Lue-Yee Tsang on Canon Wars in Classical Christian Education

Forgot earlier this month to link to my article for the Davenant Institute’s Ad Fontes journal, ‘Whose Classical Education? Which Canon War?’ I contend for a cultural specificity in classical education, to bring out in each tradition the truths about the one God of all. Check it out.

Unhealthy to Be Constantly Getting Ready for an Exam

‘Can it be good, from the age of 10 to the age of 23, to be always preparing for an exam, and always knowing that your whole worldly future depends on it: and not only knowing it, but perpetually reminded of it by your parents and masters [i.e., teachers]? Is this the way to breed a nation of people in psychological, moral, and spiritual health?’
– C. S. Lewis, letter to Warfield M. Firor, 3 December 1950

This is where I dissent from the typical East Asian expectation of high-stakes testing for students from late primary school to the end of university, or sometimes even beyond. Undoubtedly it yielded some kinds of results in China, but those fruits have not always been good. It was not the way of Confucius, and it has, over a millennium, instead made the Chinese ready to subject themselves to the lives of bugmen, entombed alive, slaves to dead machines and not to the living Christ. In comparison, the tangping 躺平 (‘lying flat’) movement, in which people check out of the rat race and do only the bare minimum they are required to do, problematic as this movement may be, is actually a sensible response to the insanity of the current system.

China and the Idea of Empire

Alain de Benoist says in his essay ‘L’Idée d’Empire’ (English translation at Gornahoor) that empire has a spiritual aspect to its authority, distinct from territorial definition. In consequence, in his judgement, ‘the decline of the empire throughout the centuries is consistent with the decline of the central role played by its principle and, correspondingly, with its movement toward a purely territorial definition’.

In the civilizational ‘great space’ that in English we call China, the anti-Qing movement of Sun Yat-sen was at first a Han ethnic-national movement against Manchu rule; upon the Qing empire’s collapse, however, it became clear to Sun and the rest of the movement that Han ethnonationalism could not hold the territory of the former Qing empire (1644–1912), nor even hold together the various Han peoples inhabiting mostly the territories that had made up the Ming empire (1368–1644). As soon as the anti-Qing revolution had succeeded in destroying Qing rule, it found that classical nationalism was a nonstarter in its own cultural and political context: it could not be the foundation of a Chinese state.

It is tempting, especially from a Chinese ethnocentric perspective, to speak of the former Ming territories as the core of the Qing empire, but even this is a mistake. As de Benoist says of the Holy Roman Empire, ‘L’empire romain germanique ne répond déjà plus à sa vocation quand on tente, en Italie comme en Allemagne, de le lier à un territoire privilégié.’ That is, the Germanic Roman empire no longer answered to its imperial vocation when it tried, as well in Italy as in Germany, to link it to a privileged territory. This idea, de Benoist invites us to note, ‘is still absent in the thought of Dante, for whom the emperor is neither Germanic nor Italic, but “Roman” in the spiritual sense, that is to say, a successor of Cæsar and Augustus’. De Benoist explains about the logic of empire,

L’empire au sens vrai ne peut se transformer sans déchoir en « grande nation », pour la simple raison que, selon le principe qui l’anime, aucune nation ne peut assumer et exercer une fonction supérieure si elle ne s’élève pas aussi au-dessus de ses allégeances et de ses intérêts particuliers. « L’empire, au sens vrai, conclut Evola, ne peut exister que s’il est animé par une ferveur spirituelle […] Si cela fait défaut, on n’aura jamais qu’une création forgée par la violence – l’impérialisme –, simple superstructure mécanique et sans âme ».

In other words, the empire cannot transform itself into a ‘great nation’ without collapsing because, in terms of the principle which animates it, no nation can assume and exercise a superior ruling function if it does not rise above its allegiances and its particular interests. ‘The empire in the true sense’, Evola concludes, ‘can only exist it animated by a spiritual fervor […] If this is lacking, one will only have a creation forged by violence – imperialism – a simple mechanical superstructure without a soul.’

The Qing empire was neither a Han régime nor a Manchu régime, but a unity above both. The most important official documents of the empire were produced in three languages: ‘the Qing language’ (Manchu), Chinese, and Mongolian. In the Forbidden City, the names of buildings were written out in both Manchu and Chinese, and sometimes Mongolian. Within the former Ming lands, Qing ruled in a ‘Chinese’ way, with substantially the same system of provincial governors and mandarins as the Ming empire it had succeeded; in Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, and Turkestan, with military governors and vassal rulers.

This is also why, though generally supportive of nationalists in the West in opposition to the common enemy of globalism, I sit lightly on the label for myself. Nation-states are not the only way, and in the case of China with its imperial history – remaining an empire even today, though defectively – I expect the nation-state model will never work.

Gunpowder and the End of the Aristocracy

Gunpowder for ever changed the social relations of Europe over the course of six centuries by gradually rendering irrelevant the traditional reciprocal obligation between knights and peasants, and the natural moral basis for the rule of the knightly aristocracy; with the First World War came the death knell of the warrior aristocracy. We cannot intelligibly return to the particular arrangements of the old system, but on the other hand no adæquate replacement has yet been found.

The process began earlier in China, during the early Song dynasty, when the replacement of the traditional aristocracy with an exam-selected bureaucracy happened to align with the loss of Tang dynasty horse-rearing lands and the replacement of cavalry tactics with massed crossbows and eventually gunpowder arms. The reduction of the warrior aristocracy’s political power was intended to avoid repeating the fall of the Tang dynasty by denying generals the use of local power bases, but it reoriented even the education system. The massive use of an examination system to populate the imperial civil service, replacing the traditional aristocratic recommendation system, oriented Confucian classical education toward success in examinations. For the last thousand years, therefore, to meet the needs of the imperial bureaucracy, Chinese classical education has increasingly stressed memorization and model answers over the dialogue seen in the Analects and the Mencius, despite some countervailing tendencies in the Qing dynasty’s (1644–1912) bannerman military aristocracy. In a process parallel to that experienced by Europe, then, one may see in China a sea change in social structure over the course of the last thousand years.

What kind of system is to replace, by translation for new material conditions, the system that upheld traditional ideals and cultivated virtue in the age before gunpowder?

Hong Kong Muwashshaḥ?

It would be interesting to see the Arabic muwashshaḥ strophic form used in the context of Hong Kong to write songs in classical Chinese with a kharja (‘exit’) in either colloquial Cantonese or English (or both).

The Old Dominion and Old China in Sympathy

Talking with a friend today, I recognized something consciously that had been only intuitive in feeling before: part of the appeal of Virginia to me, part of the reason I could identify with Virginia despite my much looser relation to America, was its familiarity to my Chinese blood. The aristocratic and localist agrarian culture of the Old Dominion bears a certain resemblance – even a ‘family resemblance’ – to the agrarian culture you can see in, say, a 1980 Hong Kong drama set in the countryside of Guangdong province.

Obvious differences between Anglo-Saxon and Chinese cultures notwithstanding, the culture of the Old Dominion is perhaps the most Chinese culture native to America. Common to rural Guangdong and the Old Dominion was a conservative power of local agrarian élites, and a respect for settled custom. Church vestries, dominated by plantation laymen, were socially powerful in colonial Virginia, and they wanted to keep it that way rather than having local bishops sent from England to interfere in local affairs. This would have been very familiar to a Chinese villager from Guangdong province. In rural Guangdong, villages had elders who led and advised villagers, but the local Confucian gentry dominated village politics. Rarely would anything change without the permission of the local landlord, and rarely would an actual official from the emperor show up. To have anything referred to the actual officials was a big deal, and villagers generally avoided such trouble even if the judgements of the landlord were not to their liking. Besides, the bribery that might be required for fair judgements from county magistrates was beyond the means of most common folk. Unsurprisingly, much about old Virginia was something my heart grasped, because of the place my own family had come from, the place where my family had lived for 700 years or more.

Needless to say, old China was a deeply flawed society, in need of reform and perhaps even social revolution in the early 20th century; in view of some of the injustices in this system’s last decadent period, it also is unsurprising that villagers during the Cultural Revolution rose up against long-resented landlords. Nevertheless, to an urban Hong Kong audience in the 1980s there could also be a measure of nostalgia for this old China in which everyone knew each other, and there was a known order. For all its flaws, it was also a deeply human order in which the drama of human struggle could be appreciated on the TV screens of Hongkongers 70 years later.

I believe that sympathetic appreciation of this old order, warts and all, is essential for the formation of America’s future, but that very thing is what America lacks today. The success in 1980s Hong Kong of a daily TV drama series told from the point of view of a peasant family, with sympathetic treatments of the landlord, the village gossip, and other characters, suggests the value of such literature even in a modern urban society. Dixie has had William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and others, but there seems to be a vacuum today. Virginia needs new prominent literary voices to show its human drama in a way that people today can understand and relate to, voices that love the South for what it is and sing out the dramas of the Virginian heart.

Chinese Academic Dress for a Christian Cleric

Cassock? Mortarboard? What is that?

Álvaro Semedo, a Portuguese Jesuit priest in China at the end of the Ming dynasty:

Nicolas Trigault, a French Jesuit priest in China around the same time:

Though a Protestant should know not to trust the Jesuits, in this case the Jesuits made a sensible choice, to adopt Chinese dress in China, specifically the dress of Chinese Confucian scholars. Two centuries later, Protestant missionary Hudson Taylor made a similar choice to adopt Chinese dress, much to the chagrin of his English missionary colleagues.

Even though the everyday clothes of ordinary Chinese are much more Westernized today, the everyday clericals worn by Christian priests and deacons ought to reflect the native meaning system in clothes, rather than shout FOREIGN. For this reason, something like the above, analogous to English cassock, gown, and college cap, is what we should come to expect in China of even priests that are come to serve from overseas.

Lawful and Prudent Treatment of Departed Saints in Chinese Culture

There is one law of God, because God is one, but in human society it takes multiple concrete forms. The morality of the same outward acts can vary between cultures, even though the inner law, the moral law of God, is unchanging as God himself. How Christian saints are treated in Chinese culture, then, should be calibrated for the existing Chinese symbol system. Evelyn S. Rawski describes part of this system in The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (University of California Press, 1998), 205–206:

Christian Jochim argues that ritualized obeisances are ‘acts both of humility and privilege’. By kneeling and kowtowing before Heaven and his imperial ancestors, the emperor partakes of their numinous power; by kneeling and kowtowing before the emperor, ministers, princes, and others participating in an audience ritual partake of the powers flowing through the emperor. The emperor’s obeisance to his mother carries a somewhat different symbolic message, one that reifies the hierarchical relationships within families that lie at the core of the Confucian order.

The symbolic significance of sitting to receive ritual homage was broadly understood in Chinese society. The same action confirms the submissiveness of the young bride to her new parents-in-law, the subordination of a concubine to her husband’s wife, of a maidservant to her mistress. By extension we find in Chinese society the symbolic vesting of authority in both a specific chair and in the pose itself. By at least Song times some of the legitimacy conferred by this symbolically charged act had been transferred to the chair itself. Chan Buddhist monasteries during the funeral of an abbot placed the deceased man’s portrait in the ‘dharma seat’ – the seat occupied by the abbot – until a new successor was installed, thus drawing on the same symbolic vocabulary found in discussions of the throne in the Taihedian.

The argument that Chinese ritual culture gave primacy to performance of the act rather than to a specific throne or chair can be supported by popular religion, where deities in Chinese temples are portrayed in a seated position, to receive the worship of the people. The tablets denoting Heaven and the imperial ancestors in the Temple of the Ancestors were also ‘seated’ on thrones during rituals. Deities in the popular religion are depicted in this seated pose to the present day. The popular woodblock prints known as zhima, which continue to be produced in the People’s Republic of China, show the deity in a seated frontal pose, ‘like a statue in a Chinese temple’: ‘This effect is no accident, since prints of this type (some authors have called this an ‘iconic’ print) were the focus of domestic religious ceremonials and received offerings, such as incense, from family members.’ As with deities, so with the emperor – or perhaps the statement should be reversed. When the new emperor sat on the throne and received the obeisances of the nobles and officials, he was performing a ritual action that not only echoed those of ordinary persons in the society but also replicated that of the gods in Chinese popular religion.

So the Chinese should not, I think, depict departed saints sitting in a frontal pose, because these saints must not be seated to receive homage. We are, after all, not servants of Mary and the other departed saints, but servants of the Most High. Rather than sitting, then, a departed saint could be depicted standing to praise God together with the living, since dead and living alike ascend to heaven to join the angels and archangels in worshipping the one holy God.

Necessarily an avoidance of depicting the dead as seated would call for changes in ritual depictions of dead parents, for instance, but some changes in standard practice are to be expected. A Christian who has gone to be with the Lord is no longer in a position of living authority on earth. The rites should be modified to exclude all ‘sitting’ of the dead, so that ritual homage in the full sense is done only to living authorities: the reigning emperor, a person’s parents, a bride’s new parents-in-law, a concubine’s mistress (her husband’s first wife), a maidservant’s mistress, and so on. It was customary to depict the dead both seated and facing the viewer, as if God had placed them as intermediate authorities between himself and the living; the truth of the gospel, however, suggests that we should depict them not only standing to praise God, but also facing upward toward the left or the right, wherever God may ritually be imagined to be.

In contrast, when my younger brother married, he and his bride knelt to serve tea to my parents, and my parents sat in chairs side by side to receive this act of homage; my parents then gave them advice and symbolic red packets of money. After order of seniority, I myself also sat to be served tea by my brother and his bride, though they stood rather than kneeling, and like my parents I also gave them words of advice. It was a touching moment for me, to receive thanks from my younger brother and his new wife, and to urge them in turn to do all things by the word of God and raise up godly children. A departed ancestor, however, is no longer in a position of living authority delegated by God, and therefore cannot rightly take a seated posture in relation to the living on earth. Therefore it is right to treat them differently when the Lord has called them to leave this earthly life and its authority, and to await the resurrection of the dead.

Su Shi’s ‘Riverside City’ Poem, to Share with the Non-Chinese

Some poems are so powerful that I cannot help showing people, even if they have almost no experience of poetry in the language in which the poems are written. Recently I was showing my American friend a Chinese poem in the ci 詞 lyric genre, written in 1075 to the tune ‘Riverside City’ 江城子 by the Song dynasty poet Su Shi 蘇軾 (art name Su Dongpo 蘇東坡):

1. 十年生死兩茫茫，
   不思量，自難忘。
   千里孤墳，無處話淒涼。
   縱使相逢應不識，
   塵滿面，鬢如霜。
2. 夜來幽夢忽還鄉，
   小軒窗，正梳妝。
   相顧無言，唯有淚千行。
   料得年年腸斷處，
   明月夜，短松岡。

The whole poem is what you hear at night after, in the daytime, having heard a shi 詩 genre poem by the Tang dynasty poet He Zhizhang 賀知章:

少小離家老大回，鄉音無改鬢毛衰，
兒童相見不相識，笑問客從何處來。

Both poems have the years away from home (十年, 少小離家), the greyed hair on the temples (鬢如霜, 鬢毛衰), the being a stranger to someone at home (縱使相逢應不識, 兒童相見不相識). If Su Shi in the Song dynasty poem was not intentionally alluding to the Tang dynasty poem, he might as well have been doing so. But if the Tang dynasty shi poem in the daytime was bittersweet, with the children in the speaker’s hometown being strangers to him, asking this foreigner where he was come from, then this Song dynasty ci poem is a very different, nocturnal poem.

Su Shi wrote his poem ten years after the death of his wife. After ten years, he says, life and death are vast, unmeasured, boundless, the distance between them oceanic. He may not dwell on it, to ponder and to reckon, to consider and to measure, yet the thing by nature is hard to forget: a thousand miles, a lone grave, and no place to speak of his bleakness. Even if they were to meet, they might not know each other. Dust fills his face; his temple hair is like frost.

The second stanza begins with a striking line that shifts the mood, and the poet and listener’s location: 夜來幽夢忽還鄉. It also is the favourite line of one of my father’s college friends. We can try to understand it by prosody and sound.

Let’s hear the line with a cæsura after the fourth syllable, as is usual in a Chinese line of seven syllables: 夜來幽夢 || 忽還鄉. Thus: night comes, dim dreams – sudden return village.

In Cantonese, this line sounds like ye loi yau mung || fat waan heung. The sound of the line’s first half is soft. Of the four syllables, three are open (no consonant after the vowel), and the fourth ends in a nasal consonant. All the consonants in those four syllables are sonorants: semivowels, liquids, or nasals. (If you want to hear the sound, even if you speak no Cantonese, it’s always possible to look up the Middle Chinese sound of every syllable on Wiktionary.) Because of the correspondence of sound and sense in this line, the netherworld dreams, or dim dreams (幽夢), have a sort of charming, romantic Southern Gothic feel to them, like a lazy, warm summer night breeze on an old South Carolina plantation, with Spanish moss hanging from the trees. That’s the kind of mood I get from 夜來幽夢, just on the edge of spooky. Now you get to the last three syllables, 忽還鄉. The first syllable there, 忽 (‘sudden’), sounds like huət̚ in Middle Chinese: first a fricative, then a reduced-sounding vowel followed by a stop! like a strong wind that suddenly stops. ‘In the night were dim dreams, and suddenly I was returned home.’ Through the texture created by the sounds in this line, the audience is suddenly transported with the author.

He shows us a little high window, and right there is combing and adorning. His and his wife’s care for each other has no words, only tears’ thousand tracks. One can guess every year the place where his guts snap: a night with a bright moon, a mound with short pines.

Our Future Belongs to the Lord

This 1978 Cantopop song, which I recently learned, has sentiments of James and Ecclesiastes, but in a happy light:

無論有幾多變遷，何必諸多掛牽？
過了今天，再有一天，仲有幾個十年。
願望係做個預算，夢幻係自我去編，
無謂去搵個道理，把你欺騙。

命裡係注定從前，夢境係一片胡言，
唯有我永遠面對目前。
明日話今天，昨天亦提到
想到舊年 更多挑戰。

迎面有幾多變遷，誰知道邊一個先？
這裡高山，那裡滄海，在那天變良田？
實在係話變就變，預伏在樂趣前面，
前面有千變萬化，不會睇見。

(Approximate English translation on Lyrics Translate.)

Why Secondary Burial? Tradition, to Stand Against Globalism

A master of disposal of skeletal remains demonstrates the meticulous sequence for placing the remains in the ‘golden pagoda’ (urn). Photo by 陳亮華, for Apple Daily.

Some people may ask, Why? I ask, Why not? I don’t even care why we deep-southern Chinese originally began to bury the dead and collect their bones seven years later for secondary burial 執骨: if it’s lawful and not burdensome, it should be done, because it’s been done for more than 2000 years, before the region was even Chinese. If we Christians need to, we can invent new Christian reasons for maintaining or reviving the practice. My instinct is just that we have to do this kind of thing to stand against globalist forces bent on destroying our culture.

Ancestral Religion v. Marketplace of Ideas

On the one hand, some people wanting a religion to practise (or else just affiliate with) go with what their ancestors have done; on the other hand, some go with what appeals to them, with no regard for historical connexion. Many Christians today are likely to think the latter is better, but I disagree. It’s natural to start with the deity worshipped by your ancestors and try to understand that thoroughly first. I have less respect for people who judge all religions on an æqual footing, trying to choose as if religious belief is a ‘marketplace of ideas’. After all, the instinct that your ancestors were probably right about something in religion is a pious one. It’s just that, when the word of God himself comes to you, you must kowtow, because he is the God who made and sustains this whole world, not a god of some but the one God.

This is true even of someone from an Islamic or Hindu or Sikh background: rather than treating all religions as æqual and starting from nowhere, he must start from somewhere, and humanly that somewhere is whatever religious tradition his family and his nation already have. When the ray of God’s word pierces into the darkness, then either he will love the light and discard what’s wrong in his religious tradition, or he will hate the light and set himself against the gospel, to his own destruction. But a person purporting to judge religions out of nowhere, even if he does outwardly become a Christian, will have much difficulty in the Christian life because of his impiety toward his parents and his forefathers. Indeed, such a convert may make shipwreck of his faith and show himself to be reprobate and destined for hellfire. But if God has chosen him to be saved, the word of God is enough, and encouraging him to pose in a false neutrality will tend toward impiety rather than genuine faith in Jesus Christ.

Chinese Canopy at the Lord’s Table

A Chinese Protestant æsthetic has a lot of opportunity for expressive decoration that promotes biblical reflection on the things done in church.

I’m imagining a Chinese ciborium over the Lord’s Table, at which each of the four posts is a tree, and the column’s bracketing is the tree’s branches, and the leaves are (as St John says) for the healing of the nations. On each tree trunk is a carved dragon-seraph in relief, outlined by gold or mother-of-pearl inlay, with the face of a man, a lion, an ox, or an eagle (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John). The canopy’s pinnacle is in the form of a pearl, the pearl of great price that is the gospel. The altar rail has opportunities for motifs as well: lingzhi for immortality, pomegranates for the blood of abundant martyrs and the resurrection.

Now you just need infinite money to also commission gorgeous pieces of the finest Chinese brocade and embroidery for richly symbolic altar frontals.

Chinese Brocades for Copes?

The cope is a churchly cape of splendour, generally having a border (called an orphrey) along the straight edge. It is often worn on state occasions, and in the Church of England required by the Canons of 1604 for the ministers in cathedral churches at Holy Communion.

Elizabeth II at St Paul’s Cathedral with two ministers wearing copes.

Usually, a cope has an ornamental hood on the back, which may be decorated with a symbolic picture.

Commonwealth Day Service, Westminster Abbey, 2020.

In the Anglican tradition, however, we have ample warrant for variation. As the 39 Articles say, ‘It is not necessary that Traditions and Ceremonies be in all places one, or utterly like; for at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men’s manners, so that nothing be ordained against God’s Word.’ Still less is it necessary or even desirable that ornaments in Asia follow those of England in every particular; rather, to illustrate the principle of national independence in churchly communion, it is desirable that ornaments be somewhat different but show a family resemblance. Imagine if copes in China, offering the best of local crafts in churchly ornaments, used Chinese brocades.

Nanjing yun (cloud) brocade used in a Qing dynasty costume.

Certainly elaborate brocades have been used in religious settings in Chinese culture, as in this Buddhist cape, whose central rectangular panel depicts a qilin while, outwith the panel, four dragons fly up from the water below:

Buddhist monk’s cape, Qing dynasty.

With the rich Chinese artistic tradition of symbolic animals, clouds, flames, waves, and plants, it would not be difficult to produce brocaded copes with highly textured imagery that aptly expressed the spirit of the occasion intended. The rectangular panel above, in this case depicting a qilin, could easily be adapted into a cope’s hood and show any number of embroidered devices: a lamb, a lion, a lotus, or even several sinograms combined in a round seal (e.g., 聖民承國, ‘the holy people take the kingdom’, referring to Daniel 7.18). When the gospel takes hold of the Chinese empire, it may have centuries to drive development in the arts, and copes worn in church are no exception.

Ci Lyric as Anthem After the Third Collect

Just as the Song of Songs is in the biblical canon, there is a place in the worship of God for the sensuousness of the teahouse, a woman singing a ci 詞 lyric as she plays the pipa. This too, after all, is part of the piety of the Church: the desire for the beloved, the Lord’s Anointed.

According to the ci genre, the musical vehicle would be existing Chinese tunes suitable for songs about love. In the first stanza of a two-stanza ci, the singer could render a piece of the Song of Songs in verse; in the second stanza, her lyric could unravel that piece of silk according to what the New Testament has shown us about Christ.