The Gospel of Love by Tang Junyi and the conundrum of presenting it as a Chinese Symposium

Abstract

The Philosopher Tang Junyi is the writer of an understudied book entitled The Gospel of Love which displays his philosophy of love in the 1940s. Previous scholarship has often described this piece of work as a Chinese or a Confucian Symposium because of some resemblance with Plato’s dialogue. However, the present paper challenges this reading and raises the issue what the reader does of a philosophical work when he considers it as a transcultural production or a book that fuses different intellectual traditions. By giving a peculiar attention to Tang’s way of displaying his philosophy of love, I state that the Gospel of Love is “a Confucian book on love under multicultural garments.” Though the book conveys elements from different traditions and merges them in a well-built philosophical tale, the author was not trying to produce global philosophy of love in dialogue with others: he was attempting to articulate a defense of the family in the context of the liberalization of unions and to foster a personal messianic agenda: love was just a gateway to selftransformation or self-transcendence.