Beyond East and West

John C.H. Wu

Description

When John C. H. Wu’s spiritual autobiography Beyond East and West was published in 1951, it became an instant Catholic best seller and was compared to Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, which had appeared four years earlier. It was also hailed as the new Confession of St. Augustine for its moving description of Wu’s conversion in 1937 and early years as a Catholic. This new edition, including a foreward written by Wu’s son John Wu, Jr., makes this profoundly beautiful book by one of the most influential Chinese lay Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century available for a new generation of readers hungry for spiritual sustenance. Beyond East and West recounts the story of Wu’s early life in Ningpo, China, his family and friendships, education and law career, drafting of the constitution of the Republic of China, translation of the Bible into classical Chinese in collaboration with Chinese president Chiang Kai-Shek, and his role as China’s delegate to the Holy See. In passages of arresting beauty, the book reveals the development of his thought and the progress of his growth toward love of God, arriving through experience at the conclusion that the wisdom in all of China’s traditions, especially Confucian thought, Taoism, and Buddhism, point to universal truths that come from, and are fulfilled in, Christ. In Beyond East and West, Wu develops a synthesis between Catholicism and the ancient culture of the Orient. A sublime expression of faith, here is a book for anyone who seeks the peace of the spirit, a memorable book whose ideas will linger long after its pages are closed.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Religious
• Philosophie et théologie
• Buddhism
• Roman Catholicism in China
• Chinese religion
• Constitution of the Republic of China
• Taoism
• Catholic
• Confucianism
• Christianity
• Eastern
• Tchang Kaï-chek

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 28 février 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268103682
• Langue: English

Extrait

Beyond East and West

Beyond East and West
by John C.H. Wu
Foreword by John Wu, Jr.
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS
NOTRE DAME, INDIANA
Copyright © 2018 by the University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
Published in the United States of America
All Rights Reserved
Original edition published by Sheed & Ward, Inc. © 1951
ISBN-13: 978-0-268-10365-1 (hardback : alk.paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-268-10366-8 (pbk. : alk.paper)
Library of Congress LCCN Number: 2018000467
ISBN: 978-0-268-10367-5 (pdf)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10368-2 (epub)
∞This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
( Permanence of Paper) .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
To Mary, Mother of Divine Grace
and Queen of Peace
Contents
Beyond East and West: A Foreword • John Wu, Jr .

A Note of Introduction • F. J. Sheed
Illustrations
Part One
PROLOGUE
1. The Gift of Life
2. My Father
3. My Little Mother
4. My Big Mother
5. The Philosophy of the Nursery
6. Adam and Eve
7. John Is My Name
8. The Hound of Heaven

9. The Story of a Friendship
10. “Law Is My Idol”
11. De Profundis
Part Two
12. The Religions of China
13. The Lotus and the Mud
14. Mental Roamings
15. Return of the Prodigal
16. The Kindergarten of My Catholic Life
17. Escape from a Lion’s Den
18. The Poetry of Life
19. A Chinese Tunic for Christ
20. The Diplomacy of Love
21. My Last Trip to China
EPILOGUE
Explanations and Acknowledgments
European Reminiscences
(an appendix to Beyond East and West )
Beyond East and West
A Foreword
I
In April 1951, when Sheed and Ward published Beyond East and West , my father had already been credited with a number of works in Chinese and English that were published in China and in Hong Kong. His autobiography was the first of a series of books written in English that initially saw light in America and then within a relatively short time were translated into several major European and Asian languages, including French, Polish, Vietnamese, and Korean. For one reason or another, however, none of these books were rendered into Chinese, his native tongue.
As for Beyond East and West , a Catholic best seller in the States, when my father was asked why he had not pushed harder for its Chinese translation—despite requests for such a project—his usual reply was that the book was meant for a primarily Western reading public and therefore, in his opinion, a Chinese version was not appropriate. Then he would quickly add that if one day he saw fit to write of his life in and for the Chinese exclusively, he would present it from a more “Chinese” or personal perspective. Unfortunately for his people, this never came to be, though I have always believed that had he fulfilled his promise, the result could hardly have been more “Chinese” or more personal than the original English version. Granted, perhaps it could have been more “Chinese,” in some sense, but certainly it could not have been more personal , at least coming from the mind of a great legal and a budding mystical scholar.
The books that followed the autobiography included The Interior Carmel (1953), a study of the Christian path of perfection through meditations on the Beatitudes; Fountain of Justice (1955), a study in the natural law tradition; Cases and Materials on Jurisprudence (1958), a casebook used in law schools in America; Chinese Humanism and Christian Spirituality (1965), a fascinating collection of essays covering such diverse subjects as Confucianism, Taoism, and the Carmelite spirituality of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the French saint whose thought was instrumental in my father’s conversion to Roman Catholicism; and The Four Seasons of T’ang Poetry (1972), a rich poetic commentary on the poetry of the T’ang Dynasty (618–906 C.E.).
My father’s book The Golden Age of Zen , initially published in English in Taiwan and translated into Chinese, French, and two separate Korean renditions, was published in America for the first time by Doubleday in 1996. Its Chinese translation by Wu I, my father’s student in Taiwan, continues to sell. In addition, my father’s Chinese translations of the Psalms and the New Testament, rendered into an exquisite modern classical Chinese form in the 1940s, continue to be read to this day in Taiwan, though they are no longer sold anywhere.
At this writing, unhappily, virtually all of my father’s works in English, including the Golden Age and his translation of the Tao Teh Ching , the classic work of Taoism, are also out of print. Regrettably, too, The Interior Carmel, Fountain of Justice , and Chinese Humanism and Christian Spirituality —English writings done during what we might regard as the height of his intellectual and spiritual powers—remain untranslated for the Chinese reading public. This neglect on the part of Chinese scholars may be attributed to at least two factors: indifference to his thought and, possibly, intimidation by the scope of his scholarship and vision.

The Holmes-Wu correspondence (April 19, 1921–April 2, 1933) of 111 letters, which is preserved at the Harvard Law School Library and extensively documented in this autobiography in the chapters “The Story of a Friendship” and “‘Law Is My Idol,’” provides the reader with excellent and copious examples of both men’s intellectual, scholarly, and leisure interests, which were many. It is rather incredible that nearly sixty years separated them in age, not to mention that they had to overcome many cultural and racial differences.
One other important set of letters that has been preserved is my father’s extensive correspondence with Thomas Merton, the American Cistercian monk and writer. These letters date from early 1961 to late 1968, up to Merton’s sudden death by accidental electrocution in Bangkok on December 10, 1968, exactly twenty-seven years to the day the monk arrived at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani near Louisville, Kentucky. A good number of Merton’s letters to my father can be found in the collection The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns (the first of five volumes of Merton correspondence), selected and edited by William H. Shannon and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1985). For a glimpse into the nature and scope of the Wu-Merton letters, see my essay “A Lovely Day for a Friendship,” delivered in Rochester, New York, in June 1991 and printed in The Merton Annual , volume 5 (1997), published by AMS Press, New York. The most complete collection of their letters is found in the book Merton and Tao: Dialogue with John Wu and the Ancient Sages (Fons Vitae, 2013).
In the early 1960s, when my father was teaching in the Asian Studies Department at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, he first threw himself into the study of Zen (Ch’an) Buddhist literature. Through his exposure to Zen Buddhism, he came to a more solid and existential identification with the world. It further confirmed for him the necessity of studying such literature in the West as a prelude to, and as groundbreaking work for, a recovery of Western culture in general and Christian spirituality in particular.

Last but not least, my father was most interested in giving his own Chinese culture, which he viewed as a sleeping giant, a much-needed spiritual and intellectual impetus. He believed strongly and often affirmed, nearly litany-like, that the cultural recovery of Asia would come through the West. And especially while in the West, he saw this as part of his own calling. Though Beyond East and West is a deeply personal spiritual odyssey, it is also a work of vast cultural and intellectual importance. To miss this point would be to miss a good part of its original élan and intention—as it were, to mistake the trees for the forest, as Walt Whitman famously implied in his “Song of the Redwood Tree” ( Leaves of Grass , 1881–82).
II
For years there have been requests to reissue Beyond East and West in its original English or in a Chinese translation. These requests come from many sources, not least from scholars who have taken a renewed interest in a twentieth-century man of letters whose specialization was the law but who, throughout his rich and, I think, saintly life, possessed an unquenchable interest in areas of knowledge that on the surface appear to have little or nothing in common. Yet in his person he seemed to have carried all these contradictions with grace and aplomb.
Requests also come from men and women of religion, particularly Christians of different sorts who are searching for a gentler and more expansive and generous form of their religion. They are sincere Christians craving to break out of the Western-oriented and masculine cultural biases of the Christian tradition and to find a more subtle and sublime, or, if I may put it this way, feminine vehicle of expression, one that would give their faith a truly universal and magnanimous tone. They seek a religion that is authentically a spirituality intended to redeem and give solace to all humankind, beyond any geographic or cultural bounds.
In a self-description to me, my father called himself an anomaly , and by this I suppose he meant a misfit, an abnormality, a person who deviates consciously or unconsciously from the expected norm. He was that, to be sure. Yet the passage of time and my rereading of his numerous writings now convince me that he was also that rare genius whose person and many achievements defy any facile classification. Could it be, I now ask, that his entire existence was dictated by an altogether higher law and providential will, one that is not fully graspable by those of us trying to fathom the roots of his often surprising and profound insights? He teases us with dreams and visions of something won