Through his efforts to re-interpret the study of Confucius, Robert C. Neville has become one of the most important philosophers and theologians in recent memory. ‘Boston Confucianism’ is the slightly tongue-in-cheek moniker Neville uses for his branch of the Confucian discourse, first formulated in New England in the late 20th century. It’s also the title of his seminal work on the subject, which advocates a more serious examination of Confucian teachings in a Western context. To Neville, Confucianism belongs not within academic cloisters, condemned to sinological scholarship, but in the schoolrooms and homes of modern America, where it can complement existing traditions to form a more inclusive global religion.
Neville’s attempts to bridge the divide between East and West are not unlike the efforts of early Christian missionaries in China, who used religion as a means to unite the two disparate cultures. In particular, I feel similarities can be drawn between Neville and Samuel W. Williams, a pioneering sinologist active during the middle 19th century. Born in Utica, New York in 1812, Williams arrived in China during a time of great philosophical debate and political upheaval. At the time, he was one of only two missionaries in the entire country. Williams’ sympathy toward locals distinguished him from many Western colleagues – he felt the opium trade was unjust and was poisoning Chinese civilization (a belief common among nascent Chinese political and faith traditions). Published in the wake of the First Opium War, The Middle Kingdom was Williams’ finest work and was considered the authoritative survey of Chinese civilization for many years. For most intellectuals in the West, The Middle Kingdom was their first introduction to the Confucian precepts Neville would later try to revive.
The Middle Kingdom describes the leading features of Confucianism as “subordination to superiors and kind upright dealing with our fellow-men”, which resembles the ‘humanness’ inherent in Neville’s concept of ren. Williams also clarifies that Confucianism is “destitute to all reference of an unseen power… (its followers) look only to this world for their sanctions”1. In distinguishing Confucian thought from religious doctrine, Williams allows other scholars (including Neville) to bring it into the philosophical mainstream. Williams understood the centrality of Confucianism to Chinese life, and considered its eminent practicality to exceed the contributions of any Western philosopher.
Much like Neville, Williams had become something of a public intellectual. He was a prolific lecturer in the United States, and had mastered a good bit of the Chinese language (he would later become the first professor of Chinese at any American university). Williams even helped to author one of the earliest English-Chinese dictionaries. This background in linguistics drew him to primary sources, especially the ‘Four Books and Five Classics’ that form the core of Confucian thought. His admiration was boundless – Williams felt the Confucian texts exerted an “incomparable influence… which no book, besides the Bible, can claim.”2 Neville shares this appreciation for classical scholarship, which forms a core element of any transported philosophical or religious culture. Beyond primary and secondary scriptures, Neville also highlights the ‘interpretive context’ behind Confucianism, which Williams (as a scholar of language and history) would have well understood.
Both scholars share a particular fascination with the concept of li, described by Neville as ‘ritual propriety’. Boston Confucianism calls for a revival of ritual propriety, or the “focus (of) ethical life on the development of social forms and styles that properly humanize people”.3 Neville echoed the Confucian understanding that people could not cooperate, nor be properly governed, without elaborate learned ways of behaving within a culture. Williams focused especially on the The Book of Rites (one of the five classics), which he knew to be critical for the healthy functioning of Chinese society. He wrote that “the religion of the state is founded upon it, and children are early instructed in all the details it contains… (the book is) singular in its object and scope among all the bequests of antiquity”.4
Williams had traveled to China to convince its people to accept Christ, but during his stay he would come to preach to a new audience: Americans. His work did invaluable service in extolling the “richness, the complexity, the flaws… the overall worthiness of Chinese civilization” to a nation largely ignorant of its finer points5. While recognizing the peculiarities of China’s civilization, Williams felt they masked a deeper similarity between China and then West – an “innate sameness of the peoples of the earth”6. Neville echoes the same sentiment when he writes that the first meaning of Boston Confucianism is “bringing the Confucian tradition into play with the other great civilized traditions in the creation of a world religion”7 . The higher purpose behind Boston Confucianism – the application of Confucian thought beyond an East Asian ethnic context – certainly exceeds Williams’ passive observation. Nonetheless, both men understood that Confucianism was the best bridge between the disparate cultures of East and West. Close study of the Confucian tradition deserves to be more than an academic curiosity – it has the potential to be the cornerstone in the construction of a more inclusive world.
- Samuel Wells Williams, The Middle Kingdom (London: Wiley & Putnam, 1848), 530, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=yale.39002008743776&view=1up&seq=638. [↩]
- Ibid, 531. [↩]
- Robert Neville, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 7. [↩]
- Williams, The Middle Kingdom, 510. [↩]
- John Rogers Haddad, The Romance of Chine: Excursions to China in US Culture, 1776 to 1876 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, 263. [↩]
- Ibid, 308. [↩]
- Neville, Boston Confucianism 1. [↩]