stronger. We should not be dismayed. Like da Vinci’s portrait of Lisa del Giocondo (1479–1542),1 the Mona Lisa – the young wife of a wealthy silk trader and a scion of Tuscany’s Gherardini clan – if we look carefully, we discover they too are peaceful figures in another priceless masterpiece, with an inviting smile in their eyes. We turn first to Confucius (c. 551–479 BCE). We can make out a bulbous head and ample physique, his rough-textured appearance well-suited to a van Gogh portrait.2 We know he was born3 – and is buried – in Zou Yi 䲜䛁 (Qufu ᴢ䱌) in the state of Lu 冟, one of the vassal territories of the Zhou Dynasty ઘᵍ (c. 1042–249 BCE), located in Shandong Province in modern southeast China. He is a contemporary of Buddha and the Old Testament prophecy and writings on Israel’s Babylonian exile and return to Jerusalem.4 His Western name, ‘Confucius’, is the Latinized version of the honorific title early Jesuit missionaries gave the celebrated Kong Fuzi ᆄཛᆀ5 (Master Kong), whom they found sitting – as to many Chinese he still sits – at the heart of

1 The painting has been in the Musée du Louvre, Paris since 2005. Most critics agree the subject is Lisa del Giocondo. ‘Mona’ means ‘Mother’ or ‘My Lady’. The French and Italian titles, ‘La Joconde’/ ‘La Gioconda’, are a pun on the happy sitter’s name and situation. 2 The earliest known portrait of Confucius is on the wooden frame of a bronze mirror in the Han grave of Liu He ࢹ䋰, the Marquis of Haihun (d. 59 BCE). Confucius is often represented meeting (in ?518 BCE) his iconic counterpart, the semilegendary c. 6th/5th-century BCE philosopher Laozi 㘱ᆀ (old master), reputed author of Tao Te Ching 䚃ᗧ㏃, or sitting in his Temple. It seems Laozi thought Confucius arrogant and stuffy. 3 28 September 551 BCE. 4 Cf. the 6th-century BCE ‘exilic’ prophets (Zephaniah, Jeremiah, Obadiah, Ezekiel) and the writings and prophecy linked to the 5th-century BCE ‘return’ of the Jews from captivity in Babylon to Jerusalem (Haggai, Zechariah, Joel, Ezra-Nehemiah and Esther). 5 N.B. often shortened today to Kongzi ᆄᆀ.

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China’s ancient culture.6 From his appearance, and the little historical data we have, it seems he was for much of his life, like ‘the suffering servant’ of Isaiah’s prophecy, ‘despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief ’ (Is. 53.3). His protégé Mencius, or Meng Zi ᆏᆀ (c. 372– 303 BCE),7 would claim otherwise: ‘Ever since man came into this world, there never has been another Confucius’ (M. 2A. 2). If we want to know about this towering figure ‘the best thing we can do is look at the Analects’ (Dawson 1981: 5). This is our best canvas. There we find what SwissGerman psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) described as a ‘paradigmatic individual’, one of few people in history who, when faced by public obloquy and political chaos, ‘lived what they preached, and represented a very high personal ethic . . . expressed in clear moral demands’ (1962: 51). As we can guess, Confucius is larger than life, intimidating on first acquaintance. We have to work to see a twinkle in his eyes. With cleaning they shine. So, what can we say? From the outset, Confucius’s life and work divided opinion. His increasingly grand titles – ‘Great Sage’ 㠣㚆, ‘First Teacher’ ‫ݸ‬ᑛ, ‘Model Teacher for Ten Thousand Ages’ 㩜цᑛ㺘, ‘Laudably Declarable Lord Ni’ 㽂ᡀᇓቬ‫( ޜ‬fr. 1 BCE) and ‘Extremely Sage Departed Teacher’ 㠣㚆‫ݸ‬ᑛ (fr. 1530) – match his growing profile, but ‘lives’ about him conflict.8 Each age has its own Confucius (Littlejohn 2011: 15). The historian Gu Jiegang 亗乑ࢋ (1893–1980) advised: ‘Take one Confucius at a time’ (q. Nylan and Wilson 2010: 26).9 To Nylan and Wilson, five frequent criticisms of Confucius recur (ibid., 29–66);10 his identity and profile always intertwined over the centuries with politics, ideology, academic debate, personal rivalry, traditions in historiography and prevailing state orthodoxy. Reviews have always been mixed. Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), the German philosopher, dismissed him bluntly: ‘[T]here is nothing to be obtained from his teachings’ (1892: 1.120f.), and damned with faint praise the ethics of the Analects as ‘good and honest, and nothing more’ (ibid.).11 Other writers for various reasons have been more generous. As we will see later, British and European literati swooned in the 17th and early 18th centuries. But, Confucius’s fortunes hit new highs and lows in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as China sought to reconcile its imperial past with modern Western

6 On Confucianism and China’s unique culture, Yin, F. (2000), ‘A classification of Chinese culture’; Tu, W. (1991), ‘A Confucian perspective on the rise of Industrial East Asia’, in S. Krieger and R. Trauzettel (eds), Confucianism and the Modernization of China, 29–41. 7 Mencius is the most famous Confucian after Confucius. Born in the State of Zou 䲜 (c. thirty miles S. of Qufu), he was purportedly a pupil of Confucius’s grandson Zisi ᆀᙍ, or Kong Ji ᆄԻ (c. 481–402 BCE). Mencius was, like Confucius, an itinerant scholar-official, who provided (often unwelcome) advice to rulers and ruled. Mengzi, his collected works, belongs to the Four Books ഋᴨ (Sishu) of the Confucian canon (below p. 30, n. 60, 102, 120, n. 156, 121, n. 161). To most scholars, unlike Confucius Mencius saw humanity as innately good; as in the ‘Four Beginnings’ ഋㄟ (Siduan; Lit. ‘sprouts’ or ‘limbs’) of virtue, he saw a human capacity to commiserate, feel shame and respect, and distinguish right from wrong. From these, he maintained, the four cardinal Confucian virtues grow, namely, benevolence ӱ (ren), righteousness 㗙 (yi), propriety ⿞ (li), and wisdom Ც (zhi). N.B. Legge found parallels in Bp. Joseph Butler’s (1692–1752) ‘Sermons on Human Nature’ (1726), preached at the Rolls Chapel, London. 8 E.g. the evolving philosophy, ethic and perception of Confucius evident in texts linked to Mozi ໘ᆀ, or Mo Di ໘㘏 (470–391 BCE), Zhuangzi 㦺ᆀ (370–287 BCE), Han Feizi 七䶎ᆀ (c. 280–33 BCE), Dong Zhongshu 㪓Ԣ㡂 (179–c. 104 BCE), Sima Qian (135–86 BCE), Yang Xiong ᨊ䳴 (53 BCE–18 CE) and Zhu Xi ᵡ⟩ (1130–1200). On Sima Qian, p. 29f., 35f., 43, 488. On Zhu Xi, p. 38, 91, n. 2, 96f., 146, 195, n. 59, 297, 483. 9 Gu is best known for his seven-volume Gu Shi Bian ਔਢ䗘 [Debates on Ancient History] published between 1926 and 1941. 10 N.B. Nylan and Wilson also point to positives derived from criticism of Confucius. 11 On Hegel, p. 233f.

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culture.12 Arthur F. Wright captures Confucius’s fluctuating fate in the 1920s as a descent from ‘The Master’ to an ‘uncrowned king’, to a religious founder, and finally to merely an ‘old teacher’ (1960: 308). He, too, quotes Gu Jiegang, a powerhouse for the ‘Doubting Antiquity School’, or Yigupai (⯁ਔ⍮), and China’s ‘New Culture Movement’ (ᯠ᮷ॆ䘀अ) of the 1910s and 1920s: Confucius was regarded in the Ch’un-ch’iu (Spring and Autumn) period (722–481 BC) as a gentleman, in the time of the Warring States (403–221 BC) as a sage, in the Western Han (206 BC–AD 9) as a religious founder, after the Eastern Han (AD 25–220) again as a sage, and now is about to be regarded once more as a gentleman. —ibid. Here, it seems, is an unlikely hero with an inauspicious reputation. It is not surprising if we find the tones in Confucius’s portrait dull and muted. This old picture has been frequently touched up, hacked about, over-painted and, at times, deliberately discoloured. The relationship between Confucius, the man, and Confucianism, as a composite cultural, and socio-ethical intellectual phenomenon, is ambiguous (Ching, J. 1976: 7). The name is once again a Western misnomer for a cluster of ancient scholarly traditions, rituals and ethical mores; namely, ru ݂ (soft, refined, scholarly), rujia ݂ᇦ (ru family, or school of thought), rujiao ݂ᮉ (ru doctrine, or tradition), and ruxue ݂ᆨ (ru learning, or teaching) (Yao, X. 2000: 29f.).13 Today, rujiao or ruxue are commonly translated ‘Confucianism’. The term is extended from its application to early classical texts and traditions, through the later metaphysical ‘Neo-Confucianism’ of scholars like Han Yu 七 ᜸ (768–824) and Li Ao ᵾ㘪 (Xizhi 㘂ѻ) (772–841) in the late Tang dynasty ୀᵍ (772–841), and Zhu Xi ᵡ⟩ (1130–1200) and Wang Yangming ⦻䲭᰾ (1472–1529) in the Song ᆻᵍ (960–1279) and Ming dynasties བྷ᰾ (1368–1644), to latter-day, eco-sensitive, spiritual versions in the now globalized New or Boston Confucianism.14 In light of the dynamic, evolutionary nature of Confucianism, we should note an early point of contrast with Christianity: Confucius does not possess, like Jesus, a necessary centrality, or an ineluctable relation, to the ideas and traditions he spawned. Julia Ching is right: ‘Jesus Christ is more decisive for Christianity than Confucius is for Confucianism’ (1993: 6).15 The socio-cultural status of Confucius and Confucianism are linked, but they are separable. Our focus here is Confucius, the man – a sufficient challenge in itself. Our first task is, then, to clean the picture – that is, to ‘read backwards carefully’ – and so to recover Confucius, the man, author of the tradition he inspired. It is not easy. Layers of archaeological dust and accumulative grime cover both. To Theodore de Bary, there was a problem from the beginning. He writes:

12 Confucius and Confucianism suffered in the iconoclastic progressivism of the ‘May 4th Movement’ (1919) and in the ideological revisionism of mid-20th-century Maoist-Leninism. On this, Wang, H-W. (1975), Legalism and Anti-Confucianism in Maoist Politics; Myers, J. T., J. Domes and E. von Groeling, eds (1989), Chinese Politics; Zhang, T. and B. Schwartz (1997), ‘Confucius and the Cultural Revolution’. 13 N.B. Yao records academic preference for ruxue, in order to present Confucianism as an ongoing process of learning (ibid.). 14 On different forms of Confucianism, Yao, X. (2000), 68–125. For a bibliography on New Confucianism, Yeo, K. K. (2008), Musing with Confucius, 113, n. 9. 15 Ricci was sensitive to the relationship between Confucius and what he hesitated to call ‘Confucianism’ (Jensen 1997: 131f.).

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The trouble with Confucianism was there from the start, to become both a perennial challenge and a dilemma that would torment it through history – there in the founding myths of the tradition as the ideal of humane governance, and thereafter even in Confucianism’s moments of apparent worldly success, as the ungovernable reality of imperial rule. —1991: 1 How, then, are we to penetrate this hard, weathered material for a clear image of the man Confucius and of classical Confucianism to emerge? To answer this question, we return to picture restoration, and look for a ‘cultural archetype’ that can help exegete Confucius.

PICTURE RESTORATION AND ‘CULTURAL ARCHETYPES’ The quality of the image, or impression, we have of Confucius may be a bit discouraging. Picture restoration, like conservation, is a complex, contentious process.16 On a small scale, white bread and saliva can do wonders! A damaged ‘Old Master’ is different. In the case of an old painting, a restorer has to assess the painting’s age and condition, the materials used, and any damage sustained to the canvas, the stretcher and the frame. She has to evaluate the merits of leaving the work in its original ‘historic’ condition, or restoring, or conserving it. Van Gogh made extensive use of ‘chrome yellow’, a pigment base that discolours over time. Other colours are ‘fugitive’ (fade altogether) or lose their ‘light fastness’. If we could, would we want to reverse this process? That’s the question. The trained eye differentiates between natural ageing and noxious agents, and will know how to remove layers, replace pigments, and clean off unwanted matter. Art and science are both needed. Alongside knowledge of solvents and chemicals, the restorer and conserver will understand the artist’s technique and media; and, as Simon Blackwood states, she will ‘nurture an appreciation’, and ‘recognize what beauty lies beneath the veils of many years of neglect or adverse conditions’ (2018). Here we have, I suggest, a useful analogy for ‘reading backwards carefully’. Layers of historical interpretation, cultural assumption, wilful misunderstanding, and our innate dull mindedness, need to be carefully removed. Multi-disciplinary modern hermeneutics is, as we will see later, about the art of meaning, or complex act of reading, as much as the science of communication. As picture restoration and conservation reveal, recovery of a valuable old image requires patience, a sense of history, technical skill and an artist’s eye. We need these to interpret Confucius and Confucianism – and, remember, ‘Master Kong’ relished beauty, and would rejoice at conscious use of an aesthetic method and analogy to explain his ideas. The long, and often heated, debates between conservators, art historians, and the public, about the propriety, limits, and disastrous consequences (!) of picture restoration17 suggest more may be at stake than the state of a canvas or the water damage to a fresco. As French philosopher Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) responded to mid-20th-century wrangling: ‘There are two ways for a painting to perish, the one is for it to be restored; the other is for it not to be restored’ (1957: 108)!18 In a

N.B. though technically imprecise, I am using ‘restoration’ to include ‘conservation’ here. Cf. the heated debate about the cleaning of ‘High Renaissance’ artist Michelangelo’s (1475–1564) fresco ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, Rome (1508–12). 18 On the philosophy, history and practice of conservation, Price, N., M. K. Talley and A. M. Vaccaro, eds (2016), Historical and Philosophical Issues. 16 17

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fine article on controversy in her profession, Dianne Dwyer Modestini, Paintings Conservator at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, concludes: ‘The restorer is always standing on shaky ground, not infrequently undermined by the work of his predecessors’ (2005: 34). The long, bitter, all too public debate between the German picture conservationist Helmut Ruhemann (1891–1973), an eminent advocate of thorough cleaning, and the Austrian-born British art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001), who abhorred it to his dying day, would seem to suggest perception is about more than empirical objectivity.19 We see, read and interpret reality, in light of an almost unlimited number of objective and subjective factors. Though the mild John Brealey (1925–2002), chairman of paintings conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1975–89), might claim, ‘The way the picture looks is the picture’ (Modestini: 27), it is we who look not the picture, just as we read not the book. Interpretation is inseparable from perception, and perception from all we are and have come, for myriad reasons, to see and believe about life and the world. So, the analogy of picture restoration offers an invitation and a caution, an invitation to think deeply about the process, pitfalls and possibilities of restoring this image of Confucius and classical Confucianism, and a caution to be aware of presupposition and prejudice. As Hall and Ames contend: ‘The primary defect of the majority of Confucius’s interpreters . . . has been the failure to search out and articulate those distinctive presuppositions which have dominated Chinese tradition’ (1987: 1).20 Chinese and Western readers of the Analects and Gospels are vulnerable. Self-awareness is essential. These images are priceless, to be cleaned with care. I have named ‘archetypes’ and ‘cultural archetypes’ before without definition: that omission must be swiftly corrected. In Plato, ‘ideal forms’ are archetypes that are perfectly and eternally what temporal objects or images are imperfectly and temporally. In popular usage, ‘archetype’ refers to a classic example of something, or somebody – be they teacher, artist, IT geek or parson – with the implication that they are a proto-type, or an example to copy. Hence, in mathematics ‘archetypes’ are ‘Canonical Examples’. In the psycho-analytic tradition of pioneer Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875–1961),21 an ‘archetype’ is a primeval image existing in the ‘collective unconscious’, accessing which may enable understanding and healing.22 More recently, drawing on Jung, ‘archetype’ has been used in comparative literature, business management, art history, anthropology and musicology, to identify the striking – at times inexplicable – similarities that appear in characters and images, myths and stories, art, tunes and ritual symbols.23 Archetypes exemplify for many the mysterious interconnectedness of life. But we must proceed with care: identifying ‘cultural archetypes’ is a slippery, subjective slope. Square cultural pegs do not fit every round theoretical hole. Archetypes can also be projected hopes and unrealistic dreams. 19 Cf. Ruhemann, H. (1968), The Cleaning of Paintings; Gombrich, E. (1962a), ‘Blurred Images and the Unvarnished Truth’; —(1962b) ‘Dark Varnishes’. Cf. also, Toch, M. (1931), Paint, Paintings and Restoration; Hochfield, S. (1976), ‘Conservation’. 20 For the American philosopher Richard Rorty’s (1931–2007) response to Hall and Ames (and a Gadamerian perspective on texts and the Analects and NT), Huang, Y. ed. (2009), Rorty, Pragmatism, and Confucianism, 296f. On Rorty, p. 332, n. 325, 474, n. 406. On Gadamer, p. 330, 332, n. 324, 360, 375, 470f., 495. 21 On Jung, p. 22, 381, n. 195, 390, n. 265, 394, 396, 398, 459, n. 297. 22 Cf. Jung, C. G. (1968), The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious; —([1953] 1972), Four Archetypes; Lawson, T. T. (2008), Carl Jung; Dunne, C. (2000), Carl Jung: Wounded Healer. 23 For a comparable use of symbols, Welch, J. (1982), Spiritual Pilgrims: Carl Jung and Teresa of Avila. On ‘cultural archetypes’ in music (i.e. Mahler’s 9th symphony), Neubauer, J. (1999), ‘Cultural Analysis and the Ghost of “Geistesgeschichte” ’, in M. Bal and B. Gonzales (eds), The Practice of Cultural Analysis, 287–302 (esp. 296).

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Jung and archetypal literary criticism add depth to our discussion. From both we are brought to seek prototypes that define perception, and patterns that symbolize commonalities in experience and culture. Hence, a dream or ancient myth may expound the ‘mother’ figure, or the image of a snake, an apple, a hero, or fraud, convey a universal cultural truth in literary or representational form. Archetypes drive intercultural dialogue towards unity in diversity, towards global harmony through experiential commonality.24 ‘Cultural archetypes’ are ties that bind and images that explain.25 The Confucian Analects and Christian Gospels cannot be understood apart from the ‘cultural archetypes’ they embody and that condition our reading of them. We do not ‘read backwards carefully’ if the presence and impact of such are missed. A potential threat to this approach needs to be addressed, namely, the extent to which ‘cultural archetypes’ are context-specific and so problematic as global operatives. Nationalist exceptionalism, cultural hubris, and ideological post-colonialism, chafe against globalizing meta-narratives and universal norms and forms. ‘My world is my world not yours’, they say. However, as argued in the Introduction, inter-cultural studies engage cultural distinctives and commonalities; indeed, apart from the former we cannot access the latter. Globalization may be a brutal, wretched, reductionist force at times: in the face of this, inter-cultural dialogue is a bulwark of generosity in a battered world of cultural antipathy and nationalist animosity. The proposal here, to recognize the impact of ‘cultural archetypes’ on reading the Confucian Analects and Christian Gospels, is invitational in tone and rhetorical in style. My hope is this approach will ‘ring true’ and assist appreciation of what the Analects and Gospels articulate independently and together, to individuals, societies and an unharmonious world.

AESTHETICS, PAIN AND NOSTALGIA We must choose ‘cultural archetypes’ carefully. They are for us like the conservationists’ chemicals and picture restorers’ solvents. Through them ancient texts are cleaned, their original meaning made clear for a contemporary audience. Gombrich was right to warn against over-cleaning, Ruhemann to advocate some. If, or when, the figures of Confucius and Jesus are lost to view, obscured by time or noxious social, intellectual and moral acids, cleaning is justified. Purist antiquarianism, that leaves a slashed canvas untouched, does not suit these ‘paradigmatic figures’. They deserve to be seen and heard. They speak of things that matter. Over-cleaning is also a risk. Pride, prejudice and presuppositions, can inspire a desire to find in the image of Jesus or Confucius what we want to find. John Brealey was in this respect right: ‘The way the picture looks is the picture.’ To ‘read backwards carefully’ is to find what Confucius and Jesus said and meant, not what we hope they said and never really meant! Differentiating between these is, surely, also ‘essential’.

N.B. I am aware that, for different reasons, Chinese intellectuals Liang Qichao ằஏ䎵 (1873–1929) and Liang Shuming ằ╡Ⓩ (1893–1988) would reject this argument. To Liang, writing in 1920, only ‘Chinese culture’ (as a moral and spiritual force) could save morally wayward Europe after WWI. To Liang, the unique archetypes of ‘Chinese culture’ could not be universalized. On this, Tang, X. (1996), Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity; Alitto, G. (1986), The Last Confucian. 25 On popular culture, politics, national brand-marketing and censorship in Asia (and on S. Korea’s ‘cultural archetypes’), Otmazgin, N. and E. Ben-Ari, eds (2012), Popular Culture and the State in East and Southeast Asia. 24

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What, then, of ‘cultural archetypes’ and Confucius and Confucianism? This is tricky. We must proceed with care and choose judiciously. A ‘cultural archetype’ must ‘fit’ the object of enquiry, lest it distort meaning, like ‘bloom’ on an oil painting under glass. It must ‘clean’ effectively like reliable hermeneutic solvents, so we experience a ‘second naïveté’ in reading, that is, ‘as if for the first time’. And it must ‘ring true’ to our sense of self, society, culture/s and the world. This is a tall order. As with the Sistine Chapel in Rome, the result will in the end prove or disprove the legitimacy of the cleaning process, and so ‘ring true’. The ‘fit’ between Confucius and the ‘cultural archetype’ affects everything. It deserves particular attention. And, so we begin the process of picture restoration. Without pre-judging what we may find, Confucius was quite extra-ordinary. His footprints still impress our world. His rather (un-)attractive combination of moral passion, practical wisdom and iconic action is striking; likewise, his educational methods, nationalist zeal and plain old humility. As he said self-effacingly: ‘I transmit rather than innovate. I trust in and love the ancient ways. I might thus humbly compare myself to Old Peng’ (A. 7.1).26 From the outset, here is a man who fascinated and frustrated, his crabby character, allusive style, and independent manner, making him hard to love, but not to admire. Here is someone with a rare capacity to venerate history, recycle nostalgia, savour beauty and acquire disciples. Here, too, lie clues, perhaps, to a plausible, interpretative ‘cultural archetype’ that ‘fits’ Confucius. ‘I am not someone who was born with knowledge. I simply love antiquity, and diligently look there for knowledge’ (A. 7.20). And, of his aesthetic sense: ‘The wise take joy in rivers, while the Good take joy in mountains’ (A. 6.23).27 This is how he explained the link between the ideal he aspired to, the Way or Way of Heaven, and temporal, political, social, moral and artistic reality: When the Way prevails in the world, rituals, music, punitive expeditions, and attacks against foreign powers issue from the Son of Heaven. When the Way does not prevail in the world, these things issue from the feudal lords . . . [I]t is seldom more than ten generations before the lords lose control of them . . . and once the household ministers seize control of state commands, it is seldom more than three generations before they lose control of them. —A. 16.2 Confucius had an acute, pessimistic sense of political, moral and cultural decay. He idealized the past, struggled in the present and feared for the future. In this, he was, and is, not unique. We access the spirit and character of Confucius, I suggest, through a global ‘cultural archetype’ that evokes destruction and nostalgia, lost beauty and moral compromise. So, we ‘read backwards’ more clearly through, say, the socio-political and cultural iconography of 9/11 or the ‘Rape of Nanking’ (1937–8),28 despoliation of the old Summer Palace in Peking, Yuanming Yuan ൃ᰾ഝ 26 There is much debate in commentaries on the Analects on the identity of the legendary, Methuselah-type ‘Old Peng’ or Peng Zu ᖝ⾆ (Ancestor Peng). The Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE) commentator, Bao Xian व૨ (6 BCE–65 CE), is probably right to attribute the reference to a respected figure in the Shang ୶ (or Yin ⇧ԓ) dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BCE), who was famed for his tales. 27 On Confucius and aesthetics, Dewoskin, K. J. (1982), A Song for One or Two; Li, Z. (1994), The Path of Beauty; also, below p. 44, 193. 28 It is estimated that between 13 December 1937 and January 1938 Japanese forces killed or raped between 50,000– 300,000 residents of Nanjing, capital of Republican China. On this and the ‘Chinese Holocaust’, Chang, I. (1997), The Rape of Nanking; and, p. 412, n. 3, 446, n. 228, 448, n. 244.

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(Lit. Gardens of perfect brightness), in 1860,29 or of the fine World Heritage site in Palmyra, Syria in 2015, or through the smoke-shrouded dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, during the blitz, or the chimneys of Auschwitz. That is, through iconic images that work like sepia filters on an old camera to create ‘archetypes’ to capture an event, evoke a spirit, connote an era, and unite our world in a sense of shame, outrage, futility and tragedy. We do not understand Confucius unless we reckon with a sense of cultural nostalgia and tragic decay, or feel his wistful gaze on an idealized past ‘Golden Age’ when the Way of Heaven was honoured and lived on earth under the great mythic ‘sage kings’ Yao ๟, Shun 㡌 and Yu ⿩ (c. 3rd millennium BCE), and his home state of Lu was ruled by the founders (and posthumously ideal political prototypes) of the Zhou dynasty ઘᵍ (1046–256 BCE), Wen ᮷ (Lit. literary or cultured) and his (second) son, Wu ↖ (Lit. martial). But he lives in the midst of political and moral ruin, hence his urgent longing to rebuild. Indeed, the intensity of his passion and focus will always disconcert the flighty and frivolous. Confucius was as concerned about the cultural, moral and aesthetic state of his society as he was its rulers’ irresponsible actions and his fellow-citizens’ dissolute lives. As we will see, art, poetry, beauty, music, archery, and all the disciplined patterns of a well-ordered life, mattered as much to him as virtue and filial piety, duty and devotion. ‘Cultural archetypes’ of destruction take us only so far: our lens must focus more. In Confucius and Confucianism, we find cultural and spiritual antecedents of the likes of the composer J. S. Bach (1685–1750) and poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), of Bach’s six Cello Suites, BWV 1007–12 (1717–23) and Eliot’s Four Quartets (1936–42), and of their cultural and literary antecedents, their legacy and heirs. In these global icons, I would argue, we find ‘archetypes’ to unite perception and illuminate the Analects. Many read life today through them. They help to clean our picture. In Bach’s Cello Suites, popularized by Spanish virtuoso Pablo Casals (1876–1973)30 and, more recently, by Chinese-American cellist, Yoyo Ma 俜৻৻ (b. 1955), we encounter another tradition creatively re-claimed. As the American cellist and musicologist Laurence Lesser (b. 1938) says, here is ‘a world of emotions and ideas created with only the simplest of materials’ (q. Siblin 2010: 1). Bach reworks old dances with poignant, prayerful cadences, as in the ‘Sarabande’ of Suite No. 2. AngloAmerican Eliot also shared Confucius’s confidence that ‘the communication/ Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living’ (1942: ‘Little Gidding’).31 During the London blitz, he kept faith and looked to history as ‘a pattern/ Of timeless moment’ (ibid.).32 The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) might dismiss Bach’s music for ‘too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, [and] crude scholasticism’, and bemoan the fact that, ‘on the threshold of European

Begun in 1707 and completed during the reign of the Qianlong Emperor Ү䲶ᑍ (1711–99), the magnificent buildings, lakes and gardens of the old Summer Palace (5 miles NW of Peking) were destroyed by British forces in 1860, during the second Opium War (1856–60). This was on the orders of the British High Commissioner to China, Lord Elgin (1811–63), in retaliation for brutal treatment of British emissaries dispatched to sue for peace. The event is still a sensitive issue in SinoBritish relations, as signs in the gardens today confirm. 30 The Spanish cellist and conductor Pablo Casals (1876–1973) was, to fellow cellist Paul Tortellier (1914–90), ‘the greatest cellist of all time’. He famously rediscovered Bach’s Cello Suites and then took twelve years to perfect his performance before his first recording of them (1936–9). Casals’s passion, technical brilliance and teaching ability, established the Suites and the cello at the centre of the musical repertoire. On Casals and Bach’s Cello Suites, Kirk, H. L. (1974), Pablo Casals; Siblin, E. (2010), The Cello Suites; Goodnough, D. (1997), Pablo Casals. 31 N.B. words from Eliot’s Four Quartets on his tomb in ‘Poets’ Corner’, Westminster Abbey, London. They also introduce David Blum’s, Casals and the Art of Interpretation (1977). 32 On Eliot as the ‘poetry of belief ’, Scruton, R. (2003), ‘Eliot as Conservative Mentor’. 29

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music . . . [he looked] to the Middle Ages’ (1980: 2.615),33 but few agree; finding instead, as musicologist James Talbot (1664–1708) said of the poignant ‘Sarabande’, Bach’s Six Suites are ‘apt to move the Passions and disturb the tranquility of the Mind’ (q. Little and Jenne 1991: 95).34 Though, as we will see later (below p. 385), he called Confucius ‘the philosopher of the rebellious protestant’ (1934: 41), Confucianism an ‘inferior religion’ (1940: 101), and his friend and fellow-American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and mentor Irving Babitt (1865–1933), rejectors of Christianity because ‘addicted’ (1934: 39)35 to ‘Confucian rationalism’ (Eliot and Haffenden 2013: 14),36 Eliot’s work has acquired an iconic status as a lament for Western civilization, a commentary on socio-cultural decay37 and a celebration of Modernist method.38 Here are his acute lines on modern Western life in ‘Choruses from “The Rock”’: Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.39 —[1934b] 1963 T. S. Eliot is well-known in China. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) was his first work to be translated (May 1934).40 Days after Zhao Luorui 䏉㱯㮔 (1912–98), a poet and professor of English at Peking University, published her first full-length translation of The Waste Land (June 1937), the second Sino-Japanese war broke out.41 More than London Bridge was now ‘falling down, falling down’ in China. Eliot’s historical sense and cultural vision spoke into its sociopolitical, cultural and military crisis. Lihui Liu observes: ‘The terrible situation of the 1930s moved some young Chinese poets to identify Eliot as virtually their spokesman’ (q. Crawford: 2015). With the slaughter of Nanking, tradition and cultural memory were attacked. This drew poet-critic Yuan Kejia 㺱ਟహ (1921–2008), and others, to study Eliot and other Western Modernist authors.42 ‘Pain, pain, all is pain – the poor man!’, Casals declared in a master-class on Schumann’s Cello Concerto On Nietzsche, p. 315f. For Bach’s use of earlier musical motifs and genre, p. 45, 52f., 70. On Talbot, Unwin, R. (1987), ‘An English Writer on Music: James Talbot 1664–1708’. On the ‘Sarabande’, Donington, R. ([1977] 1992), The Interpretation of Early Music, 326, 335f. 35 Cf. also, Miller, J. E. Jr. (2005), The Making of an American Poet, 174. 36 Cf. Eliot’s review of Pound’s Personae (The Dial, 1926). On Pound, p. 383f.. 37 On Eliot’s reception, Däumer, E. and S. Bagchee, eds (2007), The International Reception of T. S. Eliot (esp. Liu, L., ‘China’s Reception of T. S. Eliot’, 154–79). N.B. also, for recent Chinese studies of Eliot, Peng, S. (2001), ‘The Image Systems in The Wasteland by Eliot and the Puzzle of Comprehension’; Li, Y. (2002), ‘Theory on Intellect and the Artistic Turn of Modern Chinese Poetry’; Tang, X. (2003), ‘Anti-Traditional Spirit in Eliot’s Poetry Creation’; Jiang, D. (2003), ‘On the Pursuit of Dramatization in Jiuye Poets Group’; Wu, Y. (2004), ‘De-individuality is a Complex Paradox’; Feng, W. (2003), ‘On the Impersonal Poetic Theory of T. S. Eliot’; Liu, L. (2003), ‘Notions of Time in T. S. Eliot’s Poems’; Dong, H. (2004), ‘Ye Gongchao and T. S. Eliot in China’; —(2005), ‘Jiuye Poets’ Reception of T. S. Eliot’; Liu, G. (2006), ‘Burnt Norton: The Redemption and Fall of Time Present’. 38 On Modernism, Ch. 7, passim. 39 On Eliot’s Buddhistic view of suffering, Miller, J. S. (1965), Poets of Reality, 178f.; Dwivedi, A. M. (2002), T. S. Eliot, 98f. 40 Cf. the May 1934 translation of Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, by the poet, translator and literary commentator Bian Zhilin ঎ѻ⩣ (1910–2000), Haft, L. (1983), Pien Chih-Lin, 23f.; Laurence, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes, 208; Bien, G. (2013), Baudelaire in China, 207, n. 58. On ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, p. 350, 369. 41 On Zhao and Eliot studies in China, Liu, S. (1998), ‘In Memoriam: Zhao Luorui, 1912–1998’. 42 N.B. on Yuan Kejia and T. S. Eliot, Laurence, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes 123. 33 34

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in A minor, Op. 129, 1850. Eliot’s The Waste Land expresses the same. Here, again, is a ‘cultural archetype’ to shape the way we read, see, and hear the world, an intellectual, cultural, aesthetic solvent to clean up our image of Confucius and the way he really perceived his world. As we have seen, ‘cultural archetypes’ may not paint an easy life, but they do make for clearer reading. Few readers of the Analects and Gospels are unmoved by an iconography of disaster and ‘cultural archetypes’ that evoke a nostalgic sense of a lost, better world. In these we find aids to interpret Confucius’s agonized aesthetics and socio-political, moral passion. We ‘read backwards carefully’ if we take them on board. We will return to Bach and Eliot, for now, we move on to study the life and work of ‘Master Kong’.

LIFE, LEARNING AND LEGACY Later chapters will examine Confucius’s teaching in detail. For the rest of this chapter I introduce his character, life, learning and legacy. But we cannot go straight to history and assume his image is uncontaminated. We must search sources and research other resources for his life and the literature that formed like a pearl around him. Layers of assumption and projection must be lifted to begin to see this ‘Old Master’ more clearly. Character and Context So, what can we make out about the face and character of Confucius? What do we know of the world he inhabited and the context that shaped him? These questions segue well from the preceding section and prepare for study of sources for his life and the nature of his celebrity. We must look again for the essential and leave much vague. There is much more that could be said about the historical and cultural context in which Confucius lived, and the way texts that speak of him (or were inspired by him) were formed. Knowledge of Confucius’s character is as clouded as the content of his teaching. As Dawson warns: ‘We can never hope to find out what Confucius was really like and precisely what his teachings consisted of . . . The task of trying to separate the man from the myth is doomed to failure’ (1981: 7). The ‘real Confucius’ is, he says, ‘irretrievable’, but this isn’t disastrous, ‘since it was the myth rather than the reality which was important’ (ibid.). Dawson is right: we are dealing with an occluded, mythic image, where light brush-strokes form shapes that change under the bright light of inquiry. Our task, to change the analogy, is to mend a shattered Ming vase from shards of fine, translucent porcelain. So be it. Three features of Confucius’s character stand out like the recurrent pigments used in paintings by van Gogh. They are ‘base colours’ in his character and behaviour, the ‘ground’ of any later portrait. We take them in turn, though they inter-mingle, reinforcing each other to create a unique hue. First, this ‘Master’ ᆀ (zi) esteemed ‘humility’ 䅉䚌 (qian xun) and educated his followers accordingly. It was foundational for his respect of the past and his hopes for the present. ‘The Master said, “The gentleman stands in awe of three things: the Mandate of Heaven, great men, and the teachings of the sages”’ (A. 16.8).43 Without humility, there is no ‘respect’ ㏃ (jing),44 no focus on On what Confucius looks for in the junzi ੋᆀ (ideal gentleman-official), p. 30, 175, 177, 193, 210, 227, 248f., 257, 332, 333f., 483. 44 Cf. this is a central element in Confucian thought and literature, Chan, S. Y. (2006), ‘The Confucian Notion of Jing (Respect)’. Cf. also, below p. 30. 43

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what matters, no care for others, no love of tradition, no deference to seniors, no readiness to learn. Confucius and Eliot speak the same language. The Analects is explicit: ‘The Master was entirely free of the faults listed: arbitrariness, inflexibility, rigidity, and selfishness’ (A. 9.4).45 Eliot’s poem ‘East Coker’ (1940) keeps this priority: ‘The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/ Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless’ (1943: 2nd movt.). Confucius’s view of humility combines strength and subtlety. It is a primary colour on his palette of virtues.46 His life has no spirit or shape without it. Second, Confucius expects of himself and demands of his disciples, teach-ability. As he says: ‘At fifteen I set my mind upon learning’ (A. 2.4). He now looks for this in others: I will not open the door for a mind that is not already striving to understand, nor will I provide words to a tongue that is not already struggling to speak. If I hold up one corner of a problem, and the student cannot come back to me with the other three, I will not attempt to instruct him again. —A. 7.8 Slack, sloppy behaviour irks him, no matter who the culprit or what the cause. When the de facto ruler of Lu shuns protocol and forswears tradition, Confucius fears for the worst: ‘They have eight rows of dancers performing in their courtyard. If they condone this, what are they not capable of?’ (A. 3.1).47 Is it an over-reaction? Not to Confucius. Character is revealed in detail. Carelessness is cancerous. As Casals told an orchestra rehearsing the pianissimo ‘Leicht bewegt’ in Richard Wagner’s (1813–83) symphonic poem ‘Siegfried Idyll’ (WWV. 103, 1870), ‘Every note must sing’ (Blum 1980: 2).48 To anyone prepared to work hard at self-cultivation, Confucius was generous: ‘I have never denied instruction to anyone who, of their own accord, offered up as little as a bundle of silk or bit of cured meat’ (A. 7.7). Is this demeaning? No, he remembers whence he came: ‘In my youth I was of humble status, so I became proficient in many menial tasks’ (A. 9.6). However, in time he discovered: ‘If you learn without thinking about what you have learned, you will be lost. If you think without learning, however, you will fall into danger’ (A. 2.15).49 Rote and thought go together.50 Thought reveals the spirit and heart of learning. Superficiality, like esotericism, is eschewed (A. 15.3),51 proportion and practice commended in the search for the prized ‘six virtues’. As Confucius told his capable disciple Zhong You Ԣ⭡, or Zilu ᆀ䐟: Loving goodness without balancing it with a love of learning will result in the vice of foolishness. Loving wisdom without balancing it with a love of learning will result in the vice of

Cf. on ‘inflexibility’ also A. 13.20, 14.32. On ‘humility’ 䅉䚌 (qian xun), below p. 64, 176. 47 N.B. Slingerland’s comment: ‘Although he was de facto ruler of Lu, the head of the Ji Family officially held only the position of minister, and his use of eight dancers thus represented an outrageous usurpation of ritual prerogatives of the Zhou king’ (17). 48 N.B. Wagner first performed the work, a gift to his wife Cosima on the birth of their son Siegfried, at home on Christmas morning 1870. On Wagner, p. 294f. 49 On the importance of a will to learn, A. 1.16, 5.27, 7.8, 15.16. 50 N.B. Bao Xian’s व૨ (6 BCE–65 CE) comment: ‘If one learns but does reflexively seek out the meaning of what is being taught, one will be lost and will have gained nothing from it’ (q. Slingerland, 13). 51 N.B. however the ‘single thread’ is interpreted, Confucius is manifestly not in favour of abstract theorizing (cf. e.g. A. 13.5, 16.13, 17.9, 10). Also, p. 248. 45 46

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deviance. Loving trustworthiness without balancing it with a love of learning will result in the vice of harmful rigidity. Loving uprightness without balancing it with a love of learning will result in the vice of intolerance. Loving courage without balancing it with a love of learning will result in the vice of unruliness. Loving resoluteness without balancing it with a love of learning will result in the vice of wilfulness. —A. 17.8 Passion is refined by education. Balance, or ‘the Mean’, ensures maximum effectiveness and minimum waste. Mind, will, and action are focused in a sound, thoughtful, virtuous life. Education, like instrumental technique, is subordinate to something higher. As Casals said one day: ‘Imagine! They call me a great cellist. I am not a cellist: I am a musician. That is much more important’ (Blum: x). To Confucius, teach-ability is good per se, but also, as importantly, as a means to something higher, for which body, mind and will are all essential (A. 1.16, 5.27, 7.8, 15.16). In short, the moral end justifies the educational means: to that end, it is principled pragmatism and disciplined formation together that prevail. Third, Confucius is devoted to his task, and with devotion come discipline and a willingness to dissent. He can be an awkward so-and-so. Van Gogh’s brighter colours fit Confucius’s fire, will, and passion to recover ru culture – but never to promote himself. With another cause and to a different end, T. S. Eliot celebrated a comparable, self-less devotion, reminding others in ‘Little Gidding’ (Sect. 1): You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report. You are here to kneel. The Book of Rites ⿞䁈 (Liji), or ‘Record of Rites’, a third of the Five Books Confucius esteemed, captures this single-mindedness: ‘The practice of right-living is deemed the highest, the practice of any other art lower. Complete virtue takes first place; the doing of anything else whatsoever is subordinate’ (Legge 1885: 17.3.5).52 In the myth of the man we find something of his manner. He was driven and frustrated: ‘With a single change Qi could measure up to Lu, with a single change Lu could attain the Way’ (A. 6.24).53 He could be tetchy, blunt, evasive and wily, to make a point and correct a fault: ‘I have never been able to do anything for a person who is not constantly asking himself, “What should I do? What should I do?” ’ (A. 15.16). Disciples are disciplined directly and indirectly: Fan (Chi) Xu ›丸 for greed (A. 6.22, 12.21), Ran Qiu ޹≲ for moral sloth (A. 3.6, 5.8, 6.12, 11.3, 17), Zai (Wo) Yu ᇠҸ for laziness (A. 3.21, 5.10, 6.26, 11.3, 17.21), Yuan Xian ৏២ for over-fastidiousness (A. 6.15, 13.21, 14.1), Zilu ᆀ䐟 for lack of judgement (A. 2.17, 5.7, 8, 14, 26, 7.11, 9.12, 27, 11.13), Zixia ᆀ༿ for cautiousness (A. 1.7, 3.8, 6.13, 11.16, 13.17). Confucius was no push-over. He hissed at medical fussers when he was ill: ‘Would I not rather die in the arms of a few of my disciples than in the arms of ministers?’ (A. 9.12). When Zilu asked about serving

Cf. Confucius’s relation to the Four and Five Books of the Classics, p. 30, n. 60, 35, 39, 44. N.B. the relative health of Lu over its near neighbours, Qi 啺 and Song ᆻ (A. 3.9). On Confucius’s confidence that he could make a difference if given a chance, A. 17.1, 5, 7.

52 53

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his lord, Confucius fired back: ‘Do not deceive him. Oppose him openly’ (A. 14.22).54 Tough, principled behaviour is the norm. Van Norden is right to say of Confucius’s protégés: ‘Rulers no doubt found irritating their penchant for moralizing, but precisely because of their ethical commitment, Confucian disciples could be trusted not to betray their rulers’ (2002: 12). Integrity was costly, loss of it more so. That was his point.55 Confucius makes more sense in context. Just as we cannot know Jesus apart from 1st-century Palestinian Judaism, we discover Confucius in 6th-century BCE China.56 The 4th-century BCE Zuozhuan ᐖۣ (Annals of Zuo) may give a shape to Confucius’s life, and the Record of the Grand Historian ཚਢ‫ޜ‬ᴨ, the Shiji ਢ䁈 (The Scribe’s Record), by China’s famous historian Sima Qian ਨ俜䚧 (c. 145/135–86 BCE), may fill in some details – albeit written four centuries after Confucius, and said by Dawson to be ‘a hotch-potch of material of varying degrees of credibility’ (1981: 5) – but the unique, historic, cultural ‘ground’ on which Confucius’s portrait is painted adds to the tone and texture of his life. As we will see later, Sima is valuable because, as Japanese scholar Nagano Hozan (1783–1837) aptly observed: ‘He makes us see in our minds the character of the men of the time’ (Qian Sima 1993: Intro.). He helps us clean distorting wash. We see Confucius more clearly when we extract what was extra-ordinary in his life and thought from the culturally, politically, and morally, ordinary in 6th century BCE Lu. We catch at his character, personality and principles when he interacts with others or responds to problems. This may be partial, allusive, arcane evidence, but it is still vital data if we are to develop a sense of Confucius, the man, to recover an image of him. Five features of Confucius’s contextual identity warrant comment. This is the first layer of material we need to treat carefully and remove judiciously. First, in the political domain, the vassal state of Lu – where Confucius was born, lived and worked most of his life – was trapped between a bright past and a fading present. The Yellow River valley north of Confucius’s birthplace was one of the ‘cradles of civilization’. Evidence of Neolithic culture from the 5th millennium BCE has been found. We know more of this, perhaps, than of Confucius himself. As we have seen, the state of Lu traced its roots to the Zhou kings Wen and Wu. In 1046 BCE Lu set to attack its Shang ୶ԓ neighbours. Dissolute and disunited, the Shang were defeated. Thereafter, King Wu began to create a well-regulated, neo-feudal, system of regional government. His death in 1043 BCE left a minor, Cheng Wang ᡀ⦻ (d. 1021), in charge. Ji Dan လ‫ޜ‬ᰖ, the Duke of Zhou, acted as regent.57 Lu society flourished. Order, virtue, ritual, education and tradition became state policy. Confucius venerated this great Duke highly (A. 7.5).58 He believed the Shang had lost because they had lost the Way (dao 䚃) and, with it, Heaven’s Mandate (tian

54 Cf. also A. 13.15, 23, 14.7. N.B. with a little more subtlety, in A. 14.21 he takes the prescribed ritual bath and then challenges Duke Ai 〖૰‫( ޜ‬d. 501 BCE) to avenge the murder of Duke Jian 啺㉑‫( ޜ‬d. 481) by the pushy new ruler of Qi, Chen Heng 䲣ᙶ (n.d.). 55 N.B. Dawson’s comment: ‘If self-sacrifice, following Christ’s example, is the key to the Christian message, then learning, after the fashion of the Master, is the vital ingredient of the Confucian message. But in China, the message did not really get across’ (ibid., 10). 56 On the setting for Confucius’s life, Littlejohn, R. (2011), Confucianism, Ch. 1; Lo, Y. K. (2014), ‘Confucius and His Community’, in A. Olberding (ed.), Dao Companion to the Analects, 55–82. 57 For early references to this incident, Shaughnessy, E. L. (1997), Before Confucius, 122f.; —(1993), ‘The Duke of Zhou’s retirement in the East and the beginnings of the Ministerial-Monarch debate’. 58 Confucius had clear views on the Duke (Littlejohn 2011: 3).

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ming ཙભ; Lit. Heaven’s decree or destiny) and blessing. This perspective, Van Norden points out, was ‘the basis of Chinese political thought for the next three millennia’ (2002: 5). This is crucial: Confucius’s fingerprints cover the development of this later vision of China’s life. By the time of Confucius’s birth, Zhou grandeur had faded, its land divided into Western (1040– 771 BCE) and Eastern (770–221 BCE) districts. The state of Lu (a Zhou family legacy) was lent on economically and militarily by its larger neighbours. It was a tense, corrupt, conflicted, powerbrokered world. Duke Xiang, Xiang Gong 㽴‫ޜ‬, head of the Zhou, effectively served at the pleasure of three powerful families, the Ji ᆓ, Meng ᆏ, and Shu ਄ (A. 3.1, 2, 6). The polis had a real problem. As Sima Qian records: ‘In the time of Confucius, the power of the Zhou Emperors had declined, the forms of worship and social intercourse [ritual and music] had degenerated and learning and scholarship had fallen into decay’ (q. Lin, Y., 1938: 127). Tales of Lu’s former glory galvanized the young Confucius. He found a template for social reconstruction in the annals of history. Images of ru culture – icons of its old, ordered life – could be found in ‘The Four Books and Five Classics’ ഋᴨӄ㏃ (Sishu wujing), the Jing ㏃. On these, the diligent must set their gaze.59 To Confucius, from these old texts, ritual, virtue, respect, humility, education, filial piety and, above all, the Way of Heaven, could be re-minted, re-learned and re-applied, so ‘all under heaven’ ཙл (tianxia) might be redeemed.60 That was his vision, prompted by the political chaos and social decay he saw all around him. Yes, his ‘London Bridge’ might be ‘falling down’ (Eliot), but it could still be re-built. Secondly, in the dark professional and social culture of Lu, shafts of light break in with a tough, new cadre of aspirant administrators who are eager to exploit political weakness and advance their careers, Confucius among them. Though tradition claimed for Confucius royal lineage (as he did, too, it seems), he came from a military family61 and belonged to the Shi ༛ class, one of the ‘four categories/occupations of the people’ in (later) Zhou society (its fengjian system ሱᔪ). By tradition, Shi were gentry, that is, knights, scholars, bureaucrats. Their education, training and professional expectations matched their class. But warm winds of change were blowing. Zhou society felt them. Over time, it would become increasingly meritocratic.62 In this environment, Confucius envisaged the transformation of Zhou civil service into an instrument of socio-political and moral renewal. This would be achieved, he believed, through the development of a new cadre of superior, worthy gentlemen, junzi ੋᆀ (Lord’s son), trained to have an acute moral sense, an eye for detail, a love of beauty, a zeal for tradition, and a commitment to, and an aptitude for, learning (A. 3.14).63 To Confucius, society was suffocating under a pillow of lies, intrigue, ambition, laziness, lust, disrespect

On jing, Chan, S. Y. (2006), ‘The Confucian Notion of Jing (Respect)’. Cf. the Sishu ഋᴨ (Four Books) included the Daxue བྷᆨ (Great Learning), Zhong Yong ѝᓨ (Doctrine of the Mean), Lunyu 䄆䃎 (the Analects) and Mengzi ᆏᆀ (Book of Mengzi). These texts were given their final form by the Song dynasty Neo-Confucian scholar, Zhu Xi ᵡ⟩ (1130–1200). The Wujing ӄ㏃ (Five Classics) contain the Yijing or I Ching ᱃㏃ (Book of Changes), Shijing 䂙㏃ (Book of Poetry or Odes), Shujing ᴨ㏃ (Book of Documents) or Shangshu ቊᴨ (Documents of the Elder), Liji ⿞䁈 or Lijing ㏃ (Book, or Classic, of Rites), and Chunqiu ᱕⿻ (‘Spring and Autumn’ Annals). How and when these texts finally cohered is much debated, as is Confucius’s relation to their form and content. Evidence of significant editorial work emerges in the Han ╒ᵍ (220–206 BCE) and Tang ୀᵍ (618–907) dynasties. By the Song dynasty ᆻᵍ (960–1279) they belong to the Shisan jing ॱй㏃ (Thirteen Classics), the heart of Confucian orthodoxy and basis of the examination system for bureaucrats (cf. below n. 111). 61 On Confucius’s father Kong He ᆄ㌷ (or Shulianghe ਄ằ㌷), p. 41. 62 The other categories were nong 䗢 (peasant farmers), gong ᐕ (artisans and craftsmen), and shang ୶ (merchants and traders). 63 Cf. on the junzi, above p. 26, n. 43. 59 60

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and immorality. In contrast, the junzi is, he says, ‘not motivated by the desire for a full belly or a comfortable abode. . . He is scrupulous in behaviour and careful in speech’ (A. 1.14; on esp. speech, 2.13, 4.22, 24, 12.3, 14.20, 27). Indeed, ‘If a gentleman is not serious, he will not inspire awe, and what he learns will be grasped only superficially’ (A. 1.8). Speech, action and discretion must conform: ‘Words should convey their point, and leave it at that’ (A. 15.41, 9.30).64 Applying this, Confucius sought to teach a worthy past to a struggling present. As he said: ‘Both keeping past teachings alive and understanding the present – someone able to do this is worthy of being a teacher’ (A. 2.11). With prophetic energy and vision (Lau 1975: 15; de Bary 1991: 11) he taught to recover and renew ru tradition and culture (Yao 2000: 17). In the process, he changed China and the world, his visionary work helping to create two millennia of imperial bureaucrats and a curriculum they studiously imbibed.65 Thirdly, Confucius is discovered amid the educational and vocational life of Lu. In our picture he is dressed as a ‘sage’. The American sinologist and philosopher H. G. Creel (1905–94) claims there was schooling in China before Confucius, but ‘we do not know very much about it’ (1949: 84). Some say it had already existed for a millennium, Mencius in the two dynasties before his.66 Though his own education was somewhat patchy (A. 19.22),67 Confucius was keen and capable (A. 3.15, 7.22, 32). In later life, he saw education as the means to bring lasting change to hearts, minds and morals – and, thence, to society. He had an open, egalitarian view of it: ‘In education, there are no differences in kind’ (A. 15.39). As his disciple Mencius said, ‘Everyone may become a Yao or Shun [sage or junzi]’ (Mencius 6b. 2). This principle is central to Confucius’s educational philosophy.68 The educational and cultural content (wen ᮷) of the Shi’s training and formation, included ritual, calligraphy, music, archery, history, poetry, charioteering and ethics – together with the precision, grace and discipline expected from each (A. 7.1). Unlike the majority of his peers, Confucius saw warfare as second-best (A. 7.13).69 True learning ᆨ (xue) was, for him, found in ‘four great human relationships’, husband-wife, parent-child, lord-servant and friend-friend. His young, cultured disciple Bu Shang ঌ୶, or Zixia ᆀ༿, expressed this well: Imagine someone who recognizes and admires worthiness and therefore changes his lustful nature, who is able to fully exhaust his strength in serving his parents and extend himself in serving his lord, and who is trustworthy in speech when interacting with friends and associates.

On the need for the junzi to exercise discretion, Slingerland, 96f. The entrance examination for the imperial civil service was finally abolished in 1905. 66 On early Chinese education and its connection to Chinese/Confucian culture, Gu, M. (2014), Cultural Foundations of Chinese Education, Ch. 5; Lee, T. H. C. (2000), Education in Traditional China, Ch. 1. 67 N.B. Confucius’s capable young disciple Duanmu Ci ㄟᵘ䌌 (Zigong ᆀ䋒) claimed his Master had no ‘formal teacher’ (A. 19.22). The Zuozhuan speaks of him being taught at twenty-six by Viscount of Tan and a mystical cloud of water and fire ‘officers’ (48.3b–9a). It is more likely Confucius had a tutor and taught himself like others. 68 On Confucius and education, A. 7.7, 20, 34. For his holistic vision for it, A. 2.12, 6.13, 9.2, 13.4, 19.7. Confucius’s view of education as a lifelong process is echoed by Xunzi 㥰ᆀ, or Xun Kuang 㥰⋱ (d. 238 BCE), who said it ‘continues until death and only then does it cease’ (q. Dawson 1981: 10). 69 N.B. Confucius’s caution with respect to ‘fasting, war and illness’; also, J. K. Fairbank’s comment on the relative appeal of wen ᮷ (culture) and wu ↖ (warfare): ‘Warfare was disesteemed in Confucianism . . . The resort to warfare (wu) was an admission of bankruptcy in the pursuit of wen (culture or civility). Consequently, it should be a last resort . . . Herein lies the pacifist bias of the Chinese tradition . . . Expansion through wen . . . was natural and proper; whereas expansion by wu, brute force and conquest, was never to be condoned’ (1974b: 7–9). Cf. also, Wang, Y-K. (2011), Harmony and War. 64 65

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Even if you said of such a person, ‘Oh, but he is not learned (xue)’, I would still insist that it is precisely such qualities that make one worthy of being called ‘learned’. —A. 1.7 The junzi ‘draws near to those who possess the Way in order to be set straight by them’, for, ‘Surely this and nothing else is what it means to love learning’ (A. 1.14). In this vision for education, Confucius prioritized the Way and the Doctrine of the Mean ѝᓨ (Zhongyong; Lit. balanced middle). These were at the heart of his learning.70 When asked, ‘From whom did Confucius acquire his learning?’ Zigong replies: The Way of Kings Wen and Wu has not yet fallen to the ground – it still exists in people. Those who are worthy understand its greater aspects, while those who are unworthy understand its lesser aspects. There is no one who does not have the Way of Wen and Wu within them. From whom did the Master not acquire his learning? And what need was there for him to have a formal teacher? —A. 19.22 Disposition and discipline determine Confucius’s pedagogy and educational philosophy. In this, he accentuated what had always been known. He exaggerated, we might now say, this fundamental point. Yes, we can make out the Classics in the background and foreground of Confucius’s heavy face on our large, dark canvas, but it is the sage’s straight back and firm gaze that we notice. Education, ethics and self-cultivation are inseparable. As he reflected on his life and character: ‘Remaining silent and yet comprehending, learning and yet never becoming tired, encouraging others and never growing weary – these are tasks that present me with no difficulty’ (A. 7.2). Here is a ‘cultural archetype’ of a moral teacher-practitioner. Confucius’s fingerprints can also be seen on the re-focusing of classical Chinese culture on the personal and the individual. He gives a new priority to behaviour and duty, to obligation, selfdiscipline, ‘six virtues’ (A. 17.8) and social responsibility. We glimpse this when people ask, ‘Why is it that he is not participating in government?’ Confucius replies: The Book of Documents says, ‘Filial, oh so filial, Friendly to one’s elders and juniors; [and so] exerting an influence upon those who govern.’ Thus, in being a filial son and a good brother one is already taking part in government. What need is there, then, to speak of ‘participating in government’? —A. 2.2171

N.B. Confucius’s view of losing and recovering the Mean: ‘Acquiring Virtue by applying the mean – is this not best? And yet among the common people few are able to practice this virtue for long’ (A. 6.29). 71 For a different perspective, where other grounds for resisting ‘office’ are expressed, A. 17.1, 7. On Confucius’s professional life, Dubs, H. H. (1946), ‘The political career of Confucius’. On the politics of Lu at the time, Ames, R. (1983), The Art of Rulership. 70

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To his peers, power required position, to Confucius moral influence was more attractive and effective. As we will see, Confucius’s exposition of human identity meant the self-destroyed and re-built person would also become global ‘cultural archetypes’. Turning the spotlight on individuality set Confucius apart. Rediscovery of the Way and the Mandate of Heaven began one life at a time. The real battle was in a person’s mind, heart and will. Confucius’s socio-ethical programme is built on this principle: ‘When a gentleman serves as a ru, it is in order to clarify the Way (dao); when a petty person serves as a ru, it is because he is greedy for fame’ (A. 17.13). Confucius’s vocation is, then, not only ‘transmitting and teaching the traditional ritual and texts of the Zhou’ (A. 6.13),72 he works for moral formation, personal transformation, professional integrity and renewal of society. Recovery of the spirit of Kings Wen and Wu, and the great Duke of Zhou, as articulated in the ‘Canon of Yao’, involves a person’s body, mind and will: Examining into antiquity, we find that the Emperor Yao was named Fang-hsun. He was reverent, intelligent, accomplished, sincere and mild. He was genuinely respectful and capable of all modesty. His light spread over the four extremities of the world, extending to Heaven above and Earth below. He was able to make bright his great virtue and bring affection to the nine branches of the family. When the nine branches of the family had become harmonious, he distinguished and honoured the great clans. When the hundred clans had become illustrious, he harmonized the myriad states. Thus the numerous peoples were amply nourished, prospered and became harmonious. —de Bary 1991: 1 Here are ‘all the civilized virtues of a good Confucian ruler’ (ibid.), and a Way for life. The fifth area in which we glimpse the extra-ordinary in Confucius is in relation to the spiritual and religious. Early Chinese religions were habitually alive to sacrifice, spirits and the world of the dead, but we find considerable metaphysical reserve in Confucius. As Robert Louden notes: ‘Speculative chatter would only distract people’s attention away from the more fundamental moral task of deciding how to live and act’ (Van Norden 2002a: 80).73 Hence, we discover: ‘The Master did not discuss prodigies, feats of strength, disorderly conduct, or the supernatural’ (A. 7.21). He will not allow himself to be drawn on death and resists speculation on ‘spirits’. He reproves Zilu: ‘You are not able yet to serve people – how could you be able to serve ghosts and spirits’ (A. 11.12). He encourages respect for the ghosts and spirits ‘while keeping them at a distance’ (A. 6.22). He offers ritual sacrifice (A. 2.5, 3.17) and prays fervently – if not a little fearfully (A. 3.13, 7.35).74 He is, as Legge wrote in 1861 (and again in 1893), ‘unreligious rather than irreligious’,75 or, as Louden argues, he is ‘religious but not theistic’ (ibid., 91, n. 33).76 He is more a ‘spiritual teacher’ than a ‘religious leader’, but seemingly aspired to neither

On the interpretation of this, Slingerland, 57. Cf. Louden, R. B. (2002), ‘What does Heaven say?’, in B. Van Norden (ed.), Confucius and the Analects, 73–93. 74 On Confucian ritual practice, sacrifice and prayer, Wilson, T. A. (2014), ‘Spirits and the Soul in Confucian Ritual Discourse’. 75 On this, in the broader context of Legge’s view of Confucius, Girardot, N. J. (2002), The Victorian Translation of China, 470f. Cf. on Legge, p. 12, 118, 121, 203, 244f., 254f., 265f., 269f., 283, n. 104, 289f. 76 For literature and debate about the ‘religiousness’ of Confucianism, Chen, Y. (2013), Confucianism as Religion, Ch. 2. 72 73

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vocation.77 His extra-ordinary attitude to the ‘spirit world’ surprised disciples and set him apart from his peers, and, indeed, from the celestial idealism and cosmogonic naturalism we find later in Guanzi ㇑ᆀ, Laozi 㘱ᆀ and Zhuangzi 㦺ᆀ.78 Yes, the Way is from Heaven, but it is for Confucius primarily a temporal path. We see this in his advice: ‘Set your heart upon the Way, rely on Virtue, lean upon Goodness, and explore widely in your cultivation of the arts’ (A. 7.6). Matteo Ricci was acutely sensitive to Confucius’s inherent rationalism and religious reserve. He was careful not to link Confucius with every form and development of ‘Confucianism’. In the ‘Preface’ to the earliest, composite, Jesuit comparison of Christianity and Confucianism, Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687, Confucius, Philosopher of the Chinese),79 we find Ricci’s reserve – and his astute intellectual and spiritual generosity: One might say that the moral system of this philosopher is infinitely sublime, but that it is at the same time simple, sensible and drawn from the purest sources of natural reason . . . Never has Reason, deprived of Divine Revelation, appeared so well developed nor with so much power. As he wrote in his Journal: Of all the pagan sects known to Europe, I know of no people who fell into fewer errors in the early stages of their antiquity than did the Chinese. From the very beginning of their history it is recorded in their worship that they recognized and worshipped one supreme being whom they called the King of Heaven, or . . . by some other name indicating his rule over heaven and earth . . . [and] also taught that the light of reason came from heaven and that the dictates of reason should be hearkened to in every human action . . . One can confidently hope that in the mercy of God, many of the ancient Chinese found salvation in the natural law . . . [and through] the light of his conscience. —1911–13: 386; q. Harris 1966: 127

Zongjiao ᇇᮉ, the Chinese term for ‘religion’, appears in the 19th century. In that Confucianism addresses sacredness, human self-transcendence and ultimate concern, it is rightly ‘religious’, if not a ‘religion’ like Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Islam. For a contrary view, Fingarette, H. (1972), Confucius; Küng, H. and J. Ching (1989), Christianity and Chinese Religions. Other scholars have likened Confucius to Moses or a High Church ritualist (Lin Yutang), a combination of Jesus and Socrates (Van Norden) and a ‘sage’; or, they have urged the ‘spiritual’ character and potential of Confucianism. On Lin Yutang, He, J. (2010), ‘Dialogue between Christianity and Taoism’, in M. Ruokanen and P. Huang (eds), Christianity and Chinese Culture, 124–44. On New Confucian spirituality, Tu, W. (1989), Centrality and Commonality (1989); Tu, W. and M. E. Tucker, eds (2003, 2004), Confucian Spirituality; Solé-Farràs, J. (2004), New Confucianism in Twenty-First Century China; Neville, R. C. (2000), Boston Confucianism. 78 Guanzi contains ‘Legalist’ materials (that put a tough case for laws under an autocrat), named in honour of the 7th century BCE Qi 啺 minister and philosopher, Guan Zhong ㇑Ԣ (c. 720–645 BCE). In Guanzi, the dao is beyond sense and sound, but the cause and power of qi ≓ (life force) in a calm heart and mind. Laozi (also known as Tao Te Ching 䚃ᗧ㏃) is a (poss.) 6th-century BCE text associated with the philosopher Laozi 㘱ᆀ (d. 531 BCE). Dao is central to Daoist philosophy and cosmogony: it is there power in life for a person, rather than moral dictates of language, tradition or rational consciousness. Zhuangzi is a 3rd century BCE set of stories and anecdotes in which dao is the determinative, natural principle. 79 Confucius Sinarum Philosophus was a composite 17th-century work by Jesuit scholars (cf. below p. 97, 99f., 101f., 107f., 136, 142, 144). An engraved plate frontispiece has the ‘Master’ towering over the entrance to a library-type Temple. In time, ru tradition replaced Confucius’s authority with personal responsibility and gave tradition a quasi-religious status (Jensen 1997: 132). 77

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The relation between Confucianism and Christianity as ‘religious’ phenomena has taxed the minds of many. The two figures on our old canvas may appear close to one another morally and intellectually, that does not mean they stand side-by-side spiritually. In later chapters we will return to this and to other areas of contrast and comparison. In these five areas, the political, professional, educational, personal and spiritual, we catch glimpses of Confucius’s distinctiveness. In the next section we dig into the sources for his life and the nature of his celebrity, before concluding our picture restoration with primary layer material on his life and legacy and the literature he spawned. Sources and Celebrity A picture restorer or conservator needs to understand the artist’s methods and materials. We need to do the same. Ancient Chinese texts are complex, multi-layered phenomena. We can only scratch the surface here, looking briefly at the history, formation, structure, character, and ultimately the historical and textual reliability of the Analects, Zuozhuan and Sima (or Shiji) as sources for Confucius, paying most attention to the Analects.80 Working backwards, we begin with Qin dynasty 〖ᵍ (221–206 BCE) historian Sima Qian’s ਨ俜䚧 (c. 145/135–86 BCE) magisterial Record of the Grand Historian ཚਢ‫ޜ‬ᴨ (Taishigong shu), or Shiji ਢ䁈 (c. 85 BCE).81 We might say much about this work. Here is China’s grandest history, a ‘foundational text in Chinese civilization’ (Hardy 1999: xiii). By creating a confident, imperial narrative, from ancient myth to the Qin dynasty, and an elegant, new, selective, historiographical style, Sima afforded China and Confucius a fine literary legacy with cultural, intellectual and canonical authority.82 What we find here may not be unique, but it is important. In the face of Qin ‘Legalist’ opposition to Confucius’s authority and role in defining and refining the Classics, it establishes the orthodox view of Confucius’s relation to, and quasi apostolic authorization of, those texts.83 This comes through in Sima’s exposition of Confucius’s literary and educational vocation and aim to gather and ‘transmit’ (A. 7.1) ancient texts:84

On other material, Hunter, M. (2017), Confucius Beyond the Analects, 96–164. The work was begun by Sima Qian’s father, the court astrologer Sima Tan ਨ俜䃷 (165–110 BCE) and completed c. 95 BCE. 82 On Sima’s work, Dawson, R. S. trans. (1994), Sima Qian: Historical Records; Durrant, S. W. (1995), The Cloudy Mirror; —‘Shih-chi ਢ䁈’ (1986a), in W. H. Nienhauser, Jr. (ed.), The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, I. 689–94; —(1986b), ‘Self as the Intersection of Traditions’; —(2005), ‘Truth Claims in Shiji’, in H. Schmidt-Glintzer, et al. (eds), Historical Truth, Historical Criticism, and Ideology, 93–113; Hulsewé, A. F. P. (1993), ‘Shih chi ਢ䁈’, in M. Loewe (ed.), Early Chinese Texts, 405–14; Kern, M. (2010), ‘Early Chinese literature, Beginnings through Western Han’, in S. Owen (ed.), Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, I. 1–115; Knechtges, D. R. (2014b), ‘Shi ji ਢ䁈’, in D. R. Knechtges and T. Chang (eds), Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature, 897–904; Nienhauser, N. (2011), ‘Sima Qian and the Shiji’, in A. Feldherr and G. Hardy (eds), The Oxford History of Historical Writing, I. 463–84; Watson, B. (1958), Ssu Ma Ch’ien, Grand Historian of China; Wilkinson, E. (2012), Chinese History: A New Manual. 83 The earliest reference to the Confucian Classics (in the 3rd century Zhuangzi 㦺ᆀ) is from the period of ‘Warring States’ ᡠ഻ᱲԓ (Zhanguo shidai) (481/403–221 BCE), that followed the peace of what the Zuozhuan commentary calls ‘Spring and Autumn’ ᱕⿻ (Chunqiu) (770–476 BCE). Zhuangzi says there were Six Classics at that time, but the sixth text, the Yuejing ′㏃ (The Classic of Music), has been lost. 84 On the dichotomy between transmitting and not innovating, A. 7.28; also, Yu, J. (2012), ‘Transmitting and Innovating in Confucius: Analects 7: 1’. 80 81

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Confucius studied the religious or ceremonial order and historical records of the three dynasties (Hsia, Shang and Chou),85 and traced the events from the times of the Emperors Yao and Shun86 down to the time of Duke Mu of Ch’in87 and arranged them in chronological order . . . Therefore, Confucius handed down a tradition of historic records and various records of ancient customs and ethnology . . . Confucius taught poetry, history, ceremonies and music to 3,000 pupils, of whom 72 mastered the ‘six arts’ [ed. probably a reference to the ‘Six Classics’]. —q. Lin 1941: 127–35; Yao 2000: 53 Sima is at pains to contrast this with his own work,88 which is neither ‘innovation’ nor comparable to the Chunqiu. Rather, it is, he says self-effacingly, just ‘a classification of materials that have been preserved’ (130.3299–3000; q. Huang 2006: 210, n. 52). He draws on a wide range of (at times contradictory) official and unofficial materials, many of which have been lost, including versions of the Analects, Zuozhuan, writings of the ‘Warring States’ period and oral tradition. Sima is as skilled a diplomat as a historian. His aims and attitude to Confucius are complex.89 Critics abound. He must be careful. Confucius is central to his work, but controversial.90 The potential for misunderstanding is acute. In honouring ‘the Master’ he must safeguard his own position. He summarizes – note, it says as much about the author as his subject! When I read the works of Confucius, I try to see the man himself. In Lu I visited his temple and saw his carriage, clothes and sacrificial vessels. Scholars go regularly to study ceremony there, and I found it hard to tear myself away. The world has known innumerable princes and worthies who enjoyed fame and honour in their days but were forgotten after death, while Confucius, a commoner, has been looked up to by scholars for ten generations and more. From the emperor, princes and barons downwards, all in China who study the Six Arts take the master as their final authority. Well is he called the Supreme Sage! —I. 1947; q. Yang and Yang 1997: 27 Chapter 47 of the Shiji, ‘The Hereditary Household of Confucius’ ᆄᆀцᇦ (Kongzi shi jia),91 is to many the ‘standard source’ (Lau 1979: 161),92 and the classic historical, (mostly) nonhagiographical,93 form of Confucius’s life and ‘myth’. Not everyone agrees. To historian Cui Shu Otherwise known as the Xia ༿ (c. 2070–c. 1600 BCE), Shang ୶ or Yin ⇧ (c. 1600–c. 1046 BCE), and the Chou/Zhou ઘᵍ (1046–256 BCE) dynasties. 86 The mythic Emperors Yao ๟ (trad. c. 2356–2255 BCE) and Shun 㡌 (trad. c. 2294–2184 BCE) belonged to the legendary ‘Three Sovereigns (or ‘August Ones’) and Five Emperors’ (effectively ‘Royal Sages’). Traditionally these two figures, who pre-dated the Xia dynasty, provided exemplary moral leadership and civic instruction, and engendered a prolonged period of prosperity and peace. 87 Duke Mu of Qin 〖ぶ‫( ޜ‬d. 621 BCE) was, from 659–21 BCE, the (14th) ruler of the Zhou dynasty state of Qin. His skilful leadership in the ‘Spring and Autumn’ period led to his being (often) viewed as one of the exemplary ‘Five Hegemons’ ӄ䵨 (Wu Ba). 88 On implied criticism in this, Huang, M. W. (2006), Negotiating Masculinities, 210, n. 52. 89 This relationship is distinctly ‘complex’ (cf. Durrant 1995: 1–45). 90 Cf. ibid., 29. 91 Cf. ibid., on Sima’s use of the term ‘Hereditary Household’. 92 On variant interpretations of Confucius, Van der Sprenkel, O. B. (1975), ‘Confucius: six variations’, in G. Wang (ed.), Self and Biography, 79–98. 93 On Chinese hagiography and the Shiji, Jørgensen, J. J. (2005), Inventing Hui-neng, 77f. 85

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ፄ䘠 (1740–1816), a critical analyst of the Classics, it is ‘seventy to eighty per cent slander’ (q. Durrant 1995: 31). To Creel, it is ‘a piece of carefully veiled satire’ by a pro-Daoist Sima, a ‘slipshod performance’ with ‘little criticism or harmonization’ in which a ‘mealy-mouthed’ and ‘hypocritical’ Confucius ‘moves through the story like a puppet’ (q. ibid.). From his birth, education, ‘distress in the region of Chen and Cai’,94 public rejection(s), and final work collating texts, there is a heroic, cyclical quality to Sima’s cautiously loyal narrative. The story and face seem familiar. Perhaps Sima saw himself, as others have, in the life and work of this ‘Supreme Sage’, an archetypal figure of suffering, hope and redemption, whose influence (as Sima knew) extended well-beyond little Lu. If we want a fine, prose impression of Confucius, the 4th-century BCE Zuozhuan ᐖۣ (Zuo Commentary) is ideal. Digressions are minimal, excesses avoided.95 The text is a story rich in drama, pointed anecdotes, and cameo appearances by Confucius. If it feels a bit wobbly historically, ancient Chinese were not fixated on the historicity or creative limitation of legends.96 If its emphases differ from Sima (who first profiled the work), this should not surprise. Stephen Cook has convincingly unpacked the author’s agenda (2015: 298–334).97 If details and issues are addressed differently, or more succinctly, than in Sima, Gongyang and Guliang98 – so Confucius is here less a dogmatic political drudge or ritual pedant in the struggle between the Zhou and Ji or when advising his disciples99 – we should remember that paint rarely dries on Confucius’s face. Whoever Mr Zuo was, he was a skilful author,100 whose art adds much to our old canvas. Three particular features of the work stand out. First, the sombre tone in which society is described. John Wang has written of its ‘relentlessly realistic portrayal of a turbulent era marked by violence, political strife, intrigues, and moral laxity’ (1986: 804). We see Confucius here through dark clouds of chaos and controversy: war,101 assassination, uprisings, injustice, corruption, deception, scheming and hostile ‘spirits’ swirl about the text. It is not a just world. Innocents suffer: wickedness prevails. Though Confucius is not seen consistently pitting text and morality against social disorder (e.g. Z. lxvi), Zuozhuan helps reinforce our reading of Confucius through the ‘cultural archetype’ of destruction and decay. Secondly, the style, sophistication and standing of Zuozhuan – a text popularly identified with Confucius himself – extend the leitmotif of meeting an ‘Old Master’. Confucius is lauded here in a Chinese equivalent of the Greek histories of Herodotus (c. 484–425 BCE) and

94 On this important incident (when Confucius’s life was threatened) and its relation to the Spring and Autumn Annals, Ng, O-c. and Q. E. Wang (2005), Mirroring the Past, 60f. 95 On the text, context, historical value and ethos, Zuo Tradition (2016), xvii-xcv. 96 For Chinese historiography and orality as it relates to Zuozhuan and the Zhou kings, Schaberg, D. (2009), A Patterned Past, 315–26. 97 On the place of scriptural interpretation in the Han as loci of political manoeuvring, intellectual debate, ideological textualism and historiographical manipulation, Queen, S. (1996), From Chronicle to Canon. 98 The Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu) is known under the names of its three main commentators, the (Old Text) Zuo and the (New Text) Gong yang ‫ޜ‬㖺 and Gu liang ばằ (which draws on the Gong yang) of the Former Han period (206 BCE–8 CE). In time, the anecdotal character and literary quality of the Zuo afforded it precedence over the didactic, indicative politics of Gongyang and Guliang. On the character and content of Gongyang and Guliang, Cheng, A. (2003), Art. ‘Chunqiu Gongyang zhuan ᱕⿻‫ޜ‬㖺儈ۣ and Chunqiu Guliang zhuan ᱕⿻ばằௌۣ’, in X. Yao (ed.), Encyclopedia of Confucianism, I. 78–80; Miller, H. ed. and trans. (2015), The Gongyang Commentary; Ng, O-c. and Q. E. Wang (2005), Mirroring the Past, 45f. 99 On the image of Confucius in Zuozhuan ᐖۣ, Zuo Tradition, lxviif. 100 Though Zuo Qiuming ᐖш᰾ is highly praised in A. 5.25, his authorship of Zuozhuan is contested. It remains a mystery. 101 N.B. the Battles of Chengpu ෾☞ѻᡠ (632 BCE) and Bi 䛢ѻᡠ (597 BCE) between the state of Jin ᱹ (originally known as Tang ୀ) and state of Chu ᾊ.

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Thucydides (c. 460–400 BCE), with which Zuozhuan was broadly contemporary and is justifiably compared. His standing is intertwined, like a sinuous vine in an old wall, with (in every sense) a Chinese ‘Classic’ that built and buttresses China’s language, literature, cultural memory and historiography. To attack one threatens both. Confucius’s fluctuating fortunes reflect as much China’s (literary and linguistic) compulsion to venerate the ‘Supreme Sage’ as any transient political, or ideological, impulses to subvert him. Third, Zuozhuan provides moral commentary on society in the ‘Spring and Autumn’ period. The text is at its best full of principle, at its worst painfully judgemental. It does not want the reader to miss the linkage of immorality and disaster for nations and individuals. ‘Ritual propriety’ ⿞ (li) and ‘proper conduct’ are essential for a good, safe, happy life in society and at home. To this end, lines are drawn. The foolish, wicked and proud people destroy themselves, while righteousness, integrity and humility are rewarded. Many a wise word has been mined from Zuozhuan: the direct, third person narrative draws a reader in. The narrative ‘fits’ the Impressionist genre. Sentences are terse and understated. Paratactic pauses create tension. Ethics are hammered home through story and history. As Martin Kern points out: ‘Instead of offering authorial judgments or catechistic hermeneutics, the Zuozhuan lets its moral lessons unfold within the narrative itself, teaching at once history and historical judgment’ (2010: 49). Much matches, we sense, with Confucius, the man and his message. We meet him through Zuozhuan. So, to the Analects or Lunyu 䄆䃎 (Lit. sayings or edited conversations),102 a text in which most scholars believe we find vestiges of Confucius, the man, his mind, style and workmanship. To Zhu Xi, ‘The Analects and the Mencius are the most important works for students pursuing the Way . . . [its words] are all inclusive; what they teach is nothing but the essentials of preserving the mind and cultivating nature’ (75.21a–b; q. Gardner 2003: 21).103 The text’s historicity is questioned.104 Studies of its long and complex collation, and doubts (of every kind) about its thematic coherence and moral integrity, have fired controversy.105 On the face of it, in twenty Books (of varied lengths) we find pithy wisdom, moral counsel, ‘Socratic’ dialogue and choice bons mots. To critics, this is all expressed in an elitist, sexist, reactionary – if not downright bizarre – way. If we get an impression of the man, Confucius, it is through his turn of phrase or use of meaty metaphors, his robust replies and rasping jibes, his deliberate silences and gentle nurture of disciples, his moods and morals. If we meet him in what’s taught, here is someone focused on life and purpose, attitudes and relationships, ritual practice and educational opportunity, care for the sick and respect for the dead. We are to read, digest and benefit throughout. Closer examination reveals that the Analects is a more problematic source for Confucius than first appears. We must take care, think hard, clean off old varnish, and decide who we really see here. The Analects exists in various versions. It is read now beside 2,000 years of commentary. Finding what was originally said and meant is not straightforward. Key issues in Confucian-Christian dialogue find full expression here. Questions about textual integrity, variant reading, translation, On Confucius in the Analects, Ivanhoe, P. J. (2002), ‘Whose Confucius? Which Analects?’, in Van Norden (ed.), Confucius and the Analects, 119–33. 103 N.B. Zhu Xi’s commentary, Lunyu Jizhu 䄆䃎䳶⌘, was learned by heart by aspirant officials until 1905. It was also held to teach the character and content of Confucianism. 104 On the collation, structure, content and historicity of the Analects, Hunter, M. (2017), Confucius Beyond the Analects; Ni, P. (2017), Understanding the Analects. 105 Information in the text helps date parts of it: i.e. posthumous titles are applied to the Duke of Ai 冟૰‫( ޜ‬r. 494–67 BCE) and noble Ji Kangzi ᆓᓧᆀ (n.d.), who died after Confucius; so, too, Zeng Shen ᴮ৳ (quoted in the Analects), who also died (fifty years) after Confucius. 102

CONFUCIUS, ‘THE MASTER’ AND CULTURAL DECAY

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interpretative strategy and use, are all present. Perception and reception of the Analects are interconnected with the Classics, or so-called ‘Chinese canon’ ѝ഻ਔިި㉽ (Zhongguo gudian dianji), albeit the Analects didn’t join the Four Books until the Song dynasty. That said, we must treat this old canvas with care, it is highly respected as a witness to Confucianism’s birth.106 Though a complex process, if we remove textual layers of the Analects carefully, we find a ‘Modern’, ‘New Text’ Ӻ᮷㏃ (jinwen jing) version in new orthography (after the infamous ‘burning of the books and burying of scholars’ ❊ᴨඁ݂ [fenshu kengru] in 213 and 210 BCE by the first Qin Emperor 〖࿻ⲷ [259–210 BCE]), and an ‘Old Text’ ਔ᮷㏃ (guwen jing) pre-2nd-century BCE version, in ‘tadpole’ or ‘Kedou’ script 㵼㳚᮷, discovered by chance in a wall when Confucius’s old residence in Qufu was being altered. To purists, past and present, the pre-Han, ‘Old Text’ version – as seen in the Analects of Confucius by Zheng Xuan 䝝⦴ (127–200 CE), a bibulous book-worm from Eastern Han ╒ᵍ) – has a strong connection to Confucius’s grandson Zisi ᆀᙍ (c. 481–402 BCE) and to pupils of his youngest disciple, Zengzi ᴮᆀ (Ziyu ᆀ䕯) (505–435 BCE). These make plausible a claim for the text’s historical preeminence and textual reliability. Indeed, despite the appearance of a (variously ordered) twenty-chapter Lu version 冟ᵜ, and twenty-two chapter Qi text 啺ᵜ, alongside the ‘ancient version’ ਔ䄆䃎 (Gu Lunyu) of the Analects in Ban Gu’s ⨝പ (32–92 CE) Book of Han ╒ᴨ (Han shu), charges of editorial manipulation, and acceptance of an primitive core (Bks. 3–7) plus later addition/s (Bks. ?10–20), this ‘Old Text’ version has claimed primacy as the original source for the Confucius ‘myth’. As Slingerland notes (pace D. C. Lau and Cui Shu ፄ䘠): ‘It is unlikely that any stratum of the Analects was composed after the early fourth century B.C.E’; and, as a consequence, ‘[W]e can safely view the text as a genuine representation of the state of the “School of Confucius” before the innovations of Mencius and Xunzi’ (xv). If we reject Creel’s view that we have ‘no convincing evidence that he [Confucius] wrote or even edited anything at all’ (1960: 106) and accept Chen Lifu (1972: 2) and Xiong Shili’s claim that the extant Six Classics ‘were the final version fixed by Confucius in his late final years’(1996: 406; q. Yao, X., 2002: 53),107 we are at last close to one of the faces on our old canvas. Cleaning is almost complete, although John Makeham rightly reminds us not to forget the role of commentaries, from Mencius, Xunzi and the Record of Ritual onwards, in the reception and interpretation of the Analects: ‘Unless a reader is provided with a commentarial “context” in which flesh is added to the very spare bones of the text, it frequently reads as a cryptic mixture of parochial injunctions and snatches of dry conversation. It is the commentaries which bring the text to life’ (1997: 261).108 In other words, some forms of varnish help us see the original more clearly. This is a wise caveat. Cleaning the canvas to see Confucius requires, as he would say, that we ‘lift the other three corners’ (A. 7.16). Restoring the picture of Confucius from the Analects takes time, skill and effort. If we are to catch his features, it will be through the text’s archaic language and particular style, its chaotic structure and rambling exchanges, and, as in Zuozhuan, its blunt moralizing. It is only in and through all this that we can really begin to see the swarthy complexion and worsted clothing of an earthy van Gogh-type farmer, a man whose bulky frame belies his quick-wittedness and quiet self-assurance. The On formation of the Analects, Kim, T. H. and M. Csikszentmihalyi (2014), ‘History and Formation of the Analects’, in A. Olberding (ed.), Dao Companion to the Analects, 21–37. 107 On claims Confucius and his followers helped shape the Classics, Loewe, M. ed. (1993), Early Chinese Texts, ad. loc; also, Yao, Introduction to Confucianism, 52–4. 108 Cf. also, Henderson, J. B. and O-c. Ng (2014), ‘The Commentarial Tradition’, in A. Olberding (ed.), Dao Companion to the Analects, 37–55. 106

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FIGURE 1: Confucius the scholar (551–449 BCE).

person we meet is urbane, evasive, sharp, moody, morose, critical, and starchily conservative. His big hands fit and ready, not to play Bach or plough fields, but to clear cultural ruins and rebuild society. Confucius: Life, Legacy and Literature In this final part we focus on the primary layer material on our canvas, that is, Confucius’s biography, the aftermath of his life and work, and his literary legacy. We will return to these themes again. An introduction, exaggerating the essential, must suffice for now. The story of Confucius’s life comes in two forms, a famous autobiographical note and multiple biographical constructs, old and new. The Analects is the sources for the note. Confucius describes his life as a staged (perhaps three-part)109 educational, professional and psychological process. Philosophy, pedagogy, technical terminology, and tradition combine: At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven’s Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart’s desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety. —A. 2.4 N.B. like earlier commentators, Slingerland groups the process in pairs, viz. education and discipline to learn the Confucian Way, clarity and contentment in living the Way, and the fruit of this in an innate intuition (‘an ear attuned’) and spontaneous understanding (‘I could follow my desires’) of what Heaven wills (9).

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There is nothing here about parents, birth or childhood. His elderly father, Kong He ᆄ㌷ (or Shuliang He ਄ằ㌷), was garrison commander in Lu. He died when Confucius was three, leaving his new, young wife (with whom he had a whirlwind romance),110 Yan Zhengzai 乿ᗥ൘ (from the Yan 乿 family), to rear his ten children. It wasn’t easy. Confucius speaks of his impoverished childhood, and thus need to learn ‘menial tasks’. His mother died young. A big lad – records suggest he was over six feet tall – at nineteen Confucius married Qiguan Ӄᇈ. A year later their son, Kong Li (ᆄ凹) was born, and thereafter two daughters.111 We find Confucius grieving his son’s early death (c. 484 BCE), along with that of his disciples Yan Hui 乿എ (c. 521–481 BCE),112 his favourite, and Zhong You Ԣ⭡ – often called Zilu ᆀ䐟 – (542–480 BCE),113 a brave soldier who died on the field of battle. We know little more of Confucius’s family or private life. We saw before Confucius’s passion for education. His life is an extension of this.114 Missing out in Lu, like other Shi he hawked his skills around (‘took his place in society’). He went to the court of Duke Jing of Qi 啺Ჟ‫( ޜ‬r. 547–490 BCE), but was again unlucky. He was, though, he tells us, ‘free of doubts’ about his guiding lights. After various scrapes, he returned to the increasingly troubled state of Lu, where in the winter of 505 BCE Yang Hu 䲭㱾 usurped his Ji masters and ruled ‘til ousted by the ‘three families’ in 501 BCE. Confucius was meanwhile courted by Gongshan Furao ‫ޜ‬ኡᕇᬮ, who offered him a role in his moral revolt and rebuilding of the fortified city of Bi.115 Confucius declined, hitching himself instead to Jisun Si ᆓᆛᯟ (posth. Ji Huanzi ᆓẃᆀ: d. 492 BCE), the long-serving Chief Minister of Lu (505–492 BCE). Between 505 and 497 BCE Confucius advanced from land agent, to district officer, to Minister of Works, to, finally, Minister of Crime,116 a role he quit dramatically in 497, aged fifty-four, protesting ritual laxity and political corruption (A. 18.4).117 As Bao Xian’s व૨ (6 BCE–65 CE) commentary on the Analects records: ‘Seeing pleasures of the flesh so exalted, and a court so lacking in ritual propriety, how could the Master abide it?’ (q. Slingerland: 215). According to his note, Confucius was convinced he now ‘understood Heaven’s Mandate’. In self-imposed exile, he and a few disciples wandered the states of Wei 兿 (where Confucius narrowly escaped Duke Ling’s 㺋䵸‫[ ޜ‬c. 534–492 BCE] low-born, lecherous wife, Nanzi ইᆀ), Song ᆻ and Chen 䲣 (where his identity was mistaken, and his murder thwarted).118 He returned to Lu at the request of the new Chief Minister, Jisun Fei ᆓᆛ㛕 (posth. Ji Kangzi ᆓᓧᆀ: d. 468 BCE), to assume the lowly non-executive post of ‘Following the Counsellors’, or ‘Leader of the Knights’.119 To Confucius, his ear was finally ‘attuned’ to Heaven’s

Sima reports Confucius was conceived after his parents ‘made love in the fields’. On respect for parents, A. 1.7, 11, 2.6, 4.18–21, 11.5, 17.19. On Confucius’s teaching on the family, Dawson, M. M. ed. (1915), The Ethics of Confucius, Ch. 5. 112 On Confucius’s respect and affection for the gifted Yan Hui, A. 2.9, 5.9, 26, 6.3, 7, 11, 7.11, 9.11, 20, 11.3–11, 23, 12.1, 15.11. 113 Cf. Zilu’s courage, military prowess and administrative skill, A. 5.7, 8, 8.2, 17.8, 23. 114 On Confucius’s early life and career (in esp. Zuozhuan and the Shiji), Chin, A. (2007), The Authentic Confucius, Ch. 1. 115 A. 17.5. On this, Creel, Confucius, 35f.; Dubs, ‘The political career of Confucius’, 277f. On the importance of fortified cities in Lu politics (as seen in Zuozhuan and Sima), Chin, A. (2007), The Authentic Confucius, 29f. 116 It is difficult to propose direct equivalents of the offices Confucius held. 117 On Confucius’s dismay at Ji Huanzi’s response to the gift of female dancers, A. 18.4. 118 N.B. this is probably when Huan Tui ẃ养, a jealous, senior soldier in Song, lopped a branch over Confucius’s head. Doubting he knew Heaven’s Will beforehand, this incident assured Confucius of Heaven’s blessing (A. 7.23). On the attack, Creel, Confucius, 44f. 119 On Confucius’s position, Van Norden, Confucius and the Analects, 33, n. 60. 110 111

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Will, which he now lived wu wei ❑⛪ (Lit. without effort, spontaneously), his hard-won reputation habituated to curbing excess, remonstrating with leaders, and modelling the ideal of the ‘Mean’. In his last years, he followed his ‘heart’s desires’ – now synchronized to Heaven’s Decree – in the twilight world of an elder statesman and honoured teacher, without power or position, but exerting great influence. He died in the fourth month of 479 BCE, aged seventy-one (or two), surrounded by disciples, who mourned as custom dictated for three years. Even the oft-berated Duke Ai of Lu 冟૰‫( ޜ‬r. 494–467 BCE) bewailed his loss, crying: ‘Alas, Heaven has no mercy on me, and has not spared me the Grand Old Man, leaving me unprotected and in deep regret. Alas! Father Ni (Confucius)! Great is my sorrow!’ (q. Lin 1941: 153). Grief Confucius knew in life others felt at his death. Not all held him in high regard. Though disciples (most famously Mencius) lauded Confucius – within a century of his death he had been accorded iconic status – to others, he was (and would remain) grumpy and arrogant, the gentry scholar who ‘avoids the bad people’ (A. 18.6) and ‘won’t soil his dainty hands’ (A. 18.7). The bitter debates we glimpsed in the ‘Spring and Autumn’ period (722–481 BCE) intensify in the ‘Hundred Schools’ 䄨ᆀⲮᇦ (Zhuzi baijia, or Ⲯᇦҹ匤 Baijaa zhengming) of the ‘Warring States’ period (403–221 BCE). They anticipate vicissitudes in 20thcentury attitudes to Confucianism noted above, with the acerbic Mohist essay ‘Against Confucius’120 more than a match for any Maoist ideology or Western liberalism that decries Confucius’s ‘elitism’ or ‘patriarchalism’.121 Critics, it seems, link Confucius and Confucianism to foster their mutual destruction.122 Confucius’s legacy lived on in his disciples, in the state ‘cult of Confucius’, and in the literature directly associated with him. In the Shiji (which records some disciples’ lives), Confucius informs us: ‘The disciples who received my instructions, and could themselves comprehend them, were seventy-seven individuals. They were all scholars of extraordinary ability’ (q. Legge [1861] 2009: 112). Tradition says there were 3,000 disciples, so perhaps only seventy-seven passed muster. Despite what to some is stereotypical moralizing and dull didacticism,123 Confucius was a charismatic figure. He could woo as well as warn. Dull bores do not usually attract young Turks. He could be open and charming: ‘Do you disciples imagine that I am being secretive? I hide nothing from you. I take no action, I make no move, without sharing it with you. This is the kind of person that I am’ (A. 7.24). During his lifetime, disciples earned respect and extended his social influence. A word from ‘the Master’ carried weight with potential employers (A. 6.1, 8). Ji Kangzi, Lu’s Chief Minister,

Cf. The Works of Mozi, Part III. Mohism is the political, social, ethical and ‘empirical’ ‘School of Mo’ ໘ᇦ (Mo jia), or of Mozi ໘ᆀ/Modi ໘㘏 (470–c. 391 BCE). Along with Confucianism, Daoism and Legalism, Mohism was significant in the ‘Spring and Autumn’ and ‘Warring States’ periods. In tone and content, Mohism rivalled Confucianism. But, its tough impartiality ެᝋ (jian ai; Lit. impartial care), statist ideology, economic rigor, non-fatalistic morality, and wariness of aesthetics, led to criticism during the Han dynasty. Some have seen in its demise a missed opportunity for China to turn Mohism’s logical, mechanistic worldview into an early exploration of empirical knowledge. On Mohism and the Mohist attack on Confucius, Graham, A. C. (1993), ‘Mo tzu ໘ᆀ’, in M. Loewe (ed.), Early Chinese Texts, 336–41; Knechtges, D. R. (2014a), ‘Mozi ໘ᆀ’, in Knechtges and Chang (eds), Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature, 677–81; Needham, J. and L. Wang (1956), Science and Civilization in China, II ; Rainey, L. D., Confucius and Confucianism, Ch. 4. 121 On 20th-century controversy, Wang, H-W. (1975), Legalism and Anti-Confucianism in Maoist Politics; Myers, J. T., J. Domes and E. von Groeling, eds (1989), Chinese Politics; Zhang, T. and B. Schwartz (1997), ‘Confucius and the Cultural Revolution’. 122 On the positive power of criticism in Confucius’s developing profile, Nylan and Wilson, Lives of Confucius, Ch. 2. 123 N.B. the dangers of stereotyping Confucian teaching, Dawson, R. (1964), The Legacy of China, 6. 120

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asked about the suitability of three disciples for ‘official duties’ (A. 6.7). Confucius called Zilu ‘resolute’, Zigong ᆀ䋒 ‘perceptive’, and Ran Qiu ޹≲ or Ziyou ᆀᴹ, ‘a master of the arts’ (despite disappointing him, too).124 In due time, Zilu, Ziyou and Ran Yong ޹䳽125 all exercised power as ‘Steward’ to the Ji.126 Zilu later moved to Qi, where he died defending the ruling family, and Ziyou led Lu’s army out against attack. If a leader is proven in his followers, Confucius is impressive: his character and self-control carried more weight than his intellect or force of personality. He was admired because, in so many ways, he lived the vision of a junzi he enunciated. A detailed history of the state ‘cult of Confucius’ need not detain us, having been reported by Sima Qian, and amply treated by Billioud and Thoraval, Ju, Knoblock, Kuo, Needham, Shryock, Stover, Taylor, Yao, and in dictionaries on Confucianism.127 The key point to note is how early, widespread, diffuse, sincere, uncritical and long-lived, this state-sanctioned veneration was. A sacrifice was first offered by the Duke of Ai shortly after Confucius’s death (497 BCE). The first Han Emperor, Gaozu ╒儈⾆ (256/247–195 BCE), made a famous ‘Great Offering’ ཚ㘱 (tai lao) of a pig, ox and sheep in 195 BCE, and then from 59 CE schools across China were required to offer sacrifices to honour the sage. Over time, Confucius’s birthday expanded to the ‘Twice-yearly Confucian Offering’ ֯ཙ (shih-tien). In the syncretism of the Tang dynasty ୀᵍ (618–907), when Buddhism and Daoism thrived and Bishop Alopen arrived in Chang’an, grand temples were built to ‘The Sage of Antiquity’. Every town and city had its ‘literary’ or ‘cultural’ temple ᮷ᔏ (wen miao). Major Ming dynasty བྷ᰾ (1368–1644) reforms to Confucius’s titles and rituals in 1530 shaped the ‘cult of Confucius’ until the Republican era (1912–49), when his approved birthday (28 September) became a national celebration. Though the ‘cult of Confucius’ suffered in the hostility of the Maoist era, since the Cultural Revolution state-sponsored rituals have returned. In the long history of this cult, Confucius’s original identity was over time transformed into the semi-divine worthy we find represented today, a revered source of spiritual, moral and intellectual inspiration, to whom high honour and pure sacrifice are due. We study his portrait for the fame and character attaching to his name. As we saw earlier, Confucius’s vocation and identity are bound up with texts, in the process he turned ru from an educational, ritual, profession into a moral vocation.128 The Analects begins: ‘To learn and then have occasion to practice what you have learned – is this not satisfying? . . . To be patient even when others do not understand – is this not the mark of the gentleman?’ (A. 1.1). The ‘Legalist’ philosopher Han Fei 七䶎 (c. 280–33 BCE)129 recognized Confucius’s achievement: ‘In the present age, the celebrities for learning are the literati [ru] and the Mohists. The highest figure

Ran Qiu was twenty-nine years Confucius’s junior. In time, he became a gifted commander in Lu (cf. A. 3.6, 5.8, 6.12, 11.3). 125 Rang Yong, courtesy name Zhonggong Ԣᕃ, was Ran Qiu’s contemporary. From a humble home and without skilful speech (A. 5.5), he earned his position by his integrity. 126 N.B. the position of Steward was ‘the most important in Lu that could not normally be attained in any manner other than inheritance’ (Creel 1960: 31). 127 Cf. Billioud, S. and J. Thoraval (2015), The Sage and the People, Ch. 7; Gu, J. (1930), Gu Shi Bian, ad loc.; Xunzi (1988), trans. J. Knoblock, 36–50; Kuo, Y-p. (2008), ‘Redeploying Confucius’; Needham, Science and Civilization in China, II. 31f.; Shryock, J. K. (1932), The Origin and Development of the State Cult of Confucius; Stover, L. (2005), Imperial China and the State Cult of Confucius; Taylor, R. L. and H. Y. F. Choy, eds (2005), ‘State Cult’, in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Confucianism, II. 549f.; Yao, Introduction to Confucianism, 28f., 41, 204–9. 128 Cf. Liu, X. (1998), Hanshu, 1728; q. Yao, Introduction to Confucianism, 18f. 129 On the ‘Legalist’ tradition, p. 35, 42, 337, n. 367. 124

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of the literati was K’ung Ch’iu [Kong Qiu, Confucius]; the highest figure of the Mohists was Mo Ti’ (Liao 1939: 2.298). The complex issue of Confucius’s relation to the Chinese Classics is not easily resolved. In the troubled Han dynasty, the texts were rediscovered, re-edited and, where necessary, supplemented. In 175 CE they were symbolically inscribed in stone, but this did not end debate. The issue of which texts were the ‘true Confucian Classics’ continued into the Tang dynasty, when, amid the chaos, Buddhism and Daoism bloomed and Confucianism wilted. When ru tradition reemerged during the Song dynasty, it was in a new, syncretic, Neo-Confucian form, which absorbed its rivals. In this new incarnation, Confucianism assumed a permissibly dynamic, evolving character. This has continued. Confucius’s response is as inscrutable as da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’. The expression on his old rugged face gives nothing away. Two specific texts stand out for comment, and with this we end. They embody all Confucius aspired to be and to teach. They seal the blood-red aestheticism which courses through his veins. The Book of Odes (Poetry) and the lost Book of Music express the Way of Heaven for him in an accessible, rhetorical, emotional, invitational form. ‘Find inspiration in the Odes, take your place through ritual, and achieve perfection with music’ (A. 8.8). In the course of his seemingly fruitless wilderness wanderings, he learned the power of music. On one occasion in the state of Qi he was so moved by the Shao 並 court music of the sage King Shun, ‘for three months he did not notice the taste of the meat he ate’ (A. 7.14). As he said (pace Casals): ‘I never dreamed that the joys of music could reach such heights’ (ibid.).130 Aesthetic beauty, be it from art, music, poetry, or the natural world, captivated him. He drew raw, sensuous pleasure from an elegant phrase or wellperformed piece, just as he did from a well-ordered ritual or kind deed. He pleaded with his disciples: Little Ones, why do none of you learn the Odes? The Odes can be a source of inspiration and a basis for evaluation; they can help you to come together with others, as well as to properly express complaints. In the home, they teach you about how to serve your father, and in public life they teach you about how to serve your lord. They also broadly acquaint you with the names of various birds, beasts, plants, and trees. —A. 17.9 The Shiji puts this in context: All Six Arts [the Classics] help to govern. The Book of Rites to regulate men, the Book of Music brings harmony, the Book of History records incidents, the Book of Poetry expresses emotions, the Book of Changes reveals supernatural influence, and the Spring and Autumn Annals shows what is right. —Shiji I. 3197; q. Yao 2002: 50 So, Confucius praises Zigong: ‘[Y]ou are precisely the kind of person with whom one can begin to discuss the Odes. Informed as to what has gone before, you know what is to come’ (A. 1.15). He

For an introduction to, and application of, Confucius’s view of music and the Yueji ′䁈 (Record of Music), Ch. 19 of the Liji ⿞䁈 (Book of Rites), Ivanhoe, P. J. (2013a), Confucian Reflections, 45–58.

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then warns his son, Boyu ՟冊: ‘[U]nless you learn the Odes you will be unable to speak’ (A. 16.13; also, 13.5, 17.10). Zigong had grasped what Confucius and later J. S. Bach and T. S. Eliot (among many others) saw, namely, the integrative dynamism of history, texts, art and morality. Texts per se would not suffice. They must be honoured, read, felt, grasped, engaged and enacted, for their meaning and integrity to be found. Ethics and aesthetics meet in Confucian pedagogy and perception. It is no surprise the Book of Odes has a eulogy to the cosmic power behind the junzi: King Wen is on high Oh, he shines in Heaven . . . August was King Wen Continuously bright and reverent. Great indeed was his mandate from Heaven. —Legge [1861] 1966: 427–9; q. de Bary 1991: 2 The rough-hewn face on our dark old canvas begins to shine when turned, and tuned, by the texts on the floor around him to the light, beauty, good order and music of Heaven.

FIGURE 2: The Analects of Confucius.

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CHAPTER TWO

Jesus, ‘The Christ’ and Spiritual Renewal Six-footer1 hanging at the same height as two thieves, / It is suffering that moves the whole world and all ranks.2 —Emperor Kangxi ᓧ⟉ᑍ, 1654–1722 On earth difference is intense, in space distance is immaterial. It all depends where you sit, what position you adopt. Panoramas of this ‘blue planet’ beamed back from the International Space Station reconfirm the wonder of science and the beauty of nature. And the electronics, astrophysics and cosmography that hold satellites in orbit permit incredible new perspectives. They allow us to see our world from beyond our world. There are no national boundaries on the pictures they transmit. Earth is a bright spot in an ink-black space, surrounded by lesser and greater pinpricks of light. Here and now is set in relative time and seen to be of relative importance. Cultures we treasure and protect blur and bleed into one another when set in the context of space and eternity, history and time. It’s not only astronauts and theologians who see life in other ways, anthropologists and geographers do, too. Their view from earth sees the human creature appear, evolve, propagate and spread. Culture, race, ethnicity, language and gender intensify diversity: they veil biological, historical and evolutionary unity. This ‘One World’ story of Confucianism and Christianity doesn’t begin from a premise of global division. It starts from the perspective of a geographer, anthropologist and historian. Like the cosmonaut and theologian, it holds to an inter-cultural connection between East and West long before Confucius spoke, or Jesus lived. We may never know if Jesus and his world had heard stories of life beyond Persia or Arabia, but we cannot assume not. Ancient cultures and societies had ways of connecting we have forgotten in our intense, myopic, earth-bound life. Light and darkness play on the face of the second figure on our canvas, Jesus Christ. He was a 1st-century Palestinian Jew, whose followers helped to ‘convert’ the Roman Empire and lay the foundation for what was called ‘Christendom’ in honour of him. As before, our aim here is to get an impression of the man, through stripping away layers of historic varnish, ‘reading backwards carefully’ to find the inspiration behind Christian tradition. It is not an easy task. The shadow that falls on this face in our picture is threatening, light that breaks in the sky behind him discoloured and doubtful. Yet, as the Catholic theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905–88) wrote, faith is ‘the closest possible following of Jesus’ (1960: 224). In this, as the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh (1904–

1 2

Prob. ‘real human’ or from a taller ‘alien’ race. Part of Bishop K. H. Ting’s (1915–2012) translation of [4th Qing] Emperor Kangxi’s (r. 1661–1722) poem ‘The Cross’. 47

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67) pleads: ‘God must be allowed to surprise us’ (1973: 160).3 The path to Jesus is full of problems, paradox, coincidence, complexity. The story of a man nailed to a cross, who ‘rose again’, is not likely to be straightforward. In 1704 Pope Clement XI (1649–1721) finally rejected the early Jesuit principle of ‘accommodating’ Christian truth to Chinese culture. His bull Cur Deus Optimus did not end the controversy: it was another bad example of protectionist politics and in-house theological wrangling. In the year Clement died – as Bach was finalizing the Cello Suites and his time as Kapellmeister in Köthen (1717–23) winding down – the Jesuit mission to China was banned by a frustrated and disappointed Emperor Kangxi. He died a year later. His decree of 1721 proclaimed: ‘Westerners are petty . . . their religion is no different from other small, bigoted sects of Buddhism or Taoism . . . Westerners should not be allowed to preach . . . to avoid further trouble’ (Li, D. 1969: 22).4 However, in the year Pope Benedict XIV’s (1675–1758) bull Ex Illa Die (1742) reaffirmed Clement IX’s position, German composer George Frideric Handel’s (1685–1759) oratorio Messiah received its first performance in Dublin (13 April), with the pulsating, hope-filled ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ at its heart. We do not ‘read backwards carefully’ to Jesus unless ready to be surprised and dismayed. For good and ill, stories, like images, keep us awake at night. His story and image, perhaps, especially.

THE MANY COMINGS OF CHRISTIANITY In 635 CE, the year Bishop Alopen arrived in the imperial capital Chang’an 䮧ᆹ, the Frankish missionary-Bishop Birinus (c. 600–49) baptized King Cynegils (c. 611–42) of Wessex in the River Thames, near Dorchester (c. ten miles SE of Oxford). The same year, as the Venerable Bede (673– 735) records in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (c. 731, Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation), a charismatic Irish monk, Aidan (O. Irish, Áedán; d. 651), established a monastic community on Lindisfarne, a small island off the coast of Northumbria in NE Britain. These are foundational events for the church in Britain. As the saintly, scholar-Bishop of Durham, J. B. Lightfoot (1828–89) records: ‘Aidan holds the first place in the evangelisation of our race. Augustine was the Apostle of Kent, but Aidan was the Apostle of the English’ (q. MacManus [1921] 2005: 233). It is wrong to see Jesus, and the faith he inspired, as a ‘Johnny-come-lately’ to China: their arrival coincided with the coming of Christianity to Britain, where the indigenous tribes and culture were just as hard.5 Indeed, the Celts, Belgae and Picts, who inhabited the wild, but fruitful, Roman province of Britannia, were probably far less civilized than the Tang citizenry of Chang’an. Intellectual and cultural self-confidence and sophistication were part of Confucius’s lingering legacy. Art has played its part in creating, educating and conserving Christian communities. The history of Christian mission to Britain, China, Asia, the Americas, and, in time, Africa and beyond, is inseparable from the creative, artistic dialogue between Christian agents and host cultures. The On Kavanagh, Stack, T. ed. (2003), No Earthly Estate; Agnew, U. (2004), ‘The God of Patrick Kavanagh’. Missionaries allowed to stay were technical or scientific advisors, a service Ricci and other Jesuits provided. On the ‘Rites Controversy’ that produced this imperial response, Mungello, D. E. ed. (1994), The Chinese Rites Controversy; also, p. 95f., 139, 144, 147, 153. 5 On this period, Blair, J. (2006), The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society; Cavill, P. ed. (1999), Anglo-Saxon Christianity; Dunn, M. (2009), The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons; Mayr-Harting, H. (1972), The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3 4

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seeds of this were sown in the conversion of the Roman Empire and the transformation of Europe. The richly illuminated late 7th or early 8th century Lindisfarne Gospels – ‘one of the first and greatest masterpieces of medieval European book painting’ (Backhouse 1979: 10)6 – served to define and refine a new ‘British’ culture long before the whole island was evangelized. Portraits the Jesuits commissioned from Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) of their Spanish founders, Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556) and Francis Xavier (1506–52), expressed a similar compulsion to embody their invisible ideal in physical form. Turning to the second figure on our canvas, we are reminded of the Christian claim that in this young man, Jesus, invisible deity is incarnate, that in a divine-human Son we see an ‘exact image’ (Gk. eikon; Heb. 1.3) of a ‘Heavenly Father’. He is, as Bishop John A. T. Robinson (1919–83) entitled a later monograph, The Human Face of God (1973).7 But we must tread carefully: pride, prejudice, idolatry, vanity and false assumptions abound. At a glance, we can see this second face is defaced, disfigured and often repainted. Picture restoration is going to be harder here. The varnish is old, thick and discoloured, the colours burnished as if by candle wax, the canvas threadbare from dirty, desperate handling. As Rubens’s young Dutch contemporary Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69) reminds us – in his rejection of historic iconography and his realist depiction of Jesus, with fine Jewish features and warm presence – Jesus has been, and still is, seen and known in different ways.8 We see in him the face of humanity in all its beauty, diversity, ugliness and anguish. We learn of Jesus from extra-biblical, ancient sources. Despite cynical, anti-Christian bias, the Roman historian Tacitus (56–c. 120) and Jewish apologist, Josephus (37–c. 100), tell us Jesus ‘Christ’, or ‘Chrestus’, was from Nazareth in Galilee, performed miracles, drew a large following, and was crucified by the Roman Governor, or Prefect, of the province of Judaea, Pontius Pilate (r. 26–36 CE), at the behest of Jewish authorities, as a blasphemer and trouble-maker.9 You can’t tell all this from Jesus’s face or expression. From what we can make out at a distance, he looks gentle as a lamb, open like a friend, and assured as a prince, albeit, seeming to bear the weight of the world on his shoulders. In contrast to Confucius’s stolid, unchanging Chinese features, this face is fluid and ageless. Born more than 550 years after Confucius, one wouldn’t necessarily know it. He might be a little younger – perhaps even older. By repute, he is another ‘paradigmatic figure’ (Jaspers), but why or how isn’t immediately obvious. He is not striking, or impressively built. In fact, he seems frail and emaciated, his clothes those of a servant, not a sage or lord.10 He is, to quote the prophet Isaiah again, ‘one from whom men hide their faces’ (53.3), more than someone you would be

Cf. Backhouse, J. (1981), The Lindisfarne Gospels. Bp. Robinson’s book Honest to God (1963) captured the radical spirit in Britain but mired the author in controversy. His later NT scholarship (e.g. Redating the New Testament [1976] and The Priority of John [posth., 2011]) is more conservative in tone. 8 Rembrandt painted many biblical stories and images. On his Supper at Emmaus (1654) and seven wood-panel oil sketches of Jesus (1630s), that revolutionized perception and artistic representation of Jesus in Europe, Dewitte, L. ed. (2001), Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus; Perlove, S. and L. Silver (2009), Rembrandt’s Faith. 9 Cf. Church, A. J. and W. J. Brodribb (1882), Annals of Tacitus, 15.44, 304f.; Josephus, F. [37–100] ([93–4 CE] 1737, 1974), Antiquities of the Jews, 18.3.3, 20.9.1; Pliny the Younger [61–c. 113], Epistolae, X. 96. Cf. also, Bruce, F. F. (1974), Jesus and Christian Origins; Dunn, J. D. G. (2003), Christianity in the Making, Vol. I; France, R. T. (1986), The Evidence for Jesus; Theissen, G. and A. Merz (1998), The Historical Jesus; Van Voorst, R. (2000), Jesus Outside the New Testament; Whealey, A. (2003), Josephus on Jesus. 10 On Jesus as a man and a leader, Hengel, M. (1981), The Charismatic Leader. 6 7

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drawn to. And yet, as the agnostic historian and novelist H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said of him (like many others), he is ‘the most unique person of history’ (1922: c. 37), so no one can write it ‘without giving first and foremost place to the penniless teacher of Nazareth’ (ibid.). This is the second figure on our old canvas, the ‘focal point of Christianity’ (Bowden 1989: xiii). As Scottish theologian James Denney (1856–1917) argued: ‘From beginning to end, in all its various phases and aspects and elements, the Christian faith and life is determined by Jesus Christ’ (1908: 1). In contrast to Confucius, Jesus is unnaturally disengaged from the tradition he inspired. He belongs to it inextricably. We do not know it except through him. His threat to us is different: for, if we find failure thrust on Confucius, Jesus embraced it. As in Chapter 1, picture restoration requires we remove thick layers of grit and grime, and ‘read backwards carefully’ to find the man, Jesus, who sits at the heart of Christian faith. Many have done this before. Our approach, following others, is to find ‘cultural archetypes’ that condition Chinese and Western perception of what we do and do not – or, perhaps, have not, cannot, or will not – see of Jesus. It is not straightforward. We may conclude the search is impossible, that the story of Jesus Christ is unresponsive to empirical enquiry. We should not baulk at the chance and challenge to study. Like Confucius, Jesus warrants attention and respect, if for nothing else then for his revolutionary ‘Sermon on the Mount/Plain’ (Mt. 5–7; Lk. 6.17–49), and the hope-filled vision he offers through Isaiah when he begins his ministry at his home-town synagogue in Nazareth in northern Palestine: The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. —Is. 61.1f.; Lk. 4.18f. Or, as Jesus said to disciples of John the Baptist, his cousin and ‘fore-runner’, who were sent to ask if he really was God’s promised ‘Messiah’: ‘Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor’ (Lk. 7.22). To St. Augustine (354–430) the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ was the ‘perfect standard of the Christian life’ ([1888] 2007: 3). Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948), the spiritual and political leader of the latter stages of India’s movement for independence from Britain (1857–1947), said that it ‘went straight to [my] his heart’ (1927: 49). To Jesus’s disciples, their ‘Lord’ is not just an inspiring spiritual figure, who expounds the mysteries of God and morality, he is the path to purpose, ‘new life’, forgiveness, hope and eternity. He is ‘the Way’ (Jn 14.6), and his first disciples were called ‘Followers of “the Way” ’ (Ac. 9.2, 11.26). Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, reluctant convert, and popular Christian author, C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), finally concluded: ‘The discrepancy between the depth and sanity, and (let me add) shrewdness, of his [Jesus’s] moral teaching, and the rampant megalomania which must be behind His theological teaching unless He is indeed God, has never been satisfactorily got over’ (1947: 132). Lewis caught and taught the interrogative power of this figure, Jesus. I wonder what the two figures on our old canvas, Confucius and Jesus, would have made of one another other. We will never know. Their disciples have tried. When Rubens was asked to paint the gifted, fiery and ultimately suicidal procurator of the China mission, Nicholas Trigault, SJ (1577– 1628) – whose four-year European tour seeking support (1614–18) was, to Logan and Brockey,

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‘one of the greatest publicity coups ever pulled off by the Society of Jesus’ (2003: 162)11 – he dressed his subject in the lavish finery of a Confucian sage.12 The portrait is exquisitely executed.13 Despite the incongruity between Trigault’s expensive garb and Jesus’s ideal of poverty, simplicity and service, it encapsulates Ricci’s theologically inspired missionary principle: the ‘accommodation’ of Christian theology to China’s Confucian philosophy and culture.14 This cultural encounter was from the outset two-way. As Logan and Brockey argue, by criss-crossing Catholic Europe, Trigault ‘had not only brought China to Europe, he would be able to take a bit more of Europe back to China’ (ibid., 164). Like Alopen in Chang’an, Aidan on Lindisfarne, and Ricci in the ambience of Ming dynasty བྷ᰾ (Great Ming) Emperor Wanli’s 㩜ᳶ (1563–1620; r. 1572–1620) court, Trigault and his Jesuit colleagues were cultural intermediaries. They dressed Jesus in local garb and used art as much as science to commend and communicate Christian faith.15 It was a composite approach, rooted theologically in a God robed in the flesh of the man Jesus. It was a method consecrated and confirmed by his, and their, missionary endeavour. As noted above, art affords ‘cultural archetypes’ that promote inter-cultural dialogue hospitable to our human unity-in-diversity. They deterritorialize, like a view from space. As shared images, they both bind and explain. Seen in this light, we look for Confucius and Jesus painted with similar oils on the same old historic canvas. Indeed, they almost seem to look at one another. Finding Jesus, the man, through two millennia of ‘soft’ Christian adoration and ‘hard’ secularist criticism isn’t going to be easy. Much is at stake. Greater claims are made by this man and about this man than for Confucius. To disciples, he is both co-equal and co-eternal with God. As the ‘Prologue’ to John’s theological Gospel states: ‘No-one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made Him known’ (Jn 1.18). So, too, Jesus says of himself, ‘I and the Father are one’ (Jn 10.30); and, as we have seen, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life’ (Jn 14.6). These claims, and his putative status, set Jesus apart. Nothing comparable is said of, or claimed by, Confucius. English Anglo-Catholic theologian Eric Mascall (1905–93)16 articulates a classic ‘Catholic’ approach to the breadth, depth, and sacramental nature of the church’s spiritual relation to Jesus: ‘That the Christ whom we know today is the historic Christ is basic to our faith, but we

11 Cf. also, Schrader, S. ed. (2013), Looking East: Rubens’s Encounter with Asia. While in Rome, Trigault edited Ricci’s memoirs, De Christiana Expeditione (1616). Also, below p. 97, 100, 104, 108, 112. On Ricci and the early ‘China Mission’, Galagher, L. J., SJ, trans. (1953), China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci; Fontana, M. (2011), Matteo Ricci; Shelke, C., SJ, and M. Demichelle, eds (2010), Matteo Ricci in China. 12 N.B. Ricci’s 1595 description of his clothing in China: ‘worn by the literati on their social visits’, namely, ‘a dress of purple silk, and the hem of the robe and the collar and the edges are bordered with a band of blue silk a little less than a palm wide; the same decoration is on the edges of the sleeves, which hang open, rather in the style common in Venice. There is a side sash of the purple silk trimmed in blue which is fastened round the same robe and lets the robe hang comfortably open’ (q. Spence 1984: 115). 13 The three Jesuit China missionaries (plus one to Japan) Rubens painted are similarly attired. On Rubens and Sino-Dutch relations, Weststeijn, T. (2016), ‘ “Sinarum gentes . . . omnium sollertissimae”’, in G. Song (ed.), Reshaping the Boundaries, 9–34. 14 On Ricci and ‘accommodation’, p. 63, 93, 95f., 117, n. 145, 136, 139, n. 36, 143, n. 58, 146f., 232. 15 On art and Christian mission, Adeney, F. S. (2015), Women and Christian Mission, Ch. 12; Bailey, G. A. (1999), Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America. Also, for a recent study of the power of artistic ‘resonance’ in the Jesuit China mission, Urrows, D. F. (2018), ‘Art, Culture, and Resonance in the Jesuit Mission in China’. For texts on art, power, culture, ideology, creativity and conflict, Newall, D. ed. (2017), Art and Its Global Histories. 16 As an ‘Anglo-Catholic’, Mascall affirmed the Church of England’s historic ‘Catholic’ identity, as mediated through the theology of the early church Fathers, and its rites, rituals, priesthood and sacraments.

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do not depend for our acquaintance with him on the research of historians and archaeologists. He is also the heavenly Christ, and as such is the object of our present experience, mediated through the sacramental life of the Church’ (1985: 38f.). That is, the living Christ figure at the heart of the tradition he inspires is found in and through the cosmos and the church. If Jesus’s profile touches heaven, his persona and the tradition he inspired have impacted every corner of Western culture – indeed, today, the world. As T. S. Eliot wrote: It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe – until recently – have been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all of our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning . . . If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes. —[1939] 2014: 200 Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan (1923–2006) was equally clear, writing in his monograph Jesus Through the Centuries: ‘For each age, the life and teaching of Jesus represented an answer (or, more often, the answer) to the most fundamental questions of human existence and of human destiny, and it was to the figure of Jesus as set forth in the Gospels that those questions were addressed’ (1985: 2). The economist, Utilitarian philosopher, and agnostic, John Stuart Mill (1806–73) also saw this: ‘Whatever else may be taken from us by rational criticism, the portrait of Christ presented to us in the Gospels is still left; a unique figure, not more unlike all His predecessors than all His followers’ ([1850, 1870] 1874: 254). Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821; r. 1804–14), an admirer of Muhammad, was fulsome in praise of Jesus and wary of the threat he posed: Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and I myself have founded great empires; but upon what did these creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded His empire upon love, and to this very day millions will die for Him. I think I understand something of human nature; and I tell you, all these were men . . . none else is like Him; Jesus Christ was more than a man . . . [This is] unaccountable; it is altogether beyond the scope of man’s creative powers. —q. The Christian Observer 1861: 261 Again, ‘From first to last, he is the same, always the same, majestic and simple, extremely severe and extremely mild in the business of public life, so to speak, Jesus does not hold to any criticism, his prudent manner so delighted admiration by a mixture of strength and gentleness’ (q. Tristan 1841: 59). To the theologically alert church composer J. S. Bach17 – whose Johannes-Passion, BWV 245 (1724, St. John Passion) and Matthäus-Passion, BWV 244 (1727, St. Matthew Passion), recall with tenderness the bitter injustice of Jesus’s trial, and his exemplary, atoning sacrifice on the cross, with

N.B. on Bach’s theology, Butt, J. (2010), Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity; Chafe, E. (2014), J. S. Bach’s Johannine Theology; —(2015), Tears Into Wine; Leahy, A. (2011), J. S. Bach’s ‘Leipzig’ Chorale Preludes; Marissen, M. (2016), Bach & God; Pelikan, J. (1986), Bach among the Theologians; Petzoldt, M. ed. (1985), Bach als Ausleger der Bibel theologische; Rathey, M. (2016), Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio; Schweitzer, A. ([1908] 1911), J. S. Bach.

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its offer of forgiveness and life to all18 – Jesus is ‘my all’ and ‘starting-point’, my ‘faithful Shepherd’ and ‘comfort and salvation’.19 He is for everyone, he believed, the ‘soul’s best portion’, the ‘joy of man’s desiring’,20 and thence a ‘priceless treasure’.21 ‘S.D.G’ (‘Soli Deo Gloria’: To God alone the praise) and ‘J.J’ (‘Jesu, Juva’: Jesus, help), with which he ‘garnishes his scores’, are, as the young organist and musicologist Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) recognized, ‘no formulas, but the Credo that runs through all his work’ (1911: I. 166f.).22 To T. S. Eliot, in Jesus, the God-Man, we encounter the ‘impossible union’ of apparent opposites; or, as ‘The Dry Salvages’ expresses this, ‘The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.’23 In Jesus’s suffering for the right, sin is purged by fires of sacrificial love (‘Little Gidding’).24 Imagery in Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’ (1920) blends theology, art and doxology. Hence, we read: ‘. . . in the juvescence of the year/ Came Christ the tiger’, who is at his life’s end betrayed by ‘flowering Judas’ and crucified in ‘depraved May’. There is no shortage of material created in the West in praise of Jesus: its breadth, depth, and theological and artistic diversity, are to many compelling. His image is as prominent in the West as Confucius’s is in China. There is also a long, mixed tradition of criticizing Jesus and his disciples. From the withering Λόγος Ἀληθής (Alethe Logos), ‘The True Word’ (c. 177), by the acerbic Greek philosopher, Celsus (fl. 160–80), and the reductionism of Adversus Christianos (Against the Christians) and De Philosophia ex Oraculis Haurienda (Philosophy from Oracles) by the able Neoplatonist Porphyry (c. 234–c. 305),25 through to communistic, nihilistic and atheistic attacks by Karl Marx (1818–83), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900),26 Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)27 and, more recently, myriad expressions of socio-political, religious, personal and ideological protest,28 Jesus, and the communal tradition he inspired, have provoked heated reactions.29 Nietzsche lambasted Jesus’s inversion of power structures: ‘Everything pitiful, everything suffering from itself, everything tormented by base feelings, the whole ghetto-world of the soul suddenly on top!’ ([1895] 1999: 59).30 Russell reflects the reserve some feel criticizing Jesus (‘He had a very high degree of moral goodness’) and the 18 The original title of the St. John Passion captures the spirit and intention of both of these remarkable works, Passio secundum Johannem (The suffering according to John). These are devotional studies of Jesus’s crucifixion. Music can be, as Bach knew, and demonstrates, a better medium for musing on mystery and expressing awe and gratitude. 19 Sacred Cantata: ‘Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied’, BWV 190 (1724), also in BWV 190a (1730). 20 Cantata: ‘Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben’, BWV 147 (1723), last movt. 21 Funeral Motet: ‘Jesu, Meine Freude’, BWV 227 (1723). 22 On Schweitzer, p. 54, 55, n. 33, 84, 85. 23 Throughout Eliot’s Modernist poem The Waste Land (1922) life is presented as a matter of ‘hints and guesses’ that human curiosity is drawn to pursue and engage. 24 On Eliot and Christianity, Dettmar, K. (2009), ‘ “An occupation for the saint”: Eliot as a Religious Thinker’, in D. E. Chintz (ed.), A Companion to T. S. Eliot, 363–75; Kong, L. (2016), ‘ “Dust in a Shaft of Sunlight”: T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Religious Conversion in a Secular Age’, in S. Freer and M. Bell (eds), Religion and Myth in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry, 165–84; Pechey, G. (2015), Tongues of Fire; Spurr, B. (2010), ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T. S. Eliot and Christianity; also, Maddrey, J. (2009), The Making of T. S. Eliot. On Eliot, p. 24f., 64, 143, 157, n. 144, 198, 225, n. 236, 270. 25 Like many critics, Porphyry was less keen to criticize Jesus than his followers; hence, his declaration, ‘The gods have proclaimed Christ to have been most pious, but the Christians are a confused and vicious sect’ (Philosophy from Oracles; q. Berchman 2005: 126). 26 On Marx and Nietzsche, p. 315f. 27 Cf. Russell, B. (1927), Why I am not a Christian. 28 For critics and criticism of Jesus, the Wikipedia article ‘Criticism of Jesus’ is useful: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_ Jesus (accessed 31 August 2017). Some critics, it seems, succumb to the mating call of royalties more than quiet reason! 29 On 20th-century atheism and ‘protest atheism’, p. 102, 114, 116, 124, n. 172, 149, 152, n. 122, 218, 223, 238, 307, 310, n. 211, 318, 323, n. 286, 339, 415, 437, 443f. 30 Cf. Brobjer, T. H. (2008), Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context, 179, n. 56.

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freedom others have to attack his followers (‘as organized in its churches, [Christianity] has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world’) (1957: 14–16). New Testament scholars and theologians have also piled in. The Cambridge scholar Don Cupitt (b. 1934) comfortably asserted: ‘I accept the well-established . . . view of Jesus . . . that we do not know anything for certain about his life and teaching’ (1979: 137). For others – that is, those who do not engage with him, or choose to ignore him – Jesus is the ‘pale Galilean’ libertine liberal Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909) mocked in his controversial lament for Greco-Roman – read: joy-filled, free, hedonistic – culture, the ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ ([1866] 1868: 77–84): ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;/ We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.’ Seeing Jesus clearly amid disagreement is not easy.31 In the next section we look at the dynamics of praise and blame that swirl around him. This will help identify intellectual solvents needed to clean away accumulative grime.

JESUS: DYNAMICS OF PRAISE AND BLAME Before we look at Jesus’s ‘face’ as a theological, cultural and literary motif and at ‘cultural archetypes’ that shed light on it, we need to engage the conflict, confusion and emotion that Jesus’s image has provoked. ‘Praise’ and ‘blame’ encapsulate what we meet in six areas. We can only dip our toes into this raging torrent, which is full of swirls, eddies and ideas. First, as intimated above, the image of Jesus is contentiously comparable; that is, for various reasons, comparison between Jesus and Confucius – and, with any other historical figure – is at times rejected. On grounds of cultural specificity (Jesus and another belong to different contexts), or anachronistic implausibility (the result of time-gaps and geography), or theological orthodoxy (Jesus is not ‘just another’ human being), and/or intellectual suspicion (‘Where might this all end?’), some people claim Jesus and Confucius should not be painted on the same canvas. The Scottish American preacher-theologian P. Carnegie Simpson (1865–1947) was one such, as a defender of Jesus’s uniqueness: Instinctively we do not class Him with others. When one reads His name in a list beginning with Confucius and ending with Goethe, we feel it is an offence less against orthodoxy than against decency. Jesus is not one of the world’s great. Talk about Alexander the Great and Charles the Great and Napoleon the Great, if you will . . . Jesus is apart. He is not the Great; He is the Only. He is simply Jesus. —1901: 44 For quite different reasons, Albert Schweitzer, who left his life as an organist, theologian and musicologist to found Lambaréné missionary hospital in French Equatorial Africa (1913),32 also stressed Jesus’s ‘otherness’, writing (a year after his two-volume study of Bach!) at the end of his

31 For a critical view of Jesus, Crossan, J. D. (1995), Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. As an inter-cultural account of Jesus’s global, historical reception, Jongeneel, J. A. B. (2009), Jesus Christ in World History. 32 Modern Gabon. Schweitzer was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this work in 1952.

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historic overview of the 19th-century ‘Lives of Jesus’ movement, Vom Reimarus zu Wrede (1906: The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1910):33 He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is. —[1906] 1981: 401 Christian spirituality and historical theology can both be protective of Jesus’s uniqueness. As Schweitzer had come to realize: ‘There is no historical task which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus’ (ibid., 4). To the radical American New Testament scholar Dominic Crossan (b. 1934), authors of lives of Jesus (excepting himself!) ‘do autobiography and call it biography’ (1993: xviii). Like picture restoration, decisions about the propriety of criticizing Jesus, or comparing him with other religious figures, are based on other criteria.34 David Wells is right: ‘The shape which our Christology [ed. study of Jesus’s life and death] assumes is determined by the presuppositions and operating assumptions with which we start’ (1984: 1). Hence, if he is not uniquely the ‘Son of God’ and ‘Saviour of the world’, he may be justly assessed like any other prophet, shaman, avatar, or ‘inspired’ individual. If he is, however, who he and his followers claim him to be, direct comparison is impossible – and examination of theological, philosophical, or ethical similarity-dissimilarity between Jesus and Confucius is of purely academic, or cross-cultural, interest. As we saw at the start, it all depends where you sit, what position you adopt. Perspective affects who and what we see. Viewed from the wrong angle a picture in a glass-covered frame can be virtually invisible. Secondly, Jesus’s image is controversially contextual, that is, his identity is not easily, or to some satisfactorily, defined geographically or ethnically. His ‘face’, we find, reflects the family and community of his birth, and, the characteristics of his adherents and critics. Few question Jesus’s historicity per se. As New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger (1914–2007) concluded after a lifetime of work on the original texts: ‘Today no competent scholar denies the historicity of Jesus’ (1965: 77f.).35 Likewise, the classicist Michael Grant (1914–2004): ‘No serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus’ (2004: 200). Recent scholarship has focused on Jesus’s 33 N.B. there are interesting parallels between Schweitzer’s study of the theological and historical sources, styles, and imagery of Bach’s religious works (J. S. Bach: Le Musicien-Poète [1905]) – which his musical mentors Charles-Marie Widor (1844– 1937) and Ernst Münch (1859–1928) encouraged him to write – and The Quest of the Historical Jesus, which traces the content, sources and rationale of the Christusbild (picture of Jesus) in 18th- and 19th-century ‘Lives of Jesus’. See further, p. 52f., 56, 78, 82, 85. 34 For contrasting approaches to Jesus’s uniqueness, Swidler, L. and P. Mojzes, eds (1997), The Uniqueness of Jesus; Wright, C. J. H. (1997), The Uniqueness of Jesus. 35 N.B. other extra-biblical and extra-canonical literature exists, i.e. the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Philip, James, of Truth, of the Egyptians. The origin, content, interpretation and apostolic authorization of this extra-canonical literature has been a contentious issue for a life of Jesus. J. A. Fitzmyer, SJ, states: ‘These apocryphal gospels are scarcely a source of real information about Jesus of Nazareth . . . Details in them, however, have to be scrutinized, and some of them may preserve information that is authentic’ ([1982] 1991: 18f.; and, 11f. for extra-biblical material).

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1st-century Palestinian origin and inherited Jewish outlook.36 Here, it is claimed, we find the young man, Jesus. More controversial, are the degree to which his worldview was bounded by his primitive, native context, and his identity subordinates his historical origins to his global, cultural profile, and claimed divine Sonship. In other words, Jesus’s image is not just about who he is, but who God and man have made him (esp. as ‘Son of God’ and ‘Saviour’). The theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45)37 felt this keenly, writing on 30 April 1944 (a year before his hanging): ‘What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today’ (1971: 279).38 How a ‘local’ Palestinian figure is also God, and becomes a ‘global paradigm’, has preoccupied faith and scholarship for centuries. How he is invested with contextual characteristics and divested of unnecessary theological and cultural accretions, so that he can be reinvested as God and have local, indigenized, human features, remains a conundrum! Marburg church historian and theologian Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), an early contributor to this debate, stressed the original ‘activity of the Hellenic spirit upon the gospel’. He concluded: ‘The gospel entered into the world, not as a doctrine, but as a joyful message and as a power of the Spirit of God, originally in the forms of Judaism. It stripped off these forms with amazing rapidity . . . and amalgamated itself with Greek science, the Roman Empire, and ancient culture’ (1894–7: 7.292). The problem for others is that if Jesus’s identity as a 1st-century Palestinian Jew is downplayed, historical integrity and the reality of his Incarnation are threatened, but if his capacity to save, and to connect with the world in every age (with all its ethnic, cultural and sociopolitical diversity), are neglected then God’s identity and the Gospel are compromised. He may be to biblical Christians ‘the same yesterday, today and forever’ (Heb. 13.8), but what of the many ways his ‘face’ and ministry have been painted? New Testament scholar Ben Witherington rightly indicates that there are ‘as many portraits of the historical Jesus as there are scholarly painters’ (1997: 77), and, not all of these are either true or in agreement. As Schweitzer said of the ‘Lives of Jesus’ he studied: ‘He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb’ (396). But this person, ‘never had any existence’ (ibid.). In spite of doubt and controversy, Jesus is still the object of intense – at times, paparazzistyle – enquiry. If the Christusbild (picture of Christ) on our battered old canvas appears somehow fluid and malleable, it is, for some, because Jesus changes in and for every age; to others, it must be so, for the ‘living Christ’ is never bound.

36 On Jesus’s Jewishness and 1st-century Palestinian culture, Vermes, G. (1973), Jesus the Jew; —(1993), The Religion of Jesus the Jew; —(2001), The Changing Faces of Jesus; —(2003), Jesus in His Jewish Context; also, Bourquin, D. R. ([1990] 2007), First Century Palestinian Judaism, (ed.) M. Burgess; Riches, J. K. (1990), The World of Jesus; —(1982), Jesus and the Transformation of Judaism; Sanders, E. P. (1985), Jesus and Judaism. 37 Bonhoeffer’s biography is important. After theological studies in Germany and the USA (1930–1), Bonhoeffer taught at the University of Berlin (1931–3) and was ordained as a Lutheran pastor (1932), serving German churches in London from 1933 to 1935. An active opponent of Hitler as führer (leader), Bonhoeffer was a leader of the anti-Nazi ‘Confessing Church’, a signatory of the ‘Barmen Declaration’ (1933), the founder of an underground seminary in Finkenwalde (1935), a double-agent in the abwehr (Nazi military intelligence) and an object of constant government harassment. Arrested on 5 April 1944, he was imprisoned in Tegel military prison, and then Flossenburg concentration camp where he was executed on 8 April 1945, two weeks before the camp was liberated. Cost of Discipleship ([1937] 1961) and Ethics ([1949] 1955) are reckoned modern theological classics. 38 Cf. also, Bethge, E. ([1970] 2000), Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Metaxas, E. (2011), Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.

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FIGURE 3: [Jesus with] Martha and Mary by Bai Huiqun ⲭភ㗔 (contemp.)

Thirdly, the image of Jesus is caught in the complex dynamic of ‘praise’ and ‘blame’ because it is claimed by a community, namely, the church in all its denominational diversity. As we glimpsed in Mascall, some Catholic Christians celebrate a highly developed sense of an ontological, spiritual relationship between the head, Jesus, and the priesthood, sacraments and ‘body’ of the church. St. Augustine’s principle, ‘Totus Christus, caput et corpus’ (The whole Christ, head and members),39 is still invoked to describe Jesus’s intimate relationship and effective authority among his people. So, too, the spirit of Pope Pius XII’s (1876–1958) encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi [The mystical body of Christ] (29 June 1943) lives on in Catholic teaching on the church as Christ’s ‘Mystical Body’.40 In other words, Jesus’s life and ministry are both continued and realized by his Spirit at work in his church and people.41 In most Protestant churches (Germ. Gemeinde; fellowship), however, confidence in Jesus’s power and presence is tracked back to a God who promised his

39 Cf. Augustine (1956), ‘Homilies on the Gospel of John and on the First Epistle of John’, NPNF., I. 7., Tr. 1, para. 2; also, Van Bavel, T. J. (1998), ‘The “Christus Totus” Idea’, in T. Finan and V. Twomey (eds), Studies in Patristic Christology, 84–94; Canty, A. (2009), ‘The Nuptial Imagery of Christ and the Church’, in C. A. Evans and H. D. Zacharias (eds), Early Christian Literature and Intertextuality I. 225–35. For a Catholic view of the church, Kasper, W. (2015), The Catholic Church; also, on Kasper, p. 444f. 40 Cf. The Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Pope Pius XII: On the Mystical Body of Christ and Our Union in It with Christ (2009). 41 N.B. theologian Hans Küng’s (b. 1928) principle: ‘The Spirit is Lord of the Church’ not ‘The Church is Lord of the Spirit’ (1968: 162f.).

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people he would ‘never leave them or forsake them’ (Dt. 31.6, 8; Heb. 13.5), and to the word of ‘Messiah’ (Lit. anointed, or chosen, one) Jesus: ‘Where two or three come together in my name, there I am with them’ (Mt. 18.20).42 Both Catholic and Protestant streams look to Jesus’s commands and promises as ‘Lord’, and to the Bible’s unique, textual witness to his saving death, as justification of its authority and use by the church.43 The problem is, Christian groups extrapolate from Jesus’s image conflicting views of church polity, authority and morality. It doesn’t end there. The church’s adoration of Jesus appears to some non-members nastily exclusive and proprietorial. Faith in, and prayer to, Jesus, have after all never been the believers’ preserve alone. He is honoured in other religions.44 He himself speaks of other sheep ‘not of this sheep pen’ (Jn 10.16). Atheist Bertrand Russell and Hindu Mahatma Gandhi (and others) may admire the picture of Jesus without wanting or needing to own it. Christian thought and secular criticism have recognized that the question is not only ‘Which Jesus?’, but ‘Whose Jesus?’45 As at his birth, so now, Jesus is ‘homeless’: he does not have a theological or cultural postal address. Fourthly, picture restoration, or ‘reading backwards carefully’, to discover Jesus, the man, has been overtaken in many academic and ecclesiastical circles by the literary, historical and theological exercise of historical criticism; that is, to close study of the ‘world of the text’ (Soulen and Soulen [1976] 2001: 78)46 and the way texts about Jesus developed – if you like, how layers and colours of paint were applied, and sayings, sources and genres employed.47 Context and content come into play here. Few people question the value of literary analysis, but some of us baulk at embracing it uncritically. We doubt someone else’s interpretation, while enjoying reading without having to know the what, and why, and wherefore of a text. In short, biblical ‘historical criticism’, in all its varied forms, has been, and will continue to be, a contentious subject. In Christian, or more general literary, circles, where a piece of writing has acquired ‘sacred’ status (by divine mandate, authorial respect, or a community’s textual identity), the idea scholars can critique that text with impunity, is not only naïve, it is foolish, offensive and provocative. Christians and atheists may not nowadays pronounce fatwas against infidel academics, but tongues wag, fingers point, and temperatures boil over in the pious and the perverse, when the image of Jesus is mired in the muck of public dispute. On Protestant ecclesiology and its relation to the ‘Word of God’, Barrett, C. K. (1995), Jesus and the Word; MacGregor, G. ([1958] 2004), Corpus Christi; Webster, J. (2016), Word and Church. 43 N.B. Anglican ethicist Oliver O’Donovan’s comment on the Church of England’s Article VI, of its ‘39 Articles of Religion’ (1563), on the ‘sufficiency’ of the Bible ‘for salvation’: ‘[T]he authority of Jesus and of these events (recorded in the Gospels) is (from an epistemological point of view) vested entirely in the New Testament and communicated exclusively through its witness. There is no other route by which these events make themselves known to later generations’ (1986: 51). 44 For texts on Jesus in other religions, Barker, G. A. and S. E. Gregg, eds (2010), Jesus Beyond Christianity. 45 Cf. for the communal dimension to NT christology, Horrell, D. G. and C. M. Tuckett, eds (2000), Christology, Controversy, and Community. 46 On the context and formation of the NT text and ‘Canon’, Abraham, W. J. (1982), Divine Revelation and the Limits of Historical Criticism; Aune, D. E. (2010), ‘Historical Criticism’, in D. E. Aune (ed.), Blackwell Companion to The New Testament, 101–15; Barton, J. (2007), The Nature of Biblical Criticism; —ed. (1998), The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation; Stuhlmacher, P. (2003), Historical Criticism and the Theological Interpretation of Scripture. 47 ‘Historical criticism’ began in the textual revolution of the 17th century, when a text’s meaning and setting attracted increased attention. In the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, this developed various streams; initially, ‘Lower criticism’ (to recover the original text) then ‘Higher criticism’ (to identify the sources and methods in the text). Subsequently, Biblical studies have developed ‘Source criticism’ (of an author’s sources), ‘Form criticism’ (of the ‘forms’ or types of literary/verbal/ oral sources used), ‘Redaction criticism’ (exploring editorial processes), and, more recently, ‘Tradition criticism’ (tracking oral materials through to texts), and ‘Canon’ or ‘Canonical criticism’ (reading texts in the form received and used by the church). There are many parallels here with textual analysis of the Analects (cf. above, p. 38f.). 42

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Fifthly, the image of Jesus is directly implicated in creedal controversy. It is integral to the development of the church’s faith and formulae, and its deliberate defence of its Credo (faith). In this sense, what is seen is truly what is believed. If Jesus is believed to be just a man, or a prophet, or a demi-god, or the ‘Son of God’ and ‘Saviour of the world’, then that is what is – or, better, who is – perceived. Likewise, the way Jesus’s two ‘natures’ (humanity and divinity) relate to each other in his incarnate life, or relate to other claimants to spiritual eminence, is decided without reference to Jesus himself and the ‘oil painting’ of his history. As St. Paul wrote to the young church in Corinth, ‘We no longer regard Christ . . . from a worldly (Gk. kata sarka; fleshly or human) point of view’ (2 Cor. 5.16);48 that is, to the apostle and believers, Jesus is more than history, or any human perspective, determines.49 Empirical evidence is insufficient if this figure on our old canvas is both the ‘Jesus of history’ and the ‘Christ of faith’.50 Faith decisions pre-empt artistic perception. What is believed is perceived. The problem is the Christian claim ‘We see Jesus’ (Heb. 3.9) does not satisfy those who do not see: indeed, it can confuse, irritate and alienate, by appearing self-righteous, censorious, elitist, or, frankly, a bit weird, like claiming a picture is a priceless ‘Old Master’ without reference to an expert opinion or market valuation. Faith may ‘have its reasons’, but it can infuriate doubters.51 Though viewers dispute the image on our old canvas, a picture remains: old, worn, blood-splattered, neglected, may be, but more than just a pipe-dream. Lastly, the wounds we can just make out on Jesus’s forehead on our dark old canvas testify to his brutal death. The mocking crown of plaited thorns pushed down on his young head cry out for compassion. The crucifixion celebrated in the Emperor Kangxi’s poem at the head of this chapter, and seen in countless crucifixes worn privately or displayed publicly, bears gruesome, tangible, witness to the manner of Jesus’s death. History confirms he was executed by what Romans called ‘mors turpissima’ (Lit. most shameful death), that is impaling on a wooden frame by nails through the victim’s hands and feet.52 He wasn’t unique. Two common criminals died beside him. Thousands died in Emperor Nero’s (37–68 CE; r. 54–68 CE) purge after the great fire of Rome (64 CE).53 As a heroic sacrifice or example of self-giving love, Jesus’s death has prompted little criticism and much admiration. As the monk Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471) wrote in his spiritual classic The Imitation of Christ: ‘In the cross is the height of virtue; in the cross is the perfection of sanctity. There is no health of the soul nor hope of eternal life but in the cross’ ([c. 1418–27] 1850: Bk. II. 12.2, 100). The English author and preacher John Stott (1921–2011) captures the power and appeal of the cross: ‘Because he (God) loved us, he came after us in Christ. He pursued us even to

For exegesis of this tough verse, Bruce, F. F. ([1971] 1996), 1 & 2 Corinthians, 208. On the church’s early view of Jesus, Dunn, J .D. G. ([1980] 1989), Christology in the Making; Fredrikson, P. (1988), From Jesus to Christ; Hengel, M. (2004), Studies in Early Christology; Longenecker, R. N. (1970), Christology of Early Jewish Christianity; —ed. (2005), Contours of Christology in the New Testament; Marshall, I. H. (1976), Origins of New Testament Christology; Moule, C. F. D. (1977), Origin of Christology; Papandrea, J. L. (2016), The Earliest Christologies. 50 On the origins of this distinction, Kähler, M. ([1892] 1964), Der Sogenannte historische Jesus und der geschichtliche, biblische Christus (The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historical Biblical Christ); Bock, D. L. (2012), Who Is Jesus?; Demetrion, G. ed. (2017), The Historical Jesus and the Christ of Faith; Evans, C. S. (1996), The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith; Porter, J. R. (1999), Jesus Christ. 51 On the complex debate about the ‘Jesus of History’ and Christians’ Christ, Wright, N. T. (1996b), ‘The Historical Jesus and Christian Theology’. 52 On mors turpissima, Hengel, M. (1977), Crucifixion in the Ancient World. 53 Cf. Tacitus: ‘Dressed in wild animals’ skins, they were torn to pieces by dogs or crucified, or made into torches to be ignited after dark as substitutes for daylight’ (Annals 15.44). 48 49

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the desolate anguish of the cross, where he bore our sin, guilt, judgement and death. It takes a hard and stony heart to remain unmoved by love like that’ (1986: 98). However, as a necessary offering to atone for sin, and effective act of reconciliation of God and humanity, this is tricky. It has from the first seemed ‘foolish’ and ‘offensive’ (1 Cor. 1.23f.).54 It stirs feelings of guilt, anger, disbelief and disquiet. If an honest theologian is hard-pressed to make out Jesus’s face through the smoke of controversy about ‘theories of atonement’, or the need for a loving God to forgive, others cannot see his face through tears of grief or gratitude, despair or remorse, rage or regret. Paradoxically, Jesus’s death ‘attracts and repels’ (Haight 2005: 78). To sceptics, cynics and Muslims, he didn’t die, he swooned on the cross (to be resuscitated in the cool of a rock tomb). To even progressive theologians, it is one of the earliest and ‘best-attested facts’ of Jesus’s life, the Gospel accounts creating ‘no impression of being a legend apart from the women who appear again as witnesses in v. 47, and vv. 44, 45’ (Robinson 1973: 131; also, Bultmann 1963: 274).55 To artists, musicians and authors, his death affords stimuli to paint, capture sounds, and develop libretti, to live by. ‘Praise’ and ‘blame’ still compete. ‘Praise’ for a unique, ‘once for all’ offering for sin and example of love, ‘blame’ for a wasted life, pointless sacrifice, and humiliating atonement. The cross of Jesus, and its move from a ‘murderous gallows’ to Emperor Constantine’s (c. 285–337) iconic ‘dream cross’, lays bare the human story. As German theologian Jürgen Moltmann (b. 1926) asks: ‘How could the memory of a victim of injustice and violence be changed into a symbol of victorious injustice and violence?’ (2006: 259). To Moltmann, in the face of Jesus on the cross we hear a cry for justice and plea for compassion:56 his silence, humility, and willing acceptance of injustice on Calvary, plead with human pride and failure, depravity, rebelliousness, guilt and greed. To those who respond, he offers hope, healing, a new start. As he says: ‘I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full (periss¯on; Lit. abundantly)’ (Jn 10.10). Like Confucius, the cross sets the bar very high on endeavour, courage, self-sacrifice and discipleship. Jesus warned, ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (Mk 8.34, Mt. 16.24, Lk. 9.23). Countless millions over two long millennia have heeded this stark, compelling invitation. His dying face is seen in his disciples. In his death millions live and die still today. But, as at Golgotha, many jeer, look away, go about their business, seek some benefit, or just scarper (Mt. 27.27, Mk 15.16f., Lk. 23.26f., Jn 19.17f.). Many passersby don’t even stop to look. In these six areas, the image of Jesus on our canvas has become contentious. We do not look at him without being affected. ‘Praise’ and ‘blame’ compete for our affection and our attention. To see Jesus clearly, we need to neutralize their effect, and, in this instance, be attentive to potential prioritizing of insight over argument. Both principle and prejudice can be remarkably blind. In the next section, I want to look more closely at the ‘face’ of Jesus as a theme in history, theology and Christian spirituality, and at ‘cultural archetypes’ that impact oriental and occidental interpretation of Jesus Christ.

54 Cf. 1 Cor. 1.23, 24. On the foolishness of the cross and classical Chinese philosophy, Hancock, C. D. (2006), ‘Wisdom as Folly: Comparative Reflections on a Pauline Paradox’. 55 On Jesus’s burial, Mt. 27.57f., Mk 15.42f., Lk. 23.50f., Jn 19.38f. On Muslim views of Jesus’s death, Barker and Gregg, Jesus Beyond Christianity, 84, 93f., 119–22; Nazir-Ali, M. (2007), Frontiers in Muslim-Christian Encounter, 34f.; Vicchio, S. J. (2008), Biblical Figures in the Islamic Faith, 143f. 56 On Moltmann’s classic study The Crucified God ([1972b] 1974), below p. 422f., 443f., 450f., 452f.

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THE ‘FACE’ OF JESUS: IMAGE, FAITH AND POLITICS ‘So once again for the last time or the first, we face that face’: with these striking words the American Frederick Buechner (b. 1926) introduces his devotional study, The Faces of Jesus (1974: 14). The ‘face’ of Jesus – as a physical reality, spiritual motif and socio-political tool – has attracted considerable attention over the last 2,000 years. This material forms a further outer layer of varnish, veiling, and at the same time revealing, the historic figure of Jesus, and what has been said and believed of him. We cannot linger long on this, important though it is. We again exaggerate key features of the life, or now the ‘face’, that emerge. Archaeologists and historians quarry caves and libraries to uncover primitive images. Lacking reliable first-hand descriptions of Jesus’s appearance, they investigate the church’s evolving attitude to ‘images’ and icons, to Jesus as a Jewish boy and as the miraculous first-born of the Virgin Mary (and her long-suffering fiancé, Joseph), to his vulnerability in death and post-resurrection reign as the ascended ‘Christus Pantocrator’ (Christ, ruler of/over all). Evidence of physical representations of Jesus is found in early 3rd-century CE Syria, where Jesus is depicted on wooden panels and simple frescoes. He isn’t a bearded Palestinian Jew, or the haloed saint of later Western iconography, he is an elegant, young Roman philosopher, with sandals and pallium (scholar’s tunic), closecropped hair and a shaven face (Brandon 1975: 166f.). As in those deliberately strong images of Confucius, he is dressed to impress the world with his wisdom. The (contentious) beard and flowing robes come later. Though the New Testament speaks of Jesus’s transfigured and resurrected face ‘shining like the sun’ (Mt. 17.2, Rev. 1.16), it does not give a full, physical description. The early church largely heeded the commandment ‘not to make an idol’ or ‘graven image’ (Ex. 20.4). Respected church teachers, Irenaeus (d. c. 202), Clement of Alexandria (d. c. 215), Lactantius (c. 240–c. 320), and Eusebius of Caesarea (d. c. 339), were used to legitimize the Synod of Elvira’s (c. 305–6 CE) Canon 36: ‘No pictures be had in the churches’, nor ‘worshipped or adored . . . painted on the walls’ (q. Davis 2017: 155).57 The desire – or, of course, idolatrous temptation, as early ‘iconoclasts’ and later Protestant Reformers interpreted it58 – to visualize Jesus became in time irresistible, though it remained highly contentious. Many need to see in order to believe. Christian iconography, from the early church to the present day, has battled extreme forms of iconoclasm and idolatry. Jesus’s eyes have been gouged out as grotesquely as his body has been glorified in gorgeous apparel and liturgical splendour.59 57 Cf. also, Grigg, R. (1976), ‘Aniconic worship and the apologetic tradition’; Bigham, S. ([1992] 2004), Early Christian Attitudes Toward[s] Images, 161f. 58 N.B. the non-ecumenical Synod of Elvira failed to suppress the growth of iconography. The backlash came in 6th-century Byzantium, where E. Roman Emperor Justinian’s (527–65) support for images faced a rising tide of iconoclasm (esp. from poor Christians). Matters came to a head in 695 when Emperor Justinian II (668–711; r. 685–75, 705–11) issued gold coinage with Jesus’s face on the obverse side, and a series of edicts by Emperor Leo III (c. 685–741; r. 717–41) against images (726–29) led to armed conflict between church and state. Protestant iconoclasm in the 16th and 17th centuries led to the destruction of images, and violence in Switzerland, Scandinavia, Holland, France, Germany, Scotland and England (esp. during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell [1599–1658] between 1653–8). Muslim and anti-Semitic support bolstered the Protestant cause. On the rationale, character, significance, and history of ‘Iconoclastic’ disputes inside and outside Europe, Belting, H. (1994), Likeness and Presence; Besançon, A. (2000), The Forbidden Image; Boldrick, S., L. Brubaker, and R. Clay, eds (2013), Striking Images; Freedberg, D. (1977), ‘The Structure of Byzantine and European Iconoclasm’, in A. Bryer and J. Herrin (eds), Iconoclasm, 165–77; Gwynn, D. M. (2007), ‘From Iconoclasm to Arianism’; Kolrud, K. and M. Prusac, eds (2014), Iconoclasm from Antiquity to Modernity. 59 Cf. esp. Grabar, A. ([1961] 1968), Christian iconography; Schiller, G. ([1971] 1972), Iconography of Christian Art.

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Buechner’s work illustrates how the ‘face’ of Jesus lends itself as naturally to spiritual writing as artistic imagery. Many others before and after him have explored this rich theme. Jesus’s gaze, look, face and ‘turn’ to others, are recurrent themes in the New Testament.60 We learn there that in this face we not only see (a) man, we find God. Christian spirituality has, in multiple ways, sought to ponder, honour and penetrate this ‘veil of flesh’, to know God’s mind and will. Jesus’s ‘face’ becomes a signpost, a symbol, an icon and a window into a distinct way of life. Incidents in Jesus’s life are depicted in various types of Christian iconography as much for their theological meaning, or catechetical value, as for their spiritual energy and pastoral power. We find three powerful and contradictory forces at work among those who first used Christian imagery.61 There were some, like biblical exegete Jerome (347–420) and sensuous Augustine (354–430), who beautified Jesus on theological grounds. Hence, Augustine – in what Aidan Nichols delightfully terms ‘a cornucopia of “adjectival” beauty’ (2007: 10) – perceives Jesus as entirely beautiful: ‘Beautiful on earth; beautiful in the womb; beautiful in his parents’ hands; . . . beautiful on the Cross; beautiful in the sepulchre; beautiful in heaven’.62 Secondly, others pace Justin (100–165) and Tertullian (c. 155–c. 240), view Jesus’s humanity in purely functional terms, as merely a vehicle to convey God, and thus of itself physically unimportant. Or, they visually humble him, depicting him on graves and crosses as a frail and sympathetic human.63 From the 6th century on – reflecting a shift in both theology and spirituality – pictures of Jesus’s cross and ‘Passion’ (suffering) are increasingly prominent.64 The Syriac Rabbula Gospels (586),65 an illuminated manuscript as bright and fine as its Lindisfarne counterpart, has such a Christ. But there are also streams of Christian art that, thirdly, effectively ‘canonize’ Jesus. His incarnate humanity and ‘divine impassibility’66 appear now in the luminescent hues of Eastern icons, or the intense realism of Western imagery, where a haloed Jesus carries his shining cross, or a living Christ, smeared with blood, still bears the marks of his seemingly very recent crucifixion.67 The malleability of Jesus’s image, as seen in these three artistic theological traditions, has continued, the spiritual motif of Jesus’s ‘face’ being adapted to cultural context, pastoral need and human aspiration. It is made pivotal for visual Christian evangelism, enculturated spirituality, and Cf. Mt. 17.2, 26.67, Mk 14.65, Lk. 9.51, 53, 22.64, 1 Cor. 13.12, 2 Cor. 4.6, Rev. 6.16, 10.1, 22.4. Jesus as the true, exact, or legitimate ‘image’ (Gk. eikon, or charakter) of God is also a recurrent motif (e.g. 2 Cor. 4.4, Col. 1.15, Heb. 1.3), and this in contrast to idols and ‘false images’. For a theological-philosophical study of Jesus’s ‘gaze’, Sigurdson, O. (2016), Heavenly Bodies. Also, on the definition and socio-psychological act of ‘gazing’, Sturken, M. and L. Cartwright (2001), Practices of Looking, esp. 72–108, 355f. 61 On ‘faces’ and ‘images’ of Jesus, Badde, P. ([2010] 2016), The Face of God; Booram, B. (2010), Picturing the Face of Jesus; Finaldi, G., et al (2006), The Image of Christ; Lucie-Smith, E. (2011), The Face of Jesus. 62 Cf. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, 44.3. 63 N.B. 1st- and 2nd-century ‘Gnostic’ writers (who sought ‘enlightened’ spiritual knowledge [Gk. gnosis]) used Gospel stories of Jesus not being recognized after his resurrection (Lk. 24.16, Jn 20.15) to support claims that he could change his appearance at will. Cf. Ehrman, B. D. (2003), Lost Christianities, 187f.; Every, G. (1988), Christian Mythology, 65. 64 On the ‘Passion’ of Christ in Christian iconography, Schiller, G. (1972), Iconography of Christian Art, Volume II: The Passion of Jesus Christ. 65 On this 6th-century Syriac, Byzantine manuscript (it takes its scribe’s name) – with its floral borders, fine Persian-Hellenic miniatures and fascinating history – which is now thought to come from between Antioch and Apamea in modern Syria, Wright, D. H. (1973), ‘The Date and Arrangement of the Illustrations in the Rabbula Gospels’. Cf. also, the narrative and fine illustrations in Spier, J. ed. (2007), Picturing the Bible, ad loc. 66 On God being ‘impassible’ (without feeling), below p. 449, 453. 67 Devotion to Jesus’s ‘wounds’ (Mt. 28.1–15, Lk. 24.1–48, Jn 20.1–18) and wounded humanity, that he bore through his ascension into heaven (Lk. 24.50f., Ac. 1.9–11), grew during the Middle Ages. A spiritual tradition of ‘stigmata’ emerges, in which Christians (past and present) discover on their body marks similar to Christ’s wounds. 60

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moral or theological aesthetics.68 To illustrate: in Faces of Jesus69 the Latin American ‘Liberation Theologian’ José Míguez-Bonino (1924–2012) portrayed two ‘classic images’ of Christ in Latin America – the ‘conquered’ Christ of suffering, native Indians and the ‘celestial’ Christ of the Spanish conquistadores. To these he adds, provocatively, a third: the private, passive, pious Christ of modern evangelical Protestantism. For Bonino the ‘face of Jesus’ justifies power, consoles pain, satisfies need. Inspired by ‘Liberation Theology’, there are now a plethora of enculturated ‘variations’, re-imagining the common ‘theme’ of Jesus Christ, as an object of need, adoration, hope and ambition. Unlike his revisionist heirs, to avoid the risks of projection and dungeon of tradition, Bonino stressed the need to return to the New Testament Gospels to integrate social analysis in textual exegesis. According to this dynamic hermeneutic Jesus will, he argued, be the transformative agent he originally was. In Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger claims our ‘gaze’ is directly connected to our social and historical context. Hence, too, Jonathan Crary argues: ‘There never was or will be a self-evident beholder to whom the world is transparently open’ (1990: 6). The observer is caught in a matrix of forces that hinder and enable vision. As Ola Sigurdson puts it: ‘Every scopic regime carries its own unspoken cultural rules for what and how we shall see’ (2016: 154). This is important. As we began to see in Bonino, Jesus’s ‘face’ is formed by, and the source of, power. Historic artefacts like the ‘Turin Shroud’, the ‘Mandylion of Edessa’, and ‘the Holy Face of Lucca’,70 are as potent when dishonoured as owned. Through ‘faciality’ – as French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call a regime of ‘signs’ that underpin the ‘politics’ of Western Christianity (Dosse 2010: 255f.)71 – Jesus’s face is an instrument to enhance spiritual and cultural self-awareness, and a weapon of socio-political and ideological warfare. Like Confucius, Jesus’s ‘face’ has been used and abused often. The ‘enculturation’ of Jesus’s image with different cultural, racial, ethnic, or sexual features has served to extend the spirit of ‘accommodation’ of Ricci and the Jesuits. There is, as Neil Macgregor, former Director of the National Gallery in London, wrote, ‘a Christ for every age’ (2000: 115). He is not just a young bearded Jew, but also a Chinese and an African, an Eskimo and, in some radical feminism, a woman. This act of re-branding Jesus with ethnic or sexual features can be as pure as piety (‘He is our Jesus’) and as barbed as politics (‘He is not your rich, white, Western, imperialist, male Jesus’). His face comforts and confronts. In Chinese iconography he is a peaceful Buddhist sage and a dynamic hero.72 The first picture sought by the public in the National Gallery’s ‘Picture of the Month’ during World

68 On the ‘image’ of Jesus and evangelism, Borg, M. J. (1944), Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship, 144f. For a different approach to the theology of Jesus’s ‘image’, Von Balthasar H-U. (1982), The Glory of the Lord, Volume I: Seeing the Form. 69 Cf. Míguez-Bonino, J. ed. (1984), Faces of Jesus. On Bonino as a major figure in the growth of a global and local theological consciousness, Dyrness, W. ed. (1993), Emerging Voices in Global Christian Theology, esp. 216. 70 On the history, authenticity and political potency of these three (of forty-two) ‘miraculous’ medieval images of Jesus, Antonacci, M. (2000), The Resurrection of the Shroud; Cameron, A. (1983), ‘The History of the Image of Edessa’, in C. A. Mango, O. Pritsak and U. M. Pasicznyk (eds), Okeanos, 80–94; Cruz, J. C. (2012), Miraculous Images of Our Lord; Friesen, I. E. (2001), The Female Crucifix; Holmes, M. (2013), The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence; Kitzinger, E. (1954), ‘The Cult of Images in the Age before Iconoclasm’; Nicolotti, A. (2014), From the Mandylion of Edessa to the Shroud of Turin; Nickell, J. (1998), Inquest on the Shroud of Turin; Whiting, B. (2006), The Shroud Story. 71 Cf. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari ([1980] 2013), A Thousand Plateaus. On the global, philosophical category ‘faciality’ in Deleuze and Guattari, Dosse, F. (2010), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; Watson, J. (2005), ‘The Face of Christ: Deleuze and Guattari on the Politics of Word and Image’. 72 N.B. Malek, R. (2002–17), The Chinese Face of Jesus Christ; Clarke, J., SJ (2013), The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History, 1–42; Swerts, L. and K. De Ridder (2002), Mon Van Genechten (1903–1974); Tan, J. Y. (2016), ‘“Who Do You Say That I Am?” Uncovering the Chinese Sensus Fidelium’, in B. E. Hinze and P. C. Phan (eds), Learning from All the Faithful, 281–94; also, generally, Clunas, C. (2017), Chinese Painting and Its Audiences; Grabar, A. (1968), Christian Iconography.

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War II (March–April 1942) was the Venetian artist Titian’s (1490–1576) gentle, hope-filled, painting of the resurrected Jesus speaking to Mary in the garden, ‘Noli me tangere’ (Do not touch me; Jn 20.17). When we remove the varnish on the second figure on our old canvas, we find layers of repainting by enculturated devotion, and more recent re-working to satisfy socio-political and ideological agendas. Despair can creep in: ‘Will I ever see him?’ And a new self-awareness: ‘Is he only what I, or we, have made him?’ It is comforting to recall that this face may be more than humans ponder or predict, and well able to project – and protect – its unique identity.

IMAGE AND ‘CULTURAL ARCHETYPES’ So, what of appropriate ‘cultural archetypes’ that ‘fit’ Jesus and ‘ring true’? What will act like an effective hermeneutic solvent to cut through tough layers of pride, prejudice, politics and presupposition, so we see Jesus, the man, more clearly, and ‘read backwards carefully’ to experience a ‘second naïveté’ in reading and understanding ‘as if for the first time’? What ‘cultural archetypes’ will act to bind and unite perception of Jesus in China and the West? As with Confucius, this is a tall order. We must again proceed with care. A number of ‘cultural archetypes’ suggest themselves. We might, perhaps, look to the face itself, and the human capacity to recognize a face – one of the first cognitive acts of an infant – as a potent global archetype. After all, the power, beauty, personality, memorability, caricaturing, and opacity of a face, are acknowledged worldwide. ‘Dadaist’73 Austrian artist and author Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971) attacked the art establishment with his dystopian, photomontage face The Art Critic (1919) because of the power of a face. The so-called ‘face of a product’ earns millions. ‘Facereading’ is a social counterpart to palmistry in China. We might, again, look to Bach and T. S. Eliot to exemplify the power of social commentary and silent speech. Jesus’s social critique is, after all, much like Confucius: he has no power but exerts influence; he is known for his silence as much as for his speech.74 Hence, we find the Evangelist and the music in Bach’s Passions interpreting the Gospel narrative. Likewise, in Eliot’s poems ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1920) and ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) we meet caricatures of individuals imprisoned by anxiety or devoid of feeling. This is tough, loving, timeless social criticism. These modern, urbanite shades roam streets in New York, London and Beijing. We recognize the type. This ‘cultural archetype’ ‘fits’ Jesus. His offer of freedom and ‘new life’ is for such people.75 But I suggest we search elsewhere. We access Jesus, the man, I propose, not, as with Confucius, through global ‘cultural archetypes’ of destruction and nostalgia, lost beauty and moral compromise, but through those that evoke spiritthrough-form, love-in-relationship, and life-through-death. For, if humility, teachability and selfdiscipline, are marks of Confucius, interiority, intimacy and sacrifice are defining features of Jesus.

On ‘Dadaism’ and other ‘Modernist’ or avant-garde artistic movements, p. 348. On the silence of the ‘suffering servant’ and of Jesus, Is. 53.7, Mt. 15.23, 26.63, 27.12, 14, Mk 15.5, Lk. 23.9, Jn 14.30, 19.9, 10, Ac. 8.32. 75 The growth of ‘registered’ (official) and ‘unregistered’ (unofficial ‘house’ or ‘families’) Protestant and Catholic churches in China since the end of the Cultural Revolution has often been linked to a perception of Jesus meeting personal needs. A 2003 survey found 63.5% of Christians in Beijing became believers because of pressure at work, anxiety and/or the uncertainties of modernity. In the countryside, people became Christians for healing or protection for evil spirits and natural disasters. A 2004 survey revealed 63.4 per cent of Christian students became Christians at university because of its religious character and values. 73 74

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Consider: we do not know him if we mistake, or overlook, his re-directing of Jewish spirituality to the ‘spirit’ of the Law, and people to the ‘soul’ before God. As we will see, he reaffirms the first ‘two commandments’, love for God and neighbour (Mk 12.30f.). He intensifies ancient commands not to murder, or to commit adultery, divorce or swear (Mt. 5.21–37), by claiming authoritatively, ‘But I say to you’ (Mt. 5.32, 34, 39, 44), forgive, be holy, resist quickie divorces or careless curses (Mt. 18, 21f., 5.48, 5.31–8). To this, he adds a new intimacy of address in prayer to ‘Our Father’ (Mt. 6.9). He encourages his disciples to think of God’s loving care and availability as that of a generous father rather than an irascible judge (Mt. 6.8, 32, 7.11). He warns, ‘Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord”, will enter the kingdom of heaven’ (Mt. 7.21). God knows the heart as well as need. He judges impartially, sending rain ‘on the just and the unjust’ (Mt. 5.45). In biblical terms, the gap is traversed between a holy God and a sinful world by a sacrifice, offered in the Old Testament by a priest, in the New Testament by Jesus himself. Mark 10.45, probably Jesus’s ‘very own words’ (ipsissima verba), encapsulates his unique self-understanding as servant and sacrifice: ‘[T]he Son of Man [Jesus] did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’. We will return to Gospel accounts of Jesus soon, but this is the type of figure a ‘cultural archetype’ must fit. Three related ‘cultural archetypes’ suggest themselves. First, it’s said the Norwegian Expressionist artist Edvard Munch’s (1863–1944) four-fold image The Scream (Norwegian: Skrik), painted between 1893 and 1910, is the second most-readily recognized image after Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.76 The journalist Arthur Lubow (b. 1952) draws a parallel between them. The Scream, he writes, is ‘an icon of modern art, a Mona Lisa for our time’.77 The image is often referenced, copied, or alluded to in modern Chinese literature, art, cinematography and political commentary (Geall 2017: 253). The more-than-horrified expression on the large, open-mouthed face, set against the blood-red, Krakatoan sky,78 is an image hard to forget. It ‘connects’ with postmodern angst and pain in urban dislocation. Munch tells of its inception: One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord – the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked. This became The Scream. —q. Messer 1985: 72 We might say much of these haunting images. They are a further instance of art as social commentary, and a rare insight into modern anguish at alienation and fear. I want instead to use The Scream as an illustration of one of the formative Chinese art-critic Xie He’s 䅍䎛 (fl. 500–35 CE) ‘Six Canons of Chinese painting’ 㒚⮛‫( ⌅ޝ‬Huihua Liufa) found at the start of his influential monograph The Record of the Classification of Old Painters ਔ⮛૱䤴 (Guhua Pinlu), the first systematic study of the theory of painting in China. Writing in the relative calm of the Liu Song ࡈᆻ (420–79 CE) and 76 For this reason, perhaps, people have often tried to steal it. After thefts from The National Gallery (1994) and Munch Museum (2004), The Scream has been recovered. The painting sold for a record $120 million in 2012. 77 Cf. Lubow, A. (2006), ‘Edvard Munch: Beyond the Scream’; also, Prideaux, S. (2005), Edvard Munch; Holland, J. G. ed. and trans. (2005), The Private Journals of Edvard Munch. 78 One theory for the colours in the sky is Munch’s recollection of vivid sunsets a decade earlier (1883–4) caused by the eruption on Krakatoa. Cf. Olson, D. W., R. L. Doescher and M. S. Olson (2004), ‘When the sky ran red: the story behind The Scream’.

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Southern Qi ই啺 (479–502 CE) dynasties, Xie He’s ‘Six Laws’ ‫( ⌅ޝ‬liu fa) have been ‘almost obsessively applied’ (Kwo 1981: 89)79 in traditional Chinese art. The ‘First Principle’, a lynchpin of Chinese aesthetics, stands out. It is simply: ‘≓丫⭏अ qiyun shengdong’, literally, ‘breath-resonancelife-motion’. Xie saw art as a ‘spiritual’ activity, to be filled with natural energy and life-like movement, qi ≓. It should be composed, he contended, by endless, moving ‘consonances’ with nature’s rhythm. To achieve this, technique is not sufficient. The artist must establish a ‘spiritual’ connection with nature, their brushstrokes exhaling the ‘breath of life’. This principle determines all Chinese brush art. So, ‘portraiture’ is translated yingtu ᖡെ (shadow picture) or fushen 䱴䓛 (to enter the body). The picture and painter reach out for the spirit of their subject to create a spiritual impression beyond verisimilitude. The form is to capture and portray spirit. In this, poetry, painting, and calligraphy connect. They seek and speak the same essential, spiritual language. As the great Sung dynasty ᆻᵍ (960–1279) master Su Shi 㰷䔮 (or Su Tungpo 㰷ᶡඑ) (1036–1101) said of Xie He’s successor, the eminent Tang dynasty ୀᵍ (618–907) statesman, musician, poet and painter, Wang Wei ⦻㏝ (699–759): ‘There is a painting in his poem, and a poem in his painting.’80 In Munch’s The Scream and Xie He’s ‘First Law’ we discover a ‘cultural archetype’ that captures Jesus’s avocation of spirit-through-form. What Xie sought in theory, Munch felt existentially, and Jesus lived incarnationally. God found in flesh and blood. So, in Jesus’s ministry, life, sickness, material objects, and nature’s acts, are transfigured by the dynamic spirit of God. Secondly, Jesus’s orientation of life to love-in-relationship finds its ‘cultural archetype’ in a mother cradling her child. In the Madonna and Child of Christian iconography we find an image that transcends specific faith convictions and cultural allegiance. It appeals to the heart of human love. As Jiang Shaoshu ဌ㍩ᴨ (fl. 1642–79) wrote in his popular History of Silent Poetry ❑㚢䂙ਢ (Wusheng shishi [1646]) of the images of Mary and Jesus that Ricci brought to China: ‘The facial features and the lines of clothing look like images of real things in a mirror, vividly alive. The dignity and elegance of the figures are beyond the technical ability of Chinese painters to produce’ (Kao 1991: 256). In the vulnerability of a baby and protectiveness of a mother we find a psychological metaphor replete with moral and aesthetic potential. The British sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903–75) recounts her early anxiety about ‘the graven image’, and later decision that it was sin ‘only when the image sought to elevate the pretensions of man instead of man praising God and his universe’ (q. Bowness 1966: 10). Over the years, she returned to the image of the Madonna many times, prompted by her son Paul’s death in Thailand (13 February 1953), when serving in the Royal Air Force. We can track the evolution of her art from the intimate realism of ‘Mother and Child’ (1927), through the reclining grey-stone abstract ‘Mother and Child’ (1934) – one of a series of images with their iconic carved holes – to the white, pierced, Modernist form ‘Child with Mother’ (1972). Through these figures, feelings and the sub-structure of life, are explored. As Hepworth said: ‘It is a primitive world; but a world of infinite subtle meaning. Nothing we ever touch or feel, or see and love, is ever lost to us. From birth to old age it is retained like the warmth of rocks, the coolness of grass and the ever-flow of the sea’ (Bowness 1966: 13). In her Bianco del Mare stone pietà, seen in the parish church of St.

79 On the meaning and use of Xie He’s ‘Six Laws’, Qian, Z. (1998a/b), ‘ “Resonance” in Criticism on the Arts’, in Limited Views, 97–120. 80 On the two principles of painting – ‘shi zhong you hua’ 䂙ѝᴹ⮛ (Lit. painting within poetry) and ‘hua zhong you shi’ ⮛ѝᴹ䂙 (Lit. poetry within painting) – that Su Shi and Wang Wei shared, Hsiao, L-L. (2013), ‘Wang Wei’s and Su Shi’s Conceptions of “Painting within Poetry” ’.

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Ives, Cornwall, we glimpse a ‘cultural archetype’ of Jesus. Here is intimate, vulnerable, love-inrelationship that makes sense of the mystery of life and death. Modernism was well suited to expound this.81 Here is Eliot’s ‘hint half guessed, the gift half understood’ of Incarnation in sculptural form. Here is the answer Henry Moore (1898–1986),82 Hepworth’s long-term Modernist friend and artistic rival, gave when quizzed by a niece about his sculptures’ allusive, simple titles: All art should have a certain mystery and should make demands on the spectator. Giving a sculpture or a drawing too explicit a title takes away part of that mystery so that the spectator moves on to the next object, making no effort to ponder the meaning . . . Everyone thinks that he or she looks but they don’t really, you know. —Day: 2008 In the second figure on our canvas we see, but do not see. We are meant to look carefully. This person does not ‘cast his pearls before swine’ (Mt. 7.6). His whole life is an invitation to explore

FIGURE 4: Barbara Hepworth, ‘Mother and Child’ (1927). On Modernism, Ch. 7, passim. Born in Castleford, Yorkshire, UK, Henry Spencer Moore, OM, CH, FBA, RBS, settled in the vibrant artistic society of Hampstead, N. London. As Hepworth’s better-known colleague and Modernist contemporary, Moore gained wealth and fame during his lifetime. Taking early inspiration from a reclining Toltec-Maya, Chac Mool stone statue (from the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico), Moore is known for large semi-abstract, pierced sculptures (in various materials) seen today in public places around the world.

81 82

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life and love-in-relationship to God, neighbour and self. As Hepworth’s intimate sculpting of the ‘Madonna and child’ reminds us, there is particular pain in parental loss, in the death of an only child, in an infant brutalized by a wicked system. There have been many Chinese pietàs, and versions of the ‘Madonna and child’.83 A secular expression of this is found in a highly charged narrative video, ‘Don’t cry on’, cited by Paola Voci in China on Video: Smaller-Screen Realities (2010: Fig. 3.6). An ashen mother holds her dead child as troops withdraw. She screams silently, as in Munch’s picture. The inevitability of death for the weakest in such a society is, Voci notes, ‘a recurrent trope in much contemporary Chinese modern literature’ (ibid.). China’s ‘one child’ policy fuelled the sense of powerlessness and outrage.84 This is not new. Lu Xun’s 冟䗵85 (1881–1936) famous 1918 novel, ⣲Ӫᰕ䁈 (Diary of a Madman) indicts ‘the inhuman condition into which Chinese people have been forced, and in which they have become used to live’ (ibid.). In Hepworth, the video, and Lu Xun, the ideal of love-in-relationship is shattered by the fact, mystery, and anguish of death. A child dies. A mother weeps. Injustice wins. Few people gaze at the second figure on our dark old canvas unmoved by such. Herein lies another ‘cultural archetype’ for us. We have one final ‘cultural archetype’ to introduce before we turn to biblical texts that tell us about Jesus. In them we find, as we have begun to see, someone synonymous with life-through-death. What ‘cultural archetype’ will act like a solvent to clear away the dirt and grime on that feature of our second figure? We might focus on the image of the crucified. I suggest we scroll on a frame to his deposition from the cross, to Jesus caught between death and resurrection. It is a moment where time and non-time, history and eternity meet. He dies, and in his death, to the eye of faith, death dies. He rises, and in his resurrection, to the eye of faith, life is raised to ‘new life’. In ‘three days’ between crucifixion and resurrection, he inhabits the space and place we understand. Here death is wellknown, what comes after as yet unknown. We need a ‘cultural archetype’ that speaks into that anxious, uncertain space of life-through-death. Symbolically, in a year fire ravaged the Temple of Confucius in Qufu (1499), the Pietà, by the Florentine artist-sculptor Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), was completed. The work is, perhaps, as well-known as Mona Lisa and The Scream, but it talks a very different language. We do not see here the contented smile of a wealthy young mother, nor the anguish on the face of urban anonymity. We see Mary cradling her dead son after his deposition from the cross on the hill called ‘the place of a skull’ (Mt. 27.33). Carved in fine white Carrera marble, the work was a funerary artefact commissioned by the flamboyant Gascon aristocrat, Cardinal Jean de Bilhères de Lagraulas (c. 1435–99), French King Charles VIII’s (1470–98; r. 1483–98) Ambassador to the Holy See. The 23-year-old Michelangelo chose a subject familiar in France and

On the form and significance of images of the ‘Madonna and child’ in China, Clarke, J. (2013), The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History; Mungello, D. E. (2005), The Great Encounter of China and the West, 21f.; Jespersen, T. C. (1996), American Images of China, 55. The concept of pietàs is naturally extended in China to filial piety, esp. the father-son relationship. On this, Chao, P. (1983), Chinese Kinship; Fortes, M. (1961), ‘Pietas in Ancestor Worship’; Wolf, A. P. ed. (1974), Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society; Sullivan, M. (1959), Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century; —(1989), The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art. 84 The Chinese government’s ‘one child’ policy was introduced in 1979. Purportedly aimed at controlling population growth, it was a useful domestic reminder of government power. The policy, which began to be phased out in 2015, is linked to widespread female infanticide, restrictive penalties for offenders (e.g. denial of educational and professional opportunities), evasion by officials (who simply travel overseas to have other children), the creation of a generation of demanding only children or ‘little prince-lings’, and a disproportionately male population (the reason the policy was reversed). 85 Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren ઘ⁩Ӫ) was shaped by early Left-wing politics. To many literary critics, he is a founding-father of modern Chinese literature. See further, p. 160, 198, 287, n. 115, 314, 324f., 331, 457, n. 283. 83

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parts of Northern Europe, but not in Renaissance Italy. When the Chapel of St. Petronilla was demolished for Bramante’s (1444–1514) remodelling of St. Peter’s, the Pietà was positioned in the first chapel in the south nave where it remains today.86 Michelangelo’s work matches Lesser’s acute account of Bach’s Cello Suites: ‘[A] world of emotions and ideas are created with only the simplest of materials’ (Siblin 2009: 1). Beauty, truth and genius converge in Michelangelo’s pious integration of classical imagery in Renaissance naturalism. The theme is sombre, the tone is not. This pietà exemplifies life-through-death. Perhaps the disturbed geologist Laszio Toth grasped this, shouting as he struck the work with a geologist’s hammer on Whitsunday, 21 May 1972: ‘I am Jesus Christ, I have risen from the dead.’87 But look at the work. The proportionately smaller Mary has the face of a proud young mum, more than a grieving, middle-aged matron. A rare signature from Michelangelo is as visible as the wounds from Jesus’s recent crucifixion.88 It is as if he sleeps after a hard day’s work, cradled by

FIGURE 5: Michelangelo (6 March 1475–18 February 1564) – The Pietà (1498–9).

Michelangelo’s Pietà was transported to the World Fair in New York in 1964–5. It stood in the ‘Vatican Pavilion’ while crowds passed by on a moving walkway. 87 Toth struck off Mary’s arm below the elbow, a chunk of her nose and part of one of her eyelids. La Pietà is now shielded by bullet-proof glass. 88 La Pietà is the only sculpture Michelangelo signed. ‘MICHAELA[N]GELUS BONAROTUS FLORENTIN[US] FACIEBA[T]’ (Lit. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, made this) is inscribed on the sash across Mary’s chest. The artist, historian Giorgio Vasari (1511–74), author of the influential Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550; enlarged 1568), tells us Michelangelo did this when a visitor attributed the work to his contemporary Cristoforo Solari (c. 1460–1527), ‘the hunchback’. For a recent study, Wallace, W. E. (2009), Michelangelo; the Artist, the Man, and his Times; or, the tough atmospheric novel by Sidney Alexander, Michelangelo The Florentine (1957). 86

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his earthly mother and heavenly Father. Were the Pietà compared to a movement of Bach’s Cello Suites, it would be to the ‘sweet hopefulness’ of a Courante,89 not the wistfulness of an Allemande or Sarabande. Here, love, life, joy and hope converge in another ‘Old Masterpiece’. It is an awesome analogue of Incarnation: God revealed in ‘the simplest of materials’, our fine, frail, breakable humanity. Here is Jesus, a 1st-century Jew from Nazareth, captured in marble like a fly in yellow aspic, expressing life-through-death. We gaze, yes, but forget. Images fade. As Moore knew: ‘Everyone thinks that he or she looks but they don’t really, you know’ (q. Grant, 2004: 15). In the image of Jesus, we sense there is more than first meets the eye. Focus on the image of the historical Jesus misses much. There is depth here, as in the Pietà, that history and time cannot capture.

JESUS, THE CHURCH AND THE NEW TESTAMENT EVIDENCE We turn now to the primary literary layers on which our second figure is depicted, namely, the biblical texts – particularly, the four Gospels – that provide a unique account of Jesus’s life and work. We must again exaggerate the essential, there is much to consider. To ‘read backwards carefully’, we need to track back from the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and the church’s formal statement on Jesus’s full divinity and humanity. We need to see how worship, prayer, preaching, teaching, expansion, criticism, heresy and authority, all shape the figure of Jesus we find on our canvas. We also need to understand the development in New Testament thinking about Jesus and the different accounts we find inside and outside the Gospels. As with Confucius, the task of removing multiple layers of complex material is far from straightforward. Some readers of the New Testament are by nature sceptical, others credulous. As we saw before, studying Jesus shapes and reveals priorities and personalities. New Testament scholar C. H. Dodd (1884–1973) urges that this is not futile: ‘We have no right to distrust any of the Gospel statements unless there is good cause’ ([1970] 1978: 33). In fact, he says: ‘The first three gospels offer a body of sayings on the whole so consistent, so coherent, and withal so distinctive in manner, style and content that no reasonable critic should doubt, whatever reservations he may have about individual sayings, that we find reflected here the thought of a single, unique teacher’ (ibid.). Dodd’s contemporary, Vincent Taylor (1904–67) is similarly reassuring: ‘The development which can be seen is not a mark of corruption, but a process of interpretation made necessary as the tradition is understood better and is expounded in the light of the missionary expansion of the primitive church’ (1958: 22). In other words, there was a historical figure – a tangible ‘first cause’, we might say – to which the Gospels bear witness and Christianity is the lasting ‘effect’. He is – to use an analogy we will return to in relation to Confucius (p. 248, n. 366) – the ‘golden thread’ that unites the Bible and explains the church, the heart of Christian doctrine and church devotion. The fourth Ecumenical Council that gathered in Chalcedon (viz. Kadiköy, Istanbul) from 8 October to 1 November 451, drew 520 bishops from every part of the Christian church. Previously, the church had met at Nicaea (325) to resolve the doctrine of the Trinity, and at the third Ecumenical Council in Ephesus (431, 449) tried to expatiate theologically on how Jesus was and could be both

This is the astute view of the quirky Cartesian diplomat, composer, lexicographer and musicologist, Johann Mattheson (1681–1764). Author of Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre (1713) and Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739), Mattheson was a wealthy Hamburg citizen and friend of Handel. His works (mostly operas, oratorios and cantatas) were lost during WWII, but returned recently to the State and University Library, Hamburg. On Handel, p. 48, 86, 130, 197, n. 71, 366. 89

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God and man. The details of Chalcedon, and the tortuous path leading to it, cannot detain us. Three issues warrant brief attention for light they shed on the Gospels. First, the ‘Chalcedonian Definition’ signed by the whole Council was a much-needed political and theological fudge.90 The four great, negative adverbs at its heart – that Jesus’s humanity and divinity co-exist in him asynchytos, atreptos, adiairetos, achoristos (without confusion, change, division or separation) (q. Bettenson 1947: 73) – are notable for excluding heresy (particularly the views of Arius [256–336], Apollinaris [d. 382], Nestorius [386–451] and, more immediately, Eutyches [c. 375–454], which variously dehumanized Jesus or downgraded his divinity) and for including diversity (within defined boundaries). The aim was to ‘bar out extreme statements on either side’ (Mackintosh 1912: 213). To some it was an urgent, usable, ‘compromise’ (Pannenberg [1968] 1988: 285),91 to others ever since a poorly articulated anachronism, a bad example of (Greek) ‘theological bankruptcy’ (Temple 1912: 230),92 ‘the saddest and most momentous event in the history of dogma’ (Harnack [1886–9] 1976: 197), and a good reason to rebel. Furthermore, as H. R. Mackintosh points out: ‘[T]he Chalcedonian decisions had at first a near fatal influence on the Eastern Church’, with risings ‘in Egypt, Palestine and Syria’ (ibid., 215).93 The seeds of controversy are sown in the New Testament where we find multiple images of Jesus: these are often viewed as either devout attempts to honour him or useful evidence to discredit him. Better to regard them, I suggest (as many scholars do), as exemplifying an intentional expression of, and quest for, unity-in-diversity,94 which is proleptic of Chalcedon and suggestive for global enculturation today. After all, we are read differently by different people, likewise Jesus from the very beginning. Secondly, the Council of Chalcedon illustrates in microcosm the role of heterodoxy in shaping christological orthodoxy. As the German lexicographer of the New Testament and theologian Walter Bauer (1877–1960) argued, orthodoxy is a reflexive reaction to heresy.95 Besides the predictable panoply of ‘fleshly sins’ to divert and distort faith in Jesus, and the heresies Chalcedon explicitly refuted, the pathway from the New Testament to the council is strewn with the Church’s perennial inclination to Docetism (that Jesus only appeared to be human), Gnosticism (only the enlightened know Jesus) and Pharisaic Judaizing (that makes faith contingent on rules). British theologian H. E. W. Turner (1907–95) rightly identified five catalysts of heresy, namely, addition, subtraction, distortion, imbalance and denial.96 In reaction to this, the church intentionally

90 On the Council of Chalcedon, Edwards, M. (2009), Catholicity and Heresy in the Early Church; Grillmeier, A. ([1965] 1975), Christ in Christian Tradition, Volume I; Kelly, J. N. D. ([1950] 2006), Early Christian Doctrines; —([1972] 2014), Early Christian Creeds; Meyendorff, J. (1966), Orthodoxy and Catholicity; —(1969), Christ in Eastern Christian Thought; —(1989), Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions; Price, R. and M. Gaddis (2005–7), The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon; Sellers, R.V. (1940), Two Ancient Christologies; —(1953), The Council of Chalcedon; Young, F. M. and A. Teal ([1972] 2014), From Nicaea to Chalcedon. 91 N.B. Pannenberg also calls the formula ‘problematic’ for not taking as its starting point the historical unity of Jesus, the man. 92 On Temple and his critics, McIntyre, J. ([1966] 1998), The Shape of Christology 308f.; Kent, J. (1992), William Temple, 38f. 93 On the ‘monophysite’ movement (from mia physis, one nature) that sought to protect faith in Jesus’s ‘one nature’ after Incarnation, and on its churches in Armenia, Syria and Egypt (565–622), Frend, W. H. C. (2008), The Rise of the Monophysite Movement. 94 N.B. the classic study, Dunn, J. D. G. (1990), Unity and Diversity in the New Testament. 95 Cf. Bauer, W. ([1934] 1971), Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. On the debate Bauer’s position provoked, Lüdemann, G. (1996), Heretics, 242, n. 83. 96 Cf. Turner, H. E. W. (1954), The Pattern of Christian Truth. Turner was the first scholar to respond in a substantial way to Bauer’s work.

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developed authoritative textual sources (the creeds and canon of Scripture), and institutional (bishops, presbyters and deacons) and theological resources (teachers, writings, arguments and conciliar decisions). Instead of obscuring the figure on our canvas, these bring his image into sharper relief, as they were intended to do. Thirdly, like the New Testament, in Chalcedon’s deliberations and conclusions we find discernible ‘types’ of Christology. Some are ‘high’ or ‘low’ – emphasizing Jesus’s divinity or humanity; some are ‘material’ or ‘spiritual’ – maximizing, or minimizing, his body or flesh; some are ‘biblical’ or ‘philosophical’ – drawing on Jewish texts or Greco-Roman thought. Hence, the composite theological tradition ‘Nestorianism’, with which Bishop Alopen and the early Persian mission to China are linked, is rooted (like Islam, its geographic neighbour) in God’s necessary indivisibility: that is, anything said of Jesus must concur with this. The result, Chalcedon concluded, was a schizoid Jesus in whom humanity and divinity edgily co-habit. In contrast, the ‘high’ Christology of John’s Gospel – in which Platonic dualism (distinguishing ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’ decisively) and Jewish theology (that professed God ‘Almighty’ and ‘Eternal’) conflate – the mystery and miracle of Incarnation is expressed in the (hitherto) unimaginable claim: ‘The Word became flesh’ (Jn 1.14). If the authors and creedal interpreters of the New Testament were conditioned by contemporary intellectual, cultural, and religious resources, we should not be surprised to see this process repeated in oriental and occidental Christology today. Culture shapes what we write and how we read. It also affects what we see, remember, value and communicate. This is important. Stripping away a further layer on the image on our old canvas, we find, as indicated above, that worship, prayer, preaching, teaching, expansion and criticism, colour the way Jesus is seen. If the practice of baptism in the three-fold name (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) undergirds the development of the Trinity doctrine, prayer to and through Jesus inspired the church to proclaim him confidently Lord and God.97 Likewise, it was through the disciples’ obedient ‘remembering’ (Gk. anamnesis) of Jesus in their thankful ‘breaking of bread’ (Gk. and Lat. eucharistia), their preaching of ‘Jesus as Lord’ (kerygma), and their heeding of his command to ‘go and make disciples of all nations’ and to baptize and teach (Mt. 28.19, 20), that the church’s ‘rule of faith’ (Lat. regula fidei) and practice was developed, as its creedal core and ground of governance. Meanwhile, the church experienced unprecedented internal and external pressure from its expansion and persecution. It is not surprising that the ‘Quest for the historical Jesus’ moved forward after Schweitzer into a ‘New’98 and ‘Third Quest’,99 and then backwards through Jesus and the church’s preaching to find the man behind what we know as ‘Christianity’. Jesus’s centrality to the process of Church ‘tradition’ is crucial.

97 N.B. Wiles, M. (1967), The Making of Christian Doctrine, 62–93. On worship in the early church and its doctrinal impact, Dunn, J. D. G. (2010), Did the First Christians Worship Jesus?; Hengel, M. (2003), ‘Hymns and Christology’, in Between Jesus and Paul, 78–96; Hurtado, L. W. (1999), At the Origins of Christian Worship; Martin, R. P. ([1964] 1974), Worship in the Early Church. 98 N.B. the ‘New Quest’ was heralded by Göttingen (later Tübingen) Prof. Ernst Käsemann (1906–98) in a lecture ‘The Problem of the Historical Jesus’ (20 October 1953). Käsemann argued for history in the theology of the Gospels. On this, Robinson, J. M. (1959), The New Quest for the Historical Jesus; Van Voorst, R. E. (2000), Jesus Outside the New Testament. 99 The ‘Third Quest’ includes various perspectives and principles. It evaluates evidence for Jesus on the basis of dissimilarity, mutual attestation, ‘embarrassment’, plausibility, congruence, and new archaeological evidence. On this, Borg, M. J. and N. T. Wright (1999), The Meaning of Jesus; Charlesworth, J. H. (2006), Jesus and Archaeology; Jeremias, J. (2002), Jesus and the Message of the New Testament; Powell, M. A. (1999), Jesus as a Figure in History; Theissen, G. and D. Winter (2002), The Quest for the Plausible Jesus; Vermes, G. (1994), Jesus the Jew; Witherington, B., III ([1995] 1997), The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth; Wright, N. T. (1996a), Jesus and the Victory of God.

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And so, we turn to the Gospels. They do not contain all the New Testament says of the man, Jesus. Like the Analects, they are a useful way to focus our comparative discussion. Even a quick glance reveals two important things: the shape of Jesus’s life, and the character of the Gospels. In outline, Jesus is a 1st-century Galilean Jew ‘of Nazareth’ (Mt. 26.71), the ‘son of Joseph’ (Lk. 4.22), a craftsman (Gk. tekton). He was born during the reign of Caesar Augustus (27 BCE–14 CE) in the Roman province of Judea. More specifically, we find from Luke 2.2 that his birth coincided with a tax census (6–7 CE) by the new Governor of Syria, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius (c. 51 BCE–21 CE).100 ‘Jesus’ (Gk. Ἰησοῦς, Iesous) equates to the Hebrew Yeshua (‫ )ישוע‬or Yehoshua (‫)יהושע‬, meaning Yahweh’s ‘rescue’ or ‘deliverance’. Jesus’s death is also dateable to before the end of Pilate’s101 ‘Prefecture’ of Judea (26–36 CE), in the reign of Emperor Tiberius (14–37 CE). This was a tumultuous and momentous time. Rome ruled the Western world with a rod of steel and the ‘rule of (Roman) law’. Though marginal at the time, Jesus and his followers were said to have turned that world ‘upside down’ (Ac. 17.6). This is something, and somebody, quite exceptional. With regard to the details of Jesus’s life, the Gospels provide a strikingly coherent picture, although ‘harmonizing’ them is hard.102 John, Jesus’s tough, prophet-style cousin, ‘prepares the way’ by preaching repentance and announcing Messiah’s imminent arrival. At the same time, Jesus is born in Bethlehem to Mary, a virgin, who is betrothed to one, Joseph. They move to Nazareth. Jesus begins his public ministry in the fields and lanes, synagogues and villages of Galilee. He calls disciples: Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, James and John (sons of Zebedee), Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who would betray him (Lk. 6.12f.; on Levi/Matthew, Lk. 5.27f., Mt. 9.9f., Mk 2.14f.).103 ‘Many women’, we find, follow Jesus, including his mother Mary, Mary of Magdala, and Martha, a friend Lazarus’s sister. The Gospels are peopled with vast crowds, a range of interlocutors and nasty enemies. Here are Jewish leaders (the ruling Sanhedrin, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea), Zacchaeus (a despised tax-collector), a devout Roman centurion (with a sick daughter), a rich young man (seeking moral comfort), the priests Annas and his son-in-law, Caiaphas (High Priest when Jesus died), Pilate, Herod Archelaus, and countless people Jesus ‘touches’ in various ways. The Gospels have Jesus’s personality and fingerprints all over them. As C. H. Dodd describes the material: ‘A large proportion of it comes in the form of short, crisp utterances, pungent, often allusive, even cryptic, laden with irony and paradox’ (1978: 49). He then adds tellingly: ‘It is impossible to suppose that they are merely the product of skilful condensation by early Christian teachers. They have the ring of originality. They betray a mind whose processes were swift and direct, hitting the nail Thanks to Luke’s careful work, we can date Jesus’s birth accurately. In 6 CE Quirinius replaced Herod the Great’s banished son, Herod Archelaus (23 BCE–c. 18 CE), the former ethnarch of Judea, Samaria and Idumea. 101 For the slightly different accounts of Pilate’s actions and attitude in Jesus’s sentencing and death, Mt. 27.1–26, Mk 15.1–20, Lk. 22.66–23.25, Jn 18.28–19.16. 102 Scholars differentiate between a radical, synthetic, sequential and parallel approach. The first attempt to ‘harmonize’ the Gospels was the 2nd-century Diatessaron by Syrian scholar Tatian (120–80). In the 3rd century, Ammonius of Alexandria (175–240) created a ‘synopsis’ of the Gospels, the Ammonian Sections, based on Mt. Augustine also wrote a Harmony of the Gospels. Stirred by a love for the Bible and eagerness to protect its integrity, the French jurist Chas. Dumoulin (1500– 66), cartographer Gerh. Mercator (1512–94) and J. J. Griesbach (1745–1812) prepared parallel, harmonized texts. Cf. recently, Aland, K. ([1985] 1993), Synopsis of the Four Gospels; Orchard, J. B. (1983), A Synopsis of the Four Gospels. 103 On the disciples’ call, Mt. 4.18f., Mk 1.14–20, Lk. 5.1–11, 27f., 6.12f., Jn 1.35–51. Unlike Confucius and 1st-century Rabbis, Jesus chose and called his disciples, ‘Follow me’. 100

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on the head without waste of words’ (ibid.). This is the ‘style’ of Jesus, to Dodd. It is his effect we are left with more than his biography. His charismatic preaching, teaching, healing, and exorcisms soon attract attention. Tension mounts as crowds increase. Jewish leaders resent his popularity and reject his teaching. His concern for outcasts, and low regard for form, irritate Pharisaic piety and Sadducean pride. After a three-year ministry, ending in Jerusalem, Jesus is betrayed, arrested, tried, tortured and crucified. His ministry continues in his disciples, who claim, three days after his death, he has ‘appeared’ (Lk. 24.34) to them and breathed on them God’s Spirit (Jn 20.22). This is the shape of the ‘gospel’ story, but the writers treat Jesus differently. There is, like Confucius, a textual – and thence interpretable – source for Jesus’s life. From the start, his character and activities are portrayed differently. Commentary here comes in a new type of literature, four ‘Gospels’ (good news). Written to honour Jesus, they each have a unique take on his life and significance. In Mark, the earliest gospel, Jesus is a wonder-working preacher. Mark’s style is concise, his manner brusque. He begins with typical directness: ‘The beginning of the gospel (Gk. euangelion: evangel, good news) about Jesus Christ, the Son of God’ (Mk 1.1). Luke, by tradition a physician, tells his patron, Theophilus, he has made a ‘careful investigation’ of the events to produce an ‘orderly account’ (Lk. 1.1–4; Ac. 1.1–5). In Luke, Jesus is a young man who has come to save-heal (Gk. sodzein) ‘the world’. He gathers a following but is rejected and dies an unjust death. Matthew, who draws on Mark and Luke, clothes Jesus from birth in royal titles and a messianic role (Mt. 1.18–2.23). God’s ‘kingdom’ comes in and through him. In contrast, the elderly John blends tinctures of history, theology and mysticism in his cross- and counter-cultural impressionist portrayal.104 Jesus is, as a man, ‘full of grace and truth’ (Jn 1.14, 17). He is also the ‘Son’ and ‘Word’ of God, so the ‘true’ light, life, truth, hope and salvation of the world. As Jesus says: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life’ (Jn 3.16). Like van Gogh, the Gospels are partial and selective. They exaggerate essentials and leave much vague. A life of this person will, they know, fall short. As John says: ‘Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name’ (Jn 20.30). The Gospels share a hope that readers will hear ‘the Word’ in their words and his. They are part of the church’s holy writings, or ‘scripture’. Herein lies their canonical authority. We take the Gospels in their (probable) reverse historical order, beginning with John. John is different; as unlike the other Gospels as Hepworth’s modernist ‘Child with Mother’ (1972) her earlier versions. It is, indeed, as Leon Morris says, ‘a pool in which a child may wade, and an elephant can swim’ ([1971] 1974: 7). At the end of exegesis, the book can still be ‘strange, restless, unfamiliar’ (Hoskyns 1947: 20). It speaks of a wonder-filled world. Writing in the late 1st century, the elderly apostle’s aim is to explain and proclaim his friend, Jesus. His writing is spiritually profound, historically sound and instructive.105 He shares the faith and ‘essential Jewishness’ (Hunter 1963: 59–73) of the Synoptics. Here are evangelistic zeal, apocalyptic imagery and N.B. John’s cross-cultural description of Jesus as ‘Word’ in the ‘Prologue’ (1.1–18) links Jesus to OT understanding of God’s ‘Word’ as his sovereign, creative and saving revelation and will and to Greek views of logos (word) as the rational principle of cosmic coherence. 105 For introductions, Barrett, C. K. ([1955] 1976), The Gospel according to St. John; Brown, R. E. (1966), The Gospel according to John; Marsh, J. (1968), Saint John; Tasker, R. V. G. (1960), The Gospel according to St. John; also, the bibliog. in Ladd, G. E. ([1974] 1993), A Theology of the New Testament, 249f. 104

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apostolic authority. But John’s history also has a heavy coat of theological varnish.106 As such, ‘it is of the greatest importance’ to have ‘the interpretation of the Fourth Evangelist’ (Taylor 1958: 21) and to read John ‘in company with . . . the remaining books of the New Testament’ (Morris 1974: 64). From the poetical ‘Prologue’ (Jn 1.1–18), with its theological and historical climax, ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (Jn 1.14), to Jesus’s last cry on the cross, ‘It is finished’ (Jn 20.30), John’s image of Jesus is unique (e.g. Jn 4.6, 7, 11.33, 35, 19.28, 34). His Jesus is not explicitly ignorant, tempted, surprised or resistant to suffering (Jn 12.27, 19.34), as in other gospels (e.g. Mk 14.33f.). He is exalted ‘Son of God’ of the early Church’s faith and worship.107 In John, Jesus’s life is transformed into sustained doxology, his biography is written in a sermonic liturgy. This is to inspire faith. But light and darkness both play on Jesus’s face here. He is seen and known in pain and defeat, victory and glory. We sense, as in The Analects, that John writes for his words to be lived, indeed, that Jesus’s words are only interpreted if both ingested and applied. John’s Jesus shares with Confucius a sense that truth is truth if learned and lived. Three things from John stand out for comment. First, Jesus is for John ‘Messiah’, a prized title he uses sparingly (Jn 1.17, 10.24, 20.31),108 and the ‘Son’ of God and man.109 He makes visible his invisible Father (Jn 1.41, 45, and 20.31).110 He does his Father’s work to a victorious climax on the cross (Jn 20.2, 18, 20, 25, 21.7, 12; also, 20.13, 28). John’s stories encapsulate his ‘High’ or ‘Spirit’ Christology. There is no birth narrative (Taylor: 19), but Jesus is ‘baptized’ in the Holy Spirit (Jn 1.32), speaks ‘in the power of the Spirit’ (Jn 3.34), prays ‘for the Spirit’ to fill the disciples, and ‘promises’ his Spirit will lead, guide and inspire them, and ‘judge’ the world in truth and righteousness.111 John’s narrative is crafted on a cosmic scale. Jesus is God’s Spirit-inspired ‘Word’, who ‘comes down’, ‘makes God known’ (Jn 1.18, 8.19, 14.7, 9f.) and at the end of his life goes back ‘up’ to heaven (Jn 6.33, 38f., 50f., 8.21f., 12.32, 17.25). Second, John connects Jesus’s claims to be doing his Father’s ‘will’ and ‘work’ to his life and death (Jn 4.34, 5.19f., 36; also, 9.4f., 10.25, 32, 37). Miraculous ‘signs’ are linked to bold claims. Seven ‘I am’ sayings help to define Jesus’s person and work. He is the ‘bread (and water) of life’ that satisfies (Jn 6.16–59).112 He is the ‘true light’ (Jn 1.4, 9) in creation and salvation (Jn 9.1–41; also, 1.5, 47, 8.19f., 12.35f., 46.). He is the ‘door’ (Jn 10.7),113 and ‘good shepherd’, who protects and

106 Cf. W. G. Kümmel’s comment: ‘The number of texts for which a dependence of John upon the Synoptics can be defended with any reason is astonishingly small, and by closer inspection even for those texts the number of divergencies is far greater than that of the agreements’ ([1963] 1965: 155). 107 N.B. the contrast Vincent Taylor draws between John and the Synoptics: ‘The high point of St John’s christology is the Sonship of Christ and His incomparable relation to the Father . . . In the Fourth Gospel Sonship is displayed on an even plane; in the Synoptics it is visible on the highest contours’ (1958: 21). 108 Cf. Jn 17.3, when used by Jesus in the so-called ‘High Priestly prayer’ (Ch. 17). On this sparing use, Morris, 160. For development of Jn’s thought, 1.45, 49, 3.28f., 4.25f., 29, 42, 5.45f., 6.15, 7.26f., 31, 40–3, 9.22, 10.24, 11.27, 12.34, 17.3, 10.31. 109 N.B. ‘Son of Man’ is used 13x in John, sometimes by Jesus of himself. 110 For Jesus’s relationship to Moses, Morris, 111f. On the significance of this, Jn 1.51. 111 For John’s theology of the Holy Spirit, Ch. 14–16. On the ‘promise’ and ‘work’ of the Holy Spirit as ‘life’, ‘truth’, ‘comfort’ (Gk. paraclesis, advocacy) and ‘judgement’, Jn 3.34, 14.16, 15.26, 16.7f., 20.22. 112 N.B. Tasker’s comment on John 6: ‘A most noticeable feature of the last part of this discourse is the way in which the miraculous feeding of the Galilean multitude, the death of Jesus on the cross, and teaching relevant to the sacrament of Holy Communion are all blended together’ ([1960] 1974), 95f.). Also, on water, the ‘woman at the well’ and the ‘food’ of doing God’s work, Jn 4.13f., 34, 7.38f., and 6.55f. 113 Cf. Jn 10.7; also, Jn 17.12 and Ezek. 37 on the contrast between Jesus and the violence of the Jews in Jn 10.22f.

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provides for his people (Jn 10.11).114 He has power in and over life and death (Jn 11.1–44) as the ‘resurrection and the life’ (Jn 11.25).115 He is source of ‘abundant’ (Jn 10.10), ‘eternal’ life for all (Jn 3.16f., 10.15, 11.21f., 13.1f.). As such, he is ‘the way, truth and life’ (Jn 14.6), who in death ‘goes ahead’ in order to ‘prepare a place’ in heaven for believers (Jn 5.24, 7.16f., 8.28, 45f., 54f., 12.47f., 14.26, 16.13f.). He is the life-giving ‘vine’, with his Father ‘the gardener’ and disciples ‘branches’ (Jn 15.1, 5), who creates a just, dynamic, spiritual relation to those owning his name.116 Third, John’s crucifixion narrative is a drama portraying a ‘suffering that moves the whole world’, as in the Emperor Kangxi’s poem (above p. 47). For, Jesus says: ‘When I am lifted up (on the cross), I will draw all people to myself ’ (Jn 3.14f., 12.32). His death ‘glorifies’ the Father by fulfilling his plan and redeeming his world. Like the marble in Michelangelo’s Pietà, the physicality and textuality of Jesus in John, are spiritually potent. Sacramentality is a mark of his Gospel. Hence, as in the Protestant reformer Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) ‘theology of the cross’ (below p. 452), for John faith sees in the crucifixion of Jesus both shame and glory, in the ‘empty tomb’ death and victory, in Jesus’s ‘words’ life, freedom and hope. When Jesus told his disciples to think carefully before following, in fear and trust they reply: ‘You have the words of eternal life’ (Jn 6.68). This image of Jesus, like da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, holds our gaze and silently speaks of hidden joy and the hope of life. The apocalyptic tone, and reference to the Temple’s destruction, in Luke-Acts lead some scholars to propose a date soon after besieged Jerusalem’s fall to the future Emperor Titus (39–81 CE; r. 79–81 CE) in 70 CE. To Luke, the ‘end time’ has come. The delay to Jesus’s ‘Second Coming’ (Gk. Parousia), that is stressed in other Gospels, is displaced here. Jesus is a fiery, apocalyptic prophet. That is how the astute author, ‘beloved physician’ and Paul’s companion in Acts, sees him.117 Though he draws ‘substantially’ on Mark (Marshall 1978: 30) and other ‘synoptic’ resources – using, like Matthew, ‘Q’ (Germ. Quelle; source) – Luke’s personality, his Palestinian sitz im leben (situation in life)118 and direct appeal to his readers’ audience, and his explicit aims, shape his image of Jesus. He writes as an insider to Jesus’s world. He knows the message he wants to convey. Luke’s historical and theological interests are clear from the start: Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. —Lk. 1.1–4 On Jesus as both ‘door’ and ‘shepherd’, Brown, John, I. 386; also, Jn 1.4, 13. Cf. Barrett: ‘Jesus is the resurrection and the life; apart from him there is no resurrection and no life, and where he is, resurrection and life must be’ ([1955] 1976: 329). 116 Cf. Barrett: ‘Only in Christ can Christians live. In him there is fruitfulness of true service to God, of answered prayer, and of obedience in love. All who are in him are his friends, and they are necessarily united with each other in love’ (ibid., 393). 117 Cf. on medical terminology to validate the early 2nd-century ascription to Luke, and a response to doubts about his authorship of Acts (because of its ‘removed’ view of Paul and post-Pauline attitude to the church), Marshall (1978), The Gospel of Luke, 33f. 118 N.B. Marshall’s comment: ‘[F]or all his (Luke’s) individuality he gives the impression of reflecting the outlook of a particular Christian community . . . much of Luke’s special material clearly has a Palestinian basis’ (ibid., 31). 114 115

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Theology and history are inseparable for Luke (Marshall 1978: 35).119 He sees Jesus through the lens of Isaiah 61.1 and 2, read in the Nazareth synagogue. Here is ‘good news’ for the poor, imprisoned, blind and oppressed of every age (Lk. 4.18f.). Hence, Marshall says: ‘[T]he message of Jesus is finely summed up in the saying, “The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost” ’ (ibid., 36; cf. also, Lk. 19.10, Mk 10.45). Luke is drawn to Jesus’s preaching, both the fact and content of it. This Jesus brings a life-giving message. We should note, too, Luke’s attentiveness to Jesus’s character and reactions. Jesus is known through what he does. As a man, he grows ‘in wisdom and stature, in favour with God and men’ (Lk. 2.41–52). He is also tempted (Lk. 4.13, 22.28), adored (Lk. 11.27f.), disappointed (Lk. 22.15), prayerful (Lk. 5.16, 6.12, 9.18f., 10.21f., 11.1f., 18.1f., 22.32, 41, 44).120 He gets angry and anxious. Unlike John, Luke’s Jesus is ignorant and vulnerable. Throughout, his account is marked by realism and nuance.121 So, when Luke uses the name ‘Lord’ (which he does fifteen times before and after the resurrection),122 it is an intimate, respectful, devotional title (e.g. Lk. 7.19, 10.1, 11.39, 12.42, 17.5f.). Luke’s subtlety is aimed at enhancing Jesus’s love for God and neighbour, and his concern for the sick, sinful and socially excluded (e.g. Lk. 7.36–50, 9.51–6, 17.11–19, 18.9–14, 19.1–10). His Jesus provides a perfect example (Lk. 9.51–6, 14.25–35). He is a credible person with a Spirit-inspired identity and a ministry for all. Luke’s Jesus is also the suffering ‘Messiah’ and ‘the Christ’. These titles are used often to honour Jesus’s ‘royal’ coming as ‘good news of great joy’ praised in heaven and earth. These titles fit Luke’s ‘high’ Spirit-Christology, that takes and develops earlier traditions (Taylor 1958: 12). The ‘Son’ is Spirit-inspired (Lk. 1.26f., 35f.). His birth, baptism, temptation, prayer, miracles, submission to his Father, and choice of disciples, are all Spirit-guided and Spirit-endowed works (Lk. 1.35f., 3.22, 4.1f., 14, 18, 10.21, 24.49). Contra Jewish hopes, this anointed ‘Christ’ brings peace not a sword (Lk. 2.14). He offers salvation (Lk. 1.77)123 and ‘light to all nations’ (Lk. 2.31f.). Crucially, Jesus rarely uses ‘Messiah’ of himself in Luke: when he does, it is in association with his suffering (Lk. 24.26, 46). The coming of this Christ is bitter-sweet. The Spirit leads him into suffering. He comes to suffer, die and rise again (Lk. 22.46). Perhaps not surprisingly Luke’s Jesus has over the centuries inspired numerous practical Christian social ministries. Lastly, Luke urges Jesus’s power to ‘save’ young and old from physical and spiritual sickness (Lk. 4.16f., 5.15, 9.1f., 12.22f.).124 Here is bitter grief at Jerusalem’s rebellious spirit, rejection of him and imminent fall (Lk. 13.31f.), and Jesus’s anguished last hours. To the end, though apparently powerless, Jesus is in control. His ‘cleansing of the Temple’ (Lk. 19.45f., Mk 11.15f.), ‘part of the motive for the action taken against him by the Jewish leaders’ (Marshall 1978: 719), instigates a Cf. Marshall: ‘Of all the Evangelists he is most conscious of writing as a historian, yet throughout his work this history is the vehicle of theological interpretation in which the significance of Jesus is expressed’ (ibid., 35). N.B. also, Marshall, I. H. (1970), Luke: Historian and Theologian. 120 N.B. Jesus’s recourse to regular prayer to his heavenly Father is a strong theological theme in Luke: it reinforces Jesus’s (filial) relationship to, and (human) dependence on, God. 121 Contrast, for example, Lk. 6.10/Mk 3.5 (anger), Lk. 8.24/Mk 4.38 (desperation), Lk. 4.28f./Mk 6.5f. (inability to perform miracles at Nazareth), Lk. 19.41f./Mk 13.32 (ignorance of the final parousia), Mk 15.34 (the cry of dereliction, omitted by Luke). 122 This title occurs 15x (in addition to two uses associated with Mk 11.3). 123 On ‘saviour’ and the phrase ‘knowledge of salvation’, Marshall, Luke, 93. 124 On Jesus and children, Lk. 3.8, 5.34, 6.35, 7.32, 35, 11.13, 13.34, 18.29, 23.28. On his power over evil, 4.31f., 38f., 5.17f., 7.11f., 8.26f., 40f., 9.37f., 13.10f., 18.35f. 119

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grand dénouement. Jesus suffers intentionally, in accord with Old Testament prophecy (Lk. 24.27). He embraces a prophet’s plight. Though he is buried according to custom (Lk. 23.50f.), his life confronts authority (Lk. 24.27). He grieves his generation’s hardness of heart. He suffers betrayal, arrest, mockery, injustice and execution, and he does so here explicitly out of love (Lk. 22.1f., 47f., 66f., 23.26f.). In Luke’s resurrection narratives, Jesus appears ‘many times’ and ‘in many places’ (Lk. 24.1–49; contrast Mk 16.1–8 [9–20]). He is designated now the ‘Christ’ and ‘Son of God’.125 His ascension is akin to an enthronement. As the risen ‘Lord’, he commands his disciples to wait for the gift and power of the Spirit (Lk. 24.50f., Ac. 1.1–10, 2.1f.) to empower their witness. At the end, Jesus’s divinity shines through. This image is radiant. Matthew’s gospel is (probably) contemporaneous with Luke’s but feels rather older. Like Bach’s Cello Suites, it combines antiquity and creativity with exquisite ease.126 Written after Mark (whom he uses), Matthew unites (old) Jewish themes with (new) Christian ideas. As Dom John Chapman says: ‘Everything in Matthew (roughly speaking) is more primitive . . . because wholly Jewish’ (1937: 256). In comparison with Luke (and Mark), ‘primitive tradition is interpreted to a greater degree’ here (Taylor, 13). Matthew was, for some, always primus inter pares, hence its pole position in the New Testament.127 To Michael Green it is, ‘the most important single document in the New Testament’ (1988: 1). If true, this is due to what Floyd Filson calls its ‘persistent capacity to shape Christian thought and church life’ (1961: 4). Here we find the original Christusbild of the church’s life and faith. This is fine-tuned Christology. History serves the author’s pastoral, theological, ecclesiological purposes. His art exemplifies Xie He’s ‘First Law’. Matthew’s verbal brushstrokes exude ‘energy’. Jesus’s humanity is subject to subtle revision in Matthew. As Vincent Taylor says: ‘Interpretation of this kind was inevitable and necessary, and its presence is of great value for the study of the Person of Jesus’ (1958: 13). This gospel has an inner, sermonic structure. Old and new are both honoured, as the wise teacher draws out of his store ‘new treasures as well as old’ (Mt. 13.52). Writing to Jewish converts, Matthew intends to prove Jesus is ‘Messiah’ and Saviour. Hence, his Jesus is not angry or surprised (Mt. 12.9–14, 13.53–8). Instead, his high calling (Mt. 9.14f., 12.1f., 22–37, 46f., 13.53f., 15.1–9, 16.1f., 13–20, 19.16f., 21.23f., 22.15–22), miraculous power (Mt. 8.16, 12.15, 14.21, 15.38, 21.19) and disciples’ respect,128 are all accentuated. Matthew wants us to see a regal face on our old canvas. To Tasker, ‘The apologetic aim of the evangelist can be summed up in the sentence “Jesus is the Messiah, and in Him Jewish prophecy is fulfilled” ’ ([1961] 1976: 18). Like a Rubens portrait of a Jesuit saint, Matthew fulfilled the expanding missionary church’s need for a definitive – and inspirational – portrait of Jesus. There is authority in his achievement. Matthew provides a catechetical compendium of information on Jesus. First among his titles is ‘Messiah’, with ‘Christ’ a personal name (Mt. 1.16, 21). To Levertoff, the ‘great concepts’ of ‘Messiah’ and ‘kingdom’ are at ‘the heart’ of Matthew ([1928] 1940: xxvf.). A. H. McNeile echoes On Jesus’s ‘spiritual’ appearances and ‘physical’ presence (proven by eating) in Luke, contrast Lk. 24.31, 39, 41; cf. also, Marshall, 900f. 126 For new material, see e.g. Chs. 1, 2, 13 and parts of 26–28. 127 Traditionally viewed as a Greek translation of Aramaic logia (sayings) of Jesus by the apostle Matthew, the converted taxofficer, Matthew’s Gospel is first in early versions of the NT Canon because of its perceived capacity to elucidate the church’s message, identity, leadership and liturgy. On the call and apostolicity of Matthew/Levi, the tax-collector, Mt. 9.9– 13, 10.3, Mk 2.14–17, 3.18, Lk. 5.27–32, 6.15, Ac. 1.13. 128 N.B. the recasting in Mt. 8.25, 10.18, and 19.17. 125

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this opinion: ‘[T]he special impression which Matthew embodies is that of royalty. Jesus is the Messiah’ (1915: xvii). His lineage, birth, cousin John, identity as ‘the Christ, the Son of the living God’, and his kingdom rule, dignified death and promised return, all fulfil Old Testament prophecy (Mt. 1.17f., 2.4, 11.2, 16.16, 20f., 22.42, 24.5, 33, 26.63, 68, 27.17, 22). Whether he wrote to comfort Jewish converts, or commend Jesus to other Jews, Matthew’s Jesus is the royal ‘Son of David’ (Mt. 1.1, 20, 9.27, 12.23, 15.22, 20.30f., 21.9, 15), his life and work repeatedly justifying the claim, ‘that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets’ (Mt. 1.22, 2.15, 17, 23, 4.14, 8.17, 12.17f.; cf. Taylor, 15).129 The divine title ‘Lord’ (Gk. kurios) is not used here of Jesus,130 but ‘Son of Man’ is of his humanity and role as end-times judge (Mt. 16.13, 16 and 24.29–31). Jesus’s birth (Mt. 1.20), baptism (Mt. 3.16), temptations (Mt. 4.1), and life and work, are all imbued now with the Spirit. More than in Luke or Mark’s account, Jesus is God’s Spirit-inspired ‘servant’ (Mt. 12.18b; q. Is. 62.1–4) and ‘prophet’, who exorcises ‘evil spirits’ and inaugurates a new ‘age of the Spirit’.131 Because of Jesus’s association with the Father and the Spirit in Matthew 28.19, the Trinity is often traced to Matthew.132 Furthermore, use of ‘Son’ at critical moments in Matthew reinforces his ‘High’ Christology.133 Before his disclosure as ‘Son of God’ in his resurrection, Jesus’s wisdom and works anticipate the claim. Finally, Jesus is in Matthew both a ‘teacher of the law’ (Mt. 13.52), and a prophet who calls, no, commands: ‘But I say to you. . .’ (Mt. 5.21f., 27f., 31f., 33f., 38f., 43f., 6.25f., 29f., 7.24f.),134 seek righteousness that ‘surpasses that of the Pharisees and teachers of the law’ (Mt. 5.20). He quotes Hosea 6.6: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’ (Mt. 9.13),135 and explains the ‘new wine’ image of repentance and faith (Mt. 9.15f., 12.7). He is here the ‘sower’ who scatters ‘good seed’ (Mt. 13.1f.), teaching old truth in new parables (Mt. 13.34f.).136 He is ‘a great light’, who heralds a ‘new age’ for those living ‘in the shadow of death’ (Mt. 4.15f., Is. 9.1, 2). As God’s prophet (Mt. 13.53f.), he exposes darkness, offers hope, appeals to all to repent and proclaims God’s kingdom rule (Mt. 4.17).137 Throughout,

Cf. refs. to Isaiah, Mt. 6.9f., 42, 53, 8.17, 13.13f., 12.18f., 8.17. N.B. except in 21.3, which is based on Mk 11.3. 131 N.B. the change from ‘finger of God’ (Lk. 11.20) to ‘Spirit of God’ (Mt. 12.28). 132 N.B. Taylor: ‘Here we have passed beyond the Christology which sees in Jesus the Spirit-filled prophet . . . Although we may not read into the saying later Trinitarian theology, we must recognize that a step has been taken which was to find its culmination in the Christology of Nicaea’ (1958: 16). 133 Matthew follows his sources in Mt. 3.17, 4.3, 6, 11.25–27, but adds the title ‘Son’ in Peter’s Confession (Mt. 16.16), in Jesus’s walking on the water (Mt. 14.33), in the taunts of the crowds and chief priests (Mt. 27.40, 43), and in the baptismal formula (Mt. 28.19). By presenting Jesus’s birth as the result of God’s act (1.3–5, 18–25), he answers church debate. 134 N.B. Tasker’s comment: ‘In three of these apparent antitheses Jesus is clearly bringing out what is implied in the Mosaic commands in opposition to the strictly literal or legalistic interpretations of them by the scribes . . . What He is saying is that God’s demands in these matters are far more comprehensive and exacting than current interpretations of them by the scribes might seem to suggest’ ([1961] 1976: 65). 135 Beare says Jesus’s words ‘I came . . .’ mean ‘I came into the world’, or ‘I came down from heaven’, i.e. ‘[T]hey convey a consciousness not merely of prophetic mission or of Messianic dignity, but of heavenly origin’ (1981: 227). He also quotes NT scholar Rudolph Bultmann (1884–1976), this ‘serves to gather up the significance of the appearance of Jesus as a whole’ ([1921) 1963: 156; q. ibid.). On Bultmann, p. 329, 461f., 465f., 472, n. 393. 136 On differences in style between this and the Sermon on the Mount, and on Jesus’s use of parables, Beare, 286, 288f.; also, Jeremias, J. ([1947] 1963), The Parables of Jesus. 137 Cf. on the kingdom, and ‘kingdom ethics’, of Jesus, Tasker, 60f. N.B. also Dodd’s words on the ‘absolute ethics of the kingdom of God’ Jesus enjoins: ‘The precepts of Christ are not statutory definitions like those of the Mosaic code, but indications of quality and direction of action which may be present at quite lowly levels of performance’ (1947: 19). 129 130

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Jesus calls (Mt. 4.18f., 9.9f., 35f.), heals (Mt. 4.23f., 8.1f., 14f., 9.1f., 18f., 17.14f., 20.29f.), preaches and calls for a response (Mt. 5–7, 7.28f., 8.18f., 13.1–53, 19.1f., 21.23–22.14, 23). He teaches his followers (Mt. 9.14f., 10.1f., 11.1f., 16.5–20, 18, 19.23–20.19, 24, 25), corrects his opponents (Mt. 12.1f., 38f., 15.1f., 16.1f., 17.24f., 19.3f., 21.23–22.46), and announces a ‘kingdom’ that is priceless, elusive, tough and intensely dynamic (Mt. 7.13f.). Though hidden or lost, it is like treasure (Mt. 13 passim), a pearl, a broad net, and ‘good news’ to the sick, anxious, weary and wayward (Mt. 9.35f., 11.25f.). Isaiah saw this in his vision(s) of the ‘Suffering Servant’ and of the kingdom ‘Messiah’ would live and die to found (Mt. 12.17f., 21.23f., Is. 42.1–4). In keeping with its structure and perspective on Jesus’s sovereignty, Matthew’s gospel comes to a carefully controlled climax. Prophesies (Mt. 23.1–25.46), plots (Mt. 26.1f., 14f., 27f.), private grief and public denunciation (Mt. 26.36f., 26.57f., 27.11f.), military execution and celestial signs (Mt. 27.32f., 27.51f.), resurrection and repeated appearances to the disciples, end this masterful drama.138 Jesus prevails, his plans fulfilled (Mt. 28.19f.). Probably the earliest Gospel (c. 65–70 CE),139 Mark has a brusque, no-nonsense style.140 It reflects, as the German biblical scholar Johannes Weiss (1863–1914) showed in his influential study Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (1892, Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom of God), an urgent, apocalyptic sense of the imminent end to history.141 Jesus is the herald of the ‘end times’. So, the Gospel begins bluntly: ‘The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God’ (Mk 1.1). This belies the weight, secrecy, shadow, conflict, and challenge, of the message that follows. Though scholars agree Mark’s history is laced with theology, Taylor emphasizes: ‘There are good reasons for thinking that it stands near to the ideas of Jesus himself ’ (1958: 9). Jesus’s humanity and personality are drawn in Mark like a vivid van Gogh portrait. He is earthy, passionate, vulnerable, and oozing charisma, in his ‘amazing’ teaching and miracles (Mk 1.22f., 11.27f.) Strong in adversity and sensitive to need, Jesus is angry, surprised, compassionate, disappointed, doubting and ignorant (Mk 3.5, 10.14, 6.6, 34, 38, 8.2f., 17, 27, 9.19, 21, 10.18, 13.32). At times, he fails to perform miracles and feels ‘God-forsaken’ at the end (Mk 6.5f., 15.34). Like the other Gospels, Mark employs Jesus’s titles carefully: they become tools in his theology and shaping of primitive faith.142 Jesus is the long-awaited ‘Messiah’ (Mk 1.2–3, Is. 40.3). He is the ‘Teacher’ and ‘Master’ anointed and empowered by the Spirit at baptism.143 He tells his disciples to N.B. Mt’s short, dramatic, resurrection narrative, 28.1–15. On the dating, Cranfield, C. E. B. ([1959] 1974), The Gospel according to St Mark, 8. I rely heavily on Cranfield, my NT exemplary teacher, for this section. 140 It seems highly likely: i. the Apostle Peter’s young travelling companion John Mark was the author of the Gospel; and, ii. Mark wrote his gospel in Rome shortly after Peter’s martyrdom in 65 CE (on Mark, 1 Pet. 5.13, Ac. 12.12, 25, 15.37f., Col. 4.10, 2 Tim. 4.11). Cf. Cranfield: ‘The unanimous tradition of the Early Church that the author of the gospel was Mark, the associate of Peter, is not open to serious doubt’ ([1959] 1974: 5). 141 Weiss taught at Göttingen, Berlin, and Heidelberg universities. His eschatological re-interpretation of Mk led him to argue: i. the text had been adapted by the early Church in light of the delayed parousia; and, ii. Mk therefore had limited moral or spiritual value. His interpretation had a huge impact on the young Albert Schweitzer. Weiss also promoted a ‘Form Critical’ approach to the NT. This encouraged the idea of ‘Q’, an earlier text, that many scholars., incl. Bultmann accepted and used. N.B. Weiss’s other works on the NT and early Christianity: Paulus und Jesus (1909), Jesus von Nazareth, Mythus oder Geschichte? (1910), and Das Urchristentum (1917., posth.). On Weiss, p. 81, 461f. 142 In the late 19th and early 20th century NT scholarship came to see in Mk a strong theological agenda that conditioned what he says about Jesus, and how and when he says it. On Mk as a theological document, Telford, W. R. (1999), The Theology of the Gospel of Mark; Chapman, M. (2001), The Coming Crisis. 143 Mk has no supernatural birth, and, apart from the Spirit’s role in Jesus’s baptism and temptation (1: 10, 12), there are only a few references to the Spirit (Mk 3.29, 12.36, 13.11). 138 139

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keep his identity a secret.144 He is also the heavenly ‘Son of Man’ (Jesus’s preferred title in Mark)145 come to serve, suffer and die vicariously; hence, Mark 10.45: ‘The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.’ Mark keeps ‘Lord’ as a post-resurrection title,146 so pre-empting its use in the early baptismal formula ‘Jesus is Lord’ (Taylor, 6). He uses the title ‘Son of God’ from the outset, without extraneous pressure or sense of ‘pre-existence’.147 The title ‘Lord’ is justified by Jesus’s life, death and resurrection, and ultimately defines him. By coming, the kingdom of God is ‘at hand’, or inaugurated, with its fulfilment imminently anticipated (Mk 1.1–8).148 Mark 1.14f. states: ‘The time has come . . . The Kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!’ This provocative, prophetic call to repentance (also Mk 1.17f., 2.14f., 4.35f.) heralds a new beginning to God’s relationship to his world. An inner change of mind (Gk. metanoia: Mk 2.18f., 7.1f., 14f., 9.42f.), and an inclusive ethic of love (Mk 6.34, 8.2f., 10.13f., 17f., 12.28f., 14.1f.),149 are proleptic of the ‘end times’ (Gk. eschaton) when God’s kingdom will be fully realized. Meanwhile, the ‘greatest’ ‘serve’, and, like Jesus, sacrifice their life in love for their neighbour (Mk 11.1f.). Was Mark wrong to believe Jesus was about to return as King, as Weiss suggests? Cranfield is clear – Christian faith should always create a sense of divine immanence: ‘Ever since the Incarnation men have been living in the last days’ ([1959] 1974: 408). The shadow of the Cross falls early across Mark. A debate about fasting (Mk 2.18f.) provides the first hint. Cranfield comments: ‘What has happened to the forerunner will be repeated in the case of him who comes after’ (ibid., 111). Jesus is now the ‘prophet without honour in his own country’ (Mk 6.1f.). As ‘Son of Man’, he is, like Confucius, ‘despised and rejected’ (Is. 53.3). He sees himself as the ‘Suffering Servant’ of God in Isaiah’s songs. He embraces conflict without courting it (e.g. Mk 1.28, 45, 2.13f., 3.9f., 4.33, 5.20, 24), and is finally betrayed, judged, tortured and killed alongside common criminals on Calvary, a hill outside Jerusalem (Mk 15.1–41) in accord with his predictions (Mk 8.31f.). Jesus’s true identity is revealed, in Mark’s longer ending (Mk 16.15f.),150 by his resurrection ‘on the first day of the week’ (Mk 16.2), when he appears first to ‘Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome’ (Mk 16.9),151 and then to the rest of his incredulous inner circle (Mk 16.9–14). As Cranfield comments: ‘Mark’s account (more emphatically than any of the others) underlines the mystery and awe-fulness of the Resurrection and warns On Mk and Jesus as ‘Messiah’, the direct and indirect Messianic implications of Peter’s confession (Mk 8.39), the healing of blind Bartimaeus (Mk 10.46f.), the ‘triumphal entry’ (Mk 11.1f.), the trial before Caiaphas (Mk 14.60f.), and the superscription over the cross (Mk 15.26). Jesus appears to claim the title for himself (Mk 8.39, 14.62), but without nationalistic overtones or any desire that his disciples tell others (Mk 8.30). Cf. Cranfield’s comment on the ‘Messianic secret’: ‘Only faith could recognize the Son of God in the lowly figure of Jesus of Nazareth. The secret of the kingdom of God is the secret of the person of Jesus’ (ibid., 153). 145 N.B. Jesus uses the title 14x of himself, to relate to the present (Mk 2.10, 28), future (Mk 8.38, 13.26, 14.62), his suffering, death and resurrection (Mk 8.31, 9.9, 12.31, 10.33f., 45, 14.21, 41). The title suggests heavenly and earthly authority and weakness (Mk 2.10, 28, 10.45, 14.62, Dan. 7.13). 146 Unlike other Gospels, Mk does not use ‘Lord’ as an honorific title (except poss. in 11.3). 147 N.B. use of the title in the parable of the wicked husbandmen (Mk 12.6), by the Centurion (Mk 15.39) and when demons identify Jesus (Mk 1.24; also, 3.11, 5.7, 13.32). 148 Contrast Mk 1.1–8 with the order and events in Mt. 1–2, Lk. 1–2, and Jn 1.1–34. 149 Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, healings (Mk 1.21f., 40f., 2.1f., 5.1f., 21f., 7.22f., 31f., 9.14f., 10.46f.) and miracles (e.g. Mk 6.30f., 8.1f.) fulfil his ‘new command’ to love and transform his Jewish contemporaries’ messianic expectations. 150 Cf. Cranfield, 471f. on Mark’s longer ending. 151 N.B. Cranfield’s comment: ‘One feature of all four gospel accounts which goes a long way towards authenticating the story as a whole is the prominence of women; for this is a feature which the early Church would not be likely to invent’ (463). 144

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against all attempts to sentimentalize or domesticate or reduce to the measures of our mental capacity or emotional convenience the decisive intervention of God’ ([1959] 1974: 470). In later recensions, before he is ‘taken up into heaven’ (Mk 16.19), Jesus orders his disciples to continue his ministry of preaching, healing, baptism and exorcism (Mk 16.15f.). So, Mark ends: ‘Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by signs that accompanied it’ (Mk 16.20). Much could be said of Jesus outside the Gospels where his humanity and divinity are articulated with literary skill and theological creativity. Some of this material pre-dates the Gospels. Judicious selection and editorial policies have separated the chaff from the wheat. The four Gospels provide more than sufficient evidence. The story of Jesus of Nazareth is less prominent in extra-canonical material than the Christ of the community’s early faith. In the last section, we trace development of this Christ of Christian tradition. Like Confucius, the image of Jesus is susceptible to thousands of years of tampering.

THE CHRIST OF CHRISTIAN TRADITION Some New Testament scholarship stresses the diversity of interpretations found in the early Church, and the fluidity, or fragmentation, of the faith of Jesus’s first disciples. The path to the great Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) is pock-marked by unsightly – often politicized and personal – wrangling masquerading as theology, philosophy, good order or a quest for truth. From the outset Jesus’s identity and legacy are contested. Those who set Paul over against Jesus justify this from the New Testament. Others resist this, claiming the Bible’s authority, canonicity, use, and resultant literary and thematic integrity. Some see heresy determining orthodoxy prior to Chalcedon, and so validating the Conciliar process or central magisterium. To others, common-sense or charismatic gifts prove the Holy Spirit’s sovereign control over the Church’s doctrinal development and accept the inevitable ‘provisionality’ of faith claims. As with ‘Master Kong’, the tradition that carries Jesus forward in history is a vast, dynamic, evolving, multi-facetted phenomenon, not all of it worthy, but much of it noteworthy. To quote (and reassign) Lesser (above p. 69), here, too, ‘a world of emotions and ideas (are) created with only the simplest of materials’. Five characteristics of christological development warrant mention in preparation for the thematic chapters in Parts II and III. First, the Christ-tradition is essentially doxological, its medium is worship and tone joyful. A faith based in a story of death’s defeat by a resurrected saviour cannot be solemn for long. The crucified, compassionate Jesus of the poor and oppressed is the conquering ‘Christus Victor’ of a completed atonement and a promised return. The ‘sweet hopefulness’ of the Christian sarabande is shot through with gigue-like joy in the corporate ‘Eucharistia’ (thanksgivings) that anticipate an eternal, heavenly feast, and in funerals that focus on Jesus’s promised preparation of ‘a place in heaven’ for believers. Philip Spitta’s Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life and Influence on the Music of Germany speaks of the shift from other, more solemn, dance-movements to the gigue: ‘[G]rave impressions produced by the movements that have gone before are gathered up into a cheerful and animated form, and the hearer goes away with a sensation of pleasant excitement’ ([1951] 1952: 90). Though a cross-shaped shadow falls on the Christ of Christian tradition and the church’s flawed life, no authentic study of this Christ figure should fail to convey the hope Easter imparts, the ‘sensation of pleasant excitement’ this godly gigue gives to the heart of the tradition Jesus engenders.

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Unlike Confucianism, Christian tradition is both in theory and practice unequivocally ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’. That is, from earliest times Jesus inspired liturgy and praise. He is the focus of the community ‘gathered’ in worship and ‘scattered’ in service. New Testament worship, Christian liturgy, and theology reflect an essential focus on a praised Jesus Christ. Biblical exegesis and historical theology contain the principle lex orandi: lex credendi (viz. worship determines belief). The Christ of Christian tradition begins and is continued in the Church’s corporate and individual worship. The ‘Hymn to Christ’ in Philippians 2.6–11, the doxologies, good wishes, and blessings that end the Pauline Letters (Rom. 16.25f., 1 Cor. 16.19f., 2 Cor. 13.14f., Gal. 6.18, Eph. 6.23f., Phil. 4.23, Col. 4.18, 1 Thess. 5.23f., 2 Thess. 3.16f., 1 Tim. 6.20f., 2 Tim. 4.19f.), the ‘psalms, hymns and spiritual songs’ (Col. 3.16) and ‘creedal’ fragments in Colossians, Ephesians and the Book of Revelation,152 all transmit a distinctive, living, religious tradition in a renewed community. Here is Jesus, not only the object of worship (as ‘Lord’ and ‘Saviour’) and subject of beliefs, but a pattern for disciples (as ‘Friend’, ‘Husband’ and ‘Master’) and the offerer of his people’s praise, intercession and sacraments (as ‘Mediator’ and ‘High Priest’; 1 Tim. 2.5, Heb. 7.11–10.25). The liturgical refrain ‘through Jesus Christ our/the Lord’ captures the Church’s sense of its indebtedness to Christ’s mediation. In short, Jesus is central to Christian liturgy and doxology: he is ‘made known in the breaking of the bread’ (Lk. 24.35), he ‘baptizes in the Holy Spirit’ (Mt. 3.11, Mk 1.8), he is present when ‘two or three’ gather ‘in his name’ (Mt. 18.20), he promises never to ‘leave or forsake’ them (Mt. 28.20, Heb. 13.5). Here are some substantial reasons for joyful celebration with a dance-like joy that looks backwards and forwards. Second, the Christ-tradition is carefully constructed. The idea of a ‘tradition’ (Lat. trado; I hand on or over) is seen in early New Testament texts. 1 Corinthians 15.3–4 finds Paul stating definitively: ‘For I passed on (Gk. paréd¯oka) to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.’ Similarly, in 1 Corinthians 11.23–4 he says of the institution of the Lord’s Supper: ‘For I received (Gk. parélabon) from the Lord what I also passed (Gk. paréd¯oka) on to you: The Lord Jesus on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me”.’ Here is ‘language proper to traditionary processes’, as Barrett calls it ([1971] 1978: 264f.), and an early sense from Paul of ‘Apostolic Tradition’ shaping Christian faith and life (ibid., 337). The Church’s corporate worship, its preached kerygma (Gk. kerussein; to herald, proclaim)153 and its taught dogma (Gk. dogma; teaching), are ultimately indivisible, constituent elements of this – as is the centrality of God in Jesus. As Paul quoted to the Athenians: ‘In Him we live and move and have our being’ (Ac. 17.28). C. H. Dodd summarizes the apostolic kerygma: Jesus comes in the ‘latter days’; in his birth, life, ministry, death and resurrection he fulfils Old Testament prophecy; Easter and the ascension confirm him as ‘Messiah’; the gift of the Spirit fulfils his promised presence and power for his people; history will reach its climax in Jesus’s final return as Lord and Judge; meanwhile, repentance, faith and obedience are required of all. As the church expanded, key doctrinal differences emerged. The need for a clear set of beliefs intensified.154 The original integration of dogma in kerygma was lost.

Cf. Col. 1.15–20, Eph. 1.3–14, Rev. 4.8f., 11f., 5.9f., 12f., 7.12, 15f., 11.17f., 15.3, 19.2f. On the importance of kerygma in the early Church, Mt. 3.1, Lk. 4.18f., Rom. 10.14. 154 N.B. Paul’s struggle in his Epistle to the Galatians to safeguard the traditional ‘gospel’ of salvation ‘by faith in Jesus Christ’ as a sufficient, efficacious ‘saviour’ against the ‘Judaizing’ policies of religious formalists and legalists. 152 153

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Dogma became linked to accredited leaders and their ‘creeds’ and practices. Bishops became guardians of the ‘Christ of Christian tradition’; their clergy participants with them in his official ministry. The living Christ of the ‘body’, or esse (Lat. being), of the early church was in time transformed into the bene esse (Lat. well-being) of developed institutions, his power delegated to an ‘ordained’ ministry who share his ministry and headship. Though Confucianism develops, not in this way. We do not find in later Confucianism officials looking to ‘the Master’ to justify their preservation of ‘tradition’, or to empower their ministry. The image of Jesus we see has a life away from the canvas. Thirdly, the Christ tradition is the subject of intense debate. Christological conflict rages from the New Testament onwards. We have already seen the image, or ‘face’, of Jesus subject to cultural, political, philosophical, textual and ideological pressure. This was not all destructive. Pain and pressure can renew and restore; just as Barbara Hepworth’s later works re-pristinated classic models of ‘Madonna and child’. In fierce 4th and 5th century debates between the great ‘schools’ of Antioch and Alexandria, between Augustine and Pelagius (c. 360–418), a British scholar resident in Rome, or church hierarchs and advocates of heretical or purportedly heterodox views of Jesus’s divinity and humanity (i.e. Gnostics, Docetics, Arians, Apollinarians, Nestorians, Marcionites, Ebionites, Monophysites and Monothelites), the issue was not Jesus’s biography, but his capacity to save. A Christ who was less than fully God could not offer an eternal sacrifice for sin, nor intercede efficaciously for sinners. A Christ who was less than fully human could neither ‘sympathize’ with the weak (Heb. 2.17f., 4.14–16) nor suffer with, and for, them on the cross. When Athanasius (c. 296/8–373 CE) turned his heavy theological artillery on Arius (c. 250/6–336 CE) in De Incarnatione, it was to safeguard Jesus’s sufficiency as a divine-human saviour. Likewise, when Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444 CE) and Bishop Leo of Rome (c. 391/400–461 CE) persuaded Chalcedon to reject the Archbishop of Constantinople, Nestorius’s (c. 386–c. 451 CE) ‘conjunction’ (and sundering) of Jesus’s two ‘natures’, it was to safeguard the integrity of Jesus Christ as Lord and ‘saviour’ from psychological and spiritual schizophrenia. As Cyril wrote in his letter to Egyptian monks (Epistula monachos Aegypti, 25–26): ‘If the Word did not suffer for us humanly, he did not accomplish our redemption Divinely; if he suffered for us as a mere man and but the organ of deity, we are in fact not redeemed’ (q. Torrance 1996: 247). Chalcedon may have used transient terms, and failed to end christological controversy, but in its four great adverbs (above p. 71) it reserved a space for a Christ who could save. As Mackintosh argues: ‘[T]he framers of the definition wished not so much to formulate a theory of Christ’s person as to bar out extreme statements on either side’ ([1912] 1937: 213). In this it has, more or less, succeeded.155 However articulated over two millennia, the Christ-tradition has safeguarded Jesus as saviour from human sin and rebellion. Only in its most critical, revisionist, ideological forms, does theology make this into a bland, inspirational programme of social welfare, self-actualization, sexual freedom, or sinless abandonment. Fourthly, the Christ tradition is essentially ‘catholic’, that is, its reach is universal (Gk. katholik¯e), its spirit inclusive. There is more of van Gogh’s generous God, and of Schweitzer’s sacrificial philanthropy, in this Christ-tradition than Christian narcissism or nastiness might suggest. Thanks to

155 N.B. William Temple (1881–1944), Archbishop of Canterbury during part of WWII, indicted the Definition as demonstrating ‘the bankruptcy of Greek patristic theology’ (q. Houlden 2005: 163). More recently, the German systematic theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) praised Chalcedon as a ‘masterful compromise’ (1970: 198–200). The debate continues. On Pannenberg, p. 71, n. 91, 340, n. 378, 450, 454f., 459, n. 301, 468, n. 358, 472, n. 393.

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Augustine’s theological genius, the expansion of the church did not produce a contraction of its faith or vision. The church’s creeds were, for him, the context for creativity and an arena for adoration. The ‘marks’ (Lat. notae) of the Church affirmed in the Nicene Creed (325 CE) – ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’ – were to be, like the Chalcedonian Definition, boundaries for belief more than ‘articles of the faith’. United in sacramental worship, weary of controversy, and bound by common creeds, the church of Augustine and Chalcedon emerged with a remarkable capacity to accept diversity. Indeed, little changed christologically until the Enlightenment, when the Christ-tradition is subject to fierce new textual, philosophical, scientific, cultural and ecclesiastical pressures. To Friedrich Nietzsche, Bach and Christ could both be damned! But the image of Jesus, as Schweitzer’s Quest for the Historical Jesus saw, was re-worked. Adaptation was not all bad, albeit, at times it created ambiguity, if not animosity. Theological creativity created an image of Christ without cultural discipline or aesthetic respect: to parody Casals, it was theological ‘intonation without conscience’156 or concern. But, the ‘living Christ’ could not be killed by pens or guns. As the Swiss theologian, Karl Barth’s (1886–1968) Der Römerbrief (1919: The Epistle to the Romans, 1968)157 holds, the living ‘Word’ of the ‘Prince of Peace’ can still say, ‘No!’ (in holiness) to war and sin, and ‘Yes’ (in love) to all who are ‘elected’ in and through God’s love for his Son. This, for him, was the necessary new (albeit traditional) and inclusive (but raspingly confrontational or ‘dialectical’) Christ-Word for the 20th-century world. Last, the Christ tradition gives continuity to the church and the world. As we saw earlier, the image of Jesus has exerted an incomparable influence on Western culture. Art, literature, science, law, architecture, music, education, medicine, social welfare, working practices, family relationships, rulers and governments over two millennia, have all been inspired by him. To men and women outside the Christian church, he has been a personal inspiration, his life of charity and goodness, self-sacrifice and service, offering an ‘ideal’, when others are lost or compromised. In popular religion, Jesus has provided a focus for occasional prayer and comfort in a crisis. In politics, invocation of Jesus’s ‘name’ – though sometimes abused – has sounded a note of sincerity, humility and integrity. In the world of film, theatre, print and the media, Jesus still generates a strong revenue stream. For many, he has earned and deserves the theatrical title, ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’. The Christ-tradition was a leitmotif in Christendom for more than 1,500 years, to define, refine, humble and inspire individuals, cultures and communities. This has continued, more recently, in the non-Western world. Here is a powerful global brand, another ‘Master’ beside Confucius, who deserves attention and respect. For many people the problem is not really that we can’t imagine Jesus, we can imagine him, and just about believe that, despite our failings, he sees potential in us, as Confucius did in his disciples. Schweitzer once said of Bach: ‘At root, he conceived everything for an ideal instrument.’ Augustine sensed the same, praying simply: ‘Thou knowest my unskilfulness, and my infirmities; teach me and heal me’ (1923: 163). N.B. Casals oft-quoted remark, ‘Intonation is a matter of conscience.’ N.B. Barth’s rejection of the Liberal theological establishment’s endorsement of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s (1859–1941; r. 1888–1918) war effort, and publication of Der Römerbrief (when pastor of a Reformed Church in Safenwil, Switzerland), arguably justify his reputation. He taught subsequently at Göttingen, Bonn (from which he had to resign in 1935) and Basel universities, and inspired generations of scholars. He co-authored the ‘Barmen Declaration’ (1934) as the ‘Confessing Church’ response to Nazism. His early ‘dialectical theology’ set God’s sovereign ‘Word’ against rebellious humanity and proud reason. In his 13-volume Church Dogmatics (1932–67) this position is moderated, with Jesus Christ presented as God’s ‘Royal Son’, ‘Living Word’ and self-abnegating Saviour, in and through whose election and death on the cross, God’s grace is mediated to the world. On Barth, p. 239, n. 315, 270, 307, 312, n. 222, 313, n. 226, 329, 418, n. 34, 420, n. 47, 445, 450, 453, 457, 461f., 464f.

156 157

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We turn to the wisdom of Confucius and Christ not to be reassured, but to be inspired. In their hands ‘the simplest of materials’ can, with patience, skill and faith, be transformed like Carrera marble into another masterpiece. As we saw before, in the year Benedict XIV reiterated Ex Illa Die (banning Chinese rites and further debate), Handel’s Messiah received its first performance (Dublin, 13 April 1742). With a text by Charles Jennens (1700–73), a landowner and patron of the arts, drawn from the King James Bible (1611) and Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer (1662), another masterpiece was born. Setbacks are integral to Christianity, but Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ conveys the insuppressible sense of Easter hope that once pervaded Christendom.

PART II In Part I our focus has been the two central figures at the heart of this comparative, cross-cultural study of Christianity and Confucianism. We have seen how these ‘paradigmatic’ individuals spawned socio-ethical and spiritual traditions that have been, and are, variously owned and interpreted. Our aim has been to strip away interpretative grime, and layers of pride, projection, assumption and presumption to see the ‘face’ of these two figures more clearly. We have proposed global ‘cultural archetypes’ that shape – and thereby serve to unite – the way Confucius and Jesus have been and are viewed in China and the West. The dichotomy of ‘East’ and ‘West’ is profoundly questioned. In Part II we turn to three central themes in Christianity and Confucianism: i. ‘Heaven and Earth’, for the context for life; ii. ‘Human identity, Life and Society’, on the nature of life for an individual and his or her society; and, iii. ‘Character, Purpose and Morality’, or the moral ends around which life is orientated. We might say much on each of these. As noted already, to focus discussion and clarify points of comparison and contrast between classical Confucianism and historic Christianity, we allow the Analects and Gospels to act as primary texts for analysis. To ‘read backwards carefully’, and read these texts in a subtle, sensitive, way – and in light of the other – we need to understand the cultural, historical and intellectual dynamics affecting their interpretation. Inter-textual reading of the Analects and the Gospels is set in Part II against the background of the progressive engagement between China and the West from the 17th to the early 19th centuries. At the time, the context, nature and moral ends of life were much discussed. To help read this aright, we again employ ‘cultural archetypes’ that both define and unite interpretation of the Analects and Gospels in China and the West. If, as historians in China and the West have shown, there was significant East-West cultural exchange from the 17th century onwards, this deserves to be recognized in the way the Gospels have been, and are read today – likewise, for the way the Analects have been, and are, interpreted in China. There is no culture-neutral reading of texts, certainly not texts linked to ancient, ‘paradigmatic’ figures like Confucius and Jesus. The following chapters show how their devotees shaped one another in ways hitherto unknown or, more often, unacknowledged.

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Heaven, Earth and ‘Harmony’ From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began. —John Dryden [1631–1700], ‘A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687’1 The three chapters in Part II set cross-cultural interpretation of the Analects and Gospels in the context of developing East-West relations, and of decisive events and ideas drawn from the 17th and 18th centuries. In Chapters 6 to 8, our historical dialogue-partners are from the 19th and 20th centuries. The process is necessarily selective and intentionally progressive. The evidence for, and possibility of, interpretative clarity and cross-cultural understanding are, I suggest, compelling. Our story began before this, but major episodes are about to start. Tracking the content of thematic interpretation against a progressive historical and intellectual context enables development of a cross-cultural, and inter-textual, ‘history of interpretation’ of the Analects and Gospels. It also helps us to see how ‘cultural archetypes’ shape what is read. In this hermeneutic process, the protracted – often unseen, or ignored – ‘dialogue of cultures’ between China and the West impacts the use – and the abuse – of the Analects and Gospels. A new, ‘One World’ view of these old texts will not want to construe them as alien, or competitive, cultural sources, rather, as trans-national ‘Classics’ that act as receptors and progenitors of unitive ideas and global ideals. This is particularly true when shared ‘cultural archetypes’ shape what is seen or read. In this case, history, and the history of ideas, become solvents to clarify interpretation of our primary texts. They help to reveal the whence, what, and why, of interpretative assumptions today. To ignore this is dangerous. We begin with ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’. These are central themes in Confucianism and Christianity. In different ways, these two related categories impact everything that follows. They set the context – transcendent and immanent – in which the two traditions articulate their Way to life and designated sovereign power. We study ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ here in the Analects and Gospels against the background of the change and challenges to Eastern and Western history and cosmology in 17thand early 18th-century Europe and Asia. We are at the beginning of deepening East-West cultural engagement. Perception of the context and content of life ‘under heaven’ and ‘on earth’ was a major issue to understand and debate. As we will see, classical Confucianism addressed tian ཙ (heaven, or god), and its associate power Shang di/ti кᑍ (Lord of Heaven, or Lord on high), in awed terms. These were understood to control, condition, and inspire, life and death for individuals and society. The Bible and classical

1

Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1918, (ed.) A. Quiller-Couch ([1900] 1949), 479f. 89

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Christianity are similarly respectful in celebrating God as ‘creator of heaven and earth’ (cf. Nicene Creed and Gen. 1, 2), and Jesus, the ‘Son’ and ‘Lord’, as herald and instigator of a new ‘kingdom’, the authorized voice for ‘the kingdom of heaven’ (Mt. 3.2, 5.3, Mk 9.47). Earth is also configured, in both traditions, in clear cosmic, moral terms. But, the 17th and 18th centuries saw this perspective disrupted. Established convictions are challenged by cross-cultural engagement and scientific, geographic and empirical discovery. ‘Heaven’ and ‘earth’ are both subject to intellectual and cultural pressure. New evidence drives new questions and conclusions. The stakes are high. In classical Confucianism and biblical Christianity, cosmic categories condition the context in which life – in all its beauty, tragedy, power and politics, spirituality and morality – are conceived and the content of life itself, that is, what it means to live, and live in harmony, with ‘higher powers’ and earthly neighbours. We may wonder, as our forebears did, what could be more pressing and urgent? We continue study of these issues in coming chapters. For now, to ‘read backwards carefully’, and study what the Analects and Gospels say of ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’, we need to strip back to a time when these primary texts were read at face value, that is, to study them at the point they began to be embroiled in critical, creative, cross-cultural revision. The setting in the 17th and early 18th century is critical. The ‘Scientific Revolution’ – when new ‘laws’ of physics, mathematics, astronomy and cosmology arise – challenged Christian and Confucian ‘worldviews’ (Germ. Weltanschauungen). A ‘clash of civilizations’, or early ‘culture wars’, in and between China and the West looks possible; particularly as the Jesuit ‘China Mission’ lands in China, to face-off, we might assume, with the cultural forces of the late Ming and Qing dynasties. In fact, the opposite is the case. Mutual respect runs high. It becomes a time of immense importance for later global, cross-cultural history. New scholarship on this is vast. We can only scratch the surface to remove a few layers of distortion and projection. There is much still to consider. We must follow van Gogh’s advice and exaggerate the essentials to glean a reliable impression. In this chapter we look primarily at Sino-British issues, in the next Sino-European material. This is a happy historical snapshot in the sun. Storm clouds soon gather. Troubles in Sino-Western relations build. War will ensue. One final point before we begin. East-West interaction in the 17th and early 18th centuries changed the world culturally and conceptually. How the Analects and Gospels were, and are, read and interpreted still reflects this change. To say – or even imply – that Western exegesis of ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ in the Gospels was unaffected by Confucianism is as errant as Chinese exegesis of the Analects that understates the impact of Western biblical terminology. Cross-cultural studies and history refute such egregious hermeneutic isolationism. To return to the analogy in Part I, the two figures depicted on our old canvas have the same ‘ground’ and the same ‘sky’. What they saw, believed, and taught about ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ – and, thus, the context of life – reflects their unique perspective and a shared existential framework. My argument is that ‘cultural archetypes’ – drawn now from East-West exchange in the 17th and early 18th centuries – created, and still create, a common ground for Chinese and Western interpretation of the Analects and Gospels. This perceptual base has continued. The ‘wash’ on Confucian China and Western Christendom is the same. This should now be admitted.

RICCI, CHINA AND NEW 17TH-CENTURY HORIZONS The Analects and Gospels were well-established cultural resources by the time Matteo Ricci, SJ (1552–1610) reached Peking on 24 January 1601. His coming signaled the beginning of a new era in Chinese Christianity. East-West cultural exchange reached new heights under his quiet, capable,

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charismatic leadership. As scholar Li Zhi ᵾ䌴 (1527–1602; frequently known as Zhuowu ঃ੮)2 said of Ricci, having met him in Jining and Nanjing in the 1590s: ‘He is an extraordinarily impressive person. His mind is lucid, and his appearance is simple’ (Francke 1967: 39). He went on: ‘Amongst all the men I have seen, none can compare to him. All who are either too arrogant or too anxious to please, who . . . display their own cleverness or are too ignorant and dull, are inferior to him’ (ibid.). Ricci’s reception and methodology are seen to advantage through the success, strategy, theology and failure of missional forebears.3 In these, we find early efforts to use Chinese terms to translate Christian views of ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’. Ricci and his colleagues were not the first to adapt Christian tradition to local culture. As we have seen above, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and medieval iconography, ‘enculturated’ Christianity. By the 17th century, devout devotees of the Polish mathematician-astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) were adept at adjusting (private) scientific opinions to (official) Catholic teaching, while 16th century Protestant Reformers also ‘accommodated’ the gospel to culture in their vernacular translations of the Bible and support for local princes. In Catholicism and Protestantism, the written ‘Word’ of the Bible and tangible ‘Word and Works’ in creation, testified to a divine creator’s

FIGURE 6: Matteo Ricci, SJ (6 October 1552–11 May 1610). 2 Li Zhi had (Persian) Islamic ancestry. As a follower of the Neo-Confucian scholar-soldier Wang Yangming ⦻䲭᰾ (1472– 1529), who criticized the rationalist dualism of the highly influential Song Neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi ᵡ⟩ (1130–1200), Li Zhi was ostracized and committed suicide. He was a master of popular literature known for his commentary on Sanguo yan yi й഻╄㗙 (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) by the late Yuan/early Ming author Luo Guanzhong 㖵䋛ѝ (c. 1330–1400). On Wang Yangming, Ching, J., R. C. Lee and E. Y. Lee (2000), The Religious Thought of Chu Hsi, 195; also, below p. 123, 163, 313, n. 227. 3 On Christianity in China before Ricci, Gilman, I. and H-J. Klimkeit (1999), Christians in Asia Before 1500, 265–302.

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mystery, power, mercy and love. Ricci’s encounter with, and exposition of, Confucian cosmology opened unimagined cultural and intellectual vistas to Britain and Europe – past and present. This is a shared legacy. We study it to recover a greater sense of this common, cultural and intellectual heritage. The second Tang ୀ Emperor, Taizong ཚᇇ (598–649; r. 626–49), who reigned when Bishop Alopen and his colleagues arrived in Chang’an in 635, was a liberal-minded reformer and keen patron of literature, new learning and the arts. The tradition Confucius inspired had lasted as state orthodoxy through much of the Han dynasty (200 BCE–220 CE). In the 1st century CE a new syncretistic Daoism appeared, which owed much to the recent arrival in China of Indian Buddhism. By the time of Alopen, Daoism was well-established in Chinese society, and posed a serious threat to Confucianism’s old intellectual and cultural hegemony. The first expressions of Christian dialogue with Chinese culture had to imbibe a cocktail of imperial interest with flavours of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. It was a ‘Golden Age’ in China, politically, culturally and intellectually. An imperial ‘Edict of Toleration’ (638) let the homely spirituality of the Nestorian monk-evangelists flourish. Parts of the Bible and other ‘sacred books’ were translated. A church was built, twenty-one (probably Persian) priests appointed. The famed Nestorian stele (viz. stone monument)4 – or, as its self-designation states, བྷ〖Ჟᮉ⍱㹼ѝ഻⻁ (Memorial of the propagation in China of the luminous religion from Daqin) – was erected on 7 January 781. The stele sheds important – albeit contentious5 – light on the missionaries’ theology, life and practice. It was unearthed sometime between 1623 and 1625, its appearance timed, it seems, to root the Jesuit mission in antecedent Christian endeavour.6 History – true and false – plays a key role in our story. Written in Chinese and Syriac, the nine- by three-foot stone stele presents a careful, useful account of Christian truth in Chinese terms. Alexander Wylie (1815–87), a British missionaryscholar in China, said of it: ‘The Chinese titles and designations of members of the hierarchy used on this tablet are all taken from the Buddhist vocabularies’ (1897: 62). Confucianism is also here, with dao 䚃 (the Way) designating the message and lifestyle of the new ‘Persian’ faith. Buddhist terms for God are also here. God is ‘the unchanging in perfect repose before the first and without knowing’, who ‘set the original breath in motion . . . made and perfected all things’ and ‘imparts his mysterious nature to all sages’, that is, to all who express ‘goodness’, ‘a just temperament’, and avoid ‘lust and a puffed-up spirit’ (Mungello [1985b] 1989: 15f.). Jesus (or Mi-shih-he, Messiah) is presented here, in classic (heterodox) Nestorian terms, as ‘the divided Person of our Three in One’. He it was, the stele declares, who for humanity’s sin and idolatry was ‘hung up a brilliant sun to take by storm the halls of darkness’ to destroy ‘the wiles of the devil’ (Wylie 1855–6: 285f.). As Kenneth Latourette summarizes the theology and gospel of the stele: ‘The faith was said to make for the peace and tranquility of the realm, the prosperity of the living, and the joy of the dead. The virtues extolled were love, mercy, kindness, the placing of all men on equality, and the relief of Cf. p. 12, n. 37. On debate about the origin, theology, authenticity and ‘ownership’ of the stele, Havret, H., SJ (1895), La stèle chrétienne de Si Ngan-fou; Keevak, M. (2008), The Story of a Stele; Pelliot, P. (1996), ‘L’inscription nestorienne de Si-ngan-fou’; Godwin, T. (2017), Persian Christians at the Chinese Court, ad loc. 6 The first Westerner to report on the stele was the Portuguese missionary Alvaro Semedo, SJ (1585/6–1658), who visited Chang’an between 1625 and 1658. Semedo describes the stele’s discovery in his Imperio de la China (1642). Trigault translated the inscription into Latin: this version circulated in Europe and was translated into French, Portuguese, Italian and English. The German sinologist Athanasius Kircher, SJ (1608–80) published the first Chinese (and Syriac) transcription of the stele in China Illustrata (1667; ET 1673). On this, Molina, J. M. (2004), ‘True Lies: Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata’, in P. Findlen (ed.), Athanasius Kirker, 365–81; Billings, T. (2004), ‘Jesuit Fish in Chinese Nets’. On Semedo and Kircher, p. 102f., 113f., 138, 184, 187. 4 5

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suffering – clothing the naked, feeding the hungry and healing the sick’ (1929: 56). This is an early form of Chinese Christianity. It wears as-yet ill-fitting cultural clothing, but it presages Ricci’s openness to adapt Christian faith to classical Chinese terms and ideas. During Emperor Taizong’s reign, the Nestorian missionaries established hundreds of monasteries. As Lo Hsiang Lin records, the reign had ‘the reputation that “the faith spread throughout the ten districts” and “monasteries abound in a hundred cities”’ (1966: 1). The cache of 5th- to 11th-century manuscripts found in the Dunhuang ᮖ❼ caves (NW China) in the early 20th century – including four syncretic texts, or ‘Jesus Sutras’ – challenge Legge’s view of Alopen’s work (above p. 12).7 The Hymn to the Holy Trinity (from the ancient ‘Gloria in Excelsis’), Book of Jesus Messiah, and Discourse on Monotheism, in particular, show great cross-cultural skill. Messiah’s purpose is ‘to restrain (people) and guide them to do good’, and to give them ‘the way of heaven’. As Book of Jesus says: ‘[I]t was the Lord’s will to dispose the people in the world not to serve inferior spirits’ (q. Covell 1986: 28). So, Ricci trod the path of ‘accommodation’ to Chinese terminology others had explored before. His use of the term tian, and assimilation of the traditional Shang dynasty term for the ‘Lord of Heaven’, Shangdi кᑍ, to the monotheistic God of the Bible, was deliberate, provocative and controversial.8 It probably offended his Western overseers more than Chinese listeners, but all parties recognized how words shape worlds and were sensitive to the terms in which their world was defined. Our story, we will find, is often a matter of understanding words. Under Taizong’s successors, Christianity’s fortunes faltered. His son, the fourth Tang Emperor, Gaozong ୀ儈ᇇ (r. 649–83), supported the building of new monasteries and gave the missionaries freedom to travel. After January 665, however, when the fearsome Dowager ‘Empress Regnant’ Wu ⲷᑍ↖ (624–705) all but took control, persecution began to mount. It culminated in Emperor Wuzong’s ୀ↖ᇇ [↖ࡷཙ] (814–46) anti-Buddhist Edict (845), in which the ‘Ta Ch’in’ (Syrian/ Nestorian) and ‘Muh-hu-fo’ (Zoroastrian) monks – ‘to the number of more than three thousand’ – were ‘compelled to return to the world’ (i.e. renounce vows) (Philip 1998: 3).9 As Ricci – and many later Westerners – discovered, imperial whim and internal politics were potent enemies of gospel ministry and of predictable mercantile endeavour. Despite suppression, Nestorian Christianity re-emerged in the more conducive climate of the ‘Great Yuan’ dynasty བྷ‫ݳ‬ᵍ (1271–1368) under the Mongol Emperor, Kublai Khan (1215–94). In the year he died, Catholicism came to the capital, Cambaluc (Peking), robed in the simple Franciscan attire of missionary-statesman John Montecorvino (c. 1246–c. 1330). Texts from the Yuan period refer to Christians as yelikewen (poss. Turkic erke’ün) or diexie 䘝ኁ (poss. a transcription of the Persian word ‘tarsâ’, god-fearer) (Halbertsma 2008: 10).10 Dominican friars also came. But neither of these groups – nor the Augustinians after them – were predisposed to adapt historic Christianity to Chinese On these texts, Riegert, R. and T. Moore, eds (2006), The Lost Sutras of Jesus. On the historical, linguistic and theological-philosophical debate about the meaning of tian and Shangdi in the Analects, and their relation to Christian monotheism, Cline, E. M. (2014), ‘Religious Thought and practice in the Analects’, in A. Olberding (ed.), Dao Companion to the Analects, 259–92 (esp. 278f.). 9 Cf. also, Reischauer, E. O. (1955), Ennin’s Travels in Tang China. The fate of these Nestorian monks and their followers is debated. Many scholars follow P. Y. Saeki and the Welsh Baptist missionary Timothy Richard (1845–1919), claiming the majority adopted an Islamicized faith or joined the secretive ‘Jin Dao Jiao’ 䠁䚃ᮉ (‘Religion of the Golden Pill’), a sect in N. China. Geography and theology would support Saeki: ‘We take the existence of over twenty-one millions (sic) of Mohammedans in China as one of the external evidences which indicate that there must have been a very large body of Nestorians when our monument was set up in A.D.781’ ([1937] 1951: 49). 10 On a poss. reference here to Jews, Goldstein, J. ed. (2000), The Jews of China, 9. 7 8

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culture. Some of their cultural hand-luggage was, perhaps, scarred with suspicion borne of earlier work in the Philippines. All was not lost. Alopen’s legacy lived on in the intellectual, spiritual soldiery of Ricci and his tough Jesuit colleagues.11 They paid a high price gladly in their cross-cultural mission. Ricci’s arrival coincided with the growth of Western interest in China. This started in the mid16th century when Europeans quaffed the tasty (largely trustworthy)12 tales of travel in Asia (between 1276 and 1291) by Venetian merchant-adventurer Marco Polo (1254–1324), which Rustichello da Pisa (fl. 1272–1300) retold in his Book of the Marvels of the World (c. 1300).13 The work appeared in English in 1503 (trans. John Frampton), and in a new Italian version in 1559 (trans. Giovanni Ramusio). Terra firma was mundus mirabilis. Following voyages by the Italian Christopher Columbus (1450–1506) and Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama (ca 1460–1524), Asian exploration intensified. The detailed, first-hand account of the exploits of the Portuguese soldier of fortune Galeote Pereira (c. 1520–c. 1560) in China – or Da Ming བྷ᰾ (Great Ming), as he discovered it was named – provided some sense of the country’s geography, military, ritual, religion and system of justice. This fed into Europe’s growing fascination with all things oriental.14 Captured in battle and imprisoned in Fujian and Guangxi Provinces in the 1540s, Pereira’s racy derring-do was published from notes in 1561 and translated into Italian (1561) and English (1577).15 Similar works, which shed a usually favourable light on China, appeared. Some idealized its Confucian morality and well-ordered system of government (cf. Atkinson 1935: 353f., 358– 74).16 Among these were the Dominican Gaspar da Cruz’s (c. 1520–70) Tratado das cousas da China (1569, Treatise on things Chinese), soldier-author Bernardino de Escalante’s (c. 1537–c. 1605) navigational travelogue on ‘the kingdoms and provinces of the Orient, and of the existing knowledge of the greatness of the Kingdom of China’ (1577),17 and Historia de las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno de la China (1586: The History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China and the Situation Thereof, [1588] 1853–54), by Augustinian monks Martín de Rada (1533–78) and Juan Gonzáles de Mendoza (1545–1618), which reported on earlier abortive missions to China (1579–80, 1582).18 Based on only shallow coastal contacts, the work praised China’s imperial paternalism and cultural humaneness. The work played a leading role in promoting the 17th- and 18th-century myth of China’s wisdom, power and imperial radiance. Pereira had told

The ‘Society of Jesus’ or ‘Jesuits’ were formed at the initiative of the former soldier Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) in 1534, their Formula of the Institute being approved in Pope Paul III’s (1468–1549; r. 1534–1549) bull of 1540. Central to the work of the Society, or ‘Company’ as it is often called, was ‘the propagation and defence of the faith and progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine’. For background on the beginning of the China mission, Alden, D. (1996), The Making of an Enterprise, 66–71. 12 On the historical, geographical and cultural value of this material, Vogel, H. U. (2013), Marco Polo Was in China. 13 The work appeared in Franco-Italian versions as Devisement du Monde and Livres des Merveilles du Monde, and the Latin De Mirabilis Mundi. 14 On early European interest in China, Spence, J. D. (1998), The Chan’s Great Continent. 15 Cf. da Cruz, Fr. G., O.P. and Fr. M. de Rada, O.E.S.A. ([1550–75] 1967), South China in the sixteenth century, being the narratives of Galeote Pereira. 16 Cf. Atkinson, G. (1935), Les nouveaux horizons de la Renaissance française, 353f., 358–64. 17 Cf. de Escalante, B., Discurso de la navegacion que los portugueses hacen a los Reinos y Provincias de Oriente . . . (1577, Discourse of the navigation made by the Portuguese to the kingdoms and provinces of the Orient . . .). Cf. Lach, D. F. (1965, 1970), Asia in the making of Europe, II. 742–3. 18 Rada and Mendoza’s Historia was the first work published in the West containing Chinese characters. The work was translated by Robert Parke in 1588, and by the diplomat-sinologist Sir George Staunton (1781–1859) in 1853–4. Staunton played a strategic diplomatic role in the birth of Protestantism in China; cf. Hancock, C. (2008), Morrison, ad loc. 11

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his Western audience the ‘idolatrous’ Chinese named their supreme being ‘heaven’: ‘[A]s we are wont to say “God knoweth it”, so they say at every word Tien xautee ཙ᳹ᗇ; that is to say, “The heavens do know it” ’ ([1588] 1853–4: 15). His words struck an alluring – to some, jangling – note with Western readers, especially when tian and counterpart di ൠ (earth) were given Chinese imperial sanction as theological terms.19 We catch a glimpse of the interplay of ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ in Confucian minds in this remark by first Ming Emperor བྷ᰾ᵍ, Hongwu ⍚↖ (1328–98; r. 1368– 98): ‘Ever since the earliest emperors ruled all-under-Heaven (ཙл tianxia), China has controlled the barbarians from within while the barbarians have respectfully looked to China from without . . . This was hardly human effort but really the gift of Heaven’ (q. Tan 2009: 97). In time, Jesuit use of tian affirmed and countered this claim. They were walking on thin ice, as they soon found. Information stirred Western powers and awakened European interest. Careful study of the history, philosophy and culture of China – and missionary opportunities there – grew. The possibility for Christian assimilation – and, thus, confusion – of Yahweh with the Shang term Shangdi and the later Zhou dynasty tian, was clear.20 When the French Figurists Joseph Prémare, SJ (1666–1736), Joachim Bouvet, SJ (1656–1730), and Jean-François Foucquet, SJ (1665–1741), displaced biblical religion by the Chinese Classics,21 and said the mythological emperor Fu Xi Կ㗢 was author of the ‘Great Law’ that united Persian, Greek and Hebrew traditions, confusion and excess were, to many, now frighteningly realized (Pak 1974: 53f.). Though often criticized (and later officially censured), Ricci advocated a balanced, academic, pragmatic, approach.22 Ricci’s ‘courteous understanding and friendly discussion’ did not, however, ‘produce large numbers of converts’ (Lach and Van Kley 1993: 177).23 But ‘accommodationism’ did give Jesuits a template for theology and practice in China.24 It was reaffirmed by papal decrees in support of Chinese-language liturgies (1615) and, later, practices ‘favourable to Chinese customs’ (1656).25 Meanwhile, the protracted political, diplomatic and theological crisis of the ‘Rites

19 N.B. the coherence and proximity of ‘heaven and earth’ are seen in the classical Confucian term tiandi ཙൠ (Lit. heaven and earth). 20 On the origin, meaning and evolution of the ancient Chinese terms for ‘god’, or ‘Lord of Heaven’, Chang, R. H. (2000), ‘Understanding Di and Tian: Deity and Heaven from Shang to Tang Dynasties’; Dubs, H. H. (1959–60), ‘Theism and Naturalism in Ancient Chinese Philosophy’; Eno, R. (2008), ‘Shang State Religion and the Pantheon of the Oracle Texts’, in J. Lagerwey and M. Kalinowski (eds), Early Chinese Religion: Part One, 41–102; Huang, Y. (2007b), ‘Confucian Theology, Three Models’; Creel, H. G. (1970), The Origins of Statecraft in China; Fowler, J. D. and M. Fowler (2008), Chinese religions; Legge, J. (1880), The Religions of China; Yang, C. K. (1970), Religion in Chinese Society; Yao, X. and Zhao, Y. (2010), Chinese Religion: A Contextual Approach. 21 For a recent re-evaluation of these Figurist figures, Wei, S. L-c. (2018), ‘In the light and shadow of the Dao: Two figurists, two intellectual webs’. 22 On Ricci, Fontana, M. (2011), Matteo Ricci: A Jesuit in the Ming Court. 23 When Ricci became superior of the China mission (1597), there were about 100 converts there. Unlike the older missions to Japan and India, which relied on the Portuguese padrado system (viz. military and political support), the China mission, which gained independence and vice-provincial status in 1623, had a unique intellectual, cross-cultural character. When Ricci died (1610) there were 5 Jesuit residences – at Chaoch’ing (1583), Shaochou (1589), Nanch’ang (1593), Nanking (1599) and Peking (1606) – and c. 2500 converts from different social backgrounds. On padrado and the growth of the China mission, Lach and Kley, 175f. 24 For early Jesuit apologetics, esp. Wang X. (1998), Christianity and Imperial Culture. 25 The supreme (Jesuit) tribunal decree of 23 March 1656, which Pope Alexander VII (1599–1667) endorsed, responded to a request for clarity from the China mission through their Italian emissary, Martino Martini, SJ (1614–61), author of Novus Atlas Sinensis (1655). The decree described ancestral rituals as ‘a purely civil and political cult’. For a recent study of Marian devotion in China, Song, G. (2018), ‘The Many Faces of Our Lady: Chinese Encounters with the Virgin Mary between 7th and 17th Centuries’.

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Controversy’ began.26 It was sparked by (prob. innocent) attendance at a ceremony to honour ancestors (27 August 1635) by the Franciscan Antonio Caballero da Santa Maria (1602–69) and another Dominican colleague. In due time, this controversy over ‘rites’ and ‘terms’ consumed the Jesuit mission.27 ‘Accommodation’, as a Jesuit strategy, was eviscerated by Emperor Kangxi’s Edict of 1642 and long, internecine Catholic feuding.28 The West did not – and does not – always communicate clearly. The story of Ricci’s journey to Peking with Michele Ruggieri, SJ (1543–1607) – via Zhaoqing (where the governor was drawn to his cartography, horology, and mathematics), Shaoquan, Nanjing and Nanchang – cannot detain us.29 His missiological methods must. Alessandro Valignano, SJ (1539–1606), Ricci’s superior, had argued in his Résolutions and Cérémonial (proposed for the earlier Japan mission) that Christian custom could, and should, be adapted to Asian culture.30 Ricci drew on this in his dialogical apologetic – between a Chinese and Western scholar – Tianzhu Shiyi ཙѫሖ㗙 (1603, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven).31 He defended Christian faith in a clear, rational, naturalist way for his Confucian contemporaries, building comparison on friendship, ‘Natural Law’,32 and theistic intimations in the Confucian Classics.33 He used the popular celestial term tian, that Pereira had reported.34 The heart of the argument is that, ‘He who is called the Lord of Heaven in my humble country is He who is called Shang-ti (Sovereign on High) in Chinese’ ([1603] 1985: 121).35 Ricci’s work gained imperial support in 1603. A century later, as M. G. Lau 26 On the theology of the ‘Rites Controversy’, Menegon, E. (2013), ‘European and Chinese Controversies over Rituals’, in B. Boute and T. Småberg (eds), Devising Order, 193–222; —(2009), Ancestors, Virgins & Friars. 27 Caballero came to see Confucian rituals to be (like Buddhism and Daoism) dangerously religious. On this, Rule, P. A. (1986), K’ung-Tzu or Confucius?, 105. Rule says this is based on ‘a naive but not un-Chinese theory of language . . . where all ceremonies that share the same name are essentially the same’ (ibid.). On the vicissitudes of the Jesuit mission in Shandong, Mungello, D. E. (2003), The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 1650–1785. 28 To illustrate the later controversy, and its consequences: in 1676, the Dominican China missionary (later Archbp. of Santo Domingo and Primas of the West Indies), Domingo Fernández Navarrete, OP (1618–89), published Tratados historicos, politicos, ethicos, y religiosos de la monarchia de China in Madrid. The book was anti-Jesuit and pronounced the stele spurious. The Jesuits faced internal and external pressure. Navarrete’s work was translated as An Account of the Empire of China (1704) and popularized by the philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778; cf. p. 143) and Jansenists in France. On this, Cummins, J. S. (1962), The Travels and Controversies of Friar Domingo Navarette, 1618–1686. 29 On Ricci’s early years in Beijing, Witek, J. W. (2005), ‘The Emergence of a Christian Community in Beijing’, in Wu, X. (ed.), Encounters and Dialogues, 93–116; Cronin, V. (1955), The Wise Man from the West. 30 On Valignano and the Jesuit mission, Urceler, M. A. J., SJ (2016), ‘The Jesuits in East Asia in the Early Modern Age’, in T. Banchoff and J. Casanova (eds), The Jesuits and Globalization, 27–48; Moran, J. F. (1993), The Japanese and the Jesuits. 31 N.B. the 2nd edn was published in Hangzhou in 1607. This later edition was better known and more widely circulated. Cf. the recent editions and translations of The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven by D. Lancashire and P. K. Hu, SJ (1985), and T. Meynard, SJ (2013). 32 Nicolò Longobardi SJ (1559–1654) and the Franciscan Caballero disputed this. On Franciscan disputes, Criveller, G. (2014), ‘Il ruolo dei francescani nella controversia dei Riti cinesi’. There were clashes between, for example, the Province of San Gregorio that was pro adjustment and Italians, led by Carlo Orazi da Castorano (1673–1755) and commissioned by Propaganda Fide, who were anti ‘accommodation’. 33 The Buddhist Neo-Confucian secularists Zhu Xi and Lu Xiangshan 䲨ҍ␥ (1139–93) rejected this ‘spiritualizing’ of Confucius. In contrast, the German philosopher Gottfried W. von Leibniz (1646–1716) upheld it as a theo-philosophy fit for a new scientific age. On Leibniz and Confucianism, Mungello, D. E. (1977), Leibniz and Confucianism; Mühlhahn, K. and N. van Looy, eds (2012), The Globalization of Confucius and Confucianism; also, below p. 106, 116f., 137, n. 23, 139f., 141f., 149, n. 103, 153, 167, 184, 190, 192f., 214, 222, 232f., 299, 327, 336f. 364, 379, 390, 459. 34 On Jesuit methods, Standaert, N., SJ (2010), ‘Matteo Ricci: Shaped by the Chinese’. This is based on d’Elia, P. ed. (1942–9), Fonti Ricciane: Storia dell’introduzione del cristianesimo in Cina, and on (his pupil) Bettray, J. (1955), Die Akkommodationsmethode des P. Matteo Ricci S.I. in China. 35 At the time Ricci wrote, the later Shang and Zhou dynasties’ conflation of Shangdi and tian led to his often using the terms (virtually) interchangeably.

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observes, the Emperor Kangxi ‘liked the book so much that it was his constant companion for over a six-month period’, and soon ‘gave permission to the missionaries to resume preaching the Gospel at the Imperial Court’ (1982: 94). Ricci’s skill in wooing Chinese intelligentsia to see the value of comparative cross-cultural, textual dialogue is enduringly impressive. The Kangxi imperial ‘Edict of Toleration’ (1692), setting Christianity on a par with Buddhism and Daoism, endorses the wisdom of his approach: The Europeans are very quiet; they do not excite any disturbances in the provinces, they do no harm to anyone, they commit no crimes, and their doctrine has nothing in common with that of the false sects in the empire, nor has it any tendency to excite sedition . . . We decide therefore that all temples dedicated to the Lord of heaven in whatever place they may be found, ought to be preserved, and that it may be permitted to all who wish to worship this God to enter these temples, offer him incense, and perform the ceremonies practiced according to ancient custom by the Christians. Therefore let no one henceforth offer them any opposition. —q. Pittman 2001: 35f. We will return to the details of Tianzhu Shiyi later. For now, we note that Trigault’s translation and publication of Ricci’s account of work in China, De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas (1615), gained Ricci, and the Jesuit mission, the profile the Order desired. The work presents Confucius as a virtuous pagan (rather like a Greco-Roman sage), with China ruled by a Platonized ideal of a philosopher-kingship. Sixteen editions followed its first publication (in Augsburg). It was translated into European languages, including English, thanks to Samuel Purchas (c. 1577–1626), who included parts of it in his travelogue, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes (4 vols, 1625).36 ‘Accommodationism’ gained widespread international acclaim as a strategy, but in the end this proved short-lived. When the reclusive Ming Emperor Wanli 㩜ᳶ – who, incidentally, Ricci never met – invited him to the imperial and cultural fortress of the ‘Forbidden City’, metaphorically and intellectually the walls of classical Confucianism were breached. Ricci was wary of the fluid state orthodoxy of Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism, preferring the pure form Confucianism of the Analects and Confucian Classics. The discussions he entered were based primarily on these. The issues he raised were on classical Confucian tradition. A central issue was, of course, the compatibility of the Confucian ‘terms’ tian and Shangdi with the biblical ‘God’. Publication by his successors of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687)37 served to widen discussion. The issues faced, and materials Ricci used, became more generally available. Texts included the Analects and, from the Record of Rites, Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean. More minds, disciplines and communities were drawn into reception and analysis of this material. As we will see, publication of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus heralded a new era in East-West exchange.38 Without the open-mindedness, generosity of spirit, and

36 On Purchas, Koss, N. (2016), ‘Matteo Ricci on China viz Samuel Purchas’, in C. H. Lee (ed.), Western Visions of the Far East, 85–100; Lynam, E. ed. (1946), Richard Hakluyt and His Successors; Pennington, L. E. (1966), ‘Hakluytus Posthumus: Samuel Purchas and the Promotion of English Overseas Expansion’; —ed. (1997), The Purchas Handbook; Steele, C. R. (1997), ‘From Hakluyt to Purchas’, in D. B. Quinn (ed.), The Haklyut Handbook, I. 74–84. 37 Cf. above p. 34, n. 79. 38 On production of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, Dew, N. (2009), Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France, 205–33.

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intellectual acuity of Ricci and his missionary partners, the fruitfulness of this era would have been impossible. Like Ricci’s superiors – and later Protestant missionaries – we must ask: Are tian and Shangdi appropriately used of the monotheistic God of the Bible? Is tian in the Analects directly – or even generally – comparable to ‘heaven’ in the Gospels’? Let alone its mythological and religious counterpart di ൠ to ‘earth’? We will return to these issues later in this chapter. Ricci was not only inspired to discuss God and heaven, earth also attracted him. Zhou dynasty ઘᵍ (c. 1046–256 BCE) mythic cosmography conceived heaven as round and earth as square, with China (Huaxia 㨟༿) encircled by ‘barbarian’ hordes. On landing in Macau in 1582, Ricci set about learning China’s complex language, culture and religion/s. When commanded to enter the ‘Forbidden City’, it was as much for his scientific learning as for his Christian faith and part-translation of the Confucian classics.39 The Ming illuminati were captivated by mythology, and by newer scientific arts of cartography, chronometry, horology, astrology, astronomy and geography. Daoist dualism drew a starker contrast than classical Confucianism between tian (ཙ), di (ൠ), an intermediary realm (й⭼) for humans ren (Ӫ), and a lower world of gui 公 (ghosts) and mo 冄 (demons). Ricci and his peers’ astronomical and calendrical knowledge – especially an ability to predict solar eclipses (with astrological significance for the Chinese) – created a solid platform for dialogue. As a rare act of respect, Ricci, the yi ཧ (barbarian),40 was designated shidafu ༛བྷཛ (scholar official), in honour of his grasp of Confucianism and Chinese culture. His translation of Euclid’s (fl. 323–283 BCE) 13Book Elements ᒮօ৏ᵜ (Gk. stoicheia)41 – assisted by the scholar-official and Catholic convert Xu Guangxi ᗀ‫ݹ‬ஃ (1562–1633), one of ‘Three Great Pillars of Chinese Catholicism’42 – opened other avenues for cross-cultural exchange. His translation followed hard on the heels of a 1570 English translation by Sir Henry Billingsley (d. 1606), a learned merchant and Lord Mayor of London.43 In China and the West, Greek thought was changing the way the world was seen and studied. The Jesuit mission to China was advocate and beneficiary of this data exchange. Mutual respect was key. The interplay of science, culture and theology in the early years of the Jesuit China mission provided a natural setting for critical re-evaluation of tian ཙ (heaven or sky). The principles of mathematics, physics and logic Euclid propounded also resonated with China’s historic interest in the earth, its shape, history, resources and governance. ‘Earth’ in China and the West was attracting

In 1594 Ricci produced a Latin paraphrase of the Four Books and some commentarial material. Ruggieri had paved the way in his earlier translation. The Four Books were often used to teach the Jesuits Chinese. Cf. Mungello, Curious Land, 59; Lundbaek, K. (1979), ‘The First Translation from a Confucian Classic in Europe’. 40 Use of yi ཧ for foreigners (incl. officials) has a long and complex history in China. The compass quadrants had been assigned to siyi ഋཧ (four barbarians). Cf. Chan, H-L. (1968), ‘The “Chinese Barbarian Officials” ’; Chen, Z (2004), ‘From Exclusive Xia to Inclusive Zhu-Xia’; Pu, M. (2005), Enemies of Civilization; Pulleyblank, E. G. (1983), ‘The Chinese and Their Neighbors’, in D. N. Keightley (ed.), The Origins of Chinese Civilization, 411–66. 41 Readers of the Greek NT hear in stoicheia (Lit. elementary principles) the idea of cultural power and worldly systems (cf. Gal. 4.3, 9, Col. 2.8, 20). 42 The ‘Three Great Pillars of Chinese Catholicism’ 㚆ᮉйḡ⸣ (Holy Religion’s Three Pillar-Stones) were Xu Guangqi ᗀ ‫ݹ‬ஃ (1562–1633) from Shanghai, Li Zhizao (1565–1630), who held senior positions (incl. in Nanjing), and Yang Tingyun ὺᔧ㆐ (1557–1627) from Hangzhou. These senior Confucian officials shared Ricci’s interest in science. Xu Guangxi was the most senior, as Minister of Rites (responsible for foreign affairs, culture and education) and a noted agriculturalist. Li Zhizao wrote a treatise requesting the Emperor to invite more missionaries to China, so they could help correct the Chinese calendar (cf. 䃻䆟㾯⌻ᳶ⌅ㅹᴨ⮿, Plea to translate books on Western calendar methods). Heaven in every sense is prominent in their writing, i.e. Yang’s treatise on the consistency of Confucianism with Christianity, Tian shi ming bian ཙ䟻᰾䗘 (Light emitted by Heaven). 43 On this, Engelfriet, P. M. (1998), Euclid in China. 39

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new types of enquiry. Map was replacing myth.44 Ricci entered the fray bearing an orthodox view of the earth as ‘the Lord’s and everyone in it’ (Ps. 24.1). It was a perspective China, travel, and the ‘Scientific Revolution’, would in time question. Chinese cartography emerged in the 5th-century BCE ‘Warring States’ period. The discipline became more sophisticated when Pei Xiu 㼤⿰ (224–71 CE), ‘the father of Chinese cartography’, developed his six ‘Principles’. These drew on the geographical chapter ‘Yu Gong’ ⿩䋒 (Tribute of Lu) in the Shiji, and the work of the Qin cartographer Xiao He 㮝օ (d. 193 BCE). In 1602 Ricci drew his map of the world, Kunyu Wanguo Quantu ඔ䕯㩜഻‫ޘ‬െ (A complete map of the 10,000 countries on earth). The Emperor asked him then to assist with the eight-scroll, five-continent world map, Zhifang Waiji 㚧ᯩཆ㌰ (Record of the world), which Jesuit colleagues Diego de Pantoja (1571–1618), Sabatini de Ursis (1575–1620) and Giulio Aleni (1582–1649) would complete.45 Ricci had studied China carefully. He knew how maps were crafted, closely guarded and interpreted with precision. They were understood to denote a physical space and a socio-political and spiritual resource. When Ricci spoke of ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’, his words were refracted in Ming scientific interest, popular culture, and classical Confucian philosophy and ritual practice. As with tian in the Analects, Ricci’s engagement with ‘earth’, in all its myriad forms, offered an opportunity and a threat to his own and his Chinese interlocutors’ understanding. They shared an awareness of a settled world being shaken by new scientific, religious and philosophical issues. ‘Harmony’ was at a premium in this tense, threatening – to some, exhilarating – new scientific environment. A ‘shaking of the earth’ of biblical proportions occurred finally in 1644,46 when Ming China was overrun by Tartar hordes. The news reached Europe. The event attracted much political, religious and literary comment. The ‘Poet Laureate’ (1668) John Dryden’s (1631–1700), less well-known rival Elkanah Settle (1648–1724) published The Conquest of China by the Tartars in 1675.47 The following year, painter, engraver, and engineer, Henry Winstanley (1644–1703), produced a playing card in London depicting the event (Poole 2012: 148).48 To some in Britain and Europe, the event heralded China’s imperial demise, to others God’s call to expand the China mission. Bruised Confucian China would come face-to-face with a new bullish, increasingly expansionist, Christian Europe. The biblical ‘God of the nations’,49 and the Catholic Church, taught cosmic dominion and justified international exploration.50 The publication of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus in 1687 coincided with interest in China. Dedicated to French ‘Sun King’, Louis XIV (1638–1715) – as a For a recent study of Chinese cartography and its place in early-Modern East-West exchange, Morar, F-S. (2018), ‘Relocating the Qing in the Global History of Science: The Manchu Translation of the 1603 World Map by Li Yingshi and Matteo Ricci’. 45 N.B. published by Yang Tingyun ὺᔧ㆐ (1557–1627), another of the ‘Three Great Pillars of Chinese Catholicism’, in Hangzhou (1623) and revised for publication in Fujian (1626). 46 On heaven and earth being ‘shaken’, Hag. 2.6, Is. 13.13, Heb. 12.26. 47 Settle is a tragi-comedic figure. He is one of the ‘dunces’ in the poet-satirist Alexander Pope’s (1688–1744) The Dunciad (1728). His opera The World in the Moon (1697) has Chinese themes and was inspired by Bp. Francis Godwin’s (1562– 1633) mystical, utopian travelogue The Man in the Moone (posth. 1638). On Settle, Chang, D. (2015), ‘ “History and Truth”: The Conquest of China by the Tartars (1675)’. On Settle and Pope, below p. 117, 156f., 160f., 164f., 168. 48 Winstanley also designed the iconic Eddystone Lighthouse (off the SW coast of Britain). He died there in the ‘Great Storm’ of 1703 during construction. For other reactions to the Tartar conquest, cf. Poole, W. (2012), ‘Heterodoxy and Sinology’, in S. Mortimer and J. Robertson (eds), Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy, 135–54. 49 On Yahweh as ‘Lord of the nations’, Gen. 10.32, Deut. 28.1f., Pss. 2.8, 22.27, 67.1f., Is. 2.1f., 14.26, Jer. 1.5, 18.6f., Zeph. 3.8, Zech. 14.9, Mal. 1.11, Mt. 28.18f. 50 Ricci painted a rose-tinted view of a united Europe in his apologetics. Cf. Zürcher, E. (2000), ‘China and the West: The Image of Europe and its Impact’, in S. Uhalley, Jr. and Wu, X. (eds), Christianity and China, 43–61. 44

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thinly veiled effort to screw money out of him51 – the work promoted the Jesuits’ Asian mission and expertise. Cultural imperatives drew them to China’s Confucian intelligentsia. Comparison of texts and terms was inevitable. Along the way, they coined ‘Confucianism’, with which their mission could be conveniently remembered. Edited by four Jesuits led by the Belgian Philippe Couplet, SJ (1623–93)52 – from Mechelen in the Spanish Netherlands – Confucius Sinarum Philosophus was intended to high-light an ‘inflated difference’ between Christian orthodoxy and Buddhist heterodoxy. Couplet was careful to bring with him an impressive young Mandarin convert, Michael Shen Fuzong/Fu-Tsung ⊸⾿ᇇ (1657–92), when he presented a copy to Louis XIV. Flemish Jesuit Pieter Thomas Van Hamme, SJ (1651–1727), who was present, records that the king had Shen ‘recite loudly in Chinese the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, and the Credo’ (Heyndrickx 1990: 130) and gawped at his use of golden chopsticks. The book’s publication caused a stir across Europe. Catholic King James II (1633–1701) asked to see a copy when visiting Oxford in September 1687.

FIGURE 7: Michael Shen Fuzong/Fu-Tsung ⊸⾿ᇇ (1657–92) by Sir Godrey Kneller (1687). Couplet’s scheme worked. The following year Louis XIV sent six French Jesuits to China as royal mathematicians, to promote science, the French crown and the Christian gospel. 52 On Beethoven and Mechelen, p. 197f. Couplet, a pioneer in European sinology, became a Jesuit in 1640. He was drawn to China by hearing Martino Martini, SJ (1614–61); cf. p. 95, n. 25, 102, 110, 112f., 160. He sailed in 1656 and began churches in Jiangnan (on the lower Yangtze). He then returned to Europe in 1681 to secure papal permission for Chineselanguage liturgies and to persuade the king to send five more ‘mathematicians’ to the imperial Court. Like Trigault before him (Cf. p. 51, n. 11), in 1685 Couplet toured Europe, this time demonstrating missionary success in the form of Shen Fuzong. In addition to Confucius Sinarum Philosophus – which he co-edited with Prospero Intorcetta, SJ (1626–96), Christian Wolfgang Herdtrich, SJ (1625–84) and François de Rougemont, SJ (1624–76) – Couplet’s Tabula chronologica monarchiae sinicae (1686) sought a harmony between the Pentateuch and China’s imperial chronology. Delayed by an administrative row, he sailed for China in 1693, but died at sea off Goa. 51

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Bodleian librarian and orientalist Thomas Hyde (1636–1703) obliged him.53 According to Oxford antiquary Antony (à) Wood (1623–95), after this meeting with ‘the Jesuit convert’ (Shen; N.B. no Chinese Catholic had previously been in Britain) the King commissioned a portrait of ‘the little blinking fellow’ from Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723), which he kept by his bedside (1894: III. 236).54 East-West exchange was kindled by China’s mystique, the intrigue of novelty, and an endless supply of combustible suspicion, faith and personalities. Misunderstanding stoked the fires of passion in rare moments of equanimity.

CONFUCIUS SINARUM PHILOSOPHUS AND THE BIRTH OF EUROPEAN SINOLOGY Confucius Sinarum Philosophus ‘marked a watershed in the history of European knowledge of, and access to, the Chinese philosophical tradition’ (Dew 2009: 205–33). It appeared soon in various versions and translations, including the free-flowing English abridgement, The Morals of Confucius: A Chinese Philosopher (1691). It dispersed ‘infinitely sublime, pure, sensible’ virtues of Confucius ‘drawn from the purest Fountains of Natural Reason’.55 The gauntlet of rationalism was thrown down. Adolf Reichwein claims: ‘1700 was . . . the year of transition in which the affections of the learned world were turned towards China’ ([1925] 2000: 78). In 1702, the Jesuits’ eclectic and influential Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, full of China titbits, began to appear. New information on China was starting to flood the market. In 1769, the doctor, historian, essayist and cartographer, Nicolas-Gabriel Clerc (1726–98) responded to this: ‘From this moment onwards, a clear conviction banished all uncertainty, and everyone was forced to admire a people as old as it was wise, and as pre-eminent in religion as in wisdom’ (Dauterman 1970: 385). Cultural tides began to run China-wards. Before Ricci arrived in Peking, Ruggieri56 had published the first book in Chinese by a European (1584). It was a simple Catechism, with a small section of the Great Learning in Latin. Compared to Ricci’s Tianzhu shiyi, and Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, Ruggieri’s work was short and thin. A decade later, Dominican Juan Cobo, OP (1546–92) translated a late 14th-century text on Chinese philosophy, Myong sim bo-gam (trad. ᰾ᗳሦ䪁, Mingxin baojian), into Spanish.57 Espejo Rico del Claro Coraz (Precious Mirror of the Clear Heart) was already well-known in the Philippines, when it was published in Madrid in 1595. The work – a compendium of (mostly) Daoist and Confucian aphorisms – was presented to the crown-prince, the future Philip III (1578–1621).58 Domingo de

On this, and Hyde’s contact with Shen, Poole, ‘Heterodoxy and Sinology’, 143f. N.B. the conversation between the King and Hyde is reported here. 55 Cf. The Morals of Confucius, 2nd edn ([1691] 1724), ‘Advertisement’. 56 Born in Spinazzola, Italy, Ruggieri gained a doctorate in civil and canon law before joining the Jesuits in 1572. Ordained in 1578, he and a dozen others were sent to Asia. He arrived in Macau (via India) in July 1579. A gifted linguist, Ruggieri played a major role in laying the foundation for European sinology, working with Ricci to produce a Chinese Catechism and Portuguese-Chinese dictionary (1583–88). He returned to Rome in 1588 in order to persuade the Pope to send an Embassy to the Chinese court, but became embroiled in controversy, dying in Salerno in 1607 without returning to China. 57 Some attribute the work to the Daoist scholar Fan Liben ㇴ・ᵜ (n.d.), an early Ming literateur from Wulin. On the text, Blussé, L. and H.T. Zurndorfer eds (1993), Conflict and accommodation in early modern East Asia, 174; Chan, A., SJ (2002), Chinese Books and Documents, I. 137, 180–3; Chan, H. [trans. L.T. Chan] (2003), ‘The First Translation of a Chinese Text into a Western Language’, in H. Chan and L. T. Chan (eds), One Into Many (2003), 67–82; Zhang, X. (2006), [䐏䲿࡙⪚ヷࡠѝ഻] Following the Steps of Matteo Ricci to China, trans. Ding, D. and Ye, J., 150. 58 On Cobo’s work, Chan, A., Chinese Books, I. 137f. 53 54

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Salazar, OP (1512–94), the first Bishop of Manila, commended it to King Philip II (1527–98) in a letter (24 June 1590). The book proved, Salazar said, the power of reason to access truth, and the text’s value to save lost Chinese souls. But it was Couplet and his team who provided Europe with its first substantial view of China’s distinctive social, moral and ritual philosophy.59 This was the authors’ intention – an accessible introduction to Confucianism in its pure, classical form.60 They knew – but were not keen to address – Neo-Confucianism. This came later.61 In addition to lists of Emperors and dates, Confucius Sinarum Philosophus contains a brief life, and book-framed portrait (from the Library of the Imperial Academy) of Confucius, together with an annotated Latin version of three of the Four Books (the Analects, Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean). At the time, all were reckoned to have been written by Confucius. The uniqueness of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus led to its being translated and circulated widely.62 It helped inspire more than a century of ‘Sinophilia’. British and European views on government, morality, political economy, philosophy, religion, fashion, gardens, furniture, crockery and consumables (especially tea), would be affected by chinoiserie and rococo.63 Claiming commonality in Christian-Confucian social and moral teaching – contra Buddhist pagan ritual and Daoist mystical magic – Jesuit commentary developed its own panegyric for ‘the Master’ (cf. Rowbotham 1945: 224–42). In its classical form, Confucianism was said to espouse principles akin to the Old Testament law and ‘Ten Commandments’. Its adherents – particularly the literati the Jesuits knew and admired – were thoughtful, refined and morally righteous – albeit in Christianity truth challenged their rationalistic cosmology and atheistic philosophy (Brook and Blue 1999: 62). The ‘Preface’ to Confucius Sinarum Philosophus is always worth quoting for its tone and optimism: ‘One might say that the moral system of this philosopher is infinitely sublime, but that it is at the same time simple, sensible and drawn from the purest sources of natural reason . . . Never has Reason, deprived of Divine Revelation, appeared so well developed nor with so much power’ (q. Hobson 2004: 194).64 As we will see, Enlightenment rationalism found here a fruitful source of exotic justification. Many contributed to Europe’s nascent knowledge of China. In 1642 the Portuguese missionary Álvaro Semedo, SJ (1585–1658), published his Imperio de la China. The work built on that of Pereira, da Cruz, Escalante, Rada and Mendoza.65 A decade later, Martino Martini, SJ, produced De Bello Tartarico (1654), Novus Atlas Sinensis (1655), and Sinicae Historiae Decas Prima (1658), which Van Kley describes as, ‘the first systematic account of ancient Chinese history’ (1971: 359). In 1662, Prospero Intorcetta, SJ, introduced Confucius Sinarum Philosophus and published notes on the Four Books by Portuguese Vice-Provincial, Inácio da Costa, SJ (1603–66).66 Intorcetta was

Cf. Mungello, Curious Land, 257f., on the evolution and production of this volume. Cf. Mungello, 247–99; —(1983), ‘The First Complete Translation of the Four Books in the West’, 515–41; Meynard, T., SJ, ed. (2011), The Confucius Sinarum Philosophus: The First Translation of the Confucian Classics. 61 N.B. Lundbaek, K. (1983), ‘The Image of Neo-Confucianism in Confucius Sinarum Philosophus’. 62 Cf. the French version, La Morale de Confucius, Philosophe de la China, trans. J. de la Brune [some say Louis Cousin] (1688). In addition to the abridged version of 1691, further English edns. appeared (1718, 1729 and 1780). On this, Von Collani, C. (1990), ‘Couplet’s Missionary Attitude Towards the Chinese’, in J. Heyndrickx (ed.), Philip Couplet, 37–54. 63 The 1691 English version tried to harmonize Chinese chronology and the Septuagint. On E-W dates and dating, p. 110, 111f., 123, n. 170. 64 Cf. also, Hobson, J. M. (2006), ‘Revealing the cosmopolitan side of Oriental Europe: the eastern origins of European civilisation’, in G. Delanty (ed.), Europe and Asia, 107–19. 65 Cf. above p. 94, 104, 108. 66 Cf. Sapientia Sinica Ta-Hsu ¯eh (Great Learning), trans. Inácio da Costa (Jianjiangfu: Jiangsi Province, 1662). On early Jesuit apologetics and translations, Marinescu, J. M. N. (2008), ‘Defending Christianity in China’. 59 60

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trained by another Portuguese missionary, Gaspar Ferreira, SJ (1571–1649), author of a PortugueseChinese dictionary. Da Costa’s work formed part of what was effectively a ‘crash course’ in Chinese and the Classics the Jesuits introduced when facing personnel shortages in the early years of the China mission (Brockey 2007: 279; App 2012: 145f.). In 1667 Intorcetta published a larger version for his European audience, Sinarum scientia politico-moralis. These were followed by Gabriel de Magalhaes’, SJ (1610–77), Nouvelle Relation de la Chine (posth. 1688) and Kircher’s China Monumentis, qua sacris qua profanes (1667), better known as China Illustrata, a big book, written without his ever having visited China. Of all the works on China from the mid-17th century, those by the short-lived – and now highly regarded – Dutch philosophical geographer Bernhard Varen (1622–50), Descriptio regni Iaponiae (1649) and Geographia Generalis (1650), were justly deserving of attention. The earth was being comprehended and encompassed – and thereby unified – not just by maps and explorers, but by texts, translations and cross-fertilized ideas. Like Dryden’s ‘A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day’, Confucius Sinarum Philosophus speaks of ‘harmony’ as Heaven’s gift and humanity’s highest goal. ‘Harmony’ ઼䄗 (hexie) stands beside ren (humaneness) and li (ritual) in the Analects, and, as an ideal, in The Book of Odes, Book of History and Book of Changes.67 ‘Grand harmony’ ཚ઼ (taihe) – the coherence of everything in the Way – consummates all good.68 In this, Confucius Sinarum Philosophus introduced a new view of ‘harmony’ into the universe of European readers. It laid down in new ways ‘Reason’s’ challenge to Christian confidence in divine revelation and a biblical view of heaven and earth. As we will see in Chapter 4, 18thcentury Britain and Europe were culturally and intellectually predisposed to the perspective Confucianism would bring. A revolution in science, philosophy and cosmology had already begun, which Confucianism would expedite. Illuminati in Britain and Europe would be bedazzled by China’s ethics and education, its laws and governance, and a social philosophy that controlled a vast land mass and population.69 The Jesuit historian Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, SJ (1674–1743), editor of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (1711–43), and author of Description de la Chine (1735), called it ‘the most remarkable of all countries yet known’ ([1735] 1738: IV. 1).70 To some in the West, China’s allure was its antiquity and its novelty, to others, as we will see later, it demonstrated human prowess and achievement without reference to God – certainly not one who reigned in heaven and was incarnate in Jesus. If rose-coloured flavours distort taste and sweeten digestion, this is true of Britain and Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Western sinophilia and East-West interaction created what Chinese literary scholar Qian Zhongshu (1910–98) dubbed ‘striking connections’ (datong ᢃ䙊) (Egan 1998: 15–22).71 The world was shrinking and, with it, came growing awareness of local and international benefits of inter-cultural exchange. China had much

Cf. ઼ he (harmony) in A. 13.23, where the application is moral and personal. On the debate in contemporary Chinese political discourse about the legitimacy of calling he ‘Confucian’ (as in hexie shehui, ‘the harmonious society’), Ji, Z. (2015), ‘Secularization without Secularism’, in T. T. T. Ngo and J. B. Quijada (eds), Atheist Secularism and its Discontents, 92–111 (esp. 98f.). 68 On ‘harmony’ (hexie) in Confucianism, Li, C. (2014), The Confucian Philosophy of Harmony; and, on its application to music, theology and language in China, Ng, D. T. W. (2017), ‘The Sinicization of Sacred Music’, in Zheng, Y. (ed.), Sinicizing Christianity, 261–289 (esp. 284 n. 92, which cites Zheng, H. [1999], ‘A New Criterion of Translation: The Theory of Harmony’). 69 It is estimated China’s population at the time was c. 150m, France’s nearer 20m. 70 Du Halde’s famous Description de la Chine draws on various sources, incl. the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses. 71 N.B. repetition of this expression in Qian, Z. (2014), Patchwork: Seven Essays on Art and Literature. 67

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to give, the West much to both give and receive. But the present wasn’t gift-wrapped. It came inscribed in strange script and invisibly entangled with a filigree of multi-generational, cultural, intellectual, and ‘spiritual’, expectation and baggage.

BRITAIN, CHINA AND THE QUEST FOR ‘HARMONY’ To prepare for textual analysis of ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ in the Analects and Gospels in the last section of this chapter, I want to focus on perception and reception of China and Confucian thought in 17th- and early 18th-century Britain. There is a wide range of material here. It is risky to condense. This is the context for Dryden’s ‘A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687’. As noted above, ‘harmony’ is a central feature of his poem. We return to Dryden later, for now, we turn to the world – and its perception of heaven and earth – that he inhabited. We registered earlier English versions of Marco Polo and Rustichello’s Book of the Marvels of the World (trans. Frampton, 1503), Euclid’s Elements (trans. Billingsley, 1570), da Cruz and Rada’s version of Pereira’s journeys (trans. Willis, 1577), Rada and Mendoza’s Historia de las cosas más notables (trans. Parke, 1588) and the parts of the Ricci-Trigault Journal in Hakluytus Posthumus (ed. and trans. Purchas, 1625). To these, we should now add a mixture of other literature that reflects an awakening British interest in China, and its Confucian culture and philosophy, as well as geographic, scientific and historical material that casts new light on a literal, biblical perspective on ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’. Though of greater interest to radicals and intellectuals, the (sometimes dreadfilled) mystique of the Orient had widespread appeal.72 To see nuance and significance in the ‘harmony’ of Dryden’s ‘A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day’, we must cast the net wide. Material falls into a number of categories. First, as glimpsed already, British minds were entranced by exploration of the scope, culture/s and history of the earth, and scientific re-categorizing of ‘heaven’ and the cosmos. To historians, China’s role in invigorating Western philosophy and science is as pivotal as Ricci and his colleagues’ contribution to China’s technical and scientific development. Dryden’s poem73 was directly contemporary with Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687) and provides an analogue to the competing claims of art, science, music, poetry, astrology, cosmology and theology in the 17th and 18th centuries. As if to symbolize this convergence, on 5 July of the same year Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1726/7) published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Newton’s groundbreaking work formulated ‘laws’ of universal gravitation and mechanics, and projected the speed of light. In Britain and Europe (as in China), reason read ‘laws of motion’ in humanity’s political, social, ethical and ‘natural life’. As the French physicist Alexis Clairaut (1713–65) wrote of Newton’s ‘famous’ work, it ‘marked an epoch in the great revolution in Physics’. And, he adds: ‘The method its illustrious author has used to show the cause of things, has shed the light of mathematics on a science hitherto in shadowy conjecture and hypothesis’ ([1745] 1749: 329). Later opinion concurs. As George E. Smith states: ‘No work was more seminal in the development of modern physics and astronomy than Newton’s Principia’ (2007: online). Though viewed today through Albert Einstein’s

On the symbolic – and actual – commercial, political and intellectual power of the London lawyer John Selden’s (1584– 1654) map of China (deposited in the Bodleian Library in 1659) to ‘translate’ China to London (and Oxford) and encapsulate Asia’s multi-faceted role in ‘a world of densely networked information’, Batchelor, R. K. (2014), London: The Selden Map. 73 In the Church calendar St. Cecilia’s Day is 22 November. 72

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(1879–1955) theory of gravity (in the ‘general theory of relativity’, 1916), ‘no work of science has drawn more attention from philosophers’ (ibid.). Newton’s theological opinions have been much debated. His sense of an ordering ‘higher power’, that provided stability and harmony to the cosmos and thence civic life, is clear.74 To Newton and others, there was no necessary mismatch of faith and science. Classical Confucianism appeared to reinforce this position. It is against this revolutionary background that the ‘modern’ mind of Dryden, and his intellectual peers, formulated their view of China and the world.75 Newton introduced a new chapter in the ‘history of science’. Heaven and earth, once (in-)credible elements in an all-powerful creator’s visible and invisible creation, become key components of a logically – and empirically – constrained universe. Once seen through a literalist reading of the Bible and an interventionist view of God as creator and redeemer, heaven and earth are now accountable to the dictates of reason and science. The origin and age of the world, its languages, tribes and cultures, are no longer reserved to faith and piety. Now philosophers, historians, scientists, political theorists, artists and radical theologians, can lay claim to them, and, to their view of God, God’s relation to the world, and Jesus’s life, death, miracles, mores and view of man.76 In this maelstrom of science, geography, history and religion, Confucian cosmology offered new options. Yongjin Zhang is absolutely right: Confucius becomes ‘patron saint of [the] eighteenth-century Enlightenment’ (2017: 209). We should note in passing that, like Ricci and Ruggieri, Newton was conscious of his indebtedness to others. Though he accepted the biblical account of a creator, who imparted beauty, order and integrity to the cosmos, he owed much to the Cambridge philosopher Henry More (1614–87). More’s rationalist view of life and the universe afforded him an invaluable perspective on the dualism of French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650). However, in his early moderate Anglicanism and later ‘deistic’ sympathies, he was inclined to follow the mechanical philosophy of the chemist and physicist, Robert Boyle, FRS (1627–91). Boyle provided a basis to refute the reductionism of progressive pantheists, as well as the religious ‘enthusiasm’ and mysticism that were popular among his contemporaries.77 Newton gives mathematical form to the laws of elliptical planetary motion in a heliocentric universe, that the German astronomer, mathematician and astrologer, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), had framed empirically in his Astronomia nova (1609) and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae (1617–21). Kepler’s ‘celestial physics’ drew on the philosophy of Aristotle’s De Coelo et Mundi (On Heaven and Earth, c. 350 BCE), the new observations of Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), a Danish astronomer-aristocrat, and the calibration of projectiles in Italian polymath Galileo Galilei’s (1564–1642) study Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632, Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems), which once-friendly

74 On the relation between Newton’s theology, science and politics, Jacob, M. C. (1976), The Newtonians and the English Revolution: 1689–1720. 75 On the importance of sinology to the nascent Royal Society in Britain, Poole, W. (2012), ‘Heterodoxy and Sinology’, in S. Mortimer and J. Robertson (eds), The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy, 1600–1750, 135–54 (esp. 143). 76 Cf. Blue, G. (1999), ‘China and Western social thought in the modern period’, in T. Brook and G. Blue (eds), China and Historical Capitalism, 57–109 (esp. 62f.). 77 On Newton’s views on science and faith, Christianson, G. E. (1996), Isaac Newton and the Scientific Revolution; Force, J. E. and R. H. Popkin, eds (1999), Newton and Religion; Pfizenmaier, T. C. (1997), ‘Was Isaac Newton an Arian?’; Thayer, H. S. ed. (2005), Newton’s Philosophy of Nature; Webb, R. K. (1996), ‘The emergence of Rational Dissent’, in K. Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion, 12–41; Westfall, R. S. ([1964] 1973), Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England; —(1983), Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton; —(2015), The Life of Isaac Newton.

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Jesuits now saw as a slur on Pope Urban VIII (1568–1644). Though Newton’s Optiks (1704), work on colour, and development of the reflecting telescope, are unique, it is acknowledged now that he and the German polymath, Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz (1646–1716),78 must share the credit for independent work on ‘Calculus’. Following Hooke, Newton’s ‘Mechanics’ was a powerful British antidote to the work of the ‘father of Western philosophy’, René Descartes. Newton also owed much to the philosopher, scientist and statesman, Francis Bacon (1561– 1624),79 whose study of scientific, empirical method, Novum Organum Scientiarum (1620, 1645)80 links new logic with devout reason (contra dull superstition). If Principia gave scientific depth to temporal reality, Bacon added breadth to cultural perception. His three-volume Essays (1597, 1612, 1625) repositioned language and knowledge, with The Advancement and Proficience of Learning, Divine and Human (1605)81 identifying the language and characters of Chinese as perfect, primeval, conveyors of ‘Things or Notions’. New Atlantis (1627), on the other hand (now an icon of political science), imagined a Utopia. Interaction between Boyle and the Mandarin convert82 Michael Shen Fuzong on Chinese and science serves to confirm the breadth of academic interest in China at the time. Though some members of the Royal Society – i.e. Francis Lodwick (1619–94), John Wilkins (1614–72) and Isaac Vossius (1618–89)83 – viewed China’s culture, science, language, history, medicine, morality and philosophy with doe-eyed delight, others were more doubtful, dismissing them dispassionately as intellectually humdrum or exotically ‘fantastic’.84 Truth, faith, language and government are interrelated in this new Newtonian and Baconian world.85 Confucius, China, and Chinese language, become dialogue-partners on almost all things heavenly and earthly. The Copernican Bishop, Francis Godwin (1562–1633), thus ends his mythic journey, The Man in the Moone (1638) in the land of perfect communication, China.86 In contrast to the confidence the Dutch ‘Golden Age’ artist, Frans Hals (1582–1666) gave (purportedly)87 to Descartes’s face, Sir Godfrey Kneller’s portrait of Newton – painted two years Though a ‘rationalist’, Leibniz was ridiculed by his peers – especially Descartes, Voltaire and Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) – for believing the universe to be the best reality God could create. On Newton’s friend and disciple, Samuel Clarke’s (1675– 1729) correspondence with Leibniz about divine intervention, Alexander, H. G. ed. (1956), The Leibniz-Clarke correspondence. Cf. on Descartes, p. 140f.; Voltaire, p. 149f.; and, Spinoza, p. 122f, 138, n. 28, 138, 141f. 79 On Bacon, Cantor, N. F. and P. L. Klein (1969), Seventeenth-Century Rationalism. 80 The work was published in 2 parts (in England and Holland) in 1620, 1645 and 1676. 81 Published in London in 1605, the work inspired the taxonomy of French Encyclopédistes (cf. p. 133, 138, n. 28, 149f., 151f., 222f.). 82 Boyle gave the Bodleian Library a Chinese Almanac in 1671. While in Oxford, Shen catalogued the Library’s Chinese holdings. On Bacon and Shen, Poole, ‘Heterodoxy and Sinology’, 143f. 83 Cf. Poole, W. (2017), John Wilkins (1614–1672). Wilkins famously included a Chinese version of the Lord’s Prayer in his Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668). Cf. also Isaac Vossius’s De artibus & scientiis Sinarum, in Variarum Observationum Liber (1685), where Chinese inventions and discoveries are lauded without reserve. Vossius was also drawn to Chinese medicine (esp. acupuncture); cf. Lu, G-D. and J. Needham, eds ([1980] 2002 repr.), Celestial Lancets, 286. On interest in Chinese script, Kern, R. (1996), Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem, 12f. 84 On Lodwick’s (self-aware) heterodoxy, Poole, W. (2004a), ‘A Rare Early-Modern Utopia: Francis Lodwick’s A Country Not Named (c. 1675)’; —(2005), ‘The Genesis Narrative in the Circle of Robert Hooke and Francis Lodwick’, in A. Hessayon and N. Keene (eds), Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, 41–57; —(2005b), ‘Francis Lodwick’s Creation: Theology and Natural Philosophy in the Early Royal Society’. 85 On the Chinese dimension to this, Mungello, Curious Land, 183f.; also, Almond, P. C. (1999), Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought. 86 Cf. on the date of this work (perhaps as early as 1620), Butler, J. A. ed. (1995), The Man in the Moon, 14f. The work appears to have influenced Wilkins’s, The discovery of a world in the Moone (1638). On Wilkins, p. 109f. 87 On Hals’s portrait and an exposition of Descartes’s thought, Nadler, S. (2013), The Philosopher, the Priest and the Painter. 78

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after Confucius Sinarum Philosophus – depicts him with wild hair and a distracted expression. The painting captures, perhaps, the ambivalence of many in Britain to this new revolution; albeit, now in science and discovery, and not, as recently, in religion and politics. But, light from this era still shines. Few would doubt we read the Analects and Gospels in China and the West in light of the ground-breaking (and earth-shrinking) labours of Bacon, Newton and their contemporaries. The ‘Scientific Revolution’ and the history of science – like cultural ‘Classics’88 – still unite, and inspire, our ‘One (now, post-Modern) World’. The timing and content of Dryden’s poem ‘A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day’ underline the social foment of his age. He wrote in a society experiencing dramatic political, scientific and religious disruption. This is the second theme to register. A year after Dryden’s poem, Newton’s Principia, and Confucius Sinarum Philosophus appeared, the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ (1688) in Britain saw Catholic King James II (1633–1701; r. 1685–88) ousted, and a dual monarchy – his Protestant daughter, Mary (1662–94), and her Dutch husband (and cousin), the stadtholder, William of Orange (1650–1702) – established. Nine bishops and 400 ‘Nonjuring’ clergy refused to rescind their ordination oath to James II. The schism lasted to their deaths. Groups of ‘dissenting’ Protestants (viz. Puritans, Levellers and Quakers), who had broken away from the Church of England before, or during, the mid-17th-century ‘English Revolution’, were accorded new freedoms by a royal ‘Act of Toleration’ (1688). For three years prior to this, Britain saw another influx of Huguenots, fleeing the repressive ‘Edict of Fontainebleau’ (1685).89 Dryden’s earth was far from harmonious. Church, society, and – it must have appeared to some – science, were at odds. This may explain ‘harmony’s’ prominence in his poem to St. Cecilia. It may also suggest why many at the time were so keen to find new models for government, society and the universe. If the biblical heirs of Protestant Puritanism in Britain shared the dream of a trans-Atlantic Utopia, an eclectic company trailed after the free-thinking ‘Cambridge Platonists’.90 They, too, found inspiration in Confucius and the Orient. They quarried new textual mines for new ideas on government and society, God and harmony. China fed progressive minds. But we also find intriguing popular undercurrents and powerful counter-narratives. Not all accounts of China are positive. To Puritan and puritanical minds China held dark mysteries. The republican poet, John Milton’s (1608–74), mythical masterpiece Paradise Lost (1664, 1667) describes Satan, ‘the Fiend’, returning to earth via the ‘barren Plaines’ of ‘Sericana’ (i.e. China’s Goby Desert): where Chineses drive With Sails and Wind thir canie Waggons light: So on this windie Sea of Land, the Fiend

88 On the idea and importance of cultural ‘Classics’, p. 6, 35, 69, 107, 119, 147, 183, 209, 225f., 281, 283, 286, 294, 329f., 332, n. 327, 358, 425, n. 99, 430, 443. 89 It’s calculated this reduced French Protestants from c. 800,000 to c. 1500. 90 ‘Cambridge Platonism’ is a 19th century description of mid-17th century theologians and philosophers, who elevated reason (‘the candle of the Lord’) over revelation. Rejecting Puritan ‘anti-rationalism’ and the dichotomous materialism of the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the broad-minded Cambridge Platonists anticipated the 18thcentury Latitudinarian ‘Deists’ (cf. p. 114f., 126). Some of the Cambridge Platonists were fascinated with China, esp. Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83), Henry More (1614–87), Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–51), Anne, Viscountess Conway (1631–79), Joseph Glanvill (1636–80), Damaris Cudworth Masham (1659–1708) and John Norris (1657–1711). Cf. Patrides, C. A. (1980), The Cambridge Platonists.

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Walk’d up and down alone bent on his prey, Alone, for other Creature in this place. Living or liveless to be found was none. —1667: Bk. 3, I. 438–4391 In addition to tales from Marco Polo, Pereira, da Cruz, Rada and Mendoza, British interests – already piqued by the Elizabethan explorations of Sir Francis Drake (c. 1540–96) and Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618) – were drawn to information from the Dutch traveller Johann Nieuhof (1618–72), whose trip to China from 1655 to 1657 was reported in An Embassy from the EastIndia Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand Tartar Cham, Emperour of China (trans. John Ogilby, 1659).92 The work drew on the Ricci-Trigault Journal and praised the ‘morall Philosophie’ of Confucius. Nieuhof saw China as a land ‘administered by the Order of the Learned’, while Confucianism ‘taught Rules Oeconomical and Political, as well as the way to Live well and Govern well’ (Nieuhof: 163). If Newton’s work re-framed thinking on heaven, Nieuhof opened new vistas on the nature and government of earth. An early advocate of Confucianism in Britain was Sir William Temple (1628–99),93 British Ambassador to The Hague (1668–71) during the tumultuous ‘Restoration’ monarchy of Charles II (1630–85; r. 1660–85). Temple cites Nieuhof. He also praises Confucianism’s morality and its pragmatic approach to government. He lauds the mental courage, cultural respect and accurate annals of the Jesuit missionaries. He publishes a work on the beautiful – that is, moral and harmonious – asymmetry (Japanese sharawadgi) of Chinese gardens.94 His essay ‘On Heroic Virtue’ ([1690] 1814: 313–405) heralded the publication of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus and its account of Confucius as a learned sage (more than as a religious leader). To Temple, Confucianism offered an unsullied, practical, social philosophy, not the sordid form of priest-craft or useless metaphysics he knew all too well. Confucius would provide a powerful response to Puritan petulance and vapid Caroline flamboyance.95 British illuminati saw in him a respectably ancient, but relevantly modern, worldly wisdom.96 As van Gogh and Impressionism believed, there broke a new, hope-filled dawn from the East.

The fact Milton was aware Chinese used wind-blown craft to cross the Gobi Desert is a reminder not everything learned about China was new. On Milton, China and early modern globalization, Lu, M. (2016), The Chinese Impact Upon English Renaissance Literature, esp. 103–40. See further on Milton, p. 155f. 92 N.B. the full title: An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand Tartar Cham, emperor of China: delivered by their excellencies Peter de Goyer and Jacob de Keyzer, at his imperial city of Peking wherein the cities, towns, villages, ports, rivers, &c. in their passages from Canton to Peking are ingeniously described by John Nieuhoff; Englished and set forth with their several sculptures by John Ogilby. On Nieuhof, Sun, J. (2013), ‘The Illusion of Verisimilitude: Johan Nieuhof ’s Images of China’. 93 Cf. Bp. Gilbert Burnet’s (1643–1715) illuminating comment, ‘He [Temple] was a great admirer of the sect of Confucius in China, who were atheists themselves, but left religion to the rabble’ ([1683] 1833: I. 62). Cf. also, Fan, C. (1998), ‘The Beginnings of the Influence of Chinese Culture in England’, in A. Hsia (ed.), The Vision of China, 69–86; Woodbridge, H. E. (1940), Sir William Temple; Courtenay, T. P. ed. (1836), The Life, Works and Correspondence of Sir William Temple, Bt. (review in Fraser’s Magazine XV [1837], 400f.). 94 Cf. Temple, Sir W., Bt. (1690a), ‘Upon the Garden of Epicurus; or, Of Gardening, in the Year 1685’, in Miscellanea: By a Person of Honour. On sharawadgi, p. 161f., 199, 207. 95 On the socio-political context of Temple’s advocacy of Confucianism, Jenkinson, M. (2010), Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 228f. 96 On Temple, Chinese patriarchy and Confucius, Batchelor, London, 218f. 91

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Fifty years ahead of continental philosophes, Temple was ‘the first English political writer to hold up the Chinese system of government as a model’ (Woodbridge 1940: 276). Confucius’s influence extends beyond Britain. It is evident in the popular polemic of another political refugee (from Ireland), Temple’s former devotee and employee, the harsh, clerical satirist, Jonathan Swift (1667– 1745). Swift’s allegory Gulliver’s Travels ([1726] 1735)97 reiterates Temple’s praise of China’s (Lilliput-style) ‘native genius’ for virtue and learning. ‘[T]he two hinges of all government, reward and punishment’ are, he says, ‘nowhere turned with greater care, nor exercised with more bounty or severity’ (ibid., 120f.). Swift and Temple united in admiration of Confucius’s use of reason and ‘design of reclaiming men from the useless and endless speculations of nature, to those of morality’ (ibid., 46).98 As Temple stated: ‘[N]o people can be happy but under good governments, and no governments happy but over good men’ (ibid., 114). To those in Britain fearful of regicide and/or religious extremism, Confucius offered a fair, balanced path to political harmony and public morality. Biblical and political conservatives rejected this as subversive idealism and mythic fantasy.99 The philologist William Wotton (1666–1727) derided Confucius Sinarum Philosophus and denounced Temple’s 1690 panegyric on the wisdom of the ‘ancients’ (ibid., 21–4, 164–96) as, ‘an incoherent Rhapsody of moral Sayings’ (1694: 144f.).100 Confucius’s moral ‘mean’ and vision of cosmic ‘harmony’ did not satisfy everyone’s socio-political aspirations or perceived sense of need. But taste and needs would change. Nascent British sinology is evident, thirdly, in the acquisition and edition of Chinese texts. The London-based Dutch merchant and linguist, Francis Lodwick, who (despite little formal education) became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1679, had Chinese texts from the 1650s. Another, rather obscure Fellow of the Royal Society was Nathaniel Vincent (d. 1722), a Chaplain to Charles II, who recounts Lodwick showing his Chinese materials to his friends Robert Hooke and John Wilkins. It seems they thought of translating Confucius. To Hooke and Wilkins’s dismay, Lodwick’s texts were burned in the ‘Great Fire’ of London (1667). In 1674, Vincent published a sermon mentioning Confucius, and, in 1685, produced (prob.) the first translation of the Great Learning in English (Jenkinson 2006: 35–47). Two years prior to the publication of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, Hooke lectured on the Chinese abacus, and, a year before, began to study ‘Chinese Characters’. For historical, philosophical and linguistic reasons, he disputed Couplet’s opinion that Chinese had remained unchanged in form and pronunciation (Mortimer and Robertson 2012: 151f.).101 Another London-based, Dutch merchant (with broad, literary interests) was the flamboyant lawyer James Boevey (1622–96), ‘Mr Positive’.102 The bibliophile Boevey had a stack of papers on philosophy and a (now lost) ‘Life of Cum-fu-zu’, which he and Lodwick’s friend, the antiquarian, natural

The provocative, politically alert, contemporary dramatist, John Gay (1685–1732) wrote of Gulliver’s Travels in a letter to Swift (1726): ‘It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery’ (q. Fox 1995: 21). 98 Swift also supports this principle in his The Battle of the Books (1704). Temple was criticized for implying ‘the moderns were not superior to the ancients’ (Marburg 1932: 26). 99 Cf. Stone, D. (2011), ‘Swift, Temple, Defoe, and the Jesuits’. 100 Cf. Mortimer and Robertson, Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy, 144f. 101 N.B. Aristotelian historical method here and its consistency with Hooke’s respect for (and disagreement with) his mentor Wilkins. On Chinese as the ‘primitive language’, p. 110f. 102 This is the diarist Samuel Pepys’s (1633–1703) delightful (if harsh!) summary of the loquacious Boevey after dining with him (Latham and Matthews 1971: 206). The Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, has a copy of a text by Confucius (# 2452). 97

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philosopher and biographer, John Aubrey (1626–97), hoped the Royal Society Library would house.103 They were, it seems, disappointed, but British sinology would still flourish.104 As we have begun to see, nascent British sinophilia incorporated an eclectic range of interests in China’s language, philosophy, history and culture: three impact our theme here. First, China and Chinese offered new options to those fascinated by the complex historical, philological and, for many, theological and biblical issue of a ‘perfect’ world and language. As we saw, Godwin’s influential work The Man in the Moone (1638) ends in China, where he believed communication to be perfect.105 Godwin is behind Wilkins’s The discovery of a world in the Moone (1638), the French dramatist Cyrano de Bergerac’s (1619–55) paradisal study L’Autre Monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune (1657 posth., The comical history of the states and empires of the Moon) and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The opening of China aroused interest in the mystic, astral conjunction of harmony, heaven, music, truth and language. Cyrano’s work is set in heaven: there Adamic language is a musically perfect form of harmony. Like Dryden in ‘A Song to St. Cecilia’s Day’, Cyrano sees music as a model for harmony in, and between, heaven and earth. Ideas have the power to fuse cultural horizons. The 17th-century quest for the original or ‘perfect’ language106 can be traced from the unitive gift of speech at Pentecost (Acts 2.1–41), through classical scholastic interpretation of language, faith and reason in Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) and the poet Dante Alighieri’s (c. 1261–1321) defence of vernacular in Il Convivio (ca 1304–7), which Renaissance humanism and Protestant Reformers adopted to justify use of simple speech and notation. Disagreement persisted. Many (pace Dante) viewed classical, academic, ecclesiastical Latin as the perfect language, full of noble stability, virtuous form, intellectual capacity, grammatical proportion and thence inner ‘harmony’. Debate intensified. The quest for an aboriginal lingua natura that Adam spoke, and Babel lost (Gen 11.1–9), found inspiration from cultural exploration and linguistic analysis (Perriah 2014: 19f.).107 In a newly discovered – let alone redated – world, Chinese could contend historically and philologically as the aboriginal language.108 103 The oriental interest and impact of the ‘Hooke Circle’ was considerable. In addition to merchant-linguist Lodwick and antiquary Aubrey, Hooke’s conversation-partners included Administrator of the Royal Society Abraham Hill (1633–72), astronomer Edmond Halley (1656–1742), bookseller John Houghton (1645–1705), and translators (and brothers-in-law) Alexander Pitfield (1659–1728) and Richard Waller (c. 1660–1715). Hooke’s diaries show him reading Confucius Sinarum Philosophus on 17 December 1689. The account of the French Jesuit Guy Tachard’s, SJ (1651–1712), two voyages to Siam (on behalf of Louis XIV) in 1685 and 1687, his compatriot Simon de la Loubère’s (1642–1729) report of his Embassy to China (1687), Hooke and Lodwick’s translation of first Russian Ambassador Fyodor Baikov’s (c. 1612–c. 1663) Embassy to China (1656), and Martini’s Sinicae Historia Decas Prima (1658), all enhanced the ‘Hooke Circle’s’ desire to re-examine biblical universality and to consider the disruptive implications of Chinese chronology for traditional views of the antiquity, authority, priority and historicity of Genesis. Cf. further p. 100, n. 52, 102, n. 63, 111f., 123, n. 170, 137, 156, n. 138, 222. 104 On the part played by the Royal Society in the development of porcelain, p. 105f., 109f., 130. 105 On the work’s date (?1620), Butler, J. A. ed. (1995), The Man in the Moon, 14f. 106 The Majorcan philosopher, and 3rd Order Franciscan, Raymond Lull (c. 1232–1315), first conceived of a ‘perfect language’ (alongside other early work on computation) in his lively presentations on the ‘art’ of finding (Christian) truth (in the face of the Moorish Saracens), Art Abreujada d’Atrobar Veritat (1290, The abbreviated art of finding truth) and later in Ars generalis ultima or Ars magna (1305, The ultimate general art). On the issue of a ‘perfect language’, Eco, U. ([1993] 1995), The Search for the Perfect language; Perreiah, A. R. (2014), Renaissance Truths. 107 On Confucianism’s broad appeal to a range of political opinions in England, Wee, C. J. W. (2003), Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern, 214. 108 N.B. in 1659, a year after Martini’s Decas sinicae historiae, Vossius claimed China’s historiography was better than the Bible, and the Noahic flood not universal. Vossius was influenced by Isaac La Peyrère’s (1596–1676) 1655 claim that the Chinese were a pre-Adamite race. On this debate, Guy, B. (1963), The French image of China before and after Voltaire, 109–12; Morrow, J. L. (2016), Three Skeptics and the Bible: La Peyrère, Hobbes, Spinoza; Popkin, R. H. ed. (1987), Isaac La Peyrère; Sæbø, M. ed. (2008), Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, II. 817–23.

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Following Godwin, Wilkins proposed an original, universal language in his essay, ‘Mercury: or, The Secret and Swift Messenger’ (1641). He modified this in An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668). His first essay claimed Chinese to be the ideal, celestial, non-verbal language, stating, almost twenty years before Dryden’s ‘A Song to St. Cecilia’s Day’: ‘The utterance of these Musicall tunes, may well serve for the universall language, and the writing of them for the universal Character. As all Nations do agree in the same conceit of things, so likewise in the same conceit of Harmonies’ (Wilkins 1641: 144). Wilkins was not alone in seeing Chinese as a form of symbolic communication, like music.109 His sometime colleague, Scottish philosopher George Dalgarno (c. 1626–87), went a stage further in a series of practical, philosophical studies on the relation between words, ‘signs’, ‘representation’,110 and communication, creating a sign-language for the deaf. In both, we see the spirit of Baconian empiricism: ‘If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties’ (2008: 38). ‘Harmony’ was of interest, then, to British writers for a variety of reasons, with new doubt-filled reason more congenial to many than the old shibboleths of religious certainty. The claim for Chinese as the perfect, primeval language is most fully developed at the time by John Webb (1611–72), a layman from Butleigh, Somerset. Webb’s monograph, An historical essay endeavouring a probability that the language of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language (1669),111 siphons fascination provoked by maps of newly discovered countries, reports of civilizations with ancient chronologies (Chaldean, Phoenician, Egyptian, West and East Indian, American and Chinese), and a growing readiness to doubt, or defend, the data and dating of the Bible. This is our second theme. In 1650, the royalist Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, James Ussher (1581–1656), when exiled in England, published his now infamous112 Annales Veteris Testamenti, e prima mundi origine deducti (Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world), and a supplement, Annalium pars posterior in 1654.113 Dating the world from the Bible was a respectable topic. John Lightfoot (1602–75), a Hebrew scholar and ViceChancellor of Cambridge University, had published a similar work (1642–44). Ussher, using the (Latin) Vulgate, dated the world to the night before Sunday, 23 October 4004 BCE (Julian calendar). Lightfoot proposed the autumnal equinox 3929 BCE. Before we dismiss this as bizarre, it is well to remember that Bede argued for 3952, Kepler for 3992 and Newton for c. 4000 BCE. Thoughtful Bible readers – fed on new Renaissance historiography – now found the historicity of Genesis 1 and 2 to be of theological, historical and scientific interest. Ussher did not write to defend, but to celebrate God’s creation in Genesis.114 To those, like him, predisposed to date the Old Testament,

This did not transfer into comparable enthusiasm for Chinese music, which some British contemporaries saw as a sign of China’s cultural decay! 110 Dalgarno’s Ars Signorum (1661, Art of Signs) and The Deaf and Dumb Man’s Tutor (1680) took issue with Hobbes and Descartes. On this, Maat, J. (2004), Philosophical Languages in the Seventeenth Century, 66f.; also, Cram, D. and J. Maat, eds (2001), George Dalgarno on Universal Language. 111 On Webb, Mungello, Curious Land, 178f.; also, Chen, S. (1998), ‘John Webb’, in Hsia (ed.), Vision of China, 87–116. 112 The cynical American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) echoes ridicule of Ussher’s work as ‘a symbol of ancient and benighted authoritarianism’. 113 On Ussher and Lightfoot, Barr, J. (1984–5), ‘Why the World Was Created in 4004 BC: Archbishop Ussher and Biblical Chronology’; Brice, W. R. (1982), ‘Bishop Ussher, John Lightfoot and the Age of Creation’. 114 In 1675 the London bookseller Thomas Guy began printing Bibles with Ussher’s dates in the margin. By 1701, the Church of England included them in official editions of the Bible: this continued for two centuries. Arguably, neither party benefitted from this association! 109

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the flood Noah faced (Genesis 6–9) in 2349 BCE – precipitated by God’s anger at human sin – was universal. China was also submerged.115 This had massive cultural and chronological implications (see below p. 113). To his critics, Ussher exemplifies biblical naivety, a ‘young creationist’ theology, and the clash of (new) science with (old) orthodoxy. Significantly, new Chinese historiography also challenged old biblical dates. As Van Kley writes: ‘[T]he most serious challenge to the traditional scheme of world history and the factor most instrumental in changing that scheme was the “discovery” of ancient Chinese history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ (1971: 362). If the earth of the Bible was shaken by science, China disrupted Creation’s date and Noah’s flood.116 In the mid-17th century, the traditional, biblical view of Adam as proto-man, Eden as the origin of language, and the universality of the flood, began to be seriously questioned. French millenarian theologian Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676) claimed, in his controversial treatise Praeadamitae (1655), Adam was not the first man, other ancient languages existed, and there was at first ‘a general Harmony of those new-found nations’ (1656: 167).117 Other scholars looked at use of pictograms and ideograms in ancient languages, including Chinese. One is the author of De Re Literaria Sinensum (1660), Theophilus Spizelius (1639–91), a Lutheran minister from Augsburg, who claimed China had the oldest letters, indeed, had invented them per ipsum. Spizelius, using the (anon.) Artificia Hominum, Admiranda Naturae in Sina et Europa (1655: NB. by Adam Preyel, fl. 1655), held that Chronologia Sinae contradicted European and biblical chronology – albeit, Preyel also claimed the flood occurred in the reign of ‘the seventh Chinese emperor’ and was preceded by a visit by Noah to China to improve China’s culture and morals. Cornelius is right: ‘The 1650s, 1660s and 1670s were highwater years for speculations about the Chinese language’ (1965: 68).118 Webb introduced unwelcome ideas from China and Europe. Conflict began to bubble up. Perversity adds to the tension. In 1677, the weighty jurist Sir Matthew Hale (1609–76) called Webb’s claim – put forward in his posthumous The Primitive Origination of Mankind – ‘a novel conceit’ (1677: 163). The essay was republished (essentially unchanged) in 1678 as The Antiquity of China. Hitherto, the Bible was read to imply Hebrew (via the Canaanites) was the first language. As Hale saw, this presupposed the ‘hard’ truth that ‘the Holy and supposed Primitive Language should be preserved only in the Posterity of accursed Canaan’ (ibid.). Debate intensified. Webb had used the Ricci-Trigault Journal (from Purchas’s Pilgrims), Semedo, Martini and Kircher. Using Martini’s reference to a flood during the reign of the Zhou King, Yao, he argued for the primary primitivity of Chinese. To Webb, this proved the biblical flood was universal, but that, after it, Noah’s son Shem had travelled East (via India) to China. Webb’s theory contradicted Kircher, who argued in China Illustrata (1667) that

The fact that – using the same method of calculation – the Greek OT (Septuagint) dated creation to 5200 BCE, and the flood to 2957 BCE, led Jesuits to prefer the Septuagint, which dated the flood to five years after the beginning of China’s history (projected by Martini to be in 2952 BCE). Cf. Garber, D. and M. Ayers eds (2003), Cambridge History of Seventeenthcentury Philosophy, I. 91f. 116 On ‘various [mid-17th-century] attempts to reconcile Chinese antiquity with scriptural antiquity’, Lu, M. (2016), The Chinese Impact, 122f. 117 La Peyrère’s work was translated into English in 1656 as, Men Before Adam OR A Discourse upon the Twelfth, Thirteenth and Fourteenth Verses of the First Chapter of the Apostle Paul to the Romans. By which are proved that the First Men were Created before Adam. Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670, ET 1689) accepted La Peyrère’s rejection of a Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. On Hobbes, p. 107, 111, 142, 148, n. 90, 156, 159f., 216, 222. On Spinoza, p. 106, n. 78. 118 Cf. also generally, Luca, D. (2016), The Chinese Language in European Texts; Salmon, V. ([1979] 1988), The Study of Language in 17th-Century England. 115

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China was peopled by descendants of Noah’s son, Ham. Drawing on Semedo, Martini, the historical geography of Raleigh’s History of the World (1614), the polemical ecclesiastic Peter Heylin’s (1599–1662) Cosmographia (1652) and Vossius’s Dissertatio de Vera Aetate Mundi (1659), Webb dated Chinese to c. 3000 BCE; in other words, to before the flood, not pace Kircher, to 300 years after it. China’s ancient language became an issue of intense Western biblical interest.119 Faith was on the line . . . and ‘the Orient’ was to blame. Daggers were drawn. China is, thirdly, directly and indirectly adduced in more esoteric and artistic works. This is the milieu in which Dryden’s ‘A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day’ was composed. Though a man of his age, Dryden does not draw explicitly on Confucius in his poem. His inspiration is the Bible, with hints of new science. Cecilia, the 2nd- or early 3rd-century musical muse, who ‘sang in her heart to the Lord’ at her marriage to a pagan (and was martyred for it), sits at the head and foot of the poem’s opening stanza, surrounded by Genesis and Pythagoras, and the socio-philosophical, scientific, musical theme, harmonia mundi (world harmony). From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began: From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in Man. Dryden unites here a contemporary view of the cosmos, as coherent with poetry and music. The roots of this run deep. In 1525, the ‘idiosyncratic’ Italian Franciscan friar, Francesco Giorgi Veneto (1466–1540) published De harmonia mundi totius. He used Plato’s Timaeus, with its Pythagorean numerology and ‘harmony’ of ‘soul’ and cosmos, to inspire a dark form of Christian ‘Cabalism’ popular in Elizabethan England.120 Scholars see Veneto behind poet-playwright William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) The Merchant of Venice (1596–9; 1st perf., 1605), the alchemy of the much-travelled doctor to King Charles I (1600–49; r. 1625–49), Arthur Dee (1579–1651), and his melancholic friend, polymath Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), who shared Dee’s copy(!). Dryden has more for us. His poem fuses a confident post-Renaissance humanism with a traditional, biblical cosmology and eschatology. It climaxes apocalyptically with music’s ultimate demise, presaging the world’s end: So when the last and dreadful hour This crumbling pageant shall devour, The trumpet shall be heard on high, The dead shall live, the living die, And Music shall untune the sky! An exasperated Charles II is quoted as saying of Vossius: ‘He believes everything except what is in the Bible!’ N.B. on 17th- and early 18th-century biblical scholarship, and radical theology and politics, Hill, C. (1993), The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution; Killeen, K. (2009), Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England; Killeen, K., H. Smith and R. J. Willie, eds (2015), The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England; Neil, W. (1975), ‘The Criticism and Theological Use of the Bible 1700–1950’, in S. L. Greenslade (ed.), Cambridge History of the Bible, III. 238–93; Shamir, A. (2017), English Bibles on Trial. 120 N.B. More’s later, Conjectura Cabbalistica . . . or a Conjectural Essay of Interpreting the Minde of Moses, according to a Threefold Cabbala: viz. Literal, Philosophical, Mystical, or Divinely Moral (1653). 119

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As we have seen, ‘harmony’ was prominent in 17th-century European science, philosophy and culture, largely because of Kepler’s reworking of Pythagoras.121 It is symptomatic of Kepler’s eclecticism that work on his Harmonices Mundi (1619, The Harmony of the World) began in the year Ricci reached Beijing and French King Henry IV (1553–1610) issued his ‘Edict of Nantes’, that gave Protestants hitherto unimagined civic freedoms. Kepler invoked the principle: ‘Geometrical things have provided the Creator with the model for decorating the whole world’ (q. Caspar 1993: 265f.). Musica universalis (music of the universe) – the so-called ‘music of the spheres’ – is at the heart of this; so, music and the universe possess a God-given coherence and ‘harmony’. Kepler’s work – and popular interest in ‘the music of the spheres’ – ensured ‘harmony’ had a pivotal place in British and European encounters with Chinese culture.122 Dryden’s appeal to ‘harmony’ in his poem, ‘A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day’, is a further instance of a unitive ‘cultural archetype’ shared by China and the West. Western Christian culture and classical Confucian philosophy both afford ‘harmony’ a prominence in the way they conceive of life on earth and in heaven, in the cosmos and the human heart. In 17th- and early 18th-century China and the West, the Analects and Gospels were read through this shared theme. Alien texts could be, or become, allies. Recognition of this commonality helped (and still can) defuse suspicion and create intellectual optimism – or, at least for some. Interest in China and Confucius is also seen, finally, in 17th- and early 18th-century English Deism. The term ‘Deist’ was coined by Protestant Reformer John Calvin’s (1509–64) student Pierre Viret (1511–71) in his Instruction Chrétienne (Geneva, 1564). ‘Deist’ is first used in English by the enigmatic Oxford academic Robert Burton (1577–1640) in his popular The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Viret applied the term to those who believed in a creator God but rejected a redeemer Jesus. He respected their learning, but still called them ‘monsters and atheists’ (q. Corfe 2007: 54). Burton is more positive. He names atheists and near-atheists, adding: ‘Cousin-germans to these men are many of our great Philosophers and Atheists’, who are ‘Deists’ (1621: III. iv; II. 1); that is, they are moral but atheistic.123 Deism pre-dates – and most probably pre-empts – European Enlightenment sinophilia. Confucius is central to both. Before looking at ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ in the Analects and Gospels, a brief look at Deism, as it relates to our theme. The poet George Herbert’s (1593–1633) eldest brother, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), a royalist diplomat with strong continental ties, is traditionally the ‘father of English Kepler was born in Weil der Stadt (SW Germany). He worked amid intense religious, political and intellectual unrest. He held key scientific positions with aristocratic and royal patrons, including the ‘mad’, mercurial, Emperor Rudolf II (1552– 1612). A devout Catholic, Kepler did ground-breaking work on optics (Astronomiae Pars Optica, 1604), developing the refracting ‘Kepler Telescope’, and encouraging Galileo’s astronomical and optical work, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1595), on ‘celestial physics’ (uniting theology, physics and astronomy). Kepler also studied Copernican heliocentrism and the laws of planetary motion, which led to Astronomia Nova (1609), and Ephemerides (tabled predictions of the positions of stars and planets), later published as Tabulae Rudolphinae (1627). Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi (1617) appeared during his mother’s trial for witchcraft and other personal tragedies. Kepler died on 15 November 1630. His heart-felt, self-styled epitaph records: ‘Mensus eram coelos, nunc terrae metior umbras/ Mens coelestis erat, corporis umbra iacet’ (‘I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure/ Skybound was the mind, earthbound the body rests’). 122 On Kepler’s correspondence with members of the Jesuit China mission, Needham, Science and Civilization in China, 3.444, and his comment (ad loc.): ‘The two condemnations of Galileo’s Copernican views were in 1616 and 1632 and must have had a considerable effect on the China Mission.’ 123 Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy continues to attract attention. Famously, the depressive Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709– 1784) admitted in 1770 it was, ‘the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise’ (Boswell [1781] 1832: II. 508). 121

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Deism’, with the movement peaking between 1690 and 1740.124 Herbert published his magnum opus, De Veritate,125 in 1624. It is a long, complex – at times opaque – work: ‘Formed . . . in all its principle parts in England’, but finished, in Paris, with support from the Dutch political theorist and philosopher scientist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) – and to Herbert, a clear ‘sign’ from God. As an early exercise in English metaphysics, it is unique. It studies basic issues of method, knowledge, reality, truth and perception, and, crucially, pre-empts debates on body, truth and knowing in Descartes and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).126 A pious man, who believed in God, miracles, prayer and revelation, Herbert did not challenge faith or revelation.127 The Bible was to him, though, just a surer source of faith and comfort. His epistemological interests led him to seven propositions and ‘five articles’, praising reason and sense-perception at the expense of faith and dogma. Contra mind-body dualism, Herbert finds ‘a certain harmony between objects and their analogous faculties’ (ibid., 68), without which knowledge is impossible.128 The intellect bears witness to God’s creation, action and providence, being ‘the highest image and type of the divinity’. Hence, he says: ‘[W]hatever is true or good in us exists in supreme degree in God’ (ibid., 79). To critics, this exaltation of reason impoverished revelation. To others, Herbert constructed a fortress for natural religion. Correspondences with Confucianism were clearly possible, as later radicals recognized.129 Herbert alienated many. He was charged with ‘enthusiasm’, and an excessive sense of God’s immanent action, by later traditionalists (Brown 1771: 2.278; Leland [1757] 1978: I. 25). Descartes rejected his method and ‘truth’. In De Religione Gentilium (1663, posth.), Herbert locates his ‘five articles’130 in pagan religion, including Confucianism. It was an exercise in what the Scottish philosopher, historian, diplomat and economist, David Hume (1711–76), would later call ‘a natural history of religion’ or ‘comparative religion’ (q. Meister and Copan [2007] 2013: 162).131 Herbert uses philosopher-jurist John Selden’s (1584–1654) De Diis Syris Syntagmata II (1617),132 his French friend, critic, and member of the Minims’ order, Marin Mersenne’s (1588–1648) Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim (1623a),133 and Vossius’s De Theologia Gentili (1641). Reason is here a 124 On Herbert, Bedford, R. D. (1979), The Defence of Truth: Herbert of Cherbury and the Seventeenth Century; Butler, J. A. (1990), Lord Herbert of Chirbury; Hill, E. D. (1987), Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury. 125 N.B. the title: De Veritate, distinguitur a revelatione, a verisimili, a possibili, et a falso (1624: On Truth, as It Is Distinguished from Revelation, the Probable, the Possible, and the False, 1633). 126 Cf. on Kant, p. 154, 161, n. 166, 162, 165, 190f. 127 On Herbert’s faith in context, Waligore, J. (2012), ‘The Piety of the English Deists’. 128 He posits four classes of faculty, viz. natural instinct, internal sense, external sense and discourse, or reasoning. 129 On Herbert and E-W dialogue, Clarke, J. C. (1997), Oriental Enlightenment, ad loc. 130 Herbert’s ‘five articles’ of universal religion – which he believed to be true of the Catholic Church and of ‘the religion of reason’ – were: (1) there is a supreme Deity; (2) this Deity ought to be worshipped; (3) virtue combined with piety is the chief part of divine worship; (4) men should repent of their sins and turn from them; (5) reward and punishment follow from the goodness and justice of God (in this life and the next). And, these articles contain all the doctrine of the true catholic church and the religion of reason. 131 N.B. Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757) is ‘generally agreed to be the first work of comparative religion in English’ (Meister and Copan [2007] 2013: 162). 132 From 1619, Selden wrote in all his books ‘περὶ πάντων τήν ἐλευθέριαν’ (Above all things freedom!). 133 Mersenne was a friend of many of Europe’s leading freethinkers, including the progressive French priest Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655). Though initially a staunch defender of Aristotle, and an early opponent of Deism and Galileo, in time Mersenne moved from attacking atheism and scepticism to advocating the power of reason. Harmony is also a prominent theme in Mersenne. Cf. his L’usage de la raison (1623b), L’analyse de la vie spirituelle (1624), Les méchaniques de Galilée (1634), Harmonie universelle (1636), Les nouvelles pensées de Galilée (1639).

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God-given route to truth, religion a universal empirical reality.134 Confucianism, for Herbert, the erstwhile intellectual radical, warrants respect as an expression of global, rational religion. To Roetz, ‘There is not a single one of the British Deists who did not pay tribute to Confucius’ (Hölscher and Eggert 2013: 25).135 In his Anima Mundi (1679), Diana of the Ephesians (1680) and posthumous Summary Account of the Deists’ Religion (1693), the philosopher-squire Charles Blount (1654–93),136 who promoted Herbert and Deism, used Jesuit travelogues to critique ‘particular religions’ and promote universal religious ‘truth’. The Scottish republican Thomas Gordon (c. 1691–1750) bludgeoned Western culture with a utopian Orient, hoping ‘all fiery Catholicks and bigots . . . were converted into rational and sober Chinese’ (q. Tarantino 2010: 426).137 John Toland (1670–1722), an Irish pamphleteer, mathematician and philosopher – to Swift ‘the great Oracle of the anti-Christians’ (1742: 106)138 – listed Confucius among ‘Votaries of Truth’ alongside Greek philosophers and God, in a Spinozist sense,139 as ‘the Mind . . . and the Soul of the Universe’ ([1720] 1751, 17).140 Similarly, Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696) rejected biblical mystery and elevated natural religion, in what to some is a nascent type of atheism.141 The book, and Toland, were censured. He died an impoverished, but contented, ‘pantheist’ on 11 March 1722.142 The socalled ‘Deist’s Bible’, Matthew Tindal’s (1656–1723) Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), also sees China as the answer to Western problems: ‘I am so far from Thinking the Maxims of Confucius and Jesus Christ to differ; that I think the plain and simple Maxims of the former, will help to illustrate the more obscure Ones of the latter; accommodated to the then Way of speaking’ (1798: 296). Anticipating the strength of feeling many in the West had for and against him in his day, he later wrote: ‘Navarrete, a Chinese missionary, agrees with Leibniz and says that “It is the special providence of God that the Chinese did not know what was done in Christendom; for if they

134 These themes are also tracked in works included in the 3rd edn of De Veritatione (1645), viz. De Causis Errorum, Religio Laici, and Appendix ad Sacerdotes. 135 Cf. also, Appleton, W. W. (1951), A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. 136 Mostly published anon., Blount is a rare defender of Dryden’s much-lampooned rhyming Restoration tragedy, The Conquest of Granada (1st perf., 1670; pub. 1672). 137 On Gordon, Israel, J. (2011), Democratic Enlightenment, 43; also, Tarantino, G. (2012), Republicanism, Sinophilia, and Historical Writing. 138 For context, Weinbrot, H. D. (2013), Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 1660–1780, Ch. 1 and 2. 139 On the similarity of Toland and Spinoza, Garber, D. and D. Rutherford, eds (2004–18), Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, 6.264. On Spinoza, p. 106, n. 78. 140 Cf. also, Garber and Rutherford, Oxford Studies, 8. 141 On Toland’s skilful obfuscation to avoid censure, Fouke, D. C. (2008), Philosophy and Theology in a Burlesque Mode. On his atheism, Berman, D. (1992), ‘Disclaimers in Blount and Toland’, in D. Hunter and M. Wootton (eds), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, 268–72. 142 N.B. Toland’s Letters to Serena (1704), in which he (possibly) coins the term ‘Pantheist’, as a synonym for ‘Spinozist’. Toland first encountered the term pantheismus in the little-known English mathematician Joseph Raphson’s (c. 1648–c. 1715) De Spatio Reali seu Ente Infinito (1697). In his Pantheisticon (1720), Toland defines ‘Pantheism’: ‘The power and energy of All, which has created all and which governs all . . . is God, which you may call Spirit and Soul of the Universe. This is why the Socratic Associates have been called pantheists, because . . . to them this soul cannot be separated from the Universe itself.’ In his Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist (1705), he says he is a ‘Pantheist’ (7). On Toland’s ‘Pantheism’, Diller, J. and A. Kasher, eds (2013), Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities, 608f. Toland’s religious toleration extended to Jews: cf. his (anon.) pamphlet, Reasons for Naturalising the Jews (1714). But in a work now (often) attributed to him, Traité sur les trois imposteurs (c. 1711–19, Treatise on the three impostors), he condemns Christianity, Judaism and Islam as politicized frauds. Cf. Minois, G. ([2009] 2012), The Atheist’s Bible; Daniel, S. H. (1984), John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind.

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did, there would be never a man among them, but would spit in our faces” ’ (ibid., 348). Interestingly, the Scottish philosopher David Hume claims the Quakers ‘seem to approach nearly the only regular body of Deists in the universe, the literati, or the disciples of Confucius in China’, being free of priests and ecclesiastical institutions (1743: I. 81). To free-thinkers, Confucius was a congenial, controversial, ally. Use of China and Confucianism as idealized foils to Western philosophy, faith and socio-political culture, grows. As politician-philosopher Lord Bolingbroke (1678–1751), mentor to the poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778),143 said: ‘We look further back than into those of any other’, and find there ‘the effects of natural religion, unmixed and uncorrupted, with those of artificial religion and superstition’ (1841: IV. 264; q. Aldridge 1986: 142f.). In the moralism of William Wollaston (1659–1724),144 the vivid prose of the pamphleteer and spy Daniel Defoe (1661–1731),145 the unpredictability of Charles Gildon (c. 1665–1724),146 the literary horticulture of Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and other contributors to the eclectic Spectator (1711–14), and Samuel Clarke’s (1675–1729) dialogue on ‘consciousness’ (1707–8) with Anthony Collins (1676–1729), and on philosophy and natural religion (1715–16) with Leibniz – China’s Confucian philosophy and culture were cross-examined. To some, this offered the possibility of a rational heaven and a moral earth, to others, the fearful reality of a proven, corrupt and despotic hell. Confucianism assisted the scientifically minded to construct a new view of God’s relation to the world. As the Christian apologist William Paley (1743–1805) would later argue, God the ‘watch-maker’ winds up the world and then leaves it to run.147 Rationalist engagement with science (on both sides of the English Channel) found in Confucian cosmology new stimuli to assert the independence and inter-dependence of faith and reason, God and the world, earth and heaven. So, faith was possible and evidence in support available. Natural philosophy and orthodox theology could co-exist. Life could be lived and studied without bothering God. Confucianism reinforced this new theology, philosophy, cosmology and ‘proto-modern’ view of science. Despite this evidence of interest in Confucianism in the 17th and early 18th centuries, we should not misconstrue or over-state it. The capacity of the Church of England to absorb reasonable diversity ensured a creative, eclectic thinker like Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82) could be as easily absorbed as On Pope, p. 99, 117f., 156f., 160, 161, n. 168, 164f.; on Voltaire, p. 149f. Like many Deists, Wollaston welcomed what he saw as Confucius’s reduction of religion to morality, writing: ‘By religion I mean nothing else but an obligation to do (under which word I comprehend acts of body and mind. I say, to do) what ought not to be omitted, and to forbear what ought not to be done’ ([1722] 1750: 41). 145 Like George Anson (1697–1762), Captain of the Centurion that circumnavigated the world and suffered at the hands of Chinese officials in Canton, Dafoe had little, if anything, good to say of China. Castigated for his euro-centric, colonial elitism, his mythic Robinson Crusoe (1719), caustic narrative The History of the Devil (1728, in which Satan inspires Jesuit ‘accommodation’ to Confucianism) and futuristic essay ‘Of Captain Mission and his Crew’ (1728, where utopian figure Mission is converted by lewd Italian priest Carracioli, a Deist), Dafoe is aligned with Deist iconoclasts, and their views on primitive culture, in his critique of China. Cf. Chen, S. (1998), ‘Daniel Defoe’, in Hsia (ed.), Vision of China, 215–48. 146 N.B. Gildon’s less (!) odd, The Golden Spy: Or, a Political Journal of the British Nights Entertainments of War and Peace, and Love and Politics (1709). 147 After a decade at Cambridge, in 1776 Paley moved to Musgrave, Westmoreland. He became Archdeacon of Carlisle in 1782. When there, he published his Cambridge lectures, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) and first work of apologetics, Horae Paulinae (1790). His View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794) was part of Cambridge’s theology syllabus until the 1920s. Paley became Sub-Dean of Lincoln Cathedral, and a well-known abolitionist (of the slave trade). His Natural Theology (1802), which uses the ‘watch-maker’ analogy, inspired evolutionist Charles Darwin (1809–82), but irritates atheist Richard Dawkins (b. 1941). On Darwin, p. 134f., 169, n. 225, 264, 274, 296, 316, 326, 335, n. 351, 347, 448, n. 241. 143 144

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the spiritually profound Royalist Bishop of Down and Connor, Jeremy Taylor (1613–67), the broadly pragmatic John Tillotson (1630–94),148 Archbishop of Canterbury from 1691 to 1694, and the quixotic patristic orientalist Herbert Thorndike (1598–1672). In 1742 – the year Messiah was first performed, and Benedict XIV issued his bull Ex quo singulari (reiterating the ban on ancestral worship and forbidding further debate), seeds of British Protestant missionary endeavour were sown. A year after his heart was ‘strangely warmed’ at a Moravian meeting in Aldersgate, London (24 May 1738), the Oxford Anglican cleric John Wesley (1703–91) created a new cadre of lay preachers. By 1742, the Methodist class-meeting system was growing biblical faith in domestic cells. Both of these practical, spiritual initiatives would impact the late 18th- and early 19th-century mission to China. From February to November 1742, in a parish south of Glasgow, Scotland, the ‘Cambuslang Revival’ erupted, ‘a spark of grace that set the kingdom a blaze’.149 It is one of a number of spontaneous spiritual combustions recorded during the ‘Evangelical Revival’ in Britain and ‘Great Awakening’ in America. It is estimated John Whitefield (1714–70), Wesley’s gifted colleague, preached to as many as 30,000 people in Cambuslang in August 1742. This local event had a global impact. The ‘Scottish Revival’ incubated 19th-century Protestant mission to China. We see its legacy in Scottish missionary sinologists Robert Morrison (1782–1836), William Milne (1785–1822) and James Legge (1815–97). The flame of biblical Christianity was not extinguished by scientific Rationalism or sceptical Deism: like Messiah, its music and message were a response to it; like Bach’s Cello Suites, it drew inspiration from vital, repristinated classical themes. The earth might be shaken, but Martin Luther’s (1483– 1546) 17th- and early 18th-century heirs, in Britain and beyond, still found in God and the Bible ‘Ein feste Burg’ (A safe stronghold).150 Secularist varnish should not obscure this secure faith.

‘HEAVEN’ AND ‘EARTH’ IN THE ANALECTS AND GOSPELS We turn now to ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ in the Analects and Gospels. As in Chapters 1 and 2, we do so sensitized to accumulated interpretative grime that overlays these texts and distorts their meaning. ‘Reading backwards carefully’, the 17th and early 18th centuries now acquire a new cultural and intellectual significance in the relation between, and interpretation of, China and the West. Established political, philosophical, religious and cultural convictions were subject in both to intense pressure from new discoveries in the natural and physical sciences. We read now ‘on the far side’151 of nascent European sinophilia and a ‘Scientific Revolution’, which in time changed the world, and the way ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ were, and are, interpreted. We read in light of earlyModern globalization and the intensification of East-West dialogue.

148 Cf. Irish poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith’s (1728–74) comment in The Citizen of the World, or letters from a Chinese philosopher (1762): ‘The unaffected of every country nearly resemble each other, and a page of our Confucius and your Tillotson have scarce any difference’ ([1762] 1837: III. 225, Letter #33). On Goldsmith, p. 171f., 198, n. 82, 215. 149 On this 18th-century ‘Scottish Revival’, Fawcett, A. (1971), Cambuslang Revival; MacFarlan, D. ([1847] 1988), The Revivals of the Eighteenth Century, particularly at Cambuslang. 150 Written between c. 1527 and 1529, the hymn Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (A mighty fortress is our God), a paraphrase of Ps. 46, remains a Protestant favourite. Translated in 1539 by the English Reformer Myles Coverdale (c. 1488–1569) as ‘Oure God is a defence and towre’, the ‘common-usage’ version, ‘God is our Refuge in Distress, Our Strong Defence’ is from J. C. Jacobi’s (1670–1750) widely used Psalmodia Germanica (1722). 151 The expression ‘on the far side’ is used throughout of a given or unforgettable reality that shapes the way we perceive. Hence, we live, for example, ‘on the far side’ of faith, marriage, films, literature, holidays or bereavement.

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Few people in China or the West today interpret the Analects and Gospels without to some extent processing them through the 17th and early 18th centuries. The first part of this chapter sought to strip away layers of interpretative varnish. In the process, we have seen ‘harmony’ to be a shared – and thus unitive – ‘cultural archetype’, and, as result, a potent – or at least, potential – ‘solvent’ for cultural pride, prejudice and textual distortion. ‘Harmony’ helps us read our primary sources not as enculturated textual competitors, but as globalized cultural ‘Classics’. Of course, we may not readily identify with aspects of the pre- or primitive scientific view of ‘heaven’ or ‘earth’ found in biblical faith and Confucian wisdom: that is, surely, less important than the potential, global benefit of recovering commonality in these two, vast ancient traditions. ‘Harmony’ united us once: it might do so again. The Analects We begin with the Analects, aware of the two questions posed earlier; namely, Are Shangdi and its associate tian accurately used of the God of the Bible? And, is tian in the Analects rightly connected with the biblical ‘God’ or ‘heaven’ in the Gospels? As Ricci saw, more is at stake than comparative philosophy. His ‘True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven’ (1603) drew on the method and content of the pioneer missionary Alessandro Valignano’s, SJ (1539–1606), Catechismus Japonensis (A Japanese Catechism).152 Central to the Jesuits’ ‘cultural imperative’ was use of the right ‘term’ to translate ‘God’. Ricci’s decision to use ཙ tian (heaven) was clever and courageous, as he submitted Christian terminology to Confucian orthodoxy and identified ‘correspondences’ between classical Chinese texts and Thomistic theology.153 Whether or not his use of terminological, and translational, ‘equivalence’ (now, technically, ‘foreignizing’) was justified remains a moot point. At the time, it led to new meanings being projected onto ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ in China and the West. These owed as much to scientific, geographic, linguistic, and historical views of the universe, as they did to traditional or literal readings of the Analects and Gospels. Ricci, like Dryden, was a child of his age. As a pupil of Christopher Clavius, SJ (1538–1612), a leading Jesuit mathematician and astronomer (who also inspired Galileo), Ricci’s study of ཙ䴚 tianxue (heavenly matters; theology and astronomy), and grasp of various types of science and scientific instruments, set him apart, and, as we noted, attracted Chinese admirers.154 As sophisticated and enculturated figures, Ricci and Dryden add to the varnish on our old canvas. Recognizing this fact helps us to ‘read backwards carefully’ and compare more acutely the textual data on ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ in classical Confucianism

152 On this, Meynard, T., SJ (2013), ‘The Overlooked Connection between Ricci’s Tianzhu shiyi and Valignano’s Catechismus Japonensis’. 153 On Ricci’s eleven theological ‘correspondences’ between Thomist categories for God and classical Chinese understanding of Shangdi and tianzhu, Standaert, N., SJ (1995), The Fascinating God, 63f. For a famous critique of Ricci’s translational neologisms, Gernet, J. ([1982] 1985), China and the Christian Impact, 243. On the difficulties Ricci faced, Meynard’s response to them, and the claim that scholastic thinking is ‘embedded in Indo-European languages and therefore untranslatable into Chinese’, Wu, H. (2016), ‘Review: Matteo Ricci, SJ., Le Sens réel du “Seigneur du Ciel”, ed. and trans. T. Meynard, SJ (2013)’. 154 N.B. Needham: ‘Ricci, Schall, Verbiest and, in a later generation, Gaubil, were in China at a period of spontaneous decline of indigenous science, the Ming dynasty and early Ching, a decline which had nothing obviously to do with the forces which sent them there and permitted them to stay’ (1956: 3.173). On early Jesuit use of Kepler’s ‘Rudolphine Tables’ (that he sent in 1627) to prompt a revision of the Chinese calendar, Fontana, Matteo Ricci, 282f.; Needham, Science and Civilization, 3.444.

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and biblical Christianity. This avoids the dangers of what J. D. Schneewind calls ‘anachronism’ and ‘antiquarianism’ (2005: 169). This is important if the data here is to be relevant and useful. Selfawareness is basic to good communication. So, what of the context, content and consequences of Ricci’s quest for the right term for God, and decision to use tian in his celebrated treatise Tianzhu Shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven)? With regard to the Chinese context of Ricci’s work, as we have seen above, the immensely important cultural and philosophical term tian had in the Zhou Dynasty been used alongside, or in place of, the older Shang term Shangdi, ‘Lord on High’. Scholars debate the fact, origin, process and consequences of tian’s slow evolution from the essentially physical and astral ‘sky’ to the expansive and inclusive ‘deity’ projected onto its meaning by Ricci, H. G. Creel and other later writers.155 What’s more, it is disputed whether the Analects has a consistent view of tian, and, ergo, whether Ricci consciously or unconsciously imposed interpretative uniformity on it. To Eno, who studies the function of tian in the Analects and (as in Chapter 2 above) distinguishes between Confucius’s meaning and the text itself,156 generations of Ruists who ‘recorded, composed, selected and arranged’ the Analects, ‘portrayed T’ien (sic) in a consistent way, which expressed the enduring interests and goals of early Ruism’ (1990: 94).157 It seems Ricci – both by design and in context – may have deduced the same. However, in later Neo- and New Confucianism we find a more fluid interpretation of tian,158 in which materialism gives place to metaphysical idealism, and the fixed, physical, differentiated realities of ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ in early Confucianism accede to a more synthetic, processive, metaphysical vision of the unity of reality.159 With regard to the meaning Confucius and Ricci ascribed to tian in the Analects, five things stand out, which help explain Ricci’s choice of the term to translate the biblical ‘God’. First, there is a doxological quality to tian in the Analects,160 which Ricci almost certainly saw and respected. ‘Heaven and earth’ ཙൠ (tiandi), as interrelated physical realities, are a cause of wonder and joy. They exude beauty, constancy, order and harmony. In this, their greatness is explicitly connected to the mythical Yao. Hence, in Analects 8.19, Confucius proclaims: ‘How great was Yao as a ruler! So majestic! It is heaven that is great, and it was Yao who modelled himself upon it.’ And, he adds: ‘Among the Cf. the comprehensive study, Eno, R. (1990), The Confucian Creation of Heaven; also, Chang, C. (2007), The Rise of the Chinese Empire, I. 327–331, n. 66; Creel, H. G. (1970), ‘The Origin of the Deity T’ien’. 156 N.B. Eno: ‘To explore the Analects for Confucius’s own view requires a different interpretative method’ (1990: 95); with the implication, an ‘editorial’ and/or ‘original’ Confucian use of tian in the Analects may be quite different. 157 Louden shares Eno’s belief that ‘the tian passages [do] form a consistent whole’ (2002: 77). Fingarette is less confident the Analects provides a refined and constant meaning (1972: 62); likewise, Hall and Ames (1987: 208). 158 N.B. possible explanations of the character ཙ (tian): i. it is composed of the symbol for man Ӫ (ren) and one а (yi), viz. that which unites humanity in itself (Creel 1951: 139); ii. the character ཙ joins the symbols of big བྷ (da) and man Ӫ (ren), so ‘great man’, or ‘the rulers of the past’ (cf. Zhang, D: ‘The character for “heaven” is probably derived from that for “big man” ’ [2002: 3]); iii. tian denoted the ‘Sky God’ (Kunio 1958; q. Yao, X., 2000: 141), or the place to which the ashes of ceremonial sacrifices ascend (Eno 2002: 181–9). 159 During the Tang dynasty, early astronomical interests nurtured study of a differentiated ‘heaven’. As the poet Liu Zongyuan ḣᇇ‫( ݳ‬773–819) wrote: ‘That which is above and is dark the world calls “heaven”; that which is below and is yellow, the world calls “earth”.’ (q. Zhang [1989] 2002: 6). Likewise, the poet, philosopher and essayist Liu Yuxi ࢹ⿩䥛 (772–842) observed: ‘Heaven is the greatest of things having form; human beings are the most excellent of animals’ (q. Zhang, 6). 160 Tian occurs 17x in the Analects, 10 x by (‘I’) Confucius, 7x by others. As K. K. Yeo points out, the thrust of Confucius’s use is to democratize the term to ensure its application is individual and immediate, not political and detached (2008: 120f.). Cf. also, Kim, S-H. (1988), ‘Silent Heaven Giving Birth to the Multitude of People’; also, for 5 clear meanings of tian, Feng, Y. ([1937] 1981), History of Chinese Philosophy, I. 31. 155

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common people there were none who were able to find words to describe him. How majestic in his accomplishments, and glorious in cultural splendour.’ The ineffable greatness of tian (and thence Yao) is clarified by Mencius: ‘[E]verywhere he dwells is infused with spiritual power (shen ⾎), and above and below he joins together with the flow of heaven and earth’ (7. A. 13; Slingerland: 84). As is often noted, tian in the Analects offered Ricci an evocative, relational term; or, as the philosopher, linguist and diplomat Hu Shih 㜑䚙 (1891–1962) said, ‘a knowing, feeling, loving, and hating supreme ruler of men and the universe’ (1967: 110).161 In other words, this is not the mechanistic naturalism of Laozi 㘱ᆀ. But we must not overheat Confucius’s position. Though his ‘cultural brilliance . . . is readily heard about’, as Zigong noticed, ‘one does not get to hear the Master expounding upon the subjects of human nature or the Way of Heaven’ (A. 5.13). This metaphysical reserve is well-charted – and, rightly contrasted with the celestial idealism and cosmogonic naturalism of Zhuangzi, Guanzi and Laozi. But doxology can be eloquent in silence. As Confucius replied to Zigong’s question ‘What does Heaven ever say?’, ‘Yet the four seasons are put in motion by it, and the myriad creatures receive their life from it. What does Heaven ever say?’ (A. 17.19). His silence embraces and celebrates tian in its entirety.162 Faced by mystery, silence is a wise friend. Second, Ricci controversially led Western interpretation towards a divinization of the term tian. Ricci’s erstwhile Protestant critic James Legge admitted tian was to Confucius ‘the name of a personal being’. However, Legge criticizes Ricci for ‘avoiding the personal name of ᑍ (Di), or God, and only using the more indefinite term Heaven’; adding petulantly, ‘His avoidance of the name ᑍ (Di) seems to betray a coldness of temperament and intellect in the matter of religion’ (1880: 139). The degree to which Confucius and the Analects project monotheistic deity on the anthropomorphisms of tian has been much debated. To Kelly James Clark: ‘It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tian is god-like in a way that invites comparison to the Western sense’ (2007: 50).163 Peimin Ni is nuanced: ‘As long as we are aware of the unique features of tian, translating it as “heaven” can break the Western monopoly of the term, expanding its meaning and rectifying the biases associated with it’ (2016: 41). Amid the swirling political conflict of mid-20th-century China, Confucius’s view of tian is co-opted to conserve Zhou spiritualism and condemned by communism, fatalism, idealism and elitism (Eno 1990: 95). To Creel, Confucius saw tian as ‘an impersonal ethical force, a cosmic counterpart of the ethical sense of man’ (1970: 117). In contrast, Ivanhoe and Puett see ‘the greatest of the divine powers’ (tian) as an evolving concept and personal reality that Confucius revered as ‘the collective will of or supreme power in the spiritual realm’.164 Speaking into this

161 Contrast Hu Shih with Feng Youlan 俞৻㱝 (1895–1990), Hou Wailu ‫ן‬ཆᔜ (1903–87), A. C. Graham (1919–91) and Benjamin Schwartz (1916–99), who for various reasons see the Analects as the ‘only reservoir for the sage’s beliefs’ (Liang, C., 2016: 75). Interestingly, Hu perceives Confucius’s thought in the Spring and Autumn Annals and Book of Changes (ibid.). 162 N.B. the fuller sense of celebration of ‘heaven’ and a separable ‘earth’ in The Doctrine of the Mean: ‘This heaven is now only as much as what shines here, yet taken as without limit, the sun, moon, and constellations are bespangled in it, the myriad things covered by it. Now this earth is only as much as a handful of soil, yet taken in its breadth and depth, it supports Mounts Hua and Yue without being weighed down, holds rivers and seas without seeping away. The myriad things are supported by it’ (Legge 1861: I. 26). 163 For a contrary view, Littlejohn, Confucianism, 35f.; Ames and Rosemont, Analects, 47. 164 Cf. Ivanhoe, P. J. (2007), ‘Heaven as a source for ethical warrant in early Confucianism’; Puett, M. J. (2002), To become a God: Cosmology, sacrifice, and self-divinization in early China. For contemporary theological interpretations, Cline, E. M. (2014), ‘Religious Thought and Practice in the Analects’, in A. Olberding (ed.), Dao Companion to the Analects, 259–92; Huang, Y. (2007), ‘Confucian Theology, Three Models’.

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debate, Zhang Dainian states: ‘The religious idea of God and the popular use of the word to refer to the sky are but the extremes’ ([1989] 2002: 3). In general, tian implied ‘a Spinozarian notion of the “totality of all that is”’ and the ‘name of all things’ (Pak 1974: 62). In other words, despite fluidity in meaning, Ricci used a term that was compatible with Christian faith and with Chinese popular religion, even if, as Cline notes, monotheists are more inclined to find God in tian than agnostics (Cline 2014: 279).165 Thirdly, tian is represented in the Analects as possessed of moral potency; that is, it is not an arbitrary force or moral principle, but an intentional, cosmic agency that promotes and sustains ethical and ritual propriety. Again, its attractive applicability to the biblical God is clear. But tian is variously represented in the Analects. It is everything from an ultimately determinative force, like ‘fate’ (A. 14.36) or ‘The Mandate of Heaven’ ཙભ (tianming), to a personal presence that monitors and inspires moral behaviour, and inhibits and judges ethical and ritual deviance. Heaven warrants respect, if not fear (A. 9.12). As we saw in Chapter 1, Confucius views his life as directed by, and subservient to Heaven, believing that at the age of fifty he is finally in tune with its Mandate (A. 2.4). He admits to Zigong a sense of not being understood when he studies ‘what is below . . . to comprehend what is above’. But he still believes, ‘If there is anyone who could understand me, perhaps it is Heaven’ (A. 14.35). It is Heaven that protects him from physical danger, and ‘endows’ him with virtue (A. 7.23). It is also Heaven that invests him with a vocation – ‘like the wooden clapper for a bell’ (A. 3.24) – to recover the lost culture ᮷ (wen) of King Wen of Zhou ઘ᮷⦻. ‘If Heaven intended this culture to perish, it would not have given it to those of us who live after King Wen’s death. Since Heaven did not intend that this culture should perish, what can the people of Kuang do to me?’ (A. 9.5). As an anthropomorphic moral power, tian is ‘held in awe’ in the Analects. And, as Brasovan says: ‘(I)t controls the longevity and death of creatures . . . it can enact cultural revolutions, socio-political capitulations, and epochal shifts in human history’ (2017: 34). In keeping with Confucian personalism and pragmatism, tian is not linked in the Analects with rarified metaphysics: it justifies, sanctions and blesses domestic, social and political action.166 Its celestial aspect corroborates, challenges and corrects societal norms.167 Fourthly, tian is about immanent energy and heavenly harmony in the Analects; that is, its meaning transcends later bifurcations of ‘heaven above’ and ‘earth below’, as much as spirit and matter, soul and body, creator and creation. As such, it is an integrative term that comprehends visible and invisible reality. To some, it is akin to ‘nature’, but this only works if ‘nature’ is what lives, as much as what is. The conformity of an individual, or societal, life with ‘The Mandate of Heaven’ empowers that life as much as exalts its purpose. Tian, ren (ӱ benevolence), qi (≓ life force) and yi (㗙 righteousness, justice, meaning) are interrelated in the Analects. The popular invocation of tian Pereira witnessed (above p. 94f.), captures the grammar of classical Confucian usage. So, life is lived sub specie aeternitatis (eternally, or under heaven) and in terris (on earth, or temporally). Tian encompasses both. Whatever we conclude about the relation between Shang Cf. also, Louden, ‘ “What does heaven say?” ’, 91, n. 32. On ecological deductions from Confucian cosmology, above p. 8, n. 17, 9. Also, for a useful introduction and bibliography, Berthrong, J. H. (n.d.), http://fore.yale.edu/religion/confucianism/ bibliography. 166 On the relation between Confucian cosmology and political (esp. military) activity, Ames, R. T. (2011b), ‘War, Death and Ancient Chinese Cosmology’, in A. Olberding and P. J. Ivanhoe (eds), Mortality in Traditional Chinese Thought, 117–36. 167 On Feng Youlan’s view of the ethical potency of tian in the opening of the Doctrine of the Mean, Wang, H. (2008), Translating Chinese Classics in a Colonial Context, 88. 165

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dynasty ୶ᵍ (c. 1600–c. 1046 BCE) use of кᑍ (Shangdi) of the ‘Lord on High’, or ᑍ (Di) of the ‘Lord’ (god), and later Zhou dynasty ઘᵍ (c. 1046–256 BCE) use of tian for the same heavenly figure, the tradition, or ru (݂), that Confucius ‘transmitted’ conceived the existence of a power with praiseworthy qualities. Lastly, the Analects introduce tian as an intellectual or rational phenomenon; that is, as Confucius says concisely in Analects 2.4, at fifty he ‘understood’ Heaven’s Mandate. The Jesuits grasped the cerebral nature of classical Confucianism. They recognized in it a social ethic based on the development of ‘mind’ as much as ‘will’. As we have seen, tian nurtured rational judgement and moral intention (A. 7.23, 9.5, 14.36). Tianming ཙભ (The Mandate of Heaven) and ming ભ (fate or destiny) are not irrational forces, but a focused, fiery, conscious, intentionality that humans resist, or accept, to their benefit or cost. The trained, well-ordered life and active mind are in the Analects mirrors for Heaven’s beauty, harmony and rationality. However, we should not over-state the place of ‘mind’ in the Analects; in comparison, that is, with its ultimately decisive role in Mencius,168 Zhuangzi,169 the Song idealist philosopher Cheng Hao 〻井 (1032–85), for whom ‘only the mind is heaven’ (q. (Zhang, D., 2003: 10), and Ming scholar Wang Yangming ⦻䲭᰾ (1472– 1529), who claims: ‘The mind is heaven. In talking of the mind, one refers to heaven and earth and all the myriad things’ (1935: q. Ching, J., 1972: 214). The function of mind-in-reality that Spinoza saw in Confucianism is not from the Analects. In fact, the Classics commend a balanced, earthy, common-sense view of life, more than the intellectualism and impractical metaphysicalism the Enlightenment chose to profile. The temptation to find what we are looking for is so strong. The Gospels ‘Heaven’ and ‘earth’ in the Gospels are similarly multi-stranded. Critical reflection on the truth and significance of the Bible in 17th- and early 18th-century Britain confronts the impact of science and Confucianism on classical Christian cosmology.170 The five-fold categorization of tian in the Analects helps condense and compare a mountain of textual, historical material. First, a doxological tone is again clear. So, in Matthew, Jesus declares: ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned and revealed them to little children’ (11.25). As the ‘Lord of heaven and earth’, the God of the Gospels is, as Newton believed, the sovereign creator and sustainer of life.171 The disciples are to ‘consider’ the

168 N.B. Mencius: ‘To the mind pertains the role of thinking. By thinking it obtains its object. If it does not think, it does not obtain its object. This is what heaven has given to me’ (6, Gaozi A, #15); and, ‘Those who exert their minds know their nature, and those who know their nature know heaven’ (7, Exhausting the Mind A, #1). 169 N.B. Zhuangzi: ‘Do not let the human mind harm the Way; do not let human beings abet heaven’ (6, ‘The Teacher who is the Ultimate Ancestor’, line 9); and, ‘Extraordinary persons are extraordinary in the sight of human beings but normal in the sight of heaven’ (line 74). 170 On attempts to ‘accommodate’ Genesis to geology, palaeontology, Chinese chronology and language, Poole, W. ([2005] 2016), ‘The Genesis Narrative in the Circle of Robert Hooke and Francis Lodwick’, in Hessayon and Keene (eds), Scripture and Scholarship, 41–57. 171 Newton’s much-discussed theology appears to move in a rationalist, or (?) Deist direction. A reply to Richard Bentley sheds light on his position when writing the Principia: ‘When I wrote my treatise about our Systeme I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the beliefe of a Deity & nothing can rejoyce me more then to find it usefull for that purpose. But if I have done the publick any service this way ‘tis due to nothing but industry & a patient thought’ (Letter to Richard Bentley, 10 December 1692: 189. R. 4.47ff. 4A–5, Trinity College Library, Cambridge: http:// www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00254 [accessed 20 November 2017]).

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‘heavens’ (Gk. Ouranos: sky, air) in order to see a providential ordering and loving care, not only of the ‘birds of the air’, but of themselves (Mt. 6.26f.). The physical, material, reality of heaven and earth are in this sense translucent. God is seen and known through the things he has made (Pss. 8, 19.1–4, Rom. 1.20): for this he deserves thanks and praise. Those seeking ‘heavenly signs’, or idolizing creation, defame the name, mystery, majesty and creativity of God (Mt. 5.18f., 34f., 6.20f., 25f., 7.21f., 16.2). Biblical orthodoxy and popular piety in 17th- and early 18th-century Britain promoted a spiritual and scientific respect for the cosmos. Few doubted, or dissented: God was ‘Creator’, and worthy all creation’s praise (Ps. 150). As we saw earlier, if the Bible contained God’s ‘Word’, the world revealed his ‘Word and Works’. Scientific study was not inimical to this spirituality. As George Herbert’s (1593–1633) poem ‘Longing’ (1633) states: Indeed the world’s Thy book, Where all things have their leaf assigned; Yet a meek look Hath interlined. Thy board is full, yet humble guests Find nests. —1887: 132f. In the face of the finite, albeit glorious, materiality of a divinely created cosmos, Jesus says: ‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away’ (Mt. 24.35). Heaven and earth, as distinct, effulgent entities, will at the end be replaced by a new ‘kingdom’ over which Christ rules. As the disciples are taught to pray, ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ (Mt. 6.10, Lk 11.2f.). Contra Confucian cosmology, in the Gospels ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ are eschatological in character and teleological in purpose. As such, they are merely provisional realities created for specific, praise-filled purposes, through which God’s glory is seen, his will is known, and his plan of salvation accomplished. Second, as we have begun to see, ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ in the Gospels are theologically charged. They are the context in which God reveals his power, fulfils his purposes and elicits praise. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, devotion still determined scientific perception. Few questioned Jesus’s revelatory role as the divinely appointed mediator between heaven and earth.172 As he says in John’s Gospel, ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father’ (14.9). Hence, he ‘comes’ from heaven and ‘returns’ to heaven (Jn 3.31, 6.38, 14.28, 16.28, Acts 1.9–12). At his birth, baptism, transfiguration and ascension, heaven is ‘opened’ and God (both directly and indirectly) ‘speaks’, authorizing the identity and vocation of his anointed Son (Mt. 1.18–25, 3.16f., 17.1–8, Mk 1.9f., Lk. 1.26–38, 2.8–20, 3.21f., 9.28–36, 2 Pet. 1.16f.). Jesus ‘looks’ to ‘heaven’ in prayer (Mk 7.34, Jn 17.1). At his death, and separation from his heavenly Father, the ‘heavens’ are ‘darkened’ (Mt. 27.45, Mk 15.33, Lk. 23.44). During his ministry, Jesus proclaims the coming and character of God’s ‘kingdom’ as the rule, power and ethic of his ‘new (communal) life’ for those who ‘follow’ Like biblical criticism and the Gospels, atheistic and deistic tendencies in Britain were slow to direct their fire against Jesus himself. On the theological interface of progressive thought and biblical studies, Snobelen, S. D. ([2006] 2016), ‘ “To us there is but one God, the Father”: Antitrinitarian Textual Criticism in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England’, in Hessayon and Keene, 116–136.

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and ‘believe’ (e.g. Mt. 3.2, 5.3, 6.33, 7.21, 11.11, Mk 9.47, 10.14, 23, Lk. 4.43, 10.9, 12.31, 17.20f., Jn 3.5). In Jesus, ‘heaven’ is ‘at hand’ (Mt. 3.2, 4.17, Mk 1.15). Indeed, the ‘kingdom of heaven’ is ‘within’ or ‘among’ (Lk. 17.21) those who trust and obey him. In contrast, earth, though imbued with insignia of divine glory, is the domain of sin, death and demonic powers, until the decisive day of Jesus’s ‘return’. Meanwhile, his disciples are to proclaim the ‘good news’ of forgiveness of sins and ‘new life’ to the ‘ends of the earth’ (Acts 1.8). The ‘hope’ of heaven is, for Jesus’s disciples, anchored by his bodily resurrection on the ‘third day’, and confirmed by their own faith and experience. ‘Heaven’ is, then, in the Gospels, not a strained, theological abstraction, but a keen moral imperative and true philosophical and existential reality. Rather than counter this, Confucian cosmology cooled the spirits of those otherwise drawn to millennial extremism or Restoration mysticism. Third, as in the Analects, ‘heaven’ in the Gospels has clear moral connotations. It is not the power to do good (pace Confucius): it is the frame of reference in which good is done and towards which good tends.173 Jesus’s preaching and description of the ‘kingdom [of heaven]’ are the heart of his message in the Gospels, and the communal moral he enjoins. In contrast to tian in the Analects, as we will see in Chapter 5, biblical ethics look to Jesus’s dominical authority and the work of the Holy Spirit. Apart from these, the disciple has no innate moral capacity to honour God or keep his laws. That said, moral incentives are clear: the ‘kingdom of heaven’ is a precious ‘treasure’ and a ‘priceless pearl’ for which sacrifices are made (Mt. 13.1–52, 16.24f., Lk. 9.23f.). Likewise, the consequences of rejecting, or denying, Jesus’s call to ‘enter’ by ‘the narrow door’ into the ‘kingdom of heaven’ (Mt. 7.13f., Lk. 13.24f.) are vividly portrayed (Mt. 13.42, 24, 25, Lk. 13.28f., 21.5–36). Eternal bliss in ‘heaven’ is for those who ‘repent and believe the gospel’ (Mk 1.14f., Mt. 25.35–40). Though the term ‘heaven’ is applied to God in the Gospels (Mt. 21.26, Lk. 15.18, 21), it never displaces God. It is the eternal gift of God and the immanent presence – or personal sense of that gift – in the believer’s life. It is inherent in the teleological ethics of the New Testament, and integral to Christian eschatology and doctrines of ‘the last things’.174 If Ricci’s use of tian to translate the biblical God clarified matters for Chinese minds, it potentially confused Bible-believing Christians, for whom ‘heaven’ is at most the ‘throne’ or ‘domain’ of God, where his will and ways prevail.175 The potential for a false conflation of God with the cosmos is clear, but ‘divine modality’ and ‘human personality’ are no part of ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ in the Gospels. Mutual respect does not always mean accord, nor, on this last point, clear understanding. Fourth, in different language, but an over-lapping meaning, the Gospels and Analects have a clear sense of an inherent power in the conformity of life to a heavenly template. In the ‘Beatitudes’ from the ‘Sermon on the Mount’, the ‘kingdom of heaven’ is for the ‘poor in spirit’ and ‘persecuted’; while the ‘children of heaven’ are those who ‘love their enemies’, ‘do the will of the Father in heaven’, are ‘the least’, or willing not to be ‘the greatest’, like a child (Mt. 5.3, 10, 45, 12.50, 18.1f., 19.14f.). The clear implication is that in and through the way of weakness, submission, humility For a historical perspective, Hickman, L. (2017), ‘The ethical cosmos’, in Eighteenth-Century Dissent and Cambridge Platonism, 101–35. 174 Traditionally, the ‘four last things’ in Christian eschatology relate to death, judgement, heaven and hell, as the four stages of the soul after death. Cf. Chapter 8, passim. 175 On ‘heaven’ as the locus of God’s ‘throne’, Is. 66.1, Acts 7.49; also, on Jesus ‘sitting at the right hand of the Father’ or being ‘at the right hand’ of God, Mt. 22.44, Acts 2.33, 7.55f., Rom. 8.34, Eph. 1.20, Col. 3.1, Heb. 8.1, 10.12, 12.2, 1 Pet. 3.22, Rev. 3.21. 173

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and silent suffering, divine strength and blessing are discovered and distributed. This is suggestively similar to the empowered ‘harmonizing’ of human life to a higher will evident in the Analects. Seventeenth and early 18th-century readers of the Bible, though often preoccupied with the ‘Harmony of the Gospels’,176 or the harmony, beauty and design of creation that proved God’s existence,177 were, I suggest, also ready to find in Confucian moral and cosmological ‘harmony’ grounds for affirmative mutual recognition. Confucius’s popularity in late 17th-century Britain may explain the exclusion of his philosophy from the parameters of the annual ‘Boyle Lectures’ (1692-present), which are, ‘for proving the Christian religion against Notorious Infidels, viz. Atheists, Deists, Pagans, Jews and Mahometans’ (Bentley 1693: 1).178 In other words, though attractive to Deists and rationalist critics of Christianity, Confucianism could be adduced in its defence. ‘Harmony’ was a non-controversial theological theme. The Nonconformist theologian and hymn writer Philip Doddridge (1702–51) joyfully expounds the theme with heavenly choirs in a verse setting of Psalm 66.7: His praise gives harmony to all their voices, And ev’ry heart thro’ the full choir rejoices. —1805: V. 34 Lastly, in Doddridge’s friend and fellow hymn writer, Isaac Watts (1674–1748), we glimpse the final sense in which ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ are expounded in the Gospels. They refer to seasons and natural passage of time in the ‘heavens’ and ‘earth’ (Mt. 16.3, Lk. 12.56).179 Though sin may dull human perception, the evidence of God’s ordering is clear. To Watts, the Holy Spirit ‘re-establishes harmony between the human faculties’ (1813: 1.10). This mirrors God’s order, beauty and harmony in the cosmos. Hence, the Spirit’s work is, he says, ‘to put all our misplaced and disjointed powers into their proper order again, and to maintain this divine harmony and peace’ (ibid.). Furthermore, ‘It is the blessed Spirit that inclines reason to submit to faith, and makes the lower faculties submit to reason, and obey the will of our maker, and then gives us the pleasure of it’ (ibid.). Like friend Philip Doddridge, Watts skirts around ‘natural theology’ in celebration of the rational evidence in creation (for God’s existence) and faith (in God’s providential love, salvation and care) (Strivens 2015: 86f.). It is not only rationalist and Deist heirs of the Cambridge Platonists who cut the

As noted above (p. 73, n. 102), the history, theology and hermeneutical implications, and visual representation of a ‘harmonizing’ of the four gospels (or first three gospels), is long and complex. In the early 18th century, the radical Swiss theologian Jean Leclerc (1657–1736) wrote a new Harmony of the Gospels (1701), which the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704; p. 126, n. 176, 147, n. 88, 155, 162, 164, 167, 169, 215, 219, 222, 226, 315) had, while Griesbach’s (1745– 1812) classic study (1776) served to quieten the more conservative. On renewed English interest in ‘harmonizing’ the Gospels from the 16th to 18th centuries, McArthur, H. K. (1966), The Quest through the Centuries, 85. 177 N.B. naturalist John Ray’s (1627–1705), The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691), that sets out ‘to take a view of the Works of Creation, and to observe something of the Wisdom of God discernible in the Formation of them, in the Order and Harmony, and in their Ends and Uses’ (40). Cf. also, the Boyle lectures (in 1692 and 1694) by Richard Bentley (1662–1742), Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and William Derham (1657–1735) in 1711 and 1712. On this, Strivens, R. (2015), Philip Doddridge and the Shaping of Evangelical Dissent, esp. 84f. 178 On contemporary debate about God’s existence, Stewart, M. A. (2006), ‘Arguments for the Existence of God: The British Debate’, in K. Haakonssen (ed.), Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, II. 710–30; Muller, R. A. (2003), Post-Reformation Dogmatics, III. 193–5. 179 On Watts’s theology and view of reason, Beynon, G. (2016), Isaac Watts: Reason, Passion and the Revival of Religion. 176

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undergrowth of biblical literalism on the journey to Confucius’s centrality in the continental Enlightenment. Orthodox voices also assist this process, heralding ‘harmony’ as a gracious divine gift in and through God’s interrelated benefits of creation, revelation and recreation in Jesus Christ. The ubiquitous, polymorphic theme of ‘harmony’ in 17th- and early 18th-century Britain – from which, as we have seen, Dryden and others drew artistic, musical, literary, theological and scientific inspiration – though not explicit in the Gospels, is legitimately drawn from the cosmological and spiritual gifts of ‘peace’ and ‘unity’ Christ and the Spirit impart. Though Dryden does not cite the Analects, he unites and interprets in, and for, his day and age Asian Confucianism and Gospel orthodoxy, when in his poem ‘A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687’, he states: ‘From harmony, from heavenly harmony,/ This universal frame began.’ We read ‘on the far side’ of this. We also read after the rabid sinophilia of 18th-century Britain and Europe. To this we turn in the second snapshot of our story.

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Humanity, Society and the Search for Worth Am I not a man and a brother? —Josiah Wedgwood [1730–95], ‘Slave Medallion’, 1787 Self-understanding can be an unreliable guide. Exposure to another person can reveal things we would prefer to hide or ignore. Cross-cultural engagement attracts and repels most people in equal measure. We are fascinated by the other, but protective of our own. The dissimilar can be alluring, the similar and familiar oddly infuriating. International disputes and cultural tension can, like personality clashes, be provoked as much – if not more – by our rejected or unrecognized similarities, as much as cultural distance or unreconcilable differences. These psychological and relational realities impact the next stage in the story of the discovery, and break-down, of Sino-Western relations. We enter a swirling atmosphere. Our timeframe is from the last decades of the 17th century to c. 1750. Western sinophilia peaks during this period. To some, the Orient fulfilled the grandest, purest, most practical of romantic dreams: to others, China’s strangeness was a mirage created by ‘aliens’ and/or sustained by ‘Myths’. Others in the West, with a greater degree of emotional, political, or religious, detachment, objectified China, and made decisions based on a careful analysis of available data. Why people sit where they do and see what they see, cannot be easily, or conclusively, agreed. Such are people, such is perspective. International Relations, and intellectual and cultural history, are rightly understood to be very often more about personality and perspective than we might be ready to admit. Recovering harmony begins in admission of causing dissonance. We turn here from comparative analysis of classical Confucian and Christian views of the context of life, to the nature, or content, of life for an individual and his/her society. We mirror, if you like, Socrates’s (c. 470–399 BCE) shift from study of the heavens to human life (as a ‘rational’, rationally explicable reality) and from Aristotle’s (384–322 BCE) developed metaphysical and teleological view of ‘human nature’ (as a fixed, idea moving towards its natural end) – which dominated medieval thought – through their critique and reversal in the open-ended empiricism of the late 17th and early 18th centuries.1 If ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ in the Analects and Gospels are conditioned by new ideas and interaction between China, Britain and Europe in the 17th and early 18th centuries, so now are humanity and society. We ‘read backwards carefully’ when we see the ‘faces’ of Confucius and Jesus on our old canvas are dulled by interpretative grime and depicted on a 1 For non-metaphysical, non-determinist, ‘behaviourist’ views of human nature, cf. below on Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, George Eliot, Darwin, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre.

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shared ground not only of early-Modern cosmology but also of the related, contemporaneous, issue of anthropology.2 In the last chapter we saw Confucius connect the majesty of the mythic Yao to the greatness of Heaven (A. 8.19; p. 120). Psalm 8 also proceeds from praise of God’s glory in the heavens (v. 1, 3) to ask, ‘What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?’ (v. 4). Cosmology and anthropology are separated here (in Chapters 3 and 4), but the potential artificiality and interpretative risks of this are clear. In the end, the reader must decide, in the light of the evidence, if this division is warranted. But this is not our only risk: cultural entanglement also threatens this chapter. The 17th and 18th-century material reviewed here is drawn equally, and interconnectedly, from Britain and Europe. For, ideas spread like viruses, not only between China and the West, but across the English Channel and, later, the Atlantic. Such is the scope and impact of this, it has marked indelibly how life for individuals and their societies are read in, and into, the Analects and Gospels. The long, intercultural ‘history of interpretation’ of the Analects and Gospels enters a rich, rewarding new phase here. Selection and exaggeration are again essential. So, too, identification of a ‘cultural archetype’ that enriches intertextual understanding and modern EastWest dialogue. In this case, I propose, china helps China and the West understand each another.

PORCELAIN AND THE PROBLEM OF PERFECTION We begin with a chemical process that has both united and divided China and the West – the quest to make porcelain. Our ‘cultural archetype’ is now a cultural artefact. The translucent beauty of bone-white porcelain, or just the ubiquity of ‘blue and white’ china, impact us all. The history of European efforts to crack the problem of porcelain is an accessible analogue for humanity’s quest to understand and transform itself and create life in community. This can be illustrated from the life and work of the globally branded Wedgwood family. Their story is in a sense ours, too. ‘Wedgwood’ is a valuable, global ‘cultural archetype’. In the discovery, beauty, subtlety, ambition and oppression of porcelain, human life, character, progress and community, are laid bare.3 We read the Analects and Gospels ‘on the far side’ of Josiah Wedgwood’s (1730–95) life, discoveries, priorities and humanity. In the year Handel’s Messiah was first performed, 1742, Thomas Briand (fl. 1742–80), an innovator from Chelsea, London, lectured to the Royal Society on ‘soft-paste’ porcelain.4 For centuries, the quest to reproduce the delicate and highly prized porcelain from China had been an obsession of many entrepreneurial craftsmen in Britain, including Josiah Wedgwood. In the pre-industrial world, artisan skills were jealously guarded by ‘guilds’ and trade secrets. This was certainly true of porcelain. Briand was the first successful British manufacturer of ‘soft-paste’ porcelain. In 1743, the ‘Chelsea’ porcelain factory opened its gates. In 1749, the Anglo-Irish painter Thomas Frye (c. 1710–62) patented ‘bone ash’ porcelain. An industry was born that would in time enrich many people in 2 I use the term ‘anthropology’ in this chapter to include areas covered by the classical doctrine of humanity, and the later academic discipline, which emerges in the 19th century. 3 On rival products from Delft, Meissen and Sèvres, and the social impact they had, p. 133, 154. 4 The terms ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ paste refer to the different temperatures and constituents used in manufacturing porcelain. ‘Softpaste’ is clay, glass frit and feldspathic porcelain fired at lower temperatures. This process made bone china, vitreous, Seger, new Sèvres, and Parian porcelain in 18th-century Britain and Europe. But Chinese porcelain, from the 7th and 8th century, was a ‘hard-paste’ ceramic compound of crushed feldspar rock (petunse) and kaolin, fired at c. 1400°C. This was the process Western potters struggled to emulate.

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Britain, including the Wedgwood family, but it would also affect the lives of millions for good and ill around the world. Porcelain is inter-twined with East-West cultural relations, the Jesuit China mission, and the theme of this chapter, ‘Humanity and Society’. In the 16th-century word ‘manufacture’ (lit. hand-made) we speak of human life. We are what we make, and, in Durkheimian analysis, we pursue new production when pressured by competition.5 The story of porcelain illustrates this well. The history of Chinese ceramics is long, complex and fiercely contested. That China pioneered new processes and production of a wide range of artefacts on an industrial scale, few people question. The Western concept ‘porcelain’,6 as a distinct type of manufacture, does not encompass all of China’s ceramics. Some earthenware and impervious stoneware pottery (for utilitarian and finer use), from ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ regions (recovered from caves and funeral sites), dates from pre-dynastic China. ‘Proto-porcelain’ and ‘porcelaneous’ wares, tao 䲦 (using kaolin fired to temperatures of 1000˚+ in different types of ‘updraft’, ‘dragon’ 喽 [long] and ‘mantou’ kilns 併九), are found more than 800 years prior to what some see as the start of decorated Chinese porcelain (made of crushed porcelain or feldstar stone – known as ‘petunse’ – quartz, and varying amounts of kaolin, or kaolinite) in the Eastern Han ᶡ╒ pottery (c. 206 BCE–200 CE) from Zhejiang. The path from China’s palaeolithic pottery to the highly prized ‘blue and white’, high-fired (ci ⬧) porcelain of the Yuan ‫(ݳ‬1271–1368) and Ming བྷ᰾ dynasties (1368–1644) – with their graceful lines and Islamic style, that are found in Europe from the 14th century – passed through lead-glazed, ‘egg-andspinach’ sancai йᖙ (three colour), and lime-green Celadon ware of the Sui 䲻 (581–618) and Tang ୀ (618–907) dynasties, to become pure, white, translucent artefacts. Suleiman, an Arab merchant, refers to the latter in his mid-9th-century Chain of Chronicles: ‘They have in China a very fine clay with which they make vases which are as transparent as glass; water is seen through them. The vases are made of clay’ (q. Bushell and Laffan 1910: 1). In under-stated Song ᆻ (960–1276) pottery, we see Confucian influence: it believed blue under-glaze and complex patterns to be brash. In the luxuriant, cosmopolitan, Mongol Yuan and Ming ware, we see types and styles of Chinese porcelain manufactured for internal and export markets. As a cultural artefact, ‘blue and white’ china brooks few rivals: its profile in Britain and Europe is a tangible analogue of social and international relations.7 We express who we are in what we make – and in how we use products, for good and ill.8 Josiah Wedgwood was born into an English Dissenting family in Burslem, a suburb of the modern city of Stoke, the eleventh and youngest child of a potter, Thomas Wedgwood III (1685–1739). Josiah’s grandfather was a Unitarian minister, a tradition Josiah followed. In childhood, Josiah contracted smallpox. This left his right knee too weak for a potter’s wheel. He directed his energies to designs others could work, and to financial and business protocols that would, and did, benefit his industry. Like many in his day, he was drawn to Chinese, and to neo-Classical, styles. Though European sinophilia wanes during his lifetime, he benefits from increased knowledge of China, its porcelain processes and manufacturing practices. The Jesuit missionary François Xavier d’Entrecolles, SJ (1664–1741) was central to the growth of European knowledge of Chinese porcelain. D’Entrecolles landed in Canton in 1698 on the French East India Company ship, Amphitrite. Like others on board, he had been sponsored by On the French sociologist/sociologist of religion, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), Schmaus, W. (1997), Durkheim’s Philosophy of Science, 23f. 6 ‘Porcelain’, from the old Italian word for cowrie shell, porcellana, evokes its translucence. 7 Cf. the cultural significance of porcelain and statistics on Chinese export, p. 134, 135, 154f., 162, 164, n. 189, 169, 172f. 8 On truth through ‘manufacture’, below p. 148, n. 92, 154, 173, 174, 177. 5

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Louis XIV.9 With a ‘passion for the curious and unusual’ and proclivity to sift and marshal material (Finlay 2010: 18), d’Entrecolles was sent to the ‘Porcelain Capital’ of China, Jingdezhen Ჟᗧ䧞 (on the Chang river in NE Jiangxi). From the Han Dynasty on, Jingdezhen (the ancient capital Changnan) produced porcelain said to be ‘as thin as paper, as white as jade, as bright as a mirror, and as sound as a bell’. Such was its standing, the city was one of the ‘Great Four’ in the Ming and Qing dynasties;10 indeed, some say ‘China’ is a Western trader corruption of Changnan, or extrapolation from the city’s trade. D’Entrecolles lived there for twenty years before his appointment as Superior General in China (1706–19) and Superior of the French Residence in Peking (1722–32). Porcelain was another aspect of the rich, cultural legacy the Jesuit mission left Europe. Fine pottery rendered Chinese culture visible, accessible and widely admired in society. It united and divided China and the West. Purportedly the first Chinese porcelain found in Europe was the magnificent Fonthill Vase,11 a richly decorated pot gifted to Louis the Great of Hungary (1326–82) by a Chinese Embassy bound for Avignon in 1338 to meet Pope Benedict XII (1285–1342; r. 1334–42). The vase was (almost

FIGURE 8: The Gagnières-Fonthill vase by Barthélemy Rémy (1713). N.B. Louis XIV’s passion for porcelain, p. 133. The others were Foshan ֋ኡ (Guangdong), Hankou ╒ਓ (Hubei) and Zhuxianzhen ᵡԉ䧞 (Henan). 11 Also known as the Gaignières-Fonthill Vase. It was prob. made in Changnan c. 1300–40. In colour and style, it represents the end of Qingbai 䶂ⲭ ware and the beginning of the ‘blue and white’ style seen in Europe in the 15th century and imitated by European potters from the 18th century. Having various owners, incl. Jean, duc de Berry (1340–1416), the vase can be seen in a 1713 watercolour owned by the French genealogist, antiquary and collector, Francois Roger de Gaignières (1642– 1715). William Beckford (1760–1844), a profligate English novelist and art collector, who lived at Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire, procured it (hence its name). It is now in the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin. 9

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certainly) from Changnan.12 Porcelain gained favoured social status. There is a pen and ink drawing of it by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). In 1506 Archduke Philip of Austria (1478–1506) gifted some Ming celadon ware to the then Archbishop of Canterbury (fr. 1503), William Warham (c. 1450–1532).13 Later in the century, London became famous for its silver-mounted Chinese porcelain.14 Elizabeth I’s (1533–1603; r. 1558–1603) lifelong advisor and beau, William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (1520–98), had a stash of Wanli pottery c. 1580. Charles II’s mistress Barbara Villiers, the 1st Duchess of Cleveland (1640–1709), auctioned her porcelain collection in Paris in 1678. Louis XIV is said to have had a ‘porcelain fetish’. Porcelain figures of social and intellectual illuminati were popular in an 18th-century gentleman’s study. A bust of Shakespeare by the Flemish sculptor Peter Scheemaker (1691–1781) is listed in 1741/2. Europe struggled for four centuries to match and master China’s ‘hard-paste’ porcelain. The 16th-century ‘soft-paste’ Medici porcelain is one of many ignominious failures. In 1712 and 1722, after years of study, and help from local experts and converts, d’Entrecolles wrote at length to Louis-François Orry, SJ (1671–1726), treasurer of the Jesuit mission in China and India, about porcelain. His letters were finally printed in Lettres édifiantes et curieuses de Chine (1702–76),15 in Du Halde’s Description de l’Empire de la Chine (1735), and in French philosopher, advocate and literary artist Denis Diderot’s (1713–84) Encyclopédie (1751–72).16 China’s expertise was now broadcast across Europe. Wedgwood drank deep from Jesuit wells. His ‘Commonplace’ book quotes d’Entrecolles at length.17 But more is at stake. Porcelain will become a romanticized and politicized cipher for life in society. Manufacture is revelatory: it will soon become revolutionary. Though some claim earlier English success – and French soft-paste ‘blue and white’ porcelain was certainly produced in the Saint-Cloud factory, Rouen, from 1702 – in parallel with the publication of d’Entrecolles findings, Augustus II ‘the Strong’, Elector of Saxony (1670–1733), sponsored experiments into ‘hard-paste’ porcelain. The scientific polymath, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (1651–1708) experimented with kaolin clay (used in China) and alabaster mined from nearby Colditz. He was joined in 1705 by the feisty young alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger (1682–1719). A note in their workshop log records that shortly before his death in October 1708, Tschirnhaus solved the porcelain problem. The first example of hard-paste, translucent white, vitrified porcelain, had been produced. In 1709, the year Augustus became King of Poland, Böttger announced the news – and shamelessly took the credit! Its secret tightly guarded, the ‘Meissen’ factory opened its doors a year later. Though Wedgwood was fascinated by, and keen to copy, Chinese techniques, as we have seen, Briand beat him to the starting blocks. Wedgwood’s work led him to collaborate in his twenties with the eminent pioneer in British pottery, Thomas Whieldon (1719–95), his business partner from 1754, and, from 1768 to 1780, with the notable, gentleman-potter from Scropton, Derbyshire, On other pieces of porcelain de Berry may have possessed, Arnold, L. (1999), Princely Gifts and Papal Treasures, 133f. Warham bequeathed the gift to New College, Oxford in 1530. 14 On porcelain, the Jesuits and silver-mounted artefacts, Wilson, G. ed. (1999), Mounted Oriental Porcelain in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Introduction. 15 Cf. the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, below p. 101, 103. 16 On Du Halde, p. 137, 138, 139, 150, 171f., 205. On Diderot, p. 149f., 152, 153f., 161, n. 166. 17 On Wedgwood’s debt to China for refining porcelain, resolving production issues and training staff, Žmolek, M. A. (2013), Rethinking the Industrial Revolution, 409f. 12 13

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Thomas Bentley (1731–80), who brought sophistication to their work. Wedgwood’s marriage to his third cousin, Sarah Wedgwood, in 1764 provided much-needed finance to expand his primitive factories. Wedgwood’s unique style, and ‘blue and white’, ‘black basalt’, ‘creamware’, ‘jasperware’, and ‘caneware’ glaze, combined classical shapes, literary motifs and evocations of well-known paintings. The breadth and combination of his products attracted royal patronage, burgeoning domestic and overseas trade, and vast wealth. Wedgwood was passionate about perfection. He was as keen on perfect products as he was the process behind them and business that drove them (McKendrick 1982: 108). It took him three years to perfect his 1789 copy of the 1st-century BCE ‘blue and white’ Portland vase: his marketing genius, launch of new products, siting of stores, accounting protocols, and very modern commitment to (multi-lingual) customer satisfaction, continue to impress. He was quite simply a highly effective entrepreneur, who made china, and made it popular. But he was also committed to ethical practice. What has been said of Wilberforce is also true of Wedgwood: one man can change his society – but cannot do it alone. Wedgwood’s life and work left a global legacy. He is a worthy associate of the ‘cultural archetype’ for this chapter. Wedgwood’s impact lay beyond pottery. His study of Chinese porcelain production became the template for his development of new industrial processes. By separating artisan skills, productionlevels could be increased. Domestic and high-end pottery poured onto the streets of Britain. ‘Blue and white’ became a sought-after sign of affluence, then a symbol of an emergent, urban middle class. British and European society were defined and transformed by porcelain.18 Wedgwood’s wealth enabled him to change the socio-economic status quo in Britain, and her sovereign territories, in other ways. When called upon by his friend William Wilberforce, MP (1759–1833), and a group of wealthy evangelicals and ‘socialist’ Quakers, to fund a campaign to abolish the economically advantageous – and, nationally scandalous – slave trade, Wedgwood agreed. As the Quaker abolitionist Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846) said of Wedgwood’s ubiquitous ‘Slave Medallion’: Of the ladies several wore them in bracelets, and others had them fitted up in an ornamental manner as pins for their hair. At length the taste for wearing them became general; and thus fashion, which usually confines itself to worthless things, was seen for once in the honourable office of promoting the cause of justice, humanity and freedom. —[1808] 1839: 417 Produced first by poor, but skilled, Chinese labourers, Wedgwood made porcelain a key to unlock the chains of (mostly West) Africans transported on British ships to slavery in the Caribbean and elsewhere. He turned the biblical principle of human creation by, and equality before, God into a reconstructive social agenda for Georgian Britain. A century later, his own grandson, the naturalist, geologist and evolutionary biologist, Charles Darwin (1809–82), shattered the faith of many Victorian churchmen with the publication on 24 November 1859 of On the Origin of Species.19 Biology might select, economics, faith and society did not.

For a parallel with tea and tea-drinking p. 8, 186, 188, 190. N.B. the better-known later title The Origin of Species (6th edn, 1872). On the work’s history and reception, Browne, E. J. (2006), Darwin’s Origin of Species; Reznick, D. N. (2009), The Origin Then and Now; Scheibel, A. B. and J. W. Schopf, eds (1997), The Origin and Evolution of Intelligence. On Darwin and ‘social evolution’or ‘social Darwinism’, p. 235, 316, 320. 18 19

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FIGURE 9: Wedgwood abolitionist medallion, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ (1786).

After years of study, travel, discussion, sickness and heart-ache – together with 19th-century work on evolution by French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), and his own colleague, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) – Darwin advanced his theory of ‘natural selection’. His work blends Aristotelian essentialism (where species retain certain features) with anti-Aristotelian scientism (in which reality per se develops). Unlike his grandfather, Darwin symbolizes the flowering of British Cartesian rationalism and Baconian empiricism. With very different premises and prejudices, neither member of the Wedgwood family would doubt Confucius’s claim: ‘Of all that Heaven has produced and Earth nourishes, the greatest is man’ (q. Kelen 1971: 93). Readers of the Analects and Gospels in China and the West do so in light of Wedgwood and Darwin’s work, and the trans-continental ‘cultural archetype’ of porcelain. We will return to porcelain later in this chapter. For now, we note its remarkable socio-economic and moral reach. In different ways, it has touched and changed us all.

CHINA AND THE ROOTS OF EUROPEAN ANTHROPOLOGY D’Entrecolles is one of many missionaries, diplomats, explorers and entrepreneurs, who acted as cultural intermediaries between China and the West in the 17th and early 18th centuries (Rowbotham 1942: vii). The expansion of Western knowledge of China was exponential. Printed material outstripped porcelain production. China did not need to promote itself: it inspired a cultural, intellectual army of subversive Europeans. Central to China’s impact on European culture and society were issues classical Confucianism raised about the nature of ‘man’. The question was not only, ‘Who do I think am?’, but ‘How and what do I think?’ Anthropology and epistemology are inseparable. The impact of China’s challenge to the intellectual, social, and moral foundations of European culture emerged gradually. In time, innocent publications would become incendiary devices. We read the Analects and Gospels today ‘on the far side’ of the revolution in early-Modern

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anthropology and philosophy that D’Entrecolles and his colleagues, consciously and unconsciously, ignited.20 We study key European figures in this section, their British counterparts in the next. European reception of Confucius and Confucianism in the 17th and 18th centuries, is both complex and contested. Cast in sharp relief is the problem of how to preserve the right ‘interpretative context’ and avoid projecting ‘uncommon assumptions’ (especially a modern ‘self ’) on the Analects and Gospels. These, Hall and Ames rightly caution, plague Confucian studies (1987: 11, 18f.). But we also find fluidity in the image of Confucius per se. As Paul Rule says, he is ‘plagiarized by countless works’ (1986: 73). Of his ascendant profile during this period, there is little doubt. Jensen says of his European reception at the time: Confucius was a significant, and salient, artefact. The frequency with which his name and image appeared in letters, memoires, treatises, travel literature and histories suggests that he was moved like a New World species in an expanding market of new ideas joining Rome with Paris, London, Berlin, Prague and then, in turn, with the missionary outposts at Goa, Canton, Macao and Beijing. —1997: 9 The need for care is clear. The tributary stream of data on China in the early 17th century joins the fast-flowing river of Renaissance humanism. This becomes by the mid-18th century an oriental torrent. If Michelangelo’s Pietà gives physical form to ‘il Sommo Poeta’ (the supreme poet) Dante Alighieri’s (c. 1265–1321) ‘Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio’ (Virgin mother, daughter of your son),21 the radical Enlightenment in the West reimagines Confucius in a much more invasive way. Gone is the ‘accommodation’ of Jesus to Chinese culture. Confucius becomes an axe to smash Christendom’s ‘carved panelling’ (Ps. 74.6). He is invoked in expansion of the European mind from (Christian) Renaissance humanism to (secularized) Enlightenment rationalism. As the Jewish Russian philosopher and historian of science Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964) says, this involves a move From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957). The mind and meaning of ‘man’ are pivotal to this paradigm shift in European consciousness. Seventeenth- and early 18th-century European sinology can be divided into two main types: i. the study of Chinese language and translation of Confucian texts; and, ii. the use of Chinese materials to interpret, or critique, Western thought and practice.22 As we have seen, early drafts of Chinese philosophical texts by Ruggieri and Ricci appear in the 1590s. Prior to publication of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus in 1687, Jesuit manuscripts from China and Goa began to introduce Confucian thought. Sapientia Sinica (1662) has the Great Learning and some of the Analects. Sinarum scientia politico-moralis (1667–9) has a section of the Doctrine of the Mean. These, and other Confucian texts translated at this time, began to be available across continental On China and the new discipline of ‘anthropology’, Niekerk, C. (2016), ‘The Problem of China: Asia and Enlightenment Anthropology’, in B. Brandt and D. L. Purdy (eds), China in the German Enlightenment, 97–117. 21 Dante, Commedia, III. Paradiso, Cantica 33. Composed between c. 1308 and 1321, Commedia is a breath-taking literary counterpart to the ‘angelic doctor’ Thomas Aquinas’s (1225–74) Summa Theologiae (1265–74). It is a Christian vision of the afterlife, with Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise). Dante’s contemporary Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) called the work ‘Divina’ (divine). In his late-medieval Christian way, Dante defined humanity by reference to God and divine judgement, not by humanity’s self-assigned criteria which are now more popular. 22 For history and cross-cultural typology, Ji, J. (2007), Encounters Between Chinese Culture and Christianity. 20

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Europe.23 And, as David Pollard points out, these books ‘were interpreted as consistent with “natural religion” and lacking only Revelation through Jesus Christ’ (2011: III. 2184f.). In other words, early translations both interpreted, and effectively promoted, Confucian thought. Pollard continues: ‘Virtues that the Chinese regarded as only human or social were given religious colouring: for example, yi (justice) was translated fidelitatem (fidelity), ren (benevolence) was pietate et clemente (piety and mercy), shengren (sage) was translated as sanctus (saint, or holy man)’ (ibid.). And, again: ‘In the sphere of metaphysics, dao (the Way), the universal order the Chinese thought of as organic and self-generating, was translated rationally as regula (rule), a mechanical system laid down by God, and xiu dao (cultivation of the Way) interpreted as spiritual exercises like those the priests themselves performed’ (ibid.).24 Over time, this comparative process would witness rolereversal: Confucian categories would critique Christianity. In this initial stage, European Sinology shared Britain’s interest in the history, language, geography and culture of China:25 acute investigation, and application of Confucian philosophy and ethics, would come later. Seventeenth-century European studies of China and the Chinese language are almost always composed by, or dependent on, Catholic missionaries. But an influential lay source was Dutch philosophical geographer, Bernhard Varen’s (1622–50) Descriptio regni Iaponiae (1649) and his Geographia Generalis (1650).26 Inspired by his cartographer friend Willem Blaeu (1571–1638), and the Asian explorations of Abel Tasman (1603–59), William Schouten (c. 1567–1625) and other Dutch navigators, Varen investigated geography, cartography, the physics of time, climate and seasons, and many newly discovered cultures. The addendum to Descriptio regni Iaponiae is entitled ‘Chinensum religio’ (Chinese religion).27 Anthropology is often situated in and interpreted by cosmology: it is so here. Varen writes of the Chinese: [They] assert that the whole universe consists of one and the same substance and that its creator, together with sky and earth, men and beasts, trees and plants, and finally the four elements,

E.g. Du Halde’s Description of China has: i. Prémare’s part-translation of the Book of Odes (Shi jing); ii. a full Latin version by Alex. de la Charme (1695–1767), whose translation of a mid-16th century Chinese chronology was completed in 1741, but not published until 1830; iii. Ant. Gaubil’s (1689–1759) translation of the Book of Documents/Classic of History (Shu jing) published in Paris (1770); iv. the MS of Jean-Baptiste Regis’s (1663–1738) anti-Figurist translation of the Book of Changes (Yijing), Y-King, antiquissima sinarum liber (Book of Changes, the oldest Chinese book), which was initially refused publication because of its content, but was then produced in Stuttgart (1834) and Tübingen (1839). On Leibniz and the Yijing, p. 96, 116, 117, 140f., 143f. On these texts, Luca, D. (2016), The Chinese Language in European Texts. 24 N.B. Pollard has an over-view of Jesuit versions of Chinese literature and of their Western texts in Chinese. Though Chinese materials were widely read in Europe, Western texts were, Pollard points out, read by few and largely lost when the Catholic mission was proscribed in the mid-18th century. Though early materials were of an apologetic and catechetical nature, of the c. 131 Jesuit compilations and translations in and from China between 1584 and 1790, c. 89 were on astronomy with others on scientific themes (i.e. anatomy, medicine, zoology, phonology, musicology and logic). 25 On this, Lundbaek, K. (1991), ‘The first European translations of Chinese historical and philosophical works’, in T. H. C. Lee (ed.), China and Europe, 29–43; Minford, J. and J. S. M. Lau, eds (2000), Classical Chinese Literature, xlivf.; Mungello, D. E. (1988), ‘The Seventeenth century Jesuit translation project’, in C. E. Ronan, SJ, and B. B. C. Oh (eds), East meets West, 252–72. 26 Cf. Roetz, H. (2013), ‘The Influence of Foreign Knowledge on Eighteenth Century European Secularism’, in L. Hölscher and M. Eggert (eds), Religion and Secularity, 9–33 (esp. 23). Varen’s Geographia Generalis passed through fifteen complete, and four part-edns. in five European languages, and ten in an abridged French version. Varen draws a distinction between ‘absolute’, ‘relative’, and ‘comparative’ geography, and uses principles found in others, including Isaac Newton, James Jurin (1684–1759), William Dugdale (1605–86), the French cartographer J.B. Bourguignon d’Anville (1697–1782) and Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). In mapping the world, he mapped life. 27 N.B. also, von Collani, C. (1995), ‘The “Treatise on Chinese Religions (1623)” of N. Longobardi, S.J.’. 23

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compose a single continuous body, of whose great body individual creatures are members. From the unity of these substances they teach ... that we can arrive at similitude to god from the fact that he is one with him. —[1649]; q. Maverick 1939: 421 The similarity between this and the Dutch Sephardic Jewish convert to Christianity, Baruch Spinoza’s (1632–77) later thought is, as his contemporaries noticed,28 striking.29 Varen was not unique. The French adventurer-medic Francois Bernier (1620–88), pupil of the clerical philosopher and mathematician Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), reported at length on life and travel in Asia. Serving at one time as the physician to the Indian Prince Dara Shikoh (1615–59), the elder son of Shah Jahan (1594–1666) and Aurangzeb (1618–1707), the last Moghul Emperor, Bernier wrote travelogues that blend cultural commentary and empirical analysis. Like his free-thinking, empirical mentor Gassendi, Bernier used a Baconian-type system of racial classification to narrate Asian history and to objectify China and Chinese culture for European readers.30 Life’s mystery and diversity were, like Chinese porcelain, increasingly subject to empirical study and cross-cultural commentary. Humanity and society begin to look different, to take on new meaning. Social change blows in on warm oriental breezes. To Semedo, Couplet, Navarrete,31 Verbiest, and Du Halde’s early work on China’s geography, politics, religion and culture, is added now that of others. These include Louis Le Comte, SJ (1655–1728), Jean-Baptiste Regis, SJ (1663–1738), the Figurists Joachim Bouvet, SJ (1656–1730) and Joseph de Prémare, SJ (1666–1736), Jean-Denis Attiret, SJ (1702–68), Jean Joseph Marie Amiot, SJ (1718–93),32 the Parisian scholar Nicolas Fréret (1688–1749), the Italian Paolo Mattia Doria (1667–1746),33 and Shen Fuzong’s successor, Arcadio Huang 哳హ⮕ (1679–1716), brought to Paris by the Missions étrangères, who pioneered Chinese lexicography.34 All were known to, and their work scrutinized by, the leaders of the early, radical European Enlightenment. But information is contentious. Le Comte’s Nouveaux Mémoires sur l’état présent de la Chine 28 On the proto-Encyclopédiste Hugenot Pierre Bayle’s (1647–1706) view that Spinoza and the Japanese held ‘the first principle of all things that constitute the universe is nothing but one and the same substance’ (1697: II. 832), Roetz, Religion and Secularity, 23. On Bayle, p. 147, 151, n. 122 & 123, 152. 29 Cf. below p. 141f., 146, 153, 211, n. 158, 214, 238f., 276, 280, 299, 307, n. 199, 336. On Spinoza, Varen and Chinese thought, Maverick, L. A. (1939), ‘A possible Chinese source of Spinoza’s doctrine’; —(1946), China, A Model for Europe. N.B. Spinoza was converted to Christianity in 1649, the year Varen’s Descriptio was published. 30 On European views of China at the time, Brandt, B. and D. L. Purdy, eds (2016), China in the German Enlightenment; Cook, D. J. and H. Rosemont, Jr. (1994), Writings on China; Gernet, J. (1985), China and the Christian Impact; Israel, J. I. (2007), ‘Admiration of China and Classical Chinese Thought in the Radical Enlightenment’. 31 Bp. Domingo Navarrete’s, OP (1618–86), Tratados de la Monarchia de China (1676) was translated and printed as An Account of the Empire of China, Historical, Political, Moral, and Religious, 4 vols (London, 1704). Cf. on British awareness of European travelogues, The Collection of Voyages and Travel, 4 vols (London, 1704); A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels, 4 vols (London, 1746), III (which references Navarrete). N.B. also, Cummins, J. S. ed. (1962), The Travels and Controversies of Friar Domingo Navarette. 32 On Amiot and porcelain, Choi, K. I., Jr. (2015–16), ‘Portraits of Virtue’; —(2015), ‘Father Amiot’s Cup’, in A. Gerritsen and G. Riello (eds), Writing Material Culture History, 33–41. 33 N.B. a friend of historian, philosopher and social analyst G. Vico (1668–1744), cf. below p. 148f. 34 On the relation between Freret, Huang, Doria and the radical French lawyer Montesquieu (1689–1755), Israel, J. I. (2006), Enlightenment Contested, 660. On Montesquieu, below p. 152, n. 122, 153f., 171, 184, 214, 221, 226, n. 244, 228, n. 258, 275, n. 54, 316. N.B. Doria’s anti-Spinozist, pro-Platonic work on Christianity and Confucianism (cf. De Fabrizio, P., et al. [1981–6], Manoscritti napolitana di Paolo Mattia Doria). Doria wrote of the destructive power of commerce on morality. His views probably influenced Vico.

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(1696)35 was censured for setting Confucianism ‘on a par with the Christian revelation as a supreme product of the moral aspirations of Man’ (q. Rowbotham 1945: 232).36 Bouvet’s Histoire de l’empereur de la Chine (1697) presented the Emperor Kangxi as the ideal ruler, Confucius’s vision of government as exemplary. Both of these works reveal early European Sinology was confident, critical and creative. It was also collaborative and cosmopolitan.37 The German physician, botanist, philologist and sinologist Christian Mentzel (1622–1701), author of a short Latin-Chinese Lexicon, corresponds with Couplet.38 Likewise, the Flemish poet and dramatist François Noël, SJ (1651– 1729), who is prominent in early Western Sinology and the ‘Rites Controversy’, having held posts in China and Rome before teaching in Prague and dying in Lille, is praised in Du Halde’s Description of China.39 Leipzig theologian and Hebraist Johann Benedikt Carpzov II (1639–99), from an intellectual dynasty, followed the polymath Leibniz and philosopher Christian Wolff (1679–1754) in trusting Noël’s views on China, Chinese culture and Confucianism. Andreas Müller (1630–94), Thomas Bayer (1694–1738), J. L. Mosheim (1693–1755), and Christoph Murr (1733–1811) in Germany, laid the ground-work for later European sinologists, such as the French academic JeanPierre Abel-Rémusat (1788–1832), the fiery Julius Klaproth (1783–1835), the controversial missionary-linguist Joshua Marshman (1768–1837) and his angular, but honourable, nemesis, the first Protestant missionary to reside in mainland China, Robert Morrison (1782–1834).40 So, seeds were sown, thoughts spawned, the headwaters of Western culture ‘contaminated’ by new Confucian cuttings from this missionary material. The West is thereby exposed to ‘corrosive’ Asian ideas, as some rejoiced, and others dreaded, to discover.41 We should note in passing the challenge translators of the Bible into Chinese faced.42 Morrison was sanguine: ‘A European can have little motive to enter on the study of Chinese; or at least, can scarcely have motive sufficiently strong to carry him successfully through’ (1817: 121). Despite extensive Jesuit scholarship, later translators had access to only a few handwritten copies of Franciscan missionary-scholar Basilio Brollo de Glemona’s (1648–1704) 38,000-character 35 On Le Comte, Frey, L. S and M. L. Frey (2003), ‘The Search for Souls’, in G. J. Ames and R. S. Love (eds), Distant Lands and Diverse Cultures, 231–48. 36 Prompted by Dominican opposition to Jesuit ‘accommodation’, the Sorbonne investigated Le Comte and others for evidence of heresy. In 1710 the papacy forbade all publications on the China mission without official permission. Le Comte’s work remained a standard text on China. It was published in Philadelphia as early as 1787. On this, Maverick, L. A. (1946), China a Model for Europe, 21f.; Aldridge, A. O. (1993), The Dragon and the Eagle, 17f. 37 On circulation of knowledge about China, Golvers, N. (2012), ‘“Savant” in correspondence from China with Europe in the 17th–18th centuries’. 38 Cf. Mentzel, C. (1685), Sylloge Minutiarum Lexici Latino-Sinico-Characteristici; —(1696), Kurze Chinesische Chronologia; also, Kraft, E. (1975), ‘Christian Mentzel, Philippe Couplet, Andreas Cleyer und die chinesische Medizin’, in H. Wormit (ed.), Fernöstliche Kultur, 158–96. On Mentzel and other early European translations of Chinese texts, Lach and Van Kley, eds (1993), Asia in the Making of Europe, III. 1681, n. 94. 39 In 1710 Noël published his Observationes Mathematicae et Physicae in India et China Factae (Mathematical and Physical Observations made in China), and the following year, Sinensis Imperii Libri Classici Sex (Six Classic Books of the Chinese Empire), which is a significant upgrade on Confucius Sinarum Philosophus. 40 On Müller and other early German studies of Confucius, Li, W. (2012), ‘Confucius and the Early Enlightenment in Germany from Leibniz to Bilfinger’, in K. Mühlhahn and N. van Looy (eds), The Globalization of Confucius and Confucianism, 9–21; Landbæk, K. (1986), T. S. Bayer; Muslow, M. ed. (1997), Johann Lorenz Mosheim. Though a Protestant, Murr was an admirer of the Portuguese Jesuits, and author of Geschichte der Jesuiten in Portugal (2 vols, 1787– 8). On Abel-Rémusat, Klaproth and Marshman, p. 201f., 206, 290, n. 127, 297, n. 157, 328. On Morrison, 13, 118, 139f., 199f., 267, 269, 286, 290f., 297, 328, 467. 41 On Chinese thought and German philosophy from Leibniz to Heidegger, Schönfeld, M. (2006), ‘From Confucius to Kant’. 42 On Morrison’s Chinese sources (1825: 44f.).

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Dictionarium Sinico-Latinum,43 and Francisco Varo’s (1627–87) primitive grammar, Arte de la Lengua Mandarina (compiled, 1682; published in Canton, 1703), his Mexican pupil Pedro de la Piñuela (1650–1704) had revised.44 Copies of Mentzel’s Lexicon Latino-Sinicum (1685), Bayer’s two-volume Museum Sinicum (1730), and French orientalist Étienne Fourmont’s (1683–1745) Meditationes Sinicae (1737) and Linguae Sinarum Mandarinicae (1742),45 were all available, but not many.46 Like other early works, Prémare’s influential Notitis Linguae Sinicae, though completed in 1729, was not published until 1831. A part-translation of the Chinese Bible, by French missionary Jean Basset (1662–1707), also existed. This, like other Catholic resources, was used respectfully by Morrison and his Protestant heirs.47 Others had traversed the Alpine peaks of Mandarin before them. They were thankful for the footholds they had been left. English antiquarian and orientalist Stephen Weston (1747–1830) spoke for many: ‘The Chinese tongue . . . may be mastered for the purpose of knowing what it contains, if one has courage to scale the wall that surrounds it, and to force a way through the hedges of aloes, and prickly pears, with which it is fenced, by learning the mode of using its dictionaries, and by an acquaintance with its roots, or claves’ (1807: xii; q. Minford and Lau 2000: xlvi). Unless we acknowledge this, we cannot begin to understand the passion behind Europe’s Enlightenment quest to engage China’s language, philosophy and culture.48 Crucially, China did not force Europe’s hand: Europe eagerly – at times, perhaps, naïvely – submitted to the Confucian yoke from Asia.

CHINA IN EUROPE: DESCARTES, SPINOZA, LEIBNIZ AND THE BIRTH OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT Furnished with new materials and inspired by the challenge of Confucian ideas, European intellectuals engaged in a prolonged courtship of Chinese philosophy and culture. For the rest of this part of the chapter we meet their most prominent suitors. We exaggerate essential features to honour China’s impact on the early-Modern European mind. During this time, as the diplomat Sir George Staunton (1781–1859) aptly said, Confucius was ‘cried up’.49 The Analects and Gospels are read and interpreted in China and the West ‘on the far side of ’ the intellectual revolution this intense Sino-European interaction inspired. We turn, first, to the potent pre-Socratic interest in non-human realities of the French philosopher – and long-term resident in Holland – René Descartes (1596–1650). Cartesian philosophy owes little directly to Confucius’s thought. Most of the early European work on ‘the

In a famous case of plagiarism, the China resident and scholar Chrêtien Louis Joseph de Guignes (1759–1845) tinkered with the Glemona MS and published it, without attribution, in Paris as Dictionnaire chinois, français, et latin (1813). 44 On Varo’s work, Coblin, W. S. and J. A. Levi, trans. (2000), Francisco Varo’s Grammar of the Mandarin Language. On the importance of Varo’s work for Morrison and Marshman, Foley, T. S. (2009), Biblical Translation in Chinese and Greek, 74f. 45 As if to confirm the strength of early French Sinology, Fourmont’s work contains the catalogue to Louis XIV’s Chinese library and a hundred works by missionaries. Cf. Leung, C. (2002), Étienne Fourmont (1683–1745), ad loc. 46 Gützlaff disparaged this material (Reed 1838: I. 370f.). 47 On the history, use and theology of the Chinese Bible MS in the British Library, Quatuor Evangelia Sinice, presumed to be (mostly) drafted by Basset, Zetzsche, J. O. (1999), The Bible in China, 28f.; Hancock, Morrison, 21f.; Strandenaes, T. (1983), ‘The Sloane MS #3599: An Early manuscript of an Incomplete Chinese Version of the New Testament’. 48 On the later history of European and British sinology and Bible translation, p. 201f. 49 N.B. Sir George Staunton in conversation with John Cam Hobson (1786–1869), May 1819: ‘Confucius had formerly been too cried up, and (is) now too much cried down’ (q. Kitson 2013: 193). On Staunton, romanticism and China, p. 206f. 43

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Master’ appeared after Descartes’s death, but his thought is an important praeparatio Evangelii. It helped to create an intellectual climate conducive to Confucian ideas and ideals. Contemporaries recognized this, and, more or less intentionally, assigned Descartes a Chinese character and Confucius French clothes.50 In his Discours de la Méthode (1637, Discourse on the Method), Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (1639–41, Meditations on the First Philosophy), and their synthesis in his comprehensive mechanistic and metaphysical work Principia Philosophiæ (1644; French, 1647: Principles of Philosophy), Descartes justifies the British philosopher Bertrand Russell’s description of him as an intellectual ‘discoverer and an explorer’ (1946: 557). After his itinerant youth, Descartes resolved ‘to seek no knowledge other than that which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world’ ([1637] 1985: Pt. 1). In his quest for ‘certainty’ he admits doubt, suspects human judgement, and submits to God-given reason and the use of his mind. As he contended, ‘Cogito ergo sum’ (I think, therefore I am). Descartes’s impact on philosophy, scientific methodology, and human perception of material reality, is all too clear: less obvious is his direct relation to 17th and 18th-century sinophilia. To some, he heralds a rosy-fingered dawn of rationalist readings of the Confucian Classics and the New Testament Gospels; to others, the noonday sunlight on antithetical mind-body dualism; to others, again, early dusk on divine revelation and faith in a personal God. We find few references here to the well-known and ‘new’ worlds of his day: Persia, Mexico, China [x3], and Hurons of the Americas, are only glimpsed. To Descartes, it was more significant that humanity was one ‘as regards reason or sense’. As he said: ‘[S]ince it is the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts, I am inclined to believe that it exists whole and complete in each of us’ ([1637] 2008: 111).51 So, Descartes shared Confucius’s view of humanity’s rational capacity and moral potential, but to force a closer correlation between their thought is both problematic and (probably) anachronistic. If Descartes helped to create the conditionalities in which Confucianism flourished in 17thcentury Europe, his younger Dutch contemporary, Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), made a direct, albeit highly contentious, contribution to Western appreciation of Confucian thought. Drawing on the Dutch scholar and manuscript collector Isaac Vossius (1618–89),52 Spinoza was, as Roertz records, well-informed about China and new Chinese texts (2013: 23, n. 58). The similarity we saw earlier between Confucian and Spinozist cosmology and anthropology is to be read in light of this. In contradicting the theological a priorism, rationalist episteme, and residual dualism in Descartes, Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (anon. 1670, Theologico-Political Treatise) and Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata Ethics (posth. 1677, Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order) interpret the Bible as a fallible human construct, with God and nature – Deus, sive nature (God, or nature) – as one in substance, being, purpose and modality. As Leibniz states this: ‘That eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists’ ([1670] 2002: Pt. IV, Preface). Kepler and Dryden’s ‘harmonizing’ of heaven and earth has fuller philosophical and moral expression in Spinoza. He is, however, a cautionary tale on the fickleness of the (first) ‘translator’. Reading can err, translation often even more so.

50 N.B. the co-option of Descartes as a cipher for Confucius (Hall and Ames 1987: 24f.). On Descartes generally, Cottingham, J. (2008), Cartesian Reflections. 51 For the difference between Descartes, Leibniz and Montaigne on this issue, Perkins, F. (2004), Leibniz and China, 33f. 52 On Vossius, p. 106, 110, n. 108, 113, n. 119, 115.

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The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which the Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church condemned in 1673 (and banned in 1674),53 combines the biblical exegesis of Sephardic Rabbi-philosopher Moses Maimonides (c. 1135–1208) with the political thought of the Baconian philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679).54 Like his intellectual counterparts in Britain, Spinoza provocatively contrasts an institutional, religious approach to the Bible with a rational attitude, that is free of ‘prejudices of a common people of long ago’ (2002: 520). The Bible is subject to theological and practical criticism, and comparative textual analysis; while, ‘human power consists chiefly in strength of mind and intellect’ (ibid., c. 20).55 For, nature, not God, engenders laws, rights, powers and principles. Spinoza’s view of the Bible and respect for Confucius began to level the playing field between them – or so he hoped. Confucius’s influence is even clearer in Spinoza’s Ethics. In Part I, he introduces pantheist naturalism, in opposition to Cartesian rationalist materialism. To Spinoza, like Confucius, heaven and earth (qua God and world) co-inhere. Process dominates structure, being supplants necessity, and a traditional view of God is replaced by ‘modes’ of human activity. Cartesian dualism is again attacked in Parts II–V. Now, ‘intuitive knowledge’ is upheld, and human motivation and ungoverned ‘affects’ (passions) are essayed in a new, virtue-based view of human freedom and self-preservation. All is for Spinoza only really known sub specie aeternitatis; that is, in light of eternity, or Heaven (qua Confucius). It is not far-fetched to find parallels here with Confucian anthropology, ethics, political theory, epistemology and cosmology. Ironically, some at the time said Confucius was an atheistic Spinozist (!), while others learned from Spinoza’s ‘oriental philosophy’ that ‘all things are one’ (Roertz: 22f.).56 The Confucian tornado touched down in Holland, and Spinoza was held responsible. He was only partly to blame: many Nicodemuses came to Confucius by night during his lifetime.57 Later generations have been defined and refined as much by Spinoza as Descartes. Like Descartes, as Hegel later observed, Spinoza is a ‘testing-point in modern philosophy’. As he wrote, ‘it may really be said: you are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all’ ([1817] 1995: III. 252, Sect 2, c. 1, A2). The Gospels are interpreted (consciously and unconsciously) by many in China and the West as human texts Spinoza made less unique, and, as importantly, viewed through the Confucian lens he so carefully polished. Spinoza’s comparative, humanist epistemology still conditions the way life and society are viewed. In a religiously violent age, it is surprising Spinoza survived. He died in his bed in The Hague on 21 February 1677, ten years before Confucius Sinarum Philosophus appeared. To some, Spinoza is

The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was Spinoza’s attempt to pre-empt the criticism he anticipated his Ethics would provoke. Though peaceable in manner and generous in spirit, Spinoza’s principled radicalism ignited controversy. After his conversion to Christianity, he developed and maintained close links with radical Christian groups; notably, the Collegiants, a Dutch sect with Anabaptist and Arminian roots. On 27 July 1656, the Talmud Torah congregation of Amsterdam issued a writ of cherem (exclusion). In 1670, he was expelled from the city. His writings were later listed on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books. 54 On Hobbes and other progressive political theorists in Britain, p. 159f. 55 N.B. Spinoza’s sense here that ‘right is might’. 56 N.B. these ascriptions by Ricci’s successors in China, Nicholò Longobardi (1559–1654) and Antonio Caballero, SJ (Fr. Antoine de Sainte Marie: 1602–69). On the assumption that Spinoza and Confucianism were atheistic, Lai, Y-T. (1985), ‘The Linking of Spinoza to Chinese Thought by Bayle and Malebranche’; Bayle, P. ([1736] 1997), Mr. Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, V. 199, III. 550. 57 On the secretive enquirer/disciple Nicodemus, who came to see Jesus at night, Jn 3.1f. 53

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a prophet synonymous with Chinese wisdom or Confucian subterfuge. To others – like the French Cartesian cleric Nicholas Malebranche, SJ (1638–1715), in his prickly Entretien d’un Philosophe chrétien et un Philosophe chinois (1707) – the ‘impious Spinoza’ is a caricature of Chinese rationalism.58 Despite being a believer, Spinoza is also, to others, a harbinger of European ‘secularism’ on account of the confidence – borne of China study – he placed on humanity’s capacity to order life without God.59 He sowed new doubts in Christian minds. To French Christian apologist Blaise Pascal (1623–62) the issue was simple: ‘Which is more credible of the two, Moses or China?’ (q. Eliot, T., 1956: 592). Towards the end of his life, Spinoza’s thought was refined in conversation with the German polymath Gottfried W. von Leibniz (1646–1716). Leibniz was born two years after the end of the Thirty Years War in Europe (1618–48) and overthrow of the Ming dynasty in Peking by the ‘dashing’ rebel Li Zicheng ᵾ㠚ᡀ (1606–45),60 and replacement by ‘a prince of almost unparalleled merit’ (Leibniz), Qing Emperor Kangxi ᓧ⟉ (1654–1722; r. 1661–1722). Deliberately, or not, Leibniz inspired a generation of European philosophes, whose imagination was fired by the Orient. To those, like Leibniz, caught by a ‘crisis of consciousness’ in 18th-century Europe, the ‘myth of China’ – with its image of the ‘bon chinois’ (moral Chinese), deistic philosophy, and enlightened despotism – offered much. However, opinion was mixed. To British adventurer Commodore George (Baron) Anson, RN (1697–1762), Chinese were ‘dishonest’.61 Political economist Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825),62 dismissed reports from China as ‘deceitful accounts’ (q. CairaPrincipato [2001] 2013: 249). However, as we saw above, the cultural and intellectual tide was running China-wards at least until c. 1750.63 Thereafter, various types of criticism, and now ‘Sinophobia’, appear. We note them here and return to them in Chapter 5. There is much ‘Sinophilia’ to study: exaggeration of the essential is here absolutely essential! As a polyhistor mathematician, philosopher, diplomat, librarian and proto-ecumenist, Leibniz was besotted with China from his youth.64 The Preface to Novissima Sinica (1697, The latest news from China) explains: ‘Certainly the size of the Chinese Empire is so great, the reputation of this wisest nation in the Orient so impressive, and its authority so influential an example to the rest’ 58 Malebranche said Tianzhu ཙѫ (Heavenly Master, Lord of Heaven) ‘is at most a powerful divinity like Zeus who defeated many giants, and he is not the omnipotent and absolute being’. Like Bayle and Arnauld, he saw Chinese wisdom as inferior, because materialistic, irreligious and non-rational (in a Western sense). Jesuit ‘conversion by accommodation’ was finally jettisoned for Dominican ‘proselytizing’. Cf. Minamiki, G. (1985), The Chinese Rites Controversy, 15–76. Also, on Malebranche’s view of Chinese philosophy, Reihman, G. M. (2013), ‘Malebranche and Chinese Philosophy’. 59 N.B. Canadian socio-political philosopher Charles Taylor’s (b. 1931) apposite comment: ‘(T)he discovery of the intrahuman sources of benevolence is one of the great achievements of our (sic) civilization and the charter of modern belief ’ (2007: 257). 60 N.B. His birth-name was Li Hongji ᵾ卫ส. 61 On Anson’s circumnavigation of the world (including to China) in HMS Centurion, during the ‘War of Jenkins’ Ear’ (Sp. Guerra del Asiento) of 1739–48, Anson, G. (1745), A voyage round the world, in the years MDCCXL, I, II, III, IV . He was joined on part of this voyage by John Byron (1723–86) (‘Foul-weather Jack’), the noble poet’s grandfather. 62 Saint-Simon is credited with founding French sociology because of his holistic, organic view of society under social law/s: a view promoted by Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and Durkheim. On Comte, p. 234, 280, 430. On Durkheim, p. 131, 143, 293, 330, 361, n. 75, 391, 413, 477, n. 429. 63 There are intimations of later criticism of China in Navarette’s Tratados historicos (1676: above p. 96, n. 28, 138, n. 31), a work much-admired by Voltaire and the Jansenists in France and echoed in Russian diplomat (and trader with China), Lorenz Lange’s (c. 1690–1752) Journal de la residence du Sieur Lange (1726). For Diderot’s criticisms, p. 153f. 64 On Leibniz, Adams, R. M. ([1994] 1998), Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist; Aiton, E. J. (1985), Leibniz: A Biography; Antognazza, M. R. (2009), Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography; Dascal, M. ed. (2008), Leibniz: What Kind of Rationalist?; —ed. (2010), The Practice of Reason: Leibniz and His Controversies; Jolley, N. (2005), Leibniz.

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(1697: 45). Through much of his life, Leibniz gathered Chinese texts, corresponded with Catholic missionaries (fr. 1697–1707), explored Chinese as a medium for philosophy and model for binary computation,65 and engaged (as a tolerant Protestant) in the ‘Rites Controversy’ (Garber and Ayers 2003: 95f.). Despite strong mathematical, diplomatic, religious and scientific opinions, Leibniz did not project his ideas or prejudices onto China,66 as he felt others did. He scoured literature, put questions to experts,67 and developed his own ideas and perspective.68 The myth and reality of China’s history would, he maintained, serve to help humanity understand itself and recover ‘natural religion’ (Caira-Principato: 249f.). Here was a country and a system notable for ‘public tranquillity and social order’ that rarely manifested ‘hatred, wrath, or excitement’ (Leibniz 1697: 46f.). La Science des Chinois (1685: a version of Intorcetta’s Sinarum Scientia [1673]), Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687), Le Comte’s Nouveaux mémoires sur l’état présent de la Chine (1696), Longobardi’s Traité sur quelques points de la Religion des Chinois(1701),69 and Astronomica Europaea by Ferdinand Verbiest, SJ (1623–88),70 all feed into Novissima Sinica.71 Bouvet’s Histoire de l’empereur de la Chine (1699) and Caballero’s Traité sur quelques points importants de la Mission de la Chine (1701) shape Leibniz’s Annotationes de cultu religioneque Sinensum (1709) and unfinished Discours sur la Théologie Naturelle des Chinois (aka his Lettre sur la philosophie Chinoise à M. de Rémond [1716]),72 written in a series of exchanges with the British Baconian metaphysician and ethicist Samuel Clarke (1675–1729).73 As he wrote: ‘The true religion is enclosed within the [Confucian] classic books’ (q. Caira-Principato: 249).74 And, ‘[I]t is necessary for us to send for these political sages to teach us the art of governing and all their natural theology, which they carried to such a height of perfection’ (ibid.). To Leibniz, humanity and society can, and will, be changed by China for the better. Fascinated initially by the form, significance and potential of the Chinese language per se, Leibniz’s interaction with the leading Jesuit mathematician Claudio Filippo Grimaldi, SJ (1638–1712), prior N.B. Leibniz’s correspondence with the Jesuit missionary, mathematician and astronomer Joachim Bouvet, SJ (1656– 1730). Bouvet was one of the five Jesuit mathematicians sent to China with Jean de Fontenay, SJ (1643–1710), at the behest of Louis XIV (above p. 99f). De Fontenay had taught mathematics and astronomy at the College Louis le Grand. The team was well-received by the Emperor Kangxi and his court. Bouvet interpreted Western science to the imperial court, and, conversely, demonstrated to Europe the potential of the I Ching for Christianity. In exchanges with Bouvet, Leibniz explored the ‘Real (or primal) Characters’ discernible amid preternatural harmony, and the ‘Sufficiency of Reason’ as shown by China’s culture and view of character. 66 Opinions vary on Leibniz and Confucianism. Some, like Bertrand Russell, ‘secularize’ him, others, like A. Kroner (1916) and H. Schmalenbach (1921), focus on the theological potential of Confucius for Leibniz. Cf. Ching, J. and W. Oxtoby, eds (1992), Discovering China; Lach, D. F. (1957), The Preface to Leibniz’s Novissima Sinica; Mungello, D. E. (1977), Leibniz and Confucianism; —(1971), ‘Leibniz’s interpretation of Neo-Confucianism’; Perkins, F. (2004), Leibniz and China. 67 In 1689 Leibniz conversed in Rome with Claudio F. Grimaldi, SJ (1638–1712), appointed Director of the Astronomical Bureau in Beijing in 1688. On Western advisors in the Imperial court, Spence, J. D. (1969), The China Helpers. 68 On Leibniz’s creative approach to Chinese philosophy, Mungello, Leibniz and Confucianism, passim. On his place in German anthropology and ethnography, Vermeulen, H. F. (2015), Before Boas, Ch. 2. 69 Comments by Leibniz were appended to Longobardi’s Traité sur quelques points de la Religion des Chinois. 70 On reception of Verbiest’s works, Golvers, N. (2003), Ferdinand Verbiest, Ch. 9. 71 On the probability (pace Rita Widmaier) that Leibniz became acquainted with Verbiest’s text/s (dubbed by T. A. H. von Strattman as one of the ‘basic’ authorities on things Chinese) while in Rome (May to November 1689), Golvers, Ferdinand Verbiest 274f. 72 Cf. von Collani’s review of this material (2004: 40–3). 73 N.B. Ribas calls the debate ‘one of the most significant episodes that the Baconian system had to face before its definitive victory in the Age of Enlightenment’ (2003: 64). On Clarke, p. 106, n. 78, 117, 144, 146, 162, 215, n. 169. 74 Cf. the collection, Cook, D. J. and H. Rosement, Jr. trans. and eds (1994), Leibniz: Writings on China. 65

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to and after the latter’s return to China in 1692, led to a broadening of his China interests. Driven by philosophy, religion, mathematics and ecumenical diplomacy, Leibniz sought in Confucianism a universal, rationalist, natural metaphysic compatible with Christianity.75 His Pythagorean outlook found in Chinese a universal language, and in the hexagrams of the I Ching a form of binary calculus. But it was China’s essential ‘otherness’, as a civilized ‘anti-Europe’, that fascinated him. His Novissima Sinica wonders if the highest levels of civilization aren’t set by God – at the extremes of Eurasia – to foster independent excellence and mutual respect. Though equal in status and sophistication, Europe excels in the abstract disciplines of logic, mathematics, metaphysics and religion, while China leads in ‘practical philosophy’ and in ‘the precepts of ethics and politics’. Cultural and intellectual exchange is, for Leibniz, a ‘commercium not only of commodities and manufactures, but also of light and wisdom’ ([1700] 1900: 81).76 When, then, in 1697, Bouvet told Leibniz China had solved the ‘Secret of Creation’ by philosophy and mathematics, Leibniz celebrated by turning the information into a fine medallion for his aristocratic patron. ‘Light and wisdom’ from East-West exchange were, to Leibniz, like van Gogh, both enviable and inevitable. The cosmic ‘harmony’ Dryden and Kepler had professed was confirmed.77 Though (François-M. Arouet) Voltaire (1694–1778) called China ‘the wisest empire on earth’ ([1756] 2003: 11.180) and the Far East ‘the cradle of all arts to which the West owed everything’, that the West can only ‘admire, blush and, above all, imitate’ (q. Reichwein 1925: 89f.),78 Leibniz went even further. The Jesuit mission in China should be matched by a Confucian campaign in Europe.79 China’s place at the heart of the European Enlightenment was assured. Reason is to replace religion as the source of social cohesion and basis of morality. But, like Dutch ‘Delftware’, Europe’s oldest imitation of Chinese ‘blue and white’, Leibniz’s attempt to reproduce Confucian ideas and ideals in Europe proved ultimately artificial. His China is a mirage: this image is irreproducible because, as events would reveal, it never really existed. Three themes in Leibnizian Sinology map on to the theme of the present chapter. First, behind Leibniz’s interest in China’s approach to science and mathematics lies a more general enquiry into ‘ars characteristica universalis’ (Fr. spécieuse générale). This was more than a universal language for mathematical, scientific and metaphysical concepts or ‘calculus ratiocinator’: Leibniz was interested in a universally communicable way of being in the world. His quest for a universal, ideographic language (based on Chinese characters) is the cousin of contemporary British interest in pre-Adamic language and, more practically, in easier mercantile communication.80 It is also contributory inter alia to the nascent academic disciplines of anthropology and comparative philosophy. To Leibniz, in a quest for ‘some kind of language . . . by which all concepts and things can be put into beautiful order, and . . . different nations might communicate their thoughts’, God notifies us ‘that a far greater secret lies hidden in our understanding, of which these are but the shadows’ ([Leibniz] On Leibniz’s theology, Adams, R. M. (2000), ‘Leibniz’s Conception of Religion’, in M. D. Gedney (ed.), Proceedings of the 20th World Congress of Philosophy, vol. 7, 57–70. 76 N.B. Franklin Perkins’s use of this phrase in Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (2004). 77 On his recently revealed advocacy of this perspective in later life, Schweitzer, A. (2003), Nachlass: Geschichte der Chinesischen Denken; and, Roertz, H. (2003), ‘Albert Schweitzer on Chinese Thought and Confucian Ethics’. 78 N.B. Voltaire follows this up – a rebuke to Bossuet for omitting China from his Discourse sur l’histoire universelle (1681) – by beginning Essai sur les Moeurs with a section on China. 79 On Leibniz, China and Confucianism, also, Li, W. (2000), Die christliche China-Mission im 17. Jahrhundert; Widmaier, R. ed. (1990), Leibniz korrespondiert mit China. 80 Leibniz criticized misguided pragmatism in Dalgarno and Wilkins (above p. 111). 75

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q. Buchenau and Cassirer 1996: 30f.). Leibniz’s methodological shift to the general, logical, universal and pictorial, took empirical analysis of the human condition to a new level of sophistication. He hoped his exercise in pictorial algebra would stimulate scientific enquiry ‘in which are treated the forms or formulas of things in general, that is, quality in general’ ([Leibniz] q. Loemker 1989: II. 23). His Sino-European, ‘One World’, philosophy drove the ‘Scientific Revolution’ and inspired a globality, and later cross-cultural hermeneutic, that has grown and flourished. Distinguishing ‘Chinese’ and ‘Western’ philosophy, he came to re-affirm the reality and role of both.81 In China and the West, the Analects and Gospels are read today ‘on the far side’ of Leibniz’s expansive vision and his inclusive method. Second, in his long Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese, written in the first instance to co-opt support from, and to correct errors in, the influential Oratorian priest and Cartesian philosopher Nicolas Malebranche’s hastily written,82 anti-Spinozist apologia, Entretien d’un Philosopher chrétien et un Philosophe chinois,83 Leibniz exemplifies the two-way exchange between China and Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, and also Europe’s growing awareness that Confucianism is not a fixed, unchanging tradition. Leibniz argues that, by distancing himself from Spinoza’s monistic blurring of Christianity’s bifurcation of ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’, Malebranche risks Neo-Confucianism’s ‘heterodox’ distinction between li ⿞ (principle, reason, wisdom, justice and order) and qi ≓ (material energy). To Leibniz, li corresponds to Shangdi кᑍ (divinity). Leibniz’s rebuttal affords Europe early exposure to Song dynasty philosopher Zhu Xi ᵡ⟩ (1130–1200), who would in time gain many Western followers,84 and defends classical Confucianism against the (all-too-common phenomenon) of European distortion. Like Ricci before him, Leibniz favours the Confucian Classics for their textual clarity and cultural definition. He criticizes Chinese illuminati who stray ‘from the truth and even from their antiquity’ (1697: 75f.). Debating Clarke, he condemns ‘the decadence of natural religion’ and celebrates the excellence of ‘Chinese natural religion’. The Christian faith (pace Confucianism) affirms, he argues, human existence as conserved by (but never constrained by) a heavenly power. Its socio-political and ethical views of the ‘City of God’ (qua Augustine) – perfection, community, good order and justice – are all premised on God’s existence; a God, who, like tian in the Analects, ‘rules without interposing’ (Ribas 2003: Abstract) on humans (who have minds that image divinity).85 This God, to Leibniz, does not circumvent political authority or personal moral responsibility, he acts in and over them. For, in life and society we find Leibniz saw ‘Chinese philosophy’ as a coherent and substantive reality. On this large, complex and important issue, Perkins, F. (2016), ‘Leibniz on the Existence of Philosophy in China’, in Brandt and Purdy (eds), China in the German Enlightenment, 60–79. 82 The work relied on patchy information provided by Bp. Artus de Lionne (1655–1713), an ex-China missionary and Archbp. of Sichuan. Lionne opposed ‘accommodationism’. He joined the papal legate C-T. M. De Tournon’s (Carlo Tommaso: 1668–1710) mission to the Emperor Kangxi (1705–7) to reaffirm the papal ban on Chinese rites. Angered by the papal decision, the Emperor imprisoned De Tournon, who died on 1 August 1707 shortly after his incarceration (and appointment as a Cardinal). 83 Malbranche had been charged with Spinozism by critics, incl. the French patristic scholar and leading Jansenist (viz. Augustinian-Calvinist) Antoine Arnauld, ‘Le Grand’ (1619–98). On this, Mungello, D. E. (1980), ‘Malebranche and Chinese Philosophy’. 84 Cf. on Zhu Xi, p. 18, n. 8. 85 On Leibniz’s socio-political and moral philosophy, and its relation to his Monadology and Malebranche’s (1688), Dialogues on Metaphysics, Jolley, Leibniz, 181f.; Riley, P. (1999), ‘Leibniz’s Political and Moral Philosophy in the “Novissima Sinica”’; —(2003), ‘Leibniz’s Méditation sur la notion commune de la justice’; Mungello, D. E. (2000), ‘How Central to Leibniz’s Philosophy Was China?’, in Li, W. and H. Poser (eds), Das Neueste über China, 57–67. 81

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vital insignia of divine activity. As in the Analects, metaphysical harmony is, for Leibniz, the ground of moral perfection and human pleasure.86 Third, Leibniz’s wide-eyed respect for his Jesuit interlocutors (on subjects ranging from hexagrams, astronomy and ancient history, to Chinese Jews, porcelain and mining) – particularly when the banning of Chinese rites in Paris (1700) and Rome (1704) heralded the end of their China mission – is more than sinological Utopianism or cultural ‘universalism’.87 It expresses Leibniz’s intellectual and ecclesiastical ecumenism; albeit, his treatise On the Civil Cult of Confucius claims ‘strangers’ often ‘have better insight into the histories and monuments of a nation than their own citizens’ (1700–1: 64). Leibniz is not only drawn to the general and the particular: he is passionate about the universal and the useful. Europe is under threat: China offers hope. His interests are eclectic, his ideas expansive. He inhabits a new, unitive, globalized reality. With his emphasis on tolerance and ‘understanding better’, as Eric Nelson sees, Leibniz anticipates the ‘hermeneutics of inter-cultural understanding’ (2009: I. 279–302).88 Neither the Analects nor the Gospels are, for Leibniz, private, local texts: they are universal ‘Classics’ to be read charitably and comparatively. This inclusive, modern hermeneutic is operative today in the way these ancient texts are read. We cannot – and do not – read in cultural, religious, or moral isolation. The nature and content of life are changed by Leibniz: cosmic harmony is to be seen in society; human equality is the ground of a new meritocracy. This is Leibniz’s lasting legacy. Others joined Leibniz in praise of China and implicit, or explicit, blame of Europe. The generosity, civility and religious inclusivity of the Kangxi Emperor – to say nothing of imperial patience with protracted Catholic feuding – is compared favourably with Europe’s ‘Wars of Religion’ (c. 1524–1648), its ‘Thirty Years War’ (1618–48), and with Louis XIV’s vindictive revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). If anywhere, ‘the kingdom of heaven’ is to be found in China not in violent, irascible, war-torn Europe. To Leibniz and free-thinking contemporaries, China’s ancient history proves ‘how capable nature is’, as the provocative German philosopher Christian Wolff (1679–1754) put it (1985: 171, n. 83). To the extent that Confucius and Confucianism honoured lumen naturale (nature’s light), they constituted a dark, lingering threat to the dominant religious mindset of early-Modern Europe, even when this was not intended by Western devotees. To the broad-minded Huguenot historian Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), Confucianism is compatible with a Christian ‘natural theology’. His learned Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, which appeared first in 1697,89 indicts ‘bigots of faith’ who oppose Jesuit ‘accommodation’ and reduce Confucius to simply saying ‘some nice things with regard to morality and the art of rulership’ (1697: II. 832; q. Roertz 2013: 23). 86 Cf. Leibniz, ‘Of the Highest Good’: ‘Pleasure is nothing other than a perception of perfection’ ([1875–1900] 1960–61: 7.111–17). 87 On Leibniz’s vision of a new, religiously, linguistically, and politically unified earth, Lai, Y-T. (1998), ‘Leibniz and the Antiquity of China’, in A. P. Coudert, R. H. Popkin and G. M. Weiner (eds), Leibniz, Mysticism and Religion, 136–68. On his debt to Jesuit sources for seeing compatibility between Christian charity and Confucian kingship, Liu, Y. (2001), ‘From Christian Platonism to Organism: The Two Chinas of Leibniz’. 88 On Leibniz, religious pluralism and toleration, Edamura, S. (2016), ‘Leibnizian Philosophy and the Pluralism of Religion and Culture: The Case of China’; King, R. (1999), Orientalism and Religion; Masuzawa, T. (2005), The Invention of World Religions. On Locke and Leibniz on ‘tolerance’, Perkins, F. (2002), ‘Virtue, Reason, and Cultural Exchange’. 89 Appearing first in two volumes, the Dictionnaire sought to correct the French priest Louis Moréri’s (1643–80) Grand Dictionnaire historique (1674; 2 vols, posth. revised edn, 1681). Bayle’s influential work was edited and expanded many times in the early 18th century.

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We find comparable evidence in the (lately influential)90 Neapolitan philosopher and social theorist, Gianbattista Vico, whose (1668–1744) Il Diritto Universale (Universal Right; 1720–2) and mighty De Principi Scienza Nuova (1725, 1730, 1744, On the Principles of New Science) integrate Catholic faith, Baconian empiricism and rhetorical theory.91 Vico’s early expression of a ‘philosophy of history’ rejects Cartesian rationalism and metaphysicalism. Instead, as he says, Verum esse ipsum factum (What is true is what is made).92 His study of phronesis (practical wisdom), De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia (1710), pre-empts both the spirit and terms of modern social sciences: ‘[T]o introduce geometrical method into practical life is like trying to go mad with the rules of reason, attempting to proceed by a straight line among the tortuosities of life, as though human affairs were not ruled by capriciousness, temerity, opportunity, and chance’ (q. Mooney 1985: 4).93 To Vico, imagination is key.94 Life and society are both infinitely variable and scientifically recordable. With regard to China, though critical of its social and political ‘primitivity’, and eager to safeguard the Bible’s historical integrity, Vico moves from respect for early Jesuit ‘accommodationism’ to cautious admiration for Confucianism, dubbing it ‘la Filosofia – naturali è rozza, è goffa’ (the natural, rough, and clumsy philosophy) (1730: 104).95 Like Leibniz, Vico opens a door to cross-cultural hermeneutics others have passed through. In contrast to Vico, Christian Wolff – the intellectual bridge between Leibniz and Kant in Germany96 – is not as concerned to defend Christianity (especially, Lutheranism) against crossquestioning by mathematics, or, indeed, by comparison with Confucianism. In his early career teaching mathematics and natural philosophy at Leipzig (1703–6) and Halle universities (1706– 23), Wolff corresponded with Leibniz.97 Over the years, he developed an integrative system in which science and philosophy comfortably co-exist, at the expense of classical Christian cosmology and anthropology. Conflict erupted in 1721. Stepping down as pro-Rector of the university, Wolff gave a lecture on 12 July entitled, ‘Oratio de Sinarum Philosophia Practica’ (On the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese, 1750).98 Drawing on his dialogue with Leibniz and the works of Couplet and Noël, Wolff praised the socio-political and practical moral vision of the Chinese ‘Master’ and 90 On Vico, Verene, D. P. (2002), Art. ‘Giambattista Vico’, in S. M. Nadler (ed.), Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, 570. Little-known outside Naples during his lifetime, Vico was studied by Hobbes, Hume, Adam Smith (1723–90), the Scottish Enlightenment, J. G. Herder (1744–1803), Karl Marx (1818–83), 19th-century French Romantics, and the 20thcentury ‘historicism’ of social theorists from Isaiah Berlin (1909–97) to Edward Said. 91 On rhetoric and semiotics in Vico, Mooney, M. (1985), Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric. 92 N.B. also, Verum et factum reciprocantur seu convertuntur (The true and the made are exchangeable with one another). On this principle in Hume, Adam Smith, and the Scottish Enlightenment, with respect to China and porcelain production, p. 131, n. 8. 93 On the individual in society, Vico, De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione (1708); also, Bahia, S. C. and C. Hammer (2012), ‘Returning to Vico: The Role of the Individual in the Investigation of the Social’. 94 Cf. on Vico and imagination, Pern, T. (2015), ‘Imagination in Vico and Hobbes: From affective sensemaking to culture’; Verene, D. P. (1991), Vico’s science of imagination; Zittoun, T. (2015), ‘From Vico to sociocultural imagination’. 95 On Vico, China and Confucian philosophy in the context of the Jesuit mission, Canaris, D. P. (2016), ‘The Discovery of the True Confucius: The Image of China in the Thought of Giambattista Vico and its Significance for Jesuit Accommodationism’. 96 N.B. Wolff taught the German philosopher-theologian J. F. Schultz (1739–1805), who was the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) teacher and friend. On Kant, p. 190f. 97 In the end, Wolff jettisoned Leibniz’s presupposition of reason’s ‘sufficiency’ and nature’s ‘harmony’ in favour of his comprehensive ‘principle of contradiction’. Cf. Corr, C. A. (1975), ‘Christian Wolff and Leibniz’. 98 On the lecture, Wolff, C. (1998), Gesammelte Werke, Pt. 3, 45, 151f.; also, Larrimore, M. (2000), ‘Orientalism and Antivoluntarism in the History of Ethics’. On ‘natural theology’ in Wolff, Corr, C. (1973), ‘The Existence of God, Natural Theology, and Christian Wolff ’.

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of the human mind.99 His lecture combined early-Enlightenment rationalism with a confident Western Confucianism. Halle University dismissed Wolff in 1723. He moved to a chair at Marburg, for which he had been head-hunted. There he, and the university, flourished. Israel says of Wolff ’s experience in Halle: ‘The conflict became one of the most significant cultural confrontations of the 18th century and perhaps the most important of the Enlightenment in Central Europe and the Baltic countries before the French Revolution’ (2002: 29). Charged with fatalism and the capital crime of ‘atheism’ by Lutheran cleric and philanthropist August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), and his academic henchman Johann Joachim Lange (1670–1744),100 Wolff embodies the shift in European culture we have glimpsed earlier in Britain; namely, from a theocentric, biblical anthropology to an anthropocentric, practical humanism.101 And, as importantly, from dogmatic church truth to negotiable public truths. In later life, Wolff let his mind range widely. Cosmology, psychology, educational theory, economics, ethics and government policy all come under his searching gaze. Life and society are subject to intense scrutiny. Humanity has, Wolff maintains, an innate capacity to know ‘what is good’ (1985: 146f., n. 71).102 Their ‘chief end’ is found not in perfection like porcelain, but in vital society. Wolff ’s impact was – and still is – huge. His use of German (contra Latin) gave it academic kudos. His division of philosophy into clear theoretical and practical categories103 provided a rigorous new heuristic. His humanist optimism inspired generations of politicians and theoreticians.104 The Analects and Gospels are read in China and the West in light of Wolff, and the empirical, Enlightenment hermeneutic he inspired.

VOLTAIRE, DIDEROT AND THE CULTURE OF ENCYCLOPEDIAS We end this part looking at two representative francophone philosophes who play different, but equally important, roles in popularizing Confucius and Confucianism across Europe: the iconoclast historian, wit and philosopher (Francois-Marie Arouet) Voltaire (1694–1778), and the encyclopaedic art critic and author Denis Diderot (1713–84).

Cf. Lach, D. F. (1953), ‘The Sinophilism of Christian Wolff (1679–1754)’. On the charge Wolff was voicing ‘atheist’ views, Kanamori, S. (1997), ‘Christian Wolff ’s Speech on Confucianism’. Voltaire commented icily on this incident in an article on China: ‘Wolff praised the Chinese for worshipping a supreme god and for loving virtue.. . . [He] attracted to Halle 1,000 students from all nations. In the same university, there was a professor of theology named Lange who attracted nobody. This man . . . naturally wanted to ruin the professor of mathematics Wolff . . . [H]e inevitably accused him of not believing in God’ ([1764] 1972: 112). On Wolff ’s critics, Becker, G. (1991), ‘Pietism’s Confrontation with Enlightenment Rationalism’; Deppermann, K. (1982), ‘August Hermann Francke’; Gerlach, H-M. (2001), Christian Wolff, ad loc. 101 N.B. Wolff replaces Leibniz’s ontological ‘monadology’ with an atomized view of humans as conscious ‘souls’. On ‘God and the soul’ in his Psychologia Empirica (1732) and Psychologica Rationalis (1734), Blackwell, R. J. (1961), ‘Christian Wolff ’s Doctrine of the Soul’; and, on the ‘autonomy of morality’ in China, Ching, J. (1989), ‘Christian Wolff and China: The Autonomy of Morality’. 102 Cf. again, Louden, R. B. (2002), ‘“What Does Heaven Say?”, in Van Norden (ed.), Confucius and the Analects, 73–93. 103 Leibniz grounded philosophy first in philosophia rationalis (logic), and then divided it into the ‘theoretical’ fields of ontology, cosmology, rational psychology and natural theology, and the ‘practical’ disciplines of ethics, economics and politics. 104 On Wolff ’s legacy cf. European Journal of Law and Economics 4, nos. 2 & 3 (1997), esp. Senn, P. (1997), ‘What is the Place of Christian Wolff in the History of the Social Sciences?’ 99

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Voltaire’s role in our story is complex. During his life, domestic chinoiserie began to dominate European culture. Symbolic of his admiration for China, a poem ‘Sur Confucius’ (On Confucius) hung under a lithograph of the ‘Sage’ in his home in Fernay, near Geneva. De la seule raison salutaire interprète, Sans éblouir le monde, éclairant les esprits, Il ne parla qu’en sage, et jamais en prophète; Cependant on le crut, et même en son pays. —1825: II. 526105 Voltaire was born two years before Le Comte’s Nouveaux mémoires were published. His respect for China (from his mid-twenties on) is expressed in his Lettres chinoises: indiennes et tartares, published in 1766. In eighty works and 200 letters he expresses awe at China’s size, history, government, good order and morality, which he ascribes, largely, to Confucianism’s wholesome influence. As an expression of this, he wrote a three-act play in 1753, L’Orphelin de la Chine (The Chinese Orphan).106 It is based (loosely)107 on the first Chinese play known in Europe, the 13thcentury drama about revenge, Zhaoshi guer 䏉∿ᆔ‫( ނ‬The Orphan of the House of Zhao),108 by the Yuan playwright Ji Junxiang ㌰ੋ⾕ (fl. 1250). In 1731, Prémare translated part of the play (poorly) for the orientalist Fourmont at the Collège de France. Du Halde likewise included it in his Description of China (1735).109 Voltaire’s play confirms the entrepreneurism in which he (like Wedgwood) approached China: here was a useful, oriental, cultural commodity that could be adapted to serve new occidental purposes. The play employs a traditional tripartite French structure. The original setting – the state of Jin during the ‘Spring and Autumn’ period – is replaced by the Mongol invasion during the Song era, as an analogue to Manchu rule in the 18th century.110 This is not cultural or philosophical plagiarism, it is devotional secularism and a new, ideological pragmatism.111 China is adapted to Voltaire’s ‘enlightened’ purposes. Trans. (ed.): ‘The salutary interpreter of reason alone,/ Enlightening minds without dazzling them,/ He spoke only as a sage, never as a prophet,/ And he was believed, even in his own country.’ On this poem in the context of Voltaire’s thought, Javary, C. J-D. (2010), Les Trois Sagesses Chinoises: Taoïsme, Confucianisme, Bouddhisme, ‘Le confucianisme’, and ‘Voltaire, le confucéen’. 106 N.B. sub-titled, ‘Les Morales de Confucius en Cinq Actes’. 107 Voltaire follows the Chinese less than the English version by William Hackett (n.d.), The Chinese Orphan: An Historical Tragedy (1741) – a thinly veiled attack on Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745), the de facto first British PM – and the Italian by Viennese playwright Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782), L’Eroe cinese (1752), a commission from the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa (1717–80). On The Orphan of Zhao and other Chinese plays, West, S. H. and W. L. Idema, trans. and intro. (2015), The Orphan of Zhao and Other Yuan Plays; Idema, W. L. (1988), ‘“The Orphan of Zhao”’; Zhao, Y. trans. (2001), Snow in Midsummer. On Hatchett’s play, Chen, X. ([1995] 2002), Occidentalism, 100f. On Chinese plays as ‘trans-cultural archetypes’, p. 160, 205f. 108 The full title of the play is 䏉∿ᆔ‫ނ‬བྷ๡ӷ (The Great Revenge of the Orphan of Zhao). The play belongs to the 䴌ࢷ (zaju) genre of Chinese plays (viz. poetic music dramas) from the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). 109 On Voltaire’s sinophilia and Chinese literary interests, Aldridge, A. O. (1986), The Reemergence of World Literature, 141f. 110 On the character and history of the play, Hsia, A. (1988), ‘“The Orphan of the House Zhao” in French, English, German, and Hong Kong Literature’. On Voltaire’s use of historiography, Pierse, S. (2013), ‘Voltaire: Polemical Possibilities of History’, in S. Bourgault and R. Sparling (eds), A Companion to Enlightenment Historiography, 162f.; Raab, N. (2015), The Crisis from Within, 26–8. 111 On phases in Voltaire’s sinophilia, Mungello, D. E. (1991), ‘Confucianism in the Enlightenment’, in Lee (ed.), China and Europe, 99–128 (esp. 104f.). 105

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In Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1756) – written to counter what he saw as the culturally myopic, politically oppressive, Judeo-Christian chauvinism of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s (1627–1704) Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681) – in his equally provocative Le siècle de Louis XIV (1752) and Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764),112 China, and its a-religious sage,113 are turned from prophetic ‘ploughshares’ (Is. 2.4, Joel 3.10, Micah 4.3) into powerful ‘swords’ to slay a corrupt ancien régime, an incestuous polis, and a hegemonic, superstitious church. China’s ancient meritocracy is lauded at the expense of a dissolute (and hereditary) French aristocracy. China and Confucianism offered Voltaire an ideal, virtue-based, socio-political, cultural system (Chinese: ≁ᵜ minben),114 built, not on miracle, revelation or the occult, but on natural morality and a human view of ‘truth’.115 It is a ‘simple’ system unadulterated by ‘absurd innovations’ (e.g. the Trinity doctrine), that ‘has never been disgraced by miracle tales nor defiled by squabble and bloodshed’ (1756: II. 178; q. Roertz 2013: 26). As he says of the secular ‘sage’ Confucius, like the Stoic philosopher Epictetus (50–135 CE), ‘[H]e only recommends virtue: he preaches no mysteries’ (q. 2007: 400).116 Iconoclastic demons scream in Voltaire’s flowing prose. His vocation ¯ crasez l’Infâme’ (Crush the infamous one), by which he is gripped in his preferred later signature, ‘E meant the Church. In time, he pours oil on revolutionary France, and lights the match there and in America – indeed, in China, too, where Voltaire is often invoked as the justification for civil violence117 and of commendable European secularism.118 Who can avoid Voltaire today? Though best-known, Denis Diderot (1713–84) was not alone in producing the new cultural and literary genre ‘Encyclopedia’. The famous Encyclopédie that he and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717– 83), a serious Parisian polymath, co-edited from 1751, was fruit of the collaborative labours of a large, mixed bag of loosely affiliated philosophes, who were interested in new ideas and ready to put pen to paper. The Société des gens de lettres, to which the authors belonged, is a poor relation of its 19th-century namesake (fr. 1838).119 Diderot wrote of the Encyclopedia’s first contributors: ‘Among some excellent men, there were some weak, average, and absolutely bad ones. From this mixture in the publication, we find the draft of a schoolboy next to a masterpiece’ (q. Kafker 1988: xiv).120 The Following the new style of Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697), though enlarged considerably over the years, the 344pp. 1st edn of the Dictionnaire Philosophique portatif (Geneva, 1764), which Voltaire had begun in 1752, contained only seventy-three articles. 113 Contra Bayle’s atheism, Voltaire recognized – and respected – in Confucius (and other non-Western cultures) a sense of a ‘supreme being’ as a basis for morality. 114 N.B. ≁ᵜ minben, interestingly, also has democratic connotations. 115 On Voltaire, Confucius and Enlightenment anthropology, Pagden, A. (2007), ‘The Immobility of China’, in L. Wolff and M. Cipollnin (eds), The Anthropology of the Enlightenment, 50–64 (esp. 55f.); Israel, J. I. (2006), Enlightenment Contested, 657f. N.B. compare Wolff with Voltaire’s praise for Chinese wisdom in his article ‘On China’ ([1764] 1972, 2004: 112–15). 116 Cf. also Voltaire’s, The Chinese Catechism, Or, Dialogues between Cu-su, a Disciple of Confucius, and Prince Kou, Son of the King of Lou (1765). 117 N.B. for oriental views of Voltaire and Confucius, Chang, C-Y. (2013), Confucianism: A Modern Interpretation, 436f.; Lee, S-h. (2006), Confucian Discourse since Modernity, 25f. On the impact of Voltaire’s sinophilia on later Franco-Chinese relations, Bailey, P. (1992), ‘Voltaire and Confucius: French attitudes towards China in the early twentieth century’. 118 N.B. Shanghai littérateur Zhang Ruogu’s ᕥ㤕䉧 (1904-?) re-translation and invocation of Voltaire’s L’Orphelin de la Chine during WWII, ‘in order to raise the morale of the Chinese people in their struggle against Japanese invaders’ (q. Chen, X., 2002: 100f.). 119 The cultural giants Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), Victor Hugo (1802–85), Alexandre Dumas (1802–70) and George Sand (1804–6) belonged to the latter group. 120 On the contributors, Kafker, F. A. (1996), The Encyclopedists as a Group; Kafker, F. A. and S. Kafker (1988), The Encyclopedists as Individuals. 112

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work’s seventeen volumes, published between 1751 and 1765, contain articles (some anonymous) on everything from art to music, science, philosophy, history, geography and literature. Despite its deficiencies it provides a remarkable insight into the mid-18th century and the roots of the European Enlightenment. Here’s a still life of radical Europe. Diderot was high priest of the revolutionists’ principle that reform, freedom of thought, tolerance, and scientific and artistic health require education. Less well-known encyclopedic works contributed to European understanding of life, religion, society and China. The radical Swiss biblical exegete and journalist-encyclopedist Jean Leclerc’s (1657–1736) periodicals, Bibliothèque universelle et historique (1686–93), Bibliothèque Choisie (1703–13) and Bibliothèque Ancienne et Moderne (1714–27), helped to expand European awareness of progressive English thought.121 Bayle’s Dictionnaire, the Amsterdam periodical Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (1684–9, 1699–1710, 1716–18), which Bayle co-edited with French theologian and publicist Jacques Bernard (1658–1718), the scholarly journal edited by Henri Basnage de Beauval (1657–1710) Histoire des Ouvrages des Savans (fr. 1687), and the Abbé Guillaume Raynal’s (1713–96) Histoire des Deux Indes (1770, 1774, 1780), which blended oddly philosophical tirades and opinions on commerce (including with the Orient), all stimulated progressive European thought on God, religion, humanity, politics and society.122 Groundwork for later political revolutions was being laid. In the salons of Paris – like that of Diderot’s friend and fellow encyclopedist Paul (H.T.), Baron d’Holbach (1723–89) – European republican secularism held radical minds. Political realism, religious skepticism, and intellectual cynicism, all take root here.123 On China, the Jesuit Dictionnaire de Trevoux (1721) and Étienne Souciet’s, SJ (1671–1744), slipshod collation of materials from long-term Peking resident Antoine Gaubil, SJ (1689–1759), Observations mathématiques, astronomiques, chronologiques et physiques. . . Tirées des anciens livres chinois (1729–32), and the multi-volume Nouvelle Bibliothèque Germanique (1752) by the Wolffian Huguenot Samuel Formey (1711–97), all supplement Diderot and d’Alembert’s work, and anticipate later general studies, like the three-volume first edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–71) and the article on China by James Brewster (1777–1847) in his brother, Sir David Brewster’s (1781–1868), eighteen-volume rival publication, Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1808–30). As in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, perceptions of China are played out in the harsh arena of European publicity. As George Lehner’s China in European Encyclopedias illustrates, both the 1712 and 1718 editions of Louis Moréri’s (1643–80) Grand Dictionaire historique ([1674]

On Leclerc, Bots, H. (1984), ‘Jean Leclerc as journalist of the Bibliothèques’, in G. A. M. Janssens and F. G. A. M. Aarts (eds), Studies in Seventeenth-century English Literature, 53–66; Golden, S. A. (1972), Jean Leclerc; Reesink, H. J. (1931), ‘L’Angleterre et la littérature Anglaise’. 122 On Holland as the home of ‘free thought’ and progressive publication in the pan-European Respublica litteraria (Republic of Letters), Cerny, G. ed. (1987), Theology, Politics and Letters at the Crossroads of European Civilization, 255–68; Gibbs, C. G. (1971), ‘The role of the Dutch Republic as the Intellectual Entrepot of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries’; Dibon, P. (1965–6), ‘Les Provinces Unies, carrefour intellectuel de l’Europe du XVII e siècle’; Ulbach, L. ed. (1884), La Hollande et la liberté de penser au XVII e et au XVIII s siècle. On Bayle and Montesquieu as ‘atheists’, Kow, S. (2011), ‘Confucianism, Secularism, and Atheism in Bayle and Montesquieu’. 123 On male and female ‘salons’ and the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ (as Habermasian ‘public’ and ‘private’ discourse), Beasley, F. E. (2006), Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France; Craveri, B. (2005), The Age of Conversation; Goodman, D. (1994), The Republic of Letters; Habermas, J. (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Kale, S. (2006), French Salon. On Habermas, p. 323, 479f. 121

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1680, 2nd edn), edited by church historian Louis Ellies du Pin (1657–1719), take a conservative line in the Chinese ‘Rites Controversy’ (2011: 101, n. 143). Bayle – who published his Dictionnaire Historique to correct Moréri (!) – and Diderot adopt a different stance. Cracks in sinophilia widen after 1750. Confucius will all too soon be an enemy of the ‘Republic of Letters’. Diderot is a prophet of later European ‘Sinophobia’. Though he drew inspiration from Voltaire, and providential Deists, for his initial views on China, he moves increasingly away from the sinophilia of Spinoza, Leibniz, Wolff and Voltaire, and the nuanced opinions of the pioneer ‘Physiocrat’ economist François Quesnay (1694–1774).124 Dubbed by a clerical editor Nicolas Baudeau (1730–92) ‘the great law-giver, the Confucius of Europe’, Quesnay, whose classic Tableau économique (1758, Economic Table) gave early analytic expression to an ‘agrarian’ economics (in which land or ‘nature’ are the basis of wealth not mercantilism), admired Confucianism’s holistic societal ontology, and, in Le Despotisme de la Chine (1767) praised Chinese politics and society, with (to his mind) its benign despotic government.125 In contrast, Diderot’s article ‘Chinois’, in the Encyclopédie (November 1753, III) draws on Le Comte’s Nouveaux Mémoires sur le’état présent de la Chine (1696), and on German philosopher Johann Jakob Brucker’s (1694–1774) Historia Critica Philosophiae (5 vols, 1742–4; 6 vols, 1766–7), to vilify China. So, Confucius’s social and moral vision is respected, but his metaphysics is ridiculed. Chinese politics, culture and intellectual life are lambasted as regressive, oppressive, myopic, idolatrous and corrupt. In light of more honest Western travelogues, Christian anxiety (in 1742 the Catholic China mission was prohibited), suspicion of the existence of ‘sage nations’, growing respect for individual freedom, and the new sense (pace Voltaire and the radical aristocrat-lawyer Montesquieu [1689–1755]) that China was in reality just another absolutist ‘despotism’, sinophobia blossomed after 1750.126 The erosion of the orbis Christianus, tension between church and state (ultimately rooted in the 11th-century ‘Investiture crisis’), and gaudy ‘trans-confessional absolutism’ (Roetz 2013: 26), all gave Diderot and his coterie cudgels to batter Christian powers and Confucian ideals. With Abbé (Gabriel Bonnot de) Mably (1709–85), the radical Parisian philosopher-theologian Nicolas Boulanger (1722–59),127 the lawyer Montesquieu, and his aristocratic counterparts, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau (1715–89), Baron d’Holbach, the Abbé Raynal, and the philosopher-mathematician Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759), who was Director of the French ‘Académie des Sciences’ and the first President of its Prussian equivalent – to say nothing of the Genevan philosopher On Diderot and Descartes, Vartanian, A. (1953), Diderot and Descartes. On Quesnay, Zhang, W-B. (2000), On Adam Smith and Confucius, 27f. 126 N.B. ‘Sinomaniac’ Montesquieu’s categorization of societies, ‘estates’ and institutions (in De l’esprit des loix (sic) [anon., 1748: The Spirit of the Laws, 1750]), his support for personal freedom and use of ‘despotisme’, and veneration of him in Britain’s American colonies prior to the ‘Revolutionary War’ (1775–83), see esp. Althusser, A. (1972), Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx; Hsia, The Vision of China, 19f.; Lutz, D. (1984), ‘The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought’; Pangle, T. (1973), Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism; Shackleton, R. (1961), Montesquieu: a Critical Biography; Shklar, J. (1989), Montesquieu; Spurlin, P. M. ([1941] 1961), Montesquieu in America. N.B. Voltaire’s L’essai sur les mœurs sought to counter Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des loix. On Montesquieu’s Spicilège (1718) and understanding he acquired from Arcadio Huang (above p. 138) on Confucianism, Daoism (the ‘Tao’) and Buddhism (‘Foë’), Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 660f. 127 N.B. Boulanger’s Examen critique de la vie de saint Paul (Amsterdam, 1770: Critical Examination of the Life of St. Paul, 1823) was one of the first of its kind. Authorship of such works was veiled. D’Holbach gave Boulanger credit for his antireligious Christianisme dévoilé (1766, Christianity Unveiled). On the use of Boulanger’s thought by radical thinkers, such as the English-born American political theorist and activist Thomas Paine (1737–1809), Davidson, E. H. and W. J. Scheick (1994), Scripture and authority, 63f.; Clark, J. C. D. (2018), Thomas Paine, ad loc. 124 125

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and his German counterpart Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), whom we study in the next chapter – Diderot belonged to a community of discourse in which criticism of China was encouraged. In time Diderot, like Montesquieu, would come to view the Qing emperor not as ‘le premier philosophe’ (the first/preeminent philosopher), but as the guardian of an ancient system that was based on ritual obsequiousness, repression, paternalism and religious superstition, and ripe, like France, for a radical overhaul. In an opportunistic counter-charge, the church, in texts like Abbé Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier’s (1718–90) confident Apologie de la religion chrétienne (1763), concurred (pouring scorn on philosophes who had ever said other than Diderot and his fellow China critics!).128 Opportunist attacks habitually plague disputes. In the midst of this, as Christine Jones has described, we find an ‘accessorizing’ of French porcelain as an analogue of social and intellectual change across Europe. Life and society are now redressed in clay fashioned by French artisans.129 China taught the early-Enlightenment that earth mattered: it also encouraged humanity’s corporate and individual responsibility. French artisans grasped and glorified this principle through pottery kilns and guillotines. John Whitehead says of the socio-aesthetic impact of the Sèvres pottery in mid-18th-century France (that symbolically used and changed Chinese production processes), ‘[A]fter revolutionizing the art of porcelain, it stood as the undisputed arbiter of taste in Europe’ (2010: Synopsis). If, as in Wedgwood, perfection is portrayed in porcelain, life – like beauty, art and luxury – is again crafted here in manufacture. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1930–2002) work on ‘symbolic currency’ finds a ready exemplar in this use.130 As Voltaire warned a rich hedonist with prophetic zeal in his poem, ‘Défense du Mondain, ou L’apologie du luxe’ (1737) (Defense of the ‘Man of the World’, or Apology for Luxury): La porcelaine et la frêle beauté De cet émail à la Chine empâté Par mille mains fut pour vous préparée Cuite, recuite, et peinte, et diaprée. —1746: II. 719131 In time, like Confucius, fragile porcelain would become a weapon of fierce social warfare. We pick up the story of European attitudes to China after 1750 in Chapter 5, where we study its role in the (r)evolution of Enlightenment ethics. For now, we return to Britain to see how sinophilia and suspicion swirl around issues of human life and society. Here, too, thick varnish is poured over later interpretation of the Analects and Gospels.

Cf. on Bergier, Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 661f. Cf. Jones, C. A. (2013), Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France. On the socio-political role of Meissen porcelain, Cassidy-Geiger, M. (2007), Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts; Weber, J. (2017), ‘Copying and Competition: Meissen Porcelain and the Saxon Triumph over the Emperor of China’, in C. Forberg and P. W. Stockhammer (eds), The Transformative Power of the Copy, 331–73. 130 Cf. Bourdieu, P. ([1997] 2003), Outline of the Theory of Practice. 131 Trans. ‘Porcelain and the fragile sheen/ Of its enamel spread thick ‘à la Chine’/ A thousand hands with you in mind/ Fired, re-fired, and dyed, and refined’ (cf. also, Voltaire 2003: 16.273–313). 128 129

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BRITAIN AND THE BIRTH OF ANTHROPOLOGY, 1650–1750 The eminent Voltaire scholar Gustave Lanson (1857–1934) calls the young exile’s Letters concerning the English Nation (1733), written while he was in Britain between 1726 and 1729, ‘the first bomb hurled against the Old Regime’ ([1899] 1919; q. Anchor 1967: 57).132 As Robert Anchor explains, here is ‘the first writing which sought to free reason from any association with the institutions and values of the Old Regime and turn it against them’ (ibid.). These are bold claims, reminding us that however we see Voltaire’s time in Britain – or ultimately resolve scholarly debates about the relation between the Enlightenment and the ‘Republic of Letters’, or the nature of salons and the role of women members, or the use and abuse of China as a source and symbol of radical ideas in the 17th and 18th centuries – cross-Channel conversation was as important for shaping the Enlightenment mind as international exchange with China. While in Britain, Voltaire read Bacon, Locke and Newton. He kept company with politically engaged literary figures such as Swift, Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and John Gay (1685–1732), author of the popular ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera (1728). In time, D’Holbach’s salon in Paris would host Scottish philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith, as well as radical politician and journalist John Wilkes (1725–97), Whig aristocrat and man of letters Horace Walpole (1717–97), historian of ancient Rome Edward Gibbon (1737–94), actor David Garrick (1717–79),133 and Irish novelist Rev. Laurence Sterne (1713–68); to say nothing of aristocratic Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria (1738–94) and polymathic ‘Founding Father’ of the United States of America, Benjamin Franklin (1706–90). Ideas incubated, germinated and cross-fertilized by literary exchange and intellectual friendship. Views on humanity and society were shared and sharpened. In this section, we look at five late 17th- and early 18th-century figures, their society and outlook, to see the impression they leave on the Analects and Gospels in China. These are, again, important resources to help us ‘read backwards carefully’. Milton, Addison, Pope, Berkeley, Locke and Chinoiserie We begin with the prolific Puritan polemicist John Milton (1608–74) and his biblical epic Paradise Lost. Though John Aubrey says Milton began work on the poem, ‘2 yeares before the King came-in’ (i.e. 1660 and the ‘Restoration of the Monarchy’ under Charles II), Milton almost certainly began it in the 1630s. It was completed in 1653, a year after he had lost his sight (Aubrey [1669–96]; Dick 1960: 202).134 The long cultural and literary shadow cast by Paradise Lost reaches China. As we saw in Chapter 3, by the mid-17th century Britain’s intelligentsia were conscious of, and increasingly informed about, the Orient. As Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Commonwealth Council of State (fr. March 1649), Milton was engaged with foreign policy and diplomacy. Though no expert on China,135 he is fascinated by Tartary and tales of Genghis Khan. He has read Hakluyt, Purchas, 132 N.B. also, Voltaire ([1909] 1924), Lettres Philosophiques, ed. G. Lanson, 3rd edn, 2 vols. On Voltaire’s exile in Britain (after a brief imprisonment in the Bastille for cuffing a servant), Ballantyne, A. (1919), Voltaire’s Visit to England, 1726– 1729; Collins, J. C. (1908), Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau on England. 133 On Garrick’s performance in Irish playwright Arthur Murphy’s (1727–1805) translation and adaptation of Voltaire’s The Orphan of China (1755) on 21 April 1759, Chen, S. (1998), ‘The Chinese Orphan: A Yuan Play. Its Influence on European Drama of the Eighteenth Century ’, in Hsia, The Vision of China, 359–82 (esp. 374f.). 134 Cf. generally, Poole, W. (2017), Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost. 135 Milton’s knowledge of, and attitude towards, China is debated. Like many of his peers, he appears to be well-versed in the Orient. On the sources and impact of Milton’s oriental ideas, Lu, M. (2016), The Chinese Impact Upon English Renaissance Literature, 186f.

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Martini, and Heylyn’s Cosmographia (1652). He knows ‘the ancient annals of the Chinese’ and about ‘two Chinas’ with capitals in ‘Cambalu(c)’ and ‘Paquin’ (Peking).136 China is described as the ‘mightiest’, with antiquity, prosperity and the great ‘Wall of Cathay’ (1753: II. 144f.). In Paradise Lost, ‘Sericana’, the ‘Chineses’ and ‘Paquin of Sinaean Kings’ (Bks. III. 438, XI. 390) are referenced. And, as we saw earlier (p. 107), Satan enters the world through the ‘barren plains/ Of Sericana’.137 In exchanges with the German theologian, diplomat, and scientist, Henry Oldenbury (1616–77), Milton reports enthusiasm in Oxford for Martini’s Sinicae historiae decas prima (1658) and criticism of Mendoza’s History of China (1586) (Lu, M., 2016: 112). Some perceive in this Milton’s interest in debates about how biblical and Chinese history correlate a resource for ‘two forms of history’ (eternal and temporal) and the ‘complex double function’ of Chinese history (to inspire and critique the West) in Paradise Lost.138 Crucially, besides his sinological interests, Milton was, as Shen Hong says, ‘the first British poet to be introduced into China’ (2014: 96). We study him for his past and present role in Sino-Western cultural dialogue. The Analects and Gospels are read today, directly and indirectly, in light refracted by Milton’s monumental classic, his thoughtful Christian faith and, to some even today, his provocative socio-political vision.139 To focus on Paradise Lost. The poet, moralist, and literary critic Samuel Johnson (1709–84) says the poem speaks of ‘the fate of worlds, the revolutions of heaven and earth’ ([1779–81] 1905: 1.171). To Milton, its aim is to ‘justifie the ways of God to men’ (Bk. 1.25–6). Few doubt the execution of Charles I (30 January 1649), chaos in the English Civil War (1642–51), the claims of Cartesian rationalism and political critique of Thomas Hobbes’s (1588–1651) Leviathan (1651),140 and translation of the epic Os Lusíadas (1572: The Lusiads, 1655) by Portuguese poet Luís Vaz de Camões (1524–80), conspire in some way to energize Milton.141 Grand themes of divine royal decrees and rebellious human acts are depicted now on a vast canvas as a cosmic ‘civil war’. This is in the background to the faces of Jesus and Confucius. Kepler and Spinoza both find a place in Milton’s biblical cosmology.142 But Satan, ‘The Tempter’ – dramatically depicted in Doré’s dark image (1866) – plays a lead role, marshalling grotesque fiends for ‘impious war in Heav’n’ (Bk. 1.43). His archangelic adversaries, Raphael (Bks. V–VIII) and Michael (Bks. XI–XII), take the fight to him and oppose his sinful earthly host, thus opening the door to God’s future. Based on the

On ‘Cambalu’ and ‘Pequin’, Chang, Y. Z. (1970), ‘Why did Milton err on Two Chinas?’ On use of travellers and travelogues in 18th-century commentaries on Milton, McDowell, N. and N. Smith, eds (2009), The Oxford Handbook of Milton, 680f. 138 On Milton and his contemporaries’ views of China, Chinese historiography and biblical chronology, Gilbert, A. H. (1911), ‘Milton’s China’; Lu, M. (2016), Chinese Impact, 112f., 117; Markley, R. (2006), The Far East and the English Imagination: 1600–1730, 71; —(1999), ‘“The destin’d Walls/ Of Cambalu”: Milton, and the ambiguities of the Far East’, in B. Rajan and E. Sauer (eds), Milton and the Imperial Vision, 191–213 (esp. 197f.). 139 On the early reception of Paradise Lost, Hale, J. K. (2004), Milton as Multilingual, Pt IV; Leonard, J. (2013), Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667–1970; von Maltzahn, N. (1996), ‘The First Reception of Paradise Lost (1667)’; Poole, W. (2004c), ‘The Early Reception of Paradise Lost’. 140 On Milton and Hobbes, Wolfe, D. M. (1994), ‘Milton and Hobbes: A Contrast in Social Temper’. On Hobbes and early Confucianism, Huang, C-c. (2010), Humanism in East Asian Confucian Contexts, 106f.; Turner, B. S. (2013), The Religious and the Political, 66f. 141 On Milton, colonization, travel and a ‘New World’, Armitage, D., A. Himy and Q. Skinner, eds (1995), Milton and Republicanism, 215f. 142 On Milton and early-Modern cosmology, Ramachandran, A. (2015), The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe, 182–220; and, on suspicion of Milton from the scientific community, Poole, W. (2004b), ‘Two Early Readers of Milton: John Beale and Abraham Hill’. 136 137

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Genesis account of the ‘Fall’ of Adam and Eve (Gen. 3),143 and humanity’s ‘Redemption’ in Jesus, Milton’s magnum opus is a global ‘Classic’: like old stained glass, it transfigures cultural light. If to postmodern minds the poem’s biblical imagery is offensive, or unimpressive, to Christian and agnostic readers, spiritual or existential truths are conveyed with beauty and clarity. To Dr. Johnson, its ‘characteristick quality is its sublimity’, and ‘peculiar power to astonish’ ([1779–81] 1905: 1.171). To Dryden, the ‘Poet Laureate’, as we saw, when the poem was first published, it was ‘one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime POEMS, . . . this Age or Nation has produced’ (1932: III. 417).144 No fewer than 100 English editions, and multiple foreign translations, appeared before the end of the 18th century. Its influence is evident in the twelve essays by Joseph Addison (1672–1719) in The Spectator (1712) and in Alexander Pope’s (1688–1744) Dunciad (1743).145 With its ‘subversive potential and incisive exploration of the experience of alienation’, it is, as Margaret Kean points out, ‘a touchstone for all the Romantic writers’ (2013: 36).146 Poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and his sister Mary (1797–1851), William Blake (1757–1827), William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and American Walt Whitman (1819–92), all find inspiration here. Paradise Lost becomes, in short, a biblical thesaurus for life and society in 17th- and 18th-century Britain and beyond. It has entered the world’s soul, its images of heaven and hell, life and death, choice and failure, deeply wrought. Condensing Milton’s contribution to our story is hard. Focusing on his anthropology helps. The fact that China plays a part in his cosmic drama aids his integration and clarifies his contribution to our narrative. Three themes stand out for comment. Together they justify Samuel Johnson’s claim that the work has ‘the power of displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful’ (ibid.). First, just as many read Paradise Lost through the lens of Blake’s Milton lithographs (1804–10), so Paradise Lost gives poetic definition to key features of biblical anthropology. In Chapter 6, we see its counterpart in the Elizabethan and Jacobin playwright-actor William Shakespeare’s (1564– 1616) dramatized commentary on truth and personality.147 Milton’s Puritan theology proffers distorting paradoxes. It is both naturally biblical and surprisingly Modern. The Protestant Reformers’ cardinal principle sola scriptura (by scripture alone) is safe in Milton’s hands.148 His work celebrates

143 N.B. on Milton’s religion, Bryson, M. (2004), Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God; Evans, J. M. (1968), Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition; Hunter, W. B., Jr., C. A. Patrides and J. H. Adamson (1971), Bright Essence: Studies in Milton’s Theology; Kurth, B. O. (1966), Milton and Christian Heroism; Lewis, C. S. (1960), A Preface to Paradise Lost; Lieb, M. (1981), Poetics of the Holy: A Reading of Paradise Lost; —(2006), Theological Milton; Patrides, C. A. (1966), Milton and the Christian Tradition. 144 On the reception history of Paradise Lost, Kean, M. ed. ([2005] 2013), John Milton’s Paradise Lost: A Sourcebook; Shawcross, J. (1995), John Milton: The Critical Heritage. For negative criticism (for different reasons), e.g. Eliot, T. S. (1957), On Poetry and Poets, 138–45; Empson, W. (1961), Milton’s God. ‘New Milton’ studies see the poet as less clear and orthodox, his work marked by ‘indeterminacy and incertitude’, e.g. Herman, P. C. (2012), ‘Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Found: The New Milton Criticism’, in P. C. Herman and E. Sauer (eds), The New Milton Criticism, 1–22. On Milton’s Socinianism and Deism, Rogers, J. (2006), ‘Milton and the Heretical Priesthood of Christ’, in D. Loewenstein and J. Marshall (eds), Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, 203–20. On Milton’s orthodoxy, Poole, The Making of Paradise Lost, 96f. 145 On Addison and Pope, p. 160f., 164f. 146 On the love-hate relationship some Romantics felt towards Paradise Lost, Murray, C. J. ed. (2004), Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850, 747f. 147 Cf. below p. 266f. 148 On Milton’s biblicism, Fletcher, H. F. (1929), On the Use of the Bible in Milton’s Prose.

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scriptural faith. In his exegesis of Genesis in Paradise Lost, earth is a place of sin, death, darkness, sex and temptation.149 As a poetic theodicy, the poem portrays the intimate relationship Adam and Eve have with one another, and with God, before they are ejected from the ‘Garden of Eden’ for disobeying the divine decree not to eat from ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ (Gen. 2.17).150 The Bible defines the idealism and the realism of Milton’s anthropology. In the encomium to man in Book IV. 288–92 (based on Gen. 1.27 and 28), humanity’s creation in the imago Dei (the image of God) and ‘dominion’ over earth are clearly enunciated: Two of far nobler shape erect and tall, Godlike erect, with native Honour clad In naked Majestie seem’d Lord of all, And worthie seem’d, for in their looks Divine. The image of their glorious Maker shone. As willful, sexual individuals, who fear, doubt, disobey, feel shame and remorse, and go on discovering new truths about themselves and God, we also see in Milton’s Adam and Eve a poignant, Neo-Platonic ‘soul struggle’ (psychomachia) between reason (ratio) and desire (libido), and (pace Shakespeare, see p. 266f.) an early-Modern sense of individuality and personality. The glory of humanity’s God-given identity is tarnished by sin, and, as the Renaissance Christian humanist Marcilio Ficino (1433–99) warned in his Epistolae, ‘the soul is always miserable in its mortal body’ (q. Woodbridge 2002: 168). Though Milton’s Puritan biblicism is all too clear, his anthropology is still creative and eclectic. His Adam is as much a Renaissance hero as an object of divine – let alone Pauline – wrath.151 For all his honest realism, there is an early-Modern – almost Confucian – optimism in his view of man. In contrast to corporatist European Catholicism, Milton pre-empts Kantian individualism and celebrates what Walt Whitman calls the ‘democratic celebration of self ’ (Kean: 38). Second, following on from this, Milton injects into Anglophone culture a profound, poetic affirmation of the Protestant principle of personal moral and spiritual responsibility; but he does this self-consciously against the background of civil strife and societal change. We wonder, perhaps, at the poem’s remarkable reception. The reason for it surely lies here: Milton is theologically articulate for biblicist Britain, and critically attuned to its thirst for change. His poem is, then, both a poetic apologia for Protestantism and a passionate appeal for a Republic.152 Adam and Eve are innately noble: ‘authors to themselves in all’ (Bk. III. 122). They are also ‘By nature free, not over’rul’d by Fate’ (Bk. V. 527). For, a human has, we find in Milton’s Tetrachordon (1645) on divorce, ‘freedom by his naturall birthright, and that indeleble (sic) character of priority which God crown’d him with’ (1645: 589f.). And again: ‘There are left som remains of God’s image in man, N.B. on interpretations of Paradise Lost that supplant its Christian humanism with Cartesian rationalism, Herman and Sauer (eds), New Milton Criticism, 26f.; Adams, R. M. (1966), Ikon: John Milton and the Modern Critics. 150 On Milton’s doctrine of humanity and sin, Poole, W. (2005a), Milton and the Idea of the Fall. 151 On the protracted debate about Milton and ‘heroism’, Kermode, F. (1953), ‘Milton’s Hero’; Steadman, J. M. (1967), Milton and the Renaissance Hero. 152 On Milton’s republicanism and views on politics and society, Armitage, D., A. Himy and Q. Skinner, eds (1995), Milton and Republicanism; Fixler, M. (1964), Milton and the Kingdoms of God; Frye, N. (1965), The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics; Hamel, C. (2013), ‘The republicanism of John Milton’; Knott, J. R., Jr. (1971), Milton’s Pastoral Vision. 149

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as he is meerly man’ (ibid., 5). As such, contra a strict Calvinist doctrine of predestination, a person can accept or reject God.153 But, as in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans and Reformation Protestantism, sinful souls can only be saved sola fidei (by faith alone) and sola gratia (by [divine] grace alone). In light of ‘Eternal Providence’, the ‘happy fault’ (felix culpa) of human sin leads to Christ’s saving death. As Adam says near the end: ‘O goodness infinite, goodness immense!/ That all this good of evil shall produce,/ And evil turn to good’ (Bk. XII. 469–471). At the behest of ‘Heav’n’s awful Monarch’ (Bk. IV. 960), Providence acts to quash the abuse of royal power (witness, the beheading of Charles I). Contrary to rational moralism and political radicalism in Hobbes’s Elements of Law (1640), De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651), Milton’s manner is mild, his apocalypticism and iconoclasm more measured.154 Despite his will for change, he turns away from revolution in the name of responsible individualism and Nicene orthodoxy. If tension exists, as some claim, between Milton as artist and theologian,155 he sublimates this to faith, realism, a love for freedom and a sense of duty.156 Milton, the man, is impressive. Third, we find Milton’s Protestant sympathies reconfirmed when we look at his views on, and use of, China. Given the profile China and Confucius had, and the circles in which Milton moved in mid-17th-century Britain, it is no surprise that China appears in his writings; even if, as some scholars argue, he seems to confuse China and Tartary in Paradise Lost.157 We saw previously (above p. 107) how Satan enters the world via China’s ‘barren plains’. Milton may be using the monastic association of desert with spiritual conflict or alluding to the destructive power of the ‘Tartar’ (i.e. Manchu) invasion in 1644. Another clue is his ‘Letter in Latin’ in which he gives Confucius credit for protecting China from revolution – and by implication from Jesuit infiltration (Étiemble 1989: II. 319). His image of China’s bare, windswept plains is another instance of Western idealization of China’s aboriginal (Edenic) perfection, in which Confucian morality, imperial authority, ritual civility, and the beauty of porcelain,158 exist in perfect harmony, in perpetuity – that is, until crushed by Satan and the Catholic church. Torn ‘twixt a commonwealth of preservation and expansion, Milton joins those who see in China a human ‘type’ of Christ’s ‘archetypical’ kingdom of peace. Milton’s Adam – though a heroic figure akin to a Greco-Roman demi-god – has no power apart from God – and, of course, his marriage to Eve. He does not display epic, martial virtues; rather, those of Confucius and Christ: integrity, faithfulness, goodness, patience, single-mindedness and a love for peace – or, as Archangel Michael describes it, ‘a paradise within thee, happier far’ (Bk. XII. 586–7). It is little surprise the Romantics found inspiration here: Paradise Lost is a study in human psychology as much as Christian spirituality. It is also little surprise that in 1837 the German missionary Karl Gützlaff likened Paradise Lost for his Chinese readers to Homer’s much-admired N.B. Wolfe: ‘Milton . . . asserted man’s innate nobility and made the infliction of God’s wrath contingent upon man’s freedom of choice’ (1941: 63f.). 154 On the inappropriateness of using ‘iconoclastic’ of Milton, Shore, D. (2012), Milton and the Art of Rhetoric, 102f. 155 N.B. on this tension, Walker, J. M. (1986), ‘“For each seem’d either”: Free Will and Predestination in Paradise Lost’. 156 We should note, too, that after Milton’s famed meeting with Galileo in Florence in 1638, the cosmologist is the only contemporary mentioned in Paradise Lost. Though Milton is no Spinozist, Kepler and Galileo may inspire the rhetoric of Bk. VIII. 122–5: ‘. . . What if the Sun/ Be Center to the World, and other Starrs/ By his attractive vertue and thir own/ Incited, dance about him various rounds?’ 157 N.B. seeming inconsistency surrounding the ‘Cathaian coast’ (Bk. XX. 292, n. 3). This is generally taken to mean the Chinese coast. In pre-16th century cartography Cathay is only part of China, with its capital Cambalu[c]. However, Bk. XI. 388 and 390 differentiate between ‘Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can’ and ‘Paquin, of Sinaean [Chinese] kings’. 158 Cf. Chinese porcelain in ‘myrrhine cups embossed with gems’ (Milton 1671: Bk. IV. 119). 153

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epics, as ‘the crown of poetry’, praising its ‘imposing and majestic style’ and a tale of ‘our first ancestors’ exiled from ‘the Garden of Bliss’. This was, he said, ‘deep and philosophical, its intention grand and magnanimous’.159 So began Milton studies in China, their fortunes subject to academic fads, cultural need and politics. But, of the poet and poem’s power over later interpretation of the Analects and Gospels, we should not doubt. We ‘read backwards carefully’ through the vivid hermeneutic of Milton’s magisterial work. When the second edition of Paradise Lost appeared in 1674, the Monarchy had been restored and knowledge of China increased. With Milton’s consent, Dryden wrote a Five-Act rhyming operatic version, The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man. The work was never staged. Other attempts to capitalize on Milton’s success would follow. In 1676, Dryden’s brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard (1626–98) tried hard to improve on Settle’s Conquest of China by the Tartars (1667).160 Drawn by Martini’s De bello Tartarico (1654),161 and other general travelogues, the theme had already prompted an odd assortment of Dutch dramas.162 Despite Dryden’s help, Howard’s play failed. The significance of all this is the progressive transformation of China from the distant, the dreadful, and the ideal, we glimpse in Milton, into a place in which, as Foss and Lach note, ‘changing events affect the lives of real human beings as they do elsewhere’ (1991: 174). As in Hobbes, success or failure will come now not from God, but from ‘man’. It is a change from which Christendom would not recover. We will look at chinoiserie in more detail in the next chapter. It is an off-shoot of translation and distribution of 17th-century literature on China we have examined already. In the youthful poet, essayist, politician and playwright Joseph Addison (1672–1719), portrayed again in a striking portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller,163 chinoiserie found a gifted advocate.164 Addison is important in three related ways. First, he popularized the concept ‘sublimity’, and, with it, aesthetic criteria to define human life. ‘Sublimity’ was introduced into Britain by a 17th-century translation of the mythical, 1st-century soldier Longinus’s treatise On the Sublime. The text was rediscovered in the late 16th century, and translated into French, in 1674, by the poet and literary critic Nicholas Cf. Gützlaff, K., ‘Poetry’, in Eastern Western Monthly Magazine 195 (Canton: n.p. 1837), 1; q. Hao, T. (2012), ‘Milton in Late-Qing China (1837–1911)’. On Gützlaff, p. 140, 159, 204, n. 118, 259, n. 424, 270, n. 29. N.B. the first Chineseauthored work referencing Milton by the Qing dynasty scholar Lin Zexu ᷇ࡷᗀ (1785–1850), Accounts of Four Continents (1839). On this, and later respect for, and study of, Milton as a ‘master poet’ by high-profile authors like Liang Qichao ằ ஏ䎵 (1873–1929), Lu Xun 冟䗵 (1881–1936) and Ku Hung-Ming 䗌卫䣈 (1857–1928), Hao, T. (2005), ‘Ku Hung-Ming, an Early Chinese Reader of Milton’. On Liang, p. 22, 225, n. 235, 227, n. 247, 251, n. 388, 270, n. 30, 285, n. 107, 328, n. 300, 332, 335, n. 351, 364; on Lu, p. 68, n. 85. 160 For background, Scott, Sir W. [1771–1832] (1827), The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bt., I. 411. On Settle, Brown, F. C. (1971), Elkanah Settle; also, p. 99f., 168. 161 On Martini, above p. 95, n. 25, 100, n. 52. 162 E.g. Christoph W. Hagdorn’s (n.d.) courtly romance Aeyquan, oder der gro e Mogol (Amsterdam, 1670), French playwright Samuel Chappuzeau’s (1625–1701) humane tragic-comedy Armetzar ou les ennemis (Leiden, 1658), Joost van der Vondel’s (1587–1679) empathetic Zunqchin (Amsterdam, 1667) and Johann Antonides van der Goes’s (1647–84) youthful saga Trazil, of overrompelt-Sina (Amsterdam, 1685). China becomes in some plays an idealized setting for chivalry and friendship, in others a moralized forum to discuss issues of political and personal import. Compared with the angst evident in FrancoDutch dramas, Settle’s Conquest of China is weak historically and excessively attentive to civility. Cf. the contextual reference to Hagdorn in, Tan, Y. (2007), Der Chinese in der deutschen Literatur, 29f.; also, Van Kley, E. (2003), ‘Qing Dynasty China in Seventeenth Century Dutch Literature’, in W. F. Walle and N. Golvers (eds), The History of the Relations between the Low Countries and China in the Qing Era (1644–1911), 216–34. 163 On Kneller’s other relevant works, p. 99f., 106, 160. 164 Cf. Voltaire’s high opinion of Addison (Addison 1873: VI. 722f.). 159

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Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711). As a further example of cross-Channel cultural exchange, three English translations appeared in little over fifty years.165 ‘Sublimity’ established itself in British philosophy and aesthetics.166 Addison used the term in a series of papers on ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ (1712), for the Spectator magazine, which he co-edited from 1711 with his friend, the Irish politician and writer Sir Richard Steele (1672–1729). The term is used of anything that is incomparably excellent, and, as a result terrifies, amazes and inspires. To Addison, ‘sublimity’ and ‘the sublime’ are three visual elements in imagination, i.e. greatness, uncommonness, and beauty. This was an ideal referent for ‘perfection’ seen in Chinese porcelain and on the new ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe. As Addison says of the Alps on his own ‘Grand Tour’ in 1699: ‘[They] fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror’ ([1705] 1773: 261). Secondly, Addison, Antony Ashley Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713),167 and literary critic and dramatist John Dennis (1658–1734), use ‘sublimity’ to locate humanity in nature. In a post-Newtonian, Cartesian world, humanity is defined as both subject and object of their world. Biblical ideas of human ‘dominion’ over a divine ‘Creation’ are now counter-balanced by deistic awe at the grandeur of the world. Life is tested not by God’s law but ‘sublime’ human products (like porcelain) and the wonders of ‘Nature’. Miltonian spiritual conflict is re-construed as strife within man and over nature. Later Romanticism co-opts this in its repristination of Virgilian (70 BCE–19 BCE) heroes and souls in peril,168 while the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) views fine detail in oriental art as an accentuation of existential conflict.169 Thirdly, China is central to Addison’s world. To A. O. Lovejoy, his Spectator papers ‘expressly set[s] up the Chinese as the actual expression of the ideals which he is preaching’ (1948: 113).170 He reads China through Le Comte and Sir William Temple.171 He learns from Temple about the oriental garden principle sharawadgi.172 Temple first adopted the term in an essay Upon the gardens of Epicurus in 1692. The paper blends the Confucian ideal of humanity at harmony with the world with designs that are ‘truly Grand and Noble, after Nature’s own manner’ (Langley 1728: vii). As Temple stated: ‘[T]here may be other forms wholly irregular that may . . . have more beauty than any others’ (1690b: II. 57f.).173 Echoing Temple, Addison contrasts sharawadgi with dull British gardens and gardeners that ‘instead of humouring nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible’

Cf. by John Pulteney (?1660–1726) in 1680, Leonard Welsted (1688–1747) in 1712, and William Smith (1711–87) in 1739. 166 On use of the term ‘sublime’ in late 17th-century literary criticism, Kuypers, J. M. ed. (2014), Purpose, Practice, and Pedagogy in Rhetorical Criticism, 141f. N.B. also, the early work on philosophy and aesthetics by the Irish politician and political theorist Edmund Burke (1729–97), A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), which Diderot and Kant take cognizance of (cf. p. 102, 157, 160f., 193, 197, 212 below). 167 On Shaftesbury p. 165, 169. 168 We find an unlikely application of this ideal of bravery in a letter by Pope (cf. below p. 164f.) to his confidante, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), in 1717. In 1716 Lady Wortley ‘courageously’ accompanied her husband to the ‘Sublime Port’ (Istanbul) after he was appointed UK Ambassador to Turkey (Webb 1982: 53f.)! 169 On Hegel, p. 233f. 170 Cf. also, Liu, Y. (2008), Seeds of a Different Eden, 18f. 171 On Le Comte, p. 138, 139, n. 35 & 36, 144, 150, 153, 214. On Temple, p. 108f., 168. 172 N.B. sharawadgi is not a Chinese term. As Michael Sullivan explains, it is ‘a corruption of a Persian word’ (1990: 263–93). Cf. also, Murray, C. (1998a), Sharawadgi; —(1998b) ‘Sharawadgi Resolved’; Kuitert, W. (2013), Japanese Robes, Sharawadgi, and the landscape discourse of Sir William Temple. 173 In The Englishness of English Art (1956) Anglo-German architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–83) describes the impact of Temple’s horticultural comment as ‘one of the most amazing in the English language’. 165

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(1712; q. Qian, Z., 1998: 125f.).174 Nature’s ‘sublimity’ is demonstrated in what Lovejoy calls this ‘gospel of irregularity’ (ibid., 101); in other words, the ‘Chinese’ vision for a garden and not the strictly patterned parterre’s and tidy trees of France, Italy and Holland. The Romantics’ love of wild, beautiful ‘Nature’ is traceable here. In this natural form of chinoiserie – captured in the ‘blue and white’ porcelain of ‘Willow Pattern’ – horticulture celebrates Chinese porcelain, culture and its inspiration in Confucian philosophy and ritual. European and British perception of ‘Nature’ is transformed by China.175 In Addison’s Spectator articles (especially, ‘Leonora’), as in other contemporary literature, porcelain becomes a convenient literary analogue to female beauty, fragility, taste and consumerism (Kowaleski-Wallace 1996: 154).176 A shift in consciousness towards a self-aware human subject is crystallized in the writings of Anglo-Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753). As his Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), his Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) and three-part version of Principles of Human Knowledge (1713), make clear, Berkeley is drawn to the interface of anthropology and epistemology, to the relation between human subjectivity and perceived reality. In terms some find ‘mystic’, the ‘orthodox’ Deist Berkeley viewed ‘subjective idealism’ as a matter of perception. As he argued: ‘Esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived).’ So, ‘There is nothing real except minds and their ideas . . . anything else is inconceivable, and what is inconceivable cannot exist’ ([1713] 1843: 222f.). Berkeley rejects cold Cartesian rationalism and the materialist empiricism of Malebranche and Locke – and, in his own De Motu (1720), the theoretical absolutism of Newtonian laws of time, space and motion – in favour of Aristotelian ‘idealism’ and an anthropocentric ‘immaterialism’. The significance of this is huge. Berkeley has had myriad philosophical disciples.177 His thought is both taut and flexible. The knowing, sentient human subject becomes central to philosophy and theology. Berkeley shares with his fellowIrishman Sir Richard Steele and friend Addison, the influential poet-critic Alexander Pope, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, and, as we will see in Chapter 5, the German philosopherethicist Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), a new regard for human vision, interpretation, perception and intuition. He prepares the way for modern and postmodern phenomenalism, perspectivalism, and truth as perception.178 Berkeley’s ideas were controversial at the time. Samuel Johnson sought (unsuccessfully) to mock Berkeley’s immaterialism by kicking a stone (the fallacious Argumentum ad lapidem). Like Voltaire, Berkeley offended the anti-deist Samuel Clarke and Newton’s ill-fated successor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, William Whiston (1667–1752);179

174 Cf. also, Liu, Y., Seeds of a Different Eden, 91–112; Brown, T. C. (2007), ‘Joseph Addison and the Pleasures of “Sharawadgi”’; Harney, M. (2016), Place-making for the Imagination, Ch. 1; Porter, D. (2010), The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England. 175 On later chinoiserie and visuality, Sloboda, S. (2008), ‘Picturing China’. 176 Cf. also, Klein, L. E. (1996), Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, vii–ix. 177 On Berkeley’s ideas and impact, Pappas, G. S. (2000), Berkeley’s Thought; Pitcher, G. (1977), Berkeley; Tipton, I. C. (1974), Berkeley: The Philosophy of Immaterialism; Winkler, K. P. (1989), Berkeley: An Interpretation; —ed. (2005), The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley. Cf. also, on Berkeley, contemporary thought, and his philosophy of perception, natural philosophy and metaphysics (incl. on ‘consciousness’, ‘self-consciousness’ and ‘signs’), Airaksinen, T. and B. Belfrage, eds (2011), Berkeley’s Lasting Legacy. 178 Cf. Stack, G. J. (1970), Berkeley’s Analysis of Perception, 50–73. On Berkeley’s unique contribution to the Enlightenment, Clark, S. R. L. (1990), ‘Soft as the Rustle of a Reed from Cloyne’, in P. Gilmour (ed.), Philosophers of the Enlightenment, 47–62. 179 On Berkeley’s early critics, Bracken, H. M. (1965), The Early Reception of Berkeley’s Immaterialism 1710–1733.

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albeit, Whiston’s own tenure (1702–10) was curtailed by criticism, and he withdrew to author his mighty tomes Primitive Christianity Revived (1711), Josephus (1732), and Antiquities of the Jews (1737). Berkeley’s impact has been the greater. Though he may spawn doubt about reality per se, ‘matter’ is now deniable without absurdity, reality expressed as ‘ideas’ in the mind of God and God known without empirical evidence. As the limerick lampooned atheistic critics of his philosophy and resultant theology of perspective: Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd I’m always about in the Quad And that’s why the tree continues to be Since observed by, yours faithfully, God.180 We might say much of Berkeley’s philosophy. He is important for our story in other respects. He knows, and respects, China’s size, energy, historiography, science, medicine and culture. In one of seven dialogues in Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732), he says the Chinese are ‘a learned, ingenious, and acute people, very curious, and addicted to arts and sciences’; adding, ‘I profess I cannot help paying some regard for their accounts of time’(1843: I. 472).181 Britain is ‘swarming, like China, with busy people’ ([1735] 1820: III. 185). In an appendix to The Querist, he wonders if French porcelain will outstrip Chinese goods (ibid., III. 538). Conversely, Berkeley is known in China. His eclectic interests are referenced in mid-19th-century literature.182 His ‘immaterialism’ – or, as it would become, ‘subjective idealism’ – is favourably likened to the idealism of the NeoConfucian scholar Wang Yangming ⦻䲭᰾ (1472–1529) in mid-20th-century discussion of Marxist materialism and Maoist realism.183 More than this, we hear resonances of Xie He’s 䅍䎛 ‘Six Principles of Chinese Painting’184 in his view of intuition. We find him contributing to economic and ethical debate after the bursting of the ‘South Sea Bubble’ (Spring, 1720). If inter-cultural philosophy finds in Berkeley and Neo-Confucianism corroborative traditions, economic history listens to the philosopher as an important voice in debate about the relative merits of luxury, commerce, capitalist energy, and personal or social morality. To Scott Breuninger, Berkeley follows the Roman historian and politician Sallust’s (86 BCE–35 BCE)185 Bellum Catilina and Bellum Jurgurthinum, and a long line of 17th-century writers,186 who praise the ‘mediocrity of money’, and/or the moral, and 180 Cf. McCracken, C. (1979), ‘What Does Berkeley’s God See in the Quad?’; —(1995), ‘Godless Immaterialism: On Atherton’s Berkeley’, in R. G. Muehlmann (ed.), Berkeley’s Metaphysics, 249–260; McKim, R. (1997–8), ‘Abstraction and Immaterialism’. 181 N.B. he also credits the Jesuits here with knowledge of ‘Chinese affairs’. 182 N.B. his advocacy of the universal efficacy of tar-water, as recorded in The Chinese Times (Tianjin, 1888), Vol. II. 828! 183 On Chinese criticism of Berkeley’s ‘solipsism’, Liu, S-h. (2009), ‘Neo-Confucianism (II): From Lu Jiu-Yuan to Wang YangMing’, in B. Mou (ed.), The Routledge History of World Philosophies, III , Ch. 13 (esp. 411f.); —(2001), ‘Philosophical Analysis and Hermeneutics’, in B. Mou (ed.), Two Roads to Wisdom, 131–52 (esp. 144f.). 184 Cf. p. 78. 185 Cf. Breuninger, S. (2010), ‘Luxury, Moderation and the South-Sea Bubble’, in Recovering Bishop Berkeley, 71–94; to which I am indebted for this section. Cf. for context, Glaisyer, N. (2006), The Culture of Commerce in England, 1660–1720. 186 Cf. Thomas Mun [1571–1641], A Discourse on Trade from England unto the East Indies (1621), Rice Vaughan [d. c. 1672], A Discourse of Coin and Coinage (1675), Nicholas Barbon [c. 1640–98], Discourse of Trade (1690), Sir George Mackenzie [1636/8–91], The Moral History of Frugality (1691). N.B. Daniel Defoe disagreed: ‘[’T]is the longest Purse and not the longest Sword that conquers Nations’ (1705: II. 78).

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financial, benefit of frugality. As Elizabethan Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon (1561–1626) wrote: ‘Industry to increase and frugality to maintain are the true watch words of a kingdom’s treasury’ (q. Breuninger 2010: 77).187 To Berkeley, behind the irresponsibility of Directors and investors who speculated in a spate of ‘bubble’ companies in 1720, lay a loss of public spirit caused by an ‘atheistical narrow spirit, centering all our cares upon private interests’ (1820: III. 77).188 In the spirit of Calvinist mercantilism, Berkeley claims that ‘by restoring and promoting religion, industry, frugality, and public spirit’, it is is possible ‘public happiness and prosperity’ will return (ibid., III. 65). We read the Analects and Gospels in light of embittered history and moral debate about SinoEuropean trade. As commerce with China grew, Breuninger argues, ‘luxury’s economic role was reassessed and “demoralized” (or “economized”)’; to some, the ‘softening’, ‘civilizing’ effect of luxury goods was all too clear (ibid., 76). Chinoiserie dulled consciences in the 18th century as opium did a century later. Porcelain is not the ‘doux-commerce’ (soft trade)189 the American economist Albert O. Hirschman (1915–2012) claims it to be. It is an analogue for vanity, greed, power and a globalized culture.190 Facing such truths is hard for all parties in protracted sociocultural, diplomatic disputes. We turn next to Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and his philosophical inspiration, John Locke (1632–1704). Pope is one of the ‘Augustan’ authors; taking their name from the first Hanoverian King, George I’s (1660–1727; r. 1714–27) rather flouncy and imperious self-designation, ‘Augustus redivivus’. ‘Augustan’ poetry dresses politics, satire, and philosophy in deceptively drab garb. Pope was a frail, sickly, diminutive figure. He was also a prolific, silver-lipped author. Numerous notes, poems, essays, translations and treatises – including his famous Essay on Man (1734) – pour from him. He looks at humanity and society with a cool, calculating eye. As a Catholic, he was an outsider, who forged lasting friendships with leaders of the British establishment. As Maynard Mack says, in Pope ‘attitudes generated by deism, eighteenth-century sociality, and Roman Catholicism come together’ (1982: I. 235).191 He snubs hegemonic Newtonian physics (Payne 2008: 18, n. 11). The influential politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), was dedicatee, and a major source of inspiration for, the Essay on Man. Pope was astute politically.192 When Tory friends (like Bolingbroke)193 fell from grace in the aftermath of Queen Anne’s (1665–1714) death, Pope’s star still rose. The grotto he had built at his Thames-side house at Twickenham bears ample

187 Berkeley was supported by works like The Naked and Undisguis’d Truth (anon: 1721) and the vicious A New-Year-Gift for the Directors (1721), which proposed Directors of deceitful and speculative ‘bubble’ companies be decapitated and skinned! 188 Cf. also, on Berkeley, Clark, S. R. L. (2005), ‘Berkeley on Religion’, in K. Winkler (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Berkeley, 369–404 (esp. 390f.). 189 Despite later European production, the growth and size of the Chinese porcelain trade is staggering. In 1558, a Portuguese ship carried 1,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain to Europe. By 1638, one Dutch ship carried 60,000 pieces, the entire Dutch fleet 900,000 pieces. Orders for two British ships (the Essex and the Townsend) in 1717 ran to 305,000 pieces, with four British ships carrying 800,000 pieces in 1721. By the end of the century, as a symptom of changing tastes, European massproduction, and the end of ‘Sinophilia’ and emergence of ‘Sinophobia’, the import of Chinese porcelain in Europe had declined. 190 Cf. Feuerwerker, A. (1990), ‘Chinese Economic History in Comparative Perspective’, in P. Ropp (ed.), Heritage of China, 224–41. 191 Cf. also, Mack, M. (1985), Alexander Pope: A Life. On the formation and reception of Pope’s Essay on Man, Rogers, P. (2004), The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia, 118f. 192 Cf. Rogers, P. (2010), A Political Biography of Alexander Pope; Jones, E. (2013), Friendship and Allegiance in EighteenthCentury Literature. 193 On Bolingbroke, p. 168, 171, 218.

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testimony to his wealth, standing and imagination.194 He belongs unquestionably to the crossChannel community of well-connected philosophes. He shines brightly in their midst. Pope’s life proves the harsh principle, ‘The life of a writer . . . (is) warfare on earth’ (Byron 1842: 800).195 Anonymity impossible; criticism inevitable.196 Both friendship and influence are pricey. Continental opinion was divided. Voltaire’s view of Pope is unclear. He is initially positive: ‘The Essay on Man appears to me to be the most beautiful didactic poem, the most useful, the most sublime that has ever been composed in any language’ ([1733] 2003: 147).197 His satirical novella Candide (1759) is scathing about Pope’s moral optimism: ‘Whatever IS, is RIGHT’ (Bk. I. 292.). In contrast, though Rousseau doubted Pope’s innate theism,198 he said of the Essay on Man, ‘[It] softens my ills and brings me patience’ (q. Solomon, 108f.). Kant was more consistent in adulation.199 Opinions have remained divided. Pope’s equanimity is admirable, his humanist self-confidence palpable. He lives his celebrated couplet: ‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/ The proper study of Mankind is Man’ (II. I). A new British anthropology challenges the megalith of Miltonian theism. The juggernaut of Enlightenment philosophy chugs down Chancery Lane. Pope is significant here in three areas. First, there is a primitive, existential quality to his writing and in the way his work is received. Emotions are stirred. Behind Bolingbroke is Shaftesbury’s latertermed ‘moral sense theory’,200 publicized in his The Moralists (1709). Trackable to Mencius’s concept of ‘sense’, Shaftesbury’s theory (through Bolingbroke) is the inspiration for the first part of Pope’s Essay on Man. For, in Shaftesbury, we find an oriental, Spinozist, natural theology, in which a benevolent, omniscient deity orders life with harmony, balance and good taste. Human identity is recovered in its relation to this benevolent cosmic power.201 Indebted to Shaftesbury, Pope also pays parodic lip-service to Milton in a four-part Essay written (deliberately in heroic couplets) to ‘vindicate the ways of God to man’ (I. 16). In his Moral Epistles (1731–5), Pope creates a plausible, rational, proto-existential, account of the human condition. Mark Pattison (1813–84),

He apparently mused (like a Romantic) over the grotto: ‘Were it to have nymphs as well – it would be complete in everything!’ Pope is an influential pre-Romantic. Cf. On his villa, garden and grotto, and the myths and issues around them, Rousseau, G. S. and P. Rogers, eds (1988), The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays, 137f. 195 For a recent study of Pope in ‘three modes’ of discourse, Sell, R. D. (2011), Communicational Criticism, 83–150. 196 On the ‘poetical war’ over Pope, Solomon, H. M. (1993), The Rape of the Text: Reading and Misreading Pope’s Essay on Man, 7f. 197 On Voltaire’s first meeting with Pope and his shift from shock (at Pope’s disability) to respect (at his eloquence), Rosslyn, F. (1990), Alexander Pope: A Literary Life, 10. On the impact of translation and distribution of Anglophone texts (e.g. by Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Defoe, etc), Stockhorst, S. ed. (2010), Cultural Transfer Through Translation, 15f. 198 On Rousseau and Pope, Damrosch, L. (2005), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 157. 199 On Kant’s early (positive) use of Essay on Man, Cohen, A. ed. (2014), Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology, 15, n. 24. On Kant, p. 190f. 200 ‘Moral sense theory’ is a form of ‘sentimentalist’ ethical epistemology in which moral judgements arise from ‘sense’ and ‘experience’. Otherwise known as ‘ethical intuitionism’, it is an ancient view of moral judgements. Mencius is followed (and then rejected) by Xunzi 㥰ᆀ c. 312–230 BCE), Shaftesbury by British (esp. Scottish) philosophers Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid (1710–96; below p. 165, n. 200, 214f., 247, 292, n. 138, 331, n. 324), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), and contemporary authors like Michael Slote (b. 1941), Simon Blackburn (b. 1944) and Allan Gibbard (b. 1942), in whom ‘empathy’, ‘meta-ethics’ and ‘meaning’ – or ‘apt feelings’ – are (variously) central. 201 We catch snatches of Confucianism, perhaps, in Shaftesbury’s naming of earth, in The Moralists, ‘Mansion-Globe’ and ‘Man-Container’. He writes: ‘How narrow then must it appear compar’d with the capacious System of its own Sun . . . tho’ animated with a sublime Celestial Spirit’ (Pt. III, Sec. 1.373). Translation of Shaftesbury is significant. On Diderot’s 1745 French translation of An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit, Shank, J. B. (2008), The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment, 484f. 194

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the broad-church editor, said a century later Pope’s aim is, ‘to depreciate the pretensions and humble the aspirations of man’ (Pope 1871: 92) (i.e. when seduced by lust, reason, pride or science). Set between God and mortal beasts is rational sense, and what Pope calls the ‘Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d;/ Still by himself, abus’d or disabus’d’. This rational sense is necessary (as in the Analects) for a person to be, and become, a virtuous and benevolent citizen. Optimistic Confucian sociality trumps the pessimistic individuality of Cranmerian, establishment piety.202 As Pope declares: but human soul Must rise from individual to the whole. Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake, As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake. —IV. 370–3 Seen by many as the finest 18th-century British poet, Pope was lambasted by the jaundiced Headmaster of Winchester, Joseph Warton (1722–1800) for lacking ‘pure poetry’,203 more weightily by the ‘Poet Laureate’ (fr. 1813–43), Robert Southey (1774–1843), for belonging to ‘the worst age in English poetry’ (Southey 1835: II. 138);204 and, in the Romantic essayist Thomas De Quincey’s (1785–1859) damning praise, for ‘a disposition radically noble and generous, clouded and overshadowed by petty foibles’ (1863–71: XV. 137). He was also, as De Quincey perceived, ‘the most brilliant of all wits who have . . . applied themselves to the poetic treatment of human manners’ (ibid.). Pope tracks the highways of the human heart like a pioneer explorer. The Life of Pope by fellow-invalid Samuel Johnson empathizes: ‘[H]is vital functions were so much disordered that his life was a “long disease”’ (1905: III. 256).205 To the poet of ill-repute, Lord Byron (1788–1824), writing in the prolonged ‘Pope Controversy’ (1806–26):206 ‘There will be found as comfortable metaphysics, and ten times more poetry, in the Essay on Man than in the Excursion’ ([1837] 2015: 806).207 Pope is a herald of Modern anthropology. He sired countless progeny, who, like the Romantic poets and contributors to the new science of psychology, extol the mystery and majesty, the light and darkness, of the human condition.208 As in Michelangelo’s Pietà, life is sculpted here

202 Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) was Archbp. of Canterbury (fr. 1533–55). He acted as King Henry VIII’s (1491–1547; r. 1509–47) agent to establish the Church of England and was a (? the) leading theological and liturgical architect of the Anglican ethos of Pope’s day. 203 N.B. Warton’s purportedly dull, unpopular (Gosse, 1919), ‘vaguely famous’ (Saintsbury, 1911), Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope ([1756] 1782). Cf. for contemporary opinion and a new critical edition of Warton’s Essay (4th edn), Rounce, A. ed. (2004), Alexander Pope and His Critics. 204 On Southey, p. 198, 207, n. 133. 205 On Johnson’s condition, Deutsch, H. (2000), ‘The Author as Monster: The Case of Dr. Johnson’, in H. Deutsch and F. Nussbaum (eds), ‘Defects’: Engendering the Modern Body, 177–209; Lund, R. (2005), ‘Laughing at Cripples’. 206 On this controversy and its literary setting, Tasch, P. A. (1997), ‘Literary Criticism’, in G. Newman, L. Ellen Brown, et al. (eds), Britain in the Hanoverian Age, 1714–1837, 412f.; Keach, W. (2004), Arbitrary Power, 49f.; Amarasinghe, U. (1962), Dryden and Pope. 207 For an analysis of the debate and contrary view, Solomon, The Rape of the Text, 30f. 208 Though drawn to Pope’s experientialism, Romantic heavy-weights like Coleridge, Lamb and Southey were critical of his style, philosophy, theology, morality and much-discussed decadence (his relationship to women was the subject of much tittle-tattle).

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in a 360˚ perspective. Pessimistic about human behaviour, Pope denies dependence on God, and is, like Confucius, optimistic about human potential. As he proclaims: Created half to rise and half to fall; Great Lord of all things, yet prey to all, Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d; The glory, jest and riddle of the world. —Essay on Man, II. 1 Though often judged and found wanting, Pope is a prophet of paradisal progress on earth.209 Second, Pope and his circle owed much to the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704): his was as much ‘The Age of Locke’ as of the ‘Augustans’.210 Locke’s empiricist treatise An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was published in 1689.211 It is the manifesto of the erstwhile ‘Father of Modern Liberalism’. Experience is central to Locke’s thought. Contrary to Descartes’s theory of innate, or pre-existent, ideas, Locke claims sense-data (from the five senses) is the source of higher ideals, and concepts are the result of particular experiences. As a result, to Locke (and Pope) human knowledge is inevitably limited. The mind is for Locke tabula rasa. Once engaged, it is the source of continuity in human consciousness and of light through secular reasoning; independent, that is, of revelation and biblical religion. As Pope, the Deist, declared: ‘Nor think in Nature’s state they blindly trod;/ The state of Nature was the reign of God’ (III. 147–8). We hear Locke in Pope’s Essay on Man: What can we reason, but from what we know? Of man, what see we but his station here, From which to reason, or to which refer? —I. 18–20 Charged with Leibnizian rationalism and Lockean empiricism, Pope is, like Locke, a major voice in cross-Channel cultural and intellectual exchange in the early 18th century.212 Both men are thick filters on contemporary reading of the Analects and Gospels in Europe and Asia. They aid development of anthropological categories that shape/d the Modern world. Third, Pope’s attitudes towards, and reception in China are interesting.213 Though he is much less well-known in China than Milton,214 we catch glimpses of China and Confucius in Pope’s On Pope’s esteem for ‘Nature’ and his place in Britain’s growing preoccupation in the early decades of the 18th century with classical antiquity, the Palladian style and ‘Grand Tours’ to expand historical and scientific knowledge, Spadafora, D. (1990), The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain, 36f. 210 On poetry and the politics of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Connell, P. (2016), Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope. 211 On the translation of Locke by the Huguenot exile Pierre Coste (1668–1747), and the general issue of the transmission of cultural values, Delisle, J. and J. Woodsworth, eds ([1995] 2012), Translators through History, 200f. On the reception of Pope, Barnard, J. ed. ([1973] 1995), Alexander Pope: The Critical Heritage. 212 E.g. on Pope’s translation into German, Guthrie, J. (2013), ‘Eighteenth-Century German Translations of Pope’s Poetry’. 213 On Pope’s role in mediating 17th-century awareness of China to the Romantic era, Kitson, P. J. (2013), ‘Thomas Percy and the forging of Romantic China’, in Forging Romantic China, 26–44. On Pope and Temple’s sinological views, Qian, Z. (1998c), ‘China in the English Literature of the Eighteenth Century’, in Hsia (ed.), Vision of China, 125f. 214 On Pope (esp. his ethics) from a Chinese perspective, Ma, X. (2013), 㫢᷿䂙ⅼ⹄ウ俜ᕖ㪇 [On Alexander Pope’s poetry]. 209

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works. All underline his deistic sympathy and affinity with the Scriblerian club.215 From this milieu – and persistent public obloquy – emerged Pope’s satirical poem Dunciad. In an unpopular, Aeneidtype parody, the unlikely ‘hero’ is Lewis Theobald (1688–1744), a contemporary author and editor of Shakespeare’s works.216 Other contemporary figures also appear thinly veiled.217 The work relates the coronation and rule of Theobald/Tibbald, King of Dunces, and lauds the bland service of goddess ‘Dulness’ and her imbecilic minions (who are equally devoid of taste and talent!). The work is an instance of translatio stultitia (the converse of translatio studii). In Dunciad, ‘enlightenment’ moves westwards, leaving in its wake darkness. Pope transfigures grief at Western decay into veneration for the Orient. The East again has a ‘rising sun’. And, it is again the ill-fated Elkanah Settle who tells Theobald: Far eastward cast thine eye, from whence the Sun An orient Science their bright course begun: One god-like Monarch all that pride confounds, He, whose long wall the wand’ring Tartar bounds; Heav’ns! what a pile! whole ages perish there, And one bright blaze turns Learning into air. —[1728–43] 1770: III, Bk. III. 73–78218 In a footnote, Pope indicates the reference is to Emperor ‘Chi Ho-am-ti’, or 〖࿻ⲷ Qin Shi Huang (259–210 BCE, 1st Emperor of the Qin dynasty), who conceived the ‘Great Wall’, centralized government, standardized writing, and, scandalously to Pope and the Scriblerian fraternity, engaged in a violent book-burning and purge of the intelligentsia.219 It seems Pope owed much of his knowledge of, and perspective on, China and Confucianism to Sir William Temple.220 In contrast to corrupt, vulnerable, British and European culture, China is the locus of reason, civility, and a durable culture and system of government – hence, the wistful words in Pope’s Moral Essays ‘. . . tho’ China fall’ ([1731–5] 1770: III. II. 268). Similarly, in his Chaucerian poem The Temple of Fame (1715), on the temple’s eastern side we discover: ‘Superior and alone, Confucius stood,/ Who taught that useful science – to be good’ (1835–9: I. 158, l. 107–8). But beauty, purity and morality are, for Pope, frighteningly fragile. He likens them to porcelain in The Rape of the Lock (1714): Whether the Nymph shall break Diana’s Law, Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw,

The Scriblerian club (in honour of the imaginary ‘Martinus Scriblerus’) existed from 1714 to c. 1745. It produced satirical works on (what it deemed) poor poetry and cultural decay. Members included Swift (above p. 109, 116, 155, 165), Bolingbroke, Gay, Scottish physician and author John Arbuthnot (1667–1735), the literary patron and 1st Earl of Oxford, Robert Harley (1661–1724), and the Anglo-Irish clerical poet Thomas Parnell (1679–1718). 216 ‘Colley Cubber’ has this role in the 1742 version. 217 The work was published anon. in various forms between 1729 and 1743. Such was the outcry after the first edition, Pope feared for his life: if he went outside, it was with his Great Dane dog and two loaded pistols! 218 On Settle, p. 99f., 160, n. 160. 219 For use of Pope’s image by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), Philmus, R. M. (2005), Visions and Revisions, 353, n. 6. 220 On Temple, p. 108f., 161, 168. 215

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Or stain her honour or her new Brocade, . . . Haste then ye Spirits! to your Charge repair; —Canto II. 105–9 Here, as in the Restoration playwright William Wycherley’s (c. 1641–1716) The Country Wife, porcelain and its fracture acquire sexual overtones. As Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732–58) warns: ‘Glass, china, and reputation, are easily cracked and never well mended.’221 Pope is an iconic literary figure. Through his writings he mediated Confucian values to nascent British and European anthropology. He admires the rational, social, morally more optimistic, character of Confucian anthropology and ethics; but he knows human frailty and vulnerability firsthand. As a sensitive pre-Romantic, he still conditions the way the Analects and Gospels are read today. The Essay on Man is an opaque filter for modern hermeneutics. Hume, Adam Smith and New Questions about China Five years after Pope’s Essay on Man first appeared, the empiricist philosopher, magisterial historian of England, and pioneering ‘positivist’ of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume, published anonymously A Treatise on Human Nature (1739). He tells us the work ‘fell dead-born from the press’ (1777: 7f.), so he re-cast it into An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). The discussion of ‘personal identity’ is omitted. However, as noted already, like Berkeley and Locke, Hume positions empirical anthropology, and its cousin epistemology, at its heart. Cartesian rationalism, and the Spinozist cosmology of late 17th- and early 18th-century Sinophilism,222 are displaced by Hume’s new Baconian naturalism. Psychology, will, emotion and habit – rather than innate ideas, inductive reason, logic and causation (let alone oriental cultural shibboleths) – are now the root of truth, knowledge and understanding in society. Ground-work is laid here for Romantic appeals to the historical, human condition as the place of art, passion, faith and, crucially, self-expression.223 As in Shaftesbury, Hume’s Essay Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) – which he says in My Own Life (1777) is ‘of all my writings, historical, philosophical, or literary, incomparably the best’ (16) – grounds moral judgements in ‘sense’ and ‘feeling’. The seeds of sinophobia are subtly watered here. As we will see shortly, if Confucius praised the formative, cultural and ethical power of beauty and poetry, classical Confucian anthropology exalted character, will and ritual propriety (this and not Humean experientialism or Romantic individualism).224 Confucius could not answer every Western need. That said, after Hume, moral, theological, cultural and perspectives on humanity reflect an Enlightenment proclivity for human ‘sense’ and secular ‘reason’, in which there is little, if any, room for a transcendent, miracle-working God, let alone an infallible Bible and an authoritarian Church.225

Cf. Richard Saunders’s (aka Benjamin Franklin [1706–90]), Poor Richard’s Almanack, was published in Philadelphia between 1732 and 1758. On Franklin, p. 156, 220, n. 201 & 202. 222 Cf. On Descartes, above p. 106, 140f., 222. 223 Though Hume’s influence is evident in Kant, utilitarianism, logical positivism, and later philosophies of science and language, he resists defining ‘self ’ as more than an agglomeration of multiple sensory stimuli. 224 N.B. pace Hall and Ames (above p. 21), the dangers of projecting modern categories back on to Confucian anthropology are acute here. 225 Prior to Darwin (p. 117, n. 147), Hume’s anti-teleological approach to knowledge and causality was the clearest counter to traditional arguments for God’s existence ‘from design’. 221

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Enlightenment empiricism, scholastic skepticism, and atheistic Romanticism, are not Hume’s brainchild, but they are nursed and nurtured by him. In decades following, humanity is ‘born again’ by history, art, intellect, radical politics and a vast, experiential epistemology. Life ‘red in tooth and claw’ claims a determinative place in the way humanity understands its true nature and vocation. The history of European and American ‘reception’ of Hume is important for us.226 The global, political dimension to our narrative emerges clearly here. Translation of Hume’s Enquiry (and other works) into multiple European languages in the mid-18th and early 19th centuries confirms the character and impact of his ‘counter-revolutionary’ ideas.227 Hume is not only the voice of empirical enquiry, he is a prophet of modern democracy.228 His tracts ‘That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science’ (1742) and ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ (publ. in Political Discourse in 1752), resonated with leading radicals and progressive Whigs, as their influence on Federalist Paper, No. 10 (23 November 1787) by fourth US President, James Madison (1751–1836; Pres. 1809–17), would seem to confirm.229 Likewise, the trans-Atlantic political radical Thomas Paine (1736/7–1809), the pamphleteer Richard Price (1723–91), the acute journalist-philosopher William Godwin (1756– 1836), the gifted advocate for women’s rights Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), and Scottish Whig jurist James Mackintosh (1765–1832), are all admirers of his work. Hume helped to change his world – and changes ours still today. Such is the infectious power of strong ideas and acute argument. We might think Hume had little interest in China, his work little known there. This is not the case. The few, fragmentary references to China in Scottish Enlightenment literature are important: culture, ethics, politics, economics and philosophy are all adduced. Hume and his younger Scottish contemporary, Adam Smith, disagree on China’s character, economic profile and its prospects. In Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) its culture and economy are criticized for their ‘stationary state’. To Smith a vast, low-paid, population could – and should – outstrip the West economically. But, non-economic ‘laws and institutions’ hold China back from her ‘full complement of riches’ (q. Rostow 1990: 207). Hume, in contrast, respects the ‘one vast empire’ with its rational, deistic ethic (Dodds 2018: 47f.). He has none of the sinophobia, or suspicion of Confucius, we find in the late 18th and 19th centuries.230 However, in his essay ‘The Rise and Progress of Arts and Sciences’, published in 1742 – the same year Messiah was first performed, Briand lectured on porcelain, the ‘Cambuslang Revival’ erupted and Catholic missionaries were expelled from Peking – he admits China under-achieves: ‘In China, there seems to be a considerable stock of politeness and science, which, in the course of so

N.B. Jones, P. ed. (2005), The Reception of David Hume In Europe, which has essays on Italy, Russia and Sweden. Cf. also, on his past and present reception, Burton, J. H. (1849), Letters from Eminent Persons addressed to David Hume; Fiesel, J. ed. (1999–2003), Early Responses to Hume; Gawlick, G. and L. Kriemendahl (1987), Hume in der deutschen Aufklärung. Umrisse einer Rezensionsgeschichte; Hill, R. (1978), Fifty Years of Hume Scholarship; Ikeda, S. (1986), David Hume and Eighteenth-Century British Thought; Jones, P. (1975), Philosophy and the Novel, ad loc. 227 On this terminology and theme, Bongie, L. L. ([1965] 2000), David Hume, Prophet of the Counter-Revolution; Berlin, I. (1979), ‘Hume and the Sources of German Anti-rationalism’, in H. Hardy (ed.), Against the Current, 162–87. 228 Cf. Susato, R. (2016), ‘Hume as an Ami de la Liberté’; Livingston, D. W. (1990), ‘Hume’s Historical Conception of Liberty’, in N. Capaldi and D. W. Livingston (eds), Liberty in Hume’s History of England, 105–53. 229 On Hume, Madison and the making of America, Spencer, M. G. (2005), David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America; Adair, D. (1957), ‘“That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science”’; Conniff, J. (1980), ‘The Enlightenment and American Political Thought’; Draper, T. (1982), ‘Hume and Madison: The Secrets of Federalist Paper No. 10’; Morgan, E. S. (1986), ‘Safety in Numbers: Madison, Hume, and the Tenth Federalist’. 230 Cf. on this, Chapter 5 passim. 226

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many centuries, might naturally be expected to ripen into something more perfect and finished, than what has arisen from them’ (q. Schabas and Wennerlind 2008: 315). Unlike Smith, he reckons distance, trade monopolies, and Western import tariffs, conspire to eviscerate China’s market progress. Here is a classic example of personality making perspective: ‘A Chinese works for threehalfpence a day, and is very industrious. Were he as near us as France or Spain, every thing we use would be Chinese, till money and prices came to a level . . . as is proportioned to the number of people, industry and commodities of both countries’ (ibid.).231 But, China is not without hope. Like Bolingbroke, Hume celebrates China’s freedom from institutional, religious superstition. Natureworship is also, he says, found here in its purest form (1826: III, 10).232 He also admires China’s cultural history.233 Confucian cultural anthropology and practical, social morality, are deemed healthy soil. As Chinese scholars and Sinologists have noted, if Hume does not embrace Confucius’s anthropo-cosmic ontology, he does express an (empiricist) realism with respect to ‘humanity’ (or ‘sympathy’), causality and human moral responsibility.234 In short, Hume’s views are close to Johnson’s ‘Life of Confucius’ (in his three-part ‘Essay on Du Halde’s Description of China’ [1742])235 and Walpole’s Letters from Xo-Ho, a Chinese Philosopher at London (1757).236 Far closer to them than the Irish novelist Oliver Goldsmith’s (1728–74) harsh caricature of a ‘Chinaman’ in The Citizen of the World, or Letters from a Chinese Philosopher (1762) – that parodies Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721) and praises the Marquis D’Argens’s (1704–71) atheistic Lettres Chinoises (1739–40)237 – or the satirical philosopher, historian and influential, social commentator, Thomas Carlyle’s (1795–1881) commendation of China’s open civil service exam (as a model for Britain) in his On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History (1841).238 We can trace modern debate about ‘Orientalism’ to Hume and his peers. Opinion was, and is, divided about its character, threat, potential and social benefit. Occidental principles and prejudice find inspiration here; so, too, different personalities and deception. As one anonymous contemporary responded to Du Halde’s Smith did not entirely disagree: ‘The cotton and other commodities from China would undersell any made by us, were it not for the long carriage and other taxes that are laid upon them’ (ibid.). 232 N.B. Essay X is entitled, ‘Superstition and Enthusiasm’. 233 N.B. Hume’s Confucianesque denial of ‘contract’ in social and political bonds, and view of the state as an organic expression of familial, local ties (1738–40: 3.2.2). 234 For comparative analysis of Humean morality Cheng, C-y. (1991), New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy, 291f. On Confucius and Hume’s view of ‘secret and unknown causes’, Ing, M. D. K. (2012), The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism, 74f.; Slingerland, E. (1996), ‘The Conception of Ming ભ in Early Confucian Thought’; Liu, X. (2003), Mencius, Hume and the Foundation of Ethics, and the critical review by E. L. Hutton, in Hume Studies 30, no. 1 (2004): 201–3. On the absence in Confucius of the ‘whole complex of [Humean] notions centering around “choice” and “responsibility”’ (Fingarette 1972: 18); also, Kupperman, J. J. (1989), ‘Confucius, Mencius, Hume and Kant on Reason and Choice’, in S. Biedermann and B. A. Scharfstein (eds), Rationality in Question, 119–140 (esp. 119). 235 Johnson is plausibly proposed as the anon. translator of Du Halde’s two-volume work. 236 N.B. Goldsmith named his Chinese correspondent from Walpole’s work. Cf. also on this, Conant, M. P. (1908), The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century, ad loc. 237 This is a good case-study in cross-Channel and inter-continental impacts. On French influence in his Letters, Griffin, M. (2013), Enlightenment in Ruins; Barbier, C. P. (1951), ‘Goldsmith en France au XVIIIme Siècle’; Brooks, C. (1993), ‘Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World: Knowledge and the Imposture of “Orientalism”’; Brown, J. E. (1925), ‘Goldsmith’s Indebtedness to Voltaire and Justus van Effen’; Carew, R. S. (1921–2), ‘A French influence on Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World’; Dai, D. W-Y. (1979), ‘A Comparative Study of D’Argens’ Lettres Chinoises and Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World’; Sells, A. L. (1924), Les Sources Françaises de Goldsmith. Cf. also, Smith, H. J. (1926), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World; Tao, Z. (2009), Drawing the Dragon, ad loc.; —(1996), ‘Citizen of Whose World? Goldsmith’s Orientalism’; Woods, S. H., Jr. (1986), ‘Images of the Orient: Goldsmith and the Philosophes’. 238 Carlyle’s remark prompted introduction of civil service examinations in Britain in 1855. 231

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Description of China: ‘I see no cause to esteem the Chinese government . . . It is Britain only. I accept no other Country on earth, that is happy by Constitution’ (1740: 108). Patriotism is here a hermeneutic principle.239 We read the Analects and Gospels on the far side of Hume and his opinionated peers. In some, pride and patriotism were as impermeable as Chinese, in others, China could, as yet, do no wrong. Western perception of humanity and society in the late 17th century and first half of the 18th century is profoundly impacted by cross-cultural interaction with China. This is as true in Britain as Europe. Exalted ideas and everyday artefacts acquire an oriental wash. Not all welcomed Chinese philosophy and cultural influence: few remained unaffected. Like ‘blue and white’ china, Chinese culture was processed, commoditized and domesticated. We ‘read backwards carefully’ when we see the Analects and Gospels indelibly scratched by this.

HUMAN IDENTITY, LIFE AND SOCIETY IN THE ANALECTS AND GOSPELS For the remainder of this chapter we revert to the Analects and Gospels. We read sensitized by the preceding. Many at the time (like Goldsmith) equated Christianity and Confucianism. Confucius was ‘an amalgam of the qualities of the good man in the eighteenth century: the detachment and wit of the Spectator, the personal devoutness and purity of William Law, the human compassion and understanding of Parson Adams’ (Appleton 1951: 124).240 Fired by burgeoning passion for chinoiserie, prior to c. 1750 comparisons were largely positive. As Appleton notes, only later ‘disparities between the myth and the actuality became apparent’, which led to ‘downright hostility’ (ibid.). Not all followed Tindal in claiming ‘the plain and simple maxims of the former [Confucius], will help to illustrate the more obscure ones of the latter [Jesus Christ]’, but expanding horizons bred and fed Western minds open to learn. Before we consider humanity and society in the Analects, a further word on porcelain, this chapter’s ‘cultural archetype’. We have noted already the social and commercial profile porcelain had in 17th and 18th-century Britain and Europe. It would become a potent social hermeneutic: the life, lifestyle and character of women particularly were expounded (directly and indirectly) through china; as Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace notes, ‘china made it possible for people to talk about women and their qualities in a particular way’ (1996: 154).241 The ‘China closet’ was a social and literary reality. John Gay’s poem, ‘To a Lady on Her Passion for Old China’ (1725) draws (mostly negative) comparison between the fragile, decorative – and, it seems, essentially useless – Cf. on chauvinist and patriotic hermeneutics, p. 231. William Law (1686–1761) was a pious, controversial Anglican author. He belonged to the second generation of Nonjurors, who rejected the ‘oath of allegiance’ (above p. 107). Author of the best-selling A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), Law was revered as an exemplar of integrity and sanctity by leaders of the 18th-century ‘Evangelical Revival’, and as an inspiring ‘independent’ by progressives like Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon. ‘Parson Adams’, the much-loved clerical hero in Henry Fielding’s novel Joseph Andrews (1742) is modelled on Law. Fielding described the work as a ‘comic epic poem in prose’. It was his first full-length novel and one of the first of the new literary genre ‘novel’ in English. Life and literature intertwine here, as often, in our story. On novels in Sino-Western cultural and intellectual exchange, p. 196, 201, 205f., 258f., 266. 241 Cf. also, Sloboda, S. (2009), ‘Porcelain bodies: gender, acquisitiveness, and taste in eighteenth-century England’, in J. Potvin and A. Myzelev (eds), ‘Material Cultures, 1740–1920’, 19–36; —(2014), Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth-Century. 239 240

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character of china and the life and behaviour of women; albeit, porcelain also evokes physical and moral perfection and marital responsibility: China’s the passion of her soul A cup, a plate, a dish, a bowl Can kindle wishes in her breast, Inflame with joy, or break her rest. —1725: 1–2 William Hogarth’s (1697–1764) satirical etching ‘Taste for the High Life’ (1746) profiles the female china-collector. Porcelain becomes an analogue of taste and wealth, comportment and morality. To Goldsmith, porcelain’s true value lies in its combination of strength, utility and beauty. Wedgwood redeemed slaves and china through his abolitionist medallion. His craft gives form, as we saw above, to the Confucian (and biblical) truth: ‘Of all that Heaven has produced . . . the greatest is man’ (Kelen: 93). The history, mystery, beauty, marketing, and social impact of porcelain and its manufacture, restate the question at the start of this chapter, ‘What is man?’ (Ps. 8.1). As a global cultural artefact, porcelain now creates hermeneutic parity and clarity in the way the Analects and Gospels are read in China and the West today. We consider morality in Chapter 5: for now, we ‘read backwards carefully’ for humanity and society in the Analects and Gospels, and look for key points of comparison and contrast in this episodic cross-cultural, historical and philosophical survey. The Analects We begin with the Analects. As in the Gospels, the evidence is fragmentary, the task tricky. Early Confucianism is orientated towards the moral and communal more than the individual or ontological: but character and behaviour interest Confucius. ‘Human nature’, as currently understood, is only occasionally addressed by him. Analects 5.13 records: ‘[O]ne does not get to hear the Master expounding upon the subjects of human nature [ᙗ xing] or the Way of Heaven.’ We must beware of projecting modern, scientific, anthropological categories on ancient literature and traditions, let alone on their silence or ambiguity. We are in an ‘other’, ancient, pre-Socratic world. Later Western categories were not known and are not applicable. However, the Confucian Classics were of interest to late 17th- and early 18th-century Britain and Europe precisely because they do speak of humanity and society. At a time of profound social and political upheaval, they offered an attractive, alternative perspective. History also teaches caution. Like its Western reception, the Confucian material is diffuse and pluriform. ‘Which Confucius, and which Confucianism?’ are fair counter-questions to ‘What is man?’242 Detailed study of the Analects at this time is as rare as Chinese knowledge of the Bible. Most Western interpretation and application of Confucian ideas is based on second-hand evidence or general impression. Sinology and lexicography, like comparative philosophy and biblical criticism, are in their infancy. They only become part of our story later (p. 289f.). Even the little known of the Analects’ view of human life, identity, character and behaviour, was as novel and intriguing in the 17th and 18th centuries as it is today. Mystique captivates. Cf. above p. 201f. Hume, for his part, is particularly indebted to Mencius.

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To focus discussion, we look at key terms the Analects use for humans, mindful that this theme continues in Chapter 5.243 The context, as seen in Chapter 3 and previously here, is the cosmos and the Will of Heaven. The content of Confucian anthropology is ultimately reflective of the will and purpose of ‘higher powers’ (in ‘heaven’ and on ‘earth’), as much as of the psyche, decisions, or predisposition of people. Metaphysical teleology (an enduring and ultimate ‘end’ to life) and observational psychology (a composite account of the individual) are both involved. Confucianism offered a way to resolve the medieval impasse between the (dominant) rationalism of Aristotelian metaphysics – in which human nature was a God-determined ‘idea’ or ‘form’ to be pursued – and the (emergent) existentialism of the humanist Renaissance and Protestant Reformation, that accorded individuals freedom to be, do, and become ‘human’. It stimulated and stirred philosophical and theological debate: Confucian answers frequently challenging orthodox Christian assumptions. Like Chinese porcelain, European values and achievements were studied, evaluated, manufactured and smashed. First, as we have glimpsed already, humanity is interpreted through xing ᙗ,244 and its correlates of qing ᛵ and haowu ྭᜑ. The terms apply to humanity, its natural affections and pre-dispositions. The relationship between xing and qing is complex. Franklin Perkins warns of imposing modern, Western ideas of human potentiality, or actuality, on more fluid Confucian categories (2014: 130). Xing is only found twice in Analects; in 5.3, as we have seen, and in 17.2: ‘By nature (xing) people are similar.’ This infrequency must not mislead. Xing is central to the Analects. Because humans share xing everyone is teachable and, thus, also accountable. Further, as Donald Munro argues: ‘The doctrine of the natural (biological) equality gave the Confucians the strongest possible argument to support the contention that merit should be the sole criterion in awarding political and economic privileges’ (1969: 14). Early-Modern naturalism agreed. Humanity is not defined in being an aristocrat, animal, spirit, or inanimate object, nor even by being created ‘in God’s image’ (imago Dei), but by simply being born and behaving in certain ways.245 Contrary to Mencius246 and Xunzi – but, in keeping with the pre-Song philosopher Gaozi ੺ᆀ (c. 420–350 BCE), the Han scholars Dong Zhongshu 㪓Ԣ㡂 (179–104 BCE) and Wang Chong ⦻‫( ݵ‬27–c. 100 CE), and Tang poet and politician Han Yu 七᜸ (768–824 CE) – the Analects speak of humanity’s natural attributes and moral potential, which may or may not be realized. Han Yu writes: ‘Human nature is born along with birth . . . There are five things which distinguish it as human nature: benevolence, rites, trust, justice and wisdom.’247 To be clear, this is not Aristotle’s ‘four causes’ of human metaphysics (matter, form, effect and end), but it is close to the Analects, where humanity is defined (and refined) by activity. Xing is a natural gift to be developed, not a legal, or social, right to claim. There is work (of every kind) to be done for a person to be fully human. Truth and identity are revealed here once again by ‘manufacture’.

N.B. for an older study, Morton, W. S. (1971), ‘The Confucian Concept of Man’. Xing is also related to, and derived from sheng ⭏ (Lit. live, grow, give birth, generate). 245 Cf. Zhang, Key Concepts, 367f., where he shows Mencius defines the ‘innate’ as ‘human’ and ‘immoral’, and as (more) ‘animal’ (e.g. Mencius 4, 6, 7). 246 To Mencius xingshan ᙗழ (Lit. human nature) is good. On xing as a central, but complex, concept in Mencius, Perkins, Heaven and Earth, 127f. 247 Cf. Sibu Beiyao: Collected Works of Mr Chang Li, 11.2, Original Nature, 131a-b (q. Zhang [1989] 2002: 369). On xing in the Analects, Chan, S. (2012), ‘Polishing the Jade: xing (Human Nature) and Moral Cultivation in the Analects’. 243 244

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As we have seen, Confucius’s vision of societal transformation hinged on gentleman-bureaucrats, the junzi. In this hope, we see his dynamic, optimistic view of human potential. Myth and tradition are his practical inspiration, not obtuse philosophy or modern psychology. The idealized figures Yao, Shun, and Duke Zhou determine his view of the junzi, and thence his hopes for humanity and society. Ren ӱ (Lit. benevolence, humaneness) is central to this. In its 105 appearances in the Analects, ren has a broad, practical application. Cosmic tian finds its earthly counterpart in ren. As we will see in Chapter 5, ren abuts other virtues. Li ⿞ (ritual propriety) and qi ≓ (life force)248 express and nurture it. Humanity is fulfilled in and through ren, which reflects the Will of Heaven and is embodied by the junzi. Through ren, the ideal forms of human life, relationship, ritual, and virtue are expressed. As Confucius replied to Fan Chi’s request to explain ren in Analects 13.19: ‘When occupying your place, remain reverent; when performing public duties, be respectful; and when dealing with others be dutiful.’ Ren is a personal, social quality. It is also an inward disposition. As Analects 13.19 teaches (and 12.1 confirms): ‘The key to achieving Goodness (ren) lies within yourself.’ Or, as Confucius chides his gifted follower Yan Hui: ‘How could it come from others?’ As we might expect, Confucius’s view of ‘humanity’ is balanced: it comes through nature and nurture; it is corroded by indiscipline and destroyed by death.249 Ren is also a relational quality. As Confucius explains to Zigong: ‘Desiring to take his stand, one who is Good (ren) helps others to take their stand; wanting to realize himself, he helps other to realize themselves. Being able to take what is near at hand as an analogy could perhaps be called the method of Goodness (ren)’ (A. 6.30). Ren is found in action, not by abstraction. This is the thrust of the ‘inverted’ Confucian ‘Golden Rule’, ‘Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire’ (A. 12.2).250 Humanity is both discovered and recovered through relationship, ritual and morality. Abstract anthropology is unimaginable here. This type of phronesis (practical wisdom) resonated with classic Anglican spirituality, where – as in godly divines like George Herbert (1593–1633) and Jeremy Taylor (1613–67)251 – personal fulfilment, God-given peace and inner stillness, are found in sacrificial service not detached, mystical, Buddhistic contemplation. We will return to ren in Chapter 5. Four other terms are used of humans. First, xin ᗳ (Lit. heart, mind, disposition, or feeling).252 Central to Confucius’s view of humanity is his confidence in the mind’s ability to choose. In the Confucian Classics, it is xin that thinks, learns, considers, decides and senses. Indeed, everyone has an ‘evaluating mind’; that is, to Munro, ‘a capacity for making the

248 N.B. qi ≓ is rare in the Analects, though prominent in Mencius and later Confucian writers (Zhang [1989] 2002: 49f.). In A. 16.7, we find a unique connection between qi and psycho-physiological categories: ‘The gentleman guards against three things: when he is young, and his blood and vital essence (qi) are still unstable, he guards against the temptation of female beauty; when he reaches his prime, and his blood and vital essence (qi) have become unyielding, he guards against being contentious; when he reaches old age, and his blood and vital essence (qi) have begun to decline, he guards against being acquisitive.’ 249 On the forms of behaviour Confucius sees frustrating human development, p. 27, 28f, 249f., 336. 250 N.B. Nivison’s restatement of the Confucian ‘Golden Rule’: ‘My behaviour or attitude affecting another person should in some sense be the kind of thing that I would find acceptable if I were the person affected’ (‘Golden Rule Arguments in Chinese Moral Philosophy’ [1996b: 59]). Cf. also on the Confucian ‘Golden Rule’, p. 8, 248, 252, 254f. 251 N.B. the influential devotional writings of Herbert and the Anglo-Irish Non-Juror Bishop Jeremy Taylor (p. 118), the socalled ‘Shakespeare of Divines’. Both reflect the practical spirituality characteristic of the English national church. On this ethos, Moorman, J. R. H. (1983), The Anglican Spiritual Tradition; Stranks, C. J. (1961), Anglican Devotion. 252 The connection between xing (nature) and xin (mind) is debated. Some scholars find in xing ᙗ the radicals for mind xin ᗳ and birth sheng ⭏, suggesting nature involves the birth, or growth, of the mind.

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discriminations in question’ (ibid., 12, 74). Similarly, all engage in basic, human-animal functions (eating, drinking, sleeping, sex, et al). Differences arise from character, choice, ability and opportunity. Seventeenth- and early 18th-century rationalists and Deists were happy to read this. In the Analects, the mind guides a person to perceive the ‘propriety or impropriety of an object, act, position, or event’ (ibid.). In contrast to a Platonic idealization of rationality in the cosmos (the human mind ‘mirrors’), and later Kantian view of ‘mind’ (as an instrument of ‘pure reason’), xin is a composite faculty that includes all of humanity’s intellectual, moral, sensory and spiritual acts and aspirations.253 To Confucius, though the mind can be trained, it can also be dull, deceived and distracted. Thought, will and judgement can guide and mislead.254 Education, training and discipline are needed for thought to be wise, focused, structured, balanced and eagerly pursued. In Analects 7.8, Confucius is against ‘a mind that is not already striving to understand’. ‘I will not open the door’, he says.255 He is equally clear in Analects 15.31, protracted thought is less useful than active learning.256 So, in Analects 2.15 balance is again commended: ‘If you learn without thinking about what you have learned, you will be lost. If you think without learning, however, you will fall into danger.’ In contrast to the power of xin in Mencius,257 the Analects present xin as a largely passive, pedagogical tool. Its primary work is to discern the Will of Heaven and to decide to submit to it. Wisdom is found in minds conformed to the Will of Heaven. Here lies clarity, morality, peace and a quiet conscience.258 As Confucius tells Zilu: ‘This is wisdom: to recognize what you know as what you know, and to recognize what you do not know as what you do not know’ (A. 2.17).259 We are far from Cartesian confidence. Humility is a mark of Confucian pedagogy. Wisdom is gained by the humble and teachable. Western readers who were (or are) offended, or omit this, distort the Analects. Second, as glimpsed above, allied to xing (human nature) are qing (ᛵ) and haowu (ྭᜑ): together they denote the full range of human affections. Basic instincts and the emotions – subsequently defined as qi qing гᛵ (Lit. seven emotions;260 viz. joy, anger, sorrow, fear, love, hatred and longing) – are encompassed in qing.261 Likes, dislikes, taste and preference are included in On the difference between xin and primitive ideas of ‘soul’, ‘body’ and ‘spirit, Munro, 50. As Slingerland comments on si ᙍ (Lit. thinking): ‘This term might also be rendered as “concentration” and refers to focusing one’s attention on a subject or the attempt to process or reflect upon information that one has learned’ (242). 255 Cf. A. 7.8: ‘I will not open the door for a mind that is not already striving to understand, nor will I provide words to a tongue that is already struggling to speak. If I hold up one corner of the problem, and the student cannot come back to me with the other three, I will not try to instruct him again.’ 256 Cf. A. 15.31: ‘I once engaged in thought for an entire day without eating and an entire night without sleeping, but it did no good. It would have been better for me to have spent the time in learning.’ 257 Cf. Zhang, Key Concepts, 393, for a discussion of Mencius’s elaborated view of the ‘mind’ as ‘the lodging of wisdom’ (Mencius 2.5) and ‘in the place of the prince’ (Mencius 2.1). Cf. also, Mencius 2.8, 11. 258 On wisdom and conscience, below p. 178, 181. On the leading role of ‘mind, ‘inner virtue’, and ‘conscience’, in Guanzi and Xunzi, Zhang, 394f. 259 On wisdom, zhi Ც, as ‘cognitive understanding of the Way’ and ‘an ability to accurately perceive situations and judge the character of others’ (Slingerland, 243); also, A. 5.7, 6.22, 23, 14.14, 28, 15.8, 33. 260 On the concept of ‘seven emotions’ (qi qing гᛵ, viz. xi ௌ [joy], nu ᙂ [anger], ai ૰ [sorrow, pity], ju ᠬ [fear], ai ᝋ [love], wu ᜑ [hatred], and yu Ⅲ [longing]), Zhang, Key Concepts, 383f. Apart from a strong social-constructionist position, these seven ‘emotions’ are broadly comparable to modern notions. Cf. also, Li, Y. Y. and Yang, K. S. (1972), The character of the Chinese; and, on modern theory, Damasio, A. R. (2000), Descartes’ Error; Griffiths, P. (1997), What Emotions Really Are; Lutz, C. (1988), Unnatural Emotions; Rorty, A. O. ed. (1980), Explaining Emotions; Solomon, R. (1976), The Passions. 261 N.B. we probably do not need to go as far as Harbsmeier in speaking of a staged semantic development of the meaning of qing (2004: 71). 253 254

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haowu.262 Talents or gifts are expressed by cai (᡽). All are the affective responses to stimuli that occur within or around an individual’s xing, or basic nature. Hence, in the Analects emotions, preferences, and gifts evoke character and the consequences of life (like Restoration views of porcelain, they have immense revelatory power!). Like xing, the Analects are vague on the moral neutrality of emotions (Zhang [1989] 2002: 383), especially when the junzi’s character is shown by word and deed. He is what he does. He is known by responses and relationships. To Confucius, a disciple’s character and personality are defined functionally and relationally, not experientially. Analects 2.10 states: ‘Look at the means a man employs, observe the basis from which he acts, and discover where it is that he feels at ease. Where can he hide?’ We must be careful not to project later perceptions of human emotion on to the Analects. On the two occasions qing appears, it is less to do with feeling than propriety and sincerity.263 The complex, composite term haowu would seem to confirm this, with Confucius discouraging rancour, ill-feeling and petty backbiting. As he says of Bo Yi and Shu Qi, they ‘did not harbour grudges. For this reason, they aroused little resentment’ (A. 5.23). So, Confucius elevates self-control and makes passion problematic. Little in what he writes of feeling matches Romanticism’s later expansiveness. Individuality is morally and socially contingent. Preferences, like emotions, are accountable to goodness, righteousness and ritual propriety.264 Nature (xing) is to be controlled, lest emotion, or mere preference (qing) dominate. Confucius is quick to complain (twice!): ‘I have yet to meet a man who loves Virtue as much as female beauty’ (A. 15.13, 9.18). He is not devaluing sexuality or beauty: his aim is moral and ritual discrimination (A. 15.28, 4.3, 12.10). It is the capacity for calm, disciplined judgement, not mindless impetuosity, or an emotional state, that sets the junzi apart.265 He thus guards against the vain pursuit of sex, honour and wealth, all of which corrode his mind and will (A. 16.7). Through study of rituals (li ⿞), documents (shu ᴨ), poetry (shi 䂙), and music (yue ′), the junzi’s will and emotions are refined.266 Character, like culture, is both given and grown:267 it is shaped and shown in multiple media.268 It is manufactured by discipline to be as translucent as porcelain. Third, Confucius places great weight on zhi (ᘇ) in the Analects. The character has radicals suggesting ‘heart’ and ‘motion’. Hence, zhi means will, aspiration, intention and commitment: sometimes in classical definitions, ‘where the mind is going’ (Angle 2009: 114). It is no surprise zhi is named in Confucius’s youthful intention (A. 2.4): ‘At fifteen, I set my mind (zhi) upon learning.’269

262 For a detailed analysis of qing and haowu in the Analects, Kim, M-S. (2008), ‘An Inquiry into the Development of the Ethical Theory of Emotions in the Analects and the Mencius’; Eifring, H. (2004), ‘Introdution: Emotions and the Conceptual History of Qing ᛵ’, in H. Eifring (ed.), Love and Emotions, 1–36; Hansen, C. (1995), ‘Qing (Emotions) ᛵ in Pre-Buddhist Chinese Thought’, in J. Marks and R. T. Ames (eds), Emotions in Asian Thought, 183f. 263 Cf. A. 19.19: ‘When you uncover the truth of a criminal case, proceed with sorrow and compassion. Do not be pleased (xing) with yourself.’ And, ‘When a ruler loves rightness, then none among his people will dare not obey. When a ruler loves trustworthiness, then none among his people will dare to not be honest (xing)’ (A. 13.4). 264 Cf. Confucius’s indictment of slander, insincerity, carelessness, and waste (A. 17.24, 4.4, 12.16, 21); also, 20.2: ‘The gentleman is benevolent without being wasteful, imposes labour upon the people without incurring their resentment, desires without being covetous, is grand without being arrogant, and is awe-inspiring without being severe.’ 265 Cf. On the junzi and xiao ren ሿӪ (Lit. small people [sometimes pejorative]), Hsu, C-y. (1965), Ancient China in Transition, 158–161. 266 On training the junzi, Schwartz, B. (1985), World of Thought, 86f.; and, above p. 26, n. 43. 267 For a survey of love, sorrow and fear in the Analects, Kim, M-S. (2008), ‘An Inquiry into the Development of the Ethical Theory of Emotions’, Ch. 3. 268 Cf. above p. 7, 23f., 26f. 269 Cf. on zhi in Analects, Olberding, A. ed., Dao Companion to the Analects, 61f.

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Likewise in 7.20: ‘I am not someone who was born with knowledge. I simply love antiquity, and diligently look (zhi) there for knowledge.’ Zhi has the sense of enduring resolve, not glib hope. Analects 4.4 promises: ‘Merely set your heart sincerely (zhi) upon Goodness and you will be free of bad intentions.’ Analects 4.9 warns, however: ‘A scholar-official who has set his heart (zhi) upon the Way, but who is still ashamed of having shabby clothes or meagre rations, is not worth engaging in discussion.’ Single-mindedness and goodness are to co-inhere. Exchanges suggest that, though Confucius knew the importance of zhi, his disciples had still to learn it, and find direction in life by it.270 The heart-will (zhi) does not naturally know, or want, the best. The eager, but anxious, Zilu admits: ‘I would like to hear the Master’s aspiration (zhi)’ (A. 5.26; also, 11.25). If xin (heart-mind) is central to the anthropology of Analects so are liang xin (㢟ᗳ) and liang zhi (㢟ᘇ; Lit. good heart-mind, conscience, innate knowledge). These categories gain prominence in Mencius, who likens a healthy mind to a healthy tree, a sound conscience to strong branches. The Analects also recognize that right actions (i.e. by a child to a parent or sibling) arise from liang xin or liang zhi; that is, from an intuitive moral sense born of ren (goodness) and li (ritual propriety). As Mencius 7 puts it: ‘Filial affection for parents is the working of benevolence (ren). Respect for elders is the working of respect (ሺ zun). There is no other reason for these feelings: they belong to all under heaven’ (q. Zhang [1989] 2002: 412).271 As registered earlier, care is needed. The innate moralism and confident naturalism that 17th- and early 18th-century philosophes associated with Confucius is clearer in Mencius than the Analects.272 The Analects are not a manual of Spinozist cosmology or of modern psychology. The innate knowledge – or acts of ‘conscience’ – of xin are enacted more than articulated. Interpreters are right to see in Confucius’s questioning about the ‘Great Ancestral Temple’ in Analects 3.15273 a greater emphasis on minds seeking than naturally knowing. It is when he is seventy that Confucius claims to ‘follow his heart’s desires’ (viz. to act rightly and spontaneously) having finally ingested the Will and Way of heaven.274 So, if Will is subsumed in Way in Analects 3.15, elsewhere the power and gift of will (᜿ yi) are stressed. As Analects 4.4 promises: ‘Merely set your heart sincerely (yi) upon Goodness (ren) and you will be free of bad intentions.’275 The will ‘attunes’ or ‘orientates’ the life of an individual and community to ‘the Way of Heaven’. Confucius’s view of the will is, then, in keeping with early-Modern elevation of individual rights. As he says in Analects 9.26: ‘The three armies can have their general taken from them by force, but even a commoner cannot be deprived of his will (yi) in this fashion.’ The will is central to learning, morality and growth in the Way (A. 5.7, 9.9, 11, 14, 17, 19, 20, 21 and 12.1). The ‘industry’ that Westerners noticed, and sometimes praised, in China is born of Confucius’s castigating of those who waste time, energy and opportunity.276 But when the will is harnessed to good ends both the individual and society benefit. In short, the confident, anthropocentric vision we find in the Analects is based on the principle: ‘Human beings can broaden the Way – it is not the Way that broadens human beings’ (A. 15.29). To the conflicted – but increasingly confident – West, E.g. A. 5.26, 11.26. Cf. Exhausting the Mind A, #15. 272 On development in Confucian thought on liang xin and liang zhi, Zhang, 411f. 273 Cf. A. 3.15: ‘When the Master went into the Great Ancestral Temple, he asked questions about everything that took place.’ 274 On internalizing the Way (dao) and Goodness (ren), A. 4.2, 6.7, 11, 20, 7.16, 19. 275 On the power of goodness to overcome evil, below p. 9, 34, 85, 159, 178, 247f., 305, 333, 338, 403, n. 307, 434, 494. 276 Cf. p. 177, n. 264. 270 271

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Confucius offered hope, and confidence, in humanity’s ability to redeem itself and recreate the world. This was neither the message nor the mandate of Jesuit mission and of catholic Christendom (although we find echoes in the so-called ‘Protestant work ethic’ that emerged in the later 17thcentury Northern Reformation). Christian consciences and pan-European cultural ‘Sinophobia’ were stirred. A ‘clash of cultures’ and visions threatened. The Gospels We focus finally on humanity and society in the Gospels. Much could be said. The breadth of behaviour that we have seen in the history and veneration of porcelain is reflected here. Creativity, envy, ambition, greed, lust, gratitude, generosity, vision and development are all part of the story of this other famous craftsman, Jesus. As in the Analects, ideas are stated here in story-form: theory is entwined in practical narrative. The centrality of the biblical story to late 17th- and early 18thcentury Western culture ensured Christian anthropology, as in Paradise Lost, could be assumed with little or no explanation. Biblical allusions, like Greco-Roman statuary, litter contemporary literature. The Gospels are safely quoted, their authority and expository power accepted. To synthesize this material and end this chapter, we focus on five themes, mindful that, as in the Analects, whatever we say of anthropology is inseparable from morality, our theme in the next chapter. First, as in Pope, the Gospels’ treatment of humanity is essentially doxological. The persistence of Aristotelian metaphysical teleology ensured human life was conceived as a glorious ‘idea’ proceeding towards its God-ordained purpose. The amazement expressed in Psalm 8 – ‘What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour’ (4, 5) – buttresses the sense of humanity’s unique, pre-eminent vocation in creation. God’s action in revelation through the man Jesus Christ is also a cause of wonder. His story, ‘dusted’ in miracle, is not man-made. God takes the initiative. ‘In love’ he sends his Son and heir (Jn 3.16f.), a ‘second Adam’ (Rom. 5.12f.) and perfect ‘pattern man’,277 to save a sinful world and become thereby head of a new, redeemed humanity. That Britain associated this gift with the Orient, George Herbert confirms in the intentional double-entendre of his poem ‘The Sonne’: ‘From the first man in the East to fresh and new/ Western discoveries of posterity’ (1887: 150).278 The Analects’ hesitant metaphysic contrasts starkly with the clear theological ontology of the Gospels: humanity finds itself in God through Christ. The ‘Fall’ pictured in Paradise Lost is repeated in the Gospels: God is spurned, perfection spoiled.279 Though the crown of creation (Gen. 1.26f., 2.4f.), humanity is differentiated in the Gospels (as in the rest of the Bible) from God and the world by being ‘in God’s image’ (Gen. 1.27) and sharing Adam’s predisposition to sin.280 We do not find in the Analects a comparable theological basis for this anthropological confidence, nor a similar spiritual exposition of human failure. As the novelist Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) said so poetically: ‘Beautiful the habitation, limited the

On the definition of humanity in, through and in relation to Jesus, the self-designated and self-emptying (kenosis) ‘Son of Man’, Mt. 7.11, 10.32f., 26.74f., Mk 10.9, Jn 10.33, Ac. 5.29, Phil. 2.7, 1 Tim. 2.5, Jas 1.7. 278 On the poem as nationalistic, von Ende, F. (1972), ‘George Herbert’s “The Sonne”: In Defense of the English Language’. 279 On humanity’s state ‘in sin’, rather than being ‘sinful’, Gal. 3.28, Rom. 10.12, 3.22, 29, Jas 2.1f. 280 In the NT anthropos (man; Heb. adam, ish, or enos) is used of humans, as against God, animals and angels (e.g. in the OT, 1 Sam. 15.29, Gen. 1.26). As in the OT, the term includes women (Gen 2.7f., 18f.), and denotes humanity in its weakness, creatureliness and sin (Gen. 2.24, Ps. 8.5). See further, Art: ‘Man’, in NIDNTT , II. 562f. 277

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guest.’ Vorländer explains technically: ‘Statements about man are always partly theological pronouncements’ (NIDNTT , II. 565). The Gospels’ doxological anthropology is theologically contingent and strikingly realistic. Honesty can readily self-identify with both the light and dark in the Gospels’ account of human nature. Second, as in the Analects, the Gospels differentiate between the heart, soul, mind and strength of humans,281 all of which are claimed in Jesus’s iteration of the ‘Love Command’ (Lk. 10.25f.) and in a life of obedient discipleship (Mk 8.34f.). Like the rest of the New Testament, the Gospels share Judaism’s use of physical imagery to express anthropology, and its sense of humanity’s psychosomatic unity. Jesus weeps (Jn 11.35). His disciples know joy and fear (Lk. 10.17, Mt. 14.26, 17.6). The crowds are hungry and desperate (Mt. 15.32, Mk 8.2). We must again be wary of projecting clarity, consistency or sophistication on early Judeo-Christian anthropology. Distinctions between a person’s mind, body, soul or spirit, are more often poetic, or diagnostic, than anatomical. As J. Stafford Wright says: ‘The New Testament seizes on common-sense descriptive terms to describe centres of emotion, feeling, volition, life-pattern, and comprehension’ (NIDNTT , II. 567). Emotions come from the bowels (of mercy; splangchna),282 or the (less intense) heart/will (kardia), the biblical locus of morality and spirituality.283 Mind (nous) is the source of spiritual light and, with it, insight;284 which is denied to the proud and unbelieving (Jn 9.41, 1 Cor. 1.18–31). This is more than the tool of ‘reason’ that grasps universal Platonic or Cartesian truths.285 The New Testament is less to do with abstract reflection, or theoretical ideals, than the mechanism/s by which God interacts with individuals or communities and ‘fills’ them with his Spirit. It is the whole person who ‘takes up their cross’ (Mk 8.34), just as it is ‘the mind’ that is ‘renewed’ by faith, as the believer gives his/her whole life to God as a ‘living sacrifice’ (Rom. 12.1, 2). Third, as in the Old Testament, the Gospels represent human identity in physical and spiritual terms: there is no reduction of humans to mere f lesh or to mere spirit. Human life is by nature physical and by grace spiritual. In the nature miracles of the Gospels (i.e. Jesus’s turning of water into wine, his feeding of 5,000, his calming of a storm),286 life on earth is seen as subject to God as creator, and to Jesus as saviour or recreator. This is quite different from the Analects, where humanity is cast in functional, relational and moral terms. The impersonalism of the Way of Heaven in the Analects is different from the ‘compassion’ of Jesus’s (i.e. Mt. 14, 14) revelation of the ‘face’ of a Father who knows people by name.287 Jesus, who is the eikon (Heb. 1.3; Lit. exact image) of his Father, speaks of a people ‘born again’ spiritually by an act of sovereign grace (Jn 3.1f., 11.25, 14.15f.; also, Rom. 6.6f., 8.1–17, Eph. 4.22f., Col. 3.9f.). The emphasis is consistently on humanity being transformed and energized by the ‘life-giving’ work of the Spirit. The new ‘life’ Jesus offers confounds comparison: without this life humans are as good as ‘dead’. Humanity ‘cannot conceive’ We find nothing here to compare with the theological exposition of sarx (flesh), s¯oma (body), psyche (soul), nous (mind) in Paul and the rest of the NT. On these categories, Phil. 1.20, 3.21; 1 Cor. 15.44, Rom. 8.1f., 16, 1 Cor. 15.50, 2 Cor. 12.15. 282 Cf. Mt. 14.14, 15.32, 18.27, Mk 1.41, 6.34, 8, Lk. 7.13, 10.30–7, 15.20, 2 Cor. 6.12, 7.15, Phil. 1.8, Phlm. 7.12). 283 Cf. Mt. 5.8, 15.19, Mk 7.21, Lk. 8.15, Acts 16.14, Rom. 1.24, 5.5, 6.17, 8.27, 1 Cor. 2.9, 4.52, 2 Cor. 1.22, 4.6, 9.7, Gal. 4.6f., Eph. 3.17, 4.18, Col. 3.15, Heb. 10.22, 13.9, 1 Tim. 1.5, Jas 3.14, 1 Jn 1.7. 284 Cf. Rom. 7.23f., 2 Thess. 2.12, 3.8, Tit. 1.15. 285 Cf. Rom. 12.2, 1 Cor. 14.19, Phil. 2.1–8. 286 Jn 2.1–11, 6.1–14, Mt. 14.13–21, Mk 6.31–44, Lk. 9.12–17. 287 Cf. Jesus’s identification as ‘Son’ at his baptism (Mt. 3.13f., Mk 1.9f., Lk. 3.21f.) and his knowledge and call of individuals (Mt. 9.9f., Mk 1.14f., Lk. 5.1f., Jn 1.35f.). On Jesus’s ‘transfiguration’ and radiance of face, Mt. 17.1–8, Mk 9.2–8, Lk. 9.28–36, 2 Pet. 1.16f. 281

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the ‘glory’, or eternity, of life with God (1 Cor. 3.7–5.10). In contrast to Deist and rationalist confidence, the Gospels (and rest of the New Testament) present human thought, argument, insight, will, effort, ambition and ‘good works’, as incapable of attaining the life God gives to those who believe; albeit, the wise search for it like ‘hidden treasure’ (Mt. 13.44f.), and the righteous (i.e. Jewish leaders Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea and Gamaliel)288 perceive God at work. Humanity is not diminished in the Gospels. To encounter this message is to hear a word of liberating truth, elevating love, life-giving hope. It is the proud who are humbled, not the meek or weak (Lk. 1.46f.). The ethic of ‘The Beatitudes’ (Mt. 5.1–12) defines humanity. Qualities often discounted are here re-accredited as axiomatic of Jesus’s disciples – because they are first true of Jesus. His life is marked by the poverty of spirit, grief at sin, quest for righteousness, mercy, meekness, purity, peace-making and persecution, he wants in disciples. The ‘good news of the kingdom’ he proclaims, and the life he lives, create the contingencies for a new spiritually and ethically distinct community gathered by his word and joined in their common faith (Jn 10.1f., 15.1–17). Individuality is the ground, sociality the product, of Jesus’s ministry and proclamation of the ‘kingdom of God’. Later theologies of the church as the ‘people of God’ (1 Pet. 2.9f.), ‘body of Christ’ (1 Cor. 12–14), or ‘household’ (Gal. 6.10, Eph. 2.19), derive from this. In contrast to Confucius, Jesus is the personal, ontological basis of a community formed by his Spirit, through faith, baptism and ongoing proclamation of the ‘gospel’ (Mt. 28.16f; also, Rom. 5.9f., 6.6f., 1 Cor. 15.21f., 45f., 2 Cor. 5.17, Eph. 4.22f., Col. 3.1–4.6). As we noted before, Jesus remains central to the tradition he inspires. Fourth, again in contrast to the Analects, the Gospels present humanity as indebted to God as their creator and judge. Sharing Adam’s created beauty and sinful ugliness, humanity is declared sinful and called to ‘repent and believe the good news’ (Mk 1.15, Mt. 6.12; also, Mt. 5.45, 9.13, Lk. 15.7). Valued highly, despite their sin (Mt. 6.26b, 10.29f.), men and women are invited into an intimate filial relationship with a loving heavenly Father, and to a life of holiness, obedience and love (Mt. 5.45, 48). The Gospels make clear, however, that humanity prefers prodigal libertinism over the freedom of lawful obedience. Few ‘turn’ and ‘return’ (Mt. 21.33f., Lk. 15.11f., 17.17f.). As in Paul, suneidesis (Lit. conscience) acts as a guide and stimulus to right action (Rom. 2.1f.). Humanity in the Gospels risks deception and spiritual blindness without the Spirit’s guidance into truth about God, life and self.289 We do not see here Confucius’s confidence in self-discipline, cultural formation and ritual propriety to refine – and thence redeem – life from futility to purposefulness. Rather, Jesus’s regular encounters in the Gospels with cynical lawyers, self-righteous religious leaders, would-be followers and contentious disciples, afford ample opportunities for him to reveal a realistic sense of human fallibility and a capacity for patient good will. Humanity is not a lost cause. Fifthly, the Gospels present Jesus’s inclusion of women in ministry and advocacy of mutual respect between the genders. We do not find the demeaning spirit or spite of John Gay’s poem ‘To a Lady on Her Passion for Old China’. A Samaritan woman’s faith is commended; so, too, is the tax-collector Zacchaeus’s repentance and the receptiveness of children to faith (Mt. 15.21f., Lk. 19.1f., 18.15f.). This is consistent with the rest of the New Testament. Age, intellect, marital status, sex and social standing, do not fracture the unity of humanity in sin and in its need of ‘salvation’.290 Cf. Jn 3.1–21, 19.38–40, Mt. 27.57, Mk 15.43–6, Lk. 23.50–6. Cf. e.g. Jn 3.16f., 6.44, 65, 8.12, 41–7, 11.25, 12.32, 16.12f.; also 1 Jn 1.10, 2.22, 5.10, Rev. 2.2. 290 Cf. Mt. 1.19, Lk. 5.8, 23.59, Acts 6.3, 5, 15.7, 13f., 1 Cor. 13.11.2 Cor. 11.2, Gal. 3.28, Jas 1.20, 3.2, Rev. 21.2. 288 289

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Each individual is represented as loved by God and as having a unique identity and function (doxa; lit. glory).291 The love of neighbour Jesus enjoins is to be fulfilled socially and domestically. His love of his friends Lazarus, Martha and Mary, demonstrates a concern for their character, work, health and state of body, mind and spirit (Jn 11.1–44). In contrast to Confucius and the Analects, the Gospels do not discriminate on the basis of status, educational potential, ritual perfection, or moral predisposition: all people are equally – often, it seems, unexpectedly – objects of Jesus’s loving attention, healing power, call to repentance and gift of ‘new life’. As he says to his disciples: ‘I have come to give you life in all its fullness’ (Jn 10.10). It was this truth that inspired Josiah Wedgwood to turn his profits from porcelain into support for the campaign by Wilberforce, Clarkson and others to abolish slavery. It is truth that sits uneasily with absolute claims to power, privilege, insight or achievement. Modernity and post-modernity will, we will see, often choose to ignore or forget Jesus’s word: ‘The truth will set you free’ (Jn 8.32).

CONCLUSION This chapter has set discussion of humanity and society in the Analects and Gospels against the historical background of the evolution of Anglophone and European interpretation of China in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. If we are to read the Analects and Gospels aright, thick perceptual varnish from this period needs to be carefully named and neutralized: only then can we ‘read backwards carefully’, without prejudice, distortion or cultural bias. As we have seen in the last section, commonly assumed anthropological contrasts between, for example, Confucian sociality and Christian individualism, or naïve oriental optimism and grim biblical pessimism, need to be nuanced. We cannot now say, as some do, ‘People come first in China’ (Moore 1967: 5), nor that the Bible is ‘unreliable’. Likewise, projection of ‘Modern’ interpretations on core concepts, such as ‘mind’, ‘heart’, ‘will’ or ‘emotion’, risks misunderstanding and distortion. We find notable points of commonality and contrast in the anthropology of the Analects and Gospels. Both see humanity as worthy of attention and endowed with capacities to improve;292 both interpret individuality in relation to community; both recognize the human condition as susceptible – for good and ill – to ‘higher powers’ over which a person has little or, perhaps, no control. However, while the Analects urge self-mastery, the Gospels command submission to another lord, Jesus Christ. While the Analects teach respect in key relationships, the Gospels command an egalitarian, inclusive love for all. In the rich, cultural matrix of China and the West, the anthropological outlook of the Analects and Gospels offers a shared cultural heritage. Like Wedgwood’s fine, porcelain medallion, it prompts us, perhaps, to ask again of self and another the revolutionary question: ‘Am I – are they – not a person, too?’ Another’s worth is never less than mine: conflict resolution begins in this sense of shared humanity and of the culture-neutral moral obligations this imposes.

On doxa of human roles in relation to Christ, 1 Cor. 11.3f., and Colin Brown’s comment: ‘This qualification of the man . . . no longer indicates preferential status but man’s special task and responsibility, just as the woman has hers’ (NIDNTT , II. 563). 292 N.B. some commentators hear in the silence of A. 5.13 (and 13.27) Confucius’s reserve, esp. in the face of mystery. On this passage and the relation between human nature and the Way of Heaven, Slingerland, Analects, 44. 291

CHAPTER FIVE

Character, Purpose and Morality: China and Enlightenment Habits and Values Madame de la Sablière took her tea with milk, as she told me the other day, because it was to her taste. —Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné (1626–96)1 We turn now to character – the stuff of life and relationship. New tools are acquired here to read personality and culture. We also look at human purpose, and the morality that guides it. In our historical narrative, we come to the point in our story where adolescent Europe meets adult China. They fail to understand one another: the generational, cultural gap is immense. The relationship we are tracking becomes more difficult, the dialogue dangerous for lots of reasons. The story here is dominated by personalities and priorities, principles and failure. The old picture becomes clearer. The background is more complicated, the expression on the faces of Confucius and Jesus is more sharply defined. There are unattractive features in both: a tone of rebuke, a note of disappointment, we try not to register. We look at them and know they are looking back, like Da Vinci’s hauntingly still Mona Lisa. We do not need to ascribe particular authority or genius to Confucius or Jesus. These are ‘paradigmatic’ figures, with literary ‘Classics’ linked to them. We see them through the fire of ‘Revolution’ and passion of cultural and psychological discovery. We need to clean these off carefully. China and the West have known one another for centuries, and now discover the other in new ways, through new terms and languages, new perspectives and ideas. It is an age of ‘consciousness’ and of growing ‘self-consciousness’. But denial in the difficult relationship we are tracking is deep. Europe is growing up. China resists – for a while – then it learns to think and speak the language of the West and is lost in the process. Too much self-consciousness can destroy. The Emperor Qianlong Ү䲶 (1711–96) reigned for more than sixty years (r. 1735–96). The life of his son, the seventh Qing Emperor, Jiaqing హឦ (1760–1820; r. 1796–1820), was conterminous with the equally long reign of the British monarch George III (1738–1820; r. 1760–1820). Did contemporaneity mean similarity? Far from it. Georgian monarchs and Chinese emperors presided over contrasting systems of government, thought, culture and morality. Their lives witness the shift, 1 Marguerite de la Sablière (1640–93; née Hessein) was a Christian ‘saloniste’ and gifted polymath. She was married to the financier-poet Antoine Rambouillet, sieur de la Sablière (1624–79), and a patron and friend to writers such as Jean de la Fontaine (1621–95). On de la Sablière, Conley, J. J. SJ (2002), ‘Madame de la Sablière’, in The Suspicion of Virtue, 75–96.

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alluded to before, between the ‘Age of Respect’ and the ‘Age of Contempt’ in Western attitudes to China (Isaacs 1962: q. Aldridge 1993: 14).2 Sinophilia in Ricci, Kircher, Amiot, Leibniz or Voltaire, gives way to the surly disrespect of George, 1st Earl Macartney (1737–1806), Britain’s first envoy to Qing China, to the crass diplomacy of the ‘Amherst Embassy’ (1816), and to suspicion, cynicism, or rank sinophobia, in a Kant, Rousseau, Montesquieu or Herder. Sino-relations break down. Trust is lost. The background in our picture is complicated. Detail emerges in cleaning that we may not like. We study the related themes of character, purpose and morality in the Analects and Gospels against the background of cultural, political stasis in Qing China, and socio-political, intellectual, economic and commercial ‘Revolution’ in the West. During the life and reign of Emperor Jiaqing and George III, the Enlightenment West grew up, and awoke to the nature, incipient weaknesses and commercial threat of China. At the same time, the pan-European Romantic Movement sinified – and, thus, repossessed – ‘the Orient’,3 inspired by works like Purchas his Pilgrimage (1613), Sir John Mandeville’s (1300–71) Travels (orig. 1357) and Walter Landor’s (1775–1864) Imaginary Conversations of the Emperor of China and Tsing-Ti (1835).4 This is a defining epoch in cultural history. ‘Occidentalism’ and ‘Orientalism’, or simply ‘otherness’, will become metaphors in modern hermeneutics.5 We ‘read backwards carefully’ when the full implications of this era for the way the Analects and Gospels are read today in China and the West are recognized. Suspicion, ignorance, anger or denial create – and perpetuate – inter-cultural tension and interpretative bias. Varnish on what Confucius and Jesus say of character, purpose and morality, is at its thickest: the need to strip away grime, and select and simplify data, is acute. Objections will be immense on every side. As we have seen in passing in Chapters 3 and 4, Confucian ethics are central to early Western fascination with, and respect for, China and ‘Master Kong’.6 In its comprehensive, humanist vision of virtue – as a personal ideal and social obligation, developed and sustained by the wit and will of man – Confucianism was first seen to reaffirm Christian ethical values and only later to contradict the theological basis for them. Between c. 1750 and 1820 ethics assumed a new prominence in Western thought. This was partly a reaction to the uncritical sinophilia of preceding generations and partly reflective of the new ‘Revolutionary’ spirit in the West. The closely related issues of character, purpose and morality come under critical review by Western theorists and socio-political and cultural activists, who engage directly in intellectual, political and commercial ‘Revolutions’. In Part I we review material emerging from, and relating to, these revolutions. In Part II we return to the Analects and Gospels to consider the impact this revolutionary data has on how ethical themes in our texts are read. But, first, we break for tea, an archetypical analogue of how humans ingest Cf. also, Isaacs, H. (1972), Images of Asia. On changing Western attitudes to China in the 18th and 19th centuries, Jones, D. M. (2001), The Image of China, esp. 14–36, 67–98. 3 Contra Said’s Orientalism, there was no one ‘corporate institution for dealing with the Orient’ (1978: 3) in the late 18th century. There were multiple ‘orientalisms’, of which that of the British poet and theologian S. T. Coleridge (1772–1834) is one of the most interesting and influential (p. 166, 205, 206f.). On Romanticism and the Orient, p. 206f. 4 Landor’s work was well-known to Coleridge and other British Romantic authors before the publication of his Imaginary Conversations (Tao 2009: 154f.). 5 For post-colonial analysis of the impact of inadequate understanding of Asian cultures, and its contribution to a perverted ‘Orientalism’, Hung, H-F. (2003), ‘Orientalist Knowledge and Social Theories’. For debate about Chinese identity, Chun, A. (2017), Forget Chineseness. 6 On changing attitudes to the culture and morality of China, Yang, C-m. (2011), Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760. 2

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morality through image, story, rote and ritual. Sometimes light and comfort are shed from an unlikely source.

TEA, TASTE AND TRADITION IN CHINA AND THE WEST Like porcelain, tea is a ‘cultural archetype’ that still binds and defines China and the West: contra Said, this Oriental language is not wilfully ‘inaccurate’, ‘alien’ or ‘only for Europe’ (1978: 71). From Buddhist ‘tea ceremony’ to Georgian ‘tea party’, chic Parisian ‘salons’ to Charles Dickens’s (1812–70) use of the ‘little black tea-pot’ ([1846–8] 2002: 291) as a cipher for British colonial aspiration and social transformation,7 tea symbolizes global coherence as much as commercial conflict. The consumption, trade, social profile, and literary invocation of tea offer an accessible motif to access key features of the evolution of ethical thought in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Chinoiserie takes liquid form in tea: its obverse is the solid antipathy Europeans feel for China by the early 19th century. We track that reversal. Tea was grown and drunk in China for more than a millennium before Confucius.8 In one legend thirsty, mythical Emperor Shen Nong ⾎䗢 (c. 2740 BCE), the ‘father of Chinese agriculture’, or Wugushen ӄば⾎ (Five grains or five cereals god), chances to slake his thirst with hot water infused with a few falling leaves. Tea’s medicinal qualities are shown and celebrated in the definitive Materia Medica or ‘Shennong Bencaojing’ ⾎䗢ᵜ㥹㏃ (The Classic of Herbal Medicine). Tea was viewed and consumed as a physical and intellectual stimulant in ancient China, India and Japan. The pioneering medic Hua Tuo 㨟և (c. 145–208 CE) claimed: ‘To drink bitter tea constantly makes one think better’ (q. Chen, M-L., 2002: 2).9 In a legend, ‘the froth of the liquid jade’ (tea) inspired Laozi to write Tao Te Ching. Lu Yu’s 䲨㗭 (733–804 CE) ‘Cha Jing’ 㥦㏃ (the Classic of Tea, 760– 762) lists medicinal benefits, and rituals to prepare and drink it. The event matters: ‘One finds in the serving of tea the same harmony and order that govern all things’ (SCCS, 1958: 8). Tea infuses life with dignity, order, simplicity, purity and perspective. The poetic civility of Wang Bao’s ⦻㽂 (c. 84–c. 53 BCE) advice on buying and selling Camellia Sinensis (the tea plant) is amplified in elegant Tang ୀ (618–907) and Song ᆻ (960–1279) dynasty rites with fine china and loose leaves, or refined powder cut from blocks of tea. During the ‘great Ming’ dynasty བྷ᰾ (1368–1644) an imperial decree ended elite ceremonial consumption, popularizing tea, and with it the ubiquitous domestic teapot. In the history of tea in China, we trace the birth of a global trade and an ethic of

On Dickens, below p. 281f. On wider use of cultural artefacts to define and refine identity, Lewis-Bill, H. (2013), ‘ “The world was very busy now, in sooth, and had a lot to say”’; Clemm, S. (2010), Dickens, Journalism, and Nationhood; Fiske, S. (2011), ‘Orientalism Reconsidered: China and the Chinese in Nineteenth Century Literature’; John, J. (2010), Dickens and Mass Culture; Plotz, J. (2008), Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move; Porter, R. (2000), Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World; Thurin, S. S. (1999), Victorian Travellers and the Opening of China, 1842– 1907; Waters, C. (2008), Commodity Culture in Household Words. 8 On tea and tea drinking in China, Chen, M-L. (2002), ‘Tea and Health – An Overview’, in Zhen, Y-S. (ed.), Tea: Bioactivity and Therapeutic Potential, 1f.; Blofeld, J. (1985), The Chinese Art of Tea; Chow, K. and I. Kramer (1990), All the Tea in China; Heiss, M. L. and R. J. Heiss (2007), The Story of Tea; Martin, L. C. (2007), Tea: The Drink that Changed the World; Saberi, H. (2010), Tea: A Global History; Ulkers, W. (1935), All about Tea; —(1936), The Romance of Tea. And, for Chinese readers, Kong, X., ed. (1990), Cha yu wenhua [Tea and Culture]; Zhuang, W. ed. (1988), Zhongguo cha shi jielun [Some Conclusions of China Tea History]. 9 On this famous medic and pioneer of anaesthesia in China, May, B., T. Tomoda, and M. Wang (2000), ‘The life and medical practice of Hua Tuo’. 7

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ritual practice. As Wang Ling points out, in Chinese Tea Culture: The Origin of Tea Drinking (2002), tea is integral to Chinese culture: it is understood to enliven China’s spirit, aesthetics and values. The tea trade enabled new, ritualized, ethical affinities between China and the West. It also created a bond neither side welcomed. Inter-dependency brought awkward obligations and edgy political posturing. China traded tea with Asian neighbours for centuries. Portuguese merchants speak of drinking tea in China in the 16th century. The first registered cargo of Chinese tea came to Europe, via Java and Amsterdam, in 1606. The British East India Company was founded in 1615, but the Dutch East Indies Company had a monopoly on tea imports until the 1660s. On 27 June 1615, tea is first mentioned by an Englishman. The East India Company’s agent (‘Factor’) in Hirado, Japan (fr. 1613–18), Richard Wickham (d. 1618), writes to his colleague in Macau, William Eaton (n.d.), requesting ‘a pot of the best sort of chaw’ (q. Weinberg and Bealer 2001: 67).10 In September 1658, Thomas Garraway, a coffee-house owner in London, advertised tea in Mercurius Politicus. He wrote: ‘This excellent beverage, recommended by all Chinese doctors, and which the Chinese call “Tcha”, other nations “Tay” or “Tee”, is on sale at Sultaness Mead close to the Royal Exchange in London’ (q. Woolsey 2002: 146). Two years later, Samuel Pepys records in his Diary (25 September 1660) – after a discussion of foreign affairs – ‘And afterwards did send for a Cupp of Tee (a China drink) of which I never drank before’ ([1633–1703] 2000: 1.253). Not all knew what to do with the leaves. It’s said the widow of the unsuccessful insurgent, the 1st Duke of Monmouth (1649–85), sent tea to a relative in Scotland who boiled and served it like spinach. Other savants used butter. Tea divided opinion, but was, and is, loved worldwide, with power to refresh and unite. It took time for tea to match the popularity of coffee and chocolate. Critics claimed it stunted growth, spread gloom and spoiled beauty. Fearing its moral and cultural impact, the Lord Protector during the ‘Commonwealth of England’ (1649–60), Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), taxed tea heavily (and so inadvertently stimulated contraband). When King Charles II’s Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705), bore a chest of tea in her dowry – and requested a cup after her first (stormy) crossing to Britain (13 May 1662) – tea’s path to public prestige was cleared. On the opening of a new base in Macau in 1664, the East India Company sent the King and Queen a silver chest of tea (2lbs., 2oz.) and some cinnamon oil in thanks for royal patronage – and so they wouldn’t feel ‘wholly neglected by the Company’ (q. Weinberg and Bealer, 67). At first a pricey, princely delicacy, tea was soon the preferred tipple of London’s ‘Dandies’. Over time ‘Coffee Houses’ turned to ‘Tea Houses’.11 With porcelain, silk and spices, tea became a lucrative line-item in Britain’s trade with, first, India then China.12 As domestic portraits confirm, Britain’s new passion for chinoiserie ensured tea was brewed and consumed in egg-shell porcelain, or from Wedgwood’s 10 For Wickham and Eaton, and early records of the EIC in Japan and China: http://www.ampltd.co.uk/collections_az/EICFactory-1/description.aspx (accessed 9 March 2018). On Wickham’s adventurous life: http://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2013/09/ pistol-teapot-soap-and-satin-doublet-an-east-india-company-merchants-possessions.html (accessed 9 March 2018). For Eaton, and the EIC’s trade with China, Morse, H. B. (1926), The Chronicles of the East India Company; Corr, W. (1995), Adams The Pilot, 122f. 11 Anthony (à) Wood reports the opening in 1650 of the first ‘Coffee House’ at the ‘Angel’ in the Parish of St. Peter, Oxford, and the ‘Pasqua Rosee’ (run by Jacob, a Lebanese Jew) in Cornhill, London (Wood 1772: I. 65). 12 The history of Britain’s tea trade is complex. Tea and tea drinking were Chinese, but in the 18th century Britain established tea plantations and traded with India, as a more convenient alternative politically and geographically. For a parallel study, Finlay, R. (2010), The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History.

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fine bone china. Only later would a ‘cuppa’ become synonymous with plain, domestic, ‘blue and white’.13 And so, tea became a British national past-time – and probably an agent of improved health.14 The essayist Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) reported he drank tea from eight at night to four in the morning.15 Samuel Johnson, who blew hot and cold on alcohol, described himself in 1757 as ‘a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has for twenty years diluted his meals with only tea’ (Boswell [1791] 1799: VI. 21). Boswell (1740–95), his gloomy biographer, admitted: ‘I drink a great deal of tea’ (SCCS, 8). The clerical wit Sydney Smith (1771–1845) still speaks up for the majority: ‘Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea’ (Smith, S., 1855: I. 383). When the visionary evangelical clergyman, the Rev. Charles Simeon (1759–1836) – for fifty-four years Vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge – placed his black-basalt Wedgwood tea-pot beside the Bible in ‘tea parties’ at King’s College (for would-be clergy or missionaries), tea was a sign of faith, fellowship and a spiritual vocation.16 Despite the rise of sinophobia in Britain, Western tea rituals start to mimick Chinese ones. In both cultures, ritual – like habit and taste – defines and refines personality and morality.17 Character is denoted by habit: ethics are formed by discipline. In biblical Britain, divine grace wed cultural law: ‘taste’ was much discussed, and ‘habits’ closely scrutinized.18 We read and assess people by habit and action. We read both wrongly, particularly in cross-cultural dialogue. History records our mistakes. A parallel, but distinctive, passion for tea emerges in Holland, Russia, Germany and France in the 17th century, and with it the so-called ‘French art of tea’.19 Controversy over how, when, and why, to drink tea abounds. Its popularity grows steadily, especially among social elites. In Holland, tea was first dispensed by apothecaries. Leading medics like Jacob Bontius (1592–1631), a naturalist in Batavia, who authored a four-volume work on Indian medicines (1642), and Cornelis Decker (1648–86), aka ‘Dr. Bontekoe’ – a true ‘Camellian fundamentalist’, who advocated more than 200 cups a day (!) – echoed Athanasius Kircher’s view that tea was a good stimulant, and comparable to blood-letting and laxatives.20 Bontius reports in his Historiae Naturalis et Medicae Indiae Orientalis 13 On symbolism in ‘taking tea’, and domestic details in the conversation piece, ‘A Family in an Interior Taking Tea’ (anon, c. 1740), and in other 18th-century images of tea and Chinese porcelain, Lipsedge, K. (2012), Domestic Space in EighteenthCentury British Novels, 42f.; Berg, M. (2005), Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 46–84; Ellis, M. (2010), Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England; Merritt, J. T. (2017), The Trouble with Tea, 31–50; Reade, A. (1884), Tea and Tea Drinking. 14 Tea tended to be less expensive in Britain than on the continent: this increased its social impact. ‘Tea houses’ were common in puritanical London in the 1650s. King’s College, Cambridge social anthropologist Alan Macfarlane (b. 1941) claims boiling water for tea in Britain’s burgeoning cities in the 18th century (as in 14th-century Japan) mitigated the effects of widespread diseases such as dysentery, typhoid and cholera. 15 On De Quincey and the cultural symbolism of tea, Jenkins, E. Z. (2016), ‘Tea and the Limits of Orientalism’, in P. J. Kitson and R. Markley (eds), Writing China, 105–31. 16 Cf. Moule, H. C. G. (1892), Charles Simeon, 220f.; Brown, A. W. (1863), Recollections of the Conversation Parties of the Rev. Charles Simeon. On the impact of this, Scotland, N. (1995), The Life and Work of John Bird Sumner, 5. 17 On Hume, ‘taste’, and ‘habit’, and contemporary views on ethics and aesthetics, Berry, C. J. (1982), Hume, Hegel and Human Nature, 20f., 112–125. 18 N.B. three important works on ‘taste’ appeared in Britain c. 1760: the Scottish divine Alexander Gerard’s (1728–95) award-winning Essay on Taste (1755), Hume’s Essay on Taste (1757), and Henry Home, Lord Kames’s (1696–1785) Elements of Criticism (1761). 19 Russia was somewhat late to the tea party, with trade with China only made possible (through Mongolia and Manchuria) after the signing of the Nerchinsk Treaty in 1685. 20 Cf. Ulkers: ‘In Germany, a Dr. Feltman early prescribed tea as a remedy against pestilence, and Dr. Weber expressed the opinion that its use strengthened the stomach, lengthened life, and dissipated unnecessary sleep’ (1935: I. 32).

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(1642): ‘The Chinese regard this drink as almost something sacred . . . and they are not thought to have fulfilled the duties of hospitality until they have served you with it, just like the Mahommedans with their cavech [coffee]’ (q. Ulkers, I. 32). In other words, as we shall see later, tea is more than a drink, or medical cure: it is an agent of grace and an instrument of love. But not all liked the stuff. Martini said it caused ‘dried-up’ Chinese. ‘Down with tea!’ he proclaimed, ‘Send it back to the Garaments and Sauromates!’ (q. Ulkers, 1.33). Another critic called it ‘groats and dishwater, a tasteless and disgusting liquid’ (ibid). Nieuhof ’s account of an Embassy to Peking (1655) also taught the Dutch that, like Madame de la Sablière’s habit, tea could be taken with milk (and salt). These French attitudes to tea are of particular interest. The early import and use of tea in France represent, in historian Thomas Babington Macaulay’s (1800–59) striking expression, ‘a phase of extreme fissionability’ (q. Weinberg and Bealer, 66). The earliest reference is disputed. Ulkers cites the Traité de Police (1705) by Commissioner Nicolas de La Mare (1639–1723), which reports on tea in Paris in 1636. This evidence is refuted by historian and librarian Alfred Franklin (1830–1917), in his essay ‘Le Café, le Thé, et le Chocolat’ (1893). Franklin references a letter of 22 March 1648, by the eminent Parisian doctor Gui Patin (1601–72). Patin proclaims tea ‘the impertinent novelty of the century’. He lambasts Dr. Philibert Morisset’s (1594–1678) far more positive views in Ergo Thea Chinensium Menti Confert (1648, Thus Chinese tea increases mental capacity), where tea is lauded as an intellectual stimulant and a universal ‘panacea’. Members of the faculty of medicine in Paris burned Morisset’s work and made an unexpected counterclaim for sage (!). The tide was soon to turn. In 1657 the scientist Dr. Denis Jonquet (fl. 1660) praised tea as the ‘divine herb’. The pioneer missionary to Vietnam, Alexander de Rhodes, SJ (1591–1660), to whom Louis XIV’s chief minister Cardinal Mazarin (1602–61) looked for spiritual and medical advice, promoted tea’s medicinal qualities, declaring in his Voyages et Missions Apostolique (1653): ‘The Dutch bring tea from China to Paris and sell it at thirty francs a pound, though they have paid but eight or ten sous in that country, and it is old and spoiled into the bargain. People must regard it as a precious medicament: it not only does positively cure nervous headache, but it is a sovereign remedy for gravel and gout’ (q. Ulkers: I. 33). Mazarin started taking tea for his gout; likewise, Chancellor Pierre Séguier (1588–1672) and the king, who drank tea from 1665 hoping it might also help his heart. Patin repented. The king’s ‘chief druggist’ Pierre Pomet (1658–99) remained sceptical. In 1685, the apothecary, banker, and collector, Philippe Sylvestre Dufour (1622–87) published his Traités Nouveaux et Curieux du Café, du Thé et du Chocolat, which promoted dosages of tea for headaches and indigestion. Literary France woke up. The dramatist Jean Racine (1639–99) became an avid tea-drinker at breakfast in later life; likewise, later still, the Royal Governess and literary educator, Stéphanie Félicité, Comtesse (Mme.) de Genlis (1746–1830).21 Trusting to a fickle muse, Pierre Daniel Huet (1630–1721), the Bishop of Avranches, penned his Poemata (1709) with a fiftyeight stanza encomium to tea, ‘Thea, elegia’!22 The French ship Amphitrite23 arrived from China on 3 August 1700, laden with silk, porcelain and tea. Cargos from China would increase exponentially. It is estimated between 1776 and 1794 almost 140m pounds of tea alone were imported into

The Romantic poet, novelist, and dramatist Victor Hugo (1802–85) is said to have drunk a lot of tea – but, like many perhaps, fortified it with rum. 22 Cf. Weinberg and Bealer, 66. This frightful poem is a wordplay on ‘goddess’ (Gk. thea). 23 For another voyage of the Amphitrite, p. 131. 21

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Europe. French aristocrats drank more than their fair share in elegant ‘Tea salons’ and resplendent châteaux.24 Socialite gossip Madame de Sévigné let it be known the Princesse de Tarente (1763– 1814), lady-in-waiting to the (last) French Queen, Marie Antoinette (1755–93), ‘takes 12 cups of tea every day ... which, she says, cures all her ills’. Monsieur de Landgrave ‘drank 40 cups every morning’, and, when ill, tea ‘brought him back to life before our eyes’ (q. Burns 2000). The cost of tea rose. In time, like porcelain, it would become an object of bourgeois loathing. The Queen lost her head for drinking tea as much as telling crowds to ‘eat cake’.25 But tea still exercised power. When Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821) led his campaign against Austria and its Italian allies in 1796, he wrote to Joséphine (1763–1814): ‘Not one cup of tea have I taken without cursing the glory and the ambition that keeps me away from the soul of my life’ (q. Dwyer 2007: 195). In the Anglomania that conquered France fifty years later, tea returned. The prestigious tea-importer Mariage Frères was founded.26 Small pastries were added to post-prandial tea – as in England – sometimes also milk, honey and/or cognac. Parisian taste and the ‘French way’ prevailed. The rightwing newspaper was Le Thé. But civility cloaked hatred. Taste bred competition of every kind. Classism and racism became unpleasant associates of tea. Innocent pleasure became noxious obsession. Habits speak. Life, values, morality, taste, sentiment, character, and virtue are richly illustrated in the long history of this other global cultural artefact and archetype, tea.27 It is linked with indolence, violence and oppression. The early Scottish Enlightenment poet Allan Ramsey (1686–1758) depicted vividly tea’s physical, rhetorical, social power: When av’rice, luxury, and ease, A tea-fac’d generation please, Whase pithless limbs in silks o’er-clad, Scarce bear the lady-handed lad – Frae’s looking-glass into the chair, Which bears him to blassum the fair, Wha by their actions come to ken Sic are but in appearance men. —1780: I. 26128 Tea is, for Ramsay, a sign of society’s loss of character, purpose and morality: the ‘tea fac’d generation’ are only ‘in appearance men’. To those 7,000 or so colonial Americans, who on 16 December 1773 defied the ‘Townshend Revenue Act’ of 1767 (which sought to off-set tax losses for

24 Contrasts are drawn between essentially ‘domestic’ tea-drinking in the UK and the ‘Tea Salons’ in France. On the latter, see the picture ‘Le Thé à l’Anglaise’ (Tea served in the English fashion, salons of the Four Mirrors, Paris, 1764). 25 Tea was generally less popular than coffee after 1750, with bavaroise (a mix of tea and maidenhair syrup) consumed by the lower classes (Anderson 2007: 110). On state/police control of bread production as a factor in the French Revolution, Civitello, L. (2008), Cuisine and Culture. 26 Mariage Frères is the oldest tea company in France. It was founded on 1 June 1854. 27 On tea as a global commodity, Ellis, M., R. Coulton and M. Mauger (2015), Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World. 28 On Ramsay, tea and revolution, Merritt, J. T. (2017), ‘The rise of a “Tea fac’d Generation” ’, in The Trouble with Tea, 31–50.

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the British EIC by new tax levies on the colonies) and the ‘Tea Act’ of 10 May 1773 (as a violation of the rights of proud English citizens, that there would be ‘No taxation without representation’), and dumped tea from the Dartmouth (and later the Eleanor and Beavor) into Boston Harbour, the commodity of tea had ceased to enhance pleasure and enrich society: it had become a sign and instrument of British colonial oppression.29 Neither justice nor the fundamental ‘rights’ of British citizens were being respected. Further, as in Cromwell’s righteous taxing of tea, contraband was thereby inadvertently fostered. If the story of porcelain is intertwined with anthropology and natural law, the tale of tea is of a piece with morality and justice, international law and economics. If it was a correlate of taste and good order in China, of domestic normality in Britain, of class oppression and chaos in France, it is a beacon of hope and bold symbol of Revolution in colonial America. Mindful of this, we turn to an intellectual revolution that changed how character, purpose and morality are viewed in China and the West. We read the Analects and Gospels through this today.

KANT, CHARACTER AND CHINA: c. 1750–1820 Though small of stature and not predisposed to travel far from his native Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), Prussia, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) has cast a long shadow over Europe and Asia. We have mentioned him in passing before and look now in more detail at the place his ethical reflection has in East-West cross-cultural understanding, and thence on the way the Analects and Gospels are interpreted in China and the West today. But we must set Kant in context, understand his contemporaries and critics, and process the hermeneutic impact of his thought. We might say much, so again exaggerate the essential. The long-term missionary to the Qing imperial court Jean J. M. Amiot, SJ (1718–93), who was sent to China in 1750, described it as ‘the Peru and Potosi of the republic of letters’; that is, an exotic source of intellectual enrichment. Though later dubbed the ‘Chinaman of Königsberg’ by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) ([1886] 1998: # 210),30 Kant was no starry-eyed Sinophile; albeit, a Chinese ritual was central to what the lyric poet and literary critic Heinrich Heine (1797– 1856) called Kant’s ‘mechanically ordered, almost abstract, bachelor life’ (1948: 719).31 Inspired by British traders in Königsberg, for fifty years Kant drank tea – lots of it – in ‘the happiest hours’ of his day between rising at 4am and breakfast at 7am (Copleston 1960: 212; Kuehn 2001: 392).32 To the dread of his servants, with sacral precision, his oppressively egocentric life revolved around his morning tea-ritual. He might campaign culturally and intellectually against sinophilia, but he had no truck with tea – nor, indeed with some aspects of classical Confucianism. He stands on the shoulders of Leibniz and Wolff, but he is not an uncritical inheritor of their sinophilia. He symbolizes

For contrasts in European and American attitudes towards China and India in the 18th century, Weir, D. (2011), American Orient. To Weir, late 18th-century European suspicion of China is quite different from America’s colonial experience, in which relationships with Asia became ‘a means of reinforcing the enlightenment values of the West’ (15). 30 Nietzsche may mean no more than Kant’s thought was stilted, and lifestyle regimented. Kant was born in Königsberg to artisan Christian parents. He enrolled at the Albertina University at sixteen and stayed there for the rest of his life. He was made a Professor of Logic and Metaphysics aged forty-five. He lived a simple, structured, skeptical life. On Kant and China, Palmquist, S. (1996), ‘How “Chinese” was Kant?’. 31 On Kant’s regimen, Riskin, J. (2016), The Restless Clock, 191f. 32 On Kant’s tea drinking (and love of coffee), Gulyga, A. ([1981] 1987), Immanuel Kant, 253. 29

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growing selectivity in Western engagement with China in the second half of the 18th and early 19th centuries. He remains a towering figure in China, its philosophy and society.33 The fact his younger, equally influential, contemporary G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) believed Kant’s philosophy constituted ‘the basis and point of departure for modern German philosophy’ (q. Thomas 1997: 119) – and much later philosophy and ethics – confirms his pivotal place in cross-cultural analysis of character, purpose and morality in the Analects and Gospels. We might say much about Kant’s centrality to the cultural, political and intellectual Aufklärung (Enlightenment) of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Five features of his ethics and philosophy that ‘resemble’ (Wittengenstein)34 Confucianism deserve note. First, as many scholars have recognized, Kant, like Confucius, sees anthropology and ethics as interlinked and inseparable. As Katrin Froese puts it: ‘[T]he art of becoming human is synonymous with the unending process of becoming moral’ (2008: Abstract). Rejecting empiricism and rationalism, Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ in philosophy, epistemology, ethics and theology, put an autonomous, knowing ‘self ’ centre-stage.35 ‘Feeling’ (Germ. Das Gefühl), or ‘experience’ (Die Erfahrung), are now both sacrosanct. Kantian ethics involve a metaphysical, rational, universal (perhaps God-given) ‘intuition’ of what is right. The heart of Kant’s thought, like Confucius’s, is a self-aware individual, who seeks to be, and do, the ‘good’ and become a ‘better man’ (sic).36 Character matters. Kant and Confucius are at one in their quest for ‘virtue ethics’,37 and in commending disciplined self-cultivation. But, as we noted earlier, Kant is selective in his admiration for China. He writes: ‘Confucius teaches in his writings nothing outside a moral doctrine designed for princes . . . But a concept of virtue and morality never entered the heads of the Chinese.’ Adding, ‘In order to arrive at an idea . . . of the good, studies would be required, of which [they] know nothing’ (Vos 2010: 772).38 As Rein Vos points out, this is significant both for what it says about Kant’s metaphysical ethics and for its critique (contra Wolff) of Confucian elitism and political authoritarianism (ibid., 769f.). Kant is, as Reiss says, ‘the champion of liberty’ (Reiss [1970] 1991: 257): human autonomy is, for him, a moral imperative. Paradoxically, as the early, German, Neo-Kantian sociologist Georg 33 On Kant and Chinese philosophy, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 33, no. 1 (2006); esp. Muller, M., ‘Aspects of the Chinese Reception of Kant’ (141–57); Reihman, G. M., ‘Categorically Denied: Kant’s Criticism of Chinese Philosophy’ (51–65); and, on Mou Zongsan’s (1909–95) creative Neo-Confucian use of Kant, Chan, W-C., ‘Mou Zongsan’s Transformation of Kant’s Philosophy’ (125–39). Cf. on Mou, p. 195f. 34 The Cambridge linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951; p. 379, 468f.) uses the term ‘family resemblances’ of comparable ideas. But ‘Comparative Philosophy’ is difficult. Challenges come from: i. the condescension of established traditions; ii. the manipulation of other traditions; iii. the suspension of comparisons or neutralism; iv. the incommensurability of ideas, systems or intentions; and, v. the perennialism (or monolithism) that denies change or diversity in other philosophical systems. N.B. the journal Philosophy Compass (ed. K. Lai) has excellent E-W comparative studies between 2006 and 2015. 35 On the Kantian ‘turn to the self ’ and complexities in the Romantic Movement, Lockridge, L. S. (1989), Ethics of Romanticism, 39–154; Ford, F. M. ([1938] 1994), The March of Literature, 541f. On Kant and his psycho-ethical ‘Copernican Revolution’, Palmquist, S. (1986), ‘The Architectonic Form of Kant’s Copernican Logic’. 36 Cf. Xie, W. (2012), ‘Kant’s Better Man and the Confucian Junzi’. 37 N.B. ‘virtue ethics’ is discussed ‘comparatively’. Cf. e.g. Bretzke, J. T., SJ (1995), ‘The Tao of Confucian Virtue Ethics’; Ivanhoe, P. (2013b), ‘Virtue Ethics and the Chinese Confucian Tradition’, in D. C. Russell (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics, 49–69; Chen, L. (2010), ‘Virtue Ethics and Confucian Ethics’; Van Norden, B. (2007), Virtue Ethics; Slingerland, E. (2000), ‘Virtue Ethics, the Analects and the problem of commensurability’; Tiwald, J. (2010), ‘Confucianism and virtue ethics’; also, Lee, M-H. (2013), ‘Confucianism, Kant, and Virtue Ethics’, in S. C. Angle and M. Slote (eds), Virtue Ethics and Confucianism, 48f.; Fang, X. ed. (2010), Moral Philosophy and the Confucian Traditions. 38 Cf. also, Vos, R. (2008), ‘Public Use of Reason in Kant’s Philosophy: Deliberative or Reflective?’, in V. Rohden, et al. (eds), Recht und Frieden in der Philosophie Kants, 753–63.

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Simmel (1858–1918) observed, there is an ‘incomparably personal trait’ in Kant’s philosophy, which is its ‘uniquely impersonal nature’ (q. Kuehn 2001: 14). His life is a ‘mind’, his character tragically, perhaps, that of a ‘conceptual cripple’ (ibid.). Second, Kantian ethics are practical; as in Confucius, moral reasoning and practice cannot be sundered. But, if Confucianism is a deontological, daily ethic full of immediacy, intentionality, propriety and responsibility, Kantian ethics are a universal, spiritual intuition of pure ‘practical reason’. To Chung-ying Cheng: ‘There is a basic difference between Kant and Confucius, the difference between conceiving the universality of morality as a condition of morality or as a consequence of morality’ (1991: 290). Put another way: if Confucian ethics are ‘situationist’ and ‘immanentist’,39 Kantian morality is ‘transcendental idealist’.40 In his early, pre-critical phase (1745–70) Kant operates within the framework of Leibniz and Wolff, with his award-winning astronomical project41 culminating in his ground-breaking Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels (1755, A General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens). Over time, this evolves into a new, practical, ‘closed world’ metaphysic of desacralized phenomena and unknowable higher noumena. Parallels with classical Confucianism are compelling. Kant is drawn to Confucius’s stress on ‘practical reason’ and his subordination of ‘rights’ to ‘duties’. Conversely, as Palmquist recognizes, ‘Both of these tendencies [in Kant] appeal to Chinese philosophers, because . . . they are inherently “Chinese”’, and, as a result, ‘the spring-board for much cross-cultural dialogue, especially from the Chinese side’ (1996: 9, 13). It is little wonder Kant is reckoned the most influential philosopher in China after Confucius. Though ren (benevolence), li (ritual) and de (virtue) exist in a complex, dynamic relationship in the Analects,42 Kant sees ‘duty’ defined by, and determining, ‘rights’. In his socio-political treatise Die Metaphysik der Sitten (1797, Metaphysics of Morality), which expanded the better-known trilogy of the ‘astonishing decade’ (Beck 1969: 433), or ‘critical’ period (1781–91) – Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781, Critique of Pure Reason), Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788, Critique of Practical Reason) and Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790, Critique of Judgement), and Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals) – Kant outlines Rechtslehre (Doctrine of Rights) and Tugendlehre (Doctrine of Virtue); that is, ‘rights’ people have or acquire, and ‘virtues’ they ought to acquire ([1797] 1996: Introduction). ‘Duty’, like ritual, plays a central role in Kantian ethics (Murphy 1970: 35f.).43 For him, ‘independently of all experience’,44 ‘practical reason’ identifies one moral ‘Categorical Imperative’ arising from ‘duty’, namely, a practical sense of ‘what ought to be done’ ([1781] 1929), A800–2/B828–30) and a calm, disciplined pursuit of good

On situationism in Confucian ethics, below p. 247f., 250, 256; also, Lai, K. (2007), ‘Understanding Confucian Ethics’; —(2006b), ‘Li in the Analects’; Slingerland, E. (2011), ‘The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics’. 40 Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’ is premised on human beings not experiencing things in themselves, but only as the appearance of things. His theory continues to be iconoclastic and controversial. On the ‘two object’, or ‘two aspect’, debate about Kant’s idealism, Allison, H. E. ([1990] 1995), Kant’s Theory of Freedom, 4f. 41 In 1754 he won the Berlin Academy Prize for work on the earth’s rotation, in which tidal resistance was introduced. It took almost a hundred years for the significance of this to be factored into discussions of energy. 42 On the relation, and potential tension, between ren and li, Tu, W. (1968), ‘The Creative Tension Between Jen and Li’. On ren and li, below p. 246f., 245f. 43 Cf. also, on ‘duty’ as a moral and social responsibility, Stratton-Lake, P. (2000), Kant, Duty and Moral Worth. 44 Cf. Critique of Pure Reason (1st edn), Preface, where Kant indicates his aim is to examine reasoning without reference to experience. Kant’s pupil J. G. Herder (1744–1803) attacked this as a disembodied, non-linguistic view of human reasoning (cf. below p. 229f.). Among many indebted to Kant, French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984; below p. 231, 268, 313, 330, 362, 421, 429, 471, 473f.) wrote a ‘critical history of modernity, rooted in Kant and Nietzsche’ (Czy´zewski 2011: 200). 39

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‘ends’.45 Like Aristotle’s (384–322 BCE) Nicomachean Ethics, Kant’s practical moral ‘synthesis’ has entered the global cultural and intellectual mainstream. His charge to ‘enlightened’ souls to slough Cartesian rationalism, Leibnizian empiricism, and what he calls ‘unmündigkeit’ (immaturity) in conformism, inspired libertine Romanticism and humanist republicanism. His theology-lite ethical ‘idealism’ has horrified biblical moralists. But he has many Chinese admirers. Third, Kantian ethics are intertwined with human nature, and thence with aesthetics. Ethics are for him as much about beauty, taste, mood and feeling, as right and wrong. Kant’s early Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (1764, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime) follows Longinus and Addison in distinguishing between ‘beauty’ and the ‘sublime’.46 The latter he interprets in various ways as ‘feelings’; particularly of pleasure and dread. Kant accepted Greek medic Galen’s (129–c. 200/216 CE)47 four ‘humours’ or ‘temperaments’ (melancholic, sanguine, choleric and phlegmatic). He subsumed these in an aesthetic view of a personality, which (like Kant himself) bears a striking resemblance to the Confucian junzi.48 He universalized this as ‘a profound feeling for the beauty and dignity of human nature and a firmness and determination of the mind to refer all one’s actions to this as to a universal ground is earnest . . .’. This mood is inconsistent, he says, with ‘changeable gaiety’ and ‘the inconstancy of a frivolous person’ ([1764] 1960: 62f.).49 Instead, a ‘melancholic’ predisposition (Germ. Stimmung) to morality and refinement creates ‘a man of principles’ (ibid., 65),50 and not of ‘passion’, which to Kant is both risky and wrong. Crucially, an aesthetic ground of ‘sublime’ virtue is integral to the ‘Categorical Imperative’ in Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and Critique of Judgement (1790), and is later integrated methodologically in his ‘post-critical’ works Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View),51 Der Streit der Fakultäten (1798, The Contest of Faculties), Logik (1800, Logic), and the posthumous Über Pädagogik (1803, On Pedagogy) and Opus Postumum (1804). Kant’s close attention to the ‘conditions of possible experience’ (Westphal 2004: 122f.; Allison, 30f.), on which knowledge and consciousness are based, led him to emphasize the objective nature of experience and of human rationality (which is basic to his defence of philosophy itself). We hear echoes here of Confucius’s view of practical ethics and cultured aesthetics. They might despise Mme. de Sévigné as a gossip but would respect her test of Mme. de la Sablière in terms of (tea and) ‘taste’!52 For, morality, to Kant, is not rule-keeping, it is ‘doing the right thing’ at the right time.

45 On the ‘Categorical Imperative’, ‘duty’, and Heidegger’s view of Kant’s critique of human subjectivity in Critique of Pure Reason (2nd edn.), Tu, W. (1985), Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation, 155f. 46 On Addison, p. 117, 157, 160f. 47 Aelius (or Claudius) Galenus of Pergamum was the foremost medic in the Greco-Roman world, contributing much in the fields of anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, pathology and neurology, as well as philosophy and logic. 48 On the moral and aesthetic formation of the junzi, p. 30, 175, 177. 49 On this, Feld, A. (2011), Melancholy and the Otherness of God, 96f.; also, on Confucius’s dismissal of the ‘frivolous’, above p. 24. For Heidegger’s support for Kant, Feld, 96. 50 Contrary to modern connotations, for Kant ‘melancholy’ is ‘a gentle and noble feeling’ and the ‘awe of the hard-pressed soul’. It is receptor of fine feelings and acute moral distinctions. 51 Kant played a major role in establishing the modern academic discipline of Anthropology. He lectured on the subject for much of his professional life, defining it as both the study of physiology and of humanity’s practical, vocational potential. Among many others, his anthropology impacts the hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Paul Ricoeur (1913– 2005), and their interpreter, Jean Greisch (b. 1942); also, below p. 357f., 360f., 419f., 469f., 471f. 52 On ‘taste’ in Kantian ethics, Guyer, P. (1979), Kant and the Claims of Taste; —(1993), Kant and the Experience of Freedom, ad loc.; Wayne, M. (2014), Red Kant. On aesthetics in Confucian morality, Gier, N. (2001), ‘The dancing Ru: A Confucian aesthetics of virtue’; and, p. 23, 26, 45f., 193.

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Fourthly, as we have glimpsed previously, Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’ contains a Confucianesque caution about ‘spiritual’ matters. He is neither an atheist nor an agnostic. He is a pragmatic realist and ethical ‘idealist’. His religion is ‘within the limits of reason alone’. Christianity is ‘a natural religion’, that is, accessible to human cognition ([1793] 1998: Bk. IV. 1.1).53 His God, like Confucius’s Heaven, does not deny humanity moral responsibility. Jesus is the exemplification of ‘a pure moral disposition of the heart’ that pleases God (Germ. die reinemoralische Herzensgesinnung) (ibid., VI. 159). The residue from this religion of the Gospels is the gold of dignity, freedom, maturity and choice. To many in his day, Kant’s ideas constituted either unorthodox theological reductionism (with God neither knowable or near) or unnecessary epistemological reserve (while rationalism, empiricism and ‘experience’ were so much more flattering and exciting). His capacity to provoke and inspire contemporaries and successors was and is remarkable, his influence on numerous fields of study immense. He still defines for many a ‘Modern’ life and outlook. We track Kant first in the new school of ‘German Idealism’ that emerged in the work of the antinihilist Friedrich Jacobi (1743–1819), Georg von Hardenberg (1722–1801; aka Novalis) and Kant’s Austrian devotee Karl Reinhold (1757–1823). He is also traceable to the writings of Gottlob Schulze (1761–1833) and his better-known, sceptical student, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860); to the studies on ‘self-consciousness’ by Johann Fichte (1762–1814); to the conflation of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ and of ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ by the theistic philosopher-poet Friedrich Schelling (1775– 1854); and, to the work of the Lithuanian Jewish scholar Salomon Maimon (1753–1800).54 Kant’s legacy is also evident in the impact he had on his most avid devotee and critic, Hegel, and on the so-called ‘father of nineteenth-century Liberal Protestantism’, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768– 1834), in whom the intellectual ‘revolution’ of the Enlightenment reached its apotheosis.55 Hegel echoed criticism by those who rejected the abstract, and individualist character of Kantian epistemology and ethics, but he embraced Kant’s endorsement of reason’s quest for freedom beyond itself (something that Nietzsche could never accept). Schleiermacher embodies the Romantic Movement’s caution with respect to Kant’s aesthetics of ‘experience’, although not his readiness to ‘criticize’! To Schleiermacher and fellow-Romantics, Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), Wilhelm Schlegel (1772–1829), the politician and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832),56 and their British counterpart, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1732–1834), Kant was – like Confucianism a century earlier – a rich resource to break the oppressive hegemony of Christian orthodoxy, and to put the burden of moral responsibility and culture now on ‘enlightened’ individuals. Kant (like

Cf. ibid., xxxvif. for a useful bibliography on Kant and religion. On ‘German Idealism’, Ameriks, K. ed. (2000), Cambridge Companion to German Idealism; Beiser, F. C. (2002), German Idealism; Pinkard, T. (2002), German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism; Solomon, R. and K. Higgins, eds (1993), Routledge History of Philosophy, VI: The Age of German Idealism. 55 On Hegel and Schleiermacher, p. 233f., 237f. 56 Like other Romantics, the poet, philosopher, critic, diplomat, and Indo-Europeanist Karl Wilhelm Friedrich (von) Schlegel (1772–1829), an early member of the Jena School, used Kant in the literary-critical, counter movement seen in the journal Athenaeum (1798–1800). Schlegel’s ‘Fragments’ followed Kant’s introspective methodology and impressed Coleridge. As a statesman-poet, Goethe disliked theorists like Kant. Jealous of his intellectual freedom, he admitted Kant’s eminence slowly (Letter to Johann Eckermann [1792–1854], 11 April 1827), and called the Critique of Pure Reason ‘a dungeon which restrains our free and joyous excursions into the field of experience’ ([1827] 1887–1919: 1, 36.313–46). Though he may have denied this, Goethe’s organic ontology, and quest to synthesize thought and action, echoes Kant and Confucius. This is not altogether surprising given his ‘interest in things Chinese’ (Minford and Lau 2000: I. li). Cf. also, Bernier, L. (2005), ‘Christianity and the Other’. On Kant, Swift, S. (2006), Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy, 77f. 53 54

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Coleridge) was mocked by contemporaries. The essayist William Hazlitt (1788–1830) called his ideas ‘an enormous heap of dogmatical and hardened assertions’, and ‘the most wilful and monstrous absurdity that ever was invented’ (1817: 488f.; Jackson, J., 1970: 294f.). Poet Lord Byron portrayed the blinded, Kantian Coleridge as ‘a hawk encumbered with its hood’ ([1824] 1973: Dedication, St. II). De Quincey and Carlyle feared Coleridge was lost in ‘the hazy infinitude of Kantian transcendentalism’ (1851: 73; q. Class 2012: 8). To Hazlitt, he had quit ‘the plain ground of “history and particular facts” for the first butterfly theory, fancy-bred from maggots of his brain’ (ibid., 491). Coleridge was closest to Kant in Britain.57 ‘A figure of overflowing pathos and irony’ (Dorrien 2012: 119), Coleridge’s work on theology, poetry and hermeneutics – like Kant, Confucius, the Orient and his opium habit – opened for later generations unimagined worlds of possibility. We will return to Hegel, Schleiermacher, Coleridge and Romanticism later.58 We register here that by re-rendering ethics (pace Confucius) in terms of anthropology, aesthetics, habit, taste and practice, Kant challenged its historic, teleological orientation and the Bible’s sense of final accountability. The Analects and Gospels are read in China and the West through the accumulative varnish of Kantian philosophy and ethics. In every sense he provides new terms for their discussion. The fifth theme to note in Kant’s ethics is its cultural adaptability. The ‘intellectual intuition’ at the heart of his philosophy enables, and promotes, a profound psychological and cultural engagement with life. Truth is not contingent on history but aesthetic epistemology. Mindful of Kant’s Chinese interests, it is no surprise the influential 20th-century Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan ⢏ᇇй (1909–95), with an ‘almost obsessive’ (Thoraval 2003: 35)59 blend of ‘admiration and competitiveness’ (Chan. N.S., 2011: 217) – and, no small desire to stop Christianity’s spread – turned to Kant as a foil to ideological error and a fount of inspiration. As Jason Clower writes: ‘If Marx was stimulated by Feuerbach to take Hegel and stand him on his head . . . Mou was stimulated by Heidegger to do the same with Kant’ (2014: 19). Mou used Kant to re-clothe Chinese culture in Western garb, and so to create a bespoke Neo-Confucian ‘moral metaphysics’ (daode xingshangxue). More than Karl Marx (1818–83) – who in later life dissed Kant as ‘the whitewashing spokesman of

On Coleridge’s European readership, Shaffer, E. and E. Zuccato (2007), The Reception of S. T. Coleridge in Europe. Some scholars date the Romantic Movement in Britain to the publication of Coleridge and William Wordsworth’s (1770– 1850) Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Cf. on Coleridge, below p. 205f. Also, on Hegel, p. 253; Schleiermacher, p. 237; Wordsworth, p. 195, n. 58, 210f.; and, British and European Romanticism, p. 196f. 59 Mou was born in Shandong Province and educated at Peking University. After WWII he lived and worked in Hong Kong and Taipei. On Mou’s use and reinterpretation of Kant, Billioud, S. (2006), ‘Mou Zongsan’s Problem with the Heideggerian Interpretation of Kant’; —(2011), Thinking through Confucian Modernity; Bresciani, U. (2001), Reinventing Confucianism: The New Confucian Movement; Bunnin, N. (2008), ‘God’s Knowledge and Ours: Kant and Mou Zongsan on Intellectual Intuition’; Chan, N. S. (2003), ‘What is Confucian and New about the Thought of Mou Zongsan?’, in J. Makeham (ed.), New Confucianism, 131–64; Chan, W-C. (2006), ‘Mou Zongsan’s Transformation of Kant’s Philosophy’; —(2008), ‘On Mou Zongsan’s Idealist Confucianism’, in Shen, Q. and K-l. Shun (eds), Confucian Ethics in Retrospect and Prospects, 171–86; —(2012), ‘Mou Zongsan’s Typology of Neo-Confucianism: Its Hidden Sources’, in Y. Escande, V. Shen and C. Li (eds), Inter-culturality and Philosophic Discourse, 147–62; Guo, Q. (2007), ‘Mou Zongsan’s View of Interpreting Confucianism by “Moral Autonomy” ’; Liu, S-h. (2003), Art. ‘Mou Tsung-san (Mou Zongsan)’, in A. S. Cua (ed.), Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, 480–6; Schmidt, S. (2011), ‘Mou Zongsan, Hegel, and Kant: The Quest for Confucian Modernity’; Tu, W. (1989), Centrality and Commonality, ad loc.; Tu, X. (2007), ‘Dare to Compare: The Comparative Philosophy of Mou Zongsan’; Zheng, J. (2004/5b), ‘Mou Zongsan and the Contemporary Circumstances of the Rujia’; —(2004/5a), ‘Between History and Thought: Mou Zongsan and the New Confucianism’. Cf. for Mou’s idealist critique of Zhu Xi’s realism, Xin ti yu xing ti [The Mind-Substance and the Nature-Substance] (1968). 57 58

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the German burghers’ ([1867] 1965: 209)60 – Mou saw Kant’s ‘revolutionary’ potential.61 As Hegel’s friend, the Romantic lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) had written: ‘Kant is our Moses, he has led us from our Egyptian slumbers’ (q. Sheehan 1989: 343).62 To Mou, Kant’s philosophy was unique in the West, comparable with – but still inferior to – Confucianism. His Neo-Confucian (and later New Confucian) reworking sealed Kant’s centrality to post-Maoist China and confirms his cultural adaptability (pace Coleridge). Cultural ‘translation’ is complex: as often, we see here as much of Mou, the translator, as Kant, the translated text. Mou is not unique. The leading aesthetic philosopher in the ‘Chinese Enlightenment’ of the 1980s, Li Zehou ᵾ◔৊ (b. 1930), and the popular novelist, poet and essayist Zhang Xianliang ᕥ䌒Ӟ (1936–2014), have also had a central place in cross-cultural appropriation of Kantian ethics and aesthetics.63 As a post-Maoist Marxist scholar Li helped ignite what some call China’s ‘Kant Fever’ in the 1980s (Liu, K., and Tang, X., 1993: 32f.).64 Likened to Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) in 1960s France, Li’s quest for a Marxist basis for subjectivity led him to Kant.65 His Critique of the Critical Philosophy: A Study of Kant ([1979] 1984) – with its tough Kantian style (!) – traces our modern ‘self-reflection’ to Kant’s theory of rationality and his ‘anthropological ontology of subjectivity’.66 Through Chinese and Western sources, Li critiques Kant’s theory from the historicalmaterialist perspective of ‘praxis’, and presents subjectivity as ‘the main conceptual framework with which to examine Chinese culture and history’(Liu and Tang: 32).67 Tool-making and trade – the mighty power-drivers of China’s modernization – are, he maintains, constitutive of subjectivity and of a humanized ‘Nature’. In contrast, Zhang re-imagines Chinese ethics and aesthetics in novelistic form.68 Inspired by Euro-American literature, Zhang’s iconic ‘Prison Wall’ fiction – such as his bleak study of a prisoner, Nanrende yiban shi nuren (Half of man is woman) – recasts Kantian ethics and Marxist ideology from within the Chinese gulag.69 For many Chinese, the Enlightenment via Kant shapes their vision and interpretation of the Analects and Gospels. They are not alone.

CHINA, ROMANTICISM AND REVOLUTION The heavily revised second edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1787, the year Wedgwood fired his abolitionist medallion and a young, aspirant composer, Ludwig Van

On the impact of Kant on Marx’s early thought, Kain, P. J. (1986), ‘The Young Marx and Kantian Ethics’; also, —(1988) Marx and Ethics. Kain points to attention focused historically on Aristotle’s influence on Marx more than Kant’s. Cf. also, McCarthy, G. E. ed. (1992), Marx and Aristotle. 61 On the terms of Kant’s support for and opposition to Revolution, Howard, D. ([1985] 1993), From Marx to Kant, 207. 62 For a recent study of Hölderlin, Luchte, J. (2018), Mortal Thought. Cf. also, Hamburger, M. (1970), Reason and Energy: Studies in German Literature, 8. 63 On Li and Kantian aesthetics, Li, Z. and J. Cauvel (2006), Four Essays on Aesthetics: Toward a Global View, 55f.; also, Li, Z. (1994), The Path of Beauty. 64 On the ‘reception’ of Kant in China and information on publications in the last twenty years, Xu, B. (2016), ‘The Reception of Kant in China’, in G. Campagnolo (ed.), Liberalism and Chinese Economic Development, 25–48. 65 On Kant and Marxism, Deleuze, G. (1984), Kant’s Critical Philosophy; Van De Pitte, F. P. (1971), Kant as Philosophical Anthropologist. On Sartre, p. 426f. 66 N.B. Li Zehou interprets ren (benevolence) as an internalization of li (propriety, rite), i.e. external rules governing human behaviour ultimately derive from rules and rituals of ancestor worship (Liu and Tang, 51, n. 29). 67 On Li’s criticism of Western Marxism that ‘severs philosophy of practice from historical materialism’, ibid., 34f. 68 Cf. Callahan, W. A. (1994), ‘Resisting the Norm: Ironic Images of Marx and Confucius’. 69 On Zhang’s novels and significance, Williams, P. F. and Y. Wu (2004), The Great Wall of Confinement, 180f. 60

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Beethoven (1770–1827), travelled to Vienna for the first time. In his youth, Beethoven was no great philosophile. He demurred when his medical, childhood friend Franz Wegeler (1765–1848) invited him to hear Kant lecture in the 1790s, and later complained to him in a letter (29 June 1801): ‘I have often cursed the Creator and my existence; Plutarch has taught me resignation’ (q. Thayer 1991: 1.284). However, a year later – with deafness nearing – his ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ (6 October 1802) records: ‘Perhaps I shall get better, perhaps not. I am ready. Forced to become a philosopher already in my 28th year; oh, it is not easy, much more difficult for the artist than for anyone’ (ibid., I. 305).70 He does develop a philosophy, then, a very personal and artistic one. Like Confucius and the Romantics, he looks to the past for hope, freedom and inspiration. In a footnote to a letter (29 July 1819) to his new, young Viennese patron and pupil, Archduke Rudolph (1788– 1831), he cites ‘Kunstvereinigung’; a synthesis of old arts with new ideas,71 and of ‘freedom and progress . . . in the world of art as in the whole creation’ (Kinderman 1995: 1). If, as some maintain, Beethoven was always engaged in an ‘ironic play of incongruity’ (ibid., 3), old Vienna was not – Kant offered hope. In his ‘Conversation Book’ for February 1820 (written as he worked on the Missa Solemnis)72 we suddenly read: ‘Das Moralische Gesetz in uns, u. der gestirnte Himmel über uns Kant!!!’ (The moral law within us and the starry heavens above us Kant!!!) (ibid., 238).73 It is as if Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’ has pierced his silence with revelatory – no, revolutionary – clarity. This is behind his setting of Schiller’s 1803 poem ‘An die Freude’ (Ode to Joy),74 in the finale of his Ninth Symphony (1824) in D minor, Opus 125. Nature will be conquered. Humanist hopes for a ‘bourgeois’ society75 – as in post-revolutionary France and the newly founded United States of America – will be fulfilled.76 Like Kant and his fellow Romantics, Beethoven is drawn to ‘the great and the sublime’,77 through the trials of life that refine his character and vocation. Here’s art and revolutionary ardour fired by his hellish angst. There are two facts to note finally with respect to Beethoven, Kant and the Orient. First, through his grandfather Ludwig (1712–73), Beethoven traced his roots to Mechelen, Holland, the very

On Beethoven’s age here, Solomon, M. (1990), Beethoven Essays, 40. On Kunstvereinigung as ‘artistic unification’ (not artistic understanding, or the relation of music to text), Reynolds, C., L. Lockwood and J. Webster, eds (1992–8), Beethoven Forum, I. 112, n. 4. Michael Spitze sees ‘the neatest musical embodiment’ of this in ‘his most polyglot composition’, the Diabelli Variations (1819–23), a parody on Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1741) set beside a Handelian fugue and a quotation from the second movement, ‘Arietta’, of his last Piano Sonata (1822), No. 32, in C minor, Op. 111 (2006: 198f.). 72 On the Missa, p. 243. 73 Cf. for the original, Kant ([1781] 1956), Critique of Pure Reason, 166. 74 N.B. Schiller first titled it ‘An die Freiheit’ (Ode to Freedom). To his dismay, safety and politics forced the change. Apparently, Beethoven contemplated setting the ‘Ode’ to music as early as 1793 (Rumph 2004: 44). 75 On the history, composition, reception and impact of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Cook, N. (1993), Beethoven: Symphony No. 9. N.B. the Ninth Symphony connects with Beethoven’s hope for a ‘New World Order’ based on universal brotherhood and ‘the joint engagement of East and West’ (Al-Taee 2016: 119f.). 76 N.B. the German philosopher, sociologist and composer Theodore W. Adorno (1903–69) speaks of ‘the din of bourgeois revolution’ that ‘rumbles in Beethoven’ (1976: 211). On Adorno, p. 348, 366, n. 103, 451, n. 253, 477, n. 435, 479. Beethoven’s early enthusiasm for Schiller and exposure to Kant came, perhaps, via the jurist Bartholomäus Fischenich (1768–1831; Rumph, 44f.). Nietzsche admired Beethoven, but saw the Ninth Symphony as a warning of the threat art posed to the non-metaphysical artist: ‘At a certain place in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards’ ([1878–80] 1994: No. 153). On Van Gogh’s ‘starry dome’, p. 2. 77 Fischenich’s view of Beethoven (q. Rumph, 45). 70 71

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Catholic hometown of the pioneer Jesuit missionary Philippe Couplet, SJ,78 and many of his kind. Like Kant, the Orient is in Beethoven’s biography and cultural blood. But, how perceptions of China in his day differ from those of his grandfather’s missionary contemporaries!79 Second, after politicized intellectuals and artists, like Lu Xun 冟䗵 (1881–1936), Feng Zikai 䊀ᆀᝧ (1898–1975), Wang Guangqi ⦻‫( ⽸ݹ‬1892–1936), and other leaders of the ‘anti-imperialist’ ‘May 4th Movement’ (1919), had praised and ‘localized’ Beethoven as a global, cultural ‘hero’, at the historic Yan’an ‘Forum on Literature and Art’ ᔦᆹ᮷㰍ᓗ䃷ᴳ (Yanan Wen Yi Zuotanhui) in 1942, twenty-five years later the Cultural Revolution, boldly proclaimed: ‘Criticize Beethoven! Condemn Confucius!’80 Both were now ‘counter-revolutionary imperialists’. In June 1989 the ‘Ode to Joy’ rang out across Tiananmen Square during the student-led protests, or, the ‘June Fourth Incident’ (‫ޝ‬ഋһԦ). As Kant and Confucius saw, simple, ritualized pleasures – like tea, routine and music – had moral, cultural and socio-political power. The spirit of Kunstvereinigung – to which, surely, Confucius, Bach and T. S. Eliot would give their support81 – is felt in the character, purpose, and morality of pro-democracy protests today. Like tea, art can unite as well as divide. If Beethoven’s life and work cast light on the socio-political revolutions of his day (and ours), what else between c. 1750 and 1820 still impacts the way character, purpose and morality in the Analects and the Gospels are interpreted? What is essential is best gathered, or exaggerated, with a focus first on Britain, then on Europe and America. China, Britain and Changing Cultural Horizons China’s relationship to the West begins to change c. 1750.82 Trade, travel and literature all contribute to this. Ships become safer; journeys more frequent. More Chinese are seen on the streets of Europe. Knowledge fosters tension. The cultural stasis of the Qing court is buffeted by exposure to international trade and cultural re-evaluation. George III’s passion for chinoiserie is undone by social pressure and national politics at home, abroad by the new intellectual and cultural horizons of ‘Euraserie’ and ‘Européisme’.83 In 1803 Samuel Miller (1769–1850) published in New York his historic Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, with a chapter devoted to ‘Oriental Literature’ (Pt. I. c 14). Writing in 1807, the ‘Lake Poet’ and poet laureate Robert Southey (1774–1813) records: ‘Plates and tea-ware have made us better acquainted with the Chinese than with any other distant people’ ([1807] 1814: II. 46).84 If ‘Restoration Sinophilia’ and early ‘Enlightenment On Couplet, co-editor of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, p. 34, n. 79. On ‘Orientalism’ in Western music style, including recognition of ‘pentatonicism and parallel fourths’ as the ‘basic signifiers’ for musical chinoiserie, Scott, D. B. (1997), ‘Orientalism and Musical Style’. 80 On Beethoven in China, Cai, J. and S. Melvin (2015), Beethoven in China; —(2004), Rhapsody in Red; Nadel, I. (2015), Cathay: Ezra Pound’s Orient, Ch. 1; Tsang, Y-M. E. (2017), Beethoven in China. At the Yan’an Forum – famed for the ‘cultural rectification’ Mao introduced – Beethoven (pace others) was ‘criticized’ for social elitism and ‘cultural decadence’. In 1982, the CCP said it was an ‘incorrect formulation’ to subordinate literature and art to politics. 81 Whether we should add Jesus to this list is a moot point: his sense of good order, ritual, and the natural beauty of the world, suggest an aesthetic outlook that is too rarely acknowledged. 82 Chen Shouyi argues that it was the publication of Goldsmith’s ‘Chinese Letters’, in his Citizens of the World (1760–1), that ‘not only assured Goldsmith’s literary fame, but also marked the culmination of English interest in Chinese culture and things Chinese’ ([1939] 1998c: 283). On Anson, p. 117, 143, 199. 83 ‘Euraserie’ is used of blended Chinese-European styles; ‘Européisme’ of the gradual cohering of the Western mind (incl. to oppose China) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. 84 Cf. also, Porter, D. (2001), Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe, 133. On Southey, above p. 166, n. 208; also, 207, n. 133. 78 79

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Orientalism’ made China better known, they also made it more susceptible to comparison and criticism. Sharp contrasts are drawn between The Travels of Peter Mundy ([1673] 1919) and Anson’s Voyage Round the World (1778), dubbed ‘the most cocksure unfavourable opinion of the Chinese character’ (Qian, Z., 1998b: 149f.; Gunn 2003: 149f.). Like a souring familial relationship, hesitancy became distrust, scepticism cynicism, with recrimination erupting in the ‘Opium Wars’ of the 1840s and 1850s. Texts, tea and tradition are loci of conflict. War brews as the Georgian era wanes. The nature, causes and dynamics of changing Western attitudes to China in the late 18th century have attracted increased scholarly attention. In Britain, the British diplomat and traveller Sir George Staunton (who, unusually, knew China and spoke Chinese) wrote to the politician and diarist John Cam Hobhouse, later Lord Broughton (1786–1869), in May 1819: ‘Confucius had formerly been too cried up, and [is] now too much cried down’ (q. Kitson 2013: 193).85 He might have said the same of China – and probably meant as much! The note of realism – if not exasperation – in Staunton’s words expresses the ambivalence many in Britain and its ruling class felt towards China by the end of George III’s reign. Chinoiserie had always been to some, as David Beevers points out, ‘a retreat from reason and taste, and a descent into a morally ambiguous world based on hedonism, sensation and values perceived to be feminine’ (2009: 19). Or, as David Porter calls ‘blue and white’ china, ‘a flimsy fantasy of doll-like lovers, children, monkeys and fishermen lolling about in pleasure gardens graced by eternal spring’ (2001: 135). And, to the architectural authority Robert Morris (1701–54) the ‘Chinese style’ was ‘mere whims and chimera, without rules or order’, which required ‘no fertility of genius to put into execution’ (q. Beevers, 19). The king’s volatility and personal passion for chinoiserie became synonymous with extravagance and despotism. Pagodas and porcelain fell out of fashion.86 Neutrality towards China became difficult. People were, as often, casualties of a dispute not of their making, like international orphans today. The evidence for changing British attitudes towards China in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is complex, at times contradictory. Kitson speaks of a ‘strategic evasion’ of China in popular British discourse (ibid., 181), Porter of an ‘illegitimacy’ and ‘instrumental amnesia’ in its approach to Chinese cultural imagery (2010: 155).87 In popular literature, ‘blue and white’ becomes a trope for imitation (Kitson, 183). As Staunton noticed, though, the 18th-century also contains what Eugenia Jenkins designates ‘sinography’ (2013: 4f.) – a deliberate ‘writing in’ of China and Chinese culture in British literature and convention(s). Domestic ritual and royal protocol reflect a programmatic idealization of Chinese culture. Cosmopolitanism is chic in Georgian Britain.88 The

85 Cf. also, Cranmer-Byng, J. L. (1967), ‘The first British sinologists: Sir George Staunton and the Reverend Robert Morrison’, in F. S. Drake (ed.), Symposium, 247–59. Barrow’s Travels in China (1804), written before Morrison’s arrival in China, describes Staunton as ‘unquestionably the first who opened to Europeans any of the useful treasures of Chinese literature’ (q. Kitson, 99). 86 N.B. the role of the politician and art historian Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Oxford (1717–97), in converting the architectural patron and ‘founder of Sharawadji in England’, Richard Bateman (1705–73), so ‘every pagoda took the veil’ (Kitson 2016a: 13). On chinoiserie in 18th-century Europe, Ledderose, L. (1991), ‘Chinese Influence on European Art, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries’, in Lee (ed.), China and Europe, 221–50; Rosenzweig, D. L. (1982), Exotic Kingdoms; Siren, O. (1950), China and Gardens of Europe of the Eighteenth Century; Porter, D. (2010), The Chinese Taste. 87 Also, Porter, D. (1999), ‘Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy’. 88 Cf. Ch’ien, C-S. (1941), ‘China in the English Literature of the Eighteenth Century’; Clarke, D. J. (2011), ‘Chitqua: A Chinese artist in Eighteenth-Century London’; —(2010), ‘An Encounter with Chinese Music in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London’.

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American ‘War of Independence’ (1775–83) and violent French Revolution (1789–99) threaten this. National identity is re-rendered as a volatile, negotiable reality or as a romantic ideal creatively captured and jealously guarded. British attitudes to the Orient in the late 18th and early 19th centuries are fluid. There is both continuity and discontinuity with preceding generations.89 Srivinas Aravamudam speaks of a new type of xenophobia emerging (2012: 74). Lach and Van Kley (1993), André Gunder Frank (1998), and Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) connect this to money. Britain is entering a new era of trade wars and economic competition. In time, China and its trade will both be commoditized. Caution, criticism and, if necessary, conflict, are as so often sad correlates of economic ambition. Add to this the bleak national humiliation of the Macartney (1792) and Amherst (1816) Embassies to the Qing court, and sinophilia becomes plain unpatriotic.90 On broad cultural horizons we see the tired dawn of international tension breaking. The Analects and Gospels are read in the gloom of historic animosity, and the moral ambiguity it created. Drilling down into British, European and, now, American attitudes to China between c. 1750 and 1820 reveals subtle differences.91 To pan-European political, intellectual and cultural crossfertilization is added the trans-Atlantic trade and expanded East-West contact. New bi-lateral political and economic relations are generated. The British presence in India from the early 18th century, and the international reach of the EIC, meant China could never leverage ‘exceptional’ treatment. Traditional biblical attitudes to ‘the right and the good’ encounter new cultural norms and the daily pressure of real politik. In Britain, classism and rural decay, urban growth and widespread poverty, Georgian depravity and pervasive death, create the contingencies for cultural tension and colonial expansion. A new world is sought and bought. In Staunton’s realism we glimpse the light and shade in occidental attitudes to China and Chinese culture in his day. There is bright hope to master the language, literature, history and culture of China and to integrate this learning in British, European and American culture. There is gathering gloom about China’s sociocultural and religious ‘otherness’, and growing recognition of the need to confront, convert, or somehow coerce it. Questions of character, purpose and morality are integral to this East-West cultural exchange in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. An introduction to some of the literature of the period helps to explain Staunton’s words and exegete his complex world. Four British publications reveal the explosion in printed material relating to China during this period: i. Fragments of Oriental Literature: With an Outline of a Painting on a Curious China Vase (1807),92 by the cleric, antiquarian and (part-) translator of the ancient ‘Rosetta Stone’,93 Stephen Weston (1747–1830); ii. A Catalogue of the Library belonging to the English Factory in Macao (1815), which Morrison and other Protestant missionaries to China gathered; iii. the Bibliotheca Marsdeniana philologica et orientalis. A Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts (1827), by the Irish colonial civil servant and orientalist William Marsden (1754–1836); and, iv. the London bookseller ‘Orient’ is a fluid term, sometimes being used interchangeably with ‘China’, at other times including everywhere from Egypt and Persia to India, China and the Koreas. 90 On these two events, Bickers, R. A. (1993), Ritual and Diplomacy; Hevia, J. L. (1995), Cherishing Men from Afar; Webster, A. (1998), Gentleman Capitalists. 91 Cf. Elisseeff-Poisle, D. (1991), ‘Chinese Influence in France, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries’, in Lee (ed.), China and Europe, 129–150; also, Lottes, G. (1991), ‘China in European Political Thought, 1750–1850’, idem, 65–98. 92 N.B. 1807 was the year Wilberforce won his first vote in parliament against the slave trade in British territories and Morrison arrived in Canton. On Wilberforce and Morrison, p. 213, 253. 93 The ‘Rosetta Stone’ (196 BCE) is an inscribed granodiorite stele with an inscription of a decree issued in Memphis, Egypt, by King Ptolemy V Epiphanes (204–181 BCE). 89

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William Lowndes’s (c. 1798–1843) Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature (1834).94 In addition to works cited already that remain available, we find listed here John Barrow’s (1764– 1848) Travels in China (1804); James Horsburgh’s (1762–1836) Memoirs: comprising the Navigation to and from China (1805); Chrétien-Louis de Guignes, Jr’s. (1749–1845) Voyages à Peking (1808); Julius von Klaproth’s (aka Sinologus Berolinensis) Remarques Philologiques sur les Voyages en Chine de M. de Guignes (1809) and Voyage á Péking, à travers la Mongolie, en 1820 et 1821, par M.G. Timkouski (1827); John McLeod’s (c. 1777–1820) Narrative of a Voyage in H.M’s late ship Alceste to the Yellow Sea (1817); and, British surgeon and naturalist Clarke Abel’s (1789–1826) Narrative of a Journey in the interior of China, and of a Voyage to and from that country, in the years 1816 and 1817 (1818).95 These were the flammable fuel of political fears, economic hopes, Romantic dreams, and religious fervour. We might add – besides Staunton’s own diplomatic records (1797, 1821) – those by Lord Macartney’s valet Æneas Anderson (n.d.; 1795), and one of his escort, SgtMaj. Samuel Holmes (n.d.; 1798); those by Dutch emissary Andreas van Braam Houckgeest (1739– 1801), published in America by the slave-owning French lawyer-bureaucrat Médéric L.E. Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750–1819; 1798); and, those by the diplomat Sir Henry Ellis (1788–1855; 1817), who travelled with Lord Amherst. There is also a host of studies on trade with China, and, on everything from its laws, customs, poetry and novels to its topography and vaccinations.96 Life in China was cast in sharp relief by this new body of material. The opportunity and threat, morality and needs of China became ever-clearer – as did the true expense of new commodities like tea, now deemed ‘essential’ by an adolescent European society.97 Among the works on Chinese language, script, and grammar listed by Marsden are texts by the founders of modern European sinology.98 The temptation to see China behind the bamboo curtain of Chinese became for some irresistible. To works by Abel-Rémusat, Amiot, De Guignes, Klaproth, Marshman, Morrison and Weston,99 are added now those of figures such as Gregory Son of a bookseller, Lowndes’s Bibliographer’s Manual took fourteen years to complete. The first of its kind, Lowndes saw little return on his investment. What the work lacked in accuracy it possessed in originality. Henry Bohn (1796–1884), a publisher-bookseller, employed Lowndes, but he edited and republished his work to his own financial advantage. 95 Through Sir Joseph Banks, Clarke was medic and naturalist for the Amherst Embassy. 96 Cf. Amiot, J. J. M., SJ (1776–1814), Mémoires concernant l’histoire, les sciences, les arts, les moeurs, les usages &c des Chinois; Assey, C. (1819), On the Trade to China, and the Indian Archipelago; Ball, S. (1817), Observations on the expediency of Opening a Second Port in China; Davis, J. F. (1823), Hien-wun-shoo. Chinese Moral Maxims; Abbé Grosier (1788, 1795), Description of China; Montucci, A. ed. (1804), Letters to the Editor of the Universal Magazine, on Chinese Literature; Reaves, J. (1819), Chinese names of Stars and Constellations; Staunton, G. T., Bt. (1805), A Treatise on the practice of Vaccination, in the Chinese language and character; —(1810), Ta-tsing-leu-lee; Being the fundamental Laws, and a Selection from the supplementary Statutes, of the Penal Code of China —(1822), Miscellaneous Notices relating to China. 97 For study of tea alongside China’s history, geography, and poetry, Amiot, J. J. M., SJ (1770), Eloge de la Ville de Moukden. It’s said antipathy to China was fuelled by suggestions saw-dust was added to imported tea! 98 On early European Sinology, Franke, H. (1992), ‘In search of China’, in M. Wilson and J. Cayley (eds), Europe Studies China, 11–25; Honey, D. B. (2001), Incense at the Altar, 1–40. 99 Cf. Abel-Rémusat, J-P. (1814a), Critique sur l’ouvrage intitulé (extract from Moniteur 36); —(1814b), Plan d’un dictionnaire chinois; —(1815), Programme du Cours de Langue et de Littérature Chinoises; —(1822), Éléments de la Grammaire Chinoise; Amiot, J. J. M., SJ (1773), Lettre de Pékin, sure le génie de la langue Chinoise; de Guignes, C-L., Jr. (1810), Réflexions sur la Langue Chinoise; —(1813), Dictionnaire chinois, français et latin; von Klaproth, J. H. [Sinologus Berolinensis] (1809), Remarques Philologiques; —(1822), Verzeichnis der Chinesischen und Mandshuischen Bücher; —(1823), Asia Polyglotta; Marshman, J. (1809), The Works of Confucius; —(1814b), Elements of a Chinese Grammar; Morrison, R. (1815), Translations from the original Chinese; —(1815b), A Grammar of the Chinese language; —(1815–23), A Dictionary of the Chinese language; —(1816), Dialogues and detached sentences in the Chinese language; —(1817), A View of China for Philological Purposes; Weston, S. (1812), Siao çu lin, or a small Collection of Chinese Characters. 94

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Sharpe (1713–1771),100 the German typographer Johann Breitkopf (1719–94), the French linguist and orientalist Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre De Sacy (1758–1838), the pan-European lawyerlinguist Antonio Montucci (1762–1829), the pioneering Cambridge Sinologist Thomas Myers (1774–1834), the Portuguese scholar J. A. Gonçalves (1780–1841), and the diplomat-Orientalist and second Governor of Hong Kong (fr. 1844–8), Sir John Davis (1795–1890).101 The trickle we saw in Chapters 3 and 4 is now a torrent of sophisticated material that will over time both define and destroy Sino-Western relations.102 Those seeking to engage, explore or evangelize China possess new sinological equipment.103 If there is, as John Barrow claims, a ‘singular listlessness’ in British attitudes towards China and Sinology at the turn of the nineteenth century, this is not shared by all.104 The ‘contact zones’, as Ulrike Hillemann calls them, of Canton, Macao and Malacca, where trade and mission focus, ‘shaped British knowledge about China and the way the British understood their relationship with the Chinese’ (2009: 14).105 In this changing world, language, law and religion gain new pre-eminence.106 Fired by trans-Atlantic evangelical ‘Revivals’, Morrison and his missionary colleagues brought more than a gospel of peace to China. They poured oil on Sino-Western relations.107 Their spiritual sword pierced China’s cultural heart. Morrison acts with understanding. Though contentiously (to pious peers) paid as the official interpreter for the EIC, Morrison was, and still is – as his long-term ally Sir George Staunton (and, later, J. L. Cranmer-Byng) recognized – ‘the first really professional English sinologist’ (q. Kitson: 80).108 His multi-volume Chinese Dictionary

On Sharpe – esp. his relation to Chinese materials collected by Bodley Librarian Thomas Hyde (above p. 101), DNB 17, 1361f.; Golvers, N. (2003), Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J., 208f. 101 Cf. Sharpe, S. (1767), De Lingua Sinensi aliisque Linguis Orientalibus; Breitkopf, J. G. I. (1789), Exemplum Typographiae Sinicae; Silvestre De Sacy, A. I. (1815), Ouverture des Cours de Sanskrit et de Chinois; Montucci, A. (1801), ‘An Account of an Evangelical Chinese Manuscript in the British Museum’; —(1817), Urh-chih-tsze-tëen-se-yin-pe-keáou; Myers, T. (1825), An essay on the nature and structure of the Chinese language; Gonçalves, J. A. (1829), Arte China; Davis, (Sir) J. F. (1823), Hien-wun-shoo. Chinese Moral Maxims. For a fuller survey of early Western materials on the Chinese language, Lust, J. (1987), Western Books on China published up to 1850; Reed, M. and P. Demattè, eds (2007, 2011), China on Paper. On 19th-century works, and on Davis, p. 203, 205f., 267f. 102 On Chinese Grammars in the 18th and 19th century, Zurndorfer, H. T. (1995), China Bibliography, Ch. 1. On Breitkopf and new technologies to print Chinese characters, Lehner, G. (2004), Der Druck chinesischer Zeichen in Europa, 104–9. 103 On the impact of the new linguistic science of comparative philology on the work of the missionary sinologist and Bible translator Joseph Edkins (1823–1905), Foley, T. S. (2009), Biblical Translation in Chinese and Greek, 79f. 104 N.B. discussion in the Edinburgh Review (1809, 1810), Quarterly Review (1810), and Asiatic Journal (1827), of new techniques for learning Chinese (Classical and colloquial), in Lehner, G. (2010), ‘ “From Enlightenment to Sinology”, in P. F. Williams (ed.), Asian Literary Voices, 71–92. On the history of European and British sinology, Franke, H. (1968), Sinology in German Universities; Gernet, J. (1985), China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures; Wilson, M. and J. Cayley, eds (1995), Europe Studies China; Chen, Y-s. and P. S. Y. Hsaio (1967), Sinology in the United Kingdom and Germany. N.B. German academic resistance to oriental languages (Lehner 2010: 82f.). 105 On changing attitudes in the West to China’s political economy, in light of greater knowledge, Millar, A. E. (2017), A singular case: Debating China’s political economy in the European Enlightenment. 106 Cf. Stifler, S. R. (1938), ‘The Language Students of the East India Company’s Canton Factory’; also, Kitson, Forging Romantic China, 81f. 107 On Morrison generally, Hancock, C., Robert Morrison (2008). N.B. Marsden’s catalogue contains few of Morrison’s works and none of his biblical translations. On Morrison’s work as a Bible translator, Hancock, 74f., 104–9, 124f., 130f. For criticism of Morrison’s work by Abel-Rémusat and Klaproth, and praise for it by Davis and Staunton, Hancock, 211–14. On the controversy between Morrison and Marshman on the timing and relationship between their works, also Foley, Biblical Translation, 74f., n. 61, 62, 64, 65. 108 Cf. Cranmer-Byng, J. L. (1967), ‘The first British sinologists: Sir George Staunton and the Reverend Robert Morrison’, in F. S. Drake (ed.), Symposium on Historical Archaeological and Linguistic Studies on South China, 247–59. 100

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remains a remarkable feat.109 Sir John Davis called it, ‘that colossal labour of utility’ and ‘an honour at once to himself and to his country’ (1829: I. xix). When James Legge began Chinese in England, like other missionaries he was pointed to Morrison’s Dictionary by his teacher Samuel Kidd (1799– 1843);110 for radicals, characters and their use, to Morrison’s Chinese New Testament and Confucius’s Analects (Lehner 2010: 82). As Timothy Barrett says: ‘[T]he years following Morrison’s arrival in Canton in 1807 can be said to mark the first true flowering of British sinology’ (1989: 63).111 China’s language/s, texts, and traditions are studied more carefully:112 Confucian morality is scrutinized, compared and by some condemned. China must have felt increasingly ‘invaded’. Short ‘Tracts’ and other concise works – like the 13th-century Sanzijing (йᆇ㏃), or ‘Three Character Classic’ (often linked to the Song Dynasty scholars Wang Yinglin ⦻៹哏 [1223–96] and Ou Shizi ॰䚙ᆀ [1234– 1324]), that for generations had taught children Confucian values – are employed in Christian apologetics.113 As Marshman’s Clavis Sinica (1814a), Morrison’s Grammar of the Chinese Language (1815), and Davis’s Hien-wun-shoo (1823) also illustrate, Chinese texts become tools for languagelearning as much as evangelism. Earlier Catholic scholarship is supplemented by that of European academics and Protestant missionaries.114 Sinology gains a new intellectual and spiritual caché. Rivalries sprout as international tension grows.115 Alongside Morrison, Marshman publishes The Works of Confucius (1809, with Analects 1–10) and Collie The Four Books (1828).116 Thus it is comparative Confucian-Christian ethics emerges as a discrete field of enquiry: literature, story and poetry will all play a central role. Morrison’s Chinese Miscellany gives us an insight into his view of Confucius and Confucian ethics. The Four Books are, he states, ‘miserably defective’ (q. Kitson, 93). He indicts Confucianism for its atheism, materialism, spiritual optimism (it lacks a doctrine of original sin), cultural oppression, messianism and later (Neo-Confucian) pantheism. So, ‘The sanctions of the Eternal and Almighty God, arrayed with every natural and moral perfection; wise and good, and just and For criticism of Morrison’s Dictionary, Montucci, A. (1817), Urh-chih-tsze-teen-se-yin-pe-keaou. On Ezra Pound’s later use of Morrison’s Dictionary, Cheadle, M. P. (1997), Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations, 61f. On Pound, below p. 383f. 110 Kidd is also important for British sinology. After training at the LMS college at Gosport, he was sent (via Madras) to Malacca, where he continued his Chinese studies and learned Hokkien with David Collie (p. 244). Appointed Professor of Chinese at the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca in 1826, Kidd published tracts in China before being invalided back to Britain in 1832. After a brief ministry in Manningtree, Essex, in 1837 Kidd was appointed (for initially five years) as the first Professor of Chinese at University College, London. He died suddenly in June 1843. 111 For a sympathetic assessment by Samuel Kidd of Morrison’s Chinese publications (Morrison 1839: II, ‘Appendix’). 112 On debate about text-based Sinology v. inter-disciplinary Chinese Studies, Brødsgaard, K. E. (2008), ‘China Studies in Europe’, in D. Shambaugh, E. Sandschneider and Z. Hong (eds), China-Europe Relations, 35–64 (esp 56f., n. 1 and 2). 113 On missionary ‘Tracts’ in China, Lai, J. T-P. (2005), ‘The Enterprise of Translating Christian Tracts by Protestant Missionaries in Nineteenth Century China’; Barnett, S. and J. K. Fairbank, eds (1985), Christianity in China, ad loc. Also, on the missionary Walter Medhurst’s (1796–1857) educational use of the Sanzijing, Rawski, E. S. (1985), ‘Elementary Education in the Mission Enterprise’, in Barnett and Fairbank, 135–51. 114 On early Catholic translations of Confucian materials, Lundbaek, K. (1979), ‘The first translation from a Confucian Classic in Europe’; Mungello, D. E. (1981), ‘The Jesuits’ Use of Chang Chü-cheng’s Commentary’; —(1988), ‘The Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Translation Project’, in C. E. Ronan, SJ, and B. B. C. Oh (eds), East Meets West, 252–72; —(1985a), ‘The First Complete Translation of the Confucian Four Books’. 115 On the dispute in 1815 between Morrison and Marshman over mutual plagiarizing of each other’s Chinese Grammars, Foley, Biblical Translation, 76, n. 65; Zetzsche, Bible in China, 51. In 1811 Morrison sent his Grammar to Serampore for review pre-publication. 116 Marshman’s work was to be one of 5 vols. On its reception in America, Weir, D. (2011), American Orient, 74f.; Takanashi, Y. (2014), Emerson and Neo-Confucianism, 1f. Cf. also, Collie, D. (1828), The Classical Chinese Work commonly called The Four Books, which Kitson dismisses as a ‘philistine and unsympathetic translation’ (2013: 92). 109

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merciful; and the fears and hopes of immortality; and the grace of a saviour; are wholly wanting in the ancient Chinese works’ (1825: 34).117 ‘Magnificent sounding’ Confucian morality is, he says, ‘founded upon gratuitous data’ (ibid.). However, though lacking divine sanction, the ‘Confucian School’ does incorporate ‘a system of fitness, suitableness, propriety, or decorum . . . by which to attain honour, offices, and emoluments in that country’ (ibid., 42). To a dour, frequently isolated Calvinist tea-totaller there was much to admire in Confucius’s altruistic virtue and disciplined life. It is not ‘merely intellectual knowledge’, that he sees. He acknowledges ‘a clear discernment of illustrious virtue’ and ‘an accurate perception of nature’s light, connected with a sincere application of this knowledge to the moral improvement of the individual’ (ibid.). The value Confucius set on virtue per se was music to Morrison’s ears. So, commenting on the Liji (Book of Rites), he underlines its emphasis on ‘self-respect and respect for others’, its ‘seriousness of mind, of manner, of speech, at the foundation of the whole’ (ibid.). Both he and his protégé William Milne (1785–1822) quote the Analects on the title-page of their Chinese-language newspaper, Cha shisu meiyue tongji chuan (A General Monthly Record, containing opinions and practices of society), published in Malacca between 1815 and 1821: ‘The Master said, “Listen to many things, distinguish the good and follow it” ’ (q. Wagner 2007: 21).118 This invocation of the Classics (yinjing) reflects missionary concern for kouqi ਓ≓ (correct mode of speech) and Protestant enquiry into comparative Confucian-Christian ethics. In time, Morrison reckons ‘word’ and ‘deed’ to be as integral to persuasive apologetics as character and action are to effective government. The Shujing has, he holds, ‘principles of the heart, from which the good government of Rulers must flow’ (1825: 38); that is (like the mythic Yao and Yu), ‘Virtue, Benevolence, Gravity, Sincerity’.119 The Four Books teach an individual ‘the doctrine of a comparative disregard of riches’ (ibid., 43). ‘The merely rich man’, with no ‘power, or learning, or virtue’ is ‘despicable’ (ibid.). In summary, Morrison is as keen to commend Confucius’s socioethical practice as to condemn his ideas as un-Christian. Both know the power of pithy saying, parable and story. As Kidd précised Morrison’s ‘Literary Labours’ (in the Memoirs) and his view of Confucian morality (quoting the Dictionary): A family is the prototype of his nation, or empire, and he lays at the foundation of his system, not the visionary notions which have no existence in nature, of independence and equality, but the principles of dependence and subordination, as of children to parents, the younger to the elder, and so on. These principles are . . . inculcated in the Confucian writings, and . . . embodied in solemn ceremonials, and in apparently trivial forms of etiquette. And it is probably this feature of Confucius’s ethics which has made him such a favourite with all the governments of China for many centuries past, and at this day . . . his doctrines are what Europeans call common-place truisms; justice, benevolence and social order . . . nearly comprehend the whole of what he

Chinese Miscellany was published while Morrison was on furlough in Britain (Hancock, 174–197). The 51pp. work gives a reliable insight into Morrison’s mature perspective on China, Confucianism and Sinology. 118 Medhurst and Gützlaff also quote the Analects on the front of publications. 119 To Morrison, the ‘happy sway’ of government in antiquity derived from the ruler seeking ‘a virtuous heart’; for, ‘it was in vain for modern Rulers to expect good government can flow from vicious hearts’. This is echoed in his exposition of Confucian virtues and vices; namely, ‘kung’ (public good), ‘sze’ (selfish good/vice), ‘jin’ (benevolence) and ‘le’ (loving for selfish ends). He adds with characteristic vigour: ‘[T]he cant in Mercantile China, is that Europeans and Americans are a gain-seeking tribe of daring adventurers; the proof of which accusation is derived chiefly from the manifest sacrifices, in respect to domestic comfort, for gain’s sake, which their foreign visitors make’ (1825: 43). 117

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taught. They contain two of the three duties inculcated by a heaven-taught writer of the west, ‘Do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God’. —II. ‘Appendix’ We should not underestimate the invasive power of this informed analysis: nuance, fear and values enter cross-cultural studies in new ways. Hybridity is a legacy of emergent globality. Modern morality is conceived through intercourse with Chinese culture. The problem of translating key Confucian terms is found here, too;120 but new options are now on the table. Poetry, literature and theatre have occupied a unique place over the centuries in Sino-Western cultural exchange. We have seen this before and return to it in Chapters 6 and 7. Texts, their translation and performance, have unique cultural power. Worlds expand and contract when texts are shared. The process of cultural adaptation and intellectual infusion that we have seen in Coleridge (p. 195) gathers pace as Chinese literature becomes better known. A pioneer in this field is the enterprising ballad-collector and sinophile Bishop of Dromore, Thomas Percy (1729–1811). In 1761 Percy published his first translation of the classic late 17th-century Caizi jiaren ᡽ᆀ֣Ӫ (i.e. trad. romance between a poor scholar and a beautiful girl)121 by Mingjiao Zhongren ਽ᮉѝӪ (lit., Man of the Teaching of Names: [n.d.]),122 Haoqiu zhuan ྭ䙁ۣ. Percy’s new work – Hao Kiou Choan, or The Pleasing History – improves an earlier version by the EIC trader James Wilkinson (d. 1736). On the title-page Du Halde is quoted: ‘There is no better means of instruction on China than letting China speak for herself ’ (Minford and Lau 2000: xliii).123 Percy’s aims are cultural, literary and, clearly, moral: for, love and humanity are seen and prized around the world. A year later, he publishes his two-volume Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese. Mutual cultural understanding is again his priority. China and Chinese are to be known through literature. Christian virtues can be clarified and confirmed by comparison and translation. Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) is also important. Beloved of literary friends Samuel Johnson, and his biographer Boswell, Joseph and Samuel Warton (1722–1800, 1728–90), the English Romantics and the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759–96), Percy sets English and Chinese literature on a level cultural playing-field. Character, purpose and morality are now illuminated globally. Story is a medium for cross-cultural moralizing; but, as here, moral tales remain just stories unless their point is grasped and their message lived. Cf. Jürgensmeyer and Darrow: ‘There are always difficulties in translating key terms from one language to another, and the problem is particularly difficult here because each Chinese character may have several meanings, or rather, may indicate a range of meanings. Therefore, translators continue to disagree on translations for basic terms in Confucian ethics’ (1991: 197). 121 Usually dated 1683. N.B. Percy was much-translated in the late 18th and 19th centuries. 122 On humanity in the Haoqiu zhuan, Lee, China and Europe, 184; Starr, C. F. (2007), Red-Light Novels of the Late Qing, 40. 123 Fr. ‘Il n’y a pas de meilleur moyen de s’instruire de la Chine, que par la Chine même.’ On Percy and issues of translation, St. André, J. (2000), ‘Modern translation theory and past translation practice: European translations of the Hao qiu zhuan’; Chen, S. (1998d), ‘Thomas Percy and His Chinese Studies’, in Hsia (ed.), Vision of China, 301–24.; Fan, T. C. (1946), ‘Percy’s Hao Kiou Choaan’, 117–25; Watt, J. (2007), ‘Thomas Percy, China, and the Gothic’; also, for recent Chinese interest in Percy, Li, Z. (2018), 㤡഻ᰙᵏ╒ᆨᇦ⒟⪚ᯟg⧰㾯Ⲵ╒䃎⹄ウ [Early English sinologist Thomas Percy’s understanding of and comments on the Chinese language]. N.B. Watt interpreted Dodsley’s issuing of Percy’s Hau kiou choaan as important for two reasons: i. Dodsley had previously published The Oeconomy of Human Life (1750), an influential, non-denominational work on ‘Duties that relate to Man, considered as an individual’; and, ii. Percy’s work offered a way to satisfy society’s craving for chinoiserie and for an exotic, a-religious (Eastern) morality. 120

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After Percy, Morrison’s A View of China deployed two novels, or ሿ䃚 (xiaoshuo), Haoqiu zhuan124 (The Pleasing History; or, The Pleasant Union) and the mid-18th century ‘classic’ by Cao Xueqin ᴩ䴚㣩 (1715/24–63/4), ㌵⁃དྷ Honglu Meng (The Dream of the Red Chamber),125 to catechize in colloquial Chinese.126 Weston translated and published Ly Tang, an Imperial Poem, in Chinese (1809), Fan-hy-cheu: A Tale in Chinese and English (1814), The Conquest of the Miao-tse, an Imperial Poem by Kien-Lung (1815), and A Specimen of Picturesque Poetry in Chinese (1816); while Davis published San-yu-low; or, ‘The Three Dedicated Rooms’ (1815), Laou-seng-urh; or, ‘an Heir in his old age’ (1817), Chinese Novels translated from the originals (1822), and the novels Han Koong Tsew or The Sorrows of Han (1829) and, again, The Fortunate Union: A Romance (2 vols, 1829).127 The way is open for character, purpose and morality to be re-considered in close dialogue with Chinese literature and tradition, and Confucian culture and morality. All kinds of scientific, artistic and intellectual activity follow,128 as old China births the mind and morality of modernity. In time, these off-spring turn against the parent and destroy China’s ancient, familial heritage. Three other marks of changing Western – particularly here, British – attitudes towards China deserve mention for their immediate and lasting impact on our theme. First, we return to Coleridge and Romanticism. To many, Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798, 2nd edn, 1800) signals the start of the Romantic Movement in the Anglo-phone world.129 As the literary critic and poet Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) wrote glowingly in October 1821: ‘Every lover of books, scholar or not, who knows what it is to have his quarto open against a loaf at his tea . . . ought to be in possession of Mr. Coleridge’s poems, if it is only for Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Ancient Mariner’ (1821: 666).130

N.B. also transliterated Hao Kiou Choan. On the semi-autobiographical Dream of the Red Mansions (also The Story of the Stone), its reception and interpretation, Hawkes, D. (1973), The Story of the Stone, I. 15–9; Hsia, C. T. (1968), The Classic Chinese Novel, 245–97; Liu, Z. and Y. Shu (2008), Reflections on Dream of the Red Chamber; Plaks, A. H. (1976), Archetype and Allegory in the ‘Dream of the Red Chamber’; Wu, S-C. (1961), On the Red Chamber Dream; Yu, A. (1994), ‘Dream of the Red Chamber’, in B. S. Miller (ed.), Masterworks of Asian Culture, 285–99. 126 To teach different ‘tiers’ in Chinese language, Morrison takes the student from colloquial Chinese and the Shengyu guangxun zhu 㚆䄝ᔓ䁃 (Explanation of the amplified instructions on the Sacred Edict, 1724) through to Classical Chinese (wenyan ᮷䀰) in the Sishu hejiang ഋᴨਸ䅋 (Combined commentary on the Four Books) and the older Qinding wujing chuanshuo Ⅽᇊӄ㏃ۣ䃚 (The Imperial Tradition [or Commentary] on the Five Classics) (1817: 120f.; cf. also, Lehner 2010: 71–92, esp. 80). 127 Davis published his translation of the Haoqiu Zhuan (1829) while working for the EIC in Canton. Tutored in Chinese by Morrison, Davis became President of the Factory in 1832 and Chief Superintendent of Trade with China (fr. 1834–5), before being appointed Governor of Hong Kong in 1844. He resigned as Governor in 1848 after protracted conflict with traders in the colony. Cf. Davis’s translation of the Haoqiu Zhuan and role in ‘Romantic Sinology’ (Kitson 2013: 117f.). On Davis’s evolving perception of China and its relation to early- and mid-Victorian popular and political opinion, Wagner, T. S. (2007), ‘Sketching China and the Self-Portrait of a Post-Romantic Traveller’, in D. Kerr and J. Kuehn (eds), A Century of Travels in China, 13–26. 128 On the impact and use (in 1836) of Marshman’s translation of the Lunyu by American essayist and Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), Richardson, R. D., Jr. (1995), Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 218f.; Dolan, N. and L. J. Wey (2015), ‘Emerson and China’, in D. LaRocca and R. Miguel-Alfonso (eds), A Power to Translate the World, 236–48. On China and early 20th-century ‘Modernism’, Chapter 7, passim. 129 On the ‘very complicated origins’ of the Romantic Movement and its character, see the classic discussion in Ford, F. M. ([1938] 1994), The March of Literature, 541f. 130 N.B. Kubla Khan is here, ‘a voice and a vision, an everlasting tune in our mouths, a dream fit for Cambuscan and all his poets, a dance of pictures such as Giotto and Cimabue, revived and re-inspirited, would have made for a Storie of Old Tartarie’. 124 125

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Coleridge’s warm orientalism evokes ‘Regency Sinology’.131 However defined, ‘Romanticism’ plays a key role in Sino-Western cultural exchange. China is creatively re-imagined in Romantic writing, with the Romantics ever-after esteemed in China for their cultural iconoclasm, creative aestheticism, and embrace of ‘Nature’ (albeit in its wild grandeur more than the bridled order of Oriental sharawadgi).132 If we see some differences between Barrow’s ‘exogenous’ (personal) account and Staunton’s ‘endogenous’ (official) report of the ‘Macartney Embassy’, contrasts also exist between well-informed (endogenous) reports on China by missionaries and its imaginative (exogenous) re-construal by the Romantics. Location and now motivation shape perception. Four features of Coleridge’s work illustrate his distinctive views on China and on Christianity. First, amid various Romantic ‘Orientalisms’,133 Coleridge’s is the most potent. In his opiuminduced ‘dream poem’ about Marco Polo in Xanadu, Kubla-Khan – which Coleridge wrote in the year the ‘Macartney Embassy’ failed (1797) and published in 1816134 – we see again Staunton’s weary realism. The 13th-century Mongol becomes a trope for China’s cultural decay (Vallins, Oishi and Perry, 135f.). To Bloom, echoing Barrow’s ‘woeful change of sentiment’ (q. Kitson, 128), in the shadowed romance of Kubla Khan Milton’s ‘paradise’ is demonized and antiquated China’s pitiful malaise depicted (1986: Introduction). Missionary sentiment ran counter to – and skilfully coopted – socio-cultural and political negativity towards China. What secular minds sought to renew, saintly hearts longed to redeem. ‘Nature’ (qua the natural world) – more than sin – is central to Coleridgean Romanticism. The binary reality that he sets out in ‘the soothing love-kindling effect of rural Nature’ and ‘the bad passions of human societies’ ([1794–1804] 1957: I, §1376; q. Class 2012: 117) reflects his respect for the German poet Schiller and his Confucianesque view of natural, moral ‘harmony’ as conformity to heaven’s will.135 To Coleridge, ethics and salvation are derived from lived experience and submission to God. As Andrea Timár (2015) argues, Coleridge reflects a post-Kantian emphasis on ‘free will’, as the power to cultivate good ‘habits’; albeit, in Coleridge’s

Elinor Shaffer believes Coleridge the most profoundly ‘orientalist’ author in his day (1975: 17–143). For translation and reception of Coleridge in China in the 1920s by Malay man of letters Gu Hongming 䗌卫䣈 (1857–1928), poet-critic Zhu Xiang ᵡ⒈ (1904–33), ‘China’s Keats’, and poet-translator Bian Zhiling ঎ѻ⩣ (1910–2000), and, by many other scholars since the 1980s, Guo, F. (2016), ‘A Literature Review of S.T. Coleridge in China and (at) Abroad’. 132 On contrasting views of ‘Nature’, p. 1, 5, 36, 65f., 105, n. 77, 122, 129, 141f., 147f., 153, 161f., 167, 171, 182, n. 292, 196f., 204, 207, 210f., 215, 222, 226, 236. Also, on Western views of Chinese gardens, Rinaldi, B. M. ed. (2016), Ideas of Chinese Gardens: Western Accounts, 1300–1860. 133 Cf. on the various ‘Orientalisms’ of poets and essayists Southey, Shelley, de Quincey and Sir Walter Scott, Leask, N. (1992), British Romantic Writers and the East; Tao, Z. (2009), Drawing the Dragon, 148f.; Vallins, D., K. Oishi and S. Perry, eds (2013), Coleridge, Romanticism and the Orient, 3, 135f. 134 On Coleridge and Kubla Khan, Ashton, R. (1997), The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Beer, J. (1962), Coleridge the Visionary; Bloom, H. ed. (1986), Samuel Taylor Coleridge; —(1993), The Visionary Company; Burke, K. (1986), ‘ “Kubla Khan”: Proto-Surrealist Poem’, in Bloom (ed.), Coleridge, 33–52; Holmes, R. (1989), Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772–1804; —(1998), Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834; Leask, M. (2006), ‘Kubla Khan and orientalism: the road to Xanadu revisited’, in M. O’Neill and M. Sandy (eds), Romanticism: II. 179–98; Milne, F. (1986), ‘Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”; Perkins, D. (1990), ‘The Imaginative Vision of “Kubla Khan” ’, in J. R. Barth and J. L. Mahoney (eds), Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination, 97–108; Watson, G. (1966), Coleridge the Poet; Wheeler, K. (1981), The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry; Yarlott, G. (1967), Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid. 135 On ‘harmony’ in Schiller and Coleridge, cf. Class, Coleridge and Kantian Ideas, 117. Also, Gordon, T. W. ed. (1994), C. K. Ogden and Linguistics, I. 194f.; and, extending discussion to Hegel, Hamilton, P. (2007), Coleridge and German Philosophy, 62. 131

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case, this became a freedom for addiction to opium.136 In contrast to Marco Polo in Kubla Khan, ‘will’ and ‘desire’ are subject to ‘Nature’.137 But things Chinese are not without merit. In a bittersweet, youthful riposte to a grim poem on the suicide of the seventeen-year-old poet Thomas Chatterton (1752–70; ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’), ‘Monody on a Tea-Kettle’, Coleridge praises the muse of ‘Delightful Tea’ and allows her to exegete deep themes of life and death.138 As here, China is a foil for Coleridge’s attitude to character, purpose and morality. Occidental ethics are exegeted by – if not exaggerated through – personal taste and oriental type. Coleridge’s reinvention of China remains a potent cross-cultural cipher (Tao 2009: 148f., 154f.). His life and work, ‘habits’ and ethic, still colour Sino-Western interpretation. We ‘read backwards carefully’ mindful of his poetry and vision. Second, as Kubla Khan indicates, Coleridgean Romanticism celebrates imagination. Contra the rational Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and the ‘irreligion’ of William Paley’s (1743–1805) ‘Evidentialism’, Coleridge’s poetry, politics, and theology are shot through with creative passion and dynamic symbolism. He knows and nuances Kantian ‘transcendental idealism’, preferring Schelling’s theory of ‘mimesis’139 and poetic theology, and the philosopher-dramatist Gotthold Lessing’s (1729–81) evisceration of ‘history’ (that ‘ugly great ditch’)140 to defend ‘faith’. Texts and ‘symbols’141 become for Coleridge more than ‘objective correlatives’: to the observant, they act like art to reveal truth and morality in evocative, transformative ways. To the consternation of biblical Britain, he recommends the Bible be read ‘as any other book’. When allied to ‘will’, imitation and imagination become in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection allies of conscience, sources of faith, and conducive of ‘the laws of the whole considered as the one’ (i.e. ethics).142 As he states: ‘Christianity is not a theory, or a speculation; but a life – not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process’ (Aphorism 7; ibid., I. 233). Dogmatic missionary piety found this disturbing, but it

Coleridge played down the perils of opium, writing on one occasion: ‘[I]t is incomparably better in every respect than beer, wine, spirits, or any fermented liquor, nay, far less pernicious than even tea.’ Adding, on the consumption of tea by his oldest son (David) Hartley (1796–1849) and third child Derwent (1800–83): ‘It is my particular wish that Hartley and Derwent should have as little tea as possible, and always very weak, with more than half milk’ (1956a: 884). Coleridge’s biographer Samuel Levy Bensusan (1872–1958) reckoned Coleridge’s ‘second worst habit’ was his weedling financial dependency on others! 137 N.B. Coleridge’s comment: ‘The will is in an especial and preeminent sense the spiritual part of our humanity’ (1825: 136). Cf. also, Edwards, P. (2009), ‘Coleridge on Politics and Religion’, in F. Burwick (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 244f. 138 On this poem, Sandy, S. (2016), Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning, 48. For another playful link between Coleridge and tea, see the 35-scene play by Frederick L. Morey, Tea & Ecstasy: The Life Drama of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: STC (1991). 139 Cf. Burwick, F. (1990), ‘Coleridge and Schelling on Mimesis’, in R. Gravil and M. Lefebure (eds), The Coleridge Connection, 178–99. On Schelling, above p. 194; also, p. 233. 140 Lessing published German orientalist Hermann S. Reimarus’s (1694–1768) famous Wolfenbüttel Fragments, which describe the ‘ugly great ditch’ between history and faith so that, ‘Contingent truths of history can never be proof of the necessary truths of reason’ (Lessing 1875: VI. 241). 141 On Coleridge and symbols, McKusick, J. C. (2002), ‘Symbol’, in L. Newlyn (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, 217–30. 142 Cf. The Friend, in Complete Works, 2.144. On Coleridge’s use of Chinese philosophy and ‘New Criticism’ (esp. in I. A. Richards’ [1893–1979] ‘subject/object coalescence’ of ‘Human Nature’ [xing] and the natural world), Reagles, S. L. (2016), ‘The Equivocal Tao of “Nature” ’, in A. E. Hacker Daniels (ed.), Communication and the Global Landscape of Faith, 27–48 (esp. 40f.). 136

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rang true to oriental spiritualities that elevated ‘experience’ over ‘reason’.143 A way to the ‘Christ of faith and morality’ is open.144 Third, if Coleridge ‘reinvented’ China and repositioned ethics, he revisited classical claims for the Bible’s inspiration and authority. Funded by the Wedgwoods for prolonged study in Germany (1797–1800), he read widely in philosophy, theology, philology, ethics and hermeneutics.145 Critical of 18th-century ‘Rationalism’ and circumspect towards Kantian ‘Idealism’, he studied the Scriptures amid new thinking on philology and hermeneutics in Germany and the Anglophone world.146 His ‘Letters on the Inspiration of the Scriptures’ criticize (what Lessing dubs) ‘bibliolatry’ and the new school of German ‘Higher Criticism’. In his Notebooks and Aids to Reflection, he is orthodox and open-minded.147 He compares the Bible with other ancient texts. He studies the role of ‘myth’ and ‘ritual’ in society. He sees the power of ‘story’ in morality. He accepts divine and human ‘inspiration’. He promotes ‘spiritual’ readings of Scripture. Of the scholars he reads,148 he rejects Herder’s claim for the pre-eminence of historical truth;149 he repudiates J. G. Eichhorn’s (1753–1827) reductionism, but accepts his ‘two source’ theory of Genesis and the priority in Israel of ritual and myth;150 he defends the Gospel writers’ integrity against impugning by H. E. G. Paulus (1761–1851) and Schleiermacher;151 and he doubts W. M. L. De Wette’s (1780–1849) denial of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and its ‘fragmentary’ form. In short, to Coleridge, a reader of the Bible or other ‘Classic’ needs ‘imagination enough to live with his (sic) forefathers’ and a will to reject ‘a work meant for immediate effect on one age with the notions and feelings of another’ (1856: CM II. 969; q. Harding 2009: 464). As in the Analects, Coleridge’s ethics are anthropocentric: humanity is a self-aware moral agent capable of reading reality aright. Aids to Reflection calls for ‘mirroring’ of a ‘manly’ Christ-like character.152 If to pious peers this smacked of Pelagianism, to Coleridge it exemplified mature, Romantic individualism of a kind the Bible commended, and Christian integrity demanded. There is thick varnish here on later readings of the Analects and Gospels: Coleridge’s abiding influence is great. The Kantian and Romantic ‘turn to the self ’ evident in Coleridge bears fruit in his lasting contribution to the new science of ‘hermeneutics’. Careful reading, like responsible living, matters

On the sources and nature of Coleridge’s theology, Harding, A. (2009), ‘Coleridge: Biblical and Classical Literature’, in Burwick, Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 455–72; —(2009), Review: ‘Jeffrey W. Barbeau, Coleridge, The Bible and Religion (2008)’. On Coleridge, imagination and Romanticism, Barth, J. R. (1977), The Symbolic Imagination. 144 Cf. on this late 19th-century ‘Liberal Protestant’ view of Jesus, p. 59, n. 50, 462f. 145 N.B. Leigh Hunt’s comment: ‘In 1798, the late public-spirited “Etrurians”, Josiah and Thomas Wedgewood, enabled Coleridge to finish his studies of men and books in Germany, where he met Wordsworth. . .’ (The Examiner [1821], 665). On the freedom the annuity gave Coleridge for study, and the inter-relationship of Romanticism and business, Fang, K. (2010), Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs, 55f. 146 On Coleridge and ‘Higher Criticism’, Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’, passim. 147 On Coleridge’s biblical hermeneutics, Jasper, D. (2004), Introduction to Hermeneutics, 81–3. 148 Cf. Coleridge’s theological eclecticism evident in the early influence on him of the Non-Conformist Moses Lowman (1680–1752), author of Dissertation on the Civil Government of the Hebrews (1740), the Unitarian Gilbert Wakefield (1756–1801) and the Scottish Catholic Alexander Geddes (1737–1802). 149 On Herder, p. 228f. 150 On Coleridge and Eichhorn (esp. on John’s Gospel), Edwards, P. (2009), ‘Coleridge on Politics and Religion’, 246. 151 On Coleridge and Schleiermacher, Shaffer, E. (1990), ‘The Hermeneutic Community: Coleridge and Schleiermacher’, in Gravil and Lefebure (eds), Coleridge Connection, 200–9. 152 Coleridge claims arete¯ (Gk. virtue) denotes manly qualities (1825: 72, ‘Aphorism XII’). On ‘Cambridge Platonist’ Ralph Cudworth’s (cf. p. 107) influence on Coleridge here, Hedley, D. (2004), Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, 186f. 143

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to him. However, in his posthumous letters, published by his nephew Henry Nelson Coleridge (1798–1843), The Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit (1840), we find the poet admitting a ‘deep sense of infirmity and manifold imperfection’ and ‘the necessity, of religious support’ (Letter 1, 3; q. Jasper 2004: 82). Through study of the Bible he knows of the God of existential comfort, forgiveness, light and life, who effects in him ‘a consequent reverence for that Light – the image of Himself – which He has kindled in every one of His rational creatures’ (ibid., Advertisement). In other words, to Coleridge, ethics, faith and hermeneutics are inseparable.153 The Bible has an interrogative power: ‘[I]n the Bible there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all other books together’. And again: ‘[T]he words of the Bible find me at greater depths of my being; and whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit’ (1856: 5.582). Coleridge is at the forefront of existential Biblical hermeneutics, where meaning becomes inseparable from what I read and what I need. Coleridge’s disciples have been myriad: consciously and unconsciously the Analects and Gospels have been read in China and the West in the spirit of his Romantic creativity and ‘Modern’ hermeneutics. Introducing The Global Eighteenth Century (2003), Felicity Nussbaum describes the essays as resituating exposition in ‘a spatially and conceptually expanded paradigm’ (1).154 Coleridge’s use of China fits this model. Likewise, intensification of ‘otherness’ in Western perception and representation of China in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as corollary to a heightened Enlightenment sense of a public (national) and private (psycho-spiritual) ‘Self ’. Self-differentiation characteristic of adolescence emerges. We can also see this dynamic in Coleridge’s poetic contemporary, William Wordsworth (1770–1850). Three things emerge in Wordsworth’s view of character, purpose and morality that impact our cross-cultural study. First, in contrast to Coleridge, there is a visceral quality to Wordsworth’s orientalism. To heighten intensity, in his posthumous autobiographical magnum opus ‘Poem to Coleridge’ – better known by the title his wife Mary (née Hutchinson, 1802–55) gave it, ‘The Prelude’ – the vicissitudes of the poet’s life are tracked in blank verse. With the self-control of a junzi, the poem is, he emphasizes, ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ (1798: I. xiv). China’s ancient civility and mastery of nature are noted, then disputed, and finally rejected. It is not a society he chooses to ‘inhabit’. We understand the depth of Wordsworth’s feelings towards China when we find his sea-trader brother John drowned when his ship The Earl of Abergavenny sank off ‘The Shambles’ near Portland Bill, Dorset, on 5 February 1805. The ship carried cargo to and from Canton. Wordsworth was heart-broken, his hope of financial security also lost at sea. China, materialism and the EIC are blamed.155 We see now why he described ‘The Prelude’ to his sister Dorothy (1771–1885) as ‘the poem on the growth of my mind’ (q. Abrams 2006: 210). As elsewhere in Romantic poetry, creativity and reason voice feeling, subjective realities assume objective form. Character is etched in texts like lines on a world-weary face. The ‘experimental’ language and incarnational rhetoric of ‘The Prelude’ (and ‘The Excursion’, 1814) provide symbols to convey On this relationship, Haney, D. (2001), The Challenge of Coleridge, passim. N.B. Fulford, T. (2013), The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets, for their sense of ‘place’. 155 On Wordsworth’s perspective on China, in light of his brother’s death, Kitson, P. (2012), ‘The Wordsworths, Opium and China’. Cf. also, the psychological and practical study (and vivid lithograph) of the loss of the Abergavenny in Matlak, R. E. (2003), Deep Distresses: William Wordsworth, John Wordsworth, Sir George Beaumont 1800–1808, 106f. (‘Portrayed on a Tea-tray’). On serving tea, in Wordsworth, as an image of blessed domestic propriety and uncritical imprisonment (e.g. The Triad [1832]), Page, J. W. (2003), ‘Gender and Domesticity’, in S. C. Gill (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, 136f. 153 154

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(and thus control) complexity and mystery in life experience.156 But the well-known can, as with tea here, be lost in mystery. Second, there is an oriental quality to Wordsworth’s depiction of his poetic vocation. His aim to ‘recollect[s] in tranquillity’ (1798: Preface) assumes a neo-Buddhistic aura in his poem ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798). He writes in a ‘serene and blessed mood’ (line 41), with ‘an eye made quiet by the power/ Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,/ We see into the life of things’ (lines 47–9). This is the way to be, and see into the heart of human existence: the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul. —ll. 43–6 With potential to be ‘masters of their universe’, humans are caught betwixt joy and freedom, and what Wordsworth calls ‘The still sad Music of humanity’ (line 91). Though ‘the Child is father of the man’, the dark, evolving mystery of life is caught in the aspic of Wordsworth’s nine line poem ‘My Heart Leaps Up’ (26 March 1802), which was published in 1807 as an epigraph to his ‘Ode: “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” ’: ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy/ shades of the prison house begin to close/ upon the growing boy’ (1807: II. ll. 67–9). As he knew first-hand, life is wrapped in shrouds of sin, death and despair. The simplest of natural signs offer comfort: ‘To me the meanest flower that blows can give/ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’ (ibid., ll. 206–7).157 Depth and purpose in life are hidden gems. Mortality, like maturity, transforms perception. This ‘philosophic mind’ is for him the key to morality (Trilling [1962] 1975: 166). Wordsworth’s intentionality echoes Confucius’s single-minded ethic and sense of vocation. His view of the Irish statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke (1729–97) reflects this. Though critical early in his life, Wordsworth’s Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland (1818) now names Burke ‘the most sagacious Politician of his age’, whose prophetic insight ‘time has verified’ (q. Lock 1985: 173). Morality has a public face. Egotism and subjectivism are checked by duty. Integrity, like mortality, has for Wordsworth revelatory moral power. Last, like all the ‘Lake Poet’ Romantics, Wordsworth – the first great Western ‘poet of place’ – engages the natural world. His art is formed in dialogue with his inner self and his physical environment. In tree and stream, rock and mountain, he discerns ‘awesome’ symbols with ‘spiritual’ meaning.158 Paradoxically, perhaps, this pantheistic world is inspired as much by Boyle’s account of ‘the mechanical affections of the parts of matter’ and the operations of vast cosmic ‘laws’ (1772: IV. 98f.),159 as by any 156 On this, Haney, D. P. (1993), William Wordsworth and the Hermeneutics of Incarnation, 143f.; also, Bewell, A. (1989), Wordsworth and the Enlightenment; Chandler, J. (1998), England in 1819, esp. 140–6 (‘Translating Cultures’). 157 On these lines, Blank, G. K. (1995), Wordsworth and Feeling: The Poetry of an Adult Child, 213f. N.B. Wordsworth voices the language of personal and cultural maturation. 158 In 1814 he explicitly denied dependency on Spinoza, and in the 1850 edition of ‘The Prelude’ revised pantheist passages. On Wordsworth’s philosophy and naturalist poetry, Abercrombie, L. (1952), The Art of Wordsworth; Bate, W. J. (1946), From Classic to Romantic; Beach, W. J. (1936), The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth Century English Poetry. 159 Cf. on this, Durrant, G. (1970), Wordsworth and the Great System, esp. 104–6, on the relation between Wordsworth, spirituality and empiricism.

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explicit dependency on oriental philosophy. But it is hard not to associate his poetry with a Confucian – or, perhaps rather more, Neo-Confucian – anthropo-cosmic spirituality.160 Here’s ‘Tintern Abbey’: And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something for more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky and the mind of Man A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts And rolls through all things. —ll. 94–103 As in Berkeley, Wordsworth’s ‘senses’ are freed from ‘innate ideas’ and the constraints of tradition to perceive and engage life in new ways. But, as in Confucius, character, purpose and morality are assayed by conformity to a heavenly presence ‘that disturbs me with joy’.161 Likewise, as Wordsworth’s late admiration for Burke illustrates, sense, vision, aspiration and success are realized, as in the Analects, not in lonely abstraction but in decisive moral action. Wordsworth’s work has had a global impact, not least in 20th-century China.162 Two of his poems were translated by the influential linguist and psychologist Lu Zhiwei 䲨ᘇ䷻ (C. W. Luh, 1894–1970) in 1914. His poem ‘The Solitary Reaper’ appears in the poet Yu Dafu’s 䛱䚄ཛ (1896– 1945) short story Chenlun ⊹␚ (‘Sinking’).163 Leaders of the ‘May 4th Movement’ find in his work inspiration for their ‘New Culture’.164 As Debbie Adams has shown, Wordsworth has had a role in all of China’s 20th-century ‘cultural revolutions’. We read the Analects and Gospels in China and the West through the cultural varnish of his iconoclastic work. Like tea, Wordsworth’s poetry is a unitive, global ‘cultural archetype’. Cf. on Wordsworth and Chinese philosophy, Wyman, M. (1949), ‘Chinese Mysticism and Wordsworth’; Babbitt, I. (1949), Rousseau and Romanticism, 305; Bynner, W. and Kiang, K-h. trans. (1929), T’ang shih san pai shou, The Jade Mountain, xvii; Binyon, L. (1931), Landscape in English Art and Poetry, 145. For a parallel study of Wordsworth’s reception and impact in the East, Ishikura, W. (2006), ‘The Reception and Translation of Wordsworth in Japan’. 161 In contrast to Pope, for whom ‘Anima mundi’ (the spirit of the world) operates in a perfected reality, Wordsworth interprets this natural force as active, invasive, dominant and progressive (Wyman 1949: 517, n. 3). 162 On Wordsworth and China’s environmentalism, Adams, D. (2014), ‘Revolutionary Poets of Place: Wordsworth’s Footprint in Chinese Soil’; Ge, G. L. (1999a), ‘Wordsworth’s reception in China after the founding of PRC’; —(1999b), ‘Wenxue fanyi zhong de wenhua chuancheng – huazihuasi ba shou yishi lunxi’ [Cultural inheritance in literary translation – a critical analysis of eight poems by Wordsworth]; Din, E. (2011), ‘Repositioning William Wordsworth in contemporary China’. Cf. also, Chan, L. T-h. (2010), Readers, Reading and Reception of Translated Fiction in Chinese; Chang, K-i. S. and S. Owen, eds (2010), The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature: II, From 1375, ad loc.; Fan, S (1999), ‘Translation of English Fiction and Drama in Modern China’. 163 On this iconic work, Yu, D. (2007), ‘Sinking’, in J. S. M. Lau and H. Goldblatt (eds), Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature, 31–55; Denton, K. A. (1992), ‘The Distant Shore: Nationalism in Yu Dafu’s “Sinking” ’. 164 Cf. esp. Wordsworth’s translation and reception by the poet Xu Zhimo ᗀᘇ᪙ (1897–1931), the author, poet, historian, archaeologist and bureaucrat Guo Moruo 䜝⋛㤕 (1892–1978), the popular translator Wu Guangjian Խ‫( ڕݹ‬1860–1943), Zhu Weizhi ᵡ㏝ѻ (1905–99), who wrote on Christianity and literature, and the poet and critic of Western literature (esp. ‘New Criticism’) Yuan Kejia 㺱ਟహ (1921–2008). 160

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Before turning to Enlightenment interpretation of character, purpose and morality in Europe and America, we turn once again to the parliamentarian, social reformer and Christian campaigner, William Wilberforce.165 Two years after Wordsworth’s brother died, Parliament was cajoled by Wilberforce and the abolitionist lobby to approve ‘An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ (25 March 1807). In September of that year, Morrison landed in Canton. Wilberforce had partfunded Morrison’s Chinese language studies in London. The men kept in touch. They shared a common vision of humanity: all people, of whatever race, creed or colour, were made ‘in the image of God’ (imago Dei), and equally loved by their ‘heavenly Father’. The uniquely Christian concept of agape love – an unconditional divine gift shared by Christians – is not found in Confucianism, but it inspired Morrison and Wilberforce in their mission to save souls and transform societies.166 Before he campaigned against slavery, Wilberforce took on Georgian morality. In 1797, he published his socio-spiritual manifesto, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. The title of the work speaks for itself. It called for spiritual renewal as the key to social transformation. A decade earlier, Wilberforce had persuaded George III to sponsor a ‘Royal Proclamation’ to bolster a parallel initiative by ‘Clapham Sect’ friends, ‘The Proclamation Society’ (1787). Like its 17th-century precursor, the ‘Society for the Reformation of Manners’ (1692), the Society’s aim was to restore honour among aristocrats and engender integrity among the new ‘middle classes’ – and, crucially, thus thwart ‘subversive ideas’ from the French Revolution (Briggs [1959] 2000: 62). Here was ‘Victorianism before Victoria’. Here political, intellectual and cultural revolution faced off against spiritual, moral and social reform. Wilberforce’s work illustrates how effectively popular Biblical religion and homely Victorian piety – expressed in spiritual renewal and social reform – served as a counterpoint to Enlightenment progress and religio-philosophical syncretism. The 19th century is wrongly represented as only an age of progress and revolution. Conservative Christianity was throughout alive and well, reignited by ‘Evangelical Revivals’ and multiple forms of socially plausible philanthropy. Mission societies expressed a new, religiously differentiated sinophilia. In love, Christian mission both united and divided the world. The Analects and Gospels are read in China and the West today in light of the global theology and religious ‘worldview’ (Weltanschauung) – and the Sino-Western coherence and bifurcation these created – of Wilberforce and his pious peers. If Britain’s view of China in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is complex, so, too, is that of aggressively secular Europe and religiously plural America. To these we turn.

CHINA AND THE WEST IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTIONARIES As we saw in Chapter 4, seeds of French and American ‘Revolutions’ are sown in the socio-political and intellectual fervour of the early Enlightenment. Oriental ideas and practices help to water these. By the mid-18th century, better knowledge had raised new doubts about the politics, philosophy and culture of the Qing court. Cynicism has displaced idealism in the minds of Continental philosophes. As in Kant, the original myth of China’s moral perfection is exposed to

On Wilberforce, above p. 134, 182, 200; also, p. 216, 219, 253, 258. On Morrison’s shock at the lack of neighbourliness shown during the great fire of Canton in 1820, Hancock, Morrison, 161–4. On agape and ren, below p. 244f., 248, 252f., 254f. The universality of humanity is a major theme in the sermons Morrison preached on furlough (1823–6); see, A Parting Memorial (1826). On missionary perspectives on China, Kitson, Chapter 3.

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the troubling truth of her cultural ‘otherness’ and political awkwardness. Hopes of a universal, rational ethic are dashed on the rocks of respectful sinology (that appreciates China’s distinctiveness) and restless imperialism (that denies cultural alternatives). As Simon Kow shows, even the ‘subtle engagements’ with China of a Bayle and Montesquieu are shot through with colonial prejudice (2014: 347–58). Old habits die hard. Kant’s irascible servant Wasianski records his master’s fiftyyear, morning tea-ritual out-lasted his ability to read and write: ‘The force of habit was still strong in him’, he says, adding – perhaps from his bitter experience (!) – that in this dawn ritual, Kant ‘could not tolerate anyone’s presence without a mighty upheaval’ (Gulyga 1987: 253). In the ‘clash of cultures’ of China and the West in the late 18th and early 19th centuries – as Kant’s life illustrates – habit and personality are now as decisive as ideas and philosophy. Like economics and diplomacy, Enlightenment ethics are just as much about culture and psychology as faith and facts. Sino-Western comparative ethics highlight this. We see this expressed by Kant’s precursors, contemporaries and heirs. As we study them, we again exaggerate to cut through intellectual and cultural varnish that colours, and discolours, interpretation of the Analects and Gospels. Our primary focus is continental Europe, but we begin with three figures whose British roots were not bound intellectually or geographically. Ideas and impacts are, as we know well, no respecter of human boundaries, their postal address is constantly changing. Reid, Burke and Paine We saw earlier (see above p. 140f.) that the leaders of the early European Enlightenment – Spinoza, Voltaire, Wolff, Leibniz (and his mentor Thomasius), Vico, Le Comte, Diderot, Bayle and Montesquieu – are to different degrees impacted by China and Chinese thought. Taken together, they assist the uncoupling of ethics from revealed religion (Christianity) and the progressive joining of (Revolutionary) thought about human identity with the nature of government, faith and society. Kantian methodology and morality are an intensification of this ‘secularizing’ and ‘socializing’ process. If, as we have seen, Reimarus (aka Lessing) projects this process on a bifurcation of ‘faith’ (subjectivity) and ‘history’ (objective fact), a theologically trained heir to Adam Smith at Glasgow University, Thomas Reid (1710–96), buttresses faith with an appeal (like the more politically inspired Roman historian Cicero [106–43 BCE]) to the sensus communis – that is, contra Hume and Berkeley, to the common-sensical existence of a knowable external world, and thus the moral obligation for a knowing subject to do good. As Founder of the ‘Scottish School of Common Sense’, and a leader of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, Reid promotes a ‘realist’ epistemology, placing ‘pragmatic’ emphasis (like Confucius) on personal, socio-moral responsibility.167 Sensible a priorism doesn’t doubt the reality of people or predictable natural processes, nor, as Reid urges, that ‘before men can reason together, they must agree in first principles’ (1822a: I. 358).168 As in Confucius, morality and mutuality co-inhere now in Reid’s measured, practical, moralism: humanity is both

As Covell notes, many early Protestant missionaries to China, who were born and educated in Scotland, drew on Reid’s philosophy and methodology in their Christian-Confucian apologetics (1986: 97f.). On Hegel’s criticism of Confucian moral theory, precisely because it was simply ‘common-sense’, Lee, T. H. C. (2000), Education in Traditional China, 361, n. 519. 168 On Reid’s method, thought, ethics and legacy, Cuneo, T. and R. van Woudenberg, eds. (2004), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid; Davis, W. C. (2006), Thomas Reid’s Ethics; Lehrer, K. (1989), Thomas Reid; Rowe, W. (1991), Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality; Wolterstorff, N. (2001), Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology. 167

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free and accountable in this so-called ‘incompatibilist’ libertarianism.169 Many of the pioneer Protestant missionaries from Scotland exported Reid’s ideas to China. We should not assume this was intentionally aggressive or necessarily unwelcome on arrival. Dubbed Hume’s ‘earliest and fiercest critic’ (Bartholomew and Goheen 2013: 138), Reid published his Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense in 1764, his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man in 1785, and his Essays on the Active Powers of Man in the year Kant issued his Critique of Practical Reason, 1788. Twelve years his junior (and without reading him!), Kant refuted Reid’s ‘common-sense’ theory, with its distinction between (intuitive, childlike) ‘sensation’ and (more developed, adult) ‘perception’. To Reid, through recovery (as in art) of the innate ‘language of nature’ – and not, as in Locke, through ‘sense’ perception – humanity is able to link ‘sign’ and ‘signified’, and thus establish a secure epistemological foundation for natural philosophy, science and human communication. Kant and J. S. Mill’s (1806–73) criticisms compromised Reid’s standing among his peers. But he was lauded by others, including ‘eclectic’ French educationalist Victor Cousin (1792–1867), ‘pessimistic’ metaphysician Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860),170 the ‘pragmatist’ Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), the ‘analytic’ philosopher G. E. Moore (1873–1958), and, later, by American Anglican and Reformed philosophers – such as William Alston (1921–2009), Alvin Plantinga (b. 1932) and Nicholas Wolterstorff (b. 1932) – who invoke Reid to defend the ‘theistic premise’ against the need for exterior validation.171 As we will see in Chapter 7, in his critique of Locke’s understanding of memory in self-consciousness Reid’s metaphysic of ‘human identity’ anticipates Modernist thought. But it is Reid’s common-sense, linguistic view of character, purpose and morality, we note here, for its place in British and American moral theory, and, as we will see, for its resonance with Confucian thought.172 Like Reid, the intellectual reach of the Irish statesman, ‘Old Whig’ MP (1766–94), and political theorist, Edmund Burke (1729–97), extends beyond Britain.173 Burke was clubbable. In London, he associated with leading artists and intellectuals, including Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, the painter Joshua Reynolds (1723–92) and the actor David Garrick. Burke was praised as often by political foes as friends. Liberal politician-historian Thomas Macaulay called him, ‘the greatest man since Milton’ (1877: II. 377). Almost a century after his death, the long-serving Liberal Prime Minister, William Gladstone (1809–98), admitted he quarried his works as ‘a magazine of wisdom

Though this is disputed, Reid seems to offer an important alternative in British moral philosophy to the ‘sentimentalism’ of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) and Hume, and to the ‘rationalism’ of Clarke, Richard Price (1723–91) and William Wollaston (1766–1828). In England, his legacy was perpetuated by Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) and his pupil G. E. Moore (1873–1958). 170 N.B. Schopenhauer’s comment: ‘Thomas Reid’s excellent book, Inquiry into the Human Mind . . ., as a corroboration of the Kantian truth in the negative way, affords us a thorough conviction of the inadequacy of the senses for producing the objective perception of things’ ([1819] 1958: II. 20). On Schopenhauer, p. 223, n. 217, 304f. 171 Cf. the new edition of Reid’s ‘Lectures on Natural Theology’ (intro. Wolterstorff), Foster, J. J. S. (2017), Thomas Reid on Religion. On Platinga’s use of Reid’s notion of ‘sympathy’ (and Calvin’s sensus divinitatis) to justify a theistic premise in a Chinese context, Wang, R. R. ed. (2004), Chinese Philosophy in an Era of Globalization, 190. Also, for a Chinese assessment and comparison of Reid’s critique of Adam Smith’s view of ‘sympathy’ and the ‘passions’ with the Analects, Zhang, W-B. (2000), On Adam Smith and Confucius, 71f. 172 N.B. his Confucianesque balancing of ‘Nature’ and reason in education ([1819] 1872: I. 201f.). Also, the justification Scottish ‘realist philosophy’ afforded mid-19th and early 20th-century missionary apologists in China (Covell 1986: 97f.). 173 N.B. in contrast to the ‘New Whig’ Party, led by the larger-than-life figure, Charles James Fox, MP (1749–1806). ‘New Whigs’ supported the political radicalism – if not the anarchic brutality – of the French Revolution. On Burke and the ‘Old Whigs’, Raeder, L. C. (2006), ‘Edmund Burke: Old Whig’. 169

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on Ireland and America’ (Morley 1903: III. 280). In his own day, though opposed to his sociopolitical conservatism, Hazlitt admitted that he tested ‘the sense and candour of anyone belonging to the opposite party’, by ‘whether he allowed Burke to be a great man’ (Lock: 175). Burke’s humanity and insight were lauded as loudly and often as his principled passion, political acuity and literary skill. Though initially hesitant, Coleridge and Wordsworth both came to respect Burke, the former praising him for holding ‘habitually to principles’ and, as such, being ‘a scientific statesman’ and ‘a seer’ (ibid., 174). The ‘New Whig’ Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham (1778–1868), and the Tory Prime Minister, George Canning (1770–1827), also glimpsed Burke’s foresight. Perhaps grudgingly, Canning sees Reflections on the French Revolution (1790) ‘justified by the course of subsequent events’ (q. Claeys 2000: 50).174 Burke was politically conservative and religiously a ‘High Church’ Anglican. In him, the spirit of Christus Regnans co-habits comfortably with a Confucius redivivus. In ‘Reform Era’ China (late 1980s and 1990s), Burke became the doyen of ‘New Conservatism’ (ᯠ‫؍‬ᆸѫ㗙),175 for legitimating evolutionary reform, but not Tiananmenstyle revolution. His generous magnanimity attracted many. Three things in Burke that relate to this chapter’s theme warrant brief comment. First, though the historian and parliamentarian Edward Gibbon called Burke ‘the most eloquent and rational madman that I ever knew’ (Prothero 1896: 251), he admitted, ‘I adore his chivalry’ (Lock: II. 300). In Burke, as in Wilberforce, private (religious and moral) ‘habits’ inspire public action: in both, ancient tradition and inherited ‘manners’ matter. In the famous split between Burke and his longstanding Whig colleague Fox, over Burke’s critical Reflections on the French Revolution (1790), Fox said Burke’s denial of the metaphysical ‘Rights of Men’ – associated historically with the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, and more recently with a sermon delivered to the new London ‘Revolution Society’ (founded in 1788), ‘A Discourse on the love of our country’ (4 November 1789), by the Non-Conformist moral philosopher Dr. Richard Price (1723–91)176 – was ‘in very bad taste’ (q. Mitchell [1971] 1997: 113).177 For his part, Burke grounded defence of the ‘divine right of kings’, and his confidence in ‘the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages’, not in private judgement ([1790] 2001: 251f.), but on what he calls ‘prejudice’ – that is, pre-determined opinion. He explains: ‘Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved’ (ibid.). He adds, invoking moral ‘habits’: ‘Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit’ (ibid.). Classical Confucianism concurs. But we also hear Confucius in Burke’s invocation of ‘our antient indisputable laws and liberties’, and ‘antient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty’ (ibid.).178 This is the basis for his rejection of Hobbes’s ‘social contract’, which had gained considerable traction in revolutionary France. In its place Burke proposed ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who 174 N.B. Burke’s Observations on a Late State of the Nation – a response to Whig MP (later Prime Minister) George Grenville’s (1712–70) The Present State of the Nation (1769) – had earlier predicted ‘some extraordinary convulsion’ in France because of its ‘whole (economic) system’ (Lock: I. 262). 175 Translated sometimes ‘Neoconservatism’. Cf. Fewsmith, J. (1995), ‘Neoconservatism and the End of the Dengist Era’. 176 The sermon was the firing gun for the pamphlet-based ‘Revolution Controversy’ in Britain (between proponents and opponents of the French Revolution). 177 On Burke and Price, Faulkner, J. (1997), ‘Burke’s Perception of Richard Price’, in L. P. Crafton (ed.), The French Revolution Debate in English Literature and Culture, 1–25. 178 On the theme, and problem, of Burke’s notion of the ‘antient constitution’, Pocock, J. G. A. (1960), ‘Burke and the Ancient Constitution–A Problem in the History of Ideas’.

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are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’ (ibid., 261). We hear echoes, too, of concentric spheres of Confucian obligation in Burke’s imagery of society as a ‘platoon’: ‘To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind’ (ibid., 202).179 As in Chapter 4, if a ‘contempt’ for China’s desiccated despotism drove some to the French revolutionaries’ call for ‘égalité’, Burke turned Confucian morality and order against Parisian barbarity and anarchy. To him, good order is to be preserved at all costs. Confucian ‘balance’ enters the life-blood of trans-Atlantic political and social conservatism through Burke (Heywood [1992] 2003: 74).180 The Analects and Gospels are read in light refracted by Burke’s view of the socio-political power of virtuous ‘habit’, time-honoured tradition and relational obligations. Second, as we saw previously (and will revert to shortly), Confucius perceived what Burke practised, namely, the critical role ‘character’ plays in life, leadership and government. Burke’s legacy derives from his humanity as much as his political theory. Though indicting the ‘excesses of an irrational, unprincipled . . . ferocious, bloody and tyrannical democracy’ in atheistic, revolutionary France (Lock, 66f.), Burke’s Speech to the Electors at Bristol (1774) is a humane defence of ‘representative’ government, when diligent officers discharge their divine ‘trust’ with integrity and (first-hand) knowledge. Hence, Britain’s war-time Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874–1965) saw Burke as ‘a foremost apostle of Liberty’ and ‘the redoubtable champion of Authority’ ([1932] 1990: 24). In his quest for a just and free society, Burke promoted Irish interests and campaigned for ‘Catholic Emancipation’ (from legal inequalities). He took on the EIC and, in 1786, pursued the (finally unsuccessful)181 impeachment of Warren Hastings (1732–1818), first Governor-General of Bengal,182 for ‘High Crimes and Misdemeanours’. The charge was wanton abuse of India’s people and resources. This stood in stark contrast to what he calls, in his speech ‘The Nabob of Arcot’s Debts’ (28 February) – echoing Confucius – ‘the ambition of an insatiable benevolence’ (q. McCue 1997: 155) in the careful water-management of the native rulers of the South Indian Carnatic region.183 In other words, Burke was contentiously a conditional nationalist. He was pro-Irish and pro-Indian, and, even more provocatively, pro-appeasement with the American colonies, whose complaints he accepted. In a speech ‘On American Taxation’ (19 April 1774), during a debate on duty on tea, he rejected metaphysical argument in favour of ancient practice, saying, simply, American ‘slavery’ weakened British sovereignty. ‘Again and again’, he cried, ‘revert

On this, Stanlis, P. ([1958] 2017), Edmund Burke and the Natural Law, 100f.; Botting, E. H. (2006), Family Feuds, 70f. On Burke’s organic, and aesthetic, sense of ‘civil society’ (‘art is man’s nature’), Corlett, W. (1989), Community Without Unity, 128. 180 Burke gained a new American following through Russell Kirk’s (often republished), The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (1953). On American ambivalence to Burke, Spencer, M. G. (2017), ‘The Paradoxes of Edmund Burke’s Reception in America, 1757–1790’, in M. Fitzpatrick and P. Jones (eds), The Reception of Edmund Burke in Europe, 39–54. For a recent study of Burke and conservatism, Jones, E. (2017), Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830–1914. 181 The Impeachment trial began on 13 February 1788. It was as much a social event as legal dispute. Though the House of Commons found Hastings guilty, the House of Lords reversed the decision on 23 April 1795. 182 On the EIC and trial of Warren Hastings, effectively the first British Governor of India, Lawson, P. (2014), The East India Company: A History; Marshall, P. J. (1965), The Impeachment of Warren Hastings. 183 The S. Indian Carnatic region was in the Madras Presidency. It lies in the modern states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, northeastern Kerala and southern Andhra Pradesh. 179

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to your old principles – seek peace and ensue it; leave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself ’ (q. Prior [1826] 1854: 142).184 This humanity and utilitarian ‘naturalism’ are evident from Burke’s first treatise, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), through his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (3 August 1791), to his last Letters on a Regicide Peace (October 1796).185 Of ‘American Independence’, he simply said: ‘I do not know how to wish success to those whose Victory is to separate from us a large and noble part of our Empire. Still less do I wish success to injustice, oppression and absurdity’ (Lock: I. 399). Armitage is right, though: whether Burke is ‘a realist or an idealist, Rationalist or a Revolutionist’ is unclear (2000: 619).186 That he contributed to, and was critical of, the revolutionary spirit of his age, is self-evident. As in Confucius, ‘duty’, habit, propriety and conformity of life to ‘natural processes’ are, for Burke, priorities. His ideas have entered the DNA of trans-Atlantic culture. We read the Analects and Gospels ‘on the far side’ of Burke’s principled, political conservatism and humane perspective on life. Third, as noted in passing, Burke’s thought is conditioned by religion and aesthetics. His views on politics, philosophy, faith, and society, are determined as much by taste as truth. He rejects atheism and Deism because (unlike Christianity) they are inconsistent with what the French diplomat, historian and social theorist, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) later calls Britain’s ‘habits of heart and mind’ (Letter to de Courcelle, 17 September 1853; q. Hawkins 2015: 1). In essays written between 1750 and 1754 – ‘Religion of No Efficacy Considered as a State Engine’ and ‘Religion’ – and in his early treatise A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), Burke rejects rationalist atheism and deistic reductionism, but commends Christianity with its authoritative divine revelation (to which citizens are accountable) and fair and natural expression of reason and emotion (which produces joy and freedom).187 So, targeting the sinophile Deist Bolingbroke, he says:188 ‘The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own’ ([1756] 1860: I. xii.).189 Burke was always more interested in religion’s civilizing effects than demystifying its doctrines. He is, as Ian Harris argues, an advocate for ‘the social benefits of Christianity, rather than its truth’ (2012: 103). In pragmatic terms (echoed by the PRC government in the 1980s and 1990s) religion per se assists ‘the cohesion and improvement of society’ and is a moral means of socio-political harmony (ibid.). The practical, aesthetic categories Burke adduces are again reminiscent of Confucius. In his teenage work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Burke’s use of the phrase ‘seek peace and ensue/pursue it’ is a classic example of British biblicism at the time. He could assume members of the House of Commons would hear the echoing of Ps. 34.14 and 1 Pet. 3.11. 185 N.B. Burke’s argument in his ‘Second Letter’ against appeasement with France in 1796: ‘Individuality is left out of their scheme of government. The State is all in all.’ This has been seen as the first visualization of a ‘totalitarian’ regime. 186 Cf. also, Bourke, B. (2015), Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke. 187 On Burke’s ‘High Church’ Anglican Christianity and fear of the destructive atheism in France, Aston, N. (1997), ‘A “lay divine”: Burke, Christianity, and the Preservation of the British State’, in N. Aston (ed.), John McManners: Man and Historian, 185–211; Dreyer, F. (1976), ‘Burke’s Religion’; Lambert, E. (1994), ‘Edmund Burke’s Religion’. 188 On Bolingbroke, above p. 164, 168, 171. 189 N.B. Burke’s Vindication of Natural Society says this about China: ‘A Man is allowed sufficient freedom of thought, provided he knows how to chuse (sic) his subject properly. You may criticize freely upon the Chinese constitution and observe with as much severity as you please upon the absurd tricks, or destructive bigotry of the bonzees. But the scene is changed as you come homeward, and atheism or treason may be the names given in Britain, to what would be reason and truth if asserted of China’ ([1756] 1869–72: I. 36). 184

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(1757), which introduced Diderot and Kant to Burke, he developed his ideas on ‘sublimity’.190 This is his only extended work of philosophy. His use and interpretation of the ‘sublime’ is much-criticized later, but the aesthetic nature of his political theory, and moral practice, is consistent.191 He enfranchises the ‘sublime’ socio-politically. Like Confucius, he configures responsible individualism as (moral) ‘beauty’, political harmony and social ‘propriety’.192 Here too, happiness is through conformity to Heaven. Like Wilberforce, Burke pre-empts what the historian Henry Hallam (1777–1859) calls ‘the most beautiful phenomenon’, Victorian Britain (1818: II. 255), an opinion today more controversial – not least for its colonial confidence – than when penned. Burke took issue with another of Kant’s contemporaries, the English-born American revolutionary Thomas Paine (1737–1809). Paine’s pamphlets The American Crisis (1776–83) and Common Sense (1776) played an incendiary role in igniting the American revolution. To some, indeed, Paine is the ‘Father of the American Revolution’.193 As first Vice-President (1789–97) and second US President (1797–1801), John Adams (1735–1826), said of the latter: ‘Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain’ (Butterfield 1951: I. 78; q. Finkelman and Lesh 2008: I. 121). Since he also described Common Sense in a letter to Jefferson (22 June 1819) as ‘malicious, short-sighted and crapulous’, we may surmise he was not Paine’s keenest fan (Adams 1811–25: 10.380)! Paine was based in France through much of the 1790s. His Rights of Man (1791) repudiates Burke’s account of events, with its denunciation of violence and disorder, and conservative opinion of humanity’s moral ‘habits’, societal debts, and duty to honour the ‘rights’ of kings and an ‘antient constitution’. Paine bases his case, as in The Age of Reason (1793–4), on an Enlightenment appeal to humanity’s innate, rational capacity to adjudicate morality, and to build a society on equality and universal ‘Human Rights’. In his Agrarian Justice (1796), he radicalizes Locke (and Rousseau),194 and indicts economic and class exploitation as social evils a Revolution justly condemns. Political theory recognizes in Paine a radical voice that changed his world, and ours.195 Like Confucius, he saw morality and the creation of a vital community as a human responsibility – but he did not lift his eyes to Heaven for help. We cannot linger on Paine’s indictment by Burke for seditious libel (1792), nor on the details of The Age of Reason, with its free spirit and fiery denial of religious institutions, that led future (5th) President James Munroe (1758–1831) to procure Paine’s release and secure his passage back to the

On Burke and the ‘sublime’, Doran, R. (2015), ‘Burke: Sublime Individualism’, in The Theory of the Sublime, 141–70. On the ‘sublime’ and ‘sublimity’, above p. 101, 157, 160f., 193, 197, 212. 191 Cf. Carson, C. (2017), The Aesthetics of Democracy: Eighteenth-Century Literature and Political Economy, 47f.; Gibbons, L. (2003), Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime; White, S. K. ([1994] 2002), Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics and Aesthetics. N.B. this recent connection with Chinese thought, Zheng, Y. (2010), From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature, 16f. 192 On Burke’s intellectual development, Bromwich, D. (2014), The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence. 193 On Paine, Braff, D. (2009), ‘Forgotten Founding Father: The Impact of Thomas Paine’, in J. Chumbley and L. Zonneveld (eds), Thomas Paine: In Search of the Common Good, 39–43; Kostyal, K. M. (2014), Founding Fathers, Ch. 2. N.B. for the first time, Paine’s Common Sense distinguishes between ‘government’ (to curb evil) and ‘society’ (to nurture happiness). 194 On Rousseau, p. 221f. 195 On Paine’s affirmation of human (N.B. not divine) ‘authorities’ to make political and moral decisions, Davidson, E. H. and W. J. Scheick (1994), Paine, Scripture, and Authority. 190

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United States in 1802.196 We must emphasize, though, Paine’s place in Western social and political consciousness. The Modern ideal of ‘Human Rights’ – based on ‘natural law’ and human justice (i.e. without reference to Christian faith and tradition) – is traceable to his ideas.197 He contributes much to discussion of nationhood. Unsurprisingly, Paine put Confucius and Confucian morality on a par with Jesus and Greek philosophy.198 He states: ‘As a book of morals there are several parts of the New Testament that are good, but they are no other than what had been preached in the Eastern world a hundred years before Christ was born’ (Foner 1944–5: II.805). And, again: the Chinese are ‘a people of mild manners and of good morals’ (ibid., II. 737). Paine is not alone in his enthusiasm for Confucius and Chinese culture.199 The ‘Founding Fathers’ of the United States of America Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826),200 John Adams (1735–1826), and Benjamin Rush (1746–1813), all know and congratulate Confucian morality and Chinese culture publicly.201 To Benjamin Franklin: ‘The Chinese are an enlightened people, the most antiently civilized of any existing, and their arts are antient, a presumption in their favour’ ([1785]; q. Wang, D., 2010). He lauds John Wesley’s colleague George Whitefield (1714–70), the Anglican chaplain and evangelist to the American colonies, for imitating Confucius, who, ‘when he saw his country sunk in vice, and wickedness of all kinds triumphant’ opted to go ‘first to the grandees . . . won them to the cause of virtue’ and ‘the commons followed in multitudes’.202 In this ‘New World’, tea and porcelain from China are found to be as popular as in ‘Old World’ Europe. Tea is an ‘established custom’.203 One Swedish traveller records ‘. . . hardly a farmer’s wife or a poor woman . . . does not drink tea in the morning’ (q. Wang, D., 2018: 4). So, Payne and his fiery anti-colonialists took a beloved beverage and turned it into that revolutionary symbol in Boston Harbour.204 Knowingly or 196 On Paine, his peers, and his role in the Revolutions in America and France, Aldridge, O. A. (1959), Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine; —(1984), Thomas Paine’s American Ideology; Bailyn, B. ed. (1990), Faces of Revolution; Butler, B. ed. (1984), Burke, Paine and Godwin and the Revolution Controversy; Claeys, G. ([1989] 2017), Thomas Paine, Social and Political Thought; Clemit, P. ed. (2013), The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s; Conway, M. D. (1892), The Life of Thomas Paine; Foner, E. (1976), Tom Paine and Revolutionary America; —ed. (1944–5), The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine; Hawke, D. F. (1974), Paine; Hitchens, C. (2007), Thomas Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’; Kates, G. (1989), ‘From Liberalism to Radicalism: Tom Paine’s Rights of Man’; Keane, J. (1995), Tom Paine: A Political Life; Larkin, E. (2005), Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution; Levin, Y. (2013), The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left; Nelson, C. (2006), Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations; Solinger, J. D. (2010), ‘Thomas Paine’s Continental Mind’; Vincent, B. (2005), The Transatlantic Republican: Thomas Paine and the age of revolutions; Whatmore, R. (2000), ‘“A gigantic manliness”: Thomas Paine’s Republicanism in the 1790s’, in S. Collini, R. Whatmore and B. Young (eds), Economy, Polity and Society: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950, 135–57. 197 For a defence of Paine as not politically light-weight, Lamb, R. (2015), Thomas Paine and the Idea of Human Rights. N.B. Lamb maintains Paine developed ‘a liberal theory of Human Rights’, that is ‘historically and philosophically distinct and should be regarded as theoretical progenitor of our most familiar understanding of the idea’ (3). 198 On Paine, Confucius and the American ‘Founding Fathers’, Wang, D. (2014), ‘Confucius in the American Founding’; Chang, G. H. (2015), Fateful Ties, ad loc.; Zhang, W. (2018), China Through American Eyes, xxiif. 199 On China in the American Enlightenment, Aldridge, A. O. (1993), The Dragon and the Eagle; Isaacs, H. R. (1958), Scratches on Our Minds: American Images of China and India. 200 N.B. the impact of Confucius on Jefferson (Creel 1951: 275). 201 Jefferson cites him in his 1801 Inaugural Address (Whitman 1884: 65–7). Cf. also, Wang, D. (2009), ‘Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Chinese Civilization’; —(2005), ‘Benjamin Franklin and China’; Franklin, B. (1738), ‘From the Morals of Confucius’, Pennsylvania Gazette (28 February to 7 March). 202 Cf. Letter from Benjamin Franklin to George Whitefield, Philadelphia (6 July 1749); repr. from The Evangelical Magazine XI (1803), 27f. 203 Porcelain was in Albany by 1662 (Howard 1984: 61). 204 On the history of US-China trading relations, May, E. R. and J. K. Fairbank, eds (1986), America’s China Trade in Historical Perspective. Also, on this incident, Durant, W. and A. Durant ([1963] 2011), The Story of Civilization, X. 674.

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unknowingly, character, purpose and morality in the Analects and Gospels are read today through the lens of Paine’s revolutionary ideas and the new role they gave to tea.205 Rousseau, Herder, Hegel and Schleiermacher Four of Kant’s European contemporaries warrant study before we turn to what the Analects and Gospels say of character, purpose and morality. In these four – and the socio-political and intellectual world they inhabit – we again find hermeneutic hues that continue to colour Sino-Western interpretation of our ‘Classic’ texts. The material is complex. Care is needed. We are watching Europe learn a new language, acquire new categories to interpret life, and develop a new capacity for cultural self-differentiation that projects a new ‘otherness’ onto old China. What Europe learned it sent back to China with profound ramifications there. First, we return to the story of French Enlightenment ethics, and its relation to China and Confucianism, in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), ‘Citizen of Geneva’.206 If Montesquieu and the ‘Hero of Two Worlds’ (Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de), Lafayette (1757– 1834), famously impacted the French and the American Revolutions,207 Rousseau’s thought is also foundational for both. We might say much of this sad, complex, mobile, conflicted life, and the many individuals and intellectual issues connected to it. Rousseau was, as his biographer Leo Damrosch says, a ‘restless genius’,208 the spider who weaves a revolutionary web that entraps hearts and minds in Europe and the Americas in the late 18th and early 19th century. Like Kant, Rousseau’s impact on Enlightenment ethics is immense; the range and style of his writing again attracting praise and blame in equal measure. China interests him from a young age. His major works are coterminous with, and contribute to, Europe’s shift from ‘Sinophilia’ to ‘Sinophobia’. We review his work here chronologically to register his cumulative impact on Sino-Western reading of the Analects and Gospels.209 First, the timing and content of Rousseau’s First and Second Discourse, On the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences (1750) and his On the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1755), are both significant. As George Havens argues, Rousseau was familiar with the ‘philosophic’ penchant for China in the first half of the eighteenth century (1978: 194 n. 122, 124–5).210 The troubled childhood Rousseau records in his posthumous Confessions (1769, 1782) was followed by an intentional programme of self-education.211 Torn continually, it seems, between tragedy, love,

For Chinese reception of Paine, e.g. Zhu, X. (2003), ‘For a Chinese Liberalism’, in Wang, C. (ed.), One China, Many Paths, 90f. 206 In his books, Rousseau habitually styled himself, ‘Citizen of Geneva’. He was (at times provocatively) proud of his family’s centuries-old Genevan roots. As Protestants, his family had fled to Geneva to escape persecution in mid-16th century Catholic France. 207 On trans-Atlantic affinities, Lutz, D. (1984), ‘The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought’; Spurlin, P. M. (1941), Montesquieu in America; Gottschalk, L. (1950), Lafayette: Between the American and the French Revolution; Kramer, L. (1996), Lafayette in Two Worlds; Loveland, A. (1971), Emblem of Liberty: The Image of Lafayette in the American Mind; Payan, G. (2002), Marquis de Lafayette: French Hero of the American Revolution. 208 Cf. Damrosch, L. (2005), Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius. On his relationships, Kelly, C. and E. Grace, eds (2009), Rousseau on Women, Love, and Family. 209 For introductions, Riley, P. (2001), ‘Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), in P. Riley (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, 1–7; Kelly, G. A. (2001), ‘A General Overview’, idem., 8–56. 210 Cf. Cook, G. A. (2002), ‘China in the Philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’. 211 On Rousseau’s reading and exposure to information on China, Kelly, C. (2003), Rousseau as Author, 144f. 205

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fantasy and fear, in his twenties Rousseau wrote a ‘Universal Chronology’, based on the eminent French Jesuit theologian Denis Pétau’s, SJ (1583–1652), Abrégé chronologique de l’histoire universelle sacrée et profane (1682).212 Petau offers an early Jesuit view of China. In the 1730s, Rousseau read Bayle, Leibniz, Malebranche and Locke assiduously, in all of whom China and Confucian thought play a pivotal role. In the 1740s, when tutoring the teenage son of the wealthy Dupin family (owners of the beautiful Château Chenonceaux), Rousseau took a chemistry course and read more history on China.213 Music (as always) occupied much time. Drawn to China, Rousseau helped the Dupins write three refutations of Montesquieu and his Spirit of the Laws (1748) – with its many references to, and criticisms of, Chinese culture and society214 – that served to refine Rousseau’s social, political, cultural and religious ideas (Kelly, C., 2013: 21f.). We do not know or understand Rousseau apart from China. In this, as in many things, he swam against strong tidal norms. Rousseau’s First Discourse was written against the backcloth of burgeoning, mid-century, deistic sinophilia. His inherited Genevan Calvinism is challenged. He follows his deistic patroness (and lover) Mme. Françoise-Louise de Warens (née de la Tour du Pil: 1699–1762) into the Church of Rome. Moving to Paris, he is befriended by Diderot, D’Alembert and other associates of the Encyclopedia. He is always in need of money. He rejects (pro tem) his pessimistic Genevan Calvinist perspective on humanity as ‘miserable sinners, born in corruption, inclined to evil, (and) incapable [of ourselves] of doing good’ (q. Damrosch, 121), in favour of a generous Catholic, Confucian, and deistic view of humanity’s innate goodness. The Discourse – entered for an essay competition organized by the Académie de Dijon – absolved humanity and indicted the arts and sciences for societal evil. The Second Discourse (another competition essay for the Académie de Dijon) expands on the character, purpose and morality of human life. Written back in Geneva, after he had broken with Mme. De Warens (and with Diderot) and returned to the Calvinist fold, the work considers the causes of, and justification for, ‘inequality’. In four-parts, the Second Discourse examines humanity in a so-called ‘state of nature’. In this aboriginal state, man is, to Rousseau, an isolated, self-interested ‘savage’, fixated on ‘food, a female, and sleep’ ([1755] 1992: 55). ‘Physical’ inequalities infect this natural state, but a noble ‘savage’ still feels sympathy215 for suffering, learns by observation (‘perfectibility’) and (with ‘freedom’) conquers desire and the fear of death. Unlike Hobbes – who effectively conflates ‘civil society’ and the ‘state of nature’ – Rousseau presents ‘civil society’ alive with ‘moral’ inequality caused by ‘property’ and perverted self-interest. As he says: ‘The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society’ (ibid., 44). Property and taxation – especially by wealthy aristocrats – were becoming sensitive issues. If Like Herder, Hegel, the English composer Charles Burney (1726–1814), the German musicologist and composer Johann Forkel (1749–1818), and the music critic Adolf Marx (1795–1866), Rousseau developed theories of Chinese soundscapes (associated with language, literature, music and ritual) to defend the notion of ‘universal history’. As noted in relation to Beethoven (above p. 197), music (like porcelain and tea) creates global ‘cultural archetypes’ that support a ‘One World’ cultural and historical meta-narrative. Cf. on Sino-Western musicology: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/music/research/ projects/listening-to-china-sound-and-the-sino-western-encounter 1770 – 1839 (accessed 9 May 2018). 213 A seemingly despairing Rousseau described the 13-year-old Jacques-Armand Dupin on one occasion as ‘one of the worst pupils one could possibly find’ (Damrosch 2005: 166)! 214 On Montesquieu, p. 138, n. 34. 215 On ‘sympathy’ in 18th- and 19th-century Britain and Europe, Fairclough, M. (2013), The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture, esp. 21–124. 212

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Rousseau’s First Discourse brought fame, the Second – combined with his own angularity – brought notoriety. We feel Rousseau’s angst. Life is still read through the prism of his pain. The Confucianesque character of his rhetoric conditions much social commentary and moral discourse in China and the West. The fracturing of Rousseau’s relationship with Diderot and the Encyclopedists freed him from his youthful dependency on the past and aroused a new independence of thought.216 His contribution to nascent Romanticism and contemporary ‘Revolutions’ becomes clearer. The three works Rousseau produced in the early 1760s warrant particular attention. Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Émile, ou De L’Éducation (1762a), and Du Contract Social (1762b) enrich our study of character, purpose and morality in a number of important ways. Rousseau’s 800-page Bildungsroman, Julie, is an epistolary novel based on the tragic love-affair of Parisian philosopher, theologian and logician Peter Abelard (1079–1142) and his gifted student Héloïse d’Argenteuil (c. 1090/1100–64), the ward of a tough uncle, Fulbert, a secular canon. The original (true) story – full of secrecy, fame, pregnancy, forced marriage, castration, and the starcrossed lovers’ flight into ‘religious’ communities – captivated medieval minds. Rousseau’s work was a best-seller.217 Set against the backcloth of Alpine beauty, Julie played a key role in encouraging the ‘sentimentalism’ and naturalism of later Romanticism;218 the first edition being evocatively entitled, Lettres de deux amants, habitants d’une petite ville au pied des Alpes (Letters from two lovers living in a small town at the foot of the Alps). The intense spiritual realism in the hero SaintPreux’s purgation in ‘pure and subtle’ mountain air, and the explicit link made between the body and ‘sensitive soul’ of his beloved Julie (d’Etange), entranced Enlightenment Europe.219 Women and men swooned at Julie’s bitter suicide.220 One emotional reader wrote: ‘I dare not tell you the effect it made on me. . . . A sharp pain convulsed me. My heart was crushed. Julie dying was no longer an unknown person. I believed I was her sister, her friend, her Claire’ (q. Darnton 1984: 242). Here is more than pre-Romantic sentimentalism. Rousseau’s work effectively reconfigures ‘character’ and ‘morality’ through dialogue between physicality and sentiment. The book’s innate iconoclasm resonated with now openly secular (and atheistic) elements in Western culture. Wolmar221 (whom Julie ultimately marries) is a virtuous, attractive atheist. With its implicit (autobiographical) appeal to authenticity and individuality in love, faith, morality and sacrifice, Julie liberated enlightened, sexually frustrated, Francophone society. The Roman Catholic Church ‘prohibited’ the book. Rousseau became more famous – and more notorious. In so far as Julie pre-empts Modern existential literature – in which feeling, choice, and private morality displace cold reason and institutional authority – it has lastingly impacted the way character, purpose and morality are interpreted 216 On Rousseau, Diderot and freedom, Hobson, M. (2010), ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot in the late 1740s’, in C. McDonald and S. Hoffmann (eds), Rousseau and Freedom, 58–76. 217 Apparently seventy editions were printed pre-1800 (Darnton 1984: 242). Schopenhauer listed Julie with Cervantes’ (1547–1616) Don Quixote (1605, 1615), Laurence Sterne’s (1713–68) Tristram Shandy (fr. 1759), and Goethe’s (1749– 1832) Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–6, Wilhelm Meister’s apprenticeship), saying: ‘[T]hese four are the best of all existing novels’ for their emphasis on the ‘inner’ (1902: 322). On Schopenhauer, p. 304f. 218 On Rousseau and British Romanticism, Goulbourne, R. and D. Higgins, eds (2017), Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism, esp. Stark, H., ‘ “Rousseau’s Ground”: Locating a Refuge for the Libertarian Man of Feeling in Julie’, 33–50. 219 On this, McAlpin, M. (2007), ‘Julie’s Breasts, Julie’s Scars’. 220 Cf. Julie as a commentary on suicide, Faubert, M. (2015), ‘Romantic Suicide, Contagion, and Rousseau’s Julie’, in A. Esterhammer, D. Piccitto and P. Vincent (eds), Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland, 38–53. 221 N.B. some say modelled on Rousseau’s ally d’Holbach (above p. 152f., 155; also, p. 448, n. 240).

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in China and the West.222 Life and behaviour are objectified and psychologized here in fresh, seductive ways. Émile, ou De L’Éducation (1762) – to Rousseau, his ‘best and most important’ work ([1782–9] 1953: 529)223 – studies the interface of education and anthropology. Its primary tenet is made clear at the outset: ‘Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man’ (1979: 37).224 Rousseau’s revolutionary conclusion (that echoes Confucius and many after him)225 is that education both enables and empowers socio-political and moral transformation. In novelistic form, Émile is a pioneering contribution to educational philosophy and parenting.226 As in the Analects, the ideal citizen is nurtured by sound instruction and healthy habits. This requires a ‘de-naturing’ of a person from the ‘state of nature’ – or ‘absolute existence’ of ‘all for self ’ – into ‘a relative one’; that is, to ‘transport the I into the common unity’ (ibid., 40).227 Émile attracted much attention. A section in Book IV (of V), ‘Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar’, caused the strongest reaction.228 Though intended as an ‘indifferentist’ defence of religion, this section led to the work’s wide-spread condemnation and public burning in Paris and Geneva.229 Protestants took offence at Emile’s tutoring by a simple (Socinian)230 Catholic priest; Catholics at what they saw as Rousseau’s deliberate catechetical reserve and high regard for ‘natural religion’. Though generally critical, Voltaire offered sanctuary.231 Hume was candid: Rousseau ‘could not wonder that all the zealots were in arms against him’ for he had not veiled his sentiments (q. Mossner 1954: 508).232 In the agony and adultery of Émile’s unfinished, much-discussed sequel, Émile et Sophie, ou les Solitaires,233 Rousseau sets morality in the context of a bitter struggle between natural goodness in women and men, and its perversion by society. Like Confucius, Rousseau sees character, purpose and morality as socially determined as much as privately chosen. But, the adolescent turns against the parent. What Confucius commends as ‘propriety’, Rousseau condemns

On existentialism, p. 311f., and Chapter 8, passim. Cf. generally, Parry, G. (2001), ‘Émile: Learning to be Men, Women and Citizens’, in P. Riley (ed.), Cambridge Companion, 247–71; and, Shell, S. M., Émile: Nature and the Education of Sophia’, idem., 272–301. 224 N.B. as a comment on humanity and nature (Cooper 1999: 59f.). 225 On Marx and the power of public education to shape perception of ‘truth’ and compromise political ‘truthfulness’, p. 308f., 323f. 226 Cf. modern educationalist reception of Émile, Boyd, W. (1963), The educational theory of Jean Jacques Rousseau. 227 On sin and the ‘state of nature’ in Rousseau, Evrigenis, I. D. (2010), ‘Freeing man from sin’, in C. McDonald and S. Hoffmann (eds), Rousseau and Freedom, 9–23. 228 N.B. Voltaire was impressed by Rousseau’s critique of revealed religion in ‘Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar’. Cf. Howells, R. (1995), ‘Rousseau and Voltaire: A Literary Comparison of Two “Professions de Foi” ’. 229 On Émile in France and the French Revolution, Bloch, J. (1995), Rousseauism and Education in Eighteenth-century France, ad loc. 230 ‘Socinianism’ means here an anti-Trinitarian denial of ‘original sin’ and human depravity. Traced to Siennese scholar Lelio Sozzini (1525–62) and his nephew Fausto (1539–1604), Socinianism attracted 18th-century Deists, and was the basis of US and UK Unitarianism. 231 N.B. Voltaire’s reply: ‘I shall always love the author of the “Vicaire savoyard” whatever he has done, and whatever he may do . . . Let him come here [to Ferney]! He must come! I shall receive him with open arms. He shall be master here more than I. I shall treat him like my own son’ (q. Durant and Durant: X. 190f.). Rousseau later regretted rejecting Voltaire’s invitation. 232 In search of safety, Rousseau went to London (1766–7). Hume met him and records he was ‘gentle, modest, affectionate, disinterested, of extreme sensitivity’ (q. ibid., X. 209). 233 Cf. Emilius and Sophia; or, The Solitaries (ET 1783). For the text (and its place in modern feminism), Jensen, P. G. ed. (1996), Finding a New Feminism, Appendix, 193–236. 222 223

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as ‘bondage’. Habitual subjugation is akin to imprisonment. Confucianism is turned against itself in Rousseau’s passionate quest for human liberation.234 If Julie is a ‘Classic’ novel, Du Contract Social (1762) has become a ‘Classic’ of political theory.235 Like all ‘Classics’, we see life – and other ‘Classics’, like the Analects and Gospels – differently because of it.236 As the French literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–69) wrote (quoting Goethe) in his seminal essay (when the notion of ‘Classics’ was attracting attention): ‘Ancient works are classical not because they are old, but because they are powerful, fresh, and healthy’ (1868: 38–55).237 The details of Rousseau’s work, with its critique of monarchical ‘rights’ and socio-economic inequality, cannot detain us.238 Three things are relevant to this chapter. First, Rousseau redefined the nature of the polis, and, thereby, fuelled the fires of Revolution in France and America. As the title implies, The Social Contract sees life and power in society as set in a natural, mutual, ‘contractual’ relationship between every citizen. This innate bond both precedes and subordinates every other. Kings, courts, nobles and laws have no superior ‘Rights’.239 ‘Force does not create right’, he argues; and, ‘we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers’ ([1762c] 1968: 52f.). ‘Government’ serves the ‘sovereign’ and ‘General Will’ (Fr. volonté générale) of the people. Character, purpose and morality can be formed and assayed by conformity to this fundamental ‘social contract’. This social ontology echoes Confucian corporatism: here, once again, power, life and individuality are accountable to a higher system of obligation. Rousseau shocked many contemporaries but confirmed his place among multiple – and rival – masterminds of ‘Revolutions’ in Asia and the West. His empowerment of ‘the people’ cuts both ways. It has inspired ‘democracy’ in America (where power resides in ‘We, the people . . .’): it has legitimated ‘totalitarian democracies’240 (with ‘mutual obligation’ justifying oppression). Both trajectories appear in the aftermath of the book’s publication. Rousseau’s work sowed to a political whirlwind, his thought devastating historic districts of power and privilege.241 Finding morality in the rubble has been difficult.

On Rousseau’s ‘bitterness’ towards China, Guy, B. (1963), The French Image of China before and after Voltaire, 340. The Social Contract was translated into classical Chinese by the Meiji-era Japanese journalist, political theorist, and statesman Nakae Chomin ѝ⊏‫( ≁ݶ‬1847–1901), the so-called ‘Rousseau of the East’. In 1882, at a critical juncture in Japanese political life, Chomin serialized his translation in Political and Moral Science Review (which he founded). A parttranslation was published in Shanghai (1899). Other translations and works on it followed; notably, by Yan Fu ೤㼷 (1854– 1921), Zou Rong 䝂ᇩ (1885–1905), Liang Qichao ằஏ䎵 (1873–1929), Zhang Shizhao ㄐ༛䠇 (1881–1973) and other leaders of the ‘May 4th Movement’. For the context of Chomin’s translation, Ida, S. (1989), ‘Chomin: the Rousseau of the East’. 236 On the dynamics of a ‘Classic’, p. 107, n. 88; and, on T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound’s view, see n. 237 below. 237 Cf. also, Eliot, T. S. ([1944] 1975), ‘What is a Classic?’, in F. Kermode (ed.), The Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, 115–31. Also, Pound, E. ([1910] 2005), ‘Make it new’, The Spirit of Romance, 6; and, p. 387 below. 238 N.B. Bertram, C. (2004), Routledge Guidebook to Rousseau and The Social Contract. 239 Rousseau admits a sliding scale of centralized power, depending on a country’s size and bureaucracy. Larger countries need stronger (benign) rulers. Whether this extends to the Qing emperor’s despotic control of the vast landmass and population of China, is unclear. 240 Cf. Berlin, I. ([2002] 2014), Freedom and its Betrayal, 28–52; also, Talmon, J. (1960), The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. 241 On the work’s paradoxes and different interpretations, Scott, J. T. (2012), The major political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; —ed. (2006), Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Also, on the nature of Enlightenment modernity, religion and secularity in Rousseau, Bloom, A. (1990), Giants and Dwarfs, 210f.; Becker, C. (1932), The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers; Gay, P. (1966), The Enlightenment, Vol. I: The Rise of Paganism. 234 235

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Second, The Social Contract is a treatise on freedom and law. Every citizen has a duty to honour the law that safeguards his own, and his neighbour’s, freedom from tyranny. If ‘government’ is accountable to, and responsible for upholding, society’s ‘rule of law’, its ‘sovereign’, the people, are subject to laws they ultimately sanction. If Julie endorses ethical libertarianism, The Social Contract opposes political libertinism. Rousseau is committed to political order, not social anarchy; to legitimate authority, not a barbarous, illegal plebiscite. Much evil has been justified in Rousseau’s name. For all his putative antinomianism, his primary concern is that the freedom enjoyed by humanity in the ‘state of nature’ is not lost to lawlessness in a ‘civil society’. Hence, the manifesto’s iconic opening: ‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains’, with its key rider, ‘One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are’ (1968: 49). Rousseau intensifies discussion of the origin, nature and ends of human freedom,242 and the place and ‘rule of law’ within it. This has formed a heavy gloss on how human vocations, behavior, and moral formation are viewed in China and the West. Plainly put, we cannot un-remember Rousseau’s ‘Classic’. Third, expanding this last point, The Social Contract’s ‘reception’, and its place in socio-ethical reflection, past and present, in China and the West, has had the multi-facetted impact anticipated of a timeless ‘Classic’. Burke – like the Swiss-French political activist Benjamin Constant (1767– 1830), the French critic and historian Hippolyte Taine (1828–93), the social theorists and historians Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–59) and, later, Lord Acton (1834–1902) – made a direct connection between Rousseau’s ‘Enlightened’ thought and the French Revolution. Kant called Rousseau the ‘Newton of the moral world’, who had shifted focus from nature and the universe (in general) to humanity and the individual (in particular). As such, Rousseau is integral to the Enlightenment’s ‘Turn to the Self ’ and the Romantics’ love of ‘subjectivity’. As crucially, Honoré Mirabeau (1749– 91), Maximilien Robespierre (1758–94), and other leaders of the French Revolution’s first (1789– 92) and second phases (1792–99), didn’t appeal to Locke’s view of the ‘rights’ of man to life, liberty and property, but to Montesquieu and (even more) Rousseau, to justify imposition of public ownership and submission to the ‘General Will’. Ironically, the two – often seen as ‘rival’ architects of the Enlightenment and enemies of religion – fell out in 1760, not over ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’243 but over Voltaire’s support for a new theatre in Geneva! Rousseau – soured by Voltaire’s criticisms – said it degraded public morals.244 He wrote acerbically to the so-called ‘Ferney recluse’, Voltaire (17 June 1760): ‘I dislike you. You have caused me offenses, to which I was especially sensitive – I, your disciple and admirer. Geneva gave you refuge, and you have ruined it for this. You made my compatriots alien to me, in return for praises that I lavished on you’ (q. Zlatopolskaya, et al.: 2018: n.p.).245 As this sad exchange suggests, the ‘Revolutionary’ era through which Rousseau lived – and

242 N.B. the key distinction (in Émile and The Social Contract) between ‘moral freedom’ (to make informed decisions and educated moral choices) and ‘natural freedom’ (to think, move and act freely) (cf. Williams, D., 2007: 147f.). 243 For a critical review of Voltaire as upholding ‘reason’ and Rousseau ‘emotion’, Tate, R. S., Jr. (1969), ‘Rousseau and Voltaire as Deists: A Comparison’. 244 On Montesquieu and Rousseau’s mockery of Voltaire’s ‘Sinophilia’, Gunn, G. C. (2003), First Globalization, 149. For all his famed love of exotic plants, Rousseau was opposed to 18th-century attempts to profit from botanical transplants (i.e. tea from China to India, sugar and breadfruit into Caribbean slave plantations, the potato to Britain from S. America). Plants, like people, flourish in the original ‘state of nature’ (Rousseau 1994–2009: 8.130–63). 245 It seems matters only got worse. The following year Voltaire dismissed Rousseau’s Emile as ‘silly, philistine, shameless and boring’.

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in no small measure inspired – has left its mark, not only on national institutions and international affairs, but on how humans engage with one another. If Kant lived like a self-disciplined junzi, Rousseau (and the Revolutions and Romantics he inspired) did not.246 Rousseau’s reception in China requires a final comment. For he not only served to catalyse critical reflection on Qing governance in the early years of the 20th century,247 he has continued as an icon of ‘enlightened’ Chinese philosophy and political theory.248 As Els van Dongen and Yuan Chang argue, reviewing Zhu Xueqin’s (b. 1952) monograph The Demise of the Republic of Virtue: From Rousseau to Robespierre (1994)249 – which examines modern Chinese Rousseau studies (and proposes a deductive and inductive approach to his thought) – Rousseau (and the French Revolution) served as a foil to philosophy, ethics and political theory in China for more than a century. His advocacy for, and harsh criticism of, Enlightenment views of China energized numerous 20thcentury Chinese intellectuals in their engagement with both ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’.250 Metzger and Huang speak of a ‘natural fit’ between Rousseau’s utopianism and confident Confucian anthropology and epistemology (Van Dongen and Chang, 3).251 In the late 19th and 20th centuries – especially post-Tiananmen – Rousseau gave China resources to reflect on the character, causes and lasting effects of its failed, corporate, moral idealism.252 Zhu Xueqin is not alone in pointing to often disturbing parallels between the French Revolution and Cultural Revolution.253 As the quantity of secondary literature on Rousseau and China confirms, his ideas directly and indirectly

246 Symptomatically, Rousseau linked ‘tea’ with play: ‘When this meal was over, most of us engaged in an important occupation until evening: we went a little way out of town to play two or three games of mall for our afternoon tea’ ([1782–9] 1953: 267). Despite Mme. Warens’s encouragement of his botanical interests, he remained skeptical of tea’s medicinal benefits (van den Broek 2012: 29). 247 Reformists like Liang Qichao ằஏ䎵, Yan Fu೤㼷, Zhang Xirou ᕥྊ㤕 (1889–1973), Wang Yuanhua ⦻‫( ॆݳ‬1920– 2008), and the founders of the Canton ‘Society of Popular Intelligence’ (fr. 1903) that popularized Western literature, Zhu Zhixin ᵡวؑ (1885–1920), Hu Hanmin 㜑╒≁ (1879–1936) and Wang Jinwei ⊚㋮㺋 (1883–1944), took and used the cachet of Rousseau’s ideas and made them their own, or turned Rousseau into a wax nose shaped to their thinking. On this, Bastid-Bruguière, M. (1990), ‘Influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Chinese Political Thought before the 1911 Revolution’, in Zhang, Z. (ed.), China and the French Revolution, 29–36; Gao, X. (2017), ‘An Analysis of Chinese Constitutionalists’ Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau from 1899 to 1910’; Peng, W. (2017), ‘Rousseau and His Chinese “Apprentices” ’; Tao, W. (2012), ‘The Chinese reception of Rousseau’s political philosophy in the 20th century’; Van Dongen, E. and Y. Chang (2017), ‘After Revolution: Reading Rousseau in 1990s China’. 248 On parallels between Rousseau and Mao (in their connection of politics and ethics), Schwartz, B. (1996), ‘The Reign of Virtue: Leader and Party in the Cultural Revolution’, in China and Other Matters, 169–186. 249 Cf. Zhu, X. (2017), ‘The Demise of the Republic of Virtue – From Rousseau to Robespierre’; Fan, Y. (2013), ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau as “an Approach” ’. 250 On Chinese and Western Romanticism, to both forms of which Rousseau is (directly and indirectly) linked, Rabut, I. (2014), ‘Chinese Romanticism’, in Peng, H-y. and I. Rabut (eds), Modern China and the West, 201–23. 251 Cf. also, Metzger, T. (2005), A Cloud across the Pacific; Huang, M. K-w. (2016), ‘On the Translation of Democracy during the Transitional Period of Modern China’. 252 On this debated topic, Li, Z. and Liu, Z. (1995), Gaobie Geming: Huiwang Ershishiji Zhongguo [Farewell to Revolution: Looking Back upon China of the Twentieth Century]; and, on Gaobie Geming [Farewell to Revolution], He, H. Y. (2001), Dictionary of the Political Thought of the People’s Republic of China, 136f.; Yu, H. (2009), Media and Cultural Transformation, 47f. N.B. Chinese have views on French (rationalistic) and British (non-coercive) attitudes to freedom (Van Dongen and Chang 2017: 5). 253 Cf. Zhang, Z. ed. (1990), China and the French Revolution; also, Gao, Y. (1997), ‘French Revolutionary Studies in China Today’; —(1998), ‘French Revolutionary Studies in China’, in J. Germani and R. Swales (eds), Symbols, Myths and Images of the French Revolution, 321–30; —(2016), ‘Revolutionary violence of the French type and its influence on the Chinese Revolution’, in A. Forrest and M. Middell (eds), The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution, 299–320; King, D. (2017), ‘Translating Revolution in Twentieth-Century China and France’.

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shape cross-cultural interpretation of the Analects and Gospels. China, too, cannot ‘un-remember’ Rousseau: he is integral to modern China’s confidence, consciousness and morality. Confucianism is reimported into China reconfigured in Rousseauan radicalism. The last three successors of Kant, who are products of, and contributors to, the shape and spirit of this ‘Revolutionary’ era, and contemporary Sino-European moral hermeneutics, we introduce here and revert to in Chapter 6. Each deserves his own chapter. Selection and exaggeration are again essential. Their value lies in focusing issues mentioned in passing before and in framing the discussion of ‘Truth and Truthfulness’ we look at next. First, the influential poet, philosopher, theologian, and literary critic Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). We have mentioned Herder before.254 He deserves more time than space permits. From his humble origins, education at the feet of Kant and Hamann255 in the University of Königsberg (1762–4), clerical and educational ministry in Riga (1764–9), residence in Strasbourg (1770–6) where he met the young Goethe,256 and in Weimar (1776–1803) as General Superintendent of the Lutheran clergy (a post Goethe facilitated), Herder wrote prolifically. His ideas – always evolving, sometimes unresolved – addressed, adjusted, or initiated, numerous fields of scholarship. For reasons we will study, he becomes China’s historical and cultural nemesis, mocking its culture as embalmed ‘like a mummy in silk’,257 and its populace as a pitiful ‘corner people’ on the edge of history, their sad life, in thrall to Confucianism, one of apathy (Leere), passivity (ohne Tätigkeit), stupidity (ohne Intelligenz), mindlessness (Geistlösigkeit), and the loss of all individuality and personality (Vernichtung der Persönlichkeit).258 The critic constructs nevertheless a matrix in which China and the West can understand one another, and interpret the world and texts around them. For this, Herder is a central figure in the way character, purpose and morality are viewed today. He provides tools to undo life, language, culture and, in time, through his intellectual heirs, China. Three features of Herder’s thought, which feed into his view of China, warrant notice. They illuminate his contribution to the ethics and ethos of the Enlightenment. They still act to shape contemporary opinion. First, in his early life and formative works – Über den Fleiss in mehreren gelehrten Sprachen (1764, On diligence in several scholarly languages), Wie die Philosophie zum Besten des Volks Allgemeiner und Nützlicher Werden Kann (1765, How philosophy can become more universal and useful for the benefit of the people),259 the brief fragments Über die neuere

254 Above p. 184, 209. For German editions of Herder, Arnold, G., U. Gaier, et al., eds (1985-), Werke. Cf. also, Taylor, C. (1995a/b), ‘The Importance of Herder’, in Philosophical Arguments, 79–99; Adler, H. and W. Koepke, eds. (2009), A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder; Clark, R. T., Jr. (1955), Herder: His Life and Thought; Forster, M. N. (2018), Herder’s Philosophy; Gillies, A. (1945), Herder; Sauder, G. (1987), Johann Gottfried Herder, 1744–1803. 255 Often over-looked, Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88) inspired many in his day. Goethe, Herder, Hegel, and the architects of ‘Sturm und Drang’ all looked to him. 256 Herder’s meeting with Goethe is often linked to the start of the proto-Romantic ‘Sturm und Drang’ (storm and stress/ drive) movement (named after a play by the Prussian dramatist and General, Friedrich [von] Klinger [1752–83]). Sturm und Drang, in art and literature, stood for an intense, emotional repudiation of cold rationalism. 257 On this harsh, but striking, metaphor, Goebel, R. J. (1995), ‘China as an Embalmed Mummy: Herder’s Orientalist Poetics’. 258 On Herder’s view of China, Lee, China and Europe, 91f.; Zhang, C., ‘From Sinophilia to Sinophobia’, 98f. Herder had followers in the ‘May 4th Movement’ and Communist era in China, who (for different reasons) agreed with his basic diagnosis. On use of Montesquieu and Herder’s critique of China – and, similar interest in translations into Chinese of Thomas Henry Huxley’s (1825–95) evolutionary theories – by late 19th-century Chinese reformists Kang Youwei ᓧᴹ⛪ (1858–1927), Yan Fu ೤ᗙ and Tang Sitong 䆊ఓ਼ (1865–98), He, P. (2002), China’s Search for Modernity, 25f. On Huxley, p. 271, 274, 286, 289, 296, n. 153, 316, 324, n. 294, 347, 448, n. 241. 259 Cf. Forster, M. N., trans. and ed. (2002), J. G. Herder: Philosophical Writings, 3–30.

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deutsche Literatur (1767–8, On recent German literature),260 his study of aesthetics Kritische Wälder: oder Betrachtungen die Wissenschaft und Kunst des Schönen (1769, Critical Forests, or Reflections on the science and art of the Beautiful),261 and his Journal meiner reise im jahr 1769 (Journal of my voyage in the year 1769)262 – language, literature, ethics, culture, philosophy and aesthetics are (pace Confucius) the instruments of Herder’s trade. But the tools Confucius used to construct Chinese society, Herder employs to destroy it. Confucianism made China ‘infantile’ (Knabenalter): culture and geography keep it a ‘slave’.263 At every turn, China, Chinese, and Confucian culture are found wanting.264 Second, the seeds sown in Herder’s early works bear fruit later.265 His On Diligence and Fragments anticipate his later work on language theory Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772, Treatise on the origin of language).266 He still claims here a common origin of language per se, and its use as the ‘seed’ of culture, but he now denies it is a divine gift or spontaneous process. It is instead for Herder derivative of reason and thought, which (contra ancient and modern opinion) is mediated in and through language. Behind this lies Besonnenheit, humanity’s ability to remember and reflect, and thence communicate. In the midst of ongoing debate,267 Herder claimed Chinese was neither the aboriginal language, nor even an exceptional language: it is just a(nother) stage in humanity’s linguistic evolution.268 Despite his negativity to China’s language (and, elsewhere, its culture), Herder’s early views on philosophy and ethics are strikingly Confucianesque. In his prize essay (for a society in Bern), ‘(ET) How Philosophy Can Become More Universal’ (1765), his debt to ‘pre-critical’ Kant is clear.269 Here metaphysics is suspect, empiricism lauded and (pace Hume) ethics involve ‘sentiment’. If Kant moved on, Herder did not. His philosophy of history, ‘mind’, culture and ethics – Popularphilosophie – continues to unite a pragmatic, utilitarian approach, with a call for ‘healthy understanding’ and flexibility. Contra Rationalist ‘cognition’, he sees ethics as cultivated ‘moral sentiments’. There is often much here for Confucius to admire;270 for neither he, nor Herder, likes impractical theory, nor life without every

Cf. ibid., 33–64. On history, ibid., 257–67. 262 Cf. Barnard, F. M. (1969), J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, 63–116. 263 Climate also played its part. Herder was not alone in seeing in Europe ‘well-formed men molded by temperate climes’ (Stocking 1984: 20). 264 Zhang Chunjie quotes Herder’s recognition of China’s development of ‘porcelain, silk, gunpowder, printing and bridgeand ship-building’ (2008: 104), and conviction that China’s language and culture were not conducive to progress, nor to the development of European-standard science. In his Philosophie de l’histoire (1765), Herder repudiates Voltaire’s confidence in Chinese ‘perfection’ (ibid. 103f.). On Herder and ‘comparative’ literature, Mayo, R. S. (1969), Herder and the Beginnings of Comparative Literature. 265 N.B. Goethe recognized this (Morton 1989: 8f.). 266 Cf. Herder, Social and Political Culture, 117–78. 267 Cf. above p. 110f. 268 To set Herder’s anthropological insights in context, Niekerk, C. (2016), ‘The Problem of China: Asia and Enlightenment Anthropology’, in B. Brandt and D. L. Purdy (eds), China in the German Enlightenment, 97–117. 269 On Herder and Kant, Hsia, A. (2001), ‘The far east as the philosophers’ “other” ’. Herder’s later Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1799, A metacritique on the Critique of Pure Reason) and Kalligone (1800) refute Kant’s ‘critical’ method in philosophy and aesthetics. 270 Herder’s moral philosophy combines a clear Christian Bildung (viz. an articulation by a person of a plurality of classic Christian qualities, such as love, justice, honesty, forgiveness and sympathy) with conscious rejection of methodological, moral monism, as claimed, for example, by Kant’s ‘moral imperative’ or J. S. Mill’s ‘Utilitarianism’. Herder is respectful of human (cultural, psychological, moral) diversity and its historical expression/s. 260 261

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type of integrity.271 Life as a unity needs moral metaphors and embodied examples.272 But, as Herder’s response to the French Revolution, Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793–7), indicates, his modern, Enlightenment mind might conceive of a revolution in thought, but not in deed.273 That did not mean his ideas did not have revolutionary potency when exported worldwide. Third, Herder’s mature reflection on history, language, ethics and aesthetics impacts our historical study of Sino-Western cross-cultural relations. Despite continuities, Herder’s thought still develops. His philosophy of history – notably in his Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774, This too a philosophy of history for the formation of humanity)274 and Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91, Ideas for the philosophy of the history of humanity)275 – became formative for modern German (and European) historiography.276 In contrast to histories of ‘the great and the good’, he proposes an organic, moral, cultural, psychological and teleological approach. As he says: ‘[O]ne must go into the age, into the region, into the whole history, and feel one’s way into everything’ (q. Adler and Menze 1997: 36). He seeks the ‘innerness’ of history, its ‘genetic’ structure, its ‘mental’, local, cultural, linguistic distinctives. He blends rigorous historicism with devout classicism and passionate nationalism.277 Romantics turned to Herder to justify Sehnsucht nach Vergegenheit (longing for the past). In the face of vain cosmopolitanism, Herder celebrated das Volk, the original, organic, local, familial, geographic group (Adler and Koepke 2009: 170f.).278 A ‘genetic’ approach279 enhances, he contends, selfunderstanding (through cultural comparison). It requires careful moral, aesthetic study of cultural evolution from the primitive Orient and classical antiquity to attain to the maturity of Europe. There is, he holds, no Universalgeschichte (Universal history), only ‘value-filled diversity’, and ‘every human perfection is national’ (Iggers [1962] 1983: 30; q. Saranpa 2002: 33).280 When, or if, a people lose patriotism, they ‘lose themselves and the whole world about them’ [ET, ed.] (1877– 1913: 18.337).281 ‘Compare England with Germany’, he says elsewhere, ‘the English are Germans,

On Herder’s philosophy in context, Beiser, F. C. (1987), The Fate of Reason, ad loc. Like the Analects, Herder places emphasis on how philosophy can nurture exemplars, laws and literature. 273 Herder’s (socially ‘particularist’ and ‘anti-Imperialist’) support for the French Revolution was controversial, and, in the event, short-lived. On the ‘continual state of fever’ the French Revolution generated among German intellectuals, Hoffmeister, G. ed. (1990), European Romanticism, Preface (14); —ed. (1989), The French Revolution and the Age of Goethe. On Herder and German political thought, Beiser, F. C. (1992), Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism. 274 Cf. Social and Political Culture, 179–224. 275 Ibid., 253–326. Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man was translated into English by T. Churchill in 1800. On Herder and early 19th-century debate about the link between historical truth and theology, Macintyre, S., J. Maiguaschca and A. Pók, eds (2011), The Oxford History of Historical Writing, IV. 24f.; Barnard, F. M. (2003), Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History; Howard, T. A. (2000), Religion and the Rise of Historicism, ad loc. 276 Pattberg goes too far, claiming Herder’s Ideen gave Germans ‘more greatness, pride, and nostalgia than an actual, geopolitical empire could to the British’, and ‘Hegel’s Die Orientalische Welt (1837) and Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1805) were Germany’s retreat and substitute for real colonies’ (2011: 40). On Herder and German historicism, Beiser, F. C. (2003), The German Historicist Tradition, ad loc. 277 Cf. for a comparison of Herder and Vico (esp. on language, history and culture), Berlin, I. (1976), Vico and Herder. 278 On language, for Herder, in the cultural formation of das Volk, Fox, R. A. (2003), ‘J. G. Herder on Language and the Metaphysics of National Community’. 279 On Herder’s ‘genetic’ approach to history and Hegel, Nietzsche and Foucault, p. 235, 268, n. 17, 323f., 330, 362f. 280 On Herder and culture/s, Sikka, S. (2011), Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference. 281 Cf. ‘Ein Mensch der sein väterlandisches Gemüt verlor, hat sich selbst und die Welt um sich verloren’ (ibid.). On Herder’s anthropology, Waldow, A. (2015), ‘The Artifice of Human Nature: Rousseau and Herder’; Zammito, J. H. (2002), Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Modern Anthropology. 271 272

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and even in the latest times have led the way for the English in the greatest things’ ([1800] 1803: II. 120).282 Quarrying Germany’s history, culture and folk literature, Herder reimagined German ‘nationalism’.283 He believed Germany’s language and Gothic heritage under-valued, compared to Hebrew, Greek and Nordic myths. He panned historical streams for nuggets that outshone antiquity. He found much to praise, more in China (and elsewhere) to condemn. Sinology served his intellectual purpose. Germany and Christendom were compared to advantage with China.284 Though Herder spawned ‘culture studies’, he ‘unbound’ patriotic demons that possessed – and at times convulsed – Britain, Europe and China for 200 years.285 Character, purpose, and morality are redefined in Herder’s relativist ethical historicism, social relativism and profound cultural chauvinism. He inspires cultural ‘otherness’ and thence Said’s ‘Orientalism’. He pushes China away. If Herder’s nationalism has discoloured modern political economics, his views on language, literature, and textual interpretation are no less significant. As we have noted, he sees language as integral to thought and culture. His holistic view of history and nationality honours linguistic diversity. His interest in language/s attracts him to the new discipline of linguistics.286 But his ‘philosophy of mind’ – especially the (third version of his) essay Vom Erkennen und Emfinden der menschlichen Seele (1778, On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul) – transforms this. He places ‘sensation’ before ‘causation’. As his (rather less than satisfactory) work on aesthetics, Plastik: Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume (1778, Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream) states, feeling is ‘the first, most profound, and almost the only human sense’ (1877–1913: 8.104). If integral to thought, language is also therefore subordinate to feeling. This core principle determines Herder’s view of poetry and his place in the development of the new ‘science of textual interpretation’, hermeneutics.287 Poetry is the matrix for Herder’s ‘psychological’ approach to interpretation. It shapes his view of the poet as ‘creator of the nation around him’ (ibid., 8.433),288 and of poetry as the tool of ‘truth’. The poet gives his nation, he says, ‘a world to see’ and ‘has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world’ (ibid.).289 Linguistic variety, and the genre, history, and evolution of N.B. the context of this remark and Herder’s view of Ossian, Shakespeare and Britain’s German identity (Kontje 2004: 68). On ‘nationalism’, p. 234; also, Patten, A. (2010), ‘ “The most natural state”: Herder and Nationalism’; Schmidt, R. J. (1956), ‘Cultural Nationalism in Herder’. N.B. Herder’s teleological view of history (evident in his early On the Changes in the Tastes of Nations through the Ages [1766]) – as the progressive advance of reason, culture and humanity – stands in marked contrast to the retrospective idealism of Voltaire and sinophile philosophes, and to the deliberate integralism of Hume and all who saw few, if any, major differences between cultures and their moral values. It was an approach that left its mark on the Schlegel brothers, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Nietzsche and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911). Cf. Ergang, R. R. (1931), Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism; also, p. 230, n. 278, 233. 284 On the Enlightenment’s image of China, Berger, W. R. (1990), China-Bild und China-Mode im Europa der Aufklärung; Tautz, B. (2016), ‘Localizing China: Of Knowledge, Genres, and German Literary Historiography’, in Brandt and Purdy, 118–41. 285 On Herder’s role in Western rhetoric of control and subjugation in relation to China, Zhang, C. (2008), ‘From Sinophilia to Sinophobia’, 107f. For the adoption of Herder’s ideas by Hegel and Marx, below p. 233f., 308f., 323f.; also, generally, Tautz, B. (2007), Reading and Seeing Ethnic Differences in the Enlightenment; Wheeler, R. (2000), The Complexion of Race. 286 On the context for Herder’s interest in language, Forster, M. N. (2010), After Herder. 287 On Herder and hermeneutics, Gjesdal, K. (2017), Herder’s Hermeneutics: History, Poetry, Enlightenment. 288 N.B. the joint manifesto Herder, Goethe and other leading intellectuals signed: Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker (Extract from a correspondence about Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples) (1877– 1913: 5.159–207). On this, Nisbet, H. B. ed. (1985), Extract from a correspondence about Ossian, 153–161. On Herder and Shakespeare, Gjesdal, K. (2004), ‘Reading Shakespeare–Reading Modernity’; and below p. 233. 289 N.B. Herder’s view of poets and poetry (Sauder 2009: 305–30). 282

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texts, also matter to him. Meaning is elusive without knowing a text’s linguistic and cultural origin. It must then be read as a whole, with ‘divination’ of the ‘sensations’ and intentions of the author.290 As in Coleridge, Herder’s empiricist marriage of linguistics and philosophy denies privileging religious texts (including the Bible) or ‘spiritual’ readings of any kind. The Bible is to be read ‘as any other book’ – albeit, aware of its ethos, culture and character. In this context, translation also impacts Herder’s thought and legacy. There is to be ‘accommodation’ to the original, a readiness to ‘bend’ words to meaning, and an ear to rhythms, or ‘musical’ forms, of the source-text. For all of this, Herder’s high profile in the history of hermeneutics is assured. His core principles have entered the mainstream of the discipline. We will return to them when we look at Schleiermacher (below p. 237f.) and at ‘Truth and Truthfulness’ in Chapter 6. Directly and indirectly, Herder still conditions the ways character, purpose and morality are read and interpreted in the Analects and Gospels. We must also register the paradox at the heart of Herder’s thought: while respecting cultural ‘otherness’, he rejoices in German superiority and biblical authority.291 Comparison is often Herder’s path to criticism. Others have exploited the weakness and weaponry of his work. Herder’s mature perspective on ethics and aesthetics also shape contemporary cross-cultural interpretation of the Analects and Gospels. As we have glimpsed in his approach to history, language and culture, moral philosophy is ever-present.292 If personal ethics are an expression of ‘moral sentiments’, they are for Herder also (contra contemporary theories of final judgement) accounted by, and accountable to, a naturalist, this-worldly time-referent. They are also more than mere ‘sentiments’: they are cognitively articulate, historically and culturally differentiated, socially adapted, and progressively refined, with Christian faith and European Enlightenment morality the apogee of development. Herder’s relativism is clear: ‘Each nation has its centre of happiness in itself, like every sphere its centre of gravity!’ (ibid. 5.502; q. Barnard 2003: 135). But Herder is no sentimentalist. He is passionate about moral pedagogy. He fears Western societies embrace hollow replicas of moral virtues, such as love, freedom, justice, sympathy, courage, equality, forgiveness, integrity and Humanität (which is, in Herder, akin to the Confucian ren).293 Ideals are to be honoured in, and learned from, saints, art, literature and poetry. Echoing Leibniz (and, thence, Confucius), behind life and morality lies an ‘harmonious whole’ (q. Noyes 2015: 110).294 We have spoken of Herder’s aestheticism before. There are two final things to stress. Like his work as a whole, Herder’s approach to aesthetics is consciously and unconsciously unsystematic.295 His thought is often undisciplined, his method deliberately empirical. Even his defence of poetry’s aesthetic pre-eminence (over music and sculpture) – with its unique combination of sense,

290 N.B. his discussion of textual interpretation in On Thomas Abbt’s Writings (1768) and On the Cognition and Sensation (1778), where Herder (pace Schleiermacher) proposes psychology to understand and recover the creative spirit and mind of an author/text. See further p. 241. 291 Herder combines his thinking on culture, poetry and theology in his seminal study On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782–3). Cf. for his theology, Christian Writings (1794–8). 292 On Herder’s moral philosophy, Crowe, B. D. (2012), ‘Herder’s Moral Philosophy: Perfectionism, Sentimentalism, and Theism’. 293 N.B. the connection to Mencius, Lenk, H. (2008), ‘Mencius pro Humanitate Concreta: Mengzi and Schweitzer on Practical Ethics of Humanity’, in C-C. Huang, G. Paul and H. Roetz (eds), The Book of Mencius and Its Reception in China and Beyond, 174–88. 294 On Spinoza’s impact on German thought, Bell, D. (1984), Spinoza in Germany. 295 On Herder’s aesthetics in context, Norton, R. E. (1991), Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment; Noyes, J. K. (2015a), Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism.

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imagination and accepted ‘signs’ – is partial and provisional. So, too, his restricted ‘expressivism’ develops erratically; albeit with his commitment to thought-as-language anchoring his exegesis of ‘non-linguistic’ art. Secondly, as we see in his work on Shakespeare and attitude to beauty, his approach is consistently historicist. That is, aesthetic standards evolve. Culture matures. Tastes change. Indeed, as he writes in On the Change of Taste (1766), they can invert previous priorities. Furthermore, in so far as art and culture, like moral habits and political opinions, are value-laden, they educate and communicate. In Herder and his disciples, character, purpose, and morality belong to an interrelated nexus of human behaviours that are equally expressed in ‘sentiment’, ‘taste’, ‘habit’, ‘art’ and text.296 We end this section looking briefly at two of Kant’s most eminent successors, Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) and Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834). We have noted their work before and will return to it again in Chapter 6. In 1820, Hegel was lecturing on the philosophy of history at the University of Berlin. The notes of his lectures (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte) were published posthumously: first, in 1837, by his pupil and colleague Eduard Gans (1797–1839), and then again in 1840 by his son Karl (1813–1901), a well-known historian in his own right. Meanwhile, Schleiermacher was preparing his doctrinal magnum opus, Die Christliche Glaube (The Christian Faith), which appeared first in 1821–2, and again in 1831. As colleagues in Berlin, the two men did not get on.297 Against the backdrop of the American and French Revolutions, Napoleon’s war with Britain, his army’s occupation of much of Europe, and the fall of the old German Empire in 1806, like their colleagues and fellow-citizens, Hegel and Schleiermacher were asking fundamental questions about ‘world history’ and the purpose of life for individuals, nations and das Volk. Though they drew different conclusions, both men owe much to Kant. In two specific areas they are rather more indebted to Herder. We focus on these here as we begin to resolve the preceding discussion and anticipate what follows in Chapter 6. First, Hegel draws much from Herder for his view of history and perception of China. Hegel and Herder wrote in light of burgeoning (especially German) interest in ‘world history’ in the 18th century. Behind them lay the historical narratives of providential theodicy in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), and, more recently, in French bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s (1627–1704) Discours de l’Histoire Universelle (1691, Discourse on Universal History) and Leibniz’s concept Théodicée. These held that, contrary to human perception or opinion, there is a ‘sufficient’, specific, divine reason for events. In the 18th century, philosophies of history begin to change.298 Systematization appears in Spinoza, Wolff, Fichte and Schelling. Vico’s New Science (1725)

296 On Herder and the concept of Bildung, Gjesdal, K. (2013), ‘ “A Not Yet Invented Logic”: Herder on Bildung, Anthropology, and the Future of Philosophy’, in K. Vieweg and M. N. Forster (eds), Die Bildung der Moderne, 53–69. For extension of his aesthetics into politics, Noyes (2015b), ‘The Aesthetics of Revolution and the Critique of Imperialism’, in Herder, 246–96. 297 On the reason for their poor relationship, Merklinger, P. M. (1993), Philosophy, Theology, and Hegel’s Berlin Philosophy of Religion, 48f.; and fuller treatment in, Jensen, K. E. (2012), ‘The Hegel-Schleiermacher Conflict’, 89–96. As Pinkard explains, Karl Rosenkranz’s (1805–79) eulogistic Hegels Leben (1844) romanticizes Hegel’s unusual ‘habits’ in his youth, and as a celebrity (Pinkard 2000: 371). On the importance of ‘habits’ (at times ‘mechanical’) for Hegel, in enabling the transition from ‘nature’ to ‘spirit’, Novakovic, A. (2017), ‘Hegel’s Anthropology’, in D. Moyar (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Hegel, 417. 298 For an overview, Iggers, G. G. (2011), ‘The Intellectual Foundations of Nineteenth-Century “Scientific” History’, in S. Macintyre, J. Maiguashca and A. Pók (eds), Oxford History of Historical Writing, I. 41–58. Also, on the development of the idea, and form, of ‘world histories’, Hughes-Warrington, M. ed. (2005), Palgrave Advances in World Histories, 46f.; Iggers, G. G., Q. E. Wang and S. Mukherjee ([2008] 2017), A Global History of Modern Historiography, esp. 18–25, 53–63.

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universalizes human nature and thus creates a new rationale for writing a ‘universal history’. Rousseau’s Emile (1762) praises the power of education. Kant’s Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte (1782, Idea for a universal history) and Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (1784, What is Enlightenment?) both pursue the hidden truth in ‘universal history’ – namely, the progressive unveiling of humanity’s freedom and rationality. The early political scientist, historian, and philosopher Nicolas (Marquis) de Condorcet (1743–94) commends libertarian economics and egalitarian politics, while his radical, influential counterpart, Henri (Comte) de Saint-Simon (1760– 1825), projects his Utopian vision of ‘progress’ onto a new, socialist meritocracy. Alongside this systematization we find a countervailing, anti-Kantian strain of empiricism and historicism in Europe. Herder’s teacher Hamann reflects this, but it is found in other forms elsewhere. We see it in the primitive ‘polygenist’ anthropology of Göttingen philosopher Christoph Meiners (1747– 1810) and in the ‘fideistic’ individualism of Friedrich Jacobi (1743–1819). It inspires the polymathic literary and political labours of Goethe and the ‘Weimar Classicists’, and the Indo-European, comparative linguistic studies of (younger) Jena Romantic Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829). We glimpse it also in the philology of the patriotic historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831), in the economic historiography of Adam Smith, in the ‘positivism’ of the French philosopher and pioneering social scientist, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), and in the different conclusions a century and later of a Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Hegel’s view of history is only intelligible against this complex background.299 Of course, some would always follow the architectonic labours (and scepticism) of Edward Gibbon’s six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89). While others seek to emulate the ‘source-based’ style of Leopold Von Ranke’s (1795–1886) multi-volume work on Latin and Teutonic nations (1824), Southern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries (1827), Serbia (1829), the Popes (1834–36), the House of Brandenburg and Prussia (1847–8), the French monarchy (1852–61), Germany (1871–2), England (1875), the Revolutionary Wars of 1791 and 1792 (1875), Hardenberg and Prussia (1877) and ‘World History’ (1886).300 But Hegel’s new method of ‘dialectical’ historiography quickly established itself. It continues to shape the way character, purpose and morality are interpreted in the Analects and Gospels. We ‘read backwards carefully’ through Hegel’s intense, processive, philosophy of history.301 Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807, Phenomenology of Spirit) and Lectures on the Philosophy of History (delivered in 1822, 1828 and 1830) serve to synthesize earlier thinking. If he draws on Herder’s nationalism and Fichte’s universalism, he is also indebted to Kantian idealism for his vision of history as revealing the evolution of humanity’s rational capacity (and quest for ‘freedom’); while ‘the cunning of reason’ veils a providential ‘hidden hand’ ordering life (qua universal history) to its final, pre-determined end (Carney 2000: 16). Seeing France disordered by Revolution and recovered by Napoleon and the Empire, Hegel expands the tri-partite dialectic of

299 On Hegel’s view of history, and esp. his attitude to ‘Revolution’, Losurdo, D. (2004), ‘Hegel and the Liberal Tradition: Two Opposing Interpretations of History’, in Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns, 96–123. 300 On Ranke, Boldt, A. D. (2015), The Life and Work of the German Historian Leopold von Ranke; Iggers, G. G. (1962), ‘The Image of Ranke in American and German Historical Thought’; Iggers, G. G. and J. M. Powell, eds (1990), Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline; Schevill, F. (1952), ‘Ranke: Rise, Decline, and Persistence of a Reputation’; Stern, F. ed. ([1956] 1973), The Varieties of History. 301 N.B. on the unitive power of tea and divisive quality of ideas, Goethe’s conversation partner Johann Eckermann (1792– 1854) tells us that on 18 October 1827 Goethe gave a tea party in honour of Hegel. Conversation was stilted because of their differences in manner, temperament and philosophy. Hamann, who they both admired, was, it seems, a safe topic!

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the Spirit (thesis: antithesis: synthesis) in Phenomenology of the Spirit into the full-bodied teleological schemata of the Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Events, purposes, and the ‘end’ of history are now manifestations of an overarching plan. As he says: ‘The question at issue is therefore the ultimate end of mankind, the end which the spirit sets itself in the world’ (1857: 63). ‘Absolute idealism’ unites the ‘objective’ facticity of events with a philosophical historian’s discernment of their ‘subjective’, spiritual meaning. Reason is basic to this blending of philosophy and empiricism: ‘To comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason’ ([1821] 1992: 7.11).302 Hegel’s interest in ‘world-historical’ events (like the French Revolution, and Indian and Chinese culture) fits his synthetic method and dialectical theory. The legacy of his work in existentialism, Marxism, fascism, nihilism, and the ‘death of God’ movement is immense. Character and morality are restated – and exported – in Hegel’s historically processive, and morally purposive, view of the nature and action of Geist (Spirit). Hegel’s dependence on Herder for his view of China is also clear; although at no point does he quite descend to his opinion that the Chinese ‘were, and will remain’ a people ‘endowed by nature with small eyes, a short nose, a flat forehead, little beard, large ears, and a protuberant belly’; and sense that, ‘what their organization could produce, it has produced’ (1800: 293).303 Nor, the spirit of Herder’s coruscating comment on the tea trade: ‘Swelling with tartarian [Tartar] pride, she [China] despises the [European] merchant, who leaves his own country, and barters what she deems the most solid merchandise for things of trifling value; she takes her silver, and gives him in return millions of pounds of enervating tea to the corruption of all Europe’ (ibid., 298). But Hegel does articulate Herder’s ‘non-universalist’ view of human nature and culture, and ‘particularist’ explanation of Chinese civilization as a primitive stage in humanity’s cultural and political evolution.304 Europe’s love of tea did not, sadly – and provocatively, of course – elevate perception of its source(s)! To Hegel, ‘World history . . . represents the development of the spirit’s consciousness of its own freedom and of the consequent realization of this freedom’ (1975: 138). If tested by this, by Kant’s view of ‘freedom’ and Herder’s ‘genetic’, organic sense of history, China is deficient. In an extended section of Philosophy of History, he records his wonder (like other Europeans) at the size, structure, architectural achievements (i.e. the ‘Great Wall’), organization, and self-origination of the Chinese Empire, as ‘the oldest, as far as history gives us any information’, with practices of history and tradition that ‘ascend to 3000 years before Christ’ ([1857] 1956: 121). But, ‘Early do we see China advancing to the condition in which it is found at this day’ (ibid.), with change excluded by the contrast it embodies of ‘objective existence and subjective freedom’. Like India, China is ‘outside the World’s History’. It is awaiting an enlightened capacity for self-reflection and ‘subjectivity’ On this, Taylor, C. ([1975] 1999), Hegel, 423. Hegel extends this to ‘taste’, which is defined irrespective of sense and sensibility. As such, taste belongs to Hegel’s theory of materiality in general and to the particular predisposition of an individual. 303 On Herder’s views as a historical expression of ‘sinologism’, Gu, M. D. (2013), ‘Sinologism: a historical critique’, 72f. Cf. on Herder and race, Hannaford, I. (1996), Race: The History of an Idea in The West, 230f. 304 On Hegel’s view of ‘nation’, ‘history’, and his primary contribution to 19th-century discourse on evolutionism (later ‘social Darwinism’), modern analysis of China and post-colonialism, Duara, P. (1995), Rescuing History from the Nation, 20f.; Tibebu, T. (2011), Hegel and the Third World, 235–96. On his critique of the character and possibility of Chinese ‘philosophy’, Kim, Y. K. (1978), ‘Hegel’s Criticism of Chinese Philosophy’; and, his low regard for the abstract and ideographic quality of Chinese script (and Derrida’s view of this as Western ‘logocentrism’), Connery, C. L. (1998), The Empire of the Text, 37f. 302

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(ibid., 209). Until then, ‘The Substantial (ed. positive) in its moral aspect’ will rule, ‘not as the moral disposition of the Subject, but as the despotism of the Sovereign’ (ibid., 122). Though the Chinese have a keen sense of family, they are ‘children of the State’, with no freedom and ‘little independent personality’ (ibid., 126), their country ‘an empire, administration, and social code, which is at the same time moral and thoroughly prosaic’ (ibid., 129). Though this socio-political system is the product of ‘understanding’, it lacks ‘free Reason and Imagination’ (ibid.). Its highly trained Emperor may act with dignity, simplicity and humility, but he claims for himself ‘the deepest reverence’ (ibid.) and absolute obedience: as a result, his people view themselves as ‘born only to drag the car of Imperial Power’ (ibid., 145). There may, says Hegel, be ‘no distinction conferred by birth’ in China, so ‘everyone can attain the highest dignity’ (ibid.) in its social and educational system, but ‘the worth of the inner man’ is denied, and ‘a servile consciousness’ incapable of ‘distinctions’ is created (ibid.). Hegel tests China’s cultural soil and reckons it infertile.305 His is a harsh, historicist, cultural assessment. He continues. Despite its antiquity, erudition and type of social equality, China has no Constitution in the traditional sense. Until such time – or absent a dramatic disruption of the status quo – China will remain, a sad, imperial despotism locked in socio-cultural stasis and the effective ‘enslavement’ of its people. Individual freedom, property, law, punishment and religion will continue to be viewed perversely, and morality suffer. He states: As no honour exists, and no one has an individual right in respect of others, the consciousness of debasement predominates, and this easily passes into that of utter abandonment. With this abandonment is connected the great immorality of the Chinese. They are notorious for deceiving wherever they can. Friend deceives friend, and no one resents the attempt at deception on the part of another. —ibid., 137 With a religion (Buddhism) that ‘regards as the Highest and Absolute – as God – pure Nothing . . . contempt for individuality, for personal existence, (is). . . the highest perfection’ (ibid.). But the ‘truly theoretical occupation of the mind’, required for the ‘free ground of subjectivity’ and proper ‘scientific interest’, is also absent (ibid., 141). Though he esteems Chinese art – especially its capacity for imitation – Hegel nevertheless concludes: ‘This is the character of the Chinese people . . . Its distinguishing feature is that everything which belongs to Spirit – unconstrained morality, in practice and theory, Heart, inward Religion, Science and Art properly so called – is alien to it’ (ibid., 144). We track Hegelianism in Marxism, communism and 20th-century Maoism, but Hegel himself has little positive to say of China and Chinese culture.306 He takes sinophobia in a new direction, setting it on a new, critical, philosophical foundation.307 China has never been seen – or, indeed, seen On China as an aesthetic category for Hegel, Saussy, H. (1993), ‘Hegel’s Chinese Imagination’, 151–84. On Hegel and Western reception of Chinese ethics in general, Roetz, H. (1993), Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age, 7–22. 306 For 20th-century Chinese engagement with Hegel, Wang, R. R. (2014), ‘Zhang Shiying and Chinese Appreciation of Hegelian Philosophy’; Button, P. (2007), ‘Negativity and Dialectical Materialism: Zhang Shiying’s Reading of Hegel’s Dialectical Logic’. 307 N.B. the historical extrapolation from changing Enlightenment perspectives on China and Hegel’s view in Roetz, H. (2010), ‘On Nature and Culture in Zhou Culture’, in H. U. Vogel and G. Dux (eds), Concepts of Nature, 198–219. On Hegel’s political philosophy, Brooks, T. ([2007] 2013), Hegel’s Political Philosophy. 305

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itself – in the same way again. Adult, ancient China is undone by traditions it inspired that it reimported at first unconsciously and then deliberately. China’s reception of Hegel has been highly selective. His dialecticism has had more impact than his criticisms.308 As with Kant, we cannot ‘unremember’ Hegel when we study human character, purpose and morality in the Analects and Gospels: the socio-political, philosophical lacquer of Hegel and Hegelianism is very thick. Finally, we turn to Friedrich Schleiermacher, the so-called ‘Father of Modern Liberal Protestantism’; a figure as often misunderstood as intentionally misrepresented, who takes discussion of human character, purpose, and morality in important new directions. Ethics are pivotal (Schleiermacher [1812/13] 2002: if.). He disputes what he sees as dualism in Kant’s anthropology and ethics, and idealism in his fusing virtue and happiness. As Crouter states: ‘[T]he phenomenal and noumenal selves must be conceived together if we are to consider a person a moral agent’ (Schleiermacher [1988] 1996: xxi). Character is formed ‘by a long process of training and self-scrutiny and an approximation of happiness’ (ibid.). There is a Confucianesque quality to Schleiermacher’s moral pedagogy here. But it does not extend to more general interest in Herder’s sinology: Schleiermacher’s focus is his hermeneutics.309 There is much we might say of Schleiermacher’s intellect and pastoring, his creativity and scepticism, his sensitivity and his legacy. He was habitually sociable. As a professor, he would invite selected students round on Friday nights for tea (sic) – and leave them talking when he went to bed (at 2am) (Thielicke 1990: 177). As a student at the University of Halle (1787–90), he imbibed the rationalist spirit of Christian Wolff and the early proponent of biblical ‘Higher Criticism’, Johann Semler (1725–91). He sat at the feet of the ‘popular philosopher’ Johann Eberhard (1739–1809) to study Plato and Aristotle: he would return to their philosophy often. He turned his back on orthodox Christianity, telling his father: ‘I cannot believe that he who called himself the Son of Man was the true, eternal God; I cannot believe that his death was a vicarious atonement’ (q. Gerrish, 25). Before taking professorial chairs in theology at the universities of Halle (1804–7) and Berlin (1810–34), he doubled-up as a pastor, preacher, scholar and writer. In Landberg (1794– 6), Berlin (1796–1802), and (exiled in) Stolpe (1802–4),310 he developed his ‘Liberal’ views on institutional religion and European (specifically German) culture, Christian theology and moral philosophy. He is a friend to the Schlegel brothers and other leaders of the Romantic Movement. He is active in local politics, provocatively giving his support to the French Revolution. He is a bright new star of the Enlightenment, who has over the centuries enlightened many on Christian theology and communication theory. His internationalism and acute inter-disciplinarity exemplify the revolutionary ethos and ‘Romantic’ spirit of the age. He forms a natural bookend for the period c. 1750 to 1820. As an attractive, provocative, enigmatic individual, he warrants the study his

308 For analysis and bibliography on Chinese ‘reception’ of Hegel, Müller, M. (2004 and 2005), ‘Chinas Hegel und Hegels China’; —(2002), Die chinesischsprachige Hegel-Rezeption von 1902 bis 2000. 309 On Schleiermacher, Mariña, J. ed. (2005), Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher; Blackwell, A. (1982), Schleiermacher’s Early Philosophy of Life; Crouter, R. (2005), Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism; Dilthey, W. (1870), Das Leben Schleiermachers; Gerrish, B. (1984), A Prince of the Church; Lamm, J. A. (1996), The Living God: Schleiermacher’s Theological Appropriation of Spinoza; Kelsey, C. L. (2003), Thinking about Christ with Schleiermacher; Niebuhr, R. R. (1964), Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion; also, Forster, M. N. (2008), ‘Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher’. 310 Schleiermacher fled to Stople (in Pomerania) to escape the scandal of his relationship with Eleonore Grunow, the wife of a Berlin clergyman.

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hermeneutics enjoin. He enables – no exhorts – us to ‘read backwards carefully’ to find ourselves in the Analects and Gospels,311 and to see light on the faces in our old canvas. We focus on four aspects of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics. They continue to impact the way ‘Classic’ texts like the Analects are Gospels are read – particularly in a philosophical, theological, ethical, and cross-cultural context. First, Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics draw on Herder and on his own evolving ideas about ethics.312 He lectured on hermeneutics first in 1805 and engaged the subject until 1833. His early indebtedness to Herder is clear, especially with regard to the cultural origin, mental character, and social and psychological milieu for understanding language and authors, and for interpreting and translating texts. But, as elsewhere, Schleiermacher takes and develops his mentor’s ideas. In contrast to Herder, he stresses inner non-linguistic thought-forms, and the inseparability of ideas and word-use. He follows Herder’s view of the deep linguistic, conceptual, and cultural differences that exist throughout history, but then warms to Kant’s connection of sensuous images and empirical concepts, and warns that the ‘particularity’ of words and meanings makes interpretation inherently difficult. To counter this, like Herder, he locates meaning holistically in semantics, conceptual ‘systems’ and grammatical usage. But, as we will see, Schleiermacher’s work on linguistic communication uses other material, and here lies his significance for us. His work is not only foundational for modern textual hermeneutics, it also helps to frame intertextual interpretation of the Analects and Gospels. We read in light of his lasting contribution to cross-cultural, and interreligious dialogue. If Herder shapes Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, his thought is also conditioned by contemporary debates about Spinoza and Kantian ethics, and by his relation to Romanticism. Spinoza – and with him, of course, Confucian categories – came to the German Academy’s attention again with the publication in 1785 of Friedrich Jacobi’s provocative work, On the Doctrine of Spinoza, in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn.313 Mendelssohn (1729–86), a leading advocate of ‘Haskalah’, the Jewish Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries, had gained public recognition with his Phaedo or On the Immortality of Souls (1767). Jacobi and Mendelssohn had engaged in sustained literary dialogue on the philosophies of (in particular) Kant, Lessing and Spinoza, and of Goethe’s dark, misotheistic, Prometheus (1789). When Jacobi decided (pre-emptively) to publish their letters – with his own barbed commentary! – his collocutor took umbrage. Jacobi’s work turned Lessing’s (self-confessed) Spinozism into a defence of faith against Mendelssohn’s (anticipated) anti-Spinozist attack on him. Though no devotee, Jacobi claimed Spinoza to be a truer expression of ‘Enlightenment’ individuality and rationality than the sham ‘nihilism’314 manifested by many of its adherents. Rationalists mocked N.B. Schleiermacher’s urging of careful study (viz. to be wissenschaftlich) (1860: I. 269). Both Herder and Schleiermacher owe much to the German Rationalist theologian and biblical scholar, J. A. Ernesti (1707–81), whose Institutio Interpretis Novi Testamenti (1761, Principles of New Testament Interpretation) not only drew a distinction between the way OT and NT should be studied, but also launched the ‘grammatico-historical’ school of exegesis. Ernesti’s historical, classical and philological interests led him to seek commonalities in the Bible and ancient literature, and to suspect intellectually unaccountable ‘spiritual’ reading/s. 313 On later application of Spinoza’s theology, cosmology and anthropology, e.g. Dufrenne, M. (1966), ‘Dieu et l’homme dans La Philosophie de Spinoza’, in Jalons, 28–69; and, ‘La Connaissance de Dieu dans la Philosophie spinoziste’ (ibid., 112–26). 314 ‘Nihilism’ (Germ. Nihilismus) was first coined by the mystical Swiss hermit Jacob Obereit (1725–98) in 1787. A friend of Fichte, Goethe and Schelling, Obereit applied the term to Kant’s reduction of knowledge to ‘appearance’. Jacobi popularized the term, using it as a convenient peg to hang criticism of his ‘atheistic’ and/or ‘rationalistic’ contemporaries. 311 312

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Jacobi as a ‘fideist’. Soon afterwards, Schleiermacher wrote two essays on Spinoza, Spinozisme (1793) and Kurze Darstellung des Spinozistischen Systems (1793–4, A short account of the Spinozistic System). Mindful of its useful anti-Kantian tone, Schleiermacher extracted from the Jacobi-Mendelssohn controversy sympathy for Spinoza’s (Confucian) monism, in which everything (including God) is reduced to the ‘intuition’ of one ‘substance’ – or ‘force’, which was Schleiermacher and Herder’s preferred term. Like Herder’s Gott: Einige Gespräche (1787, God: some conversations), Schleiermacher’s major work on the philosophy of religion, Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (1799a, On Religion: Speeches to its cultured despisers), contains not only a neo-Spinozist (qua Confucianesque) anthropo-cosmology, and a caustic attack on dogma and institutional religion,315 but also a clear statement of humanity’s universal religious ‘intuition’ or ‘feeling’ (das Gefühl) for God. The inter-religious potential of Schleiermacher’s work has often been recognized, not least, his account of humanity’s sense of ‘absolute dependence’ on God.316 His hermeneutics view religious texts as giving literary expression to humanity’s universal ‘spiritual’ sense and aspiration. Their interpretation is, for him, necessarily subjective and difficult. He warns: ‘[M]isunderstanding occurs as a matter of course, and so understanding must be willed and sought at every point’ ([1805–33] 1977