Happy birthday, Confucius!

Today is the 2,570^th birthday of China’s great sage and classicist, Confucius 孔丘. A massive celebration is taking place in Confucius’s hometown of Qufu 曲阜.

Anyone even the slightest bit familiar with my earlier work on this blog would be aware that I consider Confucius to be one of my most profound intellectual influences, and he has been since my college days. I was drawn in particular to the peculiar radical communitarianism and familialism of the Master’s political thought, and that unfortunately led me to embrace a certain polemicism against Western (and one or two Chinese) ‘public intellectuals’ who wanted to misrepresent and coöpt Confucius for libertarian, and liberal and neoliberal projects. I felt (and still feel) that these projects are, at a certain basic level, inimical to the entire political dimension of his philosophy. It also led me to seek out and identify with a broad range of figures in Chinese left-populist politics (Wen Yiduo 聞一多, Jimmy Yen 晏陽初, Liang Shuming 梁漱溟, Tao Xingzhi 陶行知, Fei Xiaotong 費孝通, Wang Hui 汪暉, Wen Tiejun 溫鐵軍 and Cui Zhiyuan 崔之元) as well as a range of figures in Chinese traditionalist conservatism (Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒, Hou Fangyu 侯方域, Chen Zilong 陳子龍, Gong Zizhen 龔自珍, Wei Yuan 委員, Lin Zexu 林則徐, Zhang Zhidong 張之洞, Gu Hongming 辜鴻銘 and Jiang Qing 蔣慶) who drew upon the strands in Confucius’s thought that I most strongly identified with.

There is something of a deep irony to this. I am a white Midwestern American with English, Scottish, German, Danish, Czech-Jewish and Yugoslav ancestry (albeit one married to a Chinese national and father of two mixed-race kids). I have never considered myself, rightly speaking, a Ruist. That would involve a certain religious commitment which I felt it improper for me to embrace, not least because I truly do believe that Jesus Christ was God Incarnate who came to save the world from death. And yet I still feel a certain affinity for and protectiveness toward this tradition that is not mine.

Honestly, I also think my intellectual love affaire with Ruism also impacted my Christianity in several important ways. For one thing, I was struck by the central importance of ritual (li 禮) in the thought of Confucius. Ritual figures as one of the cardinal human virtues alongside love, justice, wisdom and trustworthiness. Ritual is one of the two key implements – the other being music – of establishing the legitimacy of a political order. Ritual also plays a key rôle in mediating the self-institution dialectic, and thus is necessary to a well-ordered human life. Confucius’s reverence for ritual was one of the things that drew me to higher Liturgical forms of Christianity: first to High Church Anglo-Catholicism, and then to Orthodox Christianity.

For another thing, my Christianity has clearly been impacted by the familial-religious elements of Ruism. I do mean this in an intellectual sense, of course. Filial piety and familialism should be particularly important to Christians with a political witness, as they form an important bulwark against the pernicious ideologies that seek to supplant them: racialism, kinism and ethno-nationalism. But I also mean this in a personal sense.

The folk custom, blessed by the Ru way, of venerating ancestors has also led me to embark on a hagiographical project / series here, examining in some depth the pre-Schismatic English (and related Frisian, German and Scandinavian) saints. This is not just an intellectual exercise for me; indeed, the icon of Saint Boniface up on my wall is for this very purpose. The faith I practise is not for my benefit only; it is connected to that faith which was embraced by my forefathers, and their prayers aid me. But this hagiographical project is not only personal; it has led me to some surprising conclusions about the nature of my own cultural and temporal belonging and that of the cultural ‘moment’ in general.

At any rate, from another ‘Western Confucian’ – but not that one – many happy returns of the day, Master Zhongni!