The Question of Hu 
by 

Jonathan D. Spence

 

The Worship of Words

On the face of it, this is an interesting if inconsequential history of a certain John Hu, a Christian Chinese gentleman brought to Europe as a sort of research assistant by a French Jesuit scholar, Père Jean-Francois Foucquet, in the early 18th century. The priest abandoned his protégé shortly after arrival and the stranded man spent the next two years in an asylum for the insane, a sort of Catholic Bedlam. His situation was made ever more intense because his carers/persecutors were fellow-Christians who treated him as somewhat less than fully human much less one of their own. One can only feel pity for this strange but guileless and innocent victim of a sort of naive xenophobia and cultural ignorance.

But there is also an historically significant substrate to this story that perhaps provides at least a partial explanation for the treatment afforded Mr. Hu and the further career of Pére Foucquet: language and its role in European religion, especially in Catholicism. Hu was brought to Europe by Foucquet in the midst of a crisis created in part by Foucquet and his Jesuit colleagues during decades of involvement in China. It is about how a rigidly textual religion translates, if at all, to an entirely alien language. This crisis was less public or dramatic than the Protestant Reformation 200 years earlier but no less significant for the Catholic Church. This crisis is generally known as Inculturation and would continue for at least the next two centuries. It is still not been entirely resolved.

Inculturation is a complex, often esoteric theological topic. It involves not just the definition and designation of terms but also the subtle connotations and traditions associated with these terms. At the time of Mr. Hu’s journey, inculturation was triggered by the unclear status of the so-called Chinese Rites involving the veneration of ancestors. Were established rituals religious, and therefore unacceptable in Christianity, or merely civil, in which case they could be practised by those accepted into the Christian Church? But this issue was the exposed tip of a very large theological iceberg. The same issue persists today regarding the status of economic injustice in the so-called Liberation Theology of South America. Should such injustice be considered as a civil matter or a religious scandal? To make the problem of inculturation simpler without making it trivial, I think a personal example may be useful.

I first heard the now famous Missa Luba, a musical setting of the formal or High Latin Mass, in the early 1960’s. The Missa Luba is an enduring masterpiece, a magnificent interpretation by a Congolese ensemble of all the key elements of the Catholic ceremony. It was also totally unlike any traditional liturgical music in the Catholic Church at the time (and substantially predates the sort of guitar-accompanied Kumbaya drivel composed by aspiring clerics - mostly nuns apparently - after the reforms of Vatican II). Neither the staid Gregorian chants nor the Baroque polyphonies had nearly the rousing appeal nor the emotional connection with the Catholic audience of teenagers of which I was a part.

The Kyrie alone, that very primitive, repetitive prayer for mercy, became in the Missa Luba a theme that could have come straight from a pagan festival (It was even cited as such in the cult 60’s film “if”). It was neither staid nor soaring but in some way as primitive as the prayer itself. It had a force, a direction, a meaning that none of us had previously experienced with liturgical music. And whenever I hear the Sanctus from the Missa Luba, I am reminded of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by its percussive ostinato. We played the vinyl recording over and over in our little group until it became almost unusable.

None of us realised at the time that we had entered right into the middle of the problem of inculturation. The piece was made by and for Africans. It was sectarian by definition; it derived from a tradition that had no connection at all to the European styles of music that had dominated Catholicism. The fact that it had popular appeal around the world made the situation worse. Its interpretation of divine truths inherently gave it the potential to undermine settled issues, theological as well as liturgical.*

In short, the music gave the words new meaning. This outraged traditionalists. Inculturation was a linguistic not a musical issue. The words and their established meanings, their connections to other words in the form of defined doctrines, are central to Catholicism, as they are to all Christian sects. Change the meaning of the words, that is, how the words are responded to by congregants, specifically European and other white congregants, and the great edifice of religious doctrine is threatened. The Missa Luba was perceived as the start of a very steep, very slippery slope by the church officials we were involved with. So, they confiscated the recording and warned us of its threat to the true faith.

Imagine, therefore, the official reaction in an even more conservative era to the research into Chinese religious texts by Père Foucquet when, as Spence summarises:

“In the twenty-two years that Foucquet has been in China, he has given much of his life to proving the truth of three fundamental insights that have been granted to him: first, that the origins of the ancient Chinese religious texts, such as The Book of Changes, are divine, that they were handed to the Chinese by the true God; second, that in China’s sacred books the word for the “Way”—the “Dao”—represented the same true God that Christians worship; third, that the same divine significance could be read into the Chinese philosophical phrase the “Taiji,” used in so many texts to refer to an ultimate truth.”

If one were dealing with typical linguistic or sociological inquiry, Foucquet’s hypothesis, although highly suspect, might be an interesting and culturally reconciling subject of investigation. That the Chinese purportedly discovered many of the same spiritual insights as Europeans is an important proposition. Among other things, if verified, it would give Christian missionaries conceptual and cultural entree for discussion and proselytisation in what had hitherto been a very tough, resistant, and unprofitable religious market.

But this apparently pragmatic hypothesis hides a sinister implication. If Christian ideas can be mapped to Buddhist, Confucian and Daoist ideas, these latter can in fact dilute Christian truth. Each of the Chinese concepts are part of an enormous tradition (Foucquet had several thousand Chinese volumes from which he selected his ‘target’ similarities). Therefore they are defined and derive their meaning through these alien texts and the traditions that have developed around them. If Foucquet’s conclusions are allowed to go unchallenged, Catholic doctrine will be potentially submerged by and compromised under the interpretive weight of these Chinese texts. If the words of doctrine aren’t kept from such contamination, the true faith might be lost.

Such concerns had been expressed for at least a century before the voyage of Hu and Foucquet to Europe. The Church’s initial expansion in Europe had largely been facilitated by the existence of the Roman Empire which exercised a sort of cultural magnetism that accepted the Church’s very Roman linguistic realism and dogmatic precision. But the systematic dispersion of missionaries into large populations with established cultures in South and Central America, but particularly in Japan, India and China produced this central issue unexpectedly. Policy vacillated continuously. On the one hand, Christian truth was thought to be a-cultural. Wasn’t this implied in the epithet Catholic? On the other hand non-European cultures, especially languages seemed incapable of conveying that truth reliably. 

The Church was unable either to absorb or overcome the Eastern cultures of Buddhism, Dao, and Confucianism (in others they had partial success producing syncretistic voodoo-like religious sects in parallel with more orthodox establishments). The Church’s implicit strategy seems to have been to replace these cultures entirely by insisting that Christianity must be received as an entire linguistic whole; or not at all and allow activities to be closed down completely. 

So, for example suggestions by missionaries throughout the 17th century that Chinese ancestor worship was a parallel practice to Catholic participation in the Community of Saints was rejected as quasi-heretical. Shortly after Foucquet’s departure, the Chinese emperor banned further missionary work in the country for precisely this reason, rejection being perceived as a profound lack of respect for Chinese tradtion. Not until 1939 was there a papal pronouncement that perhaps that particular similarity might have merit in catechesis.

In other words, the cultures of the East were implicitly considered a real threat to the very core of the Church, its treasury of doctrine. These doctrines, as well as various other texts like the Bible and papal instructions, were (and still are) formulated in carefully crafted Latin and essentially imposed on the various European languages (along with alphabets, vocabularies, and official translations as necessary). No such possibility existed in the East. The missionaries who did try to ‘connect’ cultural ideas were consistently blocked by central authority and their missions consistently failed except in those places which became European colonies, and not always even there.

So the Eastern religious ideas were not only alien, they were constitutionally wrong. They did not describe spiritual or supernatural reality. Those who practised these alien religions did not understand reality. Their languages weren’t even capable of describing reality accurately. In short, the people who spoke these languages were irrational, functionally insane from a Christian perspective. And their resolute unresponsiveness to proselytisation proved the point. They were incapable of understanding. Even those who appeared to accept Christian truths, couldn’t be considered Christians unless they could express those truths in an acceptable language.

Hence Mr. Hu’s (and also Pėre Foucquet’s) tragic situation. Hu was one of the few Chinese whom Europeans knew in the flesh, and the only one of an even fewer number who spoke no European language whatsoever. He was not just alien; he would likely be instinctively classed as pagan despite his putative baptism. In addition Hu was what might be called a religious enthusiast, very much attuned to visions and the visible acts of God, somewhat of an 18th century hippie child of God perhaps. His behaviour was simply odd during the voyage, moving toward the eccentric and even bizarre as he was exposed to European life.

Foucquet himself suffered less physically upon arrival but possibly experienced an equal degree of mental torture. His summons to Rome was in order to debrief the Vatican authorities on his remarkable findings before starting a sort of sabbatical in order the complete his writing. He reports an affable meeting with the Pope, which apparently didn’t touch upon the issue of the Chinese Rites or his controversial research about how “the Chinese had, in the long distant past worshipped the Christian God.” 

I think there’s a very strong possibility that senior officials had decided to bury the issue. What to do with a problematic figure like Foucquet then? He was a dedicated, well-connected scholar from a good family and with a number of friends sympathetic to his views. It was not clear that he was heretical by contravening any particular doctrine, but he had already said that his only goal in life was the completion of the exposition of his monumental thesis. But his views on the translation and meaning of Chinese texts were certainly divisive within the Jesuit community and with the other clerical orders, particularly the Dominicans. In addition his contention that Christianity could be preached through classic Chinese texts had already proved moot. The Catholic mission had already failed with the missionaries expulsion.

Better to avoid fuss and possible scandal then, and kick the man upstairs. The solution is typical of any large corporate organisation. They let Foucquet publish the first of his intended volumes about the origins of Chinese religions in biblical events. It was a dead letter in any case. Then they promoted him to an honorary bishopric with duties that absorb any free time for further writing. And then they just wait until things out until his retirement or death, whatever comes first. This was an institution with a rather long planning horizon after all.

Foucquet’s intended life’s work was clearly in those unwritten volumes. Almost half his life had been spent in his endeavour. It was now merely crates full of notes and Chinese reference works that eventually found their way to the King’s library. Foucquet, like Hu, was caught in the intense linguistic imperialism of the European Church and subtly but decisively put out to pasture.


* An old theological joke comes to mind. Question: How can you tell a liturgist from a terrorist? Answer: The terrorist is willing to compromise.