From Matteo Ricci to Hans Küng

Abrahamic religions have a long history in China. During the Tang Dynasty (618—907), Christianity was introduced to China under the name ‘Jing Religion’. The《大秦景教流行中国碑》or ‘Nestorian Stone’, erected in Xi’an in 781, provides irrefutable evidence of this early presence. Judaism entered China slightly later, namely in the Song Dynasty (960-1279); Jewish communities emerged in Henan Province in particular around the old capital Kaifeng. But even before the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), Jewish communities were assimilated and localized by indigenous Chinese cultures.Chinese Christianity, moreover, made do for centuries without priests and churches. Islam, meanwhile, played a significant role in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (1368-1644). One famous Chinese Muslim was Zheng He (1371-1433AD), who sailed the Pacific and Indian Ocean 7 times. Zheng He’s fleet of ships, manned by 30,000 soldiers, was the biggest in the world at the time. Another famous Chinese Muslim scholar was Wang Daiyu (1580-1658); in Wang’s magnum opus Qinghzen Daxue (清真大学) or The Halal Great Learning, Islamic doctrines are interwoven with concepts derived from the Confucian classics.

Christianity’s marginal situation in Chinese cultural discourse changed drastically with the arrival of Matteo Ricci in 1582. From Ricci (1552—1610) to Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1592—1666) and many others, Jesuits enjoyed significant status and prestige during the 17th-century Ming-Qing transition, most notably in the early Kangxi Period after 1662, where Jesuits dominated the Bureau of Imperial Astronomy, among other fields. The Chinese Rites Controversy, however, led to the expulsion of Jesuit priests from China by the Kangxi Emperor in 1721. This tragic failure of interreligious dialogue between ‘this-worldly’ Confucians and ‘otherworldly’ Christian monotheists could be attributed to the narrowness and arrogance of both sides. As Tu Weiming has pointed out, both the Kangxi Emperor and the Vatican took a ‘hegemonic’ approach to dialogue: Ricci, for instance, was very clear that, despite appearances to the contrary, he was uninterested in accommodating himself to the Chinese situation, arguing instead that the Chinese had ‘lost their own tradition’, and that he would lead the way to something new and Christian. On the Confucian side, the Qing mandarins’ insistence on the superiority of Chinese Rites was unshakable until 1919, when all traditions were overthrown, not by foreign churches but by a wave of half-understood ‘science and democracy’ doctrines imported from the West via Japan. The most significant reason for the rejection of Christianity, however, was the lack of cultural self-confidence among Qing élites themselves. With their nomadic Manchu heritage, these elites saw themselves as less cultured than the Han Chinese over whom they ruled, and as such felt they needed to display a much tougher attitude to foreign cultural stimuli than Han scholar-bureaucrats in order to prove their worth as inheritors of the civilized Chinese ‘Middle Kingdom’ and its ancient Dao.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, however, thanks to the work of thinkers like Tu Weiming on the Confucian side and Hans Küng on the Christian side, both Confucians and Christians have come to recognize themselves as possessors of post-hegemonic value with global significance. Working out the area of overlapping consensus at the restless dialogical horizon between human spiritualities is a task which unites contemporary Confucians and Catholics alike. In the Confucian tradition, especially in Mencius, one finds the metaphor of digging a well deeply on your own ground. If you dig deep enough, you will reach a common spring, and the water will flow. In his tribute to Hans Küng, Tu Weiming recognised a kindred Catholic spirit in this regard:

We have lost a rigorous scholar of religious understanding and one of the most imaginative and influential theologians of the twentieth century. Küng’s critical thinking defines a major trajectory in the current debate on the future of the Church. His views on God, papalism, and the doctrine of infallibility have profoundly shaped the Catholic world of ideas. As the founder of the Global Ethic movement initiated by the Parliament of World Religions in 1993, Küng was a leading public intellectual in our fragmented and yet inevitably globalizing world. He was a mentor for those dedicated to the pursuit of universal peace through dialogue.

Needless to say, the fate of ‘Dialogue Among Civilizations’ discourse, both within contemporary China and between China and the rest of the world, remains highly uncertain. Hans Küng would have remained a keen observer of, and contributor to, these developments. The Confucian community in Cultural China and around the world mourns his loss.

Jianbao Wang is the Director of the Center for the Humanities and Business Ethics at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB), starting in 2017. He is also a Research Fellow at CKGSB and Associate Researcher at Peking University.