The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History by Jeremy Clarke (review)

Abstract

Dong Zhongshu but not an attempt at understanding the potentially religious dimension of Confucianism as a social phenomenon in traditional Chinese culture. The book really is on “controversies,” as the title says, not on the facts that lie behind these controversies. Chapter 4 on the “Cultural and Historical Significance of the Controversy over Confucian Religiosity” is an attempt to deal with the “consequences.” It does so by first pointing to the “loss of meaning” that characterizes today’s China and then again goes back to some important books on Confucianism such as Joseph Levenson’s trilogy Confucian China and its Modern Fate.4 A discussion of the famous Confucian Manifesto of 1958 follows before we get to the theoretical limitations of the Neo-Confucianism of the twentieth century (pp. 158ff.), which have been pointed out by such scholars as Yü Ying-shih 余英時. Jiang Qing marks the end of the book. In his epilogue Chen states that his book “attempts to illustrate how the controversy has less to do with the academic discipline of religious studies or of philosophy than with the cultural and social concerns of Chinese intellectuals. What is at stake in the controversy is not an academic examination of Confucianism within the Western category of religion, but rather an existential endeavor to explore the possibility and feasibility of reinventing Confucianism within the paradigms of modernity” (p. 181f.). I was grateful to read these sentences although I would have been glad to find them on the first pages of the book, not the last, because here I finally understood that this book is not about facts, but about a contemporary Chinese discussion that is not all that interested in historical facts. I do wonder, however, whether a discussion that is removed so far from historical realities, be they historical or present, will have actual consequences in the future. HANS VAN ESS LMU Munich JEREMY CLARKE, The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013. xiii, 275 pp. HK$420, US$55 (hb). ISBN 978-988-8139-99-6 The Virgin Mary is a tough subject in the history of Catholicism in China. It seems that we have more sources about the blending of the Virgin’s identity with local religions, and of her story as it was associated with different levels of Chinese people, than for other sacred images including that of Christ. However, a variety of primary sources and rigorous interactions with Chinese discourses make Mary in China a fascinating but complicated subject. Until the publication of this book by Jeremy Clarke, there had not yet been a scholarly book on this knotty topic. Although it is not the principal purpose of Clarke’s research to describe Mary’s cult overall in China, a number of primary sources raised in this book ought to be of great interest to scholars of Christianity in China. In terms of Catholic history in 4 Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1958–1965), p. 195 of the bibliography the years are incorrectly given as 1958–1968. 96 BOOK REVIEWS China, writing about the Virgin Mary in the modern period covered by this book, beginning with the First Opium War (1839–1842) until the early twentieth century, is not an easy task, since the era simultaneously witnessed a chaotic transformation in Chinese history and an unstable up-and-down response to Christianity in China. Clarke organizes the multiple entangled threads with a great number of longneglected but tremendously valuable sources and images. A reader who is interested in this history seen from different perspectives can enjoy this book. The book has three parts and six chapters in total, excluding Introduction and Conclusion. Clarke’s primary thesis is that the Virgin Mary, or “the way Marian devotions are portrayed artistically” (p. 195), can best be regarded as a lens through which the establishment of a Chinese and local Catholic identity may be observed after 1900. This evolution is in contrast with that of the preceding decades, when French influence on the China missions was strong after a series of treaties was signed by the Qing dynasty with...