The Soul in Eighteenth-Century China: Depei's Confucian Christianity

Every society, wrote the French sinologist Jacques Gernet in 1985, is "founded upon a body of traditions accepted by all its members," who naturalize and internalize those traditions so that they become "an inherent part of social behavior, ways of thinking and feeling, and even languages." Different languages thus "express, through different logics, different visions of the world and of man." Such a fundamental epistemological divide existed between the cultural worlds of early modern Europe and China, Gernet argued, and nowhere was this more evident and more frustrating than in Jesuit attempts to convey to Chinese central elements of Christian doctrine.¹

In the decades since Gernet wrote, however, theoretical and historiographic interest in notions such as "indigenization" and "hybridity" has tended to challenge his assumptions. Studies of religious interaction, like those of literature, medicine, and other areas of human life, have, as Eugenio Menegon puts it, tended "to soften the prevailing attitude of cultural dichotimization between China and the West as two essentialized and incompatible entities."²

In this article we will examine one Qing individual who exemplified these processes of indigenization and hybridization, in his writing about one particular notion that Gernet saw as epitomizing the incompatibility of Christianity and China: "the idea of a rational [and eternal] soul contrasting with the body and the senses."³ Our protagonist, I argue, did successfully appropriate the Christian notion of the human soul, and moreover inserted it quite comfortably into the familiar discourse of Neo-Confucian thought.

The Christian Prince

The individual in question is a prominent Manchu official of the early Qianlong reign named Depei (1688–1752). Between 1735 and his retirement in 1748, Depei served in a variety of military and civil posts, including as governor of Gansu; as governor-general successively of Huguang, Liang-Jiang, and Min-Zhe (for a time concurrently governor of Zhejiang); and as president of the Board of Civil Office.⁴ He was known as an able administrator, active in the areas of flood relief, granary building, land development, reforestation, and construction of hydraulic works. The model "statecraft" (jingshi) official Chen Hongmou (1696–1771) worked closely with him to combat regional dearth in 1742–43, when Depei was Liang-Jiang governor-general and Chen was Jiangxi governor, and Depei's earlier famine management in Gansu was praised by no less eminent an official than Fang Bao (1668–1749).⁵

Depei was also widely admired for his generosity, his upright conduct, and his Confucian scholarship—prior to his official service he had spent thirty years in Beijing's Western Hills immersed in the classics, most notably the Book of Changes (Yijing), on which he was an acknowledged expert. Portions of two of Depei's works on the Changes were included in Sheng-yu's 1902 anthology of prose writings by bannermen (Baqi wenjing), and a Western acquaintance sent a copy of one of Depei's Changes commentaries to the noted sinologist Theophilus Siegfried Bayer (1694–1738) at St. Petersburg.⁶ The eminent official Gan Rulai (1684–1739) and the notable bannerman Li Kai (1686–1746) each contributed prefaces to Depei's works, and the poet Yuan Mei (1716–98) wrote about him admiringly and at some length.⁷ Yuan described Depei's demeanor as follows:

His complexion was ruddy and he had no beard or mustache. His chin jutted out sharp as an arrow, and he had all the air of a rigid philosopher. … His own conversation turned exclusively upon Goodness and Right, as taught by the Duke of Zhou and Confucius. When he heard good of anyone he always believed it; when he heard evil, he doubted. He was affable in manner toward all his officials; but if he found that any of them understood the Classics or showed a special talent for administration he became most affectionate and treated them more like disciples than subordinates.⁸

Depei, then, seems to have been an exemplary mid-Qing official and, as a scholar, something of a seeker after truth. But he was extraordinary in two other ways. For one, he was not only a Manchu...