One More Epicycle

John Rose over at the First Things blog makes some interesting comments about the increasing importance of third-world Christianity, describing a lecture by Philip Jenkins:

[...]

Among the interesting threads in the following day’s roundtable Q&A was Pope Benedict’s Regensburg speech and its relation to the varieties of Christianity in the Global South. In his lecture, Benedict called the European synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem the “historically decisive character” of Christianity, a providential, normative event that “did not happen by chance.”

But to look at the picture Jenkins painted of the future Church—on average, non-European and un-Hellenized—is to call into question the universality of Rome’s marriage. If, a century from now, Africa and a freer China are the scholastic centers of Christianity, with folklore and Mencius taking the place of Aristotle, what then are we in the West left to conclude about the synthesis of faith and reason described by Pope Benedict at Regensburg?

A friend sends this along on the subject: “The sun of grace has shone on our part of the world, and we [Western Christians] must be grateful, avoiding all arguments about how Socrates was more critically rational than Confucius.” Had Christ been born, per impossible, on the Yangtze, or had Muslim arms conquered Europe, which was all too possible, the face of Christianity would doubtless look different today.

I’m very fond of Confucius, who I had the joy of discovering in university. The Analects is one of the most profound and practical books I’ve ever read. He is the the wisest of men, and in many ways I prefer him to the Socrates-Plato-Aristotle trio. I don’t know about critical rationalism, because that’s not how he approached the world, but I think the case can be made that Confucius is actually more sensible than Socrates; he accepts more of what is real.

The best explanation of why Confucius is worth reading for Christians that I know of is by traditionalist conservative writer Jim Kalb (read the whole article):

[..] Many such thinkers, whether they were Mohists trying to feed the people or Legalists trying to maximize state power, called for centralization of society on functional lines. Others, like the Taoists, favored mysticism and withdrawal from society as a response to disorder. Whatever their differences, such proposals would have destroyed the special position of family and other traditional attachments and the importance of public standards of conduct and value not devised by the state.

Confucians rejected such views as unbalanced and inhuman. In their view, neither the rational centralized state nor liberation from restraint could bring a better life because social order can neither be dispensed with nor constructed arbitrarily. Confucius sought a middle way that accords with natural moral tendencies. For him, good social order consists in a cultivated harmony between nature and social institutions. That harmony grows out of attentiveness to family and other unplanned natural relationships, and is promoted and preserved by ethical principles such as reciprocity, loyalty, forbearance and benevolence.

From a Christian perspective Confucius’ thought is wanting, but it’s surprising in how few ways; and many of those weaknesses are things Confucius couldn’t do anything about, not having the Incarnation to ground his metaphysics. His views of society, and the interrelationships among the people who constitute it, are more reasonable than those of almost anyone else, and his understanding of the role of Ritual has many congruences with a sacramental worldview.

In Chesterton’s biography of Thomas Aquinas, he says that

[T]he philosophy of St. Thomas stands on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs.

A similar common-sense glory applies to Confucius. His views are founded on the conviction that people are people; that is, they are creatures with a particular nature, with corresponding natural abilities and tendencies. Important among these qualities is that man is inherently a social animal. At heart, social order is not an oppressive imposition from without, but the natural expression of the interrelationships between men. To the contrary, it’s the antinomian rejection of authority other than a man’s own preferences (the triumph of the will) which is truly oppressive, for it denies man the power to be authentically himself. A man raised alone by wolves knowing nothing but need and the satisfaction of need is still a man, but he lacks the connections to others (such as language and tradition) which are a vital part of the full exercise of being truly human.

Reading Confucius requires a little discipline — it’s more like reading the Gospels than St Paul or Aristotle, because his philosophy comes across through a series of aphorisms, question/answer pairs, and brief stories — but I found it very rewarding. He’s a deeply insightful observer of the human condition, and since modern Catholic anthropology is exploring the same man-in-communion reality, there’s a lot he has to teach.

Many translations of the Analects are freely available on the Web.  I like the Waley translation myself, which is older (and may be less accurate; I’m not qualified to say) but elegantly beautiful.

Third-millennium Christianity would do well to learn about the Order of Heaven from Confucius; he understands clearly many things which we today have forgotten.