Korean Catholicism and Confucianism

The Western Confucian, Mr. Snyder, has posted some great links on Korean Catholicism and its relationship to Confucianism. One article to which he links is "Confucian No Longer":

There is nothing inherently surprising in the fact that radical students protest outside the US embassy, decrying "US imperialism"—in Korea, as in many other countries. But the incidents at Myeon-Dong Cathedral reveal a different sort of
tension within Korean society.

Korea has a well-deserved reputation for a strong sense of spirituality. Buddhist faith and Confucian philosophy dominated the cultural landscape for hundreds of years while Catholicism and Protestantism have gained prominence only in the past few centuries. But now South Korean citizens are beginning to shun traditional customs and attitudes, including their spirituality, as they adapt to a pop culture mentality that is gaining a more and more pervasive influence in Korean society.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Korea's own "generation gap." In the winter of 2002, the Joong Ang Ilbo, a widely circulated newspaper in South Korea, asked young people if they respected their elders. Only 35 percent answered Yes. At first the editors assumed that this response reflected the general trend of opinions among young people in all the Asian countries. But when they polled the youth of those other nations, they were surprised to find that 70 percent or more answered Yes to the same question.

If this poll is accurate, then it may help to explain why young protestors rampage through the streets outside Myeon-Dong Cathedral. The Catholic Church represents a pillar of tradition, standing for family as well as faith. The leaders of the Church are known for their opposition to legislative proposals that would undermine both religious practice and family life, and Catholic traditions in Korea mesh neatly with the traditional Korean respect for elders.

In addition to the secularization of society, the Church in Korea must contend with another difficult problem. Religious rivalries are very real here, as Catholics and Protestants compete to spread the Gospel and to increase their parish membership. Clear evidence of the resulting tension is visible on the streets near the cathedral. While political ideologues organize their noisy demonstrations on one end of the street, "soap box ministers" stake out their territory a few blocks away. Some scream into their megaphones, while their followers carry a heavy 12-foot wooden crucifix.

It is telling, perhaps, that most pedestrians betray no sign of noticing the most flamboyant sidewalk evangelists. It is a common Korean custom to ignore bizarre behavior, for fear of encouraging the offender. More important, most Koreans consider their shopping more important than quarrels over religious differences.

The setting of the cathedral in the Myeon-Dong neighborhood could be used as a metaphor for Korean society. The church stands upon a steep hill. While many believers climb the steps to visit the cathedral and to attend Mass, those faithful Catholics make up only a small percentage of the people who walk along the streets below. The protestors, too, draw near to the cathedral; the apathetic majority remains at the bottom of the hill.

I was somewhat shocked by the numbers--could it be that the strictness of Korean parents (particularly the father) has taken its toll? So that while the law is observed, the spirit of the law is not taken up? Is the situation in Japan, China, and Vietnam really better?

If Korean Catholics remain faithful, they could accomplish much in being the leaven of society. What of Korean-American Catholics though? Will their Faith survive the consumerist attitude of American society and the impulse to assimilate (which at the same time is a tendency for an ethnic parish to weaken and eventually disappear)? If they could actively participate in the life of the parish, they would have something to show the rest of us. (Even if life in such a community is plagued with the weaknesses of its members, gossip and such--but this is not an argument against the goodness of communal life, but evidence of our weakness.)

Volume 2 of The Sources of Korean Tradition has a chapter dealing with "The Encounter with the West," which includes "Criticism of Catholicism" and "The Persecution of Catholicism." I don't have the book yet, but it would be interesting to see what sort of texts it has gathered for these topics.

Don Baker's "On Learning: A Neo-Confucian Critique of Western Values" (thanks to DT Strain's philosophy blog)

Sin Hudam (1702-1761) is nevertheless worth discussing today, not because of the few small contributions he made to debates among Neo-Confucian scholars in 18th-century Korea, but because of what he can tell us in the 21st century about the underlying grammar of Neo-Confucianism in Korea, its basic beliefs, values, and assumptions. Hudam was the first Korean to dissect Western religious and philosophical writings with a Neo-Confucian scalpel, to analyze their arguments and assertions in depth and criticize them from a staunch Neo-Confucian standpoint. In so doing, Hudam inadvertently rendered explicit what usually remained implicit in debates between Neo-Confucian scholars.

When Korean Neo-Confucian scholars debated among themselves, they normally did not need to state their shared assumptions. They were more interested in clarifying points of disagreement than in restating what was obvious both to them and to their opponents. However, when Hudam attacked Western missionary publications, he felt compelled to point out what to him were fundamental mistakes in Western reasoning. These mistakes, he believed, were due to the fact that Westerners clearly did not share the standard Neo-Confucian understanding of such key concepts as truth, virtue, knowledge, principle, and God. When Hudan pointed that the Western use of those terms was different from the usual Neo-Confucian usage, and therefore in his eyes was wrong, he had to provide an explict statement of the usual Neo-Confucian definition in order to contrast this correct usage with the incorrect Western usage. Consequently, Hudam's criticisms of Western missionary writings provide what can almost be called a glossary of key Korean Neo-Confucian terms, beliefs, values, and assumptions, highlighting elements of Korean traditional thought which normally remain in the backgound and thus somewhat obscured.

Hudam first encountered Jesuit missionary publications from China when he was only 22 years old. In 1724 Seongho Yi Ik, one of the most respected Confucian scholars in Korea in the 18th century, suggested that Hudam add some Western-authored books to his reading list. Hudam read three of the books Seongho recommended: Matteo Ricci's The True Significance of the Lord of Heaven, Julius Aleni’s World Geography , and Francis Sambiai's On the Human Soul, a explanation of the nature of the human soul and its faculties drawn from the writings of Thomas Acquinas. Neither Ricci's cathechism, Aleni's cultural geography, nor Sambiasi's psychology particularly impressed Hudam.

After Hudam read those Jesuit publications, he visited Seongho again to warn him against recommending those books to anyone else. Hudam insisted that Catholicism, because of its fundamental absorption with heaven, hell, and the fate of the individual immortal soul, was no better than Buddhism. He was dismayed that a respectable Confucian scholar such as Seongho would brush aside the serious moral threat Western writings posed simply because those books contained some bits of useful information which might be of interest to technicians and artisans. When he found that Seongho did not take his warnings seriously, Hudam then prepared in writing a lengthy Neo-Confucian critique of Catholic thought. In that manuscript, Hudam borrowed copious quotations from Neo-Confucian classics to support his argument that Western Learning was full of mistakes of fact, terminology, logic, and common sense and, even worse, was immoral and therefore should be severely condemned.(1)

[Institute of Jesuit Sources has an edition of Fr. Matteo Ricci's The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (looks like the hardcover is out of print).]

One notes that the Confucianism of Chosun Korea is not the supposedly pristine classical Confucianism, but the neo-Confucianism of the Sung innovators--there was an introduction and development by the Sung ru of 'metaphysics,' which is notably absent in classical Confucianism, in reaction to Daoism and Buddhism. The metaphysics nonetheless had an ethical import.

This Thomistic argument appeared reasonable only to those who shared Ricci's assumptions that the soul was the site of human consciousness and that there was a rupture in the realm of being between the material and the immaterial. Hudam and other mainstream Korean Neo-Confucians did not share either assumption. As they conceived reality, there were no such things as immaterial entities. All that existed was made up of ki and was therefore material. The Sino-Korean term Ricci adopted for the immaterial, muhyeong, meant "without form" and referred in Neo-Confucian texts to either primal ki, before that material force had been directed by li into specific shapes, or to li and other abstractions which subsisted rather than existed and so were not considered concrete beings or actual entities. In the Neo-Confucian universe, the spirit and souls Ricci described as immaterial differed from other material objects in density, but not in kind. Composed of rarefied ki, spirits existed at one end of the ki continuum running from the tenuous and light to the dense and heavy. This seamless Confucian universe of ki permitted no radical separation of material and immaterial being.(3)

This is straight neo-Confucianism, which is at its core materialist--qi or ki is a materal principle out of which all things are composed--there is nothing without it.

Moreover, Hudam charged, Catholics mistakenly fused the material life of the human soul with the moral life of the human mind. He noted that Catholics insisted that the soul is located in the brain. He could accept that, since Chinese medicine also recognized that a sharp blow to the head could separate the soul from the body.

Whoa, who was making this assertion? This is no longer the Aristotelian-Thomistic concept of the soul, and is closer in spirit to Descartes--perhaps Descartes inherited it as a part of degenerate scholasticism; the extent to which Aristotelian physics was no longer properly understood by the Jesuits is something I am becoming more aware of. Fr. Norman Wells has written a lot on the Conimbricenses; in her book on the philosophy of biology Marjorie Grene alludes to the fact that the Jesuits did not understand Aristotelian hylomorphism well.

He warned, though, that the Catholics erred when they took a concept appropriate to the practice of medicine and applied it to the more important issues of knowledge, perception, and moral action. The brain may be the seat of life but to make it also the site of thought was to let Taoist concern for the body encroach on Confucian concern for moral decision making. Such ignorance on the role of the mind-heart as the moral organ in human beings Hudam found inexcusable.(7) Sambiasi's On the Human Soul further convinced Hudam that Catholic doctrine was predicated on a distorted image of the soul. Hudam's quarrel was not with the transliteration from the Latin Sambiasi used for the soul --he accepted anima as a peculiarity of European vocabulary--but with Sambiasi and Ricci's equating of anima and hon.

This is the problem of using native terms to translate technical philosophical terms, simply because their nominal definitions may be similar--but the essential definitions may not be identical. Takling about soul without the Aristotelian hylomorphism which illumines the definition can lead to misunderstanding, as we see here.

Nor could Hudam accept the Jesuit argument that the soul would survive the death of body and would then live on for eternity in either heaven or hell. Essential to the Thomistic argument for the immortality of the soul was the belief that the soul came from the spiritual side of a universe bifurcated by a rift between the material and the spiritual, an assumption Hudam and other Neo-Confucians did not share. Equally indispensable was the assumption that what something was, was separate and distinct from what it did. In other words, the Jesuit arguments assumed that we could talk about a substance apart from its attributes or its functions.

Such an assumption was perplexing to Hudam and other Neo-Confucians who defined the soul more as an activity than as an object. This functional definition of the soul predates Neo-Confucianism. In the fifth century a Chinese philosopher named Fan Chen (450-ca.5l5) wrote an anti-Buddhist essay entitled Shen mieh lun (An essay on the extinction of the soul). Attacking the Buddhist doctrine of metempsychosis, Fan argued that:

The body is the substance of the soul; the soul is the functioning of the body....The relationship of the soul to its substance is like that of sharpness to a knife, while the relationship of the body to its functioning is like that of a knife to sharpness. What is called sharpness is not the same as the knife, and what is called the knife is not the same as sharpness. Nevertheless, there can be no knife if the sharpness is discarded, nor sharpness if the knife is discarded. I have never heard of sharpness surviving if the knife is destroyed, so how can it be admitted that the soul can remain if the body is annihilated?(9)

Here we have something that, if clarified, could lead to an Aristotelian understanding of soul--if one explains how a body is not really a body unless it is alive, and that one of our characteristic acts is understanding--which transcends matter. This needs to be shown to the neo-Confucian. While Fan Chen uses the function argument to talk about what it is for something to have a certain essence, he goes too far and fails to distinguish between a "good" and "bad" knife--a knife that is dull is still a knife, but it is unable to perform its function well, and is a "bad" knife.

The rest of the essay is devoted to other differences between Cathoicism and Confucian metaphysics and logic; while a Catholic apologetic that would have presented the differences more clearly would have been useful in the 17th to 19th centuries, it is somewhat irrelevant at this point, since there are very few who follow neo-Confucianism metaphysics, either in China or Korea. If there are any intellectual difficulties, it is due to the Western materialism present in contemporary physics, adopted everywhere as a result of modernization.

The rites controversy in China had carried over to other countries as well--the impact of the pope's forbidding of Catholics to observe rites venerating ancestors affected the status of Catholic Christianity in Korea as well, and further exacerbated what opponents saw was a clash of ethical values. (There was some legitimate concern, even if the religious/superstitious aspect was absent in official circles--the clarity of popular understandings of the rites was suspect.)

Having re-read The Confessions of St. Augustine back when I was preparing for the M.A. comprehensives, it should be noted that the Romans (the North Africans at least) had something very similar customs honoring the dead, such as offering food to the deceased (at their graves). St. Ambrose had forbidden the practice, since some might take advantage of the practice to abuse alcohol, but also because the practice could be misunderstood as an endorsement of superstition by non-Catholics and the weak.

See Book VI, ch. 2.:

But as soon as she found that this custom was forbidden by that famous preacher and most pious prelate, even to those who would use it in moderation, lest thereby it might be an occasion of gluttony for those who were already drunken (and also because these funereal memorials were very much like some of the superstitious practices of the pagans).

I don't know what other perceived conflicts between Catholicism and the dictates of Confucian political theory were. If there are others, I would like to know.

Some essays I found on the Internet, but have not carefully read yet:
"Korean Catholicism: Finding a Place between Heaven and Earth"
"Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism"
Something on Chong Yag-yong, evidently a Catholic.

"Creativity as Synthesis of Contrasting Wisdoms" (about Taiwan, but some info on comparative philosophy)

Bibliography on Korean Confucianism
A more thorough bibliography, covering all historical periods of Confucianism.
Queen Min's Court
The Four-Seven Debate
"Cheng-Chu Orthodoxy and the Four-Seven Debate"

New CE entry on Chinese philosophy

A bibliography at Weaton College on ancestors. (???)

Najumary.org
The Fu Foundation
Dao House