On The Concept Of Confucianism In Modern Western Missionaries

The aim of missionaries who came to China is to propagate Christ Jesus'gospel to Chinese, but the biggest difficulty they met was the Chinese bias against"foreign religions"; that is to say, the challenge came from the Chinese native culture centering on Confucianism. The Western missionaries soon realized the important status of Confucianism in the Chinese traditional ideology, Chinese culture and Chinese people, and they also realized that they must adopt a flexible strategy of propagation, thus making some studies and comments on the Confucian culture. In the following four parts, this essay will analyze the outlook on Confucianism of Western missionaries who came to China in the period between Ming and Qing and in the period of the late Qing.1. The outlook on Confucianism of Western missionaries who came to China in the period between Ming and Qing. In the period between Ming and Qing, the Catholic missionaries such as Matteo Ricci had realized that in order to successfully propagate Christianity, they must understand, respect and adapt themselves to the Chinese culture, and, especially, they must harmonize Christianity with Confucianism, the Chinese customs and Chinese culture. The ways"to harmonize Christianity with Confucianism"promoted by the Catholic missionaries such as Matteo Ricci were mainly embodied in the aspects below: As for their outlook on God, they stressed the similarities between the Christian God and the concepts of"heaven"and"Shangdi"in the ancient Chinese books; as for their outlook on nature, they harmonized the Confucian image of"heaven"with the Catholic one; and as regards their ethical outlook, they emphasized the accordance between the Christian concept of love and the Confucian notion of kindness, and they could tolerate the ancestral worship, Confucian worship and heaven worship, etc.. However, there were also some criticisms, and the quarrel about etiquettes initiated by Nicolas Longobardi led to the prohibition on Christianity. 2. When another great missionary wave came in the early 19th century, the space-time-crossing dialogue between the Protestant missionaries and Confucius still continued. Before the 1860s, clashes between Christianity and Confucianism were the main character of the propagation movement, for it considered Confucius and Jesus to be incompatible. From the late 1860s on, missionaries tried to build close relationships between Christianity and Confucianism by the strategy of"Confucius plus Jesus".3. The outlook on Confucianism of Western missionaries who came to China after the 19th century. The comparison between Confucianism and Christianity: By pointing out the similarities between Confucianism and Christianity, the missionaries made use of the analogous part of Confucianism in the interests of Christianity. At the same time, by pointing out their dissimilarities they also demonstrated that Christianity was more sagacious than Confucianism and that the former could serve as the complement of the later. The comparison between Confucianism and Christianity involved the aspects below: As for their outlook on God, despite their criticized attitude towards the Confucian lack of any clear transcendental notion, some missionaries stressed that just because of its non-religiousness and its secular worship of Confucius, Confucianism was in no contradiction with the Christian concept of"the only God". Others tried to draw an analogy between the Christian and Confucian outlooks on God and made a conclusion that Confucianism acknowledged the existence of God, though they thought that the Christian concept of God was much better than the Confucian one. As for their outlook on nature, the missionaries noticed the Confucian lack of the genesis legend and other natural concepts and proposed that"natural relations"should be added. As for the theory of human nature, Christianity stressed the origin sin, a typical theory about the bad human nature, while most Confucians regarded human nature as kind. Thus the missionaries pointed out that it was a mistake for Confucians to place hope on inner cultivation rather than on God's help. As for their ethical outlook, the missionaries to a large extent recognized the reasonableness of the Confucian ethic and thought that it rather accorded with the Christian one, thus doing some compromising works between the two ethics. As for their outlook on sacrifices, the missionaries made some observations and comments on the Confucian etiquettes of heavenly worship, ancestral worship and Confucian worship from their Christian perspective of one God. To sum up, the outlook on Confucianism of the missionaries in the late Qing came directly from their Christian standpoints. Their attitudes to the Confucian concepts of God, genesis and human nature were mainly nit-picking, but there were also some strained analogies. For example, the concept of"heaven"or"di"in the Confucian classics were explained as the Christian God, while the Confucian theory about kind human nature was explained as an explanation of the condition before the human ancestors had stolen the forbidden fruits. While they held a more affirmative attitude to the Confucian ethic, the missionaries were still critical of some other principles, especially the inward-looking Confucian theory of moral cultivation lacking in any responsibility for God. While most missionaries were critical of the customs of ancestral and Confucian worship, some regarded them as bearable and not necessarily antagonistic to the one God worship.4. As a comparative cultural perspective and a religious mirror of the secular, political and ethical thoughts, the missionaries'analyses and understandings of Confucianism can provide us many valuable references for grandiose perspectives, concrete analyses or comparisons when we assess the use and limit of the Confucian culture. The missionaries'studies on Confucianism and their understandings of its intellectual values as a result of Christian propagation had helped to introduce Confucianism to the world and thus promoted the spread of Confucianism.