Synthesizing East and West

In the fall of 1940, an unexpected series of events led to the creation of a landmark publication in Chinese Christian history: a new and highly unconventional classical Chinese version of the Psalms and New Testament. The text resulted from a remarkable partnership between China’s President Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong Mei-ling, who were Christians in Protestant traditions, and legal scholar and legislator John C. H. Wu (Wu Jingxiong), who only three years earlier had entered the Catholic Church. Wu had begun to combine his love of classical Chinese poetry and his love of the Christian scriptures to recast some of the Psalms as Chinese poems in ancient styles, including those of the famed Tang dynasty. In 1938 Wu shared some of these with Mei-ling’s sister, Soong Ai‐ling.¹ She shared them with Chiang and Mei-ling, who in turn in 1940 asked Wu to translate the whole Book of Psalms and the New Testament into literary Chinese, saying that Chiang had wanted such a version for years, but had not until then found someone suitable for the job.² The resulting version has been prized for its beauty by Chinese Christians, including Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox.³ Throughout the text, Wu creatively incorporates the language and concepts borrowed from the Chinese classics, including philosophical concepts, poetic styles, four-character phrases (chengyu), and more, and by using these in new ways, creates a dialogue with the classics and even expands the meanings of some terms.⁴ For readers with the necessary language skills or strong interest, I recommend the study of Wu’s version.⁵

Here, however, I will not discuss Wu’s Bible translation itself, but rather a preliminary question, that of why Wu was the most suitable person for the work of integrating the vast and disparate fields of Chinese humanism on the one hand, and Christian spirituality on the other, into a seamless whole, producing a work he called, with utmost devotion and affection, “a Chinese tunic for Christ.” Fortunately for us English speakers, he used this same ability to synthesize to write exploratory essays in English, expounding on the compelling points of harmony he found between the wisdom of the Chinese sages, including Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Buddha, and others, and the Christian saints, especially those who were mystically inclined, like St. Teresa of Ávila, St. John of the Cross, and his favorite of all, St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Here I will briefly highlight Wu’s integration of Chinese culture and Christian thought in his essays, compiled and published as Chinese Humanism and Christian Spirituality in 1965 and republished in 2017,⁶ which continue to appeal to readers today, and have contributed to the formation of an authentically Chinese Christianity, as part of an essential missionary endeavor the Catholic Church calls “inculturation.”⁷

The Essays: Synthesizing Chinese Culture and Christianity

From a young age Wu immersed himself in the humanities, learning the Chinese classics under the old system during the final years of the Qing dynasty, and later studied and developed a love for Western literature. He had a special love of poetry.⁸ In the 1930s he and other writers, including the famous Lin Yutang, founded T’ien Hsia Monthly, an English-language journal that featured writing on elements of Chinese and Western culture. Wu contributed somewhat playful titles like “Shakespeare as a Taoist.” His lifelong intellectual pursuit, to which I will return again below, was the attempt to integrate the East and the West, into what he called a “living synthesis” between opposites.

Wu’s approach to Chinese humanism and Christian spirituality is characterized by several major themes, which he elucidates with numerous examples.

First, he affirms the great value of China’s humanistic tradition, crediting the Chinese sages with serving as the teachers who prepared him to recognize Christ as the true light of divine revelation:

To me at least, [Laozi and Confucius] were pedagogues to lead me to Christ; they served as lamps shining in a dark place, until the day dawned and the morning star arose in my heart.⁹

Similarly, he writes elsewhere,

Whenever I think of Confucius and Mencius, Buddha and [Laozi], I am inclined to call them—as St. Justin Martyr called Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—Pedagogues to lead men to Christ.¹⁰

At the same time, he draws a clear distinction between their wisdom and the light of divine revelation in Christ; as he wrote of Christianity and Taoism:

It must be noted that in substance Christianity and Taoism belong to different levels. For Taoism is natural wisdom, while Christianity is supernatural wisdom. But God being the Author of both Nature and Supernature, it stands to reason that natural wisdom may serve as a mirror of supernatural wisdom.¹¹

Believing that the wisdom of the sages had God as their ultimate origin, Wu also believed that their teachings could, and in fact must, be “baptized,” as the medieval Christians like St. Thomas Aquinas and others had done with Greek and Roman philosophy,¹² or transformed like water into wine, as Jesus did with the human efforts of the servants at the wedding of Cana (John 2). For example, Wu writes of the key Confucian idea of the six cardinal relationships among people:

For the purposes of my present discourse, the six waterpots stand for the six cardinal relations of men, as the Chinese ethical tradition has presented them. Confucius and other sages of old China have filled them almost to the brim with the water of natural wisdom, waiting only for us to do the rest and for Christ to turn it into wine.¹³

Second, Wu saw great affinities between Chinese and Christian mystics, writing, “It seems that all mystics, whether Christian or pagan, Western or Eastern, talk the same language and sing the same tune. For one thing, they prefer the passive way to the active.”¹⁴ In one of his favorite comparisons, for example, Wu saw such a strong correspondence between the humility of St. Thérèse of Lisieux in her writing about the “Little Way,” her spiritual practice of choosing the lowliest path in imitation of Christ, that his first reaction was, “How Chinese she is!”¹⁵ He emphasizes this point in his essay on St. Thérèse and Lao Tzu,

To me as a Chinese, the most intriguing thing about Thérèse’s little way of spiritual childhood is that it is reminiscent, on the one hand, of the Confucian teaching of filial piety, and, on the other, of the Taoistic insight concerning the mystical significance of the little and the low, of the supple and the docile, of the feminine and the new-born.¹⁶

Wu continues in this vein throughout many of his essays, finding similar correspondences, between, for example, Shakespeare and both Taoism, and Zen. He wrote that “The moral system of Confucius is as practical and matter-of-fact as the Rule of St. Benedict.”¹⁷ And perhaps even more remarkably, he likened St. Paul and the ancient Chinese:

St. Paul was made joyful in his contemplation of God, but he was at the same time as sober as any Confucian gentleman in his dealings with men, and as unattached as any Taoist hermit or Buddhist bonze to human riches and glories. Only grace can fulfill the aspirations of nature.¹⁸

Finally, Wu’s writing is marked by a constant drive to achieve what he called a “living synthesis” between East and West. After his initial conversion and baptism by Methodist missionaries while in his late teens, Wu fell away from Christianity, and after achieving remarkable success in law at a young age, became a “freethinker” who admired Christ as a heroic figure but no longer cared whether or not he was divine. However, after falling into a dissolute lifestyle and feeling great misery in his soul, he experienced a dramatic reconversion to Christ, with tearful repentance, in 1937. Soon afterwards he became a Catholic, influenced by a Catholic family the classic book Story of a Soul by St. Thérèse of Lisieux, a French Carmelite nun whose spirit Wu felt was very close to that of the Chinese, especially Laozi.¹⁹ Through her words, St. Thérèse, with her desire to love Jesus by making herself as humble as a little flower existing only to make Jesus happy, completely captivated Wu, and won him over to the Catholic Church. Not only did she embody, in his eyes, the best of all of the Chinese sages, but she demonstrated with the great virtue of sincerity that Wu so deeply admired in Confucius, the “living synthesis” between opposites that had driven all his intellectual effort. In his words,

[In St. Thérèse] I found the living synthesis between all pairs of opposites, such as humility and audacity, freedom and discipline, joys and sorrows, duty and love, strength and tenderness, grace and nature, folly and wisdom, wealth and poverty, corporateness and individuality. She seemed to me to combine the heart of the Buddha, the virtues of Confucius, and the philosophic detachment of Lao Tse. Here was a young Sister who died at twenty-four, and had attained such perfection. What was the secret? How could she realize her individuality so fully if she were not an integral member of the Mystical Body of Christ?

It was through reading this book that I decided to become a Catholic. Grace had touched my heart.

Wu continued to write about the “living synthesis” between opposites in the years after his return to Christianity, with a focus on synthesizing the different approaches to the spiritual life traditionally found in the East and the West. This was the topic of an essay called “Christianity, the Only Synthesis Really Possible Between East and West,” in which he wrote:

There is nothing that the human mind has discovered or can discover which is not already in the Fountain of Wisdom in an eminent way. So far the East is more at home in the inexpressible, while the West is more at home in the expressible. But both the inexpressible and the expressible belong to the same Fountain, and the Holy Ghost alone can help us attain a living synthesis, because He alone knows the Mind and the Heart of the Father and the Son.²⁰

In a sense, Wu’s idea of a living synthesis, his discovery that the East and West contained the complementary but opposite elements that all originate in God, expresses what St. Paul writes about Jesus in Colossians 1:19-21:

For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

Wu went on to say that only when the East and West are united in Christ, will they love each other, and their union give birth to the “new man.”²¹

Joy and Interior Harmony

One missionary scholar and expert on Wu’s work, Fr. Matthias Christian, SVD (1941-2020),²² often said, “John Wu is a man of the future.” In conclusion, perhaps Wu’s important message for Christians (and perhaps former Christians, or “nones”) in the West, is that we need to recover to the experience of joy that follows from interior harmony, as was known by Christian mystics. Sixty years ago, he saw the dangers of “the material civilization and technical habits of the modern times.” In an essay with the bold title, “Christianity, the Only Synthesis Really Possible Between East and West,” he concluded,

In order to convert the East, we must know how to “baptize” the Eastern culture and philosophy of life. But since the most representative Eastern sages are all mystically inclined, we shall not be able to “baptize” them unless we first delve into a much neglected part of our Christian heritage, the inexhaustible mine of Christian mysticism. To lead the East to Christ, we have to plunge ourselves into “the cloud of unknowing;” we must pray to the Holy Ghost to set our souls free from bondage to the material civilization and technical habits of the modern times.²³

In another essay Wu connected the joy that comes from this freedom from bondage to material civilization, here called “interior harmony,” with effectiveness in spreading the gospel:

It is only when we appreciate and radiate from ourselves the joy embodied in the Christian Gospel that we can effectively work as missionaries. Too many Christians fail to reflect this Divine joy…Were [the Chinese sages] far wrong in identifying joy with music? I think not, because music is the art of harmony par excellence. The sages knew that joy follows from interior harmony. They knew, also, that interior harmony means development of the human personality.²⁴

Some of Wu’s most engaging traits are his deep faith, deep humanity, and deep joy. His sense of humor at times reminds one of a child frolicking in the summer sun, unconcerned with looking like a fool. His knowledge of Chinese classical literature seems as deep as the knowledge of Western literature displayed by someone like C.S. Lewis, and Wu was quite well-read in Western literature as well. Like the best writers, he was deeply grounded in human experience. His love of language and his total commitment to Christ make him an attractive companion for those who want to learn more about China’s classics and how they, also being marked by the search for wisdom that originates in God, can deepen and broaden one’s faith and effectiveness as ambassadors for Christ.

1. Soong Ai‐ling (Song Ailing) 宋藹齡, also known as Madame H. H. Kung, was the wife of H. H. Kung, Chinese minister of finance from 1933 to 1944, and a sister-in-law of presidents Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek. See New York Times, “Mrs. H. H. Kung, 85, Dies; Sister‐in‐Law of Chiang,” October 21, 1973, accessed June 26, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/1973/10/21/archives/mrs-h-h-kung-85-dies-sisterinlaw-of-chiang.html.
2. John C. H. Wu, Beyond East and West (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1951; second edition published by University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 290-91.
3. The text of Wu’s versions, both Psalms and New Testament, is available at Jesus Taiwan: http://jesus.tw (accessed June 26, 2024). A print version of the Psalms is available in Taiwan: Wu Jingxiong, yi, Shengyong Yiyi Xinban (吳經熊 譯, 聖詠譯義 新版) [Wu Jingxiong, translator, a paraphrase of the Psalms, new edition] (Taipei: Commercial Press, 2011). https://www.cptw.com.tw/book/02000037. Wu’s New Testament is not currently in print.
4. See John A. Lindblom, “A ‘Chinese Tunic for Christ’: John C.H. Wu’s Incorporation of the Chinese Classics in Translating the Psalms and New Testament,” PhD dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2021; and Hong Xiaochun, “The Bible between Literary Traditions: John C. H. Wu’s Chinese Translation of the Psalms,” Religions 13 (2022): 937.
5. Those interested in other commentaries on Wu’s version can see Lloyd Haft, “Perspectives on John C. H. Wu’s Translation of the New Testament,” in Reading Christian Scriptures in China, ed. Chloë Starr, (New York: T&T Clark, 2008); Francis K. H. So, “Wu Ching-Hsiung’s Chinese Translation of Images of the Most High in the Psalms,” in Bible in Modern China: The Literary and Intellectual Impact, ed. Irene Eber, Sze-kar Wan, and Knut Walf (Sankt Agustin; Nettetal: Institut Monumenta Serica, 1999); and Hong Xiaochun, “The Bible between Literary Traditions: John C. H. Wu’s Chinese Translation of the Psalms.”
6. John C. H. Wu, Chinese Humanism and Christian Spirituality, ed. Paul K. T. Sih (New York: St. John’s University Press, 1965; second edition published by Angelico Press, 2017).
7. The Catholic Church understands inculturation as “the intimate transformation of authentic cultural values through their integration in Christianity in the various human cultures.” See “Faith and Inculturation” by the International Theological Commission, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_1988_fede-inculturazione_en.html.
8. Wu enjoyed translating Chinese poetry into English and finding parallels in English poetry. See John C. H. Wu, The Four Seasons of T’ang Poetry (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1972).
9. Wu, “St. Thérèse and Lao Tzu: A Study in Comparative Mysticism,” in Chinese Humanism and Christian Spirituality, 120.
10. Wu, Beyond East and West, 48.
11. Wu, “St. Thérèse and Lao Tzu,” 119.
12. Wu wrote, “Time has come for Christian scholars to explore systematically the rich mine of natural wisdom of life in the culture of China and other countries in the Orient, in order to “baptize” them as our medieval predecessors did with the Greek and Roman cultures.” See Wu, “Water and Wine: Chinese Ethics and the Christian Faith,” in Chinese Humanism and Christian Spirituality, 196.
13. Wu, “Water and Wine,” 174.
14. Wu, “St. Thérèse and Lao Tzu,” 107.
15. Wu, Beyond East and West, epilogue.
16. Wu, “St. Thérèse and Lao Tzu,” 97-98.
17. Wu, “Water and Wine,” 179.
18. Wu, “The Spirit of Joy in Chinese Sages,” in Chinese Humanism and Christian Spirituality, 49.
19. Wu, “St. Thérèse and Lao Tzu,” 98.
20. Wu, “Christianity, the Only Synthesis Really Possible Between East and West,” in Chinese Humanism and Christian Spirituality, 176.
21. Wu, “Christianity, the Only Synthesis,” 178.
22. “In Memoriam – Fr. Matthias Christian SVD (1941-2020),” University of St. Joseph (Macau), July 22, 2020, accessed June 27, 2024, https://www.usj.edu.mo/en/news/memoriam-fr-matthias-christian-svd-1941-2020/.
23. Wu, “Christianity, the Only Synthesis,” 171.
24. Wu, “The Spirit of Joy in Chinese Sages,” 50.