CONFUCIUS. – Italianized form, from the Chinese
*Confuzue* [K’ung Fu-tzu] meaning “The Master (or the Philosopher) *Ccom*,” later accepted by almost all Western languages, under which the Jesuit
Matteo Ricci (v.) around 1600 introduced the Chinese sage to Europe. Born in 551 BC in the ancient city of Tsou, about 25 km southeast of the district of Sizushui near Yenchow in what was then the principality of Lu and partly corresponds to the present-day province of Shantung. His father, already over 70 years old, had married a 15-year-old girl, and from their union Confucius was born. He, however, not his father, bore the surname *Ccom* [K’ung], the given name *Chieu* [Ch’iu], meaning “hill,” and the style *Cionni* [Chung-ni], which means “second-born hill with a crater,” from the shape of his skull, which was said to have vaguely resembled a hill with steep slopes and a concave summit. Very little is known of his childhood and youth. He was left fatherless at the age of three and motherless after twenty, lived constantly in poverty, though his family traced its lineage back to the ancient kings of the second dynasty (1558–1049 BC). Like his father, he was of great stature, exceeding two meters, which earned him the nickname “the giant.” From his marriage, contracted around the age of twenty, he had a son who lived half a century, from 532 to 483 BC.
Soon he found himself surrounded by numerous and ardent disciples, the so-called “disciples of the gate,” from the name of the gate that opened into the private apartments at the far end of the courtyard where the master held his lessons. He sat facing south and presided over the assembly of disciples from a few steps above. As a most modest salary, they paid a bundle of ten slices of salted meat, an expression that later came to mean “honorarium.” It has been said that there were 3,000 disciples, a figure probably exaggerated; among them, 72 were his favorites, and these were the flower of his school. He demanded much reflection and used to say: “I do not teach those who do not strive to understand; I do not help those who do not endeavor to speak; if, after I have explained one corner of a matter, someone is unable to find the other three, I do not repeat it” (Analects of Confucius, VIII, 8).
Of the six liberal arts that young Chinese studied from the ages of ten to twenty—namely, dance, archery, charioteering, writing, arithmetic, and music—Confucius taught only the last three. He took pride in having invented nothing new but in transmitting only the pure doctrine of antiquity. “I transmit and do not invent; I have faith in antiquity and consecrate my love to it,” he declared (Analects of Confucius, II, 14), content to hand down to posterity the exact interpretation of the true thought of the ancients.
The China of Confucius’s time was a feudal China, divided into a great number of small states, at least a hundred of which lay in the basin of the Yellow River. Over these ruled a king of the already-declining Chou [Chou] dynasty, whose sovereignty in practice was merely nominal. The king resided in the capital of Loyang, present-day Honan, in the province of the same name. Not until 517 BC did Confucius travel to the court of the Chou to study antiquity more deeply. Indeed, from this visit he derived a great and profound admiration for the ancient sages, especially for the Duke of Chou (11th century BC), brother of the first king of the third dynasty. According to accounts suspect among Taoist writers, who aimed to humiliate the sage and his school, during this sojourn in the capital Confucius is said to have met Lao Tzu and received a sharp rebuke from him. Returning home, Confucius continued to teach the disciples who now flocked to him from the most distant regions. From 515 to 501 BC he devoted himself deeply to the poetry, history, rites, and music of the land.
Between 501 and 499 BC he first accepted the post of governor of a city, then that of superintendent of public works, and finally that of minister of justice. It is said that while he was minister, all went well: men were admired for their sincerity and fidelity, women for their chastity and obedience, and even merchants dared not cheat on prices. In short, Confucius became the idol of the people and the subject of popular songs. But the neighboring states were alarmed. With a government directed by such a minister, it was said, the principality of Lu would easily gain the upper hand over the other states and thus threaten to absorb them. To avert this danger, care was taken to distract the prince of Lu and his ministers from matters of government. To this end, eighty of the most beautiful dancers and forty chariots of excellent horses were sent to the prince. The prince fell into the snare, and Confucius, seeing the futility of his efforts to recall him to better sentiments, chose to leave his homeland and travel through various other states in the hope of finding someone who would listen to his counsels of sound policy: he wished to be the bell that calls men together to hear the truth. The bell indeed rang, but alas, only a few heeded II. He said: “If anyone were to employ me, within a year there would already be good results, and after three I would be capable of establishing a perfect government” (Analects of Confucius, XIII, 10).
After fourteen years of voluntary and ultimately fruitless exile, Confucius was recalled to his homeland in 483 BC, at the age of sixty-nine. The remaining five years of his life were no happier than those already past. With no public office entrusted to him, he set about carefully revising the ancient classical books to which he was to bind his name forever.
In the early days of the fourth lunar month of 479 BC, Confucius, already ill and conscious of his approaching end, leaning on a staff, slowly walked before the gate of his house and hummed, weeping: “The highest mountain is about to fall; — The main beam is about to give way; — The sage is about to wither.”
Indeed, seven days later he died. He was buried in a place now called “the forest of Confucius,” one kilometer north of the city of Küfow in Shantung; a surrounding wall of several kilometers encloses the ground that contains the tomb. A writer of the third century AD states that it was surrounded by a hundred trees, all different from one another, trees that were said to have been planted by the disciples, who brought saplings from their native lands.
The fullest moral portrait of Confucius comes to us from his disciples in the Analects of Confucius, especially in chapter 10. In public, in the temple, and at court, he was ever the man of propriety, though in private he was very simple. Full of reverence and respect for the prince, he spoke with complete freedom to superior and inferior officials alike with great firmness. He used to say: “I am content even if I must eat coarse food, drink only water, and use my arm as a pillow; but wealth and honors acquired by unjust means are to me like floating clouds” (Analects of Confucius, VII, 15). These and other such natural virtues led certain Christian or pro-Christian writers of the 17th century to think that, had he known the Gospel message, Confucius would have been the first to ask for Baptism; so reports the Sicilian Jesuit Prospero Intorcetta in his *Confucius Sinarum philosophus*, Paris 1687, p. CXIX.
C.’s fortune, almost insignificant during his lifetime, began with his death. The Prince of Lu, who had not known how to make use of him while he was alive, was the first to sing his praises immediately after his death and to erect a temple in his honor where, in every season, an offering was made on his behalf. At first, the cult did not extend beyond the borders of the principality of Lu, but in the year 57 A.D. it was decreed that sacrifices should be offered to him in the Imperial College and in the principal colleges of the Empire. For some time, the cult was inseparably linked to that of the Duke of Ceu; only in 609 A.D. did they begin to erect halls dedicated solely to C. Then the custom arose—which lasted until the beginning of the 20th century—of erecting these monuments, improperly called temples, in honor of C. alongside the colleges and examination halls. In them there are no idol statues, but only tablets on which are inscribed the names of the sage’s disciples and the finest exponents of his doctrine.
Before 1912, twice a year—in spring and autumn—the emperor offered a solemn sacrifice in his honor. Emperors through the centuries showered C. with titles extolling his learning and virtue. Much debate has surrounded the civil or religious character of the honors rendered by the Chinese to C., and thus whether they were licit or not for converted Catholics, during the famous controversy over the Chinese Rites (v.). The fact remains, however, that since the Chinese government in recent years, no less than in past centuries, has often and explicitly proclaimed the civil character of such honors, within certain limits it has been declared licit by Pius XII on 8 December 1939 (cf. AAS, 32 [1940], p. 25). To emphasize the civil character, today in China one must pay to enter the temples of C., whereas entry to all other temples is free and unrestricted. A temple of C. is thus practically regarded as a museum.
Never has a mere mortal exerted such influence over so vast a multitude of men as C. For nearly two thousand years, to attain any public office in China it was absolutely indispensable to have a thorough mastery of the Chinese classics, with which C.’s name was indissolubly linked. The magistrates of ancient China, until the beginning of the 20th century, were all doctors of Confucian learning, and of that alone. In the eyes of every good Chinese of the old school, C. has incontestably deserved to have preserved the literary monuments of antiquity and to have lived a life of such temperance as to serve as a model for future generations and to be regarded as the ideal of human perfection and learning in China. Mencius and other disciples placed C. far above the ancient emperors Yao and Shun, who in all Chinese literature are nonetheless considered as unparalleled models of every virtue; indeed, they even maintained that from the beginning of the human race no man has ever attained the perfection and learning of C. The first Chinese historian, in point of time and importance, Ssu-ma Ch’en (c. 145–80 B.C.), well aware of the enormous influence C. had exerted over the entire intellectual life of his country, as early as c. 99 B.C. devoted one of the most important and longest chapters of his Historical Records to him—not among the monographs on famous men, as in the case of Lao-tzu, but in the section dealing with the various houses of the feudal lords; the historian thus regarded him as an uncrowned king, the king of thought. His treatment, which is the most complete monograph on the great sage and the most worthy of consideration, the one that served as a source for all other Chinese and non-Chinese authors up to modern times, closes with this eulogy: “Numerous are those in the world who, like sovereigns and sages, have been honored in their lifetime and consigned to oblivion after their death. But C., though a private individual, has transmitted his fame for more than ten generations (indeed, in the years 91–87 B.C., when this historian wrote, it was the 11th generation after C.). Those who devote themselves to study regard him as a model to imitate. And all those who, from the Son of Heaven to princes and lords, speak in China of the six liberal arts, take him as their model. He may therefore be called the wisest of all.”
Such has C. always remained in the eyes of the Chinese, until 1905, when the ancient system of literary examinations—which had lasted for about two thousand years—was abolished; thus vanished the education so intimately bound up with C.’s doctrine. With the penetration of European science and languages into Chinese schools, Confucian doctrines were abandoned, and the “Master” was thus toppled from his two-thousand-year-old pedestal. The final blow came with the fall of the Empire and the founding of the Republic in 1912, when C. was consigned to the category of outmoded things. Young Chinese who had learned the art of literary criticism in the universities of Europe and America were eager to apply it immediately to the classics of China and to C.’s texts: doubt was cast on ancient books, late interpolations were sought out, and not a few ancient monuments were cast down. Today C. is not only little or not at all studied, but is often despised and repudiated, especially by young students who see in him the representative of antiquity and the patron of the monarchy that once was. Yet a certain reaction is already noticeable among well-meaning scholars. It is in fact impossible not to take account of the man who for centuries shaped the minds and customs of so great a nation.
— See pl. XII.
BML.: As has already been said, the first monograph on C. was given to the Chinese by the historian Semazzini as early as around 90 B.C., in ch. 47 of his Historical Records, translated into French by the sinologist Édouard Chavannes, *Les Mémoires historiques de Se-ma Ts'ien*, V. Paris 1905, pp. 283-435. To obtain a more exact and complete life of C., the Chinese had to wait until the monumental work of historical criticism known as the Examination of the opinions of the great author Ts'ui Shu [Zōngzǐshū] (1740-1814), in which a section written between the years 1791-1810 treats in masterly fashion the life of C. and his disciples; this life, based on all possible sources, illustrated and framed within their historical and cultural context, has however never been translated into any Western language. The first to make C. known in Europe was the Jesuit Father Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) in his *History of the introduction of Christianity into China* (Pasquale M. D'Elia, *Fonti ricciane*, I, Rome 1942; II, 1949, nn. 55, 61, 176, 553-57, 709), which remained authoritative until 1911, but was known through its Latin translation *De christiana expeditione apud Sinas* by the Jesuit Nicola Trigault, who wrongly claimed authorship of it, first published in 1615 and often subsequently translated into various Western languages. The first life, brief but accurate, in a European language was given by the Sicilian Jesuit Prospero Intorcetta in his book *Confucius Sinarum philosophus*, printed in Canton and Goa in the years 1667-69, then again in Paris in 1687 under the title *Philosophorum Sinensium principis Confucii vita* (in the 1687 edition, pp. cxvii-cxxiv). In 1697 a Life of C., probably narrated by the Austrian Jesuit Johann Gruber, appeared in Florence in *Notizie varie dell'Impero della Cina*. Far longer, however, but with little critical analysis, is the *Vie de Kuong-ts'ee, vulgairement appelé Confucius* written by the French Jesuit Joseph-Marie Amiot in vol. XII (pp. 1-430) of *Mémoires concernant les Chinois*, Paris 1786. The life of C. was also recounted in English, perhaps in too dogmatic a tone, by James Legge in ch. 5: *Confucius and his immediate disciples* of his *Prolegomena* (pp. 56-128) to vol. I of his work *The Chinese classics*, London and Hong Kong 1861. A few years later J. H. Plath wrote a highly critical life of C. under the title *Confucius und seine Schüler, Leben und Lehren*, 3 vols., Munich 1869, 1871, 1873. Among more recent publications are: Alberto Tschepe, *Konfucius*, I: *Sein Leben*, Yentschoufu 1910, and Franz Xaver Biallas, S.V.D., *Konfucius und sein Kult*, Peking-Leipzig 1928. For further bibliographical indications, cf. H. Cordier, *Bibliotheca Sinica*, Paris 1904-1908 and Suppl., ibid. 1924, cols. 667-670, 1413-14, 3107, 3503-3506. Pasquale M. D'Elia