天學問答 - Argumentative Text Against Catholicism by Korean Scholar An Chŏngbok 安鼎福 from 1790 AD) - Part 1
This is the first installment of a series of posts that I will upload with translations of a late Eighteenth Century text in literary Chinese by a (Neo-)Confucian scholar named An Chŏngbok 安鼎福 (1712 - 1791). The text is titled 天學問答 (Ch’ŏnhakmundap, “Questions and Answers on the Heavenly Teaching”), in which 天學 Ch’ŏnhak, “Heavenly Teaching” refers to Roman Catholicism, which had made large enough inroads into isolationist Chosŏn Korea to gain (negative!) attention from the powers that be. The original text may be found here. Before I would like to present you with the first part of the text (further broken down into individual paragraphs that each have their own central theme or motif - each of these individual paragraph is then followed by its translation into English), I would like to render a small description, below in cursive font, of the political and societal conditions under which the given text was created.
The Korean state, or dynasty, of Chosŏn (朝鮮) had ever since its establishment in 1392 AD sought to legitimize itself primarily by drawing on the principles and ideas, including rather metaphysical ones, of Confucianism as espoused by the Chinese scholar Zhū Xī (朱熹, 1130 - 1200). After Zhū Xī this new way of appraising Confucianism was further developed or elaborated upon by other scholars in China and in Korea. Thus a particular brand of Confucianism, known as Neo-Confucianism (Chinese term: 性理學 Xīnlǐxué, in Korean: Sŏngnihak), was thus established. In imperial China Zhū Xī’s view would remain dominant in the tradition in imperial China down into the nineteenth century.1 Especially in Chosŏn Korea, however, its ideological and political influence was hard to overstate: Neo-Confucianism quickly evolved into the single state ideology, or a religion for the elites to profess whenever they were involved in politics. Whenever some Korean scholars of political lost political-ideological conflicts, they were marginalized or -often quite severely- punished for purportedly not following or perverting Sŏngnihak, the sin that was at the core of their “crimes” according to the state authorities every time such purges were deemed in order. In this context it would come as no surprise that the Korean royal government did not tolerate any other philosophical or ideological inclinations from its elites, let alone conversions to a religion that would, because of its tenets, put into question the very metaphysical fundaments on which Neo-Confucianism was based.
Roman Catholic missionaries, from the activities of the illustrious Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552 - 1610) onward, had been making inroads into imperial China ever since the late Sixteenth Century. Although Catholicism did never become the predominant religion among the court officials and other important political power brokers, the Jesuits’ strategy of seeking to mingle with the very elites of Chinese statehood led to their religion gaining a foothold in the primary imperial capital of Beijing. As a result Christian writings in literary Chinese, translated or authored by the missionaries, were possessed by and exchanged among some members of the influential intellectual political strata in Beijing. along with the advanced technologies they often brought with them from Europe, guaranteed that certain figures in the high and influential social classes would remain drawn to, or at the very least interested in, Catholic Christianity.
Korea, at that time, was isolated from the outside world, with the exception of Japan, with which the Chosŏn had some dealings, peaceful or not, and, more notably, China, with which the Kingdom of Chosŏn, as China’s tributary, had formal diplomatic relations. These relations were maintained through regular and special diplomatic missions to China’s imperial court. It was through these ties with China that intellectually interested Koreans learned of writings authored by scholars from the West (i.e. the Catholic missionaries). At first, the Koreans who thus began to explore the thoughts penned down by these Western scholars did so mainly out of intellectual curiosity, whilst they were indifferent to, or downright dismissive of, the religion those missionaries explained and propagated in the very same works.2 In the 1780s, however, the Korean state saw a small but conspicuous surge of converts to Catholicism: It started with a conversion in 1784 of a Korean who came into contact with a Western Catholic priest in Beijing as the former was part of a diplomatic entourage,3 but later on Koreans actually started to profess their belief in the Christian-Catholic religion, i.e. they “converted” themselves without the direct involvement of an ordained Catholic priest.
The new religion was in and by itself considered at odds with central tenets of Neo-Confucianism, which was, as stated earlier, the absolute state ideology in Chosŏn Korea. The threat of this new religion was all the more apparent on account of it being adopted by few young noblemen who were disenfranchised with the government and its system. A papal ruling from 1742 that ancestor worship (a sine qua non according to Neo-Confucians) and belief were incompatible, had moreover reconfirmed that Roman Catholicism was anathema to the state ideology of the Korean kingdom.4 It may therefore be hardly surprising that the king of Chosŏn Korea declared Catholicism a heresy already in 1785. The following year a ban of the importation of any books from Beijing was put in place.5 The very first seeds of Catholicism, however, had been sown in Korea, as secret gatherings and congregations of believers still could use their Catholic writings, which had been brought from China before (or perhaps, in some cases, after!) the formal ban, and the faithful community managed to sustain itself throughout the 1790s.6
Against this backdrop of a formally illegal religion, or “learning,” that still retained a following, one could imagine a sincere Neo-Confucian scholar such as An Chŏngbok writing an apology in favour of the orthodox Chosŏn Korean state ideology and against the strange belief system from the West. That he wrote this, and, moreover, did so in the shape of a dialogue, in which a “someone” asks questions or makes assumptions, that get in turn answered or refuted by the actually knowledgeable interlocutor, may be all the more understanding because of An Chŏngbok’s personal experience with the faith: He had discovered that among one of the very first converts to Catholicism was his son-in-law, Kwŏn Ilsin (1736 - 1791), and many lively conversations that he undoubtedly had with him to attempt to have him return to orthodox (Neo-)Confucianism may have been the inspiration for quite a few passages in the text of interest. Kwŏn, his father-in-law’s attempts notwithstanding, died a tortuous death a year later because of his association with Korea’s infant Catholic community.7
或問 今世所謂天學 於古有之乎 曰有之 書曰 惟皇上帝 降衷下民 若有恒性 克綏厥猷 詩曰 惟此文王 小心翼翼 昭事上帝 又曰 畏天之威 于時保之 孔子曰 畏天命 子思曰 天命之謂性 孟子曰 存心養性 所以事天也 吾儒之學 亦不外於事天 董子所謂道之大原 出乎天是也
Someone asked: “Did what is nowadays called the Heavenly Learning also exist in the ancient past?”
[I] said: “It did. [So does] the Book of Documents mention:
The great God has conferred [even] on the inferior people a moral sense. It is capable of softening their ways.8
The Book of Poetry reads:
This king Wen,
Watchfully and reverently,
With entire intelligence served God.9
It furthermore reads:
Revering the Majesty of Heaven,
Thus to preserve [their favour].10
Confucius said:
Stand in awe of the ordinances of Heaven.11
Zǐsī (子思) stated:
What Heaven has conferred is called The Nature12
Mencius said:
It is by upholding one’s mind and nourishing one’s nature that one serves Heaven13
The teachings of our scholars did not diverge from [the principle] of serving Heaven. What Master Dǒng (董子 Dǒngzi) called the Great Origin of the [Proper] Way is the righteousness that comes out of Heaven."14
或曰 吾儒之學 果不外於事天 則子斥西士之學何也 曰 其所謂事天則一也 而此正彼邪 此吾所以斥之也
Someone asked: “If the teachings of our scholars, in fact, do not diverge from [the principle] of serving Heaven, then why, Sir, do you spurn the teaching of the Western scholars?” [I] responded: “If only what they call serving Heaving were one [and the same with ours], but this [teaching of ours] is correct, [whereas] that [teaching of theirs from the West] is heretical. This is the reason why I spurn it.”
Wm. Theodore de Bary, Irene Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition: Volume One, from Earliest Times to 1600 (Columbia University Press, 2nd Edition, 1999), p. 667
Carter J. Eckert, Ki-baik Lee, Young Ick Lew, Michael Robinson, Edward W. Wagner, Korea Old and New: A History (Ilchokak, Publishers (Seoul), 1990), p. 170
Ibid.
Ibid., the matter around this papal ruling is known as the Rites Controversy.
Ibid., pp. 170 - 171
Ibid., the book furthermore mentions a Chinese priest who entered Korea in 1795 and caused more people to convert there. It is also worthy to note that, on other pages, it refers to government campaigns of repression against Korean Catholics, in which numerous Korean Catholics lost their lives, in the very beginning of the Nineteenth Century and, again, in 1839.
In Yŏngho Ch’oe, Peter H. Lee, and Wm. Theodore de Bary (Eds.), Sources of Korean Tradition, Volume Two: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (Columbia University Press, 2000), p.131 it is written as follows: “An’s warning went unheeded and Kwŏn Ilsin died a year later of wounds he suffered while being questioned by government officials about his association with Korea’s infant Catholic community.” Ecker, Lee, Lew, Robinson, and Wagner, Korea Old and New, in Eckert, Lee, Lew, Robinson, Wagner, Korea Old and New: A History. we read that in 1791 a yangban (that is, aristocratic) convert was sentenced to death for failing to prepare an ancestral tablet for his mother and not performing the standard Confucian memorial ritual (p. 171), which I am led to believe refers to the very same person, Kwŏn Ilsin.
The relevant part in the Book of Documents (Shūjīng 書經) reads 若有恆性 克綏厥猷惟后, which Legge translates as “The great God has conferred (even) on the inferior people a moral sense, compliance with which would show their nature invariably right. To make them tranquilly pursue the course which it would indicate is the work of the sovereign.” See this page on the Chinese Text Project site.
The relevant part which was faithfully cited in the work we are translating reads 維此文王、小心翼翼 昭事上帝. The translation of this fragment in the Book of Poetry (詩經 Shījīng), which is a part of one of the odes contained therein (namely the ode titled 大明 Dà Míng), is taken verbatim from James Legge’s translation found here.
This is again taken from a few lines from an ode in the Book of Poetry (詩經 Shījīng). The ode in question has the title 我將 Wǒ Jiāng. Its translation, as made by James Legge, can be found here. You may note that, although I based the translation of the fragment as presented here is based on Legge’s translation, I have opted to use to leave out the (implicit) subject, or agent in it (i.e. the person doing the revering of the Majesty of Heaven, which would be, according to James Legge, the “I,” or First Person, inasmuch as it would be irrelevant to the context of the text I am to translate here, and would only confuse the reader: Again, the author only refers to this fragment and other parts of texts to show cases in which one could find instances of actions or thoughts hinging upon Heavenly Learning, or 天學 (Chinese: Tiānxué, Korean: Ch’ŏnhak).
This is part of a statement in Confucius’ Analects (論語 Lúnyǔ), namely as Paragraph 8 in the chapter known as 季氏 Jì Shì. The translation thereof by James Legge can be found here. Although in the actual text, Confucius describes the action of what the superior man does as a matter of fact, and in order to render this idea, I were to translate it with the verbal expression “to stand in awe” in the indicative mood. The idea of the quotation by the Korean scholar, of course, is that Confucius states it as something that one ought to do, and in order to reflect this I have decided to use the imperative mood.
This is another phrase whose translation has been taken from James Legge. See this link. It seems to be the very first phrase of the work 中庸 (Zhōngyōng, in English known as Doctrine of the Mean). Zǐsī (子思) (c. 481–402 BC), the only grandson of Confucius, is traditionally considered the author of this work, which is one of the Four Books, the doctrinally most essential works of Confucianism. The phrase in question is 天命之謂性 in the original. Possibly remarkable is that 命 is translated here by Legge as “conferred,” not by “mandated” or “ordered,” as it usually is when this character functions as a verb (and it unmistakably does so in this phrase).
Translation by the author of this post. What Mencius supposedly stated is rendered in our text as 存心養性 所以事天也. It is the only fragment that is presented as a quotation or, at least, a paraphrase here that I could not trace back in any form in the corpus of the purported original author (in this case, Mencius). It might be a more free summary by An Chŏngbok of one of Mencius’ thoughts that would show the presence of 天學 (Chinese: Tiānxué, Korean: Ch’ŏnhak) in his philosophical system, rather than a more or less citation from Mencius’ work.
董子 Dǒngzi here refers to the Chinese philosopher and politician of the Hàn (漢) Dynasty Dǒng Zhòngshū 董仲舒 (179 - 104 BC) as well as his biography in the major historical work Book of Han (前漢書 Qián Hàn Shū), whose compilation was completed in 111 AD. The biography in question, which is part of this historical document, is titled 董仲舒傳 (Dǒng Zhòngshū Chuán), whose text can be found here. The fragment referred to it by An Chŏngbok, which reads in this Chinese original as 道之大原出於天, can be found in paragraph 35 of that text.