Chapter 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity Lauren F. Pfister 1 Approaching Zhu Xi Through Modern and Contemporary Christian Scholars Historically speaking, it is a fact that Zhu Xi never encountered during his life any person that he would have been able to identify as a Christian intellectual or scholar. Nevertheless, because his interpretive influences in Ruist traditions were so immense after his death, and especially during the Qing dynasty (as other chapters in this volume document so clearly), nineteenth century foreign and indigenous missionary-­ scholars as well as twentieth century Chinese and foreign Christian scholars from a relatively wide range of backgrounds had to come to grips with the nature of his immense corpus and the claims that were associated with his mature positions. That process did not occur spontaneously, but involved several centuries of inchoate engagement with Zhu Xi’s works that did not display self-conscious awareness of his influences, lasting till the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this article, then, the major discussions will focus on those who self-consciously engaged Zhu Xi’s philosophical system and its claims, usu- ally involving some specific portion of his works. Due to the nature of this general topic and the limits of my own linguistic abili- ties, I have chosen to highlight studies that explicitly apply Zhu Xi’s teachings to particular Christian issues or explore Zhu Xi’s claims from specific Christian per- spectives. In addition, I have chosen to include studies of those who present Zhu Xi’s claims by means of the translation and interpretation of Ruist canonical litera- ture, even though they may not offer a systematic study of Zhu Xi’s works in-and-­ of-themselves. Thirdly, I have divided the study of sources dealt with in two L. F. Pfister (*) Department of Religion and Philosophy, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 681 K.-c. Ng, Y. Huang (eds.), Dao Companion to ZHU Xi’s Philosophy, Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29175-4_30 682 L. F. Pfister historical categories, the first being “pre-WWII” and the second being “post-WWII,” based primarily on the shift from studies produced by a large number of foreign missionary-scholars, many of those works being translations of key texts, to the second period where those who engage Zhu Xi’s corpus are primarily Chinese Christian scholars and their concerns are not with translation of texts, but with the interpretation of Zhu’s system and its implications. This occurred in part due to the maturation of the Chinese Christian communities in Greater China during the twen- tieth century, and the development of a number of indigenous accounts and responses to Zhu Xi that did not exist in any systematic manner previous to WWII. Finally, I have sought to identify works in a relatively wider range of linguistic media that address these themes, primarily working with texts published in Chinese and European languages. 2 Zhu Xi’s Pre-WWII Foreign Christian Interpreters Missionaries from three main traditions within Christianity lived in China at differ- ent periods and engaged teachings of Zhu Xi: they were foreign representatives of Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, and Protestant traditions. All of these figures studied various aspects of the Chinese cultures they encountered, and published something about their learning that included reference to the works and teachings of Zhu Xi. Many other missionaries did not do such extensive study and publishing, and so in order to highlight the special character of these unusual missionaries, the term “missionary-scholar” was created (Pfister 2010; Fei 2016b: 18–38). Notably, the first among this group who dealt with teachings of Zhu Xi did not do so self-­ consciously, but near the end of the eighteenth century missionary-scholars pro- duced translations and secondary works that did self-consciously present and evaluate aspects of Zhu Xi’s teachings. 2.1 The Italian Jesuit Missionary-Scholar, Matteo Ricci Although Matteo Ricci 利瑪竇 (1552–1610) as one of the first Italian Jesuit missionary-­scholars to live in China did put Chinese and “Western” scholars in dialogue within his major Chinese work, Tianzhu Shiyi 天主實義 (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven), he did not realize that a number of the interpretive positions adopted by his imagined Chinese scholar relied on or even glossed Zhu Xi’s claims. Recent scholarship has identified places where those claims can be linked to Zhu Xi’s teachings, but this was apparently not self-conscious on Ricci’s part (Ricci 2014). 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 683 2.2 The Seventeenth Century Jesuit Translation Project Recent research has also clarified that the seventeenth century Jesuit translation project, Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, that produced three of the Four Books in Latin (not attempting the Mengzi / Mencius 孟子) was also highly indebted to Zhu Xi’s commentaries to that seminal work. Still, as in the case of Ricci’s previous volume, Philip Couplet and his colleagues were not self-consciously employing Zhu Xi’s commentaries. They only integrated Zhu’s explanations into their Latin translation by means of the commentary that they did employ, Zhang Juzheng’s 張 居正 (1525–1582) Sishu Zhijie 四書直解 (Straightforward Explanations of the Four Books), produced initially in the early 1570s. Because Zhang himself relied on Zhu Xi’s earlier commentaries for many of his own interpretations, but not consis- tently or without correction of the Song Ruist’s influential philosophical assertions, that impact on the Jesuits’ translations and interpretations was only selectively pres- ent in a complicated patchwork of Zhu Xi’s and other Ruists’ interpretations, some- times also including Zhang’s own innovative elaborations (Meynard 2011, 2015). 2.3 The French Jesuit Scholar, François Noël The first missionary-scholar to employ Zhu Xi’s commentaries to the Four Books self-consciously was the French Jesuit, François Noël 衛方濟 (1651–1729), pub- lishing Latin and later French renderings of the Four Books and two other works in Prague in 1711. This effort should be considered as part of the “old Jesuit mission” that was initiated by Ruggieri and Ricci in 1580, and lasted until the dismantling of the Jesuit order by the pope in the 1770s. While Noël set this precedent for Jesuit scholarship in his own day, he employed Zhu Xi’s commentaries as a major, but not the only, source for his Latin renderings (Wong 2013, 2015). Later Protestant missionary-­scholars who also employed Zhu Xi’s commentaries in a similar fash- ion—as a recognized authority, but not their only source for their translations— include Legge, Faber, Wilhelm, and Guerra. With regard to translation precedents in rendering texts into Latin that reflect a specific Roman Catholic worldview, one precedent that is both problematic and influential among later Jesuit renderings completed by Zottoli (Latin), Couvreur (Latin and French), and Guerra (Portuguese) in the nineteenth and twentieth centu- ries, came with the rendering of the first two Chinese ideographs of the Zhongyong 中庸 (the Doctrine of the Mean). Noël took tian ming 天命 there as a single noun, rather than a noun-verb or adjective-­noun phrase, and gave it the translation of the Latin equivalent of “natural law” (Wong 2015). While there are good reasons to challenge this rendering from grammatical and conceptual explanations by many Chinese commentators, here we face an obvious eisegesis (“reading into the text”) of a prevailing worldview concept from Thomist theology that should be high- lighted as a clever, but misguided and ultimately unjustified, translation of that passage. 684 L. F. Pfister 2.4 The Russian Orthodox Abbot and Missionary-Scholar, Iakinf Unknown to most philosophers in Chinese, European, and North American contexts is that the first full European translation of Zhu Xi’s Sishu Jizhu 四書集注 (Collected Notes on the Four Books)—including not only the canonical texts of the Four Books, but also renderings and/or glosses of Zhu Xi’s commentaries—was produced initially in the period from 1814 to 1815 in old Russian by the Russian Orthodox abbot, Iakinf 雅金夫 (Nikita Y. Bichurin 比丘林, 1777–1853). A second version of the whole work was completed in 1820–1821, just before Iakinf and his ecclesiastical team returned to St. Petersburg after the chaos caused by the Napoleonic Wars. That later complete manuscript consists of two large handwritten volumes held in the Museum of Oriental Manuscripts in St. Petersburg, while a more elegantly prepared version of only two of the four texts—the Daxue 大學 (the Great Learning) and Zhongyong with Zhu Xi’s commentaries—was prepared for publication in 1835. Very unfortunately for both Russian and other European sinol- ogists, even those later tomes were never published. They are currently kept in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg (Fei 2016a). Notably, Iakinf was self- conscious of the radical reordering of the text of the Daxue and the addition of the fifth chapter by Zhu Xi’s own hand. Surprisingly, he chose not to add that one chapter created by Zhu Xi to the canonical text, adding a translator’s note that the canonical text at this point was missing materials, and the creative alternative pre- sented by Zhu Xi was not acceptable. This is a remarkably bold step taken by the Russian missionary-­scholar, something not seen elsewhere among renderings of that passage in other missionary-scholars’ translations. Notably, Iakinf still appar- ently presented all the rest of the “new text” traditions for both the Daxue and the Zhongyong in his Russian rendering.