Confucianism

CONFUCIANISM. - This is the name given to the whole body of religious, ethical and political doctrines that Confucius (v.) gathered from antiquity, inculcated through his life and his teaching, and transmitted to posterity — doctrines that Mencius (Meng Tzu, 372?-289? B.C.) consolidated, and to which Chusi (Chu Hsi, 1130-1200) unfortunately gave that atheistic interpretation and that rationalistic form which dominated from the 12th to the 20th century. Although it was neither a religion nor a philosophical system properly so called, for more than two millennia Confucianism occupied the place of both for millions of Chinese and through the centuries formed the fabric of China.

This body of doctrine is found scattered in the Five Classics and in the Four Books, to which Confucius, in one way or another, according to ancient tradition — today, however, strongly shaken by the critics — bound his name. For while it was formerly commonly admitted that all these books had been either written or at least edited by Confucius, today not a few would hold that none of them goes back beyond the 3rd century B.C. The list of the Five Classics comprises: 1. The Book of Changes, a sort of highly abstruse manual of divination, which consists of two parts, of which the older is generally attributed to King Uen (Wen) and to his son the Duke of Ceu (Chow) and would therefore go back to the 11th century B.C., while the second, more recent part must be attributed to the disciples of Confucius, and thus go back to the 5th-4th centuries B.C. - 2. The Book of Historical Annals, which is a collection of prose documents that purport to give us the concatenation of the facts of China from the beginning of its history, or rather prehistory, up to the 7th century B.C.; a collection due to Confucius, destroyed in the fire of 213 B.C., rediscovered in 140 B.C., lost again and again rediscovered, this time only in half, the other half having been added in the 3rd century A.D. - 3. The Book of Odes, a collection of 300 odes, also due to Confucius, of which the oldest may go back to the 13th-12th centuries B.C. and the most recent to the beginning of the 6th century B.C. - 4. The Memoirs on Rites contain texts compiled in their present form between the 4th and the 1st century B.C., of which, however, some passages may go back to another antiquity. - 5. The Annals of Spring and Autumn are a dry chronicle of the State of Lu, the homeland of Confucius, from 722 to 484 B.C., also due to the great master. The quintessence of Confucianism is then summarized in the Four Books, where from the 12th century A.D. onward there are collected, through the work of Chusi, the following works: The Great Learning, which was extracted from the Memoirs on Rites, of which it forms chapter 39, and today comprises eleven chapters, of which the first is said to be by Confucius and the other ten (one of them was added by Chusi himself, who believed it missing) by someone of his school of the 4th century B.C. approximately. The Unchanging Mean, extracted fairly early also from the Memoirs on Rites, of which it forms chapter 28, which is attributed to a grandnephew of Confucius, Ccomchi (K'ung Chi, 483-402 B.C.), who might also be a pseudonym. The Discourses of Confucius are a collection of anecdotes and aphorisms of the great master, at first probably handed down orally, then committed to writing by the disciples of the disciples at the beginning of the 4th century B.C.; the text of today goes back to the 2nd century A.D., but it was founded upon three texts of the 2nd century B.C., today lost. The Discourses of Mencius have transmitted in a beautiful and clear prose the thought of Mencius, who is considered the "second saint" of China, after Confucius; known from the 3rd century B.C. and perhaps even earlier, they did not become a subject of study until the 2nd century A.D., when the first commentary on them appeared, and they were not raised to the rank of a classic book until 1662; perhaps put into writing by the disciples, they were probably revised and retouched by Mencius himself, who edited them.

The content of Confucianism, as found in these sources, is religious and ethical.

Under the religious aspect, Confucius never presented himself either as the founder of a religion, nor still less as a god; the Chinese have always seen in him the first "saint" of China, and as such they have honored him for about two millennia. His religious thought is therefore that of the ancients, who venerated a Supreme Being, to whom from the beginning, or at least from the 13th-12th centuries B.C., they gave the name of Ti or Dominator, more often of Scianti or Supreme Dominator, and from the 11th century B.C. onward also that of Tien or Heaven, alone or accompanied by adjectives such as August, Immense, etc. These names, moreover, were perfectly interchangeable among themselves, as this passage from an authentic chapter of the Historical Annals proves (IV, 94): the fame of King Uen "reached up to the Supreme Dominator and the Dominator approved; Heaven then gave a great mandate to King Uen." The Discourses of Confucius show that for him, as for the ancient Chinese, Heaven is the "only Great One" (VIII, 19), since everything depends on him (XIV, 38), including life and death (VI, 8), riches and honors (XII, 5); it is He from whom the philosopher has received his own virtue (VII, 22) and his own doctrine (IX, 5), which allows him to trust in God and to defy his enemies (IX, 5); He to whom he often turns in prayer (VII, 34), since he is provident (II, 4) and is the only one who knows him fully (XIV, 37); he is an infallible judge (IX, 11) and one from whom there is no appeal (III, 13); he is therefore worthy of respect from all, even from the superior man (XVI, 8). It also seems that Confucius intuited the proof of the existence of God by way of causality and order, since he affirms that there is no need for Heaven to speak, from the moment that the four seasons proceed regularly and that beings are produced in the world, as though they were the voice of God (XVII, 18). Regarding this verse of the Book of Odes (I, 17) which proves the spirituality and transcendence of God: "The actions of the supreme Heaven have neither sound nor smell," he, or at least his school, exclaims: "Behold the height of perfection!" (Unchanging Mean, end).

To this Supreme Dominator or Heaven, from the beginning of the nation, the sovereign was accustomed to offer a sacrifice in the southern suburb of the capital. Indeed, markets and fairs, that is to say commercial exchanges, are still held today in China in the suburbs. And it is still in the suburbs that the ancient Chinese wished to make their exchanges with the divinity. In the open air, beneath the blue vault of the firmament, before dawn, they offered sacrifice to Heaven upon a raised mound in the suburb, to the south of the capital. The character that denotes both the mound and the sacrifice to Heaven is pronounced chias, and is composed of two elements, of which the first, which stands in front, means relations or exchanges, and the second, which follows, means city; hence exchanges before the city, that is to say the capital. This sacrifice was exclusively reserved to the sovereign. It was performed from as early as the 20th century B.C. and throughout the whole of the second and first millennium B.C., always in honor of the one Heaven which can only be the true God. Only in 31 B.C. was the Earth also associated with Heaven, and from this moment until 1911, with the advent of the Republic, the cult of Heaven and Earth assumed a prodigious importance. This double cult had the unhappy consequence that from the concept of a personal Heaven one passed almost imperceptibly into that of the material sky, and, as if this were not enough, there were added in the course of time innumerable divinities of the second, third and fourth order. Of these, only about ten were historical or legendary personages who had been deified, while all the others were sidereal, atmospheric, terrestrial and aquatic divinities. Finally in the 14th century there was a return, at least in part, to the primitive simplicity, by suppressing, or at least greatly reducing, these secondary divinities. Moreover, these latter, which served almost as satellites to Heaven and Earth, were no longer deified human beings, but celestial or terrestrial beings, which therefore referred back either to Heaven or to Earth. Even the Heaven-Earth dualism seems, at least for the more learned, to have been only verbal, conceptual, apparent, and that through heaven and earth one wished in short always to honor that Heaven, a personal being, known and adored from the earliest centuries, under the name of Supreme Ruler. Speaking indeed of the ancients, Confucius is said to have remarked: "By the sacrifice of the suburb to Heaven and by that of the Earth, they served the Supreme Ruler" (Invariable Mean, 10), that is to say that despite the apparent dualism, indeed through this dualism, one always wished to honor the one Supreme Ruler. It seems therefore that the cult of Heaven, of which the most solemn act was the sacrifice made by the emperor once a year at the winter solstice, recovered in the last five hundred and more years of the Empire almost all the freshness and purity of the earliest centuries. This cult was neither Buddhist nor Taoist and was carried out within and according to the principles of C.

Confucius, however, like the Chinese in general, was drawn more to ethics and the practice of life than to metaphysics and abstract questions. And in this he excels, as is gathered from his Discourses, to which all the following bibliographical references refer when they bear no other indication.

As regards individual ethics, Confucius did not yet pronounce on the question, later so much debated by Chinese philosophers, whether human nature is in itself good or evil. He maintains that men are born equal, but that they then become differentiated according to the habits they contract (XVII, 2), dividing into four classes. At the top is the "saint" to whom both knowledge and virtue are connatural; immediately after comes the "superior man" who acquires both through study and diligence; then follows the stupid man who, despite his scant capacity, makes efforts to attain both; and finally the fool who does nothing to raise himself above his stupidity (XVI, 9). Few indeed are those who follow virtue (XV, 3), while many let themselves be carried away by beauty (IX, 17; XV, 12). And yet the man of character, the man of virtue, does not seek to save his life at the cost of virtue, but rather is ready to sacrifice his life to remain in virtue (XV, 8). This latter consists in "ne quid nimis" (VI, 27). Among the virtues, Confucius recommends sincerity, justice, courage, wisdom, urbanity, and in a special way gen, which can mean benevolence, philanthropy or even humanity. And it is worthy of note that he arrived even at negative charity; to a disciple who asked him for a motto to serve as an ideal throughout his life, the master replied: [This motto] "would it not perhaps be charity, that is, what you do not want for yourself do not do to others?" (XV, 23). For him study was a joy (I, 1). He could therefore say to the disciple: "Study as if you were never to reach the goal and as if the danger of forgetting what you have learned were always present" (VIII, 17). Moreover the scholar must not delude himself: "knowledge consists in knowing that you know what you know and that you do not know what you do not know" (II, 17). The highest ideal of humanity after the "saint" is the "superior man," of whom here is the moral portrait. He seeks clarity in what he sees, discernment in what he hears; he is affable in his manners and modest in his behavior; he is sincere in speech and respectful in action; if he doubts he asks, and if he feels the stirrings of anger he restrains himself by thinking of the inconveniences that would follow; when he does good business, he is concerned for justice (XVI, 10).

If one passes from the individual to the family, Confucius inculcates in children in a special way filial piety toward parents, which consists "in serving them according to the prescriptions while they are alive, and after death in burying them and making offerings to them always according to the prescriptions" (II, 5). A pious son must take care of the persons of his parents, care for what he has received from them, that is, for his own body, and care to assure them of the means to perpetuate themselves through the centuries by means of male offspring obtained in marriage, perhaps even in polygamy. He must moreover conform his will to theirs while they are alive, and after death he must continually keep their memory alive within himself by often making offerings to them. The apex of the perfection of filial piety consists in imitating the ancient sages, who "served the dead as they had served them in life, they served them buried as they had served them when they were present" (Invariable Mean, 19). A son indeed, in the Confucian mentality, remains always a son, almost as a creature remains always a creature in relation to God. It follows that the acts performed toward the dead are nothing but the continuation of those performed while they were still alive. The son would kneel before a father or mother while alive and present them with food; now that they are dead, he wishes to continue doing the same as if they were still living, which is required by filial piety as the Chinese understand it.

From the family one then passes to the State. In the Confucian system, whoever knows how to govern his own family also knows how to govern the State, which is nothing but a larger family. The sovereign reigns by virtue of the "celestial mandate" that he has received, but which is not eternal, because through the vices of the one invested with it, it can be lost or pass into other hands. Probably joking on the word "cem," which can mean both "to govern" and "to be upright," Confucius declares: "to govern is to be upright" (XII, 17). He maintains that the sovereign's influence on the people, for good or for ill, is enormous. "The superior man is like the wind and the common man like the shrub; when the wind blows over the shrub, the latter necessarily bends" (XII, 18), that is to say, it submits to the influence of the stronger. When the prince "is upright, the people do their duty, even without any order being issued; when instead he himself is not upright, even if he issues all the orders he wishes, he will never be obeyed" (XIII, 6). Conversely, the vices of the prince are the cause of the vices of the people; to one who had usurped a dignity that did not belong to him, and nevertheless complained of the great number of thieves there were, Confucius courageously pointed out: "If you were not so rapacious, no one would steal, even if you were disposed to give a reward to the thief" (XII, 17). For Confucius the virtuous sovereign is like the pole star, which, while remaining motionless, attracts all the other stars to itself (II, 1).

This body of doctrines, which, from the first centuries of the Christian era down to the early years of the 20th century, was considered as the sole and true orthodoxy of China, has always been jealously guarded by Confucian men of letters. In this immense pleiad two names stand out: Mencius and Zhu Xi. The first consecrated his whole life to the practice and to the diffusion of the principles set forth above, and the second impressed a baneful direction upon C. by giving to the clearest texts of antiquity on Heaven and on the Supreme Ruler a distinctly materialistic interpretation, which unfortunately lasted at least until 1904.

Hence it is that when Fr. Matteo Ricci found himself at the end of the sixteenth century for the first time face to face with this teaching, undermined by the school of Zhu Xi, he very wisely, rejecting the arbitrary interpretations of this school, took up again the texts of Chinese antiquity, restoring to them the meaning they had had in the past. This necessary purification having been made, it seemed to him that C. was not a religion properly so called, but a politico-literary academy, which moreover imposed nothing against the truth of the faith and in ethics agreed well enough with the teaching of the Church, except, naturally, on polygamy; the cult of ancestors too, of course, could be tolerated, at least as long as it was possible to Christianize it completely. And so in general did the Jesuit missionaries of the 17th century also act, while other missionaries of other Orders thought differently. And yet even in 1934 the Foreign Minister of the Nationalist government of Nanking declared in unequivocal terms to the press that C., lacking theology and without any claim to doctrinal infallibility, is a philosophical school and not a religion, and that Confucius is a great man to be honored indeed but not to be adored. And in 1948, an ancient follower of Confucius, formerly Foreign Minister and President of the Council of Ministers, who later became a Catholic, a priest and a monk, wrote at the end of his long life: "C., whose norms of moral life are so well founded and beneficial, finds in Revelation and in the existence and life of the Catholic Church the most striking justification of all that it possesses of human and immortal, and at the same time finds there the completion of light and moral power that resolves the problems before which our sages had the humility to stop, understanding that it is not for man to pronounce on the mystery of Heaven and that one must, in venerating the providence of Heaven, wait for the Creator himself to reveal himself, if it pleases him to do so" (C. Lou Tseng tsiang, Souvenirs et pensées, 2nd ed., Paris 1948, p. 78).

Pasquale D'Elia