Friendship and Hospitality by Dongfeng Xu

Author:Dongfeng Xu [Xu, Dongfeng]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, China, Religion, Confucianism
ISBN: 9781438484969
Google: PkonEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2021-08-01T01:05:29+00:00

6

The Confucian Hospitality

Responding to the Jesuits

To apprehend oneself from within—to produce oneself as I—is to apprehend oneself with the same gesture that already turns toward the exterior to extra-vert and to manifest—to respond for what it apprehends—to express; it is to affirm that the becoming-conscious is already language, that the essence of language is goodness, or again that the essence of language is friendship and hospitality. … The fundamental scission into same and the other is a non-allergic relation of the same with the other.

—Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity

We must then ask ourselves what a decision is and who decides. And if a decision is—as we are told—active, free, conscious and voluntary, sovereign. What would happen if we kept this word and this concept, but changed these last determinations?

—Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship

The discussion in the two previous chapters should have made clear how both the status and identity of the Ming host, together with its Confucian Sino-centrism, became uncertain before the Jesuits’ infiltration with their world maps, calendric science, and other technologies. This chapter will examine the Jesuit challenge sustained by Confucianism when Christian ideology and theology clashed directly and drastically with Confucian rituals, doctrines, and concepts. Focusing on anti-Christian Confucian responses to the missionaries, the discussion will demonstrate how the Confucian Self confirmed its own limits and undermined its own subjectivity as it attempted to claim univocality and sole authority for Confucianism.

Compared with many of the Confucians discussed in the preceding chapters, the anti-Christian Confucians to be examined in the following pages represent a most obstinate group that insisted on an outright rejection of the missionary strangers, their Christian religion and Western science included. These Confucians began to openly oppose the missionaries in the 1610s, when some Jesuits became increasingly critical of Confucianism, especially Confucian rituals.1 They were convinced that what the missionaries planned to do was, as Mencius has put it, “convert the Chinese to the barbarian way.”2 To them, the missionaries posed a danger to everything and everyone Chinese, because with their Christian teachings they sought to eradicate fundamental Confucian doctrines and practices. The anti-Christian Confucians therefore called for the expulsion of the Jesuits. Assuming the role of an inhospitable host, this group used first of all governmental intervention—the most famous example being the so-called Nanjing Persecution that led to the arrest and trial of some Jesuits and their deportation to Macao between 1616 and 1617.3 Besides resorting to administrative means to end the missionary presence in China, the Confucians also picked up their brushes and produced a number of writings using harsh rhetoric to defend and clarify Confucian doctrines and refute ideology and religion from the West. Out of these Confucian apologetic writings, this chapter chooses to examine two examples, both written in 1623, as representatives of the Confucian responses to the Jesuits and Christianity: Shengchao zuobi (聖朝佐辟), or Assisting the Holy Dynasty in the Refutation [of Heterodoxy], by Xu Dashou (許大受),4 and Qingshu jingtan yiji (清署經談・一集), or Discourse on the Canons in the Clear Studio, Volume 1, by Wang Qiyuan (王啟元).

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