Is Confucianism a Religion?
February 20, 2012 – 8:34 amPeter Berger in The American Interest (February 15, 2012) asks: ‘Is Confucianism a Religion?’ It’s an old question and Berger himself goes through some of the issues involved – though he does not much consider the many ways that ‘Confucianism’ (ru jia) changed over time, some of which seemed to be much more ‘religious’ than others. His focus is on what we in the West would consider ‘classic’ Confucianism as we interpret it as having existed in the pre-Qin era (Spring-and-Autumn & Warring States). Nor does he properly define what he means by a religion, seeming to take it for granted that any supernatural element is ipso facto a religious element. I regard that as hardly satisfactory, since it would make Neo-Platonism – or even Platonism – a religious movement rather than a philosophical one; and I think that’s certainly debatable.
In any case, having made the obvious (and obviously true) points that Confucianism appears in large part to be a secular system:
Its teachings are almost exclusively concerned with behavior in the empirical world: ren —“altruism or “human-mindedness”; li —ritual and etiquette; xiao —“filial piety”. These are moral principles that are applied to the so-called “five bonds” —between ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife; older and younger brother; friend and friend.
And that:
It is quite clear that these virtues (including the behaviors they promoted, as in ritual and etiquette) could be divorced from any specific religious beliefs.
And yet he concludes that it is a religion on the basis that
there is one classical and rather central Confucian belief that, I think, is unambiguously religious—that of tian, usually translated as “heaven”. It is not theistic, although gods are associated with it. Rather, it is a cosmic order, supernatural in that it transcends the empirical world, over which it presides and with which it interacts. It thus serves as the necessary, ipso facto religious foundation for all the secular virtues propagated by Confucian teachings.
And since the moral order that Confucianism promotes is justified by appeal to this supernatural entity tian, it follows that the ideology itself is a religious system.
It is certainly true that tian (?) plays a justificatory role in Confucianism, but only incidentally, and far from essentially. In fact, as far as I can tell, the concept is used almost always metaphorically in early Confucian texts. Thus it may be said that a ruler was entitled to rule only so long as he possessed the ‘mandate of Heaven’ (??, tianmìng), and this was a fairly standard opinion of the time, but the Confucianists do not depend on Heaven to make things turn out the way they ought: they seem always to have other justifications than appealing to the will of Heaven. In the case of the mandate of Heaven, for example, the Mencian version of Confucianism explained that a king could be a king only so long as he behaved as a king. If he failed to behave as a king – i.e. failed to follow the rules and rites and to have the appropriate ren as indicated by the sages of old – then he could not be called a king. The ‘rectification of names’ would name him as the criminal that he was, which would allow his oppressed subjects – who are accordingly not his subjects to rid themselves of this burden. Thus King Hsuan of Ch’i asked of Mencius (1B8):
“Is it permissible for a vassal to murder his lord?”
Mencius replied, “One who robs rén you call a ‘robber;’ one who wrecks yì you call a ‘wrecker;’ and one who robs and wrecks you call an ‘outlaw.’ I have heard that [Wu] punished the outlaw Zhou – I have not heard that he murdered his lord.
But even if tian was, in fact, required to make the moral system of Confucianism work, that would not make Confucianism a religious system. To grasp this point we simply need to compare this with John Locke’s theory of rights and political legitimacy. Locke derives our claim to rights from his conception of Natural Law, which is really identical to Aquinas’s idea of Natural Law: it is a prescription of the way we ought to act, which reflects God’s authority over us, and is something that we can discover for ourselves just because we are human and rational. In these respects then, Locke’s rights’ are much more essentially tied to God than Confucius’s virtues are attached to tian, and nobody thinks to call Locke’s philosophy a religion.