Beyond East and West

John C.H. Wu

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780268103682
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Biographies religieuses

When John C. H. Wu's spiritual autobiography Beyond East and West was published in 1951, it became an instant Catholic best seller and was compared to Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain, which had appeared four years earlier. It was also hailed as the new Confession of St. Augustine for its moving description of Wu's conversion in 1937 and early years as a Catholic. This new edition, including a foreward written by Wu's son John Wu, Jr., makes this profoundly beautiful book by one of the most influential Chinese lay Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century available for a new generation of readers hungry for spiritual sustenance. Beyond East and West recounts the story of Wu's early life in Ningpo, China, his family and friendships, education and law career, drafting of the constitution of the Republic of China, translation of the Bible into classical Chinese in collaboration with Chinese president Chiang Kai-Shek, and his role as China's delegate to the Holy See. In passages of arresting beauty, the book reveals the development of his thought and the progress of his growth toward love of God, arriving through experience at the conclusion that the wisdom in all of China's traditions, especially Confucian thought, Taoism, and Buddhism, point to universal truths that come from, and are fulfilled in, Christ. In Beyond East and West, Wu develops a synthesis between Catholicism and the ancient culture of the Orient. A sublime expression of faith, here is a book for anyone who seeks the peace of the spirit, a memorable book whose ideas will linger long after its pages are closed.

Part One

Prologue

“How true is that saying, and what a welcome it deserves, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. I was the worst of all, and yet I was pardoned, so that in me first of all Christ Jesus might give the extreme example of his patience; I was to be the pattern of all those who will ever believe in him, to win eternal life” (I Tim. 1.15–16).

These words of St. Paul find a resounding echo in the depths of my soul. I do not know if he was the worst of all sinners. What I know for sure is that I was much worse than he. He was at least a Pharisee honestly trying to live up to his own lights. As for me, the case is quite different. Intellectually, I wobbled between scepticism and animal faith; morally I was a full-fledged libertine. I sneered at what I could not understand; I gave rein to the wanton appetites of sense. A slave to the world, I made myself an apostle of liberty. A well with no water in it, a cloud driven before the storm, I thought myself a clever man.

As I look back upon my past, the year 1937 stands out as the turning point of my life. It was in the winter of that year that I was converted. But in the spring of the same year I had published in the T’ien Hsia Monthly an article called “Humor and Pathos,” which contains the following passage:

Happiness can make you sing, but it is not enough to make you write. Writing, especially creative writing, depends upon the convergence of so many contingencies that a successful author may be said to be more lucky than our Father in Heaven. Many an author must have felt as badly as God did when a little before the Flood his masterpiece, Man, was discovered to be such an addle egg. And I doubt very much whether the revised edition of the same book represents a marked improvement upon the first.

This is how I sneered at the works of God! Neither the Creation nor the Redemption impressed me. This is just the reverse of my present state of mind, for, now, I have come to love with a special predilection that beautiful prayer in the Holy Mass, which begins with: “O God, who in a wonderful manner didst create and ennoble human nature, and still more wonderfully hast renewed it.” But had I heard these words then, they would have sounded more like irony than praise. Being mad myself, I would have considered all sober truths sheer madness. As I did not “see what the Church sees”¹ so I did not love what SHE loves.

But was I really happy and self-satisfied as I pretended, even to myself, to be? No, the contrary seems to be the truth. The fact is, having drifted away from God and lost hold on Eternity, I exposed myself to the merciless tides and torrents of Time. All my jolliness and buffoonery were but the hysterical laughter of a man in extreme distress. The seamy side of my apparent self-complacency reveals itself at the end of the same article which contains the terrible blasphemy I have already quoted. Here is a passage which presents nakedly the pathetic condition of my spirit at that time:

To be a Chinese of my generation is to be a very much bewildered person. I have been shocked from one haven of security after another. To be born is bad enough in any case. Didn’t we all cry and shake our fists like little devils even before our umbilical cords were cut off? How I wish I had not come out from the womb of my mother! For to see the light and breathe the air is to incur annoyances. Yes, our birth is the beginning of all our troubles, and so far as this is concerned we are all in the same boat. But to be born a Chinese in my generation is to run the gauntlet of an endless series of births and deaths. Customs and ideologies have been changing with such feverish rapidity that sometimes I have a queer feeling as though I had always been carried along by a whirlwind and had never set my feet upon solid ground. The birds have their nests and the trees are rooted firmly in the soil, but where shall I find a cozy corner to rest my soul in? It seems as though you want to go to sleep, but just as you are dozing off, people come round to change the bed for you. Suppose such a thing happens a dozen times in a single night, how would you feel? Not very comfortable, I should suppose. But that is exactly what I have been up against. How many times have I found that the environment which I had taken to be a part of nature, and the majestic systems of thought which I had taken to be a part of the eternal order of things, were nothing more than illusions and bubbles! So many illusions have exploded, so many bubbles have burst, that my heart has become callous and chary of new enthusiasms. I have been shot through by the east wind and west, the south wind and north. One idol after another has fallen from its pedestal and gone to the fire, and the real god has not yet been found. The child in me is again proclaiming the coming of a new god, but the cynic in me is querying whether he may not turn out to be just another piece of wood. My spiritual life has never matured, but is still suffering from growing, or rather decaying, pangs. I only hope that the latter part of my life will find what its early part has been searching for so earnestly but in vain.

The awareness that I was nearing forty, but had not yet attained to the Truth to which I could give my heart without reserve, that awareness was at the source of my misery. I felt like a middle-aged maiden who had had many a disappointment in love affairs and was afraid that she would remain a spinster for life. So I wrote a poem on my thirty-ninth (Lunar) birthday, which tells its own story:

Thirty-eight springs have come and gone,

And all in the twinkling of an eye!

One more spring and I shall be forty,

When life should begin and illusions die.

But illusions are still tarrying with me,

Although I’ve bidden them a hearty Goodbye.

My soul spreads its wings over nature and man:

O what a prolific source of sorrow is love!

I want to fly and carry the whole brood on my back,

But I have found no roads in the skies above.

If you are not as powerful as the eagle,

What boots it to be as harmless as a dove?

Life is short, and art is long;

And wisdom is as rare as gold.

With ardent hopes I set out at the peep of dawn;

Now the sun is setting, and it’s growing cold.

My heart is heavy with the emptiness of my hands:

O, let me return home, as I am getting old.

At home, I hear my children laughing and playing,

They hail me with “Daddie” like a singsong.

I send all my worries to Hell,

And say, “Boys, let’s play pingpong!”

I’ll cudgel my brains no more over life and death.

Who can know the meaning of the cosmic ding-dong?

Don’t you see Confucius as worried as a dog in a house of mourning;

With Jesus, wearing a crown of thorns, he forms a good pair.

And Buddha, his talk of Nirvana was mere gibble-gabble,

For he too was snuffed out in Time’s Electric Chair.

An ephemera attempts to stop a gigantic wheel;

It is crushed to dust, and what does the Cosmos care?

Don’t you see Tu Fu shedding an ocean of silent tears;

Homeless and forlorn, in spite of his poetic skill?

Peh-yung sang bitterly of the miseries of the poor,

But now the poor are more miserable still.

O God, if You are there,

I wish to know Your secret will!

It seemed as though God was playing hide-and-seek with me. But my failure to find Him was due entirely to my fault. Instead of seeking Him according to His way as revealed by Christ, I was seeking Him according to my own way. Instead of making myself better, I was desiring more power for good. I savored not the things that are of God, but the things that are of men. I saw the material miseries of the poor, but I did not realize my own spiritual wretchedness. I was perverted to such an extent that I would spend days and nights in chambering, and would think myself charitable by giving to the poor girls twice as much as they could get from others. This was like a man jumping into a well in order to save another, with the result that both of them are drowned. I did not realize then that to save others presupposes the salvation of oneself. Nor did I realize as St. Augustine did, that the value of a single soul is greater than the whole material universe.

To sum up, a wrong-headed and vicious philosophy of life had poisoned whatever good qualities I had inherited from my parents or acquired through my first rather superficial acquaintance with Christ. I was homesick for God, but I had forgotten that Christ is the Way to return to Him. I had sympathy for the poor, but I had forgotten that men have souls as well as bodies. I desired wisdom, but I had forgotten that wisdom can only be acquired by renunciation, not by a self-centered possessiveness as evidenced by the line:

“My heart is heavy with the emptiness of my hands.”

I desired power, but I had forgotten that goodness, and nothing else, is power. I desired freedom, but I had forgotten that freedom can only be won by obeying the commandments of God. I desired life, but I was running in the broad road that leads on to perdition. Because of my moral turpitude, I was lost in the labyrinths of life. The more I tried with my own effort to be disentangled from the snares of sin, the more entangled I was in them. The very universe became a prison to me, and I constantly bumped my head against its iron walls—all in vain.

“An ephemera attempts to stop a gigantic wheel;

It is crushed to dust, and what does the Cosmos care?”

This was a faithful portraiture of my soul.

It is to be noted that when I wrote these things, I was, from the worldly and material standpoint, in the most prosperous period of my life. So my unhappiness and restlessness could not have been due to external adversity. So far as I can see, they were entirely due to sin, which is nothing else than estrangement from God. Only God in His infinite mercy could have lifted me from the living hell that I had made for myself. Only the Truth could have freed me from the slavery of sin and tyranny of error, and given me a joy and a peace that taste of heaven. The more I consider my life, the more I am convinced of the truth of St. Augustine’s aperçu that God has made us for Himself and that our hearts are restless till they rest in Him.

Grace is all. Nobody can come to Christ without first being drawn to Him by the Father (John 6.44), nor can any one come to the Father except through Christ, nor can any one be sanctified except through the Sacraments of the Church, which are the regular channels of grace. It is no more than the truth to say that ever since I became a Catholic, my life has been a continual feast, a feast that satisfies without satiating. Adversities and tribulations there are aplenty, but even these are sweet, or rather they serve to bring out the marvellous sweetness of God. Whenever I read the beautiful parable of the prodigal son, I am inclined to say to Jesus, “O my Love and my All, You have understated the case!” To anyone who has tasted the infinite goodness and wisdom of God, the whole New Testament is an understatement of the Truth.

¹ F. J. Sheed, Theology and Sanity, p. 1.

1. THE GIFT OF LIFE

I was born under the Lunar Calendar. It was on the seventeenth day of the Second Moon in the year of chi-hai (1899) that I first saw the light in the city of Ningpo. The spring was fresh and young, and the day was dawning. It was the “Budding Moon,” in which, according to the old lore, “the plants on the mountain are changed into jade.” Every little leaf and bud was making ready to greet the sun; willow-tips were turning green; orchids were sending forth their fragrant blooms; and in every orchard fruit-blossoms were eager to burst their she...