Confucianism and Catholicism: Reinvigorating the Dialogue

By Michael R. Slater, Erin M. Cline and Philip J. Ivanhoe

Confucianism and Catholicism, among the most influential religious traditions, share an intricate relationship. Beginning with the work of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), the nature of this relationship has generated great debate. These ten essays synthesize in a single volume this historic conversation. Written by specialists in both traditions, the essays are organized into two groups. Those in the first group focus primarily on the historical and cultural contexts in which Confucianism and Catholicism encountered one another in the four major Confucian cultures of East Asia: China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. The essays in the second part offer comparative and constructive studies of specific figures, texts, and issues in the Confucian and Catholic traditions from both theological and philosophical perspectives. By bringing these historical and constructive perspectives together, Confucianism and Catholicism: Reinvigorating the Dialogue seeks not only to understand better the past dialogue between these traditions, but also to renew the conversation between them today.

In light of the unprecedented expansion of Eastern Asian influence in recent decades, and considering the myriad of challenges and new opportunities faced by both the Confucian and Catholic traditions in a world that is rapidly becoming globalized, this volume could not be more timely. Confucianism and Catholicism will be of interest to professional theologians, historians, and scholars of religion, as well as those who work in interreligious dialogue.

Contributors: Michael R. Slater, Erin M. Cline, Philip J. Ivanhoe, Vincent Shen, Anh Q. Tran, S.J., Donald L. Baker, Kevin M. Doak, Xueying Wang, Richard Kim, Victoria S. Harrison, and Lee H. Yearley.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: May 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9780268107710

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Reinvigorating the Dialogue between

Confucianism and Catholicism

MICHAEL R. SLATER,

ERIN M. CLINE, AND PHILIP J. IVANHOE

Confucianism and Catholicism are among the oldest and most influential religious traditions on earth; they have a long and intricate interrelationship and deeply shared beliefs, orientations, styles, and affinities. Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) began a long and at times heated debate about the nature of Confucianism and its relationship to Catholicism, which is still alive today, informing and inspiring those interested in these two grand traditions and more generally the issues they focus on and defend. Arguably, Ricci’s most important contribution to understanding the relationship between Confucianism and Catholicism was his view that Confucianism is a form of deism and an expression of natural religion. In his opinion, the Chinese people had always implicitly believed in God, and Catholicism offered them the complete and perfect expression of this long-standing faith. Ricci’s interreligious dialogue with Confucians was, of course, motivated by his desire to convert them—and the Chinese people more broadly—to Christianity, but it was also informed by the assumption that the Confucian and Catholic traditions were compatible with one another at a fundamental level, notwithstanding their many important differences. Contemporary scholars of Confucianism are sharply divided as to the religious nature of early and later Confucianism, with some seeing Ricci as on the right track but others seeing the tradition as a wholly this-worldly form of life.¹ The latter view seems to have originated with Max Weber (1864–1920) in the early twentieth century but has a number of prominent contemporary proponents.² This one issue alone offers sufficient warrant for a renewed focus on the relationship between Confucianism and Catholicism, but the justification of and motivation for such a reinvigorated dialogue do not, by any means, end there.

Confucianism and Catholicism are each supported by three pillars of thought and practice. The first is the tradition of commentary that both have generated. Not uniquely but characteristically, Confucianism and Catholicism have inspired philosophical traditions that, in large measure, revive and reinvent themselves through a process of interpreting and extending the meaning and significance of a set of classic texts with scriptural authority.³ This, in turn, accords past commentators a status and authority not found in most other traditions and influences contemporary members to think of themselves in terms of their place in this ongoing process of understanding, orienting them to the goal that Kongzi (Confucius) described as wen gu er zhi xin 溫故而知新, reanimating the old in order to understand the new.⁴ Second, both Catholics and Confucians accord a central place to ritual practice as a means of connecting with the sacred, expressing the significant, and shaping the self.⁵ Behind such exercises are deep and complex beliefs about the limits of theory and understanding and the need to engage the physical and emotional as well as the intellectual aspects of the self in spiritual practice. Third and finally, both traditions have developed rich and complex views about the need for and proper forms of self-cultivation.⁶ The underlying shared assumption here is that the process of working toward spiritual fulfillment only begins with a commitment to undertake it and is realized only in the course of a lifetime of effort and reflection. All three of these characteristics of Confucianism and Catholicism as well as the ongoing debate about the religious nature of the Confucian tradition offer challenging and profound opportunities for comparison, contrast, and mutual enrichment. In addition to their past connections and intellectual affinities, the current moment in history is witnessing a revived interest in both Confucianism and Catholicism within China, offering a third and decisive reason to embark upon a careful, sustained, and in-depth effort to reinvigorate the dialogue between these venerable traditions.⁷ These are the guiding motivations for this volume.

The ten essays that constitute this volume were written by several of the world’s leading scholars, at various stages of their scholarly careers, on Confucian and Catholic thought and the relationship between them. We sought to find a tripartite mix of Confucian scholars interested but not experts in Catholicism, Catholic scholars interested but not experts in Confucianism, and scholars who specialize in comparing and contrasting these and other traditions. In this way we believe our anthology attains a greater depth of analysis, will have a broader and more significant impact, and represents the kind of broad dialogue and debate that we hope to engender and encourage.

OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS

The essays in this volume are organized into two groups: those that primarily focus on the historical and cultural contexts in which Confucianism and Catholicism have encountered one another in the four major Confucian cultures of East Asia—China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan—and that seek to understand specific figures, texts, and issues in the light of those broader contexts; and those that offer comparative and constructive theological or philosophical studies of specific figures, texts, and issues in the Confucian and Catholic traditions.

In the first chapter, The Aristotelian Concept of Substance Introduced by Early Jesuit Missionaries to China and Its Problems in Encountering Confucianism, Vincent Shen examines the early Jesuit missionaries’ use of Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophical categories to interpret Confucianism and argues that this decision on their part created an obstacle to dialogue between the Confucian and Catholic traditions. Shen begins by discussing how early Jesuit missionaries inaugurated a two-way exchange of ideas between Western Europe and China, introducing Western philosophical works and ideas to China and Chinese philosophical works and ideas to the West. He proceeds to consider their attempts to create a harmonious synthesis between Aristotelian (and Thomistic) philosophy and Confucianism and their motivations for doing so, which were complex but fundamentally driven by their missionary aims. Focusing primarily on the Aristotelian concept of substance (ousia), Shen chronicles the history of attempts to translate this term, first into medieval Latin and later into classical Chinese, as well as its use by Jesuit missionaries to present and defend Catholic doctrines to a Chinese audience. Shen argues, however, that the latter aim was fraught with logical, linguistic, philosophical, and theological problems and that the use of an Aristotelian and Thomistic framework for interpreting Chinese philosophical and religious views created serious obstacles to mutual understanding for both parties involved.

In the second chapter, When Christian Devotion Meets Confucian Piety: The Teaching of the ‘Three Fatherhoods’ in Premodern Vietnam, Fr. Anh Q. Tran examines the early reception of Catholicism in Vietnam and the complex process of inculturation that attended its integration into traditional Vietnamese society. As Father Tran shows, in premodern Vietnam, Confucianism permeated all aspects of society, from familial ethics to social-political doctrines, and the persecutions of Catholicism that occurred from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century represented a clash of cultures between a new religion and the traditional Vietnamese way of life. Focusing on Catholic apologetic texts from the eighteenth century such as Phép giảng đạo thật (Treatise on true religion) and Hội đồng tứ giáo (Conference of the Four Religions), Father Tran addresses the distinctive challenges and opportunities that Catholicism faced in Confucian Vietnam, including the controversy surrounding ancestral rites and the Catholic effort to assimilate into Vietnamese society through the traditional doctrine of tam phụ (the Three Fatherhoods). Such efforts, he argues, illuminate how Catholicism could claim to be an acceptable expression of Vietnamese religiosity while also maintaining its uniqueness. Father Tran concludes his essay by drawing some implications for understanding the significance of Catholic interreligious encounters in premodern Vietnam.

The third chapter, "The Zhongyong through a Theistic Lens: Tasan Chŏng Yagyong’s Thoughts on Living a Moral Life, by Donald Baker, examines the distinctive and innovative religious views of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Korean Confucian philosopher Chŏng Yagyong (1762–1836), better known by his literary name, Tasan. A temporary convert to Catholicism in the 1790s, Tasan eventually rejected Catholicism in favor of Confucianism when he was forced by Korean officials to choose between the two traditions and went on to become the most prolific and wide-ranging Korean thinker of his day. As Baker shows, however, the Catholic theological and philosophical ideas that Tasan absorbed as a young man remained an enduring and significant influence on his thinking and helped him to develop highly original philosophical views that challenged the neo-Confucian orthodoxy of his day while also recovering and reinterpreting elements of the early Confucian tradition. Among other things, Baker explores Tasan’s disagreements with his predecessors in the Korean Confucian tradition, T’oegye Yi Hwang (1501–70), and Yulgok Yi (1536–84), who had inaugurated the famous Four-Seven debate" over the nature of human moral psychology, and his philosophical explorations of one of the classic texts of Confucianism, the Zhongyong (often translated as The Doctrine of the Mean). Baker devotes the greater part of his essay to the latter topic, and to revealing the complex details of Tasan’s Confucian version of theism, which Tasan developed in his extensive commentaries on the Zhongyong. One of Tasan’s greatest innovations was the important role that he accorded in his philosophy to the Lord on High (K. Sangje, C. Shangdi 上帝), the supreme deity of the ancient Zhou dynasty. As Baker shows, for Tasan belief in the Lord on High solved a number of difficult philosophical problems facing the Confucian tradition, including the need to explain the source of the order or design that we find in the natural world, and even more importantly the need to offer an adequate account of moral motivation for following the Confucian Way (Dao). Although Tasan’s Confucian theist views did not exert a major influence on the subsequent development of the Confucian tradition in Korea—largely because he wrote many of his works in exile, and his philosophical writings were rediscovered only in the twentieth century—Baker concludes his piece with a reflection on the enduring importance of Tasan’s views and the possibilities that they reveal for dialogue between the Confucian and Catholic traditions.

In the fourth chapter, Confucianism and Catholicism in Mid-Twentieth-Century Japan, Kevin M. Doak explores the unique perspectives of twentieth-century Japanese Catholics on the relationship between Confucianism and Catholicism, with a special focus on the writings of two of the most prominent Japanese Catholic intellectuals of the period, Tanaka Kotaro (1890–1974) and Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko (1904–45). Tanaka, a leading Japanese jurist and the most famous Japanese Catholic of his day, and his friend Yoshimitsu, an innovative professor of theology at Sophia University and the University of Tokyo, had a public exchange of views on the relationship between Confucianism and Catholicism in the Japanese journal Catholic Studies in 1943, with each staking out different positions on the question of how Catholics should understand Confucianism. Doak examines Tanaka’s and Yoshimitsu’s views with care and in detail, including Tanaka’s argument that the guiding legal principle of Confucianism and of Chinese society more generally is the natural law, not legal positivism (to the great credit of Chinese society), and Yoshimitsu’s argument that the tension between Confucianism and Catholicism is due, not to a supposedly essential conflict between Eastern and Western ways of thinking (as Western thinkers like Marcel Granet argued), but rather to a problem of the natural and the supernatural, in which the supernatural truth of the Christian gospel poses a challenge to any ‘natural law’ type of Truth. Doak shows, among other things, how both Tanaka and Yoshimitsu were able to recognize the distinctiveness and value of Confucianism while also rejecting the relativistic and cultural essentialist views of thinkers like Granet, and also how they disagreed with one another, as devout Catholics, over the usefulness of interpreting Confucian moral and religious views in terms of a Thomistic category like natural law. Doak concludes his essay with a brief discussion of the views of a third Catholic thinker, Fr. Sauveur Antoine Candau, M.E.P. (1897–1955), and a reflection on the contemporary state of Catholic-Confucian dialogue in Japan and argues that contemporary efforts in Japan to ground a theory of human rights could benefit from a return to the universalism and rationalism of thinkers like Tanaka, Yoshimitsu, and Candau.

The fifth chapter, Mengzi, Xunzi, Augustine, and John Chrysostom on Childhood Moral Cultivation, by Xueying Wang, aims to expand our understanding of how major figures in the early Confucian and Christian traditions thought about the moral cultivation of children and how their views were informed by their larger views of human nature. She devotes special attention to Chrysostom’s views in particular, since the views of the other three thinkers are more familiar to many scholars, and since Chrysostom’s views provide an important corrective to the widespread impression that early Christian thinkers (1) had relatively little to say about the topic of childhood moral cultivation and (2) took a generally dim view of children. After discussing the insights of each of these four thinkers, Wang briefly compares and contrasts their views and highlights important differences and similarities between them. On the side of differences, she emphasizes the diversity of views of human nature that one finds in each tradition: not only did Mengzi and Xunzi (ca. 310–219 BCE) disagree with one another over the innate goodness or badness of human nature, but so too did Augustine (354–430 CE) and John Chrysostom (ca. 347–407 CE), with the former defending the idea that children are naturally sinful and in need of supernatural transformation through divine grace, and the latter defending the position that children are naturally innocent—indeed, morally blank, with no natural inclinations toward either goodness or badness. On the side of similarities, Wang observes that although Mengzi and Augustine had quite different assessments of children’s moral natures and capacities, they nevertheless both advocated forms of moral pedagogy that emphasized the need for and importance of parental affection (which is largely absent in both Xunzi’s and Chrysostom’s writings). Likewise, she observes that while Xunzi and Chrysostom similarly disagreed over children’s moral natures and capacities, they nevertheless both advocated moral pedagogies that emphasized the need to instill moral qualities in children through socialization (which both Mengzi and Augustine would have challenged for their own distinctive reasons). By attending closely to these areas of difference and similarity between and within the Confucian and Christian traditions, Wang argues, we put ourselves in a better position to make nuanced and productive comparisons between them.

In the sixth chapter, Natural Law and Virtue in Mencius and Aquinas, Richard Kim aims to expand our understanding of natural law theories of ethics through a comparative philosophical study of the ethical views of two major thinkers in the Confucian and Catholic traditions. Against those who assume that natural law theories of ethics are uniquely Western and that no analogue to such theories can be found in Chinese philosophy, Kim uses careful textual exegesis and conceptual analysis to show that the early Confucian philosopher Mengzi (372–289 BCE)—better known to Westerners by his Latinized name, Mencius—held a form of that theory. In the process, he aims not only to deepen our understanding of Mencius’s ethical views but also to broaden our understanding of natural law theories of ethics and the possible forms they can take. While not denying that thinkers like Mencius and Aquinas (1225–74 CE) also might be helpfully interpreted through the lens of ethical theories like virtue ethics and deontology—and that their ethical views might not fit neatly into a single theoretical category—Kim shows that certain features of Mencius’s ethical views clearly merit this description. He concludes his essay with a brief discussion of the important role of traditions in moral life and a defense of the enduring value of natural law theories of ethics, and he makes a case for why we should take tradition-centered thinkers like Mencius and Aquinas seriously.

The seventh chapter, Reimagining Confucianism with Ignatius of Loyola, by Erin M. Cline, examines the question of what Confucian contemplative practices might look like if we reconstructed them in a contemporary setting and reinvented them not just for members of East Asian cultures but for others as well. Noting that it is neither wholly feasible nor desirable to try to revive all traditional Confucian practices, she outlines a reimagining of Confucian contemplative practices that would be based on the values and virtues those practices aimed to cultivate and express and that would be accessible to those of diverse religious outlooks in a contemporary setting. Cline argues that it would be helpful to mine the resources of a vibrant tradition that has preserved and developed a set of contemplative practices that successfully facilitate the cultivation of the self. She focuses on Ignatian spirituality partly because of an important area of resonance with Confucianism: its contemplative practices, like those of Confucianism, are aimed, not at eliminating thoughts or desires or becoming awakened to the ultimate unity of all things, but at helping one attend to and cultivate one’s desires, thoughts, and feelings in order to create and nurture relationships. Despite a variety of deep and important differences, Cline argues, Ignatian spirituality is a unique and helpful resource for reimagining the practices that are a part of Confucian moral self-cultivation. Drawing on two different forms of prayer from the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises (contemplation and colloquy), she proposes a reimagined version of some of the practices that were traditionally a part of the preparatory vigils for Confucian ancestor veneration. Outlining a practice that is designed to facilitate moral self-cultivation through the use of one’s imagination and through reflection on the example of the lives of one’s ancestors, Cline shows how such an exercise could be beneficial for those seeking to cultivate Confucian virtues today.

In the eighth chapter, Exemplar Reasoning as a Tool for Constructive Conversation between Confucians and Catholics, Victoria S. Harrison begins with a thoughtful reflection on Ricci’s attempted synthesis of Confucianism and Catholicism in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and draws a distinction between two different aims in interreligious dialogue—the more ambitious aim of dual belonging to two traditions and the more modest aim of enhancing mutual understanding between traditions. Pursuing the latter aim, and motivated by a desire to facilitate genuine mutual understanding, while minimizing the risk of misrepresenting the beliefs, values, or commitments of either party, Harrison devotes her essay to describing a conversational method for conducting interreligious dialogue that she terms exemplar reasoning. As she explains, exemplar reasoning seeks to promote intercultural understanding by focusing on exemplary persons rather than on abstract philosophical or religious ideas, or on the classic texts of a tradition. Through structured conversation, exemplar-reasoning participants explore the beliefs, values, and commitments that are expressed in the way exemplary figures live, or have lived, their lives. This method is particularly well suited to facilitating interreligious dialogue between Catholics and Confucians, Harrison argues, on account of the importance that both traditions accord to exemplary persons such as saints and sages. Drawing upon the work of the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88) and a number of contemporary scholars of Confucianism, Harrison carefully describes how the practice of exemplar reasoning might be profitably conducted by Catholics and Confucians in a face-to-face manner, in a way that avoids misrepresenting one’s own tradition and its distinctive beliefs, values, and commitments in an effort to make it understandable to members of other traditions.

In the ninth chapter, Understandings of Human Failures to Flourish in Catholicism and Confucianism, Lee H. Yearley explores, compares, and contrasts the different accounts that Confucians and Roman Catholics offer to explain why people often fail to attain human flourishing—by which he means, roughly, a full or complete state of virtue—and some of their corresponding teachings concerning how people can work to avoid or address such failure. Yearley’s contribution engages and interweaves four primary issues or themes. First, he describes the basic accounts these traditions offer for why people fail to flourish. Second, he identifies, analyzes, and contrasts two very different approaches to explaining such failure: one theoretical and the other literary in nature. Third, he presents an analysis of the character and value of the kind of comparative approach he offers. Fourth, he explores some of the implications his study has for understanding and addressing our own and other people’s failures to flourish. In investigating these different yet interrelated topics, Yearley relies upon four primary exemplars, two from each tradition: the Confucians Mengzi 孟子 and Du Fu 杜甫 (712–770) and the Roman Catholics St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante degli Alighieri (1265–1321). Mengzi and Aquinas represent the theoretical approach of their respective traditions, while the poets Du Fu and Dante exemplify the literary approach. Among the many bold and stimulating claims Yearley advances is that literary accounts often probe more deeply into important aspects of failures to flourish than do theoretical ones and that literary approaches can highlight phenomena relevant to such failures that theoretical approaches either overlook or attempt to interpret away. By pursuing parallel literary tracks in his comparison between the theoretical accounts of failures to be virtuous in Confucianism and Catholicism, Yearley not only enriches our understanding and appreciation of these two great intellectual and spiritual traditions but also makes a significant and distinctive contribution to our more general understanding of the roles that literary and theoretical approaches can play and the ways in which these can support, augment, and at times challenge one another.

Finally, in the tenth chapter, Concluding Reflections: Confucian and Catholic Conceptions of the Virtues, Philip J. Ivanhoe highlights some of the aims, achievements, and implications of the anthology as a whole. He focuses on comparing Confucian and Catholic conceptions of virtues, and the first issue he takes up concerns the corrective nature of the virtues, an idea that owes a great deal to the analysis of St. Thomas Aquinas. The basic idea is that virtues correct for deficiencies or excesses in natural human affections or dispositions, as Philippa Foot puts it, each one standing at a point at which there is some temptation to be resisted or deficiency of motivation to be made good. There is considerable insight in such a view; for example, it makes clear that for most people, becoming fully virtuous requires overcoming certain excesses or deficiencies and that this is often a daunting challenge. As Ivanhoe notes, this is close to how Xunzi, an early Confucian, thought of rituals: Ritual cuts off what is too long and extends what is too short. Nevertheless, while Foot’s analysis is revealing as an account of how the virtues function in the process of self-cultivation, Ivanhoe argues that it does not offer an accurate or insightful account of the nature of the virtues.

Developing ideas first raised by Eirik Lang Harris that draw upon the early Confucian Mengzi, Ivanhoe explains how at least a number of important virtues are primarily inclinational rather than corrective in nature. That is to say, such virtues are the fully developed forms of nascent human tendencies. The idea that the virtues are correctives, Ivanhoe observes, derives from and presupposes characteristically Christian notions about vice and temptation. Such accounts clearly echo Christian beliefs concerning original sin, which helps explain why Foot thinks that the very concept of what it is to be a virtue is to correct such a tendency toward wrong behavior or to provide an absent but necessary motivation toward good behavior. In closing, Ivanhoe argues that some version of this claim, that we are by nature sinful creatures or strongly inclined to err, might well be true, can be defended wholly independently of scriptural authority, and points to a lacuna in Confucian accounts of the virtues. While he defends Confucian claims that many if not most virtues are inclinational and that the nature of the virtues is better thought of in terms of their ability to overcome self-centeredness, Ivanhoe contends that the best account of the virtues can be fashioned by augmenting traditional Confucian accounts with Thomist (as well as other) views about the virtues and in particular the claim that human nature includes some rather strong tendencies toward error, and specifically self-centeredness.

AT A TIME when East Asian societies and their traditions are experiencing an unprecedented period of growth and expansion of influence, and when both the Confucian and Catholic traditions are faced with the myriad challenges (and also opportunities) presented by an increasingly globalized and rapidly changing world, the need for increased understanding and creative exchange between these traditions is perhaps greater than ever before. It is our hope that this collection of essays will contribute to a renewed and reinvigorated dialogue—and perhaps even friendship—between these great traditions and their members, for practical and personal as well as theoretical reasons.

NOTES

1. For examples of the former view, see Legge (1880), Ching (1977), and more recently Clark (2005). For examples of the latter view, see Ames (2003) and also Ames and Rosemont (1998). For views that fall somewhere between these ends of the spectrum, see Puett (2002), Ivanhoe (2007), and Cline (2013).

2. See, in particular, Weber’s influential study of Chinese religions, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1951), originally published in German as Konfuzianismus und Taoismus (1915).

3. On this set of issues, see Henderson (1991), and also Makeham (2004). For two insightful discussions of the nature and importance of tradition in human life, see Shils (1981) and Pelikan (1989).

4. Analects 2.11; translation by Philip J. Ivanhoe.

5. Important discussions of the role of ritual in the Confucian tradition include Fingarette (1972), and Ivanhoe (2013). For an influential and innovative theological discussion of the role of ritual in Christian (and specifically Catholic) faith, see Rahner (1978). And for a recent defense of the value of ritual and of religion more generally by a leading Catholic philosopher, see Taylor (2007).

6. For works that discuss the cultivation of the self in the Confucian and Catholic traditions, see Wilson (2001), Stalnaker (2006), and Ivanhoe (2013). For an influential and wide-ranging study of practices of self-cultivation in the West, see Hadot (1995).

7. On the revival of Confucianism and Catholicism (and of religion more generally) in contemporary China, see Sun (2013) and Ivanhoe and Kim (2017).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ames, Roger T. 2003. "Li and the A-theistic Religiousness of Classical Confucianism." In Confucian Spirituality I, edited by Tu Weiming and Mary Evelyn Tucker. New York: Crossroad.

Ames, Roger T., and Henry Rosemont, Jr., trans. 1998. The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine.

Ching, Julia. 1977. Confucianism and Christianity: A Comparative Study. Tokyo: Kodansha International.

Clark, Kelly James. 2005. The Gods of Abraham, Isaiah, and Confucius. Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 5 (1): 109–36.

Cline, Erin M. 2013. "Religious Thought and Practice in the Analects." In The Dao Companion to the Analects, edited by Amy Olberding. New York: Springer.

Fingarette, Herbert. 1972. Confucius: The Secular as Sacred. New York: Harper and Row.

Hadot, Pierre. 1995. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell.

Henderson, John. 1991. Scripture, Canon, and Commentary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Ivanhoe, Philip J. 2007. Heaven as a Source for Ethical Warrant in Early Confucianism. Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 6:211–20.

———. 2013. Confucian Reflections: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times. New York: Routledge.

Ivanhoe, Philip J., and Kim Sungmoon, eds. 2017. Confucianism, A Habit of the Heart: Bellah, Civil Religion, and East Asia. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Legge, James. 1880. The Religions of China: Confucianism and Taoism Described and Compared with Christianity. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Makeham, John. 2004. Transmitters and Creators: Chinese Commentators and Commentaries on the Analects. Harvard East Asian Monographs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.

Pelikan, Jaroslav. 1989. The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Puett, Michael. 2002. To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.

Rahner, Karl. 1978. Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. New York: Seabury Press.

Shils, Edward. 1981. Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stalnaker, Aaron. 2006. Overcoming Our Evil: Human Nature and Spiritual Exercises in Xunzi and Augustine. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Sun, Anna. 2013. Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Weber, Max. 1951. The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

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PART ONE

Historical Contexts

China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan

CHAPTER ONE

The Aristotelian Concept

of Substance Introduced by

Early Jesuit Missionaries to

China and Its Problems in

Encountering Confucianism

VINCENT SHEN

INTERCULTURAL MEDIATION BETWEEN

ARISTOTLE AND CONFUCIUS

From an intercultural point of view, the early Jesuits’ introduction of Western philosophy to China in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a highly significant historical event, inducting the Chinese people into the works of Western philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Bernard, and St. Thomas Aquinas, whose thoughts, and indeed names, they had not previously heard of. As such, this was an unparalleled moment of interaction between Chinese and Western philosophies. It also served to establish the role of the early Jesuits in China as intercultural mediators between China and the West. Among the Western philosophers that they introduced to China, they specifically featured Aristotle and his works,