Divine Justice: Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture by Paul R. Katz (review)

Book Reviews 95 Holloway’s book is problematic on many fronts. His model of what counts as religion is iconoclastic at best. Although there are many ways to argue that moral cultivation can indeed relate to religion, to lay such an emphasis on the role of faith, the faith that humanity is a physical substance and the faith that such a physical substance can be deployed in the world to create a religious community, would be very difficult to sustain against a generally Confucian worldview that for the most part resists the label religion, its dependence on the role of Heaven, ancestral sacrifice, funerary rites, and other forms of ritual notwithstanding. Second, his concentration on the tension between humanity and righteousness is a serious and valid topic of scholarly inquiry, but his conscious claim to ignore any examples from the received texts other than what is found in the “Tang Yu zhidao” radically reduces his argument to a kind of word-play with the text. One might compare his treatment to the masterful study of the same tension in Sarah Allan’s The Heir and the Sage: Dynastic Legends in Early China,4 which he cites but never discusses. But perhaps the most problematic aspect of Holloway’s monograph is his refusal to engage Csikszentmihalyi’s Material Virtue, which laid the groundwork for any study of “The Five Aspects.” Holloway has only two brief and tangential footnotes to that work. Finally, Holloway often claims that his study is of the “Guodian texts,” but he only deals with two in any depth (“The Five Aspects” and “Tang Yu zhidao”); a much more valuable study would have situated his topic within the total corpus of excavated texts from Guodian as well as the numerous sites dated to roughly the same period, and in such a way he could have built upon the foundations laid by previous scholars, including Allan and Csikszentmihalyi. THOMAS MICHAEL, Boston University Divine Justice: Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture PAUL R. KATZ. London, New York: Routledge, 2009. xiii, 224 pages. ISBN 978-0-415-44345-6. £70.00, US$140.00 hardcover. In this fascinating and groundbreaking study historian Paul Katz investigates the intimate links between China’s legal culture and its religious culture, combining textual analysis with ethnographic investigation, all the while drawing analytical inspirations from legal 4 San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1981. 96 Journal of Chinese Religions anthropology as well as performance studies and speech act theories. The book should interest scholars in Chinese history (including Chinese diaspora studies), Chinese religions, ritual studies, legal history, comparative law, and anthropology (especially legal anthropology). After a useful introductory chapter summarizing the book’s key arguments and methodologies, Katz opens the book with a comparative exploration of how the idea of a “judicial underworld” developed in the West and in ancient China. As opposed to the Western, Christian model of a “moral death” that hinged upon a person’s status of having been saved or not (by God’s grace), the Chinese model of how a person fares after death is based on judgments on his acts while alive (an amalgam of Daoist and Buddhist conceptions); instead of the Christian “Final Judgment,” the Chinese developed an underworld court system that mirrored the worldly courts, including the details of bureaucratic, judicial procedures. Judicial deities emerged that specialized in handling underworld (and sometimes not so underworld) justice matters, the most prominent of which are the City God (城隍 Chenghuang) and the Emperor of the Eastern Peak (東嶽大帝 Dongyue dadi). Religious specialists such as Daoist priests, Buddhist monks, and plaint writers provided ritual services for a fee to aid people in seeking justice or attempting to dodge divine punishment. One intriguing question arises: Why didn’t similar legalistic and judicial metaphors develop in the Christian West during the Roman times when law became such a prominent institution? Or did the Christian model supersede an earlier Roman model that resembled more the Chinese model? In chapter 2 Katz introduces the key notion of “the judicial continuum” to highlight the intermixing of, and “reverberation” between, a wide range of legal and dispute resolution practices found in traditional and modern China that encompasses not...