Kevin N. Cawley

10.18399/acta.2012.15.1.002

Ch’ŏnju sirŭi Neo-Confucian hierarchy deconstruction Ch’ŏnju Catholic texts equality

This article traces Chosŏn’s Neo-Confucian encounter with Matteo Ricci’s catechism, known as Ch’ŏnju sirŭi (天主實義) in Korea. It explores how this inter-cultural ex-perience culminated in a transformation from philosophical investigation, towards praxis, and its embodiment in a self-evangelizing Catholic Church. It outlines the spiritual metamorphosis which took place as Korean scholars, motivated mainly by Yi Pyŏk, converted to Catholicism without any foreign missionaries, based mainly on Ricci’s ideas about God. This inspired them to convert, and then to proselytize their new beliefs. This article draws upon “deconstruction,” stemming from the work of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). It deconstructs Korean Neo-Confucian rejections of Ricci’s concept of God (天主, Ch’ŏnju), which undermined their dependency on principle (理, i), and illus-trates how the incarnation of Jesus, as God-in-man, also threatened to overturn constructed Neo-Confucian hierarchies, which controlled their modus vivendi. Finally, it deconstructs the earliest Catholic texts written by Koreans, showing how Confucian ideas were supplemented with Christian ones, sowing seeds of social transformation, visible in their writings. These early Catholics would face the wrath of Neo-Confucian authority, which set about oppressing their beliefs, their writings and their burgeoning sense of equality.