Chinese “arcana imperii (secret of statecraft)”
Throughout the European history, the only genuine attempt at understanding China and its statecraft was made by the Jesuit missionaries at the beginning of the 17th century. This took place in a unique historical context of the early modern Christian civil wars. Today, premodern Europe’s rich interactions with the non-Western world are often dismissed and deliberately ignored by later Euro-centric historians. Democratic ideology as a new rhetorical form, together with an ethnocentric orthodoxy, only emerged in the late 18th-century Europe. They derived from Christian dichotomous worldview. Against the presumed “inferior” cultures of non-Western societies, many medieval Christian conceptual juxtapositions such as “black” versus “white” or “good” versus “evil” were reincarnated into liberal democratic ideology as modern conceptual pairs like “progress” versus “backwardness,” “civilization” versus “barbarism” and, above all, “democracy versus despotism.”
The Catholic Church had suffered heavily under the explosive intellectual rebellions of the Protestant Reformation. The end of the unity within the Christian polity could not be tolerated anymore within the Church. Faced with a political and military stalemate on the home front in Europe, the Catholic Church of the early modern era tried desperately to reassert control upon those extra-European territories to strengthen what it perceived to be Christian orthodoxy. Although the core issue of the Protestant Reformation appeared to be theological, many other factors were real drivers, including the rise of national identity: the schism which eroded people’s faith in the Papacy, the corruption of the Curia and the new learning of the Renaissance which questioned much traditional thought.
The Roman Catholic Church responded to Protestantism with a Counter-Reformation initiated by the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Against this historical background, the Society of Jesus was founded in 1540 by Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556). Much hard work in battling Protestantism was done by this well-organized new order. From the beginning, these “Jesuits,” as they were called, were tasked with revitalizing the intellectual foundations of the Church and defending the Papacy as the legitimate head of a universal community founded by the Christ. They were fashioned to become the vanguard of a revived Christianity and reformers of the far-flung networks of European settlers. Yet as they began working with the various cultural traditions of the non-West, the Jesuits recognized the vast potential for expanding the Christian community beyond European cultural spheres. Through rigorous training and strong human will, the Jesuits managed to learn the cultures, customs, languages, religious orientations and thought patterns of the many societies where they were operating. More remarkably, they were soon in a position to restructure the Christian theology to bring its basic tenets into local political orders and cultural systems. Finally unified under the common label of accommodatio, the Jesuits launched a major incursion into non-Christian world and prompted a rapid expansion of the world of Christianity.
From the beginning, this Jesuit-led process of global cultural accommodation did not have any pretension of disparaging another culture by delegitimizing its governing system, because the prevailing political pattern in Europe itself was considered by the Jesuits to be utterly corrupt and illegitimate. When the Jesuits arrived in China at the end of the 16th century, the typical modern speech-act, i.e., the discourse on political legitimacy as a twin act of delegitimating another political culture, did not yet exist. This rhetorical pattern was to become commonplace only after the European Enlightenment.
The Jesuits, therefore, merely tried to find out if Chinese “native religion” was compatible with the fundamental tenets of Christianity as they defined them. In dealing with the Chinese, the Jesuits did not rely upon an absolute sense of Western cultural superiority to the Chinese civilization, because the Confucian state they observed, though not a religious authority, was a good match to the Jesuit conception of a virtuous res publica perfecta. And more importantly, the idea of Chinese people belonging to an inferior “yellow” race (the so-called Mongoloid) had not even been invented “scientifically” until two centuries later.1 Theologically, the Jesuits were frustrated in Europe with problems caused by the vague distinction between spiritual and secular matters within and among the European societies, which often led to endless secular as well as religious wars. They wondered why Chinese rulers did not have this problem and how the Chinese people, state and religion seemed living in perpetual harmony. Eventually, they discovered with great delight a unique Chinese “secret of statecraft” (arcana imperii): that is, legitimizing the state only through ethics, which required constant moral and behavioral adjustment by the ruler to harmonize relationship between nature and the world unknown (天 Tian, or the heaven). The Jesuits preferred to describe this agnostic Chinese “heaven” as Christian God, of whom they managed to translate into the Chinese language, “Lord of the Heaven” (天主), and this became the Chinese name of Catholicism.
In this way, the Jesuit missionaries initiated the first real cultural interaction between China and the West. But their great efforts were sadly to end up with the virtual demise of their organization in 1773.2 In the 17th-century Europe, the so-called Chinese Rites Controversy (1645–1742) was launched by European Christian missionaries allied with orthodox kings and aristocrats to destroy the Jesuits. This was a game-changing moment in the history of the Western relationship with China. It is also a typical example of how internecine conflict (religious as well as secular) in Europe disrupted a healthy cultural interaction between Europe and other civilizations. The debacle of the Jesuits in China and the consequences of the Rites Controversy not only endangered the existence of Catholicism in China, but also left a powerful cognitive framework, still prevailing to our day, for misunderstanding China.
But this first debate on China in the West was not, and could not be, centered on Chinese regime’s legitimacy, as it is now the common focus of most discussions of China – no matter is it dressed in the modern costumes of human rights, democracy or other universal ideologies. Indeed, the Chinese concept of political legitimacy, the Mandate of Heaven, was considered by the Jesuits in the 17th century as a perfect conceptual solution to the myriad problems contained in the Western concept of “raison d’etat (reason of state),” because – given the dual structure of political power in Europe, secular and ecclesiastical – it was never clear why monarchy was the only way to organize a state. In China, monarch was presented as “son of heaven (天子),” as the man who possessed the heaven-granted mandate to rule. But the ruler knew that if he was morally corrupt, the mandate would be withdrawn by heaven in the form of popular revolt. This logic was very much compatible with the Jesuit political theory which stressed the absolute need for limited and moral government which all of the European states lacked at the time.3 Indeed, the defeat of the Jesuits in the Chinese Rites Controversy during 18th century through a 1742 papal bull abruptly ended their “accommodationist” approach to China, leading to a permanent tendency in the West to reject the legitimacy of Chinese statecraft in its entirety.
In reality, the Rites Controversy was not only about issues little related to Chinese civilization, but between two rivals of the European religious schism: Catholic and Protestant churches. The Papal Bull of 1742 that rejected the Jesuit approach in China was mainly out of the fear of the protestant accusation of “idol worship” against the Catholic Church, because the ancestor worship ritual in China, tolerated by the Jesuits, did have an appearance of practicing “idol worship” (i.e., bowing to ancestors’ name tablets), though the tablet is not “idol” at all. China was thus unfortunately caught in the middle and victimized by the collateral impact of the Christian civil wars in that tumultuous era.
Since this event is largely forgotten today, it is hard for us in the 21st century to imagine the extraordinary viciousness surrounding this controversy between Chinese culture and that of the Christian world. The controversy was initially the result of disagreements among European missionaries in China rooted in their deeply divided national, denominational and theological viewpoints. But in the long-winding process for over a century, this debate became deeply entangled with European politics of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and, above all, national rivalries and the international power play.
Although started as a harmless theological debate, it would soon move beyond a fight between churchmen on a battlefield for theologians and the ecclesiastical politicians. In fact, it dragged in three Popes, two Chinese (Manchu) emperors, hundreds of Christian missionaries and the entire theologian faculty at the Sorbonne, the intellectual citadel of Counter-Reformation. Many scholars throughout Europe, including the best intellectual minds of the day, were engaged in this debate or stimulated by it. Top thinkers such as Leibniz, Kant, Goethe, Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu, and lead political economists Francois Quesnay and Adam Smith were greatly influenced by this debate in their own intellectual development. Confucius was popular in Europe at the time. Some of these thinkers were even proud of being labeled “Confucius.” Goethe was once known in his day as “Confucius of Weimar,” while Quesnay occupied a happy niche as “Confucius of Europe.”
The debate also reflected the conflict between the Renaissance humanists, represented by many Jesuit missionaries in China, and their archenemies, the conservative theologians of various denominations within the Catholic Church. The Jesuits and their immediate followers – including secular humanists during the early stage of the Enlightenment – chose China and Confucianism as their significant “Other,” or an inverse mirror to contrast with the backward, feudal and morally corrupt social and political order in Europe. Thus, the Rites Controversy was quickly entangled with Church and state politics.
But around the second half of the 18th century, the prevailing political ideology produced by the late Enlightenment was turning drastically anti-Chinese, and the Jesuit model of virtuous governance, the philosopher king of the Confucian state, was suddenly turned into a symbol of evil empire. Labeling someone in Europe “Chinaman” or “Confucius” now became a speech-act of personal attack. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche was so disgusted by Emmanuel Kant’s rationalist philosophy as to call him the “Chinaman from Koenigsberg.” Even to our day, any esoteric statement is pejoratively labeled as “Confucius said” in popular Western parlance.
The Rites Controversy started in the 1640s and raged at the end of the century and continued to flare well into the 18th century. The controversy can be seen from three dimensions: the rites, the terms and the locale for worshiping practice. The specific issues involved may seem quite esoteric today: whether Chinese Christian converts might or might not be allowed to continue performing traditional rites of honoring their ancestors and master Confucius (hence the “rites” controversy); how to render the key Christian terms, especially the word God (Deus) into Chinese language (hence the “terms” controversy); and, finally, whether Chinese Mandarin class (or scholar-gentry elite), if accepting the principles of Christianity, should be allowed to continue performing rituals as part of their regular state duties at a temple in honor of Confucius or to offer prayer for stopping flood or draught (thus the “locale” controversy, i.e., a temple is not a church).
Clearly, the Rites Controversy involved no simple issues about Christian theology and liturgy, because it is also a three-dimensional debate over cultural tradition, thought pattern and state governance. According to Confucian thinking, “rites” (礼) are foundations of civilized culture; “terminology” is considered the first priority of setting correct order in human relations, and a particular “locale” can accept only one kind of worshiping act, not more. But the Confucian culture does not discriminate other “religious” acts. One can go to Buddhist and Taoist temples not only for worshiping, but also for practicing ancestral worship at home according to Confucian rites.
It is not surprising that the real “religious” issues with high stakes for the Catholic Church were actually ignored during the Rites Controversy. For example, the Church always forbade the Christianized Mandarins to go to Buddhist or Taoist temples for worshiping. This demand had never become an issue in China, for the Chinese did not have a history of religious discrimination. For centuries Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism had lived in harmony. The critical question was of course whether the Confucian tradition should be considered a religion along with Buddhism and Taoism. In The Meaning & End of Religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith contends that “religion” is a peculiarly European concept of recent origin. Practitioners of any given faith do not regard what they do as “religion” until they have formed collective perspective toward the outsider. Religion, in the modern sense of the word, is a product of identity politics:
One’s own ‘religion’ may be piety & faith, obedience, worship & a vision of god. An alien ‘religion’ is a system of beliefs or rituals, an abstract & impersonal pattern of observables. … Religion as a systematic entity, as it emerged in the 17th & 18th centuries, is a concept of polemics & apologetics.4
China has no religion in the Western sense, because, up to the defeat during the Opium War and the subsequent sense of national crisis in the face of nonstop foreign invasion, which brought modern ethnic-nationalism to China, ordinary Chinese had never felt a spiritual need for a collective identity politics. Confucianism is a secular political thought pattern and certainly not a religion. Paradoxically, therefore, “whether or not Confucianism is a religion” is a question the Western observers will never be in a position to answer, while the Chinese will never be in a position to ask, as Cantwell Smith might have argued.
However, in the 17th century, the Jesuit missionaries were not yet in a solid state of mind in believing in Western cultural (and racial) superiority over the culture of China and its people. Such sense of superiority was to become a common phenomenon only in the latter half of the 18th century, when modern racialist theory was developed in full swing. Hence, the Rites Controversy was started with an attitude of sincerity and a modest desire, on the part of the Jesuits at least, for understanding Chinese culture and its people, and for exploring opportunities to transplant Christianity to China on solid cultural footing. It is thus understandable that the Jesuit approach to China is labeled “accommodationist.” Typical debate in today’s West about China is pale in comparison even with the Rites Controversy, because it is at once condescending, patronizing and contemptuous in both attitude and action toward Chinese culture and its people, as if the final verdict is so well established that there is hardly any room for cultural accommodation at all.
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