Preface

Abstract

Preface Michael C. Jordan In a ceremony in 2007 marking the conferral by the Catholic Institute of Paris of an honorary doctoral degree upon Chinese-born writer François Cheng, Professor Nathalie Nabert described Cheng's work as "a continual dialogue of the interior worlds," a dialogue conducted on the basis of Cheng's Chinese cultural heritage and his long-time participation in French culture, culminating in his election to the French Academy in 2002 as the first Asian-born member of the Academy.1 Cheng was born in China in 1929 and has lived and worked as a scholar, writer, and translator in France since 1949. In his acceptance speech at the Catholic Institute of Paris, Cheng confirmed the importance of dialogue between China and the Christian West in his work, describing himself as having become "a man of dialogue" because of what he described as his "double destiny," and pointing to the central place of Christianity in the West as he had encountered it in his experience.2 In his recent book translated from French into English as The Way of Beauty, Cheng establishes beauty as a key term in the dialogue between the Christian West and China, but he insists that we can [End Page 5] speak of beauty "in these times of universal suffering, random violence, and natural and ecological disasters" only if we confront the position of beauty in relation to evil.3 "I am convinced that it is our urgent and ongoing task to take a hard look at these two mysteries, which constitute the two poles of the living universe: at one end, evil; at the other, beauty" (5–6). He offers a biographical account of how this realization first confronted him. One of his aunts returned to China after a visit to France and brought reproductions of a number of great paintings. Around the same time, he encountered documentary photographs depicting the results of acts of torture perpetrated during the 1936 Nanking Massacre. "From then on, in the consciousness of the eight-year-old child I then was, superimposed upon the image of ideal beauty in Ingres's 'La Source' was that of the violated woman, maimed by her abuser" (10). This horrifying juxtaposition of images powerfully reflects a dilemma concerning beauty that has frequently been discussed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: when we focus on beauty, do we evade the reality of suffering and evil in the world? Cardinal Ratzinger has expressed this problem in these words: Can the beautiful be genuine, or, in the end, is it only an illusion? Isn't reality perhaps basically evil? The fear that in the end it is not the arrow of the beautiful that leads us to the truth, but that falsehood, all that is ugly and vulgar, may constitute the true "reality" has at all times caused people anguish. At present this has been expressed in the assertion that after Auschwitz it was no longer possible to write poetry; after Auschwitz it is no longer possible to speak of a God who is good.4 How, then, does Cheng develop an understanding of beauty that responds to the reality of our experience of evil? As he tells us in his previously cited speech at the Catholic Institute of Paris, his fundamental cosmological vision comes from the great Taoist intuition of the interdependence of all things: "Beginning with the idea of the [End Page 6] Breath-Spirit, Taoism advances a unitary and organic conception of the living universe, where everything adheres and is interlinked" (168). In The Way of Beauty, Cheng argues that this cosmological vision is at the heart of Chinese culture and of the Chinese experience of the beautiful. "The primordial Breath that ensures the original unity continues to animate all beings, linking them into a giant, interwoven, engendering network called the Tao, the Way" (67). Every object, every component of the cosmos, when coming into its fullness of being emerges as a participant in the living interconnected whole: "The uniqueness of each individual can only be constituted, affirmed, gradually revealed, and finally can become meaningful in the face of other unique beings, thanks to other unique beings. That...