In European history, the "Age of Enlightenment" conventionally refers to the hundred years of the early modern period from the Glorious Revolution in England in 1689 to the French Revolution in 1789. Yet this Age of Enlightenment -- during which an unprecedented and unrepeated upheaval in thought, letters, and worldview cast off the "religious frame" that had dominated European history -- was itself preceded by a further hundred-year prehistory. Even in this "hundred-year prehistory," unprecedented intellectual and literary convulsions occurred, more radical than those of the preceding Renaissance. If the tenth to fourteenth centuries constitute the proper medieval period, then the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the age of the Renaissance, belong to the late medieval period. Hence, although letters and the arts flourished in the Renaissance, this flowering occurred entirely within a "religious frame" that still adhered to the idea of God and to Christianity. The "hundred-year prehistory," however, was an age in which new philosophers emerged who -- although they did not abandon the idea of God -- distorted it along deistic lines and freed it from Catholic and Protestant scriptural exegesis, thereby provoking serious intellectual conflict and friction with existing Christianity over the very framework of the worldview.
Some scholars simply call this age the "Renaissance," but recently certain historians specializing in cultural and intellectual history have adopted the architectural and artistic concept of the "Baroque" to designate this "hundred-year prehistory" as the "Baroque Age." The present author likewise adopts this periodization and refers to the aforementioned "hundred-year prehistory" as the "Baroque Age."
There is room for disagreement, however, as to precisely when the Baroque Age begins. Historians who periodize European history solely by political epoch tend to regard 1517, the year Luther's Reformation began, as the starting point of the Baroque Age. The present author, however, considers that the Reformation and Protestantism themselves remained confined within the Christian religious frame of the medieval and Renaissance periods. I therefore take the starting point of the Baroque Age to be 1579, the year George Buchanan's *De Jure Regni apud Scotos* (The Right of the Kingdom among the Scots) was published -- a work that repudiated the theory of the divine right of kings, a doctrine shared by Catholics and Protestants alike, and instead advanced the theory of the popular grant of royal authority (王權民授論) and the right to depose tyrants. On this reckoning, the "Baroque Age" spans roughly a hundred years from 1579 to 1688, and the "Age of Enlightenment" spans exactly a hundred years from 1689 to 1789. Together, the Baroque Age and the Age of Enlightenment encompass a span of some two hundred years.
The repeated intellectual and political upheavals and collisions of these two ages all arose as the existing "Christian religious frame" was distorted or shattered under the impact of Confucian philosophy and Chinese culture. Over these two hundred-odd years, cultural and artistic currents in Europe and England underwent radical change, and Enlightenment philosophy arose as modern philosophy. This book, *"Confucius Worship" and the Moralists in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England and Scotland*, examines the cultural and artistic currents and the Enlightenment philosophy of Baroque- and Enlightenment-era England. In terms of thinkers, it analyzes fifteen English thinkers -- from George Buchanan through Francis Bacon, John Milton, John Webb, Richard Cumberland, William Temple, Isaac Vossius, Nathanael Vincent, John Locke, Shaftesbury, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Matthew Tindal, David Hume, and Adam Smith -- from the standpoint of the influence exerted upon them by Confucian philosophy. These fifteen thinkers, Whig and Tory alike, were figures who directly or indirectly shaped the real politics of Baroque- and Enlightenment-era England.
Prior to this book, *"Confucius Worship" and the Moralists in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England and Scotland*, the present author published *The Confucian Philosophy and the Origins of the Western Enlightenment*, which traced and elucidated in detail -- and then set out in general terms -- the political, moral, and economic philosophy of Confucius and Mencius; the economic theories of Ye Shi, Qiu Jun, Huang Zongxi, and others; the reformist Confucianism of the gentry-merchant class (紳商, the Chinese bourgeoisie) of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries; the political and economic history of China and the Far Eastern empires from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries; the westward transmission (西遷) of Confucian civilization and Confucian philosophy; and the birth and origins of the Western Enlightenment as a result of the cultural and intellectual impact of Confucian civilization and Confucian philosophy. In the course of this investigation, the author established the historical stage of development of Song-dynasty China as the "universal-historical beginning of modernity," that is, the "onset of the early modern age," and identified this universal-historical modernity as "Confucian modernity." *The Confucian Philosophy and the Origins of the Western Enlightenment* thus repeatedly reduced the political and economic development of the Far East to the political and economic philosophy of Confucius and Mencius and analyzed it accordingly; it then introduced the earliest reports on China transmitted to the West from the mid-sixteenth century onward, beginning with the report of an anonymous Portuguese (1555), the reports of Fernao Mendes Pinto (1556) and his *Peregrinacao* (1614), Galeote Pereira's report on China (1564), Gaspar da Cruz's *Tratado das coisas da China* (1569-1570), Martin de Rada's official report on China (1575), Bernardino de Escalante's *Discurso de la navegacion* (1577), Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza's *Historia... del gran Reino de la China* (1585), and Alessandro Valignano and Duarte de Sande's *De Missione Legatorum Iaponensium ad Romanam Curiam* (1590). It further analyzed the earliest seeds of so-called "Baroque political thought," born under the influence of Confucian civilization as it was first transmitted to Europe, focusing on the works of Christian theologians such as George Buchanan's radical theory of the popular grant of royal authority and the right to depose tyrants (1579), Robert Bellarmine's theory of natural liberty and equality and his eclectic theory of the popular grant of royal authority (1581-1593), and Francisco Suarez's theory of the popular grant of royal authority and the right to depose heretical monarchs (1612, 1613). In the seventeenth century, moreover, there appeared the China travelogues and accounts of Purchas (1613), Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault (1615), Alvaro Semedo (1643), Martino Martini (1659), Athanasius Kircher (1667), Johan Nieuhof (1665), Domingo Fernandez Navarrete (1676), Gabriel de Magalhaes (1688), Louis Le Comte (1696), and Jean-Baptiste Du Halde (1735); and between 1662 and 1687, Prospero Intorcetta, Christian Herdtrich, Francois de Rougemont, and Philippe Couplet produced Latin translations of the *Analects*, the *Great Learning*, and the *Doctrine of the Mean* from among the Confucian classics, published as *Sapientia Sinica* (1662), *Sinarum Scientia Politico-Moralis* (1667), and *Confucius Sinarum Philosophus* (1687); and in 1711 Francois Noel published in full a Latin translation combining these three works with the *Mencius*, the *Classic of Filial Piety*, and the *Xiaoxue*, under the title *Sinensis Imperii Libri Classici Sex*. Alongside this, from the latter half of the seventeenth century into the early eighteenth century, the "forerunners of the Enlightenment" emerged who gave birth to the Western Enlightenment. This early Enlightenment, which either quietly venerated or covertly followed Confucius and Confucian civilization, was analyzed and summarized in general terms through the moral and political philosophy of twelve figures: Francis Bacon, La Mothe Le Vayer, Isaac Vossius, John Webb, Baruch Spinoza, Richard Cumberland, William Temple, Nathanael Vincent, Samuel von Pufendorf, Pierre Bayle, John Locke, and Gottfried Leibniz.
Unlike these seventeenth-century philosophers, eighteenth-century European philosophers vied openly to invoke the name of Confucius, proudly flaunting it as proof of their Enlightenment credentials. The only difference in their citation and use of Confucius lay between those who were frank and forthright and those who timidly concealed themselves or, eager to display their own originality, hid the fact that they had learned from Confucian philosophy. In the eighteenth century, nearly all philosophers -- John Webb, William Temple, Nathanael Vincent, Pierre Bayle, John Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Quesnay, d'Argenson, Diderot, and others -- openly and unabashedly invoked and extolled "Confucius." By contrast, philosophers such as Milton in the latter half of the seventeenth century, followed by Shaftesbury and Adam Smith, either feared persecution by the religious establishment or wished to pass off Confucius's ideas as their own original thought, and so plagiarized Confucian philosophy while striving to conceal the fact and erase its traces. Meanwhile, Europe's so-called "defenders of orthodoxy" (衛正斥邪派) -- Fenelon, Malebranche, Baxter, Wotton, Berkeley, Defoe, Montesquieu, and others -- who clung to a Christianity-first Eurocentrism, were pushed to the margins of British intellectual life, where they disparaged Confucian philosophy and Chinese civilization, openly or covertly.
This book offers a close analysis of England's "chinoiserie" -- that is, its Chinese-style literature, crafts, and art -- and of the thought of England's Enlightenment moralists who came under the influence of Confucian philosophy. The philosophers and men of letters who form the intensive and specific objects of analysis are far more numerous than the fifteen listed above, numbering twenty-seven in all: Buchanan, Bacon, Milton, Webb, Temple, Vossius, Addison, Pope, Chambers, Walpole, Burzell, Samuel Johnson, Goldsmith, Percy, Vincent, Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Tindal, Trenchard, Gordon, Hume, and Smith, together with clergymen of the "defenders of orthodoxy" such as Baxter, Wotton, and Berkeley, and the former slave trader turned third-rate novelist Daniel Defoe.
As the first work to treat the rise and flourishing of the Enlightenment country by country, this book, *"Confucius Worship" and the Moralists in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England and Scotland*, analyzes and clarifies precisely by what occasion, and through what channels, the Enlightenment arose and developed in England. Through a close examination of the particular circumstances of individual Enlightenment philosophers and their texts, it subjects the writings of the great masters of the English Enlightenment -- Buchanan, Bacon, Milton, Cumberland, Temple, Locke, Shaftesbury, Hume, and Adam Smith -- to detailed scrutiny, and demonstrates, in palpable and unmistakable terms, that their thought openly or covertly imitated or remade Confucian philosophy and China's political institutions.
This book thus demonstrates that the theory of natural liberty and equality, the theory of the right to depose tyrants, and the theory of revolution and the right of resistance associated with Buchanan, Milton, and Locke -- ideas commonly mistaken or misunderstood as originally Western, derived from Greece and Christianity -- together with Hume's and Adam Smith's free-market theory, and the secular, post-religious theory of natural moral sentiment found in Shaftesbury, Hume, and Smith, are all, without exception, of "Far Eastern manufacture." As is well known, the Enlightenment thought of the English moralists played a more decisive role in creating "modern Europe" than did French or German philosophy.
The Puritan Revolution and the Glorious Revolution, which erupted in seventeenth-century England, were great transformations first rehearsed in Europe, grounded in the Baroque and Enlightenment thought and new political projects that arose through the westward transmission of Confucian philosophy and Confucian civilization. John Milton was the representative thinker of the Puritan Revolution, and John Locke the representative thinker of the Glorious Revolution. Through these two revolutions -- not even called "revolutions" at the time -- England came to outpace the other nations of Europe politically by a full century. The American Revolution and the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century, and the various civic revolutions across nineteenth-century Europe, were all revolutions that remade or ideologically elevated those two English revolutions. It is therefore just as important for understanding the Confucianization and modernization of the Western nations generally -- not England alone -- to analyze the influence of Confucian and Mencian philosophy on two hundred years of modern English moral philosophy and political thought, and the Enlightenment philosophy and political thought of the English moralists that arose from it.
Of course, the Enlightenment thought that arose in France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland is likewise of great importance -- not only at the level of each individual nation, but also at the level of the closely interconnected nations of Europe as a whole. This subject will be treated country by country in the forthcoming volumes *Confucius Fever and Enlightenment Philosophy in Modern France* and *The Confucian Enlightenment in Modern Germany and Switzerland*. Thus the overall discussion of the early and high phases of the Western Enlightenment, together with its country-by-country treatment, will be completed across five works: the earlier *The Confucian Philosophy and the Origins of the Western Enlightenment* (Vols. I-II), the present book *"Confucius Worship" and the Moralists in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England and Scotland*, and the forthcoming *Confucius Fever and Enlightenment Philosophy in Modern France*, *The Confucian Enlightenment in Modern Germany and Switzerland*, and *Confucius and the Founding of America*. The purely theoretical task of drawing together the concrete findings accumulated across this pentalogy to critique the Marx-Weber narrative of modernization centered on factory production and Protestantism, and to construct a new theory of modernization centered on network production and Confucian civilization, will be carried out separately in a forthcoming theoretical work titled *The Confucian Modernization of the West and the Modern Reconstitution of the Far Eastern Empires*.
Finally, it should be stated in advance that the portions of this book dealing with eight seventeenth-century philosophers -- Buchanan, Bacon, Webb, Cumberland, Temple, Vossius, Vincent, and Locke -- consist of material summarized, reorganized, and supplemented from the discussion and analysis presented in *The Confucian Philosophy and the Origins of the Western Enlightenment* (Vol. II). Drawing on this earlier discussion of these philosophers was necessary for reasons of narrative structure, in order to weave the two hundred years of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English philosophy into a single "completed whole," and so that readers might grasp the entire coherent picture of modern English philosophy from this book alone.
The author sincerely hopes that, through this series of works, Far Eastern intellectuals will come to a deep understanding of the centuries-long civilizational patchwork -- the interweaving and grafting between Far Eastern and Far Western civilization -- so that they may properly appreciate the world-historical power of Confucian philosophy and fully overcome their sense of inferiority regarding Confucian civilization. It is the author's earnest wish that scholars, writers, and statesmen of the Far East may recover their pride in Far Eastern civilization and pursue scholarship and statesmanship that soar toward the future.
January 2020 Written by Jungnim (竹林).